A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism: Machado de Assis

by Roberto Schwarz

Overview

A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism is a translation (from the original Portuguese) of Roberto Schwarz's renowned study of the work of Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis (1839-1908). A leading Brazilian theorist and author of the highly influential notion of "misplaced ideas," Schwarz focuses his literary and cultural analysis on Machado's The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, which was published in 1880. Writing in the Marxist tradition, Schwarz investigates in particular how social structure gets internalized as literary form, arguing that Machado's style replicates and reveals the deeply embedded class divisions of nineteenth-century Brazil.
Widely acknowledged as the most important novelist to have written in Latin America before 1940, Machado had a surprisingly modern style. Schwarz notes that the unprecedented wit, sarcasm, structural inventiveness, and mercurial changes of tone and subject matter found in The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas marked a crucial moment in the history of Latin American literature. He argues that Machado's vanguard narrative reflects the Brazilian owner class and its peculiar status in both national and international contexts, and shows why this novel's success was no accident. The author was able to confront some of the most prestigious ideologies of the nineteenth century with some uncomfortable truths, not the least of which was that slavery remained the basis of the Brazilian economy.
A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism will appeal to those with interests in Latin American literature, nineteenth century history, and Marxist literary theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822322399
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	12/12/2001
Series:	Post-Contemporary Interventions
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.96(w) x 9.24(h) x 0.61(d)

About the Author

Roberto Schwarz, one of Brazil's foremost literary and cultural critics, is the author of Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture and Duas Meninas. John Gledson is Emeritus Professor of Brazilian Studies at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of two books about Machado de Assis and was the translator of Misplaced Ideas, the only other English translation of a work by Schwarz.

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A master on the periphery of capitalism

Machado de Assis

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By Roberto Schwarz

Duke University Press

ISBN: 0-8223-2239-0

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Chapter One

Initial Observations

A strident note, numerous stylistic tricks, and the urge to call attention to oneself dominate the beginning of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1880). The tone is one of deliberate abusiveness, beginning with the nonsense of the title itself-for the dead don't write. The affectionate dedication "To the worm that first gnawed at the cold flesh of my dead body," set out like an epitaph, is another impertinence. The same goes for the intimate way in which the reader is challenged at the beginning, if he doesn't like the book: "I reward you with a snap of the fingers, and goodbye" ("To the Reader"). And what is one to say of the comparison between the Memoirs and the Pentateuch, subtly biased in favor of the former, praised for their originality? Summing things up, it is a real firework display of impudence, in which one provocation follows hard on the heels of another, on a scale ranging from harmless little jokes to profanation.

This persistent recourse to effrontery, without which the Memoirs would be deprived of their peculiar rhythm, works as a technical necessity. To obey it, the narrator repeatedly invades the scene and "perturbs" the course of the novel. These interruptions, which always infringe some rule or other, are Machado's most obvious and famousdevice. Criticism on the novel has treated them as the result of the author's psychological makeup, as a deficiency in the narrative, as a witness of superior intelligence, as something borrowed from English literature, and as metalanguage: none of these ideas is mistaken. In this essay they will be seen as form, a term that will have two meanings: (a) a rule for the composition of the narrative and (b) the stylization of a kind of conduct characteristic of the Brazilian ruling class.

In Machado's novels there is hardly a phrase that doesn't have a second meaning or witty intention. His prose pays extreme attention to detail, and is always on the lookout for immediate effects: this ties the reader down to the minutiae and makes it difficult to picture the wider panorama. As a consequence, and also as a result of the narrator's campaign to call attention to himself, the composition of the whole is less apparent. But it does exist, and if we keep a certain distance, we can begin to see the outlines of a social structure. These outlines are what give a third dimension, or novelistic integrity, to the somewhat effortless brilliance of the witticisms in the foreground. Though difficult to define, this underlying unity is one of the secrets of Machado's work. After pinning it down, we will try to interpret it, a process that will lead us to its Brazilian circumstances.

Chapter One The Author's Demise I hesitated for some time as to whether I should open these memoirs at the beginning or the end, that is, whether I should put my birth or my death in first place. Granted, the common usage is to start with one's birth, but two considerations led me to adopt a different method: the first is that I am not exactly a writer who has died, but a dead man who has become a writer, and for whom the grave was a second cradle; the second is that my writing would thus be more elegant and novel. Moses, who also recounted his own death, didn't put it in the introduction, but at the conclusion: a radical difference between this book and the Pentateuch.

This much said, I died at two o'clock on a Friday afternoon in the month of August 1869, in my lovely little house in the suburbs, in Catumbi. I was some sixty-four years old, robust and prosperous, a bachelor; I was worth about three hundred contos, and I was accompanied to the cemetery by eleven friends. Eleven friends! It is true that there were no letters sent out or notices in the paper. I should add that it was raining.

