mark anderson, treacherous waters

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Troubled Waters: Rivers in Latin American ImaginationHispanic Issues On Line12 (2013)

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Treacherous Waters: Shipwrecked Landscapes and

the Possibilities for Nationalistic Emplacement in

Brazilian Representations of the Amazon

Mark D. Anderson

The turn of the twentieth century was a dynamic moment in the constructionof Brazilian nationality. Deodoro de Fonsecas proclamation of the Brazilianrepublic in 1889 finally divested the Brazilian monarchy of its politicalhegemony, which many Brazilians viewed as a continuation of Portuguesecolonialism. Likewise, the abolition of slavery in 1888 signaled thebeginning of a century-long project to redefine concepts of nationalcitizenship to be inclusive of all people living in Brazilian territory. The1890s were a particularly ebullient decade for Brazilian liberals, who set inmotion projects to rewrite Brazil by modernizing government, generatingnew notions of cultural nationalism, and liberalizing the national economy.

Effective democracy seemed to lie just over the horizon.Nevertheless, contemporary intellectuals recognized that many barriers

to their project remained. A prime concern was the existence of largeportions of the nation that lay within its geographical borders, but whoseinhabitants lived beyond the grasp of the federal government and itsinstitutions, outside the rule of law. Living in almost complete isolation,these people necessarily had little notion of national citizenship, and they didnot contribute to the national economy since they lived primarily fromsubsistence agriculture and paid taxes only on the rare occasion that a taxcollector found his way into their lands (and made it back alive). Theterritories in which they lived were virtual blanks on the national map; littlewas known about basic geographic features, never mind resources that might

be available for industrialized development. This kind of national negativespace was embodied in the concept of the serto, the wilderness orbacklands, defined not by its own qualities but rather by its distance frompolitical control and disciplined knowledge.1 In many cases, these sertes


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came not only to symbolize the unknown but also to be seen as threateningspaces that actively resisted the superposition of national control andsymbolism.2

One such space was the Amazon River Basin. Despite the founding oftwo sizeable cities, Belm and Manaus, during the 1600s and frequentincursions into Amaznia by adventurers, homesteaders, escaped slaves,scientific expeditions, planters, and rubber gatherers, until the mid-1900s theregion remained a tenuous, fantastical space in the national imaginary. It wasa land submerged in aquatic ambiguities. Maps existed, but they were of thekind etched feverishly into the bark of unfamiliar trees or scribbled insodden books that held the accounts of rubber barons. Desirous ofconsolidating political authority in the region as well as its economicposition in the rubber boom, the newly formed Brazilian Republic looked tofix the Amazon on paper and sent a variety of expeditions to survey the

regions inhabitants, geographical features, and natural resources.This essay studies the challenges that the Amazonian fluvialenvironment posed to notions of Brazilian geographic nationalism based onthe landscape of the coastal Mata Atlntica at the beginning of the 1900s,when the nation began a sustained project to incorporate marginalizedregions into national governance. I am particularly interested in the work ofEuclides da Cunha and Alberto Rangel, two authors who traveled toAmaznia at the turn of the century as part of this project. Their writingsscrutinize the positioning of the Amazon in the national imaginary with aneye to incorporation in the regionalist model.3 Paradoxically, tropes offrustration and disappointment dominate their representations of the regiondespite their stated intentions to territorialize it within the nationalimaginary; they find themselves mired in the ambiguity of the aquatic

landscape, whose blurred boundaries and murky waters place into questionthe manifestation of empirical subjectivity as well as national destiny. Iengage the field of biosemiotics to argue that much of the frustrationexperienced by these authors was due to their inability to read satisfactorilythe Amazonian environment in spite of their use of naturalism as an act oftranslation of biological and geographical meaning. In the end, thenationalistic symbolism and the international scientific imaginary on whichthey relied to decipher the landscape clashed with the physical experience ofthe river, creating a rift between sign and object that they failed to resolvesatisfactorily. As part of the nation, however, the Amazon could not be leftcompletely outside of the national imaginary; therefore it came to symbolizeindeterminacy, the space of the enigmatic or mysterious in the nationalnarrative as well as that of future potential. In a purposefully ironic twist, theindeterminacy of the Amazon in the representations of these earlier authorssubsequently became a liberating trope for the younger generation ofBrazilian modernists, who wished to escape the deterministic fatalism oftheir predecessors and open up national identity to revision during the avant-


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garde movements of the 1920s.Euclides da Cunha, author of the Brazilian classic Os sertes:

