By FILIPE DE FREITAS GONÇALVES*

A Machado-style analysis of the elevation of names and republican significance

1.

In the first chronicle of the series The Week, the last one he would publish, Machado de Assis, writing three days after the celebration of Tiradentes (who would become a symbol of the new regime and the country), constructs an intricate text, but which, as is often the case, leaves its meaning in plain sight for the attentive observer. At first glance, we are faced with a mischievous narrator who begins nowhere and ends nowhere.

Between one thing and another, he changes the subject, just as the country changed its government in those early years of republican consolidation. Behind the confusing back and forth, we find, however, a line of reasoning that runs through the entire text: the suitability or unsuitability of names for things. This is an ancient subject, which could very well be thought of in a philosophical key. From the beginning, the narrator approaches the problem in a comical way.

After stating that he had woken up with the chickens the week before and that he had then proposed a problem, he quickly changes the subject and poses the central question: the appropriate name was a riddle. The theme is central but represents a break in expectations, because the reader is certainly expecting him to tell us what the problem he had proposed was. Advancing his reasoning, let us say that, in the end, the problem was exactly the one that now presents itself before us: the most appropriate name to characterize things.

The difference in naming is then interpreted not by the suitability between the naming and the nature of the thing named, but by the effect that the name has on the audience. The name problem pleases austere readers and the narrator, supposedly interested in identifying himself as an austere person, opts for the term instead of riddle. But the following sentence breaks the expectation once again by comparing himself to the actresses, who would no longer be “a benefit, but an artistic party”.

The comparison, even in the first paragraph, places the attentive reader before what is really happening: the comical degradation of “austere” problems. Instead of a philosophy about the suitability of the name to the nature of the named, the image of dignity or indignity that a given naming generates, despite its suitability. “The thing,” he tells us about the benefit or artistic celebration, “is the same.” In the following paragraph, the conclusion: “Everything demands a certain elevation.” The elevation, however, is given by the name and not by the elevated nature of the thing that is named.

The humorous tone is confirmed in the following paragraph by the story of the “esteemed old men” who, while playing chess, fell asleep in the middle of the game but, when they woke each other up, referred to each other not by their names, but by the titles they had acquired in life: “Commander” of the Order of the Rose for services in Paraguay and “Major” of the National Guard. In addition to the evidently comical scene, which in itself demeans the titles, they also make an extra elevation: according to the narrator, we are dealing with a knight and not a commander; a lieutenant and not a major.

The elevation, comical in the daily dealings between two elderly friends who play chess and fall asleep in the middle of the game, is, above all, a lie: they are neither major nor commander. Here we have an important new element. The naming that confers dignity does not need to operate simply through the most socially prestigious names, but can, and should, falsify the thing named. The lie in the service of elevation reveals the ideological character of language, which runs parallel to the philosophical content of the act of naming itself and of the adequacy of the name to the named.

2.

That's where our character comes in: Tiradentes. Published on April 24, 1892, the columnist places the problem of the newly-republican hero at the center of his discussions. He confirms the need for the cult of the martyred ensign and throws us right into the middle of the problem: “The arrest of the heroic ensign is one that should be celebrated by all the sons of this country, if there is patriotism in it, or if this patriotism is something other than a simple reason for harsh and roundabout words.”

Tiradentes should be celebrated in the name of patriotism, which, however, must be more than “thick and roundabout words”. In other words: it must be more than simple elevation through language, than the rhetorical game that produces, as we have seen before, lies. In serious matters, the thing must correspond to the name and the noble feeling of love for the country and the personalities who sacrificed themselves to form it must be more than simply misleading language. This is a relevant fact that, in the immediate sequence, is simply discarded.

The subject turns to the comparison between the ensign and the other conspirators, before whom he should even be favored, the narrator informs us: “But the one who offered to bear the sins of Israel, the one who wept with joy when he saw the death sentence of his companions commuted, a sentence that was only going to be executed on him, the one hanged, the one quartered, the one beheaded, he must receive the prize in proportion to his martyrdom, and win for everyone, since he paid for everyone.”

The attentive reader should note that the language began to weigh heavily and invested in the identification of Tiradentes with a figure of Christological order: he bears the sins of Israel and should receive the reward in proportion to his martyrdom. The relationship that was then established between Tiradentes and the figure of Christ has already been documented by historiography and the narrator is in the discursive wave of his time.

