Brasis da ficção: Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas, de Machado de Assis, e o Triste fim de Policarpo Quaresma , de Lima Barreto.

Abstract

This study aimed to establish the literary dialogue between Machado de Assis and Lima Barreto, writers of fundamental importance for the Brazilian Literature, whose wide productions include novels, short stories, chronicles, literary criticism, essays and articles about Brazilian literary and cultural production, and have as their historical background the 19th century, between the Second Reign and the first decades of the republican phase. In this historical arc, Machado de Assis (1839-1908) and Lima Barreto (1881-1922), both afro descendant writers, of modest origin, with ancestors who were victims of human trafficking into slavery, lived experiences derived from the social and political dynamics of their historical time and place. These trajectories, from Morro do Livramento to Brazilian Academy of Letters, for Machado, and among the fluminense suburbs, public offices and the mental hospital, for Lima, are resumed, in this study, under the prism of the skeptical and critical worldview revealed by the two writers. Based on the hierarchy of class and races, the social dynamics highlighted in the novels Memories of Brás Cubas, by Machado de Assis, The Sad End by Policarpo Quaresma, by Lima Barreto, fostered spurious relations of class dependence, racism and exclusion of the poor and marginalized strata. The Imperial Brazil of D. Pedro II and the Republic, in its beginnings with a lively militaristic and authoritarian bias, provided themes that, showing a disconcerting present, under varied fictional and interpretive nuances, were reconfigured in the both writers’ literary works. Based on the analysis of novels Posthumous Memories of Brás Cubas, launched in 1881, and The Sad End by Policarpo Quaresma, whose first edition is from 1915, this study also establishes the dialogues between these fictional works and other works of their authors, beyond throwing light on the literary projects of Machado and Lima, bearing in mind the fact that both unveiled Brazil, from the on important institutions to the Brazilian cultural and political imagination, such as the traditional family, the patriarchy, the intellectual environment of letters and from journalism, Abolition, the Republic, and the intimate nature of national personalities, that are exposed, satirized and mocked in their injustices, weaknesses and will to power.