Campanha de Canudos (1902) (The Backlands), was the most prominentmember of one of the expeditions sent by the Brazilian government tosurvey (and surveil) the Amazon. Euclides had a history of traveling Brazilsbacklands not as a wanderer but in a purposeful search for a nationalnarrative that would tie the nation together geographically.4 In his earliertravels in the aridsertesof Northeastern Brazil as a journalist covering theWar of Canudos, Euclides highlighted the formative role of the SoFrancisco River in the construction of the national narrative, arguing that ithad served as a route for intrepid explorers known as bandeirantes whocarried the nascent Brazilian culture beyond the coast into the interiorwilderness or sertes.5 On the other hand, he also presented the SoFrancisco as a metaphor for Brazils challenges in creating national unity; it

embodied the conceptual boundary between the more industrialized (andliberal) South and what he viewed as the backward (monarchist or federalist)North, characterized by the aforementioned isolation in its interior and theexploitative sugar cane economy associated with slavery on the coast.6

For Euclides, as for nearly all nineteenth-century environmentaldeterminists, national destiny was inscribed almost textually in the nationallandscape. Before scientists developed a clear understanding of the geneticcode, many intellectuals believed that the environment, rather thanindividual organisms, was the main repository of biological meaning. Thelandscape was seen as a natural (and national) archive that encoded anddirected all evolution, a concept that was extended even to human social andpolitical structures. The work of the naturalist, then, was to decipher andinterpret correctly the geographical code, which would, in turn, explain

national destiny. In this view, rivers such as the So Francisco played anactive and constitutive role in codifying national landscapes, emplotting thegenerative possibilities of the land within the national narrative.

Euclides expected to find an analogous function for the Amazon Riversystem in the national symbolic geography when he was invited toparticipate in a bi-national mission to map the Purus River (a tributary of theAmazon) and delimit the border between Brazil and Peru in 1905. As hewould discover, however, the fluvial landscape of the Amazon resisteddeciphering. Euclides found himself thrust into what could be called abiosemiotic contact zone, to borrow Rolena Adornos and Mary LouisePratts terminology for describing colonial social relations, in which plant,animal, and cultural signs vied for interpretative primacy.7 He recognized thepresence of nonhuman communicative codes, but he was unable to engagefully the semiotic system, in part because he was a traveler who lackedemplacement within the Amazonian bioregion, in part because he wassearching for a metanarrative where none was available: meaning isrelational rather than inherent in biosemiotic systems (Kull 2223).


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Furthermore, his possibilities for reading nonhuman signs were fettered bythe hierarchical dualism between culture and nature that Horkheimer andAdorno, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, associate with the hegemony ofinstrumental reason in modern culture.

The Amazons semiotic complexity resisted the assignment of meaningfrom without, impeding the superposition of nationalist geographical andcultural symbolism over local signage. Its mutability defied cartographicprecision, while its waterlogged, muddy surfaces and entangled vegetationthwarted penetration by the empirical gaze. This presented a serious problemat a time when the nation saw itself primarily through the eyes of the traveler(Belinaso Guimares 707). The natural codes of the Amazon could not evenbe read, never mind translated directly into text, and Euclides rapidlybecame frustrated with the possibilities of the Amazon as a metaphor for thenational geographic narrative. Nevertheless, this frustration did not lead him

to abandon his deterministic theories of nationalism, which he viewed asinfallible due to their inscription within the framework of positivist science;rather, the Amazon came to embody both the frustrations and failings that hediagnosed within the Brazilian national project as well as hope for fruition inthe future. He penned a comparatively dry official report on his journey andpublished several pieces attempting to reconcile the contradictions he ran upagainst in the Amazon in Contrastes e confrontos (1907) (Contrasts andConfrontations), as well as in the Estado de So Paulo newspaper, theRevista Americana (American Magazine), and Kosmos. A compilation ofthese essays and reports appeared posthumously as margem da histria(1909) (On the Margins of History), and, a half-century later, Hildon Rochapublished Um paraso perdido (1976) (A Lost Paradise), a definitiveanthology of all of Euclidess writings on the Amazon, including his

personal correspondences and the speech he gave upon accepting his chair inthe Acadmia Brasileira de Letras.8

Like Euclides, Alberto Rangel came to Amaznia from afar, although helived there for nearly seven years in contrast with Euclidess mere ninemonths in the region. Rangel was an engineer from Recife who travellednorthward to work for the government in development and urbanizationprojects, and he later became the secretary-general of the State of Amazonasat the behest of the local oligarchy. He wrote a collection of short storiesbased on his experiences entitled Inferno verde: Cenas e cenrios doAmazonas (1908) (Green Hell: Scenes and Scenery from the Amazon),which many critics consider the inaugural work in the Latin Americannovela de la selva (jungle narrative) genre. Since it is based on Rangelsyears of personal experience and interactions with the Amazonianenvironment and inhabitants, Inferno verde cannot help but impart somesense of emplacement within the local environment and social life;nevertheless, it depicts movement and dislocation as the dominant tropes oflife in the region (Krger 10).9 His stories leave one with the suspicion that


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the sense of impermanence that he associates with the Amazonianenvironment is actually that of his own transience: the Amazon was never ahome, only a means.

