ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the one of Caio Fernando Abreu's most critically overlooked novellas, 'Bem longe de Marienbad'. The simplicity of the prose in 'Bem longe de Marienbad' is characteristic of all of Abreu's work, as are his maverick insights into homosexuality. The masochistic intensification of desire wills the narrator-protagonist to accept the folder-text as other-text. The 'Journal' is the principal ironic reproduction of the narrator-protagonist's project: in the folder-text he reproduces the masochistic desire-extending aims of his own text in 'Bem longe de Marienbad' but differentially, in the sense that he no longer claims to be its narrator. The folder-text's reproduced literary fragments show that the narrator-protagonist's narrative seeks to participate in a 'language game' of homosexual masochism. In the Querelle fragment the theme of sadomasochism and sailors is explored in greater depth and the deployment of Menardian authorship is subjected to further ambiguity.
