O ESPELHO E O VÍCIO: HUMOR E CRÍTICA SOCIAL EM FRONTEIRAS PERDIDAS, DE JOSÉ EDUARDO AGUALUSA

Abstract

At least since Aristotle, an endless number of philosophers, poets and mystics have been addressing the issues of the comic and the laughable in order to understand its many mysteries. One of the most repeated topics in this tradition of texts about comicality is the questioning or, in a way, “dethroning” power that it clearly possesses. In fact, passing through the famous Greek comedies of Classical Antiquity, the carnival literature that prospered during the Middle Ages, the political satires that circulated in the Enlightenment until we reach the great circus or cinematographic shows of modernity and contemporaneity, it is notorious how the comic assumed very diverse configurations, but never lost its critical, irreverent essence, averse to any absolute “truth”. It is with these considerations in mind that, in this study, we intend to make a close reading of the humor and social criticism present in the work of José Eduardo Agualusa. The Angolan writer, through a series of thematic and stylistic artifices, manages to portray very well some of the main problems that harm his country in a tone almost always light and playful. We believe, therefore, that the comical and the political can blend into his writing to create a markedly denouncing speech. To illustrate our hypothesis, we have selected for analysis the collection of short stories Fronteiras perdidas (1999) and, more specifically, “O carro malhado”, one of the sixteen narratives that make up the aforementioned book. Our observations will be based – mainly, but not only – on the insights of thinkers such as Mikhail Bakhtin (2010; 2018), Henri Bergson (2018) and Vladimir Propp (1992) regarding comicality, and also on the studies of Luzia de Maria (2004), Nádia B. Gotlib (2006), Edgar Allan Poe (2011) and Julio Cortázar (2006) on the formal particularities of the short story genre.