6/8/2017 The Brazilian Novelist Who Inspired Borges, Márquez, and Amado

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Baltimore-based. Writer on books from around the world, Portugal, urban development, bicycles, and occa…
Jun 6 · 6 min read

The Brazilian Novelist Who Inspired Borges,

Márquez, and Amado
Machado De Assis’ 1881 “posthumous novel” is a seminal
text for Latin American masters

Machado De Assis

A few months ago, I was talking books with a Brazilian colleague

when she told me that the most important book written in the
Portuguese language was a story from 1881 called Memórias Póstumas

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de Bras Cubas, or The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, by Machado

de Assis.

“How do you write a posthumous memoir?” I had asked her.

“Exactamente,” she told me.

As a reader, I sometimes have to remind myself that the written word

existed in South America before the Latin American Boom of the
1960s and 1970s, the renaissance that brought about many of the
masterful works of Jorge Amado, Jorges Luis Borges, Gabriel García
Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among others. It’s an influence and
an era that looms so large and monolithic that contemporary writers
from the region can feel squeezed out by its largess, and the same can
be said for the now-voiceless writers who came before: Who were the

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authors that inspired such an incredible outpouring of writing from

an entire continent? One of them, undoubtedly, was Machado de Assis
and his strange masterpiece, often translated in English as Epitaph of
a Small Winter.

As a reader, I sometimes have to remind myself that

the written word existed in South America before the
Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s.

Machado’s novel is told by its hero, Bras Cubas, from beyond the
grave, starting with his descent into his feverish delirium and his
eventual death from pneumonia at sixty-four years old. Only after his
death does Cubas backtrack to detail the rest of his life, telling of his
upbringing, his work as a bureaucrat, his few loves, and the many

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appearances of death to the people that Bras meets on his journey

through life: a passenger on a ship, his mother, a black butterfly, his
lover’s maid, and many others. This strange and humorous
preoccupation with death is evident before even the first page,
starting with the dedication, “To the first worm that gnawed my
flesh.”

If Machado’s endeavor to write an amusing, absurd, inventive life

story sounds familiar, it certainly should — in the opening lines, Cubas
admits to “have adopted the free form of a Sterne or of a Xavier de
Maistre,” referencing Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne and Voyage
Around My Room by de Maistre. Cubas, much like Shandy, breaks
through the page to engage with the reader, from taking hold of the
dedication to promising to delete chapters left in the book to asking
the reader to forgive him for sloppy writing. Whole pages are filled in
with line drawings, entire chapters left blank in authorial distress, all
amid the constant reminders that the words one is reading are not
just those of a dead man, but those written by a man after he has died.

. . .

Putting Borges’ Infinite Library On the Internet

The Creation of libraryofbabel.info
electricliterature.com

. . .

Machado’s willingness to break open the novel as a form could itself

be reason enough to read a previously obscure Brazilian author, and
it’s tempting to draw a line from Bras Cubas to later, beloved heroes of
the Latin American Boom. For instance, there is the first-line
announcement of the premeditated death of Santiago Nasar in García
Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, or Quincas Berro D’Água’s
sudden posthumous conversations and reanimation in Jorge Amado’s
The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray. Amado, also from Brazil,
certainly had Machado in mind while writing Double Death, a novel

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that begins with its hero dying a smiling death, and is demonstrative
of the sort of gallows humor endemic to Brazilian culture.

Amado, also from Brazil, certainly had Machado in

mind while writing Double Death, a novel that begins
with its hero dying a smiling death, and is
demonstrative of the sort of gallows humor endemic
to Brazilian culture.

Machado, however, has Cubas do more than laugh at death. While

Cubas is away at college in Portugal, he receives word that his mother
is dying back home in Brazil, and when he arrives he is just in time to
see her pass:

“The next morning, the imminence of death was inescapable. Long was
her agony, long and cruel, with a minute, cold, repetitious cruelty that
filled me with pain and stupefaction. It was the first time that I had seen
anyone die.”

For all the humor and strangeness, Machado is able to couple it with
the heartfelt woe and tragedy that comes with life in hindsight, and in
that, Cubas’ lifetime feels fluid and circuitous and terribly fleeting.
Near the end of his life, and the start of the memoir, Cubas has a fever
dream where he meets a Mother Earth-like god named Pandora, who
tells him, “‘I know; for I am not only life, I am also death, and you are
soon to give me back what I loaned you.’” It’s a comfort, breaking
death into an ebb and flow with life, and it’s something you can see
frequently in García Márquez’s work as well. In addition to Chronicle,
the opening of One Hundred Years of Solitude is a soldier remembering
his childhood while facing a firing squad, and Love in the Time of
Cholera’s first scene is a doctor discovering a suicide.

By having Cubas narrate from beyond the grave, Machado gives him a
definite authority and irreproachable nature that mortal narrators
lack:

“I do not deny that [public opinion] sometimes glances this way and
examines and judges us, but we dead folk are not concerned about its
judgment. You who still live, believe me, there is nothing in the world so
monstrously vast as our indifference.”

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While nominally a silly and jocularly styled story, the playfulness is

couched in pathos and vision of a life and family in Brazil, what
Cubas at one point describes as the “voluptuousness of misery.” By the
simple nature of its framing, sorrow and regret are baked into the
beautiful moments of a posthumous story, such as Cubas’ affair with
his love, Virgilia:

Some plants bud and sprout quickly, other are slow and never reach full
development. Our love was of the former type; it sprouted with such
impetus and so much sap that in a short time it was the largest, the
leafiest, and the most exuberant creature of the woods.

Any sort of love or triumph or beauty that occurs in Cubas’ life is

terribly tinted by the foreboding truth of those first couple pages,
Cubas’ coming demise.

Reading Epitaph of a Small Winter, there’s a tantalizing temptation to

raise it up as some sort of anthropological “Lucy” for the explosion of
beautiful and unique writing that came about in Latin America in the
twentieth century, but it’s likely a false temptation. Machado wrote in
Portuguese, and, in a frustrating revelation, his great work wasn’t
translated into Spanish until the 1950s, eighty years after it was
written, likely too late to have the sort of monumental impact and
influence it largely deserves on the Spanish-dominated continent
where Machado lived. While the delay of Machado’s arrival in Spanish
is anomalous, it is, more importantly, isolating for a brilliant novel
that is still lost in the borders of its own culture. Can a book still be
beautiful and inventive if it stands alone?

While the delay of Machado’s arrival in Spanish is

anomalous, it is, more importantly, isolating for a
brilliant novel that is still lost in the borders of its own
culture. Can a book still be beautiful and inventive if it
stands alone?

By design, Cubas’ narrative is circular — at the close you are tempted

to return to the beginning to see how it ends for Cubas, only to be
drawn in again, an endless odyssey on the different ways to meet
death. The spiraling nature of the story is itself Machado’s attempt to
conquer our very mortality, a human interest and story so old it goes

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all the way back to Gilgamesh. While Gilgamesh sought a secret

flower to bring back Enkidu, Machado’s manner of disarming death is
much simpler: a quick laugh, a smile.

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