Morte, infância e cultura: um olhar sobre a abordagem da morte em obras infantis brasileiras

Abstract

The presence of the theme, death, is in the texts directed to childhood a long time ago. Since the European classic short stories which brought with it some death scenes caused by hunger, poverty, human wickedness, or, yet, as a simple event. Therefore, we noticed that there is no way to keep away from children what is common to human nature, even when the concept of childhood was not well established, yet. Over time, through the consolidation of this ideal and all of the changes it causes, the death was being cleaned and removed from this public year after year. In addition, in Brazilian childhood literature this could not be different, after all, the relation between these texts and the European texts, for instance, was narrow. It was in the beginning of 1920, with Monteiro Lobato works we could realize the effective presence of a national literature aimed at children. The works of the author made room for the universe of fantasy and discussion of some themes, such as, war, evil, poverty, and especially death. Since then, our literature has grown, with the emergence of authors and illustrators increasingly concerned with valuing what was offered to children through books, making room for creativity, for questioning and also for the topics considered taboo. New works and authors were emerging and they continued to expand until we arrived in the contemporary texts, which are the corpus of our research, whose aim is mapping the Brazilian children’s literary production on the theme of death from the years 2000 to 2020, in order to highlight those in which to die is the central event of the text. Each title was separated and inserted in a category block in the universe of death, such as relative’s death, the pet death, death and popular culture; death, childhood, fear, friendship, and other themes. From this catalogue, we selected four books for in-depth study, namely: O avô de Lalá (2018), by Agláia Tavares; O problema do pato (2007), by Maria Valéria Rezende; Um dente de leite, um saco de ossinhos (2004), by Nilma Lacerda, and A colecionadora de cabeças (2020), by Ana Matsusaki. In this analysis, we will highlight some relevant points as they appear in the works. These points was analyzed in subcategories that will be divided into narrative links, encompassing literarity: the creative and questioning spirit of the work; narrative elements which are used to attract the attention of the reader and the ways of representing death; the book’s materiality, bringing aspects of the graphic project and the design with compose the work; the illustrations, paying attention to the colors, the type of drawing and the rhythm they confer to the text; and, at last, the paratextual elements, and as they influence in the construction of the texts through the book covers and other parts. This mapping was made from the awards, reference works in the field of Children’s Literature, in personal collections, searches on websites and through searches in banks of doctoral thesis and master dissertations. In this process, we understand that the construction of the representations of death in the Brazilian Children’s Literature, based on the texts of the noted authors in the area, such as Arroyo (2011), Coelho (1993/ 1985), Zilberman and Magalhães (1982); as well as those who dedicated their researches to the study about the death in a social and historical perspective, for instance Ariès (2012), Rodrigues (1983) and Elias (2001). This thesis, as a bibliographical research of qualitativeinterpretative nature, was organized into four chapters, which will discuss, at first, death under a social, historical and also philosophical bias; secondly, as it is approached in Brazilian children’s literature; thirdly, with the process of building the catalog of the chosen works and the categories of analysis; and finally, with the selected work analysis. Through the studies carried out during this work, we could realize the writers of Brazilian children’s literature have been engaged, in their majority, not only discuss the topic of death with children, but mainly contribute to the construction of the imaginary of these readers with regard to the subject. Moreover, in the variety of analyzed works, we highlighted that there is a predominance of the subthemes death of grandmother/grandfather and pets as a way to introduce dying in the lives of the characters, and also, of the children themselves, who are faced with the departure of both a pet and a close relative. In relation to the aesthetic questions, we also observe that there has been an intense concern with the materiality of the book as an object that brings with it not only illustrations with high quality, but a whole graphic project, that sometimes, influences in its content.