Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada (May 2023)
MISERY TRILOGY. THE LITERATURE OF JOÃO DO RIO AND TODAY’S BRAZIL
Abstract
In a text written in the last decade of the 20th century, critic Antonio Candido highlights the importance of the newspaper column for the history of Brazilian literature, as the genre provided many national authors with a relevant projection in the literary world. We add the vigor that the column retains by being transformed into a historical document – a portrait, a point of view of its time capable of reverberating in the present. From this perspective, this study proposes reading João do Rio, considered one of the greatest columnist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Reconciling fiction and reality, or even imagination and information, João do Rio’s work sculpts Brazilian society, allowing clear images of what, in the present, can be seen as Brazilian political and social structure since colonial times. With sarcastic language, as highlighted by Candido, João do Rio’s work reiterates, nowadays, the relevance of thinking about Brazil in its history insofar as it presents an evident criticism – intensified nowadays - of Brazilian society at the beginning of the 20th century. The objective of this study is to highlight, based on three texts by João do Rio, “A peste” [The Plague], “A galeria superior” [Upper Gallery], and “Crimes de amor” [Love Crimes], themes that confirm, in the 21st century, traits of a backward and anachronistic Brazil, still marked by social inequality, racism, and violence against women, revealing what we call here “the trilogy of misery”: lack of protection for poor children and adolescents, victimization of men in crimes of passion, and class privileges in times of health crisis. With the study in question, we verify how much João do Rio’s writings -one hundred years after his death - still reveal an important literary testimony of a Brazil in which violence emerges in different ways in its most unequal manners of social coexistence.
