Where the Stress Falls (5 page)
Read Where the Stress Falls Online
Authors: Susan Sontag
[2001]
The Case of Machado de Assis
I
MAGINE A WRITER WHO
, in the course of a moderately long life in which he never traveled farther than seventy-five miles from the capital city where he was born, created a huge body of work … a nineteenth-century writer, you will interrupt; and you will be right: author of a profusion of novels, novellas, stories, plays, essays, poems, reviews, political chronicles, as well as reporter, magazine editor, government bureaucrat, candidate for public office, founding president of his country’s Academy of Letters; a prodigy of accomplishment, of the transcending of social and physical infirmity (he was a mulatto and the son of a slave in a country where slavery was not abolished until he was almost fifty; he was epileptic); who, during this vividly prolific, exuberantly national career, managed to write a sizable number of novels and stories deserving of a permanent place in world literature, and whose masterpieces, outside his native country, which honors him as its greatest writer, are little known, rarely mentioned.
MAGINE A WRITER WHO
, in the course of a moderately long life in which he never traveled farther than seventy-five miles from the capital city where he was born, created a huge body of work … a nineteenth-century writer, you will interrupt; and you will be right: author of a profusion of novels, novellas, stories, plays, essays, poems, reviews, political chronicles, as well as reporter, magazine editor, government bureaucrat, candidate for public office, founding president of his country’s Academy of Letters; a prodigy of accomplishment, of the transcending of social and physical infirmity (he was a mulatto and the son of a slave in a country where slavery was not abolished until he was almost fifty; he was epileptic); who, during this vividly prolific, exuberantly national career, managed to write a sizable number of novels and stories deserving of a permanent place in world literature, and whose masterpieces, outside his native country, which honors him as its greatest writer, are little known, rarely mentioned.
Imagine such a writer, who existed, and his most original books, which continue to be discovered more than eighty years after his death. Normally, the filter of time is just, discarding the merely celebrated or successful, rescuing the forgotten, promoting the underestimated. In the afterlife of a great writer—this is when the mysterious questions of 30
value and permanence are resolved. Perhaps it is fitting that this writer, whose afterlife has not brought his work the recognition it merits, should have had himself so acute, so ironic, so endearing a sense of the posthumous.
value and permanence are resolved. Perhaps it is fitting that this writer, whose afterlife has not brought his work the recognition it merits, should have had himself so acute, so ironic, so endearing a sense of the posthumous.
WHAT IS TRUE
of a reputation is true—should be true—of a life. Since it is only a completed life that reveals its shape and whatever meaning a life can have, a biography that means to be definitive must wait until after the death of its subject. Unfortunately, autobiographies can’t be composed under these ideal circumstances. And virtually all the notable fictional autobiographies have respected the limitation of real ones, while conjuring up a next-best equivalent of the illuminations of death. Fictional autobiographies, even more often than real ones, tend to be autumnal undertakings: an elderly (or, at least, loss-seasoned) narrator, having retired from life, now writes. But, close as old age may bring the fictive autobiographer to the ideal vantage point, he or she is still writing on the wrong side of the frontier beyond which a life, a life story, finally makes sense.
of a reputation is true—should be true—of a life. Since it is only a completed life that reveals its shape and whatever meaning a life can have, a biography that means to be definitive must wait until after the death of its subject. Unfortunately, autobiographies can’t be composed under these ideal circumstances. And virtually all the notable fictional autobiographies have respected the limitation of real ones, while conjuring up a next-best equivalent of the illuminations of death. Fictional autobiographies, even more often than real ones, tend to be autumnal undertakings: an elderly (or, at least, loss-seasoned) narrator, having retired from life, now writes. But, close as old age may bring the fictive autobiographer to the ideal vantage point, he or she is still writing on the wrong side of the frontier beyond which a life, a life story, finally makes sense.
