E num recanto pôs um mundo inteiro.
[And she set a whole world in one dark corner.]
—Machado de Assis, “A Carolina”
Ao contrário de que se julga, não são tanto as respostas que me importam . . . mas as perguntas. . . . Observe como elas costumam ter, ao mesmo tempo, um objectivo à vista e uma intenção que vai escondida atrás.
[To the contrary of what one might think, the answers are not as of great importance to me . . . as the questions. . . . Observe how they usually have both a visible objective and, at the same time, a hidden intention behind them.]
—José Saramago, As intermitências da morte
A imortalidade é que é de poucos.
[Immortality belongs to few.]
—“A Semana,” August 16, 1896
Sim, considerei a vida, remontei os anos, vim por eles abaixo, remirei o espetáculo do mundo, o visto e o contado, cotejei tantas coisas diversas, evoquei tantas imagens complicadas, combinei a memória com a história e disse comigo:—“certamente, este mundo é um baile de casacas alugadas.”
[Yes, I considered life, again I mounted the years, I rode down with them, I looked again at the spectacle of the world, all that had been seen and told, I considered so many diverse things together, I evoked so many complex images, I mixed memory with history and said to myself:—without a doubt, this world is a dance in rented coats.]
—“A Semana,” June 11, 1893
IN 1908, the year of Machado’s death, the American composer Charles Ives’s “The Unanswered Question” was one of his “Two Contemplations,” in which one instrument represents the perennial question of existence, while other instruments vainly attempt to provide answers, until they become lost in dissonance.1 The continual background is “The Silence of the Druids—who Know, See, and Hear Nothing.” Groups of instruments are arranged separately, with the strings playing offstage, and the piece ends in “Undisturbed Solitude.” The fiction of Machado de Assis, filled with unanswered questions, and perhaps unanswerable ones, is a literary companion to these works of Ives. Each of Machado’s mature productions is an unanswered question developed indirectly by suggesting an atmosphere through acts or gestures rather than words. The novel in which Machado wrote that “all is music,” Counselor Ayres’ Memorial, was published in the same year as Ives’s composition. And the questions are still more important than answers, just as they continue to be for Saramago, since they seem to carry unexplained, unfulfilled portents and intentions.
In 1908 Counselor Ayres first observed Aguiar and D. Carmo, the old couple who were lost in uncomprehending silence after their adopted children Tristão and Fidélia sailed for Lisbon, characters who end in utter isolation. Ayres backs away from the old couple slowly so as not to disturb their solitude, wary of the unanswered questions they face. The same fate befell Bento Santiago, left alone in a copy of his childhood home, after the original house rejected him. Throughout Machado’s fiction, characters play their parts unaware of the greater ultimate purpose or meaning or of the author’s intentions; they are comparable to Ives’s instruments, which make sonorous, though futile, attempts to answer perennial questions. Machado’s unanswered questions are posed in allegories with pursuant philosophical, theological, and aesthetic implications.
Addressing the theme of wisdom that is of greatest importance in Machado’s fiction, the story “As academias de Sião” (“The Siamese Academies,” 1884) closes with fourteen monks from four Siamese academies, monks who are said to embody all the wisdom of the universe, sailing down the river in a magnificent junk adorned with feathers and streamers. When the king had earlier questioned them individually, each denounced his fellow monks as the greatest idiots in the kingdom, vulgar and worthless, nothing less than dunces, although of unquestionable moral character. Now they are singing in unison an ancient hymn, “Glory to us, who are the rice of knowledge and the light of the world.” Astonished by this song and display of unity, Queen Kinnara questioned how together they could be the light of the world and separately a bunch of dunces. The narrator describes this inherent contradiction that undermines any profession of wisdom and exposes irrepressible egoism and jealousy at the highest level of the social hierarchy as a “mystifying trait of human nature.” For comic relief to a question for which there is no answer, the narrator appeals to the public for an explanation to satisfy the queen’s curiosity: “If someone discovers [an explanation], he or she can oblige one of the most charming ladies of the Orient by sending it to her in a sealed envelope, and for utmost security, to our Consul in Shanghai, China.”
Brás Cubas participates comically in the theme of wisdom in his chapter “The Unsolvable Problem,” in which he fails to perceive in his one-sided account that consequences exist in ethics and politics. His brother-in-law Cotrim has published a declaration in the newspaper stating that he has no influence over Dr. Brás Cubas or any involvement in his inflammatory article attacking the present government, of which he disapproves. Brás can remember only the political favors he has done for Cotrim, procuring lucrative naval contracts, and he views the statement as an act of impertinence and ingratitude. Brás plays the basso buffo in pondering: “The reasons behind his act must have been very powerful. . . . I must confess, it was an unsolvable problem” (148).