Travel writing on the Amazon has historically formed part of thoseprojects aimed at converting alien environments into landscapes codifiedusing human interpretations that would be compatible with preexistingworldviews.10 Early foreign travelers searched within the Amazon for thefantastical otherness that would justify the Western tradition and the colonialenterprise; later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naturalists rewrote theAmazon as a prehistoric repository of life formsincluding primitivehumansthat, when viewed through the lens of evolution and speciessuccession, would unlock the secrets of natural history and, with them, thetelos of human history.11 In the work of these authors, naturalism wasconceived of primarily as the translation or deciphering of environmental

cues in order to uncover natural laws encoded in the landscape.Both Euclides da Cunha and his friend Alberto Rangel wrote theAmazon from within this tradition of naturalist travel writing. Like theirEuropean predecessors, they searched in the Amazon for the meaning ofhistory; however, they had more modest aspirations. They maintained asomewhat ambivalent stance toward the Amazons possibilities for holdingthe keys to universal natural history, with its planetary focus, but they didbelieve that it could reveal the telos of Brazilian history, which theypostulated (or at least hoped) to be the evolution of an autonomous, uniformBrazilian subject. In nationalistic naturalismwhich, as Pratt and Safierboth hint, certainly existed despite claims to impartial scientific universalityby its practitionersthe message that nature encoded was the key to thenational idiosyncrasy, that is, what distinguished one nation from another.12

Linked racially and culturally to the colonial powers, postcolonial politicalelites throughout Latin America engaged local environments duringindependence movements as markers of cultural difference: their affinitieswith the New World landscape distinguished them from Iberian colonizers.The Amazon had been appraised by European naturalists from LaCondamine and Humboldt to Alfred Russell Wallace as a uniqueenvironment whose difference was marked by tropes of grandiose, almostmonumental monstrosity. Given this apparently objective recognition of theAmazons fundamental distinctiveness by the worlds most renownedscientists at that time, it comes as no surprise that Brazilian intellectualsdesired to put it to work in the service of nationalism. In practice, however,the Amazons radical difference (monstrosity) was not so easily reconciledwith pre-existing narratives of Brazilian identity, which were then basedlargely on paradisiacal imagery associated with the nature and humanhistory of the coastal Mata Atlntica.13

Brazilian authors frequently engaged tropes of personal and historicalpresence as a strategy for nationalizing Amazonian space in the histories of


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the Amazon that they wrote in response to territorial disputes with SpanishAmerican neighbors during the turn-of-the-century rubber boom (FerreiraReis 4344). These histories justified Brazilian sovereignty over theAmazon by emphasizing the continuity of residence since colonial times.Despite echoing these tropes in his own work on the Amazon, Euclides daCunhas patriotism was tested when he first arrived in the upper Amazonslargest city, Manaus. To his surprise, he found the rubber boomtownteeming with foreign people and goods, leading him to describe it as meiocaipira, meio europia (correspondence with Domcio da Gama 312) (halfhillbilly, half European). Of course, not only the Amazons inhabitantsseemed foreign to him; despite the meticulous research he had done beforedeparting on his expedition, Euclides was unprepared for what seemed tohim a completely alien environment and one that turned on their heads allhis notions of science and aesthetics. As he would write upon comparing the

Amazon, whose defining characteristic he posits as its ability to overwhelmhuman subjectivity and, therefore, industry, to the paisagens cultas(cultured landscapes) of Europe and Southern Brazil: Desaparecem asformas topogrficas mais associadas existncia humana. H alguma cousaextraterrestre naquela natureza anfbia, misto de guas e de terras, que seoculta, completamente nivelada, na sua prpria grandeza (Amaznia126)(The topographic forms most associated with human existence disappear.There is something extraterrestrial in that amphibious nature, mixture ofwater and land, that hides, completely flattened, within its own greatness).14