Then, the grandiloquent tone continues in the identification of Tiradentes as Prometheus: “Read Aeschylus again, dear reader. Listen to the compassionate language of the nymphs, listen to the terrible screams, when the great titan is involved in the general conflagration of things. But, above all, listen to the words of Prometheus narrating his crimes to the beloved nymphs: “I gave fire to men; this master will teach them all the arts”. That is what Tiradentes did to us”.

Anyone familiar with Machado's prose will soon recognize in this “Relede Ésquilo, dear reader” the founding echo of the other, the one that the narrator of Esau and Jacob offers us at the beginning of the novel: “Re-read Aeschylus, my friend, re-read the Eumenides, there you will see the Pythia, calling those who were going to the consultation: “If there are any Hellenes here, come, approach, according to custom, in the order determined by fate””. The phrases mirror each other, but the content is different: Tiradentes, like Prometheus, would have given us the fire that would teach us all the arts.

Well, apparently, we have changed the subject. We are no longer talking about the elevation of names, but about the significance that Tiradentes should have in our national history, that is, about a patriotism that is not just a sycophant in the mouths of stupid people. How wrong. The following paragraph, instead of offering us an explanation of what this “fire” would be, ends up returning to the initial problem and putting a flea in the ear of the reader accustomed to Machado’s juggling acts. Now, we are discussing whether the name “Tiradentes” is really the most appropriate for a national hero:

Time will certainly bring back the familiarity of the name and the harmony of the syllables; let us imagine, however, that the ensign could have traveled through his imagination for a century and become a surgeon or dentist. He would be the same hero, and the profession would be the same; but he would bring a different dignity. It could even be that, in time, he would lose the second part, dentist, and remain just a surgeon.

The narrator hopes that the same thing can be done with Tiradentes as the two old sleepyheads had done with each other: to raise their social status by changing their names. Instead of Tiradentes, “surgeon”. Another story is then added that deals with the same issue: a young groom keeps putting off his wedding for longer than is appropriate and, when his mother-in-law comes with the “moral stick” to demand explanations, he quickly reveals the imbroglio: “–Excuse me, but it is not because of the title of surveyor, per se, that I am delaying the wedding. In the countryside, the surveyor is given the title of doctor out of courtesy, and I would like to get married already as a doctor”.

It is not a question, therefore, of being able to support the new family, but of how he would be called in the countryside. Called without being so, let it be noted. Called a lie. A country title. Provincialism is unmasked. The lie title is a provincial habit that cannot distinguish greatness from ordinariness because it has never truly been faced with greatness. Between the ordinary and the mediocre, the ordinary become doctors, Prometheus or something of the sort.

And we return to the central problem: wanting to change Tiradentes' title to Surgeon is a rustic habit to which, however, the well-educated narrator who recalls Aeschylus and the Bible falls like a lamb in his good-humored commentary. And this turns on the warning light regarding the central problem: is saying that Tiradentes gave us the fire that Prometheus in the myth would have given to humanity not, at the end of the day, provincialism that fails to see things clearly?

Reversing the narrator's own affirmative conclusion: Tiradentes gave us nothing, and to say that he did is a kind of false title that a patriotic narrator attributes to the recently canonized Brazilian Christ. Seen in context, the reference to the rebel seems to be the very content of the chronicle, around which the other stories, far from being a mere pointless digression by an erratic narrator, update a context that gives meaning to the elevation of the ensign to a national symbol. Far from being the pointless ramblings of someone disinterested, the text has a clear core in the question of Tiradentes and what he means (or fails to mean) in our culture.

3.

The last paragraph, which seems like another twist of the screw in changing the subject, is actually talking about the same thing. It is now about the “electoral case”.

The conclusion is so good that it deserves to be quoted in full: “From here to the electoral case it is less than a step; but, not understanding politics, I do not know if the absence of such a large part of the electorate in the election on the 20th means disbelief, as some claim, or abstention, as others swear. Disbelief is a phenomenon beyond the will of the voter: abstention is purpose. There are those who do not see in all this more than ignorance of the power of that fire that Tiradentes bequeathed to his compatriots. What I know is that I went to my section to vote, but found the door closed and the ballot box in the street, with the books and documents. Another house welcomed them compassionately, but the poll workers had not been notified and there were five voters. We discussed the question of knowing which came first, the chicken or the egg. That was the problem, the riddle, the Monday riddle. Opinions were divided; some voted for the egg, others for the chicken; the rooster itself received one vote. The candidates is that they didn't have any, because the poll workers didn't come and it struck ten o'clock.”

