Machado: sob o signo da Antropofagia

Abstract

In the present work, the novel Machado (2016), by Silviano Santiago, is studied in order to understand and demonstrate how the discourse of Anthropophagy is implicitly present in the process of creating a metanarrative whose main characters are Machado de Assis and the homonymous narrator of the author, who plays the role of a great expert of Machado's writing. The concept of Anthropophagy, initially elaborated by Oswald de Andrade in his “Manifesto Antropófago” of 1928, has been widely studied and spread among critics and researchers from the time until the present. Its formulation as an organic metaphor for the assimilation of alterity seems to intersect the fictional, historical and critical metanarrative in the novel, because by associating the biographical, the autobiographical, the documentary and the critical, the narrator-character develops a reflective analysis about the life and work of Machado de Assis in which anthropophagy is perceived as a way of processing the heritage of Brazilian and Western cultural tradition. In this sense, firstly, it is important to substantiate the idea of ​​Oswald’s anthropophagy to later advance to the analysis of the metanarrative that has the writer from Cosme Velho as a character alongside the narrator-Silviano as an anthropophagous interpreter of the materials he appropriates to construct his text.