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Race, Nation, Representation: Machado de Assis and Lima Barreto

Renata R. Mautner Wasserman

Luso-Brazilian Review, Volume 45, Number 2, 2008, pp. 84-106 (Article)

Published by University of Wisconsin Press

DOI: 10.1353/lbr.0.0029

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Luso-Brazilian Review:ISSN -, by the Board o Regents

o the University o Wisconsin System

Race, Nation, RepresentationMachado de Assis and Lima Barreto

Renata R. Mautner Wasserman

Na medida em que a questo racial entra em jogo na denio da culturabrasileira, interessa examinar obras dos dois grandes romancistas afro-brasileiros do sculo dezenove, Machado de Assis e Lima Barreto. H tempoque a crtica os ope um ao outro. Em geral a oposio se rma na forma

pela qual representam a realidade em que se inserem as suas obras e perso-nagens, e mais, pela qual representam a questo da presena africana nacultura brasileira. O exame de algumas dentre as muitas obras que deixa-ram, mostra que, embora em geral a expresso seja diferente, as posies dos

autores quanto aos problemas sociais e econmicos que abordam e quantos suas relaes com questes raciais, tem muito em comum.

A racializing reading o ction should nd, embedded in a text, a sup-pressed but determining subtext o the power relations betweenor

amongracial groups. According to oni Morrison, that subtext providesthe gurations o the culture and the psyches where the text arises (ix). InPlaying in the Dark, Morrison looks at white authors writing in the whollyracialized society that is the United States and nds that even when theirtext is neutral (neutral ofen translating to white), the subtext is alwaysconscious o representing ones own race to readers (xii). Tus an Amer-ican (that is, U. S.) identity is consistently dened, not against European(or English) culture, but against the Aricanist, as she terms it, part o thatidentity. Te construction o an American white identity always impliesthe construction o a black identity (). Morrison notes that the UnitedStates were not unique in this construction, which also happened in Europe


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and in (a generic) South America (). Te remark is suggestive and invitestaking as a test case the works o Machado de Assis and Lima Barreto, Bra-

zilian writers o Arican ancestry: rom within a different culture, they mayhave raised very different racializing questions.When Machado de Assis was turning himsel into the greatest Brazilian

writer o the nineteenth century, it was not ashionable, and certainly notviable, in a business sense, to highlight his Arican ancestry. In act, readersand critics ofen chose to orget that ancestry, in an example o collectivetact;his successes, riendships with the great, mentoring to the young, co-ounding o the Brazilian Academy o Letters, lent weight to assertions thata racial democracy reigned in Brazil, contemporaneously with slavery. It did

not, but the trajectory o Machado de Assis also highlights important differ-ences between the dynamics o race in Brazil and in the United States, wheresuch a casea nineteenth-century poet, novelist, and critic, o Arican an-cestry who was in his time a central, not marginal, gure in its literary andcultural historydoes not exist. I Machado de Assis is read or his ownplace in a literature that, like that o the US, was asserting its cultural orceagainst established European standards, and is also read in contrast withthe place o Lima Barreto, with whose lie, work, and critical ortune hisoverlapped, the differences are striking, and do not lead to generalization.

So this essay will do what Machado de Assis might not have wanted doneand look at his work in relation to history, to race, and to Lima Barretos,and consider whether there are limits to racialization as an encompassingcritical category.

In terms o their reputation, any contest between Machado de Assis andLima Barreto is lopsided: Assis is the great man o Brazilian literature, com-parable to the best that the world has to offer. Barreto is the cursed writer,who, unlike Machado de Assis, was ofen jobless, drank too much, con-sorted with bums, was placed in an insane asylum, and instead o careully

crafed and worded innovative works, wrote strident satire and dishevelednovels in which his anger at the incompetence o government, at the treat-ment o the poor, the black, the emale, and the old kept breaking throughand playing havoc with structure and rationale.Lima Barreto himsel dis-liked the comparison, and thought the older writer too timid, enslaved tostultied grammar and thought.Alredo Bosi explains that Machado deAssis was not indifferent to the contradictions between the happy promiseso evolutionism and the brutal realities o our n de sicle, but that ratherthan voicing an expressionist anguish in the convulsive prose o otherwriters, he developed his own tone o quiet resignation; the writers in thegeneration ollowing his, like Lima Barreto, rejected that tone, and took tothe extreme . . . a denunciation o the overt or latent iniquities in the socialand racial relations o a Brazil whose elites had no rhetoric beside that o


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linear progress (, ). Yet one can argue that the difference between arestrained and a convulsive prose signals a less noticeable but more sig-

nicant difference between two sel-denitions o the culture: one says itcan and will exercise the stereotypical sel-control o the (white) Englisheconomically dominant then and very much present in Brazilian affairs; theother acknowledgesaccepts, embraceswhat both earlier (with GonalvesDias, Jos de Alencar) and later was acknowledgedaccepted, embracedasits (hybrid) tropical destiny.In the context o this kind o opposition thepeculiar evaluation arises according to which, i Machado de Assis is thegreatest Brazilian novelist, he is also an isolated phenomenon, while Barretois the creator (in Policarpo Quaresma, or instance) o a prototypical, suffer-

ing, ever-hopeul Brazilian (Houaiss, xviii).

Yet, what i Machado de Assisis not indifferent to the suffering o the people around himo his own oro other colorsand Barreto is not just an undisciplined scribbler with aheart angered by racial injustice?

Te literature by and about Machado de Assis is vast; I will ocus mainlyon the late novels Esa e Jac and Memorial de Aires, and the short storyPai contra me, which span the spectrum o his involvement with the pol-itics o his time. Much o the writing by and about Lima Barreto centers pre-cisely on his race; I will address principally his novel Clara dos Anjos.

When Esa e Jacappeared, reviewers showed their enthusiasm in curi-ously negative praise: a riend, Mrio de Alencar, gushes that calling a bookby Machado de Asssis good would be superuous; calling it banal wouldbe like denying that the sun shines. Yet the book is diffi cult to like: it skirtsthe prevailing realism, and avoids the bravura structure and invention o,say,Memrias Pstumas de Brs Cubas. While realistic convention attendsto the historical context and hides the narrative voice, Esa e Jacmakes apoint o paying only oblique attention to its dramatic social and politicalcontext (proclamation o the Republic, exile o the Emperor, abolition, ina-

tion, abandonment o ormer slaves); at the same time, the chatty narrator(voluble, says Roberto Schwarz) establishes a direct, overt, ofen aggressive,and almost didactic relationship with the reader.Tese violations disturba line o critics, including Gilberto Freyre and Lima Barreto himsel,whosees Machado de Assis as selling out.

