The machadian invention and sternian experimentalism as a prologue to the 20th centry: polyphonic poetics and self-conscious multiplicity

Abstract

The poetics of the novel goes through great transformations with authors such as Xavier de Maistre and Laurence Sterne (in the 18th century) and Machado de Assis (in the 19th century). In this proposal, we highlight the works The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Sterne 1759) and Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (Assis 1880), whose publication in a short story completes 140 year in 2020. Understanding Memórias Póstumas as the first experimental Brazilian novel, we observe the marks of Sterne and Maistre language evoked by the dead author Brás Cubas since the Prologue of his memories, not by chance, posthumous. To address the ways of making self-conscious genre, we resumed unlimited styles with Rabelais and Cervantes. Wandering through Romanesque prologues, we look into “Ao leitor” by Machado. Supported by 20th century literary thinkers, such as Carpeaux, Borges, Bakhtin, and Calvino, we established a relationship between the concepts of polyphony and multiplicity in an understanding of literary without stable and hierarchical models. This way, we reveal the condition of a tanatographic poetics by the created author Brás Cubas, from which emanate desires and move self-conscious novelistic forms in constant biographical decomposition.