The Literature of Catastrophe

Nature, Disaster and Revolution in Latin America

Carlos Fonseca

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501350641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria latinoamericana y caribeña

This book investigates how nature and history intertwined during the violent aftermath of the Latin American Wars of Independence. Synthesizing intellectual history and readings of textual production, The Literature of Catastrophe reimagines the emergence of the modern Latin American nation-states beyond the scope of the harmonious "foundational fictions" that marked the emergence of the nation as an organic community. Through a study of philosophical, literary and artistic representations of three catastrophic figures – earthquakes, volcanoes and epidemics – this book provides a critical model through which to refute these state-sponsored "happy narratives, " proposing instead that the emergence of the modern state in Latin America was indeed a violent event whose aftershocks are still felt today. Engaging a variety of sources and protagonists, from Simón Bolívar's manifestoes to Cesar Aira's use of landscape in his novels, from the revolutionary role mosquitoes had within the Haitian Revolution to the role AIDS played in the writing of Reinaldo Arenas' posthumous novel, Carlos Fonseca offers an original retelling of this foundational moment, recounting how history has become a site where the modern division between nature and culture collapses.

1

Introduction

Radical landscapes

Psychology knows that he who imagines disasters in some way desires them.

But why do they come so eagerly to greet him?

– Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

In one of the opening passages of Ricardo Piglia’s 1980 novel Respiración artificial, while contemplating the river and thinking about the recurrence of floods in the border town where he lives, the narrator remembers an idea of a friend: ‘Tardewski says that nature does not exist except in dreams. Nature only makes itself manifest, he says, in catastrophes and in lyric poetry. Everything that surrounds us, he says, is artificial, bearing the mark of human life.’¹ Today, almost four decades later, when the discussions regarding the end of nature and the arrival of the era of the Anthropocene seem omnipresent, Piglia’s words gain a prophetic tone. Incapable of finding solace in lyric poetry, expelled from the natural garden that comforted the romantics, it would seem that our society can only experience the return of nature under the sign of catastrophe. Today, we witness nature return with the force of the repressed as the catastrophic occurrence that interrupts the passage of empty time, bursting the continuity of homogenous chronology, imposing upon it the time of eventuality. Confronted with the image of its eradication, it would seem that the fear of an end has finally woken nature up from its slumber, forcing it to show its radical face.

No longer the ahistorical and apolitical garden of yesteryear, nature thus proves capable of unearthing the political memory of that which was buried under the landscape of history. The travellers who today visit the state of Bahía, in Brazil, can experience directly this conflation of nature and history. During the summer months, when the droughts that assault the region become pronounced and the Cocorobó Dam begins to dry up, the visitor witnesses the re-emergence of a ruinous landscape that recalls the history of an event the Brazilian State wished had been by now forgotten. Built in 1968 under the pretence of supplying water to the often drought-stricken region, the dam was also meant to finally submerge the memory of an infamous episode in Brazilian modern history: the Canudos War, which, from the late months of 1896 till October 1897, the still-burgeoning republican government waged against the more than 8,000 followers of millenarian lay prophet Antonio Vicente Mendes Maciel, better known as Antônio Conselheiro.² Unknowingly realizing one of his most famous prophecies – ‘The backlands will become the sea and the sea will become the backlands’ – the state’s construction of the dam was meant to erase the memory of a War that hypostatized the violent foundations upon which the progressivist rails of Brazilian history were built.³ Little did the government know that the prophecy, like nature, was indeed circular and that the sea was also meant to become once again the backlands. And so, today, as catastrophe periodically strikes the region in the form of prolonged droughts, the waters of the dam subside and the sea becomes once again a desert, allowing the traveller to witness the re-emergence of the ruins of the Conselheiro’s church as a long-lost echo of a history that refuses to be silenced.

Watching the ruins of Canudos emerging from the waters of the Cocorobó Dam I remember thinking that the image instantiated an intuition that had guided my writing project all along: the belief that what we experience today as the conflation between nature and culture – that which nowadays gains the name of Anthropocene, Capitalocene or even Chthulucene – was in fact the echo of a longer history that in the Latin American case remitted all the way back to the foundational moment of our catastrophic modernity: the nineteenth century, which saw the collapse of empires throughout the continent, alongside the violent emergence of the modern nation-states. The image of Canudos’s ruins emerging from beneath the waters concretized the intuition that the relevant answers to our present-day concerns regarding the end of nature, the end of history and the fate of politics were to be found not only in the myopic inspection of the present, but rather by performing an archaeology that uncovered the ways nature and culture overlapped in that seminal century that, under the enlightened pretence of progress, marked Latin America’s problematic entrance into the modern landscape.

