My chosen career as a professional student of old authors got off to a rocky start in the 1960s. The author—or I should say the Author, capitalized—was already ailing even during my undergraduate years, and I had barely gotten my Ph.D. when his death was formally announced. That was in 1967 when Roland Barthes, the famous French literary theorist, published his influential essay “The Death of the Author”. Barthes explained brilliantly how authors have always had much less to do with the books they write than you might think. He extended and amplified the idea already popular among some of the so-called New Critics. These people, who by now probably ought to be called the Paleolithics, held that an author’s intention was irrelevant to the work of art produced, the meanings of which were out of her hands the moment it left the printing press, if not before. The arena of works by so-called authors now was the black ice and slippery cobblestones of language itself; the reader must be willing to do the heavy lifting of creating meaning, and be prepared for surprises. So Randy Newman, author of “Short People Got No Reason to Live,” might in vain claim that his song was a satirical indictment of mindless human prejudices, invoking the indisputable biographical fact that he was himself a short person; he still faced the wrath of the Short Peoples’ Lobby, which turned out to be not merely extant but militant and irate. But it wasn’t all bad. If the Author was dead, the critic could be all the more lively. Instead of talking about how smart Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf were, professors could concentrate on how smart professors are. What was not to like in English Departments?
I was pretty cool with all this because most of my main authors were writers like Ovid, Augustine, and Chaucer; and whatever else you might want to say about them, these guys were definitely dead. But then I encountered a dead author—name of Brás Cubas—of a kind I hadn’t thought much about before. Not much, but some. I remember mentioning in an earlier blog post the name of William Cooper Brann, also known as Brann the Iconoclast, the publisher of a free-thinking journal of that name, shot in the back by an avenging Baptist in 1898 on the streets of Waco TX. Brann had offended this man’s group by saying: “I don’t have anything against Baptists except that they weren’t held under long enough”—an allusion, I believe, to baptism by full immersion. Anyway it was in a sizzling essay of his (“The Mistakes of Moses”), stumbled upon in my grandfather’s house in my tenderest years, that I first encountered the potent productivity of dead authors. It was in Brann’s day the universal belief of conservative Christians that everything in the Pentateuch (alias “Five Books of Moses”) had in fact come directly from the stylus, quill, or lead pencil of the super-prophet himself. Brann drew attention to the possible difficulties of applying this belief to Deuteronomy 34:5-6: “Moses…died…and was buried in the ravine opposite Beth-Phogor.” That is, Moses didn’t just prophesy his death, he recorded it. I read “The Mistakes of Moses” more than seventy years ago, and hardly thought about it since—until quite recently.
My loyal readers will know that during the pandemic I have tried to improve the shining hour, linguistically speaking, by attempting to improve my Portuguese, the vehicle of improvement being an endless on-line Duolingo course. I am a big fan of Duolingo. But though it does not refuse its gratuitous services to geriatrics, it seems designed for the young. My grandchildren tell me that the structure is vaguely suggestive of a video game. Indeed videogame (pronounced videogamey) is a word you learn early. If your interests are in classical literature, you need to take some initiative on your own. So a while ago I set out to supplement the youth culture of the Duolingo lessons with some independent readings in major novelists. Certain historical and linguistic parallels between England and Portugal are striking. Both are small countries—Portugal almost tiny—whose colonial expansion projected their vernaculars into two very large countries in the Americas. (Brazil comprises roughly half of South America.) Two famous authors, contemporaries, were brought to my attention, one European and one American. The first, whom I have mentioned before, is the Portuguese intellectual and diplomat José Maria Eça de Queirós (1845-1900). The Brazilian novelist is Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908).
There is a quantum linguistic leap between the level of language needed to order a fish dinner in a Lisbon restaurant or try to pick up a girl in a São Paulo coffee bar and that needed to read a novel of Dickens or Henry James. I threw myself doggedly into two of Eça’s novels—The Crime of Father Amaro and The Relic. Very slow going, and I never did get completely through the first novel, though perhaps surprisingly one builds up a pretty big reading vocabulary quickly. The Relic, on the other hand, finds a place on my top ten. It didn’t quite change my life; but it certainly inspired me to further reading. This time I turned to Eça’s South American counterpart, Machado de Assis.
I started with a short story I had seen much discussed—“Missa de Gallo” (“Midnight Mass”), a masterpiece worthy of Henry James at his most ambiguous, but with the apparent simplicity of Hemingway. Emphasis on the word apparent. So I then moved on to a novel with an intriguing title: The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas). Perhaps its comparative brevity was also an encouragement. Both the Eça and the Machado novels are the first-person accounts of scoundrels. What I will call the original Brás Cubas was a Portuguese nobleman, adventurer and slaver of the sixteenth century, the founder of Santos, now a beachfront city of half a million, sort of at the bottom of the South American “hump” that is the Brazilian coastline. You are never quite sure who the Brás of Machado’s novel is; but the origins of his branch of the family date from the eighteenth century, and at the supposed time of writing several of his relatives are “still alive”. Unlike the author himself, who is dead. He tells us he died in August of 1869. Indeed one of the first problems facing the dead author in writing his memoirs is whether to begin with his birth or his death. He opts for the latter. The novel was published in 1881, a few years before the final abolition of Brazilian slavery. So if we thought it was perhaps necessary to wait for the arrival of Modernism in order to be post-Modern, we can think again.
The very first paragraph raises the intriguing question of the death of the author. In reporting his own, as he points out, the narrator has the excellent precedent of Moses, author of the Pentateuch. But there is still a bit of a conundrum, both metaphysical and linguistic, of distinguishing between an autor defunto and a defunto autor. I think what this means (and I am consistently in the middle of the cohort of the Diamond League on Duolingo) is a dead author and an author who is dead, a scribbling cadaver, so to speak. I won’t even try to tell you what is in the rest of the book.
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