Leio por instruir-me, ás vezes por consolar-me. Creio nos livros e adoro-os.
[I read for instruction, at times for consolation. I believe in books and adore them.]
—“Job,” Diário do Rio (March 1867)
Uma infinidade de ecos, que pareciam as próprias vozes antigas.
[An infinity of echoes . . . the voices of the ancients.]
—Esau and Jacob, chapter 33
Não se usavam almanaques. Vivia-se sem eles; negociava-se, adoecia-se, morria-se, sem consultar tais livros. Conhecia-se a marcha do sol e da lua; contavam-se os meses e os anos; era, ao cabo, a mesma coisa; mas não se nomeavam dias nem meses, nada; tudo ia correndo, como passarada que não deixava vestígio no ar.
[Almanacs were not used. One lived without them, negotiated, fell ill, died, without consulting such books. The march of the sun and moon were known; months and years could be counted; it was, all told, the same thing; but days and months did not have names, nothing; things kept going, like a flock of birds that left no trace in the air.
—“How almanacs were invented”]
—“Almanaque das Fluminenses,” 1890.
ONE HUNDRED YEARS BEFORE MACHADO, Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert were writing, editing, and compiling an encyclopedia covering all branches of knowledge, describing the taxonomy of human memory, reason, and imagination with the support of more than thirty French encyclopedistes, intellectuals seeking to expand learning and reason for an enlightened and transoceanic republic of letters.1 Their ideal and purpose were transcendental: “The goal of an Encyclopédie is to assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth, to demonstrate the general system to the people with whom we live, & to transmit it to the people who will come after us, so that the works of centuries past is not useless to the centuries which follow, that our descendants, by becoming more learned, may become more virtuous & happier, & that we do not die without having merited being part of the human race.”2 Machado applied the vision of a comprehensive encyclopedia to the compilation of a personal world library of texts composed of all the books read and discussed by the intellectuals of his day, and he incorporated that library into his fiction as counterpoint to narrative.3 His character Rubião in Quincas Borba became the author of an imaginary library by editing and correcting so many phrases that “he ended up writing all the books he’d ever read” (113).
Rubião’s fantasy marked a change in the critical devouring of the universal cultural heritage: his imaginary authorship is an appropriation and deconstruction of the world library, carried out with desacralizing humor, satire, and a differential nationalism that absorbs and transforms the universal library. In confusing the particular with the universal, Rubião’s delirium reaffirms the scope of libraries: “Isn’t a private library simply a universal legacy pretending to be an individual one?”4 In the short story “O Cônego, ou metafísico do estilo” (“The Canon, or Metaphysics of Style,” 1885), Canon Matias plans his unwritten sermon in a vast, unknown world of words and ideas in which remote voices overlap in an obscure yet grand unity, drawn from such diverse sources as Plato, Spinoza, and St. Thomas Aquinas, yet all are guided by a secret affinity. Matias attributes sex to parts of speech, thus nouns and adjectives come together to form both discourse and intercourse by the force of their own physical and sexual attraction. Coming from a wide world of knowledge, they draw upon theology, philosophy, liturgy, geography, history, ancient and modern examples, dogma, and syntax. All are attracted by a fatal natural law of grammar and procreation across the ages. Machado’s world library is spawned from this vast unknown world, bringing together the voices of the ancients, whether in harmony or discord, to form a Song of Songs that is the repository of human knowledge and experience.
Machado’s readers receive a startling piece of advice on the first page of Dom Casmurro: “Don’t consult dictionaries.” Bento Santiago explains that the term “casmurro,” applied to him by a young poet on the suburban train, does not have the same meaning that dictionaries give to the term, which is a stubborn or introverted person, rather than the obstinate, irritated person that the poet characterized. His advice becomes very instructive if applied to the encyclopedic citation of sources spread by the hundreds throughout Machado’s works. Those copious references go through a comparable process of decontextualization; they lose their historical or literary specificity when recalled and applied to Machado’s world. The reader-researcher is obligated to play the role of archaeologist, first searching for the meaning and context of the historical references, only to find the allegorical or symbolic clues or threads of comparison ready to be applied to a fictional situation in order to uncover or interpret Machado’s intended deeper meaning of an action, passage, or character. Taking on the role of archivist of readings and references from the encyclopedia, Machado occupies a position superior to that of his readers in that he directs and controls the redirection of the Western archive while he adapts it to his fiction. His references alter the very act of reading, while drawing in the reader as an accomplice and participant. Machado takes readers on a tour of literature, a voyage around his literary room to get to know his favorite titles from the collections of world literature at his disposal in Rio de Janeiro.
