The unreliable narrator

"To the Reader"-- signed by Bras Cubas – says it was written "with the pen of mirth and the ink of melancholy." One of the words that kept circulating in the #APSTogether discussions of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas was “unreliable narrator.”

In fiction, the unreliable narrator conventionally offers a first-person viewpoint whose version of the story cannot be trusted. Since the first-person narrator is our filter—the measure by which we judge the verity of the account—we tend to expect “truth” from this speaker. When we talk about unreliable narrators, we are generally referring to their deceptive account of the truth, and this adds suspense and tension to the story.

I am fascinated by how sincerity can be modulated in narration, especially where unreliable narrators influence our reading. In #APSTogether discussion, the unreliable narrator was assumed—and readers gave their thoughts on how Machado used the narrator, or what he intended to do by using an unreliable narrator.

Translator Flora Thomson-DeVeaux focused on the unreliable narrator as a man watching himself watch a woman, and she noted that something in that part of the translation “went haywire,” as the narrator is showing us his projections on to the woman rather than showing us the woman. On her view, everyone in the novel represents Bras Cubas in some sense, and the narrator is somehow aware of that.

“Sincerity” in context: Slavery and the Dungeon

The narrator knows what he is doing, I think, in digging his own grave. Or, it seems as if Machado helps Bras dig the grave of his meaningless existence with relish, adding to it the philosophical notions of social Darwinism that helped sustain economic hierarchies, including the based on slavery.

When Rohter brought up the word sincerity, I wondered whether (or how) that could be gauged, given the narrator’s commitment to representing the systems of slavery, status, and politics in Rio. Certainly the narrator stays true to his role as a dandy-like caricature of the nobility-aspiring class (Not "dandy," says Thomson-DeVeaux, but "pintolagrete", or man about town, as Grossman translated it.)

In “A Note on on the Calabouço,” Thomson-DeVeux offers insight into her meticulous translation, but also the systemic silences which characterized Machado’s time. She explains the translation of a single word—calabouco—to “Dungeon.” She decided to capitalize the word in order to disrupt the silence around its history—to bring this word forward as a designator of a particular time, place, and social practice.

The word comes up in Cubas’ description of his slave-smuggling brother-in-law, Contrim as a “paragon” of virtue:

People accused him of avarice, and I believe they were right; but avarice is nothing more than the exaggeration of a virtue, and virtues should be like budgets: better a surplus than a deficit. As he had a very dry manner, he had enemies, and they went so far as to accuse him of savagery. The only thing they alleged on this score was that he often sent slaves to the calabouço, from where they came down streaming with blood; but, apart from the fact that he only sent runaways and incorrigibles, it so happens that, having dealt for so long in the smuggling of slaves, he had become somewhat used to the slightly harsher treatment required by that sort of business, and one cannot honestly attribute to a man’s original nature that which is the pure effect of social relations.

Here, the narrator suggests the charge of “savagery” held against Contrim stems from the fact that he sent slaves to the calabouço, but the narrator insists that he only did this with “runaways and incorrigibles;” and Contrim’s experience as a long-time slave owner offered him insight into which slaves most deserved this unfortunate treatment. The systemic evil of slavery—the way Cubas narrates it—creates a mood of factual resignation where virtue, itself, becomes a description of success within the system where one is expected to support the dominant class rather than operating according to personal ethical considerations.

Thomson-DeVeux reveals that slaveowners delegated corporal punishment to the state after the royal decree of November 16, 1693 forbid owners from shackling or imprisoning slaves. A royal decree also established the ”workhouse” or dungeon where slaves could be “humanely” punished by men with whips would be compensated for their efforts. Until then, in 17th century Brazilian prisons, both enslaved persons and citizens were confined in the same prisons for violations of the penal code. The Dungeon was different—it was created expressly for the purpose of punishing “runaway slaves”—it’s role was to somehow civilize the brutality of violence by hiding it behind the walls of a state institution. Contrim could remain a paragon of virtue, or what Thomson-DeVeux calls “a man who outsources bloodletting, keeping his own hands clean and sparing his neighbors’ ears.”

Alongside this, the “whipping system” existed as a state-created tool which served the economic and security needs of a dominant class (and its hierarchy) by using violence to control labor. Only in 1832 did Brazil begin to require that slaveowners specify the alleged “infarction” committed by the enslaved person subject to punishment.

The relationship between the Dungeon and the prison system which replaced it carries into the present, where Thomson-DeVeux says that over one-third of Brazil’s prison population consists of pre-trial detainees. Those who are stigmatized by criminality, or the allegation of criminality, are described as bandido in the media, and the same brush is used to tarnish reputations of those who argue for pre-trial and prison reform in Brazil.

