Search

In this essay, we analyze a short story by Machado de Assis, "Um homem célebre," in which the reader follows the frustrated trajectory of the character Pestana, a pianist and composer of polkas. Our approach is based on two theories that are not obviously compatible: Antonio Candido's perspective of the formation of Brazilian Literature, and the notion of torsion as outlined by August Ferdinand Moebius and commented by Jacques Lacan. Our aim is to demonstrate that, by maintaining an ironic distance in relation to the events of the story, the narrator performs the formative synthesis of the torsion whose existence the character is unable to perceive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has become commonplace to describe Machado de Assis's characters and narrators as deeper than those of his contemporaries, and his novels as representations more creatively ambiguous than most literary depictions of nineteenth-century Brazil. In this essay I argue that throughout his novels psychological depth is a function of moral imagination; and a troubled moral imagination is a necessary condition for the literary representation of the modern self. Machado's protagonists are able to fashion the public presentation of their selves by imagining alternatives to their origins, desires, and social predicaments. They have in their pasts a burden the,v need to overcome, and while doing so they find themselves in conditions of freedom and harm. Evil then arises as a consequence of moral dynamism, in solar as it becomes a project for undoing the other. The genesis or a radical conception of free will and evil in Machado's narratives goes back to his translation of Victor Hugo's The Toilers of the Sea (1866). His concern with a more meticulous characterization of inwardness deepens between Iaiá Garcia (1878) and Dom Casmurro (1899), when adopting the structure or a confessional narrative he arrives at a balance between disguised motives (malice), double chronology (nostalgia), and human life as an unfolding, reversible, and self-aware process (metamorphosis). To frame Machado's strategy for depicting moral change, I take from Augustine's Confessions the suggestion that retrospection is the only way of restoring the identity of someone whose self is marked by his or her sense of dissimilarity with the past. Finally, from Kant and Paul Ricoeur I draw the elements for a further consideration of evil as an invitation to think differently about seeing, judging, and narrating human life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]