ADAM AND EVE ACCORDING TO EÇA AND MACHADO

Abstract

Both Eça de Queirós and Machado de Assis wrote stories about Adam and Eve, defamiliarizing in different ways the original Biblical narrative. Their deviations from the source are consistent with the general esthetic programs they established in their overall production. Through masterful detail, Eça creates a kind of Darwinian Garden of Eden, which continually tests the original parents, threatening their survival, and in the process facilitates their slow development into the capable human beings we recognize. Machado’s story is neither romantic nor naturalistic, but rather a quirky philosophical and metaliterary entertainment that plays with narrative devices. A frame story, in which the narrator of the interior story ends up denying the validity of tale he has offered, creates an ungrounded narrator. The sense of confused giddiness produced in the narrator’s audience suggests by implication an expected reader’s reaction to the short story itself. In different ways, the Edenic narratives of the Portuguese and Brazilian masters disturb readers’ comfortable assumptions regarding Adam and Eve, and encourage them to question this received wisdom.