Nelson Rodrigues – Pornographic angel and prophet of shadows

Writing is sinning with style

Nelson Rodrigues was the greatest sinner in Brazilian literature and perhaps its greatest confessor. Journalist, playwright, and columnist, he wrote as if bleeding in a public square. Born in Recife and raised in Rio de Janeiro, he lived between newsrooms and chessboards, always with a cigarette in hand and a scandal on his lips. His theater was a slap in the face of family morals, that sacred institution he ironically called “the most pornographic one there is.”

He invented modern Brazilian theater with The Wedding Dress in 1943, blending hallucination, psychological time, and repressed desire. Then came the rosary of carioca tragedies: Family Album, Golden Mouth, All Nudity Shall Be Punished, Pretty but Ordinary. He was a chronicler of hypocrisy. His characters adulterers, suicidal virgins, sons who desire their mothers, and saintly scoundrels did not fit into the proper, well-behaved Brazil of the 1950s. And that made him even more necessary.

In the press, he created the pornographic angel. He wrote about soccer as if it were an Italian opera, about politics as if it were a brothel, and about the Brazilian people as someone who finds beauty even in the mud. He was reactionary and revolutionary at the same time. He rooted for morality but exposed the most immoral depths of the soul.

He had his children, his loves, his losses—a murdered brother, a daughter who died young, and a son imprisoned as a political dissident during the dictatorship. His obsession was the human being as a stage of contradictions. He used to say that all unanimity is stupid—and perhaps that is why he was both hated and adored.

Nelson Rodrigues was a prophet of shadows. He wrote Greek tragedies with the accent of a Rio de Janeiro bar. He exposed the Brazil hidden under the rug without mercy and without censorship. And still, or perhaps because of that, he was a genius, a pornographic angel.

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