The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas Page 2

  One of the conventions challenged by Brás Cubas is the traditional form of the novel itself. Nineteenth-century novels usually represent life through a convincing plot and a smooth and captivating narrative into which the reader is passively drawn and pulled along. In presenting to the reader the supposedly real-life actions and feelings of the characters, the author pretends to be absent from the text. Brás Cubas disrupts these realistic conventions with his frequent observations about his book and its style. In Chapter LXXI, for example, he makes a startling accusation: “the main defect of this book is you, reader.” As if to explain his shocking statement, he adds: “You’re in a hurry to grow old and the book moves slowly. You love direct and continuous narration … and this book and my style are like drunkards, they stagger left and right, they walk and stop, mumble, yell, cackle, shake their fists at the sky, stumble and fall …” Displaying once more his self-conscious and self-deprecating sense of humor, Brás Cubas is clearly warning the readers—mostly those who are used to action-packed, fast-paced plots presented in straightforward narrative—that his book is indeed very different from a traditional nineteenth-century novel. His book is intended for readers who prefer “reflection” to “anecdotes,” despite Brás Cubas’ ironic comment to the contrary in Chapter IV. In this sense, these posthumous memoirs are a remarkably modern book.

  Other important conventions are also challenged in these memoirs. Critical readers will not miss the way in which, from the first chapter on, Brás Cubas ironically unveils the artificiality of the “pathetic fallacy”—the attribution of human feelings to inanimate nature—one of the basic artistic conventions of nineteenth-century romanticism still alive today in our culture. Describing his funeral, Brás Cubas tells us about the weather: it was raining—drizzling—and this fact of nature led one of his “last-minute faithful friends” to insert an “ingenious idea” into his eulogy, something like “nature appears to be weeping over the irreparable loss of one of the finest characters humanity has been honored with.” To this flourish Brás Cubas adds, in the next paragraph: “Good and faithful friend! No, I don’t regret the twenty bonds I left you.”

  This acerbic unmasking of the petty side of human motivations hiding behind a romantic convention does not mean, however, that these memoirs follow the other dominant schools of art in the nineteenth century, realism and naturalism. Throughout his book, Brás Cubas parodies and ridicules realistic and naturalistic narrative methods, as for example in Chapter IX, “Transition,” where he starts by addressing the reader: “And now watch the skill, the art with which I make the greatest transition in this book. Watch.” After a few lines of logical ratiocination, he speaks directly to the reader again: “See? Seamlessly, nothing to divert the reader’s calm attention, nothing. So the book goes on like this with all of method’s advantage but without method’s rigidity.” By poking fun at the artistic strategies and conventions of his and even in some cases of our own times, by revealing the mechanisms used by writers in the construction of their plots and narratives, Brás Cubas’voice is eminently satirical.

  The reader may have already identified this detached and irreverent narrator as a satirist, but may still find it hard to pinpoint the kind of satire Brás Cubas is practicing. The two main satirical postures in our culture are well known and well established since the Romans: either the satirist is gentle and optimistic, telling the truth with a smile, like Horace, or he is austere and pessimistic, denouncing our human foibles with stern indignation, like Juvenal. Brás Cubas is neither. His self-conscious stance is always ambiguous and bittersweet, frequently parodic and self-deprecating, more akin to Woody Allen’s sense of humor than to the traditional satirical personae usually associated with the two great Roman writers. Horace and Juvenal, in their different ways, had a serious common goal: they used satire to moralize. Unlike them, Brás Cubas is not a serious moralist, but a seriocomic persona; writing from beyond the grave, he places himself beyond morality. To some readers he may seem immoral. Many others, however, will see him as simply amoral, or rather as a questioner of established morality; these readers will accept the challenging reflections called forth by his constant questioning. To these readers, the strange form of this novel—the unusual form of this kind of satire—will be an invitation to a serious reexamination of the role played by chance in his and our own lives, of his and our hidden motives, of his and our own irrationality.