Machado’s world library of references and citations is a hybrid mixture of a long list of books and authors since biblical and classical times, which he blended because he recognized that identical themes and expressions of philosophical truth are found in all eras. The mixture is nonlinear and free of chronology. His fictional works became repositories of this information and knowledge, which he cited or creatively altered, modified, falsified, or parodied in order to draw comparisons and to promote reflections on his subjects from a position outside the text. He freely makes fun of Hamlet: “Há entre o céu e a terra, Horácio, muitas coisas mais do que sonha a vossa vã dialética” (Between heaven and earth, Horatio, there are many more things than dreamt of in your vain dialectic); “Há entre o Palácio do Conde dos Arcos e a Rua do Ouvidor muitas bocas mais do que cuida vossa inútil estatística” (Quincas Borba, 169; Between the Conde dos Arcos Palace and the Rua do Ouvidor there are many more mouths than counted in your useless statistics) (July 2, 1893). Machado’s biographer Raimundo Magalhães Jr. labeled him a “distorter of citations”:
He gave in to an irrepressible impulse and transferred to his manuscript first a passage from Coriolanus or from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, then an idea of Pascal, or a verse by Molière, of Corneille, of Racine, of Boileau, of André Chernier, of Mareline Desbordes-Valmore, Lamartine, Hugo, Musset, and so on, if not also from Dante, Shelley or Longfellow. When he began to study German, he couldn’t resist putting some verses by Goethe in a footnote to a chronicle, ending with a Latin quotation. . . . Molière, however, was always his great favorite. There he got all his inspiration and ideas. He often quoted his verses, whether from Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope, or Les Femmes savantes, and a few prose passages besides. In the choice of pseudonyms, he also paid homage to Molière by taking the name Lélio, one of the main characters of L’Étourdi and Sganarelle.5
Machado incorporates his literary education into his works in the form of such a personal world library, and his writings coexist and dialogue with authors and works from his wide literary knowledge that impressed him. They are crisscrossed with references and allusions to and quotes from dozens of authors and works representing what was then known and thought to be world literature. His sources were the knowledgeable literary circles he frequented in Rio de Janeiro, the theater, and the reading rooms where he read classics, major works, history, philosophy, and everything he could find in French and Portuguese literatures. His novels and stories depicting life in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro are filled with references from his substantial reading that complete, alter, and complement the original texts. Machado sought to apply his citations by altering them in the light of the context, often with distance, irony, and subtle emendations. Embedded in fiction, the library is a good example of temporal and conceptual blending, allowing the reader to judge the familiarity of distant relationships. It collapses time, promotes comparison of ideas and concepts, and documents Machado’s understanding of life as a series of themes and variations.
Preceding Borges’s “Biblioteca de Babel” by half a century, Machado’s library is not futuristic or combinatory, but it is magical in that it allows a sweeping overview of time. Amassing a library of world literature for Machado is comparable to Brás Cubas’s ride over the centuries of time on the back of a flying hippopotamus, witnessing the spectacle of human experience, or to the crystalline globe of the universe in which Tethys revealed the future of Portuguese voyages to Vasco da Gama. The library is another of Machado’s eternal points of view, since it was thought to synthesize all that had been thought or written or was likely to be so. Machado stated openly in a chronicle of 1867 that he believed in books and even adored them, and over the decades he accumulated a large library at his bungalow in Cosme Velho, even though he enjoyed the use of libraries in Rio de Janeiro. In Cosme Velho he could live and write both in reality and in the imagination, as Borges did in the neighborhood of Recoleta in Buenos Aires in the next century, as recollected by Maria Kodama: “It is a real Library of Babel, full of old books, their endpapers scribbled with notes in his tiny hand. . . . Sometimes, following Borges, I wonder which one is real: the world I see from the window, bathed in afternoon splendor or sunset’s soft glow, with the house that once belonged to Borges in the distance, or the world of the Library of Babel, with its shelves full of books once touched by his hands?”6 The Alexandrine world library could have been re-created, following Borges, in authors’ collections throughout the Americas, as Haroldo de Campos writes, in the Alfonso Reyes capilla (chapel) in Mexico City, in Mário de Andrade’s library on Lopes Chaves Street in São Paulo, or in Lezama Lima’s old house in Havana.7 Although part of Machado’s collection was lost after his death, Massa located 723 books in eleven fields of knowledge: Greek, Latin, the Bible and religion, Oriental, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian, English, German, French, general history, philosophy, and psychology. One of his intellectual goals was to read the universal classics in their original languages.
