Biopolitics, Violence, and Nation in Blood Meridian, Martín Fierro, and Os Sertões

Home , Meridian (horse), True Blood (season 3)

States of Exception on American Frontiers: Biopolitics, Violence, and Nation in Blood Meridian, Martín Fierro, and Os Sertões

Heath Wing, MA and BA

A Dissertation

Spanish

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Approved

John Beusterien Chair of Committee

Sara Spurgeon

Antônio Ladeira

Earl Fitz

Julián Pérez

Mark Sheridan Dean of the Graduate School

August, 2015

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would first like to thank the members of my dissertation committee. To the director of my dissertation, John Beusterien, who contributed to my interest in the US

Southwest, and who encouraged me to specialize in Comparative Literature. A special thanks goes to Antônio Ladeira, who introduced me to the beauty of the Portuguese language. To Earl Fitz, I thank you for so wisely suggesting I include Os sertões in my project. I also greatly appreciate Sara Spurgueon’s expertise and help regarding Blood

Meridian. And many thanks to Julián Pérez, a man well-versed in everything gaucho.

I owe a special thanks to Lynne Fallwell for tirelessly helping me during the application process of all those fellowships. Without her input and help with proposals, this project would not have become what it is. To my friends in Brazil and

Argentina, I cannot express my gratitude enough. First to Décio Torres from UFBA, I am grateful for all the help navigating Salvador and the libraries. I will never forget the trip out to the sertão. You are always welcome in West Texas. To Gloria Chicote, who so graciously received me in La Plata and made sure I had access to any sources needed. And finally, a highly deserved thank you to the Wallau family in Santana do

Livramento: to Marcelo and Carlos, as well as to Rodrigo and the most gaucha of them all, Ana, and to grandfather Carlos Huberto Wallau, who entertained me with wonderful stories about Rio Grande do Sul from his home in Porto Alegre. I thank

“y’all” for taking me into your fazenda and letting me see how real gauchos get work done.

ii Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

I would like to also thank Professors Carmen Pereiera, Sara Guengerich, Idoia

Elola, and Curtis Bauer, who in some way or another, during my studies at Texas

Tech, helped shape my education: whether it meant a tough class that demanded excellence, very useful advice, or attending my first academic presentation, your efforts certainly did not go unnoticed or unappreciated.

Last but certainly not least, I am grateful to my parents and family, who have provided nothing but support and love in every harebrained thing I do.

iii Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... II

ABSTRACT ...... VI

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER I CORMAC MCCARTHY’S BLOOD MERIDIAN: STATE RACISM, STATE OF

EXCEPTION, AND THE SOVEREIGN FOOL ...... 27 1.1 On Violence ...... 29 1.2 US Frontier Myth ...... 37 1.3 Captain White and State Racism ...... 43 1.4 Secularized Theology ...... 55 1.5 The Sovereign Exception ...... 60 1.6 Creaturely Life ...... 72 1.7 The Sovereign Fool and Iustitium ...... 84 1.8 Leviathan’s Body of Corpses ...... 103

CHAPTER II STALKED BY THE WOLF: BANDITRY, THE CAMP, AND CREATURELY

SHAME IN JOSÉ HERNÁNDEZ’ MARTÍN FIERRO ...... 110 2.1 Voice and Body ...... 118 2.2 People and people ...... 128 2.3 The Levas as the Exception ...... 140 2.4 The Fortín as the Camp ...... 152 2.5 Creaturely Shame ...... 164 2.6 The Wolfman Bandit ...... 175

CHAPTER III BRAZIL’S STRUGGLE FOR A BODY: EUCLIDES DA CUNHA’S OS

SERTÕES AND GRIEVABLE LIFE ...... 187 3.1 Background ...... 200 3.2 Conselheiro and the Threefold Struggle for the Body ...... 206 3.3 Anthropology, Colonialism, and Eugenics ...... 227 3.4 Governmentality and State of Exception ...... 247

iv Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

3.5 Grievable Life ...... 259 3.6 The Original Banditry of War ...... 272

CONCLUSION ...... 288

NOTES ...... 291

WORKS CITED ...... 309

v Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

ABSTRACT

The primary focus of my research is in Comparative Literature. Through an analysis of landmark literary and journalistic works from an English, Spanish, and

Portuguese context, my dissertation focuses on frontier studies, biopolitics, state racism, and human rights. This project is concerned with nation-building in the

Americas and the processes by which the bodies of a population are sifted out, some integrated into the nation-state while others are made the exception, disposed of their rights and often violently excluded.

The geographical scope of my dissertation project is inter-American, and concerned with nineteenth century state violence on American frontier spaces as represented in national literatures from Argentina, Brazil, and the United States. To give context to my comparative reading of Martín Fierro (1872, José Hernández), Os

Sertões (1902, Euclides da Cunha), and Blood Meridian (1984, Cormac McCarthy), I interpret the nineteenth century frontier spaces in these works as border regions not just between civilization and so called “barbarism” (or between sovereign law and natural law), but also as thresholds that mark the transition from colonial methods of violence to those of the new and emerging American nation-states of modernity.

During their period of expansion, these three nation-states rationalized the extirpation of certain ethnic and social groups through discourses based on exceptionalist and positivist ideologies: in the United States, “Manifest Destiny” argued democracy’s divine purpose to “civilize the savage,” whereas in South America, “civilization and

vi Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 barbarism” was the political discourse that endorsed civilization's “rightful” dominion over barbarism.

Relying on what has been observed by scholars such as Hannah Arendt,

Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe, Roberto Esposito, and Judith

Butler, I acknowledge that colonial practices of violence would, at the cusp of modernity, be integrated into the process of nation-building on the basis of anthropological and biological discourses of exclusion, often determined by race. In the Americas, nowhere was this more evident than on nineteenth century frontiers, where new nation-states endeavored to complete the colonial project of the European empires from which they had become independent. In search of national identity, such efforts of conquest would mean certain bodies would be included in the nation- building project, while others would be excluded from citizenry.

Whether the government orchestrated gaucho and Indian conflicts portrayed in

Martín Fierro, the military massacre of the Canudos village in Os Sertões, or the legalized scalp-hunting of Apaches in Blood Meridian, my comparative reading of these works highlights the couplet between the life of marginalized frontier subjects and sovereign violence. Ultimately, I conclude that this relationship is one of exception, where excluded political life is caught up in a space of suspended law imposed by the sovereign. Frontiers in these three works are thus portrayed as spaces of legalized lawlessness, or states of exception, where their narratives and the very life therein are brought about, moved even, by the sovereign exception.

vii Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

INTRODUCTION

My literary inquiry into the nature of state-sanctioned violence on American frontiers, as represented in Blood Meridian, Martín Fierro, and Os sertões, can be said to adhere to an inter-American perspective. Indeed, when I use the term American frontier, I am not simply referring to the U.S. American experience in the nineteenth century American West, save the experiences and literary representations of

Americans on both the North and South American continents. More specifically, my approach to this topic is concerned with the geographic regions of the US and Mexico borderlands, the Argentine pampas, and the backlands of Brazil known as the sertão.

On a broad scale, my work contributes to the inter-American project concerning the commonality that the people of the Americas share, beginning with pre-Colombian times, to the colonial period and into the modern era of today. The historiographical aspects of the inter-American project can be attributed to Herbert E.

Bolton and his Wider Horizons of American History (1939).1 On a literary playing field, we find inter-American perspectives on literature to be in full swing, beginning with the anthology Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? (1990), and most certainly we must consider Earl E. Fitz’ extensive bibliography dedicated to inter-

American literature such as his Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American

Literature in a Comparative Context (1991), and more recently his Translation and the Rise of Inter-American Literature (2007), written with Elizabeth Lowe.

1 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

On the other hand, I am specifically concerned with bringing into focus a perspective on inter-American frontier literature through a comparative lens. The topic of nineteenth century American frontiers, both on a historical as well as a literary plane, has also received much attention. Bolton himself, in all his inquiry into the collective experience of inter-continental Americans, could not do so without first facing the topic of frontiers, as his The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old

Florida and the Southwest (1921) so indicates.2 Undoubtedly, Bolton reminds us that the first political border established by Europeans in the Americas was demarcated by the once Spanish empire, which extended from Florida to the American Southwest and down to the Patagonia of Argentina. This topic has been taken up more recently in the anthology Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern

Edges of the Spanish Empire (1998), which provides a comparative approach to eighteenth and nineteenth century Latin American frontiers throughout North and

South America.

Pertinent to my study is Where Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin American

History (1994), edited by David J. Weber and Jane M. Rausch. This anthology considers frontiers throughout Latin America as well as the United States. Though frontiers in Latin America differ from one region to the next and, most certainly, contrast with the frontier experience of the United States, there are still many common threads to be found. Of the American nation-states as we know them today, Argentina,

Brazil, and the United States are the three whose foundation for nation-building and national character is born out of their nineteenth century experience of frontier

2 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 expansion and conquest.3 During this period of expansion, these three nation-states rationalized the extirpation of certain ethnic and social groups (often indigenous) through discourses based on exceptionalist and positivist ideologies. Such ideologies justified the notion of the “racial superiority” of those economically and technologically more powerful: in the United States, “Manifest Destiny” argued democracy’s divine purpose to “civilize the savage,” whereas in South America,

“civilization and barbarism” was the political discourse that endorsed civilization's

“rightful” dominion over barbarism. As Weber and Rausch explain in their introduction, “Indeed, in parts of Argentina and Brazil the similarities to the North

American experience seem as remarkable as the differences” (xiii). Taking into consideration both the similarities and differences, it is precisely the frontier as the defining space for nation-building in US American, Argentine, and Brazilian literatures that concerns me. More directly, I am interested in the political path of frontier violence that leads to the founding of a nation, in conjunction with the expression of that violence in these national literatures. In short, my concern is with frontiers as a political space for the sifting out of bodies, of those who will form part of a nation from those that will be excluded.

To date, academics have correlated the epic military struggles in the US and

Mexico borderlands with the Apache and Comanche to the violent conflicts between the Argentine government and the Araucanians of the pampas.4 Several scholars have even observed the Argentine ex-president Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s nineteenth century Indian policies in view of the influence of the United States’ own policies of

3 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 extermination and displacement, as well as his visits to the US.5 Many have also highlighted the tradition of banditry and violence in Latin-American literature and its ties to nation-building, connecting Argentine literary texts like Martín Fierro with other Latin-American literatures such as Brazil's Os sertões.6 Undoubtedly Euclides da

Cunha, the author of Os sertões, had read Sarmiento’s Facundo and was highly influenced by the notion of civilización y barbarie.7 Likewise, Samuel Putman has identified the nineteenth century North American extirpation of Native Americans as the event in U.S. history that most relates to the Canudos Massacre in Os sertões.8

Two-way parallels are typically drawn in ways that cross borders either from Spanish- speaking Latin America to the United States, or between Spanish and Portuguese- speaking Latin America. Rarely are all three borders crossed as my project proposes to accomplish.

Furthermore, when we speak of frontiers of the United States, Argentina, and

Brazil, we ultimately must take into account the rural lifestyles of American cattlemen and their role as a national archetype.9 I am speaking of the American cowboy who will come to occupy nationalist themes in dime novels and America cinema; the gaucho of gauchesque literature in Argentina; and lastly, the jagunço of the Brazilian sertão, who is proclaimed the bedrock of a nation in Os sertões, and who will continue as a common figure in Brazilian literature, most notably in João Guimarães Rosa’s masterpiece Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956).10 The inter-cultural connection of diverse

American cowmen has not been missed by academics, as Richard Slatta’s Comparing

Cowboys and Frontiers (1997) verifies; nor has this figure’s persistence in literature

4 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 gone unnoticed. We may consider, for example, Edward Tinker and his The Horsemen of the Americas and the Literature They Inspired (1967).

Yet I recognize that my comparative approach to distinct American frontier literatures first requires a definition of frontier. In the context of my project, and the nineteenth century Americas, I suggest that frontier implies various interconnected definitions on numerous planes. First, temporally, nineteenth century frontiers marked a threshold, indeed, a frontier itself that is at once in flux between colonialism and modernity; a transition, I would argue, from where the former colonial practices of subversion and violence so common to frontiers spaces shift (or evolve) to those methods and technologies of state violence so predominant in modernity. Indeed, we may say that modernity’s apparatuses of state violence are only a continuation and reconfiguration of those of colonial times, as maintained by Hannah Arendt.11 I would thus argue that nineteenth century frontiers in the Americas mark this transition.

Second, socially, frontiers in the Americas can be understood as a point where two or more cultures or peoples converge, interact economically, exchange with one another culturally, religiously and, at times, even violently. Finally, on a political plane,

American frontiers imply that inscrutable space where so-called civilization converts into barbarism, often denoting the violent encroachment of civilization into barbarism’s “dark” regions. Thus it is a space where state military campaigns are carried out against the supposedly savage or backwards frontier peoples, against those whose bodies are marked as incompatible with modernity and the nation-states’

5 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 conceptualization of citizenry, be it the United States’ conquering of the West, Roca’s

Conquista del desierto in Argentina, or the Canudos War in Brazil.

It is within this understanding of frontier that I place the violent settings found in Blood Meridian, Martín Fierro, and Os sertões. Indeed, each work’s setting corresponds to the abovementioned definitions of frontier in terms of the temporal, social, and certainly political aspects. This is especially true regarding frontiers as politically created military spaces for violence and extirpation: Blood Meridian correlates to the US empirical expansion into the western frontier, Martín Fierro to

Argentina’s conquest of the desierto, and Os sertões as a witness to the carnage of the

Canudos War.

Ultimately, these three works may be categorized as commentaries on the discourse of “civilization and barbarism.” Earl Fitz, in his work on inter-American literature, identifies the conflict between civilization and barbarism as one of New

World literature’s most definitive themes, persisting ever since European discovery of the Americas in 1492, and ranging from Canadian to Brazilian literature.12 However, I would also state that in the case of Blood Meridian, Martín Fierro, and Os sertões, we encounter literary works that in some way or another critique and question the barbarous acts of civilization, suggesting a discourse that undermines the dichotomy of civilization and barbarism, thus revealing the barbarism of civilization.

As it is with any comparative literary study, one must be prepared to account for his or her selection of chosen works. In my case, it was important to me that the three chosen works come from the United States, Argentina, and Brazil, given that the

6 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 nineteenth century frontier of these three American nation-states was, more than any other American country, the building site for national identity and the nation-state itself; and second, the inversion of the theme “civilization and barbarism” in these books was relevant in that they ultimately unveil the political clockwork of the state war machine in American frontiers. So whereas other works that could be categorized either as frontier literature or as literature concerned with the theme of “civilization and barbarism,” such as Sarmiento’s Facundo, Rómulo Gallegos’ Doña Bárbara, or even Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, they do not, in my view, amply expose the barbarism of civilization. On the other hand, as is the case of the Venezuelan novel

Doña Bárbara, the work does not come from an American country whose frontier plays a vital role in their formation and conceptualization of nationality.

Lastly, my choosing of these three works has much to do with the number

“three” itself. I am referring to Comparative Literature as a practice (not as methodology or theory). As a practice, Comparative Literature has traditionally adhered to the unspoken guideline known as the Rule of Three. This rule infers not just the inclusion of three distinct literary works, but to three different literary works from three different languages. This, according to Haun Saussy, creates a “third language effect,” which originally precipitated a sort of questioning that the traditional practice of single national-literature programs did not satisfy. Furthermore, comparison between two languages only works like a standard model of translation between two poles, meaning it is only adequate for formulating and answering questions of historical influence or typological similarities of the texts. However, this

7 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 only demonstrates a sort of nearsightedness. Comparative Literature, as Saussy explains, identifies the things omitted from a two-language pattern, pointing out what a dyadic explanation leaves unaccounted for.13 The third language furnishes counterexamples, frustrating “the progress to universal literature—to the delivery of the same thing in different languages, ad infinitum” (340). In short, it creates an unsettling in the analysis, maintaining an imbalance that is in fact desirable. In such a way, Comparative Literature as a practices is a process of the construction of an object, much like the geometrical creation of a triangle, whose apex is a point from where new angles open for measurement. Since the three languages keep things from settling down, an equilateral triangle is not the object sought nor obtained. Thus, of the possible 180 degrees, the Rule of Three guarantees that each comparative study produces innumerable possibilities of varying degrees of angles, constructing each time a triangle that is wholly unique.14 By placing Blood Meridian, Martín Fierro, and

Os sertões within a comparative context, the varying nature of the works themselves guarantees disruption which maintains the triangular object I attempt to construct in a constant, incongruent assembly. In short, there are many ways in which the works relate, as well as elements that create what is unsettling about their comparison.

To begin, when we consider the time period of publication of these three works, we find that José Hernández’ Martín Fierro, published in 1872, and Os sertões in 1901 (though Euclides da Cunha began writing in 1897), go together in that they both fluctuated within the realm of Latin American romanticism and realism;15 whereas Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian disrupts this as a much more

8 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 contemporary and postmodern work, published in 1985. However, based on the nineteenth century chronicle by Samuel Chamberlain, titled My Confession:

Recollections of a Rogue, as well as many other nineteenth century sources,

McCarthy’s novel can be defined as historical that is undoubtedly rooted in the nineteenth century.16 In the end, however, Blood Meridian, on the literary timeline, remains the “odd book out,” and we must remember that while José Hernández and

Euclides da Cunha were contemporaries to the subject matter of their texts, McCarthy is not.

In terms of genre we also find unsettling dynamics of these three texts.

McCarthy’s work can best be described as a novel; Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões, on the other hand, is problematic, often defined as a hybrid text that is a chronical, a novel, journalistic, and an anthropological and geological account all at once; furthermore, Martín Fierro is Hernandez’ long narrative gauchesque poem that has been described by Leopoldo Lugones as the Argentine epopee or, given its realistic nature, a novel that happened to be written in verse, as Jorge Luís Borges suggests.

One thing remains despite these divergences: each work is ambitious in its undertaking and most certainly epic in scope.

In matters of language, time and again both Blood Meridian and Os sertões are identified for employing a richly baroque and complex style of narrative. Here it would seem that Martín Fierro unsettles the three books’ relation in that its entire narrative—related from Fierro’s first person perspective—employs a highly colloquial and rustic Spanish voice that imitates the common speech of the gaucho. However, it

9 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 is important to point out that both da Cunha and McCarthy are also interested in portraying an authentic version of the rustic language of their frontier characters as well. Indeed, da Cunha, in the attitude of an anthropologist, records the rustic

Portuguese vernacular of the jagunços.17 Without a doubt, McCarthy is likewise well- known for his impressive dialogue that captures a rustic US southern dialect— language that is very present in Blood Meridian, and which contrasts with the narrative’s baroque voice.

Both Martín Fierro and Os sertões coincide with the nation’s attempt to define nationality, in the case of Argentina and Brazil. Both works are canonized as iconic national masterpieces, literary treasures of the patria, and the defining and most representative literary works of their country. The texts emerged in a timeframe analogous to when both Argentina and Brazil, as new nations, sought to modernize the country, define the national archetype, and construct a nationalist discourse of what it meant to be Argentine, what it meant to be Brazilian. Yet they emerge in resistance to prevailing nationalist discourses of identity. Both Martín Fierro and Os sertões are interestingly also examples of literatures of reassuring fratricide, when the nationalist discourse of their time excluded certain groups (fellow brothers) from the nation.

Nevertheless, by representing the traumatic violence against the excluded—the gaucho and the jagunço— Martín Fierro and Os sertões trump the nationalist discourse of

Argentina and Brazil at the time, and effectively rewrite the national narrative by resurrecting and now including the gaucho and the jagunço as national heroes of the patria, whose death and sacrifice found the nation’s identity. In these terms, Blood

10 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Meridian does not qualify. Though the book certainly follows the tradition of Moby

Dick as a critique of US Imperialism, McCarthy’s novel is written too far ahead of the establishment of US nationalist discourse and identity that came from its frontier experience. It is a work that is anti-mythical, anti-Western, in that it subverts in retrospect the national myths of the nineteenth century American West. It would seem that, unlike Latin America, US frontier myth, so embedded in American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, was too potent to overcome in its time. It would not be until Vietnam that such discourses about the American western frontier would pass from supposed history to a debunked national myth, making room for Blood

Meridian.18

Though there are certainly disruptions in the comparative construction of an analysis of these works, as I have highlighted, there are nevertheless many points where I believe all three converge. These points are pertinent to my reading of the works, as will become more and more evident. First, all three are ultimately about banditry, their characters’ juridical status undoubtedly tantamount to that of outlaws.

In José Hernandez’ gauchesque poem, Fierro himself and many other gauchos, such as

Cruz, are matreros. The narrative is the first gauchesque poem whose central figure is the gaucho malo, establishing the bandit narrative in gauchesque literature. In Os sertões the entire city of Canudos itself is described as a cave of bandits, the very term jagunço becoming synonymous with banditry. Blood Meridian presents a world where quite literally every character in the book is a coldblooded killer. At some time or another the players in the narrative become outlaws; first the Apaches are outlawed by

11 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 governor Trias’ scalp contract with the Glanton Gang, meant for their extermination.

Then, after slaughtering entire villages of Mexicans, the Chihuahua government places a bounty on Glanton’s head.

All three works likewise confront positivist and Enlightenment thinking of the nineteenth century. In Blood Meridian, positivist and Enlightenment ideas are expressed through the educated and bellicose character known as the judge, whose intellect and perverse thinking presses such ideology into the most bloody of conclusions that justify slaughter and genocide. In Os sertões, positivism and

Enlightenment thinking proceed from the book’s author himself. Da Cunha’s positivist convictions of progress and racial determinism conflict with the new Brazilian

Republic’s bloody atrocities committed during the Canudos War he witnesses, leaving the writer utterly distraught over the failures of what he believes civilization should be. Hernandez, on the other hand, addresses positivism in total opposition to its excluding discourses.19 Martín Fierro is the work that opposes Sarmiento’s notion of civilization and barbarism; it is, as Estrada notes, the anti-Facundo,20 a work that believes in the power of the individual and does not adhere neither to the racial determinism nor the social Darwinism of its time.

Furthermore, all three works are extremely violent in general. I would in fact add that violence is what moves the narratives of these texts. Violence reaches extremes such as infanticide: babies hang dead from trees in Blood Meridian, da

Cunha tells of jagunços performing human sacrifices with babies, and in Martín

Fierro the captive woman’s child has his throat slit before her eyes, her hands then

12 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 bound with his intestines by her captor. Violence seems to proceed from multiple sources in each text; indeed, everyone it would seem is capable of violent atrocity. We must remember that even Fierro himself, so shamed by political abandonment, becomes a murderer. Yet I would argue that at its core, violence is represented as a political expression of the State, and the bodies caught up in the State’s violent designs—be it the gaucho and the indio, the jagunço, or the vast range of those who fall victim to the Glanton Gang’s chaotic rampages—are forced into extreme situations where to counteract with violence becomes the only option.

Consequentially, all three texts graphically detail the most grotesque of scenes which are the byproduct of state violence. The great scenes of slaughter carried out by the

Glanton Gang are triggered by their lucrative scalping contract with the Chihuahua government in Blood Meridian, giving the narrative itself the primary motor for violence. Martín Fierro is taken from his home and pressed into military service and war on the frontier by the government. When he abandons his post, he is then deemed a bandit and enemy of the state, only to be hunted by the government as a deserter.

The entire narrative of Os sertões is entrenched in the bloody representation of the four military campaigns against the rural bandit community of Canudos.

Finally, all three works take place on that political fringe space known as the frontier. Each frontier setting can be likened unto Euclides da Cunha’s description of the sertão backlands in Os sertões: they are spaces separated from civilization by a coordinate of history and time, where certain frontier “types” are destined to be vanquished by the excluding exigencies of modernity and “relegated to the realm of

13 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 evanescent or extinct traditions.”21 Frontier spaces are, in other words, zones of political exception and exclusion. Indeed, Martín Fierro, Os Sertões, and Blood

Meridian set the stage where a diverse cast of actors―Native Americans, soldiers, bandits, mestizos, and pastoral cattlemen—play out scenes of violence made possible through lawlessness imposed by the sovereign, and not through a preexisting state of sovereign law in absentia, as is erroneously presumed. I am thus suggesting that the

“wildness” and “lawlessness” so often identified with American frontier spaces is not a sort of Hobbesian state of nature that precedes the establishment of positive law, save a zone of lawlessness created by the encroachment of sovereignty itself that is much more analogous to Agamben’s notion of state of exception than anything else. In all three of these works the frontier is overrun with state representatives, marked as state military zones by the presence of soldiers, police, judges, alcaldes, governors, and of course those antithetical bandit figures excluded from the State.

Martín Fierro, Os Sertões, and Blood Meridian are ultimately about the dark side of nation and empire in that they critique the political discourse of “civilization and barbarism” and the consequential violence caused on the nineteenth century frontiers of their respective nation-states. Regarding civilization and barbarism, Fitz comments: “American literature has manifested this theme to the extent that it can now be said to constitute a defining feature of life and letters in the New World”

(Rediscovering the Americas 211). As a political discourse of exclusion, civilization and barbarism interestingly defines both life and letters in the Americas. What this ultimately signifies is a biopolitical and literary relationship: biopolitics traces where

14 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 the very life of the individual become an issue of politics and politics comes to inform the very nature of life—all of which, as I argue, can be found transcribed in frontier literature that confronts the topic of civilization and barbarism. In other words, this political discourse, so characteristic in American literatures, does not demonstrate merely a justification for civilization’s territorial invasion of supposed “barbaric” frontiers, but a biopolitical discourse for the regulation and control of the body, of the very life of excluded frontier inhabitants. With life at the center of its calculations, it is here that politics determine who qualifies for citizenry and who will be excluded from the nation-state project. Martín Fierro, Os Sertões, and Blood Meridian are works that expose the excluding process expressed through the violent elimination of those bodies who do not qualify politically, often because they are deemed as “savages,” bandits, or the racially inferior: all unfit for civilized life. In doing so, I argue that these literary works interpret frontier spaces as the lawless space of Agamben’s state of exception, producing the consequential animal-like political subject who inhabits said space.

The current prevailing conceptualizations and variations of biopolitics derive from Foucault. It is interesting to note, and vital to point out, that biopolitics begins with the care of the body, and not destruction. Foucault notes that at the cusp of modernity, beginning in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, and only growing all the more prevalent during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there is an ever- increasing concern of the State to regulate and control the very bodies of their populations. What was once pastoral power, or pastoral care of the general populace,

15 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 where the Church was concerned with the welfare of body and soul of a people, now, during the secularization of theology in modern society, shifts and comes to occupy the primary function of the State in the form of what he calls biopower. Biopower is verified in the State’s growing concern to prolong and enhance life, proven in the

State’s tracking of birth and death rates, the emergence of public health departments, the census itself, and the State’s attempts to now regulate the body’s sexuality or drug consumption, for example. As the modern nation-state emerges, politics thus becomes more and more entrenched in biopolitics and the body will more and more become the primary locus for political action and policy.

Biopolitics, for Foucault, also marks the diminishment of the old notion of sovereignty, a “cutting off of the king’s head,” as he puts it, and indicates the emergence of what he calls governmentality. Governmentality is a structure of power concerned with managing and restricting bodies and populations through policies and departments, bureaucracies and institutions, and through law as a strategy and tactic, not a sovereign absolute. Controlling the circulation of goods and services insofar as it maintains and restricts the life of a population, is governmentality’s mode of power, which can be expressed through forms of state and non-state institutions of power. It can be said that governmentality is an almost Kafkaesque feature of modern living.

Indeed, many of his characters suggest a political subject hopelessly pressed beneath the weight of the never-ending labyrinth of bureaucratic institutions which ultimately determine the destiny of their bodies, such as K.’s unjust juridical situation in The

Trial.

16 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

I might at this point pose the question: at what point does biopolitics, supposedly concerned with the care and prolonging of life, become a politics of death?

For Foucault, biopolitics becomes thanatopolitics the moment the State takes the notion of race into consideration. This is what he calls state racism, which ultimately approaches the life of man as a species, determining who may live and die and thus maintaining the old sovereign right over death. Furthermore, the political calculation of race implies that life can be regulated genetically to optimize the national race. The emergence of eugenics as a focus of political policy is a prime example of biopolitics’ state racism. The idea that the State might racially engineer its body politic to produce a supposedly superior cast is best exemplified in Nazi Germany’s efforts to produce a purely Aryan race, thus racially cleansing the country of Jews and other marginal populations. We find similar ideology of state racism in the nineteenth century positivist discourses of nationalism in the new American nation-states such as

Argentina and Brazil. I am speaking of both countries’ immigration policies of racial whitening, which sought to attract immigrants from European Germanic and Anglo-

Saxon descent in hopes that their supposedly “superior” genes would purge the nation of its indigenous and African heritage, eventually creating a completely white society.

It has even been suggested that South American immigration policies of racial whitening were the first case of the political practice of eugenics known to modernity.22 Racial whitening as a practice of eugenics in fact informs our reading of both Martín Fierro and Os sertões, given that both texts confront the topic, as I

17 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 highlight in chapters two and three. Furthermore, Blood Meridian captures state racism in Captain White’s dialogue with the kid, also covered in chapter one.

While Foucault identifies state racism to be the way in which governmentality maintains the old sovereign’s right to take life, even he has recognized that governmentality has not entirely eliminated the notion of sovereignty in the modern nation-state. Indeed others, such as Judith Butler and certainly Giorgio Agamben, have recognized the persistence of sovereignty through the exception or, in other words, through the State’s continual recurrence to the declaration of state emergencies: those exceptional situations when law is ultimately suspended and sovereignty is paradoxically exercised through lawlessness. In fact, Butler points out that sovereignty resurfaces in the modern nation-state as one of the tactics of governmentality.23

However, for Agamben, who perhaps has done more to further the field of

Foucault’s biopolitics than any other scholar, sovereignty still remains the primary structure of political power in that it survives precisely in the persistence of the exception. What this means is that Agamben’s definition of sovereignty is, taken from the words of Carl Schmitt, he who decides the exception.24 Thus sovereignty is, in an integral sense, exercised through the state of exception, is expressed in its defining feature to suspend law and not, as is presumed, to enforce law. Though Agamben does not necessarily refute the notion of state racism, for him, all life is transcribed into a politics of death on the basis of the sovereign state of exception. All life may therefore be eligible to paradoxically be included in the State through its exclusion. Thus biopolitics becomes thanatopolitical not necessarily by way of state racism, but at the

18 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 point where state of exception comes to define the sovereign decision, which ultimately determines the political and ontological standing of all life. In effect, this opens the field for biopolitical exclusion and extermination not just based on notions of race, save on the basis of the entirety of humanity itself. This accounts for Nazi

Germany’s practices of exclusion not just based on race, but on the grounds of supposed social abnormalities, which also targeted the insane, homosexuals, gypsies, etc. Under state of exception, politics may therefore hand select bodies unfit for inclusion in the nation and exclude them from the normal juridical practice of the law, stripping them of their basic human rights and creating bare life. Thus the criteria for exclusion may supersede biology and race, branching out to fields such as psychology or sociology.

If the exception is the structure of the sovereign, then Agamben concludes that state of exception “is the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending it” (HS 28). It is therefore within the state of exception that modernity’s primary biopolitical subject is produced: nuda vita, or bare life.

Agamben’s notion of bare life is the subject abandoned by the law and whose existence mirrors the outside and inside topography of state of exception. It is here that inside and outside do not exclude one another but blur together, and bare life is the political existence of paradoxically inhabiting a space both inside and outside the juridical order, becoming a body that is included in the sovereign’s calculations of power by way of exclusion. To give evidence for his conceptualization of bare life,

Agamben traces the existence of bare life throughout western politics in the figures of

19 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 bandits and outlaws, locating its origin in homo sacer (sacred man). Homo sacer comes from an obscure Roman juridical text which states homo sacer is he who may be killed and yet whose death does not signify neither homicide nor sacrifice.

Agamben concludes that homo sacer’s double exclusion from civil and religious ceremony places him in a sort of limbo between qualified political life and the existence of animals. He illustrates this through the two notions of life found in the

Greek, of zoē, which means the simple act of living common with humans, animals and gods, and bios, which is life that is qualified politically and as such has political rights. Bare life is thus caught up in an intermediary space between zoē (exclusion) and bios (inclusion), since it is life qualified politically by way of disqualification

(inclusion by exclusion). An example of this would be the easily recognizable wanted poster of the Wild West, which states the subject’s name, followed by “wanted, dead or alive.” The outlaw in the poster finds himself in the curious position of being included, or “wanted” by the State, but whose life forgoes any right to trial by jury as the law states. He may be killed and his death will not be considered a murder, meaning his being wanted (inclusion) only alludes to his exclusion from constituted law.

For Agamben, as the modern nation-state has developed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the state of exception has increasingly become the normal practice of sovereign law. The consequences of this are twofold: first, this means bare life has become the political body of modernity; and second, when the rule of law depends on the exception and is normalized thusly, the space of the camp opens up.

20 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

The camp, such as Nazi concentration camps, Japanese camps in the U.S. during

World War II, contemporary refugee camps, and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, are all examples of the modern nation-state’s tendency to house bare life in one designated location that is tantamount to the inside and outside topography of state of exception. In other words, like the state of exception, the camp is literally a space within the sovereign realm of juridical order—within the State—that is also outside said juridical order. It is a place of permanent state of exception, where political being means being bare life.

Though Agamben’s theories of state of exception and bare life generally reflect on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, others, most notable Achilles Mbembe and

Hannah Arendt, have pointed out that contemporary structures of biopolitical violence had their testing ground in the colonial world. Mbembe compares the colonial usage of the word “savage” to Foucault’s notion of racism as biopower’s calculating factor for determining who lives and dies.25 Furthermore, he identifies slavery to perhaps be the first instance of biopolitical experimentation, and plantations to be emblematic of the paradoxical state of exception. He ultimately qualifies the colony itself as the site where sovereignty fundamentally consists of an expression of power outside the law.26

Within this context I situate nineteenth century American frontiers found in Blood

Meridian, Martín Fierro, and Os sertões. They are spaces in transition from the world of colonial conquest, slavery, and the plantation, to the twentieth and twenty-first century worlds of the camp. The conquering of American frontiers was a continuation

21 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 of Old World colonialism now carried out by the independent New World nations and their incentive to modernize.

The frontier is undoubtedly where the sovereign suspends the law; American frontiers were synonymous to lawless lands, but as I argue, lawless lands created by sovereignty. Politically I therefore classify frontiers as states of exception, the life therein as bare life. Nineteenth century American frontiers were the last corners of the world to where the politically marginalized such as Native Americas, ex-slaves, people of socially outcast religions, bandits and outlaws fled.27 Frontiers, like the camp, were the most extreme political spaces to where those who could be licitly killed were pursued and persecuted by the State. Interestingly, as American frontiers began to close (the US officially closed the frontier in 1890, Argentina in 1917),28 we perceive a political demand for new places to house bare life. The colonies gone, frontiers closed, the State would thereby adopt the camp. I would suggest that for this reason, as the western frontier in the US became more and more reduced in the nineteenth century, politics turned to displacing Native Americans on reservations, essentially a form of concentration camp.29

Biopolitics has not gone unnoticed in literary theory either, though I believe there is yet much to be said about the topic. Most notably is Eric Santner’s Creaturely

Life (2006) and Arne de Boever’s two books: States of Exception in the Contemporary

Novel (2012) and Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel (2013). Furthermore,

Judith Butler’s Grievable Life (2004) is a reflection on the representation and exclusion of political bodies in media. Each of these works focus on the way in which

22 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 bodies are written in relation to sovereign powers of exception in literature or in media such as newspapers. Santner observes how the capturing of state of exception, in

Kafka for example, reinterprets the fictional character’s bare life into a creaturely state of existence both in representation and psych. De Boever, on the other hand, develops a theoretical framework for biopolitics and sovereign exception in the novel. This genre is an ideal medium for biopolitics given that by definition the novel attempts to capture the everyday, real life existence of ordinary people, thus revealing the modern subject’s exceptional condition before the a law. In my following chapters on Blood

Meridian, Martín Fierro, and Os sertões, I will draw from Foucault, Agamben and the abovementioned scholars.

In chapter one, I discuss the episode of Captain White in Blood Meridian in relation to US frontier myth and Foucault’s notion of state racism. I demonstrate how the Virgin Land myth of the American wilderness and the national discourse of the adversarial Other are undermined by Captain White’s dialog with the kid, unveiling state racism as the driving factor for US occupation of what was once Mexico.

Subsequently, I shift the focus of the chapter to an interpretation of the Blood

Meridian’s setting as a state of exception. Here, I first identify the Glanton Gang’s scalp-hunting contract with Governor Trias as a declared state of emergency.

Following this, I highlight the work’s infamous character, the judge, as a living analogy of the sovereign exception. As a trickster character in the story, the judge’s involvement with the governor of Chihuahua represents the relationship between the

23 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 king and his fool so often found in literature, and one that implies the chaos of lawlessness inherent in the sovereign.

In chapter two, I identify Martín Fierro as not just political-literary, as the gauchesque is defined by Ludmer, but a work that contributes bio to its political- literariness. Martín Fierro is essentially about the experience of a man before the law and his poetic expression of life and song joined together in unison. In the telling of his life, Fierro takes the reader on a journey to get acquainted with the various stages of his political life: from gaucho to soldier, and then to the abandoned state of the outlaw. During this transition, I identify the draft law that initially recruits Fierro for military service to be an illegal force of law. The frontier itself in Martín Fierro is a space of exception and political elimination. Furthermore, I identify the frontier military post to where Fierro is sent to war as a type of camp, a fringe zone both inside and outside the nation. It is here, and subsequently when Fierro escapes the post and becomes a bandit, that I interpret the expression of his body and his shame—his penas he sings about—in terms of Agamben’s bare life. The chapter concludes with a biopolitical observation of the bandit figure in Martín Fierro.

Finally, in chapter three, I first provide a reading of the positivist ideas and convictions of racial determinism expressed in Os sertões in light of Foucault’s state racism. I then identify the Canudos conflict to be a threefold struggle for control over the body of the people of Canudos. Here we find the three oligarchical powers of state, church, and landowners working together as institutions of governmentality, seeking to bring the people back under their control. Furthermore, I likewise argue that

24 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Euclides da Cunha points to state of exception being utilized as a strategy against the

Canudos people, as the government increasingly reverts to unconstitutionally violent methods of extermination against its own citizens. Finally, I juxtapose my reading of

Os sertões with numerous nineteenth century newspaper sources that covered the conflict. Here I refer to Judith Butler’s notions of grievable life, and the refusal to represent certain deaths in newspapers in a light that renders them worthy of being mourned. In a sense, the refusal to represent certain bodies, while others are portrayed as grievable to the nation, is an instance of a sort of state of exception in journalism. I conclude that while newspapers at the time show soldier deaths to be great losses to the nation, they refuse to represent jagunços as grievable life in newspapers. What

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões achieves in humanizing the jagunços, is accomplished through a discourse that dehumanizes the representation of Brazilian soldiers during the war, reducing them to the level of bandits like the jagunços. In doing so, Euclides ultimately achieves the grievability of jagunço life in his masterpiece.

In short, I propose there is a connection between American nation-states born from their nineteenth century frontier experiences of exclusion and the persisting models of sovereign exclusion still found today in the Americas and beyond in world politics. National literatures from the US, Argentina and Brazil, founded on the frontier, thus become ideal mediums for the investigation of biopolitics and state of exception. Nineteenth century nationalist discourses like “civilization and barbarism” and Manifest Destiny excluded frontier inhabitants from the national project and inform us today about the continuation of sovereignly excluded bodies. Indeed, in a

25 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 post 9/11 world, one suspected of terrorism has become synonymous to the life of bandits, matreros, and jagunços found in the worlds of Blood Meridian, Martín

Fierro, and Os sertões. Under the pretext of the War on Terror, it would seem all life has the potential to become bare life. We only have to consider the current US policy that forgoes constitutional rights in declaring the use of drones to kill American citizens (and those of other countries) as permissible when in the name of fighting terrorism. Thus, functioning as the new “savagery” of old colonialism, terrorism is a continuation of civilization’s conquest against barbarism.

26 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

CHAPTER I

Cormac Mccarthy’s Blood Meridian: State Racism, State of Exception, and the Sovereign Fool

“You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.” -Davy Crockett

“It makes no difference what men think of war . . . War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.” -the judge, Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy’s epic novel Blood Meridian (1985) is a sort of sinister and perverse bildungsroman, a dark and violent coming-of-age tale that follows a pseudo protagonist, the kid, as he joins a scalp-hunting gang in the US-Mexico borderlands during the nineteenth century and embarks on a bloody year-long campaign hunting and slaughtering Apache and Mexicans, amongst others. Based loosely on Samuel

Chamberlain’s nineteenth century chronicle My Confession: The Recollections of a

Rogue, McCarthy’s novel is both a witness and verdict to the violent history of U.S. expansion into westward frontier territories.

Blood Meridian is often deemed McCarthy’s masterpiece, “his magnum opus, and one of American literature's darkest odysseys into the westering impulse” (Owens xii). Harold Bloom calls McCarthy's novel “a canonical imaginative achievement,” and ventures to say that no other living author “has given us a book as strong and memorable as Blood Meridian” (1). For Bloom, the novel’s infamous character, and possibly true protagonist, Judge Holden, “is a villain worthy of Shakespeare, Iago-like

27 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 and demoniac, a theoretician of war everlasting. . . . the book's magnificence―it's language, landscape, persons, conceptions―at last transcends the violence, and convert goriness into terrifying art” (1-2).

Since its publication, this piece of terrifying art has undergone a myriad of critical analyses, categorization of genre, literary praises, and criticism. The sheer depth and complexity of the novel is no doubt daunting, and consequently,

McCarthian scholarship has produced a body of relating academic literature which in itself can be equally daunting. In fact, Blood Meridian has solicited more academic attention and interpretations than any other work in McCarthy’s oeuvre, leading some critics like Timothy Parrish to conclude that “Blood Meridian defies interpretation altogether” (82). I would argue that while it defies any one, all-encompassing interpretation, it certainly does not defy interpretations. The transcendence of the book lies precisely in the fact that it invites us to interpret and reinterpret its content.

Transcendent dexterity is what best describes literary masterpieces such as this novel and should not discourage our willingness to prod and poke its content.

My concern with McCarthy’s novel (as well as with Martín Fierro and Os

Sertões in the following chapters) is the role sovereignty plays in relation to frontier violence on nineteenth century American frontier regions. Blood Meridian is a work that exposes violence caused by U.S. sovereign expansion into the US-Mexico borderlands. Yet it is not simply the mere identification of the sovereign in the novel’s pages that interests me but the unveiling of the very gears and cogs of sovereignty in relation to human life.

28 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

The clockwork of sovereignty and human life I speak of begins with

Foucault’s modern conceptualization of biopolitics. Biopolitics is the exercise of sovereign power over the literal biological body of a population—the couplet of life and politics. As Eric L. Santner explains, biopolitics “names the threshold where life becomes a matter of politics and politics come to inform the very matter and materiality of life” (12). I am interested in what form of life is at stake in literature that projects the thanatopolitical—politics of death—extremes that biopolitics can reach when it strips human life bare of its rights. I interpret Blood Meridian as a novel that can first be understood as a biopolitical analogy for the modern sovereign state, and second, that as such the biopolitical subject found in the text is best defined as creaturely, caught up in a threshold between human life and animal life. In short, the novel harbors literary frontier characters whose existence is tantamount to life defined by its capacity to freely be killed.

1.1 On Violence Without a doubt it is the overwhelming shock of violence that stands as the largest obstacle when confronting McCarthy's novel. Blood Meridian is a tour de force when it comes to violence. From the very beginning the reader is thrust into an orgy of human brutality that does not mitigate until the very last sentence. One simply cannot speak of Blood Meridian without speaking of violence; it permeates the pages, embellished with a prose so syntactically complex and poetically rich that the narrative is often said to recall Faulkner, Milton, Shakespeare, Melville, and

Dostoyevsky, while the voice resounds with that of the King James Bible and the

29 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Divine Comedy.30 McCarthy's capacity to describe violence with such eloquence and authorial might creates an experience for the reader that is both aesthetically pleasing and contextually appalling all at once. As Susan Kollin notes:

[Blood Meridian’s] treatment of violence is in no way restrained or

confined, but anarchic and pushed to the extreme . . . McCarthy's

portrayal of American brutality rips the lid off sentimental

understandings of the past; page after page, as bodies pile up, readers

marvel at McCarthy's ability to imagine new means of describing

human atrocity. The book's unrelenting focus on the violent history of

American expansion has been denounced as excessive. Blood Meridian

has been accused of being both “pornographically” violent and “terribly

beautiful” (Jarrell 32; Winchell 309); it has been criticized for its

obsessive detailing of the horrific depravity of the gang of mercenaries

while overindulging in Faulknerian prose (Shaviro 149; Arnold and

Luce 1). (562-63)

Such a pornographic display of violence initially subjected the book to an uneasy reception. Simply put, critics found it hard to see past the violence. Caryn James, in the New York Times Book Review, states that Blood Meridian “comes at the reader like a slap in the face, an affront that asks us to endure a vision of the Old West full of charred human skulls, blood-soaked scalps,” and even cope with the image of a tree

“hung with the bodies of dead infants” (31).

30 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Readers often struggle with mixed feelings, at once admiring the prose while despising the fact that the book is about slaughter and gives no signs for hope in the human race.31 “What do we make of this phenomenon,” as Sullivan questions, “a mind that dwells unremittingly on evil and a prose that conveys these thoughts with the tongue of an angel?” (652). It has even been suggested that McCarthy is perhaps both a genius and a bit insane.32 Yet perhaps what Sullivan, James and others should have initially been questioning was not the violence itself, nor the insanity of McCarthy, save the insanity of colonialism, of the conquest of the West itself. McCarthy obsessively researched for ten years the history of this period and, as Sepich’s historical inquiry into the novel suggests, he actually toned down the level of violence found in the historical record.33 This makes early critics who take his work as a “slap in the face” or exhibition of insanity, rather than reflect on the violent insanity of colonialism, seem like apologists for a history they prefer in its whitewashed form.

Indeed, it would seem that the agglomeration of violence and philosophical pronouncement which initially disoriented readers of Blood Meridian, and those of

McCarthy's novels in general, demanded order and explaining. Scholars who at first grappled with the sheer violence in his works initially divided themselves into two camps. The first thesis, established by Vereen Bell in his The Achievement of Cormac

McCarthy (1988)—the first scholarly book on McCarthy's oeuvre—argues that

McCarthy's novels reveal a “nihilistic mood” (1). The second thesis comes from

Edwin T. Arnold. Those who side with Arnold argue that McCarthy is in fact a

31 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 moralist. Arnold affirms that McCarthy's novels contain “moral parables” and a

“belief in the need for moral order” (44).

Amongst the attempts to construct a paradigm of morality in Blood Meridian,

Leo Daughtery's gnostic approach stands out.34 He defines Blood Meridian as a gnostic Greek tragedy and the kid as the tragic hero. The judge therefore is the embodiment of evil whereas the kid represents goodness. Yet Owens points out “two counts” against Daughtery: “first, because it diverts attention away from the grand theme of primal violence, and second, because he exaggerates the kid's supposed spark of goodness” (12). Indeed, throughout the novel the kid is no less a mindless murderer than other characters. There is little to redeem the kid.

From such moralistic and nihilistic approaches, Phillips has observed the manner in which another divide has formed based on assumptions regarding the two regions which serve as focal points in McCarthy's oeuvre. Readers who view

McCarthy's works as southern try to claim him the heir of Faulkner and O’Connor and therefore search for “something redemptive or regenerative” in his works instead of nihilistic (435). For Phillips this is an error, especially when considering Blood

Meridian, a book whose “violence tends to be just that” (435). Phillips explains that

McCarthy's fiction recalls O’Connor’s where violence is concerned, but lacks resolutions in the plot. “The “Southern” camp,” concludes Phillips, “therefore wants to defend McCarthy from the heinous charge of nihilism, to make him seem more like

O’Connor than he really is” (435).

32 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

On the other hand, Phillips identifies how ““Western” readers see in the trajectory of McCarthy's career a move toward wider relevance and a broader worldview. For these readers, Blood Meridian marks McCarthy's progress toward addressing not just the Wild West but Western culture as a whole, especially its philosophical heritage” (435). As such, according to the Western camp, “McCarthy's

“nihilism” is not, therefore, something he must counter by crafting a symbolic redemption of the fallen world or narrating the moral regeneration of his characters.

On the contrary, it is just what one would expect from a writer who has fed on such corrosive, demystifying influence” (435).

Phillips then gives us perhaps one of the more convincing frameworks regarding violence in Blood Meridian, one that breaks from the Bell and Arnold debate. Recurring to the idea of “optical democracy” (a term coined in Blood

Meridian), he recognizes that the novel contends that people and things are equal.

Bell, who finds Blood Meridian to be “a critique of our culture's anthropocentrism”

(qtd. in D. Phillips 443), does not, according to Phillips, “recognize how radically unanthropocentric it is” (446). Whereas Bell deduces competition to be the force which opposes people to things, Phillips claims that human beings and the natural world are not antagonists, but “part of the same continuum” (446). To support his claim, Phillips quotes Blood Meridian: “Above all else they appeared wholly venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time

33 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 before nomenclature was and each was all” (qtd. in D. Phillips 453). Phillips concludes that the “lack of human implication” is the novels' “most disturbing feature.

It is precisely in the raw orchestration of the book’s events, the world of nature and the world of men are parts of the same world, and both are equally violent and indifferent to the other” (447). Blood Meridian therefore, according to Phillips, does not narrate but describes, “showing” us that “[v]iolence and death . . . are the more or less objective truths of all human experience” (439). In short, Blood Meridian “treats darkness, violence, sudden death, and all other calamities as natural occurrences-like the weather, which can also be vicious in McCarthy's border landscape” (439). When men and things are equals, violence is the indifferent result of natural law. Thus, “For

McCarthy, the history of the West is natural history” (453).

Phillips’ thesis, as stated above, has continued to be reworked. Barcley Owens, in his book Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels (2000), provides a naturalist study of

Blood Meridian. For Owens, “Critical attempts to explain away the violence of Blood

Meridian begin to appear apologetic” (12). Any effort to divert our attention away from the violence “may very well cloud the initial and recurring shock of witnessing man’s atavistic nature” (12). The violence is there precisely to appall the reader, to be thrust upon him, and so we “must face it head-on” (12). Along the lines of Phillips,

Owens also identifies natural law, or a sort of “Darwinian law,” to be the root of violence. Violence, in terms of Darwinian natural law, accounts for the novel’s indifference towards human brutality. Owens employs the primal setting for violence to argue that Blood Meridian forms part of the American literary tradition of

34 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 naturalism, established by the likes of Steven Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair.35

It seems that to date, the moralistic approach to Blood Meridian has been, for the most part, abandoned. Critical focus on the novel now seems to be largely directed toward topics surrounding the nation and myth. After all, as Sara Spurgeon states in her Exploding the Western: Myths of Empire on the Postmodern Frontier (2005),

“McCarthy is interested in myths, not morals” (25). McCarthian scholarship has finally come to terms with the amoral nature of Blood Meridian. In effect, once morals are removed from the equation, it becomes more apparent that the novel utilizes violence for the shattering and subverting of U.S. national myth in a critique of the empirical process of nation-building; and second, that violence is the expression of a natural and almost Darwinian law of human existence, an amoral and unanthropocentric view that places humans in a violent context with the natural world.36 Perhaps de Groot summarizes it best when he states: “[Blood Meridian] undermines the myths of the American west by reminding the reader that the amoral nation was founded upon death, violence, rape and domination” (141). What follows in this chapter, is the role biopolitics plays in violence related to the anti-mythical nature of Blood Meridian and to the book’s amoral sense of natural law. With so many interpretations of violence regarding myth, the nation, and empire in McCarthian scholarship of Blood Meridian, it is curious to note the scarcity of academic works that investigate the novel through political theory, or at least a framework that highlights the sovereign analogy presented in its pages.

35 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

I will therefore tease out the following: first, how Blood Meridian deconstructs

U.S. nation myth through violence by exposing the biopolitical technique of State racism to rationalize state-sanctioned violence. I will argue that the episode of Captain

White and his filibusters, in its undermining of frontier myth, ultimately reveals the biopolitical discourse of Foucault’s State racism. In doing so, this episode captures the modern nation-state’s violent, biopolitical process so often occluded by national myth.

Second, I will argue that the kid’s integration into the Glanton gang marks a transition into a space of legalized lawlessness known as state of exception, a lawless state emblemized by the judge himself. In this section, I will analyze the already observed relationship between natural law and violence in Blood Meridian and interpret this argument in new light regarding the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception. For Agamben, state of exception is the sovereign’s topography for biopolitical extermination and violence. This likewise opens up space for understanding what form of life the characters in the novel take on—what qualities human life possesses in a state of exception.

My approach will not be simply to apply biopolitical theories to Blood

Meridian, rather, I see biopolitics as a lens through which we can create a dialogue between such theory and the novel, in hopes of coaxing out what allegories, conclusions, and questions such a consideration may enable me to raise. In doing so, I hope to raise questions in general about our preconceived notions of frontiers that all too ostensibly define them as spaces void of sovereign law, thus taking for granted that though the periphery, frontiers were vital to nation-building in the Americas given that

36 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 they served as the stage for sovereign expansion. The clash of nineteenth century encroaching nation-states with the very lives of frontier peoples makes frontier spaces ideal for the field of biopolitics, and Blood Meridian, whose stage is precisely set on the frontier, is very much an adequate medium for elucidating the threshold where life becomes an issue of politics and politics comes to determine the ontology of life.

1.2 US Frontier Myth To speak of biopolitics in Blood Meridian, we must first confront national myth. Throughout its pages Blood Meridian consistently debunks the myth of the western frontier, inverting mythologies which have come to form part of the larger national myth of American exceptionalism: “McCarthy's novel reorganizes the received histories of the West,” says Neil Campbell, “is concerned with the notion of conquest, and is obsessed by the continued consequence of this process. Engaging in a dialogue with the myths of the West, McCarthy follows their strange logic to dark conclusions, to the point where the myths turn in on themselves, implode and begin to deconstruct” (“Liberty beyond its proper bounds” 218). Therefore, McCarthy does not attack the myth of the West through the conventions of reason and realism, but through a contradictory mythical voice; he fights fire with fire: “McCarthy recasts myth to attack what he sees as the false and destructive cultural constructs of

American Exceptionalism in particular” (Cant 6).

“A mythology,” as Richard Slotkin surmises, “is a complex of narratives that dramatize the world vision and historical sense of a people or culture, reducing centuries of experience into a constellation of compelling metaphors” (6). Myths

37 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 therefore, “are what we wish history had been—a compressed, simplified, sometimes outright false vision of the past but a vision intended to serve a specific purpose in the present and, just as importantly, to bequeath a specific shape to the future” (Spurgeon

3). It was precisely the American West, a foundation for nation-building, which provided a stage for the creation of U.S. national myths. From the movement westward of pioneers, frontiersmen, gold prospectors, cattlemen, Indian fighters, trappers and buffalo hunters, narratives would be born to express the history of the

United States as Americans wanted their history to be. Neil Campbell states, “Out of migration and movement comes a new rooted identity as the focus for the epic narrative that gave coherence and authority to the westward urge of nation-building and provided America with its own creation of myth” (Cultures of the New American

West 3). This myth would be multi-layered and multi-faceted, complex and sometimes even contradictive. The myth of the American West “has been a series of dominant stories or myths told over time and endowed with massive cultural power, such as the

Promised Land, Manifest Destiny, Turner's frontier thesis, each of which sought to encompass and define the West” (Cultures of the New American West 6).

The myths most commonly associated with the American West are the Judeo-

Christian tradition of the Promised land, also a Virgin Land, unoccupied by inhabitants, pristine and fertile—an Edenic garden, and the myth of the heroic lone man in the wilderness who must regenerate himself through violence.37 Also known as

Joseph Campbell’s “monomyth,” the heroic lone man involves the rite of passage, initiation in the wilderness and return of the young male hero.38 The myth of the

38 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Promised Land and that of the monomyth converge on democracy, giving purpose to the hero in the wilderness and justification for his actions. As Spurgeon observes:

Part of the traditional American myth of the frontier holds that the

frontier experience created a land of freedom-loving individuals

dedicated to bringing democracy, not imperial conquest, to the rest of

the world. Thus part of this myth is a narrative that must carefully

ignore or disguise American imperialism abroad, as well as the reality

of invasion, conquest, and colonization that made possible the

European settlement of the Americas. (4)

The quest for spreading democracy was the “Manifest Destiny” of the United

States, which attributed the “divine right” of dominion to those who were supposedly racially and technologically “superior.” Such political discourse justified the extirpation of indigenous groups as providence’s errand to “civilize the savage,” and acted as a façade for the imperialist endeavors of the United States. Likewise,

Manifest Destiny allowed for the creation of an adversarial “Other” in anyone who opposed the nation’s democratic mission. This “Other” was first engendered in the

Indian in frontier literature, but as Megan Riley McGilchrist points out, has since then

“recurred in every conflict in every generation: Mexican, Filipinos, Cubans,

Panamanians, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans, Iranians” (12). This continual reincarnation of the Other in the succession of American wars likewise marks a correspondence to the repeated rejuvenation of frontier myth as means of justification for these wars. Edward Said comments:

39 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

A correspondence is evident, but frequently disguised or forgotten,

between the nineteenth-century doctrine of manifest destiny . . . the

territorial expansion of the United States, the enormous literature of

justification (historic mission, moral regeneration, the expansion of

freedom: all of these studied in Albert K. Weinberg's massively

documented 1958 work Manifest Destiny), and the ceaselessly repeated

formulae about the need for an American intervention against this or

that aggression since World War Two. (288)

Though evident, the correlation between nineteenth century frontier myth and

American intervention foreign policy “is rarely made explicit, and indeed disappears when the public drums of war are sounded and hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs are dropped on a distant and mostly unknown enemy” (288). As observed by

Said, recognition of the national mythology of the United States has been slow to catch hold in the American conscious, and when it does surface, said recognition is repeatedly silenced by new wars and buried in a resurging battle cries. Thus, Slotkin notes, “American attitudes toward the idea of a national mythology have been peculiarly ambivalent. There is a strong antimythological stream in our culture . . .”

