Machado de Assis (1839–1908) is an anomaly among the great novelists of the nineteenth century: a Brazilian, but with no tropical lushness and grandiloquence to conform to “Latin American” stereotypes of his day (and of our day if the enduring vogue for “magical realism” is anything to go by); a realist, but one who constructed his greatest novels, including Dom Casmurro, in the willfully digressive style of the antirealist Laurence Sterne; a conventional, happily married civil servant, with none of the dramatic life of a Dostoevsky, or even a Dickens or a Flaubert. True, he shared what he called with typical discretion in a letter, “the same illness” with the first and last of these: he was epileptic (the disease manifested itself from about the age of forty on) and, just as importantly, a great-grandchild of slaves and a mulatto, a fact he was apparently not keen to advertize, having grown a bushy moustache over his thick lips.1 Machado was obsessively discreet, with none of the vast quantities of revealing correspondence other novelists of the period delight us with, no diary (unless he destroyed it along with his letters), not even many revealing anecdotes.2 Yet what the author did not leave tells us something: there was something to hide—a satirical contempt for what surrounded him akin to that of Jonathan Swift and which is often, I think mostly mistakenly, called pessimism.
In the tension between the notoriously polite and discreet public figure, founder of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, and the man who, in a story in a ladies’ magazine, could drop an unmistakable reference to the rape of a twenty-four-year old bishop by the son of a sixteenth-century pope, lies both his greatness and the explanation of how late its recognition is in coming.3 Machado is a subtle and astonishingly subversive writer as capable of surprising us as his own contemporary readers.
To have its full impact, Machado’s fiction should be approached with as few preconceptions as possible. This necessarily implies that the role of this introduction is limited. I have concentrated on two subjects that will reduce the distance between us and Machado’s place and time, and put the reader in a position as close as possible to that of Machado’s own “dear reader,” with whom he had such a playful, if wary relationship. First, I have given a brief introduction to the novel’s historical and social background. This is a society which may actually look more familiar than it is, and since Dom Casmurro is narrated “from the inside,” so to speak, by someone who shares many of that society’s presuppositions, a more “objective,” outsider’s perspective is a useful complement, placing the reader on firmer ground. Second, I have sketched in some of the intellectual and literary background to Machado’s work, bringing in issues which far transcend the Brazilian context. The local and the universal cannot easily be prised apart in Machado, any more than in Dostoevsky or Joyce, but it seemed useful to deal directly with issues which can make somewhat oblique appearances in the novel. In all this, I hope to increase the reader’s enjoyment, and not spoil the pleasure by revealing too much.
Dom Casmurro was written in the 1890s, but for the first 97 of its 149 chapters remains in the 1850s, as the narrator, Bento Santiago, remembers his teens and his courtship of his next-door neighbor, Capitu (pronounced Cap-i-TU) Pádua. A contrast of the 1850s and 1890s tells us something about Brazil and about the social structure that is implicit in the plot, but in many ways taken for granted.4 It also tells us something about the novel’s peculiar realism.
In the early nineteenth century, coffee had overtaken sugar as Brazil’s main export crop; both crops depended on slave labor. The country achieved political independence as an Empire in 1822, under a branch of the Portuguese royal family, the Braganças. Britain, which had sponsored the process of independence and had tried to force Brazil to abolish the transatlantic slave trade in the intervening years, finally achieved her aim in 1850 (although slavery itself was not to be abolished until 1888). The paradoxical result of this move was the liberation of funds that had been tied up in the slave trade and along with much of the rest of the world, Brazil (and Rio de Janeiro in particular), entered years of spectacular boom. In fact Machado contemplated describing the enthusiasm of these years in the novel, in a passage that he eventually deleted. This period was crucial to Machado’s career as a writer, for it opened up a market for the arts and literature, which, narrow as it was by European standards, gave a determined and versatile young man willing to turn his hand to anything—hack journalism, poetry, short stories, drama—the small room for maneuver needed by a literary arriviste.
