Quincas Borba

by Machado De Assis

  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.

  Machado forces us into uncharted territory, but he does not merely use the falsity of his characters as a device to demonstrate the duplicity of intention and action, of consciousness and imagination, of c
lass divisions and formal egalitarianism. Nor does he directly criticize power (in this, moreover, he is ambiguous, since he never offers any support for Republicanism or any criticism of the monarchy). His aim, rather, is a critique of all representations of reality in which systems, ideas, and emotions become dependent upon power and wealth. His strategy is modern; it is indirect. He uses technique to point out the inconsistencies of society and of art, forcing the reader down a slippery path that leads from the transcendent level of the symbol (which allows the sublimation of tension) towards a perception of the symptoms which indicate disorder. Machado’s use of diverse perspectives provides evidence of his efforts to reconstitute ideas which modern science—Positivism and Darwinism—and liberal ideology had declared obsolete, but which he viewed, in essentially conservative terms, as fundamental to the reconstruction of identity.

  Making the fulcrum of his narrative the contrast between Rubião’s loss of personal unity and the effective reunification of Palha and Sofia, Machado sets up an outline of modernization which exemplifies the negative consequences of his characters’ rationalizations. There are legitimizing motives and hidden interests in both the Palhas’ calculations and Rubião’s confusion. The couple’s lack of scruples and Rubião’s regrets both presuppose, albeit with very different expectations, the common basis of enlightened reason—individualism. There is method in his madness, insists the narrator, commenting on Rubião’s dream linking Sofia to the Empress Eugénie (Chapter CIX). There is logic in Rubião’s delusions and delirium, but reason succumbs in the face of the destruction of its categories: harmony, perfection, beauty, plenitude. His delirium and madness are counterweights to the imbalance between mind and heart, between nature and society, between consciousness and imagination. In Palha and Sofia, on the other hand, the equilibrium of life is restored, in moments of weakness, by pretense; their conflicts are sublimated in their mutual desire to get ahead in society. Antithesis merely serves to convey different attitudes toward a single fact; it dramatizes the coexistence, within modernity, of the eternal and the conditional. And the narrative itself is that drama—a stage filled with ruins.

  Thus a representational narrative designed for the reader of fashionable novels and a nonrepresentational narrative designed for an ideal reader are not mutually exclusive; both readers exist and coexist. These are the dimensions of Machado’s novels beginning with The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. That which cannot be represented is the true subject of Quincas Borba; it is the presence and presentation of a “reality” that is still under construction. Machado depicts a landscape which is at once determinate and indeterminate, depending upon the point of view from which that landscape is viewed. The narrowly focused eye of the reader of fashionable novels, a participant in the contemporary historical situation of nineteenth-century Brazil, views the events in the novel as a tableau of inequalities which form part of the melancholy spectacle of human existence. The cynical eye of the ideal reader, skeptical and perverse, sees what is happening from another angle entirely, forming associations among the signs that pass, however disguised, before it. The narrator indicates that certain states of being cannot be represented; those states make alternative interpretations possible and can only be described with an “I know not what,” a “How can I say?”—expressions that do not refer to something presumably ineffable and sublime, nor to the limitations of language; they refer, rather, to the insufficiency of any point of view which seeks universality. For Machado, the “necessary variety” that creates the “balance of life” and explains the “nature of human actions” excludes the total representation of experience.

  Through the allusive brilliance of his images Machado nonetheless creates for the reader a fictional totality that is constantly variable and deceptive. As a representation of reality, an allegory of power, the book is structured by reason; at the same time, it catalogues and critiques precisely the sort of rational, moral, and artistic categories that are distilled into propositions such as: “The best way to appreciate a whip is to have its handle in your hand,” or “To the victor, the potatoes” (Chapter XVIII). These categories are encoded as “symmetry and regularity” in terms of the “spiritual unity” of the individual and of the formal unity of the narrative.

