1. The photograph is of the assembled literary society called A Panelinha at a luncheon at the Hotel Rio Branco. Present with Machado are Rodolfo Amoedo, Artur Azevedo, Inglês de Souza, Olavo Bilac, José Veríssimo, Sousa Bandeira, Filinto de Almeida, Guimarães Passos, Valentim Magalhães, Rodolfo Bernardelli, Rodrigo Otávio, Heitor Penteado, João Ribeiro, Lúcio de Mendonça, and Silva Ramos. See A olhos vistos: uma iconografia de Machado de Assis, Hélio de Seixas Guimarães and Vladimir Sacchetta, orgs. (São Paulo: Instituto Moreira Salles, 2008), 140.
2. Haroldo de Campos, “The Ex-centric’s Viewpoint: Tradition, Transcreation, Transculturation,” in Haroldo de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete Poet, ed. K. David Jackson, 7–23 (Oxford: Centre of Brazilian Studies, 2005).
3. In a letter dated June 29, 1870, the Portuguese novelist Eça de Queirós replied to Machado’s stinging critique of the novel O Primo Basílio in a review published in the Cruzeiro on April 16 under the pseudonym d’Eleazar. Eça notes Machado’s “almost partisan hostility to the Realist School,” although it is so well done that Eça considers it to have increased his own authority. While humbly praising the talented review, Eça defends the Realist School, “which he considers to contribute to moral progress.” In Exposição Machado de Assis; centenário do nascimento de Machado de Assis, 1839–1939 (Rio de Janeiro: Serviço gráfico do Ministério da Educação e Saúde, 1939), 198.
4. See Eloy Pontes, A vida contradictoria de Machado de Assis (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1939). Machado himself was aware of these inverse perspectives. In the short story “The Mirror,” his character theorizes that “every human being carries two souls within him: one that looks from inside out, the other from outside in.” See “The Looking Glass,” in The Psychiatrist and Other Stories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963).
5. For a discussion of Machado’s family tree, see Jean-Michel Massa, A juventude de Machado de Assis (São Paulo: Unesp, 2009). In his influential book The Western Canon Harold Bloom muddied the waters by introducing Machado as the most important black writer in Latin America rather than simply the continent’s most important writer. Bloom’s characterization overlooks the history of Brazilian miscegenation, which gives Machado status as both white and black. Indeed, racial composition has little bearing on the literary prowess of Machado de Assis, in view of his education in the company of noted intellectuals and Portuguese writers, an education comparable to that of Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), who is considered the greatest poet in the Russian language and whose mother was a former slave become aristocrat. In addition, he was closely associated with Brazilian authors, lawyers, diplomats, and politicians, including his colleague in the Academy of Letters José Carlos do Patrocínio (1854–1905), who founded an abolitionist society with the statesman Joaquim Nabuco (1849–1910) in 1880.
6. Benedito Nunes, “Machado de Assis e a Filosofia,” Travessia 19 (1989), 17.
7. Melinda Alliker Rabb, “Confinement and Entrapment in Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon,” in Reader Entrapment in Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Carl R. Kropf (New York: AMS Press, 1992), 229–60.
8. I am grateful to Julia H. Powers for these observations on Machado’s prefaces.
9. Machado de Assis: The Brazilian Master and His Novels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 157.
10. In Machado’s time, travel to the mountain city of Petrópolis required a connection by boat across Guanabara Bay.
11. A vida contradictoria de Machado de Assis, 20–23.
12. Dicionário de Machado de Assis: história e biografia das personagens (São Paulo: Rêde Latina Editôra, 1958).
13. Alois Riegl, Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, trans. Jaqueline E. Jung (London: Zone Books, 2004); Mike Gubser, Time’s Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in Fin-de-siècle Vienna (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006).
14. Leonardo Pereira, “Introdução,” Machado de Assis, História de quinze dias (Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 2009), 21.
15. Adelaide Ristori: folhetins (Rio de Janeiro: Academia Brasileira de Letras, 1955).
16. Rhian Atkin, Saramago’s Labyrinths: A Journey Through Form and Content in Blindness and All the Names (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012).
17. Another notorious precursor of these narrators in Portuguese literature of the period is the likewise fictional character-author Carlos Fradique Mendes, who first appeared in Eça de Queirós’s and Ramalho Ortigão’s (1836–1915) O mistério da estrada de Sintra in the Diário de Notícias (Lisbon), from 24 July to 27 September 1870. Fradique Mendes later took on full-fledged existence in Eça’s Correspondência de Fradique Mendes (Correspondence of Fradique Mendes, 1900), published the same year as Machado’s Dom Casmurro. Like Pessoa and Eça, Machado let his authors speak for themselves, while providing readers with clues to deeper meanings.
18. Machado frequently cites Camões, Portugal’s most celebrated poet, whose philosophical and literary mannerism dominates his epic and his reflective lyrical poetry.
19. Stefan Zweig, Brazil: Land of the Future, trans. Andrew St. James (New York: Viking, 1941); Brasilien: ein land der Zukunft (Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer, 1941).
20. Karl Galinsky, Classical and Modern Interactions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 150–51.
21. Marina Grishakova, The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov’s Fiction: Narrative Strategies and Cultural Frames (Tartu, Estonia: Tartu University Press, 2006), 56.
22. “La réalité du métissage ne peut être comprise que selon la production d’une différence—par rapport aux cultures et aux identités impliquées—dans un contexte historique précis, et selon les effets d’universalisation différenciée qui porte cette différence.” Jean Bessière, “Notes sur le métissage et sur ses ambivalences critiques aujourd’hui. Pour une mise en perspective littéraire comparatiste,” in Métissages littéraires, ed. Yves Clavaron and Bernard Dieterle, 13–20 (Saint-Étienne: l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2005).
