BRÁS CUBAS À LUZ DE BAKHTIN

Abstract

The present study aims at analyzing the work Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas, by Machado de Assis, (Brás Cubas’s Post-mortem Memories), taking as its presuppositions the concepts brought by Bakhtin in his works A cultura popular na Idade Média e no Renascimento: o contexto de François Rabelais e Problemas da poética de Dostoiesvski (The popular culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: the context of François Rabelais and Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics). Taking into account that, in Machado de Assis’s work, it is a dead narrator who tells his story, after having his body devoured by vermin, it is observed how the orientation to the down, the upsy-turvy view, the movement from death to birth are emphatically stressed. Based on Bakhtin studies, we can observed how the deceased narrator presents a speech where elevated values (virtues, moral values, sense of justice and solidarity) are despised. However, we should highlight that, contrary to bakhtinian perspective, there is not, in machadian work, possibilities of rehabilitating of human condition, since the narrator, besides dedicating the work to the vermin which devoured the marks of his existence, when reviewing his life, has as its only asset the fact of not leaving descendants.