Comédias de uma vida arriscada: risco e riso na crônica brasileira contemporânea

Abstract

The thematic approach of risk brought into focus by the concept of laughter has been a recurrent practice concerning the literary production of Brazilian contemporary chroniclers. Such trend is based on the assumption that risk is imposed on as an object, whereas laughter appears to be a strategy. In order to make laughable the threats we have to deal with in everyday life, their texts usually indicate our courage in facing both personal and collective woes. Such texts highlight relevant cultural aspects of our time as well as typical ways of thinking and being. Concepts such as risk, laughter and chronicle are hereby considered in two different ways one being diachronic, and the other synchronic. The same concepts are then unfolded in reference to a broader theoretical-conceptual panorama allowing that complementary notions such as experience and reflexivity, happiness and joy, memory and oblivion be studied. Once proved by evidence in the above-mentioned notions, contrast and distances will be taken to account for the complex relationship between risk and laughter as found in the selected literary corpus. The analytical study carried on here covers fifteen chronicles signed by Luis Fernando Verissimo, João Ubaldo Ribeiro, Millôr Fernandes and Moacyr Scliar. Its assumed larger scope concerns an inquiry about the manner by which the collected texts express the entanglement of risk and laughter in view of existential circumstances that so well typify life at the present time. As a more general hypothesis, it is here proposed that every chronicle operates an actual mediation between on one side the records of human behavior clearly related to the present time, and the artistic reinvention of genuinely human experiences on the other.