Flora's Androgynous Republic:
Gender Ambiguity in Machado de Assis's ESAU E JACO

It has long been my contention that, in general terms, the literature of Brazil—like much of Brazil’s culture—has tended to subvert or at least ignore the rigid codes of conduct demanded by the ruling classes of its patriarchal society. I believe, indeed, that Brazilian literature, conceived of here as both a reflection and an extension of Brazilian culture, can easily be read as being (like Capitú) essentially “matriarchal,” as a national literature that undermines or at least questions the legitimacy and supposed superiority of Western patriarchal systems.

Fitz goes on to propose an impressive list of Brazilian writers who purportedly carry the feminine torch after Machado and in whom we “see this powerfully subversive, decentering and gender-blurring matriarchal tendency at work” (italics mine). I’ve emphasized the word matriarchal in order to call attention to what I consider a major glitch in Fitz’s claim: his interpretation of Machado’s novel(s) (not to mention an entire national literature) soley in “matriarchal” terms reproduces the same kind of essentializing, either/or logic that is widely regarded as patriarchy’s original sin. Fitz himself was at least vaguely aware of the incoherence of his proposed model, as his rather incongruous juxtaposition of “gender-blurring” and “matriarchal” indicates.

Happily, Fitz, in collaboration with Judith A. Payne, has since offered a provocative re-working of his matriarchal thesis. In AMBIGUITY AND GENDER IN THE NEW NOVEL OF BRAZIL AND SPANISH AMERICA, Payne and Fitz argue that, in contrast to the formally experimental yet thematically traditional new novel of Spanish America, the Brazilian new novel—as exemplified in the work of João Guimarães Rosa, Osman Lins and especially Clarice Lispector—challenges and finally explodes the narrowly defined notions of gender that limit its Spanish American relative. Among the factors contributing to this evolutionary divergence looms the giant figure of Machado de Assis. What distinguishes the new novels of Spanish America and Brazil, according to Payne and Fitz, is

voice and gender representation, both of which are based (especially in the Brazilian texts) on a narrative self-consciousness about the fluid relationship between language, reality, truth, and being that can be directly traced back to Machado de Assis, to Brazil’s surprisingly strong female tradition, and, finally, to a cultural milieu that has long viewed assimilation (itself an effacing of rigidly maintained boundaries) as both a valid and “realistic” aspect of human existence.

Thus Fitz’s original concept of the “feminine voice” in Brazilian literature has been more convincingly shaped into a model which features gender ambiguity as its (in)determining principle. As scholars of Machado have often remarked, ambiguity is indeed a key word for anyone attempting to get to the bottom of DOM CASMURRO, but the notion of ambiguity is by no means important to this novel alone. In his little understood penultimate novel, ESAU E JACO (ESSAU AND JACOB, 1904), Machado employs ambiguity on a scale exceeding even that of DOM CASMURRO, creating an ambiguous allegory of the fate of the entire Brazilian Republic.

Certainly the most overtly political and arguably the most autobiographical of Machado’s novels—featuring the Conselheiro Aires, generally held to be the author’s fictional surrogate—ESAU E JACO might also be thought of as exemplifying the author’s definitive philosophical vision. Indeed, we read in the Advertência to the novel (written not by Aires but by a Machadoan narrator acting as editor) that the manuscript was labeled Último among the late Aires’ diaries. “Último por quê?” the “editor” muses in a manner destined to make the reader ask the same question. Helen Caldwell (MACHADO DE ASSIS: THE BRAZILIAN MASTER AND HIS NOVELS) points out that Último was in fact the title as late as in the galley proofs, yet another reason to suppose that this novel held special significance for its author.

Be that as it may, as a work featuring identical twins locked in a complex antithetical existence, both of whom fall in love with a girl described repeatedly as “inexplicável,” ESAU E JACO is very tempting (and relatively untrodden) ground in which to examine Machado’s cultivation of ambiguity and its relationship to gender. The most obviously ambiguous of the novel’s characteristics is the narration itself. Simultaneously third person romance and eyewitness account, ESAU E JACO collapses distinctions between narrator and character as Aires recounts the story of Flora and the twins and his involvement with them. Referring to himself in the third person, Aires’ narrative voice at times produces an almost uncanny effect in the reader, who is forced to accept the illogic of blurred distinctions between subject and object.

