Under Mirrors: Reflections on the Authorship of Budapeste, by Chico Buarque

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss authorship along with the figure of the narrator in the novel Budapeste (2003), by Chico Buarque, based on two classical texts on this subject: “What is an author?” (1969), by Michel Foucault, and “The death of the author” (1968), by Roland Barthes. We aim to highlight important narrative elements to reflect upon the issues of authorship and self-fictionalization of the author in the contemporary narrative. We considered the way this novel reflects on itself, mirroring the writing and the narrator, and portraying the author’s image – confusing it and demystifying it. In this amazing game, the narrative fabric circularly bans the empirical subject, the author, and the narrator; it also involves them in the plot, in a movement of death and birth, in the disappearance and resurgence of these subjects. However, sometimes one does not know who dies and who shows up in this fictional decentering of the subject. This complex and confuse battle of writing invites the reader for a critical reading of the novel analyzed here. Thus, the subjects in Budapest – name, author, and narrator – incisively intermingle and mirror each other, and converge together, indicating that they become the same people telling their story. At the same time, they escape from themselves, as if they did not represent or aim to be anyone.