Do nariz de Gogol às unhas de Rubião: a crítica social na literatura fantástica dos séculos XIX e XX

Abstract

The relationship between literature and society has always been a subject of debate among scholars on the subject. Some, like the Russian formalists, sought a more scientific method for their immanentist analyzes. Others, like Antonio Candido, sought to analyze how the text reflects and relates to the world it represents. Fantastic literature, on the other hand, is no different, there are those who privilege the structure of the text, such as Tzvetan Todorov, and there are those who admit social echoes, such as David Roas, Jean-Paul Sartre, among others. Todorov, for example, disregards the allegorical interpretation, as it is not inherent in the text; what is deconstructed by the other scholars. In our research, we studied two narratives, “O Nariz”, by Nikolai Gogol, Ukrainian-Russian author of the 19th century, and “As Nails”, by Murilo Rubião, Brazilian author of the 20th century. We will analyze how the narratives develop in the fantastic, how criticisms are constructed from an allegorical reading of them and how both represent the society in which they are inserted. Fantastic literature, generally, presents relations with the world, unlike the popular concept of fantasy as a distance from the “real”. This connection, many times, serves to denounce the abnormalities of the world. Many authors have worked with criticism of society over time. Although Nikolai Gogol and Murilo Rubião belong to different centuries and continents, the selected narratives of both are classified as fantastic. Initially, our research is developed from the survey of the authors' critical fortune and how they worked the fantastic as a form of criticism. Then, we will stop at the analysis of the text, highlighting points that awaken an allegorical reading that combines with contemporary and 19th century social factors to thus detect and classify the criticism (s) presented. According to Jean-Paul Sartre (2005), the artist persists where the philosopher gives up, thus, we intend to understand the conception of the world expressed in the authors' narratives. Our study is a bibliographic research, in which we used the comparative method in a qualitative way. After the analysis, we realized that the narratives present criticisms of the common way of life in the societies in which they are located, whether it be the class system of Tsarist Russia, or the Brazilian bourgeois way of life. In both realities, only appearance, fame or position had value. As theoretical assumptions for the present study, we present: Tzvetan Todorov (2017), David Roas (2014), Jean-Paul Sartre (2005); on allegory in literature: Walter Benjamim (2011) and João Adolfo Hansen (2006).