Machado de Assis, a chronicler on a “journey” towards modernity

Abstract

From a conventional perspective, it is known that the production of a narrative text is made from the conjunction between space and discourse. However, you can find some texts that, in a way, threaten such an affirmation, especially those that have as a project the textual organization of space, and both its formal structuring and its operational processes are oriented towards the construction of a space in speech. And this is what happens with the modern city: it is constituted in the discursive space for excellence of modern thought. Between the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, the big Latin American cities start to leave a whole colonial urbanistic to incorporate elements that respond to the changes experienced by society in its entry into the modernization process. Space and time are organized around the object-city that manifests this new vertigo through its own language, generating a diversity of discourses that seek to represent each moment, each place, each inhabitant in his transition to a new way of life. In this sense, the chronicle becomes the most appropriate narrative genre to record and count all these mutations and Joaquim Machado de Assis, one of the most outstanding chroniclers of that time of acelerated and dizzying changes. He builds his stories about the city of Rio de Janeiro from the critical and sharp look that his experience of living the journey towards modernity gives him.