In Our Time - Machado de Assis

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Starting point is 00:01:29 Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now or search for Good Bad Billionaire wherever you get your BBC podcasts. 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, Mashado Giasis 1839 to 1908, is considered the towering figure of modern Brazilian literature,

Starting point is 00:02:10 with a global reputation, although arguably not as much as he deserves. The descendant of slaves, Mashado wrote many of his novels and almost 200 short stories before Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, 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,

Starting point is 00:02:41 not a hundred years ago. Well, with me to discuss Mashado Giasis, 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

Starting point is 00:02:59 at the University of Oxford, and fellow of St. Peter's College, and Viviani Cavalio da Annunciation, affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. And Viviani, it's to you that I come first. Can you tell us something about Machado's early life in Rio de Janeiro? Mashado just sees her sometimes called the greatest Brazilian writer,

Starting point is 00:03:29 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 Jassiz was born in Rio de Janeiro, a burgeoning city. He was the son of Francisco, José Jassiz, and Maria. La Paul Gine, Machado Jassiz. His father was a painter, a descendant from freed slaves, and his mother was an Azorean washer woman. He grew up in an affluent neighborhood, but connected to a working class family. He was baptized by Donna Maria Jose Jimendonza, the wife of a senator. So he grew up going in and out

Starting point is 00:04:32 of her mansion and going back to his working class family. So what was his relationship with the wealthy family? She was his godmother and he would go to her house to have meals and to be. 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, a, wealthy family. 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. And what were the prospects for a young boy like Mashado at the time in Brazil, given his

Starting point is 00:05:27 background and this relationship of dependency with the wealthy family? 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. So although illiteracy in Brazil at this time is very high, I think around 70%,

Starting point is 00:06:10 he nonetheless has access to books and reading because of that relationship with the wealthy family. Is that right? Not exactly, because what happened is that he lost both his mother and his father at an early age, And he was brought up by his stem mother, Maria Ines, who was an Afro-Brazilian woman. And Lucia Miguel Pereira in her biography of Machado Jaciz 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.

Starting point is 00:06:56 in formal education didn't suit him, so he would learn French with Madame Gallo, the baker, classics Greek, Latin with father Silvera Sarmiento, the priest. When he was 17, 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. So Anna Claudia Soriani da Silva, he is working associated with a bookshop,

Starting point is 00:07:43 which is run by a publisher in Rio. How does he start writing? What's his first break as a writer? Machado starts to collaborate with the local press, so Paola 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,

Starting point is 00:08:21 print culture in Brazil. So with the end of censorship in 1821, all of a sudden we had lots of books being published, so a proper print culture, 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 sewing 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. So he wrote

Starting point is 00:09:21 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. And these were largely women's magazines, is that right?

Starting point is 00:09:45 Yes. Why is he so popular with women at the time? 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 a periodical. 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. So he had a very diverse readership, both men, when he was publishing short stories for political newspapers and women in these fashion magazines.

Starting point is 00:10:31 Thank you. Claire Williams, Brazilian literature comes late in the day. Was it in any sense ostracized during the slavery period? 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.

Starting point is 00:11:20 until slavery had been abolished. Why did it take so long for slavery to be abolished? 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.

Starting point is 00:11:44 So slave trade ended in 1850 and gradually slavery was abolished. in various waves through various laws, and in 1888, it was abolished. More or less at the same time that Brazil becomes a republic. Exactly. So 1889, Brazil becomes a republic. Gets rid of the monarchy. Let's look at one of Mashado's most famous works. That's the posthumous memoirs of Bras Cubas. Can you describe that novel to us?

Starting point is 00:12:16 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 realise that it's posthumous memoirs. So there's something strange going on. So he's dead when he's writing it? He's dead when he's writing it.

Starting point is 00:12:35 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 done. 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.

Starting point is 00:13:08 It also gives him the chance to look back over his whole life and draw conclusions about 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.

