Where the Stress Falls by Susan Sontag

maximum consciousness—which is what, wittily, a posthumous narrator can claim—is in itself a comic perspective. Where Brás Cubas is writing from is not a true afterlife (it has no geography), only another go at the idea of authorial detachment. The neo-Sternean narrative hijinks of these memoirs of a disappointed man do not issue from Sternean exuberance or even Sternean nervousness.
    They are a kind of antidote, a counterforce to the narrator’s despondency: a way of mastering dejection considerably more specialized than the “great cure, an anti-melancholy plaster, designed to relieve the despondency of mankind” that the narrator fantasizes about inventing. Life administers its hard lessons. But one can write as one pleases—a form of liberty.
    Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was only forty-one when he published these reminiscences of a man who has died—we learn at the opening of the book—at sixty-four. (Machado was born in 1839; he makes his creation Brás Cubas, the posthumous autobiographer, more than a generation older, born in 1805.) The novel as an exercise in the anticipating of old age is a venture to which writers of a melancholy temperament continue to be drawn. I was in my late twenties when I wrote my first novel, which purports to be the reminiscences of a man then in his early sixties, a rentier, dilettante, and fantasist, who announces at the beginning of the book that he has reached a harbor of serenity where, all experience finished, he can look back on his life. The few conscious literary references in my head were mostly French—above all Candide and Descartes’s Meditations ; I thought I was writing a satire on optimism and on certain cherished (by me) ideas of the inner life and of a religiously nourished inwardness. (What was going on unconsciously, as I think about it now, is another story.) When I had the good fortune to have The Benefactor accepted by the first publisher to whom I submitted it, Farrar Straus, I had the further good luck of having assigned to me as my editor Cecil Hemley, who in 1952, in his previous incarnation as the head of Noonday Press (recently acquired by my new publisher), had brought out the translation of Machado’s novel that really launched the book’s career in English. (Under that title!) At our first meeting Hemley said to me: “I can see you have been influenced by Epitaph of a Small Winner .” Epitaph of a what? “By, you know, Machado de Assis.” Who? He lent me a copy and several days later I declared myself retroactively influenced.
    Although I have since read a good deal of Machado in translation, Memórias postumas de Brás Cubas —the first of five late novels (he lived twenty-eight years after writing it) generally thought the summit of his genius—remains my favorite. I am told it is the one that non-Brazilians
often prefer, although critics usually pick Dom Casmurro (1899). I am astonished that a writer of such greatness does not yet occupy the place he deserves. Up to a point, the relative neglect of Machado outside Brazil may be no more mysterious than the neglect of another prolific writer of genius whom Eurocentric notions of world literature have marginalized: Natsume Sseki. Surely Machado would be better known if he hadn’t been Brazilian and hadn’t spent his whole life in Rio de Janeiro—if he were, say, Italian or Russian, or even Portuguese. But the impediment is not simply that Machado was not a European writer. Even more remarkable than his absence from the stage of world literature is that he has been very little known and read in the rest of Latin America—as if it were still hard to digest the fact that the greatest novelist that Latin America has produced wrote in the Portuguese, rather than the Spanish, language. Brazil may be the continent’s biggest country (and Rio in the nineteenth century its largest city), but it has always been the outsider country—regarded by the rest of South America, Hispanophone South