Machado de Assis: Reflections on a Brazilian Master Writer 9780292763777

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Critical Reflections on Latin America Series

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MachaAo k Assis Reflections on a Brazilian Master Writer

Edited by RICHARD GRAHAM

University of Texas Press, Austin Institute of Latin American Studies

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Copyright © 1999 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Edition, 1999 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Machado de Assis : reflections on a Brazilian master writer / edited by Richard Graham. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (Critical reflections on Latin America series) Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: Dom Casmurro : realism and intentionalism revisited / John Gledson — Dom Casmurro : simulacrum and allegory / Joao Adolfo Hansen — Dependents play chess : political dialogues in Machado de Assis / Sidney Chalhoub — Machado in English / Daphne Patai. ISBN 0-292-72821-2 (hard : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-292-72822-0 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Machado de Assis, 1839-1908. Dom Casmurro. 2. Machado de Assis, 1839-1908—Criticism and interpretation. I. Graham, Richard, 1934- . II. Series. PQ9697.M18D636 1999 869.3—dc21 99-12681 CIP ISBN 978-0-292-76377-7 (library e-book) ISBN 978-0-292-78648-6 (individual e-book)

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Contents

Introduction

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1. Dom Casmurro: Realism and Intentionalism Revisited JOHN GLEDSON

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2. Dom Casmurro: Simulacrum and Allegory JOAO ADOLFO HANSEN

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3. Dependents Play Chess: Political Dialogues in Machado de Assis SIDNEY CHALHOUB

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4. Machado in English DAPHNE PATAI

References Index

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RICHARD GRAHAM

Introduction

We relish the works of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (18391908) for their subtle irony, their relentless psychological insights, and their brilliant literary innovations. He is widely acknowledged by those who have read him to have been one of the major authors of the nineteenth century. Those who have read him, however, are relatively few because he wrote in a language—Portuguese—that regrettably lies outside the mainstream of Western culture. This book is designed not only to call new attention to this master but to raise some questions about the nature of literature itself and present alternative views on how it can be approached. Machado de Assis never left Brazil and rarely traveled outside his native city of Rio de Janeiro. His father was a mulatto house painter, and the future novelist received most of his early education in the kitchen of a girls' school, where his stepmother washed dishes. At seventeen he became a typographer's apprentice and later a proofreader. For most of his life he supported himself—and later his cultured Portuguese wife, five years his senior—from his earnings as a middle-ranking bureaucrat. He was sickly from childhood, suffered from epilepsy, and lived in fear that he would suffer a public attack. As a mulatto of modest means in a racist and classist society he must surely have feared the condescension of society even when he came to be lionized by a public that, to be sure, never really understood him.

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Machado began writing early and was acclaimed by the time he was twenty-five years old, but it was not until a serious bout with illness and a long convalescence in the late 1870s that he gave voice to his great insights into the human soul. His illness seems to have stripped from him the last vestiges of Romanticism. During that forced retreat he also had the opportunity to read extensively in English, French, and German, so that, although his artistic expression is firmly rooted in the Brazilian milieu, he simultaneously made the larger European world of letters part of his literary imagination. Some critics note his intuitive awareness of the subconscious and how it subverts logical behavior, his references to what would later be called fetishism, and his belief in human irrationality, and they conclude that his was a depth psychology before its time. Machado's frequent use of an unreliable narrator and a purposefully digressive or fragmented structure strikes readers today as surprisingly modern. Machado's first novel in this new period was Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas (1880). Told by a first-person narrator, a character who has already died, at first sight it seems merely to recount the petty concerns and meaningless acts of selfishness that typify the lives of ordinary people. Gradually, however, the reader becomes aware of how differing points of view throw into question even the best of motives. Ten years later Machado wrote Quincas Borba, a novel about a man who goes—or has always been—insane; one critic has dubbed Machado an "encomiast of lunacy" (Wilson 1949). The next prominent work was Dom Casmurro (1899). Again we find a first-person narrator, Bento Santiago, who recounts his adolescent love for Capitu, whom he then marries, and his subsequent obsessive doubts about her fidelity. The reader is left to wonder whether she actually betrayed him or whether his fevered conclusion flows from his own weak ego and continuing immaturity. Beyond that, however, lies the question as to whether or not all human relations are based on our misapprehensions about each other. Machado went on to write Esau e Jaco and Memorial de Aires and many richly provocative short stories. If we overlook the potboilers he turned out for serialized publication in Sunday supplements, he left a substantial body of work that is keenly percep-

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tive and humane. In his best work the reader, despite clear warnings, is deliberately entrapped by narrators who distance themselves from their own emotionally painful experiences, the enormity of which only strikes the reader once they have passed. At a multinational and interdisciplinary conference held at the University of Texas at Austin on Machado de Assis in 1995 considerable controversy emerged both between historians and literary critics and within the latter group as to how to interpret his work. Today, as in every generation, literary critics have found new meanings in Machado. In this book I have gathered four essays that will give the reader some notion of differing approaches now current. All four pay special attention to Dom Casmurro. By coming at the same problem from different directions, they make this volume fit well into the Critical Reflections on Latin America series sponsored by the university's Institute of Latin American Studies. In the first essay, John Gledson (University of Liverpool), the noted British specialist on Machado de Assis, takes up the core of the debate. Was Machado a critic of Realism or someone who actually extended its reach and deepened its potential? Or should we concur with some critics who have found evidence of Machado's Modernism, for instance, in his reliance on a defective narrator whom the reader wants to believe despite evidence of his untrustworthiness and selective memory or in his use of multiple digressions and a fragmented narrative that suggests a sophisticated latter-day approach to novelistic structure. Alfred J. Mac Adam even went so far as to say that Machado's penchant for the fantastic and his view of society as a madhouse identify him much more with Latin American authors of the 1960s than with the Realists of his own time. Mac Adam admitted that this consonance is "one of the mysteries of literary history/' but dismissed attempts to place Machado in his own social, political, and cultural epoch (Mac Adam 1987, 21). He and others have seen Machado as anti-Realist.1 Not Gledson. He understands Machado to have been very much a Realist portraying life as it is lived and experienced, though strongly critical of a Naturalism where all human action was seen as determined by Darwinian impulses. Machado must be understood in light of the "conventions, attitudes, ideologies, and 'institutions'" of his

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own time even if he questions and satirizes them; he cannot simply be parachuted into a later epoch. While Mac Adam focuses solely on the interior anguish of the protagonists, Gledson sees Machado as exploring the conflicts inherent in a slaveholding class society in which some ascend socially while others decline, finding in these larger tensions the framework within which to situate love, desire, envy, and jealousy. In Dom Casmurro the narrator Bento's version of his wife's behavior is given credibility by his frequent hints that she was motivated to win over his affection by her ambition for higher social status. Gledson insists that what Machado did do was not to turn his back on Realism, but to expand its boundaries and capacities, attending not only to the psyche but to society. In Machado's hands, direct Realism "gave way to another, subtler and more wide-ranging kind." Gledson, moreover, believes that it is perfectly legitimate, nay, required, that the reader seek to understand Machado's intention as an author, despite the deliberate obfuscation he introduced through the first-person narrator whom we want to trust but have reason to doubt. No one could fail to notice, for instance, Machado's intent to disavow Naturalism and Darwinian determinism—or any sort of determinism. But more than that: in Dom Casmurro he deliberately gives the reader plenty of clues that the narrator is unreliable. Although Machado allows the reader choice, not telling us whether or not to believe the narrator (was his wife faithful or not?), by the same token we are given the freedom to examine things more pensively or not, depending on our inclination, and Machado would have preferred us to read with questioning attention. In this, his intention is clear. Joao Adolfo Hansen, one of a new generation of Brazilian critics centered at the University of Sao Paulo, adopts a directly contrary point of view in this collection. He argues that it is futile to attempt to discover what Machado de Assis intended precisely because, having created a fictional narrator, Machado deliberately hid himself from such inquiry, playing games with voice and ambiguity that make it impossible to understand his work as Realism. Machado's work is never univocal. Machado, moreover, was critiquing the accepted unities of his time by suggesting that reality is frag-

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mented, hardly the approach of a Realist. Instead of a coherent self at the core of every individual, Machado proposed instead a shattered, even missing self. The commitment to cause-and-effect reasoning that underlies Realism is also absent from his work. Not only is life nondetermined, but a true representation of reality is itself impossible: Machado's great theme is "the 'nothingness' that is a metaphor for the unrepresentability of modern existence." Hansen is not alone in taking this tack. Paul Dixon, for example, has argued elsewhere that whereas the nineteenth-century novel assumed that reality was knowable, Machado was one of the first narrative authors to confront such questions as "What is Truth?" How can we know? If we do not know, how shall we act? Drawing on Carlos Fuentes, Dixon adds that Machado, rather than documenting life the way a Realist would have done, addressed universal myths (1989, 8-9). Dixon has also noted Machado's focus on life's ambiguities that "threaten to annihilate the logical basis that reigns within [Dom Casmurro's] fictional world" (1985, 54). In this vein Mac Adam has argued that Machado, like Modernists in general, "discredits all notions of progress and history" (1977, 14). Hansen would agree. For him Machado was a Realist only in that his work reflected the emerging Modernism of the period in which he wrote, the late nineteenth century. Relying on ancient principles of rhetoric laid down by Plato, Hansen's essay is not always easy to read, but it richly rewards those who make the effort. Another current that characterizes Brazilian criticism of Machado de Assis is one that, like Gledson's, emphasizes the social structure on which Machado's novels commented. Roberto Schwarz has noted that in Dom Casmurro a major theme is the clash of values, old and new, so present in late-nineteenth-century Brazil (1991). The traditional society, characterized by dominion on the one hand and subordination on the other, by patron-client relationships, by deference and respect, faced the challenge posed by the aborning modern society with its liberal individualism and capitalist economic interest. The first part of Dom Casmurro celebrates the victory of the intelligent, rational, vivacious, and creative Capitu, while the last part calendars the sad reimposition of patriarchal values, the triumph of the man of law and letters, the representative

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of order. Schwarz even notes that for decades Brazilian critics generally failed to question Dom Casmurro's allegations of Capitu's infidelity because they identified with him, "the cultured law graduate, the loving son, the zealous/jealous husband, the man of [inherited] wealth, contemptuous toward business matters, . . . with a good Catholic education, in short, the gentleman" (1991, 87). Brazilian critic Silviano Santiago has likewise stressed how Bento/Dom Casmurro, ex-seminary student and law graduate, encapsulates qualities typical of Brazilian elites (Santiago 1978). As the author of the third essay, Sidney Chalhoub has drawn inspiration from Schwarz, but probed deeper and more precisely. Unlike Hansen, he cares very little as to whether we can know what Machado de Assis intended; instead, his attention focuses on what the novels say, intentionally or not, about social life. These fictional works can tell us much, he says, about human relationships within a stratified social order, and so (by implication) he sees Machado as a Realist. In his essay Chalhoub, a leading social historian at the University of Campinas, discusses four of Machado's novels: two from the earlier period (laid Garcia and Helena) and two from the later period (Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas and Dom Casmurro). In all of them he finds characters that personify the dependent client in a patronage-ridden social system. Chalhoub's purpose is to see how clients worked the ideology of the patron to satisfy their own needs. Rather than seeing them as hapless and helpless victims in a hierarchical order, he explores how they act as agents, shaping their own destiny despite all obstacles. In the final essay Daphne Patai, of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, returns indirectly to the question of authorial intent. She lightheartedly pokes fun at the pretensions of postmodern "translation theorists," who claim a position for the translator as creator equal to that of the author. For them, the "text" is reinterpreted by every reader and therefore loses its centrality in this effort; one translation, therefore, is as good as any other. Certainly translations introduce still another gap between "reality" and the reader's perception, but, Patai suggests, that is no excuse for the ridiculous hubris of some translators. To make that point she carefully dissects two translations of Dom Casmurro into English that

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display the sharply divergent paths translators have followed—in one case simply omitting entire chapters without a word to the reader. By stressing the importance of the fidelity of translators to the original text, Patai insists that we should attend to the author's meaning: although we can never fully possess it we should strive to approach it. She thus draws our attention once again to the subtlety and power of Machado de Assis. I thank the Lampadia Foundation and its Brazilian affiliate, Vitae-Apoio a Cultura, Educagao e Promogao Social, for making possible the conference from which these papers emerged. The president of the Lampadia Foundation, Mr. Robert Glynn, agreeably nurtured our idea. The Brazil Center at the University of Texas at Austin provided the necessary infrastructure, and my colleagues in the departments of Spanish and Portuguese, French and Italian, English, History, and Music collaborated actively in making the conference a success. The Institute of Latin American Studies and especially Virginia Hagerty encouraged the selection of these papers for publication in the present series. NOTE

1. Or, in Paul Dixon's case, as both Realist and anti-Realist (Dixon, 1989, 18).

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M A C H A D O DE ASSIS

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JOHN GLEDSON

l • Dom Casmurro Realism and Intentionalism Revisited

Dom Casmurro remains the most polemical work in Brazilian literature, largely because, as Tony Tanner said in one of the first and best introductions to the author in English, it is "one of the most impressive cases of an 'unreliable narrator' in modern fiction" (1966, 51). It still provokes intemperate letters to the Brazilian press on the question of Capitu's adultery,1 which if nothing else relieves us of some of the duty of proving its durability as a piece of literature. In an attempt to clear some of the ground, about fifteen years ago I published The Deceptive Realism of Machado de Assis, subtitled A Dissenting Interpretation of Dom Casmurro. The view I was dissenting from was not primarily concerned with the question of the adultery, for by then a critical consensus had arisen that the question was insoluble—a consensus that has taken longer than might have been expected to find more universal acceptance.2 Rather, I was concerned with a question of literary history, a growing opinion most cogently expressed by Alfred Mac Adam (1977), which made Machado into a "precursor, first, of what is often loosely called 'modernism/ and later, of the equally amorphous Latin-American 'boom' of the late 1960s and 1970s" (Gledson 1984, 2). In particular, I argued that the novel is better understood as a successor and continuer of the nineteenth-century Realist tradition than as in any sense anti-Realist.3 My point of view was (and remains) that Dom Casmurro is best understood (and most enjoyable to read) in this way and that Machado himself wrote the novel in

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those terms. As I also said then, I was (and still remain) an "avowed intentionalist" in the (limited) sense that "I believe it is an essential part of the critic's role to reveal the meanings tte writer intended" and that "the necessity becomes all the more urgent in the case of writers, like Machado and Drummond, where irony is so pervasive as to make true intention a matter of debate" (1984, 11). Deceptive Realism has been by and large well-received, both at the time and since, though it has been attacked as well.4 It seems particularly worthwhile returning to the basic questions raised in the introduction to my book now, in particular in the light of a very well-argued and interesting attack on my work and that of others (principally on Helen Caldwell, Silviano Santiago, and Roberto Schwarz) by Abel Barros Baptista, in "O legado Caldwell, ou o paradigma do pe atras" (1994). In a review of Baptista's earlier book, Em nome do apelo do nome: duas interrogagoes sobre Machado de Assis, I invited him to define himself in relation to our points of view (Gledson 1993, 250). The reply came so quickly that I am sure it was something he intended to do anyway. After defending myself, and by implication to some extent those critics who have inherited "the Caldwell legacy," I want to draw some brief conclusions as to where criticism on Machado might go from here. i

It is worthwhile reminding ourselves, first of all, why there should be an argument. Dom Casmurro has many features that literary critics instinctively associate with Modernism: a notoriously unreliable narrator, an immensely sophisticated and skeptical awareness of novelistic structure, a tendency to indulge in digressions of doubtful relevance to the plot, a concern with time and memory, and a thoroughgoing relativism, most famously expressed in chapter 10 in the phrase a verossimilhanga e muita vez toda a verdade. If the appearance of the truth is (often) all that we can get of the truth itself, then reality must appear in suitable inverted commas every time it is mentioned, and realism is impossible. The trouble is that this phrase is a form of the "Cretan liar" syndrome: Bento, the narrator who tells us that the truth is inaccessible, is himself notoriously unreliable and has his own reasons for believing that

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truth-seeming is all of the truth that one can get at. He has no indisputable evidence for Capitu's adultery, so the appearance will have to do.5 I am quite prepared to agree that this is a crucial phrase, and Machado was well aware of the relativism it implies. It might seem to be enough to say that it is relativized by Bento's unreliability, and thus unavailable as a comment on the novel by the author (something of which Baptista and others are well aware). I would not wish to deny that relativism is a serious issue in itself in the novel. I would, however, also put forward another, more limited but I think important argument: that is, that this phrase must, in its turn, be seen in a contemporary, late-nineteenth-century context. This, I would argue, is a datable skepticism: datable to what Machado, along with many of his contemporaries, called the fin-de-siecle. It is something he refers to with casual amusement in his cronicas of the 1890s: for instance, in the phrase "All beliefs are becoming confused with one another in this fin-de-siecle without beliefs [Todas as crengas se confundem neste fim de seculo sem elas}" (19 March 1893) (Machado de Assis 1996, 111).6 The phrase about verisimilitude is one of the numerous evidences that Bento is a man of his time and class, that he is "a type": as Roberto Schwarz puts it in his excellent essay on the novel, "A poesia envenenada de Dom Casmurro," he is "one of the elite types most beloved in Brazilian ideology" (1991, 85). It may well appear that I and others are running the risk of becoming "history-bound," in Mac Adam's phrase (1987, 13), in putting forward arguments like this. It seems to me that the opposite is true: I would rather describe us—perhaps it would be better to speak for myself alone—as "history-liberated." Placing the novel in its context does not, or should not, limit its meaning or meanings: my own experience has been that understanding its numerous contexts, and the extraordinary wit and intelligence that molded them into this whole, can help to bring Dom Casmurro alive and help critics (and teachers) make it as interesting today as it was nearly a century ago.7 One piece of admittedly speculative evidence might back me up: for all the efforts of translators and critics over the forty-odd years since the novel was first put into English, we have singularly failed

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to make it a recognized, above all a widely read novel in the English-speaking world—Daphne Patai makes the point with admirable frankness and realism in her essay in this volume. Could it be that we have been selling the wrong novel, even perhaps still slightly embarrassed by its Brazilian origins, overeager to claim it as a "universal" masterpiece? Both Helen Caldwell's and Robin Scott-Buccleuch's translations practically do without notes, as if that universal appeal should make everything clear.8 A comment from an academic friend who has read Machado out of curiosity and is not a Portuguese specialist—though he reads Portuguese—goes some way to support the view that we need to give readers more assistance, without weighing the text down with too many notes. Where, so he says, Ega de Queiros's novels are an easy, open, pleasurable read, there is something elusive and frustrating about Machado—which one might well argue is, frustratingly, part of his greatness. The translator's troubles begin with the untranslatable title. Add to this the stifling atmosphere of the household in Dom Casmurro or of Bras Cubas's "smell of the tomb," his "rigor mortis" (Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas, chap. 71), and one can have some sympathy for Machado's would-be admirers. It might at least be worth trying a new tack. II

" Could Machado be indifferent as to how his readers might read the novel?" (Baptista 1994, 159)

I come, then, to Abel Barros Baptista's arguments, which are informed, as always in his work, by a powerful capacity for logical argument. He emphasizes, quite rightly, that the character Bento is an author in the sense that he writes the book. There is nothing in it, from the title to the last word, for which Bento does not take responsibility and for which, therefore, and to that extent, Machado does not renounce that same responsibility. This is something that, as I have already said in the context of Bento's relativism, critics must accept: there is nothing said in the book that can be isolated and taken as a direct statement by Machado. At the same time, everything was written by Machado: no one is disputing that. What is

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at issue is the relation between Machado and Bento, whom from now on, for convenience and clarity, I shall call respectively the author and the narrator,9 though this should not be taken to mean that I deny Baptista's point that Bento is the "author" of everything in the sense that he writes his memoirs and chooses every move, every detail, every word. Machado in fact goes to very considerable lengths to make Bento convincing as a narrator of this type of novel. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, he is not totally convincing, primarily because Bento is characterized as an innocent in the ways of writing, carried away by his enthusiasm into the digressions that are in fact, as we know, a part of Machado's sophistication, never so well displayed, perhaps, as in this novel. One of the subtle but perhaps inevitable ways in which Bento's necessary innocence and spontaneity affect the novel is that there is almost no real mention of any kind of contemporary fiction in Dom Casmurro: to imply that Bento was familiar with it would be to undermine this spontaneity. The only exception that I know of is the mention of Des Grieux, from Manon Lescaut (chap. 33), significantly an eighteenth-century novel, and the fiction itself is treated as if were not one: Des Grieux might as well be a real character. There is, too, Jose Dias's reading of Scott, a rather innocent novelist himself. Bento's reading is wide and sophisticated—except in fiction. One could argue that this is realistic, in that he might share the age-old conservative view of fiction as frivolous or even dangerous, and to an extent this is true (he only decides to write his memoirs after considering other, weightier possibilities, and for him they are memoirs, not fiction). However, I would argue that Machado needs this curious, and in the end contradictory, mixture of sophistication and spontaneity and is prepared to put up with a certain breach of realism to get it. In the end, Machado is a novelist, Bento an amateur. To return, however, to the heart of Baptista's article: what is the relationship between the author and the narrator? His first major argument, brought to the fore in the context of Helen Caldwell's attempt to vindicate Capitu in The Brazilian Othello of Machado de Assis, is that Caldwell is involved in a contradiction concerning the author's intention. On the one hand, she argues, Machado gives the

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reader freedom to decide on Capitu's guilt, yet, on the other, he wants the reader to decide in Capitu's favor (since Caldwell believes she is innocent): "the reader is responsible for the decision, but only if s/he decides that Capita is innocent does s/he take the right decision" (Baptista 1994, 152; italics in original). It is for this reason that Caldwell takes a stand that she herself thinks the reader might find "preposterous"—and which Baptista says is just that— in saying that Machado does intervene directly at one moment (in chap. 54, concerning the Panegirico de Santa Monica and its author) to tell the reader what to think (Caldwell 1960, 150-60). According to Caldwell, this is an example of the "pair of spectacles," which Machado mentions in Esau e Jaco (chap. 13), that allow the reader to read between the lines. Baptista is right, it is a preposterous ploy: but his point has more extensive applications. According to him, Caldwell's successors all want at some point to identify the author in the text, to go behind Bento and find Machado, and to the extent that the novel does not provide clear pointers to the reader, we are all caught in the same bind. In the case of my own book—I am called "in several ways, Caldwell's most lucid heir" (175), so in that sense the argument with me is the crux of the matter—my method of discovering these intentions is called a "proliferation of pairs of spectacles" (168) because, rather than identifying them in one particular section of the novel, I find these signals from the author dispersed throughout the text. In spite of the apparent absurdity of multiplying pairs of glasses reading between the lines, and while it is not a metaphor I would choose, I in fact agree with Baptista's characterization of my reading. There are, I would argue, multiple moments at which the reader is invited (or given the opportunity—I shall come to the reader in a moment) to read between the lines and question Bento's view. To take a few simple examples from the all-important first two chapters: Bento does not tell us the primary, dictionary meaning of casmurro, meaning "obstinate, stubborn"; he tells us he does not understand the meanings of the four busts on the walls of the main room of the Matacavalos house; and he tells us that "I eat well and don't sleep badly." These three examples by no means ex-

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haust the riches of these two chapters, but they are enough for my purposes. The reader may well not know or care about the real meaning of casmurro; s/he may be unconcerned about any meaning the busts may have and not hear any discomfort in the como bem e ndo durmo mal. But, as they add up, something may begin to happen in the reader's mind (to use an imprecise word for something that is very likely to involve feelings as well). There can be little doubt, however, that some distrust of the narrator is a major possibility, put there repeatedly, like water dripping on a stone, to use another (still unsatisfactory) metaphor, for the reader to sense and react to at will. One striking illustration of the different, immensely subtle ways in which this mistrust may operate is the reappearance of Massinissa later in the book—toward the very end, in fact, in chapter 145, when Bento comes into the room to find Ezequiel looking at his bust. Here the mention of this single character, rather than the much subtler pinpointing of the Numidian king (out of place and chronological order in the company of three Roman emperors), and his reappearance after we know the full story of the novel make it more difficult—though still not impossible—not to wonder why he should be mentioned, and so to think of the story of Queen Sophonisba, who drank a cup of poison at her husband's orders (Gledson 1984, 159-60). This process of speculation is very subtle, complex, and, in the final analysis, impossible to describe, since the levels of the reader's "mind" at which these hints have their effect and the course of their interaction are not only extremely intricate, but also differ from reader to reader. Indeed, it is because this process is so crucial to the novel's effect that I have decided in my introduction to my translation not to knit these threads together and so take from the reader the capacity to sense for him/herself that the adultery, along with other aspects of Bento's story, is problematic. Another example, equally relevant but illustrating a somewhat different issue, is the way a modern feminist might look at the text. It is almost impossible that s/he would pass by the famous olhos de ressaca (undertow eyes) chapter (chap. 32) without realizing that Bento is, consciously or unconsciously, demonizing Capitu, turning her into a monster. If s/he has read Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan

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Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic, for instance, the conclusion is almost inevitable and will immediately color that reader's view of Bento as a typical male narrator, and unreliable to that considerable extent. If I try to think back to my first encounter with this image—something almost impossible to do—I was probably taken in, or, more charitably to myself, I thought of her as one of those fin-de-siecle temptresses, the Eves, sirens, Salomes, and so on who populate the literature and the painting of the time. It is very difficult, too, not to be carried away by the sudden access of powerful poetic rhetoric in this passage, and the genuinely intense emotions they convey. When we come to chapter 101 ("No ceu"), however, Bento's ideological sexism comes to the surface in the very blatant quotation from St. Peter ("Likewise, you wives, be submissive to your husbands. . . . Likewise you husbands, live considerately with your wives, bestowing honor on the woman as the weaker sex" [I Peter 3, 1 and 7]). Here a less modern feminist in the mold of, say, John Stuart Mill might well bridle and at the very least see Bento as somewhat old-fashioned in his views. The more modern feminist would merely find the vindication of what s/he had suspected all along. S/he might even be surprised to find such an overt expression of Bento's views. All this makes the obvious point that different readers will react in different ways to the book—something true of any novel— but it also shows that in the case of Dom Casmurro this normal fact is magnified by the number of ambivalent signs, hints, and clues that are given. But does this mean that all readings are equally permissible? My answer, in part set out in The Deceptive Realism (1984, 1516), is that Machado's attitude is less one of total indifference— "think what you please," in effect—than of testing the reader to see how much s/he will question Bento's truth and suspecting that s/he will be guided more by convention and emotion than by deduction: this is a novel, not a crossword. I cannot find a more succinct way of expressing this than the Spanish phrase con su pan se lo coma (used by Machado in a different sense in the cionica for 8 May 1892 [1996, 55]) or its rough English equivalent—"make your own bed and lie in it." The reader does have freedom, but there is, in this

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book as in life, a price to pay for it. I think that this resolves the apparent logical bind that Baptista discovers in Caldwell and her successors, including myself: how can we allow the reader freedom and yet want him/her to choose a certain option? Machado knows that there are many readers (as his many different ways of addressing them make quite plain) and that some will see less than others: it goes without saying that more or less complete vision depends in part on such variables as gender, nationality, religion, age, etc.10 At least that is one way of looking at the situation: there is the more optimistic scenario that once the reader begins to suspect Bento as narrator in one field, or at one level, s/he may begin to suspect him at others and so become aware of conventions and limitations s/he had taken for granted. Then, as I put it, "the novel begins to operate its cure" (1984, 209). Of course, we cannot know the whole truth behind the novel or reconstruct its "real" plot as if it were a piece of history.11 The adultery is the obvious case in point: no one, we can safely say, will ever prove the case for or against Capitu. But I suspect that that is completely unimportant to Machado: those (and there are many, some quite unexpected) who let themselves be drawn into that argument are in effect conceding that the physical act of adultery is crucial, something I would argue is secondary to the author, who did not subscribe to the honor code of his time, with its obsession with what went on between the sheets.12 Antonio Candido, whom Baptista quotes on this question, is right, I think, when he says, "But the fact is that, in Machado's universe, it does not matter much whether Bento's conviction is right or wrong, because the consequence is exactly the same in either case: whether it is imaginary or real, it destroys his household and his life" (Candido 1970, 2526, cited by Baptista 1994, 175). Machado, whether in short stories, in novels, or in cronicas, is a good deal less interested in "facts" (a fortiori fictional facts!) than he is in attitudes and conventions. It is on this level that I think we have to admit that it is possible to read the novel in a more or a less correct way and that this greater or lesser correctness is a part of Machado's intention. Correspondingly, and central to this process, we have to see that Bento is a complex product of a number of conventions, attitudes,

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ideologies, and "institutions' 7 like the patriarchal family and that there is a very definite, measurable distance between author and narrator. It is worth pointing out that this is a relative matter in all of Machado's work: Dom Casmurro is simply the most extreme and seamless (or apparently seamless) case of an independent narrator, deliberately distanced from the author. In the first version of Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas, published in installments in the Revista Brasileira, before the first chapter, Machado put the following rather obscure but enlightening quotation from As You Like It (act 3, scene 2): "I will chide no breather in the world but myself; against whom I know most faults/' which he then translated into Portuguese, to make sure no one missed the point (Machado de Assis 1960, 111). The implication of a narrator who undermines (chides) himself and is the prime object of the novel's satire is plain to see. What is even more significant is that Machado should have withdrawn this epigraph when the novel was published in book form. He has seen the advantage of not giving the game away to his readers and was never to make the same mistake again: as the older, wiser man puts it in the cronica for 21 August 1892: "Let's get rid of this habit of the writer saying everything, like the bearer of good tidings [Acabemos com este costume do escritor dizer tudo, a laia de alvissareiro]" (1996, 108). At least from 1880 onward, this deliberate hoodwinking of the reader became a frequent, if intermittent necessity: there is no need for there to be a first-person narrator for it to happen, as the intervention in chapter 106 of Quincas Borba shows, revealing as it does that the reader has been lured into imagining a liaison between Sofia and Carlos Maria that does not exist. Bento is exceptional, it is true, because he is the only narrator to take on writing a complete work of art (though not a novel, as I have said) and who himself writes in a self-conscious way, organizing the whole and the details, so that everything has to be thought of as decided by him. He also (unlike Bras Cubas) writes from within this world, as a contemporary of the novel's first readers. It is this very closeness that has made him take so long in the unmasking.13 In every case, however, in every novel written after 1880 (and in many stories too), Machado experiments with the creation of a narrator who not only is

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not himself, but who the unwary reader might well think either is Machado or is to be closely identified with him and thus be led astray. The creation of consistently unreliable first-person narrators is not without its own problems for the author. Nothing is exempt: even the words they report others as saying might reflect on the character of the narrators, revealing, for instance, something they should, for the sake of consistency and realism, be unaware of. No wonder, in the most mundane sense, that it took Machado so long: the first evidence of him writing this novel is in the publication in 1896, in Republica, of an early version of parts of some of the early chapters, under the title "Um agregado."14 So Dom Casmurro was at least five years in the writing, quite possibly more. But "Um agregado" is primarily interesting in that it shows us, in the changes that took place between it and the final version, something, however small, of the novelist's careful calculation, his doubts and his choices as the novel was in the process of composition. In The Deceptive Realism, I focused on how the later suppression of the long passage describing the "external life" of Rio in the mid-1850s is evidence of how one kind of more direct, "journalistic" realism gave way to another, subtler and more wide-ranging kind (1984, 57-59). But other details reveal the careful avoidance of too much clarity: in the early version Jose Dias says this to Dona Gloria of his rival Padua (or Fialho, as he was called in 1896): "Well, of course! Naturally he wants to climb upwards: a rich, respectable house, where will he find a son-in-law like him, or anywhere near him? I understand your gesture, madam, one can't imagine that the idea of such a match could enter the head of such a common, inferior man. . . ,"15 Significantly, the only words retained in the final version refer to Dona Gloria's gesture, something not easily defined in words. Why should Machado omit this blunt statement? Is it simply because of the aversion to clarity he vaunts in comic terms in the crdnicas2. Or is it part of a move toward the greater subtlety, shades of meaning, and half-lights that critics admire in a story like "Missa do galo," itself published around this time, in 1894? Perhaps: but it could equally be that it would not do for Bentinho the child, or by extension Bento the narrator, to be too directly aware of

