Estrategias e mascaras de um fingidor: A cronica de Machado de Assis (review)

While the crônica is the genre to which Machado de Assis most consistently applied himself throughout his career, few would consider it his strongest medium. Nearly one hundred years after Machado's death, it must be acknowledged that because of their frequent references to current events, the crônicas have not remained as accessible to most readers as the other genres. That being the case, it is remarkable if not surprising that the newspaper columns have received such serious attention in the last fifteen years or so. Es tra té gias e máscaras de um fingidor belongs to an impressive scholarly corpus including excellent new editions, at least three books, several graduate theses and a series of major articles. In part this crônica boom is simply because of the continued consolidation of Machado as Brazil's most studied author. I believe that it is also because Brazilian scholars in particular are still intensely interested in defining Machado's bra sil i dade, because the crônicas are clearly replete with references to the national scene, and at the same time because they are rather problematic in their kind of reference.

Cruz's book focuses on a set of "mature" crônicas, appearing in the Ga zeta de Notícias under the name "A semana" between April 1892 and December 1893. Their commentary on social events is predictably more skeptical and ironic than those of Machado's youth, studied in Lúcia Granja's Ma chado de Assis, escritor em formação. Because in Cruz's view the crônicas have a more oblique style of political reference, the author praises editor John Gledson for his painstaking research in providing background information about the texts, but warns that his "obsessive" attachment of the texts to specific historical moments "pouco acrescenta ao entendimento do que a crônica tem de realmente significativo, servindo antes como despistamento do leitor" (21). Cruz compares Machado's use of the historical facts to what a sculptor does with his raw materials. While their presence is undeniably important, they are not the primary focus: "os fatos comentados são um pretexto para a discussão que realmente interessa o autor" (29). And this discussion, according to Cruz, is essentially metalinguistic, and conscious of the relationship between discourse and political power: "Machado propõe, nos textos analisados, uma reflexão sobre os processos de construção do sentido e [. . .] o faz com o objetivo de compreender a realidade nacional" (29).

For Cruz, Machado's crônicas are a grand play of disparate voices, involving a sometimes subtle, sometimes jarring interplay of various discourses and their corresponding ideological perspectives. The author's primary theoretical support for his analysis is Mikhail Bakhtin and his conception of polyphony. This dialogic play in Machado's crônicas takes several forms. The narrator may take on the voice of a philosophical opponent as when, for example, he agrees with a proposed law restricting the rights and wages of domestic servants. He may create an alien voice by means of hyperbole by declaring that medical science will have such efficacy that one day, all sickness will be eliminated, and scientists will be forced to invent colds and hangnails out of sheer boredom. He may carry on a dialogue with readers by, for example, allowing them to give voice to their boredom and confessing to having planted a false promise of great novelty, merely to make them continue to the end of the column. The cronista may use the device of apostrophe, arguing with a personified world view (for example, positivism) or with ideas (the week's newsworthy events). Or, he may create fictional dialogues with observers of the bombardment of Rio during the Armada Revolt, or even between two donkeys pulling a streetcar. These and several other practices are expertly analyzed by Cruz, to show how Machado creates polyphony, focuses on the elaborative...