Machado de Assis

Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the towering figures of Brazilian and world literature, Machado de Assis (1839 - 1908). He was the descendant of slaves and built his career while slavery was still in place in Brazil (abolished 1888) and many of his characters were from the slave-owning class who were also the readers of his books. At the time, those readers were delighted to see themselves represented and it was only later in the 20th Century that critics realized just how much Machado was satirising them. While he brings 19th Century Brazil vividly to life, Machado's works transcend time and place and, according to Salman Rushdie, they seem to have been written yesterday not 100 years ago. With Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva Associate Professor in Brazilian Studies at University College London Claire Williams Professor of Brazilian Literature and Culture at the Faculty of Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, fellow of St. Peter's College And Viviane Carvalho da Annunciação Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: Lamonte Aidoo and Daniel F. Silva (eds.), Emerging Dialogues on Machado de Assis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) Helen Caldwell, The Brazilian Othello of Machado de Assis: A Study of Dom Casmurro (University of California Press, 1960) Viviane Carvalho da Annunciação, The Contradictions of Science in Machado de Assis (Liverpool University Press, 2025) Machado de Assis (trans. Daniel Hahn), The Looking-Glass: Essential Stories (Pushkin Press, 2022) Machado de Assis (trans. Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson), 26 Stories (Liveright, 2019) Machado de Assis (trans. Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson), The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis (Liveright, 2018) Machado de Assis (trans. Flora Thomson-Deveaux), The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (Penguin, 2020) Machado de Assis (trans. Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson), The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (Liveright, 2020) Machado de Assis (trans. Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson), Quincas Borba (WW Norton & Co, 2024) Machado de Assis (trans. Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson), Dom Casmurro (WW Norton & Co, 2024) Machado de Assis (trans. Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson), Memorial de Ayres (Liveright, August 2026) John Gledson, Machado de Assis: Fiction and History (Francis Cairns, 1984) Richard Graham (ed.), Machado de Assis: Reflections on a Brazilian Master Writer (University of Texas Press, 1999) James N. Green, Victoria Langland and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz (eds.), The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University Press, 2019) Daniel Hahn and Padma Viswanathan (eds.), The Penguin Book of Brazilian Short Stories (Penguin, January 2027) Mario Higa (ed.), A History of the Brazilian Novel (Cambridge University Press, August 2026), especially the chapter on Machado de Assis K. David Jackson, Machado de Assis: A Literary Life (Yale University Press, 2015) Anthony W. Pereira, Modern Brazil: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2020) Roberto Schwarz (trans. John Gledson), A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism: Machado de Assis (Duke University Press, 2001) Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling (eds.), Brazil: A Biography (Allen Lane, 2018) Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva, Machado De Assis's Philosopher or Dog?: From Serial to Book Form (Routledge, 2010) Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva and Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos (eds.), Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Brazilian Novel (UCL Press, 2020), especially the chapters “Capitu against the Elegiac Narrator” by Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva and “Machado de Assis and the Novel” by Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos Marcus Wood, The Black Butterfly: Brazilian Slavery and the Literary Imagination (West Virginia University Press, 2019) In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Overwhelmed? That was me with diabetes. Hey, I'm Jabraan. Between teaching and coaching, managing diabetes felt like an extra job. With the Freestyle Libre 3 CGM, I get real-time glucose readings and have the insights to make informed decisions. My life feels lighter now. Learn more at freestylelibre.us.

• 0:25Speaker 02

  The views expressed should not be used for medical diagnosis or treatment as a substitute for professional medical advice. Individual circumstances may vary. For prescription only. Safety info found at freestylelibre.us.

• 0:36Speaker 03

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:08Speaker 04

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:40Speaker 05

  This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. Machado de Assis, 1839 to 1908, is considered the towering figure of modern Brazilian literature, with a global reputation, although arguably not as much as he deserves. The descendant of slaves, Machado wrote many of his novels and almost 200 short stories before Brazil abolished slavery in 1888,

• 2:23Speaker 05

  the last country in the Americas to do so. And while he vividly critiques the slave-owning classes, he transcends that time and place. In Salman Rushdie's view, his work seemed to have been written yesterday, not 100 years ago. Well, with me to discuss Machado de Assis are Anna Claudia Suriani da Silva, Associate Professor in Brazilian Studies at University College London; Claire Williams, Professor of Brazilian Literature and Culture at the Faculty of Modern Languages at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St. Peter's College; and Viviane Cavalli da Anunciação, affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages

• 3:08Speaker 05

  and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. And Viviane, it's to you that I come first. Can you tell us something about Machado's early life in Rio de Janeiro?

• 3:20Speaker 04

  Hmm, Machado just sees it sometimes called the greatest Brazilian writer, but I come to think of him as the Pele of literature. Machado did the same thing as Pele did for football. He inherited an European tradition, mastered it, and transformed it completely, creating it something unmistakably Brazilian and original. And Machado de Assis was born in Rio de Janeiro, a burgeoning city. He was the son of Francisco José de Assis and Maria Lepoldina Machado de Assis. His father was a painter, a descendant from freed slaves.

• 4:07Speaker 04

  And his mother was an Azorean washerwoman. He grew up in an affluent neighbourhood but connected to a working class family. He was baptised by Dona Maria José Jeremã Donça, the wife of a senator. So he grew up going in and out of her mansion and going back to his working class family.