Starting point is 00:13:40 He doesn't even need to work. And he could do anything with his learning. he's 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,

Starting point is 00:13:57 he gets. 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. So that's what I want to go on to, Viviani. Can you tell us what the story,

Starting point is 00:14:15 social critique in this novel is really about? 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, Bras 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 the... That is a big joke than Mashado plays with the reader. How did I become a politician? There is nothing to be read about it.

Starting point is 00:14:57 In the following chapter, well, I am in my house. I am with my slaves. I'm with my son, my chair, but I keep thinking about the work that I don't have. This is very typical of the higher classes. They have everything and they want to love. little bit more in the Brazilian situation of the 19th 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 that little thing that

Starting point is 00:15:34 didn't happen. Anna Clouder, that sense of entitlement, which Viviani described there, it sounds quite a lot like the Brazil of today. There's not much of a plot in this novel. So what is it that inspires people to read the book? Well, in terms of the entitlement, Machado is writing to a niche of readers. So the literacy levels were actually quite low in Brazil. It was 30% 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. So he moves away, from the sentimental, ominousant narrator of his first novels. And in the preface of this specific novel,

Starting point is 00:16:25 he says that he's now being in his second phase and he's heavily influenced by Stern and Tristan Shandy. 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?

Starting point is 00:17:12 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 well received? 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.

Starting point is 00:17:32 And it had all sorts of positive reception that read in favor of this very witty, charming narrator. You mean almost as though they were celebrating the factlessness of the Brazilian elite? Exactly, yes. And actually not seeing that a lot that is silence. For example, Brascuba 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.

Starting point is 00:18:12 see that the silence is more important that what is said. Right. So reception changes as Brazil develops and people start to look at it in different ways. Claire Williams, the narrator here is a man, Bras Kubas. But how strong are women in Mashado's work? Women are crucial. So before Brash Kubosh, before the memoirs, he'd published four other novels. This is his fifth novel. And the third and fourth have female protagonists and the titles are female names,

Starting point is 00:18:48 Elena and Jaya 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 bear their shoulders. And kissing them is close to heaven.

Starting point is 00:19:22 And 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 Capitou, who's the heroine of the seventh novel, Don Cajmouro. That title, Dom Casmuro, has a double meaning which we can talk about later. Well, do tell us now what it means. Well, Don is a title as in Don Quixote. It's a title that means nobility, but here it's used ironically.

Starting point is 00:20:06 And Casmouhu is a term which means grumpy, basically. So it's so grumpy. 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 realize 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 Quasman. who when I didn't take his poems seriously. And I accepted that title.

Starting point is 00:20:45 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? 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,

Starting point is 00:21:10 get very frustrated when they don't know what they're thinking and are seduced by their beauty to a certain extent. How has America shaped the world? I'm Asma Khalid, host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. As the United States marks its 250 year anniversary, we've been exploring the surprising and often hidden ways. The U.S. has shaped the modern world. And today on the show, we answer your questions about this moment and what to expect in the years to come. From the BBC, it's the United States at 250. Listen to the global story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 00:21:52 Hi, I'm Simon Jack. I'm Zing Singh. And together we host Good Bad Billionaire. The podcast exploring how some of the wealthiest people on the planet made their money. And we are back with a new season. From sporting superstars to music moguls and celebrity CEOs. We'll be taking a closer look at the lives and fortunes of some of the world's richest people. And asking you to decide if they're good, bad or just another billionaire.

Starting point is 00:22:14 Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now or search for Good Bad Billionaire wherever you get your BBC podcasts. How did the United States build the largest soft power empire in the world with the help of some tiny metal objects? I'm Tristan Redmond, one of the hosts of the Global Story Podcasts from the BBC. To mark 250 years of the United States, we speak to Roman Mars of 99% invisible. This soft power, this influence was an incredible. invention. For more, listen to the global story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 00:22:58 Viv, we've just heard from Claire about Don Casmoor. 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? Well, it's all about jealousy. It's all about this woman, Capitou, who has watery eyes under He was 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, Escobad, 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,

Starting point is 00:23:45 and after he comes out, he keeps thinking, well, poor does the Mona. She is not guilty. But what would have happened if she was guilty? Ask Capitou. And then he tries to think about ways to punish Capitou. And in many ways, this Casmuro has deceived the readers and literary critics for 50 years. It took an American critic, Helen Caldwell, in the 80s, 90s to write to 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.

