As representações do diabo na literatura de tradição oral do Brasil: variação e repetição nas funções da personagem

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to give some thought to the representations of the Devil as a character in literature within Brazilian oral tradition. In order to discover what elements connected to the actions of this personality either remain the same and/or vary in such representatives, we have applied Propp s function theory, which has been especially developed in Morphology of the marvellous tale, with possible alterations, to a corpus made up of 31 tales taken from eight classical anthologies of our popular culture, as follows: Histórias da avozinha and Histórias da baratinha, by Figueiredo Pimentel, Contos tradicionais do Brasil and Literatura oral no Brasil by Luís da Câmara Cascudo; Estórias do diabo, by Altimar Pimentel; Folclore brasileiro: contos populares do Brasil, by Sílvio Romero; Contos populares brasileiros by Lindolfo Gomes; and Território da danação, by Mário Souto Maior. During this investigation, special attention has been given to the way in which the character concerned carries out his role in the narrative pieces studied, particularly in regard to his role as an antagonist and a false hero: the standards as defined by Propp are followed with regard to functions; such standards suffer radical transgression; or there is an indication of a certain ambivalence between good and evil, normally associated to certain popular representations of popular culture. For this purpose, this work has been divided into three chapters: the first seeks a better understanding of the universe which includes the Devil as a literary character in Brazil, therefore being subdivided into: popular culture; literature from the oral tradition; the myth, the tale and the brief story. The second chapter is dedicated to the methodology adopted, including the identification, within the literary corpus, of the excerpts in which the Devil takes on the role of an antagonist or a false hero, showing such a survey through a series of comparative tables, each of which is dedicated to one of the Propp functions selected for the study considered. The second chapter also tries to discuss and analyse the data collected and presented in the tables, with the reference for this discussion being the work of the Russian formalist. Finally, the third chapter presents the conclusions obtained from these analyses