Literary Allotropy: A New Transtextual Relationship

Abstract

This article presents the hypothesis that a new transtextual relationship could exist: literary allotropy. The proposal is framed in the paradigm of Gérard Genette's transtextual relationships. The approach to literary allotropy arose by identifying a phenomenon of rewriting, initially, in two pairs of texts: the novel Snow Country and the short story "Gleanings from Snow Country," by Kawabata, one one hand, and the short stories “The Aleph,” by Borges, and “The fattened Aleph,” by Katchadjian, on the other. The particularity of the texts in which I identify the rewriting is that, despite changing form, they retain the plot and a large number of passages in a literal way. Considering that neither intertextuality nor hypertextuality—which are the relationships that I consider the closest to what I understand by allotropy—completely responded to the behavior observed in the indicated texts, I thought that another relationship could exist.