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these conflicts of interest surrounding the Santiago household, which he is much less conscious of, and so less able to manipulate, than Capitu. The crucial point is this: Bento is very carefully constructed as a narrator and as a character (Gledson 1984, 2): his manner of narration is an aspect of his character—perhaps its most complex aspect. Machado's creation of Bento is not an abandonment of Realism, but a daring extension of it, in which the character's language, his manipulation of the plot and the narration in the book he writes, and everything about him point back to the kind of man he is. This argument has an important corollary: that as we see Bento complete and encounter him "in the round," to revert to E. M. Forster's old distinction between flat and round characters in Aspects of the Novel, so we should become more reluctant to blame him. This is a relative matter: Antonio Candido is rightly careful to say, in the passage already quoted, that it is Bento's "conviction" (of Capitu's guilt) "whose consequence is" the destruction of his household and his life. This stops a long way short of saying that Bento, or Bento's jealousy, "is responsible for," "to blame for" the destruction of three lives (his own, Capitu's, and Ezequiel's). Such is the complex concatenation of causes, social, psychological, etc., in the novel that we are forced to understand before we judge and so see what it is that produces Bento's jealousy.16 "Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner"? Not quite, I think, for there still remains that element of satirical attack on a society that may be explicable but is still wrong, even though the balance may have shifted further toward understanding and forgiveness than it does in Memohas postumas de Bras Cubas, for instance. Though Roberto Schwarz's (1991, 85) description of the elite type he represents remains an accurate one, Bento is a character with whom many readers, not merely because of a subconscious ideological commitment to the Brazilian elite (I can only cite myself as evidence), will identify. This all-round creation of Bento as narrator and character is crucial to one part of Machado's plan, or his idea of what fiction should be, which is realized perhaps in Dom Casmurro more perfectly than anywhere else. Because there is no direct, isolatable authorial comment on the text (no single pair of glasses, but multiple ones, to

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use Baptista's image again), our relationship with Bento is much more like that with a real human being, a casual encounter we might make, say, on the train from the center of Rio de Janeiro to Engenho Novo. Understanding, forgiveness, blame, identification, contempt: we experience these and any number of other attitudes and emotions as we make closer acquaintance. To press the point somewhat: just as Bento is a character, and an author "in the round/' so is Machado's reader. This brings me to the (literary-historical) question of how Machado came to conceive of this plan. It is underlain, no doubt, by moral convictions: his interest in such philosophers as Pascal and Schopenhauer is, I think, to a great extent motivated by an interest in the question of determinism and free will.17 But this question entered the realm of fiction in a very direct way with Naturalism and Emile Zola's notorious belief that novels should be conducted like chemical experiments, or Hippolyte Taine's statement in the introduction to his Histoire de la litterature anglaise (1864) that "vice and virtue are products, like vitriol and sugar." In the late 1870s, the publication and immense success of L'Assommoir forced this issue on Machado, and his reaction can be judged from his most important critical statement, the negative review of Jose Maria de Ega de Queiros's O primo Basilio, and his reply to Ega's defenders (1962, 3:903-13). This is not the place to deal with it at length: one detail will suffice to make my point. Quoting the novel, Machado says, "Of a coal-heaver [uma carvoeira], standing at a shop door, [Ega] says that she revealed a 'bestial pregnancy.' Why bestial? Naturally because the adjective stretches out the noun and the author sees no sign of human maternity there; he sees a phenomenon of the animal world, nothing more" (ibid., 907). This adjective implies Ega's ideology, a rigid mind-set, and it is the flight from any such implicit commentary that leads Machado with a certain degree of inevitability to the first-person narrators whose ideology is much less simple, more subtly layered and nuanced, and cannot be pinned down in single words, because he is relieved of the necessity of describing them from the outside at all. No one should imagine, however, that Machado's choice was an easy one. For he retains his own intentions, his own project: he

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"merely" has to imagine the vehicles of this intention and give them, or let them take on, as much life as he can. There is, in other words, a permanent tension set up between author and narrator (and, as Quincas Borba shows, this does not necessarily involve first-person narrators). It is very significant that in none of the six principal Machado novels (if we include Casa velha) is the situation of the narration the same.18 All are experiments, and all are bound, in the end, to show the same marks of authorial intention, albeit in a sharply different way from Ega's cruder thumbprint. Baptista says that "the supposed author, repeating himself or affirming the possibility of doing so, is the crisis of the author. Perhaps more than the crisis: the ruin" (1994, 148). There is, he says, "the risk of none of Machado's identity surviving" (149). I agree that there is a crisis: it was widespread toward the end of the nineteenth century, and it had in part to do with a crisis in Realism (though great mid-century Realists like Gustave Flaubert had experienced it in their way too), felt particularly acutely by Machado, and it forced or led him into daring experiments with Realism that involved the narrative point of view. Machado, from the (very limited) evidence we have, does not seem to have been particularly au fait with other parallel experiments with narration taking place elsewhere in the world in the 1890s, like those of Henry James. His experiments, I suspect, were the product of an internal logic, impelled perhaps above all by two factors: the reaction against Naturalism already mentioned and a very intense and complex relationship with his Brazilian readership, with whom he carried on (not only in the novels) a playful, sarcastic, knowing, treacherous "affair" for many years, and by whom he loved to be misunderstood, in Mucio Leao's words.19 In the end, the argument between Baptista and those critics who have, as he rightly says, in one way or another inherited Helen Caldwell's "legacy" is about intentionalism (Baptista 1994, 155). All of us believe that we can discover important facts about Machado's intentions in writing Dom Casmurro. It is, I confess, difficult for me to imagine what Dom Casmurro (or any other elaborately constructed work of art) would look like if we assumed the lack or the total inaccessibility of that intention. However, at the

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end of Baptista's essay, we get some taste of the consequences for our view of the author: Machado was enlightened (esclarecido) "because he did not make his novels depend on his being a lucid writer, a determined critic, or on anything of the sort. Because he serenely accepted the risk that all his novelistic production would cover the totality of his positions, his ideas, and his intentions with a cloak of ambiguity" (1994, 172). Not for the first time,20 I find a strange coincidence between our positions that I think is not merely apparent: I hope it is the result of logical rigor within our respective presuppositions. I almost agree with these words, and indeed, if they were taken out of context, I think I could wholly agree with them. There is a sense in which Machado did abdicate, did accept the risk that the genuine ambiguity present in his work—did she or didn't she, after all?—gave leeway to his readers. But this is not the same as having no intention at all or of—passively?—accepting ambiguity.21 On the contrary, as I have tried to explain, each reader will make choices, some right, some wrong, and (in perfect consonance with the idea of moral responsibility that Machado maintained against the sub-Darwinistic determinism of his age) "con su pan se lo coman." The crucial point is that those decisions, individually or when woven together into a view of the novel, are more—or less— right in ways that correspond to Machado's intentions. I wait with genuine curiosity to see what a reading of Dom Casmurro based on Baptista's presuppositions would look like. But I remain convinced that it is an illusion to describe Machado's fiction as in any way anti-Realist. It is an explicable illusion: no doubt the features listed toward the beginning of this essay—the unreliable narrator, the willingness to play with the structure of the novel and to digress, the emphasis on memory—do have their parallels in some twentieth-century fiction that has anti-Realist aims. That is because they are, though in different ways, the product of the same crisis in Realism, prompted in great part by its exacerbation in Zola's Naturalism, which pervades the whole of late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century fiction. But in Machado's case at least, these things not only did not destroy Realism, they are part of a daring and continuous experiment to extend Realism's boundaries and capacities.

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III

Briefly, I would like to conclude this essay with some comments on where criticism of Machado might go from here. These are only suggestions: no one would be so presumptuous as to lay out a plan of campaign when so much depends on individual tastes and approaches: who, twenty years ago, could have foreseen Roberto Schwarz or Abel Barros Baptista? I might seem suspect as belonging to a certain "line": not just the "Caldwell legacy," but the social and political interpretation espoused in different ways by Raymundo Faoro (1976) and Roberto Schwarz. Nevertheless, I think there are useful suggestions to be made, which may help in producing a basic consensus.22 The first point that needs to be made concerns the texts themselves. We are still without a real Obra completa (neither the Jackson nor the Aguilar edition remotely fulfills that need, in spite of their titles). The determined reader can piece things together from these two editions, Jean-Michel Massa's Dispersos de Machado de Assis, Raymundo Magalhaes Junior's collections of stories and crdnicas, and the essential guide, Jose Galante de Sousa's Bibliografia de Machado de Assis: even then s/he will sometimes have to rely on untrustworthy texts. The Comissao Machado de Assis did admirable work in its critical editions, but limited itself to works published in book form in Machado's lifetime, which excludes an enormous amount. It also, for mysterious reasons, did not use the manuscript of Esau e Jaco, which is in the keeping of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and has enormously interesting corrections (judging by a photograph of an individual page that has been published).23 Many of the stories, and a great majority of the crdnicas, remain without the kind of editing that is necessary—and here I do speak from a kind of personal interest, having produced two editions of, altogether, 125 crdnicas in what I think is the only way it should be done: annotating them to make their contemporary context clear (Machado de Assis 1990a and 1996). Until this work is done, it is unlikely that we will have a complete works at all. In a tantalizing entry in Galante de Sousa's bibliography (Sousa 1955, entry no. 353-A, p. 434), it is revealed that, between 1869 and 1876,

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a section entitled "Badaladas," to which Machado is known to have contributed, appeared in the Semana Ilustrada. Galante comments: "We don't think it prudent, however, to attribute the authorship of this or that cronica to Machado de Assis, without a serious and meticulous study of the style."24 He is right: he could also have said that without proper editions of Machado's other cronicas such a study is impossible. Is this such a small detail? My next point concerns the relative lack of study of the minor—or shorter—works. It is curious, for instance, that the three (to my knowledge) books on Machado's women (Stein 1984; Xavier 1986; and, most recently, Lisboa 1996) all deal exclusively with the novels. The amount of material in the stories is so enormous that I find it difficult to understand this limitation: many of the stories, also, were published with a primarily female readership in mind (in women's magazines, the Jornal das Familias and A Estagao).25 Even Roberto Schwarz's brilliant, genuinely ground-breaking Ao vencedor as batatas, an account of the novels of the 1870s, could have drawn evidence from the stories, which went through a curiously hesitant mutation at this time. Until these works have been better mapped, we will lack some of the material for all kinds of worthy enterprises: but they are also deserving of study in their own right. Three projects spring to my mind, aside from the study of his portrayal of women: others will have other ideas, no doubt. First, we still do not know enough about Machado's reading or, to use a more controversial word, his sources. I said above that I had the impression that he was not very au fait with developments in fiction elsewhere. My impression is that his tastes were conservative (which makes his experimentalism all the more remarkable): it certainly is true that, in one cronica, on 9 October 1892, he described the nineteenth century as having begun with the publication of Rene and ended with the death of Ernest Renan (Machado de Assis 1996, 134). Whether I am right or wrong in this surmise, it would be very useful to have a discriminating study of the major influences on his thinking. Second, and linked to this, we need a new study of his philosophical thought, to replace that of Airanio Coutinho (1959), useful as it is. It will have to steer carefully between

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the rocks and shoals of Machado's irony, but it still could illuminate much of his thinking on other topics: I have always wanted to know, for instance, how to judge his relationship with Schopenhauer, whom Machado probably read already in the 1870s, early in terms of the European fashion for his work. Finally, we need a study of his political and historical thinking, evident in all his work but particularly in the crdnicas. A part of that, too, concerns his activity as a civil servant, largely in the Ministry of Agriculture, where he was inevitably involved in daily application of the law on slavery among other things, a topic being explored by Sidney Chalhoub, another contributor to this volume. This list may seem too ambitious, yet too conservative in its theoretical approach. I am unsure: this may be my own bias, and I am far from denying the possible usefulness of, for instance, the varying strands of Marxism, of feminism, or of Derridean deconstruction, so long as they are coherently argued and sustained.26 But I still have doubts: when we compare the state of studies on Machado to those of a great contemporary like Henry James, with whom one can draw such interesting parallels, I cannot help but conclude that there is a great deal of—fascinating, revealing—spade-work to be done before we have the materials fully to understand him and his own peculiar kind of greatness. NOTES

1. Or did at least until 1992, when Otto Lara Resende, then cronista of the Folha de Sao Paulo, published a piece entitled "Nao traiam o Machado" (Don't Betray Machado), asserting that it was only common sense that the adultery had taken place. 2. The clearest expression of this point of view is Silviano Santiago's article (1978). 3. Realism and Modernism, as their names reveal, are not logical opposites, and it is only a critical shorthand (I am tempted to say knee-jerk) that can make them so. The interplay of intellectual, social, formal, economic, and psychological (e.g., in terms of theories of motivation) influences on the authors of the period between, say, 1880 and 1920 tends, as soon as one focuses on a single author, to dissolve into something much more interesting than such a dichotomy. The bibliography on the topic is vast: one perhaps little-known attempt to grapple with the complexity of the subject in

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the English language—it is a study of George Meredith, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James—is Allon White, The Uses of Obscurity: The Fiction of Early Modernism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). 4. Most notably by Alfred Mac Adam, who has recently returned to Dom Casmurro in his "La retorica de los celos: Dom Casmurro." He continues to maintain that the novel is above all the discourse of a jealous man, whose "first-person narrative allows Machado to exclude reality from the text" (n.d. [1992?], 44). Bento Santiago, argues Mac Adam, knows that "the space within which he works has only two dimensions, and he also knows that his readers will give in to the temptation to see it as a three-dimensional world" (52). Mac Adam and I are as wide apart in our views as ever. I would simply point out one form of contradiction these views tend to lead to, which Baptista's arguments (see below) have alerted me to. Mac Adam himself, rather like Helen Caldwell with the Panegyric (see below), wants to find confirmation for this interpretation in the text itself, in chapter 73, dealing with the passion evinced by Ezequiel (Bento's son) for painted soldiers. At this point, the narrator, and the author behind him, would be telling us the truth: "Bento does know the difference, which he explains, to us as much as to his son" (51; my italics). Here, then, it would seem, some kind of reality—the truth about the nature of Bento's text— violates the "non-Realism" of the text. 5. Here and at other moments in this article I repeat arguments from The Deceptive Realism. This is inevitable, and I beg the reader's indulgence for it. I have not given page references every time it happens. 6. I have dealt with this and some related topics linking the cronicas of the 1890s and Dom Casmurro in an essay on Capitu (Gledson 1995b, 64-66). 7. It is perhaps worth making clear that I do not regard my stance as reductionist: the kind of Realism that I believe Machado embraces excludes nothing. It is interesting that in one of his few unironic statements on his own work Machado says (in his notes to the volume) that one of the stories of Papeis avulsos ("A serenissima republica") is "the only one which has a restricted meaning [in this case a political one, concerning Brazilian elections]" (Machado de Assis 1962, 2:366). In my article "Brazilian History in Machado de Assis's Papeis avulsos" (1995a), I make it plain (see note 12 of the article) that I do not regard my interpretation of "O espelho" and "Verba testamentaria" as excluding a psychological one that in fact is notably parallel to mine. 8. I recently completed a new translation, published in 1997. In it, I have limited the notes in the translation to what I think is essential. A fascinating example of, perhaps excessive, annotation of a modern—Realist—

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work is James Joyce, Dubliners: An Illustrated Edition, with Annotations, ed. John Wyse Jackson and Bernard McGinley (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995). Here the annotation is the main aim of the edition: in my case it is simply intended to elucidate things the reader could not be expected to know or deduce from the text. 9.1 have decided to ignore the by now almost conventional separation between "Bentinho" the character and "Dom Casmurro" the narrator. They are, after all, the same person, and there is a considerable gray area between the fifteen-year-old and the sixty-year-old telling the story. To use "Bento" in general for both seems in the end more helpful. 10. In this sense, Roberto Schwarz (1991, 85) is quite right to speculate on why Helen Caldwell should have sensed Capital's (possible) innocence ("because she was a woman? because she was a foreigner? because she was perhaps Protestant?"). However, critics' reactions can show more suspicion than one might think, even outside the "Caldwell legacy." When the novel was published, Jose Verissimo doubted Bento's view of Capitu: "Dom Casmurro describes her, moreover, with love and hatred, which may make him suspect" (1977, 30). Indeed, his whole article "Urn irmao de Bras Cubas" is well worth rereading as an example of a reaction to the novel before views became rigidified. As interesting is a recently republished article, "O defunto autor," by Lucia Miguel-Pereira, originally published in the Suplemento Literdrio do Estado de Sao Paulo on 27 July 1958 (before Caldwell's book, therefore), in which she says, "But perhaps, in spite of her oblique manner, Capitu might be innocent, and the whole tragedy might only exist in Bentinho's head: his timidity is transformed, under the influence of jealousy, into sado-masochistic impulses" (Miguel-Pereira 1994, 32). 11. Baptista says that I "open the way to a reconstruction of the plot of Dom Casmurro's narrative freed from Dom Casmurro's point of view" (1994, 169,- italics in original). I would argue that I am less interested in the reconstruction of the plot than in the interpretation Bento puts on it. 12. As a cronista and short-story writer, Machado shows himself a good deal less interested in the sexual act than in the moral taboos, feelings, and conventions surrounding it. One example will have to suffice: the story "Singular ocorrencia," which apparently centers on one "singular" act of casual sex, but in fact centers on the attitudes of three men to the woman involved—the storyteller, his interlocutor, and the man whom she "betrays" (who has the good sense to "forgive" her, though we don't find out how much he understands of her motivation). 13. Perhaps the most similar case to that of Bento is that of the priest in Casa velha, though it should be remembered that his conscience is less easy than Bento's—and that Machado never published this short novel in

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book form. In the case of Counsellor Aires, the narrator of Machado's last two novels, Esau e Jaco and Memorial de Aires, who has taken even longer to be unmasked, the reasons are somewhat different, primarily having to do with the fact that he seems less involved in the stories he is telling than is Bento. 14. This interesting document can be found at the end of the critical edition of the novel published by the Comissao Machado de Assis (Machado deAssis 1969, 251-55). 15. Pudera! Quer naturalmente subir: casa rica, casa respeitdvel, onde e que ele achard genro igual, nem que de longe se aproximel Compreendo o seu gesto, minha senhora, ndo se pode admitir que ideia de semelhante enlace entre na cabeca de homem tdo reles, tdo infimo . . . (Machado de Assis 1969, 253—I have modernized the orthography). 16. As Baptista says apropos of Roberto Schwarz, "we must conclude that the 'method of self-exposure' contains necessarily within itself the possibility . . . that the 'apology7 and the 'ferocious critique' might not be able to be distinguished" (1994, 166). I agree that this is true (in art as in life): as often seems to be the case, I agree with many of Baptista's formulations, without letting them lead me to his conclusions. We are confused by Bento—Machado knows or hopes we will be, but he also knows that in the most important matters (which do not include the adultery) we should be able to clear up the confusion, something that life less commonly gives us the opportunity to do. 17. The most famous appearance of the topic in connection with Schopenhauer is the cronica (to which Mario de Alencar, in his edition of some of Machado's cronicas published in 1910, gave the title "O autor de si mesmo"), published on 16 June 1895, concerning the murder of the baby Abilio. Pascal was one of Machado's favorite writers, and the name of Escobar has its origins in the Lettres provinciales (Gledson 1984, 138), a book to which the issue of free will is central. 18. Baptista describes this process (1994, 145) as a "program or series of individual decisions," which shows, it seems to me, an admission of the need for intention to operate at some level. My own feeling is that it was probably a mixture of the two things, that is, that there was the sketch of a grand plan in Machado's mind, but that details were filled in as each work came to be written (see Gledson 1986, 17). 19. Mucio Leao's words, which I cited at the beginning of the first chapter of The Deceptive Realism of Machado de Assis, are quoted from Meyer 1958, 13-14. He gives his source as "Mucio Leao, Ensaios contemporaneos." Unfortunately, I have never found this volume. 20. See note 16 above and my review of Em nome do apelo do nome: "I

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am impressed by how two opposed methods, each possessing a certain consistency, can arrive at parallel conclusions'' (Gledson 1993, 249). 21. The words Baptista chooses are interesting: "he serenely accepted the risk [of the ambiguity of his work]." Surely even accepting is an intentional act? 22. We now have a journal, Espelho, dedicated exclusively to Machado, edited at Purdue University and the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. Their Bibliographical Project, announced on p. 135 of the first volume, promises to be very useful. 23. See the (unnumbered) pages of the introductory material to Costa 1974. 24. Some of these cronicas have been published, in spite of their uncertain authorship, by Raymundo Magalhaes Junior, in Machado de Assis (1958, 187-295). 25. For an excellent account of the second of these magazines, see Meyer 1993. 26. Perhaps this is a little disingenuous: I am well aware that Baptista's arguments find a good deal of their inspiration in Jacques Derrida's work (see Baptista 1991, 101), and I suspect that our ultimate disagreements come down to such theoretical questions. But this will have to wait for another occasion. In the meanwhile, another essay by Allon White, "Bakhtin, Sociolinguistics and Deconstruction," in Carnival, Hysteria and Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 135-59, provides for me the most useful description of the dangers of deconstruction, in that, as he puts it, it "treats texts not as specific performances within a social discourse, but as abstract repertoires of competence" (154). Machado's work needs to be understood (among other things) as just this kind of "specific performance."

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JOAO ADOLFO H A N S E N

2- Dom casmurro Simulacrum and Allegory

Translated by John Gledson "The whole point is to provide it with an idea and fill in the missing middle." (Dom Casmurro, chap. 55) Recently, in a stimulating article, the Portuguese critic Abel Barros Baptista called attention to what he called "a certain problem": the fact that Machado de Assis "inscribed his own signature on a network of fictional signatures" in three of the principal novels of what is usually termed his second phase (1880-1908). Among them is Dom Casmurro, in which the "author" ("Machado"), signs the book, but removes himself as the authoritative enunciator of the text, presenting himself, mimetically disguised, in the writing of someone else, that is, as "Casmurro" (Baptista 1994, 145-46). This delegation of full responsibility to a fictional author is, of course, intentional. One might think that this is any one of several stratagems: a parody of authorial property; a critique of Romantic subjectivity or of the form and narrative point of view typical of determinism or, perhaps, of Realist pretensions to objectivity; an imitation of contemporary positivist discourses,- an allegory of the domineering style of the Brazilian ruling class; a game of cat-and-mouse with the reader of popular novels; a melancholy caprice; the product of an irresponsible, arbitrary, and cynical fantasy. . . . The possible meanings of this stratagem of delegating authority are many, and the position and direction of criticism that should follow from it are not at all clear.

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The "supposed author/' a term borrowed by Baptista from Wayne Booth's terminology, is defined by writing, that is, by establishing a written relationship with a totality (the book), which in turn has a reader as its destination. Differing in this from a simple narrator or a narrator who is himself the object of narration, as Baptista also says, what defines him as a supposed author is the fiction that the book is the result of his decision; thus, he introduces his text to its addressee "as if the other author, the conventional, non-fiction one, did not exist" (Baptista 1994, 146). Putting it another way, the fictional author is not confused with the personification of the "author [autoria]"1 (which is itself a signature or a classificatory category and does not refer to Machado, the man himself). Yet the supposed author is a function of this same "author": each has a relationship of mutual dependence on the other. The supposed author does not have total autonomy, since he is an invention of the "author," that is, of "Machado." At the same time, this same "author," "Machado," depends on the signature of the supposed author to go on being recognized. Let us begin by clarifying our terminology. Mimetic authorship is dealt with in the Dialogues of Plato as characteristic of the Sophist technique that uses double arguments to affirm that everything is true or everything is false. When Plato discusses enunciation (lexis), he says that that is where we should investigate the origins of falsity, as happens in the case of the "mythic lie" of poets, who are thought of as "irresponsible" because they give an appearance of autonomy to their discourse. The basic yardstick of the Platonic analysis of poetry is that of dissimulation and nondissimulation. The poet can certainly speak in his own name, without passing for another person, and without having recourse to quoting the words of others, in which case we have haple diegesis, "simple narration." However, if he disguises himself in his discourse as another author and, as an apocryphal person, carries on speaking through the voice of another, making himself seem what he is not, and, furthermore, removing the authorship from himself with the formulation of this other, we have mimesis. At the same time as he hides the actual author, the poet shifts the place from which he speaks. According to Plato, the actual or "diegetic" author appears as an image propor-

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tionate to or synonymous with the person producing it; but the fictional or mimetic author, imitating an imitation, is a mere homonym and, at times, a homonym of a homonym, in an increasing spiral of deformations and nondetermination of the author's image. Fictional authorship is a simulacrum (e.g., The Republic 376a; The Sophist 266a). It should be remembered that, according to Plato, even diegesis is already the substitution of real relationships by apparent, but true-seeming ones [eikastike). As for mimesis, it replaces these apparent and verisimilar relationships with other, merely apparent ones,- as an appearance of an appearance, it is doubly removed from the truth of something, from reality, and at least once removed from the verisimilitude of appearances proportionate to their objects. It is phantastike. Rightly, Baptista affirms that the repeated use by Machado of supposed authors is a sure sign of the crisis of the author, since it is basically impossible to separate the fiction of the "author" from the fiction of the supposed author. His discussion of these questions jnoves in the direction of undermining the interpretative tendency according to which, in his words, criticism on Machado has tried and is still trying to avoid the possibility that there is no such thing as an identity or an "intention" called "Machado de Assis." This tendency proposes that the "author" himself, "Machado de Assis," has an identity and can be identified. With the skeptical expression "the paradigm of the step back [oparadigma dope atrds],"2 Baptista proposes that, from the work of Helen Caldwell (1960) onward, some of Machado's principal critics, with an interest in this identification, have adopted a "suspicious attitude," which consists of reading against the fictional author to determine the true intention of the "author," a process that, according to these critics, reveals the "real Machado." Baptista's critique is extremely acute and should not be bypassed. In order to deal with it we should propose first of all that, when he invents a supposed author who writes the fiction of the book signed with his name, Machado gives him the form of a mimetic reflector—doubly mimetic, in fact—who refracts discourses or likenesses of ideological statements that in his time were thought to be "true" and that provided the parameters of verisimil-

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itude. As a mimetic reflector, Dom Casmurro is, on the one hand, a signature homonymous with that of "Machado de Assis"; on the other hand, and simultaneously, he is a means by which stylized representations of contemporary discourses are systematically deformed according to the arbitrary will of the fictional author. To the extent that Machado reactivates the hypochondriacal narrator of the eighteenth century as a compositional framework for Dom Casmurro, he too—the supposed author—appears divided in two, as the fictional author who writes and as another who comments on what he does. It has long been noted that the book revives the hypochondriacal self-reflexive author of Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759; 1767) or of Xavier de Maistre's Voyage autour de ma chambre (1794). Now, in the eighteenth century the medical doctrine of the humors prescribed that such narrators distance themselves from social life, as Dom Casmurro does in chapter 2, because their livers have been ruined by black bile [atra bilis), which makes them atrabilious or melancholy. It is this melancholy that causes their arbitrary, depressive, and nihilistic decisions, but, according to the convention, the representation of their melancholy cannot be total, because the narrator must also be duplicitous, something that is achieved technically by means of the introduction of certain tensions that make him into a satirical character. Thus, he must affirm himself to be a reasonable person, given to virtuous simplicity and normal, average conversation. But he must make an extremely complex use of rhetorical techniques in making this very affirmation; he must assert the truth of what he is saying, but distort his actions by means of hyperbole; he must be sober and rational, but frequently adopt outof-proportion, irrational positions (Kernan 1959)—just like Dom Casmurro. To Dom Casmurro's composition Machado applies two basic characteristics: one melancholy and given to ups and downs, which applies to all the intellectual and sentimental manifestations of his obsessive passion, resentment; and another firm and constant, which ensures the simulation of rational judgment when he is dealing with matters in which the black bile does not heighten his imagination. As a self-reflexive hypochondriac, he shows great dis-

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cernment in matters that are irrelevant to his principal passions and, at the same time, he is blind and arbitrary when it comes to judging the value of his own opinions. This application of the figure of the duplicitous hypochondriacal narrator is a guarantee that conflicting, opposed, or even contradictory points of view are brought into play. In Dom Casmurro, it gives allegorical power to a well-defined authorial irony, whether it be that of the fictional author or the real author. However, the sarcastic and ironic allusions of the supposed author, Dom Casmurro, are also self-directed parodies, since they appear as a contrast to a mediocre life and to his complicated method of telling his story. The two principal styles that are counterposed in the psychological duplicity of the eighteenth-century hypochondriacal narrator also appear in this case. One of them is serious and elevated, tending to the sublime, with lyric, tragic, and epic features,- the other is comic and low, ironic and amiable in ridiculous situations, sarcastic and gossipy in painful ones. Their juxtaposition within Dom Casmurro, as each transforms itself into the other, implies that the meanings connoted by each singly are relativized. When something comic is used to signify something tragically elevated, or something mean and derisory is put on a serious level, the effect is the suspension of single meaning, a kind of humorous or ironic dissonance, which may be taken as "skepticism" or "nihilism" by the reader. There is also a homology between the supposed author and the "author" in the narrative process that produces a rupture of meaning. We find in Dom Casmurro both the typical eighteenth-century narrator and narrative structures characteristic of the end of the nineteenth century: that is, different durations, practices, and material processes. As a starting point, we could propose that the arbitrary direction of the supposed author and the ambiguity introduced into his writing by the expedient of self-interpretation are carefully calculated effects of nondetermination of meaning. It is useful, first, to remind ourselves that the material medium of contemporary literature itself—the techniques and conditionings, the material situation and means of existence of the work—is included by Machado as an element that determines its form. Organizing the perception and the memory of the reader, the form and

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arrangement of the chapters imitate the rhythm of the new, modern simultaneous world of multiple perceptions, inherent in the social fabric of the late nineteenth century. Here fiction no longer depends on publication by installments in newspapers, as in the time of the Romantics in 1840 or 1850, when such episodes came out monthly, weekly, or daily. Now, at the beginning of each chapter, the supposed author no longer writes the resumes that reminded the reader of the previous days7 chapters and that today, partly because we read them in books, make Romantic fiction repetitive and tedious. Different from Romantic novels, Machado's fiction includes the material presence of the book-object as a constitutive element in its writing. The inclusion of the book itself as a constructive model allows Machado to dramatize, in the writing of the supposed author, several kinds of duration, some of very recent origin, just off the boat from Europe, others of much greater age, dating from the colonial period, that coexist in the new kind of world brought into existence by the conservative modernization of the country. Nervous and lively, this form dispenses with the omniscient didacticism of the Romantics, with their sense of mission; it affects a cynical superficiality of styles in the discontinuity of its fragmentary organization, the formal equivalent of the new ways in which capital operates. Also, it imitates ways of reading the daily press, including that of the hurried newspaper reader. These are all relations between the form and its context, which themselves determine alterations in the content. Archaisms—like maxims, proverbs, and moral sayings, which in Machado's time were already the ruined remains of a premodern world based on personal relations—become suitable material, because they are concise and easily parodied, for an ironically incongruous integration of disparate things, both "old" and "modern," appropriate to the impersonality of contemporary existence. Ruins of a dead time, they also suit the shape, itself allegorical, of the ruin figured forth by Dom Casmurro's writing. Traditionally, in the Romantic and Realist fiction that Machado de Assis's work feeds off, the unity of the beginning, middle, and end of the stories in which narrators limit themselves to recounting, in an omniscient manner, the actions of "real" people, coher-