23. Described theoretically by Hans-Jörg Schmid and Réka Benczes in Windows to the Mind: Metaphor, Metonymy and Conceptual Blending, ed. Sandra Handl and Hans-Jörg Schmid (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011).
24. Hans-Jörg Schmid, “Conceptual Blending, Relevance and Novel N + N-Compounds,” in ibid., 219–21.
25. Réka Benczes, “Blending and Creativity in Metaphorical Compounds: A Diachronic Investigation,” in ibid., 247–48.
26. Wladimir Krysinski, “Sur quelques généalogies et formes de l’hybridité dans la littérature du XXe siècle,” in Le texte hybride, ed. Dominique Budor and Walter Geerts, 27–39 (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2004).
27. The writers cited include Ezra Pound (1885–1972), T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), James Joyce (1882–1941), Alfred Döblin (1878–1957), John Dos Passos (1896–1970), Hermann Broch (1888–1951), João Guimarães Rosa (1908–67), Julio Cortázar (1914–84), Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937), and extending to Augusto Roa Bastos (1917–2005), José María Arguedas (1911–69), Céline (1894–1961), Alejo Carpentier (1904–80), Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012), Günter Grass (b. 1927), Milan Kundera (b. 1929), Robert Musil (1880–1942), and Patrick Chamoiseau (b. 1953), among others. Ibid., 32, 36.
28. “Des beaux examples d’un certain style baroque, où la demarche de l’invention est inseparable de celle de la thésaurisation. De lá ce mélange de fraicheur et de decrepitude que, pour nos modernes, fait le charme hybride de ce livre.” Jean Starobinski, “La mélancholie de l’anatomiste,” Tel Quel 10 (Summer 1962), 21, quoted in Le texte hybride, 33.
29. See Fernando Pinto do Amaral, “Melancolia,” in Dicionário de Camões, ed. Vítor Aguair e Silva, 581–86 (Lisbon: Caminho, 2011).
30. Jean-Claude Laborie, “Le baroque au XVIIe siècle: Un espace esthétique atlantique,” in L’Atlantique Comme Pont (Clermont-Ferand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2012), 181–92.
31. Leopoldo Castedo, The Baroque Prevalence in Brazilian Art (New York: Charles Frank, 1964). See Edward J. Sullivan, Brazil: Body and Soul (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2002), 10, 18. In his preface to the Guggenheim Museum exhibition catalogue “Brazil: Body and Soul,” Edward J. Sullivan asks what makes Brazilian baroque art Brazilian? Despite regional differences, Sullivan sees coherence and singularities in its intensity, in the theatricality of faith, in the directness of communication between the object and the beholder, in the power to transcend time, and in the hybridization of the European, indigenous, and African sources that characterized Brazilian culture and demography for centuries. Rather than a consequence or appendage of European expression, the Brazilian baroque presents a distinct vision of a syncretic reality that Sullivan observes to be vibrant in the modernist generation in the work of Victor Brécheret (1894–1955), Vicente do Rego Monteiro (1899–1970), and Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973) and continued in popular imagery in the painting of Alfredo Volpi (1896–1988) and Adriana Varejão (b. 1964). David K. Underwood sees a continuation of baroque expression in Brazilian modernism and its modern cinema in “Toward a Phenomenology of Brazil’s Baroque Modernism,” Robert Stam and Ismail Xavier, “The Baroque, the Modern, and Brazilian Cinema,” in Brazil: Body and Soul, 526–38, 572–83.
32. Robert Stevenson, “A Note on the Music of Colonial Brazil,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell, 2:799–803 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
33. Jorge de Sena, Trinta anos de Camões: 1948–1978 (Estudos camonianos e correlatos) (Lisbon: Edições 70, 1980), 1:63–92.
34. In a long essay published in 1879 in the Revista Brasileira titled “Antônio José e Molière,” Machado compares the play Guerras do Alecrim e Manjerona to Calderón and cites his self-parody: “Es comedia de Don Pedro / Calderón, d’onde hade haber / Por fuerza, amante Escondido / Y rebozada mujer” (It is a comedy by Don Pedro / Calderón, where there must always be / without fail a hidden lover / and a woman covered by a shawl).
35. Roberto Calasso, A folie Baudelaire (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012), 14.
36. Mariano José Pereira da Fonseca, the Marquis of Maricá (1773–1848), was a philosopher, politician, and author of aphorisms, collected as Máximas, pensamentos e reflexões in 4 vols. published in 1837–41.
37. João Roberto Faria states that to Machado the theater was to the people of Rio de Janeiro what the chorus was to ancient Greek theater. See Machado de Assis do teatro (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2008), 34.
38. See Myriam Louviot, “L’hybridité, un concept pour aborder les littératures post-coloniales,” in Métissages littéraires, 487–94.
1. Scholars who choose to divide Machado’s work into two phases commonly posit an inexplicable division or change in Machado circa 1878–80, when he leaves Rio for the mountains to care for his declining health and returns with the strikingly inventive and enormously influential Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. Such a seemingly magical or mysterious transformation, when offered as an explanation for Machado’s altered fictional style, discounts an intensive and continuous literary existence and coming of age during the preceding quarter of a century as well as the twenty years required to produce three subsequent novels. In Luso-Brazilian literature, the concept of formative period was applied to the works of José Saramago by Horácio Costa in his doctoral thesis at Yale, published as José Saramago: o período formativo (Lisbon: Caminho, 1997).
