Hugh Kenner (2011) believes that Flaubert would be the chief writer in the group of "Stoic comedians", followed by Joyce and Beckett. This term defined those writers who deemed literature to be a closed system of signs, in which the 26 letters of the alphabet and their commutative possibilities, as well as the appropriate places of different acts of speech in specific situations within communication, are the resources that enable the writer to create a technique that distinguishes the possibilities of written communication from the spoken word. Tofollowthis tradition, Machado de Assis disqualifies all the literate cultural inheritance, breaks from the illusion of the project of totality of Queirosiana's realistic aesthetics and denounces the arbitrary aspect of the linguistic sign and all the empirical matters it represents.
iconography; spoken word; fragmentation; material culture