The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

About the work

Author

Machado de Assis

Publication

Serialized in the Revista Brasileira from March 1880; in book form in 1881

Genre

Novel

Setting

Rio de Janeiro, with the stay in Coimbra and in Europe

Period

From 1805, when Brás is born, to 1869, when he dies: from colony to the Second Reign

Narrator

First person: Brás Cubas himself, after death, talking with the reader

Protagonist

Brás Cubas, son of a wealthy family from Rio de Janeiro

Central Theme

A dead man writes his own memoirs and, because he is dead, says what the living keep silent about. Brás Cubas, son of a wealthy family from Rio de Janeiro, born in 1805 and dead in 1869, recounts a life without achievement: paid or hidden loves, a candidacy another man takes from him, a deputy's seat he loses, a newspaper that dies within months, and a single grand project, a plaster against the melancholy of humanity, that kills him before it exists. What makes the book last is the voice. The narrator interrupts the story, talks with the reader, male or female, mocks himself and others, corrects earlier chapters, writes chapters of a single line, and exposes, with the frankness he says is the first virtue of a dead man, the self-interest that drives people of his class, beginning with himself. Slavery runs through this world without the narrator lingering on it: the boy who rides the enslaved boy Prudêncio like a horse, the same Prudêncio, now freed, whipping on the street the enslaved man he bought. In the last chapter, the balance of a life is made of negatives, and the small remainder is that he passed on to no one the legacy of our misery.

Dedication

Ao verme que primeiro roeu as frias carnes do meu cadáver dedico como saudosa lembrança estas Memórias Póstumas, To the worm that first gnawed the cold flesh of my corpse I dedicate these Posthumous Memoirs as a fond keepsake

The dedication is already the dead man's: the first reader he acknowledges is the worm, and the "fond keepsake" is of the body that served as food. The book opens with a joke about its own decomposition, and this is the tone the reader should expect.

Prologue to the third edition

Machado, signing, responds to two remarks about the book: Capistrano de Abreu had asked whether it was a novel, and Macedo Soares had recalled the Travels in My Homeland. He answers with the words of Brás himself, who calls himself the heir of the free form of Sterne and Xavier de Maistre, and marks the difference.

Há na alma deste livro, por mais risonho que pareça, um sentimento amargo e áspero, que está longe de vir de seus modelos, There is in the soul of this book, however cheerful it may look, a bitter and harsh feeling, one that is far from coming from its models

The author speaks over the narrator only once, to say what separates the book from its models: the form is that of the humorists who traveled around their room or their own land, the substance is bitter. And he closes by refusing to enter "the criticism of a dead man," which already treats Brás as someone who painted his own portrait.

Laurence Sterne is the author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey; Xavier de Maistre, of A Journey Around My Room (1794); Almeida Garrett, of Travels in My Homeland (1846). These are the journeys the prologue alludes to: "Xavier de Maistre around his room, Garrett in his own land, Sterne in other people's lands."

To the reader

Brás Cubas opens the book by foreseeing very few readers, fewer than Stendhal's hundred, and describing the work as rambling and the work of a dead man.

Escrevi-a com a pena da galhofa e a tinta da melancolia, e não é difícil antever o que poderá sair desse conúbio, I wrote it with the pen of jest and the ink of melancholy, and it is not hard to foresee what may come of this union

The formula describes the whole book: laughter is the instrument, melancholy is the material. Brás warns in advance that neither the serious nor the frivolous will be satisfied, and in doing so places himself above both.

A obra em si mesma é tudo: se te agradar, fino leitor, pago-me da tarefa; se te não agradar, pago-te com um piparote, e adeus, The work in itself is everything: if it pleases you, discerning reader, I am paid for my labor; if it does not, I pay you with a flick, and goodbye

The flick is the first of the many times the narrator treats the reader with intimacy and disdain at once. He refuses to explain how he wrote "in the other world here," and the refusal is the first chapter of the relationship: whoever reads learns that he will not be spared.

The Thread That Runs Through the Work

Three threads run through the book from beginning to end, and each can be followed through the chapters where it appears.

The first is the fixed idea of glory. The plaster that kills him is born of the pleasure of seeing his name printed in newspapers, placards, and pamphlets (ch. II). His father wants him a deputy and arranges a fiancée and a candidacy at once (ch. XXVI, ch. XXVIII), and Lobo Neves carries off both in a few weeks (ch. XLIII). On seeing a minister pass by in a chaise, Brás wonders why he should not be one too (ch. LIX). He reaches the Chamber years later, but what he holds back, in front of his former lover's husband, is the wish to be a minister (ch. CXXVIII, ch. CXXIX). The ministry never comes (ch. CXXXIX), he loses his seat, founds an opposition newspaper that dies within months (ch. CXLVII, ch. CL), and ends up in the Third Order, in the phase he calls the most brilliant of his life (ch. CLVII). Among the negatives of the last chapter is that of not having been a minister (ch. CLX).

The second is love and its price. Marcela loves him "for fifteen months and eleven contos de réis" (ch. XVII); Eugênia, pretty and lame, is left behind in Tijuca (ch. XXXIII, ch. XXXV). With Virgília married, love begins in a waltz (ch. L) and is organized in a little house in Gamboa kept by Dona Plácida (ch. LXVII, ch. LXX), to whom Brás gives the five contos found on the beach, and his conscience accuses him of having reduced her to a go-between (ch. LXXVI). Virgília does not separate love from public regard (ch. LXVII), and public opinion, which Brás calls the good solder of domestic institutions, prevents both separation and revenge (ch. CXII, ch. CXIII). In the end, she mourns her husband sincerely, and Brás, who on the way back cannot reconcile betrayal with weeping, ends up finding the combination possible, and even easy (ch. CLII).

The third is the law of the victor. In the delirium, Nature or Pandora explains that the jaguar kills the young bull because the jaguar's reasoning is that it must live, and if the young bull is tender, so much the better (ch. VII). The boy Brás rides Prudêncio like a horse (ch. XI), and the same Prudêncio, freed, whips in the street the man he bought, passing on to another the blows he received (ch. LXVIII). Quincas Borba gives this a doctrine, Humanitism, in which war, hunger, and crime are necessary functions and pain is an illusion (ch. CXVII); the same law appears in the cockfight that absorbs Damasceno (ch. CXXI), and Quincas contemplates it in ecstasy in the two dogs fighting over a bone with no meat (ch. CXLI), and dies demented, repeating that pain is an illusion (ch. CLIX).