Nelson Rodrigues
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Nelson Falcão Rodrigues (August 23, 1912 – December 21, 1980) was a Brazilian
playwright A playwright or dramatist is a person who writes plays. Etymology The word "play" is from Middle English pleye, from Old English plæġ, pleġa, plæġa ("play, exercise; sport, game; drama, applause"). The word "wright" is an archaic English ...
,
journalist A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalism ...
and
novelist A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others aspire to ...
. In 1943, he helped usher in a new era in Brazilian theater with his play ''Vestido de Noiva (The Wedding Dress)'', considered revolutionary for the complex exploration of its characters' psychology and its use of colloquial dialogue. He went on to write many other seminal plays and today is widely regarded as Brazil's greatest playwright.


Early life and work

Nelson Rodrigues was born in
Recife That it may shine on all ( Matthew 5:15) , image_map = Brazil Pernambuco Recife location map.svg , mapsize = 250px , map_caption = Location in the state of Pernambuco , pushpin_map = Brazil#South A ...
, the capital of the Brazilian state of
Pernambuco Pernambuco () is a state of Brazil, located in the Northeast region of the country. With an estimated population of 9.6 million people as of 2020, making it seventh-most populous state of Brazil and with around 98,148 km², being the 19 ...
(in the Northeast of Brazil), to Mario Rodrigues, a journalist, and his wife, Maria Esther Falcão. In 1916, the family moved to Rio de Janeiro after Mario ran into trouble for criticizing a powerful local politician. In Rio, Mario rose through the ranks of one of the city's major newspaper and, in 1925, launched his own newspaper, a sensationalist daily. By fourteen Nelson was covering the police beat for his father; by fifteen he had dropped out of school; and by sixteen he was writing his own column. The family's economic situation improved steadily, allowing them to move from lower-middle-class Zona Norte to what was then the exclusive neighborhood of Copacabana. In less than two years the family's fortunes would be reversed spectacularly. In 1929, older brother Roberto, a talented graphic artist, was shot and killed at the newspaper offices by a society lady who objected to the salacious coverage of her divorce, allegedly involving an adulterous affair with a local doctor. At her trial the woman admitted that she had intended to kill Rodrigues' father Mario, the newspaper's owner; unable to find him, she settled for his son instead. Devastated by his son's death, Mario Rodrigues died a few months later of a stroke, and shortly after that the family newspaper was closed by military forces supporting the
Revolution of 1930 The Revolution of 1930 () was an armed insurrection across Brazil that ended the Old Republic. The revolution replaced incumbent President Washington Luís with defeated presidential candidate and revolutionary leader Getúlio Vargas, concludi ...
, which the newspaper had fiercely opposed in its editorials. The ensuing years were dark ones for the Rodrigues family, and Nelson and his brothers were forced to seek work at rival newspapers for low wages. To make matters worse, in 1934 Nelson was diagnosed with tuberculosis, a disease that plagued him, on an off, for the next ten years. During this time Rodrigues held various jobs including comic strip editor, sports columnists and opera critic. In 1941, Rodrigues wrote his first play ''A Mulher Sem Pecado'' (The Woman Without Sin), to mixed reviews. His following play, Vestido de Noiva (The Wedding Dress), was hailed as a watershed in Brazilian theater and is considered among his masterpieces. It began a fruitful collaboration with Polish émigré director Zbigniew Ziembinski, who is reported to have said on reading ''The Wedding Dress," "I am unaware of anything in world theater today that resembles this." In the play, which takes place after the female protagonist is hit by a car and undergoes surgery, the playwright revealed the mastery of his craft by overlapping moments in time and place in order to create a more dynamic vision of reality. The stage is divided into three planes: one for real-time action happening around the character, another for her memories, a third for her dying hallucinations. As the three planes overlap, reality melds with memory and delusion. The play has been described as a jigsaw puzzle—we are left to interpret the truth from the disjointed hallucinations of a woman lying on an operating table who mixes her life story with the story of a prostitute whose diary she once read. Slowly we discover the mystery of the woman's accident.


