As intermitências da morte e as fabulações em Saramago : ironia e paródia na crítica social e política

Abstract

This research proposes the analysis and critical-literary discussion about the bias of political and social criticism adopted by the Portuguese writer José Saramago in the novel As intermitências da morte, based on literary criticism on the author's aesthetic process in the composition of characters who are representatives of Church, State and Society. Therefore, it was necessary, first, to retrace the path through which the representation of death has passed over time, choosing a clipping about the images produced by its symbology in certain historical and cultural contexts. It seeks to demonstrate the presence of political bias, a mark of Saramago's writing, in the analyzed novel, and how the author uses the construction of characters in the narrative to criticize the interference of the power exercised by social institutions in the life of the citizen, discussing the the way in which death passes from a rite restricted to the private sphere to an institutionalized conception of life in contemporary society. In this sense, by evidencing Saramago's implicit discourse on how the trivialization of death is used within the narrative construct, through the composition of some characters, the present work aims to demonstrate how Saramago's writing calls the reader to reflect on the perverse logic of the power exercised by social institutions in contemporary times. The research is based on the fundamental theoretical-critical contribution to the studies of authors who deal with the theme of death, parody and irony as aesthetic resources, such as Philippe Ariès, Michel Foucault, Linda Hutcheon, Maria Alzira Seixo , Susan Sontag, Camila Diogo de Souza, Ana Cristina Cerdeira, Carlos Reis, among others and others. It is also worth mentioning the investigative dialogue with the critical fortune of José Saramago, which has valuable contributions to investigate the research corpus