Machado de Assis’s Afterlives : The Brazilian novelist’s overlooked politics

A bolition, when it finally arrived, was a festive occasion in Brazil. The streets of Rio de Janeiro were packed on May 13, 1888, the day Princess Isabel granted the country’s last remaining slaves their freedom. Plays and orations were put on in honor of the decree, known as the “Golden Law”; blacks and whites were encouraged to mix in celebration. There “remains a general consensus among Brazilians,” writes the historian Marcus S. Wood, “that the hours directly following the [proclamation] were among the most ecstatic and genuinely optimistic that Rio has ever witnessed.” Famously, Isabel signed the decree with a pearl- and- diamond- encrusted quill. In photographs, you can make her out above the chaos, perched on the balcony of the Imperial Palace, waving at the gathered crowds.

The Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis attended the Golden Law celebrations. He left a terse record of the events: “There was sunshine, great sunshine, that Sunday of 1888 when the senate voted the law, which the Regency approved[,] and we all went out on the streets. Yes, I myself went out in the street, the most closed of all the big snails, I entered the parade in an open coach, the guest of an absent fat friend, we all breathed happiness, it was all a delirium.”

In contrast to the bombast of the day’s journalism (“A Day That Will Go Down in History,” one headline read) there is something hushed, even ironic about this passage. Machado lingers on the surface of events—the weather, the atmosphere, the rush of impressions—as if recounting a performance, and a seductive one at that: “In truth it was the only day of public delirium I ever remembering having seen,” he concludes.

The legacy of slavery looms large over the career of Machado de Assis. He grew up in the shadow of Brazil’s four- decade- long manumission; in his writings, he pondered how this drawn- out process changed—or failed to change—his country. In an era when slavery was a literary taboo, when only the elite were literate and “literature” was an elite pastime, Machado imagined the lives of slaves and servants, looked hard at poverty and backwardness, and was not afraid to depict acts of racial violence. At the same time, he was attuned to the psychology of the slave- owning classes, who sensed their glory days were drawing to an end. That he could slip between these incommensurate perspectives owes much to his distinctive biography: Machado was a poor mulato (mixed- raceindividual) who was welcomed into the white elite.

In a famous photograph from 1901, Assis poses with members of “A Panelinha,” a literary club which included the most respected writers, statesmen, and nobility—all of them white. The picture speaks to the adulation he received from contemporaries, who missed the critique of Brazilian society seething beneath his playful style. A century later, things are not so different, though Machado has been translated into many languages and is recognized as an avant- garde master, said to prefigure the narrative games of writers as different as Calvino, Kafka, and Nabokov. Far less attention has been paid, however, to the social dimension of his work, despite the renewed discussions about race in the literature of the Americas.

In fact, Machado’s formal innovation and social criticism are two sides of the same coin. He lived amid the white elite, who remained deaf to all appeals for reform; his achievement was to invent a narrative style that captured their racial pathologies. If he turned away from European realism, this was not out of greed for novelty but because the genre offered little traction on the colonies’ social inequalities. Writing from “the periphery of capitalism,” as the critic Roberto Schwarz put it, Machado de Assis painted a timeless image of underdevelopment. No writer of the nineteenth century looked harder at Brazil’s social ills, from whose clutches the country is yet to escape.

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machado de assis was born in 1839 to mixed-race agregados, or indentured servants, who were tied...