A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism: Machado de Assis (Post-Contemporary Interventions) - Hardcover

Schwarz, Roberto

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822322102 ISBN 13: 9780822322108

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

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

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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

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"This is a masterpiece of criticism. The coherence of Schwarz's perspective and the clarity with which he elaborates the economic and cultural insights that form his dialectical approach to literature make his study a paradigmatic one for theoretical enterprise. By concentrating his interpretive talents on Machado's style, Schwarz also illuminates a question that has puzzled many present Machado readers: Why do we find him so satisfylingly contemporary?"--Leslie Damasceno, Duke University

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Master on the Periphery of Cap

By Roberto Schwarz

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2001 Roberto Schwarz
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822322108

Chapter One

Initial Observations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The satire at this point is bland, for the reader will easily concede that the affected use of official culture and the educated trappings (hesitations, suppositions, considerations, method) is amusing. And it contains no surprises, since the voice from beyond the grave automatically puts parody into everything it says. In the final sentence of the paragraph,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822322102
• ISBN 13: 9780822322108
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 232
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar