BY 1880 MACHADO had chosen the compositional features that both altered and refined his fiction to constitute what is known as his mature style in short stories and in his “Carioca quintet,” so named by Jorge de Sena. Sena’s term recognizes the common links in theme and composition that unite the last five novels. In the first novel of the quintet, the Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, Machado’s narrator refers to the Pentateuch, the first five novels of the Old Testament, from Genesis to Deuteronomy, to which he immodestly compares his book because it too is concerned with questions of genesis and legacy applied in a retrospective, reflective although deceptive autobiography, written by an outside author. Machado takes up the themes of genesis, testament, and legacy in all five novels. They dialogue like the instruments in a quintet because they share comparable literary and thematic material, and their composition is literary and aesthetic: books and men interchangeably follow the plots of their unseen authors.
The first three novels in the quintet are each separated by a decade, leading Barreto Filho to characterize Machado’s literary development even in his mature phase as “a laborious and long incubator.” The final two novels, composed between 1900 and 1908, are almost interchangeable. Even if separated over twenty-eight years, the five novels, like the chapters that make them up, are not independent of each other except in the act of reading. They should be thought of as a unified group, one in which the triviality of the action and the irrelevance of the learned citations are supported and coordinated by the author’s repetition and concentration in variations of a half dozen literary themes that constitute the main content of life and the subtle element of chance seen in Dom Casmurro: “After all, there are no more than a half dozen expressions in the world, thus many similarities happen naturally” (131). In each novel of the quintet a male protagonist is writing near, or even after, the end of his life. They find themselves childless, single, and alone, facing the recurring issues of their genesis, the social isolation of their testaments, and the existential oblivion of their legacies. Each has been reluctant to accept the role of traditional fatherhood, yet at the moment of writing each faces mortality without a biological heir. All their legacies remain purely textual: Brás leafs through his memoirs from beyond the tomb; Counselor Ayres passes his own desire vicariously to Tristão and Fidélia; Quincas Borba burns the manuscript of his mad Humanitas; while Dom Casmurro disguises his bitterness and remorse in a text whose impossible purpose is to recover the legacy that the protagonist himself destroyed.
The most important advances in Machado’s so-called mature phase, which convey directly into the twentieth-century modernist novel, are the predominance of irony and humor, textual self-consciousness and play with the reader, intensive use of references and symbols, probing of hidden psychological states and conditions, and mastery of the art of narration through techniques of distancing from immediate reality. The author’s incontrovertible, if at times invisible, control of his subject matter is applied to the act of reading as a self-conscious theme. Machado feigns substituting his own authorship with character-narrators who are themselves masters of deceptive rhetorical strategies. Brás Cubas, Bento Santiago, and Counselor Ayres each pen retrospective memoirs in their attempts to reconstitute and justify their lives. From the outset each account conceals ulterior motives and psychological problems, whether to excuse the narrator’s own deficiencies or to control the reader’s interpretation, or both. Machado, the dramatist, is the creator and director of their staged memoirs. By abandoning explicit authorship, Machado creates multiple possibilities of reading; space opens between the ostensible real world and the narrator’s world, between the social world occupied by the characters and their interior dramas, and between the narration and the external author’s interventions. Parallel to his fiction, a certain sign of modernity can be perceived even in the way Machado brought the outside world into his carefully furnished study on Rua Cosme Velho: “Machado is exemplarily modern because of the way he dwells and fashions his subjectivity in an invented space that is able to bring the world inside, while at the same time keeping other forces out.”1 More centrally, Machado sought the greatest distance from his text, a point of view of the eternal from which he could impassively overlook all of human existence and drama, as if he were reading a world encyclopedia or observing the human species from the Southern Cross constellation. The eternal was an abstraction, a spatial point of view, such as Brás’s flight over the centuries in the Delirium and the clock without hands in Dom Casmurro; a timeless allegory, like that of the world as an opera divided between God and Satan in Dom Casmurro; and an omniscient revelation, exemplified by the mechanical model of the universe that the goddess Tethys revealed to Vasco da Gama in The Lusiads.