The bumptious affectation of this opening, in which the impossible is said in the first-person singular, is very great. It seems clear that the situation of the "dead man who has become a writer," contrasting with that of the "writer who had died," with its deliberately cheap wit, does not destroy the realistic effect, even if it mocks it. On the contrary, it bolsters it, because without that realism it would be neither original nor funny. Instead of affirming the existence of another world, Bras wants to heap abuse on ours, which is his too, and to inflict his impertinence on us. It is a "cheap" and methodical humor, something like a practical joke, tiresome at first sight but still a vital find, as we shall see.

In other words, we have a narrator who is deliberately impertinent and lacking in credibility. And what is one to think of the literary doubts ("I hesitated for some time"), logical considerations, and choices between different methods paraded by the dead man? In the abstract, in their subject and tone, they would pass for the concerns of an enlightened gentleman. In the context, they are no less false than the status of the false dead man itself, something that makes them all the more insulting. They are posturings that are not intended to delude, nor do they hide anything. It is not a question, then, of believing them, or of looking for their truth or logical coherence, but of admiring their cheek and the virtuosity with which they are handled. At every turn Bras puts on the airs of a modern gentleman, only to disparage them the next moment, then take them up again, setting up a system of inconsequentiality that in the course of the novel will become the norm. It is as if enlightened conduct were equally deserving of respectful consideration and mockery, functioning at one moment as an indispensable norm, at another as an obstacle. These pendulum swings provide the outline of a mode of existence.

There is also something of a falsetto about the prose. The intonation of the first lines is prim and proper: "I hesitated for some time," "Granted, the common usage," "to adopt a different method." The same thing goes for the rhetorical tricks of the dead man, which sound as if they were in italics, with their starched syntax, and above all their antithetical constructions: beginning and end, birth and death, common and different, grave and cradle, and so on. The aim of showing off one's superiority is obvious, even if it is inseparable from the absurd narrative situation. Thus, prestige and its opposite are joined together in the novel's diction. They are there together at every moment, and behind the combination the narrator always wins out, always triumphs twice over, first when he points out the merits of his own rhetoric, and then when he laughs at its absurdity. It is true that the discourse and the ambiguities in this case are the dead man's, and that they characterize him as an individual-if one can call him that-but their import does not end there, for the eloquence is all set out in order to point to social prerogatives and give a dimension or an aftertaste of class to the writing.

The satire at this point is bland, for the reader will easily concede that the affected use of official culture and the educated trappings (hesitations, suppositions, considerations, method) is amusing. And it contains no surprises, since the voice from beyond the grave automatically puts parody into everything it says. In the final sentence of the paragraph, however, in a break with this-in the end somewhat tepid-humor, comes a real bombshell, out of the blue: "Moses, who also recounted his own death, didn't put it in the introduction, but at the conclusion: a radical difference between this book and the Pentateuch." Distinguishing between his work and the Bible on one precise point, as if they were comparable in other respects, Bras Cubas shows that his mocking disposition is not going to be limited to metaphysical literary banter, or to games with verisimilitude and literary conventions. His courage doesn't fail him when it comes to a clear case of "bad taste," and it reaches its true fulfillment in outrage and blasphemy.

Far from being presumptuous, the parallel with the Scriptures is the product of another feeling, much less easily avowed: there is a malicious satisfaction in humiliating and insulting, in letting it be known that the narrator's insolence will stop at nothing, that not a stone will be left standing-all of which represents something superior or inferior for him, we don't know which. The contrast between this provocation and the previous ones is marked, since it is one thing to belittle literary good sense, counting on the reader's complicity-itself malevolent, since Bras Cubas himself is the object of laughter-and quite another to trivialize Holy Writ in the space of a short sentence. In this second case, the intention is to overstep the bounds. Of course, the literary effect is neither in the little jokes nor in the profanity taken separately, but in the sudden intimacy established between the two, as they follow one on the heels of the other. Ignoring the difference between them, the narrator unveils what was only hinted at in the first affronts to the reader: that is, the desire to provoke and destroy, which is either attenuated or accentuated by the frivolity of the diction. This unexpected shift from humor to open aggression, the first of a long series, is a key maneuver in the Memoirs, where it appears at every level, as subject matter, as narrative rhythm, as a quirk of diction, and so on. We will find it again in more developed forms, when we will attempt to interpret it. For the time being, we repeat that it is the culmination, the unveiling of what is latent and implicit in the liberties the narrator takes with the norms, whether literary or not. The exercise of abuse for its own sake, the basic material worked with in the Memoirs-and which will be described later on-has one of its moments of truth in these sudden shifts to something more serious, when the narrator's subjective excesses are given full play.