Machado writes that he often climbed the mountain to preach to men, although he lived with them on the plain (January 27, 1895). He observed the spectacle of the world in a few hours or days spent high on a mountain with a view over all humankind, reminiscent of the mount where Tethys looked into a crystalline globe and revealed the history of the future to Vasco da Gama. There, he composed doctrine and formulated moral and ethical critiques while observing the eternal human theater. Yet that universal perspective, he remarks, is an unpleasing exception to nature, which prefers a straight path and soon returns the author to life among men on the plain below. By means of this authorial self-description in a metaphor contrasting high and low, Machado recapitulates the dynamic that defines his work and imbues it with baroque tension and drama. Characters in his fiction are likewise constantly ascending and descending, perhaps reflecting the topography of Rio de Janeiro as well as the author’s metaphor on eternal versus temporal perspectives.
As a result of his almost timeless viewpoints, Machado considered technical innovations to be of negligible importance to human nature, which he thought to be unchangeable. In a chronicle dated October 16, 1892, he viewed the latest imports and inventions with ironic humor: “Tannhäuser and electric streetcars. We finally have those two great novelties in the country. The impresario of the Theatro Lyrico does us the favor of presenting the famous opera of Wagner, while the Companhia de Botafogo has the courage to transport us more quickly. Will the burro and Verdi fall at the same time?” The donkeys that are put out of work claim philosophy for their race and leave flying high to the eagles and to humans, for whom philosophy will always be a “perfect chimera.”
Furthermore, he continues, too much efficiency and mechanization would limit remunerated work for humans, a situation in which, Machado predicted, a form of aggressive futurism lay: “Ten percent of Humanity will suffice for the business of the world. The remaining ninety percent are useless mouths, and, what is worse, reproductive. Twenty formidable wars will put an end to them.”2 The spectacle of the Paraguayan War for Jorge, in Iaiá Garcia, was enough to convince him of the irresolvable conflict of human affairs. In Helena, Eustácio proposed to Dr. Camargo that humans who are happy are not those who are seduced by distant, vast spaces or subjugated to the will of others, but those who are content with a few feet of space in which to live, a roof, and the obliviousness of history. Machado contrasts the timeless meaning of literature with the insatiable desire for new information in a journalistic age: “In the comedy Verso e reverso, by José de Alencar, a character asks every person who comes on stage:—What’s new? . . . I confess that this week I began to dislike that question. . . . While at home in the afternoon, it was the first thing they asked me. I ate poorly at dinner; I had a nightmare; three hundred voices brayed from the depths of infinity:—What’s new? The winds, seas, Balaam’s ass, locomotives, artillery, the prophets, all the celestial and earthly voices formed this unison cry:—What’s new?—The earthquake . . . a century and a half ago” (November 5, 1893).
Machado follows the pendulum swinging between his authorial role as philosopher and analyst in the guise of his own Counselor Ayres and his function as a close participant in the customs and rituals of daily life in his city-universe. His lofty perspectives as artist and analyst are the building blocks of his philosophy: he considers life, reviews the years, takes another look at the spectacle of the world, evaluates things both seen and told, compares its diverse contents, reconciles memory with experience, and composes an independent account. From his position on the mountain, Machado predicts Joyce’s stance of the artist in his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916): ‘‘The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (5); while in the society of men, he observes the metaphoric stage exemplified by Calderón’s La vida es sueño (1635), “que toda la vida es sueño y los sueños sueños son” (that all life is a dream, and dreams are dreamed), that challenges cognition and meaning. In composing his theater of the world, Machado joins these two perspectives by reconsidering experience from the outside, once again looking onto the spectacle of the world, while from the inside he observes the stage where human affairs are subjected to catharsis, illusion, dissimulation, and deception. On this stage is the superior humor of Don Quixote, capable of admiring the nobility of human illusion and failure.
