Versions of South America

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2009-05-02T08:54:00.018+12:00

[Jan Van der Straet: Amerigo Vespucci meets America
(1609)]

This blogsite presents a - very slightly updated - version of my PhD thesis, written while I was studying at the University of Edinburgh between 1986 and 1990. It also includes, as appendices, a few published articles which I carved - with certain revisions and modifications - out of the body of the thesis between 1988 and 1995. You can find some general reflections on the experience of working on it here.

For the moment, though, all I want to say is that if you're intrigued by the idea that there might be a region of the mind called "South America" which co-exists - in the European imagination, at any rate - with the actual geographical entity, then this set of essays could be of interest to you. I attempt to substantiate the existence of a set of tropes repeated from writer to writer (many of whom had never visited or even seriously studied any Latin American countries or peoples), then go on to try to provide a kind of conceptual map of this phantom "South America."

Clearly the same reasoning could be applied to a lot of other imaginary or semi-imaginary worlds of romance, and I guess my intention was always that this thesis might provide a template or blueprint for just such a set of comparative studies. Ambitious, no?

Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think.

- Jack Ross, Mairangi Bay, 22 July 2009

•

Abstract

Acknowledgments

General Preface

Introduction: Mythologies of South America

Part 1: Exploration

[Malinche between Cortés & the Indians (1519)]

Chapter 1 – Behn and the Discoverers

Part 2: Historians and Naturalists

[Malinche in Tlaxcala]

Chapter 2 – Darwin and the Naturalists

Chapter 3 – Graham and the Historians

Part 3: Romance

[Malinche's Curse]

Chapter 4 – Hudson and the Pastoral

Chapter 5 – Conrad and ‘Costaguana’

Chapter 6 – Masefield and the Quest

Part 4: Translation

[José Clemente Orozco: Cortés & Malinche (1926)]

Chapter 7 – Bishop and ‘Helena Morley’

Conclusion: The Idea of the Post-modern

Bibliography

Original Appendices

[Laura Esquivel: Malinche (2007)]

Appendix 1 – Imaginary Countries in South America

Appendix 2 – English Fictions about South America

Published articles

[Contemporary Mural: Malinche (Tabasco, Mexico)]

Appendix 3 – Views of South America in Recent British Cinema (1988)

Appendix 4 – Wilson Harris, Joseph Conrad, and the South American ‘Quest’ Novel (1992)

Appendix 5 – Cunninghame Graham’s Brazil: Differing Interpretations of the Canudos Campaign, 1896-97 (1993)

[Antonio Ruíz: El sueño de la Malinche
[Malinche's Dream] (1939)]

Abstract

2009-05-01T08:26:00.003+12:00

[Diego Rivera: La Civilización Tarasca]

Rather than being an account of 'South Americanism' to echo Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), this study of books about South America in English literature attempts to make the critical and methodological distinctions which would be essential to such an account. Its examination of the geography of the 'South America' of the European imagination therefore begins by using Roland Barthes' model – from Mythologies (1957) – of sinité as the clichéd popular stereotype of China, la Chine, in order to differentiate the physical reality of the South American continent from the literary worlds which have been promulgated under that title.

The textual strategies adopted to sustain (or subvert) these 'mythological' assumptions in a number of representative works – ranging in era from Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) to Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), and in genre from Darwin's Journal of Researches (1839) to Conrad's Nostromo (1904) – are then detailed. Authors are examined individually, in terms of their cultural and generic context, but each book has also been chosen to contribute to an overall picture of methods of presenting the 'alien' in Western writing. To this end, authors such as W. H. Hudson, John Masefield, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, and Elizabeth Bishop are contrasted with analogous Latin American writers – D. F. Sarmiento, Alejo Carpentier, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Euclides da Cunha.

In the final analysis, this is a study of the various ways in which the words 'South America' can act as the ideological or meaning-giving centre of a text. It is therefore not surprising that only the letter of the works under discussion – their own conception of this relationship – is found to be adequate to the complexity of the mimetic problems raised as a result.

[José Clemente Orozco: Cortes and Malinche]

Acknowledgments &c.

2009-04-30T08:53:00.011+12:00

[Diego Rivera: La Civilización Tarasca (1950)]

Table of Contents:

Abstract

Acknowledgements

General Preface
‘South Americanism’
Orientalism
The Invention of America
(Partial) Precedents
Methodology

Introduction:
Mythologies of South America
1. Theoretical Models
  - Roland Barthes
2. The New World
  - Paradise
  - El Dorado
3. The Gaucho
  - Machismo
  - Carnival

Part 1: Exploration

Behn and the Discoverers
1. Saussure
2. Synchronic Section
  - Columbus
  - Montaigne
3. Oroonoko
  - Conventional Elements
  - Innovation – Subversion

Part 2: Historians and Naturalists

Darwin and the Naturalists
1. L'invitation au Voyage
2. The Brazilian Forest
3. The Voyage of the Beagle
  - Gauchos and Indians
  - The Cordillera

Graham and the Historians
1. Antonio Conselheiro
2. The Historians
  - Euclides da Cunha
  - R. B. Cunninghame Graham
  - Mario Vargas Llosa
3. Conclusion – Ideas of South America

Part 3: Romance

Hudson and the Pastoral
1. Questions of Genre
2. Themes and Images
  - Fiction – Non-Fiction
  - South America – England
3. Green Mansions

Conrad and 'Costaguana'
1. Landscapes of Romance
  - Critical Modes
  - Seven Examples
2. Three South Americas
3. Nostromo

Masefield and the Quest
1. Sard Harker
  - Mimicry
  - Peculiarities of Character
  - Landscapes
  - Small Town Paranoia
2. Tenor
3. Vehicle

Part 4: Translation

Bishop and 'Helena Morley'
1. Translation
  - The Nature of the Artefact
  - Walter Benjamin
2. Nightingale Fever
3. Minha Vida de Menina
  - Society
  - Politics

Conclusion:
The Idea of the Post-modern
1. Southern Gothic
2. The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffmann
  - The City Under Siege
  - The Mansion of Midnight
  - The River People
  - The Acrobats of Desire
  - The Erotic Traveller
  - The Coast of Africa
  - Lost in Nebulous Time
  - The Castle
3. Conclusion

Bibliography:
Select Bibliography of Primary Sources
European
Latin American
Select Bibliography of Secondary Sources

Appendices:
Imaginary Countries in South America

English Fictions about South America

[Pollock Halls of Residence (Edinburgh)]

Acknowledgments:

To my supervisor, Mr. Colin Manlove, for much acute criticism.

To my long-suffering readers, Jackie-Anne Jensen and K. M. Ross, for devotion beyond the call of duty.

To Gus Maclean, prince of booksellers, and the class he so consummately embodies.

And finally, to my parents, without whom this stay in Edinburgh would not have been possible at all.

Statement:

I hereby certify that this thesis was composed by myself, and is entirely my own work.

Note:

A Companion Volume to the thesis, in three parts - a 'Chronology of Europe in South America', a 'Chronology of Latin American literature', and a series of bibliographies and discussions of 'South America in Popular Culture' – exists, and may be consulted on application to the author.

[Maldición del malinche]

Appendix:

Companion Volume

Table of Contents:

A Chronology of Europe in South America
Major Authors
Secondary Authors
Chronology
Bibliography

A Chronology of Latin American Literature
Major Authors
Secondary Authors
Chronology
Bibliography

South America in Popular Culture
Film
British Views of South America
Hollywood Views of South America
Film Reviews
List of Films
Bibliography
Television
Abstract
List of Programs
Bibliography
Visual and Performing Arts
Reviews
José Donoso: A Seminar
List of Events
Bibliography
Cartoon
Abstract
List of Cartoons
Bibliography
Travel
Abstract
List of Books
Popular Fiction
Abstract
List of Books
The South-West
Abstract
List of Films
List of Books

Appendices:
Theoretical Preface (September 1988)
Reference Guide (March 1988-October 1989)

Bibliography:
Select Bibliography of Secondary Sources

[Edward Said: Orientalism (1978)]

General Preface

2009-04-29T08:28:00.024+12:00

[Diego Rivera: La Civilización Totonac (1950)]

I

'South Americanism'

In Journeys through the Labyrinth, his recent ‘interpretive history of the Latin American novel in the twentieth century’ (Martin, 1989, p. xi), Gerald Martin remarks, almost as an aside:

One Hundred Years of Solitude, the first Latin American novel ever to achieve international best-seller status apparently on its own terms, raises the question of what those foreign – especially Anglo-American – readers saw in the book, and whether there is not some need for a book on 'South Americanism' to match Edward Said's book on Orientalism. America has acted as Utopia or as Exotic Other ever since it was discovered. and as a combination of natural paradise and political fantasy since the nineteenth century. (Martin, 1989, pp.224-25)

This thesis. I hasten to add, is not intended to be that book – but it does, perhaps, represent some of the groundwork which would be necessary for such a study. Certainly it attempts to examine many of the questions raised by Martin here and at other points in his rather labyrinthine argument.

Why, for example, are Anglo-American readers especially' attracted by what he calls elsewhere 'the tropical "Greeneland" of heat, vultures and hopelessness’ (p.292)? Is it, as he claims, simply because the stereotyped Latin America' associated with such a 'caricatured "magical realist" style',

allows such readers both to enjoy the voluptuous delights of barbaric Otherness whilst satisfying the inherent sense of cultural superioritv and ethnocentric attitudes that go with an ex-colonial mentality. (Martin, 1989, p.313)

Quoted in isolation, this rather programmatic answer may seem to verge on self-parody, but to take it thus would not do justice to the difficulties of Martin's position. His task is, after all precisely not to become entangled in questions of the image of Latin America in European tradition – 'Latin Americans need to discover their identities before they decide to discard them' (Martin, 1989, p.366). In terms of the alternate study which he himself envisages, though, such an answer raises as many questions as it solves. Why do the 'voluptuous delights of barbaric Otherness' as laid out in (mis)readings of One Hundred Years of Solitude appeal more to Anglo-Americans than, for example, the French? Neither the English nor the French ever had a colonial presence in Latin America to compare with that established by them in Africa or the Middle East – also fruitful sources of 'barbaric Otherness' in literature. Is it, then, to be ascribed to a difference in temperament between the two nations – the fact that, as Martin puts it, 'what the British persist in calling "South" America was actually "Latin" (p.142), and therefore more 'Exotic' and 'Other' to Anglo-Saxons than to their fellow Latins, the French and Spanish?

These are large questions, and somewhat beyond the scope of a literary inquiry such as this; but they do at least indicate the possible ramifications that such an interrogation of some of the classic gringo texts about South America entails. ('South' rather than 'Latin' – pace Martin – because the geographical division of Panama understandably appeals more to outside commentators, whose acquaintance with the region may be confined to books and maps, than the somewhat intangible cultural divide between Ibero and Anglo-America). They also explain why this study is being conducted under the aegis of a Department of English, rather than Hispanic Studies or even Comparative Literature. A number of Latin American works are cited and discussed in the text, but it is in terms of their influence on Western writers and theorists, rather than in their own right as contributions to their indigenous culture(s).[1] What interests me, for the purposes of this study, is therefore the distortion rather than the truth, the inappropriate rather than the appropriate contextualization, the misreading rather than the 'correct' interpretation. It is easy enough (and undoubtedly necessary) to see Western images of Latin America as the rubble of an exploded 'colonial mentality', but it seems to me perhaps more fruitful to attempt to introduce some finer distinctions into our picture of the assimilation of an alien environment into our own literary culture. Martin's emphasis on the 'nineteenth century' may also be seen, in these terms, to be more the result of his own expectations of Imperialist backlash than the actual intellectual genealogy of such iconographic representations.

To make my own position in relation to these 'post-colonial' questions somewhat clearer. it might be best for me to abandon the rather generalized tone of these opening remarks and lapse into autobiography. The history of my work on this topic is that of a series of false starts – false starts each with something significant about it – and it may therefore be useful to say a little about these dead ends in order to explain the course I have finally taken.

I began with the discovery, while reading John Masefield's novels Sard Harker (1924) and Odtaa (1926), that there was something identifiably 'South American' not only about their setting, the imaginary Caribbean republic of Santa Barbara, but also about the kinds of action described – revolutions, bandits speaking a strange argot, canyons filled with blood. It was a landscape made familiar by American Westerns and the 'magic realism' of García Márquez and his colleagues as much as by boys' Romances about Cortés, Drake, and the Spanish Main. If that had been all, one might have been tempted to write it off as a clichéd European view of New World peoples and landscapes, but there was something in it that was more cerebral, as well. For Masefield, it seemed to be operating as a kind of country of the mind – a metaphysical stage where certain realities of life could be highlighted without the distraction of quotidian detail.

My conclusion was that a distinction could legitimately be made between these two things: the geographical South America. a part of Latin America with its own characteristic landscapes and peoples: and the literary 'South America', constructed in European writing and thought over the last five hundred years – overlapping, but not at all identical with the former. I therefore began, in a paper entitled 'John Masefield's South America'[2], by looking for themes or factors in Masefield's treatment of South America which could be paralleled in the works of other imaginative writers - among them Conrad, Aphra Behn, W. H. Hudson, as well as Latin Americans such as García Márquez, Pablo Neruda and Octavia Paz. And (in retrospect, inevitably) I found them. I found, for example, an interesting continuity in these writers' treatment of women as idealized figures of South America - Hudson's Rima, the spirit of the forests in Green Mansions (1904), can be matched against Conrad's 'beautiful Antonia' in Nostromo (Conrad, 1986, p.33), for whose sake the geographical division of the 'Occidental Province' Sulaco from Costaguana is accomplished by her lover Decoud; or, for that matter, with Pablo Neruda's picture of the continent as a woman:

Amada de los rios, combatida
par agua azul y gotas trasparentes,
como un arbol de venas es tu espectro
de diosa oscura que muerde manzanas
(Neruda, 1983, p.16)

'Beloved of the rivers, beset
by azure water and transparent drops
like a tree of veins your spectre
of dark goddess biting apples'
(Neruda, 1970, p.173)

There was nothing in all this, however, or in the other threads of 'quest imagery' and 'the imaginary country' (which I also discussed), which gave me a clue to the essential 'South American-ness' of Masefield's inspiration - beyond the fact that all of the writers treated had reimagined South America in their own image. The identification of women with countries, and of their bodies with physical details of topography was obviously a generic theme of Romance[3], and could not per se characterize the spirit of a particular place. The problem I was attempting to solve could be expressed in terms of the question: Could the atmosphere of South America in literature be distinguished from that of other alien environments such as Africa, South-East Asia or the Pacific? And, in terms of the critical methodology which I was employing, the answer appeared to be 'no'.

My next task became, therefore, the search for a theoretical model which would allow me to put such a question more effectively. I found this in Roland Barthes' book Mythologies (1957) and (specifically) in a distinction made by subsequent critics, including Paul de Man[4], between 'mythological' (i.e. naive) and 'fictional' (sophisticated and subversive) employments of the same set of motifs. My way forward now became clear - first, to isolate some representative 'myths' of South America to match the clichéd views of China described by Barthes (1982, pp.191-247), and then to give an account of their systematic elaboration in various works of 'fiction' (in the above, specialized sense).

The mythological paradigm is, however, essentially a truism. It is useful as a way of characterizing common perceptions of a place, and such notions can undoubtedly be seen to function in any artistic portrayal of that place, but it turns simply into another catalogue of defining elements if used as one's sole method of analysis for those works themselves. The problem can be illustrated by the fact that mythologies, as presumed constants, cannot be used to differentiate between Latin American and European portrayals of the same continent - or, indeed, to discover if such a distinction is in fact justified. Also, the elements of imagined versions of South America - godlike/ beastlike natives; welcoming/ forbidding mountains, rivers and plains; forests of 'incense-bearing trees'[5] - would inevitably be found to recur in descriptions of any of the other 'alien' regions listed above. Since the particularity of my project depended on making just such a distinction, I felt that the essence of a literary 'South America' must lie somewhere else.

My third start, then, consisted of an examination of the different approaches of a series of individual authors to 'South America' as the ideological centre of the works, fictional or non-fictional, for which they chose that setting (bearing in mind the inevitable ambiguity of such a term). In order to cover as many aspects as possible, I identified each of them with a particular generic approach to the problem of re-imagining or re-creating a place - historiography, travel-writing, the novel, the Romance, even the act of translation itself. This had the advantage of finally getting away from the idea of 'South America' as an amalgam of particular sets of things: curare, condors, castanets - the Amazon, the Pampa, the Andes - Indians, gauchos, and rubber-barons. It also provided a vehicle for talking about the various contingent ways in which the words 'South America' can establish a meaning for themselves.

Its disadvantage as a model, however - besides its diffuse character - was the essentially static readings it provided. I attempted to examine different treatments from a number of different angles; but without an ideological thread to connect them, this promoted a confused and finally unhelpful approach to the problem of the true nature of literary 'South American-ness' with which we started - Masefield becoming just another example, instead of the key.

So, to summarize, of the three approaches tried by me,

The first looked at some of the common features of Romance to be found in treatments of South America.
- The advantage of this was that these features were undoubtedly there to be found; but the disadvantage was the lack of any specific connection to South America as a quality.

The second employed Barthes' 'mythological' model.
- The advantage of this was its success in classifying some important structural features of the popular view of South America; but the disadvantage was that a mere list of features was not much help in analyzing the specific strategies of 'fictionalizers'.

The third took a series of authors and studied their individual approaches to the problem of making a 'South America' in their own image.
- The advantage of this was that it finally dispensed with the list of things allegedly characteristic of South America; but the disadvantage was that it was static and unprogressive by nature, which promoted confusion.

At this point it became essential to ask whether the problem lay on a level deeper than that of methodology. Martin, Barthes, and Said do, after all, share a strong sense of the political purpose of their theoretical paradigms - indeed, it might well be that a quest such as my own for the significance of the Latin American equivalent of chinoiserie is in itself an ideologically insensitive one, given the current social and economic turmoil in the region (undoubtedly to some extent the result of such pre-digested notions of a backward and picturesque South America). It might be seen as helping to perpetuate misunderstandings, rather than clearing them up.

Let us then examine the question a little differently, by looking at some other approaches to the same or similar problems of definition (which must, after all, bulk large in the thinking of anyone concerned with the general field of cultural relations between Europe and the developing world - whether during the era of colonialism, or in the present day).

[Edward Said: Orientalism (1978)]

II

Orientalism

one must repeatedly ask oneself whether what matters in Orientalism is the general group of ideas overriding the mass of material - about which who could deny that they were shot through with doctrines of European superiority, various kinds of racism, imperialism, and the like, dogmatic views of 'the Oriental' as a kind of ideal and unchanging abstraction? - or the much more varied work produced by almost uncountable individual writers, whom one would take up as individual instances of authors dealing with the Orient. (Said, 1985, p.8)

This statement from Edward Said's influential book on the Western concept of 'Orientalism' as a branch of study puts the methodological difficulties which stand in the way of such an inquiry with impressive candour. As he acknowledges, and as few of those who have followed in his footsteps since Orientalism appeared in 1978 have cared to admit, the choice which must always be made is whether it is the overriding assumptions and cultural codes of each text which are to be teased out, or whether each individual author's 'orientation' with regard to this set of attitudes should be examined separately. Nor is the question purely a matter of emphasis. As Said comments towards the end of his book:

Islam has been fundamentally misrepresented in the West - [but] the real issue is whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or whether any and all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer. (Said, 1985, p.272)

It is a familiar device of rhetoric to imagine the two opposing sides of an argument as representing two absolute poles of meaning. Said, here, counters criticism of his own interpretations of interpreters (just as historically contingent as their own, presumably), by seeing such critiques as amounting to ideological relativism. Since no debate is possible without some fixed points of reference, he therefore sets up an oblique justification for his own political 'decoding' of three centuries of Western thought. He quotes with approval R. W. Southern's 'demonstration that it is finally Western ignorance which becomes more refined and complex, not some body of positive Western knowledge which increases in size and accuracy" (62), but fails to explain how such a seemingly immutable process can be corrected by simply documenting such distortions. 'Ignorance' surely only exists in contradistinction to 'knowledge' - and unless one has some stable ground on which to found one's claim to possess the latter, argument becomes simply an exchange of words based on the personal interests of those involved.

Islam has been fundamentally misrepresented in the West, as Said says, but the question that remains is whether the kind of ideological overview which he has so brilliantly achieved in Orientalism is the best intellectual counter to this misrepresentation. In one sense, of course, it is - as everyone now has a list at their fingertips of 'Eurocentric' distortions of the Other; but it is surely naive to imagine that this represents a new way of thinking, emancipated from the past. 'Orientals', Indians, South Americans, can be as securely patronized from within a context of post-colonial guilt as they ever were by Imperialists. As Said puts it:

It is perfectly natural for the human mind to resist the assault on it of untreated strangeness: therefore cultures have always been inclined to impose complete transformations on other cultures, receiving these other cultures not as they are but as, for the benefit of the receiver, they ought to be. (Said, 1985, p.67)

The important thing, therefore, is to be self-conscious about the ways in which these mechanisms operate in oneself - and, by extension, in the culture of which one forms a part.

Said's position is a carefully thought-out one, and he does not lightly set aside such issues. Some more recent books, however, show the dangers of simply aping his conclusions without studying the method of his text. Rana Kabbani's Europe's Myths of Orient (1986), for example, reduces the history of Western relations with the East to a kind of comic-strip, awaiting the services of a textual critic before such a tissue of falsehoods can be evaporated. A classic example of her methods can be found in the following statement about 'seraglios':

These descriptions [of seraglios) were a self-perpetuating topos, repeated and copied again and again since they corresponded exactly to Western expectations. (Kabbani, 1986, p.18)

So, in other words, Westerners knew what they expected of seraglios, and repeated descriptions of them because they satisfied such expectations. But how could the first descriptions have been composed according to these 'expectations', since the West needed to read the descriptions before they could 'repeat and copy' them because of their fidelity to the aforementioned pre-conceived views? It is an argument in a circle, but it is more than that. The reason why Kabbani's statement comes to grief is because she never makes any attempt to distinguish between the reality of the East and the iconography built up around it by the West. She assumes that any Western description must consist entirely of the latter, and therefore spares herself the trouble of finding out anything first-hand about, say, seraglios. In this she imagines herself to be following Said, who says that the evidence for such 'representations' of the Orient, 'is found just as prominently in the so-called truthful text (histories, philological analyses, political treatises) as in the avowedly artistic (i.e., openly imaginative) text':

The things to look at are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, nor the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original. (Said, 1985, p.21)

Kabbani takes this to mean that one need only look for 'style, figures of speech, setting .. .' etc. in any text chosen for study, and that the 'correctness of the representation' is irrelevant. In fact, of course, what Said is saying is not that 'seraglios' (for example) exist solely as a 'self-perpetuating topos' - but that the way in which they are described is a fruitful source of information on larger attitudes towards the East. For Kabbani, it is enough that they are described at all; for Said, the actual terms of each description are significant.

The source of dispute can be found stated again in Patrick Brantlinger's book Rule of Darkness (1988) - about Imperialism in nineteenth century British writing. He specifies at the outset:

Among some critics there is an evident desire to downplay politics altogether; my own view is closer to Fredric Jameson's, He contends [in The Political Unconscious (1981)] that 'the political perspective' is ... more than a mere 'supplementary method ... auxiliary to other interpretive methods current today'; such a perspective is rather 'the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation.'

and continues:

This is true not because class consciousness or economic forces 'determine' in some absolute, one-dimensional manner the ideas and values expressed in literature but simply because literature is inevitably social: it is written in society, by social beings, addressed to other social beings (Brantlinger, 1988, p.10).

The 'argument from absolutes' identified earlier with regard to Said is seen here in its most virulent form. 'Politics' is identified (as usual) with a particular view of politics - 'class-consciousness [and] economic forces' - but, lest the evident absurdity of anyone claiming to be able to disentangle such forces from such a limited set of data be recognized, he goes on to identify this fact with the other 'fact' that 'literature is inevitably social: it is written in society ... '. A truism is thus used to reinforce a polemical view by making alternative points-of-view seem to deny the validity of the truism. Criticism is, indeed, always 'political' - and writing is written in society - but it does not follow that the criticism that best acknowledges this is that whose methodology most insists on charting 'class consciousness and economic forces' (i.e. the symbolic terminology of Marxism).

Returning to the central question under discussion, the proper methodology for treating Western views of South America - and its two concomitant branches: how to distinguish such views from other generalized views of the 'alien'; and whether the 'South America' of imaginative authors like Masefield should in fact be equated with the South America of geography - it is clear that many of these questions have already been faced by Said. He himself acknowledges, however, in the quotation at the head of this section, that an ideologized 'political' perspective cannot be adopted without the loss of a power to discriminate between specific individuals' employment of 'South Americanism' (to reiterate Martin's original term). Studies like Kabbani's show the danger of such an abdication, while the difficulties of a political absolutism are pointed up by the contradictions inherent in Brantlinger's position (despite the cogency of many of his readings).

In short, then, despite my basic agreement with many of Said's points (the 'evidence' to be gleaned from the 'so~called truthful' text; his twin methods of 'strategic location' and 'strategic formation'[6]; and the distinctions he makes between the West and other cultures, 'To the Westerner ... the Oriental was always like some aspect of the West' (Said, 1985, p.67), I feel that his method has many of the defects of my 'Romance' classification of South America. It depends on a preconceived intellectual model for its ordering (in the one case, genre theory, in the other, post-colonial politics), and is unspecific in its approach to the nature of the places described. In Said's case, given the fact that his subject is the extension of the 'Orient' to cover a myriad of diverse cultures and experiences, this is quite pardonable - indeed, practically inevitable. A similar analysis of 'South Americanism', however, could not be as specific to its equivalent of, in V. G. Kiernan's phrase: 'Europe's collective day-dream of the Orient' (Said, 1985, p.52).

[H. Marion Palmer: Donald Duck sees South America (1945)]

•

The Invention of America

The answer to our problem now becomes clear: the fault that lies at the root of the entire history of the idea of the discovery of America consists in assuming that the lump of cosmic matter which we now know as the American continent has always been that, when actually it only became that when such a meaning was given to it, and will cease to be that when. by virtue of some change in the current world concept, that meaning will no longer be assigned to it. (O'Gorman, 1961, p.42)

Having examined one possible approach to the problem of characterizing the European literary construct 'South America', it is now necessary to look at another important branch of theory associated with the subject. By and large, there are two major lines of approach to this question of the 'invention of America' which have to be distinguished. On the one hand, we have a series of Latin American perspectives - beginning with the book by Edmundo O'Gorman cited above and continued by Gabriel García Márquez (1982), Carlos Fuentes (1987), and Mario Vargas Llosa (1987). The endeavour here is essentially to distinguish the reality of contemporary Latin America from the fiction of America created by Columbus and other theorists of his 'discovery'. As Vargas Llosa puts it:

In the eighteenth century, in France, the name of Peru rang with a golden echo, and an expression was then born 'ce n'est pas le Pérou' - which is used when something is not as rich and extraordinary as its legendary name suggests. Well, 'Le Pérou, ce n'est pas le Pérou'. It never was, at least for the great part of its inhabitants, that fabulous country of legends and fictions (Vargas Llosa, 1987, 15).

The other approach is what might be called the 'Anglo-American' one, beginning, again, with O'Gorman's lectures at the University of Indiana, and continued in a series of diverse studies by R. W. B. Lewis (1955 - a study of the' Adamic ideal' of the 'authentic American as a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities. poised at the start of a new history' (p.l)), Hugh Honour (1975 - an English art historian's view of how Europeans have tended 'to see in America an idealized or distorted image of their own countries. onto which they could project their own aspirations and fears' (p.3)), and Peter Conrad (1980 - an Australian cultural critic's account of a set of English literary visitors' 're-inventions' of America).

To this short list one could undoubtedly add a myriad of other names - D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), Stefan Zweig's Brazil, Land of the Future (1942), Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques (1955), P. Rayner Banham's Scenes in America Deserta (1982), Jean Baudrillard's Amérique (1986); even films like Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984), or Percy Adlon's Bagdad Cafe (1988) - but the few that I have mentioned can be taken to represent a certain scholarly concensus.

O'Gorman's argument (it seems best to begin with him) hinges on an essentialist notion of the nature of 'contemporary thought'. He claims that Columbus is enshrined as the 'discoverer' of America rather than its 'inventor' because of a philosophical fallacy - the idea 'that the lump of cosmic matter which we now know as the American continent has always been that'. Columbus could not have discovered it, as he had not yet conceptualized it. He concludes his ingenious demonstration by stating that it is this very process of invention which constitutes America's importance in world history:

It was the Spanish part of the invention of America that liberated Western man from the fetters of a prison-like conception of his physical world, and it was the English part that liberated him from subordination to a Europe-centered conception of his historical world. (O'Gorman, 1961, p.145)

This rather naive view of the beneficent nature of first Spanish and then American expansionism - fruit of an absolutist and idealist conception of historical progress - is corrected by Carlos Fuentes, in his own parallel summation of the mythological status of America in European thought:

This is America. It is a continent. It is big. It is a place discovered to make the world larger. In it live noble savages. Their time is the Golden Age. America was invented for people to be happy in. You cannot be unhappy in America. It is a sin to have tragedy in America, There is no need for unhappiness in America. America does not need to conquer anything. It is too vast. America is its own frontier. America is its own utopia.

And America is a name. (Fuentes, 1987, p.3)

Within its own context - a study of the 'mythical history' of America as recorded and parodied in García Márquez's Cien años de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude] (1967) - Fuentes' logic is unassailable. Latin Americans must combat European 'fictions' of their identity in order to survive; and literature, rather than historiography, is the most appropriate arena in which to do so.

Our Anglo-American theorists, however, have a much less urgent brief hence their easy acceptance of the term 'America' as denoting simultaneously the United States and the two continents of North and South America. It is not that the books which I have mentioned do not contain a good deal of valuable analysis of the ways in which America has acted as a distorting mirror - part Utopia, part Dystopia - for the European mind; it is just that their authors do not appear to think it necessary to distinguish effectively between this imaginary America and the reality of its inhabitants' lives. Conrad, Honour, and (to a lesser extent) Lewis talk happily of the fact that 'When a European sets out on his first journey to America he knows, or thinks he knows, not only where he is going but what he will find when he arrives. So did Columbus' (Honour, 1975, p.3).[7] But if these imaginations are always fallacious, would it not be better to speak of a self-perpetuating 'New World' myth than of a series of travelogues centred around a single fixed America?

My own position as a New Zealander, writing as a commentator on European views of South America, forbids me to adopt either the 'engaged' perspective of a native Latin American or the cultural security of this dominant Anglo-American tradition. I observe with interest, therefore, these two intellectual genealogies of the idea of 'America' (with a tinge more respect for the Latin American view), but neither offers me a methodology which can be honestly sustained by so marginalized a critic.

But am I simply protesting too much? Is there really a problem here on the scale I have implied? To answer these questions, let us look at some studies which have attempted something more along the lines of my own inquiry.

[Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano (1947)]

•

(Partial) Precedents

This is ultimately how the Mexican setting functions in these novels, as an infernal paradise, a dualistic image which conflates all of the horrors and hopes that constitute the spiritual lives of the four protagonists. (Walker, 1978, p.24)

The 'four protagonists' in question are the heroes of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory (1940), D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent (1926), Aldous Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza (1936), and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947), all set in Mexico, and collectively the subject of Ronald Walker's Infernal Paradise: Mexico and the Modern English Novel (1978). The similarity to my own topic is at once striking, and it will therefore be interesting to examine some of the theoretical assumptions to be found in Walker's work.

there are important images in each work that tend to localize the quest for rebirth and give it a clearer focus. My discussions of the novels trace the use of three such images - blood, border, and barranca - which gradually become identified with the most compelling forces, at the heart of Mexican existence as seen by the English novelists. (Walker, 1978, p.25)

Essentially, then, Walker's is an inventory method of criticism - along the lines of my Romance and Mythological characterizations of South America - and with the attendant disadvantages of 1/ lack of specificity to Mexico, and 2/ the difficulty of demonstrating a more than coincidental accord in the employment of these 'images' in the works under discussion.

Walker's is, in any case, a largely documentary account. He traces (most interestingly) the movements of each author around Mexico, and looks at the travel books and notes devoted by each of them to the region before attempting a reading of their novels. The three 'images' become, as a result, more of a structuring device for traditional close readings than a theoretical statement about the nature of 'Mexico' as a European construct. Indeed, many of the claims he makes in passing would seem impossibly naive if they did not actually depend on such an established set of conventions of interpretation.

For instance:

Whether presenting impressions of the native character, landscape or politics ... or simply describing the author's travel experiences the best travel writing is generally characterized by subjectivity, by a deliberate focus on the author's state of mind as affected by the strange surroundings. (p.11)

Or else:

This is one of the important insights offered by the generic border experience recorded in Another Mexico [American title of Greene's The Lawless Roads (1939)]. The progressive stages looking across, crossing, looking back, then recrossing, and finally looking back from the familiar side to the unfamiliar - disclose, in the end, the fundamental cyclicity of experience in all regions. (Walker, 1978, p.197)

The question is, are such statements only problematic in my terms? In what sense is Walker's a study of Mexico if the experience of border crossing (one of his three 'b's') is 'cyclic' in all regions? One can see the justice of doing a reading of a series of novels which happen to be set in Mexico, and examining how they influenced one another - even of pointing out some features of Mexico ('death', borders, 'blood', barrancas[8]) which appear in all of them - but is this not a study of the 'Modern English Novel in Mexico' rather than 'Mexico in the Modern English Novel'? For the latter, one presumes, some discussion of the relationship between European and Latin American paradigms of 'Mexico' would be required.

