Machado de Assis: realism in his own way

Abstract

Machado de Assis is one of the Brazilian authors to whom literary criticism has devoted the most attention. This is due not only to the vast production of Capitu's father, but also to the quality of his narrative, especially with regard to works published after 1880. With a literary production that stands out for its narrative quality, a problem surrounding Machado de Assis that extends to the present day stands out: his aesthetic classification, that is, a certain incongruity between what we had and still
have in textbooks and literature manuals and what critics observe today. In this sense, this article proposes a dialogue between concepts of philosophical and literary realism and excerpts from
Machado's work, in order to broaden our understanding of the author's style. The theoretical bases for these reflections are from René Wellek (1963), Alexander Baumgarten (1993), José Ferrater Mora (2001), Ian Watt (1990), Gustavo Bernardo (2011), Roberto Schwarz (2000), José Guilherme Merquior (2011), George Lukács (2009) and Augusto Meyer (1964, 2008), which allow us to broaden our understanding of Machado's style. The results indicate that, although there are elements that guarantee verisimilitude and social criticism, such as the representation of bourgeois hypocrisy, the narrative led by a deceased author and the unilateral and cynical perspective of the narrator challenge the fundamental criteria of traditional realism. It is concluded that Machado constructs a dialectical poetics that merges and tensions elements of different aesthetic schools, refusing rigid frameworks.