Quincas Borba (Library of Latin America) (3 page)

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 make 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.
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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.
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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

As we come to realize that only one act of infidelity occurs in the text—the narrator’s betrayal of our trust—we cease to believe in the narrator
and
in the philosophy he is propounding. The narrator goes on to accuse us of being the sort of readers who need detailed chapter titles so that we can understand what is happening, or who claim to have read the text when we have only skimmed the titles (Chapter CXIII). Furthermore, the narrator increasingly ignores Rubião, with whom we have come to identify. We catch only an occasional glimpse of Rubião as he spirals downward to insanity and penury, the narrator, like Rubião’s faithless friends in Rio de Janeiro, is eager to move on to other, more interesting topics. Our frustration turns to shock in the final chapters of the novel; nothing in the text, we feel, has prepared us for the unexpected and miserable deaths of Rubião and Quincas Borba the dog—deaths to which the narrator insultingly suggests we may react with laughter.

Araripe Júnior was correct, then, in his perception that Machado was manipulating us, as readers, through his text; he was also correct in implying that Machado had his own philosophy—a philosophy very different from Humanitism. That philosophy, moreover, while expressed through the text of
Quincas Borba
, transcends the particular—the details of nineteenth-century Brazilian life and society upon which this introduction has necessarily focused. Rubião, despite some positive qualities and the affection Machado leads us to feel for him, is very much an antihero;
Quincas Borba
can usefully be read as an antinovel through which Machado sought to express a skepticism so absolute and universal that it approaches an antiphilosophy.

Unlike Quincas Borba the philosopher, Machado did not reject the existence of evil in the world; unlike Saint Augustine, the emblem of Quincas Borba’s final insanity, Machado did not believe that any external force—other than the pitiless and unknowable operations of blind chance—controls our lives for good or evil. As suggested by the constantly shifting quote from
Hamlet
, for Machado all of reality lies beyond human philosophizing. Machado’s friend Jose Verissimo described him, in a 1908 eulogy, as a Tyrrhenian—a believer in an extreme form of philosophical skepticism which holds that the truth is utterly unknowable and that for every possible theory of existence one can find an equally plausible but antithetical theory.
⁸
The only coherent position is to suspend belief—“When in doubt, abstain,” as Teofilo tries to put it in Chapter CXIX.

Any approach to reality other than pure skepticism is, for Machado, a denial of that reality and, implicitly, a form of insanity. Quincas Borba’s Humanitism, beyond its justification of the social order, represents a failed attempt to deny the ultimate reality of human existence, the inevitability of death; as the doctor points out to Rubião in Chapter IV, “philosophy is one thing and dying is another.” Machado’s skepticism, however, extends beyond philosophical explanations of reality. Any belief around which an individual organizes his or her life can easily become a destructive obsession—Camacho’s politics, Palha’s capitalism,
Sofia’s longing to be adored are just a few examples. And while Rubião never quite comprehends Quincas Borba’s grand theories, he has his own
philosophic
—here not the love of knowledge, but an obsession with Sofia the woman—that likewise leads to madness and to death.