A far more limited and therefore less helpful, though perhaps ultimately more successful study is Colin Steele's English lnterpreters of the Iberian New World from Purchas to Stevens: A Bibliographical Study (1975), All that Steele feels able to conclude after an exhaustive listing of seventeenth century translations of Spanish and Portuguese books about the New World is, 'Ironically therefore it took nearly all of the period 1603 to 1726 [the bounds of his study] for a return to the intellectual standards and discipline of Richard Hakluyt (1975, p.282). This is honest, if unexciting, but not much help for formulating larger terms of comparison between the two cultures - something which Walker at least attempts. Eventually, though, the latter leaves Malcolm Lowry to ask the larger question: 'But what is the secret of the attraction, one might say the almost teleological psychic attraction, of Mexico?'; and himself concludes:

The answers to these questions, like so many things pertaining to Lowry's life and personality, are elusive. (Walker, 1978, p.282)

A more fruitful attempt to codify the relations between Mexico and Europe is to be found in Octavio Paz's classic El laberinto de la soledad (1950). A selection of phrases from the essays included in this account of 'Vida y pensamiento de México' will show the extent to which Paz has reflected on precisely this subject.

mientras los españoles se complacen en la blasfemia y la escatología, nosotros nos especializamos en la crueldad y el sadismo. El español es simple: insulta a Dios porque cree en él. (Paz, 1988, p.70)

['while the Spaniards enjoy using blasphemy and scatology, we specialize in cruelty and sadism. The Spaniard is simple: he insults God because he believes in Him.' (Paz, 1985, p.69)]

La novedad de las nuevas naciones hispanoamericanas es engañosa; en verdad se trata de sociedades en decadencia o en forzada inmovilidad, supervivencias y fragmentos de un todo deshecho. (Paz, 1988, p.110)

['The newness of the new Spanish-American nations is deceptive: in reality they were decadent or static societies, fragments and survivals of a shattered whole.' (Paz, 1985, p.113)]

[Leopoldo] Zea afirma que, hasta hace poco, América fue el monólogo de Europa, una de las formas históricas en que encarnó su pensamiento; hoy ese monólogo tiende a convertirse en diálogo. Un diálogo que no es puramente intelectual sino social, político y vital. (Paz, 1988, p.152)

['Zea declares that until recently America was Europe's monologue, one of the historical forms in which its thought was embodied. Lately, however. this monologue has become a dialogue, one that is not purely intellectual but is also social and political.' (Paz, 1985, p.159)]

Paz sees the relationship between Spain and Mexico as a dynamic one - based at first, of course, on the latter's being a fragment 'de un todo deshecho', but in the process of becoming a dialogue between mutually dependent cultural systems. The contrast between 'blasphemy' on the one hand and 'sadism' on the other may denote, as he suggests, the residues of eschatological belief on the European side but it also shows the extent to which Spanish America provides a malign echo of Spanish baroque in the colonial period, Enlightenment thought after the Liberation, and now multi-national capitalism. As he puts it elsewhere Liberalism 'Afirma al hombre pero ignora una mitad del hombre: ésa que se expresa en los mitos, la comunión, el festín, el sueño, el erotismo' (Paz, 1988, p.115) ['championed man but ignored a half of his nature. that which is expressed in communion, myths, festivals, dreams, eroticism.' (Paz, 1985, p.119)] In other words, it is precisely the Utopian tradition of European thought about Latin America which has denied it its right to be human. Being seen successively as Earthly Paradise, Federation of free Democracies, and haven for the Western debt mountain makes a hard legacy to disown.

A creditable, but far more limited attempt to allow the continent its own voice on such questions of identity is to be found in Harriet de Onís' anthology The Golden Land (1948), which she describes as 'a theory illustrated by an anthology' (de Onís, 1948, p.vii).[9] In the following summary of the 'theory', one detects the unspoken assumptions of Western liberal thought, but also an honest attempt at allowing the other partner in the dialogue at least equal space:

For a long time, in the course of my readings in the field of Latin American literature. I had been struck by the way certain themes. certain attitudes. kept repeating themselves throughout the different phases of its development. Particularly impressive is the Antaeus quality about Latin American writers: their strength is proportionate to their union with their own earth. Keyserling has spoken of the telluric force of South America, how man is dominated by the earth, the landscape. to the point of becoming an integral part of it. Tradition plays an equally powerful role. (de Onís, 1948, p.vii)

[t is perhaps partly the date of de Onís' work - during the period (roughly from the 1920s to the 1950s) of the 'regional' or 'telluric' novelists - which misleads her, but the terms of her statement say quite a lot. The authority of Europe (Count Keyserling) and of classical tradition (Antaeus) are employed to define the 'South American' - note how the term changes from 'Latin American' further up, when speaking of their literature - as someone 'dominated by the ... landscape' and by 'tradition'. From my point of view, however, the most disappointing thing is her proposal to illustrate how 'certain themes, certain attitudes' keep repeating themselves in this writing. We have returned to the concept of the inventory - or, in other words. to the pitfalls of my 'Romance' classification of South America.

Numerous other works remain to be examined, but I imagine I have said enough to illustrate the difficulties of devising a critical methodology to deal with the question of South American identity without being in either the clear position of a native Latin American or a critic tacitly assenting to the ethnocentric dogmas of traditional Western scholarship. As Bell Gale Chevigny and Gari Laguardia put it in the preface to their recent collection of essays, Reinventing the Americas
(1986):

Conceived in the Old World, the New World may be said to have been written in advance, and then rewritten in the chronicles of discovery, conquest, and settlement. (Chevigny & Laguardia, 1986, p.vii)

Despite their attention to modern gender studies and the politicized context of 'post-Said' criticism their work achieves little theoretical advance in this respect on its Anglo-American predecessors.

[Abraham Ortelius: Typus Orbis Terrarum (1570)]

III

Methodology

The most obvious response to the previous section's rather polemical attempt to show the theoretical gap remaining in the field of 'South American' studies would be to challenge the present author to do better. One reply to such an ultimatum would be to acknowledge that many of the books which I have discussed - Ronald Walker's, Harriet de Onis's, Colin Steele's - are not even attempting to deal with these particular critical issues. Nevertheless, pointing out this failure even to see an issue to be addressed seems to me as important as trying to provide a panacea singlehanded.

I would therefore summarize the lessons learnt from this process as follows:

In the absence of a contingent cultural position, such as that of a native Latin American (or a Palestinian, in the semi-parallel case of Said's strictures on 'Orientalism'), it is important to avoid simply echoing the cultural certainties of a dominant critical ideology.

The obvious alternative to this would appear to be the political dogmatism of a Brantlinger or Kabbani, but the danger here is forfeiting the ability to make intelligent distinctions between the achievement of individual texts.

My conclusion, almost inevitably, is a compromise among the various alternatives presented. From Said, I have adopted something resembling his system of 'strategic location' (the general 'laws' of representation of South America, as codified in Barthes' mythological model), and 'strategic formation' (the relationship between a particular text and its cultural and generic positioning). While I continue to accept de Man's idea (adapted originally from Claude Lévi-Strauss) of the distinction between myths and already 'demystified' 11ctions, I have modified my original use of it into an essentially progressive view of the build-up of information within a single study - moving from mythological sub-stratum, to the generic and historical context of each work, and finally to the individual stratagems employed by that work in its attempt to re-create a 'South America' resembling the complexity of the actual South America.

We therefore go from:

The Utopian! Dystopian nature of the myths of discovery in Aphra Behn;

the 'factual' discourse of a travelling Naturalist in Charles Darwin;

the narrative shaping of historiography in R. B. Cunninghame Graham;

to a working model of the distinction between fictional and non-fictional
prose in W. H. Hudson;

thence to the creation of imaginary countries in fiction in Joseph Conrad;

to South American quest landscapes in John Masefield;

to translation from one cultural context to another in Elizabeth Bishop;

and finally to the subversiveness of post-modern genre theory in Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972).

My standards of judgement remain personal and eclectic - reflecting my own historical and cultural subjectivity (the extent to which Latin America's economic and ideological subjection to North America resembles the culturally marginal position of New Zealand vis-à-vis Australia and Great Britain, for example) - but they are at least on record. And, since my subject is not South America but 'South America' - not so much a place or even a mental space but a form of words which acts (at least in terms of my analysis) as the ideological centre for each of the books under discussion - it is doubtful whether anyone is better qualified to speak of it than a deracinated European, brought up on images of snow and ice and London weather in a land of rainforest and continual sunshine.

It remains only to say, therefore, that the dependence on textual commentary as a form of argument which will have been apparent even in this preface is not accidental. I highlight short extracts from each work because they represent for me the principal way in which literary criticism can claim for itself a field independent of that of the history of ideas. A false stability is perhaps implied by such close attention to the exact forms of words and phrases, but this may serve also to represent my distrust of any dependence on larger sets of generalizations when treating so inherently unstable a subject.

Of the two questions discussed earlier - the implied distinction between 'South America' and the physical South America; and the ways in which this 'South America' can be distinguished from the 'Africa', 'South-East Asia' and 'Polynesia' of the European imagination - it will by now have become apparent that one cannot be treated independently of the other. Said remarks that it is 'perfectly natural for the human mind to resist the assault on it of untreated strangeness', and one might add to this that the imaginative ingredients of such 'transformations' are both limited in number and extremely malleable in character. 'South America', then, is not so much the sum of a particular set of motifs or topoi, as of particular arrangements to fit diverse circumstances. So Caliban and the 'noble savage' are not so much South American myths - though both were inspired by reports of the customs of New World Indians - as myths with certain applications in South America. This answer to the conundrum may seem still to be a trifle tentative, but for more details, you will have to read on.

[Lopo Homem: Brazil (1519)]

1. Since this is a line which is easier to draw in theory than in practice, I make a point of citing any texts which are particularly concentrated upon both in the original and in translation (that is, with the exception of works in Portuguese, owing to my ignorance of that language).
2. Delivered as a Departmental Seminar to the English Department of Auckland University on June 19, 1986.
3. Note the omnipresent 'apples' even in Neruda's allegedly indigenous imagery. Gerald Martin quotes a remark by Julio Cortázar to the effect that 'the female as "Eve" (woman of flesh and blood rather than ideal projection) arrived late in Latin American literature ... her first appearance was ... in Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924)'. (Martin, 1989, p.370).
4. 'But the fiction is not myth. for it knows and names itself as fiction. It is not a demystification. it is demystified from the start.' (de Man, 1983, p.18).
5. A conceit to be be found in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (Behn, 1915, V: pp.125-208), as well as in Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan').
6. 'strategic location, which is a way of describing the author's position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes about, and strategic formation, which is a way of analyzing the relationship between texts and the way in which groups of texts. types of texts, even textual genres. acquire mass, density, and referential power among themselves and ... in the culture at large.' (Said, 1985, p.20).
7. Compare Peter Conrad: 'Before America could be discovered, it had to be imagined. Columbus knew what he hoped to find before he left Europe.' (1980, p.3).
8. Defined by Walker as 'deep gaping ravines cutting into the mountainous terrain.' (1978, p.26).
9. De Onís' work may be taken as broadly representative of other European summaries of Latin American approaches to the question of their own identity. Of these, Gordon Brotherston's Image of the New World: The American Continent Portrayed in Native Texts (1979) should be mentioned, along with the recent 8-part BBC television series Made in Latin America (U.K., 1989).

[Malinche in Tlaxcala]

Works Cited:

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. 1957. Points Civilisation. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982.

Behn, Aphra. "Oroonoko." In The Works of Aphra Behn. Ed. Montague Summers. 6 vols. London and Stratford-on-Avon, 1915. V: 125-208.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism,
1830-1914. Ithaca and London, 1988.

Brotherston, Gordon. Image of the New World: The American Continent Portrayed in Native Texts. London, 1979.

Chevigny, Bell Gale, & Gari Laguardia, ed. Reinventing the Americas: Comparative Studies of Literature of the United States and Spanish America. Cambridge, 1986.

Conrad, Joseph. Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. 1904. Ed. Martin Seymour-Smith. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.

Conrad, Peter. Imagining America. New York, 1980.

de Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. London, 1983.

de Onís, Harriet, ed. & trans. The Golden Land: An Anthologv of Latin American Folklore in Literature. New York, 1948.

Fuentes, Carlos. Gabriel García Márquez and the Invention of America. E. Allison Peers Lectures, 2. Liverpool, 1987.

Fuentes, Carlos. "Gabriel García Márquez and the Invention of America". In Myself with Others: Selected Essays. London, 1989. pp.180-95.

García Márquez, Gabriel. El olor de la guayaba: Conversaciones can Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza. Barcelona, 1982.

García Márquez, Gabriel. The Fragrance of Guava: Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza in Conversation with Gabriel García Márquez. Trans. Ann Wright. London, 1983.

Honour, Hugh. The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time. New York, 1975.

Hudson, W. H. Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest. 1904. London, 1954.

Kabbani, Rana. Europe's Myths of Orient: Devise and Rule. London, 1986.

Lewis, R. W. B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago and London, 1955.

Martin, Gerald. Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century. Critical Studies in Latin American Culture. London: Bloomsbury, l989.

Masefield, John. Sard Harker. London: William Heinemann, 1924.

Masefield, John. Odtaa. London: William Heinemann, 1926.

Neruda, Pablo. Canto general. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1983.

Neruda, Pablo. Selected Poems. Ed. Nathaniel Tarn. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970.

O'Gorman, Edmundo. The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History. Bloomington, Indiana: 1961.

Paz, 0ctavio. El laberinto de la soledad. 1950. Colección Popular. Mexico, 1988.

Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico. 1950. Trans. Lysander Kemp. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 1978. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

Steele, Colin. English Interpreters of the Iberian New World from Purchas to Stevens: A Bibliographical Study, 1603-1726. Oxford, 1975.

Vargas Llosa, Mario. 'Latin America: Fiction and Reality'. In Modern Latin American Fiction: A Survey. Ed. John King. London, 1987. pp.1-17.

Walker, Ronald G. Infernal Paradise: Mexico and the Modern English Novel. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1978.

[El Dorado]

Introduction:

2009-04-28T08:00:00.036+12:00

[Diego Rivera: The Great City of Tenochtitlan (1945)]

Mythologies of South America

[Roland Barthes (1915-1980)]

I

Theoretical Models

(a) Roland Barthes

There are a number of ways in which one might approach the subject of portrayals of South America in English literature. One possible beginning would be a history of Britain's involvement with the area - the exploration of Guiana, the Scottish Darien scheme, assistance given to the Independence movements during and after the Napoleonic wars - followed by an attempt to link these pragmatic concerns with a tradition of representation.[1] Or, alternatively, one could look at a series of representative novels and 'works of the imagination' and attempt to deduce from them some common traits.[2] Or one could produce a negative definition by examining the ways in which pictures of South America in literature differ from pictures of Africa, India, China, and South-East Asia - those other avatars of 'alienness'.[3]

I do not propose to attempt in detail any of the above, though the project which I shall outline contains something of each of them. One thing is certain: some method of selection must be found to reduce such a potentially overwhelming mound of data to manageable proportions. The first step towards this lies, I feel, in drawing a distinction between the South America of geography and the 'South America' of the imagination. This differentiation is to some extent justified simply by the 'literary' nature of our inquiry; but to explain its implications, I shall be making use of some terms defined by Roland Barthes in his 1957 book Mythologies.

In his essay 'Le mythe, aujourd'hui', Barthes offers the following illustration of the distinction between reality (geographical or otherwise) and myth:

La Chine est une chose. l'idée que pouvait s'en faire il n'y a pas longtemps encore, un petit-bourgeois français en est une autre: pour ce mélange spécial de clochettes, de pousse-pousse et de fumeries d'opium. pas d'autre mot possible que celui de sinité. Ce n'est pas beau? Que l'on se console au moins en reconnaissant que le néologisme conceptuel n'est jamais arbitraire: il est construit sur une règle proponionelle fort sensée. (Barthes, 1982, p.206)

['China is one thing, the idea which a French petit-bourgeois could have of it not so long ago is another: for this peculiar mixture of bells. rickshaws and opium-dens. no other word possible but Sininess. Unlovely? One should at least get some consolation from the fact that conceptual neologisms are never arbitrary: they are built according to a highly sensible proportional rule.' (Barthes, 1987, p.121)]

Three points are worth stressing here. There is a country ('La Chine'), and there is a popular conception of it ('sinité'), It is, however, also essential to note the nature of Barthes' implied observer - un petit-bourgeois français. The first two points certainly fit 'South America' as a region of the mind (one might substitute the tango. curare and condors for Barthes' temple-bells, rickshaws and opium-dens), The third is a little more problematic.

Barthes uses the term 'petit-bourgeois' advisedly, convinced as he is of the political motivations lying behind the condensation and over-simplification of experience into mythological patterns. Sinité, for him, is the bourgeois myth of China, la Chine the reality which must be screened out. In 'Continent perdu', one of the other essays in the same collection, he specifies:

Face à l'étranger, l'Ordre ne connaît que deux conduites qui sont coutes deux de mutilation: ou le reconnaître comme guignol ou le désamorcer comme pur reflet de l'Occident. De toute façon, l'essentiel est de lui ôter son histoire.(Barthes, 1982, p.165)

['Faced with anything foreign, the Established Order knows only two tvpes of behaviour. which are both mutilating: either to acknowledge it as a Punch and Judy show, or to defuse it as a pure reflection of the West. In any case, the main thing is to deprive it of its history.' (Barthes, 1987, p.90)]

This serves to make his political position far clearer. Sinité stands for the essentially ahistorical process of imagining foreign peoples either in one's own image ('pur reflet de l'Occident'), or as a kind of timeless pageant or spectacle ('guignol'), which is indulged in - almost as a function of its being - by 'l'Ordre'.

Of course, the problem still remains whether any imagination of the foreignness of a particular people or region can be exempted from this accusation - even the sensitivity of a Lévi-Strauss in Brazil, or of a Barthes before the Japanese culture of L 'Empire des signes (1970). Nevertheless, whether or not one agrees with Barthes' politics, one can acknowledge his point that the process of mythification is not arbitrary and neither are the forces behind it markedly innocent. For this reason, Barthes favours discourses which emphasize their own stylization and conventions (the language of wrestling, le catch, for instance) as opposed to those which aspire to be regarded as a part of reality. For Barthes, myth is the lowest common denominator of impressions. It falsifies by suppressing contradictions and awkwardnesses that do not fit in with its collective world-view. However:

Si paradoxal que cela puisse paraître, le mythe ne cache rien: sa fonction est de déformer, non de faire disparaître. (Barthes, 1982, p.207)

['However paradoxical it may seem, myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear.' (Barthes, 1987, 121)]

Myths are transparent - but transparently misleading. One inhabits them, as a rule, without knowing they are there. Barthes, however, is convinced of the necessity of recognizing and understanding the nature of a myth before it is possible to step outside its comforting (and reactionary) certainties.

Here the difficulty really begins. Barthes opposes mythological distortions of experience to something called 'reality' which he accepts as an a priori quality, and into whose nature he does not inquire very deeply. So far. no doubt, most of us would be in agreement with him - but this sharp distinction does tend to obscure the fact that the difference between a French petit-bourgeois' and a mandarin intellectual's perception of the complexities of a foreign country is more a matter of degree than of essence. Both must, inevitably, simplify and, as it were, 'mythologize' in order to make sense of the data which they receive. What Barthes turns out to be saying, then, must be seen more as a defence of self-consciousness in the construction and recognition of myths, than an alternative way of thought. Since a wholly unprejudiced eye is an impossibility (such an observer would have to renounce the capacity to interpret - let alone communicate - what he saw), we must accept that it is a matter of degrees of accuracy of perception rather than a simple dichotomy of reality and distortion. And. to do him justice, Barthes largely acknowledges this:

aujourd'hui, pour le moment encore, il n'y a qu'un choix possible. et ce choix ne peut porter que sur deux méthodes également excessives: ou bien poser un réel entièrement perméable à l'histoire, et idéologiser; ou bien, a l'inverse, poser un réel finalement impénetrable, irréductible, et, dans ce cas, poétiser. (Barthes, 1982, p.247)

['there is as yet only one possible choice. and this choice can bear only on two equally extreme methods: either to posit a reality which is entirely permeable to history, and ideologize: or, conversely, to posit a reality which is ultimately impenetrable, irreducible and, in this case, poetize.' (Barthes, 1982, p.158)]

These two models of reality are both compatible with Barthes' mythological hypothesis - but the modes of analysis which they respectively support might be characterized as belonging to the ideologist and the literary critic (as it is clear that 'poésie', here, implies literary artifice itself). The sharp distinction between 'myth' and 'poetry' as subjects of critical discourse should not, however, blind one to the fact that they are essentially two sides of the same coin:

La poésie occupe la position inverse du mythe: le mythe est un système sémiologique qui prétend se dépasser en système factuel; la poésie est un système sémiologique qui prétend se rétracter en système essentiel. (Barthes, 1982, p.220:

['Poetry occupies a position which is the reverse of that of myth: myth is a semiological system which has the pretension of transcending itself into a factual system; poetry is a semiological svstem which has the pretension of contracting into an essential system.' (Barthes, 1987, p.134)]

In other words, 'poetry' (or fiction, as I prefer to call it, for reasons that will shortly become clear) is a system of meaning which aspires to represent reality by laying maximum emphasis on the artifice and fictionality of its own tools, 'Myth', on the other hand, pretends to establish the facts of a situation by excluding all complexities from it.

To explain what this means in practice. it will be necessary to mention some more examples from Barthes' collection of essays. 'Le catch' is a self-conscious myth - one that highlights its own exaggeration of brawling and ,treet-fights - but it is not a fiction. However, to return to Barthes' Chinese example, while the parodic views of China recorded in Ernest Bramah's The Wallet of Kai Lung (1900) are certainly mythological, the book itself is a fiction - that is, a piece of writing which is playing on its own nature as writing. Fiction, in this sense, represents a level of language which is aware of the intrinsic paradox of claiming to be about 'not-writing'. It is always conscious of the accepted conventions of representation in any particular field, but it reverses, distorts, or even ironically sustains them in order to convey a more complex picture of things in general. As Paul de Man puts it in his 1971 book Blindness and Insight:

the work of fiction invents fictional subjects to create the illusion of the reality of others. But the fiction is not myth, for it knows and names itself as fiction. It is not a demystification, it is demystified from the start. (de Man, 1983, p.18)

It has always been obvious that writers were influenced by popular myths about the places they describe. What is less obvious is that their descriptions of those places must at least refer to those myths and conventions (even if only to contradict or subvert them) in order to be understood by their audience. Still less obvious - but no less important - is the fact that their writings will be interpreted according to these conventions whether they wish them to be or not. It is therefore a necessary starting-place in our exploration of European views of South America to isolate and describe some of the basic mythologies of the continent before looking at elaborations upon them.

Myths cannot (by definition) be difficult to find. A myth is a common perception - one that many people share. It is enshrined in cliches and proverbs, in popular literature and popular ideas. Barthes emphasizes that they are multiple, pervasive and ephemeral. They are also interlinked in extremely complicated ways (Barthes' principal theoretical innovation was, indeed, not so much the recognition that there were myths, as the application of semiological techniques to anatomize them). He saw them in the hairstyling conventions in Hollywood's Roman epics, in fashionable photography, even in the face of Brigitte Bardot. They are, in short, phenomena of society's surface.

The fact, however, that he so clearly contrasts 'poésie' and 'un réel entierement permeéable à l'histoire' [a reality entirely permeable to history] makes it clear that his primary intention in dealing with myths is to situate apparently 'timeless' ideologies in their contemporary context. He therefore gives examples which are designed to illustrate a number of things simultaneously: First, the inherently distorting quality of those readings and interpretations favoured by 'the Order of Things'; Secondly. the theoretical model of mythologies elaborated by him which allows them to be interpreted according to the laws of the Saussurean sign - on a secondary level of 'signified' and 'signifier'; and, last of all, since he was writing as a journalist, his essays function as parodies of the traditional bourgeois feuilleton.

In the case of South America, on the other hand, one cannot confine oneself entirely to these contemporary analyses. Myth-structures can be descried running through the entire pattern of European perceptions of the continent from the Conquest till now, and it is these which I am interested in charting. I therefore propose to reverse Barthes' expectations, and argue precisely for that model of 'poésie' as a 'système sémiologique qui prétend se rétracter en système essentiel' [a semiological svstem which has the pretension of contracting into an essential system], which he mentions only to dismiss, in order to make sense of such a diachronic as well as synchronic expanse. I shall begin by quoting passages from writers who will occupy us at greater length later in this study, and pointing out some of the tacit assumptions behind their remarks. This must, of course, be restricted mainly to the mythological level - leaving speculation about their fictional role to later chapters.

[Aphra Behn: Oroonoko (1688)]

II

The New World

(a) Paradise

certainly had his late Majesty, of sacred Memory, but seen and known what a vast and charming World he had been Master of in that Continent, he would never have parted so easily with it to the Dutch. 'Tis a Continent, whose vast Extent was never yet known, and may contain more noble Earth than all the Universe beside; for, they say, it reaches from East to West one Way as far as China, and another to Peru: It affords all Things, both for Beauty and Use; 'tis there eternal Spring, always the very Months of April, May, and June: the Shades are perpetual, the Trees bearing at once all Degrees of Leaves, and Fruit, from blooming Buds to ripe Autumn: Groves of Oranges, Lemons, Citrons, Figs, Nutmegs, and noble Aromaticks, continually bearing their Fragrancies: The Trees appearing all like Nosegays, adorn'd with Flowers of different Kinds; some are all White, some Purple, some Scarlet, some Blue, some Yellow; bearing at the same Time ripe Fruit, and blooming young, or producing every Day new. The very Wood of all these Trees has an intrinsic Value, above common Timber; for they are, when cut, of different Colours, glorious to behold, and bear a Price considerable, to inlay withal. Besides this, they yield rich Balm, and Gums; so that we make our Candles of such an aromatic Substance. as does not only give a sufficient Light, but as they burn, they cast their Perfumes all about. Cedar is the common Firing, and all the Houses are built with it. The very Meat we eat, when set on the Table, if it be native, I mean of the Country, perfumes the Whole Room; especially a little Beast call'd an Armadillo, a Thing which I can liken to nothing so well as a Rhinoceros: 'tis all in white Armour, so jointed, that it moves as well in it, as if it had nothing on: This Beast is about the Bigness of a Pig of six Weeks old. But it were endless to give an Account of all the divers wonderful and strange Things that Country affords, and which we took a great Delight to go in Search of; tho' those Adventures are oftentimes fatal, and at least dangerous (Summers, 1915, V: 178-79).

This passage comes from Oroonoko (1688), a novel by Aphra Behn which I propose to discuss at greater length in the next chapter. For the moment, however, I will confine myself to those aspects of her work which can be used to illustrate some of the basic myths of South America.

The first thing to be noted is the tone of the passage. It is rapturous - the description of an ideal. The 'Continent of Surinam'(Summers, 1915, V: 177) is vast, possibly larger 'than all the Universe beside'. The climate is 'eternal Spring', and the trees afford 'all Things, both for Beauty and Use'. It is not entirely safe, 'those Adventures are oftentimes fatal, and at least dangerous', but 'we fear'd no Harm, nor suffer'd any' (Summers, 1915, V: 179). It reminds one, in short, of nothing so much as Sir John Mandeville's description of the lands around 'Paradise terrestre' - Taprobane, 'the wildernesse wherein groweth the trees of the sonne & the Moone', Pantoroze, and the other 'yles of the land of Prester John', where 'fynde they all marchaundises, & popiniayes, as great plentie as larkes in our countrey' (Bramont, 1928, pp.220, 217, 215, 195, 221 & 197).

Nevertheless, Behn is not simply expressing her delight in the wonders of the new land - there is a clear political purpose in what she says. The book was written in 1688, after the first fervour of the 'scramble for America' had died down; but the other European powers were still looking enviously at Spain and Portugal's possessions in the New World. Both the Dutch and the English were concerned to extend their influence at least over the Caribbean coastline of South America. The fact, then, that a Dutch king had just ascended the throne, driving away the brother of 'his late Majesty, of sacred Memory' gives her remarks about the loss of Surinam to Holland an added point. It is true that she writes more in a spirit of 'ubi sunt' - the lost glories of America, of the Restoration court - than with a politically subversive message, but this is presumably through prudence rather than apathy. In any case, her portrait of America is no less 'valid' for the subtext discernible in what she says.

This is the first point to make about the views of the New World which we shall be discussing. Political, or any other sort of bias, does not disqualify them as examples - on the contrary, it simply makes them easier to disentangle and clarify. A knowledge of why a writer is describing South America is obviously immensely helpful in determining the extent to which they are governed by convention in what they say.

Thus, to turn to one of the first extensive eyewitness accounts of South America in English, Sir Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana (1596), flattery of a Queen back home can be more important than giving an accurate portrait of the new land:

I made them vnderstand that I was the seruant of a Queene, who was the great Casique of the north, and a virgin, and had more Casiqui vnder her then there were trees in their iland: (Ralegh, 1971, p.15)

Having succeeded in translating the Old World into the terms of the New, he goes on to record the natives' response to this revelation:

I shewed them her maiesties picture which they so admired and honored, as it had beene easie to haue brought them idolatrous thereof. (Ralegh, 1971, p.15)

Obviously this was in the hope of pleasing his patron Elizabeth sufficiently to make her favour his ambitions, but the specific mechanism he employed is most interesting. The fact that the flattery is put in the mouths of 'savages' is apparently held to be enough to make it sound disinterested. What reason, after all, could they possibly have for wanting to praise Queen Elizabeth, whom they had never even heard of before? Ralegh presumably made it all up - but if it was actually true, then it would add immeasurably to the Queen's status. Her face alone was enough to inspire idolatry in those who knew no better. Truly, in this case, ignorance was strength - their remarks, like those of children, were valued because one could suppose them to be sincere. This is indeed the first (and still the foremost) thematic significance of South America - the New World. It is fresh and unsophisticated. Life can be started again without the pressure of precedent on everv action. Mankind, both emigré and indigenous, can be seen in its purest state. Ralegh accordingly concludes:

Guiana is a Countrey that hath yet her Maydenhead, neuer sackt, turned, nor wrought, the face of the earth hath not beene torne, nor the vertue and salt of the soyle spent by manurance, the graues haue not beene opened for gold, the mines not broken with sledges, nor their Images puld down out of their temples. It hath neuer been entred by any armie of strength, and neuer conquered or possesed by any Christian Prince. (Ralegh, 1971, p.73)

This is avowedly an invitation to Englishmen both to take that gold and to settle in this new land (the principal intention of Ralegh's voyage), but Ralegh couches it in terms of a 'New World' myth that would have been familiar to all his readers, and which still survives in various forms today. The strongly sexual content in his image of Guiana as a 'virgin' territory waiting to be entered by Europe is also rather disingenuous. It simultaneously reminds the settlers he is hoping to attract of the charms of the country, and of its guileless inhabitants (both female and male).

To return to Aphra Behn. she has no patroness to placate, nor does she hope to stimulate fresh explorations, but her description, too, is conventionalized to the last degree. I mentioned, above, its resemblance to Mandeville's account of the Earthly Paradise - but probably a better parallel would be with one of the topoi in Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948). Specifically, with the locus amoenus (or 'delightful spot'). This, in Curtius' schema, includes six separate elements: Springs, Plantations, Gardens, Soft breezes, Flowers, and Bird-voices (Curtius, 1979, p.197). Only three of these appear in the description I have quoted above (plantations. gardens and flowers) - but if we turn over a page and come to the account of Behn's own residence in the New World, at 'the best House in it ... call'd St. John's Hill (Summers, 1915, V: 179), we find no fewer than five of the six:

SPRINGS:
'the little Waves [of the river] still dashing and washing the Foot of this Rock, made the softest Murmurs and Purlings in the World'

PLANTATIONS:
'a Walk, or Grove, of Orange and Lemon-Trees, about half the Length of the Mall here, whose flowery and Fruit-bearing Branches met at the Top, and hinder'd the Sun'

GARDENS:
'Not all the Gardens of boasted Italy can produce a Shade to out-vie this, which Nature had join'd with Art to render so exceeding fine'

SOFT BREEZES:
'the cool Air that came from the River, made it not onlv fit to entertain People in, at all the hottest Hours of the Day, but refresh the sweet Blossoms, and made it always sweet and charming'

FLOWERS:
'vast Quantities of different Flowers eternally blowing, and every Day and Hour new'

BIRD-VOICES:
She mentions none - only 'Tygers' (Jaguars), Snakes, and electric eels. (Summers, 1915, V: 179-83)

It is not that Aphra Behn is observing the laws of classical description with any conscious intention, She is, after all, included in the ranks of the 'moderns' in Swift's 'Battle of the Books' (1704). The point of this close correspondence with Curti us' prototype is to show the essentially formulaic nature of her perception of this new 'Universe'. It was thought for a long time that Mrs, Behn had never in fact visited Surinam, and that she was merely 'romancing' when she claimed that her father had been designated 'Lieutenant-General of six and thirty Islands, besides the Continent of Surinam' (Summers, 1915, V: 177). Recent research has however shown less reason to doubt her word on this point (Dhuicq, 1979, 524-26), and one may therefore conclude that it is quite likely that she did spend some of her youth in the country. Nevertheless, her description has been shown to have been at least partly lifted from earlier works, among them Warren's An Impartial Description of Surinam of 1667 (Summers, 1915, I: xix). What this shows, above all, is the extent to which she was dependent on textual precedent for her perception of the landscape around her.

Bearing this in mind, a closer look at the passage quoted at the head of this section will betray a quite clear structure in her seemingly spontaneous description. It resolves itself. to use Curtius' model, into seven elements: 1/ Extent, 2/ Season, 3/ Shade, 4/ Trees, 5/ Fragrance, 6/ Value, 7/ Danger. The extent is more 'than all the Universe beside'; the season 'eternal Spring'; Shades are 'perpetual' ('Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a Shade (Pope, 1961, p.77)); and the trees are 'like 'Nosegays', 'continually bearing their Fragrancies'. The timber (and meat) 'if it be native, I mean of the Country' has an 'intrinsic Value' above the common, The 'Adventure' of going in search of these things is 'at least dangerous', but 'we fear'd no Harm, nor suffer'd any'. In short, it 'affords all Things, both for Beauty and Use'.

If we then proceed to link this set of clichés with the cliché 'The New World', we begin to get some inkling of how this particular myth is operating. From at least the time of Amerigo Vespucci, the 'New World' has had a particular symbolic resonance. In terms of traditional Christian theology: God made the World; He made it perfect, in all respects ideal for man (made in His image). It was then corrupted by the Fall. Was the new world fallen, though? A sober view would have to say 'yes', but it could at least provide a symbol of a world unfallen - of an earthly paradise. Thus Indians, in Aphra Behn, are 'like our first Parents before the Fall' and 'represented to me an absolute Idea of the first State of Innocence, before Man knew how to sin' (Summers, 1915, V: 131). Hence the references to Eden, Adam, Paradise, Snakes etc. which distinguish almost all European attempts to come to terms with South America. :'lot that the references are always favourable ones. The idea of South America as Earthly Paradise is one that depends on a train of thought obvious, once it has been formulated, to the European mind. The place itself is thereafter scrutinized to find evidence that conflicts with or supports this extravagant notion. Indians are not perfect, so the notion of them as 'unfallen' is always an easy one to contradict. Mrs. Behn herself treats them with a certain levity later on in her novel, and mentions that:

by the extreme Ignorance and Simplicity of 'em, it were not difficult to establish any unknown or extravagant Religion among them. and to impose any Notions or Fictions upon 'em. (Summers, 1915, V: 186)

The Indians, then, are tried against the idea - not the other way around. They are praised if they match it, and condemned and mocked if they do not. Of course, the idea itself is often scoffed at - but this, in its way, is as effective an acknowledgement of it as any other. Are Indians unfallen or not? Whichever answer you give, you are acknowledging that the question makes sense to you, and that you understand the conventions that it invites you to use in framing your reply.