The Amazons alienness did not depend solely on the lack of Brazilianinhabitants to territorialize the wilderness; it was a constitutiveungroundedness, a non-landscape, in which water usurped but failed toreplace the foundational function of land in the national imaginary. He

captured this paradox eloquently in the opening statement of the speech hegave upon accepting his chair in the Acadmia Brasileira de Letras(Brazilian Academy of Letters), calling the Amazon uma espcie denaufrgio da terra, que se afunda e braceja convulsivamente nos esgalhosretorcidos dos mangues (Falando aos acadmicos 83) (a kind ofshipwreck of the land that sinks flailing convulsively its arms, the twistedmangrove stumps). As Rangel echoed in his story O Tapar, A floresta,afogada na cheia, mais prpria ao nativo. No dilvio amaznico o homemtrocaria bem os seus pulmes por guelras (38) (The forest, drowned duringthe flood cycle, belongs to the native. In the Amazonian deluge, man woulddo well to exchange his lungs for gills). The aquatic holds sway over theterrestrial in the Amazon, and, even if people are unable to spontaneouslyevolve gills, they had best adapt to an amphibious lifestyle. Constructing thenational edifice on this waterlogged landscape seemed a project doomed tofailure.

There was yet hope, however; the dominance of water over landindicated that the Amazon was a youthful landscape with a long future


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before it. Playing off William Morris Daviss organismic theories ofgeomorphology that linked the rise of civilizations to the maturity of thelandscape, Euclides da Cunha coincides with earlier travelers such as AlfredRussell Wallace and Frederick Hartt in diagnosing the Amazon as thenewest corner of the New Worlda landscape that is just coming into being(est em ser; Amaznia 125).15 Tellingly, both Euclides and AlbertoRangel call the Amazon a contemporary, unfinished page of Genesis: theland was only just beginning to emerge from the water as in the first days ofcreation, preparing itself for natural and, eventually, human life.16 In apositivist worldview that believed that evolution moved progressivelytoward perfect order, what they perceived as the disorganized, chaoticvegetation and the singular and monstrous fauna that existed imperfectlyas mere links in the evolutionary chain were indicators of an immaturegeography that was not yet ready for human habitation (Cunha, Amaznia

100). The writing metaphor is key: the Amazon is still a blank page inhuman history.Arriving in such an unhistoried space, the nation-oriented naturalist

sente-se deslocado no espao e no tempo; no j fora da ptria, senoarredio da cultura humana, extraviado num recanto da floresta e num desvoobscurecido da histria (Amaznia126) (feels dislocated in space and time;not only outside the nation, but withdrawn from human culture, lost in ahidden corner of the forest and in a darkened attic of history). Yet naturalismonce again provides an escape from this nationalistic conundrum of internalspatial and temporal exile: European naturalists had already located theAmazon as an originary space at the dawn of natural history. Thecomplement to the primitivism paradigm used in the anthropology of thetime to explain the apparently anachronistic lifestyles of non-Western

societies, the Amazon becomes a primitive or prehistoric landscape thatholds the key to the evolution of homo brasilienses, the Brazilian subject.Thus inscribed as the site of the nations prehistory, the Amazon could beused in conjunction with Brazils present (associated with the modernSouthern cities of Rio de Janeiro and So Paulo) to triangulate its future. Atthe same time, the nationalization of Amazonian naturalism allowed for thereterritorialization of a landscape that European naturalists had claimed astheir own, for they considered themselves (white Europeans) heirs to naturalhistory as the pinnacle of evolution.

Euclides da Cunha and Alberto Rangel hoped to delineate the future ofthe nation and the national subject by mapping the Amazon River Systemliterally, but also figuratively, deciphering its nationalistic symbolism. Thisproject was by no means novel: the unidirectional motion of rivers has beenequated with destiny since antiquity, while particular rivers were oftenassociated with local identities through mythology and ritual (Jones 21, 65).In turn, these fluvial mythologies were frequently turned to nationalist endsduring the process of nation building.17 For some classical philosophers, an


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emplaced identity (as poetic inspiration) could even be imbibed through thevisceral process of drinking a rivers waters (Jones 5658). Indeed, drinkingand immersion in a rivers waters have a long genealogy as symbols ofcommunion and baptism, and nationalism has frequently engaged religiousrhetoric as a mechanism for legitimation as well as sublimation. Inoverwhelmingly Catholic, postcolonial Latin America, national waters tookon pseudo-religious connotations of purity, communal integration, rebirth,and emergence. On a more earthly plane, rivers came to signifycartographically the arteries and veins that distributed the nations lifeblood(political culture and commerce) throughout the organic body of the nation.

