Machado de Assis

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1:50This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. Machado de Assis, 1839 to 1908, is considered the towering figure of modern Brazilian literature with a global reputation, although arguably not as much as he deserves. The descendant of slaves, Machado wrote many of his novels and almost 200 short stories before Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so.

2:36And while he vividly critiques the slave-owning classes, he transcends that time and place. In Salman Rushdie's view, his work seemed to have been written yesterday, not a hundred years ago. With me to discuss Machado Giasis are Ana Claudia Suriani da Silva, Associate Professor in Brazilian Studies at University College London, Claire Williams, Professor of Brazilian Literature and Culture at the Faculty of Modern Languages at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Peter's College, and Viviane Cavaglio da Annunciação, affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge.

3:22And Viviane, it's to you that I come first. Can you tell us something about Machado's early life in Rio de Janeiro? Machado just sees us sometimes called the greatest Brazilian writer, But I come to think of him as the Pele of literature. Machado did the same thing as Pele did for football. He inherited an European tradition, mastered it and transformed it completely, creating it to something unmistakably Brazilian and original. And Machado de Jassiz was born in Rio de Janeiro, a burgeoning city. He was the son of Francisco José de Assis and Maria La Polgina Machado de Assis. His father was a painter, descendant from freed slaves, and his mother was an Azorian washerwoman.

4:21He grew up in an affluent neighborhood, but connected to a working class family. He was baptized by Dona Maria José de Mendonça, the wife of a senator. So he grew up going in and out of her mansion and going back to his working class family. So what was his relationship with the wealthy family? She was his godmother and he would go to her house to have meals and to be. So just to make it clear, what was that relationship between a relatively poor family, working class? How come he has this relationship with a wealthy family? Well, it's where his father and mother would work. This is basically where he would paint their houses, she would wash their clothes.

5:22And that was a patronage relationship. And what were the prospects for a young boy like Machado at the time in Brazil, given his background in this relationship of dependency with the wealthy family? It was very slim. It was believed that he was going to follow the footsteps of his father and become a painter or some sort of manual worker. But effectively, his health wasn't so great. So he started working, selling sweets, but then he wasn't strong enough. and developing this incredible intelligence for literature, he transcended his background. So although illiteracy in Brazil at this time is very high, I think around 70%, he nonetheless has access to books and reading because of that relationship with the wealthy family.

6:24Is that right? Not exactly, because what happened is that he lost both his mother and his father at an early age. And he was brought up by his stem mother, Maria Inés, who was an Afro-Brazilian woman. And Lúcia Miguel Pereira, in her biography of Machado de Assis, says that she worked in a school for young women. And apparently he would overhear the lessons and the corridors and get very much interested in what they were studying. Formal education didn't suit him, so he would learn French with Madame Galot, the baker. Classics, Greek, Latin, with Father Silveira Sarmiento, the priest. When he was 17, he started to go to the bookshop Pereira Brito and frequent literary circles.

7:30So in addition to reading by himself, studying by himself, he was also learning from people in different social classes and in different levels of education. So Ana Claudia Soriane da Silva, he is working associated with a bookshop which is run by a publisher in Rio. How does he start writing? What's his first break as a writer? Machado starts to collaborate with the local press, so Paula Brito's press, as a translator. So he translates poetry and he translates novels, but also he is an aspiring poet, and he's not very successful as a poet. He very soon realises from very harsh criticism that he's not a very good poet.

8:23At that time, there was a flourishing publishing market, print culture, in Brazil. So with the end of censorship in 1821, all of a sudden we had lots of books being published, so a proper print culture, bookshops, circulating libraries. One of the circulating libraries was the British Subscription Library, the Portuguese Royal Cabinet, and lots of newspapers and periodicals. Many of them were ventures by European publishers that settled down in Rio de Janeiro, including Garnier. So Garnier played a very important role in Machado's career because he had a fashion magazine, a magazine for women.

9:11So it was basically a magazine full of sewing material, fashion plates, and a lot of literary content. So Machado went from being an average poet to being a very successful short story writer. So he wrote in this specific journal published once a month and it was actually printed in Paris. So his manuscripts had to travel to Paris and come back to Brazil and serialized and his short stories were very long, which means that he made a good amount of money because of the word count of these stories. And these were largely women's magazines, is that right? Yes. Why is he so popular with women at the time?

