The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas Read online

  THE POSTHUMOUS MEMOIRS OF BRÁS CUBAS

  LIBRARY OF LATIN AMERICA

  General Editor

  Jean Franco

  Series Editor for Brazil

  Richard Graham, with the assistance of Alfredo Bosi

  Editorial Board

  Antonio Cornejo Polar

  Tulio Halperín Donghi

  Iván jaksi

  Naomi Lindstrom

  Eduardo Lozano

  Francine Masiello

  THE POSTHUMOUS MEMOIRS OF BRÁS CUBAS

  A Novel by

  JOAQUIM MARIA MACHADO DE ASSIS

  Translated from the Portuguese by

  GREGORY RABASSA

  WITH A FOREWORD BY ENYLTON DE SÁ REGO

  AND AN AFTERWORD BY GILBERTO PINHEIRO PASSOS

  Oxford University Press

  Oxford New York

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  Copyright © 1997 by Oxford University Press

  First Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 1997

  First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1998

  Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

  electronic, mechanical, photocopying recording, or otherwise,

  without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Machado de Assis, 1839-1908.

  [Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas, English]

  The posthumous memoirs of Brás Cubas / by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis:

  translated by Gregory Rabassa: with a foreword by Enylton de Sá Rego

  and an afterword by Gilberto Pinheiro Passos.

  p. cm. — (Library of Latin America)

  ISBN 0-19-510170-7 (Pbk)

  I. Rabassa, Gregory. II. Title. III. Series.

  PQ9697.M18M513 1997

  869.3—dc20 96-44125

  1 3 5 7 9 1 0 8 6 4 2

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Series Editors’ Introduction

  Preface

  ENYLTON DE SÁ REGO

  The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

  JOAQUIM MARIA MACHADO DE ASSIS

  Afterword

  GILBERTO PINHEIRO PASSOS

  Series Editors’ General Introduction

  The Library of Latin America series makes available in translation major nineteenth-century authors whose work has been neglected in the English-speaking world. The titles for the translations from the Spanish and Portuguese were suggested by an editorial committee that included Jean Franco (general editor responsible for works in Spanish), Richard Graham (series editor responsible for works in Portuguese), Tulio Halperín Donghi (at the University of California, Berkeley), Iván jaksi (at the University of Notre Dame), Naomi Lindstrom (at the University of Texas at Austin), Francine Masiello (at the University of California, Berkeley), and Eduardo Lozano of the Library at the University of Pittsburgh. The late Antonio Cornejo Polar of the University of California, Berkeley, was also one of the founding members of the committee. The translations have been funded thanks to the generosity of the Lampadia Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

  During the period of national formation between 1810 and into the early years of the twentieth century, the new nations of Latin America fashioned their identities, drew up constitutions, engaged in bitter struggles over territory, and debated questions of education, government, ethnicity, and culture. This was a unique period unlike the process of nation formation in Europe and one which should be more familiar than it is to students of comparative politics, history, and literature.

  The image of the nation was envisioned by the lettered classes—a minority in countries in which indigenous, mestizo, black, or mulatto peasants and slaves predominated—although there were also alternative nationalisms at the grassroots level. The cultural elite were well educated in European thought and letters, but as statesmen, journalists, poets, and academics, they confronted the problem of the racial and linguistic heterogeneity of the continent and the difficulties of integrating the population into a modern nation-state. Some of the writers whose works will be translated in the Library of Latin America series played leading roles in politics. Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, a friar who translated Rousseau’s The Social Contract and was one of the most: colorful characters of the independence period, was faced with imprisonment and expulsion from Mexico for his heterodox beliefs; on his return, after independence, he was elected to the congress. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, exiled from his native Argentina under the presidency of Rosas, wrote Facundo: Civilización y barbarie, a stinging denunciation of that government. He returned after Rosas’ overthrow and was elected president in 1868. Andrés Bello was born in Venezuela, lived in London where he published poetry during the independence period, settled in Chile where he founded the University, wrote his grammar of the Spanish language, and drew up the country’s legal code.

  These post-independence intelligentsia were not simply dreaming castles in the air, but vitally contributed to the founding of nations and the shaping of culture. The advantage of hindsight may make us aware of problems they themselves did not foresee, but this should not affect our assessment of their truly astonishing energies and achievements. It is still surprising that the writing of Andrés Bello, who contributed fundamental works to so many different fields, has never been translated into English. Although there is a recent translation of Sarmiento’s celebrated Facundo, there is no translation of his memoirs, Recuerdos de provincia (Provincial Recollections). The predominance of memoirs in the Library of Latin America series is no accident—many of these offer entertaining insights into a vast and complex continent.

