The Suffering of the Righteous (June, Part 1)

"For I expected good, and there came evil; and I waited for light, but there came darkness." The Book of Job 30:26



There is a beautiful link connecting atheist Susan Sontag and God-fearing Job. Their stories of being radically faithful to their own principles has, nonetheless, taken them into the valley of the shadow of death, demanding from them that they faced the experience of illness in spite of their high moral, intellectual or social standards.

"Illness as Metaphor", as well as the book of Job, is a well articulated speech in defense of the author. Against the truth of their ages, Sontag and Job argue against superstition, respectively in favor of Reason and God. The question that remains, is: how could the righteous discourse of Sontag and Job resolve the paradoxal experience of illness without making use of the figures of punishment and atonement?

Different answers arise from these two diverse experiences of man's essential frailty and mortality. And so we start our reading for the month of June.

A conclusion (May, part 7)

So, Fortunate had a Secret Cause. Although I'm not a fan of Freudian literary interpretations, this one is hard to avoid in such a case. The father of all explanations regarding our subconscious motivations was preceeded in many philosophers and artists but, in fact, was able to articulate much of man's previous ideas on the theme as a clear and understandable theory.

The central discussion in "The Secret Cause" is not so much ethical as it is historical and genealogical. The matter does not concern Fortunate's acts or Garcia's acts as being right or wrong, but their very nature is under scrutiny, in reality.

Machado de Assis' brilliant shor story invites us, by telling the tales of two men involved in human health care, to question not only our own actions, but our deeper reasons and ultimately our own nature. It's not that Fortunate alone is above good and evil. The poet himself is there, contemplating what's more profound (and sometimes uglier) than morals; and we, readers, are called to the same exercise. If we have such a courage.

[images: Sigmund Freud and "The Fall of Man", by Lukas Cranach, 15th century]

The sleeping beauty (May, part 6)

It is around Maria Luiza's body that the characters of Garcia and Fortunate will manifest in full. She is the axis of the transvaluation of values, of the turning of The Wheel of Fortune. Around the coffin, we see Garcia as the byronian (almost medieval) devastated man who cries over the body of his dead, forbidden, unreachable love - now immortalized in her youth and perfection; there, we also see Fortunate as the cold-hearted observer, who sucks on Garcia's pain to the point of no longer mourning the death of his wife, and not even resenting his friend's betrayal.

There is, of course, a fine piece of scholarly irony here, because Machado de Assis is known for his ability to turn against the Romantic values of the Literature which generated him. Garcia, representative of such values, is here demoralized, as Fortnuate becomes our sole fountain of admiration in his full strength and sheer sincerity - human, all too human. But this text goes far beyond mere aesthetical polemics.

Edgar Allan Poe, the Romantic poet from the 19th century, went far enough even to say that "the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world", in his Philosophy of Composition, 1846. Cordelia, Ophelia, Ines de Castro and ultimately the Church as Christ's bride, for whom He died and ressurrected in order to give life to, are all examples of such a powerful and resonant theme in poetry.

Such is the importance of Maria Luiza to this story: she is the eye of the whirlpool, the axis of the Wheel and the element before which all things are revealed. The image is a detail of the famous John Everett Millai's Ophelia.

Literature and morals, a misapprehension (May, part 5)

What's most irritating about Harold Bloom is that he's usually right. The statement that Literature won't make us men of morality and kindness should be repeated, proclaimed and even exaggerated today, to fight one of the meanest crimes ever commited against aesthetics.

It's mandatory that we undo this misapprehension, the confusion of aesthetics and morals in people who think Literature has some important contribution to this mess. I can't think of any other clearer example of confusion than the case of the study of Literature in Medical Schools, where Shakespeare and Machado de Assis are being used as tools of “humanization”.

When I read “A Causa Secreta” (M. de Assis), being 19 years old, it was by Paulo César de Souza's suggestion on his notes to his own translation of “Genealogy of Morals” (F. Nietzsche), but then I was certainly not mature enough to see the “transvaluation of all values” in the short story. Anyway, the attraction Fortunate will have on any person with an IQ above 70 is automatic; even after the scene of the scisors and candle.

It's impossible not to feel accused by the story's author: if we're not guilty of the same sadism as Fortunate is, we'll be at least blamed by this instinctive sympathy for he that should be the villain, while kind and romantic (in an aesthetic sense, as everything else in Machado's works) Garcia can only cause us repulse and indigestion.

