Title: The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas Author: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis Creation Date: 1881 Location: Brazil Collection: One Book Per Country
Brief
Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas was serialised in the Revista Brasileira through 1880 and published in Rio de Janeiro in 1881. Its author, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, was forty-one; the book marked a complete rupture with the Romantic novels of his previous decade. Nothing in Brazilian — or Latin American — fiction had sounded like it. It arrived as an anomaly and has never stopped being one. Flora Thomson-DeVeaux's 2020 Penguin Classics translation is the first English rendering to carry the full weight of Machado's irony, his diction, and the grammatical hinges on which his sentences pivot.
The novel is narrated by a dead man. Brás Cubas speaks from beyond the grave across 160 very short chapters — some a few pages, some a single sentence, one consisting only of ellipses — dedicating the work "to the first worm that gnawed my cold flesh." The technique derives from Sterne's Tristram Shandy, but Machado turned it into something Sterne would not have recognised: a digressive voice aimed at a class, a city, and an empire from the inside.
The novel is canonical because it invented Brazilian literary modernity from inside a slaveholding empire as that empire was starting to crack. Machado read the whole apparatus — manners, self-deceptions, casual cruelty — without raising his voice. Every subsequent Brazilian novel has had to reckon with the fact that the country's first fully modern work of fiction is the confession of a dead slaveholder who finds the whole exercise mildly amusing.
The Country
Brazil in 1881 was the last monarchy in the Americas and the last slaveholding state of any size in the western hemisphere. The Empire, ruled by Pedro II since 1822, had a political culture of parliamentary forms, court ceremonial, and landholder oligarchy. Seventeen years after the American Civil War, Brazil was still organised around enslaved labour. The coffee plantations of the Paraíba valley depended on it. Rio de Janeiro was a city where enslaved men and women carried water, swept streets, cooked meals, and raised the children of the free classes.
The legal architecture of slavery had reluctantly begun to shift. The Eusébio de Queirós law of 1850 ended the Atlantic slave trade under British pressure. The Lei do Ventre Livre of 1871 freed the children of enslaved women from birth, but fine print kept them effectively bound to their mothers' owners until adulthood. Each was presented as progress; each delayed the full abolition the coffee barons feared. The Lei Áurea of 13 May 1888 abolished slavery outright; the military coup of 15 November 1889 proclaimed the republic.
Machado himself — mulatto, epileptic, grandson of freed slaves, self-educated son of a house painter and washerwoman, risen through the Ministry of Agriculture bureaucracy — was writing from inside the very apparatus the novel mocks. He knew the Rio elite not as an outsider but as a man who shared its offices. The novel is the report of someone who could see the whole system because he lived at its working joints.
The Writer
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was born on 21 June 1839 on Livramento Hill in Rio de Janeiro. His father was a mulatto house painter and son of freed slaves; his mother a Portuguese washerwoman from the Azores. Machado was orphaned young and raised by a stepmother who sold sweets outside a city school.
He never attended university. Everything he knew he taught himself: French, English, German, eventually enough Greek to translate fragments of the Iliad. He began as a typesetter's apprentice at the Imprensa Nacional, started publishing poetry at seventeen, then journalism through his twenties. He entered the Ministry of Agriculture in 1873 and eventually became Director of Accounting at the Ministry of Transport and Public Works. The civil service gave him a salary, a routine, and a daily vantage point on the machinery of empire.
In 1869 he married Carolina Xavier de Novais, five years his senior and by all accounts the great happiness of his life. They had no children. He suffered from epilepsy all his life. In 1897 he helped found the Brazilian Academy of Letters and served as its first president until his death in 1908.
The Posthumous Memoirs was the break in his writing. Before it he had produced conventional Romantic novels — Ressurreição (1872), Helena (1876) — readable but unrevolutionary. After it came the sequence that places him among the most important Latin American writers of the century: Quincas Borba (1891), Dom Casmurro (1899), Memorial de Aires (1908).
The Reckoning
Machado was celebrated within Brazil during his lifetime; when he died in 1908, the funeral drew crowds. Brazilian schoolchildren have read him ever since. Outside Brazil, however, he was almost entirely unknown through the first half of the twentieth century. Grossman's 1952 translation attracted a small following — Elizabeth Bishop was an early English-language reader — but did not detonate a reputation.
The detonation came from Susan Sontag, who in a 1990 New Yorker essay described Machado as "the greatest author ever produced in Latin America." The statement was hyperbolic and she knew it, but it forced the anglophone literary establishment to notice that a writer of the first rank had been sitting for a century in a language most of its members did not read. Harold Bloom placed Machado in The Western Canon (1994). Philip Roth introduced a new American edition of Dom Casmurro. His posthumous ascent is one of the most extreme cases in the nineteenth-century canon.
Thomson-DeVeaux's 2020 Penguin translation is the first fully successful English Machado: it preserves the strangeness of the original syntax rather than smoothing it into something more openly sarcastic than the original allows.