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ent even in their incoherences, implies representation and the appearance of truth. In such representation, the topics and the words of the fiction are similar to the entities "out there" that are taken as the ultimate ground of the discourse and that provide the context for what is narrated. In such works of representation, the reader is assumed to be the synonym of the person to whom the narrator addresses himself. In remembering the "real" foundations that coherently join the beginning to the end of the novel, the reader makes the narrative into a totality, including himself or herself in this representation as another unit of meaning. The memory thus activated reproduces the reader as part of the system oriented by the laws of normality that are the basis of those discourses imitated by the author so as to give a semblance of reality. As Wolfgang Iser says, stories have a beginning, middle, and end because of the exemplarity that causes them to be narrated (Iser 1987, 11). Functioning precisely because it dysfunctions, the use of the supposed author in Dom Casmurro produces a literary nondetermination that undermines the identity of subject and form founded on organicist notions. The work itself is a process that dramatizes the reader, proposing that reading cannot be the simple reproduction or recognition of a reality, since there is nothing to be recognized in the world that Dom Casmurro puts into play. As it brings into negative existence the images of the "real," distinguishing them as brute, crude, untotalizable products of the supposed author's desire, in the midst of equivocal insinuations of disbelief and resentment, the fiction refuses to collaborate in producing a unity of meaning or a similarity with the external. Here too, Machado de Assis's great theme—the "nothingness" that is a metaphor for the unrepresentability of modern existence— is brought into being by the systematic process of negation in its rhetorical forms: attenuation, litotes, euphemism, ellipsis, dislocation, anticlimax, paralepsis, irony, oxymoron, allegory, false attribution, ambiguity, parody, and the double. These forms of negation characterize his writing as one that "mixes styles," in the manner of the hypochondriacal narrator. This bringing back of the eighteenth-century type is not a simple regression to the past, since it has a very practical, negative use. Dom Casmurro dramatizes in his

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writings the simultaneous way in which contemporary forces operate, emphasizing their oppositions and contradictions. Carried along by one side of the contradiction or the other, he has no unity and is not reliable as a representative of the individuality of the "person." He does function, however, as a "conceptual character" in whom there converge several abstract determinants that are treated allegorically. A mixture of nostalgia for the Brazilian Empire that ended in 1889, of "Catholic" positivism, of egalitarian republicanism, of publicly accepted racism, of rhetoric and jurisprudence, of distinguishing signs (such as quoting French with an exaggerated concern for grammatical exactitude and listening with pleasure to Italian opera), Dom Casmurro appears to be a cultured, pedantic type, used to quoting the Bible, Dante, Tacitus, or Shakespeare apropos of nothing at all. If this much is allowed, it must be said that the inclusion of Baptista's critique here is not an attempt to "correct" Helen Caldwell and the critical tradition that, according to him, appropriates Machado's work by attempting to discover its "intention." Any "correction" would necessarily mean that one possessed the "true intention" of the author behind the text—and that is exactly what we do not have, and probably will never have. It is possible, however, to say that perhaps the so-called intentionalist readings are also the effect of a critical presupposition that is not made sufficiently explicit, thanks to the overdetermination of their analyses of the "social content" of the novel: the presupposition of the realism of the work. When one understands the term "realism" as a hypothesis about representation, a hypothesis that takes the work as corresponding to "reality" (social and/or individual), posited as an antecedent totality, the question of the form fades into the background and the content emerges as central to criticism. Exclusively analyzing the content implies that reading has a hermeneutic focus, becoming an attempt to "peel" the text as if it were an intention hidden by "enigmas," until we reach the core of the fruit and its unity can be seen as an expression of meaning—even when we discover an empty rind! But the form is, after all, also a historical fact. Ironically, when critics do not consider the form itself as a practical

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means of neutralizing the referential power of the text, criticism runs the risk of reintroducing into the text the alienation that the exclusive analysis of content declares it fights against. It tends to neutralize the form itself, as it converts the work into one more instrument for the critique of instrumental reason. Continuing along the lines of Baptista's argument, the supposed author as defined by him would permit one to say that the mimetic artifice of the narrator, Dom Casmurro, is a means of dissolving authorial intentionality (at least in the substantialist terms in which it was understood in Machado's time). This is something that, while it is certainly "intentional," nevertheless functions practically as the dissolution of a specific way of conceiving verisimilitude and implies other rules for the way fiction operates—rules by which the nondetermination of the true meaning of authorial "intention" would be a basic presupposition. The work does offer hints that make this hypothesis a likely one. Here I wish to discuss this gap within the making of the fictional author of Dom Casmurro, because it seems to me that, in the novel, it is possible to find evidence for an authorial "point of view" that can be characterized basically as nondeterminate and that dissolves authorial "intentionality." It is in this mimetic "gap" that the incongruities and even contradictions of the fictional author appear. His portrayal is one of total nonrepresentation, whose distorting effects on the texture of the novel, where the characters of Bento Santiago and Capitu can be found, make the use of the text as evidence in a legal sense impossible. It is true, however, that the fictional author tends to construct Bento Santiago as a type whose education, in the contexts of the family, of religion, and of his profession, can imply, logically and "naturally," arbitrary decisions and ambiguities. A contemporary of Emile Zola and Aluisio Azevedo, of Gustave Flaubert and Ega de Queiros, Machado produced a work between the discourses that appeared on the ideological horizon of the economic, political, and intellectual elites. Among these discourses were those of Spencerian and Darwinist determinism that gave a foundation to the racism excluding blacks and mulattos from the citizenship proposed by the Historic Republicans;3 those in favor of

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mass European immigration, who desired the Aryanization of the country; those of psychiatric medicine and Naturalist novels centered on knowledge of the mind through measurement of the skulls of children, bandits, lunatics, and "degenerates"; those of the Comtean positivistic Apostolate who preached the necessity of "order" as the basis for "progress"; those of the urbanists of Rio de Janeiro whose reforms, carried out from the end of the nineteenth century, sought to control the masses through hygiene and moralization. . . . As they excluded the masses from citizenship, the agents of these discourses set up rules that based their authority on metaphysical and scientific unities: they affirmed, for example, the unity of the person, defined in the Civil Code as someone who fulfilled a social role; the unity of normality, defined as noncontradiction, as the repetitive memory of proper behavior and the rational aptitude for carrying out useful tasks,- the unities of morality and Catholicism, posited as the ultimate principles of hierarchy defended as a necessity, since the need for it was also scientifically proven; the unity of the evolutionary continuity of time, set out as the basis of an organicist history of order and progress so necessary to the rational organization of labor. Placing itself in between these discourses, Machado's writing is obviously polemical. Not because it attacks any particular discourse of its time that followed the exclusive direction and supposed truth of some ideology or other. It is polemical, precisely, because it has a propensity to cast doubt upon the very unities naturalized in those discourses, appropriating their alleged universality to parrot them, taking them to the final consequences of cynicism, before dissolving them in the nothingness of the simple desire for power,- that is, power put into action in the style of the typical authoritarian fictional narrator, self-indulgent and "volatile," as Roberto Schwarz has rebaptized Sterne's hypochondriacal narrator (Schwarz 1990, 31). Undermining the unities of contemporary discourses already constitutes a critique of the notion, current at the end of the nineteenth century, of "Literature" as an organic form that attempted the objective representation of a "reality" interpreted by the biological sciences and of an authorial principle constituted as the expres-

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sion of a form and subject normalized by psychiatric medicine. In a literature in which being "in opposition" is already something extremely rare, the use of fictional authors like Bras Cubas and Dom Casmurro is fantastic in the Platonic sense of a mimetic representation that reduplicates and deforms honest representations. As a simulacrum, this use of fictional narrators also produces in the reader the presupposition of a necessary self-destruction. However, there is realism. Not because the work makes a direct transposition of "local color" or psychological analyses that are complex reflections of empirical life,- not because the writing is polyphonic or "dialogic." Nor because it does not deform, written as it is in a magnificently elegant style. It is realist in its expression, which sets up forces without determining them in a univocal fashion. There are many of these forces: the accidents of similarities, the blindness of desire, the inertia of the family institution, social ambition fueled by sexual or economic motives, the subservience of family dependents, slavery, Catholicism, stupidity, the language of madness, and scientific, philosophical, artistic, and commonsense "ideas." It is realist, finally, because it figures forth the unrepresentable modernity of the contradictory forces in the supposed author's allegorical fantasy. The structure of their multiple action is put into play, as a deformation and an absence of unity. Unlike the realism of its time—all certainty in its subordination of human truth to simple scientific principles—here realism is precisely the result of a refusal to hypostasize single causes for action. Dissolving all univocal and exclusive criteria—whether race, climate, heredity, instinct, the unconscious, sentiment, genius, progress, order, human rights, freedom, etc.—realism springs, paradoxically, from nondetermination, from dramatizing contradiction, and, almost always, from an opposition of forces. Provisional, artificial, and precarious insofar as it pretends to knowledge of him and of his past, the work written by Dom Casmurro is, for that very reason, a praxis in which the very notion of "Literature" as then understood appears nondetermined. It is no longer the transparent window of the Romantics, of the Realists, or of the Naturalists, in which the mediation of the narrative itself— representation—appears as a clear glass through which one sees the

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whole landscape as a preexisting social totality, but does not see oneself. As a theoretical, analytic, and descriptive category organized by means of the notion of "similarity" in several of its modalities—the unity of the real, totality, consciousness, memory, the evolutionary continuum, imitation, the correspondence of signifier and signified, verisimilitude, totalization—representation here appears shaken to its foundation. "Representation" implies an equilibrium, a correspondence between the subject and object in which signifier and signified are revealed as harmonious and revelatory of a recognizable meaning, already inscribed in the reader's consciousness and by memory. If there is "Realism" in Dom Casmurro, it is not that of represented content, since the prose cannot propose any unity of the "real," no totalization, no unitary subject, no conciliation of the subject/object, no correspondence between signifier and signified. Thus, it is useful to note that the image that the fictional author, Dom Casmurro, makes of himself as writer comes from an interpretation that he cannot allow to be his own, which would imply recognizing his status as a fictional author. The fiction of his writing incorporates, as a commentary, the double meaning of his nickname, casmurro, and also includes, as John Gledson has pointed out, the stereotypical discourses of common sense, which, in his imitation of them, he makes seem to be the reader's thoughts, at the same time as he ironically neutralizes them (Gledson 1984, 1516). In this way, he apparently denies responsibility for what he says, attributing authorship to someone else—for example, the "young poet on the Central line train," who it seems has invented the nickname "Dom Casmurro," attributing "aristocratic airs" to him. The delegation and reception of authorship appears in an ambiguous form in the first and second chapters/which are external to the main story. In the first, writing about the title of the book, Dom Casmurro comments on the term "author": "There are books that only owe that to their authors,- some not even that much." In this case, the words are a matter of convention and seem to suggest a suppression of authorship according to which "Machado de Assis" would be, for example, the author of the title alone—which is obviously not true. Much further on, in chapter 59, repeating what he

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has written about the "lacuna" and the "lack of memory" in chapter 2, the fictional author states that he has a "weak memory," that "everything can be found outside a book with gaps in it," and that he sometimes fills in "others' lacunae." Whose? Perhaps Machado's, in the first two chapters, readers might think, if not their own. Or maybe those of Bento Santiago, of Capitu, and even of the author of the Panegyric of Saint Monica (chap. 59)? In any case, the first two chapters indicate that the structure of the fictional author's discourse is an allegory, if we understand by that term the continued metaphor that is set up at the beginning by him being a "supposed" author and, thus, an author who makes a mimesis of a mimesis, redoubling and deforming the representation. At a first level, the allegory is a parody of representations, including those customary in the law-courts in Dom Casmurro's time, the 1890s. But, since the fictional author is a homonym or an other, who establishes the relationship of mutual dependence with the authorial, classificatory principle "Machado de Assis," the allegory is also a dramatic mediation of another "point of view," which can be read not necessarily as a teleological guide to the meaning of the novel, but as a constitutive element of its mimetic form. Here the expression "point of view" should be taken to mean something objective and material. It should be remembered that the expression, idealist per se, generally presupposes representation as the unreflective mediation of forms as in a window or in a tavoletta a la Brunelleschi—an optical contrivance placed between the objects represented and the central point of vision of the supposed unitary subject focusing on them. In Machado de Assis, however, beginning in 1880 with the mimetic reduplication of the fictional author as the dead author who writes the Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas, this optical centrality, which implies a unitary point of view, is displaced. In Dom Casmurro this is also the case, because not only what is visible and sayable but vision and the act of saying are the objects of the work of nondetermination. By undermining the representations of the fictional author, they also undermine the substantive unity presupposed in the "author" himself, "Machado de Assis." This nondetermination appears as the constructive principle behind Dom Casmurro: a fictional author, a mimetic author,

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he is a simulacrum. Absolutely everything he writes is undercut a priori. The mimetic structure of the fictional author necessarily implies, however, the presence, though very deformed, of his "other." But "presence" does not mean "intention"—or at least not the univocality and teleological directing of the intention. Here, again with John Gledson's help, we should remember that the simulacrum of the memory of the fictional author includes class-based stereotypes of the reader (Gledson 1984, 15-16). The allegory of the fictional author, however, can be reformulated according to another level of "intentionality," if we redefine the "point of view." For example, we could use the categories proposed by Robert Weimann (1984), who redefines it as the presence or evidence, in the literary text, of actual intervention in terms of the selection, organization, stylization, and putting into action of the materials that form the social context of the novel, an intervention shown in particular uses of technical devices. Used in this way, the notion allows one to criticize the biographical or psychological motives that still cause critics to attribute to the empirical author direct responsibility for the work, defined as "authorship," "creation," and "expression." It also allows one to criticize the idea that the author is transformed into a producer of automatic writing, as formulated in the "death of the author" declarations current in the structuralist and poststructuralist criticism of the seventies and later, like those of Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva. To avoid the empiricism of representative reflection, of the notion that the work is an expression of the psychology of a single "intention," one might propose that the use of the fictional author implies the authorial function "Machado de Assis," but now defined as an intervention that, observable in the organization of the novel itself, prevents one from reading it in certain ways. The "point of view," in this case, is the formal unity of nonrepresentation or the principle of nondetermination brought into the novel. The use of a fictional author also implies an authorial principle that dramatizes the historical conditionings of its literary praxis, among them the stereotypes the reader is assumed to have about institu-

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tions such as "literature," "woman," "marriage," or "adultery," refracting them allegorically in the simulacra of a fictional author, in ambiguous actions, and in apparently aimless digressions. Of course, ambiguity is ambiguous, and, logically, one cannot ask the question about the final meaning, so to speak, of nondetermination. But the devices to produce it appear on the surface of the text—only on the surface, moreover, since every "enigma" is merely an effect, when it is a simulacrum that does the writing. In Dom Casmurro, the two external chapters at the beginning and others like 9, "The Opera," 54, "The Panegyric of St. Monica," 59, "Companions with Good Memories," or 144, "A Belated Question," are allegorical duplications of the allegory, in the form of parallel commentaries on the central artifice. As Baptista proposes, the application of allegorical fictional authors implies the impossibility of capturing the "intention" of the author from the evidence of the book, perhaps because "intention" and "author" are dissolved by the "point of view." Nonetheless, the supposed author appears divided. As we have seen, his autonomy as a simulacrum is relative, since it is also a way of revealing the other, who corrodes him from inside by the conventionality of his stereotypes, displaying Casmurro's dissolving irresponsibility without, however, being able to direct the corrections or the dissolution of that autonomy in one direction or another. If one supposes once again the impossibility of a clear separation between the "intentions" of the fictional author and those of the author himself, it is also impossible to decide, at any moment, between apologetics and criticism. Here perhaps one of the reasons why Machado reactivated Sterne's self-reflexive narrator becomes clear. Imagined as a bilious type, the fictional author brings in contrary and contradictory perspectives as a matter of indifference. The equivalence of the meanings that he produces puts the dramatizing sense of the critics into abeyance, because this can have no object. It is as if Dom Casmurro were proposing the equivalence of perspectives as inevitable, led on by the force of his hypochondria to a dissolution for its own sake, making the distance between the house he writes in and his earlier circumstances and context into something of no consequence, as if

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seen from Sirius. It is in the staging of his irresponsibility, however, that the ideological limits of what he writes are made explicit. For instance, whereas the stereotypical and so to speak "biblical" opinion of Dom Casmurro about women almost always coincides, as a prejudice, with that of his character, Bento Santiago (although not in the refined rhetoric with which this prejudice is elaborated), the signature of "Machado" is not engaged in either case. Now, it may be that the "arbitrariness of narrative direction" in which the fictional author plays cat-and-mouse with the reader is itself a mimicking of the authoritarianism of the ruling class, as Schwarz has proposed (1990, 40-46), but this same arbitrariness means taking a stand, when one also considers that it is not an immediate Realist mediation, but a mimetic and allegorical artifice. This same partiality allows the book signed by the "author," "Machado de Assis," to appear as a calculated destruction of patriarchal values, founded on the formality of the law, and exposed in the allegory of Dom Casmurro—without Machado's position being clear. By the allegorical mediation of the fictional author, the book stylizes the universality of rights in liberal discourses; at the same time, it allegorizes, in the images of poor people, sick people, slaves, dependents, and women, the relations of domination and the poverty produced by these same rights. Examples are the paternalistic relation between Jose Dias and Dona Gloria, a "good Catholic lady" who owns slaves; or Padua's consuming desire to emulate marks of social distinction,- and, obviously, the social climbing of Capitu and the rest. In the contrast, all the unity between freedom and rights affirmed in the mimesis of the mimesis of ideology by Dom Casmurro appears split open, dissolved; altruistic Catholic virtues are translated into values of exchange, as if in a business transaction, and disintegrate in comic, ridiculous, and disgusting fusions; the delicate Romantic soul motivated by the Ideal appears in the form of social-climbing in which stupidity is the dominant feature; the progressive direction of time finds its natural limits in the competing vulgarities of calculation and archaism. And, if the homeopathy of Jose Dias is a new version of Quincas Borba's Panglossian optimism, the temporal continuity of science is thrown into question in the discontinuity of the chapters that, since they

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are not sequential, dislocate the representation of time as just another illusion added to the spectacle put on to amuse Saturn. The question that Dom Casmurro faces, writing as a fictional author, is not properly that of his material or the book's contents, but that of the allegorical unity of memory that ought, in theory, to organize them in a teleological sense. He is a simulacrum and for that reason appears as a mimetic reflector of the absence of a centralized perspective and so as a tediously chattery person, who talks about everything because he can remember nothing, except to parrot scattered and anonymous remnants of memory as in the allegory of the Panegyric of St. Monica. The details of his writing, stylized as second-degree mimesis of representations of the years of 1899, 1871, and 1857, may appear as "verisimilar/' at a first reading, as one presupposes the descriptive realism of each one in turn, when they are isolated; but the procedure that juxtaposes them and comments on them in the allegory is a necessarily factitious and false one. His lack of verisimilitude is, in rhetorical terms, one of " application/' like a counterfeit in which the defect is deliberate. A well-read writer in the nineteenth-century style, an ex-seminarist, almost a priest, and a lawyer, Dom Casmurro is made up of metaphors that imitate the metaphors of the rhetoric of jurisprudence of the law-courts of his time. His decision to write is motivated by the medallions of the ancients: Caesar, Augustus, Nero, and Massinissa. Copies of the copies that had cast their shadow over the Matacavalos house of his boyhood, they have been copied in the present-day one in Engenho Novo. They are absolutely factitious and simulate simulations, among them the classical taste popular between 1830 and 1840 and put into paintings done in the Americas; they also all relate to cases of betrayal of the Capitol. When Dom Casmurro states that the busts inspired him to write about "past times" so that perhaps the narration might give him "the illusion" of them, this defines the allegory in functional terms, for it means that it is creating a piece of writing about the writing of the illusion of illusions. The duplication en abime highlights the artifice applied by an external "point of view" and simultaneously mediated by the fictional author, according to whom the time remembered is nothing.

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The novel might remind one of Marcel Proust, as many critics have suggested. In appearance, its theme is that of the lost time of childhood and love. Very different from the Recherche, however, its nonexistent substance is that of the abolished time of memory, memory of a supposed author, a simulacrum ironically fashioned as being incapable of memory. Its artistic result is a melancholy one, when it is looked at with the half-hearted lyricism that does not take the allegory of the simulacrum into account and is moved by contemplating what might have happened. But it is truly fantasmagoric when it is seen as an allegory through which there speaks the impossible voice of a historical ruin. Already in the first two chapters, moreover, the writing appears as a fantasy, whose rarefied addressee includes the reader above all, encouraged to participate in an experiment in which memory and rationality have nothing of the positive or of order in the sense of fitting facts that have objectively occurred. The nonmemory of the supposed author is, in the end, an allegorical means for the construction of the novel as the emptying-out of representation. The continual process of "de-identification" (Schwarz 1982, 316) operates as the suppression of references that might allow the reader to unify Dom Casmurro into a total recognizable, harmonic coherence. In this division there is produced a humoristic vacuum, the simultaneity of laughter and melancholy already put into operation in Memorias pdstumas de Bras Cubas. Reading simultaneously in the spirit of both laughter and melancholy, the reader is included in the process of theatricalization in which the narrative decisions are more fundamental than the things and events that are put onstage. As the dissolution is, above all, that of the supposed author, the narrative events themselves appear unreliable. The solitary state and the sentimental journey to the ruined landscape of childhood love do provoke pity, especially when one thinks that they are remembered contents. But there is nothing to remember, and in this same solitude of the simulacrum there vibrates the simulation of an insidious cruelty and a desperate sadness that could be called a "class unconscious." Not belonging only to Dom Casmurro's enunciation, nor probably only to the class that is being parodied, the story allegorizes the ruin of a whole period, still in its

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death-throes after its official demise in the present time of the "Central Line train." There is a distancing device in which the whole past appears as perspectivized, an effect of the construction in the present of a past that at the same time has to be continually derealized. Chasing his character—the Bento Santiago of the years from 1857 to 1871—the supposed author also has to parody himself, as Edoardo Sanguinetti says (1972, 93), seeing himself write as a narrator who narrates himself. Principally because he characterizes himself from the beginning as a "lack" or a "lacuna," his writing is not exactly that of the (past) story that happened, but that of the story that does not yet exist. Thus, Dom Casmurro writes carrying out a reclassification of time in which he demobilizes time itself, freezing it in the inertia of what is dead as an irredeemable past, but active in the simulacrum's resentment of that past. The reader also comes to occupy the "place of the dead man," as Michel de Certeau defines the place of the historian (1973, 158). The reader locates himself or herself in the place of a metaphor. Everything is silently dissolved through the experience of inventing a factitious memory, a memory that provides the topics that direct and interpret the plot only to simultaneously empty its twists and turns of all meaning. When he dealt with the legal discourse in Dom Casmurro, Silviano Santiago (1978) moved away from the empiricist substantialism of previous critics of the novel, who until then read it as if they were in a law-court, trying to decide whether Capitu were "guilty." That is an irrelevant question, he argued, because the book casts doubt upon the "rhetoric of verisimilitude" itself, the application of which alone would prove the guilt or innocence of the accused. In 1960, Helen Caldwell had already suggested that Bento should be mistrusted: after Silviano Santiago's article, Capitu left the dock, but was replaced by her accuser, Dom Casmurro, and his creation, Bento Santiago. The transference of the judgment from one character to another remains, obviously, within the very same "rhetoric of verisimilitude" that the book questions. From Memohas postumas on, Machado had already learnt to make the supposed author's lack of being the allegorical expression exemplifying the impossibility of organic representation. It is nee-

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essary to note that metaphors of death and synonyms of absence, like the lack of memory or the fatality of destiny, are applied to Casmurro's writing in just the same way as they are applied to that of Bras Cubas, in Memorias postumas. In this latter book the supposed author introduces himself to the reader as a dead man who writes. It is a fantastical notion, and its deformed nature allegorizes the seriousness of the authorial "point of view" of Bras Cubas and of "Machado," who, with the metaphor of the dead man, questions in a vertiginous manner the very possibility of fiction. Obviously, death is nothingness, and, not being say able or writable, in it there is nothing to do. The delegation of the writing to the dead man displaces the fiction toward an intransitive and artificial authorial freedom, which cannot be limited by any unity or opposition. In it the unitary representation of subjectivity and of the objective world is annulled, and with it is removed any kind of illusionist shaping of the fictional material, something that was already dead as a result of the march of time in Machado's world. By definition, nothing can be affirmed about death, since any notion of making a concept of it is self-contradictory. Obliquely, the allegory alludes to the never-endingness of the nonbeing of fiction, a metaphor of modern unrepresentability. The allegory of death excludes an empathetic reading on the part of any reader who wants to find in fiction a recognition of the familiar and naturalized unities of ideology, even of a "critical" ideology. If the expectation of readers is a unitary representation, either the tragic and serious one of melancholy or the frivolous and comic one of laughter, they will be disappointed. The denaturalization of fiction by the allegory of death confers the rights of citizenship on literature defined as negativity and alienation. Did this apparently Olympian means of neutralizing meaning have as its aim an aesthetic liberty that refuses all practical use? Along with Abel Barros Baptista (1991, 103), one could argue that, not wanting to be modern according to the models of the conservative modernization of his time, but unable not to be modern in this way by historical fatality, Machado puts on show in his fiction the historical conditionings of his practice, imprinting it with the dissolution of any ideological positivity.

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Linking through its digressions the themes of destiny, theater, the devil's opera, and writing, the "point of view" organizes the selfdramatization of Dom Casmurro as an allegory of the tension between necessity and representation, fatality and contingency. From chapter 3 on, the simulacrum of Othello begins to die falsely in Engenho Novo. As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, according to Plato the simulacrum is a phantasm, an imitation of an imitation, the double of a double. It is fantastike. In modern literature the simulacrum appears as a fiction of fiction or a technique of writing about writing that takes a literary reference—such as Shakespeare—as the raw material that is deformed, subverted, inverted, or destroyed. In this sense everything that the text affirms is effectively indeterminable or even false because its affirmations/ negations are fictions built on other fictions. Let me be specific: Machado uses Othello, for Dom Casmurro is surely a parody of tragedy. Let us remember that at the end of the play Othello seeks to expiate his guilt and remorse for having killed Desdemona. His injustice toward her has an objective cause: Othello's blindness regarding his own jealousy and the bad intentions of lago, a blindness that is tragic because it is a destructive and self-destructive force. Machado, however, cites the language of lago—"puts the money in his pocket"—to suggest the emptiness of worldly interests, suggesting as well the emptiness of Bento's jealousy. Dom Casmurro is thus the artifice of an artifice. There is no substantial evidence either of Capitu's guilt or of Bento's blindness. Like Desdemona, however, Capitu also dies. The character Capitu duplicates but inverts the character of Desdemona, just as Casmurro, as a simulacrum of Othello, pretends to pretend a speech on Capitu's death. But the way in which the book is narrated does not allow one to know anything objective about the innocence or blame of Capitu or whether Bento is right or wrong in his suspicions. The functioning of the simulacrum makes the riddle indecipherable and the very question of her alleged unfaithfulness beside the point. Machado's admirable art is precisely to suspend any certainty. From chapter 3 on, we are dealing with a simulacrum. A parody of tragedy, a systematic falsifying of all evidence, the text is a literature on literature, a fiction of fiction. Thus, I repeat, the simu-

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lacrum of Othello begins to die falsely from the very beginning of the story. It is from that beginning that Casmurro produces his idyllic and beautiful childhood when his Desdemona, gypsylike and with her oblique eyes, was still the promise of happiness, the song of new mornings. Mesmerized by nostalgia for the nonexistent unity of his self, Dom Casmurro reclassifies dead images of the past, using them to fill a great emptiness. We gradually discover that the emptying-out is total, which turns the narration to stone, like the ruin of some dead thing: "I myself am missing, and that lacuna is allimportant" (chap. 2). A simulacrum in Engenho Novo, the repetitions are destructively intensified in the supposed author like the resentment that empowers his images. His melancholy is slowly gnawed by the silence of the dead. The effect of the indifferent rumination of time by time in time is perhaps a sense of nausea in the reader, who has a glimpse of the horror or, who knows, the humor of the opera that a devil composes with the falsely false notes of ambiguity. When the novel is read as an allegory of a certain kind of life under the Imperial regime in the second half of the nineteenth century—a point of view that has been reinforced in recent years by the interpretations of John Gledson (1984) and Roberto Schwarz (1991)—we move from a critique of representation to the figurative embodiment of a past experience of losing historical illusions. As in this case one can mistrust neither Bento nor Dom Casmurro, since they are simulacra and we are only concerned to observe the disguised way in which the fictional author produces the past, such allegorical interpretive hypotheses cannot be excluded. In this case, if readers wish to assume either that Capitu is guilty of betrayal or that Bento is really mistaken, and, above all, if they stop thinking about both things at the same time, the radical loss of youthful ideals and the shipwreck of love in the undertow of her eyes will probably form a story with tragic resonances, which will remind them of Othello, as Helen Caldwell (1960) has argued, following the suggestions of Lucia Miguel-Pereira (1939, 272-73) and Eugenio Gomes (1949, 25). The assumption of the adultery is beside the point, because it is the manner of composition that is decisive and

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the allegory of the loss of one's social bearings. In this sense, yes, Dom Casmurro shows the operation of class conditioning. For example, the Bento Santiago of the childhood invented by Dom Casmurro is naive, but his is a practical naivete, alienated from the destructive power contained in the innocence of his good intentions that are always waiting to be betrayed. When we remember again that the supposed author uses a nickname provoked by nodding off in the train as the title of the book, we can again observe that he plays with the two principal meanings of the word casmurro. "Obstinate," as it will be read in the chapters still to come, will be the Bento Santiago of years ago, a character in the text, who will be married to Capitu; "unsociable" is the supposed author, Dom Casmurro. In the present, the text makes explicit the semantic values attached to the second meaning—solitude, disenchantment, distance, resentment, and the chattiness of the middle-aged "unsociable" man—projecting them into the narration in which the fictional author plans to be reborn as what he says he once was, the old Bentinho—"insecure," "stubborn," "jealous." The reader is invited to pass continually back and forth from the present of the enunciation to the past of what is enunciated, attempting to decipher, in the false images of the nonexistent memory of the fictional author, why the present unsociability of Dom Casmurro, a taciturn man, a confirmed melancholic, produces in this picture of the past his old obstinacy and jealousy. More probably, however, the reader will forget the functionality and, identifying Bento with Dom Casmurro, will want to know why jealousy has become resentment, following the process of cause and effect given shape by the fictional author. In this fictional past, Bento Santiago's family is patriarchal and is organized according to Christian precepts of "human nature." In it, for this reason, "masculine" and "feminine" are two sexual natures that exist prior to any practice, and, opposed yet complementary to one another, they define subjectivity as fitting into pre-fixed roles. In the metaphors of patriarchalism in the book, the characters naturally interiorize the family name, gender, property, religion, honor, the privileges and pomp and circumstance of position, as rights and duties corresponding to individual and social nature as it

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is assumed in metaphysics. This interiorization, which really did make up the imaginary unity of the person in practicing clientelism during the Empire, appears in the text in the historical form of an authoritarian memory. It repeats models of past experience and shapes the expectation of the future as a repetition of authority. To this end, it foresees and adapts actions to the legality of institutions. Legally and metaphysically, the discourses of the Law and of Catholicism provide the foundation for this repetition, for they formalize the liberties that distinguish the member of the ruling class from the poor freeman or freewoman and from the slave. In Dom Casmurro, one can say, the dead govern the living, and this is perhaps the principal reason why Dom Casmurro has no memory, when the story is read as an account of facts: all Bento's memory is on loan. Thus, the memory of Bento the young man is made up of the commonplaces of patriarchal jurisprudence repeated by his family group. Each character allegorizes a principle: Religion and Property in Dona Gloria; Law in Uncle Cosme; Dependency in cousin Justina ; and Submission in Jose Dias. As a "conceptual person" or principle of mediation and interpretation for the preexisting family structure's general meaning, Jose Dias is the perverse allegory of the Darwinist allegories of this world. His character makes explicit the mediocrity that is necessary in this world as a cunning way for the weak to take their revenge on those stronger than themselves. As a metaphor for the bourgeois principle of common sense acclimatized into the Brazilian patriarchal, clientelistic structure, he repeats characteristics of the philosopher Quincas Borba, a character in Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas and Quincas Borba. There may be a reference to Homais, the naively scientistic pharmacist in Madame Bovary. Composed in a caricatural way by Dom Casmurro, Jose Dias demonstrates his inferiority by his use of superlatives, to gain authority, thus countering his basic lack of autonomy,- his affectation, however, is only a hyperbole of the norm, and functionally the character is an inverted version of Capitu as a girl and as an adult. Both are composed as institutionally inferior people, and they seem to know how this order functions, he as a dependent, she as a woman; she without property and he poor. But he

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is a servant who conforms to the role expected of him, she a type who is perhaps punished thanks to her curiosity, independence, and desire to rise in the world. In this sense, chapter 31, "Capitu's Curiosity/7 is exemplary. One cannot stress too much that all the images of the past are provided by the supposed author: Bento Santiago is Dom Casmurro's invention. In the present of his writing the book, as he represents the ancient principle of authority that forms Bento Santiago as a type trained under his mother's orders, Dom Casmurro also shows partiality in pretending to believe that independence of character is a vice. Thus, it is possible that he gathers details of what he calls "Capitu's curiosities," as simulated evidence of "facts" that prove her "guilt." In the world of the simulacrum, Bento lives, from his childhood, a destiny that he does not choose, as the instrument of his mother's desire. As a widow, Dona Gloria wants him to be castrated and angelic, a priest not a man, because of the promise she made before he was born. As Helen Caldwell (1960, 44) suggests, Bento Santiago's fate is inscribed in the transparent allegory of his name: "blessed" as "saint and Iago." Unable to act on his own behalf, he is only capable of facing obstacles by repeatedly activating the principle of authority that, as it is given substance in institutions, occupies every corner of his memory: for example, when he imagines that the emperor, the embodiment of the family, might be able to free him from his mother's promise that he would enter the church (chap. 29). His fantasy is built up by Dom Casmurro as an obtuse slowness, a difficulty in abstracting himself, and a passive receptivity, which is symmetrically inverse to Capitu's pragmatism,- what is more, in their dialogues, in chapter 43, Bento appears as a foolish, timid boy, who has interiorized the "good creature" he thinks of his mother as being. Dona Gloria reproduces in the shape of the family microcosm the Catholic ordering of the body that is also that of the whole of society she lives in. The overreligious and fearful form of divine power she gives credence to is typical of women under patriarchalism, frightened of thunder and of the husbands in the domestic Olympus. Historically, it is defined as passivity and submission, but it is the subordinate side of a single social unit that includes

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kid-gloved violence and a merely arbitrary concern for the welfare of others. Including metaphors that simulate historical references, Dom Casmurro composes Bento's lack of autonomy as the result of the social construction of his memory by this same social unit of authoritarian indulgence and benevolent violence. In the decisions they make for him, the patriarchal structure is repeated, as an appearance to be kept up and for whose purposes the keeping of promises is basic. This is what happens in Dona Gloria's dealings with heaven, when she buys Bento from God, paying Him, with Father Cabral's connivance, with a poor young man who happens to be available. Thus, it is useful to remember that, in colonial society and in Imperial Brazil, the title "Dom" meant "lord" and was a sign of aristocracy, as in the case of the emperor "Dom Pedro II." Dom Casmurro explains early on that the young poet ironically attributes "aristocratic airs" to him with his nickname. In this case, the term "Dom" means a distinction represented by overt signs, which include their bearer in the overall hierarchical principle. In the present moment of reading, like a spirit speaking through a medium, the term invokes the hierarchical principle so that Dom Casmurro may possess Bento's subjectivity in the past. As it depends on opinion and recognition, the term also implies his obedience to pre-fixed roles. Thus, the image of Bento is constructed as the result of an unconscious law that binds the family together in an authoritarian unit. This possession, signified in the title "Dom," is like the rind of a fruit: the firmness and strength of a repetition that contains and represses the soft pulp of subjectivity, preparing it for the harvest day. The "rind" surrounds the two sections of Bento's life in the past, as an adolescent bachelor in the house in Matacavalos, and after his marriage, on Gloria beach. In the latter the sexual and germinative spirits of the fruit have an intense struggle. Wittily suggesting that the authoritarian principle is repeated in the new situation, the supposed author sets the love-nest on the beach with the same name as that of his mother, "Dona Gloria." And it is on Gloria beach that the couple tighten their already close relationship with Escobar and Sancha and that their son, the "son of man," Ezequiel, is born.