(3). For many years, well into the twentieth century, the myth of the West, as portrayed in dime novels and Hollywood Westerns, has been tantamount to history.39

The current U.S. passport best highlights just how much frontier myth persists in our concept of history and national identity. Upon recently renewing my passport, I immediately noticed the new background images on the visa pages. Of the roughly ten

40 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 images in the passport, six in some way refer to the western frontier. The prints include the Rocky Mountains, the desert, buffalo, cowboys on a cattle drive, a steam locomotive, and a grizzly bear and totem pole. On the inside of the cover there is even an image of a lunar mission, highlighting how western frontier lives on in twentieth and twenty-first century’s space exploration.

Part of the reason for the United States’ strong adherence to its myths in place of history has to do with its colonial past. Simply put, American independence from a

British Empire forged utopic ideas which diverted Americans’ focus from the empirical agenda of their newly formed republic. The colonists freed from an empire did not wish to view the new republic as an aspiring empire itself. Consequently, the complexities of U.S. imperialism—beginning with nineteenth century western expansion, the cultural and material extirpation of Native Americans, sovereign conquest and land grabbing—are reduced to very two dimensional, mythical narratives such as Manifest Destiny, Promised Land, and the lone hero (narratives which go largely unnoticed as mythical by the American public since they are generally perceived as historical). As summarized best by Roland Barthes, “[Myth] abolishes the complexity of human acts . . . it does away with dialectics . . . organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident” (143).

According to Owens, it took the Vietnam War to produce the unraveling of

American mythology back to the original complexities of nation-building and imperialism:

41 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

In popular wars, American defeats have been quickly reformulated into

national sacrifices, part of the framework of mythic progress, and are

usually followed by a popular call to arms: “remember the Alamo,”

Buffalo Bill's “First Scalp for Custer,” and Pearl Harbor's aftermath.

But no such calls rang forth for Vietnam. Instead, antiwar forces at

home organized protests […] In the revised frontier myth, the Indians

became good and the cowboys bad, while progress and its

accompanying technology were evil, full of military, chemical, and

nuclear hazards. (25)

Published in the wake of Vietnam, Blood Meridian flows from the severed vein of frontier myth exposed during the backlash of the war. The novel shatters and subverts the myths of the American west by divulging to the reader that the United

States was founded on violent slaughter and domination. McCarthy is aware that

“nations themselves are narrations” (Said xiii). He knows, as Homi Bhabha states, that “[n]ations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind's eye . . . but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west” (1). When we consider the frontier myth of the Virgin Land in light of

Bhabha’s words, for example, we find revealed a narrative which depopulates the frontier, enabling “the American people to replace the fact that the land was already settled by a vast native population with the belief that it was unoccupied. And the substitution of the national fantasy for the historical reality Americans to disavow the

42 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 resettlement and in some instances the extermination of entire populations” (Pease

63). Such mythical rationalizations serve to “soften the blow” of the reality of the events they replace. It is this human tendency that leads Slotkin to claim that “man is essentially a myth-making animal” (7). Yet national myths are highly political. They rationalize nation-building and sovereign expansion; ultimately, myths create a pleasing story of the nation’s history to justify its political and sovereign actions. I argue that inasmuch as he is a “myth-making animal,” man is also, as stated by

Aristotle, “by nature a political animal” (4). It is the point where the myth-making man and the political animal converge that interest me. Blood Meridian peels myth away from the man layer by layer with violence, and in the process, reveals the underlying biopolitical empirical strategies beneath the myth, unveiling the political animal in all its appalling savagery. In the Episode of Captain White, his expedition is fueled by frontier myths such as the Virgin Land and the Adversarial Other. Yet when his expedition is met with violent disaster, such myths are radically deconstructed. It is precisely the contact between frontier myth and violence that the biopolitical method for extermination, known as State racism, becomes evident.

1.3 Captain White and State Racism Whereas sovereignty once preoccupied itself with the control of borders and territories throughout the Middle Ages, for Foucault there is a shift at the cusp of modernity, during the decades of the Enlightenment. This shift no longer focuses on territorial control, but on the regulation of the political body. Foucault identifies governments’ emerging fixation with birthrate, death-rate, the control of epidemics,

43 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 public health programs, the illegalization of drugs, and even the control of sexuality in the seventeenth and eighteenth century as evidence of this deviation.40 Political power’s newfound concern for biological life is dubbed by Foucault as “biopower.” In effect, such power is one that blurs the very lines of the public and private realm, where power’s main concern consists of prolonging and enhancing the biological existence of its subjects. This may very well lead one to question how a paradigm of government founded on prolonging life may also destroy life. Foucault makes it very clear that whereas the term biopower constitutes a concern with enriching the biological lives of its citizens, it also implies a dark side. In keeping with the king’s

(sovereignty) longstanding power to take life, biopower also maintains the right to end life in the emergence of the modern nation-state. It does not give up the king’s sword.

According to Foucault, in his Society Must be Defended, the right to end life becomes embedded in a State racism:

At this point [in the early nineteenth century], the discourse whose

history I would like to trace abandons the initial basic formulation,

which was “We have to defend ourselves against our enemies because

the state apparatuses, the law, and the power structures not only do not

defend us against our enemies; they are the instruments our enemies are

using to pursue and subjugate us.” That discourse now disappears. It is

no longer: “We have to defend ourselves against society, but “We have

to defend society against all the biological threats posed by the other

44 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

race, the subrace, the counterrace that we are, despite ourselves,

bringing into existence. (61-2)

Foucault goes on to explain that “we see the appearance of a State racism: a racism that society will direct against itself, against its own elements and its own products.

This is the internal racism of permanent purification” (62). Therefore, the biological concern poised in politics to take life is one based on race, on man as a species.41

There is little coincidence between the common usages of “body” in political terms as well as in biological ones: thus the “body” of the person, of the people, or the body of a nation. Within the political body of a populace, we may imagine that once the State’s function becomes concerned with the biology of that body, a need to eradicate all biological irregularities is created so that the body can reach optimal health. This eradication, or purification as Foucault puts it, is based on race. The State thus maintains a “healthy” political body of subjects by eliminating those whose race is deemed inferior and does not comply with predetermined nationalist ideas of how that body should appear and act.

In chapter three of the novel, after the kid has left Tennessee and made his way into Texas, he joins a group of filibusters under the command of Captain White. Here

White, as a captain, can clearly be understood as an embodiment of the endeavors of the U.S. nation-state. His voice is one that echoes the call for sovereign expansion on the frontier through the political scapegoat of race. During the process of his recruitment into the Captain’s army, we find men acting as both a political and myth- making (or myth-sustaining) animals.

45 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

The episode begins with the kid, in rags and poorly equipped, having left

Nacogdoches on a mule. He later attacks and robs a Mexican barman in Bexar, smashing two bottles over his head and gouging an eye with one of the broken bottles.

Afterwards, he lies naked under a tree when a man awakes him. He first assures the kid that he’s white and Christian, aligning himself with cultural signifiers that exponentially signify goodness, honesty, civilization, democracy.

The man then asks the kid if he was “the feller knocked in that Mexer’s head yesterday evenin?” (29). When the kid asks, “Who wants to know?” the man replies,

“Captain White. He wants to sign that feller up to join the army” (29). The immediate irony of the man identifying himself as “white and christian” now comes into play.

The kid’s violent acts against a Mexican interest Captain White (whose name alone alludes to “white and Christian”). His violent actions are absolved and in fact desired since they were enacted against the adversarial “Other,” a Mexican, against whom the

United States has been at war. The white Christians’ civilized goodness apparently reaches its limit at the juncture where people are racially different. Here, the myth of the adversarial Other, initiated with Native Americans and now passed to Mexicans, intersects the discourse of State racism, the biopolitical method which harbors the

State’s right to take life.

The man then inquires if the kid wants to join the army and “whip up on the

Mexicans” (29). When the kid asks what the wages will be, the man replies, “Hell fire son, you wont need wages. You get to keep everthing you can raise . . . Aint a man in the company wont come out a big landowner” (30). He then takes the kid to see

46 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Captain White, explaining, “If I’d not run up on Captain White I dont know where I’d be this day. I was a sorrier sight even than what you are and he come along and raised me up like Lazarus. Set my feet in the path of righteousness” (30). At this point, this man’s “path of righteousness” appears analogous to the reader with contradictory mission to “whip up on the Mexicans.” Yet both the man and the kid are blinded by such contradictions due to the discourse of myth employed by the man, both that of the Promised Land, which will make them all rich landowners, as well as that the adversarial “Other.” The complexities of empirical expansion and the historical implications of a republic waging a bloody war over territory on the basis of race are whittled down to culturally powerful metaphors of Promised Land and the racial

Other, which justify the war and eliminate all contradictions of these white Christians’ actions.

When the kid interviews with Captain White, these cultural metaphors become even stronger, wrapped not only in myth, but also in law. The kid enters the captain’s quarters in the hotel, where he sits in his makeshift office, at a “wickerwork desk writing letters” (33). After a period of silence, he begins to interrogate the kid, asking him from where he came, his age, and then how he came to be in such conditions. The kid responds that he was robbed, to which Captain White queries, “Were they

Mexicans?” The captain is prodding, trying to poke out the adversarial Other in attempt to give justifying context, provide evidence before the kid of the need to invade and subject the Mexicans. He is searching for proof of their barbarism, in effort to juxtapose it with the white Christians’ civilization. The kid’s answer, or lie, is in

47 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 part satisfying when he says “Mexicans and niggers. They was a white or two with em” (33). If he is referring to the cattle drovers composed of “crossbreeds,” free slaves, and Indians who shared a meal with him, his lie is twice as offensive; yet the offense, the true contradiction, is that in all his travels, the only thief has been the kid when he attacked the Mexican barman and stole a bottle of alcohol. The captain’s immediate act of throwing the adversarial Other into the middle clouds the true happenings of the events lived by the kid, maintaining an image of the good and civilized white Christian as well as that of the adversarial Other, instead of the actual and truthful inverse.

The captain continues. Speaking of the battle of Monterrey, where U.S. army, along with volunteer fighters, took the city, only to later hand it back to Mexico upon the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. The captain explains:

We fought for it. Lost friends and brothers down there. And then by

God if we didnt give it back. Back to a bunch of barbarians that even

the most biased in their favor will admit have no least notion in God’s

earth of honor or justice or the meaning of republican government. (33)

The captain first categorizes the Mexicans as barbarians. This is significant because barbarians, according to Foucault, are different from savages. A savage, “once he enters a relation of a social kind, he ceases to be a savage” (Society 195). However, a barbarian is and always will be an enemy to civilization. He can only exist in relation to civilization:

48 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

There can be no barbarian unless an island of civilization exists

somewhere, unless he lives outside it, and unless he fights it. And the

barbarian's relationship with the speck of civilization—which the

barbarian despises, and which he wants—is one of hostility and

permanent warfare. The barbarian cannot exist without the civilization

he is trying to destroy and appropriate. (Foucault, Society 195)

The reason the Mexicans haven’t an inkling as to the meaning of a republican government, according to White’s argument, is precisely because of their barbarian status; they are the natural enemy of civilization.

Yet his argument which identifies Mexicans as the adversarial Other does not stop at barbarism. He continues, now speaking in terms of race, which in turn, in his words, delegates certain rights of dominion to the Americans:

What we are dealing with, he said, is a race of degenerates. A mongrel

race, little better than niggers. And maybe no better. There is no

government in Mexico. Hell, there’s no God in Mexico. Never will be.

We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing

themselves. And do you know what happens with people who cannot

govern themselves? That’s right. Others come in to govern for them.

(34)

What captain White is doing is declaring his “rights” and those rights of every white

Christian capable of governing comprehending a republican government. He is expressing the discourse of rights, identified by Foucault and Stathis Gourgouris,

49 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 which emerged during the Enlightenment. Whereas the subject tied to the sovereign had traditionally been bound to the figure of the king or even God himself, the

Enlightenment argues that “society will no longer be linked by allegory to a divine universe but will be exclusively a worldly affair, guaranteed by a series of sentences that hand society the gift of acting as a subject” (Gourgouris 55). These sentences are, as Foucault explains, ones where the subject “speaks the discourse of rights . . . he is demanding and asserting “his” rights—he says: “We have a right”” (Society 52).

Hence there is a shift in the meaning of subject, from that of the medieval sense of being subjected to a Lord or king (subjectus), to the political subject (subjectum), or the citizen.42 The modern idea of the citizen is therefore one where the subject is a double-subject, one who is subject to law, but who also must bear the burden of the law. This is the “burden” of law which Captain White bears. He is a citizen and captain of a nation, a nation he imagines in terms of a republican government, and in effect, it is his rights, his burden, to bring government and democracy to the Mexicans who are incapable of such imaginings. The declaration and upholding of his own rights ultimately depletes Mexicans of their own, in a sort of check and balance of legal rights.43

Foucault explains that in order to fulfill these rights, be them conquest, invasion, the maintaining or acquisition of property, the position of the subject leads him to establish a truth that is not the truth of the philosopher or the jurist, it is a truth which generates a constant war, even in times of peace. This truth cannot not place itself between two adversaries or above them, but must always chose a side with the

50 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 subject who is speaking of rights and assume a “combat position.”44 This truth of dissymmetry is irrational and brutal and ultimately, becomes the discourse of the dominion of a “superior” race over an “inferior” one. Thus Captain White’s declaration of his right to invade and conquer Mexico is inevitable coupled with the argument of race. The Mexicans are, according to the truth fomented by his rights, an inferior “mongrel race,” and thus he rationalizes the Americans’ rights of invasion and acquisition of property from the inferior race, claiming that “we will be the ones who will divide the spoils. There will be a section of land for every man in my company”

(34). Captain White exemplifies Foucault’s formulation of biopower, which, in the words of Achille Mbembe, “appears to function through dividing people into those who must live and those who must die.” Biopower operates “on the basis of a split between the living and the dead” and “presupposes the distribution of human species into groups, the subdivision of the population into subgroups, and the establishment of a biological caesura between the ones and the others” (166). Captain White’s discourse ultimately demonstrates that “race has been the ever present shadow in

Western political thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of, or rule over, foreign peoples” (Mbembe 166).

At this point in the novel, even though the Mexican American War is over, the treaty signed, White is still waging war based on the question of race. Foucault identifies “a race war” to be the “war that is going on beneath order and peace, the war that undermines our society and divides it in a binary mode” (Society 60). In the nineteenth century Americas, and most specifically on frontiers and in Latin America

51 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 as well, this binary mode is commonly known as “civilization and barbarism,” which states that “our civilization has a right over their barbarism.” In a biopolitical context, we may also see this binary opposition in terms of State racism: our “civilized race” has a right over the “inferior” racial Other, the savage.

Ultimately, I propose that the frontier myth of the adversarial Other is born out of biopolitics’ State racism. As is customary of national myth, that of the adversarial

Other simplifies the biopolitical techniques for violence employed by the State. Here myth attempts to hide State racism, cover-up the very biopolitical workings of conquest and empire. With Captain White, however, McCarthy is prodding out and exposing State racism. Indeed, as highlighted in White’s words, a large part of his filibuster campaign is based on race. This campaign even receives political support, as

White explains, “We have the tacit support of Governor Burnett of California” (34).

More than any other rationalization, White recurs to State racism as a tactical resource to siege the Mexicans’ land and eliminate them if necessary. Within the political body of the republic that White so envisions, there is no place for the Mexican race. They present a threat to the health of the body of the U.S. nation for two reasons: first, they are “mongrels,” racially impure, “little better than niggers,” and like a disease or any other biological irregularity of the body, said corpus must be “purified” (using

Foucault’s term) from such “abnormalities.” Second, their supposed racial inferiority makes them incapable of democracy, according to White. Such an incapacity to govern means they are all the more a threat to U.S. democracy and its political body.

52 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

As such, measures are taken by White to violently exclude or extract the Mexican race from integrating into the political body of the U.S.

If my argument for State racism does not prove convincing up to this point, let us consider for a moment the resurgence of frontier myth concerning the adversarial

Other. As already stated, the Indian as the adversarial Other in frontier literature has been transplanted in each subsequent U.S. generation and conflict: Mexicans,

Philippines, Cubans, Japanese, Vietnamese, Russians, Iraqis, etc. The continuation of the adversarial Other is highly dependent on race, and only resurfaces in U.S. culture and politics when the enemy can be identified as racially different from what the national body of citizens is idealized to be. McGilchrist observes:

It is notable that during the Second World War, Germans, though they

were military enemies, were not regarded with such fear and loathing

as the more alien-seeming Japanese. Japanese Americans were interned

in the United States. German Americans were not. Apparently the true

“other” had to be, like the Indians, a different racial type. (12-3)

McGilchrist’s gives a prime example here of what is undoubtedly State racism in terms of frontier myth. The fact that Germans were not interned like Japanese is ultimately a question of race, just as White’s argument for his military expedition is, more than anything, founded on race. State racism thus justifies actions of political extremes such as displacement, war, and even genocide within the thanatopolitical extreme of Foucault’s biopower.

53 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Foucault’s prime example of State racism is the Nazi Holocaust, and one cannot help but consider the notions of genocide and concentration camps in terms of nineteenth century Indian removal and placement on reservations. Such extremes of

U.S. State racism have undoubtedly resurged in American history, as exemplified by

McGilchrist’s quote of Japanese prison camps. More contemporarily, we may also consider the “War on Terror” and current U.S. toleration of Guantanamo in light of

State racism. Those interned, simple put, are racially different, and given the strong tow of frontier myth’s adversarial Other still found in U.S. culture and politics, the reenactment and permissibility of similar discourses and situations will continue.

However, the role state racism plays in Blood Meridian lasts about as long as

Captain White does as a character. Leading up to their slaughter, the filibusters’ traversal of the American desert presents a world anything but a pristine Virgin Land, much less one we could call promised. The further into Mexico they travel, the less likely it seems that each filibuster will receive his partial of lush grassland. The harsh environment which leaves animals in the expedition dying by the wayside and men praying to God for rain can be best described as a “terra damnata” and a “purgatory waste.” In such a way, McCarthy contradicts and subverts preconceived notions and myths about the American West. Indeed, when Captain White and his crew of filibusters are routed by Indians in the next chapter and slaughtered by “death hilarious,” he is drawing in the reader to consider frontier myth as a sinister and almost laughable matter. The adversarial Other, White’s usage of State racism, he himself the “lone hero” on democracy’s errand, are in every literal sense violently

54 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 subverted and deconstructed when he and his band of filibusters are slaughtered in the most heinous fashion possible by the barbarian—by the enemy civilization is destined to overcome. They are conquered by the racial Other who they, the white Christians, were to rightfully subdue.

1.4 Secularized Theology Just as I have highlighted the biopolitical underpinnings of violence through

State racism found in McCarthy’s subversion of frontier myth in Blood Meridian, I will now turn to violence as the atavistic and amoral expression of natural law. Here I will interpret the relationship between violence and nature in biopolitical terms, this time in light of sovereignty’s state of exception. I argue that what many have interpreted as a state of nature setting, should in fact be viewed as evidence for violence sanctioned by the sovereign’s exception.

After the early episode with Captain White, race plays little part in sovereign violence. Indeed, White’s rhetoric of State racism is an isolated example. Characters in the novel from all races are ultimately all killers who likewise murder any person with impunity regardless of his or her race. The Glanton gang itself is comprised of men who are white, Indian, Mexican, and Black. As a whole, as Owens notes, in Blood

Meridian “[t]he references to “all races, all breeds” and the child's innocence and the ape motif reveal McCarthy's thesis: mindless, atavistic violence is the true nature of mankind, a genetic heritage in common with apes and wolves” (4). Thus, for Owens,

“Primal violence is the novel's common denominator, the leitmotif, the horrible adumbration” (6). I feel that here there is something missing when we view violence

55 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 simply as a natural, primal part of nature. After all, what violence is not primal? And does not denoting violence as such at the same time give privilege to a less primal violence, perhaps suggesting that there exists a more civilized violence? Within

McCarthian scholarship, and most certainly with respect to how we approach violence in Blood Meridian, there is a missing link. The provenance of violence in the novel cannot simply be explained through natural law but requires that we look at another element in the book that has, until now, been largely ignored: violence as the product of positive law as well—a violence which is no less primal than that of natural law.

The novel’s concern with empirical expansion, nation-building, and national myth, suggests in itself a political and sovereign world. Undoubtedly present in Blood

Meridian are government and law, details which are easy to overlook given the lawless stage where the action takes place. As I will argue, lawlessness in Blood

Meridian is not due to a sovereignty in absentia, but is a space of exception opened up by the sovereign itself, which serves as the paradigm for the extirpation of frontier people the sovereign is unable to internalize.

The sovereign lurks within the pages of Blood Meridian, embodied in governors, alcaldes, sargentos, lieutenants, soldiers, lawmen, and even their outlaw and the bandit counterparts. The politico-juridical implication of the judge’s name alone implies sovereignty. There is also continual reference to the “citizenry” in the novel—talk of jurisprudence and case law; the judge cites “cases civil and martial” to the lieutenant in the bar and quotes “Coke and Blackstone, Anaximander, Thales”

(239). Why, in all of the judges philosophical mutterings, is the only bibliography he

56 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 cites full of Enlightenment era British politician-philosophers? Why, when the world of Blood Meridian seems so devoid of law and so entrenched in a state of nature? It is not a cruel joke, nor a contradiction. McCarthy is highlighting something vital to our understanding of what sovereignty means. What McCarthy understands, is that the

Enlightenment, with all its secularization and reason (from which emerged our modern concept of sovereignty), managed to monopolize violence and chaos in the law.

McCarthy is contrasting all the reason and philosophy of law, embodied in the judge, with law’s hidden dark side: its violence—also embodied in the judge. In essence, the judge is living proof “that the progress of legal procedures is embarrassed by the shadow of violence that attaches itself to the law and cannot be shrugged off”

(Haverkamp and Vismann 223). The words of jurisprudence are, in effect, empty when placed in context with the real life practice of the law. As Robert Cover observes in his article, “Violence and the Word,” the pain and fear suffered by those subjected to law unveils the “unredeemed reality” with law’s inescapable shadow of violence:

“Between the idea and the reality of common meaning . . . falls the shadow of the violence of law, itself” (1628-29). There is a philosophy of law, a jurisprudence, but then there is the practice of law, and McCarthy shows us just how violent and alien it is to our imaginings of what law should be.

From the very beginning of Blood Meridian, the reader is thrust into a brutal, secularized world. Everywhere the kid (and the gang) goes, all churches are described as abandoned and in ruins, filled with dead bodies and hermits. Owens interprets the decay of religion as evidence for a primal setting of violence: “Throughout the novel,

57 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 violence overwhelms the tabernacles of Christianity, lending the primal theme an iconoclastic aura” (4). However, the ruins of churches and religious temples in the novel are evidence for a secularized world and not a primal one—a world where the church has been replaced by the State. Such a scene alludes to Carl Schmitt’s Political

Theology and his famous quote that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” (36). In Blood Meridian, religion has been secularized and made sovereign, and there is no longer a place for theology in this secularized world. Nineteenth century U.S. nationalism and the push for westward expansion of the nation-state has replaced religious fervor, reminding us of secularism’s triumph, of sovereignty’s place in what was once God’s.

According to Schmitt, secularized theology replaces religious doctrine with political theory, God with the sovereign nation-state. In a sense, we have new names for a secularized version of theology, yet the same reverent and fanatical attitude.

Therefore, Foucault’s observation that “politics is the continuation of war” (Society

15) sheds light on the judge’s infamous declaration that “war is god” (249). If sovereignty (or the State) is the new god, then the judge is ultimately proclaiming what has been observed: that the greatest achievement of the modern sovereign State is that it holds a monopoly on war. Foucault highlights the verification of this monopoly during the Enlightenment through the emergence of “the army as institution” (Society 49), going on to explain that “[w]ar is the motor behind institutions and order” (50). For this reason, after his declaration that war is God, the judge then also charges the expriest Tobin as follows: “For the priest has put by the

58 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 robes of his craft and taken up the tools of that higher calling which all men honor.

The priest also would be no godserver but a god himself” (250). The expriest, in joining the gang and waging war, has abandoned religion for secularism and, like the judge, has become a maker of war. Consequently, Tobin has sought to become a god in that he is enacting sovereign’s violent function.

Thus the world of Blood Meridian is one where the violence of religious fervor experienced during the medieval crusades has been replaced with the violence of nationalism, and in the United States, this means the cry for westward expansion of a sovereign power guilty of slavery in the South, and which now seeks to displace and exterminate the native population in the West.45 Violence that was once enacted in the name of God, is now carried out in the name of the sovereign, encapsulating Benedict

Anderson’s observation: “The century of the Enlightenment, of rational secularism, brought with it its own modern darkness” (11). The judge is the promoter of this modern darkness. With his extremist rationalism—convinced of its omnipotence like that of the Enlightenment—he therefore “can justify the most totalitarian and barbarous behavior” (Pughe 379). In effect, Bell observes that “what the judge says and he and his confederates act out eventually seems like an only slightly and demented revival of Enlightenment philosophy” (124).

In short, the judge’s god is the sovereign and the sovereign means war. The two are one and cannot be separated. The judge’s name is in fact no coincidence, as he acquires more and more the semblance of his god throughout the novel. “Made in his

59 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 image,” the judge slowly reveals his own sovereign character as he himself comes to embody sovereignty.

1.5 The Sovereign Exception The judge makes it clear that, in all his recordings and documentation of artifacts, plants and animals, and even humans, he is a seeker of absolute sovereignty.

As he explains: “Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth” (198). When he then expounds to Toadvine that suzerain is a

“keeper or overlord,” Toadvine asks, “Why not say keeper then?” (198). Though the question may seem trivial, the judge does not think so. Considering Toadvine’s inquiry, he answers, “Because he is a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules where there are other rulers” (198). The judge’s insistence on the usage of the words

“suzerain,” a word whose origin lies the term sovereign, confirms his desire for absolute sovereign dominance. The judge’s drive for absolute sovereignty over man and nature is expressed after Toadvine tells him, “No man can acquaint himself with everthing on this earth.” Tilting his great head, the judge reasons:

The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden

lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. . . . But the

man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from

the tapestry will be the decision alone have taken charge of the world

and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate

the terms of his whole fate.” (199)

60 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Holden affirms that his very act of documenting all things in nature, asserting his dominion over all life, animal and human, places him in charge of the world. He wages war on nature and man, and in doing so, makes himself the ruler of rulers.

The bellicose judge seeks to accomplish this through “an only slightly and demented revival of Enlightenment philosophy” (Vereen 124), and so, “With the moral universe shrunk to reflect merely the will’s desire for absolute sovereignty over the external (whether of man or nature), the judge is spokesman for an extreme paranoid of individualism as Melville's Ahab” (Jarrett 79). The Enlightenment rationalization that the judge utilizes to establish his sovereignty is ultimately what engenders violence in Blood Meridian. He is a fictional character whose function in the novel upholds Max Horkheimer and Theodor W Adorno’s thesis in their Dialectic of Enlightenment: “In the most general sense of progressive thought, the

Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant” (3). How is it then, that Enlightenment rational, in seeking to establish men’s sovereignty, ultimately radiates disaster?

To answer this question, and to further understand the judge, we must first understand what definition of the sovereign the Enlightenment gave us, and to what form of the sovereign the judge adheres. Schmitt’s definition: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (5), has universally been the foundation for our modern understanding of the sovereign, and though differing on many issues, the likes of

Franz Kafka, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, Gilles Deleuze, and of course Giorgio

61 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Agamben, concur with Schmitt that what is at stake in the honoring of the rule of law is an operation which is in play both outside and inside sovereignty—in other words, the exception. Thus sovereignty is defined by its ubiquitous nature of inside and outside, its paradoxical function to enforce and suspend its very laws. Law depends on lawlessness, ultimately operating though chaos. In essence, what defines sovereignty is the paradoxical domain where the sovereign decision is based on the exception, enacting a suspension of the law in order to validate the sovereign. This space in juridical order is known as the state of exception—a space of suspended law or legalized lawlessness—the threshold where law and violence meet.46 In the secularized world, “The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology” (Schmitt 36). Just as a miracle is an event in opposition with the very laws of nature, a state of exception promotes and allows sovereign actions, especially violent ones, which contradict the very rule of law. Ultimately, the judge’s secular reasoning, his “intellectual imperialism” can be understood as an “instance of what happens if Enlightenment doctrine is pressed into its logical conclusion” (Vereen 124).

This logical conclusion, in imperialist and sovereign terms, is precisely the state of exception. It is in this sense that the judge ultimately creates disaster; he does so as the sovereign state of exception.

The judge’s very outward appearance, which often shift from a man of civil refinement to that of a savage, corresponds to the state of exception’s definition as the point or threshold where the sovereign nomos and anomie meet (nomos, understood as the Greek mythological term for the spirit or god of law, and anomie as the very

62 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 antithesis of nomos—literally meaning without nomos, or without law). The judge’s appearance marks this point of convergence between nomos and anomie: at times he is dressed in the fineries of civilization, in linen suits and Panama hats, signifying law and order, whereas other times he trades in such attire for “a woven wreath of desert scrub about his head like some egregious saltland bard” (219), alluding to anomie.

Furthermore, the judge voices the contrary ideology to Irving’s argument that “[m]ight does not make right” (250). Sovereignty, like Judge Holden, aligns itself through the exception with what the seventeenth-century fabulist Jean de la Fontaine knew all too well: “The strong are always best at proving they are right” (Qtd. in State of Exception and the Contemporary Novel 16). This statement, correlated by Boever to the conditions of not just a state of nature but a state of exception,47 is the reason why the judge retorts to Irvine, “Decisions of life and death, of what shall and shall not be, beggar all question of right” (250). According to Holden, moral law only weakens the strong and strengthens the weak. For this reason, questions of right and wrong become irrelevant when the order of state of exception, which he so embodies and promotes, permits all question of “right” to be simply determined by the strongest.

In his article “Demystifying the Judge: Law and Mythical Violence in Cormac

McCarthy's Blood Meridian,” James Dorson verifies, up to this point, my claim. He too recognizes the relationship between law and violence in Blood Meridian to be that of a state of exception, and likewise, draws a line between state of exception and the judge:

63 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

We may further understand the fusion of law and violence in Blood

Meridian in the light of what Giorgio Agamben in State of Exception

described as the “articulation between life and law, between anomie

and nomos” in the legal limbo of the state of exception. . . . in Blood

Meridian, the unholy matrimony between law and violence is

consummated in the figure of Judge Holden. His very presence in the

novel is the “substantial articulation” between law and violence. (111)

The sovereign’s presence in the judge, articulated through the state of exception, presents a new angle from which we may reconstruct the amoral sense of violence so often observed in Blood Meridian. Instead of attributing the violent world of the novel to a state of nature, “a Hobbesian war of all against all” (159) as Cant does, as well as others, we can now consider this state of nature as in fact, a state of exception. The

Hobbesian notion of a state of nature is man’s existence prior to established sovereignty, or positive law. It is a world where man is subjected to natural law, where there is a continual war of all against all, when any man can intrude on another’s territory or dwelling to pillage or kill him.48 Thus, according to Hobbes, man recurs to an artificial barrier that protects him from the conditions of natural law: positive law.

This is what Max Horkheimer and Theodor W Adorno speak of: the Enlightenment sought to liberate man from the fear of such a free-for-all state of nature and establish their sovereignty. However, what Hobbes does not recognize, and what many philosophers have pointed out since, is this only spells more disaster for the subject because in the process of establishing sovereignty, violence itself is brought into the

64 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 sovereign and internalized there. Ultimately, the sovereign monopolizes violence. This violence is then expressed through the exception, which in fact necessitates the conditions of a state of nature that preceded it. Roberto Esposito explains:

The idea of the impossibility of a true overcoming of the natural state in

that of the political emerges in opposition to the modern conception

derived from Hobbes that one can preserve life only by instituting an

artificial barrier with regard to nature, which in itself incapable of

neutralizing the conflict (and indeed is bound to strengthen it).

Anything but the negation of nature, the political is nothing else but the

continuation of nature at another level and therefore destined to

incorporate and reproduce nature’s original characteristics. (Bíos 17)

The political barrier man uses to overcome the state of nature only continues the war of all against all on another reorganized level of lawless play. In other words, as

Agamben explains, the Hobbesian state of nature and its violence, are the being-in- potentiality of the law, “the law’s self-presupposition as natural law” (HS 36).

I do not rest my thesis entirely on Judge Holden’s symbolic representation of the sovereign state of exception. Violence’s adherence to the political and the sovereign in Blood Meridian goes far beyond the judge. It can be said that the very plot for the novel’s violence is fixed on the political. Indeed, the motor for violence in the book is precisely a legal action: the Chihuahua government's legalization of scalp- hunting and the sanctioned payments on the bloody receipts. As Steven Frye explains,

“The gang works directly in the interest of the civil body politic, clearing away the

65 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 violent and uncivilized natives that stand in the way of progress and civilization” (74-

75). It is thus not injudicious to state that sovereignty engenders violence in the novel.

Would the Glanton gang have formed were it not for the government-sanctioned campaign of scalp-hunting? Would we have scene after scene of bloody scalping were it not for governor Trias’ lucrative incentive of payment on scalps? The gang’s bloody crimes, in large part, are due to the contract they have with the Chihuahua government, a contract which makes their actions, which would normally be considered illegal and criminal, permissible and licit.

The exchange of this sovereign contract is represented early in the novel. The kid, after surviving the slaughter of Captain White’s crew of filibusters, lands himself in a Mexican prison where he finds Toadvine. From the prison in Ciudad Chihuahua, both the kid and Toadvine see the elegant governor, the representative of the sovereign, in all his grandeur and civility, counterposed with all the savagery and primitiveness of the Glanton gang. It is interesting to note that the first time the kid witnesses the gang, they are viewed in relation to the governor, suggesting the tie that binds the two together:

They saw the governor himself erect and formal within his

silkmullioned sulky clatter forth from the double doors of the palace

courtyard and they saw one day a pack of viciouslooking humans

mounted on unshod indian ponies riding half drunk through the streets,

bearded, barbarous, clad in the skins of animals stitched up with thews

and armed with weapons of every description, revolvers of enormous

66 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

weight and bowieknives the size of clay-mores and short twobarreled

rifles with bores you could stick your thumbs in and the trappings of

their horses fashioned out of human skin and their bridles woven up

from human hair and decorated with human teeth and the riders

wearing scapulars or necklaces of dried and blackened human ears and

the horses rawlooking and wild in the eye and their teeth bared like

feral dogs and riding also in the company a number of halfnaked

savages reeling in the saddle, dangerous, filthy, brutal, the whole like a

visitation from some heathen land where they and other like them fed

on human flesh. (78)

The kids then spots the Judge, “the foremost among them” (79), and then this barbarous and motley crew of scalp hunters pass through the open doors of the governor’s palace.49

When they enter and the doors close behind them, Toadvine says to those watching from the prison, “Gentlemens . . . I’ll guarangoddamntee ye I know what that there is about” (79). What is Toadvine referring to other than the confirmation that the governor of Chihuahua is in league with these savage men? Toadvine is clearly aware of their murderous business which has become common practice in the borderlands. From the very beginning of the novel, McCarthy is highlighting the very words of Walter Benjamin: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (256). Hence, the contract (or document) concerted between the barbarous gang and the governor embodies Benjamin’s words.

67 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

The contract binds civilization to barbarism, illustrating that no violence can ever be purely civilized. No matter how much violence is bound up in laws or contracts, barbarism is always skulking somewhere in the fine print, reminding us that whether of natural law or positive law, violence in and of itself is primal by definition.

McCarthy makes clear the fact that law and government do exist in the world of Blood

Meridian by portraying the Glanton gang’s partnership with sovereignty through a bloody contract sanctioned by the governor. This situation in effect nullifies a state of nature, which can only exist prior to the establishment of positive law. Governor’s

Trias’ contract can therefore only be understood in terms of a sovereign declaration of state of exception.

When we call a space “lawless,” we can refer to two things: that the lawless region is so because no sovereign power has ever set foot on said terrain, and is thereby in a state of nature where, according to Hobbes, every man is against every man in a free-for-all, or, that a place is lawless because the existing sovereign has declared it so and instituted a state of exception, where law is dissolved and all crimes go unpunished. Many preconceptions about the nineteenth century American frontier adhere to the former definition of lawlessness to define the “Wild West.” Yet such adherence merely conforms to frontier myth, to that of the pristine and untouched

Virgin Land. Part of this myth defines the West as uninhabited, preexisting in a state of nature, waiting to be civilized by white man’s sovereign law. The myth of lawlessness in relation to state of nature is what is taken for granted in Blood

Meridian, a book which in fact debunks such myth. The West conceived as lawless, in

68 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 a wild state of nature, is a strong cultural metaphor that is instinctively yet erroneously presumed when we read a book that takes place in the West. By considering Governor

Trias’ contract in Blood Meridian, we can invert such perceptions by identifying the sovereign as the architect of lawlessness and violence.

The closest Owens comes to identifying sovereign law in Blood Meridian is when he states, “McCarthy's amoral vision of frontier violence is one of mankind running amok, subverting law at every bend in the trail and rendering all moral questions “void and without warrant”” (7). The subversion of law Owens observes in

Blood Meridian is precisely, as we have discussed, the definition of sovereignty. The honoring of the rule of law is an operation which is in play both outside and inside sovereignty—in other words, the exception. Law depends on lawlessness, operates through both order and chaos; it necessitates the conditions of a state of nature that preceded it, and thus sovereignty is defined by its ubiquitous nature of inside and outside, its paradoxical function to enforce and suspend its very laws. Consequently, the suspension of law does not revert back to a state of nature, but creates a state of exception.

State of exception’s close proximity to state of nature is what makes the two concept so easy to confuse, and is part of the reason sovereignty is so overlooked in

Blood Meridian. State of nature and state of exception are both, according to

Agamben, zones where “everything is possible” (HS 36). What distinguishes state of exception from Hobbes’ pre-sovereign state of nature is precisely the existence of sovereign law prior to the anomic state. Arne de Boever states, “Unlike a state of

69 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 nature, a state of exception is a situation or state in which the legal and political order has disintegrated and become dissolved” (State of Exception in the Contemporary

Novel 16). Such a disintegration of law, represented in the scalp-hunting contract between Trias and the gang, best defines the realm of Blood Meridian, a book which takes place within the sovereign realm of established nation-states such as Mexico and

Texas (U.S.), nation-states upheld by constitutions and sovereign law.

The novel’s setting is one of chaotic space of suspended law, law disposed of by governor Trias’ gruesome contract with the Glanton gang. Unlike many American constitutions, the Mexican constitution of 1824 maintained the liberal racial philosophy of the 1812 Law of Cádiz, which meant “race could no longer be legally used to prevent Indians, mestizos, and free afromestizos from exercising the citizenship rights enjoyed by Whites” (Menchaca 161). The constitution names all indigenous ethnic groups as citizens who enjoy all the rights of sovereign protection that such a title entails. In effect, Trias’ contract employs what Agamben calls a “force of law”—a force acting without law since it contradicts the law—given that it negates the very rights of the Apache as declared by the Mexican constitution.50 The act of sanctioning the extermination of Apache follows suit with sovereignty’s paradigm of eliminating perceived threats within its own citizenry (in this case the Apache) through a declared state of exception. Indeed, when McCarthy utilizes the term

“citizenry” in Blood Meridian (both citizen and citizenry appear regularly throughout the novel), he does so with inevitable irony. There is a lack of sovereign care of citizenry in the novel; few rights seem to be possessed by the so called “citizens,”

70 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Apache or otherwise. The root of such irony is located in the Glanton gang’s sovereign contract with the governor. This accord is not one of territorial “land-grabbing”—as is commonly associated with frontier expansion—but of sovereign power over the living bodies of a population: the extirpation of Apache whom the sovereign has deemed a

“threat,” and therefore excluded from citizenry. This contract, however, does not simply exempt Apache from their rights of citizenry, but consequently anyone who crosses paths with the Glanton gang. Thus, what so many have interpreted to be a

Hobbesian state of nature, is in reality a state of exception which engenders a similarly anomic space.

Interestingly, state of exception gives new meaning to the common assumption that the “West was where anything could happen” (Murdoch 24). It furthermore opens new avenues for the way we approach the Judge’s same words:

The truth about the world . . . is that anything is possible. Had you not

seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would

appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered

dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor

precedence, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate

destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable

and calamitous beyond reckoning. (245)

All the reasoning of the Enlightenment and its ordering of the world, its organizing of society with sovereign law, has yet to eradicate the chaos in the world—that which is

“strange,” like “a fevered dream,” or an “itinerant carnival” still persists and in fact

71 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 forms part of man’s sovereignty inasmuch as the sovereign is simply man’s reworking of that anomic world.

1.6 Creaturely Life Perhaps no other philosopher has done more to advance Foucault’s work on biopolitics than Giorgio Agamben. Whereas Foucault identifies the emergence of biopolitics during the Enlightenment, for Agamben, biopolitics has always formed part of Western politics.51 Yet for Agamben, the point where biopolitics no longer enhances life but reverts to a thanatopolitical mode to destroy life is not State racism, but is in fact founded upon the state of exception. In his interpretation of Schmitt,

Agamben defines the sovereign exception as a borderline concept or a threshold.

For Agamben, it is modern sovereignty’s paradoxical nature of inclusion and exclusion, inside and outside, which has become so entrenched in the biological lives of its citizens. State of exception’s topography is the paradoxical zone of inside and outside, where the sovereign “is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order” (HS 15). This is because in suspending law and juridical order to protect the state, the sovereign exception places itself outside of law. However, since according to the law there can be nothing outside the law, the exception is an exclusion which includes, or an inclusive exclusion, whereby that which is outside law is brought inside the rule of law while remaining outside: “[T]he sovereign, having the legal power to suspend the validity of the law, legally places himself outside the law. This means that the paradox can also be formulated this way: “the law is outside itself,” or:

“I, the sovereign, who am outside the law, declare that there is nothing outside the law

72 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

[che non c' è un fuori legge].” (HS 15). Therefore, “what is excluded in the exception maintains itself in relation to the rule in the form of the rule's suspension. The rule applies to the exception in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it. The state of exception is thus not the chaos that precedes order but rather the situation that results from its suspension” (HS 17-18).

From the sovereign topography of state of exception emerges Agamben’s biopolitical notion of life. The form of political life produced in a state of exception, and that resides therein, is the inhuman kind of life in between human and animal that

Agamben calls “vita nuda”—bare life, or at times called naked life. This life is what is formed between the split of the two Greeks concepts of life: zoē and bios. Zoē is existence, the simple fact of living found in animals, mankind, and gods. Bios is life that attempts to go beyond zoē; it is a collective or qualified life, the political body or life of a people.52 Yet when the rule of the exception can no longer be distinguished from the rule of law, upon the threshold of state of exception, neither zoē nor bios can exist. As the sovereign excludes life of rights, it is attempting to politicize zoē, conceptualize the political subject as life in mere existence. Yet zoē by definition is life in the absence of political qualification, and on the other hand, life stripped bare of rights cannot be bios, because bios is life qualified politically and upheld by law and rights. Therefore, what we are left with is bare life, neither one nor the other, a life of depleted rights that is not fully animal but not entirely human either.

In his genealogy of bare life, Agamben traces this biopolitical figure back to homo sacer (sacred man). Based on an obscure Roman political text, homo sacer is he

73 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

“who may be killed and yet not sacrificed” (HS 8). Thus homo sacer corresponds to the sovereign exception given that the “sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice”

(HS 81). This double exclusion of homo sacer from the religious and political realm is congruent to the outside and inside topography of state of exception, an appropriate position for Blood Meridian, a novel whose author “lovingly writes the voices of the excluded into his discourse of America” (Cant 6).

Homo sacer’s exclusion to a domain outside of law, like the sovereign exception, is what paradoxically includes him in the political realm, where the capacity of law applies in no longer applying. To illustrate this, Agamben recurs to

Jean-Luc Nancy’s conceptualization of abandonment, or the ban:

The relation of exception is a relation of ban. He who has been banned

is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but

rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold

in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. It

is literally not possible to say whether the one who has been banned is

outside or inside the juridical order . . . It is in this sense that the

paradox of sovereignty can take the form “There is nothing outside the

law.” (HS 28-29)

Homo sacer’s relationship to law is therefore one of abandonment where, like the blurred inside and outside fringe zone of the state of exception, it is impossible to

74 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 distinguish whether the subject is outside or inside the law. Bare life is in essence abandoned by the law to the state of exception.

In literature, Eric L. Santner observes that literary characters’ experience with the law often places them in a creaturely existence; they take on a creaturely form of life. This creaturely life, as he explains, is none other than bare life: “creaturely life is life abandoned to the state of exception/emergency, that paradoxical domain in which law has been suspended in the name of preserving law” (22). To give an example,

Santner refers to Kafka: “When, at his execution at the end of The Trial, Josef K. exclaims “like a dog,” Kafka is thus referring not only to the pathetic scene of K.’s execution but also to the larger structure of K.’s experience with the law, one that renders him, precisely, “creaturely”” (22). In the same way I have identified both

Judge Holden as the embodiment of the sovereign exception and Governor Trias’ scalp-hunting contract as the sovereign declaration of state of exception in Blood

Meridian, we can also expect that life in the novel related to the Holden and this contract to likewise be the creaturely life of homo sacer. We may consider, for example, the slaughter of the Gileño Apache after the gang forges the bloody contract with Trias as that which allows their killing without being considered a homicide.

When Glanton and his gang reach the Apache’s camp, he orders his men, “Dont leave a dog alive if you can help it” (155). The statement here is ambiguous. Is Glanton commanding his gang to kill all life, including the literal dogs in the camp, or is he literally calling the Apache dogs? Is this dog animal or dog man? Either way, the ambiguous proximity of human life to that of the animal life of a dog places the

75 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Gileños in the category of creaturely life. Under Trias’ contract, the Gileños have been abandoned to the state of exception and their life occupies the threshold between human and animal, a point where Glanton makes no distinction between the two.

Yet it is not just the Apache who are homo sacer. As Agamben explains, under the regime of biopolitics all life is potentially homo sacer.53 For this reason, throughout the entire novel, humans are continually associated with and given animal qualities. There are constant references to wolves in the novel; they continually haunt the passage of the kid and the gang throughout their bloody exploits with their shapes, shadows, footprints, and howls. Indian and white alike are often described as canine- like: Yumas “squatted on their haunches like wolves” (280), and the kid and Sproule

“slept like dogs” in the cave (65). Creaturely life seems to be expressed most sharply when violence is involved. For example, when the alcalde and his wife are tied up and left with a pan of water “they drank like dogs and they had howled at the booming surf” (71). When Glanton is killed by the Yuma, they toss him into a bonfire having

“tied his dog to his corpse and it was snatched after in howling suttee” (274). Here, in

Glanton’s death, the union of his body with that of his dog undoubted mark him as creaturely. More specifically, Agamben even relates the cultural relevance of wolves and the wolf-man to be a brother to homo sacer.54 Glanton being tied to his dog expresses his wolf-man status: evidence that his life is creaturely and defined only by its capacity to be freely killed.

Creaturely life also haunts the characters in the novel through an association with apes. The noises men emit in the novel are described as the “grunting of apes”

76 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

(4), the Mexican bandits “pummel one another like apes” (65), the prisoners “picked at themselves like apes” (74), dead men “gazing up with ape’s eyes at brother sun”

(153). Once again their creaturely status is often expressed through moments of violence or death, reminding us of bare life’s exposure to all sorts of licit violence in the state of exception generate by Trias’ contract.

Here, on a speculative note, I ask, might we consider the “optical democracy” in the novel to be attributed bare life in a state of exception? In Phillips thesis already mentioned, the following passage from Blood Meridian exemplifies how extremely unanthropocentric the novel’s world is:

In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a

strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of

grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these

articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on

some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another

and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such

landscape all preferences is made whimsical and a man and a rock

become endowed with unguessed kinships. (247)

Aside from attributing the novel’s unanthropocetric view to simply a fact of nature, I would suggest that this “optical democracy” (democracy itself a political creation) is the biopolitical process of exception that produces bare life. What makes humans so equal to animals and the things of nature, what makes them creaturely, is the process of state of exception that maintains the characteristics of a state of nature when it

77 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 suspends law in order to protect sovereignty. Santner explains that “human beings are not just creatures among other creatures but are in some sense more creaturely than other creatures by virtue of an excess that is produced in the space of the political and that, paradoxically, accounts for their “humanity” (26). Part of our humanity is that we are political beings, and as such, we are in fact more creaturely that creatures themselves. Mankind’s political paradigm of the sovereign produces what is creaturely within us, and in Blood Meridian, accounts for the novel’s unanthropocentrism, one that is so extreme that humans are in fact more creaturely than creatures. As the judge argues, “Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet?” (146). Humans are precisely creaturely in that, more so than wolves, we cull ourselves. We do this par excellence on a political level, where the sovereign exception culls out unwanted or threatening political subjects from the sovereign through abandonment of bare life, stripping subjects of their rights, placing them outside of law, and in effect, including them in the sphere of the sovereign. We see this with governor Trias, who sees the Apache as a threat. Though constitutional citizens of Mexico, he lays the Apache bare before the law, depleted of rights, and exposed to be killed without legal repercussions. There can be no clearer example of the sovereign exception and its relation to bare life, no clearer instance where the unanthropocentric mood in the novel opens up to biopolitics, to an optical democracy that places all life on the same playing field as bare life.

Creaturely life’s relation to the sovereign is especially evident when we consider the Glanton gang itself. Interestingly, the gang is described as “without . . .

78 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 camaraderie any more than banded apes” (148). This is particularly important because the text suggest that the gang acts in relation to one another like bare life, whose relationship is, as I have already highlighted, one of abandonment, where creaturely life is abandoned by law to the state of exception. The members of the gang are quite literally the bandit figure of homo sacer, the outlaw whose exclusion from the law paradoxically includes him.55 The way bare life is included in its exclusion through the ban, or abandonment. The judge is the ultimate keeper of this code. As the living exception he is the enforcer of the ban.

Just as the sovereign captures bare life through the ban, this gang of bandits capsulates its members through abandonment, imitating the relationship of bare life to sovereignty. Indeed, throughout the novel, members of the gang who cannot continue due to injury or circumstance are simply abandoned, left to their own fate or killed in the moment. In effect, McGill, “skewered through with a lance” during the battle with the Gileños (157), is shot in the head by Glanton. Though this could be interpreted as an act of mercy towards a man who would suffer and die anyway, the subsequent case involving David Brown suggests otherwise. Brown’s injury is not necessarily life- threatening; an arrow has pierced his thigh during the slaughter. He is unable to remove it and consequently asks the judge for help first. The judge replies that he will not, and jokes that he will write a policy for Davy’s life “against every mishap save the noose” (161). Brown curses him and the judge simply laughs. He then turns to the rest of the gang and all refuse succor save the kid. This scene first and foremost

79 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 highlights how the gang allegorically functions as a paradigm of the sovereign exception.

Like bare life’s relation to law, the members are bound to their gang through abandonment. This is the gang’s code, and all the men follow the code, refusing

Brown any help. Everyone understands and follows the code of abandonment, that is, except for the kid. He is the one who agrees to help him remove the arrow and thus refuses to abandon, denies the fulfillment of the sovereign exception’s paradigm. The kid’s propensity to not abandon is consistent throughout the novel. Early on, the kid refuses to abandon Sproule, though mortally wounded. Sproule even orders him to abandon him, but the kid silently accompanies him until he ultimately dies of gangrene. The gang abandons Grimly; they abandon six men during the shootout in chapter fourteen. Despite this pattern, though, the kid does not abandon, even when the gang draws lots and he is left with Tate to kill the wounded Shelby and the others who cannot continue. He has been ordered to put a bullet in Shelby’s head, but cares for him instead, gives him water and, only according to Shelby’s desires, leaves him.

Again, when Tate’s horse becomes lame, the kid does not abandon Tate, he remains with him, and in the process, is left behind by the gang, abandoned.

In terms of abandonment the judge and the kid are opposing forces. This is what establishes the enmity between them. After helping Brown, the expriest Tobin hisses, “God will not love ye forever,” warning him against the judge, who he says would’ve “took you, boy. Like a bride to the altar” (163). Yet the kid constantly declares that he is not afraid of the judge, defying him in his refusal to abandon. For

80 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 this reason, the judge is watching the kid when he draws lots to find out who will have to kill the wounded. Under his gaze, the kid chooses the arrow that indicates he is the one to kill Shelby, but when he immediately looks at the judge, this time he acts as though he noticed nothing. But the judge is watching; he is continually aware of the kid’s actions—the only member of the gang who does not follow the code of abandonment.

When the gang is broken up by the Yuma attack at the ferry, the kid and Tobin are left to wander the desert together. Here too the kid, as is his custom in the novel, does not abandon Tobin, even though he possesses the pistol and has no need of him.

For this reason the judge charges the kid of being “mutinous” and having “reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen” (299), or later that “our tribe you have betrayed.” The kid’s betrayal is to the gang because of his clemency towards and refusal to abandon the heathen, which in this case is bare life. Instead of abandoning bare life as he should, as the judge demands in his symbolic representation of the sovereign exception, the kid is loyal and cares for the injured gang members. As such, we can understand the kid and the judge as the two opposite extremes of biopolitics. If we understand the gang as a sort of micro nation-state, a model for modern sovereignty, then the kid is the part of biosovereignty whose politics is concerned with life to the extent of preserving and prolonging it (only within the gang; outside this circle the kid is an obvious killer). On the other hand, the judge is the other thanatopolitical extreme of biopolitics. For him, the members of the gang and any

81 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 foreign entity outside the gang are creaturely, bare life, whose relationship to the gang is one only that includes them through an exclusion, through abandonment.

To conclude this section, I would like to briefly consider the Holden’s proximity and interest in the imbecile towards the end of the novel. The judge, who emblematically represents the sovereign exception, is consistent in his treatment of all life as bare. Regardless of race, gender, and age, he mercilessly kills since for him human life’s biopolitical value is defined by its to-be-killed-ness. However, he curiously takes a unique interest in the so-called idiot, or imbecile, he rescues, who has been kept caged-up as a sort of freak-show attraction. The imbecile is the one character whom the judge does not abandon when the Yuma attack nor when they are forced to cross the desert, which begs the question, why? We do not know what ultimately happens to the imbecile, whether Holden kills him like he has done with previous human toys of his (I’m thinking of the Apache child he scalps after three days of treating him as a sort of plaything). We do not even know if he abandons the imbecile in the end, even though he amongst the gang exemplifies this practice best.

The imbecile is no doubt creaturely in status. As he and the judge cross the dessert he is described in animalistic terms, as a lemur and a sort of tracking blood hound. We read: “The imbecile squatted on all fours and leaned into the lead like some naked species of lemur. It swung its head and sniffed at the air, as if it were being used for tracking” (298). The judge’s fixation with the imbecile can possibly be understood as the sovereign exception’s production and harboring of bare life, as though the two depended on each other. Yet I suggest that there is something more here, something

82 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 hidden that alludes to a grander scope of the biopolitical cosmology in Blood

Meridian.

Parting from the creaturely and the sovereign, there is another aspect in the relationship between the judge and the imbecile. As they cross the desert together, they are also described as “[the judge] pale pink beneath his talc of dust like something newly born, the imbecile much the darker, lurching together across the pan at the very extremes of exile like some scurrilous king stripped of his vestiture and driven together with his fool into the wilderness to die” (282). Here we may think of

Shakespeare’s King Lear, stripped of his kingdom and wandering the desert with his fool. Like King Lear, the naked judge embodies the sovereign’s propensity to strip itself bare of its very laws and legitimacy and follow the fool, an action which can only lead to its own exile and death in that it is the death of the citizens who recognize its rule, a mutual death caused by a sovereign mass-murder and consequential suicide.

The judge’s coupling with the imbecile, his proximity and fixation with the fool, is precisely because he himself is “both a master of ceremonies who orchestrates his environment and a reckless Lord of Misrule, he is the spitting image of anomie and law,” when they “coincide in a single person” (Dorson 111). As an incarnate representation of the sovereign exception, the point where violence and law converge, the judge also embodies the figure of the fool, the trickster and master of folly and ceremonies. The events involving governor’s Trias’ contract with the gang, his own relationship with the judge and the continual presence of creaturely life in the novel, produce a broader allegorical narrative and warning of what can happen to the people

83 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 of a nation so deeply invested in the thanatopolitical paradigm of the sovereign exception. The interplay and exchange between Trias, the gang, and the judge-fool’s ceremonial actions symbolically reveal the imminent threat to a nation’s people posed by an overproduction of bare life or, as I like to call, a biopolitical bankruptcy of life.