Likewise, Aires occupies an ambiguous epistemological position. Alternately omniscient and uninformed, inside the other characters’ minds and in the dark, Aires rather flippantly moves back and forth between otherwise mutually exclusive ways of knowing. Even on a formal level ESAU E JACO fits neither a mimetic nor a properly metafictional paradigm. As is typical in Machado’s fiction, the novel combines elements of realism with a bewildering array of self-referential techniques, rendering simple generic categorization virtually impossible.

To conclude that ESAU E JACO waffles endlessly in semantic free play, however, is to miss the point. Just as DOM CASMURRO has been read, thanks to its equivocal narration, as a trenchant critique of Brazilian society (in the figure of its eponymous narrator) during the Segundo Reinado, ESAU E JACO employs the technique of ambiguity in order to convey a decidedly “political” message of its own. Part of that message comes, to be sure, in the form of overt social critique less poignant than but not unlike that which is embodied in DOM CASMURRO; what the later novel loses in piquancy it gains in variety, as character after character is rendered laughable if not loathsome by Aires’ bifocal satirical vision.

Of Pedro and Paulo, Aires writes with cutting irony, “Já então os dois gêmeos cursavam, um a Faculdade de Direito, em S. Paulo; outro a Escola de Medicina, no Rio. Não tardaria muito que saíssem formados e prontos, um para defender o direito e o torto da gente, outro para ajudá-la a viver e a morrer.” While lawyer and doctor are thus defending wrong and helping people to die, respectively, capitalism receives a satirical beating in the characters of Santos, Nóbrega and the petty merchant Custúdio; while political ambition is well represented by the spineless Batista and his overstepping wife Claúdia (compared to Lady Macbeth and Satan), and superstition and spiritualism are panned in the characters of the Cabocla and Plácido. Even the lovely Natividade—once courted by Aires, and for whom he maintains a strange affinity—fails to escape the novel unscathed by irony, as her naïve belief in the Cabocla’s substanceless prophecy makes clear.

For all the novel’s self-conscious ambiguity and energetic social critique, ESAU E JACO differs from DOM CASMURRO insofar as Aires represents a different kind of narrator from the manipulating, psychopathic narrator that Bento Santiago has become. This difference is reflected most prominently, once again, in the narrative technique employed: whereas DOM CASMURRO inconsistently recounts his story in the first person, with the effect that we question and ultimately refute his authority, Aires’ “two-eyed” narration suggests, as Marta Peixoto points out, his basic reliability. Thus the two narrators are distinguished, in effect, by the quality of their vision as determined by their respective narrative viewpoints. DOM CASMURRO’s first person discourse implies and finally exposes—despite his stated intention of proving Capitu’s guilt—his own myopic self-interest. Aires’ narrative, on the other hand, has the effect of objectifying his experience, giving him (and us) a bifocal, disinterested perspective on the events he documents.

Vision is the key concept here, and it applies not only to Aires, who is consistently engaged in “reading” the other characters in order to write about them, but to the Reader au sens large. Aires remarks of his Dantean epigraph, “Não é somente um meio de completar as pessoas da narração com as idéias que deixarem, mas ainda um par de lunetas para que o leitor do livro penetre o que for menos claro ou totalmente escuro.”

Speaking through his mouthpiece Aires, who we learn has already done much of our interpretive work for us, Machado makes no attempt to hide the fact that he seeks to communicate a message:

Tal foi a conclusão de Aires, segundo se lê no Memorial. Tal será a do leitor, se gosta de concluir. Note que aqui lhe poupei o trabalho de Aires; não o obriguei a achar por si o que, de outras vezes, é obrigado a fazer. O leitor atento, verdadeiramente ruminante, tem quatro estômagos no cérebro, e por eles faz passar e repassar os atos e os fatos, até que deduz a verdade, que estava, ou parecia estar escondida.

