Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, who wrote in the last half of the nineteenth century and into the first decade of the twentieth, has left an indelible mark on Brazilian literature as well as the letters of Latin America. In recent decades, his oeuvre has gained increasing relevance in world literature, reaching new audiences. His nuanced plots and characters—along with his innovations in terms of narration—have influenced innumerable writers and cultural talents of his generation and those that followed, including Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Susan Sontag, Woody Allen, and José Saramago.
Machado de Assis, as he is better known, or even simply Machado, was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1839, seventeen years after the official independence of Brazil from the Portuguese crown. Although historian Lilia Moritz Schwarcz’s essay will cover his biography and his milieu in more detail, to understand the depth of his impact on national and international literature and culture, it is worth noting a few particular points regarding his life. He was born in the Morro do Livramento neighborhood of Rio to Francisco José de Assis, a mulatto son of freed slaves, and Maria Leopoldina da Câmara Machado, an Azorean working-class immigrant. Francisco was a painter and Maria, a washwoman. The family resided in the home of their employer, Dona Maria José de Mendonça Barrozo Pereira, wife of the then-deceased Senator Bento Barroso Pereira, as dependent workers, or agregados. Dona Maria José would become Machado’s godmother, giving him his middle name. Throughout his childhood, Machado experienced two vastly different worlds in terms of race and class: the poverty and deplorable conditions facing the then capital city’s enslaved population, and the privilege and abuses of slaveholders of the nation’s elite. Machado climbed the social ladder, rising from the poverty of his childhood to become one of the nation’s most celebrated writers, intellectuals, and critics. His personal experience of witnessing and navigating these two worlds deeply affected his life and hisliterary endeavors. This complex reality would be a recurring theme in many of his works, as many of the chapters in this book will show. Moreover, Machado had frail health throughout his life. He suffered from epilepsy, often having seizures in public. Machado died on September 29, 1908, at the age of 69, of cancer.
During his lifetime, Machado witnessed great sociopolitical shifts. As some chapters in this volume will elaborate, 1888 brought the formal abolition of slavery in Brazil and the following year marked the end of the Brazilian Empire and the beginning of the republic. However, while the nation experienced these monumental political changes, as Machado underscores in his later work, always with his emblematic wit and irony, the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. From the racial meanings central to slavery in some of his early short stories to a society entrenched in relationships of dependence evident in Dom Casmurro (Lord Taciturn) and the complex voice of the patriarchal elite in Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas), it is impossible to separate Machado’s work from his life and time.
The sheer quantity of his work and its great profundity across genres of writing and art—novels, short stories, journalism, theater, and poetry—have yielded over the years a no less substantial amount of scholarship regarding his life and oeuvre in Brazil, the USA, and across the globe. He is one of the most heralded literary figures of Brazil and one of the most acclaimed writers to produce literature in Portuguese, and there is no shortage of books, articles, and courses in Portuguese dedicated to Machado. Significant work has also been published in English in the USA and Great Britain by scholars such as Helen Caldwell, Earl Fitz, G. Reginald Daniel, Paul Dixon, and John Gledson. Machado has undoubtedly become an established presence in anglophone academia, from classrooms to libraries, from Lusophone Studies departments to courses in world literature. As this trend continues, new Machado students and scholars continue to emerge, shifting our perceptions of the past (of both Brazil and history in general) and our understandings of literature.
Despite Machado’s growing reputation among anglophone readers and in academic circles, there had yet to be a collection of essays published in English dedicated entirely to his life and work. The closest project to such a volume was Machado de Assis: Reflections on a Brazilian Master Writer edited by Richard Graham and published in 1999. A more broad-ranging collection can be found in volumes 13 and 14 (2005) of the journal Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, which bring together essays from noted and emerging scholars from Brazil, the USA, Italy, and Portugal. Scholarship from Brazil and around the world, in a myriad of languages, has continued to offer new interpretations and insights into Machado, often shifting established readings.
Emerging Dialogues on Machado de Assis, while revisiting some previously studied topics, presents new and innovative perspectives on Machado’s life and work that can help us understand social and political issues of nineteenth-century Brazil in new ways. We hope, with the publication of this volume, to generate more interest in Machado and to place his works in dialogue with emerging theoretical concerns such as the politics of hybrid racial identity and the connections between homosociability and masculine institutional power. Many of the chapters in this book ask new questions. For instance, how does a nuanced exploration of an unreliable narrator shed light on experiences of sexuality in turn-of-the-century Brazil? Or, what can Machado’s deployment of fantastic elements, or incipient magical realism, reveal regarding the reproduction of political power over othered bodies?
