Re-fable history from ruins

Abstract

This essay reflects on the possibility to read the short story “Ruínas”, by Gonzaga Duque, and the canvas “Caipira picando fumo”, by Almeida Junior, with the aim of understanding the (re)construction of the present from its remainders. In this perspective we search in the fragments – seen by Walter Benjamin as the way the things look at the world – clues on to how to see the antique in the “new”. We observe this text and this Brazilian end-of-century painting as the “new” trying to obliterate the old, and the latter as a part of the former. To re-read these objects of art we took them out of the library, a place that orders, fixes and ranks, and file them, making possible the reorganization, the movement, the re-reading and the re-fabling of the a story.