Beyond Poetics: Raúl Ruiz’s Rethinking of Narrative

Mistérios de Lisboa (Mysteries of Lisbon, 2010), Raúl Ruiz’s magisterial adaptation of the nineteenth-century Portuguese novel of the same title by Camilo Castelo Branco, can well be considered Ruiz’s magnum opus. Available as a six-hour TV miniseries and a four-anda-half-hour feature film, Mysteries of Lisbon is epic in scope. Not only does it weave a rich tapestry of Portuguese life at the turn of the nineteenth century, it also delivers a sustained and rigorous meditation on the mutation and possibilities of narrative at the beginning of the twenty-first. Questioning fundamental assumptions about how narrative works, including cause-and-effect relationships; focalisation and point of view; the presence of stable, goaloriented characters; and the notion of a hierarchy of knowledge and reliability of narration, Mysteries of Lisbon puts forward an alternative model of storytelling. This model mobilises a productive potentiality of narrative incoherence, open-endedness, and ambiguity, attesting to the impossibility of fixing the unresolved past and the unfinished, in-flux present. Ruiz puts forward a model of storytelling that goes beyond poetics, as it is aimed not so much at producing a finished product—a narrative—but at staging the process of narrativisation itself, thus liberating its transformative potential.