Filoctetes em uma cadeia de recepções: do abandono em Lemnos à fragmentação em Ramon, o Filoteto americano

Abstract

This work aims to carry out a comparative study that takes the Greek tragedy Philoctetes (409 BC) by Sophocles as its starting point. Based on the theoretical assumptions of Reception Studies, especially Hardwick (2003), we analyze how the Greek playwright from the 5th century BC. takes up thematic and structural elements of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (8th century BC) to build his tragedy. Then, in a leap in time and space, we see how the Brazilian playwright Carlos Henrique Escobar (1976) takes up Sophocles's tragedy and the archer hero's myth in his modern rewriting Ramom, o Filoteto americano. In this way, we assume reception as a movement in which a reader/receiver becomes a producer/writer in a chain of receptions. Thus, Sophocles receives Homer and, in turn, is received by Escobar. Continuing this chain, the three are received by their readers and critics so that their texts can become a source for a writer/producer who rewrites the plot of the archer Philoctetes, which is full of possibilities. In the Greek myth, after being bitten by a serpent and falling ill, Philoctetes, embarked on a ship heading to Troy, was discarded by his companions on a desert island. After ten years, he is summoned by the same people who abandoned him, to put an end to the war with his weapons inherited from Heracles. Sophocles takes up precisely the undertaking intended to lead the archer, disgusted by his abandoned condition, to fight alongside those who deserted him. When we probe what remains constant between the texts, on the one hand, we have Greek myth and tragedy; on the other, the play by Escobar, who wrote his text in the midst of the Military Dictatorship in 1975 and published it the following year, still in the same decade in which, according to Figueiredo (2015), with the increase in censorship and violence by the regime due to AI-5, Brazilian theater lived under coercion. Set in Upper Peru, present-day Bolivia, during the struggle for independence from Spanish rule, Escobar's play takes up the myth of Philoctetes and the Sophoclean tragedy, focusing on the theme of oppression to emphasize the need to combat it. Topics such as resistance to tyranny, identity formation, social isolation, spaces of exile, labor exploitation, and ethnic-racial relations are covered. In addition to the authors already mentioned, the following give theoretical support to our research, among others, Amossy (2018), Araújo and Silva (2021), Aristóteles (2005; 2015), Brandão (2005), Carvalhal (2006), Rivera Cusicanqui (2018), Jauss (1984), Kogawa (2014), Levine (2003), Martindale (1993), Mandel (1981), Moraes (2018), Pavis (2015), Perysinakis (1994), Prado (1996), Rosenfeld (2012; 2018), Santos (1991a; 1991b), Schein (2012), Ubersfeld (2005) and Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (2005).