Just as the judge leads the gang to a bloody end, so too does the folly of the sovereign fool lead the politically excluded to tragic destruction.

1.7 The Sovereign Fool and Iustitium Upon securing their scalp-hunting contract with the Chihuahua government, the kid and Toadvine are freed from prison and join the gang to take part in their violent and lucrative exploits. The gang departs and several days later, after spending the night in the plaza of a town called Corralitos, a group of Mexican jugglers, or travelling gypsies, asks to accompany the gang upcountry to Janos for protection.

Glanton reluctantly consents and the gypsies fall in line with the Glanton’s band as they leave town.

That night, as the gang and gypsies camp, Glanton asks the head juggler if he can tell fortunes. The man quickly produces a deck of Tarot cards and calls the woman fortuneteller to join them. Black Jackson’s card, the harlequin, el tonto, or the fool, is the only card the judge comments on, telling Jackson that “in your fortune lie our fortunes all” (93). John Sepich, in his article “Blood Meridian and the Dance of

History,” identifies how the various elements of the Tarot fool do indeed distribute themselves among the members of the gang. However, most importantly, Sepich concludes that in the larger context of the novel, “the card of the fool is meant to be

84 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 found embodied in Judge Holden” (22-23). Though Glanton is the gang’s captain and leader, there can be no doubt that the judge is the true puppet master, directing and manipulating the bloody destiny of each of their lives.

Therefore, the card of the fool, which “is the most powerful of all the Tarot

Trumps" (Nichols 23), best represents the judge. Of the fool, Butler writes: “In a sense it is the spirit of The Fool which animates the entire Tarot deck. In the earliest deck known he is shown towering over midget human figures, a Giant of Folly and of super-rational sanity” (23). We can easily understand the judge in these terms, of him towering over the imbecile in the desert. His amorality and strange philosophy

“rationalizes” the gangs actions, “animates” them to deadly action and to folly, for, as

Tobin says, “He appeared to be a lunatic and then not” (127). The fool is the

“wanderer, energetic, ubiquitous, and immortal. He is the most powerful of all the

Tarot Trumps. Since he has no fixed number he is free to travel at will, often upsetting the established order with his pranks” (Nichols 110). The judge likewise is a wanderer, ubiquitous, “Every man in the company claims to have encountered the sootysouled rascal in some other place,” says Tobin (124).Tobin goes on to explain how he is found by the gang sitting upon a rock in the middle of the desert, “Like he’d been expectin us” (125). His pranks are constant: he fools the Apache on the volcano, feigning to have shot the gang, holding up a white shirt for surrender, only to lead them into an ambush. He and Glanton fool the Yumas to attack at the ferry-crossing.

The fool, immortal, “dances through the cards each day” (Nichols 27) just like the judge who, at the end of the novel “[s]ays he will never die […] He is dancing,

85 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 dancing. He says that he will never die” (335). The gang member’s fortunes undoubtedly lie in that of the fool in that they lie with the judge. In his footnote,

Sepich even identifies that “[i]n the Ozarks, Mencken relates, “Judge or jedge is used to mean a fool or clown, and there is even an adjective “jedgy”” (Qtd. in Sepich 22-

23). However, linking the fool to the judge does not explain exactly how their fortunes are bound to him.

The answer to this inquiry is found in the relationship that the fool shares with the sovereign. This relationship is precisely that of the king and the fool. The king’s court is continually occupied by the fool, as Louise Amoore and Alexandra Hall observe, “Whether in the form of ‘natural idiots’, professional buffoons or deformed mascots of ancient courts, or the famous court fools or fool societies of the Middle

Ages, or even the archetypal Elizabethan jesters, the fool enjoys a distinct place in the sovereign court” (100). In the same manner, Blood Meridian reveals to the reader that the judge has a privileged seat alongside the king in his court. Tobin informs us that the evening the judge and the gang dined in the governor’s palace, “Him and the governor they sat up till breakfast and it was Paris this and London that in five languages, you’d have give something to of hear them. The governor’s a learned man himself he is, but the judge…” (123). Like the fool, the judge “acts as a counterpoint and touchstone to the follies and vanities of those round him, and his wisdom and insight are proved greater than those of his ‘superiors’” (Amoore and Hall 101). It is the judge’s place by the governor where the gang member’s fortunes lie. Though it is

Glanton who “clapped for entrance” (79) at the governor’s palace, it seems that the

86 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 judge is the one who entertains the governor and mediates the scalp-hunting contract.

He is, after all, the man really in charge of the gang’s fate. Pulling at Glanton’s strings, he is the master of their fortunes. He is the one who is well versed in legal matters, the fool who saved them from the Apache by forging gun powder out of a volcano, and he appears to be the fool who has led the men to the governor’s palace and placed them in alliance with the sovereign.

The judge’s identity as the fool means that he also occupies a position both outside and inside the sovereign realm. He is in the king’s court but not of the king’s court. His presence during the forging of the contract between the governor and the gang further strengthens the argument that a state of exception is being declared and that Holden is its keeper, for the fool

occupies a privileged, protected position, and the license that he enjoys

allows him to speak and act in a way that no one else can . . . His

association with a disordered ‘outside’ (madness, chaos, nature)

threatens the king, but his expanded line of sight makes him necessary .

. . The fool, then, like Agamben’s topology of the exception, ‘being-

outside, and yet belonging’, expresses something of the indistinction

between inside and outside that plagues, but is necessary for, the

exercise of sovereign power. In this specific sense, sovereign power

requires the slippery figure of the fool, who embodies the blurred

distinction between inside and outside, and who speaks from a place

87 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

and with a voice that is otherwise unavailable to the king. (Amoore and

Hall 102)

The judge, as rightfully described by Owens as he who acts “as a composite of

Hobbes’ First Man and Fukuyama’s Last Man” (57), is able to impress upon the governor all his “wisdom” of the “Last Man” and his democracy, entertaining him with his discussion of Paris and London, the great “civilized” nations of the West; but at the same time, his association with the gang—the savage “First Man,” a man without law in a state of nature—enable him to give the governor what he both despises and needs: lawlessness. The governor “needs” the Apache threat to be eliminated, and to do so, he needs the chaos and disorder offered by the judge and the gang in order to ironically “keep the peace,” and through the resulting state of exception, maintain power and keep sovereignty intact. The judge fool provides the

“voice” the governor king cannot have without him, the savage voice of the exception necessary to validate sovereign power—the voice of extermination and of genocide.

The gang’s fortune’s lie in the card of the fool inasmuch as they are associated with the judge fool, and as far as they share in his voice, they too stand in the king’s court to complete the sovereign paradigm of inside and outside, they being that lawless outside needed to eliminate the Apache. The judge is therefore the two-faced representation of law and chaos, a living metaphor of how the two must coexist in the sovereign so that, as Agamben argues, state authority may validate itself through force and violence. In creating the state of exception, what is as stake is a process where

“the sovereign ‘creates and guarantees the situation’ that the law needs for its own

88 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 validity” (HS 17). Governor Trias is validating his sovereignty through the violent extermination of the Apache who threaten the State.

After the slaughter of the Gileños, the gang returns triumphant to Chihuahua

City and receives a hero’s welcome:

Hundreds of onlookers pressed about as the dried scalps were counted

out upon the stones . . . There were one hundred and twenty-eight

scalps and eight heads and the governor’s lieutenant and his retinue

came down into the courtyard to welcome them and admire their work.

They were promised full payment in gold at the dinner to be held in

their honor that evening at the Riddle and Stephens Hotel and with this

the Americans sent up a cheer and mounted their horses. (167)

The governor’s lieutenant and his retinue’s admiration of their gruesome work is the most horrendous aspect of this passage. Their admiration, combined with the scalp- hunter invitation to dine with the governor as guests of honor, reiterate the sovereign’s need for the exception and illustrates the paradoxically lawless side of law. We are then told that

This Angel Trias who was governor had been sent abroad as a young

man for his education and was widely read in the classics and was a

student of languages. He was also a man among men and the rough

warriors he’d hired for the protection of the state seemed to warm

something in him. (168)

89 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Two factors are significant here. First, that anyone could feel warmth towards these pack of man-hunters is repulsive. The reader has just finished passages about the gang’s slaughter of the Gileños, turning perhaps the most bloody and difficult pages to read in the book, only to find them well-received, celebrated, and embraced warmly by the governor. The paternalistic affection is significant in that it demonstrates Trias’ dependency and even an emotional bond to the rough warriors, elucidating sovereignty’s reliance on chaos and violence in order to validate its power.

McCarthy’s specific reference to the governor’s hiring of the scalp-hunters to “protect the state,” implies his rationalization for the suspension of law.

Agamben, in his genealogy of state of exception, locates a parallel, or origin, of the modern paradigm for state of exception in the Roman notion of iustitium.

As explained by Agamben:

Upon learning of a situation that endangered the Republic, the Senate

would issue a senatus consultum ultimum [final decree of the Sentate]

by which it called upon the consuls […] and, in some cases, the praetor

and the tribunes of the people, and even, in extreme cases, all citizens,

to take whatever measures they considered necessary for the salvation

of the state […] At the base of this senatus consultum was a decree

declaring a tumultus (that is, an emergency situation in Rome resulting

from a foreign war, insurrection, or civil war), which usually led to the

proclamation of a iustitium . . .The term iustitium--which is constructed

90 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

exactly like solstitium—literally means “standstill” or “suspension of

the law.” (State of Exception 41)

During the years of the Roman Republic, state crises would be followed by the senate declaring an eventual iustitium in the name of preserving and protecting the state.

Agamben points out that later, during the age of the Roman Empire, the iustitium takes on a meaning of public mourning, instituted upon the death the emperor while the inauguration of a successor was pending. Thus the iustitium marks the hiatus between one sovereign order to the next, and ultimately, “becomes an effective instrument of the emperor, to be turned on or off at will” (Humphreys 682). In contemporary terms, one can think of the United States president’s ability to declare an executive order in times of crisis and war. Yet Agamben points out that iustitium, in terms of public mourning, also has its parodic inverse and can be traced throughout the long history of carnivalesque feasts in Western culture, “which have in common a suspension and complete reversal of the juridical and social relations that define the normal order”

(“The State of Exception” 296).

Here, Governor Trias’ actions in Blood Meridian take on a striking resemblance with iustitium, and not solely in his declaration of a sovereign “standstill” of law in order to eliminate the Apache threat to the state, rather, even more salient is the carnivalesque feast which ensues when the gang returns to Chihuahua City. The feast the governor holds in the gang’s honor symbolizes what Agamben comes to associate with iustitium: the western tradition of anomic, topsy-turvy feasts: “those periodic feasts (such as the Anthesteria and Saturnalia of the classical world and the

91 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 charivari and Carnival of the medieval and modern world) that are characterized by unbridled license and the suspension and overturning of normal legal and social hierarchies” (State of Exception 71). Though these feasts are generally accredited to agrarian celebrations of solar cycles, Agamben draws on Karl Meuli’s explanation that they are remnants of legal issues related to law, given their inexplicable tolerance by religion and law in civil societies that has so baffled scholars. Agamben takes up this explanation to place these carnivalesque feast in context with iustitium:

If Meuli's hypothesis is correct, the “legal anarchy” of the

anomic feasts does not refer back to ancient agrarian rites, which in

themselves explain nothing, rather, it bring to light in a parodic form

the anomie within the law, the state of emergency as the anomic drive

contained in the very heart of the nomos.

That is to say, the anomic feasts point toward a zone in which

life's maximum subjection to the law is reversed into freedom and

license, and the most unbridled anomie shows its parodic connection

with the nomos. In other words, they point toward the state of exception

as the threshold of indifference between anomie and law. In showing

the mournful character of every feast and the festive character of all

mourning, law and anomie show their distance and, at the same time,

their secret solidarity. (State of Exception 72-73)

The parody of governor Trias’ state of exception is inaugurated when Glanton’s gang arrives for dinner, when this “civil” feast is quickly transformed into a chaotic one,

92 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 enacting a symbolic parody of anomie’s connection with the nomos, or the lawless character of law. Interestingly, as is common in carnivalesque feasts, where “men dress up and behave like animals, masters serve their slaves, males and females exchange roles” (State of Exception 71), the gang arrives in costume. Roles are subverted and savages dress like civilized men: the Delawares appear “strangely austere and menacing in their morningcoats . . . Soldiers attended them, fetching extra glasses, pouring the wine, lighting cigars …” (168-69), and the Kid finds himself dressed “in the first starched collar he’d ever owned” (169). The parody here lies in the subverted roles of the governor and his soldiers serving men no different than the supposed savages they fight on the frontier. These barbaric men, normally the would- be-enemies of the state, are dressed in civilized fashioned and catered to by representatives of the sovereign, signaling through parody the zone where anomie and chaos reside in the sovereign nomos.

The judge comes in to dine last of all. The man who days before killed and scalped the Apache boy the gang had played with as a sort of mascot is now “dressed in a well-cut suit of unbleached linen that had been made for him that very afternoon .

. . His feet were encased in nicely polished grey kid boots and in his hand he held a panama hat . . .” (169). Trias sees him when he enters, and immediately the fool-jester takes his right-hand place in the king’s court: “[N]o sooner had the governor seen him than he rose again and they shook hands cordially and the governor had him seated at his right and they at once fell into conversation in a tongue none other in that room spoke at all . . .” (169).

93 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

With the one true fool in counsel with the king, the foolish gang begins the anomic feast:

Cigars were presented and glasses of sherry poured . . . and there was a

tandem run of dishes, fish and fowl and beef and wild meats of the

countryside and a roast shoat on a platter and casseroles of savories and

trifles and glaces and bottles of wine and brandy from the vineyards at

El Paso. Patriotic toasts were drunk, the governor's aides raising their

glasses to Washington and Franklin and the Americans responding with

yet more of their own country's heroes, ignorant alike of diplomacy and

any name at all from the pantheon of their sister republic. (169)

The gang’s ignorance of diplomacy adds humor to this parody of the sovereign exception. The comedic scenes continues and any sense of civilization and order is lost when the men’s appetite is impossible to satisfy and food becomes scarce:

They fell to and they continued to eat until they had exhausted first the

banquet and then the larder of the hotel altogether. Couriers were sent

abroad through the city to fetch more only to have this also vanish and

more sent for until Riddle's cook barricaded the door with his body and

the soldiers in attendance took to simply dumping great trays of

pastries, fried meatskins, rounds of cheese—whatever they could

find—out upon the table. (169-70)

When the governor attempts to make a toast, his “well-phrased english” is drowned out by the “bloated and belching mercenaries” who “were leering about and

94 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 were calling for more drink and some had not ceased to scream out toasts, now degenerated into obscene pledges to the whores of various southern states” (170).

Glanton then cuts the governor short and “dumped the gold out onto the table among the bones and rinds and pools of spilled drink and in a brisk drumhead disbursement divided out the gold with the blade of his knife” (170). The judge, as entertaining jester and master of this ceremony, takes charge of the feast and ushers the skiffle band “into the adjoining ballroom where a number of ladies who had been sent for lay already about the wall on benches and fanned themselves without apparent alarm”

(170). The judge, the eternal dancer, is “in close conference with the band and soon a quadrille was struck up” (170). The dance begins, and the “scalphunters stood grinning at the dames, churchishlooking in their shrunken clothes, sucking their teeth, armed with knives and pistols and mad about the eyes” (170). The dance reaches its climax when “[b]y midnight the governor had excused himself … A blind street harpist stood terrified upon the banquet table among the bones and platter and a horde of luridlooking whores had infiltrated the dance. Pistolfire soon became general . . .”

(170-71).

The riotous feast continues and like a state of exception of pure anomic space, where all crime is licit, McCarthy painstakingly illustrates the chaotic feast:

Fights broke out. Furniture was disassembled, men waving chairlegs,

candlesticks . . . Jackson, pistols drawn, lurched into the street vowing

to Shoot the ass off Jesus Christ, the longlegged son of a bitch . . . At

dawn the shapes of insensate topers lay snoring about the floor . . . A

95 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

family of thieves were tiptoeing through the wreckage turning out the

pockets of the sleepers. . . .(171)

Common characteristics of carnivalesque celebrations are confirmed in McCarthy’s relentless description: societal taboos become acceptable—thus Jackson can “shoot of the ass of Jesus Christ”—and “criminal behavior is considered licit” (State of

Exception 71), whereby thieves take advantage of the parodic iustitium to pillage the drunken sleepers.

Yet McCarthy does not stop here, the scene of anomic feasting escalade and repeats:

These scenes and scenes like them were repeated night after

night. The citizenry made address to the governor but he was much like

the sorcerer’s apprentice who could indeed provoke the imp to do his

will but could in no way make him cease again. The baths had become

bordellos, the attendants driven off . . . Cantinas were evacuated . . .

horses ridden indoors . . . as the gold began to dwindle away

shopkeepers found themselves presented with debits scrawled on

butcherpaper in a foreign language for whole shelves of goods . . .

Charcoal scrawls appears on the limewashed walls. Mejor los indios.

(171)

Baths have become bordellos, savage scalp-hunters and whores the king’s magistrates and ladies of the court, and barn animals inhabit homes in a world turned upside down.

The citizens of the town plead to a governor who has lost control as Glanton’s gang

96 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 spreads chaos and unchallenged, anarchic rule. Our understanding of the judge’s role as the fool in relation to carnival is vital here, for the

fool as a ‘jovial ring-leader’ and ‘mischief-maker’ (Welsford, 1935:

197) creates an inverted and upturned world. We see this clearly in the

long-running association of foolery with carnival. For example, in the

heyday of misrule – the medieval Feast of Fools – the religious

ceremonies of the cathedrals and churches were parodied by improper,

bawdy and grotesque merriment (Bakhtin, 1968: 74). The fool became

king, the normal order of things was reversed. . . . (Amoore and Hall

99)

This scene of carnivalesque celebration, where the fool “becomes king,” is what has precisely taken place: a “complete reversal” of the juridical order. McCarthy’s analogy of the governor enacting the sorcerer’s apprentice who cannot control the imp he has provoked, mirrors his beckoning of the judge. The governor—the apprentice or representative of sovereignty—has recurred to the fool in his court. The judge, in turn, has introduced him to the lawless gang, to the anomie so vital for the function of the sovereign. However, once the contract has been fulfilled and the Gileños slaughtered, there is no controlling this anomic force; it will continued unbridled. The gang has arrogated the governor, and in effect, the judge has declared himself the new king. The carnivalesque feast in Blood Meridian represents the iustitium in that it marks the hiatus and subsequent shift from one sovereign ruler to another.

97 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

The judge has become the sovereign and, consequently, the governor is now the fool. He can no longer help the citizens he originally was to protect. The scrawls on the walls, “Mejor los indios,” are a testament to his newfound place as the fool.

Their roles are reversed, like King Lear who, abandoned by his family and stripped of his title, descends into madness, verifying his fool’s foretelling: “Thou wouldst make a good fool” (55).

After leaving Ciudad Chihuahua, the gang continues their rampage under the banner of the sovereign fool. Personified by the judge, the sovereign exception reaches extremes. The gang no longer follows a contract to determine who is bare life, but now revels in a space of pure anomie where the state of exception designates all life as bare. All are now homo sacer, since in a state of exception the potentiality of becoming bare life eventually haunts all forms of life.56 Chaos spirals out of control and the criteria is no longer Apache scalps, but the scalps of anyone that can be said to resemble those of the Apache, qualifying most everyone in Northern Mexico.

And so, the gang slaughters a “band of peaceful Tiguas” and, subsequently, enters the town of Nicori and overtakes the cantina there. While in the cantina, a funeral procession rounds the corner and the juggler leading the procession releases a rocket into the plaza where it explodes. Then, “[t]wo more rockets exploded in the street and now the rest of the procession had swung into view, a fiddler and a cornetplayer leading with a quick and lively tune” (177). I do not believe it is a stretch to say that the timing of this scene in Blood Meridian is interesting, to say the least.

First, the funeral scene immediately follows the topsy-turvy feast with governor Trias,

98 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 alluding to iustitium’s connection to public mourning observed upon the death of the

Roman Emperor. If the carnivalesque feast with the governor demonstrates the reversal of roles between the king and the fool, marks the transition from one sovereign to the successor—from the governor and the judge—then the funeral procession signals the public mourning of the “death” of the previous ruler, of Trias.

Though it is not his physical death, it is certainly the death of his sovereign power, for he can no longer control Holden and the Glanton Gang, nor the state of exception that is spiraling out of control. The way McCarthy presents the procession is curiously twofold. On the one hand, the juggler and the fiddler—popular participants in carnivalesque celebrations and associates of the fool—do not seem to be in mourning.

They are, in fact, celebrating the judge’s rule of utter and chaotic license. The juggler fires off rockets, while the fiddler and his cornet-playing companion lead with a

“quick and lively tune” (177). Hardly an appropriate beat for a funeral, the music is far from the solemn, mournful litanies associated with such occasions. On the other hand, their celebration contrasts with the mournful countenance of the citizens participating in the procession: “At the rear advanced a company of mourners, some of the men drinking, the old women in their dusty black shawls helped weeping over the potholes and children bearing flowers who looked shyly at the spectators in the street at they passed” (178). What is reason for celebration for the carnivalesque figures of the juggler and the fiddler, is ample reason for the citizens of Chihuahua to mourn, for under the judge’s rule, where the state of exception is no longer the exception to the rule of law but now the rule itself, all life is qualified as bare life and therefore

99 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 exposed to a death which cannot be considered homicide. Anomie reigns: good news for those who cast in their lots with the fool, but bad for citizens who depend on law and order to uphold their rights.

The second timely event related to the funeral procession is what confirms the reason for the citizen’s mourning: their loss of rights as bare life and exposure to be killed with impunity. In the moment that the rockets explode, members of the gang happen to be contesting insults muttered to them in the cantina. Thinking the rockets are gunshots, we read that “the entire company of Americans made for the floor”

(178). In this moment, in the calm before the storm, the fiddler and the cornetist make satisfied “little bows to each other” (178), as though anticipating an applause. The applause that ensues is a chaotic brawl in which men brandishing knives are cut down in a gunfight with Glanton’s gang. Twenty Mexicans lie “shot to pieces among the overturned chairs and the tables with the fresh splinters blown out of the wood” in the cantina, and four more are shot down in the plaza and streets by Tobin. By the time the smoke settles, the gang, out of habit, “had scalped the entire body of the dead” (180).

The episode is concluded when the townspeople reappear thirty minutes later and a man who has been scalped, but still alive, emerges from the cantina “like a bloody apparition . . . he was holding shut a huge hole in his chest where a pink froth breathed in and out” (181). Then we read that “[o]ne of the citizens laid a hand on his shoulder. A dónde vas? he said. A casa, said the man” (181). The ending of this massacre is accentuated by the final action and words in the scene. Here, of all places,

McCarthy utilizes the term “citizen” to describe the man who places his hand on the

100 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 shoulder of the scalped man. The close, physical contact of the “citizen” with the bare- headed and bloody man creates a curious image of the Mexican citizenry’s current political status as bare life. Thus, when the “citizen” asks where he is going, the scalped matter-of-factly replies, “A casa.” Bare life he has no other choice but to go home. In a state of exception, he occupies a political void, and therefore, what has happened to him carries no juridical connotation, but can only be considered as mere facts:

If we wanted at all costs to give a name to a human action performed

under conditions of anomie, we might say that he who acts during the

iustitium neither executes nor transgress the law, but inexecutes

[inesegue] it. His actions, in this sense, are mere facts, the appraisal of

which, once the iustitium lasts, they will be absolutely undecidable, and

the definition of their nature--whether executive of transgressive, and,

in the extreme case, whether human, bestial, or divine—will lie beyond

the sphere of law. (Agamben State of Exception 50)

He was shot, scalped—end of story. The scalped man’s matter-of-fact attitude—when he simply replies that he will go “a casa”—reflects the same indifferent, factual way the narrator recounts the violent events throughout the novel. Indeed, the amoral and matter-of-fact narrative voice in Blood Meridian capitulates a space environed by a state of exception, where “no act is lawful; but, reciprocally, neither is any

“transgression” possible” (“The State of Exception” 287). The gore and violence in

101 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Blood Meridian are presented simply as they are: facts—bare, raw actions narrated through a voice of indifference all too appropriate for state of exception.

Two days after the shootout in Nicori, the gang slaughters a Mexican village of

“mud huts.” The creaturely citizenry flees before the gang like “harried game,” seeking asylum in their church “where they knelt clutching the altar and from this refuge they were dragged howling one by one and one by one they were slain and scalped in the chancel floor” (181). Having reached such terrible heights, the state of exception instituted by Governor Trias has ironically brought about the slaughter of his own people, further consolidating himself as the fool. The judge on the other hand, now reigns in complete anomie and chaos, and all life before the gang is bare.

The irony of the Governor’s fate is reinforced as the gang once again returns to

Ciudad Chihuahua, this time cashing in the scalps of Mexicans:

They entered the city haggard and filthy and reeking with the blood of

the citizenry for whose protection they had contracted. The scalps of

the slain villagers were strung from the windows of the governor's

house and the partisans were paid out of the all but exhausted coffers

and the Sociedad was disbanded and the bounty rescinded. (185)

We are then told that “a week of their quitting the city there would be a price of eight thousand pesos posted for Glanton’s head” (185). State of exception in Blood

Meridian only generates more states of exception, in a sort of Girardian cycle where only sovereign violence can put an end to sovereign violence, entrapping its players in a perpetual continuum of mimetic violence and revenge. Yet just as the governor’s

102 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 associated with the judge led to his demise, so too will the gang’s fortune with that

“sootysouled rascal” spell their catastrophic end.

1.8 Leviathan’s Body of Corpses To recapitulate what I have discussed in this chapter, let us consider the following points: violence and the amoral, unanthropocentric environment in Blood

Meridian cannot be explained away as a Hobbesian state of nature. The presence of sovereign law in the novel forces us to reconsider violence in political terms. When we do, state of exception emerges as a more relevant construct for violence and amorality in McCarthy’s novel.

The state of exception is literally represented in the figure of Judge Holden, a man where the nomos and anomie meet, where violence and law reside. As the incarnate sovereign exception, the judge entices Governor Trias, enacting the fool in his court, to bind himself to the gang with a scalp-hunting contract. This contract is a declaration of a state of exception. The state of Chihuahua and its governor turn to the exception to eliminate the Apache, a part of their own citizenry, in order to validate sovereignty.

The state of exception introduced by Governor Trias and upheld by Judge

Holden creates a fissure which continually splits, breaks and grows throughout the novel. This fracture in the novel is impossible to mend, and from it spills a continual flow of violence that eventually engulfs all life in the novel, including the members of

Glanton’s gang. By deciding on the exception and suspending law, Governor Trias hands his sovereign power over to the judge, to the exception. As the state of

103 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 exception spirals out of control, McCarthy employs the analogy of the sovereign fool and the iustitium to demonstrate how a state of exception, which was initially aimed at solely the Apache, spreads like wildfire and consumes all citizenry in bare life status.

Eventually, the sovereign exception will devour the gang itself and the state of exception, as it becomes the normal procedure of law, can only spell catastrophe:

The sovereign, who should decide every time on the exception, is

precisely the place where the fracture that divides the body of the law

becomes impossible to mend: . . . between power and its exercise, a gap

opens which no decision is capable of filling.

This is why, with a further shift, the paradigm of state of

exception is no longer the miracle, as in Political Theory, but a

catastrophe. (Agamben State of Exception 56)

Thus the miracle on the volcano, when the judge miraculously forges gun powder to save the gang at the hands of the Apache, becomes the catastrophe at the Yuma river crossing later in the novel. Blood Meridian is a prophetic tale of what can befall a people of a nation under the paradigm of the sovereign exception. The demise of the gang at the hands of the Yuma is an allegorical warning to the U.S. nation-state and its quest for empire. The disregard for life, the suspension of constitutional human rights, can only lead to disaster for the people.57

The gap spoken of by Agamben, the fissure which cannot be mended when a nation-state divides its body of law and functions through the exception, can only lead to catastrophe and the swallowing up of citizens’ rights. Violence and anomie

104 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 eventually consume and overpower the nomos of the sovereign, casting it off into the abyss created by the exception. This is ultimately what the judge represents, he is, as

Dorson notes, that great empty space:

[Judge Holden] has no solid core, no “atavistic egg” to substantiate his

presence. Like the groundless violence of the law that he embodies, the

judge hovers just above the abyss. He is a “great ponderous djinn” (95)

called out of the void, appearing in the desert “out of nothing at all”

(125) . . . this also strengthens the comparison between him and what

Agamben writes about the hollow articulation that unites law and

violence in the state of exception: . . . that the state of exception is

“essentially an empty space.” (114)

Within this moral void and “empty space” of confused nomos and anomie, the judge exemplifies how, through state of exception, “the juridico-political system transforms itself into a killing machine” (Agamben HS 86). The judge’s great white body, like the great white whale in Moby Dick, is quite literally Hobbes’ Leviathan in every sense of its political meaning. As depicted on the original title page of Hobbes’ Leviathan, the king’s body is only made up of only more bodies. In the same manner the judge is the

“great metaphor of the Leviathan, whose body is formed out of all the bodies of individuals” (HS 125). Yet the judge’s body is made of corpses, not the living, and as such the judge proves that the “absolute capacity of the subjects’ bodies to be killed forms the new political body of the West” (HS 125). In the final scene of novel, several decades after the gang’s bloody exploits, the judge finally kills the last

105 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 member: the kid. He does so waiting for him in the jakes, by precisely taking him up into his great white and naked body: “He was naked and he rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh” (333). The judge completes the catastrophe. By finally absolving all bare life into his immense and terrible flesh—the body of the sovereign—the judge has given us a terrible and prophetic narrative for the “new political body of the West,” which has been all too prevalent throughout the 20th and 21st century, a body which is built upon its insistence of internalizing bare life, life which may be freely killed.

According to Agamben, the eventuality of the sovereign paradigm of the exception (which he considers to be the predominant paradigm in all modern democracy) can only lead to detainment camps. For Agamben, the camp is the ultimate end to state of exception; it is the space that is opened up in the fissure created by the exception we just discussed. As such, it is by nature the political space most representative of a state of exception; for the camp, like the exception, is a space set outside of law, where law applies in no longer applying and is therefore an excluded space included in the law: “The camp is the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule. In it, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporal suspension of the state of law, acquires a permanent spatial arrangement that, as such, remains constantly outside the normal state of law” (Means

39). In the camp, life itself is defined as bare life:

Inasmuch as its inhabitants have been stripped of every political status

and reduced completely to naked life, the camp is also the most

106 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

absolute biopolitical space that has ever been realized—a space in

which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without

any mediation. The camp is the paradigm itself of political space at the

point in which politics becomes biopolitics and the homo sacer

becomes indistinguishable from the citizen. (Means 41)

One has only to briefly consider the past one hundred fifty years of U.S. and world history to confirm the persistence of the camp, starting in the nineteenth century and becoming prevalent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Native Americans and Apache in Blood Meridian will subsequently be displaced and concentrated on reservations, a form of concentration camp, where their life is defined best as bare life, stripped of political status. Mark Rifkin, in his article, “Indigenizing Agamben:

Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the “Peculiar” Status of Native Peoples,” in fact has already provided a unique biopolitical interpretation of U.S. indigenous removal to reservations.58 One immediately thinks of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps of Jews in World War II, of the simultaneous Japanese detainment camps in the

U.S., and of the Argentine prison camps during the Dirty War in the 70s and 80s.

Biopolitics reverberates with post 9-11 exceptional spaces like Guantánamo and Abu

Ghraib.59 Such a correlation between camps and the exception, when considered in relation to the judge, gives credence to the kid’s words when he asks, as he and the expriest Tobin are being hunted by Holden in the desert, “Will it not stop?” (290). The answer would seem that even in the twenty-first century it has yet to stop; the judge continues to stalk the West’s paradigm of nation and empire.

107 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

McCarthy does not appear to be too optimistic either. The unique ending to the novel seems to imply that the sovereign exception, which “has today reached its maximum worldwide deployment” (State of Exception 87), is what gives some who are not yet born to “curse the Dauphin’s soul” (327). Those born in the modern nation state are born into a political space where citizen and bare life have blurred together.

The modern political subject, in the form of the illegal immigrant, the refugee, the political prisoner, etc., is under constant threat of exclusion from the juridical order.

The continual play between bare life and the citizen, between legality and the exception, in the political care of life and its propensity to be licitly killed, is the dance

Judge Holden speaks of: “Plenty of time for the dance” (327), he claims. The judge as the sovereign fool, the king of mayhem, the dancer, is curiously described in the concluding paragraph of the novel as “[t]owering over them all . . . he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge pale and hairless, like an enormous infant” (335). Mark Franko, in his article “Dance and the Political: States of Exception,” explains that the carnivalesque roles of the king where he plays the androgyne signals, in seventeenth century burlesque ballet, “anti-normative figures of force that imply the exception implicit in sovereignty. Thus, the king’s performance of anti-normative roles is both an assertion of legitimacy and a threat of legitimacy’s suspension” (12). The judge’s androgyny is verified in his masculine size, “huge” and “towering,” yet at the same time he is hairless like a woman (even though McCarthy compares him to an infant) and his feet are femininely “small” and “quick.” Thus the judge’s dance is that of the androgyne

108 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 king, the dance which asserts the judge’s sovereign legitimacy through the sovereign exception and the suspension of law, threatening, as he towers above over them all, to reach down and scoop up bare life into his terrible embrace. The judge’s continual dancing footwork between the assertion of his legitimacy as sovereign king and with the fool’s suspension of law, is the beat to which he steps and keeps rhythm. This is the dance he has danced all through the United States’ empirical history, and in an eerie conclusion, McCarthy warns us almost prophetically that this dance will never end, for the judge “is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die” (335).

109 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

CHAPTER II

Stalked by the Wolf: Banditry, the Camp, and Creaturely Shame in José Hernández’ Martín Fierro

“porque el ser gaucho…¡barajo! El ser gaucho es un delito.” Martín Fierro

In his chronicle, Una expedición a los indios ranqueles (1870), Colonel Lucio

Mansilla records his expedition to the Argentine frontier and his time spent with

Pampean natives and gaucho outcasts. During his stay on the frontier, Mansilla interviews a well-known bandit by the name of Rufino:

—¿De dónde eres?

—No sé.

—¿Dónde has nacido?

—No sé.

—¿Quiénes son tus padres?

—No sé.

—¿En qué trabajabas antes de ser soldado?

—En nada. . . .

—Dicen que eres ladrón, cuatrero y asesino.

—Así será.

—Pero, ¿tú qué crees?

—Yo no soy hombre malo.

—¿Qué eres entonces?

110 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

—Soy hombre gaucho. (204)

As the interview implies, by 1870 the term gaucho had almost come to be synonymous with bandit, if and when he was not being used by the Argentine government as a sort of enslaved frontier soldier. Soldier and bandit: the two opposing poles that seem to denote the gaucho’s existence on the nineteenth century pampa, a figure split between defender of the motherland and excluded outlaw abandoned by law and country.

A gaucho was a free roamer of the South American pampa, a hybrid figure caught up somewhere between barbarism and civilization, a man whose ethos fluctuated between that of the Pampean native and his Andalusian and Arabic ancestors. A criollo, and native Argentine, he also often came from a mestizo origin.60

As a whole, however, the exact details of his origins remain a mystery, though it is most likely he emerged in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as a hunter of the wild cattle that proliferated along the banks of the Río de la Plata. Throughout the centuries the gaucho remained aloof of the landowning elite and the State, preferring his life of freedom over that of the peon herder or the man of arms that the urban elite would have him be.

If his social origins are vague enough, then the etymology of the word gaucho is even more complex. Without referring to a montage of theories, the likeliest origin of the term, and the one preferred by the likes of Richard Slatta and Ezequiel Martínez

Estrada, stems from an indigenous background, possibly the Araucanian word huachú or from the Quechua, huak-cha, both meaning orphan.61 This is certainly a title appropriate for Rufino, who confirms in his interview with Mansilla that he neither

111 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 knows his place of birth nor his parents. In political terms as well, there could not be a more suitable word to describe the gaucho. A truly political orphan, a sort of refugee in his own country, the gaucho remained on the fringe of Argentine political integration for centuries. Often viewed as posing as much of a threat to civilization and progress as the Pampean natives, the term barbarism was used as a pretext to justify violence against both.62 Consequently, the gaucho was utilized time and time again as a soldier, his blood spilled in Argentines wars for independence, spilled in the long line of ensuing civil wars and frontier struggles against the indigenous populations, only to quickly be abandoned and claimed by no one—often marginalized as a bandit and enemy of the state when he resisted, like Rufino.

According to Julie Skurski and Fernando Coronil, “In the official histories of

Latin American and European nations, bandits and other frontier populations appear as an obstacle to the nation’s progress, while the structural conditions that shaped them and the moral codes they lived by are ignored” (19). Not until the publication of

Martín Fierro will a voice be given to this orphan and the political abuse that turns a gaucho bueno into a gaucho malo made fully visible; the work will investigate the moral code Fierro lives by and most importantly, demonstrate that the structural conditions which shape the gaucho bandit originate in the State itself.

José Hernández’s Martín Fierro (the first part published in 1872, known as La ida de Martín Fierro, and the second in 1879, called La vuelta de Martín Fierro) is not only unanimously praised as the culmination of the genre known as gauchesque poetry, but also a universal masterpiece of Latin American and world literature. “Si

112 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Italia tiene su Divina Comedia, España su Quijote, y Alemania su Fausto,” proclaimed

Pablo Subieta as early as 1881, “la República Argentina tiene su Martin Fierro” (qtd. in Anderman 221).

Considered the representative work of Argentine nationality and culture, it is difficult to express to what extent Martín Fierro is considered to entail “everything

Argentine.” The greatest of the gauchesque genre, according to Menéndez y Pelayo, it is also for Azorín and Lugones the greatest contribution Latin America gave to the nineteenth century literature. Furthermore, Unamuno has argued that the work, following in the footsteps of Don Quixote, is an exemplary continuation of

“everything Spanish.”63

Borges, reflecting on the nature of Argentine literature, states: “En cenáculos europeos y americanos he sido muchas veces interrogado sobre literatura argentina e invariablemente he respondido que esa literatura . . . existe y que comprende, por lo menos, un libro, que es el Martín Fierro” (El Martín Fierro 95). To add a North

American context to the topic, John B. Hughes explains that neither Moby Dick nor

Huck Finn, nor any other book, is for the U.S. American what Martín Fierro is for the

Argentine.64

It is perhaps somewhat curious that in a country like Argentina, with its high culture literary tradition that boasts the likes of Borges, Cortázar, Puig and Sábato, a popular work of so called low brow literature, as the gauchesque was defined in its time, has remained at the peak of Argentine literary representation and reference.

Though the point of this chapter is not to discuss how Martín Fierro became

113 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 canonized as the bedrock for Argentina’s national literature, I will briefly point to several factors concerning this question.65

Not to be confused with gaucho poetry—a rustic oral tradition descended from medieval Spanish romances and sung on the pampas by illiterate real gauchos in the

18th and 19th centuries—the gauchesque is a published popular genre written by the lettered elite of Southern Cone urban cities centers who imitate the rustic oral poetry and speech of gauchos in their poems for political motives. Given their political and popular nature, gauchesque poetry was often published in newspapers and pamphlets.

Hernández, as it is often pointed out, was far superior to his lettered predecessors in his usage of gauchesque metaphors and accurate imitation of their rustic speech.

Simply put, his poetic talent, combined with his familiarity of gaucho culture and lifestyle, put him ahead of the rest with his Martín Fierro.66 As Jens Andermann argues, Martín Fierro is true art because there is coherence between voice and argument, as well as between form and content. The work thus gives the reader immediate access to the phenomenon it represents, a voice that is in its origin.67

Apart from its aesthetic value, according to Alfredo A. Roggiano’s pivotal essay “Personal Destiny and National Destiny in Martín Fierro,” Hernández’ work is a national masterpiece in that is represents the destiny of a nation in conflict with that of the individual:

It is precisely that, due to the success with which a poetic voice is

achieved, as well as for the vision which it gives of a reality that

constitutes the decisive circumstance of the destiny of a country in

114 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

formation, and of the human element that must survive or perish with

that destiny. Thus, the work of José Hernández is representative of a

unique literary mode, and, at the same time, the most effective

document to testify to the formation of a nationality. . . . as a work

which transcends mere verbal song and directs itself toward the center

of a truth of life which is, for us Argentines, the first step of an

individualizing search, as well as the reason for being of a nation that,

paradoxically, attempts to become, to found itself, while in conflict

with a fundamental part of its people. For that reason, Martín Fierro

aptly expresses what we have proposed for these reflections: a personal

destiny struggling against the destiny which the country must assume.

(37)

Roggiano goes on to observe that national destiny in Martín Fierro is based on a policy of doing: “doing by annihilation, or, at least, by a process of exclusion. Doing in this dialectic would be equivalent to national destiny, and annihilation or exclusion that which determines the individual destiny.” (38) The destiny of the nation to which

Roggiano refers, or the doing by annihilation and exclusion, in the context of Martín

Fierro, is the gaucho and Indian wars on the frontier in which Fierro is violently forced (“recruited”) to fight, as well as his exclusion from the nation when he deserters said post and becomes a bandit. These wars primarily sought to annihilate the indigenous populations that inhabited the country’s fringe spaces and, since gauchos were also excluded from the nation-building process—often classified as “primitive”

115 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 as indigenous groups—his forced military service on the frontier to war against the natives can be interpreted as an effort by the state to “kill two birds with one stone.”68

“In certain ways,” says Shumway, “the gauchos faced problems similar to those of the

Indians since, although Spanish-speaking and in some sense Christian, they also lived on the margins of society, and were slowly being pushed from lands they once roamed freely. Moreover, like the Indians, the gauchos held no place in liberalism’s vision of

Argentina” (255). In short, Fierro’s personal destiny, to live a free and peaceable life as a gaucho on his small ranch with his family, is in constant conflict and interruption with the destiny of the nation, which at the moment is expanding its territory into frontier regions and sifting out the life that will be excluded from that which will be included in the nation.

Destiny can be understood here in terms of legal rights as well. Denying Fierro of his destiny is to negate his fundamental human rights, rights denied him by the very state that should protect him. The gaucho lacked any legal representation;69 his history, as Dabove notes in Nightmares of the Letter City, “embodied for generations to come the political predicaments of the subject “before the law”” (166). This political predicament is one whose status before the law is null and void, one who bears the burden of the law without any rights of citizenship guaranteed by the law,

“[P]orque el gaucho,” as Fierro himself recognizes, “no tiene ningún derecho” (La vuelta 313). Fierro is essentially caught up in the sifting process of the state, which

helps define the moral categories and standards of civilized life on

which practices of inclusion and exclusion are based and identities

116 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

constructed, and it buttresses the norms of civility against which

respectability and belonging are measured and by which marginality

and transgression are established.” (Skurski and Coronil 9-10)

The gaucho is a victim of this process, his construed identity established on the basis of banditry, which deprives “the culprit of the rights and guarantees derived from citizenship” (Dabove 32). As the bandit, Fierro is the one who is in constant transgression and therefore must be excluded.

Such a paradigm of exclusion models precisely the Agambenian biopolitical workings of the modern nation-state, one by which the lives of a people are sorted out on the basis of suspended law—the state of exception—some included while others are excluded. Ultimately, in this chapter I will argue that Fierro, as excluded bare life, comes to occupy a state of exception embodied by the frontier, where he is first excluded by way of his forced military service and, where he later roams as the excluded bandit—in a zone paradoxically both inside and outside the law. It is there that his bandit status may be interpreted in terms of Agamben’s bare life, or homo sacer—he whose death can neither be considered homicide nor sacrifice, and whose death is so necessary, so fundamental for the founding of the modern nation-state.70

Just as the nation is founded on the excluded, Martín Fierro is an example of a nation’s literature that imitates this processes, not just in its representation of the excluded, but also in the fact that such a work should come to represent that nation as it’s iconic literature. Martín Fierro is a testament to the strange case where the

117 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 excluded and marginalize, upon their death, are resurrected as symbols of a nation: the gaucho Fierro as a national figure, his canto a nation’s literature.71

2.1 Voice and Body As a genre, it can be said that gauchesque poetry is undoubtedly born from politics. For Josefina Ludmer, the gauchesque is a genre that she calls

“políticoliterario” (political-literary). Martín Fierro is not only the culmination of the gauchesque, but also the work that marks the end of the political cycle of the genre.

Angel Rama, in his Los gauchipolíticos rioplatenses, identifies the various postcolonial stages and evolutions of the gauchesque concerning this political cycle.72 The first political purpose the gauchesque serves is one of revolutionary epicenter for independence, starting in 1810 and continuing until 1828-30, with the Uruguayan poet

Bartolomé Hidalgo and his patriotic cielitos as the central representative of this stage.

Just as Hernández marks the close of the genre, Hidalgo, in fact, is often identified as the poet who initiated the gauchesque.

From roughly 1832 to 1852, the second stage is marked by Juan Manuel de

Rosas and the power struggles in the Argentine provinces between political caciques

(chieftains). Rosas’ reign was made possible by his alliance with frontier peoples, specifically through his “gaucho army” and ability to keep peace with native Pampean

Indians. During this stage, Hilario Ascasubi is the central poet who, like many other writers contemporary to him, enters into the service of the political parties of the time, fulfilling a role of mediator between party representatives and the illiterate masses.

118 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Posterior to 1852, and lasting until 1870, the third political stage of the gauchesque has the progressive imposition of a liberal economic order as the historical backdrop, with the presidency of Bartolomé Mitre playing the central act. Estanislao del Campo’s Fausto is a culminating example of this period, where the gauchesque now combines cultured poetry to the popular genre and, in this case, becomes a tool for ridicule and satire of the supposedly simpleminded gaucho of the nation’s provinces. During an era that supported the economic privilege of elite landowners, del Campo’s satire about a gaucho who attends an opera for the first time and believes the story to be real, demonstrates the distance that Argentine urban society had established between itself and the reality of its frontier and rural regions. Such representation of the gaucho’s “inorancia” of civilization only fortified the argument for the subversion of their social potential, stifled to nothing more than that of a peon labor force to the elite proletarian, or to frontier soldier for the military.

It is the fourth stage in the development of the gauchesque that the social realities of Argentine frontier life, and specifically the political abuse of gauchos, become exposed by the genre. At the peak of this stage of social critique, “de rara intensidad y de escasa duración” (Rama 62), is Hernández’ Martín Fierro. This long narrative poem, as observed by Roggiano, “was the first outcry for social justice in

Argentina” (41). In short, the purpose of the genre is inverted on itself, and what was once a political self-serving dialog, now becomes one of protest against political injustices. In this stage, the gauchesque no longer subverts gaucho characters to speak as the lettered elite desire in the name of progress, nor does the genre ridicule and

119 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 satirize the gaucho’s ignorance of civilization; instead, Hernández allows the gaucho to speak in his own voice and with his own words, from his perspective. If, for the urban elite, the gaucho bueno was the patriotic soldier and submissive laborer to the landowning elite, the gaucho malo was the deserter and the outlaw—the gaucho who roamed free and refused to be subjected to the whims of the nation. Hernández innovatively chooses the gaucho malo as his character: “The gaucho malo as the axis of the narrative,” explains Dabove, “does not appear in the guachesque genre before

Martín Fierro. However, his figure would occupy the genre almost in its entirety from that point on” (167). Contrary to the genre up to that point, Hernández innovatively demonstrates that the gaucho malo, and banditry as a whole, is ultimately the byproduct of political abuse and state violence.73 Martín Fierro is where, as Julián

Pérez points out in his Los dilemas politicos de la cultura letrada, we find a radical transformation of the gaucho character in the genre, one that endows him with new social, human, and political meaning,74 where the gauchesque becomes a “literatura de ideas que critica seriamente al sistema político vigente” (209).

“[A] cada alma dolorida,” says Martín Fierro, “le gusta cantar sus penas” (La ida 144). Fierro’s penas, his shame and his pain, are the product of political abuse: first in his suffering at the hands of political parties seeking votes, second, as a potential soldier to be pressed into military service, and third, as a deserter and marked outlaw. Martín Fierro is a social mirror to its time, one that reflects what Shumway summarizes:

120 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

They [gauchos] were ignored, outcast, and marginal; necessary only for

rigging elections and fighting wars. In short, Hernández sees his

primary mission as that of giving voice to the voiceless, of making a

place for the excluded, of inscribing the gaucho into Argentina’s

guiding fictions. (276-77)

In the first part, La ida, Martín Fierro presents himself to us as a payador (gaucho minstrel), who strums up a cord on his guitar to tell his story: “Aqui me pongo a cantar

/ al compás de la vigüela” (111). Uniquely narrated in the first person, he tells us with his own voice—the voice of the excluded and marginalized—that he will reveal “una pena estrordinaria, / como la ave solitaria, / con el cantar se consuela” (111). And so

Fierro consoles himself by singing first about his once peaceful life on the pampa, where he lived free, with a small piece of land, a wife and children, only to then inform us about when, not having voted for the right man, he is taken from his home and pressed into military service to defend the frontier from Indian attacks. He is assigned to his post at a fortín (military outpost on the frontier, or fort, much like the

19th century U.S. military frontier forts in the West). There he suffers all forms of misfortune: hunger, neglect, torture and the violence of war.

After three years of living in the worst conditions without pay (he was originally assigned 6 months of service with pay), his only option and way out is to desert, an act which will immediately place him outside the law, making him a traitor to the State, an outlaw matrero and gaucho malo. He escapes and returns to his home

121 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 to find his property no longer his; his wife, out of necessity, is with another man; and his children have been forced to live as wandering peons.

Fierro ultimately shows us that the criminal status often associated with the gaucho is a product of the state, a social phenomenon produced by the military’s abuse of gaucho soldiers. Fierro explains:

Yo he sido manso primero

y seré gaucho matrero

en mi triste circunstancia:

aunque es mi mal tan projundo

nací y me he criao en estancia

pero ya conozco el mundo. (La ida 149)

Fierro, who was first submissive and docile to the law, has been introduced to a world where the law has gone beyond its bounds, and now, in his only option of resistance, swears to be a gaucho matrero and fight back. What follows is a series of violence and killings, as Fierro lives up to his word, earning a truly bandido status and reputation. A wanted man, Fierro eventually forms an alliance with his newfound friend and fellow outlaw, Cruz, and realizes that the only place they can exist in peace, away from the long arm of the law, is to return to the frontier. This time, however, he and Cruz choose to live with the Indians they once fought, coming to the conclusion that there is no place for them in the new emerging Argentine society and nation.

Fierro closes La ida by explaining, “he relatao a mi modo / males que conocen todos, / pero que naides contó” (190). These evils that everyone knows about but no

122 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 one ever told, first have at their center the body of the gaucho, used politically as a cog in the state’s war machine, and second, they are made known by Fierro himself, in his own way and with his own voice. Body and voice, two points of convergence where

Ludmer finds a parallel regarding the gauchesque as a genre. This crossroad is marked by usage: the use of the gaucho’s body by the army and the use of his voice by the lettered elite. In such a way, “Las dos instituciones, ejército y poesía, se abrazan y complementan” (18). As a political-literary genre, the gauchesque therefore oscillates between meanings of usage: between war and a war of words.75 Fierro is engaged in a literal war, and Hernández, in giving a voice to the voiceless, engages him in a war of words as well; yet this time, unlike the gauchesque works of his predecessors, who sought to promote their own political ideology no real gaucho would ever harbor, the voice is authentic and one in defense of the gaucho. To do so, Fierro’s voice is constantly remitting itself to the abuse of his political body, as Ludmer explains: first his body as a soldier, then as a deserter, and finally the body as a bandit criminal.76 In the following sections, it is my intention to understand these bodies: the soldier, the deserter, and the bandit, through a biopolitical context.

The usage of Fierro’s body and his voice provide a point of departure for my argument that Martín Fierro, beyond forming part of the political-literary tradition of the gauchesque, is precisely, in its joining of body and voice, a biopolitical text, a sort of example of what Arne de Boever would call “bioart”—the union of body and art.77

In this case, art is Fierro’s payada, or his canto (song) about his life, expressed through his voice in reference to his body—a body that is first and foremost a political

123 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 one. “Canto y vida,” as Andermann points out, “son una misma cosa para Fierro quien, de esa manera, se inscribe en la continuidad genérica pero en términos de superación: es el primer cantor que no canta otra cosa que su propia vida” (208). Song and life are the same thing for Fierro, and it is in this way that he surmounts the gauchesque and goes beyond the genre. What were once two gauchos conversing with political words implanted by the urban elite, words no real gaucho would have ever uttered, their patriotic voices used to argue political matters for independence in

Hidalgo, for instance, has now become one voice whose sole purpose is to sing about his life’s misfortunes before the law. Gone is the gaucho of exaggerated satire in

Fausto, and in his place we find a real body.

The first part of Martín Fierro reinvents the genre in that finally it presents a real gaucho and a believable man. The gaucho is no longer a puppet figure invented by the lettered elite, who acts and speaks as dictated by the political intentions of the poet, save a man who acts and speaks of his own accord. Thus Hernández, in his social concern for the gaucho, cuts the strings and gives us the real man, that “pobre gaucho,” as he states in his prolog, “con todas las imprerfecciones de forma que el arte tiene entre ellos” (la ida 105). It is precisely the realist aspect, to the point of imperfection, that leads Borges to argue contrary to Leopoldo Lugones’ pivotal conclusion in El payador (1916). Is his essay of a book, the modernist writer and poet likens Martín Fierro to a Homeric epic such as The Iliad, declaring it the Argentine epic, which in turn contributed a great deal to the secular acceptance of the work as a national masterpiece.78 Borges, however, in his El Martín Fierro, argues that though

124 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 the work is epic in proportion, it cannot be classified as an epic in the sense of the

Greek genre. The heroic and mythical characters in epics are infallible and unrealistic, unlike Fierro who, given his moralistic ambiguity, for some can be seen as good and others bad. Unamuno phrased it best when he said, “¡Pobre gaucho! “Él es bueno y parece malo.”79 Fierro as a character is simply too real and believable, to abstruse and even tragic, for us to consider Martín Fierro to be an epic poem.80 The poem’s realism is the reason why Borges instead classifies the work as a novel, one that just happened to be written in verse.81

The novel as a genre, in all its endeavors to narrate the lives of real people, is also Arne de Boever’s point of departure for his theoretical framework regarding the novel and biopolitics in Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel. Quoting Foucault, who identifies the rise of biopolitics as a political structure markedly modern, taking place during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and especially the nineteenth centuries,

Boever goes on to suggest that the rise of the novel during the same timeframe as modernity’s predominant literary form is no coincidence, and that the two are related.82 “[I]t makes sense to consider that the novel,” he says,

as a characteristically modern genre, might be the literary expression of

a political logic that developed simultaneously to it. I argue that

something had to break within human beings’ political imagination in

order for the novel as a literary form to become possible—in order for

the human being to try its hand at a form of fiction that would concern

the lives of ordinary people. It is a major shift in the imagination if one

125 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

comes to think of it: from the lives of mythical, historical, and

legendary figures or the lives of characters of older stories, the human

imagination moves to the creation of everyday characters, people like

us, and the fates of their private lives (their births and deaths, their

happiness and their sickness, their loves, their work, and so on). It is as

if what used to be merely an exercise of fiction suddenly becomes real.

(67)

It would seem that as politics became more and more concerned with regulating the private lives of everyday people—their births and death, their sicknesses, their sexuality (love) and even their happiness—so too did everyday human lives and their private struggles become the focal point for the novel. This is undoubtedly the narrative foundation in Martín Fierro, one that is centered on the (fictional) private life of its characters, as Pérez notes, but where the public world and the dehumanizing

“civilization,” with its corrupt authority of arbitrary judges and thieving civil servants

(so common in Kafka), determine the trajectory of the private life of the gaucho.

Though focused on the individual life of the gaucho and his family, the politics of the

State condition the relation of the characters to their society.83

Yet the relation between the gaucho and his society is one created out of constant political negation of his body, not inclusion nor political care of the body, suggesting what Agamben would call the inclusion of life into the political by way of exclusion.84 At every turn the State’s decisions regarding Fierro’s private life mean exclusion and depravation. For work, he is sent to the frontier to fight; concerning his

126 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 health, he is deprived the basic necessities for living while housed in the fortines; he is even excluded from happiness and love, as his family is taken from him. Fierro may be the protagonist, but there is, according to Pérez, a constant chorus of judges, legislators, soldiers and police that act as a collective voice in the background of the narrative, determining the destiny of the poor paisano’s life.85

The concern to present Fierro’s life and body in such a realistic manner is how

Hernández captures his biopolitical condition before the law. In the traditional sense, the gauchesque was a political-literary genre where the political aspect was transcribed directly into the literary through the patriotic voices and words of caricature gauchos; whereas in Martín Fierro we encounter a voice that transcribes within itself the story of the same life and body that give it utterance. In this case, the political is therefore indirectly inserted in his voice as it is carried along in the story of Fierro’s life and in the destiny of his body as a political subject. Political matters are never directly discussed like previous works of the genre do; there is only song, the telling of a life.

