Race, Nation, Representation: Machado de Assis and Lima

Barreto
Renata R. Mautner Wasserman

Luso-Brazilian Review, Volume 45, Number 2, 2008, pp. 84-106 (Article)

Published by University of Wisconsin Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lbr.0.0029

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/259039

Access provided by Stephen F Austin State University (12 Mar 2019 17:13 GMT)
 Race, Nation, Representation
Machado de Assis and Lima Barreto

Renata R. Mautner Wasserman

Na medida em que a questão racial entra em jogo na definição da cultura

brasileira, interessa examinar obras dos dois grandes romancistas afro-
brasileiros do século dezenove, Machado de Assis e Lima Barreto. Há tempo
que a crítica os opõe um ao outro. Em geral a oposição se firma na forma
pela qual representam a realidade em que se inserem as suas obras e perso-
nagens, e mais, pela qual representam a questão da presença africana na
cultura brasileira. O exame de algumas dentre as muitas obras que deixa-
ram, mostra que, embora em geral a expressão seja diferente, as posições dos
autores quanto aos problemas sociais e econômicos que abordam e quanto
às suas relações com questões raciais, tem muito em comum.

A racializing reading of fiction should find, embedded in a text, a sup-

pressed but determining subtext of the power relations between—or
among—racial groups. According to Toni Morrison, that subtext provides
the “figurations” of the culture and the psyches where the text arises (ix). In
Playing in the Dark, Morrison looks at white authors writing in the “wholly
racialized society that is the United States” and finds that even when their
text is neutral (“neutral” often translating to “white”), the subtext is always
“conscious of representing one’s own race” to readers (xii). Thus an Amer-
ican (that is, U. S.) identity is consistently defined, not against European
(or English) culture, but against the Africanist, as she terms it, part of that
identity. The construction of an American “white” identity always implies
the construction of a “black” identity (90). Morrison notes that the United
States were not unique in this construction, which also happened in Europe

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 Wasserman 85

and in (a generic) South America (7). The remark is suggestive and invites
taking as a test case the works of Machado de Assis and Lima Barreto, Bra-
zilian writers of African ancestry: from within a different culture, they may
have raised very different “racializing” questions.
When Machado de Assis was turning himself into the greatest Brazilian
writer of the nineteenth century, it was not fashionable, and certainly not
viable, in a business sense, to highlight his African ancestry. In fact, readers
and critics often chose to “forget” that ancestry, in an example of collective
tact; his successes, friendships with the great, mentoring to the young, co-
founding of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, lent weight to assertions that
a racial democracy reigned in Brazil, contemporaneously with slavery. It did
not, but the trajectory of Machado de Assis also highlights important differ-
ences between the dynamics of race in Brazil and in the United States, where
such a case—a nineteenth-century poet, novelist, and critic, of African an-
cestry who was in his time a central, not marginal, figure in its literary and
cultural history—does not exist. If Machado de Assis is read for his own
place in a literature that, like that of the US, was asserting its cultural force
against established European standards, and is also read in contrast with
the place of Lima Barreto, with whose life, work, and critical fortune his
overlapped, the differences are striking, and do not lead to generalization.
So this essay will do what Machado de Assis might not have wanted done
and look at his work in relation to history, to “race,” and to Lima Barreto’s,
and consider whether there are limits to racialization as an encompassing
critical category.
In terms of their reputation, any contest between Machado de Assis and
Lima Barreto is lopsided: Assis is the great man of Brazilian literature, com-
parable to the best that the world has to offer. Barreto is the “cursed” writer,
who, unlike Machado de Assis, was often jobless, drank too much, con-
sorted with bums, was placed in an insane asylum, and instead of carefully
crafted and worded innovative works, wrote strident satire and disheveled
novels in which his anger at the incompetence of government, at the treat-
ment of the poor, the black, the female, and the old kept breaking through
and playing havoc with structure and rationale. Lima Barreto himself dis-
liked the comparison, and thought the older writer too timid, enslaved to
stultified grammar and thought. Alfredo Bosi explains that Machado de
Assis was not indifferent to the “contradictions between the happy promises
of evolutionism and the brutal realities of our fin de siècle,” but that rather
than voicing an “expressionist anguish” in the “convulsive prose” of other
writers, he developed his own “tone of quiet resignation;” the writers in the
generation following his, like Lima Barreto, rejected that tone, and “took to
the extreme . . . a denunciation of the overt or latent iniquities in the social
and racial relations of a Brazil whose elites had no rhetoric beside that of

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 86 Luso-Brazilian Review 45:2

linear progress” (157, 156). Yet one can argue that the difference between a
restrained and a convulsive prose signals a less noticeable but more sig-
nificant difference between two self-definitions of the culture: one says it
can and will exercise the stereotypical self-control of the (white) English—
economically dominant then and very much present in Brazilian affairs; the
other acknowledges—accepts, embraces—what both earlier (with Gonçalves
Dias, José de Alencar) and later was acknowledged—accepted, embraced—as
its (hybrid) “tropical” destiny. In the context of this kind of opposition the
peculiar evaluation arises according to which, if Machado de Assis is the
greatest Brazilian novelist, he is also an isolated phenomenon, while Barreto
is the creator (in Policarpo Quaresma, for instance) of a prototypical, suffer-
ing, ever-hopeful Brazilian (Houaiss, xviii). Yet, what if Machado de Assis
is not indifferent to the suffering of the people around him—of his own or
of other colors —and Barreto is not just an undisciplined scribbler with a
heart angered by racial injustice?
The literature by and about Machado de Assis is vast; I will focus mainly
on the late novels Esaú e Jacó and Memorial de Aires, and the short story
“Pai contra mãe,” which span the spectrum of his involvement with the pol-
itics of his time. Much of the writing by and about Lima Barreto centers pre-
cisely on his race; I will address principally his novel Clara dos Anjos.
When Esaú e Jacó appeared, reviewers showed their enthusiasm in curi-
ously negative praise: a friend, Mário de Alencar, gushes that calling a book
by Machado de Asssis good would be superfluous; calling it banal would
be like denying that the sun shines. Yet the book is difficult to like: it skirts
the prevailing realism, and avoids the bravura structure and invention of,
say, Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas. While realistic convention attends
to the historical context and hides the narrative voice, Esaú e Jacó makes a
point of paying only oblique attention to its dramatic social and political
context (proclamation of the Republic, exile of the Emperor, abolition, infla-
tion, abandonment of former slaves); at the same time, the chatty narrator
(voluble, says Roberto Schwarz) establishes a direct, overt, often aggressive,
and almost didactic relationship with the reader. These violations disturb
a line of critics, including Gilberto Freyre and Lima Barreto himself, who
sees Machado de Assis as selling out.
Though these critics do what Morrison rejects—determining how an
author should have written (90)—like Morrison they raise the question of
how to present, or represent context, and, particularly in the New World,
national or cultural identity: do certain forms of representation lead to the
“normalization” of characteristics that are especially reprehensible? In
a tactful and restrained essay published in New York, in 1871, “Notícia da
atual literatura brasileira: instinto de nacionalidade” [Notes on present-day
Brazilian literature: the instinct of nationality], Machado de Assis explains

