Um A piercing scream was heard: contagious unreasonings in Valêncio Xavier’s ‘O mez da grippe’

Abstract

This article is aimed at analysing the relations between microparasitism and macroparasitism in the novella ‘O mez da grippe’, by Valêncio Xavier, originally published in 1981, whose major setting is the city of Curitiba in 1918, plagued by the Spanish flu. The kaleidoscopic polyphony in Xavier’s book, composed by a collage from several textual/imagetic genres (such as newspaper articles, official documents, old photographs, advertisements, obituaries), interpolated by fictional fragments, allows for the development of several layers of reading, including the perspective of the disease, and above all the epidemic ones, as a metaphor  ̶  of war, madness, abnormality, crime, in short, of ‘contagious unreasonings’  ̶  which stands out as one of the most instigating ones. Thus, literary writing makes it possible to think about the unique condition of living in times of pandemic, what is accomplished by means of the analysis of some of the figures and characters in the work, such as the lone walker, Kaiser William II, the survivor Ms. Lúcia, Mr. Telêmaco Jardim, the madman Manoel de Campos, the victim Clara Heisler, the Mão Peluda, and the Hespanhola herself. For the development of the proposed analysis, the main theoretical-critical and historiographic contributions are the texts by McNeill (1998), Sontag (2007), Foucault (2010), Benjamin (1989), Delumeau (1989) and Eco (1994).