SOURCE: Wasserman, Renata R. Mautner. “Mario Vargas Llosa, Euclides da Cunha, and the Strategy of Intertexuality.” PMLA 108, no. 3 (May 1993): 460-73.

Intertextuality can be said to arise when literary texts connect with other literary texts, with nonliterary texts, and with broadly conceived cultural contexts. It comprises a historical component in the relation between new cultural productions and earlier ones and includes a notion of activity, by any consumer on any text and by producers on the texts with which new ones are intertextual.¹ Intertextuality can be conscious, as a text parodies, imitates, or improves on another, or unconscious, as a text—like a fish in water—develops in a context that its will or even its keenest analytic faculty cannot touch. But intertextuality can be seen not just as a condition for the existence of a text but as an instrument used for the purpose of validating a cultural configuration, of asserting cultural power.

In The Boom in Spanish American Literature, a memoir, the Chilean novelist José Donoso recalls the thrill with which, in the early 1960s, he discovered new Latin American writings as innovative and exciting in form as the products of the “universal” literary cultures of France, Spain, and the United States but addressing matters specific to Latin America conceived as a community with its own independent, positively valued cultural traits.² Like Donoso's memoir and essays of Angel Rama (Ciudad), Darcy Ribeiro, and Alejo Carpentier (Tientos), among others, La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World)—with which the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa revisits Os sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), the account by the Brazilian Euclides da Cunha of the uprising known as the war of Canudos—confronts what it means for Latin American intellectuals to look in Latin America for the expression of their national characteristics, for validation of their self-perceptions, and for analyses of their national problems.³

After becoming nations, the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies in America developed in ignorance of and in isolation from one another. Few roads cross the borders, and each country knows little of the others' histories, thought, literatures. Though at times official consensus within Latin American nations argues that their similarities demand separation or even hostility, at others it deplores such a lack of solidarity and proposes economic or cultural correctives. At the turn of the century, the Brazilian critic José Veríssimo speculated that Latin America was a culture whose participants had more in common with one another than with Europe or the United States, against which they commonly measured themselves (Cultura). In the 1950s, Latin America rediscovered itself within its continental boundaries and searched there for a sense of identity less dependent on confrontation with models derived from northern or transatlantic concepts of history or society than on the specific conditions of the continent itself.

Vargas Llosa's retelling of Os sertões participates in this recovery of the autochthonous, through fiction—not sociology, political economy, or reportage—and, like the work of Renaissance poets, through the conscious creation of an intertextual work that asserts the value of and at the same time derives value from a chosen ancestor.⁴ The reader of his novel is assumed to know about Os sertões and is invited to read La guerra doubly, intertextually (or hypertextually). By invoking the power of identity and similarity, of the documentary that aims to capture an idea or event and of the novel that aims to approximate ideas and events, both works frame historically recurring questions about the particularity of the culture of the Americas: is there such a culture, distinct from others in the Western world, and, if there is, how should the distinction be defined and evaluated?⁵ By choosing to rewrite an earlier Latin American work, by eschewing originality of subject in this way, Vargas Llosa affirms the continuity, originality, and distinction of Latin American culture. Thus he strengthens the traditional claim of new nations to a historical depth they are customarily chided for lacking and consciously establishes a form of intertextuality, a conversation between canonical texts, that traditionally marks culturally predominant political entities.⁶ At the same time, in choosing a classic for the source of a new text, Vargas Llosa appropriates intertextuality to affirm cultural authority. And finally, by rewriting a canonical text, he plants this cultural authority firmly among the powers of the larger, validating culture, for, as Rama points out, his appropriation of Euclides da Cunha is similar to Joyce's de- and re-forming of the Odyssey or to Picasso's reimagining of Velázquez's Las meninas—Vargas Llosa's act produces a text immediately recognizable as characteristic of twentieth-century high culture, in being both creation and pastiche (“La guerra” 619), and by implication also assigns to Os sertões the high-culture value Joyce's and Picasso's borrowings automatically assigned to Homer and Velázquez.

Euclides da Cunha's Os sertões documents the Canudos war, that surprisingly difficult campaign waged by the troops of the young Brazilian republic against a band of backland followers of the messianic figure Antônio Conselheiro—“the Counselor.” As Cunha attempts to tell the full truth about the war, to analyze the real forces that opposed each other in the inhospitable Brazilian northeast, the book becomes a meditation on the entire nation—Brazil's land, people, and history—on the national character and its origins in European history, and on the ability of a discourse (as the concept would be called today), European still, to produce an accurate account of national reality. Unexpectedly, in the course of explaining Brazil, the author-journalist finds himself tracing his slow realization that European, scientific analyses of the social sphere do not, despite their theoretical plausibility and the force of the culture where they arise, provide an adequate assessment of the society that grew in Brazil or explain satisfactorily what happens when action is performed by dwellers in a land that at first seems to have conditioned its population (this wording echoes in reverse order the three section titles of Os sertões: “The Land” ‘A terra,’ “The People” ‘O homem,’ and “The Fight” ‘A luta’).⁷ Cunha's change of mind and heart results from the same objectivity that guarantees the truth of his account and that justifies his initial dismissal, in the name of reason, of the messianic movement whose destruction he went to cover.

