“But Then, What Would Criticism Be?” Balzac Reads Stendhal, Machado Reads Eça

Abstract

In 1840, Balzac wrote an article about Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme. Though praising the book’s qualities, in the final paragraphs Balzac is very critical of the book, in a way that leads us to infer that what he criticizes in La Chartreuse de Parme is that it is not the novel he would have written himself. In 1878, Machado de Assis wrote two articles about O primo Basílio, then recently published by Eça de Queirós. Identifying affinities between Eça and Balzac and between Machado and Stendhal, this paper claims that the Brazilian criticism of the Portuguese novel is based on these affinities. In other words, Machado’s condemnation of Eça’s submissiveness to Realism/Naturalism originates in his own need to create characters as “moral persons”, whose actions are triggered by their innermost motives. Among such motives stands out the prevalence of the will over the intellect, of personal interest over the influence of circumstances, which is more akin to the heroes of Stendhal than to Balzac’s characters, a model Eça admittedly tried to emulate in the beginning of his career as a novelist.