A máquina na máquina: desconstruções de estruturas sociais e narrativas em “Bartleby, o escrivão”, de Herman Melville, e em Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas, de Machado de Assis

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ABSTRACT This paper reflects on the mechanicality of machines produced by advances in industrialization in the 19th century and its turn on human subjectivity, considering the Cartesian relationship between body and mind translated by Gilbert Ryle as “the Ghost in the Machine” (1966). Concerning the lieu of the narrator in literature, the premise of this paper is to propose a reading of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) and Machado de Assis’s novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881) as a precursor to the deconstruction brought by 20th-century scholars such as Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. The aim is to show how the narrativity proposed by Machado and Melville is a way of dismantling the very narrative as well as producing social criticism.