O vampiro é o leitor: o processo de vampirização do leitor na literatura fantástica

Abstract

This study starts from the perspective of the fantastic as a space in-between a plural and fragmented space, which is characterized by decentralization and heterogeneity, able to hold even the contradictory perceived as an environment characterized by an inherent duplicity. Knowing this, we may observe that this dual character is intensified in the vampire narratives, insofar as it is extended to vampire and reflected in the reader. Hence, the reader s distinctive aspects of this type of narrative are identified and analyzed, recognizing their role in the gender construction and in the maintenance of the open nature of the work, such as a co-authorship in which the registered mark is the hesitation. Nonetheless, more than this can be evidenced from the relation between reader and vampire, after all, generally speaking, the fantastic narrative not only the vampire type always points to the reader as a loose thread that does not allow that the work come to a close. We can also observe, through the description and analysis of different kinds of manifestation of the vampire in literature, a process of reconfiguration of the relation between vampire and reader, and between the latter and the fantastic narrative, as well with the literature as a whole. Thus, it s considered the relation of the reader with the classic vampire a scary type , that is marked by disidentification; with the modern vampire a seductive type, and humanized in the figure of Louis, Anne Rice s character marked by identification; and with the contemporary a human and seductive type marked by the appropriation of identity. In this last movement, which is understood as the vampirization of the reader, the aim is to prove that, after he is transformed, recognizing himself as such in his double (the vampire), he nurtures himself on the vital force of this double and on the fantastic narrative, and retains the appearance of hesitation, which is the driving force of the genre in question. The reader becomes the character more active in the narrative, operating in the realm of reality, and also in fiction. The understanding of this process from disidentification to the appropriation of identity is probed by the analysis of these three vampire narratives, that are outstanding to the thought developed in this study: Bram Stoker s Dracula, Anne Rice s Interview with the Vampire, and Flávio Carneiro s A Confissão