The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
translated from the Portuguese by Gregory Rabassa
"Only great passions are capable of great actions."
So the narrator of what is arguably Machado de Assis' finest novel, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, tells the married woman with whom he is engaged in a liaison. Although he attempts to get this woman, Virgilia, to run away with him, he is unsuccessful. He plants the seed in her mind that her husband doesn't care for her as much as he does. But to no avail. She wants to continue to play her role as a respectable married woman.
This is just one scene in which the narrator is unlucky in love. But be not deceived: this is a novel of buoyant wit and vibrant energy. Indeed, there is nothing tragic about it. Machado de Assis is clearly having great fun throughout all 200 pages, as he engages our attention in the life of a man who is already dead at the outset.
Where most novels are concerned with plot and characters, this one is all about structure. The narrative is a chronicle, of sorts, and through its realism and satire, it's impossible not to think that Machado de Assis is poking fun at the very form he is seeking to embrace. There are many themes at the crux of this work, not least of which is time, and how it relates to the deterioration of people, places, customs, and things. We are instructed to understand that even that which brings us joy
is only temporary:
"...No one should trust present happiness, there's a drop of Cain's drivel in it. With the passing of time and the end of rapture,
then, yes, then perhaps it's possible really to enjoy, because between these two illusions the better one is the one that's enjoyed without pain."
The narrator describes Virgilia as "the great sin of his youth." It was when she came into his life, he says, that his delirium began. Although Machado de Assis lived in a time when Romanticism in literature was the style du jour, the naturalistic, even sardonic brush with which he paints his characters and scenes is refreshing for its very distinctiveness. Unlike Eca de Queiroz, whom he has been compared to on more than one occasion, Machado tends to parody the melodramatic genre, making light of romance, and treating love scenes with as much sincerity as if they were part of a theatrical skit.
In a Chapter entitled "Fate," the narrator speaks of his relationship with Virgilia with such a mixture of sentimentality and melodrama that it's impossible to take him seriously:
"Yes, sir, we were in love. Now all the social laws have forbade it, now was when we truly loved each other. We found ourselves yoked together like the two souls encountered in Purgatory.
Di pari, come boui, the vanno a giogo
and I'm wrong comparing us to oxen because we were a different species of animal, less sluggish, more roguish, and lascivious.
There we were, going along without knowing where to, on what secret roads, a problem that frightened me for a few weeks but whose outcome I turned over to fate. Poor Fate!....It was our fate to fall in love."
Shortly after this, when Virgilia expresses remorse over their illicit affair, they embrace one another, and she murmurs:
"I love you. It's the will of heaven."
Like a character in an old Victorian novel, Virgilia seeks solace for her sins in religion. She prays nightly, and plays the role of
the virtuous wife. Her husband, Lobo Neves, fits the role of the betrayed husband perfectly. Never once does he doubt his wife's purity.
"He thought that Virgilia was perfection itself, a combination of solid and refined qualities, loving, elegant, austere, a model woman."
The humor that underlies every sentence of the book is almost macabre. Machado is the first to give us a look into the petty side of human nature, yet he never seems to expect us to feel any genuine compassion. How can we feel anything but amusement when we see the farcical way that everything plays out? The characters are always deceiving each other,
never ceasing to use whatever duplicitous means are at their disposal to bring about the outcome they desire.
One moment Virgilia is filled with remorse. The next she is demonstrating her ardor to the narrator:
"Virgilia loved me furiously.....With her arms around my neck, silent, breathing heavily...She had the look warm natures have,
and it could be said that in reality she summed up all love."
As I have mentioned before, the narrator is deceased at the book's beginning. Thus, all that he reflects upon is part of his past. Before Virgilia, he takes us into his childhood. One would think there would be some clue to his character in this portion of the novel. And perhaps there is:
"From the age of five I'd earned the nickname of 'Devil's Child,' and I was really just that. I was one of those malevolent children of my time, evasive, nosey, mischievous, and willful...more than by any prayers...I was governed by nerves and blood, and the Golden Rule lost its living spirit and became a hollow formula."
Later, when the narrator reaches an age in which he becomes interested in women, he devises a theory:
"...there are really two ways of enticing a woman's will: the violent way like Europa's bull and the insinuative way like Leda's swan or Danae's shower of gold..."
Ironically, all the philosophies in the book are no match for Marcela, the bewitching prostitute that the narrator becomes enraptured with. It's obvious from the beginning that Marcela cares more about his pocketbook than she does about his love.
However, even though the narrator suspects that he is being used, he views the situation with characteristic dry humor, at one point admitting, after presenting her with an expensive necklace:
"I didn't like the expression with which her eyes passed from me to the wall and from the wall to the jewel."
The narrator's next love is the lovely Eugenia, who seems flawless until he discovers that she was born lame. Never one to feel a large amount of sympathy for other people, he queries:
"Why pretty if lame? Why lame if pretty? That was the question I kept asking myself on the way back home at night without hitting upon the solution to the enigma."
