Tableau Vivant in Lucíola: the ficto in the aesthetics of the nineteenth century novel

Abstract

These notes address the status of fiction and of genre/gender in two moments and places of José de Alencar’s writing. Focus is placed on the privilege of the visual exercise in his non-fiction accounts of the mid-19^th century, as well as on the convergence of the visual and scenic arts in his novel Lucíola (1862). Walter Benjamin’s theoretical framework comes on the foreplay to shed light on the changes affecting optical sensitivity, especially when it comes to large cities, as from the mid-19^th century, whether observed in his criticism over Baudelaire (1989), whether in his considerations on photography and cinema (Benjamin,1994). Limits imposed to that emerging formal apparatus are discussed in face of the Brazilian novelist’s compromises with moral edification. Yet, the productivity of Alencar’s writing at that moment stands out in paving the way to the aesthetic-historic synthesis Machado de Assis will head at the last quarter of the 19^th century, in view of the strongly dramatic-cinematographic narrative of the latter’s.