  Nor have we neglected the novel. The series includes new translations of the outstanding Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’ work, including Dom Casmurro and The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. There is no reason why other novels and writers who are not so well known outside Latin America—the Peruvian novelist Clorinda Matto de Turner’s Aves sin nido, Nataniel Aguirre’s Juan de la Rosa, José de Alencar’s Iracema, Juana Manuela Gorriti’s short stories—should not be read with as much interest as the political novels of Anthony Trollope.

  A series on nineteenth-century Latin America cannot, however, be limited to literary genres such as the novel, the poem, and the short story. The literature of independent Latin America was eclectic and strongly influenced by the periodical press newly liberated from scrutiny by colonial authorities and the Inquisition. Newspapers were miscellanies of fiction, essays, poems, and translations from all manner of European writing. The novels written on the eve of Mexican Independence by José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi included disquisitions on secular education and law, and denunciations of the evils of gaming and idleness. Other works, such as a well-known poem by Andrés Bello, “Ode to Tropical Agriculture,” and novels such as Amalia by José Mármol and the Bolivian Nataniel Aguirre’s Juan de la Rosa, were openly partisan. By the end of the century, sophisticated scholars were beginning to address the history of their countries, as did João Capistrano de Abreu in his Capítulos de história colonial.

  It is often
in memoirs such as those by Fray Servando Teresa de Mier or Sarmiento that we find the descriptions of everyday life that in Europe were incorporated into the realist novel. Latin American literature at this time was seen largely as a pedagogical tool, a “light” alternative to speeches, sermons, and philosophical tracts—though, in fact, especially in the early part of the century, even the readership for novels was quite small because of the high rate of illiteracy. Nevertheless, the vigorous orally transmitted culture of the gaucho and the urban underclasses became the linguistic repertoire of some of the most interesting nineteenth-century writers—most notably José Hernández, author of the “gauchesque” poem “Martín Fierro,” which enjoyed an unparalleled popularity. But for many writers the task was not to appropriate popular language but to civilize, and their literary works were strongly influenced by the high style of political oratory.

  The editorial committee has not attempted to limit its selection to the better-known writers such as Machado de Assis; it has also selected many works that have never appeared in translation or writers whose work has not been translated recently. The series now makes these works available to the English-speaking public.

  Because of the preferences of funding organizations, the series initially focuses on writing from Brazil, the Southern Cone, the Andean region, and Mexico. Each of our editions will have an introduction that places the work in its appropriate context and includes explanatory notes.

  We owe special thanks to Robert Glynn of the Lampadia Foundation, whose initiative gave the project a jump start, and to Richard Ekman of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which also generously supported the project. We also thank the Rockefeller Foundation for funding the 1996 symposium “Culture and Nation in Iberoamerica,” organized by the editorial board of the Library of Latin America. We received substantial institutional support and personal encouragement from the Institute of Latin American Studies of the University of Texas at Austin. The support of Edward Barry of Oxford University Press has been crucial, as has the advice and help of Ellen Chodosh of Oxford University Press. The first volumes of the series were published after the untimely death, on July 3, 1997, of Maria C. Bulle, who, as an associate of the Lampadia Foundation, supported the idea from its beginning.

  —Jean Franco

  —Richard Graham

  Preface

  WARNING: DEADLY HUMOR AT WORK

  Dear Reader:

  If you have never heard of the nineteenth-century Brazilian writer Machado de Assis, this novel will afford you a triple surprise. You will be surprised by its form, its content, and the author’s strange originality behind these pages.

  The form of this novel is certainly unusual. As we are told at the outset, these memoirs are posthumous, albeit not in the usual sense of having been published after the death of their author. These are posthumous memoirs in a very literal sense: Brás Cubas, the memorialist, tells us in his preface “To the Reader” that he started writing his autobiography only after he died. If you accept this quite unconventional possibility for a work of fiction, you have here an extremely uncommon form of autobiography, written from beyond the grave, with all the advantages of perfect hindsight.

  Having lived his life to its very end, Brás Cubas supposedly knows the whole truth about it. Since he writes from this privileged point of view, we have the right to expect a highly organized compendium of the knowledge and wisdom acquired by Brás Cubas during his existence. If these memoirs are indeed the final confessions of a dead man, we can expect him to be deadly serious about the meaning of life. What we get instead is a digressive and fragmented account of an ordinary man’s experiences, an account in which an incredibly irreverent and facetious narrator chattily addresses his readers at every step, challenging us to make our own sense of the inconsistencies of his unheroic life. From his extremely detached point of view, Brás Cubas can tell us the blunt truth about his ordinary life, unmasking in the process most conventions of appropriateness he no longer has to obey. In doing so, he compels the reader to reconsider both these social conventions and the very meaning of life. Brás Cubas is serious about life, but in a peculiarly ludicrous way: his is indeed a deadly sense of humor.