9:55Oh, because these magazines were very successful. So there were all sorts of periodicals being published in Brazil. It was a very vibrant market for periodicals. So political newspapers published daily, and also these magazines that targeted women and were suited for the domestic sphere. So Machado was writing short stories and the short stories were actually a big attraction to the readers for them to subscribe to these magazines. So he had a very diverse readership, both men when he was publishing short stories for political newspapers and women in these fashion magazines. Thank you. Claire Williams, Brazilian literature comes late in the day.

10:44Was it in any sense ostracised during the slavery period? Brazil as a nation was ostracised and looked down upon by the rest of the world while they were a slave-owning nation. And the development of Brazil is quite unique in that it was a colony of Portugal for 300 years and then became an empire in 1822, a kind of constitutional monarchy. And all this time, the economy was run largely on slavery. This was something that was very much looked down upon by the rest of the world. And Brazilian politicians and intellectuals were worried that they wouldn't be taken seriously as a modern nation until slavery had been abolished.

11:29Why did it take so long for slavery to be abolished? There are lots of thoughts about that. Historians have written many tomes about that. But because the politicians, the governing classes were plantation owners, so a lot of money was at stake if they were going to give up their workforce. But they did eventually. So the slave trade ended in 1850 and gradually slavery was abolished in various waves through various laws. And in 1888, it was abolished. More or less at the same time that Brazil becomes a republic. Exactly. So 1889, Brazil becomes a republic. Gets rid of the monarchy. Let's look at one of Machado's most famous works.

12:17That's the posthumous memoirs of Bras Cubas. Can you describe that novel to us? Absolutely. It's a novel where nothing happens and everything happens. So you'd think from the title that it's the story of a life. then you realise that it's posthumous memoirs so there's something strange going on. So he's dead when he's writing it? He's dead when he's writing it and he tells us at the beginning after making a dedication to the worms that gnawed on his cold body the first worm who gnawed on his cold body that this is not the book of an author who has died but a dead man who has become an author. so he tells us right from the very beginning that he's not a very good writer but he is quite good at being dead and being dead gives him license to say all sorts of things that he couldn't say when he was alive it also gives him the chance to look back over his whole life and draw conclusions about the causes that produced certain effects and to reflect on how important he could have been because he's a character who's desperate for approbation, for acclaim, for recognition.

13:36And yet he's so lazy and cowardly and so entitled as well. He comes from a rich background. He's wealthy. He doesn't even need to work. And he could do anything with his learning. He studied in Portugal. He could do anything with his money, but he keeps it all for himself. And in fact, he's one of the great ironies is that he's very lucky. So almost as if whatever he wants, he gets. He likes a particular woman. He manages to seduce her. He finds money in the street. And all this at the time where poverty was rife. So that's what I want to go on to. Viviane, can you tell us what the social critique in this novel is really about?

14:26Well, the European, you have the tradition of the self-made man, the person who works, who comes out of nothing and builds something extraordinary. In a way, Brás has everything and he doesn't make anything out of that. And there is a whole chapter about him trying to be a politician, which is dot, dot, dot. And that is a big joke that Machado plays with the reader. How did I become a politician? There is nothing to be read about it. In the following chapter, well, I am in my house. I am with my slaves. I'm with my son, my chair. but I keep thinking about the work that I don't have. This is very typical of the higher classes.

15:20They have everything and they want a little bit more in the Brazilian situation of the 19th century, but he's still talking about what he could have been. In a way, it is Brazilian, but it's also very universal in a way because we might have everything, but we still keep thinking about that little thing that didn't happen. Ana Cláudia, that sense of entitlement which Viviane described there, it sounds quite a lot like the Brazil of today. There's not much of a plot in this novel, so what is it that inspires people to read the book? Well, in terms of the entitlement, Machado is writing to a niche of readers, So the literacy levels were actually quite low in Brazil.

16:10It was 30 % of people could read. And he was writing to the educated elite. Yes, it's the first novel he publishes in the first person. So he moves away from the sentimental, omniscient narrator of his first novels. And in the preface of this specific novel, he says that he's now being in his second phase and he's heavily influenced by Stern and Tristan Shandy. So we are about to engage with a novel that is going to be digressive. It's going to be fragmented and very witty and ironic. So he constructs a character that is going to embrace the blindness of Brazilian elite. And for many times, critics couldn't understand that he was actually being critical to the status quo, because that character who achieves nothing, leaves no legacy, is a failed scientist, a failed politician, a bad lover, is actually represents the failure of the Brazilian elite.

