A humanidade pelo ralo: relações sociais enquanto montagens perversas em O Cheiro do Ralo de Lourenço Mutarelli e Heitor Dhalia

Abstract

In O Cheiro do Ralo (2002), by São Paulo writer Lourenço Mutarelli, we find the path of an immoral buyer of used objects that uses his position of power with the purpose of subjecting people around him, objectifying them and using them as tools, in order to satisfy his perverse desires - result of a marketing logic that increasingly permeates the actions of people in contemporary society. The present study proposes to identify the referential and critical potentialities of Mutarelli's novel O Cheiro do Ralo and its cinematic adaptation by Heitor Dhalia (2006) based on an analysis of how, in each of these textual forms, human relations, inherent in a sociocultural context guided by the market and spectacle, are represented as legitimizing actions of social perversion. After presenting the idea of translation and adaptation according to Itamar Even-Zohar (2013), Andre Lefevere (2007) and Linda Hutcheon (2011), we will show the prominent role assumed by this matter in the current Brazilian cultural field, thus revealing an increasingly intimate connection between the national literary and cinematographic systems coupled with a greater possibility for the audience to come into contact with different viewpoints on the same subject - due to re-readings profusion offered by adaptations. Later, we will present characteristics portrayed by culture thinkers, such as Zygmunt Bauman (2008), Gilles Lipovetsky (2011) and Richard Sennet (2010), about the condition of culture within globalized societies - assumed as consumer societies. Next, we will use the concept of "traumatic realism” offered by Hal Foster (2013) to unveil the politicalideological dimension in O Cheiro do Ralo, which points to a critical look at the submission of interpersonal relations to the market logic, in a violent and amoral way, increasingly fostering equal treatment for individuals and objects, and ends up delineating a scenario in which the social ties begin to be integrated by eminently perverse subjectivities, as observed by Dany- Robert Dufour (2014) and Jean-Pierre Lebrun (2009). In the last part, we will start from a description of how such a scenario is allegorically represented in Dhalia's narrative, emphasizing its ideological and utopian dimensions, as theorized by Fredric Jameson (1992). Finally, we will discuss the existing dialogue between Mutartelli's adaptation and novel, highlighting the ways in which each of these media questions the theme of intersubjective bonds degradation in contemporary times.