  The book is broken up into 160 chapters, few containing more than three or four pages, and some made up of only one or two sentences. For example, Chapter CXXXVI in its entirety reads: “But, I’m either mistaken or I’ve just written a useless chapter.” Fittingly, the title of this chapter is “Uselessness.” Some readers will smile, finding it funny. Others will probably be annoyed, or judge the exercise clumsy and contrived, if not a good example of total uselessness, thus confirming the appropriateness of the chapter. If you are in the latter group, dear reader, your surprise will probably increase when you come upon portions of the novel containing no words at all, such as Chapter LV.

  Under the title “The Old Dialogue Between Adam and Eve,” a chapter is presented as a full-page conversation between a man and a woman. It starts with his asking her a question. After the give and take of a few more questions and answers, it reaches its climax with both man and woman using exclamations at the end of whatever it is they are saying to each, other. Yet, the only elements we get of this verbal exchange are the question marks and the exclamation points; the whole dialogue is represented on the blank page by ellipses alone, or, graphically speaking, by suspension points. Evidently, the reader is supposed to fill in the blanks, projecting into this dialogue his or her own ideas about the tenor of Adam and Eve’s intercourse. Here, as throughout this novel, the reader is invited to assume an active, creative, and critical role, a surprisingly modern approach for a novel written in the nineteenth century.

  This active role is sometimes challenging. Chapter CXXXIX, “How I Didn’t Get to Be Minister of State,” contains only a few blank lines. The reader, probably surprised by a short, empty chapter, may decide to go on to the following chapter, CXL, “Which Explains the Previous One,” only to find these opening words: “There are things that are better said in silence. Unsuccessful ambitious people will understand it.” The suggestion is clear: if you want to understand the narrator’s silence in Chapter CXXXIX, you will have to consider your own failures. For some readers, this may seem threatening, for we are reminded of our own frustrated ambitions for power, and nobody likes to acknowledge, however fleetingly, having ever been a loser.

  These narrative tricks were uncommon in the usually romantic or realist nineteenth-century novels. Yet, they were not entirely new; English-language readers will be reminded of strategies employed by the eighteenth-century British writer Laurence Sterne in his still-hilarious Tristram Shandy, and the narrator Brás Cubas himself acknowledges in a foreword to the reader that he appropriated Sterne’s “free-form” style for his memoirs. What is new, as he also warns the reader, is that to this usually comical form he will attach “a few fretful touches of pessimism” of his own. In an old-fashioned yet unforgettable metaphor, he tells us that he wrote his book with a playful pen, “a pena da galhofa” the pen of irreverent laughter—suggesting that this would certainly make his work light and funny. But he immediately adds that the ink well in which he dipped his pen contained “a tinta da melancolia” melancholy ink—thereby indelibly attaching to his laughter a more somber hue. This admixture of laughter and seriousness, intimately blended into the same thought or action, is an unusual and dangerous recipe for a novel: “one can readily foresee what may come of such a marriage,” he concludes.

  Brás Cubas is aware of the danger of mingling seriousness with amusement when vying for favorable public opinion. His book, he tells us, may have only five readers. Serious readers will probably dislike it, seeing in it only the pure fiction of a nonrealistic novel, while frivolous readers will not find in it the entertainment they crave. Thus, he adds, this book runs the risk of being deprived both of the pompous esteem of the serious and of the superficial infatuation of the frivolous. According to Brás Cubas, these are “the two main pillars” of public opinio
n. Some readers may be offended by his words. After all, seriousness is not always pompous, entertainment not always frivolous; and we readers, as an important part of public opinion, do not appreciate criticism from anyone, least of all a dead man.

  A historical interpretation will remind us that when Machado de Assis was writing this book in Brazil in 1880 the country was still a monarchy, slavery had not yet been abolished, and only a small fraction of the population—the elite—were literate. In such an unequal society, his few potential readers would tend to go along with the mores of their times, a morality based on favoritism, patronage, and its attendant hypocrisy. In such a society, as we can easily imagine, the main practical virtues had to be social conformity and the cultivation of appearances. So perhaps we can excuse Brás Cubas’ apparent insolence on the grounds that he is criticizing others, not us.

  Yet, some readers will not be convinced by this historical explanation, since our times do not seem to be that different; disrespecting public opinion remains a daring attitude. Conformity and cultivation of appearances are still considered sure recipes for success. Perception, public opinion, and “image-building” have arguably attained today the axiomatic status of political principle and even scientific dogma. By questioning accepted ideas, this book forces the perplexed reader to reexamine his or her own opinions, and ask him or herself: When I read this book, should I laugh or should I cry? With its seriocomic questioning of conventional ideas, this book is a subtle antidote to the power we ascribe to public opinion and the accompanying cultivation of appearances.