Once formulated, moreover, a myth with an appeal as universal as this seems to insinuate itself everywhere. Even in Mrs. Behn's time one would have thought it was wearing a little thin. It was, after all, two hundred years after Columbus's arrival. But if anything it appears to have gathered momentum with the passage of time - its great advantage being the ease with which it could evolve to match changing circumstances. For Behn and Montaigne (in his famous essay 'Des Cannibales' (1580)), it was a relief from the artificialities of the Old World, and a chance to castigate them by contrast. Rousseau followed their example, but with a Humanist emphasis on the rectification of Europe by analogy with 'natural' man. For Latin American writers after the wars of independence in the early nineteenth century, the New World myth was an invitation to 'make it new' in a half-literary, half-social sense. Andrés Bello heralded a return to the 'world of Columbus' (Carcciolo-Trejo, 1971, p.395), echoing the spirit of Bolívar's remark:

This country was guided by an instinct that can be called the wisdom of nature itself. There were no known models for its creations, and its doctrines had neither teachers nor examples, so that everything about it was original, and as pure as the inspiration that comes from on high. (Leonard, 1968, p.7)

Even in this century, five hundred years after the Discovery (or Conquest), Jorge Luis Borges has denounced this attitude as a tiresome affectation. What is strange, though, is that he criticizes it as an innovation:

Llego a una tercera opinion que he leído hace poco sobre los escritores argentinos y la tradición, y que me ha asombrado mucho. Viene a decir que nosotros, los argentinos, estamos desvinculados del pasado; que ha habido como una solución de continuidad entre nosotros y Europa. Según este singular parecer, los argentinos estamos como en los primeros días de la creación; el hecho de buscar temas y procedimientos europeos es una ilusión, un error (Borges, 1985, I: 223).

['I now arrive at a third opinion on Argentine writers and tradition which I have read recently and which has surprised me very much. It says in essence that in Argentina we are cut off from the past, that there has been something like a dissolution of continuity between us and Europe. According to this singular observation, we Argentines find ourselves in a situation like that of the first days of Creation; the search for European themes and devices is an illusion, an error' (Borges, 1979, p.217).

Thus we come full circle. We have already analyzed Aphra Behn's description of Surinam and found it to consist of seven separate elements - referring to all the expectations which a European could reasonably be presumed to entertain of a place designated as 'The New World'. Enough space and land for everyone (Extent); temperate weather all year round (Season - Spring); Shade from the sun; Trees for commodities and decoration, natural Fragrance (and spices? - the original motive for these explorations); richness and Value (as defined in Europe - the Old World); and, finally, just enough Danger to make it interesting, but not enough to discourage settlement. The same sort of analysis can now perhaps be applied to the whole 'New World' myth - necessarily with less precision - but hopefully clearly enough to illuminate the broad trends of thought associated with it.

NEW WORLD = The Earthly Paradise

EARTHLY PARADISE = A Pastoral Arcadia

ARCADIA = Innocence

INNOCENCE = Innocent people

INNOCENTS = Noble Savages

NOBLE SAVAGES = Childishness and Children

CHILDREN = Childhood

This, of course, is a model of a model. It gives some idea of the associations which combine to make this myth a discrete entity - while mythological analysis, in its turn. is only a device for making sense of innumerable strands of human thought. Nevertheless, despite the fact that none of the transitions are particularly unexpected, they show a progression from the 'New World' to 'Childhood' which might seem a little far-fetched if it were not backed up by our diagram, and the pieces of text which have inspired it.

Freud links childhood to Paradise by emphasizing that all such myths refer to the 'undivided' world of infancy - when satisfaction followed immediately upon desire: the era of 'polymorphous perversity', before the child was taught to postpone fulfilment of its wishes. This. then, is the golden age before the Fall. The concept of 'mythologies of South America' is. however, designed precisely to enable us to discuss the links between such ideas without adopting this or any other 'explanation' of their origins. Freud's seems to me quite a cogent view, but to subscribe to his model would falsify the essentially documentary nature of this study. I am, that is, more of a geographer than a genealogist of ideas. I do not attempt to understand or 'account for' South America - but simply to examine and classify earlier understandings and representations.

We have as yet, though, examined only half of the 'New World' myth as revealed in the works of Aphra Behn.

[The Golden Man]

•

(b) El Dorado

As we were coming up again, we met with some Indians of strange Aspects: that is, of a larger Size, and other sort of Features, than those of our Country ... [who] told us, they had been coming from the Mountains so many Moons as there were Knots [in their 'Cotton String']: they were habited in Skins of a strange Beast, and brought along with 'em Bags of Gold-Dust; ... and offer'd to be the Convoy to any Body, or Persons, that would go to the Mountains ... And because all the Country was mad to be going on this Golden Adventure, the Governor, by his Letters, commanded (for they sent some of the Gold to him) that a Guard should be set at the Mouth of the River of Amazons (a River so call'd, almost as broad as the River of Thames) and prohibited all People from going up that River, it conducting to those Mountains or Gold. (Summers, 1915, V: 188-89)

In this passage, a little further on in Oroonoko, Behn meets some strange Indians: 'that is, of a larger Size, and other sort of Features, than those of our Country'. They use knots instead of writing, like the Incas, and come from 'Mountains' which can onlv be reached by a long river journey (Behn's ignorance of the true dimensions of the Amazon - 'almost as broad as the River of Thames' - is amusing, but not significant; she had, after all, never been anywhere near it). They also bear with them 'Bags of Gold-Dust', and the temptation they present is so irresistible that the Governor is forced to set a guard to prevent people from following them.

All this, of course, refers to the legend of EI Dorado - the gilded man - which, according to Sir Clements Markham, 'probably originated in a custom which prevailed amongst the civilized Indians of the plateau of Bogota':

When the chief of Guatavita was independent, he made a solemn sacrifice every year ... On the day appointed the chief smeared his body with turpentine, and then rolled in gold dust. Thus gilded and resplendent, he entered the canoe, surrounded by his nobles, whilst an immense multitude of people, with music and songs, crowded round the shores of the lake. Having reached the centre, the chief deposited his offerings of gold, emeralds, and other precious things, and then jumped in himself, to bathe. At this moment the surrounding hills echoed with the applause of the people; and. when the religious ceremony concluded, the dancing, singing, and drinking began.
- Descubrimienco de la Nueva Granada,
por el Coronel J. Acosta (Simon, 1861, p.ii).

News of this, which began to reach the Spanish in the 1540's, focussed their originally more generalized greed for gold and slaves onto a single objective. The city or empire of which El Dorado was said to be ruler was generally assumed to be the last surviving offshoot of the Inca empire (hence the 'Knots' in Aphra Behn - Inca quipu strings). It was also associated with the 'Temple of the Sun' discovered by George of Spiers in 1538, and identified with the tribe of the Omaguas by Philip van Huten in 1544. At first variously located in Amazonia and Bogotá, it gradually shifted eastwards as more and more of these vast new territories were explored - finally coming to rest in the Sierra of Guiana towards the end of the sixteenth century (details from Ralegh, 1971, pp. xlv-xcv). There it became the 'Manoa' of Antonio de Berrio and Sir Walter Ralegh.

This myth has often been seen as in some sense a 'punishment' for the indiscriminate greed of Europeans, since, as Presbyter Suarez remarks, 'the Indians ... to escape torment, invented all manner of stories of El Dorado' (Ralegh, 1971, p.li). Disregarding this teleological interpretation, one can still see the importance of Suarez' remark for our purposes, as it implies very strongly that the idea of immense wealth lost in the jungle predates the specific circumstantial framework which was found for it.

The last two sections of Mrs. Behn's 'Earthly Paradise' description were not very adequately accounted for in our previous reading: the 'Price considerable' borne by the various pieces of flora and fauna described, and the danger of the journeys in search of them. They certainly serve to heighten aesthetically the sense of wonder evoked by 'my America! my new-found-land' (Donne, 1971, p.107), but they are not really represented in the table which we compiled. Behn goes on to give a long and circumstantial account of a 'tyger' hunt, which again does not match the picture of a world where the lion lies down with the lamb.

If, however, we take a slightly different slant from our cliché 'The New World', we find that this too can be included. What, after all, does one do with a new world? Alexander lamented having no more worlds to conquer - Cecil Rhodes lamented having no time left to conquer them ('there is your hinterland'), To Shakespeare's Miranda (or John Donne), a new world is a place to wonder at: '0 brave new world! That has such people in't! [Tempest, V, 1, 186-87] (Shakespeare, 1986, p.1338). To their contemporary Ralegh (and his predecessors the Conquistadors) it was a place to conquer and rule - a source of wealth and power. Money is most easily comprehensible in terms of gold, and power in terms of slaves - and both were readily available in the 'New World' of South America. I would therefore propose a pattern much as follows (along the lines of the associations of ideas recorded in the last section - but still recognizably a 'New World' topos):

NEW WORLD = Conquest

CONQUEST = Power (slaves) / Wealth (gold)

GOLD & SLAVES = Golden Indians

GOLDEN INDIANS = El Dorado

EL DORADO = A Lost city

This is the sort of thinking that inspired both the earliest chroniclers of South America (Hernán Cortés, Bernal Díaz, and other writer-conquistadors), and their successors - Ralegh, Fray Simon, and Aphra Behn. It is a blend of the strictly historical with the mythological. America was a new world - it must contain gold and slaves, New worlds, since Alexander, were well known to do so. Cortés and Pizarro had applied such a model to their new and alien surroundings and found it adequate. Vague stories of 'golden cities' in the hinterland had led them to Tenochtitlán and Cuzco. The myth of El Dorado, by contrast, seems if anything to have thrived upon failure. Not only did new expeditions continue to search for the 'golden man' even after the failure of Ralegh - but each new writer tried to descry the 'truth' of the matter, postulating the usual panoply of lost tribes of Israel, colonists from Atlantis, and offshoots from Ancient Egypt to supplement the original notion of a sister-empire to the Incas. Aphra Behn, as we have seen above, simply repeats the main lines of the story - carefully including all the major elements (the Inca origins, the gold, even the mountains - the few clues which the searchers believed themselves to possess).

'El Dorado' thus came to have another set of associations as well - associations bound up with the very difficulty of the quest for the city of the 'gilded man'. The terrain which the searchers had to traverse was as difficult as any in the world (few of the early expeditions had lost less than half their men and some had been wiped out altogether).[4] El Dorado had therefore become a symbol of the unattainable and inaccessible - and was accordingly associated thematically with the impenetrable undergrowth of the South American rainforest, the swollen immensity of its rivers, and the sheer faces of its mountains. A further paradigm therefore projects itself from the last:

LOST CITY = Lost, hidden

LOST, HIDDEN = Impenetrable forests / Impassable mountains / Unbridgeable rivers / Unbounded plains

FOREST = Matto Grosso, Darien

MOUNTAINS = The Andes, the Cordillera

RIVERS = Amazon, Orinoco

PLAINS = Pampas, Llanos

Our series of 'searchers for El Dorado' can therefore continue up to the present day and include archaeologists like Hiram Bingham (discoverer of Macchu Picchu), Stephens and Catherwood (explorers of the lost and overgrown cities of the Maya), and Colonel Percy Fawcett, whose search for a 'lost city' In the Matto Grosso ended in tragedy in the 1920s.

In literature, one should cite Romances of 'lost cities' (like John Masefield's Lost Endeavour (1910), but also the numerous works which hinge on the meaningless immensity of Amazonia and other jungle regions (Waugh's A Handful of Dust (1934), for example - or Werner Herzog's film Aguirre der Zorn Gottes [Aguirre Wrath of God](1972)). The hero of W, H, Hudson's Green Mansions (1904) retains a vague sense that he stumbled through the streets of Manoa in delirium after the death of his beloved Rima - and this half-recollection is perhaps as sensitive an employment as any.

The mythological associations of this view of 'South America' do not, however, end there.

[Gaucho]

III
The Gaucho

(a) Machismo

General Rosas is also a perfect horseman - an accomplishment of no smaU consequence in a country where an assembled army elected its general by the following trial: A troop of unbroken horses being driven into a corral, were let out through a gateway, above which was a cross-bar; it was agreed whoever should drop from the bar on one of these wild animals, as it rushed out, and should be able, without saddle or bridle, not only to ride it, but also to bring it back to the door of the corral. should be their generaL The person who succeeded was accordingly elected; and doubtless made a fit general for such an army. This extraordinary feat has also been performed by Rosas. (Darwin, 1891, p.53)

I mentioned 'unbounded plains' in the last section - and it is true that Doré's picture of the quest for El Dorado shows a group of knights lost on an illimitable desert - however the usual association of ideas equates the search for gold (or lost civilizations) with mountains, rivers, and trees. The plains have their own mythology, bound up principally with the charismatic figure of the gaucho.

The quotation above, from Darwin's Journal of Researches (1839), refers to his encounter with Juan Manuel Rosas, later dictator of Argentina, and at that time engaged in the extermination of all the Indians in the country. Despite the slightly patronizing air in his remarks, one can sense Darwin's real admiration for Rosas and his gauchos. He says, in fact, a little earlier: 'There is high enjoyment in the independence of the Gaucho life - to be able at any moment to pull up your horse, and say, "Here we will pass the night"' (Darwin, 1891, p.50). The first words, then, to be associated with the idea of the gaucho are freedom and independence. He represents the masculine ideal of having no ties and no domestic encumbrances. The gaucho is the man alone, the adventurer with only his faithful horse for company.

Perhaps the best summary of the gaucho lifestyle comes from Colonel Sarmiento's book Facundo: Civilación y Barbarie (1845). He describes their education as follows:

Los niños ejercitan sus fuerzas y se adiestran por placer en el manejo del lazo y de las boleadoras, con que molestan y persiguen sin descanso a las temeras y cabras; ... más tarde, y cuando ya son fuertes, recorren los campos cayendo y levantando, rodando a designio en las vizcacheras, salvando precipios y adiestrándose en el manejo del caballo; cuando la pubertad asoma, se consagran a domar potros salvajes y la muerte es el castigo menor que les aguarda, si un momenta les faltan las fuerzas o el coraje. Con la juventud primera viene la completa independencia y la desocupación. (Sarmiento, 1981, p.4l)

['The boys exercise their strength and amuse themselves by gaining skill in the use of the lasso and the bolas, with which they constantly harass and pursue the calves and goats ... When they become stronger, they race over the country, falling off their horses and getting up again, tumbling on purpose into rabbit burrows, scrambling over precipices. and practicing feats of horsemanship. On reaching puberty, they take to breaking wild colts, and death is the least penalty that awaits them if their strength or courage fails them for a moment. With early manhood comes complete independence and idleness.' (Sarmiento, 1961, 37)]

Emphasizing this last point of 'desocupación', Sarmiento specifies that 'todas las ocupaciones domésticas, todas las industrias caseras, las ejerce la mujer; sobre ella pesa casi todo el trabajo: y gracias si algunos hombres se dedican a cultivar un poco de maíz para el alimento de la familia' (Sarmiento, 1981, p.41) ['All domestic occupations are performed by women; on them rests the burden of all the labor, and it is an exceptional favor when some of the men undertake the cultivation of a little maize' (Sarmiento, 1961, 37)]. Sarmiento was Argentinian, though too much of a town-dweller to be a gaucho himself - Darwin points out that the term actually means 'countrymen' (1891, p.112), and one can already see a certain nostalgia and idealization creeping into his account:

¿Cuanto no habrá podido contribuir a la independencia de una parte de la America la arrogancia de estos gauchos argentinos que nada han visto bajo el sol mejor que ellos, ni el hombre sabio ni el poderoso? El europeo es para ellos el último de todos, porque no resiste a un par de corcovos del caballo. (Sarmiento, 1981, p.42)

['To what extent may not the independence of that part of America be due to the arrogance of these Argentine gauchos. who have never seen anything beneath the sun superior to themselves in wisdom or in power? The European is in their eyes the most contemptible of all men. for a horse gets the better of him in a couple of plunges.' (Sarmiento, 1961, 38)]

The questionable political equation of the 'independencia' of gaucho life with the 'independencia' of the United Provinces of Rio de la Plata is made even more suspect when the discussion turns to the poetry of the plains. We begin to see the authoritarian outlines of the gaucho myth taking full, mystical form:

¿qué impresiones ha de dejar en el habitante de la República Argentina el simple acto de clavar los ojos en el horizonte, y ver ..., no ver nada? Porque cuanto más hunde los ojos en aquel horizonte incierto, vaporoso, indefinido, más se aleja, más los fascina, lo confunde y lo sume en la contemplación y la duda. (Sarmiento, 1981, p.45)

['what impressions must be made upon the inhabitant of the Argentine Republic by the simple act of fixing his eyes upon the horizon, and seeing nothing? - for the deeper his gaze sinks into that shifting, hazy, undefined horizon, the further it withdraws from him, the more it fascinates and confuses him, and plunges him in contemplation and doubt.' (Sarmiento, 1961, p.41)]

To freedom and independence, then, we must add an element of existential doubt - a world where one's very identity begins to shift, and where the only meaning is confined to action. Sarmiento continues:

¿Dónde termina aquel mundo que quiere en vano penetrar? ¡No lo sabe! ¿Qué hay más allá de lo que ve? La soledad, el peligro, el salvaje, la muerte. He aquí ya la poesía. El hombre que se mueve en estas escenas se siente asaltado de temores e incertidumbres fantásticas, de sueños que lo preocupan despierto. (Sarmiento, 1981, p.45)

['What is the end of that world which he vainly seeks to penetrate? He knows not! What is there beyond what he sees? The wilderness, danger, the savage, death! Here is poetry already; he who moves among such scenes is assailed by fantastic doubts and fears, by dreams which possess his waking hours.' (Sarmiento, 1961, 41)]

'La soledad, el peligro, el salvaje, la muerte' - it is easy to see that discussions of the 'significance' of the gaucho lend themselves very easily to inflated romantic flourishes: but that is not the extent of his influence on Argentine letters. Borges has deplored the tendency to take the vocabulary and attitudes of 'poesía gauchesca' as an archetype for contemporary writers, commenting that 'un colombiano, un mexicano o un español pueden comprender inmediatamente las poesías de los payadores, de los gauchos, y en cambio necesitan un glosario para comprender, siquiera aproximadamente, a Estanislao del Campo o Ascasubi' (Borges, 1985, I: 219) [''a Colombian, Mexican or Spaniard can immediately understand the poetry of the pavadores, of the gauchos, and yet they need a glossary in order to understand, even approximately, Estanislao del Campo [author of Fausto (1870)] or Ascasubi.' (Borges, 1979, p.213)]. This is, of course, due to the fact that (as Borges points out) it is only to a non-gaucho that the gaucho lifestyle and habits appear remarkable and worthy of reverence, Thus we find poems like Hernández' Martín Fierro (1872), which even Borges acknowledges to be 'la obra más perdurable que hemos escrito los argentinos' (Borges, 1985, I: 218) ['the most lasting work we Argentines have written' (Borges, 1979, p.211)], being regarded as the Argentine equivalent of the Homeric poems, 'nuestra Biblia, nuestro libro canónico (Borges, 1985, I: 218) ['our Bible. our canonical book'] (Borges, 1979, p.211).

It is scarcely possible to overestimate the influence of this myth on Argentinian literature. Ricardo Güiraldes dedicates Don Segundo Sombra (1926) - which, as Waldo Frank puts it in his introduction to Harriet de Onís' English translation of the novel, 'occupies in Argentinian letters a place not unrelated to that of Huckleberry Finn in the literature of the United States (Güiraldes, 1948, p.vii)) - 'Al gaucho que llevo en mí, sacramente, como la custodia lleva la hostia (Güiraldes, 1962, p.346) ['To the gaucho I bear within me, sacredly, as the monstrance bears the holy wafer'(Güiraldes, 1948, p.v)]. He extends these high flown sentiments to his account of the gaucho 'code' of conduct:

la resistencia y la entereza en la lucha. el fatalismo en aceptar sin rezongos 10 sucedido, la fuerza moral ante las aventuras sentimentales, la desconfianza para can las mujeres y la bebida, la prudencia entre los forasteros, la fe en los amigos. (Güiraldes, 1962, p.390)

['courage and fairness in the fight, love of one's fate whatever it might be, strength of character in affairs of the heart, caution with women and liquor, reserve among strangers, faith to friends.' (Güiraldes, 1948,p.61)]

The gaucho might be taken to represent freedom, fatalism, and justice - if one were to subscribe entirely to this reading. But there is another side as well (perhaps better represented in European than Latin American literature) but rather less favourable to this 'lone man on a horse'. W. H. Hudson comments of the gauchos he grew up among: 'they loved to kill a man not with a bullet but in a manner to make them know and feel that they were really and truly killing' (Hudson, 1925, p.124). And in his biography of R. B. Cunninghame Graham, another 'gaucho-ized' European, A. F. Tschiffely remarks:

When passing a river, if he could avoid it, no man rode into the water first, especially if he wore silver spurs or reins, for it might chance that he received a knife-thrust in the back from a too admiring friend, or perhaps merely because the sudden lust to kill, so frequent amongst dwellers of the plains, rose in the heart of the man who followed immediately behind. (Tschiffely, 1937, p.51)

We can thus see two overlapping perceptions of the gaucho - one (represented by Hudson and R. B. Cunninghame Graham) seeing him as an instinctively free, instinctively violent, child of nature; and the other (represented by Güiraldes and the 'gauchesque' poets) seeing him as the ideal 'man without women', stern and just, like the shadowy Don Segundo Sombra. Interestingly, neither group identifies directly with the gauchos - Hudson and Graham preserve their European distance, and even Güiraldes' narrator is forced to abandon his mentor when he inherits an estancia - but perhaps this is an essential part of the mystique. In any case, one might sum up the literary topos as follows:

GAUCHO = Freedom / Independence (Sarmiento)

FREEDOM = Wide plains / Horses / Violence (Hudson & Graham)

VIOLENCE = Impulse (Güiraldes )

IMPULSE = Unpredictability (Borges)

UNPREDICTABILITY = Machismo

Darwin, Hudson and Sarmiento could observe the gauchos at first hand, but we are no longer able to do so. It would therefore be necessary, in order to get the full force of the contemporary gaucho myth, to add 'GAUCHO = A lost way of life'.

This myth might seem most useful for interpreting the literature of the Argentine and its closest neighbour Uruguay, but it is by no means confined to them. Similar cowboy-like figures roam the Llanos of Venezuela and the sertão of Brazil. Also, the point has been made that a certain laconic and casual attitude towards danger and death is a strand to be observed running through most of the literature of South America - and it seems appropriate to link the idealization of the gaucho with this. In Borges' later short stories, for example, the aesthetic appreciation of 'witty' behaviour - such as the story of the two brothers who, instead of fighting over a girl, decide to kill her instead (''La intrusa', in Borges, 1985, IV: 15-18) - becomes a definite motif. In his case, it recalls the similar codes of behaviour in saga literature where the matter-of-fact acceptance of death and 'necessary murder' is endemic. Elsewhere, however, it seems to refer directly to the strain of humour to be found in anecdotes about gauchos - such as some of those Darwin repeats about Rosas: the time that he had himself put in the stocks for infringing one of his own regulations, and then imprisoned his steward for releasing him; the court jester who remarked: 'when the general laughs he spares neither mad man nor sound' (Darwin, 1891, p.53).

This exaltation of cruelty can be traced in many works of Latin American literature, and deserves more extensive discussion on its own - for the moment, however, we can sum up the gaucho by saying that he is, in an almost Hemingwayesque sense, the 'natural man'. He reacts, but does not brood upon his decisions. He is suspicious of language and glib speech, and will kill either friend or stranger at the slightest provocation.

The association of this set of attitudes with machismo is a fairly natural one since women, in gaucho stories like Don Segundo Sombra, bring nothing but trouble. Its links with the motifs of violent revolution and carnival may seem a little harder to establish but, as we shall see in the next section, this too forms one of the staples of literary idealizations of South America.

[Carnival]

•

(b) Carnival

Si en la vida diaria nos ocultamos a nosotros mismos, en el remolino de la Fiesta nos disparamos. Más que abrirnos, nos desgarramos. Todo termina en alarido y desgarradura: el canto, el amor, la amistad. La violencia de nuestros festejos muestra hasta qué punto nuestro hermetismo nos cierra las vías de comunicación con el mundo. Conocemos el delirio, la canción, el aullido y el monólogo, pero no el diálogo. Nuestras Fiestas, como nuestras confidencias, nuestros amores y nuestras tentativas por reordenar nuestra sociedad, son rupturas violentas con lo antiguo o con lo establecido. Cada vez que intentamos expresarnos, necesitamos romper con nosotros mismos. Y la Fiesta sólo es un ejemplo, acaso el más tipico, de ruptura violenta. (Paz, 1988, pp.47-48)

['If we hide within ourselves in our daily lives, we discharge ourselves in the whirlwind of the fiesta. It is more than an opening out: we rend ourselves open. Everything - music, love, friendship - ends in tumult and violence. The frenzy of our festivals shows the extent to which our solitude closes us off from communication with the world. We are familiar with delirium, with songs and shouts, with the monologue ... but not with the dialogue. Our fiestas, like our confidences, our loves, our attempts to re-order our society, are violent breaks with the old or the established. Each time we try to express ourselves we have to break with ourselves. And the fiesta is only one example, perhaps the most typical, of this violent break.' (Paz, 1985, p.45)]

The novel Terra Nostra (1975) by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes has been described (by a Times reviewer quoted on the back-cover blurb of the Penguin edition) as 'a fresh, cruel look at western humanity'. This attitude of half-fascination, half-repulsion for the everyday cruelty which is allegedly a feature of Latin American life, can be observed in a great deal that is written about the area - South and Central America as well as Mexico. In the passage quoted above, from the essay 'Todos santos, día de muertos' in his book E1 laberinto de la soledad - interestingly, the English translator prefers the resonant title 'The Day of the Dead' - Octavio Paz attempts to analyze some of the sources of this obsession. The terminology he uses in doing so gives us a clue to the larger implications of this particular myth:

La Fiesta es una Revuelta, en el sentido literal de la palabra. En la confusión que engendra, la sociedad se disuelve, se ahoga, en tanto que organismo regido conforme a ciertas reglas y principios. Pero se ahoga en sí misma, en su caos o libertad original. Todo se comunica; se mezcla el bien con el mal, el día con la noche, lo santo con lo maldito. (Paz, 1988, p.46)

['The fiesta is a revolution in the most literal sense of the word. In the confusion that it generates, society is dissolved, is drowned, in so far as it is an organism ruled according to certain laws and principles. But it drowns in itself, in its own original chaos or liberty. Everything is united: good and evil, day and night, the sacred and the profane.' (Paz, 1985, p.43)]

Paz sees an equation between the 'hermetismo' (secrecy) that is characteristic of his region and its discharge in 'el remolino de la Fiesta' [the whirlwind of the fiesta]. The fiesta itself is merely a symbol for the 'ruptura violenta' [violent break] which this kind of society feels periodically called upon to make. One name for this kind of reversal of the conventional order is carnival or fiesta (the Saturnalia of the Romans) - another is revolution. He specifies in the second quotation that in these upheavals society 'se ahoga en si misma' [is drowned in itself], in its original 'caos o libertad' [chaos or liberty] - a good metaphor for the kinds of ideological shift required for a thinker like Sarmiento to reconcile his own 'civilized' existence with the chaotic freedom of gaucho life. Indeed, one might almost say that it is a 'town and country' dialectic inescapable for Latin Americans concerned about their own identity.

The association of political upheaval with public discharges of emotion is therefore as common in Latin American writing as it is in the sometimes facetious commentaries of Europeans such as Charles Darwin:

The revolutions in these countries are quite laughable; some few years ago in Buenos Ayres, they had 14 revolutions in 12 months. - things go as quietly as possible; both parties dislike the sight of blood; & so that the one which appears the strongest gains the day. - The disturbances do not much affect the inhabitants of the town, for both parties find it best to protect private property. (Keynes, 1988, p.85)

'Fiesta' and 'Revolution' are the lighter and darker sides, respectively, of the same sense of upheaval and violence. Which of them one emphasizes depends to a large extent on one's own contingent position. Against Darwin's flippancy one could therefore cite 'dictator' novels like Miguel Angel Asturias' E1 Señor Presidente (1946) and García Márquez' E1 otoño del patriarca (1975) as well as in analyses like Paz's. The train of associations seldom ends there, however - the 'religions of death' which dominated Southern America before the Spanish conquest are usually held to have something to do with this fatalistic acceptance of everyday violence, along with the atrocities perpetrated by the first settlers: the 'leyenda negra' of Spanish brutality and cruelty referred to by Ralegh in his Discoverie of Guiana.

A paradigm for this set of ideas might take the following form:

FREEDOM = Impulse

IMPULSE = Violence, cruelty

VIOLENCE = Revolution

REVOLUTION = Reversal, bouleversement

REVERSAL = Carnival

Thus, representations of 'South American' revolution generally include many of the concomitants of classical carnival - the pope of fools, the jester or mountebank, and also the reversal of men and women's roles. Nor do these operate solely on a political level - the idea of the 'reversal' of dead and living (referred to in the title of Paz's essay) is no less important in books such as Lowry's Under the Volcano or Asturias' Mulata de tal (1963) than the need to purge society of the meaningless masks and façades of authority.

Further associations of the 'carnival' myth in the literature of South America accordingly include the violent alternation of conservative and radical political parties - invariably defined in terms of 'black and white'; absolute good and absolute evil (though which is which depends on the writer's own bias). The motif is mocked in Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad:

Como Aureliano tenía en esa época nociones muy confusas sobre las diferencias entre' conservadores y liberales, su suegro le daba lecciones esquemáticas. Los liberales, le decía, eran masones; gente de mala indole, partidaria de ahorcar a los curas, de implantar el matrimonio civil y el divorcio ... Los conservadores, en cambio, que habían recibido el poder directamente de Dios, propugnaban por la estabilidad del orden público y la moral familiar (García Márquez, 1985, p.148).

['Since Aureliano at that time had very confused notions about the difference between Conservatives and Liberals, his father-in-law gave him some schematic lessons. The Liberals, he said, were Freemasons, bad people, wanting to hang priests, to institute civil marriage and divorce ... The Conservatives, on the other hand, who had received their power directly from God, proposed the establishment of public order and family morality.' (García Márquez, 1980, p.84)]

García Márquez' sympathies, like those of most Latin American writers, appear to be with the libelled progressives (like those of his character, the future Colonel Aureliano Buendia). In John Masefield's Odtaa (1926), however, advocacy of the 'white' position is unalloyed by irony:

the dirty way is the way the Reds take by nature, being what they are, people without dignity and without belief. (Masefield, 1927, p.55)

Again, one might make the point that the attitudes associated with being on the outside looking in are significantly different from those of the 'criollo' inhabitants of America.

One might, then, summarize these further shifts as follows:

REVOLUTION = Alternation

ALTERNATION = Political parties

PARTIES = Red (radical) / White (conservative) / 'Black and white' judgements

RED = Radical / Atheistic / 'Native' / Cruel

WHITE = Conservative / God-fearing / Catholic / Reactionary

Thus we can see monocular partisanship as an essential addition to the mythological train of thought running from Freedom, to Revolution, to Cruelty, to Death, to Fiesta and the 'Day of the Dead'.

It would be easy to go on to examine other myths, but it will be apparent by now that the task is a potentially infinite one. All one can do is present a selection. What is more, the law of Diminishing Returns operates particularly fiercely in this field: even the myths which I have outlined overlap with one another, and make more sense in the aggregate than they do separately. If one subjects them to too close a scrutiny they begin to dissolve into random pieces of colour - it is only from a slight distance that the picture makes sense.

Myths do exist, as Roland Barthes has demonstrated - and all of us order our lives by them, whether we are aware of the fact or not. In purely literary terms, however, a myth tends to stand for the tension between opposing tendencies with the oddity that even its seemingly outmoded aspects can be continuously revived, thanks to their nature as texts. There are obvious distinctions to be made between the four myths that I have discussed in this chapter - the 'New World', for example, being both the most long-lived and the most adaptable to shifts of fashion: while 'El Dorado' and the gaucho are most specifically linked to particular historical phenomena (not that that in any way reduces their significance in either the textual or worldly realms). 'Carnival', finally, is perhaps the myth which has been subjected to the the weightiest deliberations in Latin America itself. Octavia Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Miguel Angel Asturias and Gabriel García Márquez constitute a particularly impressive line of authority.

Of course, this is to some extent to be disingenuous. Another division could be made between 'myths of exploitation' and 'myths of the exploited' - associated, respectively, with the European and Latin American traditions. The 'El Dorado' myth is shamelessly acquisitive, but the insensitivity to the native cultures of the New World displayed by those who cast its inhabitants as shepherds in an Arcadian landscape has been perhaps even more damaging psychplogically in the long run. Hence the periodic crises of American 'identity' in respect to Europe; hence also the idealization of cruelty and stoicism, as personified in the figure of the gaucho, adopted by Latin Americans in order to break out of this mould.

I acknowledge the force of this reading, and hope that a count of the passages in Spanish and English in the two mythological 'sections' in question will make it clear that I do see a dichotomy in the employment of these motifs by British and South American writers (to adopt the more narrow terminology demanded by the scope of my topic). I must conclude, however, that the choice between a reading 'entièrement perméable à l'histoire' [entirely permeable to history] and one which, on the contrary, decides to 'poétiser' [poeticise], which I made at the beginning of this chapter, was not a casual one. These myths have been used to justify oppression and exploitation, and yet to equate them with that injustice tout court would be to carry the argument too far. For myself, I see more value in a reading of successive fictional 'versions' of the continent in terms of their ability to create a South America

The poets have imagined, terrible and gay. (Yeats, 1984, p.320)

A 'South America', that is, which might be in some ways adequate to the original. And it is my hope (a pious one, perhaps) that by pursuing this task more can be done to disentangle the processes involved in the persistent 'mythologizing' of other peoples and cultures, than by attempting to ignore altogether the aesthetic imperatives of richness and delight which inspired the authors I am studying.