Writings

Nelson Rodrigues wrote 17 full-length plays, 9 novels and thousands of short stories. He was most influential as a playwright, and his plays include ''Toda Nudez Será Castigada'' (
All Nudity Shall Be Punished ''All Nudity Shall Be Punished'' ( pt, Toda Nudez Será Castigada, links=no) is a 1973 Brazilian drama film based on Nelson Rodrigues' play by the same name and directed by Arnaldo Jabor. It was entered into the 23rd Berlin International Film Fe ...
),'' Dorotéia'', and ''Beijo no Asfalto'' (The Asphalt Kiss, or The Kiss on the Asphalt), all considered classics of the Brazilian stage. Rodrigues' plays were divided into three categories by critic Sábato Magaldi: psychological, mythical and Carioca tragedies. The latter plays, which include some of his later and best-known productions, are mostly tragicomedies where Rodrigues explored the lives of Rio’s lower-middle class, a population never deemed worthy of the stage before him. From the beginning, Rodrigues's plays shocked audiences and attracted the attention of censors. Rodrigues's third play (1945) "Álbum de família" (''Family Album'') chronicled a semi-mythical family living on the fringes of society and mired in incest, rape and murder. It was considered so controversial that it was censored and only allowed to be staged 21 years later. Other important earlier plays included "Anjo Negro" (''Black Angel''), an explosive 1946 play held from the stage by censorship until 1948 that deals with issues of race and incest. In the play — which takes place in a semi-mythical setting, which is never identified — a successful black doctor marries a white woman and their marriage cannot help but reflect the dysfunctional race relations of society at large. The woman slowly kills their black children one by one, and the husband does nothing to intervene. When the doctor's white brother arrives, his wife sleeps with him in the hopes of having a white son. In the 1960 play "O Beijo no Asfalto" (The Asphalt Kiss or the Kiss on the Asphalt), Rodrigues tackled the issue of homophobia. In the play, a recently married man comforts a dying stranger who has just been run over in a traffic accident. A newspaper reporter witnesses the kiss and spins a salacious story that the two were lovers. The kiss occurs before the play actually begins and, Rashomon-like, it assumes different characteristics according to who describes it. Slowly, the innuendos and lies begin to corrode the young man's marriage. The play was written in 1960 at the request of actress
Fernanda Montenegro Arlette Pinheiro Esteves Torres ONM (née da Silva; born 16 October 1929), known by her stage name Fernanda Montenegro ( /feʁˈnɐ̃dɐ mõtʃiˈnegɾu/), is a Brazilian stage, television and film actress. Considered by many the greatest Brazil ...
. Rodrigues reportedly wrote it in three weeks. "Os Sete Gatinhos" (''Seven Kittens'') was described by the playwright as a "divine comedy." Determined to remind us that things are not always what they appear, Rodrigues created the Noronha family, a seemingly normal lower-middle-class Brazilian family headed by the family patriarch, a low-level employee in the Brazilian congress. As the action unfolds, we become aware that nothing is as it seems. Four of the five daughters are prostitutes, and the one teen daughter who is held up as the symbol of chastity by the family is no longer a virgin. Amid an atmosphere where seemingly realist outlook becomes unreal vulgarity - the mother writes obscenities on the bathroom wall, the father prohibits the family from using toilet paper - the family's many unspoken secrets climax into a gruesome last scene. "Doroteia" (1949), is one of five plays Magdali classified as mythical. It is a surreal play in which Rodrigues anticipates Ionesco and Beckett's theater of the absurd. Filled with guilt after the death of her son, Doroteia abandons a life of prostitution and seeks redemption in the house of her three cousins, all widows. The cousins disdain all sensuality and live a puritanical life of chastity and privations. To accept Doroteia, they impose one condition, she must disfigure her appearance and become ugly. In the play, men are completely absent, except for a pair of boots on stage meant to represent the fiancé of the daughter of one of the widows, Das Dores, who is actually the ghost of a stillborn child. "Toda Nudez Será Castigada" (All Nudity Shall Be Punished) is a "Carioca tragedy' written 1965, and along with The Wedding Dress is one of his most-produced plays. It is the story of despondent widower Herculano who has promised never to remarry. His son, Serginho is the self-appointed guardian of his father's celibacy. When Herculano's brother introduces him to a lively prostitute and nightclub singer he is smitten and brings her home to live with him, unwittingly creating a menage á trois with his own son and wreaking havoc on the entire household. Much of the film's humor revolves around Herculano's need to make everything look right and proper to his bourgeois neighbours and friends. In 1973, the play was made into a film by the same name, which won the silver bear at the 23rd Berlin International Film Festival. In spite of his success as a playwright, Rodrigues never dedicated himself exclusively to the theater. In the 1950s, Rodrigues began publishing daily short stories as part of highly successful column ''A Vida Como Ela É'' (Life As It Is). Rodrigues wrote the column six days a week eleven years, writing an estimated 2,000 of these stories. The stories in the column became a laboratory for many of his full length plays. They have since been republished in several collections. Rodrigues also wrote soap operas, movie scripts, and novels. In the 1960s and 70s, he became a well-known TV persona and sports commentator. His fanciful columns on
soccer Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played between two teams of 11 players who primarily use their feet to propel the ball around a rectangular field called a pitch. The objective of the game is ...
, where he melded scant commentary on the games' happenings with his literary obsessions and stock phrases, are said by
Alex Bellos Alexander Bellos (born 1969) is a British writer, broadcaster and mathematics communicator.Alex Bellos He is the author of books about Brazil and mathematics, as well as having a column in ''The Guardian'' newspaper. Education and early lif ...
to take have taken football-writing "into a new dimension". During this period, Rodrigues relished his role as an iconoclast and had running feuds with major figures of the Brazilian Left and Right.


