Should we care about literary movements? The outstanding case of Machado de Assis, Modernist before Modernism

 

In 1881, a Brazilian writer named Machado de Assis published in book form what had been serialized in a Brazilian newspaper: The posthumous memoirs of Bras Cubas (originally published in Portuguese as Memorias posthumas de Braz Cubas). It was published in French in 1911 (the first translation of that novel), and only reached the English-reading world in 1953 (even today, the English-reading world is notoriously reluctant to publish translation of foreign works).

In English it first appeared in an American translation under the name ‘Epitaph of a small winner’, a terrible title in many ways and a great one in others, but it seems that this first English translation was not up to scratch and so a new one appeared in 1997, and then two more in 2020, all under the new title ‘The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas’. Translating it was obviously difficult since so far there have been three different French translations, two Germans etc. – but the title The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas now seems to have become the accepted English title (in French: Mémoires posthumes de Bras Cubas…).

And this novel is simply stunning. Completely original, inventive, light in tone but deep in ideas, superficial-looking on the outside but rich and masterful on the inside. And what is even more surprising perhaps, that novel is not only modern, it could be said to be an example of Modernism.

In his seminal and definitive guide to Modernism, the writer and critic Malcom Bradbury (author of the still very readable novel The History Man) framed that movement temporally and geographically in his very title: ‘Modernism: a guide to European Literature, 1890-1930’. Bradbury and his collaborators proceeded to cover a lot of ground, from a geographical perspective (as in Berlin, London, Paris or Prague), a movement-based one, a thematic one, and of course a genre-based one (i.e. the novel, theatre, poetry). And that leads us to ask a simple question: what of Modernism outside of Europe? And more specifically, outside of the Western world? After all, we all know Ezra Pound, Eliot (America-born), Williams or Marianne Moore, we know of Sylvia Beach, her Shakespeare bookshop and Joyce, and obviously we’ve heard of (and hopefully read) anything from Virginia Woolfe to Gadda to André Gide and Paul Valery. But what of other places? And what of before?

Of course, there’s little value in categorizing novels that way: who cares whether Bras Cubas is a Modernist novel avant la lettre or not if it’s a good novel (and it’s a fantastic one)? In fact, de Assis’ novel was sometimes referred to as a Realist novel, surely the polar opposite of Modernism? So why bother?

There are two reasons (for me): first, borrowing from Borges, is the fact that Literature is a continuum, and it happily ignores borders and time-periods, unlike schools and readers. Second, to borrow from Gombrich, ‘The whole story of art is not a story of progress in technical proficiency, but a story of changing ideas and requirements’. We may slightly disagree here in the sense that technical proficiency can progress as well (the invention of perspective, say), but we understand that it’s not that progress which matters but the reasons for it: changing ideas and requirements. And Bras Cubas illustrates that wonderfully: it can easily be seen as a pre-Modernist novel in that its originality of form is a reflection of a changing world then too, and of changing artistic desires, ideas and requirements.

Perhaps it’s time to say a few things about this Posthumous Memoirs then.

First of all, as the title suggests, this is a novel written from beyond the grave in the first-person narrative: Bras Cubas, the narrator, is well and truly dead, but no it’s not a mystery story or a detective novel where the only interest lies in finding out whodunnit. But being dead, he has time enough to tell us about his life, and in a way it really is about who and what: who he was, what he did, why.

Presented that way, it sounds like many other novels, the dead bit aside. But the posthumous part is by far the least original aspect of this novel, although it does have a narrative role – dissociation from the present of course, no fear of retribution or shame (even though he’d like to be remembered in a positive way, and some passages are clear attempts at winning our sympathy), total and, for once, justifiable recall, and above all probably, it gives the narrator total freedom to organize his memoirs the way he wants.

And how does he want it? Well, in 160 chapters for one, most of which (the novel is not very long) are very short, and sometimes extremely so: a page, perhaps two, sometimes even shorter. 160 chapters arranged semi-chronologically, as Bras Cubas really goes back and forth in time as well, with notable flashbacks – he is dead, after all, and so every evocation of his life must be a flashback…He tells us about himself, about some of his life, some of his thoughts, he’s not shy about what he’s done, or what he’s not done, he’s happy to interrupt his narrative to talk about his breakfast as much as to philosophise and let us know how he thinks the world works.

This kind of inventive structure, of deconstruction (a-chronologically, I do not mean to refer to the literary theorists of the 20^th century), especially considering the tradition until then, is a first sign of what we really should call Modernism – Bradbury, after all, was at pains to point that Modernism meant narrative innovation(s). But it is not the only one, nor is it the most important for us. What really stands out is Bras Cubas’ voice, and his high degree of unreliability as narrator.

His voice is pitch-perfect in that it achieves precisely the effect looked for: light, at times ironic, conversational, never precious or pretentious, down-to-earth at times and above all humble. Or rather, it wants to be seen as humble, it wants to be heard, listened to, believed, and yes, why not say it, it feels like he wants to be liked. He’s not begging for it, and he hardly makes any effort to ingratiate himself with his readers, but he sometimes explains or justifies or rationalizes in such a way that it does feel he wants something from us: understanding, as well as (probably) not pity as such but sympathy at least.