• 4:35Speaker 05

  So what was his relationship with the wealthy family?

• 4:39Speaker 04

  She was his godmother and he would go to her house to have meals and to be with her.

• 4:49Speaker 05

  So just to make it clear, what was that relationship between a relatively poor family, working class? How come he has this relationship with a wealthy family?

• 5:00Speaker 04

  Well, it's where his father and mother would work. This is basically where he would paint their houses, she would wash their clothes. And that was a patronage relationship.

• 5:17Speaker 05

  And what were the prospects for a young boy like Machado at the time in Brazil, given his background in this relationship of dependency with the wealthy family?

• 5:28Speaker 04

  It was very slim. It was believed that he was going to follow the footsteps of his father and become a painter or some sort of manual worker. But effectively, his health wasn't so great. So he started working, selling sweets. But then he wasn't strong enough. And developing this incredible intelligence for literature, he transcended his background.

• 6:02Speaker 05

  So although illiteracy in Brazil at this time is very high, I think around 70%, he nonetheless has access to books and reading because of that relationship with the wealthy family, is that right?

• 6:14Speaker 04

  Not exactly, because what happened... Happened is that he lost both his mother and his father at an early age. And he was brought up by his stepmother Maria Inés, who was an Afro-Brazilian woman. And Lucia Miguel Pereira, in her biography of Machado de Assis, says that she worked in a school for young women. And apparently, he would overhear the lessons and the corridors and get very much interested in what they were studying. Formal education didn't suit him.

• 6:56Speaker 04

  So he would learn French with Madame Gallo, the baker. Classics, Greek, Latin, with Father Silvia Sarmiento, the priest. When he was seventeen, he started to go to the bookshop Pereira Brito and frequent literary circles. So in addition to reading by himself, studying by himself, he was also learning from people in different social classes and in different levels of education.

• 7:33Speaker 05

  So Ana Claudia Soria de Silva, he is working, associated with a bookshop, which is run by a publisher in Rio. How does he start writing? What's his first break as a writer?

• 7:48Speaker 06

  Machado starts to collaborate with the local press, so Paula Brito's press, as a translator. So he translates poetry and he translates novels. But also, he is an aspiring poet. And he's not very successful as a poet. He very soon realizes from very harsh criticism that he's not a very good poet. At that time, there was a flourishing publishing market, print culture in Brazil. So with the end of censorship in eighteen twenty one, all of a sudden, we had lots of books being published, so a proper print culture.

• 8:31Speaker 06

  Bookshops, circulating libraries, one of the circulating libraries was the British Subscription Library, the Portuguese Royal Cabinet, and lots of newspapers and periodicals. Many of them were ventures by European publishers that settled down in Rio de Janeiro, including Garnier. So Garnier played a very important role in Machado's career because he had a fashion magazine, a magazine for women. So it was basically a magazine full of soy material, fashion plates, and a lot of literary content. So Machado went from being an average poet to being a very successful short story writer.

• 9:17Speaker 06

  So he wrote in this specific journal, published once a month, and it was actually printed in Paris. So his manuscripts had to travel to Paris and come back to Brazil and serialized. And his short stories were very long, which means that he made a good amount of money because of the word count of these stories.

• 9:39Speaker 05

  And these were largely women's magazines, is that right?

• 9:42Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 9:42Speaker 05

  Why is he so popular with women at the time?

• 9:45Speaker 06

  Oh, because these magazines were very successful. So there were all sorts of periodicals being published in Brazil. It was a very vibrant market for periodicals. So political newspapers published daily, and also these magazines that targeted women and were suited for the domestic sphere. So Machado was writing short stories, and the short stories were actually a big attraction to the readers, for them to subscribe to these magazines.

• 10:18Speaker 06

  So he had a very diverse readership, both men, when he was publishing short stories for political newspapers and women in these fashion magazines.

• 10:28Speaker 05

  Thank you. Claire Williams, Brazilian literature comes late in the day. Was it in any sense ostracized during the slavery period?

• 10:38Speaker 04

  Brazil as a nation was ostracized and looked down upon by the rest of the world while they were a slave-owning nation. And the development of Brazil is quite unique in that it was a colony of Portugal for 300 years and then became an empire in 1822, a kind of constitutional monarchy. And all this time, the economy was run largely on slavery. This was something that was very much looked down upon by the rest of the world. And Brazilian politicians and intellectuals were worried that they wouldn't be taken seriously as a modern nation until slavery had been abolished.

• 11:19Speaker 05

  Why did it take so long for slavery to be abolished?

• 11:23Speaker 04

  There are lots of thoughts about that. Historians have written many tomes about that. But because the politicians, the governing classes, were plantation owners, so a lot of money was at stake if they were going to give up their workforce. But they did eventually. So the slave trade ended in 1850 and gradually slavery was abolished in various waves through various laws. And in 1888, it was abolished.

• 11:52Speaker 05

  More or less at the same time that Brazil becomes a republic and...

• 11:57Speaker 04

  Exactly. So 1889, Brazil becomes a republic.

• 12:00Speaker 05

  Gets rid of the monarchy. Let's look at one of Machado's most famous works, that's the posthumous memoirs of Brascubas. Can you describe that novel to us?

