Machado versus Machado: Silviano Santiago and the Art of Survival

Abstract

If oldhood was what Silviano Santiago had in mind when he wrote Machado, what happens when we bring his category of survival closer to Benjamin’s concept of Überleben – the quality of a literary work from which translation is born? And if the translation can encompass the ideas of relation, understanding, and interpretation, what kind of “survival” (Fortleben) does Santiago propose through the dramatization of Machado’s singularities? Based on a narrative analysis, we propose that Machado appears as the characterological embodiment of the very absence to which he is confined by the epilepsy crisis. In a play of parallels and contrasts – with other captives, such as the attractions of human zoos, Rilke’s “The Panther,” Ted Hughes’s “The Jaguar,” Kafka’s Red Peter, as well as the ideas of Elizabeth Costello/Coetzee –, we suggest a reading of certain of the work’s most unsettling and revealing passages by problematizing the role of the narrator-critic and the concept of “double consciousness,” as conceived by the American thinker W. E. B. Du Bois.