2. Helen Caldwell, Machado de Assis: The Brazilian Master and His Novels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 67.
3. Jean-Michel Massa, A juventude de Machado de Assis, 1839–1870: ensaio de biografia intelectual, trans. Marco Aurélio de Moura Matos (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1971); 2d ed. rev., prologue by Antônio Cândido (São Paulo: Unesp, 2009), 68.
4. His readings and references include the poets Hugo (1802–85), Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869), Alfred de Vigny (1797–1863), Alexandre Dumas fils (1824–95), Musset (1810–57), and André Chénier (1762–94); the dramatists Gustave Vattier (1827–1914), Émile de Najac (1828–89), Théodore Barrière (1823–77), Victorien Sardou (1831–1908), and Louis Bouilhet (1822–68); the novelist Octave Feuillet (1821–90); the prose drama “Cléopâtre”(1847) by Delphine de Girardin (1834–1900); the librettist Édouard Plouvier (1821–76); and the songwriter Gustave Nadaud (1820–93).
5. Mauro Rosso, Contos de Machado de Assis: relicários e raisonnés (Rio de Janeiro: Edições Loyola, PUC, 2008), 15.
6. The group that met in the law office of Caetano Filgueiras (1830–82) included Francisco Otaviano (1825–89), the director of the Correio Mercantil; Augusto Emílio Zaluar (1826–82), a recently arrived Portuguese poet who became editor of the journal Paraíba; the poet Casimiro de Abreu (1839–60); José Joaquim Cândido de Macedo Júnior (1844–60); and the Portuguese poet Francisco Gonçalves Braga (1836–60).
7. Paroles d’un croyant (1834) by Hugues Felicité Robert de Lamennais (1780–1860), Histoire des girondins (1847) by Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869), Le monde marche (1857) by Eugène Pelletan (1813–84), Histoire des martyrs de la liberté (1851) by Alphonse Esquiros (1812–76), and the prose poem Ahasverus (1833) by Edgar Quinet (1803–75). In Joaquim Nabuco, Minha formação (Rio de Janeiro: H. Garnier, 1900), 12; My Formative Years, trans. Christopher Peterson, introduction and notes Leslie Bethell (Oxford: Signal, 2012), 7.
8. Machado’s first published play, Queda que as mulheres têm para os tolos, 1861, is a translation and adaptation to the stage of a comedy, Victor Hénaux’s De l’amour des femmes pour les sots (Liege, Paris, 1859), itself a work taken from Louis Champcenetz’s (1759–94) Petit Traité de l’amour des femmes pour les sots (1788). A Ópera das janelas from unknown French authors; Hoje avental, amanhã luva, an adaptation of Gustave Vattier’s and Émile de Najac’s (1828–99) Chasse au lion (1852); Montjoye, a translation of Octave Feuillet (produced on October 12, 1864); Suplício de uma mulher (produced on September 30, 1865), a translation of Delphin de Girardin (1804–55) and Dumas fils; O anjo da meia-noite (premier July 6, 1866), a translation of Théodore Barrière and Édouard Plouvier; his translation of Il barbiere di Siviglia, ossia L’inutile precauzione (produced September 7, 1866), and a translation of La Famille Benoiton by Sardou (produced May 4, 1867).
1. Barreto Filho sees the influence of the theater in self-contained scenes, the entrances and exits of the characters, and short dialogues, yet he also notes the importance of backstage activity and the creation of scenic movement, which contribute to a new genre. Introdução a Machado de Assis (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Agir, 1947), 190.
2. See Sharon Allen, EccentriCities: Writing in the Margins of Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).
3. “À présent, je puis considérer l’existence a peu près comme d’outre-tombe, comme d’au-delà; tout m’est étrange; je puis être en dehors de mon corps et de mon individu, je suis dépersonnalisé, détaché, évolué. Est-ce là de la folie?” (July 8, 1880), Fragments d’un journal intime, 4th ed. (Geneva: H. Georg, 1885), 2:289.
1. Estela Vieira, Interiors and Narrative: The Spatial Poetics of Machado de Assis, Eça de Queirós, and Leopoldo Alas (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 20.
2. “Vinde cá, meu tão certo secretário dos queixumes que sempre ando fazendo, / papel, com que a pena desafogo!” in The Collected Lyric Poems of Luís de Camões, trans. Landeg White (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 297.
3. The French authors Balzac (1799–1850), Baudelaire (1821–67), Maxime du Camp (1822–94), Dumas fils (1824–95), Flaubert (1821–80), Anatole France (1844–1924), Edmond (1822–96) and Jules (1830–79) de Goncourt, Victor Hugo (1802–85), Eugène Labiche (1815–88), Maupassant (1850–93), Prosper Mérimée (1803–70), Stendhal (1783–1842), Eugène Sue (1804–57); the English authors Dickens (1812–70) and Hardy (1840–1928); the Americans Dickinson (1830–86), James (1843–1916), and Melville (1819–91); the Italians Gabriel d’Annunzio (1863–1938), Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873), Gustavo Strafforello (1820–1903); the Russians Chekhov (1860–1904), Dostoevsky (1821–81), Gogol (1809–52), Ivan Turgenev (1818–83); the Portuguese Almeida Garrett (1799–1854), António Feliciano de Castilho (1800–1875), Eça de Queirós (1845–1900), Antônio Nobre (1867–1900), and Ramalho Ortigão (1836–1915).
