Raymond Federman | Smiles on Washington Square / 1995 || Two Twofold Vibration / 2000

returning to the closet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Raymond Federman Smiles on Washington Square (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995)

Raymond Federman The Twofold Vibration (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2000)

Raymond Federman "Reflections on Ways to Improve Death"

 

On Tuesday, October 6, 2009, Raymond Federman died in his San Diego home at the age of 81.

     I published—or more correctly, I republished—two books by Ray, The Twofold Vibration in 2000, a fiction first published in 1982 by Indiana University Press, and, six years earlier on Sun & Moon, Smiles of Washington Square, first published by Thunder's Mouth Press in 1985.

  

      I seem to have known Ray (who preferred to be called Raymond, but who I knew as Ray) forever. Long before I met him, I had read his criticism, Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow, and referred to it extensively in my PhD dissertation of 1979. Ray seemed to me one of the few critics of the time who had attempted to do what I myself was trying to accomplish, to define the differences between modernist and non-modernist (narrowly referred as postmodern) fiction. Like Ray, I saw its roots from the beginning of the 20th century, from Gertrude Stein on, and I wanted to create a kind of handbook which would help people see its different approaches to voice, character, place, theme, and, most of all, form.

    I think I must have first met him in the flesh—and the words "in the flesh" are important when describing Ray because he is so very much larger than life—in the early 1980s, when I began distributing Fiction Collective and other small presses along with my own Sun & Moon Press. I had found a small band of independent sales representatives to sell these and my own books across the country, and each season I would meet with them, describing the new titles, in New York.

    Ray, whose important fiction Take It or Leave It was published by the Fiction Collective, was a member of that group, and he and others wanted to meet with my representatives to sell their own titles. The art of describing new works to sales people who have hundreds of books to represent each season is a difficult one, which I felt I had mastered. Accordingly, I tried to dissuade the Fiction Collective authors from coming to speak with my representatives, but they were insistent. Ray, along with Russell Banks and Jonathan Baumbach (yes, the father of Noah Baumbach played by Jeff Daniels in the film The Squid and the Whale)—all sublime egoists, each capable of dominating any conversation—showed up late to the meeting and took so much time describing their three new titles that my reps insisted that they would never see them again! I was, accordingly, put in the difficult position of scolding the three, but two of them, at least, Ray and Russell remained lifetime friends.

     That is not to say that I wasn't a bit taken back by Ray's dynamic personality. Indeed, in his unpredictable enthusiasms, directed mostly toward his own writing projects and, later, his understandable delight with the French and German attention to his writing, along with his winking sexual innuendos about women, sometimes irritated me and even, on occasion, scared me a little. I liked him enormously, but on occasional he was not where you thought he was. As one of his own characters describes "the old man" in The Twofold Vibration (clearly a mirror image of the narrator, Federman):

 

                yes, that's how our old man was, so unpredictable, so changeable,

                and so careless with his own life, despondent one day, hopeful the

                next, always more interested in the process than finalities....not an

                easy man to deal with

 

      And then there was his voice, with a French accent, of course, but seemingly also from another time and place. As French fiction writer Jean Frémon once told me, "When I met Raymond Federman I could not believe what I was hearing. It was a voice from another time. Only a small neighborhood in Paris spoke French that way, the way Maurice Chevalier had spoken and sung, and it has long disappeared. I asked him, my God, where did you get that accent? He told me his story, how as young boy he was hidden away from the Nazis in a closet. And when he finally came out, that was the way he would remain the rest of his life, since by the end of the War he had escaped to the US, joining the Army."

     Federman's family, his mother, father and, sisters were sent to Auschwitz, where they died.

     When I visited SUNY-Buffalo several years later, on tour with fellow poet Rae Armantrout, we dined with Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, and the Federmans, Ray and his wife Erica, at a very pleasant Italian restaurant. On our way home, after having left the Federmans and Susan, the two of us chuckled to ourselves about Ray's grandiose manner, I adding my reservations about the man. Charles quickly interrupted, "How else might you expect him to be, given the life he has led, his childhood, the condition of creating several new beings? He had no choice but to become a series of alternating voices."

      I was embarrassed, and realized the truth of what Charles had said. To be fair, moroever, Ray has never denied the forcefulness and energy of his own being. In fact, he celebrates it, just as he celebrates a world in which all the action is placed on something in process without ever coming to fruition. He writes what he calls "pre-texts," texts that exist before any happening; and, in that respect, his work is about potentiality more than plotted events, the writing existing as a potential for changes not only in the future but the past.