• 12:13Speaker 04

  Absolutely. It's a novel where nothing happens and everything happens. So you'd think from the title that it's the story of a life. Then you realize that it's posthumous memoirs, so there's something strange going on.

• 12:29Speaker 05

  So he's dead when he's writing it?

• 12:31Speaker 04

  He's dead when he's writing it. And he tells us at the beginning, after making a dedication to the worms that gnawed on his cold body, the first worm who gnawed on his cold body. That this is not the book of an author who has died, but a dead man who has become an author. So he tells us right from the very beginning that he's not a very good writer, but he is quite good at being dead. And being dead gives him licence to say all sorts of things that he couldn't say when he was alive. It also gives him the chance to look back over his whole life and draw conclusions about

• 13:10Speaker 04

  the causes that produced certain effects and to reflect on how important he could have been, because he's a character who's desperate for approbation, for acclaim, for recognition. And yet, he's so lazy and cowardly and so entitled as well. He comes from a rich background, he's wealthy, he doesn't even need to work, and he could do anything with his learning, he studied in Portugal, he could do anything with his money, but he keeps it all for himself. And in fact, he's, one of the great ironies is that he's very lucky, so almost as if whatever he wants, he gets.

• 13:55Speaker 04

  He likes a particular woman, he manages to seduce her, he finds money in the street. And all this at the time where poverty was rife.

• 14:07Speaker 05

  So that's what I want to go on to, Viviane. Can you tell us what the social critique in this novel is really about?

• 14:16Speaker 04

  Well, the European, you have the tradition of the self-made man, the person who works, who comes out of nothing and builds something extraordinary. In a way, Brass has everything and he doesn't make anything out of that. And there is a whole chapter about him trying to be a politician, which is dot, dot, dot. And that is, that is a big joke, then my shadow plays with the reader. How did I become a politician? There is nothing to be read. That's what to be read about it. In the following chapter, well, I am in my house, I am with my slaves, I'm with my son,

• 15:01Speaker 04

  my chair, but I keep thinking about the work that I don't have. This is very typical of of the higher classes. They have everything and they want a little bit more in the in the Brazilian situation of the nineteenth century, but he's still talking about what he could have been. In a way, it is Brazilian, but it's also very universal in a way, because we might have everything, but we still keep thinking about the little thing that didn't happen.

• 15:32Speaker 05

  And, Ana Clara, that sense of entitlement which Viviane described there, it sounds quite a lot like the Brazil of today. There's not much of a plot in this this novel, so what is it that inspires people to read the book?

• 15:49Speaker 06

  Well, in terms of the entitlement, Machado is writing to a to a niche of readers. So the literacy levels were actually quite low in Brazil. It was thirty percent of people could read, and he was writing to the educated elite, yes. It's the first novel he publishes in the first person, so he moves away from the sentimental, omniscient narrator of his first novels. And in the preface of this specific novel, he says that he's now being in his second phase, and he's heavily influenced by Stern and Tristan Shandy.

• 16:30Speaker 06

  So we are about to engage with a novel that is going to be digressive, it's going to be fragmented and very witty and ironic. So he constructs a character that is going to embrace the blindness of Brazilian elite. And for many times, critics couldn't understand that he was actually being critical to the status quo, because that character, who achieves nothing, leaves no legacy, is a failed scientist, a failed politician, a bad lover, is actually represents the failure of the Brazilian elite, yes?

• 17:09Speaker 05

  So how was it received when it was first published? You said that they didn't really understand it. They liked the novel, but they didn't understand it. Was it was it well received?

• 17:18Speaker 06

  It was extremely well received. It was first published in a scientific magazine and then a sign of success that it was very quickly published in book form. And it had all sorts of positive reception that read in favour of this very witty, charming narrator.

• 17:39Speaker 05

  You mean almost as though they were celebrating the factlessness of the Brazilian elite?

• 17:46Speaker 06

  Exactly, yes. And actually not seeing that a lot, a lot that is silenced. For example, Bras Cubas is a slave owner and he barely mentions slaves in his plot. So it's again that silence that tells everything. And that's what more reception, the reception of his novel from the 1950 onwards start to open the eyes and see that the silence is more important than what is said.

• 18:12Speaker 05

  Right. So reception changes as Brazil develops and people start to look at it in, in different ways. Claire Williams, the narrator here is, is a man, Bras Cubas. But how strong are women in Machado's work?

• 18:30Speaker 04

  Women are crucial. So before Bras Cubas, before the memoirs, he'd published four other novels. This is his fifth novel. And the third and fourth have female protagonists and female, and the titles are female names, Elena and Yaya Garcia. And then from then on, he focuses on male narrators, almost all of them writing in the first person. So they are the ones with the voice, they are the ones with the agency. But we have to read between the lines to see what's going on with the women. So a lot of the female characters who these male narrators speak about are extremely beautiful. They have lovely, long, black hair. They have glittering eyes. They go to balls and they bare their

• 19:14Speaker 04

  shoulders. And kissing them is close to heaven. And the, the men become bewitched until the point when they want to drop them. So we see, it's a bit like Jane Austen, the way that the world of the women is that they have to capitalize on their beauty. They have to be practical and strategic in order to survive. And perhaps the best example of this is Capitul, who's the heroine of the seventh novel, Doncage Morho. That title, Don Casmuuro has a double meaning which we can talk about later.