17:19Yes. So how was it received when it was first published? You said that they didn't really understand it. They liked the novel, but they didn't understand it. Was it well received? It was extremely well received. It was first published in a scientific magazine and then a sign of success that it was very quickly published in book form. And it had all sorts of positive reception that read in favor of this very witty, charming narrator. You mean almost as though they were celebrating the fecklessness of the Brazilian elite. Exactly, yes. And actually not seeing that a lot that is silence. For example, Bras Cubas is a slave owner and he barely mentions slaves in his plot.

18:07So it's again that silence that tells everything. And that's what more reception, the reception of his novel from the 1950 onwards starts to open the eyes and see that the silence is more important than what is said. Right. So reception changes as Brazil develops and people start to look at it in different ways. Clare Williams, the narrator here is a man, Brás Kúbás. But how strong are women in Machado's work? Women are crucial. So before Brás Kúbás, before the memoirs, he'd published four other novels. This is his fifth novel. And the third and fourth have female protagonists and the titles are female names, Elena and Yaya Garcia.

18:57And then from then on, he focuses on male narrators, almost all of them writing in the first person. So they are the ones with the voice. They are the ones with the agency. But we have to read between the lines to see what's going on with the women. So a lot of the female characters who these male narrators speak about are extremely beautiful. They have lovely long black hair. They have glittering eyes. They go to balls and they bare their shoulders. And kissing them is close to heaven. And the men become bewitched until the point when they want to drop them. So we see it's a bit like Jane Austen, the way that the world of the women is that they have to capitalise on their beauty.

19:42They have to be practical and strategic in order to survive. And perhaps the best example of this is Capitou, who's the heroine of the seventh novel, Don Cazmuro. That title, Don Cazmuro, has a double meaning, which we can talk about later. Well, do tell us now what it means. Well, Don is a title, as in Don Quixote, it's a title that means nobility, but here it's used ironically. And Kazmuhu is a term which means grumpy, basically. So it's Sir Grumpy. Yes, exactly. And in the first chapter of this novel, again, in the first chapter, that's where they give themselves, start to give themselves away.

20:30I think the reader gives them a bit of benefit of the doubt, but very soon we start to spot contradictions and realise that we need to think very hard about what they're saying before we trust them. So he tells us in the first chapter, oh, a young poet called me Don Cazmojo when I didn't take his poems seriously. And I accepted that title. But dear reader, don't go and look up in the dictionary. I will tell you what this means. It means somebody who is very quiet, a recluse. And of course, what does the reader do? The first thing we do is to go and look it up. And it means grumpy, stubborn. And I think this is a very early example of mansplaining.

21:12So we get these male characters who tell the women what to do, get very frustrated when they don't know what they're thinking and are seduced by their beauty to a certain extent. This is summer at its peak. Whole Foods Market Summer Fruit Fest is your invitation to eat the season. Fresh, organic, and bursting with flavor. Start your day with peaches and organic blueberries and yogurt. Build a grazing board with fresh fruit, prosciutto, and artisanal cheese. Then fire up the grill with no antibiotics ever proteins and fresh produce. Savor the season. Shop Summer Fruit Fest at Whole Foods Market.

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23:28Viv, we've just heard from Claire about Donkas Mouho. It doesn't sound like the way a lot of people describe it, which is a modern Othello. Is that right? And why is it compared to Othello? Well, it's all about jealousy. It's all about this woman, Capitu, who has watery eyes under toe-wise, who is very seductive. And we don't hear her voice. We hear her through his eyes. But he's very jealous. He believes that his best friend, Escobar, had an affair with her. And their child is actually his best friend and not his. And the end of the novel, he goes and watches Othello. And after he comes out, he keeps thinking, well, poor Desdemona, she's not guilty.

24:23But what would have happened if she was guilty? Es capitu. And then he tries to think about ways to punish capitu. And in many ways, this casmurro has deceived readers and literary critics for 50 years. It took an American critic, Helen Caldwell, in the 80s, 90s to write The Brazilian Othello. And she pointed out to us, which was right in front of us, you shouldn't trust this first person narrator. we are hearing everything from his point of view. That's right, because in Shakespeare's Othello, we know throughout the play that Desdemona is absolutely innocent. Here, we don't know because we only have one voice, and that's Don Casmurro, and so there is doubt.

