Birth and adolescence

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was born on 21 June 1839 in Rio de Janeiro, then capital of the Empire of Brazil. His parents were Francisco José de Assis, a mulatto wall painter, and Maria Leopoldina da Câmara Machado, an Azorean Portuguese washerwoman. His birth occurred in Livramento country house, owned by Dona Maria José de Mendonça Barro Pereira, widow of senator Bento Barroso Pereira, who protected his parents and allowed them to live with her. Dona Maria José became Joaquim’s godmother and her brother-in-law, commendatory Joaquim Alberto de Sousa da Silveira, the godfather, and both were paid homage by giving their names to the baby. He also had a sister who died young. Joaquim studied in a public school, but was not a good student. While helping celebrate masses he met Father Silveira Sarmento who became his Latin teacher and also friend.

When he was ten year old, his mother died, and his father carried him along as they moved to São Cristóvão, where Francisco de Assis met the mulatto Maria Inês da Silva and later married to her in 1854. Joaquim had classes in a school for girls only, thanks to his stepmother who worked there making candies, and at night he learned French with an immigrant baker. In his adolescence he met the mulatto Francisco de Paula Brito, who owned a bookstore, a newspaper and typography. In 12 January 1855, Francisco de Paula published the poem Ella (“She”) written by Joaquim, then 15 years old, in the newspaper Marmota Fluminense. In the following year he was hired as typographer’s apprentice in the Imprensa Oficial, where he received the incentive to follow the literary career from Manuel Antônio de Almeida, the newspaper’s director and also a novelist. There he also met Francisco Otaviano, journalist and later liberal senator, and Quintino Bocaiúva, who decades later would become known for his role as a republican orator.

Early notoriety and marriage

Francisco Otaviano hired him to work on the newspaper Correio Mercantil as a proofreader in 1858. Joaquim continued to write for the Marmota Fluminense and also for several other newspapers, but he did not earn much and thus had a humble life. He did not live with his father anymore, and it was common for him to eat only once a day for lack of money. Around this time, he became a friend of the writer and liberal politician José de Alencar, who taught him English. From English literature he was influenced by Laurence Sterne, William Shakespeare, Lord Byron and Jonathan Swift. He learned German years later and in his old age, Greek. He was invited by Bocaiúva to work at his newspaper Diário do Rio de Janeiro in 1860. Joaquim had a passion for theater and wrote several plays for a short time; his friend Bocaiúva concluded: “Your works are meant to be read and not played.” He had, at that point, achieved some notoriety, and by signing his writings as J. M. Machado de Assis he would immortalize the way he would be known for posterity: Machado de Assis.

Francisco de Assis died in 1864. Joaquim learned of his father's death through acquaintances and felt remorse for having distanced himself from Francisco. He dedicated his compilation of poems called “Crisálidas” to his father: “To the Memory of Francisco José de Assis and Maria Leopoldina Machado de Assis, my Parents.” With the Liberal Party's ascension to power in the country around that time, Machado believed that he would be remembered by his friends and would receive a public office that could improve his quality of life, but all in vain. To his surprise, aid came from the one he least expected: Emperor Dom Pedro II, who not only hired him as director-assistant in the Diário Oficial in 1867, but also made him a knight and later in 1888 officer of the Order of the Rose.

In 1868 Machado met the Portuguese Carolina Augusta Xavier de Novais, five years older than him and also Faustino Xavier de Novais’ sister, for whom he worked in the magazine O Futuro. Machado was afflicted with a stammer, was also extremely shy, short and lean and was not considered a handsome man by the standards of his time, but was very intelligent and well learned. He married Carolina on 12 November 1869, although with the disapproval of Miguel and Adelaide (Faustino had already died due to a disease that drove him insane), and of Carolina’s siblings, who did not accept her marriage to a mulatto. No children were born from their marriage.