The couplet between politics and the literary in Martín Fierro is expressed through the ontological definition of his body in relation to the law: first soldier, followed by deserter and bandit. In short, just as we can say biopolitics is the couplet of life and politics, we can likewise say that in Fierro’s narrative, the political-literary aspect of his song, forges a link between his life and politics—an act carried out in the expression of his voice and body working in conjuncture. The political is expressed through his body’s subjection to and abuse by the law. For this reason, I believe

Martín Fierro is a wholly unique work in the gauchesque genre. Hernández breaks

127 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 with the genre by giving Fierro a voice and a real political body; he adds bio to the political-literary.

2.2 People and people Fierro’s life and body represent, as Shumway notes, “the story of all gauchos .

. . [where] his task is not only identifying himself but speaking for the people” (266).

For this reason, Fierro, in telling his story, refers to the paisano or el gaucho in general, implying a first person plural. He does so when he speaks of the Golden Age of gaucho living, before being taken by the state and pressed into military service:

Yo he conocido esta tierra

en que el paisano vivía

y su ranchito tenía

y sus hijos y mujer…

Era una delicia el ver

cómo pasaba sus días. (La ida 115)

We continue to see the plurality of Fierro’s speech in his description of various gauchos’ daily chores: one tying his spurs, another singing as he goes, one saddling his horse and another securing his lasso and whip. He is saying, “This is how we used to live”:

Éste se ata las espuelas,

se sale el otro cantando,

uno busca un pellón blando;

éste, un lazo; otro, un rebenque;

128 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

y los pingos, relinchando,

los llaman dende el palenque. (La ida 116)

Then the Golden Age is shattered by the intervention of the law, and the gaucho is forced on the run:

Estaba el gaucho en su pago

con toda seguridá;

pero aura… ¡barbaridá!,

la cosa anda tan fruncida,

que gasta el pobre la vida

en juir de la autoridá. (La ida 120)

It is here, where Fierro tells of what happens to the gaucho when caught by the alcalde, that he shifts from the suggestive “we” to an unequivocal second person

“you”: “[Y] que usté quiera o no quiera, / lo mandan a la frontera / o lo echan a un batallón” (La ida 121). The direct “you,” in referring to the reader at the moment of social injustice, means the gauchos’ misfortunes could easily be the possible misfortunes of an entire people before the law.86 Fierro is saying “this is what can happen to you, you could just as easily be sent to the frontier or forced into a battalion.” This all-inclusive voice is what leads Pablo Subieta to suggest that Martín

Fierro is not a man, but a class and a race, “casi un pueblo” (almost a people).87

Fierro’s body as representative of the people, the body of a people, is imbedded with political undertones suggesting his excluded status. “Any interpretation of the political meaning of the term people,” notes Agamben, “ought to start from the

129 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 peculiar fact that in modern European languages this term always indicates also the poor, the underprivileged, and the excluded” (Means 29). Fierro, in La ida, clearly represents the people in that he embodies the potential all people share to be politically excluded—that excluded political subject necessary for nation-building. On the other hand, as Agamben goes on to explain, there is a duality in the term people, split between the body politic and the body of the excluded—something very strongly implied in Latin languages such as Italian’s popolo and Spanish’s pueblo, as well as their adjacent adjectives populare and popular, whose Latin roots imply citizenry as well as an inferior class at the same time:88

It is as if, in other words, what we call people was actually not a unitary

subject but rather a dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles:

on the one hand, the People as a whole and as an integral body politic

and, on the other hand, the people as a subset and as fragmentary

multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies; on the one hand, an

inclusive concept that pretends to be without remainder while, on the

other hand, an exclusive concept known to afford no hope; at one pole

the total state of the sovereign and integrated citizens and, at the other

pole, the banishment—either court miracles or camp—of the wretched,

the oppressed, and the vanquished. (Means 31)

On this basis, Agamben notes that already within the word people, we can recognize what he considers to be the conceptual pair that defines the category of the original political structure, upon which foundation the sovereign state forms itself; namely,

130 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 upon the “sifting out” of naked life (people)—or life stripped bare of its rights, from the life of political existence (People), or the citizen. Thus in the word people we find a teetering between exclusion and inclusion. Agamben then concludes regarding this split in biopolitical terms, the point where the life and body of the individual becomes an issue of politics, and where politics comes to inform the very nature of life:

[T]he constitution of the human species into a politic comes into being

through a fundamental split and that in the concept of people we can

easily recognize the conceptual pair identified earlier as the defining

category of the original political structure: naked life (people) and

political existence (People) . . . the concept of people always already

contains within itself the fundamental biopolitical fracture. It is what

cannot be included in the whole of which it is a part as well as what

cannot belong to the whole in which it is always already included.

(Means 32)

To complete our understanding of Martín Fierro’s embodiment of the people, we may therefore consider the first part, La ida, as the expression of his body as the people, the excluded and the oppressed. In the second part, La vuelta, however, we may interpret Fierro’s return to civilization and his integration back into Argentine society emblematic of the People, as he becomes part of the included and integral body politic. With the rapid demographic, social, and technological changes of modernity, there is simply no more room in society for the gaucho in the traditional sense of the vagabond and free roamer that we find in La ida. Written seven years

131 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 after the first part, the world has become considerably calmer, the frontier in control.

Roca’s “Conquest of the Desert” comes to a conclusion just a month after La vuelta’s publication. The mistreatment of gauchos in the frontier wars, criticized in part one, has now become a thing of the past. Yet gauchos still remain on the political margin of

Argentine society. In the advancing liberal economy, Hernández determines the gaucho’s place in society. Instead of rebellion, we now have concession. Given that

Argentina is an agricultural nation, the “hijo natural” of the country, argues

Hernández, with his knowledge of the countryside, should be included, protected as a resource to help develop the agricultural wellbeing of the country. What was a cry for social justice in the first part, the work’s iconoclast spirit, as Martínez Estrada calls it—the antigovernment and antipolitical protest,89 now in La vuelta becomes a how-to handbook for the gaucho’s integration and place in society as a citizen, as part of the

People.90

Yet to do so, Hernández must tie strings to Fierro and this time employ him as a puppet. Fierro must be and must say precisely what he is not; and so, in La vuelta we have, as Shumway notes, “the virtual disappearance of Martín Fierro as a possible man of flesh and blood; so intent is Hernández on proclaiming moral values that he preempts his character, forcing him to say what Hernández wants to say and not what would render him convincing” (285-6). Instead of a free roamer of the pampa, he must now, as Hernández advocates in La vuelta, work—integrate himself in the workforce of the agricultural sector.

132 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Part narrative, part moral lecture, the second part argues that through educating the gaucho with good books, as Hernández states in his prologue (and implying a self- promotion of La vuelta), the gaucho should be taught that all honorable work is the way to improve their wellbeing.91 In a voice that is more a renewed Hernández than the old Fierro, Martín Fierro, in La vuelta, having miraculously encountered his lost children, gives them advice, recognizing that in the new economically liberal

Argentina,

El trabajar es la ley

porque es preciso alquirir . . .

Debe trabajar el hombre

para ganarse su pan. (La vuelta 345)

All men should work, and by working they are in accordance with the law and thereby admitted as productive members of society. The man who once rebelled against the law and lived in disobedience, is now contending for adherence and obedience to the law, which means to work.

Another reason for the shift from resistance and rebellion to concession and defeat in Martín Fierro, between the publication of La ida and that of La vuelta some seven years later, has to do with the changes in Hernández’ personal life as well.

Though I certainly am making no claim to interpret the life of the author (and his intentions) in relation to that of his character in absolute terms, the parallel between

Fierro and Hernández is a long discussed topic in Hernandian scholarship, and indeed forms an integral part to our understanding of the work.

133 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Hernández and his Fierro suggest a relationship where the life of the creator and that of his creation seem to fall into one another, trapped in a sort of reciprocating mise en abyme, where fiction mimics reality and reality comes to inform fiction. To rapidly highlight this phenomenon, we must remember that Hernández himself wrote the first part of Martín Fierro as an exiled man, an outlaw who had been on the run in

Uruguay and southern Brazil. Hernández, a journalist and a long-time critic of

President Sarmiento, had been a victim of censorship by Sarmiento’s government, having his newspaper El Río de La Plata shut down. Throwing his cards in with the provincial movement, Hernández fled to support the caudillo in an uprising. Upon failure, he subsequently found himself, much like Fierro, an exile. Hence in the La ida we have author and character, two bandits, on the fringe of the law, engaged in rebellion against the State. Hernández, the man of letters and his Fierro, the illiterate gaucho, mark a relationship where, for the first time in the history of the gauchesque, there is briefly “a collusion between letrado and rural outlaw whereby one could serve as a metaphor for the other . . . and this relationship would not be repeated in

Argentina culture. The collusion was possible since both letrado and outlaw were subjects “before the law”” (Dabove 167).

By the time he writes La vuelta, however, life had drastically changed for

Hernández. He himself had gone from the marginalized to the integrated, from a subject before the law, to one in accordance to it. No longer in conflict with the

Argentine government, Hernández’ life had experienced a drastic change. Having returned to Buenos Aires in 1875, Hernández, now with a calmer life and a family,

134 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 became a successful business man, first as a land agent and then on the board of a mortgage bank.92 Essentially, he contributed to the same problem of land concentration in the hands of elite landowners he had once condemned. Likewise, no longer the provincial rebel, Hernández had become a civil servant, and was even elected senator to the province of Buenos Aires. In short, Hernández’ return from exile and integration into Argentina’s liberal economy and politics, becomes Fierro’s return as well in La vuelta.

In the La ida we have a man whose actions, words, body and morals all coincide in a believable character, one so believable he even seems to take control of

Hernández at times, as Borges suggests, such as the case of the episode of Fierro’s cruel murder of the negro, where the internal logic of the fictional character pushes

Hernández beyond his conscious intentions even at the risk of the reader’s sympathies towards Fierro as a victim or hero.93 In La vuelta, however, Hernández pushes back, forcing Fierro to be and say what he is not, forcing him to concede to the law and economic liberalism just as he himself has. For this reason Estrada states that in the first part, Hernández is Martín Fierro, and in the second, Martín Fierro is Hernández.94

Fierro had in fact become so real, so much a part of Hernández, that as senator, he was referred to as “el senador Martín Fierro,” and even signed his name as such.95

Hernández and his Fierro present a perfect example of life and art transcribed one onto the other. Hernández’ passage from marginalized people to integrated People marks

Fierro’s passage as well, a passage that more than anything, is truly a defeat. National triumph means personal defeat for Fierro and Hernández.

135 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Fierro’s journey from the excluded people to the included People, the negation of everything he is during the transition from part one of Martín Fierro—his ida or sojourn out to the fringe of the law, to part two—his vuelta or return back to the realm of sovereign law, marks the contradiction and aporia that the term people, according to

Agamben, implies every time it is brought into play on a political stage. Fierro, in becoming the People, must shake off the bandit and abolish everything he was prior as the people, and in this sense, he defines the road to Argentine “peopleness” and national identity, for people

is what always already is and what, as well as what has yet to be

realized. It is the pure source of identity and yet it has to redefine and

purify itself continuously according to exclusion, language, blood, and

territory. It is what has in its opposite pole the very essence that it itself

lacks; its realization therefore coincides with its own abolition; it must

negate itself through its opposite in order to be. (Means 32)

Within this parameter, Agamben associates the split and conflictive meaning of the term people with the aporias of workers movements, which at once turn towards the people while trying to abolish it.96 In other words, a workers’ movement defends the people by eliminating class difference marked by the People. For Agamben, the fracture in the word people is a more original split for popular conflict, civil war and revolution, than enemy and friend, suggesting an incessant civil war that at once divides and keeps [a nation] united.97 Thus, what Marx calls class struggle, is nothing other than the civil conflict that divides all people, one which can only come to an end

136 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 when people and People coincide in a classless society, where people and People are on equal civil and legal terms.

I do not believe, however, the second part of Martín Fierro represents a

Marxist workers’ movement. In La vuelta there is no argument for workers’ rights and equality, save a discourse for the right to work and receive citizenship within this capacity. Indeed, Hernández does not attack the class system. His concern is to simply gain the most basic human rights for the gaucho, who should, as he concludes in the second part, have a house, a school, a church, and rights. 98 To do so, he must become a worker. In effect, Hernández is advocating for the change of the juridical legal status of the gaucho, from the abused soldier and excluded bandit, to an integrated worker citizen with basic legal rights. Only in this sense does Fierro go from people to People.

However, it is as if this comes at a price of give and take. On the social economical level, in terms of class, his transition from people to People must remain incomplete, as he will have to submit to the landowning elite. His gaining of legal rights is obtained through the subjection to a subversive economic liberalism.

We may, in the context of people, come to one last conclusion. In this regard, I am referring to the demographics of the book’s success. It is interesting to note that

Hernández’ targeted audience for La ida, as he implies in the prologue, is the lettered elite. As he explains, Martín Fierro is not like Fausto; it is not like the burlesque story of a gaucho who has visited the wonders of the city who then goes back to the countryside to refer to other gauchos what he has seen, but the story of the gaucho’s life in the country side, of his hardships and “los azares de su vida de gaucho” (La ida

137 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

106). Hernández’ intention for Martín Fierro is that the true story of the gaucho living in the campaña reach those in the city. He could not have, however, miscalculated any further from the real outcome of the first part’s publication. Published November 28,

1872, the first edition of El gaucho Martín Fierro received limited critical attention from Buenos Aires, but in the rural countryside it was a booming success. For the first time in the history of the gauchesque, which was a genre read amongst the literate urban class, the book became popular amongst real gauchos themselves—many of whom, due to illiteracy, would memorize parts of the poem from those who could read, thus integrating the written work into their own oral tradition.

To illustrate the impact of the poem on real gauchos, the Uruguayan poet Silva

Valdés narrates that as a child, he tried reading Fausto to a group of gauchos in the mess hall of an estancia. When he was done, one of the gauchos told him, “¡Eso es cosa de dotores! Oiga esto, que es cosa de gauchos…” and he began to recite by memory various sextillas of Martín Fierro. From then on, Valdés only read Martín

Fierro to the gauchos, and concluded that in those days, Fausto’s place was the sitting room and the desk, whereas Martín Fierro’s was the mess hall. He goes on to explain that now, in Argentina, Fausto continues on the desk, but Martín Fierro occupies the whole house.99

Certainly to Hernández’ surprise, in less than two years the book went through seven editions (something unprecedented in Latin America at the time), and parts of the poem were printed and reprinted in newspapers throughout Argentina and

Uruguay. A testament to Hernández’ realistic portrayal of the gaucho, the popularity

138 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 of the book amongst gauchos was due to the fact that they related to the work because it accurately “recounted in their own language the alienation, hardship, and frustration that were constants of their existence” (Shumway 277).

For this reason, Hernández, recognizing the first part’s popularity amongst gauchos, now destines La vuelta specifically to gauchos, explaining how the book can help instruct them to live right in society, through the institutions of family, religion, education, and work. In as much as he misjudged his preconceived target audience in

La ida, so too does he erroneously presume who will be attracted to La vuelta. The true audience certainly was not the same gauchos who could be found reciting the first part. The patronizing tone, the long moral discourses and preachy voice in the second part, were simply too high and mighty for the common gaucho. If anything, the book gained more respect amongst the lettered elite at the time, as it advocated the same national project of which they were a part.

La ida, therefore, whose subject is the downtrodden people, though intended to call the attention of the included urban elite (the People), only attracted the people whom it represented, those who could sympathize and truly understand Fierro’s lot in life. On the other hand, La vuelta, in instructing its subject how to “return” to the nation and become the People, was unable to connect with the people for whom it was intended and, instead, found appreciation amongst those already considered the

People.

In closing, the relationship of contradiction between La ida and La vuelta is congruent to the very contradicting split implied in the term people. Borrowing from

139 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Andermann, we can say that the first part of Martín Fierro is concerned with the dispute over the usage of his body in war and its consequential social interpretation into banditry, whereas the second part disputes the use of his cadaver.100 In La vuelta, the gaucho from La ida is dead; Fierro must deny himself, cease to be who he was and become the only thing society will accept him to be: a worker. Thus the second part disputes the usage of his cadaver that is left behind. As the people, though excluded and mistreated, Fierro could still resist and fight to live free of legal oppression, whereas his surrender and integration into Argentine society, his transition to becoming the People, means he is the defeated cadaver that must be what society demands of him, integrated into the system he once fought, a sort of living dead, a puppet on a string—the drone worker bee in a hive. Cruz was not the only one left behind dead on the frontier in La vuelta; the Fierro that returns is in no way the Fierro that sojourned out.

2.3 The Levas as the Exception Without the frontier in Martín Fierro, observes Pablo Ansolabehere, we would have no story; Fierro and his “pena estrordinaria,” his pain, his sorrow and his shame, all have their origin in the frontier, a source that both begins and ends with suffering.101 Yet frontier can be and is defined in so many different ways; it can be a political border between two countries, a space were two cultures meet or a fringe space where so called civilization simply comes to an end.

Most importantly, and often overlooked in frontier studies, is the definition of frontier as a wholly political space, a space where bodies are regulated by an

140 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 encroaching state power, included and excluded. In the case of Martín Fierro, we have in a sense, two frontier spaces. The first, as Estrada has insisted, is the frontier as the natural habitat of the gaucho, an intermediary space between city and toldos (Indian camps), with elements of both civilization and barbarity, where fortines are present, but also the rural zones where initially Martín Fierro lives and works in peace and happiness, and where later he will return to roam as a bandit. 102 I would suggest that this frontier is a private one, one where Fierro lives out his private life with his family and works on his own small plot of private land, before having it all disrupted.

The second frontier in Martín Fierro is the one identified by Ansolabehere.

This is an invasive frontier, and certainly the most present in the poem. It is not the natural habitat of the gaucho, save a condemnation to which he is submitted.

Ansolabehere describes this frontier as a state-military space where the gaucho is destined to war, a state institution even, and one that inundates the rural zones where gauchos live, invading their private lives and forcing them into the public service of war. Once introduced, this frontier determines the entire ideological narrative of the poem.103

According to Ansolabehere, the government, through its representatives in

Martín Fierro, intervenes in his private life, inserting him as another cog in the machinery of the state. This begins with forced displacement, taking him from his natural habitat and family—the first frontier in the poem—and sending him to that other space, un “espacio estatal” (space of the state), which is the [second] frontier.104

The first frontier, a sort of paradise, contrasts dramatically with the hellish second

141 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 frontier. Thus the gaucho goes from a frontier inhabitant who initially occupies a private and rural space, to one who forcedly comes to inhabit a space of the state as a figure of the state: first a soldier, then the bandit.

The legal process by which Fierro is taken from his home and sent to the frontier was known as the levas, or draft quotes. This political practice of forcedly drafting gauchos into frontier military service has a long history in Argentina, spanning almost the entire nineteenth century. Beginning with the struggle for independence in 1810, a rigorous draft was implemented, called the “Proclama y reglamentación de la milicia,” which included all men between the ages of eighteen and forty who were considered vagrants and vagabonds. This law would continue in some form or other to maintain Rosas’ private gaucho army throughout his reign.

Upon the fall of Rosas, two more pieces of legislature would appear: La Ley de Levas

(The Law of Draft Quotes) in 1858 and the Código Rural in 1865, both of which would build upon the drafting tradition.105 Though not entirely congruent, it is interesting to note the relationship between these draft laws and Rama’s political stages of the gauchesque. Just as the gaucho’s body is being used by the political to fight wars, so to do the lettered elite employ his voice as a patriotic tool to rationalize the political endeavors the drafts are being implemented to achieve (i.e. independence or the Paraguayan War). To the Argentine public, the gaucho’s body is used to fight for ideals that coincide with his patriotic voice in the gauchesque.

In reality, the gaucho felt not political nor ideological sense of duty. As

Hudson in his Tales of the Pampa puts it, the “gaucho is, or was, absolutely devoid of

142 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 any sentiment of patriotism and regarded all rulers, all in authority from the highest to the lowest, as his chief enemies, and the worst kind of robbers, since they robbed him not only of his goods but of his liberty” (247).106 The government was oppressive, and the gaucho’s liberty was lost first and foremost due to the imposition of a draft law not in harmony with the law. Forced conscription of soldiers for the frontier army, explains Estrada, consisted of almost the entire armed forces at the time, and “revestía siempre tal carácter de arbitrariedad y de violencia, que despertaba en el hombre del campo un espíritu de repulsión” (I: 198). The draft was a despised power that abused, discriminated, a law that in fact marked a suspension of the law due to a continual state of war: “Argentina suffered perpetual warfare from its struggle for independence through the federalization of Buenos Aires in 1880. . . . Civil wars, continual battles against fierce Pampean Indian tribes, and conflicts with Spain, Brazil, Paraguay,

France, England, and José Artigas in the Banda Oriental, took an immense human and economic toll” (Slatta Vanishing Frontier 126). Duncan Beretta and Markoff explain the result of such constant conditions of political and civil unrest meant “a kind of continuous warfare . . . which was also systematic” (36). Continuous warfare required the incessant need for soldiers, meaning the constant need for a systematic draft that preyed on the poor and the marginalized. The continuous warfare in the world of

Martín Fierro excludes, first directly the Pampean indigenous groups being attacked, and secondarily, the gauchos who are pitted against them in war. Therefore, two undesirables are violently and systematically eliminated.

143 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

This is readily observable in Fierro’s own inscription into the military. He is systematically taken by a force of law that is in opposition to the law and to Fierro’s constitutional rights. Since the state of exception is “not the chaos that precedes order but rather the situation that results from its suspension” (HS 18), it is important to point out that Fierro inhabits a constituted nation of laws and order. As Slatta explains,

“The resulting legislation [El Código Rural], passed in November 1865, proved even more restrictive . . . The code’s broadly construed vagrancy clause utterly nullified for rural citizens those civil rights granted under the national Constitution of 1853”

(“Rural Criminality” 459). In an article published by Hernández himself in El Río de la Plata on August 20th, 1869—a period of his journalistic writing for gaucho rights that would lead to Martín Fierro some three years later— he states that “el servicio de fronteras es inconstitucional, arbitrario, y que no puede exigirse con justicia, del habitante de nuestra compaña” (200).107 He goes on to explain that the gaucho “no ha conocido hasta ahora los beneficios de un orden regular y constitucional . . .” because, we may infer, the constant legal irregularities of war in the provinces have become the norm, “como un fenómeno de vida” (203). It is the continuous pressure of war that keeps the laws in flux—and the state of exception in effect.108 The ley de levas is the primary evidence of the exception in constant play, and the central outcry of injustice found in Martín Fierro, an outcry already summarized by Hernández years prior when he asks in his newspaper if the government believes it is licit to part ways with the law and assault civilians’ rights: “¿O cree el gobierno que es lícito alguna vez apartarse de la ley, desviarse de la justicia y atentar contra los derechos del ciudadano?” (201).

144 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

The ley de levas is no law at all, as Hernández notes, save its suspension in a state of exception, where Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty is verified: sovereign is he who decides the exception.109 The levas, as a law of exception, creates

“an anomic space in which what is at stake is a force of law without law (force-of- law)” (State of Exception 39). Fierro is the exception to the law, a victim to a lawless force acting is if it were law, as we find when he is taken by the government from his home and family.110 Fierro makes it clear that he is not a vagrant and so not eligible for the draft:

Tuve en mi pago en un tiempo

hijos, hacienda y mujer;

pero empecé a padecer,

me echaron a la frontera. (La ida 122)

He is a sedentary gaucho, “Sosegao vivía en mi rancho, / como el pájaro en su nido”

(La ida 122), with a ranch and a family, not a vagrant; yet he is made an exception to the rule and sent to the frontier anyway.

The episode of his capture occurs in the pulpería (a sort of trading post saloon), where Fierro is playing his guitar and singing when the juez de paz enters with his draft posse:

cantando estaba una vez

en una gran diversión,

y aprovechó la ocasión

como quiso el juez de paz:

145 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

se presentó y ay no más

hizo una arriada en montón. (122)

Fierro tells us that the real vagrants in the pulpería are the first to escape: “Juyeron los más matreros / y lograron escapar” (122). Fierro likewise wants to make a run for it, but as he says, “soy manso y no había por qué. / Muy tranquilo me quedé / y ansí me dejé agarrar” (La ida 122). Fierro claims he remained calm and did not flee because there was no reason. His having “no reason” to flee is based on the fact that Fierro is expecting the “normal” application of the draft law, and since he is not a vagrant, he presumes he has nothing to worry about. However, and unbeknownst to him, his relation to the law is not application, but suspension and exception, which “is a kind of exclusion,” remarks Agamben. “What is excluded from the general rule is an individual case. But the most proper characteristic of the exception is that what is excluded in it is not, on account of being excluded, absolutely without relation to the rule” (HS 17). Fierro’s individual case, the man before the law, is a relation to the law through the exception. He may in effect be taken regardless of being a vagrant or not.

We then find out the real reason Fierro is taken by the draft party. Simply put, he did not vote for the right man in the last elections:

A mí el juez me tomó entre ojos

en la última votación . . .

y él me dijo que yo servía

a los de la esposición. (La ida 124)

146 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

The anomic space that is created in the state of exception, the conditions where anything is possible, means the judge may do as he pleases, enforce a “force of law” under any pretext he finds satisfying.

Emilio Carrilla explains that in order to create the authentic, true character in

Martín Fierro, Hernández does not refer to a gaucho of the past, but to one of the present, because “la realidad que vale es la inmediata, caliente, viva” (70).

Hernández’s social and political concerns for the wellbeing of the gaucho were immediate and contemporary matters of his time, meaning around 1870, or, as Carilla more specifically points out, during Sarmiento’s presidency from 1868 to 1874.111 It is by this time, after more than sixty years of forced military service under rural codes and draft laws (more if we were to consider Spanish colonial practices), that the practice of draft laws has reached an extreme sense of exception.

In what may resound with the Argentine Dirty War and the desaparecidos, or with the negation of the right to trial to Guantanamo Bay detainees in the United

States’ War or Terror, as early as 1853, a decree empowered national guard commanders to enter private homes and draft for two years any male there not in a local unit, though they usually served indefinitely, or more often until they deserted.

During the coming years, even the ceremonial trials that had been previously required to judge vagrants and “suspicious people,” became superfluous.112 All that was needed for conviction was a verbal testimony from a judge; no appeals were allowed, and though towards 1870 the unpopular war with Paraguay was over, there was still a constant demand for soldiers to occupy and defend the fortines on the frontier against

147 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Indian attacks.113 This meant rural police “could almost always “create” a vagrant and send him off to fill the country’s conscription quota” (Slatta “Rural Criminality” 460).

By Fierro’s time, such boundless practices of the draft laws were anything but exceptional and had undoubtedly become the norm. In 1872, the same year Martín

Fierro was published, a man by the name of José Ortubia, having been held for several months based solely on suspicion, put his situation in the following context: “For the poor, like me, constitutional guarantees are dead letters”.114 Like Fierro, Ortubia does not realize that his relation to the law is the exception, and that furthermore, what sustains the law is not its enforcement, save its suspension:

The statement “The rule lives off the exception alone” must therefore

be taken to the letter. Law is made of nothing but what it manages to

capture inside itself through the inclusive exclusion of the exceptio: it

nourishes itself on this exception and is a dead letter without it. . . . The

sovereign decision traces and from time to time renews this threshold

of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion,

nomos and physis, in which life is originarily excepted in law. (HS 27)

What for Ortubia signifies the dead letters of his constitutional rights, means nourishment for the law, for without the exception, without the suspension of

Ortubia’s constitutional rights, the law cannot validate itself. Law is made of the exception, strengthened as it captures inside itself Ortubia, Fierro, and any other body included through its exclusion. Their lives, and especially Fierro’s, as demonstrated

148 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 throughout La ida, are the lives excepted in law. Only without their exclusion, paradoxically, would the law be a dead letter.

We may therefore further presume, given what happens to Fierro, that even the matreros in the draft episode who do escape from the pulpería, had at one point been in the same position as Fierro: mansos and sedentary gauchos with families and land unjustly taken from them, sent to the frontier, then turned deserters and bandits. Being a gaucho matrerero in Martín Fierro, after all, is undoubtedly a cyclical creation of the state, and in later pulpería episodes in the poem, Fierro will be the matrero who flees. Thus we have a sort of never-ending creation of gauchos buenos turned by the state into matrero bandits. Duncan Beretta and Markoff explain:

In short, wars, forced recruitment, the continuous expansion of great

estates, and the judicial repression of vagabonds continuously created

new wanderers and kept the old ones in movement. It is then not

unlikely that many people in these areas would have been vagrants at

least once in their lives, and that they would have shared social ties and

cultural norms with the nomadic sector of the population. (47)

In Martín Fierro, the people, the poor and marginalized—and here I am referring to

Agamben’s lower-cased “people”—are potentially subjected to the illegality or the draft. Their lives are exposed to the state of exception, caught up in it; and as such, their ontological and political status becomes bare life: the inhabitant of the state of exception, the type of human existence made possible in a lawless space.

149 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Here it is important to point out just how systematic the draft was. The frontier army was almost entirely comprised of rural criollos; the rural private spaces of the frontier were emptied by the draft in order to fill the military spaces of the frontier.115

Cruz reports to Fierro:

Le alvertiré que en mi pago

ya no va quedando un criollo;

se los ha tragao el oyo,

o juido, o muerto en la guerra,

porque, amigo, en esta tierra

nunca se acaba el embrollo. (181)

As a whole, the urban population—here we may presume the People with a capital

P—was exempt.116 The draft represented an exception in the law that only targeted the poor rural inhabitants (people) of the country, not the urban elite. Hernández protests this fact in several articles in El Rio de la Plata. On August 19th, 1869, he writes:

Parece que las leyes protectoras no se hubieran hecho para el

territorio sino para la ciudad, asiento de las autoridades centrales, y que

éstas creyesen admirablemente desempeñada su misión con sólo

extender hasta ellas las garantías con que ampara la ley, el hogar del

ciudadano. (198)

Again just days later, on August 21st, he states:

Nuestros compatriotas de la compaña son perseguidos como

delincuentes que debieran caer bajo el duro peso de una ley implacable.

150 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Entretanto los hijos de la ciudad reposamos tranquilamente en

nuestro hogar inviolable.

¿Qué ley puede autorizar ese monstruoso privilegio y desoír el

clamor y la protesta hiriente de la campaña martirizada? (204)

The “monstrous law” directed at Argentina’s frontier inhabitants, but that saves city dwellers, leads Hernández to beg the question: “¿Acaso la ley ha consentido que haya hijos y entenados en el territorio argentino?” (199). “Hijos y entenados,” sons and stepsons of the State—those citizens qualified for political life, and those excluded from it and marked as bare life: Hernández detects the two possible relationships life may have with the sovereign.

Agamben’s nuda vita, translated as bare life, naked life, and traced through his genealogy of the Latin term homo sacer,117 is the original activity of sovereignty and its consequential production of a biopolitical body. Through the exception, sovereign power places biological life at the center of its calculations, where in the anomic space created it may do with life as it pleases.118 For Agamben, the exception is the structure of sovereignty, the negating force through which nations are built and maintained, and most importantly “the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending it” (HS 28). It is the process by which law, in its suspension, threatens life by placing it on the fringe of the judicial order, abandoning the subject to a threshold where life and law, inside and outside, become indistinguishable.119

Therefore, the nation in Martín Fierro, in its effort to establish sovereign validity on the frontier and maintain it, internalizes the bodies of frontier subjects in its

151 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 exception where life, no longer possessing legal status or rights, may be killed with impunity, or forced to the frontier military camps without any normal process of law.

This gives new meaning to the transition from gaucho to soldier in Martín Fierro, in the sense that being the soldier substantiates being bare life. “In the official view,” points out Slatta, “the frontier inhabitant was de facto the frontier soldier, so that even private life had to be controlled by a “truly military regimen”” (Vanishing Frontier

133-34). As a frontier inhabitant, he is a soldier in potential, and therefore potentially bare life: “the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri” (Agamben HS 84). Thus once made the soldier, his potential realized, he truly becomes bare life.

2.4 The Fortín as the Camp I believe the consumption of the gaucho’s private life by a military regime, his pre-soldier life of peace on the pampa turned a living hell on the frontier, marks his passage to consequently inhabit a space even more sinister: the camp. I am suggesting here that the fortín to where Fierro is sent to serve can be interpreted as his displacement to a form of concentration camp, where the bodies of bare life are concentrated in one lawless location. Here I argue that the frontier military camps were precisely that: camps.

In his compelling article, “The Archaeology of the Gaucho,” Facundo Gómez

Romero analyses the frontier army as a form of disciplining power, with methods such as the stakes, whipping, the stocks, and public executions. He then interprets the frontier outposts in terms of prisons, that given their architectonic structure and

152 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 surveillance system from the magrullo (watchtower), they represent an “imperfect” version of Foucault’s panopticon.120 He refers to the forts as an imperfect panopticon precisely because gaucho-soldiers themselves were made to keep watch from the tower and not the cyclopean eye of power.121 Gauchos were to keep watch first for

Indian attacks, and second, for deserting comrades. Failure to fulfill duties as a watchtower guard meant extreme forms of punishment, and abandonment from the post or failure to fire their rifle in alarm of someone deserting could mean death.122

However, much more than an imperfect panopticon prison, the military fort represents a faultless camp. The very element that makes the panopticon imperfect in the fortín—a guard who is not a professional agent of power but the prisoners themselves—in fact alludes to the state of exception and the camp. Agamben explains that “[a]t the two extreme limits of the order, the sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative” (HS 84). The first figure is the relation all man have with the sovereign in that they are potentially homo sacer, and since bare life inhabits the sovereign exception where he may be killed and not considered a homicide (by anyone), then likewise “homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns” (HS 84). In short, once corralled in the military camp, gauchos, as homo sacer, are exposed before a force-of-law which they are also burned to carry out.

Furthermore, real criminality has nothing to do with gauchos’ placement in the military camps and therefore cannot be categorized as prisons nor power’s disciplining techniques. Fierro himself is the perfect example of this. What qualifies him to be

153 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 displaced to the frontier camps is that he is poor, oppressed, the wretched and the vanquished. He represents the opposing pole of what it means to be the politically integrated People; he represents the excluded people, who are abandoned by the state through “either court miracles or camp” (Means 3). We know Fierro was taken to the fortín on the frontier without trial or conviction of any crime. The juez performs a court miracle, and through his word alone Fierro and the others are assigned six month to the military camps:

El juez nos jue a ploclamar

y nos dijo muchas veces:

—“Muchachos, a los seis meses

los van a revelar. (La ida 124)

Upon arriving to the forts, it becomes more and more clear that the court miracle has assigned him to a form of concentration camp, where his conditions are dire at best.

Fierro explains that “a nadies le dieron armas” for their own protection (La ida 126).

The Coronel keeps the weapons locked up and swears he will hand them out when an

Indian invasion comes. When they are attacked, however, the gauchos must fight the

Indians without weapons, having to use their boleadoras and facones because as it turns out, the rifles have no ammunition. As bare life, the welfare of the gaucho- soldier’s body is neglected; they are not paid and are forced to beg:

Del sueldo nada les cuento, . . .

nosotros de cuando en cuando

solíamos ladrar de pobres;

154 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

nunca llegaban los cobres

que se estaban aguardando. (La ida 134)

Their hygiene is anything but healthy:

Y andábamos de mugrientos

que el mirarnos daba horror

le juro que era un dolor

ver esos hombres ¡por Cristo!

En mi perra vida he visto

una miseria mayor. (La ida 134)

It becomes immediately apparent the animal-like conditions of the gauchos. Their humanity has been reduced to bare life, their lives’ ontological value placed somewhere between human and animal. So Fierro and the others bark instead of beg for charity in a state of misery that Fierro, in all his “dog life,” has never seen. To even look at the gauchos, explains Fierro, is horrific, resounding perhaps with the effect modern images of concentration camp refugees can have on a viewer.

So abandoned are the gauchos in the camp, that the only sustenance they are allowed to acquire are the ñandú (wild ostriches) they are allowed to hunt, only in the mornings. Yet this is apparently not enough. Poor, naked and starving is the gaucho- soldier’s fortune in the military camps:

Afigúrese cualquiera

la suerte de este su amigo

a pie y mostrando el umbligo,

155 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

estropiao, pobre y desnudo. (La ida 135)

The image of the gauchos, poor and naked, showing each other their bellies, summarizes the absolute refusal of any political care of the soldiers’ bodies. As Fierro says, “Ni un pedazo de tabaco” do they give to the poor soldier, “y lo tienen de delgao

/ más lijero que un guanaco” (La ida 139). When Fierros finally does go to his superior, humbly suggesting, “Tal vez mañana / acabarán de pagar,” the response he receives is “—“Qué mañana ni otro día!”. . . / La paga ya se acabó, / Siempre has de ser animal”” (La ida 137). Fierro will not be paid, he will continue to suffer and starve because there is no political obligation to care for a body void of any rights. The major defines him politically, stating he will always be an animal, always be haunted throughout the poem as the excluded bare life of the sovereign exception—that barbarous human tribute sacrificed to the state.123

Agamben identifies various other characteristics of the camp that mark the fortín in Martín Fierro as such. First he distances camps from prisons, explaining that the camps

were not born out of ordinary law, and even less were they the

product—as one might believe—of a transformation and a development

of prison law; rather, they were born out of the state of exception and

martial law.” (38)

There is no doubt that frontier military camps were first born from the unordinary draft law, if not at least maintained by this lawless law we have already identified as evidence of the state of exception. Second, I believe it is apparent that martial law is

156 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 related directly to both the draft laws and the frontier army camps, especially given the continual state of warfare in nineteenth century Argentina. What further places the fortines in the category of an Agambenian camp is that

[t]he camp is the space that opens up when the state of exception starts

to become the rule. In it, the state of exception, which was essentially a

temporal suspension of the state of law, acquires a permanent spatial

arrangement that, as such, remains constantly outside the normal state

of law. (Means 39)

The prolonged state of the draft laws and frontier wars means the state of exception gradually became the rule, especially by Fierro’s time. The forts then become the

“special arrangement” outside the normal state of law, where sovereignty houses bare life and does with it as it pleases.

Essentially, “the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the consequent creation of a space for naked life as such,” meaning we are

“facing a camp virtually every time that such a structure is created, regardless of the nature of the crimes committed in it and regardless of the denomination and specific topography it might have” (Means 41-42). As the materialization of a permanent state of exception, any and everything may happen in the camp and no crime is really a crime. The vilest act (masked as a punishment) to which the gaucho could be subject in the camps, was torture. This included being “staked,” whipped, placed in the cepo

(stocks) or even execution. Fierro himself falls victim to the stakes, a form of torture in which a man is laid prostrate on the ground, his members tied to stakes with wet

157 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 leather. As the leather then dries, his body is pulled and stretched out in excruciating pain.

Having returned drunk to the fortín late at night, Fierro is caught trying to sneak back in by the gringo (Italian immigrant) who was placed on guard duty. Not recognizing Fierro, the gringo sounds the alarm and fires upon him, missing his target.

The commotion gets Fierro caught and in trouble with the major. When it is all over,

Fierro tells us: “quedó en su puesto el nación / y yo fui al estaquiadero” (142). Fierro’s disdain for the gringo immigrants includes a bibliography of academic commentary in and of itself. What concerns us here is the term he uses: “el nación.” The only time we see the word nation in La ida is when Fierro refers to this immigrant he so despises, literally calling him “the nation.” His disgust for the gringos lies in their lack of equestrian skills, courage, and that “no sirven pa carniar” (La ida 142). They are

“delicaos” and “parecen hijos de rico. . . . / solo son güenos / pa vivir entre maricas”

(La ida 143). Yet beyond the fact that gringos lack everything Fierro considers to be

“manly” and of value for life on the pampas, a great part of his disdain lies in the fact that the nation has made room for the immigrant while excluding its own native criollo, the gaucho. Calling the gringo “el nación” is a critique of Sarmiento’s immigration policies, which sought to Europeanize the Argentine population—a biopolitical policy if ever there was one.124

This immigration policy sought to advance Argentina’s progress by inserting

Aryan and Anglo-European immigrants into Argentine society, thus engineering the population with a “superior” race. Sarmiento’s positivist immigration efforts,

158 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 however, attracted more southern Europeans than anything, such as Italians.125

Regardless, we may consider this a precursor to politicized eugenics, and a racial engineering that is seeking to replace Fierro’s blood, with a supposedly “better” one.

“No trate de economizar sangre de gauchos,” states Sarmiento in an 1861 letter to

Mitre. “Este es un abono que es preciso hacer útil al país. La sangre es lo único que tienen de seres humanos” (Obras Completas XXV: 260-61). Gaucho blood, according to Sarmiento, needs not be saved; it is useful to the country only as fertilizer to be spilled over the land.126 His death is for the growth of the nation. Sarmiento’s dehumanizing attitude toward the gaucho, one that favors the European immigrant for nation-building, is why Fierro disdainfully calls the gringo “el nación”. Thus the gringo gets a pat on his back for denouncing Fierro and remains in his post as the new body upon which Sarmiento’s politics are forming the nation; while Fierro the gaucho, the native criollo and the “hijo natural” of the country, is tortured and put in the stakes, his blood replaced by the gringo he curses:

De la manos y las patas

Me ataron cuatro sinchones;

les aguanté los tirones

sin que ni un ¡ay! se me oyera,

y al gringo la noche entera

lo harté con mis maldiciones. (La ida 142)

Based on his own experience in the military camps, Fierro does not see a correlation between the supposed function of the fortín and what it really is:

159 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Aquello no era servicio

ni defender la frontera:

aquello era ratonera

en que solo gana el juerte. (La ida 139)

In Fierro’s own words, life in the fortín is not military service nor is its function to defend the frontier, for the military camps are nothing but mouse traps that capture and imprison; they are traps that dehumanize the gauchos—the designated space on the frontier where bare life is held. The fortín is a place where the strongest impose their will and triumph; it is a camp which has no specific topography save it harbors the conditions of a perpetual state of exception, where people move “about in a zone of indistinction between the outside and the inside, the exception and the rule, the licit and the illicit, in which every juridical protection had disappeared” (Means 40-41).

Could there be a more ideal space for the localization of the camp than the frontier? A frontier is a territory already by definition a fringe space, a zone somewhere between outside and inside, lawful and lawless. Thus I would suggest here that we may consider the frontier in Martín Fierro as the zone of exception and continuous war, and the fortín, which exists within that indeterminate frontier threshold of inside and outside the law, functions as an assigned space of perpetual state of exception.

I would also like to suggest that the nineteenth century frontier in the Americas also marks a zone of indistinction between the methods of power used in colonial times and those marked by the emergence of the modern nation-state. Zilly notes that during the nineteenth century many new nation-states in Latin America enforced

160 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 politics of conquest and colonization in their interior—such as the Argentine pampas, the Brazilian sertão, and the Venezuelan llanuras—similar to those used by the colonizing European powers in Africa, Asia, and previously in the Americas.127

For Mbembe, “the colony represents the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law. . . and where “peace” is more likely to take on the face of a “war without end”” (171). He goes on to note:

In the same context, colonies are similar to the frontiers. They are

inhabited by “savages.” The colonies are not organized in a state form

and have not created a human world. Their armies do not form a

distinct entity, and their wars are not wars between regular armies.

They do not imply the mobilization of sovereign subjects (citizens)

who respect each other as enemies. They do not establish a distinction

between combatants and noncombatants, or again between an “enemy”

and a “criminal.” It is thus impossible to conclude peace with them. In

sum, colonies are zones in which war and disorder, internal and

external figures of the political, stand side by side or alternate with each

other. As such, the colonies are the location par excellence where the

controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended—the zone

where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the

service of “civilization.” (172)

Frontiers share with colonies the characteristics of a state of exception in continual warfare. However, I would suggest that beyond sharing this criteria with the colonies,

161 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 the frontier we find in Martín Fierro adds something else which is wholly a product of the modern nation-state: the camp. The frontier is therefore in political flux between colonialism and modernity.128

To arrive to my conclusion, we will turn to Hernández. In Rio de la Plata,

August 19, 1869, Hernández states:

Parece que lo menos que se quisiera fomentar en la población laboriosa

de la campaña o que nuestros gobiernos quisieran hacer purgar como

un delito oprobioso el hecho de nacer en el territorio argentino y de

levantar en la campaña la humilde choza del gaucho. (198)

Hernández’s observation here, I believe, captures various elements vital to our understanding of the camps role in the modern nation-state. He explains that it would seem like the government wishes to “purge” the ignominious crime of having simply been born in the Argentine territory and constructed his humble shanty on the frontier.

In his statement we find the three elements that form the structure of the nation-state: territory, order, and birth. Yet Hernández realizes that something is not working here.

Despite his birth in the nation’s territory, the gaucho is being purged as though his existence were a crime. As Agamben explains, when the political system of the modern nation-state founded its function on a determinate localization (territory) and a determinate order (the state), it did so on the mediation of the automatic inscription of life into citizenship by way of birth. However, birth as the new marker for inscription into citizenry is synonymous to the inscription of bare life (birth is the pure biological sense of life and not political, meaning for Agamben it may coincide with bare life).

162 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Thus bare life’s inscription into the nation-state’s configurations of power from birth means an oscillation between inclusion byway of qualification as political life, or inclusion byway of exclusion, which creates a rupture in the relation between territory, order, and birth. Inscription of bare life into the state (order) means that a new space, or territory, outside of the nation must open up.129 What is produced is the camp:

The political system no longer orders forms of life and juridical norms

in a determinate space; rather, it contains within itself a dislocating

localization that exceeds it and in which virtually every form of life and

every norm can be captured. . . . The camp is the fourth and inseparable

element that has been added to and has broken up the old trinity of

nation (birth), state, and territory. (Means 44)

Therefore, when Hernández accuses the government of purging the gaucho from the

State simply for having been born within the nation’s territory, it is because as bare life—an unqualified political body—even his birth can be a crime; birth in the nation’s territory cannot guarantee him citizenry nor the right to any rights. His naked life ruptures the system of order, territory, and birth, and replaces them with inscription into the state by way of the state of exception. Consequently, the camp is born from this rupture and, as I have noted, the camp is made manifest in the fortín, a dislocating localization that finds its home on the frontier. The fortín is the space where the purging takes place. In short, the frontier in Martín Fierro can be seen a transitional space between the colony and the modern nation-state; a threshold where the colony’s

163 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 characteristics of the state of exception are in play alongside modernity’s emerging fourth element of the national trinity: the camp.

2.5 Creaturely Shame Within his extensive bibliography dedicated to Martín Fierro, Ezequiel

Martínez Estrada, considered one of Argentina’s greatest essayists and literary critics, identifies a Kafkaesque condition of existence in the poem; he locates in Fierro a sense of isolation and helpless resignation beneath the weight of line after line of political authorities piled upon his shoulders, the weight of which he cannot escape. All the characters in Martín Fierro are extremely poor, comments Estrada, and there is a redundancy of individual suffering, a tone of misery and an environment of laments and misfortunes profoundly transmitted throughout the work; there is a sense of abandonment in adversity and even a sense of impotence in resisting the abuses and mistreatment that overwhelm the destitute.130 The misery in the poem, the “penas” suffered by Fierro and the others can be traced to a long line of “predators,” and that

detrás de ellos hay otra fila de depredadores, detrás de ésta otra, cada

vez más elevada y poderosa, como si los recursos de apelación por esta

clase de calamidades estuvieran absolutamente vedados, a lo largo de

infinitas jerarquías como en La muralla china o en El castillo, de

Kafka. Quiénes sostienen al juez, al comandante, al comisario, no se

sabe ni se averigua; pero deben ser otros comandantes, jueces y

comisarios más influyentes, a su vez aparados por otros de mayor

influencia. (II: 279)

164 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Continually lurking in the poem, hovering above Fierro, is an endless chain of command composed of judges, police commissioners, and commanders; and above them, only more judges and police commissioners, each one more powerful and influential than the last. It is under the weight of such a long line of political corruption and bureaucracy that Fierro’s must resign himself to the ever-present and almost omniscient authorities that determines his destiny.

Roggiano, in reference to Estrada’s observation, comments:

Estrada has been able to find in Martín Fierro a Kafkaesque concept of

existence: that of confinement and postponement without hope. Martín

Fierro is a displaced person, a social and political outlaw, a person alien

to his habitat; the others have violated his being like an impotent

creature or a mere object which is unnecessary and undesirable. (45)

It is precisely Fierro’s helpless condition as an “impotent creature”—his

“creatureliness”—that concerns us here. Martín Fierro projects a political world much like that found in Kafka’s works, one where, as Eric L. Santner points out, “the law is everywhere and nowhere” (22). Santner, in his On Creaturely Life, goes on to explain that Kafka’s world, much as I have described Fierro’s world on the frontier, is a state of exception:

In Kafka’s universe, the “natural historical” dimension of law that gives

rise to the allegorical sensibility comes to be registered as a chronic

state of agitation and disorientation, a perpetual state of exception

165 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

/emergency in which the boundaries of the law become undecidable.

(21)

In literature, the capturing of this chronic state of agitation, or the state of exception, is what produces literary representations of “creaturely” characters and protagonists: “To bring it to a formula, creaturely life is just life abandoned to the state of exception

/emergency, that paradoxical domain in which law has been suspended in the name of preserving law” (Santner 22). Santner therefore draws a biopolitical conclusion to the creaturely representation of existence so often identified in the works of Kafka, stating that “[t]he “essential disruption” that renders man “creaturely,”” for Kafka and writers like him, is “a distinctly political— or better, biopolitical— aspect” (12). What makes the characters in Kafka creaturely is not their relationship to other animals nor their location in a state of nature, save their proximity to other humans with political authority that places them in a state of exception. Essentially, Santner’s argument for creaturely life resides in Agamben’s state of exception, concluding that creaturely life is simply the literary interpretation of Agamben’s notion of bare life.

It is precisely within this same parameter of creaturely life that Estrada connects Kafka to Martín Fierro. Fierro and the other gaucho characters are continually represented in this light, both in their struggles on the frontier and in the military camp, and like in Kafka, their creatureliness is attributed to their status before the law, as the subject caught up in a state of exception. Just as Santner’s thesis argues that creatureliness in Kafka is the biopolitical existence of Agamben’s bare life, so too is Fierro’s creatureliness this same biopolitical product of the state of exception. As

166 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 bare life, Fierro demonstrates the point where sovereignty places biology at the center of its calculations, where the differentiation between the political and biological body can no longer be identified.

For this reason, Estrada not only refers to the Kafkaesque in Fierro’s helpless subjection to a never-ending line of abusive political authority, but also in regards to biology. According to Estrada, Hernández, like Kafka in his The Penal Colony or The

Burrow, treats life like the biologist in his microscope beholds the fly and the toad, or even human sperm. Hernández does not disfigure life, save with great delicacy and tact he manifests life by illuminating it in foreshortened perspective and bringing it to scale, demonstrating all its significant details and creases.131 Such scrupulous details are brought to light in the faithful representation of Fierro’s creaturely existence in the state of exception, embodied by the frontier and the military camps which are, like

Hannah Arendt’s description of concentration camps, “the laboratories in the experiment of total domination, for human nature being what it is, this goal can be achieved only under the extreme circumstances of human-made hell” (Essays 240).

“¡Quién aguanta aquel infierno!” cries out Fierro. “Si eso es servir al gobierno, / a mí no me gusta el cómo” (127). Infierno, hell: perhaps one of the most consistent words

Fierro uses to describe the world he lives in: a hell that is human-made and thrust upon him by the government.

Undoubtedly, there is something creaturely in the representation of the characters in the “human-made hell” of Martín Fierro. In describing the life of the errant gaucho matrero, Fierro states:

167 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Sin punto ni rumbo fijo

en aquella inmensidá,

entre tanta escuridá

anda el gaucho como duende; (161)

The gaucho roams the vastness of the pampa like a “duende” (best translated as an imp, a goblin or gremlin), a form of life that harbors something human and at the same something of the animal, producing a wholly monstrous figure.

Fierro is ultimately about the subject “before the law,” and in effect, gives us the figure of what that subjects represents. We therefore find that it is in the moments when he is most exposed to the law that his creatureliness becomes most apparent.

While on the run, after having deserted the fortín and killed both the negro and the guapo, Fierro literally finds himself before the law when the police surround him. In this instance Fierro gives us a truly creaturely description of himself: “Como a perro cimarrón / me rodiaron entre tantos” (164). Like a feral dog he is surround by the police, alluding to the familiar final scene of Kafka’s The Trial. Right before his senseless execution, K. exclaims that he is being sentenced to death “like a dog!” The novel then concludes with the following: “it seemed as though the shame was to outlive him” (231). Here we find the creaturely in K.’s identification with his pathetic situation “like a dog” before the law. However, as Santner explains, “Creatureliness is also at issue in the reference to shame that immediately follows upon Josef K.’s exclamation (“like a dog”) and provides the last words of the novel as we know it”

(22-23). Shame is therefore the psychological effect of being creaturely, the trauma

168 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 suffered by one before the law, by one subjected to the state of exception. We encounter this same sense of shame in Fierro’s experience with the law. At every turn

Fierro’s becoming, his being, is marked by helplessness before the law, which leads to shame. His becoming the soldier and his subsequent being the outlaw are humiliating experiences for him, shameful even—the psychological condition of bare life. In

Martín Fierro, “The will of the government is cruel,” explains Roggiano, “the illegal draft, a source of mockery and degradation; the outpost, a chain of injustices and the most humiliating of infamies” (44). Citing a nineteenth century governor, Slatta explains: “Manuel Dorrego, who became provincial governor in 1828, condemned the levas, or draft quotas, as an evil that “demoralizes and humiliates the people” (127).

The “illegal” draft and life on the outposts are the expressions of a cruel government that demoralizes and humiliates the subject, rendering it creaturely not only on a physical plane of one who is made animal-like, but also on a psychological plane where the creaturely is he who has suffered the trauma of shame like an abused animal.

This is the extraordinary pena that Fierro carries with him throughout the poem. Fierro’s greatest concern, and the reason why he sings about his life, is to relate to us his penas: his pain, his sorrow and his shame suffered at the hands of the government. A versatile word in Spanish, pena implies a range of meanings. In

Hernández’ work, when Fierro tells us, “Ninguno me hable de penas, / porque yo penando vivo…” (La ida 115), he is not only stating that he lives in sorrow, in pain and in suffering, but that he also lives in shame. Within this complex word Fierro is

169 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 alluding to his embarrassment before his hopeless situation. His inability to control his destiny at the hands of the law, as a “real” man would, is shameful.

I would reason this is why, after he deserts the outpost and finds he has lost his land and family, he swears to be the most ruthless bandit and gaucho matrero possible.

Ashamed, and realizing all he has lost, facing a future that means a life on the run,

Fierro proclaims: “Yo juré en esa occasion / ser más malo que una fiera!” (La ida

146). He does not let the reader down, and in fact proves himself to be meaner than a wild beast to a point of cruelty that the reader cannot condone. I am speaking of the episode in the pulpería where Fierro murders the negro. It would seem that here, an ashamed Fierro rages against his own helplessness by asserting his supposed superiority over someone whom he and society has deemed as inferior to his own cast.

To overcome his shame, Fierro is set on shaming the negro at the pulpería. It is important to note that before he murders the black man, he first seeks to embarrass him through insults. A man who has been unable to keep his own wife, Fierro insults the negro’s girlfriend first. Through a play on words, he calls the negra a cow, saying

“[v]a…ca…yendo gente al baile” (La ida 151). After more insults to his mujer, and several more racist comments directed at the negro himself, Fierro and his victim engage in a knife fight, where Fierro emerges as the victor and the negro is left behind dead and crumpled like a sack of bones.

Shumway explains that “to prove that he is not entirely impotent, Fierro must insult and kill, choosing as his victim people he views as his racial inferiors. So reduced are his pride and circumstances that only in violence can he affirm himself”

170 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

(273). Perhaps most disturbing about this episode is that afterwards it appears Fierro feels little remorse, neither toward the dead man nor his now wailing girlfriend who kneels over his dead body. He describes her laments as a “bellowing wolf,” to which

Fierro’s only response is he would like to give her a slap to shut her up. Instead, he says with a sense of disgust, “Limpié el facón en los pastos” (La ida 155), and on he rode. Perhaps what is most shocking to the reader is that Fierro’s own cruelty mimics that of the cruel government to whose actions he has been a victim, though he seems to be oblivious to this irony. He shames the negro as he has been shamed, reduces his girlfriend to a creaturely state: like a wolf she howls in her state of hopelessness against what has befallen her, in a creaturely condition similar to that hopelessness in which Fierro had lived at the outpost.

In regard to this episode, Shumway notes:

If we confine ourselves to the political, the scene suggests how much

society’s mistreatment of Fierro has brutalized and alienated him,

making him a criminal of the most vile sort. . . . Whether so intended or

not, the scene reveals extraordinary psychological perception into

Fierro’s need for violence as a means of denying his inability to control

his own destiny. Although the fight and murder lend uncertainty to

Hernández’s political agenda while risking loss of the reader’s

sympathy, this scene more than any other makes Fierro believable.

(273)

171 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

The loss of control over his destiny, for a gaucho who prides himself in his freedom and carefree life, is perhaps the most shameful fate he can face. Losing his wife and family, as a man, is perhaps the other misfortune that diminishes any trace of pride

Fierro once had.

Fierro is not alone in his creaturely shame. When he joins up with Cruz, the two gauchos find they share a common pena. Cruz explains to Fierro that he too has hopelessly suffered cruelty at the same hand of that long line of political predators.