How race “maps”: Brazil and US

In the discussion, Rohter said contemporary American discussion of marginalized persons has helped to make Machado relevant as “a writer of color and a Latino.” He also said it was interesting to compare how race is mapped in Brazil with how it is mapped, or translated, in the US. Thomson-DeVeux noted that this novel experienced a resurgence in the early 1950’s when translator William Grossman published an essay in the NAACP’s paper, The Crisis, which identified Machado de Assis as a “great negro writer.” To this, Rohter added that race classifications in the US and Brazil are very different (though they seem to be moving closer to the US map in Brazil). Grossman's depiction of Machado as a "negro writer" might have been strange to the author, himself, who identified as a "mulatto." A Brazilian translator present for the discussion confirmed that "mulatto" was the more common word to Brazilians, also "moreno" meaning "dark-skinned."

“But the white slave owning mobster that the author has created is not colorblind," added Thomson-DeVeux. Slavery was gratuitous, a sort of background noise that existed as part of the landscape in Brazil at the time. The scene with the whip and the freed slave who buys his own slaves and competes for power by whipping them, is one of the most tragic in the book. For me, it’s tragedy lies in the absolute power of the system to replicate hierarchies that aren't questioned or refuted. For a formerly-enslaved person to whip their own slave does not leave us with an ethics or an out—it leaves us only with the System.

Machado’s appropriate cynicism meets Bras’ sincerity

Rohter thinks the end is “devastating in its cynicism (“I came out even with life,” he avers, because of “the final negative in this chapter of negatives.” No spoiler alert here: let’s just say that his final sentence is devastating in its cynicism”). Since the novel ends without giving any meaning to the narrator's life, Rohter wonders if  this is because the author went straight to writing his best novella, The Psychiatrist, immediately after this.

But Thomson-DeVeaux maintains that the ending is true to the form – the ending will be abrupt when you ride the bumpy hippo.

I would argue that the ending is actually the opposite of cynical. A narrator involved in competing for status in the Brazilian system of enslaved labor should have a meaningless life—there should be no beautiful meaning or continuance after having been compromised to the point of nihilism, after wallowing in a friend’s eugenicist Humanitist survival-of-the-fittest “philosophy”….. Machado does not promise us meaning in this memoir-novel. In fact, he delivers on his promise of showing us how the rich and fabulous die with only the perfume of blood on their hands.

When we speak of unreliable narrators, we assume the narrator is lying or hiding—but I think Machado’s narrator is devastating precisely because he hides none of the moral nihilism at the heart of Brazilian 18th century society. He writes straight into its vanity and puts on its airs. He doesn’t repent or ever see through his own mistakes. He never questions the system in which he wants to succeed.

If honesty is essential to sincerity, then Bras Cubas is both honest and sincere. He is a social striver torn between the duty of leaving an inheritance (through children) and the magic thing/philosophy he hopes to become famous for (thus gaining the status that eludes him). It is because we want Machado to repudiate these things that we hold his narrator, Bras Cubas, to be unreliable.

There are also questions how Victorian or European notions of “sincerity” map onto narrative form. For  example, is Fernando Pessoa an unreliable or insincere narrator? Is he, when writing that mix of poetry and philosophy, being sincere? The standards of the European bildungsroman or confessional doesn’t always map onto the expectations of innovative fiction—and perhaps we narrow the reading (or narrow what we can experience from it) by relying on those constructs.

Because the class system and the focus on status is central to Machado’s novel—and because Machado allows it to exist as “part of life,” as a sort of naturalism—I was intrigued by Brandon Taylor recent his sub stack comments on Zola:

What if the active tension at the heart of most Millennial Novels is between Naturalism and Existentialism, between Zola and Camus. What if the Millennial Novel seeks to answer the question of whether or not a person’s experience is actually unique and individual or whether it is truly just an emanation from the various systems we are subjected to. I think some novels tend to fall on the side of the purely naturalistic—that is, race, gender, sexuality, class, and on are bounding phenomena that determine how people will treat you and what you can expect. And some are more existential. That is, a life is unique, that one’s choices are not predetermined.

Perhaps, in a more extensive sense, the question of sincerity and narrative voice also emerges here.

I wish I had more time to think about it—though I will probably share a brief summary with some themes and points of interest next week. In the meantime, you can cross-reference some of the ways in which Machado uses these words in Thomson-DeVeaux’s translation with this index.