The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America [1 ed.] 1138668923, 9781138668928

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
A Note on Translations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Desertmakers
1 War in Terra Incognita: Richard Burton’s Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay
2 In Praise of Deviation: W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land
3 Making Museums, Making Deserts: Francisco Moreno in Patagonia
4 The Limits of Visibility and Knowledge: Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões
Afterword: What Is Left?
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Desertmakers

This book studies how the rhetoric of travel introduces different conceptualizations of space and time in four scenarios of war during the last decades of the nineteenth century in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. By examining accounts of war and travel in the context of the consolidation of state apparatuses in these countries, Uriarte underlines the essential role that war (in connection with empire and capital) played in the Latin American process of modernization and state formation. In this book, the analysis of British and Latin American travel narratives proves particularly productive in reading the ways in which national territories are reconfigured, reimagined, and reappropriated by the state apparatus. War turns out to be a central instrument not just for making possible this logic of appropriation, but also for bringing temporal notions such as modernization and progress to regions that were ­described—albeit problematically—as being outside of history. The book argues that wars waged against “deserts” (as Patagonia, the Brazilian sertão, Paraguay, and the Uruguayan countryside were described and imagined) were in fact means of generating empty spaces, real voids that were the condition for new foundations. In The Desertmakers, the study of travel writing is an essential tool for understanding the spatial transformations brought by war, and for analyzing in detail the forms and connotations of movement in connection with violence. Uriarte pays particular attention to the effects that witnessing war had on the traveler’s identity and on the relation that is established with the point of departure of their own voyage. Written at the intersection of literary analysis, critical geography, political science, and history, this book will be of interest to those studying Latin American literature, travel writing, war, and state formation, Empire writing and neocolonialism. Javier Uriarte is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature, Stony Brook University, USA.

Routledge Research in Travel Writing Edited by Peter Hulme, University of Essex Tim Youngs, Nottingham Trent University

Women, Travel Writing, and Truth Edited by Clare Broome Saunders French Travel in the Ottoman Empire Marseille to Constantinople, 1650–1700 Michèle Longino Politics, Identity, and Mobility in Travel Writing Edited by Miguel A. Cabañas, Jeanne Dubino, Veronica Salles-Reese, and Gary Totten Travel Writing from Black Australia Utopia, Melancholia, and Aboriginality Robert Clarke Travel Writing in Dutch and German, 1790–1930 Modernity, Regionality, Mobility Edited by Alison E. Martin, Lut Missinne, and Beatrix van Dam French Political Travel Writing in the Interwar Years Radical Departures Martyn Cornick, Martin Hurcombe, and Angela Kershaw Travelling Servants Mobility and Employment in British Fiction and Travel Writing 1750–1837 Kathryn Walchester The Desertmakers Travel, War, and the State in Latin America Javier Uriarte https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-Travel-Writing/ book-series/RRTW

The Desertmakers Travel, War, and the State in Latin America

Javier Uriarte

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Javier Uriarte to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2019953269 ISBN: 978-1-138-66892-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-61839-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

A Blanca y Tica, mis abuelas Per Fernando

Contents

List of Figures A Note on Translations Acknowledgments

ix xi xiii

Introduction: The Desertmakers 1 1 War in Terra Incognita: Richard Burton’s Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay

41

2 In Praise of Deviation: W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land

86

3 Making Museums, Making Deserts: Francisco Moreno in Patagonia 127 4 The Limits of Visibility and Knowledge: Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões Afterword: What Is Left? Bibliography Index

206 267 275 297

Figures

1 1863 map of the Paraguayan Republic, by Alfred Lucien de Brayer 57 2 1862 map of Paraguay, by Ernest Amédée Barthélemy Mouchez 58 3 Approximate map of Lamb’s travels narrated in The Purple Land 88 4 Cover of the first edition (1879) of Viaje a la Patagonia austral 131 5 General Roca’s 1879 expedition to the Neuquén and Negro rivers 136 6 Expeditions to the Nahuel Huapi lake (1881), to the Andes (1882–83), and to the interior of Patagonia (1883–84) 137 7 Map of Moreno’s 1876–77 trip, narrated in Viaje a la Patagonia austral 138 8 A Tehuelche camp. Drawing by Alfredo Paris based on a sketch by F. P. Moreno 148 9 Façade of the Museum of La Plata. Photo by author 155 10 Approximate map created from the inscriptions on Moreno’s revolver, including likely current names of places visited on his 1875 journey 173 11 Map that continues the previous one, including the remaining places visited by Moreno on his 1875 trip, as suggested by the inscriptions on his revolver 174 12 Group of indigenous prisoners, including the caciques Inacayal, Foyel, and their families 178 13 Margarita, daughter of the cacique Foyel 179 14 Praying card given to the author in 2010, on his way to Canudos 207 15 Map included in the first (1902) edition of Os sertões 215 16 “Colonel Roosevelt and Dr. Moreno with Four Argentine Indians”, by Frank Harper 270

A Note on Translations

Unless otherwise indicated, all English translations of texts originally written in Spanish or Portuguese are by Andrea Rosenberg. For the sake of brevity, I have decided to keep the Spanish or Portuguese original versions only in the cases when I transcribe literary texts, mainly those that are subject of study in this book.

Acknowledgments

This book has been for a long time in the making. And so, it is the result of a truly collaborative work; through the years, it gained immensely from the insights, suggestions, ideas, and criticism of many friends and colleagues in various countries. Its shortcomings, of course, are my own responsibility. First and foremost, I would like to thank Mary Louise Pratt, who read this work when it consisted of just a few pages that would become a doctoral dissertation at New York University; she was the one who first told me that war was an element that would help me put together many of the ideas and authors I wanted to write about. I am truly thankful for her unparalleled intellectual generosity and honesty, for closely following my writing process, and for urging me not to stop, not just during my PhD years, but until this very moment. For telling me what I needed to hear at the right times. I am privileged to be friends (and neighbors!) with her. Hugo Achugar has been a true maestro. With him I learned to do research and to think critically: he also taught me the importance of collaborative work in our profession, and to stand by my own ideas. The Desertmakers, at different stages, received the crucial and lucid input of many colleagues, friends, and/or mentors I truly admire. I would like to state here my deep appreciation for their time, patience, and generosity. They are Hugo Achugar (who told me, when reading a previous version of this book, he was reading my novel), Sylvia Molloy, Sibylle Fischer, Gabriel Giorgi, Felipe Martínez-Pinzón, Paul Firbas, Ximena Espeche, Carl Fischer, Lena Burgos-Lafuente, Santiago Deymonnaz, Fernando Degiovanni, Laura Torres-Rodríguez, and Marta Peixoto. I also thank the two anonymous readers of this book’s manuscript, who gave me many valuable and useful suggestions. I thank Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, the co-editors of the Routledge Research in Travel Writing series, for including this book in their prestigious series. Peter was interested in this project from the very beginning. I discovered in him an exceptionally rigorous and generous reader. I think I was very lucky to work with him, for this book would have been much weaker without his detailed reading and pointed questions.

xiv Acknowledgments A previous version of The Desertmakers won the 2012 National Prize for Literature in Uruguay (in the unpublished literary essay category). I thank the members of the jury, from whom I have learned a great deal through the years: Ana Inés Larre Borges, Elena Romiti, Gustavo ­Remedi, Juan Introini (in memoriam), and Wilfredo Penco. This book has benefited significantly from the work of colleagues whose ideas are present here, in various forms. Our conversations, their classes, their writings, conferences or other projects we have shared are, in different ways, part of The Desertmakers: thanks to Graciela Montaldo, Jens Andermann, Ericka Beckman, Jennifer L. French, Julio Ramos, Fermín Rodríguez, Juan Pablo Dabove, Pedro Meira Monteiro, Thiago Nicodemo, Patrick Deer, Francisco Foot Hardman, Fernando Degiovanni, Lúcia Ricotta, Claudia Torre, Alejandra Laera, Denilson Lopes, Adriana Amante, Ettore Finzzi-Agrò, Mariano Siskind, Luca Bacchini, Roberto Vecchi, Victoria Saramago, Sebastián Díaz-Duhalde, Leopoldo Bernucci, Bruno Carvalho, Alejandro Quin. My colleagues in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University—Paul Firbas, Lena Burgos-Lafuente, Aurélie Vialette, Adrián Pérez-Melgosa, Daniela Flesler, Víctor Roncero, Katy Vernon, Joseph Pierce, Lou Deutsch, and Lilia Ruiz-Debbe—have been supportive at all times, providing me with the perfect working ­environment to complete this manuscript. Through the years, I have come to realize how lucky I am to work with such generous colleagues. The first version of this book, written in Spanish, was translated into English by Andrea Rosenberg. Her excellent work and elegant prose, her very useful questions, and the incredible swiftness and attention (two things that I have never known how to combine) with which she performs her task have considerably improved this book. We worked closely on the revisions of the many versions and rewritings of this manuscript that followed her initial translation (Peter Hulme was also fundamental in this editing process). In our many backs and forths I learned a lot about my own writing. I have been working in various projects with Felipe Martínez-Pinzón since 2009. Ours is the best intellectual collaboration I could dream of: a friendship that is also a permanent exchange of ideas, readings, and projects, endlessly stimulating. Un abrazo termítico. Working together with (and learning from) María Rosa Olivera-­ Williams, Valentina Litvan, Beatriz Vegh, Lindsey Cordery, Fernando Blanco, Cristián Opazo, Kari Soriano Salkjelsvik, and Néstor Sanguinetti has been, at the same time, fun and intellectually stimulating. Thanks also to Silvia San Martín, mi profe, an inspiring example of passionate engagement, who taught me that it is our students who make us. So, thanks to my students at Stony Brook, with whom I have enjoyed discussing many of the ideas that appear in The Desertmakers. In these years I have discovered that teaching graduate classes and the

Acknowledgments  xv task of mentoring students are the most rewarding parts of my job. The experience of teaching at the Universidad de la República (­ Uruguay), the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP, Brazil), the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (Argentina), and the Universidad Alberto Hurtado (Chile) has been stimulating too: in all these venues, I have had the opportunity to discuss some of these hypotheses in different contexts and with engaged students. I thank all of those who invited me to present various parts of this book at various institutions: Marcos Lopes (at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas), Thiago Nicodemo (at the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros of the Universidade de São Paulo), Nuno Manna and Itânia Gomes (at the Universidade Federal da Bahia), Élcio Cornelsen (at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais), Inés de Torres (at the School of ­Communications of the Universidad de la República), Ximena E ­ speche (at the Universidad de Buenos Aires), Laura Demaría and Saúl Sosnowski (at the University of Maryland), Rocío Rodríguez Ferrer and Wolfgang Bongers (at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), Ana Ribeiro (at the Universidad Católica del Uruguay), Consuelo Figueroa (at the Universidad Diego Portales), Carlos Gómez Florentín (at the Secretaría Nacional de Cultura, Paraguay), and Eric Beverley (Initiative for Historical Social Sciences, Stony Brook University). I thank the Library of the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin, the European Commission Erasmus Mundus Program and the University of Bologna, and the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook for having supported this project. I also thank the personnel at the Archivo General de la Nación and at the Ambrosetti Museum (particularly Mónica ­Ferraro) in Buenos Aires. The years as graduate student at New York University gave me the privilege of meeting people whose friendship I still keep today; this might be the most inspiring and joyful outcome of that period of my life. Thanks to Santiago Deymonnaz, Lena Burgos-Lafuente, Marcos Rohena-­Madrazo, Lina Meruane, Felipe Martínez-Pinzón, Claudio Benzecry, Christian Gerzso, Michiel Bot, Katharina Piechocki, Guido Herzovich, Marcos Rico, Aldo Marchesi, Carl Fischer, José Juan Pérez Meléndez, Sebastián Baña, Mariano Siskind, Ximena Espeche, Alexandra Falek, Micaela Kramer, Alexandre Bonafos, Laura Torres-­ Rodríguez, Analía Lavín, Claudia Salazar, Kahlila Chaar-Pérez, Brian De Grazia, Licia Fiol-Matta, ­Denilson Lopes, José del Valle, David Fonseca, Ángeles Donoso, Steven Crumb, Benjamin Johnson, Ana Teresa Toro, Lydia Bellido, Marco Antônio Sousa Alves, Patricia Benabe, Marco Aurélio Sousa Alves, and César Barros Some of my most enduring and beautiful friendships date from the days before I left Uruguay. I thank these friends for their persistence, for their patience and their company, for having been “there” (or here) for more than 20 years. And for every encounter, for which I always

xvi Acknowledgments zealously long. Santiago Labat, Mariana Ferreira, Diego Gianelli, Juan Ariel Bogliaccini, Ignacio Zubillaga, Juan Cardelino, Pablo Aguirre, Federico Kuster, Martín Solari, Leonardo de los Santos, Cristián Troncoso, María José Bruña, Marina Lussich, Martín Garreta, Leandro Vila, ­L eticia Eyheragaray, Rosario Lázaro, Edgar Ergueta, Bruno Demoro, Julio César Fernández, Gerardo Fresia, Ignacio Lagomarsino, Javier Mosca. ¡Gracias! The loving support of my family has been essential in the making of this book. Gracias totales to the entire puppeada and to the Uriarte family: it is always a joy to share with them so many stories, travels, music, readings, and asados. This book is dedicated to my two grandmothers, Tica (in memoriam) and Blanca, for being, each in her very personal way, and so many times, adventurous accomplices: for being courageous, for teaching me so many things, for knowing me very very well. My brother and my sister, Ignacio and Inés, have been, in many ways, a true model for me: I admire their passionate way of dealing with life and thank them for always listening to and understanding me, and for their invaluable advice. When I finished my dissertation, Cleo González, my niece, was born: now she is seven. She has completely and joyfully transformed my family. My father, José Ignacio Uriarte, has told me, referring ironically—and lovingly—to the many times I spoke or wrote about the topics of this book, that the deserts of which I write have proven to be actually quite fruitful (“el jugo que les has sacado a esos desiertos”). My mother, Corina Puppo, “hiding” in the audience of some of my talks, asked me questions about the relationships between the deserts and the figure of the deserter, of which I speak in these pages. I thank them for being a brilliant example of many many things; and for being with me, wherever I am, in spite of the distance. The Desertmakers is also dedicated to Fernando Loffredo, whose intelligence and sense of humor I profoundly admire, and from whom I endlessly learn. I have shared with him many of the ideas of this book, and he has been a rigorous and honest reader. He has been supportive and caring (and patient!) since the very beginning of this project: this book is also his.

Introduction The Desertmakers

Auferre trucidare rapere falses nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and when they make a desert, they call it peace. Tacitus, Agricola1

Desertifications How is a desert made? How is it manufactured; where does it come from? The question might seem strange, even absurd. Isn’t the desert a natural space, mere geography? Isn’t a desert a monotonous, motionless landscape containing in abundance only sand, extreme heat, and absolute aridity? Yet the epigraph from Tacitus refers to the desert as a result, as a product. The desertifying agent, as he sees it, is imperial conquest. Agricola was his first work, published in the year 98. It is the biography of Gnaeus Julius Agricola, an important Roman general and Tacitus’s son-in-law. The text criticizes the Roman Empire’s exploitation of the populations it conquered. The excerpt above, the most famous lines from Agricola, appears in the text spoken by Calgacus, one of the chieftains of the Caledonian army resisting the Roman invasion of what is now Scotland, to criticize the imperial government. The Latin noun solitudo means, in fact, “desert”, a word that, like  the Spanish desierto, comes from the participle desertus, derived from the verb deserere (to abandon, to desert), and which means abandoned, alone, empty. 2 So, the desert, in its very etymology, was not always there. There is the connotation of an outcome or conclusion implied by the participle and lost in the noun form. The desert is, properly ­speaking, a place that was made desert. In addition, the epigraph underscores the civilizing aspect the Roman Empire attributed to itself. For Tacitus, the empire is conquest, destruction, slaughter. The result of all these is the desert, which facilitates the substitution of one people for another. Thus, he questions not merely the euphemism “empire” but also what the Romans choose to call peace. The conqueror’s focus on the outcome implies an effort to mask the destructive power that leads

2  Introduction: The Desertmakers to it. Therefore, these words condemn the discourse by which war, as a maker of deserts, is made invisible, civilized, disguised as peace. In several Latin American countries the desert has been understood as a primordial solitude, an elemental void.3 This trope was used repeatedly, first by foreign travelers and later by Latin American intellectuals; it was a construction, a necessary fiction for the establishment of nations.4 This idea of America as a tabula rasa in which history was always about to begin and had to be constructed, as a virgin space waiting for projects to be brought to fruition in it, was a constant in the literature on the continent from the so-called discovery until the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet the void, the tabula rasa, was the result of real and systematic practices of extermination. The questions I attempt to answer in these pages address the concretization of those plans. I argue that in the second half of the nineteenth century, the desert becomes concrete, tangible, present. The governing elites construct the desert they had imagined on paper in previous decades, when―in some countries―they were not yet in power. War itself is the necessary instrument of desertification. This book suggests that the end of the desert as a representation coincides with the creation of the desert as a void appropriated by the state, as solitudo. In a beautifully written discussion of literary constructions of the desert in Argentina, Fermín Rodríguez reads the so-called Conquest of the Desert (1879–85), the war of extermination waged by the Argentine government against the indigenous populations of the pampas and Patagonia, as the end of the desert: “The space ceases to be perceived as a desert. The exploration of the territory, combined with the new techniques for representing the ground, transforms the desert into a fertile space, fit for colonization and cultivation.”5 Here an important clarification is needed: a necessary condition for this end of the desert as perceived by the state is the creation of a new void, one that previously existed only in discourse. The transformation of the arid or wild desert into a productive space first requires the transformation of the desert into the deserted. It is the concretization of what has previously been an expression of desire. Upon that void, which is now objective and indisputable, the process of modernization and consolidation of the national states will be carried out. The desert, in the second half of the nineteenth century, ceases to be a metaphor or image and takes on a tragic, absolute character. Needless to say, the ideas of modernization, order, and progress―like the idea of peace condemned by Tacitus―hide the true destructive nature of the process: as in the times of the Roman Empire, the desert is the void that results from war. These pages reflect on the place that war as a generator of deserts― as a desertifier―occupies in the view of travelers in the second half of the nineteenth century in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the term “desertification”

Introduction: The Desertmakers  3 as “the  process of becoming desert (as from land mismanagement or climate change)”.6 It is precisely this topic that Euclides da Cunha addresses in his 1901 essay “Fazedores de desertos” [Desert-makers].7 The text criticizes the way the soils irretrievably lose their fertility first at the hands of the native populations of the Brazilian interior through practices such as the burning of vegetation that deplete the soils. These flawed soil management methods were later continued by the colonists and, subsequently, by modern man, who created more drought and more poverty. By appropriating the title of Euclides’s essay to construct the central argument of this book, I hope to give new meanings to the very idea of the desert, which I read as a product―and, paradoxically but fundamentally, a condition of possibility―of the consolidation process of the state bureaucratic and military apparatus in South America at the time.8 In the essay, Euclides worries―avant la lettre with respect to those who warn of the consequences of climate change today―about the effects of agricultural production methods on climate, denouncing their unsustainability and calling attention to the continuity between the antiquated practices of the sertão’s previous inhabitants and those of Euclides’s contemporaries. The exploitation of the land is a form of the destruction that identifies those contemporaries with the supposed barbarians who preceded them: “prolongamos ao nosso tempo esse longo traço demolidor, que vimos no passado” [we extend into our own time the long trail of devastation that we saw in the past].9 Thus, the destructive relationship with the natural space likens the inhabitants of the sertão to the colonists who have replaced them. Also in Euclides’s best-known work, Os sertões (Campanha de Canudos) [Backlands. The Canudos Campaign], published in 1902, which narrates the 1897 Canudos War between the state army and a rebel town in the northeastern part of the country, a similar destructive and barbaric logic is one of the elements that links the urban army and the rebels in the eyes of the narrator. Os sertões will be one of the focuses of analysis here.10 Though my research does not examine different ways of exploiting the soil, the desert-making logic discussed in these pages also caused destruction and death in the name of modernization. The notion of the desert is incredibly rich, its meanings and connotations multiple and changing. While this richness is palpable in Latin America, and is at the core of this book, deserts, their connection with war, with resistance, and with states’ efforts to control nomadic or unknown populations, and to conquer territories, are present in many different contexts. The authors discussed in The Desertmakers make reference to the African deserts and to the Arab world in many occasions. And the Conquest of the Desert in Argentina viewed the US conquest of the West as an example to imitate. Historian Brian DeLay, in War of a Thousand Deserts, has studied the way in which the desert appears as a category in the context of the nineteenth-century Indian Wars and

4  Introduction: The Desertmakers Mexican-American War. He explains how the desert was understood in the writing of the authors he studies as sources: “in this context the term referred not to aridity, but to emptiness, silence, fruitlessness, desolation, to the absence of industry and improvement and of human mastery over nature.”11 In other words, this is equivalent to Tacitus’s solitudo.12 This is also close, in its rich connotations, to the English word “wilderness” (one of the many English words to which the Latin solitudo has been translated).13 In the chapters that follow many references will be found to ways in which the desert is conceived of in different contexts, and even continents. These references to North American, European, African, or Asian discussions about the relationships between deserts, states, and war mold to a certain extent the views and ruminations of the travelers discussed here.

Traveling to War This book focuses on four travelers’ perspectives on the phenomenon of war between 1864 and 1902 in South America. The texts discussed in detail are Richard Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay (1870), which describes the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70), a conflict in which Paraguay was utterly destroyed by an alliance between Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay; William Henry Hudson’s novel The Purple Land (1885), a narrative of the adventures of his alter-ego Richard Lamb throughout the Uruguayan territory and his participation in the civil wars that took place there during the 1860s; a variety of texts by Francisco Pascasio Moreno, who traveled to Patagonia a number of times before, during, and after the Conquest of the Desert; and Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões, which recounts a massacre of a rebellious rural community in the Brazilian region known as the sertão at the hands of the Brazilian state. I examine the narrative effects of the different approaches taken by these four writers, concentrating on the transformations in the travelers’ understandings of themselves and their starting points―both geographic and ideological. I read travel and war in tandem, during a critical moment in the processes of state consolidation in South America. What particular elements does the perspective of the traveler, constituted by―and in―motion, contribute to an understanding of the phenomenon of war? If war is essentially a spatial phenomenon, then approaching it from the perspective of travel writing, anchored in space and in movement, can bring a new light to its understanding.14 What place do these narratives have in the tragedy of state consolidation to which they bear witness? In the different ways of describing war in these narratives, what aspects of the conflicts appear most vividly? These wars led to the discovery of worlds that were unknown to the narrators, transforming their conceptions of not only the national space but also themselves as part of the

Introduction: The Desertmakers  5 spiral of violence. As Dennis Porter has noted in an influential book on European travel narratives, “the most interesting writers of nonfictional travel books have managed to combine explorations in the world with self-exploration. They submitted themselves to the challenge of travel and, in the process, managed if not always to make themselves over, then at least to know themselves differently”. And he adds that “there emerges a process of exploration and self-transformation through a dialogic engagement with alien modes of life”.15 To this we might add, crucially, with their disappearance, given the particular circumstances in which the travelogues discussed in The Desertmakers were conceived (Porter does not discuss war). Some of the texts analyzed focus more than others on the narrator’s point of view and interior processes, but it is always the military conflict that is crucial in determining the ­interiority/­exteriority of the self (and the other) with regard to national spaces. Here we encounter disorientation, together with a struggle to find a center and to define the visited territory in relation to the homeland. The texts largely share a particular rhetoric of confusion, an uneasiness as to how, exactly, to perform the act of looking, and they constantly reveal a need to adjust or readapt the eye. The encounter with that unknown other, the oxymoronic inhabitant of the “deserts”, whose uncanny nature makes it familiar and alien at once, ends up inserting that alienation into the narrator and, by extension, into the nation-­state itself. In the process of getting to know themselves again, or knowing themselves in a different manner, that these narrators undergo, I am particularly interested in the contact with others, with those whom Mary Louise Pratt has called “travelees”.16 The Desertmakers stresses that it is not just travel that allows for a better understanding of the phenomenon of war, but also the other way round: the discussion of the intersection of war and travel that I study constitutes an innovative way to look at travel, as it is considered in dialogue with the violent spatial reconfigurations and unexpected ways of looking at and moving through a territory imposed by war. These pages suggest that there is no coming back from war: returning the gaze to the state, the place from which one has figuratively embarked, sometimes leads to no longer recognizing oneself in it. In exploring this idea, I work with the concept of oikos as it has been discussed by Georges Van Den Abbeele, for whom the oikos, or home―that point from which one departs and to which one returns―can be lost from view, making the return impossible: in travel, “something can always go wrong. The ‘place’ of the voyage cannot be a stable one.”17 For these travelers, the experience of war produces deviations, dis-identifications, disorientation, an inability to recognize the self in the state or sometimes even to locate it. Traveling to war also means beginning to look with one’s own eyes. In the first half of the nineteenth century, travel entailed the repetition of other people’s commonplaces; the gaze was constructed

6  Introduction: The Desertmakers based on previous descriptions.18 One could even describe a territory in which one had never set foot, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo (1845) being the best-known example of this. In an influential article Graciela Montaldo focuses on this fundamentally (though not merely) Sarmiento-esque manner of looking at the new as if it were familiar through previous reading and knowledge: “Sarmiento, with a blind faith in the written word—a ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’ way of legitimizing knowledge—finds in those texts a truth with which to describe his culture and his own territory”.19 It was not necessary, in these earlier texts, to travel in order to describe a given territory. Reading and repeating or adapting some tropes seemed to be enough. However, war makes it so that it is no longer enough to read in order to give a precise account of a territory; in these cases, of a territory undergoing a radical and violent form of transformation. The travelers I study here highlight the clash between the readings that lead them to each battlefront and the way their own gaze is shaped by the conflict. War confronts the traveler with the insufficiency of reading. These travelogues, then, describe another sort of passage: one that moves from someone else’s perspective to one’s own. Though in traveling it is impossible not to quote―the texts by Richard Burton and Euclides da Cunha examined here are good examples of this―war nevertheless requires in no uncertain terms that one begin to look. Not all travel writing produces a disconnection between what is expected at the moment of departure and what’s found while traveling; traveling does not always mean discovering. While it is nonetheless common to find travel narratives that question the assumptions of the self that leaves home, the estrangement that can be found in these texts produces a sensation of foreignness shared by all four of the travelers. This estrangement is a consequence of the experience of war and it calls into question the traveler’s identification with the modern state (and in some cases with empire).

Latin American Modernization and the State This book originates in the indisputable fact that war as a cultural phenomenon merits study in much greater depth. In general, military conflicts have been examined within the framework of history or political science; in the case of Latin America, few scholars have looked at the relationship between war and the state in literature or other cultural products. Ways of depicting war and evaluating its meanings and consequences are nearly absent from discussions in cultural criticism, especially for Latin America—which is all the more remarkable considering war’s powerful presence in political processes in the region. 20 War is considered here in connection with the state. It is one of the premises of this book that the links between cultural production and the

Introduction: The Desertmakers  7 state, specifically the role of the latter in the production of the former, and, in general, the discursive dimension of the state, call for a more detailed study in the Latin American context. For Max Weber, the state is defined as a system of domination: “a relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by means of legitimate (i.e. considered to be legitimate) violence”.21 To exert dominance, the state must have a monopoly on that legitimate violence, as Weber himself noted: “a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”22 War is not merely a form of that violence but also a central mechanism through which the state obtains its monopoly. Complementing the well-known formula that “war makes states”, set out by Charles Tilly in his 1985 article “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime”, is the idea that, simultaneously, the state creates war to legitimize itself in its citizens’ eyes and in this way consolidate its power and institutional apparatus: “the threats against which a given government protects its citizens are imaginary or are consequences of its own activities.”23 There is another element in this mutual reinforcement between war and the state that seems to be fundamental in the process of state making: the capitalist mode of production. Tilly mentions taxation as a way of obtaining the economic means by which war and the state can arise. 24 The European states emerged out of interactions between war, the state’s tax-levying powers, and capitalist accumulation of wealth. 25 It is an open question how these factors interconnected in Latin America in the second half of the nineteenth century and to what extent Tilly’s model explains the consolidation of the state apparatus in the region, but the political scientist Fernando López-Alves has asserted that many of the points mentioned by Tilly are pertinent to the state-building process in Latin America. 26 My aim in these pages is to talk not about the founding of nations but instead about the consolidation of the state’s bureaucratic apparatus: what in Latin America has been called “modernization”. The consolidation of oligarchic nation-states after a long period of unrest unleashed multiple changes in the economic, political, and cultural realms in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The region witnessed the complex transformation of pastoral and rural societies into modernized and market-oriented states with strong agroexport sectors. The regimes that characterized these decades have been aptly described, quite recently, by Juan Pablo Dabove as “the late nineteenth-century Latin American formula of rule: ostensibly liberal and formally republican, but in fact authoritarian, oligarchical, and decisively bent on a project of export-led macroeconomic growth, nation-state building, and social transformation according to Eurocentric models, inspired by positivist philosophy.”27 I am thinking here not of dictatorial regimes (though the Mexican Porfiriato and Uruguayan Militarism are two good examples of this)28 but of a significant militarization of the state that was key in its

8  Introduction: The Desertmakers push for territorial control. In fact, Tulio Halperín Donghi explicitly associates the repressive nature of Julio Argentino Roca’s first administration (1880–86) in Argentina with the Mexican Porfiriato, 29 while Ángel Rama explores the importance of the army as a modernizing agent in Latin America: The entity that carried out the modernizing project and was able to make it viable was the army. This phenomenon can be explained another way: only through the repressive force available to the army was it possible to impose the modernizing model, since that model implied an economic and social restructuring that would punish indigent rural communities, thus driving them to desperate rebellion.30 It was these populations that war would help stamp out for good. Therefore, modernization and repression worked together to achieve the military and economic objectives of the elites in late nineteenth-century South America. I therefore examine the modern state as a militarized and capitalistic institutional apparatus, and not the construction of the idea of the nation. The focus here is not national configurations nor the perception or portrayal of the essence of the nation (the “imagined communities” discussed by Benedict Anderson), but the concrete effects of the state’s intervention in the social, economic, spatial, and political dynamics of four Latin American countries.31 Oscar Oszlak, in La formación del Estado argentino, talks about the state as being characterized by a fundamental duality, constructing itself as a body that is at once both abstract and material.32 If the state is an abstraction, I am interested in moments of its materialization, the various ways that its authority (or traces of it) becomes tangible in the population and the territory. My analysis not just highlights how the presence of the state is felt in concrete ways, and in concrete episodes of violence, but also focuses on symbolic instances. I frequently employ the juridical notion of territory, as in the texts examined war is a territorializing operation whose concern is to establish fixed boundaries for the state or to assert its power over the totality of the country. My reading focuses precisely on this moment of constructing state bureaucracies and the concomitant effort to push the Latin American economies into the international market, a process complemented by foreign capital’s unprecedented penetration into Latin America. The Desertmakers suggests that war and state violence in the subcontinent at the end of the nineteenth century functioned as a manifestation of those nations’ integration into the global order of capital. War is fundamentally an instrument of the state, but—as is apparent even today— it must be read in dialogue with economic interests that employ it as a tool. Françoise Perus has explained the economic characteristics of

Introduction: The Desertmakers  9 modernization. At the end of the nineteenth century, Latin America joined the global markets through economies based on agricultural exportation, sending raw materials to industrialized metropolitan centers. At the same time, substantial flows of capital arrived from those same urban centers, to be invested in shipping and mining, and in some countries even came to control vital economic centers.33 Ericka Beckman, in her insightful Capital Fictions, outlines the characteristics of the years focused on in her work (which include the period I examine here): Between roughly 1870 and 1930, Latin American nations were brought swiftly—if unevenly—into the fold of global market relations, mainly as exporters of “raw” or “primary” commodities, and as importers of European and North American manufactures. At the height of European imperial and industrial expansion, the mainly independent nations of Latin America joined an emerging world order rooted in the primacy of the commodity form.34 In the book, Beckman studies the way the language of the market and capital was adopted in the literature of the period, and examines this economic aspect of literature (as well as the literary or fictional aspect of economic discourse) in showing how certain “fictions” and tropes are shared by the language of the economy and that of literature. I would argue that my own book can be read as a way of exploring the other face of the same phenomenon, as an effort to explore the processes that complement those described by Beckman. Modernization was not imposed because it was inevitable, then, nor did it arrive to naturally or magically transform spaces, as the intellectual discourse that lauded capitalist progress claimed throughout the nineteenth century.35 The process of modernization also included fundamental changes in transport and communication, which took place hand in hand with the strong immersion of Latin America in the global markets. The most visible change in this respect was the unprecedented growth of railroads throughout the region (and, notably, in the four countries studied here), a tangible sign of the penetration of British capital. Ángel Rama and Julio Ramos have studied the ways in which the new forms of circulation of goods and ideas, as well as the imposition of a bourgeois mentality in these years, fundamentally transformed the role of the intellectual visà-vis that of the journalist.36 The newspaper became a new forum for the expression and circulation of ideas and opinions, as it significantly changed the experience of both readership and authorship. Newspapers were central to the ways politicians and public personalities debated wars in these years; some of the writers studied here wrote dispatches from war or heatedly discussed its causes and consequences in newspapers. In addition, the chronicle, a new genre that began during this period, and that incorporated new ways of understanding displacement, bears