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 Wasserman 87

Brazilian literature to the outside world: contemporary novels are instruc-

tive to “any foreigner not familiar with our customs,” for they describe “na-
ture and . . . manners” in “animated and picturesque pages.” He deplores the
inferiority of Brazilian writing in any genre requiring analysis, but is happy
that at least the “books of a certain French school . . . have not contaminated
Brazil . . .”(III, 818). The “instinct of nationality” makes Brazilian literature
continuous and internally intertextual; national character is represented by
precisely those elements, like nature, or certain manners, that Machado de
Assis is accused of ignoring; the “French school,” on the other hand, in-
forms, even if it doesn’t determine, Barreto’s work. “Instinto de nacionali-
dade” defines the specifically national; while still measuring it against an
external model, it also declares its independence from the aesthetic form
that demands an engagement with its immediate and generally problematic
circumstances. Thus the essay deflects attention from Machado de Assis’s
choice of setting his novels in an urban environment—not in “nature”—and
showing the forces of commerce and politics aslant.
Suddenly, Barreto’s mockery of both the Romantic “indianism” of a na-
tionalizing Brazilian literature, and of the cult of Brazilian “nature,” seen
in Triste fim de Policarpo Quaresma, hints at a convergence between the
two writers who abandon the Indian and Brazilian nature as the privileged
markers of Brazilian difference and greatness. But if the detached, urbane
prose of Machado de Assis does not signal a detachment from Brazilian
“reality” (and John Gledson, Roberto Schwarz, Raymundo Faoro, among
others have argued that convincingly), the difference between the writers
resides in their stance rather than in their engagement. In any case, if the
“problem” with Machado de Assis is his indifference, especially in the works
of the “last phase,” this indifference could refer not to Brazilian reality as an
absolute, but to “Brazilian reality on the terms imposed by the national pro-
ject founded by [Brazilian] romanticism” (Baptista, 32–33).
By the end of the nineteenth century, as slavery was abolished and immi-
gration encouraged, renewed argument flared up about a definition of na-
tional difference founded on “nature” and embodied in the original inhabit-
ants; a definition that could also function to hide the African component,
on which the nation depended economically. Given the economic pressure
to enter a global economy and the cultural pressure to adopt European theo-
ries like Spencer’s “social” Darwinism (which Machado de Assis spoofs with
Quincas Borba’s theory of “humanitism”), and the racial theories gaining
force in European cultural centers, the actual racial composition of the
Brazilian population, noted and studied by every foreign visitor, becomes a
problem, as does how to write it. Thus the difference between Machado de
Assis’s and Lima Barreto’s approach to the problem of (their) color becomes
a feature in the “national project.” Machado de Assis can then be accused of

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 88 Luso-Brazilian Review 45:2

denying, repressing, and ignoring both the problem of race in Brazil and his
own place in it; Barreto can be praised for highlighting the same thematics
and launching a series of red-hot indictments of racism and racial prejudice
into the comfortable discourse about a characteristically Brazilian racial
democracy.
By setting their works in Rio, both writers immerse them in the epicen-
ter of Brazil’s transformation from a rural to an urban economy, based on
money, not barter, and on commercial, not personal relations. Raymundo
Faoro takes a census of characters in Machado de Assis to argue that through
them the author traces this transference of economic power from landown-
ers to the (urban) agents who bought, sold, and financed them, from the
producing countryside to the commercial city, while nobility titles sold and
granted to rural landowners kept the social and political power firmly cen-
tered around the Emperor, and work was performed by slaves, rural and
urban. Land itself had little value and was exploited to exhaustion; most
of the landowners’ capital was tied up in their slave holdings. In the result-
ing society leisure was an indispensable status sign—both Antonio Candido
and Roberto Schwarz argue forcibly that while in the dominant Western
nations economic and political power was moving to a class of bourgeois
entrepreneurs who valued economic activity, Brazil continued to value and
support living on interest or on slave labor and to devalue all work, which it
was unable to dissociate from slavery.
The clash of values in this state of transition leaves its mark on the fiction
of the time, but it is in his “crônicas,” or newspaper columns, that Machado
de Assis chooses to show his interest in them directly, savaging his sur-
roundings in a mild and reasonable tone, satirizing a society of show and
patronage (April 13, 1889), and its attitude toward slavery. Five days after
the publication of the decree of emancipation, his column features a “lib-
eral” bragging of having freed his slave days before the decree, though keep-
ing him employed for a pittance, insulting and cuffing him when necessary,
intending to highlight this deed when he runs for office (May 19, 1888); a few
weeks later he proposes, on the model of Gogol’s Dead Souls, a scheme of
buying slaves and then backdating the purchase in order to pocket the resti-
tution the government offered slave owners for their loss of capital (June 26,
1888). There is a contained anger at precisely those “manners” that a for-
eigner would not notice in the literature that displays the “instinct of nation-
ality:” the crônicas wash the domestic laundry at home, while the corrosive
urbanity of his fictions creates, by sheer force, the analytic, that is, detached
accounts of his culture that Machado de Assis proposes as competitive with
foreign models. Barreto’s characters, on the other hand, are versed in Euro-
pean thought and literature and in Brazilian lore (the eponymous Gonzaga
de Sá and Policarpo Quaresma, respectively) but no less crushed by race

