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.

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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.