Tough these critics do what Morrison rejectsdetermining how anauthor should have written ()like Morrison they raise the question ohow to present, or represent context, and, particularly in the New World,national or cultural identity: do certain orms o representation lead to thenormalization o characteristics that are especially reprehensible? Ina tactul and restrained essay published in New York, in , Notcia daatual literatura brasileira: instinto de nacionalidade [Notes on present-dayBrazilian literature: the instinct o nationality], Machado de Assis explains


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Brazilian literature to the outside world: contemporary novels are instruc-tive to any oreigner not amiliar with our customs, or they describe na-

ture and . . . manners in animated and picturesque pages. He deplores theineriority o Brazilian writing in any genre requiring analysis, but is happythat at least the books o a certain French school . . . have not contaminatedBrazil . . .(III, ).Te instinct o nationality makes Brazilian literaturecontinuous and internally intertextual; national character is represented byprecisely those elements, like nature, or certain manners, that Machado deAssis is accused o ignoring; the French school, on the other hand, in-orms, even i it doesnt determine, Barretos work. Instinto de nacionali-dade denes the specically national; while still measuring it against an

external model, it also declares its independence rom the aesthetic ormthat demands an engagement with its immediate and generally problematiccircumstances.Tus the essay deects attention rom Machado de Assisschoice o setting his novels in an urban environmentnot in natureandshowing the orces o commerce and politics aslant.

Suddenly, Barretos mockery o both the Romantic indianism o a na-tionalizing Brazilian literature, and o the cult o Brazilian nature, seenin riste m de Policarpo Quaresma, hints at a convergence between thetwo writers who abandon the Indian and Brazilian nature as the privileged

markers o Brazilian difference and greatness.But i the detached, urbaneprose o Machado de Assis does not signal a detachment rom Brazilianreality (and John Gledson, Roberto Schwarz, Raymundo Faoro, amongothers have argued that convincingly), the difference between the writersresides in their stance rather than in their engagement. In any case, i theproblem with Machado de Assis is his indifference, especially in the workso the last phase, this indifference could reer not to Brazilian reality as anabsolute, but to Brazilian reality on the terms imposed by the national pro-ject ounded by [Brazilian] romanticism (Baptista, ).

By the end o the nineteenth century, as slavery was abolished and immi-gration encouraged, renewed argument ared up about a denition o na-tional difference ounded on nature and embodied in the original inhabit-ants; a denition that could also unction to hide the Arican component,on which the nation depended economically. Given the economic pressureto enter a global economy and the cultural pressure to adopt European theo-ries like Spencers social Darwinism (which Machado de Assis spoos withQuincas Borbas theory o humanitism),and the racial theories gainingorce in European cultural centers, the actual racial composition o theBrazilian population, noted and studied by every oreign visitor, becomes aproblem, as does how to write it. Tus the difference between Machado deAssiss and Lima Barretos approach to the problem o (their) color becomesa eature in the national project. Machado de Assis can then be accused o


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denying, repressing, and ignoring both the problem o race in Brazil and hisown place in it; Barreto can be praised or highlighting the same thematics

and launching a series o red-hot indictments o racism and racial prejudiceinto the comortable discourse about a characteristically Brazilian racialdemocracy.

By setting their works in Rio, both writers immerse them in the epicen-ter o Brazils transormation rom a rural to an urban economy, based onmoney, not barter, and on commercial, not personal relations. RaymundoFaoro takes a census o characters in Machado de Assis to argue that throughthem the author traces this transerence o economic power rom landown-ers to the (urban) agents who bought, sold, and nanced them, rom the

producing countryside to the commercial city, while nobility titles sold andgranted to rural landowners kept the social and political power rmly cen-tered around the Emperor, and work was perormed by slaves, rural andurban. Land itsel had little value and was exploited to exhaustion; mosto the landowners capital was tied up in their slave holdings. In the result-ing society leisure was an indispensable status signboth Antonio Candidoand Roberto Schwarz argue orcibly that while in the dominant Westernnations economic and political power was moving to a class o bourgeoisentrepreneurs who valued economic activity, Brazil continued to value and

support living on interest or on slave labor and to devalue all work, which itwas unable to dissociate rom slavery.

Te clash o values in this state o transition leaves its mark on the ctiono the time, but it is in his crnicas, or newspaper columns, that Machadode Assis chooses to show his interest in them directly, savaging his sur-roundings in a mild and reasonable tone, satirizing a society o show andpatronage (April , ), and its attitude toward slavery.Five days aferthe publication o the decree o emancipation, his column eatures a lib-eral bragging o having reed his slave days beore the decree, though keep-

ing him employed or a pittance, insulting and cuffi ng him when necessary,intending to highlight this deed when he runs or offi ce (May , ); a ewweeks later he proposes, on the model o Gogols Dead Souls, a scheme obuying slaves and then backdating the purchase in order to pocket the resti-tution the government offered slave owners or their loss o capital (June ,).Tere is a contained anger at precisely those manners that a or-eigner would not notice in the literature that displays the instinct o nation-ality: the crnicas wash the domestic laundry at home, while the corrosiveurbanity o his ctions creates, by sheer orce, the analytic, that is, detachedaccounts o his culture that Machado de Assis proposes as competitive withoreign models. Barretos characters, on the other hand, are versed in Euro-pean thought and literature and in Brazilian lore (the eponymous Gonzagade S and Policarpo Quaresma, respectively) but no less crushed by race


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and history and culture. In both cases race is an inescapable platorm romwhich to mount the argument, not because it is intrinsically determinant,

but because it constructs the cultures marginal position.Machado de Assiss analytic and oblique treatment o matters may thusbe precisely what counts as his universal appeal. I Sterne and De Maistreare his main inuences, and his style is British in its humor and stoicismthen heand by extensionBrazilian culture can claim cultural develop-ment on a par with that o those who do not seem to have the problem orace.Barreto was not civilized in that way.His style, his drinking, hisbouts with madnessand his athers madness, which gives him a tara,a hereditary stainmark him and by extension his writings as deormed.

Te deormation can be presented as a atal deect, or as the inevitable con-sequence o the pressure o Brazilian racism. Yet Machado de Assiss re-straint may be as much a consequence o social pressure as the lack o it inBarreto.