Death

In the 1970s, at the height of his reputation as a journalist and playwright, Rodrigues health began to fail because of lifelong gastroenterological and heart problems. Rodrigues died on a Sunday morning in 1980, at 68 years of age, of cardiac and respiratory complications. He is buried in
Cemitério de São João Batista Cemitério de São João Batista (Saint John the Baptist's Cemetery) is a municipal necropolis originally owned and operated by the ''Santa Casa da Misericórdia do Rio de Janeiro'' (Holy House of Mercy of Rio de Janeiro), and run, since August 20 ...
, in Botafogo.


Controversies, literary and political

Much of Rodrigues's career was filled with controversy, a state of affairs he often courted and even relished. He called his theater "the theater of the unpleasant" and had an almost messianic conviction that it was his duty to hold a mirror up to society's hypocrisies and to expose the darkness in the audience's heart. "We must fill the stage with murderers, adulterers, madmen; in short, we must fire a salvo of monsters at the audience," he said. "They are our monsters, which we will temporarily free ourselves from only to face another day". According to the critic
Paulo Francis Paulo Francis (Rio de Janeiro, September 2, 1930 – New York City, February 4, 1997) was a Brazilian journalist, political pundit, novelist and critic. Francis became prominent in modern Brazilian journalism through his controversial critiqu ...
Rodrigues' constant subject-matter was simple: "human beings are prisoners of irresistible passions, taken as shameful by society ..and usually punished ..Nelson was a moral conservative, with a talent for depicting emotions below the waist". From the very start of his playwright career, Rodrigues' was to be labeled by conservative critics as a "pervert" for his nearly obsessive exploration of sexual taboos (adultery, homosexuality, incest) in his plays, novels and columns. However, as various critics have remarked, Rodrigues' theater and narrative fiction themselves partake of a deeply felt conservative streak shared by other Modernist Brazilian writers (
Raul Pompéia Raul d'Ávila Pompeia (April 12, 1863 – December 25, 1895) was a Brazilian novelist, short story writer and chronicler. He is famous for the Impressionist romance ''O Ateneu''. He is patron of the 33rd chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. ...
,
Octavio de Faria Octavio is a Spanish language masculine given name. In the Portuguese language the given name Octavio or Octávio is also found, but in Portuguese the normal spelling is Otávio. It is also used as a surname in the Philippines. Individuals * Octa ...
,
Lúcio Cardoso Joaquim Lúcio Cardoso Filho, known as Lúcio Cardoso (August 14, 1912 – September 22, 1968), was a Brazilian novelist, playwright, and poet. Biography The son of an impoverished but prominent family in Curvelo, Minas Gerais, Lúcio Cardoso wa ...
, among others) a moral anguish before modern society and the menaces offered by it to traditional religiosity and morals: the flaunting of traditional sexual taboos, specially, being felt as sharply increasing an awareness of moral guilt for living in a society felt as increasingly amoral, where the old hierarchies and taboos were being actively destroyed. An anguish for order that could be summarized by Rodrigues' famous quote: "all women like to be spanked" (''Toda mulher gosta de apanhar''). During the 1960s, Rodrigues was to write that giving room for the young to offer opinion was to turn society upside down, and that
Betty Friedan Betty Friedan ( February 4, 1921 – February 4, 2006) was an American feminist writer and activist. A leading figure in the women's movement in the United States, her 1963 book ''The Feminine Mystique'' is often credited with sparking the se ...
should be locked in a mental institution. It was exactly this implicit awareness of the immorality of ''existing'' social relations - the portrayal of the bourgeois family as both sacred and failed - that didn't endear Nelson Rodrigues to fellow conservatives: after reading ''Album de Família'', his close friend, the poet
Manuel Bandeira Manuel Carneiro de Sousa Bandeira Filho (April 19, 1886 – October 13, 1968) was a Brazilian poet, literary critic, and translator, who wrote over 20 books of poetry and prose. Life and career Bandeira was born in Recife, Pernambuco. In 190 ...
, offered him the advice to try his hand at writing about "normal people". In the early 1950s, the myth of Rodrigues as pervert bogey was already well settled: in 1953, the maverick rightist politician Carlos Lacerda compared excerpts from Rodrigues' column to the
Communist Manifesto ''The Communist Manifesto'', originally the ''Manifesto of the Communist Party'' (german: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei), is a political pamphlet written by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Commissioned by the Comm ...
to "prove" that Rodrigues's column was part of a Communist conspiracy to subvert family values; in 1957, a conservative Rio de Janeiro councilman, present at the opening night of Rodrigues' play ''Perdoa-me por me traíres'' (Forgive me for cheating on me) pointed a gun at the applauding audience for condoning what he regarded as an immoral play. During the military dictatorship, Rodrigues' 1966 novel ''O Casamento'', about a middle-aged businessman who gradually realizes his incestuous love towards his daughter on the eve of her wedding, was withdrawn from circulation by government censorship for alleged indecency. As a playwright, Rodrigues is frequently considered a realist, mostly on account of the self-acknowledged influence exerted on him by the dramatic work of
Eugene O'Neill Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama techniques of realism, earlier ...