I know only one example of that enthralling genre, the imaginary autobiography, which grants the project of autobiography its ideal—as it turns out, comical—fulfillment, and that is the masterpiece called
Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas
(1880). introduced into English under the pointless, interfering title
Epitaph of a Small Winner
. In the first paragraph of Chapter 1, “The Death of the Author,” Brás Cubas announces gaily: “I am a deceased writer not in the sense of one who has written and is now deceased, but in the sense of one who has died and is now writing.” Here is the novel’s first, framing joke, and it is about the writer’s freedom. The reader is invited to play the game of considering that the book in hand is an unprecedented literary feat. Posthumous reminiscences written in the first person.
Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas
(1880). introduced into English under the pointless, interfering title
Epitaph of a Small Winner
. In the first paragraph of Chapter 1, “The Death of the Author,” Brás Cubas announces gaily: “I am a deceased writer not in the sense of one who has written and is now deceased, but in the sense of one who has died and is now writing.” Here is the novel’s first, framing joke, and it is about the writer’s freedom. The reader is invited to play the game of considering that the book in hand is an unprecedented literary feat. Posthumous reminiscences written in the first person.
Of course, not even a single day, much less a life, can ever be recounted in its entirety. A life is not a plot. And quite different ideas of decorum apply to a narrative constructed in the first person and to one in the third person. To slow down, to race ahead, to skip whole stretches; to comment at length, to withhold comment—these done as an “I” have
another weight, another feel, than when said about or on behalf of someone else. Much of what is affecting or pardonable or insufferable in the first person would seem the opposite if uttered in the third person, and vice versa: an observation easily confirmed by reading aloud any page from Machado de Assis’s book first as it is, a second time with “he” for “I.” (To sample the fierce difference
within
the codes governing the third person, then try substituting “she” for “he.”) There are registers of feeling, such as anxiety, that only a first-person voice can accommodate. And aspects of narrative performance as well: digressiveness, for instance, seems natural in a text written in the first person, but amateurish in an impersonal, third-person voice. Thus, any piece of writing that features an awareness of its own means and methods should be understood as in the first person, whether or not the main pronoun is “I.”
another weight, another feel, than when said about or on behalf of someone else. Much of what is affecting or pardonable or insufferable in the first person would seem the opposite if uttered in the third person, and vice versa: an observation easily confirmed by reading aloud any page from Machado de Assis’s book first as it is, a second time with “he” for “I.” (To sample the fierce difference
within
the codes governing the third person, then try substituting “she” for “he.”) There are registers of feeling, such as anxiety, that only a first-person voice can accommodate. And aspects of narrative performance as well: digressiveness, for instance, seems natural in a text written in the first person, but amateurish in an impersonal, third-person voice. Thus, any piece of writing that features an awareness of its own means and methods should be understood as in the first person, whether or not the main pronoun is “I.”
To write about oneself—the true, that is, the private story—used to be felt to be presumptuous, and to need justifying. Montaigne’s
Essays
, Rousseau’s
Confessions
, Thoreau’s
Walden
, and most of the other spiritually ambitious classics of autobiography have a prologue in which the author directly addresses the reader, acknowledging the temerity of the enterprise, evoking scruples or inhibitions (modesty, anxiety) that had to be overcome, laying claim to an exemplary artlessness or candor, alleging the usefulness of all this self-absorption to others. And, like real autobiographies, most fictional autobiographies of any stylishness or depth also start with an explanation, defensive or defiant, of the decision to write the book the reader has just begun—or, at least, a flourish of self-deprecation, suggesting an attractive sensitivity to the charge of egotism. This is no mere throat-clearing, some polite sentences to give the reader time to be seated. It is the opening shot in a campaign of seduction in which the autobiographer tacitly agrees that there is something unseemly, brazen, in volunteering to write at length about oneself —exposing oneself to unknown others without any evident interest (a great career, a great crime) or without some documentary ruse, such as pretending that the book merely transcribes existing private papers, like a journal or letters, indiscretions originally destined for the smallest, friendliest readership. With a life story offered straight-out, in the first person, to as many readers as possible (a “public”), it seems only minimal prudence as well as courtesy for the autobiographer to seek
permission to begin. The splendid conceit of the novel, that these are memoirs written by someone who is dead, just puts an additional spin on this regulatory caring about what the reader thinks. The autobiographer can also profess not to care.