A third addition to Machado’s evolving approach to composition was the coexistence of multiple literary genres in a hybrid structure resembling a collage. His keen observation of the social world was matched by his literary bricolage, replete with references to classical literatures and history employed to throw the reader off guard with unexpected descriptions and juxtapositions, full of ironic content. Machado enlarged his repertoire by recourse to multiple genres, displayed in a series of miniature chapters with witty titles. As a result, his prose features composite or hybrid structures that incorporate or digest diverse genres and forms of representation, arranged in a layered or sequential series, usually in short, numbered or titled chapters. Within this malleable structure Machado further broke the narrative frame with bizarre interruptions, graphics, and dreams and hallucinations as well as the introduction of apparently irrelevant or extraneous materials. His character-narrators became self-conscious, aware of their roles as writers through ad hoc comments, questionings, and challenges to the reader and at times by addressing the very paper on which they wrote, a convention Camões had used in his Canção X: “Come, my trusty writing desk / always at hand for scribbling protests / and paper for my pen to unburden its heart.”2 Finally, Machado greatly increased his use of aphorisms, maxims, allegories, and episodes meant to lend symbolic meanings and transcendent views of the human condition to his writings. After 1880 he enlarged his world of reference, alongside the expansive use of humor and irony with a satirical tone.
Machado found the basic themes for his novels in literary sources: lines from Shakespeare, Dante, and Goethe; Sterne to Flaubert; the cantigas of the early modern Iberian lyric, Camões, Bernardim Ribeiro to Almeida Garrett, and a world library. He incorporated numerous historical literary genres and forms into his novels, including the oral tale, biblical and moral texts, aphorisms and proverbs, satire and irony, dramatic comedy, the memoir, novel of education, and the philosophical essay. He relied increasingly on an external, allegorical, or referential point of view that subsumed the universal in the particular, along with pointed reciprocal interplay between comedy and tragedy, reason and madness, inclusion and alienation, thereby creating tensions that both question and dramatize his expositions. The presence of different genres in his prose is a reflection of the universal library or encyclopedia that constituted his field of information. He maintained a poetic sensibility throughout his prose career that proved essential in tying together such diverse contents. Signs of his radical modernization are communicated through characters’ loss of existential unity; the inviability of systems and institutions; open, discontinuous, and nonfinite narrative; and a narrative strategy of classical elegance, distance, and openness that will typify the twentieth-century novel. Machado became an expert at telling what cannot be said and saying what cannot be told; he opened deep implications and thematic perspectives without mentioning them directly, yet embedding the concepts and suggestions subtly into the fabric of stories, situations, and characters.
As a result of these refinements and modifications in the recipe of his hybrid, synthetic compositional method, Machado de Assis takes his place as one of the creators of literary modernism in fiction, a reputation based on his last five novels and his notable production of short stories and novellas, which include such classics of the genre as “Missa do galo” (“Midnight Mass,” 1894), “O espelho” (“The Mirror,” 1882), and “O alienista” (“The Psychiatrist,” 1881). He invented his literary modernity through intensive reading, hybridity, and creative appropriation.