• 19:52Speaker 05

  Well, do tell us now what it means.

• 19:55Speaker 04

  Well, Don is a title, as in Don Quixote, it's a title that means nobility. But here it's used ironically. And casmuhu is a term which means grumpy, basically. And

• 20:08Speaker 05

  So it's so grumpy.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly. And in the first chapter of this novel, again, in the first chapter, that's where they give themselves, start to give themselves away. I think the reader gives them a bit of benefit of the doubt, but very soon we start to spot contradictions and realise that we need to think very hard about what they're saying before we trust them. So he tells us in the first chapter, "Oh, a young poet called me Don Casmuhu when I didn't take his poems seriously, and I accepted that title. But, dear reader, don't go and look up in the dictionary, I will tell you what this means. It means somebody who is very quiet, a recluse. And of course, what does the reader do?

• 20:53Speaker 04

  The first thing we do is to go and look it up. And it means grumpy, stubborn. And I think this is a very early example of mansplaining. So we get these male characters who tell the women what to do, get very frustrated when they don't know what they're thinking, and are seduced by their beauty to a certain extent.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by Miguel.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  That last year, finishing that record was the hardest experience of my life. To find your creativity and to believe in yourself, because somewhere in the midst of it, I stopped believing that my voice mattered and that I could find it again. That's a challenge. I was not feeling very confident creatively, only, again, defiant in my belief that what this is about is

• 22:08Speaker 03

  Express something honest. Say something honest. Experience before the moment. A Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  Hey, what's up? This is Kelvin Washington from The Odd Couple with Rob Parker and Kelvin Washington. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability, and it starts with a great deal on off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra. Two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shoptoyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 22:58Speaker 04

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star Trust Pilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 23:26Speaker 05

  Hello, Misha Glenny here. Before you listen to this episode, I wanted to share some exciting news. You can now watch this episode and all future episodes of In Our Time in full video. Just search for In Our Time on YouTube or watch episodes 28 days early by subscribing to the streaming service, BBC Select, in the U.S. and Canada.

• 23:51Speaker 05

  Viv, we've just heard from Claire about Doncas Muho. It doesn't sound like the way a lot of people describe it, which is a modern Othello. Is that right, and why is it compared to Othello?

• 24:05Speaker 04

  Well, it's all about jealousy. It's all about this woman, Capitú, who has watery eyes, undertow eyes, who is very seductive. And we don't hear her voice. We hear her through his eyes. But he's very jealous. He believes that his best friend, Escobar, had an affair with her. And their child is actually his best friend and not his. And the end of the novel, he goes and watches Othello. And after he comes out, he keeps thinking, well, poor Desdemona. She's not guilty.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  But what would have happened if she was guilty? Ask Capitú. And then he tries to think about ways to punish Capitú. And in many ways, this Casmujo has deceived the readers and literary critics for fifty years. It took an American critic, Helen Caldwell, in the eighties, nineties, to write The Brazilian Othello. And she pointed out to us, which was right in front of us, you shouldn't trust this first-person narrator. We are hearing everything from his point of view.

• 25:29Speaker 05

  That's right, because in Shakespeare's Othello, we know throughout the play that Desdemona is absolutely innocent. Here, we don't know, because we only have one voice, and that's Don Casmujo. And so there is doubt. We simply don't know.

• 25:46Speaker 04

  But his name is Bento Santiago.

• 25:51Speaker 05

  Bento and Don Casmujo are the same person.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  So Saint Iago. Iago is within his name. So Machado, as a brilliant author that he is, he's already shown us. Iago is inside his mind.

• 26:10Speaker 05

  So Don Casmujo is both Othello and Iago at the same time. Both the duped one and the person who's suggesting that Capitú is unfaithful.

• 26:25Speaker 05

  Anna Claudia, this is probably his best-known work. How does it highlight his strengths as a writer?

• 26:33Speaker 06

  It's a novel that shows how varied his style and prose is. So the young Machado was exposed to a tsunami of novels. He read at the same time Stern, Bauzak, Dickens, Servantes, different traditions of novels. And throughout his career, he experimented with different novel traditions. So in Don Casmurru, we see this all together. It's at the same time a sentimental novel. It's an elegy, so he misses Capitú. So he has a sort of hate and love relationship with Capitú, and he misses her.

• 27:14Speaker 06

  He writes a memoir, which is at the same time an autobiography, but an elegy.

• 27:20Speaker 05

  So he doesn't kill Capitú, she leaves him for Europe?

• 27:24Speaker 06

  It's also realist. So there are chapters in which you find very clear and realistic descriptions of the setting, the farm where he grew up, characters like Escobar, his mother, his aunt, and the dependent.

• 27:43Speaker 05

  Can you just explain what the dependent is? Because this is an important concept in Brazil, but not so familiar here.

• 27:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, so Machado was a sort of dependent of this wealthy family that he lived with and supported him. So dependent is a free person that works and has a very complicated relationship with a wealthy family because it's not an enslaved person and it has no blood ties with the family. So they have to make themselves useful for the family in order not to be sent out.

• 28:16Speaker 05

  Viv, you wanted to come in briefly there.