[Looking for the Revolution]

1. As, for example, in Colin Steele's English Interpreters of the Iberian New World (1975).
2. Something analogous to Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (1977), where the literature of the First World War is broken down into a series of thematic categories allegedly central to later Modernist writing.
3. This might be done from the works of a particular author, such as Conrad: or, on a larger scale, as part of a general study of European iconographies of the Foreign - as in Hugh Honour's The New Golden Land (1975).
4. Aguirre in 1561 turned pirate and was finally executed: Alfinger in 1532 left only 'a few worn-out stragglers'; Maldonado and Tortoya's expedition were all killed or captured by the 'savage Chunchos'. (Ralegh, 1971, pp.xlviii & lxv).

[La Malinche between Cortés and the Indians (1519)]

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Simon, Fray Pedro. The Expedition of Pedro de Ursua and Lope de Aguirre in search of El Dorado and Omagua in 1560-1. Trans. William Bollaert. Iintroduction by Clements R. Markham. Hakluyt Society, 28. London, 1861.

Steele, Colin. English Interpreters of the Iberian New World from Purchas to Stevens: A Bibliographical Study, 1603-1726. Oxford, 1975.

Summers, Montague, ed. The Works of Aphra Behn. 6 vols. London and Stratford-on-Avon, 1915.

Tschiffely, A. F. Don Roberto: Being the Account of the Life and Works of R. B. Cunninghame Graham, 1852-1936. London: Heinemann, 1937.

Yeats, William Butler. The Poems: A New Edition. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. London: Macmillan, 1984.

[Aphra Behn: Oroonoko (1688)]

Chapter 1:

2009-04-27T08:36:00.034+12:00

[Diego Rivera: Creation (1923)]

Part One:
Exploration

Behn and the Discoverers

Aphra Behn (c.1640-1689)
[Mary Beale]

I

Saussure

In the previous chapter I looked at the mythological foundations of any 'fictional' version of South America in the European tradition. It is now time to discuss the techniques which I shall be employing in order to distinguish between mythological and fictional readings of the same works.

[Columbus on the Beach (1)]

I have already mentioned some of the problems caused by the geographical overlapping of the entities known as 'South' and 'Latin' America, but the difficulties presented by the chronological scope of our study have not yet been made apparent. The best way to illustrate this is perhaps by looking at a single iconic picture of South America, and examining the various different ways in which it could be investigated. The picture which I have chosen, a composite of a number of similar scenes, is called 'Columbus on the beach'. It exists in two forms. In one, Columbus is stepping onto the beach at San Salvador, clad in full armour and surrounded by kneeling natives. In the other, Columbus is kneeling on the beach and giving thanks to heaven for his deliverance and that of his crew. Innocent, unclad natives look on in awe and incomprehension.

[Columbus on the beach (2)]

I shall be looking at the ideological implications of this scene in more detail later. For the moment, what should concern us is the status of Columbus himself. As an historical figure - and since history is the study of documents and documentation - it is clear that Columbus exists for us in the form of texts. But precisely which texts? There are, of course, his various surviving letters to the Monarchs of Spain. These are at least contemporary with his voyages, although they have the disadvantage, at least for purposes of strict veracity, of being written as propaganda for his discoveries (in much the same way as Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana, discussed above). Then there is his Journal, transcribed and edited after his death by Bartolomé de las Casas, and not published in full until 1825 (information from Clements R. Markham's introduction, in Columbus, 1893, p.vi). Alternatively, one could turn to third-person accounts: the Historie by Don Fernando Colón, the Admiral's son, which only survives in a 1571 Italian translation as Vita dell Ammiraglio (Colón, 1960); Washington Irving's The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), with its sequel The Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus (1831); or, more recently, Samuel Eliot Morison's Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942). A study of the figure of Columbus in imaginative literature, on the other hand, might make its choice between Joel Barlow's epic poem The Vision of Columbus (1787) (revised and expanded as The Columbiad (1807); J. H. Campe's Die Entdeckung von Amerika (1780-81) (translated into English as The Discovery of America, for the use of children and young persons (1799)); Paul Claudel and Darius Milhaud's Livre de Christophe Colomb, first performed in 1930; or Michel de Ghelderode's Christophe Colomb, performed in 1929 but not published until 1954. His voyages have inspired a series of novels - notably Stephen Marlowe's The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus (1987), but also children's books such as C. Walter Hodges' Columbus Sails (1939) and Gordon Stable's Westward with Columbus (1894), not to mention Rafael Sabatini's Columbus: A Romance (1943) or the recent English translation of Abel Posse's The Dogs of Paradise (1987).

If, then, we perceive the history of America as a horizontal ribbon of time, we can see these varying treatments of Columbus as a series of vertical axes passing through it - preserving the intellectual and stylistic emphases of five centuries of European and American culture. We therefore have a choice of levels - we can look at Columbus vertically, examining the variations in his projected image and relating these to the intellectual currents of the day; or horizontally, attempting to reconstruct the day-to-day reactions of the Admiral and his contemporaries to the new discoveries. The corner of our graph is accordingly set on 1492 (for the purposes of this specific image), and its two axes are, respectively, chronology and textuality, both of them running up to the present day.

Each of the texts about Columbus which I have mentioned represents simultaneously an attempt to reconstruct the events of 1492 (within the technical constraints of each genre), and the attitudes of its own historical moment. What is more, many of these works set up their own methodological difficulties - Don Fernando Colón's biography of his father, for example, having been composed in the last years of his life (he died in 1539); then read and quoted by various near-contemporaries such as Las Casas; then translated (inaccurately) into Italian by Alfonso Ulloa and published in Venice; and finally lost or destroyed in its original form. Which of these dates should we take account of when speaking of the historical 'moment' of this work? Presumably the answer must be, both the (unknown) period of composition and the moment(s) of the work's first publication and diffusion.

Problems of methodology similar to this were dealt with by Ferdinand de Saussure in his 1916 Cours de linguistique générale (Saussure, 1964), where he made an influential distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic approaches to semiotic (sign) systems. The diachronic approach examines objects historically, in terms of individual cause-and-effect - the standard example being Historical Linguistics. The synchronic approach studies the system which exists at a particular time, and defines the signs in question in terms of their function within that system. The diachronic, then, is our horizontal ribbon of time - but the synchronic is not precisely our vertical extension to the graph. It is, rather, a vertical, un extended section cut through the diachronic line of history. It cannot continue upwards into subsequent eras and modes of representation.

The advantage of a synchronic mode of analysis is that it eliminates, at a stroke, the necessity to supply a family-tree of causation for every item within a system (a task impossibly vast) - simply because the origin of these factors would not help to define their place within that system. It is thus apparent that there is no advantage to be served in extending our vision above the horizontal base-line of our examination, since this would simply multiply - without clarifying - the objects under investigation. Nor is there any purpose, in a study of this kind, in trying to compete with the numerous excellent (diachronic) histories of Columbus's life and times which already exist. Our purpose is to reconstruct a textual system - the particular implications of the words 'South America' which suggested the way in which one author chose to represent it at a particular time, and in order to do this our choice of texts must be chronologically consistent.

Of course, this is to make things a little too simple. The objects of Saussure's investigation were languages, ideal for his purposes because of the arbitrariness both of signifier (few words can be accounted for either by onomatopoeia or euphony), and signified (if concepts were constant from language to language translation would be an exact science). It was therefore easy for him to argue that language must be divided into two categories: langue and parole - la langue being the 'system of a language, the language as a system of forms, whereas parole is actual speech, the speech acts which are made possible by the language' (Culler, 1979, p.29). If the signs in his system, words - made up of both the concept they signalled and the sounds they consisted of - were arbitrary on both counts, they could only be perceived as having meaning because of their place within the system of language. The historical evolution of each word could therefore provide no clue to its structural positioning; its 'meaning', as it were. Langue is therefore the correct object of study for theoretical linguists (and, by extension, semiologists), and the synchronic approach is the only way in which to isolate their particular objects of study.

In the case of a literary study like this, however, the factors - and data - become more complex. The ideological system of 'representations of South America' is obviously linked to a real place, South America (just as words define, as often as not, actual objects within the world) - but this is more a practical than a theoretical difficulty. If we bear in mind that the focus of our study is versions of 'South America' written from the outside - rather than its own history or indigenous literature (except insofar as they assist us in defining what is specific to this external view) - then we see that these three areas of study (reality, textuality, and Latin American literature) in fact complement one another. The real problem, then, is positioning the data at our disposal. If two important texts were published a century apart (like Montaigne's 'Des Cannibales' and Behn's Oroonoko), what is our justification for assuming that they form part of the same synchronic constellation, given that that is determined by a single section cut across the diachronic line? What is more, while laws of syntax and grammar can easily be subsumed under langue, leaving actual utterances produced by a speaker of that language to be described as parole, how are we to distinguish the two when our parole consists of texts by Montaigne and Columbus, and our langue of complex - and never fully consistent - generalizations deduced from them?

My answer to these problems must be a pragmatic one. The methods of 'strategic location' and 'strategic formation' used by Edward Said in Orientalism to place texts within a particular tradition of authority have already been discussed in the General Preface. The first (defined by Said as 'a way of describing the author's position in a text with regard to the ... material he writes about') was identified by me with each author's relationship to the mythologies of South America discussed in the last chapter. The second ('a way of analyzing the relationship between texts and the way in which groups of texts, types of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass, density, and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large' (Said, 1985, p.20)) I equated with the relationship between a work and its cultural and generic context. Given that the text at the centre of this chapter, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, was published in 1688, it is clear that our 'synchronic section' should concern the system of influences working upon her in that year. Books. however, like words, do not simply come into existence at a particular moment. In English, for example, words from different eras (the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Norman invasions, for example) all operate together without much distinction at any given time. Columbus's Journal was not physically available to Aphra Behn, but a number of subsequent works reflecting the general insights of the 'discoverer' (including Montaigne's essays) certainly were. It seems not too unreasonable, accordingly, to see discussion of the implications of these texts as a necessary adjunct to any truthful account of how Aphra Behn reacted to these conventions of representation. I therefore allow myself a larger synchronic section than would be desirable in the case of a sign-system such as a language, simply because I see no other way of gathering a sufficiently representative sample from which to deduce the laws of langue which inform - and are, perhaps, subverted by - the example of parole quoted in each chapter. 'Strategic location' denotes the process by which I place Aphra Behn against the set of conventions established by (among others) Columbus and Montaigne. 'Strategic formation' acts, then, almost as a control - an account of how each work obeys the constraints of its particular function (Romance, Journal, Travel account, Critical essay) in order to define its particular version of 'South America'.

[Columbus on the Beach (3)]

II

Synchronic Section

(a) Columbus

Let us begin again, then, with our image of 'Columbus on the beach'. He himself wrote of the original version of this scene:

Yo ..., porque nos tuviesen mucha amistad, porque conoscí que era gente que mejor se libraria y convertiria á nuestra Santa Fé con amor que no por fuerza, les di á algunos de ellos unos bonetes colorados y unas cuentas de vidrios, que se ponian al pescuezo, y otras cosas muchas de poco valor, con que hobieron mucho placer y quedaron tanto nuestros que era maravilla. (Colón, 1941, p.19)

['I, ... that we might form great friendship, for I knew that they were a people who could be more easily freed and converted to our holy faith by love than by force, gave to some of them red caps, and glass beads to put round their necks, and many other things of little value, which gave them great pleasure, and made them so much our friends that it was a marvel to see.' (Columbus, 1893, p.37)]

This image of a conqueror metaphorically handing out the 'cap and bells' accords very much with the first version of of the scene outlined in Section I above. He was, however, impressed by their appearance:

Ellos andan todos desnudos como su madre los parió, y tambien las mugeres, aunque no vide mas de una, farto moza, y todos los que yo vi eran todos mancebos, que ninguno vide de edad de mas de treinta años, muy bien hechos, de muy fermosos cuerpos y muy buenas caras ... dellos se pintan de frieto, y ellos son de la color de los canarios. ni negros ni blancos (Colón, 1941, pp.19-20).

['They go as naked as when their mothers bore them. and so do the women, although I did not see more than one young girl. All I saw were youths, none more than thirty years of age. They are very well made, with very handsome bodies, and very good countenances ... They paint themselves black, and they are the colour of the Canarians, neither black nor white.' (Columbus, 1893, p.38)]

Having painted this idyllic picture, he proceeds to spoil it:

Ellos deben ser buenos servidores y de buen ingenio, que veo que muy presto dicen tad a 10 que les decia, y creo que ligeramente se harian cristianos, que me pareció que ninguna secta tenian. (Colón, 1941, p.20)

['They should be good servants and intelligent, for I observed that they quickly took in what was said to them, and I believe that they would easily be made Christians, as it appeared to me that they had no religion.' (Columbus, 1893, p.38)]

This first encounter contains in embryo many of the major themes which would define the intellectual system of the first explorers - the nakedness and humility of the people (witness their contentment with 'cosas ... de poco valor' [things of little value]); their physical attractiveness and the freedom of their lives (they have 'ninguna secta' [no religion]); and finally the duplicity of the Europeans faced with such innocence (Columbus plans to 'free' them by making them servants).

The appeal of this scene is more devious than that, though, as we will find if we compare it with subsequent 'close encounters'. The nakedness and innocence of these people makes them both erotically and theologically stirring. Columbus notes that 'no vide mas de una, farto moza' [I did not see more than one young girl] as if he were looking for just that (not surprisingly, under the circumstances), but one of the first accounts of Brazil enlarges on this aspect of their appeal more unequivocally, talking of a girl who was:

all dyed from head to foot in that [black] paint; and indeed she was so well built and so well curved, and her privy part (what a one she had!) was so gracious that many women of our country, on seeing such charms, would be ashamed that theirs were not like hers (Hemming, 1978, p.4).

What is more, he makes it clear that seeing this nudity inspires him with reflections unfavourable to the women back home. In the rather differently intended words of Joseph Brodsky: 'the discovery of the New World ... gave pensive men of the time a chance to look upon themselves and the nation as though from outside' (Brodsky, 1987, p.79). Their colour ('ni negros ni blancos' [neither white nor black], as Columbus puts it) also helps, since to covet the black by nature would presumably be a perverse, 'African' desire.

Their theological importance is inextricably bound up with the titillation of this innocent nakedness. As Brodsky puts it:

The appeal the concept of the 'noble savage' enjoyed among the literati and, subsequently, with the rest of society had clearly to do with a very vulgar public notion of paradise ... It was simply based on the notion that Adam, too, was naked, as well as on the rejection of Original Sin (Brodsky, 1987, p.334).

Clothes are a consequence of the Fall (the 'shame' felt by Adam and Eve after their disobedience). Therefore not to wear clothes is a blessing to which sinful humans cannot aspire until they reach their final pardon or condemnation - in the one case, to emphasize forgiveness; in the other, to strip off the mask from sin. Columbus's naked natives are therefore either reminders of the bliss before the Fall - or wicked and ignorant savages who are unaware of their own degradation (and whose own theological status is presumably as low as a beast's by consequence).

To continue with Columbus, there are two other important points to make about his initial encounter with the natives. The first is his obsessive interest in a very trivial aspect of their attire:

yo estaba atento y trabajaba de saber si había oro, y vide que algunos dellos traian un pedazuelo colgado en un agujero que tienen á la nariz, y por señas pude entender que yendo al Sur ó volviendo la isla por el Sur que estaba allí un rey que tenia grandes vasos delio, y tenia muy mucho. Trabajé que fuesen allá, y despues vide que no entendian en la ida. (Colón, 1941, p.21)

['I was attentive, and took trouble to ascertain if there was gold. I saw that some of them had a small piece fastened in a hole they have in the nose, and by signs I was able to make out that to the south, or going from the island to the south, there was a king who had great cups full, and who possessed a great quantity. I tried to get them to go there, but afterwards I saw that they had no inclination.' (Columbus, 1893, 39)]

They prove unable to fathom this peculiarly European fixation, and show 'no inclination' to drop everything in its service. Columbus, however, continues to question diligently each group of natives he meets about the source of this substance.

The second point to note is the apparent tendency of the natives to regard the newcomers as gods (as in the first of the scenes in Section I above):

entendiamos que nos preguntaban si eramos venidos del cielo; y vino uno viejo en el batel dentro, y otros a voces grandes llamaban todos, hombres y mugeres: venid á ver los hombres que vinieron del cielo; traedles de comer y de beber. Vinieron muchos y muchas mugeres, cada uno con algo, dando gracias a Dios, echándose al suelo, y levantaban las manos al cielo, y despues a voces nos llamaban que fuésemos á tierra (Colón, 1941, p.22).

['We understood that they asked us if we had come from heaven. One old man came into the boat, and others cried out, in loud voices, to all the men and women, to come and see the men who had come from heaven, and to bring them to eat and drink. Many came, including women, each bringing something, giving thanks to God, throwing themselves on the ground and shouting to us to come on shore.' (Columbus, 1893, 41)]

It can never be otherwise than flattering to be taken for a god, and this motif has therefore always been emphasized by European writers. By the principles of doublethink (which is perhaps the most accurate analogy for the processes of any pervasive ideology), this 'error' of the natives proves simultaneously their gullibility (and therefore their unfitness to rule themselves, or their souls), and their good taste ('if they take us for gods, that proves that we must be god-like - just as we always suspected'). It is not, therefore, an entirely innocent emphasis on the part of these discoverers and explorers. Nor is it really naivety that leads Columbus to exclaim:

siempre están de propósito que vengo del cielo, por mucha conversación que ayan avido conmigo.

['they are always assured that I come from Heaven, for all the intercourse which they have had with me' (Jane, 1930, I: 10-11).]

Having looked at the parameters of this scene, we should be able to extrapolate some more general principles.

The first point to be made is the tendency, from the beginning, to see the 'New World' in terms of some pre-existing intellectual system. Not that this is a novel point, but its precise workings in this case are surprising. Columbus shows considerable scepticism in his treatment of the stories told him by the natives:

Toda la gente que hasta hoy ha hallado diz que tiene grandísimo temor de los de Caniba ó Canima, y dicen que viven en esta isla de Bohio, ... y cree que van á tomar á aquellos á sus tierras y casas, como sean muy cobardes y no saber de armas ... decian que no tenian sino un ojo y la cara de perro, y creia el Almirante que mentian, y sentia el Almirante que debian de ser del señorio del Gran Can que los captivaban. (Colón, 1941, pp.60-61)

['The Admiral says that all the people he has hitherto met have very great fear of those of Caniba or Canima. They affirm that they live in the island of Bohio ... The Admiral understood that those of Caniba come to take people from their homes, they being very cowardly, and without knowledge of arms ... They declared that the Canibas had only one eye and dogs' faces. The Admiral thought they lied, and was inclined to believe that it was people from the dominions of the Gran Can who took them into captivity.' (Columbus, 1893, p.87)]

Also:

De esta gente diz que los de Cuba ó Juana, y de todas esotras islas tienen gran miedo, porque diz que comian los hombres. Otras cosas le contaban los dichos indios, por señas, muy maravillosas; mas el Almirante no diz que las creia, sino que debian tener mas astucia y mejor ingenio los de aquella isla Bohio para los captivar quellos, porque eran muy flacos de corazon. (Colón, 1941, pp.69-70)

['The Admiral says that the inhabitants of Cuba, or Juana, and of all the other islands, are much afraid of the inhabitants of Bohio, because they say that they eat people. The Indians relate other things, by signs, which are very wonderful; but the Admiral did not believe them. He only inferred that those of Bohio must have more cleverness and cunning to be able to capture the others, who, however, are very poor-spirited.' (Columbus, 1893, p.98)]

We can see in these two quotations Columbus's two principal sources of information displayed.[1] One is the sailing instructions given him by the Florentine astronomer Paolo Toscanelli in 1474, which detail the western route to the Indies, and the wonders to be found there, mainly from the account given by Marco Polo two centuries before (hence the reference to the 'Gran Can'). We see, thus, that Columbus has a textual justification for setting aside the stories of those who just happen to live there - and this also explains his equation of 'Cuba' with 'Cipango' (Japan), and 'Caniba' with 'Gran Can' (Colón, 1941, pp.34 & 76).

His other criterion of evaluation is common sense. The stories of the 'Caniba', or Caribs (or cannibals) are obviously implausible, and can therefore be set aside by a European intellect. It is tempting to despise this ready dismissal of what in fact turned out to be the case - the existence of cannibals - but it is difficult to see how else a man like Columbus could have acted when faced with stories of 'hombres de un ojo, y otros con hocicos de perros, que comian los hombres' (Colón, 1941, p.44) ['men with one eye, and others with dogs' noses who were cannibals' (Columbus, 1893, p.68)]. Unconditional acceptance, or judicious 'interpretation' were the alternatives - and twenty years of trying to convince European monarchs to send a fleet westwards to the Indies may not have accustomed Columbus to accepting received opinion.

In any case, as we have remarked before, what is wholly new is wholly meaningless. It must be interpreted in terms of what one already knows in order to make sense. Columbus was thus engaged in setting up a textual system the moment he began to rationalize his view of the natives. By the same token, the natives too can be observed employing similar means of interpretation.

Despues, á la tarde, vino el Rey á la nao; el Almirante le hizo la honra que debia, y le hizo decir cómo era de los Reyes de Castilla, los cuales eran los mayores Principes del mundo. Mas ni los indios quel Almirante traia, que eran los intérpretes, creian nada, ni el Rey tampoco, sino creian que venian del cielo, y que los rein os de los Reyes de Castilla eran en el cielo, y no en este mundo. (Colón, 1941, p.82)

['In the afternoon the king came on board the ship, where the Admiral received him in due form, and caused him to be told that the ships belonged to the Sovereigns of Castille, who were the greatest Princes in the world. But neither the Indians who were on board, who acted as interpreters, nor the king, believed a word of it. They maintained that the Spaniards came from heaven, and that the Sovereigns of Castille must be in heaven, and not in this world.' (Columbus, 1893, p.114)]

Again, this seems a reasonable hypothesis on the Indians' part - making sense of an entirely unforeseen invasion in terms of religion. (That is, assuming that the incident was not simply invented in order to flatter 'los Reyes de Castilla', as in Ralegh's account of the native reaction to a picture of Queen Elizabeth). The same process can, however. be observed in the first accounts of the Conquest of Mexico.

Y lo más cierto era, según entendimos, que les habían dicho sus antepasados que habían de venir gentes de hacia donde sale el sol, con barbas, que los habían de señorear. Agora sea por lo uno o por lo otro, estaban en posta y vela muchos indios del gran Montezuma en aquel río (Díaz, 1942, I: 43).

['Now it is a fact, as we afterwards heard, that the Indians' ancestors had prophesied that men with beards would come from the direction of the sunrise and rule over them. So, for one reason or another, many of the great Montezuma's people were posted beside that river, watching for us' (Díaz, 1974, 35).]

Unfortunately, it is clear that what these methods of reading have in common is a tendency to make their proponents see what they expect to see. The Indians have apparently been conditioned to expect gods from afar, and accordingly that is what they encounter ('por mucha conversación que ayan avido conmigo' [for all the intercourse which they have had with me], as Columbus puts it). Columbus, on the other hand, trained in a more arrogant ethnocentric tradition, is prepared to decry the Indians he meets as timid and unagressive on the flimsiest evidence:

y certifica el Almirante a los Reyes que 10 hombres hagan huir a 10.000: tan cobardes y madrosos son (Colón, 1941, p.67).

['The Admiral assures the Sovereigns that ten thousand of these men would run from ten, so cowardly and timid are they. (Columbus, 1893, p.95)]

This belief almost leads him to grief on more than one occasion (and led him to sacrifice the lives of thirty-nine of his men, whom he left as a 'garrison' on Hispaniola). On the very same day that he wrote the entry quoted above his interpretation proved false:

uno dellos se adelantó en el ria junto con la popa de la barca, y hizo una grande plática, quel Almirante no entendia, salvo que los otros indios de cuando en cuando alzaban las manos al cielo y daban una grande voz. Pensaba el Almirante que lo aseguraban y que les placia de su venida; pero vido al indio que consigo traia demudarse la cara, y amarillo como la cera temblaba mucha, diciendo par señas quel Almirante se fuese fuera del rio, que los querian matar (Colón, 1941, pp.67-68).

['One of the natives advanced into the river near the stern of the boat, and made a long speech, which the Admiral did not understand. At intervals the other Indians raised their hands to heaven, and shouted. The Admiral thought he was assuring him that he was pleased at his arrival; but he saw the Indian who came from the ship change the colour of his face, and turn as yellow as wax, trembling much, and letting the Admiral know bv signs that he should leave the river, as they were going to kill him.' (Columbus, 1893, 95)]

The second important point to make about our schematic picture of 'Columbus on the beach' is the nature of Columbus's influence in this period. For example, while his claim that he had reached Japan and China was soon dismissed - his equally 'textual' belief that the Earthly Paradise was located somewhere in the hinterland of the Orinoco was far more influential:

creo que pueda salir de allí esa agua, bien que sea lexos y venga á parar allí donde yo vengo, y faga este lago. grandes indiçios son estos del paraÿso terrenal, porqu'el sitio es conforme á la opinión d'estos sanctos y sanos theólogos.

['I believe that this water may originate from there, though it be far away and may come to collect there where I came and may form this lake. These are great indications of the earthly paradise, for the situation agrees with the opinion of those holy and wise theologians' (Jane, 1933, II: 38-39).]

This adoption of the paradigms of Biblical and classical authority to 'explain' new features of the landscape became the dominant mode throughout the period of the discovery. More important than this for our purposes, though, was the extent to which Columbus became an emblematic figure in his own right. His action in taking captive a native who came to plead for the release of his wife and three children (hostages for the Indians' good behaviour), is denounced by Las Casas as:

a breach of the law of nations, which is not excused by the Admiral's good intentions; for it is never right to do evil that good may come of it ... on account of this act alone ... he well merited all the sorrows and misfortunes which he suffered during the rest of his life. (Columbus, 1893, p.75)

All of Columbus's sufferings in jail and exile were thus seen as justified by one evil deed, according to this reading (similarly with Cortés, robbed of the fruits of his labours by bureaucrats - or Pizarro, killed in the faction fights between the Conquistadors). One might see these as classical exempla - like Belisarius begging his bread on the streets; or Croesus punished for presumption in declaring himself happy - but they are somewhat more. They represent a determinedly metaphysical approach to the dilemma of finding a world where no world was meant to be. How could the fates of its conquerors not share something of that New World's nature as (potential) heaven or hell? We can thus see the two different versions of the beach scene as contrasting emphases of the same essential pattern - in the one, Columbus is arrogant, a conquering god; in the other, a 'man of sorrows', having suffered in crossing the ocean, and prepared to suffer more.

We shall have more to say of this later, when discussing Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, but for the moment, the implications of the natives on the beach may be expressed in a simple, four-cornered paradigm:

EUROPEAN as god / INDIAN as dupe
EUROPEAN as despoiler / INDIAN as innocent

Taking the Europeans as gods makes the Indians seem:

Idolatrous: unable to distinguish between man on earth and God in Heaven;
Foolish: like children who have to be thwarted for their own good.

If, however (as Las Casas was the first to contend, in his 1552 Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias), the Europeans were in fact mere despoilers, the Indians become both innocent and dignified.

In fact, though, the two positions are not so diametrically opposed as they might seem. They embody some constants. For example, the Indians are consistently child-like and innocent - whether that gave Europeans a right to lord it over them or not. The Europeans are always powerful, dominant, and 'adult' whether using their power to do evil or good.

Our paradigm, then, to some extent explains how both of these attitudes to the Indians can subsist in the same work without being perceived by its author as contradictory. In Columbus, the Indians are said to be 'muy simplices y muy lindos cuerpos de hombre' (Colón, 1941, p.23) ['very simple-minded and handsomely-formed people' (Columbus, 1893, p.42)], and 'la mejor gente del mundo' (p.81) ['the best people in the world' (p.112)], all of which makes them 'buenos para les mandar y les hacer trabajar, sembrar, y hacer todo lo otro que fuere menester, y que hagan villas (p.83) ['to be ordered about, to work and sow, and do all that may be necessary, and to build towns' (p.114)].

[Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)]

•

(b) Montaigne

In general terms, there seem to be two reactions to this paradigm of South America among contemporary writers. One is what might be called the 'aesthetic' response - revelling in the sheer imaginative possibilities of an Edenic landscape. The other is more analytical, and involves attempting to reconcile the European (or, rather, Renaissance) system of ideas with the observations made in America. Michel de Montaigne is the most famous example of the latter tendency, and I therefore propose to devote some time to the implications of his essay 'Des Cannibales' (already mentioned in Chapter One) before going on to examine the treatment of landscape in Columbus and Bernal Díaz del Castillo. A few exemplary quotations should suffice for this purpose:

Or je trouve, pour revenir à mon propos, qu'il n'y a rien de barbare et de sauvage en cette nation, à ce qu'on m'en a rapporté, sinon que chacun appelle barbarie ce qui n'est pas de son usage; comme de vray, il semble que nous n'avons autre mire de la verité et de la raison que l'exemple et idée des opinions et usances du païs où nous sommes. Là est tousjours ta parfaicte religion, la parfaicte police, perfect et accomply usage de toutes choses. Ils sont sauvages, de mesme que nous appellons sauvages les fruicts que nature, de soy et de son progrez ordinaire, a produicts: là où, à la verité, ce sont ceux que nous avons alterez par nostre artifice et detournez de l'ordre commun, que nous devrions appeller plutost sauvages. (Montaigne, 1967, p.203)

['Now, to return to my argument, I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits. Indeed we seem to have no other criterion of truth and reason than the type and kind of opinions current in the land where we live. There we see always the perfect religion, the perfect political system, the perfect and most accomplished way of doing everything. These people are wild in the same way as we say that fruits are wild, when nature has produced them by herself and in her ordinary way; whereas, in fact, it is those that we have artificially modified, and removed from the common order, that we ought to call wild.' (Montaigne, 1985, pp.108-9)]

Montaigne's information is entirely at second-hand, as he admits - but since his intellectual method works by imposition rather than empirical deduction, this causes him little trouble. His real intention is to criticize contemporary Europe through the agency of the 'golden age' savages of America, and what would normally be perceived as an obstacle to this view, their status as cannibals, he turns into a point in their favour:

Je ne suis pas marry que nous remerquons l'horreur barbaresque qu'il y a en une telle action, mais ouy bien dequoy, jugeans bien de leurs fautes, nous soyons si aveuglez aux nostres. Je pense qu'il y a plus de barbarie à manger un homme vivant qu'à le manger mort, à deschirer par tourmens et par géenes un corps encore plein de sentiment ... que de le rostir et manger après qu'il est trespassé. (Montaigne, 1967, pp.207-08)

['I am not so anxious that we should note the horrible savagery of these acts as concerned that, whilst judging their faults so correctly, we should be so blind to our own. I consider it more barbarous to eat a man alive than to eat him dead, to tear by rack and torture a body still full of feeling ... than to roast and eat a man after he is dead.' (Montaigne, 1985, p.113)]

Montaigne, of course, is in a long tradition of satirists who used other, theoretically 'ideal' societies to point out the faults of their own (Tacitus's Germania, and the second book of Virgil's Georgics are cases in point) - and he acknowledges this by using quotations from the Classics as his 'authority' for denouncing Christian Europe - but his real importance is almost inadvertent. He intended to show the weakness of our case if we sought to criticize others for 'barbarism' - however, the picture he drew of the Indians (whether drawn from published sources, as some commentators believe, or obtained, as he claims, first-hand from a house-guest) was so alluring as to support an image of them as pure innocents. 'Earthly Paradise' mythology, the connotations of nakedness, sexual liberty (as John Hemming puts it, 'an adolescent's dream world [of] carefree single women' (1978, p.17)) - all worked, as we have seen, as much in the Indians' disfavour as in their favour; and Montaigne, with his eulogy of a Platonic golden age, had succeeded in fostering the very notions he sought to defuse. His attempts to quash an ethnocentric myth of superiority had, paradoxically, reinforced an eschatological one.

Montaigne, then, could be said to straddle two traditions - one exemplified by the stern and denunciatory Las Casas, with his belief in the absolute evil of the colonists; The other best summed up as the 'landscape' tradition: the sensuous (and nostalgiac, since it was constantly being eroded) appreciation of the beauty of the New World and its inhabitants.

Columbus is the first great exponent of this mode of response:

Ella es isla muy verde y llana y fertilísima, y no pongo duda que todo el año siembran panizo y cogen, y así todas otras cosas; y vide muchos árboles muy disformes de los nuestros, y dellos que tenian los ramos de muchas maneras y todo en un pie, y un ramito es de una manera y otro de otra, y tan disforme que es la mayor maravilla del mundo cuánta es la diversidad de la una manera á la otra, verbi gracia: ... ni estos son enjeridos, porque se pueda decir que el enjerto lo hace, antes son por los montes, ni cura dellos esta gente ... Aquí son los peces tan disformes de los nuestros qués maravilla. Hay algunos hechos como gallos de las mas finas colores del mundo, azules, amarillos, colorados y de todas colores, y otros pintados de mil maneres; y las colores son tan finas que no hay hombre que no se maraville y no tome gran descanso á verlos. (Colón, 1941, p.27)

['It is a very green island, level and very fertile, and I have no doubt that they sow and gather corn all the year round, as well as other things. I saw many trees very unlike those of our country. Many of them have their branches growing in different ways and all from one trunk, and one twig is one form, and another in a different shape, and so unlike that it is the greatest wonder in the world to see the great diversity ... Nor are these grafted, for it may be said that grafting is unknown, the trees being wild, and untended by these people ... Here the fish are so unlike ours that it is wonderful. Some are the shape of dories, and of the finest colours in the world, blue, yellow, red, and other tints, all painted in various ways, and the colours are so bright that there is not a man who would not be astonished, and would not take great delight in seeing them.' (Columbus, 1893, p.47)]

The points, then, that Columbus emphasizes are: the country's fertility, the fact that one can harvest all year round; the country's wildness, the fact that 'grafting is unknown' and that the trees grow spontaneously in the shapes preferred by art; the country's diversity, the fact that the fish come in all the primary colours ('and other tints' besides), and that this is something that would cause wonder and delight ('maravilla') to any man.

In essence, then, he is describing a landscape which is different from that of Europe - but different in very patterned ways. It does all the things that a landscape can, but more so. It is continuously fertile, endlessly various, and yet absolutely wild - untended except by the hand of God. The influence of this 'garden' description can be seen to extend to Aphra Behn as well, in her account (quoted in Chapter One above) of the diversely-coloured trees in Guiana:

some are all White, some Purple, some Scarlet, some Blue, some Yellow; bearing at the same Time ripe Fruit, and blooming young, or producing every Day new. (Summers, 1915, V: 178)

Nor is it perhaps superfluous to remark here that the main reason why Alexander von Humboldt, chief exponent of the idealist conception of American history, was prepared to herald Columbus as the 'discoverer' is because: 'Columbus was sensitive to the beauty of tropical nature, which enabled him to announce the existence of a truly new world' (O'Gorman, 1961, p.32).

