The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (32 page)

By leaving the glamorous movers and shakers of history aside, the reader can narrowly focus his gaze on characters of apparently insignificant stature. Thus we can appreciate the gossiping Dona Plácida, Eugênia, the disfigured girl of humble origins, and Prudêncio, the former slave who in turn becomes the master of another.

Nevertheless we shouldn’t place undue emphasis on the narrator’s predisposition toward detailed description. Despite precise references to public parks or charitable organizations, these details don’t add up to the usual chronicle and are not meant to be read as picturesque or exotic elaborations on the city of Rio de Janeiro.

The thoroughly urban landscape allows us to immerse ourselves in a few decades of a city’s life which only gradually became modern, retaining
nuances of the Portuguese colonial and baroque styles of architecture, but, thanks to the French Mission contracted by João VI in 1816, mixing in some neoclassicism. Rio de Janeiro struggled incessantly both against the tropical climate and plagues (the yellow fever in
Ch. CXXVI
) and hosted a considerable number of foreign residents—the typographer Plancher, and the hotelier Pharoux. It was the capital of a country clamoring for independence (
Ch. XIV
) yet constrained by its basically agrarian, slave-based, export economy.

Rio de Janeiro, the political and cultural center of nineteenth-century Brazil, offered a variety of entertainments that set it apart from the rest of the country: theatres, newspapers, bookstores, confectionary shops, jewelry stores, high fashion. The elegant Ouvidor street, where the fashionable met, with its showpiece. The capital city sought its models in England and, more than anywhere else, in France.

Cosmopolitan Rio de Janeiro did not need just a chronicler, but rather a keen observer attuned to a panorama of changing relationships between people and the new foreign influences. Its variegated face demanded an ever-evolving psychological complexity. Before turning to Brás Cubas’ cosmopolitan strategies, however, it is worth considering his shrewdness as a narrator, his peculiar and particular point of view, and his skepticism toward all ideals and certainties, especially those favored in the nineteenth century.

The narrative displays a certain anxiety here and there, a fitful questioning of itself beyond the scope of its modus operand!. The narrator himself realizes that he is implicated. Restricted by formal commitments to tradition, he nevertheless thrusts his own amusing critique of those traditions and literary conventions into the text itself.

The reader would be wise not to yield completely to the narrative vagaries—-after all he actively participates in them—and must always keep in mind the narrator’s special circumstances. Brás Cubas, the posthumous narrator, is more audacious about telling the truth than are the living, an advantage he used to reveal not only secrets but follies, treachery, rivalries, and deceptions, all quite jarring in terms of the era’s expectations of the memoir.

Neither should we expect that the story be told in a linear fashion or be altogether faithful to common experience. Brás Cubas meanders through his narrative collage, a shrewd narrator intent on throwing the reader off the scent, offering explanations in one chapter only to qualify them in the next in a continual process of affirmation and equivocation. This technique tends to go against the grain of verities established in the eighteenth century concerning narrative development. And by constantly throwing the reader off the track with equivocation, humorous digressions, the questioning of fictional convention, and assertions and denials, the narrator weaves a symbolic web that does not hide its allegiance to a particular class perspective.

Some insight into class helps us understand the significance of citing Stendhal:

Here Brás Cubas is referring to the preface of the second edition of
De L’Amour
in which Stendhal discusses the concept of the “happy few.” The winds of 1789 swept away the old system of arts patronage. What remained was an avid reading and theatre-going public, eager, above all, to be entertained. The book had become a piece of merchandise, something merely to sell and to consume. Now the question was how to seduce the
typical reader armed with “common sense” and a bulging pocket book. This hypothetical figure terrorized and obsessed the man of letters represented by Stendhal, and takes on unique dimensions in the musings of Brás Cubas who doesn’t hesitate to prove his superior discernment by using a Stendhalian formulation.

Brás Cubas writes from the point of view of one doubly exempt from the mundane. For one thing our narrator is a rich, idle Brazilian for whom tedious labor and the bitter flavor of poverty and financial preoccupation are not important considerations. The narrator’s relationship with Quincas Borba is exemplary in this regard. As a classmate (in a double sense), Borba becomes an object of worship among his peers for always affecting a regal air. Later the beggary to which he is reduced makes our narrator sick. But even after Borba robs him (snatching his watch), Borba regains his extraordinary stature when he is restored to his accustomed place by an inheritance. The narrator’s attitude toward Dona Plácida’s birth resembles his stance toward Eugênia’s dignity. Brás Cubas belongs to a social stratum to which individual expression must always be subordinated.

