Substituir crianças. Acerca de dois dramas familiares em crise epidémica: Der Findling de Heinrich von Kleist e “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” de Brian Aldiss

Resumo

 The 158 years that separate the publication of the two stories Der Findling by Heinrich von Kleist and “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” by Brian Aldiss rightly suggest that the notion of epidemic underlying them will take on different meanings and approaches. Whereas in Kleist’s novella, published in 1811, the epidemic – a “plague-like disease” – triggers a series of catastrophes that lead
to the final tragedy of an entire family, in Aldiss’s 1969 short story, the tragedy constitutes a status quo that spreads out in the representation of questionable humanity, where the epidemic, not explicitly named as such, consists of an already installed and irreversible contagious pathology. The desire to alleviate the pain of absence caused by the epidemic leads the protagonists of these two narratives to replace their child with another child. The devastating effects in both cases bring about different descriptions of what we now call an epidemic, the severity of which can be measured by its subliminal, undefined, transversal, and persistent presence, rather than by its individual lethality.