“But a humane social order is not always achieved without the grotesque, and sometimes not without the cruel” (Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Father versus Mother, 89).

The minute I read this my mind flashed back to the movie The Prestige. It went specifically to near the beginning of the movie when they are at a magic show and see the trick of the vanishing bird cage. You find out later the way they did it was through killing the birds in a collapsible bird cage.

Going to a magic show is a perfectly acceptable form of entertainment. Everyone loves watching amazing, seemingly impossible feats become possible right before their eyes. To keep up with this natural societal order of watching magic they on occasion used some “grotesque” methods to keep ahead in the game.

But how could that still be considered “humane” as Machado states? Part of me thinks we desensitize ourselves as a people. One person calls something normal that may not be quite so normal, and everyone believes him because they want to enjoy whatever he called normal. For example, people liked watching the bird cage disappear and decided it had to be fine then. It’s all about fitting in, about being in the social “norm” of things.

Another part of me thinks it has to do with the fact that everything has its opposite. Maybe we need the “grotesque” and the “cruel” to know when something actually is humane and decent. Without it, there is no way to measure the difference or the progress.

So does Machado’s statement actually have hints of truth laced in it, or is it yet another one of his overtly sarcastic remarks?