584
PARTISAN REVIEW
ART. AND NOT BY DODGING
DOM CASMURRO. By Ma chado de Assis. Noonday Press. $3.50.
A captivating book is
Dom Casmurro,
the recently translated
novel of Machado de Assis; it is said to be the Brazilian writer's master–
piece. Like many other readers I have been struck by the book's
human–
ity,
and by this term, which is so general, I think I mean something
definite: the characteristics the author shows himself to have in telling
his story are the ones we like to see in a human being: intelligence, wit
and fantasy, and a whimsical
wry
humor, tenderness toward others, and
just the right, elegant alternation of sternness and indulgence toward
his own defects. As important as the humanity is the fact that it is
essential to the art; Machado is not a rare human being and also a
story-teller: telling his story is an act of constituting his humanity. He
does not dissimulate the fact that his aim is to entertain us; but this
aim enables him to overcome the inherent painfulness of certain episodes
in his own life-modified in the telling with respect to actual fact, but
probably rendered exactly in terms of real emotion-to summon them
from memory, and to note, before artfully tampering with, their real
order and arrangement. He is able to keep such episodes clearly before
him by his very effort to make them enjoyable to us. We feel that in
attaining our interest he has been able to see his own life as it actually
was.
Machado is a humanist. Certainly his is not a religious view of life.
From the standpoint of a religious view, such facts as he reveals, with
all their implications, repercussions and ambiguities, could hardly be
truly seen except in agony of spirit; indeed, they would be more truly
grasped if not told at all; Machado has elaborated them artistically
with a view to entertaining his readers. Yet it is not the case that
Machado is simply skeptical about the essential truth of his life; his
attitude is not: I shall make a gay affair of it to entertain the public.
This sort of skeptical nineteenth-century humanism is typical, say, of
Anatole France or, in our own time, of Jean Giraudoux. Such human–
ism does not interest us today. Machado's is much more complex. It
is as if he felt that in order to get at the truth (not of a proposition,
mind you, but of a life), just that side of human nature which keeps
truth from us has to be conceded to. Now there is no more sure way
of lying about inner facts than by recounting them to someone else. By
telling the facts, or variants of the facts, Machado proposes to recapture
the reality behind whatever happened. His art is one of not dodging.
