Deliriums and Delights

the reading of the dialogues of Machado de Assis with John Milton in Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

Abstract

The texts of Machado de Assis and mainly his novels established many dialogues with different writers and traditions. However, the way Machado de Assis chose to refer to the English poet of the seventeenth century, John Milton, on his Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, demands a careful observation. In this novel, the Brazilian writer refers to Milton but not in a direct manner; on the contrary, the allusions to Milton are indirect, creating a textual composition within the English poet and inviting him, in an absent way, to be also part of the narrative. It seems that Machado de Assis, in the elaboration of Brás Cubas’s deliriums and delights, reflects upon his act of composition and establishes a textual dialogue with the English poet, as an attempt to proliferate the meanings of Milton’s oeuvre, more specifically Paradise Lost, in the Brazilian literary context. These dialogues will be analyzed based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s studies on the idea of dialogism, which is a constituent of the concept of intertextuality and deviates the focus on the notions of authorship, causality and finality, with writing working “as a reading of the anterior literary corpus and the text as an absorption of and reply to another text” (1973, p. 39). Thus, it is possible to say that Machado de Assis absorbs some elements of composition from Milton’s creative universe and answers him on his Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, reviving them in his literary creation and in his experiences as a reader of the English poet.