Quincas Borba

by Machado De Assis

  I would argue, however, that Machado’s allegory extends beyond the person of the Emperor to include the Empire itself. Machado interrupted the serialization of Quincas Borba several times, most significantly between July and November of 1889; the Empire fell on November 15 of that year. Machado appears to have realized that Pedro II’s rule was coming to an end and used these interruptions to make substantive changes in the text, changes that refocused the novel ever more closely on the Empire and allowed him to express, in carefully ambiguous ways, his central perception of that Empire: it was a shared national illusion, a vast and complex fictionalization of reality. I would argue, in addition, that Machado came to this view of the Empire as a fiction in the late 1870s and that this perception fundamentally shaped the great novels he produced after 1879.

  Machado, of course, was fundamentally right about the Empire. It was in many ways a fiction held together by its central character, Pedro II; the Emperor—a highly intelligent and learned man who impressed and charmed all those he met on his frequent trips abroad—was the “mysterious Prospero” who transformed Brazil into “a sublime masquerade”(Quincas Borba, Chapter LXXXII). The Empire’s title, chosen to emphasize the country’s physical size, was part of this masquerade, suggesting that Brazil’s rulers were more important than European kings and queens. Brazil was governed, in theory, by a parliamentary democracy modeled on that of Victorian England; as Machado’s description of Brazilian politics in Quincas Borba suggests, however, personal and regional alliances were far more important than ideology, and the elections—in which only a minuscule percentage of the population was eligible to participate—were overwhelmingly fraudulent.

  This sense of the fictive nature of the Empire liberated Machado the novelist. His earlier fictional texts provide clear evidence of his struggle to deal with the novel as a genre and with the larger question of what he called “ideas out of place,” that is, ideas Brazilians imported from Europe but which had absolutely nothing to do with Brazil’s reality. Deeply embedded within the plot structures of most of the nineteenth–century European novels he had read were social patterns—true love leading to marriage, upward mobility, the rise of the middle classes, for example—that were utterly alien to a society in which virtually all upper-class marriages were arranged and characterized by its rigidly immobile and hierarchical structure, without anything approaching a European bourgeoisie. After 1879, therefore, Machado stopped trying to be realistic in his plots and descriptions; he recognized that he was describing an apparent reality that was itself fundamentally fictional. Courtship and marriage were reduced to subplots acted out by relatively minor characters, and the central focus of his three greatest novels, including Quincas Borba, became adultery—symbolic, perhaps, of a society unfaithful to its own reality. These accounts of real or potential infidelity are presented by unreliable (that is, unfaithful) first-person and third-person narrators who refer repeatedly to the difficulties of textualizing reality and even question, in one way or another, the very existence of an objective reality.

  All of these elements can be found in Quincas Borba, particularly in the sections which deal with Rubião’s increasing inability to separate reality and fantasy and his consequent descent into madness. One of the first indications that fantasy is replacing reality—in Rubião’s mind as in Machado’s vision of the Empire—comes in Chapter LXXXI. Planning his wedding (although he does not yet, of course, have a bride), Rubião recalls the Emperor’s magnificent coach and the lesser but still splendid vehicles that followed that coach in royal processions; he would be happy to settle for one of the latter as his wedding coach, but the setting becomes increasingly imperial as he envisions the rest of the ceremony and the reception. This wedding fantasy is linked, by the Emperor’s carriage, to Rubião’s dream in Chapter CIX, the formal beginning of his vision of himself as Napoleon III. From that point on, Rubião’s fantasies become ever more specific and more destructive. At the same time, Machado carefully sets up a series of interlocking emblems of imperial pretension. The mad Rubião believes that he is Napoleon III, ruler of France’s Second Empire (1852–1870). Louis Napoleon, Napoleon I’s nephew, called himself Napoleon III, but he was surely a second-rate imitation of his glorious uncle, a real Emperor. The last link in this chain, implicitly, is Pedro II, ruler of a fictive Second Empire in the Americas.