For Roberto Schwarz this restraint is structural, the result o a sel-disidentication, resulting rom the contradiction at the oundations o thenationality between the liberal ideas it derived rom external (European)models, and an economy based on slavery that orces members o its elitesto dene themselves simultaneously as proponents o slavery and as en-

lightened individuals. Its aesthetic expression, Schwarz argues, producesthe characteristic tone o Machado de Assiss late works ([], , ). Yeti it is oundational, the dislocation cannot be unique to Machado de Assisand would be equally present in Policarpo Quaresma, Barretos relation oa spectacular series o ailures to construct a coherent Brazilian sel. And itis: there too race is treated obliquely, in the orm o Quaresmas wise, aro-Brazilian helper in his arming experiment, or in the amily he nds wait-ing outside the insane asylum rom where he has just been reed, or one otheirs who is still inside. But while Barreto has Quaresma executed in the

early years o the Republic, Esa e Jacunctions throughout on Machadode Assiss signature distancing effect, oating schematically through highlydramatic political events: the emancipation o the slaves, the proclamationo the Republic, the exile o the Emperor. On the other hand, Lima BarretosClara dos Anjos, which conronts racism and racial prejudice head-on, ig-nores the larger political context; there, questions o race are treated mostdramatically in the private sphere.

Perhaps readerly readiness then plays a more important role than usu-ally acknowledged in the assessment o the two novelists. Esa e Jacwasrst received as a psychological drama: Mrio de Alencar delights in theportrait o the ostensible narrator, Counselor Aires, and cries at the deatho the heroine, Flora (). And the redoubtable Jos Verssimo nds thatMachado de Assis paints an unexpectedly emotional scene (in the death o


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the twins mother). Reviewers agree that the plot is thin but the character-izations are wonderul and the style, the language, are exquisite, inimitable,

light, and clear and humorous

though Alcides Maya observes that thishumor arises rom a deep current o bitter pessimistic philosophy ().Recent allegorical readings however, tilt heavily toward the political. Teysee the twins reerred to in the title as two sides o Brazil, in conict romthe womb: the revolutionary, republican, admirer o Robespierre against theconservative monarchist. Te passivity and good manners o the retired dip-lomat, Counselor Aires, whose help their mother enlists to reconcile them,represent instruments or peace but also o stagnation.Both brothers loveFlora, who loves both and, incapable o making up her mind, dies o the

internal conict, a picture o Brazil itsel, unable to decide its political di-rection.Tis reading conrms the authors pessimism; in effect, this char-acterization o the nation as rail, undecided, and eventually dead, is notso different rom Barretos in riste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma, built on atriply reiterated structure o nationalist hope leading to disappointment anddeath (see Silviano Santiago).

Te sense o a dead end plays itsel out, both in Machado de Assis andin Lima Barreto, through a consistent warping, thwarting, and sabotagingo the marriage plot, so commonly used in novels o the period to indicate

the ethnic and ethical development o a society.In Machado de Assiss latenovels the main characters are typically bachelors (Bras Cubas, happy, atthe end, not to have had children; Quincas Borba; the Counselor Aires; evenBento Santiago o Dom Casmurro, whose wie, andputativeson die); sothey are in Barreto (Gonzaga de S, Policarpo Quaresma, even Clara dosAnjos, seduced and rejected). Te result is a eeling o stagnation, the con-tradiction Schwarz notes resulting in paralysis and (again) pessimism.

Flora, who occupies the position o heroine, is mostly passive, or, asCounselor Aires describes her, indecipherable. In her indecipherable pas-

sivity, unlike other young women in Machados ction, she does not work orscheme to achieve social mobility and nancial security.Neither does sheemulate her mother, who engineers her husbands career. But i, as the nar-rator implies, she dies o indecision, the constraints that lead to her deathare the same that keep the brothers stuck in the impasse they represent oreach other: the generation o emancipation and the republic do not marry orreproduce; they are stymied and thus reute the myth o progress on whichthe nation builds its sense that as a Republic without slaves it can nally jointhe club o the powerul.

Tis stymie appears also in the secondary characters, as in Floras a-ther, whose political principles, liberal or conservative, can be changed, likean overcoat, because ideas dont really matter; only power does, and thatremains in the amily.Similarly, Santos, the twins ather, a nancier, pro-


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its rom the economic transormations that bring about both emancipationand the encilhamento, the big inationary bubble o the s caused in part

by an injection o money rom the central bank, to compensate slave ownersor their losses. In aunays O encilhamento, a novel about the bubble, thehuge prots weakened the national moral ber (and scrambled its social hi-erarchy). Assiss narration remains neutral:he just says Santos is involvedin some agricultural miracle somewhere in Paran; we assume it ails, but hedoes not suffer.But Paran is one o the Southern states that turn to immi-gration as a substitute or slavery; abolition is one o the economic changesin the background o the novel that Santos navigates so well.

For this atmosphere o paralysis amid momentous-appearing changes,

Aires is a paradigmatic character. He is a spectator: he is not married, hasno children, does not work.He reuses to take sides in the controversiesswirling around him, personal or historical, and endeavors to create, i notpeace, then its appearance among the other characters, with a cordiality thatis in the end corrosive. Te Advertncia (a modied preace) with whichthe book opens, implies that Aires is the narrator, as he is in Assiss nextand last novel, theMemorial de Aires, a diary undermined by the unreliabil-ity he shares with others o the authors narrators.Aires has the involveddetachment that denes an aesthetic stance toward lie and society,pro-

grammatically avoiding the engagement o the crnicas with the burningpolitical and moral questions that constitute the subject and background othe last two novels.

Tis tone o the novels documents and keeps at a distance, accordingto Jos Guilherme Merquior, the collapse . . . o a certain orm o society,which Faoro terms estamental, a society o relationships, rather than ocontract ([] ).Both Merquior and Faoro insist that Machado de Assisdoes not share his narrators detachment rom social and economic chang-es.For Merquior, in act, his sensitivity to the social problems o his time is

biographically determined, as Assis embodied the possibility o social mo-bility in the old regime or someone o his humble origins and mixed race,once he secured the protection o a high-status amily; that initial pushled to his high position in the Imperial bureaucracy, and allowed him theprestige with which he established the Brazilian Academy o Letters (). Butthose springboard niches, as Merquior calls them, that allowed selectedindividuals to rise socially, also allowed the society not to make opportuni-ties more generally available. I affected by this contradiction, Machado deAssiss work should show a lower degree o integration than his personalstoryand one way to mask such disruptive content would be through itselegance and its erudition, qualities that signaled, in the works reception,the social elevation that had been achieved by the author.But Merquioralso claims that this indirect approach to the representation o historic or


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social conditions places Machado de Assis ully within the realist/natural-ist movements at a level o sophistication and complexity that are the hall-

marks o Brazilian post-Romanticism.

