The Japanese Prostitute and the Man from Basra: the failure of the reader as a textual strategy in Valêncio Xavier’s fiction

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze the meaning-producing strategies used by Valêncio Xavier in his short-story O Mistério da Prostituta Japonesa. Thus, it appeals to some concepts, such as the existence of empty spaces in the narrative, as described by Iser, and the consequent failure of the reader before the impossibility to overcome the asymmetry between his own reference and co-reference horizon and the levels of determination of the text, which results in the act of filling those textual gaps only with one’s own projections (ISER, 2000). It also recurs to Umberto Eco’s (2000) concept of open work, specially referring to the filling of the semantic field of the text by the expectations of the reader, including those expectations attached to his original cultural environment. Xavier’s short-story can be interpreted, according to this point of view, as a mirror-narrative, in which the reader can see in the failure of the narrator-character in interpreting the asymmetry between the still surface of the Japanese whore who entitles the tale, and the apparently moving deep interior of hers, a failure that is simultaneously originated from and filled by his cultural expectations related to Oriental women, an image of reader’s strategies of reading and generating meanings from the text.