The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (2 page)

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

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 opinion. 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.

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.