A tessitura do medo na literatura brasileira: o insólito terror naturalista em "Demônios", de Aluísio Azevedo

Abstract

This research seeks to reflect on the literary domains of terror and the codes that constituted it over time: its role in subverting dominant patterns within a historical-cultural context, its capacity for transformation in intercultural dialogue, the representation of fears in the process of social construction, and its relationship with the Other. We track its emergence in Gothic novels, passing through Romanticism and Ultraromanticism, as well as the possible inherited marginalization markers to which the genre has undergone and, finally, its prevalence in the face of Brazilian literary criticism in recent decades. Our research assumes as corpus the short story “Demons”, published in 1891, by Aluísio Azevedo, in its full version. The aim is to discuss the narrative strategies employed in the construction of this work, and how they guarantee the aesthetic quality of this narrative belonging to the horror genre. Thus, it proposes the analysis of the short story by cutting a text with Gothic architecture, fantastic and at the same time naturalist, which culminates in an experimental horror. To carry out this intent, we appropriated an analytical tool based on the three pillars of Gothic writing highlighted by Júlio França. In the first pillar, “locus horribilis”, we base ourselves on the reflections of Edmund Burke and H.P. Lovecraft. For the second, the “phantasmagorical presence of the past in the present”, we again rely on Burke's studies added to Giorgio Agamben's inferences about ghosts, also relying on the works of Virgílio and Dante Alighieri. In the last pillar, the “monstrous character”, we turn to thinkers like Aristotle, and in the reflections of Jorge Luis Borges, Noël Carroll, Wolfgang Kayser, and, mainly, in the studies of Victor Hugo. Given this, finally, we seek to give new meaning to this particular chapter of Aluisian production, contributing to a rise in critical studies of Brazilian horror literature