The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (33 page)

The initial reference to the complex figure of Hamlet is a case in point. Through the insertion of an untranslated quote from English literature the reader is forced to fathom the text through the mediation of Shakespeare.

In the play the character’s anxious relationship to death is related to the implacability of the unknown. There is no return possible for he who voyages to the “undiscovered country.” In the text under discussion, Brás Cubas plays a different hand. He has already passed over the threshold. He is speaking to us from beyond the grave and is flush with the certainties this state bestows upon him. On the other hand he has neither the pathos nor the princely demeanor of Hamlet. Nor is he young. Rather he is an old rue sated by life and at this point rather indifferent to it.

The differences notwithstanding, it’s important to note how the theatrical mode seeps into the text. For instance, through the word
spectacle
, signifying both representation and theatrical show. Then the narrator abandons himself to a delirium in which all of humanity’s trials and tribulations are reduced to an amusing if rather monotonous and repetitive entertainment.

The term
spectacle
is apt not only because the theatre is one of the obsessions of our deceased author, but because he is acutely attuned to the levels of dissimulation necessary to thrive in the bourgeois and aristocratic salons of Imperial Brazil.

Thus the novel allows for constant theatrical references: Estela Sezefreda, Candiani,
Prometheus Unbound, Norma, Othello, El Cid
. Tartuffe and Figaro also make appearances, characters who skillfully use subterfuge to gain financial advantage.

Let us turn now to the influence exerted by the French. Not only the primacy of its literature, but the vitality of its political and cultural life left an indelible imprint on Brazilian culture. France’s artistic renown and intellectual preeminence were firmly established by the seventeenth century. With the death of Louis XIV, Paris—a burgeoning metropolis with cafes, theatres, and salons where literary reputations could be made or broken—usurped the role the court had once played as cultural arbiter and exerted enormous influence over all European elites. For a picture of France’s artistic scope one need only consider the century’s literary giants—Corneille, Racine, Boileau, Molière, Bossuet, and La Fontaine (and, later, the Académie Française). The French Revolution fanned the flames of this influence even as it caused a shift in political allegiances. And the ideas forged and tempered in France found a responsive echo in the clamor of liberty spreading throughout the Americas.

Already in the eighteenth century Brazil was turning away from Portugal, the European country to which it had the clearest ties. Eschewing that cultural and political environment with its waning vitality, Brazil sought its models in a more progressive Europe, assimilating its ideas, debates, and issues. This cross-pollination occurred via Brazilian students educated abroad and through the mediation of Portuguese elites themselves sent to Brazil as colonial administrators or who accompanied the royal family when it hurriedly moved to Brazil in 1808. In addition, a significant number of French nationals took up residence in Brazil after the fall of Napoleon. As booksellers and entrepreneurs they became the intermediaries between the two cultures.

The principal players were Victor Hugo, Musset, Lamartine, the Dumas brothers, Zola, and the philosophers Victor Cousin and Auguste
Comte. Paris remained an object of fascination for the Brazilian upper crust. At that time the royal family had many ties with France: Princess Isabel, heir to the throne, was married to the Count D’Eu. The emperor Pedro II exchanged letters with French intellectuals including Gobineau, the exambassador to Brazil, and Victor Hugo himself whom the emperor visited in Paris. Furthermore, since Brazil had never had a colonial relationship with France, there was no vestigial rancor to contend with or unresolved sovereignty issues. A gauge of France’s influence on South American cultural and political life in the mid-1800s is expressed by the poet Junqueira Freire:

As we have seen, the narrator’s domain has been shaped by French elements. In the same way that Brás Cubas has preserved for posterity realities which are typically local—the sweets of the Mothers of Charity, the festivals of independence—he characterizes for us, both as witness and active agent, the elements of Brazil’s cultural miscegenation. Let’s examine some of the traces this France left in Brazil, without losing sight of the fact that the new fictional parameters demanded that foreign influences be incorporated in original ways.

A French quote will offer a window onto the amorous world of Brás Cubas, a world in which tragic emotions have no place. The recurrent underplaying of the theme of love confirms only the cold, static realization that it is impossible to give oneself fully to feeling.

In
Chapter VI
a vision of Virgília, Brás Cubas’ great love, appears to him when he is at death’s door. The title of the chapter, a French quote from Corneille’s
Le Cid (Chimène, qui l’eût dit? Rodrigue, qui l’eût cru?)
is inverted to read
“Rodrigue, qui l’eût cru? Chimène, qui l’eût dit?”