  So my first warning to the potential readers of this book is that its form will be surprising, and may even seem offensive to a “sensitive soul” (Chapter XXXIV), if you do not accept its amusing yet oftentimes dangerous challenges.

  The content will also come as a surprise. If we disregard the “extraordinary method” that allowed Brás Cubas to write his memoirs from beyond the grave, we note that the book is the story of an ordinary life.

  His great-great-grandfather was an honest worker who made his fortune as a farmer. His great-grandfather inherited everything, took a law degree in Portugal and became a politician. His father was a rich, ambitious, mediocre but imaginative man: he made up an aristocratic origin for the family. Brás Cubas was born at the beginning of the nineteenth century and grew up in a protected environment, pampered by his father. While still a teenager, he becomes involved with a courtesan who takes all she can from him. His father discovers the affair and sends him to study in Europe, from which he returns when his mother is on her deathbed. Through this last experience, he is introduced to the problem of life and death and becomes deeply depressed. He isolates himself from the world on a mountain top near Rio de Janeiro, where he discovers the voluptuousness of hypochondria and melancholy.

  Brás Cubas’ father pays him a visit, bringing an offer: a marriage of convenience, an arranged alliance that would bring him a successful political career. After some hesitation, he accepts the deal and leaves his retreat to meet his unknown fiancée. She soon dumps him for a more ambitious and assertive rival. Years later, they become lovers. Their long-lasting liaison is almost uneventful. They are finally forced to end their relationship when her husband is appointed to a high office in a faraway province. With no great effort or emotional strain, Brás Cubas attains worldly success and old age.

  At sixty-four, he has an idea that strikes him as brilliant and becomes an obsession: the invention of an antimelancholy poultice, a cure-all designed to relieve the despondency of mankind, a panacea that would bring him wealth and fame. In his obsessive dedication to his fixed idea, he neglects his health, catches pneumonia, and dies, and with him his idea. After his death, he decides to write his memoirs, exposing and emphasizing his mediocrity, with the frankness which, in his opinion, is “the prime virtue of a dead man.”

  This is a straightforward summary of the main events in this book. Brás Cubas’ narration of these same events, however, is anything but straightforward. As he has warned the reader, his book and his style, like drunkards, ramble incessantly. Moreover, he brings in an enormous number of references to other books, not always identifiable.

  The reader will easily identify some of his literary allusions, such as, for example, to the New Testament (Matthew, 7:3), when he describes the impact his obsession has had on his life: “God deliver you, dear reader, from a fixed idea; better a mote in your eye, better even a beam.” Most frequently, however, Brás’ allusions are encyclopedic, absorbing and incorporating many great passages of Western literature and history from ancient times to his contemporaries, as if his book were in itself an intertextual library, or the result of an active dialogue with other books, an active dialogue in a very real sense, since most of these allusions to other texts are not accurate quotations. Instead, they frequently deviate slightly from the original text. Some literary critics have suggested that these deviations were the result of the alleged fact that Machado de Assis quoted from memory, not always remembering correctly the passage he was citing. The same argument—lack of memory—was used to explain Erasmus’ misquotations in his Praise of Folly and
Robert Burton’s in his Anatomy of Melancholy, two books that belong in the same tradition of jestful encyclopedic erudition as these Posthumous Memoirs.

  It is not known whether Machado de Assis was acquainted with Burton’s book, but he certainly knew the Praise of Folly, since he makes Brás Cubas quote it in Chapter CXLIX, and since he even wrote a parody of it, his “Praise of Vanity.” Moreover, in one of his short stories Machado de Assis justified this practice of slightly misquoting, explaining the difference between literal quotations—which simply invoke someone else’s authority—and the really artistic quotations—which creatively rewrite the quoted authors.

