{"id":42665,"date":"2012-04-05T19:21:02","date_gmt":"2012-04-05T22:21:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=42665"},"modified":"2012-12-05T19:24:59","modified_gmt":"2012-12-05T21:24:59","slug":"the-dilemmas-of-the-moor-of-matacavalos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/the-dilemmas-of-the-moor-of-matacavalos\/","title":{"rendered":"The dilemmas of the Moor of Matacavalos"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"PAULO CAVALCANTI<\/span>In his book The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte<\/em>, Marx mentions Hegel\u2019s comment that all historically important facts happen twice and characters appear twice. Marx added: \u201cHegel forgot to say that they first appear as a tragedy and then as a farce.\u201d Marx was not familiar with the bookshelf of Machado de Assis, in the Cosme Velho area of Rio de Janeiro. But this was the spirit in which Machado de Assis revisited Shakespeare\u2019s view of the human element. \u201cThe author\u2019s many references to the bard were not mere ornaments; they were an in-depth revelation of the characters. An example is found in Dom Casmurro<\/em>, where the elements of tragedy in Othello<\/em> were inverted to reveal the farce of the Rio de Janeiro version of the Moor, namely, the main character, Bentinho, lost in the midst of the patriarchal society of the nineteenth century,\u201d explains Adriana Teles, author of the post-doctoral thesis A presen\u00e7a de <\/em>Otelo em <\/em>Dom Casmurro: a problem\u00e1tica do tr\u00e1gico em Machado de Assis<\/em> [The presence of Othello in Dom Casmurro<\/em>: the problematics of the tragic element in Machado de Assis], with the support of FAPESP.<\/p>\n

Although Othello<\/em> was the underlying plot of Dom Casmurro<\/em>, Machado de Assis\u2019 novel lacks the tragic contents of the play. Marx was right: the second time around is a farce. \u201cFor Machado, subverting tragedy was akin to showing the real face of modern society, where human conflicts are guided by the rules of survival and social behavior is mediated by convenience. This is a world in which the honor and character of Shakespearian tragedies no longer fit in,\u201d says Adriana. The English playwright was the major literary influence on the \u201c sorcerer\u201d during his entire life, as he himself mentioned in various texts: \u201cOne does not comment on Shakespeare, one admires him;\u201d or, \u201cwhen the British Empire or the American Republic no longer exist, there will be Shakespeare; when nobody speaks English anymore, people will talk about Shakespeare.\u201d Specialists have tracked down more than 200 references on the bard (Adriana\u2019s research revealed more), from 1859, when Machado de Assis was a 20-year old apprentice, up to 1908, when he wrote his last novel, Memorial de Aires<\/em>, and passed away. Few readers wanted to read Dom Casmurro<\/em> as a \u201cpastiche\u201d of Othello<\/em>, in spite of the clues \u201caccidentally\u201d left by the narrator. The \u201cbetrayal\u201d of the model is important to understand the real theme of the book \u2013 which is not betrayal.<\/p>\n

In the course of six decades \u2013 from 1900 to 1960, when American feminist Helen Caldwell wrote an essay, O Otelo brasileiro de Machado de Assis<\/em> [The Brazilian Othello of Machado de Assis] that unveiled the lack of reliability and the baits of the novel\u2019s narrator, no Brazilian or foreign literary critic had challenged Bentinho\u2019s allegations about Capitu. Even today \u2013 with few exceptions \u2013 attempts are still being made to \u201c prove\u201d the betrayal. \u201cIn fact, betrayal was never at the core of Machado\u2019s concerns. The book is a subtle analysis of the male phantoms in the realm of patriarchy, in which Machado ironically describes the romantic and tragic-pathetic tendencies of Brazilian culture, which was actually permeated by an anti-tragic spirit,\u201d says literary critic Kathrin Rosenfield, a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and author of the research study A ironia de Machado em <\/em>Dom Casmurro [The irony of Machado in Dom Casmurro<\/em>] (2007). This \u201c distance\u201d between discourse and reality is reborn as a farce. \u201cFor himself, Bentinho wants a grandiose, tragic drama, similar to a Shakespearian tragedy. However, his attitude reinforces the abyss between Othello\u2019s tragedy and the second-rate drama he acts out,\u201d Adriana agrees.<\/p>\n