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 Wasserman 89

and history and culture. In both cases race is an inescapable platform from
which to mount the argument, not because it is intrinsically determinant,
but because it constructs the culture’s marginal position.
Machado de Assis’s analytic and oblique treatment of matters may thus
be precisely what counts as his “universal” appeal. If Sterne and De Maistre
are his main influences, and his style is British in its humor and stoicism
then he—and by extension—Brazilian culture can claim cultural develop-
ment on a par with that of those who do not seem to have the problem of
race. Barreto was not “civilized” in that way. His style, his drinking, his
bouts with madness—and his father’s madness, which gives him a “tara,”
a hereditary stain—mark him and by extension his writings as deformed.
The deformation can be presented as a fatal defect, or as the inevitable con-
sequence of the pressure of Brazilian racism. Yet Machado de Assis’s re-
straint may be as much a consequence of social pressure as the lack of it in
Barreto.
For Roberto Schwarz this restraint is structural, the result of a “self-
disidentification,” resulting from the contradiction at the foundations of the
nationality between the liberal ideas it derived from external (European)
models, and an economy based on slavery that forces members of its elites
to define themselves “simultaneously as proponents of slavery and as en-
lightened individuals.” Its aesthetic expression, Schwarz argues, produces
the characteristic tone of Machado de Assis’s late works ([1990], 41, 40). Yet
if it is foundational, the dislocation cannot be unique to Machado de Assis
and would be equally present in Policarpo Quaresma, Barreto’s relation of
a spectacular series of failures to construct a coherent Brazilian self. And it
is: there too race is treated obliquely, in the form of Quaresma’s wise, afro-
Brazilian helper in his farming experiment, or in the family he finds wait-
ing outside the insane asylum from where he has just been freed, for one of
theirs who is still inside. But while Barreto has Quaresma executed in the
early years of the Republic, Esaú e Jacó functions throughout on Machado
de Assis’s signature distancing effect, floating schematically through highly
dramatic political events: the emancipation of the slaves, the proclamation
of the Republic, the exile of the Emperor. On the other hand, Lima Barreto’s
Clara dos Anjos, which confronts racism and racial prejudice head-on, ig-
nores the larger political context; there, questions of race are treated most
dramatically in the private sphere.
Perhaps readerly readiness then plays a more important role than usu-
ally acknowledged in the assessment of the two novelists. Esaú e Jacó was
first received as a psychological drama: Mário de Alencar delights in the
portrait of the ostensible narrator, Counselor Aires, and cries at the death
of the “heroine,” Flora (2). And the redoubtable José Veríssimo finds that
Machado de Assis paints an unexpectedly emotional scene (in the death of

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 90 Luso-Brazilian Review 45:2

the twins’ mother). Reviewers agree that the plot is thin but the character-
izations are wonderful and the style, the language, are exquisite, inimitable,
light, and clear and humorous —though Alcides Maya observes that this
humor arises from “a deep current of bitter pessimistic philosophy” (431).
Recent allegorical readings however, tilt heavily toward the political. They
see the twins referred to in the title as two sides of Brazil, in conflict from
the womb: the revolutionary, republican, admirer of Robespierre against the
conservative monarchist. The passivity and good manners of the retired dip-
lomat, Counselor Aires, whose help their mother enlists to reconcile them,
represent instruments for peace but also of stagnation. Both brothers love
Flora, who loves both and, incapable of making up her mind, dies of the
internal conflict, a picture of Brazil itself, unable to decide its political di-
rection. This reading confirms the author’s pessimism; in effect, this char-
acterization of the nation as frail, undecided, and eventually dead, is not
so different from Barreto’s in Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma, built on a
triply reiterated structure of nationalist hope leading to disappointment and
death (see Silviano Santiago).
The sense of a dead end plays itself out, both in Machado de Assis and
in Lima Barreto, through a consistent warping, thwarting, and sabotaging
of the marriage plot, so commonly used in novels of the period to indicate
the ethnic and ethical development of a society. In Machado de Assis’s late
novels the main characters are typically bachelors (Bras Cubas, happy, at
the end, not to have had children; Quincas Borba; the Counselor Aires; even
Bento Santiago of Dom Casmurro, whose wife, and—putative—son die); so
they are in Barreto (Gonzaga de Sá, Policarpo Quaresma, even Clara dos
Anjos, seduced and rejected). The result is a feeling of stagnation, the con-
tradiction Schwarz notes resulting in paralysis and (again) “pessimism.”
Flora, who occupies the position of “heroine,” is mostly passive, or, as
Counselor Aires describes her, “indecipherable.” In her indecipherable pas-
sivity, unlike other young women in Machado’s fiction, she does not work or
scheme to achieve social mobility and financial security. Neither does she
emulate her mother, who engineers her husband’s career. But if, as the nar-
rator implies, she dies of indecision, the constraints that lead to her death
are the same that keep the brothers stuck in the impasse they represent for
each other: the generation of emancipation and the republic do not marry or
reproduce; they are stymied and thus refute the myth of progress on which
the nation builds its sense that as a Republic without slaves it can finally join
the club of the powerful.
This stymie appears also in the secondary characters, as in Flora’s fa-
ther, whose political principles, liberal or conservative, can be changed, like
an overcoat, because ideas don’t really matter; only power does, and that
remains in the family. Similarly, Santos, the twins’ father, a financier, prof-

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 Wasserman 91

its from the economic transformations that bring about both emancipation
and the encilhamento, the big inflationary bubble of the 1890s caused in part
by an injection of money from the central bank, to compensate slave owners
for their losses. In Taunay’s O encilhamento, a novel about the bubble, the
huge profits weakened the national moral fiber (and scrambled its social hi-
erarchy). Assis’s narration remains neutral: he just says Santos is involved
in some agricultural miracle somewhere in Paraná; we assume it fails, but he
does not suffer. But Paraná is one of the Southern states that turn to immi-
gration as a substitute for slavery; abolition is one of the economic changes
in the background of the novel that Santos navigates so well.
For this atmosphere of paralysis amid momentous-appearing changes,
Aires is a paradigmatic character. He is a spectator: he is not married, has
no children, does not work. He refuses to take sides in the controversies
swirling around him, personal or historical, and endeavors to create, if not
peace, then its appearance among the other characters, with a cordiality that
is in the end corrosive. The “Advertência” (a modified preface) with which
the book opens, implies that Aires is the narrator, as he is in Assis’s next
and last novel, the Memorial de Aires, a diary undermined by the unreliabil-
ity he shares with others of the author’s narrators. Aires has the involved
detachment that defines an aesthetic stance toward life and society, pro-
grammatically avoiding the engagement of the crônicas with the burning
political and moral questions that constitute the subject and background of
the last two novels.
This tone of the novels documents and keeps at a distance, according
to José Guilherme Merquior, “the collapse . . . of a certain form of society,
which Faoro terms ‘estamental,’ ” a society of relationships, rather than of
contract ([1998] 43). Both Merquior and Faoro insist that Machado de Assis
does not share his narrators’ detachment from social and economic chang-
es. For Merquior, in fact, his sensitivity to the social problems of his time is
biographically determined, as Assis embodied the possibility of social mo-
bility in the old regime for someone of his humble origins and mixed race,
once he secured the protection of a high-status family; that “initial push”
led to his high position in the Imperial bureaucracy, and allowed him the
prestige with which he established the Brazilian Academy of Letters (33). But
those “springboard niches,” as Merquior calls them, that allowed selected
individuals to rise socially, also allowed the society not to make opportuni-
ties more generally available. If affected by this contradiction, Machado de
Assis’s work should show a lower degree of “integration” than his personal
story—and one way to mask such disruptive content would be through its
“elegance” and its erudition, qualities that signaled, in the work’s reception,
the social elevation that had been achieved by the author. But Merquior
also claims that this indirect approach to the representation of historic or