One feels, comments Grieco, that Diderot was one of Machado’s favorite readings because “so many features of his fiction are recognizable in Machado.” Literature and philosophy provide a framework of wide latitude for the multitude of references that pass through the two authors’ minds. In Diderot’s Le Nevue de Rameau, first published in a translation by Goethe in 1805, a narrator (“Moi”) and the nephew of the title (“Lui”) engage in a comic dialogue, a self-reflexive contest of wit full of allegory and allusion. Signs of Machado’s fascination with this work may be seen in the narrator’s intense interest in chess at the Café de la Régence; in the unreliable, contradictory, ironical dialogue form; and in the nephew’s resemblance to a picaresque and witty provocateur. The book’s epigraph from Horace, Vertumnis, quotquot sunt, natus iniquis (Born under the baleful influence of Vertuminis), links the work to the Roman god of chance, to satire, and to comic writing. Diderot’s novel Jacques le fataliste et son maître, published posthumously in 1796 and known in a partial translation by Goethe, would have interested Machado for its journey motif, its many contradictory characters who make up their stories, and its grounding in a philosophy of determinism approaching fatalism. Diderot confessed that he lifted a part of Jacques’s story directly from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (published 1759–67), perhaps as a kind of homage but nevertheless creating a bond that could be extended to a group of international writers working with similar ideas and techniques, all of whom were among Machado’s major influences and whom he continually cited. Magalhães tries to trace part of the web of writing that links authors who use borrowing, quotation, and invention, leading to Machado de Assis: “Carlyle’s Dr. Teufelsdröckh comes from Laplace and the Alcoran, as well as Robinson Crusoe and the Belfast Town and Country Almanack, and Mariana’s husband Conrado, in Machado’s story ‘A Chapter of Hats,’ comes from Darwin and Laplace. And both Carlyle and Machado allude to celestial mechanics, citing Laplace. Even Carlyle’s nonsense of mixing the Alcoran and Laplace with the Belfast Almanaque is matched by the mixture of that volume with Darwin’s Worms in Machado de Assis” (Magalhães Jr., 218). Sérgio Paulo Rouanet notes that Diderot and Sterne met in Paris, where Diderot expressed his admiration for the Irish writer and the novel from which he would later borrow; meanwhile, while imprisoned in Turin, Maistre composed travel memoirs that would later inspire Almeida Garrett to write his Viagens na minha terra (1846), based on an excursion in Portugal from Lisbon to Santarém. All of these titles involving the travel-biography theme and the capricious control of a narrator over his readers converge in the Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas; other points of contact include temporal and spatial disposition, subordination of historical time to narrative time, changes in pace, fragmentation, graphic discontinuities, a dialectic of the comic and serious, and use of satire.
Machado de Assis wrote for profoundly literary reasons. While his references brought to bear the scope of a world library, most of his novels were based on a single phrase or idea culled from the great authors he admired, particularly Shakespeare (Othello and Hamlet), Goethe (Faust is the work most applicable to the novels), and Dante. He created original Brazilian contexts with which to develop these motifs, often reversing or inverting themes and situations. In the preface to his first novel, Resurrection, Machado acknowledged that he wrote his novel to illustrate a phrase from Shakespeare: “My idea when I wrote this book was to put into practice Shakespeare’s thought: “Our doubts are traitors, / And make us lose the good we oft might win, / By fearing to attempt” (Measure for Measure, 1.4, 1604). The citation became the novel’s epigraph. Machado used the practice of quotation in the epigraphs of his last two novels also. Esau and Jacob begins with a quotation from Dante, “Dico, che quando l’anima mal nata . . . ,” that refers to the evil-born who come before Minos in the second circle of hell to await his judgment and learn their places. It sets an ominous reference to the twins Esau and Jacob, who were already fighting in their mother’s womb. The plot develops as an allegorical and literal elaboration of a line from Goethe’s Faust, which Ayres urges Flora to quote to express her situation: “Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust” (Oh, two souls live in my breast!) in her irresolvable love conflict between Natividade’s twins Pedro and Paulo (LXXXI).
