Amazonian Cartographies: Mapping Novels and the Production of Space in Twentieth-Century Latin America
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AMAZONIAN CARTOGRAPHIES: MAPPING NOVELS AND THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY LATIN AMERICA by Amanda Mignonne Smith A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland June 2015 © 2015 Amanda Mignonne Smith All Rights Reserved Abstract The decline of the first Amazonian Rubber Boom in 1912 was only the beginning of Amazonia’s emergence as an important literary territory. This dissertation explores how Latin American intellectuals throughout the twentieth century grapple in their novels with the ways that extractive processes at different historical moments surveyed, transformed, and devastated Amazonia and how their resulting literary cartographies have intervened in Amazonian spaces. Scholars have recently begun to consider the representation of Amazonia across Latin American fiction, addressing the void in literary criticism on this region commonly relegated to anthropological, biological, and geographical studies. However, the role that literature has played in shaping Amazonia has not received sufficient attention. My research focuses on authors from Amazonian countries whose work writes against processes such as state mapping, geographic curriculum, railroad construction, and extractivism that have codified Amazonia for integration into cultural and economic projects. I examine how their novels try to account for geographic experiences elided for the sake of those projects as well as how their efforts to design what they see as more faithful literary “maps” often produce other problematic omissions. I engage the problem of the translation of space from observation to representation—literary and otherwise—and I theorize how these representations work to create Amazonia in their image. The first chapter unpacks La vorágine (1924) as a response to José Eustasio Rivera’s participation in the Colombian-Venezuelan border commission from 1921-1922. Chapter 2 departs from Rómulo Gallegos’s 1935 novel Canaima to illustrate the ways that literature, geographic curriculum, and shamanism have overlapped in mapping Guayana. The third chapter shows how the destruction of railroad records presents an opportunity for Brazilian author ii Márcio Souza in Mad Maria (1980) to reinvent the spaces of American capitalism along the Madeira and Mamoré Rivers. Finally, my last chapter considers the transformation of Iquitos into a shamanic retreat center via César Calvo’s Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo y otros brujos de la Amazonía (1981). Together, these chapters demonstrate the complex interplay between various modes of spatial representation and the crucial role played by literature in negotiating and producing Amazonian spaces. Advisor: Sara Castro-Klarén Second Reader: Eduardo González iii Acknowledgements This dissertation had to cross the Andes before reaching Amazonia, an intellectual and personal journey that would not have been possible without the guidance, support, flexibility, and tireless feedback of my advisor, Sara Castro-Klarén, whose expertise, insight, and academic rigor both demanded and inspired excellence in my work. I am also indebted to Eduardo González, Bill Egginton, Harry Sieber, Nadia Altschul, Lisa DeLeonardis, Debbie Poole, and Franklin Knight, in whose seminars I began tinkering with many of the ideas that appear here. A special thanks to Julie Reiser for her indispensable dissertation writing workshop and to la Joda members, Amy Sheeran, Christopher Kozey, Julia Baumgardt, and Mike Strayer, for being exemplary colleagues and peer editors and steadfastly encouraging friends. My archival work in Colombia and Peru was supported by grants from JHU’s Program in Latin American Studies and the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures. I am eternally grateful to the personnel at the Archivo General de la Nación and the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia (BNC) in Bogotá, especially Camilo Páez and Robinson López Arévalo of the BNC. In Iquitos, I am grateful to Julio Ramírez Arévalo for helping me navigate the Biblioteca Amazónica and to Martín Reátegui for the tips on Manuel Córdova that saved me days of searching. To my generous hosts and homes away from home, my most heartfelt gratitude: in Bogotá, Elsa, Gustavo, and Mauricio Patiño, and Tulia Peña; in Lima, Norma Vital Luna, Raúl Molina Caballero, Sebastián Flores Molina, and turay Carlos Molina Vital. I wrote the entirety of this dissertation in my surrogate university community in Bloomington, Indiana. There, I am indebted to Micaela Richter, John Nieto-Phillips, Anke Birkenmaier, and Sylvia Martínez, who adopted me into the Latino Studies familia and sponsored me to use IU’s research facilities. The first people to welcome me to IU were Spanish iv graduate students, Eric Carbajal and Hannah Agauas, whose support and companionship are woven into the pages that follow. I thank them, especially, for the necessary levity that their senses of humor brought to long hours of dissertating. The seeds of my future doctoral self were planted during my undergraduate years on another Big Ten campus in a course on Borges, García Márquez, Onetti, and Rulfo. María E. Mudrovcic’s challenging and provocative class discussions first whetted my appetite for Latin American literature, and she has, since that time, been a constant and enthusiastic champion of my intellectual pursuits. For the inexhaustible fount of inspiration that her wisdom has provided me over the years, I offer my most profound appreciation. I am overwhelmed with gratitude for mi amor, mi cómplice y todo, to borrow from Benedetti. Grant Whipple shared in every frustration and anxiety, triumph and joy along this adventure, both on paper and in the jungle. He patiently listened as I talked through ideas, asked stimulating questions that helped me clarify my thoughts, celebrated milestones big and small, believed in me during every step forward and back, and shared a soggy night of sleeplessness on the jungle floor of Pacaya-Samiria in the middle of a tropical storm. He would be the first to say that I could have done this without him, but the experience would have lacked luster. Finally, this dissertation is dedicated to two people who accompanied me only in spirit throughout this process. To my grandfather, Bob Smith, who played poker to pay his way through medical school, studied less than his peers, and received the highest marks. Without his hard work, vision, and generosity, my education would not have been possible. To my dad, Paul Smith, who, more than anyone else, helped me to cultivate my imagination and curiosity. I thank him for spending many weekends of his all-too-brief life telling me that everything I wrote was genius as I sat on his lap crafting short stories on his word processor. v Table of Contents Introduction..................................................................................................................................1 1. Mapping Lines, Writing Vortexes: Cartographic Illusion and Counter-Mapping in La vorágine..................................................................................................................................25 2. Canaima and the Layers of Spatial Discourse in Guayana: Regionalism, Geography Manuals, and Kanaimà................................................................................................................................83 3. Laying Tracks to Nowhere: Márcio Souza’s Dark Ecology in Mad Maria ............................148 4. Iquitos at the Crosscurrents of Extraction and Shamanism: Hidden Spaces in César Calvo’s Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo y otros brujos de la Amazonía.....................................................207 5. Conclusions..............................................................................................................................285 6. Works Cited.............................................................................................................................293 vi List of Figures 1. Carlincatura from February 5, 2015 ........................................................................................2 2. Colombian 20,000 peso note ...................................................................................................33 3. Detail of 1923 map corresponding to Rivera’s section of the commission.............................43 4. One of Rivera’s maps of the river system near the Isana, Inírida, and Guaviare ....................45 5. First page of the manuscript of La vorágine............................................................................46 6. 1928 Editorial Andes front matter ...........................................................................................65 7. Photograph of Rivera as Arturo Cova for early editions of La vorágine ................................77 8. Los pueblos que se tragó el carbón..........................................................................................81 9. Front matter for Smith’s geography ........................................................................................118 10. Logging rails overgrown with vegetation at site of Astoria mill...........................................263 11. Overgrown sawmill infrastructure at former Astoria site......................................................264 12. Rusted metal crane and overgrown sawmill infrastructure at former Astoria site ................264 13. Astoria Sawmill on the Amazon River, c. 1947-1948...........................................................269