Efeitos barthesianos da escritura múltipla – os Machados de Assis

Abstract

The essay focuses on Brazilian writer Machado de Assis’s original correspondence with other academics, during the eleven years he served as president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. Since our reading found a lack of meaningful factual data in the letters, that is, an absence of narration, an intransitive telling, we chose to read the silences, the fissures, the repetitions, the denials. Our aim was then, backed by Barthe’s “The death of the author” and Foucault´s “The care of the self”, to develop a reading approach which could tackle Machado’s discursive strategies as a letter writer, the masks and folds with which he constitutes himself in this multiple writing. We also take into account Machado’s fiction and the critical brazilian writings of Roberto Correa dos Santos and Maria Helena Werneck. The analysis is a mapping out of fundamental questions which help to understand the writer’s personae and his place in nineteenth-century Rio’s society. From the reported frailties, both physical and affective, emerge some aspects’ of Machado’s experience: recognition and social transit, the writer’s practice, resistance and complaints about disease which strengthened the poets’ brotherhood in their ties and social standing. In Machado, letter writing is a social practice which links the care of the self with oneself to the communication – strategic, liberating – with the other.