Morality in Asfalto selvagem

Nelson Rodrigues between Two Times of the Brazilian Novel

Abstract

We compare Asfalto selvagem to the contemporary and the immediately preceding novelistic production in Brazil, in an attempt to understand why Nelson Rodrigues’s novels have received little attention from our literary critique. More specifically, we compare his approach to morality with what prevailed in the “1930s novel”, here analyzed in two representative works: Octávio de Faria’s “Bourgeois tragedy” and Jorge Amado’s Captains of the sand. While in the 1930s a normative and dualistic morality prevailed, with the staging of conflicts between two visions as a means to establish the “right views” as moral guides to the readers, in Rodrigues there is no such ostensive moralization, but the display of textual elements that suggest moral inferences to be made by the reader himself. Through Webb Keane’s concept of “ethical affordances” we analyze how the characters’ rationalizations and justifications also build a paradoxical representation of morality and a “neurotic” pattern of behavior, again in contrast with preceding and contemporary novels in Brazil. In the end, we suggest that four characteristics of Rodrigues’s novels might explain their small academic repercussion: the use of humor in the dramatization of “sin”; the refusal of moral and political activism; the absence of Brazil (as society, history and culture) as a dominant theme; a paradoxical moral perspective that did not recognize religion, family, the State, political ideologies or any work ethic as sources of authority.