Humboldt goes on to claim that 'in spite of his crude expression, he rose above Camoëns and other poets of his day, who were still anchored to the literary fiction of an imaginary artificial arcadian Nature'. Certainly there are some distinctions to be made here, but it is difficult to agree with Humboldt that the conventions of Pastoral landscape description did not influence Columbus almost as much as his poetic contemporaries. He says, a little further on:

En este tiempo anduve así por aquellos árboles, que era la cosa mas fermosa de ver que otra que se haya visto, veyendo tanta verdura en tanto grado como en el mes de Mayo en el Andalucía, y los árboles todos estan tan disformes de los nuestros como el dia de la noche; y así las frutas, y así las yerbas y las piedras y todas las cosas. Verdad es que algunos árboles eran de la naturaleza de otros que hay en Castilla, por ende había una gran dlferencia, y los otros árboles de otras maneras eran tantos que no hay persona que lo pueda decir ni asemejar á otros de Castilla. (Colón, 1941, pp.28-29)

['During that time I walked among the trees, which was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, beholding as much verdure as in the month of May in Andalusia. The trees are as unlike ours as night from day, as are the fruits, the herbs, the stones, and everything. It is true that some of the trees bore some resemblance to those in Castille, but most of them are very different, and some were so unlike that no one could compare them to anything in Castille.' (Columbus, 1893, p.49)]

The comparison of what he saw to his experience of May in Andalusia - the most 'tropical' part of Europe - emphasizes the point. 'Everything' is different from Europe, but everything is categorized as an ideal version of its European counterpart. As in Pastoral, pests and predators have been de-emphasized and pushed to the periphery of the picture; but, also, the forms of the seasons, and the plants, and the stones, have been changed and made more various and delightful.

Columbus, in finding a verbal equivalent for his delight in the scenery, is forced back on two complementary textual modes. One, as we have seen, is the language of Pastoral (Virgil, or Longus, or Sannazaro); the other is the language of Millennial discourse (exemplified in the descriptions of paradise in the Middle English Pearl). Whether he wishes to or not, he cannot convey a sense of what he has seen to other people's minds except by employing these recognized paradigms. A similar dilemma is signalled in Bernal Díaz's description of his first sight of Tenochtitlán, the city of the Aztecs:

Y desque vimos tantas ciudades y villas pobladas en el agua, y en tierra firme otras gran des poblazones, y aquella calzada tan derecha y por nivel cómo iba a Méjico, nos quedamos admirados, y decíamos que parescía a las cosas de encantamiento que cuentan en el libro de Amadís, por las grandes torres y cues y edificios que tenían dentro en el agua, y todos de calicanto, y aun algunos de nuestros soldados decían que si aquello que vían, si era entre sueños (Díaz, 1942, I: 297-98).

['And when we saw all those cities and villages built in the water, and other great towns on dry land, and that straight and level causeway leading to Mexico, we were astounded. These great towns and cues and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed like an enchanted vision from the tale of Amadis. Indeed, some of our soldiers asked whether it was not all a dream.' (Díaz, 1974, p.214)]

We have seen, then, the relentlessly textualizing and interpretative spirit in which these first interpreters of South America approached their task. Not much has been made of the distinction of genres between Columbus's Journal - with its dual purpose of providing a record of events and a set of suggestions for the possible commercial exploitation of his discoveries - and that of Bernal Díaz's history. Or, for that matter, between the genre of the 'essay', recently invented by Montaigne, and that of the 'novel' - not really far developed beyond classical models such as Daphnis and Chloe - as exemplified in Oroonoko. The way in which they have been discussed, too: going from Columbus to Las Casas to Montaigne, may have given the impression of a rhetorical evolution apparent in historical terms. It remains for me to say, then, that while such precisions can and perhaps should be made, that has not been the purpose of these introductory sections. Any sense of ideological 'progress' from Montaigne to Behn would be one of which I was extremely suspicious; but I do feel that it is legitimate to layout a 'synchronic section' of texts in this schematic fashion in order to provide a sense of the paradigms which governed an undoubtedly differently motivated work by Aphra Behn.

[John Gabriel Stedman: Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (engraved by William Blake)]

III

Oroonoko

(a) Conventional Elements

When Behn published her novel Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave in 1688 (shortly after the upsurge of interest in American subjects which had been started by Dryden's Indian Emperor (1665), D'avenant's Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1685), and Sir Robert Howard's collaborative The Indian Queen (1665)), the principal way in which her work was distinguished from theirs stemmed from her claim to have spent her childhood in South America - in Surinam (then a British colony). She could therefore claim to be presenting authentic experience, untinctured by fictional invention:

the History of this ROYAL SLAVE ... shall come simply into the World. recommended by its own proper Merits, and natural Intrigues; there being enough of Reality to support it, and to render it diverting, without the Addition of Invention. (Summers, 1915, V: 129)

I shall have more to say about this claim of hers later, but for the moment let us note the effect which it has upon the implied authority of her work. Behn's work is no less a fiction than the novels of Daniel Defoe, which similarly supplied a 'factual' genealogy of autobiographical witness for the events recounted. Merely claiming to be an account of 'Reality' rather than the product of 'Invention' is enough, however, to align her statements with the (alleged) objectivity of Columbus and his commentators Las Casas and Montaigne. Her work is shaped according to the dictates of fiction, but it claims (whether rightly or wrongly) to be the result of experiences she had had. Since this is more or less the state of affairs already detected by us in these other 'textualizers' of South America. it would therefore seem appropriate to examine some of the features in her work which run parallel to theirs.

Her description of the country, in the first few pages of the novel, begins with an account of the Indians, whom she characterizes as:

Gods of the Rivers, or Fellow-Citizens of the Deep; so rare an Art they have in swimming, diving, and almost living in Water: by which they command the less swift Inhabitants of the Floods. (Summers, 1915, V: 133)

This rather curious metaphor, recalling Columbus's wonder at the multi-coloured dories, at least explains the habitual mode of dress of the Natives, with whom 'we trade for Feathers, which they order into all Shapes', and 'Beads of all Colours' (Summers, 1915, V: 130).

The Beads they weave into Aprons about a Quarter of an Ell long, and of the same Breadth; working them very prettily in Flowers of several Colours; which Apron they wear just before 'em, as Adam and Eve did the Fig-leaves (Summers, 1915, V: 130).

Aphra Behn has negotiated herself very cunningly around the nakedness of the Indians. They swim a lot, and almost 'live' in the water - and therefore wear next to nothing - but on land they adopt aprons, after the manner of Adam and Eve after the Fall. To avoid any more unequivocal sense of 'paradise lost', however, she emphasizes that the materials of the aprons are sold to them by the Europeans. They may or may not have been perfect in their natural state - but, in any case, now they have to accommodate themselves to our ways.

The other, erotic implication of nudity is not ignored by Behn either, though she weaves her way around it, again, in a most original way.

tho' they are all thus naked, if one lives for ever among 'em, there [is] not to be seen an indecent Action, or Glance: and being continually us'd to see one another so unadorn'd, so like our first Parents before the Fall, it seems as if they had no Wishes, there being nothing to heighten Curiosity: but all you can see, you see at once, and every Moment see; and where there is no Novelty, there can be no Curiosity. (Summers, 1915, V: 131)

There is a certain dignity in this refusal to take refuge in innuendo. Her Indians are naked and unashamed; but this is the result of custom, not of any exceptional passivity or lack of feeling, for, as she says:

Not but I have seen a handsome young Indian, dying for Love of a very beautiful young Indian Maid; but all his Courtship was, to fold his Arms. pursue her with his Eyes, and Sighs were all his Language (Summers, 1915, V: 131).

It is, of course, as much of an artifice as the thinly veiled voyeurism of Columbus or Caminha - only in this case the model has been transferred to the language of the cult of sensibility (with which Behn was well acquainted, having herself written three volumes of Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1683-84), full of high-minded sentiments).

A more significant parallel with these predecessors is her version of the Indian / European paradigm described in Section II above. Her Indians are innocent:

these People represented to me an absolute Idea of the first State of Innocence, before Man knew how to sin: And 'tis most evident and plain, that simple Nature is the most harmless, inoffensive and virtuous Mistress. (Summers, 1915, V: 131)

Her Europeans are full of duplicity:

they being on all Occasions very useful to us, we find it absolutely necessary to caress 'em as Friends, and not to treat 'em as Slaves: nor dare we do otherwise, their numbers so far surpassing ours in that Continent. (Summers, 1915, V: 133)

By the same token, her Indians are foolish and easily duped into regarding their visitors as gods:

I soon perceiv'd, by an Admiration that is natural to these People, and by the extreme Ignorance and simplicity of 'em, it were not difficult to establish any unknown or extravagant Religion among them. and to oppose any Notions or Fictions upon 'em. For seeing a Kinsman of mine set some Paper on Fire with a Burning-Glass, a Trick they had never before seen, they were like to have ador'd him for a God (Summers, 1915, V: 186).

However sincere her admiration for the state of innocence, one cannot help seeing that Behn - like her contemporaries - also regards it with a little contempt. In short, she is the very type of the 'double' European - like the Governor who gave the Indians his word to come on a particular day; and, when he failed to do so, was mourned for by them:

And when they saw he was not dead, they ask'd him what Name they had for a Man who promis'd a Thing he did not do? The Governor told them, Such a Man was a Lyar, which was a Word of Infamy to a Gentleman. Then one of 'em reply'd, Governor, you are a Lyar, and guilty of that Infamy. (Summers, 1915, V: 132)

The simple moral of this story is complicated by the fact that Behn herself is capable of telling it with apparent approval, while contradicting it with her own attitude not only towards the Indians - but towards Oroonoko, the 'Royal Slave' hero of the novel, whom she deceives as a result of thinking him a danger to the community, despite her sympathy for his position: 'After this [his confession to her 'in whom he had an entire Confidence'], I neither thought it convenient to trust him much out of our View, nor did the Country, who fear'd him' (Summers, 1915, V: 177).

Having observed in her the duplicity of the European, it remains to be seen how Behn's fiction accommodates itself to the 'aesthetic' / 'analytical' divide analyzed above.

Like Montaigne, she has theories about the Indians' displays of valour:

when any War was waging, two Men ... are ask'd, What they dare do, to shew they are worthy to lead an Army? When he who is first ask'd, making no Reply, cuts off his Nose, and throws it contemptibly on the Ground; and the other does something to himself that he thinks surpasses him, and perhaps deprives himself of Lips and an Eye: So they slash on 'till one gives out, and many have dy'd in this Debate. (Summers, 1915, V: 188)

Unlike him, however, she has no larger scheme to set it in. Hers is, essentially, the art of an impressionist - rendering a landscape and supplying each part of it with the appropriate emotion (in this case, horror; but also black humour).

Her descriptions of the country have a tendency, as a result, to become a kind of catalogue of 'Excellencies':

little Paraketoes, great Parrots, Muckaws, and a thousand other Birds and Beasts of wonderful and surprizing Forms, Shapes and Colours ... prodigious Snakes, of which there are some three-score Yards in Length; as is the Skin of one that may be seen at his Majesty's Antiquary's; where are also some rare Flies, of amazing Forms and Colours, presented to 'em by myself; some as big as my Fist, some less; and all of various Excellencies, such as Art cannot imitate. (Summers, 1915, V: 130)

Like Defoe's after her, Behn's fiction depends on an appearance of veracity - and the melodrama of her plot, while admirable in itself, seems sometimes just an excuse to present strange landscapes and vistas to her readers (for example, the three expeditions that interrupt the narration of Oroonoko's adventures just when they have reached their peak).

As an artist, then, we can see her paralleling quite closely the topics and concerns of the discoverers, but always with a subtle twist. Her naked Indians entertain only the loftiest of emotions, and are careful to wear 'fig-like' aprons whenever they are out of the water. The high-mindedness of these sentiments does not prevent her from mocking the credulity of her hosts in the Indian village, nor does she trouble to moralize the bloody rituals of the warriors there into an ethnographic system.

This is partly because, for the purposes of her slave narrative, she is compelled to place the wonders of Surinam in the background but it also seems to show a personal and considered response to the problems of representation implied by such a project. Fiction must, after all, resist the pressure to generalize exerted on all other forms of analytical prose in order to distinguish its function from theirs.

Having matched her against these models, then, the necessity to chart her innovations becomes more apparent.

[Albert Jones and Toi Perkins in 'Oroonoko' (2008)]

•

(b) Innovation - Subversion

The first point to note about the structure of Behn's novel is one that has already been raised in passing - the 'realism' claimed for her descriptions. So striking, indeed, is the appearance of verisimilitude, that it has itself been the central topic in most discussions of Oroonoko. Recent research has thrown doubt on the previous orthodoxy, established by Ernest Bernbaum's article 'Mrs. Behn's Biography a Fiction' (1913), which claimed that she had never visited the country, but had instead constructed her entire narrative from hints in other writers. B. Dhuicq has demonstrated that many of the Indian words listed in the novel could not have been fabricated, since they match quite closely (but not precisely - proof of dependence) the words in a French vocabulary of the Guianese language (1979, pp.524-26).

Any attempt to resolve this long-standing controversy would be outside the scope of this study, but the fact that it has dominated debate for so long is significant. The impression of depth and accuracy given by her listings of native customs, local animals, and features of the landscape must be accepted to be a datum in itself. Paradoxically, for all the obscurity of Romance which envelops its African scenes, the first major innovation in Oroonoko is its attention to detail. This might seem a surprising characterization of a writer of fiction, when set against explorers and historians - but (as we have noted with her description of 'savage' customs) she seems less concerned to explain and interpret, more intent on watching and describing.

The next important point is her introduction of a third factor into the racial equation in the New World. Columbus and the chroniclers dealt only with the Indians and their own followers, but for commentators of Behn's generation, there were the complications of slavery to be addressed. Negroes were, in a sense. honorary natives - simply by virtue of not being white - but they lacked most of the eschatological mystique of the Indians. As Aphra Behn remarks:

before I give you the Story of this Gallant Slave, 'tis fit I tell you the Manner of bringing them to these new Colonies; those they make Use of there, not being Natives of the Place: for those we live with in perfect Amity, without daring to command 'em (Summers, 1915, V: 129-30).

What is more, it is notable that one of these slaves, the 'Royal Prince' Oroonoko of the title, should be the hero of the book - the indigènes being largely relegated to the sidelines. Almost half of the book is set in Coramantien, in Africa, and relates the early adventures of Oroonoko, who is the heir to the throne - focussing on his rivalry with his grandfather for the favours of the lovely Imoinda 'the beautiful Black Venus to our young Mars' (Summers, 1915, V: 137). It is only the contrast in actuality and vividness between the descriptions of this prototypical 'savage kingdom' and those set in Surinam that justifies the claim that it is principally a version of 'South America'.

In a deeper sense, however, one could claim that this choice of a black hero is crucial to the thematic development of the book - and that this in fact constitutes an interpretation of Surinam and what it has become. To explain what I mean, a brief summary of the plot may be in order.

Oroonoko has found his lover Imoinda in Surinam, and has been allowed to unite with her thanks to the good offices of his sympathetic master Treffry (a friend of Aphra Behn's - herself a character in this little drama). The growing conviction that he will not be allowed to return to his own country, and the knowledge that the child that is growing within Imoinda's womb will be born a slave, persuade him to revolt - and he leads the other slaves off into the woods to found a new country:

He said he would travel towards the Sea, plant a new Colony, and defend it by their Valour (Summers, 1915, V: 192).

On the way, however, they are overtaken by the whites, and all of his faint-hearted followers flee. Oroonoko surrenders, after being assured of honourable treatment, but is promptly flogged 'in a most deplorable and inhuman Manner' (Summers, 1915, V: 197).

This is the last straw. Betrayed by his hypocritical masters and abandoned by . his own countrymen, he escapes to the woods with Imoinda, and there, in a secluded glade:

he told her his Design, first of killing her, and then his Enemies, and next himself, and the Impossibility of escaping, and therefore he told her the Necessity of dying. He found the heroick Wife faster pleading for Death, than he was to propose it ... and, on her Knees, besought him not to leave her a Prey to his Enemies ...

All that Love could say in such Cases, being ended, and all the intermitting Irresolutions being adjusted, the lovely, young and ador'd Victim lays herself down before the Sacrificer; while he, with a Hand resolved, and a Heart-breaking within, gave the fatal Stroke, first cutting her Throat, and then severing her yet smiling Face from that delicate Body, pregnant as it was with the Fruits of tenderest Love. (Summers, 1915, V: 202-3)

The horror of this scene lies essentially in its emphasis on opposites: instead of loving her, the man kills the woman - the Edenic landscape inspires them to death and despair instead of hope (this the man who hoped to 'see if we can meet with more Honour and Honesty in the next World we shall touch upon' (Summers, 1915, V: 166-67)). The looking-glass logic of killing her in order to save her from his enemies is paralleled by the fact that our 'New World' Adam and Eve are black and enslaved - not fair and 'free of the fruits of the garden'.

A more substantial paradox, though, is the ghastly way in which Oroonoko is executed by the Europeans - for the crime of 'murder', to which they themselves have driven him by first robbing him of position and dignity, and then forcing him to sacrifice everything to his revenge:

the Executioner came, and first cut off his Members, and threw them into the Fire; after that, with an ill-favour'd Knife, they cut off his Ears and Nose, and burn'd them; he still smoak'd on, as if nothing had touch'd him (Summers, 1915, V: 208).

This is almost a reenactment of Montaigne's diatribe against the hypocrisy of European complaints about the barbarism of cannibals. Oroonoko is robbed of strength by his 'sacrifice' of Imoinda, and lacks even the steadiness to complete his own suicide when he is found by the Europeans. He must, however, be nursed back to health in order to be killed in the appalling way described above. Once again, a topsy-turvy world with its own negative logic.

There was, in a perverse sense, a sort of love in Oroonoko's action - not so much the fact that he did not want his enemies to trifle with Imoinda, as the way in which the two of them transformed the killing itself almost into an act of love an erotic ritual of death, paralleling the obsessions of warrior cultures such as the Aztecs (or the Spanish?). In his death, however, there is no love - though it significantly recalls the self-inflicted wound competitions of the Indians:

it's by a passive Valour they shew and prove their Activity; a sort of Courage too brutal to be applauded by our Black Hero; nevertheless, he express'd his Esteem of 'em. (Summers, 1915, V: 188)

This native passivity was displayed before - when Oroonoko insisted on grasping an electric eel, and was fished out of the river, stunned, by the Indians. While in the background of the action, they are, therefore, a pervasive influence a kind of commentary on the increasingly futile activity of the trapped Oroonoko. The Indians exist on sufferance in their own country, on condition that they cause no trouble. trade with Europe, and remain in the majority. As soon as they step outside these bounds, sentimental regard for their innocence will turn to stern adult retribution.

Oroonoko, then, is the ideal hero for the South America of Aphra Behn's time. Not a native, but a slave; not there by choice, but by force; not able to act, but punished by enforced passivity - he exemplifies the element of 'Dystopia' or malign pastoral in the book. It is, indeed, his personal tragedy, but it is also the tragedy of America. The act of love has been transformed to murder, the verdant landscape to a slave plantation - the Earthly Paradise has been transformed to a Hell on Earth by its discoverers.

Or, as The Great Gatsby has it:

as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees ... had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. (Fitzgerald, 1949, pp.163-64)

Aphra Behn had found herself a niche - if not a very comforting one - among the interpreters of South America. The 'picture' of the country that she gives us is full of the same features as Columbus's, but with the polarities reversed. Where he allows us to extrapolate doubleness, she embodies it - where he saw a paradise, she sees a trap (the 'golden Indians' from up-country in the middle of the novel) where he imposed an Andalusian pastoral, she puts grand guignol.

Our mythological paradigms can thus be seen to lend themselves as much to melodrama as to landscape evocation. A desire to specify the 'moment' of her fictional interpretation has compelled a perhaps misleading emphasis on the chronology of this picture of the New World; but in the next chapter, we will see a proportionate stress on the genealogical complexities of genre.

[F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (1925)]

1. It must be specified that the peculiar processes of textual transmission in the case of the Journal, which survives only in the form of an abstract prepared for his own purposes by the Conquest's bitterest critic, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, mean that only some of the entries are attributed verbatim to Columbus by the editor. In this case, for example, it is Las Casas who summarizes 'el Almirante's' reflections in the third person, rather than some self-aggrandizing bent of Columbus's.

[Aphra Behn: Oroonoko (1688)]

Works Cited:

Bernbaum, Ernest. 'Mrs. Behn's Biography a Fiction'. PMLA, 28 (1913): 432-53.

Brodsky, Joseph. Less Than One: Selected Essays. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987.

Colón, Cristóbal. Viajes de Cristóbal Colón, con una carta. Ed. M. Fernandez de Navarrete. Madrid, 1941.

Columbus, Christopher. The Journal of Christopher Columbus: During his First Voyage, 1492-93). Trans. Clements R. Markham. Hakluyt Society, 86. London, 1893.

Colón, Fernando. The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son Ferdinand. Trans. Benjamin Keen. London: Folio Society, 1960.

Culler, Jonathan. Saussure. Fontana Modern Masters. Glasgow, 1979.

Dhuicq, B. 'Further Evidence on Aphra Behn's Stay in Surinam'. Notes and Queries, 26 (1979): 524-26.

Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España.. Ed. Carlos Pereyra. 2 vols. Madrid, 1942.

Díaz, Bernal. The Conquest of New Spain. Trans. J. M. Cohen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. London, 1949.

Hemming, John. Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians. London, 1978.

Jane, Cecil, ed & trans. Select Documents Illustrating the Four Voyages of Columbus. Hakluyt Society, second series, 65 & 70. 2 vols. London, 1930-33.

Montaigne, Michel de. Oeuvres Complètes. Ed. Albert Thibaudet & Maurice Rat. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1967.

Montaigne, Michel de. Essays. Trans. J. M. Cohen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

O'Gorman, Edmundo. The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History. Bloomington, Indiana: 1961.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 1978. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally & Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Reidlinger. Trans. Wade Baskin. London, 1964.

Summers, Montague, ed. The Works of Aphra Behn. 6 vols. London and Stratford-on-Avon, 1915.

[Charles Darwin: The Voyage of the Beagle (1839)]

Chapter 2:

2009-04-26T08:29:00.028+12:00

[Diego Rivera: The Flower-carrier]

Part Two:
Historians & Naturalists

Darwin and the Naturalists

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
[G. Richmond, 1840]

I

L'invitation au Voyage

In conclusion, it appears to me that nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in distant countries. It both sharpens, and partly allays that want and craving, which, as Sir J. Herschel remarks, a man experiences although every corporeal sense be fully satisfied. The excitement from the novelty of objects, and the chance of success, stimulate him to increased activity. Moreover, as a number of isolated facts soon become uninteresting, the habit of comparison leads to generalization. (Darwin, 1891, p.368)

The Voyage, or 'journey in distant countries', might well be regarded as the Naturalist's equivalent of the Grand Tour – a period abroad to round off and exploit one's years of education.

Certainly this point can be illustrated by looking at the careers of a number of representative Enlightenment Naturalists. Of Sir Joseph Banks, for instance, Ship's Naturalist aboard the Endeavour – it has been said:

His own fieldwork was limited and quickly over. He made a natural philosopher's anti-Grand Tour to Labrador at the age of twenty-three: then he supervised the plant-hunting on the Endeavour's voyage; after his return he made a trip to the Hebrides and Iceland. But that was virtually the end of it ... Instead he garnered the fruits of the fieldwork of others, trips he usually organized and often paid for himself? (Rogers, 1988, p.603)

Pat Rogers, who made these comments in a TLS review, equates Banks' first excursion to Labrador with a 'natural philosopher's anti-Grand Tour', but one might apply this term just as accurately to his circumnavigation with Captain Cook. Assuming that Rogers means the sobriquet 'anti' to apply to the 'anti-dilettantishness' of these scientific journeys, Banks seems actually a more typical case than he acknowledges – a contention which might be substantiated by providing a similar career-summary of one of his successors, Alexander von Humboldt.

After a student's field-trip through Holland, England, and France in 1791 (in the company of another veteran of Cook's voyages, Georg Forster), Humboldt devoted the rest of his university education to rigorous preparations for his great South American expedition of 1799. to 1804. After his return he spent twenty years, mainly in Paris, writing up his collections and diaries for publication – a series that eventually reached 35 volumes (comparable to Banks' work on the Florilegium, a compendium of the flowers and plants encountered by him on his travels, which remained unpublished until after his death). In 1827, with this task substantially complete, Humboldt planned another journey on a similar scale to the East – to India and the Himalayas. Circumstances, however (mainly the intransigence of the East India Company), made this impossible, so he had to content himself with diplomatic life in Berlin. He made one further research trip to Russia and Siberia in 1829, but this could not be compared in scope or importance with the South American expedition; partly because his role was restricted to supervising the other scientists who had been invited along. The rest of his life was devoted to the Kosmos, a vast attempt to anatomize and describe the laws of the known universe, which remained incomplete at his death in 1859. (Meyer-Abich & Hentschel, 1969)

Scientific and rigorous though it may have aspired to be, Claude Lévi-Strauss sees an analogy between this convention of the 'Naturalist's Voyage' and the puberty rituals of native tribes (not essentially dissimilar in their nature from the Grand Tour, one is tempted to add):

Qui ne voit à quel point cette «quête du pouvoir» se trouve remise en honneur dans la société française contemporaine sous la forme naïve du rapport entre le public et «ses» explorateurs? Des l'âge de la puberté aussi, nos adolescents trouvent licence d'obéir aux stimulations auxquelles tout les soumet depuis la petite enfance, et de franchir, d'une manière quelconque, l'emprise momentanée de leur civilisation. Ce peut erre en hauteur, par l'ascension de quelque montagne; ou en profondeur, en descendant dans les abîmes: horizontalement aussi, si l'on s'avance au cœur de régions lointaines. (Lévi-Strauss, 1982, pp.41-42)

['It is obvious that this 'quest for power' [through rituals] enjoys a renewed vogue in contemporary French society, in the unsophisticated form of the relationship between the public and 'its' explorers. Our adolescents too, from puberty onwards, are free to obey the stimuli which have been acting upon them from all sides since early childhood. and to escape, in some way or other, from the temporary hold their civilization has on them. The escape may take place upwards, through the climbing of a mountain, or downwards, by descending into the bowels of the earth, or horizontally, through travel to remote countries.' (Lévi-Strauss, 1984, p.47)]

There are some distinctions which need to be made here. We have, on the one hand. a generalized paradigm of 'Voyages' or explorations made by young people in order to 'franchir ... l'emprise momentanée de leur civilisation' [escape … from the temporary hold their civilization has on them]. These might be aligned with tribal masculine puberty ordeals, with the European 'Grand Tour', or even Romantic artistic 'escapes' such as Baudelaire's trip to India (1841-42), Flaubert's Egyptian expedition (1849-51), or Gérard de Nerval's Voyage en Orient (1851). On the other hand, we have professional research journeys, undertaken by young natural scientists (Banks, Humboldt, Darwin, Huxley, Bates, Wallace) both as a final polish to their education and an opportunity to gather the raw material on which they could work for the rest of their careers. As Darwin remarked, at the beginning of the Beagle voyage:

perhaps I may have the same opportunity of drilling my mind that I threw away at Cambridge. (Keynes, 1988, p.13)

However, while the researches of Naturalists like Humboldt and Darwin laid the foundations of modern disciplines like Geography, Botany, Geology, Zoology, and the Life Sciences generally, it would be a mistake to see these seminal figures entirely in terms of those studies. Both Darwin and Humboldt had a strong interest in literature and literary matters generally. Humboldt had, in fact, composed an 'allegorical fable': Die Lebenskrait oder der rhodische Genius (1795), which had been printed by Schiller and admired by Goethe. His works are full of musings on the subject of the correct artistic emphasis to apply to landscape description (curtailment of detail in the interests of a more accurate overall impression) . and he attempts to analyze literature and art in the same taxonomic terms already applied by him to plants and minerals in volume 2 of Der Kosmos (1847). Darwin too was alert to the problems of representing Nature, as is shown by the care with which he pruned and revised his descriptions in the Journal of Researches (1839; revised second edition 1845). Above all, the desirability of producing a textual artefact to match the artefact of the perfectly planned and accomplished 'Naturalist's Journey' was always present in their minds, as we will find if we return and examine more closely the quotation by Darwin with which I headed this section.

While his recommendation of the 'journey' to young Naturalists sounds like rhetorical generalization, Darwin's argument in fact breaks down quite neatly into three pans, isolated in three successive sentences. Interestingly, he begins with a quasi-metaphysical justification, quoting Sir John Herschel's influential Introduction to the Study of Natural Philosophy on the desire for something more than 'corporeal' gratification – an almost Wordsworthian sentiment. He then mentions a further incitement – the attraction of novelty, and the possibilities of success and distinction that accompany it. This is, of course, an observation prompted by his own experiences on the voyage. He expands on it a little in his Autobiography:

As far as I can judge of myself, I worked to the utmost during the voyage for the mere pleasure of investigation, and from my strong desire to add a few facts to the great mass of facts in natural science. But I was also ambitious to take a fair place amongst scientific men, – whether more ambitious or less so than most of my fellow-workers I can form no opinion. (Darwin & Huxley, 1974, p.46)

Finally, we come to the third point touched upon in this passage: how 'the habit of comparison leads to generalization'. The voyage of the Beagle itself supports this assertion, since the specific observations made by Darwin led eventually to the theory of Evolution – but leaving that aside for the moment, we can see the principle operating in this very passage, where Darwin makes his own experience, his own voyage, exemplary. True, he acknowledges, there are disadvantages to this arrangement:

as the traveller stays but a short time in each place, his descriptions must generally consist of mere sketches, instead of detailed observations. Hence arises, as I have found to my cost, a constant tendency to fill up the wide gaps of knowledge, by inaccurate and superficial hypotheses. (Darwin, 1891, pp.368-69)

Let us take the last point first. Most accounts of voyages are written in the form of diaries, or are at least based on diaries that have been kept during the trip. The sense of day-to-day fortuitous discovery which can be imparted by employing this form – and which parallels the similar chances which determine the success or failure of an expedition – can be either obscured by turning disparate entries into a single seamless narrative, or enhanced by guarding the convention of dates and daily entries. Both Darwin and Humboldt use a combination of the two methods. While it would be false to claim that the voyage was the text a Naturalist made it into, it is clear that disentangling the two becomes problematic in such cases. Perhaps, then, it is safer to say that the two, Voyage and Text, are subject to parallel influences. Both are planned carefully in advance, both are subject to fortuitous chance during their execution, and one's final assessment of both is conditioned by results.

The pressure to produce accurate scientific results (one thing which the Naturalist of the nineteenth century has in common with the Life Scientist of today) is of a rather different nature. Both Darwin and Humboldt published their travel accounts separately from the main body of their results. In Humboldt's case, his personal narrative, the Relation historique du voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent appeared in 3 volumes between 1814 and 1825. His scientific results, by contrast, came out in 35 volumes (consisting of Astronomical and Geophysical Data, Botany, Geography of Plants, Zoology and Comparative Anatomy, the Politics of Mexico, and a General Report on the Journey and Geography) between 1808 and 1827. As for Darwin, his Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. 'Beagle' was included as the third volume of the official account of the voyage, edited by Captain FitzRoy and published in 1839, The scientific results were issued as The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. 'Beagle', in 5 vols (1839-43); and The Geology of the Voyage of the 'Beagle', in 3 parts (1842, 1844, and 1846). This ratio of three to thirty-five, and one to eight, outlines the principal problem of any Naturalist with literary aspirations – that of selection.

Humboldt sums up the matter very neatly in the preface to his personal narrative:

Had I adopted a mode of composition, which should have contained in the same chapter all that has been observed on the same point of the globe, I should have composed a work of cumbrous length, and devoid of that clearness, which arises in a great measure from the methodical distribution of the matter. (Humboldt, 1814-29, I: xviii)[1]

The solution, then, is to group together the facts and observations connected with a particular subject. It is notable that this is precisely the method adopted by Darwin in the published form of his Journal:

To prevent useless repetitions, I will extract those parts of my journal which refer to the same districts, without always attending to the order in which we visited them. (Darwin, 1891, p.29)

The difficulty, however, is to preserve the spontaneity of the original account while rejecting its diffuseness and lack of form:

The richness of nature leads to a piling up of individual images, and this disturbs the balance and overall impression projected by the 'painting'. If the style is to appeal to emotion and imagination, it all too easily degenerates into poetic prose. (Meyer-Abich & Hentschel, 1969, p.110)

These are two separate pitfalls. One is to overvalue the details at the expense of the picture; the other is to turn the picture into an exercise in 'poetic prose'. Both ability as a writer, and a correct theory of writing about landscape are therefore required if one is to convey:

A view of nature as a totality, proof of the working together of various forces, a renewal of the pleasure aroused in the breast of any sensitive person at the sight of the tropics (Meyer-Abich & Hentschel, 1969, p.109)

which are, Humboldt says, 'the aims I strive for'.

All of which brings us to the first point made by Darwin in his recommendation of the journey to young Naturalists – what might be called the metaphysical justification for this 'Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone" [Prelude. iii. 63] (Wordsworth, 1924, p.250). We noted, above, the Wordsworthian aspect of this desire which 'a man experiences although every corporeal sense be fully satisfied':

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar
(Wordsworth, 1924, p.359)[2]

But it now appears that we can proceed with more confidence to locate this aspect of the Naturalist's Voyage in the context of the Voyage as an adolescent 'escape' - or (its natural extension), a Romantic literary motif – in the terms suggested by Lévi-Strauss.

Just as the Naturalist must artfully select details from his experiences with the intention of

conveying the sense of a spontaneous experience, not wholly arranged in retrospect;
avoiding a picture cluttered by too much incidental information; &
not lapsing into 'poetic prose' and evocation for its own sake

so the creative artist must convey the general in terms of the particular. The Voyage is extremely valuable in this connection, implying, as it does, a constantly changing scene of action (yet one which, if required, can be portrayed as monotonous through its very variety). The ship is useful as an assurance of a fixed set of characters in a bounded space (and as tangible expression of the 'ship of society'). The physical surroundings of sea and sky, what is more, evoke almost automatically an expression of awe and wonder at the grandeur of the physical world (thus entailing a redefinition of one's own consequence amongst these 'giant forms').