Machado’s literary structure, philosophy, and materials can be found in the overlapping of these contrasting scenarios. After observing the world theater from outside and inside, he concludes almost reluctantly that life is “certainly a dance in rented coats” performed by characters who are generally unaware of their changeable, transient, and ephemeral world.3 Machado regarded the world as theater, defined his art through his superior consciousness, recognized the limits of rationality in a largely irrational world, and perceived the ultimate absurdity and vacuity of human nature and behavior with a calculated, distanced humor.4
Deceptive, misleading, and distorting possibilities of human affairs and memory are played out in Machado’s fiction. In his first novels Machado began to point out errors and illusions of perception, the implausibility of truth, the bitterness of life, the uniform law of the miserliness of human society, and the insoluble conflict of human affairs: “Goethe once wrote that the vertical line is the law of human intelligence” (Helena, 16). And in a late chronicle Machado asserted, “Any one of us could have organized this world better than the way it came out. Death, for example, could well have been just a retirement from life, with a fixed date. . . . It could be either a family or public ceremony; there would be the custom of a farewell dinner, frugal but not sad, at which those who were going to die would speak of their longings, make recommendations, give advice, and if they were happy tell light anecdotes. Many flowers . . . like at weddings. And it would be best not to have anything else besides verbal and friendly good-byes” (September 6, 1896). His fiction systematically undermined illusions, revealing the velleities of intentions and interactions that he exposed by techniques of inference, entrapment, and surprise. He compared life in his writings to a chess game, a comic opera, a carousel, and a dance.
The dance in rented coats is a metaphor in Machado’s philosophical world theater, an operatic ballo in maschera requiring costumes that do not even belong to the dancers, even for minor parts, since the costumes and situations are reusable in the next spectacle; they are part of the wardrobe borrowed from the author’s world library, whose themes and costumes repeat indefinitely in variations throughout the ages.5 They will reappear at the next dance along with a new generation of dancers for as long as the music and the performances continue. Theatrical and operatic performances, with their roles and actors, continue to function as the controlling metaphor in these works of dramatic comedy which, like chess pieces, pit type and category against individual will and character. The operas Machado attended in his formative years provided him with paradigms for his fiction in which he found literary equivalents for phrase length, voicing, articulation, instrumentation, balance, dynamics, texture, mode, dramatics, scene, and character development. The hidden truths of his characters and their world are constructed so as to be glimpsed through what he called plastic motivation, seen in each gesture, step, and movement of the theater, exemplified by the actress Adelaide Ristori and the soprano Augusta Candiani, whom Machado so greatly admired.
Like the stars of the impassive Southern Cross that Rubião invokes with passion before an uncomprehending, astonished Sofia, Machado takes the stance of neutral observer with an eternal point of view when it comes to a philosophy for his human theater. The critic Augusto Meyer saw in this attitude the indefinable lethargy of a spectator of himself, a writer whose stylistic grace, finely honed inferences, and unexpected jumps could not disguise his overly sharp consciousness and the Pyrrhic nihilism of his thought. When Guiomar gazes out at the moon and onto serene skies in The Hand and the Glove, the author thinks of a silent eternity: “Eternal, yes eternal, my dear reader, which is the most saddening lesson God could give us in the midst of our agitations, battles, anxieties, insatiable passions, daily pains, and fleeting pleasures, which follow along and end with us underneath that blue eternity, impassive and mute like death” (9). Estela interrogates the heavens to no avail in Iaiá Garcia: “This immense, taciturn being has eyes with which to see, but no ears with which to listen. The evening was clear and serene; millions of glittering stars seemed to be laughing at earth’s myriad miseries”; her soul was ready to plunge into “the vague and perfidious darkness of the future” (13, 9).
Counselor Ayres had observed Fidélia and the canvas she was painting “with these eyes that the cold earth will one day devour.” Beyond Salvador’s backyard, in Helena, lay “the infinity of human indifference” (21). Machado admits that his is an arid philosophy, as when one is tired of solid earth and “the vast beachless sea calls us” (The Hand and the Glove, 10). Insignificance, emptiness, and nothingness are the materials of his life and fiction: “Nothing on top of the invisible is the most subtle work of this world” (Esau and Jacob, 22). With this perception, however, Machado asserts his artistic power to see to the other side of material life through form, a position foreshadowing a statement made by the plastic artist Lygia Clark in a publication: “Man is not alone. He is form and emptiness. He comes from ‘emptiness’ into form (life) and leaves it for the full emptiness of relative death. There, he achieves an ethical state in the highest sense. While the emptiness remains separated from the other side (life), he must study it like an abyss and experience its nothing, death, and lack of meaning. All men feel this interior state. The artist through the work of art shows him this ‘slice of eternity’” (Bichos, 1960). Ayres anticipates her thought in other words: “The eye of man serves as a photograph of the invisible” (Esau and Jacob, 41).
Counselor Ayres, in the foreword to his edited diary concerning material the editor left out, concludes dryly, “The rest will appear some day, if another day appears.” The radical uncertainty of his “if” in an unpredictable world is another baroque inheritance that Machado appends to his reflections as a crucial second thought, expressing profound skepticism and resignation. The counselor’s aside is even more stark than Camões’s sonnet on change, “Mudam-se os tempos, mudam-se as vontades” (“The times change, along with fashions”), with its destabilizing conclusion that change always counters one’s expectations by changing in unexpected ways: “Outra mudança faz de mor espanto, / Que não se muda já como soía” (“One further change is the greater woe / that it changes no longer as was its wont”).6 Machado was aware of Camões’s poetry of disconcert of the world in the overseas baroque, living in shifting realities where even change itself changes. Machado’s pessimism belies its precocious modernity, however, by its skepticism without the support of faith, by a sense of Pascalean tragedy, and by its ridicule of philosophical systems; Benedito Nunes’s analysis here becomes the prologue to a radical modernity. The mad philosopher Quincas Borba simply dismisses difficult philosophical problems that might confound his theories by eliminating them like the Gordian knot: “Not every philosophical problem is worth five minutes’ attention” (149). Both Ayres and Quincas challenge and ridicule philosophy, thereby supporting Nunes’s assertion that Machado makes fun of philosophical systems in his fiction from the outside, an attitude perhaps supported by his agnosticism and his interest in eternity and in an unexplainable, unpredictable universe.
“Why beautiful if lame? Why lame if beautiful?,” Brás Cubas questions when tempted by the love of the sincere and modest Eugênia, who is perhaps the only noble character in his memoirs. The mirrored questions speak to the ethical inequality and asymmetry in Nature. Although Brás has an inkling of Eugênia’s honesty and depth of character, he looks for an excuse to break off the incipient relationship because of both his restless ambition and his previous knowledge of her illegitimate birth. In response to his innocent comment about her limp Eugênia replies that she has been lame since birth, mortifying Brás only because of the social faux pas. Because he cannot truly sympathize or reconcile a physical imperfection with his social ideal of refinement and of consonance between beauty, class, position, and physical perfection, Brás callously invents an excuse to leave Eugênia, after gaining her first kiss, to return to his father in the city. With his puzzling matching questions, Brás pithily captures seemingly unjustifiable contradictions that challenge and defy the ethical, social, and aesthetic constructs of hierarchical societies. From his own egotistical, if surprised, reaction, Brás unwittingly coins a phrase that epitomizes contemporary existential doubt. His questions have become part of popular lore in Brazil: when faced with any unexplainable contradiction, readers of Machado look at each other with ironic smiles and repeat, “Why beautiful if lame? Why lame if beautiful?”
Asymmetry and the impasses of destiny are illustrated in the stories “A Celebrity” concerning Pestana, a famous composer of polkas whose sole desire in life was to compose classical music, and “Wedding Song,” about the old conductor Romão Pires, who could not complete a composition he had begun after his marriage and before his wife’s early death. The theme of the contrariness and asymmetries of life recurs more comically when Custódio, the owner of a pastry shop in Esau and Jacob, is concerned that he will lose his customers if the name of the establishment does not reflect the current governing party. He would change it from “Pastry Shop of the Empire” to “Pastry Shop of the Republic” if he could be sure that the republic would last. Ayres suggests adding “founded in 1860” to the original sign or “Empire of Laws,” but Custódio thinks the added wording will be too small to have any immediate effect. The solution Ayres leaves him with is to name it after himself, “Custódio’s Pastry Shop.” Here the unforeseen strikes outside of the text, as Admiral Custódio José de Melo will soon lead a naval uprising that makes the name taboo in republican Brazil. Again, the vicissitudes and reverses of events recur when Ayres reminisces about his dalliance with the fashionable actress Carmen during his assignment in Caracas. As he was entertaining her at home, they heard an alarming commotion in the streets: “What noise is that?” he asked Carmen. “Don’t be frightened my friend, it’s the government falling,” she answered. “But I hear cheers,” he replied. “Then it is the government rising. Don’t be frightened. Tomorrow is time enough to pay your respects.”
