The Secret Days of Orson Welles in Brasil: Textual variation and addressing change

Abstract

Textual construction is a dynamic movement of prospecting and retrospection, in which the writer materializes his ideas in a continuum of choices and intentions from the rereading of the writing itself. Pre-writing notes and drafts are memorial documents of artistic making in search of the uniqueness of the work through a style of genesis, an individual rhythm that shapes the writing. In this paper, we use the concepts of Stylistics added to the foundations of Genetic Criticism to analyze the opening scene of the play Eterno, by Doc Comparato, from a set of documents. We observe the textual variation, from the first notes to the publication, besides the metamorphosis for the movie script entitled The Secret Days of Orson Welles in Brazil. We selected seven manuscripts (out of a total of two hundred) and organized the prototext of the Scene of the wild egg. We identified records of the elaboration of the style of the work, which can be seen in the acts of rejecting and selecting language resources, in addition to practices in the development of writing that are repeated in other works of the author and may indicate an individual mark of Comparato.

Keywords

• genetic criticism
• dramaturgy
• textual creation