Posthumous Fame

More Fun Than A Barrel Full of Monkeys

In the preface to the reader in Machado de Assis’ Epitaph of a Small Winner (Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, 1881) the fictional narrator writes, “When we learn from Stendhal that he wrote one of his books for only a hundred readers, we are both astonished and disturbed.”  He then goes on to say, “The world will be neither astonished not, probably, disturbed if the present book has not one hundred readers like Stendhal’s, nor fifty, nor twenty, nor even ten.  Ten?  Maybe five.” In a sense, this reduction of possible audience is part of the spoof that signals the satirical intentions of the novelist, as are his claims to have antecedents in Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy or Xavier de Maistre’s Journeys Around My Chamber.  Books like these—and one can well add Apuleius’ Golden Ass, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Heller’s Catch-22: that is, satire in the sense of satura, the supersaturated spilling or leaking out of story, characters and ideas from the supposed framework of an adventure or well-made argument. 

Classically-trained readers, like naïve or innocent audiences who have missed out on the niceties of literary tradition, may find themselves confused by these works of fiction, and it is no wonder that Stendhal, Machado et al. fortify themselves for long periods of poor sales and oblivion when launching their  hearts’ delights into the world.  Of course, in due course, should the writer manage to survive into his own posthumous fame, there will be more than ten or twenty or even a few hundred readers.  Those audiences in the know, as it were, pass on the good news that this kind of “diffuse work,” as Braz Cubas (Machado’s persona in Epitaph for a Small Winner) terms it is a great deal of fun, more than a whole barrel full of proverbial monkeys; and part of the joy comes from the pretense that you are part of an elite of special readers able to join in the joke, whilst everyone else stares from the outside wondering what the grin is for on the faces of all these people with their noses inside what are presumed to be ponderous tomes of incomprehensible pedantry.

Hopefully the joke will not be closed off from everyone who should be able to enjoy it because our schools and universities dare not break the code of political correctness by teaching classes that literature is not only fun and games, but also that much of culture is best understood as games of deception, masquerade and naughty innuendo.  Dictatorships of all stripes have a moralistic streak that fears to let its citizens and subjects become aware of the secret—and the techniques for readings closely, in context, and with a sense of ironic, sometimes mordant wit, so as to see through pretentiousness, speciousness and overly orotund self-righteousness.  Prudes, prigs and prats have a deep aversion to encounters where their claim to perfection and power can be put in question.  Hence the obvious danger of confusing social science jargon and the tweets of the self-proclaimed celebrity with the oblique and subversive texts of wide-thinking and deep-feeling persons. 

One day, lamenting the poor showing of my own books on the amazon.com best seller lists—some of my books now rank around eleven millionth in sales while others hover in the category of three-to-five millionth, occasionally dipping below a million should there be a particularly fruitful week when more than five copies are ordered by my loyal and living fans—a friend pointed out that in his day Nietzsche could barely sell twenty copies of his now famous (but still usually unread) tomes, and other great writers forced to peddle their labours among friends in their cafes of Paris, Berlin, London or New York. 

On the other hand, for there are many of these to be found, as you will see, another colleague-in-arms, when I asked her how she could be sop successful with her many books, revealed to me that she had to pay a publicist, keep a stable of assistants to help her respond to every speck of criticism in the reviews, and keep pushing herself forward in every conference or convention she could afford—or not afford—to attend.  Fat lot of good that does me stuck at the bottom of the world and eking out my retired existence on a pension (or superannuation, as we say down here). 

Still, on one of these other hands that are always ready for manipulating the minds of my dear potential readers, there is the eventual wearing down of resistance among what Milton calls “fit audience though few” when emails and ordinary letters provoke reviews in small journals, purchase of a few volumes every few weeks, and rarely received but always welcome responses on Facebook or some similar social network.  The goal is not to make money—something I gave up on many books ago or thirty years ago—but two other little things.  On the one hand, the pleasure of being read and entering into dialogue with the faithful few; and the other, stimulating just enough sales to encourage publishers to accept my next book.

Does this sound like whining or special pleading, at a time of the year when pop stars of screen and other media congratulate one another on their latest chart-breaking achievements and garnering a few hundred thousands—no, a few millions of dollars and oodles of publicity?  Sour grapes?  Raucous raspberries and jealous gestures?  Perhaps. 

Quite clearly the corner grocery has a turn over each weekend of more than almost every writer not on the top one hundred lists will make in a lifetime or a blue moon of lifetimes.  So, yes, to be frank, Machado’s or Braz Cubas’ complaint or Stendhal’s lament or boast of one hundred books put in circulation sounds very good sometimes, or an impossible dream.  Yet still another hand to turn in: just how many monkeys are in that barrel who are having so much fun?  Maybe it is better that there only be a dozen or less.