Álvaro Uribe’s “The Audience of the Birds”: A Fantastic Shakespearean Transtextuality

Abstract

The interference of one literary work in another has been a permanent and aesthetically valuable phenomenon. This transtextual task requires deep knowledge and interest in the referenced work and a sharp talent to create a new text from it. That is the case of Álvaro Uribe’s story “The Audience of the Birds”, where the direct intervention of literature is verified through paratexts, intertexts, and hypertexts. The relevance of these transtextual links is that, in the story to be studied, they nurture and lay the foundation for the fantastic present in various resources. In this sense, Uribe’s story appeals to the poem “The Phoenix and the Turtledove” by William Shakespeare; through an epigraph, footnotes, allusions, and a narrativized diegetic transposition of the poem, it tells the story of a man who dies from the intrusion of a supernatural being in his apartment, apparently a phoenix, who sets everything on fire, as in Shakespeare’s hypotext. This creative act implies recognizing the previous literature, but also the ability, intelligence, and talent to create a story without demeaning the previous work—a new fictional universe is proposed: creation and recreation in permanent dialogue. Thus, page by page, the richness of “The Audience of the Birds” is discovered: a disturbing fantastic story is built upon another literary work and its aesthetic experience becomes memorable thanks to an impeccable warp.