Upon engaging both supernatural and natural metaphors, nationalismmarried the generative role of water in ancient cosmogoniesagriculturalproductivity and human fertilitywith the function of rivers as geopoliticalboundaries and routes for modern commerce.

The wild instability of the Amazon River System, however, resistedincorporation into this taming nationalistic symbolic imagery, which was tooromantic for Euclides da Cunhas positivist aesthetic in any case. For him,national symbolism was only acceptable when the sign was not seen as theproduct of creative (poetic) abstraction but rather as embedded directly inthe national landscape, where it could be deciphered through empiricalobservation in conjunction with scientific theory. In this paradigm,nationalism was not seen as subjective because it arose from nature; thesame natural laws that governed the land and its denizens were extendedto encompass human affairs through environmentally determined behavior.Evolution was the dominant force and it applied to geography as much asbiology: the national landscape coevolved with the national subject, who,rather than diversifying through adaptation as most often occurs in

Darwinian evolution, consolidated ethnic differences into a single nationaltype through what Euclides, following Kirchoff, called telluric selectionthat is, the homogenizing process of adaptation of different racial types toa single, national landscape (Amaznia 13031). The Amazon, as anenvironment that appeared radically different from the rest of Brazil, heldthe key to understanding this process: theoretically, if an authenticallyBrazilian subject could emerge there on the margins of the nation, theorganic unity between the national landscape and its human inhabitants,which was fundamental in theories of nationalism based on environmentaldeterminism, was preserved.

This is why Euclides places such emphasis on the behavior of theriverscape. More than simple cartography, his study of the Purus Riverfocuses on its aquatic behavior with an eye to divining its evolutionaryhistory. For this reason, he reads the rapids on the river as clues to theadaptations it has undergone during its evolutionary struggle with the land(Amaznia 117). Euclidess conclusions frustrate him, however; whileEuropean and Southern Brazilian river behavior is constrained and


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channeled by mountains and other prominent geographical features,acquiring direction (and, therefore, meaning) through the mediation of theland, this Amazonian river has taken a bizarre evolutionary turn, triumphingover the land and molding it to its ever changing whims (Amaznia 118).Clearly, this is not an ideal situation for constructing a nation rooted in thelandscape. In fact, the rivers apparent lack of direction has dire implicationsfor national destiny, for nationalistic naturalism believed that destiny wasinscribed in the land, which here is subjected to the vicissitudes of water. AsJones has pointed out, the common symbolism of rivers as metaphors forpassing time (and destiny) extends to the concept of the source: traveling uprivers becomes a return to origins, and, in turn, finding the source of a riveris seen as a way of acquiring control over it through accessing the origins ofknowledge (100). Euclidess mission in mapping the Purus was to follow theriver to its headwaters, thus demarcating the Peruvian-Brazilian border, but

he also hoped to find there the source of national identity. In his writings, theheadwaters of the Purus River became the origin of both natural and humanhistories, their shared source underscoring their complementarity. Thingstook quite an unexpected turn, however, as Euclidess hapless journey to thesource came to symbolize his coming to know not of the evolution of thenational subject but rather of the limits of his own subjectivity.

Mapping the Amazons topography and essential knowledge was muchsimpler to plan from afar than to put into practice in the local setting. AsEuclides detailed in the essay As cabeceiras (The Headwaters) from hisofficial report on the journey, it became increasingly difficult to follow thePuruss trajectory, as it obstinately refused to follow a straight or evenpermanent path. He reiterated this conundrum somewhat more eloquently inImpresses generais (General Impressions):

Os mesmos rios ainda no se firmaram nos leitos; parecem tatear umasituao de equilbrio derivando, divagantes, em meandros inestveis,contorcidos emsacados, cujos istmos e revezes se rompem e se soldamnuma desesperadora formao de ilhas e de lagos de seis meses, e atcriando formas topogrficas novas em que estes dois aspectos seconfundem. (Euclidess emphasis;Amaznia100)

(The rivers themselves have not yet settled into their beds; they seem tofeel their way along blindly toward a state of equilibrium, wandering inunstable meanders, contorted in sacados, whose isthmuses and bendsbreak and rejoin in the maddening formation of islands and lakes thatlast mere months, even creating new topographical forms in which thesetwo aspects confuse themselves.)