The significance of the inversion is not readily apparent. After all we’re at the beginning of the book and not yet privy to the full details of this passion. What we know is that there is a woman at the funeral who appears to be mourning more intensely than Brás Cubas’ own relatives. In the French play Chimène’s father strikes Rodrigue’s old father, who,
unable to parry the attack from the younger man, asks his son for revenge. The son does his father’s bidding despite his love for Chimène, obligating her in turn to revenge her own father’s death despite her enduring passion for the young man. The quoted verses constitute one of the high points of the play: it is at this juncture with the alexandrine that love and fate are synthesized.

The deceptively vague inverted reference to Corneille is in truth an alteration that has profound bearing on the text. The die have been recast: there are significant shifts in meaning and tone between Corneille’s play and Brás Cubas’ memoir. Let us see why:

From a pair of Western tradition’s most passionate lovers is fashioned this pragmatic duo: Brás Cubas and Virgília. Average through and through, bourgeois, sated, and weary. Corneille has been appropriated and subverted and as parody becomes part of a Brazilian text of the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Literary culture helps to shape Virgília as well. Metaphors straight out of French, literature define her character. In the beginning the narrator hedges:

Still without a name, Virgília is soon beholden to French letters, for in his capacity as one beyond the pale of the living, the narrator allows himself a flight of fancy which invokes Chateaubriand:

The reader has no choice but to follow the narrator’s circuitous paths with skepticism; at every turn allusions abound as to his aesthetic preoccupations. In
Chapter V
, for instance, the metaphor distilled straight from Chateaubriand again illuminates the character of Virgília.

In addition to the sympathetic rendering of Virgília’s beauty and her grief over the death of Brás Cubas, it should also be noted that there are constant references to the passage of time. Essentially time is the leit-motif of the work, from the disenchanted perspective of a narrator, who, from “the other side of the mystery” chronicles the ineluctable deterioration of people, monuments, and institutions. Thus the first mention of Virgília’s beauty is nullified by the comment Brás Cubas makes about her apparent decrepitude: “She was fifty-four then, she was a ruin, a splendid ruin …” (
Ch. V
).

Chateaubriand’s test (found in the Grecian voyage section in
Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem)
also refers to the disenchanted contemplation of ruins. After having visited, the Athenian temples, testimony to humanity’s past, the French writer entwines observations on culture, transitory and mutable, and nature, permanent and immutable, represented by the eternally youthful storks. The French text prepares the
way for a return to the past, a search for youth. Virgília is imagined young, as Brás Cubas remembers her. Yet her youthful beauty is invoked precisely to underscore the “splendid ruin” she, as well as Brás Cubas, has become.

In the context of Chateaubriand’s protagonists/ruins, the opening quote from Corneille gains in meaning. It serves simultaneously to minimize and discount conflict and to emphasize—through textural differences such as Brás Cubas’ inversion of the quotes—the profound change wrought by the passage of time.

From his privileged position—both materially speaking and literally from beyond the grave—Brás Cubas ironically relates the struggle of a number of characters vying for inheritances, donations, and handouts. This occurs with Sabina, Quincas Borba, Dona Plácida, Dona Eusébia, and even the orator at the cemetery. Additionally, there is Virgília’s desire to inherit from Viegas, and the fact that the narrator’s own family “begins” with the fortune inherited by Luís Cubas.

Brás Cubas’ father wanted to “inherit” from the founder of the city of Santos the prestige associated with the name of the town. Thus the theme of what is handed down from one to another is played out again and again.

But the act of writing involves first and foremost memory, not only of existence itself, but of books and authors. To remember one’s lifetime is also to remember what one has read—the legacy of literature—goods that represent a major part of social commerce. There are essentially two types of transmission represented in
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas:
texts and material goods. This is what makes up the poetics of the legacy, the integration of the socioeconomic sphere (which affords the characters sufficient leisure to cultivate the arts) and the cultural legacy that devolves from this leisure and which borrows liberally from foreign sources. In this manner plot and bill of lading are integrated into a harmonious whole.

Memory transforms and creates unconscious links as does the narrative. Through the alteration, inversion, and symbolic redeployment of foreign texts, the narrator constantly mediates between the raw material of existence and his writing. Filtered through the utterances of the “other,” the legacy and its several modes of remembering is a highly indirect and circuitous route toward the narrative. Plot may be dislocated,
but everything is eventually redeemed by the act of writing, the moment when memory transforms itself into text.

The legacy is one of the narrative tricks to distance the reader from the text. Throughout the book we are observed by a narrator who sends us veiled messages by way of this or that quote. The last trick comes at the end: “I haven’t transmitted the legacy of our misery to any living creature.” In reality, however, the legacy expands beyond its mimetic limits to become a tribute paid to posterity: a novel.