Quincas Borba (Library of Latin America) (40 page)

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 class 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 tyrannies 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.

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.