Euclides da Cunha and the José de Alencar Tradition

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 The coexistence of two Brazils has persisted to this day in the Brazilian imaginary. A more recent example was Brazilian economist Edmar Bacha's coining the term Belíndia in 1974 to describe Brazil as a combination of modern and wealthy Belgium with backward and poor India.

2 For a perceptive and persuasive analysis of the theatricality of Os sertões, please consult Berthold Zilly's “A guerra como painel e espetáculo: a história encenada em Os sertões.”

3 Da Cunha's own statements point to an awareness of the fuzzy boundaries between science and literature, and preference for works that mixed genres. In a famous letter to critic José Veríssimo, da Cunha stated that “the writer of the future will necessarily be a polymath; and literary works will differ from strictly scientific ones only by virtue of a more delicate synthesis, which excludes the latter's insatiability for analyses and experiments” [my translation] (da Cunha 1996, II, 621).

4 “The word sertão has been used, in Brazil and in Portugal, to designate the ‘uncertain,’ the ‘unknown,’ the ‘remote,’ the ‘interior,’ the ‘uncultivated’ (both in the sense of uncultivated lands and primitive people), from a perspective opposed to the viewpoint of an observer who always sees himself as standing on the ‘certain,’ the ‘known,’ the ‘near,’ the ‘cultivated,’ that is, in a privileged place—in other words, in ‘civilization.’ It is one of these words that carry the mark, inside and out, of the process of colonization” (Teles 2002, 263, my translation).

5 Da Cunha is alluding, of course, to the monarchist uprising in the Vendée region against the French Revolution. Unlike in the earlier newspaper articles, when he mentions “Vendeia” in Os sertões, his tone is ironic: “Canudos was our Vendée” (da Cunha 2010, 169).

6 For a thoroughly original study of the motif of the mutable sertão in Guimarães Rosa's works, consult José Carlos Garbuglio's O mundo movente de Guimarães Rosa.

7 After the defeat of Canudos, da Cunha provides a more racially diverse portrait of its inhabitants, which subscribes to the official “fable of the three races.” In Samuel Putnam's translation, “there were few whites or pure Negroes among them; an unmistakable family likeness in all these faces pointed to the perfect fusion of three races" (da Cunha 1944, 473). Da Cunha's use of the word family in this context establishes a further link with Alencar, whose novels constructed the Brazilian nation as a family. Indeed, the emphasis on the family as the model for a nation where liberalism existed more in theory than in practice is congruent with the patriarchal structure of nineteenth-century Brazilian society. As Thomas E. Skidmore has indicated, “however enlightened [Emperor] Pedro II might have been, he stood at the apex of a hierarchical society based on human enslavement. . . . An authoritarian structure, however ameliorated in practice, extended down into the family system, where the male head of the household enjoyed a power over the women and children which could border on sadism” (Skidmore 1993, 5). For a more detailed analysis of this topic, please see my article “Literature and Citizenship: From Euclides da Cunha to Marcos Dias.”

8 See an English translation of this famous passage in this issue of Review.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Luiz Fernando Valente

Luiz Fernando Valente is Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University. He is the author of História e ficção: convergências e contrastes (2002), Mundivivências: leituras comparativas de Guimarães Rosa (2011), and dozens of book chapters and journal articles about Brazilian literature, comparative literature, and Brazilian intellectual history.