Yet the writers o the period ofenrelied on literature to rise in social status: both Assis and Barreto did that,but Machado de Assis, unlike Barreto, disguised the matter when he dealtwith status. According to Antonio Candido his sense o status was pro-ound but not at all documentary (Esquema, ) and as Bosi shows, hisuse o pairs o characters that were not ar apart socially points to, while dis-guising it, social distance as one o the actors that keep the aro-Brazilianpopulation in a state o oppression. Blocked at the social status immediatelyabove, the character o mixed race will see the impediment as psychological

or economic, not racial, his story shaped in the language and through theculture o the cultivated classes.Machado de Assis does address the problems o race and slavery in c-

tion rontally, in one o his many short stories, Pai contra me, which is asblunt as anything by Barreto, yet shows clearly the differences between theauthors and raises the question o how to approach those differences.Un-characteristically stark and direct, the story begins with a description, nota narrative, o the conditions o slavery, and o the instruments o conne-ment and torture. When Machado de Assis explains the economics o how

slaves could improve their living conditions or buy their reedom, and whenhe explains how requent escapes create the occupation o slave-catcher,there is nothing o the detachment o Aires or the cruelty o Brs Cubas; thecharacterization o the shifless protagonist who makes his living catchingugitives against erce competition condemns both the man and the societythat creates him. But it is not that simple: on his way to place his new-born,whom, to his surprise, he nds himsel loving, on the wheel or abandonedchildren, the slave catcher recognizes a pregnant ugitive. As a parent, heeels or her; he knows that, when he returns her, she will be beaten, but he

needs the money. She is beaten and miscarries; the slave-catcher retrieveshis boy, and with the reward money is able to support him or another while.In the tale the suffering o slaves does not exist by itsel but is part o the piti-less struggle or survival at the Hobbesian bottom o the social scale, a rot-ten substratum that inects the entire structure and that a couple o decreeswont cure. In its directness, this story belies the indifference o the narrativevoice throughout, and reveals it as a cover and a deection o pain and alsoas a characteristically aggressive stance against itsel and the reader, whomMachado de Assis accuses, atters, and disdains at the same time. I Paicontra me, breaches the customary detachment o his ction, the breachshines a different light on his programmatic skepticism, as on Airess aes-thetic position toward lie,and this distancing achieves an indictment noless serious, and possibly even less hopeul than Barretos.


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Esa e Jaccan then be seen to be as disillusioned a novel about back-wardness as Barretos Policarpo. It is not gripping, but meanders aimlessly:

a psychics prediction when the twins are born, that there will be uturethings remains suspended; so does the romance between Flora and thetwins, and so does everything else in the novel. At that point in his career,Machado de Assis could afford to thwart convention, and experiment byrepresenting paralysis in a novel that does not move. Formally, the novellooks ahead to the sel-reerential mode o modernity, yet the plot showsthe nation stuck in time: while the world is talking about socialism, evolu-tion, and the scientic control o the natural sphere, the twins quarrel aboutwhether to post over their beds the portraits o Robespierre or o the King o

France (Louis XVI!), an outdated controversy that has France as a reerent.Floras death is undramatic and almost immotivated: she ades away leavingthe two young men stymied and without issue. Tere is no view o a uturein the book, except as a ruitless repetition o the past. Te unwillingness oCounselor Aires to take any position, and his obsession with conciliationare typical and ineffective ways o dealing with the genuine problems thathis riends, and the country ace. At the same time, posing as a psychologi-cal essay, the novel sidesteps the reeing o the slaves, the end o the Empire,the proclamation o the Republic, which, everybody knows, were historical

turning points: they glance off the characters, who are incapable o strongemotion or effective action. An indictment o the indifference and the lacko a civic lie in the country, the novel accounts or, and neutralizes politicsin the same movement.

Te allegorical readings o John Gledson, and o Raymundo Faoro op-pose psychological or purely ormal approaches and concentrate on theclose relation between the plot and the contemporary social and politicalsituation.Gledson in particular reers to the crnicas to show the authorsinterest in politics, even an obsession with the encilhamento.He reads pas-

sages that seem obscure, arbitrary, or disconnected rom the plot as ironicand critical observations on current events, or on the uture o the nation;his tight allegorical reading establishes its kinship with stiffer works, likeQuincas Borbaand apparently tries to compensate or the slackness o thetext ([], ).

I in Esa e Jacclass and race insulate characters rom momentous po-litical events, effecting criticism by omission, inMemorial de Aires, arguesGledson, Machado de Assis is more specic about the sham o abolition asenacted. Tere, the slaves o the lovely heiress beg her to let them ollow herto Rio rather than stay at the plantation; instead, she decides to give themthe plantation, impressing riends and relations with her grand gesture. Butsince the ormer slaves have neither the capital nor the training to run it, hergif is not an act o generosity, just as their request was not a sign they were


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content under servitude; the incident, as narrated, uncovers the cruelty oemancipation as enacted and disguised by talk o reedom. Yet even in this

instance, the indictment is glimpsed through the thoughts and opinions oAires, uninvolved and, with the instinct o his nationality, inclined to placecompromise and conciliation above principle.

It is his stress on principle and his intolerance o conciliation that giveBarreto his edgy and exaggerated tone, and to an extent marginalize him.Conciliation serves the powerul well and that Barreto disdains it is anotherway in which he sticks in their craw. However, there is no applicable princi-ple on which to accept one narrative stance and reject the other, apart rompersonal preerence, especially since it is not clear that either has a greater

effect on political or social action or change, or which would be the mosteffective.Slavery does not come up directly in the plot o Esa e Jac: the main

characters own slaves as a matter o course, and none think o it as a prob-lem; Santos and the conservative twin think that abolition will ruin theBrazilian economy. Yet Santos, the nancier, prots handsomely rom thebubble that grows in the years ollowing it, ueled in part by governmentcompensation to sofen the blow to slave owners.Gledson then shows thatinMemorial de AiresMachado de Assis presents abolition not as a gesture

o benevolence toward slaves, but as a necessary economic move, and grant-ing land to ormer slaves as a cynical transer o assets that were (as Faorohas argued) losing value. Te owners were perectly ready to let their newlyreed slaves sink in a new economy that disadvantaged them as rmly as theold economy had.Machado de Assiss doubts about that benevolence andthe uniormly positive consequences o abolition, could be and were ignoredor a long timewith a twist on Jauss horizon o expectations in whichthe writing can handle evolving expectations (). By the time Barretowas writing, that horizon had in act changed enough in his avor or Mon-

teiro Lobato to ask him or a manuscript and offer to pay him royaltiesbutnot enough to grant him, till two decades afer his death, the attention hewas due.

