Literatura e direito: o problema do mal e o parricídio no romance Richthofen, de Roger Franchini

Abstract

The object of study of this research was the novel Richthofen: the murder of Suzane's parents, by Roger Franchini, published in 2011, written from a famous case in the legal field that has repercussions until today, as will be observed throughout this work. The book Richthofen is a narrative with several points of view, which will be analyzed and discussed in the fourth chapter of this study. The work tells in detail the murder orchestrated by the then law student, Suzane von Richthofen, principal and facilitator, as she provided the opportunity for the executioners to enter her parents' house to commit the crimes. The killers were Suzane's boyfriend and brother-in-law. The trio premeditated the crime with exquisite details, such as removing her brother from the house and then executing the Richthofen couple with clubs. The novel brings the sequence of days and facts and then brings new information to the scene, such as the parents' alcoholism and the oppressive and violent family environment, through the investigation of three São Paulo police detectives, configuring itself as a type of narrative that presents characteristics of detective novels, especially noir. From this point, the problem arises that the research intends to clarify during the reading of the theoretical corpus, the fictional corpus and the constant dialogue with the area of Law, with which we wish to dialogue in this research. The generating questions that were answered throughout the research ask about the reasons for the legal case to enter the world of literature and reflected on the consuming public of the police genre. The general objective was to study the work Richthofen, from the perspective of detective literature and the issue of evil. The research methodology was mixed, that is, bibliographic and documentary, by analyzing the literary work and making incursions into the legal process and journalistic sources. The theoretical foundation and/or theoretical framework was linked to literary criticism and the comparative study between Law and Literature, bringing to the scene some very specific elements due to the object of research, such as transiting through the police genre and the theme of evil. This dissertation was structured in four chapters. In the first one, we introduce the theme, the objective, the research problem, the methodology and the research relationships with the theme of evil and the detective novel. In the second, the issue of evil in the detective novel was addressed, studying the relationship between Literature and Law, often, as in the novel under study, in which the areas are amalgamated in an artistic representation, in this case, literary art. From this, we analyzed the novel on screen, as an aesthetic and historical-social phenomenon, from the critical reception of the work markedly with characteristics of a detective novel, according to the classification of Tzvetan Todorov, in his work The Narrative Structures (1969). Also in this chapter, we study the Richthofen criminal case, based on the case file, especially those described by Ilana Casoy (2016) and the literary representation created by Franchini. In the third chapter, we study the issue of evil and the Richthofen criminal case. As a theoretical itinerary, we chose to research the origin of evil and literature in some critical theorists, such as Sigmund Freud (2011 and 2013) and George Bataille (2009) among others. Then, we discussed the banality of evil and violence, weaving some connections and possible dialogues between the novel The Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë (2019), El mal de Montano, by Enrique Vila-Matas (2002), and the novels The devil and Fake Coupon, by Leon Tolstói (2020). In the fourth chapter, we present the steps of the crime from the coverage of online newspapers and magazines, as well as aspects of the legal system of the Brazilian Penal Code - CP (1940) on crime and parricide. The novel Richthofen, by fictionally portraying the plot of a murder orchestrated by his daughter, brings unease to the reader, above all because it touches on a historical and social neuralgic point, which is the issue of evil, patricide and matricide. From this, we analyzed the work Richthofen as a novel of the detective genre in the view of Tzvetan Todorov (1969) and patricide and matricide were discussed from the dramatic works Electra (s/d), Oedipus Rei (2001), Hamlet (1997) and the novel The brothers Karamazov (2013), always in dialogue with the novel under study. We conclude that the themes of evil and parricide are timeless and universal, therefore, they do not age and do not lose their value, as propagators of thinking human and existential aspects.