As doenças infectocontagiosas nos romances de Machado de Assis

Abstract

The Brazilian writer Machado de Assis explicitly refers to seven infectious diseases in his novel to which the deaths, suffering or destiny of certain characters are linked. This happens in the novels A mão e a luva (1874), Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (1880), Dom Casmurro (1899) e Esaú e Jacó (1904, when using the diseases cholera-morbo, smallpox, tuberculosis, yellow fever, leprosy, typhoid fever and typhus in the construction of the narrative. One can think initially, using the French theorist Roland Barthes, on the role of the informant in relation to Machado's procedure. The allusion to the disease “serves to give authenticity to the reality of the referent, to root fiction in the real: it is a realistic operator” (BARTHES et al., 2011), both in terms of situating the action in determined space and time, as well as define the profile of the characters. The great writer , however, goes far beyond merely fixing his fiction in reality when he makes use of the resource. In this article, the objective is to demonstrate that the realistic operator is part of the logic of Machado's novels, and, as Candido (1968) teaches, helps in the creation of credible plots and characters and, therefore, unforgettable. The data present in the texts that seek to highlight the main epidemic occurrences in Rio de Janeiro in the period 1835-1889 (PIMENTA; BARBOSA; KODAMA, 2015) and map the chronology of these epidemics in the 19th century (MARCÍLIO, 1993) are used as historical support for the proposed discussion.

Keywords: Machado de Assis; novels; infectious diseases; narrative theory