Euclides da Cunha was a military engineer by profession and by curiosity and learning also a botanist, a geologist, geographer, a social historian, and an inspired, inflamed observer. His mind is a thicket of interests and ideas and if some of them, such as “atavistic traits” as the result of racial mixture, come out of the science of the time, he transcends his own categories by humane, radical, obsessive genius. The extraordinary landscape of northern Brazil, the fantastical environment, and the people of the backlands who live in “unconscious servitude” to nature and isolation seem to appear to him as a demand, an intellectual and emotional challenge he must find his energetic art to give word to and to honor.
His “vaqueiros” and “jagunços” of the north are men of a different breed from the “gauchos” of the south, who live under the “friendly” natural abundance of the pampas. The gaucho “does not know the horrors of the drought and those cruel combats with the dry-parched earth . . . the grievous sight of calcined and absolutely impoverished soil, drained dry by the burning suns of the Equator.”
This backland epic with its “philosophy” of environment and biologic predisposition is an unrolling landscape of collective psychology, of Brazilian temperament with its ebb of inertia and flow of primitive guerrilla and politically sanctioned violence and disorderly bravery. The book gives the sense of a summing up, a conclusion of a part of history that nevertheless stands amidst the unpredictability of Brazil, an astonishing country so peculiar that its inclusion in the phrase “Latin-American” never seems entirely appropriate.
Euclides lived to be only forty-three years old. In 1909 he was shot and killed by an army officer. Putnam’s introduction says that the assassination is thought to have come about “as the result of a grim domestic tragedy that rendered the victim’s life a tormented one.” In that he leads back to Antônio Maciel whose wife ran off with a police officer and in so doing created the wandering Conselheiro of the backlands tragedy. Cunha’s appearance also, from contemporary accounts, reminds one of the “crude gnostic” on his travels: “An intimate acquaintance tells us of his disdain for clothes, of his face with its prominent cheekbones, his glance now keen and darting and now far away and absorbed, and his hair which fell down over his forehead, all of which made him look altogether like an aborigine, causing him to appear as a stranger in the city, as one who at each moment was conscious of the attraction of the forest.”
At the time of his death, Euclides da Cunha was at work on another book about the backlands. Its title was to be “Paradise Lost.”
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The magnificent Rio landscape of sea and thick, jutting rocks, which Lévi-Strauss thought of as “stumps left at random in the four corners of a toothless mouth.” Like Os Sertões, Tristes Tropiques is a classical journey of discovery, a quest for the past and for the realization of self. It is also in many ways a discovery of Brazil as an idea. Speaking of the towns in the state of Paraná Lévi-Strauss writes:
And then there was that strange element in the evolution of so many towns: the drive to the west which so often leaves the eastern part of the towns in poverty and dereliction. It may be merely the expression of that cosmic rhythm which has possessed mankind from the earliest times and springs from the unconscious realization that to move with the sun is positive, and to move against it is negative; the one stands for order, the other for disorder.
Lévi-Strauss left France in 1934 and went to teach at the university in São Paulo and from there to travel into the interior of Brazil in order to pursue his anthropological studies of various Indian tribes. He was ambitious, abstract, learned, in exile, and violently open, as one may speak of a violence of inspiration and energy coming when the mind and spirit meet the object of dedication. This French mind met not only the Indians of the interior but the obstinate, dazed fact of Brazil. And immediately Lévi-Strauss conveys to us that sense of things standing in an almost amorous stillness. Standing still—or when moving somehow arduously turning in a circle that sets the foreign mind on edge, agitates the thought of possibility, of loss and renewal.
Tristes Tropiques, written fifteen years after Lévi-Strauss left Brazil for the last time, has the tone of a memorial. It is a work of anthropology, grandly speculative and imaginative in the encounter with the Caduveo, the Bororo, the Nambikwara. And the anthropology lives like a kernel in the shell of Brazil. The search for metaphor, the weight of doleful contradiction; these tell you exactly where you are.
