A excentricidade da personagem «trabalhadora»: o caso Molero

Despite its notoriety, Dinis Machado’s novel O que diz Molero (1977) has not received the attention it deserves from critics, who have only devoted to it a few brief words within the more general reflection on the diachronic development of the Portuguese post-revolutionary novel (Seixo, Eminescu, Real, Reis, Lourenço). However, as demonstrated by the contribution proposed on the occasion of the research project Towards a New Anthropology of the Literary Character. Survival of Modernism and Realism (1945-today) (University of Pisa, 2017-19), Dinis Machado manages to build, in dialectics between the categories of narrator and character, an original diegetic game in which all characters are at the same time protagonists and narrators: they participate in the construction of the plot (but will there be a real plot in the novel?) and, at the same time, watch the same narrated events as spectators. This intervention (taking into consideration the theorizations of, among others, Debenedetti, Forster, Genette, Woloch) aims to discuss especially the «character-space» (Woloch) dedicated by Dinis Machado to Molero along the narration in the «character-system» of the novel, in his interaction with the other personae of the narration. This contribution aims also to investigate and describe Molero’s structural function in the narrative construction of the whole novel.