However, Machado’s narrator, Bento Santiago, shows a different side to the decade (which is probably why the above-mentioned passage was finally omitted, as we shall see). The house on the Rua de Matacavalos is the product of a more permanent, stable social structure, largely brought about by slavery and the kind of economy and society it presupposed. Patriarchal (though Bento’s father is dead, the father’s eyes still “cast a shadow over him”), devoutly and excessively religious, careful in its finances, with its considerable wealth originally based on a plantation (probably producing sugar) not far from Rio de Janeiro, Bento’s family is a typical representative of the land-owning aristocracy. A literal “aristocracy,” at least in name, many of these wealthy people were in fact barons, viscounts, and marquises, and took their place in the hierarchy whose summit was the Emperor himself, the studious and discreet Dom Pedro II (1825–1892). When he appears in Bento’s fantasy in Chapter XXIX, we should visualize his coach as a heavy, baroque affair, as antiquated as the Santiago family’s own chaise (Chapter LXXXVII). The title “Dom,” given to Bento in the first chapter, and used for the title of the novel, was in fact reserved for the Emperor and senior religious figures; it is not the exact equivalent of the Spanish “don.” (“Casmurro,” the adjective that completes the appelation and gives the title to the book, is explained in Chapter I. If any reader is so mischievous as to disobey Bento’s instructions and look it up in the dictionary, he or she will find that it normally means “stubborn, headstrong.”)
As Machado unobtrusively shows us, this is a very conservative and backward world, where leeches and emetics are still the common currency of medicine, and, as much to the point, where a mother’s vow to make her unborn son a priest can be seen as acceptable. The Santiagos are only atypical in that the father is dead, and so the family is limited to one child, where the norm was for Victorian-style fertility, and in that they live in the city, though on money with rural origins.5 (Even in this they represent a trend toward the concentration of power and wealth in Rio de Janeiro, continued in another way by Escobar, Bento’s best friend in the seminary, with his “vocation” for commerce.) Chapters XCIII and XCIV, under the pretext of showing us Escobar’s astonishing ability to count fast, tell us a great deal about what the Santiago family owns, which still reflects the conservatism of their class: buildings for rent, government bonds, and the hiring out of some of their slaves while others were sent out into the street to work with part of their earnings returned to their masters.6
It is perhaps a more exotic world than it appears at first sight. One very important member of the household, José Dias, requires more extensive commentary. He lies at the heart of the novel: he is the first to “reveal” to Bento that he loves Capitu, however unintentionally he does it, and his comments about Capitu’s “sly and dissimulating eyes” and the probability that she is after “some local dandy” have an equally devastating effect on Bento. It is crucial, then, to understand Dias’s position, which in turn explains his motivation. He is a dependent (the Portuguese word is agregado; literally, an addition, an adjunct, emphatically not, as another translation has it, a “friend of the family”), and could, as Bento says, be thrown Out of the house from one day to the next. He might seem to be a kind of Brazilian Uriah Heep, worming his way into the household and manipulating it for his own benefit. It may well be that Dickens had some influence on Machado here; early on in his career, Machado translated Oliver Twist from a French translation and, later on, he learned English well and built a library that included a large number of books in English.7 However, it would be wise not to see José Dias as simply “evil”: he is a fully fleshed out character, perfectly understandable in social realist terms, as indeed, I would argue, are all the characters in the book. A couple of small details which might pass unperceived illustrate the point. First, in Chapter III, arguing that Bento ought to fulfil his mother’s promise and go to the seminary sooner rather than later, José Dias remembers two liberal members of the Brazilian clergy, the Bishop Silva Coutinho, who presided over Brazil’s first Constituent Assembly, forcibly dissolved by the Emperor Pedro I in 1824, and Father Feijó, Regent during Pedro II’s minority in the 1830s, and who went so far as to argue against priestly celibacy. Second, in Chapter XXXV, José Dias remembers Pius IX’s first political acts, “great hopes for Italy”—a subject no other characters latch on to, hardly surprisingly given that these first acts were unequivocally liberal. Later, he atones for his slip by referring to the conservative Pope’s “august and most paternal heart.” In other words, Dias is a repressed liberal, who generally keeps his opinions well hidden.
There is a certain poetic justice in the central position of the dependent or agregado in the novel. Machado himself, born the son of a housepainter and the protégé of a wealthy family, belonged to this “class,” if it can be called that, and his earlier, more conventional fiction frequently returns to the topic. But it is not just a personal matter. The dependents, as Machado saw, embody some of the contradictions and paradoxes of the Brazilian social structure in much more revealing ways than slaves: slavery is not an obviously subtle relationship, as the brief conversation in Chapter XCIII demonstrates. The agregados were free, yet not free, as Machado’s portrayal of less fortunate characters in other novels reveals, and so they show how domination works. In an immobile, conservative society, they are one of the few points of unresolved tension that can make a novel move: in a sense, along with the death of the all-powerful father, they allow the novel to have a plot at all.
