Quincas Borba

by Machado De Assis

  If the narrator cuts short the episode or interrupts the book, it is because the reality he seeks to describe cannot be narrated—or, at least, cannot be narrated using the techniques of the time. However, if the reader winds up confused and lost, it is because he or she did not read slowly and carefully. Even such a reading, however, will not lead to an understanding of “reality.” At best, the reader will be able to stitch together “the tatters of reality.” In this way, however, the reader may discover “a fourth cause, the true one, perhaps,” which will explain the characters’ motivations; that cause, however, is indeterminate, outside the order of causality: it is no more than chance (Chapters CVI-CVII).

  This novel is written for those who “know how to read,” for those who seek not verisimilitude but a mental shock, a liberation of the imagination, the surprise and laughter that derive from unconscious motivations. Machado toys with the expectations of readers who desire, out of habit, to follow plot lines; he leads those readers to presume that facts, feelings, and situations are linked together in ways that appear logical and probable but that are, in fact, the product of a sickly imagination, of a guilty conscience, of jealousy. In this sense, the book uses Rubião as symbolic of the misadventures of desire—the fire that occasionally burns, out of control, within him.

  A writer of the implicit and the inverted, Machado symbolizes the lost unity of life through his dualities. The desire to reconstitute that unity consumes Rubião; his attempts to use action and reason to do so lead to disaster. Unable to understand what is happening within himself or—because he has never mastered the art of deceit—within others, Rubião becomes enmeshed in thoughts that are not “the product of his spirit or his legs but . . . caused by something else, which, like a spider, he couldn’t tell if it was good or bad.” Moreover, “what does a spider know about Mozart? Nothing. But it listens with pleasure to a sonata by the master. The cat, who has never read Kant, could still be a metaphysical animal. . . Rubião felt scattered. Transitory friends. . . gave life the feeling aspect of a journey to him, a trip where language changed with the cities, Spanish here, Turkish there” (Chapter LXXX).

  The reference to the spider is not, obviously, accidental. It is an image of Rubião’s entrapment, of his duality, of his confusion—foreshadowing the fragmentation that will follow. It is also a metaphor for the process through which the narrative is constructed, and a critique of reason. In the Greek myth, Arachne challenges Athena, the goddess of reason, to a weaving contest and, as punishment, in transformed into a spider. Arachne, here, is a metaphor for writing and, by extension, for all art. The apparently arbitrary association of the spider with Mozart and of the cat with Kant would seem to derive from the unconscious rather than the conscious, despite Machado’s feigned rationalism. Mozart and Kant are emblems of regularity, in art and in philosophy. But Mozart also refers to leaps, to his capering musical phrases, and Kant to the inversion of classical metaphysics. These are interwoven signs that suggest the diversity and the power struggles that lie beneath the representation of harmony. But there remains the cat, a “metaphysical animal.” The spider is in the myth; it is crafty, arrogant, and competitive. The cat is clever and wary, always watching but never understanding; its reactions are immediate and precise. If the spider, in its eternal weaving, is the image of remembrance, like that of Rubião, then the cat is a metaphor for displacement and adaptation, abilities Rubião lacks. And remembrance clearly presupposes rumination on a presumptive original sin, a sin always ready to be reborn in remorse and in guilt. But the cat has no origin; it exists solely in the extended present of events.

  Thus Machado speaks to the reader, saying: do not seek the truth in my plot; it is hard enough to “mend the tatters of reality”; nor should you seek an easy ending to the spectacle of humanity, since the only finality is that of nature. The most to which one can aspire, given that the soul is a “patchwork quilt,” is “for the colors not to contradict each other—when they are unable to follow symmetry and regularity.” Rubião represents the impossibility of even this precarious agreement. Palha, on the other hand, “had a mixed-up look at first sight, but with close attention, as opposite as the tones might be, the man’s moral unity could be found there” (Chapter LV). If the unity to which Rubião aspires is transcendent, Palha’s unity is transcendental, the unity inherent in the profit motive.

