doubles, author, source, characters, reality and fiction

"Cervantes, whom I salute in the first and last section of the book, must have suffered such anxieties at some point; to write Don Quixote he made use of a manuscript by the Arab historian Seyyit Hamit bin Engeli, and to make it his own he filled the gaps with word games."
Pamuk em Other Colors sobre o seu próprio White Castle.

ah assim se enganam os citadores! é tão fácil...

a citação faz parte do parágrafo em que Pamuk refere o artifício literário de inventar um historiador e uma crónica para justificar o próprio livro histórico, artifício do qual faz um pequeno historial, ou seja, com quem aprendeu. o historiador ou cronista ficcional pode ser - obviamente - também uma personagem de uma obra anterior. (não estou certa porque nunca li mas estava capaz de adivinhar que Zafón faz isto). assim fez ele em The White Castle.

o parágrafo:
"I am still not sure if it was the Italian slave or the Ottoman master who wrote the manuscript of The White Castle. When writing it, I decided to use the closeness I felt to Faruk, the historian in The Silent House, to safeguard against certain technical problems. Cervantes, whom I salute in the first and last section of the book, must have suffered such anxieties at some point; to write Don Quixote he made use of a manuscript by the Arab historiam Seyyit Hamit bin Engeli [Sidi Hamid Benengeli, Cide Hamete Benengeli, aqui e aqui], and to make it his own he filled the gaps with words games. Those familiar with The Silent House will remember that after Faruk found the manuscript in the Gebze archives and undertook to render it in the language of the citizenry, he seems to have added passages from other books. At this point, I should like to point out to readers who imagine that I, like Faruk, worked in the archives, rummaging among the shelves of dusty manuscripts, that I am unwilling to take responsibility for Faruk's actions. What I did was use a few details that Faruk discovered. For these I borrowed a method from Stendhal's Three Italian Chronicles, which I read while writing my first historical books: I arranged for the discovery of an old manuscript by sprinkling the details into the foreword I wrote for faruk. This perhaps opened the way for my using Faruk again (as his grandfather Selahattin Bey would) in another, subsequent, historial novel, while also sparing the reader the hazards of a costume ball arriving out of nowhere - always historical fiction's greatest danger point."