Colcha de retalhos: investigações sobre metaficção e alegoria na microssérie Hoje é Dia de Maria 1ª Jornada

Abstract

A scrap is a piece of cloth which once comprised a whole unit and had a different utility. It is a fragment, a part taken from a different context. Scraps can be reworked, juxtaposed, stitched to form a new configuration, a new piece: a patchwork quilt, for example. In each scrap, there may be a latent history. We use this image to approach the micro-series Today is Marys Day 1st Day. Broadcasted in 2005 by Rede Globo, written by Luis Alberto de Abreu and Luiz Fernando Carvalho and directed by the latter, the micro-series is constructed from intense recycled references, quoting and alluding to other images and scenes from audiovisual, literature, visual arts, and to Brazilian television itself with particular attention to other narratives in which the national problematic was at stake. Also, Today is Mary´s Day - 1st Day makes explicit its narrative devices by the presence of characters that directly address the viewers, by the artificiality of the circular setting and by the presence of animated objects. In this process, the production proves to be highly metafictional as it exposes its own construction and working of language, as well as it writes a fiction which refers to other fictions. In this research, we investigate the possibility of assigning an allegorical reading to this second metafictional dimension. In this sense, allegory is understood as a strategy for writing and reading texts that make use of a variety of fragments (including intertextuality), so as to emerge the crisis between experience and language. In sum, our research aims to investigate how the metafictional elements of Today is Mary´s Day - 1st Day are mobilized and what its functions are. It also aims to identify the micro-series meanings it engenders from the sewing of various references, and highlight those that thematise in different ways and in different contexts, a presumed Brazilianness. More precisely we ask: can the peculiar use of these elements be interpreted as an allegorical strategy?