When, almost a century later, Vargas Llosa picks up the same tale, he revalidates the problem of land, people, origin addressed by Cunha as central to the discussion of the development of a modern society in Latin America and simultaneously restates the issue. Thus while Cunha casts doubt on the adequacy of the conceptual and ideological framework with which, as a journalist, he had covered the war, Vargas Llosa goes a step further and, in the figure of a journalist modeled on Cunha, challenges the predecessor's basic capacity to perceive, and report on, the world. By turning reportage into fiction and making the journalist into one character among many, buffeted by physical and historical forces beyond the power of writing, Vargas Llosa also strips writing of its privileged status. He embeds reason in existence, the act of knowing in the object to be known. In attacking the basis for positive knowledge, he undermines the belief in effective action from which Cunha's text starts, and he places greater emphasis on the implications of Cunha's ending; this move in turn changes the terms of the discourse in which relations within the physical world and between that world and the realm of power are expressed.⁸ The frame of reference of the more recent book is intra-American; messianism—that of the Shining Path like that of Canudos—appears as one among a cluster of Latin American phenomena to be analyzed in accordance no longer with Taine, or even Marx, but with models so autochthonous as to arise within the text itself, displacing from its surface the theoretical framework on which the older work depended. Cunha, who though respected has generally been read as marginal in the development of Brazilian literature,⁹ is thus recruited for the task of constructing or—better still, given the implication of necessity and immanence—discovering a continental cultural identity.

If one stresses the literary, high-culture character of the two works by privileging discursive traits, the difference between the books begins to appear in their rhetorical stances. Cunha's style, singled out as remarkable by his earliest critics, is metaphoric,¹⁰ and it assimilates the natural and the human. In the geologic and geographic first part of Os sertões, Cunha describes a convulsed landscape, with plains and plateaus, mountains, bays, canyons, and rivers, features that run and fall, rise and clash, stretch and sway like beings with their own life and volition. For Mary Louise Pratt, Alexander von Humboldt's descriptions of the continent, famous in the nineteenth century, provide the model for investing the American landscape with human traits, continuing the process by which, from the beginning, Europeans discursively emptied the land of its inhabitants (Pratt, ch. 6; see also Hulme 156-58). But Cunha contests Humboldt and includes the inhabitants: they are the crux and telos of the description. In Os sertões, the movement of populations to cover the land is part of the same dynamic natural process that governs the geologic past: people flow in a divided torrent to cover the heaving territory. Similarly Cunha assimilates the defeated armies to the landscape in the last part of the book: is it the waters of the Vaza-Barris River or the soldiers trying to cross it that bubble, foam, and roar (435; 498)? Often one has to reread a rushing paragraph carefully to see whether its subject is a soldier, a jagunço,¹¹ a river, or a mountain slope. At length it becomes clear that this verbal indeterminacy, this metaphoric riot, is at the heart of the relation Cunha uncovers between action, actor, and setting and is part of the import lent to the events by the collectivity for which his text acts as interpreter. “The exaggerated romancing of the most trivial events” ‘exagerado romancear dos mais triviais sucessos’ told and retold within that collectivity merges myth and history and determines the meaning of the campaign, “giving the war the impressive and legendary tone [that] shocked the public opinion of the old capital and in due course of the entire country” ‘dando à campanha um tom impressionate e lendário, abalavam a opinião pública da velha capital e por fim a de todo o país’ (388; 439). Though early critics base much of their favorable opinion of the work on the strength and originality of its language, which they see as an intentional product of thought and work, though they emphasize the link between word and thought and note that the relentless metaphoric blurring of the boundaries between land and people, between the movements of mountains and rivers and those of armies and explorers, carries an intellectual and ideological charge and constitutes an interpretation, ultimately their focus on the literary aspect of the work deflects attention from the real “shock” of the book.

Notably, toward the end the charge of the language changes: the line of refugees from Canudos—old men, women, and children the rebel command has forced to surrender so that the citadel can hold out—is described in terms of horror. Degraded and famished, dirty, sick, wounded, mutilated, the refugees are human, neither natural forces nor animals. Once established, however, this distinction between the human and the natural gives rise to a profound pessimism, which opposes the energetic beginning, where they were assimilated to each other: only humanity is capable of creating or suffering the horrors described. The bitter tone of the ending suggests that it were better had the metaphoric riot of the first sections been sustained and had the science that can read from a cut in a mountain the succession of geologic eras and the history of the planet not been degraded to contemplating Antônio Conselheiro's severed head and attempting to trace in the “expressive convolutions” ‘circunvoluções expressivas’ of his brain “the essential lines of crime and madness” ‘as linhas essenciais do crime e da loucura’ (476; 542). The cultural logic in this coupling of madness and crime to explain the Counselor is almost too obvious to a post-Foucauldian reader of Os sertões, but the final image of that disinterred head shipped to Bahia for study, pored over by those who did not take part in the campaign or learn what the actions of the living man had taught the journalist, functions as a gruesome deconstruction of the explanatory scheme into which the researchers try to fit Canudos.¹² “Expressiveness,” Cunha implies, is imposed on the brain's convolutions and is mute about the essence of the man and about the meaning of his actions. Those who read these folds must err, as Cunha himself may err when reading the essence of the nation in the convolutions of the terrain described in the first part of the book—except perhaps insofar as the metaphoric flow of the description allows for meaning to extrude. Thus the earlier description of the sertanejo, the backlander, cuts through the racial theories behind it to an appreciation of the inhabitants of the sertão it had not set out to provide. It is also apt, then, that while abandoning explanation, the ending also abandons metaphor, and the book, so weighted down with theories in its middle parts, leads to openness and indeterminacy.

Vargas Llosa's basic figure of speech is not the metaphor, which blurs boundaries, but the simile, which perpetuates them: Antônio Conselheiro's clothes are like the cassocks of missionaries; the comparison implies that the Counselor is not a legitimate missionary. Starting with him, with his sharp outline “silhouetted against the light of dusk or dawn” ‘[s]u larga silueta se recortaba en la luz crepuscular o naciente’ (3; 15), Vargas Llosa promises a precision of figuration that will leave essence in the dark. He also prefigures an almost exclusive concentration on the human aspect of the story—decisions and errors are not attributable to forces outside the individual, like climate, soil, history, or the accidents of genetics. The racial explanation that rears its head even in the last pages of Os sertões has no place in La guerra. In avoiding the trap of an explanation tied to prejudices masquerading as knowledge, however, Vargas Llosa also abandons Cunha's gamble that knowledge is possible when founded on individual experience and ability. Thus La guerra emphasizes seeing, explored in all the contradiction between the certainty sight engenders in the recipient of the visual impression—vidi as the classic guarantor of an account's accuracy—and the uncertainty that accompanies any attempt to encode the impression in language, that creeps into accounts when they encounter other accounts, or that ensues when the instruments of perception are examined closely; the link between vidi and vici is shown up as a sleight of pen.

