Posthumous Memories of Brás Cubas is one of the most important works of Machado de Assis. Published in 1881, is considered a landmark in Brazilian literature, as it inaugurated the artistic movement of realism in Brazil.
It is a autobiography of Brás Cubas, narrator-character, who tells us, in 1st person, the story of his life from his memories – posthumous, as it is after death that he remember what you lived. The fact that he is already deceased also contributes for the character to narrate the facts without fear of reprisals or judgments, making use of a biting irony.
As usual in novels and Tales of Machado de Assis, the plot is banal and everyday, but it is from these apparently irrelevant events that the author works, making use of debauchery, universal themes relevant to Brazilian society.
Historical context
Brás Cubas was born in 1805 and died in 1869, the year he wrote, therefore, his memoirs. With the arrival of the royal family
, in 1808, Rio de Janeiro became the official court, urbanizing itself. Nineteenth-century Brazil was agrarian, patriarchal and slavery. THE high society in Rio it was made up of rural landowners who owned slaves – a portion of which Brás Cubas himself was a part. The theme of slavery is addressed in the novel, with special emphasis on the excerpts relating to the narrator's childhood:“Since the age of five I had deserved the nickname 'devil boy'; and truly it was nothing else; I was the most evil of my time, shrewd, indiscreet, mischievous and willful. For example, one day I broke a slave's head because she had denied me a spoonful of the coconut candy I was making, and not happy with the evil, I poured a handful of ash into the pot, and, not satisfied with the mischief, I went to tell my mother that the slave had spoiled the candy “for prank”; and I was only six years old. Prudencio, a boy from home, was my everyday horse; I put my hands on the ground, received a string on my chins, as a bridle, I climbed on his back, with a wand in my hand, lashed him, gave a thousand turns to one and the other side, and he would obey—sometimes moaning—but he would obey without saying a word, or, at the most, a — 'Oh, nhohh!' — to which I retorted: — 'Shut up, beast!'"
(Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas)
The book was published in 1881, a time when the ideals of romanticism, the predominant artistic trend at the beginning of the century, were already in frank decay: the aspirations for freedom and sentimentality were replaced by objectivity and by scientism, that is, the belief in progress from scientific development.
They grew up in Europe to industrialization and the centersurban, dramatically transforming the way citizens lived and interacted with the environment. Art, following the steps of modernization and in the light of science, started to opt for a objective representation of reality. Therefore, realism was born, an analytical school, which privileged, among other aspects, the psychological aspects of human anxieties and that which is least ideal and basest in our species - and this is the case of Posthumous Memories.
Read too: Mario Quintana: the poet of simple things
Characters
- Brás Cubas, protagonist narrator who tells his life story;
- Virgília, Brás Cubas' lover and great passion;
- Lobo Neves, politician and husband of Virgília;
- D. Placida, a lady hired to watch over the house where Brás Cubas was with Virgília;
- Marcela, Brás Cubas' first passion, a woman with many financial interests and also many young men;
- Eugenia, Brás Cubas' second passion;
- Sabina, sister of Brás Cubas;
- Eulália or Nhã-loló, the girl Sabina suggested that her brother marry to get rid of the rumors of his involvement with the adulteress Virgília;
- Quincas Borba, childhood friend of Brás Cubas, who gained prominence in another novel by Machado de Assis, whose title bears his name.
See too: Carlos Drummond de Andrade: a great name in Brazilian poetry
Summary and analysis of the work
The dedication of the The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas: "To the worm that first gnawed the cold flesh of my corpse I dedicate these posthumous memories as a nostalgic remembrance." On the first page of the novel, therefore, the pessimism and the irony that cross the work, structured in 160 microchapters, a stylistic mark of Machado de Assis.
Brás Cubas begins the narrative of his memories with the moment he died, and not with his birth – a first suggestion of the inversion of values that delineates the character. After he is dead, he decides to tell the story of his life, selecting the events he understands to be most relevant.
It is a fragment narrative, digressive and psychological, because Bras Cubas does not follow a fixed linearity when mentioning his life episodes: starts with the description of the funeral, then mentions what the led him to get sick and the delirium he had before expiring, and he then proceeds to narrate episodes of his childhood. The book is structured, therefore, in the order in which the facts come to mind and favors the psychological approach, being lacking in descriptions of landscapes and rich in descriptions of the interiority of the character. Look:
“And look now with what dexterity, with what fine art I make the greatest transition from this book. Look: my delirium began in the presence of Virgília; Virgília was my great sin of youth; there is no youth without childhood; childhood supposes birth; and here is how we effortlessly arrived at the 20th of October, 1805, on which I was born. See? No apparent juncture, nothing to entertain the reader's leisurely attention: nothing. So the book is like that with all the advantages of the method, without the rigidity of the method.”