In the town of Nalike, on the grassy plateau of the Mato Grosso, Lévi-Strauss studies the body painting, leather and pottery designs of the Caduveo Indians. The style of representation—hierarchical, still, symbolic in the manner of playing cards—is of a striking sophistication and inevitably calls forth a sense of “kinship” with primitive styles far away in time and place. These remarkable chapters, so intense in their contemplative beauty, are aspects of scientific investigation—and beyond that always is the presence of an absorbed, French genius, living out, in a hut next to a witch doctor, his exemplary personal history and intellectual voyage.
Great indeed is the fascination of this culture, whose dream-life was pictured on the faces and bodies of its queens, as if, in making themselves up, they figured a Golden Age they would never know in reality. And yet as they stand naked before us, it is as much the mysteries of that Golden Age as their own bodies that are unveiled.
The Mysteries of the Golden Age. When Lévi-Strauss traveled to Brazil in 1934 and later, fleeing the Nazi occupation in 1941, he found, one might say, in Brazil his genuine autobiographical moment, found it as if it were an object hidden there, perhaps a rock with its ornate inscriptions and elaborate declamations waiting to be translated into personal style. The book is a deciphering of many things. One of them is a magical and profound answering of the descriptive and explicatory demand Brazil has at certain times made upon complex talents like Lévi-Strauss and Euclides da Cunha.
What is created in Tristes Tropiques is a work of science, history, and a rational prose poetry, springing out of the multifariousness of the landscape, its baffling adaption or maladaption to the human beings crowding along the coast or surviving in clusters elsewhere. Lévi-Strauss was only twenty-six when he first went to Brazil. The conditions are brilliantly right. He is in a new world and it is ready to be his, to be named, described. The newness, freshness, the exhilaration of the blank pages are like the map of Brazil waiting to be filled. When the passage grates and jars, it is still material. Two French exiles in their decaying, sloppy fazenda on the edge of the Caduveo region; a glass of maté; the old European avenues of Rio; the town of Goiânia: he speculates, observes, re-creates in a waterfall of beautiful images.
It is the brilliance of his writing at this period that is Lévi-Strauss’s deepest preparation for his journey through the Amazon basin and the upland jungles. He is pursuing his professional studies, but he is also creating literature. The pause before the actual writing was begun, when he was forty-seven, is a puzzle; somehow he had to become forty-seven before the demand that was the inspiration of his youth presented itself once more. It was stored away, still clear, shining and immediate. Often he quotes from the notes he made on the first trip and they, perfect and intense, seem to have brought back the mood, and the mode also, and to have carried the parts written later along on the same pure, uncluttered flow.
A luminous moment recorded by pocket-lamp as he sat near the fire with the dirty, diseased, miserable men and women of the Nambikwara tribe. He sees these people, lying naked on the bare earth, trying to still their hostility and fearfulness at the end of the day. They are a people “totally unprovided for” and a wave of sympathy flows through him as he sees them cling together, man and woman, in the only support they have against misery and against their “meditative melancholy.” The Nambikwara are suddenly transfigured by a pure, benign light:
In one and all there may be glimpsed a great sweetness of nature, a profound nonchalance, an animal satisfaction as ingenuou
s as it is charming, and, beneath all this, something that came to be recognized as one of the most moving and authentic manifestations of human tenderness.
Tristes Tropiques is not a record of a life so much as a record of the moment of self-discovery. At times, in a place “few have set eyes on” and among uncharted images and decimated tribes, he will feel the past stab him with thoughts of the French countryside or the music of Chopin. This is the wound of the journey, the cut of one place against another. But there is nothing of love, of family, of his personal history in France. At the same time the work is soaked in passionate remembrance and it does speak of a kind of love—that is, the love that determines the great projects of a great man’s youth. It is the classical journey again, and taken at the happy moment. Every step has its drama; all has meaning and the shimmer of creation; the mornings and evenings, the passage from one place to another are fixed in a memorial light.
