A Unique Example of Flat-Out Genius
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By Federico Perelmuter
How things come about is how they end. Little changes, even if much happens along the way. What is had to be; what is not never should have been. Put bluntly: “To the winner, the potatoes!”
Thus claims the doctrine of Humanitism, proposed by Quincas Borba, the old, mad philosopher who first appears in Machado de Assis’s 1881 novel, Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, and later gets a semi-titular yet peripheral turn in Quincas Borba, serialized in the late 1880s and published in edited form in 1891. Semi-titular, in fact, because we never learn whether the novel is titled after the philosopher or his dog, whom he named after himself in affirmation of the human spirit’s universality.
Humanitism, as presented in the opening pages of Quincas Borba, posits a “single common, universal, eternal, indivisible and indestructible principle” of Humanitas, an ill-defined life force, at the center of the universe. It satirizes positivism’s Boolean reduction of the world into truth and nonsense and social Darwinism’s quasi-theological eugenicist naturalization of inequality. Quincas Borba explains Humanitism with an astonishing story:
Imagine for a moment a field of potatoes and two starving tribes. There are only enough potatoes to feed one tribe, which would thereby gain sufficient strength to cross the mountains and reach the other slope, where there is an abundance of potatoes. But if the two tribes divided the field of potatoes between them peacefully, there wouldn’t be enough to nourish both tribes sufficiently, and they would all die of starvation. Peace, in this case, is destruction; war is preservation. . . . To the vanquished, loathing or compassion; to the winner, the potatoes.
Alas, the philosopher himself soon returns to Humanitas, dying after his ill-advised journey from the small town of Barbacena, in the peripheral mining region of Minas Gerais, to Rio, then capital of imperial Brazil, where he “had certain matters to deal with.” Quincas Borba goes mad when in Rio and sends Rubião—his dumb-as-a-rock friend and assistant, and Quincas Borba’s real protagonist—a letter claiming to be Saint Augustine. Quincas Borba’s doctor, at this point none the wiser about Quincas’s health, never sees the letter. Rubião, who expects a small part of the wealthy philosopher’s inheritance, hides it, hoping to avoid madness-related challenges to the validity of Quincas’s will.
Shockingly, Quincas—perhaps in madness, perhaps not—leaves everything to Rubião: “all his goods and chattels, his houses in Rio, one in Barbacena, his slaves, as well as government bonds, shares in the Bank of Brazil and other establishments, jewelry, cash, books.” There is only one condition: “the heir must keep his poor dog Quincas Borba, a name he had bestowed on him as a token of his great affection.” The canine Quincas Borba will follow Rubião throughout the course of the novel, never evolving into a real character but always present and never treated quite well enough by his new owner, to whom he offers nothing but the utmost affection. What Rubião makes of his unearned inheritance—whether something can truly come of such providential deliverance—will be the novel’s critical center point.
Quincas Borba returned to English in July of this year after Gregory Rabassa first translated the novel in 1998. A commendable series of Machado translations, spearheaded by the illustrious Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson and published by Liveright over the past few years, also includes Bras Cubas, two tomes of short stories, and Dom Casmurro, another of Machado’s later novels. Jull Costa and Patterson prioritize readability and preserve the electricity of Machado’s jocund early modernism, which one hopes more readers will now become familiar with, while their introduction contextualizes the novel. Brazil’s collapsing monarchy and dying slave trade—it was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to free its slaves, in 1888—are critical context, not least because Machado, an abolitionist and himself descended from slaves, almost entirely refused to speak out publicly against slavery, though enslaved people appear in his fiction and are often granted a rare degree of subjectivity for the time and place. In perhaps their only questionable decision, Jull Costa and Patterson describe the War of the Triple Alliance—which pitted Paraguay against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, killing over half of Paraguay’s population and almost all its men—as the product of “an expansionist Paraguay.” Such a reuptake of nineteenth century anti-Paraguayan propaganda—encouraged by the United Kingdom, which supported the conflict in order to undermine Paraguay’s burgeoning industrial development and isolationism and keep South America dependent—is shocking, considering that historians often refer to the war as a genocide. That was probably the Brazilian perception of the war at the time, but a historical account coming a century and a half later should challenge that narrative.
Because the novel is set in the 1860s, as Brazil was beginning a slow transition from the parliamentary monarchy of Dom Pedro II—a possible analogue for Rubião—into a republic, inheritance and the circulation of wealth are central to Quincas Borba and the rest of Machado’s oeuvre. Because Brazil’s aristocracy had vanished by the time of the novel’s publication, Rubião’s desire for nobiliary status is humorous and absurd. Rubião proves incapable of aligning his desires—for recognition in the form of titles and prestige; for wealth; for celebrity and influence—with the extant paths for obtaining them at his time in history. He might be stupid; he may also simply exist out of sync with his historical present, not least because of his unfamiliarity with the ways of the wealthy.
