João de Melo's White Paper: an Allegory of Commodity Fetishism

Abstract

In the twentieth century, the fantastic presents the function of
problematizing reality, since its production is efficient in revealing what
is absurd in the real mimetic. Thus, this literary aesthetic directs the
reader's gaze to an everyday life that, as usual, is often ignored. This
genre, then, provokes a paradigm shift in the experience of the
contemporary reader-man, who does not understand the world as a
function of its absorption by a quotidian that prevents the production of
questioning. In this article, we analyze the Portuguese tale “O Solar dos
Mágicos” (1987) by João de Melo, in which the fantastic problematizes the semantic emptying of modern society, a more evident symptom of
the phenomenon that Marx had diagnosed a century...