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 92 Luso-Brazilian Review 45:2

social conditions places Machado de Assis fully within the realist/natural-

ist movements at a level of sophistication and complexity that are the hall-
marks of Brazilian post-Romanticism. Yet the writers of the period often
relied on literature to rise in social status: both Assis and Barreto did that,
but Machado de Assis, unlike Barreto, disguised the matter when he dealt
with status. According to Antonio Candido his sense of status was “pro-
found” but “not at all documentary” (“Esquema,” 31) and as Bosi shows, his
use of pairs of characters that were not far apart socially points to, while dis-
guising it, social distance as one of the factors that keep the afro-Brazilian
population in a state of oppression. Blocked at the social status immediately
above, the character of mixed race will see the impediment as psychological
or economic, not racial, his story shaped in the language and through the
culture of the cultivated classes.
Machado de Assis does address the problems of race and slavery in fic-
tion frontally, in one of his many short stories, “Pai contra mãe,” which is as
blunt as anything by Barreto, yet shows clearly the differences between the
authors and raises the question of how to approach those differences. Un-
characteristically stark and direct, the story begins with a description, not
a narrative, of the conditions of slavery, and of the instruments of confine-
ment and torture. When Machado de Assis explains the economics of how
slaves could improve their living conditions or buy their freedom, and when
he explains how frequent escapes create the occupation of slave-catcher,
there is nothing of the detachment of Aires or the cruelty of Brás Cubas; the
characterization of the shift less protagonist who makes his living catching
fugitives against fierce competition condemns both the man and the society
that creates him. But it is not that simple: on his way to place his new-born,
whom, to his surprise, he finds himself loving, on the “wheel” for abandoned
children, the slave catcher recognizes a pregnant fugitive. As a parent, he
feels for her; he knows that, when he returns her, she will be beaten, but he
needs the money. She is beaten and miscarries; the slave-catcher retrieves
his boy, and with the reward money is able to support him for another while.
In the tale the suffering of slaves does not exist by itself but is part of the piti-
less struggle for survival at the Hobbesian bottom of the social scale, a rot-
ten substratum that infects the entire structure and that a couple of decrees
won’t cure. In its directness, this story belies the indifference of the narrative
voice throughout, and reveals it as a cover and a deflection of pain and also
as a characteristically aggressive stance against itself and the reader, whom
Machado de Assis accuses, flatters, and disdains at the same time. If “Pai
contra mãe,” breaches the customary detachment of his fiction, the breach
shines a different light on his programmatic skepticism, as on Aires’s aes-
thetic position toward life, and this distancing achieves an indictment no
less serious, and possibly even less hopeful than Barreto’s.

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 Wasserman 93

Esaú e Jacó can then be seen to be as disillusioned a novel about back-

wardness as Barreto’s Policarpo. It is not gripping, but meanders aimlessly:
a psychic’s prediction when the twins are born, that there will be “future
things” remains suspended; so does the romance between Flora and the
twins, and so does everything else in the novel. At that point in his career,
Machado de Assis could afford to thwart convention, and experiment by
representing paralysis in a novel that does not move. Formally, the novel
looks ahead to the self-referential mode of modernity, yet the plot shows
the nation stuck in time: while the world is talking about socialism, evolu-
tion, and the scientific control of the natural sphere, the twins quarrel about
whether to post over their beds the portraits of Robespierre or of the King of
France (Louis XVI!), an outdated controversy that has France as a referent.
Flora’s death is undramatic and almost immotivated: she fades away leaving
the two young men stymied and without issue. There is no view of a future
in the book, except as a fruitless repetition of the past. The unwillingness of
Counselor Aires to take any position, and his obsession with conciliation
are typical and ineffective ways of dealing with the genuine problems that
his friends, and the country face. At the same time, posing as a psychologi-
cal essay, the novel sidesteps the freeing of the slaves, the end of the Empire,
the proclamation of the Republic, which, everybody knows, were historical
turning points: they glance off the characters, who are incapable of strong
emotion or effective action. An indictment of the indifference and the lack
of a civic life in the country, the novel accounts for, and neutralizes politics
in the same movement.
The allegorical readings of John Gledson, and of Raymundo Faoro op-
pose psychological or purely formal approaches and concentrate on the
close relation between the plot and the contemporary social and political
situation. Gledson in particular refers to the crônicas to show the author’s
interest in politics, even an obsession with the encilhamento. He reads pas-
sages that seem obscure, arbitrary, or disconnected from the plot as ironic
and critical observations on current events, or on the future of the nation;
his tight allegorical reading establishes its kinship with stiffer works, like
Quincas Borba and apparently tries to compensate for the slackness of the
text ([1986], 161–214).
If in Esaú e Jacó class and race insulate characters from momentous po-
litical events, effecting criticism by omission, in Memorial de Aires, argues
Gledson, Machado de Assis is more specific about the sham of abolition as
enacted. There, the slaves of the lovely heiress beg her to let them follow her
to Rio rather than stay at the plantation; instead, she decides to give them
the plantation, impressing friends and relations with her grand gesture. But
since the former slaves have neither the capital nor the training to run it, her
gift is not an act of generosity, just as their request was not a sign they were

