Rio’s rococo genius

The surname is pronounced ‘M’shahdo j’Asseece’. There are also two Christian names — Joaquim Maria — which are usually dispensed with. K. David Jackson, professor of Portuguese at Yale, confines himself to ‘Machado’ and has invented an adjective ‘Machadean’. Stefan Zweig, who committed suicide in the very Machadean town of Petropolis, called him ‘the Dickens of Brazil’ which is not true — he has not Dickens’s range or sustained ebullience. I used to say he was the Gogol of Brazil — particularly in his short stories — but re-reading Dom Casmurro, one of the five novels of Machado’s maturity, I can see he has not Gogol’s hatred, which gives the Ukrainian’s work such devastating comedic glitter.

Professor Jackson makes a very high claim at the outset — and carries on repeating it in a tone bordering on hysteria — that Machado is ‘arguably the major literary figure of all time in Latin American literature’. He was born in Rio in 1839, lived all his life in the city, and died there in 1908. His world is that of Emperor Pedro II, roughly 1840 to 1890. Another of Jackson’s favourite adjectives to describe Machado’s writing is ‘baroque’. But it would be more sensible to tame this extravagance to something like ‘rococo’: Machado’s world is smaller than Jackson would have it. His scenes could never be in London, Paris, Vienna or Rome; but they could easily be in Lisbon, Marseilles, Naples or Palermo with hardly a word altered. The only alert to a different milieu altogether is the casual use of the word ‘slave’.

What is absent is Brazil. In its place Machado packs his work with references to the greats of western literature. In Dom Casmurro there are pop-ups from Homer, Lucian, Plutarch, Dante, Camoes, Shakespeare and more. Thus he is reminding us at every opportunity that though he be writing at the periphery of civilisation he is very much connected to its core.