Machado’s efforts to uncover truth beneath appearances are a function of the large catalogue of aphorisms and maxims from the age of reason that made up his practical, rational philosophy, but they are additionally a beneficiary of the experimental medicine of the mid-nineteenth century. Differences between observed behavior and pathology led such figures as Carl von Rokitansky at the University of Vienna and Claude Bernard at the Sorbonne to conclude that truth lay beneath the surface, just as the Vienna school of psychoanalysis would seek to find thoughts in the unconscious mind, as would the modernist portraits of the painters Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele and the surrealists in experiments of automatic writing. Mystifying traits of human psychology investigated by Machado include cruelty and perversity, cases in which the human heart is a “well of mysteries.” The short story “The Secret Cause” presents the curious case of punishment without crime or cause in Fortunato, who at the story’s conclusion stands unseen, quietly observing his close friend and partner Garcia bending over the casket of Maria Luísa, Fortunato’s wife, who had died from the shock of witnessing her husband’s cruelty and enjoyment of suffering, including her own. Garcia’s chaste kiss of repressed love and his desperate sobbing gave the impassive Fortunato one more occasion to taste the pleasure of an explosion of moral pain, made more delicious to him the longer it lasted. Garcia discovered Fortunato’s obsession only after he became a victim. In Helena, when Salvador returns home after his father’s final illness in search of his wife and daughter, he finds an empty house. A neighbor gives him directions to where they went, but both sense approaching disaster. Salvador noted the neighbor’s pitying smile and gloating humiliation, even though Salvador had never given him the slightest offense. Why, then, did the neighbor take a secret pleasure in his great misfortune, which he even managed to communicate slyly to the sufferer? Salvador can only ask rhetorically, “Why? I leave it to the philosophers to solve this puzzle of human nature” (25).
The aged Bento Santiago also wonders why he feels pleasure in retelling and reliving old sufferings. Just before this short chapter, Capitu has threatened that at the first new sign of jealous suspicion on his part, all would be dissolved between them, and Bento swore that it would never happen again. In view of his jealous obsession, this new spiritual pleasure seems a cruel sublimation: “In telling of that crisis in my adolescent love, I feel something I do not know how to explain: somehow the sufferings of that period have become so spiritualized with time that they have melted into pleasure. This is not clear—but not everything is clear in life or in books. The truth is I feel a particular pleasure in retelling this ordeal, while it is certain that it reminds me of others which I would not be reminded of for anything” (77). When Tristão decided not to return to Lisbon when called for elections, the witty Cesária remarked in a melancholy tone to the counselor that Tristão loved Fidélia but preferred politics. The counselor detected that the disguised aim of her sharp perception was the pleasure of seeing Fidélia diminished, an emotion he may have shared for a moment, given the rivalry he felt for Tristão. In making this perception, the counselor felt admiration for her wit, her pointed allusions, and her elegant manner; he even shared her pleasure vicariously in his increased admiration for her talented verbal display (November 30). He had penned his own aphorism on the interaction of good and evil: “There is no evil that does not bring a little good, and for that reason what is bad is useful, often indispensable, sometimes delicious” (Esau and Jacob, 59). The basis for his thought is found in Nature, as we read in the short story “Uma senhora” (A lady): “Nature, however, is not only immoral, but also illogical.”
Machado applied his observations of the world’s illogic to a purpose greater than a refuge from or critique of political and social affairs. He confronted what Counselor Ayres called “life’s imprescriptive laws” that determine the eternal human predicament. If Machado wrote as a miniaturist and portraitist, his human consciousness was transcendental and metaphysical. His twists of irony emphasize the impossibility of one’s knowing whether freedom of thought and nobility of mind and ethics exist to motivate human action. Ayres comments to Dona Perpétua that the night would be the same whether it were clear and warm or dark and cold and that the bay of Rio de Janeiro never changes; at the same time, men might one day fill in the bay with earth and stones, illustrating comically Ayres’s supreme maxim: “Everything is possible under the sun and moon.” “Even death,” he jokes with Baron Santos, “is an hypothesis . . . perhaps a legend” (Esau and Jacob, 1). In this, he recapitulates the arguments and contrasts the worldviews of the baroque and Enlightenment eras; he is governed by a search for meaning beyond appearances and by systematic doubt. Through his allegories Machado nevertheless conceives positively, if existentially, of life’s unknown dimensions and the role of chance, whether for good or ill. In a world of clocks whose ticking anxiously counts down the duration of life and channels one’s perception of time, unseen eternal principles are still present behind the scenes. The unknown remains a positive, if daunting, force against the immutable laws of fate, present in Machado’s clock without hands and in humanity’s dance in rented coats. After all, God and Satan may agree to revise their play or to alter the scenario radically or to change the time of the performance. As long as there is birth and renewal in the world theater, the play and the dance will continue repeating their performances, whether to good or bad reviews, and wise authors will continue to observe them from afar, until in some unimaginable future time the theater closes and all comes to an end.
