Where the Stress Falls by Susan Sontag Read Free Book Online Page B

such a narrative are complex. The narrator professes to be worrying about the reader—whether the reader gets it. Meanwhile, the reader can be wondering about the narrator—whether the narrator understands all the implications of what is being told. A display of mental agility and inventiveness which is designed to amuse the reader and purportedly reflects the liveliness of the narrator’s mind mostly measures how emotionally isolated and forlorn the narrator is. Ostensibly, this is the book of a life. Yet, despite the narrator’s gift for social and psychological portraiture, it remains a tour of the inside of someone’s head. Another of Machado’s models was a marvelous book by Xavier de Maistre, a French expatriate aristocrat (he lived most of his long life in Russia) who invented the literary micro-journey with his Journey around My Room, written in 1794, when he was in prison for dueling, and which recounts his diagonal and zigzag visits to such diverting sites as the armchair, the desk, and the bed. A confinement, mental or physical, that is not acknowledged as such can make a very funny story as well as one charged with pathos.
    At the beginning, in a flourish of authorial self-knowingness that graciously includes the reader, Machado de Assis has the autobiographer name the eighteenth-century literary models of his narrative with the following somber warning:

    It is, in truth, a diffuse work, in which I, Brás Cubas, if indeed I have adopted the free form of a Sterne or of a Xavier de Maistre, have possibly added a certain peevish pessimism of my own. Quite possibly. The work of a man already dead. I wrote it with the pen of Mirth and the ink of Melancholy, and one can readily foresee what may come of such a union.

    However modulated by whimsy, a vein of true misanthropy runs through the book. If Brás Cubas is not just another of those repressed,
desiccated, pointlessly self-aware bachelor narrators who exist only to be seen through by the full-blooded reader, it is because of his anger—which is by the end of the book full-out, painful, bitter, upsetting.
    The Sternean playfulness is lighthearted. It is a comic, albeit extremely nervous, form of friendliness with the reader. In the nineteenth century this digressiveness, this chattiness, this love of the little theory, this pirouetting from one narrative mode to another, takes on darker hues. It becomes identified with hypochondria, with erotic disillusionment, with the discontents of the self (Dostoyevsky’s pathologically voluble Underground Man), with acute mental distress (the hysterical narrator, deranged by injustice, of Multatuli’s Max Havelaar ) . To natter on obsessively, repetitively, used to be invariably a resource of comedy. (Think of Shakespeare’s plebeian grumblers, like the porter in Macbeth; think of Mr. Pickwick, among other inventions of Dickens.) That comic use of garrulousness does not disappear. Joyce used garrulousness in a Rabelaisian spirit, as a vehicle of comic hyperbole, and Gertrude Stein, champion of verbose writing, turned the tics of egotism and sententiousness into a good-natured comic voice of great originality. But most of the verbose first-person narrators in the ambitious literature of this century have been radically misanthropic. Garrulousness is identified with the baleful, aggrieved repetitiveness of senility (Beckett’s prose monologues that call themselves novels) and with paranoia and unslakable rage (the novels and plays of Thomas Bernhard). Who does not sense the despair behind the loquacious, sprightly musings of Robert Walser and the quirkily erudite, bantering voices in the stories of Donald Barthelme?
    Beckett’s narrators are usually trying, not altogether successfully, to imagine themselves as dead. Brás Cubas has no such problem. But then Machado de Assis was trying to be, and is, funny. There is nothing morbid about the consciousness of his posthumous narrator; on the contrary, the perspective of