Amazonia: A Laboratory for Fiction by Camilo Jaramillo A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literatures in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Natalia Brizuela, Chair Professor Candace Slater Professor Ivone del Valle Professor Kent Pucket Summer 2016 Abstract Amazonia: A Laboratory for Fiction by Camilo Jaramillo Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literatures University of California, Berkeley Professor Natalia Brizuela, Chair Amazonia: A Laboratory for Fiction, analyzes the process and the forms through which Amazonia became a literary topic in the twentieth century. This dissertation proposes that the emergence of modern literature about the region articulates a distrust of the discourses and practices of imperial and neo-colonial territorial apprehension. It proposes the study of a regional tradition, looking at Hispanic and Brazilian texts in dialogue, and it focuses on the self- referential practices of this tradition. By doing so, this dissertation claims that Amazonia has served as a laboratory of representation and fiction that has contributed to the transformation and evolution of the Latin American novel. Ultimately, what is at stake in this research is the emergence of modern literature as a means to destabilize the imageries and practices that have forced Amazonia’s integration into processes of modernization. To this extent, this dissertation is an inquiry into the relationship between aesthetics, science, and politics, and constitutes a critique of History. It intervenes in debates on theory of the novel, postcolonial studies, and eco- criticism. The first chapter shows how Euclides da Cunha’s À margem da história (1909) forges a new national language informed by science and poetics that ultimately creates a new imagery of the region as an inapprehensible space. Da Cunha’s essays inaugurate a literary tradition that the “novelas de la selva” further develop by continuing to challenge the modes through which it has been portrayed. To this extent, the second chapter focuses on how José Eustasio Rivera’s La vorágine (1924) questions the domestication of nature rendered by the aesthetic of modernismo and stages a crisis of representation from which Amazonia surfaces as a disorienting and unconquerable site. The creation of the novel La vorágine itself is the outcome. Rivera’s novel consolidates the modern literature of the region as a self-referencing tradition that underscores its own aesthetic practices, becoming a site that debates and questions the discursive constructs through which the Amazon has been imagined. Following this, the third chapter studies how Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos (1953) constructs the “selva” as an artifice through a mechanism of quotation of previous texts like La vorágine, thus generating a critical gap between the text and the “real” geographical referent. The fourth chapter analyzes Milton Hatoum’s Órfãos do Eldorado (2008) as a critique of the inscription of Amazonia into western “civilizing” discourses of History through the idea of memory as a means to reconstruct the ruins of the present left by modernization. 1 Para mim, a Amazônia é o mapa de um labirinto infinito. Cidade Ilhada. Hatoum Orientarme por la selva de la lengua El entenado. Saer i Table of Contents Introduction: Amazonia, a Laboratory for Fiction. (i) Chapter One. “Uma miragem de territorio”: The Emergence of a Literary Amazonia in Euclides da Cunha’s À margem da história. (1) Chapter Two. On Getting Lost: Re-Writing the Experience of Space in La Vorágine. (48) Chapter Three. The Jungle as an Act of Fiction: Or How the Jungle Became Literature in Los pasos perdidos. (89) Chapter Four. Amazonia in Ruins: Nostalgia and Critique in Órfãos do Eldorado. (133) Works Cited (174) Cited Maps (185) ii Introduction: Amazonia, a Laboratory for Fiction In his 1935 novel Canaima, Venezuelan writer Rómulo Gallegos delivers some of the most astonishing images of the Latin American “selva” [jungle]. Much more than a background or even a character, the “selva” appears as an overwhelming and powerful force. ¡Árboles, árboles, árboles! Una sola bóveda verde sobre miríadas de columnas afelpadas de musgos, tiñosas de líquenes, cubiertas de parásitas y trepadoras, trenzadas y estranguladas por bejucos tan gruesos como troncos de árboles. ¡Barreras de árboles, murallas de árboles, macizos de árboles! Siglos perennes de la raíz hasta los copos, fuerzas descomunales en la absoluta inmovilidad aparente, torrente de sabia corriendo en silencio. Verdes abismos callados… Bejucos, marañas… ¡Árboles! ¡Árboles! (119)1 The image, excessive, repetitive, and even exasperating, forces us to experience the “selva” as an act of language: we are forced to replicate the recurrence of the trees through the repetition of the word árboles, and to entangle our tongues with the words trepadoras, trenzadas, and