A violência legitimada na ordem social: uma leitura de O matador, Patrícia Melo

Abstract

The text is a lecture of the book O matador (2009), by Patrícia Melo, a Brazilian fictionalist from the 1990s, to discuss the representation of violence in the centuries-old literature. It is believed that the book has a unique character in the Brazilian fiction, because the violence is showed as extreme and legitimized for the promotion of social order, which suggests that it is a fiction that is in line with a real problem. For that purpose, the writings of Jacques Laplante (2001) and Yves Michaud (2012) about the violence as an element present in the everyday of the real context are revisited; the writings of Michel Foucault (1999), Jaime Ginzburg (2017), Perrone-Moisés (2016), Tânia Pellegrini (2002, 2008), Regina Zilberman (1994), Karl Schollhammer (2000, 2009), Ronaldo Lins (1990), about the representation of violence, as well as the aesthetics of violence in evidence in the universal fiction and brazilian fiction. Finally, some research and studies of Sérgio Adorno (2002), Alba Zaluar (1998), Silvia Carbone (2008), Bezerra Júnior (2006), Michel Wieviorka (1997), Hannah Arendt (2013), Marilena Chauí (2018), and other researchers about the practice of extreme violence, exercised by citizens murderers, legitimized by society. By means of such lecture, it was realized that Patrícia Melo's fiction shows a social fissure in which the representation of violence is not so different from the real violence, present in the daily life of Brazilian society. The theme of O matador (2009) is relevant and actual, because it confronts the reader with violence and with harmful values of society in relation to the man himself, with violations of rights prevailing for various types of aggressions