• 28:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, because I think that the drama is very important in Don Casemiro. Of course, it is from Shakespeare. Machado Justiz was him. He begun his career writing poetry, but also writing theatre. It's also very Brazilian, this type of performance. When you are under a patronage, some sort of system, you have to perform in a certain way that you're going to make your employer very much flattered.

• 28:51Speaker 05

  It's a very theatrical society, Brazil. I remember when I first went there, I had come from working in the Balkans for a long time. Circumstances in Brazil, in terms of poverty and things like that, are comparable to the Balkans, but people still party all the time. It's a very lively society. And I wonder if Machado captures any of that liveliness as well.

• 29:17Speaker 06

  I think so, because his novels and short stories, they all have, you know, a dark side because of the plot, characters owning slaves, et cetera. But they are joyful, and that reflects a characteristic of Brazilian culture and Brazilians nowadays. If you go to Brazil for the first time, you think everybody's happy. And if you read the statistics, not really. Lots of people are not happy, but we are joyful. So in Brazil, you learn very quickly to distinguish between being joyful and happy. And I think that this is a part of his wit. And one contribution for the formation of Brazilian literature is exactly how to convey

• 30:01Speaker 06

  this very specific, unique Brazilian humour into literature, which was then, of course, expanded, incorporated by Lima Barreto, João do Rio and other writers that came after him.

• 30:18Speaker 05

  Claire, do you think that he was writing for women? Were those his first readers, as it were? I mean, we know that he wrote for women's magazines. Do you think he was hoping that women would recognise? What was in these novels?

• 30:32Speaker 04

  Very possibly. I think he he creates these very resourceful, practical, strategic female characters because they are the ones who are going to educate the sons and the Brazilians of the future. And clearly, nobody wants the Brazilians of the future to be like Bento or Brash Kubash, because society will fail, just as they have failed. And I think one of the things that's interesting is that in these novels, none of the protagonists have children who survive past the end of the of the book. They are the end of a generation in a way. That's really important because Brazil needed to reinvent itself, create

• 31:15Speaker 04

  new citizens who were forward looking.

• 31:19Speaker 05

  Yes, of course, one of the cliches about Brazil is Brazil is the country of the future and it always will be. And it's it's that elite, that middle class elite, who are often seen as preventing the development because of characters like Don Casemurhu. Anna Claudia, Machado has been criticised for not speaking out enough about slavery as as clearly as he might have done. Is that a fair assessment?

• 31:50Speaker 06

  Not really, but that's how he was read for many generations of critics. So first of all, in his birth and death certificate, he appears as a white person, and he was considered by many contemporary critics as apolitical. He was even considered against the republican, the change of the regime. He was considered a monarchist, and just basically because he didn't believe in any changes. He was not really the person who would believe that changing, abolishing slavery or changing from the monarchy to republic would change anything. His writing for the elite and talking and embracing

• 32:33Speaker 06

  the point of view of the elite and leaving a lot unsaid about the working class and slavery.

• 32:42Speaker 06

  But as one of the critics says, Alfredo Bosi, a Brazilian critic from the University of São Paulo, Machado worked around asymmetric relations that were very close to each other. So father against mother.

• 32:59Speaker 05

  That's the story, that's the title of the story.

• 33:01Speaker 06

  Yes, yes, it's a short story and it was published in 1906, eighteen years after the end of slavery. And Machado just sees, constructs a narrator presenting elements of slavery and what it was like in an anecdote about a slave catcher and a runaway slave woman. So you see the very asymmetric relations. The slave catcher has to catch the slave because it depends on that reward in order to keep his son. So we, as readers, we have in one side the runaway slave who is a pregnant woman, a mina, and the slave catcher, whose wife is also pregnant.

• 33:47Speaker 06

  So as readers, we, the narrator doesn't pass any judgment and we are put in this moral dilemma. So this was a way for him to confront the system, talk about it, expose without being judgmental, leaving for the reader to, to make the conclusions.

• 34:07Speaker 05

  Claire, there's a sense in Machado's work that he really despises mediocrity. Where do you find examples of this?

• 34:17Speaker 04

  There are, there are lots of examples of this and we've already touched on the fact that Bragg Kubas achieved very little in his life, despite having all the wealth, all the training, all the education, all the charm to do this. So Bragg is the ultimate underachiever. He wanted attention from everybody, but he did nothing really to deserve it. He's somebody who does nothing. And this, I think, is very frustrating for Machado, but also for the reader. He has no initiative, you know, this is, this is what the new generation need. They need initiative, they need to take responsibility.

• 34:57Speaker 04

  And there's, the last chapter of Bragg Kubas is called Negatives and it's all about what Bragg didn't do in his life. Um. So he says, I did not have children and thus did not bequeath to any creature the legacy of our misery. He's he's listed all the things that he didn't do, which is basically what the whole the whole story is about.

• 35:21Speaker 05

  And also, I would say that although he's, Machado is described as a realist, it seems to me as though there are the seeds of modernism in what Machado is doing as as as well. Anna Claudia?

• 35:34Speaker 06

  Yes, so I think Don Casemiro, for example, is a novel that is almost impressionist. We have the one version of a story and not exactly the access to facts because it's a first person narrator. So we are very close to, we can compare to James Joyce and also Lord Jim by by Conrad. So we have the impressions of the narrator and the narrator writes about his relationship with a dead character, exactly like in Lord Jim. So we don't have access to that character, be, you know, in the in the case of Lord Jim and Machado de Assis Capitú.