25:21We simply don't know. But his name is Bento Santiago. Bento and Don Casmurro are the same person. So Saint Iago, Iago is within his name. So Machado is a brilliant author that he is. He's already showing us Iago is inside his mind. So Don Casmurro is both a fellow and Iago at the same time, both the duped one and the person who's suggesting that Capitou is unfaithful. Anna Claudia, this is probably his best known work. How does it highlight his strengths as a writer? It's a novel that shows how varied his style and prose is. So the young Machado was exposed to a tsunami of novels. He read at the same time Stern, Balzac, Dickens, Cervantes, different traditions of novels.

26:30And throughout his career, he experimented with different novel traditions. So in Don Casmurro, we see this all together. It's at the same time a sentimental novel. It's an elegy, so he misses Capitu, so he has a sort of hate and love relationship with Capitu, and he misses her. He writes a memoir, which is at the same time an autobiography, but an elegy. So he doesn't kill Capitu, she leaves him for Europe. It's also realist, so there are chapters in which you find very clear and realistic descriptions of the setting, the farm where he grew up, characters like Escobar, his mother, his aunt, and the dependent.

27:19Can you just explain what the dependent is? Because this is an important concept in Brazil, but not so familiar here. Yeah, so Machado was a sort of dependent of this wealthy family that he lived with and supported him. So dependent is a free person that works and has a very complicated relationship with a wealthy family because it's not an enslaved person and it has no blood ties with the family. So they have to make themselves useful for the family in order not to be sent out. Viv, you wanted to come in briefly there. Yeah, because I think that the drama is very important in Don Cazmorro. Of course, it is from Shakespeare.

28:04Machado de Assis was himself. He began his career writing poetry, but also writing theatre. It's also very Brazilian, this type of performance. When you are under a patronage, some sort of system, you have to perform in a certain way that you're going to make your employer very much flattered. It's a very theatrical society, Brazil. I remember when I first went there, I had come from working in the Balkans for a long time. Circumstances in Brazil, in terms of poverty and things like that, are comparable to the Balkans, but people still party all the time. It's a very lively society. And I wonder if Machado captures any of that liveliness as well.

28:53I think so, because his novels and short stories, they all have a dark side because of the plot, characters owning slaves, etc. But they are joyful, and that reflects a characteristic of a Brazilian. Brazilian culture and Brazilians nowadays. If you go to Brazil for the first time, you think everybody's happy. And if you read these statistics, not really. Lots of people are not happy, but we are joyful. So in Brazil, you learn very quickly to distinguish between being joyful and happy. And I think that part of his wit and one contribution for the formation of Brazilian literature is exactly how to convey this very specific, unique Brazilian humour into literature, which was then, of course, expanded, incorporated by Lima Barreto, João do Rio, and other writers that came after him.

29:55Claire, do you think that he was writing for women? Were those his first readers, as it were? I mean, we know that he wrote for women's magazines. Do you think he was hoping that women would recognise what was in these novels? Very possibly. I think he creates these very resourceful, practical, strategic female characters because they are the ones who are going to educate the sons and the Brazilians of the future. And clearly nobody wants the Brazilians of the future to be like Bento or Barash Kubas because society will fail just as they have failed. And I think one of the things that's interesting is that in these novels, none of the protagonists have children who survive past the end of the book.

30:43They are the end of a generation in a way. That's really important because Brazil needed to reinvent itself, create new citizens who were forward-looking. Yes, of course, one of the clichés about Brazil is Brazil is the country of the future and it always will be. And it's that elite, that middle class elite, who are often seen as preventing the development because of characters like Don Cosmour. Anna-Claudia, Machado has been criticized for not speaking out enough about slavery as clearly as he might have done. Is that a fair assessment? Not really, but that's how he was read for many generations of critics.

31:33So first of all, in his birth and death certificate, he appears as a white person. And he was considered by many contemporary critics as apolitical. He was even considered against the Republican, the change of the regime, he was considered a monarchist. And just basically because he didn't believe in any changes, he was not really the person who would believe that changing, abolishing slavery or changing from the monarchy to republic would change anything. He's writing for the elite and talking and embracing the point of view of the elite and leaving a lot unsaid about the working class and slavery.

32:18But as one of the critics says, Alfredo Bozi, a Brazilian critic from the University of São Paulo, Machado worked around asymmetric relations that were very close to each other. So, Father Against Mother... That's the title of the story, right? Yes, yes. It's a short story and it was published in 1906, 18 years after the end of slavery. And Machado de Assis constructs a narrator presenting elements of slavery and what it was like in an anecdote about a slave catcher and a runaway slaved woman. So you see the very asymmetric relations. The slave catcher has to catch the slave because it depends on that reward in order to keep his son.