MACHADO IMPRESSED the men of his time with his youthful, lithesome spirit. In a letter from London on October 8, 1904, Nabuco, the statesman, gives his opinion of Machado, the man behind the mask of fiction: “But what vivacity, with a light touch, what sweetness, what benevolence of spirit, I was going to say, what beatitude! You may cultivate bile and gall in the social philosophy of your novels, but your letters betray you. You are not only a happy man, you live in beatitude, like a Pope, and a Pope in an age of faith, as exists today in the Academy. Now you’re not going to say that I’ve offended you and accused you of hypocrisy by calling you happy?”7 On the death of Carolina on October 20, 1904, however, Machado struggled to maintain his will and his composure. In an exchange of letters with Nabuco, soon to be Brazil’s first ambassador to the United States, Machado despairs of his condition and his future:
So far away, by other means the news of my great disgrace reached you and you right away expressed your sympathy by telegram. The only word I used to thank you is the same one I send you now, not knowing any other that could say everything that I feel and that grieves me. The best part of my life has gone away, and here I am alone in the world. Note that solitude doesn’t weary me, rather I’m grateful for it, because it’s a way of living with her, of hearing her, noticing the thousand cares that my companion of 35 years of marriage had for me; but there’s no imagination that does not wake up, and vigilance increases the absence of the person loved. We were old, and I counted on dying before her, which would be a great favor; first, because I could never find anyone who could better help me to die; secondly, because she has a few relatives who would console her for her loss, and I don’t have any. Mine are friends, and truly those are the best; but life scatters them in space, in spiritual concerns and in the careers of each one. Here I remain, for now in the same house, in the same room, with the same ornaments of hers. Everything makes me remember my friend Carolina. As I am on the edge of eternal retirement, I won’t spend much time in remembering her. I will go to see her; she will be waiting for me. (November 20, 1904)
In his reply, Nabuco tried to raise the author’s spirits by recommending a return to writing and study: “In your case imagination, intellectual interests and work is an environment that will allow your pain in part to evaporate. . . . You will understand that the heart’s vacuum must be compensated by movement and by the stirring of your spirit.”8
Two years earlier, in a letter dated August 19, 1906, Machado had commented on Nabuco’s collection of thoughts and remembrances in Pensées detachées et souvenirs, published in Paris that year. Praising in Nabuco the coexistence of the statesman and the artist, Machado shares his taste for the succinct expression of philosophical ideas and reflections: “From early on I read Pascal intensely, not to cite other sources, and not because I had nothing else to do. Still today when I return to those readings, to console myself with the disconsolate Ecclesiastes, I find the same taste in them as before” (August 19, 1906). In his comments on Nabuco’s publication, it seems as if Machado is describing his own method of composition:
Thoughts come alive and live by exact or new observations, by a sharp or profound reaction, and no less do they demand originality, simplicity, and graceful phrases. . . . In these pages history is subjected to religious and philosophical influences, to moral and aesthetical observations, taken from long personal experience. Your intimate thoughts are open here for all to see in that lapidary form that memory retains best. . . . You inscribe them directly or suggestively, and a spiritual tone is another characteristic of your pages. In all of them a serene and strong optimism shines through. (Correspondência, 1932, 66).
In selected examples of Nabuco’s reflections Machado sees potentially complete books, and his selections of passages are surprisingly close to well-known aphorisms found in his own novels: “‘Very rarely are beautiful lives happy inside; something always has to be sacrificed for the sake of unity’ calls to mind historical memoirs, or direct observations, that in the hands of a narrator or psychologist could result in a book.” In other phrases he comments on the efficacy of orthography to teach political lessons: “Many times a life is lost because where there should have been a period someone has put a question mark.” Machado even cites a reflection that casts doubt on the accuracy of all our observations: “The butterfly finds them heavy, the pheasant poorly dressed, the nightingale hoarse, and the eagle lowly” (August 19, 1906). Aphorisms, to Machado, express beauty, truth, and mystery, even going beyond philosophy to the point where descriptive words have no effect.