Within Brazil, Machado is the measure against which every subsequent writer is judged. Guimarães Rosa, Clarice Lispector, Graciliano Ramos — each worked in his long shadow, each reckoning with the fact that the country's first fully modern novelist proved that a literature could emerge from a slave society and be metaphysical, cosmopolitan, and ruthless about its own foundations.
The Reading
The novel opens with a dedication: "To the worm that first gnawed the cold flesh of my corpse, I dedicate these posthumous memoirs as a nostalgic remembrance." It continues with a note to the reader in which Brás Cubas explains that he has hesitated for some time about where to begin. "I hesitated for some time as to whether to open these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, that is, whether to put my birth or my death first." He decides, after some reflection, to put his death first, on the grounds that he is not a living author whose book might be improved in later editions but a dead one whose book is the only one he will ever write. He is writing, he explains, from beyond the grave. The usual obligations of chronology do not apply to him. Neither does the usual obligation to be liked.
He died, he tells us, on 22 May 1869 of pneumonia, caught while working on a fixed idea — a utopian scheme to invent and market an anti-hypochondriac plaster that would cure the melancholy of the human race and make his name immortal. The plaster killed him. He was sixty-four, a bachelor, without children, without any great public achievement and without the kind of reputation that survives a man. He writes his memoirs as a corpse writes: with the particular freedom of someone who has no reputation left to protect and no future left to fear.
He describes his own funeral with the detachment of a man who has finally become a spectator at an event he once would have dreaded. Eleven friends attended. One of them, his most constant companion in the last years, delivered a graveside speech of such perfectly calibrated tedium that even the corpse, listening from inside its coffin, began to grow impatient. Brás notes with satisfaction that the rain fell lightly during the ceremony and that nobody cried with any real conviction. He is, he reminds us, an author deceased — not a deceased author. The distinction is important to him. A deceased author is one who used to write and now does not. An author deceased is one whose death is the precondition of the writing.
Having dispatched his own death in the opening chapters, Brás Cubas doubles back to the beginning of his life. He was born in 1805, into a Rio de Janeiro family of the comfortable colonial elite. His father, Bento Cubas, was a vain man who liked to trace the family's origins to a pair of noble Portuguese ancestors called the Cubas but whose actual ancestor, Brás notes with a dead man's disrespect for ancestors, had been a barrel-maker. His mother was pious, patient, and worn down by the casual hardnesses of her husband. Brás grew up indulged and imperious. His central memory of childhood is the boy Prudêncio, a slave child assigned to him as a companion and whom the little Brás used as a horse, climbing on his back and riding him through the yard with a stick for a whip. The chapter describing this game is short and perfectly composed. Brás narrates it without apology. He remembers the pleasure of riding the boy, the pleasure of beating him, the ordinariness of it all inside the household. The memory returns, much later in the book, in a way that forces a second reading of the first.
At seventeen he was sent to Coimbra to study law, as sons of the Brazilian elite then were. He acquired a law degree without noticeable effort. More importantly, he acquired his first serious love affair, with a beautiful and mercenary Spanish courtesan named Marcela, "who loved me for fifteen months and eleven contos de réis." Brás spent what was, by his family's standards, a considerable sum of money on Marcela, who received it with the cool professionalism of someone who had accepted similar sums from other men. When his father discovered the depth of the entanglement, Brás was called home to Rio. Marcela was left behind without visible regret. Years later he encountered her again in the street, disfigured by smallpox, and he records, without sparing himself, the faint revulsion with which he turned away.
Back in Brazil he drifted through the stations of a young man of his class. His mother died, and the chapters recording her death are among the most tender in the book and among the hardest to square with the narrator's usual irony — a reminder that Machado can do sentiment when he wants to, and that his refusal to do it most of the time is a refusal, not an inability. His father, diminished by the loss, soon followed, and Brás inherited the family fortune and the family uselessness in the same instant. To recover from the grief, or from the proximity of grief, he went to stay at a relative's country house at Tijuca, and it was there that he met Eugênia, the illegitimate daughter of a family friend. He was briefly attracted to her. She was intelligent, self-possessed, and unafraid of him. Then he discovered that she was lame, and the attraction collapsed inside him with a speed that shocked even its owner. Eugênia is one of the novel's minor but unforgettable figures. She understood exactly what had happened and said so, and Brás, decades later in his grave, gives her a small corner of the book in which to speak and an honesty about his own recoil that the living Brás never managed.
The central passion of his adult life was Virgília, daughter of a powerful politician, beautiful, witty, and intended for him by an informal arrangement between the families. The arrangement fell through when Brás failed to make himself into a man of political weight, and Virgília married instead a rising deputy named Lobo Neves. After her marriage she became Brás's lover, and they conducted a long adulterous affair over several years, meeting in a small house on the Rua da Gamboa that Brás had rented specifically for the purpose. The Gamboa house is one of the fixed points of the novel. The affair is rendered with a clarity that refuses both romantic sentimentalism and cynical dismissal. They genuinely loved each other in the only way available to them, which was a way that required constant small dishonesties, elaborate precautions, and the eventual acceptance that neither would ever give up what the other could not supply.
