Alternative protagonism and narrative disruption in Brás Cubas: A reconsideration of Roberto Schwarz's voluble narrator

Abstract

This article examines the question of narrative form in Brás Cubas by considering the alternative protagonism of intermediary chapters, the majority of them errata and reflexive commentary on the book's composition. It examines the manner in which Roberto Schwarz, in his A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism, lowers the aesthetic value of these sections while constituting them as formally necessary for his notion of the voluble narrator. Ultimately, this article argues that these in-between sections are less formally constitutive of the novel's mimetic intention than they are demonstrative of a little-known side of Brás Cubas, in which he reflects nervously, and at times philosophically, on the question of time.