The tale ends, then, not with an ironic assessment of the role and claims of science but with the testimony of the old woman who has appropriated a consoling story and elected herself to the position of historical source: “surrounded by the eyes” ‘cercada por los ojos’ of the other women (568; 531), she testifies that the heroes of Canudos have ascended into heaven, that the secular, science-centered century has defeated but not assimilated her. She affirms at the end the separation between appearance and definition implied in the rhetorical stance of the whole novel. With her and with the difference between accounts—hers and the Lion of Natuba's, on one hand, and the journalist's and the novel's, on the other—Vargas Llosa reproduces the radical split running through the core of the population constituting the matrix of movements like Canudos and suggests that this split may in effect be the most characteristic quality of the civilization of the subcontinent. The novel thus becomes a metonym for the universe it contains, harboring the split and the separated sides.¹³

From the beginning, the experience of the New World has been validated by reference to the literature and mythology of the Old World, whether the New World is portrayed as Eden, as the evil place, or as a classical arcadia of forests primeval peopled by fauns and nymphs of surprising colors. But writers in the new American nations have always considered it necessary to pass from mythology to history. These authors wrote history because of its explanatory and culture-validating force and also because history is kin to the epic, which is commonly viewed as an expression of cultural identity and as an index of high cultural achievement. And they aimed for the epic because in it a product of the historically located human will is necessarily camouflaged as mythical and outside time. Thus in La guerra Vargas Llosa does more than appropriate an earlier theme, more than emulate the intertextual links between Iliad and Aeneid or Aeneid and Lusiad. In rewriting a tale of nationality, he strengthens what his work simultaneously posits as an already established New World epic tradition; in revisiting a non-European tale, he neutralizes the relation of dependence implicit in the classical succession—Graecia capta depends politically on culturally backward agreste Latio, which it civilizes. But La guerra arises from egalitarian intertextuality rather than from hierarchical influence. Yet, in epic mode, La guerra validates the event, told in a system of narratives by bard, hagiographer, journalist, and novelist that establish the work's capacity to stand up to continued scrutiny, to yield a variety of interpretations, to suffer the transformations characteristic of stories that inhabit the culture-determining space where myth turns to history. Thus Vargas Llosa's development of Cunha's figure of Canudos as the “mud-walled Troy” ‘Tróia de taipa’ (143; 160) ascribes to Os sertões this epic liminarity but also marks the difference that makes of their literary enterprise a defense rather than a simple account: mud-walled, can this other defeated Ilion originate a new system of tales and a new civilization like the one the earlier refugees carried to another shore? The first critics of Os sertões speak of it as a new Iliad; Vargas Llosa's book wagers that it can bear the burden of the ancient tale.¹⁴

The interrogation of history is a stage in the search for identity.¹⁵ As the two works probe history, they raise the ontological and epistemological questions that arise with any discussion of identity: what is identity and how can it be known? On the ontological level the two books come closest to each other; on the epistemological they differ. In trying to achieve adequate and complete knowledge, Cunha, an engineer of vast reading and multiple interests, who wrote Os sertões while building a bridge, asks contemporary European science for instruments that will allow him to study the society that has evolved in Brazil. Critics habitually list authors cited in Os sertões: Alfredo Bosi mentions Spencer, Darwin, and Comte (9); Magda Maria Renoldi-Tocalino adds Hobbes, Kant, Humboldt, Taine, Gumplowicz, and others (34n26); Nelson Werneck Sodré names Darwin among many (35); Guilherme de Almeida cites the German explorer and naturalist Martius (30); Nancy Stepan states that Cunha “synthesized the sciences of his day,” particularly in matters of “population analysis” (or race; 46).¹⁶ These sources are seen as shaping the framework of scientific “laws” Cunha calls on to explain Canudos and to interpret it as a representative event, one that characterizes the nation diachronically and synchronically, in history and character. The geographic, climatic, and racial determinism informing the theories that inspire such “laws” endeavors to arrest history by repressing contingency and denying difference and seems to drive the metaphoric impulse of Cunha's work. These “laws” then mediate between, on one side, the physical laws governing the flow of rivers, the rise and erosion of mountains, the scourge of droughts and, on the other, the social forces that enmesh and govern the populations whose history unfolds along those rivers, around those mountains, under those pitiless brilliant skies. The motion of the elements mimics the flow of history, and rivers and migrations roll on together in the same ideologically grounded figure of speech.

Intertextuality in Os sertões, then, is the call on science to furnish a more or less coherent theory of the events of Canudos, one underpinning and validating what the philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and historiography of the period offered as an interpretation of the rebellion, and is also a call on history to buttress science. Cunha, in his first approach to the movement, looked to a European historical precedent and, before going on the expedition against the rebels, wrote two articles comparing Canudos to the French wars of the Vendée, which pitted a conservative, Catholic peasant population, under the banner of the deposed monarchy, against the atheistic Revolution. The combination of historical precedents and scientific laws promises great explanatory power. The greater is the tension as it becomes progressively evident that they may not, even if valid in their premises, provide an adequate assessment of the events reported.¹⁷ The suspicion of inadequacy haunts Cunha's account. By rejecting certainty, then, Vargas Llosa does not depart radically from these implications, though his presuppositions are different. But Vargas Llosa too starts from current knowledge: the scientific insights of his own time that suggest the uncertainty of all knowing have deeply marked literary and philosophical discourse in this century.