Essays
, Rousseau’s
Confessions
, Thoreau’s
Walden
, and most of the other spiritually ambitious classics of autobiography have a prologue in which the author directly addresses the reader, acknowledging the temerity of the enterprise, evoking scruples or inhibitions (modesty, anxiety) that had to be overcome, laying claim to an exemplary artlessness or candor, alleging the usefulness of all this self-absorption to others. And, like real autobiographies, most fictional autobiographies of any stylishness or depth also start with an explanation, defensive or defiant, of the decision to write the book the reader has just begun—or, at least, a flourish of self-deprecation, suggesting an attractive sensitivity to the charge of egotism. This is no mere throat-clearing, some polite sentences to give the reader time to be seated. It is the opening shot in a campaign of seduction in which the autobiographer tacitly agrees that there is something unseemly, brazen, in volunteering to write at length about oneself —exposing oneself to unknown others without any evident interest (a great career, a great crime) or without some documentary ruse, such as pretending that the book merely transcribes existing private papers, like a journal or letters, indiscretions originally destined for the smallest, friendliest readership. With a life story offered straight-out, in the first person, to as many readers as possible (a “public”), it seems only minimal prudence as well as courtesy for the autobiographer to seek
permission to begin. The splendid conceit of the novel, that these are memoirs written by someone who is dead, just puts an additional spin on this regulatory caring about what the reader thinks. The autobiographer can also profess not to care.
Still, writing from beyond the grave has not relieved this narrator from showing an ostentatious amount of concern about the reception of his work. His mock anxiety is embodied in the very form, the distinctive velocity of the book. It is in the way the narrative is cut and mounted, its stop-and-start rhythms: 160 chapters, several as brief as two sentences, few longer than two pages. It is in the playful directions, usually at the beginning or end of chapters, for the best use of the text. (“This chapter is to be inserted between the first two sentences of chapter 129” “Please note that this chapter is not intended to be profound.” “But let us not become involved in psychology,” et cetera.) It is in the pulse of ironic attention to the book’s means and methods, the repeated disavowal of large claims on the reader’s emotions (“I like jolly chapters”). Asking the reader to indulge the narrator’s penchant for frivolity is as much a seducer’s ploy as promising the reader strong emotions and new knowledge. The autobiographer’s suave fussing over the accuracy of his narrative procedures parodies the intensity of his self-absorption.
Digression is the main technique for controlling the emotional flow of the book. The narrator, whose head is full of literature, shows himself adept at expert descriptions—of the kind flattered with the name of realism—of how poignant feelings persist, change, evolve, devolve. He also shows himself understandably beyond all that by the dimensions of the telling: the cutting into short episodes, the ironic, didactic overviews. This oddly fierce, avowedly disenchanted voice (but then what else should we expect a narrator who is dead to be?) never relates an event without drawing some lesson from it. Chapter 133 opens: “The episode serves to illustrate and perhaps amend Helvetius’ theory that …” Begging the reader’s indulgence, worrying about the reader’s attentiveness (does the reader get it? is the reader amused? is the reader becoming bored?), the autobiographer continually breaks out of his story to invoke a theory it illustrates, to formulate an opinion about it—as if such moves were needed to make the story more interesting.
Brás Cubas’s socially privileged, self-important existence is, as such lives often are, starkly uneventful; the main events are those which did not happen or were judged disappointing. The rich production of witty opinions exposes the emotional poverty of the life, by having the narrator seem to sidestep the conclusions he ought to be drawing. The digressive method also generates much of the book’s humor, starting with the very disparity between the life (modest in events, subtly articulated) and the theories (portentous, blunt) he invokes.
