Quincas Borba (Library of Latin America) (39 page)

“To the victor the potatoes!” he concluded, laughing.

A
few days later he died … He didn’t die vanquished or defeated.

Before the start of his death agony, which was short, he put the crown on his head—a crown that wasn’t even an old hat or a basin, where the spectators could touch the illusion. No, sir. He took hold of nothing, lifted up nothing, and put nothing on his head. Only he saw the imperial insignia, heavy with gold, sparkling with diamonds and other precious stones. The effort he made to lift his body up halfway didn’t last long and his body fell back again. His face maintained a glorious expression, however.

“Take care of my crown,” he murmured. “To the victor …”

His face grew serious, because death is serious. Two minutes of agony, a horrible grimace, and his abdication was signed.

I
should like to speak here of the end of Quincas Borba, who also fell ill, whined ceaselessly, ran off unhinged in search of his master, and was found dead on the street one morning three days later. But on seeing the death of the dog told in a separate chapter, it’s possible that you will ask me whether it is he or his late namesake who gives the book its title and why one instead of the other—a question pregnant: with questions that would take us far along… Come now! Weep for the two recent deaths if you have tears. If you only have laughter, laugh! It’s the same thing. The Southern Cross that the beautiful Sofia refused to behold as Rubião had asked her is so high up that it can’t discern the laughter or the tears of men.

H
eir to a great fortune and, perforce, to a dog, Rubião moves from Barbacena to Rio de Janeiro toward the end of the Empire. He had previously tried his hand, unsuccessfully, at business and had been a school teacher before he dedicated himself entirely to caring for the eccentric philosopher Quincas Borba; the latter had returned, sick and delirious, from the Court in Rio de Janeiro to the interior city of Barbacena, in the province of Minas Gerais. Rubião is credulous and a believer in moral principles; easily offended and without any opinions of his own, he aspires to all the advantages wealth can confer. When he is named the sole heir of Quincas Borba, who had himself unexpectedly inherited a fortune, Rubião sees a chance to fulfill his dreams and aspirations for greatness in the capital city of the Brazilian Empire; he is convinced that the mere possession of wealth will afford him luxury, power, glory—in short, all of the progress of modern life. It is also his chance for revenge, “to get one up on the people who’d paid scant attention to him,” those who laughed at his friendship for the mad philosopher and for the philosopher’s homonymous dog (Chapter XV).

Rubião is unfamiliar with the complexities of the nourishing bourgeois lifestyle of the elite in Rio de Janeiro, unaware of stratagems
for upward social mobility, of Court intrigues, of all the nuances of modern behavior and the wiles of power. He is, therefore, easy prey for social climbers who pretend to be eager to introduce him to business and to politics, but who exploit his trust. Filled with romantic fantasies, Rubião falls madly in love with Sofia, who seduces and abandons him; unfamiliar with business, he delegates the management of his capital to Cristiano Palha, Sofia’s husband; aspiring to political power, he is deceived by Camacho. Confused and disillusioned, unprepared for the pretense and selfishness that are the rule in the elite circles he has so suddenly entered, Rubião slowly loses his way and breaks apart. He loses his moral bearings, his unity, his identity. Fragmented, the victim of “diverse and contrary sensations” (Chapter XLIX), he is stripped of his money, of his dreams of greatness, of his fantasies of love and power; he oscillates between bedazzlement and disenchantment, between excitement and boredom, between lust for power and delirious megalomania. He wanders joylessly through salons, down avenues, through the Chamber of Deputies; he takes refuge in dreams and seeks spiritual repose in the “glow of luxury” of his house, reading novels that describe “a noble and royal society” (Chapter LXXX). Bereft of ideas, like Madame Bovary he compensates by using imagination to escape reality and to reconstitute his lost unity of consciousness. Split in two, existing at the “extremes of heart and spirit” (Chapter XL), he shifts back and forth between madness and a certain lucidity. Abandoned by those who once besieged him with protests of friendship, Rubião is now reborn as the image of Quincas Borba, with all the philosopher’s eccentricity and his inheritance of madness—confirming the theory of Humanitism the philosopher devised. Finally, Rubião disappears from Rio de Janeiro and returns to Barbacena; sick and in rags, his only companion is the dog. There he dies insane, crowning himself like the Napoleon of his delusions: “He took hold of nothing, lifted up nothing, and put nothing on his head.” Going from nothingness to nothingness, Rubião brings the pitiful illusion of human destiny full circle, showing us “the laughter or the tears of men” (Chapters CC and CCI).

