Mass culture and parody in Tupinilândia

Abstract

The novel Tupinilândia, by Samir Machado de Machado, published in 2018, uses mass culture to talk about itself, and how it sustains the collective memory as well as the aspirations of a society in a capitalist context. This article showed how Machado, by building a parodic narrative, as defined by Hutcheon (1988), with elements of mass culture, without falling back into adherence and uncritical homage or rejection, manages to establish a game that allows a reflection on the country’s history, of contemporary issues such as capitalism and memory, points raised in depth in a parodic novel of entertainment literature. For that, historical characters and events mentioned by the author were selected, as well as cultural references to that period of History, in order to understand the factual repertoire on which Tupinilândia is based. Passages that echo classic adventure stories and mobilize the general knowledge of this type of narrative were also highlighted. It was observed that Tupinilândia both reflects trends in contemporary Brazilian literature pointed out by Schollhammer (²⁰⁰⁹), in how much it creates a particular space with his sophisticated reflection both about the current Brazilian reality, questioning the role of dystopia as mere sarcasm in the face of of the absurdities that surround us, and about the way in which our society deals with memory and nostalgia, a selective fantasy in which relevant elements are disregarded, and those that are harmful are always at risk to return.