We relish the works of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) for their subtle irony, their relentless psychological insights, and their brilliant literary innovations. He is widely acknowledged by those who have read him to have been one of the major authors of the nineteenth century. Those who have read him, however, are relatively few because he wrote in a language—Portuguese—that regrettably lies outside the mainstream of Western culture. This book is designed not only to call new attention to this master but to raise some questions about the nature of literature itself and present alternative views on how it can be approached.
Machado de Assis never left Brazil and rarely traveled outside his native city of Rio de Janeiro. His father was a mulatto house painter, and the future novelist received most of his early education in the kitchen of a girls' school, where his stepmother washed dishes. At seventeen he became a typographer's apprentice and later a proofreader. For most of his life he supported himself—and later his cultured Portuguese wife, five years his senior—from his earnings as a middle-ranking bureaucrat. He was sickly from childhood, suffered from epilepsy, and lived in fear that he would suffer a public attack. As a mulatto of modest means in a racist and classist society he must surely have feared the condescension of society even when he came to be lionized by a public that, to be sure, never really understood him.
Machado began writing early and was acclaimed by the time he was twenty-five years old, but it was not until a serious bout with illness and a long convalescence in the late 1870s that he gave voice to his great insights into the human soul. His illness seems to have stripped from him the last vestiges of Romanticism. During that forced retreat he also had the opportunity to read extensively in English, French, and German, so that, although his artistic expression is firmly rooted in the Brazilian milieu, he simultaneously made the larger European world of letters part of his literary imagination. Some critics note his intuitive awareness of the subconscious and how it subverts logical behavior, his references to what would later be called fetishism, and his belief in human irrationality, and they conclude that his was a depth psychology before its time. Machado's frequent use of an unreliable narrator and a purposefully digressive or fragmented structure strikes readers today as surprisingly modern.
Machado's first novel in this new period was Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (1880). Told by a first-person narrator, a character who has already died, at first sight it seems merely to recount the petty concerns and meaningless acts of selfishness that typify the lives of ordinary people. Gradually, however, the reader becomes aware of how differing points of view throw into question even the best of motives. Ten years later Machado wrote Quincas Borba, a novel about a man who goes—or has always been—insane; one critic has dubbed Machado an "encomiast of lunacy" (Wilson 1949). The next prominent work was Dom Casmurro (1899). Again we find a first-person narrator, Bento Santiago, who recounts his adolescent love for Capitu, whom he then marries, and his subsequent obsessive doubts about her fidelity. The reader is left to wonder whether she actually betrayed him or whether his fevered conclusion flows from his own weak ego and continuing immaturity. Beyond that, however, lies the question as to whether or not all human relations are based on our misapprehensions about each other. Machado went on to write Esaú e Jacó and Memorial de Aires and many richly provocative short stories. If we overlook the potboilers he turned out for serialized publication in Sunday supplements, he left a substantial body of work that is keenly perceptive and humane. In his best work the reader, despite clear warnings, is deliberately entrapped by narrators who distance themselves from their own emotionally painful experiences, the enormity of which only strikes the reader once they have passed.
At a multinational and interdisciplinary conference held at the University of Texas at Austin on Machado de Assis in 1995 considerable controversy emerged both between historians and literary critics and within the latter group as to how to interpret his work. Today, as in every generation, literary critics have found new meanings in Machado. In this book I have gathered four essays that will give the reader some notion of differing approaches now current. All four pay special attention to Dom Casmurro. By coming at the same problem from different directions, they make this volume fit well into the Critical Reflections on Latin America series sponsored by the university's Institute of Latin American Studies.
In the first essay, John Gledson (University of Liverpool), the noted British specialist on Machado de Assis, takes up the core of the debate. Was Machado a critic of Realism or someone who actually extended its reach and deepened its potential? Or should we concur with some critics who have found evidence of Machado's Modernism, for instance, in his reliance on a defective narrator whom the reader wants to believe despite evidence of his untrustworthiness and selective memory or in his use of multiple digressions and a fragmented narrative that suggests a sophisticated latter-day approach to novelistic structure. Alfred J. Mac Adam even went so far as to say that Machado's penchant for the fantastic and his view of society as a madhouse identify him much more with Latin American authors of the 1960s than with the Realists of his own time. Mac Adam admitted that this consonance is "one of the mysteries of literary history," but dismissed attempts to place Machado in his own social, political, and cultural epoch (Mac Adam 1987, 21). He and others have seen Machado as anti-Realist. Not Gledson. He understands Machado to have been very much a Realist portraying life as it is lived and experienced, though strongly critical of a Naturalism where all human action was seen as determined by Darwinian impulses. Machado must be understood in light of the "conventions, attitudes, ideologies, and 'institutions"' of his own time even if he questions and satirizes them; he cannot simply be parachuted into a later epoch. While Mac Adam focuses solely on the interior anguish of the protagonists, Gledson sees Machado as exploring the conflicts inherent in a slaveholding class society in which some ascend socially while others decline, finding in these larger tensions the framework within which to situate love, desire, envy, and jealousy. In Dom Casmurro the narrator Bento's version of his wife's behavior is given credibility by his frequent hints that she was motivated to win over his affection by her ambition for higher social status. Gledson insists that what Machado did do was not to turn his back on Realism, but to expand its boundaries and capacities, attending not only to the psyche but to society. In Machado's hands, direct Realism "gave way to another, subtler and more wide-ranging kind."