Once Cruz had had a beautiful china (girl) whom he deeply loved: “¡La pucha, que la quería!” (La ida 172). When a commander of the militia takes notice of her, his lust leads him to find any excuse to separate Cruz from her. He begins to employ Cruz “de chasque,” having him run errands and deliver messages for the military that take him to the farthest corners of the frontier. Though the commander treats Cruz like a friend, the gaucho explains that he did not trust him, and since “era el gefe,” Cruz’s situation is hopeless, because “ya se ve, / no podía competir yo” (La ida 172). Cruz is not idle, however. He narrates: “No me gusta que otro gallo / le cacaree a mi gallina,” and so, in his suspicion of the commander, he finally catches the man “abrazándome a la china” (La ida 173). Enraged, a fight ensues and Cruz beats up the commander, and later killer one of his men, forcing him to flee from the law and, like Fierro, live life on the run “como vicho sin guarida”—a creaturely existence, because “es esa vida / como vida de animales” (La ida 177).

Yet a man who loses his china to another man is impotent in the eyes of others, and Cruz’s shame follows him. Later, as he is dancing in a pulpería, the guitar player

172 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 recognizes Cruz and, knowing his shameful story, begins to insult him in his canto:

“Hay gauchos que presumen / de tener damas” he sings, “y a lo major los dejan / tocando tablas” (La ida 178). The payador’s insults confirm that having “lost” his woman is for Cruz a source of shame in nineteenth century rural Argentina. Unable to bear the insults, Cruz, like Fierro, turns to violence in an effort to reconcile his embarrassment. In a rage he slices the payador’s guitar strings with his facón and then cuts open the man’s belly, leaving him with his tripas in hand to restring his guitar.132

In the second part of the poem, when Fierro reunites with his children, we find that they too have only known suffering and shame to that never ending line of predatory authorities of the landowning elite and the State. Perhaps in the case of the eldest son we find the most illuminating example. Filling in the timeframe from when

Fierro was sent to the frontier in the first part, to when they are reunited in the second, the eldest son tells us that he lived an abandoned orphan, who is no different than a

“sabandija.” He grew up “desnudo a veces y hambriento,” never finding compassion, living “como los bichos” (La vuelta 252). Finding himself working as a peon at an estancia, he is, much like K. in The Trial, accused of a crime he did not commit.

However, though K. never finds out the nature of his supposed crime, Fierro’s oldest son knows he is accused of murder. Since, as the son says, “El que manda siempre puede / hacerle al pobre un cautiverio,” he is brought to trial and accused by those who committed the crime. The judge, finding the situation suspicious, but never fully clearing up the confusion, simply sends them all to prison. What concerns him most about his situation, is precisely expressing to those listening to his tale his absolute

173 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 shame and embarrassment of being grouped with those who really committed the murder:

Piensen los hombres honrados

en la vergüenza y la pena

de que tendría la alma llena

al verme ya tan temprano

igual a los que sus manos

con el crimen envenenan. (253)

Helpless and powerless, he serves time in prison, where conditions are incomprehensively inhumane. “La justicia muy severa / suele rayar en crueldá,” he says, and “no esiste pior martirio / que esa eternal soledá” (La vuelta 259-60). They are not allowed to do any of the things gauchos hold so dear: sing, drink mate, smoke, and in their solitary confinement, two things are taken from the son that gauchos most esteem: words and friendship. With only the bars of their cell with which they have to converse, the prisoner “se convierte en animal, / privao del don principal / que Dios hizo a los mortales” (La vuelta 260).

If, as Larraya identifies, the most illuminating idea in the world of Hernández is the rendition of the gaucho as human, then I would suggest that Hernández does so in a manner contrary to what we would expect to be human.133 He illuminates humanistic traits in gauchos not in what is laudable or exemplary about humanity, but by demonstrating the deplorable effects of excessive political abuse that leads to a creaturely state of shame, and which will eventually produce the vilest of criminals.

174 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Hernández does not just give us the subject before the law, save one who is pushed outside the law and treated as a mere creature. He highlights for us the human condition by way of an understanding of man as a political animal. Human for

Hernández means the politically marginalized and the creaturely. He ultimately shows us that “human beings are not just creatures among other creatures but are in some sense more creaturely than other creatures by virtue of an excess that is produced in the space of the political and that, paradoxically, accounts for their “humanity””

(Santner 26).

2.6 The Wolfman Bandit In essence, via the capturing of creatureliness, Martín Fierro is a literary inquiry into the human condition of the bandit, or the outlaw, and a testament to the longstanding tradition of banditry in Latin American culture. It is important to note that being the bandit does not imply any specific crime; he is not the thief, the cattle rustler, the vagrant, or the murderer. He can be all of these things and none of them.

This means, as Dabove explains, that “since no particular action is deemed banditry, any action could be (and was) deemed banditry, a catchall word use much in the way that “terror” is currently used in the United States” (4). This word designates those who were to be abandoned by the sovereign, a scapegoat term that excludes undesirables from the nation-state in the name of progress, civilization and the validation of the nation-state: “This labeling process (of bandit) played an integral part in the legitimation of an elite-led project of nation-state building in Latin America and thus was a defining feature of the Latin American historical experience” (4). The term,

175 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 much like the contemporary usage of terrorist, meant the exception and a denying the subject of constitutional and human rights, for “the bandit trope appears initially from the state gesture of expulsion” (8). The enactment of expulsion in Martín Fierro, as we have covered, takes place on the frontier—a fringe space already marked by an inside and outside paradigm, much like the sovereign state of exception. It is here that the political subject (gaucho) emerges as bare life, a state of creaturely, animal-like existence that we will now trace through banditry.

The bandit is a juridical figure of the State who like bare life is included in the calculations of sovereign power through exclusion, and is a figure that has been translated into a strong literary trope in Latin American literature. This trope carries with it heavily charged biopolitical elements regarding Agamben’s state of exception and his notion of bare life. Turning to an often overlooked and little understood passage in Martín Fierro, but one that I believe is the pinnacle moment in the work, we will examine the bandit trope in light of the figure of the wolf-man in relation to the bandit.

In his genealogical investigation of homo sacer (sacred man), taken from an ancient roman text that defined such a man as he who could be killed and neither considered a sacrifice nor a homicide—and which for Agamben is synonymous to bare life and, in our case, we may add Santner’s creaturely life—Agamben correlates the recurring legal phenomenon of banditry with the figure of the werewolf, or the wolf-man, in western cultures’ folklore. This correlation, for Agamben, highlights the persistence of bare life throughout the political history of western society. Like the

176 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 bandit, homo sacer is life devoid of any legal rights, he who inhabits a state of existence outside the law and who can thus be freely killed. In such a way, his inclusion in the workings of sovereignty is marked by his exclusion or death.

Agamben points out:

In the bandit and the outlaw . . . Germanic and Scandinavian antiquity

give us a brother of homo sacer beyond the shadow of any doubt. . .

Germanic and Anglo-Saxon sources underline the bandit’s liminal

status by defining him as a wolf-man . . . the life of the bandit is the life

of the loup garou, the werewolf, who is precisely neither man nor

beast, and who dwells paradoxically within both belonging to neither.”

(HS 104-5)

In Martín Fierro, we find the same allusion to the wolf-man as a representation of the bandit. This comes at the end of the first part, when Cruz explains to Fierro that they will live as bandits (matreros) together:

Andaremos de matreros

si es preciso pa salvar;

nunca nos ha de faltar

ni un güen pingo para juir,

ni un pajal ande dormir,

ni un matambre que ensartar. (La ida 182)

When in need of clothing, and for their choice of poncho against the elements, he suggests:

177 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Y cuando sin trapo alguno

nos haiga el tiempo dejao

yo le pediré emprestao

el cuero á cualquiera lobo

y hago un poncho, si lo sobo,

mejor que poncho engomao. (La ida 182)

The curious image of Fierro and Cruz dressing themselves in wolf skins adheres to their current, and now permanent condition as bandits. Consequently, in their wolf skins, it becomes as if one cannot tell where Fierro and Cruz begin and the wolf ends.

The government will not care for them, never embrace them nor clothe them. So they must depend on what they have become as bandits to survive. Their coming choice in the next chapter to live with the Indians reflects their decision to wear the wolf skin, to embrace their bandit status and to choose barbarism over civilization. Life with the natives means they can run from their shame, escape their sorrows: “puede que allá veamos luz / y se acaben nuestras penas” (La ida 188). To declare that the wolf skin will make a better poncho than a waterproof one is to say that life with the Indians is better than anything the city, or civilization, has to offer them. They are embracing their banishment.

Cruz’s suggestion to dress in wolf skin ponchos has baffled scholars given the blatant fact that on the pampas, in the gauchos’ world, there exist no native wolves.

Efforts to explain this usage of imagery so alien to their world have reached extremes.

Santiago Lugones, for instance, has even suggested that the wolf skin is really the skin

178 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 of a seal, like those found on the Argentine coast (seal is translated as lobo marino in

Spanish).134 Far from a literal explanation, I would suggest that, conscious or not,

Hernández’s reference to the wearing of wolf skins is embedded in the strong social significance the figure of the wolf-man shares with banditry in western cultures. In the moment of artistic creation, Hernández pens Cruz’s illustration as the recipient of a collective conscience of the banditry connotation implied by lupine imagery.

Furthermore, Cruz does not say they will actually kill and skin a wolf, but says they will “borrow” the skin (or leather) from a wolf, alluding to an actual transaction and agreement between man and beast. The wolf skin serves to accentuate the trope of banditry precisely when the two characters officially recognize themselves as bandits.

It is thus no coincidence that the usage of such imagery coincides with the exact moment when the two come to terms with their being bandit matreros.135

We find persistence of canine proximity to gaucho bandits in Juan Moreira

(1880) as well, a popular gauchesque novel written by Eduardo Gutiérrez. Often compared to Martín Fierro, the narrative follows the infamous exploits of Juan

Moreira, a gaucho bueno who, wronged by a judge who lusts after his wife, becomes a bandit much in the same way Cruz does. During his years as a bandit, the narrative places special attention on Moreira’s relationship with his horse and dog. Their own fame rivals that of his own, and the narrative continually praises his animals, emphasizing how important both are to the gaucho. Interestingly, after the chapter titled “Un castigo terrible,” when Moreira is officially banned, we find the following chapter is completely dedicated to his dog, Cacique. In this chapter, we are presented

179 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 with the diverse breeds of dogs that accompany gauchos, as well as their strong points and uses. Cacique is a cuzquito (basically a mutt), but this breed is called the “policía del gaucho.” In the case of Moreira, Cacique serves as a watchdog, keeping vigilant when his master sleeps the siesta, growling and waking Moreira if someone approaches, or helping him when in a fight. He is Moreira's only constant companion and the two seem to be so bound together, that we are told Cacique could even sense the sadness that would envelope Moreira on the lonely Pampa and, "haciéndole abatir la cabeza sobre el pecho a impulsos de un recuerdo amargo, se veía al Cacique sentado sobre sus patas traseras, mirando a su amo con una expresión patética y tristísima . . .”

(68). The close relationship between Moreira and his dog gives the impression that the two are one, the one depending on the other for survival. Cacique is ever present in the novel, continually serving his master and helping him escape danger. The proximity that these two share coincides with what Agamben points out about the bandit in relation to the wolf-man. In Juan Moreira, we literally find a bandit defined by his dog, the actions of the one are indistinguishable from the other. When danger approaches, Cacique serves as Moreira's ears; when the two find themselves surrounded by the law, Cacique has his teeth and Moreira his knife, but in the frenzy the two are one, combating with the same purpose.

Gutiérrez based his literary Moreira on a real, historic gaucho also named Juan

Moreira, who had gained fame in Argentina as a bandit. Though pure coincidence, it is beyond curious that both the historical and, in effect, the literary Moreira, are killed by the police in a small pueblo whose name is all too fitting for the death and burial site

180 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 of a bandit: Lobos (the historic Juan Moreira was killed by a posse in 1874). Even in death, and sealing their wolf-man relationship, Gutiérrez writes that Moreira’s dog

Cacique would not part from his grave site in the Lobos cemetery. Refusing food and nourishment, the dog soon dies on his master’s grave, where he had stood guard until death.

In conclusion, if in the first part of Martín Fierro the gaucho is the bare life figure of the bandit, the one excluded from the nation-state for the purpose of building the nation, in the second part he is the one integrated as a legitimate juridical citizen who will finally form part of the nation. Yet his inclusion also marks the decisive exclusion of the likes of the negro and the indio. As Heffe has observed, in the gauchesque, while the gaucho finally acquires a voice as a juridical figure (beginning with Martín Fierro), the voice of the negro and the indio disappears from the genre.136

We undoubtedly witness this process in the transition from the first part to the second in Martín Fierro. Though I would say the negro is never represented as an equal to

Fierro, the native in the first part is. Ansolabehere points out that in La ida both gaucho and indio come from the same rural universe, and that if the native is an enemy (because the enemy is unquestionably the government), it is because he is an equal and worthy opponent to the gaucho.137 Indeed, he has characteristics that to the gaucho are laudable and that are of import for life on the pampas: bravery and skill with the lance and bolas, and most certainly, equestrian skills. The indio possesses all of these skills and rivals those of the gaucho, creating an air of respect for this adversary. The indio, however, is not the Other in the first part; the Other who truly

181 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 comes from a different world than the gaucho, according to Ansolabehere, is the gringo immigrant, who possesses none of the qualities cherished by the gaucho. In fact, Fierro’s disgust for the gringo is evident throughout La ida, an attitude never expressed toward the indio in the first part of the poem.

At the end of La ida, Fierro, along with Cruz, enters into that other frontier space, one beyond the limits of the fortines and supposedly out of reach of the State’s hellish clutches he has known. They journey to share that frontier zone inhabited by the indios. Both gauchos not only sojourn out to share this space with the natives, but also to share in their status as official enemies of the State. In Hernández’s 1869 articles published in El Rio de La Plata, it is evident that he envisions an Argentine utopia following Sarmiento’s formula that to conquer the frontier means to populate.

Yet unlike Sarmiento, Hernandez’s vision of this utopia incorporates both the gaucho and the indio.138 Therefore, when Fierro and Cruz decide to live as far away as possible from civilization with the Pampean natives, he is grouping gaucho and indio together as outcasts from the State, revealing the injustice of their political condition in hopes of advocating their inclusion. For this reason, the true Other—the gringo who occupies the inside—is so criticized by Hernández. He sees a political world that has gone topsy-turvy, where a nation is creating orphans of its native sons to adopt foreign ones.

This paradigm, however, will change. Ansolabehere observes that in the second part of Martín Fierro we have the complete inverse of the first part. Fierro will return to civilization and integrate into the nation along with the gringo immigrant,

182 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 meaning in La vuelta it is now the indio who is marked as the Other and left alone on the outside.139 Whereas at the end of La ida it appears Fierro and Cruz are parting to the frontier to live in a safe haven where they will be accepted by the indio, Hernández throws the reader a curve ball from the get-go in part two. As it turns out, and contrary to the perception of part one, life with the Indians is even more of a hell than life in the military camps. To demonstrate this, Hernández must swim against the current of his ideology not only in the first part of Martin Fierro, but also against that of much of his extensive body of journalistic writings as well.140 To paint this hell and illustrate the indio’s otherness, we find over twelve hundred verses in the beginning of La vuelta— roughly from chapter two to chapter ten—where the indio and the frontier space they inhabit are portrayed again and again in the most horrid fashion, as though Hernández is attempting to unravel every ideological thread he has knitted in La ida.

Throughout these verses the native is animalized, marked as inhuman and limitless in cruelty. Like Glanton’s men in Blood Meridian, they are beings who wear necklaces beaded with the teeth of Christians they slaughter.141 The culmination of the indio’s savagery in La vuelta is revealed in the episode of the white captive woman.

Having her young son ripped from her arms by her captor, his throat is slit before the cautiva’s eyes and her hands then bound with his intestines. With Cruz now dead,

Fierro hears the cautiva’s cries and alone comes to her aid. He finds her bound and covered in blood from a whipping she is receiving with a lasso at the hands of her captor. A fight ensues and, after killing the Indian and helping the cautiva collect “en unos trapitos / los pedazos de su hijito” (La vuelta 241), Fierro finds himself now an

183 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 outlaw amongst the Indians for having killed one of their own. For this reason he must flee with the cautiva back to civilization.

Ultimately, what Hernández’s shift to an almost demonic representation of the indio demonstrates is his own defeat to and acceptance of Argentina’s state-building project he had once resisted. As Shumway explains,

These verses served one purpose only: to justify the brutal

extermination of Argentine Indians currently in process under General

Roca and President Avellaneda. To rationalize genocide, its victims

must be viewed as subhuman, bestial, inferior by nature, unopen to

improvement. (287)

Unlike his previous outside location of resistance to Sarmiento’s presidency when he wrote La ida, Hernández is now inside and in conformance with President

Avellaneda’s state policies, including General Roca’s 1879 Conquest of the Desert campaign which ultimately exterminates Argentina’s native populations. This campaign was coming to an end within the timeframe of writing and publishing La vuelta. Fierro himself mentions their extermination as he lives amongst them:

Las tribus están deshechas;

los caciques más altivos

están muertos o cautivos,

privaos de toda esperanza,

y de la chusma y de lanza

ya muy pocos quedan vivos. (La vuelta 220)

184 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Yet the indios are not the only ones hunted by the State. It would seem that even amongst the Indians in the most far-reaching confines of the frontier Fierro cannot escape the long arm of the law; still he is persecuted by the State: “Pues allí a los cuatro vientos / la persecución se lleva; / naide escapa de la leva” (La vuelta 213).

Fierro never fully escapes the haunting of the draft law, and explains that the leva follows him, possibly for recruitment in Rocca’s campaign.

With the indio all but lost, it would seem Hernández abandons him, turns on him whom he once praised for harboring gaucho refugees.142 By dehumanizing the indio in La vuelta, he justifies Roca’s campaign. Yet never relenting in his defense of the gaucho, he brings Fierro back to the nation and uses the second part to argue for his integration into society as a worker. Thus Fierro sheds his wolf skin for peon clothing in La vuelta, while the Indian maintains his bandit status and, unlike

Hernández’s judgement of the bandit gaucho, is condemned for it and hunted like the wolf unto extermination. Heffes suggests that in La vuelta Hernandez frames his own voice in the redefinition of Fierro’s, thus constituting the gaucho as lawyer and judge.143 He is the lawyer who now prosecutes the Indian, placing before the jury all his creaturely traits (everything Fierro once was in La ida), as well as the judge who condemns him to death.

If Henández’s vision for the gaucho to live on as an agricultural worker saves him from political abandonment, it saves him only in his death, for the new gaucho lives on only in the death of the once free gaucho who roamed the pampas like the natives. Only in this way, through concession to the whims of modernity and

185 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 liberalism’s emerging new order, can the gaucho becomes a national symbol and protagonist in the narration of a new nation, while the Pampean natives will truly perish in their death; they will be forgotten and excluded from the historical narrative of Argentine national consciousness. I believe David Viñas puts it best when he questions if perhaps the indios were really Argentina’s desaparecidos of 1879.144

186 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

CHAPTER III

Brazil’s Struggle for a Body: Euclides Da Cunha’s Os Sertões and Grievable Life

“Deus o dissera—em mau português, em um mau italiano e em mau latim. Estava farto dos desmandos da terra...” Os sertões

“Aí, e as horas não acabavam. O sol encostava na nuca da gente. Sol, solão, debaixo eu suava, transpirava dos cabelos, e pelo dentro das roupas, de sentir as cócegas grossas no meio do lombo; e essas dormências numas partes do corpo. Então, eu atirava.” Grande Sertão: Veredas

Amidst the chaos of Brazil’s Canudos War in 1897, a journalist and war correspondent by the name of Euclides da Cunha records the following scene in his personal journal:

9 horas da noite – Escrevo numa cômoda mesa na farmácia

anexa ao Hospital Militar . . . Em frente alevantam-se as barracas

cheias de feridos e doentes – e cheias de lamentos e exclamações, mal

abafadas, de dores cruciantes. No fundo da farmácia, ressona

estentoricamente o correspondente da Notícia resguardado por uma

barricada enorme de caixas cirúrgicas vazias. E sobre a cobertura de

couro do casebre passam, sibilando, as balas.

Já me vou acostumando a essa orques.145 (Caderneta 67)

This curious description allows for a unique analogy of nation-building all too accurate in the context of the Canudos conflict. Euclides da Cunha, a journalist

187 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 charged with reporting the progress of Brazilian civilization’s war against its backwards rural citizens in the best light possible, is essentially writing the story of the nation. In the passage above, and by way of introduction, it is precisely from where he writes this story that interests me: a pharmacy.

In Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy,” the French philosopher provides a reading of

Plato’s Phaedras that deconstructs his usage of the Greek word pharmakon (drug) to its dual meaning of being at once the remedy and the poison, for there “is no such thing as a harmless remedy” (99).146 The topic of the pharmakon matters greatly for

Plato within the context of life and memory’s relevance to the techné of writing. Since the pharmakon is artificial, “it goes against natural life: not only life unaffected by any illness, but even sick life, or rather the life of the sickness” (100). Furthermore, “under the pretext of supplementing memory, writing makes one even more forgetful; far from increasing knowledge, it diminishes it” (100). In relation to the writing of a nation, Derrida comments on the Republic. Here Plato sees writing, sculpting, and painting as immoral for politics and philosophers because they are “artificial” imitations of the “natural” truth. Thus, the “magic of writing and painting is like a cosmetic concealing the dead under the appearance of the living. The Pharmakon introduces and harbors death” (142). This makes sense when one considers how the story of a nation’s origin always implies death and exclusion occluded somewhere in the fine print. However, Plato also notes that the pharmakon of storytelling might be utilized to govern the ideal city, when ontological knowledge, the knowledge of the true nature of things, is introduced as a “pharmaceutical force opposed to another

188 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 pharmaceutical force” (138). Thus, writing the story of the nation can imply both remedy and poison, according to how it is administered.147 In the case of Brazil and the Canudos War, war correspondents for Brazilian newspapers write about the nation from within the confines of a wartime pharmacy, emblematic of the pharmakon being administered both literally to the life of a people, as well as literarily in their writing the story of a nation.

Undoubtedly, da Cunha’s scene in the pharmacy is not one that implies remedy, though at the time he may have viewed the war as a cure for what ailed the new republic, seeing his journalistic coverage as a curative pharmakon that tells of the

“ideal city.” However, his words only disguise the dead as the living. Indeed, while he writes, bullets fly overhead like a poison being administered to the inhabitants of the town Canudos. From within, even the Republic’s soldiers suffer, writhing in pain and crying out in the night. Likewise, da Cunha’s colleague, the correspondent from the newspaper Notícias, seems to shout in fear from where he is hiding. War correspondents like da Cunha were diminishing the memory of the war’s true happenings and diverting the reader to a story that was favorable to the public along the Brazilian urban seaboard. Not until da Cunha looks back in retrospect to the war, will he recognize it as a crime and massacre—a poison that was administered to the life of a nation, portrayed in the guise of the Republic’s glory and modernity’s victory over barbarism. As if to undo the poisonous pharmakon of writing and storytelling he and other journalists had published throughout Brazil during the war, Euclides sets out

189 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 to provide the curative pharmakon and give a “true” account, ultimately publishing his masterpiece, Os sertões, and rewriting the story of a nation.148

Os sertões: campanha de canudos (Rebellion in the Backlands in English) is da Cunha’s full account of the tragic Canudos War fought in the isolated desert region known as the sertão (translated as backlands or hinterland) in the northeastern

Brazilian province of Bahia. At its core, the Canudos conflict was a war waged by the

Brazilian Republic against its own rural citizens of an obscure town, a case of national fratricide. The conflict was civilization’s attack on rural backwardness, modernity’s affront against primitiveness. Euclides da Cunha, a fervent supporter of the Republic and a man of science, began writing Os sertões in 1897, the same year the war ended, and it was published in 1902. A war correspondent for the newspaper O Estado de São

Paulo, da Cunha was a firsthand witness to the brutality of the Republic’s fourth and final expedition against Canudos, a campaign that ultimately burned the rural village to the ground and massacred its inhabitants: men, women and children.

Os sertões is the artistic product of an author, both “poet and scientist,” who attempts to reconcile the tragic horrors of a senseless war with scientific meaning, assign signifiers to a violence wholly in opposition to representation and reason.149

The work is, as José Guilherme Merquior describes it, that “great book, part scientific, part literary,” a book that has survived in the Brazilian canon for so long because of its

“poetic energy and style,” as well as for its “illuminating sociological brilliance”

(198). The phenomenon of Canudos, the violence and war, could not and cannot be captured in words, nor explained through the scientific ideologies that Euclides

190 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 assigned to the very land of the Brazilian sertão, to its people and to their conflict with the Republic. Consequently, if the phenomenon of the historical Canudos War proves difficult enough to encapsulate, Euclide’s epic work inspired by the conflict becomes even more enigmatic. The narrative is replete with nineteenth century positivist ideology and racial determinism of his time, and at once given to artistic and literary tendencies. Leopoldo Bernucci states that da Cunha’s conscience is split between the tendencies of an imaginative romanticism and a pullulating naturalism.150 Divided in three sections, A terra (The Land), O homem (The Man), and A luta (The Conflict), da

Cunha attempts to explain the horror of the war itself, through a scientific, socio- anthropological argument based on social Darwinism. His political thinking, his scientific convictions, in the end cannot reconcile what he sees.

To put it blatantly, Os sertões is an unorthodox book, difficult to categorize, much like Sarmiento’s Civilización y barbarie.151 The book in reality is many things: an epic chronicle of war, a socio-anthropological essay, a geological record, an historical account, journalistic literature, a poetic work of art, fiction—a novel.152 It is a book that is a testament to the science of its time and an artistic monument. Da

Cunha, himself an engineer, and called many other things—naturalist, ethnologist, geologist, sociologist, anthropologist, journalist, novelist, poet, artist—seems to have invested all these qualities into his masterpiece.153

In this chapter, I will demonstrate that Os sertões, despite being so many things, is par excellence a biopolitical text, what Boever would call a work of “bioart.”154 I do so with the purpose of indicating what new conclusions we may draw

191 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 from some of the work’s more conflictive characteristics that have for so long been debated. It is almost baffling that a book so concerned with the body, so wrapped up in nation-building and in the politics of violence and death, has not yet been viewed through a biopolitical framework.

As Natalia Brizuela points out, in Euclides’ newspapers articles about the war, his “pen initially traces—much as the Republic itself had been doing—an undesirable space of geographic, political, social, and physical bodies: this space and its people are frightful and revolting, the geography utterly uninhabitable” (156). Subsequently, in

Os sertões, those bodies and spaces will continue to be terrifying and repulsive; yet unlike his newspaper reports, this time da Cunha will expose the true nature of the

Brazilian republic to be just as frightful, more barbaric even, than the supposed enemy they are fighting. He furthermore demonstrates, in his criticism of the Republic, that the undesirable and bellicose space is ultimately created by the State, and not by the people of Canudos as shown in newspapers of the time. Therefore, I believe Euclides’ pen, in Os sertões, labels the Republic’s actions to be like those of Agamben’s exception, of a process that sets aside an undesirable space (the sertão and Canudos itself) that functions much like a concentration camp: a zone for extermination and exclusion of certain people(s) so the ideal archetype of a nation may solely inhabit the nation-state.155 This space harbors the frightful and revolting, political bodies that are made inhuman, placed on the threshold between animal and man, and—like

Agamben’s notion of bare life—these unsightly bodies are defined inasmuch as their stock value equates the capacity to be killed licitly. However, in his book, da Cunha

192 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 inverts the paradigm found in newspapers, and the frightful space and its repulsive inhabitants will be for the condemnation of the State and its war crimes.

Given that his pen first imitates and then labels the actions of the Republic, we may very well view Euclides himself as a sort of authorial sovereign figure. We can easily discern the correlation sovereignty and its subjects share with the author and his or her characters. Boever, in his theorizing of the novel as a genre in relation to biopolitics, does just this, explaining that the “author, then, becomes aligned with government . . . the characters with modern subjects” (Narratove Care 43). He goes on to note that

the situation of the character can said to allegorize the modern, bio-

political condition—that is, the condition of being subjected to the

government of life in its most intimate details . . . One’s pull into

literature could then be explained from two directions: from above—we

all enjoy being authors, being in the position of government, and seeing

how character-lives unfold within the novel's programmed regulations;

and (second) from below—we identify with characters, we recognize in

their governed lives our own biopolitical condition. (Narrative Care

47)

Considering Boever’s words, I would argue that reading Os sertões precisely involves the experience he describes: we are able to place ourselves in Euclides shoes, from above, as the author in control of the lives and bodies of the characters, while on the other hand, we understand what it means to be governed like those characters.

193 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Ultimately, when reading da Cunha’s book, we “experience the essentially modern condition of both being the subject and being subjected to” (Narrative Care 47). Why we experience this modern condition in Os sertões lies in the duality of the work. On the one hand, da Cunha, with his usage of anthropology and racial determinism, with his vision of the Republic’s motto Ordem e Progresso, functions much like the

Republic, and so too does the reader share in this vision and enact sovereignty from above; yet on the other hand, his moments of admiration for the stubborn resistance of the people of Canudos and his criticism of the Republic, allow us to also recognize their situation from below, relate to the politically subverted subject.

Without a doubt, Os sertões displays a broad biopolitical spectrum; it is a testament to the modern biopolitical forms of power and government in relation to state violence and death. Da Cunha’s writing of bodies, of the inhabitants massacred at

Canudos, combined with his secular and political convictions, imitates the sovereign and provides us insight into how life can ultimately be politically devalued and destroyed.

Why Os sertões affords us such an opportunity can be reduced to two reasons.

First, on a historical and political plane, the Canudos War takes place on the cusp of and in reaction to Brazil’s shift from a Monarchy to a Republic, marking the separation of church and state, and thus the change from theological politics (i.e. God is sovereign) to a politics of secularized theology (i.e. the sovereign nation-state is now God). This book literally highlights the transition (by capturing the conflict of that transition) from what Foucault calls the “pastoral” care for the body of a

194 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 population—care consigned to the church and God—to a care and regulation of the body that is headed by the state: a biopolitical care of the modern subject. Second, the very nature of the text itself favors biopolitics. What I mean by this is the journalistic qualities of Os sertões inevitably catch up in its pages the biopolitical existence of its characters—bodies taken from real life and transformed into writing. As discussed in the previous chapter, Boever, in his Narrative Care, identifies the novel as the ideal medium of writing for the representation of the biopolitical experience of human beings, in that it portrays, or at least seeks to represent, the everyday real life existence of its characters, and no longer the epic heroes and mythological stories of antiquity.156

These real-life characters carry the burden of the modern political body. For this reason, concludes Boever, newspapers (journalism) are the most extreme expression of language’s relation to biopolitics. Journalists do not tell real life stories, he explains, but create stories out of real lives.157 This is why we enjoy reading novels, and why in modern times the newspaper has been so predominantly read: in reading the quotidian, the narratives of everyday lives put into a spectacular format, be it some case of police brutality, health-care failures, refugees of war, desperate immigrants, prisoners of war, we, the everyday readers, indulge in the everyday biopolitical struggles of our fellow man. To a great extent, Os sertões as a literary work, presents an impasse between being a novel and an extensive work of journalism, a sort of conjuncture where the two meet. In order to write Os sertões, and concerned with representing what he understood as the truth, Euclides had to rely on newspapers, magazines, interviews with soldiers and sertanejos themselves (inhabitants of the sertão); not to mention his

195 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 own notes he had taken from the field of battle (published as Caderneta do campo), as well as his own newspaper articles he published in O Estado de São Paulo during the last campaign of the war and later published as Diario de uma expedição.158 Many of these elements, including interviews, war reports, letters, and even quotes from newspapers, make it into Os sertões, giving the reader the impression of reading at once a novel-like narrative and a text that could also be found in a newspaper. A book that reads like fiction and a news report, this hybrid work borrows from two mediums or writing so characteristic of modernity—the novel and the newspaper—and as such, is a prime example of a text that creates a narrative from the real lives of a nation: from bodies that compose the sovereign (officers, politicians, soldiers) and those bodies excluded from the sovereign (the people of Canudos). What we have before us, in conclusion, is a unique text that is a thanatopolitical example of bioart.

The Canudos War, as Brizuela points out, “would be, knowingly or unknowingly at the time, the event that would become the symbol for the new

Republic's arrival into modernity” (151). Dabove elaborates: “Canudos was a reassuring fratricide, and as such it is the cornerstone of the Brazilian national imaginary and the indelible mark of its modernity” (219). Here, Dabove is alluding to

Benedict Anderson with his coining of the “reassuring fratricide.”159 Anderson’s term defines the process by which nations imagine their genealogies by forgetting certain violent happenings essential to their history and reconstructing them with a national narrative unknown to the real participants of the events. Often those participants, especially in Latin America, who were violently excluded (bandits, outlaws, rural

196 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 rebels) from the nation-state in the past, persist in the present, redefined as national symbols, heroes and the national archetype, thus reassuring that their death was not in vain.160 When the historical outcome of an event is considered good, but the means to get there recognized as bad, according to Walnice Nogueira Galvão, the way to cope with such a dilemma is that the dead must pass on as brothers and be incorporated into nationality.161 Such is the case of the Canudos inhabitants, whose massacre and death has continually been reconstructed in the present as, borrowing from Berthold Zilly’s phrasing, “a ground zero for Brazilian history”—that the vast cemetery left behind would become a national monument and cornerstone for Brazilian national identity.162

This reconstruction is foremost indebted to Euclides’ Os sertões. Through his representation of the sertão, the Canudos conflict, and the actors in his work, Euclides ultimately and unknowingly determined the understanding and interpretation of

Brazilian nationality for generations to come.

Though the Canudos conflict took place eight years after the formation of the

Brazilian Republic (1888), it was the event which validated its sovereignty, manifested through the forced exercise of biopower over the body of a population—the power over life and to determine death. The Brazilian Republic’s beginning “is necessarily linked to death . . . That social and political death—history, which is always a type of death—was necessary for the consolidation of the Republic that had been proclaimed only eight years before” (Brizuela 151). Da Cunha’s Os sertões is a literary work that investigates Renan’s words; written in immediate retrospect to the war, such an exhaustive examination into the conflict means the book’s “[h]istorical investigation,

197 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 in fact, brings to light the deeds of violence that took place at the origin of all political formations, even of those whose consequences have been fortunate. Unity is always achieved by brutality” (45-6). Da Cunha, despite his dedication to the Republic, cannot avoid coming to this conclusion. He cannot help but find the nation’s origins entrenched in the same violent brutality he originally assumes it is fighting against.

For this reason he states: “Estamos condenado à civilização. Ou progredimos, ou desaparecemos. A afirmativa é sergura.” (OS 157). Euclides knows that affirming civilization can also be a condemnation. Inevitably he exposes this in the pages of Os sertões, especially through his representation of the sertanejos themselves. Ultimately, though he portrays them as primitive, ignorant, savage, backwards, racially inferior, as cases of “historical atavism,” and less-than-human—less than capable of participating in the Republic and in civilization—he recognizes that the sertanejos are “o cerne de uma nacionalidade. Atacava-se a fundo a rocha viva da nossa raça. Vinha de a dinamite...Era uma consagração” (OS 766). Canudos, a case of “reassuring fratricide,” demonstrates that the bedrock of a people must be blasted away with gunpowder and dynamite so that a foundation for the nation may be consecrated. The people of

Canudos and the space they inhabit, excluded from that nation, in fact become the symbol of this nation. In Agambenian biopolitical terms, those citizens victim to fratricide, whose lives are stripped of any political rights, are none other than his homo sacer (bare life)—the life of a nation who has “the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men” (HS 7).

198 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

By marking Brazil’s introduction into modernity, Canudos would also be the first Brazilian war highly publicized in Brazilian newspapers, and as such, “the war would be a spectacle of sovereignty—but above all else, a spectacle of modern sovereignty” (Brizuela 143). As a spectacle of modern sovereignty in writing, my reading of newspaper articles covering the war will tease out of the vast landscape of biopolitical mechanisms that give impetus to the violent conflict, manifested through the political body’s ties to state apparatuses such as the sanitary departments for the war (hospitals and pharmacies), to technology, economy, and ultimately, to the sovereign war machine itself. In newspapers, these apparatuses were portrayed by da

Cunha and his fellow journalists in a positive light, in an attempt to demonstrate the validity of the sovereign Republic they supported that in reality was anything but competent. Here I am essentially concerned with the relationship between Os sertões and journalism. I will therefore juxtapose my reading of war coverage in newspapers with my reading of Os sertões in order to demonstrate the shift in da Cunha’s thinking.

Ultimately, I argue that Euclides da Cunha, in his book, completely inverts the national discourse that justified the war in newspapers by identifying the workings of suspended law in the war, leading to incomprehensible acts of violence and terror. By comparing and contrasting the journalistic with the literary, I seek to explain, through a biopolitical framework, how the excluded bare life of a nation, after its death, may be resurrected as the nation’s archetype.

In short, I will first demonstrate that the Canudos conflict was a three-way struggle for control of the body between the oligarchy powers of church, state, and the

199 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 elite landowners. This will be followed by an interpretation of Euclide’s sense of anthropology and racial determinism in terms of colonialism, Foucault’s biopower, and his state racism. Here I will show this to be Cunha’s primary defect, in that he is never able to identify his own sense of racial determinism as part of the biopolitical motor for the war he condemns. Next, I will juxtapose da Cunha’s identification of state of exception in Os sertões with numerous sources of nineteenth century newspaper coverage of the war. In newspapers, the representation of the apparatuses of Foucault’s governmentality is remarkably evident, as well as Judith Butler’s notion of grievable life, which deals with biopolitics in relation to the representation of the body (or lack thereof) in newspapers and other media. I argue that though newspapers portrayed the people of Canudos as ungrievable life, unfit to be mourned like the life of the Republic’s soldiers, in Os sertões da Cunha achieves their grievabiliity by paradoxically dehumanizing the soldiers to their level, thus raising the people of

Canudos to the status of “the bedrock of a nation.”

3.1 Background One of the most notable characteristics of Os sertões is that it is a bipolar work, an almost schizophrenic book with many voices. This is first evident in the representation of the inhabitants of the sertão, whom Euclides goes to great lengths to describe, physically, sociologically, culturally, etc. Composed of rural vaquieros

(cowboys) and peasants referred to as sertanejos and jagunços (Putnam often translates them as “backwoodsmen”), the harsh climate of the sertão, for Euclides, is what produces what is both laudable and deplorable in the jagunço. Perhaps the title

200 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

“Hercules-Quasimodo” da Cunha gives the sertanejos best represents the contradictive nature of his writing. On the one hand, the sertanejo is weak, “desgracioso, desengonçado, torto,” whose “andar sem firmeza, sem aprumo, quasi gingante e sunuoso, aparenta a translação de membros desarticulados” (OS 207). While on the other hand, when forced to act in his natural habitat, he is the copper-hued Titan, “num desdobramento surpreendente de força e agilidade extraordinárias” (OS 208).

Many sertanejos were caboclos and mulatos—northeastern Brazilians of mixed

African, Ameridian, and European origin.163 The term jagunço was synonymous to sertanejo, but with the proliferation of the Canudos conflict throughout Brazil, the term “jagunço took on a pejorative connotation, that of cangaçeiro or outlaw—one among many ways in which Canudos burrowed into the national psyche” (Levine

“Mud-Hut Jerusalem” 528). In what follows, for the sake of clarity, the terms sertanejo, jagunço, and cangaçeiro will be used synonymously.

Furthermore, da Cunha’s portrayal of the Brazilian Republic becomes more and more ambiguous, and eventually more critical as the book goes on. In the end, despite his loyalty to the Republic and his own positivist thinking, Cunha’s allegiance and convictions give way to a critique of the barbarity of civilization, as he calls the military campaign “um crime inútil e bárbaro” (OS 682). His “livro vingador”

(avenging book), as Euclides would call it, was more an attack against the Republic than it was a defense of the sertanejo,164 for the war “foi, na significação integral da palavra, um crime. Denunciemo-lo” (OS 67). However, he would, in contradiction to his own words, later declare himself a lawyer to the poor sertanejos, who were

201 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 murdered by a criminal and blood-thirsty society.165 Be it what may, though he certainly denounces the Republic, the sertanejo will, in da Cunha’s work, seemingly be left to fend for himself. Though da Cunha at times esteems the sertanejo, even places him as the archetype of Brazilian nationality, he nonetheless categorizes the backlander as a “racial degenerate,” an inferior species of the human race. And though he attacks the Republic, one cannot help be sense in Euclides’ writing a persisting belief in the European model of civilization, an echo of what he previously wrote as a war correspondent for O Estado de São Paulo, that the “República é immortal!”

(Diário 68). Though this vision slowly crumbles as we read Os sertões, it would appear, according to Euclides, that Brazil simply got it wrong, erred in its path to democracy and civilization.166 More than anything, this is what da Cunha seems to criticize, what he considers the crime. Not once does he connect this crime of violent fratricide with the very racist and degrading discourse both he and the Republic use against the sertanejos. In the end, as Patrícia Cardoso Borges puts it, Euclides’ inability to fully understand the Other, be it another culture, another religion and beliefs—his impossibility of being open to differences, makes the Euclidian text a “sea of contradictions” (203).

Yet despite its racism and contradictions, despite the positivist sense of progress in its pages, Euclides’ book has persisted for more than a century as the iconic emblem of Brazilian literature and nationality. To account for this, Gilberto

Freyre, the celebrated Brazilian intellect, explains that in his descriptions of the sertão,

Euclides the scientist would err in his details of geography, in geology and

202 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 anthropology, as well as in his social diagnostics. However, what redeems his technical errors is that in Euclides da Cunha we find the poet, the prophet, the artist full of intuition.167 Adelino Brandão reminds us that Euclides’ “scientific prejudices,” his “scientism,” while they should be rightfully condemned, we should do so remembering that such thinking was characteristic of the time in which the book was written. What today we call scientism, was science for Euclides and his era.168

Os sertões has been heralded by Brazil’s great abolitionist and intellect

Joaquim Nabuco as the “the Bible of Brazilian nationality,” and alluding to the authenticity of the work, declared that Euclides wrote the book “com cipo,” or with a liana stalk, a plant native to the arid sertão.169 Samuel Putnam, academic and first translator of the book in English, explains:

There can be no doubt that Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões is a work

that is unique not only in Brazilian but in world literature as well. In no

other instance, probably, has there been such unanimity on the part of

critics of all shades of opinion in acclaiming the book as the greatest

and most distinctive which a people has produced, the most deeply

expressive of that people’s spirit. (iii)

Regarding Euclides da Cunha, Putman goes on to note that “[Euclides] emerges, alongside the nineteenth-century novelist, Machado de Assis, as one of the two outstanding figures in all Brazilian letters” (iv). The book was an immediate success when published, making da Cunha a celebrity overnight.170 In 1994, almost a century after the book’s publication, the journal Veja and a committee of 15 intellectuals

203 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 created a list of the top 20 most influential Brazil works in any genre, placing Os sertões in the number one spot, followed by Casa grande e senzala (1933) by Gilberto

Freye and Guimarães Rosa’s Grande sertão: veredas (1956).171

Bernucci explains that reading the work is like falling into a complex snare, that when read as a book of history or a socio-anthropological essay, the reader will simultaneously be driven by the literary impulses imposed upon him page after page, and vice-versa.172 This complex trap is in part what has drawn in readers and academics for so long. Levine comments:

Called the hallmark of Brazil's intellectual coming of age, it has

become a sacred text-leaving its interpretation of Canudos, in turn,

virtually untouchable. Da Cunha intermixes a passionate description of

the events, colored by his anguish over what he saw as an urban

southerner and a war correspondent, with his deep ambivalence over

the nature of the fanatical backlands peasantry, the national-racial

question, and the peasants’ tenacious struggle to preserve their lives.

(“Mud-Hut Jerusalem” 526)

The “livro número um” of Brazilian nationality can attribute its aura as a “sacred book” to critics like Roquette-Pinto, who have compared it to Cervantes’ Don

Quixote, Camões’ Os Lusíadas, a peer to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In effect, there are over 4,700 references to Euclides da Cunha alone at the Biblioteca Nacional in Brazil as of 1995 (the number would be even higher now).173

204 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

However, I believe there is another snare we step into when reading Os sertões, another reason why the book has enigmatically come to signify Brazilian nationality and thus been placed atop the Brazilian literary canon. First, it is precisely the work’s biopolitical nature as a text, as both novel-like and journalistic, that fascinates its readers much like CNN war coverage captivates its audience. Euclides’ book stands as a monument to modern-day journalism and its hold on the public.

Violence sells, and the sensational “spectacle of sovereignty” that journalism displays in the war-torn refugee, in the scenes of mutilated bodies piled up in the conflicts of war, is ultimately what people tune into. The initial public reaction to Os sertões and the persistence of the work to our day (over thirty editions and counting), was something new and inherently modern to its original readers, and something that continues to intrigue today’s readers. By modern, I am speaking of the thanatopolitical spectacle of totalitarianism and the modern biopolitical forms of government that have come to define our times and captivate us in the media and, yes, in literature as well.174

The modern condition exposed in Os sertões—being subject and subjected to—best defines our existence within the modern nation-state, and what better form of literature to represent nation and people than a book founded on these grounds? In Os sertões, we are coaxed in to the uninhabitable spaces that Euclides’ pen traces, and for a moment we live the thundering cannonades and the sulfurous smell of gunpowder.

Intrigued and appalled at once by the frightful bodies he sketches before us, we look not wanting to look.

205 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

3.2 Conselheiro and the Threefold Struggle for the Body To confront the Canudos phenomenon, and in order to discuss Os sertões here in this chapter, we must begin with Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel, more commonly known as Antônio Conselheiro, or, Counselor. Conselheiro was one of many sertanejo beatos, a wandering hermit and religious leader of the sertão backlands, but one who would reach unprecedented fame and renown. In the backlands he would be known as a man of God, a saint and savior, whereas for the Republic and in the newspapers from the Brazilian city centers, he would be depicted as a fanatic, a degenerate and a crazed monarchist. For two decades during the second half of the nineteenth century,

Conselheiro wandered the isolated desert backlands of Bahia. Working without wage, he preached and repaired neglected chapels, church walls, cemeteries, shines and other religious edifices. Legend and myth followed Conselheiro, and eventually so too would a large population of sertanejo peasants and penitent bandits. Not an official

Catholic priest, Conselheiro’s relationship with the Church was precarious. Though he did enjoy positive relations with certain clergy in the remote regions of the sertão— who allowed him to repair their churches and preach—in 1882 the Church hierarchy officially prohibited him from preaching in any church.

In 1888 Brazil absolved its monarchy, became a republic and abolished slavery. Marked by positivist tendencies of the time, this pivotal moment in Brazilian history created a fervor along the urban costal hubs for the triumph of secularism, a push to define Brazilian nationality, the racial Brazilian type, and to modernize the country. Hence the neglected and isolated rural regions of the interior, where traditional and religious tendencies flourished, and where monarchist sentiment still

206 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 existed, would suddenly be remembered, thrust into the national spotlight and marked as backwards and primitive, as the antithesis to everything that defined the new

Republic. Consequently, the inhabitants of rural Brazil would embody the adversarial

Other, and nowhere is there found a better example of this than the sertão. The city centers of coastal Brazil would pit their civilization against the barbarism of Brazil’s isolated northeast regions, and Conselheiro and his Canudos, the sertão itself, would emerge as the epicenter of this conflict.

Conselheiro himself was a sympathizer to the old Brazilian Monarchy and a fiercely traditional Catholic.175 Just as he had been banned by the Catholic Church, so too he would be opposed and condemned by the new Republic. With the emergence of the Republic in 1888, Conselheiro’s conflict with established order would only intensify. In 1893, Conselheiro staged his one and only spectacle of public protest, which was against taxes to the Republic (he burned tax edicts in a public square).

Though similar acts of rebellion—the burning of tax edicts—would occur in other parts of Brazil, it would seem that this would eventually give Conselheiro’s enemies the tinder necessary to start their own fire.176 After the protest, Conselheiro and a group of devoted followers would make their way to the most isolated and ecologically harsh region of the sertão to resurrect the old town of Canudos.

Far from the reaches of the Republic, Canudos was an arraial, or country hamlet tied to a ranch whose proprietor had since abandoned. Canudos would be a religious refuge from the republic and its secular laws Conselheiro and his followers opposed, such as the separation of state and church, verified by the Republic’s

207 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 introduction of civil marriage. In just two years, the town would grow to become the second largest city in the state of Bahia, which at the time was the second most populated state in the whole country.177 This would mean Canudos became a citadel of over 5,000 mud-hut homes, and that at its height, it would boast of an estimated

25,000 inhabitants, with lower estimations around 20,000 and others suggesting as much as 35,000.178

The larger the town grew, the more far-fetched the rumors became:

Conselheiro was a religious fanatic, a fervent millenarianist preacher of sebastianismo—the Portuguese myth that the 16th century king Dom Sebastão, lost fighting the Moors in 1578, would return to free the poor and oppressed, and once again bring glory to the Portuguese crown. Conselheiro had begun a fanatic cult, it was said, bent on destroying the Antichrist: the Republic. During the yearlong conflict from 1896 to 1897, these rumors would grow into political discourses that would incite the public to fear of and rage against Canudos, thus gathering public support for the war effort. It was said that Canudos was attempting to stage a rebellion, that their religious fanaticism and sebastianista beliefs meant they sought to overthrow the

Republic and reestablish Brazil’s fallen monarchy. Rumors stated weapons from

Argentina were arriving to arm the people of Canudos; troops were supposedly being sent from the United States and Austria to aid in the fighting.179

Da Cunha, on the other hand, does not merely rely on rumors of sebastianismo and millennialism but, adhering to the British psychiatrist Henry Maudsey, gives these phenomenon a socio-anthropological and psychological touch in Os sertões.180 He

208 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 explains such extremist religious fanaticism and criminality as a sort of “side effect” to racial miscegenation and the isolated, harsh conditions of the sertão, and even conducts a psychological analysis of Conselheiro, diagnosing him not only as psychotic, but as a prime example of what he calls “historic atavism.” Hence Euclides da Cunha can attribute Conselheiro’s backwardness to insanity, and not only is he madman, but a Gnostic who exemplifies historic regression in his ways of thinking.

His historic atavism and insanity, like a disease, infects his followers who, due to their degenerate and inferior racial makeup, are susceptible to primitive superstitions and backward ways of life. This meant that in the Conselheiro’s own life, and consequently within Canudos, reigned sexual promiscuity, unbraided violence, disorder, starvation, and rampant alcoholism. Ventura explains that Euclides essentially imposes upon Conselheiro many of his own obsessions, such as his fear of irrationality, sexuality, chaos and anarchy, thus creating a tragic character overcome with obscurantism and hereditary defects that lead him to insanity and conflict with social order.181 For this reason, Euclides gives us various accounts of Conselheiro’s early life, helping explain how he became the fanatical religious leader. To do so, he tells the story of a long-lasting family feud in which his father was involved, how

Conselheiro’s wife left him for another man, all of which lead to an insane criminal, suggesting he violently attacked, with the rage of a madman, a relative who had provided him lodging during his nomadic wanderings.182 These same characteristics da Cunha invests in Conselheiro are likewise transferred to Canudos, as though the city itself were an urban personification of the man.

209 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Suffice it to say, da Cunha’s psychological analysis of Conselheiro and his followers is far from accurate. The truth was, as many scholars have pointed out, neither Conselheiro nor his followers were fanatic sebastianistas.183 They may have held certain religious tendencies towards the belief, as was common in the backlands at the time, but it was never to the scale suggested by Conselheiro’s opposition.

Furthermore, the function of millenarianism in sertanejo culture had more to do with the volatile climate prone to drought that anything. Millenarianism for sertanejos was

“a practical social framework for coping with environmental instability” (Davis 189).

In short, the hope of a better future, of a prosperous paradise, gave the people of the sertão hope and strength to make it through drought years.

In all of Euclides’ interviews during the war, not once did he ever prod out of a jagunço any indication of sebastianism nor any of the other common assumptions relating to the conselherists’ fanatic beliefs. Dated August 19, 1897, Euclides published his interview with a captured adolescent jagunço named Agostinho in O

Estado de São Paulo. Speaking with Euclides, the kid negates to have seen any of the supposed miracles of Conselheiro, and says in fact he had never even heard that the

Conselheiro performed miracles. When asked by Euclides if it was true Antonio

Conselheiro promised the jagunços resurrection if killed in battle, Agostinho once again answers no. Possibly a bit frustrated at this point, Euclides then asks him what it is that Conselheiro promises. The boy replies with what is described as an unexpected answer: “Salvar a alma.” (Diário 110). It is interesting to note that this interview did not make the cut for Os sertões. Here we can see an example of da Cunha’s inability

210 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 to comprehend the Other and access the jagunços’ real way of thinking. His own preconceptions nullify what he hears from the source itself, and he will continually impose his own scientific reasoning on something that is not even there.

There was, however, no doubt Antonio Conselheiro was a tradition Catholic, his doctrine conservative and rigid. There was no doubt he opposed the Republic in things such as civil marriage, that in his own writings he referred to the Republic as a

“great evil for Brazil.”184 He followed a strict dichotic belief of good and evil, preached a fire and brimstone message, and certainly had an influential hold on the people, who likewise followed a strict moral code. Yet perhaps the greatest tragedy of the entire conflict is both he and his followers were peaceful. They never had intentions for a rebellion, nor did they seek to bring back the monarchy.

It would be, however, Euclides’ insane Conselheiro, his Canudos and his version of the conflict that would triumph in the end, determining for generations how the Canudos phenomenon would be viewed. As Sara Castro-Klarén points out, in the same way that Sarmiento invented the Facundo Quiroga we know in order to conceive a conquering truth for his ideals, we may also say that “[t]o a very large extent, the

Conselheiro that we know . . . was the Conselheiro that Euclides produced in Os sertões” (“Santos and Cangaceiros” 396).

In both his Vale of Tears and ““Mud-Hut Jersusalem”: Canudos revisited,”

Robert M. Levine provides comprehensive looks into the historic Conselheiro, as well as into the environmental and social factors that pushed him and his followers to establish Canudos. Though it is not the intention of this study to compare and contrast

211 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 truth with fiction in Os sertões, it is relevant to point out a few realities pertaining to

Canudos. To help us better understand Canudos, and contrary to what was often assumed, Levine highlights what the village was not:

[T]here was no enforced standard of communal behavior, religious or

otherwise, even though Conselheiro constantly reminded his

congregants of the obligation to live according to God’s laws. There

was no drunkenness, no prostitution, no hunger caused by lack of food.

Canudos’s inhabitants never suspended their rational understanding of

the realities of backland life. Those who wanted to remained in

constant touch with neighboring communities; they came and went at

will. People visited Canudos, did their business, and left. Many

conselherists worked outside the community every day. They were not

prisoners. They came to Canudos to preserve their Catholicism, not to

exchange it for a cult or deviant sect. (Vale of Tears 133)

What Canudos was, on the other hand, was a refuge against the harsh sertão environment, as well as a social refuge where the sertanejos could freely live out their religious convictions. Susceptible to extreme conditions of drought and hardship, the sertão can best be described as a feast and famine type climate. Under the continual threat and pressure of drought, this one factor shaped nineteenth century hinterland life. During extreme drought years, inhabitants were displaced and forced to flee for the coast, the lives of loved ones often lost to famine. Canudos was an attempt to communally hedge against such an environment. Mike Davis, in his Late Victorian

212 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Holocausts, notes that, after having already suffered decades of drought, followed by fleeting relief, dry conditions and famine “returned with a vengeance in 1891, one of the most intense El Niño years in modern South American history” (189). The drought would be coupled with economic depression in 1893, but this time, instead of fleeing the hinterland, many sertanejos would seek out a new survival option: flock to the

“drought ark” being constructed by Conselheiro at Canudos and remain in the interior.185 Thus, as Conselheiro considered how to care for his ever increasing number of followers in dire times, “Canudos was a rational response to the relentless chaos of drought and depression. In the face of the inability of the state to develop, or even slow the decline, of the sertão, it exemplified the practicality of a self- orgnanized, “socialist” alternative, even if its official ideology was Marian and monarchist” (191-92). As Levine explains, “Conselheiro’s vision inverted the harsh reality of the impoverished backlands: the weak, strengthened by their faith, would inherit the earth. Nature would be transformed: rains would come, bringing forth the earth’s bounty” (Vale of Tears 2). Canudos was to be, and in fact achieved becoming, a communal refuge against the harsh conditions of the sertão. Conselheiro “chose

Canudos as his locale because of its capacity to support agriculture, not, as was claimed later, for its defensive capabilities” (“Mud-Hut Jerusalem” 540). Conselheiro chose Canudos because, though a ruined fazenda, it was fertile land, “well defended by rugged mountains and watered by seasonal rivers and reliable springs” (Davis 191).

And flourish it did. As already noted, in two years it would grow to support between

25,000 and 35,000 inhabitants. Visitors were stunned by its prosperity: river banks

213 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 lined with vegetable gardens, corn, beans, watermelons, squash, sugarcane, and potatoes.186 Life in Canudos was essentially “pastoral, and centered around seasonal planting and daily religious ministrations” (Levine “Mud-Hut Jerusalem” 540). In effect, Canudos arose from a vision and desire to establish a community independent from the Republic, an autonomous and self-reliant community that could support itself spiritually and economically. If ever there was a social project to live disconnected from the ties of established social institutions, Canudos was it. Upon arriving to the village, settlers gave up their worldly possessions to the community and dressed in simple cotton pants, roughhewn shirts and leather sandals.187 Indeed, even white inhabitants who were small landowners had sold their assets for the good of the community, and they too dressed and lived in a humble manner.188 The city did not use Republican money (for lack thereof) and was supported by its own barter system and transactions made by script.189 Levine goes to show that compared to most hinterland hamlets, and despite the drought, life in Canudos was reasonably improved.

