Analysis
Latin American literature is filled with narratives that represent the awareness of the physical reality of Latin America and the adoption of an emotional position toward literature. Indeed, the stereotypic caricature of the Latin American narrative, in the eyes of both Latin Americans and their foreign readers, is that of W. H. Hudson (born and reared in Argentina) in Green Mansions (1904) or of reductionist readings of classics such as Ricardo Güiraldes’s Don Segundo Sombra (1926), José Eustasio Rivera’s La vorágine (1923), or Rómulo Gallegos’s Doña Bárbara (1929). At its worst this strain of Latin American literature is a blend of romantic ideals (the Pampas and the Andean highlands) and bizarre exotica (the jungles and feudal oppression). At its best, however, as exemplified in the novels of contemporary masters such as Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, Mario Vargas Llosa, Augusto Roa Bastos, and Alejo Carpentier, it represents the attempt to come to grips with the paradoxes and the anomalies of a complex sociocultural tradition that seems to defy its Western roots without really opting out of the modern world nourished by those roots. The fiction of João Guimarães Rosa clearly belongs to this view of Latin America as an unstable amalgam of modern Western myths and a sense of experiential reality as something far richer and more profound than nationalism is capable of recognizing or explaining. Hence there appeared terms such as “Magical Realism” or the “marvelous real” that have been applied to writings exemplified by the aforementioned writers. It is a groping for the much-desired terminological exactitude of academic criticism in the attempt to identify a texture of event and experience in modern Latin American fiction that depends on the reader’s recognizing it as not consonant with the everyday rational description of reality purveyed by official ideologies.
“The Thin Edge of Happiness”
Guimarães Rosa’s “As Margens da Alegria” (“The Thin Edge of Happiness”) is deceptively simple, yet its semiological richness is what makes it so indicative of the sort of fiction described above. Five narrative segments that break up the barely five-page story into microtexts seem to describe no more than a young child’s sadness over realizing that his initial, spontaneous happiness with a newly beheld nature can be so suddenly shattered by the inexorable needs of human society. Taken by an aunt and uncle to visit a new city being carved out of the wilderness (probably the futuristic capital of Brasília, one of the symbols of the mid-twentieth century economic boom of capitalism in Brazil), “the boy” (he remains nameless throughout the story) is thrilled, amazed, and awestruck by the new reality he discovers at the end of a mere two-hour plane trip from his home. This reality includes the hustle and bustle of a veritable frontier city, a big city being built almost overnight by powerful machines, and the lush and seductive flora and fauna of the wilderness literally at his doorstep. Suddenly, however, one of the wondrous creatures he sees, a prancing turkey, is killed for a birthday party. Just as suddenly, the boy is treated to what the adults intend as a marvelous display of the power of the machines being used to carve the new metropolis out of the jungle: A sort of juggernaut machete slashes down a tree so efficaciously that the boy does not even see it fall. One minute it stood in understated beauty, then the machine leapt, and the tree lay on the ground, reduced to kindling. Rather than amazement at the machine’s prowess, the boy feels sick as he contemplates the “astonished and blue” sky, exposed so brutally by...
(This entire section contains 1444 words.)
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the slash of the machine.
Yet it would be an impoverishment of Guimarães Rosa’s text to read it as a brief sketch of a child’s loss of innocence in the face of the implacable and mindless destruction of what he has held as beautiful and to which he has reacted with spontaneous, childlike joy. To be sure, Guimarães Rosa’s text, particularly when one senses the vignette-like effect of the internal divisions, is somewhat of an inverted narrative haiku (Guimarães Rosa was profoundly influenced by Asian culture): A series of spare images describes, rather than the independent glory of nature as perceived by a neutral and respectful observer, the sudden and irrevocable destruction of a sense of the integrity of natural beauty as perceived by an innocent witness. Yet what increases the depth of sociocultural meaning of this story is precisely the nature of the controlling consciousness described by the narrator, the “privileged” status of the consciousness vis-à-vis the situation or reality portrayed and the conjunction of different orders, the mechanical-industrial and the natural-physical, that are arrayed antagonistically.
Guimarães Rosa’s narrator tells his story in a tone that is virtually a parody of children’s once-upon-a-time tales: “This is the story: A little boy went with his aunt and uncle to spend a few days in a place where the great city was being built.” The narrative goes on to describe in a matter-of-fact, short-sentence fashion how the boy leaves behind his parents and the city to fly with his aunt and uncle to the unknown frontier, how the plane trip is a child’s delight of new sensations provided by the indulgent and solicitous adults, and how the place where he arrives is a veritable fairyland: “The boy looked around and breathed deeply, wishing with all his heart that he could see even more vividly everything that presented itself in front of his eyes—so many new things!” One of these new things is a spectacular turkey, an animal unknown in the city; but no sooner is the boy’s delight with the pompous and loquacious animal described than it “disappears,” slaughtered for a birthday meal. The boy’s awe turns to terror: The turkey’s absence foregrounds the threatening wilderness from which the animal’s strutting had distracted him. Just as quickly the narrator moves to the scene of the mechanized machete felling the simple tree.
In rapid succession the narrative juxtaposes implied opposites: known experiences versus unknown delights, childlike and exuberant joy versus unfocused anxiety, wild nature versus “wild” machines, the wilderness versus civilization and progress, childlike wonderment versus adult matter-of-factness, and the comforting versus the terrifying.
More than an anecdote concerning the brutal shattering of youthful and innocent happiness, Guimarães Rosa’s text foregrounds, through the boy’s mediating consciousness, a paradigmatic Latin American conflict: the natural versus the mechanical, spontaneous sentiment versus artificial power, what is human versus what is artificial and therefore destructive. Whereas United States society might typically see the union of the mechanical and the human as bringing the greater comfort of the latter, a text such as Guimarães Rosa’s sees the two as irremediably antagonistic. The boy’s loss of innocence is not the product of any routine process of maturation, whereby the child comes to harmonious terms with modern mechanized society. Rather, it is the result of the brutal imposition of the new mechanized society (the adult representatives of progress and their machines, for whom the beauties of nature discovered by the boy are at best food and at worst a nuisance) on an awesome nature. It is only when the boy’s perception of his new surroundings has been “conditioned” by the attitudes and action of the adults that he sees the new reality as no longer a fairyland but a threatening and dark void: “The boy could not understand it. The forest, the black trees, were much too much, they were the world.”
In the view of one metatheory of contemporary anthropology, acculturation is a process of acquiring a socially conditioned way of seeing unordered events and situations and of giving them structure and meaning. Guimarães Rosa’s story proposes the clash of two processes of acculturation, one the unfettered spontaneity of childlike innocence whereby the world is a garden of delightful marvels; and one the harsh dominance of nature by humans’ mechanized society, whereby the world is a threatening enemy to be conquered, swept away in the name of civilized progress. While the child cannot adequately assess the clash between these two processes and while the essentially laconic narrator refrains from doing so, the spiritual destruction of the boy evokes much more than a mythic loss of innocence. It bespeaks the semiologically productive clash, between two processes of acculturation, that underlies much of Guimarães Rosa’s writing, making it so characteristic of the literary exploitation of a fundamentally unresolved conflict of Latin American society.