  In one of his pieces of literary criticism, Machado de Assis also discussed the subtle interplay between originality and appropriation of other texts, making use of an interesting culinary allegory: any writer has the right to look for “spices” in the work of any other writer, but the “final sauce” has to be of his or her own making. In these Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas Machado de Assis gives a good example of the banquet he can serve to the reader. If the reader does not suffer indigestion and survives this exuberant and ironic, display of encyclopedic erudition, he or she will be gratified, for the result is indeed humorous.

  These memoirs are humorous, but they are also serious, if we remember the seriocomic aspect: of this kind of satire. Brás Cubas himself describes his book in. Chapter IV as “a supinely philosophical work, of an unequal philosophy, now austere, now playful, something that neither builds nor destroys, neither inflames nor cools, and, yet, it is more than a pastime and less than an apostolate.” As a philosophy this does not seem to be very powerful, but it certainly is a good definition of art as practiced by Machado de Assis: more than mere pastime—since for him art is a serious human activity, but not so serious as to become preachy, since it should not be dogmatic.

  Some readers will identify in Machado de Assis’ unorthodox philosophy the old tradition of cynicism; others will probably see him as a radical skeptic; others still may recognize in his novels the presence of an old literary tradition called Menippean satire; some could even say that his novels, written in the nineteenth century, are more modern than many modern novels, and that they could even be considered postmodern. Whatever classification we choose, his is indisputably a position of unmitigated disbelief toward all philosophical systems and categorizations, some of which he deliberately mocks through one of this book’s characters, the philosophizing Quincas Borba. His medium, however, is not the well-reasoned philosophical or scientific treatise, but the lighter form of the novel. Since any novel presupposes a social context, other readers will probably enjoy what has been called Machado’s deceptive realism, a kind of realism that allegorically describes, in a very devious and disguised way, the social realities of nineteenth-century Brazil, or, in a still more indirect way, the reality of our own times.

  But who was this Machado de Assis, this strange nineteenth-century Brazilian writer? As I promised in my opening lines, this is the last surprise to the readers—the last, that is, before the best surprise, the book itself.

  Machado de Assis was born in 1839, in Rio de Janeiro. His father, a poor house painter, was the son of freed slaves. His mother was a servant from, the Azores who worked in a wealthy household on the outskirts of the city. She died when her son was nine years old. Machado’s father was remarried to a poor black woman, and then died a few years later. Machado de Assis, therefore, grew up a poor, mulatto orphan, the grandson of slaves in a country where slavery would continue officially to exist until he was fifty years old. He had no formal education and probably never attended school.

  Machado also had some other problems: he was frail and shy, terribly myopic. He almost went blind at forty, and he stuttered and was epileptic. Despite all these social and personal disadvantages, he acquired French and English, read voraciously in several languages, worked as a typesetter and journalist and from his youth onward dedicated his life to literature. At thirty-one, he married a Portuguese woman five years his senior. She died in 1904 and he, four years later. As founder and president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, he was recognized as the most important and famous writer of his time. He wrote nine novels, a few plays and volumes of poetry, some literary criticism, many journalistic columns, and also published a few excellent translations from French and English.

  Some literary critics, both in Brazil and abroad, have tried to explain Machado’s production in terms of his biological and psychological history. Some have suggested that he wrote in a fragmented style because he stuttered. Others have focused on the influence of his epilepsy and his eye problems on his approach to life and literature. Others still have suggested that his racial origins determined the content of his literary production.

  This search for an ultimate scientific cause for Machado’s literary genius is ironic, given his radically skeptical views of all-encompassing explanations of human behavior, especially those of the reductionist kind. Whatever the reason for his greatness, it is surprising that a man who was born in poverty, had no formal education, and faced so many physical and social disadvantages was able to become such an impressive writer. His novels—and most of all these Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas—have been admired, studied, analyzed, and even carefully dissected by many critics, some very sympathetic and some less so. But even those who are not amused by his style and his message do not deny his importance for Brazilian and world literature.

