Allegorical Vehicles in Machado de Assis’ Crônicas and in Alessandro Baricco’s Novecento

Abstract

Taking Walter Benjamin’s concept of allegory as a theoretical basis, this essay aims at carrying out an allegorical reading of two means of transportation: the streetcar, present in some Brazilian writer Machado de Assis' crônicas (short literary commentaries on facts of daily life), and the ship Virginian, from Italian fictional story Novecento, un monologo, by Alessandro Baricco. The streetcar is considered an allegorical vehicle, in accordance with the ideas of Ana Luiza Andrade, who sees it as a means of transportation for the crônica itself. It is possible to think of a similarity with the Italian fictional ship, which was also a vehicle that conveyed not only passengers, but also their life stories. Therefore, both of them can be thought of as allegorical vehicles representing the historical context of nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively.