Abstract:
We investigated how Machado de Assis, in the short story "Pílades e Orestes", proposes a unique way of representing repressed speech as a sign or symptom of friendship and love both at the level of the character and the narrative form. We try to show how the posture of the character Quintanilha can be understood both as an inversion of sexual and family roles, and as a representation of hysterical neurosis, in a psychoanalytic key. To do so, we compared the short story both with Machado's last two novels, as well as with Greek tragedies that feature the myth, in addition to two short stories from 18th century France, by Diderot and Saint-Lambert.
Keywords:
Machado de Assis
;
Brazilian literature
;
comparative literature
;
French literature of XVIIIth century
;
Diderot