In the researcher\u2019s opinion, this kind of subversion brings Machado closer to Shakespeare, rather than farther apart. \u201cThe nature of the disruption with established parameters guides both writers\u2019 creativity. Shakespeare breaches the units of time, space, and action. Machado inverts the tragedy, incorporates the drama to the novel, and thus blends the genres, as Shakespeare did, reinforcing tragedy with a comic hue,\u201d analyzes the researcher. Othello never hesitates. Bentinho hesitates all the time, is influenced by everything and everybody around him, has childish, melodramatic outbursts and, ever since he was a child, has never had the courage to drive his plans forward.<\/p>\n

\"\"PAULO CAVALCANTI<\/span>Dominated by his mother, who had promised to send him to a seminary, Bentinho fantasizes about meeting the Emperor on the street and asking him to intercede with his mother. The young girl is the character that takes action and makes him take action, thinking up real ways of working around his mother. This leads the narrator to whisper comparisons with the evil Lady Macbeth into the reader\u2019s ear. Bentinho realizes that he \u201cloves\u201d Capitu as he stands behind the door and listens to the comments of Jos\u00e9 Dias. The wedding finally takes place, after a long, drawn-out family approval. \u201cLater on, and in line with his personality, Bentinho is eaten up by jealousy and is unable to manifest any passionate action. He is not a passionate Othello; he is a contained human being, in a larva-like state. His attitudes are violent only in terms of their intent, which he keeps to himself,\u201d says Adriana.<\/p>\n

Contrast<\/strong>
\nMachado de Assis\u2019 hero has no aspirations and takes no action, which deflates the tragic nature of his existence. \u201cWhen he goes to the theater to see Othello<\/em>, we realize the contrast between the Shakespearian hero\u2019s will and Bentinho\u2019s lack of will. Bento leaves the theater with a desire to kill and die, but does nothing. The novel portrays a hero being ridiculed by the reference he makes to tragedy. He is unable to separate the distance between his civil-bourgeois world and the Moor\u2019s tragedy,\u201d says the researcher. Thus, the reference that Machado makes to Shakespeare is ironical and inter textual, and is supported by denial, by analogy, and by the contrast with Othello\u2019s pathway. In spite of his admiration for the bard, the \u201c sorcerer\u201d picks up his tragedy to subvert the base that supports it. \u201cWe see a native of Rio de Janeiro, a typical bourgeois from the nineteenth century, far from heroic greatness, locked up in a bland, banal existence, pleased about his ability to hide himself or mask conflicts, with no will or impetus to take action.\u201d Unable to be as violent as Othello, albeit strongly motivated by what he sees on the stage, he does not murder Capitu. Instead, by sending Capitu to exile in Europe, he chooses the death which is \u201cappropriate\u201d for his social class.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe truth never surfaces, unlike in the Shakespearian play, where the truth becomes evident. The characters are already dead and, at the end, Bentinho only has his own truth. As he did not have a revelation, like Othello did, Bentinho believes that he acted as he should have. Machado places the narrator in the ridiculous position of stating the tragic nature of an existence that is unable to be tragic,\u201d Adriana analyzes. His tragedy is that he is part of a modernity where everybody is deprived of the truth and led to believe that this is the result of a partial reading of potentially ambiguous facts. \u201cHe withdraws into himself and refuses to confront himself except in his intimacy and within the space he dominates. Bento lives with this conflict, within his own arrangement. Instead of dealing with the conflict in a passionate confrontation, he lives with the conflict in a cold-blooded, calculating manner. This cold-bloodedness leads him to ignore his wife\u2019s letters and to desire his son\u2019s death from leprosy. The doubt-related dialectic remains.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the researcher\u2019s opinion, Othello explodes the world in his search for the truth, while Bentinho has no intention of finding the truth. Bentinho only decides to narrate the facts after everybody has died and he finally learns to live with that which oppresses him. \u201cBy maintaining this civil, bourgeois attitude, the timid audience of that time, portrayed in Dom Casmurro<\/em>, suppresses the truth \u2013 whatever it may be \u2013 asphyxiating the soul and the action in the nebulous phantoms of resentment. Machado\u2019s fellow human beings are familiar with conflicts, yet avoid identifying them. The novel\u2019s narrator is ambiguous when he subverts cordiality and agrees with it, while at the same time he ironically analyzes \u2013 with the utmost discretion – the patriarchal misogyny,\u201d Kathrin points out.<\/p>\n

