Ficção e história em O Cavaleiro Inexistente, de Ítalo Calvino

Abstract

This study aims to analyse the novel The Nonexistent Knight, by Italo Calvino, and some reflexions are proposed regarding how some historical discourse might (and, to some extent, usually are) built from fictional bases. In this way, the proposal is to combine Charlemagne and his Paladins’ dinner scene, specially the discussions about truth and lie in the setting up of an official narrative about french nation’s great heroes, with the concept of the “narrative mode of representation”, by Hayden White. Three perspectives about the past are shown in this scene, it means, three different ways to describe certain interpretations about what has passed: one interpretations is built from a substantiated and logical perspective (Agilulfo’s perspective); another one is built from a more engaged and interested action (Ulivieri et al.); and the last approach is constructed by an uninterested and distant speech, which is mediated by a set of “legitimizing instances”, but still not free of contradictions (Charlemagne’s perspective).