Starting point is 00:24:36 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 Casmuro. And so there is doubt. We simply don't know. But his name is Bento Santiago. Bento and Don Casmuro are the same person.

Starting point is 00:25:00 So Saint-Iago. Yago is within his name. So Machado is as a brilliant author that he is. He's already showing us. Yago is inside his mind. So Don Casmuho is both a fellow and Iago at the same time, both the duped one and the person who's suggesting that Capitou is unfaithful. Anna Claudia, this is probably his best-known work.

Starting point is 00:25:36 How does it highlight his strengths as a writer? 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, Balsak, Dickens, Cervantes, different traditions of novels. And throughout his career, he experimented with different novel traditions. So in Don Casmuro, we see this all together. It's at the same time a sentimental novel.

Starting point is 00:26:13 It's an elegy. so he misses Capitou, so he has a sort of hate and love relationship with Capitou, and he misses her. He writes a memoir, which is at the same time an autobiography, but an elegy. So he doesn't kill Capitou, she leaves him for Europe. 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. Can you just explain what the dependent is because this is an important concept in Brazil but not so

Starting point is 00:26:55 familiar here? Yeah, so Machad 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.

Starting point is 00:27:23 Viv, you wanted to come in briefly there. Yeah, because I think that the drama is very important. In Don Casmore, of course it is from Shakespeare. Machado Jassiz was himself. He began his career writing poetry, but also right in theater. 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.

Starting point is 00:27:57 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 comprehensive. to the Balkans, but people still party all the time. It's a very lively society. And I wonder if Mashado captures any of that liveliness as well. I think so, because his novels and short stories, they all have a dark side because of the plot,

Starting point is 00:28:31 characters owning slaves, etc. But they are joyful, and that reflects a characteristic of Brazilian, Brazilian culture and Brazilians nowadays, if you go to Brazil for the first time, you think everybody's happy. And if you read these statistics, not really. Lots of people are not happy, but we are joyful. So in Brazil, you learn very quickly

Starting point is 00:28:54 to distinguish between being joyful and happy. And I think part of his wit and one contribution for the formation of Brazilian literature is exactly how to convey this very specific, unique Brazilian humor into literature, which was then, of course, expanded, incorporated by Lima Barreto, John de Rio, and all the writers that came after him. Claire, do you think that he was writing for women?

Starting point is 00:29:27 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 recognize what, was in these novels? Very possibly. I think 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 Brasch Kubas because society will fail just as they have failed. And I think one of the things that's interesting is that in these novels,

Starting point is 00:30:07 None of the protagonists have children who survive past the end of the book. They are the end of a generation in a way. That's really important because Brazil needed to reinvent itself, create new citizens who were forward-looking. 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 that elite, that middle-class, who are often seen as preventing the development because of characters like Don Casmouh.

Starting point is 00:30:45 Anna Claudia, Marciardo has been criticised for not speaking out enough about slavery as clearly as he might have done. Is that a fair assessment? 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

Starting point is 00:31:28 who would believe that changing, abolishing slavery or changing from the monarchy to republic would change anything. He's writing for the elite and talking and embracing the point of view of the elite and leaving a lot unsaid about the working class and slavery. But as one of the critics says Alfredo Bosse, a Brazilian critic from the University of San Paulo, Machado worked around asymmetric relations that were very close to each other. So father against mother. That's the title of the story.

Starting point is 00:32:08 Yes, yes. It's a short story and it was published in 1906, 18 years after the end of slavery. And Machado just sees, constructs a narrator presenting elements of slavery in 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, Arminda, and the slave catcher whose wife is also pregnant. So as readers, the narrator doesn't pass any judgment and we are put in this moral dilemma.

