Polifonia, carnavalização e paródia na Teoria do Medalhão, de Machado de Assis: confronto com Le Père Goriot, de Balzac

In the short story “Teoria do Medalhão”, written by Machado de Assis in 1881, a zealous father decides to give good advices to his son who just turned 21 years old. Using a speech that represents the official ideology of the eighteenth century, created by the dominant hegemony, including the France of Balzac’s time, the father suggests that the son abandons his ideals, using masks and annulling his thoughts and tastes to become a true Medalhão. The dialogue that is established between both of them is surrounded by irony and humor, because the father makes an apparently wise speech, which is, actually, empty and fool, leading to think about the concepts of parody and carnavalization by Bakhtin. Besides that, when he built a story in dialogue form, Machado de Assis transfers the word to the characters, in a crossing of voices that makes us think about “embryos” of polyphony. This work aims to make a bakhtiniana reading of the machadiano short story, “Teoria do Medalhão” in opposition to the novel Le Père Goriot by Balzac.