The narrator’s point of view is also shaped by death. It is within this realm that the author is born, now definitively free from the responsibilities of the living. Death offers him the indolence of eternity. Everything is past, already lived, frozen for the narrator’s use in a kind of crude bas-relief that displays a particular social milieu with its characteristic constraints and obligations.

The text, however, does not function as an apologia for the Brazilian upper classes of the nineteenth century. The reader does not end up identifying with the narrator or defending his point of view, thus subverting the era’s understanding of the memoir. There is surely a subtly ironic thwarting of the reader’s expectations as well in the treatment of the social misfits of the book: Brás Cubas, Cotrim, and Quincas Borba.

In the delirium chapter the lack of a coherent ethical structure sets the stage for a discourse on the futility of all human action, a discourse that perfectly coincides with the vision of the dominant classes in Brazil in the nineteenth century. But it goes further than a narrow discussion of class and proffers a discourse with a metaphysical twist—set forth slyly by the narrator as a delirium which compromises his credibility and leaves the reader wondering how much to believe.

This “sick mind” will produce an image whose name is not Jehovah or God, rather Nature or Pandora, a mix of Mother (because it engenders) and Nemesis (because it causes suffering and metes out death). There are no underlying moral principles implied in the action of this being which engenders life; nor are there moral guidelines for those beings thrust out into the vortex of history without the possibility of redemption or final knowledge.

Protected by the knowledge conveyed to him by Nature/Pandora and by death, Brás Cubas realizes that his century, along with the history of humanity with its ideologies, institutions, and images, is an illusion. Such reasoning makes the final words of the book comprehensible: because he is without offspring the narrator at least can state that he wills the legacy of miserable human history to nobody.

Why narrate, then? The narrative justifies itself as a summing up of personal experience despite the superimposed dimension of class. In each individual, whether rich or poor, the gifts offered by nature resonate: knowledge, life, the will to live, and that scourge of the species—hope—surely one of the foundations of any belief.

The perspective under discussion is a radical one, deceptive and systematically elusive. But within, narrated material everything is justified: the ideals of loyalty to country, God, ethnicity, progress, and the other givens of the nineteenth-century worldview, along with all the mistaken
and contradictory viewpoints that make the following surprising comparison possible:

Illuminated by Nature’s aura, divested of its original mythic significance, the figure of Moses is transformed into just another element buffeted about within the vortex of time. The Bible becomes a text like any other, subordinate to the narrator’s whim.

Through this metamorphosis Brás Cubas becomes St. Thomas Aquinas’
Summa Theologica
itself. Ironically the two discourses, one on the verities of faith and the other on the verities of philosophy, blend, with the
Summa
representing just one more monument to the written word, a stage in the inexorable journey toward annihilation and the loss of one’s precious identity (name, rank, social milieu). The
Summa
is an achievement only outdone by Nature, which seeks not to individuate, but to erase distinctions, and to whom the goings on of a Chinese barber and the writings of a church father are equivalent.

Nevertheless, one has to live to enjoy the brief time which Nature concedes to us. And preferably one should live in Rio de Janeiro in the middle of the nineteenth century looking for ways to satisfy one’s condition as a lazy man of means lacking in neither cultivated social discourse nor the consolation of literature. So let us return to Brás Cubas’ cosmopolitanism.

Broadly speaking a dependence on foreign culture nourishes the social imagination of Rio’s reigning elite, to which Brás Cubas is inextricably linked. The mix of European and tropical culture is evident in the conversation of a recent arrival at the capital:

To establish his role in the reigning social and literary milieu, Brás Cubas resorts to a series of dialogues with writers emblematic of the
Western tradition, writers whose works he has thoroughly enjoyed, including Homer, Dante, Molière, and Klopstock. Sometimes the dialogue is mediated through translated or untranslated direct quotes. In other cases the dialogue takes its cue from the quote in a more obvious intertextual relationship.

The blatant borrowings result in a poetics of the novel based upon a rendering of text that is at once immediate and complex. For the full resonance of the verbal play to be realized, the reader must actively engage in a dialogue with the “other.” This tactic is essential in establishing the textual parameters within which the meaning of the work is inscribed. The questions of love, power, social relations, and existence are set forth in terms of this narrative symbiosis.