(The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Machado de Assis)
In the excerpt above, it is possible to notice something that is repeated throughout the entire narrative: the narrator addresses the reader directly, a narrative resource that is a hallmark of Machado's works and that brings the reader closer to what is being narrated, as if it were a conversation.
A rich child, she was spoiled by her parents and relatives – uncle João and uncle Idelfonso (who was a canon). Son of wealthy landowners, was a naughty and mean child: mistreated the slaves and he didn't respect adults. The non-idealized childhood is one of the aspects that point to the realism in Machado's work: far from all purity, Brás Cubas was nicknamed "devil boy" and her evils were covered up by her father.
as a boy, fell in love with Marcela, girl with many boys and many financial interests. “Marcela loved me for fifteen months and eleven contos; nothing less.”, says Brás Cubas. There is a clear difference with romantic texts: love here is not idealized, but it is even accounted for in money. Upon learning of the amount spent, Brás Cubas' father sent him to Coimbra to study law and become a less frivolous man. But mediocrity The spirit of the privileged Bras Cubas remained: he memorized one or another Latin expression and left the university as mediocre as it was before.
Back in Brazil, she met Eugenics, beautiful girl, the single honorable character and solid throughout the novel. Brás Cubas showed interest in her – but the girl was the daughter of a single mother, without a declared father, and poor, which prevented her from having a marriage with someone from Brás' social lineage. He, an adventurer, seduces the girl and she gives him a kiss. But when he discovers that Eugenia has one leg longer than the other, he disappears, considering the idea of marrying a lame girl ridiculous.
It being the dream of Brás Cubas' father to see him in the position of minister, arrange the girl as a suitor Virgil, part of the family of great social prestige, which would boost his career in politics. But Brás Cubas, apathetic and indifferent to the situation, ends up losing his fiancee and his position to Lobo Neves.
The two meet again after some time and become lovers. To squelch the adultery scandals, they find a house and employ D. placid, a lady who had nowhere to live or how to support herself, to help cover up the couple's encounters. She, in turn, considers herself ashamed, but has no choice but to accept this job – once again the theme of exploration is present, as well as the financial dependence that governs all choices and relationships.
The buzz about adultery doesn't stop, so Sabina, sister of Brás, get him the girl Eulalia for the two to marry. This, by chance, falls ill and dies before marriage.
in front of a lonely old age and without any relevant achievement in life, Brás Cubas finds himself surrounded by a “genius idea”: that of create a plaster to fight hypochondria and heal the melancholy of humanity. However, the proposal was not philanthropic – he wanted to see his name printed on all the bottles: “Emplasto Brás Cubas”. It was with this idea that the protagonist contracted a flu that he did not treat correctly and that worsened, leading to pneumonia that killed him. See the final chapter, which ends with the same pessimism of the dedication that opens the book:
“This last chapter is all negative. I didn't achieve the celebrity of the plaster, I wasn't a minister, I wasn't caliph, I didn't know marriage. The truth is that, along with these faults, I had the good fortune of not buying bread with the sweat of my brow. More; I didn't suffer the death of D. Placid, nor Quincas Borba's semi-dementia. Adding some things and others, anyone will imagine that there was no shortage or leftover, and consequently that I came out even with life. And you will imagine badly; because when I got to this other side of the mystery, I found myself with a small balance, which is the ultimate negative from this chapter of denials: — I had no children, I did not transmit to any creature the legacy of our misery."
(The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Machado de Assis)
As he himself says, “it fell to me the good fortune of not buying bread with the sweat of my face”: Brás Cubas is a copy of landlord, someone who has lived and enjoyed all social privileges. It can be seen, by the encyclopedic knowledge in which he weaves the narrative, that he had access to the best that society produced in cultural terms – he attended the best schools and universities, but that did not make him a man of character.
Each of the relationships that Brás Cubas establishes with the characters is based on financial interests and in social conventions – including the passion for Virgília, who would never abandon her husband and his high resources and social position.
Based on Brás Cubas' autobiography, Machado de Assis approaches universal themes of his time, unmasking the hypocrisy, a relativity of morals and social conventions, the philosophical duality of essence and appearance, always portrayed under the penalty of irony It's from sarcastic humor.