Tossing aside all plans to marry a crippled woman, the narrator embarks on an affair with Virgilia, whom he was first introduced to at an earlier date. She is married now, and the fact she is married seems to make her much more desirable.
"Virgilia's beauty had a tone of grandeur now, something it hadn't had before she was married. She was one of those figures carved in Pentelic marble, of noble workmanship, open and pure, tranquilly beautiful, like the statues but neither indifferent nor cold."
When speaking of their love, the narrator says:
"There are some plants that are born and grow quickly. Others are late and stunted. Our love was like the former. It burst forth with such drive and so much sap that in a short while it was the broadest, leafiest, and most luxuriant creation in the forest."
What comes between their love is, of course, Virgilia's husband. But even that hurdle is handled with a certain amount of irony. These are not star-crossed lovers who are kept apart. They are moody, temperamental people who are continually having quarrels. The narrator eventually tires of being Virgilia's adulterous lover, and he finds himself longing for a "conventional" life:
"I felt taken for a longing for marriage, by a desire to straighten my life out. Why not? My heart still had things to explore....I immediately saw myself married, alongside an adorable woman, looking at a baby sleeping in the arms of a nursemaid, all of us in the back of a shady green yard, and peeping at us through the trees was a strip of blue sky...."
But such idllyic fantasies are not to be, for this book is anything but conventional. Indeed, Machado peppers his chapters with literary allusions, allows his narrator to converse with the legendary Pandora in a dream, and even dedicates one chapter to Reason and Folly, whom he depicts as two women fighting for supremacy.
The sources that inspired Machado to pen this extraordinary book are varied. It has long been thought that Laurence Sterne's Tristam Shandy had a pivotal role in shaping The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas. Like Sterne, Machado specializes in scathing satire, and, also like Sterne, he is adept at depicting the petty motivations that are often behind the conduct of those in society. In the scenes between the narrator and Virgilia, De Assis evokes the aura of Chateaubriand, and the lovers in Corneille's El Cid are a precursor to the comparatively modern duo of Bras Cubas and Virgilia.
The key to why this book works so well is that it's a parody of everything it represents. In spite of all the subtexts and literary allusions, it's worth reading strictly for its satire, as well as for its exceptional prose. It isn't difficult to see why this is considered to be a landmark novel in the history of Brazilian literature. Never has Machado more deftly conveyed his realization of the vanity of all existence than he does in The Posthumous Memoirs of Bra Cubas.
The Posthumous Memories of Bras Cubas was first published in the 1880s in segments in Revista Brasileira. Later, before it
was put into book form, Machado de Assis revised it extensively.
My rating: *****+
~Titania
translated from the Portuguese by Gregory Rabassa
"Only great passions are capable of great actions."
So the narrator of what is arguably Machado de Assis' finest novel, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, tells the married woman with whom he is engaged in a liaison. Although he attempts to get this woman, Virgilia, to run away with him, he is unsuccessful. He plants the seed in her mind that her husband doesn't care for her as much as he does. But to no avail. She wants to continue to play her role as a respectable married woman.
This is just one scene in which the narrator is unlucky in love. But be not deceived: this is a novel of buoyant wit and vibrant energy. Indeed, there is nothing tragic about it. Machado de Assis is clearly having great fun throughout all 200 pages, as he engages our attention in the life of a man who is already dead at the outset.
Where most novels are concerned with plot and characters, this one is all about structure. The narrative is a chronicle, of sorts, and through its realism and satire, it's impossible not to think that Machado de Assis is poking fun at the very form he is seeking to embrace. There are many themes at the crux of this work, not least of which is time, and how it relates to the deterioration of people, places, customs, and things. We are instructed to understand that even that which brings us joy
is only temporary:
"...No one should trust present happiness, there's a drop of Cain's drivel in it. With the passing of time and the end of rapture,
then, yes, then perhaps it's possible really to enjoy, because between these two illusions the better one is the one that's enjoyed without pain."
The narrator describes Virgilia as "the great sin of his youth." It was when she came into his life, he says, that his delirium began. Although Machado de Assis lived in a time when Romanticism in literature was the style du jour, the naturalistic, even sardonic brush with which he paints his characters and scenes is refreshing for its very distinctiveness. Unlike Eca de Queiroz, whom he has been compared to on more than one occasion, Machado tends to parody the melodramatic genre, making light of romance, and treating love scenes with as much sincerity as if they were part of a theatrical skit.
In a Chapter entitled "Fate," the narrator speaks of his relationship with Virgilia with such a mixture of sentimentality and melodrama that it's impossible to take him seriously:
"Yes, sir, we were in love. Now all the social laws have forbade it, now was when we truly loved each other. We found ourselves yoked together like the two souls encountered in Purgatory.
Di pari, come boui, the vanno a giogo
and I'm wrong comparing us to oxen because we were a different species of animal, less sluggish, more roguish, and lascivious.
There we were, going along without knowing where to, on what secret roads, a problem that frightened me for a few weeks but whose outcome I turned over to fate. Poor Fate!....It was our fate to fall in love."
Shortly after this, when Virgilia expresses remorse over their illicit affair, they embrace one another, and she murmurs:
"I love you. It's the will of heaven."
