Epitaph of a Small Winner

Overcoming Boredom

IN SEVERAL OF its original Portuguese editions, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis carries an evocative subtitle, which can be translated as Epitaph of a Small Winner. In the English translation I first read, this subtitle was adopted as the title. So that’s what I call this remarkable novel, which is dedicated “To the first worm that gnawed my flesh.” Thanks to reading the dedication, I knew right away that our narrator is dead. (Of course, had I read the book in Portuguese or in another English translation, the original title would have told me this; I also would have learned this fact had I first read the Susan Sontag foreword in my edition, as she rightly makes much of it.) The novel is divided into 160 very short chapters. And it begins with a disclaimer, in which our dead narrator lets us know that he doubts the book will be of interest to more than five or ten readers, tops.

Its author, Machado de Assis, lived and wrote in Brazil in the nineteenth century, was the founder of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, and is one of the country’s most revered writers. He also happened to be a favorite of Lin Yutang.

Sontag places Epitaph of a Small Winner “in that tradition of narrative buffoonery—the talkative first-person voice attempting to ingratiate itself with readers.” She continues, “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.” She compares the book to one of Machado’s favorites, Journey Around My Room, “a book by Xavier de Maistre, a French expatriate aristocrat (he lived most of his long life in Russia), who invented the literary micro-journey” when he was under house arrest for dueling. In de Maistre’s highly experimental work, written in 1790, he describes traveling to various locations in his room: his walls, his chaise, his desk. More on that later.

Machado, born in Rio de Janeiro in 1839, was biracial. His father was a housepainter whose parents had been enslaved. His mother, a washerwoman for a rich family, was Portuguese by way of the Azores. Machado’s mother died when he was nine. His father soon remarried, but then died a couple of years later.

Machado was mostly self-taught and was obsessed with literature from an early age. The translator into English for the edition I read, William L. Grossman, fills in some more details in his introduction to the volume, explaining that even though Machado published a large number of works in all different genres (including plays and poetry) before the age of forty, it wasn’t until Epitaph of a Small Winner came out in 1880 that his reputation blossomed. Grossman adds that Machado worked as a government bureaucrat and that he married an aristocratic Portuguese woman who was five years older, and “who lived with him in what appears to have been complete harmony and devotion.” They didn’t have children. Machado’s wife died in 1904; Machado in 1908, leaving more than a dozen works to be published posthumously.

Epitaph of a Small Winner is a book that, right from the start, meanders. The narrator halfheartedly apologizes for that: “The reader, like his fellows, doubtless prefers action to reflection, and doubtless he is wholly in the right….However, I must advise him that this book is written leisurely, with the leisureliness of a man no longer troubled by the flight of time; that it is a work supinely philosophical, but of a philosophy wanting in uniformity, now austere, now playful, a thing that neither edifies nor destroys, neither inflames nor chills, and that is at once more than pastime and less than preachment.”

Our dead narrator is named Bras Cubas. Hence the original title. He’s every bit the maddening egotistical misanthrope that Sontag warned me (well, not just me but anyone who reads her foreword) that he would be. He’s either constantly ill or a hypochondriac or both. He’s pompous. Selfish. And his life is a series of blunders and disappointments and misunderstandings. He’s convinced he’s made a great discovery that will change the world, but nothing ever comes of it.

This is not a great man. But he’s a modern one.

The book is filled with oddities. One chapter is nothing but a series of dots. It’s titled “How I Did Not Become a Minister of State.” Another chapter is titled “Unnecessary.” It reads, in its entirety: “And, if I am not greatly mistaken, I have just written an utterly unnecessary chapter.” It’s unclear to me whether he’s referring to the chapter at hand or the one before. I’m not sure it matters.

An early chapter is set in 1814, at the height of Napoleon’s power. Our narrator’s father hates the dictator; his uncle loves him. When news reaches Rio that Napoleon has fallen (fallen for the first time, our narrator hastens to point out), there is “great excitement” in the house. He writes of himself, then only nine years old:

During those days, I cut an interesting figure wearing a little sword that my uncle had given me on St. Anthony’s Day, and, frankly, the sword interested me more than Napoleon’s downfall. This superior interest has never left me. I have never given up the thought that our little swords are always greater than Napoleon’s big one. And please note that I heard many a speech when I was alive, I read many a page noisy with big ideas and bigger words, but (I do not know why), beneath all the cheers that they drew from my lips, there would sometimes echo this conceit drawn from my experience:

“Do not deceive yourself, the only thing you really care about is your little sword.”

