COVER TO COVER

THE POSTHUMOUS MEMOIRS OF MACHADO DE ASSIS

JOAQUIM MARIA MACHADO DE ASSIS

August 19, 2026

Machado de Assis (1839–1908), Brazil’s great nineteenth-century novelist, published “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas” in 1881. Its narrator, Brás Cubas, tells the story of his life from beyond the grave, freed by death to look back on himself and his world with irony, vanity, and unusual candor. This essay borrows Machado’s own invention and turns it back upon its creator. More than a century after his death, Machado becomes Brás Cubas: the dead author returning to narrate, and perhaps misrepresent, his own life, work, and afterlife.

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I died in Rio de Janeiro on September 29, 1908. This was not, as some of my biographers seem to suggest, the culmination of my literary career. It was merely its most effective publicity campaign. There were visitors before the end, flowers afterward, speeches, obituaries, recollections, and eventually that peculiar second burial reserved for writers: scholarship. My body was put into the ground, but my life was dug up. Men and women whom I had never met examined my childhood, my complexion, my marriage, my illnesses, my employment, my politics, my silences, my books, and even the photographs in which I made the mistake of looking serious. They discovered influences of which I had been unaware and intentions I do not remember possessing.

Death gives a writer certain advantages. One no longer has deadlines, one need not answer letters, and bad reviews lose their urgency. Unfortunately, it also deprives one of the right of reply. I have therefore returned—not physically, since resurrection is an unnecessarily theatrical solution to a literary problem, but merely to correct certain inaccuracies concerning the life of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, a subject about which everyone now appears to know considerably more than I ever did. I should warn the reader that I have attempted something similar before. That time I called the dead man Brás Cubas.

I was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1839, the son of Francisco José de Assis and Maria Leopoldina Machado de Assis. My father was the son of freed slaves; my mother was Portuguese, from the Azores. We were poor, although poverty, like most things in biography, becomes more picturesque at a sufficient distance. Posterity likes an improbable childhood because it permits the biographer to place greatness at one end and deprivation at the other and draw a straight line between them. The reader then experiences the agreeable sensation that destiny has been demonstrated.

“Just one more chapter,” he said, inventing literary insomnia.

There was no straight line. I did not attend university. My formal education was limited. I learned where I could, read what I could find, acquired languages imperfectly and books indiscriminately. I worked as a printer’s apprentice, proofreader, and journalist before discovering the civil service, that great Brazilian institution for men whose ambitions exceed their incomes.

I had epilepsy. I stammered. I was poor. I was of mixed race in a country organized around distinctions of color and class. These facts have subsequently proved irresistible to biographers because they make the eventual outcome appear unlikely. I became a writer and, more improbably, became respectable. I entered the bureaucracy, advanced through it, married well, dressed correctly, published books, acquired friends, and eventually founded and became the first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. The boy whom society might easily have overlooked became a man whom society ceremoniously acknowledged. It would make a pleasing story of triumph if triumph were ever as simple as its narrators require.

A man who enters a room from the margins learns things about the room that those born inside it may never notice. He learns where everyone sits, who is permitted to speak loudly and who lowers his voice, and where the little humiliations are concealed beneath good manners. Above all, he discovers that power rarely announces itself as power. It prefers etiquette. This education was perhaps more useful to me than university would have been.

The Brazil into which I was born was an empire. It was also a slave society. I have noticed that readers of the twenty-first century arrive rather quickly at this subject, wanting to know what I thought about slavery, and they are right to ask. It surrounded me for most of my life. Human beings were bought and sold in the city in which I walked, worked, married, wrote, and became respectable. You may therefore expect a declaration. I am afraid I was never very good at declarations. There are writers who point toward injustice; I was more interested in the gentleman who walks past it while discussing the weather.

This has caused difficulties for my descendants. Some have wanted me to be more heroic, others have suspected my discretion, and still others have argued that my irony concealed precisely what my public position prevented me from saying openly. The dead should resist the temptation to assist their interpreters. I will say only this: Slavery was not hidden in nineteenth-century Brazil. It did not need to be. That was its obscenity. It existed amid dinners, inheritances, romances, debts, and conversations. People could behave affectionately toward their children in the morning and regard another human being as property in the afternoon without experiencing any contradiction that prevented them from sleeping. Such contradictions interested me.