Seeing that ghostlike landscape, witnessing how the spectres of history had been there conjured by the power of nature, I remember recalling that the phenomenon of Canudos had in fact been constructed upon a myth of return. It had been around the myth of the return of legendary King Sebastian of Portugal that Antônio Conselheiro was able to weave the millenarian message that recruited the improvised army of more than 8,000 outlaw bandits, jagunços, landless farmers, former slaves and indigenous people who bravely defeated three expeditionary army forces sent by the Brazilian government before falling victim to the unmerciful bombardment of the state forces led by General Arthur Oscar de Andrade Guimarães. The Conselheiro’s anti-Statist message, in its prophetic annunciation of the return of monarchic rule, had echoed with the multitude composed of all those who felt excluded from the representative apparatus that had emerged in 1889 alongside the republic and its uneven project of modernization. Like the ruins of the church, emerging from within the waters that threatened to condemn its history to oblivion, Canudos was indeed a symptom that marked the return of the repressed: the violence of history inscribed within a political landscape that refused to be tamed or domesticated by the progressivist logic of the state.

To begin then to think of nature’s return, today, implies thinking of nature against the social contract, which, since the beginning of modernity, has forced us to conceive of it as an entity beyond culture and outside history. Confronted with the ruins of Canudos and with the catastrophic logic of covering and uncovering that is there disclosed, the question remains: how to think of this radical landscape that refuses to be incorporated into that which Jens Anderman has called ‘the optic of the state’?⁴ And if, as W.J.T. Mitchell has suggested, ‘landscape is an instrument of cultural power’, a dispositif through which first imperial powers and later state powers legitimized and naturalized their existence, what would it mean to speak of such a radical landscape?⁵ These questions point towards the heart of many of the concerns which will echo throughout this book. They suggest that Latin American nature, rather than being the peaceful site of sublime contemplation, has been for centuries the site of power contestations and that as such it bears, inscribed within it, a history of political struggles that it is our task today to decipher, as a geologist would interpret a fossil or a rock. In fact, it is precisely under such geological terms that the figure of Antônio Conselheiro is first brought up in Euclides da Cunha’s 1902 classic Os sertões, the seminal account of the Canudos War, as well as its most complex and fascinating historical analysis:

It was not surprising that our deep ethnic strata pushed up the extraordinary figure of Antonio Conselheiro, ‘the counsellor’. He is like a fossil. Just as the geologist can reconstruct the inclination and orientation of very old formations from truncated strata and build models of ancient mountains, so can the historian deduce something about the society that produced this man, who himself was of little worth.⁶

Euclides da Cunha, by then a young civil engineer and an avid supporter of republicanism, originally became interested in the Canudos Rebellion in 1897, after the central government’s initial failure to subdue what he took to be a simple barbarous uprising. Afraid that the events in the Northeast would turn into a Brazilian version of the bloody War in the Vendée, where Vendean royalists nearly overthrew the emerging French Republic, da Cunha first wrote an article entitled ‘A Nossa Vendeia’ and later decided to join the fourth military expedition as an army correspondent for the newspaper Estado de São Paulo. It would be there that he would experience first-hand the atrocities of a war that would transcend the dichotomies of civilization and barbarism, progress and regression, positivism and fanaticism, forcing him in turn to rethink his faith in the modernity of the republican model. Os sertões: campanha de Canudos, his complex sociological account of the War, was published in 1902, five years later, and remains a fascinating literary rendition of how nature and culture intercepted in the complex process of production of Brazilian history. As the figure of the counsellor as a sociological fossil showcases, his account of the conflict, as well as his exploration of Brazilian character, is profoundly marked by geohistorical considerations. As Mark Anderson has noted, Hippolyte Taine’s formulation of environmental determinism had deeply influenced da Cunha in his study of the ungovernable, fanatical and barbaric sertanejo, or backlander, whose character he took to be a reflection of the torturous landscape that enveloped him.⁷ The book’s own structure – with its three subdivisions entitled ‘The Land’, ‘Man’ and ‘The Struggle’ – suggests the profound knot tying nature, culture and history within a study that, like da Cunha’s own perspective on the war, ends up undoing many of its initial presuppositions. Just as the book’s famous final line – ‘It is regrettable that in these times we do not have a Maudsley, who knew the difference between good sense and insanity, to prevent nations from committing acts of madness and crimes against humanity’ – seem to counteract his original commitment to the republican enterprise, the book is marked by subterraneous argumentative currents that suggest that Os sertões must be read against the grain as a text that discloses the historical violence inherent to the project of Brazilian modernity, allowing us in turn to sketch the contours of a critique of the progressivist logic that marked the violent emergence of the modern nation-state.⁸

Not surprisingly, it is in da Cunha’s portrayal of the landscape of the backlands where we begin to see the dialectic between nature and history that will guide our reading of his account as a veiled critique of progressive modernity. The environment described in the opening pages of the book is one that defies the taming powers of the domesticating eye, refusing to be framed and naturalized. It is, instead, a radical landscape that finds in the trope of natural catastrophe the language for expressing its profound historicity. That is to say, it is a landscape where nature is seen as an agent of change:

It is an impressive landscape. The structural makeup of the land has been coupled with a great upheaval of external agents in the design of stupendous reliefs […] The forces that work on the land attack it, in its deepest parts and on its surface, with no letup in their destructive action, each taking over in an inevitable inter cadence during the only seasons that the region has. They break it down during the scorching summers and they break it down during the torrential winters. They go from a gently working molecular imbalance to the wonderful dynamic of storms.⁹