\u201cDom Casmurro<\/em> summarizes a long relationship between Machado and Shakespeare, the peak of a movement in which Machado\u2019s early novels portrayed female rectitude and women\u2019s firm moral values. His later novels contained narratives of male protagonists whose ambivalent standards of ethical perception were questionable,\u201d says sociologist Jos\u00e9 Luiz Passos, a professor at the University of California and author of Machado de Assis: romance com pessoas <\/em>[Machado de Assis: romance with people] (Edusp, 2007). \u201cThe novel represents the apex of the writer\u2019s relationship with English literature. In those times, this relationship with European literature was uncommon. The result was stronger emphasis on the character\u2019s psychological development and on the moral emotions of the narrators, a characteristic that distinguished his work from other tendencies entrenched in Brazilian fiction,\u201d he points out.<\/p>\n

\"\"PAULO CAVALCANTI<\/span>Realism<\/strong>
\n\u201cIn Machado\u2019s opinion, the bourgeoisie principles that typified romantic novels did not reflect Brazil\u2019s social process. In terms of realism, these dilemmas had already been included in the theater for many years; theater in the 1870s was way ahead of novels in terms of the desire to represent a rational reality,\u201d says Passos. It is important to keep in mind that Machado\u2019s aesthetic education was developed through his work as a theater critic from 1855 to 1865. \u201cThe reference to delusion was an important point in terms of how the realistic theater and Machado\u2019s novels dealt with the issue of the representation of human actions,\u201d says Passos.<\/p>\n

\u201cUp to 1871, Machado and the rest of the country had only had contact with Shakespeare through reading and French versions of Shakespeare\u2019s plays, which deformed their content by adapting them to the neoclassic view, in spite of the efforts of actor Jo\u00e3o Caetano, who attempted to confer a vital ‘violence’ to the ‘diluted’ versions of plays such as Othello,\u201d <\/em>says Jo\u00e3o Roberto Faria, a full professor of Brazilian literature at the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (USP). \u201cDuring that year, when Ernesto Rossi\u2019s Italian theater company visited Brazil, Machado gained a more direct access to the bard\u2019s world.\u201d \u201cShakespeare is a revelation to many people,\u201d Machado wrote , making it clear that he included himself in this group and had experienced the great difference between reading a play and watching the play on stage.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is not a coincidence that Bentinho confesses, on his way to see Othello<\/em>, that he had never seen the play before. Seeing the play had a huge an impact on him, to the point of driving him out of his mind, thus revealing the potential of a tragedy being staged. This is a noteworthy insertion of theater into the novel, blending one genre into the other,\u201d says Adriana. From then on, the actions stem directly from theater. Even the view of Othello\u2019s <\/em>outcome does not change Bentinho\u2019s feelings, which are not coherent with his conclusions. Bentinho laments Desdemona\u2019s fate, yet asks \u201cWhat would the audience have done if she were truly guilty, as guilty as Capitu?\u201d In other words, if Othello\u2019s wife had really betrayed him, would the audience still have appreciated the play?<\/p>\n

\u201cThis leads him to the decision not to kill Capitu, because her death would have been ‘fair’ and justice is not a ‘tragic spectacle,’ like the kind he wants stage. He then considers killing himself,\u201d says the researcher. The idea of a stage set is taken to the extreme, and everything that can hamper a grandiose final effect is removed from the \u201cstage.\u201d Prior to killing himself, Bentinho picks up a book by Plutarch and worries as to how the newspapers will describe the color of his trousers. \u201cHe makes an effort to create a situation that would be appropriate for a tragic hero, but the daily banality makes this effort look ridiculous. He sets the stage, memorizes the text, but the action does not take place. The tragedy in Dom Casmurro<\/em> is restricted to the stage, to the performance that he watches. The performance reflects the character\u2019s deep feelings, but in reality there is no space for action, at least not in the world of this Machado character,\u201d Adriana points out. \u201cTo be and to seem, a basic dialectic of Machado\u2019s, is actually the dialectic between being and acting, between the face and the mask, between authenticity and dissimulation,\u201d analyzes Faria. That is the question.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A passion for Shakespeare directly influenced Machado de Assis","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[165],"tags":[245,263],"coauthors":[117],"class_list":["post-42665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities","tag-literature","tag-theatre"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42665\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42665"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=42665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}