The Workshop of an Iconoclast

By Marshall Shord

A cold heart beats at the center of Machado de Assis’s fiction. The felicitous tone he achieved in his prose was a covering gleaned from the world he inhabited: Rio de Janeiro’s upper-crust in the latter-half of the 19th century. The men who narrate the novels on which de Assis’s reputation as a literary genius rest—The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and Dom Casmurro—are native to an environment in which cruelty was camouflaged with grace and wit.

The irony in these two novels is so finely wrought it can unleash a threatening sense of unreality. De Assis’s titular narrators are tonal shapeshifters. They woo, they harangue, they tease—always sniffing the air to follow the scent of the reader’s interest—as they mine their pasts to mold plausible versions of themselves for public display. It’s no wonder that the contemporary Brazilian writer Silviano Santiago (in his novel Machado) imagines de Assis himself as a mimic performing before an audience.

In engaging with De Assis’s narrators, the reader is torn between the suspicion of being played upon by confidence men and the desire to remain in their alluring company. One can never let one’s guard down for risk of being poisoned into sympathy. There is a line I think of often that captures the experience of reading de Assis: “Decipher me, or I devour you.” The impression created is a feeling of floating in dark water, not knowing what lies below.

This entangled relationship between reader, narrator, and writer is not yet developed in de Assis’s first novel, Resurrection (1872). The savage narcissists who narrate his later books are free to present themselves and their lives as best advantages them. In Resurrection, however, de Assis employs an omniscient narrator to render damning and continual judgment on its main character, a cold fish named Félix.

Félix, “an idle, unambitious fellow” who lives off “an unexpected inheritance” after practicing for a time as a doctor, awakens on New Year’s Day resolved to break up with his lover. He does so decisively, without remorse or nostalgia, though he can offer no justification other than that, by his measurement, things have run their course. His stated intention to still support his lover is dripping with condescension. He is high-handed with his friends as well, calling one a parasite, hardly listening to the heartbreak of another, whose request for a few kind words he dismisses curtly: “No, I’m not lending you any advice . . . you resolve it yourself.”

By the close of the first chapter, Félix’s words and actions have made clear who he is. Unfortunately, the narrator doesn’t seem to realize this. It should come as no surprise that a character who proudly says something like “Men either don’t feel or stifle what they do feel” would, in practice, be as easily hurt as a child. But, in case we missed it, the narrator emphasizes that, “[Félix] was wounded at the slightest brush of a rose leaf.” A novel’s main character doesn’t normally come with a thesis statement, but Resurrection’s narrator supplies one anyway: “A man cannot hide from himself, and the worst pain inflicted on a pusillanimous heart is to realize it is so.” Forget swimming alone in dark water—the narrator’s heavy-handed characterization of Félix’s deeds is akin to an overzealous lifeguard at a community pool blowing his whistle at the slightest infraction of the rules.

Attending a ball, Félix is reintroduced to Lívia, the widowed sister of a friend. (They have met passingly twice before). Romantic feelings grow between them, which Félix experiences as a type of erosion.

The outcome of this situation of inequality, a cold man and a woman who is passionately in love, would seem to be the woman’s undoing. It was his. To make his conquest, Félix thought only of the results, whereas the widow—apart from her love—had two active, latent attendants working on her behalf: time and habit. Each passing day felt like a drop of water delving into the doctor’s heart, carving deeply therein with the cold tenacity of destiny.

Their courtship is contingent on Felix’s mood swings. He enjoys being wanted, playing the game of desire, then leaving when real emotions begin to stir. Being loved means being seen, and Félix wants nothing more than to hide the emptiness and weakness inside him. Rather than face it, he contrives an imagined infidelity on Lívia’s part and abruptly ends their relationship by writing her a letter full of “hatred and scorn.” When she does not respond to his letter, he transforms her into “a vulgar coquette, and a vulgar coquette was not his ideal.”

Eventually, Lívia confronts Félix. He offers a feeble apology; they reconcile and become engaged. Marriage, Félix believes, “will restore my trust . . . when the two of us are together, removed from society, from contact with strangers, peace will rule my heart.” Even so, as a way of hedging his bets, he extracts a promise from Lívia that they will keep their betrothal to themselves until just before the wedding day. When she asks why, he tells her its “mere whim.” But “the real reason was the vacillation in his soul.”

As a result of Félix’s “whim,” a pair of romantic rivals, innocent in their ignorance of the trouble they are about to cause, emerges from the couple’s social circle. A friend of Félix’s confides to him that he loves Lívia. Rather than disabuse his friend of his feelings, Félix decides to encourage it, as “a sort of stratagem—an experiment, he would say—to place before each other two souls that seemed to him, in a word, kindred . . . to tempt them both, and then appraise Lívia’s constancy and sincerity.” Later, the daughter of a family friend falls in love with Félix after he brings her to back health from a grave illness. He is oblivious of her feelings until it’s too late.

Lívia, on the other hand, becomes aware of the love that has grown in both characters, and it falls on her to let each down gently while maintaining Félix’s demand for secrecy. Earlier in the novel, Félix ridicules Lívia for having “the heart of a child.” This is simply not true. In such an emotionally complicated situation, Lívia demonstrates honesty, maturity, and compassion in her interactions with others. It’s unfortunate that otherwise, save for the resolve she demonstrates at the end of the novel, the novel’s main female character seems to be composed mostly of tears and sighs.

The plot mechanics of Resurrection are transparently Shakespearean: the mutability of relationships, the hidden emotions, the secrets kept purely for the sake of advancing the plot, the dramatic irony. (José Luiz Passos’s introduction explores de Assis’s debt to Shakespeare in great detail). There is even an out-and-out villain: a predatory fellow named Luís Batista, the dance partner Lívia abandons early in the novel so she can talk with Félix. Batista continues to skulk around the edges of the narrative until he gets his revenge. Although he does present an interesting analog to Félix—Batista is more at ease in his sociopathy—he adds nothing to the novel but a bit of drama. He is the unnecessary accelerant to the implosion of Félix and Lívia’s relationship. For it is Félix who builds the fire and stokes its flames, and it is Félix who fully earns the appellation “the craftsman of his own misfortune.”

Had Resurrection been published by some lesser-known author, it might have gone out of print long ago. But here it is, the name above the title belonging to one of the stranger geniuses of modern literature. That the book in itself is not strange, but competent—at times piercing—in its portrait of a deeply unhappy man, makes for a challenge. How to evaluate a novel on its own terms when it bears little resemblance to the work of an author widely known for his uniqueness? De Assis himself, in a preface written in his final years, consigned Resurrection to “the first phase of my literary life.” Looking back across his career, de Assis knew his greatest books were still to come. The same can be said for the reader of this new edition of Resurrection. Consequently, whatever joy the novel offers feels diminished—qualified, at least. (It should be noted that de Assis’s prose, in Karen C. Sherwood Sotelino’s translation, is as distinctively charming and light as ever.)

But is this a fair assessment? Perhaps it’s best to view Resurrection as an invitation, if even an unwitting one, into the workshop of an iconoclast. Here, in some one hundred and sixty pages, de Assis tests themes and techniques he will either develop or discard in his masterpieces. More importantly, he offers a glimpse into the character of the sort of men—self-conscious, greedy, insecure; avatars of a cruel society—to whom he would give voice in his greatest novels. In those books, de Assis uses these voices to conceal the moral vacuum at the center of his work. Yet here, at the innocent beginning, the author is still honing his cunning.

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Marshall Shord lives in Maryland. He is currently at work on a novel about the formation of the CIA.