Reading Machado over a century after his death inevitably produces new meanings in his texts, offering new understandings of his work and historical context while allowing his oeuvre to enrich our understanding of the present. In this regard, Machado, whether at the level of narration, plot, or even his own personal experiences, can help us grapple with such urgencies of the present as the construction of race, performance of identity and ego totality, the conflicts between gender and desire, and the intersections of historicization and power. In the chapters that follow, we can think of Machado as not only the political critic or keen, biting social observer of his time, but also as a sort of queer theorist, feminist thinker, postcolonial critic, and even psychoanalyst.
Emerging Dialogues on Machado de Assis is divided into five sections that approach different facets of Machado’s work, life, and legacy. Many chapters dialogue with one another while exploring unstudied motifs, extrapolating new insights from Machado’s works, and reevaluating how we read Machado today vis-à-vis his own lifetime and the present. Sections will focus on Machado’s place in literature and philosophy, racial discourse and the politics of identity, the construction of womanhood, his problematization of masculinity, and his intertwining of political concerns with narrative form. These will offer us new ways of thinking through his literary innovations as well as the discourses that structured society in Machado’s era and continue to impact societies today.
The collection opens with three chapters situating Machado within the historical events of his time and within literature, in terms of both his literary influences and his impact on letters. Lilia Moritz Schwarcz’s chapter, “Machado de Assis: Creator and Character in a Troubled Scene,” functions as a historical introduction to Machado and the political and social environment in which he lived and with which he dialogued through his work. His life spanned seven decades that saw substantial political changes during the formative years of Brazilian nationhood. The Paraguayan War, the abolition of slavery, and the declaration of the republic are merely a few of the landmark events that impacted Machado’s life and work as a Brazilian writer. Schwarcz also traces his life from his agregado childhood to the cementation of his literary and cultural acclaim, and from his beginnings as a typographer apprentice and teenage poet to founding the Brazilian Academy of Letters.
The following chapter, “Machado de Assis and Realism: A Literary Genealogy,” by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, aims to locate Machado’s place in the development of literature, more specifically realism, in Brazil. This exploration of the aesthetic mode of realism in Brazilian literature focuses on Machado and his often-contentious place within literary movements. More importantly, Gumbrecht addresses how Machado reconfigured realist aesthetics to the demands of his time, engendering a new brand of realism—in stark contrast to the European realist tradition—founded upon a firm philosophical questioning of placing reality into representation. Gumbrecht interrogates Machado’s relationship with realism, centering on the writer’s singular narrative form of instability and self-reflexivity. From this, Machado creates a form of realism that fundamentally questions representational authority. The chapter closes by establishing a critical dialogue between Machado’s realism and that of Brazilian writers who have followed him, offering a heightened understanding of not only the realist aesthetic in Brazil, but of Brazilian literature overall.
Chapter three, “Machado de Assis and Pascal,” by Pedro Meira Monteiro, revisits Machado’s dialogues with the seventeenth-century French philosophers he was known to have read. Monteiro aims to understand how the French moralists enabled Machado to explore the limitations and shortcomings of the modern conception of an autonomous subject, most strikingly, in his late work. Blaise Pascal has been often referred to as a main philosophical source for the Brazilian writer. This chapter studies the influence of the moralists in how Machado portrays individuals who cannot escape from the mundane mechanics of passions and self-interest. Thus, a difference between the Brazilian and the French writers emerges: where Pascal proposes a leap of faith, Machado invents a narrator who is stuck in those mechanics and whose characters can be the victims of a meaningless, purely material world.
Part 2, “Machado on Race, Identity, and Society,” begins with Sidney Chalhoub’s chapter, “The Legacy of Slavery: Tales of Gender and Racial Violence in Machado de Assis.” Chalhoub explores how the themes of slavery, gender, and racism, seen as intertwined, were manifested in the work of Machado de Assis throughout his career. Chalhoub identifies three moments, successive but also to some degree coeval, in the way in which Machado approached and interrelated these subjects. In the first moment, in texts written mainly in the 1860s and 1870s, he denounced the seigneurial custom of resorting to sexual violence against free and enslaved black women, and depicted these women’s dignity in dealing with the problem. Next, in the 1880s, in a very allegorical fashion, some of his works offer nuanced reflections on the relations between division of labor, scientific ideologies, and racial injustice. Finally, in his work spanning the 1890s until his death in 1908, Machado turned to the legacy of slavery and its consequences for Brazilian history and society at a time – after abolition – when national elites sought to erase the violence of Brazil’s slaveholding past.G. Reginald Daniel’s chapter, “Machado de Assis: From ‘Tragic Mulatto’ to Human Tragicomedy.” Critics have been historically ambivalent regarding Machado’s degree of interest in slavery, race relations, and other social concerns, some going so far as to argue that he sought to deny his racial background. Drawing from Machado’s own statements as well as his prose fiction, Daniel provides an alternative interpretation of how Machado’s writings were inflected by his life—especially the experience of his racial identity. He argues that Machado endeavored to transcend rather than deny his racial background by embracing his greater humanity. Machado presents a challenge to the notion that the most important thing about one’s personhood is one’s community of descent. Daniel maintains that Machado sought to universalize the experience of racial ambiguity and duality regarding the mulatto condition in Brazil into a fundamental mode of human existence. Accordingly, the conception of the hybrid human subject erodes the very foundation of “raciological” thinking. As a multiracial individual of African and European descent in a society that prized whiteness and stigmatized blackness, Machado viewed the challenge of achieving upward mobility and public success without compromising his own personal integrity as merely one of the myriad epiphenomena of universal duality and ambiguity confronting all of humanity.