Brás Cubas’s socially privileged, self-important existence is, as such lives often are, starkly uneventful; the main events are those which did not happen or were judged disappointing. The rich production of witty opinions exposes the emotional poverty of the life, by having the narrator seem to sidestep the conclusions he ought to be drawing. The digressive method also generates much of the book’s humor, starting with the very disparity between the life (modest in events, subtly articulated) and the theories (portentous, blunt) he invokes.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
is of course the principal model for these savory procedures of reader awareness. The method of the tiny chapters and some of the typographical stunts, as in Chapter 55 (“The Venerable Dialogue of Adam and Eve”) and Chapter 139 (“How I Did Not Become a Minister of State”), recall the whimsical narrative rhythms and pictographic witticisms of
Tristram Shandy.
That Brás Cubas begins his story after his death, as Tristram Shandy famously begins the story of his consciousness before he is born (at the moment of his conception)—that, too, seems an homage to Sterne by Machado de Assis. The authority of
Tristram Shandy,
published in installments between 1759 and 1767, on a writer born in Brazil in the nineteenth century should not surprise us. While Sterne’s books, so celebrated in his lifetime and shortly afterward, were being reassessed in England as too peculiar, occasionally indecent, and finally boring, they continued to be enormously admired on the Continent. In the English-speaking world, where in this century he has again been thought very highly of, Sterne still figures as an ultra-eccentric, marginal genius (like Blake) who is most notable for being uncannily, and prematurely, “modern.” When looked at from the perspective of world literature, however, he may be the English-language writer who, after Shakespeare and Dickens, has had the greatest influence; for Nietzsche to have said that his favorite novel was
Tristram Shandy
is not quite as original a judgment as it may seem. Sterne has been an especially potent presence in the literatures of the Slavic languages, as is reflected in the centrality of the example of
Tristram Shandy
in the theories of Viktor Shklovsky and other Russian formalists from the 1920s forward. Perhaps the reason so much commanding prose literature has been issuing for decades from Central and Eastern Europe as well as from
Latin America is not that writers there have been suffering under monstrous tyrannies and therefore have had importance, seriousness, subjects, relevant irony bestowed on them (as many writers in Western Europe and the United States have half enviously concluded) but that these are the parts of the world where for over a century the author of
Tristram Shandy
has been the most admired.
is of course the principal model for these savory procedures of reader awareness. The method of the tiny chapters and some of the typographical stunts, as in Chapter 55 (“The Venerable Dialogue of Adam and Eve”) and Chapter 139 (“How I Did Not Become a Minister of State”), recall the whimsical narrative rhythms and pictographic witticisms of
Tristram Shandy.
That Brás Cubas begins his story after his death, as Tristram Shandy famously begins the story of his consciousness before he is born (at the moment of his conception)—that, too, seems an homage to Sterne by Machado de Assis. The authority of
Tristram Shandy,
published in installments between 1759 and 1767, on a writer born in Brazil in the nineteenth century should not surprise us. While Sterne’s books, so celebrated in his lifetime and shortly afterward, were being reassessed in England as too peculiar, occasionally indecent, and finally boring, they continued to be enormously admired on the Continent. In the English-speaking world, where in this century he has again been thought very highly of, Sterne still figures as an ultra-eccentric, marginal genius (like Blake) who is most notable for being uncannily, and prematurely, “modern.” When looked at from the perspective of world literature, however, he may be the English-language writer who, after Shakespeare and Dickens, has had the greatest influence; for Nietzsche to have said that his favorite novel was
Tristram Shandy
is not quite as original a judgment as it may seem. Sterne has been an especially potent presence in the literatures of the Slavic languages, as is reflected in the centrality of the example of
Tristram Shandy
in the theories of Viktor Shklovsky and other Russian formalists from the 1920s forward. Perhaps the reason so much commanding prose literature has been issuing for decades from Central and Eastern Europe as well as from
Latin America is not that writers there have been suffering under monstrous tyrannies and therefore have had importance, seriousness, subjects, relevant irony bestowed on them (as many writers in Western Europe and the United States have half enviously concluded) but that these are the parts of the world where for over a century the author of
Tristram Shandy
has been the most admired.