Masterpieces

Machado managed to rise in his bureaucratic career, and was called to work in the Agriculture Department and three years later he became the head of a section in it. Meanwhile, he published two poetry books: Falenas, in 1870, and Americanas, in 1875. Their weak reception made him look after other literary genres, which made him write several romantic novels, such as: Ressurreição, A Mão e Luva, Helena and Iaiá Garcia. The books were a success of public, but in literary terms they were considered little more than mediocre. Everything changed when Machado suffered repeated epileptic attacks that he had never had before and after he heard of the death of his old friend José de Alencar. Both occurrences left him melancholic, pessimistic and fixed on death. The result was one of his masterpieces published in 1881 that was marked by “a skeptical and realistic tone”: Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, also translated as Epitaph for a Small Winner). By the end of the 1880s, he is widely renowned as a writer.

Although Machado was opposed to slavery, he never spoke against it in public. He avoided discussing politics and because of that he was heavily criticized by the abolitionist José do Patrocínio and by the writer Lima Barreto for abstaining himself of dealing with political matters, mainly slavery abolition. He was also criticized by them for having married a white woman. Machado was caught by surprise with the monarchy overthrown in November 15, 1889. Machado had no sympathy towards republicanism, as he considered himself a liberal monarchist and venerated Pedro II, whom he perceived as “a humble, honest, well-learned and patriotic man, who knew how to make of a throne a chair [for his simplicity], without diminishing its greatness and respect.” When a commission went to the public office where he worked to remove the picture of the former emperor, the shy Machado defied them: “The picture got in here by an order and it shall leave only by another order.”

The birth of the Brazilian republic made Machado become more critical and observer of the Brazilian society of his time. From then on he wrote “not only the greatest novels of his time, but the greatest of all time of Brazilian literature.” His works such as Quincas Borba (Philosopher or Dog?) (1891), Dom Casmurro (1899), Esaú e Jacó (1904) and Memorial de Aires (1908), considered masterpieces, are a success of both critic and public. In 1893 he published A Missa do Galo (Midnight Mass), considered his greatest short story.

Later years

Machado de Assis, along with other fellow monarchists such as Joaquim Nabuco, Manuel de Oliveira Lima, Afonso Celso de Assis and Alfredo d'Escragnolle Taunay and other writers and intellectuals, founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters and was its first president from 1897 to 1908, when he died. For many years he requested to the government to grant a proper headquarter to the academy, which he managed to succeed on 1905. On 1902 he was transferred to the accountancy’s directing board of the Ministry of Industry. His wife Carolina Novais died in October 20, 1904, after thirty five years of a “perfect marriage couple life”. Feeling depressed and lonely, Machado did not survive her for much longer, and died at 3h20m in September 29, 1908.

Machado's style is unique, and several literary critics have tried to explain it since 1897. He is considered by many the greatest Brazilian writer of all times, and one of the world's greatest novelists and short story writers. His chronicles do not share the same status and his poems show a curious difference with the rest of his work: while his Machado's prose is serene and elegant, his poems are often shocking for the use of crude terms, sometimes similar to those of Augusto dos Anjos, another Brazilian writer.

Machado de Assis was included on American literary critic Harold Bloom's list of the greatest 100 geniuses of literature, alongside writers such as Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes. Bloom even considers him the greatest black writer in Western literature (although his characterization as a black man is derived from perceptions of race, such as hypodescent, predominant in the United States but almost nonexistent in Brazil). His works have been recently studied by critics in various countries of the world, such as Giusepe Alpi (Italy), Lourdes Andreassi (Portugal), Albert Bagby Jr. (United States), Abel Barros Baptista (Portugal), Hennio Morgan Birchal (Brazil), Edoardo Bizzarri (Italy), Jean-Michel Massa (France), Helen Caldwell (United States), John Gledson (England), Adrien Delpech (France), Albert Dessau (Germany), Paul B. Dixon (United States), Keith Ellis (United States), Edith Fowke (Canada), Anatole France (France), Richard Graham (United States), Pierre Hourcade (France), David Jackson (United States), Linda Murphy Kelley (United States), John C. Kinnear, Alfred Mac Adam (United States), Victor Orban (France), Houwens Post (Italy), Samuel Putnam (United States), John Hyde Schmitt, Tony Tanner (England), Jack E. Tomlins (United States), Carmelo Virgillo (United States), Dieter Woll (Germany) and Susan Sontag (United States).

