The amazonian vortex of Euclides da Cunha

Abstract

On O Brasil não é longe daqui: o narrador, a viagem [Brazil is not far from here: narrator and travel] (1990), Flora Süssekind focuses on narratives written in the 19th century and distinguished by their obsession of founding a literary history for the nation by referring to local color, a conductive line to nationalism. On the other hand, Euclides da Cunha (1866-1909) was dissociated from those narrators as well as from naturalist travelers when revealed the purpose of detaching the landscape from its sight on his unfinished work Paraíso perdido [Lost Paradise]. This article discusses how Cunha presented, on the book À margem da história [On the Margins of History], part of Paraíso perdido, a version of the Amazon forest which challenged naturalist scientists (as Wallace and Humboldt). Cunha reveals a perspective of the forest as a vortex, which continuously devours mater (from vegetal, human and animal worlds), shared with Latin American writers as Alberto Rangel and Eustasio Rivera (Bernucci, 2017). By conceiving man and land as absence and apparition, the survival of the original and spectra (the Amauhacan corpse), the author foresaw contemporary debates on the absent-presence of indigenous peoples in Brazilian culture, placed on the threshold of figuration, as an unreachable origin (Finazzi-Agrò, 2016).