On negatives

Machado de Assis and modernist (self-)criticism

Abstract

The controversial relationship between Brazilian Modernism and the legacy of Machado de Assis is discussed in this essay, whose starting point is the series of articles on Machado published in 1939 by Mário de Andrade, amid the celebrations of the centenary of the author of Dom Casmurro’s birth. Also taking into account texts written earlier, during the height of the Modernist campaign, by Carlos Drummond de Andrade — in which there was a vehement repudiation of Machado — the analysis seeks to highlight not only the connections between this critical stance and other readings of Machado’s work circulating in the early twentieth century, but also the profound identification of both authors with the writer they claimed to admire without loving — or to sacrifice despite all their adoration. In both cases, Machado de Assis emerges as a "mirror for writers." In attacking him, Drummond's effort, as a recent convert to the 1922 avant-garde, would have been to immolate himself. In Mário's case, the emphasis falls on the link between his ambiguous and embittered articles and the critical reassessments he was beginning to make of the Modernist movement itself.