The radical intellectuals of nineteenth-century Latin
America, heirs of the independence movement that began in 1811,
set themselves the task of exposing the corruptions of empire in
their pamphlets and their poetry. But the South American we
should consider the true declarer of intellectual independence
from the Old World—the true Simón Bolívar of letters, if you
will—was no radical. The Brazilian Joaquim Maria Machado de
Assis (1839–1908), monarchist and votary of the decidedly
unrevolutionary-sounding French literary movement called Parnassianism,
offered in fact the most iconoclastic account of the ideas and
institutions—even the personality traits— which his
countrymen inherited from Europe.

Machado was bent on exploring every kind of self-delusion of
which the male ego—epitomized by the Latin ego—was capable.
Of his nine novels and several dozen short stories,
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881),
Quincas Borba (1891), Dom
Casmurro (1899), and
“The Psychiatrist” (1881) stand
as his acknowledged master works.[1]
All deliver penetrating satire
with an economy and a lightness of touch that commentators have
come to refer to as “Machadian.” This tone represents a kind of
perfection of calibration—Machado’s ability to draw near
enough to people to sympathize with them, while still keeping an
amused distance, knows few equals in literature. Looking down
from Parnassus, he is cool but seldom cold. Like his contemporary
Henry James and the aristocratic epigone Giuseppe di
Lampedusa, Machado is skeptical of efforts to reform the human
race. But the Brazilian writer, much as the American and the