• 36:17Speaker 06

  So what we have is are the impressions, the the memories of the main narrator about that character. So we are getting very close to modernism, but Machado is still still grounded in the 19th century. So his plots are very grounded in a patriarchic, slave owning society, and the characters reflect that society.

• 36:39Speaker 05

  But he also, he writes quite economically, which if I might say is not necessarily a Brazilian trait, of short books, short sentences, short chapters. He's a very efficient writer.

• 36:55Speaker 04

  Yes, that's true. I mean, he's also been described as a postmodernist, and I think that's something to do with the knowing nature of the way that the characters address you, as if, you know, they've they've just, you've just left the room and come back in and you are their dear reader.

• 37:10Speaker 05

  Yes, that addressing of the audience is is quite striking, isn't it?

• 37:15Speaker 04

  And it's to call attention to the medium of the novel. This is not reality. You have to engage with this in some sort of way because sometimes it's dear reader, sometimes it's

• 37:27Speaker 04

  Damned reader or something like that. I don't like, yeah, I don't like he read or like, don't look up that in the dictionary. Don't tell Virgilia about this. So there is like, like, yes, so what do we do with this? So he's, he's always spoken. You're like, yeah, let's, in the theatre, when you break the fourth wall and it's like, oh, yeah. Now you make your own decision about the novel, about the story, about society, about what you think of the world.

• 38:01Speaker 05

  Claire, why do you, or indeed your students, why do you find him so fresh today?

• 38:07Speaker 06

  Well, I think he covers very juicy topics, such, uh, uh, universal topics about love, uh, about parenting. So sometimes I read Memorious Past and Must as a kind of parenting manual, how not to be

• 38:21Speaker 05

  How not to?

• 38:22Speaker 06

  How not to bring up your children. Do impose discipline. Uh, and then, um, also, Don Cash Muho is a kind of marriage counselling, can be read as a kind of marriage counselling guide. So it, it's, it's very up to date in the topics that it's dealing with. And then I, I very much enjoy texts where the reader has to participate. Machado's novels are full of gaps and holes and clues which the reader has to put together. We, once we realise that the narrator is a narrator, that it's not, he's not the author, we have to deal with that sort of that, that gap, the fact that there are different versions of reality

• 39:04Speaker 06

  being portrayed here. And when it, and we also realise that the, the narrators have their own agenda. Um, so for example, in Don Cash Muho, Bento is trying to prove throughout the novel that, in fact, that Capitou is guilty. And you can read it if you're on Capitou's side, that she's innocent. Um, just some other things that I really enjoy and my students have enjoyed, the fact that there are, he's, he's very entertaining. The, the texts are full of jokes, they're full of like typographical quirks, as Viv was mentioning before, there's a, there's a chapter called the age-old dialogue of Adam and Eve in

• 39:46Speaker 04

  The Posthumous Memoirs, which there are no words, there are ellipses and there is punctuation. And you can tell from the number of question marks and exclamation marks that this is an argument between lovers. Yeah, so we become part of the storytelling process and we sort of, we, we search for these clues and gaps and Easter eggs as well, like Easter eggs that they have in films where he makes a reference to a particular place or a quotation, which we then go and follow up and find out what extra information that adds to the story.

• 40:22Speaker 05

  Okay, Viv, a big question for you. How did Machado change Brazilian literature?

• 40:29Speaker 04

  That, that, that is very, um, I think he, he changed it forever. He gave us, uh, he gave us a body of work that will go on for, uh, for another hundred years and we could still be writing about the short stories. There's still a lot to be written about his, uh, his novels. And I think it's a love and hate relationship. So we have Mario Giandraghi, who was one of our greatest modernist, uh, novelist. He wrote in a very avant-garde style and he used to characterize Machado Justiz as this classic writer, very much

• 41:11Speaker 04

  a Greek, that wrote in the models of an European tradition. But I would, and I would, I would argue against that, especially in terms of science. So, and Claudia was talking about, about slavery, about the issue of race. At the end of the 19th century, we have the beginning of eugenics. Nina Rodriguez was writing in a similar way as Cesare Lombroso in Europe, identifying the race with criminality, certain aspects of genetic predisposition. And of course, Machado Justiz was not.

• 41:56Speaker 04

  Only Afro-descendants, but he also had a strange illness. His condition, his illnesses, which was epilepsy. And it was believed that it was associated with degeneracy, with the mixture of races. And in a way, when Machado just says, wrote stories like The Alienist to Ualienista, he was trying to criticize also these new scientists. Of course, in the 19th century Brazil, we don't have a big difference between the intellectual or the scientists, they all kind of wrote about everything.

• 42:42Speaker 04

  And he identified a problem with this kind of discourse of the whitening of the race. And that was what happened in the beginning of the century in Brazil. The whitening of Brazil was a governmental project to bring European immigrants from Portugal, Spain and Italy to create this kind of whitening of the race. And this will happen at the end of the 19th century, the generation of 1870s. And Machado, in one of his critical texts, which made him hated by many intellectuals like Silvio Romero,

• 43:24Speaker 04

  he said, this generation doesn't read Spencer and Darwin properly. If you want to understand it properly, you should apply a scientific method. And this is exactly what he did in his short stories. He applied the scientific method to criticize what was happening in this change in society.