Counselor Ayres’ Memorial is even more densely symbolic and referential in its literary construction. The novel is a contemporary enactment of two epigraphs from the medieval Galician-Portuguese lyric on two central themes: ordering ships made to travel over the seas and a young woman’s farewell to her mother as she departs to meet a distant lover. The two quotations condense and foreshadow the story of Fidélia and her final departure from Brazil by ship. After his sister Rita challenges him to marry the widow Noronha, Ayres takes his volume of Faust off the shelf and reads the relevant passage: “The contest between God and the Devil over poor old Faust, servant of the Lord, and of his inevitable destruction at the hands of the Clever One” (January 10). This quotation clarifies Ayres’s personal struggle with death and desire. Ayres adds a third level of reference from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s line, “I can give not what men call love,” from the poem “One Word Is Too Often Profaned” (1822), which he first misreads, then repeats at significant moments throughout his memoir so as to incapacitate his desire through a kind of devilish, paralytic incantation. On a symbolic level Counselor Ayres’ Memorial is intended to be a thematic and character development based on the bet between God and Mephistopheles in Goethe’s celebrated verse play (part 1, 1808; part 2, 1832), which Machado certainly saw in Charles Gounod’s operatic version (Faust, 1859) performed in Rio de Janeiro in 1871 and 1886.8
The other six novels carry no epigraphs but choose to reveal their sources through symbols or direct references in the texts, in which Goethe’s works continue to play a major role. In The Hand and the Glove, a young Estévão opens a page from Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774, The Sufferings of Young Werther) by Goethe, which characterizes the suffering from love that intensifies his own fragile emotions; a Shakespearean title, All’s Well That Ends Well (1602), predicts the novel’s outcome, as Guiomar is permitted to marry the suitor whom she has secretly chosen. In Quincas Borba, Rubião uses his newfound wealth to decorate his mansion in Botafogo with, among other things, two figurines, one of Mephistopheles and the other of Faust, purchased at the suggestion of his supposed friend Palha, who would appropriate his fortune and abandon him to poverty and madness: “Silver, gold, those were the metals he loved with all his heart. He didn’t like bronze, but his friend Palha told him it was valuable and that explained the pair of figures here in the living room, a Mephistopheles and a Faust” (3). Dom Casmurro, in beginning his tale of regret, cites advice he has heard from busts painted on the four walls to take up his pen and write in hopes of reconstituting lost time as a form of consolation. Bento recognizes that the purpose is to provide him with an illusion, which he compares to Faust’s: “Perhaps the act of narration would summon the illusion for me, and the shades would come treading lightly, as with the poet, not the one on the train but the one in Faust: ah there, are you come again, restless shades”? (2). Bento reveals another major literary source of his memoir in the final chapter, when he quotes Ecclesiasticus 9:1 only for the rhetorical purpose of disagreeing with its logic: “Love your wife, but don’t act jealous—do not teach her lessons in how to harm you.” Bento finds harm in his wife’s nature rather than in his emotions, yet despite his allegation he has become a restless Faustian shadow in pursuit of absolution.
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is the novel with the greatest number of literary citations, which come piled one upon the other like a cascade, particularly in the introduction and in Brás’s thematic-biographical exposition. The note to the reader covers Stendhal, Sterne, and Xavier de Maistre. Bras’s story of his demise cites Moses as author and travels from the Grecian river Ilissos to Africa by way of the undiscovered country of Hamlet. His anti-hypochondriacal poultice can be traced to Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste et son maître (“l’emplâtre est un incident, l’histoire est le récit de tout ce qui s’est passé”), Balzac’s César Birroteau, and to Louis Reybaud’s Jérôme Paturot à la recherche d’une position sociale (1846). Brás’s self-description as two-faced only fails to name Janus. To explain his idée fixe he invokes Cavour, Bismarck, Suetonius, Claudius, Seneca, Titus, Madame Lucrezia Borgia, Ferdinand Gregorovius, the pyramids, the battle of Salamina, the Augsburg Confession, and Oliver Cromwell. Cain, Hezekiah, and Pandora are complemented by references to Buffon, Corneille, Molière, and Napoleon. Portuguese literature comes into play with references to Manuel Maria Barbosa de Bocage and playwright Antônio José da Silva. The miscellany continues with Shakespeare, Klopstock, and The Arabian Nights. It is a bricolage from many different authors in which, so thinks Grieco, “the author least present is the Brazilian” (1960, 23). Yet Machado is director of a symphony, which is his world library and personal literary archive, much more than a single instrument or book because of his involvement in a complex score and multiple texts. What impresses readers is not the sheer number of references but rather the skill, irony, and psychological insight brought to bear by Brás Cubas—with some outside assistance from Machado de Assis—to assemble his past life from reference and archetype. His is a question not of influence, but rather of assimilation and invention. The Posthumous Memoirs marks the point at which Machado fragments his authorship in both voice and style by passing it on to internal writers. In this way Machado can devote his attention to form rather than story, and he can refine his presence outside the text and even, philosophically, outside of time and history.
