Afterlives:

The Case of Machado de Assis

IMAGINE 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.

 

 

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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 Sseki’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.

The seductions of such a narrative are complex. The narrator professes to be worrying about the reader—whether the reader gets it. Meanwhile, the reader can be wondering about the narrator—whether the narrator understands all the implications of what is being told. A display of mental agility and inventiveness which is designed to amuse the reader and purportedly reflects the liveliness of the narrator’s mind mostly measures how emotionally isolated and forlorn the narrator is. Ostensibly, this is the book of a life. Yet, despite the narrator’s gift for social and psychological portraiture, it remains a tour of the inside of someone’s head. Another of Machado’s models was a marvelous book by Xavier de Maistre, a French expatriate aristocrat (he lived most of his long life in Russia) who invented the literary micro-journey with his Journey around My Room, written in 1794, when he was in prison for dueling, and which recounts his diagonal and zigzag visits to such diverting sites as the armchair, the desk, and the bed. A confinement, mental or physical, that is not acknowledged as such can make a very funny story as well as one charged with pathos.

At the beginning, in a flourish of authorial self-knowingness that graciously includes the reader, Machado de Assis has the autobiographer name the eighteenth-century literary models of his narrative with the following somber warning:

It is, in truth, a diffuse work, in which I, Brás Cubas, if indeed I have adopted the free form of a Sterne or of a Xavier de Maistre, have possibly added a certain peevish pessimism of my own. Quite possibly. The work of a man already dead. I wrote it with the pen of Mirth and the ink of Melancholy, and one can readily foresee what may come of such a union.

However modulated by whimsy, a vein of true misanthropy runs through the book. If Brás Cubas is not just another of those repressed, desiccated, pointlessly self-aware bachelor narrators who exist only to be seen through by the full-blooded reader, it is because of his anger—which is by the end of the book full-out, painful, bitter, upsetting.

The Sternean playfulness is lighthearted. It is a comic, albeit extremely nervous, form of friendliness with the reader. In the nineteenth century this digressiveness, this chattiness, this love of the little theory, this pirouetting from one narrative mode to another, takes on darker hues. It becomes identified with hypochondria, with erotic disillusionment, with the discontents of the self (Dostoyevsky’s pathologically voluble Underground Man), with acute mental distress (the hysterical narrator, deranged by injustice, of Multatuli’s Max Havelaar). To natter on obsessively, repetitively, used to be invariably a resource of comedy. (Think of Shakespeare’s plebeian grumblers, like the porter in Macbeth; think of Mr. Pickwick, among other inventions of Dickens.) That comic use of garrulousness does not disappear. Joyce used garrulousness in a Rabelaisian spirit, as a vehicle of comic hyperbole, and Gertrude Stein, champion of verbose writing, turned the tics of egotism and sententiousness into a good-natured comic voice of great originality. But most of the verbose first-person narrators in the ambitious literature of this century have been radically misanthropic. Garrulousness is identified with the baleful, aggrieved repetitiveness of senility (Beckett’s prose monologues that call themselves novels) and with paranoia and unslakable rage (the novels and plays of Thomas Bernhard). Who does not sense the despair behind the loquacious, sprightly musings of Robert Walser and the quirkily erudite, bantering voices in the stories of Donald Barthelme?

Beckett’s narrators are usually trying, not altogether successfully, to imagine themselves as dead. Brás Cubas has no such problem. But then Machado de Assis was trying to be, and is, funny. There is nothing morbid about the consciousness of his posthumous narrator; on the contrary, the perspective of maximum consciousness—which is what, wittily, a posthumous narrator can claim—is in itself a comic perspective. Where Brás Cubas is writing from is not a true afterlife (it has no geography), only another go at the idea of authorial detachment. The neo-Sternean narrative hijinks of these memoirs of a disappointed man do not issue from Sternean exuberance or even Sternean nervousness.