  Rubião’s circular journey, like the text itself, begins and ends in the town of Barbacena, in the province of Minas Gerais. Despite his desperate efforts to adapt to life in Rio de Janeiro and his consequent madness, Rubião’s ultimate loyalty is to the real Brazil of the interior. Machado, however, chose Barbacena for specific and important reasons. In Chapter LXXXII, Rubião’s wedding dreams lead him to fantasies of titled nobility, and he selects a title for himself: the Marquis of Barbacena. However, another nobleman associated with Barbacena already existed in Brazilian history—the Viscount of Barbacena, colonial governor of the Province of Minas Gerais who, in 1789, smashed the potential conspiracy against Portuguese rule that is known as the “Inconndencia Mineira.” The accused leader of the conspiracy, the shadowy figure known as Tiradentes, was hanged and quartered in Rio in 1792. The official historiography of the Empire attributed Brazilian independence in 1822 entirely to the Portuguese royal family, but a popular mythology developed around the Inconfidencia and around Tiradentes. When Rubião returns to Barbacena, he wanders endlessly up and down Tiradentes Street, symbolically searching both for his own past and for the nation’s true history. Machado suggests, finally, that the crown of imperial Brazil, like the crown Rubião so carefully and lovingly places on his head at the end of the novel, is not real; it is not even a literary allusion (in this case, tcr the barber’s basin Don Quixote fantasizes as Mambrino’s helmet). Rather, the essence of the Empire—the world in which Machado spent most of his life—is its absolute, irreducible nothingness.

  The bitter intensity of this symbolic negation of the Empire leads us back to Araripe Junior’s other perception about Quincas Borba: his description of Rubião as “the stalking-horse for the rage of a philosopher hiding in the bushes.” Rage is, clearly, not too strong a term for Machado’s attitude toward the Empire. It is more difficult to ascertain the source of this virulent hostility. After all, Machado’s is one of the real success stories of imperial Brazil; his books sold well, a high-ranking government job provided financial security, and the Emperor rewarded him with membership in the elite Order of the Rose. Nonetheless, one very plausible explanation of the novelist’s rage can be found in Chapters XLIII through XLVIII, one of the defining moments of Quincas Borba.

  Rubião has just left a party at the Palhas’ house after quite violently declaring his love for Sofia, the wife of his host; this declaration is, in fact, the only forceful and fully conscious action Rubião ever takes. Other guests, Major Siqueira and his spinster daughter, Dona Tonica, do not witness the declaration, but they clearly understand what has taken place. Tonica goes home, bitter that one more potential suitor has fallen in love with another woman, and fantasizes about attacking Sofia—strangling her, ripping out her heart. Tonica represses this violence and turns to tears, but the narrator tells us that, just for an instant,“a tiny thread of Caligula,” the monstrous Roman emperor, ran through her soul.

  At the same time, Rubião walks down the hill to the center of town, debating what to do next: Should he be loyal to his friend Palha, or should he continue to pursue Sofia? Several horse-drawn cabs are waiting for passengers, and Rubião finds it hard to choose among them—an indecision that reflects his internal debate about his relationship with the Palhas. As the drivers call out to Rubião, Chapter XLVI restates one of Machado’s convictions: powers greater than ourselves, if they in fact exist, care nothing about our existence and our actions and can provide neither help nor guidance.

  As Chapter XLVII begins, Rubião does not consciously choose a cab; he simply gets into the closest one. As he tries to avoid thinking about the choice he must mak
e regarding Sofia, he suddenly remembers an incident from his youth. During a previous visit to Rio de Janeiro many years before, he came across a mob watching the execution of a black slave. While such scenes were commonplace in Rio in the nineteenth century, this is virtually the only description of a slave execution in Brazilian literature of the period; it is shocking today, but must have absolutely appalled Machado’s readers in its unexpected revelation of the darkest side of the nation’s life.