In Quincas Borba, Machado builds a story parallel to that of his characters derived from classical myths, yet his allusions are much more disturbing and immoral than those in the novel’s plot, suggesting a more complex psychological situation than might appear in the story alone. The character Palha, for example, is described as “a kind of King Candaules, more personal on one side, more public on the other.” The allusion is to the reputation of King Candaules of Lydia, betrayed by his wife, whom he put on display and forced his prime minister to see nude. As a result, the wife convinced the minister to kill the king and marry her. Palha did in fact display Sofia in décolletage as a social and financial ploy, and his sadistic nature emerges in the dreams of Sofia and Rubião, although neither has the courage to denounce Palha because they are in different ways accomplices to his enrichment schemes; at the same time, Palha’s pathological control of his wife and of Rubião disguises his sadism. Rubião’s declaration of love to Sofia catches the attention of the night sky and is referenced in the myth of Diana and Endymion. The goddess sees the sleeping Endymion in a cave and falls in love with him, visiting him every night. They have fifty daughters and a son, which here represent the fecundation of the night sky.
One of the advantages Machado enjoyed as a Brazilian writer was his access to and knowledge of Portuguese literature. He read and was educated by Portuguese authors in Rio de Janeiro, and his fiction and criticism extend from the medieval Galician-Portuguese lyric to his critical debate with Eça de Queirós over the novel O Primo Basílio, published in O Cruzeiro on April 16, 1870. He invokes major authors of Portuguese literature to support the context and even the geography of his fiction. He cites Fernão Mendes Pinto, the author of the Peregrinação (1614), a work based on travels in Asia, in a story set in the Orient. Bernardim Ribeiro, the author of the first pastoral romance, História de menina e moça (1554, Maiden and Modest), the Renaissance poet Sá de Miranda, and Portugal’s most celebrated writer, Camões, become references. Machado weaves in several of the famous episodes of Camões’s epic poem The Lusiads to color his context. In Esau and Jacob, Natividade sails the seas of the Portuguese discoveries in episodes comparable to those in The Lusiads: “The Cape of Storms turned into the Cape of Good Hope, and she conquered her first and second age of youth, without the winds capsizing her ship or the waves swallowing it . . . there were yawns of Adamastor. She quickly mended the sail and the giant was left behind with Thetis, while she continued on course to India” (19). Adamastor’s failed and tragic attempt to court the goddess Thetis, who taunts him eternally after turning him into a giant rock, colors Ayres’s loss of Natividade, who sailed past him years before and continued to reject him as a suitor of her husband’s sister. Ayres conjectures that the twins Pedro and Paulo may have attracted the attention of many young ladies, whom they would certainly have defended “like the medieval knights who defended their ladies” (18), a reference to the Portuguese knights who traveled to England in the 1390s to avenge the honor of certain English ladies. In his memoirs, Ayres ironizes his observation that Tristão has fallen in love with Fidélia on the same reference: “When I was a young man, we said smitten; it was more forceful, but less graceful and did not have the spirituality of the other expression, which is classic. Making love is banal; it gives the idea of an occupation for idlers and sensualists; but fallen in love is bonny. ‘Battalion of the fallen-in-love,’ that troop of Portuguese knights who fought for love of their ladies” (November 12).
Bento Santiago makes subtle references to The Lusiads almost as casual remarks or asides, so that the reader may risk dismissing their central importance. He compares Capitu’s captivating eyes to the force of the tide and describes her by writing the name “Thetis” before crossing out the word. Thetis is the goddess who turns Adamastor into the stony cape forever, rejecting his passion: “Even before I was speaking of her eyes like the tide, I wrote Thetis—then crossed it out. Let us also cross out nymph” (33). His subconscious has portrayed Capitu as unrelentingly cruel, using commanding force over him as Thetis did to Adamastor. Bento infers that he would happily have preferred to cohabit with the nymphs of the Camonian “isle of love”—the erotic paradise of the ninth canto to which the Portuguese sailors with Vasco da Gama are led by Venus as a reward for achieving their goal—if his idealization had not been made obsolete by modern times: “But times changed everything. The ancient dreams had been pensioned off, and the modern ones dwelt in a person’s brain. And these, though they tried to imitate the former, could not do it: the isle of dreams, like the isle of love, and all the islands of all the seas, are now the object of the ambition and rivalry of Europe and the United States” (64).
Machado pays homage to the short story “José Matias” by Eça de Queirós, published in the Revista Moderna in 1897, by inserting a parallel episode into Esau and Jacob. The unfortunate clerk Gouveia wishes to court Flora but is too shy to express his love, even by letter; instead, he stays on the sidewalk opposite the house where she lives looking fixedly at it, trembling. When it begins to drizzle, Gouveia prefers to stand in the rain rather than to take shelter, “ready to die for his lady as in the times of chivalry” (95).
