"Machadian Spectrographies: Unstable legacies of Writing Between the Printed and the tradition"

• Grant number: 23/17697-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: April 01, 2025
• End date: March 31, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Brazilian Literature
• Principal Investigator: Lucia Granja
• Grantee: Guilherme de Souza Lopes
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This thesis project is linked to the thematic project 2020/03648-5: "Machado de Assis: written pages and editorial roles." Machado de Assis's material consciousness, as an author whose career and working practices reveal his active participation in the productive chains of books and newspapers, as well as in the bureaucratic processes of ministerial offices (Chalhoub, 2003), allowed him to operate with a notion of "text" that, far from the usual associations with the fixedness or stability of the printed record, is marked by incompleteness, iteration, and rewriting. This results in the inconsistency of meanings attributed to the writings and the material fragility and degradation of the papers. Such an understanding is present not only in the renewed critical stance of the mature author towards the newspaper (Granja, 2018), which comes to be seen as a space for essay and errata (Süssekind [1989] 2003), but also in the status of his fiction. The instability of paper and writing becomes recurring themes in Machado's fiction, dramatically exemplified in The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, a central novel for the thesis, which will serve as the axis from which other works by the author will be analyzed. The hypothesis to be investigated is that the notions of volubility of the fictional author/narrator Brás Cubas, his ghostly condition in a liminal space between past and present, and the fragile staging of the writing of his memoirs-figured in the theory of the thinking errata-are ways of exposing the spectral condition of the text, embodying a process in progress that shapes a certain formulation about the difficulty of establishing fixed meanings about the past, about a supposed predefined reality, and about the very present situation of enunciation. We interpret this procedure by relating it to issues and understandings of the time, in tune with the context of Machado's world of papers and his reading repertoire. Historically situated, Machado's spectrographies would correspond to the way in which the discourse of fiction, through the figurations of errata and editing, makes visible the non-fixity of the past and exhibits the openness of meaning in the present. Consequently, the procedure would also be linked to the theme of tradition, as the authorial gesture of rewriting the meanings and propositions of the old papers of his predecessors dramatizes the mobility and variation of these texts, while also suggesting the active stance of reformulating them as a way to choose and respond, in a dynamic of contaminations, to the spectral inheritances of tradition and the scriptural crises of his time.