estranguladas. It also invites us to imagine the location: trees, everywhere, filling the space, claiming it their own, forming a vault held by wooden columns covered in lichens and strangled by other vegetation, forming an impenetrable and hostile barrier of green. Through its perennial and colossal interconnected system, albeit seeming still and quiet, a “torrente de sabia” circulates within. It is like the currents of the sea or like the winds in the atmosphere; forces that alienate humanity in the size of their power and the mystery of its existence. It is sublime, both astonishing and exasperating. It numbs human understanding: “¡Árboles! ¡Árboles! ¡Árboles!... La exasperante monotonía de la variedad infinita, lo abrumador de lo múltiple y uno hasta el embrutecimiento” (119).2 Added to this, there is the irrational attraction in beholding it and being part of it: La obsesión de contemplarla a toda hora, de no poder apartar la mirada del monótono espectáculo de un árbol y otro y otro, ¡todos iguales, todos erguidos, todos inmóviles, todos callados!... La obsesión de internarse por ellos, errante como un duende, despacio, en silencio, como quien crece… De marcharse totalmente, de entre los hombres y fuera de sí mismo, hasta perder la memoria de que alguna vez fue hombre y quedarse parado bajo el chorro de sol del calvero donde hierve la vida que ha de remplazar el gigante derribado, todo insensible y mudo por dentro, la mitad hacia abajo, oscuro, creciendo en raíces, la mitad hacia arriba, despacio, porque habría cien años para asomarse por encima de las copas más altas y otros cientos para estarse allí, quieto, oyendo el rumor del viento que nunca termina de pasar. (136-137)3 1 “Trees, trees, trees! A single green canopy over myriad columns velvet with moss, scabby with lichens, covered with parasites and climbers, braided and choked by lianas as thick as the trunk of trees. Barriers of trees, walls of trees, great masses of trees! Endless centuries between root and crown, extraordinary forces beneath the apparent absolute immobility, torrents of sap running in silence. Green silent abysses…. Lianas, thickets… Trees, trees! (173). All English translations of Canaima are by Will Kirkland (1996). 2 “Trees! Trees! Trees!... The irritating monotony of infinite variety; the overwhelming manifestation of multiplicity and singularity to a point of stupefaction” (173). 3 “The obsession to contemplate it constantly, not to be able to take his eyes of one tree after another after another, monotonous, all of them the same, all of them erect, all of them unmoving, all of them silent! The obsession with disappearing into them, of wandering like a spirit of the jungle, slowly and silently, like something growing… Of leaving completely, of getting away from all men, and from himself, until loosing the memory of having once been a man and coming to a stop in the shaft of light in the clearing where the life that will replace the fallen giant is swarming, everything inside him mute and without feeling, one half spreading downward, dark, growing roots, the other half upward, slowly, because it would take one hundred years to climb above the highest crowns and another hundred to be there, quiet, listening to the noise of the wind that never stopped blowing” (198). iii The contemplation of the “selva” becomes an obsession; more than that, becoming part of it turns into an urgency: a mystic return to nature. Within its trees, man loses his dimension and his time; he smoothly and quietly detaches from his humanity and transcends into some other kind of existence. He experiences the limits of the intelligibility of the world that surrounds him, encountering like this a form of transcendence. Not only is he in a place out of time, but he is also in a place of silence, where language seems to expire. No wonder, then, that the protagonist of Canaima constantly echoes Hamlet by asking “Se es o no se es?”4 as if understanding the limits and threats of his existence. And at times there is also the “selva” pushing him away, defending itself from the intruder, violently marking the limits between the human who dares to wander and the reign of the woods. When no one is watching, it dusts off its immobility and exercises its own power: “Negros árboles hostiles que por momentos parecen ponerse en marcha sigilosa para cerrar aquel hueco que abrieron los hombres intrusos, a fin de que todo amanezca selva tupida otra vez” (121).5 * So there it is. The “selva” as a force, as a metaphysical frontier, as the reign outside human time and place, bigger than man’s humanity. The “selva” as an uncontrollable entity that pushes humans away. The “selva” as a repetition, as a vault, as a barrier, as an impenetrable web, as a torrent that circulates. The “selva” as an abysm, as silence, as darkness, as an insensible entity bigger than life, at the limits of human cognition and language.