Brás Cubas’s Theory of Human Editions
Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. Liveright, 256 pp., $27.95.
Do you remember my theory about human editions? Well, by then I was in my fourth edition, revised and amended, but still infested with mistakes and barbarisms. [1]
These words, uttered by the deceased narrator of Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas,[2] do far more than to impugn a dead man’s moral probity. Machado provides us readers with a rubric for evaluating social progress. Certainly humanity has authored multiple original works over the years — what with its philosophical tracts, its sweeping acts of legislation, its political revolutions. Or has it? Are the world’s many cultural projects simply reprints of the same human drama, with a crimson leather cover slapped on top for the purpose of self-promotion?
Far be it for Brás Cubas to engage in self-promotion. Writing from beyond the grave, he chronicles his string of stymied love affairs, as well as his failed career in politics, all the while folding in copious — even pretentious — literary allusion. The narrative expends much of its energy on Brás Cubas’s extended dalliance with Virgília, the ambitious young woman to whom his father had previously arranged for him to be married, before losing out to Lobo Neves, the more conventional political aspirant.
Colorized portrait of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. Wikimedia Commons.
While Machado’s novel features a number of memorable trysts, it is actually the narrator’s description of the circumstances leading up to the conception of Dona Plácida, his and Virgilia’s romantic go-between, that best conveys the uniquely devastating egotism of love affairs — or at least certain love affairs. Imagining a dialogue between the infant Dona Plácida and the sacristan who has illegitimately sired her, Brás Cubas explains that the child’s parents called her into existence:
So that you could burn your fingers on the stove, ruin your eyes with sewing by candlelight, eat badly or not at all… getting sick and then better, only to get sick again and better again… until one day you end up in the gutter or in hospital. That’s why we called you, in a moment of kindness.
The imaginary exchange takes on heightened significance later in the novel, when Virgília, pregnant with Brás Cubas’s bastard son, unexpectedly miscarries. Dona Plácida’s birth and subsequent poverty wind up representing a miscarriage of justice — one induced largely by the same vanity fueling Brás Cubas’s desire to become a father.
In addition to moral failings personal and pedestrian, Machado’s narrator exposes humanity’s spectacular indifference to human suffering. Passing through the public square, Brás Cubas walks onto a scene of horrific brutality: he discovers that Prudêncio, a freedman who was formerly in thrall to the Cubas family, is viciously lashing his own slave in front of an eager crowd. Prudêncio lets up only once he recognizes Brás Cubas, who commands his former slave to pardon the man. “It was Prudêncio’s way of ridding himself of all the beatings he had received,” writes Brás Cubas, “by passing them on to someone else.” With characteristic glibness, he continues: “He had bought a slave and was paying him, with hefty interest, for all that he had received from me. See what a rascal he was!”
The episode marks one of the narrative’s most chilling moments, attesting as it does to the trenchant cruelty in human nature, as Jull Costa and Patterson note in their introduction. Here Machado — who was himself the grandson of freed slaves — contends with the limits of human solidarity. The passage is so harrowing because it calls into question one man’s revisionary capacity, to say nothing of a milieu’s revolutionary potential.
Are we not more than stock characters and familiar plotlines? Are we not greater than our smallest moments?
Candido Portinari, Caterpillar, 1943. Página Cinco.
Despite the Memoirs’s construction as a compendium of petty slights, major moral lapses, and repeated failures, in his novel Machado seems to admit that change is possible, albeit mischievously. The narrator’s persistent citation — and miscitation — of his cultural forebears suggests there truly are no sacred cows. That the power to revise history is fully ours. Jull Costa and Patterson note, again in their introduction, that Brás Cubas alights and riffs on diverse source material without so much as acknowledging his misprision. Revisionist pastiche is celebrated nowhere more fantastically than in the philosophical musings of Quincas Borba. The mad founder of Humanitism — who later went on to become the protagonist of an eponymous novel by Machado de Assis — embraces a zero-sum notion of morality in which envy, for example, is “nothing but a combative form of admiration, and since struggle is the main function of the human species, envy is a virtue.” At other moments, we catch him reworking Pascal’s Pensées; ditto Erasmus.
