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Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) |
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Brazilian novelist and poet, a predecessor to the imaginative fictions of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. Machado de Assis' career brought him from the lower social classes to the intellectual elite. His work reflects the trends of several European literary movements of the19th-century, including romanticism, realism, naturalism, impressionism, and symbolism. He is widely regarded as Brazil's greatest novelist. Machado wrote nine novels, eight short-story collections, four volumes of poetry, 13 plays, and numerous critical essays. He often satirized bourgeois values and behavior. "For some time I debated over whether I should start these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, that is, whether I should put my birth or my death in first place. Since common usage would call for beginning with birth, 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, for whom the grave was a second cradle; the second is that the writing would be more distinctive and novel in that way. Moses, who also wrote about his death, didn't place it at the opening but at the close: a radical difference between this book and the Pentateuch." (The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas: A Novel by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, translated from the Portuguese by Gregory Rabassa, with a Foreword by Enylton de Sá Rego and an Afterword by Gilberto Pinheiro Passos, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 7; original title: Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas, 1881) Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was born in Rio de Janeiro, the son
of Francisco José de Assis, a house painter of some artistic talents, said to be of mixed race,
and Maria Leopoldina da Câmara Machado, a Portuguese woman from Azores. She could read and write. Machado was the grandson
of freed slaves – in Brazil the slavery was not abolished until 1888.
His mother died in his early childhood, and Machado was raised by his
step-mother, a mulatto woman, who worked as a diswasher at a girls
school. He also spent some time with his wealthy godmother, Dona Maria
José de Mendonça Barrozo Pereira, the widow of a distinguished senator.
In spite of attaining a visible position among Brazil's intellectual aristocracy, Machado received little formal education; French he learned from a neighboring baker. Little is known of his childhood. He suffered from a speech impediment, and epilepsy, which he described as "nervous phenomena" or "original sin." While working as a printer's apprentice at the National Press,
Machado began to write. Later he was employed as a clerk at Paula
Brito's bookstore and press. He published Machado's first poems. When
he died in 1861, Machado wrote in Diary of Rio de Janeiro: "He began as a printer and died a printer. In that modest role, he enjoyed the friendship of everyone around him." (Francisco de Paula Brito: A Black Publisher in Imperial Brazil by Rodrigo Camargo de Godoi, translated by H. Sabrina Gledhill, Nashville, TN: Vaderbilt University Press, 2020, p. xi) Machado's early works appeared in periodicals such as A Marmota Fluminense, Correio Mercantil, Diário do Rio de Janeiro, and A Semana Ilustrada. In his mid-twenties, he began to gain fame as a poet, and by the late 1860s he had became a successful Brazilian man of letters. Chrysalidas (1864), Machado's first volume of verse, was dedicated to his father and mother. Between 1862 and 1864 Machado de Assis was a member and a censor of
Conservatório Dramático Brasileiro. In 1869 he married Carolina de
Novaes, a cultured Portuguese woman from a distinguished family. She
was five years older than Machado. They
had no children, but the marriage was happy and harmonious. "Mind and
heart like yours are rare gifts," Machado wrote to her in March 1869,
"a soul so good and noble, a sensibility so delicate, reason so
straight and true, are not treasures that nature scatters generously
among the members of your sex. You belong to the very small number of
women who have the ability to both love and feel, and think." (Machado de Assis: The Brazilian Master and His Novels by Helen Caldwell, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970, p. 29)
The couple
lived in a two-story cottage in the Cosme Velhi district. Carolina's
brother was the journalist, editor and poet Faustino Xavier de Novaes. From 1873 Machado was employed as a clerk and then as a Director of the accounting
division at the Ministry of Agriculture. When his health broke down in
1879, Machado went to a health resort, from where he emerged with a new
vision of literature. When he was having trouble with his eyes, he dictated some halfdozen chapters of Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas to his wife. In 1897 he founded and became first
president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. After nearly losing his
sight, Machado de Assis rarely traveled outside his native city. Due to
excessive intake of bromides, he suffered also for diarrhea. Machado de
Assis died on September 29, 1908. His friends called him the wizard of
Cosme Velho, according to the district and street where he lived. The so-called romantic phase of Machado de Assis' literary career
encompasses his first four novels, some short fiction, a few plays,
much of his poetry and a considerable number of journalistic sketches
and critical writing. The second phase began with his novel Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas,
which marked a break with the literary conventions of the day. To the
question of one critic, "Is The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas a
novel?" the author replied yes and no, that it was
a novel for some and wasn't for others." ('Prologue to the Third Edition,' The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, p. 3) Machado acknowledged his debt to the British writer
Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) and the French novelist and travel writer
Xavier de Maistre (1763-1852). His stories have also been
compared to those of Henry James in their psychological depth. The use
of an unreliable first-person narrator, multiple perspectives,
philosophical speculations, self-consciousness, and other
experimentations with literary techniques also anticipated the
20th-century avant-garde. Referring to his reading of the book, the
film director Woody Allen said that "I was shocked by how charming and
amusing it was. I couldn’t believe he lived as long ago as he did. You
would’ve thought he wrote it yesterday. It’s so modern and so amusing.
