O clichê e o obsceno: textualidades no Inferno da Biblioteca Nacional

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes a group of graphic products, including booklets, magazine issues and books, from the beginning of the 20th century, contained in the section called Inferno of the Biblioteca Nacional of Rio de Janeiro (BN), in which literary objects are related to images contained therein, whether in the form of illustrations or photographs. Inferno is a collection located in the section named Obras Raras (Rare Works) of the BN, which has about 50 titles, mainly arising from the legal deposit law, most of them being pornographic objects, being cataloged as “prohibited” works, despite having their circulation in its context of production occurred in a considerably broad way. These books are inserted there, with other documents of a political and religious nature, also “hidden”, as they were wrongly cataloged in order to enable the preservation of their volumes, through a camouflage in their records. Selected from research in this collection, the corpora of this dissertation are Variações de amor, by Zé Bedeu, apparently published in 1913, a booklet composed of 3 pornographic stories, one containing zoophilia, a second about a lesbian relationship and the third about life sex of a clerk; O Menino do Gouveia, by Capadócio Maluco, a story published in an installment by the newspaper O Rio-Nú, in 1914, considered to this day the first homoerotic story produced and published in Brazil; and A pulga, by Lucio D’Amour, probably also published in 1914, which tells a story of an interracial encounter between a rich lady and her black servant. It is observed that part of the selected works make use of ironic pseudonyms, and until today it has not been possible to define their authorship. The selection of corpora is carried out for three fundamental reasons; first because it deals with a thematic diversity around obscenity, second because of the obligatory presence of images, and third because they are short works. It is also interesting to investigate, together with the aforementioned objects, the advertisements for these works contained in the satirical-pornographic newspaper O Rio-nú, creating intersectionality with the media in force at the time of their production, as an object of research, observing the motivation of these works to be illustrated.