In chapter six, “ ‘Father Versus Mother’: Slavery and its Apparatuses,” Fernando de Sousa Rocha uses Machado’s short story to reinterpret the structuring role of slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil, tracing how, in a microcommunity of Afro-descendants, even those who were free continued to experience slavery as it permeated all aspects of everyday life. Machado’s story begins with the assertion that with slavery there came occupations and apparatuses that were specific to it, such as slave catching (the protagonist’s occupation), and masks and iron collars, which might be used on Arminda, the runaway slave whom the protagonist catches. What interests Rocha is the extent to which occupation and apparatuses constitute fields in which this microcommunity moves. By means of these apparatuses and this occupation, Machado elaborates a close struggle between Afro-descendants who, being socially so close, clash due to their liminal proximity with the subjugation and death instituted by the “slavocracy.”
The final chapter of this section, by Sônia Roncador, titled “The ‘Chinese Question’ in Machado’s Journalism,” adds further nuances to Machado’s racial politics. This chapter adds one further (and unstudied) layer to the controversy surrounding Machado’s racial identity by analyzing his contributions to late nineteenth-century debates regarding Chinese immigration to Brazil. In order to examine Machado’s ambivalent position on this question, Roncador relies on his crônicas (chronicles), reflecting on the visit of Mandarin Tong King Sing and his African American assistant, G.A. Butley, to Brazil in October 1883. As Roncador argues, by ambiguously embracing the popular Sinophobia of his time, Machado ends up addressing the contentious overlap of nonwhite immigrant servitude and black slavery in Brazil. Such chronicles, as well as his later 1888 column, “Bons Dias!,” on the controversial proposal of compulsory naturalization, reveal Machado de Assis’s strategy of using by-proxy black(ened) servants to denounce the whitening ideology that would soon give rise to the republican regime.
Part 3 of this volume, “Women in Machado’s Work,” shifts the focus to the writer’s construction of female characters. In chapter eight, Earl E. Fitz’s essay, “Writing Womanhood in the New Brazil: Machado’s Lição de Botânica ,” offers an analysis of Machado’s representation of female characters through critical readings of his short stories and his understudied theatrical works, particularly Lição da Botânica (Botanical Lesson). Fitz’s argument is that Machado’s female characterizations, in his narratives and in his theater, are much more important to his overall sense of literary art than we have long believed. More than mere props or foils for his more famous male characters, Machado’s fictional women possess their own narrative logic and their functions are quite distinct from those of his better-known male characters. Machado’s fictional women are also the mechanism by which he shows his reading public (made up largely of women) that a new, more socially conscious woman is part of what the new Brazil needs as it creates its postemancipation and postempire era.
In the following chapter, “Capitu’s Curiosity: Undecidability and Gender in Dom Casmurro ,” Marta Peixoto revisits one of Machado’s most emblematic, if not controversial, characters, Capitu. Raising new questions, Peixoto offers a new reading of Capitu’s radically undecidable moral substance, in relation to the position of women on the brink of change in nineteenth-century Brazil. If we read the novel in full awareness of the undecidability of some of its key components, as a literary character, Capitu remains both extremely devious and deceitful, and a proper wife—to the extent that her possible villainy is camouflaged as perfect submissiveness. Peixoto places this characterization in the context of Machado’s other female characters, of ideologies of proper female behavior in the nineteenth century, and, considering that intelligence is her salient trait, also in the context of Machado’s writings about education for women, of which he was a proponent. Taking into account the long history of reception of this perhaps most written about Brazilian novel, Peixoto considers the undecidability of Capitu’s character as a starting point and asks how we can interpret Machado’s intricately worked out refusal to settle this issue with certainty, while making it the novel’s most urgent question.
If part three is centered on Machado’s female characters, positing them as the lens through which to explore other political and social topics, part four, “Machado on Masculinity and Queer Relations,” offers readings on the nuanced construction of Machado’s male characters, how their identities are performed, and how these are tied to prevalent discourses on masculinity and sexuality. This section of...