Te ability to survive such changes may reside in how, in his last novels,Esa e JacandMemorial de Aires, Machado de Assis uses the narrator to de-construct the anodyne story line. Roberto Schwarz argues that the narratoroMemrias pstumas de Brs Cubasis a brilliant invention through whichMachado de Assis exposes and criticizes the class o owners, as Schwarzcalls them, through the voice o one o them; in Esa e Jacthis voice setsitsel apart as an observer. In both cases it belongs to the class that dispensespatronage and on whom the poor depend absolutely, in the absence o alabor market, and that thereore can turn abruptly rom generosity to ca-price and cruelty, both orms o affi rming power. For Schwarz, this techni-


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cal innovation o the last phase destabilizes the power system rom withinand deprovincializes the writer and by extension all o Brazilian literature

([] ). Te invention o the Aires voice, as well as the breaks in itscontinuity can then be seen not as detachment or retreat but as strategiesthrough which Machado de Assis adapts his technique to the progressive-looking stagnation o his times.

A key point o Schwarz analysis o the work o Machado de Assis is thecontradiction between the material basis o a slave-owning economy andits aspiration to ull participation in a world culture and economy. Te sys-tem depends on a market o labor and o products, invokes the liberalismbased on Mills and Adam Smith, and promotes democratic governments

and a package o civil rights and civic obligations (excepting women, racial,religious, or ethnic minorities as a matter o course). Esa e Jacplaces it-sel precisely at the moment when, having ormally abolished slavery andestablished itsel as a republic, not a monarchy or an Empire, Brazil is onceagain, as it was at the time o Independence, positioning itsel at the gate omodernity.

Tus, like other novels o its period, Esa e Jacollows the ortunes o abanker and a speculator, a gure positive as a maniestation o the progressand modernity o markets, though negative since markets, progress, moder-

nity threaten oundational social and economic structures like the amily,securities, and credit. However, the narrator is not interested in Santosinact, he dislikes the man, even though there is nothing really evil about himand though Machado de Assis assigns Natividade to Santos rather than toAires, who wanted her; nevertheless, it is Aires, and not Santos, who takeson the cultural atherhood o the their twin sons, who will see or be uturethings, in the impressive words o the psychic. Machado de Assis nevermakes it clear whether he gives narratorial preerence to Aires becausehe is on his side, or because he thinks that while Santos opens the way to

the uture, he disapproves o whatever uture things he envisions. Tus,while Machado de Assis deprovincializes Brazilian literature in the narra-tion, he conrms its marginality in the plot and discredits the traditionallyBrazilian strategy o cordiality and compromise as means to deprovincial-ize itsel culturally or economically.

Perhaps this is because the desired harmony and cordiality depend onmuffl ing the great arguments shapingor accompanyingthe political andeconomic developments o the time. o an extent it matters little whetherMachado de Assis himsel approved or not o how abolition was enacted,or o the encilhamento.What does matter is how he embeds it in the novel:aunay made the latter central, Assis makes both peripheral. But it is pe-ripheral only in Airess narration; Santos makes a killing and presumablyrom his point o view the opportunity is not peripheral at all. Santos is


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not, as Schwarz says o other characters in Machado de Assis, horrible.But in the voice o Aires, his achievement and his interests are attened and

de-emphasized. As ar as the narrator is concerned, the phenomena o thewider world into which Brazil could enter, now that it is no longer a slave-holding monarchy, are not signicant (and remember he was a diplomat, andlived in that wider world). In act, as Alcmeno Bastos notes, Aires assuresSantos, who is araid or his wealth, his position, perhaps his lie during thedays o the proclamation o the Republic, that the change in regime wouldnot amount to more than a change in clothes, and in a ew days all wouldbe back to normal: banks are indispensable and a new constitution wouldrespect that ().Aires de-couples the political and the private. But it is

precisely this separation, which covers up how political institutions attendto the interests o the dominant class that marks the distinction betweenBrazil and the states among which it wants to be in concert. A change inthe constitution, or in the system o government will not affect Santos, butSantoss economic power, that appears, in those other states, as an index otheir modernity, rests on very different nancial and labor oundations. Tisis the paradox that appears in Esa e Jac.

Aires then is another instance o the narrator as a vehicle or denounc-ing what he himsel represents. His deep indifference to the historical events

he witnesses, his unailing and disengaged courtesy, his lack o sympathyor the modernization all around him signal not so much the emotionaldetachment o Machado Assis, as an abiding distrust that they will affectthe core o the culture and correct the horrors that he had been writingup all along. I Aires embodies a certain national tolerance, that toleranceis corrosive, a smothering cordiality that abhors conict and thereore al-lows or ineffi ciency, ineptitude, and corruption to go unchallenged, whichmay be why the Counselor is ofen read as an entirely positive character(though not by Gledson). Te underlying value is harmony or its own sake;

the corollarythat there is no more merit to one o the sides in the conictthan to the otherdoes not seem to bother readers.

Barreto, on the other hand, nds no overriding value in conciliation andin act, a number o his conciliatory characters are simply corrupt, reusingto see the evil o the side they are conciliating. Yet, in a blunter and moredirect way, Barreto too writes about the horrors. Clara dos Anjos, is thestory o a lower-middle class mulatto girl caught in the horrible, arbitrarypower o the white upper class: the villain can promise he will ignore classand race differences and make her his equal and his companion, but he alsohas the power, once he has seduced her, to renege and drop her. His motherexplains it very clearly, when she declares that a girl rom Claras class andcolor should never presume to have a call on his avor. He treats her withthe same cruelty that Assis had shown in the narrator o Brs Cubas, except


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that Barreto, unlike Assis, does not have the narrator betray the readerscondence just as the villain betrays the girl. Barreto relies on the readers

sympathy or an other, whereas Assis expects merely that the reader willreact to an injustice done to him(or her), the readera greater trust in thereaders sophistication and sel-interest and a lesser in his kindness.