Matters of health and poverty received attention, the needy and sick aided with provisions. It was a community that cared for one another, worshiped together and even improved Canudos’ infrastructure and housing. Overnight some 2,000 houses would be built and, unlike in most sertanejo villages, many were painted (some had tile roofs).190 The old church was repaired and a larger and more improved new one was under construction; there was a cistern built, a warehouse and armory.191 A public school was even established, and many who otherwise would never have the opportunity, in Canudos had access to education.192 In the end, though public opinion

214 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 would say otherwise, Canudos was not inclined to violent rebellion against the

Republic. In fact, though distanced from society and the Republic, Canudos before the war proved perfectly willing to cooperate with authorities. Such is the example of a murderer found in the town who was turned over to the police in Monte Santo to be tried in Salvador.193

In reality, it was the war itself that would create fanaticism, both on behalf of the Republic as well as Canudos. During the war soldiers would continually cry out their “vivas” to the Republic, whereas the jagunços fighters would counter with their own “vivas” to the “bom Jesus” or to Conselheiro himself. The rumors that Canudos was a cradle for end-of-the-world fanaticism and revolution was never true, as Levine explains:

Before Canudos was attacked, most of its residents were too busy

following Conselheiro's austere precepts of daily behavior to be crazed

by end-of-the-world (or other) fantasies. Deprivation and Conselheiro's

spellbinding explanations about the evilness of encroaching modern life

brought them together, but they were not “fanatics” until circumstances

united them in common defense against armed outside attack. (“Mud-

Hut Jerusalem” 572)

Inevitably, backed by rumors of fanaticism and revolution, conflict would knock on

Canudos’ doorstep. The rumors themselves would also become even more exaggerated and widespread with each failed military expedition. There were four expeditions in all, four military campaigns sent to crush the supposed uprising. The

215 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 first took place in November of 1896, and involved 100 men and their lieutenant sent to capture Conselheiro. Before they could complete the mission, they were intercepted and routed by Conselheiro’s jagunços at Uauá (a victory, even though the 150 jagunço casualties far outweighed that of the troops). With each new campaign the number of the soldiers would increase, as well as the fire power. By the third expedition, led by the war hero Coronel Moreira César, the army attacked with 1,300 men, 15,000,000 rounds of ammunition, a squadron of cavalry, and an artillery battalion with 70 rounds of cannon shot.194 A total disaster, the third campaign seemed to only confirm the rumors. How else could a ragtag group of jagunços defeat a modern army with their guerilla tactics and primitive weaponry unless they were receiving outside help, reinforcements and equipment from say, Argentina or Austria? How else could the

Republic’s great Moreira César have died in battle if not for something bigger than just a backland resistance? All of Brazil, now crazed with patriotic fervor, launched the fourth and final expedition in June 1897, utilizing all the resources of the Brazilian army. It would be a spectacle of modern warfare and technology. Over ten thousand soldiers from all corners of Brazil made their way to Canudos, from local sertanejos themselves who were pressed into service, to a cavalry of gaúchos from the southernmost parts of the country. They would be backed by the latest technology in

European warfare, with names like Manulicher, Mauser, Kropatchek, and Krupp inscribed on the steel of their rifles, machine guns, and cannons. Yet despite such extremes, both in firepower and manpower, the final expedition would not come to an end until October 1897, after four months of bombardment and continual fighting.

216 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

The jagunços were able to miraculously hold out for so long due to various factors. I will name a few, though they certainly are not all. First, the land was on the jagunços’ side. As Euclides continually points out, the jagunços knew the sertão hinterland and all its secret paths and roads, they were familiar with the landscape and the caatingas (word used to describe the thick underbrush of cactus and other vegetation that congested the sertão). Their crude rawhide clothing, their breastplates and leg guards protected them from the heat and caatingas. The army, on the other hand, was ill adapted in every sense of the word.195 Their modern military tactics they refused to abandon were useless, their wool and cotton uniforms torn to shreds after a day in the harsh sertão, and their basic supplies (besides ammunition) continually ran out. By the time each expedition completed the long trek across the backlands to reach

Canudos, they were in a sense already defeated, exhausted and suffering the pangs of thirst. Furthermore, the jagunços were able to upgrade their armory with each failed expedition. They managed to capture various munition trains and thus exchanged their

18th century muskets, blunderbusses, and cattle prods for the same modern rifles formerly used to attack them. As da Cunha notes, after the failed third expedition,

“Levaram para o arraial os quatro Krupps; substituíram nas mãos dos lutadores da primeira linha as espingardas velhas e de carregamento moroso pelas mannlichers e

Comblains fulminantes” (OS 491). If anything, the only thing the previous expeditions accomplished was to supply the jagunços with unlimited ammunition, ensuring an epic fourth and final battle. When it was all over, da Cunha notes:

217 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Canudos não se rendeu. Exemplo único em toda a história,

resitiu até ao esgotamento completo. Expungnado palmo a palmo, na

precisão integral do termo, caiu no dia 5, ao entardecer, quando caíram

os seus últimos defensores, que todos morreram. Eram quatro apenas:

um velho, dos homens feitos e uma criança, na frente dos quais rugiam

raivosamente cinco mil soldados. (OS 778)

Prior to Euclides’ first-hand experience in the fourth expedition, he had published an article about the Canudos conflict titled “Nossa Vendéia” (Our Vendee), referring to the French Revolution revolt of the rural peasants of Vendée.196 In favor of the Catholic Church and the Monarchy, the people of Vendée opposed the revolutionary government, bringing about a bloody conflict from 1793 to 1796. The peasants fought a guerilla war that ultimately ended with over 200,000 lives lost. Da

Cunha, highly influenced by French romanticism, the likes of Hugo and the French

Revolution, initially romanticizes the conflict (for this reason too, he was assigned as war correspondent to the fourth expedition, since only strong sympathizers to the

Republic were allowed to report, and de Cunha’s zeal at the time was ideal).197 In Os sertões, however, after having witnessed the fourth expedition, da Cunha attempts this analogy once again; but this time there is doubt, as if he realizes such a comparison is flawed. Still he forces the analogy: “Malgrado os defeitos do confronto, Canudos era nossa Vendéia” (OS 365). Trying to still make it work, da Cunha fails because as he admits, the Canudos situation was defected. Vendee really is not apt because the parallel between the two is incongruent. The Vendée resistance really was a

218 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 monarchist effort to battle the French Republic; Canudos, defected, was not. Behind the rumors of religious fanaticism and revolutionary uprising, we begin to detect in the pages of da Cunha’s book the real reason for the war, in the bodies and spaces he writes. Lurking on the other side of the façade, behind the conspiracies regarding

Canudos, we inevitably encounter the real struggle: a fight for sovereignty, a struggle for control over the body of a people.

It would precisely be Canudos’ autonomy that would so threaten the Republic and incite it to violence. This power struggle, in essence, was a three-way struggle between Brazil’s oligarchies: the Republic, the Church, and powerful land-owners, each wanting its own piece of sovereignty over the body of the conselherists for their own means and purposes. Though it sounds contradictory, their concern for the body, who cares for it and how, and is what leads to the conflict that destroys Canudos and the body of its population. Conselheiro had appropriated the body of his followers, provided spiritual and temporal care for his people outside the bounds of the economic, spiritual, and political institutions designated to do so; and in its autonomy,

Canudos was therefore a threat to state, church, and landowners, producing a threefold struggle for the body: for care of the political body, salvation of the soul of the body, and the body as a unit of agrarian production.198 Davis summarizes that

there was no “rebellion in the backlands” . . . only an attempt at

peaceful withdrawal into millenarian autonomy. Like earlier quilombos

(slave republics) in the Nordeste, however, Canudo’s simple desire to

be left alone in peace was perceived as a dire threat to social order. On

219 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

the one hand, the holy city drained the surplus of cheap labor otherwise

available to local oligarchs . . . Canudos signified successful resistance

to the new order that the Paulista elites and their republican allies were

attempting to impose across Brazil . . . it also contradicted the church’s

project of subduing backlands Catholicism. As a result, Conselheiro’s

premature experiment in a “Christianity of the base” was denounced by

Salvador’s savants as “communism,” by the ultramontane bishops as a

“political religious sect,” and by the federal government as “seditious

monarchism.” The Jeremoabos and other big landowners demanded

Canudo’s prompt destruction. (192)

The Brazilian oligarchy of sertão landowners, church, and state unite in a common cause to reestablish societal order regarding bodily care, though their reasoning might be slightly varied. For the landowners, their concern for the body is in its capacity as a unit of production, as “mão-de-obra”—the body as manpower and labor force. The landowners interests in bodily care go as far as the cheap wages they pay, measured so long as their investment is “just enough” to keep the body alive and able to work the land, no doubt a political-economical approach to the body.

On the other hand, both church and state have a common stake in bodily care, one that is an inherited legacy—a shared archeological line traced between the two, leading to our modern concepts of biopower and biopolitics. The Church’s concern with the body, as observed by Foucault, is one that is rooted in what he calls “pastoral power,” that is, the governing of the souls of men to lead them to salvation. This is the

220 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 origin of biopower. Though Foucault does track a sense of pastoral power back to the

Greeks, it is Christianity and the formation of the Church that will institutionalize this power: “[A]s a Church, that is to say, as an institution that claims to govern men in their daily life on the grounds of leading them to eternal life in the other world, and to do this not only on the scale of a definite group, of a city or a state, but of the whole of humanity” (Security 148). Thus humanity is the flock, the Church the shepherd who cares for and guides the flock to safety.

Inevitably, a government of souls implies the governments of bodies, for the body houses the soul, and to care for the inner vessel you must likewise care for the outer:

Salvation is first of all essentially subsistence. The means of

subsistence provided, the food assured, is good pasture. The shepherd is

someone who feeds and who feeds directly, or at any rate, he is

someone who feeds the flock first by leading it to good pastures, and

then by making sure that the animals eat and are properly fed. Pastoral

power is a power of care. It looks after the flock, it looks after the

individuals of the flock, it sees to it that the sheep do not suffer, it goes

in search of those that have strayed of course, and it treats those that are

injured. (Security 126-27)

Pastoral power is one of care, one that not only saves souls through the sacraments and teachings of the church, but that also cares for the literal body of that soul: feed the hungry, clothe the needy and administer to the sick.

221 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Conselheiro threatens the church because he, a man unauthorized by the church, is fulfilling its function. Yet he was not the only one. Conselheiro was in no way a unique phenomenon to the backlands. For decades wandering sertanejo beatos had taken up the slack for the church. Official church priests were far and few in between on the sertão, and in the more isolated regions of the hinterland they were a rare sight indeed. Furthermore, when drought struck, the priests, usually foreigners, would flee for the coast, leaving their flock to fend for themselves. Therefore, backland hermits and holy men like Conselheiro filled in and functioned as spiritual guidance when the flock was in the direst of needs. They became the unofficial caretakers of the flock. In the case of Conselheiro, and there are examples of other beatos doing the same, this also meant that he provided subsistence for the body of his followers as well.199 Canudos was in every sense of the word self-sufficient in spiritual and temporal terms, existing independently of church authority. What is interesting, however, is that the Conselheiro in no way undermined that authority. His influence over the people was always within the bounds of church doctrine. Never did he even attempt to act as priest or administer sacraments.200 Yet Canudos’ spiritual autonomy nullified the need for the Church, posing a threat in the sense that a people subsisting without sacraments was damnation.

This is why the Church, in 1882, banned Conselheiro from preaching or even repairing churches. The influence of the beatos was overriding church authority, and he, the most influential of them all, had to be reined in. Though many sertanejo priest tolerated Conselheiro, his condemnation by the church would come from the

222 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 archbishop of Bahia. Euclides da Cunha does not miss any of this, and even includes the archbishop’s letter of address to the pastors, which states that there is an individual, “Antônio Conselheiro, pregando ao povo, que se reúne para ouvi-lo, doutrinas supersticiosas e uma moral excessivamente rígida com que está perturbando as consciências e enfraquecendo . . . a autoridade dos párocos destes lugares . . . lhes proibimos , absolutamente, de se reunirem para ouvir tal pregação” (OS 280). As da

Cunha explains: “Foi inútil a intervenção da Igreja. Antônio Conselheiro continuou sem embaraços a sua marcha de desnorteado apóstolo, pervagando nos sertões” (OS

280).

Upon the secularization of theology marked by the shift from the sovereign church to the sovereign state, a transition which began in the 17th and 18th centuries, reaching its peak in the nineteenth century, pastoral power will evolve into biopower, and slowly the question of modern healthcare, of a state invested with function to care for the health of its population—the welfare state—will take shape and form modern biopolitics. If Conselheiro threatens the church, it is in that he assumes the Church’s pastoral role and thus nullifies their authority, a sort of indirect and undeliberate threat.

It is against the Republic that his opposition is undoubtedly direct and intentional. The most compelling reason for his anti-republicanism is that he opposes the Republic precisely because he opposes biopower and the biopolitical agenda. Ventura explains that he considered the Republic the Antichrist, and that he criticized civil marriage and the state registration of deaths and births (the census) introduced by the 1891 constitution.201 Foucault traces these same trends, the State’s concern with sexuality

223 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

(marriage), as well as registering death rate and birth rate, as evidence for the emergence of biopower.202 Essentially, for Conselheiro, marriage is a sacrament to be conducted by the Church alone, and birth and death—life itself—likewise belong to the Church. The Antichrist, one who is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and the antithesis of

Christ, will nonetheless seek to lead the people away with Christ’s own doctrine. It is no wonder Conselheiro considered the Republic to be the Antichrist; here was an institution that had replaced (illicitly for Conselheiro) the Church (Christ) regarding the care of the flock. This is his resistance to modernity: he cannot accept the secularization of the care of the body, and consequently, he opposes the Republic’s insistence on governing aspects of life that for him belong to the Church. He himself takes the pastoral care of the sertanejos upon his own shoulders, but he never sought to undermine or speak against church authority. Against the Republic’s secularized authority over the body, however, he would speak against, though never in terms of revolution or violent rebellion.

In May, 1895, a year before the war, accompanied by a friar and a curate, a

Capuchin missionary by the name of João Evangelista de Monete-Marciano visits

Canudos with the intention of reporting on the conditions there. This report, however, is not solely intended for the church, save he was sent as an emissary for the government as well, a request made by the State to the Church.203 In this case, the objective of both church and state is to regain control of the Canudos population and reestablish their sovereignty, both over the soul and the body.

224 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Da Cunha does not miss the importance of church and state working together for the same cause, and includes the Capuchin’s visit in Os sertões, along with fragments of his official report. As a testament to Conselheiro’s support of the Church itself, the Capuchin remarks on how amiably he is treated by the beato, who offers to be their guide for the new church they were building. He was, however, alarmed by the sure number of people in the town, concerned with “o espectáculo dos infelizes que acabava de encontrar armados até aos dentes” (OS 321). What was yet more disagreeable to them, were the “8 defuntos levados sem sinal algum religioso para o cemitério, ao fundo da igreja velha” (OS 322). In his representation of both Church and State, we can understand the Capuchin’s horror: here was death being handled without the sacred rites of Church, without a state death certificate.

What appeared to go so well at first, takes a quick turn for the worst. Hastily the Capuchin speaks to the people of Canudos to explain his mission. In his report, he admonishes them, saying he was surprised to find armed men there (although sertanejo backwoodsmen commonly carried arms), that he disapproved of families living in lewd and idle conditions, and was shocked that eight to nine people died a day in the town (something not uncommon in other sertanejo towns of the time, especially during drought years). He goes on to say: “Por isto, de ordem, e em nome do Sr. Arcebispo, ia abrir uma santa missão e aconselhar o povo a dispersar-se e a voltar aos lares e ao trabalho no interesse de cada um e para o bem” (OS 323). Asking the people to leave

Canudos, to go back to the homes from whence they came, is his “holy mission” to restore social order, give back to the landowners their workforce, but most of all, to

225 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 release them from the clutches of Conselheiro and place their bodies back in the care of church and state. All this is said in the name of their supposed “bem geral,” or welfare—for their own care.

The people of course refuse, telling him, “Nós queremos acompanhar o nosso

Conselheiro!” (OS 324). The Capuchin tries to explain that the church condemns revolts and teaches that the “poderes constituídos regem os povos em nome de Deus”

(OS 324). The people will not hear it, and Conselheiro tells him he will not recognize the Republic. The Capuchin is not hindered in anyway by Conselheiro, who lets him preach as he would like, and allows “55 casamentos de amancebados, 102 batizados e mais de 400 confissões” (OS 326). In no way does the authority of the church offend

Conselheiro or his people; however, on the fourth day, when the Capuchin returned to the touchy subject of politics, the people of Canudos cry out that he is a spy, an

“emissário do governo e que de inteligência com este ia abrir caminho à tropa que viria de surpresa prender o Conselheiro e exterminar a todos eles” (OS 326). Indeed, their words are spot on, prophetic in that they see exactly what is happening. There is no doubt about the influence the Capuchin’s report had over the Bahia oligarchy. His findings would only add fuel to the fire that eventually led to their extermination.

This episode shows that the mission to convince the people to depopulate

Canudos was ultimately argued to be for their welfare. The Capuchin’s reports of how the dead were buried without ceremony shows that their “bem geral” was centered on the body, and that they were cared for “properly.” Needless to say, on the seventh day the Canudenses would come knocking on the Capuchin’s door and force him and his

226 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 two companions to leave town, “fazendo-lhes sentir que deles não careciam para a salvação eterna” (OS 326). A body that does not need institutional ministrations, for salvation or care, is a body no longer in possession of its rights, and is thus to be eliminated, for autonomy will not be tolerated by the new Republic.

3.3 Anthropology, Colonialism, and Eugenics I believe that ultimately, to a large extent, Conselheiro opposed the Republic because it was contrary to everything he and his Canudos stood for. This is especially true in terms of racial equality. Though da Cunha describes the inhabitants of Canudos as predominately mestizo, this was only true to an extent. Canudos was in reality a heterogeneous community. Even freed slaves, who after emancipation were left without a place in society, without land and the means for independent survival, found their place in Canudos. As Davis notes, “Canudos was a broad ethnic cross-section, and many previously outcast and marginalized groups found themselves in civil and military leadership positions, such as descendants of fugitive slaves, former outlaw cangaçeiros, and even the aboriginal Kiriri people—whose last two chiefs would die fighting for Canudos” (191). Canudos was a safe haven for people of all races, something the nineteenth century positivist Brazil Republic was not. The new

Republic’s nineteenth century Eurocentric vision for its own national identity and character, meant privileged went to the white elite.

In the Republic’s search for the national archetype, in its struggle for the body, what ultimately determines that fight is biology. Canudos was the shining example of this: “Perhaps the most important lesson that Canudos offers is that it confirmed the

227 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 elites’ attitudes of rigid biologic determinism, of latent fear of the rural underclass, and reveals the fragility of the First Republic and the brutal lengths to which its officials were willing to go to crush discord” (“Mud Hut” 528). The elites’ biological determinism was deeply rooted in race. These racial sentiments stemmed from nineteenth century notions of social Darwinism and positivist conceptualizations of progress.

Without a doubt, Darwin’s work on natural selection and his Origin of Species would have a profound effect on not only biology, but on vast scope of sciences, especially on social sciences like anthropology and sociology. It would in fact be the motor behind the formation and acceptance of many of the human sciences within nineteenth century academics (including anthropology). From a Darwinian hypothesis,

Spencer would extend survival of the fittest to human society, thus marking the process through which humanity progresses. Sociologists such as Bagehot would reason that stronger civilizations would always conquer the weak and consequently preserve the most desirable “civilized” qualities of a people. Karl Pearson would reason that there has always been a struggle between races and nations. Others, such as the faithful Darwinian disciple Huxley, would oppose such propositions, as well as

Wallace, because of the ethical implications of such principles. Once put into practice, such thinking could only mean political doctrine for colonialism and conquest.

Both Europe and the Americas were highly influenced by such thought, and nowhere was this truer than in nineteenth century Brazil, specifically with regards to

Canudos.204 Gerald Greenfield notes that “Brazil during the latter portion of the

228 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 nineteenth century embraced the tenets of positivism, enlightenment notions of progress, and the concomitant scientific racism of thinkers like Buckle and Spencer, the backlanders became not merely curiosities from a bygone age, but detriments to the nation’s progress” (83). The notion that “racial inferiority” and racial miscegenation were to blame for the country’s supposed lack of morality, intellectual progress, and ultimately any degree of perceived “social backwardness,” was supported by the sciences of the time amongst Brazil’s elites and integrated into its politics, especially into the new Republic’s sense of nationality. This is the world in which da Cunha wrote Os sertões, a work notable marked by positivist ideas and tones of social Darwinism. The anthropologically based panorama of superior and inferior races, the civilized versus the primitive, is what forges da Cunha’s mind, as well as the rest of Brazil’s intellectuals of the time. And we cannot omit the positivist influence of

Augusto Comte, who coined that “freedom is a right but equality a myth” (qtd. in Vale of Tears, 15). The so called political myth of equality was “debunked” by racist arguments supported by biology, meaning inequality was a biological fact of race.205

In the section titled O homem (The Man), da Cunha demonstrates most blatantly his biological and scientific racism, classifying natives, African Brazilians, and mestizos as degenerate.206 The mix of “inferior” races (native and African

Brazilian) with “superior” European one, creates “casos de hibridez moral extraordinários: espíritos fulgrantes, às vezes, mas frágeis, irrequietos, inconstantes, deslubrando um momento e extinguindo-se prestes, feridos pela fatalidade das leis biológicas, chumbados ao plano inferior da raça menos favorecida” (OS 200). In an

229 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 attempt to explain the Canudos resistance, da Cunha claims that according to biological laws, the sertatejo’s isolation in the harsh backlands, his continual fight with the environment, means he is a fatalist, able to withstand any conflict and suffering for long periods of time—thus they were able to withstand the four military campaigns of the Canudos War. Furthermore, he is “o homem primitive, audacioso e forte, mas ao mesmo tempo crédulo, deixando-se facilmente arrebatar pelas superstições mais absurdas” (OS 238). In this way, due to their supposed biological aptness for superstition, the people “[p]recisava de alguém que lhe traduzisse a idealização indefinida, e a guiasse nas trilhas misteriosas par aos céus...” (OS 268).

This someone would be Conselheiro, the “monstrous being” and “automaton” created by the multitude, whose admiration drove him to heights of self-indulged grandeur fed by his own madness. Therefore, the Conselhero was a puppet who at once controlled and was moved by a mass of puppets.207 When all is said, he was doing no more than condense the “obscurantismo de três raças” (OS 268). However formidable in his own society and environment, “nômade ou mal fixo à terra, o sertanejo não tem, por bem dizer, ainda capacidade orgânica para se afeiçoar à situação mais alta” (OS 237-8). On a political plane, the sertanejo mestizo race, concludes da Cunha, “é tão inapto para aprender a forma republicana como a monárquico-constitucional” (OS 316). Here we discern that when taken to political levels, such biological racism leads to discourse which may exclude certain “inferior” races from the nation-state. Conclusion: one cannot participate in the Republic if unable to understand the most basic forms of government.

230 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

As we observed in the previous section, a struggle over the right to care for the body of the sertanejos is what marked Conselheiro as a threat to the Brazilian

Republic. If Antonio Conselheiro’s resistance to modernity and ultimately his reluctance towards the nation-state’s biopolitical endeavors threatened the Republic, then it is precisely the biologic concept of race that leads the government to conflict against Canudos, the rationalization needed for state violence. Biopolitic’s primary agenda is the biological politicization of the body. As Edward Ross Dickinson highlights, biopolitics composes the “extensive complex of ideas, practices, and institutions focused on the care, regulation, disciplining, improvement, and shaping of individual bodies and the collective “body” of national populations” (3). Regulating bodies, shaping and improving them, is carried out by biopolitics, through the couplet of biological and political means such as medical practices, public hygiene and health campaigns; social welfare programs and tax policies intended to encourage certain demographic outcomes; and finally, the whole of racial sciences, anthropology and racial theories such as eugenics and human heredity. A governing system formatted to care for the biological body, therefore, reserves a place for eliminating that body based on the racial sciences, through what focault calls “state racism”:

Given that this power's [biopower] objective is essentially to make live,

how can it let die? How can the power of death, the function of death,

be exercised in a political system centered upon biopower?

It is, I think, at this point that racism intervenes […] It is indeed

the emergence of this biopower that inscribes it in the mechanisms of

231 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

the State. It is at this moment that racism is inscribed as the basic

mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States. As a result,

the modern State can scarcely function without becoming involved with

racism at some point, within certain limits and subject to certain

conditions.

What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a

break into the domain of life that is under power's control: the break

between what must live and what must die. (Society 254)

It is on the basis of racism that biopolitics ceases to be a politics of life and became one of death, of thanatopolitics. Canudos disrupted social order in that the regulation of the sertanejos’ bodies fell out of the state’s hands, and when social order was not restored—when the people did not disperse back to their homes, as requested by the

Capuchin—they ultimately refused to be internalized into state care. The next step was forced removal and elimination. Destroying Canudos would put an end to the threat, and death would be rationalized politically through the discourse of state racism.

In this way more than any other, Euclides’ pen imitates the Republic itself. As a stanch believer in the Republic, though highly disillusioned by the war, he elucidates state racism in Os sertões, expressed through his own biological conceptualization of race. Euclides’ scientific reasoning, what we now call scientism, more than anything demonstrates how he as an author functions in the capacity of the sovereign of his book, for “[s]cience must be sovereign, a “total” system of knowledge; it could only do its work if it were completely free to pursue its own logic. Many historians refer to

232 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 this belief as a commitment to “instrumental rationality” or sometimes “scientism””

(Dickinson 3). Much of what drives his narrative in Os sertões is Euclides’ belief that he can encapsulate the whole of the conflict into a system of scientific knowledge— socially, biologically, geologically, and anthropologically. Yet much like sovereignty, his subjects escape his control, he cannot fully contain nor explain within the bounds of his scientific convictions the horrible atrocities that take place in Canudos. And perhaps the greatest bit of irony is that the very biological racism he utilizes in his attempt to explain Canudos, is precisely the contributing factor to the political violence and atrocity he so despises. Euclides simply cannot see past his own ideology. It blinds him. He is appalled by the barbarity of civilization and cannot comprehend how the new Brazilian Republic can be led to commit such a crime like that of Canudos. Yet it is his own racism, embedded in positivist thinking, that promotes the political exclusion of certain ethnic groups through violent means once said groups are dehumanized and deemed racially inferior.208 His own thinking, the ideology transcribed in the pages of his Os sertões, on the biopolitical level of state racism, is responsible for Canudos’ exclusion and termination. The reason—the discursive motor for civilization’s barbarity itself—is in front of his nose, and it would seem during his lifetime he never puts two and two together, or that if he does, he refuses to do so.

Sara Castro-Klarén suggests that Vargas Llosa, in his historical novel about the

Canudos War, La guerra del fin del mundo, substitutes Euclides da Cunha’s conscience directly present in Os sertões, for one that is divided and articulated into

233 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 three characters in Llosa’s book: the Baron, the nearsighted journalist, and the positivist idealist and phrenologist Galileo Gall.209 This observation provides insight regarding the discursive conflict in Os sertões. Da Cunha is never fully able to give a coherent account of Canudos because he cannot reconcile his own fragmented mindset, represented by the three mentioned characters. On the one hand, he is like the elite Baron who sees Canudos as a disruption to the social order, whereas at the same time, like Galileo Gall, he is an idealist, a fervent believer in the progress of civilization, and a scientist who believe biology determines the “superiority” and

“inferiority” of races. It is important to note that these two characters are never in

Canudos and never witness the battle. The one who does, however, is the nearsighted journalist. Tragically, with his glasses broken, his handicap is that he does not see the war clearly, like the journalist da Cunha, who also has a blurry view because he will not fully allow the atrocities witnessed there to override his social and scientific convictions and “clear up” his vision; da Cunha will not rethink his positivist and racist ideology, and therefore he never fully sees Canudos for what it is, never detects that his convictions of social elitism and race are a big part of the puzzle to explaining the terrible violence. Galileo Gall and the Baron are never allowed in Canudos, and therefore are never impacted nor influenced by the war so as to go through any sort of character development or change. And so da Cunha remains a nearsighted witness to the carnage, his masterpiece fragmented and contradictory.

I would suggest that there is also something beyond Euclides’ biological and racist approximation to the sertanejo that is subversive. In his anthropological

234 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 approach and treatment of time regarding the people of Canudos, he enacts the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. He approaches his subject in the present, as the modern man, the civilized—the colonizer; whereas the sertanejos remain in the past, distanced from him, as the primitive and the savage. It is upon his civilization, his modern political notions, that they are judged. As Salvadori de Decca and Gnerre point out, the inexplicable trauma of fratricide described in Euclides da

Cunha’s work is much like the impetuous genocide of Spanish conquistadors in

Cabeza de Vaca. In Canudos, the colonial dispute is repeated between two factions of a nation, a people, that have recently exited the colonial period.210 Canudos stands upon the threshold between the colonial era and modernization. Brazil has yet to leave behind entirely its colonial past, nor has it entered fully into the postcolonial modern world. Within this fringe space, both colonial and biopolitical forms of power converge.

Da Cunha’s anthropological account of the sertanejos, his attempt to construct its object—the Other, reveals anthropology’s political act of power over its subject.

Fabian Johannes, in his Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, exposes anthropology’s usage of Time in relation to power over the Other:

Anthropology’s claim to power originated at its roots. It belongs to its

essence and is not a matter of accidental misuse. Nowhere is this more

clearly visible, at least once we look for it, than in the use of Time

anthropology makes when its strives to constitute its own object—the

savage, the primitive, the Other. It is by diagnosing anthropology’s

235 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

temporal discourse that one rediscovers the obvious, namely that there

is no knowledge of the Other which is not also a temporal, historical, a

political act. (1)

Johannes argues that under the paradigm of human and social evolution rests a secularized version of Time that is spatialized. Thus, “anthropology’s efforts to construct relation with its Other by means of temporal devices implied affirmation of difference as distance” (16). As a consequence of distancing itself both spatially and temporally, anthropology became a tool of colonialization:

Anthropology contributed above all to the intellectual justification of

the colonial enterprise. . . . It promoted a scheme in terms of which not

only past cultures, but all living societies were irrevocably placed on a

temporal slope, a stream of Time—some upstream, others downstream

. . . the “primitive”; it thinks, observes, studies in terms of the

primitive. Primitive being essentially a temporal concept, is a category,

not an object, of Western thought. (17-18)

Euclides’ approach to sertanejo culture and society places them in past, distancing himself and the reader from the sertanejos in a temporal and spatial sense. As an anthropologist, da Cunha assumes the role of the colonizer, dehumanizing his subject and its culture by placing them on the downstream slope of the past. His very attitude towards his travels to Canudos as a war correspondent assumes that he is travelling back in time. In his Preliminary Note to Os sertões, da Cunha recognizes Time’s important role and informs the reader that “àqueles extraordinários patrícios [os

236 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 sertanejos] . . . deles de todo nos separa uma coordenada histórica—o tempo” (OS 66).

Like an anthropologist in a primitive and foreign land, da Cunha explores the past, attempts to bridge the gap between the reader and another age of humanity. He keeps notes of his travels to Canudos and the backwards, “primitive” people he meets along the way in his Caderneta de campo (Field or Camp Notebook), essentially a travelogue—the new literary discourse engendered by anthropology to synthesize the science of man through travel accounts.211 Notes from his Caderneta de campo, his anthropological notebook, reveal the nineteen century belief that scientific knowledge could be accessed through observation made while traveling. Caderneta de campo would be one of da Cunha’s sources for Os sertões, attributing to the air of having traveled far away both temporally and spatially when the reader negotiates descriptions of Canudos and its people. As he says, the campaign itself was like staging “uma invasão—em território estrangeiro” (OS 679). Da Cunha takes the reader into this foreign world, a primitive and dangerous heart of darkness.

First we will take into account Canudos, the city itself. Throughout the book

Euclides refers to Canudos as the “Tróia de taipa [mud walls]” (OS 192) and the

“acrópoles desmanteladas” (OS 510), placing the city in a contextual past as a city already in ruins. However, this is not just a historic past, but one that is prehistoric and primitive, that creates curiosity for the archeologist: “Sob tal aspect era [Canudos], antes de tudo, um ensinamento e poderia ter despertado uma grande curiosidade. A mesma curiosidade do arqueólogo ao deparar as palafitas de uma aldeia lacustre, junto a uma cidade industrial da Suíça” (OS 503). He places the primitive village in contrast

237 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 with the modern European city—the past and the present side by side in contrast.

What’s more, are the dwellings themselves, the huts where the jagunços live are a

“fase transitória entre a caverna primitiva e a casa . . . equiparado ao wigwam dos

Peles-Vermelhas” (OS 292). The city itself takes on “a feição media entre a de um acampamento de guerreiros e a de um vasto kraal africano” (OS 294).212 Here, da

Cunha places them in an evolutionary context of being somewhere between the cave and the house in their social development. He compares Canudos to a kraal—later he will even call the huts “African wadies.” In doing so, da Cunha utilizes strong imagery associated with colonization, thus relying on tropes the reader already recognizes and then may employ to interpret Canudos as a town and people in need of “civilizing.”

Da Cunha’s treatment of the sertanejos themselves is no different from that of the city they dwell in. The jagunços are continually referred to as primitive and savage. They are not a people but a clan, “o clã tumultuoso de Antônio Conselheiro”

(OS 294). They are of the past, distant and separate from modern Brazil. Euclides explains that the modern cities of Brazil left behind those of their interior:

Vivendo quatrocentos anos no litoral vastíssimo . . . Ascendemos, de

chofre, arrebatado na caudal dos ideais modernos, deijando na

penumbra secular em que jazem, no âmago do país, um terço da nossa

gente. . . . mais fundo o contraste entre o nosso modo de viver e o

daqueles rudes patrícios mais estrangeiros nesta terrado do que os

imigrante da Europa. Porque não no-los-separa um mar, separam-no-

los três séculos. (OS 317)

238 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Trapped three centuries in the past, the Canudos campaign seems to be a battle with

Time. The rest of Brazil has progressed, modernized, and those left behind can no longer be tolerated.

Da Cunha attempts to tie the sertanejos’ primitiveness to the land itself and to natural evolution; the harsh conditions of a dessert, the isolation from civilization meant the “força portentosa da hereditariedade, . . . arrasta para o meios mais adiantados . . . trogloditas completes” (OS 501). He then explains that in the normal course of social progress, civilization contemns such primitive beings, “os domina, e os manieta, e os inutiliza, e a pouco os destrói, recalcando-os na penumbra de uma existência inútil, de onde os arranca, às vezes, a curiosidade dos sociólogos extravagantes ou as pesquisas da psiquiatria” (OS 501). Civilization may drive the primitive man back into the darkness because as a thing of the past, his existence is meaningless. He has already been, already existed and therefore cannot inhabit any meaningful state of existence in the present. The primitive man is a dark void of nothing, only fit to be brought out of obscurity and studied as the object of science. De

Cunha sees himself as the socio-anthropologist and the psychiatrist of the sertanejos, the one who plucks them out of the darkness and places them on display for civilization. He diagnoses Conselheiro as a lunatic and victim of “historic atavism,” his people suffering from a lowered mental condition prone to superstition. In Os sertões he studies them, gives an account of their backwards culture, their religion, superstitions, folklore, even the vaqueiro’s clothing, his work habits and his cattle round-ups.

239 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Essentially, what all this means is that the primitive sertanejos, distanced in the past from modern Brazil, are already dead. Their historical self, their bodies, belong to another time and place. As such, their lives have already been lived. They are dead, and their city, Canudos, “já feito ruínas. Nascia velho” (OS 291-92), is also dead, suited more for the archeologists shovel than for life in the Republic. So the Republic may cannonade the city, pepper its inhabitants with bullets, and there is no real damage because they are attacking a “necropolis” full of the living dead. Da Cunha therefore illuminates, through his anthropological discourse of Time, the intellectual justification for colonization. A people of the past must be replaced by a people of the present. Already dead, they cannot be killed; there is no crime, no genocide in their destruction. Euclides knows that civilization will continue to push into the sertão backlands and relegate the jagunço to “tradições evanescentes, ou extintas” (OS 66).

With this knowledge he enters the sertão as the anthropologist and writer, with the eyes of a colonizer. He travels through the hinterland showing the reader the

“necrópoles vastas,” whose “estrutura se desvenda em pontiagudas apófises, em rimas de blocos, em alinhamentos de penedias, caprichosamente repartidos, semelham, de fato, grandes cidades mortas,”and that city of the dead Euclides imagine therin lives

“uma população silenciosa e trágica de almas do outro mundo” (OS 390).

The Canudos phenomenon is likewise not without its colonial fears and myths.

As is common with colonization, the colonized are dehumanized to such a degree they become monsters, the places they inhabit the dark unknown that haunts the cities of men. Canudos is not just primitive, but for the new Brazilian Republic it becomes the

240 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

“A urbs monstruosa, de barro” the product “a civitas sinistra do erro” (OS 291). Da

Cunha notes and records in Os sertões how the sertanejos themselves become subhuman monsters. Much like the colonial fears of the native cannibal, as the

Canudos conflict intensifies, so to do the rumors about the jagunço. Da Cunha explains:

Urdiam-se estranhos episódios. O jagunço começou a aparecer como

um ente à parte, teratológico e monstruoso, meio homem e meio trasgo;

violando as leis biológicas, no estadear resistências inconceptíveis;

arrojando-se, nunca vista intangível, sobre o adversário; deslizando,

invisível, pela caatinga, como as cobras; resvalando ou tombando pelos

despenhadeiros fundos, como espectro; mais leve que a espingarda que

arrastrava; e magro, seco, fantástico, diluindo-se em duende, pesando

menos que uma criança, tendo a pele bronzeada colada sobre os ossos,

áspera como a epiderme das múmias... (OS 647)

The jagunços go beyond the biological laws of evolution that Euclides employs to diagnose their primitiveness. Transgressing these laws, they become the monster who resists the Republic and refuses to be subdued with unnatural power. Dehumanized, the battle against them is no longer a war of so called civilized humans versus primitive ones, but one where primitiveness and savagery become synonymous with monster. The colonial subjection of the Other thus becomes a war against monstrosity.

Nineteenth century colonial anxiety with dark frontier territories and the monsters they harbor correlates to modernity’s own preoccupation with the hereditary

241 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 degeneracy. In this section, what began with modernity’s state racism, transitioned to colonialism’s tie to anthropology in the appropriation of the Other through Time, and has now led us back full circle to biopolitics. This is because early colonial fears of primitiveness and savagery would be transcribed, in the nineteenth century, into fears of racial degeneracy. The mechanisms for colonial violence against the savage would evolve into modernity’s state racism. The most defining characteristic of modernity has been labeled “the biologization of the social”; a process that would take place from the 1860s to the Third Reich.213 According to Arendt, colonial conquest exposed a potential for violence formerly unknown. Nazism, for instance, did not happen in a test tube, nor was it an isolated explosion of unbridled racial violence, save the continuation and intensification of the “civilized” European methods originally reserved for “savages”.214 As Mbembe explains, biopolitics’ mechanisms and technologies of Nazism— subjugation of the body, health codes, social Darwinism, eugenics, legal theories on heredity, degeneration, and race—would derive from colonial practices.215 As he states, most instances of race like “the selection of races, the prohibition of mixed marriages, forced sterilization, even the extermination of vanquished peoples are to find their first testing ground in the colonial world” (171).

Totalitarianism, like colonialism, dehumanizes the Other. Hence, there is a direct link between colonization and modernity: the former utilizes anthropology to rationalize violence against the primitive other, whereas the later integrates biology to engender the racial other. In this way, according to Arendt, “Race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end . . . not the natural birth of man but his

242 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 unnatural death” (Origins 157). Da Cunha’s Os sertões seems to expose both sides of the coin, both colonial fears of the primitive other and, in an even more “front stage” spotlight, modernity’s fear of racial degeneracy. Perhaps in this way more than any other, Os sertões exemplifies, as so many academics have noted, Brazil’s crossing of the threshold from colonialism into modernity.

The Canudos conflict was a fight against race, a racist war against the State’s own “degenerate” people. Da Cunha’s racial thinking, his conviction of the inferiority of some races to others, his own fear of degeneracy, implies a recognition for the need to correct this “race problem,” much like one would cure a sickness or improve the stock in a bloodline of horses by introducing a purebred stallion. Canudos was an appendage of the Republic that had supposedly become festered and degenerate with backwards ways of life and thinking. Amputating the infected member and excluding

Canudos from the state organism—much like Conselheiro was decapitated in the end—was one way to fight degeneracy. It was, for da Cunha, also the inevitability of social Darwinism that the stronger races would overcome the weak:

Retardatários hoje, amanhã se extinguirão de todo.

A civilização avançará nos sertões impelida por essa implacável

“força motriz da História que Gumplowicz, maior do que Hobbes,

lobrigou, num lance genial, no esmagamento inevitável das raças fracas

pelas raças fortes. (OS 66)

Euclides’ reference to Gumplowicz’s genius over Hobbes’, lies in the fact that between the two political commentators, Gumplowicz was a social Darwinist who

243 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 transcribed race into sociology and politics. Canudos was, on the one hand, the verification of something bigger than race struggle, politically broader than any war to physically eradicate degeneracy. The war itself was the product of a modern nation- state who had adopted an immigration policy of eugenics, a platform of national racial cleansing. After all, the Brazilian army fighting against the “degenerate” mestizo sertanejos was itself composed in part of mestizo soldiers. Their own hereditary makeup, according to Brazils’ long-term project of so called racial improvement, would also have to be purged from the nation.

Perhaps nowhere does biopolitics’ mission to regulate the body become more evident than in eugenics. As Arendt recognizes, Social Darwinism, on a political level

“offered two important concepts: the struggle for existence with optimistic assertion of the necessary and automatic “survival of the fittest,” and the indefinite possibilities which seemed to lie in the evolution of man out of animal life and which started the new “science” of eugenics” (Origins 178). As defined by Dickinson, eugenics is “the study of the (alleged) inheritance of physical, intellectual, and social characteristics in human populations,” and as such, it

has occupied a key place in this emerging model [biopolitics]. The fear

of degeneration neatly summed up the moderns’ sense of crisis, and at

the same time eugenics expressed the almost religious sense of

possibility at the heart of modernity, by holding out the promise of

transcendence, of improving the actual material of humanity itself.

Thus, eugenics can be seen as a kind of transmission belt directly

244 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

linking Darwinist evolutionary science to the project of social

engineering. (3)

Social engineering in nineteenth century Brazil meant immigration, and Brazilian policy was one based on the “teoria brasileira do branqueamento racial” (racial whitening).

Adelino Brandão points out that racial whitening was very much an Euclidian discourse, and one also shared with many Brazilian intellects, including the likes of politician and writer Coelho Netto.216 This theory originates from theses formulated by the likes of Europeans such as Agassiz, Chamberlain, Gustave L. Bon, Lapouge,

Spencer, Gobineau, and other scientists, each one racist, as well as equally racist

Brazilian scientists and thinkers such as Nina Rodrigues, Sílvio Romero, Batista de

Lacerda. Each tried to resolve national problems by resolving the “race problem”. This fomented a political immigration policy in Brazil (and in other parts of Latin America, most notably Argentina) to attract “loiros,” Anglo-Saxon and Germanic Europeans so that they might “whiten” the Brazilian population. According to their theories, the

“superior and stronger” white blood would purge the “weaker” African and Native

American blood from the population, thus resulting (over time) in a predominantly

Anglo and Germanic nation. This would happen as the “inferior” races would succumb and be “thinned out” by infirmities, low birth rates, poverty, and hereditary expulsion through marriages to whites, or by the process of evolution itself. Thus the conclusion could be drawn that the diverse Brazilian races would be forged into one

“superior” white race.217

245 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Brazilian political policy for immigration means that the Brazilian Republic

“was probably the first government anywhere explicitly committed to large-scale

“positive Eugenics”” (Davis 383). It is interesting to find, that in da Cunha’s

Preliminary Note to Os sertões, he specifically refers to immigration and racial whitening, as though the Canudos war is simply a violent footnote to the larger racial project of Brazil. He explains that his book will sketch “ante o olhar de futuros historiadores, os traços atuais mais expressivos das sub-raças sertanejas do Brasil,” a noble cause for Euclides, because due to the “deplorável situação mental em que jazem,” modernity will soon render them “efêmeras, destinadas a próximo desaparecimento ante as exigências crescents da civilização e a concorrência material intensiva das correntes migratórias que começam a invader profundamente a nossa terra” (OS 65). Due to his conviction of social Darwinism and civilization’s progress, for Euclides, the disappearance of the “subraces,” whether through violence or not, was inevitability a fact of natural selection. The government’s immigration policy to

“whiten” Brazil was an effort to force natural selection, harness it to engineer their nation into one normative, homogenous and “superior” race.

In retrospect, however, it is the sertanejos themselves who get the last laugh.

Brazil has never been a racially homogenous country of European stock, save a country of “morenos e mulatos,” of an interracial outcome totally opposite to that of the racist theses and Arianism prevalent during end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth.218

246 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

3.4 Governmentality and State of Exception For Foucault, the State, traditionally vitalized by a sovereignty that legitimated law, begins to shift in modernity to what he calls governmentality, as sovereignty losses its credibility. On a broad scale, governmentality is a mode of power concerned with managing and restricting bodies and populations through policies and departments, bureaucracies and institutions, and through law as a strategy and tactic, not a sovereign absolute. Controlling the circulation of goods and services insofar as it maintains and restricts the life of a population, is governmentality’s mode of power, which can be expressed through forms of state and non-state institutions of power, something I believe we find in the case of Canudos. We have already seen how Brazil oligarchies such as landowners, church, and state, strategically sought to undermine

Canudos’ autonomy and reestablish traditional social order. The example of the

Capuchin working bureaucratically in conjuncture with a state and non-state institutions (Church and State) to persuade the sertanejos to abandon Canudos, demonstrates governmentality.

Furthermore, newspaper correspondents (including da Cunha) reporting on the war seemed to be almost obsessed with demonstrating the diverse departments of state power in order to stress the competence of the Republic and restore public confidence.

The Brazilian public was continually informed in newspapers regarding the excellent health of the soldiers, and how well provisioned they were. Names of the government departmental heads become common place in newspapers, especially the Minister of

War Marshal Carlos Bittencourt, the Chief of Public Safety Dr. Félix Gaspar, the pharmaceutical directors such as Captain Isaías Pinto da Silva, Artur Martins Torres,

247 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 and Alferes Antônio Fonseca, the chief of health service Dr. Major José Lopes da

Silva Júnior (“chefe do corpo sanitário” and also called “chefe do serviço sanitário), and the long lists of other doctors, pharmacists, academics and pharmaceutical and medical students that enlisted in the war effort. Indeed, it would seem the majority of the Republics’ departments focused their full attention on the conflict. Most interesting is that the health and sanitary departments will converge on war; departments intended to improve and prolong life’s biological health are somehow tied up in an endeavor to eliminate it.

To a large extent, the war correspondents were charged with portraying to the

Brazilian people a competent government, one that was organized and in control, capable of handling the conflict as well as protecting the people. This was something surprisingly easy to accomplish. As Zilly explains, most of the journalists had good relations with the military officials, and there was strict collaboration between the press and the army, with many journalists who were officials in the reserve to begin with, like Euclides da Cunha himself.219 Moreover, they shared likeminded ideology and radical republican conviction of “order and progress,” meaning few journalists questioned the war, overlooking the atrocities and crimes committed.220 Even Euclides is silent regarding war atrocities in his newspaper articles, something that changes drastically when he writes Os sertões. As Ventura points out, any critique of the

Republic was heavily censured by the military before being dispatched by telegraph anyway.221 Consequently, journalism itself becomes another institution of governmentality and the management of bodies.

248 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

The conditions of the Brazilian soldiers were portrayed in newspapers, at best, as confusing and contradicting. The dire state of starvation and deprivation of the most basic provisions during the fourth expedition was not fully made clear to the public. It’s true that it was often reported that hunger and thirst were the two greatest enemies of the war; yet at the same time, many other reports undermined such claims. Da Cunha himself reports from Bahia on August 20th, before reaching the battleground, that the most difficult conditions of the campaign come from “um inimigo que morre e revive todos os dias . . . a fome”

(Diário 114). Later, on September 2, when in the town of Queimadas, the military post closest to Canudos with telegraph, he reports: “Não há epidemias; o estado sanitário das forças é, até hoje, o melhor possível” (Diário 142). Closer to the action in Monte Santo, he comments that the Republic doesn’t lack men to die by bullets, but that it should not expect them to die of hunger.222 Another correspondent for the Rio de Janeiro based Jornal do Brasil, also reporting from

Monte Santo, well into the fighting on August 16th, will exaggerate: “As forças estão animadas e em boas condições” (232).223

Overriding the truly dire state of affairs of the war in the press was an effort to portray the Republic, through its departments of war and health, in the best light possible. This was done by reporting on the success of delivered supplies, specifically food rations and medical drugs, as well as commenting on the organization of military hospitals and pharmacies. At every turn the names of state representatives in these departments are praised for circulating the goods necessary for the care of soldiers and

249 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 civilians alike. In Jornal de Notícias, for example, on September 6th, the correspondent

Lelis Piedade reports from Quiemadas that “o Estado . . . tem feito esforços que o honram. O Dr. Félix Gaspar, Chefe da segurança Pública . . . tem prestado os melhores serviços. É assim que a Coluna Girard weguiu com cerca de 300 animais, fornecidos pelo Estado e isto com prontidão” (341-2). Then, in an ironic attempt to show the

“benevolence” of a government feeding its own troops sent to war, the correspondent explains that the number must be added to the 1,000 animals already supplied by the state.

There is also an effort to show the State cares not only for its troops, but for its citizens as well. With the failing public confidence in the Republic, by proving the government can care for the soldier, journalists are attempting to convince the people of Brazil that the State can likewise care for them. In a Rio de Janeiro paper, A

Notícia, it’s reported on July 26th from Queimadas that the pharmacy, headed by the

“infatigável” Captain Isaías, has the “medicamentos precisos para socorrer às necessidades locais e às da expedição” (404). Later on August 3rd, from Monte Santo, it is reported that “[o] estado sanitário do lugar, antes da ocupação das forças, era péssimo, graças à desídia das autoridades locais e à proverbial incúria dos sertanejos”

(407). The poor conditions of healthcare are precisely explained away as a local sertanejo problem. Once state officials and the health department arrive, we find that

“devido aos esforços do dr. chefe do serviço sanitário, o arrial apresenta aspecto mais agradável, notando-se já alguma limpeza nas ruas e casas, que são de contínuo visitadas pelos médicos” (407). The war itself—the presence of the state military—is

250 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 being used (though it sounds contradictory) to promote confidence in the State’s function to care for the body of its population. Thus, sanitary and health conditions are so improved in Monte Santo, the State so invested in their well-being, that doctors continually make house calls to administer to them, while in the meantime, republican soldiers administer lead and steel to their sertanejo brothers of Canudos just down the road.

Though it is readily reported that in Canudos both republican soldiers and sertanejos suffer from hunger and thirst, and that their greatest needs are basic supplies, journalists generally do so in passing and lacking detail. Details in newspaper reports are reserved to display the “humanity” and heroism of the Republic and, as we will soon see, to dehumanize the sertanejos themselves. Humanizing the

Republic means reporters focus on the sanitary care afforded to both soldiers and sertanejos, especially in the towns of Quiemadas and Monte Santo, where hospitals and pharmacies are reportedly put into the best conditions by the State.224 Even the treatment of sertanejo prisoners who turn themselves over to the commander-and-chief

General Artur Oscar, are reportedly treated by him “com todas as regalias de prisioneiros de guerra” (410). This means that “[m]ulheres, crianças e homens são tratados com humanidade, nada lhes faltando, nem mesmo a comiseração de que são dignos” (410). Those familiar with the history of the Canudos conflict, and with Os sertões, might find such reports hard to believe, provided the execution of the 300 prisoners at the end of the war, mostly women and children, who had been promised amnesty if they turned themselves over. Though never reported in the press at the

251 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 time, in Os sertões, da Cunha, unable or unwilling to put the event into words, makes reference to the massacre through silence: “E de que modo comentaríamos, com a só fragilidade da palavra humana, o fato singular de não aparecerem mais, desde a manhã de 3, os prisioneiros válidos colhidos na véspera, e entre eles aquele Antônio Beatinho que se nos entregara, confiante” (OS 779).

It should be noted, however, that certain newspapers did report the poor conditions on the frontlines. Supplies, rations, and medical care for the soldier in

Canudos, where the fighting was taking place, could not have been worse. The Rio based newspaper Jornal do Comércio was probably the most accurate in reporting the true conditions of the war: reports of injured soldiers starving to death, no established supply trains, rations being cut to a handful of flour a day, the poor sanitary conditions of the hospital (“hospital de sangue”) at Canudos, not a single doctor, nurses scarce, the infections and gangrene, the absolute lack of medicine and sterilizers, aguardiente being used to clean wounds, etc.225 This is very much the Canudos War that da Cunha illustrates in Os sertões, considerably different from his own reports as a war correspondent. In his book we find constant hunger, the unsanitary conditions, deprivation abounding in every sense. He includes stories of the soldiers becoming so desperate for food that many would sneak out of camp and risk the danger of the caantinga in search of stray livestock, many never to return. The gaúcho Calvary was organized as a “round-up” party to search for and herd stray cattle to camp while they simultaneously fought off jagunços hiding in the brush. He recounts that the crafty jagunços began to wear goat bells around their neck and crawl through the caantigas,

252 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 luring in soldiers in hopes of finding a meal, but instead, they found themselves staring down the barrel of the enemy and shot.226 Only at the very end of the fourth expedition does the army even establish a sustained supply train, thanks to Marshal

Carlos Bittencourt. This single fact, later recognized humorously by da Cunha, is what finally won the war:

De feito, aquela campanha cruenta e na verdade dramática só

tinha uma solução, e esta singularmente humorística.

Mil burros mansos valiam na emergência por dez mil heróis. A

luta com todo o seu cortejo de combates sanguentos descambava,

deploravelmente prosaica, a um plano obscuro.

Dispensava o heroísmo, desdenhava o gênio militar, excluía o

arremesso das brigadas, e queria tropeiros e azêmolas. (OS 665)

In short, what these episodes demonstrate is an encounter with a new Republic exercising numerous facets of governmentality to circulate goods and information— from state and non-state institutions like the church, the press, state war and health departments—all in an effort to manage one body of their population while restricting another in modernity’s primary feature: the biologization of society. However, I do not think human life’s exposure to the techniques of governmentality in the Canudos conflict is what ultimately derives life’s ontological meaning. There is another form of state power—a negating form—that is at work.

Though Foucault attempts to claim a “cutting off of the King’s head,” placing governmentality subsequent to and in place of sovereignty, many scholars like Judith

253 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Butler and especially Giorgio Agamben, have pointed out that the old model of sovereignty has never really gone away, specifically sovereignty founded on the exception. Furthermore, Foucault himself has recognized that the two forms of power, both sovereignty and governmentality, can coexist.227 Sovereignty traditionally has been a legitimizing power of the force of law, but as what Butler calls the “petty sovereigns” reign through the bureaucratic tactics and institutions of governmentality, the sovereign’s function to legitimize diminishes. Still, it does not vanish save reintroduce itself in the very acts by which the State suspends law, emerging precisely when law is withdrawn. Suspended law, the sovereign state of exception, can be used as a tactic of governmentality to preserve the state, and therefore “the suspension of the rule of law allows for the convergence of governmentality and sovereignty; sovereignty is exercised in the act of suspension” (Precarious Life 55). The

“anachronistic” sovereignty of legitimacy resurges in modernity in a “ghostly” and structurally inverse relation to the rule of law. It is a negating and excluding power, the lawless “rogue” power of sovereignty that for Agamben, constitutes the “originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending it” (HS 27).

The state of exception suspends the ontological status of life, deprives it of legal rights. Neither dead nor alive, life is no longer a citizen, no more a political animal in a community, but placed outside the rule of law. This is the sertanejos’ relation to the

Republic; this is the terrifying, lawless space they inhabit, in which their bodies have become unreal. Neither dead nor living, they are bare life.

254 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Euclides da Cunha perceives the Republic’s suspension of law in Os sertões.