      Smiles on Washington Square, for example, is the story of a chance meeting between a poor, immigrant American Moinous (one of Federman's regular stand-ins for himself) and a New England born, slightly order sophisticate, Sucette (who shares some of Erica's qualities). The two meet, but say nothing, only smiling at one another. The rest of the tale is a series of possibilities for their future encounter(s) and relationship, all of which entail a great deal of patient waiting and outright frustration for Moinous. Their relationship, in this non-existent reality (which is, at its heart, what all fiction is about), is a touching, even romantic tale, as these two opposites gradually reveal themselves before the inevitable breakup.

     This work is perhaps Federman's closest in tone to his friend Samuel Beckett. For here, the major character, like many of Beckett's tragic clowns, is an insecure, lonely, and despairing figure who bluffs his way through life. Like Federman, he has lived in the protective closet before sneaking out to enter—barefoot, armored only by an outsized overcoat—a world of excitement and danger, a tyrannical innocent ("A typical bull with his feet on the ground and his head in the clouds who struggles constantly to conquer vanity and indolence") in a world he can never completely comprehend.

      In Federman's futurist fiction, The Twofold Vibration, his friends Moinous and Namredef (Federman spelled backwards) attempt to uncover what "the old man" has done to be sent to the space colonies along with other undesirables on the eve of the new Millennium. To Federman, the writer, they tell the story of their friendship and as much as they know about "the old man's life," but have no clue, in this comic Kafkaesque tale, what his criminal acts have consisted of.

      Like Ray, "the old man" was been hidden in a closet, and to this part of his own story, he adds other tales, how he was later arrested and sent to the camps, escaping from his railway car at the stop to eat potatoes in another train car that had paused alongside them. More stories emerge, an brief involvement in radical politics, a short affair with a Jane Fonda-like movie star, and travels across the US and Europe, including a visit to a concentration camp, encompassing excesses and suffering, boisterous outbursts of philosophical thoughts and deep retreats into fear and doubt. His famed "Voice in the Closet" screed was to have been at the center of this work, but was rejected by Indiana University Press' editors.

     Through it all, Federman is represented to his reading audience as outsized, a being at once affable and slightly embarrassing. Yet his friends—and that might include any sympathetic reader—can find nothing in his past so terrible that it might result in his being sent into outer space for what, most believe, is certain death.

      The search for his unknown crime is played out almost like a mystery tale, but, as usual in Federman's works, no ending seems appropriate. As the thousands of soon-to-be expelled individuals are gathered in a large room, Moinous and Namredef are there to see their friend off. "The old man" appears reposed, even resigned, finally ready for his fate. One by one the names are called, the prisoners taken on board and their families sent off, until only "the old man" remains. The shuttle is about to be sent into space without him! What has happened? his colleagues wonder. "BUT WHAT ABOUT ME, WHAT ABOUT ME," the old man cries out, striking his chest with his hand. He has been put back into the closet a second time. The snake has swallowed its own tail; the past has become the future, a twofold vibration. The survivor without a clue how to survive is left to start his struggle all over again.

     Now, finally, Ray has been removed from that closet, that coffin-like precursor of death, forever. He has joined the dead by giving up his voice. For us still here, still trapped in each of our personal closets, so to speak, we can only, like "the old man," become lonely and forlorn. We miss that larger than life wise fool so very desperately. And, gathering today, we need to speak of our great emptiness, to share it with others. As Ray himself wrote some time before his death, however, in the humorous and profound short essay, "Reflections on Ways to Improve Death":

 

               The fact that Federman cannot say I am dead. The fact of being unable to speak

               one's death is the supreme category which abolishes all the others. It is the ultimate

               category, the category of the unspeakability of death. Whether one dies in bed, dies

               in one's books, dies with one's boots on, dies on the vine, dies in harness, dies

               prematurely or in one's sleep, dies in a gas chamber, dies while making love to

               one's lover, when all is done and said, that is the category of death that has

               reached total improvement because it can no longer be spoken.

 

               Language vanishes into death, and death vanishes into silence. Or is it, death

               vanishes into language, and language into silence?

