O jardim selvagem de Anne Rice: tradução intersemiótica da obra de William Blake a partir de um “projeto criativo”

Abstract

In this thesis, I’m interested in discussing a type of artistic recreation undertaken by Anne Rice concerning William Blake’s illuminated books and paintings. Rice, in The Tale of the Body Thief, mentions the poem The Tyger to approach the main character characterization, the vampire Lestat. Moreover, the kind of recreation shaped by Rice it’s also related to themes such as evil, guilt, and human redemption, which are altogether subjects of the vampire Lestat’s obsession. In Memnoch the Devil the author approaches paintings and illustrations by Blake in order to characterize her devil, adding a Blakean nuance to the voice, mode of action, and ideas of Memnoch. Aiming to approach the research question properly I’m reading the kind of artistic recreation conceived by Rice as intersemiotic translation. This kind of process can be understood as a creative and critic recreation of an aesthetic subject by another distinct and autonomous aesthetic subject. While many authors provide some general basis concerning intersemiotic translation, there’s no indication about how to approach, to read or to analyze such a process. Nevertheless, the nonexistence or even the vague mentions towards criticism suggests that the analysis of an intersemiotic translation should find its basis in the inner coherence of the translator subject. Far from trying to fall in a theoretical quarrel, my intention throughout this research is to offer a point of view related to literary criticism. In order to achieve such goal my hypothesis is that the intersemiotic translations of Blake’s works in The Tale of the Body Thief and Memnoch the Devil are conceived by a ‘structural scheme’, a kind of aesthetic motto, which its function is to offer a grounded basis to Rice’s artistic recreations in those novels; that scheme is what I call ‘imaginative design’. My path of criticism, in this sense, includes identifying the imaginative design that operates in those novels – Anne Rice’s Savage Garden, an idea conceived in The Vampire Lestat. Aiming to illustrate my thesis I take this notion – the Savage Garden – as the basis to analyze the intersemiotic translations in the referred novels. This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001.