- specially in his earlier, "mythical" plays. Actually, in terms of style, Rodrigues' work is a kind of belatedly
Expressionism Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it rad ...
, combining an appearance of empirical reality (the accurate portrayal of small everyday happenings and the use of the contemporary Brazilian
vernacular A vernacular or vernacular language is in contrast with a "standard language". It refers to the language or dialect that is spoken by people that are inhabiting a particular country or region. The vernacular is typically the native language, n ...
) surrounding a kernel of mythologized, intense and unrealistic - to the point of "cartoonish absurdity" - psychological dramatic action. In it, the viewpoint is always that of the small man who acts as the writer's alter ego, with his "obtuse, fanatic, delirious obsessions" - the small man of the 1950s Rio de Janeiro lower middle-class,who, as Rodrigues himself, had "a single suit, a single pair of shoes", and was torn between the longing for a lost moral order - specially, when a male, to the threat posed to his authority by the incipient female emancipation fostered by the development of an urban milieu and its possibilities of unwitnessed encounters and his (or hers) sexual drives.In short, his work displays a "violent prejudiced patriarchal society" confronted to "all manner of sexual repression, perversions and taboos". It was this petit-bourgeois, almost lumpen viewpoint, that explained Rodrigues' antipathy towards the higher middle-class intelligentsia that made much of the political Left of the period ("I'm not moved by marches of the ruling classes", was he to say before a march of protesters against the military dictatorship). Conversely, for those Brazilian writers that equated modernism in literature with support for social change, Rodrigues' longings for a lost old order made it impossible to accept the reality of his formal innovations: for the great modernist
Oswald de Andrade José Oswald de Souza Andrade (January 11, 1890 – October 22, 1954) was a Brazilian poet, novelist and cultural critic. He was born, spent most of his life and died in São Paulo. Andrade was one of the founders of Brazilian modernism and a m ...
, Rodrigues' literature was "nothing but a wretched newspaper feuilleton", and Rodrigues himself "an ill-educated, lbeitillustrious, pervert". However, in 1962, Rodrigues' 1958 play ''Boca de Ouro'' (The Golden Mouth) - the tragedy of a mobster of the illegal Brazilian animal lottery ( jogo do bicho) known for his set of gold false teeth, hence the title - was to be adapted to the screen by leftist director
Nelson Pereira dos Santos Nelson Pereira dos Santos (22 October 1928 21 April 2018) was a Brazilian film director. He directed films such as ''Vidas secas (film), Vidas Secas'' (Barren Lives), based on the Vidas Secas, book with the same name by Brazilian writer Gracilia ...
, who tried to meld Rodrigues' moralizing streak with Brechtian social drama and American
mob film Mafia films—a version of gangster films—are a subgenre of crime films dealing with organized crime, often specifically with Mafia organizations. Especially in early mob films, there is considerable overlap with ''film noir''. Popular regional ...
. A fervent, spontaneous anticommunist already before the military coup d'etat of 1964, Rodrigues was generally regarded as apolitical before the dictatorship, during which he was to engage in constant clashes and running feuds with the Left. During much of the 1960s and early 1970s, he included incendiary attacks in his newspaper column against various opponents of the dictatorship—a list that ranged from leaders of leftist movements and guerrilla organizations to the bishop of Olinda Helder Câmara and the Catholic literary critic Alceu Amoroso Lima, eventually leading charges of being an apologist for the dictatorship. One of his collections of articles - where he offered, in an almost daily basis, an exquisite mix of adulation for the dictatorship and denunciation of allegedly communist plots -he proudly titled ''O Reacionário'' (The Reactionary). His support for the dictatorship, however, was by no means unconditional. In 1968, he participated in an anti-censorship rally to protest the closing of eight plays by the military censors, and signed a petition that formally requested that such censorship be rescinded. He also successfully intervened to help release well-known leftist Helio Pellegrino from jail and testified at a military tribunal in favor of jailed student activist Wladimir Palmeira. He managed to keep among his friends several people who were confirmed leftists at the time, people like theater director
Augusto Boal Augusto Boal (16 March 1931 – 2 May 2009) was a Brazilian theatre practitioner, drama theorist, and political activist. He was the founder of Theatre of the Oppressed, a theatrical form originally used in radical left popular education movemen ...
, actor and black activist Abdias do Nascimento, and filmmaker
Arnaldo Jabor Arnaldo Jabor (12 December 1940 – 15 February 2022) was a Brazilian film director and producer, screenwriter, writer, journalist and political pundit for Brazilian television network Rede Globo. Biography He was of jewish lebanese descent an ...
. In his later years, such support for the dictatorship was tempered by the arrest and torture of his son, a militant opponent of the regime. In one of his last political interventions, he asked for a general amnesty of political prisoners.''O remador de Ben-Hur'', 289 Afterwards, in poor health and unable to write during most of the late 1970s, Rodrigues died in 1980 in Rio de Janeiro. After his death, landmark productions of his plays in the 1980s and '90s as well as the publication of several collections of his writings helped secure his reputation as a great playwright and literary figure.