The Pádua family represent a different kind of dependence, and indeed the rivalry between them and José Dias is in all likelihood based on that difference. Pádua, a civil servant as Machado was for much of his life, is dependent on the state, and the novelist goes to some lengths to show how little freedom of maneuver he has. His place in the bureaucratic hierarchy is so fixed that promotion, even after temporarily replacing his superior, seems out of the question. He owns his house only because by a lucky chance he won the lottery. Like José Dias, who never gives up the idea of an all-expense-paid trip to Europe, he has to make do with imaginary compensations. He is like his own caged birds. It cannot be overemphasized that there is an enormous social gap between the Santiagos and the Páduas: in the early version of this chapter, Dona Glória simply says that they came to know one another because she did them a favor; in the final version, accident in the form of a flood intervenes to take the sting out of the condescension. Capitu, perhaps the most famous female character in Brazilian literature, has her complexities and her charms, which would be spoiled by too much introduction, though it should be remarked that she, too, is the product of her place in society, and has a natural desire to climb the social ladder and to educate herself in such unladylike subjects as Latin.
By the 1890s, when Bento is recalling his youthful love, the European façade that can make us think we are reading a rather strangely constructed but recognizably European novel had, if anything, become more solid and convincing. Slavery had been abolished in 1888, and the Empire had fallen in the next year, giving way to a Republic. Rio de Janeiro was once again expanding and desperately trying to modernize itself to attract European immigrants: Bento himself is now living out in the suburbs, within easy reach of the train on which we first encounter him. His conservatism is eccentric, certainly: the visitor to Engenho Novo today can find plenty of houses built around the turn of the century (with façades that recall French Second Empire, Swiss chalets, and many homes that would best be called “eclectic”), but nothing as shamelessly nostalgic as Bento’s folly. A retired lawyer, cultured, conservative (“I was always a little Muscovite in my ideas,” Chapter XC) and perhaps more than a little snobbish, he prefers to shut himself off from the modern world, even as he shuts the window after thinking how everything has become the object of competition between the United States and Europe (Chapter LXIV). It is possible that he has come down in the world somewhat, at least relatively, because his house in the suburbs, whatever his personal reasons for having it built, is in a much less privileged area than the one in which he was born.
In sketching some of the historical background to the novel, I am not trying to argue that the essence of its message is historical or social, though it is true that unless something of that background is understood, a great deal of Dom Casmurro’s richness and subtlety will go unnoticed. But the novel’s realism is much more ambitious than that. What might appear to be a domestic drama with a passing resemblance to Romeo and Juliet (though in a comic vein), can be seen as a commentary on the nineteenth century, described in Chapter IX of Machado’s Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas as “agile, skilful, vibrant, proud, a little verbose, audacious, learned, but in the end … as miserable as the other ones.” Machado was aware, of course, that Brazil, along with the rest of Latin America, was a backwater that imported everything from philosophies of life to fashions in clothes from Europe. But he also knew that larger cultural—even spiritual—changes were reflected there, too, however distantly, and that they were as necessary a part of his subject as the streets, the characters, and the customs of his Rio de Janeiro.
To illustrate this, and to show Machado’s ambition, I shall quote from the earlier version of some chapters of the novel (the only one we know of, published in the Revista Brasileira in 1896, when the novel was nowhere near finished, we can assume). This is Machado’s picture of Rio de Janeiro in the aftermath of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade:
Public life was festive, energetic and varied. The political revolutions had ended. Luxury was on the increase, money was in good supply, improvements were springing up. Nothing but balls and the theatre. One columnist of 1853 (if you don’t trust me) said there were three hundred and sixty-five balls a year. Another in 1854 writes that all through the year everyone was off to see the shows. Private salons vied with one another…. The Italian opera had for a long time had its yearly program of events; in the previous decade more than one singer had sent our tenderhearted, enthusiastic populace wild; now there passed through a series of more or less famous performers, Stoltz, Tamberlick, Mirate, Charton, La-Grua. The dramatic theatre itself in its performances blended song and dance, arias and duets, a pas de trois, a pas de quatre, occasionally a whole ballet. There was already horseracing, just one club that attracted the cream of the city. The races began at ten o’clock in the morning and finished at one in the afternoon. One would go simply in order to see them [i.e., in contrast to the 1890s, when people went to bet. JG]. Europe was sending over its fashions, its arts and its clowns. Old-style carriages, traquitanas and seges, gave way to the coupé, and Cape-horses came in like victors. Brazilian songs and serenades went hand in hand with Italian arias. Ecclesiastical festivals were numerous and splendid; inside the church and out, there were widespread, sincere piety, local pilgrimages, and endless picnics.9
This passage was originally inserted, very awkwardly, in the middle of the conversation in Chapter III that now gives the main plot of the novel such a lively start. Its realism is that of the newspaper columns (called crônicas in Portuguese) that it quotes, the most famous of which were the work of Machado’s predecessor, mentor, and friend, José de Alencar (1829–1877). The awkwardness is, in a sense, inevitable, for these developments contrast with the world inside the house, which is “monotonous and gloomy.” Only through one of José Dias’s platitudes—“the theater is a school of manners”—is Bento even allowed to go to the theater.
