Cigarros e fezes: o absurdo na ficção contemporânea de Lourenço Mutarelli

Abstract

When reading the works of Lourenço Mutarelli, a comic artist and novelist already renowned in the contemporary scene of Brazilian literature, it is common to come across the construction of grotesque, dirty, intensely urban and apathetically desolate universes. Its protagonists are pathetic, failed, incomplete and dangerous figures in different ways (usually both to others and to themselves). The plots that develop from and around such characters seem to expose an inherent impotence in the face of the apparent lack of meaning in their lives. So effective is the Mutarellian narrative in its simplicity, that the senselessness of the novels seems to extend beyond the literary field, making apparent a possible lack of meaning in the reader's own reality. Based on this effect, and based on the concept of the Absurd as proposed by Albert Camus in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus (2023), this research aims to expose how Lourenço Mutarelli's novels, having the Absurd as the existential foundation of their universes fictional, enable/trigger access to an absurd contemporaneity through the representation of different responses to the phenomenon of the Absurd. With this purpose in mind, the novels O Natimorto: um musical silencioso (2018) and O Cheiro do Ralo (2009), by Lourenço Mutarelli, were selected and, based on their readings, supported by the writings of Gaston Bachelard (1978), Carl G. Jung (2002; 2008, 2021), Félix Guattari (1993), among others, it will be demonstrated how the literary space and the focus on the internal universe of the protagonists function as means of representing the (feeling and notion of) the Absurd and the different ways out that the individual can choose to resolve this issue: suicide and absurd existence