Hispania

In this passionate and convincingly argued monograph, titled Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory: Language, Imitation, Art, and Verisimilitude in the Last Six Novels, Earl E. Fitz advocates for the overly due installation of Machado de Assis as the creator of a new Realism within the Latin American novelistic tradition and as a central figure in the development of Western literature. The new Realism is here defined as a self-reflective, self-conscious, and semantically unstable narrative in which language's inherently ambiguous nature is embraced as a mimetic tool capable of articulating equally ambiguous fiction. Within a Heideggerian frame that emphasizes language as the very means of creating and perceiving reality, Fitz further indicates that Machado's later fiction combines both narrative theory and practice, and that its "salient issue is less thematic than theoretical"(12). Machado, as Fitz points out, "does not cultivate ambiguity . . . as a theme per se; he engages it . . . because it is the defining property of language itself" (12).

Fitz's analysis is based on the last six novels written by Machado between 1880 and 1904, a period that brought the Brazilian author to the realization that, like other imitative arts, "narrative could become an art form itself . . . but, unique among them all, it was at the very moment of its creation, also the medium by which we discuss its nature and its significance, both personal and political" (6). Each chapter of the book focuses respectively on each one of Machado's six last novels and on how language interacts with the reader and with itself in each of these narrative ventures.

In chapter 1, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, Fitz elucidates how Machado's new, "language-centered" Realism relies on the active participation of a new, more alert reader, who is inclined to embrace the uncertainties of an unstable narrative frame set forth by a dead author/ narrator who narrates from the afterworld. Fitz also provides several examples of how Machado's semantic challenges, most of which can be anticipated in the titles of many of the Posthumous Memoirs chapters, invite the reader "to see the world in new and hitherto unimagined ways" (58). Fitz is particularly careful to emphasize how in his new, more skeptical narrative scheme, Machado exposes his own brand of meta-narrative theory, in which to narrate and to theorize become one and the same. [End Page 625]

Chapter 2, The Psychiatrist, explores the issue of verisimilitude within the norms of the new Realism and analyses how Machado concocts a seemingly verisimilar text (presented as a chronicle) while underscoring that, regardless of the reader's need for semantic and epistemic stability, "all language use is fiction" (72). Fitz illustrates Machado's concern with the protean nature of language and the process of signification by pointing out how the repeated use of the same signifiers—in this case "bunch of lunatics," uttered several times in different situations by the wife of the psychiatrist protagonist—can produce divergent signifieds. Each chapter of The Psychiatrist is discussed in light of Machado's exploration and exposition of the hermeneutical challenges embedded in language's imprecision to signify, an exploration that, as Fitz remarks, refutes the idea of language as the conjurer of static, uncontestable truths and "shows instead that the process of reading always produces multiple, often conflicting interpretations" (92).

The discussion on Machado's Quincas Borba and Dom Casmurro (chapters 3 and 4, respectively) continues to expose the play between mimesis and verisimilitude within Machado's new narrative technique. In Quincas Borba, Fitz further advances the thesis that language, in the new narrative proposed by Machado, articulates a "special and realistic sense of verisimilitude" (95), but one that diverges from the norms of the realism expressed in the sub-genres that preceded this new narrative (the historical and naturalist novel, and the bildungsroman). Machado's new...