The apparent success of Brás Cubas, first in Portuguese and now in English, means that, at the present moment, there are potentially as many readers grappling with Borba as with Pascal. This alone seems to suggest that, yes, revision — both of culturally significant works and the humanity that produces them — is possible. It’s fair to say that cultural transformation as conceived here is too literal to offer much hope for future generations striving to blot out injustices. After all, it is far easier to manipulate an actual text than it is to reform our nature.
Candido Portinari, Girl Praying, c. 1940. Página Cinco.
Machado’s willingness to overwrite his literary ancestors hardly illuminates a path towards social progress; they do, however, contain an ennobling truth. If past is prologue and occasionally prolix (the novel refers to several fruitless or superfluous historical upheavals), the past is also ours to cut, redraft, and discard as we see fit. It is also ours, whether out of reverence or apathy, to let alone. This is a far cry from a theory of solidarity with any power to mobilize, but it is an appeal to morally and intellectually edifying irreverence. Besides, might there be, in an ever-widening circle of mischievous readers, the potential for social change? Brás Cubas’s theory of human editions is, perhaps, a theory of humanity’s editability.
For a posthumous memoir posits a future readership — one unlike any the writer could have anticipated. Machado’s Posthumous Memoirs are a de-composition, so to speak, a gnawing of the source material that their author had encountered both in literature and in society. “From that soil and from that dung,” Brás Cubas writes in an early chapter, “this flower was born.” It is fitting, then, that Machado has called on readers to find nourishment in a dead man’s living words. He has called for a flowering of reactions and counterreactions, enthusiasms and disdains.
And from the very fertile soil of Machado’s literary accomplishment a new readership has indeed emerged — along with four major translations, including the two versions released within days of one another, in June.
Posthumous Memoirs first edition title page. Wikipedia.
The first translation, by William L. Grossman, and the subsequent translation by Gregory Rabassa are both perfectly good, as Machado biographer K. David Jackson wrote over a decade ago in a review for the Times. Readers of Portuguese-language literature would be right to recall the similar editorial coincidence, in the early nineties, of the four editions of Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, which until then had gone untranslated.
If Bernardo Soares’s restive, experimental fiction served as a counterpoint to the expansionist optimism of the 90s, what role might Machado’s novel be playing in 2020? To put it more simply: Why the Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas? Why now?
Perhaps it’s the defunct memoirist’s quiet assertion that our past could use some reviewing and revising. That would be apt. Machado does not, of course, give much indication as to how we might set about writing this next chapter or any other after it.
The two fresh editions will resonate with two different posthumous readerships. Readers who are broadly familiar with Brazilian literature, or who have already read other works by Machado de Assis, will enjoy the extensive critical apparatus provisioned by the scholar Flora Thomson-Deveaux in the Penguin edition. The Thomson-Deveaux translation has been covered widely in Brazilian media, after quickly selling out in the States.
Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson’s translation, by comparison, features little commentary and seems to have made less of a splash. But their jointly translated version perfectly captures Brás Cubas’s voice: his kindness and his parsimony, his volubility, his learned indolence. Consider their version of the opening to the chapter in which Brás Cubas details his first kiss:
I was seventeen; a little soft down was beginning to appear on my upper lip and I did my best to tease it out into a moustache. My bright, resolute eyes were my only truly virile feature […] I was a handsome [...] lad mounted on a swift, strong, skittish steed just like a steed out of an old ballad, the kind the Romantics went looking for in a medieval castle only to find in the streets of their own century.
The wiliness of his “teasing out” of a moustache; the purely alliterative thrust of his imaginary steed; the breezy aphorism at the end of the simile — these essential qualities come through clearly, thanks to the pair’s finely-tuned ear and clever word choices. Margaret Jull Costa shines most dazzlingly as a translator of realist or satirical fiction; the Memoirs are no exception.
Now, has the duo produced the definitive translation of The Posthumous Memoirs, bringing to a halt the perpetual change set out by Brás Cubas in his theory of human editions? I doubt it. Even as the ink on these elegantly rendered pages dries, another translation can’t be far away — improved, abridged, expanded, or substantially intact, it’ll become yet another voice in the editorial back-and-forth. //
Candido Portinari, The First Kiss, 1943. Página Cinco.
[1] Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, trans. Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson (New York: Liveright, 2020), 84.
[2] Originally published in 1881.