Montage, Inespecificity, and Image Regimes in Macao, by Valêncio Xavier

Abstract

This article analyzes Macao, the fifth composition of Rremembranças da menina de rua morta nua e outros livros, by Valêncio Xavier, based on the hypothesis that the work is configured as a literary installation. In dialogue with Florencia Garramuño’s concept of nonspecific art, it argues that the narrative displaces the boundaries between literature, photography, cartography, and cinema, establishing an image regime that empties the centrality of the narrator. The technique of montage is understood, on the one hand, in light of Walter Benjamin as an experience of shock and fragmentation; on the other, as a procedure that requires a historical reconfiguration of vision, as proposed by Jonathan Crary. Marjorie Perloff’s notion of the “unoriginal genius” helps to elucidate the citational logic that organizes the materials of the work. It is concluded that Macao operates through the montage of verbal and visual fragments, establishing a fragmentary aesthetic experience that displaces authorship and calls upon an active reader, capable of producing meaning amid instability.