Questão 2930032

At the age of forty, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis invented a narrative device that transformed him from a provincial, rather conventional writer into a world-class novelist. This leap is usually explained biographically, and psychologically. Critics like to say that Machado, who nearly went blind, lost his illusions and passed from romanticism to realism — and so on. Explanations of this sort, however, are beside the point, since anyone can contract an illness, shed illusions or accept a new literary doctrine without becoming a great writer. But if we consider the change as one of literary form, the terms of the argument alter. Machado’s innovation then appears as an aesthetic solution to objective problems, lodged not simply within his own earlier fiction, but in the development of the Brazilian novel and indeed of Brazilian culture at large: perhaps even of ex-colonial societies in general.

In 1880 Machado published The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, the first world-class Brazilian novel. What had changed with this novel? Its stroke of genius was to move the narrative point of view to the upper-class position. Hitherto, the narrators in Machado’s novels had always sympathized with those in a precarious, socially dependent situation, fretting over the arbitrary and unreliable behaviour of those who called the shots, as if to ask how such dependents could persuade their overlords to behave in a civilized manner, to make society more just and liveable for all. In other words, Machado’s unreliable narrator has a distinctly nineteenth-century class substance, and as a device this is its secret.

SCHWARZ, R. A Brazilian Breakthrough. In: New Left Review. 36, nov./dec., 2005. p. 91- 107 (adapted).

O texto apresenta um elemento inovador fundamental da ficção de Machado de Assis, que refere-se ao (à)