Shortly after reading this passage, I decided to take a break from reading and found myself, as I so often do, checking Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Hipstamatic, and, well, you get the point. And as I looked at all the posts, I was struck by the fact that, really, what everyone on social media was doing was sharing their little swords. And there I was, sharing mine. In a world of big books and big events and big ideas, of course there were some people commenting on these, and of course I was, too, sometimes. But mostly we were all reveling in the minutiae of our daily lives: our little meals, our little pets, our little observations, our little wry asides. As for those of us traveling, we were sharing our little delays and little discomfitures and little peeves: They had the wrong gate marked so I walked past it three times! The boarding was literally [actually, figuratively, as someone else pointed out, while going on to comment that frequent misuse of that word was a major pet peeve] a madhouse!

But maybe there is nothing wrong with that. Maybe that’s what we’ve always done—on the village green, in the corridors of our apartment buildings, at breakfast with our families as we stood around the kitchen drinking coffee and spreading butter on English muffins. “How did you sleep?” is the first question we ask one another—not, “How did the president sleep?”

What has grown is our desire to share our little swords with absolute strangers. Sharing them with our friends and families is no longer enough. Increasingly, people want to make their little swords go viral, to get approval from the crowd, to have everyone acknowledge and proclaim that their little swords are as important as Napoleon’s.

When I post something to social media, why do I do it? I really don’t know. Part of it is the prompt—the various social-sharing programs are very good at encouraging you to add your voice to the chorus. One might ask you, “What’s on your mind?” and so I answer. Another asks you to “Share,” and so I do. Or maybe it lets you know that it’s a friend’s birthday and suggests that you write on her wall. Mostly, though, I’m not prompted: I want to add some encouragement or acknowledge a friend’s joy or pain or simply reaffirm a social bond. Look at my little sword, my friend says. I like your little sword, I reply—meaning, I like you.

Then there’s the shilling—for myself or for a friend: Visit this store! Buy this thing!

And then there’s the type of post where someone advertises a contribution—literal or figurative—to a charity or cause. Boasting or helpful?

Our dead narrator in the Machado novel says of another character, “Naturally, he was not perfect. For example, after making a charitable contribution he always sent out a press release about it—a reprehensible or at least not praiseworthy practice, I agree. But he explained his conduct on the ground that good deeds, if made public, rouse people to do likewise—an argument to which one cannot deny a certain force.”

People also like to share wisdom in the form of maxims on their social feeds, just as they always have in every medium.

Near the end of Epitaph of a Small Winner our dead narrator decides to “set down parenthetically a half dozen maxims.” He describes them as “yawns born of boredom” but thinks “perhaps some aspiring essayist will find use for them as epigraphs.”

They include:

One endures with patience the pain in the other fellow’s stomach.

We kill time; time buries us.

A coach-man philosopher used to say that the desire to ride in carriages would be greatly diminished if everyone could afford to ride in carriages.

“Nothing could be more ridiculous than the childish delight that savages take in piercing a lip and adorning it with a piece of wood,” said the jeweler.

I could share on social media any of these as my own tomorrow, and it would probably be enthusiastically received. As our narrator says, they were born of boredom. And people seeking a moment’s escape from boredom would read them.

Of course, we know that the narrator is not just dead but fictional. Epitaph of a Small Winner is the work of one of the world’s great writers, a master storyteller, who is treating us to a delightful, inventive, and absorbing novel that is all the more engaging thanks to its eccentric, bored, dyspeptic, infuriating narrator. There’s something magical about this book. People say books made them laugh out loud; this one really did that to me. I underlined passages all the way through it. If this novel is the fruit of boredom, or an ode to it, bring it on.

Lin Yutang writes, “Perhaps all philosophy began with the sense of boredom. Anyway it is characteristic of humans to have a sad, vague and wistful longing for an ideal. Living in a real world, man has yet the capacity and tendency to dream of another world. Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination.”

So the question I find myself contemplating is what to do with my boredom. Should I distract it? That’s what I do when I mindlessly scroll through news feeds or sit in front of the television cycling through channels, or pretend that flipping through a stack of magazines that has sat unread is a worthy project. Or should I engage it? That’s when I question myself as to why I’m bored, though this often takes the form of a kind of self-flagellation, and winds up with my berating myself for not having planned some kind of activity: a trip to a museum or to the gym or to a movie. In those instances, boredom becomes something like jealousy, of others doing more worthwhile things or even of a version of myself who isn’t so lazy and indolent.

In these moments of bored reflection, I don’t create philosophy—what I create is a kind of accounting of my life. Which is what the narrator of the Machado novel is doing from beyond the grave.

I’ve been trying increasingly to embrace and enjoy my boredom. In our distracted world, it’s become a precious commodity. And of course, when I am no longer enjoying my boredom, the one sure cure is at hand: it’s a book—the right book, or even just any decent book—that can instantly snap me out of it.