Throughout his fiction Machado weaves Shakespearean meaning into the psychology and character of his principal actors. Shakespearean plays provided not only augurs of fate and tools for psychological probing; Shakespeare spoke as a representative of eternity and universality, such that no topic of this world could be compared to their lasting, inherent human value:
Cuba, what does Cuba matter to me now? . . . African wars, Asiatic rebellions, the fall of the French cabinet, political agitation, the proposal to suppress the Senate, the Egyptian budget, socialism, anarchy, the European crisis that makes the Earth shudder and only doesn’t explode because nature, my friend, hates that verb, but it must explode, certainly, before the end of the century, what does all that matter to me? What do I care if Christians and Muslims on Crete are killing each other, according to what telegrams of the 25th say. And the accord signed the day before yesterday between Chileans and Argentines, and just yesterday was undone, what do I have to do with the blood that flowed and that will flow? . . . The Monroe doctrine, which is good as an American law, is nothing compared to that embrace of English souls in the memory of its most extraordinary and universal representative. One day, when there is no more British Empire or North American republic, there will be Shakespeare; when English is no longer spoken, Shakespeare will be spoken. What will all the current disagreements be worth then? The same as those of the Greeks, who left us Homer and the tragedies. . . . The celebrations of the human soul have come to an end.” (April 26, 1896)
Machado introduces parallels with Shakespeare through the tragedies Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet, while also making use of The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, Richard III, Coriolanus, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, and The Merry Wives of Windsor.
In Quincas Borba, Rubião romantically asks Sofia to look at the stars of the Southern Cross at the same time every night. References to Othello, legion in the novels, here invoke the passage in which Othello speaks to chaste stars, which are not guilty as he thinks Desdemona is, yet whose light will be forever lost when he kills her. Jealousy equally drives Rubião mad, although the chaste stars he observes reflect only the unreadable reaction of Sofia to his declaration, “Now one way, then another.” Sofia’s own ego is reflected in her jealousy of Rubião, to whom she denies any connection, when she resists telling her cousin to marry him. Jealousy here takes on another cruel role, which is to “contrive this other jealousy in a person who didn’t want to release what she didn’t want to possess.” The same pattern returns in Esau and Jacob, when Natividade resists her sister’s possible marriage to Counselor Ayres, who was once her beau; in his own veiled response, certainly a sly challenge to her veto, Ayres reveals to her his romantic interest in her sons’ girlfriend, Flora. When Rubião is daydreaming about a marriage that will take his mind off Sofia, there is a reference to The Tempest at the point when Prospero creates a magical spectacle for Miranda, his daughter, and Ferdinand in honor of their engagement; Rubião’s possible false wedding is compared to Prospero’s masquerade, revealing just how deeply Rubião has wandered into fantasy.
Machado’s dark themes are centered on Othello, which had fascinated him since 1861. The play underlies a central theme of Dom Casmurro: in the chapter “A Touch of Iago,” Bento turns pale and becomes cruelly jealous when José Dias blithely reports in a visit to the seminary that Capitu, whom he calls a “giddy creature,” is being courted by neighborhood gentlemen. Bento gnaws on the words and convinces himself of her betrayal—a pattern that will be repeated—while imagining her at the window of her house. In a confused whirlwind he dreams of running there, seizing her, and forcing her to confess, before he exits his obsession and relents, yet the impression is cast in his mind and, more important, in the reader’s. This chapter prepares what will follow, when Escobar returns from the grave in the person of Bento’s son Ezequiel, who resembles him. Bento’s accusations against Capitu have been formalized, and a “certain idea,” his “project,” comes into his mind. Only when he thinks of his childhood house does he think of relinquishing his obsession and remaining there, engraving the house within himself, as he does when he has a replica of the house constructed in his old age in an attempt to recover that special moment of return to innocence. Once again, however, a distraction or coincidence restores Bento to his delusional obsession: he goes to the theater and sees Othello, which only confirms his suspicions of false paternity, illegitimacy, and betrayal, although Bento would have readers believe he was only slightly familiar with the play’s theme and had never read or seen it, even though he had effectively played the part in chapter 62: “I went to the theater in the evening. They happened to be playing Othello, which I had never seen or read. I was familiar only with its theme, and rejoiced at the coincidence. I watched the Moor rage because of a handkerchief . . . since I could not escape the observation that a handkerchief was enough to kindle the jealousy of Othello and fashion the most sublime tragedy of this world. . . . These were the vague and muddled ideas that passed through my mind as the Moor rolled convulsively and Iago distilled his calumny. . . . The last act showed me that not I, but Capitu ought to die. I heard the prayers of Desdemona, her pure and loving words, the fury of the Moor, and the death he meted out to her amid the frantic applause of the audience” (135). At this point, Bento plays a Shakespearean role (“Let them call me assassin if they like . . . my second impulse was criminal”); being incapable of facing Capitu, he decides to poison his young son but relents at the last moment, just as he always does from a number of perverse fantasies. To get his way, Bento bends one of the novel’s utopian themes to his own devices—the voyage to Europe—which now becomes an exile til death for Capitu, Bento’s way of justifying his fixed idea by hiding it behind a common façade of innocence, the European voyage.