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From the time in Matacavalos, in 1857, until the day of Escobar's funeral, in 1871, Bento is made by Dom Casmurro to be a satellite of Capitu, in a relation of social dependence in which normal powers are inverted. When one considers the models of the time that are imitated, the inversion is double: the willful girl who wields authority over the timid boy is also of an inferior social class: Jose Dias, a good subordinate, will of course warn his mistress. One can suppose that the relative autonomy obtained by Capitu through marriage is by no means guaranteed in the intimacy of the new home in Gloria. There Bento is still the well-beloved son of the church and Dom Pedro II: for, since childhood, his decisions have been made by others—initially, by his mother's choices; later, by the mediation of Capitu and Jose Dias; later still, by Escobar,- and always by Dom Casmurro. In his alienation, Bento is a receptacle of the images people attribute to him. His relationship with others determines his lack of initiative and the instability that characterizes his objective badfaith in what appears to be the past. Thus, his jealousy is also the result of his lack of autonomy and again reveals the authoritarian principle behind his upbringing. Supposing that, in the construction of the fiction of the past, readers are brought to believe in the post hoc propter hoc causality of the simulacrum, they will conclude that Dom Casmurro is unreliable because he was Bento Santiago, and Bento Santiago, of course. . . . But there is no evidence. Once more, the metaphor of reincarnation does not seem forced here, since the Central Line train, Auguste Comte, Allan Kardec, and the simulacra are complementary. In the ruin of the dead time that Dom Casmurro inhabits, the order and progress of the Spirit release one from all possessions, including authorial ones. NOTES

1. Translator's note: the word autoria, which the author defines here as not meaning the "author" (autor) in the usual sense, does not have an exact English translation. It usually means "authorship," and something of that sense of a role rather than a person is present, but the word will not suit in English. I have adopted the expedient of putting "author" in quotation marks when autoria is used.

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2. Translator's note: the Portuguese phrase ficai de pe atrds means "to keep a step back" in the sense of "to keep one's distance," "to be mistrustful," and it is this attitude that Baptista is referring to. 3. Translator's note: those long in favor of a Republic while still under the Imperial regime that ended in 1889.

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SIDNEY C H A L H O U B

3. Dependents ?ky chess Political Dialogues in Machado de Assis

The politics of dominance prevailing in nineteenth-century Brazilian society could properly be described as paternalist.1 The main characteristic of this kind of domination—present in strategies for the subordination of both slaves and dependent free people—was the idea of the inviolability of seigneurial will. The world was represented as a mere expansion of that will, and economic, social, and political power always seemed to converge at the same point, situated on top of an imaginary pyramid. Paternalism, as is the case with any form of domination, evolved its own technology, pertaining to the power and privileges exercised in its name: rituals of affirmation, practices of dissimulation, strategies for the stigmatization of social adversaries, euphemisms, and, obviously, a sophisticated vocabulary to sustain and express all these activities. At least since the publication of Roberto Schwarz's Ao vencedor as batatas (1977), we know that Machado de Assis was an acute observer and expositor of just such a technology of domination. In Machado's novel Helena, the scene that portrays the opening of the last will and testament of conselheiro Vale provides an exemplary description of a ritual affirmation of seigneurial will, even if carried to the limits of absurdity: the conselheiro is so assured of his prerogatives—"strict justice is the will of my father/' says Estacio (H, chap. 2)2—that he decides to bequeath his sentiments regarding Helena along with his real estate. In laid Garcia, Valeria struggles against her son's desire to choose a wife without taking into consid-

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eration "family traditions/' "assets," or "acquired relations," all elements pertaining to "the best classes of society"—relying on the detailed definition of the seigneurial class made explicit in the very first paragraphs of Helena [H, chap. 1). Thus she decides to send Jorge to the Paraguayan War in order to separate him from the virgin—truly loved, but a person of "a certain condition" [IG, chap. 2). In doing so, the widow resorts to "national honor" to give "a noble and august meaning" [IG, chap. 2) to the cause and thus disguise her real objectives—"from a domestic case there emerged a patriotic action," the narrator states [IG, chap. 3). Dissimulation could not be more clearly drawn. In Helena, Estacio harasses his adversaries with cruel strategies of stigmatization. He crushes Mendonga with a brief and malignant allusion to his "credit" [H, chap. 19), thus insinuating mere economic interest in the young man's engagement to Helena. In his first meeting with Salvador, Helena's natural father, Estacio seeks to blame the man for his poverty; because Salvador is "a strong, young and intelligent man," he "does not have the right to descend into penury" [H, chap. 21). In other words, for Estacio, the young and handsome landlord of Andarai who did not need to do, and thus did not do, anything for a living— he lived off inherited "assets"—poverty was a moral defect. Salvador, however, was then put under the suspicion of having acquired the "vice" of idleness. Euphemisms of paternalist domination are ubiquitous in Machado (and elsewhere), and it suffices to remember that in nineteenth-century Brazil the routine torture of slave workers was referred to as "fair punishment." As for the existence of a vocabulary pertaining to this politics of dominance, I have deliberately chosen, by way of example, several words and expressions from Machado—in fact, the majority of those that appear between quotation marks in the long paragraph that ends here. "The politics of dominance prevailing in nineteenth-century Brazilian society could properly be described as paternalist." Is that really true? We cannot assert it without confronting some problems and taking necessary precautions. The ideology that sustained seigneurial power did indeed include an image of that society as organized solely along vertical lines—that is, social places were defined, attributed, and thought of only in terms of dependence and alle-

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giance to authority. If the problem consisted of knowing the slaves' opinion regarding Helena, for example, it was enough to consider that bondspeople in the Vale estate followed D. Ursula in these matters—they "shaped their sentiments'7 after those of the old woman, says the narrator (H, chap. 4). In laid Garcia, Luis Garcia "had molded things according to his ways," and so "it was not surprising that he molded man as well" (IG, chap. 1); therefore, Raimundo, "slave and free," "seemed expressly made to serve Luis Garcia" (IG, chap. 1). In the world as construed by such ideology, a world dreamed of, the worth of any one individual is measured by the web of personal relations to which he or she manages to belong ("acquired relations," as stated in Helena [H, chap. 1]). There is no social place outside the formally and customarily instituted forms of hierarchy, authority, and dependence. The agents and overseers of seigneurial power make concessions; that is, they imagine themselves as the controllers of an economy of favors or concessions. They are never supposed to yield to pressures or to recognize rights obtained in the course of social struggles. In other words, outside vertical definitions of social belonging, there was only pulverization, mere atoms without social existence. In the ideology of paternalism (taken on its own terms, in a transparent, self-descriptive way) the possibility of the development of horizontal interests and solidarities—those that are likely to emerge among subordinate or dependent people—is left out of the picture. Paternalism is precisely the quality of the world masters idealized, the society they imagined and dreamed of realizing in daily life. It was an altogether impossible dream, one in which Estacio and Bentinho were still able to believe, perhaps because of their alleged purity before the Fall (dramatized in the Law of 1871 that declared free the children thenceforward born to slave women). It was a dream that Bras Cubas and Dom Casmurro shared, though somehow learned to ridicule, partly in self-commiseration for having been inescapably aware of their defeat. It is obvious that masters knew of solidarities among their workers, slave and free, existing beyond the common fact of their subordination, and thus they tacitly recognized some local customs, ethnic links, dialects, religious manifestations, arts of heal-

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ing, and other cultural practices. The problem is that this otherness, this autonomy, which was real, could not appear as such in the ideology of paternalism. The autonomous practices of the subordinate could not be perceived as expressing political differences, much less as evidence of social antagonism. Those on top had to believe that such practices only existed because masters had allowed their workers to bring them into being. Because the inviolability of the masters' will lay at the center of paternalist ideology, the ideas and attitudes of the dependent appeared to have originated in that will, as mere extensions of it. Masters took whatever could not be included in this seigneurial way of interpreting things as insubordination or outright rebellion and firmly believed such behavior had to be crushed with justified incivility. More ambiguous and indeterminate social territories also existed, however, ones characterized by political attitudes and practices other than either apparent submission or open antagonism. These were the territories where dialogues took place, the situations evolving from direct daily exchanges between slaves and masters, between masters and dependent free workers. It is obvious that these territories had been generally mapped out and established by masters, since the social meanings there activated were those characteristic of the politics of seigneurial domination. The fact is, nonetheless, that political differences and antagonisms did make their way and expressed themselves through the routine and inevitable exchanges between social unequals. Machado de Assis was a sophisticated and tireless interpreter of the possibilities of political discourse available to subordinate peoples in those situations that, though belonging to daily social intercourse, always carried the danger of a slip, of a word or expression uttered on the wrong occasion, or of any other infelicity that could provoke the masters7 aggressions and consequent humiliations. 3 From the perspective of the dependent, the plot or situation present in such dialogues is always the same. In Dom Casmurro, Capitu once explained to Bentinho precisely that which I wish to point out here. In order to convince Bentinho that Jose Dias, the agregado (a dependent person residing with the family), is their best ally in

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the campaign to avoid his being sent to the seminary, Capitu develops the following rationale to her boyfriend: "Don't you remember how you went to the theater for the first time, two months ago? Dona Gloria didn't want you to go and that was enough for Jose Dias not to insist; but he wanted to go, and he made a speech, remember?" "I remember: he said that the theater was a school of manners." "That's it; he insisted so much that your mother ended up agreeing and paid for both your tickets. . . . Go on, ask, demand it." [DC, chap. 18) The situation depicted in the passage is clear. The alleged subject of the conversation is Bentinho's desire to go to the theater for the first time. Dona Gloria, however, is originally opposed to the idea. The conversation would finish there if it were not for the fact that Jose Dias, the agregado, also wants to go. A dependent man, living with the Santiago family and at their favor, Jose Dias cannot challenge the widow's determination,- the fact that the woman does not want her son to go to the theater is enough for h i m not to insist. What seems to be in question, nonetheless, is whether it is proper for the boy to go to the performance, and so Jose Dias makes "a speech" arguing that "the theater was a school of manners." In other words, the agregado develops an argument seeking to demonstrate that it should be the widow's own will to send the boy to the theater—which, after all, has been turned into "a school." Dona Gloria finally agrees to give her permission; that is, it now becomes her determination that Bentinho go to the theater. Jose Dias is then designated to accompany the boy, whose desire is attended to, for the whole situation supposedly originated in his asking to go to the theater for the first time. I say "supposedly" because the real, underlying motive of the whole situation is evidently different. Perhaps it was Jose Dias himself who had suggested to Bentinho that he should go to the theater for the first time. The agregado is the one who really wants to go, and he finds a way of going for free, because the widow pays for both, as Capitu does not fail to remark. If we observe this passage as a structural comment or description, as an interpretation of the possibilities for political expression available to people submitted to extremely unequal social relations,

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characteristic of but not exclusive to paternalist domination, we may conclude, first, that the prerogatives of seigneurial will are never called into question—quite the contrary, they are ritually reinforced at every step; second, that the option left to dependents is to pursue their own objectives by trying to induce masters to take actions that interest them, the dependents. In other words, not being able to struggle openly for their own objectives, Jose Dias and similar figures try to reach their goals by making their masters imagine that it is the masters' decision to do exactly what they (the dependent people) want done. Political actions and strategies of this kind presuppose the possibility of a dialogue—both in the literal sense of exchanges or communication between people and in a metaphorical sense, because such exchanges occur in the established and routinized arenas of class struggle. My argument is that Machado de Assis, in several of his writings, presented and analyzed in detail the viewpoint of the dominated—or the dependent—in these situations, which were at the same time both routine and acutely dangerous. In sum, the facts and politics of paternalist domination did not mean that subordinate people were passive, incapable of pursuing their own objectives or of expressing political dissent. Despite the constant threat of invasion and plundering by the dominant, and certainly for this very reason, the challenge for people like Helena, Luis Garcia, Capitu, and so many others was to reaffirm cultural and political difference while engaging in the rituals of seigneurial domination. It was indeed a dangerous art form that ratified paternalist ideology in appearance even when undermining it. An art of survival conceived amidst tyranny and violence, exercised in the spheres designed and controlled by class antagonists, such political practices of dependent people allowed for the achievement of ends—otherwise unattainable—through the active manipulation of acts and symbols associated with their own subordination. It was the production of a text, a countertext, revealed between the lines (but not to any observer), in the supposedly naive joke or witty remark, in the ambiguity of words, the ambivalence of intentions. Such was, I think, the art of political dialogues in Machado de Assis. I will now proceed to comment on a host of examples.

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In Helena, Machado carefully analyzes antagonisms inherent to seigneurial domination, while situating events in a period in which the political and cultural hegemony of paternalism had not yet been seriously questioned. As I have argued elsewhere (Chalhoub 1992), an adequate reading of this novel requires attention to the fact that Machado wrote it in 1876, attempting to describe and interpret structures of domination that had prevailed in the 1850s. Historical events of the late 1860s and early 1870s—especially the Paraguayan War and the Law of 1871, perhaps also the political crisis of 1868—had expanded and sharpened his critical awareness regarding the mechanisms of seigneurial domination. Thus some dialogues in the novel explore in detail the possibilities opened to dependent people seeking to attain their own objectives. Humor, irony, and witty remarks—frivolous or harmless at first sight, but actually ambiguous in meaning and intention—seem to be common resources in the cultural practices of subordinate peoples. In the first chapters of Helena, those in which the emergence of the domestic crisis has not yet ruined the possibility for humor, Helena is a delightful joker. In chapter 6, she was poking into Estacio's books—"I stole something/' she said to the handsome young lord—and she found things inappropriate to young ladies. She dropped the book after reading a couple of pages,- then " opened a geometry book . . . and I confess that I had a wish . . ." "I imagine!" D. Ursula interrupted. "I wish I could learn how to ride a horse/ 7 concluded Helena. An amazed Estacio looked at his sister. That mixture of geometry and horseback riding did not seem sufficiently clear and explicable to him. Helena let out a happy giggle, as if she were applauding her own mischief. "I can explain/' she said; "I opened the book, full of scribbles and marks I could not understand. I heard the clatter of hooves, however, and went to the window. There were three people on horseback, two men and a lady. Oh! how charming was the horsewoman! Imagine a twenty-five-year-old lady, tall, beautiful, composed as a fairy, the train of her dress trailing on one side. The horse was spirited; but the woman's hand and whip kept it under control. I confess that I regretted not being able to ride a horse . . ." "Do you want to learn it from me?" [H, chap. 6)

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A lesson is immediately arranged for the following day. The whole episode is so odd, even childish, that one can scarcely expect the reader to take his or her time to examine what Helena is doing in the passage. However, the girl probably told a lie. The foolishness of the original motive and then the visibly forced and idealized description of the horsewoman arouse suspicion. The girl wants to go riding, but she manages to avoid asking Estacio openly for the favor,- thus she makes up a story that obliges the young man to offer her lessons. What is crucial in this context is that Helena knows how to induce behavior that serves her interests or objectives,- in other words, the girl knows perfectly well the causal links that constitute the young man's mental structure. The situation becomes fully clear the following morning, when the lesson is to take place. Helena appears in riding dress and seemingly content with her condition as a beginner. A slave brings a stool, while tb~ girl caresses the mare "with her white and delicate hand": "What is her name?" she asked. "Moema." "Moema\ Wait . . . it is an Indian name, isn't it?" [H, chap. 6) With a foot resting on the stool, Helena repeats the mare's name, "as if she were reflecting on it" [H, chap. 6). The narrator of the story then intervenes, explaining that all this was just a disguise. Estacio does not understand anything of the girl's actions and attitudes; he is merely confused. An attentive reader might at this point have understood the meaning of the passage without such an explicit intervention by the narrator. Why did Helena repeat the mare's name, "as if she were reflecting on it"? Because the name is a clue to the correct interpretation of Helena's movements in this whole chapter of the novel: "Moema. Lie, in the Tupi language. Same meaning as in Portuguese." The author of the dictionary also registers—though thinking it incorrect—that another meaning attributed to the word moema in Tupi is "sweet and tender" (Sampaio 1986, 107).4 Sweet and tender, but capable of dissimulation and deceit, such is the girl that Estacio is not able to decipher. "Estacio," as a matter of fact, is also a suggestive name. It may

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refer simply to the idea of stability, of the continuity of seigneurial rule; this is doubtless a meaning associated with this character in the novel. It is intriguing, nonetheless, that the word estdcio is present in the curious "vocabulary" entitled "The Slang of Carioca Thieves." Elysio de Carvalho compiled the "vocabulary" at the beginning of the present century to help in training future policemen, to make them knowledgeable of routine expressions used by thieves in their craft (Carvalho 1912, 168-81). Because the confusion between the concepts of "poor classes" and "dangerous classes"—just to employ the terminology of the period—was already present in the minds of politicians and public authorities at that time, Carvalho's "vocabulary" is actually a precious glossary of popular slang and expressions then used in the city of Rio de Janeiro. "Estdcios" are "silly people," who are easy victims for robbers. Even taking into consideration that decades elapsed between the writing of Machado's novel and the compilation of Carvalho's vocabulary, it is impossible to forget that Helena's art of dissimulation in this chapter is introduced by the following dialogue: "Do you think I spent the whole afternoon doing needlework?" she asked her brother, walking to the dining room. "No?" "No, sir,-1 stole something." "You stole something!" "I picked up a book from your bookshelves." (H, chap. 6)

Estacio was an easy victim for a robber. Soon afterward he learns that his joking sister can ride a horse perfectly well. The ensuing dialogue clarifies the whole situation: "Would you tell me why, knowing how to ride, you asked me for lessons ?" "The reason is clear," she said; "it was just a trick, a fancy . . . or rather a calculated move." "Calculated?" "Profoundly, hideously, diabolically," continued the girl smiling. "I wanted to go riding once in a while,- it wasn't possible to go alone, and in this case . . . " "It was enough to ask me to accompany you." "It was not. I wanted you to be more interested and pleased in going

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out with me; to achieve this, I pretended that I couldn't ride. The illusion of superiority on the subject would suffice to inspire total dedication on your part." (H, chap. 6)

On the one hand, the passage confirms that, from the reader's point of view, it is necessary to follow Helena's movements very cautiously; that is, because she is able to deceive or to omit things, what she says cannot be fully trusted—or simply taken in its literal sense. On the other hand, once it is understood that the girl has a sophisticated intellect and is capable of dissimulations, we perceive that she is extremely trustworthy as an expositor and interpreter of paternalist ideology. Helena knows that, in the world Estacio idealizes, things that happen are expressions of his will; it follows, as I stated earlier, that the boy and similar figures like to imagine themselves as "controllers of an economy of favors or concessions." Helena also knows that this one-sided, classbound vision of the world carries with it the constant threat of arbitrary moves or outright violence—but this is a subject I leave aside for the moment. What matters in this context is to notice that the girl comprehends that the surest way of obtaining something from Estacio is to make him believe in his superiority on the subject at hand. In other words, she decodes perfectly well the modus operandi pertaining to the lord of seigneurial prerogatives; therefore, and struggling to avoid open hostilities, she moves to achieve her objectives solely through astuteness and cunning. In the passage quoted, because the moment is one of gaiety and frankness, Helena even explains to the boy how easy it was for her to induce him to a certain behavior. It is clear that the precondition for the girl's maneuvers is her ability to be analytical of, and thus remain distant from, Estacio's world view. Furthermore, regardless of the fact that Estacio is the mathematician, it is Helena who is capable of calculating moves, of estimating events and their consequences. As the plot of the novel unfolds, the centrality of Helena's jokes and tricks in chapter 6 becomes evident: they made it possible for her to achieve the objective of regularly visiting her real father, who lived secretly in the neighborhood. Helena's moves are almost completely opaque for Estacio. That is, because the girl analyzes paternalist ideology and pursues her own goals moving inside such ideology, her "otherness" or distinct

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political views remain unknowable to him. For Helena, the antagonism between masters and dependents is manifest and subject to scrutiny—after all, she knows the precariousness of her position and devises strategies to avoid danger and hurt on the basis of this perception. For Estacio, the main seigneurial character in the plot, it is quite otherwise. Perhaps the historical period portrayed in the novel helps to explain many of his traits. Events take place in the 1850s, the golden years of the Brazilian Empire, according to much of the political memory constructed in the nineteenth century. The suppression of provincial rebellions that had characterized the Regency (1831-40) and the next decade, the waning of political disputes owing to the formation of governmental cabinets resulting from the "conciliation" of the Conservative and Liberal parties, and the end of the African slave trade that removed the danger of British intervention all contributed to the image of peace and prosperity in the 1850s and 1860s—at least until the coming of the Paraguayan War (1864-70) and the first parliamentary skirmishes that would result in the Law of 1871. Accordingly, Estacio was "satisfied with himself" (H, chap. 2) and performed naturally the "rights and obligations which were conferred on him by his age and by the class into which he was born"—"rights and obligations" that "he neither yielded nor forgot" [H, chap. 2). In other words, standing in front of his alcove mirror, Estacio appears as the representative of an uncontested, organic, virtuous domination, blessed by religion (Father Melchior) and polished by science (the young man had "will" and "passion for knowledge" and "dedicated himself to science with ardor and perseverance") [H, chap. 2). The hypothesis that Machado de Assis intended to convey social and political truth in the way he conceived Estacio in the novel is strengthened by contrasting the young man with his father, conselheiro Vale, from whom he inherited "assets" and privileges. While Estacio is virgin and candid, the conselheiro had had a rather eventful, unchaste, love life, "and there were matrons who saw the best pages of their youth go buried with him" (H, chap. 1). His unruly sexual behavior originates much of the injustice and suffering in the novel ("one does not harvest figs from star thistles" [H, chap. 24]); despite repeated vows of regeneration made to the priest, the

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old man never mended his ways ("promises made in the sand; the first wind blowing to his heart swept the scripture" [H, chap. 4]). This image, in which virtue is absent and vice abounds, brings to mind the interpretation that subsequent political generations made of the historical period ranging from the mid 1830s to 1850. This was a time characterized by unrestrained political passions and scandalous illegalities, especially regarding the African slave trade that, although officially abolished in 1831, was booming again in the late 1830s.5 The illegal slave trade proceeded and intensified in the 1840s and had reached an unprecedented peak when a new law abolishing it was enacted in 1850; meanwhile, politicians and public authorities pretended they could do nothing to stop the carnage. As a result, thousands and thousands of Africans, survivors of the middle passage, were illegally introduced into the country as slaves even though "to reduce free people to slavery" was a crime specified in the penal code. In 1850, Helena was "sixteen to seventeen years old" (H, chap. 3), so she had been born in 1833 or 1834. The love affair between conselheiro Vale and the girl's mother then occurred in the late 1830s, since Helena "was six years old" [H, chap. 25) when Salvador left Rio de Janeiro for a trip to the South, clearing the way for the unrepentant womanizer from Andarai. It is perhaps impossible to know if Machado had all such minute details in mind as he drew characters in the novel. In any case, Roberto Schwarz has shown beyond any reasonable doubt that, in conceiving plots and characters, Machado intended to reveal structural historical truths. John Gledson, on the other hand, has demonstrated that the novelist also sought to describe and interpret historical processes—that is, to analyze and evaluate social changes over time—and this is the probable explanation for the carefully drawn contrast between conselheiro Vale (1830s and 1840s) and Estacio (1850s) (Gledson 1986, 1991). In laid Garcia, a novel first published in 1878, Machado deals extensively with the period he saw as the most decisive in the crisis of paternalism—1866 to 1871; thus he offers an acute interpretation of the historical transformations that occurred then. The novel begins with a detailed exposition of the universality of the politics of domination based upon the ideas of the inviolability of seigneurial

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will and the constant renovation of personal ties of dependence. It proceeds to examine the unfolding of the political and social crisis of the late 1860s and early 1870s, including a rather timid—but also somewhat skeptical—discussion of possible alternative social arrangements. In this context, in which social agents perceive tensions and antagonisms more clearly, dependent people continue to show deference and subordination to masters; meanwhile, they laboriously—sometimes nervously—try to figure out and interpret the real intentions of their adversaries. Threats of retaliation and revenge are present in each situation,- tricks and ironies become riskier. Perhaps the most remarkable change in the whole social picture is that dependent people confront masters who are more conscious of possible resistance to their ways and therefore more willing to exercise and show off power and authority, not hesitating to resort to fraud and violence to achieve their ends. The dialogues between Luis Garcia and Valeria, in chapter 2, encapsulate Machado's vision of this particular historical period in a masterly way. Valeria, "the widow of an honorary magistrate" but still a "robust" and "fresh" woman (IG, chap. 2), has asked Luis Garcia to come to her house in order to convince h i m to become an ally in her campaign to enlist Jorge, her son, as a volunteer in the Paraguayan War. The situation is unexpected, and Luis Garcia, a "skeptical" man, who has sought personal independence by staying "distant from the outside world" (IG, chap. 2), can barely disguise his surprise and incredulity: "Mr. Luis Garcia/7 said the widow; "this Paraguayan War is long and nobody knows when it is going to end. Is there news today?" "Not that I am aware of." "Yesterday's news was not in the least encouraging," continued the widow after an instant. "I don't believe in the peace Lopez came to propose. I fear this is not going to wind up well." "Maybe so, but since it does not depend on us . . ." "Why not? I believe it is time for all mothers to make a great effort and give worthy examples that will not be lost. As for myself, I have been trying to convince my Jorge to enlist as volunteer; we can arrange for him to be a second or first lieutenant; he will return a major or colonel. However, he has been resisting the idea so far; it is not for lack of

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courage or patriotism; I know he has generous sentiments. He resists, nonetheless/ 7 "What does he say?" "He says he doesn't want to be separated from me." "That's a good reason." [IG, chap. 2)

This is a dialogue in which the representative of seigneurial power does not say what she thinks, and the dependent does not believe in what he hears. Both of them know perfectly well that this is exactly what is happening. Luis Garcia remains wary and cautious, seeking to make out Valeria's real intentions and meanings from behind the words calculated to cover them. His interventions are short, and he keeps on the watch for a word or lapse that may reveal something more concrete about the widow's objectives ("Not that I am aware of," "Maybe so," etc.). That patriotic fervor or sudden interest for the public good is unconvincing; Valeria's "liveliness" in approaching the subject seems "more simulated than sincere" [IG, chap. 2). Luis Garcia, however, does not dare "to state the suspicion and the doubt" openly; thus he argues that, once the young man rejected the idea of being separated from his mother, one should not insist with him. Having to adduce other reasons, Valeria admits that there is "a bit of personal interest" in her campaign, but the alleged motive is the need to make her son a war hero, thereby honoring the family's name and traditions. Such a motive appears noble enough, though absolutely improbable ("there must be a reason she did not want to disclose, or could not reveal" [IG, chap. 2]), and Luis Garcia is stunned by the spectacle of someone who can lie so much, pretending that reason is on her side. The impossibility of speaking the truth sharpens the widow's rhetoric, and she continues to allege considerations of a "superior" order and the like. The duel between mistress and dependent aspiring to independence continues for a while: on the lady's side, there is a constant display of arguments and verbal skills; Luis Garcia, on the other hand, is an able practitioner of the art of evasion. Garcia follows Valeria's moves with "sharp, suspicious eyes" [IG, chap. 2); the success of his struggle to resist and preserve his autonomy seems to depend on his ability to prevent the situation from deteriorating into

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open conflict. Under extreme pressure, unwilling to support Valeria's campaign to send her son to war, but unable "to refuse openly/' and seeking to maintain "his own neutrality," which "was absolutely difficult," the dependent finally gives in: " 'I will do it/ he said unenthusiastically." The retreat is calculated; because Luis Garcia can no longer stand up to the widow's pressure without risking his position, he decides to gain some time in order to investigate "the mistress's secret motivation," the "unique, personal advantage" she pursued in the whole business [IG, chap. 2). On the following day, during dinner, Luis Garcia talks to Jorge and learns that the future volunteer's love for a woman of "a certain condition" originated tensions between son and mother. However, the dependent is surprised to see Valeria's determination on the subject. The widow told her son that it was Luis Garcia's opinion that he should go to war. Though confronted with such an outright fraud, the skeptic is able to control himself and remains silent. Deceit and lies are again at the core of the mistress's strategies when she leads Luis Garcia to the erroneous conclusion that Jorge's loved one is a married woman ("Suppose . . . the person is married?" [IG, chap. 2]). Garcia does not catch any hint of fraud at this time, and so his understanding of the whole situation remains incomplete. In any case, the theme of falsification at the heart of seigneurial ideology is dear to Machado in laid Garcia and other writings, and one easily recalls the fake genealogy of the Cubas family presented in chapter 3 of Memorias postumas. Bras's father, who invented the genealogy, sincerely comes to believe in it—"imagination raised up to certitude," says Bras [MPBC, chap. 44). Likewise, Luis Garcia does not "doubt Valeria's patriotic zeal," but he knows that she pursues some "unique, personal advantage" in the matter (IG, chap. 2). The effect of these minute maneuvers in the novels' plots—beginning with Memorias postumas such maneuvers are the novels' plots—is to show the relativity, the transitoriness of dominant ideologies. Such ideologies are dated, historical constructs and thus permeable to criticism and eventual invalidation. Subjected to scrutiny, paternalist ideology is, like fear, "a prejudice of the nerves," and "a prejudice melts down,- it suffices to reflect upon it," according to Helena [H, chap. 6).