Between 1896 and 1899 an extraordinary transformation took place in Machado’s plan, if I am right. He took one idea—that of the opera, which appeals so much to a sentimental Brazilian audience—from the plethora of detail in this passage and turned it into a theme pursued throughout the novel. It is the subject of the narrator’s first major digression, as he is flushed with enthusiasm at his new occupation of writing, and not “running out of paper” as happens later. In a simple sense, Machado is recognizing the fact that Bento is narrating in the 1890s, and that it is somewhat false for him to quote earlier journalists, but much more important than that is what has happened in the intervening years. The opera, from being a social event or merely a fact in the history of Brazilian culture, becomes a symbol of a whole mentality. From the first chapter, we see Bento going to the theater (“I’ll give you a box, tea, and a bed; the only thing I can’t give you is the girl.”) In Chapter IX his friend Marcolini, the out-of-work tenor, insists that the Creation itself was an opera—Paradise Lost, perhaps?—and, what seems even more ridiculous, they argue about the accuracy of this absurdly anachronistic story and conclude that it might be true. What does this mean? Many readers must put the book down in despair when confronted by this frivolous brain-teaser. We would perhaps be wise to remember not only the enormous popularity of opera in the nineteenth century, but also the immense claims made on its behalf, especially by Wagner and his devotees. There can be no doubt that Machado has the idea in mind of the “Gesamtkunstwerk,” the total work of art in which words, music, scenery, and the theater itself are under the overall control of one creative genius (this theory is in fact mentioned in Chapter CI).
No story is perhaps more central to questions of truth, fiction, and belief in the nineteenth century than that of the Creation. Of course the chief agent of disbelief was the Origin of Species, which destroyed any notion that the creation story might be literally true. If it was not literally true: however, perhaps its message—that of original sin and the presence of evil in the world, at least—might be metaphorical, and true in that sense? Machado was, by all accounts, skeptical: no doubt he had read Darwin—“Reread your Spencer and your Darwin,” as he says to the younger generation of writers appearing on the scene at the end of the 1870s10—but a more profound influence on him was Ernest Renan, whose Life of Christ was published in 1864.11 Renan’s whole thrust as a historian was to separate the mythological from the literally true, the first sentence of his book tells us that Jesus was born in Nazareth. Machado himself remained, as far as the scanty evidence can tell us, a radical skeptic: towards the end of his life, he published anonymously a short piece called “Christ’s Passion,” in which he tells the story of the Crucifixion as a purely human drama.12
In a sense, “The Opera” is the reverse of this plainness, an astonishing self-proclaimed fiction, complex, detailed, and absurd. Yet we should not be deceived: Bento does in a sense believe the story or, rather, he believes that what is seemingly true may contain all the truth we can have. This product of a seminary, and of an earlier decade when “there was widespread, sincere piety,” has embraced a total skepticism typical of the turn of the century. In one of the very illuminating and witty crônicas Machado wrote in the 1890s, as Dom Casmurro was in gestation, he commented ironically on the fact that the Great Turk, as he prefers to call the Sultan, has sent the Pope a letter of congratulations on his jubilee: summing the matter up three weeks later, he tells his readers that “all beliefs have become confused in this unbelieving fin-de-siècle.”13 This is Bento’s state of mind, as it is expressed in this chapter: there is no ultimate system of belief, and everything can be relativized. His fondness for classical allusions, and the temptation he feels (in Chapter XVII) to compare a biblical saying to a myth about Achilles, form part of his cultured, skeptical, and somewhat cynical mind. Thus too, his friends have “gone to study geology in God’s acre,” joining the new science and traditional religion in humorous juxtaposition. The range of Machado’s realism has undergone enormous expansion, from a journalistic description of an out-of-the-way corner of the world in the 1850s, to what is implicitly a characterization of a cataclysmic change in mentality that, in one way or another, affected people everywhere who were in the reach of Western culture. We should be careful, however: Bento’s delight in what is seemingly true—a likely metaphor, as opposed to the truth—is not necessarily Machado’s.