Amongst all the names and titles attributed to da Cunha—the anthropologist, sociologist, poet, engineer, journalist, geologist, etc.—I would add political philosopher or, at least, a political commentator.228 Upon the failure of the second

Febronio de Brito expedition, da Cunha observes the uncontrolled state of affairs regarding the government. The defeat at Canudos only seems to deepen the abnormal function of government, one that is debasing law. A process that he understands has been underway for a time, and only worsening as the State confronts more and more crises. The state of exception, the abnormal function of government, is becoming the norm:

O governo civil, iniciado em 1894 . . . Encontrara o país dividido em

vitoriosos e vencidos. E quedara na impotência de corregir uma

situação que, não sendo francamente revolucionária e não sendo

também normal, repelia por igual os recursos extremos da força e o

influxo sereno das leis. . . . deixava que se verificasse o fenômeno

inverso: a significação superior dos princípios democráticos decaía—

sofismada, invertida, anulada. (OS 418)

He goes on to note the enigmatic nature of such a situation, an almost continual state of revolution and war, where

um golpe de estado violador das garantias constitucionais, criara o

processo da suspensão de garantias; abraçado tenazmente à

Constitução, afogava-a; fazendo da Legalidade a maior sítese de seus

255 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

desígnios, aquela palava, distendida à consagração de todos os crimes,

trasmudara-se na fórmula antinômica de uma terra sem leis. (OS 418)

The dividing line between legality and illegality has become blurred, undistinguishable, and the State has created that paradoxical space where sovereignty is expressed through the suspension of law and setting aside the Constitution on which it was founded. The Republic’s tactic is to illegally justify crimes with terms of legality.

It should come to no surprise then, when the Republic turns to Moreira César to lead the third expedition. A war hero who fought many wars for Brazil, da Cunha describes that in his soul, “a extrema dedicação esvaía-se no extreme ódio, a calma soberana em desabrimentos repentinos e a bravura cavalheiresca na barbaridade revoltante” (OS 424). State of exception demands representatives that can at once dress in robes of “civility” and noble bravery, while at the same time express the indescribable barbarities of violence and war. All too appropriately, Moreira, like the judge in Blood Meridian, exhibits the best and worst of the two-faced sovereign actions of the State. Yet we learn in his case, that his embodiment of barbarity and civility is due to an infirmity: “Tinha o temperamento desigual e bizarro de um epiléptico provado, encobrindo a insestabilidade nervosa de doente grave em placidez enganadora” (OS 424). Moreira’s epilepsy is a sickness of “delírios,” that lead Moreira

“a desencadear-se em ações violentas, que o podem atirar no crime ou, acidentalmente, na glória, o potencial da loucura” (OS 429). There could be no better disease to metaphorically represent a state of exception. Thus violence is hidden

256 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 beneath “deceptive placidity,” control falsified by suspended law, where crimes and heroism are produced by the same uncontrolled convulsions. Da Cunha interestingly gives a diagnosis to the condition of Brazil’s body politic: “a guerra de Canudos era . .

. sintomática apenas. O mal era maior. Não se confinara num recanto da Bahia.

Alastrara-se. Rompia nas capitais do litoral.” (OS 501) The “mal,” or malady of the

State, is like Moreira’s epileptic swing between order and chaos marked by the sovereign exception.

I believe here as well, we can connect state of exception to colonialism. Once again Canudos appears as a bridge between Brazil’s colonial past and its crossing over into modernity. The cruelty of colonialism and slavery, a very real experience in

Bahia, is, as Mbembe has highlighted, expressed through a structure analogous to the modern state of exception. The plantation system in particular, is a “concatenation” of race, biopower, and state of exception.229 As the periphery in the Republic, Canudos is a rural frontier, a region formerly rooted in colonial principles, in slavery and the plantation system that must be subdued once more, civilized, “recolonized” again by the State. Mbembe states that colonies, like frontiers, are zone were war and peace, internal and external political figures, all stand side by side. Therefore colonies, are locations were all juridical guarantees are suspending, marking zones where the state of exception is the motor of violence in the service of civilization.230 Consequently,

“savage” is used to denote the almost animal existence of those who are bare life:

“That colonies might be ruled over in absolute lawlessness stems from the racial denial of any common bond between the conqueror and the native. In the eyes of the

257 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 conqueror, savage life is just another form of animal life, a horrifying experience, something alien beyond imagination or comprehension” (172).

During the fourth expedition, published in the Rio based Gazeta de Notícias on

August 27th, war correspondent Favila Nunes inverviews the ex-governor of Salvador,

José Golçalves da Silva (the first constitutional governor of Bahia). In the interview,

Golçalves explains:

Aqui, na Bahia, não há Constituição nem leis, garantia da liberdade

política nem civil: aqui reina o mais estúpido e brutal despotismo.

Canudos levantou a ponta do véu; sacudiu o torpor do país, que deve

estar hoje convencido de que urge mudar as normas da sua política

governamental. . . . Canudos e outros que forçosamente hão de

aparecer, prejudicando a pátria e a República. (156)

The ex-governor’s accusation of lawlessness is accredited to the mindset and

“stupidity” of the sertanejos themselves. If not reigned in, this mentality will spread throughout the country. However, lawlessness exists in this region of Brazil as an extension and continuation of a colonial model of rule, one that spreads like a disease throughout the Brazilian seaboard, as da Cunha notes.231 Topics of savagery, race and social inferiority still flourish in the backlands, the people’s lives seen as being little more than animals. Ex-slaves have no more place in society than when in bondage. On the other hand, despite the Republic’s emerging structure of governmentality, the tactics of bureaucracies and state departments, the State holds to suspending law in order to validate its sovereignty, keeping the sovereign alive through the exception.

258 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Thus the Republic’s clash with Canudos is one both colonial and modern: Bahia is the space still trapped in its colonial past, brought to conflict with the new Republic whose modern structure of state violence only reintroduces an “upgraded” political tactic that creates the same conditions of suspended law tantamount to those of colonial times.

The war was, in Zilly’s words, the “illegal assault of legal troops against a community of relatively peaceful vaqueiros and workers” (“Uma construção” 32). Canudos thus becomes the focal point where a war “represents the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law (ab legibus solutus) and where “peace” is more likely to take on the face of a “war without end” (Mbeme 23).

This endless war is evident in the four expeditions against Canudos. If the town had not fallen on the fourth attack, there would have been a fifth, a sixth, etc. The Canudos conflict was a war that did “not establish a distinction between combatants and noncombatants, or again between an “enemy” and a “criminal,”” and for this reason it

“is thus impossible to conclude peace with them” (Mbeme 24).

3.5 Grievable Life On account of the war and the center stage Canudos took in the press, the terms sertanejo and jagunço became synonymous in Brazil to the word cangaçeiro:

“an armed bandit on the payroll of the powerful landowners of the region. This was an individual who would pillage and engage in all sorts of violent behavior” (Ayala-

Martínez 61). The entire community of Canudos had been transformed into criminals, bandits and outlaws placed outside the law. There are thus no distinctions between combatants and civilians, and as such there can be no collateral damage, no lamentable

259 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 deaths, neither women nor children. Canudos, as described by General Arthur Oscar, the commander-in-chief of the fourth expedition, was a “bandit’s cave,” not even considered a city in “civilized” terms.232 After Canudos was destroyed, the newspaper

Gazeta de Notícias declared it the “cidadela maldita, onde o banditismo, a ignorância e o fanatismo estúpido e perverso acastelaram-se para eterna vergonha de nossa Pátria, não existe mais,” the reporter coldly concluding as he parts: “Há um monte de ruínas, atestado vivo das misérias humanas. . . . Subindo ao alto da Favela, perto das nossas velhas trincheiras, encontrei umas mulheres mortas; aí me detive para lancar uma

último olhar para Canudos” (214). The indifference with which the reporter treats the dead women is shocking to say the least. Almost in passing, they are simply there, a detail to be given before he takes one last look at the “damned citadel.” There is no indication of grief or mourning, as though their bodies do not form part of the human family. The Canudos War was not a conflict between two regular armies viewed as mutual sovereign enemies, but the sovereign elimination of a city declared uninhabitable and life deemed unlivable.

Brizuela, in her exceptional article on the photography of the Canudos War, holds that

through this war, and through, I believe, the central place that

photography and visibility played in articulating it, that the modern

State constituted itself by way of the forces of exclusion and inclusion:

some lives would be more worthy than others, some bodies would need

260 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

more cleansing and discipline than others, some bodies would be

visible and others invisible. (156-57)

Though Brizuel’s concern with Canudos is the photographic representation of the Canudos War, brought to the public by way of an exposition which visited cities in

Brazil after the conflict (photography was not printed in newspapers at that point), the horrors of the war are still undoubtedly presented as a written spectacle in printed newspapers as well. Furthermore, do not narratives, especially those found in newspapers, help the public “see” what is happening? In doing so, just like photography, some bodies, some lives, are narrated and made visible, while others remain invisible and excluded from representation to the public, through what Butler calls a “a refusal of discourse that produces dehumanization as a result” (Precarious

36). This refusal to discourse, which occludes certain bodies or marks their death as unqualified for grief, can be viewed as a journalistic state of exception that excludes undesired bodies from representation.

To help give context to what Butler is speaking of, and to also give the

Canudos War a contemporary context, we will turn here to her books Precarious Life and Frames of War. In these books, Butler expounds on the ontological representation of life in media and newspapers in a post 9/11 world. She confronts the notion of terrorism and the terrorist, and how media propaganda and even newspaper obituaries censure certain life from being represented as “grievable,” or worthy of being mourned. What is grievable is life that fits national ideology and identity, ungrievable life being that which opposes the national project, i.e. those who meet a certain ethnic

261 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 and religious criteria associated to terrorism (Islam, Arabic culture, Middle Eastern origins, etc.). This highly political action in media gives a country its own sense of identity and, at the same time, designates the adversarial Other—what the national populace is not. In Agambenian terms, life that is represented as ungrievable in media is tantamount to bare life.

As Zilly has pointed out, in late nineteenth century Brazil, the terms atavistic, jagunço, and especially cangaceiro, were used by journalists and da Cunha himself to

“slander” the Canudenses, “which in that time period were accusations as severe as those of fundamentalists and terrorists now days” (“Uma construção” 33). To dehumanize the sertanejos, they were framed as “cangaceiros, outlaws who, like madmen, must live away from the normally constituted society. Neither the word of a madman nor the “reasoning” of a cangaceiro could be accepted as authorized discourse on reality, for they act and live outside the norm” (Castro-Klarén “Santos and Cangaceiros” 372). In the same way today, “terrorists are like the mentally ill because their mind-set is unfathomable, because they are outside reason, because they are outside of “civilization”” (Precarious 72). Both terrorists and cangaceiros are mentally ill because of their religious ideology and modes of thinking unacceptable and “archaic” to the modern and secular world: “Only madmen or primitive people on their way to extinction, such as Martin Fierro, the Conselheiro, etc., would make the fatal mistake of addressing the new constituted forces of the republican states in terms of the language and ideology contained in books such as Missão Abreviada or Las horas de Santa María” (Castro-Klarén “Santos and Cangaceiros” 386).233 Likewise,

262 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 in a post 9/11 world, Islam becomes the basis for madness and, as Butler wonders, if it is not just the extremist acts, “but rather all beliefs and practices pertaining to Islam that become, effectively, tokens of mental illness to the extent that they depart from the hegemonic norms of Western rationality” (Precarious 72). Consequently, all sertanejos and all Muslims become terms analogous to “fanatics, extremists, who do not espouse a point of view, but rather exist outside of “reason,” and do not have a part in the human community” (Precarious 89). By nature, wars against fanaticism, against terrorism in broad terms, and against a people for being “savage” and “dangerous,” creates a state of emergency and exception where war has no end in sight, and in fact become the normal situation of politics.234

To speak about how the “fanatic” sertanejos were marginalized from the human community in Brazilian newspapers, we must first consider Butler’s concept of what she calls “precarious life.” This term refers ontologically to humanity’s condition of vulnerability, to life’s constant relation to its condition of subjection to the possibility of social and political violence. As Butler explains: “Although precarious life is a generalized condition, it is, paradoxically, the condition of being conditioned.

In other words, we can say of all life that it is precarious, which is to say that life always emerges and is sustained within conditions of life” (Frames 23). This condition of being conditioned to our own vulnerability, our own precarity as humans, can be enumerated and measured in terms of “a hierarchy of grief.” Politically, to hedge up against our own vulnerability, “Lives are supported and maintained differently, and there are radically different ways in which human physical vulnerability is distributed

263 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 across the globe. Certain lives will be highly protected, and the abrogation of the claims to sanctity will be sufficient to mobilize the forces of war. Other lives will not find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as “grievable””

(Precarious 32). The way we frame life—be it in photography, fiction, journalism— especially in times of war, reflects the “grievability” of life, demonstrating which lives matter and which ones politically do not. Representations of imprisonment and torture, mangled corpses of war, the stateless refugee and the immigrant, so acceptable in our media, reflects those “whose loss is no loss, and who remain ungrievable” (Frames

24). The way we frame life creates the “differential distribution of grievability across populations” and, in effect, “has implications for why and when we feel politically consequential affective dispositions such as horror, guilt, righteous sadism, loss, and indifference” (Frames 24). On this scale of distribution, loss of Afghani civilian life in the Afghanistan War, for example, is found on the lower spectrum of grievability.

Their ungrievable status is a byproduct of the US response of “righteous” violence and war after having suffered a tragic act of violence on 9/11. In similar fashion, the

“righteous” civilizing violence of the Brazilian Republic against the sertanejos found them framed in such a way that to mourn their death was unthinkable: “They are the one whose lives are not “regarded” as potentially grievable,” and are made to bear the burden of “starvation . . . legal disenfranchisement, and differential exposure to violence and death” (Frames 25).

Life’s distribution of grievability in Brazilian newspapers regarding Canudos is highly reflected in the way deaths are reported. Some deaths matter and are given a

264 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 face, others omitted and will remain faceless and unknown, unreal, as though they never existed. As one can imagine, officers and soldiers of the Republic are portrayed as heroes, their deaths sacrifices, while sertanejo deaths of men, women, and children are only occasionally expressed in numbers, in a mass of bodies used to measure the success of the war, demonstrate that the Republic is winning.

Brazilian newspapers are meticulous in reporting the wounded and killed, providing numbers and names of officers. A correspondent for O País by the name of

José Siqueira de Meneses, who wrote under the pseudonym “Hoche,” likewise a military engineer, and highly esteemed by da Cunha himself, gives an account of the operations performed by Dr. José de Miranda. We find 19 amputations at the thigh, 3 of the legs, 4 at the forearms, 2 entire arms, 24 fingers, 1 bandaging of the radial artery, 4 of the femoral, and 246 extractions of bullets.235 Alfredo Silva does the same in A Notícia, reporting the operations (all amputations), and also giving the names of injured officers and the battalions they belong to.236 Most notably is the Rio newspaper Jornal do Comércio that reports the injuries and deaths of all soldiers and officers as of July 15th. The report is ordered by brigades and battalions, occupying a considerable section of print in the newspaper.237 What these newspaper reports are expressing is that the lost limbs, the extracted bullets, the injuries and deaths accompanied by these names are great losses to the country, sacrifices in the name of the Republic. The countless names meticulously reported are like abbreviated obituaries of lives that matter, names that should be printed and mourned. The obituary, explains Butler “functions as the instrument by which grievability is publicly

265 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 distributed. It is the means by which a life becomes, or fails to become, a publicly grievable life, an icon for national self-recognition, the means by which a life become noteworthy” (Precarious 34). The names of the soldiers and officers lost are reported for public mourning, they become recognized nationally as fallen heroes. For the sertanejos, on the other hand, life fails to become grievable through silence. Their names are not reported. It is true that a few prominently known jagunço leaders of the resistance, such as Pajeú, are reported dead, yet their death is not mourned save celebrated, much like the death of known terrorist Osama Bin Laden was celebrated.238 In this way, through the absence of jagunço representation,

“dehumanization emerges at the limits of discursive life, limits established through prohibition and foreclosure,” which ultimately, as Butler puts it, “leaves a mark that is no mark,” and so

[t]here will be no public act of grieving (said Creon in Antigone). If

there is a “discourse,” it is a silent and melancholic one in which there

have been no lives, and no losses; there has been no common bodily

condition, no vulnerability that serves as the basis for an apprehension

of our commonality; and there has been no sunder of that commonality.

(Precarious 36)

The jagunços do not share the common bodily condition of vulnerability with the

Republic’s soldiers; they are not mourned and so their lives cannot be considered precarious like the rest.

266 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

The long lists of names of fallen soldiers are not accompanied with biographies for obviously practical reasons. Simply put, there would be no room for so many biographies. But this does not mean that we do not find many brief biographies accompanying the reports of soldier casualties. In A Nóticia, war correspondent

Alfredo Silva reports: “Acabo de acompanhar à última morada o cadáver do inditoso aluno de Faculdade de Madicina da Bahia, Joaquim Pedreira. Com 19 anos de idade apenas, cheio de vida, o distinto acadêmico, filho do Coronel Afonso Pedreira ” (432).

We are told how after being shot, he “passou terrível noite de agonia,” and was then found by Alferes Toscano, “cujo coração nobre, cujos sentimentos grandiosos fizeram-no apear-se para dar-lhe o braço ate Jueté” (432). After the heroic efforts of

Dr. Major José Marques dos Reis and others to save Joaquim, his father was at his side to see him “partir em busca da eternidade” (432). The report concludes that in the simple cemetery of Monte Santo, “coberto de ervas e de flores silvestres . . . jaz hoje o corpo de um dos distintos e abnegados heróis dessa cruzada terrível contra a horda de fanáticos de Antônio Conselheiro” (432). In another example from O Estado de São

Paulo, Euclides da Cunha writes that Major Queirós, commander of the 29th, fell mortally wounded: “Emoldurado o rosto arroxeado pela barba branca maltratada, o aspecto do digno chefe comovia profundamente” (Diário 210). At his deathbed in the hospital, “Rodeava-o a simpatia de todos,” and we are told “os soldados do 30o, respeitavam-no como a um pai” (211). In newspaper reports like these, the public is brought in to witness the hospital deathbed scene of those who are being framed as national heroes. Just as Joaquim’s father is there to mourn him as a son, and Major

267 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Quierós’ soldiers are there to grieve him like a father, likewise is the reader able to access grief for the lives of the sons and fathers of Brazil, the war heroes tragically lost to the “crusade” against fanaticism. Obituary-like scenes such as these give the public a body made personal, a familiar one they can mourn: the 19 year-old student, full of life—the white-bearded Major, like so many fathers and grandfathers. The public’s exposure to such reports is why Butler suggests “we have to consider the obituary as an act of nation-building” (Precarious 34). The names and brief biographies of fallen heroes create grievable life that comes to constitute the nation and its very identity, while omitting the “fanatics” from having any part in public mourning excludes them from the nation.

There are also public acts of grieving during the war, acts commemorating the soldiers, actions that through their silence negate mourning to the nation’s sertanejo brothers. Da Cunha notes throughout all of Brazil, after the defeat of the Moreira

César expedition, “Decretou-se o luto nacional. Exararam-se votos de pesar nas atas das sessões municipais mais remotas” (OS 506). Furthermore, many religious ceremonies are announced in newspapers to be held in memory of the dead soldiers.

On April 3rd, for example, it is reported in Gazeta de Notícias that the “partido republicano autonomista manda celebrar, às 10 horas de hoje, na matriz desta cidade, uma missa com Libera-me, pelo repouso eterno dos heróicos defensores da República, vítimas dos assalariados monarquistas; para esse ato convida todos os que sabem prezar o amor da Pátria” (34).239 It is interesting to note the usage of the word

“victims” here. The lost soldiers are considered victims of the sertanejo “monarchists.”

268 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

They are not the casualties of war, but are victimized—victims of crimes carried out by outlaw cangaceiros. Victims are to be mourned. This sort of victimizing language is consistent in Brazilian newspapers. During the action in Canudos, refering to the soldiers, da Cunha reports he saw “cairem as primeiras vítimas sobre o acervo informe das ruínas da igreja” (Diário 208). Another report states “coronel José Américo, nosso amigo, como todos que o são, vítimas dos jagunços de Canudos” (106). The only time the word “victim” is associated with the jagunços, is to show that their death is the result of their own fanaticism, and not the Republic’s. When the army burns the remaining sertanejos alive in their own village (using kerosene and dynamite), in

Gazeta de Notícias we are told: “Ficando soterradas, em suas ruínas, tudo carbonizado, muitas vítimas do fanatismo e da exploração política.” (201).

Immediately following the description of these nameless deaths, the journalist Fávila

Nunes then reports the names and battalions of all injured and dead soldiers lost in the assault, markedly delineating grievable victims from ungrievable victims of fanaticism. Later, the same journalist states: “Os soldados lançavam lenha sobre as fogueiras, o Tenente Dourado lançava dinamita e em poucos minutos todo o sitio sitiado era um vasto incêndio, mal se ouvindo as agonias das vítimas do fanatismo”

(210). The sertanejos are thus not burning to death at the hands of soldiers who throw gas and dynamite on the fire, but by their own hand; their own fanaticism brought such an ungrievable and horrendous death upon them. In effect, “Uma mulher atirou- se às chamas com uma criança ao colo,” as horrid as the image is, does not qualify as grievable because “muitos jagunços morreram queimados dando vivas a Monarquia e

269 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 ao Bom Jesus Conselheiro, recusando peremptoriamente darem vivas à República”

(212). Such fanatic madness nullifies their lives, for lives worth living and worth grieving shout their “vivas” to the Republic. These passages demonstrate that the

“violence that we inflict on others is only—and always—selectively brought into public view” (Precarious 39).

The weaponry used in the war becomes an interesting focal point in newspapers, and relates to the process of victimization. The modern technology of machine guns and cannons are a thing of curiosity, symbols of progress and civilization. The “armas de precisão, são manejadas com segurança, com as quais se têm mostrado exímios atiradores” (485). Manuclicher, Mauser, and Kropatchek leave no doubt to the “vitória das armas civilizadoras,”and when these “grandes inventos modernos” are fired upon Canudos and its citizenry, they offer the “calmo observador o quadro de sinistra beleza, grandioso e esplêndido, da terra abrasando-se ao som forte e vibrante de mil trobetas de guerra,” impressing upon the sertanejos the biblical day of vengeance brought by the “ango do extermínio” (487). It is no surprise that these reports come from the military engineer José Siqueira de Meneses, a fervent believer in the Republic and even greater admirer of modern technology. A segment of one of his newspapers articles is quoted in Os sertões by da Cunha, highlighting the wonder of the Republics’ modern weaponry:

Foi magnífico, esplêndido mesmo, o espectáculo que a todos vivamente

impressionou, vendo a artilharia com seus metais faiscantes e polidos,

altiva de sua força soberana, atravessar garbosa e impotente, como

270 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

rainha do mundo, por entre os fantásticos clarões de grandes fogos,

acesos no deserto, como que pelo gênio da liberdade, para mostrar-lhe

o caminho do deverm da honra e da glória. (OS 530)

These modern weapons bring liberty, inspire honor and glory. When fired they are done so with precision. They are a civilized way of war, the correct and efficient way to kill, whereas the sertanejos’ rustic and outdated weapons, called “rude and crude,” continually noted for their sinister inferiority, “vomit projectiles” at the soldiers, who are “cruelly gunned down.”240 The sertanejos’ acts of violence are cruel crimes. Words like murder and slaughter accompany their violence against the soldiers, who in turn become victims. Sinister and primitive, the jagunço’s ways of war are neither licit nor civilized, and so their violence cannot be like that of the Republic’s. The governments’

“righteous” violence is licit, expressed as a “self-defense” of liberty and honor, and therefore it cannot be cruel or a crime. Even their weapons are portrayed in a positive light. Far more advanced in killing than the sertanejos’ weapons, it is as if the

Republics’ artillery capacity for mass extermination becomes a laudable symbol of modernity and progress, much like praises for the mass production lines of industrialization’s factories. Mowing down a line of sertanejos with a machine gun is sadly presented as far more humane than the sertanejo who stabs a soldier to death with a cattle prod.

In effect, the government’s own inhumane acts of violence do not receive graphic coverage in Brazilian newspapers. They remain justified as a noble cause, namely, in the rooting out of the monarchist rebels and the extinguishing of

271 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 fanaticism. Meanwhile, elaborating on the inhumane and criminal violence of the sertanejos, they are dehumanizated as subjects and made ungrievable, meaning

“jounalists have accepted the charge to be part of the war effort itself, reporting itself has become a speech act in the service of the military operations” (Precarious 36-7).

The differentiating allocations of grief in newspaper coverage of the Canudos conflict, designating what life is grieved publicly, and what life isn’t, ultimately “serves the derealization aims of military violence” (Precarious 37). What this means is there will be neither protest nor public outcry against the death of the Other. Something not real, that never existed, cannot be killed nor mourned. Mourning is for those who are real subjects of a national community, grief over their lives reinforces their realness and makes them the heroic symbols of a nation.

3.6 The Original Banditry of War Ultimately, I believe the power of da Cunha’s Os sertões lies precisely in the fact that he undermines the “speech act” established by Brazilian journalism during the war, a discourse that had become all too familiar for the public.241 What I mean by this, is that Os sertões, written and published so soon after the war, fills in the gaps of events omitted by the press. He reveals to the public the horrendous crimes of what they originally understood to be licit and just violence. I do not believe da Cunha’s directly humanizes the sertanejos—far from it. The first three-quarters of his work continually portrays them much like and other war correspondents did: primitive, racially inferior, atavistic and fanatic. However, at the same time he will gradually dehumanize the soldiers and mark them as primitive, fanatic, and racially equal to the

272 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 sertanejos, until in the last quarter of his book we find the masterpiece emerge, where completes the inverse in his discourse to present an interpretation of Canudos entirely novel. The soldiers will become no different than the sertanejos. The history and truth established in newspapers are reversed into a reality in Os sertões that itself is contradictive and even seems unreal. The scenes so horrifying, the acts so unthinkable,

Euclides, like McCarthy in Blood Meridian, exhausts the limits of language itself, putting all his aesthetic and poetic effort into the expression of something so elusive and “unreal.”

Everything leading up to the last expedition—his portrayal and interpretation of the previous expeditions, of the sertanejos and the land—flow very much in the same dehumanizing vein of previous articles and books written on the subject. It is important to remember that everything prior to the fourth expedition, da Cunha did not witness; he was not there. As the reader begins see what da Cunha saw, live the events he lived, he or she enters into another realm entirely. It is as if there is a rupture in his discourse; his narrative can no longer resist and must confess to the atrocities of war.

When da Cunha begins to be present in the text, when he narrates what he witnessed, there is a shift in the way events are told compared to those when he was not present.

When he is there with us, saying “I witnessed for myself,” we finally begin to understand why he claims earlier in the work that “a guerra é uma coisa monstruosa e ilógica em tudo. Na sua maniera atual é uma organização técnica superior. Mas inquinam-na todos os estigmas do banditismo original” (OS 379). Ultimately, war is

273 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 monstrous because it cannot shake off the original banditry that lurks behind its formation.

Thus, as we will see, Euclides teases out acts of banditry committed by the

Brazilian army—he shows us that licit sovereign violence is no different than so called illicit outlaw violence. In doing so, he reduces the soldiers, who were once so praised as heroes in the press, to the same plane as the bandit jagunços. They become the sertanejos, become the monster. As Dabove explains it, the Republican soldiers are

“devoured” by the bandit city:

Canudos devours the army. The devouring metaphor names the huge

death toll suffered by the army . . . It also names a more ominous thing.

As in many monster narratives, the monster hunter (the army) is

possessed by the monster and becomes a monster himself . . . The war

against the jagunços launches first the army and then the entire nation

on a time traveling journey toward the past, toward cannibalism . . . and

toward the original banditry (banditismo original) whereby the hidden

origin of the army reappears when the army reverts to the condition and

status of a horde. (225)

Euclides da Cunha observes how the extreme conditions of starvation in Canudos transforms the soldiers into monsters, as though the colonizer has become the cannibal he once so feared. He describes the starving soldiers, upon obtaining wild game, as

“acorcorados em torno das fogeiras, dilacerando carnes apenas sapecadas— andrajosos, imundos, repugnantes—agrupavam-se, tintos pelos clarões dos braseiros,

274 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 os heróis infelizes, como um bando de canibais famulentos em repasto bárbaro” (OS

411). The soldiers are becoming that against which they came to make war.

Effectively, their becoming the monster means they are dehumanized, their lives made just as unreal as the sertanejos’. It is precisely the dehumanization and derealization of the soldiers, placed in context with the sertanejos, that gives the sertanejos their humanity. Da Cunha never elevates the people of Canudos above that of bandits in his entire work, but almost paradoxically, by contradicting the humanity of the Republic army established during the war by newspapers, by lowering them to the level of monsters and bandits, he gives a face to the faceless sertanejo, concedes humanity to his own work and, finally, to the sertanejos.

No longer are those fighting for the Republic victims, save the ones who are truly carrying out the slaughter. Os sertões rescued an obscure people from tyrannical acts that da Cunha believed would have gone unperceived by History. As he explains,

“não havia temer-se o juízo tremendo do future. A história não iria até ali. . . . Nada tinha que ver naquele matadouro” (OS 734). I believe da Cunha was right. If not for his Os sertões, Canudos would have remained in obscurity as just another backlands skirmish, another of many nineteenth century Latin-American rebellions. The Canudos

War and the sertanejos massacred there, if not for da Cunha, would have been forgotten. Instead, his book exposes the “slaughterhouse,” brings to light the acts of a government whose their army had entered into a “hiatus” and a moral “void,” a place the military thought did not exist and would not be remembered: “Traposto aquele cordão de serras,” which lead to Canudos, “ningém mais pecava” (OS 735). Da Cunha

275 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 denounces the sins of the Republic covered up by the press, sins he himself originally occulted as a war correspondent. Almost as if in an act of penance for his sins of omission, he gives us a terrible glimpse of sovereign violence in its true form, forces us to look and see the jagunço subjected to such an extreme violence that makes even bandits grievable. By doing so, he inverts the “nation-building” discourse established by journalism, designating (intentionally or not) the sertanejo as the new national archetype and symbol of a people.

In a space void of any moral standards, the soldiers who represent the nation will become no different than the jagunços, and so the true archetype of the nation will be passed on and revealed in the sertanejos themselves. The soldiers thus come to abandon their “civilized” methods of war and employ the same “barbaric” strategies of guerrilla warfare. In short, sovereign “licit” violence adopts “illicit” outlaw violence.

Da Cunha points out that the soldiers, after months of fighting, begin to adapt—evolve even—to the bandit city. The soldier and the jagunço essentially become indiscernible, as the former began “vestindo a pele do jagunço, copiando-lhe a astúcia requintada, a marcha cautelosa acobertando-se em todos os sulcos do terreno” (OS 581). They cease to even resemble a military organization, as da Cunha notes, most of the soldiers having adopted the “hábitos do sertanejo, nem os distinguia o uniforme desbotado e em tiras. E calçando alpercatas duras; vestindo camisas de algodão; sem bonés ou barretinas, cobertos de chapéus de couro, figuravam famílias de retirantes demandando em atropelo o litoral, fustigados pela seca” (OS 637). Da Cunha later goes on to charge the Republic with the same fanaticism possessed by the jagunços:

276 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

“A luta pela República, e contra os seus imaginários inimigos, era uma cruzada. Os modernos templários, se não envergavam a armadura debaixo do hábito e não levavam a cruz aberta nos copos da espada, combatiam com a mesma fé inamolgável” (OS

617). Thus the fight against religious fanaticism has been fueled by the reworked and secularized fanaticism of nationalism. Fire is being used to put out the fire.

In other words, “The Europeanized national army,” as Dabove points out,

has to dissolve itself in the sertão, become a multitude to actually win

the war (134-38, 222), cease being a disciplining machine, and become

a nomadic war machine. It has to become its enemy to defeat it, which

implies, paradoxically, the eventual (and invisible) triumph of the

jagunços, regardless of their empirical defeat. (225-26)

The evident “barbarism of civilization,” where the civilized army must become the horde, act as the same nomadic war machine against which it is fighting, suggests

Roberto Esposito’s biopolitical paradigm of Immunity. For Esposito, the sovereign continually takes a position of prevention in order to prolong the life of the body politic, acting like a vaccine which seeks to immunize the body of the nation from any unwanted pathogens. Tracing a link between the origin of the words communitas

(community) and immunitas (immunity), Esposito observes that a political community protects itself from an excess of undesired parts of its own self though a power that negates.242 This power is derived from his immunity paradigm, where a community immunizes itself by introducing into its body politic a form of the original pathogen of which it wishes to avoid an excess or even eliminate: “Just as in the medical practice

277 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 of vaccinating the individual body, so the immunization of the political body functions similarly, introducing within it a fragment of the same pathogen from which it wants to protect itself, by blocking and contradicting natural development” (Bios 46). To give context to this paradigm, he argues that in order to maintain an overall state of health of the body politic, observable “preventive prophylactic” tendencies have accumulated into modernity:

Hence the need, increasingly emphasized, for immunitary barriers,

protection and apparatuses aimed at reducing, if not eliminating, the

porosity of external borders to contaminating toxic germs. How much

actual or threatened invasions contributed to this obsession with self-

protection, such as the Spanish one in England, or even contact with

unfamiliar cultures and ethnicities such as the Native American, not to

mention the growing Jewish immigration to Western Europe, is not

difficult to imagine: the greater the vulnerability of the body politic

must have appeared, the more urgent the need became to hermetically

seal the orifices that had opened up in its frontiers. (Immunitas 123)

Esposito’s immunization paradigm makes perfect sense in the context of Os sertões’ attack against the barbarity of the Brazilian republic.243 In order to prolong the lives of the body politic the Republic sees as representative of Brazilian nationality, it immunizes that body with the same pathogens seen as threatening to the health of those lives. It is important to note that Canudos is literally situated on the geographical frontier of the Brazilian body politic. The State, in an attempt to seal up the “orifices”

278 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 through which the “germs” of religious fanaticism, racial degeneracy, primitivism, barbarism, and overall sertanejo backwardness may infect the national body, must introduce these same pathogens to combat and essentially vaccinate the nation. Da

Cunha thus points out the proverbial “injection” of a national fanaticism in the body politic similar to the sertanejo’s religious fanaticism; he concedes that in reality, the majority of the soldiers were mestizos, of the same racial makeup as the backwoodsmen,244 and he observes that they eventually don the jagunços’ same primitive leather garb, becoming the monster, employing their same “barbaric” tactics of war. In order to win the war, they must war in the fashion of the nomadic war machine.245

The immunization paradigm in Os sertões essentially leads the reader to realize that the soldier is no different from the sertanejo, and that he is, if anything, civilization’s pathogen against barbarism that becomes increasingly more and more ruthless, the soldiers’ barbaric cruelty even surpassing that of the sertanejos. Da Cunha accomplishes this by first narrating Canudos as a void, a “terra incognita” not even found on the Brazilian map, where all life, jagunço or soldier, is derealized and negated any value. As the unreal, as lives never lived, there can be, in Butler’s terms, no injury: “The derealization of the “Other” means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral” (Precarious 33). And so da Cunha give the readers scenes of death where both soldiers and sertanejos are chillingly similar and spectral. During the third expedition, dead sertanejos are described as “de bruços ou de supino sobre as pedras, desenlapando-se à boca das furnas, esparsos pelas encostas, viam-se os

279 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 jagunços . . . Os companheiros sobreviventes passavam-lhes, agora, de permeio, parecendo uma turba vingadora de demónios entre caída muldã de espectros…” (OS

409).246 After the army is driven off, the sertanejos take the dead bodies, decapitate them and line them up along the highway to their town, faces turned towards the road.

Later, they impale the corpse of Colonel Tamarindo on a dried angiço bough. This horrid scene should be given a cry of protest on da Cunha’s part, an act of grieving or daring proclamation of heroism and tragedy of their terrible fate. Instead, he describes the final state of the dead soldiers much like those of the sertanejos: dark and grotesque. He does nothing to humanize their bodies. What he provides is an unreal scene so extreme the bodies themselves have become spectral. Tamarindo’s corpse is compared to “um manequim terrivelmente lúgubre, o cadaver desaprumado, braços e pernas pendidos, oscilando à feição do vento no galho flexível e vergado, aparecia nos ermos feito uma visão demoníaca,” and three months later, when the fourth expedition arrives, they are met by “renques de caveiras branqueando as orlas do caminho, rodeadas de velhos trapos, esgarçados nos ramos dos arbustos e, de uma banda,—mudo protagonist de um drama formidável—o espectro do velho comandante...” (OS 493).247

The favor will be returned in the fourth expedition when da Cunha reveals to the reader that the soldiers begin to do the same, only more barbarically. Under the presumption that the sertanejos believe that by being beheaded their souls could not enter into heaven, the soldiers begin to exploit this superstition. Unlike the sertanejos, however, who decapitated corpses, the soldiers decapitate their victims while still

280 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 alive. Two methods of execution were preferred, decapitation and gutting them with a knife. As da Cunha explains it, as soon as an able-bodied jagunço was captured, the soldiers’ motto becomes: “Degolava-se, estripava-se” (OS 729). He gives various account of beheadings, describes how many prisoners had a rope run around their neck and were dragged to the edge of camp, where “o infeliz perdeu-se com os sinistros companheiros que o ladeavam no eio misterioso da caatinga” (OS 726). To describe a jagunço as “unhappy” and a soldier as “sinister,” is a complete inversion of language

Euclide’s uses prior in his work, and contrary to the language used previously in newspapers. “Sinister,” reserved time and time again for sertanejos, now inverts as we see the tide shift. Before beheading, the soldiers “impunham invariavelmente à vítima um viva à República, que era poucas vezes satisfeito,” then “[a]garravam-na pelos cabelos, dobrando-lhe a cabeça, esgargalando-lhe o pescoço; e, francamente exposta a garganta, degolavam-na” (OS 726). Once again we see the inversion of what has been up to this point the common trope—the sertanejo is now, finally, the victim, because

“[a]pesar de três séculos de atraso os sertanejos não lhes [os soldados] levavam a palma no estadear idênticas barbaridades” (OS 727).

Euclides does attempt to sound apologetic, explaining that “não se trucidavam mulheres e crianças,” but he seems to say this with irony, for he goes on to explain the proviso attached: “que não se revelavam perigosas” (OS 732). Apparently “dangerous” is open to a broad array of interpretations. Immediately following, he describes an old woman who refuses cooperate with soldiers, resisting their interrogations and telling the soldiers they will be defeated. “Irritou,” says da Cunha with irony, as though

281 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 irritating were synonymous to dangerous: “Era um virago perigoso. . . . aquele demônio de anáguas, aquela bruxa . . . foi degolada” (OS 733).

Da Cunha goes on to illuminate the real reason for the unbridled violence, the reason why the conflict was not a military campaign, but a “slaughterhouse.” He explains: “Não era a ação severa da lei, era a vingança. Dente por dente. Naqueles ares pairava, ainda, a poeira de Moeriera César, queimado; devua-se quemar. Adiante, o arcabouço decapitado de Tamarindo; devia-se degolar” (OS 734). He expounds that revenge sought through “fire and knife” was justified with stories that each sertanejo they killed were the ones responsible for shooting the Colonel or hanging up the corpses of lost comrades like scarecrows. In such a way the soldier’s “selvageria impiedosa amparava-se à piedade pelos companheiros morto. Vestia o luto chinês da púrpura e, lavada em lágrimas, lavava-se em sanque” (OS 734). I find it fascinating that da Cunha recurs to mourning as the source of violence. Mourning for their lost soldiers means revenge, as though a nation must expunge violently those who have given them reason to grieve. Tears shed means bloodshed, life mourned abnegates another’s life who will not be mourned. Here we can detect his criticism of this formula. He is deconstructing this pattern and slowing presenting us a new criteria, where mourning becomes disassociated with the soldiers and invested in the sertanejos.

Da Cunha ultimately levels the playing field, explaining that taking place was a

drama sanguinolento da idade das cavernas . . . Os atores, de um e de

outro lado, negros, caboclos, brancos e amarelos, traziam, intacta, nas

282 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

faces, a caracterização indelével e multiforme das raças—e so podiam

unificar-se sobre a base comom dos intintos inferiores e maus.

A animalidade primitiva, lentamente expungida pela

civilização, ressurgiu, inteiriça. Desforrava-se afinal. Encontrou nas

mãos, ao invés do machado de diorito e do arpão de osso, a espada e a

carabina. (OS 735)

Race no longer separates superior from inferior, the civilized from primitive. All men in this “Stone Age” conflict reveal their most primal and animalistic instinct. But the victors, those left standing, will be the ones to bear the weight of guilt for these atrocities.

Da Cunha’s description of the prisoners and corpses is what tips the scale of grievable life towards the end of Os sertões. His descriptions, often grotesque, reveal the most detestable aspects of war. One of the most remarkable and shocking moments is the episode of the child in the quepe (large hat). The quepe, far too large for the child, covers his whole head, reaching his shoulders. Da Cunha, then relates to us the soldier’s reaction to this seemingly humorous sight:

O quepe, largo e grande demais, oscilava grotescamente, a cada passo,

sobre o busto esmirado que ele encobria por um terço. E alguns

espectadores tiveram a coragem singular de rir. A criança alçou o rosto,

procurando vê-los. Os risos extinguiram-se: a boca era um chaga aberta

de lado a lado por um tiro! (OS 680)

283 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Da Cunha gives a face to the faceless in the sertanejo boy; he makes the reader look and consider the poor child. The boy’s mutilated face, which stifles the war-hardened soldiers’ laughter, is what makes the work powerful, what gives the book its humanity—the fact that it concedes, finally towards the end, the humanity denied the sertanejos in journalism. Just as the reader had contemplated the familiar face of

Joaquim Pedreira in the newspaper, the fallen student who could be anyone’s brother or son; now, in Os sertões, the reader is forced to look into the wounded face of a small boy, who could now likewise be anyone’s son. The whole series of nation building published in Brazilian newspapers are trumped by da Cunha in Os sertões.

This sentiment is capitulated in the final pages of Os sertões. The war all but over, the soldiers mount their final engagement into the rubble of the city. They expect an easy final charge that will heroically vanquish and crush the remaining enemies.

They are, however, stopped dead in their tracks before a ditch of the dead:

Mas eram terríveis lances, obscuros para todo o sempre. Raro tornavam

os que os faziam. Aprumava-se sobre o fosso e sopeava-lhes o arrojo o

horror de um quandro onde a realidade tangível de uma trincheira de

mortos, argamassada de sangue e esvurmando pus, vencia todos os

exageros da idealização mais ousada. E salteava-os a atonia do

assombro... (OS 778)

The mutilated face of the sertanejo child, is enough to suffocate laughter; the horror of a mass grave of putrefying bodies sufficient to paralyze soldiers on the charge, and in place of the silence where laughter once was, in the empty space of a paralyzed attack,

284 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 the reader glimpses their grievability and even finds room to mourn them. The republican soldiers fighting in the war, their death originally mourned, is overturned by da Cunha’s masterpiece, and it is in fact the sertanejos whose fratricide will become the bedrock of a nation.

Though representations of the injured and dead sertanejos in Brazilian newspapers served as spectacles of war that sold newspapers,248 there is at least one passage found in Diário de Noticias that contradicts this tendency. On October 20th,

1897, a report is given that very well may have inspired da Cunha’s descriptions as well as his conclusion. Similar images are portrayed: cadavers in flames, thirsty women with chapped lips, drizzling in pus. Yet the conclusion to this breaks with the spectacle and brings the sertanejo, as Euclides does, into the nation. “Mas finalmente são todos heróis,” states the journalist, “São todos brasileiros!” (138). It should be noted that this newspaper was a Bahian one, and as such, seems much more sympathetic, more disposed to recognize the people of the sertão as brothers of the nation, unlike the far-reaching newspapers of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

The fighting finished, the soldiers find and uncover the buried body of

Conselheiro. Da Cunha narrates that his corpse was decapitated by the soldiers and his head paraded around from city to city in celebration of their victory: “Trouxeram depois para o literal, onde deliravam multidões em festa, aquele crânio. Que a ciência dissesse a última palavra” (OS 780). Much like the epileptic delirium of Moeira César, the delirium into which the State and its people have fallen marks an almost carnivalesque celebration, where crime and glory are indiscernible, and this grotesque

285 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 head displayed on a pike as the centerpiece of their chaotic madness. Once again, the

State is reenacting the same fanaticism that lead the jagunços to decapitate the corpses of the Republic’s fallen officers after the third expedition. Da Cunha’s curious statement, that science should have the last word, is a reference to the final destination of that head: the laboratories of legal medicine at the Medical School in Bahia.

Here the scene of seemingly barbaric ritual and delirium gives way to modernity, biology, positivism, and politics. Adhering to Lombroso and Maudsley’s theories, doctors concluded that the skull was normal and revealed no signs of degeneration.249 The skull of the dead beato examined at the laboratories of legal medicine implies the coupling of biology and politics in the new Brazilian nation state.

It designates the modern State’s ever-increasing concern with calculating biology in its political objectives. In this case, by medically examining Conselheiro’s skull, the political objective is to grant validity to the extermination of the people of Canudos. A diagnosis of degeneration and madness means the state simply amputated an infected limb of the body politic and thus improved its health. Yet the medical examiners’ conclusion of normality instead of degeneration implies a healthy limb had been needlessly severed, indicating the Brazilian state is the true madman, for only an insane man would self-mutilate a healthy part of his body. For this reason, Euclides da

Cunha reserves these final words to recapitulate his attack of the Republic: “É que ainda não existe um Maudsley para as loucuras e os crimes das nacionalidades...” (OS

780).250 Had Maudsley’s same psychological theories been applied to the Brazilian

286 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015 national body at the time of the Canudos War, the diagnosis would have been madness and a state of sovereign order anything but normal: a truly exceptional state.

287 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

CONCLUSION

Aquí también. Aquí, como en el otro confín del continente, el infinito campo en que muere solitario el grito; aquí también el indio, el lazo, el potro . . . Aquí también esa desconocida y ansiosa y breve cosa que es la vida -Borges, “Texas”

In the epigraph above, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, after having spent time Texas, compares its frontier setting to that of Argentina. He cannot help but recognize that “here too,” as in Argentina, we find the Indian, the lasso, the mustang.

In this poem he titles “Texas,” he notes that we find the same “clamors of history,” the same “mystic alphabet of stars.” He compares San Jacinto to that other Thermopylae, the Alamo. Most importantly, he declares that here too, at both ends of the hemisphere, on those endless plains where men’s cries die a lonely death, we find that unknown and brief thing called life.

Certainly, though a more arid climate, the Texas plains compare to the

Argentine pampas, both as frontiers where cattlemen lassoed and Indians once road on roughshod mustangs, but also as places where life was brief and often came to a violent end. Indeed, we may say “here too” with respect to the Brazilian sertão, a desert region of cactus and caatinga much like the US Southwest chaparral. Indeed, I would say the US/Mexico borderland setting in Blood Meridian is much more similar to the sertão region in Os sertões than the lush and green pasturelands found in Martín

288 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Fierro. Yet above all else, the sertão in da Cunha is another frontier where sertanejo vaqueiros, jagunços, Indians, mestizos and mullattos were politically marginalized.

As demonstrated in my chapters concerning these three works, we may say that

“here too” we find frontier spaces violently encroached upon by the State, marking them as the exception to the rule of law. Lawlessness in these works, therefore, is a product of the sovereign state, defined as the state of exception. It is here that that

“brief thing called life” is abandoned to outlawry, designated as bare life that may be licitly killed.

In Blood Meridian, all frontier life in relation to the judge as the embodiment of the state of exception—Apache, Mexicans, and the gang members themselves—are scooped up in the embrace of his great white body, included in the sovereign through the his violent methods of exclusion. Like Hobbes’ great figure of the Leviathan, the judge’s body is made of other bodies; yet the analogy of sovereignty in Blood

Meridian proves that the body of the judge is formed from the cadavers of the excluded and not the living.

Martín Fierro presents the predicament of a man before the law. As a bandit

Fierro is bare life, the illegal military draft the state of exception, and the fortín on the frontier a camp—the space that opens up when the state of exception become the normal practice of the law. Ultimately, Fierro’s subjection to political oppression produces a Kafkaesque form of creaturely shame, an existence of helplessness pressed beneath the abuse of the sovereign exception.

289 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Finally, in Os sertões, da Cunha reveals the workings of governmentality, where the Brazilian oligarchy comprised of state, church and landowning institutions, struggles for control of the sertanejo’s body. This body will also become the victim of banditry, a body whose death is ungrievable. Yet in Os sertões, the Republic and its soldiers are derealized by da Cunha and the original banditry of war exposed.

Ultimately, the violent actions of the Republic, of civilization, are proved to be just as savage as the supposed barbarism it attacks.

In conclusion, I hope to further build from this project in the future. I believe much is yet to be said regarding biopolitics in both literature and frontier studies. I find Agamben’s notion of state of exception to be an ideal framework for the political conceptualization of American frontier spaces. I hope to expound on this notion in showing that frontiers were preliminary to the forming of the camp. I believe that frontiers were where emerging American nation-states first housed bare life, and that as those frontier spaces began to grow smaller and eventually close, the modern State, so entrenched in the exception and in need of a new space for bare life to inhabit, ultimately created the camp. I would also like to further develop, through a literary perspective, the notion of Latin America’s “civilization and barbarism” in the biopolitical terms of Roberto Esposito’s immunity paradigm. I believe that this discourse, so common in American literatures, ultimately demonstrates civilization’s need to employ the same “savage” pathogen and means of violence supposedly found in barbarism, in order to eradicate barbarism. This is an opportune framework which will allow further discussion of and an accounting for the barbarism of civilization.

290 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

NOTES

1 I would also mention Bolton’s article “The Epic of Greater America,” which reflects on a course the author taught for fifteen years at the University of California titled “The History of the Americas.” This course marked his viewpoint for the need to integrate an inter-American approach to our perception of American history. 2 We may also consider Bolton’s Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century: Studies in Spanish Colonial History and Administration (1915), as well as Albert L. Hurtado’s recent Herbert Eugene Bolton: Historian of the American Borderlands (2012). 3 David Weber and Jane Rausch put it this way: For the last century the idea that the frontier experience shaped the character of North Americans and their institutions has constituted the most influential explanation of the distinctive character of the United States citizens. Many parts of Latin America also experienced processes of conquest and settlement by Europeans that seem, at least on the surface, analogous to Anglo-Americans’ frontier experiences. Nonetheless, with the exceptions of Brazil and Argentines, Latin American intellectuals have seldom considered their own frontiers central to the formation of national identities or of national institutions. (xiii) 4 See Jones, “Comparative Raiding Economies,” in Contested Ground. 5 See Patton, Sarmiento in The United States. Also see chapter by Kristine L. Jones, “Civilization and Barbarism and Sarmiento's Indian Policies,” and Michael Aaron Rockland’s “Sarmiento’s Views on the United States,” both found in Sarmiento and his Argentina. 6 See Dabove, Nightmares of the Lettered City: Banditry and Literature in Latin America, 1816-1929. 7 See Berthold Zilly’s exceptional chapter titled “A Barbárie: antítese ou elemento da Civilização? Do Facundo de Sarmiento a Os Sertões de Euclides da Cunha,” in De sertões, desertos e espaços incivilizados, 271-301. 8 See Putman’s introduction to the English translation of Os Sertões titled Rebellion in the Backlands, v. 9 This is also true for many other American countries such as Mexico and the vaquero, as well as Venezuela and the llanero, each a frontier cattleman. 10 Here, in highlighting the jagunço as a national archetype, I am most certainly not discarding that other frontier figure so often associated with Brazilian national identity: the bandeirante—a sort of trailblazer and pioneer that explored and settled Brazil’s far-reaching frontier spaces. Indeed, much has been said about the similarities between bandeirantes and North American pioneers regarding their contribution to the national pioneering spirit in both countries. See, for example, Moog, “Bandeirantes and Pioneers,” in Where Cultures Meet. However, on a literary level, due in large part to Os sertões, I would argue that the jagunço arguably comes to occupy the national stage as an archetype of Brazilianess.

291 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

11 See Arent, Origins, 185-221. 12 See Fitz, Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context, 211-32. 13 See Saussy, “Comparative Literature?,” 339-40. 14 Ibid., 340. 15 Both Hernández’ Martín Fierro and da Cunha’s Os sertões have received critical commentary for harboring tendencies that stem from both romanticism and realism. Martín Fierro certainly romanticizes the “Golden Age” existence of the gaucho’s peaceful and pastoral lifestyle, while it very realistically captures his political abuse. Da Cunha’s romanticized sense of Brazilian nationalism undoubtedly comes from the French influence of Victor Hugo. Yet his description regarding the war itself is grotesquely realistic and adheres much more to naturalism that romanticism. For more about Victor Hugo’s influence on Os sertões, see Goeveia Fernandez, “Euclides e a Literatura,” 52. I also recommend Raimundo Moreira Pereira’s “Victor Hugo e a Vendéia em Os Sertões: historiografia e literatura em Euclides da Cunha.” 16 See Sepich, ““What kind of Indians was them?”: Some Historical Sources in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” in Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, as well as his Notes on Blood Meridian. 17 For examples of Euclide’s imitation of the jagunço’s rustic speech, see the case of the small lad in Os sertões, 681. Also see pages 771-73, where Euclides da Cunha transcribes the case of Antônio the “Beatinho” from his own diary. Here he also imitates Antônio’s supposedly ignorant Portuguese. In both examples, Euclides marks their rustic speech and vocabulary with italics, also spelling according to the pronunciation of their words. 18 See Owens, Cormac McCarthy's Western Novels, 38-43. 19 Roggiano states: Hernández, who was a cultured man and from the city, more than the gaucho himself, what he wanted was to retain a part of his native virtues and nothing more, as a condition of the man of those lands, according to romantic telluric theory and opposed to the alienations of positivism, which was always avarous for the human being, and excessively generous for the voracity of all industrialisms. Here it seems opportune for us to remember that Martín Fierro was the first outcry for social justice in Argentina, and also the greatest failure. What grieved Hernández more than anything was the plunder carried out against the native in the name of progress and civilization. (41) 20 See Estrada, Muerte y transfiguración, vol. I, 36. 21 This comes from Putnam’s translation, Rebellion in the Backlands, xxix. 22 See Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 383. 23 See Butler, Precarious Life, 51-54. 24 See Schmitt, Political Theology, 5. 25 See Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 166. 26 Ibid., 170-3.

292 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

27 Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski note that frontiers, which were once spaces of freedom, were encroached by by way of capitalist interests. They explain that the expulsion and flight of Indians, blacks, and mestizos to cattle frontiers created ambiguous zones of freedom and economically and ideologically constitutive of urban centers. Over time, the expansion of capitalist relations meant that plains activities once viewed as customary and legitimate, such as hunting wild cattle, became defined as banditry and their practitioners classified as criminals (18). 28 See Guglielmini, 7. Here he discusses both the U.S. and Argentina’s closing of their frontiers, continuing to highlight both countries’ frontier experiences in a comparative context from pages 8-13. 29 For more about Indian reservations within an Agambenian framework, see Rifkin, “Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the “Peculiar” Status of Native Peoples.” 30 See Phillips, “History and the Ugly Facts of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian,” 434-35. 31 Writer Peter Josyph comments on his reading of Blood Meridian, stating that when a highly charged, richly textured novel driven by some of the most impressive American Prose of this century features no major figure who is not, quite literally, a slaughterer, and offers scarcely a single act to inspire hope for the race, it is natural to ask questions about their talent and to wonder whether one is perceiving it rightly and judging it fairly. One gluts upon a baroque of thieving, raping, shooting, slashing, hanging, scalping, burning, bashing, hacking . . . (170). 32 Ibid., 176. 33 See Sepich, “What Kind of Indians Was Them?,” in Perpspectives on McCarthy. 34 See Daughtery, “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy.” 35 See Owens, 46. 36 For scholars who focus on U.S. national myth in Blood Meridian see Spurgeon and Cant. For examples of violence in context with unanthropocentric natural law see Owens and Phillips. 37 For more on frontier myth and Promised Land, see McGilchrist, The Western Landscape in Cormac Mccarthy and Wallace Stegner: Myths of the Frontier, 11-16. 38 See Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 30-1 and 245-6. 39 See Owens, 19-20. Also, for more on the myth-making impact of dime novels, see McGilchrist, 14. 40 See Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 245. 41 Foucault further expounds on how “biopower,” a force that enhances life, can act negatively through State racism in the following words: Given that this power's objective is essentially to make live, how can it let die? How can the power of death, the function of death, be exercised in a political system centered upon biopower?