Critics are divided as to the very nature of Machado de Assis's writing. Some, such as Abel Barros Baptista, classify Machado as a staunch anti-realist, and argue that his writing attacks Realism, aiming to negate the possibility of representation or even the very existence of a meaningful objective reality. Realist critics such as John Gledson are more likely to regard Machado's work as a faithful transcription of Brazilian reality...but a transcription executed with daring innovative technique. Historians such as Sydney Chalhoub argue that Machado's prose constitutes an exposé of the social, political and economic dysfunction of Second Empire Brazil. One area in which critics are largely in agreement, however, is best represented by the analysis of Roberto Schwarz. Schwarz points out that Machado's extraordinary innovations in prose narrative are driven by his need to expose the hypocrisies, contradictions and dysfunction of nineteenth-century Brazil. Schwartz argues that Machado inverts many of the narrative and intellectual conventions of his day in order to reveal the pernicious ends to which they are used.

Machado's literary style has inspired many Brazilian writers and his works have been adapted to television, theater and cinema. In 1975 the Comissão Machado de Assis ("Machado de Assis Commission"), organized by the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Culture, organized and published critical editions of Machado's works, in 15 volumes. His main works were translated to many languages and great contemporary writers such as Salman Rushdie, Cabrera Infante and Carlos Fuentes and film director Woody Allen have confessed being fans of his fiction.

In his works, Machado involves the reader, breaking the so called fourth wall.

Titles

• Member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters (1896—1908).
• President of the Brazilian Academy of Letters (1897—1908).

Honours

• Knight of the Order of the Rose (1867).
• Officer of the Order of the Rose (1888).

Further reading

• Andrade; Mário. (1943) Aspectos da literatura brasileira. Rio de Janeiro: Americ. Ed.
• Aranha; Graça. (1923) Machado de Assis e Joaquim Nabuco: Comentários e notas à correspondência. São Paulo: Monteiro Lobato.
• Barreto Filho. (1947) Introdução a Machado de Assis. Rio de Janeiro: Agir.
• Bosi; Alfredo. (Organizador) Machado de Assis.
• Bosi; Alfredo. (2000) Machado de Assis: o enigma do olhar. São Paulo: Ática.
• Bosi; Alfredo. Folha explica Machado de Assis.
• Broca; Brito. Machado de Assis e a política.
• Chalhoub; Sidney. (2003) Machado de Assis, historiador. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
• Faoro; Raimundo (1974) Machado de Assis: pirâmide e o trapézio. São Paulo: Cia. Ed. Nacional.
• Gledson; John. Machado de Assis: ficção e história.
• Gomes; Eugênio. Influências inglesas em Machado de Assis.
• Graham; Richard (ed.). (1999) Machado de Assis: Reflections on a Brazilian Master Writer. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
• Magalhães Jr.; Raimundo. Vida e obra de Machado de Assis.
• Massa; Jean-Michel. A juventude de Machado de Assis.
• Meyer; Augusto. (1935) Machado de Assis. Porto Alegre: Globo.
• Meyer; Augusto. (1958) Machado de Assis 1935-1958. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria São José.
• Paes; José Paulo. Gregos e baianos.
• Pereira; Astrogildo. (1944) Interpretação. Rio de Janeiro: Casa do Estudante do Brasil.
• Miguel-Pereira; Lúcia. (1936) Machado de Assis: Estudo critíco e biográfico. São Paulo: Cia. Ed. Nacional.
• Schwarz; Roberto. Ao vencedor as batatas.
• Schwarz; Roberto. Duas meninas.
• Schwarz; Roberto. (1990) Um mestre na periferia do capitalismo. São Paulo: Duas Cidades. Trans. as A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism. Trans. and intro. John Gledson. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.
• Taylor; David. (2002) Wry modernist of Brazil's past. Américas Nov.-Dec. issue. Washington, DC.
• Veríssimo; José. História da Literatura Brasileira.