The name now has consequences because calling the absence of voters (a thing) disbelief or abstention (names) implies interpreting political life and taking a position. Here the problem takes on another aspect, which can be retroactive: to say that Tiradentes is the Prometheus who gave us fire is already interpreting the world. This does not imply, obviously, that the interpretation is correct, as the contrast between disbelief and abstention shows us.

The same thing can be interpreted in different ways. Disbelief does not imply will, that is, it affects the population in a generalized way and does not have a clear political message. Abstention is purposeful, that is, it implies active reflection on the political situation and the decision not to vote; abstaining is an act full of meaning, while disbelief is an act of emptying meaning and will. Anyone who wants to attest to the current relevance of the phrase can watch the journalistic discussions about the increasing data on absence from the last elections to see that we are in the same place as in 1892.

The next sentence is the essential one: “There are those who see in all this nothing more than ignorance of the power of that fire that Tiradentes bequeathed to his compatriots.” Neither disbelief nor abstention: ignorance. Now we have a clue as to what that fire that Tiradentes bequeathed to us might be: it is not simply and purely about independence, but about the Republic, about the possibility of a group of voters taking a position on the follow-up of national affairs. Election as the quintessence of the bourgeoisification of the country that had swept a monarchy off the map and established a Republic, and Tiradentes as the quintessence of the election.

Well, Tiradentes' fire is, then, democracy, popular participation. But now that we have found the content, we can return to the joke from before: isn't this story of the Republic and elections a hoax? A little country lie? We call a surveyor a doctor and a lieutenant calls a knight a commander, just as a knight called a commander calls a lieutenant a major. Aren't we calling a Republic something that doesn't deserve the name? Or even: aren't we transforming a figure who simply doesn't fit the role into a republican hero?

The rest of the paragraph is even more revealing: the narrator, having arrived at his polling place, finds everything on the street. He doesn't explain why, but a more or less informed reader knows that elections in 19th century Brazil were violent affairs that involved beatings. At the very least, we are faced with disorganization that prevents the sovereign act of voting. And, at the end, as a joke that picks up on the beginning, another joke: the voters decide to discuss who came first, the chicken or the egg, and in the end, unable to vote in the real election, they are reduced to the pantomime of voting for the downgraded candidates of this new election. The plot is interesting because the voters who went to vote were also unable to do so, which points to another explanation for the absence: the disorganization or violence intrinsic to Brazilian electoral processes. The country is not made for voting.

4.

But the chronicle does not end here. He prefers to end by quoting the opening lines of the poem “Sara La bagnose”, by Victor Hugo.[I] The indolent character in the poem lies in a hammock bathing on top of a lake where the waters of an Athenian river flow. She lets time pass, and after the description of her beauty, we finally find her saying what she is thinking:

“Oh! if I were captain
Or sultana,
I would take amber baths
In a yellow marble tub,
Near a throne,
Between two golden griffins!

I would have a silk net
That bends
Under a body about to faint;
I would have a soft ottoman
Where does it emanate from?
A perfume that makes you love.

I could have fun naked,
Under the clouds,
In the garden stream,
Without fear of seeing in the shadow
From the dark forest
Two eyes suddenly flare up.

So I could, without being pressured
My indolence,
Leave with my clothes
Spread over the large slabs
My sandals
Of cloth embroidered with rubies.”

As you can see, the reference is not random and reinforces the central theme of imagining being something you are not. As our lieutenant likes to be called major, Victor Hugo’s bathing Sara would like to be a sultana. But the difference is also essential: the bather wants to be the sultana simply so she can continue her carefree enjoyment of the wonderful nature that surrounds her. It is just a dream, a desire and a delirium of our “indolent” beautiful bather.

In the case of the major, the commander and the republican martyr, the thing has another function: the dream assumes the form of immediate reality, even if it is a lie. Furthermore, the falsification of elevation is the social truth. Not being de jure Doctor, the surveyor is one in fact, because provincialism dictates it. Everything is upside down. In the land of fantasy, the Republic is happening without elections, that is, without the will of the people. And everything continues as if it were normal.

Right at the end of the poem things get complicated. The frivolous bathers, who like our Sara sing of their desire to be a sultana, continue the song as follows:

– Oh! the indolent maiden
Who dresses so late
On harvest day!

It's harvest day! They are bathing and late for work. But it is the group that makes the connection, and the individual bather is left with only the statement of desire. Victor Hugo's poem is complex and deserves more attention than we can give it here, focusing only on a few things. The narrator ends his chronicle by referring to the poem that talks about the subjects he had discussed, without, however, including in his citation the passages that are truly important to the theme.

