Who Was Machado de Assis?

 

 

". . . the greatest author ever produced in Latin America . . ."

Susan Sontag, The New Yorker, May 7, 1990, p. 107
 
 

Machado's Life:

"Not everything is clear in life or in books." To find strong evidence for this understated aphorism [from Dom Casmurro], one need go no further than . . . Machado de Assis, the man who wrote it.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1839 to a Portuguese mother and a Brazilian mulato father. By all accounts the family was extremely poor, and the boy's formal education never went beyond the elementary level. This combination of circumstances is normally enough to condemn a person to the lower rungs of Brazil's social ladder; neither racer nor income nor education in itself is an overwhelming determinant, but the combination of the three is usually quite sufficient. In view of this social structure, Machado de Assis' life story is atypical, if not mysterious. He became involved with the printed word at an early age, first as a typesetter and proofreader, and later as a writer of columns on current events and ideas for various newspapers. He attended literary discussions at the city's best bookstore and gradually attracted the attention of some already important writers. All the while he was doing his own writing in all the popular gentres and reading voraciously.

The growth of his reputation as a writer matches the rather steady growth in maturity, polish and brilliance of his works. With his rising reputation came a series of important bureaucratic appointments -- government posts carrying high prestige but somewhat limited demands in terms of time or creativity. These appointments were often implicit subsidies for the best intellectuals, affording financial security while allowing time for writing. He was made founding president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. By the time he died in 1908, Machado de Assis had reached the pinnacle of Brazil's intellectual establishment.

His rise from a position of great disadvantage to one of supremacy reads almost like a Horatio Alger story, in which pluck, responsibility, hard work and tenacity are always rewarded. If we can judge by his written works, however, Machado never really accepted the idea that one can get ahead by simply following the rules of the game. Most of his characters start out in an economically advantaged position (although through no particular personal merit) but are somehow "impoverished" in less material ways. There are winners and losers among his characters, but the game they are involved in seems to be more one of chance than of skill. An element of relativity or reciprocity is often present: a person is but a small winner, or wins one day only to lose the next.

Closer examination of the author's life sheds light on the contingency of his characters' successes; his was no simple victory either. Machado apparently stuttered and suffered from epileptic seizures. He may well have had problems accepting his racial identity. Some critics point to the beard and closely cropped hair in his photographs as an attempt to hide his African features, and others mention his preference for aristocratic characters in his works as evidence of a racial or social inferiority complex. The author's marriage (to a Portuguese woman from a good family) is celebrated in Brazil as an example of mutual devotion. Machado's sonnet dedicated to the beloved Carolina on the occasion of her death is now one of the classic poems of the Portuguese language. Yet even the success of his marriage was tinged with the disappointment of childlessness. Machado's characters frequently speak of a desire for parenthood or express their anxiety if deprived of that state.

No Brazilian writer is more fascinating to biographers or would-be biographers than Machado de Assis, yet few Brazilian writers' lives are as stubbornly unknowable as his. Personal data about the author is scarce; references by the author to his private self are practically nonexistent. Machado maintained that the way to write an interesting book was to leave things out. By withholding data, he claimed, the book stimulates the imagination of the reader. The book of Machado's life is vague indeed, and the conjectural activity that continues to surround that life is fine support for his thesis.

From Paul B. Dixon, Retired Dreams: Dom Casmurro, Myth and Modernity. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue UP, 1989, pp. 1-3.

 

Machado's Works:

Novel:

Short Story:

Poetry:

Theater:

Essay:

For a good selection of Machado's crônicas (newspaper columns), literary criticism and correspondence, see Afrânio Coutinho, ed., Machado de Assis, Obra completa, Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 1985. Vol. 3.

 

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