O Bruxo e o pós-modernismo: a reconstrução dos últimos dias de Machado de Assis em Memorial do fim, de Haroldo Maranhão, e em Machado, de Silviano Santiago

Abstract

The objective of this research is to analyze the fictionalization of Machado de Assis in the works Memorial do Fim (1991), by Haroldo Maranhão and Machado (2016), by Silviano Santiago, raising the strategies adopted by the writers to dialogue about the layers that constitute the individual Machado de Assis through the reconstruction of his last days/years of life. Both works are part of the historiographical metafiction genre or the Brazilian historical novel, which are inserted in the poetics of postmodernism. To understand the process of reconstruction of this period of the writer's life within such poetics, the research is divided into three parts, in which each one contemplates one of the proposed specific objectives. Firstly, based mainly on the theorists Luiz Costa Lima (1989, 2006), Benedito Nunes (1988), Maurice Halbwachs (1990), and Georg Lukács (2011), we discuss the relationship between historical and fictional time and discourse, as well as the issue of memory. In the second moment, through the reflections of Linda Hutcheon (1980, 1988), Antônio R. Esteves (2010), Patricia Waugh (1984), and Leyla Perrone-Moisés (2016), the poetics of postmodernism, the new historical novel, historiographical metafiction, and the fictionalization of writers are discussed, raising the characteristics that bring together the works under analysis. Finally, using the biography of Machado, written by Daniel Piza (2005), the considerations of Lucilinda Ribeiro Teixeira (1998) and Silviano Santiago (2002, 2020) it is analyzed how the authors recreated Machado de Assis as a writer, reader, character and sick individual. For this, the use of parody and pastiche used in Maranhão is distinguished from the hybridism between the genres of novel, biography, and essay, observed in Santiago. In addition, the narrator of post-modernism, which differs in both works, is analyzed. By the approximations and, mainly by the strategic differences of each author is that the works enable new ways of reading the writer from Rio de Janeiro in the early twentieth century and understand him as a character of his own narratives and survivor of his own history.