Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory

Language, Imitation, Art, and Verisimilitude in the Last Six Novels

Earl E. Fitz

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781684481149
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

This book makes the argument that Machado de Assis, hailed as one of Latin American literature's greatest writers, was also a major theoretician of the modern novel form. Steeped in the works of Western literature and an imaginative reader of French Symbolist poetry, Machado creates, between 1880 and 1908, a "new narrative, " one that will presage the groundbreaking theories of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure by showing how even the language of narrative cannot escape being elusive and ambiguous in terms of meaning. It is from this discovery about the nature of language as a self-referential semiotic system that Machado crafts his "new narrative." Long celebrated in Brazil as a dazzlingly original writer, Machado has struggled to gain respect and attention outside the Luso-Brazilian ken. He is the epitome of the "outsider" or "marginal, " the iconoclastic and wildly innovative genius who hails from a culture rarely studied in the Western literary hierarchy and so consigned to the status of "eccentric." Had the Brazilian master written not in Portuguese but English, French, or German, he would today be regarded as one of the true exemplars of the modern novel, in expression as well as in theory.Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide byRutgers University Press.

1 THE POSTHUMOUS MEMOIRS OF BRÁS CUBAS

In terms of technical daring and imagination, the gulf that separates Iaiá Garcia (1878), usually considered to be the best, the technically most proficient, of Machado’s early novels, and a work published just two years later, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, is enormous. As critics have long noted, it is with this 1880 novel that Machado clearly enters a new phase of development. Something very new is happening. Reading for the first time in William L Grossman’s translation, Susan Sontag pronounced it “thrillingly original,” “radically skeptical,” and, though it first appeared in 1880, thoroughly “modern.”1 What it is, exactly, has long been a matter of debate and speculation among Machadoan specialists. It is to this discussion that the present book contributes.

Featuring a dead but still very voluble narrator/protagonist and hippos flying through time and space, Machado’s first great novel (or, if one prefers, anti-novel) liberates Brazilian narrative from the bonds of traditional Realism. While there are clues in the earlier novels as to where Machado’s thinking about how a new and different kind of narrative, and novel, might be written, this 1880 work truly broke new ground, in Brazil, in the Americas, and in terms of the European tradition. It also broke, with clear intent, all the rules about what a good novel should be. And it even had the temerity to poke fun at these same rules, even as it argues that it, too, will continue within the great storytelling tradition of the protean novel form. It will just do so differently, and, I believe, with a new awareness concerning the writer’s raw material—language. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas also demands consideration as Machado’s direct artistic response to his own 1879 pronouncement about the uselessness, or falsity, of Realism, as a mode of novel writing, and the value of reality, which, suddenly, is here presented as being much more a function of language than we had seen in his previous novels. The appearance, in 1880, of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas marks a turning point in the history of the American novel. For those who know this extraordinary Brazilian novel and its place in the comparative Latin American and inter-American perspective, the New World novel has a brilliant new theoretician and a brilliant new practitioner. And for those willing to consider the argument I make here (that while Machado was writing from Brazil, a far-flung outpost of the old European empire, he was also writing from deep within it), so, too, does the European narrative tradition.

In the “Prologue to the Third Edition” of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, its real author, Machado de Assis, notes that a real and greatly respected Brazilian intellectual of the time, Capistrano de Abreu, had wondered publicly if Machado’s seemingly disorganized and digressive narrative should, in all its rather shocking strangeness, be considered a true novel at all. Rather than reply to this query himself, Machado has his fictional character, Brás Cubas, do so in his stead. This is our first indication that something truly original is about to be experienced. Brás’s coy reply to Abreu was that it was and it wasn’t, that for some, yes, it could be construed as a novel, whereas for others it would not be so judged. As Brás describes what he has written, “It’s a question of a scattered work where I, Brás Cubas, have adopted the free form of a Sterne or a Xavier de Maistre” (BC, 3). Then, going a bit further and calling attention to what the reader will soon see to be his improvement over both Sterne and de Maistre, he ventures this: His narrative, he declares, “is a far piece from its models. It’s a goblet that may carry a similar design but contains a different wine” (BC, 3–4). Recognizing the play of influence and reception that characterizes a living, breathing literary tradition (and Machado claimed the entire Western tradition as his own),2 Brás Cubas, the putative author of these memoirs, then uses the word “goblet” to stand for, or symbolize, his radically new and innovative novel. He then tells us that while it carries “a similar design,” that is, retains at least the outward trappings of the conventional novel form, this “new novel” contains, in truth, “a different wine,” which I take to be a direct, if metaphorical, reference to the “new narrative” he is here premiering.