Here again, this time on a thematic level, we must distinguish between DOM CASMURRO and Aires. While it’s true that both narrators are “retired,” Aires maintains an active interest in and a certain affection, however critical, for his fellows that is diametrically opposed to DOM CASMURRO’s subtly vicious misanthropy. Explaining his reluctance to openly criticize others, Aires remarks of himself, “Quero crer que não dissesse mal por indiferença ou cautela; provisoriamente, ponhamos caridade.” For DOM CASMURRO’s self-interested narrative motivation Aires thus substitutes a degree of kindness and charity for his fellow human beings; and the novel he produces, at times self-contradictory and often downright scathing, takes on a curiously didactic aura from a readerly perspective. We’re reminded of Henry Fielding’s famous definition of the satirist’s role: “The satirist is to be regarded as our physician, not our enemy.” Machado, as is well known, was greatly influenced by Fielding, and so it should surprise no one that his satirical voice is referred to in the title to Chapter XCVIII as “O Médico Aires.”

What, then, are the doctor’s orders? What is the “cure” he proposes for our illness, the “hidden truth” alluded to at various moments throughout the text? In order to answer these questions, let us first consider the text’s other doctor, Paulo. Paulo, of course, is virtually inseparable from his twin Pedro, and any discussion of one must include the other.

On the surface, with the exception of their appearance, Paulo and Pedro couldn’t be any more dissimilar. Paulo is a physician, a Republican, emulates Robespierre and evokes a comparison with the aggressive figure of Achilles; Pedro is a lawyer, imperialistic, idolizes Louis XVI and suggests the cunning of an Odysseus. Beginning in the womb—if we’re to believe the Cabocla’s prophecy—Pedro and Paulo quarreled; they continue to quarrel throughout childhood; they fall in love with the same girl and quarrel over her; and by the end of the novel, despite brief pacific interludes, they’re quarreling in the political arena of the National Congress, to which they’ve recently been elected.

Long before this point, however, the illusion of Pedro and Paulo’s irreconcilable difference has been shattered, as we come to understand to what extent they represent merely opposite sides of the same coin, embodiments of what Machado has elsewhere called “a eterna contradição humana.” Likened to the Old Testament figures of Essau and Jacob, named after the Apostles Peter and Paul, and finally made to resonate in a specifically Brazilian context as apostles of the politics of Petrópolis and São Paulo, respectively, Pedro and Paulo represent a transhistorical opposition within human nature itself.

This notion of sameness in difference is explicitly thematized at various moments throughout the novel. When Pedro and Paulo receive and immediately accept an invitation from their mother to attend mass in memory of their grandfather, Aires concludes, “já não era harmonia, era uma espécie de diálogo na mesma pessoa.” (As if on cue, both twins sleep through mass the following morning.) At other points this theme is couched in more properly political terms, as when Aires remembers a famous quip “que dizia ... não haver nada mais parecido com um conservador que um liberal e vice-versa.” And of course, in Flora’s nocturnal vision of Chapter LXXXIII the twins are momentarily fused, along with herself, into “uma só pessoa, feita das duas e de si mesma,” before reaching a kind of apotheosis of sameness in Flora’s highly symbolic deathbed query, “Ambos quais?”

In short, we’re invited to interpret Pedro and Paulo as potentially a single character, and here the somewhat uncomfortable business (for the modern reader, at least) of interpreting Machado’s complex political allegory begins. Without taking much of an imaginative leap, we can safely conclude that the twins symbolize, on a primary level, the positivistic, either/or thinking that served as the “scientific” base for Brazilian authoritarianism. This is precisely the guilty-or-not-guilty mentality that Machado attacks in DOM CASMURRO, and it would hardly be an exaggeration to claim that an assault on positivistic thinking—with its naïve belief in “truth” and simplistic notions of “progress”—constitutes the central thrust of Machado’s mature production.

