Machado de Assis - The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis

Copyright 2018 by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson
Foreword copyright 2018 by Liveright Publishing Corporation

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J OAQUIM M ARIA M ACHADO DE A SSIS wrote short stories throughout his career, publishing seven collections between 1870 and 1906, interspersed with his nine novels. Critics like to divide the novels into two sets, seeing the first four as slender and romantic (the authors own term) and the last five as complex, ironic masterpieces. We cant do anything like this with these stories, although we may say that with the years the continuing lightness of touch is applied to darker subjects. This is certainly the impression the full set of stories gives. We move from young love and shallow social ambition to suicide and slavery, from portraits of manners to deep philosophical questions. But even this impression calls out for some correction. There are early stories about memory and late stories about youth, and it is hard to think of anything darker than the early piece Brother Simo (1870), where a monk dies filled with loathing for humanity because of a lie told to him long ago. So perhaps the firmer truth is that as we read the stories we get better at registering the darkness, at seeing through the light, so to speak.

Machados short stories resemble those of Chekhov in their talent for saying too little (that is, just enough), but his closest literary companion, if we are looking for comparisons, is his almost exact contemporary Henry James, and especially in his longer pieces, where he appears as a great master of the form that James called our ideal, the beautiful and blest nouvelle. In this respect, we might think especially of The Woman in Black, The Blue Flower, and The Alienist.

But more than either of these writers, Machado constantly engages in an open playfulness with the reader. In the stories as in the novels, his style of wit belongs with that of Henry Fielding or Laurence Sterne, whose work he knew well. We could also cite the excellent company he could not know he would come to keep, that of Vladimir Nabokov and Italo Calvino.

Machado has generally been well served by translators, although many of his stories have not until now appeared in English versions. But no one has caught the ease and grace of his prose as Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson have. This achievement is important not only because it allows us actually to see a style traveling from one language to another but because the apparently casual movement of Machados writing, so well rendered here, allows all kinds of implications to arise as if of their own accord.

In one story, a single narrator tells us both that there are no mysteries for an author who can scrutinize every nook and cranny of the human heart and that one of his characters had a series of thoughts that remained hidden from the author of this story. In others we meet imagined readers who are less canny, less demanding, or more experienced, and in Miss Dollar, the first story in The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis, the author goes to town on this topic.

The narrator thinks melancholy readers will imagine the female of the title as a pale, slender Englishwoman and devotes a whole paragraph to creating this pre-Raphaelite possibility. The description ends, Her voice should be like the murmurings of an aeolian harp, her love a swoon, her life a contemplation, her death a sigh. The next sentence begins, All very poetic, but nothing like the heroine of this story. The narrator offers a robust American girl as an alternative, more in keeping with the currency of her name, no doubt, and also a well-off middle-aged English lady, who will arrive in Brazil and marry the readeror at least the reader who imagines her in this incarnation. The more astute reader will have none of these fantasies, of course, and will be sure that Miss Dollar is Brazilian through and through, although still as rich as her name makes her sound.

None of this is true, the narrator now tells us, meaning none of this matches the fiction he has in mind, because Miss Dollar is a little Italian greyhound bitch. And the story is not about her anyway, but about the man who finds her when she is advertised as lost, and who falls in love with her owner.

Machado teases his readers, but he also relies on them to be his accomplices; and sometimes he makes our complicity distinctly uncomfortable. In the last story in this volume, The Tale of the Cabriolet (1906), a slave arrives at the church of So Jos in Rio de Janeiro and asks the priest to perform the last rites at a nearby house. The man seems quite distraught about the news he is carrying, and the narrator comments:

Anyone reading this with a darkly skeptical soul will inevitably ask if the slave was genuinely upset, or if he simply wanted to pique the curiosity of the priest and the sacristan. Im of the view that anything is possible in this world and the next. I believe he was genuinely upset, but then again I dont not believe that he was also eager to tell some terrible tale.

The sacristan in fact spends the rest of the story sniffing out the tale for himself, not because he is a gossip or a meddler but because he loves tales. With him it was a case of art for arts sake. And with us? With Machado himself? Arent we looking for tales, terrible or not? How far are we from being upset?

The wit and grace of Machados writing never diminish in these stories, and the scene is almost always the same. We are watching the bourgeoisie of Rio Janeiro at play, and occasionally trying to be serious. They misunderstand each other, they get married, they worry about dying, there is the occasional violent murder. Money and the business of keeping up appearances are large questions. The characters read Hugo and Feydeau, Dumas pre and Dumas fils, and indeed the general tone is that of nineteenth - century Paris as reconstructed in so many Latin American locations of that time. Machado is gently mocking this class that believes only in borrowed culture, or in what the Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz calls misplaced ideas, but he is not advocating any kind of nativism.

When the chief character of The Alienist, refusing distinguished positions offered to him by the king of Portugal, refers to the Brazilian city of Itagua as my universe, we laugh because he seems to have made his world so small. But then we may also feel that his grandiose claim for his hometown and the exclusive fascination of others with the culture of Europe are simply rival forms of provincialism. There is a third way. We can take all culture, local and international, as our own, and this is the practice suggested by Machados own allusions, as it is by those of Jorge Luis Borges, writing a little later in a neighboring Latin American country. We cannot confine ourselves to what is Argentine in order to be Argentine, Borges says, and Machado might add that we dont have to believe that Paris is the capital of the world in order to read French literature.