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In laid Garcia, events take place at decisive political moments. It may be possible to demonstrate that the novel tells a history of the period through the actions and attitudes of characters and through the relations established among them over time (the events narrated start in 1866 and continue until the beginning of the 18 70s,chronology is carefully referred to in the text precisely up to September 1871, the date of passage of the Free Birth Law). But I leave this kind of analytical approach for the future, and it is clear that I will be further exploring clues and possibilities previously indicated in the work of John Gledson. For the moment, it suffices to remark that in laid Garcia antagonism between masters and dependents is explicit and clearly perceived as such by the characters involved. In the dialogue between Valeria and Luis Garcia, which we have just focused on, the narrator of the story himself intervenes to expose tensions to the reader. Contrastingly, in the dialogues between Helena and Estacio, in chapter 6 of Helena, the narrator is not very helpful and rarely explicates characters' attitudes and meanings. The critical import of Helena's sayings and tricks seems obvious to me, but its full comprehension requires a reader capable of making out by her/himself most of the strategies that constitute the girl's art of resistance. The reader needs to suspect, for example, that there is meaning in the name given to the mare Helena rides and, most importantly, needs to understand that Helena's ideology is very different from that of Estacio, despite abundant appearances to the contrary. Class antagonism is inherent to society,- however, it may go virtually unnoticed by many people, and Estacio still displays that self-confidence that makes him almost completely obtuse to things happening around him. In sum, if not alert enough, the reader becomes an estacio—a "silly person" or easy victim to thieves. In laid Garcia, the narrator constantly assists the reader, describing characters' strategies and thoughts as they participate in the events. It is true that we learn much about Valeria's moves and manipulations, and we observe some of the same strategies deployed by Jorge as well. The fact remains, nonetheless, that what is best and most systematic in the novel is the study of the dependents' perspective, the description of the maneuvers they are obliged

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to perform in a moment of crisis and open animosity in order to defend their interests and avoid humiliation and violence. Bras Cubas and Dom Casmurro, heirs to masters of slaves and possessors of land, themselves masters and owners of slaves and comfortable properties in the Court city, are the narrators of their own stories. In Memorias postumas de Bids Cubas, the "deceased author/' a very shrewd and lively narrator otherwise, takes advantage of his condition in order to recount episodes of his life claiming independence and sincerity—"frankness is the prime virtue of a dead man" (MPBC, chap. 24). Relieved from worldly considerations and pressures, scornful of other people's opinions—"there's nothing as incommensurable as the disdain of the deceased" (MPBC, chap. 24)—Bras can now openly confess "what he was" and "extend" to others revelations previously made solely to his conscience. The political significance of the narrator's attitude is potentially explosive: after all, a legitimate representative of the seigneurial class, former holder and continuator of its prerogatives, decides to speak his mind, to tell the truth about himself and, consequently, about those associated with him by "family traditions," "assets," and "acquired relations." Bras is occasionally so daring that he even acknowledges the unsettling, almost subversive, consequences of his conduct: a certain Jaco taught him that "absolute veracity was incompatible with an advanced social state, and that the peace of cities could only be obtained at the cost of . . . deceits" (MPBC, chap. 87). In any case, Bras professes to combine frankness and derision,since truth is, by definition, serious, even taciturn, the reader of the Memorias postumas may always wonder whether what such a narrator confesses about himself really reveals something of himself or rather serves to dim the vision of others—"clean your glasses—because this [blur] is sometimes due to glasses" (MPBC, chap. 34). In Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas, Machado de Assis in effect rewrites Helena. Most events related in the text take place between 1840 and 1869, and Machado epitomizes some of the novel's intended meanings through the life history of Bras, which is also the history of Brazilian society as it existed until 1869, then agonized, died, and was delivered to the worms in 1870 and 1871, years of intense political agitation regarding the future of slavery

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(Gledson 1986, 1991). As is the case in Helena, the Memorias postumas refer to a period in which the hegemony of paternalism— that is, the politics of dominion based upon the image of the inviolability of a benevolent seigneurial will—remained practically uncontested. Estacio and Bras are brothers in history, nurtured and anointed in the exercise of their class prerogatives, flowers of "that earth and that manure/ 7 to recall a ludicrous self-description by Bras himself (MPBC, chap. 11). The difference is that Estacio is narrated to us—quite often through Helena—while Bras alleges that he recounts himself. Therefore, as we have seen, it is the girl who expounds Estacio's ideology to us, especially as concerns that conspicuous capacity of representing other people's actions and attitudes as mere confirmation of his world view and fulfillment of his needs. Bras once remarked about his father something that applies to Estacio as well: looking at others, "He didn't see anything; he was seeing himself" {MPBC, chap. 12). If "the child is father to the man" (MPBC, chap. 11), then Bras is the offspring of Estacio. Both share the philosophy of the tip of one's nose: ruminating once upon certain obscure philosophical questions, Bras comes to doubt Dr. Pangloss's theory according to which "the nose was created for the use of eyeglasses" [MPBC, chap. 49). The real and definitive explanation for the existence of this organ lies in the observation of the habits of fakirs, who spend "long hours looking at the tip of the nose, with the sole intention of seeing celestial light." The fakirs' secret is that, on looking fixedly at the tip of the nose, they lose their grasp of "external things," move away from earthly matters, "dissolve" themselves, "become ethereal." Bras thinks it possible to prove that the faculty of concentrating so deeply on the tip of one's nose does not belong exclusively to fakirs; it is "universal," each person having "the necessity and power of contemplating" his/her own nose. Is this in order to see celestial light, to dissolve oneself in the impalpable, as fakirs supposedly do? Certainly not; on the contrary, for Bras the contemplation of one's nose concentrates power because it allows for the elimination of "external things"—that is, it makes possible the representation of the nonexistence of social agents, and thus of political actions expressing antagonism to the seigneurial class. So as to

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dispel possible doubts regarding metaphors for social and political domination present in the passage, note that the main effect of the contemplation of one's nose "is the subordination of all the universe to just one nose"; such an effect guarantees, actually "constitutes the equilibrium of societies" (MPBC, chap. 49). For Bras the contemplation of one's nose is not the "sublimation of the being," as is the case for the fakir, but it forms the core of a particular political being, historically constructed, which I have been calling, for convenience (others, more pompous, would say "for theoretical rigor"), the seigneurial class, living at the apogee of its power and social prestige during the Empire. If Estacio is self-confident, "satisfied with himself" [H, chap. 2), Bras is hardly less so and delights in repeatedly explaining to the reader how characters and events in the narration are justified only by taking into consideration the narrator's caprices or alleged needs. Consider, for instance, the idea of arranging a little house, with a dependent woman living in it and acting as go-between, to make possible secret trysts between Bras and his lover, a married woman, the irresistible Virgilia. Bras soon finds the little house— "made to order" for his purposes (MPBC, chap. 67)—on a secluded spot in Gamboa: in front, a garden, climbing vines on both sides, mystery. He proceeds to divagate upon the meaning of their hiding place. At first sight, what we have is just a lover's possessive dreams: as the lover of a married woman, Bras gets from the house in Gamboa "an appearance of exclusive possession, of absolute dominion." But wandering thoughts suddenly converge on the attribution of a "social meaning," so to speak, for the little house; at least the language and concepts utilized vigorously convey a world dreamed of according to the parameters of paternalist ideology (or according to the philosophical fashion of the contemplation of one's nose). In the same sentence, there is a complete transition from personal and domestic references to the affirmation of a general principle for social domination: The house rescued me completely: the ordinary world would end at its door. From there on there was the infinite, an eternal, superior, exceptional world, ours, only ours, without laws, without institutions, without any baroness, without eyes, without ears—one single world, one

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single couple, one single life, one single will, one single affection—the moral unity of all things through the exclusion of those that were contrary to me. (MPBC, chap. 67} my italics) It is not only regarding their general, structural comments on social domination that the Memorias postumas rewrites Helena. We also find in it an attention to historical change, an intent to describe and interpret social transformations. Earlier in this text I contrasted conselheiro Vale and Estacio, the two main seigneurial figures in Helena, attempting to suggest that Machado made them succeed each other in time perhaps to serve as metaphors for meanings then attributed to the social and political history of the Empire in the 1840s and 1850s. Seen from this perspective, Bras is a synthesis of the conselheiro and his son. Again, adultery represents a historical period characterized by political unrest and consented illegalities concerning the African slave trade. The love affair between conselheiro Vale and Helena's mother begins in the late 1830s, continuing over the following years; Bras and Virgilia have their affair in the 1840s. Also significantly, the year 1850, in which a new and definitive law abolishing the African trade was enacted, appears as decisive in both novels. Vale dies in April 1850; and "there were matrons who saw the best pages of their youth go buried with him" (H, chap. I). That is, conselheiro and matrons leave the scene, opening the way for Estacio and his placid, mathematical, asexual (or sexually repressed) manners. After the end of his romance with Virgilia, Bras seeks regeneration through marriage in 1850; his fiancee, Nha-lolo, however, dies a victim of the first great yellow fever epidemic in Rio. The thematic association between yellow fever and regeneration (frustrated or not, depending on the interpretation) is meaningful: the occurrence of the 1850 epidemic hastened final parliamentary approval of the law abolishing the African trade, for many physicians and politicians thought the "infamous commerce" responsible for the importation of the plague (Chalhoub 1996, chap. 2). As a matter of fact, even Helena may have fallen victim to the onslaught that began in the summer of 1850, although there is no explicit mention of yellow fever in the novel or any reference to black vomit, the most terrible symptom of the disease (and one that would

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hardly have pleased prospective romantic readers, in any case). It is said, nonetheless, that "The fever . . . had finally taken over the poor girl" (H, chap. 28). In the Memohas postumas, in which the related events extend into the 1850s, historical allusions continue with obsessive attention to detail. During the Parana ministry, usually regarded as a conciliatory period between the political parties, Bras Cubas, then a parliamentary deputy, delivers his speech on the desirable height for the shakos of the National Guard—changing their height would make them more "hygienic," he affirms (MPBC, chap. 137). The experience of the conciliation of political parties in the 1850s came to represent the pacification of the country and the apogee of the Empire, according to nineteenth-century historians and politicians,-6 Machado's allegory, however, seems to emphasize that rather insipid political discussions characterized the period. In sum, in Helena, Machado depicts Estacio, a virtually asexual character, as assuming seigneurial prerogatives beginning in 1850; in the Memohas postumas, he presents Bras at the same historical moment in parliament discussing the sexual preferences of angels. Thus, indeed, Memohas postumas rewrites Helena. It is not without significance that Bras, the acute, sharp-minded Bras, is all too often an estacio with women. He never succeeds in subduing Eugenia, "the flower from behind the hedge," lame and beautiful; likewise, Estacio never disciplines his Eugenia, a fiancee expressly arranged for him, "one of the most brilliant stars among the tiniest of the fluminense [of the Province of Rio de Janeiro's] firmament" [H, chap. 5). Neither does Estacio obtain Helena's submission in the decisive moments of the boring romantic drama that entangles them in the latter part of the novel; likewise, Jorge can never tame Estela's "savage" pride in laid Garcia (IG, chap. 17). In the Memohas postumas, women do as they wish with this "twig of the illustrious tree of the Cubases," otherwise a self-confident lover [MPBC, chap. 44); in like manner, Helena is able to predict and control the reactions of the landlord of Andarai, a young man "satisfied with himself." Similarly, Iaia Garcia deploys an impressive arsenal of tricks and charming maneuvers to seduce Jorge, whereas the lad is naive enough to think that he is the seducer. Marcela, Bras's first

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sweetheart, shows a striking appetite for the boyfriend's "assets" or future inheritance, whereas the lad keeps thinking that the appetite in question is sexual, and his. Virgilia is unfaithful to her husband with Bras and is unfaithful to Bras and her husband with other dandies who happen to pass by. Chapter 77, in relating a conversation between Bras and Virgilia, is invaluable in this regard. That is, it features a dialogue between the possessive and supposedly superior male and the smooth and submissive lady, as is de rigueur; or between the jealous male lover and the oblique and dissimulating woman, as expected. Given the ingredients, the situation soon evolves into a quarrel between lovers. Virgilia "had waltzed twice with the same dandy" at a ball. Bras fulminated against her with his eyes; pretended indifference the rest of the party; committed the affront of not attending the tea offered by Lobo Neves, Virgilia's husband. Entering the little house in Gamboa the following day, Virgilia says to Bras that she is angry with his behavior. Learning the reason for the lover's attitude, she is astonished. With "a mouth half-open, her eyebrows arched, a visible, tangible stupefaction," Virgilia then shakes her head, incredulous, and makes fun of the man's jealousy: "Oh, you!" The whole scene ends in good-natured kidding, and Bras/Estacio, reassured of his sweetheart's virtues, and "satisfied with himself," concludes that his suspicion is unfounded. But the Portuguese wording of this conclusion carries deliberate ambiguity: Era claw que me enganara, says Bras. The phrase conveys the idea that Bras becomes convinced that he was wrong in thinking that Virgilia had seduced the dandy, yet insinuates that Virgilia wronged Bras by seducing the dandy. Perhaps the history of Dona Placida, the dependent living in the house in Gamboa, condenses, as an extreme case, the argument I present for the Memorias postumas. On the one hand, Bras's daring and self-confident manners, his whims and caprices—or his inconstancy [volubilidade, as Roberto Schwarz prefers)—imply the historical interpretation that the seigneurial class lived at the peak of its cultural and political hegemony during the first half of Dom Pedro II's reign; on the other hand, Bras's narrative suggests much opposition and daily resistance to his power and influence, without

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his necessarily perceiving that this is happening. In sum, Dona Placida is probably the most helpless and humiliated of all dependents present in the story that Bras recounts; in spite of that, it remains possible to filter her political actions through the narrative tricks and maneuvers the "deceased author" puts to use. Let us see. Dona Placida used to be a seamstress and dependent in Virgilia's family house, and Virgilia "held a real enchantment over her" (MPBC, chap. 67). A hardworking, honest woman, Dona Placida accepts her role as an accomplice in the affair between Bras and Virgilia out of need, but is somewhat ashamed—she "was sick with herself," says the narrator (MPBC, chap. 70). Bras attempts to win her over, tries to gain her confidence, at least her benevolence. He fabricates a story telling of formidable family opposition to his relationship with Virgilia while the lady was still unmarried, and he piously believes that the dependent believed in such a humbug because "it was a necessity of her conscience" (MPBC, chap. 70). Bras comes to use the five contos de reis he had found earlier on Botafogo beach to make a donation to the woman,- D. Placida expresses her gratitude, "tears in her eyes," and says she will begin to devote prayers to her benefactor every night "before an image of the Virgin" (MPBC, chap. 70)—all this according to the "deceased author." Thus Bras thinks he has bought her scruples and discretion. Bras's half a dozen paragraphs about D. Placida constitute a minute demonstration of the philosophy of the contemplation of one's nose. Ruminating on obscure philosophical questions once again, Bras faces the challenge of explaining the meaning of D. Placida's life. His initial answer is that the woman came into existence to burn yourfingerson pots, your eyes in sewing, to eat poorly or not at all, to go from one place to another in drudgery, getting ill and recovering only to get ill and recover once again, sad now, then desperate, resigned tomorrow, but always with your hands on the pot and your eyes on the sewing until one day you end up in the mire or in the hospital. That's why we called you [into existence], in a moment of sympathy. (MPBC, chap. 75) In other words, it is not possible to attribute any meaning whatsoever to D. Placida's life. With the question then left unanswered, Bras feels obliged to return to it in a later chapter. D. Placida has

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just passed away in Misericordia, the hospital to which Bras took her after finding the woman "a bundle of bones, wrapped in rags, lying on an old and revolting cot" [MPBC, chap. 144): I asked myself again, as in chapter LXXV, if that was why the sexton of the cathedral and the candy-maker had brought Dona Placida into the world at a specific a moment of affection. But I realized immediately that, if it hadn't been for Dona Placida, my affair with Virgilia might have been interrupted or broken off suddenly in its full effervescence. Such, therefore, was the usefulness of Dona Placida's life. A relative usefulness, I admit, but what the devil is absolute in this world? [MPBC, chap. 144) A massacre, a total triumph of seigneurial caprice, that is one's impression from reading these passages about D. Placida. Bras's final conclusion is that the poor woman lived because he needed her to. "External things" pertain to the world only insofar as they confirm Bras's ideology and attend to his material and spiritual needs. Virgilia, just to mention another example, "was the pillow for my spirit"; all things considered, "that was the only reason for Virgilia's existence" (MPBC, chap. 62). In sum, if Bras is now looking at a certain tree, the tree is there,- if he turns around and looks in another direction, the tree vanishes from the world. On arriving at this point, I must either change my route or find striking similarities between the ideology of slaveholders and the epistemology of postmodern relativists. I definitely take another path. That which Bras says is D. Placida cannot say everything about D. Placida. Bras recognizes this fact sometimes—however imperfectly—perhaps because of the perspicacity and sincerity acquired by studying the geology of burial grounds after his death. Though humiliated and reduced to the most abject dependence, D. Placida participates in political skirmishes, articulates moves designed to achieve certain objectives, to provoke in masters attitudes and interpretations that interest her, the dependent. Evidently, Bras and Virgilia rely crucially on D. Placida's faithfulness and discretion. Any slight hostile move by the servant and their clandestine love would be at risk, with the cuckolded husband perhaps willing to redress his tainted reputation with blood, as "if blood can wash anything away in this world"

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(MPBC, chap. 34). Bras thinks he can buy the dependent's conscience and fidelity,- the dependent may have learned to pursue her own objectives precisely by making him believe this. I mentioned before that she received a gift from Bras worth five contos de reis. On a later occasion, D. Placida refuses once more the couple's invitation for her to join them for luncheon. Seemingly resenting the attitude, Virgilia says that D. Placida does not care for her anymore. The dependent's response is to hold Virgilia's hands and look at her fixedly, "look and look until her eyes watered from staring so hard." Bras shows thanks for this demonstration of affection by dropping a coin in the pocket of the servant's dress. For readers of the Memorias postumas, full understanding of D. Placida's moves and meanings requires a willingness to read between the lines. Again, the passage carries ambiguity: D. Placida would "look and look" at Virgilia, "until her eyes watered," thus provoking in master and mistress the interpretation that interested her, the dependent—tears of affection were repaid with a coin in the pocket (MPBC, chap. 73).7 This is the politics of subordinate or dependent people, exercised in their own way, that is, by carefully moving within the paternalist ideology of class antagonists. Otherwise, humiliation and violence might ensue. The argument is strengthened if we observe D. Placida's actions and attitudes during quarrels between Virgilia and Bras. One day the man arrives more than an hour late at the house in Gamboa. The lady is gone. D. Placida, "really upset," walks up and down the living room, sighs, shakes her head, reprimands the careless lover: "It's just not done" [MPBC, chap. 103). In the meantime, she describes Virgilia's reaction to the episode: "that she'd waited a long time, that she'd got annoyed, that she'd wept, that she'd sworn contempt for me [Bras], and other things." All this is spoken in tears. Afterward, she offers to be the agent of reconciliation between the lovers. It seems that the whole situation becomes clear: Three days later, everything had been explained. I imagine Virgilia was a little startled when I asked forgiveness for the tears she'd shed on that occasion. I can't remember if inside I attributed them to Dona Placida. Indeed, it could have been that Dona Placida had wept when she saw her disappointment and, through a phenomenon of vision, the tears she had

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in her own eyes seemed to be falling from Virgilia's. Whatever it was, everything had been explained . . . [MPBC, chap. 103) Is everything explained? Not the tears of Virgilia, who certainly did not cry. Perhaps she was not angry either; nor did she even swear to despise Bras thereafter. Who knows if she actually waited for the man a long time. The explanation for Virgilia's tears indeed lies with D. Placida, but not because of wet eyes, as Bras imagines: the conclusion one comes to is that the dependent manipulates situations between the lovers, seeking to inflate quarrels, hence arrogating to herself a decisive role in reconciling the couple. Then we may guess at coins flying from Bras to D. Placida's dress pockets and other amenities coming from Virgilia. Bras himself understands that the servant occasionally lies, because to each of them she "would mention sighs and longings she hadn't witnessed" (MPBC, chap. 103). In sum, even someone reduced to being a go-between in love intrigues, poor D. Placida, demeaned, massacred, subordinated to Bras's seigneurial nose, retains the "universal" power of contemplating the tip of her own nose—that is, she is able to engage in political dialogues and struggle for her objectives. In Dom Casmurro, Machado de Assis returns to the interpretation of historical transformations that had been central to the writing of laid Garcia. The analysis of potential risks for dependents in routine political dialogues is one of the underlying themes in the novel. Once the holders of seigneurial prerogatives begin to doubt the authenticity of the moves and attitudes of subordinate peoples—seeing them as capable of representation, of dramatization— they tend to adopt the view that dependents are always and universally false and mischievous. Dom Casmurro is an allegory of the experience of defeat for the defenders of a certain understanding of class politics and social domination. The narrator, Dom Casmurro, writing in the late 1890s, seeks to discover the reasons for his economic and social decline. He presumes to have found such reasons in the unrepentant, but then unsuspected, antagonism his dependents had demonstrated against him throughout his life. In the biased, teleological, autobiographic narration he composes, Dom Casmurro reinterprets dialogues and daily situations, thus reorganizing his comprehension of past experiences. When he was still naive and

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innocent, still Bento, Bentinho (bento means blessed) he did not perceive what he later perceives as the malice, perfidy, and falseness inherent in the actions of Capitu and other dependents surrounding him. Unable to deal with the political dimensions of his own defeat, the older "Dom Casmurro" depicts himself as a victim and regrets the alleged unfaithfulness and ingratitude of those under his protection. That is, confronted with the evidence that there is an art of resistance to be found in, say, Capitu, Dom Casmurro conceptualizes this fact as unfaithfulness and ingratitude. Such was the potential risk in each situation, in each routine political dialogue. Hence Capitu could not prevent the attack and relentless revenge waged by her—one hopes cuckolded—husband.8 Dom Casmurro, the novel's hypochondriacal narrator, emerges in March 1871—right after the formation of the Rio Branco cabinet, which would enact the Free Birth Law—precisely at the moment when Capitu's "undertow eyes" seem "to swallow up" Escobar's corpse during his funeral [DC, chap. 123). The scene sets off Bentinho's suspicion that his wife has committed adultery. Besides Escobar, therefore, it is the innocent Bentinho who dies on that occasion, and Dom Casmurro comes to life. Once again, domestic drama is political metaphor. Tormented by a political defeat that perhaps had its major emblem in the passing of the Law of 1871, and attempting to reflect upon such experience within the thinking habits of the seigneurial class, Dom Casmurro writes to argue that he has been victimized by the ingratitude of dependents. It is as if Estacio finally understood that there are "external things," beyond the tip of his nose, and, unable to deal with this type of evidence, begins to represent the loss of himself, nostalgic for the world that had been—"I myself am missing, and that lacuna is all-important," says Dom Casmurro at the very outset of his narration [DC, chap. 2). The dependents have caused his defeat; he has been inadvertently disarmed before them. It follows that Dom Casmurro needs to draw Bentinho Santiago as an Estacio come to ultimate perfection—that is, completely obtuse about what goes on around him. For a final touch to the picture, it suffices to consider Capitu a revised and enlarged edition of Helena and her astuteness—or, more rigorously, of Iaia Garcia, who is a more daring version of Helena.

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We need only to focus on Dom Casmurro's chapter 18, entitled "A Plan/ 7 to grasp fully the narrator's politics and methodology in drawing Bentinho and Capitu. Bentinho has just told his girlfriend that Jose Dias, the agregado, has started a conversation with his mother about the necessity of fulfilling the promise of sending him to a seminary. Capitu turns "as pale as wax," her eyes looking inward, still "as if she were made of wood." Bentinho, on the other hand, bursts into bravadoes, swears by the hour of his death that "nothing in the world" could make h i m go to the seminary. Then Capitu herself bursts out against Dona Gloria: "The sanctimonious so-and-so! Always at the altar rail! Never away from mass!" Vituperations such as these are shocking, uttered as they were before the embryo of a future priest. Bentinho's response is to repeat his oaths, promising to declare to his family that same evening that he would by no means enter the seminary. The dialogue continues as follows: "You? You'll go." 'Til not." "You'll see if you go or not." She went quiet again. When she spoke again she had changed; she was not yet the Capitu I knew, but almost. She was thoughtful, calm, and spoke in a low voice. She wanted to know about the conversation at home,-1 recounted it all to her, except the part concerning her. "And what's Jose Dias's interest in bringing this up?" she asked when I had finished. "None, I think; it was just to create trouble. He's a mean person,- but you wait, he'll pay me back. When I'm in charge here, you'll see, it'll be out in the street with him; I'll not have him in my house a moment longer. Mamma's too good; she pays him too much attention: there were even tears . . . " "Who cried? Jose Dias?" "No, mamma." "What did she cry for?" "I don't know; I only heard them telling her not to cry, that it was nothing to cry about. . . . He even said that he regretted what he'd said, and went out; that was when I left the corner and ran to the verandah, so as not to be seen. But you wait and see, he'll pay me for this!" (DC, chap. 18)

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Dom Casmurro starts describing Capitu's insubordination, a striking event considering that she is a girl who "got no money" and whose family owes favors to the Santiago clan. The reader must be impressed by the audacity, the capacity for revolt that this dependent shows: Capitu blasphemes, mocks Dona Gloria's "religious customs"; shows ingratitude by calling the mistress "such ugly things" (DC, chap. 18); finally, she ridicules Bentinho's oaths to resist because she knows he is submitted to his mother's authority and to the "rights and obligations" pertaining to "the class into which he was born" (H, chap. 2). In addition to so much disrespect for values that should be "her own," there is the frightening style the girl adopts: she shouts the "ugly things" as if she were "ready to tell everything to anyone"; clenches her teeth, shakes her head, does not allow Bentinho to defend his mother. The lad, poor wretch, scared and trembling, keeps swearing "for life and death" that he would not enter the seminary. The reader is stunned, can hardly believe in "such an explosion." Then suddenly Dom Casmurro changes his focus. He turns to analyzing Capitu's political sophistication, her skills for strategic maneuvers. Now serious, untroubled, speaking quietly, she asks Bentinho to tell her the whole conversation he has heard behind the door,- she wants to know "circumstances," "the actual words spoken by each person/and their tone." Afterward she asks questions meant to make out the real intentions of the people involved, to calculate their positions and actions (DC, chap. 18). It is as if, once the crisis takes hold, Capitu sits down to play chess, just as laia Garcia has done before: "Of the skills necessary to play chess, laia had the two most essential: a sharp mind and Benedictine patience, skills that are precious in life, which is also chess, with its problems and games, some won, others lost, others ending in a draw" (IG, chap. 11). "A sharp mind": the capacity to understand at a glance the adversary's possible moves. While Capitu seeks to gather evidence to figure out intentions—"And what's Jose Dias's interest in bringing this up?"—Bentinho behaves like an idiot. No ; he behaves like an estdcio. He thinks Jose Dias did what he did without any self-inter-

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est, "it was just to create trouble": "He's a mean person." And threats follow, fists shaking in the air: when he becomes master, the dependent will be kicked "out in the street," "hell pay me for this," just "you wait." Meanwhile Capitu is "reflecting"; she is unlucky to be limited, for her reflections, to the information provided by Bentinho. It is necessary to read beyond it to search for meanings. Dona Gloria cried. Bentinho does not know the reason: Capitu concentrated particularly now on my mother's tears; she could not convince herself she understood them. In the middle of all this, she admitted that my mother certainly did not want to make me a priest out of malice; it was the old promise, which she, God-fearing as she was, dared not break. I was so pleased to see that she made up for the insults that had sprung from her a short time before that I took her hand and squeezed it. Capitu let herself go, laughing. (DC, chap. 18) Dom Casmurro finds in Capitu an ability we have already noticed in Helena, in Luis Garcia, even in D. Placida: she discovers inner contents or meanings of seigneurial ideology, then correctly interprets the motivations and attitudes of her class antagonists. For Bentinho Santiago, people are inherently good or bad; Capitu, on the contrary, thinks they just express their social and cultural values and prejudices. Dona Gloria's religious^fervor—according to the legend, she and many other women of those former times feared God and thunder—explains her crying: she has to keep the sacred promise of making Bentinho a priest; separation from her son, however, is a painful prospect, hence the tears. Capitu has j\xst figured out an important part of the problem,- the challenge thereafter is to find a solution that would abort the idea of the seminary without hurting the widow's religious feelings. She has to pursue her own goals while operating within the religious prejudices of the mistress. And within Bentinho's prejudices as well, for he understands Capitu's comment as a confession of having made a mistake. In addition, he imagines that she is apologizing for the "ugly names" she has called his mother. Deeply in love, Bentinho holds his girlfriend's hand. "Capitu let herself go, laughing." She was laughing at the lad. "Benedictine patience" is another essential for the political chess dependents play. While Capitu reflects, Bentinho continues

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to vociferate childishly, making "plans for open resistance" (DC, chap. 18). Dom Casmurro, a shrewd narrator and disguised accuser, attempts to unite, in the same Capitu, insubordination and astuteness. At fourteen years of age, the girl from Matacavalos Street "already had some daring ideas," "but they were only daring in themselves: In practice they became clever, insinuating, stealthy, and reached the required end, not with a single bound, but with lots of little jumps." No matter how grandiose, how bold the idea, she seeks to realize it by tiny steps. In the situation at hand, she shrugs off Bentinho's bravadoes and, at the same time, tries to convince the idiot (I beg the reader's pardon) to rely on "milder means, persevering, with words, by slow daily persuasion." She gives "consideration first to the people we could count on" (DC, chap. 18). In other words, dissimulation, strategy, patience are the means available to confront powerful antagonists who are always willing to discipline insubordinate dependents. From Dom Casmurro's perspective, nonetheless, these constitute the means for deceit and treachery, those which would produce, in the long run, his political defeat; "the fruit inside its rind" (DC, chap. 148). In another maneuver that amazes Bentinho, Capitu turns the situation upside down and concludes that the best solution for them is to seek the intervention of Jos6 Dias, the family's agregado, precisely the one who reminded Dona Gloria of her promise and thus originated the whole trouble. To the embryo of a priest, Capitu seems to be teaching her own, earthly version of the lesson of Eliphaz to Job: "Despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty; for He woundeth and His hands make whole." She herself might be fonder of the pagan oracle that states that "Achilles' lance also cured a wound it had inflicted" (DC, chap. 16 and chap. 17). In any case, examining potential allies in the campaign against the seminary, Capitu consecutively rejects uncle Cosme—"all for an easy life"—cousin Justina—"better"—and padre Cabral—"better than either . . . but . . . would do nothing against the interests of the Church." Unless Bentinho confesses he does not have a vocation: "Can I admit that in confession?'7 "Yes, I suppose so, but that would be to come out in the open, and there is better way. Jose Dias . . . "

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"What about Jose Dias?" "He could be really useful." "But it was him that brought the subject up . . ." "It doesn't matter," Capitu went on, "now he'll say something else. He's very fond of you. Don't be apologetic with him. It all depends on you not being afraid: show that you'll be master one day, show him what you want and what you can do. Make sure he understands that it's not a favor you're asking. Sing his praises too,- he loves to be praised. Dona Gloria pays a good deal of attention to him, but that's not what's most important; the main thing is that, if he has to serve your interests, he'll speak much more warmly than anyone else." "I don't think so, Capitu." "Then go to the seminary." "Never." [DC, chap. 18) What we see initially is that Capitu evades direct confrontation; to confess the lack of vocation is "to come out in the open." She chooses the "sinuous" way,- that is, she tries to goad other people into actions that interest her. The girl knows Jose Dias's position very well. A dependent of the family, faithful to it—"the most faithful," he would probably say—Jose Dias has to worry about his condition in the future. Bentinho spells the future. Capitu calculates that if her boyfriend abandoned his childish attitude for a moment and made the dependent see in h i m the master to be, it would be possible to obtain Jose Dias's "superlative" adhesion to the cause. The agregado seems expressly made for the job. Similarly to Capitu, he knows subordinate people's art of political dialogues—in other words, he masters the art of struggling for his objectives by maneuvering within the masters 7 ideology (just to repeat the idea one last time). It is in this context that there appears in the book the passage, previously analyzed, in which Capitu translates to Bentinho the agiegado's intricate moves to satisfy his desire to go to the theater. Furthermore, she needs to teach Bentinho how to perform his role as master, how to use and display his authority: "Make sure he understands it's not a favor." A couple of lines below, in a fine compact formulation of what should characterize a "natural" exercise of seigneurial will, Capitu insists that Bentinho speak to Jose Dias "politely but like asking for a glass of water from someone who has the obligation to bring it."