Both books question history, finding it inadequate sometimes as an explanatory model for contemporary events and sometimes as a mode of knowledge. But by focusing on a historical occurrence, both works affirm the need for history as an explanatory and legitimizing tool in the definition of nationality and as a necessary basis for understanding the present. Both find a definition-defying dissonance among what are eventually seen as the various cultures coexisting dramatically in each political unit of Latin America, cultures embodied in populations not just different from one another but seemingly existing in disparate epochs. It is a dissonance that history attempts to regularize; Os sertões and La guerra ask how much of the character of the populations under scrutiny depends on that dissonance and imply that through the attempt to regularize, history deprives itself of explanatory power and renders itself an unfit guide for evaluation or for appropriate action in the inevitable shock among peoples. Eventually, Cunha questions whether the historical imagination as conceived in Europe and transplanted to Brazil is relevant to the situation at Canudos. History has no place in Canudos. She has become used to seeing the fearful face of peoples in “the majestic ruins of vast cities … in the epic savagery of the great invasions. There was nothing for her in that slaughterhouse” ‘na ruinaria majestosa das cidades vastas … na selvatiqueza épica das grandes invasões. Nada tinha que ver naquele matadouro’ (443; 506).

In the first part of Os sertões, Cunha describes the general geographic, geologic, and climatic conditions of the entire country, in broad sweeps from the coast to the hinterland and from north to south, assuming that such a delineation will help explain Brazil past and therefore present. Fascinated by geology, intrigued by Taine's geographic determinism, and excited, as Veríssimo says, by the mere thought of a geographic coordinate (“Diplomática” 135), Cunha eventually pans to the sertão, which, in his view, forms not only the physical but the moral substratum of the nation. The populations inhabiting this natural setting—the poor, the oppressed, the criminal—appear as a response to the topography; but it is their strength of will and their faith in the possibility of more than simple survival that allow them to withstand adverse circumstances and at the same time condition them to follow the messianic Antônio the Counselor. The result is a city, Canudos, located nowhere and made of nothing, negations that forced Brazil, which was constituting itself on a European model of positive rational power, to doubt itself. Taken seriously, Cunha's conclusions would have demanded a fundamental shift in the nation's sense of its identity and of its position in the world.

These backland populations are also racially non-European. The racial theories on which Cunha bases his account of the “atavisms” and backwardness that led sertanejos to the Counselor and to Canudos are among the most problematic parts of the book.¹⁸ Instead of railing at these sections as they deserve, however, or dismissing them to make the book more acceptable, it may be useful to regard them as the most shocking expression of the anxiety of difference that in some ways underlies all discussions of the present character and future possibilities of the continent. Assessed positively or negatively, the composition of the New World population has been a component of all meditations on value and difference in the Americas: ethnically (or racially) different from Europeans but resulting from the activity of Europeans on American soil, New World populations call into question all definitions of identity that rest on clear oppositions between those recognizably like and those unlike a predefined European self. That self is shattered and combined with other fragments into identities whose heterogeneity precludes complete acceptance as well as complete rejection and who are both self and other, kin and stranger. Implicit in Cunha's exposition of the nation's physical and geographic characteristics and of its mixed-blood population, there lies the attempt to find the source of positive value that would satisfy European criteria of civilization and at the same time that would encompass the non-European aspects of both nature and humanity in the tropics. Thus, though he repeats the prejudices of his age, Cunha also slides from the negative to the positive in his portrait of the sertanejo, whom, till the last page, he describes as uniquely strong because adapted to conditions that would kill the pure European though also as forever “weak” in qualities externally defined as determining civilization. In effect, the sertanejo moves, in the second part of the book, from clearly opposing civilization into a middle ground. The leather-clad jagunço, who can turn the deadly sertão into an ally, begins to stand for his own, legitimate civilization as he confronts, adapts to, and finally uses a hostile nature, even while seeming a barbarian to the Europe-oriented coastal cities, which, however, had formulated the policies that isolated him in his special ways and which now originate the barbarous impulse to eliminate him. The recognition of this duality in the central section modifies the work's initial definition of the national self and at the same time prefigures the disillusionment that ends the book.

When Cunha can no longer clearly attribute civilization to the coast and to the republic and barbarism to the interior and to Canudos, Os sertões develops a disturbing uncertainty about where each lodges; simultaneously arises a radical uncertainty about the explanatory power of two basic characteristics of Western civilization—rationality and reliance on science as they are defined by, and diffused from, Europe. National identity for Brazil begins to reside in the capacity to show that European rational schemes cannot explain the country's national reality and therefore cannot claim universality.

The matter of the composition of New World populations appears differently in the two works. The sexual relation between European and non-European often occupies an important metaphoric place in discussions of American identity. Cunha, whose book is strangely devoid of women, who sees them only in groups of hags (Andrade 324) and ignores their role in the internal economy of Canudos, allows this relation to appear only in scattered meditations on how racial mixing affects national character and on the real origins of Canudos.¹⁹