And that is where Machado de Assis comes into his own as magnificent writer of a now-classic novel of indubitably modernist tendencies: while that voice is aware of us and our existence, while that voice is aware of its readers, their judgements and their possible opinions, it is supremely unaware of itself, or at the very least, it is unaware of how it comes across to us – how we read his personality, how we make sense of him as a man, and how we understand what he does. What that means is that we have this double movement: a narrator aware of us and trying to sell us something (the life of a decent man, all told), but telling it in such a way that at every turn the reader is forced to ask: really? This is what you think of yourself? And you give us that example to try and get us to like you? Can you not see it’s doing the opposite?

What happens then is that we begin to understand the real Bras Cubas, the one behind the narrative mask as it were, and when he pleads with us, or when he wink-wink-nudge-nudges us, he gives us the exact opposite impression from the one he’s keen to make. A glorious example of this is chapter 21, called The Muleteer, 680 words of brilliance where Bras tells us about how magnanimous he’s been with a simple muleteer who helped him as he was about to fall off his donkey (itself a telling image of course). But the recounting has two levels: the narrator’s, and ours. On the first, Bras presents himself as generous, forgiving and good (as in, a good man). On the second, our level, we see how much of a miser he is, how high-minded and ultimately prejudiced – how very much a small man he actually is. This double level of reading requires us to pay attention to the text, to read the sub-text, to read between the lines, and to think about what we’re reading – to think about what Bras is saying, how, and what it may all actually mean. He’s unreliable, we can’t take him at his words…but he's not trying to deceive us: he’s deceiving himself.

The ‘Unreliable narrator’ is a school (or Higher education) staple, forced-fed to generations of students as a device to, variously, suggest nothing can be truly known, you can’t trust people, any single point-of-view is skewed and likely to be false, or half-true, a misrepresentation rather than a picture of the truth. Well, perhaps it is all that and more, but it’s certainly more important to ask oneself: what makes that narrator unreliable? After all, there are different reasons why someone might be an unreliable narrator: through forgetfulness, through intent, through a desire to lie, through ignorance, through loss of memory, through their own lack of perceptiveness (as here) or lack of self-awareness, through personality (Ishiguro’s butler in The Remains of the Day), through their training (as in Star Turn by Nigel Williams) or even through narrative ingenuity (Times’s Arrow, by Martin Amis).

Here, Bras Cubas is unreliable because he is completely unaware of how others see him: his self-image, repeatedly presented as humble, is not at all aligned with the perceptions others have of him. He has no self-awareness at all: he constantly mis-reads reactions to his words or actions, he constantly misjudges other people and different situations, and crucially, WE see it all. That’s where de Assis’ genius really lies: we read against the text, as critics would say, except really we read against the narrator: we see through him, and we realise, chapter by chapter, anecdote by anecdote, how small a man he actually is. Bras Cubas has a good image of himself, and feels he interacts well with his surroundings: we know better, and see him for what and who he is.

The beauty of it all also lies in the fact that de Assis never intervenes in the narrative, and as everything is written by Bras Cubas, it is very much a question of showing and not telling. More: it makes demands on the reader, it rewards careful reading; it requires the reader to pay attention and dissociate the claims made from the way they are received. This double level of narrative is technically very assured, and works extremely well. It also reminds us that technical abilities – craftsmanship – is probably the most under-valued characteristic of great writers.

Modernism is hailed as an important moment in literature in that many technical innovations were introduced which have become common-place – Maddox Ford’s The good soldier, the last chapter of Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, Moore’s poetry, Stein’s prose, not to mention the text’s awareness of itself and its status, a propensity towards psychology or a dislike for Romanticism (and a tendency to think of right and wrong). Modernism is a European thing first, with some Americans jogging along (and Modernism is more wide-ranging than just Literature of course). But in terms of technique and themes and more crucially perhaps, in terms of conceptual approach to the novel, Machado de Assis is right in the thick of what Modernism is only beginning to build.

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas is a masterpiece of Literature in its own right, but it is also a reminder of what Jorge Luis Borges called ‘the continuum of Literature’: we like to categorise and label and neatly delineate, but the reality is that a Brazilian writer steeped in a very different world (there will still slavery then, and the country belonged to Portugal) also had a vision of what a novel could be, and what you could do with it. You could play with its structure, play with the voice, infuse the dialogue with plenty of opposing meanings, show reality through deception, show deception through gestures and looks, and you could also establish a new relationship with the reader who would not be subservient to your narrative choices and story-telling.

A Modernist before Modernism; an innovator, a brilliant technician with a subtle touch, with plenty of irony and understated humour and a lot to say: in all his books Machado de Assis proved himself a Master, and Bras Cubas has got to be his ultimate triumph.

Read it now.