The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (34 page)

The deceased narrator’s use of foreign texts is fascinating. It allows him to deploy his formidable arsenal of erudition and provides a contrast to the humdrum life described in the text. This juxtaposition is crucial because it unveils the relativism of the narrator. It establishes the framework for the play of ambiguity and contradiction and emphasizes the discrepancy between the minutiae of life and the great ideas and ideals embodied in some texts which he also questions with his humor.

The narrator’s own relationship to literature undergoes the same process: after an existence animated by literature and his subsequent transformation of reminiscence into a posthumous literary production, he dedicates his work to the worms, a paradox that can only be explained by his melancholy realization of the vanity of all existence. Nevertheless, it is literature that temporarily saves him from dissolution, transforming his work into a legacy for coming generations, and thus assuring the circulation of the written word.

The preceding examples illustrate Machado de Assis’ aim in his use of foreign literature: it has helped him depict a panorama in which cosmopolitan and local culture are mixed. As a man of his era, our author couldn’t help but be powerfully affected by foreign, and especially French culture. His oeuvre is a testament to the intense interest he had in France’s literary and political landscape. His work deserves to the made accessible on the stage of world literature the way French luminaries were made available in Portuguese.

Such an intercultural symbiosis is not merely a result of Machado de Assis’ own vision of Brazilian culture. It also reflects the effort of Brazilian literature as a whole since the mid-1800s to reconcile the tension between the local and the universal.

Getting to know the slyly cosmopolitan Brás Cubas enhances our enjoyment of the European legacy, unifying and rationalizing theory
and praxis. The new reader will be charmed by this mosaic, featuring not only a character of Imperial Brazil, but the process of his self-representation. The book combines critical vision and fictional dexterity, and is one of the greatest novels of Brazilian letters.

—
Gilberto Pinheiro Passes

Translated by Barbara Jamison