While the realism o Machado de Assis is thus deconstructive, depend-ing on playing narrative and plot, tone and subject against each other, LimaBarreto engages the politics o their time openly. As a satirist, he has a stronginvestment in such openness, and in the plots o his novels he conrontsracism and the war on the poor he sees around him. An argument aboutwhether Machado de Assiss enervation or Lima Barretos aggressiveness

give the better sense o the time and place is not very protable. Better to askwhether one could not look or the authors complementarity and whethertheir differing styles dont accomplish exactly what they seem to aim or. IMachado de Assis is so contained that only the acute reading given him byRoberto Schwarz (or instance, in the chapter on Te Fate (or the Luck) othe Poor o Um Mestre na periferia do capitalismo)can bring it out, thenthe critical stance o the novelist toward his environment has lain dormantbeore that reading. I on the other hand Lima Barretos orceulness has ledreaders to dismiss parts o his indictment as prompted by the unortunate

circumstances o his lie, then he too misses the mark and both go againstthe sel-sense o many o their readers and critics. Differences in evaluationmay also respond to differences in the kind o realism they practice. At onepoint o its range, realism can shade into irony, the orm o realism thatMachado de Assis perected, and that inects Esa e Jac. At its urther end,it tumbles into the satire that Barreto engages in. Barretos version seems toinvite action; Machado de Assiss oregrounds understanding. In Machadode Assiss ironic pessimism that understanding can appear as an aestheticexercise. Esa e Jacis ull o jabs that show Machado de Assis ully aware

o the politics o his times, but the understanding shown in the narration isnot transmitted to the characters, not even to the presumed narrator Aires,not even when he says o the encilhamento: Nasciam as aes a preo alto,mais numerosas que as antigas crias da escravido, e com dividendos inni-tos (shares were born expensive, more numerous than the litter o slaves inolden times, but with innite dividends)neither he nor any other char-acter catches the conation o slavery and nance; readers will skim over theobservation; Machado de Assis is conscious enough to make it.

Barreto has no patience with indirection. In Clara dos Anjos he abandonsthe satire o Policarpo, or the Bruzundangas, and plays neither with realitynor with the conventions o ction; the narration proceeds mostly throughdialogue and the narrator hides in ree indirect discourse, in the minds othe characters. Te poetically named poet Flores (Flowers) is a drunk and


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despite his high-sounding palaver on ame and the peaks o poetic inspira-tion sells his verses, anonymously, to the evil Cassi or the seduction o the

innocent Clara; Flores is a hypocrite, but it is a general, social carelessnessthat gives his words their power. Te villain is called Cassi Jones; his great-grandather was a Lord and a British consul in some provincial Braziliancapital: the jab at the heritage lef by the white, slave-trading nation is all butsubtle. And Clara concludes at the novels end that her upbringing, loved,protected, and coddled like a normal middle-class girl, had been all wrong,an unsubtle comment on the discrepancy between the norms o bourgeoissocial interaction and what can be expected by a mulatto girl in Rio: We arenothing in this lie, is her bitter conclusion, and the last line in the novel.

Bras Cubass humanitism is a much more complicated version o the same:the poor mans individual lie is not improved by submersion in the vastuniversal body o Humanitas: thats or the rich.

In the end, the author who ends one novel with Brs Cubass, the pro-tagonists observation that I did not transmit to any creature the legacy oour misery is not so different in his position rom the one who ends a novelwith the protagonists observation that We are nothing in this world. o aculture that prizes itsel or its smooth cordiality, these authors, who knowwhy they must do so, bring as a correction, the bitter taste o coffee and the

aggressive re o aguardente.

Notes

. Galvo quotes Joaquim Nabuco writing to Jos Verssimo, both critics, riendso Assiss, berating him or mentioning Assis was a mulatto: o me, Machado

was white . . . All I saw in him was the Hellene (). Morrison is scathing on thiskind o tact, calling it another way o suppressing race.. Racialization poses a undamental problem o denition. Saying that it ex-

amines the representation or evaluation o racial difference, or attributes negativecharacteristics to race does not solve it, because race itsel appears as such auid concept. In Patricia McKees Racialization, Capitalism, and Aesthetics inStokers Dracula, or example, white, Western, European, and capitalist areused, and East (another uid concept) can mean just about anything: the Countsransylvania, Slovakia, Westby, whateverthough these might all be surprised tond they are non-European, or non-white.

. See the title o Hlcio Pereira da Silvas: Lima Barreto:Escritor maldito[LimaBarreto: Cursed Writer].

. One should not orget, however, that Machado de Assis was not always uni-versally lauded; the rst ull-length study o his work, by Slvio Romero, gave a


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negative account, though it contained some o its own retraction. It has taken lon-ger or Barreto to be appreciated, and, like those o many realists and naturalistswho programmatically, i not really, disdained sel-conscious orm, his works hadto contend with critics who particularly prized ormal qualities. Arnio Coutinholists the critics who were inclined to deny Machado de Assiss merit: Romero opensthe polemic and is ollowed by Cruz e Souza (the black symbolist poet), Mcio ei-xeira, and Agripino Grieco, among others (Introduo/Estudo Crtico, ).

. See Francisco de Assis Barbosa, . Barbosa lists the many writers and criticswho valued Barretos work.

. Antonio Candido says that at his most typical, Lima Barreto conates per-sonal and social problems; poverty or prejudice destroy the person. Program-matically, Barreto wants to play out all local, Brazilian problems in the open (Os

Olhos . . . , ). On the other hand, the Brasilianness o Machado de Assis needs, itseems, to be affi rmed: Arnio Coutinho spends several pages o his Introductionto the Obras Completasarguing that the national character o his work is guaran-teed, among other aspects, by his race, or he is representatively Brazilian preciselyor being o mixed race, even i one grants that some o his art was inspired by or-eign books that had no connection with Brazil ().

. Examining the reception o Machado de Assis abroad (especially in the US)and at home, Roberto Schwarz notes the different ways in which the author wasramed: in Europe and the US he was a post-modernist beore his time, read, to anextent, a-historicallyhe quotes Susan Sontag to the effect that he had a retroac-

tive inuence on her. In Brazil, on the other hand, he was the anodyne nationalclassic, o agreed and established greatness, but existing aside rom national lieand literature (Leituras em competio, ). Te essay is a wide-ranging, com-plex disquisition, resting on the critical history o Machado de Assis, and on ways inwhich center and periphery, local and universal, are to be read and under-stood in terms o history (literary and other), aesthetics, and politics (colonial, post-colonial, academic, aesthetic). In his review o the novels English translation Ale-xandre Eullio notes what Schwarz analyzes: the relation between a serious readingabroad and being exoticized, both at home and abroad (Esa e Jacem ingls).

