Rethinking Literary Realism(s) in Global Comparative Perspective: Displaced Realisms: Machado de Assis in the 19th and 20th century

Rethinking Literary Realism(s) in Global Comparative Perspective: Displaced Realisms: Machado de Assis in the 19th and 20th century

Speaker: Paulo Lemos Horta, New York University Abu Dhabi

Realism represented a rupture in the ouvre of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis in late nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. His first four novels had been more indebted to romanticism, and represented relatively conventional and idealized myths of Brazilian national culture and cultural difference. But after a personal and professional crisis marked by a bout of schizophrenia, Machado produced the mature realist fiction for which he is known in Brazilian letters and abroad. It is an experimental, ironic realism, marked by short self-referential chapters influenced by Sterne and Schopenhauer. And if the earlier romantic fiction flattered myths of Brazilian nationalism including an idealized portrait of its native peoples, the realism of the late fiction suggested a much more critical stance toward the self-aggrandizing and justifying beliefs of Rio’s socio-political elite. Machado’s narrators came from this elite background, yet their unreliability, myopia, and the general ironic stance at their expense, invites the reader to question their presentation of reality. Machado’s mature fiction invites readers to ponder whether his own status as the son of a freed slave in a slave culture (slavery was only abolished in Rio in 1888, well into Machado’s mature period) informed the underlying satire of Rio’s elite, including pointed, if parenthetical, reflections on the treatment of slaves.