It’s a very, very original piece of work." ('Woody Allen on The Books that Inspired Him,' interview by Eve Gerber, Five Books, August 13, 2012, https://fivebooks.com/best-books/woody-allen-on-inspiration/. Accessed 1 July 2025) The novel, which first appeared in serialized form in the Revista Brasileira, begins with the demise and burial of Brás Cubas, a well-to-do citizen. He had expired at "two o'clock on a Friday afternoon in the month of August, 1869". In eternity, Brás Cubas, the whimsical narrator, has plenty of time to think about life and death. "The gaze of public opinion, that sharp and judgmental gaze, loses its virtue the moment we tread the territory of death. I'm not saying that it doesn't reach here and examine and judge us, but we don't care about the examination or the judgment. My dear living gentlemen and ladies, there's nothing as incommensurable as the disdain of the deceased." (Ibid., p. 52) Brás Cubas died of pneumonia after inventing an antihypochondriac poultice, which could help melancholic humanity. He tells about his genealogy, philosophy, life, and comments on his writing. The reader also meets Quincas Borba and Virgília, with whom Cubas had an affair. The book contains 160 chapters. One of the shortest, Chapter CXXXVI, titled "Uselessness", reads in its entirety: "But, I'm either mistaken or I've just written a useless chapter." Machado de Assis' later novels include Quincas Borba (1891, Philosopher or Dog?), narrated in the third person. Machado parodied Darwinism and natural selection. Quincas Borba has a handsome, medium-sized dog named Quincas Borba. He believes that "Since Humanitas, according to my doctrine, is the principle of life and is present everywhere, it also exists in the dog, so, therefore, he can have a human name, be it Christian or Muslim . . ." (Quincas Borba, translated from the Portuguese by Gregory Rabassa, with an Introduction by David T. Haberly and an Afterword by Celso Favaretto, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 9) After his death Borba has left his friend Rubião all his wealth and property, with one condition: Rubião must take care of his dog. Dom Casmurro (1899), a sort of Bildungsroman, has for decades been obligatory reading at Brazilian schools. Bento Santiago, 'little Bento,' lives in a world of privileged security. Before his birth, his mother has made a pact with God: she has promised Him to bring little Bento up to be a priest, but Bento has other plans. He falls in love with his next-door neighbour Capitu Pádua, believing that he will be happy as her husband. However, infantile paranoia robs him of everything, and he ends in solitude. He is a lawyer and bitterly and ironically presents evidence of Capitu's infidelity, but the validity of his statements can be constantly questioned; there is a hidden story within Dom Casmurro's narrative. "What is here may be likened to dye on hair and beard: it barely preserves the outer habit, as they say in autopsies; the inner structure will not take dye. A certificate stating that I am twenty years old might deceive a stranger, like any forged document, but not me." (Dom Casmurro, translated from the Portuguese by Helen Caldwell, London: W. H. Allen, 1953, p. 7) Bento believes that Capitu has betrayed him with his best friend Escobar. The remarkable likeness between his son Ezequiel and Escobar is thrown into doubt by the fact that Ezequiel likes to imitate other people. Machado de Assis was a sharp observer of the human mind and its dark
sides. Like many authors of his period, he had adopted a reformist
concern, but his view was colored with skepticism concerning the
"Naturalist documentary method" and the possibility of human goodness;
reality is the ultimate truth that destroys illusions. Irony was for
him a vehicle for social criticism – especially sensitive he was about