10  Introduction: The Desertmakers witness to the professionalization of the intellectual, who felt forced to work as an employee of the newspapers, to which he frequently contributed.37 Julio Ramos has described this professionalization process as the constitution of literature as an autonomous sphere, increasingly differentiating it from the realm of politics.38 Relevant to the process of modernization in Latin America was the role that positivism had in the political and social struggles of these decades. Its close relationship with scientific theories of evolution and with racial theories impacted on the ways in which the state was understood in Latin America, the Brazilian flag’s motto Ordem e progresso being perhaps the clearest example in this regard.39 Positivism was a widespread presence in the intellectual production of these years, in particular informing some of the literary currents of end-of-the-century Latin America, such as naturalism. Theories that sought to legitimize forms of racial inequality in the nation went some way toward explaining the wars recounted in this book. At the same time, they informed the views on supposedly backward peoples—against whom the wars were waged—expressed by the authors studied. Their descriptions and understanding of nature were also greatly influenced by contemporary science: in fact, the label “scientist” could be applied—with no identical ­connotations—to the four travelers analyzed in The Desertmakers. Modernization had, needless to say, specific articulations in each of the four countries studied. There has been a heated and largely still open discussion regarding the nature of the autocratic governments that ruled Paraguay practically from its independence in 1812 to the end of the War of the Triple Alliance in 1870. With important differences between them, presidents José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (1814–40), Carlos Antonio López (1841–62), and Francisco Solano López (1862–70) consolidated the Paraguayan state, which was centralized, militarized, and early obtained the monopoly of violence over the entire territory. While Francia strictly isolated Paraguay from international commerce and power dynamics in the region (Paraguay did not participate in the frequent wars that devastated its neighboring countries after independence), Carlos Antonio López stimulated foreign investment in the country (the construction of railroads, the first to exist in the region, being the clearest example), which was therefore in many ways already modernized when the war began, although several elements of a premodern economy persisted. These regimes defended national sovereignty and were pivotal in the construction of a sense of national identity and nationhood, almost unique in the region at the time. The war signaled the end of this process, and completely destroyed the economy of Paraguay, which, deeply in debt and having lost the majority of its population and almost half of its territory, became decidedly a premodern and dependent country.40 In Argentina, the modernization process followed the defeat of Juan Manuel de Rosas’s government (1829–52), though Rosas had imposed

Introduction: The Desertmakers  11 order and largely ended the turbulent civil wars of the postindependence years. Argentina is perhaps the clearest example in the region of the triumph of liberal ideas: this was a modernization process based on the stimulation of European immigration, openness to foreign capital, important urban reforms (Buenos Aires became known in those years as the “Paris of South America”), free trade, and the appropriation of vast tracks of land to be devoted to cash crops for export. A cattle-raising export economy which benefited ranchers (estancieros) went hand in hand with the forced proletarianization of rural populations to work on this land. All of this was finally accomplished during the 1880s. According to Oscar Oszlak, in the case of Argentina it was precisely the wars of independence and civil wars that impeded the establishment of the state in the early nineteenth century.41 The latter half of the century saw a crucial metamorphosis of the traditional caudillos, if not their utter disappearance. Oszlak mentions the shift from a struggle for hegemony among several simultaneously existing power centers to a definitive verticalization of power.42 Thinking of Latin America more generally, John Lynch discusses the different positions that caudillos occupied in relation to the national state and concludes that the new states, products of economic growth and possessors of improved financial resources derived from tax revenues and foreign loans, could not tolerate the existence of political rivals of the caudillo type. The state now had a professional army, modern arms beyond the capacity of a caudillo, and railways capable of extending its authority to the farthest corners of the republic.43 In Uruguay civil wars continued until 1904 when, during the governments of José Batlle y Ordóñez (1904–07 and 1911–15), the last rural insurgency was defeated, and a modern, secular welfare state was consolidated. Social unrest and permanent civil wars between the Colorado and Blanco parties characterized the postindependence years in Uruguay, after the country’s first constitutional president, Fructuoso Rivera, took office in 1830. Modernization began in a systematic way only in the 1870s, with a succession of military governments known as militarismo (1876–86), when the state augmented its repressive power, the rural ­police succeeded in bringing order to the country’s interior and protecting rural property, a major reform in education took place, foreign capital flowed into the country, and exports of meat, leather, and wool significantly increased. Brazil has frequently been considered as exceptional with respect to its Spanish-American neighbors. This is so mainly for three reasons: first, because Brazil’s independence was declared (in 1822) as the result of an agreement between elites and did not involve wars of emancipation; second, because the country continued to be ruled by a monarchy until

12  Introduction: The Desertmakers 1889, when the Republican system was proclaimed after a military coup d’état; and third, because it was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888. Even if the period of the monarchy was a relatively stable one, when the state had a stronger presence than in the neighboring countries, only after the proclamation of the republic in 1889 did the Brazilian state become truly modern: the abolition of slavery and the importance that the military and positivism acquired were defining new elements in the country’s social and economic life that characterized the period following the proclamation of the republic. Even though Brazil achieved a centralized government earlier than its neighbors, then, the years following the proclamation of the republic brought a scale of militarization and repressive power that were completely new, and the Canudos War was a key manifestation of this new militarized state.44 Emília Viotti da Costa lucidly refers to the moment when the army was brought into the political scene: “Convinced that civilian politicians were corrupt, [members of the elite] understood that the army needed to adopt a regenerative mission, that of savior of the nation.”45 This perception of the army, and its central role in the political life of Brazil, might be among the most lasting legacies of turn-of-the-century Brazil. War is in fact an important presence in the cultural, social, and political history of Brazil, in spite of the conventional wisdom. Brazil is not a warless country, and though it enjoyed relative peace compared to its Latin American neighbors, the importance of the international wars it fought, and of the internal rebellions it brutally repressed during the nineteenth century, must not be overlooked.46 From 1825 to 1828 Brazil fought a long war against what is now Argentina, known as the Cisplatine War or the Argentine-Brazilian War, which ended with the intervention of Great Britain and the creation of Uruguay as a buffer state. Brazil then actively participated in what is known in Uruguay as the Guerra Grande (Great War, 1839–51) which was a succession of civil wars between the Colorado and Blanco parties in Uruguay, in which the governments (and other political factions) of Argentina, France, and Great Britain also intervened. From 1835 to 1845 there took place the Ragamuffin War (known in Portuguese as Revolução Farroupilha or Guerra dos Farrapos), a separatist rebellion in the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, next to Uruguay and Argentina. This was the longest and one of the bloodiest failed wars of secession during the Brazilian Empire, in which Giuseppe Garibaldi fought in support of the rebels. Another important rebellion that also ended up being defeated by the government was the Cabanagem Revolt (1835–40) in the northern region of Grão-Pará (today’s states of Pará, Amazonas, Amapâ, Rondônia, and Roraima). In addition, the Revolução Praieira (Beach Revolt, 1848–50), a liberal and federalist rebellion in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, also defeated by the government, should be mentioned. Afterward, during the republican regime, together with the

Introduction: The Desertmakers  13 Canudos War there was the Contestado Rebellion in the southern state of Santa Catarina (1912–16), and the Juazeiro Rebellion (1914), in the northeastern state of Ceará.47

Four Travelers, Four Wars: Reflections on the Corpus Chapter 1 of The Desertmakers examines Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay, by Richard Burton, which describes a journey from the River Plate through Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Corrientes until reaching the territory where the War of the Triple Alliance, also known as the Paraguayan War or (in Paraguay) the Great War, was playing out. Burton, who had been living in Brazil for three years as a British consul, visited Paraguay in 1868, and again the following year, when the war was almost over and the allied forces had taken Asunción, the capital city. By the time he arrived in South America, Burton had traveled to the Middle East, India, Central Africa, and North America, and had published more than 15 books. In Letters, Burton cites previous descriptions of Paraguay and the war, engages in historical and cultural debates, reviews contemporary works on the war, and responds mockingly to authors with whom he disagrees. In a way, he encapsulates a substantial portion of the previous intellectual production about the war and about Paraguay. In addition, Burton arguably stands as the most widely traveled writer of those who visited the South American country in those years. This gives his book extraordinary comparative breadth and allows him to situate Paraguay within a global context, and within South American dynamics, which he knew well by that time. Most important, however, he manages to construct an exceptionally complex and ambiguous approach to the war, something that, even today, most accounts lack. At the same time, he establishes an equally complicated relationship with the British Empire, which, as consul, he represented at the time but whose positions with respect to the war he does not follow: indeed his trip to the battlefront constitutes, I argue, an act of disobedience, a form of detour. Unlike many of his contemporaries’ writings on Paraguay, Burton’s account is distinguished by his exceptional independence of mind. Finally, this chapter studies Letters’ place in the representational history of Paraguay as a desert, an unknown and difficult-to-reach t­ erritory of barbarism, as it discusses the ways in which the war rearticulated these representations, and to a certain extent brought an end to them. Burton alludes to different ways in which Paraguay will now be open to mapping and commerce, as transits through the rivers that surround the country will be possible without the obstacles previously imposed by the ever-present Paraguayan state that preceded the conflict. The second chapter looks at W. H. Hudson’s novel The Purple Land, which narrates the trials and tribulations of the protagonist Richard Lamb throughout the turbulent rural Uruguayan regions in the late

14  Introduction: The Desertmakers 1860s, where he participates in an armed revolt against the government and, specifically, in a fictitious battle that will be the focus of my analysis. Hudson, born in what is today Argentina, is a rather exceptional traveler in that his fictionalized account, narrated by the Englishman Lamb, sees war as a form of resistance to the British imperial presence in South America. Hudson wrote about his native South America from England and in English, but while it has been repeatedly affirmed that his writing constitutes an effort to recover the lost world of his idyllic boyhood and youth, I argue that war and violence are pivotal elements in this nostalgic fiction. Therefore, in this chapter I pay attention to the way in which nature and wilderness are conceived of as violent and resistant. Finally, another element of the chapter are the connections between the understanding of travel and the exercise of violence. In other words, war—and violence more generally—influences both the way the protagonist moves through the territory, and his very identity. So the first two chapters of The Desertmakers deal with texts written in English by narrators who are foreigners to the conflicts they narrate (although Hudson’s “foreignness” is extraordinarily complicated), and whose gaze in these texts enters into a productive, tense, and contradictory dialogue with the imperial perspective that is at the origin of their journeys. The texts examined in the final two chapters are produced by travelers who at least initially adopt the perspective of the modernizing Latin American state. The third chapter analyzes various travel accounts by Francisco Moreno in the context of the Conquest of the Desert. Viaje a la Patagonia austral [Journey to Southern Patagonia] (1879), Reminiscencias [Reminiscences] (1942, posthumous), and Apuntes preliminares sobre una excursión al Neuquén, Río Negro, Chubut y Santa Cruz [Preliminary notes on an excursion to Neuquén, Río Negro, Chubut, and Santa Cruz] (1897) refer, respectively, to journeys made before, during, and after the Conquest (Reminiscencias also includes rewritings of episodes recounted in Viaje, as well as writings from the postwar years). Francisco Moreno wrote as a collector and scientist whose descriptions of the territory and its peoples were molded in a national narrative of evolution (he founded and directed for more than 20 years one of the most important Natural Sciences Museums in Latin America). His view of indigenous peoples as remnants of the past, and his conviction that the museum was the only space that the modern nation-state could offer them should be read alongside the state’s project of conquest and land appropriation that was taking place as Moreno zealously collected bones and indigenous corpses. At the same time, his attitude toward space and movement was also shaped by the fact that he represented his government in the tense negotiations with neighboring Chile over the necessity of establishing the international border in the Patagonian regions. He was, then, a traveler who sought to draw an exact border and thus read the territory in nationalistic terms. At the same time, his movements

Introduction: The Desertmakers  15 through these supposedly deserted areas helped bring the presence of the state to frontier regions, where the state did not possess a monopoly on legitimate violence since indigenous communities and other local caciques controlled transit and circulation of people and goods. This chapter also offers a diachronic perspective that shows how Moreno’s ideas about (and the strategies for representing) the Conquest of the Desert changed in his successive visits to Patagonia from the mid-1870s to the mid-1910s. The final chapter focuses on Os sertões, perhaps the most canonical and complex of these texts. The book presents itself as a chronicle that relates the origin, development, and final massacre of the Canudos War, waged by the Brazilian state against the inhabitants of the town of Canudos (though the rebels called it Belo Monte), in the north of the state of Bahia. Euclides’s unclassifiable text is also—among many other things—a meditation on nationhood itself and on the place within it occupied by the inhabitants of that region. The many references to invisibility and ruins throughout Os sertões evoke the narrator’s inability to make sense of the spaces of war. Through what I call a rhetoric of bewilderment, the narrator represents his own difficulties in understanding his surroundings and the absurd massacre that is taking place. In Os sertões, the way Euclides defines or refers to deserts is linked to his representation of ruins through the temporal and tragic connotations attributed to both.48 I explore various moments when different elements which had remained invisible emerge unexpectedly, reading these moments not only as suggesting the Canudos rebellion and its resisting nature, but also as symbolically referring to the meaningful revelations and discoveries that the narrator experiences as a consequence of the conflict and its tragic ending. The chapter suggests, furthermore, that in the writing of Euclides there is a profound and original conceptualization of spatiality and displacement, as his text pays an exceptional amount of attention to the way people, rivers, and even the soil move. He attributes cultural and moral values to ways of walking, of writing, and of waging war: he repeatedly remarks upon the symbolic connotations of linearity, as opposed to those of meandering or erring. The texts by Burton, Hudson, and Moreno share many of the general characteristics of nineteenth-century travel literature, an enormously popular genre. They include explicit references to other travelers, incessantly imitating, questioning, or simply quoting them. There is, in these books, a complete self-consciousness of the conventions and commonplaces of the genre, which are alternatively (or often simultaneously) adhered to and parodied. All these accounts—including Hudson’s fictionalized one of what was an actual trip throughout Uruguay—give precise, sometimes day-by-day details of the places visited and the people encountered; in short, of the way the trip progresses. Euclides da Cunha’s book, while not a traditional travelogue, is based largely on

16  Introduction: The Desertmakers notions of space and movement. These notions inform the narrator’s approach to the Brazilian backlands (sertão) and to the war through which the state appropriates that territory. Os sertões is also a book about a journey in the sense that it involves a brutal experience of learning that happens only when the narrative voice reaches the battlefields. This denunciation of a criminal state massacre is at the heart of the author’s project, yet it is revealed progressively as the book unfolds, as the result of a terrible discovery that emerges only when the journey’s destination is reached. Despite the differences in the travelers’ origins, all of them are foreigners in the places they visit. The narrator of Francisco Moreno’s Viaje a la Patagonia austral and the disconcerted chronicler of Euclides’s text both describe themselves as completely alien to the spaces explored. In the case of Richard Burton, foreignness is not a factor that impedes observation. Indeed, of these travelers, it may be Burton, thanks to his vast traveling and writing experience, who has the best tools to describe and understand the genocidal war he is recounting. While the narrators in Burton’s and Hudson’s works view modernization in terms of imperial power, represented by Britain (the nation with which their narrators identify and which they construct as the—deviating, imprecise, problematic—origin of their journeys), the Latin American texts offer narrators whose travel accounts have to do with the national state itself, from whose perspective they observe (or attempt to observe, or prefer not to observe) the phenomenon of war. For this reason, whereas Chapters 1 and 2 consider their texts in relation to forms of imperial politics and economy in the context of the consolidation of the Latin American states, Chapters 3 and 4 focus primarily on the internal dynamics of Argentina and Brazil, respectively, always positioning them in dialogue with other regional and national dynamics and conflicts. As a result, the first two chapters deploy postcolonial theory, and also discuss concepts such as informal empire and neocolonialism.49 The Tacitus epigraph with which this book opens brings together the two general perspectives by asserting that it is always through an imperial logic that deserts are created. These pages will suggest that the logic that tells powers “to ravage, to slaughter, to usurp” was thoroughly assimilated and implemented by Latin American elites at the end of the nineteenth century. The British neocolonial presence is actually akin to what David Viñas called, in his groundbreaking Indios, ejército y frontera, “an implacable movement of internal colonialism”.50 These four wars were very different. The Paraguayan War was an international war, fought by four states; The Purple Land relates political unrest and revolts involving rural gauchos rebelling against the state in Uruguay; the Conquest of the Desert was more clearly a frontier war, while the Canudos War could be defined as a civil war, but quite different from what happened in Uruguay in that it involved a specific episode

Introduction: The Desertmakers  17 of violence (in Uruguay armed revolts were the norm throughout the nineteenth century). But what I emphasize here is the important, though different, role these wars had in the consolidation of nation-states in the region. In addition, all these conflicts allow me to think of the ways spaces, and displacements through them, are represented. I pay attention to the ways they involved issues of belonging, complicating notions of exteriority and interiority. While some of these conflicts were conceived of by their protagonists as internal and others as international, it is important to stress that at this time and in these places the concepts of interiority and exteriority were deeply ambiguous. For example, if the Conquest of the Desert was indeed a frontier war, it is discussed here taking into consideration the very tense territorial dispute with Chile that Argentina was having in the same years. We should also consider the place of indigenous peoples in the process of state modernization: were (are) indigenous peoples part of the Argentine nation? I discuss the intense forms of circulation of people and goods, and the complex ways in which people identified themselves (or were defined by others) in southern Argentina toward the end of the century. In all these conflicts, then, war reconfigures the interior space by drastically erasing what was thought of as unassimilable or by incorporating what had previously been considered exterior. These are, ultimately, parallel forms of incorporation, of absorbing what the state claims as its own. The Paraguayan War is particularly pertinent from a comparative perspective because it brings together the four countries visited by these travelers. Fundamentally, though, in this context it serves as a pivotal moment in the centralization process of each country’s bureaucratic apparatuses. Although the army and the repressive power of the state became essential weapons in the modernizing effort at century’s end, the Paraguayan War mobilized armies in unprecedented ways, and, on top of it, afforded them a great deal of power in governing circles. Indeed, the repressive and modernizing governments in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay in the 1880s and 1890s were headed by veterans of this war and had the army as their primary source of support.51 In Paraguay the war generated the opposite effects from those produced in the allied countries: while it meant the end of a state that was already modernized, centralized, and militarized like none other in South America, it also marked the beginning of a silenced nation, condemned to oblivion. The modernization of some countries seemed to require that others be left behind, mired in dependence. The Desertmakers, then, assesses four conflicts linked in their historical significance. Each took place during one of the last four decades of the century. They therefore represent four different moments in the process of desertification/modernization with which the century came to a close. By examining these four contexts of war, I trace a trajectory which starts with the initial moment that brings the four countries together in

18  Introduction: The Desertmakers Paraguay, moves through events of war that reveal a Uruguayan state in the final phase before definitive militarization, and ends with two conflicts, in Argentina and Brazil, that complete that process.52

Travel Time, War Time There has been a good deal of discussion about the homogenizing logic underpinning the thinking of most nineteenth-century Latin American intellectuals. Today it is practically a cliché to note that one of their goals was to achieve equal rights for anyone who was like them. There is no doubt that war, and the destruction of the other that it brought, constituted a significant step in that direction. In the countries studied in this book, the effect of war was not only the homogeneization―whitening― of the countries’ populations, but also the homogenization of spaces. The desert produced by the conflict is a space without topographical features, without barriers, where movements and their meanings can now be controlled by the logic of the state. War inaugurates, then, a new way of moving through reterritorialized spaces. My analysis of texts pays particular attention to how people travel, to the different ways of moving and traversing space present in these narratives and to their relationships to modernization and war. Yet little attention has been paid to the fact that there is a homogenization not just of subjects and spaces but also of time. That is, the state seeks to impose the temporality of the city and of progress across the entire territory. It is precisely the—violent, imposed—arrival of this new sort of time that has been called “modernization”. David Harvey has shown that the triumph of a mercantilist logic, which has as its only goal the maximization of profit, seeks to secure control over spaces and times.53 The expansion of the railroad is without a doubt one of the most unmistakable signs of the process of modernization. The railroad brought with it, as Michel Foucault put it, “a new aspect of the relations of space and power”, 54 but it is a domesticator not merely of space but also, and in significant measure, of time. By creating a space free of obstacles and unforeseen events, travel by rail produces a homogeneous passage that allows the traveler to glide seamlessly across distances. Time, too, becomes predictable, as a journey’s duration can be calculated beforehand. Railroads and maps go hand in hand. To the potential of maps to read, resignify, and conquer territories, the railroad adds the possibility of integrating them into the international market. However, the erasure implied by war helps both maps and the railroad to do the work of expansion. That surface that is now so easily traversed, those now reachable and exploitable territories, are in reality the result of a meticulous campaign of annihilation. Foucault has argued that “the railroads rendered war far easier to wage”.55 Like the state, whose reach throughout an entire territory it represents, the railroad establishes a relationship of

Introduction: The Desertmakers  19 mutual dependence with war: the railroad is an element that makes war possible, but at the same time it counts on war’s desert-making effects in order to expand. On the back of those effects, the railroad transformed the ways time and space were conceived in the region. Like travel, war is a phenomenon intrinsically made of time. Temporally speaking, war simultaneously marks ends and beginnings: it is the beginning of the realization of concepts and visions such as those of progress or modernization, but it also brings with it crucial erasures, significant absences. Referring to the process by which the elites construct the national state in the region, Miguel Angel Centeno explains, “it involves conquest, the eradication of cultures, forms of ethnic cleansing, or even genocide. A nation-state may arise even with a significant part of the population excluded from it.”56 This is a book about destruction, about a destruction that generates deserts. In his stimulating Rubble, Gastón R. Gordillo explores processes of what he calls “destructive production” in the province of Salta, in northern Argentina. He works, as I do here, with forms of the destruction of space that are “geared toward the production of new commodities and places”, 57 but claims that warfare “is destruction as sheer negativity, in which the obliteration of particular places is usually not geared (in the short term) toward the production of a new place, but is an end in itself as part of a military engagement”. 58 War lacks for him all generating capacity, and thus is excluded from the variety of events that he studies as having simultaneously produced and destroyed space. The Desertmakers argues for a connection of war with newness and inauguration through destruction: the outcome of war is a new void. Foucault also notes the generative nature of destruction: “the law is born of real battles, of victories, massacres, and conquests which can be dated and which have their horrific heroes; the law was born in burning towns and ravaged fields.”59 Destruction, for Foucault, generates the institution, the state.60 What the accounts that constitute the corpus of this book share, in their various ways of narrating the destruction that pervades them, is an awareness of the loss provoked by war. The notion of “rhetorics of vanishing” will be used here to describe the way in which destruction is narrated in these texts. To speak of vanishing may be more apt for describing the moments in which the narrators hide the war, or instead portray their own slow-dawning understanding of its consequences. Vanishing and extermination are, then, two ways to refer to the same phenomenon, though the rhetoric of vanishing also incorporates an element of nostalgia that makes it more complex than mere extermination or the justification offered for it. Despite all appearances, progress and nostalgia are not always mutually exclusive. Quite the contrary—and this will be evident in most of the texts discussed here—nostalgic discourse requires progress. As Svetlana Boym puts it: “Nostalgia, like progress, is dependent on the modern conception of

20  Introduction: The Desertmakers unrepeatable and irreversible time. The Romantic nostalgic insisted on the otherness of his object of nostalgia from his present life and kept it at a safe distance.”61 The absolute otherness that the travelers discover in the spaces of war, and in the cultures they see disappearing there, as well as that other time they build there in their writings—these elements are essentially linked to the notion of modernization.62

The Past in the Present: War and Ruins The journeys that I examine here present themselves as journeys into the past, to a temporal dimension characterized by primitiveness, even if the relationship between the self and that other time differs from book to book. Anne McClintock, in Imperial Leather, has referred to the use that imperialist discourse makes of what she calls “anachronistic space”: “Geographical difference across space is figured as a historical difference across time.”63 The construction of the contemporary other as an inhabitant of another time takes on new connotations when produced in the context of war. In The Desertmakers, the notion of ruin is used with a general and sometimes figurative meaning. While images of actual ruined buildings or landscapes appear—sometimes centrally—in all of these texts, these images are often read alongside elements that evoke some connotations of the ruin, such as the juxtaposition of notions of newness and antiquity, of past and present, or of creation and destruction. Ruins, considered as the leftovers of people and places that once existed, are also associated here with images of remains and read as—and alongside—traces of vanished things. I highlight the notions of remains and traces due to their powerful material component and their connections with the discourse of archeology and the activity of unearthing fossils, so present in the narratives discussed here. Particularly in the texts by Euclides and Moreno, I read the references to traces of ancient lives that need to be brought to the surface alongside images of devastated landscapes that prefigure war. The finding of ancient traces appears in these texts alongside the discovery of the corpses (also described with the word “remains”) or devastated landscapes that the contemporary wars leave behind. While conceptually not identical, then, in this book ruins, traces, and remains are associated, as their connotations of permanence (what Gordillo calls their “affirmative resilience”)64 are emphasized over their evocation of destruction. In Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay, Richard Burton not only visits the actual scenes of conflict, detailing destruction in nature and in a variety of objects, but also describes the ruins of Asunción after the pillage that took place following the allied forces’ invasion. Hudson’s novel describes, in its initial chapters, how the protagonist strolls through Montevideo, which had suffered the ravages of war for nine

Introduction: The Desertmakers  21 years, as he collects traces of that war; he then visits a ruined fortress, from which he observes and proclaims his condemnation of the city; finally, in his wanderings in rural Uruguay he stops at a ruined house, pretending to be someone previously thought of as having died. In the writings of Moreno, he not only describes his work as that of the archeologist who excavates and finds ruins in the desert (by “ruins” he refers mostly to bones and petrified traces of prehistoric beings, such as mollusks), but also, after the war, returns to Patagonia to describe how these territories have become a catalogue of ruins: he enumerates the many fortresses that have become abandoned and destroyed after the Conquest of the Desert eliminated the resistance of indigenous peoples. Os sertões is perhaps the work of this corpus that most insistently makes use of the imaginary of ruins. In his book, Euclides not only sees the Brazilian backlands as having been created as a result of seismic activity, and thus as being already destroyed in their origin, but also describes the landscape, the body of the revolt’s leader Antônio Conselheiro, and the very city of Canudos as ruined. While he refers repeatedly to literal ruins (these references are present throughout his entire work, not just in this book), he understands ruins as bringing together the past and the present, as images of the corrupt nature of what may seem new. The ruin is ubiquitous in Western literature, especially during the ­Romantic period. Though the texts studied here incorporate many of the conventional themes associated with the representations of ruins, the scenes of war offer a clearer illustration of the ambiguous nature of the ruin as a sign: just as the ruin evokes the inevitability of the passage of time, it can also be a symbol of persistence, of resistance, a way of preserving memory.65 In one crucial aspect the catalogue of ruins presented in these texts deviates sharply from the nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetic: there is no effort to make the ruin picturesque. It is for this reason that Gordillo uses the notion of rubble, which lacks the harmony, stability, and aesthetic value of the ruin. He affirms that rubble indicates “the disintegration of recognizable forms”, while the ruin “is the attempt to conjure away the void of rubble and resulting vertigo it generates”.66 Yet ruins are not always a synonym of serenity, calmness, or beauty. As I understand them here, they are in fact close to Gordillo’s characterization of rubble: they are forms of the void, forms of vertigo. They do not always convey clear or understandable meanings. They are never glamorous or purely beautiful. These are, then, ruins of war. Michael S. Roth understands that war contributes to the production of what he calls “premature ruins”.67 “Photography”, he says, “framed the destruction of buildings as the creation of ruins”.68 In these pages, I explore the simultaneity of construction and destruction contained in both the ruin and war, reading the ruin as an effect of war.69 As consequences of war, ruins are not a result of the passage of the centuries. As Roth puts it, “It is one thing to aestheticize the gradual

22  Introduction: The Desertmakers decay of monumental buildings, another to aestheticize the effects of a disaster.”70 When they do not describe landscapes as already ruined, and sometimes as ruined in their very origin, these texts propose a sudden, violent production of ruins. There is an immediate relationship between ruins and war, unknown to the Romantic imaginary, for which a ruin was a sign of some ancient violence, or just of the passage of time. This immediacy of the ruin partially blots out its soothing character, its status as landscape. Instead, these “premature ruins” are already present in what is new.71 Paradoxically, the very idea of ruins suggests a slow destruction, one that battles with the obstinate presence of what has already been destroyed in order to emphasize the process that led to its collapse. In this sense, whereas war—like an earthquake—destroys in abrupt ways, the ruin is a way of extending that destructive element in time: the traces and meanings of these cataclysms become constant. The images of ruins are an additional example of instances discussed in this book where war is alluded to, remaining nonetheless unseen. While war demands new ways of looking at (and of traversing) spaces, it also impedes seeing; combat hurls writing into the abyss of the invisible. Thus, the act of looking is shown to be as essential as it is limited. This book is, then, about strategies of representing war, and suggests that war, conceived of as concrete clashes between armies, tends to remain elusive to representation. In exploring the intricacies of war and representation, I continue a reflection that has long been present in cultural and literary studies. In his article “War and Representation”, Fredric Jameson discusses the ways in which language seeks to approach the phenomenon of war in indirect ways, claiming that, while war is unrepresentable, accounts of war in cinema and literature concentrate on specific aspects of conflicts; he refers to these accounts as “the various forms the impossible attempt to represent [war] may have taken”.72 In her influential The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry reflects on the difficulties of language to communicate experiences of intense suffering, paying special attention to war. She claims, for example, that “physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned”.73 In a study of war representations in US literature, James Dawes claims that war disrupts language in many ways, as he quotes Walt Whitman’s idea that language could not represent war.74 The Desertmakers explores these four narrators’ approaches to war, and how they struggle to say it. War is unquestionably at the center of the texts studied here; and it is, at the same time, surprisingly absent from them. Burton describes scenes of the aftermath of the Paraguayan War, or narrates what others tell him about the development of the conflict, while Euclides most effectively makes war present in its signs on the landscape and nature of the Brazilian backlands. Moreno does not mention the war that looms on

Introduction: The Desertmakers  23 the horizon while he visits indigenous communities that he describes as being on the verge of disappearance without naming the reason for such vanishing; or, in later trips, he describes places in which all traces of indigenous presence have now been replaced by railways or schools, again without making explicit how this came to happen. Hudson’s main character, Richard Lamb, participates in a clash that he cannot describe, while in Euclides’s text the narrator emphasizes moments in which he (or the state’s army) cannot see the enemies, or, in his bewilderment, cannot make sense of what is going on as the war draws to a close.

