Inscrições distópicas no romance português do século XXI

Abstract

Utopia and dystopia go hand in hand, composing an interdisciplinary theoretical and artistic horizon that shares, first of all, the act of projecting a society, drawing it through imagination and fiction. Utopianism - from Plato, through Arcadia, to paradises on Earth and Cockaigne - creates positive images of tomorrow or idealizes a better place. The word utopia, associated with this positive projection (which uncovers human yearnings), was formalized by Thomas More in 1516 with the publication of the work Utopia. Since then, with the influence of Renaissance thought, utopia has come to mean "another idyllic place" (an island) and to represent a literary genre (or subgenre). In this way, a utopian tradition was formalized and we associated it with both artistic works and social projects and ways of thinking. Dystopia resignifies utopia by complementing it; The denial of the place (the "u" of utopia) becomes a negative description (the "dys" of dystopia), that is, the representation of a defective place, an environment of distortions. While utopianism and utopia come from a long tradition, dystopia is formalized only in the twentieth century (a historical moment marked by wars and social failures) and only in the literary sphere. Classical dystopias, created in the early decades of the twentieth century - with authors such as Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell - were responsible for stabilizing a negative imaginary through fiction. In view of this complex tradition, this thesis aims to study the specificities of dystopia as a genre (understood here as an artistic romanesque work that appropriates the imagery of nightmare), in view of its relations with the utopian tradition. Through an analytical perspective, anchored in a comparative perspective (thus always thinking about intertextual mechanisms), I propose a study of the contemporary Portuguese Novel - works published in the twenty-first century - whose plots, to some extent (and with different intensities), recover and reinterpret what we know as dystopias. To that end, ten works were selected – Um homem: Klaus Klump (2003) and A máquina de Joseph Walser (2004), by Gonçalo M. Tavares; O Dom (2007), by Jorge Reis-Sá; Diálogos Para o Fim do Mundo (2010), by Joana Bértholo; Por Este Mundo Acima (2011), by Patricia Reis; O Destino Turístico (2008) and A Instalação do Medo (2012) by Rui Zink; Um Piano Para Cavalos Altos (2012), by Sandro William Junqueira; O Último Europeu - 2284 (2015), by Miguel Real; Os números que Venceram os Nomes (2015), by Samuel Pimenta. As we shall see, fears (the key word for dystopias) incited by oppressive and totalitarian governments and the imminence (or presence) of apocalypses are the most expressive dystopian categories in the portuguese novel under study, to which other images relate, thus, a poetics of dystopia.