• 43:46Speaker 05

  Thank you very much, Viv. Anna Claudia, finally for you, what do you think Machado's appeal is today? He remains the lodestar of Brazilian literature. Certainly among writers and scholars, he enjoys a huge reputation. But Machado is not that well-known by a general public outside Brazil. Why do you think that's the case?

• 44:11Speaker 06

  Well, I think the case is with Brazilian literature in general, or, you know, literature in Portuguese language. We have our big neighbor or neighbors that write in Spanish. And the United States, you know, is a big market for Spanish literature. So it's... But I think Machado and all the Brazilian writers like Clarice de Specto, Jorge Amado, and Machado with the new wave of new translations are now actually bringing Machado to the shop windows of libraries and to the interest of newspapers. So there are more articles.

• 44:51Speaker 06

  And for me, Machado is the type of writer that teaches how to read and how to doubt narratives, which is something very important nowadays. So he teaches us basically not to trust the media system. So he's writing novels, he's writing for periodicals. He's criticizing the information that is circulating in Brazilian periodicals all the time. He's mocking those who actually own the newspapers, the bookshops. And this is an excellent reading skill to acquire.

• 45:32Speaker 06

  So we can read his novels for that reason, but also just for the pleasure of his prose, which is so diverse, witty, ironic. And readers who enjoy Mopassan, Gogol, Jane Austen, Dickens, they are going to find something interesting in Machado and enjoy the prose by itself.

• 45:55Speaker 05

  My thanks to Claire Williams, Ana Claudia Surianni da Silva, and Viviane Carvalho da Anunciação. Next week, the Delian League: How Ancient Athens Used and Abused Its Alliance Against Persia. Thank you for listening.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  Time Podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests.

• 46:21Speaker 04

  The alienista. I still wanted to talk about alienista.

• 46:26Speaker 05

  Well, talk about now is your now is your chance, Viv, to talk about alienista, the alienist.

• 46:33Speaker 04

  I think I think alienista is as important as Brascobas and as important as Don Casmo and it's usually looked down. He's disregarded.

• 46:43Speaker 05

  So why why is it so important?

• 46:45Speaker 04

  It's a short story. It's a it's a novella. It's it's slightly shorter and it's about this, the greatest doctor of the greatest physician in Brazil, Portugal and of the two Spains. And he's basically the Don Quixote of science who comes to who returns from Europe to the village of Itaguaii and he wants to find the cause of madness and he dedicates himself to the study of madness. He he creates the greenhouse, the Casa Verde, where he starts to to create a catalogue

• 47:26Speaker 04

  of illnesses and very in a very absurd way, he starts to put everybody in in this Casa Verde when everybody rebels against him and nothing happens to him. He continues putting people in his mental asylum. At the end of the story, he realizes there is no mad person in Itaguaii. I am the only mad person. And then he locks himself up and dies alone and dies alone. And it's one of Machado's critique to the new vision of Brazil, of of this intellectuality,

• 48:07Speaker 04

  which is replacing religion by science, positivism, creating a new society, but reproducing the same mistakes, reproducing the same social relationships, the same structure.

• 48:25Speaker 05

  So it seems to me that one of the real strengths of his work is that Those things which he critiques, aspects of Brazilian society, the elite, the way the elite ignores the mass of other Brazilians, primarily Afro-Brazilians, the inequality, the entitlement. These are phenomena which, when you go to Brazil today, they're all still there, they're all visible. Machado was writing about Brazil a hundred years ago, but he's also writing about Brazil today. Is that a fair enough comment?

• 49:04Speaker 04

  And I think that is, he captures that zeitgeist of Brazil, but he also captures our way of dealing with things, which is sometimes we joke, we make, we are, we are very much about not dealing with things directly. We, we kind of weird, we gossip about it, and then we move on.

• 49:32Speaker 05

  And he's initially seen as a romantic author with a capital R, and then he becomes what's described as a realist author. But what does realism mean within the Brazilian context?

• 49:49Speaker 04

  It's very, it's very strange that a dead author is the father of realism in Brazil, and that shows a lot about, about us as Brazilians. Well, we are realist, but yeah, that was before the Latin American magic realism. And in a way, this way of dealing with things in a very oblique way.

• 50:13Speaker 05

  Oblique way, exactly, that's right.

• 50:15Speaker 04

  The, the great British researcher into Machado de Assis, John Gledson, wrote a book about the deceptive realism of.

• 50:22Speaker 06

  Doncasmojo, and that's what it is. It's skewed, it's oblique, it's realism with joy, with moments of shade and shock. And I was thinking that the films of Cléber Mendonça Figno, who's a contemporary filmmaker, may have something, may be sort of a like 21st century reinvention of this idea of presenting a realist version of urban Brazil, but with little pockets of magical realism. So shadows of little Afro-Brazilian boys running across the screen, or there's a famous scene with, in his film Neighboring

• 51:05Speaker 06

  Sounds, with suddenly a fountain of blood, which there are lots of allusions to the slave-owning past. And he writes films about landowners in contemporary Brazil.

• 51:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, in the northeast of the country where the reality is much more present than in Rio or São Paulo.