Works

Plays
*1941: ''A Mulher Sem Pecado'' *1943: ''Vestido de Noiva'' *1946: ''Álbum de Família'' *1947: ''Anjo Negro'' *1947: ''Senhora dos Afogados'' *1949: ''Dorotéia'' *1951: ''Valsa No. 6'' *1953: ''A Falecida'' *1957: ''Viúva, Porém Honesta'' *1957: Perdoa-me por me Traíres *1958: ''Os Sete Gatinhos'' *1958: ''Boca de Ouro'' *1960: ''Beijo no Asfalto'' *1962: 'Otto Lara Resende ou Bonitinha, mas Ordinária'' *1965: ''Toda Nudez Será Castigada'' *1973: ''Anti-Nélson Rodrigues'' *1978: ''A Serpente''
Novels
*1944: ''Meu Destino é Pecar'' (as Suzana Flag) *1946: ''Escravas do Amor'' (as Suzana Flag) *1946: ''Minha Vida'' (as Suzana Flag) *1947: ''A Mulher Que Amou de Mais'' (as Suzana Flag) *1947: ''O Homem Proíbido'' (as Suzana Flag) *1948: ''Núpcias de Fogo'' (as Suzana Flag) *1953: ''A Mentira'' *1959 ''Asfalto Selvagem'' (also known as ''Engraçadinha'') *1966: ''O Casamento''
Newspaper column collections
*1967: ''Memórias de Nélson Rodrigues'' *1968: ''A Cabra Vadia'' *1970: ''O Óbvio Ululante'' *1971: ''A Sombra Das Chuteiras Imortais'' *1972: ''A Pátria em Chuteiras'' *1977: ''O Reacionário'' *1978: ''O Remador de Ben-Hur'' *2006: ''A Vida Como Ela É...''


Works in English

*''Life as it Is'' (stories transl. 2009) *''The Theater of Nelson Rodrigues I''. Text selected and arranged by Joffre Rodrigues and translated to English. Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 2001.


See also

*
Mongrel complex "Mongrel complex", or alternatively "mutt complex" ( pt, complexo de vira-lata, lit=street dog complex, mutt complex), is an expression used to refer to a collective inferiority complex reportedly felt by many Brazilians when comparing Brazil ...


References


External links


New York Times on "The Reawakening of the Giant of Brazilian Theater"
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rodrigues, Nelson 1912 births 1980 deaths Brazilian male dramatists and playwrights Brazilian male novelists Brazilian anti-communists Brazilian journalists Conservatism in Brazil Brazilian columnists People from Recife 20th-century Brazilian dramatists and playwrights 20th-century Brazilian novelists 20th-century Brazilian male writers 20th-century journalists Burials at Cemitério de São João Batista