By the end of the century, sophisticated scholars were beginning to address the history of their countries, as did João Capistrano de Abreu in his Capítulos de história colonial.

It is often in memoirs such as those by Fray Servando Teresa de Mier or Sarmiento that we find the descriptions of everyday life that in Europe were incorporated into the realist novel. Latin American literature at this time was seen largely as a pedagogical tool, a “light” alternative to speeches, sermons, and philosophical tracts—though, in fact, especially in the early part of the century, even the readership for novels was quite small because of the high rate of illiteracy. Nevertheless, the vigorous orally transmitted culture of the gaucho and the urban underclasses became the linguistic repertoire of some of the most interesting nineteenth-century writers—most notably José Hernández, author of the “gauchesque” poem “Martín Fierro,” which enjoyed an unparalleled popularity. But for many writers the task was not to appropriate popular language but to civilize, and their literary works were strongly influenced by the high style of political oratory.

The editorial committee has not attempted to limit its selection to the better-known writers such as Machado de Assis; it has also selected many works that have never appeared in translation or writers whose work has not been translated recently. The series now makes these works available to the English-speaking public.

Because of the preferences of funding organizations, the series initially focuses on writing from Brazil, the Southern Cone, the Andean region, and Mexico. Each of our editions will have an introduction that places the work in its appropriate context and includes explanatory notes.

We owe special thanks to Robert Glynn of the Lampadia Foundation, whose initiative gave the project a jump start, and to Richard Ekman of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which also generously supported the project. We also thank the Rockefeller Foundation for funding the 1996 symposium “Culture and Nation in Iberoamerica,” organized by the editorial board of the Library of Latin America. We received substantial institutional support and personal encouragement from the Institute of Latin American Studies of the University of Texas at Austin. The support of Edward Barry of Oxford University Press has been crucial, as has the advice and help of Ellen Chodosh of Oxford University Press. The first volumes of the series were published after the untimely death, on July 3, 1997, of Maria C. Bulle, who, as an associate of the Lampadia Foundation, supported the idea from its beginning.

—Jean Franco
—Richard Graham

Preface
WARNING: DEADLY HUMOR AT WORK

 

Dear Reader:

If you have never heard of the nineteenth-century Brazilian writer Machado de Assis, this novel will afford you a triple surprise. You will be surprised by its form, its content, and the author’s strange originality behind these pages.

The form of this novel is certainly unusual. As we are told at the outset, these memoirs are posthumous, albeit not in the usual sense of having been published after the death of their author. These are posthumous memoirs in a very literal sense: Brás Cubas, the memorialist, tells us in his preface “To the Reader” that he started writing his autobiography only after he died. If you accept this quite unconventional possibility for a work of fiction, you have here an extremely uncommon form of autobiography, written from beyond the grave, with all the advantages of perfect hindsight.

Having lived his life to its very end, Brás Cubas supposedly knows the whole truth about it. Since he writes from this privileged point of view, we have the right to expect a highly organized compendium of the knowledge and wisdom acquired by Brás Cubas during his existence. If these memoirs are indeed the final confessions of a dead man, we can expect him to be deadly serious about the meaning of life. What we get instead is a digressive and fragmented account of an ordinary man’s experiences, an account in which an incredibly irreverent and facetious narrator chattily addresses his readers at every step, challenging us to make our own sense of the inconsistencies of his unheroic life. From his extremely detached point of view, Brás Cubas can tell us the blunt truth about his ordinary life, unmasking in the process most conventions of appropriateness he no longer has to obey. In doing so, he compels the reader to reconsider both these social conventions and the very meaning of life. Brás Cubas is serious about life, but in a peculiarly ludicrous way: his is indeed a deadly sense of humor.

The book is broken up into 160 chapters, few containing more than three or four pages, and some made up of only one or two sentences. For example, Chapter CXXXVI in its entirety reads: “But, I’m either mistaken or I’ve just written a useless chapter.” Fittingly, the title of this chapter is “Uselessness.” Some readers will smile, finding it funny. Others will probably be annoyed, or judge the exercise clumsy and contrived, if not a good example of total uselessness, thus confirming the appropriateness of the chapter. If you are in the latter group, dear reader, your surprise will probably increase when you come upon portions of the novel containing no words at all, such as Chapter LV.

Under the title “The Old Dialogue Between Adam and Eve,” a chapter is presented as a full-page conversation between a man and a woman. It starts with his asking her a question. After the give and take of a few more questions and answers, it reaches its climax with both man and woman using exclamations at the end of whatever it is they are saying to each, other. Yet, the only elements we get of this verbal exchange are the question marks and the exclamation points; the whole dialogue is represented on the blank page by ellipses alone, or, graphically speaking, by suspension points. Evidently, the reader is supposed to fill in the blanks, projecting into this dialogue his or her own ideas about the tenor of Adam and Eve’s intercourse. Here, as throughout this novel, the reader is invited to assume an active, creative, and critical role, a surprisingly modern approach for a novel written in the nineteenth century.

This active role is sometimes challenging.