Lobo Neves rose. Virgília and her husband were offered a provincial governorship and left Rio. The affair ended, as affairs in such circumstances end, slowly and without drama, through a sequence of missed letters and cooler meetings. Before the end there was a pregnancy that did not come to term; Brás spends a short chapter imagining the child that was not born, the son he would have had, and gives the ghost a name and a career before dismissing it back into the dark. Brás was briefly elected to the Chamber of Deputies, made one unmemorable speech — its subject was the correct dimensions of the helmets worn by the National Guard — and failed to be re-elected. He acquired no ministerial post. He founded no newspaper. He wrote no books. He accumulated a respectable fortune by inheritance rather than effort and spent it without interest.
The other great figure of his adult life was the philosopher Quincas Borba, an old schoolfellow whom Brás met again in the streets of Rio, at first as a beggar and later as a madman who had inherited a modest fortune and devised a philosophical system called Humanitismo. Humanitas, in Quincas Borba's teaching, is the single principle of the universe, the force that drives all life and all striving, and whose basic law is that the strong consume the weak for their mutual benefit. The victors get the potatoes. The vanquished become the necessary compost of progress. "To the victor, the potatoes," Quincas Borba declares, and elaborates his doctrine with complete seriousness over many pages. Brás is charmed. He does not quite believe in Humanitismo, but he does not disbelieve in it either, and the doctrine colours his account of every subsequent episode. Quincas Borba eventually declines into more serious madness and dies, leaving Brás his money and a small dog also named Quincas Borba.
The great digressive set pieces of the novel are scattered through the middle chapters like ornaments. There is the chapter titled "The Reason of Unreason," in which Brás meditates on how the structure of the world runs on assumptions that nobody can defend. There is the chapter consisting only of ellipses, in which Brás announces that some things cannot be written and then refuses to write them. There is the chapter in which he harangues the reader directly and accuses the reader of impatience, and another in which he apologises for the length of the last digression and immediately embarks on a longer one. There is the famous "Black Butterfly" episode, in which a butterfly enters his room, he tries to catch it, he crushes it, and he experiences a small thrill of disproportionate pleasure in the crushing — the pleasure, the narrator observes, of the strong exercising power over the weak without consequence.
And there is the return of Prudêncio. Years after their shared childhood, Brás is walking through a square in Rio when he sees, in the middle of the street, a freed black man beating a younger black man tied to a post, beating him methodically and without particular anger. He approaches. The man doing the beating is Prudêncio, his childhood playmate — now a freedman, now himself the owner of a slave. The scene is rendered in a handful of sentences and no commentary, because no commentary is necessary: "the slave of yesterday was now a master" and was doing to his own slave what had been done to him, or at least what had been done in front of him, when he was the child Brás climbed on for sport. The episode does not moralise. It simply sets two images beside each other — the little Brás on Prudêncio's back, the grown Prudêncio with a whip in his hand — and leaves the reader to understand that the system reproduces itself regardless of who stands in which position, and that freedom within a slave society does not, on its own, free anything.
The novel closes with a short balance sheet of Brás Cubas's life. He adds up what he has done and what he has failed to do. He had no particularly degrading occupation, he says; he did not transmit any serious vice; he did not steal, at least not in any measurable way; he did not kill anyone; he loved a woman and was loved in return. Against these small credits he places the many failures: the career not made, the book not written, the plaster not completed, the children not fathered. The two columns almost balance. And then, in the final sentence of the book, he gives the one small positive that tips the ledger in his favour. "I had no children; I did not transmit to any creature the legacy of our misery." The sentence is delivered as comedy, with the lightness of a man tidying up his affairs. It is also the truest political statement the book makes. What Brás Cubas understood — what Machado understood — is that to be born into a slaveholding empire is to inherit a misery that cannot be undone and can only be refused forward, and that the refusal to reproduce that misery, even at the cost of leaving no trace of oneself behind, is the one action a man of his class can take that actually subtracts something from the sum of cruelty in the world. He dies a bachelor and calls it his one achievement of consequence. The empire that produced him will not outlast him by two decades. The book that reports on him, written by a dead man with nothing to lose, will outlast them both.
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Flora Thomson-DeVeaux's 2020 Penguin Classics translation is the first English Brás Cubas to carry the full weight of Machado's irony and the oddness of his diction. Her edition preserves Machado's original chapter breaks — each of the 160 short chapters begins on a fresh page — and includes an introduction and notes that open up the Rio of 1881, with a foreword by Dave Eggers. It is the edition to read.
Translated by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux. The standard English edition — the first to do the novel full justice.
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