In a letter to Nabuco in Washington, D.C., he commented wryly that Counselor Ayres’ Memorial would be his last novel: “I say firmly that this is my last book. . . . I’ve finished. As long as the book doesn’t disappoint, it will be a good place to stop” (August 1, 1908). In a reply that arrived after Machado’s death, Nabuco saw in the novel a portrait of everything he associated with its author: “As for your book, I read it letter by letter with true delight as a portrait of you yourself, your tastes, your way of taking up life and considering everything. It’s a book that produces longing for you, but also satiates it. What freshness of spirit! Again I recommend the company of young men, more intimately, at home. You seem to feel this with Tristão [Tristão da Cunha] and with Mário de Alencar. But the benefit of being close to youth wouldn’t be yours alone. You are a perpetual youth surrounded by all those affectations of old age” (September 3, 1908). Graça Aranha, on reading Counselor Ayres’ Memorial, also saw in the novel a different Machado de Assis, an author who had qualified the ironic and unrelenting critique of life, the doubt and mistrust of earlier writings: “It’s another Machado de Assis. No longer the disdainful writer, impudent, daring, who shattered the moral universe and analyzed it cruelly with a spirit that damns and denies. . . . Here petulance of spirit was converted into gentleness, irony into piety, distrust into neglect, doubt into hope for another life.”9 The reactions of both Nabuco and Graça Aranha are influenced by their personal identification as diplomats with the stature and career of Counselor Ayres as author and narrator, enhanced by his tactful diplomatic manner, whether in social discourse or in disguising his inner thoughts and emotions. Neither reader captured the Faustian predicament, marked by barrenness and approaching death, with which Ayres censors his impudent, lively, and erotic spirit, nor perhaps the ironic distance between Ayres as author and his creator. Nevertheless, Nabuco’s critical judgment of the value and place of the last novel by Machado de Assis for his generation continues to be valid after more than a century: “The unconscious admiration that you inspired in the previous generation, and in ours, enjoys a reputation today that will oblige posterity to read your novel and to study it in order to understand the fascination that you exercised over your time.”10 The aura of Machado de Assis was captured by Haroldo Maranhão in his novel Memorial do fim (Memorial of the end), which reconstructs his death scene, capturing the drama and the transcendent import of the moment of which all those present were intensely aware. One of the chapters is composed entirely of passages culled from the fiction of Machado de Assis.
Nunes observes that Machado’s fictional work cannot be used to document the philosophic ideas of the real author, neither by its conceptual content nor by its rhetorical argumentative intention. Machado as a narrator is not the subject of the ideas of fiction, and neither is fiction the objective vehicle set up exclusively for the transmission of ideas. Distanced from reality, the author recuperates it aesthetically, thereby casting associated philosophical ideas differently than they would have been expressed as pure theory. Nevertheless, his own conception of the world and philosophy is invariably connected to and inseparable from his narratives, even if refracted through other layers of meaning. Throughout Machado’s fiction, one encounters ideas and rhetorical forms that filter philosophical attitudes and give voice to values that stand up against the corrosive effects of time and customs. Many of those values are affirmed by narrators and characters as the most fundamental or meaningful in life; while not constituting an authorial philosophy, such ideas in literary form contribute to the collection of maxims and aphorisms from the library and to the wisdom of accumulated experience and observation that constitute the worldview of Machado de Assis as author and person.
Machado brings out a baroque countercurrent that embodies and expresses the difference and tension between the world as we could conceive it or wish it and the prisms of society, language, politics, fate, and time that confine and restrict human actions and imagination. Counselor Ayres wryly advises Flora and all his readers against growing old, “that bad habit of growing old. Do not fall into that habit, reader. There are others, also bad, none worse, this is the worst. Let the philosophers say that old age is a useful state because of the experience and other advantages. Do not grow old, my friend, as much as the years invite you to leave spring behind; as a last resort, accept summer. The summer is good, warm, the nights are short, that is certain, yet the dawns do not always bring fog, and the sky is born blue. Thus you will dance forever” (Esau and Jacob, 48). Ayres conceives of the nobility that comes from personal struggles for freedom or independence from limitations and restrictions of whatever kind or origin, even against the nature of the world. When Ayres saw that Flora wanted to flee from bright lights and the duties of office any time she wished to become her own subject, he supported her by murmuring, “Every free soul is an empress” and immediately meditated on the import of his spontaneous maxim: “The phrase was good, sonorous, and seemed to contain the greatest sum of truth that there is on Earth and in the solar system” (Esau and Jacob, 48). Ayres is aware of the limitations of performance, that truth is both compromised and enhanced by a good, sonorous phrase, as in opera, tinged with circumstance and the parentheses of context, exaggerated as if the voice reached throughout the solar system; nevertheless, within the irony and self-criticism of his formulation, his belief in the fundamental value of the metaphor persists, even when the freedom of his soul is in doubt.
