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Before diving into today’s post, a quick thank-you to all of my subscribers. I’ve been at this now for almost a month, and I reached my 50th subscriber over the weekend. I refuse to say how many of them are related to me! Thanks for reading, and if you know others who might also enjoy From My Bookshelf, please share this with them.
Browsing the bookstore shelves, I came across one of those small, attractive paperbacks from Pushkin Press: The Looking-Glass: Essential Stories, by Machado de Assis. The name seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it. The back-cover flap came to my rescue. He was the author, so I read there, of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas.
Not that I’ve ever read Brás Cubas. Not yet. But I knew now where I’d heard the name Machado de Assis: on an episode of the excellent “Writ Large” podcast series, hosted by
. (The podcast series has unfortunately concluded, but episodes can still be found online.) I had come away from it thinking that de Assis (1839-1908) sounded interesting: the multilingual grandson of freed slaves and a government official who managed to become one of Brazil’s greatest writers on the side.So I decided to give The Looking-Glass a try. And am not entirely sure what I think. It contains ten stories—really, nine stories and one novella, since one of the ten, at 90 pages, is far longer than the others and too long for a short story. Most of them cast a detached, bemused eye upon human foibles, offering realistic social criticism spiced with an occasional touch of the fantastical. In “The Posthumous Portrait Gallery,” for instance, a universally beloved pillar of the community dies somewhat before his time. His nephew and five of his best friends, going through his papers, come across a journal full of “political and social observation, much philosophical reflection, [and] some stories about public men.” After the friends depart, planning to return the next day to read further in the impressive document, the nephew continues reading on his own. To his surprise, he discovers brief, caustic character sketches of all the friends—uncomfortably true-to-life portrayals by a man they thought their dear friend. When they return, the nephew sends them away again with rather lame excuses, and they depart lamenting, “Ah, so different from his uncle! Such a chasm between them! The inheritance has quite puffed him up!”
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De Assis is skilled at capturing the unpredictable rapidity with which people often change their minds, and their moods, for no good reason. In “The Fortune-Teller,” a man is having an affair with the wife of his best friend, and rumors begin to spread. When the friend summons him peremptorily to his home one day, he gradually becomes more and more certain that his friend must have discovered the truth. Perhaps he should even go armed in order to defend himself if necessary. Along the way he passes the home of a fortune-teller. Though he has sneered at the folly of fortune-telling in the past, he decides to go in and see what she has to say. After receiving her encouraging report, he continues on his way, now persuading himself that he was a fool to be concerned and has nothing to worry about. As quickly as he had come to fear for his life, he now grows sunnily optimistic. Without spoiling the story’s sudden ending, let’s just say that he ought to have stuck with his first instinct.
Similarly, in “The Loan,” a fellow hard on his luck stops by the office of a notary whom he knows very slightly, intending to request a substantial loan. When the notary turns him down, he requests a smaller amount, then a smaller, then a smaller, growing increasingly irritated. Finally the notary shows him his wallet, which contains only a small bill. “This is all I have,” he says. But he offers to share it, and his visitor accepts it, delighted—”not sadly, nor grudgingly, but smiling, exhilarated, as if he had just conquered Asia Minor.” He is happy, but he is also a fool.
These miniatures justify a characterization of de Assis supplied in a short recollection at the end of the book. Its author, Tristão da Cunha (the great-grandfather of the collection’s translator, Daniel Hahn) had known de Assis personally. He captures his tone more tellingly than I could:
His art is bitter. It is the serenity of the thinker consoling himself for life. A sceptic, his skepticism still did not make him turn towards it.
The ironic tone of these stories is not really one of affection or warmth.
The highlight of the collection, in my view, is the novella, “The Alienist” (evidently an old term for a psychiatrist). Published in 1882, it tells of a doctor who opens a mental hospital in a small Brazilian town. He is devoted to his scientific work, utterly intent on probing the causes of mental illness and learning the secrets of the mind. With support from the town council, he begins confining in his institute anyone who shows signs of mental imbalance. Unfortunately, all too many people display such signs. Soon the doctor has locked up in his hospital not only the obviously mad, but also many ordinary citizens whose “insanity” consists of excessive generosity, vanity, flattery, or other common weaknesses and vices.
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The outraged citizens revolt, enjoying brief success before being put down. Then the doctor makes a sudden and surprising change of course. Having confined about four-fifths of the population in his hospital, he has concluded that he must be misidentifying the true signs of madness. Mental imbalance is obviously the normal human condition; the truly insane must be those, instead, who exhibit no such signs. So he releases all of his patients and then begins confining the much smaller number who appear perfectly balanced: the honest, modest, and just. And he offers therapy designed to cure them and turn them back into normal human beings: temptations to turn the honest dishonest, the modest immodest, and the just unjust.
His therapy is so successful that he modifies his theory one last time. He decides that these patients’ apparent mental balance must have been merely an appearance. Instead of curing them, he has only revealed the imbalance that was lurking beneath the surface all along. This leads him nearly to despair, because it would mean that no one had been insane at all—which, if true, would mean that all his scientific labors had been in vain. Fortunately, he realizes that there is indeed one truly insane person in the town, someone perfectly balanced, with no weaknesses or imperfections. And he confines himself within his own hospital.
“The Alienist,” in addition to being quite funny, bears the marks of its historical context: increasing confidence in science, a desire to apply its techniques to social life, a growing interest in psychology, dreams of a “scientific” politics. But its themes are also surprisingly contemporary. We today frequently hear calls to let science drive our politics. Think of the coronavirus pandemic, for instance, or of climate policy. And of course we should certainly want our public policy to be informed by the best information science can provide.
Yet “The Alienist” reminds us, in its satirical way, that scientific knowledge, however advanced it is, and essential though it may be, cannot tell us what we should do. Those decisions remain, always, political and moral ones. They require knowledge not just of nature but also of human nature; prudence and good judgement; an ability to weigh and balance competing goods. The doctor is not the only foolish person in de Assis’s tale. Equally so—perhaps more so?—are the members of the town council and those other citizens who assume that because he is a skilled scientist, he must also be a wise man, and who thus abdicate their own responsibility for the public good.
“The Alienist” is well worth reading, as are a number of other stories in the volume, including the last one, “Midnight Mass,” often considered one of de Assis’s very best. Not all of the selections are equally strong, and I don’t know that I warmed to the author, exactly. But the book was sufficiently interesting and enjoyable that I may still get around to The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas one of these days.
Thanks for reading. See you later this week for another installment From My Bookshelf. (One last bonus image below!)
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