Machado’s stylistic and narrative innovations are evidence that the novel as later refined by renowned twentieth-century modernist authors owes its existence to inventive writers of the nineteenth. Reminding us of Emily Dickinson’s maxim, “The Truth must dazzle gradually,” the literary scholar Noël Valis returns to a neglected interior side of nineteenth-century realist prose, one whose creative variety has escaped attention perhaps because readers have become overly familiar with its stylistic conventions and thus insensitive to its inner forms and “invisible worlds.” Machado’s position as an outside insider, an ex-centric writing at the fringes of empire, expanded his freedom to mix and match from his world library of readings, to make a journey around literature. The breadth of his syntheses is demonstrated by the extended list of European writers of his century writing in French, English, Italian, Russian, and Portuguese to whom he has been compared.3 His universe is tragic and indifferent like Hardy’s; he brought out the dark underside of reality as did Melville, Gogol, and Dostoevsky; his stories unmask the social façades of a Maupassant; his laconic, compressed narratives have the poetic quality of Dickinson; the unconscious conflicts and deceptions of his characters mimic Chekhov’s disintegrating society; and his psychological depth combines the perversity of Poe with the poised portraiture of James’s novels.4
Machado’s hybrid style endowed his fiction with characteristics that the modernist novel of the early twentieth century inherited, embraced, and advanced. In his short stories and novels, dating from the 1860s, he constructed original, cohesive, complex works of prose fiction that distinguished him as a writer from other masters of the realist novel because through art and imagination he drew from a much wider compositional frame. He used a bigger dictionary and read in a larger library. He wrote in opposition to the mechanical determinism of his age and the positivism that had taken hold in Brazil. The human depth of his encompassing vision was said to surpass the limits of the observable social world. To call Machado a precursor of the modernist novel would be to invert logic and discredit his inventiveness; he set the creative precedents, rather, for several generations of modernist writers who are his heirs and descendants. Brás Cubas, Quincas Borba, and Bento Santiago face major psychological and existential problems comparable to those found in Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, Hardy, and James, while for the interests of contemporary fiction Machado has as much in common with Fernando Pessoa as he does with the psychological and realist masters of his day. He cultivated a taste for the aphoristic paradox, reserved his personal life for literature, assigned his major novels to substitute authors, and found the nature of things to be ultimately mysterious, fatal, and unknowable by design.
As James wrote of Flaubert, “He was born and lived literary, and that to be literary constituted for him an almost overwhelming accident.”5 Machado was equally a somewhat unlikely reclusive painter of life in pursuit of a style. He assembled his nihilistic universe in elegant, rational prose, while continuing to write and think in poetry. His “Gazeta de Holanda,” forty-eight chronicles on current affairs published in the Gazeta de Notícias in 1886–88, were all written in rhymed quatrains. Inspired by theater and opera, he invented heteronyms, the character-narrators who penned his major novels so convincingly along with their heroines. Counselor Ayres’s variegated story of a city constructed through the narrator’s involvement with a web of characters predates Lawrence Durrell’s quartet of novels on Alexandria (1957–60), each told from the point of view of a different character. Ayres’s self-deprecating introspection in Counselor Ayres’ Memorial, with its airs of Proust, further anticipates Bernardo Soares’s celebrated diary, O Livro do desassossego (The Book of Disquietude), composed over Pessoa’s lifetime.6 Just as Pessoa was plural, many Machados existed in his chronicles, plays, stories, and poetry through their mutual desire to be universal. Both writers were tempered by a sense of inexorable fate and philosophical disbelief. While Lisbon was a backdrop for Pessoa’s expansive poetic imagination, Machado’s city-universe of Rio de Janeiro was his subject of analysis and served as his stage. Machado’s manipulation of fantasy and imagination has been connected to the writings of Borges, and his use of intertextuality and referentiality relates his writings to Nabokov. The Russian writer also narrated from beyond the tomb, evoked deliriums that lasted weeks, and filled his prose with rapid comic asides to readers. Through their metaphysical and artistic imaginations, both portrayed the deficiencies of their societies, the brevity of life, and the miserliness of the human condition. Machado’s indifferent universe and vulnerable characters resonate in Joyce’s Dubliners, Eliot’s myth and irony, Albert Camus’s absurdity, and Thomas Mann’s restless world; Counselor Ayres’s fragile reconstitution of memory links his memoirs to Proust’s recollections in À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27). José Guilherme Merquior found that Machado was not a realist at all, but an author of comic fantasies in the tradition of Mennipean satire, the form of parody and burlesque found in Aristophanes, Lucian, Petronius, and Apuleius and related to Bakhtin’s theories of carnival inversion and alienation.7 Taken as a whole, Machado de Assis’s works are both a literary encyclopedia and compelling critical reenactments of his times. In his analysis and depiction of the human comedy and theater of Rio de Janeiro, he synthesized baroque drama with the satire of the age of reason. He disguised a diverse, hybrid compositional method within the realist conventions of his day, to which he belonged on the surface, while adding to its hidden repertoire of inventiveness, fantasy, and imagination where the modernist novel began.