Wrestling With Machado

8 1 R W R E S T L I N G W I T H M A C H A D O I L A N S T A V A N S Susan Sontag, in an essay called ''Afterlives'' published in The New Yorker in 1990, called Joaquin Maria Machado de Assis, who, along with journalist Euclides da Cunha, was Brazil's most famous nineteenth-century literary figure, ''the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America.'' That's high praise, but it's also bombastic and rather shallow. The greatest writer? One could easily come up with a half-dozen other authors from the region equal in greatness who were already essential when Sontag published her appreciation . Jorge Luis Borges, whom Sontag places ''second best,'' is far more consistent in style, and his worldview has been much more influential. Gabriel García Márquez turned lo real maravilloso , what in English is known as Magical Realism, into an international vogue. And literature isn't a competition. Who is ''the greatest writer'' in the United States? The question itself is preposterous. A related issue with Sontag's valuation is that Machado is almost totally unknown within Latin America. Borges, who seems to have read everything (though, by his own confession, not One Hundred Years of Solitude), doesn't mention him anywhere. The apathy isn't altogether Machado's fault. Brazil occupies a liminal space in the 8 2 S T A V A N S Y hemisphere's map: in square miles, it is a mammoth country, by far the largest in Latin America, yet its language and heritage can be traced to imperial Portugal, which, in the context of Europe, has always sat in an awkward, tangential position. In the Americas this makes it an anomaly and turns Brazil into an archipelago of foreignness. Sontag is not unaware of this marginalization, but she manages to twist that, too. In her New Yorker essay, she writes that Brazil has always been ''regarded by the rest of South America – Hispanophone South America – with a good deal of condescension and even racism.'' Again, untrue (and where does she get that information?). Indi√erence, yes, maybe even disdain, but not condescension – and racism even less so. Brazil's ethnic tapestry is similar to that of some of its neighbors, such as Colombia and Venezuela. On the other hand, Sontag is right when she argues that ''a writer of one of those countries'' (meaning Spanishspeaking Latin America) ''is far likelier to know any of the European literatures or literature in English than to know the literature of Brazil, whereas Brazilian writers are acutely aware of Spanish-American literatures.'' Again, Borges is the prime example : he barely noticed Machado, and to a large extent that goes for Brazil in general. Only a couple of Borges's stories mention it, ''Emma Zunz'' among them. On the other hand, almost anything Anglo-Saxon, from Beowulf to Shakespeare to Robert Louis Stevenson , Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton, and even Rudyard Kipling, fascinated him. Machado in his own right was utterly oblivious to Spanish-language writers. Don Quixote, considered to be the first modern novel, hardly dents his repertoire of references, of which there are many. As far as he was concerned, Argentina, Peru, Uruguay, and other countries in the area might as well have been on Mars. Nowadays many Spanish-language Latin Americans avidly read Brazilian writers. Clarice Lispector, for example, has been a staple of the continent's literary canon since the 1960s. Indeed, in the English-speaking world, there was a time when she was described as ''the Brazilian Virginia Woolf.'' Not long ago a Buenos Aires publication referred to Woolf as ''Bloomsbury's Clarice Lispector,'' prime evidence that the tide had changed. Jorge Amado is another icon (or at least he was in the 1980s). And while not a maker of W R E S T L I N G W I T H M A C H A D O 8 3 R artistic gems by any stretch, Paulo Coelho, known for such novels as The Alchemist and The Zahir, is a staple in airports, pharmacies, and supermarkets all over Latin America...