Perspectives on War, Space, and Capital In the pages that follow I focus on four specific approaches to war, displacement, and space, and on their aesthetic implications. This perspective complements analyses of Latin American wars conducted in the political sciences. For example, Miguel Angel Centeno’s Blood and Debt has the indisputable merit of being the only book wholly devoted to the relationship between the state and war in Latin America.75 He proposes adjustments to Tilly’s theory, saying that in Latin America war did not so much make states, but rather strengthened them.76 One of Centeno’s central claims is that—contrary to what one might think intuitively—­ international wars were relatively rare in Latin America.77 That fact might be surprising, but the quantitative perspective nevertheless elides the impact of these wars on memory, culture (and cultural production), and the construction of national imaginaries, key factors that my book seeks to consider. If it is true that there were not as many wars as in other regions of the planet (which is not, of course, the same as saying there were few wars), Centeno’s analysis does not take into account the fact that, for example, the Paraguayan War was practically unmatched in its all-consuming and destructive power, even compared to the European wars of the twentieth century. In many aspects, the four scenes of war on which The Desertmakers centers represent exceptions to Centeno’s ideas. Centeno makes assertions such as that “control over faraway hinterlands rarely led to geopolitical conflict” or that “the sheer amassing and control of territory was not as central for Latin America as it was for Europe”, or, also, that “with notable exceptions, the frontier was not a threatening place where the state’s support was needed or where the new nation could expand and grow into itself”.78 It might indeed be so in general terms, but the four scenes of war on which The Desertmakers centers constitute important exceptions. The exploration of the texts, their authors, and their contexts in the pages that follow will put forward evidence to argue that the opposite in fact happened.79 In any case, it is important to reaffirm that the states that came out of the push toward modernization in late nineteenth-century Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay were unprecedented

24  Introduction: The Desertmakers in terms of their territorial control, repressive power, and bureaucratic and military apparatuses, as was the Paraguay that preceded the War of the Triple Alliance. Also, in many Latin American countries, the second half of the nineteenth century—and perhaps the entire century—­ consisted of a constant battle for territory. Working from a Marxist sociological perspective, Henri Lefebvre, in The Production of Space (1974), has examined the ways in which space is produced and resignified through an array of cultural practices, and he has in fact insisted on the relationship between capitalism and the appropriation of space. The methods of appropriating and transforming spaces as well as using them are fundamental in his analysis of social relations. Although war has a relatively marginal place in his analysis, Lefebvre is clear about its importance in the emergence of the European capitalist state: “under the dominion of capitalism and of the world ­market, [violence] assumed an economic role in the accumulation ­process … the centuries-old space of wars … became the rich and thickly populated space that incubated capitalism.”80 The state, war, and capital are elements that bolster one another in Lefebvre’s analysis (which is in this sense not dissimilar from Tilly’s). Violence is the origin of the state: “every state is born of violence, and … state power endures only by virtue of violence directed towards a space.”81 This violence is wielded against nature itself, which is transformed in accordance with a new logic. It is important to highlight that what Lefebvre calls “production of space” frequently involves destruction. Gordillo has pointed out that the French sociologist conceived of “the production of space as a disruptive, tension-ridden process” and that “this destructiveness is particularly severe under capitalism”.82 Lefebvre affirms that “violence enthroned a specific rationality, that of accumulation, of the bureaucracy and the army—a unitary, logistical, operational and quantifying rationality … A founding violence, and continuous creation by violent means … : such are the hallmarks of the state.”83 This founding violence is, for Lefebvre, inextricably tied to the accumulation of capital.84 He therefore defines the state in spatial terms. This spatial quality of the state (and its ability to produce spaces) is what allows it to make its power concrete.85 The conceptualization of war as a struggle over space that has as two of its principal protagonists the state and capital is one of the main concerns of my readings here. The capitalist dynamic that spread through Latin America with remarkable force in the late nineteenth century in large measure explains war and the process of state consolidation that employed war as its instrument, so attention needs to be paid to Neil Smith’s question: “How does the geographical configuration of the landscape contribute to the survival of capitalism?”86 Or, to be more precise, how does capitalism reconfigure (the geography of) landscapes in order to survive? Oscar

Introduction: The Desertmakers  25 Oszlak also underlines the connection between order, progress, and capitalism in Latin America: “‘Order and progress’, the classic formula of the positivist credo, thus encapsulated the central concerns of an era: that era in which relationships of capitalist production began to spread throughout Latin America.”87 War was a key element in the production of capitalist space that took place in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Lefebvre’s theoretical effort to spatialize the state, giving it concrete form and thereby discarding the notion of the state as pure abstraction, is key. This theoretical gesture is particularly productive in order to examine the writings of travelers, which largely deal with spatial phenomena. Focusing on displacement in looking at war as a space-reconfiguring practice offers a particularly rich opportunity for thinking about spatiality. Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s notions of nomadology and the war machine have also informed my approach to these texts. Their poststructuralist philosophy agrees with Marxist theory in its critique of the logic of the modern state.88 In their chapter “1227: Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine” from A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze and Guattari discuss the relationship between the state (the state ­apparatus, particularly in its modern sense) and the nomadic groups that ­oppose it. The war machine “is like the necessary consequence of nomadic organization”.89 For this reason, it is always external and previous to the state: “it seems to be irreducible to the State apparatus, to be outside its sovereignty and prior to its law: it comes from elsewhere.”90 The state (Deleuze and Guattari seem to be thinking of the modern European state) triumphs over the war machine by appropriating it, whereupon the war machine ceases to exist as such, having been domesticated: “the State acquires an army, but in a way that presupposes a juridical integration of war and the organization of a military function.”91 But at the same time the war machine as such is never fully appropriated, and its drive to resist (which is perhaps its primary feature) may be maintained.92 In the logic of Deleuze and Guattari, the appropriation and vanquishing of the war machine also constitute a metamorphosis, a renewal, one that does not cancel out the subversive power of the war machine but instead provides more sophisticated and surreptitious channels and modes of action. This is important here because there may be a limit to the state’s successful war-related actions, to its dynamics of appropriation and extermination. This book therefore pays attention to any signs of the persistence of other logics, ways of relating to space, and modes of production that the drive to consolidate state and empire at the end of the century was unable to make completely invisible. What relationship does the war (and state) machine have with space? Deleuze and Guattari outline a distinction between the smooth space inhabited by the nomad and the striated space of the state. Striated space

26  Introduction: The Desertmakers is furrowed by lines that measure and divide it (for example, highways, roads, political borders, milemarkers, markers describing historic events or that indicate starting or ending points). These authors refer to “the difference between a smooth (vectorial, projective, or topological) space and a striated (metric) space: in the first case ‘space is occupied without counting’ and in the second case ‘space is counted in order to be occupied’”.93 The state, a powerfully territorialized concept, cannot be conceived of without precise boundaries and a concrete expanse: it therefore seeks to codify territory, give it directions, points of departure and arrival, roads. Territory, for the state, is part of its power—or, rather, there is no state power without a territory to which to apply it. Later, Deleuze and Guattari remark on this spatial binary: Smooth space … has no homogeneity, except between infinitely proximate points, and the linking of proximities is effected independently of any determined path. … Smooth space is a field without conduits or channels. A field, a heterogeneous smooth space, is wedded to a very particular type of multiplicity: nonmetric, acentered, rhizomatic multiplicities. … They do not meet the visual condition of being observable from a point in space external to them.94 Contrary to what one might think, smooth space is not homogeneous, and the perpetual proximities are not linked by roads: it is the opposite of the desert created by war in South America. One could say, in Deleuzian fashion, that in the scenarios discussed here, war transforms the “smooth” desert into a “striated” desert. The visibilization project, for its part, seeks to create a homogeneous, monotonous, predictable space. Smooth space resists measurement, and it can be thought of as a space that contains proximities, but not points of arrival or departure: a space where there is movement, but no roads. A third key opposition here is between the city and its outside, which implies the identification between the space of the city and the space of the state. Deleuze and Guattari contrast the deterritorializing logic of the nomos with the reterritorializing polis. The city is the place that seeks to channel, organize, and measure movement, where transit is diagrammed and planned. There, distances are always measured in minutes or in blocks. And in its relationship with the outside, the city is often a point of arrival or departure from which it is possible to read—and circumscribe, Deleuze and Guattari would say—movement. I read these wars as moments in which the decisive political authority of the city is imposed on the countryside, on the interior. Through war, economic channels are configured that will make the countryside dependent on the capital city.95 With the exception of Hudson, for whom the opposition country-city is nonetheless central, all the travelers studied here have an eminently urban perspective.

Introduction: The Desertmakers  27

On Deserts and Frontiers: Thinking Exteriority For Deleuze and Guattari, the state is defined territorially in opposition to an outside that it itself constructs, yet at the same time seeks to internalize: the State itself has always been in a relation with an outside and is inconceivable independent of that relationship. The law of the State is not the law of All or Nothing … but that of interior and exterior. The State is sovereignty. But sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing, of appropriating locally.96 The state has a complex relationship with that exterior, which it seeks to obliterate and appropriate but without which it cannot be conceived. In nineteenth-century Latin America, these internalizing dynamics are embodied in the image of the desert. The war scenes examined here are key moments in which the state, in an absurd discourse, wages war on a desert, only to establish another desert in that space. The difference between that supposedly enemy desert and the void that replaces it lies in the shift from the external nature of the former to the interiority of the latter: the result of war is a void that is no longer alien to the state. War, in making legible what has been discursively constructed as a desert, turns out to be a crucial internalization tool. In an activity typical of imperial conquest, the state swallows up territories and populations: war is pure deglutition. In these scenes of conflict, the notion of the desert has some elements in common with the Spanish idea of frontera, meaning both “border” and “frontier”. From the perspective of the state, the border, as a condition of the state’s existence, is inherently and necessarily immobile. The frontier, on the other hand, is a place of exchanges where movement is multiple, constant, and impossible to measure. It is significant that in Spanish both meanings are encapsulated in a single word, and, for this reason, the distinctions between them are sometimes blurry: the closeness between border and frontier is embedded in language. At the same time, the frontier is closer to the image of the desert, and the two are often treated as equivalent in state discourse. The (blurry) distinction between the desert and the frontier therefore resides in the fact that the desert is described as something totally external, a space that is completely detached from the state. The frontier, in contrast, is an intermediate, fluid space, but one that is similar to the desert in its nonparticipation in state efforts to monopolize violence, and so is deemed similarly threatening.97 While desert connotes lack, stillness, and void, frontier suggests action, transit, and movement (in this sense, it is closer to the very idea of war). The conflicts examined here take place in a setting that is sometimes a borderland (what one might call the external

28  Introduction: The Desertmakers border—that is, with other national states) and at other times a frontier (the internal border, that murky space, in theory within the national borders, where the state does not have a monopoly on violence, a space where other laws hold sway). Wars require the notion of danger implicit in both connotations of frontera. The importance of defining boundaries with other states was a central and urgent concern in this period, as is evidenced in the origin of the Paraguayan War, the anxiety over the border with Chile in Argentina, and the equivalent anxiety regarding the Amazon in Brazil (and many other South American countries), during the same years. It was vital to definitively and precisely establish the dimensions of the territory in which the state would exert its sovereignty—a territory that contained inexactitudes, blurry and disputed spaces. Two of the writers studied here, Moreno and Euclides, represented their states in international debates and commissions regarding the national borders of their countries with Chile and Peru, respectively. But precisely because both border and frontier are constructed as dangerous by the state, they appeal to travelers. In the contexts studied, states constructed instability in the border and frontier regions, where the state’s inability to “see” provoked uncertainty and paranoia, thus producing a continuum between the two kinds of border.98 The enemies concocted by the state, who usually live in these so-called deserts, are, like the territory itself, characterized by a certain exteriority, as is evident in the texts examined here.99 Although most of the conflicts studied here are not international, borders at the time were blurry or disputed. The very status of these territories, their exteriority or interiority with respect to the state, was at the heart of the conflicts and was largely decided through them; these are wars waged against an exteriority that is constructed as dangerous in discourse.

Forms of the Visible In Seeing Like a State James C. Scott studies different cases of state manipulation of nature and people. I am also interested here in the forms in which the territories and the peoples are seen by the state; this is why I focus on the technologies of seeing present in the texts I study. In the opening chapters, Scott offers a historical discussion of forms in which state-sponsored ways of transforming nature to make it “legible” took place in various regions (mainly in Europe). The state seeks to sedentarize its population through the parallel processes of legibility and simplification. The former is necessary for the state to be able to manipulate its subjects: Any substantial state intervention in society—to vaccinate a population, produce goods, mobilize labor, tax people and their property, …

Introduction: The Desertmakers  29 conscript soldiers, enforce sanitation standards …—requires the invention of units that are visible. The units in question might be citizens, villages, trees, fields. … Whatever the units being manipulated, they must be organized in a manner that permits them to be identified, observed, recorded, counted, aggregated, and monitored. The degree of knowledge required would have to be roughly commensurate with the depth of the intervention. In other words, one might say that the greater the manipulation envisaged, the greater the legibility required to effect it.100 If war was a tool for making territory “legible” in Latin America, as I claim here, it is because the interventions that Scott enumerates were not possible with certain groups, perhaps because those subjects did not perceive themselves as state subjects. Societies, from the modern state’s perspective, need to be remade before they can be quantified or measured. Legibility comes first, manipulation being a consequence. Building on what Scott suggests, we can think of war as a necessary legibilizing tool for achieving a kind of radical manipulation: extermination (that is, the condition that allows other populations, who would occupy those lands, to be manipulated). What the states studied here needed initially to discern was, precisely, the void. Attempts to make territory visible were, Scott claims, “undermined by intra-state rivalries, technical obstacles and, above all, the resistance of [the state’s] subjects”.101 The state strives to improve the levying of taxes, prevent uprisings, and organize the drafting of its men into the military in the simplest manner possible. To that end, it engages in an effort to make individuals and spaces legible so it can effectively control people’s movements through its territory. Organizing individuals in order to conduct a census and establish a tangible and concrete relationship between them and the state—that seems to be the state’s aim. The idea of simplification, for its part, is associated by Scott with the concept of a uniform and homogeneous citizenry, an idea that is also present in the concerns of Latin American intellectual elites throughout the nineteenth century.102 The concepts of legibility and simplification are productive for thinking about war, hence the recourse here to metaphors related to issues of (in)visibility; in these pages, I will discuss ways of seeing and representing war and territories, and I will point out moments when I find limits to the simplifying gaze, and to the ability to make sense of war and massacres. The desert and the frontier are “foggy” spaces that the gaze of the state is unable to fathom, places the state cannot understand in order to subsequently dominate them. Scott speaks of the tragic consequences of “well-intended schemes to improve the human condition”, a phrase that cannot refer to the phenomenon of war.103 In Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, the possibility of reading a territory and

30  Introduction: The Desertmakers its inhabitants implied a combination of ordering and erasure, organization and elimination. This is, in a way, a translation of the motto of President Roca, the primary architect of the Conquest of the Desert: “peace [tacitly, war] and administration”.104 Thus, war implies a successive but complementary process of desertification, legibilization, and appropriation, three elements in a single successful endeavor. In this context, the simplifying and homogenizing dynamics of the state and the market constituted a single project. *** On 2 September 2018, a fire burnt to the ground Brazil’s National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, destroying the vast majority of its collections. The two-centuries-old museum (it had been established in 1818) was the country’s oldest scientific institution. It was the largest natural history museum in Latin America, containing millions of very diverse items, including pieces that had belonged to the Emperor Dom Pedro I of Brazil (1822–31); text and sound materials documenting indigenous languages of Brazil, many of them disappeared; and the skeleton of Luzia, the oldest one ever found in the Western hemisphere (parts of this skeleton were eventually recovered). In an interview on the Portuguese newspaper Publico, anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro referred to this devastating fire, and to the utter neglect to which the museum (and the country’s cultural patrimony in general) had been condemned, using an expression particularly pertinent to this book: “In Brazil, to govern is to create deserts.” He also stated that the ruins of the museum should remain as such, “as memento mori, as the memory of death, of dead things, of dead peoples, of dead archives”.105 These are very present echoes of a systematic destruction, of a logic that has been creating deserts for a long time, only through different means. The Desertmakers speaks of deserts that are also museums, of ruins that continue to evoke destruction, of scenes that anticipate these newer forms of destruction, in which the state disappears and abandons, instead of—as happened in these wars—actively and systematically destroying.

Notes 1 Tacitus, The Agricola, with an introduction and notes by Duane Reed Stuart (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1909), p. 19. Cornelius Tacitus, The Works of Tacitus. Vol. II. The History, Germany, Agricola, and Dialogue on Orators, the Oxford Translation, revised with notes (London: Bell & Daldy, 1872), p. 372. 2 Joan Corominas, Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana (Madrid: Gredos, 1967), p. 208. For the English etymology of “desert”, see The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. C.T. Onions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 259. See also the English Online Etymology Dictionary www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=desert (1 May 2015).

Introduction: The Desertmakers  31 Other terms used as translations in English are “wasteland” (Benario) and “wilderness” (Fyfe). Cornelius Tacitus, Tacitus’ Agricola, Germany, and Dialogue on Orators, rev. ed., trans. with an introduction and notes by Herbert W. Benario [1967] (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), p. 45. See also Cornelius Tacitus, Tacitus Dialogus, Agricola and Germania, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), p. 73. Santiago Segura Munguía defines the word solitudo as “soledad, lugar solitario; desierto” [solitude, solitary place; desert] (Santiago Segura Munguía, Diccionario etimológico latino-español [Madrid: Ediciones Generales Anaya, 1985], p. 681). The example given on the same page is the phrase vastae solitudines, which appears in translation as “desiertos inmensos” [vast deserts]. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Juan Introini for these references, which he sent me, with his remarkable generosity and erudition, in June 2012, a year before his death. 3 There are a great number of works that examine the literary and ideological construction of the Latin American space. Some noteworthy works on the issue include Jens Andermann, Mapas de poder. Una arqueología literaria del espacio argentino (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2000); Gabriela Nouzeilles, ed., La naturaleza en disputa. Retóricas del cuerpo y el paisaje en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2002); Graciela Montaldo, De pronto, el campo. Literatura argentina y tradición rural (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 1993); Graciela Montaldo, “Espacio y nación”, Estudios. Revista de Investigaciones Literarias 3, no. 5 (1995), 5–17; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992); Candice Vidal e Souza, A pátria geográfica. Sertão e litoral no pensamento social brasileiro (Goiânia: UFG, 1997); Ileana Rodríguez, Transatlantic Topographies. Islands, Highlands, Jungles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Flora Süssekind, O Brasil não é longe daqui. O narrador, a viagem (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1990); Eva-Lynn Alicia Jagoe, The End of the World as They Knew It: Writing Experiences of the Argentine South (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008); Tulio Halperín Donghi, “Una nación para el desierto argentino” [1980], in Tulio Halperín Donghi, ed., Proyecto y construcción de una nación (1846–1880) (Buenos Aires: Ariel/ Espasa Calpe, 1995), pp. 7–107; Fermín A. Rodríguez, Un desierto para la nación: la escritura del vacío (Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2010); Willi Bolle, grandesertão.br. O romance de formação do Brasil (São Paulo: Duas Cidades/ Editora 34, 2004); Nísia Trindade Lima, Um sertão chamado Brasil. Intelectuais e representação geográfica da identidade nacional (Rio de Janeiro: IUPERJ/Editora Revan, 1999); João Marcelo Ehlert Maia, A terra como invenção. O espaço no pensamento social brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2008). 4 On nation, fiction, and foundation in Latin America, see Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America ­(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 5 Rodríguez, Una nación, 405. 6 “Desertification”, Merriam-Webster Dictionary www.merriam-webster. com/dictionary/desertification (9 December 2016). 7 The article first appeared in the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo as “Fazedores de desertos”. It was later included in Euclides’s 1907 book of essays Contrastes e confrontos [Contrasts and Comparisons]. 8 Following the Brazilian scholarly tradition, I have decided to refer to Euclides da Cunha by his first name throughout the book. 9 Euclides da Cunha, “Fazedores de desertos”, in Contrastes e confrontos [1907], com um estudo crítico do Dr. Araripe Júnior (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1975), pp. 186–91 (at p. 189).

32  Introduction: The Desertmakers 10 Os sertões also contains a number of pages that discuss man as a geological agent. The book’s first part, “A terra” [The Land], has two sections, one after the other, titled “Como se faz um deserto” [How a Desert Is Made] and “Como se extingue o deserto” [“How the Desert Is Extinguished”]. The first of these sections reiterates the ideas that the author had put forward one year earlier in “Fazedores de desertos”. The question posed at the beginning of this introduction was inspired by the title of the first of these sections. 11 Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts. Indian Raids and the US-­ Mexican War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. xvi–xvii. 12 The book’s epilogue, from a Mexican source, describes the presence of the Indians in northern Mexico as desertifying. It is a clear reference to Tacitus: “Such is the peace of the barbarians in an old one’s expression: When they have reduced the settlements to the silence of the deserts, this they call peace.” According to the sources DeLay works with, for Mexicans in those years the deserts were a creation of the indigenous peoples: “A prominent author from Chihuahua, for example, said that raiders had ‘destroyed the haciendas, the temples, the cities, all the work and glory of many generations, in order to recreate the desert which the Apalache eye deligths in’” (DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts, p. xvi). 13 A very stimulating discussion of wilderness can be found in chapter 8 of Edward Casey’s Getting Back into Place, titled “Going Wild in the Land”. Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place. Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), pp. 227–70. 14 On war and spatiality, see (among others) Fredric Jameson, “War and Representation”, PMLA 124, no. 5 (2009): 1532–47 (at p. 1537). 15 Dennis Porter, Haunted Journeys. Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 5. 16 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 8. 17 Georges Van den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. xv. 18 One of the key works on this subject is Adolfo Prieto, Los viajeros ingleses y la emergencia de la literatura argentina (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1996). For the case of Brazil, see also Süssekind, O Brazil não é longe daqui. 19 “Nuestro oriente es Europa”, in Néstor García Canclini and Beatriz González Stephan, eds., Cultura y Tercer Mundo. 2. Nuevas identidades y ciudadanías (Caracas: Nueva Sociedad, 1996), pp. 201–20 (at pp. 208– 09). Adriana Amante has returned to the importance of this territorializing operation in that book, which founded Argentina’s spatial imagination: “[F]aithful to the dictates of a time shaped by the work of naturalists and travelers, [Sarmiento] begins by analyzing a territory that he does not know in any practical sense. Despite this lack of familiarity (if it is even a disadvantage), or perhaps precisely because of it, here Sarmiento offers one of the most determinant configurations of the pampa as a national space. A pampa in which he had never set foot, as we know, but that nobody could have depicted with the clarity with which he does it in this text. Experience can also be gained through letters, and it is through these readings or testimonies (of travelers and naturalists, but also of soldiers, locals, geographers, and poets) and the cartographic way that their thinking can operate that he has gained knowledge about that terrain through which he has never traveled. Reading and thinking are also a form of knowing: that is one of the assumptions of Facundo.” (Adriana Amante, “Sarmiento el boletinero: del Diario de Campaña al libro de vistas y paisajes”, in Adriana

Introduction: The Desertmakers  33 Amante, dir. Historia crítica de la literatura argentina. Vol. 4. Sarmiento [Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 2012], pp. 181–212 [at pp. 181–82]). 20 A number of recent works have approached war from a decidedly cultural perspective and have to some degree mitigated the silence I refer to here. These include Julieta Vitullo, Islas imaginadas. La guerra de Malvinas en la literatura y el cine argentinos (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2012); Martín Kohan, El país de la guerra (Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2014); and Sebastián Díaz-Duhalde, La última guerra. Cultura visual de la Guerra contra Paraguay (Barcelona: Sans Soleil, 2015). Vitullo’s and Díaz-­ Duhalde’s books examine, respectively, the Malvinas War in literature and film, and visual representations of the War of the Triple Alliance, while Kohan’s posits war as being central to the political and cultural history of Argentina. Also noteworthy is the book I recently coedited with Felipe Martínez-Pinzón, Entre el humo y la niebla. Guerra y cultura en América Latina. The book brings together essays by a number of experts who look at various military conflicts throughout Latin American history from a cultural perspective. It also includes an introduction that seeks to create a systematic cartography of the multiple meanings of war in the cultural life of Latin American nations. A key impetus for this project is the fact that war is a sort of a black hole in Latin American cultural and literary studies, which the book explicitly attempts to correct (Felipe Martínez-Pinzón and Javier Uriarte, “Entre el humo y la niebla: guerra y cultura en América Latina”, in Martínez-Pinzón and Uriarte, eds., Entre el humo y la niebla. Guerra y cultura en América Latina [Pittsburgh: IILI, 2016], pp. 5–30 [at p. 6]). As I finished editing this book, Fernando Degiovanni published Vernacular Latin Americanisms. War, the Market, and the Making of a Discipline (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), in which he explores the role that the Second World War had in the origins of the field of hispanism in the USA. In spite of being a very different approach to the dynamics of war and culture from the one adopted here, I think the book merits to be mentioned in this context. 21 Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation”, in Catherine Besteman, ed., Violence: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2002), pp. 13–18 (at p. 14). 22 Weber, “Politics as a Vocation”, p. 13, original emphasis. 23 Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime” [1985], in Catherine Besteman, ed., Violence: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2002), pp. 35–60 (at p. 37). Tilly also agrees with Weber’s claim: “governments stand out from other organizations by their tendency to monopolize the concentrated means of violence” (Tilly, “War Making”, p. 38). 24 Tilly, “War Making”, p. 49. 25 Tilly, “War Making”, p. 38. 26 Fernando López-Alves, State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 1810–1900 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 19–20. 27 Juan Pablo Dabove, Bandit Narratives in Latin America. From Villa to Chávez (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), p. xi. 28 Porfirio Díaz was the president of Mexico first between 1876 and 1880 and then between 1884 and 1911, though the entire period from 1876 to 1911 is known as the Porfiriato. Militarismo (militarism) is the term used in Uruguay to refer to the succession of three administrations headed by military leaders between 1876 and 1890: Lorenzo Latorre (1876–80), Máximo Santos (1882–86), and Máximo Tajes (1886–90). I will discuss in greater detail this process of militarization and centralization in each of the countries and conflicts studied in the corresponding chapters. 29 Tulio Halperín Donghi, Historia contemporánea de América Latina [1967] (Madrid: Alianza, 1986), p. 249.

34  Introduction: The Desertmakers 30 Ángel Rama, La crítica de la cultura en América Latina, ed. Saúl Sosnowski and Tomás Eloy Martínez (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1985), p. 354. 31 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism [1983] (London: Verso, 2006). 32 Oscar Oszlak, La formación del Estado argentino: orden, progreso y organización nacional [1982] (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1997), p. 17. 33 Françoise Perus, Literatura y sociedad en América Latina: el modernismo (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1976), p. 48. 34 Ericka Beckman, Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), p. ix. 35 Neil Smith explains the rhetoric through which capitalism has been made natural (to the extent that nature has been made unnatural, Lefebvre would say): “capitalism is not treated as historically contingent but as an inevitable and universal product of nature” (Smith, Uneven Development, p. 29). 36 See Ángel Rama, “Los poetas modernistas en el mercado económico”, in Rubén Darío y el modernismo (Caracas: Alfadil, 1985), pp. 35–79; and Julio Ramos, Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina: literatura y política en el siglo XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989). 37 On the chronicle and the transformations in the role of the intellectual it implied, see Susana Rotker, La invención de la crónica [1992] (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005). 38 See especially the section titled “Fragmentación de la República de las letras”, in Ramos, Desencuentros de la modernidad, pp. 50–81. 39 The importance of positivism in fin de siècle Brazil cannot be overstated. On this particular issue, see chapter 6 of an essential book for understanding these times. José Murilo de Carvalho, “Positivists and the Manipulation of the Collective Imagination”, in The Formation of Souls. Imagery of the Republic in Brazil [1990], trans. Clifford E. Landers (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), pp. 137–50. ­ reces, 40 About this singular period in the history of Paraguay, see Nidia R. A Estado y frontera en el Paraguay. Concepción durante el gobierno del Dr. Francia (Asunción: Universidad Católica “Nuestra Señora de la Asunción”, 1988); Henryk Szlajfer, “Against Dependent Capitalist Development in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: The Case of Haiti and Paraguay”, Latin American Perspectives 13, no. 1 (1983): 45–73; Roberto Ares Pons, El Paraguay del siglo XIX. Un estado socialista (Montevideo: Nuevo Mundo, 1987); Richard Alan White, Paraguay’s Autonomous Revolution, 1810–1840 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978); Thomas Whigham, “Autonomy, Authoritarianism, and Development”, in Peter Lambert and Andrew Nickson, eds., The Paraguay Reader. History, Culture, Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 70–74; John Hoyt Williams, The Rise and Fall of the Paraguayan Republic, 1800– 1870 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978). 41 Oszlak, La formación, p. 45. 42 “From a ‘horizontal’ conflict between peers (e.g., conflict between ­caudillos— as in the long period of anarchy—or between blocs created through ephemeral alliances—as occurred during the clashes between the Argentine Confederation and the State of Buenos Aires) there was a shift to a ‘vertical’ confrontation between unequals. Any mobilization of forces opposing the order established by the victors would thenceforth be classed as ‘revolt’ or ‘internal rebellion’. A hierarchical element has been imposed on the segmental nature of the social structure” (Oszlak, La formación, p. 96). Enrique Méndez Vives offers as a Uruguayan example of the fragmentary and local nature of power the words of a caudillo in response to official repression: “The government

Introduction: The Desertmakers  35 has risen up against us!” (Enrique Méndez Vives, Historia Uruguaya. Tomo 5. 1876–1904. El Uruguay de la modernización [1975] [Montevideo: Banda Oriental, 1987], p. 10). 43 John Lynch, Caudillos in Spanish America. 1800–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 427. Charles Tilly outlines a similar idea in discussing the emergence of the European states: “Early in the state-making process, many parties shared the right to use violence, its actual employment, or both at once” (Tilly, “War Making”, p. 39). He continues, “The distinctions between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ users of violence came clear only very slowly, in the process during which the state’s armed forces became relatively unified and permanent” (p. 40). In Latin America the main difference may reside in the speed of the process, which was carried out almost without exception during the period examined in this book. 44 In Blood and Debt, Miguel Angel Centeno recognizes the importance of the Canudos War in the process of state territorial control: “With the victory over the Canudos rebellion, the government effectively established its authority over most of the country” (Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America [University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002], p. 109). 45 Emília Viotti da Costa, Da monarquia à república: momentos decisivos (São Paulo: Livraria Editora Ciências Humanas, 1979), p. 16. 46 I would add that war is also a logic, a discourse, a disposition, as Hobbes has explained: “The nature of the war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto.” ­Roberto Vecchi, after quoting Hobbes, affirms that “this disposition to war is a constant in Brazilian history and the history of the modernization of its state” (Roberto Vecchi, “A forma literária e o diagrama da Gewalt: exceção e excesso da guerra nos limiares modernos da cultura brasileira”, in Martínez-Pinzón and Uriarte, eds., Entre el humo y la niebla, pp. ­159–71 [at pp. 163– 64]). Also, João Camilo Penna has argued, for Brazil’s twentieth century, that war is central to three of the country’s most emblematic works: Os sertões (1902), João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande sertão:veredas (1956), and Paulo Lins’s Cidade de Deus (1997). His article shows that different ways of understanding and waging war are omnipresent in different regions and moments of the last century. João Camilo Penna, “A imitação da guerra”, in Martínez-Pinzón and Uriarte, eds., Entre el humo y la niebla, pp. 315–40. 47 A comparative analysis of these three revolts during the First Republic in Brazil can be found in Duglas Teixeira Monteiro, “Um confronto entre Juazeiro, Canudos e Contestado”, in Boris Fausto, ed., História geral da civilização brasileira. Tomo III. O Brasil Republicano, 2 Volume, Sociedade e Instituições (1889–1930) (Rio de Janeiro: DIFEL, 1978), pp. 39–92. 48 This is certainly an association that existed in antiquity. The Online Etymology Dictionary gives “destruction, ruins” as two of the original meanings of “desert” (“Desert”, in Online Etymology Dictionary www. etymonline.com/word/desert (14 October 2018)). 49 Edward Said, Orientalism [1978] (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). See also Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993). 50 David Viñas, Indios, ejército y frontera (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1982), p. 43. 51 For a contextual and comparative reading of the Conquest of the Desert from a Latin American perspective, see the lucid overview set out by Viñas (Indios, ejército y frontera, pp. 22–44).

36  Introduction: The Desertmakers 52 Chapter 1 will offer a detailed study of the importance of the War of the Triple Alliance in South America, with a special focus on its effects on each of the four countries involved, on their processes of modernization and state consolidation, and specifically with regard to the other conflicts studied in this book. 53 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 227. 54 Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, and Power”, in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 239–56 (at p. 243). 55 Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, and Power”, p. 243. 56 Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt, p. 276. 57 Gastón R. Gordillo, Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 82. 58 Gordillo, Rubble, p. 82. 59 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 50. 60 This is obviously close to Tilly’s notion that war makes the state (Tilly, “War Making”, p. 36). 61 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 13. 62 On this subject, see the concept of “imperialist nostalgia” proposed by Renato Rosaldo, which could be useful for reading a significant portion of the corpus examined in this book (Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia”, Representations, 26 [1989]: 107–22). 63 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 40. 64 Gordillo, Rubble, p. XII. 65 Robert Ginsberg has pointed out that one of the characteristics of the ruin is “its resistance to the forces of destruction” (Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), p. 311). 66 Gordillo, Rubble, p. 9, 10. 67 Michael S. Roth, “Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed”, in Michael S. Roth, Claire Lyons, and Charles Merewether, eds., Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute of Art and the Humanities, 1997), pp. 1–23 (at p. 11). Roth studies the photographic representations of the ruins of war. The topic is one that might be amply enriched by the conflicts examined in these pages, since—at least in the War of the Triple Alliance, the Conquest of the Desert, and the Canudos War—photography had a significant presence. The ruin is not, I think, all that dissimilar to the conceptualization of photography in now-classic works such as those of Susan Sontag or Roland Barthes: both the ruin and the photograph inhabit a number of time periods at once; they are simultaneously forms of life and objectifications of death; they are signs both of permanence and of absence, of loss. See Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar/Straus and Giroux, 1989), and Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). 68 Roth, “Irresistible Decay”, p. 13. 69 This is not as obvious as it might seem. Andreas Huyssen, for example, argues that in discussing war we should talk about rubble and not, strictly speaking, of ruins (Andreas Huyssen, “Nostalgia for Ruins”, Grey Room 23 [2006]: 6–21 [at p. 8]). In this respect, see my discussion of Gordillo above.