And it is no wonder that Tristes Tropiques begins: “Travels and travelers are two things I loathe . . .” and ends, “Farewell to savages, then, farewell to journeying!” The mood of the journey had been one of youth and yet, because it is Brazil, the composition is a nostalgic one. At the end there is a great sadness. The tropics are tristes in themselves and the traveler is triste. “Why did he come to such a place? And to what end? What, in point of fact, is an anthropological investigation?”
Lévi-Strauss was in his youth, moving swiftly in his first important exploration; and yet what looms out of the dark savannahs is the knowledge that so much has already been lost. Even among the unrecorded, the irrecoverable and the lost are numbing. The wilderness, the swamps, the little encampments on the borders, the overgrown roads that once led to a mining camp; even this, primitive, still, and static, gives off its air of decline, deterioration, displacement. The traveler seldom gets there on time. The New World is rotting at its birth. In the remotest part, there too, a human bond with the past has been shattered. Tristes Tropiques tells of the anguish the breakage may bring to a single heart.
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Breakage—you think of it when the plane lets you down into the bitter fantasy called Brasília. This is the saddest city in the world and the main interest of it lies in its being completely unnecessary. It testifies to the Brazilian wish to live without memory and to the fatigue every citizen of Rio and São Paulo must feel at having always to carry with him those alien Brazilian others: the unknowable, accusing kin of the northeast, the backlands, the favelas. If you send across miles and miles the stones and steel, carry most of it by airplane, and build a completely new place to stand naked, blind, and blank for your country, you are speaking of the unbearable burden of the past. Brazilians have more than once moved the capitals that stand for collective history; they shifted from Bahia to Rio and now to Brasília. This new passage, the crossing, was a stark and at the same time manic gesture. It is a sloughing off, thinning out, abandoning, moving on like some restless settler in the veld seeking himself. At last, in Brasília there is the void.
It is colder, drearier in 1974 than in 1962. Building, building everywhere so that one feels this prodigal people can produce new structures as simply as the national cuisine. In every direction, on the horizon, in the sky, the buildings stand, high, neat, blank, and below cruder housing, called “superblocks.” Everything leads to a highway and there are, strictly speaking, no streets and thus no town or corner life. A soulless place, a prison, a barracks. There are no streets, you remind yourself even as you keep looking for them, as if, as a foreigner, you had misunderstood. At every turn there is a roadway, wide, smooth, filled with cars. Nothing to do with the sad tropics, with the heart of history. Still, this city without memory is the dead center. Everything comes from this clean tomb, a city that only can have been conceived in order to be dramatically photographed from an airplane.
So Brasília has its space, its contours, its placement and design at a removal; that is, in the sky. Down below in the red dust, in the sunshine, it is yet another mysterious dark entrance. The purpose of the new capital, away from the coastal cities, was to open up the country, to make a whole of this very large “little Portugal.” This city, pure idea, coldly dreamed, a modern folly, seems to represent only itself, another contradiction. It could not perhaps be otherwise, for it is still Brazil about which Cunha wrote, “There is nothing like it, when it comes to the play of antitheses.”
1974
SENSE OF THE PRESENT
GUILT
DO YOU know a brooding Bulstrode? Guilt, central to classical fiction, was the secret of dramatic natures who found themselves greedy for something and, when seizing it or annihilating obstruction, were nevertheless conscious of their usurpation and its violation of others. This “type”—greedy, impatient, violent, and as the saying goes, “filled with guilt”—lives in a condition beyond irony, the attitude that sweetens guilt and alters it to absurdity or, most frequently, rotten luck.
The private and serious drama of guilt is not often a useful one for fiction today and its disappearance, following perhaps the disappearance from life, appears as a natural, almost unnoticed relief, like some of the challenging illnesses wiped out by drugs or vaccines. The figures who look out at us on the evening news—embezzlers, crooks, liars, murderers—are indeed furiously inconvenienced by the trap that has sprung on the free expression of will. It seems unfair, their chagrined countenance indicates, that they should be menaced by arithmetical lapses, by their natural, self-protecting gun shots from the window of the getaway car, by insurance policies cashed with impugning haste, by the follies of accomplices. And how rapidly does the startled glance of the accused shift to the suspicious, outraged grimace of the wronged.