Following this short, cryptic, and quite cunning section, Brás proceeds to give us his “To the Reader” section, wherein he lays out, albeit in oblique form, what he has done in writing this narrative. In other words, Brás Cubas, our deceased and (though we do not yet know this) unreliable narrator/protagonist, feels obliged to tell his reader a little (but only a little) about this unusual text. He says, for example, that it is the “work of a dead man,” that he wrote it from the afterlife “with a playful pen and melancholy ink,” and that, tantalizingly, “it isn’t hard to foresee what can come out of that marriage” (BC, 5). Once again, we have lots of words expended, but we still don’t know much. Only a close and careful explication de texte is going to help us achieve the level of understanding we seek. Quite conscious of how unusual his narrative is and of how it will be received (just as the real author, Machado de Assis, must have been), Brás then allows that while “serious people” (the critics, one could suppose) will find in it “some semblance of a normal novel,” “frivolous people” (the reading public?) “won’t find their usual one here” (BC, 5). In other words, Machado has just told us, through the mouth (or pen) of his acutely self-conscious but also very crafty narrator/protagonist, that he is fully aware of having composed here a very new kind of narrative and novel, that he wants to alert his audience (both sides of it, the “serious” and the “frivolous”) to his having done something new and different, and that he is trying to tell us (via his new discursive style) how we need to respond to it.3

He then reinforces this position by declaring, as if to set himself apart from his better known New World contemporary, Henry James, who was fond of laying out his narrative theories in elaborate prefaces to his novels, by declaring that the best prologues are either the ones that say “the fewest things” or those that say them in “obscure or truncated” ways (BC, 5). I believe that, beginning here, Machado does not explain or elaborate on his theories on narrative and novel writing; instead, he shows them to us by embedding them in the very texts he is writing and that we are reading. Unlike James, an American writer to whom Machado is sometimes compared, Machado prefers to “show us” his new narrative theories rather than “tell us” about them. This is why, I contend, that Brás (or, in this instance, Machado) then writes, “I shall not recount the extraordinary process through which I undertook the composition of these Memoirs, put together here in the other world” (BC, 5). To do so, he then immodestly avers, would be “interesting” but, in the end, “unnecessary for an understanding of the work” (BC, 5).4 And the alert, engaged reader wonders, why is this? Because, as Brás/Machado, sounding here ever so much like a “New Critic,” declares, “The work itself is everything: if it pleases you, dear reader, I shall be well paid for the task; if it doesn’t please you, I’ll pay you with a snap of the fingers and goodbye” (BC, 6).

The business of actually narrating his story then begins in chapter 1, with Brás musing about whether he should begin his memoirs “at the beginning,” which would be conventional, or “at the end,” when he is dead. In yet another sign that something unusual is afoot here, our narrator chooses the latter. As he (ever thoughtful) puts it, “two considerations led me to adopt a different method: the first is that I am not exactly a writer who is dead but a dead man who is a writer” (BC, 7). Although Gregory Rabassa’s translation is accurate and deftly captures the key issue (that our novel is going to be narrated by a dead man), the play on words is much more effective in Portuguese,5 where the reader who knows that particular sign system realizes instantly that the meanings generated here depend not on some inherent quality in the words themselves but on the order—the syntax—in which they occur. In virtually the first sentence, then, of the first novel of Machado’s mature period, the reader is given a lesson, a comic one to be sure, in how meaning derives not from words themselves but from the patterns in which they appear and the semantic relationships they have with one another. In Portuguese, the joke here depends entirely on structure and on a curiosity of Portuguese syntax, which is itself an issue of structure. Although the line is funny, and the still uninitiated reader does not think too much of it, Machado and his quite dead narrator manage to make at the outset a serious point about what his “new narrative” is going to be like and how it will have to be read.

Jolted out of her complacency here by some clever word play, the reader is reminded that the text she is reading is not a conventional realistic novel. That same reader is also provided with something of a clue to what is going on when Brás, pretending to clarify his thinking, adds that the point of his second “consideration” is that he wants the writing of his narrative to “be more distinctive and novel,” which it certainly is (BC, 7). There will be, Brás comically tells us, “a radical difference between this book and the Pentateuch,” to which he immodestly compares it (and, both indirectly and ironically emphasizing its supposed truth-telling power), but, for the alert reader (whom he will soon begin to invent), there is also going to be “a radical difference between this book” and the texts of the realistic novel tradition. Already in chapter 1, Machado’s “new novel” is coming into existence, and it is going to be profoundly antirealistic. Indeed, this initial anti-Realism is quickly reinforced in chapter 7, with additional commentary by the flying hippo, astride which and sailing backward through time is our narrator/protagonist, Brás Cubas, and by the disquisitions of a mysterious female form that calls herself “Nature or Pandora” (BC, 17). While traveling backward toward the beginning of time, Brás and the reader are able to review the endless parade of human endeavor, replete with all the violence, cruelty, and selfishness (a word that, known as egoism, will characterize Brás’s own nature) that seem to characterize it. It is in this still hotly debated chapter that Brás (and perhaps Machado himself) introduces the idea of life not as a grand process of constant improvement and progress but as a sorry “spectacle,” a dreary repetition of the same crimes and stupidities (BC, 18). A continuation of this outlook, we have, in chapter 8, titled “Reason Versus Folly,” not recognizable characters discussing the virtues of “Reason” over “Folly,” which Machado’s reader (believing deeply in the idea of progress) would have been expecting, but “Reason” and “Folly” themselves enjoying a clever but notably inconclusive chat. This is not the stuff of the traditional realistic novel.

