‘The eulogy of selfishness’: the rediscovery of The Posthumous Memoir of Brás Cubas in social media

Brasil de Fato

This week, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas went viral on social media thanks to Courtney Henning Novak. An American Tiktoker, writer and podcaster, Courtney declared on TikTok: “Why didn’t you warn me this is the best book that’s ever been written?”

Taking part in the #ReadAroundTheWorld project, which proposes reading a book from each country in alphabetical order, Novak chose Machado de Assis’ work to represent Brazil, reigniting interest in this classic and attracting new readers.

Courtney’s video went beyond the limits of social media and was featured in the main Brazilian media outlets. In addition, the English edition of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas tops the bestseller list in the “Latin American and Caribbean Literature” category on Amazon in the United States, beating out works by other renowned authors from the region.

If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas adapts perfectly to current times due to its irony and sarcasm, resonating well with the kind of humor seen on digital platforms.

If, on the one hand, the book’s fragmented structure, with short, independent chapters, fits in perfectly with the fast and dispersed consumption format common on social media, on the other hand, the universal and timeless subjects, such as the futility of life and social hypocrisy, continue to be relevant and boost debate and reflection among users, increasing online engagement.

International acclaim and literary influence

From time to time, since the 1950s (a little earlier, in fact), Machado de Assis has been rediscovered in the US and received almost reverential attention from big names in English-language literature and criticism, such as Maya Angelou. In a 1988 interview, she confessed she decided to become a writer after reading Machado, Langston Hughes – “the doyen of African-American poets” – Susan Sontag, Harold Bloom, Philip Roth and the British Salman Rushdie. The latter, in his recently released book Knife – a dramatic account of the attack he suffered on August 12, 2022, which almost cost him his life – says with a mixture of melancholy and relief: “In Machado de Assis’ excellent Brazilian novel, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, the hero of the title confides that he is telling his story from beyond the grave. He doesn’t explain how, and I haven’t learned that trick yet.”

Brás Cubas, being a dead author, tells his story from an arbitrary and super-realistic point of view, with a tone of irony and sarcasm. “I’ll avoid telling you about the extraordinary process I used to compose these ‘Memoirs’, worked out here in the other world. It would be curious, but it would be far too long, and unnecessary to understand this work,” says Brás Cubas in the ‘Prologue to the Reader’, which opens the novel.

As writer Augusto Meyer observed in a famous 1958 article entitled From Machadinho to Brás Cubas, Machado de Assis managed to create a work worthy of his genius by facing his demons and leaving his comfort zone.

Machado de Assis’ literary revolution

In 1878, Machado de Assis began a new and revolutionary phenomenon in his literary work. Fiction ceased to be an objective and finished thing, becoming an organic, unstable and risky matter, inscribed in the author’s own temporality. This challenge to literary conventions began with The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, the first major Brazilian novel, a true sphinx of 160 chapters, which was published as a book on January 11, 1881, a Tuesday.

Before that, the novel was published as a pamphlet in Revista Brasileira, between March and December 1880. There were several changes when comparing the text published in Revista Brasileira and the one published in the book. The total number of chapters, for instance, was reduced from 163 to 160 due to the suppression of a chapter and the fusion of two other chapters.

The pamphlet’s original epigraph, taken from Shakespeare’s play As You Like It and translated by Machado (“I will chide no breather in the world but myself, against whom I know most faults”), was replaced in the book by the famous dedication “To the worm that first gnawed at the cold flesh of my cadaver I dedicate as a fond remembrance these posthumous memoirs” [as translated into English by Flora T. DeVeaux].

The publication of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas coincided with the most tormented phase of Machado’s life. The literary critic Nestor Vitor, who, looking for an explanation for the drastic change in the writing of The Posthumous Memoirs, compared it to the writer’s previous books and asked him the reason for the change, Machado replied: “I don’t know, but perhaps it came from the fact that Brás Cubas, for the most part, was not written, but dictated to my wife. It was dictated because I was almost blind. I was suffering from an eye disease, which only went away after a lot of work.” This exceptional situation may explain the pessimism and morbid tone of the novel, written with “the pen of mirth and the ink of melancholy” [as translated into English by Flora T. DeVeaux].

