Sex & Violence in Brazilian Books

From short stories to full novels, no author has explored more the themes of sexuality and violence than Nelson Rodrigues. It is impossible not to mention his work thoroughly if we wish to analyze how the country’s media was and still is exposed to such themes and how it influences media consumers’ behaviors.


Nelson Rodrigues as he started his career in the '40s

“I am a pornographic angel,” said Rodrigues, born in August, 1912, in Recife, city of the state of Pernambuco. Living his childhood as an observer of the hypocritical behavior of his neighbors and relatives, Rodrigues began working as a police reporter in 1925. He soon began to impress his colleagues, all renowned writers and poets, with his detailed accounts of the simplest facts of life, and he immediately specialized in young lovers’ death pacts, a common occurrence at those times. Young men and women pledged their love for one another, but amid the social distinctions and economic divisions of the times such relationships were often prohibited, leading to the suicide of one or both lovers.

Rodrigues began to show his taste for violence and strong sexual contents in his literature when he wrote The Rat... (this infamous ellipsis at the end of his titles turned out to be a registered mark), where he told the short story of a rat he had seen, smothered by the tires of a passing car. There was no particular plot for the story, just the mere account of a gruesome scene.

Rodrigues had witnessed the murder of his brother and the passing of his father before he turned 18, which deeply contributed to his artistic perspective. He became popular writing and directing for theater, particularly after The Bride’s Dress, a story riddled with sex, jealousy and murder. Many of his short stories and theater plays eventually became TV mini-series. One of the memorable and most recent plays transformed into a TV show was The Cutie, a short story about a young couple bothered and tempted by the bride’s younger sister, who comes of age and decides to seduce the groom. Successfully managing to bring him to her bed, the jealousy, guilt and inconformity with the unreal situation brings the groom to murder “the cutie” and return gloriously to his wife, just in time for his arrest.

Later in life, Rodrigues speaks

But was Brazil ready for Rodrigues? The answer is probably yes, since his fame managed to grow when all other artists had their wings cut by the military regime that later ensued in 1964.

As the novelist supported dictatorship (even though one of his sons was tortured by the military), and as the times grew dark and violent, Rodrigues’ exploration and exploitation of the vile costumes of Brazilian culture grew in controversy, but sold massively and brought in large audiences to the theaters almost infallibly.

Since the times of his first acclaimed story, The Woman without Sin (1942), Rodrigues was considered “both immoral and a moralist” (Brazil Journal). Readers and spectators were often in awe of his sordid accounts, but it never seemed to turn them off. In spite of strong literary criticism, Rodrigues is still known as the father of modern Brazilian theater. With vast short stories, novels and plays, aside of his witty, famous quotes, the writer had most of his work compiled in Life as Life Is (1951-1961). He died in December, 21, 1980.

Life as Life Is, the movie

In Brazil, however, both sex and violence as a method for storytelling has always seemed a bit more valid, real and original than the violence depicted in Hollywood. In its literature, it wouldn’t be different. Instead of ridiculing violence by creating stereotypes and flooding the pages of his books with gory accounts and pornographic images, it seemed that Rodrigues’ violence had a place and a meaning in the story, and even though it has certainly shocked readers, it did so by telling the truth about people’s intimate lives, not creating a paradox where anything goes.

Also, Rodrigues’ characters seldom found happiness and always had some sort of pathology haunting them, and his women were objectified to an extent, as the anonymous author of the Weblog Bacanartes, a literary critic, explains: “In a suburban room, the conflict between lovers occurs, while none of the members of a love-triangle is happy. A friend who says he is sick, incapable of not having sex with all the girls he sees – and the woman as an object, whether she is innocent, or woman, or free – and the man betrayed, desperate before the sands of Ipanema or any other Brazilian beach. On a train destined to anywhere, a man slides his hands through the thighs of another man, a sordid sexual advance in a public situation. And The Cutie. The Cutie precedes Lolita and Anita for a decade. The man opens the door to his dark living room… And the surprise…”

My Destiny is to Sin, one of Rodrigues' famous books and theater plays

Rubem Fonseca, another contemporary author, has written of violence in his dozens of short stories, but with a different perspective. Unlike Rodrigues, Fonseca incorporates the modern concepts of human behavior and inter-relations as he speaks of drug dealers and users, the homeless, prostitutes and petty thieves in a heavy urban setting that resembles noir films, but that are ever too close to Brazilian reality.

Born in May 11, 1925 in Minas Gerais, Fonseca has never liked the public life and has constantly avoided it. His last book, Romance has died, was published in 2007, but the author has very few interviews and even less current pictures of him along his career. A former police officer, Fonseca has incorporated what he had witnessed while on duty in the pages of his fiction. As his friends describe (Releituras, 2008), at the time that Fonseca worked as a policeman, the profession tended to be more about maintaining peace and helping the community than hunting thugs. Nevertheless, it is those thugs and marginal men and women that Fonseca liked to write about in his chronicles.

Once again, because of the modernity of his writing and how they have always appealed to young and old audiences as they attempted to use his books and tales to make sense of the world around them, Fonseca has also had some of his stories turned into movies, and he wrote most scripts for those productions as well. Reports of a Married Man (1974), Stellinha (1990), and the thriller The Great Art (1991) were three award-winning movies of the several screenplays he wrote and saw directed.

One of the rare pictures taken of Rubem Fonseca

Although some literary critics have condemned the work of Nelson Rodrigues as immoral, times favored the accounts of somber violence and urban crimes in 1963, a year before the military revolution, when Fonseca wrote and published his first chronicle, The Prisoners. Whereas Rodrigues perhaps sensationalized violence and sex through the eyes of his common characters, Fonseca’s characters already belonged to the dog-eat-dog medium of the big cities.

David Sexton, writing for the Independent, has said this about Fonsecas’ romance The Great Art: “Latin-American fiction has showed itself capable of combining, without any difficulty, the intelligent with the popular. The Great Art captivates readers because its paradoxical elements underscore, instead of depreciating, its sensationalist side, turning it into a refined and superior book.”

From the critics (both positive or negative) of these two authors we can infer that, although violence and sexuality have been intrinsically explored in their works, sensationalized and objectified, they don’t take much from their artistic and philosophical value, remaining among the “high culture” literature still found on Brazilian bookshelves.

64 Tales by Rubem Fonseca

Both Rodrigues and Fonseca, as seen before, have contributed immensely to national cinema and TV shows. The next two parts speak of the two media formats.

(Click to go to the next part of the presentation)