The varadouros, waterways that link larger rivers in confusinglabyrinths (without converging them into a single stream), were disorienting,


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but he found the sacados (oxbow lakes) most problematic in theoreticalterms, for they transformed rivers into circular sites that confounded thelinear directionality that endows rivers with the symbolism of destiny. Theconcept of round rivers has existed since antiquity; the Okeanos played adefinitive role in classical notions of geography as a watery boundary thatinscribed the known world (Jones chapter 5). However, Okeanos wasconsidered a demarcator, a geographical other that encoded land as the spacefor human habitation and history. The sacado has the opposite effect; itconnotes stagnation, the senseless detour from progress, and, rather thandefining the limits of land, it undoes them, collapsing riverbanks intremendous avalanches of mud and vegetation known as terras cadas. AsEuclides notes forlornly, Depois de uma nica enchente se desmancham ostrabalhos de um hidrgrafo (Amaznia 100) (After a single flood cycle, ahydrographers work is undone), a situation that is driven home in Rangels

own story about the Terras cadas, in which a mans lifework is undone inan instant when his homestead collapses into the river. The mans soleoption, barring suicide, is to rebuild and persevere until some fresh disastererases his progress. In the Amazon, mapping and modernization alikebecome Sisyphean exercises that mirror the futile circularity of thesacado.

This instability has nefarious consequences for nationalistic telluricselection, as it reveals that h no Amazonas um flagrante desvio doprocesso ordinrio da evoluo das formas topogrficas (Euclides,Amaznia102) (in the Amazon, there is flagrant deviation from the ordinaryevolutionary process of topographical forms). Not only do the Amazonianrivers refuse to follow a set course, constantly changing direction anddoubling back on themselves, but they also systematically dismantle thenation, devouring their own homeland. In contrast to other great rivers such

as the Hwang-He and the Mississippi, which progressively add to nationalterritories by expanding their deltas, the Amazon is distinguished by itsantagonistic relationship with the national landscape: The enormous torrentis destroying the land through erosion (103). Lacking a true delta, theAmazons waters fall directly into the deep Atlantic, where the silt it carriesis whisked off by the Gulf Stream only to deposit what had formerly beenBrazilian land on the United Statess shores of Georgia and South Carolina(104). The Amazon is thus guilty of aquatic treachery, undermining its ownnation and delivering it into the hands of its northern rival. Waxing poetic,Euclides summarizes that o rio que sobre todos desafia o nosso lirismopatritico, o menos brasileiro dos rios. um estranho adversrio, entreguedia e noite faina de solapar a sua prpria terra (104) (the river that morethan any other inspires our patriotic lyricism is the least Brazilian of allrivers. It is a strange adversary, dedicated day and night to the labor ofundercutting its own land). Returning to the metaphor of rivers as writerswho emplot nationality within landscapes by endowing them with direction(and therefore destiny) and irrigating them with the lifeblood of the nation,


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culture and commerce, here the Amazon unwrites the national narrative,eroding national identity in the same way that its waters dissolve the nationalsoil. The Amazon River System thus becomes an agent ofdeterritorialization.

Euclides da Cunha and Alberto Rangel were deeply vexed by thechallenges that the Amazon posed to projects of nationalisticterritorialization as well as to the dominion of instrumental reason and theconstitution of the naturalist subject itself. This was not, however, the casewith the next generation of Brazilian writers, who reveled in theinterpretative freedom left open by the failure of the project toinstitutionalize Brazilian identity under the sign of an environmentallydetermined homogeneity. The avant-garde writers associated with the 1922Semana de Arte Moderna in So Paulo did not feel at ease with theessentialist vision of national identity that their precursors had attempted to

develop using environmental determinism. Far from following in Euclidesand Rangels footsteps in lamenting Brazils lack of a racially and culturallyhomogenous model citizen, modernistaauthors such as Oswald de Andrade,Mrio de Andrade, and Ral Bopp published manifestos, narratives, andpoetry that celebrated Brazils vast cultural diversity by emphasizingpolitical and cultural processes as the factors that unified the nation ratherthan some untenable underlying national essence. They proposed aninclusive national aesthetics based on collage that would cobble together in apurposefully unstructured way the wide variety of local Brazilian culturaltraditions with foreign elements through unabashed postcolonialappropriation and mimicry. Common identity would no longer be dependenton the evolution of the fittest, but rather on what biosemiotician JesperHoffmeyer calls semiotic freedomthat is, the liberty to interpret codes in

a way that is not determined by natural laws.18Oswald de Andrades seminal Manifesto da poesia pau-brasil (1924)

