Acceso usuarios
Francisco Serra Lopes
Despite its apparently rhematic subtitle, Maria Gabriela Llansol's O Senhor de Herbais - breves ensaios literários sobre a reprodução estética do mundo, e suas tentações (2002) appears in a collection of Portuguese fiction. Whereas distinctively Llansolian topoi are revisited, the possibility of interpreting them is consistently undermined. Perhaps the most specific feature of O Senhor de Herbais is the author's fictional self-representation as a metatextual reader of her own oeuvre. However, I argue that what makes such a reading possible is Llansol's shift from what Augusto Joaquim calls �organic writing� to a mode of textual materialization of an evil more radical than that which she ascribes to realist novelists. I therefore try to show through textual examples that evil is the discursive kernel of O Senhor de Herbais. Moreover, I suggest that evil, even under some different forms, is a more general precondition for the possibility of literary narrative