The dual chronological focus of the novel (1850s/1890s), which is maintained with unfailing skill and appositeness throughout, can produce problems, especially for the modern reader unaware of just how traditional Brazilian family life had been in mid-century, though in such chapters as LXXXVII (“The Chaise”) these things are roundly hinted at. Equally, we may be in a sense over-familiar with more modern aspects of Bento’s mind, which are overlaid, sometimes with seeming incongruity, on traditional attitudes. Capitu is at one moment (Chapter XII) a fifteen-year-old girl who dreams of dancing in the moonbeams over the Corcovado (the famous mountain in Rio de Janeiro on which the statue of Christ the Redeemer now stands). At another moment, in chapter XXXII, she turns into a devouring temptress, a siren ready to lure Bento to his destruction. This second image, a product of Bento’s fertile imagination—or even an emanation from his subconscious—seems much more a product of the 1890s—with its several femmes fatales, its Eves, Medeas, and Salomés—than of the world of the 1850s Bento is trying to evoke.
One combination in which Machado takes particular pleasure is that of religion and money: in fact, the pleasure is partly due to the paradoxical links between the two things, and so between the traditional and the modern. God is described as a “Rothschild, only much more humane,” because for Him, good intentions are legal currency. Escobar, whose “vocation” is commerce, takes his name, without a doubt, from the Jesuit casuist who is one of the main targets of Pascal’s Lettres Provinciales. What Machado is saying is that certain forms and traditions of Catholicism habituate their devotees to a kind of calculating relativism, in which sins have values attached, and can be “paid for” quite literally, in the currency of prayers, paternosters, and Ave Marias: in this case, there is a fatally easy transition from the 1850s to the 1890s. It should be said, however, that the 1890s brought Machado—or, more likely, Bento—into a sharp awareness of the importance of money, and in particular of the reliability of “currency.” The “Encilhamento,” the boom and bust of the early nineties, which began with a licence to print money and ended in high inflation, corruption, and scandal, sent shock waves through the whole of Brazilian society, and undermined the reputation of the nascent Republic. Machado was probably one of the few people not be to taken in by the euphoria: even in his earlier novels, speculative financiers (one of them significantly called Cristiano Palha, literally translated, Christian Straw), are present, and indeed are more obviously corrupt than is Escobar, or are given greater opportunities to show their paces. Machado was no innocent in economic matters but, as numerous crônicas show, he was obsessed by the phenomenon itself, and aware of its deep social and psychological effects.14
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Dom Casmurro was published in 1899, or 1900 depending on whether one takes its appearance from the French presses or its arrival in Brazil as the criterion. “Turn of the century” it undoubtedly is, but where does it fit into the development of fiction in that period, so often seen as the beginning of modernism? One could begin by making comparisons with contemporaries, with Henry James (1843–1916), for example, who shares a similar acute awareness of the role of the narrator, or even with later writers such as Marcel Proust (1871–1922) since Machado, too, especially in this novel, gives a crucial role to memory.15 This latter comparison is much more problematic, for Dom Casmurro is about memory-loss, not memory recovery, as Lúcia Miguel-Pereira rightly points out.16 Bento has failed, as he says in Chapter II, to tie the two ends of his life together.
A more valid route to an evaluation of Machado’s place is to take the story back into the nineteenth century, and in particular to understand his relationship with and position within the realist tradition. There is no doubt of his profound admiration for the great masters of realism, notably Stendhal and Flaubert. Machado has Flaubert’s concern with finding the exact word (which places some pressure on the translator) and Stendhal’s psychological acumen and ironic familiarity with the reader (and a certain nonchalance about whether he is understood now or in fifty years time). But it is not so much affinities as negative reactions which cast the stronger light.
In 1877, Émile Zola published L’Assommoir, his study of the downfall of a French working woman, Gervaise Macquart, due to misfortune and hereditary alcoholism. It was an enormous, worldwide success, running into thirty-eight impressions in the year that it was published. In the next year, the great Portuguese novelist Eça de Queirós published his study of adultery in middle-class Lisbon, Cousin Basilio. Also in 1878, Machado published a review of Eça’s novel, which is his most important work of criticism. It is a wounding attack, not so much on Eça himself (though he does accuse him of a servility to French models almost amounting to plagiarism), as on Naturalism, the movement to which both he and Zola belonged.. On the surface, Machado may seem to be disgusted by the crude details to be found in some of the scenes (and it has to be admitted that he plays the prude for effect) but, in reality, his objection to Naturalism is much more interesting than that, and his own prudery is largely for show. In neither sphere can he accept the materialistic determinism that underpins the novels: not only does it revolt his sense of human freedom that characters should be utterly predetermined by their ancestry (as in the case of Gervaise’s alcoholism) it also makes for novels without tension, so long as one knows what the basic causes of their actions are. Human beings cannot be reduced to totally knowable and predictable creatures.