In La guerra, by contrast, a gallery of women confront men with the practical meaning of masculine theories and actions, actively like Maria Quadrado, at Canudos, and passively like Jurema, the most important of the women, charged with the role of “bedrock of the nationality” that in Os sertões is attributed to the entire population of the backlands (“o cerne da … nacionalidade … a rocha viva da nossa raça” [78, 464; 89, 529]). Jurema permits the journalist to complete his task: she offers him her body for sex, comfort, life; her eyes are his witness and protection when, in the thick of the last battle, his glasses break. The European anarchist Galileo Gall rapes her brutally and irrationally, as he would the land; his entirely coherent and completely irrelevant political theories lead him to interfere (destructively) in the American action and keep him from understanding it. But one of the fiercest Canudos bandits, whose violence, though harnessed for the movement, isolates and kills him, loves her respectfully. She is married to the good man Rufino, whose traditional, rigid, and simple virtue is inadequate to the political and personal crises that find him out. Finally, she inspires the Baron to rape her successor among his household staff, uncovering the brutality that underlies the high civilization he represented. In Jurema's marriage with Rufino, Vargas Llosa depicts an Edenic version of the people and shows the creative force of this ideal blocked by the destructive savagery of European ideology and high civilization and of backlands violence and superstition. Through Jurema's relation with the journalist, however, Vargas Llosa creates a symbiosis between the illiterate and the literate, the substratum and the superstructure, that Cunha could not find (see Renoldi-Tocalino, part 2, ch. 2).

Still, the manner of and tools for knowing, the techniques for telling, are for both authors the theories of European geographers, geologists, historians, and social scientists, the narrative forms of Euro-American literatures. Brazilian history is measured and understood in relation to European history, served by European science and art. Though Brazilian and European realities are defined ab initio as necessarily different, the latter is asked to furnish the conceptual tools, the terms of the discourse, that will make the former intelligible.

But creating intelligibility does not simply mean superimposing an adventitious and distorting grid on an autochthonous reality. Explanatory tools are not only used for the prestige of their extranational origins and do not only imply the hold of foreign cultures. Such means are also internally determined. As Roberto Ventura argues, the accusations of monarchism directed at Canudos served to give the movement an explanation compatible with a Eurocentric view of history. But they also clad in prestigious language a complicated internal fight for power: the new civilian government of Campos Salles contended with factions within the military determined to preserve the power they had gained by deposing the emperor, while the old landed aristocracy confronted a newly rising urban industrial and merchant class. Ventura traces Cunha's intellectual journey from giving Brazilian events a Europeanizing analysis to assigning them national explanations and recognizing distortions as originating not in alien schemes but in domestic “republican propaganda” (111). Ventura's close political analysis is unusual among critics of Os sertões, however, who praise the book less for its coverage of the immediate political situation than for the “scientific” accuracy of its generalizations. Cunha shares with his first readers the belief that science can explain the circumstances that gave rise to Canudos and therefore provide the key for changes to ensure that such an uprising never happens again.²⁰ But even the initial project of the book, framing the account in terms simultaneously progressive and deterministic, contains a half-acknowledged contradiction: the same science that should make it possible to prevent Canudos also explains why Canudos must be.

Vargas Llosa's greatest departure from his predecessor's text is in removing from the start that faith in the power of science to explain, to lift the observer out of the thing perceived into a truth independent of the observer's limitations. The incident in which the nameless journalist who stands for Cunha loses his glasses at the climax of the fight he was hired to witness does more than add a touch of ridicule and pathos, against which the first text is armed; the journalist also becomes incapable of receiving the full impact of sights and events that can disabuse him of the notions with which he came to the fray. There is a weakening both of the ability to know and of the drama by which reasoned knowledge is acquired, both of the characters and of the drama that occurs when the strength of human beings—whether the illiterate sertanejo adapted to the dry and spiny wilderness or the journalist come to report on the backlanders' fate—confronts the forces of nature or of history.

In both works, however, history is naturalized, as the force that properly eradicates Canudos, and at the same time called into question, as one more of the elements that contribute to the definition of nationality. Carpentier calls the Americas “the Continent without History”²¹; they lack the coherent identity thought to derive from the march of significant events in orderly causal and chronological array. The events recorded by Cunha and Vargas Llosa are not out of history, however, but out of sync with—ahead or behind—“real,” or European, history. Yet both writers convey a sense of the significant passage of time, and the two works bear witness to events judged to determine the character and the image of a cultural entity. José Miguel Oviedo discusses the sense not only in Os sertões but also in the Argentinian epic Facundo that the image Brazil—and, by implication, the rest of Latin America—constructs of itself as a proper partner in the concert of nations dominated by Europe is discrepant with the ragged mass led by the mystic rebel from another age that Brazil has to contend with and to recognize as a part of itself (657). But what Canudos reveals is precisely that the mystic rebel is not of another age but of his own. Antônio Conselheiro revolts against contemporary events like the secularization of politics implicit in the removal of Pedro II or like the disturbance in the established relation between landowner and client effected by the shift in power from the slave-holding, sugar-producing north and northeast to the center and south of Brazil, where both agriculture and a nascent industry depend on “free” labor.²² The response to the Counselor in state and federal government, as well as in public opinion, is contemporary also, determined by specific conditions of the time, not only in the analysis of his “madness,” based on current psychological theories,²³ and in the justification given for the attack on the rebels, seen as agents for international monarchism, but also in the instruments of this attack: the national army of the new republic took over from the regional militia of Bahia, which had been denied sufficient support in an earlier attempt to curb Canudos because the central government was reluctant to strengthen regional military forces. The central government's choice of Moreira César, bloody and successful “pacifier” of an earlier regional rebellion, to lead the first expedition of federal forces against Canudos had a symbolic meaning that was not lost on the nation.

But it is also necessary to see the Counselor as a mystic, living in an explanatory universe rejected by the republic that combats him, in a universe classified as mythical and relegated by a consensus among those in power to a stage of history earlier than that which, according to a similar consensus, the republic inhabits.²⁴ For this classification allows another form of response to the Counselor: he provides historical depth, by constituting a living example of the material on which mythologies are built. This depth does not save him, since by definition the mythical past no longer exists; mythologizing may therefore provide justification for destroying him, implicit in the aspirations to the modern that the culturally respectable accounts of his exploits will attempt to satisfy. Vargas Llosa directs attention to this other reading by dividing his narration between the myopic journalist, on one hand, and the bardic Dwarf and the hagiographic Lion of Natuba, on the other; this splitting introduces into the narration itself the difference between the mythical and the historical views that in Os sertões establishes an almost unbridgeable distance between the account and the event, the literate reporter and the illiterate actors.

