A brief survey of the short story part 47: Machado de Assis
Still neglected by English readers, the Brazilian writer is one of the very greatest of the
early modern era
The Brazilian Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is, to English-language readers, perhaps the most
obscure of world literature’s great short-story writers. Producing work between 1869 and 1908,
Machado wrote nine novels and more than 200 hundred stories, more than 60 of the latter
appearing after 1880. This date marks the point at which Machado metamorphosed from a
writer of romantic trifles into a master of psychological realism, seemingly overnight. The Brazilian
poet and critic Augusto Meyer compared the shift to the one between Herman Melville’s earlier
works and Moby-Dick.
The evolutionary leap is unquestionable, although the precise reasons for it are unclear. Indeed,
many uncertainties surround the biography of Machado, who was an intensely private person.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that such a man should create a body of work that prizes the puzzle above
the certainty. Meyer called ambiguity Machado’s most prominent theme and the translators Jake
Schmitt and Lorie Ishimatsu agree, seeing it as being “in part the result of his subjective, relativistic
world view, in which truth and reality, which are never absolutes, can only be approximated;
no character relationships are stable, no issues are clear-cut, and the nature of everything is
tenuous.” Machado writes with pleasurable clarity – he worked as a journalist for a time – but the
straightforwardness of his stories is a camouflage for less obvious, more troubling cargo.
(...)
Machado’s most recent English translator, John Gledson, says the difficulty of translating him
is capturing the right balance of distance, understanding and sympathy. Trapdoors to the
unexpected open constantly in his work, from the sadism of “The Hidden Cause”, or the bleak
violence of “Father versus Mother”, to the subtle play of what Michael Wood terms his “quiet,
complicated humour”. Reading him prompts thoughts of so many different writers that he can
only be unique. Poe’s chilling shadow falls across “The Hidden Cause” and “The Fortune-Teller”.
“The Alienist” glitters with Swiftian satire. Machado’s shrewd, even devious work with the point of
view of his narrators positions him alongside Henry James. Numerous stories anticipate the moral
ambiguity of Chekhov’s mature work, in particular “A Singular Occurrence”. Machado’s literary
mapping of Rio reaches back to the St Petersburg of Gogol and Dostoevsky, and anticipates the
Dublin of Joyce. Finally, some of his more obviously strange works (nearly all of it is strange to
some degree, which is part of its brilliance) evoke Borges and Kafka. Given all this, it’s little wonder
that writer and critic Kevin Jackson would feel confident enough to claim that Machado “invented
literary modernity, sui generis”.
(...)
At its most pessimistic, as at the conclusion of “Dona Paula”, all pleasure lies in a past that proves
impossible to meaningfully access.
This conception of a hollow, unreal present tied to a genuine but obliterated past finds a binary
in Machado’s interest in the duality of the self, and the exploration of characters whose outer and
inner personae differ radically. In “The Diplomat” this idea is expressed through the description
of a man’s unexpressed passion for a friend’s daughter. In “A Famous Man” a hugely successful
composer of polkas is wracked by his inability to compose ‘serious’ music. But it is in an earlier
treatment of this theme, 1882’s “The Mirror”, that Machado captures the phenomenon most
memorably. Alone in a desolate plantation house, Jacobina, a sub-lieutenant in the National
Guard, finds his reflection growing dimmer and less distinct. The only way to bring it back into
focus, and thus cling to reality, is to spend a period several hours each day standing before
the mirror in his uniform. Jacobina steps out of this strange, haunting story to take his place
alongside Chekhov’s Dmitri Gurov and Joyce’s Gabriel Conroy, men whose fatally divided selves
leave them trapped in a limbo between their public and private personae. Just as the characters
belong together, so do their creators; writing about Machado in 2002 Michael Wood complained,
“Everyone who reads him thinks he is a master, but who reads him, and who has heard of him?”
Not nearly so many as he deserves.
Quotations from the stories are translated by John Gledson, Jack Schmitt and Lorie Ishimatsu.
Source:POWER, Chris,The Guardian, Books Blog, Posted by Chris Power on Friday 1 March 2013 15.28 GMT
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/mar/01/survey-short-story-machado
(Adapted) Access November, 2014
Augusto Meyer, Jake Schmitt and Lorie Ishimatsu