Slavery was abolished in 1888. The empire disappeared the following year. Brazil became a republic, and people naturally announced the arrival of a new age. I already knew to be suspicious of new ages. Institutions change their names more quickly than people change their habits.

For some years I wrote books of the kind respectable writers wrote. They were not bad. This is perhaps the cruelest thing I can say about them. Then, approaching forty, I became ill. Illness is useful to biographers because it provides another bridge between two versions of a person: He became ill, and afterward, his work became darker. Life rarely observes such convenient punctuation, but in my case I will permit it. In 1881, I published The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. The narrator was dead, which solved several problems. The living have reputations to protect; they must worry about careers, marriages, enemies, creditors, and tomorrow morning. The dead have only style.

The face you make when realism turns out to be everyone else’s problem.

Brás Cubas therefore begins his autobiography after his life has ended. He can look back upon ambition without ambition, desire without desire, society without needing its invitation. He is free to admit what a living man would disguise—or so he tells you. Brás is wealthy, vain, charming, idle, and almost entirely useless. He accomplishes remarkably little and explains himself magnificently. He interrupts his own story, quarrels with the reader, jumps backward and forward in time, shortens chapters when bored, and extends them when pleased with himself. The form was considered eccentric. Later it became modern. Later still, I am told, it became postmodern. I was particularly surprised to discover that I had become postmodern. During my lifetime I had considerable difficulty being modern.

I have since been compared with Miguel de Cervantes, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and several writers born after my death. Such comparisons are flattering, though they create unusual problems of chronology. Apparently I anticipated people who had not yet had the courtesy to exist. But the important thing about Brás Cubas was not that he was dead. It was that he was speaking. A narrator can confess everything and reveal nothing; indeed, confession is sometimes the most sophisticated form of concealment. Brás tells us exactly what sort of man he is while remaining convinced that he has explained himself favorably. The reader sees the difference. At least, I hoped so.

Ten years later came Quincas Borba. I invented in that book a philosophy called Humanitism, which, like all successful philosophies, could explain cruelty while allowing its beneficiaries to feel intelligent. Two starving tribes encounter a field of potatoes sufficient to feed only one of them. They fight. One tribe destroys the other and eats the potatoes. “To the victor, the potatoes.” People laughed. I was pleased, although I was not entirely joking. The nineteenth century had become extremely talented at explaining why the fortunate deserved their fortunes. Science, philosophy, economics, race, and progress could all be enlisted to transform appetite into necessity. Humanitism merely carried this reasoning to the point where its absurdity became visible. The joke has survived rather well. Unfortunately, so has the reasoning.

Then there was Capitu. I published Dom Casmurro in 1899, and ever since, people have been asking me whether she committed adultery. I confess that I find the persistence of the question flattering and the question itself slightly disappointing. Bentinho tells us that his wife, Capitu, betrayed him with his closest friend. He remembers gestures, glances, coincidences; he examines the face of his son and assembles evidence. And because Bentinho tells the story, Capitu cannot answer. This is the point. I gave the prosecution three hundred pages and the defense none. Readers nevertheless became jurors.

Was she guilty? Perhaps. Was she innocent? Perhaps. The more interesting question is why you believed you were in a position to decide. Bentinho is cultivated, wounded, intelligent, and persuasive. He does not present himself as a monster. Monsters rarely do. He presents himself as reasonable, which is one of the great conveniences of telling one’s own story.

Watching society perform its little comedy and taking excellent notes.

And here, reader, you may detect a difficulty. I have now spent several pages telling you about myself. I have explained my childhood, my poverty, my race, my society, and my books. I have selected the episodes, chosen the adjectives, determined which matters deserve paragraphs and which disappear between sentences. Why should Machado de Assis be more trustworthy than Bento Santiago?

Because I am dead? I refer you to Brás Cubas.

