O agressor by Rosário Fusco

Evil or Paranoia

Abstract

The article analyzes O agressor (The aggressor), a novel by Rosário Fusco published in 1943 and reviewed by Antonio Candido shortly thereafter in “Folha da Manhã”. However, differently from Candido’s assessment, which seems to be guided both by the defense of the national novel and a certain realism in the literature, then criticizing Fusco’s book precisely by its supposed disintegration in connection to the “Brazilian experience”, the article seeks to revalue O agressor taking two approaches into consideration: with Kafka and with surrealism. For this purpose we try to associate the novel with the “critical-paranoid method” as elaborated by Salvador Dalí after the spanish painter read first Lacanian theories around the notion of paranoia, also considered in this article. As will be seen, as Gunther Anders argues about the author of “The Process”, Fusco’s novel, through its own technique of estrangement, does nothing but touch the very core of reality.