Although both Cunha and Vargas Llosa try to recover original (con)text, in the end the results of their efforts point to that distance as characteristic of the event and of its matrix. Each author's awareness of the distance leads him to deconstruct the event and the explanations his work suggests. Vargas Llosa displays skepticism about the possibility of reading, in his making the literate, modern teller deficient in sight, and Cunha expresses skepticism about the possibility of understanding, in the inadequacy of the explanatory schemes he himself introduces.

Vargas Llosa also casts doubt on even the limited possibility of integration he raises. On one had, his juxtaposition of narratives within one text implies that, although any one account will be flawed and any one point of view will be incomplete, the text in which all accounts and points of view appear can come close to encompassing the complexities of its context. On the other hand, however, as that text exists within the same context that conditions its fragmentation, the collected narratives may not, in the end, be able to fulfill the function that they criticize their model for not fulfilling. The paradox appears in the section at the end of La guerra where the journalist confronts the Baron, who has been, till then, the detached, more or less tolerant, slightly cynical and world-weary voice of the highest civilization among the characters, his estate an oasis of refinement in the rough backlands. The Baron does not escape the external consequences of the rebellion: his property is burned by the rebels; his wife goes mad. Under pressure he abandons his refinement, a development with which Vargas Llosa dramatizes that civilization simply superimposed rather than integrated will fail to function either intellectually (in relation to what the journalist represents) or morally (in relation to what Sebastiana and Jurema represent). As the rebels destroy the Baron's dream of creating a replica of the Enlightenment in the middle of the sertão and as his wife embraces unreason, his dismay corrodes what turns out to be a veneer of civility: he rapes his wife's maid, resolves not to read the journalist's book, and vows to confine its author to a menial job in his publishing empire. In all ways open by money and rank, the Baron, who has praised reason, asserts naked power over those around him.²⁵ The power is also over reality: his threat not to read the book is at once ridiculous and apt; he can make silence wash over this disgrace, as over so many others, and make the shame cease to exist, as the massacre of the planation workers of Macondo ceases to exist in Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude). In the Baron's refusal, Vargas Llosa also indicates how the journalist, who reports on the campaign, who at great cost learns something important about the nation, is distinct from the power structure, which, having hired him to do so, decides to ignore the uncomfortable things he discovers.

In the interplay among the problematically objective record kept by the journalist, the mythopoeic chronicle offered by the Lion of Natuba and placed at the conclusion of the book, and the silence enforced by the Baron, Vargas Llosa implies that there is nothing between myth and forgetting, that the place of History herself is problematic in the culture of the Americas—or, rather, that the culture of the Americas demonstrates the problematic nature of history and invites a change in the way its own validity is judged.

Taken together then, the two books create an inter-American intertextuality and affirm a kinship among American nations based on the recognition of shared problems that, more than economic, are social and cultural, ontological and epistemological. By attacking the problem of national identity and history frontally, Cunha forces a consideration of its centrality to American literary expression. By making the earlier text central in La guerra, Vargas Llosa forces the assertion of identity in difference and repeats the attempt to wrench from the long-standing external authority the tools that would define identity and evaluate difference.

Notes

1. This sense of the historical component approximates Julia Kristeva's first characterization of intertextuality as the relation of a text to previous codified cultural production, written or oral (115, 132-37, 255). Michael Riffaterre establishes the consumer's role by arguing that textuality implies intertextuality, which is also defined by perception—a reader's recognition of the intertextual (“Syllepsis” 625; Production 121-22). Gérard Genette's notion that a text exercises a “transformative operation” on another implies the activity of the producer. Genette calls such transformations “hypertextuality,” a special case of “transtextuality” (12, 11). See Tilottama Rajan for a range of definitions of intertextuality.

   All translations of quotations from works cited in foreign language editions are my own, except for passages from Vargas Llosa's La guerra del fin del mundo, for which I give Helen R. Lane's versions. For the convenience of readers, however, the parenthetical documentation following each bilingual passage from Cunha's Os sertões first supplies the relevant page number in Samuel Putnam's translation; then, after a semicolon, the page number in the Portuguese edition appears.

2. Donoso's memoir describes intellectual life under pressure of relations between societies at the centers of cultural power and those at the margins, focusing on the implications of accepting an international style, on the effort of defining national cultures while evaluating literary works in accordance with international criteria, on the problems of influence, translation, and publication. It is telling that naming the extraordinary eclosion of literary masterpieces in Latin American in the 1960s became controversial also, for “el boom” comes from English and connotes an unstable, dependent economy.

3. La guerra is read consistently as intertextual. Mac Adam places on the reader the responsibility for developing the intertextual relation; Rama explores the connections among La guerra, Os sertões, and the Argentinian Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo as Latin American epics of a characteristic socioeconomic condition (“La guerra”); Bernucci does a superb job of tracing all the works with which La guerra is intertextual, somewhat deemphasizing its link with Os sertões. Renoldi-Tocalino's careful and informed analysis strengthens the argument for intertextuality by noting that La guerra is Vargas Llosa's first work based on bibliography rather than on biography (47); Renoldi-Tocalino also emphasizes La guerra over the older text, traces La guerra's recovery of the medieval European roots of Brazilian peasant beliefs in the backlands, and considers some implications of Vargas Llosa's transformation of Cunha into a character. In general, critics treat intertextuality as a “fact” (Mac Adam 157). I discuss it as an instrument or a strategy. I attend to the texts' transformations of the political and cultural, to the newer text's revision of the older.