One need look no further than QUINCAS BORBA to realize with what devastating irony the author was capable of exposing positivism’s dangerous doubletalk. In that novel, which precedes DOM CASMURRO, positivism is satirically rendered as the philosophy of humanitismo, whose slogan—“Ao vencedor, as batatas!”—smacks overtly of social Darwinism. Not surprisingly, we find the same kind of exclusionary language attached to Pedro and Paulo in their ongoing amorous and political “battles”: “Tinham já combinado que o rejeitado aceitaria a sorte, e deixaria o campo ao vencedor.” Or further, “Cada um deles não queria mais que prolongar a batalha [para Flora], esperando vencê-la. Entretanto, não confiavam um do outro este pensamento gêmeo, como eles. Ambos se iam sentindo exclusivos.” Later, after the Republic has been firmly established and Pedro and Paulo have traded political opinions, we learn that “apenas trocavam de armas para continuar o mesmo duelo.”

Helen Caldwell has argued that the real protagonist of ESAU E JACO is society itself, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that society is the novel’s antagonist—insofar as Pedro and Paulo represent an entire social system based on deceptive binary logic, capitalism and patriarchy. This last term is the most important for our discussion, but we should keep in mind that the three are definitely of a piece in the turn-of-the-century Brazilian society Machado scrutinizes.

The notion of social system becomes crucial here, as Machado/Aires exposes the complicity which underlies the dominant ideology of (phal)logocentric antagonism, in which “[a] discórdia não é tão feia como se pinta ... Nem feia, nem estéril.” The twins’ political opinions, which logically should open an immense gulf between them, are by no means essentialized, but rather described in terms of fashionable clothing which can be worn and discarded (or traded, as the case may be), as “gravatas de cor particular, que eles atavam ao pescoço, à espera que a cor cansasse e viesse outra.” Indeed, from their very first fight as children, Pedro and Paulo are cast as complicit in their own division. After Natividade has separated the two and given them kisses, toys and candy to quiet them, we read

De noite, na alcova, cada um deles concluiu para si que devia os obséquios daquela tarde, o doce, os beijos e o carro, à briga que tiveram, e que outra briga podia render tanto ou mais. Sem palavras, como um romance ao piano, resolveram ir à cara um do outro, na primeira ocasião. Isto que devia ser um laço armado à ternura da mãe, trouxe ao coração de ambos uma sensação particular, que não era só consolo e desforra do soco recebido naquele dia, mas também satisfação de um desejo íntimo, profundo, necessário. Sem ódio, disseram ainda algumas palavras de cama a cama, riram de uma ou outra lembrança da rua, até que o sono entrou com os seus pés de lã e bico calado, e tomou conta da alcova inteira.

Thus the twins’ antagonism—and metaphorically, that of the sociopolitical system they represent—is exposed as a mutually beneficial contract in which both sides agree to disagree. (For a related discussion of Machado’s critique of the Brazilian system of the favor, see Roberto Schwarz, UM MESTRE NA PERIFERIA DO CAPITALISMO.) Or as Aires puts it, “a discórdia dos dois começou por um simples acordo.” The anti-positivistic text thereby fittingly dissolves its own internal logic, contradicting the notion that the twins’ antagonism is a genetic condition consistent with transcendental human “nature.”

And yet, to contradict this contradiction, the social contract between Pedro and Paulo, instead of producing mutual dividends, results in tragic loss for both parties. Flora’s death flies directly in the face of the logic of humanitismo, for it makes all too clear that its promises are empty: in their blind desire to achieve “victory,” to prolong the battle at all costs, Pedro and Paulo never manage to harvest the potatoes.

This is a classic example of Machadoan irony, stripping away as it does positivism’s progressivist rhetoric to reveal its rotten middle, but Machado is hardly employing irony merely for irony’s sake. As a “physician,” the satirist simultaneously must propose a cure for society’s ills. Here we come back to the questions of gender and ambiguity discussed at the beginning of this essay. The patriarchal system represented by Pedro and Paulo is clearly unacceptable from an authorial point of view, but it’s not the only “system” intimated in this novel which foregrounds dualism on both structural and thematic levels.

There’s another set of twins in ESAU E JACO, an unlikely pair at first glance, but more strikingly similar from a psychological or philosophical perspective than their physically identical counterparts: Aires and Flora. Symbolically linked by their association with flowers—Aires wears one in his boutonniere, whereas Flora’s name speaks for itself—temperamentally similar in their mutual love for solitude and the arts, Aires and Flora share, more importantly, an ability to internalize contradictions that distinguishes them from the rest of the novel’s characters. (A possible exception is Gouveia, the young poet/official who unsuccessfully courts Flora. Embodying both romantic and naturalistic impulses, Gouveia might be read as a younger, more tormented version of Marchado/Aires, before the latter has gained the wisdom of experience and accepted the inevitability of contradiction.)