 

 

Los Angeles, January 9, 2010

Reprinted from Sibila [Brazil] (February 2010)

Christopher MIddleton | Loose Cannons: Selected Prose / 2014

the dissipating poem

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christopher Middleton Loose Cannons: Selected Prose (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014)

 

In his brief Prologue to this new selection of Middleton’s significant contributions of literature, the writer argues that Loose Cannons should be recognized as a short prose work different from both the short story and the prose poem—elements of which these works outwardly share. Alluding to the writings of John Earle, Ben Jonson, Pascal, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Franz Kafka, and Kenneth Patchen (Borges and Robert Walser also come to mind), British writer and German translator Middleton suggests that his work belongs to a genre that displays “a resistance to the tendency of written prose to prolong itself, to expand.” For him, his writing process relates to what he calls an “antigram,” “a variety of imaginative writing which revolts against and may reverse the programmatic.” What interests him, he makes clear, is “something not-said, a hiatus, a vestige of mystery,” as opposed, presumably, to prose fiction’s thrust to delineate meaning through accumulation, if nothing else.

     “The antigram calls for (and should arouse),” Middleton asserts, “the most scrupulous thrift, panache, and refinement in writing as such.”

      As a lover of genres, I’m always willing to accept the notion that an author is attempting to mine new territory, is exploring boundaries of what we think we know or, more importantly, how we read something that, simply because of its surface appearance, we think we recognize but does not necessarily conform to what we have experienced in the past. Any knowledgeable reader can cite numerous instances of significant authors’ works being dismissed simply because they didn’t seem to fit into the confines of more normative perceptions of a particular genre. I have often repeated in these My Year volumes just such occurrences in connection with writings by Djuna Barnes, Wyndham Lewis, and numerous others. And even as the publisher of two books from which nine of these 33 prose works were selected—In the Mirror of the Eighth King (1999) and Depictions of Blaff (2010)—I must admit that I originally had difficulty, despite my immediate appreciation of the writing, defining their genres. The works of the former volume I simply ascribed to be very personal prose meditations, and the works of Depictions of Blaff I suggested to myself and to others as being an unusual kind of short prose fiction. And I must admit that rereading those works in the context of the others, I more thoroughly enjoyed them as being cryptic and mysterious prose works with no narrative solution to their meanings.

     Middleton is also one of the well-read and informed academics (without being an academic writer) I know, and some of his remarkable prose works read somewhat like satires of pedants discoursing on esoteric information—a bit like Raymond Queneau’s OULIPO-inspired writings—ramblings of a charming madman. Certainly all of the Blaff works might fall into that category, as well as pieces such as “From the Alexandria Library Gazette,” “Manuscript in a Lead Casket,” the frightfully futuristic “A Memorial to Room-Collectors,” and “The Turkish Rooftops.”

     Other works focus their attention on intense observation, revealing what is clearly Middleton’s art-critical facilities, often featuring a work or a series of works of art—prose works such as “Louis Moillon’s Apricots (1635),”  “The Execution of Maximilian,” “Le Déjeuner,” “A Polka in the Evening of Time,” or, on a more enigmatic  level, often involving what is not seen or is only somewhat visible in “Balzac’s Face” and “The Gaze of the Turkish Mona Lisa.”

      Still others appear almost to be meditations on history or, more specifically, the possibilities of history or, at least, recreating what might soon become history: “The Birth of a Smile,” “A Bachelor,” “Nine Biplanes,” “Or Else,” “Cliff’s Dwarf,” and “In the Mirror of the Eighth King,”

     But all do share what the Introducer of this work, August Kleinzahler, describes as forces of that are “subversive” and “ludic,” “liminal” and “disruptive,” in favor of any pre-conceived or determinative experience. Time and again, what might at first seem narrative, is transformed through metaphor into an animistic or even spiritual moment which one might describe as dissipating any plot- or character-based evocation. Although “Nine Biplanes,” for example begins with what seems to be a very specific time and narrator, an “I” located in 1940, the author redirects the reader’s attention throughout until what began as a concrete image has been miraculously transformed into a grotesquely unseen world, invisible from the eyes of the work’s original seemingly narrative voice. The work begins:

 

                    Summer 1940: I opened the double glass front door of the rambling

                    country mansion, school, and saw nine biplanes flying low, in close

                    formation, and slow; the lower edge of what I saw is a ruffled green

                    mass of trees.