  The action of Quincas Borba takes place from 1867 to 1871, a period marked by the institutional crisis of the Second Empire, by overwhelming enthusiasm for the idea of progress, and by the rise and fall of ministries and the regular rotation, in power, of Liberals and Conservatives (though the difference between these groups was far from clear). During the debates about abolition, about the Paraguayan War (1864–1870), and about republicanism, there was a search for political unity through the compromise of party interests; in this process, conflicts over issues were dampened by the personal and imperial prestige of Pedro II. The modernization that was under way was conservative in nature; the rural upper classes had weakened, and new leadership had emerged among the increasingly powerful commercial bourgeoisie, but in ideological terms the goals of these two groups were not in conflict. Power was primarily based on personal prestige, a prestige reinforced by the distribution of favors, rather than on accomplishment. Despite a series of crises that were the result of the power struggle between the provinces of the north and south, of the discontent of the armed forces, of spats between Church and State, of the shift in the focus of economic power from Northeastern sugar to the coffee plantations in the Paraiba Valley, institutional changes were reformist rather than revolutionary. The law ending the importation of slaves (1850) and the Law of the Free Womb (1871) met resistance in rural areas, already facing economic difficulties; one result was the start of efforts to replace slave labor with that of immigrants.

  The situation was complex. Modernization, propelled by currents of liberal ideas and policies from Europe and North America, brought about changes in the country’s physiognomy—there were railroads, and capital that had been tied up in the slave trade was now free to be invested in speculation and in business—but it did not fundamentally alter power relationships. The ideology of personal favor, the privileges of proximity to the Court, and social inequality were still very much in evidence. Nonetheless, something was happening, and abolition and the Proclamation of the Republic were just over the horizon. Two power centers were clearly visible: the army, strengthened by the Paraguayan War, and the press, the focus of liberal ideas.

  Playing with duality and incompleteness, Machado sketches the landscape of morality and history in terms of power relationships, picturing a world that is dissolving just as another is being formed. It is a landscape of ruins. As Freitas says of himself, although he wears a “smiling mask,” he is melancholy—“an architect of ruins” (Chapter XXX). Quincas Borba depicts the difficulties inherent in a moment of crisis, a moment in which the still active ruins of the past coexist with the ruins of an as yet incomplete present characterized by Brazil’s predatory modernization. The implacable process which leads to Rubião’s destruction is a portrait of this convergence of a dying age and an age that is still being born. This is also what happens in the narrative. The narrative pace begins to accelerate as madness takes control of Rubião. The character’s ruination is quickly accomplished with sudden cuts from one scene to the next, creating the allegory of the potatoes that Rubião’s downward trajectory is designed to demonstrate.

  Machado scatters representations of all of this throughout his text, capturing the interplay of ambition, vanity, self-interest, and, no less, the horrors of slavery, the pettiness of political solutions, and the abstract rationalizations that validated those solutions. The congruence between what happened within the family and in public salons, in political conversations and business deals, derived from a general inability to distinguish between appearance and ideals. Individuals moved from one sphere to the other without any trace of conflict; conflicts that did occur were simply repressed or were accepted implicitly. In either case, conflict was relegated to the small tyranni
es of private life.

  Thus the tableau Machado paints denies any positive effects of enlightened reason, which should have found expression in the separate spheres of religion, of science, of morality, and of art, but which, in Brazil, failed to produce any truly modern break with the past. The elites constructed, through compromise, an image of happy tranquillity. Belief in science and enthusiasm for progress—both of which were supposed to lead to control over nature and to the creation of just institutions—are denounced by Machado as illusions. The elite’s optimism is satirized because the concrete results of its actions belie its abstract ideals. Economic relationships based on slave labor make ludicrous the lovely ideas which serve to assuage the consciences of his self–deluding and social-climbing characters. In the tradition of the moralists, Machado reveals the outlines of a human nature that is monstrous, distilling a “poisoned” wisdom.5

  In his construction of Quincas Borba, Machado makes the anachronism of Brazilian modernization concrete by juxtaposing its fragments. Characters and situations are articulated through antithesis, more specifically through duality. Meaning does not flow directly from the description of characters, landscapes, and situations. The reader is frequently warned not to expect, in this narrative, what the avid consumption of other novels has led him or her to expect: “the analysis of our man’s mental operations” of the characters, since that would be “long and tedious” (Chapter CXIII). In Machado’s pairings—Quincas Borba as philosopher and dog, Quincas Borba and Rubião, Rubião and Sofia/Palha, Rubião and Camacho, Carlos Maria and Sofia, Carlos Maria and Maria Benedita, etc.—the gaps left by the novelist’s narrative leaps can only be filled in by the reader. The reader is not working to analyze characters and situations that are missing, but to find meaning in a constellation of scattered signs, like a hunter who has leapt back in time, like an investigating eye which, viewing everything anew, tries to put together fragments. The representation the reader confronts is one ordered not by reason, but by delirium, by madness, by the imagination.