Machado de Assis’s novel belongs in that tradition of narrative buffoonery—the talkative first-person voice attempting to ingratiate itself with readers—which runs from Sterne through, in our own century, Natsume S
seki’s
I Am a Cat
, the short fiction of Robert Walser, Svevo’s
Confessions of Zeno
and
As a Man Grows Older
, Hrabal’s
Too Loud a Solitude
, much of Beckett. Again and again we meet in different guises the chatty, meandering, compulsively speculative, eccentric narrator: reclusive (by choice or by vocation); prone to futile obsessions and fanciful theories and comically designed efforts of the will; often an autodidact; not quite a crank; though sometimes driven by lust, and at least one time by love, unable to mate; usually elderly; invariably male. (No woman is likely to get even the conditional sympathy these ragingly self-absorbed narrators claim from us, because of expectations that women be more sympathetic, and sympathizing, than men; a woman with the same degree of mental acuity and emotional separateness would be regarded as simply a monster.) Machado de Assis’s valetudinarian Brás Cubas is considerably less exuberant than Sterne’s madcap, effusively garrulous Tristram Shandy. It is only a few steps from the incisiveness of Machado’s narrator, with his rueful superiority to the story of his own life, to the plot malaise that characterizes most recent fiction in the form of autobiography. But storylessness may be intrinsic to the genre—the novel as autobiographical monologue—as is the isolation of the narrating voice. In this respect the post-Sternean anti-hero like Brás Cubas parodies the protagonists of the great spiritual autobiographies, who are always profoundly, not just by circumstances, unmarried. It is almost a measure of an autobiographical narrative’s ambition: the narrator must be, or be recast as, alone, certainly without a spouse, even when there is one; the life must be unpeopled at the center. (Thus, such recent achievements of spiritual autobiography in the guise of a novel as Elizabeth Hardwick’s
Sleepless
Nights
and V. S. Naipaul’s
The Enigma of Arrival
leave out the spouses who were actually there.) Just as Brás Cubas’s solitariness is a parody of a chosen or an emblematic solitude, his release through self-understanding is, for all its self-confidence and wit, a parody of that sort of triumph.
seki’sI Am a Cat
, the short fiction of Robert Walser, Svevo’s
Confessions of Zeno
and
As a Man Grows Older
, Hrabal’s
Too Loud a Solitude
, much of Beckett. Again and again we meet in different guises the chatty, meandering, compulsively speculative, eccentric narrator: reclusive (by choice or by vocation); prone to futile obsessions and fanciful theories and comically designed efforts of the will; often an autodidact; not quite a crank; though sometimes driven by lust, and at least one time by love, unable to mate; usually elderly; invariably male. (No woman is likely to get even the conditional sympathy these ragingly self-absorbed narrators claim from us, because of expectations that women be more sympathetic, and sympathizing, than men; a woman with the same degree of mental acuity and emotional separateness would be regarded as simply a monster.) Machado de Assis’s valetudinarian Brás Cubas is considerably less exuberant than Sterne’s madcap, effusively garrulous Tristram Shandy. It is only a few steps from the incisiveness of Machado’s narrator, with his rueful superiority to the story of his own life, to the plot malaise that characterizes most recent fiction in the form of autobiography. But storylessness may be intrinsic to the genre—the novel as autobiographical monologue—as is the isolation of the narrating voice. In this respect the post-Sternean anti-hero like Brás Cubas parodies the protagonists of the great spiritual autobiographies, who are always profoundly, not just by circumstances, unmarried. It is almost a measure of an autobiographical narrative’s ambition: the narrator must be, or be recast as, alone, certainly without a spouse, even when there is one; the life must be unpeopled at the center. (Thus, such recent achievements of spiritual autobiography in the guise of a novel as Elizabeth Hardwick’s
Sleepless
Nights
and V. S. Naipaul’s
The Enigma of Arrival
leave out the spouses who were actually there.) Just as Brás Cubas’s solitariness is a parody of a chosen or an emblematic solitude, his release through self-understanding is, for all its self-confidence and wit, a parody of that sort of triumph.
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