Two girls: dissidences in Guimarães Rosa and António Lobo Antunes

Abstract

This article analyzes aspects of main fictional characters in two canonical narratives of Portuguese language: The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, by Guimarães Rosa, and What can I do when everything’s on fire?, by the Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes. The aim is to demonstrate how the fictional construction of these characters of dissident sexualities leads the diegesis itself, conforming the dissident textualities of these two literary works. The analysis undertaken based on the critical proposal of Silviano Santiago (“wilderness”) and on the propositions of Jacques Derrida (“semantics of the undecidable”) indicates that the process of identity metamorphosis experienced by these two “monad-characters” and revealed at the end of their respective narratives obliges the reader to a constant interpretative repositioning and evidences that these characters textualize the famous axiom “character is plot, plot is character”.