A Metaficção historiográfica em Teoria geral do esquecimento de José Eduardo Agualusa

Abstract

The works by José Eduardo Agualusa have been evaluated as of great importance for the Portuguese-speaking African Literature and, consequently, for Literature in Portuguese as a whole. In his work, Teoria Geral do Esquecimento (2012), the author's proposal is noticeable and, to engage a literature search on the main theoretical literature and history in contemporary times, it is possible to highlight some arguments that reinforce this placement. It inserts several characters whose identities are forged from the specific historical context of Angola before, during and after the Civil War. The author, by using these characters to build a narrative of loneliness, social interdependence and political criticism, proposes a reflective attitude to the reader. These construction features off-center personalities, ex-centric, within an intertextual narrative and self-reflexive with the very recent history of Angola and shows up postmodernists, typical of historiographical metafiction, as conceptualized by Linda Hutcheon. Thus the romance, Teoria Geral do Esquecimento, moves away from the traditional historical novels to build a plot surrounded by the historical setting of the Angolan Civil War and at the same time, explain the main difficulties in social relationships and development of national identities in contemporary times. From the theories of identity literature and post-modernity, this dissertation analyzes the novel as a historiographical metafiction to, then, reflect on why the post-modernity paths are being trodden by some contemporary african portuguese-speaking historical novelists.