4. Many of these comparisons are made or repeated in Earl Fitz, Machado de Assis (Boston: Twayne, 1989). See Fitz’s comments on Machado in comparative context in Brazilian Narrative Traditions (New York: MLA, 2005).
5. Henry James, “Gustave Flaubert,” in Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. W. Blaydes, with a critical introduction by Henry James (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1902), vi.
6. Fernando Pessoa’s annotations first appeared as Livro do desassossego de Bernardo Soares, introduction and selection Maria Alzira Seixo (Lisbon: Editorial Comunicação, 1986); a current edition is Livro do desassosssego, composto por Bernardo Soares, ajudante de guarda-livros na cidade de Lisboa, ed. Richard Zenith (Lisbon: Assírio and Alvim, 1998); among various English translations is Richard Zenith’s The Book of Disquietude (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991).
7. José Guilherme Merquior, “Género e estilo das ‘Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas,’” Colóquio/Letras 8 (July 1972), 12–20.
1. M. L. Foucault, “Physical demonstration of the rotation of the Earth by means of the pendulum” (Philadelphia: Franklin Institute, 2000).
2. The phrase belongs to Michael Gubser, the author of Time’s Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006). Riegl, an art historian, had argued that art conveys a culture’s consciousness of time.
3. Harry Hurt III, “Is Anybody Necessary? Dr. Ying and the Four Noble Truths,” New York Times, January 4, 2006.
4. The “Christ the Redeemer” statue, designed by Heitor da Silva Costa and sculpted in France by Paul Landowski, opened on Corcovado on October 12, 1931.
5. Wilson Martins, “Sessão solene de instalação,” in Congresso internacional de escritores e encontros intelectuais (São Paulo: Anhembi, 1957), 39.
6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916 (New York: Harper, 1961), 83.
7. Kenneth Chang, New York Times, June 16, 2012, A21.
8. Maurice Maeterlinck, “The Deeper Life,” in Treasure of the Humble, trans. Alfred Sutro, introduction A. B. Walkley (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1925), 187.
1. Fernão Mendes Pinto (1509–83), a traveler and the author of the Peregrinação (1614; The Travels of Mendez Pinto, ed. and trans. Rebecca D. Catz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), was considered to have been a great liar and exaggerator until Catz’s research into his book confirmed his geographical references.
2. A collection of animal fables in Sanskrit dating from 300 to 200 BCE, widely translated in Europe in the 1500s and one of the first printed books.
3. This episode parallels a moral quandary that became a motif in nineteenth-century fiction: in a passage in Balzac’s Le Père Goriot Rastignac asks his friend Bianchon if he recalls a passage in Rousseau in which the reader could become rich by killing a mandarin in China simply by willing to do so. The challenge comes from François-René Chateaubriand’s (1768–1848) Génie du christianisme (1802), based on a passage from Diderot’s Entretien d’un père avec ses enfants, ou du danger de se mettre au-dessus des lois (1773). Eça de Queirós dedicated an entire book to the theme, the fantasy O Mandarim, published in Lisbon the same year as Machado’s novel with the Dalmatian chapter.
4. By writing only the first and last lines of his sonnet, Brás alludes to a form of recognition similar to recent theories of word recognition, based on the first and last letters of any given word. Brás theorizes that by beginning to write, the rest of the sonnet would just come to him automatically. He anticipates composition based on recognition of the whole, rather than partial lines at the beginning and end: “Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabridge Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.” Richard Shillcock, “Visual Word Recognition” (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics).
5. “Deste modo, não havia como escapar: a compreensão literária, só inteiramente efetivada quando preenchida pela variação histórica, haveria de incluir, para melhor incorporação das ‘grandes obras,’ como fonte de conhecimento cultural as reflexões críticas por elas provocadas no curso do tempo.” João Alexandre Barbosa, A biblioteca imaginária (São Paulo: Ateliê, 1996), 16.
6. Lionel Trilling’s essay “The Sense of the Past,” in The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953), posits that new works change not only the meaning of the old but also their historical relationship, which in itself plays a significant role in the process. See R. V. Young, “Literary Tradition, Lionel Trilling and the Transmission of the Literary Work.”
7. António Manuel Hespanha, Cultura jurídica europeia: síntese de um milénio (Lisbon: Almedina, 2012), 52.
8. Zulficar Ghose, “Reading Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis,” Context 12.
9. Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–87), “No Meio do Caminho,” Revista de Antropofagia 1 (1928).
10. José Pereira de Graça Aranha, Machado de Assis e Joaquim Nabuco, comentários e notas à correspondência entre estes dois escritores, 2d ed. (Rio de Janeiro: F. Briguiet, 1942), 45–46.
11. See Dicionário de Camões, ed. Vítor Aguiar e Silva (Lisbon: Caminho, 2011), 581–86.
12. Xavier de Maistre, Voyage Around My Room, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (New York: New Directions, 1994), chapter 4.
13. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, (York: J. Hinxman, 1759), chapter 2.
1. Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société de gens de lettres, mis en ordre par M. Diderot de l’Académie des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Prusse, et quant à la partie mathématique, par M. d’Alembert de l’Académie royale des Sciences de Paris, de celle de Prusse et de la Société royale de Londres (Paris, 1759–72). Charles Joseph Panchoucke continued the work by printing supplementary material and an index (1776–80) and initiated a much-enlarged successor, the Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières in more than two hundred volumes (1782–1832).
2. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Discours Préliminaire des Éditeurs (The Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot) is considered to be one of the foundational texts of the Enlightenment. Denis Diderot, Encyclopédie, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, published 1751–72; 28 volumes, 71,818 articles, 3,129 illustrations.
