On the short story as a canon of poetry: Eça, Machado and the aporias of modernity

Abstract

If we set out to read Machado de Assis’ short story “Missa do Galo” (1893) and Eça de Queirós’ “Civilização” (1892) in the light of the short story’s categorical guidelines, we’ll see that the unquestionable modernity of Machado’s short narrative isn’t exactly recognisable in the Queirosian short story. In the old (but unquestionably modern) wake of Poe, Macha­do’s short story seeks to show why the narrative exercise is, in this literary genre, as necessary as it is disliked - because there is always a story to tell, but only its most visible face is told, the secret profile of which seems to prefer to retreat to the meaningful virtuality of an instant that then opens up to what transcends it in the possibility of meaning. For its part, Eça’s short story, published for the first time in 1892 in the Portuguese newspaper Gazeta de Notícias (and which would later become the matrix for the novel A cidade e as serras, published in 1901), does not embrace the discursiveness of the frame that shapes Machado de Assis’ short story, which is still profoundly modern today in its compositional defence of a brevity that cannot be measured according to the thread of logic dictated by number.