No Brasil, quem não é canalha na véspera, é canalha no dia seguinte , ou, A figura do canalha nas tragédias cariocas de Nelson Rodrigues

Abstract

This Master s thesis analyses the figure of the rascal as a social type inevitably associated to the Brazilian cultural settings and, as the title announces it, within a specific cycle of Nelson Rodrigues s dramatic work: the so-called Rio de Janeiro tragedies . In fact, this paper is divided into two parts. In the first, the label Rio de Janeiro tragedies is called into question to point to implications dictated less by exegetic reasons than by publishing reasons. This first part also brings up the thesis that it was Nelson Rodrigues, starting with A Falecida (1953) his first play to receive that class tag he who first made a sui generis introduction of the national-populism motifs in the country s dramatic genre. This position clashes head-front with most mainstream criticism, which endeavors to canonize the version that it is the politically-oriented generation led by Teatro de Arena upon the opening of Gianfrancesco Guarnieri s Eles não usam black-tie, in 1958 that pioneered social typing of subaltern segments in the national drama, imparting a full ideological program to the on-going dramatic standards, which would make a privilege of local color in Brazilian life. The second part focuses on the object this thesis sets out to analyze: the rascal proper. Here, the tragic dialectics between subject and object, according to Georg Simmel, and the problem of divergence, in Robert Merton, provide the theoretical frameworks to the sociological perspectives adopted. The thorough approach of the Rio de Janeiro tragedy Otto Lara Resende ou Bonitinha, mas ordinária (1963), ends up as a case study on its own, as it places moral issues right up in the foreground. Still in the second part, there is a mandatory distinction between the Rodrigues s drama projects and those of the engaged generation, as for their treatment of those characters marked by lack of principles and the consequent relation each characterization bears to different conceptions of the nature of the average Brazilian and to the light it sheds onto the understanding of our national identity