Monday, March 28, 2016

Fusion, transfusion, diffusion, confusion, and profusion - Machado de Assis at his Dalkeyest

Four years ago I read three collections of the short stories of the Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis.  With a bit of scrounging in anthologies I ended up reading forty of his stories.  Since then three more collections have been published in English, increasing both the quantity of good stories available and also the redundancy.  The novella The Psychiatrist or The Alienist (1881-2) is now published, and in print, in three different translations, for example.

Good news, but confusing.  Now there is room for specialization.  I read Selected Short Stories (2014), translated by Rhett McNeil, published by Dalkey Archive, and the title is accurate – these stories (1878-86), including The Psychiatrist,  are specifically selected to show the most experimental side of Machado.  These are the Dalkeyest of his stories.

There was once a barrel-maker and demagogue named Bernardino, who, in the realm of cosmography, professed a belief that the world was an enormous tunnel of marmalade, and in the realm of politics insisted that the throne should belong to the people.  (“The Dictionary,” 90)

The barrel-maker becomes king and through a series of events kicks off a language reform, including a Dictionary of Babel:

There wasn’t a single phrase that bore resemblance to the spoken language.  Consonants scrambled atop consonants, vowels were diluted by other vowels, words with two syllables now had seven or eight and vice versa, everything was jumbled, mixed up; a complete absence of vigor, of elegance: a language of shards and tatters.  (93)

That last phrase, especially, has a pure Dalkey flavor to it.

In the next story, “The Academies of Siam,” a king and his favorite concubine switch bodies – why not? – and learn a valuable lesson about their advisors.  “She couldn’t understand how it was that fourteen men gathered together in an academy could be the light of the world, yet, individually be a bunch of camels” (103).  In the next, “The Priest, or The Metaphysics of Style,” Machado describes the journey of an adjective and a noun in a priest’s brain, before they are joined romantically and written on a page.

Give me your hand, dear lady, my reader; stay close to me, good sir, good reader.  Let’s trudge along with them.  (108)

Conceptual, satirical, odd, that is the rule in this collection.  Lots of parables of artistic creation.  “Fusion, transfusion, diffusion, confusion, and profusion of beings and objects” (“Ex Cathedra,” 129)

The playful conceptual stories show an essential side of Machado de Assis.  It is hardly his only side, though.  We will have to go elsewhere for his poignant social protests (“Father against Mother”) or his Chekhovian psychological insight (“Midnight Mass”).  Aside from the political parody of The Psychiatrist, there is surprisingly little of Brazil in Selected Stories.  There is plenty about Brazil in stories in Machado’s other modes.

Perhaps someday someone will publish in English Machado’s stories as they were originally published.  A complete and non-redundant set would be handy.  Still, it’s not so bad now, is it?

17 comments:

  1. a brazilian writer, i take it? i've heard the name but never read any; that one quote sounded slightly borgesian...

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  2. I think I've asked this before (but I forget doing so, and I forget the answer), so I'll try again: How do you make your reading decisions, some of which seem to include some very obscure writers? (Note: My decisions are almost always accidents; see my most recent posting for an example -- http://thewritersalmanac.blogspot.com/2016/03/death-is-now-my-neighbor-and-few-other.html -- but I with my Swiss-cheese mind am the confused exception who must rely upon serendipity and impulse.)

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  3. Brazilian, yes, Brazil's greatest writer, or such is the conventional opinion. He's a true original, writing Borgesian stories in the 1880s, as well as other kinds of works, often of the highest quality.

    Several years ago, I read five of his novels as well as the three collections of stories. I probably should, this time, have written more about who Machado was. I should learn to repeat myself more. I wrote those other posts about him a long time ago, in some sense.

    The Psychiatrist is a great starting point - fierce, funny, relevant, etc.

    As far as "reading decisions" go, I just read what I want to read, constrained by the availability of books. Maybe I ask, as I finish a book, now do I want something similar or something different?

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    1. I have begun reading all of Clarice Lispector and she certainly is in the running for Brazil's greatest writer.

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    2. You'll have to take that up with Brazilian readers, Mel. I don't know enough to say. Machado is Brazil's - who is famous enough - Brazil's Mark Twain, the author everyone reads - or is assigned - in high school.

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    3. As much as I love Lispector, I must say that Machado is up there with Melville, James, Faulkner and Borges among the very greatest fiction writers the American continents have produced.

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    4. Ha, those are exactly the names I would list.

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  4. i've read quite a bit of borges; don't know nearly enough about what literary figures influenced him, though. guess i'll have to get ahold of some machado. tx

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    1. I've read so much by Borges, non-fiction-wise, and I don't remember mentions of Machado; it could be that at the time my mind wasn't focused on Machado to notice. It's telling, though, that he doesn't include him in any of the two lists of favourite books he compiled.

      If you read John Barth's two first books of essays, though, you'll find several mentions of Machado. I don't think he and Borges are that similar; Machado liked too much to write about people and relationships; and even his metafictions are in the service of showing the mental idiosyncrasy of the narrator. Borges instead started from a description of an object or a concept and seldom moved into human territory.

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    2. It's really just that "Dictionary" story that stands out as Borges-like. Restless, imaginative Machado anticipated so many writers, even if just here and there.

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  5. I've read A Chapter of Hats and The Psychiatrist as well as Dom Casmurro but this sounds like a collection that takes his work even further out there! Definitely agree that a more orderly translation would be good - I never understand why we can't just have equivalent collections in English.

    Tim - love the concept of a Swiss cheese mind - that is *so* what I've got!!

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  6. I don't know that Machado did influence Borges, actually. I doubt it. Machado's novel Dom Casmurro (1899) is so strangely Nabokovian that Brian Boyd has written a piece comparing the two writers, but there is no hint Nabokov read Machado. Everyone was behind Machado, that's all.

    A Chapter of Hats is a nicely balanced collection.

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  7. I've yet to read Machado other than a cursory glance through Brás Cubas, but "Dalkeyest" certainly gets my vote for the Oxford Dictionnaries Word of the Year 2016, Literary Category.

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  8. All that body switching talk in ye olde post reminds me that I ought to return to Machado's Quincas Borba this year. Have not tried his short stories as yet, but what I've read of his novels makes me sad that he's regarded as an "obscure" writer even by some of your more than usually well-read readers. What a treat!

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  9. Such a treat, those late novels. I never did get to the last one.

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