Joaqhim Maria Machado de Assis

From 1862 to 1864 Machado de Assis was a member and a censor of Conservatório Dramático Brasileiro. By the late 1860s he had became a successful Brazilian man of letters. In 1869 he married Carolina de Novaes, a cultured Portuguese woman from a distinguished family. They had no children, but the marriage was happy and harmonious. From 1873 he worked as a clerk and then as a Director of the accounting division at the Ministry of Agriculture. When his health broke down in 1879, Machado went to a health resort, from where he emerged with a new vision of literature. He dictated to his wife Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881, Posthumous Reminiscences of Bras Cubas), in which the narrator tells his story after his death. In 1897 he founded and became first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. Machado de Assis was afflicted by epilepsy and he rarely traveled outside his native city. He died on September 29, 1908.



The so-called romantic phase of Machado de Assis' career as writer encompasses his first four novels, some short fiction, a few plays, much of his poetry and a considerable number of journalistic sketches and critical writing. The second phase started with his novel Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas, which marked a break with the literary conventions of the day. In its explanatory preface Machado acknowledged his debt to Laurence Sterne and Xavier de Maistre. The novel begins with the demise and burial of Brás Cubas, a well-to-do citizen and whimsical protagonist of the story. "The sharp and judicial eye of public opinion loses its power as soon as we enter the territory of death. I do not deny that it sometimes glances this way and examines and judges us, but we dead folk are not concerned about its judgment. You who still live, believe me, there is nothing in the world so monstrously vast as our indifference." Brás Cubas has died of pneumonia after inventing an antihypochondriac poultice, which could help melancholic humanity. He tells about his genealogy, philosophy, life, and comments on his writing. The reader also meets Quincas Borba and Virgilia, with whom Cubas has an affair. Machado's use of an unreliable first-person narrator, multiple perspectives, philosophical speculations, self-consciousness, and other experimentations with literary techniques anticipated the 20th-century avant-garde.



Among Machado de Assis' other later novels is Quincas Borba (1891, Philosopher or Dog?), which parodied Darwinism and natural selection. Quincas Borba has a handsome, medium-sized dog named Quincas Borba. He believes that "since Humanitas, according to my doctrine, is the principle of life and is present everywhere, it also exists in the dog, so, therefore, he can have a human name, be it Christian or Muslim ..." After his death Borba has left his friend Rubião all his wealth and property, with one condition: Rubião must take care of his dog. Dom Casmurro (1899), a sort of Bildungsroman, has for decades been obligatory reading at Brazilian schools. Bento Santiago, 'little Bento', lives in a world of privileged security. Before his birth, his mother has made a pact with God: she has promised Him to bring little Bento up to be a priest, but Bento has other plans. He falls in love with his next-door neighbour Capitu Pádua, believing that he will be happy as her husband. However, infantile paranoia robs him of everything, and he ends in solitude. He is a lawyer and bitterly and ironically presents evidence of Capitu's infidelity, but the validity of his statements can be constantly questioned. "What is here, if I can put it this way, is like dye that you put on your beard and hair, and which only preserves the external habit, as they say in autopsies; the internal parts will not take dye. A certificate saying I was twenty years old might fool others, like any false document, but not me." Bento believes that Capitu has betrayed him with his best friend Escobar. The remarkable likeness between his son Ezequiel and Escobar is thrown into doubt by the fact that Ezequiel likes to imitate other people.



Machado de Assis was a sharp observer of the human mind and he revealed its dark sides. He shared with many authors of his period a reformist concern, but his view was colored with irony and skepticism concerning the 'Naturalist documentary method' and the possibility of human goodness. He explored the interaction between Europe and Brazil and the local adoption of European models but avoided regionalism. Irony was for him a vehicle for social criticism - he was especially sensitive about the plight of women. In Machado's verse is seen the influence of the serenity of the French Parnassians, and his novels have been compared to those of Henry James in their psychological depth. On the other hand, in the English-speaking world, such modern writers as John Barth and Susan Sontag have acknowledged their literary debt to Machado.