The great poet does not “humanize” his readers. On the contrary, he holds them over a candle falme, while cutting off their paws, because he proposes another reading(unauthorized) of that which his readers justly considered more important and certain in the text of morals, psychology and tradition. From Fortunate to Iago, Shylock and Puck, including Jesus Christ in the Gospels, the center of the Canon(here, Bloom was wrong, being one of the strongest misreaders of the Bible, side by side with Nietzsche), the strength of Literature is in the deconstrustor characters, the dehumanizers, the "misreaders" of the morals their antecessors wrote as a text weaker than the characters' own personalities.

If "humanizing" Med-students is therefore to make them lovely and clown-like, Nietzsche, Shakespeare and Machado de Assis will be of little use. Such an error must be corrected so that Medical schools will honestly declare that, aiming to doctrinate their students towards good citizenship (which makes all sene in the political logics of public shools and state-financed training of doctors for the State), they're in search of good moral texts. Which takes us far from where true wisdom shall be found. Once again, Harold Bloom was right.

Garcia and values transvaluated (May, part 4)

Garcia is our good man, in this short story. He is the medicine student, the care-giver in training, the future and the hope of people's healths and well-being. He is the man in white.

Nevertheless, it is him who betrays his best friend, falls in love for Maria Luiza and even in the beginning of the story he is the one who follows the still strenge and unknown Fortunate along the streets of 19th century Rio de Janeiro - a fine piece of weird behaviour.

Fortunate, on the other hand, is the cruel man: the torturer, the ruthless, the brute. He is also, notwithstanding, the one who tirelessly cares for the beaten man in the beginning of the story, the one who suggests the opening of the hospital and the one who, ultimately, will apparently forgive his friend for the betrayal at the end of the story - all the expense of human suffering, of course, but who would condemn such a kind and forginving man based on his motivations.

Machado de Assis' propositions as to human character, here, are "beyond good and evil". They wander the perilous paths of relativity and leave us reader in want of the concrete answer. Again, we see that humanities in Medicine are not all about comfort and joy.

(May, part 3)

So, as we gaze upon Fortunate, we understand what is his secret bond with the goddess Fortuna: as life agonizes, they but watch. The link between visual perception and the medical practice is notorious, and M. Foucault well characterized the silent interplay of power and observation in many of his works, and not surprisingly also in his "The Birth of the Clinic".
The term "humanities" has been terribly misused in Brazil and often is confused with "goodness" and "kindness", but contrarily the scientifical look upon the workings of our mind and motivations will frequently reveal badness and cruelty in the root of many of our noblest actions. Which, finally takes us back to F. Nietzsche and his transvaluation of values.
Paulo Cesar de Souza, Brazilian scholar and translator of many of Nietzsche's works for Portuguese, well suggested a reading of "A Causa Secreta" based on the ideas from the Genealogy of Morals. Acute perception, which could be useful for the attentive physician still in training.

Sors immanis et inanis (May, part 2)

Now, there are certain moments in which the poet's intentions just cannot be mistaken as mysterious. Such a case is seen in "A Causa Secreta", or The Secret Cause, by Brazilian writer Machado de Assis. The opening scene shows us the picture of three characters which are, right on the first paragraph, revealed in their most intimate features through a series of visual images, as well as through their names.

Today, we focus on Fortunato, which we will here translate as Fortunate. His name is a clear reference to the gentile Roman goddess Fortuna, associated throughout the Middle Ages to the ever changing moods of fate. The Wheel of Fortune, a constant literary and graphical motif in the medieval times, reflects the elements of human experience associated to this figure Fortuna.

The Wheel is commonly divided in four parts, which represent four stages in the ever-turning story of men: regnabo, regno, regnavi, sum sine regno (I shall reign, I reign, I have reigned, I have no kingdom, in Latin). Our character Fortunate, as the goddess herself, is the personification of luck in the sense of power. On the first scene, he is found looking up, with his head held high, while the other two characters show signs of discomfort and anguish.

For all beings will the Wheel of Fortune turn, except for Fortuna and Fortunate, in this story: this goddess (as well as this unique short-story character) is also the embodiment of cruelty, because in the face of the most apalling terrors she is still impenetrable. To the minds of the roman and medieval poets, such a goddess could as well find pleasure in life's frailty and proneness to suffering.

So, let us not be mistaken: the first lines of this short story are very clear. One of the three people in that room must be understood as an overcomer, as a strong, that is, a cruel man.

[image: The Wheel of Fortune, in a medieval miniature]