Introduction: The Desertmakers  37 70 Roth, “Irresistible Decay”, p. 7. 71 Francisco Foot Hardman has used the equivalent expression “ruínas precoces” [precocious ruins] when discussing Euclides da Cunha’s writings (Francisco Foot Hardman, A vingança da Hiléia. Euclides da Cunha, a Amazônia e a literatura moderna [São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2009], p. 117). 72 Jameson, “War and Representation”, p. 1533. 73 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 4. 74 “When Whitman asserted that the real war would never get into the books, he was arguing not only that the scale of the war defied comprehensive encapsulation, but also that the attempt to depict war’s violence through language afterward is impossible, necessarily, because the essential nature of violence is always in excess of language. All that is ever produced amounts to ‘scraps and distortions’” (James Dawes, The Language of War. Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002], p. 7). 75 A general historical study of Latin American wars is René De La Pedraja, Wars of Latin America, 1899–1941 (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2006). It focuses on a later period than that examined in this book. I consider it problematic to study war in Latin America without mentioning the nineteenth century, when war occupied a central place in governmental and political dynamics. In addition, De La Pedraja categorizes numerous wildly varying conflicts as wars without adequately distinguishing among them or explaining that it is not easy to determine what constitutes a war in Latin America, which he describes as a “turbulent region” (De La Pedraja, Wars of Latin America, p. 1). Robert L. Scheina also devotes two lengthy volumes to war in Latin America. The first, subtitled “The Age of the Caudillo, 1791–1899”, is relevant to my analysis. See Robert L. Scheina, Latin America’s Wars. Volume 1. The Age of the Caudillo, 1791–1899 (Washington: Brassey’s, 2003). 76 Centeno, Blood and Debt, p. 276. A key reference on the relations between war, capital, and the state, from the perspective of political science, is Michael Mann, States, War, and Capitalism: Studies in Political Sociology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). 77 Centeno, Blood and Debt, p. 261. 78 Centeno, Blood and Debt, pp. 270, 271. 79 Centeno seems to be aware of the importance of the wars that I study here in their respective countries’ processes of state consolidation. He is also aware of the particularities of the Paraguayan case. Some of the general assertions I quote here from Blood and Debt seem to contradict his detailed approaches to specific conflicts. 80 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 276. 81 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 280. 82 Gordillo, Rubble, p. 79. 83 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 280. 84 David Harvey himself has continued Lefebvre’s thinking with regard to the relationships between space, time, and capital: “command over spaces and times is a crucial element in any search for profit” (Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 226). Harvey highlights the importance, building on Lefebvre’s ideas, of the category of time and the ways it becomes a form of profit. He also thinks deeply about space and time as sites of struggles for power. In this sense, as we will see, his thinking intertwines with that of Deleuze and Guattari (who are nevertheless working within another

38  Introduction: The Desertmakers theoretical framework), for whom, according to Harvey, “capitalism is continually reterritorializing with one hand what it was deterritorializing with the other” (Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 238). 85 “Without the concepts of space and of its production, the framework of power … simply cannot achieve concreteness” (Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 281). 86 Smith, Uneven Development, p. 4. 87 Oscar Oszlak, La formación del Estado argentino, p. 27. 88 It is important to consider that at the time of the publication of The Production of Space in 1974, only the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, titled Anti-Oedipus (1972), had been published. It does not include a critique of the state, as Lefebvre points out (with regard not just to Deleuze and Guattari, but also to Foucault) (Stuart Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre. Theory and the Possible [London: Continuum, 2004], p. 240). In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), however, this critique is evident. In The Production of Space Lefebvre refers critically to the concept of the machine that recurs throughout Anti-Oedipus, since he believes the concept is inadequate: it “is not only highly abstract but also embedded in a very abstractly conceived representation of space” (Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 195). In Le temps des méprises, a collection of interviews published a year later, he questions the use of the concept of flow in a discussion of Deleuze and Guattari that culminates in an explanation of the real reason for his disagreement with those philosophers: “I do not think we can talk about our own era without foregrounding the analysis of capitalism, the bourgeoisie, the state” (Henri Lefebvre, Le temps des méprises [n.p.: Stock, 1975], p. 173). We should relativize some of these claims, since a political tone and critical analysis of the state become central in A Thousand Plateaus. 89 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Masumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 390. 90 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 352. 91 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 352. 92 “Could it be that it is at the moment the war machine ceases to exist, conquered by the State, that it displays to the utmost its irreducibility, that it scatters into thinking, loving, dying, or creating machines that have at their disposal vital or revolutionary powers capable of challenging the conquering State?” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 356). 93 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 361–62. The embedded quotations are in the original, attributed to Pierre Boulez’s work on music. 94 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 371, emphasis added. 95 On this subject, see the section titled “Territorialidad” in Ana Ribeiro’s Los muy fieles. It includes insightful reflections on the relations of power and discipline between the city (especially Montevideo and Asunción) and the interior in the period just prior to and early on in the revolutionary process. Ribeiro contemplates the way bodies and power are distributed both within the space of the city and between the city and the countryside. See Ana Ribeiro, Los muy fieles. Leales a la corona en el proceso revolucionario rioplatense: Montevideo-Asunción, 1810–1820: estudio comparado. Tomo 1 (Montevideo: Planeta, 2013), pp. 117–202. 96 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 360. 97 Chapter 3 will present a more detailed discussion of the notion of the frontier. At the beginning of this book, I have outlined some important books that deal with the Latin American space from a cultural perspective. The

Introduction: The Desertmakers  39 bibliography on frontiers in Latin America is abundant. When discussing this notion it is inevitable to refer to Frederick Jackson Turner’s pivotal address “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893). While this text does not focus on Latin America, it reflects on the notion of the frontier vis-à-vis national identity and state expansion. And, clearly, war, which seems to be inextricably linked to the frontier. A very useful book that traces a history of the conceptualization of the frontier in Latin America is David J. Weber and Jane M. Rausch, eds., Where Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin American History (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1994). The frontier is a central topic in the work of Richard W. Slatta; perhaps his most relevant books for this study are Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983) and Comparing Cowboys and Frontiers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997). A compelling discussion from the perspective of anthropology is Miguel Bartolomé, “Antropología de las fronteras en América Latina”, AmeriQuests 2, no. 1 http://ejournals.library.vanderbilt.edu/ojs/index.php/ameriquests/ article/viewFile/41/30 (12 January 2016). See also Alejandro Grimson, Fronteras, naciones e identidades. La periferia como centro (Buenos Aires: Cicus-La Crujía, 2000). On the desert, especially for its conceptualization in Argentina, see the essential book by Fermín Rodríguez Un desierto para la nación. 98 Tilly has explained the state’s need to create imminent dangers to increase its control over spaces and subjects: “governments … commonly simulate, stimulate, or even fabricate threats of external war” (Tilly, “War Making”, p. 37). 99 This goes beyond the matter of the bandit, that impure figure who is expelled, excised from the body of the nation. Dabove explains that the bandit is someone who is persecuted, since there is a “ban” (hence the word’s origin, the Italian bandire, to prohibit) that declares him outside the law. He is a member of society who has broken its norms and is therefore judged, persecuted by the law itself. The origin of the bandit is found in what Dabove calls “the state gesture of expulsion”. In the late nineteenth century, the state constructed its enemies as largely external, and in this sense they were exempt from that gesture of expulsion (Juan Pablo Dabove, Nightmares of the Lettered City: Banditry and Literature in Latin America, 1816–1929 [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007], p. 8). The final consolidation of the state, at century’s end, was accompanied by logics of erasure, of extermination, not of expulsion. It may be possible to read the idea of the bandit and his relationship with the ban in accordance with Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical theory. In his section on “The Ban and the Wolf”, Agamben talks about the liminal status of the bandit, who is defined under the law as a wolf-man and is located in “a threshold of indistinction and of passage between animal and man” (Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998], p. 105). I believe that the very notion of war and the way the subjects it eliminates are narrated in these texts could be productively approached from a biopolitical reading. I have chosen not to do so here, as such an endeavor is beyond the scope of my project. I am nevertheless grateful to Gabriel Giorgi and Roberto Vecchi for their insightful remarks on the possibility of looking at war and its victims (and at the desert itself) from that state of near nonbeing implied by the Agambian concepts of homo sacer and bare life. 100 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 183.

40  Introduction: The Desertmakers 01 Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 80. 1 102 Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 32. 103 Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 4. In fact, for Scott war is an opportunity for a state to intervene, employing a visibilizing strategy. It is as if war were, for him, something independent of the state, as if its origin were not in the state. For Scott, war is not in itself a phenomenon that reconfigures spaces. 104 Each of these terms is equivalent to the corresponding terms in the Brazilian slogan “Ordem e Progresso”. 105 Alexandra Prado Coelho, “Entrevista. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: ‘Gostaria que o Museu Nacional permanecesse como ruína, memória das coisas mortas’”, in Público, 4 September 2018 www.publico.pt/2018/09/04/­ culturaipsilon/entrevista/eduardo-viveiros-de-castro-gostaria-que-o-­museunacional-permanecesse-como-ruina-memoria-das-coisas-mortas-1843021 (4 September 2018).

1 War in Terra Incognita Richard Burton’s Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay

“The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances … you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert” Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness1

“A Disastrous War” There are few places in this world where Sir Richard Francis Burton (1812–90) did not set foot. Among many other adventures, he visited India, traveled to Africa in search of the source of the Nile, and made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1853 disguised as a Muslim pilgrim, risking grave consequences if he were discovered. Indefatigably engaged in a wide range of activities, he was not only a traveler but also a translator, diplomat, spy, and poet. 2 Compared to this perpetual movement, his ten-year stint in the Americas (1860–69) could seem insignificant. Indeed, historians and biographers tend to overlook Burton’s three years living in Brazil as a British consul and his subsequent travels through South America, which eventually brought him to territories where one of the cruelest wars in the subcontinent’s history was playing out. It is with the words that open this section that Richard Burton describes the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70) in his Letters from the Battle-­ Fields of Paraguay (1870), the focus of the present chapter. This war, known in Brazil as the Paraguayan War, and in Paraguay as the Great War (Guasú War in Guarani), was one of the central events in the history of the nineteenth century in Latin America. Not only was it the first formally declared international conflict that involved four nations, but it was also, in many senses, the region’s first modern war.3 It included, for example, the widespread use of artillery; key roles played by the railroad, steamships, and telegraphy; and the unprecedented participation of the press.4 Francisco Doratioto and Luc Capdevila, two historians who have written about this war, agree in calling it a “total war”, an expression describing, in the words of historian David Bell, a conflict “involving the complete mobilization of a society’s resources to achieve the absolute destruction of an enemy, with all distinction erased between combatants and

42 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay noncombatants”.5 It was there, too, that photography was first used to portray military conflicts in Latin America.6 Moreover, the conflict had, as we have seen, a profound and multiform impact on the modernization efforts of the institutional apparatuses of the participating states. Thanks to its particular characteristics and its dire consequences, the Paraguayan War has also been a subject of critical debate among historians and intellectuals. The exceptional brutality of the conflict, the extraordinary length of time over which it dragged out, and the devastating consequences wreaked on Paraguay make this war a particularly sensitive issue. Most of its accounts consist of subjective opinion, pamphlets, or the establishment of sole responsibilities to explain the Paraguayan genocide that resulted from the conflict. Brazilian troops occupied Asunción, the country’s capital, until 1876, and some Argentine troops remained in the country even longer. Luc Capdevila explains that “the country was in shambles. It had lost 40 percent of its original territory and 60 percent of its inhabitants. Its adult male population had been wiped out, and its economy devastated”.7 There are still heated debates over the type of leadership and authority exercised by the Paraguayan president at the time, Francisco Solano López (1862–70); the characteristics of the country’s economic, political, and social structure prior to the war; the interests of each of the three allied nations in the conflict; and the diplomatic intricacies that led to it. Other ongoing topics of discussion are the precise scale of the population decrease experienced in Paraguay, its causes and effects, and the role played by the most important foreign powers (particularly England) in the origin, development, and consequences of the conflict. The allied countries’ version of events gave the president of Paraguay sole responsibility for the war, but this view has long been discredited.8 Marshal Solano López is a complex figure who demands a careful reading. One can recognize the despotic nature of his regime without forgetting his fierce defense of Paraguayan sovereignty and the Paraguayan people’s remarkable sense of identification with their president. For example, the description of Solano López in Augusto Roa Bastos’s novel El fiscal (1993) [The prosecutor] alternates between the narrator’s identification with, exaltation of, and bitter criticism for the president. One of the main objectives of the book is to deconstruct the official discourse that casts Alfredo Stroessner, Paraguay’s dictator from 1954 to 1989 (the longest twentieth-­ century Latin American dictatorship), as Solano López’s successor. The official appropriation that positions the two tyrants as members of a single lineage is laid bare from the book’s first reference to Stroessner: “¡Y ahora este gringo miserable de la colonia Hoeneau se ha declarado su heredero y sucesor!” [And now this miserable Gringo from the Hoeneau colony has declared himself to be Lopez’s heir and successor!].9 The most convincing conclusions on the loss of the majority of the Paraguayan population have been provided by Thomas Whigham and Barbara Potthast, who estimate that the figure must be between 60 and 69 percent.10 This makes the conflict remarkable in modern history, as

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  43 no other country is known to have seen its population decline to such a degree.11 Burton’s eye, or his ability to gather information and interpret his sources, seems quite apposite on this subject: We may, I believe, safely adopt the 220,000 souls of Dr. Francia’s census in 1840, and double them for 1865, thus obtaining at most 450,000 inhabitants, of whom 110,000 would be fighters between the ages of fifteen and fifty-five, and perhaps 150,000 of twelve to sixty years old. It is evident that the male population must now be almost destroyed or deported. … Paraguay will presently be left with a population of some 200,000 women and children.12 Whigham and Potthast’s estimates are startlingly similar to Burton’s: according to them, before the war, Paraguay probably had between 420,000 and 450,000 inhabitants; at the end of war, it had between 141,351 and 166,351.13 Though deaths on the battlefield were numerous, disease and epidemics appear to have been the main cause.14 Brazil’s decision to continue the war until the death of President Solano López was also a key factor in wiping out the enemy’s resources.15 Of particular interest for this chapter is England’s role in the conflict. Moniz Bandeira has claimed that the war was a result of Brazil’s imperialist policies and that no blame can be assigned to England because the country did not have diplomatic relations with Brazil at the time.16 Nevertheless, revisionist historiography casts English economic interests as the real cause of the war.17 I would add some nuance to Moniz Bandeira’s claim by noting that the consular offices of Burton himself demonstrate that despite the interruption of diplomatic relations, England continued to be the primary sociocommercial force in Brazil during the war, and its main creditor afterward.18 While English diplomats declared their country’s neutrality during the conflict, Richard Burton’s critical eye would question the sincerity of that claim: “The fleet is to be increased by four new gunboats from Europe, which will be stationed in the Upper Uruguay. The Monitors and some of the ironclads were built at Rio de Janeiro; the rest were supplied by France and the Thames ironworks. A curious form of showing neutrality!” (p. 345). While describing the participation in the conflict of naval ships bought in Britain, he adds that “Marshal-President Lopez was justified in complaining that we should be more strict in enforcing the laws of neutrality” (p. 331). Historian Leslie Bethell explicitly addresses the direct influence of British loans and weaponry: “although Britain was officially neutral in the War, British loans to Argentina and, more particularly, to Brazil and British arms made an important contribution to the eventual victory of the Allies over Paraguay.”19 The Argentine revisionist historian León Pomer was arguably the one who most compellingly advanced the interpretation of the war as an example of “informal empire”, suggesting that Britain was the country that most profited from it. 20

44 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay The title of the well-known article “The Imperialism of Free Trade” (1953), by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, gives a name to this kind of exploitation, which was the dominant form of imperial activity in the nineteenth century.21 The authors highlight the interconnectedness of political and economic actions and objectives: “[I]t is the politics as well as the economics of the informal empire which we have to include in the account. Historically, the relationship between these two factors has been both subtle and complex.”22 What we could call informal empire—but also simply neocolonialism, or even invisible empire, as Jennifer French refers to it—constituted the predominant mode of British presence in Latin America; furthermore, according to Gallagher and Robinson, the region seems to have been the main setting in which this kind of domination existed.23 French notes “the almost complete occlusion of neo-colonialism in Spanish American cultural discourse of the nineteenth century”.24 She defines invisible empire as “a hegemonic formation that was effective enough to dominate economic (and, consequently, social and cultural) life in Latin America, and yet almost imperceptible there”. 25 For French, then, invisible empire is the silence with which informal empire is manifested in the Latin American cultural arena. She works with the concepts of informal empire and neocolonialism interchangeably. English involvement in the Paraguayan War can be read, then, as a case of informal empire. Bethell gives a detailed account of how private British interests were benefited by the war, and of how British officials privately supported the perspective of the allied countries in the conflict, even if he states that there was no active or open involvement of the British government against Paraguay (he, in fact, is not convinced about calling this “informal empire”): Privately, once the war began, not only [Edward] Thornton [the British minister in Buenos Aires, who was given responsibility for Paraguay] but most British officials favoured the Allies. They were critical of the Solano Lopez regime; they had (racist?) contempt for Paraguayans; and they generally blamed Paraguay for the war. For them, as for Brazilians and Argentines, the war came to represent progress and civilisation versus backwardness and barbarism. British interests were obviously greater in Argentina and Brazil than in Paraguay. British commercial banks and British merchant houses in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires naturally favoured and—through their loans and the use of their merchant ships to transport arms, specie, correspondence etc.—even supported the Allies. British manufacturers sold ironclad warships, iron bars, tubing and plate for the building of warships, steam launches, artillery and ammunition to the belligerents—i.e. in practice to Brazil and Argentina, since Paraguay quickly came under a Brazilian blockade. 26

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  45 Many analysts of the conflict (including Burton himself) have interpreted this very clear commercial and financial presence, and the fact that the war benefited Britain, economically, more than any other country, as a palpable example of “invisible empire”. The War of the Triple Alliance was a key event in the South American modernization process. 27 It was a foundational moment in the consolidation of the state apparatus that would, in Argentina and Brazil, come to a close with the Conquest of the Desert and the Canudos War, respectively. In both countries, participation in the War of the Triple Alliance resulted in the powerful militarization of the state, which in Brazil led to the fall of the monarchy and the consequent proclamation of the Republic in 1889, product of a military coup carried out by veterans of the war. 28 The first governments of the so-called República Velha [Old Republic] (1889–1930) were under the strict control of the army. 29 In Argentina, this war can be seen as the beginning of a series of events that culminated in the campaign against the native populations, during which the army, the main reconfigurer of Argentine territory, was at the peak of its power and appropriated a large percentage of indigenous lands in the pampas and Patagonia.30 In Uruguay the war did not have such obvious consequences in terms of forming a national army, but only six years after the war’s end, the period of so-called “militarism” would begin, in which a succession of military governments pushed hard for modernization, critically transforming Uruguay’s rural landscape. The first of those presidents, General Lorenzo Latorre (1876–80), was a veteran of the Paraguayan War and he also participated in the 1864 invasion of Uruguay that constitutes the true first event in the conflict.31 The War of the Triple Alliance began as a conflict in and over Uruguay. In this sense, it is worth examining Doratioto’s claim that Paraguay was the aggressor, given that the war actually began with the invasion of Uruguay by the exiled General Venancio Flores allied with Brazilian forces and with the tacit support of President Bartolomé Mitre (1862–68) of Argentina.32 In the face of the invasion, the democratically elected Uruguayan president sought Paraguay’s support. It was when this dual incursion into Uruguay took place that Solano López declared war on Brazil. Doratioto’s text attempts to dispel the widespread perception imposed by revisionist historiography that Paraguay was the great victim of this conflict and that the blame rests solely with the allied forces. Starting the book by declaring Paraguay an “aggressor” is a bold move with interesting ramifications in this regard, even if the Paraguayan invasion of Mato Grosso with which the war formally began was no more than a response to Argentine-Brazilian support of Flores’s invasion of Uruguay. Paraguay’s declaration of war on Brazil was justified by Solano López as a response to a provocation. The suggestion that Paraguay was not the victim, but the “aggressor”, is problematic and misleading.33

46 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay Taking this historical context into consideration, this chapter discusses the particularities of Burton’s book on Paraguay vis-à-vis the characteristics of some of the most salient elements of his other writings and the way his figure was perceived in his lifetime. I suggest that his trip to Paraguay can be understood as a detour, a way of delaying his return to England, and read this deviation as one of the elements that show his complicated, sui generis relationship with the empire he worked for. After discussing the ways in which Paraguay had been represented before the war, I focus on how Burton’s travelogue presents various aspects of the desertification of Paraguay. The final part of the chapter analyzes specific instances of the representation of war in Letters, not as the firsthand account of concrete battles, but as the description of deserted and ruined spaces.

Travel as Deviation; or, on the Many Voices of a Seasoned Traveler Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay, which describes Burton’s travels to the Paraguayan War, is unquestionably one of his least-known books.34 One of the earliest Burton biographies from a lengthy list, Thomas Wright’s The Life of Sir Richard Burton (1906), devotes two descriptive paragraphs—adding no analysis or speculation of any sort— to his Paraguay trip.35 In a more recent biography, Jon R. Godsall’s The Tangled Web (2008), the topic takes up only two of the volume’s 429 pages.36 Edward Rice, in his well-known Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1990), pays it even scanter attention, devoting only two of his 483 pages to the subject. The pages in question come at the end of the chapter titled “Brazil”, and there is no subheading or any other element that allows the reader to identify the section (the entire chapter is only six pages long).37 Furthermore, Rice includes some surprising errors with regard to Burton’s account. Some are historical, such as Rice’s claim that “Argentina and Uruguay were soon drawn into battle on the side of Brazil after Paraguay had violated their territories”, since Paraguay never invaded Uruguayan territory before or during this war.38 He also writes that the Paraguayan army had “battalions of women”, a claim that Burton’s book explicitly declares “solid and circumstantial lies” (p. 379).39 On the same page, Burton explains that even the commander of the Brazilian forces had personally recognized that although the rumor had gone international, there was no evidence to that effect on the battlefield. Did Rice even read Letters? Perhaps the most interesting exception to this tendency to minimize Burton’s time in the Americas is Frank McLynn’s From the Sierras to the Pampas, which is devoted in its entirety to an examination of Burton’s journeys through North and South America.40 Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay is widely held to be one of Burton’s minor works. Indeed, McLynn decries the fact that

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  47 this book, which he considers one of Burton’s best, has been “absurdly underrated vis-à-vis the established classics by Burton”.41 Because of the frenzy of activity, travel, and work that composed his intense life, the author is a protean and surprising figure. His 1870 book gives evidence of that complex and always personal perspective. This silence is a product of the short shrift that studies of nineteenth-­ century British imperialism have given Latin America. Though there are surprisingly few critical—that is, not biographical—works on Burton, those that are most interesting (because they discuss him within a postcolonial framework) always place him in the context of his other travels. Such is the case with Edward Said’s classic study, Orientalism (1978).42 Other useful works that read Burton in the context of imperialism or Victorian England are equally silent on his Latin American period. Ben Grant’s Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire (2009) contains not a single mention of Paraguay, while Dane Kennedy’s The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (2005) refers only once, and in passing, to Letters from the ­Battle-Fields of Paraguay.43 Richard Burton was in Paraguay twice: first between 15 August and 15 September 1868, and later, briefly, from 4 April to 18 April of the following year (p. xiii). The book that came out of these visits consists of a series of letters addressed to a probably fictional recipient referred to as “Z”. The structure of the book turns Paraguay—and especially Asunción—into the objective toward which everything is pointed. Burton’s journey, like the war itself, takes place largely on rivers. He sets sail from Rio de Janeiro to Montevideo, and then visits the capital city of Argentina across the River Plate. After a brief stay in Buenos Aires, he travels up the Uruguay and Paraná rivers. He stops over in the major cities on those rivers’ banks: Salto, Concordia, Uruguayana, and especially Rosario and Corrientes. The descriptions of the cities echo one another. They are ambiguous, contradictory, generally negative. Unlike his earlier travels, Burton’s journey through southern South America is mostly a catalogue of cities. It is also a more official journey than previous ones in that the narrator now exploits his position as a British diplomat to finagle interviews with the most prominent figures in Argentine politics at the time: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Bartolomé Mitre, and Justo José de Urquiza. The first of these, the president of Argentina (1868–74) at the time of Burton’s visit, is without a doubt the one the traveler most admires. When they meet, Sarmiento gives him a book—no title is m ­ entioned—and inscribes it to him with these words: “Au Capitaine Burton, voyageur en route, D. F. Sarmiento, voyageur en repos” [To Captain Burton, traveler en route, D. F. Sarmiento, traveler at rest] (p. 165).44 Indeed, Sarmiento himself had abundantly read travel narratives (which had been one of the main sources for his representations of the Argentine pampas in Facundo [1845]), and, most important,

48 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay had also visited several continents and written a long travelogue, Viajes por Europa, África y América, 1845–1847; and, in 1868 (the same year of Burton’s visit), he had visited the USA. Burton responds in a metanarrative twist, asking the president for the opportunity to “address him these pages” (p. 165); Letters is, in effect, dedicated to Sarmiento. The Argentine president comes out on top in the comparison the narrator makes with Mitre (the meetings with the two of them take place in the same location, one right after the other), blaming the latter, who was Argentina’s previous president (1862–68) for the war, which he calls a “profound political immorality” (p. 168).45 This is just an example of the ways in which Burton’s text shows a clear understanding of and interest in the political dynamics of Latin America. Burton’s relationship with imperial power was certainly complicated. Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay is not an exception in this respect. Being both a critic and an agent of the British government, he adopted an ambivalent position with regard to the imperial policies he represented. This complicates his approach to the territories he visits and gives his perspective an undeniable originality. Here we see the emergence of what Said, discussing the traveler’s trips to Asia, called “Burton’s two voices”.46 According to Said, Burton deeply understood the territories through his unusually intimate knowledge (he spoke the languages of most places he visited, studied the cultures in depth, mingled with natives, and spent long periods of time in various places) while at the same time that very understanding strengthened the empire’s domination over them. In Burton, imperialism and individualism converged in the sense that, while being part of the imperial enterprise (not just because he was a British national who shared the ideology of empire, but also, most obviously, because he was a British official in many cases), he was able to understand the systems of thought of the other. His opinions and personal judgments—which sometimes rebelled against imperial logic—had at their core a direct and profound knowledge of the cultures and languages he was talking about: “what we read in his prose is the history of a consciousness negotiating its way through an alien culture by virtue of having successfully absorbed its systems of information and behaviour.”47 We have seen several indications of Burton’s exceptional knowledge of South American politics and cultures. Said argues that though Burton never abandons imperial logic altogether, the possibility of forgetting it, of setting it aside momentarily or even openly criticizing it, paradoxically lends his discourse more dominating power (or, as Said puts it, “a position of supremacy over the Orient”). Said goes on to assert that “in that position his individuality perforce encounters, and indeed merges with, the voice of Empire”.48 This is not to say that he had the same relationship with South America as the enduring, profound, and unique one he established with the Orient. It is also important to remember that the Asian relationship with empire itself was quite different

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  49 from the Latin American one. Said’s ideas are useful for understanding Letters to the extent that they address the complicated relationship he maintained with empire vis-à-vis his powerful personal and sui generis views of otherness. In this sense, Letters offers an extraordinarily intertextual account. Burton compares his experiences and opinions with those of other writers, and responds to them; the book is also a form of literary criticism. The traveler, who always names his sources, also always evaluates them and, true to his style, attacks many texts and mocks them when they contradict what he considers to be incontrovertible fact. He even provides a long list of names of authors who have already addressed the topic and promises to avoid repeating their work (p. 149). When he does repeat them, it is through citation, and almost always with a (sometimes ironic) critical take aimed at distancing himself from the source, correcting or deauthorizing it. This profusion of discourses contradicts Burton’s initial claim that his book will introduce Paraguay to Europeans, who know nothing about it (pp. vii, xi). But it also represents a contrast with our times, when there is a need for such books (and such impassioned ones) about Paraguay as those mentioned in this work. Letters has been called “one of the more impartial and thought-provoking works on the war”.49 Burton himself posits the absence of a true account of the war as a problem that his text seeks to correct: “Truth seems to be absolutely unknown upon the banks of the Plate” (p. xi).50 Burton’s critical view of the allied forces takes various forms: criticism of the armies of the three allied nations, the ironic comments on England’s supposed neutrality seen above, and a certain admiration for the tenacity and capacity for resistance of the Paraguayan army. But that admiration is always measured and is sometimes accompanied by problematic—and often racist—generalizations. Racism is expressed constantly and openly against blacks, and sometimes against the indigenous population: “the Paraguayans are, like all Indians, an eminently childish race” (p. 129).51 Mc Lynn explains, “Burton saw Paraguay as the inheritor of the Spanish tradition of the ‘marvellous, Oriental, fatalistic patience under despotisms.’ Such despotism was endogenous and seemed both natural and inevitable to Paraguayans.”52 Burton also makes numerous criticisms of Solano López: he questions his strategic decisions, such as to string his troops all along the river instead of concentrating them in one spot (p. 307), and also accuses him of being irresponsible (p. 300) and having weakened his own forces through repeated mistakes. Yet the narrator is also endlessly skeptical of the reports of Solano López’s alleged atrocities (p. xi), which he views as mere allied propaganda. In a remarkably balanced and personal account, sarcasm, criticism, and praise are doled out in equal measure. The balanced—though always very subjective—quality of his report on the conflict, which for revisionist historians involved the country he

50 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay represented, can be read as a further evidence of his critical allegiance to it. So, the war marks an interesting moment of dis-identification with empire, also visible in the traveler’s destination. Some of Burton’s biographers have interpreted the very fact that he went to Paraguay as an act of disobedience, as a way of willingly postponing his return to England. Byron Farwell is the most insistent on this point. After suffering from a serious illness in Brazil, Burton was granted sick leave from the Foreign Office. However, instead of visiting Buenos Aires, where he had been authorized to go, “Burton set off on a journey for his health: a visit to the battle front of the sanguinary war raging between Paraguay and her neighbours!”53 Ana Inés Larre Borges also views this request for sick leave with suspicion; indeed, the backdrop of the Paraguayan War, in which more people died from different diseases and plagues than in combat, hardly seems conducive to recuperating from a respiratory ailment like the one from which the consul claimed to be suffering.54 Burton himself describes one of the places of the war thus: “This site, the first solid ground seen after the Confluence, smells of death; here lie some 10,000 men, victims of cholera and small-pox, fever, and Crimean diarrhoea” (p. 303).55 Again, this decision to convalesce in a place filled with death prioritizes Burton’s personal project, his own curiosity, over his consular duties. Furthermore, even when in 1868, between his two visits to Paraguay, he was appointed as consul in Damascus and requested to return to London immediately, he kept delaying his return: instead, he decided to go back to Paraguay!56 Detours and disobedience are frequently at the origin of many interesting travel narratives. As Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs have explained, “Travellers will usually follow their instincts and opportunities, rather than directions from home, and it is travellers’ eccentricities and extravagances—in the literal sense of wanderings off—which have attracted many readers to the genre of travel writing.”57 In the case of Burton, the detour highlights the ways that this inveterate traveler makes a personal use of an official post by selectively adopting those aspects of his duties that he finds beneficial: Burton uses his diplomatic privileges to satisfy his own restlessness, abandoning the formality and bureaucratic nature of his job, which he has always despised. McLynn has argued that “[a]s a Foreign Office functionary Burton left a great deal to be desired”.58 In the case of Burton, the conjunction of war and travel does not produce this estrangement with respect to the oikos, something that appears with more clarity in the texts by W. H. Hudson and Euclides da Cunha analyzed later in this book. Burton was always a radically independent mind; however, the War of the Triple Alliance is an event that makes explicit and unquestionable this distance, as a fine example of the rich potentialities of extravagance (a particularly apt word to describe Burton’s practice of travel and writing). In Letters, war becomes the final destination, but the arrival is delayed by the descriptions of the journey toward it: approximately half

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  51 of Burton’s book is not about Paraguay or the war. The narrator arrives there only in the 13th letter (there are 27 in total), “From Corrientes to Humaitá”, the opening sentence of which signals a desire to construct the war as a destination that is simultaneously announced and postponed: “We now enter upon the proper scenes of the Paraguayan war. I will tantalize your impatience for a while by recounting our life on board the good ship Yí” (p. 292). War is present in the very title, and a goodly portion of the preface and long “Introductory Essay” deals with that topic. Yet those sections talk about war only in general terms, and Burton uses the introduction to give a detailed but rather cold historical account of Paraguay and the first years of the conflict. Its presence is announced, but there is no actual account of the conflict or description of the spaces of war until we get to page 300 (of 480). What is more, Burton never describes the conflict itself; he is never a direct witness to it.59 This constitutes another contradictory element in his writing (in fact, Burton relished contradictions). On the one hand, Burton was a character associated with adventure (especially imperial adventure) and was very well known in England at that time. His most famous books narrate the voyages of a traveler who enjoys taking risks and exposes himself to dangerous situations. The book’s title could be seen as misleading in that it made reference to the “battlefields” but did not represent battles, at a time when narratives, paintings, and even photographs of war already existed.60 Burton’s book was written during the bloodiest years of the war, as the conflict was coming to its tragic end. In it, war is not something from the past, for a powerful sense of immediacy traverses the text. On the other hand, while the title might have generated the wrong expectations in some readers, it is in fact quite apt, since the book describes deserted battlefields. The narrator is aware of this. When Burton refers with admiration to another book on the war, almost contemporary to his but which he read before finishing Letters, he seems to acknowledge this: “The ‘War in Paraguay’ is semi-historical, treating of what the author witnessed during the hostilities. ‘Letters from the Battle-fields’ is a traveller’s journal of much lighter cast, and necessarily more discursive” (p. xv). According to this brief description, this book focuses on “discourse”, that is, the task of critically commenting on different sources, interviewing participants in the war, and expressing informed opinions about actual or supposed events related to the conflict. These “discursive” aspects take priority over action and adventure; in a sense, if compared to Burton’s previous work, they represent a very different understanding of travel itself. Instead of portraying the actual conflict, something others could do according to him, the traveler sees only remains, ruins, corpses. He moves ever behind the clashes, interviewing soldiers and especially the commanding generals, extracting the information to construct his narrative from those accounts; he describes the traces left by war.61

52 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay One of my interests in this book is to examine the different authors’ choices and strategies for representing war. In all the cases studied, war remains elusive; for different reasons it resists representation. However, the travelers approach their conflicts in different ways, and these oblique operations of representation can effectively render the violence and senselessness of war. Burton is not an exception, and this is a good reason to consider how he gazes at the landscape vis-à-vis some of his previous work. This Burton seems quite different from the one who reached Lake Tanganyka in his search for the source of the Nile, for example. Mary Louise Pratt has noted, in Burton’s African account, the self-proclaimed discoverer who projects a gaze that appears to see everything and who employs a rhetoric frequently seen in imperial writing which she calls “the monarch-of-all-I-survey” trope.62 These journeys of supposed discovery are sprinkled with new elements that the narrator gradually adds to the empire’s possessions. In her analysis of the moment when Burton claims to discover Lake Tanganyika by spotting it from an elevated point, Pratt concludes that discovery in fact translates into the mere act of looking. In Paraguay, however, these appropriative operations are absent. In what Burton describes as a “discursive” book, landscapes are no longer described à la Pratt’s “verbal painter”. In this trope, the “rhetoric of presence” is fundamental; the viewer is a powerful eye that surveys and describes the landscape in detail.63 In Paraguay, the traveler is never there; the gaze is not constructed as an act of domination, which may be another reason that this book was so much less widely read than Burton’s earlier texts, in which conquest, adventure, and imperial “discovery” took on an epic air. There is no reading of the territories as landscape, understood as something harmonious and static that can be dominated by the person who “paints” it. While the text cites and discusses many different sources about the conflict, war itself, an effective visibilizing tool for the modern state, remains invisible.64 In Letters, when Burton inquires about the possibility of visiting the Paraguayan front, they recommend that he not pursue it, and he obediently complies: My visit was now ended, and it afforded no opportunity of passing over to the Paraguayan lines. … [T]he Brazilian authorities were opposed to private visits amongst their enemies, and, after the frankness and courtesy with which they had received me, it was impossible to ignore their wishes. Finally, I knew too well that … the “sick leave”, so freely granted to me, implied the condition that it must be used with prudence. (401–2) This traveler is no longer the adventurer of his earlier books, which is another possible reason that the book has been largely forgotten. Now

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  53 things happen to others, while the narrator loses his passion for risk and instead focuses his energies—with remarkable lucidity—on recounting, opining, and seeking to understand. Far from the forms of involvement he adopted in his earlier journeys, this traveler is a witness but no longer an adventurer.65 This passage shows once more the degree to which Burton’s ideas and interests were independent from those of the Brazilians who had brought him there, and from the positions he was expected to take: as one of his biographers explains, “Richard ought of course to have openly sided with the Allies against the protectionist policies of Lopez.”66 It also evinces his sincere effort to understand the conflict, his eagerness to develop a balanced account of it. But his boldness ends there. He adopts a perspective that almost resembles that of a historian, of an astute and sometimes ironic analyst of a conflict in which he never intervenes.

