A doença como metáfora em Philip Roth e Samuel Rawet

Abstract

This dissertation aims to approximate the short novel Homem Comum (2006), by the American writer Philip Roth (1933-2018), with four short stories by the Brazilian writer Samuel Rawet (1929-1984): "O fio", "O crime perfeito", "A batalha de Kurukshetra", and ―Consciência do mundo‖. Our hypothesis is that in these texts disease, melancholy and degeneration are allegorically represented in order to express what Freudian psychoanalysis understands as the primordial conflict of the human being: the tension between the forces of life drive (Eros) and death drive (Thanatos). Based on Walter Benjamin, these narratives question the decline of experience and tradition in modernity, the impossibility of transmitting authentic experiences and affirming a single, eternal and universal meaning. The narration, in this regard, ceases to have a collective character, in which experiences were passed on from generation to generation, to give way to the narration of the life of a solitary man struggling to succeed in a society marked by competition. In this way, Roth's and Rawet's works represent the disenchantment of the world in modernity and it is this devaluation of the apparent world and the death of the classical individual that makes the allegorical form resurface as Walter Benjamin defined it, namely that allegory manifests the fragmentation of the Real. Although the text is imbued with melancholy due to the loss of ultimate meaning, its productivity is born from the recognition of the fragments of this loss, as allegory reveals to us, the meaning comes not only from life, but also from death. Our analysis is based on the studies of Walter Benjamin, Freud, Betty Fuks, Jaime Ginzburg and Susan Sontag.