Between biography and fiction

the essay of Agustina Bessa-Luís

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the literary hybridization that can be seen in As meninas (2008), a text by Agustina Bessa-Luís about the Portuguese-British painter Paula Rego. We believe that, in the process of writing this book, Bessa-Luís used at least three literary discourses: the essayistic, the biographical and the fictional. The aim here is to investigate this discursive interweaving based on the relationship established by the novelist herself between her text and the various paintings that illustrate the volume, focusing on Agustina's comments on Rego's series A Menina e o Cão (1986). We followed some reading guidelines pointed out by Anamaria Filizola (2000) and Catherine Dumas (2002) with regard to Agustinian biographies, novels and fictional aesthetics, as well as Filizola's (2009) text on the work under analysis here. Thus, we were able to identify that the work in question presents genological hybridization as one of the characteristics that Agustina Bessa-Luís uses in her texts that deal with historical figures, in this sense, the author uses her craft as a novelist to account for the biographical elements of Paula Rego that are, according to herself, suggested in her paintings, which are analyzed essayistically by the writer in order to conceive them in a fictional diegesis of the painter's life.