O fantasma em narrativas de horror da literatura brasileira

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the role of ghosts in Brazilian literature in a corpus of narratives from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries: “A dança dos ossos” (1871), by Bernardo Guimarães; “Flor, telefone, moça” (1951), by Carlos Drummond de Andrade; and “O Fotógrafo” (2006), by Marcelo Dias Amado. The author intends to determine how the narrative mechanics produce the horror effect and how the role of the ghost is incorporated into the plot. Our hypothesis is that elements of the fantastic contaminate horror literature and that this has a direct impact on the production of fear and terror. This investigation is supported by a three-pronged foundation of history, theory, and critical studies on the intersection between the horror and fantastic genres, standing on the shoulders of work by Jean Delumeau, Zygmunt Bauman, Sigmund Freud, Tzvetan Todorov, and David Roas, in addition to two authors who were exponents in their production of both literature and critical essays about the genre: Edgar Allan Poe and Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The work of Wayne Booth will also offer tools with which to perform discourse analysis. In conclusion, we note that the fantastic contaminates the narratives in the corpus, leading to the production of fear and terror, albeit in different degrees of intensity. In “A dança dos ossos”, there is a conflict between belief and disbelief in the supernatural nature of the ghost’s danse macabre, culminating in an ostensible acceptance of incongruous events. In “Flor, telefone, moça”, the virtual nature of the presence of the ghostly voice introduces doubts about its existence, in addition to the fear of the deceased coming to demand from the living that which has been taken from it. In “O fotógrafo”, the ghost haunts by means of audiovisual elements, revealing evidence recorded with a camera, making the camera an eyewitness to the crime the ghost suffered. The horror effect arises from the confirmation that ghosts exist and can interfere in the world of the living. We found thematic similarities in the motivations of the ghost characters, grounded on cultural and historical beliefs, but also aesthetic differences in the narrators and settings, probably due to when the stories were written. However, the intersection with fantastic elements is clear in all three short stories: the establishment of what is real and the subsequent break from it is characteristic of the fantastic and essential in horror literature