Formas grotescas: a representação da violência em contos de Verônica Stigger

Abstract

Studies in the contemporary Brazilian literature area claim that violence is one of the most common subjects in our literature. It was observed that violence is usually represented by the need for dialogue with social issues which motivate it, especially in the big cities’ context. In most cases, such texts use realistic representation schemes as an explicit form of denunciation of Brazilian reality, but they also run the risk of becoming a trivial spectacle of violence. It is possible to delineate a trajectory of the representation of violence in contemporary Brazilian fiction and indicate structural and thematic tendencies that are repeated over centuries and the writers them are related to, but it is also possible to recognize how some authors differ by using aesthetic solutions. Therefore, we discuss the works Gran cabaret demenzial (2007) and Os anões (2010), by the contemporary Brazilian author Veronica Stigger, setting them in the literary series that chooses the violence theme and which can be distinguished by the concept of refracted realism (Pellegrini , 2012). This work proposes that because Stigger uses the aesthetic procedure of grotesque to represent violence, her short stories distinguish themselves from the realistic representation of violence in which the reality is the scenery or the argument for social criticism that has become paradigmatic in contemporary Brazilian literature. To support our analysis, we traced the course of the representation of violence in contemporary Brazilian narrative, from the 1970s to the first decade of the 2000s, indicating the main literary tendencies related to the aesthetic procedures used by the authors to approach this theme, and then we identified what is dissonant in Stigger's short stories in comparison to them. In the developing of this research, we used literary theory and criticism that talks about the representation of violence in contemporary Brazilian literature, namely Bosi (2002), Candido (1987), Pellegrini (1996, 2004, 2008), Schøllhammer (2009); works by Pellegrini (2007, 2012) which discuss realistic representation schemes in contemporary Brazilian literature; works about the genre short story related to contemporary Brazilian narratives, such as Bosi (1975) and Dalcastagnè (2001); and discussions about the grotesque by Kayser (2009) and Sodré and Paiva (2002).