  But I fear this introduction is becoming too long. As Brás Cubas himself says in his first words to the reader, “the best prologue is the one that says the fewest things or which tells them in an obscure and truncated way … The work itself is everything.”

  So you have been warned, dear potential reader of this book: enjoy it, but beware, because there is in it some deadly humor at work.

  —Enylton de Sá Rego

  THE POSTHUMOUS MEMOIRS OF BRÁS CUBAS

  To the Worm

  Who

  Gnawed the Cold Flesh

  of My Corpse

  I Dedicate

  These Posthumous Memoirs

  As a Nostalgic Remembrance

  Prologue to the Third Edition

  The first edition of these Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas came in sections in the Revista Brásileira during the 1880s. When they were put into book form later on I corrected the text in several places. Now that I have had to review it for the third edition, I have emended yet a few more things and eliminated two or three dozen lines. Revised in this way, this work which seems to have garnered some acceptance on the part of the public, is published once again.

  Capistrano de Abreu, taking note of the publication of the book, asked “Is The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas a novel?” Macedo Soares in a letter that he wrote me around that time recalled fondly the Travels in My Land [of Almeida Garrett]. To the first the late Brás Cubas has already replied (as the reader has seen and will see in the prologue by him that opens the book) yes and no, that it was a novel for some and wasn’t for others. As for the second, this is how the decedent has explained it: “It’s a question of a scattered work where I, Brás Cubas, have adopted the free form of a Sterne or a Xavier de Maistre. I’m not sure, but I may have put a few fretful touches of pessimism into it.” All those people traveled: Xavier de Maistre around his room, Garrett in his land, Sterne in other people’s lands. It might be said of Brás Cubas that he traveled around life.

  What makes my Brás Cubas a singular author is what he calls “a few fretful touches of pessimism.” There is in the soul of this book, for all of its merry appearance, a harsh and bitter feeling that is a far piece from its models. It’s a goblet that may carry a similar design but contains a different wine. I shall say no more so as not to get into any criticism of a dead man who painted himself and others according to what seemed best and most authentic to him.

  —Machado de Assis

  To the Reader

  That Stendhal should have confessed to have written one
of his books for a hundred readers is something that brings on wonder and concern. Something that will not cause wonder and probably no concern is whether this other book will have Stendhal’s hundred readers, or fifty, or twenty, or even ten. Ten? Five, perhaps. The truth is that it’s a question of a scattered work where I, Brás Cubas, have adopted the free-form of a Sterne or a Xavier de Maistre. I’m not sure, but I may have put a few fretful touches of pessimism into it. It’s possible. The work of a dead man. I wrote it with a playful pen and melancholy ink and it isn’t hard to foresee what can come out of that marriage. I might add that serious people will find some semblance of a normal novel, while frivolous people won’t find their usual one here. There it stands, deprived of the esteem of the serious and the love of the frivolous, the two main pillars of opinion.

  Nonetheless, I hope to entice sympathetic opinion and the first trick is to avoid any explicit and long prologue. The best prologue is the one that says the fewest things or which tells them in an obscure and truncated way. Consequently, I shall not recount the extraordinary process through which I undertook the composition of these Memoirs, put together here in the other world. It would have been interesting but excessively long and also unnecessary for an understanding of the work. The work itself is everything: if it pleases you, dear reader, I shall be well paid for the task; if it doesn’t please you, I’ll pay you with a snap of the finger and goodbye.

  —Brás Cubas

  I

  The Author’s Demise

  For some time I debated over whether I should start these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, that is, whether I should put my birth or my death in first place. Since common usage would call for beginning with birth, two considerations led me to adopt a different method: the first is that I am not exactly a writer who is dead but a dead man who is a writer, for whom the grave was a second cradle; the second is that the writing would be more distinctive and novel in that way. Moses, who also wrote about his death, didn’t place it at the opening but at the close: a radical difference between this book and the Pentateuch.