Starting point is 00:33:00 So this was a way for him to confront. the system, talk about it, expose without being judgmental, leaving for the reader to make the conclusions. Claire, there's a sense in Mashado's work that he really despises mediocrity. Where do you find examples of this? There are lots of examples of this, and we've already touched on the fact that Brasqouba achieved very little in his life, despite having all the wealth, all the training, all the education, all the charm to do this.

Starting point is 00:33:38 So Bras 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 Mashadabud, but also for the reader. He has no initiative. This is what the new generation need. They need initiative. they need to take responsibility.

Starting point is 00:34:03 And the last chapter of Brasch Kubas is called negatives. And it's all about what Bras didn't do in his life. So he says, I did not have children and thus did not bequeath to any creature the legacy of our misery. He's listed all the things that he didn't do, which is basically what the whole story is about. And also I would say that although he's much, Shaddo is described as a realist.

Starting point is 00:34:33 It seems to me as though there are the seeds of modernism in what Mashado is doing as well. Anna, Claudia? Yes, so I think Don Casmu, for example, is a novel that is almost impressionist. We have 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 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, in the case of Lord Jim and Machado de Assis Capitou.

Starting point is 00:35:23 So what we have is the impressions, the memories of the main narrative, about that character. So we are getting very close to modernism, but Machado is still grounded in the 19th century. So his plots are very grounded in a patriarchic, slave-owning society, and the characters reflect that society. But he also, he writes quite economically,

Starting point is 00:35:49 which, if I might say, is not necessarily a Brazilian trait, of short book, short sentences, short chapters. He's a very efficient writer. 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

Starting point is 00:36:10 address you, as if, you know, they've just, you've just left the room and come back in, and you are their dear reader. Yes, that addressing of the audience is quite striking, isn't it? 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

Starting point is 00:36:32 sometimes it's 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, yes, so what do we do with this? So he's always spoken. You're like, yeah, let's, in the theater when you break, the fourth wall and it's like, now you make your own decision

Starting point is 00:37:01 about the novel, about the story, about society, about what you think of the world. Claire, why do you, or indeed your students, why do you find him so fresh today? Well, I think he covers very juicy topics, such universal topics about love, about parenting. So sometimes I read Memoirius Pastomus as a kind of

Starting point is 00:37:25 parenting manual, how not to bring up your children. Do impose discipline. And then also, Donkashmojo is a kind of marriage counselling, can be read as a kind of marriage counselling guide. So it's very up to date in the topics that it's dealing with. And then I very much enjoy texts where the reader has to participate. My Shadow's novels are full of gaps and holes and clues which the reader has to put together. Once we realise that the narrator is a narrator, he's not the author, we have to deal with that sort of that gap, the fact that there are different versions of reality being portrayed here. And we also realise that the narrators have their own agenda.

Starting point is 00:38:18 So for example, in Donkaj Mujo, Bento is trying to prove throughout the novel that in fact that Capito is guilty and you can read it if you're on Capitou's side that she's innocent. Just some other things that I really enjoy and my students have enjoyed the fact that he's very entertaining.

Starting point is 00:38:40 The texts are full of jokes, they're full of like typographical quirks as Viv was mentioning before. There's a chapter called the age old dialogue of Adam and Eve in 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 search for these clues and gaps and Easter eggs as well, like Easter eggs

Starting point is 00:39:17 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. Okay, Viv, a big question for you. How did Mashado change Brazilian literature? That is very, I think he changed it forever. He gave us a body of work that will go on for another hundred. years and we could still be writing about the short stories. There's still a lot to be written about his novels.

Starting point is 00:39:57 And I think it's a love and hate relationship. So we have Mario Jandraji, who was one of our greatest modernist novelist. He wrote in a very avant-garde style. And he used to characterize Mashado Jassiz as this classic writer, very much a Greek that wrote in the models of an European tradition. But I would argue against that, especially in terms of science. So, Na Klaude was talking about slavery, about the issue of race. At the end of the 19th century, we have the beginning of eugenics.

