Memórias póstumas e romance: um estudo sobre gênero, ficcionalidade e vazio

Abstract

In the first part of this thesis, Machado de Assis Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, published in 1881, serve as a starting point to develop the idea that in novels wich do not disguise their fictional nature, when the reader begins to read it the character is already dead, as it has no life beyond fiction. That is, novels that bluntly manifest their fictional aspect will always be posthumous memories of this or those characters. Therefore, Machado s novel becomes an allegory of the Romanesque gender. In the reading experience, the character s announced death aids the reader to be prepared for its own, as he or she live such death as their own. Afterwards, the thesis raise the argument that the Romanesque gender by its turn is an allegory of the tragic human existence. The recurring metaphor of picturing life as a book, used in Machado s novel, enables one to hurdle the categorization of the act of reading, elaborated by the German theorist Wolfgang Iser, towards the relation we maintain with the facts of our own existence. Therefore, through that analogy, the emptiness of the novel to be read highlights the existential emptiness we are all subject to. In the second part, the research is focused in two moments of the approach of emptiness by the 20th Century literature, to realize how the emptiness and the indeterminations of the text relate to the characters existential emptiness. In Graciliano Ramos São Bernardo, the loss of the wife triggers the crisis that make the storyteller question his own life; In Carlos Sussekind s Que pensam vocês que ele fez, the protagonist s obsession for the diary written by his late father leads the reader to question the sense of life itself.