Intriguingly, Machado’s canny but unreliable narrator/protagonist, the deceased bourgeois Brás Cubas, spends quite a bit of his time telling us about the unusual narrative he is relating, how it compares to earlier novels, and how the reader should learn to respond to it. His disquisitions on these subjects range from the metaphorically oblique to the humorously, and ironically, direct. At the end of chapter 1, for example, Brás is regaling his reader about how he didn’t die so much of pneumonia, as he himself has just said, but, ironically enough, because of “a magnificent and useful idea” he had had. He ends by saying that if he had told the reader that, she might not have believed him, and yet, he insists (thus suggesting that we should have confidence in what he says), “it’s the truth” (BC, 8). Then, speaking directly to his reader, Brás declares, “You can judge for yourself” (BC, 8). This utterance, which quickly becomes a motif in the novel, of requiring the reader to decide things for herself, will now recur throughout the text, becoming, finally, a key characteristic of it. Clearly, Machado understands that he needs to create a “new reader” who can appreciate the “new narrative” that he is also creating. Only a few words later, in fact, as he is relating to his reader how his two uncles, one a military man and the other a canon, felt about his likely future, Brás says, “Let the reader decide” (BC, 9). Only a couple of pages later, however, Brás and Machado alert this same reader to the dangers of a single interpretive stance, or, as they put it, comically, from an idée fixe, “God save you, dear reader, from an idée fixe, better a speck, a mote in the eye” (BC, 11). For Machado’s “new narrative” and “new novel,” the traditional reader, passive and waiting to be told the significance of what is happening, will no longer suffice.

This deliberate construction of the “new reader” that he wants, and, apparently, feels that his “new narrative” and “new novel” demand, continues on until chapter 9, where the reader receives a short lecture of what she has most likely missed or what, still surprised at the oddity of having a dead man as narrator, she has not properly appreciated. Machado opens this decisive chapter with what I propose is a parody of the traditional novel’s reliance on the omniscient narrator. Using the comic mode to offset the theoretical seriousness of his endeavor here, Brás, our intrepid narrator, lauds what he takes to be his own great dexterity as a storyteller. “And now watch,” he (again, immodestly) tells us, “the skill, the art with which I make the greatest transition in this book” (BC, 22). “Watch,” he goes on to instruct us, as if to call attention not so much to the transition, the deftness of which he makes much of, but, I would argue, to the unusual and unrealistic nature of the “new novel” he is here writing. But after quickly reviewing what he insouciantly takes to be his cleverness as a narrator, his words (symbols) suddenly take on more serious connotations; not tone, for he is as droll here as ever, but connotations, possible meanings other than the ordinary ones that I believe are now alluding to the “new narrative” he is composing.

Demanding much from his readers, Brás/Machado calls our attention to one thing (his transition) while actually doing something much more significant (showing us her “new narrative” in action, and, in the process, schooling us about what we need to learn to do in order to read it properly). “Seamlessly,” Brás brags, his book “goes on like this with all of method’s advantages but without method’s rigidity” (BC, 22). The alert reader, the one who responds to the urgings of both Brás and, I maintain, Machado himself, then begins to consider that the words, “method’s advantages,” could mean the advantages of the novel form’s traditionally flexible definitions (BC, 22); that is, a story will be told here, by a storyteller, and for a reader. But it will be told (and read) in a distinctly new way, one that, arising from out of his own polyvalent words, does not here suffer from that same “method’s rigidity”; that is, it does not suffer from what had become, for Machado, the suffocating confines and conventions of the old realistic novel. The reader is then provided with an additional clue, one that encourages precisely this new line of thinking, or interpretation: “It was about time. Because this business of method, being something indispensable, is better still if it comes without a necktie or suspenders, but, rather, a little cool and loose, like someone who doesn’t care about the woman next door or the policeman on the block” (BC, 22). If we take the reference to “the woman next door” as his reading public, and “the policeman on the block” as the critical establishment (those who pass judgment on what is, and is not, a good novel), we can also see how the words, “this business of method, being something indispensable,” could easily be Machado’s recognition of the importance of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• A Note on Translations
• Introduction
• 1. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
• 2. The Psychiatrist
• 3. Quincas Borba
• 4. Dom Casmurro
• 5. Esau and Jacob
• 6. Counselor Ayres’ Memorial
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author