  Rubião had been alternately attracted and repulsed by the spectacle of the slave execution; he tried to leave, but his feet could not decide in which direction to move. The narrator overtly links Rubião’s past indecision to his uncertainty about which cab to pick and which path to choose with Sofia, and compares Rubião—the friend and disciple of Quincas Borba, a mad philosopher who declared himself the reincarnation of Saint Augustine—to Saint Alypius, Augustine’s closest friend and disciple; Alypius’s weakness, as Augustine describes it in the Confessions, was his love of bloody spectacles.5 Rubião stayed to watch the execution, but then fainted; he appears to lose consciousness in the present as well, suddenly awakened from his memories by the cab driver, who loudly praises his horse and insists that horses—and dogs—are almost human. This observation leads Rubião to embrace the possibility of the transmigration of souls: the soul of the philosopher Quincas Borba may now reside in the body of Quincas Borba the dog. Rubião is so obsessed with this possibility that he forgets to tell the cab driver where he lives.

  These chapters reveal a great deal about Machado’s view of the world in which he lived; that view, inevitably, was conditioned by the rage he must have felt, as a descendent of African slaves on his father’s side, at the continuation and omnipresence of slavery in Brazil. The impulse to violence, first, exists in even the meekest and gentlest humans; moral societies restrain that violence and channel it into acceptable outlets. Imperial Brazil, however, like Caligula’s Roman Empire of bloodthirsty circus entertainments, is founded upon the violence of slavery and depends upon that violence for its very existence. The fundamental immorality of Brazilian society, moreover, forces even its most decent citizens to confront painful and morally destructive choices. Educated Brazilians found themselves secretly embarrassed and offended by slavery but unprepared to accept the social and economic consequences of its abolition.

  The political system of the Empire that Machado describes and satirizes throughout this novel could not offer a solution, primarily because Pedro II was unable to resolve the dilemma in his own mind, at least until the late 188os. Pedro II, whose illustrious foreign friends implored him to abolish slavery, declared that he was personally opposed to the institution; at the same time, however, he was afraid that to end it would destroy both Brazil’s economy and his family’s rule. The first small step towards abolition, the timid and tentative “Law of the Free Womb,” freeing newborn slaves once they reached the age of twenty-one, was enacted in 1871—the year in which much of the action of Quincas Borba takes place. As he wrote the novel in the 188os, Machado was very much aware that the 1871 law had failed to accomplish even its minimal, temporizing aims.6 The nation’s inability to confront and resolve the issue had ensured the survival of the institution for another seventeen years and had revealed fundamental flaws in the Empire itself. The bifurcation and consequent inertia Rubião experienced at the slave execution parallel his inability, in the novel’s present, to choose between morality and his desire for Sofia; this bifurcation will slowly deepen into schizophrenia and lead inevitably to Rubião’s destruction. In the same way, the fall of the Empire—its glory reduced to the nothingness of a nonexistent crown—can be traced back to the divisive and destructive issue of slavery, an issue that made painfully clear the abyss between image and reality that was, for Machado, the essence of imperial Brazil.

  Araripe Júnior’s reading of Quincas Borba not only perceived Machado’s rage, but also described the novelist as “a philosopher hiding in the bushes,” that is, a philosopher who is not prepared to express his ideas openly and whose text is at least potentially a trap for the unwary. This seems, at first glance, a strange characterization; the third-person narrator of Quincas Borba talks openly, repeatedly, and at considerable length about philosophy. Furthermore, that narrator tells us that he is the creator of the Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, Machado’s 1881 novel in which the character of Quincas Borba the philosopher first appeared. We quite naturally presume, therefore, that the narrator and Machado de Assis are one and the same. We also presume, on the basis of our experience with various forms of narration, that an omniscient third-person narrator is a reliable guide to the characters and events described in the text.

  The narrator, however, is not Machado de Assis but one of the novelist’s fictional creations. The charm and serf-assurance of this chatty, irreverent, and sophisticated man-about-town both propel the narrative and guarantee its validity. The discourse and social attitudes of the narrator are very much those of the imperial elite; the philosophy the narrator expounds, while clearly a pastiche, nonetheless represents much of educated Brazilian thinking in the late nineteenth century, particularly in its justification of social and economic privilege.

