Quincas Borba (Library of Latin America) (2 page)

Machado’s major novels, including
Quincas Borba
(1891), often strike English–speaking readers as at once comfortably familiar and disquietingly alien. We recognize the narrative voice, discursive, descriptive, and often intrusive, as one we have encountered in British and French novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Machado, despite his relative isolation in a nation on the fringes of nineteenth–century Western culture, immersed himself in the European fictional tradition; Laurence Sterne was Machado’s favorite novelist and one of his primary models, but echoes of a great many other novelists can be found everywhere in his texts. In the case of
Quincas Borba
, for example,
Sofia owes a great deal to Emma Bovary. Because we are familiar with at least some of the European novels Machado relied upon to create his own fictions, we recognize both some of his basic plot elements—the quest for a socially suitable spouse and even, perhaps, a happy marriage; the struggle to move upwards in society or, at the very least, to hold on to status and respectability. Moreover, Machado’s characters play out their dramas surrounded by carefully described artifacts, almost all imported from Europe. Beyond this, Machado’s various narrators constantly refer to both major and minor figures from the whole sweep of European cultural history, reflecting the profound and remarkable knowledge of Classical and Renaissance literature of a self-educated Brazilian who never traveled more than a few hundred miles from Rio de Janeiro.

At the same time, there are many elements in Machado’s texts that fall considerably outside both the European cultural tradition and our own experiences and expectations as readers of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European fiction. To suggest but a few examples, the stars Machado’s characters contemplate, in moments of passion or despair, are the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere. In
Quincas Borba
, Sofia tends her roses—but outside the walls of her garden lies Brazilian nature in all its lush exoticism, a nature that has survived intact, in at least a few areas of the city, despite the nineteenth-century urbanization of Rio de Janeiro. Machado’s novels deal at some length with the politics and personalities of the Brazilian Empire, an Empire about which most English-speaking readers know very little. And while Cristiano Palha assures Rubião, in the first chapters of
Quincas Borba
, that Rio de Janeiro is fast becoming a South American Paris or London, it is impossible to read this novel without realizing that imperial Brazilian society, despite its architectural imitations and imported European artifacts, was very different indeed from that of nineteenth-century France or England. Many of the most striking differences do not appear overtly in the text, largely because Machado and his readers took them so much for granted; those differences—the oppressive heat, the tropical diseases, the filth and squalor of much of the
city, the omnipresent poverty, the African origins of the great majority of Rio’s population—can better be seen in contemporary photographs and in the narratives and drawings of European and North American visitors. But one absolutely essential difference does appear in
Quincas Borba
, and is here described more openly and in greater detail than in any of Machado’s other novels: while Rubião takes Cristiano Palha’s advice and hires European servants, hidden behind the kitchen door is Rubião’s black slave—symbolic of the hundreds of thousands of black slaves who served imperial Brazil until the abolition of slavery in 1888.

The alien quality of Machado’s fiction, however, extends beyond these differences in setting and social context into the nature of the text itself, as the novelist alters or ignores the ground rules of nineteenth-century European Realism. The stars are not simply a different set of heavenly bodies; they look back down at Machado’s characters and, sometimes, comment upon those characters. The European roses in Sofia’s garden converse with each other, discussing her character and actions. A major character in
Quincas Borba
is a dog of the same name, who may or may not be the reincarnation of a philosopher named Quincas Borba. The erudite narrator of the novel occasionally inverts or even perverts his references to the European classics, transforming them in bizarre ways; for example, a quote from
Hamlet
(“There are more things on heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”) appears in several whimsical and almost incomprehensible variations. The voice of that narrator, moreover, is often extreme, referring to the novel’s characters—and to us, his readers—with sarcasm and patronizing condescension. A good many of the very brief chapters into which the narrator’s text is divided do not appear to be directly related to the action; the narrator uses some of those chapters to reflect at some length upon the nature of his text, upon his defects as a narrator and our defects as readers, upon the problems inherent in any attempt to portray reality. Above all, careful readers of
Quincas Borba
come to realize that the novel’s third-person omniscient narrator is, like all of the narrators of Machado’s greatest novels, utterly unreliable.

Readers wishing to approach
Quincas Borba
entirely on its own terms, fully experiencing the text within the context of their own reactions—and, quoting Antônio Cândido again, “their own obsessions” —should stop here and go directly to Machado’s novel; Celso Favaretto’s Afterword and the rest of this Foreword can be read later. Those, on the other hand, who wish to first find out a bit more about the novel’s social and historical context, about its structure, and about a few possible interpretations of the text should read on—but should also be aware that any discussion of the novel necessarily gives away large chunks of the plot and that, further, in Machado’s fictional universe any attempt to construct a single interpretation of any phenomenon is
prima facie
evidence of mental instability.

*      *      *

QUINCAS BORBA
WAS SERIALIZED
in a women’s magazine,
A Estaçāo
, between 1886 and 1891, but was considerably revised before its final publication in 1891.
²
We can only guess at what contemporary Brazilian readers made of the text, for one of the curiosities of Machado’s career is that his major novels, which sold very well and established his reputation as Brazil’s greatest writer, were almost never reviewed. Two phrases in one review of
Quincas Borba
, by Tristão de Alencar Araripe Júnior, nonetheless suggest that at least a few of Machado’s readers did read the novel in ways not dissimilar from modern interpretations of the text. Araripe Júnior, first, posed a basic question about Rubião, the novel’s central figure: “Can anyone say,” he asked, “that this character is not Brazil?” Secondly, Araripe Jünior described Rubião as “the stalking–horse for the rage of a philosopher hiding in the bushes.”
³

Let us turn first to the idea, suggested by Araripe’s rhetorical question, of
Quincãs Borba
as allegory. A modern critic, John Gledson, has argued that Rubião is an allegorical representation of Pedro II, ruler of Brazil from 1831 to 1889.
⁴
There is certainly considerable evidence within the text to support this view. For example, Rubião’s full name, Pedro Rubião de Alvarenga, is very close to the Emperor’s given name, Pedro de Alcântara. Rubião
first meets the Palhas on the Pedro Segundo Railway, and his later fantasies that he is Napoleon III of France draw heavily upon real or imagined details of life in the Brazilian Court and can be read as a carefully oblique attack on Pedro II’s pretensions to imperial status.

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
.