Dobraduras e desdobramentos do engenho literário em Machado de Assis: a representação do anormal

Abstract

This work investigates the elements that compose Quincas Borba, by Machado de Assis, as a critical work of the XIX century scientism. The criticism is made especially through Rubião‟s persona. Why did Rubião go mad? How was the scientific discourse inserted on literature reaching to the point of causing the criticism and what is the relationship between this criticism and the construction of the abnormal? These are the questions that introduce the problem and locate it in the sphere created by the relationship between the scientific and the literary discourse. Accordingly, we focus the abnormality representation and its relationship with a scientific discourse to identify the aspect (talent) behind the fable, something Foucault would call fiction. Our hypothesis is that the abnormality representation suggests voices crossing each other and a double face text in that it juxtaposes the scientific discourse to the madness. This ends up inserting the literary discourse in an atopy, characterized by the representation of the representation, which does not prevent us from relating literature and society. Accordingly, Michel Foucault‟s studies about the discursive constructions of madness and abnormality are extremely important. These constructions historically explains the normalization practice characterized by the capture of the madman from the dismissal of the subject. The bourgeois society emersion context helps us in that it reveals the book‟s production conditions. We try to demonstrate how the bourgeois normalized discourse shows up on the literary text and which are this appearance‟s implications in the shape of the madman in Rubião. Accordingly, introducing the theme, we divided this work in two main chapters: 1) we address O alienista, embematic tale in which Machado de Assis represents the madness as the manifestation of a normalized discourse about abnormality, the author demonstrates the XIX century bourgeois discourse origins about the madman, suggesting that what has made the notion of monomania is what encodes the madness in the interior of the morphologically scientific discourse, just like the psychiatry was, as danger, or even better, a range of social danger that, after that, was encoded as disease; 2) we analyze Quincas Borba, in three steps: i) we present a thought about the Humanitismo as a discursive formation, in which it seems to live the genesis of the abnormality thematic and the normalized discourse in Machado de Assis‟ work; in a certain way, it introduces and justifies the approximation we did between Machado de Assis‟ work and Foucoult‟s theory; ii) study about the discourse, pointing the relationships between Humanitas and Humanitismo, between abnormality and normalized discourse; we try to draw a historical profile, highlighting the Bourgeois Revolution, that allows the appearance of this concept in Machado‟s work; iii) study about the subject, analyzing the construction of the character Rubião as a madness symbol; we try to analyze the ficcional procedures starting from a foucaultian concept of representation. Finally, we consider about the palimpsest structure which demonstrates, like folds in the text, a discursive management, that is how Machado incorporates ironic and subtly the target of his criticism: the constitution of knowledge.