  Machado’s novel is already a fully modern text in which the characters are not constructed as symbols of a totality; his theme is the fragmented, dispersed individual in all of his loneliness. The novel deals with a structural change in human experience, with individuals whose lives are ruled by chance rather than by eternal verities. The text is no longer a narrative of man’s spiritual adventure in the world; rather, it represents the ridiculous consequences of man’s loss of unity, which makes him a stranger to himself. The fragmentation of the individual is replicated in the fragmentation of the narrative, in the use of techniques of deceptive distancing. One of Machado’s tactics here is the displacement of the reader—the “serious” and “frivolous” reader alike—through the dissolution of our expectations of totality. Allegorical in structure, Quincas Borba sets up the “four or five situations” in the very first chapters; the novel catches Rubião in his delusions of greatness and in his disunity (“what a gulf there is between the spirit and the heart!”); in the flashback, the text introduces the theory of Humanitism which the novel objectifies; it sketches Rubião’s personality—weak, without opinions, easily wounded—and contrasts that weakness with Sofia’s guile and Palha’s calculation. Finally, the novel sets up the historical background upon which his narrative strategies will function.

  If Machado addresses the reader constantly, as frequently happens in Quincas Borba, it is because the reader seeks, by reading novels, to in some way repair his or her loss of moral unity—a loss visible in the increasingly powerful presence of the newspaper. Machado not only used the periodical press to transmit his writings to readers; his novels are also contaminated by journalism. He explores the form of the news item in order to satirize readers of serialized novels in newspapers, using the press as symbolic of the “corruption” of traditional narrative.6 Look, for example, at the news item which informs Rubião of the philosopher’s death:

  “Mr. Joaquim Borba dos Santos has died after enduring his illness philosophically. He was a man of great learning and he wore himself out doing battle against that yellow, withered pessimism that will yet reach us here one day. It is the mal du siŌcle. His last words were that pain was an illusion and that Pangloss was not as dotty as Voltaire indicated . . . He was already delirious. He leaves many possessions. His will is in Barbacena. (Chapter XI)

  Machado mixes references to banal death notices with references which have come, through constant reuse, to identify grand moral principles and cultural values. He alludes to the explanation of the philosophy of Humanitism in The Posthumous Memoirs of Brãs Cubas, especially in chapter CXVII, quoting but deforming the final phrase of that allusion (“Pangloss was not as dotty as Voltaire indicated”). Machado parodies the moralizing tone of reactionary Brazilian conservatism (“that yellow, withered pessimism that will yet reach us here one day”), that Quincas Borba “wore himself out doing battle against”; it is one of the consequences of modernization that the social “crisis” is defined in terms of traditional ethics. He validates the figure of Quincas Borba by inserting him in the tradition of impassivity and of the consolations of philosophy. A man of great knowledge, Quincas Borba was nonetheless “already delirious” and, finally, left “many possessions.” Madness deconstructs the philosophy and the values attributed to Quincas Borba, while the statement about the size of his estate restores his social position.

  The emphatic tone of the item parodies newspaper death notices but also Humanitism—which is itself, it should be remembered, a parody of Positivism. As is well known, Pangloss, a character in Candide, postulates an unshakable optimism. The quote of the principle that “p
ain was an illusion” in turn stands in contrast to Machado’s statement that “various forms of illness” exist.

  Quincas Borba, then, as a demonstration of the allegory of the potatoes, is also a critique of Brazilian Positivism. The latter, an amalgam of fashionable ideas—from Comte, from Spencer, from Darwin, from naturalist rationalism, from monism and skepticism—is a “philosophy” only in the sense of an accumulation of doctrines.7 Humanitas is the principle of life, existing everywhere: “All things have a certain hidden and identical substance in them, a principle that’s singular, universal, eternal, common, indivisible and indestructible, ...” The equilibrium of life is guaranteed by the “necessary variety” of events, of individual, social and natural phenomena. Evil does not exist, pain is an illusion, and “man only commemorates and loves what he finds pleasant and advantageous.” Thus, competition and war are fundamental to the preservation of the species: “To the conquered, hate or compassion; to the victor, the potatoes” (Chapter VI). And individuals are no more than “transitory bubbles.”