Forms of the Void: Imagining and Reconfiguring Paraguay The figures offered by Whigham and Potthast, among many other historians, are conclusive: the war turned Paraguay into a wasteland. Before the war, the elites who ruled the allied nations saw Paraguay as an unknown, barbaric space—in a word, a desert. As Wilma Peres Costa affirms, the Brazilian empire, for example, justified its involvement in the war by “emphasizing the tyrannical aspects of Solano López’s personality and the supposed archaism of Paraguayan institutions”; from the perspective of the allied forces the war was described as a struggle between civilization and barbarism, or between liberty and tyranny.67 Revelations on the Paraguayan War and the Alliances of the Atlantic and the Pacific, an 1866 English-language text attributed to Sarmiento, which sought to defend the point of view of the allied forces before international public opinion, further describes Paraguay as an unknown and mysterious land void of any modern political ideas, and Paraguayans as virtually nonexistent.68 This line of representation, that is, the identification of Paraguay— and particularly of Solano López’s regime—with inveterate barbarity, concluded that the war needed to continue until the president was killed in battle, on 1 May 1870, in the jungles of the heretofore unassailable northern reaches of the country.69 After the war, what had been described as a void was effectively turned into one, and was subsequently made visible and appropriated (recall that Paraguay lost 40 percent of its territory, of which Argentina and Brazil took control). The result was the utterly premodern and dependent Paraguay of modern times, a condition that it still struggles to transcend today. What emerged was a silenced, forgotten, and ignored country. The war put in place a silence, a void, a desert.70 Apparent once more is the desert’s transition from a discursive trope or an ideological construct to a real void, an objective emptying out. This modernizing erasure, this modern inauguration of

54 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay the premodern, this transformation of Paraguay into the periphery of the periphery are consequences of military action. Here we should remember the Tacitus quotation that opens this book, indicating that the result of colonial wars is always a new desert, misleadingly called “peace”. Tacitus seems to have known that, as we see in the allied justifications of this conflict, war has perhaps always been built on a contradictory logic, full of paradoxes, euphemisms, concealments, and blatant lies. Imposed democracy, destructive modernization, peace as a void: these are the tropes of war. Paraguay is evidence of the perverse logic of the warlike gaze that can see only the desert that war itself has created. If Paraguay was imagined as a desert in the decades that led to the war, it was also in many ways a borderland and a frontier. On the one hand, the question of the international political boundary was part of the conflict’s origin. Paraguay and Brazil engaged in a protracted border dispute that had originally begun in the colonial period as a disagreement between Spain and Portugal. In the early 1860s, Paraguay and Brazil reached an agreement that nevertheless left the matter open, to be resolved later.71 The Treaty of the Triple Alliance, secretly signed by Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay in 1865, had already established how Paraguayan territory would be divided up between Argentina and Brazil.72 In other words, the war was partly caused by border problems, which largely explains the involvement of the various actors (Paraguay had been arming itself for a likely war for a long time). Moreover, most of the war was fought on the proximities of the gigantic rivers that separate Paraguay from its neighbors; the borderland regions were the main scenarios of war (as we will see, the Paraguayan riverbanks were strongly fortified).73 As many chronicles of the time witnessed, the most difficult thing for the allied forces was to penetrate into Paraguayan territory. On the other hand, Paraguayan territory was conceived as a ­frontier— that is, as an area understood to be blurry and appropriable. While Brazil’s sertão and Argentina’s Patagonia were conceived as “exteriorities” within a preexisting national space, which then became nationally recognizable through the wars conducted there, Paraguay was, for Brazil and Argentina, pure exteriority, a space that was both alien and alienating. According to Doratioto, “The decades of isolation turned the country into a sort of enigma: its hinterlands, the real number of its inhabitants, and the extent of its military resources were all unknown.”74 It is not clear whether the historian is referring to the allied powers’ lack of knowledge or if it was Paraguay that did not know itself (the former seems more likely). Burton talks about Dr. Francia’s regime (1814–40) in similar terms. He describes a space that remains unknown, almost phantasmal and nonexistent except on paper: “Paraguay became to the political, travelling, and commercial world a terra incognita, a place existing only in books and maps; it had been caused to disappear, as it

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  55 were by a cataclysm, from the surface of the globe” (p. 51). As happens in the aforementioned Revelations on the Paraguayan War, here Paraguay is discursively transformed into a void even before the war takes place (Burton was very aware of the fact that the war was desertifying Paraguay).75 This suggests that, from the allied perspective, Paraguay could not be looked at using what James C. Scott has called “state maps of legibility”, which are “maps that, when allied with state power, would enable much of the reality they depicted to be remade”.76 So, this is not just about drawing maps, but also refers to visualizing constructions that would allow direct transformations and control of population and nature. I imagine Paraguay back then as being a sort of invisibility zone, a murky space indecipherable to the allied powers, which, as Scott has noted of the modern state, sought obsessively to tally their populations and quantify spaces (this is something that the Paraguayan state had accomplished many years earlier). In the case of this war, and indeed in all cases studied in The Desertmakers, the rearticulations and re-­ readings that war brings are produced not just by states, but mainly with its alliance with capital: “large-scale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogeneization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state is.”77 This is important for thinking about the specific nature of the Paraguayan simplification brought by the war, clearly different from what existed previously. It is the war itself that, through the elimination of the majority of the country’s population, and of its autonomy, functions as what Scott has called processes of simplifying and legibilizing nature and inhabitants. The Burton passage is also evocative because it establishes an equivalence between the realms of travel, politics, and commerce. In these years, the imperial presence in Latin America selected the channels through which travel and commerce would take place in order to acquire political influence. This constitutes another manifestation of the informal empire in the region.78 The war, indubitably another form of conquest, erased mystery in Paraguay, made an alien territory appropriable, turned darkness legible. Part of the previous representation of Paraguay that the war erased was its association with the images of the prison and the fortress. During the time of Dr. Francia nobody could leave or enter the country without its leader’s permission; more than that, it was a territory through which it was not possible to travel. Hence the images of the fortress and the prison: entry was not possible, but when it occurred, it meant stasis for the foreigner—“All who entered the Republic without permission were straightway imprisoned” (p. 50). The travelers who wrote about the Francia regime (the best known are the Swiss doctors Rengger and Longchamps, who remained in Paraguay from 1819 to 1825, along with the Robertson brothers, Scottish merchants who remained from 1811 to 1815) traveled before and after arriving in Paraguay, but their staying in the country meant the impossibility of travel. According to Burton, “the

56 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay Doctors Rengger and Longchamps enjoyed an obligatory residence of six years” (p. 51).79 This association of the country with a fortress and a prison persisted until the very beginning of the war. Burton states that “The fact is that nothing about Paraguay is known outside the country, and of its government very little is known even inside its limits” (p. xi). Charles Washburn, the US Minister to Paraguay, in 1862 (just two years before the beginning of the war) described Paraguay as a “terra incognita”, entering which could only be done at serious risk.80 And Leslie Bethell prolongs this to the years of the war: “After the summer of 1865 it was impossible to get out of Paraguay.”81 Roa Bastos’ familiar phrase “isla rodeada de tierra” [landlocked island], often used to describe the distance—in the sense of isolation—that Paraguay has maintained from its neighbors, can be better grasped if considered in terms of Foucault’s notion of heterotopia: Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications.82 The most important element of this description has to do with the need to use codes to enter and leave the place, as entry and exit are restricted or selective. Paraguay was conceived of as a heterotopic space in its complete independence and isolation, in the fact that it was thought of as a world in itself, existing in a different time.83 Richard Burton describes a country that found itself in uncertain circumstances, that was being “produced” (this is the language of Henri Lefebvre, who sees war, within the frame of the capitalist state, as a process of producing spaces), and opines on the mechanisms of war that were in operation. Doratioto claims there were no maps of Paraguay, which is probably an error, since Burton himself refers to various maps.84 For example, the traveler relates that Mr. Gould (an acquaintance he hadn’t seen since 1856) “showed me a map by Count Lucien de Brayer (1863) [see Figure 1], and allowed me to compare it with the most modern plans in his possession” (p. 166). While maps of Paraguay did in fact exist, it is likely that the ones that the allied forces possessed did not give a precise image of the territory. Richard Burton recalls that when he arrived in Asunción, by then a deserted and destroyed city, it was impossible to locate the mouth of the Pilcomayo River (the longest tributary of the Paraguay River) on maps: “in maps we may notice the same dissidence, some placing its influence north, and others south, of Asuncion” (p. 429). This is not the only time in the book that Burton comments on the incompleteness or inaccuracy of maps, a “problem” that the allied forces seek to solve. After leaving Paraguay for good, he

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  57

Figure 1  1863 map of the Paraguayan Republic, by Alfred Lucien de Brayer.89

relates a meeting in the allied barracks in which exotic commodities from Latin America are enjoyed while different maps are displayed: The General welcomed us, glanced at our letters, and asked if we had breakfasted … He then produced a box of the best Havannas, which were followed by cups of the fragrant Yungaz coffee. Originally from Mocha, this Bolivian variety is justly held in the highest esteem; unfortunately it is rare as it is delicious … The guest-rite concluded, we sat down to a table spread with charts, especially an enlarged copy of Captain Mouchez’ s excellent map, into which details taken from various informants had been filled. (p. 465)

58 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay This scene, in which generals discuss maps while consuming some of the commodities that would invade the global markets in the decades to follow, is a fine expression of the intimate links between war, mapping, and capital. Here we see war function as a mapping tool, an operation that seeks to make visible that which was absent from (or unclear in) previous maps. War is a process of adding information and new narratives to a map that is understood as incomplete at the beginning of the war: while the map is filled with new details, though, the territory represented in it is transformed into a desert: these new marks and names erase previous narratives. The map by Mouchez, from 1862 (only a couple of years before the beginning of the war, see Figure 2), was actually the one on which more precise maps, drawn after the conflict, were based. This is the case, for example, of the 1889

Figure 2  1862 m  ap of Paraguay, by Ernest Amédée Barthélemy Mouchez.90

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  59 map of Paraguay by Dr. E. De ­B ourgade, which also relied on “documents from the boundary commission of 1871–1873”—that is, on the considerable redrawing of borders that was one of the most concrete outcomes of the war.85 As Jens Andermann has explained regarding the Argentine Conquest of the Desert, whose parallels to the Paraguayan War are central to this book’s argument, the map changes names of places and turns the actual desertification that the war accomplishes into objective facts; he refers to this as a “cartography of extermination”.86 In a similar fashion, but thinking more generally on the relations between space and mapping, Michel De Certeau understands the map as the place in which previous narratives are lost: “The map, a totalizing stage on which elements of diverse origin are brought together to form the tableau of a ‘state’ of geographical knowledge, pushes away … the operations of which it is the result or the necessary condition.”87 The map is created when there is nothing else to recount, when there is no more story: in that sense, considered as a silencer, it is not so unlike war.88 Burton employs a key sentence which should be read alongside this mapping scene: “Wars, it has been said, teach the nations their geography” (p. 139). Only the invasion allowed the allies to at last discover the particular characteristics of Paraguayan territory, whose swamp- and jungle-filled terrain hampered troops’ advancement. That is, knowledge of the territory turned out to be fundamental to Paraguayan resistance. As with the Brazilian sertão and Argentine Patagonia, the Paraguayan swamps are represented (by the allied forces) as unknown, suspect, enemy spaces. The very lands themselves are central elements in the conflicts, sometimes conceived of as siding with the groups that defend themselves from the state. Struggle is already inherent in movement itself, in the labored progress, in the persistent overcoming of obstacles; in these wars, movement is already a sign of battle.91 A territory that impedes such movement is therefore, according to the logic of modernization, one that deserves to be erased, or perhaps transformed, because it goes hand in hand with a slowing down, a faltering or foundering advance. Regarding the advancement of troops, though, the speed of the movement is not chosen in accordance with the wishes of the army or the traveler, but imposed from “without”, by the space itself. Yet Burton’s sentence, while certainly true and quite rich in meaning, leaves out a certain active sense of the phenomenon of war in spaces—that is, its transformative power and its ability to alter borders, to establish new ways to read maps and understand territory. Paraguay’s devastating territorial losses are relevant here; as in our discussion of the connections between war and mapping, war does not just reveal geography, but also creates it. Burton’s text offers other interesting moments in which the notions of immobility and backwardness, so frequently associated with the desert, and an obstacle for the necessary (and apparently unstoppable) free

60 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay circulation of goods, appear as a problem that war can “solve”. Burton offers clear support to the Brazilian empire, as explicitly stated near the beginning of the text: My sympathies are with the Brazil, as far at least as her “mission” is literally, not liberally, to unlock the great Southern Mississippi; to “keep open and develop the magnificent water system of the ­Paraguay-Parana-Plate”, and to sweep away from the shores of its main arteries the Guardias and Piquetes, the batteries and the ridiculous little stockades which served to keep its waters comparatively desert, and to convert a highway belonging to the world into a mere monopoly of Paraguay. (p. x) This support could be explained by Burton’s three and a half years residing in Brazil and his admiration for the level of progress that country had achieved. Certainly, though, the narration gradually relativizes that sympathy, which is explicit but also nuanced. The quoted passage is clear in that sense: while the narrator implies that there is an opposition between war (the “unlocking” tool) and liberalism―that is to say, thinks it inappropriate to open up spaces for commerce through war―he seems unaware that war actually constitutes a central method of transforming spaces for the expansion of capital. In it, the narrator offers an entirely capitalist argument as an explanation for the conflict: that it is a battle for the unhampered navigation of the rivers.92 In addition, he reads the war as a way to erase the signs of backwardness that impede movement. Once more, the arrival of progress as capitalism is linked to peaceful, speedy travel with reliable timetables. The boat is eager to glide unhindered through the water; it wants, like the railroad, to cross smooth spaces.93 But this merely implies a new monopoly of routes and transit through the river: simply wiping out the strict control over river usage imposed by the Paraguayan state and replacing it with a supposedly liberal logic that assumes an economic link among the victors (who compose the “world” Burton is talking about). As Deleuze and Guattari put it, the modern state transforms spaces through “a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital, etc. There is still a need for fixed paths in well-defined directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativize movement, and measure in detail the relative movements of subjects and objects.”94 The space that is presented as smooth is actually, for these critics, striated. The conquest of the rivers means only a new control of movements, the imposition of new routes that now have new points of departure and arrival. The passage is resolute on another point: the war is an effort to do away with the desert, and therefore to “populate” the waters. It is no

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  61 coincidence that Burton cites Argentine intellectual Juan Bautista ­Alberdi’s then famous motto: “Le désert est le grand ennemi de l’Amérique, et dans le désert, gouverner c’est peupler” [The desert is the great enemy of the Americas, and in the desert, to govern is to populate] (p. 15). It is yet another sign of this traveler’s deep understanding of South ­American politics. His defense of the idea of progress leads him to admire the policies of imperial Brazil and the Argentine governing elite, especially Sarmiento. In this sense, Letters is one more chapter in the dialogue between South American elites and foreign travelers that had begun in the first half of the century.95 The dedication to then President Sarmiento for “the homage which he pays to progress” is therefore eloquent. On the one hand, this paratext offers clues for reading; it reveals the traveler’s ideological stance with regard to the powers involved. In other words, his admiration for Paraguay’s heroic resistance does not prevent him from recognizing that its destruction was both inevitable and necessary. Thus, the war is itself the arrival of progress that Sarmiento celebrated. On the other hand, the dedication constitutes a response to South ­A merican readings of European texts, as it is a mark of the fact that Latin American intellectuals were also read in Europe. Though it can be interpreted as merely a condescending gesture, this approval originates in a genuine knowledge of Argentine intellectuals and their texts. Sarmiento may have read the Europeans, but some of them also knew his work.96 Therefore, McLynn’s claim that Burton’s narration initiates a line of argument that revisionist historians would take up again a century later is probably exaggerated. It is not true that he advances “the Paraguay not guilty thesis”.97 Rather, it is clear that he strongly believed in liberalism and progress, and that, in his view, Paraguay represented an obstacle to them. Even if war brings progress, though, Burton assumes a critical position toward the conflict: with compelling lucidity, he describes the armies’ disillusionment and conveys a feeling of absolute futility and complete senselessness. As we have seen, Burton thought war would “open” the navigation of the rivers—up until then controlled by Paraguay—to the “world”, the free navigation of rivers being one of the top priorities of liberalism; also, several times in the book (the dedication is just one eloquent example), Burton praises the idea of progress. This alludes to the temporal dimension of war and compels a temporal consideration of the conflict. What is wartime? It is worth considering the dual nature of this conflict as a watershed event in the history of the participating states: it is an inaugural moment, a new beginning, at the same time that it marks definitive endings and crucial erasures. Thomas Whigham makes reference to this simultaneous capacity for destruction and construction that generally characterizes the phenomenon of war, something that is even more evident in the context of this specific conflict.98 This reading of war as a rupture between beginnings and endings, between past and future, runs

62 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay through this study. In the case of Paraguay, this war marked the end of a sui generis process of modernization, and it condemned the country to premodernity. Burton’s support of the Brazilian “civilizing” enterprise, like his dedication to Sarmiento, allows this war to be read, in Burtonian terms, as a form of penetration by the future (“civilization”) into the past (Paraguay), a form of introducing progress in space; or, more precisely, as the entrance of time into a timeless space. So, Burton comes to identify progress with war when he refers to “the utter extinction of the race, which the progress of mankind is sweeping from the face of the earth” (p. 31).99 This claim is deceptive because it substitutes a concrete element with an ideological one: the Paraguayan population is being wiped out by war, not “progress”. I highlight Burton’s drawing of this equivalence because it establishes the notion of war as initiating a new era, which nevertheless operates through an emptying out, a desertification of the territory that precedes the incorporation and resignification of that territory (Burton seems to expect the total incorporation of Paraguay into Brazil or think it inevitable—indeed, he also refers to it as Uruguay’s imminent destiny [p. 133]). But perhaps the clearest moment in which this conceptualization of war as an “infusion of time” in an inveterate backward region can be seen appears right in the opening pages of the book: The war in Paraguay, impartially viewed, is no less than the doom of a race which is to be relieved from a self-chosen tyranny by becoming chair à canon by the process of annihilation…. it shows the flood of Time surging over a relic of old world semi-barbarism, a paleozic humanity. (pp. xi–xii) Many of the issues analyzed in this chapter (indeed throughout the entire book) are present in this “impartial” rendition of the conflict: Burton’s certainty that the war was one of extermination, the notion of war as modernizing or liberating, the equivalence between war and progress, as a way of bringing the past into the present. The War of the Triple Alliance may be the best evidence of the degree to which the idea of the desert is not an essential element of the South American landscape, as the conquering Latin American elites would have it, but a result of the conflict. Indeed, the conflict was the true desertmaker. The immobility (or the restricted and controlled mobility of a prison) linked to Paraguay is also apparent in the fact that entry to the territory is accompanied by a slowing. This is partly related to the wetlands common in Paraguay’s border regions, where much of the fighting took place, but there is also a stark difference between the time the narrator travels and wartime: “We run rapidly past ground whose every mile cost a month of fighting” (p. 302). The allied powers whose route Burton is following advanced through the territory at a mile per month. In this

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  63 antithetic sentence, in which the velocity of the narrator’s movement opposes the slowness of the displacement of troops during invasion and resistance, the rhythm of war becomes part of the territory, like a mark left behind.

The War That Ever Was: The Ruined Landscape As we have seen, only the battlefields, in which war is present merely as a residue, appear in the book. The narration describes a stage that war has abandoned. War appears then through what it has left behind, through those signs that keep naming it in its aftermath. There, in the battlefields, time has stopped and points perpetually toward the past: everything is the presence of what no longer is there. The text is constructed as a clear crescendo, as the scenes heralded in the title are described only in the second half of the book. The structure prefigures (hence this chapter’s epigraph) Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899): the narrator travels by river from the coastal areas that in both Brazil and the River Plate basin reflect the highest levels of “civilization”, to the unknown depths of the continent, where wild nature (full of swamps and jungles) abounds, and madness, barbarism, and death reign. Thus, Burton describes a realm that had remained largely impenetrable and unknown before the war.100 In spite of this gradual and tantalizing approach to the announced battlefields, violence—if not war—is omnipresent in the text. It is already apparent in the journey through Montevideo, when Burton describes the “day of the long knives”, 19 February 1868, when the leaders of the Colorado and Blanco Parties, General Venancio Flores and Bernardo Prudencio Berro, were killed.101 But the text constantly conveys a sense of the violent atmosphere that pervades all these South American territories. In a few lines devoted to a trip he made between his two visits to Paraguay, Burton mentions “the terrible earthquake at Mendoza”, and states that Santiago de Chile is “known to you by the fire in the Jesuit church, which destroyed some 2000 of the fairest of the fair Chilenas” (p.  414). The brief account concludes with a visit to Peru, where he describes yellow fever, seemingly the main consequence of a tsunami (“perhaps the most destructive recorded in history”) but in reality “engendered by the putrefaction of unburied dead, human and bestial” (p. 414). Various similar scenes appear later in the descriptions of the Paraguayan battlefields. Hyperbole, references to natural disasters, and the idea of illness operate in concert with the war he is discussing. In these brief remarks, Burton’s gaze shifts from Paraguay to other spaces, where earthquakes, disease, and other forms of destruction and death hold sway. At one point, we encounter in Paraguay a landscape that resembles the Peruvian one described above: “Paraguayan corpses, in leathern waist-wraps, floated face downwards, rising and falling after a ghostly fashion, with

64 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay the scour and ripple of the stream” (p. 403). The scenes of violence and destruction in other parts of South America, then, are often unrelated to the war (for example, the descriptions of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the passing references to Burton’s visit to Chile and Mendoza), but the narrative is constructed in such a way that the war in Paraguay becomes all-encompassing, as it works as the lens through which everything else is described. Burton’s trip to Mendoza, Peru, and Chile is merely mentioned in passing in Letters, but not described in any detail. In fact, it remains largely a mystery: Burton never published an account of it, which is plainly remarkable given his penchant for recounting his voyages, even (or particularly) their most scandalous or unexpected episodes. He never even spoke publicly about it.102 The places described appear only as ­disaster—they are already destroyed, and this is all the information we have about them. The presence of seismic activity in the visited territories is related, in my reading, to ruins. The urban spaces Burton describes are the result of earthquakes and epidemics. This passing construction of different cities in various South American countries can be read as erasing the idea of origin in these territories: at first glance, the traveler sees them as effects of something, as being already destroyed. In a book about an utterly destructive conflict, the sole element that the narrator remembers about other cities visited (between the two moments in which he approaches the scenes of the war) is destruction itself. While the war remains always ahead of Burton, it also seems to be happening everywhere; in fact, we can say it determines a way of representing the “new” Latin American space. War not only leaves ruins behind but also reconfigures the broader territory as a ruin. Burton’s journey is, to a considerable extent, a catalogue of ruins. The places have an original meaning that has been left in the past. For example, there is a reference to the “Capella de Ipané … where in peaceful times the citizens of Asuncion enjoyed their picnics” (p. 426). In the present, though, the different elements found have been resignified, and they now acquire new names in accordance with the battles that have been fought there, or are simply distinguished by a particular incident from the war. This is one of many possible examples: “The little wooden bridge where the slaughter took place is about half a mile from the mouth” (p. 427). It serves as an additional example of an operation we have seen elsewhere in this chapter: war as conquest implies renaming as an element of territorial transformation. Therefore, the different traces of war can be seen in these new connotations attributed to different places spotted throughout the journey, but on many occasions Burton also describes utterly ruined landscapes. For example, in his visit to the legendary fortress of Humaitá, where one of the fiercest battles of the war took place (Humaitá was known as “The Sebastopol of the South”), he sharply differentiates the “before and after” of the war thus:

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  65 We read in 1863—“The church is a splendid edifice with three towers, the middle one being 120 or 150 feet high; the interior is neat, and a colonnade runs round the exterior; there are four large bells, hung from a wooden scaffolding, one bearing the inscription, Sancte Carole, ora pro nobis”. It is now a mere heap of picturesque ruins, with hardwood timber barely supported by cracked walls of brick; the latter is unusually well baked, and the proportions are those of the old Romans—twelve or fourteen inches long, eight broad, and two thick. One belfry, with the roof and façade, has been reduced to heaps. (p. 317) This stark contrast between what exists before the conflict and what is left after it is a good example of the transformative effects of war on landscapes. Burton adopts an interesting tone here, as he continues to find the ruined church somehow aesthetically appealing; while the site has been completely destroyed, some type of harmony is still present in it. But destruction seems to be there even before the conflict, as we have seen. Burton is, I contend, one of the first writers to trace a line of thought in which South America is described as a ruin and these ruins exist even before the act of destruction. After Burton, many other intellectuals would read Latin American landscapes through this lens. For many of them, ruins symbolize a certain incompleteness in the spaces described, indicative of the tragic contradictions associated with the onset of modernity.103 Of course, there are texts prior to Letters that aestheticize Latin America through images of ruins. Sarmiento employs such images in both Facundo (1845) and his autobiography, Recuerdos de provincia (1850). In Facundo, for example, these references are part of the rhetoric of Romanticism. Sarmiento uses the words of the French Romantic writer Volney to describe the pampas. The mention of the “tintura asiática” [Asian hue] of a pampa Sarmiento claims to have seen prompts the following invocation: “Muchas veces, al salir la luna tranquila y resplandeciente por entre las hierbas de la tierra, la he saludado maquinalmente con estas palabras de Volney en su descripción de las Ruinas: ‘la pleine lune a l’Orient s’élevait sur un fond bleuâtre aux plaines rives de l’Euphrate’”104 [“Many times, when a tranquil, resplendent moon appears from amid the grassland, I have saluted it mechanically with these words by Volney, describing the Ruins: ‘la pleine lune a l’Orient s’élevait sur un fond bleuâtre aux plaines rives de l’Euphrate’”] 105 To be clear, the reference is to Volney’s descriptions of the ruins of Palmyra. The mention of ruins is one of the various strategies used in Facundo to construct the Argentine pampas as a completely foreign space, as in many occasions the text compares this region to an exotic Arabian desert. It is interesting that, although the text mentions the ruins, the actual  quotation from

66 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay Volney does not refer to any buildings in particular but to the landscape. The text continues: en efecto, hay algo en las soledades argentinas que trae a la memoria las soledades asiáticas; alguna analogía encuentra el espíritu entre la pampa y las llanuras que median entre el Tigris y el Éufrates; algún parentesco en la tropa de carretas solitaria que cruza nuestras soledades para llegar, al fin de una marcha de meses, a Buenos Aires, y la caravana de camellos que se dirige hacia Bagdad o Esmirna.106 [In effect, there is something in the Argentine solitudes that brings to mind the Asian solitudes; there is some analogy to be found between the spirit of the Pampas and the plains that lie between the ­Tigris and the Euphrates; some relation between the troop of solitary wagons crossing our solitudes to arrive, after marching for months, in Buenos Aires, and the caravan of camels heading for Baghdad or Smyrna.]107 The ruins seem to metonymically evoke the absolute solitude about which the text goes on to talk, since no other reference to ruins, or a description of them, is found in the book. This association is frequent in Facundo, and it is important to remember that Volney, like Burton himself, was a well-known orientalist. This orientalist perspective contributes to the representation of the pampas (which, as discussed in the introduction, Sarmiento had never seen when he wrote Facundo) as an alien space of inveterate violence, with the Arab nomads frequently being compared to the Argentine gaucho.108 It is not absurd to think that Sarmiento’s fascination with the Orient (together with his love for travels and travel narratives, as his dedication implies) played a role in his admiration for Richard Burton. In this quotation from Facundo, however, ruins are not the result of a sudden event, of a specific episode of violence. They are instead an aestheticized object of serene contemplation, only metonymically related to wilderness. This representation is a complex and fascinating one, though it is far removed from the imaginary of war. Burton’s writing is also clearly bereft of Romantic imagery (although he has been usually portrayed as a sort of Romantic hero). In Burton’s descriptions, we see how war brings about a new way of reading the landscape and of naming it. The landscape has been reduced to wreckage, to scars left by war’s passage: “The wet ditch is still black with English gunpowder” (p. 320). The weapons found date back, in some cases, to the seventeenth century. Burton comments on this with irony but also bitterness: “To be killed by such barbaric appliances would add another sting to that of death” (p. 322). There are numerous—and sometimes poetic—references to the deserted settings. At one point, like an apparition, there is a skinny dog that vanishes when someone approaches it (p. 347). There are a number of scenes of corpses floating in the rivers (or tossed on their banks), and references to stagnant waters:

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  67 “At present the surface is tolerably pure; presently it will become a sheet of offal and garbage, and the waters will be turned into cess, and sink, stagnant and putrid, into animal and vegetable decay” (p. 463). The idea of illness is also recurrent: “The pest extends everywhere from Corrientes, where it is worst, to Asuncion” (p. 347). And so every natural element is resignified and read according to the function it had or could have had in combat. The flora and fauna are described, but largely as survivors of the conflict. At one point, the listing of animals is presented as a continuation of Brazilian territory: It was impossible not to remark how Brazilian the fauna and flora had become. The chattering ainuns, the parroquets with thrilling flight, and the bem-te-vis were noisy as ever; the charming white and black viuva flitted from bush to bush as on the banks of the Rio de São Francisco. (p. 455) It is quite likely that Burton is simply moving closer to Brazil within Paraguayan territory, but the passage can also be read in reverse, as the penetration of Brazil into Paraguay. It is not that the fauna and flora are becoming Brazilian, but that Paraguay is being invaded by Brazil (and, for Burton, as we have seen, it would inevitably become Brazilian). Thus, the flora and fauna gradually take on the rhythms of war; there is a sort of metonymic cross contamination between them. The appropriation of Paraguayan territory that will take place at the end of the process is already a reality in nature. Indeed, Burton identifies many Paraguayan plants using their Portuguese names.109 Now, the flora is read as a new value by the traveler, who assigns meanings related to the productive capacity that the plants acquire through war: “and there was an abundance of the banana, whose fruit before the war was looked upon as ‘basura’ or sweepings” (p. 456). Paraguay becomes suddenly a land of abundance, and the description has paradisiacal connotations: the land is overflowing with fruits, flowers, and vegetation that is apparently virgin and exploitable. Burton continues with a long enumeration, noting the marked difference between before and after: There was an abundance of sarsaparilla; of the red-stemmed sugarcane; of melons; … of mandioca, the local parsnip; of oats, which, formerly unknown by name in the Republic, now grow wild; whilst the cotton, which at one time promised to become a staple of Paraguay export, was black with neglect. (p. 457, emphasis added) The list takes up about two pages; the narrator’s enthusiasm is apparent in the repetition of the word “abundance” (which also appears—used in the same way—in the previous quotation). The text returns to the cliché

68 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay of progress-pushing imperialist discourse when it implies the ineptitude or indolence of the native populations, who are unable to exploit—not even to name, which is a form of possession—what are now considered natural resources. As Scott puts it, “utilitarian discourse replaces the term ‘nature’ with the term ‘natural resources’, focusing on those aspects of nature that can be appropriated for human use.”110 The following paragraph includes a house near this wild area, which is also abandoned, and the description of the person in charge of taking care of it makes explicit the perceived idleness of the Paraguayans: “torn books lay in the corners, a huge mirror had been smashed, and the furniture was represented by the foul beds of the Paraguayan ‘care-taker’ and his friends— ruffians like himself, who sleep all night and half the day” (p. 457). The fruits so obsessively listed arouse the narrator’s interest only as long as they are about to lose that uncultivated quality and become incorporated into the capitalist logic that—with the war—arrives in the country. Then comes the description of Asunción itself. The visit to the capital city is key in this rhetoric of ruins: after being conquered and sacked by the allies, it has become deserted, a synecdoche of what has happened in the entire country: “The population of Asunción as made by Du Graty 48,000. Mr Mulhall reduces the figure to onehalf, including the suburbs. Mr. Mansfield lets it down to 20,000; and I would further diminish it to 12,000” (p. 443). The narrator describes a city of which there is no map (p. 434), where the foul smell of dead animals and offal invades the streets (pp. 435, 437, 441), where streets are “overgrown with grass and weeds” (p. 437), and where gardens and buildings are now “sadly dilapidated” (p. 437). And, again, the text draws a sharp contrast between what Asunción was said to be, and the current cityscape. The marketplace, previously bustling, is now a desert: “Formerly the place ‘presented a most picturesque aspect at sunrise, several hundreds of women dressed in white being assembled to dispose of their different wares―fruits, cigar, cakes, and other comestibles.’ At present all is barren” (p. 443). It is not only a ruined city, but also an unfinished one in which there is hardly a building for which construction has been completed: “every third building, from the chapel to the theatre, is unfinished” (p. 444). The juxtaposition of destroyed and half-built constructions implies a continuity between war and an already existing state of corruption. It is pertinent to remember here the notion of “premature ruins” discussed in the Introduction: ruins seem to have been there even before the destruction brought by war and pillage. Robert Ginsberg has explained the connection between incompleteness and ruin: “We might consider the unfinished or the incomplete as the ruin of the work that was to be … Usually, the ruin is a remnant of what once existed, but the unfinished work is the remnant of what never existed: the completed whole.”111 Asunción was a ruined city even before the war, an idea that is consistent

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  69 with the traditional representation of Paraguay as a barbaric desert. This can be read through the lens of Anne McClintock’s notion of “anachronistic space”, a typical element of the rhetoric of empire, which conceives of travel as a movement not just in space but also in time: Burton construes his voyage to Paraguay as a trip to another time (not by chance does he call Paraguayans “a paleozoic humanity” [p. xii]).112 Toward the end of the chapter dedicated to Asunción, which had pointed out various positive aspects of the city, the balance is nonetheless devastating. The city is almost its own negation: empty of people, with streets that cannot be called streets and might instead be mistaken for swamps, lacking adequate sanitation, its buildings half-finished, there is a continuity between urban and rural spaces. In Burton’s opinion, the apparent modernization of the city cannot hide the “capital sin” of barbarism, which he links to the presence of Jesuits and the indigenous population: A large and expensively-built arsenal, riverside docks, a tramway, and a railway, have thrown over the whole affair a thin varnish of civilization; but the veneering is of the newest and the most palpable: the pretensions to progress are simply skin-deep, and the slightest scratch shows under the Paraguayan Republic the Jesuiticized Guarani. (p. 444) Through his letters, Burton sketches distressing scenes while marveling at the scale and impact of the war. His book was published in 1870, the year the war ended, which is why he does not discuss the desolation that followed or the dependent Paraguayan nation that was created, although he astutely guesses at its likelihood. But there was no time to turn back to look southward; when the book was published, Burton was already consul in Damascus, a position he had long yearned for.