Such, in brief, are the plot and themes of
Quincas Borba
, a novel which is also a continuation of an earlier novel by Machado de Assis,
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
, in which the philosopher Quincas Borba also appears. It is a social, political, and philosophical satire; more precisely, it is an allegory of bourgeois modernization in late nineteenth-century Brazil. Superficially, it is a typical novel of the period, dealing with the topics of love, family, social life, and politics with all the usual plot lines. Its method of composition, however, displaces the clichés that appear in fictional narratives, a displacement that implies a critique of literature, of mimetic Naturalism, of the novels then in fashion. And, as allegory, it is a terrifying compendium of the asynchronisms inherent in nineteenth-century Brazilian efforts to adopt modern European mores and mechanisms.

Quincas Borba
, like life itself, “is made up strictly of four or five situations, which circumstances vary and multiply in people’s eyes” (Chapter CLXXXVII). The plot itself is simple; what matters is the nuancing of specific situations, of circumstances created by the “gulf. . . between the spirit and the heart” (Chapter II), by individual self-interest, by social competition, by politics and business. These circumstances create the so-called inner life, the alliance between love and money, the vicissitudes of power. Profit, the supreme value of “modern life,” however disguised as friendship, love, progress, social solidarity, nonetheless exposes the emptiness of imported and supposedly universal values, the falsity of modernity, and the illusory nature of the new bourgeois ideal of private life.

Quincas Borba
dramatizes the inadequacy of the historical novel, the naturalist novel, and the bildungsroman in the face of the loss of existential unity which is so obvious in the modern experience. Endorsing diversity, it proposes that compromise is the only way to deal with the loss of individual unity, the impossibility of mimesis, and the inviability of all organic systems, whether ethical, political, or artistic. This is the modern effect of the novel; going far beyond its portrait of the elites of the Brazilian Second Empire, it dramatizes the limitations of the human condition through the crisis of the novel itself as a genre.

Determined to remain an open, discontinuous and nonfinite narrative, this novel by Machado—like his other works—sets out to create an inventory of the forces set in action by imposed modernization, contrasting those forces with the still-active remnants of a previous world in which life was in harmony. Rubião’s illness—in contrast to Palha’s impassive single–mindedness, Sofia’s wiles, and Camacho’s guile—reveals the uncritical positivism of the modern era. In Rubião’s condition, we cannot discern the boundaries between the real and the ideal, between sanity and madness, between appearance and true value, between stagnation and progress.

Machado pushes language, our “poor human tongue” (Chapter XXVIII), to its limits, intensifying and transforming both symbolic structures and the fixed discourse of social life, playing language like an instrument. He explores the outer boundaries of language; he explodes the use of language as a mere representation of reality. He thus displaces both plot elements and metaphors, emphasizing their articulation; by creating a gap between sign and significance, he produces a vacuum of meaning which must be filled in by the reader, who is thereby brought into the text as an active participant. Machado thus redefines realism through a new balance between content and expression; this redefinition is alien to the Naturalist tradition.

As the narrator addresses the reader with feigned benevolence and describes the harshness of this new, modern world—a specific reference, in the Brazilian context, to the rise of capitalism—the narrator suggests that nothing changes in the reality he describes but that, rather, the change lies in how that reality is portrayed, a change that affects the reader’s perception. Sententiously enunciated maxims implying transcendent values are simultaneously displaced and devalued by the form in which they are enunciated. Irony and humor are precisely the tactics Machado uses to invert high moral principles, to emphasize the particular rather than the universal, to encourage the reader to laugh at the pomposity of dogmatic ideas and opinions.

