Os discursos sobre o trabalho em Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas: o honesto tear do romance machadiano

Abstract

This thesis is a Dialogical Discourse Analysis (DDA), from Bakhtin’s perspective, about the discourses on work, in Machado de Assis’ work Posthumous Memories of Brás Cubas, published in 1881. The investigation was an integral part of the research project “The discursive formalization of the universe of work and technology in literary texts” and the discussions of the research group “Discourse on Technology, Work and National Identities”, inserted in the research line Technology and Work, of the Post-Graduate Program in Technology and Society, at the Federal University of Technology - Paraná, of an interdisciplinary bias. Initially we presented some discourses about work as an employed activity or not, since the nineteenth century: Marx’s voices, by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Paul Lafargue, followed by György Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, André Gorz, Richard Sennett, Christophe Dejours, Zigmund Baumann, Ricardo Antunes and Danièle Linhart, contemporary authors. The dialogical analysis followed the theoretical line of Bakhtin and the Circle: dialogicity, alterity, ideological sign, intersubjetivity, plurilingualism, romanesque genre and enunciation. We drew a profile of labor relationships in nineteenth-century Brazil, discussing history with authors such as Boris Fausto, Sidney Chalhoub, Maria Sylvia C. França, Gilberto Freyre, Sergio B. de Holanda, among others. As for the social and cultural horizon of the author from Rio de Janeiro, his biography and his critical fortune, there were dialogues among critics such as Antonio Candido, Roberto Schwarz, among others. The objective was to bring for analysis, from the ideology of everyday life formalized in the novel, the dialogues, the contradictions and the clashes that occur among the discourses, as well as to perceive the positivity, the damnation or the denial of the work from the language, in the author’s ironic architectural form and in the compositional elements pertinent to the novel, such as hybrid constructions, alternating styles and tones, the early response, reduced laughter and the menipeaen satire. The methodological perspective of DDA led to a corpus composed by three discursive dimensions, is composed of Machado de Assis´s enunciation on work: the discourse of ‘favor’ represented by the character Dona Plácida; the discourse of ‘slavery’ represented by the character Prudêncio and the discourse of ‘immaterial work’ or ‘non-work’, represented by the characters Brás Cubas and Quincas Borba. The following conclusions were reached: Machado’s language vehemently discourses on work in the nineteenth century. Its enunciation transits between positivizing it or denying it, reinforcing the distinction between material work and immaterial work. The immaterial activities are seen as positive by the elite, because, besides being redundant in non-work, they represent prestige and ascension. The slave practiced most of the work and the aggregate played the role of mediator, since it belonged to no one, but he needed to find ways to support himself. In Machado’s discourse, work is not ontological; it is a form of survival, including a discourse, which maintains a social order.