Off the Map: From the Desert to Deserter War creates deserts, and deserters, too, are a product of war. It is no coincidence that the two terms have the same etymological origin.113 A deserter is someone who empties out his own army; someone who abandons the battlefield, who flees both the glorious narration of the victor and the silence of the new mapped desert produced by the conflict. A deserter is someone who seeks to escape the logic of war, its consequences, and the state’s cartographic gaze; he resists the nationalist basis of the act of war. Therefore, when he is discovered, he is punished with the state’s harshest punishment (generally with the death penalty after a court martial).114 Burton seems to be aware of the strong implications of desertion for the logic of war and, as if in passing, mentions the legendary existence of a community of deserters: “All manner of ‘pasados’ (deserters) are

70 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay hanging about; and there is a report that in the Gran Chaco opposite exists a large quilombo, or maroon settlement, where Brazilians and Argentines, Orientals and Paraguayan fugitives, dwell together in mutual amity, and in enmity with all the world” (pp. 429–30).115 Against the logic of the world, against itself, war can create community, can nullify itself. It is not clear what Burton thinks of this reunion: is his reference to enmity with the world a way to point out its aberrant nature? Yet the traveler condemns the absurdity of war. In any case, it is worth mentioning. It shows that war has unexpected constructive consequences: that it can build resistant communities—in short, that war too can be made desert.

Notes 1 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness [1899] (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1916), n.p. 2 Dane Kennedy sums up Burton’s profile compellingly: “A protean figure whose restless energy and intellect led him to venture across vast portions of the globe, learn a staggering number of languages, and write a mountain of books, Burton was both an agent and a critic of British imperialism, an outspoken racist and an equally vocal relativist, an enemy of missionary Christianity and a defender of Islam, a pornographer and cultural provocateur, and a good deal more” (Dane Kennedy, Review of Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire, by Ben Grant, Victorian Studies, 52, no. 1 [2009]: 125–27 [at p. 125]) 3 There were earlier international conflicts, but none had involved the formal participation of four Latin American states. The war over the region then known as the Cisplatine Province (1825–28)—today Uruguay—involved Brazil and Argentina. The Guerra Grande (1839–51; Great War, not to be confused with the Paraguayan War, which is, as mentioned above, known as the Great War in Paraguay) was waged by factions or parties from different countries (Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina) and also involved the participation of England and France. Nevertheless, it was never formally a declared war between more than two states. 4 Luc Capdevila, Une guerre totale. Paraguay 1864–1870 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007), p. 23. 5 David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston: Mariner Books, 2008), p. 7. Capdevila uses this expression in the very title of his book, and affirms that the Paraguayan War was “one of the first modern total wars” (Capdevila, Guerre totale, p. 11). And he adds: “here, the focus is put in the dynamics of the clashes, as well as on the mechanisms of mobilization of the entire society which resulted in the disappearance of more than half of the inhabitants of Paraguay, and more than 80% of the masculine population in arms” (Capdevila, Guerre totale, p. 11). For Capdevila, “total war” largely means war of extermination. Doratioto refers to the Paraguayan War as the “second total war”, immediately following the US Civil War (1860–65) (Francisco Doratioto, Maldita guerra: nova história da Guerra do Paraguai [São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2002], p. 477). 6 Regarding the photographs of this war, see Miguel Ángel Cuarterolo, Soldados de la memoria: imágenes y hombres de la Guerra del Paraguay (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2000). In addition, Sebastián Díaz-Duhalde’s recent book, mentioned above, lucidly explores visual representations of the war.

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  71 7 Capdevila, Guerre totale, pp. 34–35. 8 It was nonetheless recently revived by James Schofield Saeger. On this subject, Barbara Potthast has argued, “Blaming the war entirely on him [Francisco Solano López] and his character will not … aid in achieving a fuller understanding and more balanced collective memory of the war in Paraguay” (Barbara Potthast, Review of Francisco Solano López and the Ruination of Paraguay: Honor and Egocentrism, by James Schofield Saeger, Journal of Historical Biography, 3 [2008]: 182–85 [at p. 185]). Thomas Whigham, one of the historians who have studied this war in the most depth, has a similar view: “To my knowledge, there is no convincing explanation that gives the despot Solano López sole responsibility [for the consequences of the Paraguayan war]” (Thomas Lyle Whigham, “La guerre détruit, la guerre construit. Essai sur le développement du nationalisme en Amérique du Sud”, in Nicolas Richard, Luc Capdevila, and Capucine Boidin, eds., Les guerres du Paraguay aux XIXe et XXe siècles [Paris: CoLibris, 2007], pp. 23–32 [at p. 31]). See James Schofield Saeger, Francisco Solano López and the Ruination of Paraguay: Honor and Egocentrism (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). 9 Augusto Roa Bastos, El fiscal (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1993), p. 16. Augusto Roa Bastos, The Prosecutor, trans. Helene Carol Weldt-Basson (Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018), p. 4. In relating Solano López’s fictitious meeting with Richard Burton (who never mentions such a meeting in Letters), Roa Bastos’s narrator says, “Ese hombre no se volvió loco en ese momento. Ya lo estaba. No era un malvado. Era un hombre de honor” (Roa Bastos, El fiscal, p. 269) [That man didn’t go mad at that moment. He already was. He was not evil. He was a man of honor (The Prosecutor, p. 184)]. But on the next page, Burton himself adds, “Necesitaba seguir derramando ríos de sangre, la de todo su pueblo, para calmar la apoplejía de su furor sobrehumano. Tomarse a sí mismo como destino era su peor desatino” (Roa Bastos, El fiscal, p. 270) [He needed to keep spilling blood, that of his entire citizenry, to calm the apoplexy of his superhuman furor. Taking himself as destiny was his worst mistake (The Prosecutor, p. 185)]. El fiscal thus embarks on a delicate mission to partially rehabilitate the figure of Solano López, removing him from the discourse of power, reading him as being more aligned with the Latin American left than with the Paraguayan right. In this sense, the novel is close to Roa’s Yo el Supremo [I, the Supreme] (1974), another rereading that critically vindicates another controversial figure, José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. Also relevant are the contemporary echoes of these debates in Latin American politics. In early 2011 the Argentine army named a group of armored artillery in Entre Ríos province after Francisco Solano López, in a decree in which the country’s president Cristina Fernández (2007–15) referred to López as “ese gran patriota, humillado por lo que yo llamo la alianza de la triple traición a Latinoamérica, a sus hombres y a sus mujeres” [that great patriot, humiliated by what I call the alliance of the triple betrayal of Latin America and of its men and women]. An editorial in the rightwing Argentine paper La Nación (founded by Mitre himself, president during the Paraguayan War) criticized the decision harshly. What is surprising, however, is the revival of Mitre’s unnuanced discourse in claiming that Solano López “in 1865 facilitated the invasion of Argentine territory, caused massive damage, the deaths of innocent people, and the kidnapping of women in Corrientes province, who suffered cruelly at his orders, necessitating a military reaction that cost the country an enormous outlay of resources”. An analogy is then drawn with the idea that “France or Poland might name one of their

72 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay regiments after Adolf Hitler”. See “Absurdo tributo a un dictador”, La Nacion.com (6 December 2007) www.lanacion.com.ar/968480-­absurdotributo-a-un-dictador (21 July 2011). 10 Thomas L. Whigham and Barbara Potthast, “The Paraguayan Rosetta Stone: New Insights into the Demographics of the Paraguayan War, 1864–1870”, Latin American Research Review, 34, no. 1 (1999): 174–86 (at p. 185). 11 In the case of the Soviet Union in the Second World War, often cited as exceptional, 12 percent of the population disappeared (Whigham, “La guerre détruit”, p. 31). Also Capdevila refers to these figures (Guerre Totale, p. 17). 12 Richard Francis Burton, Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay ­(London: Tinsley Brothers, 1870), p. 9. Further references are included parenthetically in the text. 13 Whigham and Potthast, “The Paraguayan Rosetta Stone”, p. 184. 14 Doratioto gives responsibility for most of the deaths to Solano López while he corrects Burton, who, according to the Brazilian historian, did not consider the fact that most of the deaths were caused by disease and hunger (Doratioto, Maldita guerra, p. 456). His effort to minimize the allies’ responsibility and Paraguay’s losses is also apparent in his noting that after the war Paraguay had a larger population than Whigham and Potthast estimate. 15 Once again, this is a decision that Doratioto considers logical. After the fall of the Paraguayan fortress of Humaitá in 1868, voices in Brazil began to clamor for peace. Nevertheless, Emperor Dom Pedro II decided to prolong the conflict until his forces had succeeded in killing Solano López or sending him into exile. Doratioto concludes: “No historian who became at all familiar with the Paraguayan dictator’s personality by studying primary sources could deny that there was some logic in the emperor’s reasoning” (Doratioto, Maldita guerra, p. 478). A similar argument—claiming that it was the only option for achieving peace—has been made to justify the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 16 Luiz Alberto de Vianna Moniz Bandeira, O expansionismo brasileiro: o papel do Brasil na Bacia do Plata (Rio de Janeiro: Philobiblion, 1985), p. 264. 17 By revisionist historiography I am referring to a critical view of the conflict that was influential in the 1960s and 1970s. It represented a break with traditional approaches to the conflict in the allied countries. Revisionist historians were to be found in all of the countries involved in the war, although the focus of the different works was not always exactly the same. In general terms, these books suggested the complicity of imperial Britain with the allied countries against a Paraguay that defended national sovereignty and independence, and the deliberate genocide of the Paraguayan population. The clearest example of this historiographical tendency are, in Argentina, León Pomer, La Guerra del Paraguay: Estado, política y negocios [1968] (Buenos Aires: Colihue, 2008), and José María Rosa, La Guerra del Paraguay y las montoneras argentinas [1965] (Buenos Aires: Punto de Encuentro, 2008); in Brazil, Júlio José Chiavenato, Genocídio americano. A Guerra do Paraguai (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1979); and, in Uruguay, Ares Pons, El Paraguay del siglo XIX. One important European work that vindicates, in heroic terms, the role of Solano López is Manlio Cancogni and Ivan Boris, Il Napoleone del Plata (Milan: Rizzoli, 1970). See also José Alfredo Fornos Peñalba, “Draft Dodgers, War Resisters and Turbulent Gauchos: The War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay”, The Americas, 38, no. 4 (1982): 463–79. 18 “[I]n 1864–5, out of total exports to Brazil of £13,160,000, Great Britain supplied £6,309,700. In 1865–6 the sums were respectively £13,809,500

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  73 and £7,375,100. Then Burton points out that because of the impact of the Paraguayan war, and the resulting depreciated currency and deficient industry, the figures fell; even so Britain exported £6,528,342. To offset this lesser trading performance, Brazil incurred war debts of some £14,000,000 to British financial institutions” (Frank McLynn, From the Sierras to the Pampas: Richard Burton’s Travels in the Americas [London: Trafalgar Square, 1992], pp. 110–11). 19 Leslie Bethell, The Paraguayan War (1864–1870) (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, 1996), p. 6. 20 Pomer describes the main goal of the liberal forces in the war: “to govern from the metropolis the national will of Paraguay, to exploit and sack it, to eliminate it as a bad example, to reduce it to a servile condition. And eventually the primary, the ultimate beneficiary of the destruction of the Paraguayan people will be England, which, as the very first world power will be better positioned than anyone … to take advantage of the defeated Guarani nation” (Pomer, La Guerra del Paraguay, pp. 11–12) 21 The term was used for the first time by C. R. Fay in his Cambridge History of the British Empire (1940). 22 John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade”, The Economic History Review, Second Series, VI, no. 1 (1953): 1–15 (at p. 7). 23 This line of inquiry has sparked an important theoretical debate as well as scholarly work that specifically deals with Latin America. On this topic, see D. C. M. Platt, “The Imperialism of Free Trade: Some Reservations”, The Economic History Review, New Series, 21, no. 2 (1968): 296–306; W. Roger Louis, Imperialism: The Robertson and Gallagher Controversy (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976); Bernard Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism. Classical Political Economy, the Empire of Free Trade and Imperialism, 1750–1850 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Matthew Brown, ed., Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture, Commerce and Capital (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008); Peter Winn, “British Informal Empire in Uruguay in the Nineteenth Century”, Past & Present, 73 (1976): 100–26; David McLean, War, Diplomacy and Informal Empire: Britain and the Republics of La Plata, 1836–1853 (London: British Academic Press, 1995); and H. S. Ferns, Britain and Argentina in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Arno, 1977). P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, who are also part of this school of thought, proposed the concept of “gentlemanly capitalism”. See, among others, their articles “The Political Economy of British Expansion Overseas, 1750–1914”, The Economic History Review, New Series, 33, no. 4 (1980): 463–90; and “Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas, 1850–1945”, The Economic History Review, New Series, 40, no. 1 (1987): 1–26. Brown’s book includes a detailed discussion of the term and partially justifies its relevance. He also makes it clear that the concept is a controversial one. In this study my aim is not to use this term as connoting lesser presence or importance (as might, for example, the term “informal market”), which is why I also use the bald notion of empire, or, rather, neocolonialism. 24 Jennifer French, Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish-American Regional Writers (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2005), p. 6. 25 French, Nature, Neo-Colonialism, p. 7. 26 Bethell, The Paraguayan War, p. 25. 27 There are numerous historical accounts of this war. I have attempted here to work with the most recent ones and with those that have been most influential in studies of the conflict. I have also striven to bring together different perspectives, and have therefore examined the work of historians

74 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay from different countries. Here is a necessarily incomplete list of texts on the war that I have consulted in my research for this chapter, some of them already mentioned: Thomas Whigham, The Paraguayan War. Volume I: Causes and Early Conduct (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Whigham and Kraay, eds., I Die with My Country: Perspectives on the Paraguayan War, 1864–1870 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Capdevila, Une guerre totale; Richard, Capdevila, and Boidin, eds., Les guerres du Paraguay; Doratioto, Maldita guerra; Washington Reyes Abadie and Andrés Vázquez Romero, Crónica General del Uruguay. Tomo V: la modernización (Montevideo: Banda Oriental, 2000); León Pomer, La Guerra del Paraguay; José María Rosa, La guerra del Paraguay; Fernando da Silva Rodrigues and Fernando Velôzo Gomes Pedrosa, eds., Uma tragédia americana. A Guerra do Paraguai sob novos olhares (Curitiba: Prismas, 2015); Cancogni and Boris, Il Napoleone del Plata; Herib Caballero, Mabel Causarano, et al., Más allá de la guerra. Aportes para el debate contemporáneo (Asunción: Secretaría Nacional de Cultura, 2016); Chiavenato, Genocídio americano; Horacio Crespo, Juan Manuel Palacio, and Guillermo Palacios, eds., La guerra del Paraguay. Historiografías. Representaciones. Contextos (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2012); Chris Leuchars, To the Bitter End: Paraguay and the War of the Triple Alliance (London: Greenwood Press, 2002). 28 Cristina Scheibe Wolff, “L’historiographie brésilienne de la guerre du Paraguay”, in Richard, Capdevila, and Boidin, eds., Les guerres du Paraguay, pp. 125–38 (at p. 127). On the history of the Brazilian army in the latter half of the nineteenth century, see Wilma Peres Costa, A espada de Dâmocles: o exército, a Guerra do Paraguai e a crise do Império (São Paulo: Hucitec & Unicamp, 1996). 29 I am referring mainly to the presidencies of Deodoro da Fonseca (1889–91), Brazil’s first president, and Marshal Floriano Peixoto (1891–94). Both were veterans of the War of the Triple Alliance. The former also participated in the Brazilian invasion of Uruguay that led to the conflict. The third republican government was that of Prudente de Morais (1894–98), who, though he was not a military man, waged the murderous Canudos War, when the state was nothing but war. 30 Alejandra Laera has argued that the Conquest of the Desert is the culmination of a progressive strengthening presence of the army in the national life, whose first important moment was the Paraguayan War (Alejandra Laera, “Sobre la guerra en el Paraguay [relatos nacionales en las fronteras]”, in Graciela Batticuore, Loreley El Jaber, and Alejandra Laera, eds., Fronteras escritas. Cruces, desvíos y pasajes en la literatura argentina [Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2008], pp. 183–213 [at p. 195]). 31 A group of exiled men from the Colorado party invaded Uruguay in 1863, with the support of the Brazilian empire and Mitre’s Argentina, in order to overthrow the democratically elected Blanco party government, something at which they were ultimately successful. The leader of this Cruzada Libertadora (Liberating Crusade) was Venancio Flores, who, after the defeat of the government, would become president. Flores later signed the Treaty of the Triple Alliance with Brazil and Argentina, and led Uruguay into war. 32 Doratioto, Maldita guerra, p. 17. 33 We can briefly return here to Cristina Fernández’s government in Argentina and her efforts to defend Solano López. In this respect, it should be noted that La Nación newspaper published an interview with Doratioto on 6 January 2008, refuting the Argentine president. In it, the historian argues that “in Brazil, history is history, unlike in the River Plate basin, where

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  75 history  is still wielded in current political combat” (Pablo Mendelevich, “Francisco Doratioto: ‘No fuimos víctimas del imperialismo’”, La ­Nación – ­Enfoques, 6 January 2008 www.lanacion.com.ar/976408-­francisco-doratiotono-fuimos-victimas-del-imperialismo [15 August 2011]). Is that why Brazil never returned its trophies of war to Paraguay? Is that why it allowed Stroessner to die in exile in Brazil—during the Lula administration (­ 2003–11)— without ever standing trial for the crimes he committed against his people? On the other hand, La Nación and Doratioto himself also make current political use of history (and what does the tautological expression “history is history” mean anyway?). The problem is not so much deciding whether Solano López was a dictator or not (the answer to that question being fairly obvious) but finally recognizing that the war and its consequences were absurd and unjust, as it is absurd to pretend that the blame for the Paraguayan extermination falls squarely on the victims themselves. Regarding the spoils of war, in 2013 Paraguay continued to exert its claims against Brazil on this point (see, on this topic, “Paraguay reclama a Brasil trofeos de la Guerra de la Triple Alianza”, Terra 1 March 2013 https://­noticias. terra.com.ar/mundo/paraguay-reclama-a-brasil-trofeos-de-la-guerra-de-la-­ triple-alianza,6fb250a686f1d310VgnCLD2000000ec6eb0aRCRD.html [12 December 2016]). Also in 2013, on the occasion of the assumption of President Horacio Cartes to power in Paraguay in August, President Fernández de Kirchner announced the return of the spoils of war that remained in Argentine possession (“Cristina Fernández anuncia devolución de trofeos de guerra a Paraguay”, UPI Español. Cien años de excelencia periodística, 16 August 2013 http://espanol.upi.com/Politica/2013/08/16/ Cristina-Fern%C3%­A1ndez-anuncia-devoluci%C3%B3n-de-trofeos-deguerra-a-Paraguay/UPI-21771376636880 [10 December 2013]). 34 The other book that deals with his South American experience is Explorations of the Highlands of Brazil, published in two volumes in 1869. Brazilian critics have given the book some attention. See, for example, Karen Macknow Lisboa, “Olhares estrangeiros sobre o Brasil do século XIX”, in Carlos Guilherme Mota, ed., Viagem incompleta: a experiência brasileira, 1500–2000 (São Paulo: SENAC/SESC, 2000), pp. 264–98. 35 Thomas Wright, The Life of Sir Richard Burton (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1906), p. 102. The fascination that Burton provokes in biographers is remarkable. I will be working with several of these biographies, which tend to repeat some arguments (some of which are mistaken) almost identically at times. Yet, surprising as it is given Burton’s importance in nineteenth-­ century Britain, scholars have produced few academic works on him. And certainly not on his travels to Paraguay, which, were one to judge by the number of works on the topic, would seem never to have happened at all. 36 Jon R. Godsall, The Tangled Web: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (Leicester: Matador, 2008). 37 Similarly, a biography of the traveler in novel form, Ilija Trojanow’s The Collector of Worlds, first published in 2006, which became an absolute best seller, predictably leaves out Burton’s time in the Americas altogether. It is divided into three parts, titled “British India”, “Arabia”, and “East Africa”. There is an evident effort to exoticize the figure of Burton. The novel offers only a partial look at his travels, even as it presents itself as a “biography”. Trojanow’s text perpetuates traditional views of Burton and erases nearly ten years of his life. See Ilija Trojanow, The Collector of Worlds, trans. William Hobson (New York: Ecco, 2009). It may be worth pondering how Burton’s American period can be compared to his earlier adventures, and I will partially address this issue here.

76 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay 38 Edward Rice, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Secret Agent Who Made the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Discovered the Kama Sutra, and Brought the Arabian Nights to the West (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), p. 391. Similarly, Fawn Brodie, another of Burton’s biographers, claims that Brazil invaded Paraguay, and that the latter retaliated. Exactly the opposite in fact happened (Fawn M. Brodie, The Devil Drives. A Life of Sir Richard Burton [London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1967], p. 242). 39 Rice, Captain Sir Richard, p. 391. This error also appears in other biographies of Burton. See Byron Farwell, Burton. A Biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1963), p. 259. Contemporary historiography has sided with Burton. Barbara Potthast has asserted that “organized female units never existed in Paraguay. Tales of companies of women soldiers were wartime propaganda, nothing more” (Barbara Potthast, “Protagonists, Victims, and Heroes: Paraguayan Women during the ‘Great War’”, in Kraay and Whigham, eds., I Die with My Country, pp. 44–60 [at p. 50]). 40 Burton remained in the USA for seven months in 1860. His time in Salt Lake City and his views on the Mormons are some of the most notable elements of the book that came out of that journey, The City of the Saints and Across the Rocky Mountains to California (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1862). 41 McLynn, From the Sierras to the Pampas, p. 219. Brodie agrees with this statement: “Though somewhat disorganized, and in parts carelessly written, it was one of Burton’s better books” (Brodie, The Devil Drives, p. 246). Of Burton’s most famous and enduringly popular works, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah (1855–56), published in three volumes, and Lake Regions of Central Africa: A Picture of Exploration (1860) stand out. His translation of the Arabian Nights is also memorable; it even serves as the subject of good part of Jorge Luis Borges’s essay “Los traductores de las 1001 Noches: El capitán Burton, El doctor Mardurs y Enno Littman”, included in Historia de la eternidad (1936). See Jorge Luis Borges, “The Translators of a Thousand and One Nights”, trans. Esther Allen, in Selected Non-Fictions, ed., Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin Classics, 1999), pp. 92–109. Even Borges, who admired Burton and was familiar with his work, completely failed to mention his text on the Paraguayan War (in which he also describes his trips through Argentina and meeting with then President Sarmiento, subjects that would no doubt have been interesting to Borges). Letters was quite ignored also in the Spanish-speaking world: it was first translated into Spanish in its entirety only in 1998. 42 I will shortly return to what Kennedy has called “Edward Said’s surprisingly sympathetic remarks about Burton” (Kennedy, “Review”, p. 125). In contrast with his lucid discussion in his 1978 book, however, Said utterly disregards Burton in Culture and Imperialism (1993). 43 Ben Grant, Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis, and Burton: Power Play of Empire (New York: Routledge, 2009). Dane Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man. Richard Burton and the Victorian World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 181. 44 It is likely that the book in question was Facundo. First, because the third Spanish edition of Facundo was published in 1868, precisely the year of Burton’s visit, and the year Sarmiento was elected president. The book was published in the USA but circulated widely in Argentina; its republication was part of Sarmiento’s electoral campaign. Second, because on many occasions Sarmiento showed to be aware of the importance of Facundo

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  77 among his works, using it as a way to introduce himself to those who did not know him. One clear example can be found in his Travels, when he brings his book to Paris to get it translated and gives it to the public personalities he meets. I thank Patricio Fontana for pointing my attention to the 1868 edition of Facundo. 45 The narrator is definitive in his judgment, accusing Mitre of “having caused for party, nay, for personal and for egotistic purposes, a military alliance, whose result is the present disastrous and by no means honorable war” (p. 168). Burton also refers explicitly to the powerful opposition that the war provoked in Argentina, especially in the interior of the country. On this topic, see Ariel de la Fuente, “Federalism and Opposition to the Paraguayan War in the Argentine Interior: La Rioja, 1865–67”, in Kraay and Whigham, eds., I Die with My Country, pp. 140–53. See also Rosa, La guerra del Paraguay. Justo José de Urquiza, the third of the political figures encountered by Burton, was a caudillo from the province of Entre Ríos. He was one of the leaders of the coalition who defeated Juan Manuel de Rosas in 1852, but was for the most part an enemy of Buenos Aires. In fact, it was expected that Urquiza would support Paraguay during the War of the Triple Alliance. The fact that he ended up not joining the Paraguayan forces against Buenos Aires was a relief to Mitre and the porteño elite, and remains an open question in the life of the enigmatic caudillo. He was assassinated in 1870, the year in which the war ended and Burton’s book was published. On Urquiza’s role in the war, see Fornos Peñalba, “Draft Dodgers”, p. 473. See also Efraim Cardozo, Urquiza y la guerra del Paraguay (Buenos Aires: Academia ­Nacional de la Historia, 1967). 46 Said, Orientalism, p. 196. 47 Said, Orientalism, p. 196. 48 Said, Orientalism, p. 196. Another of Burton’s qualities that Said highlights in Orientalism is the balance that his texts achieve between an orientalist’s scholarly objectivity and a personal aesthetic, which in some ways makes his texts readable beyond their own immediate objectives. Burton’s orientalist treatises are also, in large part, about the narrator himself (Said, Orientalism, pp. 158–59). 49 Fornos Peñalba, “Draft Dodgers”, p. 463. It should be mentioned that Fornos Peñalba is a defender of the Paraguayan cause during the war. His article attempts to prove Britain’s responsibility for the destruction of Paraguay that resulted from the conflict: “[T]he nature and outcome of the war were shaped significantly by the participation of the Triple Alliance’s indispensible [sic] fourth ally, Great Britain” (Fornos Peñalba, “Draft Dodgers”, p. 463). Given this perspective, Fornos Peñalba’s insistence on the impartiality of Burton, a member of the imperial administration, is another sign of Burton’s ability to demonstrate his independence from concrete policies that he himself represents. 50 The narrator exhibits a remarkable awareness of the partial nature of previous accounts. He also points out that Paraguay does not have its own narration of the conflict, which means a silencing of its voice: “All accounts which have hitherto appeared are necessarily one-sided: the Allies—­ Brazilian, Argentine, and Oriental—have told and re-told their own tale, whilst the Paraguayans have mostly been dumb perforce” (p. xiv). 51 This is another good example in Letters: “The Argentine ‘Contingent’ gave the impression of being fine men, large and strong; the rank and file, however, showed a jumble of nationalities: the tall, raw-boned, yellow-haired German, the Italian Cozinhero, and the Frenchman, who under arms always affects the Zouave, marched side by side with the ignoble negro”

78 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay (p. 325). Dane Kennedy explains, “Bolstered by the ‘scientific’ racism that came to prominence in Britain and other western countries around midcentury, Burton embraced a new view of difference, one that identified the body as its primary site and skin color and skull shape as its principal markers. By the mid 1860s [that is, when he was living in South America] he had become one of Britain’s foremost proponents of the polygenist thesis that Africans constituted a distinct and inferior species of humanity. He advanced this position in a series of books about his travels in West Africa and Brazil and promulgated it as one of the founding members and leaders of the Anthropological Society of London” (Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man, p. 4). Kennedy dedicates an entire section of his book, titled “The Racist”, to this issue. See Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man, pp. 131–63. 52 McLynn, From the Sierras to the Pampas, p. 177. It has repeatedly been argued that Burton describes Paraguay with orientalizing eyes. See, for example, Leila Gómez, Iluminados y tránsfugas. Relatos de viajeros y ficciones nacionales en Argentina, Paraguay y Perú (Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2009), pp. 142–46. 53 Farwell, Burton, p. 259. 54 Ana Inés Larre Borges, “Prólogo” to Richard Burton, Cartas desde los campos de batalla del Paraguay (Buenos Aires: Librería El Foro, 1998), p.  33. Burton also seems to have been sick with hepatitis (this does not change the inexplicable nature of this trip, naturally). 55 And Farwell continues: “Burton even had bad words to say about the weather and the general unhealthiness of Paraguay, although he had gone there ostensibly for his health” (Burton, p. 265). 56 Farwell, Burton, p. 264. Farwell points out that this series of delays continued even when Burton was back in London: “After having stretched a six weeks’ sick leave into a ten-month adventure, one of his first actions on arriving in England was to complain of his hepatitis and request an additional six weeks’ leave” (p. 265). 57 Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, “Introduction”, in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–13 (at p. 5). 58 McLynn, From the Sierras to the Pampas, p. 110. And he adds later on: “Burton’s superiors at the Foreign Office concentrated on his imperfect office administration rather than his statistical and analytical skills. The consular files for Santos contain frequent rebukes and reproaches at Burton’s unwillingness or inability to operate ‘by the book’” (McLynn, From the Sierras to the Pampas, p. 111). 59 This fact is an important one and has led astray those who, like Fornos Peñalba, claim that Burton “was an actual eyewitness to many of the battles waged, and his excellent description is of great use to students of the war” (Fornos Peñalba, “Draft Dodgers”, p. 473). No firsthand accounts of the battles are ever given in Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay. This inability to be there seems indicative of one of the limitations of the war narratives studied in this book. 60 A good example of war writing in the context of the Paraguayan War is León de Palleja, a colonel of the Uruguayan forces who kept a diary of the war during 1865 and 1866. In this respect, see Javier Uriarte, “Disintegrating Bodies: The Undoing of the Discourse of War in Palleja’s Diario (1865–66)”, in Federico Pous, Alejandro Quin, and Marcelino Viera, eds., Authoritarianism, Cultural History, and Political Resistance in Latin America: Exposing Paraguay (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 19–36.

