No Coração das Trevas: o paraíso e inferno do outro em Bernardo Carvalho e Joseph Conrad

Abstract

This dissertation studies the role of subject in literature and its relation to culture and alterity through the analysis of two works: Nine Nights by Bernardo Carvalho and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. This work show the crisis that the protagonists of both books faces after the encounter with other cultures. In Nine nights the Indian and Heart of Darkness by Africans represents the other. Nine nights tells the story of the anthropologist Buell Quain who commits suicide after a stay between the Indians Krahô, and in Heart of Darkness we see the deterioration of the white man represented by the character of Kurtz. Considered a remarkable man and an unselfish in Europe, Kurtz would have been corrupted by contact with the reality of the Congo and becomes, in the words of the narrator Marlow, one of the demons of the land. The dissolution of the personality and moral code of the white man, represented by two characters, will be studied by analyzing the relationship between personality and culture and how the lack of support and control of the group disarticulates values until then considered stable, as well as the contact with other cultures. The disarticulation of the subject caused by culture shock adds to the general crisis of the modern subject and the discontents of civilization, as described by Freud. The paradoxical position of the anthropologist, which is situated between two cultures, is part of this analysis, even as questions regarding the position of Indians and Africans in the Congo. In the specific case of Heart of Darkness will be studied a intersection between the analysis of the subject, and their implications, and the construction of the character of Kurtz as a symbol of colonial violence. The paper also examines the similarities between the two works, both in thematic and in narrative techniques in their work and influence of Conrad's novels Carvalho