Reading scenes in Silviano Santiago

Abstract

The objective of this article is to reflect on the role of reading in the work of Silviano Santiago. The first section of the paper is devoted to presenting an overview of the uses of reading and the figure of the reader in Silviano Santiago, both in his fiction and essays, emphasizing the importance of affective processes in the choice and use of literary and theoretical references (Graciliano Ramos, Barthes, Althusser). The second section deals more specifically with Santiago’s essay “Life as Literature” (2006), analyzing the author’s strategies regarding his reading of the work of Cyro dos Anjos and his peculiar problematization of the experience of subjectivity in reading and in writing, which is made possible by the use of the signifier “Silviano”, both as the author's own name and as a character of Cyro dos Anjos. Finally, the article will analyze an interview of Silviano Santiago in 2004 in which he presents the work of the German writer W. G. Sebald as required reading. Faced with this stated position as a reader and the establishment of this reading scene, we seek to investigate the presence of Sebald’s fictional procedures in the last novel of Silviano Santiago, Machado (2016). In presenting the figure of the reader as a point of convergence of difference and repetition, Silviano Santiago makes the contact between reading and writing a performance of reconfiguration of tradition and contemporary references.