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  79 61 A decade earlier, Burton had tried to participate in the Crimean War (1853–56), to no avail: “Although he obtained a staff appointment in 1855 with Beatson’s Horse, an irregular Turkish cavalry unit, any hopes he had of achieving military glory were frustrated once again. Beatson’s Horse never saw combat and if soon collapsed as a result of internal bickering and the antagonism of the British high command. By late 1856, his Crimean interlude was over” (Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man, p. 95). 62 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 197. 63 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 201. 64 This view from the heights appears again in W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land, which I examine in the next chapter. Perhaps both Burton and Hudson were aware of the commonplace of describing/dominating a territory from above. 65 In those years, other planned adventures also did not happen. According to Godsall, Burton was greatly looking forward to arriving in Buenos Aires, as he planned to explore the pampas and Patagonia and to scale the highest peaks of the Andes. But soon it all came to nothing (Godsall, The Tangled Web, p. 275). 66 Mary S. Lovell, A Rage to Live. A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton (London: Little, Brown and Company, 1998), p. 485. 67 Peres Costa, A espada de Dâmocles, p. 168. 68 “Since the time of Dr. Francia there has been no revolution in Paraguay, whence it is evident that no change has been effected in the essential part of the dictatorship of that monster. Paraguay has had no opportunity of imbibing republican and liberal ideas, having cut herself off from all communication with the outer world in 1811, since which period the only sentiment of which she has been capable is that of hatred to her free and republican neighbors” (Domingo Faustino Sarmiento [attr.], Revelations on the Paraguayan War, and the Alliances of the Atlantic and the Pacific [New York: Hallet & Breen, 1866], p. 22). This is another eloquent example, in which barbarism is associated with the image of the void: “Hence, if any one, out of mischief, should insist on proving by affidavit that, if there is a Paraguay, as the geographers pretend, that country has no inhabitants, it would be extremely difficult to prove the contrary. The Paraguayan, if he exists at all, is mute and invisible” (p. 31). The copy from the National Library of Argentina, which I have consulted, attributes the text to Sarmiento (and its translation into English to Sarmiento’s friend Mary Mann). Regardless of its author, this pamphlet unquestionably reflects the point of view of the Argentine governing elites. 69 Part of this portrayal of Paraguay as a desert includes references to the jungle. Doratioto, for example, parrots the allied depictions of Paraguay as an impenetrable jungle: “At the time, Paraguay lacked roads and was covered with dense vegetation inhabited by wild animals, and jaguars prowled a few kilometers from downtown Asunción” (Doratioto, Maldita guerra, p. 457). Indeed, though they might seem to be exact opposites, the jungle and the desert are often equivalents in the rhetoric of the nineteenth century (the English word “wilderness” can in fact apply to both). The jungle is also a sort of “desert” because it represents an unpopulated, unknown space untouched by state dynamics that seek to monopolize violence. Like the desert, the jungle must be made readable. Ileana Rodríguez examines the construction of the jungle as “a humongous ungovernable void” or as “a liminal border, an orilla … a frontier, or empty signifier” (Rodríguez, Transatlantic Topographies, pp. 166, 167). Alejandro Quin explains that

80 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay “the jungle represents the limit or collapse of state control but also, paradoxically, the space that offers the state its foundational natural metaphors” (Alejandro Quin, Taming the Chaos: Nature, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Writing in Modern Latin America, unpublished doctoral dissertation [University of Michigan Ann Arbor: ProQuest/UMI, 2011], p. 2). It is precisely this that occurs with the image of the desert in nineteenth-­ century Argentina, for example. For more, see Fermín Rodríguez’s Un desierto para la nación. 70 This statement does not come out of revisionist historiography’s attempt to construct Paraguay as a modern state—or socialist one, as Ares Pons and José María Rosa have claimed—before the war. There is no doubt that the country’s social and economic structures defied the dictates of the liberalism predominating in South America, and that Paraguay had relevance in international diplomacy and an independence that it took pride in and defended—beginning under the government of Gaspar Rodríguez de ­Francia—against foreign meddling. This Paraguay disappeared for good after 1870. As pointed out before, what did not change after the war (though to be sure it acquired new articulations) was the profound sense of national pride (which led to strong and problematic nationalistic discourses well into the twentieth century) and the clear awareness of having a singular identity different from that of the other South American nations, elements that persist in the present. The original Paraguayan experience has been studied in dialogue with the Haitian revolution and the model of nationhood that succeeded it in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Roberto Fernández Retamar, for example, draws a line between Haiti, Paraguay, and revolutionary Cuba, in “Cuba defendida”, in Cuba defendida (Buenos Aires: Nuestra América, 2004), pp.  199–228. See also Henryk Szlajfer, “Against Dependent Capitalist Development in Nineteenth-Century Latin America”; and Javier Uriarte, “Tyranny and Foundation. Appropriations of the Hero and Rereadings of the Nation in Augusto Roa Bastos and Jean-Claude Fignolé”, in Helene Carol Weldt-Basson, ed., Postmodernism’s Role in Latin American Literature. The Life and Work of Augusto Roa Bastos (New York: Palgrave ­M acmillan, 2010), pp. 153–88. 71 Doratioto, Maldita guerra, pp. 32–37. 72 Doratioto, Maldita guerra, pp. 160–61. It was partly for this reason that Peru, Bolivia, and Chile protested once the treaty was published. The criticisms offered in the Argentine press were also quite harsh. 73 A marginal episode took place in the northern Paraguayan border, close to the present-day Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul. A Brazilian unit tried to “surprise” the Paraguayans by invading their country through the forests and swamps that were found there; this episode ended with the almost complete annihilation of the Brazilian forces. It was later recounted by Alfredo d’Escragnolle Taunay, known as the Viscount of Taunay, one of Brazil’s canonical Romantic writers, in La retraite de Laguna (The Retreat from Laguna, 1871). 74 Doratioto, Maldita guerra, p. 476. 75 Burton refers to some chronicles of the war as describing it as “a barbarous race blotted out of the map, an obscure nationality eaten up, as the Kafirs say, by its neighbours” (p. viii). 76 Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 3. 77 Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 8. 78 See on this subject Jean Franco, “A Not So Romantic Journey: British Travelers to South America, 1818–28” [1979], in Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman, eds., Critical Passions. Selected Essays (Durham, NC: Duke

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  81 University Press, 1999), pp. 133–46. Here the author makes explicit this relationship, which Burton only obliquely suggests, and also discusses the well-known version of dictator Francia created by the Robertson brothers. On these travelers’ account, see also Leila Gómez, “Los hermanos Robertson y el gótico dr. Francia”, in Iluminados y tránsfugas, pp. 137–41. 79 The case of the French traveler Aimé Bonpland, who stayed in Paraguay from 1821 to 1829, is an obvious one in this regard. But perhaps the most significant instance is that of Uruguayan caudillo José Artigas, who fled Argentine troops and entered Francia’s impenetrable Paraguay. Francia saved his life but did not allow him to leave for 30 years. Artigas lived in Paraguay from 1820 until his death in 1850. On this period, and on the relationships between Artigas and Francia, see Ana Ribeiro, El caudillo y el dictador (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2005). 80 Pelham Horton Box, Los orígenes de la Guerra de la Triple Alianza, trans. Pablo Max Ynsfrán [1927] (Buenos Aires: Nizza, 1958), p. 187. 81 Bethell, The Paraguayan War, p. 25. 82 Michel Foucault, “Of other spaces” [1984], Diacritics, 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27 (at p. 26). Augusto Roa Bastos, “Paraguay. Isla rodeada de tierra” [1977] www.lacult.unesco.org/docc/oralidad_06_07_56-59-paraguay.pdf (15 December 2016). 83 Leila Gómez traces travelers’ representations of the country, calling it an “inaccessible Arcadia” (Gómez, Iluminados y tránsfugas, pp. 107–46). With regard to the inaccessible character of the Paraguayan space, I find significant the following passing comment by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, he includes a list of all the unknown places that Europeans were exploring: “The whole world is bespread with peoples about whom we know only their names, and we go about judging the whole human race! Suppose a Montesquieu, a Buffon, a Diderot … were to travel in order to instruct their countrymen, observing and describing as only they know how, Turkey, Egypt … and then in the other hemisphere, Mexico, Peru, Chile, and the lands by the Straits of Magellan, not forgetting the Patagonians, true and false, Tucamán [sic], Paraguay if possible, Brazil” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, trans. Franklin Philip, ed. Patrick Coleman [1755] [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994], pp. 108–9, emphasis added). The quote is illuminating in many ways, but for the purpose of this chapter I find it especially interesting that Paraguay is the only one among the enumerated unknown lands whose accessibility remains a problem. The quote makes it clear that it is a land that remains elusive, complicating the very idea of travel as exploration. 84 Doratioto, Maldita Guerra, p. 476. As explained above, Doratioto tends to reproduce uncritically the most frequent “barbarizing” tropes coming from the allied countries. Francisco Moreno and Euclides da Cunha, whom I will examine later in this book, also exhibit over the course of their lives great anxiety over the lack of maps and the need to create them. 85 “Carte de la république du Paraguay… / par le Dr E. de Bourgade, d’après les observations recueillies pendant ses voyages en 1887–1888, les documents inédits de la commission des limites de 1871–1873 et les cartes de Mouchez et Taeppen”, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallica https:// gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53025285v (28 April 2018). 86 Jens Andermann, “El sur profundo: geografía, paisaje y conquista en la Campaña del Desierto”, ESTUDIOS. Revista de investigaciones literarias y culturales, 8, no. 16 (2000): 105–27 (at p. 113). 87 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. 121.

82 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay 88 The inability to see the Paraguayan territory appears in the abovementioned novel The Prosecutor, by Roa Bastos, in which the return of the protagonist from exile means the impossibility of seeing. Thus, Paraguay turns into what it had been before the war: a space that remains shrouded in mystery, unknown, unknowable. From the plane, the protagonist is unable to distinguish his own land, which remains invisible: “Desde mi observatorio continúo sin ver nada. Abajo y arriba todo es opaco y brillante a la vez” (Roa Bastos, El fiscal, p. 192) [From my observatory I continue not seeing anything. Above and below everything is opaque and bright at once (The Prosecutor, p. 130)]. Along similar lines: “no concibo percibir el paisaje… . No hay nubes, no hay cielo, no hay tierra” (Roa Bastos, El fiscal, p. 191) [I cannot see the landscape … There are no clouds, no sky, no land] (The Prosecutor, p. 129). These descriptions show the impossibility of detecting a landscape in Paraguay. In Roa Bastos, this highlights the utter foreignness of an exiled self who is aware of his otherness on his arrival, a self who cannot recognize his birth city or his homeland. The idea of a legible, representable, meaning-bearing whole evaporates in the realm of shadows that is Stroessner’s Paraguay. 89 “Mapas de la República del Paraguay desde la Colonia hasta la Actualidad”, www.paraguay1900.com/mapas/1863-Carte-de-la-Republique-duParaguay-Alfred-Lucien-de-Brayer.htm (24 April 2018). 90 “Carte de la République du Paraguay (Cours du Parana et du Paraguay) (Amérique Meridionale) Dressée par Mr. F. Mouchez Lieutt. de Van. Commt. l’Avisa a vapeur le Bisson … pendant les trois voyages du Bisson en 185758-59  … 1862”, in Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc. www. raremaps.com/gallery/archivedetail/35575hs/Carte_de_la_Republique_ du_Paraguay_Cours_du_Parana_et_du_Paraguay/Mouchez.html (24 April 2018). 91 David Harvey has shown that capitalism is in large part an attempt to facilitate the circulation of goods: “Efficiency of spatial organization and movement is therefore an important issue for all capitalists” (Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 229). 92 David Rock interprets this—correctly—as an expression “of the type of imperialist outlook commonly identified in postcolonial literature as the ‘imperial gaze’” (Rock, “The British in Argentina: From Informal Empire to Postcolonialism”, in Brown, ed., Informal Empire in Latin America, pp. 49–77 (at p. 64)). Yet his analysis is only partial: it omits those moments in which, in the same text, that gaze becomes impossible, as well as the frequent criticisms of England and of the allied army. Rock reads this quotation in the context of Pratt’s description of the capitalist vanguard (this figure will be briefly discussed in chapter 2). Toward the end of his essay, Rock draws a distinction between the “official mind” of Burton and another group, made up of “travellers and tourists” (Rock, “British in Argentina”, p. 76). I have preferred to read Burton as a traveler positioned somewhere between the tourist and the English diplomat, this ambivalence being one reason for the complexity of this text. 93 I am not thinking here of the smooth space discussed by Deleuze and Guattari. The movement that would be imposed corresponds to Deleuze’s striated space created by the modern state, because movement will be controlled in new ways, as we will see. 94 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 386. 95 On this subject, see Prieto, Los viajeros ingleses; Montaldo, “Nuestro oriente es Europa”; Pratt, Imperial Eyes; David Viñas, De Sarmiento a Dios. Viajeros argentinos a USA (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1988); and Diana

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  83 Sorensen, El Facundo y la construcción de la cultura argentina (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 1998). 96 Revelations on the Paraguayan War, a text attributed to Sarmiento, as we have seen, repeats clichés and calls Paraguay a “remote region” whose dictator, Francia, “secluded it from communication with the outer world” (Sarmiento, Revelations, p. 3). A number of elements draw Burton’s reader’s attention, such as the mention that the country is known as “American China” (Burton jokes about the nickname in his introduction—“both grow tea, but that is their chief point of resemblance” (p. 1)—considering it evidence of European ignorance about the country). Paraguay is also said to be “[t]raversed by a river resembling the Mississippi, whose sources are lost, like those of the Nile, in the mysterious wilds of the Equator” (Sarmiento, Revelations, p. 3). Burton, who claimed to have discovered the source of the Nile, also compares the Paraguayan river to the North American one. Once again, vastness and the unknown appear as the country’s primary characteristics. I have been unable to find any scholarly analyses of this text, which remains quite unknown and whose authorship is still a mystery. Dardo Scavino’s stimulating book on the forms of war in Sarmiento’s writing does not even mention Revelations. See Dardo Scavino, Barcos sobre la Pampa. Las formas de la guerra en Sarmiento (Buenos Aires: El cielo por asalto, 1993). 97 McLynn, From the Sierras to the Pampas, p. 177. 98 Whigham, “La guerre détruit, la guerre construit”. 99 Burton is discussing the—for him—destructive influence of Jesuits in history. Particularly, he criticizes the strong isolation imposed by Jesuits in their missions. He attributes the important role of despotism in the subsequent history of the country to the way in which Jesuits exercised authority. The war is, for Burton, the ultimate consequence of this isolation and proneness to authoritarianism: “the tree planted by the hand of St. Ignatius began to bear its legitimate fruit in 1864 [the year of the beginning of the war]. I need hardly say that the fruit is the utter extinction of the race, which the progress of mankind is sweeping from the face of the earth” (p. 31). Thus, the War of the Triple Alliance, and the complete annihilation of the Paraguayan population that it brings, is for Burton an expected consequence of the regimes that Paraguayans had inherited (always according to Burton) from the Jesuits. Progress does not allow regimes of that kind to continue to exist, and war makes that erasure objective. 100 It would be interesting to explore the link between Burton and Conrad in greater depth. It seems clear that the latter read the former. A number of analyses have mentioned various aspects of this relationship. According to McLynn, the letters from Paraguay “caught the imagination of Conrad, already deeply impressed by Burton’s Arabian lore, and it has been speculated that the Martin Decoud of Nostromo owes a good deal to the Decoud of Battlefields” (McLynn, From the Sierras to the Pampas, p. 219). Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) has suffered a fate similar to that of Letters, as it has gotten relatively little attention from scholars. For more on the relationship between Conrad and Burton in the context of the Arab world, see Hans Van Marle, “Conrad and Richard Burton on Islam”, Conradiana, 17 (1985): 137–42. On Letters and Nostromo, see Norman Sherry, Conrad’s Western World (London: Cambridge University Press, 1971); and Jennifer French, “Martin Decoud in the Afterlife: A Dialogue with Latin American Writers”, Conradiana, 40, no. 3 (2008): 247–65. Though I have not found any discussion of the Letters’ “dark-hearted” quality (might Burton be a precursor to Conrad in the sense discussed by Borges in his essay “Kafka y

84 Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay sus precursores”?), I contend that despite their obvious differences, the two texts share a similar narrative approach. 101 In the next chapter, I will discuss references to this day that are found in The Purple Land. In fact, the visits of Hudson and Burton to Uruguay seem to have been very close in time. 102 Byron Farwell calls the period between September 1868 and March 1869 “one of the most mysterious episodes in his life”, and refers to this as “his only unrecorded trip” (Farwell, Burton, p. 263). 103 Later in this book we will see how Euclides da Cunha employs images of ruins, and, more generally of material remains, to describe the Brazilian sertão. On the presence of ruins and more generally of time in the spatial descriptions of Euclides and Lévi-Strauss, see Javier Uriarte, “Fora da ordem, or on Time and Travel in Euclides da Cunha and Claude LéviStrauss”, in Regina Félix and Scott D. Juall, eds., Cultural Exchanges between Brazil and France (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2016), pp. 100–16. More contemporarily, the Cuban writer Antonio José Ponte talks about the “arte nuevo de hacer ruinas” (new art of making ruins) that characterizes the urban space of Havana, and refers to himself as a “ruinólogo” (ruinologist). Antonio José Ponte, Un arte de hacer ruinas y otros cuentos (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005). This look at ruinous Latin American modernity appears in various artistic genres. A stroll through Montevideo might remind one of the ways the dilapidated condition of the buildings is aestheticized in Christine Laurent’s film Transatlantique (1996). Also contemporarily, Caetano Veloso, in his song “Fora da ordem” (1991), conceives of Latin American reality in these terms: “Aquí tudo parece que é ainda construção e já é ruína” [Here everything looks half built and already lies in ruins]. I thank Emilio Irigoyen for having pointed me to this song in the context of my work. 104 Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo o civilización y barbarie [1845] (Buenos Aires: Sopena, 1963), p. 28. 105 Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism. The First Complete English Translation, trans., Kathleen Ross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 49. 106 Sarmiento, Facundo o civilización y barbarie, p. 28. 107 Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, p. 49. 108 For a discussion of the presence of orientalism in Sarmiento, see, among others, Carlos Altamirano, “El orientalismo y la idea del despotismo en el Facundo”, in Carlos Altamirano and Beatriz Sarlo, Ensayos argentinos. De Sarmiento a la vanguardia (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1997), pp. 83–102. The use of the Arab analogy (among other analogies, a rhetorical operation usually employed by Sarmiento) has been lucidly studied by Ricardo Piglia, in one of the foundational critical texts about Facundo. See Ricardo Piglia, “Notas sobre Facundo”, Punto de vista. Revista de cultura. 3: 8 (1980), pp. 15–18. 109 It is true that the use of Portuguese should come as no surprise in Burton’s writing, and that it cannot be linked to his support—or lack thereof—of the imperialist Brazilian enterprise. It is likely that Burton did not know the Spanish or Guaraní names for the things he was describing, and that his use of Portuguese is due simply to that fact. What interests me here, though, is to propose that the adoption of the Brazilian perspective—which is not constant in the text, but rather critical, shifting, and problematic—has to do here with the “progressive” perspective that, as I believe I have convincingly argued, is present in Burton’s text starting even with the dedication to Sarmiento, and is one of the keys to reading the war as Burton sees it. 110 Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 13.

Burton’s Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay  85 111 Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins, p. 295. 112 That is what occurs not just in Heart of Darkness but in many accounts of travels to places far from the metropolitan center. The following chapters are no exception in this respect. 113 The root words in Latin are in this case sero and its derivative desero. The term “deserter” must have originated from the latter word, though it probably arrived in Spanish (and English) through the French deserter (Corominas, Breve diccionario, p. 208). Of particular interest for my research is what Ernout and Meillet say about the Latin word desero: “term originating from military language” (Alfred Ernout and A. Millet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine; histoire des mots [1932] [Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1952], p. 1091). It is the antonym of conserere. Ernout and Meillet offer two opposing examples: conserere pugnam (to engage in battle) and deserere pugnam (to abandon battle). Thence the term “deserter”. Ernout and Meillet continue, “In everyday usage, it has acquired the meaning of ‘to abandon’, desertus ‘dropped’ (by those who were attached), abandoned, deserted”(Ernout and Millet, Dictionnaire, p. 1092). This, I believe, offers sufficient evidence of the close relationship between the two terms. Here again I am indebted to Juan Introini. 114 Desertion was also a grave problem for the Uruguayan army during the war. Colonel León de Palleja’ account of the war is a good example of this. In it, the desperate narrator refers to desertion as “the worm that gnaws our body” [gusano roedor de nuestro cuerpo]. León de Palleja, Diario de campaña de las fuerzas aliadas contra el Paraguay. Tomo I [1865] (Montevideo: Ministerio de Instrucción Pública y Previsión Social, 1960), p. 71. 115 In a recent book, María Gainza has rewritten this quotation in the following way: “Antes de emprender su viaje río abajo de regreso a Buenos Aires, Burton oyó hablar de un falansterio en medio de la selva. ‘Hay gente que no quiere la guerra’, decían los campesinos. Se referían a un grupo de hombres, unos doscientos de ambos bandos, que habían desertado para crear un refugio al margen de la civilización… El Quilombo del Gran Chaco, lo llamaban. Nadie sabía bien dónde estaba, nadie sabía realmente qué pasaba ahí dentro, porque los que llegaban hasta allá nunca regresaban”. [Before beginning his journey downriver back to Buenos Aires, Burton heard about a phalanstery in the middle of the jungle. “There are people who do not want the war”, the peasants would say. They were referring to a group of men, about two hundred from both sides, who had deserted and created a refuge at the margins of civilization… It was known as the Gran Chaco Quilombo. Nobody knew quite where it was, nobody really knew what happened there, because those who reached it never returned.] (María Gainza, El nervio óptico [Barcelona: Anagrama, 2017], p. 29).

2 In Praise of Deviation W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore;— Turn wheresoe’er I may, By night or day. The things which I have seen I now can see no more. William Wordsworth, “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”1

During the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the British Empire expanded greatly and encompassed vast territories such as India, South Africa, Australia, and Canada. Though Latin America was never formally part of these possessions, the British nevertheless exerted a powerful influence there that nearly dominated several national economies. This influence was manifested mainly through what has been called informal empire, a manner of controlling particular regions or nations through economic means, regardless of whether there has been a political appropriation of the territory. In their discussion of informal empire, Gallagher and Robinson point to the cases of Brazil and Argentina. After helping the Portuguese king flee the invasion of Napoleonic troops and escorting him to Brazil in 1808, the British were granted enormous preferential treatment in their trade dealings with the South American colony. 2 This is not an example of a concrete attempt at political domination, though the economic benefits are closely linked to political events. In Argentina and Uruguay, the British desire to achieve unimpeded navigation of the River Plate and other waterways served to justify the empire’s involvement in numerous wars during the 1830s and 1840s. Gallagher and Robinson claim that Juan Manuel de Rosas, the caudillo who governed Argentina for nearly 20 years and fiercely opposed foreign presence in the country, was ousted from power more because of the possibilities offered by future trade with

W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land  87 England than because of specific British interventions.3 British interests in Uruguay were also important throughout the nineteenth century, and although this presence remained unnoticed in most Uruguayan fiction of the period (this, as we have seen, is what Jennifer French calls the “invisible empire”), a novel written in England toward the end of the century paid particular attention to it. In this chapter I will examine the relationship between the dynamics of power—state and imperial—and the representation of territory and people in the novel The Purple Land (1885) by William Henry Hudson (1841–1922). The first-person narrative describes the travels of Richard Lamb, an alter ego of the author, through the extremely violent territory of Uruguay during the late 1860s and early 1870s, where he has several adventures and encounters numerous dangers. At one interesting metanarrative moment, the protagonist tells another character that he will write the novel we are reading, and explains the title, linking it to violence: “I intend writing a story of my wanderings in the Banda Orientál, and I will call my book The Purple Land; for what more suitable name can one find for a country so stained with the blood of her children?”4 Richard Lamb is an Englishman raised in Argentina, where he marries Paquita (an Argentine) against the will of her family. This event triggers their flight to Uruguay, insistently called the Banda Oriental (Uruguay’s colonial name) in the novel, in order to escape the law, for this unauthorized marriage is portrayed as a criminal act. The novel recounts these events only as memories, since the narrative begins with the couple’s arrival in Montevideo: “I begin my itinerary where, safe on our little ship, with the towers of Buenos Ayres fast fading away in the west, we began to feel free from apprehension” (p. 3). After Lamb reaches Montevideo, described as being overrun with crime, and is unable to find a stable job there, he heads for the interior of the country on his own in search of work, leaving Paquita with an aunt who lives in the city. Then, having failed in his efforts, he abandons his original goal and embarks on a series of adventures, postponing his return to Montevideo again and again. He narrates his travels through the countryside, where he visits several departments (the country’s political divisions), giving a somewhat precise account of the directions and parts of the country visited: “I took the road northwards through Canelones department, and was well on into the Florida department when I put up for the night at the solitary mud rancho of an old herdsman” (pp. 11–12). This precision has allowed critics to sketch an approximate map of Lamb’s travels in Uruguay (see Figure 3). The tales recounted in the novel deal with two different aspects, both of which grow in intensity and complexity. On the one hand, they present a series of encounters with Uruguayan women characterized mainly by romance and gallantry, though erotic desire does peek through from time to time. On the other hand—and this is the aspect that will interest me more here—the protagonist’s interactions

88  W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land

Figure 3  A  pproximate map of Lamb’s travels narrated in The Purple Land. 5

with the other characters become more and more violent. Lamb’s own attitude changes noticeably throughout the story: while at first he came to Uruguay to escape the law’s violent punishment, he ends up engaging in violence himself. On several occasions he meets the chameleonic General Santa Coloma, a fictitious character who stands in for the leader of the Partido Blanco’s [White Party] rebellion against the governing Partido Colorado [Red Party], in which the protagonist plays a brief but significant role. After his failed participation in war (the Blanco army is quickly defeated), Lamb continues his trip alone, and ends up killing a man who threatens to denounce him to the authorities. The end of the narrative is signaled by the obligatory return to the city of Montevideo, which will lead in turn to the subsequent return to Buenos Aires and the later death of Lamb’s wife. The events that take place once the narrator leaves Uruguay are again not narrated but appear as recollections in the first chapters of the novel. One of the most remarkable elements of this text, frequently commented upon by scholars, is the protagonist’s shift from an imperialist

W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land  89 position to a discourse that, toward the end of the novel, questions and undermines imperialist logic, lauding a particular natural and primitive manner of living. While this positive valuation of nature and this critique of the notion of progress are key in most of Hudson’s work, the link between these elements and violence—and, specifically, war—has not been studied in any depth. This violence is one that finds its most direct expression in war and that opposes the equally violent forms of both state oppression, on the one hand, and imperial power, on the other. My objective is therefore to examine the relationship between war—a particular form of violence—and the rhetoric of travel articulated in The Purple Land. Jorge Luis Borges, in reading the text as an example of gaucho literature and including it within the criollo literary canon, notes the complexity that the protagonist, Richard Lamb, acquires over the course of his journey thanks to “chance and … the diversification of war”6 [“el azar y … la variedad de la guerra”].7 The odd terms in which Borges refers to the effects of war hark back to the significant shifts in identity that, because of the experience of war, the protagonist undergoes in terms of his relationship with the land and with the state. In this novel, unlike in any of Hudson’s other writings, violence and war are incorporated into the interlinkage between travel and nature that is a common theme throughout the body of his work. Because The Purple Land is the account of a journey, movement is central to the plot, and the rhetoric of travel serves as one of the story’s structural elements. Movement also acquires a symbolic value in that it gives rise to a variety of instabilities that grow gradually more important over the course of the novel. It is for this reason that I read Hudson’s novel via Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of nomadism.8 The different elements that are important to the novel—violence as natural, nature as violent, the centrality of war, the critique of the modern state, constant movement in geographical space, the protagonist’s increasingly fluid and mobile identity, the growing presence of rural spaces, and the consequent erasure of the urban space—are a major part of what these two philosophers have called the war machine and nomadic space. These notions allow us to read the profound fluidity and instability in The Purple Land as forms of resistance to the violently homogenizing and ­centralizing discourse that would be imposed in Uruguay in the mid-1870s. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the state seeks to codify its territory, to read and interpret it, to assign it directionalities, points of arrival and departure, roads: “Settling, sedentarizing labor-power, regulating the movement of the flow of labor, assigning it channels and conduits … this has always been one of the principal affairs of the State, which undertook to conquer both a band vagabondage and a body nomadism.”9 Controlling spaces (and movement within them) is essential to the state, which cannot be conceived of without precise limits and a concrete area, without territory on which to impose its power. We might recall the fundamental

90  W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land distinction that Deleuze and Guattari draw between striated space and smooth space.10 In this regard it is relevant to analyze how the main character in The Purple Land moves, what relationship he establishes with the territory, how he travels, how he “occupies space”. Hudson, I suggest, writes against that official effort to delimit, to control, to oversee movement, as part of an effort to stabilize and fix identities in place. In what follows I will discuss these issues in depth, taking into consideration some particularities of Hudson’s life and work, and the political and economic context regarding both the imperial presence of British interests in Uruguay and the specific dynamics of the country during the 1860s and 1870s. I will then compare three episodes in which the narrator climbs the Cerro de Montevideo (the highest hill in the city, 132 meters), from where he discusses ways of relating to the Uruguayan territory and its people, and that in my reading constitute the structural axis of the novel. I will then analyze the war scene in the novel alongside other moments in which the protagonist employs violence, and the identitarian instabilities these episodes impose on him and his continuous flight. The chapter will then move to a reading of the impossibility of return suggested by the novel, seen in the fugitive nature of the protagonist. This must be considered, I argue, in connection to the strong presence of nostalgia in the text. Finally, I will briefly discuss the notion of “consolidated vision” suggested by Edward Said and the ways in which The Purple Land should be read together with other British texts that complicate the usual perspective on the representation of foreign lands.