One could perhaps summarize the various influences involved as follows. At one extreme we have the Voyage as a literary motif – as first exemplified in (presumably) Homer's Odyssey, and then a succession of early nineteenth century works such as 'L'Albatros', 'Le Voyage' and 'L'invitation au Voyage' in Baudelaire's Les F1eurs du Mal (1857); Tennyson's 'Ulysses' (1842); Edgar Allan Poe's 'MS. Found in a Bottle' (1833), 'The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaal' (1835) and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket (1838); along with Herman Melville's Typee (1846) and Mardi, and a Voyage Thither (1849). At the other extreme we have the voyage as a purely scientific project – as a contribution to knowledge in its purest form (as exemplified in the 35 volumes occupied by the results from Humboldt's expedition, or the eight volumes of geological and zoological data deduced from Darwin's collections). The 'Naturalist's Voyage' as a genre lies somewhere in between. Just as the actual voyage and the account that results from it are subject to parallel chance influences, so the 'Naturalist's Voyage' as a text is acted upon almost equally by impulses from each side – the extent in each case being governed as much by the expectations of an audience as the predisposition of the writer concerned.

The introduction to the last chapter was largely concerned with the methodological implications of chronology in a study as temporally wide-ranging as this. I said there that the 'synchronic section' which could be seen to be operating on a single text (such as Darwin's – published in 1839, but continuously composed and revised over the period 1831-45) was far more extensive than a strict definition of the term would suggest. The generic distinctions made there between 'Journal' and 'Romance' were, by contrast, fairly perfunctory – and I therefore propose to highlight that aspect in dealing with the curious hybrid that is Darwin's Journal of Researches.

This chapter is arranged in two main sections, each intended to represent simultaneously a characteristic myth or vision of South America, and an essential stage in our reading of the nature of Darwin's text. The first, 'The Brazilian Forest', examines the actual process of textual accretion in the progress from his experiences to the final published text – through the intermediate stages of notebooks, letters, and Diary. The second, 'The Voyage of the Beagle', attempts to read Darwin's travel narrative as both influenced by and as a contribution to the Romantic iconography of the Voyage. In order to do this, I shall be looking at Darwin's textual antecedents in Humboldt's Personal Narrative, and in the poetry of Wordsworth and Milton (which had an approximately equal influence on him).

The structure, then, is essentially the same as the last chapter, although it introduces a new emphasis on the particularity – rather than the exemplary nature – of its central text. Only by balancing with equal care the dual influences of genre and literary precedent will it be possible to see clearly Darwin's specific contribution to any larger literary topos of 'South America'.

[Martin Johnson Heade: Brazilian Forest (1864)]

II

The Brazilian Forest

The day has passed delightfully: delight is however a weak term for such transports of pleasure: I have been wandering by myself in a Brazilian forest: amongst the multitude it is hard to say what set of objects is most striking; the general luxuriance of the vegetation bears the victory, the elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers. – the glossy green of the foliage, all tend to this end. – A most paradoxical mixture of sound & silence pervades the shady parts of the wood. – the noise from the insects is so loud that in the evening it can be heard even in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore. – Yet within the recesses of the forest when in the midst of it a universal stillness appears to reign. – To a person fond of Natural history such a day as this brings with it pleasure more acute than he ever may again experience. – After wandering about for some hours, I returned to the landing place. – Before reaching it I was overtaken by a Tropical storm. – I tried to find shelter under a tree so thick that it would never have been penetrated by common English rain, yet here in a couple of minutes, a little torrent flowed down the trunk. It is to this violence we must attribute the verdure in the bottom of the wood. – if the showers were like those of a colder clime, the moisture would be absorbed or, evaporated before reaching the ground. (Keynes, 1988, p.42)

Here is the true voice of feeling; the words written by Charles Darwin in his diary (hereafter referred to as the Diary) after going ashore for the first time in South America. And here is what they became in the second edition of his Journal of Researches (1845, hereafter referred to as the Journal) – which may be regarded for our purposes as the definitive version of his text, since it differs in many particulars from the original edition of 1839:

The day has passed delightfully. Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time. has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest. The elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage, but above all the general luxuriance of the vegetation, filled me with admiration. A most paradoxical mixture of sound and silence pervades the shady parts of the wood. The noise from the insects is so loud, that it may be heard even in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore: yet within the recesses of the forest a universal silence appears to reign. To a person fond of natural history, such a day as this brings with it a deeper pleasure than he can ever hope to experience again. After wandering about for some hours, I returned to the landing-place; but, before reaching it, I was overtaken by a tropical storm. I tried to find shelter under a tree, which was so thick that it would never have been penetrated by common English rain; but here, in a couple of minutes, a little torrent flowed down the trunk. It is to this violence of the rain that we must attribute the verdure at the bottom of the thickest woods: if the showers were like those of a colder clime, the greater part would be absorbed or evaporated before it reached the ground. (Darwin, 1891, p.9)[3]

Before we begin to examine the specific divergences between these two versions, and the reasons for them, let us go a little deeper into the textual history of Darwin's account.

On going ashore at a new location, Darwin would record his immediate impressions in a small notebook. Twenty-four of these survive, and have been partially transcribed by Nora Barlow (1945, pp.149-268). When he had completed his observations, or was at leisure, he would expand these notes into an entry for his Diary (referred to by him, confusingly, as the 'Journal'). Also, he often described the same scenes in letters to his family and friends, so these provide yet another medium for expressing the same sensations.

The notes, then, on Brazilian forests, include passages like the following:

Sosego. Twiners entwining twiners – tresses like hair – beautiful lepidoptera – Silence – hosannah – Frog habits like toad – slow jumps – iris copper-coloured, colour became faint. Snake, fresh water fish, edible; musky shell, stain fingers red. One fish from salt Lagoa de Boacia, 2 from brook; one do. pricks the fingers – (Barlow, 1945, p.162).

In the Diary, this becomes 'These two days were spent at Socêgo, & was the most enjoyable part of the whole expedition; the greater part of them was spent in the woods, & I succeeded in collecting many insects & reptiles' (Keynes, 1988, p.58). The 'twiners entwining twiners' have been expanded into 'The woody creepers, themselves covered by creepers', and the 'tresses like hair' to 'tresses of a liana, which much resembles bundles of hay' (Keynes, 1988, p.59). The 'hosannah' may refer to the fact, noted both in the Journal and in the Diary, of the silence of his walk being 'broken by the morning hymn, raised on high by the whole body of the blacks [on the fazênda there' (Darwin, 1891, p.17 - see also Keynes, 1988, p.57; and Browne & Neve, 1989, p.61). However, this was two days before, so it may be merely an expression of praise at the beauty of the scene. In any case, these raptures are still further truncated in the Journal: 'In returning we spent two days at Socêgo, and I employed them in collecting insects in the forest. The greater number of trees, although so lofty, are not more than three or four feet in circumference.' (Darwin, 1891, p.18)

Unfortunately the notes which prompted the passage which I have quoted at the beginning of this section have not survived (or been transcribed); the closest equivalent being the following, from a few months later:

Silence well exemplified; – rippling of a brook. Lofty trees, white boles: the pleasure of eating my lunch on one of the rotten trees - so gloomy that only shean of light enters the profound. Tops of the trees enlumined; cold camp feel. (Barlow, 1945, p.165)

This becomes, in the Diary, 'A profound gloom reigns everywhere: it would be impossible to tell the sun was shining, if it was not for an occasional gleam of light shooting, as it were through a shutter, on the ground beneath; & that the tops of the more lofty trees are brightly illuminated. – The air is motionless & has a peculiar chilling dampness. – Whilst seated on the trunk of a decaying tree amidst such scenes, one feels an inexpressible delight. – The rippling of some little brook, the tap of a Woodpecker, or scream of some more distant bird, by the distinctness with which it is heard, brings the conviction how still the rest of Nature is' (Keynes, 1988, p.74).

Here we see the rewriting mechanism really in action. The 'lunch' has gone - perhaps because it is not sufficiently august, but more likely because it does not fit with Darwin's own stated principle of description: 'the habit of comparison leads to generalization', The poetic expression 'the profound' has become 'a profound gloom'; 'enlumined' has become 'illuminated'; the evocative 'cold camp feel' has become 'a peculiar chilling dampness'. It is almost as if a Modernist text has been juxtaposed with a nineteenth century one – the first notes resembling the acuteness of vision of Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal, while the transcription makes them seem a conscious rhetorical exercise.

The potentially distorting quality of this allegedly 'simple' procedure of copying notes makes it easier to understand why Joseph Huxley described Darwin's working notebooks from the voyage as a mass of '"worthless MSS" ... because of his lack of training in Biology' (Barlow, 1945, p.149). From our point of view, however, they make clear the precise sort of composition at which Darwin was aiming – one which would be flexible enough to include scientific observations side by side with anecdotes and descriptive passages, not to mention the human story of the voyage. For this reason, no one aspect could be emphasized too much – which explains the sometimes rather jerky feel of the Journal by comparison with the more relaxed and capacious Diary.

The letters represent yet another textualizing impulse:

Nobody but a person fond of Nat: history, can imagine the pleasure of strolling under Cocoa nuts in a thicket of Bananas & Coffee plants, & an endless number of wild flowers. – And this Island that has given me so much instruction & delight, is reckoned the most uninteresting place, that we perhaps shall touch at during our voyage. (Burckhardt & Smith, 1985, 1: 202)

Interestingly, this statement about 'being unable to imagine the pleasure' – applied here to St. Jago – closely parallels his remarks about 'such a day bringing with it pleasure more acute than [a person fond of Natural History] ever may again experience' in the Diary description of Bahia. Any confusion between the two descriptions is, however, accounted for a little further down in this letter (addressed to his father):

I have written this much in order to save time at Bahia. (Burckhardt & Smith, 1985, 1: 203)

A verbal characterization of Brazil may therefore be quite legitimately displaced onto another 'tropical' paradise.

Finally, the long documentary letter actually reaches Bahia:

I arrived at this place on the 28th of Feb & am now writing this letter after having in real earnest strolled in the forests of the new world. – 'No person could imagine anything so beautiful as the antient town of Bahia; it is fairly embosomed in a luxuriant wood of beautiful trees ... the bay is scattered over with large ships. in short & what can be said more it is one of the finest views in the Brazils'. – (copied from my journal) ... If you really want to have a [notion] of tropical countries, study Humboldt. – Skip th[e] scientific parts & commence after leaving Teneriffe. – My feelings amount to admiration the more I read him. (Burckhardt & Smith, 1985, 1: 204)

We thus see, in a nutshell, the two separate lines of descent of Darwin's text. The first is his own notes and journal entries, which could be paraphrased or even quoted verbatim in the attempt to convey some impression of what he was experiencing to those at home (a not dissimilar problem from the one that faced him when he 'wrote up' the journal itself). The second is his response to the tropical descriptions in Humboldt's Personal Narrative; and references to this are scattered through the letters and entries (some surviving even into the published Journal) – giving his work, at times, the atmosphere of a commentary on the earlier text, a sort of 'in the footsteps of' Humboldt.

With reference to the first of these aspects, he himself remarks:

It is very odd, what a difficult job I find this same writing letters to be. – I suppose it is partly owing to my writing everything in my journal: but chiefly to the number of subjects; which is so bewildering that I am generally at a loss either how to begin or end a sentence. And this all hands must allow to be an objection. - (Burckhardt & Smith, 1985, 1: 219)

The entire process of composing his final text, charted in this section, could be said to be an illustration of this remark. We see him go from fragmentary statements such as 'beautiful lepidoptera – Silence – hosannah – Frog habits like toad', to the hasty syntax of some of the Diary entries: 'amongst the multitude it is hard to say what set of objects is most striking; the general luxuriance of the vegetation bears the victory, the elegance of the grasses ... the glossy green of the foliage, all tend to this end'. He then repeats these impressions in different words in letters home – sometimes using a particular phrase from the Diary in a different context, in order to 'save time at Bahia'. Finally, he painstakingly rephrased, cut and expanded (almost by haif) the whole into the published Journal (1839), which was further rewritten for its second edition in 1845 – the received text. Before I begin to look at the implications of this process of composition, however, it seems best to examine in a brief excursus Darwin's specific debt to Humboldt – the second 'line of descent' mentioned above.

Let us begin by quoting some representative passages from Humboldt, and then look at Darwin's reaction to them.

Vegetation here displays some of its fairest and most majestic forms in the banana and the palm-tree. He who is awake to the charms of nature finds in this delicious island remedies still more potent than the climate. No abode appeared to me more fitted to dissipate melancholy, and restore peace to the perturbed mind, than that of Teneriffe, or Madeira ...

The baobabs are of still greater dimensions than the dragon-tree of Orotava. There are some, which near the root measure 34 feet in diameter, though their total height is only from 50 to 60 feet ... That in Mr. Franqui's garden bears still every year both flowers and fruit. Its aspect feelingly recalls to mind 'that eternal youth of nature,' which is an inexhaustible source of motion and of life ...

On leaving Orotava, a narrow and stony pathway led us across a beautiful forest of chesnut trees, el monte de Castannos, to a site which is covered with brambles, some species of laurels, and arborescent heaths. The trunks of the last grow to an extraordinary size; and the flowers with which they are loaded form an agreeable contrast, during a great part of the year, with the hypericum canariense, which is very abundant at this height. We stopped to take in our provision of water under a solitary firtree ... (Humboldt, 1814-29, 1: 127, 143-44 & 145-46).

Humboldt has rejected the diary format in favour of an episodic narrative of events, and the 'scientific parts' are more lavishly treated in his text. Nevertheless, there is something rather evocative in his 'rich and smiling verdure' ((Humboldt, 1814-29, 1: 134) and endlessly 'attractive prospects'. I have tried to quote examples of his generalizations, his classifications of particular plants (the baobab), and his account of a walk – and, while the first is the one which can be observed most directly influencing Darwin's expression ('He who is awake to the charms of nature' becoming 'a person fond of Natural history'), the other two can be seen to inspire categories of description in both Diary and Journal.

Take the passage at the beginning of this section, for instance. It is a description of action, like Humboldt's: 'wandering by myself – 'wandering about for some hours' – 'before reaching it'; but it ends with an account of the tree he sheltered under, together with speculations on the thickness of the 'verdure in the bottom of the wood'. Containing, as it does, generalizations like 'delight is a weak word for such transports of pleasure', and 'pleasure more acute than he ever may again experience', we see that it includes all three of the categories highlighted in Humboldt's text: action, scientific detail, and generalization.

So what are we to conclude from this? There is no doubt of the amount of attention Darwin paid to Humboldt's text. He says in his Autobiography:

During my last year at Cambridge I read with care and profound interest Humboldt's Personal Narrative ... I copied out from Humboldt long passages about Teneriffe, and read them aloud ... to (I think) Henslow, Ramsay and Dawes; for on a previous occasion I had talked about the glories of Teneriffe' and some of the party declared they would endeavour to go there (Darwin & Huxley, 1974, p.38).

Elsewhere we find references to: 'a very pleasant afternoon lying on the sofa reading H umboldts glowing accounts of tropical scenery'; 'Already can understand Humboldts enthusiasm about the tropical nights'; 'I am at present fit only to read Humboldt: he like another Sun illumines everything I behold'; and, most importantly, 'Here I first saw the glory of tropical vegetation. Tamarinds, Bananas & Palms were flourishing at my feet. – I expected a good deal, for I had read Humboldts descriptions & I was afraid of disappointments' (Keynes, 1988, pp.18, 20, 42 & 23).

It would not be putting it too strongly to say that Darwin came text in hand to South America. We see here that his highest praise for the wonders of the Brazilian forest is to say, of Humboldt's description, that 'even he ... with all this falls far short of the truth' (Keynes, 1988, p.42). Oblique praise – to expect the reality to justify itself against the text. It is not that Darwin is behindhand in recording his rapture at the sight of tropical scenery – it is simply that he does so in a manner as much conditioned by the rhetorical traditions he has inherited as by the sights themselves ('If we rank scenery according to the astonishment it produces, this [the Caucovado at Rio de Janeiro] most assuredly occupies the highest place, but if, as is more true. according to the picturesque effect, it falls far short of many in the neighbourhead' (Keynes, 1988, p.67)). The main reason for treating Humboldt in such detail, then, is to introduce a note of specificity into this textual dependence:

Few things give me so much pleasure as reading the Personal Narrative: I know not the reason why a thought which has passed through the mind, when we see it embodied in words, immediately assumes a more substantial & true air. (Keynes, 1988, p.67)

With this in mind, let us return to the two passages at the head of this section.

The Diary records the 'transports of pleasure' associated with the fact that 'I have been wandering by myself in a Brazilian forest'. The Journal, on the other hand, says that: 'Delight itself is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest'. The first person immediacy of the first entry inevitably appeals more to a modern sensibility, but that is not really the point. The point is that Darwin has been forced to objectify his narrative, to turn 'I' into the 'person fond of Natural history' and the 'naturalist who ... has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest', for a specific reason. This is because the reader of a book like Darwin's, representing the genre of 'Naturalist's Voyage', does not expect, and will not trust, a subjective record of the experiences of a first-person narrator. Rather, he expects an account of a foreign country which will enable him in some way to apprehend the reality of that country. No more does he desire, of course, a completely impersonal summary of landscape features there must be anecdotes and personal experiences included, but as clearly identified adjuncts to the main thrust of locating the narrative in objective fact. This is, indeed, the process of 'generalization' favoured by Darwin in the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter.

Darwin, then, is forced to construct a sort of ideal narrative out of his own experience of the voyage. Each successive overlay of writing is another step in this process – with the author himself becoming an increasingly objectified character, like the Dante of the Divina Commedia. Darwin's project might therefore be conceived as a series of rhetorical shifts designed to convey a truer overall picture of the voyage – but also, as a corollary, supplanting it in favour of another, textual identity.

Our original discussion of the Naturalist's Voyage as an artefact – to be re-created by the written description of that voyage – can therefore be supplemented with the effect of distancing achieved by these successive exercises in style. The effect of going from the Notebooks to the Diary, sideways to the Letters, and on to the two editions of the Journal, takes one steadily further from the experiences themselves. To some extent this is an inevitable process – but the replacement of the genuine question 'it is hard to see what s,et of objects is most striking' in the Diary with, first, the more decisive 'the general luxuriance of the vegetation bears away the victory' in the 1839 edition of the Journal; and, finally, a mere listing of objects which 'filled me with admiration' in 1845, seems a gradual falsification indulged in for reasons of style, not sense. The literary precedent of Humboldt also enables him to transfer responsibility for interpreting what he sees: 'If you really want to have a notion of tropical countries, study Humboldt'.

Our question must remain – having established the context in which Darwin is writing, and the process of generation of his text – what picture of South America he actually creates. His picture of the Brazilian forest is apparently generically 'tropical', since parts of it can be transferred from descriptions of Teneriffe and Madeira; yet he also makes reference to Brazil as 'the new world' and the fact that 'Brazilian scenery is nothing more nor less than a view in the Arabian Nights, with the advantage of reality' (Keynes, 1988, p.43). To expand on these hints about the terms in which the words 'South America' are operating in Darwin's travel journal, I shall be examining his attitude towards the human clientele of the countries visited by him – Spaniards, Indians. and gauchos. This will then be supplemented by an account of the reactions to the Andes (or 'Cordillera'), with which he rounded off this part of his circumnavigation.

[Gauchos in Argentina (1894)]

III

The Voyage of the Beagle

(a) Gauchos and Indians

The object of this chapter is, as we have seen, two-fold: it seeks to establish the generic terms in which we can best define Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle as a textual artefact; and, as a natural accompaniment, it attempts to elicit the reading he has provided of the place most 'visited' by his text – South America (at least three fifths of the entries being devoted to it alone (Browne & Neve, 1989, p.16). The first two sections were occupied mainly by the former objective. but introduce the system of categories which I intend to employ in these last two sections – devoted, respectively, to the People and the works of Nature in Darwin's 'South America'.

Let us begin by defining the classes of people Darwin includes in his narrative.

There are. according to my reading, at least four different groups:

Gauchos. About these Darwin talks a good deal:

There were several of the wild Gaucho cavalry waiting to see us land; they formed by far the most savage picturesque group I ever beheld. – I should have fancied myself in the middle of Turkey by their dresses ... The men themselves were far more remarkable than their dresses; the greater number were half Spaniard & Indian. – some of each pure blood & some black. (Keynes, 1988, pp.99-100)

On the subject of such men of 'mixed breed, between Negro, Indian, and Spaniard', Darwin remarks in the Journal: 'I know not the reason. but men of such origin seldom have a good expression of countenance' (Darwin, 1891, p.51). In a more generalized passage, he explains:

We dined at a Pulperia, where there were present many Gauchos (this name only means 'countrymen' & those who dress in this manner & lead their life) ... [f their surprise was great. mine was much greater to find such ignorance; & this amongst people who possess their thousands of cattle & 'estancia's' of great extent ... I was asked whether the earth or sun moved; whether it was hotter or colder to the North; where Spain was & many more such questions. – Most of the inhabitants have an indistinct idea, that England, London, N. America are all the same place; the better informed well know that England & N: America are separate countries close together; but that England is a large town in London ... I am writing as if I had been amongst the inhabitants of central Africa. Banda Oriental would not be flattered by the comparison, but such was my feeling when amongst them. (Keynes, 1988, pp.154-55)

He sums up:

The Gauchos, or countrymen, are very superior to those who reside in the towns. The Gaucho is invariably most obliging, polite, and hospitable: I did not meet with even one instance of rudeness or inhospitality. He is modest, both respecting himself and country, but at the same time a spirited, bold fellow. On the other hand, many robberies are committed, and there is much bloodshed ... It is lamentable to hear how many lives are lost in trifling quarrels. In fighting, each party tries to mark the face of his adversary by slashing his nose or eyes; as is often attested by deep and horrid-looking scars ... At Mercedes I asked two men why they did not work, One gravely said the days were too long; the other that he was too poor. The number of horses and the profusion of food are the destruction of all industry. (Darwin, 1891, pp.112-13)[4]

The change of tone brought about by a slight change of register is very apparent in this last extract from the Journal. The Diary says 'Their politeness is excessive, they never drink their spirits, without expecting you to taste it; but as they make their exceedingly good bow, they seem quite ready, if occasion offered, to cut your throat at the same time' (Keynes, 1988, p.156) – a rather more vivid expression than their being 'invariably most obliging, polite, and hospitable'. The burden of the two remarks is much the same, but the tabular form – arguments pro and contra gaucho life - adopted in the Journal gives it a more authoritative (and therefore potentially more misleading) tone. The explanation why those particular 'two men ... did not work', for example, is given in W. H. Hudson's The Naturalist in La Plata (1892), where he says: 'The philosopher was astonished and amused at the reply, but failed to understand it. And yet, to one acquainted with these lovers of brief phrases, what more intelligible answer could have been returned? The poor fellow simply meant to say that his horses had been stolen ... or, perhaps, that some minion of the Government of the moment had seized them for the use of the State' (Hudson, 1912, p.351).[5]

Indians. While crossing the Argentinian Pampas, Darwin witnessed the early stages of the war of extermination being carried out against the Indians by General Rosas – and he therefore had a special interest in describing a way of life that was soon to disappear:
The next day three hundred men arrived from the Colorado ... A large portion of these men were Indians (mansos, or tame), belonging to the tribe of the Cacique Bernantio. They passed the night here; and it was impossible to conceive anything more wild and savage than the scene of their bivouac. Some drank till they were intoxicated; others swallowed the steaming blood of the cattle slaughtered for their suppers, and then, being sick from drunkenness, they cast it up again, and were besmeared with filth and gore. (Darwin, 1891, p.73)

These, admittedly, are Indians who have already been partially corrupted ('tame'): 'Not only have whole tribes been exterminated, but the remaining Indians have become more barbarous: instead of living in large villages, and being employed in the arts of fishing, as well as of the chase, they now wander about the open plains, without home or fixed occupation' (Darwin, 1891, p.75). Their demeanour can still be admirable at times, however:

The three survivors [of a massacre] of course possessed very valuable information; and to extort this they were placed in a line. The two first being questioned, answered, 'No sé' (I do not know), and were one after the other shot. The third also said, 'No sé;' adding, 'Fire, I am a man, and can die!' Not one syllable would they breathe to injure the united cause of their country! The conduct of the ... cacique was very different: he saved his life by betraying the intended plan of warfare, and the point of union in the Andes. (Darwin, 1891, p.74)

This noble simplicity is matched by their appearance: 'They were remarkable fine men, very fair, above six feet high, and all under thirty years of age'. Of another group, Darwin says:

The taste they show in their dress is admirable; if you could turn one of these young Indians into a statue of bronze, the drapery would be perfectly graceful. (Keynes, 1988, p.165)

It is tempting to say that that is precisely what Darwin is doing – turning them into statues of bronze (as when he refers to a night encampment of gauchos and Indians as 'a Salvator Rosa scene' (Darwin, 1891, p.80)). For the moment, let us note the fine scorn heaped on the 'cacique', as opposed to his magnificent followers. This must be seen in the general context of Darwin's concentration on the 'picturesque' qualities of both Indians and gauchos – 'No painter ever imagined so wild a set of expressions' (Keynes, 1988, p.100) – but it is perhaps as paintings and 'statues' that they are most easily interpreted by him.

3/ Slaves and Estate-owners. The theme of 'levelling' indignation expressed in the contrast between the cacique and his followers is echoed by the distinctions Darwin draws between slave-owners and their property.

While staying at this estate [near Rio de Janeiro), I was very nearly being an eye-witness to one of those atrocious acts which can only take place in a slave country. Owing to a quarrel and a lawsuit, the owner was on the point of taking all the women and children from the male slaves, and selling them separately at the public auction at Rio. Interest, and not any feeling of compassion. prevented this act. Indeed, I do not believe the inhumanity of separating thirty families. who had lived together for many years, even occurred to the owner. Yet I will pledge myself, that in humanity and good feeling he was superior to the common run of men. It may be said there exists no limit to the blindness of interest and selfish habit. (Darwin, 1891, p.18)

And to emphasize the 'blindness of [that] selfish habit', Darwin has changed the icily polite 'person' in the first edition to a more indignant contrast between 'male slaves' and 'owner'. Darwin goes on to define his attitude towards the slaves:

I was crossing a ferry with a negro, who was uncommonly stupid. In endeavouring to make him understand, I talked loud, and made signs, in doing which I passed my hand near his face. He, I suppose, thought I was in a passion, and was going to strike him; for instantly, with a frightened look and half-shut eyes, he dropped his hands. I shall never forget my feelings of surprise, disgust, and shame, at seeing a great powerful man afraid even to ward off a blow, directed, as he thought, at his face. This man had been trained to a degradation lower than the slavery of the most helpless animal. (Darwin, 1891, p.18)[6]

One feels a certain contempt mingled here with the pity, and this extends to the landowners as well – despite their ready acceptance of him as part of their own class and caste.

At night we asked permission to sleep at an Estancia at which we happened to arrive. It was a very large estate ... & the owner at Buenos Ayres is one of the greatest landowners in the country. - His nephew has charge of it & with him there was a Captain of the army, who the other day ran away from Buenos Ayres. Considering their station their conversation was rather amusing. They expressed, as was usual, unbounded astonishment at the globe being round, & could scarcely credit that a hole would if deep enough come out on the other side ... The Captain at last said, he had one question to ask me ... I trembled to think how deeply scientific it would be. – 'it was whether the ladies of Buenos Ayres were not the handsomest in the world'. I replied, 'Charmingly so'. He added, I have one other question – 'Do ladies in any other part of the world wear such large combs'. I solemnly assured him they did not. – They were absolutely delighted. – The Captain exclaimed, 'Look there, a man, who has seen half the world, says it is the case; we always thought so, but now we know it'. My excellent judgement in beauty procured me a most hospitable reception; the Captain forced me to take his bed, & he would sleep on his Recado. (Keynes, 1988, p.202)

The reception might not have been quite so good if they could have read that entry in his Journal, however. Darwin tells such anecdotes without malice – and this one is amusing in itself – but his complacency about his own state of knowledge as compared with theirs is complete.

Patagonians. This attitude de haut en bas becomes even more marked when he meets the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego:

I would not have believed how entire the difference between savage & civilized man is. – It is greater than between a wild & domesticated animal, in as much as in man there is greater power of improvement. – The chief spokesman was old & appeared to be head of the family: the three others were young powerful men & about 6 feet high. – From their dress &c &c they resembled the representations of Devils on the Stage, for instance in Der Freischutz ... Their language does not deserve to be called articulate: Capt. Cook says it is like a man clearing his throat: to which may be added another very hoarse man trying to shout & a third encouraging a horse with that peculiar noise which is made in one side of the mouth. – Imagine these sounds & a few gutterals mingled with them, & there will be as near an approximation to their language as any European may expect to obtain. (Keynes, 1988, pp.122-24)

It is true that he toned down these remarks in the published Journal, adding that 'They are excellent mimics ... They could repeat with perfect correctness each word in any sentence we addressed them, and they remembered such words for some time' (Darwin, 1891, p.149) – but even this is scarcely a tribute to their humanity. When they are not regarded as zoological specimens, they are seen as clowns:

The tallest amongst the Fuegians was evidently much pleased at his height being noticed ... He opened his mouth to show his teeth, and turned his face for a side view: and all this was done with such alacrity, that I daresay he thought himself the handsomest man in Tierra del Fuego. After our first feeling of grave astonishment was over, nothing could be more ludicrous than the odd mixture of surprise and imitation which these savages every moment exhibited. (Darwin, 1891, p.151)

No acknowledgement here of the fact that the crew's fascination with tallness was actually due to a peculiarly European absurdity: the legend of the Patagonian giants, surviving from the time of Magellan into the nineteenth century. (See further Percy G. Adams' 'The Patagonian Giants or The Drama of the Dolphin' (1962, pp.19-43).

Brazilian Indians were thought by Montaigne to have important lessons to teach Europe and Europeans. The nineteenth century liberal Darwin, however, observes all these species of men as inferiors – at best, material for a case-study. A better way to look at it, perhaps, is not so much as an expression of Darwin's contempt for them as people, but rather as a sign of his too hasty categorization of them. These four sets of characters are, after all, as well-defined as the stock figures of Commedia dell'Arte; or, more to the point, like the stages of human development in a text-book. The Estate-owner might be seen, on one level, as Pantaloon – a well-meaning fool with more power than is good for him; on the other, as the king at the top of a feudal pyramid – the ignorant ruler of an ignorant race. The Gaucho is wild and free, yet courteous. His blood-thirstiness is as proverbial as his hospitality. We might see him as the jeune premier, Pierrot; or else as a throwback to the Heroic Age. The Indian is noble but inscrutable. We may corrupt him, but we can never fully understand him. He seems to represent the helpful beasts in fairy tales as much as, say, Chingachgook in the Leatherstocking Tales. Historically, of course, he is the Noble Savage. Finally, the Patagonian is the lowest of all – incapable of any social organization or cooperation outside the family unit; A sub-human troll or dwarf, who greets kindness with suspicion and scorn: a Caliban.

The whole thing might be written out as a table, using the terminology of both History and Romance:

The Estate-owner - FEUDALISM (Pantaloon)
The Gaucho - HEROIC AGE (Pierrot)
The Indian - SAVAGERY (Chingachgook)
The Patagonian - PRIMITIVISM (Caliban)

In this context, it might be interesting to quote some remarks on the subject of American iconography from Sarmiento's Facundo:

El único romancista norteamericano que haya logrado hacerse un nombre europeo, es Fenimore Cooper, y eso, porque transportó la escena de sus descripciones fuera del círculo ocupado por los plantadores al límite entre la vida bárbara y la civilizada, al teatro de la guerra en que las razas indígenas y la raza sajona están combatiendo por la posesión del terreno. (Sarmiento, 1981, p.44)

['The only North American novelist who has gained a European reputation is Fenimore Cooper, and he succeeded in doing so by removing the scene of the events he described from the settled portion of the country to the border land between civilized life and that of the savage, the theatre of the war for the possession of the soil waged against each other. by the native tribes and the Saxon race.' (Sarmiento, 1961, p.40)]

He goes on to record his own impression, while reading 'El último de los Mohicanos', that many of the indigenous customs recorded there were identical to those he had encountered on the Pampas. He concludes: 'modificaciones análogas del suelo traen análogas costumbres, recursos y expedientes. No es otra la razón de hallar en Fenimore Cooper descripciones de usos y costumbres que parecen plagiadas de la pampa' (Sarmiento, 1981, p.45) [analogies in the soil bring with them analogous customs, resources, and expedients. This explains our finding in Cooper's works accounts of practices and customs which seem plagiarized from the pampa' (Sarmiento, 1961, p.41)].

The point that I would like to make about Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826) is not essentially dissimilar. It is not so much, in Darwin, that we see a set of 'usos y costumbres' [practices and customs] held in common between North and South America – but a system of types which operates in the works of both Cooper and Darwin. Cooper's Romance anticipates the system of human levels adopted by Darwin's Travel Account; again, without plagiarism, but because 'modificaciones análogas ... traen análogas ... recursos y expedientes', which one might paraphrase as: 'similar [textual) needs call for similar solutions'.

Let us examine this proposition in a little more detail. Pantaloon is replaced by Colonel Munro, the ineffectual Englishman (with the wayward daughter - remember 'whether the ladies of Buenos Ayres were not the handsomest in the world'?). Pierrot, the hero, is of course Natty Bumppo, 'Hawk-eye' – with his bewildering mixture of civility and savagery ('He is modest, both respecting himself and country, but at the same time a spirited, bold fellow. On the other hand, many robberies are committed, and there is much bloodshed' (Darwin, 1891, pp.112-13)). Chingachgook, the last of the Mohicans, is self-explanatory: an embodiment of the mystery of the woods and of nature (The third also said ... 'Fire, I am a man, and can die!' Not one syllable would they breathe to injure the united cause of their country!'). Finally, his enemies, the Hurons (as well as the treacherous Magua) represent the dark side of ignorance and barbarism – a predominant theme in American Gothic – ('Matthews [the missionary left with the Fuegians] described the watch he was obliged always to keep as most harassing; night and day he was mrrounded by the natives, who tried to tire him out by making an incessant noise close to his head. One day an old man, whom Matthews asked to leave his wigwam, immediately returned with a large stone in his hand; another day a whole party came armed with stones and stakes ... Another party showed by signs that they wished to strip him naked, and pluck all the hairs out of his face and body. I think we arrived just in time to save his life' (Darwin, 1891, p.163)[7]). Darwin can afford to mock the Patagonians a little more than Cooper his Indians because they represent no peril to him. Natty and his companions, however, are in the position of Matthews – at the mercy of creatures who have to 'show by signs' even so basic a concept as murder.

