“Assuming that the Story is a Train”

Technological Modernity and Poverty of Experience In Machado de Assis

Abstract

This paper aims to propose a reflection on the work of Machado de Assis, considering the ways in which he represented the train in his writings—particularly in the short story “Evolution” and through an analysis of selected passages from Quincas Borba, Dom Casmurro, Esau and Jacob, and Counselor Ayres’ Memorial. The approach adopted here is grounded in Media Studies, especially drawing on the McLuhanian conception of media—which allows the train to be understood as a mediatic technology—and on Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s (2014) formulations, who examines how the train and the railways promoted changes in the human perceptual apparatus by creating a new relationship with time and space. This perceptual crisis—hence, an aesthetic (aesthesis) one—leads to a crisis of experience (Erfahrung), analyzed by Walter Benjamin (2012) as a symptom of modernity and whose consequence is the crisis of narration. In other words, the train becomes a formal principle within Machado de Assis’s work.