There are subjects about which irony is merely cowardice. Carolina is one of them. Carolina Augusta Xavier de Novais became my wife in 1869, and we remained married for thirty-five years. She read me. She corrected me. She accompanied the ordinary hours from which a life is actually made, those hours biography removes because nothing sufficiently historical occurs in them. We had no children. She died in 1904. I continued for four years. There is a temptation, particularly when writing from beyond the grave, to make something beautiful of grief. I will resist it. I missed her. That is enough.

After my death, I became considerably busier. Streets, schools, libraries, and institutions acquired my name. My books continued to be printed. Students were examined on them, which is one of the stranger punishments posterity inflicts upon literature. I became Brazil’s greatest novelist. This was gratifying, although I was no longer in a position to enjoy the advantages. Then something still more peculiar happened: Foreigners began discovering me.

Every few decades, someone announced that Machado de Assis had finally been discovered outside Brazil. I enjoyed these repeated discoveries; they gave me something of the quality of a continent. Critics compared me to the greatest writers of Europe, new translations appeared, and readers marveled that a Brazilian writing in the nineteenth century had produced books that seemed to belong to the twentieth. The compliment contained a small insult. Why, after all, should Brazil have been incapable of producing strangeness on its own?

I was also repeatedly reinvented at home. For a time, the respectable Machado proved especially useful: the civilized man of letters, the academician, the impeccably dressed founder of an institution. My origins could become hazy. My complexion occasionally became lighter in reproduction and in memory. Later generations looked again and emphasized what others had diminished: the Black Machado, the mixed-race Machado, the grandson of freed slaves who had risen to the summit of literary culture in a society structured by slavery and its aftermath. Even my complexion enjoyed a posthumous career.

When you’ve seen through society and adjusted the monocle for a closer look.

Was this Machado more accurate? Certainly he corrected something. But correction is not completion. I have been made successively into pessimist, humorist, realist, modernist-before-modernism, postmodernist-before-postmodernism, Black intellectual, universal genius, and national monument. The adjective changes. The corpse remains patient.

I do not object to these Machados. How could I? Writers make characters, and readers make writers. When I created Brás Cubas, I believed I possessed him. Then readers began reading him, and immediately he acquired opinions I had not given him. The same happened to Capitu. I left a woman inside a book and returned, after death, to discover an entire nation arguing over her fidelity. Perhaps this is what publication means. You surrender custody. The author becomes, eventually, another character in his own work.

There is the Machado who lived from 1839 to 1908. He ate breakfast, suffered seizures, went to the ministry, worried about money, loved his wife, disliked certain people, forgot appointments, revised sentences, and grew old. I remember him imperfectly. Then there is Machado de Assis. I have never met him. He is much more coherent than I was. He has themes. He represents things. His childhood anticipates his achievement; his illnesses explain his pessimism; his racial identity explains certain silences; his bureaucratic career explains others; his marriage illuminates his women; his society explains his irony. Everything fits.

But nothing in a life fits so well. This is the secret shared by novels and biographies: Both remove the accidents until destiny becomes visible. I ought not complain. I practiced the same fraud. I began these pages because I wished to correct my biographers and find, having reached the end, that I have merely joined them.

Perhaps there never was a single Machado de Assis available for recovery. There was the poor boy from Rio, the grandson of freed slaves, the printer, journalist, bureaucrat, husband, epileptic, monarchist by temperament if not declaration, skeptic, academician, humorist, novelist, widower, and dying old man. And then there are all the Machados invented afterward: the Brazilian Shakespeare, the precursor of Borges, the secret modernist, the postmodernist who arrived before modernism, the Black Machado, the universal Machado, and the Machado you have just met, who has been dead for more than a century yet displays a suspiciously detailed knowledge of his critical reception.

The last portrait and still dressed as though death were merely another critic to outwit.

I cannot tell you which is the true one. Death has clarified many things, but authorship is not among them. Brás Cubas had one advantage over me: being fictional, he was permitted to remain himself. I, unfortunately, became an author, and authors, like the dead, belong increasingly to people who never knew them. I promised you a correction, and have given you another version. Someone will eventually correct this one too.

I wish them luck. The reader has the last word. I have always disliked him for it.

Machado de Assis was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1839 and died there in 1908. He has been writing ever since.

Cover image: When your facial hair has more plot twists than most novels.