A novel from 1880 about Rio, 1805 to 1869
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas appeared as a serial in the Revista Brasileira starting in March 1880, and was collected in book form in 1881. The narrator, Brás Cubas, was born in 1805 and died in 1869 (ch. I), and the world he recounts was still the world of his readers: slavery was the law of the land and would only end in 1888, and the reign of Pedro II lasted until 1889. After novels with more conventional plots, such as Iaiá Garcia, of 1878, Machado de Assis made the turn here: a dead narrator who interrupts the story, mocks the reader, and says what the living keep silent about. The form was so free that the author, in the prologue to the third edition, had to answer the question of whether it was really a novel.
Three regimes in one life
Brás is born in 1805, when Rio de Janeiro was the capital of a colony, three years before the Portuguese court moved there. In 1814, at nine years old, he sees his family give a dinner to celebrate Napoleon's fall, with gun salutes and a Te Deum in honor of the royal family, already settled in the city (ch. XII). In 1822, at seventeen, he sees Marcela on the night of the lanterns with which Rio celebrated independence (ch. XIV). Afterward he is sent to Coimbra, the destination of the sons of rich families, because Brazil would only create its first law faculties in 1827 (ch. XX).
At his mother's death, the father speaks of the condolence letter from one of the Regents (ch. XXVI). The scene falls in the Regency: after Pedro I's abdication in 1831, the heir to the throne was a child, and the country was governed by regents until 1840. Damasceno, father of Nhã-loló, boasts of having made "the revolution of 1831" (ch. XCII). Brás's maturity belongs to the reign of Pedro II, and the ball where he meets Virgília again is dated precisely: 1855 (ch. CXXX).
Posts, decrees, and titles
Under the Empire, the emperor appointed the ministers, the central government appointed provincial presidents by decree, deputies were elected by indirect vote with income requirements, and the titles of baron or marquis were granted by the emperor. Brás's father wants his son a deputy and arranges for him a fiancée, the daughter of a "political influence" (ch. XXVIII). Lobo Neves takes both the candidacy and the fiancée in a few weeks, and promises Virgília the title of marquise (ch. XLIII). Later, Lobo Neves, appointed provincial president, refuses the post out of superstition and, since the minister does not believe in private motives, goes over to the opposition (ch. LXXXIII, ch. LXXXIV). As a deputy, he tries to reach the post of minister by speaking of the barretina of the National Guard, a civilian militia created in 1831 (ch. CXXXVII), and loses his seat (ch. CXL).
Slavery and the slave trade
The society of the book is slaveholding, and the narrator seldom lingers on it. In Valongo, the area of Rio tied to the trade in enslaved Africans, Brás finds Prudêncio, whom his father had freed, whipping an enslaved man he bought (ch. LXVIII). The trafficking of Africans to Brazil had been outlawed in 1831 but went on clandestinely for almost twenty years, until the law of 1850. Brás's brother-in-law, Cotrim, "fiercely honorable" and treasurer of a lay brotherhood, had, according to the narrator, "long smuggled in slaves" (ch. CXXIII). When the book was published, the Law of the Free Womb, of 1871, had already freed the children of enslaved women born from then on, but slavery still stood.
The ideas of the time
Quincas Borba's Humanitism is a parody of a systematic philosophy: in the name of Humanitas, the man divided among all men, war, hunger, and crime become necessary functions, and pain an illusion (ch. CXVII). The doctrine recalls the theories of the struggle for life that circulated after On the Origin of Species, by Darwin, of 1859. Nhã-loló's death, in the "first onset of yellow fever," refers to the epidemic that struck Rio from 1849 onward, which Quincas reads as a service to the species (ch. CXXVI).