The Vestibular is the Brazilian equivalent of the American SAT test, but it is more difficult, requiring several days and an oral exam.
One of the subject matters of the test is Brazil’s greatest author, Machado de Assis, who happens to be one of my favorites.
According to Lucas Limberti, or any other teacher on Youtube who prepares Brazilian students to take the Vestibular, Machado de Assis is “the first representative of realism in Brazil,” and this is the received opinion. A student who wants to get the “correct answer” on the Vestibular ought to repeat “Machado de Assis is the first realist writer of Brazil.” And he ought to elaborate on how Machado de Assis was influenced by Marxism and by science and by realist writers such as José Maria de Eça de Queirós.
But . . . the received opinion that Machado de Assis is realistic . . . is wrong.
A literary critic such as Silviano Santiago understands Machado de Assis better, as shown on a June 24, 2019 show on Canal Livre.
And Wikipedia also correctly identifies Machado de Assis as surrealistic.
There is an old saying not to judge a book by its cover, but when a cover artist has understood a book, the cover can be a good guide!
These cover artists understand the fantastical nature of Machado de Assis’s art:
In O Alienista, a psychologist opens an asylum for the insane; but he is insane, and his patients sane.
Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas opens with the narrator narrating his own funeral, which he sees from the beyond.
These fictions are obviously not realistic, unless I’ve been living in a world very different from the real one.
Machado de Assis’s narratives are as fantastical as those of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
But not every cover artist has understood the fantastical nature of the Scarlet Letter. Alas, most of the book covers for the Scarlet Letter are realistic, like these:
Gogol is another writer who is commonly classed with the realists, even though Dead Souls is about an emissary of Satan who buys deceased serfs from bewildered landowners.
But when taking the Vestibular . . . remember students! Repeat after me: “Machado de Assis was a realist writer who was heavily influenced by Marxism, science, and activism!”
That will be the correct answer on the Vestibular.
But the correct answer is incorrect—and more often than people think!
Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, usually available at Amazon for $4.91.