In a chapter suggestively entitled “Entre Aires e Flora” (LXXXVII), we encounter the following dialogue between the two, beginning with Flora:

—Já o tenho achado em contradição.

—Pode ser. A vida e o mundo não são outra coisa. A senhora não saberá isto bem, porque é moça e ingênua, mas creia que a vantagem é toda sua. A ingenuidade é o melhor livro e a mocidade a melhor escola. Vá desculpando esta minha pedanteria; alguma vez é um mal necessário.

—Não se acuse, conselheiro. O senhor sabe que eu não creio nada contra a sua palavra, nem contra a sua pessoa; a própria contradição que lhe acho é agradável.

—Também concordo.

Whereas Aires’ investment in contradiction is explicitly thematized throughout the novel as a well-developed philosophy based on years of personal experience, Flora’s internalizing of contradictions—as the above dialogue indicates—accompanies the sudden flowering of her womanhood and remains little understood by her. Describing Flora shortly before her “Grande Noite” in which she briefly synthesizes the twins within herself, Aires writes that she was “tão atordoada com a vista dos rapazes que as idéias não se enfileiraram [numa] forma lógica do pensamento. A própria sensação não era nítida. Era uma mistura de opressivo e delicioso, de turvo e claro, uma felicidade truncada, uma aflição consoladora, e o mais que puderes achar no capítulo das contradições.”

Allegorically speaking, Flora has been variously interpreted, but critics generally agree that she symbolizes, at least on one level, a kind of ideal Brazilian Republic. This reading is entirely justified by the text. Caldwell goes too far when she associates Flora specifically with the Republic as it actually existed in its initial months under Quintino Bocayuva before Floriano Peixoto’s troubled regime—an unmerited interpretation, given Machado’s enduring political skepticism. Nevertheless, it should be obvious that in the figure of Flora Machado is suggesting the possibility of a radically different society from the positivistic, patriarchal social system exemplified by Pedro and Paulo and in which the other characters furiously (and often hilariously) jockey for position.

This is not to imply that Machado essentializes the feminine and naïvely proposes matriarchy as an alternative to the dominant “masculine” political economy. As Dixon has demonstrated, matriarchy in itself is no solution in DOM CASMURRO, and neither is it here. Not only does the presence of Aires—who retains his sex despite his “Cixousian” investment in contradictions and preference for the conversation of women—negate this possibility; pure matriarchy is exploded in the womb, as it were. Natividade is by far the most likely candidate to embody an unadulterated “feminine” state in that she literally gives birth to contradictions, and yet her status as matriarch is compromised early and often in the text—from her laughable belief in the Cabocla’s prophecy and monomania to see that prophecy fulfilled, to her complicity in initiating the separation between the twins (thus aiding and abetting the institution of patriarchy) by spoiling them with selfish maternal generosity.

In the figures of Aires and Flora, however, contradiction becomes a means of subverting the compromising, either/or logic required by patriarchy, as both characters insist on the potentially liberating possibility of both/and: Aires recognizes that truth exists simultaneously on both sides of the ideological fence, while Flora—less consciously perhaps but with great determination—refuses to choose either Pedro or Paulo and dies in her attempt to unite them.

Significantly, this contradictory collapsing of binaries gets mapped into Aires and Flora’s gender identities as ambiguity. Asked for his opinion of the Cabocla in conversation at the Santos household, “Aires não pensava nada, mas percebeu que os outros pensavam alguma coisa, e fez um gesto de dois sexos. Como insistissem, não escolheu nenhuma das duas opiniões, achou outra, média, que contentou a ambos os lados, coisa rara em opiniões médias.” (emphasis mine). In Flora’s case gender ambiguity is even more pronounced, as her visionary incorporation of Pedro and Paulo during her “Grande Noite” makes abundantly clear:

Flora, não tendo visto sair nenhum dos gêmeos, mal podia crer que formassem agora uma só pessoa, mas acabou crendo, mormente depois que esta única pessoa solitária parecia completá-la interiormente, melhor que nenhuma das outras em separado. Era muito fazer e desfazer, mudar e transmudar. Pensou enganar-se, mas não; era uma só pessoa, feita das duas e de si mesma, que sentia bater nela o coração.