Criticism and contemporary reflections

Machado de Assis is one of those rare writers about whom, even when everything seems to have been written, new and curious revelations suddenly emerge. In essence, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is the book of a moralist, and therein lies another line of the work’s uniqueness.

The narrator is not satisfied with reporting the episodes, he underlines them with his caustic comments. The “ironist” insinuates himself into the moralist’s pen. In one of the few reviews published at the time of its release, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas was described as a book of “worldly philosophy disguised as a novel.” According to Urbano Duarte, the reviewer, the book lacked a solid plot to be considered a traditional novel and could, without much impropriety, be titled “The Eulogy of Selfishness.”

Among the sayings that Machado de Assis defined as “yawns of boredom” and which he offered to readers to serve as “epigraphs to speeches without a subject,” in chapter 119, there is one about the colic of others: “The pains of others are borne with patience,” in a rough translation. Machado took it from the collection of another writer, François de La Rochefoucauld, with a slight distortion. La Rochefoucauld wrote: “Nous avons tous assez de force pour supporter les maux d’autri,” in free translation, “We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of others.”

Initial reception and posterity of the “Memoirs”

When the book first appeared, it’s no exaggeration to say that the novel went almost unnoticed. Aluísio Azevedo’s O Mulato [Mulatto, as translated by Jeffrey Cook], which ushered in Naturalism in Brazil, which had been long awaited and desired, appeared with much wider repercussions in the same year as the volume edition of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas.

However, there was no denying the value of Machado’s book. Professor Galante de Sousa recorded in his book Fontes para o estudo de Machado de Assis [Sources for the study of Machado de Assis, in a rough translation] that, in the year it appeared as a book, The Posthumous Memoirs received only three reviews in the press (or little more than that). Mulatto, on the other hand, appeared in “more than a hundred articles”, as the author himself, Aluísio Azevedo, explained in the preface to the second edition of his novel.

To a large extent, this difficulty was due to the uncertainty of classifying the work as a novel, as evidenced by Capistrano de Abreu’s doubt: “Is The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas a novel?” – a question that Machado himself reproduces in the prologue to the third edition and answers by not answering: “a novel for some and not for others.”

The legitimate doubt arises when Capistrano comes across the unusual narrative devices used by Machado throughout the work, such as the incorporation of small narratives, or anecdotes, which could even have a “life of their own,” but which the author inserts in the intermissions of the narrative.

The critic and journalist Modesto Abreu pointed out that, by adopting “the free form of a Sterne or a Xavier de Maistre”, putting in “a few grumbles of pessimism” in someone who had decided to write “with the pen of mirth and the ink of melancholy” and contenting himself – more modest than Stendhal – with having “ten or perhaps five readers,” Brás Cubas made, by the hand of Machado de Assis, one of the most improbable, provocative and fascinating works in Brazilian literature.

Brás Cubas’ lasting influence

The man who later wrote Quincas Borba [Translated into English by Clotilde Wilson as Philosopher or Dog?], Dom Casmurro, Esau and Jacob and Counselor Ayres’ Memorial would never be able to free himself from the bitter double and “desabusado” specter who had written him The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. He would always lean over the writer’s shoulder to blow into his ear a sentence, excerpt or entire chapter, in which one immediately recognizes skepticism, melancholy and mirth. Brás Cubas is an ideal “mask-character” to raise the question of the relationship between autobiography and fiction.

In The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, Machado shocks his usual audience by abandoning chronology, linear narrative, and devaluing the plot. Continuity is now centered on the narrator’s identity, who serves as an element of unification to the episodes and characters, using various narrative devices, such as direct references to the reader, critical observations on the text, confrontation of chapters or motifs through constant allusions and alternation of verb tenses.

More than 140 years after its release, the book written by a “dead author” continues to attract critics and new readers, both Brazilian and foreign. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas warns against the innocuous, the fleeting and the evasive, and is considered the first truly modern novel in Brazilian literature. The Brás Cubas’ ironic smile, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat, keeps haunting us even so many years later.

* Claudio Soares is an editor, writer and journalist. He is currently writing a biography of Machado de Assis.

** This is an opinion piece and does not necessarily express the editorial line of Brasil de Fato.