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 94 Luso-Brazilian Review 45:2

content under servitude; the incident, as narrated, uncovers the cruelty of

emancipation as enacted and disguised by talk of freedom. Yet even in this
instance, the indictment is glimpsed through the thoughts and opinions of
Aires, uninvolved and, with the instinct of his nationality, inclined to place
compromise and conciliation above principle.
It is his stress on principle and his intolerance of conciliation that give
Barreto his edgy and exaggerated tone, and to an extent marginalize him.
Conciliation serves the powerful well and that Barreto disdains it is another
way in which he sticks in their craw. However, there is no applicable princi-
ple on which to accept one narrative stance and reject the other, apart from
personal preference, especially since it is not clear that either has a greater
effect on political or social action for change, or which would be the most
effective.
Slavery does not come up directly in the plot of Esaú e Jacó: the main
characters own slaves as a matter of course, and none think of it as a prob-
lem; Santos and the conservative twin think that abolition will ruin the
Brazilian economy. Yet Santos, the financier, profits handsomely from the
bubble that grows in the years following it, fueled in part by government
compensation to soften the blow to slave owners. Gledson then shows that
in Memorial de Aires Machado de Assis presents abolition not as a gesture
of benevolence toward slaves, but as a necessary economic move, and grant-
ing land to former slaves as a cynical transfer of assets that were (as Faoro
has argued) losing value. The owners were perfectly ready to let their newly
freed slaves sink in a new economy that disadvantaged them as firmly as the
old economy had. Machado de Assis’s doubts about that benevolence and
the uniformly positive consequences of abolition, could be and were ignored
for a long time—with a twist on Jauss’ horizon of expectations in which
the writing can handle evolving expectations (144–207). By the time Barreto
was writing, that horizon had in fact changed enough in his favor for Mon-
teiro Lobato to ask him for a manuscript and offer to pay him royalties—but
not enough to grant him, till two decades after his death, the attention he
was due.
The ability to survive such changes may reside in how, in his last novels,
Esaú e Jacó and Memorial de Aires, Machado de Assis uses the narrator to de-
construct the anodyne story line. Roberto Schwarz argues that the narrator
of Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas is a brilliant invention through which
Machado de Assis exposes and criticizes the class of “owners,” as Schwarz
calls them, through the voice of one of them; in Esaú e Jacó this voice sets
itself apart as an observer. In both cases it belongs to the class that dispenses
patronage and on whom the poor depend absolutely, in the absence of a
labor market, and that therefore can turn abruptly from generosity to ca-
price and cruelty, both forms of affirming power. For Schwarz, this techni-

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 Wasserman 95

cal innovation of the last phase destabilizes the power system from within
and “deprovincializes” the writer and by extension all of Brazilian literature
([1998] 47–64). The invention of the Aires voice, as well as the breaks in its
continuity can then be seen not as detachment or retreat but as strategies
through which Machado de Assis adapts his technique to the progressive-
looking stagnation of his times.
A key point of Schwarz’ analysis of the work of Machado de Assis is the
contradiction between the material basis of a slave-owning economy and
its aspiration to full participation in a world culture and economy. The sys-
tem depends on a market of labor and of products, invokes the liberalism
based on Mills and Adam Smith, and promotes democratic governments
and a package of civil rights and civic obligations (excepting women, racial,
religious, or ethnic minorities as a matter of course). Esaú e Jacó places it-
self precisely at the moment when, having formally abolished slavery and
established itself as a republic, not a monarchy or an Empire, Brazil is once
again, as it was at the time of Independence, positioning itself at the gate of
modernity.
Thus, like other novels of its period, Esaú e Jacó follows the fortunes of a
banker and a speculator, a figure positive as a manifestation of the progress
and modernity of markets, though negative since markets, progress, moder-
nity threaten foundational social and economic structures like the family,
securities, and credit. However, the narrator is not interested in Santos—in
fact, he dislikes the man, even though there is nothing really evil about him
and though Machado de Assis assigns Natividade to Santos rather than to
Aires, who wanted her; nevertheless, it is Aires, and not Santos, who takes
on the cultural fatherhood of the their twin sons, who will see or be “future
things,” in the impressive words of the psychic. Machado de Assis never
makes it clear whether he gives narratorial preference to Aires because
he is on his side, or because he thinks that while Santos opens the way to
the future, he disapproves of whatever future things he envisions. Thus,
while Machado de Assis deprovincializes Brazilian literature in the narra-
tion, he confirms its marginality in the plot and discredits the traditionally
Brazilian strategy of cordiality and compromise as means to deprovincial-
ize itself culturally or economically.
Perhaps this is because the desired harmony and cordiality depend on
muffling the great arguments shaping—or accompanying—the political and
economic developments of the time. To an extent it matters little whether
Machado de Assis himself approved or not of how abolition was enacted,
or of the encilhamento. What does matter is how he embeds it in the novel:
Taunay made the latter central, Assis makes both peripheral. But it is pe-
ripheral only in Aires’s narration; Santos makes a killing and presumably
from his point of view the opportunity is not peripheral at all. Santos is

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 96 Luso-Brazilian Review 45:2

not, as Schwarz says of other characters in Machado de Assis, “horrible.”

But in the voice of Aires, his achievement and his interests are flattened and
de-emphasized. As far as the narrator is concerned, the phenomena of the
wider world into which Brazil could enter, now that it is no longer a slave-
holding monarchy, are not significant (and remember he was a diplomat, and
lived in that wider world). In fact, as Alcmeno Bastos notes, Aires assures
Santos, who is afraid for his wealth, his position, perhaps his life during the
days of the proclamation of the Republic, that the change in regime would
not amount to more than a change in clothes, and in a few days all would
be back to normal: banks are indispensable and a new constitution would
respect that (139). Aires de-couples the political and the private. But it is
precisely this separation, which covers up how political institutions attend
to the interests of the dominant class that marks the distinction between
Brazil and the states among which it wants to be “in concert.” A change in
the constitution, or in the system of government will not affect Santos, but
Santos’s economic power, that appears, in those other states, as an index of
their modernity, rests on very different financial and labor foundations. This
is the paradox that appears in Esaú e Jacó.
Aires then is another instance of the narrator as a vehicle for denounc-
ing what he himself represents. His deep indifference to the historical events
he witnesses, his unfailing and disengaged courtesy, his lack of sympathy
for the modernization all around him signal not so much the emotional
detachment of Machado Assis, as an abiding distrust that they will affect
the core of the culture and correct the “horrors” that he had been writing
up all along. If Aires embodies a certain national tolerance, that tolerance
is corrosive, a smothering cordiality that abhors conflict and therefore al-
lows for inefficiency, ineptitude, and corruption to go unchallenged, which
may be why the Counselor is often read as an entirely positive character
(though not by Gledson). The underlying value is harmony for its own sake;
the corollary—that there is no more merit to one of the sides in the conflict
than to the other—does not seem to bother readers.
Barreto, on the other hand, finds no overriding value in conciliation and
in fact, a number of his conciliatory characters are simply corrupt, refusing
to see the evil of the side they are conciliating. Yet, in a blunter and more
direct way, Barreto too writes about the “horrors.” Clara dos Anjos, is the
story of a lower-middle class mulatto girl caught in the horrible, arbitrary
power of the white upper class: the villain can promise he will ignore class
and race differences and make her his equal and his companion, but he also
has the power, once he has seduced her, to renege and drop her. His mother
explains it very clearly, when she declares that a girl from Clara’s class and
color should never presume to have a call on his favor. He treats her with
the same cruelty that Assis had shown in the narrator of Brás Cubas, except

