The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Malevolent Grace

Like Moses recounting his own death in the Torah, this memoir is a miracle from beyond the grave. The miracle is only incidentally theological, however, and much more importantly literary. Written by a self-educated descendant of African slaves brought to Brazil, the last country in the Americas to abandon slavery, the book’s wit and style are timeless yet unique.

Brás Cubas is a sardonic sceptic whom it is impossible to dislike. His honesty about himself and his insights about the world around him are witty, comical, and tragic in equal measure. Every institution - the church, civil administration, the military, education, even the family - is corrupt. They persist because of the delusions produced by the one disaster that Pandora did not release from her hand bag - hope.

The book is self-referential in the tradition of Cervantes and Velásquez. It is as ruthlessly doubtful of itself as Montaigne’s Essais; it is often as epigrammatic as Pascale’s Pensées; and as mystically profound as Meister Eckhart. Machado references everybody who’s anybody in the Western literary world from Aristophanes to Shakespeare, and alludes to dozens more. Fortunately Flora Thomson-Deveaux’s translation provides usefully succinct and entertaining notes on everything from currency conversion to contemporary world events to the sources of Machado’s quotes, intentional misquotes and creatively interpretive quotes.

As Thomson-Deveaux says in her Introduction, the book has a “malevolent grace and depth.” It’s humour is continuous but absurd. Machado plays with the reader while entertaining her. But as he says in his own Prologue, he did not write it for the reader but for himself. “[T]he esteem of the serious and the love of the frivolous, which are the two chief pillars of public opinion,” were of no apparent concern to him. He could offend everyone by laughing at them laughing at him.

A good cause for laughter is precisely how seriously we take the words we use and turn them into ideals toward which to strive. This includes the words Machado himself uses. For Machado the term ‘fixed idea’ is meant to designate our obsession with the symbolic at the cost of living. Brás Cubas dies precisely because he could not shake his obsession with his “pharmaceutical invention,… an anti-hypochondriacal plaster destined to alleviate our melancholy humanity.” But this is only the final stage of a life filled with such compulsive idealism.

What Brás Cubas sought in life was not a better world but a better position in it. He wanted power. As he says, “what drove me most of all was the gratification it would give me to see in newsprint, showcases, pamphlets, on street corners, and finally on the medicine boxes, those four words: The Brás Cubas Plaster.” Isn’t this the universal trap of humanity, power-seeking disguised as humanitarian idealism? We can rationalise any atrocity in the name of social improvement.

In his delirium while dying, Brás Cubas has an important vision of Nature herself who is providing some perspective on the significance of his life. Asking why she wants to kill him since she created him, Nature responds without hesitation, “Because I have no more need of you.” Nature also reminds him of her role in his life: “[F]or I am not only life, I am also death, and you are about to return what I have lent you. For you, great hedonist, there await all the sensual pleasures of nothingness.”

In his vision, Brás Cubas gets to understand why we delude ourselves that it could be otherwise. It is precisely that our idealistic verbiage has got us by the throat because in some mythical pre-history “[Reason] grabbed Folly by the wrists and dragged her outside; then she went in and locked the door. Folly whined a few pleas, snarled a few curses; but she soon resigned herself, stuck out her tongue, and went on her way . . .” This was the original sin passed down since. From its position of complete freedom, Folly formulates the ideals which seem to arrive from nowhere, and thence wreak havoc with our lives and the lives of those around us. Malevolent grace indeed.

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