UMA FACE IRÔNICA DO REALISMO

Abstract

This article proposes a reflection over the construction of the effect of fantastic in literature through observing the narrative procedures of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. From the ideas of Tzvetan Todorov in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Introduction à la littérature fantastique), it is proposed that the hesitation between two narrative fields, the strange and the marvelous, which, according to Todorov, is in the axis of the fantastic in literature, is reached through an investment in typical strategies of the literary realism of the 19th Century, but taking its effects to its extreme, generating shocks to the realistic representation model through itself, in a game of language and narrative which, in Poe, gains ironic colors through the manner that the author works the narrative between fiction and the testimonial account (pretending to be factual). Although Poe's novel isn't the typical example of fantastic literature – approaching the strange-exotic -, it permits to visualize the construction of the hesitation of fantastic, above all at the end of the book, in the way it disarticulates the floor of the meticulously elaborated realism through the narrative, when reaching the extremes of reality and when flirting with the marvelous. Crossing this article, there is a proposal that the fantastic – which has its peak, not for coincidence, around the same 19th Century marked by the realism – shows itself as an ironic façade of this realism, in which the authors of the genre of the fantastic, playing with the procedures of the discourse of realism, exploit its failures to reach the non-place of hesitation where the effect of fantastic is achieved.