Though Quincas Borba is not autobiographical, Machado’s own experiences as an outsider who climbed to the summit of Brazilian literary society—he was the first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters—likely informed his portrayal of country bumpkin Rubião’s ignorance of “high society” mores. Born in 1839 to a poor, mixed-race family, Machado mostly taught himself to read, devouring just about everything of note in no fewer than six languages. He began a career in newspapers as an adolescent that made him into an important intellectual by his early twenties. He soon took up a bureaucratic career and began publishing literature: first (poorly received) poetry, then a series of commercially successful but relatively mediocre Romantic novels. Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, written following the death of a dear friend, appeared when Machado was in his early forties. Experimentally narrated by a dead man, erudite and rich with wry, Tristram Shandy-esque humor, the novel rocketed Machado’s reputation to the heavens. His subsequent novels and stories—Quincas Borba, Dom Casmurro, Esau and Jacob, “Midnight Mass”—and assiduous newspaper presence solidified his standing as the preeminent Brazilian writer of his era and ours, a unique example of autodidacticism and flat-out genius.
Rubião, meanwhile, squanders his almost unbelievable fortune, perhaps partially because he quite simply did not earn it. Having potatoes doth not a victor make, it seems, a challenge to nineteenth-century realism’s “inheritance plot” a la Middlemarch or Jane Eyre, where marriage and inheritance were the gravitational centers around which plots turned. That inheritance inaugurates the plot instead of tying its loose threads at the end upends tradition, turns inheritance from divine interference in favor of class preservation into sheer good fortune. In Quincas Borba, inheritance is neither legitimate—Rubião inherits partly because he hid evidence of Quincas’s insanity, and pretty much accidentally—nor providential. The aristocracy is rotting alive, and Machado’s novel documents the process with exactitude.
Following his stroke of luck, Rubião decides to travel to Rio, where Quincas Borba had an expansive and beautiful mansion. On the train he meets Cristiano de Almeida e Palha (aka Palha) and Sofia, a young couple born into money. The ever-naive Rubião impulsively discloses his novel wealth. Palha at first appears an earnest, considerate man, warning Rubião: “Don’t go telling strangers. I’m grateful for the trust you have placed in me, but don’t take risks on a first meeting. Kind faces and discretion don’t always go together.” It is quickly clear that he has done this to keep away other suitors from his potential cash cow; he eventually assumes control of Rubião’s finances, though the once-poor man spends so foolishly that it is hard to entirely blame Palha for his fortune’s dissolution.
As months progress in the capital, a court of sycophants and losers assembles for every meal at Rubião’s mansion, and he begins funding a partisan newspaper. In an instant of instinctual valor, he rescues a child who was about to be hit by a carriage; the newspaper’s editor, a middling politician, writes an essay praising his bravery and gets Rubião’s financial backing. His generosity with money is remarkable, if ill-advised, and his political ambitions develop. Meanwhile, his romantic affairs are similarly foolhardy: Rubião believes that Palha’s wife, Sofia, displays a degree of romantic interest, though she quickly retreats when he makes a (brash and charmless) move. Palha and Sofia present Rubião with at least two suitable candidates for marriage—forever a path toward the kind of social legitimacy money cannot buy—but he is either too distracted or too enamored with himself to take much interest.
Madness like Quincas Borba’s begins to set into Rubião. A witty carriage driver—perhaps a stand-in for Machado—takes advantage of his evident idiocy to confirm an apparent affair between Sofia and another man that did not, in fact, transpire. Soon thereafter, after forcing his way into Sofia’s carriage and threatening to confirm yet another nonexistent affair to potential onlookers, his delusions begin. Like Quincas Borba with Saint Augustine, so Rubião is with Napoleon III. Inheritance in full, or perhaps the cost of mismanaged, outrageous wealth.
Or, perhaps, Rubião’s madness is Humanitas’s hunger returning. Restoring ironic balance to existence, devouring Rubião’s few outstanding potatoes, and recovering a preexisting aristocratic order that will, itself, soon wither away. Rubião, Quincas Borba in tow, flees the sanatorium where Palha had him committed for treatment, attempting to return to his hometown. Furious storms greet them upon arrival, and they continue walking in sheer sodden misery, which will ultimately kill them both. Machado writes: “He died neither a subject nor vanquished. Before his death, before the agony began, he placed a crown on his head—at least it wasn’t an old hat or a basin, an illusion that the onlookers could actually touch. No, he picked up nothing, raised up nothing, and placed nothing on his head.”
From nothing to nothing; from no one to no one. How things come about is how they end. Little changes, even if much happens along the way. “To the winner, the potatoes!”
Federico Perelmuter is a writer. He lives in Buenos Aires.
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