Gledson, moreover, believes that it is perfectly legitimate, nay, required, that the reader seek to understand Machado's intention as an author, despite the deliberate obfuscation he introduced through the first-person narrator whom we want to trust but have reason to doubt. No one could fail to notice, for instance, Machado's intent to disavow Naturalism and Darwinian determinism—or any sort of determinism. But more than that: in Dom Casmurro he deliberately gives the reader plenty of clues that the narrator is unreliable. Although Machado allows the reader choice, not telling us whether or not to believe the narrator (was his wife faithful or not?), by the same token we are given the freedom to examine things more pensively or not, depending on our inclination, and Machado would have preferred us to read with questioning attention. In this, his intention is clear.
João Adolfo Hansen, one of a new generation of Brazilian critics centered at the University of São Paulo, adopts a directly contrary point of view in this collection. He argues that it is futile to attempt to discover what Machado de Assis intended precisely because, having created a fictional narrator, Machado deliberately hid himself from such inquiry, playing games with voice and ambiguity that make it impossible to understand his work as Realism. Machado's work is never univocal. Machado, moreover, was critiquing the accepted unities of his time by suggesting that reality is fragmented, hardly the approach of a Realist. Instead of a coherent self at the core of every individual, Machado proposed instead a shattered, even missing self. The commitment to cause-and-effect reasoning that underlies Realism is also absent from his work. Not only is life nondetermined, but a true representation of reality is itself impossible: Machado's great theme is "the 'nothingness' that is a metaphor for the unrepresentability of modern existence."
Hansen is not alone in taking this tack. Paul Dixon, for example, has argued elsewhere that whereas the nineteenth-century novel assumed that reality was knowable, Machado was one of the first narrative authors to confront such questions as "What is Truth?" How can we know? If we do not know, how shall we act? Drawing on Carlos Fuentes, Dixon adds that Machado, rather than documenting life the way a Realist would have done, addressed universal myths (1989, 8-9). Dixon has also noted Machado's focus on life's ambiguities that "threaten to annihilate the logical basis that reigns within [Dom Casmurro's] fictional world" (1985, 54). In this vein Mac Adam has argued that Machado, like Modernists in general, "discredits all notions of progress and history" (1977, 14). Hansen would agree. For him Machado was a Realist only in that his work reflected the emerging Modernism of the period in which he wrote, the late nineteenth century. Relying on ancient principles of rhetoric laid down by Plato, Hansen's essay is not always easy to read, but it richly rewards those who make the effort.
Another current that characterizes Brazilian criticism of Machado de Assis is one that, like Gledson's, emphasizes the social structure on which Machado's novels commented. Roberto Schwarz has noted that in Dom Casmurro a major theme is the clash of values, old and new, so present in late-nineteenth-century Brazil (1991). The traditional society, characterized by dominion on the one hand and subordination on the other, by patron-client relationships, by deference and respect, faced the challenge posed by the aborning modern society with its liberal individualism and capitalist economic interest. The first part of Dom Casmurro celebrates the victory of the intelligent, rational, vivacious, and creative Capitu, while the last part calendars the sad reimposition of patriarchal values, the triumph of the man of law and letters, the representative of order. Schwarz even notes that for decades Brazilian critics generally failed to question Dom Casmurro's allegations of Capitu's infidelity because they identified with him, "the cultured law graduate, the loving son, the zealous/jealous husband, the man of [inherited] wealth, contemptuous toward business matters,... with a good Catholic education, in short, the gentleman" (1991, 87). Brazilian critic Silviano Santiago has likewise stressed how Bento/Dom Casmurro, ex-seminary student and law graduate, encapsulates qualities typical of Brazilian elites (Santiago 1978).
As the author of the third essay, Sidney Chalhoub has drawn inspiration from Schwarz, but probed deeper and more precisely. Unlike Hansen, he cares very little as to whether we can know what Machado de Assis intended; instead, his attention focuses on what the novels say, intentionally or not, about social life. These fictional works can tell us much, he says, about human relationships within a stratified social order, and so (by implication) he sees Machado as a Realist. In his essay Chalhoub, a leading social historian at the University of Campinas, discusses four of Machado's novels: two from the earlier period (Iaiá Garcia and Helena) and two from the later period (Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas and Dom Casmurro). In all of them he finds characters that personify the dependent client in a patronage-ridden social system. Chalhoub's purpose is to see how clients worked the ideology of the patron to satisfy their own needs. Rather than seeing them as hapless and helpless victims in a hierarchical order, he explores how they act as agents, shaping their own destiny despite all obstacles.
In the final essay Daphne Patai, of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, returns indirectly to the question of authorial intent. She lightheartedly pokes fun at the pretensions of postmodern "translation theorists," who claim a position for the translator as creator equal to that of the author. For them, the "text" is reinterpreted by every reader and therefore loses its centrality in this effort; one translation, therefore, is as good as any other. Certainly translations introduce still another gap between "reality" and the reader's perception, but, Patai suggests, that is no excuse for the ridiculous hubris of some translators. To make that point she carefully dissects two translations of Dom Casmurro into English that display the sharply divergent paths translators have followed—in one case simply omitting entire chapters without a word to the reader. By stressing the importance of the fidelity of translators to the original text, Patai insists that we should attend to the author's meaning: although we can never fully possess it we should strive to approach it. She thus draws our attention once again to the subtlety and power of Machado de Assis.
I thank the Lampadia Foundation and its Brazilian affiliate, Vitae-Apoio á Cultura, Educação e Promoção Social, for making possible the conference from which these papers emerged. The president of the Lampadia Foundation, Mr. Robert Glynn, agreeably nurtured our idea. The Brazil Center at the University of Texas at Austin provided the necessary infrastructure, and my colleagues in the departments of Spanish and Portuguese, French and Italian, English, History, and Music collaborated actively in making the conference a success. The Institute of Latin American Studies and especially Virginia Hagerty encouraged the selection of these papers for publication in the present series.
