Jorge Edwards at CLAS
Alberto Simpser moderates a Latin American Briefing Series public lecture on "The Militarization of US Foreign Relations with Latin America" by Lisa Haugaard, Executive Director of the Latin American Working Group, Joy Olson, Executive Director of the Washington Office on Latin America, and Adam Isacson, Program Director at the Center for International Policy.
Earlier this month, Tinker Visiting Professor Jorge Edwards spoke on the the works of nineteenth-century Brazilian novelist Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (Memorias Postumas de Bras Cubas) and Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. A former diplomat and the author of several novels, including Persona non grata (1974), a personal account of his time as the Chilean ambassador to Cuba during the regime of Salvador Allende, Edwards was awarded the highly prestigious Premio Cervantes in 1999.
In his talk, Professor Edwards focused on the invention of the narrator in the Latin American literary canon. He began by introducing us to the idiosyncratic voice and persona of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. Machado de Assis was several steps ahead of the Modernist movement, publishing his first major work of fiction, Memorias Postumas de Bras Cubas (The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas) in 1881, decades before renowned innovators of literary modernism such as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein had entered the scene, and over half a century before the works of Latin American modernists like Borges and Julio Cortázar were published.
Memorias Postumas de Bras Cubas is written as a posthumous autobiography. Bras Cubas begins the story by dedicating his words to "the first worm that gnawed on the cold flesh of my corpse." Comic and highly self-critical, the narrator considers how to begin the story-should he begin with his birth? He decides that it will be best told if he works his way backwards, beginning with his death. He often questions, retroactively, his decisions to use certain words or phrases in previous chapters. Verisimilitude does not concern Machado de Assis; the book is a continuous subject of the book. Echoes of Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Cervantes' Don Quijote occur throughout this irreverent and construction of a narrator.
Machado de Assis, Professor Edwards told us, "had what he called a cabeza de rumiante-a ruminating head. I think that Borges, perhaps, had this too."
Borges wrote that what is disturbing when you read literature is that you begin to think you're not real. Hence, Borges felt that only he could be his own narrator; one example of this problem appears in the short story, Borges y yo. Drawing on modernist traditions, as well as the works of Cervantes and 19th-century European authors, Borges was a leading force in the movement of fantastical literature that dominated the Latin American Boom era of the 1940s and '50s. Edwards said he was relatively certain that Borges had never read the works of Machado de Assis, but that common stylistic threads were evident in their writing-likely resulting from the influence of Cervantes' Quijote. Both, he pointed out, were critiqued for their thematic and stylistic references to the works of European writers; they were seen as "not Latin American enough."
Professor Edwards noted that perhaps this was their strength-that because of the relative newness of the Latin American voice, authors like Borges and Machado de Assis could draw on the traditions of many nations and periods. The Latin American writer, he said, "is not boxed in by a tradition."
At the end of his talk, Professor Edwards reminded us that at the end of Don Quijote, Cervantes jokes that the pen he uses has been telling the story from the beginning. Only Borges and Machado de Assis, Edwards said, would make jokes like this.