 

What immediately declares itself to be a story in which any seasoned reader can predict will be a tale of the discovery of evil in an seemingly innocent world, a tale of gradual recognition of the child-like narrator that within the “beauty” of what he first excitingly glimpses, there is all the horror of destructive hate. In a sense, Middleton’s prose work, indeed, is about just such issues, but the way he reveals that is radically different from what we might expect. By constantly shifting viewpoints after that introductory paragraph to other scenes within the school, moving in and out of different adult and child perspectives, and by placing events is a shifting time that jumps from place to place—from Hué, An Loc, Barcelona, Norfolk, a French road, a certain Moscow elevator in 1937, etc.—Middleton pulls us out of a limited here and now to a surrealist perspective that questions our very assumptions. Yes, by work’s end, we do indeed encounter an evil world, but it surely is not the like one we first expected:

 

                    A child, instead of looking downward, now looks outward, and still

                    cannot awake, the inability to awake being, like an arm’s reach or

                    the tilting of a head, part of his condition. With hacked-off hands he

                    constructs for himself someone else, old, scribbling. Amid the

                    droning clatter of the motors, a bell of pink fire suddenly sounds.

                    …he listens to the flying metal blare and does not see the girl’s head

                    rolling across the gravel to his toecaps.

 

As if this brutal image—all the more horrific because it goes unnoticed—were not enough, Middleton moves away from the purely visual human-based perceptions, to the aural and aromatic sensations of the now horrific landscape overseen by the animals who, with the destruction of human beings, continue to inhabit it alone:

 

                    The sounds are people running in plimsolls, knock of the red leather

                    ball on the willow cricket bat. A smell of linseed oil in the thatched

                    pavilion. But the pilot’s head is wrapped in leather: the pilots are

                    going to knock the Germans for six, if they can find them, behind

                    the pavilion, between the pavilion and the woods, where you could

                    hear the cock pheasant scream before any thunderstorm, or, in the

                    evening twilight, quietly see rabbits feeding, their ears laid back along

                    their little skulls.

 

 I think no series of passages can better depict what Middleton, himself, has characterized of his work as being “the animular miniaturism of short prose.” He continues, apropos the work described above, “In the pregnancy of these antigrams, a naïve attention of curiosities of nature, as to outlandish freaks of behavior…has been interiorized and subtilized into crystalline intelligence fathoming its language at outer limits of the imaginable.”

     Accordingly, I’ll gladly go along with Middleton’s definitions of his own writing. Call these works “antigrams” if you want, a stunningly original genre that I hope others might emulate.

     Yet, I can’t help feeling that part of the author’s insistence on our refraining from describing these works as “short short narratives” or “prose poems” has to do with Middleton’s somewhat old fashioned notions of the borders between prose and poetry. I’d be willing to describe all of Middleton’s writings, just like those of Gertrude Stein, as being variations of poetic expression. For it is, as Kleinzahler perhaps unintentionally argues, Middleton’s imaginatively lyrical approach to experience (what Kleinzahler calls the author’s “primal and unpredictable sources of lyrical expression”) that most characterizes his art, whether it be these short “prose”-oriented works or his more straight-forward “poems.” several volumes of which Middleton has published described as such.

     One cannot read the works of Serpentine, for example, without recognizing just how completely immersed in the linguistic as opposed to the narrative his writing is. The opening paragraph from “This Is Lavender,” for example, reads:

 

                This is lavender and how it grows large blue caterpillars run parallel

                up their slopes and down in convex furors never stop following con-

                tours a whole field of ripples flows in large blue caterpillars lavender

                caterpillars large and blue running and flowing up and down and

                whole blue ajoining fields are solid blue until you move and then the

                whole sold blue lavender field swishes open like a fan.

 

Another passage, this from his fractured fairy-tale, “From Earth Myriad Robed,” reads:

 

                Rope sole of a razouteur. Dust beaten out of it. A puff of dust beaten

                out of a rope sole in a small French hotel, old oak beams overhead. In

                the puff of dust, vestiges of a village dancing floor. A dancing floor in

                the dust in a land soaked in blood. The features of Elif: mop of tight

                black curls, dolphin eyebrows, immense dark eyes, small straight

                nose, her breath from lips parting. Elif in her satin dress, pale golden

                satin with a blue sash. And the pounding of the music, in the village

                dust, the puff of dust gone, Elif gone, into the smoke.

