Simetrias inesperadas: a história não-dita do Memorial de Aires, de Machado de Assis

Abstract

This research undertakes an analysis of Machado de Assis’s final novel, Memorial de Aires (1908), advancing the idea that his late work displays an original compositional technique. Often regarded as the most unconventional among Machado’s novels, Memorial de Aires may be characterized above all by the silence that permeates it and renders it a singular work. We argue that, precisely because it is a “silent” narrative, it has often been pointed out how difficult it is to assign a clear “subject” to the novel. Conversely, it is precisely the “subject” — or rather, the work’s “inner and singular thought” — that is foregrounded in the prologue, entitled “Advertência”. In examining the narrative’s composition, we therefore consider the following elements: a preconceived notion of “subject” and a specific mode of narration through which the fictional author and the characters produce “blank spaces”, extended into a distinctive mode of punctuation by means of ellipses. By denaturalizing the term “subject” and emphasizing the elliptical character of the work, this study seeks to address what remains unsaid in the narrative and what, repressed, seems to find paths of elaboration in the suggestions conveyed by the ellipses, digressions, and other fractures forged by the text. Our hypothesis is that these silences invariably respond to a specific “subject”: the fate of the formerly enslaved people after Abolition. Indeed, although the narrative time frame encompasses the years 1888 and 1889, the novel was published twenty years after the period it depicts, and Memorial de Aires appears to revisit and work through the silence that marked the final quarter of the 1800s. Despite the fact that the narration unfolds in the months preceding and following Abolition, amid the imminence of the proclamation of the Republic, the historical element is erased from the narrative and rejected by the voices within it. While, on the surface of Counselor Aires’s diary, there is a recurring focus on private experience, suggesting a form of enclosure that even hinders the elaboration of form itself, we argue that, at a different level of depth, this other “subject” resides. In order to narrate it, that is, to lend density to a theme that cannot properly be spoken except through silence, Machado employs certain fictional strategies, which are examined in this study. Through what we term “unexpected symmetries”, that is, dialectical movements that correspond to one another within the narrative, and through the action and presence of a new fictional instance, the editor, we contend that a historical subplot is bound to the main narrative. In this way, Machado de Assis, in his late style, not only fictionalizes a social truth, insofar as silence mimics the ways in which Brazilian elites sought to erase the memory of slavery, but also articulates narrative forms capable of addressing this very unacknowledged subject.