The novels written on the eve of Mexican Independence by José Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi included disquisitions on secular education and law, and denunciations of the evils of gaming and idleness. Other works, such as a well-known poem by Andrés Bello, “Ode to Tropical Agriculture,” and novels such as Amalia by José Marmol and the Bolivian Nataniel A.gaiire’s Juan de la Rosa, were openly partisan. By the end of the century, sophisticated scholars were beginning to address the history of their countries, as did João Capistrano de Abreu in his Capítulos de história colonial.

It is often in memoirs such as those by Fray Servando Teresa de Mier or Sarmiento that we find the descriptions of everyday life that in Europe were incorporated into the realist novel. Latin American literature at this time was seen largely as a pedagogical tool, a “light” alternative to speeches, sermons, and philosophical tracts—though, in fact, especially in the early part of the century, even the readership for novels was quite small because of the high rate of illiteracy. Nevertheless, the vigorous orally transmitted culture of the gaucho and the urban underclasses became the linguistic repertoire of some of the most interesting nineteenth-century writers—most notably José Hernández, author of the “gauchesque” poem “Martin Fierro,” which enjoyed an unparalleled popularity. But for many writers the task was not to appropriate popular language but to civilize, and their literary works were strongly influenced by the high style of political oratory.

The editorial committee has not attempted to limit its selection to the better-known writers such as Machado de Assis; it has also selected many works that have never appeared in translation or writers whose work has not been translated recently. The series now makes these works available to the English-speaking public.

Because of the preferences of funding organizations, the series initially focuses on writing from Brazil, the Southern Cone, the Andean region, and Mexico. Each of our editions will have an introduction that places the work in its appropriate context and includes explanatory notes.

We owe special thanks to Robert Glynn of the Lampadia Foundation, whose initiative gave the project a jump start, and to Richard Ekman of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which also generously supported the project. We also thank the Rockefeller Foundation for funding the 1996 symposium “Culture and Nation in Iberoamerica,” organized by the editorial board of the Library of Latin America. We received substantial institutional support and personal encouragement from the Institute of Latin American Studies of the University of Texas at Austin. The support of Edward Barry of Oxford University Press has been crucial, as has the advice and help of Ellen Chodosh of Oxford University Press. The first volumes of the series were published after the untimely death, on July 3,1997, of Maria C. Bulle, who, as an associate of the Lampadia Foundation, supported the idea from its beginning.

—Jean Franco
—Richard Graham

Introduction

 

Joaquim Maria de Machado de Assis (1839–1908) is the greatest nineteenth–century novelist of Latin America and one of the most remarkable literary talents to appear in the Americas as a whole. His most important fictions are complex and highly original texts that were carefully and deviously designed to be open to multiple interpretation. As Antônio Cândido noted in 1970, Machado’s major texts are so rich in potential meanings that successive generations of critics have found in these works “their own obsessions, their own ideas of what must be expressed.”1

Machado’s major novels, including Quincas Borba (1891), often strike English–speaking readers as at once comfortably familiar and disquietingly alien. We recognize the narrative voice, discursive, descriptive, and often intrusive, as one we have encountered in British and French novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Machado, despite his relative isolation in a nation on the fringes of nineteenth–century Western culture, immersed himself in the European fictional tradition; Laurence Sterne was Machado’s favorite novelist and one of his primary models, but echoes of a great many other novelists can be found everywhere in his texts. In the case of Quincas Borba, for example, Sofia owes a great deal to Emma Bovary. Because we are familiar with at least some of the European novels Machado relied upon to create his own fictions, we recognize both some of his basic plot elements—the quest for a socially suitable spouse and even, perhaps, a happy marriage; the struggle to move upwards in society or, at the very least, to hold on to status and respectability. Moreover, Machado’s characters play out their dramas surrounded by carefully described artifacts, almost all imported from Europe. Beyond this, Machado’s various narrators constantly refer to both major and minor figures from the whole sweep of European cultural history, reflecting the profound and remarkable knowledge of Classical and Renaissance literature of a self-educated Brazilian who never traveled more than a few hundred miles from Rio de Janeiro.

At the same time, there are many elements in Machado’s texts that fall considerably outside both the European cultural tradition and our own experiences and expectations as readers of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European fiction. To suggest but a few examples, the stars Machado’s characters contemplate, in moments of passion or despair, are the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere. In Quincas Borba, Sofia tends her roses—but outside the walls of her garden lies Brazilian nature in all its lush exoticism, a nature that has survived intact, in at least a few areas of the city, despite the nineteenth-century urbanization of Rio de Janeiro. Machado’s novels deal at some length with the politics and personalities of the Brazilian Empire, an Empire about which most English-speaking readers know very little. And while Cristiano Palha assures Rubião, in the first chapters of Quincas Borba, that Rio de Janeiro is fast becoming a South American Paris or London, it is impossible to read this novel without realizing that imperial Brazilian society, despite its architectural imitations and imported European artifacts, was very different indeed from that of nineteenth-century France or England. Many of the most striking differences do not appear overtly in the text, largely because Machado and his readers took them so much for granted; those differences—the oppressive heat, the tropical diseases, the filth and squalor of much of the city, the omnipresent poverty, the African origins of the great majority of Rio’s population—can better be seen in contemporary photographs and in the narratives and drawings of European and North American visitors. But one absolutely essential difference does appear in Quincas Borba, and is here described more openly and in greater detail than in any of Machado’s other novels: while Rubião takes Cristiano Palha’s advice and hires European servants, hidden behind the kitchen door is Rubião’s black slave—symbolic of the hundreds of thousands of black slaves who served imperial Brazil until the abolition of slavery in 1888.

The alien quality of Machado’s fiction, however, extends beyond these differences in setting and social context into the nature of the text itself, as the novelist alters or ignores the ground rules of nineteenth-century European Realism. The stars are not simply a different set of heavenly bodies; they look back down at Machado’s characters and, sometimes, comment upon those characters. The European roses in Sofia’s garden converse with each other, discussing her character and actions.