4. In an interview, Vargas Llosa states, “I only write about Peru and it only interests me to write about Peru …” (qtd. in Oviedo 645). One can argue that in La guerra he is still writing about the country: there were numerous insurrections in nineteenth-century Peru, and the most serious Indian peasant uprising, at Huanta in 1896-97, is roughly contemporaneous with Canudos (Vázquez 77). Rama mentions the many Latin American rebellions of the last century, all brutally suppressed, by which peasants resisted the modernization imposed by their governments (“La guerra” 619-20). It is significant then that Vargas Llosa finds the Peruvian in the continental.

   Though not explicitly, Vargas Llosa returns to intertextuality as strategy with El hablador (The Storyteller), which argues with Alejo Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps) about historical disjunction in South America, about writing and orality, about the role of the Latin American intellectual, about how the Latin American context affects Europeanizing definitions of nature and culture—variations on matters that La guerra also raises.

5. A commonplace in cultural studies of American literatures is that the discipline concerns itself primarily with defining, studying, evaluating, and valorizing national character; novelists, poets, social scientists share this view with critics. The goal of achieving what Rama calls “independence, originality, representativity” (Transculturación 11) is pursued differently by different authors, some more and some less hostile to the European component in Latin America. Vargas Llosa, who broke with Fidel Castro (see Renoldi-Tocalino, part 2, ch. 2) and ran for the Peruvian presidency on a free-market platform (see, for example, Dietz 250-51), is often classed as (too) Eurocentric. I want to see La guerra as mimesis rather than as model, assuming, as Lukács does when discussing Balzac, that authors' beliefs do not necessarily determine the import of their fiction.

6. The question of historical depth appears differently in Brazil and in Peru; José Matos Mar counts Peruvian history as continuous over the last 10,000 years, superior in “density” to European history (7-9). Vargas Llosa's choice of a post-colonial event for his subject can be read as an affirmation of continental historical solidarity or as a confrontation with European concepts of historical “density” on the grounds where they are usually expressed.

7. Nelson Werneck Sodré is one of the few critics to follow this change in the author's vision. Cunha's campaign diaries indicate that “[t]wo weeks after arriving in Bahia [before leaving with the troops on the campaign], Euclides is struck by his first doubts about Canudos,” when he notices he has been fed misinformation about the situation (Sodré 31, 32).

8. For Renoldi-Tocalino, this distrust prompts some to accuse La guerra of questioning whether effective action is possible (51-53, 117, 135; she refers to Cornejo Polar; Rama, “La guerra”; Delprat).

9. Cunha occupies a peculiar place in Brazilian literature: on one hand, Os sertões stands apart from the literary tradition; the work is more fittingly classified as “writing,” in the sense of écriture. On the other hand, Cunha's preoccupation with the “bedrock of the nationality,” the stylistic force of his book, and especially his characterization, positive evaluation, even mythification, of the sertanejo, or backlander, provided Brazilian literature with one of its stock figures and place Os sertões at the origin of other, literary texts—from those of northeastern regionalism to Guimarães Rosa's subtle development of Riobaldo in Grande sertão: Veredas (see Castro-Klarén 388).

10. In “Uma visão de Euclides da Cunha,” Afonso Arinos approaches his subject with a selection of consecrated critical tools—biography, sociology, politics, psychology—but, on the basis of some early effusions of Cunha's, begins by identifying the author as a poet and Os sertões as an epic, comparable to the Aeneid and War and Peace (11, 12, 14).

11. A rough translation of jagunço might be “bandit,” in a complex sense that implies a sociopolitical or anthropological dimension: the jagunço could (and can) belong to the private army of a landowner or to an independent band of compeers operating with armed force on the margins of the economy of the Brazilian sertão, or backlands. Many jagunços joined Canudos; they were the warriors of the settlement. They also provided the Counselor's enemies with propaganda weaponry, especially after the theory of a “foreign influence” was discredited. For a review of the literature on banditry, including the Brazilian variety, see Gilbert M. Joseph.

12. Maria Tai Wolff notes the implied parallel between the brutality of the soldiers and of the jagunços (53). Nancy Stepan documents the influence on Latin American social, medical, and political thinking of French, German, and Italian theories about the connection between physical characteristics and social behavior; the treatment of the Conselheiro's head shows the mark of Cesare Lombroso's “scheme for distinguishing criminal types according to their physiognomy and craniometry” (114). She notes Cunha's acceptance of theories of racial determinism (45-46) but also argues that Latin American thinkers often adapted such ideas to valorize rather than dismiss local populations (3-4, 19, 27). For Sara Castro-Klarén this ideological connection is a shortcoming Cunha shared with his time rather than a problem Os sertões eventually raises (372).

13. Vargas Llosa addresses backlands fanaticism in one other work. The view in Pantaleón y las visitadoras (Captain Pantoja and the Special Service) of Brother Francisco and his Brotherhood of the Ark, a messianic movement in Amazonian Peru, is less sympathetic, bitterer, and more comic than that of Canudos in La guerra (see Renoldi-Tocalino 116).

14. Afrânio Coutinho places Os sertões at the end of a line that begins with the Iliad and includes the Chanson de Roland and War and Peace (7). Rama also links Cunha's book with other epics of nationality, like War and Peace. He quotes Cunha's À margem da história (“Marginal to History”) to show that the author knew and admired Sarmiento's Facundo, an earlier account (from 1845) of a popular rural rebellion against a central urban government; for Rama these two texts and Os sertões document a specifically Latin American “sociocultural structure not always liable to analysis in accordance with foreign sociological explanatory schemes” (“La guerra” 600, 601, 603). Like Rama, Mac Adam connects Os sertões with Facundo (160) and constructs an intertextual chain linking the Latin American texts to each other directly rather than through common relations to European texts.