Brás Cubas finds himself caught between the satiety of his desire for Virgília, after the annoyance of an anonymous letter sent to Lobo Neves and the deception required to refute it, and the titillation of Nhã-loló, whose name is Dona Eulália, a charming young girl whom his cousin Sabina selected for him. Contemplating how chastely a dress covered her knee, Brás arrived at yet another of his grand theories about human nature and society based on the pendulum’s action: “that nature foresaw human clothing, a condition necessary for the development of our species. Habitual nudity, given the works and cares of the individual, would tend to dull the senses and retard sex, while clothing, deceiving nature, sharpens and attracts desires, activates them, reproduces them, and, consequently, drives civilization.” Here, Brás may anticipate Freud, but he turns his theory toward Shakespeare to conclude, “A blessed custom that gave us Othello and the transatlantic packets.” He refers to the eroticism of the play, performed in Brazil by European theatrical companies who arrived by ship. Brás then adds a paragraph that at the same time he suppresses because it comes dangerously close to a comment on female sexuality, both central and centrifugal in Virgília, who has just given Brás a cold kiss of death. He describes the alternative, Nhã-loló, both as Pascalian angel and beast: angel because of “the heavenly things she says”; however, he suppresses the chapter to avoid describing her opposite nature, which by implication lies in the eroticism of a revealed knee and the sex incited by human clothing. Brás’s unspoken revelation completes the erotic circle now being closed with the cleverly deceptive, yet now symbolically naked, Virgília.
In Quincas Borba, Othello underlies the energized yet empty love triangle of Rubião, Carlos Maria, and Sofia. When Rubião and Sofia leave the party to look at the moon and the stars from the terrace, he becomes suddenly and uncharacteristically loquacious and poetic in his declaration of love to Sofia, who must pretend not to understand what he means. The stars are laughing, insists the narrator, who assures the reader ironically that they are stars unlike those in the scene on the terrace: “Chaste stars! That’s what Othello the terrible and Tristram Shandy the jovial call them. Those extremes in heart and spirit are in agreement on one point: the stars are chaste” (40). Once again, the chaste stars from act V, scene 2 (“Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!”), replace what cannot be spoken, which is Rubião’s sexual intention here displaced to the stars of the Southern Cross.
In Resurrection, the blunt Félix blurts out his suspicions to Lívia: “He did not adopt Yago’s method, which struck him as risky and childish; rather than insinuating suspicion into Félix’s ears, Luís Batista placed it before his eyes” (9). In The Hand and the Glove, persons from towns in the interior of the state come to the capital in search of the music of Rossini’s Othello as sung by the famous soprano Emmi La Grua: “Today . . . I am here thirsting for music. Vassouras has neither a Lagrua nor an Othello” (2). In Helena, some days before Helena’s father, Salvador, receives a letter from his wife, Angela, explaining that she has run away, he has a premonition in the form of a quote from Othello from an English sailor as he voyaged from Porto Alegre to Rio: “A few days before, on board ship, an English engineer on his way from Rio Grande to this city had lent me a dog-eared volume of Shakespeare. . . . ‘She has deceiv’d her father, Brabantio said to Othello, and may do thee’” (25).
In the story “O Diplomático” (“The Diplomat,” 1884), Machado arranges a fate worse than Othello’s for Rangel, a scribe who cannot bring himself to declare his love for Joaninha and during a party one night loses her to an unknown newcomer, Queirós. Rather than exact his revenge on Joaninha/Desdemona, Rangel is obliged to swallow his hatred for Queirós and serve as best man in their wedding six months later as a consequence of his unchangeable pusillanimous character.
