A trilogia de aventura de Menotti Del Picchia : a década de 1930 entre utopias e distopias

Abstract

The research analyzed three fictional works by the author Menotti del Picchia, from São Paulo: A República 3,000 (1930), Kalum (1936), and Cummunká (1938). The work was conducted through: analytical reading of the novels; research of primary sources to study their repercussion; study of the historical context of the 1930s; critical and historiographical analysis of literary genres; and an intersection between literary discourse and relevant cultural debate subjects. The approach adopted was to promote an interpretation of how the three dimensions of time – past, present and future – were organized and gave meaning to the novels, according to the problems created by the context and the ideological positioning of the writer. In this work, we observe the importance of literature as a primary source of historical research, demonstrating how Picchia's romances promoted representations of the 1930s and presented his reading of the time, reporting the conflicts of the context after the Great War, marked by world crisis in the economic and political fields. For this, he used the languages of the adventure novel and the science fiction, an extremely popular literary genre at the time, to present narratives that expressed his conservative positioning. The novels show a reading of what would be the barbarism and the negative consequences of technological utopias, which could ruin the human essence. Picchia used the growth of the book market to reach a young audience, to introduce a worldview that expressed a desire for caution in adopting change, with a preference for a simple and moderate lifestyle. In relation to the futuristic societies that appear in the books, all of them introduce great comfort improvements in the lives of their residents, but these developments would have led to the loss of feelings, especially love, giving dystopian tones to these utopian societies. Was also analyzed the author's concern regarding the evolution of international tensions in politics, which leads him to a reversal, in the novel Cummunká, some approaches of the previous novels, for example through the glorification of the indigenous figure, when interpreting the modernizing transformation in the1930s as a path to real barbarism.