3. The idea of a world library existed in the ancient and medieval world, in the Royal Library of Alexandria (3d century BC–30 BC), in Diodorus Siculus’s (60–30 BC) Bibliotheca historica, and in Photios I’s (810–93) Bibliotheca or Myriobiblon of Constantinople (a collection of abstracts and abridgments of 280 volumes of classical authors). Private libraries and public libraries existed in the Roman Empire, while the first classification system came from the Han Dynasty in the second century.
4. James Wood, “Shelf Life: Isn’t a Private Library Simply a Universal Legacy Pretending to Be an Individual One?,” New Yorker, November 7, 2011, 43.
5. Raimundo Magalhães Jr., Machado de Assis desconhecido (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1955).
6. Maria Kodama and Matteo Pericoli, “The World in the Library,” trans. Esther Allen, New York Times, January 2, 2011.
7. Haroldo de Campos, “Da razão antropofágica: A Europa sob o signo da devoração,” Colóquio/Letras 62 (July 1981), 10–25; “The Rule of Anthropophagy: Europe Under the Sign of Devoration,” trans. Maria Tai Wolff, Latin American Literary Review 14 (1986), 42–60.
8. An Italian company presented Faust in 1871 alongside operas by Verdi and Giacomo Meyerbeer; in 1886 the company of Claudio Rossi brought a new production of Faust. A young cellist named Arturo Toscanini substituted for the conductor at the last minute. See Cristina Magaldi, Music in Imperial Rio de Janeiro: European Culture in a Tropical Milieu (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 43–44.
9. See Augusto Meyer, “Introdução,” Exposição Machado de Assis; centenário do nascimento de Machado de Assis, 1839–1939 (Rio de Janeiro: Serviço gráfico do Ministério da Educação e Saúde, 1939), 14.
1. “A Semana,” November 11, 1897, in Obra completa (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 2004), 3:772.
2. Published in “A Semana,” Gazeta de Notícias, 1894, and included in Páginas Recolhidas, 1899. See “Midnight Mass,” in The Psychiatrist and Other Stories, trans. William L. Grossman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 94–100.
3. “Dona Paula,” Várias histórias. See “Dona Paula,” The Devil’s Church, trans. Jack Schmitt and Lori Ishimatsu (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), 59–67.
4. Emília Viotti da Costa, “Town and Country,” in The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 185.
5. “Singular Ocorrência,” Histórias sem data. See “A Strange Thing,” The Devil’s Church, 36–43.
6. História verdadeira da Princeza Magalona, filjia d’El Rei de Napoles, e do nobre, e valoroso cavalheiro Pierres, Pedro de Provença, E dos muitos trabalhos, e adversidades, que passaram, sendo sempre constantes na fé, e virtudes, e como depois reinaram, e acabaram a sua vida virtuosamente no serviço de Deus (Lisbon: Typ. de Antonio Joaquim da Costa, Rua do Quelhas no. 59, 1851).
7. The libretto is based on Têtes rondes et cavaliers by Jacques-François Ancelot and Joseph Xavier Saintine, which they took from Walter Scott’s Old Mortality, the first part of Tales of My Landlord (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1817). The two stories are set in seventeenth-century England and Scotland, respectively.
1. Carlos Wehrs, Machado de Assis e a magia da música (Rio de Janeiro: C. Whers, 1977), cites the role of music in 91 short stories and locates multiple references in all of the novels. He finds that Machado cites, above all, the piano (102 times), along with 16 other instruments; that he refers 25 times to the opera as well as to 29 other musical forms from “adagio” to “volata”; that he refers 21 times to song; and that throughout his fiction he cites 19 operas by name, 25 composers, and 16 interpreters, including the famous female artists he heard in his youth.
2. The poem was subtitled “Imitado de Su-Tchon,” indicating a poetic version of French prose translations by Judith Gautier (1845–1917) of the Chinese poet Su-Tchon (tenth to eleventh century). Illustrating Machado’s technique of appropriation, his poem was derived from poems from the Chinese poet in a French translation by Gautier that Machado encountered in her Livre de jade (Paris: Alphonse Lamerre, 1867). See “As canções de Machado de Assis,” Revista Brasileira 10 (May 2008). See also Brigitte Kodama-Richard, Le Japon et la Chine dans les oeuvres de Judith Gautier (Tokyo: Edition Synapse, 2007). See additionally six songs with musical versions of Machado’s work in Echos do passado, 1o álbum de romances, para canto com acompanhamento de piano por Arthur Napoleão, published between 1867 and 1869, cited in Galante de Sousa’s bibliography and in Wehrs, Machado de Assis e a magia da música, 91.
3. The prominent figures present include Counselor Silveira da Mota, Baron of Vila Franca (1815–85); Manuel Marques de Sousa, Count of Porto Alegre (1804–75); Supreme Court Justice Agostinho Marques Perdigão Malheiro (1788–1860); José Maurício Wanderley, Baron of Cotegipe (1815–89); Francisco Otaviano (1825–89); Sizenando Nabuco (1841–92); José Paranhos, Baron of Rio Branco (1845–1912); the jurist Gaspar da Silveira Martins (1835–1901). From Ernesto Matos, Cousas do meu tempo (Bordeaux, 1916), 286.
4. Verdi’s operas were performed in Rio de Janeiro not long after their premieres in Europe: Otello was premiered on February 5, 1887, in Milan and in 1894 in Brazil, and Falstaff was produced at La Scala on February 9 and in Brazil on July 29, 1893.