. One o the loci classicio the accusation o indifference to, or denial o, hisracial origins comes rom Gilberto Freyre, who calls Machado de Assis preten-tious and accuses him o denying his race, his class, and anything purely Brazilian,including the landscape (; qtd in Baptista, ). Te accusation echoes in Galvo,who argues that though both writers mapped Rio, they saw very different parts othe city: Machado saw the white, the wealthy, Barreto the poor (). But RobertoSchwarz has shown Machado de Assiss sense o the cruelty to which the poor andthe weak are subject in Brazilian society (see or instance, the chapter A sorte dospobres [Te ate o the poor] in Um mestre na periferia do capitalismo).

. Alexandre Eullio, in an extensive essay on the novel that is part o a recent

revaluation, sees it as a culmination o Machado de Assiss career, where the authoruses all the narrative techniques he developed in previous works and exercises ab-solute control over both material and reader to create a complex portrayal and judg-ment o the times (see O Esa e Jacna obra de Machado de Assis).


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. See Alredo Bosi, who in act disagrees with this line o analysis in O enigmado olhar. ().

. He is not alone in this obliqueness: Roberto Reis notes that the nineteenth-century Brazilian novel represses the relation between masters and slaves, displac-ing it into a romantic relation o emale submission (, ). Tose who blameMachado de Assis or this repression, however, imply that his background imposedon him a special obligation in to air it.

. In Counter-Discourses on the Racialization o Tef and Ethics in Doug-lasss Narrative, Lovalerie King reers to critical race theory as a challenge to thenormalization o racism, which can occur in a number o cultural products ().

. en years later, Aluzio de Azevedo published O mulato(), the French-school-inspired novel that, scandalously, thrust manners aside and race directly

into the conversation.. Abel Barros Baptista examines relations between ideas o nationality andideas o the unction o literature, with particular emphasis on Machado de Assis.More generally, Baptista argues that the entire project o developing a national lit-erature depends on seeing literature as rooted in nature and solidary with nation,in an essentially circular process (, ).

. When Policarpo Quaresma decides to engage in agriculture, on the promiseo plenty (i you plant, all will grow) that appears in the rst document on Brazil,the oundational Letter by Pedro Vaz de Caminha, he is bankrupted and drivenrom his arm by a combination o extremely national ants and corruption. See

Lima Barreto, riste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma; see also Renata R. Mautner Was-serman ().

. Critics are ascinated by the question o Machado de Assiss debt to oreign,particularly English or French literatures (Arnio Coutinho quotes Alredo Pujol,Lcia Miguel Pereira, and Eugnio Gomes on the inuence o English and Frenchliteratures; Mcio Leo on that o the Portuguese novelist Bernardes; Josu Monteloon that o de La Rocheoucauld; Otto Maria Carpeaux on that o the Portuguesenovelist Almeida Garrett, and so on). J. Mattoso Cmara Jr. sees that inuence inthe use o ree indirect discourse (style indirect libre), which, he says, is oreign to

lusophone literature () but in Machado de Assis keeps the narration careullyaloo (cuidadosamente separado) rom the characters ().. SeeMemrias pstumas de Brs Cubas; Borba is mad.. Note that North American novels o the period value entrepreneurship (in

Howells, Norris, Dreiser) even i they are not sure o the moral legitimacy o its -nancial rewards.

. According to Luiz Roncari, Machado de Assis reers to these changes notonly in the crnicas, but in all his late novels, transposing the shif rom the pub-lic to the private sphere where, to the shock and dismay o several characters, likeor instance Bentinho in Dom Casmurro, the patriarchal (rural) amily is changing

into the modern (urban) bourgeois amily. Tus the novels detachment rom thehistorical events in which they are immersed is only apparent, their involvement,deep (see O bom diabo e a marinhade Fidelia, aboutMemorial de Aires, and DomCasmurroe o retrato dos pais).


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. Tese crnicas are selected or reprint by Valentim Facioli, one o the editorsoMachado de Assis,Antologia e Estudos(, , ).For Roberto SchwarzJohn Gledsons ocus on the crnicas as evidence o the authors engagement withcontemporary politics is one o the contributions o hisMachado de Assis:co ehistria(, ); in a later essay, Schwarz argues that the crnica was in actan authocthonous orm o literary engagement with a writers immediate environ-ment, and that in part Machado de Assiss intimate connection with Brazilian real-ity and literary tradition comes precisely rom his attention to the orm as practicedby his colleagues and predecessors (Leituras, ). Granja traces the developmento the author as a writer and his attention to ethical and political matters in hiscontributions to the periodical press in Rio; Duarte anthologizes crnicas to showAssiss concern or the plight o aro-Brazilians. For John Gledson, the crnicas o-

er not only a window into Machado de Assiss views about the political events othe time, particularly in those o the series A semana, written at the time whenEsa e Jacis set, but are also remarkable as specically literary achievements (see A semana: . . .).

. Seem is the operative word, i it has taken a ull century or Morrison,Henry Louis Gates, or Betsy Erkkila to start writing about blackness in all o Amer-ican literature (Black literature is kept apart, with its own separate shelves at Bor-ders bookstore).

. Barreto was not that discreet about the prejudice he encountered, comment-ing on it in his diaries or having his characters suffer it. Maria Cristina eixeira

Machado compiles many examples o such reports ().. Analyzing the crnicas o Machado de Assis, Costa Lima argues that the

authors roundabout, non-linear presentation counteracts press censorship, leavinga way out should the thought police come afer him or an implicit, radical critiqueo the dominant positivist reason ().

. Tis line leads Jos Guilherme Merquior to classiy Machado de Assis as animpressionist writer, like Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Henry James, JosephConrad, who preserve complexity o vision and literary language against sensation-alist realism ([], ).

. Alcmeno Bastos notes that though the rivalry is presented as central to thenovel, it is effectively emptied o meaning as various other characters examine itby the light o games with numbers or speculation about mythological precedents().

. Tis is John Gledsons reading inMachado de Assis:co e histria. In TeLast Betrayal o Machado de Assis, Gledson does a rmly allegorical reading oMemorial de Aires, Machado de Assiss last novel, whose central character is thesame Counselor Aires.

. An insuffi cient number o examples: Fenimore Coopers Last of the Mohi-cans, George Eliots Daniel Deronda, Emily Bronts Wuthering Heights, or the hy-

brid and complicated marriages in Jos de Alencar.. In A novidade . . . , Roberto Schwarz shows the poor girls in the rst novels

by Machado de Assis maneuvering to improve their position; each novel presents aparticular problem o social mobility and acceptance.