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The political meaning of D o m Casmurro's manipulative narration is clear. In Bras Cub as, it is said that "the boy is the father of the man ; / ; in Dom Casmurro, the girl is the mother of the woman. Infidelity is in Capital's nature; it is in her "earth" and in her "manure." Reading the metaphor, we find the possible seigneurial notation for the idea of class antagonism and for the experience of political defeat: dependents are unfaithful. Whenever they act as agents of their own history, subordinate people are said to cheat their masters. If that is the only possible representation, let us have it the masters' way: Capitu seduced Escobar. The reader should now return to the initial pages of this text. This is so because I used a most unusual method of composition here: the conclusions precede the discourse of evidence and demonstration. The artifice rendered my text "more distinctive and novel" [MPBC, chap. 1). Go back, then; read the conclusions. And farewell. NOTES

1. Part of this text was originally written for presentation at the conference on Machado de Assis held at the University of Texas at Austin, 27-28 October 1995.1 return here to ideas—even plagiarize some passages—first argued in Chalhoub 1992.1 felt it necessary to retrace my path in order to advance further. My thanks to Professors Michael Hall and Robert Slenes for their corrections of my English. 2. Helena, chapter 2, is cited as (H, chap. 2); a similar system applies to laid Garcia [IG], Dom Casmurro [DC) and Memohas postumas de Bras Cubas [MPBC). Citations from Helena and laid Garcia refer to Machado de Assis: Obra completa (1986), and the translations from Portuguese to English are my own. In the case of quotations from Dom Casmurro and Memohas postumas de Bras Cubas, I rely on the translations of John Gledson and Gregory Rabassa, respectively, in the Oxford University Press's Library of Latin America series. 3. On the question of deference and antagonism within paternalist domination, the reflections I find most penetrating are in Thompson 1993. In organizing thoughts for this article, I found useful the book by Scott (1990). I sketched some of these ideas in previous works (Chalhoub 1990, 1992). 4. My thanks to Adauto Damasio, who obtained this reference for me. 5. Joaquim Nabuco referred to this political period as one of "degrada-

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tion," of "violation of moral law"; as for the question of the slave trade specifically, "we drank all dregs in the chalice" (Nabuco [1883] 1977, 111). Luis Carlos Martins Pena, a contemporary of the illegal slave trade, denounced the lack of scruples among authorities and traffickers in a hilarious comedy, Os dous, ou o inglez machinista (1845). 6. The original reference for the argument seems to be Rocha [1855] 1956. 7. For another instance of association between tears and fixed eyes: in Dom Casmurro, chapter 123, during Escobar's funeral, "Capitu looked for some moments at the body with such a fixed gaze, with such a passionate fixed gaze, that it's small wonder that into her eyes there came a few silent tears...." 8. What I argue here about Dom Casmurro presupposes the findings and interpretations present in Caldwell I960, Santiago 1978, Gledson 1991, and Schwarz 1991.

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4. Machdo in English

If the heavens are open to all languages, as Machado de Assis wrote in one of his A Semana columns in 1895 (Machado de Assis 198694, 3:691), earthbound readers and critics, alas, are not. Thus, the problem for an author like Machado—a major figure writing in what is considered a "minor" language (or, as it is sometimes said, from a place that is, literarily speaking, a "small country" [Boldizsar 1979])—is how to extend his reputation beyond his immediate national and linguistic boundaries. Jorge de Sena said many years ago that the tragedy of Portuguese writers—and he surely meant Brazilians as well—is that they write in Portuguese.1 Machado himself was not above making ironic comments about this very perception: in Esau e ]aco7 Santos waxes eloquent about his son Paulo's speech: "The speech is magnificent, and must not be allowed to perish in Sao Paulo. The Court city might read it, and the provinces also. I wouldn't mind seeing it translated into French. In French it'll very likely be even better" (chap. 43).2 But literary fame does not reside merely in having the "right" language—though this certainly helps. It also depends upon writing in the right circumstances, and upon the extent to which these circumstances can be exploited. There is a provocative story by Igor Pomerantsev about the making of literary fame, which, not being able to read Russian, I know only from the reports of colleagues. Entitled "Between Tortures," the story was published in the journal Sintaksis (Pomerantsev 1987, 188-95), edited by M. V. Rozanova,

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the wife of Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Terts).3 It concerns an obscure Russian emigre writer who, like the author himself, lives in London. Determined to be noticed, he hits upon the idea of writing a cycle of poems and letters called "Between Tortures/ 7 which he will leave in the custody of his wife while he returns to Russia. There he plans to commit some political crime for which he will be arrested, tortured, and exiled to Siberia, after which his wife will bring out his texts, allegedly straight from the Gulag, and his fame will be assured. The story reflects its author's cynical understanding of literary markets and the vagaries by which artistic reputations are made and unmade. Machado de Assis, clearly, would have had to plan his career more cleverly had he wanted to be noticed by readers of the English language, whose literature he admired so much. As it is, those of us in North America who do hold him in high regard must endlessly gnash our teeth at his continuing obscurity. But our frustration should not keep us from honoring those who have labored to make Machado's work available in English. And it is their labors—and the theoretical and practical issues they raise—that I want to address in this essay. The history of Machado translations in English begins rather inauspiciously—and late—with Isaac Goldberg's volume Brazilian Tales, published in 1921. Reviews of this volume, which included three stories by Machado ("O Enfermeiro" [translated as The Attendant's Confession], "Viver" [Life], and "A Cartomante" [The Fortune-Teller]) along with stories by J. J. Medeiros e Albuquerque, H. M. Coelho Netto, and Carmen Dolores, were not greatly enthusiastic. While Dial magazine (72 [May 1922]: 536) commented on the indebtedness of all four writers to Edgar Allan Poe, the Bookman (55 [April 1922]: 202) merely noted, somewhat condescendingly: "Any nation could be proud to have these stories in its contemporary literature." Most interesting from a present-day point of view is the irritable review in Catholic World ([September 1922]: 844), which takes Goldberg to task for his forty-two pages of introduction "and fourteen of sheer padding," but does not even mention Machado, commenting instead that "The Pigeons" by Coelho Netto and "Aunt Zeze's Tears" by Carmen Dolores "are the only

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stories in the book that may hope for a sympathetic welcome among the English-reading public. "4 No wonder it took another thirty years before several intrepid translators in the United States tackled Machado's novels. In this age of demystification, few people are left, I imagine, who believe that the quality of a work is enough to guarantee it an audience. After Richard Ohmann's list (1983) of the essential publications in which a work must be reviewed if it is to be successful;5 after Barbara Herrnstein Smith's Contingencies of Value (1988); after all the work that has been done resurrecting works by forgotten women writers, or forgotten black writers, or forgotten gay writers (or attempting to do so)—after, in short, more than two decades of assault on canonicity, one hardly dares embrace the pristine vocabulary of "quality" or "literary value/7 even when a writer demonstrates his claim to it as prodigiously as does Machado. In the case of translation, the process is even more complicated, and it would be naive not to acknowledge what is by now clear: that diverse circumstances (often governed by commercial considerations) play a role in who and what is translated, when, and with what impact. Brazilian literature, Jorge Amado notwithstanding, is still so little known in the United States that "professional" translators are few and far between. Most translations of Brazilian writers have been undertaken as labors of love, usually by professors of Brazilian literature who then take the initiative of attempting to interest a press in publishing their work. From the publishers' point of view, however, the market for Latin American fiction—after undergoing a boom period inaugurated in 1970 by the success of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude—has been shrinking. Avon Books, for example, has all but abandoned its line of translations from Latin American fiction, though Jorge Amado is still in print. For newly discovered living writers, there is the excitement of watching their work unfold. Several years ago, for example, a small growth industry seemed to be developing in translations of Moacyr Scliar. But such fortunes are unstable. As one translator cannily observed about the Brazilian writer Oswaldo Franca Junior, who died in 1989 just as his work was beginning to appear in English: no ed-

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itor would henceforth be interested in having his books translated, because "there's no future in it." 6 Clarice Lispector's work, on the other hand, with a faithful constituency now available in women's studies courses, seems to have made it into the American academic market, but not without considerable distortion of her past reputation. One recent critic has expressed the now widely held view that "it was Helene Cixous who 'discovered' this virtually unknown Brazilian woman writer . . . and brought her to the attention of a feminist and literary public by translating, publishing, and writing about her work" (Bammer 1991, 144). This would certainly be news to Brazilian critics, as well as to Gregory Rabassa, whose translation of A maga no escuro was published in the United States in 1967. In fact, it might be worth noting that Lispector, long celebrated by Brazilian critics as a universal writer, has in her newly "discovered" guise been reduced to the smaller sphere of feminist concerns. There is no point, however, in denying that targeting a particular constituency of readers is an important marketing strategy. Since literary canons evidently do not travel unscathed across national borders, some more creative effort is required. Imagine what would happen to sales of Machado in English if he were now repackaged for U.S. intellectuals and academicians as a writer of color concerned above all with the issue of race. Alternatively, one might imagine that many of Machado's superbly drawn female characters could without difficulty be presented as protofeminist heroines. And finally, what if he were found to have had a cryptogay life or if (perhaps more plausibly) his work could be read as promoting a transgressive sexuality or engaging in gender-bending? One could foresee great things for him in the American market. Interestingly, one Brazilian writer has recently achieved astonishing commercial success outside of Brazil as well as within. This is, of course, Paulo Coelho, whose novel The Alchemist (1993) has been something of a publishing sensation. While disdained by serious critics and reviewers as a "familiar theme in a New Age package" (Partello 1993, 94), Coelho's fable of a boy on an exotic journey in search of his destiny, drawing on myth and legend and unabashedly modeling itself on other inspirational works of the Jona-

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than Livingston Seagull genre, was on Brazilian best-seller lists for years after its publication in 1988. Machado's French publisher, Anne-Marie Metailie, refused repeated offers of Coelho's book, stating that in her view "it's not literature/ 7 which did not keep it from being a great success for Anne Carriere, the publisher who did bring it out in France ("Editora," 1995). Coelho's six books have thus far sold four million copies in Brazil and two million abroad. A local bookshop in Amherst, the small university town in which I live, had sold over twenty-five copies of The Alchemist, in hardback, over a period of just three months in the spring and summer of 1995. And why not? The Alchemist carries endorsements from the authors of such inspirational works as The One-Minute Manager, Awaken the Giant Within, Change Your Mind, Change Your Life, and Are You Running With Me, Jesusl As for Dom Casmurro, whose main character can hardly compete in this league, the same bookshop had only one copy of the novel (and had sold none in the preceding year and a half, which was as far back as its computerized record went). No other books by Machado were in stock. By contrast, there were thirteen titles by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in stock, in seventeen different editions, typically with one to four copies of each edition actually available in the shop. Whether Paulo Coelho's recent international success should be celebrated on behalf of "Brazilian literature" is yet another question. At the very least, it's interesting to note that his hero is, in fact, not a Brazilian at all, but a Spanish boy, a shepherd named Santiago whose pursuit of his dream evidently speaks to readers around the world. Veja called this literary success "unbelievably pathetic," and Coelho countered that this was mere envy on the part of an "intelligentsia" soured by Marxism-Leninism. "I am being attacked by authors who have no readers," he is reported to have said ("Loved by Readers, Hated by Critics," Economist [11 March 1995]: 84), alas with some justification. Machado de Assis's own Santiago—Bento Santiago, the narrator of Dom Casmurro—is a bird of a quite different feather,- and it is therefore not surprising that Machado is still in search of a significant English-language readership. And this is despite the fact that

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his translated volumes have had firm support, and even enthusiastic response, from critics and reviewers in publications ranging from the Times Literary Supplement to the Village Voice Literary Supplement. What kind of Dom Casmurro is it, then, that has been presented in English? TRANSLATING MACHADO

It was Noonday Press that first brought out, in the 1950s, translations of three of Machado's most famous novels (Bras Cubas, Dom Casmurro, and Quincas Borba), by three different translators. Eight of Machado's nine novels have now appeared in English, some in two different versions (with third versions now appearing in the Oxford Library of Latin America series). Comparing translations is a complex business, requiring line by line reading. One thing is clear, however: all English-language translators of Machado up to the present time have belonged to the old school, the pre-postmodern tradition that assumed the importance of the original rather than that of the translator. Machado's translators, as their work demonstrates, have seen themselves as self-effacing writers in the service of their author. It is rare for one of them even to comment, in the prefaces and introductions they have contributed to their translations, on the work of translation itself. But despite their evident commitment to accuracy and fidelity (which for most of them seems to go without saying), they could not avoid making decisions at every turn, and it is interesting to note what some of those decisions have been in the case of Machado. For the purposes of this essay I will focus on Dom Casmurro and its first two translators, in order to show the character of each translation and the sorts of issues it raises. There is, to begin with, the matter of the novel's title. Helen Caldwell, whose translation of Dom Casmurro appeared in 1953, retained the original title, whose meaning is in any case explained on the novel's first page. Robert Scott-Buccleuch, working nearly forty years later (1992), also kept the title, but added beneath it the parenthetical translation "(Lord Taciturn)." More importantly, he held onto the English phrase and repeatedly translated casmurro as "taciturn." As for Caldwell, faced with the difficulty of rendering

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"Dom Casmurro" in English, she opted for a dash of bilingualism, which she assumed the reader could handle. She did not, in other words, ask herself the oft-cited translator's question: how would the writer have said this if he had been writing in English? Instead, she acknowledged that her work was a translation of a Brazilian text, and she retained traces of that text—even in as important a place as the novel's title—when no acceptable alternatives in English presented themselves. Scott-Buccleuch, wanting to work entirely in English, chose the word "taciturn," which in fact had appeared in Caldwell's translation. Where Machado describes Bento's hdbitos reclusos e calados (chap. 1), Caldwell had written "my taciturn, recluse-like habits." Scott-Buccleuch rendered the same phrase as "my quiet, retiring habits" and transferred the word "taciturn" to the title, which then led him to the following version of the novel's explanation of Bento's nickname: "Don't bother to look it up in the dictionary. Taciturn' is not used literally, but in the more popular sense of a man who says little and keeps to himself" (chap. 1, p. 14). Needless to say, "one who says little" is precisely the literal meaning of "taciturn" in English, while nowhere that I know of in the English-speaking world is the word used "in the popular sense" to mean one who keeps to himself. Beyond the title, the very first sentence of Dom Casmurro serves as a good point of departure for a discussion of what happens to Machado in English. The original reads as follows: Uma noite destas, vindo da cidade para o Engenho Novo, encontrei no trem da Central um rapaz aqui do bairro, que eu conhego de vista e de chapeu (chap. 1, p. 11). Helen Caldwell gives a very precise translation: "One night not long ago, as I was coming from the city to Engenho N o v o / on the Brazil Central, I ran into a young man from here in the neighborhood, with whom I have a bowing acquaintance" (chap. 1, p. 3). The asterisk refers to a footnote Caldwell has added, explaining that Engenho Novo is "The New (sugar) Mill,' a suburb of Rio de Janeiro." She translates trem da Central as "Brazil Central" and assumes people will recognize this as a train (hence eliminates that word) and sticks to the structure of the original sentence. Machado's interesting example of semantic contamination: que eu conhego de vista e de chapeu (chap. 1, p. 11; literally:

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"whom I know by sight and by hat") is translated with the simpler but appropriate "with whom I have a bowing acquaintance" (p. 3)— a phrase with greater formality than the more habitual expression "a nodding acquaintance." Scott-Buccleuch handles the same Portuguese sentence quite differently: "One evening on my way home to Engenho Novo from town I met a young fellow on the Central Line train. He lived in the neighborhood and I knew him vaguely by sight" (chap. 1, p. 13).7 First of all, he eliminates the time frame of Machado's uma noite destas (which Caldwell had translated as "not long ago") and adds the word "home"—"on my way home to Engenho Novo"—thus obviating the need for further explanation of what "Engenho Novo" represents. Again, apparently aiming to facilitate the reader's comprehension, he opts for "Central Line train," probably a clearer translation of no trem da Central than Caldwell's. But most important are two other decisions he makes: he rearranges Machado's syntax and divides this uncomplicated sentence into two. He also simplifies the phrase que eu conhego de vista e de chapeu to a mere "I knew him vaguely by sight"—eliminating the very graphic image of raising one's hat (de chapeu), which Caldwell had evoked with her phrase "a bowing acquaintance," and adding the word "vaguely," perhaps so that this last part of Machado's longer sentence, now standing alone, would sound a bit less abrupt. Thus, from the very beginning we see that each translator approaches the task of translation in a distinctly individual way: noite may be given as "evening" or "night," rapaz as "young man" or "fellow." Such choices are, more often than not, uncontroversial. What is significant is that each translator has made different decisions about what needs to be added strictly for explanatory value in English, what degree of fidelity to the style and not just the sense of the original is warranted, and how to deal with unique and slightly ironic Machadian formulations such as de vista e de chapeu. Both have translated the sense of the passage adequately—and "adequacy," rather than the far more demanding concept of "equivalency," is not at all a bad achievement8—but one translator has treated Machado's style with more care and respect than has the other, minimizing editorial interferences and not making syntacti-

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cal rearrangements where there is no stylistic or other benefit to be gained in English by doing so. Let me give another example—a small but telling one—of the different approaches two translators can take to the same text. In chapter 83, O retrato (The Portrait), Capitu's maturing is described as follows: Era mulher por dentro e por fora, mulher a direita e a esquerda, mulher por todos os lados, e desde os pes ate a cabega (p. 97). Helen Caldwell retains Machado's veritable geography of Capitu: "She was a woman within and without, a woman to the right and to the left, woman on every side and from head to foot" (p. 161). Scott-Buccleuch, by contrast, deletes Machado's expressive repetition of the word mulher and reduces the passage to the following: "In every possible way, inside and out, from head to foot, she was a woman" (p. 131). Certainly one can quibble about the respective merits of these decisions, without feeling that any of them is fatal to the translation. But now consider a more revealing example: the famous description in chapter 32 of Capitu's eyes: olhos de ressaca. Caldwell translates this as "eyes like the tide," and this is the phrase that has already become so familiar to my ear that I can hardly gauge how it sounds to an English reader encountering it for the first time. Scott-Buccleuch, eager, I suspect, to produce not only a new but a different translation, rendered this image as "whirlpool eyes." The synthetic phrase is, it seems to me, both less sonorous and less evocative. Even Helen Caldwell, so committed to fidelity in translation, appears upon occasion to have felt the need to add a phrase. Thus, in chapter 132, O debuxo e o colorido (The Sketch and the Color), in which Bento discusses his metaphors and connects Escobar's death by drowning to Capitu's eyes, Caldwell chose not to end the sentence with the usual description of Capitu's olhos de ressaca, as the original does, but to render the phrase: "eyes like the tide when the undertow is strong" (p. 240), recalling, with this elaboration, Machado's original description (chap. 32) of Capitu's eyes. ScottBuccleuch simply repeats his usual phrase, "whirlpool eyes" (p. 197). Another change in nuance appears in the handling in English of Jose Dias's description of Capitu's eyes (olhos de cigana obliqua

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e dissimulada, chap. 32), in which the interesting phrase (translated more literally by Caldwell as "gypsy's eyes, oblique and sly") becomes, in Scott-Buccleuch's rendering, "sly and cunning like a gypsy's." Both translators have transferred the adjectives from the gypsy, to whom they are attached in the original, to the eyes, but Scott-Buccleuch has given the phrase a more negative edge (evident in many of his other lexical choices as well) than it has in the Portuguese by reducing the connotations of "oblique" and opting for the reiteration "sly and cunning." A far more serious problem in translating Dom Casmurro is the absence in English of a ready equivalent for o agregado (chap. 5). Given the importance in the novel of Jose Dias's role as a hangeron, the problem of accurately conveying this status in English is no minor matter. The relationship of patron-client is, of course, an ancient one. But the translators could not use the term "client" in a modern translation since its meanings in English have veered in so many other directions. Once again Caldwell and Scott-Buccleuch deal with this problem in their distinctive ways. Caldwell titles chapter 5 simply "The Dependent" (p. 10). Thereafter, when Machado on occasion refers to Jose Dias as o agregado, Caldwell translates this as "our dependent." She had to add the possessive "our" since the phrase, already somewhat strange to English-speaking ears, would be stranger still if it read simply "the dependent." Scott-Buccleuch, however, faced a somewhat more complex set of problems. He had to deal not only with Machado's original text but also with Caldwell's translation, which it seems probable he consulted, if only to make sure his was not too similar. I can think of no other explanation for some insignificant alterations in, for example, vocabulary and punctuation, which seem to refer not to the original but to Caldwell's version and the need to differentiate his own from it. Confronting, in addition, the residual awkwardness in English of calling Jose Dias a "dependent," Scott-Buccleuch eliminated the difficult term altogether. Thus, his chapter 5 is called "The Friend of the Family" (p. 19). And the second paragraph of that chapter, which reads: era nosso agregado desde muitos anos,

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translated by Caldwell as: "He had been our dependent for many years" (p. 10), becomes, in Scott-Buccleuch's hands, the quite different phrase: "He had been one of the family for many years" (p. 19), while for Machado's subsequent references to o agregado ScottBuccleuch simply substitutes the name, Jose Dias. This detail happens to be one of great significance for the novel, as earlier chapters in this volume have pointed out, and it is important for an understanding of Machado's work generally, as Roberto Schwarz has shown. Its loss in English is characteristic of Scott-Buccleuch's approach. Where Caldwell attempts to be a faithful translator, at times perhaps still somewhat in thrall to the original language,9 Scott-Buccleuch allows himself to function also as redactor of Machado, in ways both great (as we shall see) and small. To take another example: in the novel's penultimate chapter, 147, entitled A exposigdo retrospectiva, which both translators call, unproblematically, "The Retrospective Exhibition," ScottBuccleuch again does some pruning. Bentinho describes his subsequent relationships with women using the metaphor of a retrospective exhibition, and he works the metaphor out in detail, first with the somewhat cryptic question he puts to a departing visitor, Levas o catdlogo! (Are you taking the catalogue?), and finally in the chapter's last few words, when Bentinho says that after viewing the exhibition, tambem esta cansava, e ia embora com o catdlogo na mdo . . .10 Caldwell's translation of this is straightforward, graceful enough to please an English-language reader and leaving intact the irony of the original: "They never returned. I would stand at the door waiting. I would go to the corner, look up and down, consult my watch, and see nothing, nobody. Then, if another visitor appeared, I would give her my arm, we would go in, I would show her the landscapes, the historical paintings, the genre paintings, a water color, a pastel, a gouache, and she too would grow weary, and go away with the catalog in her hand . . . " (p. 262). Scott-Buccleuch, on the other hand, seems to believe that the original is too—dare I say oblique? Very well, too oblique for his readers, as if the metaphor can't work in English. Thus he eliminates the first reference to o catdlogo and instead of Bentinho's words Levas o catdlogo! has him say words that Bentinho certainly does not say in the original:

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"You'll be back?" Even more curiously, at the chapter's end, he suppresses the last few words, com o catdlogo na mao . . . , instead replacing them with the words (duplicating the ones above) "until this one too grew bored and would leave, promising to return . . ." (p. 215). The effect here is not only to efface the original's dry irony, which is bestowed by the metaphor, but also to transform Bentinho into a somewhat plaintive character. But far worse is to come. Scott-Buccleuch's most astonishing decision as a translator is to eliminate entire chapters of Machado's text—without, incidentally, justifying or even mentioning this fact in his introduction. What chapters has he judged superfluous? First of all, chapter 52, O Velho Padua, vanishes. In fact, Scott-Buccleuch seems to have had grave doubts about this entire elliptical but essential middle section of the novel. For he goes on to make even more serious cuts. Chapter 54, Panegihco de Santa Monica, he retitles "Escobar." He then treats as a superfluous digression everything after that chapter's first two lines, to which he joins chapter 56's second paragraph, introducing Escobar: Eis aqui outro seminarista. Chamavase Ezequiel de Soma Escobar ("Here was another seminarist. His name was Ezekiel de Souza Escobar"—in Caldwell's translation). He has, in other words, eliminated the lengthy commentary beginning Esta sarna de escrever, quando pega aos cinquenta anos, ndo despega mais ("This itch to write, when you catch it at fifty, never leaves you" [Caldwell, chap. 54]) as well as the important subsequent chapter (55: "A Sonnet"), about Bento's incomplete sonnet. After this newly constructed chapter on Escobar and on Bento's relationship with him in the seminary, Scott-Buccleuch cuts the following four chapters (57 to 60 in the original), making the small changes necessary to knit the remaining prose into a coherent text. He then translates the two important chapters A vaca de Homero (Homer's Heifer) and Uma ponta de Iago (A Touch of Iago), but cuts two further chapters (63 and 64 in the original), Metades de um sonho (Halves of a Dream) and Uma ideia e um escrupulo (An Idea and a Scruple). It is true that without these chapters the plot moves quite neatly in Scott-Buccleuch's version, with one chapter (62 in the original) ending with Bento's appeal to Jose Dias to send for him

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on Saturday, and the subsequent chapter (64 in the original) beginning Chegou o sdbado (Saturday arrived). What has the translator done here? He has largely suppressed the theme of Bento's effort to construct a seamless web, an effort in which he is constantly frustrated by his own digressions. In other words, he has eliminated much of the metanarrative that is absolutely crucial to understanding Bento and his task in composing the story we ostensibly have before us, and he has even cut from that story such episodes as Padua's farewell, Bento's youthful sexual responses (to the woman who falls in the street, revealing her legs and underclothes), and Bento's dream and subsequent reflections about himself and the act of writing. All this has been sacrificed in the interest (judging by the achieved effect) of advancing the plot, which indeed has more "punch"—that characteristic quality, its name perhaps borrowed from the world of advertising, that modern editors like to tell their authors to strive for. Not that such decisions are unique to this particular translator. Gregory Rabassa, in translating Jorge Amado's Tocaia Grande (Showdown, 1988), in fact produced (unacknowledged) an edited and abridged version in English. Approximately 20 percent of the novel—phrases, sentences, in some cases even whole paragraphs— has been cut, as if Amado's prolix style (which is, indeed, Amado's style) were unacceptably excessive for an American audience. Having said this, I must also state that in the case of Amado it would be hard to argue that these excisions seriously damage the text. With Machado, on the other hand, the effect of the translator's deletion of nine chapters is to reduce enormously the complexity and self-reflexivity of the original. For those who believe the interest of the novel lies above all in Bento and Capitu's relationship, and who simply want to get on with the story, little damage will perhaps have been done. But to readers who want to know what Machado as a novelist is up to, the loss is inestimable. There are still other ways in which translators interfere with or facilitate (depending on one's point of view) the reader's experience of the original. One important method is by forewords and introductions to their translations, which serve as framing devices for the book's reader. Another is by means of comments on the trans-

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lation process itself—although, of course, where such comments do not appear in the published translation, they cannot be said to have any effect on the general reader. As it happens, we do have ScottBuccleuch's views on translating Machado. In a 1980 conference on translation held in Rio de Janeiro, he discussed his experience translating Brazilian fiction. Especially noteworthy is his judgment that " despite his unique and entirely personal style, Machado de Assis would be far easier to translate/' for the simple reason that "there is nothing, be it in the content or the form of Machado's book, which the English language can not adequately express/' 11 And yet, at this conference, Scott-Buccleuch also stated that it is a fact that Brazilian authors are never easy to translate, hypothesizing that the reason for this difficulty may be that they all write exclusively for a Brazilian public and make no concessions to foreigners. The great exception to this, he goes on to explain, is Machado, for, despite the great differences between the English and the Portuguese languages, and despite the great Brazilian master's personal style, it is possible for a good translator to do justice to Machado's work. This is because for the European (and I'm referring mainly to the English), both the cultural shock and what we might call the linguistic shock are relatively mild. Machado de Assis did not veer much from the traditional European paths. (Staut 1992, 112)12 By the time, some ten years later, he was composing the introduction to accompany his translation of Dom Casmurro, ScottBuccleuch appears to have had second thoughts. He now finds that "there are words in Portuguese that have no exact equivalent in English or that Machado de Assis deliberately uses in an unusual sense" (p. 8); he offers the word casmurro as an example. A second difficulty, in his judgment, resides in the difference in nature between "Portuguese, one of the most synthetic of European languages, and English, perhaps the most analytic." Two words in Portuguese "require four or five in English for their meaning to be fully conveyed" (p. 8), with the result that a translator can only rarely find a direct "equivalent"—a word that carries not only the denotation but also the connotations of the original. To get at those con-