(Brazil-wood Poetry Manifesto) rejected outright the literary naturalism ofhis predecessors. He privileged aesthetic facts rooted in cultural practiceover naturalisms colonizing optical illusion in which os objetos distantesno diminuam. Era uma lei de aparncia (43) (distant objects did notdiminish. It was a law of appearances), the problem of distance (perspective)alluding to the unquestioning implementation of neocolonial dispositions ofknowledge. He shared the criticism that Michel Foucault articulated later inThe Order of Things: that natural history is nothing more than thenominalization of the visible (132). Oswald de Andrade censurednaturalism precisely for its paradoxical failure to establish a relationshipwith the object beyond the abstract: empirical description imposed a signover an object through nominalization, but meaning was dependent more onthe categorical subject/object hierarchy than on any immanent qualities ofthe object itself. Limited by its uncritical application of European modalitiesof representation, naturalism failed its own criteria as a procedure for


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establishing Brazilian nationalism: it could not reveal the immanence of thenation-state that, according to its own precepts, should underpin all formsthat manifest themselves in the nation, whether cultural, ethnic, orgeographical, according to natural laws. This is why Oswald de Andradeended up proposing to substituir a perspectiva visual e naturalista por umaperspectiva de outra ordem: sentimental, intelectual, irnica, ingnua (43)(substitute a visual and naturalist perspective for one of another order:sentimental, intellectual, ironic, ingenuous). The contrasting terminologyindicated that this other order of nationality relied on juxtaposition ratherthan essentialism. The nation had no inherent meaning beyond sharedspaceor surface, as Gilles Deleuze would have itthere was no telosortranscendental formula to endow the nation with depth (O. Andrade 44).In a paradox designed for his times, he proposed a wild, rhizomaticnationalism, free from disciplinary control and hierarchies.

Not surprisingly, given the indeterminacy that the Amazon had come tosymbolize in the national imaginary, the Brazilian modernistas found it asalluring as had the prior generation of naturalists.19 Mrio de Andradetraveled extensively throughout the Amazon in 1927, eventually making hisway to Peru and Bolivia, a journey that formed the backdrop for his novelMacunama: O heri sem carter (1928). His picaresque title character, thehero with no (national) character, is born to the Tapanhuma tribe on thebanks of the Uraricoera River, a tributary of the Rio Negro that, in turn,flows into the Amazon. Like Euclides and Rangels representations of theAmazon River, Macunama is a slippery Other who resists empiricalnominalization; he undergoes constant, comic transformations (includingskin color) and his language is playful, imprecise, and often nonsensical.Ironically, this shape-shifting, impermanent quality is precisely what grants

him status as a national icon.20Likewise, Ral Bopp claimed that he wrotethe majority of his equally epic poem, Cobra Norato (1931), in a feverishhaze brought on by an attack of malaria while he was living in theAmazonian city of Belm.21 Cobra Norato narrates in first person thewanderings of the title character, a changeling who is able to take human oranaconda form, throughout the Amazon in search of his beloved, thedaughter of Queen Luzia. Again, there is a strong emphasis on theindeterminacy of identity and the tenuousness of its relations to place andhistory, which is driven home by the poems first verse: Um dia / eu hei demorar nas terras do Sem-fim (148) (One day, I will live in the land of No-End).

In their use of self-reflexive, ironic exoticism and satire, these authorsseem to share Euclides and Rangels skepticism toward the possibilities ofpositioning the Amazon at the heart of the national imaginary, but they donot share their frustrations. The modernistasrejected the teleological view ofBrazilian identity implicit in Euclides and Rangels deterministic visions ofnational citizenship in favor of free experimentation based on the


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unapologetic, creative appropriation of models, whether local, national, orforeign: what Oswald de Andrade so memorably called anthropophagy inhis eponymous manifesto. And, while Mrio de Andrade and Ral Boppmay have cannibalized their precursors indiscriminately, whether Brazilianor European, they washed them down with Amazon River water, imbibing inthe process the rivers indeterminacy and turning it to their own digestiveends.

Notes

1. For in-depth studies of the concept of thesertoand its political uses, consult NsiaTrindade Limas Um serto chamado Brasiland Candice Vidal e Souzas A ptriageogrfica.

2. The most (in)famous of these spaces of resistance were the Northeastern sertes

surrounding the town of Canudos, whose inhabitants reluctance to recognizegovernmental and ecclesiastical authority led to the War of Canudos (18961897).

3. I choose these two authors because they exemplify this process of constructing theAmazon from without in a process of internal colonialism that novelist and criticMrcio Souza criticizes roundly in his A expresso amazonense. During thenineteenth and the early-twentieth centuries, even authors who grew up inAmaznia, like Ingls de Sousa and Jos Verssimo, rarely wrote about it when theylived there; they published their literature after travelling southward for morelucrative or prestigious educational and career opportunities, and their works reflectthe external narrative position common in regionalist writing (see Maligo 2526).