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. For Eldia Xavier Machado de Assis, unlike Alencar, demythies roman-tic love (). However, in Alencarat least in his Amerindian trilogy, the marriageplot in its romantic version modeled not just the ideal married pair, but also the idealsource or the population o the new land: the romantic pair will people and orm thehybrid nation. (See Wasserman, , ). Machado de Assis then may be show-ing up romantic love as one more idea out o place in a society that has eliminated theAmerindian and will not acknowledge the Arican element o its composition.

. Machado de Assis wrote several short stories on clothing that not only deter-mines, but displaces the wearer.

. See aunay, and Wasserman [].. In his crnicas Machado de Assis ofen claims not to understand nance

and trivializes the encilhamento: see the crnicas inA semana, o August , ;

October , : Finance o nances, . . . I know the vocabulary but dont yet knowwhat ideas correspond to the words . . .; December , : the writer gets caughtin a crowd that gathered neither or a ght nor or an orator, but or the amousencilhamento, and then the subject is dropped. (Obra completa, III, , , ).

. Maia Neto () makes this point.. In Te Last Betrayal o Machado de Assis:Memorial de Aires John Gledson

discusses the prevalence o unreliable narrators in Machado de Assis ction, nota-bly in D.Casmurro, but also in his short stories and in other novels.

. See Maia Neto, .. Te reerence is to FaorosA pirmide e o trapzio. See Brook Tomas or a

discussion o contract in this sense.. According to Merquior (who reers to Enylton de S Rego on the matter),

Assis dealt with these changes by developing a sense o the ridiculous that he ex-pressed in the orm o Menippean satire ([] ).

. Antonio Candido reminds us that, come to think o it, the sufferings oMachado de Assis did not seem to have exceeded those o everyone else, and nei-ther was his lie particularly arduous. Mixed-race individuals o humble origin be-came some o the more representative men in our liberal Empire. Tey were menwho, o his same color and born poor ended up receiving titles o nobility and occu-

pying important positions in government . . . it would be more accurate to note theexternal normalcy and the relative ease o his public lie ([] ).. Here (), Merquior reers to Roger Bastides analysis o Brazilian

literature.. Machado de Assis, Relquias da Casa Velha, in Obra completa, II, .. In chapter , Counselor Aires and his Memorial, Maia Neto conates the

worldviews o Machado de Assis and o Aires as resting on an aesthetic skepticismderived rom Phyrro through Montaigne and Pascal, a ew more o those high-culture inuences whose identication busies so much Assis criticism.

. Eugnio Gomes was an early proponent o an allegorical reading, though he

privileged the psychological and the mythic (lviii).. In her study o the crnicas, Lcia Granja shows how they share both tech-

niques and subject matter with the ction (); any distancing resides in the novel,not in the author. Other clues the crnicas offer to the stance o the novelist, are


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their tone o playul irony, as in Comentrios da semana (Dirio do Rio de Ja-neiro, november, , quoted by Granja, ), and the orm o direct address tothe reader, as in BONS DIAS (rom Gazeta de Notcias, April , quoted byGranja, ).

. See Wasserman [], or a more detailed discussion o the encilhamento,the stock renzy that hit the Brazilian economy in the early s.

. In Te Last Betrayal, Gledson quotes Emilia Viotti da Costas observationthat Abolition reed whites rom the burden o slavery and abandoned blacks totheir own ate (; Gledson, ).

. See the correspondence with Monteiro Lobato in Barreto, Um longo sonhodo futuro. Tis correspondence concerns Gonzaga de S; part o it was con-ducted rom inside the asylum where Barreto was conned.

. Tese breaks in the narrative voice have bothered critics rom the beginning.Tey annoy Slvio Romero no end, and he accuses Machado de Assis o a stutteringstyle, o suffering rom some perturbation in the organs o speech (qtd in Souza,, ).

. aunays is a roman clef, which in plot and narration roundly condemnsthe speculative renzy that ed the bubble and ctionally reconstitutes the old waysthreatened by current political and economic trends; O encilhamentois an interest-ing novel, but not a good one.

. Bastos reers to Esa e Jac, vol. IV o Obras escolhidas de Machado deAssis, .

. Esa e Jac, (), .

Works cited

Alencar, Mrio de. Esa e Jacob,Jornal do Commercio, Rio de Janeiro, October ,

, p. . In Hlio de Seixas Guimares, Os leitores de Machado de Assis:O romance machadiano e o pblico de literatura no sculo . So Paulo: EDUSP,: .

Assis, Joaquim Maria Machado de. Esa e Jac. Introduction, editing, and notes byMassaud Moiss. So Paulo: Cultrix, . Also in Obra Completa, I: . InEnglish: Esau and Jacob. Intr. and trans. Helen Caldwell. Berkeley/Los Angeles:University o Caliornia Press, .

. Notcia da atual literatura brasileira: instinto de nacionalidade. In ObraCompleta, Arnio Coutinho, ed. vols. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Jos Aguilar,.

. Obra Completa. Arnio Coutinho, ed. vols. Rio de Janeiro: Editora JosAguilar, .

.Relquias da Casa Velha. In Obra completa, ed. Arnio Coutinho. vols. Riode Janeiro: Editora Nova Aguilar, : II, .


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.Memrias pstumas de Bras Cubas []. In Obra completa. Ed. ArnioCoutinho. vols. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Aguilar, : I, .

Baptista, Abel Barros.A formao do nome:Duas interrogaes sobre Machado deAssis. Campinas: Editora Unicamp, .

Barreto, Lima, Clara dos Anjos,in Contos e novelas, org. Francisco de Assis Barbosae Antonio Houaiss Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Garnier, .

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nico, .Candido, Antonio. Esquema de Machado de Assis, in Vrios escritos.So Paulo:

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Coutinho, Arnio. Introduo/Estudo Crtico In Machado de Assis, Obra Com-pleta, Arnio Coutinho, ed., vols. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Aguilar, :I, .

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Eullio, Alexandre. Esa e Jac em ingls. In Livro involuntrio: Literatura,histria,materia e modernidade. Eds. Carlos Augusto Calil and Maria EugeniaBoaventura. Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRG, : .

. O Esa e Jacna obra de Machado de Assis: As personagens e o autor diantedo espelho. In Escritos, Berta Waldman and Luiz Dantas, eds. Campinas, SP:Editora da UNICAMP/So Paulo: Editora da UNESP, : .

Faoro, Raymundo.Machado de Assis:A pirmide e o trapzio. Porto Alegre: EditoraGlobo, .

Freyre, Gilberto. Reinterpretando Jos de Alencar. Rio de Janeiro: Ministrio daEducao Nacional, .

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45.2.Mautner Wasserman