There may well have been personal reasons for Machado’s rejection of Naturalism. A mulatto with epilepsy cannot have felt comfortable with doctrines that often reached daring conclusions about race and disease. But these reasons were, more importantly, philosophical and artistic. Moreover, Machado’s opposition was the most obvious cause of the extraordinary artistic transformation he underwent at the end of 1870s, and that divides his fiction so clearly into two periods. The first period is that of his first four novels published in the 1870s, which are usually labelled “romantic,” which approach problems parallel to those treated in Dom Casmurro (love across class boundaries, between dependents and masters), and which are told by a traditional third-person narrator.18 None of the five later works that constitute the second period, however, on which his reputation stands, have simple third-person narrators. The baby had had to go out with the bathwater: any real omniscience on the part of the narrator had become impossible to Machado, for it would imply that complete control which is itself determining, and deterministic. He needs at least the illusion of freedom: a first-person narrator is one way of achieving that, though one that brings its own problems with it. This means, not so much that he finds a new method, as that he is plunged into a process of continuous experiment, with one narrator who is dead, another who seems to be conventional but turns on the reader in the middle of the novel to tell him that he has been leading him up the garden path, another who writes a diary in which, of course, he cannot see what is going to happen the next day, and so forth. But—and this is a point which needs to be insisted on—none of these solutions makes Machado less of a realist. They are better understood as part of a search for a more consistent realism, and none of the novels illustrates the point better than Dom Casmurro. Its subject matter—a Brazilian family, typical of a place, a class, and a time, and typical in the way in which people interact both inside and outside that family is perfectly within the conventions of realism. What is more daring is that the narrator too from the first to the last word of the novel, in his attitudes, his narrative method, his language, is part of that realism. This has already been shown in the ways in which the 1890s color the view we get of the 1850s: the important point is that Bento is no more above the fray, removed into omniscience, than any other of Machado’s narrators. Part of the unique fascination of this novel, in fact, is that he is so thoroughly grounded in his own physical and temporal environment: the glimpses of his suburban setting, as he opens the window to look at the children playing in Chapter LXXXV, or our first encounter with him on the train in Chapter I, are only the most overt parts of a subtle process that affects every sentence of the novel.
Machado’s continuous experimentation after 1880 is driven in part by his rejection of Naturalism, and quest for a more coherent and searching form of realism. On one level, it might seem as though he had been revolted by Naturalism’s excesses in other ways, too: in particular, two favorite subjects both in Zola and in Eça de Queirós, the Church and the priesthood, and sex, receive a much blander treatment than in the novels of his more aggressive contemporaries, or so it might seem. Father Cabral is certainly a tame object of fun beside the gallery of corruption and perversion of Eça’s The Crime of Father Amaro, with nothing more than a little gourmandise and an overwhelming mediocrity to distinguish him. Bento’s fellow seminarians are no worse and no better: the one who “they say has discovered a specific against yellow fever,” a disease which made hundreds of victims in Rio de Janeiro every summer still at the end of the century, perhaps sums up their ineffective harmlessness. But when one thinks further, the novel contains at its heart an attack on the Catholic Church which goes far beyond the sins of any of its individual representatives: its whole plot revolves around the question of priestly celibacy. What interests Machado, one could say, is the perversity of the norm, the fact that it can be realistic at this given place and time, with the sanction of authority, to condemn a young man to forgo his most natural need and instinct, and be seen to be doing the right thing; even uncle Cosme, a ladies’ man in his own youth, is reduced to bumbling apology when he attempts to protest.
