Ménage Literário/Literary Ménage/Ménage Literario (original) (raw)
Jacques Fux’s writing is characterized by intertextuality, self-reflexiveness, and a lu- dic (and lucid) stance in relation to his ques- tions about literature and life, fiction and reality. In the short story “Ménage à Trois” and the film Literary Ménage: An investiga- tion into the Writing of Jacques Fux, direct- ed by Rodrigo Lopes de Barros, Fux evokes or dialogues with David Foster Wallace, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Susan Son- tag, Charles Baudelaire, Jacques Prévert, Fernando Pessoa, James Joyce, and possibly more writers, resignifying texts by others within his own creation. In the narrative of both works, a casual encounter in a coffee shop between a man and an unknown wom- an—just like the encounter described by Baudelaire in “À une passante”—gives rise to reflections by the (male) narrator about desire, pleasure, sin, religiosity, arousal, and attraction to the unattainable. By including Jacques Fux, who talks with the woman and eats a churro in Mexico, the film adopts another characteristic of his own writing: autofiction, in which Fux is both the author and a character. “Ménage à trois”? Yes, but between whom? The author and the two characters in the film by Rodrigo Lopes de Barros? Or between the narrator, the wom- an, and the churro, as in the short story?—Randal Johnson