Machado de Assis: A Literary Life by K. David Jackson (review)

For students and scholars of Luso-Brazilian literature, the overriding mystery surrounding Machado de Assis has long been this: How is it that a writer as brilliant, as innovative, and as cosmopolitan as Machado is not more widely celebrated than he is? In short, why is Machado de Assis not yet recognized as the great world master that he is? In Machado de Assis: A Literary Life, K. David Jackson seeks to rectify this situation. And he has succeeded brilliantly. Pointing out that while even today Machado "is still not widely known outside of Brazil," where, as Haroldo de Campos has argued, he is venerated as "the mythological founder of modern Brazil," Jackson declares that his book "seeks to contribute to the reinterpretation of Machado … by reconfiguring the function and meaning of his special genius as a thinker and writer, redefining him as one of the fundamental authors of world literature" (7).

The book is divided into four parts, each one of which then subdivides into smaller units that address specific aspects of Machado's art. Part 1, "The Literary World of Machado de Assis," "defines the main lines of interpretation of Machado and the principles with which he constructed his literary world" (xi). Part 2, "Reading Machado de Assis," "describes key principles of Machado's writing, centering on his wish to bypass chronological time by creating points of view through distanced or eternal perspectives" (xii). Part 3, "Three Exemplary Modes," "follows three characteristic motifs in Machado's work identified by the philosopher and literary essayist Benedito Nunes in his study of the origin of Machado de Assis's ideas: the delirium in which Brás Cubas rides to the beginning of time on the back of a flying hippopotamus; the philosophy of Humanitas propounded by the mad Quincas Borba; and the metaphor or parable of the world as an opera in a joint effort by God and Satan, in Dom Casmurro" (xii). Part 4, "The Actor-Authors," "unites and describes for the first time together the three character-narrators—Brás Cubas, Bento Santiago, and Counselor Ayres—who write and narrate their retrospective memoirs" (xii). The Conclusion, "Machado and the Spectacle of the World," "discusses Machado as contrary philosopher, analyst, and keen observer from afar of the customs and rituals of life in his city-universe" (xii).

In Part 1, we learn how important the theater, journalism, and translation were to the neophyte Machado as he honed his craft and formed the aesthetic and philosophic principles that would guide his work. As Jackson points out, Machado's too often neglected first four novels actually demonstrate the themes, forms, techniques, and psychological tensions that highlight his more famous later narratives. Machado's unmistakable style is developed during this early period and would later be seen as the foundation of the twentieth century's "modernist novel" (xi). Jackson identifies "hybridity and intertextuality" as the "twin pillars of Machado's composite fictional constructions" and argues that they allow him to synthesize the best of Western literature's literature, philosophy, music, and art into something new and uniquely his. In some of the book's most important pages, the section discussing "The Literary Modernism of Machado de Assis," Jackson finds that Machado employs Rio de Janeiro as a microcosm of the entire world and that he "disguised a diverse, hybrid compositional method within the realist conventions of his day, to which he belonged on the surface, while adding to its hidden repertoire of inventiveness, fantasy, and imagination where the modernist novel began"(58).

Part 2, focusing on a close examination of the techniques that guide the composition of Machado's fiction, provides us with new insights into how and why Machado writes as he does. We see how what appears, at times, frivolous and desultory is actually the conscious refining of a very particular and identifiable style, one that has tremendous implications for such basics of fiction writing as point of view, characterization, plot, and the role of...