  The author brings the book to a close, but the narrative does not end like a romance. Machado leads Rubião, sick and in rags, back to Barbacena; he gives him the dog as companion, recreating the philosopher’s situation. Delirious, Rubião understands the allegory of the potatoes—at least, he gets from it “a vague feeling of struggle and victory” (Chapter CXCV). Thus the philosophy of Humanitism is objectified in the character’s fate, sending the reader back to the beginning of the text. The last chapter, in which the dog’s death is recounted, opens with the question of the book’s title, “a question pregnant with questions that would take us far”—a question and questions related to the validity of fiction and the novel’s ability to represent reality. More precisely, by confusing the reader about the book’s title, a title which refers to allegorical characters in the text rather than to events in the narrative, Machado throws doubt on the forms of narration as they were structured in his time—as efforts to distinguish between human laughter and tears to describe and decipher the human condition though the epic construct of experience. Machado here indicates the crisis of narrative, the crisis of the novel as a genre characterized by ideas of unity and totality. Quincas Borba, on the contrary, only pretends to be a novel. Remember the warning to the reader at the beginning of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brãs Cubas: “I might add that serious people will find some semblance of a normal novel, while frivolous people won’t find their usual one here. There it stands, deprived of the esteem of the serious and the love of the frivolous, the two main pillars of opinion.”8

  Machado delineates ambition, vanity, and passion as “the different forms of a single disease.” The effect of his moralizing—“unreasonable, timeless, unexpected, untimely”—gives concrete form to “the truth of his age,” esthetically internalized.9 In contrast, Rubião’s ineptitude in this society based upon pretense makes him a stereotypical symbol, a grotesque monument to imitative modernization. In Rubião, purely conspicuous consumption of all that is fashionable coexists with the morality of a sensitive conscience, brimming with regret and desires to make amends. If the other emblematic characters, Palha, Sofia, and Camacho, are stereotypical, historically based representations of indifference, Rubião is a figure out of time and out of place. On the one hand, indifference or pleasure; on the other, pain—but all indicate the illusory nature of modernity. Within the narrative, everything depends on the fickleness of desire—and on the self-interest and the willfulness that creates desire. Beyond lies the fickleness of the stars, of the moon, of the Southern Cross, all of which, impassive, neither laugh nor cry at the spectacle of human life—skepticism.

  —Celso Favaretto

  Translated by David T. Haberly

  NOTES

  1. See John Gledson, Machado de Assis: Impostura e Realismo (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1991), p. 102.

  2. See “Machado de Assis: Um debate. Conversa com Roberto Schwarz,” Novos Estudos CEBRAP (São Paulo), 29 (March 1991), 68–69. (This is a discussion of Schware’s Um Mestre na Periferia do Capitalismo: Machado de Assis [Sao Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1990]).

  3. Ibid., pp. 67, 71.

  4. See John Gledson, Machado de Assis: Ficçāo e Histdria (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1986), p. 113.

  5. “Conversa com Roberto Schwarz,” p. 66.

  6. Kátia Muricy, “Machado de Assis, um Intempestivo?,” Gávea (Rio de Janeiro), 10 (March 1993), 13–15.

  7. “Conversa com Roberto Schwarz,” p. 66.

  8. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brãs Cubas, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 5.

  9. See Kátia Muricy, A Razão Cética: Machado de Assis e as Questões de sen Tempo (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1988), p. 35; and Paulo Eduardo Arantes, “O Positivismo no Brasil,” Novos Estudos CEBRAP (São Paulo), 21 (July 1988), 186.