One has to take the trouble to read the entire poem to notice what is significant. And here he plays with something that had permeated the narration as a whole and that reveals, in the narrator's own writing practices, the same habits that the chronicle, in the set of debasement and confrontation of its parts, seems to condemn: the Brazilian habits of elevation without elevated content. Strictly speaking, the narrator quotes the wrong passage. He himself, in fact, had fallen into the trap of elevating Tiradentes as Prometheus and as Christ, reproducing in his discourse what the content of the chronicle denies as valid. He is part of the problem he criticizes.

If we read it in a positive light, we could say that the country lacks the group consciousness of the young bathers in Victor Hugo's poem: one must go to work. One must not imagine being a sultan when one is a worker and needs to go to the harvest. Simply put: one must go and create a Republic before creating mythologies of the Republic. People must vote and there must be some minimum level of popular participation in order to be able to call it a Republic.

And it is always good to remember that, in the 1848th century, the Republic, despite the endless scholarly and bibliographical discussions about what this idea means or has meant, was linked to the French Republic, to the revolution. And even more so in the pen of Machado, who had lived in his youth with the exiles of XNUMX. The Republic is the vote and popular participation: the rest is the false elevation of a language that twists itself to any feeling of displaced and contentless superiority.

5.

It is enlightening to recall José Murilo de Carvalho's argument about Tiradentes. At a certain point in his essay on the transformation of the ensign into a symbol, the historian from Minas Gerais asks himself the fundamental question of why he chose this movement. There were other movements that were closer to symbolizing Brazilian republicanism and much more deeply rooted in what the Republic really means. Why choose the Inconfidência Mineira and Tiradentes?

The answer is wonderful: precisely because nothing happened in the Inconfidência, precisely because the Inconfidência, although it spoke of Emancipation and Republic, said nothing exactly about Abolition or popular participation (on the contrary, the Republic there was not yet that of the French, but that of the Americans which, as we all know from Hannah Arendt, did not imply social transformation, but only a new form of political management), precisely because Tiradentes never represented, in fact, a challenge to the system but was diluted in a more or less religious symbolism that 19th century painting would explore in the identification of the martyr with the Lamb of God.

In other words, the Republic needed a symbol that symbolized nothing. Imagine if someone like Frei Caneca had been chosen. The young man had truly participated in a movement with republican and popular significance; he was a true martyr of what the Republic meant as Frenchness, to use a Portuguese term. He was no good for a Republic that did not intend to be republican. An empty symbol would have been better.

Now, Machado de Assis's chronicle seems to be telling us the same thing without the erudite apparatus of José Murilo de Carvalho, only with the perceptive vision of its author. To say that Tiradentes is the symbol of the Republic is to elevate him to what he is not and to pretend that the Republic is republican. But the problem lies deeper, because the chronicle makes it very clear that this is not an isolated fact, but is intertwined with the popular mentality. What is done with Tiradentes is not a bolt from the blue: Brazilian society does it daily as a habit. The name of benefit is replaced by celebration and so on.

There is a social substratum that is very easy to overlook. Let's put it this way: the chronicle challenges, through the identification that we all have with the narrator's intelligent point of view, our own common practice of attributing content to what, in fact, has none. Of attributing greatness to what, in fact, has none. In other words: Machado's narrator, understood from the point of view of authorship, is a constant invitation to self-criticism for the learned.

I'm going to jump right in and get to the point. Machado de Assis's column is talking, to use the abstract language of our times, about the credibility of institutions, about people's ability to believe in institutions as mechanisms that say something concrete. A very hot topic, as you can see. Machado is taking the institutionalization of the Republic through its symbolism and is discussing what the Republic really represents, and if we are to believe in his opinion, it means little more than a fake doctor.

Let's change the word Republic to contemporary democracy and what do we have? We are left with the same uncomfortable question: what does democracy mean to people today? To the majority of people? Is it a fake doctor? Just turn on the TV to the right commentator. GloboNews and everyone will be able to see that Machado's narrator is there, saying that Tiradentes is the Prometheus who gave us the fire with which we will learn the other arts. The most important of these being social justice.

If we are to believe the newspapers and political commentators, Lula won the 2022 elections because he created a broad front and began to represent democracy against Jair Bolsonaro, who was eroding institutions. Perhaps this made him viable among the ruling classes and among the middle classes, which, as everyone knows, represent very little in terms of elections.