With the issue of celibacy not only religion, but sex comes to the heart of the novel and, again, it is the perversity of the norm which reveals Machado’s line of attack. Bento has “orgies of Latin” and is a “virgin with women”: in other words, he has received what in British or American terms would be a Victorian upbringing—in the Brazilian case complicated by slavery and Catholicism—carefully shielded from his own most basic urges, repressed, and made to feel guilty about his urges. In the 1890s, he is still very careful that his language should be “chaste for the chaste, as it may be foul for the foul,” though there is no doubt that his habits are more unbuttoned than they used to be: here, too, he is in tune with the fin-de-siècle. Chapter LVIII is perhaps the best example of Machado’s “chastity”: it seems to me to be a description of adolescent masturbation, but so brilliantly relayed that many readers would divine it rather than be conscious of it. (Many would not be aware of it at all and, most importantly, nobody could prove it.) Not only does this suit the respectable citizen Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, with his position in society and his domestic peace to think of, it is also a perfectly realistic way for Bento to recount this moment in his slow and imperfect sexual development. He too does not entirely understand what is going on, nor does he want to face it. It has become something of a commonplace to compare Machado to Freud. Fortunately, the Interpretation of Dreams was published too late for speculation about influence to arise, though Machado had read precursors such as Eduard von Hartmann (The Philosophy of the Unconscious), and above all Schopenhauer.19 But my suspicion is that, if anything, such readings legitimated what Machado already knew, through acute observation and common sense.
The subtlety and precision of Machado’s observation of the psychology of his characters is perhaps nowhere so complete as it is here, so intricate and so sustained. This has a great deal to do with the fact that Dom Casmurro inhabits the world of adolescence. As we see his characters (particularly Bentinho and Capitu, of course) try to understand and manipulate the adult, social world in which they appear to be pawns, we understand both that world and him. Thus the vital importance of gestures, of the tone in which people speak, which can be supplicating or demanding, or any of a hundred shades in between. Why does Capitu suggest that José Dias, apparently the young couple’s greatest enemy, the one keenest for Bento to go to the seminary, could be their greatest ally? How is it that she knows that that might be so? Why does Dona Glória cry in Chapter III? Why does Capitu fix on that event in particular? As we ask and answer these questions—keeping out of the reckoning as far as possible the idea that people are “good” or “bad”—we too begin to build up the jigsaw of this world, to which Machado gives us most of the pieces. It is a very different activity from reading a Naturalist novel, in which we know to a much greater degree how people will act. Our judgments of the characters are defined, very largely, by their interactions, their perceptions, the power that they have—or would like to have—over one another.
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It will be useful to say a few words about the translation, though in general it must stand on its own merits. I have made considerable efforts to be both accurate and readable with a writer who, without any deliberate virtuosity, is perhaps as subtle in his nuances as any in the Portuguese language, and who keeps an equally guarded familiarity with both the colloquial and literary linguistic registers, something that is basic to his irony. In general, I have erred on the colloquial side, most obviously in the use of elided forms (you’re, can’t, shouldn’t, etc.) in narrative as well as in quoted speech. In Portuguese there are no equivalents for these elided forms, so we have no way of knowing whether Machado would have approved: admittedly, English-language contemporaries would not have used them. I have used them, I confess, to convey the carefully cultivated conversational quality of the narrator (“Listen,” the narrator says to the reader at one moment), and to make the novel sound more natural to a modern reader. I have made efforts to stick to Machado’s own punctuation, which some might think makes an excessive use of semicolons, because there is considerable evidence that he gave punctuation a great deal of care: the run-on effect caused by the paucity of full stops is thus deliberate. When Machado quotes the Bible, I have used the Authorized (1603) version.
Most importantly, I have used the notes, rather as I have used the introduction itself, to reduce the modern English-language reader’s distance from a novel that is, after all, a domestic drama, and that, as we have seen, cannot within its own parameters of narration be too explicit or explanatory. It seemed a misuse of space to tell the reader the story of Othello (to give one obvious example) and not to give some idea of the geography—physical and social—of Rio de Janeiro in the late nineteenth century. Notes have been kept to a minimum but, to exclude them, as both the previous translations (by Helen Caldwell and Robert Scott-Buccleuch) have done, seems unrealistic and unhelpful. I would like to thank Cristina Carletti, whose excellent notes for the 1994 Editora Scipione edition of Dom Casmurro were extremely useful. If a reader in 1900 would have known how much money a conto and seventy milreis was, why should we not? I have the suspicion (witness Joyce and some of the editions of Dubliners, for instance) that a willingness to take seriously a writer’s local roots is part of the process of recognizing his universality. In Machado’s case, this process is still under way, and it is to be hoped that this new translation furthers the cause.
—John Gledson
University of Liverpool
1. “This afternoon, I reread a page of Flaubert’s biography; I found the same loneliness and sadness and even the same illness, you know, the other one [como sabe, o outro …]” From a letter to Mário de Alencar, 29 August 1908, a month before Machado’s death. Obra Completa (Rio de Janeiro: Aguilar, 1962), Vol. 3, p. 1094. Unless otherwise specified, all references to Machado’s work are to this edition.