 

A moment later the female figure speaks in a language that might put the Russian Trans-rationalists to shame (after all, Middleton is also a brilliant translator):

 

                —Tais da efendim (so she said, standing near)

                    bu ghejeh

                    ti thelis ti theleis efendim

                    surieyebilir musunuz yakoondala

                   

                —oosa ana tanta asnula kyriye

                    ishmek ishki inghiliz tek ort poro

                    tek ort poro yabanchuh…ti theleis?

 

                    [This goes on for another half page and into the next.]

 

I’ll grant, there may be more Turkish and even other European root-words in here than I can fathom. But it is clear, nonetheless, as I previously argued for the so-called fiction writer, Ronald Firbank (see My Year 2012), that any meanings we glean from these passages arise not from rational recognition of the signs, but from an emotional and perhaps irrational sensations of its semantics.

     Perhaps there is no other work that better describes Middleton’s poetic aspirations in all this new collection than the “prose” piece he titles “A Postcript of the Great Poem of Time.” In this work he speaks of a poem just as he does of the “antigram,” as a kind of spore that combines with other spores to become globules, which then collide with others of their kind to briefly articulate a kind of “rotary syntax” (like sestinas, or anagrams, or even the “speech of the dead”). The poet’s “spores” bounce (creating rhythm), smell (like “coffee…pinewoods, the iodine sea-coast, cordite, and many smells that exist, like ghosts, only in the memory”), and voice themselves. But their most notable quality, like nearly all of this poet’s works, is their “trailing off,” their transformation into “snippets”—something close to what I described earlier as the sensation of the work dissipating into space:

 

                  Into each snippet, however, are built the outlines, now marked, now

                  fading, now gone again, of a waiting room. Over the heads of the

                  multitude inside, stiff in sedimentations or moving about as the

                  travellers strike their antiquated attitudes, the roof lifts majestically

                  and on every side the walls expand, roof and walls perform an

                  immense and constant inhalation, constantly (in the illusion of

                  this idiom, rotary or anagrammic) the space expands, the furniture

                  dwindles, and it is less and less like that any transport will ever

                  arrive, for the waiting room is coming to encompass, inescapably,

                  whatever journey might have imagined itself into these multitudi-

                  nous heads.

 

    Whether you want to describe such a work as a antigram or simply as a very effective poem, I don’t care, but I will certainly join the writer in that “waiting room” in order to encounter his work, as he puts it, “at random,” as I get ready to “pass it by reading again.”

 

Los Angeles, February 15, 2015

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (February 2015)

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis | Philosopher or Dog? (Quincas Borba) / 1954

the potatoes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Quincas Borba, translated from the Portuguese by Clotilde Wilson as Philosopher or Dog? (Quincas Borba) (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Noonday Press, 1954)

 

The major character of Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis’ great classic, Quincas Borba—translated into English as Philosopher or Dog?—is a kind of everyman, an innocent who is deluded and ultimately goes mad, but is far from being “dim-witted” as the book’s jacket describes him. Rubião has once been a director of a boy’s school, we are told, and has closed the school in order to care for a friend, Quincas Borba, a philosopher who is ailing. He comes under the influence of the philosopher in attempting to comprehend certain of his teachings, most notably Borba’s theories of “Humanitism” which maintain, among other things, that the major principle of life is humanity, a “unique, universal, eternal, common, indivisible and indestructible force that sums up the universe, and the universe is man.” As does Candide’s Pangloss, Borba, accordingly, argues in his circular logic that, given such a role, the human race necessarily must behave as it behaves, fighting for survival and dominance, even war being seen as a beneficial preservative.

    Although near death, Borba suddenly determines to travel from his home in Barbacena to Rio de Janeiro to take care of business affairs, leaving the care of his dog, whom Quincas Borba has named after himself, to Rubião. After several weeks, the friend receives a letter from the philosopher, wherein Borba claims to be Saint Augustine, and a week later the old man dies, willing his entire estate—along with the care of his dog—to his disciple.    

     Although Rubião may not thoroughly comprehend the teachings of the philosopher, I have chosen the word “disciple” because the meandering plot that follows makes it clear that the author is in some manner retelling the story of Quincas Borba—detailing his descent from sanity to lunacy—in the tales of Rubião and his adventures in the great capitol city that follow.