Androgyny, the synthesis of “masculine” and “feminine” characteristics—or in Jungian terms, the marriage of animus and anima—is proposed here as a means of achieving what today’s psychologists would call “wholeness.” Allegorically, Flora resonates as androgynous wholeness raised to the sociopolitical level, a system which would organically fuse matriarchy and patriarchy in the creation of a new order to replace the (phal)logocentric “twinning” of Pedro and Paulo into the dangerously simplistic, myopic categories of left and right, right and wrong.

Androgyny, I offer, is the text’s “hidden truth,” the “medicine” prescribed by the satirist/physician to cure society’s disease; and yet in contrast to the younger Machado’s somewhat ingenuous script of “Felicidade pelo casamento,” ESAU E JACO offers no such step-by-step recipe for the combining of masculine and feminine ingredients. Flora, as we know, perishes as a result of her effort to achieve a figurative androgyny, and even her poignant memory is finally insufficient to hold the twins to their vow of peace.

We should guard against underestimating Machado’s skepticism where “solutions” are concerned. In THE DECEPTIVE REALISM OF MACHADO DE ASSIS, John Gledson has written that “behind the urbanity and subtlety of [Machado’s] style hide some uncomfortable truths. Attempts to find hope at the bottom of Pandora’s box are misguided, at least in the great novels.” I take this to be an extreme position, but we would be wise to heed Gledson’s warning. As Machado’s fictional persona, the “velho incrédulo” Aires maintains a rigorous skepticism, not only when evaluating other characters’ often questionable motivations, but even as to the communicability of the very message he’s elaborating with such painstaking didactic intent. To cite but two of the numerous instances in which Aires theorizes the failure of his own narrative,

Leitor, não é muito que percebas a causa daquela expressão [de Natividade] e desses dedos abotoados. Já lá ficou dita atrás, quando era melhor deixar que a adivinhasses; mas provavelmente não a adivinharias, não que tenhas o entendimento curto ou escuro, mas porque o homem varia do homem, e tu talvez ficasses com igual expressão, simplesmente por saber que ias dançar sábado.

Há aí o seu tanto de exagerado, mas a hipérbole é deste mundo, e as orelhas da gente andam já tão entupidas que só à força de muita retórica se pode meter por elas um sopro de verdade.

Absurdly consistent with its own internal (il)logic of contradictions, the novel at times seems almost on the verge of deconstructing itself, inviting the kind of postructuralist critique Fitz brings to bear on DOM CASMURRO. Properly speaking, however, Aires’ lack of faith has more to do with his readers than with the properties inherent in textuality itself. Or perhaps we should say that it has more to do with a specific kind of reader, one who—to paraphrase Jonathan Swift—will look into the mirror of the text and fail to recognize his or her own face.

In a novel grounded in contradiction, we should expect to find the opposite of Fielding’s notion of satire as a social curative, but to conclude that ESAU E JACO is entirely devoid of hope is to ignore the fact that Machado’s vision is by no means limited to his specific historical moment. Mal nata, Flora’s androgynous republic is born out of time, but a flower of hope remains—significantly, in the writer’s breast. Future readers await, and perhaps the novel will help them see themselves and the world from a more holistic perspective. Ironically, despite his mockery of prophecy, Aires is the text’s greatest oracle. “Todos os oráculos têm o falar dobrado,” he writes, “mas entendem-se."

“Coisas Futuras!” indeed.

[Sol Luckman is author of the internationally acclaimed nonfiction Conscious Healing: Book One on the Regenetics Method and the Beginner's Luke Series of novels. Luke's signature obsessions with self, sex, satire and slapdash highlight a serious, and life-changing, point: consciousness creates. The point is there is a point to living in the imagination–for only through it can we reinvent our ourselves and our world. Currently, the author is giving away FREE copies of Beginner's Luke. To take advantage of this special offer, click here.]