A Brazilian and grandson of slaves, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is probably the most important Portuguese-language writer of the past two-hundred years. When I asked my director of studies for recommendations for South American literature – beyond the usual suspects – she named various people, but when she mentioned Machado and this novel specifically, she spoke with such passion that I really had no excuse not to go out and get a copy. Also translated as Epitaph of a Small Winner, I read Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas in the recent translation by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, though there is also a new Penguin translation too.
There are many reasons for having a go with this book. It is short and immensely readable thanks to its equally short chapters; it is funny; it has an interesting narrative approach; and it tells a story whose messages remain valid a hundred years later – and will remain valid, I don’t doubt, for many hundreds of years yet.
The novel is the life story of the titular Brás Cubas, written by himself from beyond the grave, where he lies festering. Being dead allows him a certain degree of perspective on his life, but this is not the dramatic perspective of, say, the dying Ivan Ilyich, who realises that his entire world was a dreadful bourgeois lie. Instead, Brás Cubas gains just enough perspective to criticise the world, but not enough to properly criticise himself. As a result, there are two layers of irony here – first Brás Cubas ironises his world, and then the author ironises Brás Cubas. And what was Brás Cubas’s life? An affair, bachelorhood, and some politics. But how wonderfully is all that story told!
Style
Let’s begin with the style. After all, it’s unmissable. Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is written in a style that is self-consciously imitative of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and de Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room, but with an additional “harsh, bitter sentiment” – a kind of pessimism about human nature. What I mean is that the text knows it is a text: there are chapters that ask to be deleted, chapters that ask to be inserted elsewhere, and the reader is a regular partner in Brás Cubas’s narration. He is always talking to us, advising us, telling us what we think. His preface is wonderfully short because that’s the best way to “win the sympathy of… popular opinion”, and he regularly suggests that if we don’t like the book we can simply get rid of it – “the main problem with this book is you, the reader”.
Although the story of Brás Cubas’s life is told in a fragmentary, if realist, style, these chapters are then further broken up by more philosophical ones, including a selection of our narrator’s finest aphorisms, and comments on the construction of the book itself. Not for nothing does Brás Cubas refer to his book and style as akin to “a pair of drunkards” staggering down a street. Chapters and approaches never overstay their welcome – most are no longer than a page. What is more, the style is funny. At one point a character is discoursing tediously so our narrator announces his decision to cut him off and get on with the narration.
But at the same time, within the style itself there is already a hint of the pessimism that characterises the work. Brás Cubas’s mother dies and he cannot properly mourn her because he feels an obligation to move on to a happier chapter. After another death he lists various things he saw at a funeral – “this may seem like a simple inventory, but these were actually notes I took for a sad, rather trite chapter I won’t now write”. Brás Cubas’s disdain for these things, and a certain sense that he doubts the reader is interested, means that he ends up unable to write seriously about almost anything – the style and self-consciousness of what readers apparently want all end up reinforcing his own sad self-centredness.
Worms
Brás Cubas dedicates his novel to those worms that have been enjoying his decomposing corpse, and worms are a significant image throughout the novel. They are those things that drive us and eat away at our minds – negative things, mostly, such as ambition, vanity, and greed. There are few good characters in the novel. Old friends rob our main character or else steal his money in more indirect ways. Everyone is obsessed by a good political position, and even Brás Cubas’s own family is not exempt from these things. His father has told a pleasant lie about the family’s origins so much that he has now forgotten the rather more boring truth, while even the Brás Cubas’s priestly uncle is full of pride, hoping the child will turn out to be a great and powerful member of the clergy.
Our narrator himself is in no way exempt from all this. In fact, he’s more interested in justifying himself than anything else. At several points, he mentions his theory about “windows” in one’s conscience. Put briefly, it suggests that one good deed, however small, is more than adequate for cancelling out the awkward feelings created by a bad one. Brás Cubas uses this to justify all sorts, and especially his illicit affair with a friend’s wife.
Slaves
These worms draw our attention to the essential rottenness of the world, at least as Brás Cubas sees it. Another example of that, albeit one hidden behind a few of the text’s layers, is slavery. The novel was published in about 1881, and slavery in Brazil was only abolished a few years later (!). In the text slavery is regularly present, but often only in the background. Brás Cubas describes how, as a boy of six, he would take a slave “and I would place a rope between his teeth as a bridle, climb onto his back, and then, with a stick in my hand, I would whip him and make him carry me hither and thither”. This got an “ugh” in the margins of my copy, but it gets worse.
We encounter the same slave when our narrator is an adult, and by this time the slave is a free man. Brás Cubas meets him on the street, where the former slave is busy lashing a slave of his own in broad daylight. Our narrator explains the situation thus – “it was Prudencio’s way of ridding himself of all the beatings he had received, by passing them on to someone else”. There is no moral judgement of slavery in the text, certainly not by our narrator, but with comments like these the novel makes us aware of how violence perpetuates itself, not exactly to our world’s credit.
At the same time, our heroic narrator – who is anything but – discusses his own “slavery” to love. Oh, how hard it is to have a lover! He does spend a lot of money on her, true, but nevertheless I would still say that such a situation is slightly better than being someone else’s chattel. It is a ridiculous comparison – we can’t help but notice it. And it forms another aspect of the novel’s general view of humanity as not in a particularly good state – greedy, self-centred, and ultimately cruel.
Our Heroic Narrator
Towards the end of the novel there is a chapter, not containing any words, called “How I did not become minister of state”. And indeed, aside from his romance, there’s very little that might be called a success in Brás Cubas’s life. We do not notice, perhaps, for although this story is full of a certain emptiness – the wreckage of so many disappointed ambitions – Brás Cubas’s narrative style manages to make hollow “somethings” out of so many failures to do or achieve anything. At the end, Brás Cubas is pleased that he did not, at least, have any children, “and thus did not bequeath to any creature the legacy of our misery”.
The whole book is funny and silly, but it is still a highly pessimistic work. People live dreadful lives – the women all seem to die early, or die in poverty, or both, with their only chance at salvation being marriage to a rich man. This is easier said than done, given our hero rejects one girl because she has a lame foot. And indeed, Brás Cubas, for all his faults – at one point, he describes taking the dead to the cemetery as not unlike “taking money to the bank” – does not appear any worse, morally speaking, than the other characters. Everyone here is ambitious, and unable to show any concern for the lives of others. Why on earth were we born, our author seems to ask. Yes, if it weren’t so funny, this whole story would be rather depressing.
Conclusion – Layers of Irony
What redeems this pessimism is the feeling that that’s not all there is to Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. The world he describes is cutthroat, money-driven, and incredibly petty. And he himself, for all his hindsight now that he is dead, still remains wedded to those values that he had had during his life. Only the sense that Brás Cubas does not quite understand all that he says saves him and his story. We have a feeling that Machado de Assis is hiding behind him, showing us that not all he says needs to be taken at face value, and that what drives our narrator – his vanity and the rest of it – need not drive us all. Life is more than political positions and making money and good marriages, and Brás Cubas’s own life – his bachelorhood and political failure – demonstrate that, even if he does not quite notice it himself.
Short, funny, serious, it’s well worth reading.