Questão 69 - UECE 2ª fase 1º dia 2018/2

A Master Storyteller from 19th-Century
Brazil, Heir to the Greats and
Entirely Sui Generis 

By Parul Sehgal

 

    In a famous Hindu parable, three
blind men encounter an elephant for the
first time and try to describe it, each
touching a different part. “An elephant is
[05]  like a snake,” says one, grasping the
trunk. “Nonsense; an elephant is a fan,”
says another, who holds an ear. “A tree
trunk,” insists a third, feeling his way
around a leg.
 [10]    In the Anglophone world, a similar
kind of confusion surrounds Joaquim
Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908),
the son and sly chronicler of Rio de
Janeiro whom Susan Sontag once called
[15]  “the greatest writer ever produced in
Latin America.” To Stefan Zweig,
Machado was Brazil’s answer to Dickens.
To Allen Ginsberg, he was another
Kafka. Harold Bloom called him a
[20]  descendant of Laurence Sterne, and
Philip Roth compared him to Beckett.
Others cite Gogol, Poe, Borges and
Joyce. In the foreword to “The Collected
Stories of Machado de Assis,” published
[25]  this month, the critic Michael Wood
invokes Henry James, Henry Fielding,
Chekhov, Sterne, Nabokov and Calvino
— all in two paragraphs.
    To further complicate matters,
[30]  Machado has always reminded me of
Alice Munro. What’s going on here? 

    What kind of writer induces such
rapturous and wildly inconsistent
characterizations? What kind of writer
[35]  can star in so many different fantasies?
    The protean, stubbornly
unclassifiable Machado was born into
poverty, the mixed-race grandson of
freed slaves. He had no formal education
[40]  or training; like Twain, his
contemporary, he got his start as a
printer’s apprentice. Out of a regimen of
ferocious self-education, he established
himself, initially as a writer of slender
[45]  romances for and about the women of
the ruling elite.
    But in 1879, his style changed —
or rather, it arrived. Prolonged illness
(Machado was epileptic), and the near
[50]  loss of his sight, snapped him to
attention. The gentle romantic
blossomed into a wicked ironist whose
authorial intrusions, jump cuts and sheer
mischief influenced American
[55]  experimentalists like John Barth and
Donald Barthelme.
    Five novels produced in this
period — including his masterpiece, “The
Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas”
[60]  (1881) — cemented his reputation. If
this collection of 76 stories (culled from
more than 200) cannot rise to their
ranks, it still offers a different and
valuable vantage point — especially for
[65]  readers who like to keep an eye on the
life as well as the art.
    “The Collected Stories” reveals
the arc of Machado’s career, from the
straightforward love stories to the
[70]  cerebral and unpredictable later works.
One story is told from the point of view
of a needle. Political satire begins to
appear. In one tale, a dictator, bald
since youth, decrees that all his subjects
[75]  must also shave their heads, arguing
that the “moral unity of the state
depended on all heads looking the
same.”
    Machado’s stories pulse with life.
[80]  The endings are frequently murky and
strange, often abruptly truncated. The
title of an early work characterizes them
well: “Much Heat, Little Light.” Certain
preoccupations persist: alluring widows,
[85]  naïve young men, a fondness for
coincidence. Machado remained
fascinated by femininity and the
strictures governing the lives of women
— it’s why he reminds me of Munro. Like
[90]  chess pieces, Rio’s well-born ladies could
make only a few authorized moves
(Machado was a chess fanatic), but
everything was theirs to win or lose.
    Above all looms the figure of the
[95]  bibliomane. “This is my family,” one
says, pointing to his bookshelf. These 

are characters shaped by their reading,
sometimes even physically (“his head
jutted forward slightly from his long
[100]  habit”).
    It’s a curious feature of Machado’s
stories that Brazil is so absent. There are
few landmarks, few mentions of the
weather. But there are allusions to
[105]  Molière and Goethe. Novels and authors
are the signposts. Like his characters,
Machado was a creature of literature;
ink ran in his veins. Though he never
roved far from his hometown he read
[110]  widely, claiming all of culture, all of
Europe — giving his work that
remarkably open, cosmopolitan feel.
    This creation of a personal
cartography — of anchoring himself in
[115]  the life of the mind — might explain one
of the lingering frustrations with
Machado’s work: namely, his refusal to
write more explicitly about slavery. He
might not have dared; slavery ended in
[120]  Brazil only in 1888. His stories stay
trained, sometimes monotonously, on
the elite, slaves flitting through in
silence.
    Yet Machado is always writing
[125]  about liberation in his way, which to him
begins with the freedom — the
obligation — to think. Few fiction writers
have written so affectionately about
ideas, as if they were real people; he is
[130]  always describing how ideas emerge and
move, the way they can lose their way
and get caught in a crush with others.
The way they can appear “fully formed
and beautiful” at times, or grow
[135]  “pregnant” with other ideas.
    Ideas and fixations elevate and
distort in these stories. In one, a man
consumed by his pet bird becomes “pure
canary.” In another, a father intent on
[140]  grooming his son to become “a bigwig”
demands he cultivate the necessary
vapidity: “I forbid you to arrive at any
conclusions that have not already been
reached by others. Avoid anything that
[145]  has about it so much as a whiff of
reflection, originality or the like.”
    To Machado, your identity and the
contours of your world are formed not
just by your circumstances but by what
[150]  you think about habitually. You are what
you contemplate, so choose wisely.
These stories are a spectacular place to
start.

From: www.nytimes.com/June 6, 2018

According to the author of the text, Machado de Assis