Macbeth, and the famous expression of Lady Macbeth, comes as a refrain in the novels and stories. In the short story “Uma Senhora,” for example, the eternal vanity and youthful beauty of D. Camila leads her to reject all of her daughter’s suitors; indeed, when the two women go out they are thought to be sisters. In time, however, when her first white hair appeared D. Camila yanked it out with a passion comparable to Lady Macbeth’s murderous monologue, as if conscious of the tragedy and crime of age that would compromise her beauty: “Alone, she looked once more into the mirror. . . . Out, damned spot! Out!” In Iaiá Garcia, D. Valéria secures permission from Estela’s father, Antunes, to supply his daughter with a dowry, in the hope of arranging a marriage that would divert the passion that her son Jorge nurtured for her: “This favor seemed to her a sort of damage which Jorge’s mother was liberally paying her, a cleansing water which would wash from her lips the kisses she was making an effort to extinguish, like Lady Macbeth, with her bloodstain: ‘Out, damned spot!’ That was her estimation of the situation: it was also her grief.” In Dom Casmurro, when Bento Santiago comes home with a law degree from São Paulo, his marriage to Capitu is assured. “You will be happy, Bentinho!” is the wish that Bento whispers, thinking it to be a voice he hears from a fairy. There follows an ominous foreshadowing that juxtaposes this fairy wish with the fate of Macbeth, as Bento surmises that the fairy must be a cousin of Scottish witches: “‘Thou shall be king, Macbeth!—Thou shalt be happy, Bentinho.’ After all, it is the same prediction, to the selfsame tune, which is universal and eternal” (100). The tragic, murderous end of his marriage is thus foretold even before it has taken place.
The story “Aurora sem dia” (Ever-expected dawn, 1873) comes close to self-parody of Machado’s own literary coming of age. The young Luís Tinoco woke up one morning a writer and threw himself into the task, producing a sonnet before lunch, although missing a few required syllables. There followed a sentimental ode. Both were published in the Correio Mercantil, which Tinoco carried around with him to show off. He began to put on airs of a theatrical skepticism, quoting Byron and Dante without ever having read them. Once those gates were opened, he continued to cite a collection of literary names and allusions without knowing anything about them: “It was not necessary for him to have read Shakespeare, for example, to talk about to be or not to be, about Juliet’s balcony or the tortures of Othello.” He went beyond Shakespeare to Aspasia, the companion of Pericles, then descended to local references, Padre Caldas and Lindóia, the heroine of Basílio da Gama’s epic O Uraguai (1769). With experience, Tinoco came to realize that all his writings had been ridiculous. Old Anastácio had warned him: “You must have read Macbeth. . . . Careful with the voice of the witches, my friend.” Tinoco finally abandoned writing entirely in favor of drinking a cup of coffee in silence.
Machado saw the world through books and as a book, and he was aware of their positive and negative potential and also concerned about their reception. Brás Cubas says insincerely that he does not want to provide food for future critics. In “The Bibliomaniac,” he parodies a fixation with books and their meanings that causes any collector to ignore every political or social event of importance: “He reads, rereads, reads again, disjoins the words, takes out a syllable, then another, and another still, and examines the remaining ones inside and out from all sides, up against the light, dusts them off, rubs them against his knee, washes them, and nothing doing. He can’t find the absurdity” (72). Having failed as a reader and critic, the bibliomaniac contents himself with writing a brief report on the finding of first editions and the sublimity of ownership and collecting, thumbing through his books lovingly. Even Brás Cubas in his delirium was transformed into a single morocco-bound volume of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica with silver clasps and illustrations. When Bento attempts suicide with poisoned coffee, he thinks of literature, citing the case of Cato, who read and reread a book of Plato before killing himself. While thinking of the nobility of imitating Cato, Bento forms a maxim about the positive numbing effect of books: “I believe more people would put a term to their days if they could find this sort of moral cocaine in good books” (136). Books do nothing if not reflect the disconcert of the world, as the narrator of Esau and Jacob explains with devastating humor: “Discord is not as ugly as they say, my friend. It is neither ugly nor sterile. Count only how many books it has produced, from Homer to the present day, not excluding . . . not excluding what?” (36). Machado goes beyond irony in his lack of confidence in humankind’s desire to share his love of books or, for that matter, to learn anything from them or even to understand their purpose. The Italian tenor in life’s opera between God and the Devil in Dom Casmurro confirms the pure and ultimate truth of the production: “One day, when all the books have been burned as useless, there will be someone, maybe a tenor, most likely an Italian, who will teach this truth to men. All is music, my friend. In the beginning was the do and the do became re, etc” (9).
For Machado, the life of books is parallel to human life: “One should remember that the life of books is as varied as that of men. Some die at twenty, others at fifty, others at one hundred, or at ninety-nine. . . . With the turn of the century, many end up in libraries where they will be picked up by the curious, from where in part they may go into history, in part into anthologies. Well, this prolonged life, whether short or long, gives them a little shred of glory. Immortality is reserved for the few.”9 Books are a beginning, the genesis and the regeneration of thought and life. Machado revitalizes world literature by connecting it through art and philosophy to fundamental truths about humanity and existence.