Starting point is 00:40:44 Nina Rodriguez was writing in a sense. similar way as Cesare Lombroso in Europe, identifying the race with criminality, certain aspects of genetic predisposition. And of course, Mashado Jase was not only Afro-descendant, but he also had a strange illness, his condition, his illnesses, which was epilepsy. And it was believed that it was. It was associated with degeneracy, with the mixture of races. And in a way, when Mashad D'Soujad Jassiz wrote stories like the alienist to Wallienista, he was trying to criticize also these new scientists.

Starting point is 00:41:36 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. 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 the skis. this kind of whitening of the race. And this happened at the end of the 19th century, the generation of 1870s.

Starting point is 00:42:21 And Mashado in one of his critical texts, which made him hated by many intellectuals like Silvio Romero, 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.

Starting point is 00:42:52 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 Mashado is not that well known by a general public outside Brazil. Why do you think that's the case? Well, I think the case is with Brazilian literature in general or literature in Portuguese language. We have our big neighbor or neighbors that write in Spanish,

Starting point is 00:43:30 and the United States is a big market for Spanish literature. But I think Machado, and all the Brazilian writers like Clarice Lispecto, George 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. And for me, Machado is the type of writer that teaches how to read and how to doubt narratives,

Starting point is 00:44:05 which is something very important in nowadays. So he teaches us basically how to be 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.

Starting point is 00:44:38 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. My thanks to Claire Williams, Anna Claudia, Suriani da Silva and Viviani Carvalho da Annunciation.

Starting point is 00:45:10 Next week, the Deelian League, how ancient Athens used and abused its alliance against Persia. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests. The Wallienista. I still wanted to talk about Wali Anista. Well, talk about, now is your chance, we've, to talk about uallienista, the alienist. I think Ualienista is as important as Brascuba's and as important as Don Casmojo, and it's usually look down. So why is it so important?

Starting point is 00:45:51 It's a short story. It's a novella. It's slightly shorter. And it's about this, the greatest doctor of the greatest physics. in Brazil, Portugal and of the two Spains. And he's basically the Don Quixote of science who returns from Europe to the village of Itaguay. And he wants to find the cause of madness. And he dedicates himself to the study of madness. He creates the greenhouse, the Casa Verde, where he starts to create a catalog of illnesses and

Starting point is 00:46:35 in a very absurd way he starts to put everybody in this Casa Verdi when everybody rebels against him and nothing happens to him he continues putting people in his

Starting point is 00:46:50 mental asylum at the end of the story he realizes there is no mad person in a Taguay I am the only mad person and then he locks himself up and that is and it dies alone. And it's one of Machado's critique to the new vision of Brazil of this intellectuality, which is replacing religion by science, positivism, creating a new society,

Starting point is 00:47:22 but reproducing the same mistakes, reproducing the same social relationships, the same structure. 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-Brailians, the inequality, the entitlement. These are phenomena which when you go to Brazil today, they're all. still there. They're all visible. Maschado was writing about Brazil a hundred years ago, but he's also writing about Brazil today. Is that a fair enough comment? And I think that is, he captured

Starting point is 00:48:13 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 kind of weird, we gossip about it and then we move on. And he's initially seen as a romantic author

Starting point is 00:48:43 with a capital R and then he becomes what's described as a realist author. But what does realism mean within the Brazilian context? It's very strange that a dead author is the father of realism in Brazil, and that shows a lot about us.

Starting point is 00:49:05 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. A bleak way, exactly. The great British researcher into Mashad de Sitch, John Glemson, wrote a book about the deceptive realism of Doncash Mojo. And that's what he. 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 Clebre Mendonsofidio, who's a contemporary filmmaker, may have something, may be sort of a like 21st century reinvention of this idea of presenting

Starting point is 00:49:53 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 in his film Neighbouring 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.