  Quincas Borba the philosopher first propounded the theory of Humanitism in Machado’s Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, but gives his friend and disciple Rubião a more detailed explanation in the first chapters of Quincas Borba. The narrator later restates the theory through a parable of his own, the story of the poor woman’s hut and the rich man’s cigar (Chapter CXVII), and clearly implies that his entire narrative demonstrates the validity of Quincas Borba’s vision. Humanitism is an exaggerated fusion of Auguste Comte’s Positivism—with its belief in the inevitability of progress and the goodness of all things—and the application of theories of natural selection to the study of human society that is generally referred to as Social Darwinism. As the narrator constructs his text, we as readers are supposed to see Humanitism validated by the success of the winners (Palha and Carlos Maria in particular) and the failure of the losers (Major Siqueira, Dona Tonica, and, of course, Rubião, the most unfit character of all). Like Rubião, we are supposed to realize, by the last chapters of the text, that the winners do indeed get—and richly deserve—the potatoes. The Positivist component of Humanitism, moreover, preaches that Rubião’s destruction, like the death of Quincas Borba’s grandmother, is natural and inevitable and that we are not supposed to feel either pity or sorrow at the outcome of the text.

  Machado clearly did not accept the imported philosophies upon which Humanitism is based, but he chose to satirize their ideas rather than attack them directly. Machado, however, went beyond pastiche, using the structure of his text to demolish these rationalizations of injustice. The key here is the character of Machado’s narrator, since the validity of the text—and the validity of the philosophy that narrator insists is exemplified in his narrative—depend upon our willingness to believe him.

  The narrator, first, while enormously self-confident, is also extremely self-conscious about his enterprise. He addresses us directly, eager for our full attention and understanding, and frequently comments—both directly and through what can best be described as authorly parables—on the act of writing. He discusses his own text and his decision to use numbers rather than long titles for his chapters (CXII–CXIV); he contemplates the difference between events and written descriptions of those events in Camacho’s account of Rubião’s rescue of Deolindo (LXVII); he satirizes the editors and typographers upon whom writers, alas, depend (Chapters CXI and CXIX).

  Beyond this, the narrator constantly warns us, in an increasingly patronizing way, about the dangers of misreading; these warnings are issued to us directly or through exempla, such as Rubião’s misreading of the note that accompanies the strawberries. At the same time, the narrator’s discourse contains elements that appear to contradict his messages about the importance of accuracy and clarity. He does not seem able, for example, to decide
who we are and how he will treat us; he addresses us as female and as male, as singular and as plural, with both grammatical formality and familiarity. His discourse jumps from detailed descriptions to self-indulgent flights of fancy, from seriousness to sarcasm. Some of his explanations of character and of events seem entirely reasonable; others strike us as odd and incomplete.

  The narrator’s full betrayal of our trust occurs in the section that begins with Chapter LXIX and runs until Chapter CVI. We have already been presented with one possible adulterous relationship, that between the central female character in the text, Sofia, and Rubião. We believe, on the basis of what appears to be reasonable evidence, that Sofia is at least potentially unfaithful to her husband, but we have come to realize—if Rubião has not—that the affair is not going to take place. In this new section, the presumably omniscient narrator carefully and persuasively presents us with bits and pieces of quite plausible evidence which lead both us and Rubião to conclude that an adulterous relationship between Sofia and Carlos Maria has very probably been consummated. In Chapter CVI, however, the narrator condescendingly describes the reader as “disoriented” and a “wretch,” responsible, along with Rubião, for slandering two upstanding characters. Rubião believed because he misread and misinterpreted the unopened circular and the coachman’s tale; we are also dismissed as bad readers, since the narrator declares that the truth would have been evident, “had you read slowly.” The narrator, who has dealt a stacked deck to Rubião and to us, then gloatingly points out just how cleverly and effectively he misled us.7