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notations often requires additional words—in effect, an expansion on the original. It is interesting to note, in this regard, the curious fact that translators of Herman Melville into German often justified their habit of breaking up Melville's long sentences into shorter German units by claiming (no doubt to the astonishment of foreigners struggling with German syntax) that German simply cannot handle long convoluted sentences as can English (Hayes 1973). This would seem to suggest that the complaint "you can't do that in this language" should be viewed with some suspicion; it is perhaps little more than an exculpation for fatigued or insecure translators. The most serious problem of translation, of course, is precisely how to convey a writer's style in a foreign idiom. In his introduction to Dom Casmurro, Scott-Buccleuch now asserts, contrary to his 1980 declaration, that Machado's style "being so concise, even in Portuguese, becomes, one must confess, virtually impossible to render satisfactorily in English" (pp. 8-9). However, these comments may well reflect the very differing experiences ScottBuccleuch had in translating Machado's early novel laid Garcia and the subtle masterpiece that is Dom Casmurro. Perhaps the translator's decision to excise entire chapters of Dom Casmurro was an effort to respond to what he experienced as the untranslatability of Machado's style—though I doubt this. The comments about Machado's untranslatability more plausibly refer to the level of phrase and sentence, whereas Scott-Buccleuch's deletion of whole chapters suggests that his concern was directed not primarily to that level at all but, rather, to what he considered an appropriate structure and rhythm in a novel. For what his excisions succeed in accomplishing is to sacrifice the narrative to the plot, which, ScottBuccleuch seems to think, must proceed with as few impediments as possible. The pieces of Machado's carefully fragmented narrative have, as a result, been neatly reassembled and locked into place by his translator.13 Scott-Buccleuch's introduction to his translation of Dom Casmurro is brief, stressing above all Machado's universality. Most interesting to me was that, writing in May 1991 for a British publisher,

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the translator felt obliged to comment on race relations in Brazil and as portrayed in the novel (just as Waldo Frank did in the original 1953 introduction written for Noonday Press): "The only cultural shock a non-Brazilian reader might experience is the existence of slavery, which is apparently unquestioningly accepted. Otherwise, with the sub-tropical setting deliberately subdued, the urban background might well be a variation of Paris, Vienna or London" (p. 8). There is, in fact, some residual awkwardness, in both translations of Dom Casmurro, in rendering references to pretos and escravos. This thorny subject requires an entire analysis to itself, and I must pass over it in the present essay. Without question, however, it causes the translators some discomfort, as Scott-Buccleuch's introductory comments underscore. Attempting perhaps to make excuses for Machado, he "contextualizes" him and refers to the rapid change about to overtake Brazilian literature with the appearance of works such as Os Sertoes and Canaa, books depicting, as ScottBuccleuch says, "a different world altogether from that of Machado de Assis."14 He then makes a telling judgment about Machado: "However, within the narrow [sic] limits that he set himself Machado still reigns supreme as Brazil's greatest novelist" (p. 8). Helen Caldwell never wrote about Machado in such a tone. Her introductions (which unfortunately do not comment on her problems as a translator) unapologetically treat Machado as a great writer by any standard. Still, despite his questionable theories and practice of translation, Scott-Buccleuch, like Helen Caldwell, belongs squarely in the "traditional" camp, based roughly on linguistic equivalence, not in the new poststructuralist camp (to which I am about to turn), which stresses the creativity of the translator, the impermanence of the "original," and the ideological dimension of the whole enterprise of translation. Explicitly declaring his aim as a translator of Dom Casmurro, Scott-Buccleuch says: "With the reservations mentioned above it is hoped that the present translation will convey to English-speaking readers some of the qualities of Brazil's greatest author, enabling them to enjoy an unusual and haunting story, and introducing them to one of the most fascinating and controversial female characters in literature: Capitolina Padua—Cap-

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itu" (p. 9). And judging by a few recent reviews of this translation, Scott-Buccleuch may have succeeded after all, and only "purists"— who should in any case learn Portuguese—will quibble. Two recent, very brief, reviews celebrate the appearance of the 1994 British edition of the novel. The Observer reviewer calls it a "laconic masterpiece" and, apparently unaware that the Helen Caldwell translation has existed for over forty years, asks: "Why have we been deprived of it for so long?" (30 October 1994: 23). The London Times (22 October 1994) calls the novel "the masterpiece of Brazil's greatest novelist" and notes, as does the Observer, the fundamental ambiguity of the narrative.15 A third review (Irish Times, 24 September 1994), however, summarizes the plot as follows: "The anti hero of this novel is what we could call a spoiled priest, who pursues a romantic affair into marriage and sees it all crumble into middle aged banality."16 Not quite the synopsis, I would guess, that attentive critics and readers would recognize. THEORIZING TRANSLATION

It is with something of a shock that one turns from an examination of the workaday world of translators to the realm of contemporary theorizing that sees "appropriative and imperialist movements in every act of translation," as Lawrence Venuti, at the forefront of current translation studies, puts it in his volume Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (1992, jacket copy). A perfect sampling of the state of current theorizing about translation, the book includes eleven essays by as many current translator/theorists, almost all stamped from the same mold. Venuti, in his preface, begins by rightly protesting the traditional "invisibility" of translators, who are, indeed, important cultural mediators. What he wants to claim for translators becomes clear when he objects that, though translators are always hard at work, they typically "appear as aesthetically sensitive amateurs or talented craftsmen, but not critically self-conscious writers who develop an acute awareness of the cultural and social conditions of their work" (p. 1). Translators themselves collude in this invisibility, he says, by their failure to claim proper stature as major cultural agents. But it

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is not modesty that explains their reluctance. On the contrary, they are distinctly culpable. For, says Venuti, their reticence helps "perpetuate the dubious idea that translation is foremost a practical activity, distinct from theorization, from reflection on the cultural and social implications of methodology." Even more reprehensible to Venuti is the fact that this traditional representation of translators "also participates in the cultural elitism fostered by class divisions in advanced capitalist societies" (p. 2). When viewed from the eminence of contemporary translation theorists, then, the Scott-Buccleuchs and Helen Caldwells of the world are naive about cultural politics. Furthermore, not only are they in thrall to hierarchical and romantic ideas about the creative geniuses in whose service they labor, they are also dupes of their own unrecognized motives. Gregory Rabassa is cited by Venuti as a translator who "colludes" with the traditional view of the translator as "dilettante/ artisan" (Venuti's words), whose discourse remains "casual, belletristic, limited to sporadic prefaces, interviews, invited lectures" (p. 2). This is true enough. But it is hardly deserving of Venuti's sneers. Rabassa's views of translation are well known. He is perfectly aware that translations are done by writers using their own creative resources and those of their language. The difference is that Rabassa's reflections on translation focus on the translator making decisions, not the translator making decisions in an overdetermined environment, as is the current theoretical penchant. His old-fashioned ideal of translation is clear when he unabashedly declares in an article attacked by Venuti that "a translation can never equal the original; it can approach it, and its quality can only be judged as to accuracy by how close it gets." Here the original remains the measure of the translation. But Rabassa is well aware of the vagaries of the process and tells of his own switching from one word to another on different days, and then back again: These incessant changes are the bugbear of the translator. It is my feeling that a translation is never finished, that it is open and could go on to infinity. . . . The phenomenon in question is doubtless because the choices made in translation are never as secure as those made by the author. Since we are not writing our own material, we are still unsure

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whether or not the word we have used is the best one, either for meaning or for sound or for ever so many other reasons. (Rabassa 1989, 7; italics added) Rabassa describes the sense of dissatisfaction he feels when reading what he has translated: "It is this feeling possibly that lies beneath the need for new translations of old books every so often while the original text goes on and on in all its glory" (1989, 8). Contrast this with Venuti's complaint that ranking translations below original works is merely an instance of "a hierarchy of cultural practices" (1992, 3), as if invoking the dreaded term "hierarchy" were sufficient to prove the illegitimacy of any such distinctions.17 To clinch his argument, Venuti picks on Rabassa's juxtaposition of the original, which endures, and the translation, which ages. "The 'original' is eternal, the translation dates," echoes Venuti, evidently believing that merely repeating such ideas, and placing scare quotes around "original," is enough to discredit them. Rabassa had in fact expressed his view in even more emotional terms: "Through some instinct wrought of genius, the author's original choices of word and idiom seem to endure," whereas the choice made by an earlier translator does not, and so "we must choose again." That is why Rabassa thinks of the work of translation as a "continuous process," a labor of Sisyphus (1989, 8).18 Perhaps Rabassa is a special target of Venuti's disdain because he is in fact a cross-over translator, not only academically respectable but also with considerable commercial rewards and high visibility, yet in no sense does he share Venuti's views of translation. Rabassa's $25,000 translator's fee, 10 percent of the $250,000 Bantam Books paid for the English-language translation rights to Jorge Amado's Tocaia Grande, was widely publicized in the late 1980s. Unfortunately, Bantam's effort to duplicate, with Amado, the best-seller status enjoyed by Rabassa's 1970 translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude was not successful. The Brazilian translation critic Rosemary Arrojo (who received her Ph.D. in the United States) approaches translation through a combination of Derridean deconstruction and Stanley Fish's penchant for testing the limits of argument. Arrojo approvingly cites the postmodernist critical practice of questioning in high theoreti-

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cal terms the meaning of "original work," situating it, instead, in the never-ending process of cultural transmission. In an essay entitled "A que sao fieis tradutores e criticos de tradusao?" (To What Are Translators and Translation Critics Faithful?) Arrojo (1993) takes a quick hop and skip through deconstruction, with thumbnail sketches of the contributions of Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida to this endeavor. Since meanings (like "truths") are never simply "deposited" in texts, but always produced, she arrives at the predictable conclusion that no text can be precisely faithful to the "original" (which she, too, places in quotation marks), not, as earlier translation theorists thought, because of the inherent differences among languages, but rather because the "original" has no existence as a stable object, or—as she ironically puts it—as "the implacable guardian of the author's original intentions" (Arrojo 1993, 19-20; my translation). This takes her to the observation that in comparing a translated text to the "original" we are merely comparing the translation to our interpretation of that original, in effect comparing one translation with another. Arrojo's aim, it seems clear, is to demolish the idea of an "original," to which the translation is secondary. In this she is also following the logic of Stanley Fish (1980), who has argued that because meaning is always negotiated between a text and a reader—is always, in effect, constructed through acts of communication—there is no fixed and predetermined meaning to a literary text. In other words, the text does not exist until it is read, and reading is always interpretation. For the translator and translation theorist, this notion raises the heady possibility that no "original" exists as a fixed and static object to be subjected, at some point, to a process of translation. This possibility, in turn, paves the way for translators to emerge as figures claiming an importance equal to that of the authors of the misnamed and quotation-mark-enclosed "originals" they translate. But to say such a thing is, of course, to play with words. Texts certainly exist as physical objects that can be read over hundreds of years,- and even when they are ambiguous, each is ambiguous in its own way. By no stretch of the imagination could a "creative" reader "read" Machado so that he becomes Lispector. In a recent article

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challenging Fish's argument, Rafael Eugenio Hoyos-Andrade objects to the notion that the text "is a fantasmagorical entity and, in that sense, does not exist" (1992, 208; my translation). He makes the excellent point that to say that the text may not be identical to each reader does not mean that the text is "totally recreated/ created by the recipient/reader." He criticizes the headlong rush from one extreme to another. Having discovered that the text is not merely a repository of unproblematic meaning, why should we let this insight push us into a radical denial that the text has some role in the production of its own meaning? Despite the imprecations of contemporary translation theorists, there is, it seems to me, an undeniable difference between the work of an original writer and that of the translator. It is more than an inconsequential advantage that the translator confronts a preexisting text. And it seems to me a bad-faith gesture for translators to attempt to undo this inconvenient fact by renaming the original work just one more step in the endless process of creation and transmission of cultural artifacts. I believe the interest of translators and critics in cultivating such a world view is embarrassingly obvious. Tired of being in the shadows of figures honored as the Real Thing, they have drawn on the current fad for high theory to nudge the author off center stage and refocus the floodlights on themselves instead. I very much doubt that they are convincing anyone but, perhaps, themselves and one another—the small group of people currently engaged in this exalted branch of translation studies. Readers, however grateful for good translations, will no doubt go on frustrating these theorists by foolishly considering Dostoyevsky and Machado, and not their translators, as the creative geniuses to be honored. Interestingly, the older generation of critics never claimed such a role for themselves. If the new translation critics want us always to be aware of the institutional and ideological factors at work in publication and translation, if they mock their predecessors (as Venuti clearly does in the case of Rabassa), let us learn from them to view their own positions, too, with skepticism, through the prism of Machado's untiring exposure of self-interest; for these translation critics are almost exclusively academics who are protesting the in-

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equality that has made translation activity rank lower in the academic scale of values than original (without quotation marks) scholarly or creative work. In their tone, one hears not the articulation of high principles to which they too feel themselves bound, but the plaintive pique of malcontents who have, apres Foucault, discovered "power" in the world and have learned to point the finger—always, needless to say, at others. Such a stance strikes me as a good example of what Harold Bloom has called "the School of Resentment," a phrase he uses to describe the various kinds of fashionable critical approaches flourishing in the American academy. As David Lehman (1991, 28) explains in citing Bloom's comment, in the School of Resentment "literary criticism is used as a weapon on behalf of groups perceived as historical victims—it's their way to get even with their oppressors." If there is no text, as Stanley Fish polemically suggests, then there is no way of choosing between a poor translation and a good one, no way to justify celebrating one reading as illuminating while deriding another as procrustean. No evidence need be adduced, for all "readings" are equal, equally inventive, equally appropriate, as are all scribblings. But such a view is foolish, of course, and Derrida himself (in the context of the Paul de Man affair and much to the amusement of those who had never comfortably embraced deconstruction) was quick to protest when he felt that his words and his authority as their creator, expressing particular intentions, were being misinterpreted.19 In sum, specific context and authorial intent, as well as what is actually printed on the page, do continue to have a claim on our attention. Capitu, to take one striking example, is Machado's creation, not Caldwell's or Scott-Buccleuch's. Her character, in all its enigmatic hues, is given to us by Machado—and the translators have had to deal with what Machado's text presents to them, ambiguities and all. Thus, Scott-Buccleuch's decision to delete the repetition of the word mulher (woman), as I mentioned earlier, is of a different nature than Machado's decision to include such a repetition. Of course, we need to understand what is implicit in speaking of the translator's "decisions." This individual, the translator, facing a large range of possibilities, is no slavish "imitator" of the original;

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in that sense the claims for the translator's creativity are true enough—though, I hasten to add, true in a rather trivial sense. The language that is replacing the original may be better or worse. But certainly it need not merely be applauded because we now know that the translator is creatively grappling with words just as did the author of the original. The achievements of Caldwell and ScottBuccleuch, like those of Machado's other translators, should be recognized and appreciated, as well as analyzed. Without doubt they have made Machado available to many readers who otherwise would never have encountered his work, and they have assured him of an "afterlife" in other languages, as Walter Benjamin put it (though he intended something far more mystical than I mean to suggest here).20 But their work is derivative of his, not the other way around. Machado faced the blank page,- Caldwell and ScottBuccleuch did not. It seems foolish to have to say something so obvious; but, unfortunately, the state of translation theory at the moment is such that commonsensical observations need to be laboriously restated. Even those translation theorists who accept the existence of an original often reveal, in their writing, the obsession with politicizing their activities so that they may appear as serious contenders in the culture studies sweepstakes. Consider, for example, the general preface written in 1990 by Routledge's Translation Studies series editors, Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere: "Translation is, of course, a rewriting of an original text. . . . Rewriting is manipulation, undertaken in the service of power, and in its positive aspect can help in the evolution of a literature and a society . . . and in an age of ever increasing manipulation of all kinds, the study of the manipulation process of literature as exemplified by translation can help us towards a greater awareness of the world in which we live" (Lefevere 1992, viii). The loftier aims of the series are summarized as follows: "Through the concepts of rewriting and manipulation, this series aims to tackle the problem of ideology, change and power in literature and society and so assert the central function of translation as a shaping force" (ibid.). These passages are telling examples of the hold of what might well be called Power Criticism on intellectuals today. Obviously

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adopting a Foucauldian approach, they also, interestingly, express another impulse: to save the "mere" craft of translation by claiming for it major action on the social stage, which seems to be the measure of all intellectual work in America at this moment. Like Foucault, who uses "capitalism" as his scapegoat, seldom articulating its connections to the particular problems he discusses, these critics denounce "power" in all its guises, not least in the hands of the lowly translator. But in examining the work of translators such as Rabassa, Caldwell, and Scott-Buccleuch, I detect no political agendas, no groveling submission to the "manipulation" going on in the corridors of power. To speak of Machado's translators in the context of contemporary translation studies may seem bizarre. Their interests are quite clear—and can be discerned by the work they do (underpaid and little acknowledged; this part certainly is true). On the other hand, publishers7 interests might perhaps be more amenable to analysis through a translation studies approach. Certainly, even in the case of Machado, we see publishers (having perhaps given up on the prospect of widescale course adoption of Machado in English) seeking the patronage of intellectuals with "name recognition," whose reputations can be borrowed in an effort to sell books. Invoking Susan Sontag and Elizabeth Hardwick as presenters of the work of Machado, as the recent Noonday Press reprints of Epitaph of a Small Winner and Dom Casmurro do, is an attempt to make patronage work to bring a novelist to the public's attention—and, of course, to sell books. In Susan Sontag's case, the effort was a considerable one. Her foreword to Machado's Epitaph of a Small Winner (1990b, xi-xx) was first published (in virtually identical form) as an article in the New Yorker. But Noonday's hopes that the name-recognition held out by Hardwick and Sontag, luminaries in New York intellectual circles, would do wonders for sales of Machado were doomed to disappointment. Cultural transmission remains so uncertain a game that such patronage is by no means enough to ensure public success. As an editor at Noonday Press said to me in August 1995, when I inquired about sales of these reprints: "The sales suck!"21 Had Helen Caldwell not died in 1987, this might have been of

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some consolation to her, even if belated, for Noonday Press apparently judged that Caldwell, who later wrote two books on Machado, lacked the cachet to introduce her own translation of Dom Casmurro. Just as in 1953 the then-popular American novelist and social critic Waldo Frank provided an introduction (a surprisingly subtle one, stressing the novel's ambiguity) to the Noonday edition, nearly forty years later this introduction by a no-longer-recognizable-name was discarded by Noonday in its bid for the stronger patronage afforded by Elizabeth Hardwick. Never mind that Hardwick knows little of her subject or of Brazilian history—she describes Machado's mother as "Spanish, from the Azores" and Machado himself as having "an unprotected status in the hierarchical intellectual world of Portuguese colonialism" (1991 [1953], xii).22 Never mind, too, that she labels Machado's narrators as "provincial young men" (xiii), or that she enlightens the reader with the comment that "Machado's curious, rather claustrophobic constructions in no way seek to correspond to the vast, dominating landscape of Brazil" (xvii), or even that she characterizes Bento as "a cuckold like no other" (xx). She does, after all, provide the reader with a summary of the novel and praises its "modernist accent and tone" (xxi). Meanwhile, Helen Caldwell got to publish her own introduction to her translation of Dom Casmurro, but only in a university press edition: the 1966 reprint of her translation published by the University of California Press. Caldwell performed admirably as a translator of Machado—she has four of his novels and several short stories to her credit—a translator of the old school, self-effacing, eager to serve. It would be interesting to have her here today, commenting on the pretensions of the new translation theorists, who, if they could put their money where their mouths are, would honor her as Machado's equal. I doubt she would be comfortable with such a characterization. But if authors are "dead," at least according to those traditional views that credited them with interpretive authority and creative proprietorship over their own texts, translation theorists and critics are very much alive, apparently energized by the resentful rivalry that seems to motivate much of their work, perhaps reveling in the successful displacement they are managing to pull off. And that

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this kind of theorizing is occurring at precisely this historical moment of putative radicalism in the academy is not surprising. What is more "elitist," after all, than the admiration lavishly bestowed on cherished writers? How exclusionary this is, compared to the "nonhierarchic" practice, now vying for institutionalization, of pretending that readers, critics, and translators (mere variants, all, on forms of reading and writing) are "equals" in the construction of signification and the complex web of cultural transmission. In a recent essay, Sergio Luiz Prado Bellei (1989, 29) calls attention to Machado's view of originality by citing a passage from "Cantiga de Esponsais," a story about one Mestre Romao, described by Machado as bom miisico e bom homem (a good musician and a good man,- my translation), who had not, in the course of a lifetime, managed to finish the melody that as a young man he had begun to compose in celebration of his marriage (in Obra completa 1986-94, 2:386). More than thirty years later, as he tries unsuccessfully to develop the musical phrase he had long ago invented, he watches a couple of newlyweds through his window. Suddenly the young woman begins, unconsciously, to hum a melody, the very melody Mestre Romao had always sought, which Machado describes as uma coisa nunca antes cantada nem sabida (a thing never before known or sung, 389). And so it is Machado who gets the last word, for that, of course, is what sets translators apart from their authors. Translators are not laboring to create uma coisa nunca antes escrita nem sabida (something never before written and known)—but merely, modestly (and I say this with full appreciation of the enormous debt translators are owed), uma coisa jd escrita e sabida (something already written and known)—though not in their own language. Machado ends his story with this line: O mestre ouviu-a com tristeza, abanou a cabega, e a noite expirou (Master Romao listened to her in sadness, shook his head, and that night breathed his last, 390). Another's creativity, unmatched by one's own, causes sadness, heartbreak, even death, Machado seems to say. And this, I believe, explains in a nutshell the efforts of some contemporary adherents of translation studies to alter our understanding of the relationship between original literary works and their translations. It is a mel-

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ancholy effort, if viewed in this light, but perhaps an understandable one. Let us hope Machado finds his readership in English before he is cast aside as just another toiler in the workshop of cultural transmission. NOTES

1. I recall this comment from 1969-70, when I studied with Professor Sena at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, during his last year as a professor there. 2. O discurso e magnifico, e ndo ha de monei em S. Paulo-, e preciso que a Corte o leia, e as provincias tambem, e ate ndo se me daha faze-lo traduzir em fiances. Em fiances, pode sei que fique ainda melhoi (Machado deAssis 1986-94, 1:999). 3.1 was first told about this story by Alexander Zholkovsky at the National Humanities Center in 1990. Professor Zholkovsky said: "The story includes the poems themselves, with cynical comments by the narratorauthor. An additional twist to the story is that it was published by Sinyavsky and his wife, whose own story it spoofs, for Sinyavsky himself was tortured, was sent to Siberia, did write from there, etc., and yet in his journal is capable of being ironic about that entire situation/' Robert Rothstein, my colleague at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, then tracked down the story and provided me with the complete reference. 4. Even in recent years, commentators on Brazilian literature writing in the English-language press still express the apparently irresistible impulse to condescend to Latin American literature. An article entitled "The Great Latin American Novel Enters Its Second Generation/7 in the Economist (13 June 1987, pp. 101-4), informs us that "Latin Americans did not, of course, begin suddenly to write well 25 years ago" and goes on to discuss Brazil's— and hence its literature's—"isolation" in the context of Latin America, commenting reassuringly: "Nonetheless, Brazilian literature has been enjoying recognition over the past decade, producing as good a crop of new writers as Spanish America." 5. Ohmann also explored the relationship between the books selected for review and the publishers who advertised in these publications. 6. Telephone conversation with Ellen Watson, 5 January 1991. There are of course exceptions to this. As in Pomerantsev's story, special circumstances also play a role, as is no doubt the case with the recent publications in English of the work of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. 7. My thanks to Ana Santos, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who repeated to me that a friend of hers had

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noticed the failure to capture Machado's sense in his very first line in the phrase que eu conhego de vista e de chapeu. 8. See, on this matter, Shveitser 1993. Shveitser writes: "Full equivalence, embracing both the semantic and pragmatic levels, as well as all relevant types of functional equivalence, appears to be an idealized construct. This does not mean that full equivalence does not exist in reality at all. Cases of full equivalency are possible, but as a rule they are encountered under relatively simple communicative conditions in texts with a relatively narrow range of functional characteristics. The more complicated and controversial the demands of a translation (or its 'paradoxes7), the slimmer the possibility of creating a text that would be a mirrored refraction of the original" (p. 51). On the other hand, he also says that "all deviations from equivalence should be motivated by objective necessity, rather than the translator's arbitrary judgment" (p. 53), before finally concluding: "A translation is adequate when the translator's decisions correspond to the communicative conditions to a satisfactory degree" (p. 53). He also notes that the evolution of literary traditions and translational norms means that new translations become necessary, even if their predecessors had long been considered unsurpassed and unsurpassable (p. 54). 9. Betty Radice, herself a translator of classical literature and the editor, from 1964 until her death in 1985, of Penguin Classics, was described as "particularly alive to the dangers of letting the style and syntax of the original over-influence the English sentence structure." See the introduction by her son, William Radice, to The Translator's Art (Radice and Reynolds 1987, 20). 10. John Gledson (1984, 108-9) explains the metaphor further: it is part of the front Bento keeps up for his neighbors. 11. My translation. Cited by Lea Mara Valezi Staut (1992, 112). Staut discusses a series of conferences held in Rio de Janeiro by ABRATES in May-June 1980 on translation, later published as a book, A tradugao da grande obra literdria: depoimentos (Sao Paulo: Alamo, 1982). Staut clearly disapproves of Scott-Buccleuch's views of Machado. Most of her comments, however, relate to French translations of Machado. 12. My translation. Staut deduces from this comment that ScottBuccleuch is calling Machado less Brazilian than Jose Americo de Almeida and Lima Barreto, whose novels A bagaceira and O triste flm de Policarpo Quaresma he had also translated; or that he considers Machado more European, which Staut finds equally objectionable: "Underlying these affirmations is the outmoded perspective that considers Machado removed from national problems, ignoring the postulate established by Machado himself: O que se deve exigir do escritor antes de tudo, e certo sentimento intimo,

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que o tome homem do seu tempo e do seu pais, ainda quando trate de assuntos remotos no tempo e no espaco [What one must demand above all from the writer is a certain intimate sentiment, which makes him a man of his time and of his country, even when he deals with subjects far removed in time and space]." This line from Machado is from his famous essay "Noticia da atual literatura brasileira: o instinto da nacionalidade" (Note on Current Brazilian Literature: The Instinct of Nationality). Without further discussion, Staut concludes: "Everything suggests that ScottBuccleuch concerned himself merely with linguistic structures, ignoring literary structures or, at least, considering them secondary" (Staut 1992, 112-13; my translations). A less polemical reading might interpret ScottBuccleuch's words somewhat differently. A bagaceira, with its specific northeastern vocabulary, obviously presents special problems of translation. So does Jose de Alencar's O Guarani as compared to, say, Senhora— though by Machado's own standards that does not make one either more or less Brazilian than the other. 13. And yet, oddly enough, in his introduction to his translation of Memorial de Aires, The Wager: Aires' Journal (1990c, 6), published shortly before his translation of Dom Casmurro, Scott-Buccleuch does reveal an awareness of Machado's literary aims: "As in other of Machado's novels the story is of secondary importance, the primary interest being in the characters themselves." Perhaps Scott-Buccleuch made the cuts he did in response to comments by reviewers of Caldwell's translation in 1953. The more careful of these reviewers seem to have read Waldo Frank's introduction and picked up from him the importance of the ambiguity of the novel. See, for example, Jean Holzhauer's subtle comments in "The Ambiguity Which Concerns Us All" (Commonweal, 12 June 1953, pp. 254-55); the brief mention in Booklist (15 June 1953, pp. 340-41), which cautiously states: "Flickers of irony light up the ambiguities of a novel that will be enjoyed by the discriminating reader"; and Harvey Curtis Webster, "The Essential Ambiguities in Us All" (New York Times Book Review, 24 May 1953). But Webster is not alone in warning readers about the novel's "irrelevant discourses" and "the deceptively thin line of the narrative." Webster comments that the narrative's "progress is unsteady" and its " 'shirtsleeves and suspenders' style annoying to the reader who expects a steady advance toward a climax." The New Yorker, in its review of 6 June 1953, p. 150, gives a brief summary of the novel and then concludes: "It is a sad story, but it moves one to impatience rather than pity, because the spark of life that lies behind it is so remote, and, more than that, so weak." R. D. Charques, writing in the Spectator, 27 November 1953 (in a composite review that also includes works by John Hersey and A. J. Cronin), describes

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Dom Casmurro as a story that is "blown out, as it were—rather tiresomely, I think—from tiny and wandering fragments of memory and is constantly punctured by lisping invocations of the 'gentle reader7 variety." Hubert Herring, in a brief review titled "Brazil [sic] Classic," New York Herald Tribune, 30 August 1953, p. 13, while noting (as did some other reviewers, though not all) that Capitu's unfaithfulness "is never entirely clear," comments: "It seems a slight and unsubstantial tale to an English reader, not quite worthy of the ecstasy of Waldo Frank, who furnishes an introduction." With ill-concealed condescension, Herring concludes: "But Helen Caldwell did a fine job in translation, and deserves thanks for giving us a glimpse of what the Brazilians regard as one of their finest novels." By contrast, Edith Fowke, in the Canadian Forum, October 1953, p. 164, notes the novel's "many apparent digressions, but each seemingly irrelevant detail contributes to the total effect," which leads to the conclusion: "This is an unusual and fascinating book." 14. Scott-Buccleuch here echoes a 1953 reviewer of Dom Casmurro: W Rex Crawford, himself author of A Century of Latin American Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1944), refers, in his "Reminiscences in Portuguese" (Saturday Review, 20 June 1953: 19), to the "choppy, Sterne-like story, devoid of narrative powers de longe haleine," and uses his acquaintance with Brazilian literature to suggest that other works, such as "the virile social novels of Jose Lins do Rego, the satire of Marques Rebelo, the modern short stories of Anibal Machado or Clarice Inspector, the delicate art of Carlos Drummond de Andrade" would introduce American readers to Brazilian literature better than "the classic but dated work of Machado." 15. Contrast this with the 1953 Times Literary Supplement review (4 December 1953: 773). Called "Reflections of Life," it reviews Machado along with some modern novelists such as Romain Gary and Joyce Cary and summarizes Dom Casmurro without apparent awareness of its original date of publication. The review concludes: "Machado de Assis, as was evident from Epitaph of a Small Winner, possessed an original talent, but here the unvarying tone of his narrative becomes monotonous, and its sequence is badly broken up by the headings, which sometimes enclose a passage of no more than ten lines. His style and his conception of the character of Dom Casmurro seem to owe something to Anatole France, but lack the flash of France's wit and the polish of his prose." 16. Even as keen a reader as V. S. Pritchett ("Machado de Assis," New Statesman, 25 February 1966: 261), however, similarly misapprehended what Machado is doing in Dom Casmurro, as have so many readers and critics. In a subtle and highly admiring essay, occasioned by the British

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publication of Helen Caldwell's translation of Esau and Jacob, Pritchett describes Machado7s awareness of "the double quality of our sensibility, and the uncertainty of what we are. We are the sport of nature, items in a game/' Yet in summarizing the plot of Dom Casmurro, Pritchett describes Escobar as the "friend [who] becomes the father of the boy Dom Casmurro thinks his own." 17. Venuti's most recent book is called, not surprisingly, The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation (1995). The impact of his and like-minded approaches on contemporary translation studies is considerable. To relate just one anecdote: at the 1995 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, in Washington, D.C., I participated in a panel (on 28 September 1995) about the state of translation from Latin American literature. The panel's organizer heatedly denounced the fact that Latin American literature in translation in the United States is successful "as a product," which, she said, sacrifices attention to it "as a process." She argued that we should make it impossible to ignore the practice of translation: we should add introductions, glossaries, notes; in every way we should always call attention to the fact of translation and the work of the translator. In teaching, we should use multiple versions, "and treat all translations as necessary." Above all, translations must be made visible as translations. I merely commented that this does not serve the interests (in both senses) of most readers. In response to my statement that some translations are better than others, she exclaimed: "But that's hierarchical!" 18. In an unusual coincidence, while working on the first draft of this essay I saw Alan Bennett's TV adaptation of his stage play A Question of Attribution (PBS, 10 September 1995), about the British art historian and Soviet agent Anthony Blunt. In one scene Blunt makes a comment about pictorial art that resembles Rabassa's: a forgery ages over time, he says, and the fact that it is a forgery becomes readily apparent to all, while the original continues unblemished. 19. See David Lehman (1991, 257-58): "[Derrida] would tell us what he meant to say and ridicule those who revealed their ignorance or ineptness by disagreement. He thus illustrates the deconstructive double standard: the theorist feels free to exempt himself from his own strictures. It is all very well to argue that all readings are misreadings and that the author doesn't know best. But see what happens when you give the author of that argument a taste of his own medicine." 20. Willis Barnstone (1993, 242) argues that Benjamin's famous essay "The Task of the Translator" is "the work of a philosopher of language who has the messianic purpose of finding through translation the universal language and the memory of God."