Starting point is 00:50:25 Yeah, in the northeast of the country where the reality is much more present than in Rio or Sao Paulo. So it seems there was, I mean, what happens in the 1930s in Brazil 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,

Starting point is 00:50:49 you have the same equal opportunities, but that of course doesn't reflect the economic reality in Brazil. But tell me, Masjado 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? I think it was more towards the 20th century. In the 1870s, it was the beginning of the world.

Starting point is 00:51:20 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, why it was behind Europe was because we were mostly a mixed, a black nation or an Afro-Brazilian race. And that was because of Raimondoninus Rodriguez's work on the Brazilian criminal, for example, he would analyze criminals in Brazil as being predisposed to that. And that was the Republican government. Well, we need to make sure that Brazil is not going to make this mistake again. So they were associating modernity with. whiteness and Europeanness.

Starting point is 00:52:19 I have to say that attitude towards criminality and Afro-Brazilian persists to this day in Brazil, sadly. So, and in terms of the literature, after Mashado, Brazilian literature must have gained quite a deal of self-confidence because of his work.

Starting point is 00:52:44 And he becomes recognized as this towering figure fairly early on in Brazil. Would you see people like Georgie Armado, who's writing a little later or later on Clarice Lispector, these are also great, great figures of Brazilian literature? Do they all admit a debt to Mashado? I think not directly, but you can certainly Lima Barreto, for example, an author that has a quite great deal of humor, of a critical voice. Mario Jandraji, for example, he criticized Macho Diasis,

Starting point is 00:53:24 but if you analyze it, if you read his first novels, it's very much psychological analysis that are present in Mashado from the beginning of his work when he was a romantic. His greatest difference between him and Jose Gialencad was the psychological analysis of these female characters. Okay, final question before we get our tea and coffee, much deserved. What would you recommend to readers who don't know Mashadu Gassiz? What should you read first? Claire?

Starting point is 00:54:06 I love Don Cashmohu. I mean, I really love the character of Capitou, 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 aliens. There is a good translation now, and I think it's short you can read over the weekend, and it's massively entertaining and extremely relevant for our society.

Starting point is 00:54:35 Anna, Claudia? Since I cannot choose Don Casmohu, I'm not going to repeat it. I would say father against mother. And another short story in which the main character is a woman, a chapter on hats. 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 in the old town of Rio de Janeiro, Rue Aduido, Consumer Habes.

Starting point is 00:55:06 in Rio de Janeiro with chapter on head. Rio is already the capital at this point. Yes. So no longer Salvador. And if you get the chance to go to Rio, you should visit the Café Colombo, which is where Machado used to hang out with, and it's a wonderful 19th century cafe still open today

Starting point is 00:55:29 with beautiful dark paneled walls and wall-length mirrors. Very glittery. Yes, it is. It is. You have to queue. And you should also visit the Café Capitou, which is in Cosmévelu, up the hill,

Starting point is 00:55:47 where you can purchase a penadagalliofa, the pen of mirthful merriment, filled with the ink of melancholy, which is what Mashado says, what Brash says he's writing his story with. Well, on that point... Would you like to your coffee? Tea, please.

Starting point is 00:56:07 Tea, please. Tea. Four tea. Yes. Thank you very much. Four tea. In our time with Misha Gleney is produced by Simon Tillotson, and it's a BBC Studios production.

Starting point is 00:56:19 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. Oh, really? Well, who am I then? I'm afraid you're not real pal. You're just an imitation.

Starting point is 00:56:36 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 vaccine, skeptics. What's it called? Everything is fake and nobody cares with me, Jamie Bartlett. And me, Jimmy Botlett. Listen first on BBC Sounds. How has America shaped the world? I'm a smachologist. the host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. As the United States marks its 250 year anniversary, we've been exploring the surprising and often hidden ways

Starting point is 00:57:20 the U.S. has shaped the modern world. And today on the show, we answer your questions about this moment and what to expect in the years to come. From the BBC, it's the United States at 250. Listen to the global story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

In Our Time - Machado de Assis

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