Breaking free from the symbolic chains that tried to imprison it within the realm of the ahistorical, refusing to become mere background, the catastrophic nature of the backlands becomes a historical agent itself. Like George Cuvier’s contemporary reflections, where history is seen as a successive series of geological catastrophes aptly called revolutions, da Cunha’s nature becomes a revolutionary agent in itself, a realm of competing forces whose complexity ends up being instantiated in that political fossil which is the figure of Antônio Conselheiro. Like the fossil, the historical figure of the counsellor condensed the history of unredeemed struggles that had led to Canudos and which remained inscribed in that landscape as latent potentiality. If we then speak of a radical landscape in relationship to the nature of the backlands, this is because nature opens up there as a space of eventuality. As natural catastrophe, the landscape defies the frames that wish to imprison it and instead becomes the preferred modality for figuring that which following Alain Badiou we could call the political event: the emergence of the new within the coordinates of the political situation or status quo.¹⁰

Catastrophe then serves to designate that instant in which nature, behaving unnaturally, discloses its historicity.¹¹ This was one of the great discoveries of geohistory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Martin Rudwick has shown, and it is what first comes to light in the Cocorobó Dam when, every summer, the droughts that assault the region help bring back the memory of this long-buried seminal event.¹² Interestingly, it is precisely through the dialectic between floods and droughts that Euclides da Cunha decides to illustrate the catastrophic historicity of such a landscape: ‘The strong storms that quench the dull fire of the drought, in spite of the rebirth they bring along with them, set up the region for greater troubles. The harshly denude it, leaving it more and more unprotected from summers to come. The region goes through a deplorable interlude that resembles a vicious circle of catastrophes.’¹³ The series of droughts and floods that periodically strike the region are presented by da Cunha as imposing a circular temporality that defied the linear progressivism of the First Brazilian Republic, on whose flag one finds a statement of modernity: ‘Ordem e Progresso.’

Neither ordered nor progressive, the circular historicity disclosed by this vicious circle of catastrophes should not, however, be read as signalling towards an archaic conservatism, just as the figure of Conselheiro should not be viewed as being merely a conservative monarchist. Rather, what this dialectic between drought and flood already expressed was a dialectic between lack and excess that should be understood as defying what Badiou has elsewhere called ‘the state of the situation’ and what we, in the context at hand, could rephrase as the First Republic’s failed attempt to posit itself as the representative of the totality of its citizens.¹⁴ Either by transforming the sertão into a desert, as droughts do, or by turning it into a sea, as floods do, catastrophic nature signals towards a political site which exceeds the representative apparatus of the modern state. Needless to say, both the desert and the sea have always been problematic spaces for the state, as the figures of the bandit or the pirate show, both pointing towards an out-of-bounds beyond the state’s representative sovereignty.¹⁵ In fact, it was precisely as romantic pirates that Machado de Assis first described the followers of Conselheiro in an article entitled ‘Cançao de piratas’ which, as Adriana Campos Johnson has noted, highlights the community as a utopic ideal against the powers of the state:¹⁶

Imagine a legion of gallant, audacious adventurers, without profession or reward, who detest the calendar, the clocks, taxes, social graces, everything that regiments life, forcing it in line. They are men who are sick of this dull life, the same days, the same faces, the same events, the same crimes, the same virtues. They cannot bear that the world is a secretary of the State, with its appointment book, the fix start and end of his workday, his pay docked for days missed […] The followers of Conselheiro remembered the romantic pirates, shook their sandals at the gates of civilization, and left in search of free life.¹⁷

As pirates of the desert, as backland bandits, the sertanejos conjured the image of an army resistant to enlightened modernity and the progressive historicity which the state tried to impose under the pretence of civilization. The sertão – in its etymological association to desert – was seen as the site of a struggle between the state and that excessive other or multiplicity which, following Badiou’s terminology, refused to be reduced to the count-as-one of the state’s representational apparatus.¹⁸ Not in vain did we see, throughout the nineteenth century, alongside the instauration of the modern republics, a series of state-sponsored crusades directed towards conquering those vast indigenous or native territories which the states could only think of as ‘deserts’: I am thinking, among others, about the Argentine and Chilean Conquistas del Desierto, the Yucatán Caste War and the War of the Triple Alliance. The Canudos Campaign must be understood within this context as part of what Martin Lienhard has called the wave of second conquests.¹⁹ Canudos, with its mismatch of outlaws and minorities, a community composed mainly of pariahs, was seen by the state as a barbaric excess that needed to be domesticated, just as nature had to be tamed through positivist description. The Counsellor’s prophetic message – ‘The backlands will become the sea and the sea will become the backlands’ – can then be read, not merely as divining a future in which the impoverished backlands would gain the position of the wealthy littoral, but also as inscribing within history this catastrophic logic of droughts and floods. His millenarian message then becomes a call to everyone who felt left behind by the Republic’s technocracy and positivism, a call to remain faithful to a political event that remained inscribed in the land itself...