5. Her success can be judged by concerts given in her honor arranged three years later: “On 19 March 1862 the company sponsored a benefit that, despite its link to the past, promised to attract considerable attention: it was a tribute to the well-known and loved singer, Augusta Candiani, with the participation of artists from both the national opera and drama companies. The programme included excerpts from Columella and a duet from Bellini’s Norma, one of Candiani’s signature roles sung together with Millie L, in Italian and not in Portuguese.” André Heller-Lopes, “Brazil’s Ópera Nacional: Music, Society and the Birth of Brazilian Opera in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro” (Diss., King’s College, University of London, 2010), 283, 291.
6. Giuseppe Verdi’s “commedia lirica” was an adaptation by Arrigo Boito of two Shakespeare plays, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV, first performed on February 9, 1893, in Milan and on July 29, 1893, in Rio de Janeiro. It was Verdi’s third opera based on Shakespeare (Macbeth, 1847, and Othello, 1887, preceded) and only his second comedy in twenty-eight operas. Machado attended theatrical performances of Shakespeare in 1871, based his first novel on a quote from Measure from Measure (1.5), and adapted Othello in the novel Dom Casmurro and other works.
7. Marie Robinson Wright, The Brazilian National Exposition of 1908 (Philadelphia: George Barrie and Sons, 1908), 164.
8. Wehrs, in Machado de Assis e a magia da música, recalls the theaters of Rio de Janeiro in the time of Machado: the Imperial Theatro São Pedro de Alcântara (1826), destroyed by fire in 1851 and reopened in 1857; the Theatro Provisório, built in six weeks to replace the São Pedro, later named Theatro Lyrico Fluminense (1854); the Theatro da Praia de D. Manuel (1834) renamed Theatro São Januário (1838), later called the Atheneu Dramático (1862); the Theatro Polytheama Fluminense (1880); the Imperial Theatro D. Pedro II (1871), renamed the Theatro Lyrico after the proclamation of the republic (1890); for dramatic theater, the São Luís (1871); the Theatro Gymnásio Dramático (1855, previously Theatro São Francisco from 1846); the Alcazar Lyrique, also called Théâtre Lyrique Français (1866–80); the Theatro Apollo (1890); and theaters for dramatic art and music, including the Lucinda (1880); the Theatro des Varietées (1877), later called Brasilian Garden (sic) and Recreio Dramático (1877); the Theatro Cassino Franco Brasileiro (1872), renamed the Theatro Sant’Anna (currently Teatro Carlos Gomes); and the Theatro Éden-Lavradio (1895).
9. The opera academies were the Imperial Academia de Música & Ópera Nacional (1857–60), Ópera Lyrica Nacional (1860–62), and Ópera Nacional & Italiana (1862–63). Heller-Lopes explains: “The Brazilian Ópera Nacional is associated with the forging of the country’s national identity, and as such is comparable to the many ‘national opera schools/movements’ that appeared in Europe during the nineteenth century; it enjoyed the collaboration of prominent writers, politicians and intellectuals living in Rio de Janeiro during that period, and produced Latin America’s most important opera composer, Carlos Gomes.” “Brazil’s Ópera Nacional,” 8.
10. Carl Schlichthorst, Rio de Janeiro wie es ist: Beiträge zur tages-und sitten-geschichte der hauptstadt von Brasilien mit vorzüglicher rücksicht auf die lage des dortigen deutschen militairs (Hannover: Hahn, 1929); O Rio de Janeiro como é, 1824–1826 (huma vez e nunca mais); Contribuições dum diário para a historia atual, os costumes e especialmente a situação da tropa estrangeira na capital do Brasil, trans. Emmy Dodt and Gustavo Barroso (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Getúlio Costa, 1943).
11. Among the European actors performing in Brazil were Francisco Alves da Silva Taborda (1871), Coquelin Ainé (1888), Ermette Novelli (1890), José Ricardo (1895); and the singers Henrique Tamberlick (1856), Julião Gayarre (1876), Francisco Tamagno (1878), Juliana Dejean (1856), Ana Lagrange (1858), as well as others listed in the text.
12. O caminho da porta was produced on September 12, 1862; Gabriela on September 20, 1862; O protocolo on December 4, 1862; Quase ministro on November 22, 1863; and Os deuses da casaca on December 28, 1865.
13. She appeared in Jean Racine’s (1639–99) Phèdre (1677), Friedrich Schiller’s (1759–1805) Maria Stuart (1800), Carlo Goldoni’s (1707–93) La locandiera, and Paulo Giacometti’s (1816–82) Isabel, reina de Inglaterra (1863). See Adelaide Ristori: folhetins (Rio de Janeiro: Academia Brasileira de Letras, 1955), which is a collection of nine reviews Machado wrote for the Diário do Rio de Janeiro under the name Platão.
14. Charles R. Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms (London: John Murray, 1881).
1. Golden Bough (London: Macmillan, 1890); La mentalité primitive (Paris: F. Alcan, 1925).
2. See Étienne Esquirol, Maladies mentales considérées sous les rapports médical, hygiénique et médico-légal (Paris: J. B. Ballière, 1838).
3. Remorse Too Late
My dark and lovely thing, when you at length lie dead,
And sleep beneath a slab of marble black as pitch;
And have, for perfumed alcove and seductive bed,
Only a rainy cavern and a hollow ditch;
When the oppressive stone upon your frightened breast
Lets settle all its weight, and on your supple thighs;
Restrains your heart from beating, flattens it to rest;
Bends down and binds your feet, so roving, so unwise;
The tomb, that knows me well and reads my dream aright,
(What poet but confides his secret to the tomb?)
