The Amazon of Euclides da Cunha

March 24, 2008

photo by Flick user matt.hintsa, used under Creative Commons License

I am a little late stumbling on this, but Oxford University Press has been steadily releasing volumes for their Library of Latin America series. These are English translations of works that are important for understanding the Latin American tradition, but which do not break into what we might call world literature.

The volume I have been reading is by Euclides da Cunha, and is entitled The Amazon: Land Without History. This work relates to my long standing interest in the way places acquire cultural meaning. The place in question is the Amazon basin, which Euclides visited in 1905 and about which he proceeded to write a series of short essays. The commercial exploitation and human settlement of the Amazon was well under way even a century ago. Euclides, in fact, sees himself as arriving at the tail end of this process:

The contemporary narrator arrives during the final act of a drama and sees, astonished, only the close of the last scene. [45]

The Amazon and its continuing destruction has come to our consciousness over the past couple of decades. Saving the Amazon is a cause taken up now by celebrities. But the stakes were already clear in 1905..

Euclides appears to fill the important role of mediator and interpreter for the Amazon. He acknowledges that other important writers have described the Amazon, but nevertheless he views the Amazon as a culturally empty space. Here is a passage from the opening paragraph of his first essay:

But since, from early on in life, each of us has drawn an ideal Amazonia in our minds thanks to the remarkably lyrical pages left us by the countless travelers, from Humboldt down to today, who have contemplated the prodigious hylean rain forest with almost religious awe, we experience a common psychological reaction when we come face to face with the real Amazon: we see it as somehow lacking with respect to the subjective image we have long held of it. [3]

So the Amazon is hardly "empty space" in cultural terms. Countless travelers have written about this space.. even with "religious awe"! Meaning has therefore been generated for the Amazon, but Euclides is complaining about the way this international cultural frame does not match up with what a traveler actually encounters in the Amazon. Immediately following this passage we find Euclides switching to a nationalistic frame of reference:

...as a strictly artistic phenomenon... it is decidedly inferior to countless other sites in our own country. In this regard, the entire Amazonian region cannot match, for example, the stretch of our coastline that runs from Cabo Frio to Ponta de Munduba. [3]

That simple phrase "our coastline" drags us away from the international audience that Humboldt had in mind and lets us know that this is an essay in Brazilian cultural geography.. i.e. how to imbue this space with nationalistic meaning.

The problem with the Amazon as Euclides first describes it is that it cannot hold history:

...because of this lack of the vertical dimension, essential to imparting a sense of life to a landscape, within a few hours the observer tires in the face of an unbearable monotony and begins to notice that their gaze is less and less frequently directed to that endless horizon as empty and undefined as that of the sea. [4]

Place gains meaning through its association with culturally central narratives. Those narratives need what we might call a foothold.. some way for a particular incident to be identified as occurring at a particular spot on the earth. Although the oceans have witnessed many historical events, those events can never be marked on the ocean. There are no landmarks for the open sea and the ocean is history-less in that sense. Euclides, by invoking the image of the sea, sets the Amazon as a natural blank slate. This blank slate image is further aided by his description of the shifting rivers and their random destruction of river banks. Just try to settle down history here!

His second essay begins by citing The Rivers and Valleys of Pennsylvania (1889) by the geographer William Morris Davis. He sketches quickly what he finds interesting in this North American work:

...revealing [our watercourses] to be possessed of an ebullient infancy, a rebellious adolescence, a self-controlled maturity, and a melancholy old age or decrepitude... [18]

Euclides goes on to discuss the natural history of the Amazon and its tributaries, adapting this narrative approach to his South American setting. This conjunction of a history-less land with a natural history that provides a long back story for a place is a textbook example of the cultural use of scientific work.

We might ask more broadly: why does natural history become such a flourishing form in the modern period? A common answer would be that this form of writing mirrors scientific advances. I lean more toward the notion that as Europeans encountered lands with foreign populations, they turned to a new mode of writing that allowed for the emplacement of a new history. This was part of the colonial enterprise, but the new nations that formed in the wake of colonialism took up natural history for themselves, using it as a way to define and give history to their land.

That contextualization of scientific works might sound strange, I know.. but that is because we continue to live under these same assumptions about scientific work. Euclides is particularly valuable for the clear connection between national interest and natural history.