As with Sarmiento's list of customs common to Cooper's Indians and the gaucho, I do not mean to imply that this was a conscious intention on Darwin's part – or even one that he would have recognized in his own work. The point is rather that the hierarchies of characterization he creates in his Beagle narrative - most of which stem from an attitude of superiority; the god-like contempt of a creator for his work – communicate in terms of already accepted conventions to his readers. It is they therefore, as much as Darwin, who seize upon such satisfactory systems of ranking to explain and assimilate another part of the earth's surface. A region, what is more, so alien – so permanently novel – that it retains the title of the New World more than 300 years after its discovery. If Darwin is a Romancer, it is unconsciously – but this is not to say that his work cannot communicate to others in the language of Romance.

[Frederic Edwin Church: The Andes of Ecuador (1855)]

•

(b) The Cordillera

When we reached the crest & looked backwards, a glorious view was presented, The atmosphere so resplendently clear, the sky an intense blue, the profound valleys, the wild broken forms, the heaps of ruins piled up during the lapse of ages, the bright colored rocks, contrasted with the quiet mountains of Snow, together produced a scene I never could have imagined. Neither plant or bird, excepting a few condors wheeling around the higher pinnacles, distracted the attention from the inanimate mass. – I felt glad I was by myself, it was like watching a thunderstorm, or hearing in the full Orchestra a Chorus of the Messiah. (Keynes, 1988, p.309)

It seems that with this extract we come full circle in our discussion of Darwin. His reaction to the wildness of the Mountains is as sure a manifestation of Romantic 'sensibility' (in Jane Austen's sense) as any in Wordsworth. And Wordsworth would no doubt have appreciated his attempt to define what he saw in terms of the contrasting elements that composed it: 'bright colored rocks' against 'mountains of Snow, together produced .. .' something that excelled his own 'fancy', or imagination.

Once again, he is following Humboldt's example – but this time with a subtle difference. Humboldt, a good Enlightenment man, reacts with more horror than wonder to the heights:

Our short stay at that extreme altitude was very dismal; mist (brume) enveloped us and only now and again revealed the terrible chasms which surrounded us; no living thing was to be seen and tiny mosses were the only organic things which reminded us that we were still on an inhabited planet. (Meyer-Abich & Hentschel, 1969, p.145)

Darwin at first dutifully follows suit: 'In the deep ravines the death-like scene of desolation exceeds all description. It was blowing a gale of wind, but not a breath stirred the leaves of the highest trees; everything was dripping with water; even the very Fungi could not flourish' – but soon a sense of Romantic exaltation overtakes him:

Here was a true Tierra del Fuego view; irregular chains of hills, mottled with patches of snow; deep yellowish-green valleys, & arms of the sea running in all directions; the atmosphere was not however clear, & indeed the strong wind was so piercingly cold, that it would prevent much enjoyment under any circumstances. (Keynes, 1988, p.219)

Too cold, certainly – and the air not sufficiently clear – but one feels an exuberance in that 'a true Tierra del Fuego view' which is lacking in Humboldt's remarks. It is not so much that Darwin is always enthusiatic. about what he sees, as that he seems to be in a state of continual awe at it:

Everthing in this southern continent has been effected on a grand scale (Darwin, 1891, p.124).

An awe analogous, perhaps, with that with which he contemplated 'that mystery of mysteries', the origin of species on this earth (Darwin, 1911, p.1).

To express this feeling, he has recourse to various techniques. The most obvious of these, as we have already seen, is making reference to works of art. We have heard him compare the sight of a mountain range with 'hearing in the full Orchestra a Chorus of the Messiah.' Likewise, in. one of his evocations of the Patagonian plain, he quotes from Shelley's 'Mont Blanc':

There was not a tree, and excepting the guanaco ... scarcely an animal or a bird. All was stillness and desolation. Yet in passing over these scenes, without one bright object near, an ill-defined but strong sense of pleasure is vividly excited. One asked how many ages the plain had thus lasted, and how many more it was doomed thus to continue.

None can reply – all seems eternal now.
The wilderness has a mysterious tongue,
Which teaches awful doubt. (Darwin, 1891, p.122)

The poetry seems here for sensuous impact rather than sense, which leads one to see much of the rest of the passage, too, as an attempt to re-create the sensation of 'visionary dreariness' familiar to us from Wordsworth's Prelude.

Nor is this technique employed merely for the highs, the mountain slopes, of Darwin's experience. He says of one landscape: 'The entangled mass of the thriving and the fallen reminded me of the forests within the tropics – yet there was a difference: for in these still solitudes, Death, instead of Life, seemed the predominant spirit' (Darwin, 1891, p.152).[8] 'Death' and 'Life' are poetic, almost allegorical personifications hardly to be expected in a sober traveller's account. Darwin, the Romantic writer, is however as fascinated with darkness as with light – as in his comparison of the gauchos at camp with a 'Salvator Rosa scene'; or the Latin tag which follows the scene of the Indian's feast, 'besmeared with filth and gore'. The Patagonians, too, are like Devils in 'Der Freischutz'. If one were to characterize the entire view of South America presented by him, one could do no better than his remark:

The theatre is worthy of the scenes acted on it. (Darwin, 1891, p.136)

An appropriately artificial metaphor to sum up this aspect of his work.

Darwin's voyage, then, represents a progression: a progression from imagination to reality – and from reality, through various layers of textuality, to Art – but also a narrative progression from the forests of Brazil, through the embattled plains of Argentina, to the heights of the Andes. The first of these stages is marked by an extreme dependence on precedent – both textual (in the form of Humboldt's writings), and personal (sticking close to the ship, and not undertaking many expeditions inland). The genre here is Naturalist's Diary pure and simple – with each entry blending narrative, generalization, and Scientific detail: the three categories exemplified by Humboldt's Personal Narrative.

In Argentina, Darwin became more independent. Circumstances allowed him to roam more widely, but it was he who acted upon the opportunity. His view of men and their foibles becomes more Olympian – the human categories of South America become a sort of cross-section of characters from Romance: Savages, foolish Aristocrats, Heroes, and ignoble Primitives.

In Chile his genre mutates again. Alone, now, he contemplates the universe and attempts to echo its effect on him by the loftiness of his aspirations ('to add a few facts to the great mass of facts in natural science'). Just as Wordsworth saw in Newton a kindred spirit, 'Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone', so Darwin finds in Shelley and Handel the appropriate models for his state of mind.

The journey, of course, continued – out across the Pacific: to the Galapagos Islands (most commonly associated with his name); to Tahiti; New Zealand; New South Wales; and finally home – but the main body of the epic is set in South America, and it is in the attempt to re-create South America that he ranged across the myriad styles that together make an epic: from the homely, the anecdotal – to the heroic and warlike – to the sublimity of the elemental forces of nature. If the Voyage of the Beagle is, on the one hand, a Romance: it is also a primary epic - one, like Homer, that accretes over time. For secondary, self-conscious epic, one must turn to Moby Dick (1851), The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897), and Arthur Gordon Pym.

In the next chapter, too, we shall be examining such questions of narrative coherence, and the shaping of experience associated with the allegedly 'objective' genres of Historiography and Scientific Naturalism. Only after that will it be possible for us to consider in their full ramifications the overtly fictional accounts of 'South America' (Hudson, Conrad, Masefield), which are, after all, the principal concern of this study.

[Patagonia]

1. This was the translation used by Darwin, and the one which he took with him on the Beagle [Information from Keynes (1988, p.24)].
2. Indeed Darwin himself remarks: 'About this time [1837-39] I took much delight in Wordsworth and Coleridge's poetry, and can boast that I read the Excursion twice through (Darwin & Huxley, 1974, p.49).
3. I shall record all significant departures from the first edition text in footnotes. Here, for example, aside from a few accidentals, the substantive changes are from 'has been wandering by himself' (1839), to 'has wandered by himself' (1845) in the second sentence; the inversion of 'he ever can hope again to experience' (1839), to 'he can ever hope to experience again' (1845) in the sixth sentence; and the addition of 'that' (1845) to 'it is to the rain we must attribute' (1839) in the ninth. The only major change is between: 'Among the multitude of striking objects. the general luxuriance of the vegetation bears away the victory. The elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage, all tend to this end.' (1839), which has become the single sentence: 'The elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage, but above all the general luxuriance of the vegetation, filled me with admiration.' (1845) – (Information from the - unfortunately slightly abridged - version of the first edition text reprinted by Janet Browne and Michael Neve (Harmondsworth, 1989, p.50).
4. 'On the other hand, there is much blood shed, and many robberies committed.' (1839) has been reversed to 'On the other hand, many robberies are committed, and there is much blood shed' (1845) – (Browne & Neve, 1989, pp.143-44).
5. Information from Ruth Tomalin (1984, p.91).
6. The phrase 'the male slaves' (1845) has replaced 'the men' (1839) in the second sentence. In the fourth, 'the person' (1839) has become 'the owner' (1845) - (Browne & Neve, 1989, pp.62-63).
7. This whole passage was added in the 1845 edition. 1839 has merely, 'Captain FitzRoy has given an account of all the interesting events which there happened.' – (Browne & Neve, 1989, p.182).
8. It is interesting to note that in the Diary entry corresponding to this, 'death instead of life' is written without this distinctive capitalization – evidence of a conscious intention on Darwin's part in accentuating them in both editions of the Journal (Keynes, 1988, p.126).

[The Voyage of the Beagle]

Works Cited:

Adams, Percy G. Travelers and Travel Liars: 1660-1800. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962.

Barlow, Nora, ed. Charles Darwin and the Voyage of the Beagle. London, 1945.

Browne, Janet & Michael Neve, ed. Voyage of the Beagle: Charles Darwin's Journal of Researches. 1839. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.

Burkhardt, Frederick & Sydney Smith, ed. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume I: 1821-1836. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans. Ed. James A. Sappenfield. Introduction by Richard Slotkin. Penguin Classics. New York: Penguin, 1987.

Darwin, Charles. Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H. M. S. 'Beagle' Round the World. 2nd ed. Sir John Lubbock's Hundred Books, 2. London, 1891.

Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. 6th ed. London, 1911.

Darwin, Charles, & Thomas Henry Huxley. Autobiographies. Ed. Gavin de Beer. London, 1974.

Hudson, W. H. The Naturalist in La Plata. London, 1912.

Humboldt, Alexander von. Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent During the Years 1799-1804, by Alexander de Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland. Trans. Helen Maria Williams. 7 vols. London, 1814-29.

Keynes, Richard Darwin, ed. Charles Darwin's Beagle Diary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes tropiques. Paris: Terre Humaine, 1982.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. Trans. John & Doreen Weightman. Harmondsworth. 1984.

Meyer-Abich, Adolf, & Cedric Hentschel. Alexander von Humboldt: 1769/1969. Bonn & Bad Godesberg, 1969.

Rogers, Pat. 'Monument to the Multitudinous'. TLS, 4444 (3 June 1988): 603-4.

Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. Facundo: Civilización y Barbarie - Vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga. Colección Hispanica. New York, 1981.

Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days at the Tyrants: or, Civilization and Barbarism. Trans. Mrs. Horace Mann. New York, 1961.

Tomalin, Ruth. W. H. Hudson: A Biography. Oxford, 1984.

Wordsworth, William. The Complete Poetical Works. Ed. John Morley. London, 1924.

[R. B. Cunninghame Graham: A Brazilian Mystic (1920)]

Chapter 3:

2009-04-25T09:27:00.032+12:00

[Diego Rivera: Day of the Dead (1924)]

Graham and the Historians

Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (1852-1936)
[Sir John Lavery, 1893]

I

Antonio Conselheiro

History never repeats itself. The historians repeat each other. There is a wide difference.
– Oscar Wilde (Ellmann, 1987, p.102)

El hombre era alto y tan flaco que parecía siempre de perfil. Su piel era oscura, sus huesos prominentes y sus ojos ardían con fuego perpetuo. Calzaba sandalias de pastor y la tunica morada que le caía sobre el cuerpo recordaba el hábito de esos misioneros que, de cuando en cuando, visitaban los pueblos del sertón bautizando muchedumbres de niños y casando a las parejas amancebadas. Era imposible saber su edad, su procedencia, su historia, pero algo había en su facha tranquila, en sus costumbres frugales, en su imperturbable seriedad, aun antes de que diera consejos, atraía a las gentes. (Vargas Llosa, 1981, p.15)

[‘The man was tall and so thin he seemed to be always in profile. He was dark-skinned and raw-boned, and his eyes burned with perpetual fire. He wore shepherd’s sandals and the dark purple tunic draped over his body called to mind the cassocks of those missionaries who every so often visited the villages of the backlands, baptizing hordes of children and marrying men and women who were cohabiting. It was impossible to learn what his age, his background, his life story were, but there was something about his quiet manner, his frugal habits, his imperturbable gravity that attracted people even before he offered counsel.’ (Vargas Llosa, 1984, p.3)]

‘The man’ is Antonio Vicente Mendes Maciel – better known as Antonio Conselheiro (Anthony the Counsellor) – and the ‘backlands’ region in question is the Sertão in the arid North-east of Brazil. Compare, however, with this rather sympathetic description with the following passage from R. B. Cunninghame Graham’s biography of the same person A Brazilian Mystic (1920):

he was an unconscious Montanist, or perhaps a Carpocratian, preserved miraculously, just as a mammoth is occasionally found preserved in ice, in the Siberian wilds. Nature, it would appear, is indestructible, preserving prehistoric forms and follies intact for us to wonder at, to imitate and copy, and to perpetuate, so that no form of man’s ineptitude shall ever perish, or be rendered unavailable for fools to promulgate. (Cunninghame Graham, 1920, p.84)

He was, in other words, a mystic – with beliefs like some of the ‘Gnostic sects in Asia Minor in the first and second centuries’ (Cunninghame Graham, 1920, p.3). Sufficient cause therefore, apparently, for an eruption of Voltairean scorn on Graham’s part.

As if this were not enough, let us look at yet another reading of him – this time from Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões (1902), the standard account:

A species of great man gone wrong, Antonio Conselheiro in his sorrowing mysticism brought together all those errors and superstitions which go to form the coefficient of reduction of our nationality. (da Cunha, 1944, p.140)

Which, then, are we to accept? Antonio Conselheiro as the itinerant preacher whose ‘quiet manner ... attracted people even before he offered counsel’; as a mammoth frozen in ice, whose mere existence proves the indestructibility of every ‘form of man’s ineptitude’; or as a kind of quintessence of all the bad features of Brazilian nationality? From the point of view of this study, it will probably be found more profitable to leave aside the question of disinterested historical validity, and ask ourselves rather what we can learn about these three authors from the form of their remarks.

In her article ‘Santos and Cangaçeiros: Inscription without Discourse in Os Sertões and La guerra del fin del mundo’, Sara Castro-Klarén notes:

For the first time this master storyteller [Mario Vargas Llosa] is attempting to get a direct grip on the history of Latin America, and he finds that in order to write historical novels one must have a theory of history. (Castro-Klarén, 1986, p.382)

Her own argument hinges on the failure of either Euclides da Cunha or Vargas Llosa (let alone Cunninghame Graham, whom she mentions only in passing) to succeed in providing a field of discourse for the ‘mystic’ at the heart of the Canudos campaign, Antonio Conselheiro. In order to make sense of these and subsequent remarks, however, it will be necessary to provide some summary of the conflict in question – since even the most resolute historicizer is to some extent bound by the shape of the events he reports.

Antonio Conselheiro first began to attract attention in the late 1870s, when a traveller in the Sertão reported his influence thus:

Accompanied by a couple of women followers, he lives by reciting beads and litanies, by preaching, and by giving counsel to the multitudes that come to hear him when the local Church authorities permit it. Appealing to their religious sentiments, he draws them after him in throngs and moves them at his will. He gives evidence of being an intelligent man, but an uncultivated one. (da Cunha, 1944, p.130)

All that was known of him then was that he was the offspring of a family, the Maciels, which had been devastated by one of the Corsican-style vendettas endemic to the region; and that he had spent ten years in the wilderness after having the course of his life as a book-keeper disrupted by his wife’s adulteries (the immediate casue of his flight was the attack he made on one of her seducer’s cousins). The staples of backlands life – revenge and betrayal – thus surrounded his life ‘in the world’. Ever since his return, however, he had done nothing but good – travelling through the backlands (at first alone but later with a group of followers), repairing churches and cemeteries, and giving ‘counsels’ to the poor.

In 1893, in a small town called (rather appropriately) Bom Conselho, Antonio Conselheiro was shown some notices recently posted by municipal officials throughout the region. These notices concerned the collection of taxes, and the organisation of a census for this purpose. Giving voice to the suspicions of those who surrounded him, he at once declared that this was a plot on the part of the forces of the Republic (which had succeeded the Empire in 1889) to reintroduce slavery (abolished by Emperor Dom Pedro II in 1888) and begin the persecution of true believers throughout Brazil. He tore the notices down. ‘Then,’ (as Euclides da Cunha puts it) ‘realising the gravity of his offense, he left town, taking the Monte Santo Road, to the north’ (1944, p.142).

What da Cunha refers to as his ‘hegira’ (1944, p.142) came to an end when he reached the small settlement of Canudos and established there his own Civitas Dei, the ‘mud-walled Troy of the jagunços’ (1944, p.143).[1] The Government in the South were too concerned with squashing dissension at home to notice events in the traditionally neglected North-east, so Canudos was quite a thriving town when it next attracted attention – in 1896, when the chief magistrate of the Joazeiro district telegraphed the Governor of Bahía, asking for protection against the jagunços, who were threatening to take revenge on a local merchant who had cheated them.

There were, all in all, four military expeditions against Canudos. The first consisted of 100 troops, and was routed before it even reached the town. The second was larger, 560 men, but it too was defeated in a series of battles in January 1897. The third comprised an entire regiment, under the command of the war hero Moreira Cesar, but he and most of his force were killed in a frontal assault on Canudos in March. The fourth and final expedition was in two columns, each of 2,000 men – nevertheless, it took them from June until September, with periodic heavy reinforcements, to capture the town. Da Cunha again summarises:

Canudos did not surrender. The only case of its kind in history, it held out to the last man. Conquered inch by inch, in the literal meaning of the words, it fell on October 5, toward dusk – when its last defenders fell, dying, every man of them. There were only four of them left: an old man, two other full-grown men, and a child, facing a furiously raging army of five thousand soldiers. (da Cunha, 1944, p. 475)

It is this defence which Samuel Putnam, in an interesting aside to his 1944 translation, compared to the ‘contemporary epic of Stalingrad’ (1944, p.v).

Antonio Conselheiro was already dead. He had collapsed and died of dysentery on September the 22nd. The victorious forces of the Republic tortured his closest disciple, ‘Pious Anthony’ (who had been captured a few days before) until he showed them the site of the grave. The corpse was first disinterred, then photographed, and finally decapitated so that it could be examined for signs of ‘crime and madness’ (da Cunha, 1944, p.476) by the phrenologists in the capital. Antonio Beatinho, like all the other male prisoners, had his throat slit on the spot.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss three different ‘readings’ of the man, Antonio Conselheiro, and the war of which he was the effective cause. We have already seen something of the inevitable change of focus required simply by the historical circumstances of our three authors – not to mention their ‘theories of history’. All of them see Antonio Conselheiro as in some way exemplary – but of different things. For the Brazilian eye-witness da Cunha, he exemplifies the degeneracy and barbarism of his ‘uncivilised’ contemporaries (though he combines this with a certain admiration, not unlike Sarmiento’s attitude towards the gauchos). For Mario Vargas Llosa, he represents the challenge to reconstitute ‘La vision de los vencidos [que] es totalmente desconocida, en primer lugar porque no hubo entre ellos ningún testigo que llegase a escribirla’ [The vision of the conquered which goes entirely unrecognised, in the first place because there were no witnesses among them who were able to write it down], but also ‘porque lo que sobre todo se conoce objetivamente es la historia official’ [because all we tend to know for certain is the official version].[2] As for Cunninghame Graham, his position as an outsider ought to qualify him to see the event in wider terms – but in fact, paradoxically (as we shall see), it is the European who is most resolutely ‘South American’ in his interpretation.

This part of our study ought, therefore, to be a test-case for both the chronological and generic distinctions introduced in the last two chapters, On the one hand we have a ‘synchronic section’ focused on Cunninghame Graham’s book, published in 1920, which takes Euclides da Cunha’s account (1901) and Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel (1981) as the two poles of its ‘strategic location’.Its ‘strategic formation’ (‘how each work obeys the constraints of its particular [generic] function’, to quote from Chapter Two above), must consequently be defined before we can examine the particualr version of ‘South America’ which it provides.

I shall therefore close this first, expository section with another quotation from Cunninghame Graham which, when compared with da Cunha’s description, demonstrates the diverse ways in which one can interpret even so simple an event as the finding of a body:

His face was calm, his body almost mere skin and bones, worn out with fasting and with the death of his illusions, but his soul unconquerable.

... Some of the faithful had placed some withered flowers upon his breast. His body lay upon a ragged piece of matting, and both his eyes were full of sand. (Cunninghame Graham, 1920, pp. 233 & 238)

[Antonio Conselheiro]

II

The Historians

(a) Euclides da Cunha

Euclides da Cunha, the author of the first comprehensive account of the Canudos campaign, himself accompanied the fourth expedition as a reporter for the Estado de São Paulo. He was thirty years old at the time, and had already tried several careers – the army, journalism, and civil engineering – all of which contributed to the form of Os Sertões, which took him five years to write. As Putnam puts it:

From 1898 to 1902 he was engaged, simultaneously, in building a bridge and in writing his masterpiece, and the two were completed at one and the same time. Directing the work of construction by day, at night he labored on the curious, rough-hewn architecture of his prose. (da Cunha, 1944, p.xvii)

The nature of the book is perhaps best conveyed by saying that it is a combination of genres. As a working journalist, da Cunha was of course interested in giving his readers an action-packed but 'factual’[3] account of the events of the campaign – and this he provides in the eight chapters of Part II: 'The Rebellion'.

As a scientist (he had studied at both a Polytechnic and a Liberal Arts College, and was a trained engineer), he was interested in accounting for the causes of this rebellion from the ground (literally) up. In Part I of his book: 'The Backlands', he devotes 50 pages to an account of the geology, soil types, climate. and vegetation of the Sertão, and then goes on to anatomize its inhabitants in a further 120 pages. Beginning with general reflections on the race 'problem' (i.e. miscegenation) in Brazil. he goes on to describe the particular mixtures of races to be found in the Backlands (Negro and Indian producing the cafuso; Negro and White producing the mulatto; and Indian and White producing the curiboca, or mameluco – also used as a generic term for all people of mixed blood (da Cunha, 1944, p.52)). This leads him to speculate on the 'reflection of environment in history’ (da Cunha, 1944, p.62) – with reference to the first settlers in the area, the Portuguese, then the Jesuits, the Mulattoes, and finally their descendants, the jagunços. We are given an epitome of the culture of the Sertanejo, or Backlander – his prowess on horseback (even more impressive. because of the rougher conditions of the bush-clad Sertão, than that of Sarmiento's gauchos to the South), his ability as an improviser and bard, his sufferings in times of drought, and finally his religious extremism. Da Cunha concludes as follows:

The man of the backlands, as may be seen from the sketch we have given of him, more than any other, stands in a functional relation to the earth. He is a variable, dependent on the play of the elements. Out of a consciousness of his own weakness in warding off those elements is born the strong and constant impulse to fall back upon the miraculous, representing the inferior mental state of the backward individual who feels himself the ward of divinity. (da Cunha, 1944, p.112)

This quotation should be enough to give some flavour of da Cunha's scientific reductionism. The 'impulse to fall back on the miraculous' naturally must come from an 'inferior mental state' – how else is it to be accounted for in a world which is rapidly succumbing to the analytical force of nineteenth century Determinism? Da Cunha's racial theories, too, are offensive to a post-colonial reader (though they actually represent a softening of the extreme positions of savants such as Lombroso or Gumplowicz (da Cunha, 1944, pp.84-88)).

Other genres which intluenced da Cunha include the novel (the book has been described as 'a great document, which, though not a novel, reads like fiction' (da Cunha, 1944, p.v) – a somewhat disingenuous tribute), an aspect discernible in passages such as the Dostoyevskian analysis of the character of Colonel Moreira Cesar in the fifth chapter:

All the strange things that he had done in the course of his incoherent life were now seen to be warning symptoms, which could point to but one unmistakable diagnosis. (da Cunha, 1944, p.233)[4]

Da Cunha had been a lyric poet in his youth, and this undoubtedly helped him in shaping the 'epic' of Os Sertões. As Samuel Putnam remarks, the experience of reading da Cunha 'is comparable in quality to that of the European of the last century listening for the first time to Walt Whitman's "barbaric yawp.''' The comparison', he goes on to say, 'is a particularly valid one on the side of form and style’ (da Cunha, 1944, p.viii). As a former lieutenant in the army, he also feels himself to be an authority on strategy and tactics, and does not hesitate to castigate the shortcomings of the senior officers who commanded the various expeditions.

Finally, da Cunha was a philosopher of some distinction, and in fact lectured on logic at the Pedro II Institute in the last year of his life (1909). This aspect can be noted not only in his lofty view of history and causality – the rather Schopenhauer-like tone of his caustic remarks about the 'vision' of the overall commander of the expedition, Marshall Bittencourt, who talked 'as if this world were one huge barracks and History merely a variation on a sergeant's records’ (da Cunha, 1944, p.395); but also in his ability to distance himself from the passions of the moment and see things from the perspective of his opponents:

what had they [the soldiers] achieved by ten months of fighting and one hundred days of incessant cannonading; of what profit to them those heaps of ruins ... that clutter of broken images, fallen altars, shattered saints – and all this beneath a bright and tranquil sky which seemingly was quite unconcerned with it all, as they pursued their flaming ideal of absolutely extinguishing a form of religious belief that was deeply rooted and which brought consolation to their fellow-beings? (da Cunha, 1944, p.464)

Given this multiplicity of personae, it is scarcely surprising to find so much of a contrast here to his earlier remarks on the 'inferior mental state of the backward individual who feels himself the ward of divinity'. He himself made the admission (replying to one of his critics) that 'in this mortal leap – 616 minus 70 equals 546 pages – one might expect to meet with a few seeming discrepancies’ (da Cunha, 1944, p.481)[5]; but the fact of the matter is that these 'seeming discrepancies' in his work – his wildly divergent attitudes to the army and the jagunços depending on which 'character' (scientist, soldier, poet or journalist) he is speaking in – are part and parcel of the method of composition he has chosen to adopt. That this choice was a deliberate one can be deduced both from his own remarks,[6] and from the extraordinary care with which it is constructed – each section being told in the way which most closely echoes the events being recounted. There is a section of quoted diary at one point (pp.369-72), for instance, to give the impression of the 'alarums and excursions' which accompanied that whole period of the siege; and a lengthy passage (reminiscent of Crane's Red Badge of Courage (1895)) in the same chapter which chronicles the anabasis of the wounded soldiers from Canudos to Monte Santo.

Castro-Klarén has stated that:

Modernity in the nineteenth century in Latin America was synonymous with science. The ultimate model for the Latin American pensador and novelist was the scientist, and scientific (or pseudo-scientific) observation dominated the discourse of those subjects who [sic] pretended to knowledge. The arrogance of science, tempered after World War I, is transformed into the relativity of a human science and of this the favourite posture of the Latin American pensador becomes the anthropological stance. (Castro-Klarén, 1986, p.383)

Euclides da Cunha died too soon to experience World War I, but the Canudos campaign might be seen as an equally traumatic event in his life – even if not in those of his readers. His work, therefore, seems to be influenced equally by the 'scientific (or pseudo-scientific)' stance affected by nineteenth-century 'pensadors' and the 'anthropological' position characteristic of his successors. Seen as a 'novelistic' account, the narrative is too clogged with detail and intellectual excursuses. As a scientific treatise, it must be seen as flawed by the contradictions of tone and attitude which constitute much of its interest as a human document. If one were to seek one description that reconciles these eccentricities of form and content – and justifies da Cunha's quoting Taine's dictum about the honest narrator who wants to 'sentir en barbare, parmi les barbares, et, parmi les anciens, en ancien’ (1944, p.xxx) [feel like a barbarian among the barbarians, and an ancient among the ancients (my translation)] – one might do worse than an 'anthropological history’.[7]

[Euclides da Cunha (1866-1909)]

•

(b) R. B. Cunninghame Graham

A short introduction to the man is still, perhaps, required. In Chesterton’s famous remark about him, ‘Nothing could prevent Balfour being Prime Minister or MacDonald being a Prime Minister, but Cunninghame Graham achieved the adventure of being Cunninghame Graham’ (Tschiffely, 1937, p.189). Even now, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham is a figure who inspires either enthusiasm or exasperation – never apathy. To an admirer who described him as a poet and a gaucho, he replied, ‘more gaucho than poet’ (Walker, 1978, p.4), and this was an essential part of his legend. As George Bernard Shaw put it, in the preface to his play based on Graham’s Moroccan adventures, Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1900):

His tales of adventure have the true Cervantes touch of the man who has been there – so refreshingly different from the scenes imagined by bloody-minded clerks who escape from their servitude into literature ... He is, I understand, a Spanish hidalgo ... He is, I know, a Scottish laird. How he contrives to be the two things at the same time is no more intelligible to me than the fact that everything that has ever happened to him seems to have happened in Paraguay or Texas instead of in Spain or Scotland. (Watts & Davies, 1979, p.133)

At their best, his writings combine these two qualities of poet and man of action in a manner which contrives to illuminate both[8]; unfortunately, this is by no means all of the time. He himself confessed, in the preface to the last collection of his sketches: ‘But still I might have finished all those sentences; not broken off to moralize right in the middle of the tale; split less infinitives, and remembered those rules of grammar that I have disregarded, as freely as a democratic leader tramps on the rights of the poor taxables who put him into power’ (Tschiffely, 1936, p.xvi) (thus repeating the very fault for which he is apologizing). A certain rationale for the interplay between the two roles has been suggested by his biographers, Cedric Watts and Laurence Davies:

The point that should be made is this: Robert’s South American exploits [in the 1870s and 1880s] stocked his brain with remembered situations and remembered sensations for the rest of his life. The memories stay relatively constant; what changes is their significance ... what comes through is sometimes the absurdity, sometimes the savagery, sometimes the boredom and discomfort of events (1979, p.32).

Cunninghame Graham’s opinions – whether on politics (radical); imperialism (anti-); or literature (he championed both Hudson and Conrad before it was fashionable to do so) – are, in short, always worth taking seriously, but they are not consistent either internally or chronologically. To some extent this is because the essence of his philosophy was to be free and unpredictable[9] – but it had the unfortunate side-effect of allowing him to lapse into reactionary and even (occasionally) racist attitudes in his later writings.[10]

The later Graham depends more on literary stock-responses; often, where formerly his religious scepticism had been prominent, there is now a recurrent indulgence in religiose reverie (Watts & Davies, 1979, p.282).

The truth of this statement by Watts and Davies can be illustrated by a simple comparison of the two passages from A Brazilian Mystic already quoted in Section I above. In the first, a certain ‘Voltairean scorn’ is apparent (as I noted at the time). In the second, a kind of sentimental transformation has taken place – the brutal scene of decapitation and disfigurement from Os Sertões has been replaced by what Watts and Davies, in their discussion of the book, call ‘Graham’s gentler, more elegiac and plangent version’ (1979, p.278). To examine the consequences of these mutually contradictory views of the same set of events, it will be necessary to go deeper into the genesis of this, in their judgement ‘certainly the best of Graham’s historical biographies’ (1979, p.275).

Graham had, as was mentioned above, travelled extensively in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and the South-west of the United States, so it was quite natural that Theodore Roosevelt should write him the letter quoted in the preface to A Brazilian Mystic:

‘What you and Hudson have done for South America, many have done for our frontiersmen in Texas, Arizona, and New mexico. Others have written of the Mexican frontiersmen, and written well about them. No one, as far as I know,’ so he said, ‘has touched the subject of the frontiersmen of Brazil. Why don’t you do it? for you have been there, know them, and speak their lingo. The field is open to you.’ (Cunninghame Graham, 1920, p.vii).

Graham caps off this extract from the letter with an anecdote about his last visit to Brazil during the war, when he first found out about the story of Canudos, in order to justify choosing it as just such an illustration of the character of life in the backlands.

Cunninghame Graham’s declared intention as the historian of Antonio Conselheiro and Canudos – first, to interpret the character of the region to his own countrymen (hence his quoting the Trossachs ‘as an equivalent’ for Sertão, ‘for it is said to mean a broken land of hillocks’ (Barroso, 1924, p.6)); and, second, to include it in the generalized vendetta against human folly and self-deception (either the folly of ‘progress’, as in the sketch of that name, or the folly of fanaticism: the Counsellor and his followers) which he had been waging since he first entered politics as a radical M.P. in 1886 – is thus somewhat compromised from the first. Theodore Roosevelt was, after all, the very man who engineered the Panamanian ‘revolution’ of 1903, which brought about its independence from Colombia (and, incidentally, safeguarded American rights in the canal zone). As Joseph Conrad, then in the midst of planning Nostromo, wrote to Graham at the time, ‘à propos what do you think of the Yankee Conquistadores in Panama? Pretty, isn’t it?’ (Watts, 1969, p.149). Graham’s fiercely polemical stance (expressed in anti-imperialist sketches like ‘Niggers’ (1897)) had been somewhat softened by America’s intervention in the First World War – significantly, it was while buying horses for the British army in France that he first heard about Canudos – but one cannot help feeling that this confusion of stances has something to do with an ideological incoherence at the heart of the work itself.

Presumably the letter and the anecdote did indeed provide Graham’s motivation for undertaking the project, but they combine to give a false impression of the genesis of his book. Graham has compounded this by attempting throughout to imply that he is relying on a number of source books, rather than directly on Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões.[11] Again, this is probably true as far as it goes – and Graham did have genuine experience of the region to draw on – but a close comparison of the two texts reveals again and again his dependence on the earlier book not simply for the historical details mentioned, but even for apparently ‘spontaneous’ opinions about Antonio Conselheiro’s kinship with the first century Gnostics, and the racial implications of the conflict. Graham’s history re-orders the material into a biography, rather than a history of the campaign, but the main result of this is merely to force him to pad out his actual information with many more-or-less irrelevant descriptive passages.

This (deliberately veiled) dependence on da Cunha also has unfortunate consequences for the book’s ideological tone. If he had written it before the war – at the time of ‘Progress’ (1905), for example – one omight have expected him to be far less willing to the scientific fatalism propounded by Os Sertões. In this early work he expresses sympathy (or, at any rate, contempot for their adversaries) with the illiterate villagers of Tomochic, victims of a similar siege, from a ‘free-thinking’ but essentially humanist standpoint:

It seemed like insolence, in men without a uniform, without an officer who had gone through a military school, and ignorant of tactics as they were, to keep in check a force three times as numerous as their own, all duly uniformed, and officered by men who had commissions stamped and signed by the chief magistrate of Mexico.

