Machado de Assis Anticipating Postmodernism

 This is a an informal critique I wrote up for class:




Machado de Assis Anticipating Postmodernism

Machado de Assis subverts Modernist conceptions of the novel through defamiliarization, resulting in a deterritorialization of national Lusophone discourse in 1880s Rio de Janeiro and thus a reterritorialization of language and knowledge within that national discourse, thereby anticipating the Postmodernist movement in literature.

“The emergence of the modernist novel, for example, is widely perceived as an exclusively European phenomenon” (Earl E. Fitz, “The Memorias Postumas de Bras Cubas As (Proto) Type of the Modernist Novel: A Problem In Literary History And Interpretation” 7). Defining characteristics of the Realist novel include: a presupposed structure, a style that portrays objective reality, a reliable narrator, and linearity in terms of chronological presentation of events.

In Posthumous Memoirs, Machado de Assis defamiliarizes the reader of Modernist literature and anticipates Postmodernist literature by employing a narrative and structure which subvert expectations of Modernism. For one, our narrator presents us with subjective reality (the inner workings of the psyche). Bras Cubas can be considered an unreliable narrator because of his contradictions. Finally, de Assis structures his text in non-linear fashion, as events unfold diachronically as the narrator skips around in time.

As we have seen, Modernism seems to reflect a certain stability and order. Postmodernism, on the other hand, seems to reflect instability or chaos.

MdA in terms of deterritorialization and reterritorialization of language and knowledge: Machado de Assis deterritorializes the rhizomatic center by borrowing (major) language and knowledge of the bourgeoisie to branch off and create new areas of language and knowledge in a new “minor language.” De Assis reterritorializes by giving a voice to the “other” or “marginalized” by using language of the educated, bourgeoisie class to tell the story of the middle working class, the uneducated. From the rhizomatic center, de Assis has created multiplicities that are equal to other knowledge areas, but which are not necessarily “better”.

When we think of a tree and its growth from roots in a foundation, we think of

ascension, as in growth developing upward and one dimensionally. Upward to Heaven or downward to hell.

Root books, such as the Bible, works by Homer etc. and other various Western, Eurocentric literature provide a pretext, a subtext, on which our discourse is centered.

 

Alternatively, existence, according to Machado de Assis, is viewed not in terms of upward ascension, but as

Rhizomatic, as in branching off

in multiple directions, underground, up and down and in all directions.

“Either dead or alive, or both dead and alive,” but

In the center, in the middle and existing everywhere in between.

 

The Cannibalist Manifesto by Mario DeAndrade as metaphor:

Devouring root book

And branching off

Recycling

 

Christianity in terms of chronology

“I am the beginning and the end”

 

To Bras Cubas, there is no beginning

Nor is there an end

After life

Life after death?

Bras Cubas, memoirs written after death?

Huh? Excusez-moi? Je ne comprends pas.

 

Existence as energy in perpetual motion

Taking on various incarnations of matter

According to ebbs and flows, the laws of the universe:

In a word, Infinite

 

As opposed to the temporal and eternal

The now and the ever after.

 

The past, the present and the future occurring concurrently, all at once.

—Anthony M. Obiedzinski

 

 


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