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21. Telephone conversation with Ellie Urbas, 14 August 1995. 22. It is not uncommon for reviewers to make such errors, all attesting to the obscurity of Brazilian culture to these reviewers. Jean Holzhauer, for example, in a 1953 review of Caldwell's translation of Dom Casmurro, makes some subtle observations, such as the following, about Machado's "digressions": "The vital passage passes for casual, the casual for important. It is all, in short, very like life." But then, in commenting on "the stunning impact of [Bento's] 'projection' of guilt," Holzhauer wonders what causes this: "Is it the rigid Castilian-like framework of his social milieu?" (Holzhauer 1953, 254, 255).

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References

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. 1991. "A poesia envenenada de Dom Casmurro." Novos Estudos (Cebrap) (29 March): 85-96. Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. . 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Shveitser, Alexander. 1993. "Equivalency and Adequacy." In Translation as Social Action: Russian and Bulgarian Perspectives, ed. and trans. Palma Zlateva, pp. 47-56. London and New York: Routledge. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. 1988. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Sousa, Jose Galante de. 1955. Bibliografia de Machado de Assis. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Nacional do Livro. Staut, Lea Mara Valezi. 1992. "O estilo machadiano e o tradutor." Alfa (Sao Paulo) 36: 111-17. Stein, Ingrid. 1984. Figuras femininas em Machado de Assis. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra. Tanner, Tony. 1966. "Machado de Assis." London Magazine (April): 41-57. Thompson, E. P. 1993. Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. New York: New Press. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge. , ed. 1992. Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology. London and New York: Routledge. Verissimo, Jose. 1977. "Urn irmao de Bras Cubas: o Dom Casmurro do Sr. Machado de Assis." In Estudos de literatura brasileira, pp. 25-30. 3rd series. Sao Paulo and Belo Horizonte: EDUSP/Itatiaia. (Originally published in 1900.) Webster, Harvey Curtis. 1953. "The Essential Ambiguities in Us All." New York Times Book Review (24 May). Weimann, Robert. 1984. Structure and Society in Literary History. Expanded ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wilson, Clotilde. 1949. "Machado de Assis, Encomiast of Lunacy." Hispania 32:2 (May): 198-201. Xavier, Therezinha Mucci. 1986. A personagem feminina no romance de Machado de Assis. Rio de Janeiro: Presenca.

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Index

Academy of Letters, 16 Adultery: and ambiguity, 15; assumption of, 44; and domestic drama as political metaphor, 77) as insoluble question, 1, 7, 9; in Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas, 70; and unreliable narrator, 21n.l6 Agregado. See Dependents "Urn agregado," 11 Allegory: allegorical duplications of, 37; and archaisms, 28; and authorial irony, 27; and Bento Santiago's fate, 47; and Brazilian Empire, 30, 44; of characters, 46; of elites, 23; and fictional author, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 44; of historical period, 40-41; and illusions of illusions, 39; Jose Dias as allegory of Darwinism, 46; and memory, 40; and modern unrepresentability, 42; and point of view, 42, 43; and Realism, 33; and representation, 35, 40 Almeida, Jose Americo de, 112n.l2 Amado, Jorge, 87, 97, 103

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Ambiguity: of authorship, 34; in Dom Casmurro, xi, 8, 15, 101, 113n.l3; and fictional authorship, 37; and intention, 15, 56, 57; in Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas, 72, 75; and political dialogues, 56, 57; and readers, 44; and Realism, x; of social structure, 54; and subordinates, 57; and supposed author, 27; and translation, 106 Andrade, Carlos Drummond de. See Drummond de Andrade, Carlos Anti-Realism, ix-x, 1, 15, 19n.4 Archaisms, 28, 38 Arrojo, Rosemary, 103-104 UAssommoir, 13 Authoritarian principle, 48, 49 Authorship: ambiguity of, 34; and cronicas of the 1890s, 10, 17; and death metaphor, 42; in Dom Casmurro, 4-5, 6, 14-15, 23; Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas, 33; and narrator, 4-7, 10, 12-13, 14; and psychiatric medi-

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124 cine, 33; and structuralism, 36. See also Fictional authorship; Mimetic authorship,- Supposed author Autoria, 24, 49 Azevedo, Aluisio, 31 Baptista, Abel Barros: and authorship of Dom Casmurro, 4, 5-6, 14-15, 23; and Caldwell legacy, 2, 14, 25, 30; and Derrida, 22n.26; and fictional authorship, 37; and literary criticism, 16; and Machado's varied narrators, 2In. 18; and modernization, 42; and readers7 freedom, 9; and supposed author, 24, 25, 31; and unreliable narrator, 3, 2In. 16 Barreto, Lima, 112n.l2 Barthes, Roland, 36 Bassnett, Susan, 107 Bellei, Sergio Luiz Prado, 110 Benjamin, Walter, 107, 115n.20 Bennett, Alan, 115n.l8 Bible, 30 Bloom, Harold, 106 Blunt, Anthony, 115n.l8 Booth, Wayne, 24 Brazil: aristocracy of, 48; Aryanization of, 32; as racist/classist society, vii Caldwell, Helen: Baptista on, 2, 14, 25; and Bento Santiago's fate, 47; and Capitu's innocence, 20n.l0; and Capitu's vindication, 5-6} and distrust of Bento, 41; Dom Casmurro translation of, 4, 90-91, 93, 94, 95, 101, 106, 107, 109, 113-114n.l3, 116n.22; Esau and Jacob translation of, 114n.l6;

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Index and intention, 30; and interpretation of text, 19n.4; introductions to Dom Casmurro, 100, 108-109; and Othello, 44; and readers' freedom, 9; and title of Dom Casmurro, 90-91; and translation theorists, 102; as translator, 108 Candido, Antonio, 9, 12 Capitalism: and cultural elitism, 102; and Dom Casmurro, 28; Foucault on, 108; and social structure, xi Carriere, Anne, 89 "ACartomante," 86 Carvalho, Elysio de, 59 Cary, Joyce, 114n.l5 Casa velha, narrator of, 14, 20-21n.l3 Casmurro: meaning of, 6-7, 34, 45; Scott-Buccleuch on, 98; translation of, 90-91 Catholic Church: discourse of, 46; and Dona Gloria, 47-48; and unity, 32; virtues of, 38 Certeau, Michel de, 41 Chalhoub, Sidney, xii, 18 Charques, R. D., 113-114n.l3 Cixous, Helene, 88 Class: and Bento's dependence on Capitu, 49; in Brazil, vii; class antagonism, 54, 56, 57, 61, 66, 68, 75, 76, 80, 81, 83; class conditioning, 45; class unconscious, 40; and domination, 23; Helena's awareness of, 60; in laid Garcia, 51-52; and political dialogues, 56, 79; and readers, 36; and slaveholding, x; and traditional representation of translators, 102; and vocabulary, 59. See also Social structure

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Index Cliar, Moacyr, 87 Clients. See Dependents Coelho, Paulo, 88-89 Coelho Netto, H. M., 86 Comissao Machado de Assis, 16 Communication, and meaning, 104 Comte, Auguste, 49 Contradiction, 33, 37 Coutinho, Afranio, 17 Cronicas of the 1890s: attitudes and conventions as focus of, 9; and authorship, 10, 17; and aversion to clarity, 11; and determinism, 2In. 17; and Dom Casmuno, 3; and intention, 8; and Machado's political thinking, 18; and Machado's sources, 17; Magalhaes Junior's collection of, 16; and sexual taboos, 20n.l2 Culture, transmission of, 104, 105, 108, 110, 111 Dante, 30 Darwin, ix, x, 46 Death metaphor, 42 Dependents: as agents, xii; and allegory of domination and poverty, 38; antagonism with masters, 57, 61, 66, 75; and Dom Casmurro's defeat, 77-, and horizontal solidarities, 53-54; as institutionally inferior people, 46-47; and personal ties of dependence, 63; and political dialogues, 54-57, 64-67, 73, 74-77, 79-82; representation of, 83; and social structure, xii, 54; subordination of, 51. See also Subordinates Derrida, Jacques, 18, 22n.26, 103, 104, 106, 115n.l9

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125 Des Grieux (character in Manon Lescaut referred to in Dom Casmuiro), 5 Determinism, 13, 23, 31, 32 Diegesis, 25 Diegetic authorship, 24 Digressions. See Structure, digressive Dissimulation: in Dom Casmurro, 81; in Helena, 58, 59, 60; in laid Garcia, 52; and paternalism, 51; and Platonic analysis of poetry, 24; and women, 72 Dixon, Paul, xi Dolores, Carmen, 86 Dom Casmurro: ambiguity in, xi, 8, 15, 101, 113n.l3 ; authorship in, 4; and Bento as elite type, 3, 9-10; and Bento's credibility as narrator, X; Bento's reading in, 5; bookobject as element in writing of, 28; and Capitu's guilt, 6, 43; and Capitu's infidelity, viii, xii, 1, 3; and Capitu's innocence, 20n.l0; Capitu's victory in, xi; class antagonism in, 83; contemporary fiction in, 5; historical context of, 3, 76} and intention, 14; and literary critics, ix; and literary market, 89-90; mimetic form of, 35; and Modernism, 2; narrative structure of, 27-28; and nondetermination, 35-36; and paternalism, 53; political dialogues in, 76-83; and Realism, 1, 2, 11, 19n.7, 30, 33-34; and reality, 19n.4; and relationship between author and narrator, 5-6, 9-10; reprints of, 108; and simulacrum of Othello, 43-44; and slaveholding, 67-, social structure

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126 of, xii, 54-55; translations of, xii-xiii, 3-4, 90-101, 106, 107; unreliable narrator of, viii, x, 1-3, 7-8, 9; values clashing in, xi ; writing of, 11 Domination: and class, 23; Estacio as representative of, 61; in laid Garcia, 62-63; in Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas, 68-70; and paternalism, 51, 52; structures of, 57; and traditional society, xi. See also Paternalism Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 89, 105 Drummond de Andrade, Carlos, 2, 114n.l4 Eca de Queiros, Jose Maria de, 4, 13, 14, 31 Eikastike, 25 Elites: allegory of, 23, 30; authoritarianism of, 38; and class distinctions, 46; and Dom Casmurro, xii, 3, 30; ideology of, 31; Schwarz on, 12 Elitism, cultural, 102, 103, 110 Empire: allegory of, 30, 44; and conciliation of political parties, 71; in Helena, 61; and meaning of "Dom," 48; and patron-client relationships, 46; and seigneurial will, 69, 70 "O Enfermeiro," 86 Epitaph of a Small Winner, 108 Esau e Jaco: and Comissao Machado de Assis, 16; Machado's writing of, viii; narrator of, 2In. 13; and reading between the lines, 6; and translations, 85, 114n.l6 Euphemisms, 51, 52 Fantasy: and allegory, 40; and fic-

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Index tional author, 25; and Plato, 43; and supposed author, 42 Faoro, Raymundo, 16 Feminism, 7-8, 18, 88 Fetishism, viii Fin-de-siecle: and skepticism, 3; temptresses of, 8 Fish, Stanley, 103, 104-105, 106 Fictional authorship: and allegory, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 44; and ambiguity, 37; and casmurro, 45; as conceptual character, 30; and intention, 23, 31, 36, 37; and literary criticism, 23, 25, 36; and mimetic authorship, 25, 36, 38, 39; and personification of "author," 24; and readers, 23, 34-37, 38, 40; self-interpretation of, 26; as simulacrum, 25, 33, 36, 37, 39. See also Supposed author Flaubert, Gustave, 14, 31 Forster, E. M., 12 Foucault, Michel, 104, 106, 108 Fowke, Edith, 114n.l3 Franca Junior, Oswaldo, 87-88 France, Anatole, 114n.l5 Frank, Waldo, 100, 109, 113-114n.l3 Free Birth Law. See Law of 1871 Free will, 13 Fuentes, Carlos, xi Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, 87 Gary, Romain, 114n.l5 Gilbert, Sandra M., 7-8 Gledson, John: and allegory, 44; on casmurro, 34; and fictional author, 36; on interpretation of historical processes, 62, 66-, on Machado, ix-x, xi Goldberg, Isaac, 86

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Index Gomes, Eugenio, 44 Gubar, Susan, 7-8 Hansen, Joao Adolfo, x-xi, xii Haple diegesis, " simple narration/ 7 24 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 108, 109 Helena.Capitu compared to Helena, 77} Memorias postumas de Bras Cub as compared to, 67-71; political dialogues in, 57-62, 66; and seigneurial will, 51-53, 58-59, 61, 65, 68, 70; and social structure, xii, 53; yellow fever in, 70-71 Herring, Hubert, 114n.l3 Holzhauer, Jean, 116n.22 Hoyos-Andrade, Rafael Eugenio, 105 laid Garcia: Capitu compared to Iaia Garcia, 77} domination in, 62-63; ideology in, 53; political dialogues in, 62-67, 76, 77, 79; seigneurial will in, 51-52; and social structure, xii; translation of, 99; women in, 71 Ideology: of Bento, 8; of Eca de Queiros, 13; of elites, 31; of fictional author, 38; in Helena, 66; in laid Garcia, 53; mimesis of, 38; of narrators, 13; of paternalism, 53-54, 56, 60-61, 65, 69, 75} and patron-client relationships, xii; and seigneurial power, 52, 80; of slaveholders, 74; unity of, 42 Immigration, European, 32 Individualism, xi Intention: and ambiguity, 15, 56, 57; authorial nondetermination,

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127 31; and Caldwell, 5-6, 14, 30; and dependent clients, 63, 64; and fictional authorship, 23, 31, 36, 37; and irony, 2; and literary criticism, 2, 25, 30; Machado's intention as author, x, xii, 9, 13-15, 21n.l8, 25, 30, 38, 97} and original work, 104, 106; Patai on, xii; and political dialogues, 79-80; and reading between the lines, 6; and supposed author, 31; and unreliable narrator, 8 Interpretation: and ambiguity, 75; and Caldwell, 19n.4; controversy of, ix; of historical transformations, 62, 66, 70, 76} and meaning of original work, 104; of readers, 7, 8-9; self-interpretation of Dom Casmurro, 26, 27, 34,37 Intervention, 36 Irony: authorial irony, 27; and dependent clients, 63; and intention, 2; and philosophical thought, 18; and subordinates, 57; and supposed author, 27, 34; and translations, 92, 95-96 Iser, Wolfgang, 29 James, Henry, 14, 18 Jealousy: and Bento's lack of autonomy, 49; and destruction of lives, 12; and fictional author, 45; in Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas, 72; and simulacrum of Othello, 43 Jurisprudence, 30, 39, 41, 46 Kardec, Allan, 49 Kristeva, Julia, 36

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128 Latin American literature: boom of late 1960s and 1970s, 1; condescension toward, llln.4; market for, 87; and translation, 115n.l7 Law, 39, 41, 46 Law of 1871: and Dom Casmurro, 77} and laid Garcia, 66} and paternalism, 53, 57, 61; and yellow fever, 70 Leao, Mucio, 14 Lefevere, Andre, 107 Lehman, David, 106 Liberalism, xi Lispector, Clarice, 88, 104, 114n.l4 Literary criticism: Bloom on, 106; and Dom Casmurro, 3, 20n.l0; and fictional authorship, 23, 25, 36; and form/content emphasis, 30-31; and intention, 2, 25, 30; on Machado, ix, xi-xii, 16-18; Power Criticism, 107-108; and translations, 85, 105-106 Literature: and allegory of death, 42; in Dom Casmurro, 5; and literary fame, 85-86; literary history, 1; literary market, 87, 88, 89; and material presence of bookobject, 28; and nondetermination, 33-34; as organic form, 32-33; and Portuguese language, 85; and simulacrum, 43 Mac Adam, Alfred J.: and historical perspective, 3; and Machado as anti-Realist, ix-x, 19n.4; and Machado as Modernist, xi, 1 Machado, Anibal, 114n.l4 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria: and dependent's viewpoint, 56; and domination, 51, 57, 65; and Eca de Queiros, 13; family back-

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Index ground of, vii; and fictional authorship, 23, 25, 38; intention as author, x, xii, 9, 13-15, 21n.l8, 25, 30, 38, 97; on original work, 110; philosophical thought of, 17-18; and social changes, 62-63, 70, 76} writing career of, viii-ix. See also specific works Magalhaes Junior, Raymundo, 16 Maistre, Xavier de, 26 Man, Paul de, 106 Marxism, 18 Massa, Jean-Michel, 16 Meaning: ambiguity in, 57, 75; of authorial intention, 31; and clarity, 11; of Dona Placida's life, 73-74; and fictional authorship, 23, 37; and historical context, 3; and historical transformation, 70; and literary criticism, 2; and memory, 41; neutralization of, 42; nondetermination of, 27, 37; of original work, 104, 105; and point of view, 35; and political dialogues, 64; and readers, 27, 104; and representation, 34; and seigneurial ideology, 80; social meaning, 54, 69; and supposed author, 27; and translation, xiii; and unity, 29, 30 Medeiros e Albuquerque, J. J., 86 Melville, Herman, 99 Memorial de Aires, viii, 2In. 13, 113n.l3 Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas: ambiguity in, 72, 75; authorship of, 33; and bourgeois principle of common sense, 46; class antagonism in, 83; Helena compared to, 67-71; historical allusions in, 71; humoristic vac-

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Index uum in, 40; and mimetic authorship, 35; narrator of, viii, 10, 67-68; and paternalism, 53; political dialogues of, 67-76-, and social structure, xii, 12; and social transformation, 70; and supposed author, 41-42; translations of, 4, 90; and truth, 65, 67 Memory: authoritarian memory, 46; and Bento's lack of autonomy, 48; and fictional author, 35, 39; and historical illusions, 44; and meaning, 41; and Modernism, 2; and readers, 27, 41, 45; and reclassification of past, 44, 76) and representation, 34; simulacrum of, 36; and supposed author, 40; and unity, 32, 34 Metailie, Anne-Marie, 89 Miguel-Pereira, Lucia, 20n.l0, 44 Mill, John Stuart, 8 Mimesis, 24, 25 Mimetic authorship: and fictional authorship, 25, 36, 38, 39; and Plato, 24; and relationship with author, 25-26; and representation, 33, 35; and verisimilitude, 25-26, 31 Ministry of Agriculture, 18 "Missa do galo," 11 Modernism: Baptista on, 42; and defective narrator, ix; and digressive structure, viii, ix, 2 ; and Dom Casmurro, 2, 28; Machado as, xi, 1; and progress, xi, 32; and Realism, xi, 18n.3, 33 Narrators: and Capitu's character, 81; as characters, 12, 26, 30; and class, X; fictional narrators, 32; of Helena, 58, 66) hypochondria-

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129 cal narrators, 26-27, 29-30, 32, 37, 77} of laid Garcia, 66) of ideology, 13; independent narrators, 10; Mac Adam on, 19n.4; Machado's varying of, 14; of Memdrias postumas de Bras Cubas, viii, 67-68; and Modernism, ix, 2; and political dialogues, 76, 78-79; political meaning behind, 67, 83; readers' entrapment by, ix; and Realism, x, 12, 14; and relationship with author, 4-7, 10, 12-13, 14; reliability of, with readers, 6-7, 9, 29; and satire, 10, 26; and slaveholding, 67-, and supposed author, 24, 41; and unity, 28-29; unmasking of, 20-21n.l3. See also Unreliable narrators Naturalism: and determinism, 13, 32; Machado as critical of, ix, x, 14; and Realism, 15; and representation, 33 Negation, 29 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 104 Noonday Press, 90, 100, 108-109 Nothingness: and death metaphor, 42; as metaphor for unrepresentability of modern existence, xi, 29 Ohmann, Richard, 87 Paraguayan War, 57, 61, 63-64 Parody, 27 Pascal, Blaise, 13, 21n.l7 Patai, Daphne, xii-xiii, 4 Paternalism: and autonomy of subordinates, 54, 56; crisis of, 62; and domination, 51, 52; hegemony of, 57, 58; ideology of,

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Index

130 53-54, 56, 60-61, 65, 69, 75) between Jose Dias and Dona Gloria, 38; and political dialogues, 56 Patriarchal values: and Bento as elite type, 9-10; and Bento Santiago's family, 45-48; destruction of, 38; in Dom Casmurro, xi; and women, 47-48 Patron-client relationships: and authoritarian memory, 46; and bourgeois principle of common sense, 46; and Dom Casmurro, xi; and social structure, xii, 53; and translation, 94. See also Dependent clients Pedro II, 49, 72 Phantastike, 25 Plague, 70 Plato, xi, 24-25, 33, 43 Poe, Edgar Allan, 86 Poetry, 24 Point of view: and allegory, 42, 43; and fictional author, 39) and hypochondriacal narrator, 27; and intentionality, 36, 37; and nondetermination, 36; and representation, 35 Political crisis of 1868, 57, 63 Political dialogues: and dependent clients, 54-57, 64-67, 73, 74-77, 79-82; in Dom Casmurro, 76-83; in Helena, 57-62, 66} in laid Garcia, 62-67, 76, 77, 79} in Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas, 67-76-, risks of, 77-, and seigneurial will, 54, 56, 64; and social structure, 54, 55-56 Pomerantsev, Igor, 85-86 Portuguese language, vii, 4, 72, 85 Positivism, 23, 30, 32

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Postmodernism, 90, 103-104 Post structuralism, 36, 100 Poverty, 52 Power Criticism, 107-108 Pritchett, V. S., 114-115n.l6 Proust, Marcel, 40 Psychiatric medicine, 32, 33 Queiros, Jose Maria de Eca de. See Eca de Queiros, Jose Maria de Quincas Borba: author/narrator tension in, 14; and bourgeois principle of common sense, 46; and hoodwinking of reader, 10; insanity in, viii; Panglossian optimism in, 38; translations of, 90 Rabassa, Gregory: and Amado, 97, 103; and Lispector, 88; and original work, 102-103, 115n.l8 ; and Power Criticism, 108; and translation theorists, 102-103, 105 Racism: of Brazil, vii, 100; and determinism, 31; public acceptance of, 30 Radice, Betty, 112n.9 Readers: and ambiguity, 44; and Capitu's betrayal, viii; and Capites guilt, 6, 44; and class, 36; and cultural transmission, 110; differing interpretations of, 7, 8-9; English-language readership, 86, 88, 89, 114n.l4 ; female readership, 17; and fictional authorship, 23, 34-37, 38, 40; freedom of, x, 8-9, 15; and Helena's reliability, 60, 66; hoodwinking of, 10, 14; and identification with Bento, 12; and literary market, 88, 89; and meaning of casmurro, 6-7) and meaning of orig-

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Index inal work, 104-105; and memory, 27, 41, 45; narrators' entrapment of, ix; and narrators' explanation of social meaning, 69; and narrators' explanation of tensions, 66) and narrator's reliability, 6-7, 9, 29; perceptions of, 27-28; and political dialogues, 79; and reading between the lines, 6, 7; and representation, 29; and simulacrum, 49; and supposed authors, 24, 29, 42; and translation theorists, xii; and translations, 85, 86, 97-98, 115n. 17; and unreliable narrators, 10-11,49 Realism: AntiRealism, ix-x, 1, 15, 19n.4; crisis in, 14, 15; and Dom Casmvno, 1, 2, 11, 19n.7, 30, 33-34; expansion of boundaries of, x, 15; and fictional authorship, 23, 38; Machado as critic of, ix; and Modernism, xi, 18n.3, 33; and narrators, x, 12, 14; and nondeterminism, 33; and representation, 30, 32, 33; and social structure, xii; and unity, 28-29; and unreliable narrators, x, 11 Reality: and Dom Casmurro, 19n.4; fragmentation of, x-xi; representation of, xi; and supposed author, 29 Rebelo, Marques, 114n.l4 Regency (183140), 61 Regeneration, 70-71 Rego, Jose Lins do, 114n.l4 Reincarnation metaphor, 49 Relativism: and Dom Casmurro, 2-3, 4; and ideology of slaveholders, 74; and Modernism, 2

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131 Renan, Ernest, 17 Representation: and allegory, 35, 40; critique of, 44; of dependent clients, 83; and digressive structure, 43; and fictional authorship, 26, 35; and mimetic authorship, 33, 35, 39; and nondetermination, 35; and realism, 30, 32; and supposed author, 41; of time, 38-39; and unity, 29, 34, 35, 42 Republicans, Historic, 31 Rituals of affirmation, 51, 56 Romanticism: didacticism of, 82; and fictional authorship, 23; and Machado's illness, viii; and newspaper installments, 28; and representation, 33; and unity, 28-2-9 Rozanova, M. V., 85 Sanguinetti, Edoardo, 41 Santiago, Silviano, xii, 2, 41 Satire, 10, 12, 26 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 13, 18, 21n.l7 Schwarz, Roberto: and allegory, 44; Baptista on, 2; and Bento as elite type, 3; and Caldwell, 20n.l0 ; and domination, 51; and elite type, 12, 38; and historical truths, 62; and hypochondriacal narrator, 32; and inconstancy of Bras Cubas, 72; and patron-client relationship, 95; and short stories, 17; on social structure, xi-xii, 16; and unreliable narrator, 2 In. 16 Scott, Sir Walter, 5 Scott-Buccleuch, Robert: Dom Casmurro translation of, 4, 90,

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132 93, 94-95, 106, 107; elimination of chapters by, 96-97, 113n.l3 ; and equivalency, 98, 100; introduction to Dom Casmurro translation, 98, 99-100; and irony, 95-96; translation of title of Dom Casmurro, 90-91; and translation theorists, 102; as translator, 108; views on translation, 98-99 Seigneurial will: and attitudes of subordinates, 76; and autonomy of subordinates, 56; of Bento Santiago, 82-83; and class antagonism, 57, 68; and dependents' ingratitude, 77; and Estacio's name, 58-59; in Helena, 51-53, 58-59, 61, 65, 68, 70; Helena's use of, 60; in laid Garcia, 62-64; ideology of, 52, 80; inviolability of, 51, 54, 62-63, 68-69; in Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas, 74; and political dialogues, 54, 56, 64; political hegemony of, 72; and social structure, 52-53; and truth, 65 Sena, Jorge de, 85 Sexuality, in "Singular ocorrencia," 20n.l2 Shakespeare, William, 10, 30, 43-44 Short stories: attitudes and conventions as focus of, 9; and Machado's writing, viii; Magalhaes Junior's collection of, 16; narrators in, 10; and sexual taboos, 20n.l2 ; translations of, 86-87; women in, 17 Simulacrum: Bento's life in world of, 47; and class unconscious, 40; in Dom Casmurro, 35, 37, 44;

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Index fictional authorship as, 25, 33, 36, 37, 39; and memory, 40; of Othello, 43-44; and readers, 49 "Singular ocorrencia," 20n.l2 Sinyavsky, Andrei, 86, l l l n . 3 Slaves and slaveholding: and allegory of domination and poverty, 38; and class, x, 46; ending of, 61; ideology of slaveholders, 74; illegalities of, 62, 70, 84n.5; and Law of 1871, 53; and Machado's civil servant career, 18; and political agitation, 67-68; and social structure, 54; subordination of, 51; torture of slave workers, 52; and translations, 100 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 87 Social structure: and Capitu's social climbing, 38; and Dom Casmurro, 30; and domination, 70; and Estacio compared with Vale, 61-62; hierarchy of, 48, 52-53; and horizontal solidarities, 53-54; and human relations, viii, xii; and laid Garcia, 63; and Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas, xii, 12; and nonexistence of social agents, 68-69; and political dialogues, 54, 55-56; Schwarz on, xi-xii; and seigneurial will, 52-53; and unequal social relations, 55-56. See also Class Sontag, Susan, 108 Sophism, 24 Sousa, Jose Galante de, 16-17 Staut, Lea Mara Valezi, 112-113n.l2 Sterne, Laurence, 26, 32, 37, 114n.l4 Structuralism, 36 Structure, digressive: of Dom Cas-

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Index murro, 2, 5, 15; and fictional authorship, 37; and literary reviews, 116n.22; Machado's use of, viii, ix, 5; and Modernism, viii, ix, 2; and representation, 43; and translations, 97, 113-114n.l3 Subconscious, viii Subordinates: and ambiguity, 57; autonomy of, 54, 56, 64; horizontal solidarities of, 53-54; and political dialogues, 82; political discourse of, 54; representation of, 83; and traditional society, xi. See also Dependent clients Supposed author: and allegory, 35; apparent division of, 37; and authoritarian principle, 48; and casmurro, 45; and crisis of author, 25; definition of, 24; and images of past, 47; and irony, 27, 34; and literary nondetermination, 29, 31; and material presence of book-object, 28; melancholy of, 44; and memory, 40; and past as perspectivized, 41; relationship with author, 24, 26, 27, 37; and unreliability of narrative events, 40. See also Fictional authorship Tacitus, 30 Taine, Hippolyte, 13 Tanner, Tony, 1 Terts, Abram, 86 Time: and Modernism, 2; and past as perspectivized, 41; reclassification of, 41; representation of, 38-39; and translations, 92 Tragedy, 43-44 Translation theorists: and Cald-

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133 well, 109; and Derridean deconstruction, 103-104; and invisibility of translators, 101-102; and original work, 100, 102-106, 107, 109-111; of postmodern era, xii-xiii Translators and translations: and adequacy vs. equivalency, 92, 98-99, 100, 112n.8; andbilingualism, 91; as cultural mediators, 101; decisions of, 90, 93, 97, 99, 102, 106-107; of Dom Casmuno, xii-xiii, 3-4, 90-101, 106, 107; and elimination of chapters, 96-97; and forewords and introductions, 97, 115n.l7; and idioms, 99; and importance of original work, 90, 92, 97, 100, 102-103, 104; and irony, 95-96; and literary canon, 87-88; and notes, 4, 7, 16, 19-20n.8; nuances of, 93-94; and patron-client relationship, 94; and poststructuralism, 100; and readers, 85; and semantic contamination, 91-92, 112n.8; and syntax, 92-93, 112n.9; translating as continuous process, 103 Unity: and death metaphor, 42; and elites, 32; of ideologies, 42; Machado's critique of, x-xi; and meaning, 29, 30; and memory, 32, 34; and narrators, 28-29; and Realism, 33; and representation, 29, 34, 35, 42 Unreliable narrators: and confusion, 2In. 16; of Dom Casmurro, viii, x, 1-3, 7-8, 9; and intention, 8; and readers, 10-11, 49; and Realism, x, 11; and rel-

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Index

ativism, 3; separation of Bento from "Dom Casmurro," 20n.9

rience with, viii; and Portuguese language, vii Women: and allegory of dominaVenuti, Lawrence, 101-102, 103, tion and poverty, 38; Brazilian 105 women writers, 88; Capitu as Verisimilitude: and Bento as elite controversial character, 100-101; type, 3; and Capitu's guilt, 41; and dissimulation, 72; and ficand mimetic authorship, 25-26, tional author, 38; as institu31,39 tionally inferior people, 46-47; literary criticism on Machado's Verissimo, Jose, 20n.l0 women, 17, 88; in Memohas "Viver," 86 postumas de Bras Cub as, 71-72; Vocabulary: and class, 59-, and domand patriarchalism, 47-48 ination, 51, 52 Voice, and Realism, x Yellow fever, 70-71 Webster, Harvey Curtis, 113n.l3 Weimann, Robert, 36 Zola, Emile, 13, 15, 31 Western culture: Machado's expe-

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