They are a kind of antidote, a counterforce to the narrator’s despondency: a way of mastering dejection considerably more specialized than the “great cure, an anti-melancholy plaster, designed to relieve the despondency of mankind” that the narrator fantasizes about inventing. Life administers its hard lessons. But one can write as one pleases—a form of liberty.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was only forty-one when he published these reminiscences of a man who has died—we learn at the opening of the book—at sixty-four. (Machado was born in 1839; he makes his creation Brás Cubas, the posthumous autobiographer, more than a generation older, born in 1805.) The novel as an exercise in the anticipating of old age is a venture to which writers of a melancholy temperament continue to be drawn. I was in my late twenties when I wrote my first novel, which purports to be the reminiscences of a man then in his early sixties, a rentier, dilettante, and fantasist, who announces at the beginning of the book that he has reached a harbor of serenity where, all experience finished, he can look back on his life. The few conscious literary references in my head were mostly French—above all Candide and Descartes’s Meditations; I thought I was writing a satire on optimism and on certain cherished (by me) ideas of the inner life and of a religiously nourished inwardness. (What was going on unconsciously, as I think about it now, is another story.) When I had the good fortune to have The Benefactor accepted by the first publisher to whom I submitted it, Farrar Straus, I had the further good luck of having assigned to me as my editor Cecil Hemley, who in 1952, in his previous incarnation as the head of Noonday Press (recently acquired by my new publisher), had brought out the translation of Machado’s novel that really launched the book’s career in English. (Under that title!) At our first meeting Hemley said to me: “I can see you have been influenced by Epitaph of a Small Winner.” Epitaph of a what? “By, you know, Machado de Assis.” Who? He lent me a copy and several days later I declared myself retroactively influenced.

Although I have since read a good deal of Machado in translation, Memórias postumas de Brás Cubas—the first of five late novels (he lived twenty-eight years after writing it) generally thought the summit of his genius—remains my favorite. I am told it is the one that non-Brazilians often prefer, although critics usually pick Dom Casmurro (1899). I am astonished that a writer of such greatness does not yet occupy the place he deserves. Up to a point, the relative neglect of Machado outside Brazil may be no more mysterious than the neglect of another prolific writer of genius whom Eurocentric notions of world literature have marginalized: Natsume Sseki. Surely Machado would be better known if he hadn’t been Brazilian and hadn’t spent his whole life in Rio de Janeiro—if he were, say, Italian or Russian, or even Portuguese. But the impediment is not simply that Machado was not a European writer. Even more remarkable than his absence from the stage of world literature is that he has been very little known and read in the rest of Latin America—as if it were still hard to digest the fact that the greatest novelist that Latin America has produced wrote in the Portuguese, rather than the Spanish, language. Brazil may be the continent’s biggest country (and Rio in the nineteenth century its largest city), but it has always been the outsider country—regarded by the rest of South America, Hispanophone South America, with a good deal of condescension and often in racist terms. A writer from these countries is far likelier to know any of the European literatures or literature in English than to know the literature of Brazil, whereas Brazilian writers are acutely aware of Spanish-American literature. Borges, the other supremely great writer produced on that continent, seems never to have read Machado de Assis. Indeed, Machado is even less well known to Spanish-language readers than to those who read him in English. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas was finally translated into Spanish only in the 1960s, some eighty years after it was written and a decade after it was translated (twice) into English.

With enough time, enough afterlife, a great book does find its rightful place. And perhaps some books need to be rediscovered again and again. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is probably one of those thrillingly original, radically skeptical books that will always impress readers with the force of a private discovery. It hardly seems much of a compliment to say that this novel, written more than a century ago, seems, well … modern. Isn’t every work that speaks to us with an originality and lucidity we’re capable of acknowledging one we want to conscript into what we understand as modernity? Our standards of modernity are a system of flattering illusions, which permit us selectively to colonize the past, as are our ideas of what is provincial, which permit some parts of the world to condescend to all the rest. Being dead may stand for a point of view that cannot be accused of being provincial. Surely The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is one of the most entertainingly unprovincial books ever written. And to love this book is to become a little less provincial about literature, about literature’s possibilities, oneself.

[1990]