Tradição e modernidade em Gota d’água, de Chico Buarque e Paulo Pontes

Abstract

The artistic production in Brazil in the second half of the 20th century was characterized by a strong, critical perspective, resulting from the historical context since 1964, the year of the military coup. Chico Buarque de Hollanda, a significant representative in music, literature, and theater, and Paulo Pontes, one of the playwrights who founded the Opinião theater group, were actively engaged in the entire cultural movement in this period. The work of these two authors has a strong political content, characterized by criticism and the expression of a time when resistance was necessary against repression. Gota d'água: uma tragédia brasileira (1975), a partnership between them, uses the classic text Medea, by Euripides, to illustrate 20th-century Brazilian society through the process of intertextuality. Set in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, the play features Joana, a woman who suffers from oppressive relationships. When she is left by Jasão, author of the samba Gota d'água, she is driven by the impulse for revenge, which leads to the murder of her children and her suicide. Parallel to this, another narrative involves Creonte, father of Jasão's fiancée and owner of the properties where Joana and other characters live, representing the figure who holds power in the community. Full of symbolism, Buarque and Pontes’ work points to aspects of society that remain present and need to be discussed. We propose to research the similarities and disparities between tradition and modernity in Buarque and Pontes’ text in this essay, based on the assumption that every literary work maintains intertextual relationships with other works. In this sense, this study seeks to present a theoretical analysis of some fundamental concepts and ideas in literary studies, relating them to the text Gota d'água. We will investigate the thoughts of Plato, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Hegel, and Friedrich Nietzsche, using tradition and modernity approaches, to trace theoretical paths and reflect on how much the past is present in this literary work