Modernity is central to
Quincas Borba
. Through allegorical representation, the novel reveals the process which had created a
“modern” reality; beneath the surface of that reality, nonetheless, the old Brazil—its economy based on large landholding, its society embracing the values of nineteenth-century liberalism—can still be seen in the structures of mutual obligation and compromise which have replaced patriarchal authority.
¹
Brazil’s rush to adopt the ideals of the Enlightenment, while producing the charm of an ornamental culture like that of Europe, nonetheless somehow magically ignored an ideology still based upon personal favor and upon slavery. An uncritical, Positivist belief in progress, which translated into a mercantilist view of the production of ideas, of patterns of behavior, and of emotions, disguised the fact that social inequality and the profit motive were the driving forces behind the new social order. None of this escapes Machado, however. In love, friendship, and family relationships, compromise in fact simply disguises domination, imposes equilibrium, and promotes social status and its privileges. Machado skewers the formal representation of egalitarianism, both in the actions of his characters and in the parody of Positivism and of Darwinian Evolutionism that is found in the theory of Humanitism—expounded by Quincas Borba and made flesh in Rubião’s experiences.

Equally central to the text is Machado’s narrative strategy. Here, the novelist’s technical solution is unique in Brazilian literature, but is linked to other challenges to the bourgeoisie from Sterne to Flaubert. Machado’s novel is crafted with intellectual rigor as an open text. His search for exactly the right word and his use of calculated effects go hand in hand with his exploration of ways to pare down his narrative and to muddle its form, mixing and subverting such standard styles and forms of representation as classical elegance, romantic sentimentality, and naturalistic description.
²
Irony, humor, the grotesque, parody, and allegory combine to distance the reader from content and form alike. Moreover, that reader is also required to participate in deciphering the narrative—not as a spectator-receiver and readerconsumer of romances, but as a producer. In this sense, the openness of Machado’s narrative implies the sort of open-endedness typical of the twentieth–century novel.

Quincas Borba’s
double modernity, then, is fundamentally structural in nature. Machado’s skeptical and ironic portrayal of an enlightened elite’s integration into modernity—whether in business, in politics, in the press, or in fashion—represents the optimistic faith in progress of a bourgeoisie which nonetheless still enjoyed the privileges, status, and honors which proximity to the Imperial Court could provide. Machado violently reduces this to a personal level, using several characters as emblems of the appeal of modernization’s promises and, simultaneously, of the imitative character of changes in Brazilian society and the anachronistic nature of that society’s disorder. One of the central themes of the novel, therefore, is moral and political compromise as a means, in formal terms, of creating unity in the face of inequality. But this reductionism is also functional,
³
in that it is also manifest in the text’s intertextuality and visible in the creative process of reading.

Rejecting both the pessimism of Naturalism and the sensibility of the Romantics, Machado articulates a very personal realism that resists easy interpretations based on psychological projection and identification with characters or on the establishment of pathologies and predetermined traits—elements typical of the novels of his time. Cleverly and with great irony, Machado exploits his contemporaries’ taste for intrigue and cultural ornamentation, turning that taste against the reader. He demands from the reader a different sort of reading, a reading of what is hidden in the narrative—a narrative in which his characters’ lack of consistency is the objective correlative of his critique of verisimilitude.
⁴
Interrupting the narrative flow, reshuffling the chronology, and changing the focus of the text from one character to another, he makes it impossible for the reader simply to follow the plot: reading, as a result, is no longer an automatic process.

The double discourse of Machado’s novel implies a negation of the legitimacy of systems and fixed values, of social territories and identities. Given that “the landscape depends upon the point of view” (Chapter XVIII), the narrative denies the universality of enlightened reason, a central value of the nascent urban and commercial bourgeoisie and one which was expressed in individualism,
in the belief in progress typical of liberal political speeches about slavery and republicanism, and, above all, in the concept of bourgeois individualism.