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 Wasserman 97

that Barreto, unlike Assis, does not have the narrator betray the reader’s
confidence just as the villain betrays the girl. Barreto relies on the readers’
sympathy for an “other,” whereas Assis expects merely that the reader will
react to an injustice done to him (or her), the reader—a greater trust in the
reader’s sophistication and self-interest and a lesser in his kindness.
While the realism of Machado de Assis is thus deconstructive, depend-
ing on playing narrative and plot, tone and subject against each other, Lima
Barreto engages the politics of their time openly. As a satirist, he has a strong
investment in such openness, and in the plots of his novels he confronts
racism and the war on the poor he sees around him. An argument about
whether Machado de Assis’s enervation or Lima Barreto’s aggressiveness
give the better sense of the time and place is not very profitable. Better to ask
whether one could not look for the authors’ complementarity and whether
their differing styles don’t accomplish exactly what they seem to aim for. If
Machado de Assis is so contained that only the acute reading given him by
Roberto Schwarz (for instance, in the chapter on “The Fate (or the Luck) of
the Poor” of Um Mestre na periferia do capitalismo) can bring it out, then
the critical stance of the novelist toward his environment has lain dormant
before that reading. If on the other hand Lima Barreto’s forcefulness has led
readers to dismiss parts of his indictment as prompted by the unfortunate
circumstances of his life, then he too misses the mark and both go against
the self-sense of many of their readers and critics. Differences in evaluation
may also respond to differences in the kind of realism they practice. At one
point of its range, realism can shade into irony, the form of realism that
Machado de Assis perfected, and that inflects Esaú e Jacó. At its further end,
it tumbles into the satire that Barreto engages in. Barreto’s version seems to
invite action; Machado de Assis’s foregrounds understanding. In Machado
de Assis’s ironic pessimism that understanding can appear as an aesthetic
exercise. Esaú e Jacó is full of jabs that show Machado de Assis fully aware
of the politics of his times, but the understanding shown in the narration is
not transmitted to the characters, not even to the presumed narrator Aires,
not even when he says of the encilhamento: “Nasciam as ações a preço alto,
mais numerosas que as antigas crias da escravidão, e com dividendos infini-
tos” (shares were born expensive, more numerous than the litter of slaves in
olden times, but with infinite dividends)—neither he nor any other char-
acter catches the conflation of slavery and finance; readers will skim over the
observation; Machado de Assis is conscious enough to make it.
Barreto has no patience with indirection. In Clara dos Anjos he abandons
the satire of Policarpo, or the Bruzundangas, and plays neither with reality
nor with the conventions of fiction; the narration proceeds mostly through
dialogue and the narrator hides in free indirect discourse, in the minds of
the characters. The poetically named poet Flores (Flowers) is a drunk and

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 98 Luso-Brazilian Review 45:2

despite his high-sounding palaver on fame and the peaks of poetic inspira-
tion sells his verses, anonymously, to the evil Cassi for the seduction of the
innocent Clara; Flores is a hypocrite, but it is a general, social carelessness
that gives his words their power. The villain is called Cassi Jones; his great-
grandfather was a Lord and a British consul in some provincial Brazilian
capital: the jab at the heritage left by the white, slave-trading nation is all but
subtle. And Clara concludes at the novel’s end that her upbringing, loved,
protected, and coddled like a normal middle-class girl, had been all wrong,
an unsubtle comment on the discrepancy between the norms of bourgeois
social interaction and what can be expected by a mulatto girl in Rio: “We are
nothing in this life,” is her bitter conclusion, and the last line in the novel.
Bras Cubas’s “humanitism” is a much more complicated version of the same:
the poor man’s individual life is not improved by submersion in the vast
universal body of “Humanitas:” that’s for the rich.
In the end, the author who ends one novel with Brás Cubas’s, the pro-
tagonist’s observation that “I did not transmit to any creature the legacy of
our misery” is not so different in his position from the one who ends a novel
with the protagonist’s observation that “We are nothing in this world.” To a
culture that prizes itself for its smooth cordiality, these authors, who know
why they must do so, bring as a correction, the bitter taste of coffee and the
aggressive fire of aguardente.

Notes

1. Galvão quotes Joaquim Nabuco writing to José Veríssimo, both critics, friends
of Assis’s, berating him for mentioning Assis was a “mulatto”: “To me, Machado
was white . . . All I saw in him was the Hellene” (21). Morrison is scathing on this
kind of “tact,” calling it another way of suppressing race.
2. “Racialization” poses a fundamental problem of definition. Saying that it ex-
amines the representation or evaluation of racial difference, or attributes negative
characteristics to “race” does not solve it, because “race” itself appears as such a
fluid concept. In Patricia McKee’s “Racialization, Capitalism, and Aesthetics in
Stoker’s Dracula,” for example, “white,” “Western,” “European,” and “capitalist” are
fused, and “East” (another fluid concept) can mean just about anything: the Count’s
Transylvania, Slovakia, Westby, whatever—though these might all be surprised to
find they are non-European, or non-white.
3. See the title of Hélcio Pereira da Silva’s: Lima Barreto: Escritor maldito [Lima
Barreto: Cursed Writer].
4. One should not forget, however, that Machado de Assis was not always uni-
versally lauded; the first full-length study of his work, by Sílvio Romero, gave a