The ruin of one’s own life as the result of transgression is punishment, but it is not guilt, not even remorse. What sustains the ego in its unhappy meeting with consequence, the meeting that was so felicitous for drama and fiction? The “popular” response to error, crime, bad faith in which our own actions are involved, is paranoia. Bad luck, betrayal, enemies, the shifting sands of the self-interest of accusers, briberies, lies: these indeed enter the mind with blinding rapidity. The culprit is carrying a thousand mitigations in his pocket, whether his delinquency be legal or merely having to do with offenses in personal relations. When he is being judged, he is judging, and not himself, but the tangle of obstructions oppressing him. He rages about in a crowd of others, saying that he is not alone; individuals and abstract society are whoring about, shooting, thieving, and going scot-free. You can’t go to heaven on other people’s sins, we used to say. Well, why not?
CHARACTER
The literature of paranoia is naturally different from the literature of guilt. A wild state of litigious anxiety slides, as if on ice, into the spot held by the ethical. Free-floating, drifting in his absorption and displacement, the paranoid is not a character at all. Most of all he comes to resemble a person with a cerebral stroke and shows peculiar, one-sided losses, selective blocks and impairments, unpredictable gaps.
Nathalie Sarraute said in a lecture that she could not imagine writing a novel about, for instance, a miser, because there is no such thing as a miser. Human beings with their little bundle of traits and their possession of themselves as a synthesis. Yes, they have vanished because they are not what they seemed to be and least of all to themselves, which confuses and undermines the confidence of the observer.
The coquette, the spendthrift, the seducer, the sensitive were points of being, monarchies of self, ruled over by passions and conditions. How smoothly the traits led those who possessed them, led them trotting along the path of their lives, to the end of cause and effect, to transgressions that did not fade but were still there at the last stop. This was known as plot.
When the young man in The Mayor of Casterbridge comes into town and decides in his misery to sell his wife and daughter we know what is ahead. He will succeed, he will be mayor, and the wife and daughter will return, borne on the wheels of plot, the engine
of destiny, and he will be ruined. As he says, in the midst of gathering consequences, “I am to suffer, I perceive.”
For us the family could very well vanish into its fate, which is expressed in the phrase, “making a new life.” Still, mayors fall, the past is discovered by the opposition and we have our plots—in the conspiratorial sense. Ruin is another matter. It becomes harder and harder to be ruined; for that one must be a dedicated fool. For the well-placed there are always sympathizers. Through support, flattery, and the wonderful plasticity of self-analysis, paranoia enters the wrongdoer’s soul and convinces him of his own innocence as if it had been confirmed by the accounting of St. Peter at the gates of Heaven.
Fiction, taking this in, shrugs, and while a shrug is not as satisfactory as ruin in the aesthetic sense, it will have to do. Aesthetics, Kierkegaard said, “is a courteous and sentimental science, which knows of more expedients than a pawnbroker.”
POSSIBILITIES
Contrivance is offensive to the contemporary novelist and it bears the further strain of being impossible to make use of without full awareness. Awareness turns contrivance into a self-conscious jest. But without it the novelist is hard put to produce what everyone insists on—a novel. It is easy to imagine that all possibilities are open, that it is only the medium and not life itself that destroys the branches one by one. Caprice, fashion, exhaustion, indulgence: these are what the novelist who has not produced a circular action of motive and resolution is accused of. Meanwhile he looks about, squinting, and he sees the self-parodying mirror and this is his present, now, in its clothes, make-up, with its dialogue, library of books read, his words, his memories of old spy stories, films, baseball scores, murders, revolutionaries, of Don Quixote to be rewritten, Snow White, and “all of this happened, more or less.”
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 28