15. The epigraph of Roberto Ventura's essay comes from Cunha's Contrastes e confrontos (“Contrasts and Comparisons”): “we do not yet have a history” (109).

16. Brazilian historiography commonly traces the weight of positivism on the intellectual foundation of the republican movement that ousted the emperor Pedro II in 1889. Luis Costa Lima notes that positivists favored a dictatorial republic and, quoting José Maria Bello (31) and José Joaquim Medeiros e Albuquerque (33), that positivists taught future political and intellectual elites in school (155-56). Cunha studied under the Brazilian intellectual Benjamin Constant (a namesake of the French revolutionary and writer), whose courses explicated positivism and defended republicanism in Brazil (Bosi 9). But Costa Lima also argues on the evidence of À margem da história that Cunha eventually rejected Comte (156). Describing Cunha's intellectual development, Sodré asserts that the author, unlike most of his contemporaries, kept abreast of scientific developments; Cunha committed errors in understanding, however, and he was blind to the class interests of the military establishment and of the public sector, with both of which he worked throughout his life, particularly during the Canudos campaign (33-46). The title of Almeida's pamphlet—A poesia d'Os sertões—asks the reader to judge the book as a literary text, by literary standards. The republic, whose reforms (secularization, the imposition of taxes) triggered the Canudos movement, expelled Pedro II one year after the abolition of slavery and little more than ten years before the writing of Os sertões. Abolition was accomplished in stages that coincided with increased European immigration and with the transference from Europe of an intense discussion on “race,” variously defined, and on the racial factor in the formation of national identities. Stepan documents these discussions in Latin America and their difference from their European versions. Cunha argues the “race” question in his work, which records the effect of European eugenics, biotypology, and anthropology on Brazilian thought about the Brazilian population and indicates the deviations that a focus on the Brazilian situation could impose on those ideological imports.

17. This change of mind is sometimes located between the writing of the campaign journal from which Cunha drew his war dispatches and the elaboration of these notes into Os sertões (Andrade 342-43). Renoldi-Tocalino also deals with this change of mind (204-05).

18. For background on the diffusion of theories about “race” in Brazil, see Stepan 44-46. Gilberto Freyre discusses this aspect of Os sertões at some length, conceding that Cunha “attaches an exaggerated importance to the ethnic problem and seems not to have realized the depth and extension to which the so-called ‘agrofeudal economy’ influenced Brazilian life.” Freyre notes, however, that cultivated opinion in Cunha's time held such “ethnocentric exaggerations” and “ethnic fatalism” to be scientifically defensible. Dissenters, like Alberto Torres, a follower of Franz Boas rather than of German and French proponents of racial determinism, or Manuel Bonfim, who still, like the Romantics, extolled the superior virtues of “primitives,” were exceptions among historians and among what would today be called cultural critics. All the same, Freyre concludes that Cunha never succumbed to the “mystical extremes of any theories proposing racial superiority” (39-41).

19. The absence of women and of romance in Os sertões may fulfill another function: marking the book as definitely not a novel—that is, as a text addressed to a male, not a female, public, to readers with the power to shape both public events and the definition of national reality. Sousa Andrade quotes Manuel Benício's O rei dos jagunços (“The King of the Jagunços”) as one investigation of Canudos that attends to the role of women in the government and maintenance of the Counselor's holy city (324n24).

20. Costa Lima considers both the cultural history and the political implications of Cunha's thought, tracing the evolution of the author's ideas through the book, from an explanation based on a European historical precedent (“our Vendée”) and on the politics of the moment (monarchism) to a biosocial interpretation (citing atavism, regression, the backwardness of mixed populations) to admiration and a heartfelt proposal not to marginalize and fight this backward, atavistic, mixed population but to integrate it fully in the nationality (160).

21. The expression appears in The Lost Steps (89), which contradicts it by showing the Americas overlaid with history like a palimpsest, existing synchronically as many histories, an invitation to review the usual concept of history. Or one could argue that the novel presents the Americas as a universe where geography is history and where travel in space is inevitably travel in time. The novel's beginning and ending in the “metropolis of the North” (New York) thus makes of the United States another stop in the time-space of the Americas, erasing the usual separation between north and south—but reinstating it at the end, when the protagonist, by returning to the north, becomes unable to find the opening to the remotest past, in the Amazonian jungle.

22. See Octavio Ianni, ch. 5, for a discussion of economic shifts preceding and following abolition. Note that some scholars—see Todd A. Diacon and Patricia R. Pessar—analyze movements like those of Canudos and of the Contestado Rebellion (in the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina between 1912 and 1916) as the results of socioeconomic conditions, expressed in millenarian terms. René Ribeiro, however, sees the movements as rooted in myth, both continuous in Brazil from pre- to post-Columbian times and universal.

23. Freyre traces Cunha's views of the Counselor's mental health to the pioneer Brazilian sociologist Nina Rodrigues (40).

24. Freyre states this view most strongly: “the truth is that the Counselor's movement was mainly a violent shock between cultures: between the modern, urban coast and the cattle-raising sertão, archaic and stagnant” (44). Rama notes that between 1870 and the turn of the century Latin America broke out into popular rebellions opposing modernization; he sees them as the resistance of unlettered masses against the urban culture of the literate elites (“La guerra” 621). Today those who think of the Third World as still stuck in history while the developed countries have reached a postmodern, posthistorical position have not abandoned the parameters according to which Canudos and the republic existed in different times.

25. According to Rama, the figure of the Baron is one of the weak points of the book, for the character exists outside history (“La guerra” 633). But the Baron can also be seen as illustrating the strangely nonlinear form of history in Latin America, a concept Rama might have been less willing than Vargas Llosa to entertain.

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