I believe he won because of the hunger, inflation and social calamity experienced during the pandemic, which promised to stay. Lula won the election not because people looked at him and saw democracy, this abstract thing that, strictly speaking, no one who hasn't taken a higher education course in the humanities knows what it is. He won because the poor and the miserable looked at him and identified with what he truly represents, the mitigation of the Brazilian calamity. Maybe it's the opposite of what the newspapers say: the middle classes and those in power had to swallow him because he represented that to the people and would win the election anyway.

For those at the top, elections are always a nuisance. Look, whether this is correct, whether the benefits of their first terms were the result of the commodities boom, whether it is all mere propaganda, whether their government is neoliberal or something like that: none of this matters to our problem. This is scholarly speculation. Not that it is not important; it is. But at the level of popular identification, democracy means a little food and a sense of social optimism.

All of this seems to be embodied in his figure. It could all be ideological mystification, the movement of history could be pointing in another direction, but I believe that, when it comes down to it, he only won those extra million votes because of this. This is his political capital. Apart from this, what we call institutions do not exist. Apart from this, they are a fake doctor or a sleepy commander.

If we were to take the chronicle as a political lesson, which is always a mistake (but an irresistible mistake), we could say that it is about making the Republic something that has meaning in people's lives. Or, to use Victor Hugo's language, we should get up and go to the harvest. Stop dreaming. I don't buy the image of a skeptical and relativistic Machado de Assis. The chronicle is clearly written from the perspective that the Republic has meaning in popular participation (if it didn't, the jokes and the debasement wouldn't make sense) and this only doesn't become an explicit political project because old Machado de Assis already knew that the world turned in a more complicated way and that the historical process had its tricks.

Bringing things to our days, it would be something like building a “democratic culture”, to use the expression that Heloísa Starling used in her interview on the program Live Wheel last year. What the hell does this mean in practical terms? Nobody knows. Well, if nobody knows, it is because the assumption is wrong and we should abandon the institutions. In the language of Machado de Assis: let go of Tiradentes-Prometheus and move forward with that quote that Walter Benjamin makes from Hegel: food and clothing first, the Kingdom of God later. The problem is that, between food and clothing, there comes the ideological cudgel and the complications of cunning history. The Kingdom of God, well, the Kingdom of God has become the Kingdom of Heaven.

Let's end by saying the following, because it is almost proof that Machado de Assis's chronicle is correct: April 21st is not Tiradentes' day. It is Saint George's day and, consequently, Ogum's day. No one is going to celebrate the rebel. We are all going to eat feijoada. Unlike Tiradentes, Ogum means something in popular culture. As one of his points says: he wins lawsuits, he comes to work, he is your Beira-Mar. Or, as another one says, which I think is the most beautiful of all:

I heard a bugle call on the moon.
But it was the biggest touch of the day.
Ogum was a cavalry soldier.
It was an ordinance of the Virgin Mary.

This is followed by a “la ha la ha” whistle that imitates the sound of a bugle.[ii] It is beautiful, because the clarion, the instrument whose name means light, is played under the moon, the light in the darkness. Strictly speaking, it is the light that emanates from the moon and, therefore, because it is the light in the darkness, it is “the greatest of the day”. The one who plays it is Ogum, who is said to have been ordained by the Virgin Mary, in a wonderful syncretism that makes us see the orisha and the saint in a mixture that is difficult to describe visually, but that popular poetic wisdom constructs with a sharp simplicity, which also means clear, of a clarion. This light in the darkness reminds me of the song we sing in the procession of the Easter candle in the church next to our house. It is by Friar Luiz Turra:

O light of the Lord
that comes upon the earth,
floods my being,
remains in us.[iii]

Entering the church with a lit candle, in procession, is perhaps the plastic image of this light of hope that Ogum represents in one of his most inspiring moments. Has anyone ever written something so beautiful and moving about Tiradentes? Only those tacky paintings from the 19th century are about him. Does anyone make feijoada to celebrate Tiradentes? I prefer Saint George.

Filipe de Freitas Gonçalves He holds a PhD in Literary Studies from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG).

Notes

[I]A translation of the poem can be found at: Sara la baigneuse / Sara, the bather | Antenna 2 – RTP. It is she who I will quote in the following excerpts.

[ii]The point can be heard here: Moon Clarion.

[iii]It can be heard here: O LIGHT OF THE LORD.