Two Books by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

Dom Casmurro and The Looking-Glass

Dom Casmurro

By Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson

288 pages. Liveright. $27.95.

The Looking-Glass

By Machado De Assis, translated by Daniel Hahn

224 pages. Pushkin Collection. $18.

The best literature of the American 19th century - Melville, Whitman, Dickinson - is totally unlike what we find across the Atlantic. Radically breaking away from their European forebears, these three authors conceived a wholly new world of language and ideas, one that shocks us even today when we encounter their work on the raw printed page.

I have been wondering recently whether this phenomenon extends to the rest of the western hemisphere. When we get to the 20th century it certainly does, but I think we can also see it appear in the 19th century. The Argentine poet José Hernández (author of Martín Fierro) possibly stands within this phenomenon – just read the excerpts here. Do any other Latin American authors qualify? I am unsure about all but one: the Brazilian writer of fiction Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. If I have any doubts that Machado de Assis can be compared with Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson, it is only because he is so anomalous, so singular an author that he stands completely alone in literary history.

This is not to say he is without influences. Indeed, he is one of the greatest examples of how the literary canon as a whole can be incorporated into an author’s writings. From ancient Greek and Latin authors to 18th century picaresque novels, Machado de Assis’ work abounds with the lineaments of past literary monuments. 

His greatest influence is the late 16th and early 17th century baroque. His novel Dom Casmurro in particular contains references to Camões, Montaigne, and Shakespeare (and I would be shocked were Machado de Assis not also a dedicated reader of Cervantes). Of these authors, Machado de Assis resembles most closely Montaigne. Both men wrote prose of exceptional elegance and density, while at the same time remaining conversational, direct, and witty. 

Machado de Assis in particular likes to comically undermine his own fine flourishes of language, as in this passage where he describes a youthful flight of fancy: “I seem to recall reading in Tacitus that Iberian mares were made pregnant by the wind; or if it wasn’t Tacitus, it was some other classical author [...] my imagination was a great Iberian mare, the slightest breeze produced a foal, which immediately turned into Alexander’s stallion, but enough of such bold metaphors, which are so unlikely in a fifteen-year-old.” His fiction always seems to be in the first person, even if the narrator is not a character in the story; there are always those rhetorical devices of a spoken-word storyteller (“I shall share an anecdote,” “Let us put the case simply,” “Let me explain”).

Because he was so playful with his narrative voice, Machado de Assis has sometimes been described as a precursor of postmodernism. But the clever, self-aware narrator of Dom Casmurro is not the most exceptional thing about the novel. What most powerfully arrests us is that the bulk of the narrative is spent in the passions of adolescence, early adolescence. Dom Casmurro is narrated by Santiago, a man in the latter days of his middle age; he recounts the whole course of his life, but it takes until two thirds of the way through the novel for him to turn eighteen. The majority of his story is taken up with his tumultuous early courtship with Capitu, his life’s great love. Though they are infatuated with each other from the beginning, Santiago’s mother believes he should live the chaste life of a priest. 

In a rare moment alone for the two of them, Santiago tells Capitu that he may have to part with her forever due to being bound to the seminary:

We fell back on the sofa, and sat staring into space. No, that’s not true; she was staring down at the floor. As soon as I noticed this, I did the same. But while I think Capitu was actually looking deep inside herself, I really was staring at the floor, at the worm-eaten cracks, two flies strolling about, and a chipped chair leg. It wasn’t much, but it took my mind off my troubles.

The narrator affects ironic distance, as he does many times in the novel, but this only poorly covers up the fact that he has lived his whole life in the shadow of this tumultuous early love. Disclaim as he might that he was looking “deep inside” himself, his photographic memory of this scene –  the two flies and chipped chair leg – makes it abundantly clear that this was a very emotionally moving incident for him. This is a passage with a rough, uncertain quietness, with the drama suggested through the objective correlative, and it is not really something you see in 19th century fiction. Novelists even today struggle with this.

Machado de Assis was a writer of enormous range. His novella “The Alienist” (collected in The Looking-Glass) resembles nothing so much as a piece of speculative fiction from the golden age of American magazine stories (not The New Yorker, more like Playboy or maybe Esquire). Like "Bartleby the Scrivener," it is a conceptual work of fiction, best summed up in a question that begins with “what if.” In the case of "The Alienist," the question is, what if a doctor were given complete control over a society - and decided to regulate his subjects on the basis of mental health? The titular alienist soon becomes a merciless dictator; in short order, all of the town is found to be mentally unwell, and are imprisoned in a psychiatric ward.

There are several turns of the plot from there. Like an enlightenment philosopher, the doctor, named Simão Bacamarte, aims for the establishment of reason in a small community, but his vision of a rationally well-ordered utopia inexorably becomes a totalitarian despotism. “The Alienist” is a great work of fiction because of how it tears down all the easy categories we use to order the world: there is no clear distinction between the intellect and emotions, between humanitarian impulses and the tyrannical desire for control, nor even between virtue and vice. The radical philosophers of the twentieth century could not have put the case more clearly.

As much as Machado de Assis can enchant a reader from the very first sentences, it takes a while to appreciate his finest qualities. In this way he reminds me of Henry James, who will spend a whole novel developing a character slowly in order to gradually build up to a dramatic climax. The difference between the two writers is that the failures and disillusionments of James’ characters are ultimately limited affairs within small social sets, usually hinging on the emotions and circumstances of a few individual persons, with perhaps the gossip of a few dozen others enclosing the boundaries of the known world. For the characters of Machado de Assis, the struggle is one of the soul against life and the universe (his most famous novel is narrated by a dead man). His characters, when they are not outright eccentrics, still somehow do not fit into society – their values and attitudes are somehow other than what is standard.

His story “The Secret Cause” focuses on a strange man obsessed with medicine, anatomy, and biology. This man opens a charitable hospital and devotes all his energies to it: “There was nothing from which he recoiled, no disease was too distressing or repellent, and he was airways ready for anything, at any hour of the day or night.” But this man’s apparent service to humanity hides something sinister; I will not give away the secret cause of the story’s title, but be assured that once revealed, it brings with it the intimations of more secrets, ones no author could ever reveal.