Will say to you some day during that endless night,
“They fare but ill, vain courtesan, in this cold room,
Who bring here no warm memories of true love to keep!”
—And like remorse the worm will gnaw you in your sleep.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay, Flowers of Evil (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1936).
4. In a review of Caldwell, the scholar Raymond Sayers deepens the question of the relationship between Bento and D. Glória: “It is obvious that in pleading his own case Bento was trying to hide his conscious motives for his rejection of his wife Capitu and his son Ezequiel. However, he was unaware of his subconscious motives. In this part of her analysis Miss Caldwell might have done some deeper probing into the theme of the silver cord than she actually does. It is probable that Bento’s aggression against Capitu represents a flare-up of resentment against Dona Glória, his mother, a resentment which he had always repressed in his dealings with the older woman. The book is almost as much a study of mother-son relations as it is a story of jealous love. Throughout his childhood and youth Bento accepted obediently the domination of his over-protective mother, and on marrying he took a wife who was able to exercise over him the same dominance through her superior intelligence and spirit.” Raymond Sayers, “Helen Caldwell: ‘The Brazilian Othello of Machado de Assis: A Study of Dom Casmurro,’” Romantic Review 54:1 (February 1963), 73.
5. Sayers suggests an exploration of the theme of Bento’s weakness as a source for his demoniacal jealousy: “It would have been interesting, too, if Miss Caldwell, after demonstrating that Bento’s jealousy was unfounded, had analyzed the cause of the jealousy; though complicated in nature, it appears to me to have grown out of Bento’s doubts about his own merits as a man and a husband. As one reads between the lines of the narrator’s brief, one learns that Bento understood how much more intelligent and aggressive Capitu was than he, and it is easy enough to draw the conclusion that he expected her to have moments of revulsion from him and preference for his supposed rival, Escobar, with his strong biceps, his ability as a swimmer, and his beautiful eyes. Furthermore, he had no test or competition in winning Capitu’s hand. The homes of the two families had been adjacent when they were youngsters, and access to Capitu was obtained by slipping through a fence gate without a latch. The reader senses that Bento felt his success in love to be due to their continuity rather than to his personal desirability.” Sayers, “Helen Caldwell,” 74–75.
6. The phrase is from the New Testament centurion, the source of a prayer in the Tridentine Mass to be pronounced before receiving the host: “Domine, non sum dignus ut intres sub tectum meum, sed tantum dic verbo et sanabitur anima mea” (Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof. Speak but the word and my soul shall be healed). Joyce rewrites the phrase “sub tectum meum” in Bloom’s entrance to the Holles Maternity Hospital in Ulysses as “infare under my thatch,” with the inference of sexual relations.
7. D. Pedro II (1825–91), reigned 1840–89.
8. The fatality of the number three, corresponding to the acts of tragic Greek theater, resonates throughout Machado’s fiction: Bento repeats “I am a man” three times; Sofia heard her roses say three times “bem feito”; the hammer strikes three times on Freitas’s coffin; D. Tonica’s fiancé dies three days before the wedding; Bento’s garden is three steps from Capitu’s; the leprous Manduca repeats three times “The Russians will not take Constantinople”; Pedro and Paulo give Flora three months to choose between them; “No, no, no,” says the narrator to himself about the content of a chapter; Flora’s hallucination has three parts, “Fusão, difusão, confusão”; Ayres hopes to solve Flora’s indecision between Pedro and Paulo by telling her to choose “one of the three,” etc. I am grateful to Javier Sangrador Martínez for these observations.
1. A lei darwínica é certa
Inda em acontecimentos . . .
Não fiquem de boca aberta,
Vão vê-lo em poucos momentos.
Há nelas a mesma luta
Pela vida, e de tal arte
A crua lei se executa,
Que é a mesma em toda a parte.
Há seleção, persistência
Do mais capaz ou mais forte,
Que continua a existência
E os outros baixam à morte. . . .
Mas por um só que resiste,
Quantos passaram calados
Na penumbra vaga e triste
Dos seres mal conformados! . . .
Porque nos próprios eventos
A lei darwínica é certa. Provei-o em poucos momentos,
Não fiquem de boca aberta.
“Gazeta de Holanda,” Gazeta de Notícias, December 6, 1886, in Mauro Rosso, Machado de Assis: Crônicas, A + B, Gazeta de Holanda (Rio de Janeiro: Editora PUC, Edições Loyola, 2011), 81–85.
2. Borba parodies Compte’s stages of positivism, “theological, metaphysical, and positive.”
3. Cannibalism had been associated with Brazil since the mid-sixteenth century in books by Hans Staden (1525–76) and Jean de Léry (1536–1613), based on their travels and residence in Brazil and, in the case of Staden, his capture by the Tupinambá. The theme is the subject of Michel de Montaigne’s (1533–92) celebrated essay “Des cannibales,” in Montaigne, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat (Paris: Gallimard, 1962).
4. A connection between cannibalism and capitalism is posited in the first chapter of Quincas Borba, when, recently arrived at his new mansion in Rio, Rubião meditates, “What was he a year ago? A teacher. What is he now? A capitalist,” unaware that he is about to become a victim of Cristiano Palha, who has made a fortune from bank failures and will soon appropriate Rubião’s fortune and abandon him to madness and death.
5. Antônio Vieira, SJ, “Sermão de Santo Antônio aos Peixes” (Maranhão, 1654), Sermões (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos de Filosofia, Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 2008); The Sermon of Saint Anthony to the Fish and Other Texts, trans. Gregory Rabassa (North Dartmouth, Mass.: Tagus Press, 2009).