… Shame, patriotism, duty, or what not spurred the general to declare that the town must be taken by assault. He might as well have waited until thirst and hunger did their work; but, not unnaturally, a solider thinks his first duty is to fight, and in this case a red flag fluttering at the top of a tall pine stung him to fury, for nothing moves a reasonable man so much as a new flag. (Walker, 1986, p.81)

In keeping with the ‘stock-responses’ already mentioned as a characteristic of his later writing, a certain amount of lip-service is paid to this attitude even in A Brazilian Mystic:

‘our Brazilian mothers,’ our ‘great and glorious land,’ and freedom, themes which with little variation re-occur in every speech in South America, brought forth the usual cheers … All this [‘reign of progress and peace’], of course, as is the case in all such speeches and on such occasions, was to be brought about by blood, for blood is the baptismal water by which peace is ensured. (Cunninghame Graham, 1920, p.157)

The onus of his sympathy has, however, ceased to be wholly with the beleaguered villagers, whom he describes as ‘misguided sectaries’, and as a ‘pack of wolves’ face to face with ‘a submarine, charged with torpedoes and with mines’ (Cunninghame Graham, 1920, pp.173 & 205).

One passage which illustrates very clearly the complicated processes at work in Cunninghame Graham’s writing at this time runs as follows:

In the days of Antonio Conselheiro, the challenge of the Semitico-Asiatic hordes had not been sounded, and the security of life and property, with European marriage, all seemed as firmly rooted as the foundations of the world. (Cunninghame Graham, 1920, 175)

What at the time of ‘Niggers’ – with its Swiftian explanation that ‘Niggers who have no cannons have no rights. Their land is ours, their cattle and their fields, their houses ours; their arms, their poor utensils, and everything they have; their women, too, are ours to use as concubines, to beat, exchange, to barter off for gunpowder or gin, ours to infect with syphilis, leave with child, outrage, torment, and make by contact with the vilest of our vile, more vile than beasts’ (Watts & Davies, 1979, p.163) – would have ben purely ironic, is still faintly ironic. The ‘Semitico-Asiatic hordes’ can no longer be taken simply as a bogey-man threatening the Established Order, as in ‘the days of Antonio Conselheiro’ – an age of innocence. Now, when Graham repeats Euclides da Cunha’s table of the various cross-breeds encountered in the Sertão, he is careful to specify that ‘The Cafuz, known in the Spanish republics as the Zambo [’the result of interbreeding between the negro and the Indian’] is the lowest of the three types’ (1920, pp.11-12), and concludes magisterially that the Sertanejo’s ‘tinge of negro blood ... may perchance have given him whatever qualities the African can claim’ (p.17).

To conclude, then, the mixture of roles and qualities which we employed to characterize da Cunha’s writing have their parallel in a certain duplicity at the heart of Graham’s project. His preface makes it clear that he wishes to provide an accurate account of the Backlands, based on his own experience and reading – but the experience is fifty years out of date, and the reading consists (for all intents and purposes) of one book, Os Sertões. What in da Cunha is the logical conclusion of certain Determinist theories pushed to their breaking point becomes even more questionable in Cunninghame Graham as a result of this undeclared dependence. One thus finds passages like the ones in ‘Progress’, quoted above, associated with others expressing the purest reaction. The only unifying factor is, in fact, fatalism – or rather, ‘the great book of human folly which so many take for fate’ (1920, p.191), in Cunninghame Graham’s own words.

A Brazilian Mystic, then, is another generic hybrid – lke Darwin’s Journal of Researches. Its ‘theory of history’ – the juxtaposition of events very far in the past (the Canudos campaign itself, as well as Graham’s own travels in the region twenty years before that) with an up-to-the-minute dramatised commentary – means that it adheres neither to the anthropological perspective of Os Sertões nor the fictional subversiveness of La guerra del fin del mundo. There is a certain vividness in Graham’s evocations of the Backlands life known by him in the past – this description of a tyical house, for example: “Two or three negro slaves and a dozen yellow dogs were certain to be lounging near the front door, or just outside the fence. To complete the Oriental air, you might have stayed a week within the house and never seen the women (Cunninghame Graham, 1920, p.51) – but his attempts to ‘novelise’ the conflict itself end up sounding forced, like Shaw’s ‘scenes imagined by bloody-minded clerks’. This, for example, as a description of the first all-out assault on Canudos:

It was the moment for a man of spirit to curse a little, to pray a little, to talk of honour and of home, of sweethearts and of wives; to strike some, half in anger, half playfully with the flat of his sword, to encourage falterers with a brave word, to curb the headstrong, and by example, bring back courage into their hearts and order to the ranks. (Cunninghame Graham, 1920, p.186)

‘If only I’d been there’ is an unfortunate subtext to glimpse in the history of such a campaign.

In short, then, the essence of Graham's literary method, as described by Watts and Davies above ('The memories stay relatively constant; what changes is their significance'), is severely compromised in this case by 1/ his dependence on an already strongly ideologized 'history' of the campaign; and 2/ his lack of any other relevant first-hand information. The fact that Graham's own 'histories' are by no means representative of the ideals of the form ('too dependent on documentary source-material ... to be popularizations, yet too selective and quirky to be scholarly studies (Watts & Davies, 1979, p.206)), does not, however, disqualify them for our purposes. On the contrary, isolating the version of 'South America' presented by a work such as A Brazilian Mystic is made more specific by its individuality of genre as well as treatment.

[Mario Vargas Llosa (1936- )]

•

(c) Mario Vargas Llosa

Rather than attempting to define the last of our authors – the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa – in the same way as the first two, I have decided to look at a single representative datum or piece of evidence mentioned in all three accounts, and to compare the diverse significances they elicit from it.

Euclides da Cunha states that Antonio Conselheiro 'predicted the following misfortunes for various successive years':

In 1896 a thousand flocks shall run from the seacoast to the backlands; and then the backlands will turn into seacoast and the seacoast into backlands.

In 1897 there will be much pasturage and few trails, and one shepherd and one flock only.

In 1898 there will be many hats and few heads.

In 1899 the waters shall turn to blood, and the planet shall appear in the east with the sun's ray, the bough shall find itself on the earth, and the earth some place shall find itself in heaven.

There shall be a great rain of stars, and that will be the end of the world. In 1900 the lights shall be put out. God says in the Gospel: I have a flock which is out of this sheepfold, and the flock .must be united that there may be one shepherd and one flock only! (da Cunha, 1944, p.135)

This prophecy, striking enough in itself, was found (according to da Cunha) 'written down in numerous small notebooks ... in Canudos'. He goes on to compare it with the 'extravagant millenarianism' of the followers of Montanus and to supplement it with various 'mad ravings … of the racial messiah':

when nation falls out with nation, Brazil with Brazil, England with England, Prussia with Prussia, then shall Dom Sebastião with all his army arise from the waves of the sea. (da Cunha, 1944, p.136)[12]

Let us see, by contrast, what Cunninghame Graham makes of the prophecy, For a start, he edits it quite severely:

'In 1896,' he said, 'a multitude shall come up from the shore to the Sertão. The Sertão shall then become a sea-beach and the shore become Sertão,. In 1898 there shall be many hats and a great scarcity of heads. In 1899 the waters shall be all changed to blood and a planet shall appear in the East ... a great fall of stars shall bring about the destruction of the world. In 1900 all lights shall be extinguished. God says in his Holy Gospel "I will have but one field and one shepherd ... for I have but a single flock."’ (Cunninghame Graham, 1920, pp.85-86) [all ellipses in the original]

Minor differences of wording between the two quotations can be explained by the fact that Graham is following the Portuguese original – thus his 'Sertão' instead of 'backlands' – but the sense remains much the same. Samuel Putnam, the translator, comments in a footnote that 'it is obvious that the preacher is at times inspired by the mere sound of words (echolalia)’ (da Cunha, 1944, p.135) – and gives an example from the Portuguese to confirm this ('muito pasto e pouco rasto'). It is presumably this that Graham is trying to echo with the consonances and assonances of 'The Sertão shall then become a sea-beach and the shore become Sertão'. The pseudo-Biblical resonance of 'there shall be many hats and a great scarcity of heads' is also rather more powerful than Putnam's 'there will be many hats and few heads'.

The main points to be made about Graham's use of this quotation are, then: 1/ its immediate context; and 2/ the artful way in which it has been compressed from da Cunha's original. Let us take the second of these first. He has, of course, left out a good deal of his prototype – the 'shepherd' and his flocks have become simply 'a multitude', and the entry for 1897 has been suppressed altogether (thus taking away a little of the Psalm-like parallelism of the original). The way it is printed, however – in a single paragraph instead of as a series of entries from an almanac – makes it seem more consciously literary. The original is, one must admit, rather confused and self-contradictory (the lights go out after the world has been destroyed), leading one to suppose that it is supposed to be read as a few ramblings extracted from a larger body of doctrine. Graham's version makes the contradictions seem intentional. Light, after all, is the first thing to be created in Genesis; why should it not be the last to be destroyed? Whether or not he is bringing out some feature that da Cunha has suppressed is difficult to ascertain –
but one has to admit that the overall effect of their versions is different.

As far as the context is concerned, it is apparent that Graham regards Antonio Conselheiro as more interesting in his own right than da Cunha does. In Os Sertões, the prophecy comes as the highlight of the section entitled 'Antonio Conselheiro, Striking Example of Atavism' – that is, as part of a case-study, intended to illustrate larger points about the 'degeneration' of the races in the backlands. Only enough detail is provided to allow us to assess the 'representativeness' of this example of religious fervour gone wrong. In A Brazilian Mystic, on the other hand, the very structure of Graham's book – a biography of Antonio Conselheiro – makes the 'mystic' into a more considerable figure. He is, to be sure, representative of various regressive types of mysticism (as in the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter), but that does not prevent him from being an interesting man. The prophecy, therefore, is intended to have a literary effect as a composition in Graham – whereas in da Cunha it is seen simply as proof of the 'absurd conceptions preached by this apostle’ (da Cunha, 1944, p.135).

Graham, despite himself, cannot help admiring the jagunços:

When all is said, it is impossible not to sympathise to some extent with the misguided sectaries, for all they wanted was to live the life they had been accustomed to, and sing their litanies. (Cunninghame Graham, 1920, p.173)

Similar statements of regret at the pointlessness of the slaughter in da Cunha have a significantly different effect, as his primary concern is to present the campaign as a scientific object lesson. It may be for this reason that Graham allows himself to 'tidy up' the prophecy. He has no interest in emphasizing the deluded nature of Antonio Conselheiro's thought processes (though he does follow da Cunha's diagnosis); his concern being rather to present us with a striking piece of free verse – to please as well as instruct.

Finally, let us look at yet another employment of this prophecy, in Vargas Llosa's La guerra del fin del mundo:

Alguna vez alguien – pero rara vez porque su seriedad, su voz cavernosa o su sabiduría los intimidaba – lo interrumpía para despejar una duda. ¿Terminaría el siglo? ¿Llegaría el mundo a 1900? Él contestaba sin mirar, con una seguridad tranquila y, a menudo, con enigmas. En 1900 se apagarían las luces y lloverían estrellas. Pero, antes, ocurrirían hechos extraordinarios … En 1896 un millar de rebaños correrían de la playa hacia el sertón y el mar se volvería sertón y el sertón mar. En 1897 el desierto se cubriría de pasto, pastores y rebaños se mezclarían y a partir de entonces habría un solo rebaño y un solo pastor. En 1898 aumentarían los sombreros y disminuirían las cabezas y en 1899 los rios se tornarían rojos y un planeta nuevo cruzaría el espacio. (Vargas Llosa, 1981, p. 17)

['Occasionally someone interrupted him – though this occurred rarely, since his gravity, his cavernous voice, or his wisdom intimidated them – in order to dispel a doubt. Was the world about to end? Would it last till 1900? He would answer immediately, with no need to reflect, with quiet assurance. and very often with enigmatic prophecies. In 1900 the sources of light would be extinguished and stars would rain down. But, before that, extraordinary things would happen … In 1896 countless flocks would flee inland from the seacoast and the sea would turn into the backlands and the backlands turn into the sea. In 1897 the desert would be covered with grass, shepherds and flocks would intermingle, and from that date on there would be but a single flock and a single shepherd. In 1898 hats would increase in size and heads grow smaller, and in 1899 the rivers would turn red and a new planet would circle through space.’ (Vargas Llosa, 1984, p.5)]

If Graham compressed and edited the prophecy he read in da Cunha for rhetorical effect, in order to exploit its biblical resonances, Mario Vargas LIosa has preserved its oddities and merely tidied a few loose ends. The prophecy for 1897, for example (omitted altogether in Graham) has here acquired the middle stage 'pastores y rebaños se mezclarían' [shepherds and flocks would intermingle] in order to get from da Cunha's 'much pasturage and few trails' to his 'one shepherd and one flock only'. Vargas LIosa has, it is true, left off the rather incoherent ending of the prophecy for 1899 (which one feels da Cunha sees as sure proof of 'degeneracy'): 'the bough shall find itself on the earth, and the earth some place shall find itself in heaven'. Even here, however, he cannot be faulted for faithfulness, as the fact that he has broken the prophecy up into two parts – with the predictions for 1900 off by themselves – means that this passage would have come in between the two. It could therefore be described as 'unreported' rather than simply left out.

There are other cunning tricks of tone in this passage which one would like to look at in detail, but I shall confine myself here to specifying two. The first is the way in which the passage is intercut with views of the reverence and awe displayed by 'the Counselor's' audience: 'su seriedad, su voz cavernosa o su sabiduría los intimidaba' [his gravity, his cavernous voice, or his wisdom intimidated them]. Or (the sentence I left out in quoting the passage):

Un silencio seguía a su voz, en el que se oía crepitar las fogatas y el bordoneo de los insectos que les llamas devoraban, mientras los lugareños, conteniendo la respiración, esforzaban de antemano la memoria para recordar el futuro. (Vargas Llosa, 1981, p.17)

['A silence ensued after he had spoken, in which the crackling of open fires could be heard, and the buzzing of insects that the flames devoured, as the villagers, holding their breath, strained their memories before the fact in order to be certain to remember the future.' (Vargas Llosa, 1981, p.5)]

By an adroit use of third person narration, Vargas Llosa has put us here in the position of the listening villagers – as far beneath, and as puzzled by this enigmatic figure as they are. Da Cunha and Graham have to patronize Antonio Conselheiro in order to speak of him favourably, but here we are reminded that a more appropriate stance for us would be to look up, 'conteniendo la respiración'. Vargas Llosa does this, what is more, without tempering the tone of the prophet's message. True, he contextualizes it – making it a response to someone's question, thus making the Counselor seem a more impressive intellectual presence – but this is surely much less of a liberty to take than some of Graham's stylistic devices – such as the lengthy 'reconstruction' of a typical pilgrim's journey to Canudos, or his account of what would be 'certain' to be found in a representative backlands house (Cunninghame Graham, 1920, pp.216-18 & 50-51).

The second point I should like to make about this passage is based on a line in Helen Lane's English translation, from which I have quoted in my footnotes. Vargas Llosa, following da Cunha's 'In 1898 there will be many hats and few heads', writes 'En 1898 aumentarían los sombreros y disminuirían las cabezas', Lane translates this as 'hats would increase in size and heads grow smaller'. Obviously this is a misunderstanding of the phrase, which means that a lot of people would have lost their heads (= lives) by 1898 (rather an accurate prediction, in retrospect). The significant thing about it, though, is that the Spanish could be understood either way. It is only because we have other textual analogues that it can be stated authoritatively that Lane's version is incorrect. What is more, the fact that Lane could translate it in this way implies that this prophecy could be taken (in Vargas Llosa's version) as being at least partly nonsensical – there is, after all, no immediate significance to the statement that hats will get bigger and heads smaller. So, in a sense, Vargas Llosa has succeeded in literally preserving the 'enigmatic’ [Lanes’s translation of ‘con enigmas’] quality of the original statements – both as recorded in da Cunha, and as they (presumably) were in reality – curious words, susceptible both to misinterpretation and faulty transmission.

Vargas Llosa's imposition of the form of an historical novel on his material, then, can be seen to be an asset rather than a drawback to his mirroring of events as they may have been. Far from imposing his own viewpoint upon them (the traditional role of the writer of fiction), his version can be seen to preserve more of the ambiguity of this particular text than the doctrinaire historicism of da Cunha, or the 'common sense' of Cunninghame Graham.

I quoted above Castro-Klarén's statement that 'to write historical novels one must have a theory of history', but she seems to feel that the failure fully to 'articulate' the speech of Antonio Conselheiro is a feature of all three of our texts. This discussion of the different 'versions' of the same prophetic text contained in Os Sertões, A Brazilian Mystic, and La guerra del fin del mundo, should give some support to my conviction that she is wrong – at any rate, in the case of Vargas Llosa. The reason why the prophecy comes so early in his book is, I suspect, primarily structural: the book is called 'The War of the End of the World', and he therefore wants to introduce as soon as possible the sense in which he means that title – not as a fanciful novel about the Apocalypse, but a novel set at a particular moment in the past. He therefore has one of his villagers ask the Counselor (as yet unnamed) '¿Terminaria el siglo?' [Was the world about to end?]. The form of the reply tells us all he wants us, at this moment, to know – the era we are concerned with (the late nineteenth century); the sort of people the story concerns (vaqueros [cowboys] and peones [peasants]); and, since everything before this point has been 'timeless', the survival of such wandering preachers (more appropriate to first-century Galilee, where one might, at first, imagine oneself to be) into such an era in the backlands of Brazil. He has, in other words, made in a few paragraphs most of the points that took da Cunha 120 and Graham 50 pages: the 'atavistic' resemblance to first century mystics, the ambiguity (yet power) of his prophetic utterances, and the susceptibility of the people of the back lands to an Apocalyptic sense of doom.

The point I am making is not that the historical novel is better suited to such subjects than da Cunha's history-cum-treatise or Graham's 'padded' biography (Errol Lincoln Uys' disappointing vignette of the Canudos campaign in his recent novel Brazil (1986) is sufficient disproof of that) – but simply that, since the historian of such events is forced to shape his narrative according to his or her prejudices and the information at his or her disposal, the fatal disingenuousness implied by Graham's references to his 'many sources' or da Cunha's pretence of 'Scientific' objectivity in fact detracts from the accuracy of the picture they present. A novelist like Vargas Llosa may therefore, paradoxically, attain a greater precision as a reporter and chronicler of events simply because his cards are laid on the table to start with. 'The truest poetry', once again, 'is the most feigning’ [As You Like It, III, 3, 16-17] (Shakespeare, 1986, p.722).

[Flávio de Barros: Guerra de Canudos (1897)]

III

Conclusion – Ideas of South America

Having examined the implications of some of the textualizing strategies adopted by our three historians of Canudos, it remains to discuss the 'South American' nature of the campaign itself – why (to return to the quotation at the beginning of the chapter) it, or the errors it exemplified, were regarded by da Cunha as 'the coefficient of reduction of our nationality'. In order to do this, I will be concentrating principally on the 'sense of an ending' provided by each of the authors in question.

Let us begin, then, with Euclides da Cunha. After a laconic account of Canudos' failure to surrender (quoted above), he goes on to describe the disinterring of the 'Counselor's Corpse', and ends with 'Two Lines':

The trouble is that we do not have today a Maudsley for acts of madness and crimes on the part of nations ... (da Cunha, 1944, p.476)

The reference to 'Maudsley' is to a celebrated phrenologist (1944, p.120), recalled here because Antonio Conselheiro's skull was said to have 'Standing out in bold relief ... the essential lines of crime and madness’ (1944, p.476). It is rather an odd note to leave us on. The reference is obscure (having to be footnoted by its own author), and the significance a little doubtful. Does he mean that his work is to be this 'Maudsley'? Or that such a gauge is impossible and not even to be thought of? The bitterness of his tone would seem to imply that he regards the findings of these 'skull-readers' as contemptible pseudo-science – but he nowhere actually informs us of his attitude towards phrenology (held in high esteem in Brazil long after it had been abandoned by the rest of the world). It is. in any case, a fatalistic and disillusioned – almost, one might say, exhausted conclusion.

Cunninghame Graham, on the other hand, ends with an extraordinary evocation of the after-lives of some of the combatants:

some of them possibly still are living ['in the impenetrable forests'l, waiting for the millennium and for the prophet's second coming upon earth. Let them live on, and watch the humming-birds as they hang poised above the flowers, the lizards basking in the sun, listen to the mysterious noises that at night in the tropics rise from the woods, inhale the scent of the dank vegetation, and till their crops of mandioca and of maize. That is the true millennium, did they but know it, and each man makes or mars it for himself, as long as health gives him the power to drink it in, and to enjoy. (Cunninghame Graham, 1920, pp.234-35)

The actual last lines of Graham's account are in the passage quoted above, describing the 'withered flowers' found on the prophet's breast – but the tone of his conclusion is represented better here, One cannot help feeling that this set-piece nature description is a rather inadequate post-mortem on the lives of Antonio Conselheiro and his followers. Graham's evident sentimentality – what Watts and Davies call his 'recurrent indulgence in religiose reverie' – should not however be allowed to hide the larger strategy behind this and other such pieces of 'prose-poetry' in his book.

Let us look more closely at the actual imagery he employs. They are living in 'the impenetrable forests', watching 'humming-birds ... hang poised above ... flowers' and 'lizards basking in the sun', and listening to 'the mysterious noises that at night in the tropics rise from the woods'. All of these are images from the topos of the locus amoenus (as described in Curtius' European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages), but they also represent a curious reversion to the 'Earthly Paradise' (or 'true millenium') myths described in Chapter One. Indeed, this surrender to the clichés surrounding the name of 'South America' in European tradition becomes increasingly apparent as Graham's text advances.

On one occasion a complaint was brought to him that a Jagunço in an excess of pious fervour had seduced a girl of tender years. He answered, 'She has but followed the common destiny of all, and passed beneath the tree of good and evil like the rest.' (Cunninghame Graham, 1920, p.112)

Graham hastens to condemn this judgement of the 'Counselor', but he is careful to frame it. nevertheless, in the language of Genesis and the 'tree of good and evil'. His half-fascination, half-revulsion for the ‘jagunços' (so like that displayed by him towards the gauchos – as in the passage from Tschiffely's Don Roberto (1937) quoted, again, in Chapter One) also makes use of scientific, Darwinian imagery, but one feels that this too is being used in a 'mythological' sense – as if the universal qualities of death and rebirth familiar everywhere were in some sense especially appropriate to the South American landscape:

This struggle for existence among plants and trees presents its counterpart amongst mankind. The climate sees to it that only those most fitted to resist it arrive at manhood, and the rude life they subsequently lead has forged a race as hard as the Castilians, the Turk, the Scythians of old, or as the Mexicans. (Cunninghame Graham, 1920, p.17)

Having thus read Graham's ending in the 'mythological' terms already familiar to us, let us go on to examine the conclusion of Mario Vargas Llosa's book. La guerra del fin del mundo, it might be argued, has many endings – to match its many narrative streams – and these are perhaps better dealt with in summary than in quotation. The actual ending comes as the culmination of an argument between a local Bahían Colonel and the gaucho lieutenant Maranhão who has been acting as unofficial executioner (by decapitation) of the prisoners. After the Colonel has humiliated the lieutenant by slapping his face and urinating on him, one of the woman prisoners (who has observed this act of revenge) catches hold of him and gives him the answer to the question he has been asking: where is João Abade, the military commander of the rebels?

– ¿se escapó entonces?
La viejecita vuelve a negar, cercada por los ojos de las prisioneras.
– Lo subieron al cielo unos arcángeles – dice, chasqueando la lengua –. Yo los vi. (Vargas Llosa, 1981, p.531)

['''He got away, then?" The little old woman shakes her head again. encircled by the eyes of the women prisoners. "Archangels took him up to heaven," she says, clacking her tongue. "I saw them,''' (568)]

One could see this as Vargas Llosa's determination not to end in despair, but rather with a sense of victory of some sort – however equivocal. The main characters of the novel have already been dealt with, in the fashion of a nineteenth-century novel: the 'nearsighted journalist' (who one feels is some kind of analogue – though not a precise one – to Euclides da Cunha, one of the dedicatees of Vargas Llosa's book) has found happiness with Jurema, whom he met in Canudos; 'Galileo Gall', the Scottish revolutionary and phrenologist (it is perhaps too neat to see him as suggested in part by R. B, Cunninghame Graham) has died precisely because of his abuse of love, with the 'fatalidad femenina’ (Vargas Llosa, 1981, p.475) [fateful femininity] Jurema; and, finally, the Baron de Canabrava, the éminence grise of Bahían politics, has succeeded in making love again, thus restoring his wife and himself to the spiritual harmony they had lost in the siege. It sounds a wild farrago, but it all builds up to the single unified (avowedly authorial) conclusion to be drawn from the tale. As he himself has said, this is something new in his work:

Obligadamente, por el tipo de problema que viven los distintos personajes he tenido que pensar en ciertas ideas generales, cosa que nunca he hecho cuando escribo una novela, porque es una clase de reflexión que es más bien un obstáculo, porque una novel a es un mundo fundamentalmente concreto, para mi al menos (Castro-Klarén, 1986, p.382).

['Because of the type of problem faced by the various characters. I have had to think in terms of generalized concepts – something which I have never done before while writing a novel, because it is a kind of thinking which tends to create obstacles, a novel being (for me, at any rate) a fundamentally concrete world of experience' (my translation).]

What this conclusion is defies simple expression – but it seems, essentially, to set against the 'world-historical' cataclysm of Canudos the human values and human scale of the lives and mutual affections of the various characters. In essence, then, it is an attempt to draw from the particularities of the Canudos campaign 'ciertas ideas generales'.

In my own conclusion I would like to point out that only Graham's version of the events surrounding Canudos could be said to tie into the generalized set of literary topoi associated with South America. His original starting-point – the letter from President Roosevelt inviting him to introduce European readers to the life lived in the back lands of Brazil – has been only too faithfully followed; and, as Watts and Davies remark, 'da Cunha toils to build his epic, while Graham is content to hustle together an engagingly dramatic life-story’ (1979, p.278) –. a kind of South American travelogue with historical elements. Thus the frequent digressions into purple prose descriptive of nature or the Brazilian lifestyle – praise of 'tropic vegetation, with the groves of palms and of bamboos fringing the bank' (Cunninghame Graham, 1920, p.14) alternating with 'reconstructions' of Antonio Conselheiro's early life:

Imagination pictures him, dressed in drill trousers and an alpaca coat, seated absorbed with the small details of a village store, his recreations a walk round the plaza in the evening, or a rare visit, on a pacing mule, to a country neighbour a league or two away. (Cunninghame Graham, 1920, p.62)

The 'pacing mule' sums up his method particularly well. In fact, one comes to feel that these digressions are perceived by him as being more central to his purpose than the narrative of the siege. He characterizes Antonio Conselheiro's ten years in the wilderness, for example, by remarking that 'Nature in Brazil is so tremendous, not cut in squares and utterly subdued and tamed as here in Europe; it is so overpowering in its strength that it reduces man to the proportions of an ant, busy, but futile in his enterprises against her immensity’ (Cunninghame Graham, 1920, p.67). This may perhaps be true in general, but surely not of the man who, in 1897, succeeded in convulsing an entire nation.

When one compares Graham with our two South American authors, one finds (not surprisingly) their intentions to be very different. Euclides da Cunha set out, it is true, to characterize an entire region of his nation – but the immensity of this task was sufficient to daunt him without adding the burden of a general 'Anatomy' of South America (indeed the sole use of the latter term in Os Sertões comes when he mentions the Buenos Aires paper 'that perhaps carries most weight of any in South America’ (da Cunha, 1944, p.384) – meaning, presumably, to distinguish it from 'Spanish' or 'Latin' America). Mario Vargas Llosa, as a Peruvian, is forced to relocate himself to some extent in order to write a book set in Brazil – but the tone (already noted in our analysis of his employment of the 'prophecy') of events that might have happened anywhere and which are universally significant. despite their specifically regional (Brazilian, even Sertanejo – rather than 'South American') trappings, is sustained throughout. The move from the particular to the universal here seems to be confined to the Latin Americans – while the attempt to restrict all significance to a regional level is an attribute of the European historian.

This is, one must admit, largely a matter of degree. Nevertheless, it remains my contention that not only is Cunninghame Graham's the only one of the three accounts that mentions 'South America' as if that were what he was characterizing in this book (and in his historical works generally), but also that only his can be shown to contain any of the paraphernalia of romantic stereotypes and myth that have traditionally been employed to represent such regions in European literature. The pressure of facts connected with Canudos itself, and that of the various roles in which the three of them write, may do a good deal to obscure such 'hidden agendas' in their work – but the comparison should at least have made it clear that. while all three mythologize a 'mundo concreto' in their own image, only Graham is prepared to associate that construct specifically with South America. As Vargas Llosa puts it (and it is perhaps a fitting epigraph for our tale):

– ¿Se da cuenta? – dijo el periodista miope, respirando como si acabara de realizar un esfuerzo enorme –. Canudos no es una historia, sino un árbol de historias. (Vargas Llosa, 1981, p.433)

['''Don't you see'?" the nearsighted journalist said, breathing as though he were exhausted from some tremendous physical effort. "Canudos isn't a story: it's a tree of stories.'" (Vargas Llosa, 1984, p.459).

[Mario Vargas Llosa: La guerra del fin del mundo (1981)]

1. The ‘name of jagunço’, which came to be the generic term for a follower of Antonio Conselheiro, is defined by da Cunha as ‘the name which up to then had been reserved for rowdies at the fair, bullies on election day, and the pillagers of cities’ (1944, p.148).
2. From Vargas Llosa’s 1979 interview with José Miguel Oviedo, ‘La historia de la historia: conversación en Lima’, quoted in Castro-Klarén (1986, p.382) – the English translation is mine.
3. His newspaper articles from Canudos have been collected in Euclides da Cunha. Canudos: Diario de uma expedição. Ed. Gilberto Freyre. Documentos brasileiros. 16 (Rio de Janeiro. 1939). I highlight the word 'factual' because of the tendency of journalistic prose to give lavish circumstantial detail of dates and names in order to establish the authority of the account as a whole and downplay any (inevitable) bias in its reporting.
4. The 'diagnosis' in question is, appropriately, epilepsy: ‘It may accordingly be said, without any exaggeration, that a crime or a rare burst of heroism is often but the mechanical equivalent of an attack.' (da Cunha, 1944, p.233).
5. The reference is to the page numbers in the first Brazilian edition.
6. 'this book, which originally set out to be a history of the Canudos Campaign, subsequently lost its timeliness when ... its publication was deferred. We have accordingly given it another form ....’ (da Cunha, 1944, p.xxix.).
7. The nearest precedent in Latin America is Sarmiento's Facundo, of which José Pablo Feinmann has commented:

¿Es una novela, un ensayo histórico, sociológico, filosófico, es una bibliografía, un panfleto político? Es todo esto. Y lo es porque es la expresión totalizadora de una práctica politica diferenciada. Es la construcción de una verdad. (Castro-Klarén, 1986, p.369)

['Is it a novel or an essay? – if an essay, is it historical, sociological or philosophical? – is it a bibliography? or a political pamphlet? It is all of these. This is because it is the complete expression of a flexible and pragmatic politics. It constructs its own truth. (my translation)].
8. In Shaw’s words: ‘He handles the other lethal weapons as familiarly as the pen: medieval sword and modern mauser are to him as umbrellas and kodaks are to me.’ (Watts & Davies, 1979, p.133).
9. He remarked of W. H. Hudson: ‘Nothing was more intolerable to [him] than a Utopia, as it must ever be to all artistic minds. Rather the freedom of the wilds, than a society, where there is no folly, sorrow or no crime.’ (Watts & Davies, 1979, p.267).
10. Watts and Davies record a lapse into what they call ‘uncharacteristic anti-Semitism’ in a 1920 letter, precisely contemporaneous with A Brazilian Mystic, to the Scottish Home Rule Society: ‘Graham says that though he has “of course no idea of imputing complicity in murder to the Jews as a race”, he believes that “these murders [of Black and Tans in Ireland] are instigated chiefly & certainly paid for by the band of international Jews, grouped around their fellow Jew, Mr. ‘De’ Valera in New York”.’ (1979, p.250).
11. ‘I listened to the story [from ‘my friend Braceras’], and,when we landed at the capital, bought books about it, bought more in Santos, and as I read and mused upon the tale, the letter from the President came back into my mind.’ (Cunninghame Graham, 1920, pp.ix-x).
12. ‘Dom Sebastião' is the Portuguese equivalent of King Arthur, a historical figure identified with the leader of the forces of good in the 'last battle' of Armageddon. The jagunços expected him to intervene in the siege of Canudos.

[Carlos Ferreira & Rodrigo Rosa: Os Sertões (2008)]

Works Cited:

Barroso, Gustavo. Mapirunga. Trans. R. B. Cunninghame Graham. London: Heinemann, 1924.

Castro-Klarén, Sara. ‘Santos and Cangaçeiros: Inscription without Discourse in Os Sertões and La guerra del fin del mundo’. Modern Language Notes, 101 (1986), 366-88.

Cunninghame Graham, R. B. A Brazilian Mystic: Being the Life and Miracles of Antonio Conselheiro. London: Heinemann,1920.

Curtius, Ernst R. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.

da Cunha, Euclides. Rebellion in the Backlands (Os Sertões). 1902. Trans. Samuel Putnam. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1944.

Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987.

Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. Ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.

Tschiffely, A. F., ed. Rodeo: A Collection of the Tales and Sketches of R. B. Cunninghame Graham. London: Heinemann, 1936.

Tschiffely, A. F. Don Roberto: Being the Account of the Life and Works of R. B. Cunninghame Graham, 1852-1936. London: Heinemann, 1937.

Uys, Errol Lincoln. Brazil. London & Sydney, 1987.

Vargas Llosa, Mario. La guerra del fin del mundo. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1981.

The War of the End of the World

Walker, John, ed. The South American Sketches of R. B. Cunninghame Graham. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978.

Walker, John, ed. The North American Sketches of R. B. Cunninghame Graham. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1986.

Watts, C. T. ed. Joseph Conrad’s Letters to R. B. Cunninghame Graham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Watts, Cedric, & Laurence Davies. Cunninghame Graham: A Critical Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

[W. H. Hudson: Green Mansions (1904)]