293 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

It is, I think, at this point that racism intervenes […] It is indeed the emergence of this biopower that inscribes it in the mechanisms of the State. It is at this moment that racism is inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States. As a result, the modern State can scarcely function without becoming involved with racism at some point, within certain limits and subject to certain conditions. What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die. (Society 254). 42 See Balibar, “Citizen Subject.” 43 In his Immunitas, Esposito explains that laws are always partial and never provide rights for everyone: “It is logically impossible to extend a right to all without emptying it of meaning as a right. If it were extended to everyone, it would no longer even be perceived as such” (24). Rights can only exist in a sense of privilege or privation (24-5); where rights are extended to some they are taken from others. We see this in Captain White’s discourse on race. The U.S. Americans declare they have a “right” to govern the Mexicans, to take their land, thus nullifying their “inalienable right” which are supposedly for all men, as is the common discourse of constitutional democracies. 44 Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 52. 45 Evidence of biopolitics and state of exception in nineteenth century America is exemplified in Slavery. Achille Mbembe notes: Any historical account of the rise of modern terror needs to address slavery, which could be considered one of the first instances of biopolitical experimentation. In many respects, the very structure of the plantation system and its aftermath manifests the emblematic and paradoxical figure of the state of exception (169). 46 According to Agamben: “In truth, the state of exception is neither external nor internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other” (State of Exception 169). 47 See Boever, State of Exception and the Contemporary Novel, page 16. 48 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 76-79. 49 Here, though I do not pursue the topic in this chapter, we might very well consider Roberto Espsito’s biopolitical paradigm of immunity. For Esposito, politics’ concern with life is one that works like a vaccine. The sovereign continually takes a stance of prevention in this sense. In order to expel or prevent an unwanted pathogen from taking over the body of the political populace (in Blood Meridian the unwanted pathogen would be the Apache and “savegry”), a form of that original pathogen must be introduced to the political body: “Just as in the medical practice of vaccinating the individual body, so the immunization of the political body fucntions similarly, introducing within it a fragment of the same pathogen from which it wants to protect itself, by blocking and contradicting natural development” (Bios 46). Therefore, Governor Trias needs “savagery” to put an end to savagery. The Glanton gang is

294 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

portrayed even more “barbaric” than the Apache Trias hires them to eliminate. His contract with Glanton’s gang is representative of Espositos paradigm of biopolitical immunization. As the gang enters the governor’s palace, Trias is introducing the savage gang into the political Mexican body of Chihuahua in order to protect that body from the same “savage Apache pathogen” that he wants to prevent from taking over. It would seem that civilization can only protect itself from barbarism through introducing barbarism into civilization, the often observed “barbarism of civilization.” 50 See Agamben, State of Exception, 39 51 See Agamben, Homo Sacer. 8-17. 52 See Agamben, Means without end, 3-11; and also his Homo Sacer, 1-3. 53 Agamben, Homo Sacer. 15 54 Ibid., 104. 55 Ibid., 104. 56 Ibid., 84. 57 We may consider here the Patriot Act, a political policy which infringes upon the privacy rights of citizens under the guise of the greater good of the community. 58 Reservations were officially classified as POW camps, liking them even more to modern detention camps like Guantanamo Bay. The Lakota South Dakota reservation is frequently referred to as Prisoner of War Camp #334. 59 See Gregory, “The Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and the Space of Exception.” 60 For an extensive overview about the various theories regarding the social and ethnic origin of the gaucho, see Slatta, Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier, 7-16. 61 Ibid, 9. Also see Estrada, Muerte y transiguración, Vol. 1, 241-6. 62 Silvio R. Ducan Baretta and John Markoff, in “Civilization and barbarism : cattle frontiers in Latin America,” explain that: Given their status as outcasts who did not belong to civilization, the methods adopted were also old—similar, indeed, to those of the colonial era . . . The ideology that saw gauchos . . . as uncontrollable barbarians became an adequate framework for justifying the cruel methods employed by the political elites as a response. (43) 63 See Borge’s quoting of both Unamuno and Menéndez y Pelayo in his El Martín Fierro, 91-2. 64 See Hughes, Arte y sentido de Martín Fierro, 177. 65 Borges notes that Martín Fierro forms part of a shift in in the concept of the book that took place in the nineteenth century. What had once been the canonical religious conceptualization of sacred texts, such as the Koran, the Bible, etc., evolved into the canonical national books, no less sacred, that represented a people and culture. Thus the Divine Comedy best represented Italy, Don Quixote Spain. See Borges, El Martín Fierro, 89. 66 See Leuman, El poeta creador, 135-143. 67 See Andermann, Mapas de poder, 209. 68 Antonio Pagés Larraya, in his Prosas del Martín Fierro, puts it this way: “Indio y gaucho estaban hermanados por una misma condición de perseguidos” (63). 69 See Heffe, Gisela, “Martín Fierro ante la ley,” 13.

295 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

70 See Agamben, Homo Sacer, 7. 71 The same thing may be said of Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões regarding the sertanejo, as we will see in the next chapter. 72 See Ramas, Los gauchipolíticos rioplatenses, 60-3. 73 Dabove, in Nightmares of the Lettered City, observes: Martín Fierro was heralded as an expression for the vindication of rural populations against the state. For Hernández, banditry as a historical phenomenon was produced by the state. As such, it was considered by Martínez-Estrada as the anti-Facundo. (170) 74 See Pérez, Los dilemas politicos de la cultura letrada, 207. 75 See Ludmer, El género gauchesco, 29. 76 Idib., 20. 77 See Boever, Narrative Care, 13. 78 For more on the impact of Lugones, gaucho myth, and the canonization of Martín Fierro, see Franco, “Lugones y el mito gauchesco.” 79 See Unamuno, El gaucho Martín Fierro. Prólogo a José Hernández. Madrid: Giner, 1972. Page 58. 80 Borges states: “Martín Fierro es de índole realista, y es de común observación que las obras de este tipo parecen evidentes y fáciles, sobre todo cuando están bien ejecutadas” (El Martín Fiero 87). Interestingly, he goes on to note the relationship realist works have with journalism: “Toda obra realista parece mera transcripción, mero periodismo . . . (El Martín Fierro 87). In the next chapter we will observe how these two modes of writing so prevalent in modernity, the novel and the newspaper, in their representation of the lives of real people, by nature capture the biopolitical condition of the modern subject before the law. 81 See Borges, El Martín Fierro, 96-97. 82 Op. cit., 43. 83 This is paraphrased from Pérez in his Los dilemas politicos de la cultura letrada. The full quote is as follows: El poema se centra en el mundo privado (y novelado) de los personajes, pero el mundo público, “la civilización” deshumanizante (la autoridad corrupta, los jueces arbitrarios, los funcionarios ladrones), determinan los acontecimientos de la vida privada de los gauchos. . . . Si bien el poeta se enfoca en la vida individual del gaucho y su familia, la política del Estado condiciona la relación de los personajes con su sociedad (120). 84 This is Agamben’s formula for bare life’s relation to the sovereign. See Homo Sacer, 8-9. 85 Op. Cit. The quote reads: “El Estado nacional es el culpable de la situación del gaucho, y su mano armada: su policía, sus soldados, así como sus jueces y sus legisladores, son el coro, el personaje colectivo contra el cual se recorta el destino y la suerte del paisano.” (210) 86 Martín Fierro, as representative of the people, is a common trope through Argentine history. Peronism, for example, used Fierro as a battle cry against Argentine

296 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

liberalism. Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz, in a speech call “The Enemies of the Argentine People,” given in July 3, 1948, states: “the oligarchy governed the country with no concern beyond the ambition and selfishness of their own. . . . Martín Fierro is the tragedy of the entire pueblo” (Qtd. in Shumway 277). 87 Quoted in Andermann, 221. Also, Ricardo Rojas states: “he ahí la vida de del gaucho Martín Fierro; he ahí la vida de todo el pueblo argentina,” (qtd. in Borges El Martín Fierro 90). 88 See Agamben, Means without End, 29-30. 89 See Estrada, Muerte y Transfiguración, Vol. II, 186. 90 Shumway, in The Invention of Argentina, puts it this way: “As a result, The Return of Martín Fierro is both a justification for the new Argentina and an advice manual written for gauchos on how to become good, productive, acquiescent citizens.” (284) 91 See Martín Fierro, 194. 92 See Shumway, The Invention of Argentina, 283-4. 93 See Borges, Obras completes, 195-97. 94 See Estrada, Muerte y transfiguración, Vol. 1, 74. 95 Ibid., 32. 96See Agamben, Means without End, 32. 97 Ibid., 32. 98 See Martín Fierro, 350. 99 Silva Valdés’ story here is quoted in Enrique Herrero’s prolog to Prosas de José Hernández, 10-11. 100 Op. cit., 222. 101 See Ansolabehere, “Martín Fierro: frontera y relato,” 234. In his essay, he estates: “Sin frontier en Martín Fierro no hay historia.” 102 For more about the frontier in Martín Fierro, see Estrada, Muerte y transfiguración, Vol 2, 105-187. 103 Op. cit., 235. 104 Ibid., 238. 105 See Dabove, Nightmares of the Lettered City, 170. 106 Slatta states: “the gaucho felt no pressing ideological or patriotic urge to sacrifice himself in battle for a distant and oppressive government” (Vanishing Frontier 127). 107 All of Hernández’ newspaper quotes come from Larraya’s collection titled Prosas del Martín Fierro. 108 Agamben notes the close relationship between war times and the state of exception: One of the elements that make the state of exception so difficult to define is certainly its close relationship to civil war, insurrection, and resistance. Because civil war is the opposite of normal conditions, it lies in a zone of undecidability with respect to state of exception, which is state power's immediate response to the most extreme internal conflict. . . . In this sense, modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but

297 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system (State of Exception 2). 109 See Schmitt, Political Theology, 5. 110 In Río de La Plata, August 20, 1897, Hernandez refers to the draft laws in Argentina as the “artificial combinations of the law.” This artificial law destines the gaucho, who was born free, to the military camps where he is forced, according to Hernández, into “temporary slavery,” as he is pressed into manual labor and battles against natives: Las combinaciones artificiales de la ley, no persuaden a nuestros gauchos, no pueden persuadirles de que sea lícito agobiarlos con la pesada carga de una esclavitud temporal. Han nacido para vivir libres, sus ante pasados han sabido romper los eslabones de la ignominiosa cadena y les han enseñado el camino de la emancipación. (202) 111 See Carilla, La creación del Martín Fierro, 71. 112 See Slatta, Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier, 129. 113 See Slatta, “Rural Criminality,” 458. 114 Qtd. in Slatta, “Rural Criminality,” 470. 115 See Estrada, Muerte y transfiguración, second volume, 102. 116 Slatta explains: Many in the urban population received exemptions from service, including doctors, lawyers, students, scribes, and pharmacists. Wealthier rural males, ranch foremen, and managers with capital exceeding 4,000 pesos also enjoyed exemption. A poor man could be spared only if he could prove that he was a sole surviving son. (Vanishing Frontier 130) 117 See Agamben, Homo Sacer, 8. 118 Ibid., 6. 119 Ibid., 28-29. 120 See Gómez Romero, “The Archaeology of the Gaucho “Vago y Mal Entretenido,”” 146-48. 121 Ibid., 147. 122 Ibid., 149. 123 “Barbarous human tribute” comes from Larraya, whose description of life in the military camps is at par with Fierro’s, and who also points out the city inhabitants’ exclusion from the draft laws: En la extrema frontera, frene a la constante amenaza del indio y cercado por el desierto, vegetaba el gaucho en los fortines. Allí subsistían pobres, mugrientos, sin paga, sin armas, semidesnudos, estafados por el pulpero y el jefe que era su socio, y, de cuando en cuando, convertidos en peones de la charca del coronel. . . . Ese bárbaro tributo humano, en el que aparecían complicados jueces y comandantes, jefes militares y comerciantes, iba devorando irremisiblemente al gaucho. Este contestaba con su silencio, con su abstención, con la malicia de algún gesto, débiles desahogos del

298 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

sacrificado…Sólo en último extremo afloraba la rebeldía, otra forma de sacrificio. Lo más injusto del sistema consistía en que los habitantes de la ciudad no estaban obligados a ese servicio. (60) 124 For more on eugenics and biopolitics, see Edward Ross Dickinson, “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy.” 125 Roggiano explains Hernández’s firm opposition to modernity’s positivism, and that he was if anything, a romanticist: Hernández, who was a cultured man and from the city, more than the gaucho himself, what he wanted was to retain a part of his native virtues and nothing more, as a condition of the man of those lands, according to romantic telluric theory and opposed to the alienations of positivism, which was always avarous for the human being, and excessively generous for the voracity of all industrialisms. . . . What grieved Hernández more than anything was the plunder carried out against the native in the name of progress and civilization. . . . In this sense, Hernández was a romantic, perhaps the most idealistic and lyrical of our romantics, because of his faith in the immanence of individual rights and in the natural adaptation of man to his living conditions. (41-2) He goes on to relate positivism with national destiny: The science of positivism assured the national Argentine destiny, with the death of what remained of its Hispanic past: the romantic soul of the gaucho, the presence of an absence which is the elegy of a lost being and the irrecoverable song of love. Mitre, Sarmiento, Avellaneda, Roca, forgers of the destiny of Argentina, gave their lesson of modernity with firm determination and courage. Hernández gave his lesson of humanity, as well as his Martín Fierro. (43) 126 The word “abono,” here, can be understood as payment or contribution. However, I prefer to word’s alternative meaning, which can be understood as fertilizer. In this context, we may allude to the words of Uruguayan poet Juan Zorilla de San Martín, for whom the blood of the gaucho, instead of a fertilizer, is used to “water” the land: “If he hasn’t’ learned to work much, it is because he had to fight much . . . [He is] not very used to watering the land with the sweat of his brow because he has had to water it for a long time with the blood of his veins” (Qtd. in Slatta Vanishing Frontier 140). In both contexts, as fertilizer or water, the blood of the gaucho is spilled over the land to make the nation grow. His sacrifice and death bring life to the nation. 127 See Zilly, “Uma construção simbólica da nacionalidade num mundo transnacional,” 31-2. 128 Julie Skurski and Fernando Coronil in their introduction to States of Violence, suggest: “State violence in the multiple forms that accompany nationalism and colonialism, both internal and external, becomes normalized as the necessary hand of modernity” (11). 129 See Agamben, Means without End, 42-3. 130 See Estrada, Muerte y transfiguración, Vol. II, 278-79.

299 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

131 Ibid. 199-200. 132 See Hernández, Martín Fierro, 178-179 133 See Larraya, Prosas del Martín Fierro, 58. 134 This is found quoted in the Cátedra edition of Martín Fierro, 182, footnote 251. 135 To validate his claim, Agamben provides examples of medieval law in reference to werewolves and bandits: Salic law and Ripuarian law use the formula wargus sit, hoc est expulsus in a sense that recalls the sacer esto that sanctioned the sacred man’s capacity to be killed, and the laws of Edward the Confessor (1030-35) define the bandit as a wulfesheud (a wolf's head) and assimilate him to the werewolf ( . . . “He bears a wolf's head from the day of his expulsion, and the English call this wulfesheud”). What had to remain in the collective unconscious as a monstrous hybrid of human and animal, divided between the forest and the city—the werewolf—is, therefore, in its origin the figure of the man who has been banned from the city. (Homo Sacer 105) 136 Op. cit., 20. 137 Op. cit.,, 240. 138 Ibid., 241. A fine example where Hernández defends the indio is found in Larraya’s compilation of his journalistic prose. Published August 22, 1869 in Rio de La Plata, Hernández argues the following on behalf of the Indian in his newspaper article titled “Qué civilización es la de los matanzas?”: Nosotros no tenemos el derecho de expulsar a los indios del territorio y menos de exterminarlos. La civilización sólo puede darnos derechos que se deriven de ella misma. . . . ¿Pero qué civilización es ésa que se anuncia con el ruido de los combates y viene precedida del estruendo de las matanzas? Las bestias se enfurecen y acometen, cuando son perseguidas de muerte, y ¿cómo no esperar que los indios, que tienen al menos la organización humana, se vuelvan contra nosotros sedientos de venganzas, cuando no nos anunciamos a ellos sino como heraldo de la muerta? (208). 139 Op. cit., 242. 140 Undoubtedly, Fierro and Cruz’s escape to live with the natives is presented in a positive light in La ida, and the reader has the impression that their arrival to this refuge space will finally mean a life of freedom and peace. Furthermore, Hernández writes about gauchos’ seeking refuge with natives in Rio de La Plata. We can certainly see this as a precursor to what will be Fierro and Cruz’s resolution at the end of La ida. In the newspaper, Hernandez presents the topic of gaucho and indio coexistence in a voice that praises the indio who takes him in and facilitates his escape, while at the same time he demonstrates this necessity for gaucho survival as civilization’s ultimate defeat. On August 20, 1869, he writes that news of the draft spreads across the pampa with the speed of the telegraph, inciting the gaucho to saddle his horse and escape civilization, preferring refuge amongst the tribes of barbarism.

300 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

He then cites the specific case of the a tribal chief Coliqueo’s involvement in aiding the gaucho: Los caciques se convierten en sus [los gauchos] protectores y se produce ese fenómeno singular, esa derrota de la civilización. . . . Los corresponsales se encargan de comunicarnos esos hechos y ayer mismo en nuestro correo de la Campaña se ha dado la noticia de que el cacique Coliqueo proporcionaba toda clase de facilidades a la fuga de nuestros gauchos. ¿Y en nombre de qué principio no levantaremos nosotros para condenar al hombre oprimido que corre en busca de aire, de espacio y de libertad? ¿No es ésta la necesidad más imperiosa de nuestra condición humana? (201) 141 See La vuelta, verses 1037-8, 231. 142 See endnote 139. 143 Op. cit., 21. 144 See Viñas, Indios, ejército y frontera, 18. 145 All primary sources in this chapter are left in the original Portuguese. However, secondary sources are my own translation into English. 146 The source from which I quote here Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy,” is from Dissemination. 147 Boever explains it this way: Plato also notes that he drug of storytelling might at times be useful to govern the ideal city he envisions. Statesmen . . . are in this sense like doctors: with the proper training, they can learn how to administer the drug of storytelling so that it becomes beneficial rather than destructive. Storytelling is, then, characteristically pharmalogical: it can cut both ways, depending on how it is administered (Narrative care 7). 148 Later, in Os sertões, Euclides will recognize the poisonous pharmakon in the military hospital; it is a danger to life: “Fantasiara-se em casarão acaçapado e escuro um hospital military. Mas este era o pavor e a condenação suprema de todos os feridos e doentes” (OS 638). 149 Mónica Ayala-Martínez, in her “Euclides Da Cunha and the Trap of the Republican Dream,” puts it this way: Modernization, order, and progress are the concepts at the base of this national ideal. In order to reconcile these, da Cunha resorts to various scientific discourses popular during that period: biology, psychiatry, ethnology, geography, and anthropology. He does this in order to construct a complex frame of reference with which to interpret the war of Canudos and its possible effects on Brazilian history. The text continuously demonstrates da Cunha's ambivalence. The author admires the people of Canudos while at the same time considering them to be primitive. It is clear that his positivist vision led him to

301 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

understand, at least initially, the military campaigns as crusades against the backwardness of the rural life of the Sertão (60). 150 See Bernucci, A imitação dos sentidos, 23. 151 For more about the influence the Argentine writer had on Euclides, as well as the relationship between the two, see Bernucci, “Além do real, aquém do imaginario: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento e Euclides da Cunha.” Also see Zilly, “A Barbárie: antítese ou element da Civilização? Do Facundo de Sarmiento a Os sertões de Cudlides da Cunha.” 152 For a comprehensive understanding of the multi-faced discourse of science, history, memory, and fiction, as well as the intertextuality of Os sertões, see Bernucci, “A ontologia discursive de Os sertões,” and his A imitação dos sentidos. Also refer to Luiz Costa Lima, “Os sertões: História e Romance”; José Carlos Barreto de Santana, “Os sertões: Aspectos da Construção do Discurso”; and Luiz Fernando Valente, Os sertões: Entre a Memória e a história,” all found in Discurso, Ciência e Constrovérsia em Euclides da Cunha. 153 The book and author’s heterogeneous natures have been the subject of comment since the work’s very first literary review by José Veríssimo, in the Rio de Janeiro newspaper Correio da Manhá in December of 1902. In a much cited quote regarding the many faces of Os sertões and its creator, Veríssimo states: Mr. Euclides da Cunha’s book, notable for so many titles, is at the same time the book of a man of science, a geographer, a geologist, an ethnographer; of a man of thought, a philosopher, a sociologist, a historiographer; of a man of sentiment, a poet, a novelist, an artist, who knows how to see and describe, who is touched by and feels so many of nature’s aspects as well as the soul’s, moved to tears, in the face of human suffering, whether from the fatal conditions of the physical world, the “droughts” that devastate the backlands of the Brazilian North, or whether from the stupidity and evil of men, like the Canudos campaign. (45) 154 See Boever, Narrative Care, 13. 155 In his Narrative Care, Boever also speculates about an Agambenian theory of the novel, one where characters are construed in the frightful image of bare life, trapped within the pages of the novel which comes to embody a literary space much like a concentration camp. I believe the space the sertanejos inhabit in da Cunha’s work functions much like a literary concentration camp, where their lives are devalued and bodies subjected to the most horrendous of state violence. Regarding this Agambenian theory of the novel, Boever states: Agambenian theory of the novel would not only align the novel with the camp, but also the life of characters—character life—with bare life. . . . This would be a theory of the novel as a camp, and of the character as the bare life that is caught up within it. If Watt argues that the novel is the characteristic political structure of modernity, and if Agamben argues that the camp is the characteristic political structure of

302 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

modernity, should we not then also consider the argument that there might be a connection between the novel and the camp? (72). 156 See Boever. Narrative Care, 43-45. 157 Ibid.,. 47, endnote 120. 158 See Castro-Klarén, “Locura y dolor,” 212. 159 See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 199-203. 160 The same may be said of Martín Fierro with regards to the reassuring fratricide. He is the son of a nation, excluded from that nation, and who, upon his death, is later reintegrated as a national archetype. 161 See Walnice, No Calor, 107-08. 162 See Zilly, “Uma crítica precoce à “globalização” e uma epopéia da literatura universal,” 68. 163 See Levine, “Mud-hot Jerusalem, 527-8. 164 See da Cunha, Os sertões, Author’s Note 1, 783-4. 165 See da Cunha, Correspondência, 165. 166 As Adriana Johnson explains in her article “Subalternizing Canudos,” “It is important to stress first that da Cunha is not criticizing the Brazilian state and its action from either an anarchist or monarchist viewpoint, but measuring it against the new republican state as he thinks it should be but is not” (373). 167 See Freyre, Perfil de Euclides e Outros Perfis, 25-6. 168 See Brandão, Euclides da Cunha e a questão racial no Brasil, 28. 169 See Olimpio de Souza Andrade, “’Os sertões’ numa frase de Nabuco,” 170 Da Cunha himself states that he fell asleep a nobody (desconhecido) only to wake up famous the next day. See the preface to Bernucci’s edition of Os sertões, 15. 171 See Abreu, O enigma de Os sertões, 19. I recommend this book for further understanding of the far reaching success of Os sertões. 172 See Bernucci, “Além do real, aquém do imaginario,” 53. 173 Ibid. 20-22. 174 Here we may think of the entire body of Kafka’s works, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the war novels of Hemmingway, etc. 175 Conselheiro’s rigid teachings can be found in two texts attributed to him. The first, written in 1895 at Belo Monte, is called Preceitos, and confirms his loyalty to traditional Catholic precepts. The second, Prédicas y discursos de António Conselheiro, written amidst the turmoil of the Canudos War in January 1987, was possibly written as a message to his adversaries and to confirm his legacy. Only after the war were both books found in the rubble of his meager home in Canudos. For more, see Levine, “Mud-Hut Jerusalem,” 544-5. 176 For more information about the Conselheiro’s burning of the tax edicts, see Levine, “Mud-Hut Jerusalem,” 538. For da Cunha’s own version of this event, see Os sertões, 285. 177 As Levine explains, “Indeed, Canudo’s size was staggering for a backland religious refuge: at its height the population was more than one-tenth that of the city of São Paulo in the mid1890s” (Vale of Tears 2). 178 See Levine, “Mud-Hut Jerusalem, 527.

303 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

179 Ibid., 558. 180 For more about da Cunha’s diagnosis of “historic atavism,’ and his tales about Conselheiro, see Os sertões, 251-87. 181 See Ventura, “Canudos como cidade iletrada,” 166. 182 Ibd. 121-129 183 See Villa, “O Diáraio de uma expedição e a construção de Os sertões” in Os sertões de Euclides da Cunha: releituras e diálogos, 38-9; as well as Ventura, “Canudos como cidade iletrada: Euclides da Cunha na “urbs” monstruosa,” 171-72 and 178. 184 See Ventura, “Canudos como cidade iletrada,” 176. 185 See Davis, Late Victorian Holocaust. 190. 186 Ibd. 191. 187 See Levine, “Mud-Hut Jerusalem,” 551. 188 Ibd. 551. 189 Ibd. 564. 190 Ibd. 552. 191 Ibd. 547. 192 Ibd. 556. 193 Ibd. 556. 194 See da Cunha, Os sertões, 431. 195 Sevcenko elaborates: The problem lay in the characteristics of the Brazilian Army itself. Its officials were trained in French, by Belgian instructors, using Belgian manuals and tactics appropriate to the territories of the Netherlands. None of them had the slightest notion of typical conditions in the Brazilian backlands. Their red uniforms offered easy targets for the backlanders, their cannons sank in the sandy soil, and their woolen clothes were a recipe for certain dehydration under the desert sun. Euclides demonstrated that successive expeditions were defeated above all by their total ignorance of the land, people, customs and Brazilian popular culture. (83) 196 See da Cunha, O Diáraio de uma expedição, 44. 197 For more on this topic, see Ventura, ““A Nossa Vendéia”: Canudos, o Mito da Revolução Francesa e a Constituição de Identidade nacional: Cultura no Brasil (1897- 1902).” 198 For more about the complex struggle of oligarchical powers during the Canudos campaign, see Sampaio, “Repensando Canudos: O jogo das Oligarquias.” 199 See Davis, Late Victorian Holocaust, 189. 200 See Ramos, “Interpretando o fenômeno Canudos,” 78-9. 201 See Ventura, “Canudos como cidade iletrada,” 166. 202 See Foucault, Society must be Defended, 245. 203 As Levine points out: “That the Church sent the mission at the request of state officials despite the formal separation of church and state after 1889 was not unusual in the Northeast, where republican-era secularism never fully took hold behind the

304 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

scenes as long as religious and political leaders shared common objectives” (“Mud- Hut Jerusalem” 542). 204 See Brandão, Euclides da Cunha e a questão racial no Brasil, 56. 205 It is important to note, however, as Bernucci does, that Euclides’ usage of science was not always textbook. In reality, he blurs the dividing line between science and art, even erasing the limits established by positivist thinking, thus preferring to manipulate positivism and thus enrich the concept in question and return it to the reader in all its complexity. See “Cientificismo e aporias em Os sertões,” 24. 206 An example of Euclide’s conviction of the primitive degeneracy of mixed races can be found in his description of the Canudos bandit Pajué: Legítimo cafuz [half Native American, half African], no seu temperamento implulsivo acolchetavam-se todas as tendências das raças inferiores que o formavam. Ero o tipo completo do lutador primitivo—ingênuo, feroz e destemeroso—simples e mau, brutal e inantil, valente por instinto, herói sem o saber—um belo caso de retroatividade atávica, forma retardatária de troglodita sanhudo aprumando-se ali com o mesmo arrojo com que, na velhas idades, vibrava o machado de sílex à porta das cavernas... (408) 207 Da Cunha calls him a “títere” and a “sombra.” See Os sertões, 268. 208 Much along my same thought line here, Mónica Ayala-Martínez explains: The theoretical context in which he lived cannot offer him the tools to definitively understand the anomaly represented by Canudos and the failure of the modernizing function which the nation should perform for the collective. To 19th-century thinking, it is possible to assume an analytical and critical position. However, what remains out of reach of this analytical paradigm is that every unifying principle is by definition excluding and discriminatory. It is destined to abolish differences and in so doing, includes contradictions and ambivalence. Neither can it explain that violence, repression, and collective national amnesia are necessarily a part of the definition of the national project. (62). 209 See Castro-Klarén, “Locura y Dolor,” 210. 210 See Edgar Salvadori de Decca and Maria Lucia Abaurre Gnerre, “Trauma e história na composição de Os sertões,” in Releituras e diálogos, 58. 211 See Johannes, Time and the Other, 7. 212 In Diário da Cunha also refers to Canudos as a Kraal and a Biblical city, published on September 10th , 1897. 177-8. 213 See Dickinson, “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy,” 3. 214 See Arent, Origins, 185-221. 215 See Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 171. 216 See Brandão, Euclides da Cunha e a questão racial no Brasil, 47. 217 This paragraph is a rough paraphrasing of Brandão, Euclides da Cunha e a questão racial no Brasil, 47-8. 218 Ibd. 48. 219 See Zilly, “Canudos Telegrafado,” 107-8.

305 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

220 Ibid., 62 221 See Ventura, “Canudos como cidade iletrada,” 169. 222 See da Cunha, Diário, 171. 223 All newspaper sources not written by Euclides da Cunha come from Walnice’s newspaper collection of the Canudos War entitled No calor da hora. Da Cunha’s newspaper references come from his Diário de uma expedição. 224 For another example, see No Calor da Hora, 416. 225 Ibid., 280-281 and 290-293. 226 Da Cunha goes to great lengths to describe the desperation of soldiers to hunt and aquire food. For more detail, see Os sertões, 581-5. 227 Foucault explains that governmentality and sovereignty coexist in the forms of power connected to discipline. See Security, Territory, Population, 107. 228 For a full list of titles, see Adelino Bradão, Euclides da Cunha e a questão racial no Brasil, 20-1. 229 See Mbeme, “Necropolotics,” 170-71. Furthermore, Mbembe states: In many respects, the very structure of the plantation system and its aftermath manifests the emblematic and paradoxical figure of the state of exception. This figure is paradoxical here for two reasons. First, in the context of the plantation, the humanity of the slave appears as the perfect figure of a shadow. Indeed, the slave condition results from a triple loss: loss of a “home,” loss of rights over his or her body, and loss of political status. This triple loss is identical with absolute domination, natal alienation, and social death (expulsion from humanity altogether). To be sure, as a political-juridical structure, the plantation is a space where the slave belongs to a master. It is not a community if only because by definition, a community implies the exercise of the power of speech and thought. (170) 230 Ibid., 172. 231 See Zilly, “Uma construção simbólica da nacionalidade num mundo transnacional,” 31-2. Here Zilly explains that many of the new nineteenth century Latin-American nation-states, and especially Brazil, practiced a sort of “internal colonialism,” treating their rural provinces just as the imperialist powers treated their colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. 232 There term is “caverna dos bandidos.” See da Cunha, Os sertões, 541. 233 Fierro and Conselheiro are both incompatible with modernity. Fierro’s desire to live free as a gaucho on the pampa and Conselheiro’s desire to freely practice his religious convictions in the backlands both contradict what modern society demands of them. 234 See Butler, Precarious Life, 79-80. 235 See Walnice, No Calor da Hora, 494. 236 Ibid., 442. 237 Ibid., 269-79. 238 Da Cunha himself, for example, reports Pajeú’s death in Diário, 106. Also see Os sertões, 625.

306 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

239 Libera-me, or Deliver Me, is a Catholic responsory, or death chant, sung during a service for the dead. Also, the sertanejos are called “salaried monarchists” because of the belief that they were receiving foreign aid and supplies to restore the old Brazilian Monarchy. 240 See Walnice, No Calor da Hora, 486. 241 Da Cunha directly admits to the inaccuracy of newspapers multiple times in Os sertões. Undoubtedly he was aware of the exaggerations and twisting of truth in the press. In the following, he points out the ingloriousness of supposed victories that he states were in reality defeats: A ordem do dia relative ao feito de 28 de junho caracteriza-o “uma página tarjada de horrors, mas perfumada de glória”. Mas fora franco o revés. . . . O “exército victorioso”, segundo o brilhante eufemismo das partes oficiais armadas a velarem aquele insucesso, apresentava na noite daqule dia o caráter perfeito de uma aglomeração de foragidos. Triunfadores, que não podiam ensaiar um passo fora da posição conquisrtada. (571) 242 See Esposito, Bios, 50. 243 Interestingly, Sevcenko compares the Canudos War to the 1904 Revolt of the Vaccine in Rio de Janeiro some seven years after the Canudos conflict had ended. This event was sparked in reaction to the government’s desire to modernize the port of Rio de Janeiro, thus recurring to methods much like those used against Canudos. First, in an effort to modernize the port, the government gave engineers unlimited power to engineers which made them immune to judicial action. The mulatos and Afro- Brazilians who inhabited the port were forced from the city center, forming the first favelas. Furthermore, the Health Ministry, alarmed at the outbreak of smallpox now rampant due to the unsanitary conditions where the displaced lived, unleashed a massive vaccination campaign against them. Batallions of health visitors and armed police entered the favelas and cheap hotels under the pretext of vaccinating the residents. However, if signs of health risk were detected, they were authorized to order the place be evacuated, condemning it to demolition with no compensation. Such extreme State violence in the name of modernity and health led to the rebellion known as the Reviolt of the Vaccine. For more, see Sevcenko, “Peregrinations, Visions and the City,” 85-9. 244 See da Cunha, Os sertões, 483. 245 Mbembe explains the war-machine, through modern examples of conflicts such as the Gulf War and the Kosovo campaign, as the point where military-technology can attack the enemy and incur large-scale destruction through air raids, smart bombs, laser-guided missiles, stealth capabilities, etc (think of the Bush administration’s tactic of Shock and Awe in the Afghanistan War). Essentially, “This new moment is one of global [military] mobility,” and “[i]n this sense, contemporary wars are more reminiscent of the warfare strategy of the nomads than of the sedentary nations or the “conquer-and-annex” territorial wars of modernity” (178). The same can be said of nineteenth century frontier conflicts in the Americas. With more advanced technology, the American nation-states warred against the natives or rural inhabitants of their

307 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

frontiers in the same manner as the nomads themselves. We can certainly consider the US cavalry’s tactics against Native Americans. The Glanton Gang in Blood Meridian, armed to the teeth, attacks the Apache in a sort of Shock and Awe strategy; gauchos in Argentina were preferred as soldiers for their equestrian abilities to quickly strike against Pampean natives; and in Os sertões, soldiers wore the clothing of the sertanejos and adopted their ambush tactics of war. In closing, the military presence in American frontiers is not just a technologically advanced war-machine, save a war- machine that adopts the nomadic strategies of the enemies they extinguish. 246 Later, Euclides describes sertanejos that “incinerados, se desenhavam, salteadamente, nítidos, esbatida a bracura da cinzas no chão poento e pardo, à maneira de toscas e grandes caricaturas feitas a giz…” (OS 749). 247 Though separated by two languages, English and Portuguese, I find the often recognized baroque nature of the prose in Os sertões to be strikingly parallel to the remarkable prose in Blood Meridian. This is especially true in regards to the representation of life and the characters in both books. It seems both authors derealize the life of the characters in their books, marking them as eerily spectral and primitive. In Blood Meridian we read: Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all. (172) 248 Walnice, in the first three introductory chapters to No calor da hora, identifies three principal ways the Canudos War was represented in newspapers: “galhofeira, sensacionalista e ponderada” (comical, sensationalist and ponderous). In the galhofeira, the journalist, as unthinkable as it is, makes fun of the simple sertanejos, often portraying humorous ways they die (33-44). The sensacionalista presents the war and violence against the sertanejos as a spectacle (54-75). Finally, the ponderada, the rarest representation, takes the war into account through a critical and thoughtful position (76-108). 249 See Brizuela, ““CURIOSITY!,” 162-3. For more about the positivist evaluations of Conselheiro and his decapitated cranium, also see Levine, “Mud-Hut Jerusalem,” 558- 61. 250 Interestingly, Maudsley did in fact provide certain references to the formation of nations, implying a certain sense of madness to the process, and one that describes perfectly the Canudos conflict: “Have not nations,” he states, “owed their formation as much to brotherly hate as to brotherly love—more perhaps to the welding consolidation enforced by the pressure of hostile peoples than to the attractive forces of their components?” (26).

308 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

WORKS CITED

Abreu, Regina. O enigma de Os sertões. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco Funarte, 1998. Print.

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel

Heller-Roazen. California: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print.

---. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare

Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Print

---. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,

2005. Print.

---. “The State of Exception.” Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio

Agamben’s Homo Sacer. Eds. Hent Vries and Samuel Weber. Calif: Stanford

University Press, 1997. 284-97. Print.

Amoore, Louis and Alexandra Hall. “The clown at the gates of the camp: Sovereignty,

resistance and the figure of the fool.” Security Dialogue 44.2 (2013): 93-110.

JSTORE.

Andermann, Jens. Mapas de poder: Una arqueología literaria del espacio argentino.

Argentina: Estudios Culturales, 2000. Print.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Print.

Andrade, Olimpio de Souza. “‘Os sertõs’ numa frase de Nabuco.” Planalto 1.14

(December 1941): np. Print.

Ansolabehere, Pablo. “Martín Fierro: Frontera y relato.” Fronteras escritas: Cruces,

desvíos y pasajes en la literatura argentina. Eds. Alejandra Laera, Graciela

309 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Batticuore and Loreley El Jaber. Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2008.

235-60. Print.

Arendt, Hannah. Essays in understanding, 1930-1954. Ed. Jerome Kohn. New York:

Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1994. Print.

---. Origins of Totalitarianism. 7th ed. New York: Meridian Books, 1962. Print.

Aristotle. Politics. Trans. C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998. Print.

Arnold, Edwin T. “Naming, Knowing and Nothingness: McCarthy's Moral Parables.”

Southern Quarterly 30 (1992): 31-50. JSTORE.

Ayala-Martínez, Mónica. “Euclides Da Cunha and the Trap of the Republican

Dream.” Chasqui 34.1 (2005): 57-64. JSTORE.

Balibar, Etienne. “Citizen Subject.” Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Ed.

Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson. Tans. James B.

Swenson. New York: Routledge, 1994. 39-60. Print.

Barreto de Santana, José Carlos. “Os sertões: Aspectos da Construção do Discurso.”

Discurso, Ciência e Constrovérsia em Euclides da Cunha. Ed. Leopoldo M.

Bernucci. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2008. 141-56.

Print.

Barretta, Silvio R. Duncan and John Markoff. “Civilization and Barbarism: Cattle

Frontiers in Latin America. States of Violence. Eds. Fernando Coronil and Julie

Skurski. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006. 33-74. Print.

Barthes, Roland, and Annette Lavers. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.

Print.

310 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Bell, Vereen M. The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana

State University Press, 1988. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. 1968. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New

York: Schocken Books, 2007. Print.

Bernucci, Leopoldo M. A imitação dos sentidos. São Paulo: Editora da universidade

de São Paulo, 1995. Print.

---. “A ontologia discursive de Os sertões.” História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos 5.0

(1998): 1-12. Sielo. Web. 17 Abril 2015.

---. “Além do real, aquém do imaginario: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento e Euclides da

Cunha.” Brasil/Brazil: Revista de literatura brasilera 3.4 (1990): 51-68.

JSTORE.

---. “Ceintificismo e Aporias em Os sertões.” Discurso, Ciência e Constrovérsia em

Euclides da Cunha. Ed. Leopoldo M. Bernucci. São Paulo: Editora da

Universidade de São Paulo, 2008. 23-40. Print.

---. Prefácio. Os sertões: campanha de canudos. By Euclides da Cunha. Ed. Leopoldo

M. Bernucci. Brazil: Ateliê Editorial, 2002. Print.

Bhabha, Homi K. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. Print.

Bloom, Harold. Introduction. Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West.

By Cormac McCarthy.

Boever, Arne de. Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel. New York: Bloomsbury

Academic, 2013. Print.

311 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

---. State of Exception and the Contemporary Novel. New York: Continuum, 2012.

Print.

Bolton, Herbert Eugene. Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century: Studies in Spanish

Colonial History and Administration. New York: Russell & Russell, 1962.

Print.

---. “The Epic of Greater America.” American Historical Review 3 (1933): 448-74.

Print.

---. The Spanish borderlands: a Chronicle of old Florida and the Southwest. New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1921. Print.

---. Wider Horizons of American History. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame

Press, 1967. Print.

Borges, Jorge Luis. El “Martín Fierro.” Ed. Margarita Guerrero. Madrid: Alianza

Editorial, 1983. Print

---. Obras Completas. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1974. Print.

Borges, Patrícia Cardoso. “A interpretação d’Os sertões, ontem e hoje.” Os sertões de

Euclides da Cunha: Releituras e diálogos. Ed. José Leonardo do Nascimiento.

São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2002. 191-204. Print.

Brandão, Adelino. Euclides da Cunha e a questão racial no Brasil (a antropologia de

Os sertões). Rio de Janeiro: Presença, 1990. Print.

Brizuela, Natalia. ““CURIOSITY! WONDER!! HORROR!!! MISERY!!!!” THE

CAMPANHA DE CANUDOS, OR THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF

HISTORY.” Qui Parle 15.2 (2005): 139-169. JSTORE.

312 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Butler, Bill. Dictionary of the Tarot. New York: Schocken, 1975. Print

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?. New York: Verso, 2009.

Print.

---. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso, 2004.

Print.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 3rd Ed. Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2005. Print.

Campbell, Neil. "Liberty beyond its proper bounds: Cormac McCarthy's history of the

West in Blood Meridian." Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac

McCarthy. Ed. Rick Wallach. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press,

2000. 217-226. Print.

---. The Cultures of the American New West. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers,

2000.Print.

Cant, John. Cormac Mccarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism. New York:

Routledge, 2008. Print.

Carilla, Emilio. La creación del Martín Fierro. Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1973. Print.

Castro-Klarén, Sara. “Locura y dolor: La elaboracion de la historia en Os sertões y La

guerra del fin del mundo.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 10.20

(1984): 207-231. JSTORE.

---. “Santos and Cangaceiros: Inscription without Discourse in Os Sertões and La

guerra del fin del mundo.” MLN 101.2 (March 1986): 366-388. JSTORE.

313 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Coronil, Fernando and Julie Skurski. “Introduction: States of Violence and Violence

of States.” States of Violence. Eds. Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski. Ann

Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006. 1-32. Print.

Cover, Robert M. “Violence and the Word.” The Yale Law Journal 95.8 (1986): 1601-

1629. JSTORE.

Cunha, Euclides da. Caderneta de Campo. Ed. Olímpio de Souza Andrade.

Brasil: Editora Cultrix LTDA, 1975. Print.

---. Correspondência de Euclides da Cunha. Ed. Walnice Nogueira Galvão e Oswaldo

Galotti. São Paulo: EdUSP, 1997. Print.

---. Diário de uma Expedição. Ed. Walnice Norgueira Galvão. São Paulo: Companhia

das Letras, 2000. Print.

---. Os sertões: campanha de canudos. Ed. Leopoldo M. Bernucci. Brazil: Ateliê

Editorial, 2002. Print.

---. Rebellion in the Backlands. Trans. Samuel Putnam. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1964. Print.

Dabove, Juan Pablo. Nightmares of the Lettered City: Banditry and Literature in Latin

America. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Print

Daughtery, Leo. “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy.”

Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Eds. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C.

Luce. Revised Ed. Jackson: University Press of Missippi, 1999. 159-74. Print.

Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the

Third World. New York: Verso, 2001. Print.

314 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

De Groot, Jerome. The Historic Novel. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press, 1981. Print.

Dickinson, Edward Ross. “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on

Our Discourse about “Modernity”.” Central European History 37.1 (2004): 1-

48. JSTORE.

Dorson, James. “Demystifying the Judge: Law and Mythical Violence in Cormac

McCarthy's Blood Meridian.” Journal of Modern Literature 36.2 (2013): 105-

121. JSTORE.

Esposito, Roberto. Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2008. Print.

---. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Trans. Zakiya Hanafi. USA:

Polity Press, 2011. Print.

Estrada, Ezequiel Martínez. Muerte y transfiguración de Martín Fierro. 2 vols.

Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1948. Print.

Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New

York: Colombia University Press, 1983. Print.

Fernandes, Raul C. Gouveia. “Euclides e a literatura: Comentários sobre a "moldura"

de Os Sertões.” Luso-Brazilian Review Vol.2 (2006): 45-62. JSTORE.

Fitz, Earl E. Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a

Comparative Context. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. Print.

315 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

--- and Elizabeth Lowe. Translation and the Rise of Inter-American Literature.

Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. Print.

Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France,

1977-78. Ed. Michel Senellart. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave

McMillan: République Français, 2007. Print.

---. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France. Trans. David

Macey. New York: Picador, 1997. Print.

---. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978 – 79.

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.

---. The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Book, 1978.

Print.

Franco, Rafael Olea. “Lugones y el mito gauchesco. Un capítulo de historia cultural

argentina.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 38.1 (1990): 307-331.

JSTORE.

Franko, Mark. “Dance and the Political: States of Exception.” Dance Research

Journal 38.1/2 (2006): 3-18. JSTORE.

Freyre, Gilberto. Perfil de Euclides e Outros Perfis. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria José

Olympio Editora, 1944. Print.

Frye, Steven. Understanding Cormac McCarthy. USA: The University of South

Carolina Press, 2009. Print.

Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1977. Print.

316 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Gourgouris, Stathis. Does Literature Think?: Literature As Theory for an Antimythical

Era. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2003. Print.

Greenfield, Gerald. “Migrant Behavior and Elite Attitudes: Brazil’s Great Drought,

1877-79,” The Americas 43:1 (July 1986): 69-85. JSTORE.

Gregory, Derek. “The Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and the Space of Exception.”

Geografiska Annaler 88.4 (2006): 405-427. JSTORE

Gutiérrez, Eduardo. Juan Moreira. Buenos Aire: Centro Editor de América Latina,

1980. Print.

Guglielmini, Homero M. Fronteras de la literature argentina. Buenos Aires: Editorial

Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1972. Print.

Guy, Donna J., and Thomas E. Sheridan, eds. Contested Ground: Comparative

Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire. Tucson:

University of Arizona Press, 1998. Print.

Hauns, Saussy. “Comparative Literature?.” PMLA 118.2 (2003): 336-341. JSTORE.

Haverkamp, Ansel and Cornelia Vismann. “Habeas Corpus: The Law’s Desire to

Have the Body.” Violence, identity, and self-determination. Eds. Hent Vries

and Samuel Weber. Calif: Stanford University Press, 1997. 223-35. Print.

Heffes, Gisela. "Martín Fierro" ante la ley: el problema del cuerpo, la voz y sus usos

específicos.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 37. 74 (2011): 9-

23. JSTORE.

Hernández, José. Martín Fierro. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2007. Print.

317 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Herrero, Enrique. Prosas de José Hernández, autor de “Martín Fierro.” Buenos Aires:

Editorial Futuro, 1944. Print.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: Or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth

Ecclesiasticall and Civill. Ed. Ian Shapiro. New Haven: Yale University Press,

2010. Print.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York:

Herder and Herder, 1972. Print.

Hudson, William Henry. Tales of the Pampa. New York: Alred A. Knopf, 1916. Print.

Hughes, John B. Arte y sentido de Martín Fierro. Madrid: Castalia, 1972. Print.

Humphreys, Stephen. “Legalizing Lawlessness: On Giorgio Agamben’s State of

Exception.” The European Journal of International Law. 17.3 (2006): 677–

687. JSTORE.

Hurtado, Albert. Herbert Eugene Bolton: Historian of the American Borderlands.

Berkley: University of California Press, 2012. Print.

James, Caryn. “Is Everybody Dead around Here?” New York Times Book Review 28

(1985): 31. Print.

Jarrett, Robert L. Cormac McCarthy. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997. Print.

Johnson, Adraiana M. C. “Subalternizing Canudos.” MLN 120.2 (March 2005): 355-

382. JSTORE.

---. Sentencing Canudos: Subalternity in the Backlands of Brazil. Pittsburgh:

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. Print.

318 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Jones, Kristine L., “Comparative Raiding Economies.” Contested Ground:

Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish

Empire. Eds. Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan. Tucson: University of

Arizona Press, 1998. 97-114. Print.

---. “Civilization and Barbarism and Sarmiento’s Indian Policy.” Sarmiento and His

Argentina. Ed. Joseph T. Criscenti. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993.

35-44. Print.

Josyph, Peter. “Blood Music: Reading Blood Meridian.” Sacred Violence: A Reader’s

Companion to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach. El Paso:

Texas Western Press, 1995.169-88. Print.

Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Trans. Breon Mitchell. New York: Schocken Books, 1998.

Print.

Kollin, Susan. "Genre and the Geographies of Violence: Cormac McCarthy and the

Contemporary Western." Contemporary Literature 42.3 (2001): 557-88.

JSTORE.

Larraya, Antonio Pages. Prosas del Martín Fierro. Buenos Aires: Editorial Raigal,

1952. Print.

Leudman, Carlos Alberto. El poeta creador. Cómo hizo Hernández “La vuelta de

Martín Fierro.” Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1945. Print.

Levine, Robert M. ““Mud-Hut Jerusalem”: Canudos Revisited.” The Hispanic

American Historical Review 68.3 (August 1988): 525-572. JSTORE.

319 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

---. Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1893-

1897. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Print.

Lima, Luiz Costa. “Os sertões: História e Romance.” Discurso, Ciência e

Constrovérsia em Euclides da Cunha. Ed. Leopoldo M. Bernucci. São Paulo:

Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2008. 63-76. Print.

---. Terra Ignota: A construção de Os Sertões. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira,

1997. Print.

Ludmer, Josefina. El género gauchesco: Un tratado sobre la patria. Buenos Aires:

Editorial Sudamericana, 1988. Print.

Lugones, Leopoldo. El payador. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1991. Print.

Mansilla, Lucio V. Una Excursión a Los Indios Ranqueles. Ed. Saúl

Sosnowski. Caracas, Venezuela: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1984. Print.

Maudsley, Henry. The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind. London: MacMillan,

1897. Print.

Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Biopolitics: A Reader. Eds. Timothy C Campbell

and Adam Sitze. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2013. 161-

92. Print.

McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West. 1984.

USA: Vintage, 1992. Print.

McGilchrist, Megan R. The Western Landscape in Cormac Mccarthy and Wallace

Stegner: Myths of the Frontier. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.

320 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Menchaca, Martha. Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and

White Roots of Mexican Americans. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.

Print.

Merquior, José Guilherme. De Anchieta a Euclides: breve história da literatura

brasileira. 2ª ed. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria José Olympio Editora, 1979. Print.

Moog, Clodomir Vianna. “Bandeirantes and Pioneers.” Where Cultures Meet:

Frontiers in Latin American History. Eds. David J. Weber and Jane M.

Rausch. Wilmington, Del: SR Books, 1994. 165-72. Print.

Moreira, Raimundo Nonato Pereira. “Victor Hugo e a Vendéia em Os Sertões:

historiografia e literatura em Euclides da Cunha” Universidade Estadual

Sudoeste da Bahia. ANPUH, 2007. Web. 21 May 2008.

ira.pdf>

Murdoch, David H. The American West: The Invention of a Myth. Wales: Welsh

Academic Press, 2001. Print.

Nichols, Sallie. Jung and the Tarot: An Archetypal Journey. New York: Weiser, 1980.

Print.

Owens, Barcley. Cormac McCarthy's Western Novels. Tucson: University of Arizona

Press, 2000. Print.

Parrish, Timothy. From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and

American Fiction. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. Print.

321 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Patton, Elda Clayton. Sarmiento in The United States. Indiana: The University of

Evansville Press, 1979. Print.

Pease, Donald E. "Between the Homeland and Abu Ghraib: Dwelling in the Bush's

Biopolitical Settlement." Eds. Ashley Dawson and Malini J.

Schueller. Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New

Imperialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 60-87. Print.

Pérez, Firmat Gustavo, ed. Do the Americas Have a Common Literature?. Durham:

Duke UP, 1990. Print.

Pérez, Julián. Los dilemas políticos de la cultura letrada (Argentina-siglo XIX).

Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor, 2002. Print.

Pughe, Thomas. “Revision and Vision: Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian.”” Revue

française d'études américaines 62. 80 (1994): 371-382. JSTORE.

Putnam, Samuel. Introduction. Rebellion in the Backlands. By Euclides da Cunha.

Trans. Putnam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964. Print.

Phillips, Dana. “History and the Ugly Facts of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.”

American Literature 68.2 (1996): 433-60. JSTORE.

Rama, Angel. Los gauchipolíticos rioplatenses. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de

América Latina, 1982. Print.

Renan, Ernest. “What is a Nation?” On the Nation and the Jewish People. Trans.

David Fernhach. Ed. Shlomo Sand. New York: Verso, 2010. 37-68. Print.

322 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Rifkin, Mark. “Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the

“Peculiar” Status of Native Peoples.” Cultural Critique 73 (2009): 88-124.

JSTORE.

Rockland, Michael Aaron. “Sarmiento’s Views on the United States.” Sarmiento and

His Argentina. Ed. Joseph T. Criscenti. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers,

1993. 45-50. Print.

Roggiano, Alfredo A. “Personal Destiny and National Destiny in Martín Fierro.”

Trans. William J. Straub. Latin American Literary Review 3.5 (1974): 37-49.

JSTORE.

Romero, Facundo Gómez. “The Archaeology of the Gaucho "Vago y Mal

Entretenido." International Journal of Historical Archaeology 9.3 (September

2005): 143-164. JSTORE.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. Print.

Salvadori de Decca, Edgar and Maria Lucia Abaurre Gnerre. “Trauma e história na

composição de Os sertões.” Os sertões de Euclides da Cunha: releituras e

diálogos. São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2002. 41-62. Print.

Sampaio, Consuelo Novais. “Repensando Canudos: O Jogo das Oligarquias.” The

World Out of Which Canudos Came. Spec. Issue of Luso-Brazilian Review

30.2 (1993): 97-113. JSTORE.

Santner, Eric L. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2006. Print.

323 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Sarmiento, Domingo Fausto. Facundo: o, civilización y barbarie. Caracas: Biblioteca

Ayacucho, 1977. Print.

---. Obras Completas de Sarmiento. Tomo XXV. Buenos Aires: Editorial Luz del Día,

1952. Print.

Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology. Trans. George Schwab. Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press, 2005. Print.

Sepich, John. “Blood Meridian and the Dance of History.” The Southern Literary

Journal 24.1 (1991): 16-31. JSTORE.

---. Notes on Blood Meridian. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. Print.

---. ““What kind of indians was them?”: Some Historical Sources in Cormac

McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Eds. Edwin

T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Revised Ed. Jackson: University Press of

Missippi, 1999. 121-42. Print.

Sevcenko, Nicolau. Literatura como Missão: tensões sociais e criação cultural na

Primeira República. 3rd ed. São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1989. Print.

---. “Peregrinations, Visions and the City: From Canudos to Brasília, the Backlands

becomes the City and the City becomes the Backlands.” Through the

Kaleidoscope. Ed. Vivian Schelling. New York: Verso, 2000. 75-107. Print

Shakespear, William. Kind Lear. Ed. Burton Raffel. New Haven: Yale University

Press, 2007. Print.

Shumway, Nicholas. The Invention of Argentina. Berkley: University of California

Press, 1991. Print.

324 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Slatta, Richard. Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier. Lincoln: University of Nebraska

Press, 1983. Print.

---. “Rural Criminality and Social Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires

Province.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 60.3 (1980). 450-472.

Print.

Slatta, Richard W. Comparing Cowboys and Frontiers. Norman: University of

Oklahoma Press, 1997. Print.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American

Frontier, 1600-1860. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.

Print.

Spurgeon, Sara L. Exploding the Western: Myths of Empire on the Postmodern

Frontier. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2005. Print.

Sullivan, Walter. “About Any Kind of Meaness You Can Name.” The Sewanee

Review 93.4 (1985): 649-656. Print.

Tinker, Edward L. The Horsemen of the Americas and the Literature They Inspired.

Austin: Published for the Humanities Research Center by the University of

Texas Press, 1967. Print.

Unamuno, Miguel de. “El gaucho Martín Fierro: Poema popular gauchesco de don

José Hernández.” Revista Española 1.1 (1894): 5-22. Print.

Valente, Luiz Fernando. “Os sertões: Entre a Memória e a história,” Discurso, Ciência

e Constrovérsia em Euclides da Cunha. Ed. Leopoldo M. Bernucci. São Paulo:

Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2008. 157-70. Print.

325 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

Ventura, Roberto. “Canudos como cidade iletrada: Euclides da Cunha na "urbs"

monstruosa.” Revista de Antropologia 40.1 (1997): 165-181. Print.

---. “A Nossa Vendéia”: Canudos, o Mito da Revolução Francesa e a Constituição de

Identidade nacional: Cultura no Brasil (1897-1902).” Revista da Crítica

Literaria Latinamericana. 12.24, (1986). 109-125. JSTORE.

Veríssimo, José. Estudos de literature brasileira: 5ª. série. São Paulo: Belo Horizonte,

Itatiaia, 1977. Print.

Villa, Marco Antonio. “O Diáraio de uma expedição e a construção de Os sertões.”

Os sertões de Euclides da Cunha: releituras e diálogos. São Paulo: Editora

UNESP, 2002. 11-40. Print.

Viñas, David. Indios, ejército y frontera. México: Siglo Veintiuno, 1983. Print.

Walnice Nogueira Galvão. No Calor da Hora: A Guerra de Canudos nos Jornais, 4ª

Expedição. 3rd edition. São Paulo: Editora Ática, 1994. Print.

Weber, David J, and Jane M. Rausch, eds. Where Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin

American History. Wilmington, Del: SR Books, 1994. Print.

Zilly, Berthold. “A Barbárie: antítese ou elemento da Civilização? Do Facundo de

Sarmiento a Os Sertões de Euclides da Cunha.” De sertões, desertos e espaços

incivilizados. Eds. Angela Mendes de Almeida, Berthold Zilly and Eli

Napoleão de Lima. Rio de Janeiro: Mauad, 2001. 271-301. Print.

---. “Canudos Telegrafado: A guerra do fim do mundo como de mídia na Europa de

1897” Ibero-amerikanisches Archiv 26 (2000): 59-96. JSTORE.

326 Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015

---. “Uma construção simbólica da nacionalidade num mundo transnacional: Os

sertões de Euclides da Cunha, cem anos depois.” Revista outros Sertões 3

(2009): 31-45. Print.

---. “Uma crítica precoce à “globalização” e uma epopéia da literatura universal: Os

sertões de Euclides da Cunha cem anos depois.” Os sertões de Euclides da

Cunha: Releituras e diálogos. Ed. José Leonardo do Nascimiento. São Paulo:

Editora UNESP, 2002. 63-72. Print.

327