2. “Machado de Assis: A Biographical Sketch,” included in Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 78–83, is a useful summary of the author’s life, concentrating on his early years.
3. This story, Casa velha [Old House] was published in A Estaçāo in 1885–86. See my article, “Casa velha: A Contribution to a Better Understanding of Machado de Assis,” in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 60 (1983), pp. 31–48.
4. Interestingly, in the introduction to his multivolume study of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century, Peter Gay refers to these two decades as presenting a crucial contrast for judging “a broad band of far-reaching cultural shifts”: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Vol. 1: Education of the Senses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 3.
5. See Antonio Candido, “The Brazilian Family,” in T. L. Smith, Brazil: Portrait of Half a Continent (New York: Dryden, n.d.). We should note, however, that the early death of Bento’s father is not in the least unrealistic in this tropical nineteenth-century setting; Machado’s fiction is rife with young widows, most of them more available than Dona Gloria, Bento’s mother.
6. See my Deceptive Realism of Machado de Assis: A Dissenting Interpretation of Dom Casmurro (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1984), p. 45.
7. For a list of the extensive and fascinating remains of Machado’s library, see Jean-Michel Massa, “La Bibliothèque de Machado de Assis,” in Revista do Livro 21–2 (March–April 1961), pp. 195–238.
8. An appreciation of the role of the agregado/a has been one of the fundamental insights of criticism of Machado de Assis in recent years. The most important book on the subject is Roberto Schwarz’s Ao Vencedor as Batatas [The Winner Gets the Potatoes] (Sāo Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1977). One of the essays in his Misplaced Ideas, “The Poor Old Woman and her Portraitist” (pp. 94–9) deals with one extremely poor agregada, Dona Plácida in the Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas.
9. This chapter, “Um agregado (Capítulo de um livro inédito)” [“A Dependent (Chapter of an Unpublished Book)”] is published as an appendix to the critical edition of Dom Casmurro by the Comissāo Machado de Assis (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Nacional do Livro/Ministério da Educaçāo e Cultura, 1969), pp. 251–5.
10. From “A nova geraçâo” [“The new generation”] (1879) in Obra Completa Vol. 3, p. 836.
11. Perhaps the most moving of Machado’s tributes to Renan are the essay “Henriqueta Renan” (Obra Completa, Vol. 2, pp. 626–36), and the crônica written on the occasion of his death in October 1892 (Obra Completa, Vol. 3, pp. 549–50).
12. Originally published in April 1904: see Obra Completa, Vol 3, pp 1021–3.
13. “Todas as crenças se confundem neste fim de século sem elas,” see Machado de Assis, A Semana (crônicas 1892–1893) ed. John Gledson (Sāo Paulo: Hucitec, 1996), p. 212 (crônica for 19 March 1993). For the previous quotation, see crônica for 26 February 1893, ibid., p. 241.
14. One of the most famous is the “Devil’s Sermon,” published 4 September 1892, which contains the following advice: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves may break in and steal. Rather, send your treasures to a bank in London, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, neither do thieves steal, and where you will go and see them on the Judgement Day.” A Semana, ed. cit., p. 114.
15. Roberto Schwarz makes the comparison with Henry James in “A poesia envenenada de Dom Casmurro, in Duas meninas (Sāo Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997), p. 12: “Like his contemporary Henry James, Machado invented narrative situations, or narrators placed in a situation”
16. See “Variaçōes sobre o mesmo tema,” in Lúcia Miguel-Pereira, Escritos da Maturidade (Rio de Janeiro: Graphia, 1994), pp. 11–14.
17. This essay, along with Machado’s reply to critics who came to Eça’s defence, can be found in Obra Completa, Vol. 3, pp 903–13.
18. These novels are Ressurreiçāo [Ressurrection], (1872), A Māo e a Luva [The Hand and the Glove (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970)], (1874), Helena [Helena (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)], (1876), and laiá Garcia [Yayá Garcia (London: Peter Owen, 1976) and Yayá Garcia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1977)], (1878).
19. See, e.g., the reference to “the painful or melancholy note, the pessimistic note, the note of Hartmann,” “A nova geraçāo” [The new generation] (1869) Obra Completa Vol. 3, p. 811. The influence of Schopenhauer—much the greater philosopher, of course—is much more pervasive. In one of his last surviving letters (Obra Completa, Vol. 3, p. 1093), Machado says he is rereading one of Schopenhauer’s books.