The reader will have felt, in the paragraph we have quoted, that the impression Bras makes changes with every proposition. The character that in the first line hesitates as to the best way to compose one's memoirs is not the same one who, straight away, promises-just like that-to enlighten us about death itself. In turn, this is not the same one who takes pleasure in the paradox of the dead man who has become an author, who again is not the same one concerned about the elegance and novelty of his style (and so about fashion), who is not the same one who makes the joke about the Pentateuch. There are no transitions in this rotation of different poses: it is an exercise in volubility, and the literary effect depends on the vivacity and frequency of the contrasts. To round it off, the cultivated prose-itself a pose-lends a varnish of respectability to the narrator's leaps, maneuvers, and transformations. This veneer in turn disguises the crude aspect of the insolence, at the same time as it gives depth to his social characterization, as well, of course, as producing a comic disproportion. In any event, this is a rhythm that presupposes calculated effects at every turn, and a prose written as if one were watching oneself in the mirror. The personifications have to be created and completed in the space of a sentence, with one eye on the sentence before, another on the one just coming, and a third on the reader, without all of which the element of the unforeseen, essential to the liveliness of this rhythm, cannot be guaranteed. It is true that its manipulative, exhibitionist dimension makes for unease, and leads to a reading enlivened by reservations and mistrust. In their turn, these will be brought to the surface and manipulated ("don't be turning your nose up at me" [ch. 4]), bringing right home to the reader the relationship that the novel is examining.

Which of Bras's faces is the real one? None in particular, of course. The more so as the narrative situation (the dead man who has become a writer) is a self-evident joke that plays havoc with the parameters of fictional reality. In other words, since the narrator lacks credibility, the features that he constantly puts on and takes off have an uncertain truth status and become an element of provocation: this latter, on the other hand, there can be no mistaking. The same goes for the lack of definition, or for the jokes, which destabilize the book's literary status: as they create doubts about genre, they allow the threat that a stab in the back might come at any moment to hover above the text. These are shifting sands, and the reader has to find his way as he can, without the guidance of agreed reference points, with only the narrator's words to point the way-words that are said right to his face, with the undisguised intention of causing confusion. A kind of "anything goes" in which, in the absence of a conventional framework, the narrative voice is important in every single line forces the reader into a state of continuous alert, or maximum attention, that is characteristic of great literature.

Paradoxically, the rhetorical artifice and blatant insincerity make for an effect of the most indiscreet kind of nakedness, because they reveal such an obvious desire to manipulate appearances. By means of an inversion that lies at the basis of modern literature, the mistrust in the artist's power of representation-whose innocence is placed in doubt-does not abolish reality but displaces it into the very act of representing, which becomes its ultimate foundation and is never disinterested. In these circumstances, it's not a question of knowing if Bras is a conscientious writer of his memoirs, a straight-faced comic, a snob, or a cultivator of profanities, but rather of accompanying the movements of the will going on behind this procession of different embodiments, somewhat at our expense. In place of the convention of veracity, which is prevented from taking shape by the narrator's continual transgressions, there is created between reader and author a de facto relationship, a struggle to fix meanings, and an attempt to label one another-what kind of wise guy is this narrator? what kind of wretch is this reader?-in which the one tries to bring the other down. And so, the representation flows along quite openly in the element of will, or better, of arbitrariness, and objectivity is at most an appearance that Bras likes to make use of from time to time.

In analogous fashion, we can see that the liveliness of the sentences depends, without exception, on the presence of some peccadillo or other that gives them their piquancy. To recount absurdities as if they were the truth, to show no respect for the common man, to sacrifice eternal verities to novelty, to affront religion, and so on are modes of conduct generally thought of as wrong, and that Bras flaunts for their own sake. How can we fail to judge him, even if it's to let him off? Not even the ill-humored, somewhat cynical kind of reader, who perhaps sympathizes with the character's excesses, forgets the norm being flouted. It is Bras who obliges one to make moral judgments, at the same time as he pays no attention to them, setting up a situation that at once has no rules and is normative, that is permanently morally out-of-court and characterized by the unpunished abuse of power. It may be added that the picture here is purely of the narrator's subjective character, constructed on the basis of provocations and stylistic exercises. It so happens that the only given of external reality-the narrator's status as a dead man-is unrealistic, which removes its factual nature and makes it nothing more than a witty fraud. So, in the absence of an undeniable material reality that would establish the illusion of objectivity and commit the narrator to not countering his own words, the reader has nowhere to grasp him and is delivered up to him, tied hand and foot. The narrative relationship is one of disloyalty, and the last word, though it has no authority, always belongs to the narrator.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Introduction / John Gledson

Preface

1. Initial Observations

2. A Formal Principle

3. The Practical Matrix

4. Some Implications of the Prose

5. The Social Aspect of the Narrator and the Plot

6. The Fate of the Poor

7. The Rich on Their Own

8. The Role of Ideas

9. Questions of Form

10. Literary Accumulation in a Periferal Country

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

"A brilliant and penetrating analysis of Machado's Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas. This is the kind of reading that transforms one's understanding of the novel. After reading Schwarz, it is impossible to see Machado in the same light as before. Exemplary of what literary analysis can and should be, this seminal study transcends its focus on Brazilian literature and becomes a model for literary critics. "--Randal Johnson, University of California, Los Angeles

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