the plight of women. He avoided regionalism and looked toward Europe
for his literary models, borrowing from his multiple sources and
assimilating them into his own fiction. "Franco-Brazilian art exists
not because of the place of birth of the artists," he argued, "but by a
combination of Rio with Paris or Bordeaux." (Machado de Assis: a Literary Life by K. David Jackson, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2015, p. 9) The influence of the French Parnassians was evident in Machado's verse; Paris and its intellectual denizens was in
general an object of admiration to the Brazilian cultural elite. On the
other hand, in the English-speaking world, such modern writers as John
Barth and Susan Sontag have acknowledged their literary debt to
Machado. Harold Bloom said
that "Machado de Assis is a
kind of miracle, another demonstration of the autonomy of literary
genius in regard to time and place, politics and religion, and all
those contextualizations that falsely are believed to overdetermine
human gifts. . . . Reading Machado de Assis, I first wrongly assumed
that he was what we call "white" (but which E. M. Forster charmingly
called "pinko-grey")." (Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds by Harold Bloom, New York: Warner Books, 2002, p. 675) When Carlos Fuentes
received the first international "Don Quijote de la Mancha" award in
2008, he spoke of the universality of Cervantes, that can be seen in
the work of Machado whom he called "Machado de la Mancha". (International Don Quixote, edited by Theo D'Haen and Reindert Dhondt, Amsterdam; New York, N.Y.: Rodopi: 2009, p. 84) For further reading: Machado de Assis: the Brazilian Master and His Novels by Helen Caldwell (1970); The Craft of an Absolute Winner by Maria Luisa Nunes (1983); Figuras femininias em Machado de Assis by Ingrid Stein (1984); The Deceptive Realism of Machado de Assis by John Gledson (1984); A personagem feminina no romance de Machado de Assis by Therezinha Mucci de Xavier (1986); Machado de Assis by Lúcia Miguel Pereira (1988); Machado de Assis: estudo crítico e biográfico by Lúcia Miguel Pereira (1988); Retired Dreams by Paul B. Dixon (1989); Machado de Assis by Silvio Romero (1992); Machado de Assis, the Brazilian Pyrrhonian by José Raimundo Maia Neto (1994); Machado de Assis, ed. Richard Graham (1999); Contos de Machado de Assis: relicários e raisonnés by Mauro Rosso (2008); Machado de Assis: a loucura e as leis: direito, psiquiatria e sociedade em doze contos machadianos by Daniel Martins de Barros (2010);Interiors and Narrative: the Spatial Poetics of Machado De Assis, Eça de Queirós, and Leopoldo Alas by Estela Vieira (2013); Machado de Assis: Toward a Poetics of Emulation by João Cezar De Castro Rocha (2015); Machado de Assis: a Literary Life by K. David Jackson (2015); Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory: Language, Imitation, Art, and Verisimilitude in the Last Six Novels by Earl E. Fitz (2019); Machado de Assis, crítico da imprensa by Marcos Fabrício Lopes da Silva (2024); Writers: Who Changed History, foreword by James Naughtie; editor, Dorothy Stannard (2024); Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas, edited by Vanessa K. Valdés and Earl E. Fitz (2024) - In Finnish: Suomeksi kirjailijalta on julkaistu mm. tarina kokoelmasta Contos Fluminenses Tyyni Tuulion toimittamassa antologiassa Espanjan ja Portugalin kirjallisuuden kultainen kirja, Porvoo: WSOY, 1953. Parnassians: Influential literary movement in France in the second half of the 19th century. Its members included Théophile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, Sully Prudhomme, Francois Coppée, Léon Dierx, Jean Lahor, and J.-M. de Heredia. Gautier saw that a poet must be objective and the poems must be fashioned as tangible as in the plastic arts. Selected works:
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