     Machado de Assis’ novel is nearly overstuffed with humanity representing, in one form or another, the principles of “Humanitism,” characters fighting for survival and dominance, most often at the one another’s expense. On the train to Rio, Rubião meets a young couple, the predominant figures in his series of adventures, an intelligent young man, Christiano de Almeida e Palha, and his young wife Sophia. Enchanted with the meek and quiet Sophia and her exuberant, young husband, Rubião readily tells them of his newfound wealth and reveals his plans. The man is so disarmingly innocent that Palha warns him not to tell his affairs to strangers: “Discretion and kind faces don’t always go together.”

     Indeed, they do not! For, although Rubião quickly makes friends with the couple, and as a regular visitor in their house, he is soon asked for loans of money, requests he is only too ready to grant. The seemingly shy woman is revealed as a flirtatious wife, fully aware of her own beauty and only too ready to use it in conquering the hearts of the males she encounters, including Rubião. In his innocence, however, he confuses cultural flirtatiousness with romance, and crosses the line by admitting his love to Sophia, who responds with distressed shock. The friendship between the couple and Rubião soon resumes, in part, because the young Palha is still in his debt. An even closer relationship soon develops as Rubião becomes a partner in Palha’s new importing business.

    Rubião has also made friends with Dr. Camacho, a politician/journalist whose politics seems to consist of being on the right side of every cause. He too is happy to consort with the new visitor to the city, particularly since Rubião is only too happy to fund his newspaper. Others avow friendship, rewarded with nightly gatherings at Rubião’s house with lavish meals and drink.

    Sophia attempts to marry her cousin, now living with her and Palha, to Rubião without success; ironically she is now courted at the dinner event by Carlos Maria, a young man far more handsome than Rubião, whose proclamations of love to Sophia are received far differently from the older man’s. But Carlos Maria, unlike the smitten Rubião, is not truly in love with anyone except himself; his marriage to Sophia’s cousin, Maria Benedicta, is perfect, for she has such low self-esteem that she is quite willing to serve as a submissive wife and accept his common outbursts of dissatisfaction with her and their life together.

     Meanwhile, Palha, who now serves as executor to Rubião’s finances, is increasingly impatient with the man’s readiness to give away his fortune, including gifts of jewelry to his own wife. As Palha becomes more and more successful—despite the fact that he has still not repaid his own debt to Rubião—he ends their partnership, perhaps so that he will not have share his own wealth. The nightly dinners at Rubião’s home continue, despite the fact that the host is often late or absent from the events. Just as Rubião has been misled in affairs of the heart with Sophia and others, so is he misled in politics by Camacho, who insists that Rubião will soon be elected to government office. In short, ideas of grandeur gradually expand in Rubião’s mind, as he begins gradually to lose his sense of perspective, harboring a suspicion that Quincas Borba, the philosopher, may actually reside in the dog for whom he has become the guardian.

    Numerous other characters come and go in Rubião’s increasingly frenetic life—figures who, like nearly all the Rio de Janeiro citizens the author presents, struggle for what Quincas Borba has described as “the potatoes” of life, not only the true necessities but what they mistakenly perceive as necessary for their pleasures—money, love, class, power. Is it any wonder that Rubião, who has been only generous and open in all his relationships, should also desire these things?

    Convinced he is Napoleon III, Rubião alternates between moments of sanity and utter lunacy, ultimately going along the streets greeting his imaginary subjects, followed by gangs of mocking children, including a young boy whose life he once saved from being overrun by a carriage. Given the behavior of the humans into which he has been thrown, Rubião, like the philosopher before him, becomes “someone else,” a being at war with the world about him.

    Now without money, Rubião has little to offer his former friends, who half-heartedly (the easily distracted and comically portrayed Dona Fernanda being, perhaps, the one exception) seek treatment for him; but as he comes close to being cured, Rubião determines to return to his old home in Barbacena, where the “fever” once more overcomes him. Although he has taken in by an old friend, he dies laughing: “To the victor, the potatoes!” The dog—or is he, after all, the true philosopher, himself seeking attention and love—dies three days later in the street.

    Machado de Assis’s brilliant satire is at once a loving acceptance of the condition of man, and a somewhat cynical view of mankind’s intentions. As the author, himself, explains the apparent contradiction: “The Southern Cross, which the beautiful Sophia would not gaze upon as Rubião begged her to do, is too high in the heavens to distinguish between man’s laughter and tears.”

 

 

Los Angeles, August 20, 2006

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (June 2009).