4. I follow the Brazilian convention in calling Euclides da Cunha by his first name inhomage to his unique position in Brazilian letters.

5. Brazil was by no means unique in wishing to address the problem of marginalgeographies within the nation. Many of Spanish Americas most prominentnineteenth-century intellectuals addressed this issue in their writings, among themDomingo Faustino Sarmiento, who postulated in his foundational Facundo, o lacivilizacin y la barbarie(1845) that such spaces posed a threat not only to nationalsovereignty and governance but also to society itself. Sarmiento believed thatArgentinas rivers held the key to urbanizing the rural interior of the country,forming a natural economic infrastructure capable of channeling the flow of goodsand ideas that he viewed as so necessary in civil governance. In Sarmientos view,not to make use of rivers in the construction of nationality was akin to thwartingdestiny. Significantly, Euclides da Cunha cited Sarmiento as a precursor in thespeech he gave upon accepting his chair in the Acadmia Brasileira de Letras(Falando aos acadmicos 87).

6. See Os sertes pages 79 and 17174, among other passages in which Euclidesaddresses the role of the So Francisco in dividing os dois Brasis (the twoBrazils), the North and the South.

7. Rolena Adorno and Mary Louise Pratt engage Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtins

concept of semiotic contact zones to theorize colonial power relations in GuamnPomaandImperial Eyes, respectively. Jesper Hoffmeyer provides a good overviewof biosemiotics in Signs of Meaning in the Universe.

8. The variations between collections of Euclidess writings on the Amazon can beconfusing since they were not edited by the author into a single work. Consult


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Barreto de Santanas Euclides da Cunha e a Amaznia for a clarifying chronologyof Euclidess travels and writing on the Amazon.

9. As Coelho de Paiva points out, this tension between emplacement and dislocationmay also emerge from the purposing of Rangels book as a literary investmentthat complemented his insertion into and ascent within the Amazons politicaleconomy (360).

10. Srgio Buarque de Holanda, Neide Gondim, Mary Louise Pratt, Neil Safier, andCandice Slater have all studied this relationship in depth. I use the term landscapehere to describe an environment codified within human culture, what Daniels andCosgrove describe as a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring,or symbolising surroundings (1).

11. Consult Buarque de Holandas Viso do paraso regarding the colonial process ofanalogizing the New World to Old World models. See Pratts Imperial Eyeson theuse of scientific naturalism as a universalizing mechanism at the service ofneocolonialism, although Safier takes issue with Pratts position, arguing thatknowledge emerged from a broad narrative interaction involving multiple sites ofcollection and codification (1415).

12. See pages 2223 and 3536 of Pratts Imperial Eyes and pages 67 of SafiersMeasuring the New Worldregarding how naturalism was put to work at the serviceof European nationalism as an instrument of empire.

13. See my National Nature and Ecologies of Abjection regarding the positioning ofthe coastal Mata Atlntica as a national paradise in contrast to the interior sertes,whose differences were represented using tropes of abjection.

14. All translations are my own unless I note otherwise.15. Wallace and Hart are cited on page 101 ofAmaznia.16. See Euclidess introduction to Rangels Inferno Verde, page 27, and Rangels O

Tapar, page 39.17. See, for instance, Klaus Ploniens study of the appropriation of mythology

associated with the Rhine in the construction of German nationality in GermanysRiver.

18. See the fifth chapter of Hoffmeyers Signs of Meaning regarding the concept ofsemiotic freedom. He argues that many life forms, not only humans, are capableof interpreting environmental cues and other species behavior in ways that are notalways predetermined by their genetic disposition (a central dogma of modernbiology). The concept is pertinent here because Euclides and Rangel insist that theenvironment determines the disposition of the national subject.

19. In chapter four of Land of Metaphorical Desires, Pedro Maligo argues that themodernistas extend Euclidess and Rangels project to nominalize the Amazon inorder to control it, substituting myth for empiricism where naturalism failed. I argue,however, that the modernistas were more interested in undefining the nation thanredefining it through mythical discourse; in this sense, the Amazon served as foil tothe nation rather than an object of knowledge.

20. Lcia S discusses in depth the inevitability of reading Macunama within anationalistic framework as well as the frustrations it presents to such projects (3540).

21. See the epistolary preface to Urucungo(1932), 197.


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