Abstract
Confronting the theories about Afro-Brazilian, Black-Brazilian and modern literatures, we return to the notions of implicated author, reading pact and suspicious reader to indicate that Machadian dissimulation empties the power of the ideally white reader. We suggest that the theory of the modern European novel is insufficient to encompass the Machadian narrative procedures, proper as they are to a society whose ethnic relations are based on slavery. Seeing in Aires the last of Machado's untrustworthy narrators, we indicate the slave bases of the counselor's cordiality, focusing his notes on abolition. We conclude that the suspicious reader, in the face of the Machadian novel, recovers the pact of trust in the real author, whose rhetorical devices mark the indignity of the narrative voices of our elites.
Keywords:
suspicious reader; abolition; cordial man