The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas Read Free

represent life through a convincing plot and a smooth and captivating narrative into which the reader is passively drawn and pulled along. In presenting to the reader the supposedly real-life actions and feelings of the characters, the author pretends to be absent from the text. Brás Cubas disrupts these realistic conventions with his frequent observations about his book and its style. In Chapter LXXI , for example, he makes a startling accusation: “the main defect of this book is you, reader.” As if to explain his shocking statement, he adds: “You’re in a hurry to grow old and the book moves slowly. You love direct and continuous narration … and this book and my style are like drunkards, they stagger left and right, they walk and stop, mumble, yell, cackle, shake their fists at the sky, stumble and fall …” Displaying once more his self-conscious and self-deprecating sense of humor, Brás Cubas is clearly warning the readers—mostly those who are used to action-packed, fast-paced plots presented in straightforward narrative—that his book is indeed very different from a traditional nineteenth-century novel. His book is intended for readers who prefer “reflection” to “anecdotes,” despite Brás Cubas’ ironic comment to the contrary in Chapter IV . In this sense, these posthumous memoirs are a remarkably modern book.
    Other important conventions are also challenged in these memoirs. Critical readers will not miss the way in which, from the first chapter on, Brás Cubas ironically unveils the artificiality of the “pathetic fallacy”—the attribution of human feelings to inanimate nature—one of the basic artistic conventions of nineteenth-century romanticism still alive today in our culture. Describing his funeral, Brás Cubas tells us about theweather:
it
was raining—drizzling—and this fact of nature led one of his “last-minute faithful friends” to insert an “ingenious idea” into his eulogy, something like “nature appears to be weeping over the irreparable loss of one of the finest characters humanity has been honored with.” To this flourish Brás Cubas adds, in the next paragraph: “Good and faithful friend! No, I don’t regret the twenty bonds I left you.”
    This acerbic unmasking of the petty side of human motivations hiding behind a romantic convention does not mean, however, that these memoirs follow the other dominant schools of art in the nineteenth century, realism and naturalism. Throughout his book, Brás Cubas parodies and ridicules realistic and naturalistic narrative methods, as for example in Chapter IX , “Transition,” where he starts by addressing the reader: “And now watch the skill, the art with which I make the greatest transition in this book. Watch.” After a few lines of logical ratiocination, he speaks directly to the reader again: “See? Seamlessly, nothing to divert the reader’s calm attention, nothing. So the book goes on like this with all of method’s advantage but without method’s rigidity.” By poking fun at the artistic strategies and conventions of his and even in some cases of our own times, by revealing the mechanisms used by writers in the construction of their plots and narratives, Brás Cubas’voice is eminently satirical.
    The reader may have already identified this detached and irreverent narrator as a satirist, but may still find it hard to pinpoint the kind of satire Brás Cubas is practicing. The two main satirical postures in our culture are well known and well established since the Romans: either the satirist is gentle and optimistic, telling the truth with a smile, like Horace, or he is austere and pessimistic, denouncing our human foibles with stern indignation, like Juvenal. Brás Cubas is neither. His self-conscious stance is always ambiguous and bittersweet, frequently parodic and self-deprecating, more akin to Woody Allen’s sense of humor than to the traditional satirical personae usually associated with the two