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 Wasserman 99

negative account, though it contained some of its own retraction. It has taken lon-
ger for Barreto to be appreciated, and, like those of many realists and naturalists
who programmatically, if not really, disdained self-conscious “form,” his works had
to contend with critics who particularly prized formal qualities. Afrânio Coutinho
lists the critics who were inclined to deny Machado de Assis’s merit: Romero opens
the polemic and is followed by Cruz e Souza (the black symbolist poet), Múcio Tei-
xeira, and Agripino Grieco, among others (“Introdução/Estudo Crítico,” 61).
5. See Francisco de Assis Barbosa, 594. Barbosa lists the many writers and critics
who valued Barreto’s work.
6. Antonio Candido says that at his most typical, Lima Barreto conflates per-
sonal and social problems; poverty or prejudice destroy the person. Program-
matically, Barreto wants to play out all local, Brazilian problems in the open (“Os
Olhos . . . , 39). On the other hand, the “Brasilianness” of Machado de Assis needs, it
seems, to be affirmed: Afrânio Coutinho spends several pages of his “Introduction”
to the Obras Completas arguing that the national character of his work is guaran-
teed, among other aspects, by his race, for he is representatively Brazilian precisely
for being of mixed race, even if one grants that some of his art was inspired by for-
eign books that had no connection with Brazil (33).
7. Examining the reception of Machado de Assis abroad (especially in the US)
and at home, Roberto Schwarz notes the different ways in which the author was
framed: in Europe and the US he was a post-modernist before his time, read, to an
extent, a-historically—he quotes Susan Sontag to the effect that he had a “retroac-
tive influence” on her. In Brazil, on the other hand, he was the “anodyne national
classic,” of agreed and established greatness, but existing aside from “national life
and literature” (“Leituras em competição,” 62). The essay is a wide-ranging, com-
plex disquisition, resting on the critical history of Machado de Assis, and on ways in
which “center” and “periphery,” “local” and “universal,” are to be read and under-
stood in terms of history (literary and other), aesthetics, and politics (colonial, post-
colonial, academic, aesthetic). In his review of the novel’s English translation Ale-
xandre Eulálio notes what Schwarz analyzes: the relation between a “serious” reading
abroad and being exoticized, both at home and abroad (“Esaú e Jacó em inglês”).
8. One of the loci classici of the accusation of indifference to, or denial of, his
racial origins comes from Gilberto Freyre, who calls Machado de Assis preten-
tious and accuses him of denying his race, his class, and anything purely Brazilian,
including the landscape (9; qtd in Baptista, 33). The accusation echoes in Galvão,
who argues that though both writers mapped Rio, they saw very different parts of
the city: Machado saw the white, the wealthy, Barreto the poor (12). But Roberto
Schwarz has shown Machado de Assis’s sense of the cruelty to which the poor and
the weak are subject in Brazilian society (see for instance, the chapter “A sorte dos
pobres” [The fate of the poor] in Um mestre na periferia do capitalismo).
9. Alexandre Eulálio, in an extensive essay on the novel that is part of a recent
revaluation, sees it as a culmination of Machado de Assis’s career, where the author
uses all the narrative techniques he developed in previous works and exercises ab-
solute control over both material and reader to create a complex portrayal and judg-
ment of the times (see “O Esaú e Jacó na obra de Machado de Assis”).

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 100 Luso-Brazilian Review 45:2

10. See Alfredo Bosi, who in fact disagrees with this line of analysis in O enigma
do olhar. (158).
11. He is not alone in this obliqueness: Roberto Reis notes that the nineteenth-
century Brazilian novel represses the relation between masters and slaves, displac-
ing it into a romantic relation of female submission (570, 572). Those who blame
Machado de Assis for this repression, however, imply that his background imposed
on him a special obligation in to air it.
12. In “Counter-Discourses on the Racialization of Theft and Ethics in Doug-
lass’s Narrative,” Lovalerie King refers to critical race theory as a challenge to the
normalization of racism, which can occur in a number of cultural products (55).
13. Ten years later, Aluízio de Azevedo published O mulato (1881), the French-
school-inspired novel that, scandalously, thrust “manners” aside and race directly
into the conversation.
14. Abel Barros Baptista examines relations between ideas of nationality and
ideas of the function of literature, with particular emphasis on Machado de Assis.
More generally, Baptista argues that the entire project of developing a national lit-
erature depends on seeing literature as rooted in “nature” and solidary with nation,
in an essentially circular process (29, 31).
15. When Policarpo Quaresma decides to engage in agriculture, on the promise
of plenty (“if you plant, all will grow”) that appears in the first document on Brazil,
the foundational “Letter” by Pedro Vaz de Caminha, he is bankrupted and driven
from his farm by a combination of extremely national ants and corruption. See
Lima Barreto, Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma; see also Renata R. Mautner Was-
serman (1992).
16. Critics are fascinated by the question of Machado de Assis’s debt to foreign,
particularly English or French literatures (Afrânio Coutinho quotes Alfredo Pujol,
Lúcia Miguel Pereira, and Eugênio Gomes on the influence of English and French
literatures; Múcio Leão on that of the Portuguese novelist Bernardes; Josué Montelo
on that of de La Rochefoucauld; Otto Maria Carpeaux on that of the Portuguese
novelist Almeida Garrett, and so on). J. Mattoso Câmara Jr. sees that influence in
the use of free indirect discourse (style indirect libre), which, he says, is foreign to
lusophone literature (31–2) but in Machado de Assis keeps the narration carefully
aloof (“cuidadosamente separado”) from the characters (34).
17. See Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas; Borba is mad.
18. Note that North American novels of the period value entrepreneurship (in
Howells, Norris, Dreiser) even if they are not sure of the moral legitimacy of its fi-
nancial rewards.
19. According to Luiz Roncari, Machado de Assis refers to these changes not
only in the crônicas, but in all his late novels, transposing the shift from the pub-
lic to the private sphere where, to the shock and dismay of several characters, like
for instance Bentinho in Dom Casmurro, the patriarchal (rural) family is changing
into the modern (urban) bourgeois family. Thus the novels’ detachment from the
historical events in which they are immersed is only apparent, their involvement,
deep (see “O bom diabo e a marinha de Fidelia”, about Memorial de Aires, and “Dom
Casmurro e o retrato dos pais”).