Machado is under no illusion that the wisdom embodied in his writings will have a transformative effect on his readers or on human nature, but he is well aware of its virtues as art and philosophy, since it is found in the masterpieces of the world library that are Machado’s direct sources. Each of his major works develops from a literary citation or allusion, and his writing contains hundreds of references to history, art, literature, drama, and philosophy. His concept of the value of literature is placed ironically and reflexively in the mouth of Counselor Ayres, as he observes the thread of a conversation between Pedro and Flora. He was concentrating on their attitude, since the conversation was in murmurs and the couple was absorbed; it seemed that they had a sixth sense, reminding Ayres of conspirators or lovers in a mysterious dialogue that belongs to the ages. It was an archetypal story of youth, perhaps about them alone, or perhaps a series of stories, or one long story about others. Since Ayres was preoccupied with resolving Flora’s indecision about the twins, he exulted in the appearance of another suitor: “This world belongs to lovers. Everything else is dispensable; the day will come when even governments can be done away with, and anarchy will organize itself as in the first days of paradise. As far as food is concerned, from Boston to New York will come a process by which people nourish themselves from simply breathing the air. It is lovers who will be perpetual” (Esau and Jacob, 95). Continuing his meditative observations, Ayres concludes that “there are states of the soul in which the subject of the narration is insignificant, and the pleasure of doing it and hearing it is everything. It could be that.” Telling and hearing are states and ends in themselves, which is the full justification for the literary world of Machado de Assis. Ayres further observes that in such mysterious, inner dialogues, “nature guides the smallest and biggest things, if fortune assists her” (51). His aphorism could have come from the classical and mythological allegories of any baroque opera.
Remembrance and memory play central if duplicitous roles throughout Machado’s fiction. Brás Cubas parodies the bibliomaniac who is fixated with first editions for their own sake, and Ayres makes fun of Custódio’s old sign at the teashop and of Dona Perpétua’s devotion to Evaristo da Veiga’s old inkwell, a simple artifact that had been used by the journalist during the first reign and the regency. In a letter to Nabuco, Machado affirms the value of remembrance of things past, whether the memory of those far away or the affection for days long gone: “Two lines are enough to remember that some heart keeps the memory of someone far away and beats with the rhythm of old affections and days past.” His position as a writer who finds prime material in the past is so much like an eternal truth that he decides to make it one: “The past (if I didn’t read it somewhere, pretend that my experience is saying it now), the past is still the best part of the present—at my age, one understands” (January 5, 1902).
In another letter to Nabuco, Machado addresses the question of the value and survival of his artistic work. He highlights three qualities most likely to promote the universal value of creative work for future generations. It should be profound, artistically crafted, and well written or spoken. Then, he is convinced that the writer will be aided by time itself, which is capable of selecting and recognizing true value: “Time will help time, and what in it is profound, fine, and well said will conserve its great value” (July 7, 1907). Machado, the great synthesizer, was capable of recasting all he had read and the performances he had attended into creative texts carrying his personal signature. He explored the technique of creative blending so thoroughly and even experimentally that by 1880 he had completed the transition from realism to modernist author par excellence. Questions of influence and reader reception would require redefinition after Machado’s displacement of authorship, eternal point of view, breaks in the narrative frame, challenges to the reader, and eclectic selection of authors, texts, and ideas. His profound observations of the society of empire opened unexpected and fearsome psychological depths. Throughout his novels and short stories, classical balance and baroque universality were the two opposite poles of the swinging pendulum that circumscribed and energized his literary world.
Readers of Machado’s works today share the spectacle of the world recorded by the literary art of the wizard of Cosme Velho and seen in the large cast of characters and dramas in his fiction. There are Brás Cubas’s opera buffa; the Faustian dramas of Rubião, Bento Santiago, and Counselor Ayres; the touch of Iago in Félix and Bento; the less than merry wives Virgília, Sofia, and Capitu; Flora’s inferno; Fidélia’s lyrical voyage of exile over the seas to Lisbon with a new lover; and the supporting cast from the social world of the Brazilian empire. Readers of Machado de Assis attend these great fictional performances and experience a joy similar to that of the young theatergoers who laughed at the comic operas on the stages of Rio de Janeiro, recalled so fondly by Machado himself: “Today Candiani returned, after such a long silence, to awaken echoes of those days. Old people like me will remember something of their youth: the best thing in life and perhaps the only one” (July 15, 1877).