Quincas Borba (Library of Latin America) Read Online Free PDF Page A

mirroring other individuals and circumstances.
    The ultimate example of this human quest for order is the created, knowable reality of the literary text. The singularity of
Quincas Borba
lies in its denial of the validity of the text as a version of reality; we are betrayed by the narrator in large measure because he so carefully sets up doublings that we instinctively want to accept: the real Machado and the narrator of
Quincas Borba;
Quincas Borba and Rubião; Rubião and Napoleon III; Quincas Borba the philosopher and Quincas Borba the dog; the Rubião–Sofia relationship and the Sofia-Carlos Maria relationship.
    Through the narrator’s betrayal, moreover, Machado betrays our expectations as readers and demands the unexpected of us. He presents us with the “tatters of reality” his narrator has stitched together into an ordered sequence, but the narrator’s evident unreliability invalidates that order and forces us to create our own reality from those tatters. A unitary explanation of events, imposed by a narrator or an author, gives way to chaos—a potentially infinite number of possible readers and of possible readings. And, finally, each of those readings may fail to capture an ultimately unknowable reality, since our human vision of our own lives, of the lives of others, of the world in which we live,is vague, fragmentary, and formless—just a bit more complex, perhaps, than “the ideas of a dog, a jumble of ideas” (Chapter XXVIII).
    —
David T. Haberly

NOTES
     
    1. Antônio Cândido,
Váries Escritos
(São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1970), p. 18.
    2. The chronology of the serialized version and the meaning of some of the changes are discussed by John Gledson,
Machado de Assis: Fícção e História
(Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1986) and by J. C. Kinnear,“Machado de Assis: To Believe or Not To Believe,”
Modern Language Review
, 71 (1976), 54–65.
    3. “Idéias e Sandices do Ignaro Rubião,” first published on Feb. 5, 1893, in the
Gazeta de Notícias
(Rio de Janeiro); in Araripe’s
Obra Crítica
, II (Rio de Janeiro, MEC, 1960), 309.
    4. John Gledson,
Machado de Assis: Fícção e História
and
The Deceptive Realism of Machado de Assis
(Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1984). For more general discussions of Machado’s attitude towards the Empire, see Raymundo Faoro,
Machado de Assis: A Pirâmide e o Trapézia
(São Paulo: Editora Nacional, 1976), and Roberto Schwarz,
Ao Vencedor as Batatas
(São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1977).
    5. Agustine’s
Confessions
, Book Six, chapters 7–9.
    6. For a discussion of Machado and the slavery question, see Gledson,
Deceptive Realism
, pp. 123–30.
    7. A more detailed analysis of the narrator’s betrayal can be found in Kinnear,“Machado de Assis”
    8. Josć Raimundo Maia Neto traces the influence of this form of skepticism in several of Machado’s novels in
Machado de Assis, the Brazilian Pyrrhonian
(West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1994).

QUINCAS BORBA
     

Prologue to the Third Edition
     
    T he second edition of this work sold out faster than the first. Here it is in the third with no changes except for certain typographical corrections, such as they were, and so few that even if they had been left in they would not have altered the meaning.
    An illustrious friend and confrére insisted that I follow this book up with another. “Along with
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
, from which this is derived, you should make a trilogy, and the Sofia from
Quincas Borba
will have the third part all to herself.” For some time I thought that it might be possible, but as I reread these pages now I say no. Sofia is here completely. To have continued her would have been repeating her, and that repetition would be a sin. I think this is how some have found fault with this and a few other books that I’ve gone about putting together, over time, in the silence of my life. There were voices, generous and strong, that defended me then; I’ve already thanked them