Like a character in an old Victorian novel, Virgilia seeks solace for her sins in religion. She prays nightly, and plays the role of
the virtuous wife. Her husband, Lobo Neves, fits the role of the betrayed husband perfectly. Never once does he doubt his wife's purity.
"He thought that Virgilia was perfection itself, a combination of solid and refined qualities, loving, elegant, austere, a model woman."
The humor that underlies every sentence of the book is almost macabre. Machado is the first to give us a look into the petty side of human nature, yet he never seems to expect us to feel any genuine compassion. How can we feel anything but amusement when we see the farcical way that everything plays out? The characters are always deceiving each other,
never ceasing to use whatever duplicitous means are at their disposal to bring about the outcome they desire.
One moment Virgilia is filled with remorse. The next she is demonstrating her ardor to the narrator:
"Virgilia loved me furiously.....With her arms around my neck, silent, breathing heavily...She had the look warm natures have,
and it could be said that in reality she summed up all love."
As I have mentioned before, the narrator is deceased at the book's beginning. Thus, all that he reflects upon is part of his past. Before Virgilia, he takes us into his childhood. One would think there would be some clue to his character in this portion of the novel. And perhaps there is:
"From the age of five I'd earned the nickname of 'Devil's Child,' and I was really just that. I was one of those malevolent children of my time, evasive, nosey, mischievous, and willful...more than by any prayers...I was governed by nerves and blood, and the Golden Rule lost its living spirit and became a hollow formula."
Later, when the narrator reaches an age in which he becomes interested in women, he devises a theory:
"...there are really two ways of enticing a woman's will: the violent way like Europa's bull and the insinuative way like Leda's swan or Danae's shower of gold..."
Ironically, all the philosophies in the book are no match for Marcela, the bewitching prostitute that the narrator becomes enraptured with. It's obvious from the beginning that Marcela cares more about his pocketbook than she does about his love.
However, even though the narrator suspects that he is being used, he views the situation with characteristic dry humor, at one point admitting, after presenting her with an expensive necklace:
"I didn't like the expression with which her eyes passed from me to the wall and from the wall to the jewel."
The narrator's next love is the lovely Eugenia, who seems flawless until he discovers that she was born lame. Never one to feel a large amount of sympathy for other people, he queries:
"Why pretty if lame? Why lame if pretty? That was the question I kept asking myself on the way back home at night without hitting upon the solution to the enigma."
Tossing aside all plans to marry a crippled woman, the narrator embarks on an affair with Virgilia, whom he was first introduced to at an earlier date. She is married now, and the fact she is married seems to make her much more desirable.
"Virgilia's beauty had a tone of grandeur now, something it hadn't had before she was married. She was one of those figures carved in Pentelic marble, of noble workmanship, open and pure, tranquilly beautiful, like the statues but neither indifferent nor cold."
When speaking of their love, the narrator says:
"There are some plants that are born and grow quickly. Others are late and stunted. Our love was like the former. It burst forth with such drive and so much sap that in a short while it was the broadest, leafiest, and most luxuriant creation in the forest."
What comes between their love is, of course, Virgilia's husband. But even that hurdle is handled with a certain amount of irony. These are not star-crossed lovers who are kept apart. They are moody, temperamental people who are continually having quarrels. The narrator eventually tires of being Virgilia's adulterous lover, and he finds himself longing for a "conventional" life:
"I felt taken for a longing for marriage, by a desire to straighten my life out. Why not? My heart still had things to explore....I immediately saw myself married, alongside an adorable woman, looking at a baby sleeping in the arms of a nursemaid, all of us in the back of a shady green yard, and peeping at us through the trees was a strip of blue sky...."
But such idllyic fantasies are not to be, for this book is anything but conventional. Indeed, Machado peppers his chapters with literary allusions, allows his narrator to converse with the legendary Pandora in a dream, and even dedicates one chapter to Reason and Folly, whom he depicts as two women fighting for supremacy.
The sources that inspired Machado to pen this extraordinary book are varied. It has long been thought that Laurence Sterne's Tristam Shandy had a pivotal role in shaping The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas. Like Sterne, Machado specializes in scathing satire, and, also like Sterne, he is adept at depicting the petty motivations that are often behind the conduct of those in society. In the scenes between the narrator and Virgilia, De Assis evokes the aura of Chateaubriand, and the lovers in Corneille's El Cid are a precursor to the comparatively modern duo of Bras Cubas and Virgilia.
The key to why this book works so well is that it's a parody of everything it represents. In spite of all the subtexts and literary allusions, it's worth reading strictly for its satire, as well as for its exceptional prose. It isn't difficult to see why this is considered to be a landmark novel in the history of Brazilian literature. Never has Machado more deftly conveyed his realization of the vanity of all existence than he does in The Posthumous Memoirs of Bra Cubas.
The Posthumous Memories of Bras Cubas was first published in the 1880s in segments in Revista Brasileira. Later, before it
was put into book form, Machado de Assis revised it extensively.
My rating: *****+
~Titania
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