Readings, times, convulsions: the novel Machado, by Silviano Santiago

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the novel Machado (2016), by Silviano Santiago, focusing on the problematization of the reading gesture that the author, and character-writer, proposes to fictionalize and reframe the character Machado de Assis in literary historiography. As a reader that split into a writer, Silviano Santiago reframes the literary scene that creates about personas, places and times from the past, making some kind of curatorship of documents, images and annals. After a discussion about propositions of reading gestures fictionalized in the novel, the chosen approach allows a cutout and a deeper look at the temporal relation between the character-writer Machado and the present in Silviano’s work. The starting point is the archival disorganization operated by him about the ruins of the social time, the Belle Époque, but also about the personal ruins of the Academia Brasileira de Letras, such as his disease and final days. In the spiral made by the contemporary critic and fictionist, the reading gesture staged in the diegesis performs the reading ideal in the work’s reception, in the continuity of literature from a sign that tells XXI century readers to emancipate and occupy other places. Thus, the literary reading is the novel’s aesthetic and political potential.