Machado de Assis e o outro: diálogos possíveis orgs. by Marta de Senna and Hélio de Seixas Guimarães (review)

Comparative or intertextual perspectives have a long and honorable tradition in studies of Machado de Assis, as books by Eugênio Gomes, Gilberto Pinheiro Passos and others testify. The building-blocks for systematic study, in the form of editions (notably of crônicas and the correspondence), dictionaries and so on, are appearing with encouraging regularity—in particular, I should mention the searchable list of allusions in the novels and stories on machadodeassis.net. In recent years, such studies have tended to move beyond specific cases of influence to more general approaches, represented most ambitiously in Marcelo Pen’s recent Realidade possível: dilemas da fcção em Henry James e Machado de Assis (Ateliê, 2012). The eight essays in the book under review, the production of a study group led by the two editors of this volume, are evidence of this shift. Their approaches are varied, and cover all genres, including poetry and drama; all three cultures with which Machado had the greatest contact outside Brazil—Portuguese, French and English—are present. All in all, this is a valuable volume, though in some of the essays a clearer idea of what is being compared and why, and what the meaning of the comparison is in the context of Machado’s own work, would have improved it.

Three of the essays are on Portuguese authors. This is a welcome sign, for Machado’s links with Portugal were considerable and intimate, biographical and literary, and they have been ignored. As Hélio Guimarães says in his essay on Faustino Xavier de Novais (Dona Carolina’s brother who tragically died before her marriage to Machado), silence about this context is the product of old cultural preconceptions we should be overcoming.

Guimarães’s essay is a well-documented chapter of literary history, telling the story of Novais’s arrival in Brazil in 1858, his welcome by Casimiro de Abreu (in a poem reprinted here), and the curious “collaboration” between Machado and his friend, as Machado included Novais’s reply to one of his own worse poems in his first book, Crisálidas (1864). As importantly, Guimarães emphasises the importance of the satiric vein in Portuguese poetry (Bocage, Tolentino, O hissope) which is one of Machado’s constant references in the crônicas. It is a tradition to which he himself contributed in O Almada (a poem worth a comparative study in its own right).

Marta de Senna’s essay, “O silêncio do bruxo,” on Camilo Castelo Branco comes from the same area, for Novais and Camilo were good friends. Why, then, are there no references to Camilo in Machado’s fiction, and sparse and relatively unimportant ones in the rest of his work? Was Camilo a rival, an awkward presence? Senna makes a convincing case that this might be so—in particular, the invention of an “antídoto contra a melancolia” in Camilo’s Coração, cabeça e estômago (1862). Both these essays open doors into an important, understudied area of Machado’s life and writings, by no means limited to his youth.

Paul Dixon’s essay on Camões focuses a different kind of influence. Often, when Machado quotes Camões, there is no need for quotation marks—everyone would recognise and hear the echo. For me, this essay typifies the possible limitations of some comparative studies. Where the conventional importance of a writer makes him part of a common language, tracing specific, illuminating influences becomes by the same token, more difficult. The essay looks at three aspects of this contact—two of them, the play Tu, só tu, puro amor, and four sonnets which were written for the tercentenary of Camões’s death in 1580, and to that extent “written to order”—the coincidence between their idealism and Brás Cubas’ cynicism is less surprising than might...