6. See Thomas Mann’s essay “Schopenhauer,” in Essays of Three Decades (New York: Knopf, 1947), 375: “For paradoxical it certainly is, to say that knowledge can only refer to the invisible, the thought-about, perceived in the mind; it is paradoxical to explain the visible world as a phenomenon, which, in itself worthless, has a reality and meaning only through that of which it is an expression. The reality of the actual—only a loan from the mind!”
1. Published posthumously in forty-two volumes (Brussels: Tarride, 1848–50), although originally intended for publication fifty years after the author’s death.
2. Confessiones, thirteen books written in 397–98, published in Strasbourg by Jean Mantelin in 1465–70.
3. Les confessions de J.-J. Rousseau, 12 vols. (Paris: Cazin, 1782, 1789).
1. Machado attended Faust (1859) by Charles Gounod (1818–93), Macbeth (1847) by Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), and Otello (1816) by Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868) in theaters of Rio de Janeiro.
2. Helen Caldwell describes Bento’s motivation in his memoirs: “With a criminal’s urge to talk, he discloses, in carefully guarded metaphor, that his jealousy was rooted in aboriginal evil, that it antedated its object, groped until it found an object, then pursued and clung to it with obdurate blindness,” Machado de Assis: The Brazilian Master and His Novels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 145.
3. The reader assumes the role of astute investigator, or member of a jury, from whom the narrator must conceal information to avoid self-incrimination.
4. Sancha may also be a substitute for Bento’s mother, D. Glória, earlier courted by Escobar, in a disguised case of the Oedipal complex.
5. Chapters 75, 76. Note that not eating and sleeping poorly is the inverse of what he claims his situation to be while alone in old age.
1. Ayres’s diary is open to other genres such as the memoir, short story, allegory, and dramatic monologue and may be considered an example of mixed-genre texts, as defined by Norman Fairclough (in Media Discourse [New York: E. Arnold, 1995], 89), or hybrid genres, described by John Hartley (in Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies, ed. Tim O’Sullivan [et al.] [London: Routledge, 1994,] 129). Jacques Derrida, in “The Law of Genre” (trans. Avital Ronell, Glyph 7 [1980], 202–32), considers the distance between genre and one’s perception of it to be open, neither inclusive nor exclusive, such that form is not allowed to identify with itself alone, thus denied its ability to engender exclusive meaning; rather, the form becomes invisible or transparent.
2. Fernando Pessoas’s heteronym Ricardo Reis repeats the idea in the ode “Só esta liberdade nos concedem / Os deuses: submetermo-nos / Ao seu domínio por vontade nossa” (Only this liberty is conceded to us / by the gods: to submit ourselves / willingly to their control).
3. In their quest to win Flora, in Machado’s literary context, they bring to mind Camões’s classic sonnet on a biblical theme, “Sete anos de pastor.”
4. Machado imaginatively anticipates José Saramago’s novel As intermitências da morte (Lisbon: Caminho, 2005), in which no one is allowed to die for one year in a certain country.
5. In a chronicle, Machado comments on visits to the cemetery that color Ayres’s view of Fidélia: “Visiting the dead is a good Catholic custom; but there is no wheat without chaff; and the opinion of Sr. Artur de Azevedo is that in this situation everything is chaff without wheat,” November 1, 1877.
6. The tension between myth and political history in the novel constitutes a parallel with conflict in German baroque dramas studied by Walter Benjamin in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Berlin: E. Rowohlt, 1928).
7. Caldwell finds Shelley’s prose fragment “On Love” to epitomize the theme of Machado’s novels in general: “That love is the true manifestation of life, and that lack-love or self-love must be equated with death.” Machado de Assis: The Brazilian Master and His Novels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 189.
8. In “The Grandfather Clock” (“A Pêndula”), chapter 54 of the Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, Eros and Thanatos appear in the guise of “an old devil sitting between two sacks, that of life and that of death, taking out the coins of life and giving them to death.”
1. The other contemplation was “Central Park in the Dark” (1906). “The Unanswered Question” was not performed until 1948.
2. Crônicas, crítica, poesia, teatro, 2d ed., introduction and notes Massaud Moisés (São Paulo: Cultrix, 1964), 53.
3. The theatrical metaphor ties together two ends of Machado’s literature and thought over three decades by referencing his play Os Deuses de casaca (1865).
4. These qualities in Machado anticipate the esthetic program of Fernando Pessoa, which he largely conceives between 1907 and 1914.
5. In “A Genetic Atlas of Human Admixture History,” Science 343:6172 (February 14, 2014), researchers in the Globetrotter Project identified only ninety-five distinct populations in human genetic history from their analysis of world DNA samples.
6. Translation by permission of Landeg White.
7. Joaquim Nabuco, Obras completas de Joaquim Nabuco, vol. 2, Cartas a amigos, collected and annotated by Carolina Nabuco (São Paulo: Instituto Progresso Editorial, 1949), 179–80.
8. Correspondência de Machado de Assis com Joaquim Nabuco, José Veríssimo, Lúcio de Mendonça, Mário de Alencar e outros, seguida das respostas dos destinatários (Rio de Janeiro: Oficina Industrial Gráfica, 1932), 50.
9. Machado de Assis e Joaquim Nabuco, comentários e notas à correspondência entre estes dois escritores, introduction by Graça Aranha, 2d ed. (Rio de Janeiro: F. Briguiet, 1942), 67.
10. Cartas a amigos, 2:308.