• 51:25Speaker 05

  So it seems there was, I mean, what happens in the 1930s in Brazil is, is that you start to get the creation of the myth of Brazil being a non-racial society, where everyone, it doesn't matter what you're born, you have the same equal opportunities. But that, of course, doesn't reflect the economic reality in Brazil. But tell me, Machado was, as you pointed out, Viv, he was writing at a time where there was this huge campaign to whiten Brazilian society. Who was driving that amongst the elites? Why did they want to whiten Brazilian society?

• 52:05Speaker 04

  I think that was, it was more towards the 20th century. In the 1870s, it was the beginning of this wave of new ideas that arrived in the country from Europe, and eugenics was one of them. And one of the explanations why Brazil was underdeveloped, was behind Europe.

• 52:32Speaker 04

  Was because we were mostly a mixed ra- a black nation or an Afro-Brazilian race. And that was um that was because of Jaime do Nina Rodriguez's work on the on the Brazilian criminal. For example, he would analyze criminals in Brazil as being predisposed to to that. And that was the the republican government. Well, we need to to make sure that Brazil is not going to make this this mistake again.

• 53:07Speaker 05

  So they were associating modernity with whiteness and European-ness.

• 53:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:13Speaker 05

  Um, I have to say that attitude towards criminality um and Afro-Brazilian persists to this to this day in Brazil, um sadly. So, and in terms of the literature, after Machado, Brazilian literature must have gained quite a deal of self-confidence because of his work. And he becomes recognized as the sort of this towering figure fairly early on in Brazil. Would you see people like Jorge Armado, who's writing a little later or later on Clarice de Lispector?

• 53:52Speaker 05

  These are also great, great figures of Brazilian literature. Do they all admit a debt to Machado?

• 54:01Speaker 04

  I think not directly, but you you can certainly Lima Barreto, for example, an author that has quite a great deal of humor, of a critical uh voice. Mario Giandraghi, for example, he criticized Michel Giasis, but if you if you analyze it, if you read his first novels, it's it's very much psychological analysis that are present in Machado from his the the beginning of his of his work when he was a romantic. His greatest difference between uh between him and Jose de Alencar was the psychological analysis of these female uh characters.

• 54:45Speaker 05

  Okay, final question before we get our tea and coffee. Much deserved. What would you recommend to readers who don't know Machado Giasis? What should you read first? Claire?

• 54:59Speaker 04

  I I love Don Casemurho. I mean, I really love the character of Capitú. And I always hope that I'm going to spot a clue every time I read it that's going to prove that she was innocent. I will go for the the aliens. There is a there is a good translation now, and I think it is. It's short, you can read over the weekend, and it's it's massively entertaining and extremely relevant for our society.

• 55:29Speaker 05

  Anna Claudia.

• 55:30Speaker 06

  Um, since I cannot choose Don Casemurho, I'm not going to to repeat it. Um, I would say father against mother. And another short story in which, you know, the main character is a woman, are chapped on heads. They they all have been translated into English, so you can see the both sides of Machado. You can also learn a lot about Rio de Janeiro, social life. Uh, in in the old town of Rio de Janeiro, Rua do Vidor, consumer habits in Rio de Janeiro with chapter on heads.

• 56:03Speaker 05

  Rio's already the capital at this point.

• 56:05Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 56:06Speaker 05

  Yeah. So no longer, no longer Salvador.

• 56:11Speaker 04

  And if you get the chance to go to Rio, you should visit the Café Colombo, which is where Machado used to hang out. Um, with, and it's a wonderful 19th century café, still open today with beautiful dark paneled walls and uh, uh, wall-length mirrors.

• 56:30Speaker 05

  Very glittery.

• 56:31Speaker 04

  Yes, it is. It is. You have to queue. And you should also visit the Café Capitú, which is in Cosmevelu, up up the hill, where you can purchase a pena da gallofa, the pen of mirthful merriment, filled with the ink of melancholy, which is what Machado says, what Brash says he's writing his story with.

• 56:56Speaker 05

  Well, on that point.

• 56:58Speaker 00

  Would you like to your coffee?

• 57:00Speaker 05

  Tea, please.

• 57:01Speaker 04

  Tea, please. Tea, tea.

• 57:03Speaker 00

  Four teas. Thank you very much.

• 57:06Speaker 04

  In Our Time with Misha Glenny is produced by Simon Tillotson, and it's a BBC Studios production. I'm Jamie Bartlett, and for BBC Radio 4, I'll be looking at how fakery took over the world. No, no, hang on, hang on, sorry. You're not Jamie Bartlett, I'm Jamie Bartlett.

• 57:25Speaker 06

  Really? Well, who am I then? I'm afraid you're not real, pal. You're just an imitation chatbot I created to help me make this series on modern fakery and why it's everywhere. Sounds good. What's going to be in it? Well, there's a lot. 1980s professional wrestling, dodgy academics, AI psychosis, Covid vaccines, sceptics. What's it called? Everything is fake and nobody cares with me, Jamie Bartlett. And me, Jimmy Botlett.

• 57:53Speaker 05

  Listen first on BBC Sounds.

• 58:00Speaker 05

  Hello, Misha Glennie here. Did you know you can get episodes of In Our Time 28 days early with a subscription to the BBC website and app? Just head to bbc.com/subscribe to find out more.