Machado de Assis and the experience of historicity

haunted historians and the phantasmagorical presence of the past in Casa Velha

Abstract

This article explores how Machado de Assis (1939-1908) articulates the perceptions of the experience of historicity and the writing of history, which were in tension with the dominant perspectives on the culture of history of the nineteenth-century Brazil, in the work Casa Velha (1885-1886). With this end, the article aims to develop how the literary production of the author establishes a dialogue with contemporary studies on the Theory of History and History of Historiography that indicate the (im)possibility of the past to pass, evincing its present/absent spectral performance. The focus is to analyze how the figurations of historicity and the writing of history in Casa Velha imply the crisis of the modern concept of history while suggesting the impossibility of a complete rupture, so that its presence denotes the condition for the historical literary imagination. The article also discusses how the haunting experience of the past in the work is connected to other writings of the author, relating to the haunting evoked by him in the contemporary Brazilian culture of history.