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 Wasserman 101

20. These crônicas are selected for reprint by Valentim Facioli, one of the editors
of Machado de Assis, Antologia e Estudos (109, 106, 107–08). For Roberto Schwarz
John Gledson’s focus on the crônicas as evidence of the author’s engagement with
contemporary politics is one of the contributions of his Machado de Assis: ficção e
história (1999, 106); in a later essay, Schwarz argues that the “crônica” was in fact
an authocthonous form of literary engagement with a writer’s immediate environ-
ment, and that in part Machado de Assis’s intimate connection with Brazilian real-
ity and literary tradition comes precisely from his attention to the form as practiced
by his colleagues and predecessors (“Leituras,” 63). Granja traces the development
of the author as a writer and his attention to ethical and political matters in his
contributions to the periodical press in Rio; Duarte anthologizes “crônicas” to show
Assis’s concern for the plight of afro-Brazilians. For John Gledson, the crônicas of-
fer not only a window into Machado de Assis’s views about the political events of
the time, particularly in those of the series “A semana,” written at the time when
Esaú e Jacó is set, but are also remarkable as specifically literary achievements (see
“ ‘A semana’: 1892–3 . . .”).
21. “Seem” is the operative word, if it has taken a full century for Morrison,
Henry Louis Gates, or Betsy Erkkila to start writing about blackness in all of Amer-
ican literature (“Black” literature is kept apart, with its own separate shelves at Bor-
der’s bookstore).
22. Barreto was not that discreet about the prejudice he encountered, comment-
ing on it in his diaries or having his characters suffer it. Maria Cristina Teixeira
Machado compiles many examples of such reports (55–64).
23. Analyzing the “crônicas” of Machado de Assis, Costa Lima argues that the
author’s roundabout, non-linear presentation counteracts press censorship, leaving
a way out should the thought police come after him for an implicit, radical critique
of the dominant positivist reason (184).
24. This line leads José Guilherme Merquior to classify Machado de Assis as an
“impressionist” writer, like Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Henry James, Joseph
Conrad, who preserve complexity of vision and literary language against sensation-
alist realism ([1979], 152).
25. Alcmeno Bastos notes that though the rivalry is presented as central to the
novel, it is effectively emptied of meaning as various other characters examine it
by the light of games with numbers or speculation about mythological precedents
(141).
26. This is John Gledson’s reading in Machado de Assis: ficção e história. In “The
Last Betrayal of Machado de Assis,” Gledson does a firmly allegorical reading of
Memorial de Aires, Machado de Assis’s last novel, whose central character is the
same Counselor Aires.
27. An insufficient number of examples: Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohi-
cans, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, or the hy-
brid and complicated marriages in José de Alencar.
28. In “A novidade . . . ,” Roberto Schwarz shows the poor girls in the fi rst novels
by Machado de Assis maneuvering to improve their position; each novel presents a
particular problem of social mobility and acceptance.

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 102 Luso-Brazilian Review 45:2

29. For Elódia Xavier Machado de Assis, unlike Alencar, “demythifies” roman-
tic love (108). However, in Alencar—at least in his Amerindian trilogy, the marriage
plot in its romantic version modeled not just the ideal married pair, but also the ideal
source for the population of the new land: the romantic pair will people and form the
hybrid nation. (See Wasserman, 1994, 106–219). Machado de Assis then may be show-
ing up romantic love as one more idea out of place in a society that has eliminated the
Amerindian and will not acknowledge the African element of its composition.
30. Machado de Assis wrote several short stories on clothing that not only deter-
mines, but displaces the wearer.
31. See Taunay, and Wasserman [2001].
32. In his crônicas Machado de Assis often claims not to understand finance
and trivializes the encilhamento: see the crônicas in A semana, of August 14, 1892;
October 9, 1982: “Finance of finances, . . . I know the vocabulary but don’t yet know
what ideas correspond to the words . . .”; December 18, 1892: the writer gets caught
in a crowd that gathered neither for a fight nor for an orator, but for “the famous
encilhamento,” and then the subject is dropped. (Obra completa, III, 572, 577, 587).
33. Maia Neto (159) makes this point.
34. In “The Last Betrayal of Machado de Assis: Memorial de Aires” John Gledson
discusses the prevalence of unreliable narrators in Machado de Assis’ fiction, nota-
bly in D. Casmurro, but also in his short stories and in other novels.
35. See Maia Neto, 161.
36. The reference is to Faoro’s A pirâmide e o trapézio. See Brook Thomas for a
discussion of “contract” in this sense.
37. According to Merquior (who refers to Enylton de Sá Rego on the matter),
Assis dealt with these changes by developing a sense of the ridiculous that he ex-
pressed in the form of Menippean satire ([1998] 37).
38. Antonio Candido reminds us that, come to think of it, the sufferings of
Machado de Assis “did not seem to have exceeded those of everyone else, and nei-
ther was his life particularly arduous. Mixed-race individuals of humble origin be-
came some of the more representative men in our liberal Empire. They were men
who, of his same color and born poor ended up receiving titles of nobility and occu-
pying important positions in government . . . it would be more accurate to note the
external normalcy and the relative ease of his public life” ([1977] 32).
39. Here (34–35), Merquior refers to Roger Bastide’s analysis of Brazilian
literature.
40. Machado de Assis, Relíquias da Casa Velha, in Obra completa, II, 661–667.
41. In chapter 7, “Counselor Aires and his ‘Memorial,’ ” Maia Neto conflates the
worldviews of Machado de Assis and of Aires as resting on an aesthetic skepticism
derived from Phyrro through Montaigne and Pascal, a few more of those high-
culture influences whose identification busies so much Assis criticism.
42. Eugênio Gomes was an early proponent of an allegorical reading, though he
privileged the psychological and the mythic (lviii).
43. In her study of the crônicas, Lúcia Granja shows how they share both tech-
niques and subject matter with the fiction (18); any distancing resides in the novel,
not in the author. Other clues the “crônicas” offer to the stance of the novelist, are

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 Wasserman 103

their tone of playful irony, as in “Comentários da semana” (Diário do Rio de Ja-

neiro, 10 november, 1861, quoted by Granja, 24), and the form of direct address to
the reader, as in “BONS DIAS” (from Gazeta de Notícias, 5 April 1888, quoted by
Granja, 25).
44. See Wasserman [2001], for a more detailed discussion of the encilhamento,
the stock frenzy that hit the Brazilian economy in the early 1890s.
45. In “The Last Betrayal,” Gledson quotes Emilia Viotti da Costa’s observation
that “Abolition freed whites from the burden of slavery and abandoned blacks to
their own fate” (226; Gledson, 127).
46. See the correspondence with Monteiro Lobato in Barreto, Um longo sonho
do futuro 247–52. This correspondence concerns Gonzaga de Sá; part of it was con-
ducted from inside the asylum where Barreto was confined.
47. These breaks in the narrative voice have bothered critics from the beginning.
They annoy Sílvio Romero no end, and he accuses Machado de Assis of a stuttering
style, of suffering from “some perturbation in the organs of speech” (qtd in Souza,
65–79, 66).
48. Taunay’s is a roman à clef, which in plot and narration roundly condemns
the speculative frenzy that fed the bubble and fictionally reconstitutes the old ways
threatened by current political and economic trends; O encilhamento is an interest-
ing novel, but not a good one.
49. Bastos refers to Esaú e Jacó, vol. IV of Obras escolhidas de Machado de
Assis, 145.
50. Esaú e Jacó, (1961), 162.

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