On the stage of performances: the dramatic and cinematic romance of O Delfim

Abstract

Wanting to explore the materiality of the literary text, seeing it as a body to be traversed, this study intends to read in O Delfim, a novel by Portuguese author José Cardoso Pires, published in 1968, some of his narrative strategies that dialogue with the theatrical genre and discourse cinematic. The study seeks to interpret the narrator's stylistic choices of a narrator ethically committed to the human and to the art of revolutionary tradition, and also engaged with the permanent revolution of literary language. This article studies how strategic choices for textual materiality are directly related to its message. The analysis focuses on the relationships between the narrative and dramatic genres, as devices for a memorialistic and at the same time metafictional narration, but also highlights the text's relationships with cinematographic techniques. Through a subversive writing, the narrative forces the reader to see the metaphors of possible revolution and the perversion of a time of oppression also in the structural options of the discourse and, thus, re-elaborates the paradigm of Portuguese neorealist art.