“On the Sensation of Not Being Fully There” Born in Quilmes (in what is now Argentina) in 1841 to US parents, Hudson lived and worked for several years in his birth country, traveled to Uruguay and Patagonia, and in 1874 left South America, never to return.11 He settled in London, where he lived until his death and where he published—always in English—all of his work. But his displacements were not merely geographical in nature. They were also linguistic, since although he wrote in English, he frequently wrote about ­Spanish-speaking territories: the Spanish language is present as an element of interference in his Anglo-Saxon discourse.12 Ana Inés Larre Borges has stressed the fact that Hudson started writing right after he set sail for England. The first thing he wrote was a travel diary.13 Eleven years later, The Purple Land would be his first novel. Writing in English about a distant land had a dual purpose: the book was a way to enter the English literary world, to construct its author as a traveler in a nation of travelers and, fundamentally, as an Englishman.14 His literary success in England was limited, but he ended up obtaining some recognition, particularly after the publication of The Naturalist in La Plata (1892) and Idle Days in Patagonia (1893), a book that recounts a trip Hudson

W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land  91 made to the southern regions of Argentina, and whose understanding of the relationships between humans and nature should be read alongside that found in The Purple Land.15 After years of living in England, he began to travel and write prolifically about his adopted home. Some examples of his work on the landscapes and peoples of England are Afoot in England (1909), A Shepherd’s Life: Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs (1910), and A Traveller in Little Things (1921). His biographer Felipe Arocena has suggested that the conceptualization of travel, nature, and progress in these works has many points in common with Hudson’s South American-­themed works, specifically The Purple Land.16 His only real success was Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest (1904), a novel set in the Amazon rainforest (which Hudson did not visit) that today can be found in an edition of Oxford World’s Classics and upon which a 1959 homonymous Hollywood film starring Audrey Hepburn and Anthony Perkins was based. Jason Wilson affirms that “only at the very end of his life (the 1916 edition of Green Mansions) did Hudson make any money”.17 In 1915, John Galsworthy wrote a prologue to this novel, and one year later Theodore Roosevelt wrote an “Introductory Note” to a US edition of The Purple Land. Virginia Woolf mentioned Hudson on several occasions, not with excessive enthusiasm, although she pointed out that The Purple Land was among his best works.18 Hudson’s work has some interesting points in common with that of Joseph Conrad, namely the sincere interest that the two writers shared about far-off lands and their problematic relationship with the imperial project. In fact, both writers, while never themselves engaged in a sustained exchange, were close friends with Robert Cunninghame Graham (1852– 1936), who frequently traveled to Latin America, a region about which he wrote abundantly.19 Despite being well regarded in life, Hudson was largely forgotten soon after his death. He was never a canonical British writer, and studies of his work remain scarce in the UK.20 He is much more widely read and studied in Argentina and Uruguay. The Purple Land is a fictionalized version of an actual trip that Hudson made to Uruguay in the late 1860s. Arocena notes that Hudson must have traveled to Uruguay in 1868 and that he most likely explored a large portion of its territory. 21 Ruben Cotelo, for his part, claims in his introduction to the Spanish translation of the book that Hudson remained in Uruguay from mid-1868 to March 1869.22 Hudson himself admits in his letters that he based his novel upon his trip.23 The protagonist of the novel is not, however, a transplanted criollo or the Quilmes-born son of US immigrants, but an Englishman. Argentina is never mentioned in the novel by name, but referred to as “that fatal country which I had inhabited from boyhood and had learned to love like my own, and had hoped never to leave” (p. 2), words which make it clear that the country was not Lamb’s birthplace. This erasure of Hudson’s own birth in the text, this choosing of England as the site of origin of the self, constitutes

92  W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land an interesting element in the way identities shift and the meaning of origins becomes blurry in the novel. Nevertheless, even though Lamb is an Englishman, over the course of the novel he ceases to identify himself with the progress-oriented, civilizing initiatives promoted by the place he calls home. This process should be read as a nostalgic effort to recover something fundamental that has been lost. The expression that opens this section, “on the sensation of not being fully there” (“a sensação de não estar de todo” in Portuguese), adequately conveys the intricate ­operations related to the representation of national identity and belonging in the novel. Flora Süssekind has used this beautiful phrase to describe travelers’ failed attempt to seek an origin, an endeavor that is also, as we will see in this chapter, a theme in Hudson’s writing.24

The Purple Land: Between Informal Empire and Civil War In The Purple Land, war and revolution are key to articulating a new relationship between the protagonist and the Uruguayan state, and between the protagonist and the British Empire. Though the influence of the British Empire in Latin America was primarily informal, there were deliberate attempts to infiltrate the political arena. Indeed, the title of the two-volume first edition of the novel, The Purple Land That England Lost, retained a certain imperial nostalgia that the text nevertheless also mocks. 25 This title is an allusion to the failed attempt at political dominance in the Platine region known there as the “English invasions” (1806 and 1807). 26 In the subsequent edition (1904), the title was shortened to The Purple Land, though the author added a long subtitle that emphasizes the ideas of travel and adventure: Being a Narrative of One Richard Lamb’s Adventures in the Banda Orientál, in South America, as Told by Himself. One of the clearest examples of British intervention in the history of nineteenth-century Latin America, overlooked by Gallagher and Robinson, was the creation of Uruguay. Seeing that the war between Argentina and Brazil for possession of the territory (1825–28) had already dragged on for years without either side showing any intention of relinquishing its claim, the English diplomat Lord Ponsonby proposed the creation of a new state that would guarantee Great Britain certain trade benefits and the free navigation of the rivers. Alan Knight refers to this episode as a form of “nontraditional” imperialism, since the objective was not annexation or direct political control: British political and military efforts to establish Uruguay as an independent buffer state between the hostile republics of Argentina and Brazil, and thus to keep the Plate open to British commerce, would, by virtue of its coercive, interventionist, and political nature, constitute some sort of imperialism, even though the goal was not Uruguayan annexation but Uruguayan survival. 27

W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land  93 Peter Winn has pointed to Uruguay as emblematic of the modus operandi of informal empire: “The establishment of the new republic represented both the triumph and the quintessence of British informal empire.”28 According to the historiography of Uruguay, it would not be accurate to assert that British diplomacy was directly responsible for the creation of the Uruguayan state, though it seems incontrovertible that it played a central role in that process.29 This episode shows how direct political intervention was sometimes disguised beneath a diplomatic rhetoric as the best way to achieve economic benefits. Through these different forms of informal empire, the UK maintained a close relationship with Latin America. The economic presence is particularly highlighted by Gallagher and Robinson: “By 1913, in Latin America as a whole, informal imperialism had become so important for the British economy that £999,000,000, over a quarter of the total investment abroad, was invested in that region.”30 Yet the efforts to stabilize the subcontinent and make it attractive to foreign investment ran into obstacles, since many South American countries were mired in civil war until the final decades of the nineteenth century. Uruguay was no exception. At the time during which the events described in The Purple Land seem to take place (when Hudson visited Uruguay), violence loomed large in the nation’s political life. José Pedro Varela, who was responsible for Uruguay’s most significant educational reform (carried out during the modernization process that began in the 1870s) concluded, after assessing the armed uprisings that took place between 1830 and 1876, “And so, in 45 years, 18 revolutions! One might very well say, without exaggeration, that war is the status quo in the Republic.”31 Indeed, one of the years most racked by violence in Uruguayan history was 1868, the year that Hudson visited the country. Not only was the country bogged down in its participation in the War of the Triple Alliance, but 19 February of that year saw the double assassination of then President Venancio Flores and former president and Partido Blanco opposition leader Bernardo P. Berro. Though there are no direct references in Hudson’s text to these events, passages such as the following appear to allude to them: The expected change and tempest is a political one. The plot is ripe, the daggers sharpened, the contingent of assassins hired, the throne of human skulls, styled in their ghastly facetiousness a Presidential Chair, is about to be assaulted. It is long, weeks or even months, perhaps, since the last wave, crested with bloody froth, rolled its desolating flood over the country; it is high time, therefore, for all men to prepare themselves for the shock of the succeeding wave. (pp. 8–9) The fact that this spectacularly bloody chapter happened in the year of Hudson’s visit must have intensely affected his portrayal of the country.32

94  W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land But The Purple Land has also been linked to events that took place a few years later. The Revolución de las Lanzas [Revolution of the Lances] (1870–72), which critics have identified with the Battle of San Paulo (the fictitious conflict that Lamb participates in), was one of the most important revolutions in nineteenth-century Uruguay: “Suffice it to say that the regular armies and unattached groups on both sides totaled more than 16,000 men, in an Uruguay that had around 400,000 inhabitants.”33 In addition, it was Uruguay’s last premodern military conflict (hence its name). The year 1876 (when Varela stops considering wars as pervasive in Uruguay) is in fact the year in which the period known as “militarism” began. This era ushered in a succession of military governments that lasted—with an exceedingly brief interlude of civil government—until 1890. During this time, and particularly during the presidency of General Lorenzo Latorre (1876–80), a veteran of the Paraguayan War, the country underwent an effort to modernize and become a player in the international market. Prior to that, the Uruguayan economy had been a predominantly agricultural system that lacked a capitalist logic of production and accumulation.34 The central political influence that the British Empire had exerted in the early years of Uruguayan independence (Uruguay became de facto independent in 1828, although the first constitution was inaugurated in 1830, when the first president took office) would now become economic in nature: in the initial years of militarism, the railroad system was expanded and trains reached most of the interior of the country.35 During those years the state created a centralized power based on the army and the rural police. Perfecting the repressive apparatus was one of its goals, as historian Eduardo Méndez Vives has affirmed: “the government allowed and encouraged the arbitrary use of force, understanding the objective of protecting the right to property and rural peace as justifying any excess.”36 The government now held the monopoly on Remington rifles (a decree from 1876 established this monopoly; also, the rifles were extremely expensive for private citizens to buy) used to subdue the countryside, where property boundaries were clearly marked with wire fences.37 The affirmation of the right to private property was one of the key tenets of these administrations, and one of its consequences was the concentration of land ownership. Previously, country property was not clearly indicated, and animals roamed the fields freely, at great risk of being stolen or simply killed to feed the gauchos who also traveled the countryside. Movement across the land became more regulated, or flat-out prohibited. In the cultural landscape of rural Uruguay, one of the most drastic consequences of this transformation of rural property into units of capitalist production was in fact the extinction of the traditional nomadic gaucho, a phenomenon that Lamb complains about near the end of The Purple Land. This point is important because the action of the novel

W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land  95 takes place in the final years of the precapitalist period, even though the book was published in 1885, when all of the changes described had already been implemented and Uruguay was becoming a modern country. The Purple Land narrates a disappearing world, one that, at the moment of publication, no longer existed. Hudson narrates the moments that precede the disappearance, when the death of that world is already tangibly imminent. In the novel, the agent responsible for this destruction is progress and the effects it has brought with it: economic growth and South America’s entrance into the global markets. In other words, Europe and modern capitalist dynamics take on the blame for this definitive reconfiguration of the landscape. Lamb’s understanding of this process takes shape throughout the novel and becomes explicit toward the end, at which point he directs his speech at the country he is about to abandon: “may the blight of our superior civilisation never fall on your wild flowers, or the yoke of our progress be laid on your h ­ erdsman— careless, graceful, music-loving as the birds—to make him like the sullen, abject peasant of the Old World!” (p. 248).

Modes of (Not) Looking In an essay on English travelers in South America in the first half of the nineteenth century, Jean Franco examines different discursive strategies through which the travelers’ texts do exactly the opposite of what they claim: they avoid describing, listening, seeing.38 The narrative voice establishes a perspective that is fixed and undeviating from the very beginning, what Franco describes as “a unified subject, and whose unity and purpose can only be maintained by suppressing the discourse of the other”.39 This perspective coincides with what Mary Louise Pratt has called the “capitalist vanguard”: those travelers who arrived in South America after Alexander von Humboldt, and whose perspective was that of informal empire.40 These men traveled in search of natural resources that could offer them (or the state they represented) profits. Their gaze was pointed only in that direction, disregarding everything that might have diverted them from the logic of capitalist accumulation that allowed them to identify exploitable resources. Hudson’s novel offers a critique of that logic, even if there are problems with its nostalgic construction of Uruguay and its adoption of a conservative perspective that views the restoration of the colonial system as positive. The indisputable enemy in Hudson’s text is modernization, against which open violence is proposed as an antidote to foreign incursion into Uruguay, as a form of independence and identity construction for the character and for the country. It is important to note that the narrator is not unaware that the practice of war is a constant in the presence of the British Empire abroad, even in its past intervention in Uruguay. In his initial rage against that unproductive country, Lamb seems to be

96  W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land invoking the passage of Tacitus used as the epigraph of this book in alluding to the imperial desert-making operation: Oh, for a thousand young men of Devon and Somerset here with me, every one of them with a brain on fire with thoughts like mine! … What a mighty cheer we would raise for the glory of the old England that is passing away! Blood would flow in yon streets as it never flowed before, or, I should say, as it only flowed in them once, and that was when they were swept clean by British bayonets. And afterwards there would be peace, and the grass would be greener and the flowers brighter for that crimson shower. (p. 9, emphasis added) The quotation simultaneously affirms the imperial discourse and undermines it by identifying what the text describes as the bloodiest moment in Uruguay’s history with the imperial presence and revealing the deceitful nature of the equivalence between progress and peace that Lamb himself extols at the beginning of the novel. The peace brought by empire is, in this novel, as it is for Tacitus, the emptying-out brought by war. Yet The Purple Land seems to focus above all on the existence of an institutional and imperceptible violence that spreads via economic channels and characterizes the modes of neocolonial penetration. In The Purple Land we see a fundamental shift in both the narrator’s manner of looking and his vantage point. Once the journey—and, with it, the instability—begins, the narrative voice abandons its initial effort to give a fixed or unwavering account of the experience. There are three moments when Lamb climbs the Cerro de Montevideo, which open and close the novel. The first moment related is actually the one that occurred last (I will refer to it as the third ascent, then). In the very first pages of the novel, Lamb explains that after his return to Buenos Aires once his adventures in the Banda Oriental ended, and once he was imprisoned and Paquita died as a consequence, he went back to the Banda Oriental. This climb functions, then, as a sort of out-of-place epilogue. The narrator explains that he would climb the hill often to reflect and contemplate; he claims to be looking, though he in fact is remembering: Sometimes sitting on the summit of that great solitary hill, which gives the town its name, I would gaze by the hour on the wide prospect towards the interior, as if I could see, and never weary of seeing, all that lay beyond—plains and rivers and woods and hills, and cabins where I had rested and many a kindly human face. Even the faces of those who had ill-treated or regarded me with evil eyes now appeared to have a friendly look. (p. 2, emphasis added)

W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land  97 Once Lamb’s travels end, those spaces are now familiar, and the Uruguayans have acquired faces; however, loss consumes everything. The landscape contains merely a past that, though wholly Lamb’s own, is nevertheless inaccessible. At the same time, the narrative seems to take that return as its starting point; not just because it begins there, but also because it is upon returning to Montevideo that the narrator decides to write the story of his adventures (although he does not do it there or then). In this way, returning offers a confirmation of loss, and it is that confirmation that makes the narrative itself possible. The other two ascents of the Cerro de Montevideo happen during the main story, and they symmetrically oppose each other in terms of the feelings and opinions about the country expressed by the protagonist. On the first ascent, there is an explicit imperial desire that is counterbalanced by his ultimate conclusion, on the second: that these lands will be better off without Great Britain. The colonialist enterprise is celebrated at its first appearance when the narrator laments that his country has not maintained control over these territories after the invasions of 1806 and 1807 referred to in the book’s original title, The Purple Land That England Lost.41 At bottom, though, what this succession of three ascents proposes are contrary ways of looking that mark a shift in the narrator’s relationship with the territory he traverses. The key difference lies not just in the way the character claims to feel on each of his climbs up the Cerro, but especially in what he sees and in how he looks at it. However, it is only in his first account that he is able to truly describe and appropriate at the same time: “Whichever way I turn”, I said, “I see before me one of the fairest habitations God has made for man: great plains smiling with everlasting spring; ancient woods; swift, beautiful rivers; ranges of blue hills stretching away to the dim horizon. And beyond those fair slopes, how many leagues of pleasant wilderness are sleeping in the sunshine, where the wild flowers waste their sweetness and no plough turns the fruitful soil, where deer and ostrich roam fearless of the hunter, while over all bends a blue sky without a cloud to stain its exquisite beauty?” (p. 8) The way this discourse manages to dominate through the act of describing is an example of what Pratt has called “the monarch-of-all-I-survey trope” in connection with Richard Burton’s account of his supposed discovery of the source of the Nile, revealing how the description and aestheticization of the landscape within the frame of the discourse of “discovery” allow its subsequent appropriation.42 This passage from The Purple Land constructs a landscape that has not been transformed

98  W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land by work or capital. Furthermore, the territory encompassed by the eye seems to be much vaster than what the eye can actually take in from its observation point (the narrator sees “great plains”, “beautiful rivers”, and “ranges of blue hills”). It is as if, through the gaze, the enthusiasm produced by the void conjures up the Uruguayan territory, its fauna and hydrography, in its entirety. What the eye sees here gives way to imagination: the discourse creates the fantasy of a savage land that is slumbering, waiting for civilization to awaken it.43 The capitalist logic in which this perspective is rooted sees nature as unproductive and, thus, as in need of appropriation. A desert must be created through discourse in order to be subsequently appropriated. The mere mention of the absence of productive forces could be understood by any reader as a call to expand the informal empire to encompass those lands.44 The previous quotation includes the aestheticizing vision of an immaculate blue sky that symbolically reflects the uniformity of the ­desert ­being discursively built and which, at the same time, produces “the ­relation of mastery predicated between the seer and the seen” (also, the land reflects the sky, as the hills are actually “blue”).45 In these first chapters, the narrator is representing the logic of empire, and this description anticipates a domination that the space itself is construed as calling for. Mastery is wielded not just over the empty land but also over those who inhabit it, because in fact, immediately after this description, men, too, appear. They are portrayed as incapable of taking advantage of the virgin land that surrounds them and from which, indeed, they cannot be differentiated: “What have they done with this their heritage? What are they doing even now? They are sitting dejected in their houses, or standing in their doorways with folded arms and anxious, expectant faces” (p. 8). Motionless, identified once more with the equally motionless land, they seem to be waiting for a master who will show them how to produce, who will teach them the value—always economic, of course—of the country they live in. To a large extent the perspective of the traveler in The Purple Land has to do with the place that man occupies with regard to nature: these men do not take advantage of the environment, are incapable of exploiting it, of dominating it; they are its peers and do not seek to place themselves above it (we mustn’t forget that Lamb himself is surveying that land from above). The desert is the equivalent of unproductivity. These settlers are immobile, and depicted as being far from the deserted lands described, which they possess but do not transform; insofar as they are unproductive, they, too, are desert. The attribution of idleness and lack of productivity to the local populations, which is central to the racist civilizing discourse of nineteenth-century imperialism, is part of an operation to legitimize the political or—­afterward, in the years of informal empire—economic domination of territory.46 The need for productivity obsessed Latin America’s intellectual elites as well, and its lack was made part of their exclusionary discourse within

W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land  99 the national space, as Graciela Montaldo has shown: “Idleness is the most worrying tendency from a businessman’s rational-modernizing perspective because it is fundamentally threatening: in a productivist society, a person who has no function has no identity.”47 If people do not produce, they do not count, and thus are absent. This moment is completely focused on the future, on the ways in which this territory can be transformed; it is quite different from the third ascent in which the relationship with the land is seen as an irretrievably lost experience. The strongly optimistic tone of the first ascent is denied by the third one, in which the narrator remembers (no longer sees) while being again in exile, this time in complete solitude after Paquita’s death. The second ascent of the Cerro serves to negate the first. When he climbs the Cerro for a second time, Lamb rejects the very idea of looking: “I did not gaze admiringly on the magnificent view that opened before me, nor did the wind, blowing fresh from the beloved Atlantic, seem to exhilarate me. My eyes were cast down and I dragged my feet like one that was weary” (pp. 242–43). This time, Lamb no longer sees or describes anything. There is no longer a “magnificent view” to survey. A comparison of these two moments reveals Lamb’s journey to be a process through which territory is made illegible. The subject adopts a manner of looking that makes it impossible to offer a totalizing and legibilizing explanation of the landscape. Now the gaze turns to spaces nearby, operating on a micro, more intimate level. In fact, he ends up kneeling and kissing a stone. Grandiloquent discourse and a panoramic gaze are no longer possible.48 It is no longer possible to take in all of Uruguay with a single glance. In The Purple Land, Lamb’s depictions of the territory reflect a gradual distancing from what Scott calls “state maps of legibility” as he learns to see elements that remain invisible to the modernizing gaze.49 In parallel fashion, the fantasy unfurled in the initial gaze is replaced by memories of adventures and the territory’s inhabitants: “After my rambles in the interior, where I carried about in me only a fading remnant of that old time-honoured superstition to prevent the most perfect sympathy between me and the natives I mixed with, I cannot say that I am of that opinion now” (p. 243). These words substitute the notion of “discovery” by a motionless subject from atop the promontory with the firsthand knowledge garnered from the experience of travel. The static description of the deserted lands created in the opening chapters is subverted. The person who “knows” now is Lamb, since he is now able to move away from the discourse of progress, which no longer proves adequate for understanding the New World reality; in the end, Lamb associates it with prejudice and ignorance (“I was then ignorant”, p. 243), represented in this scene by “these old English spectacles, framed in oak and with lenses of horn” (p. 243), which the narrator proceeds metaphorically to bury right there on the Cerro. If we read the first ascent as

100  W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land a form of symbolic possession, or call for colonization, here we find the opposite operation: in a clear act of dispossession the narrator is divesting himself of his initial way of looking. What he has acquired is a new mode of knowledge and of relating to nature. On the third ascent, as we have said, Lamb no longer looks—he merely recalls, knowing that looking does not grant possession (“as if I could see”). Thus, the three ascents mark three different operations: the confident gaze that possesses from afar, the impossibility of looking (and possessing) inherent in the affirmation of proximity and experiential knowledge, and a performance of looking that signifies dispossession and is therefore a door onto memory and narration (perhaps onto narration as the only way of possessing). As these scenes show, there is in The Purple Land an awareness of the tropes and turns of phrase that were commonly used during that period in imperial descriptions of supposedly newly discovered territories.50 The critique of the imperial gaze, identified with progress, becomes explicit when, on this second climb, Lamb (while no longer gazing, let’s recall) states that “British occupation does not give to the heart all the things for which it craves” (p. 244). As this happens toward the end of the novel, it becomes clear that the critique of those imperial tropes was one of the book’s undertakings. Lamb’s description of his second visit to the Cerro de Montevideo ends with an encomium on violence, disorder, and passion over order, political stability, and progress. Lamb assumes—problematically—that the premodern Banda Oriental was a space of equality and happiness: “If this absolute equality is inconsistent with perfect political order, I for one should grieve to see such order established” (p. 245). The narrator’s insistence on referring to Uruguay as the Banda Oriental, the name given to the country under Spanish colonial rule, can be read as a nostalgic attempt to restore a “lost paradise” of premodernity.51 Crime and violence are, at the end of the novel, seen as necessary for the existence of a “healthy” society: “A community in which there are not many crimes cannot be morally healthy” (p. 245). The association between violence and a positive morality is itself a protest against the modern state, which institutionalizes order as a way of maintaining apparent harmony, while making all forms of violence illegal except those that it itself produces. Thus, violence is clearly a threat which Hudson is prepared to accept as necessary in order to protect the natural world of the region: I do not wish to be murdered; no man does; yet rather than see the ostrich and deer chased beyond the horizon, the flamingo and blacknecked swan slain on the blue lakes, and the herdsman sent to twang his romantic guitar in Hades as a preliminary to security of person, I would prefer to go about prepared at any moment to defend my life against the sudden assaults of the assassin. (p. 244)

W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land  101 This proto-ecological and powerfully Romantic perspective posits a fundamental and intimate bond between man and the natural world and assumes that the destruction of the latter is an inevitable consequence of progress. The choice is therefore between a world in which man can live freely, even if surrounded by violence, and one in which progress—which is no less violent—is based on the destruction of that natural world.52

Violence, Deviations, and Shifting Identities: Toward a Nomadic Subject Let’s now examine in detail how this change in the perception of the territory comes to happen. As suggested above, it is the result of the narrator’s gradual involvement with the violent dynamics of everyday life in nineteenth-century Uruguay. Even though on his first visit to the Cerro Lamb calls for a productive transformation of the desert he describes (and creates), over the course of The Purple Land he begins to embrace exactly the opposite view, basing his identity on unproductivity, rejecting labor in favor of adventure, violence, and disregard for the laws promulgated by the modern state. Traveling ceases to be a tool for seeking work and instead becomes an end in itself. After an unsuccessful attempt to work on the Virgen de los Desamparados ranch in far-off Paysandú, Lamb is supposed to return to Montevideo. Yet he decides to deviate, not to return immediately: “I now determined to go back towards Montevideo, not, however, over the route I had come by, but making a wide circuit into the interior of the country, where I would explore a new field, and perhaps meet with some occupation at one of the estancias on the way” (p. 36). This is the first deviation, the first rejection of the city and all it signifies (the state, order, family, institutions), the first act of not-returning. Later, the excuses for postponing his return multiply: “my absence from Montevideo had already lasted so long that a few days more could not make much difference one way or the other” (p. 129). The delay does not make the narrator impatient; rather, it serves him as an excuse to prolong his absence. The obstacles to his return cause him not to attempt to overcome them but instead to look for additional obstacles.53 Stripping travel of all commercial or practical meaning is also a ­Romantic gesture. Dennis Porter has noted that in Romanticism “travel becomes self-consciously an end in itself”.54 The Romantic quality that emerges in the latter half of the novel is manifested in a number of aspects, including the conception of travel. The narrator, in the moment of this first deviation, does not merely seek adventure; he ceases to conceive of travel in terms of departure and arrival, nomadifying it. Lamb takes a path that has not been marked, that does not obey the logic of movements controlled by the state. In fact, this first deviation is actually an escape: the protagonist has wounded a man while defending himself from an

102  W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land attack and has as a consequence earned the respect of the gauchos, who will now challenge him to fight to prove his manhood. While he is not yet fleeing from the Uruguayan state (although from the beginning of the novel he is escaping from the law, since his unauthorized marriage with Paquita is treated as a crime in Argentina), he nevertheless, in not taking the expected routes, avoids what in terms of Deleuze and Guattari would be a striated space, one that establishes roads by counting kilometers, measuring space, and channeling—enclosing—movement. It is important to keep in mind how closely linked escape and deviation are in this book. Avoiding roads is also a way to avoid the state itself. When, not long afterward, Lamb encounters Marcos Marcó, who will later reveal himself to be the Blanco revolutionary General Santa Coloma, Marcó tells him that traveling via the official roads is less practical and significantly slower: “The road, he said, is like a lawsuit; round-about, full of puddles and pitfalls, and long to travel” (p. 66). In other words, the road is uncomfortable because it is like the law. To deviate from the official route is, then, to make oneself invisible, to become illegible to the state. This equivalence between travel, deviation, and flight, which is so central to The Purple Land, is the principal lesson that Lamb will adopt from this caudillo-like figure. It is in these first instances of deviation that the narrator embraces the idleness invoked by Montaldo, which becomes the protagonist’s way of occupying territory. Moving without a destination, and even not moving at all, become forms of travel.55 Abandoning objectives and destinations. Celebrating the route and being willing to inhabit it. This is Hudson’s nomadic (and certainly Romantic) credo.56 That rejection of finality, of conclusiveness, that remaining perpetually en route, can also be applied to the narration itself. In chapter 8 of The Purple Land, Lamb recounts a story told by Anselmo, a gaucho who begins by announcing that he is going to describe something unusual, which captures the narrator’s attention and expectations (p. 55). But the story never reaches the anticipated ending: “Here ended Anselmo’s story, without one word about those marvellous matters he had set out to tell. They had all been clean forgotten” (p. 61). There is a clear departure, but the destination is discarded along the way; arrival ceases to be of interest. This episode, which focuses on an apparently useless narration, can be read as yet another form of deviation, as a representation of the nomadic poetics proposed by the novel. Lamb moves in space in the same way that the Uruguayans tell stories. The more experience Lamb shares with the Uruguayans, the more unstable his perspective becomes. The critique of a fixed British identity also emerges in the way Lamb sees himself in his compatriots. The first example of this can be found when he recounts his encounter with a group of Englishmen who live in the countryside and are portrayed as lazy, violent, and heavy drinkers. They are the exemplar of unproductivity and violence. In showing that the English aren’t all that different

W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land  103 from how he sees the locals, Lamb undermines the discourse that posits a clear distinction between them. At the end of the episode, the protagonist ends up fleeing (again) from his countrymen to save himself. In the final pages of the novel, this strategy of mirroring identification appears with a very different character, the “un-Scotched Scotchman” (p. 183) John Carrickfergus. When Lamb meets him, he notes that Carrickfergus, who is married to a Uruguayan woman, does not have the characteristics of the “typical” Scot. Referring to his children, the man says, “All we think about in the old country are books, cleanliness, clothes; what’s good for soul, brain, stomach; and we make ’em miserable. Liberty for everyone—that’s my rule. Dirty children are healthy, happy children” (p. 181). This view openly defies the late nineteenth-­ century hygienic obsession and offers an almost Rousseauian concept of education. Carrickfergus is quite close to Lamb in that moment of the narrative: someone who has discarded certain cultural principles and adopted new and contrasting ones. In fact, he is also a runaway who has left home never to return: “ran away at fifteen, and have never heard a word from home since” (p. 181). Lamb describes him as “that genial runaway John Carrickfergus” (p. 185). The British Empire is no longer represented in the novel by the sordid Englishmen that we see in the first chapters; Carrickfergus signals a change in the way the imperial subjects appear (this is, to a certain extent, the same change that Lamb has undergone).57 This culminates with the adoption of that in-betweenness that Lamb comes to inhabit and from which Hudson writes. In 1926 Jorge Luis Borges, praising The Purple Land—whose title he translated as La tierra cárdena—used an expression similar to “unScotched Scotchman” when he referred to the process of “desinglesamiento” [un-Englishing] that “saves” English characters such as Lamb.58 Borges’s essay was probably the first critical response to The Purple Land in the Platine region, but generally speaking Argentine scholars have not emphasized clearly enough the novel’s foreign nature, the fact that the tale escapes (and this verb is particularly apt) from Argentine territory. 59 Only Borges, in a later essay, remarked on the importance of Uruguay in the novel: “Otro acierto de Hudson es el geográfico. Nacido en la provincia de Buenos Aires, en el círculo mágico de la pampa, elige sin embargo la tierra cárdena donde la montonera fatigó sus primeras y últimas lanzas: el Estado Oriental.”60 [Another of Hudson’s adroit strokes is his treatment of geography. Born in the province of Buenos Aires in the magic circle of the pampa, he nonetheless chooses to write about the purple land where the revolutionary horsemen used their first and last lances: the Banda Oriental].61 It is interesting that Borges (who frequently identified Uruguay with some lost gaucho traditions) insists on calling Uruguay the “Banda Oriental” or, as he does here, the “Estado Oriental”.62 The title of the prologue to the first edition of Hudson’s novel—removed in the 1904 edition—“A Flight to the East” insisted with a tinge of orientalism

104  W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land on that “other” east in which it was possible to take refuge (Montevideo is explicitly called “the city of refuge” [p. 3]).63

Oscillating Identities: War and Flight In the opening pages of The Purple Land, idleness is linked to war: what keeps the settlers inactive is the looming revolution. War, then, not only modifies spaces but also introduces a temporal uncertainty; just as it keeps men motionless, it also creates an expectation that impedes the arrival of progress. Time comes to a halt. Those lands that imperial desire has constructed as waiting passively are in fact anticipating not progress but war. The imminence of military conflict thus characterizes Uruguayan time and space, having been made central to the text from the very first chapter. Horrified, Lamb desperately attempts to be productive, but this environment is of no help: his insistence that “business was … in a complete state of paralysis” (p. 6) shows that the fundamental problem presented by war is economic. Obtaining fat profits is in fact the only objective from the perspective of informal empire, which, as Gallagher and Robinson have persuasively suggested, seeks to avoid the complications that political domination entails. The connection between war and politics, with the corresponding disastrous consequences for trade and “business” (a term that Lamb uses repeatedly), is highlighted in the first chapters. Also in the first chapter, right after he climbs the Cerro for the first time, the protagonist takes on the (always quite distant) curious gaze of the tourist or collector: At first I only acted the intelligent foreigner, going about staring at the public buildings, and collecting curios–strangely named pebbles, and a few military brass buttons, long shed by the garments they once made brave; rusty, misshapen bullets, mementoes of the immortal nine or ten years’ siege which had won for Montevideo the mournful appellation of modern Troy. (p. 6) These are, it is clear, traces left by war.64 A war that at first defines that country without involving the narrator, who observes, explores, collects. This idea of gathering objects and appropriating them is inverted toward the end of the novel, since, as we have seen, in his second ascent of the Cerro Lamb metaphorically deposits his own possession, while posing an experiential view that wipes out distance. While in these first pages we find an urban landscape full of remains of war, of the by-product of someone else’s war, Lamb will eventually transform war into a personal and meaningful experience. Furthermore, while these first remains of epic combats are completely alien, throughout the novel the protagonist

W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land  105 will find intimate memories (in fact, other types of remains) of the experience of war; and these memories will be the origin of the novel, as seen in the analysis of his third ascent. Lamb’s participation in the Battle of San Paulo offers him the experience of violence from “within”, but it also generates a debate about his identity. Nationality is used either as a reason for him to participate or—depending on who is arguing—as an excuse for him not to. In the face of Dolores’s insistent efforts to persuade him to join the fight, Lamb confesses: “I took refuge in the argument that I was a foreigner, that I loved my country with an ardour equal to hers, and that by taking arms in the Banda Orientál I should at once divest myself of all an Englishman’s rights and privileges” (p. 133). And, then, when he finally agrees to take part in the battle, he adds: “once this oppressive, scandalous, and besotted Colorado party is swept with bullet and steel out of the country … I shall go to Santa Coloma to lay down my sword, resuming by that act my own nationality” (p. 136). His participation in the conflict would mean a temporary shedding of his Englishness and an adoption of Uruguayan nationality, thereby positing nationality as a sort of a pose or a disguise that someone can put on and off at will.65 These shifts are also present in the way people see the protagonist: for example, Dolores tells him that “You never seemed to me like a foreigner; ah, Richard, why will you make me remember that you are not one of us!” (p. 134). Misidentifications also happen earlier in the text, regarding nationality and language. When Lamb is stopped by the police, who want to arrest him to recruit him for the army, he says, rather absurdly: “I carry no passport … My nationality is a sufficient protection, for I am an Englishman, as you can see” (p. 68). The notion that nationalities can be easily seen shows the point to which Lamb conceives of them as exterior or ornamental elements. The policeman’s answer complicates this: We have only your word for that … I see in you only a young man complete in all his members, and of such the republic is in need. Your speech is also like that of one who came into the world under this sky. You must go with us. (p. 68) Here, what actually happens is the opposite: to the policeman, Lamb looks (and, significantly, sounds) like a perfect Uruguayan. What each of them “obviously” sees in him is completely different; a dispute over the very notion of belonging is at the center of scenes of (mis)recognition such as this one. Lamb is not the only character in the novel who wears a disguise, who is described ambiguously, whose origins, language, and nationality confuse the people he meets. Santa Coloma, too, the general who leads the rebel Partido Blanco army, constantly puts

106  W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land on disguises, making himself unrecognizable to the narrator—and to other ­characters—on several occasions. The caudillo travels through Uruguayan territory assuming a shifting array of identities and voices. Also Lamb, who does not tell anyone until chapter 17 (out of 28) that he is married, justifies himself by saying that “often in the Banda Orientál I did not quite seem to know how to mix my truth and lies, and so preferred to hold my tongue” (p. 128). As Fermín Rodríguez puts it, “Nobody in the countryside seems to coincide with himself, nobody is what he appears to be.”66 That instability of identity and discourse is what the narrator increasingly adopts. Once he has decided to go to war, as we have seen, Lamb states that his “Uruguayanness” will last as long as the conflict does. Even though the protagonist claims that as a British subject he cannot enter the battlefield, since, from a “civilized” perspective, it would be an aberrant and barbarous act, he is clearly joking (Lamb frequently makes fun of himself, delighting in his own ridicule): what the text actually does, in fact, is bolster the opposite logic. On the one hand, it establishes a differentiation between what we might call institutionalized violence and nomadic violence. The latter is contrary to the former, opposing and combating it. That is, there is a powerful awareness of the violent underpinnings of the discourse of modernization, and not just of the wars through which it is imposed. That violence undergirding imperial occupation and exploitation is clearly referred to for example, in a quotation given earlier in this chapter: “Blood would flow in yon streets as it never flowed before, or, I should say, as it only flowed in them once, and that was when they were swept clean by British bayonets” (p. 9). But the text also plays with the English “horror” of war, which is nothing of the sort. War, for England, was not actually an unbearable or unthinkable experience; rather, it was an almost quotidian practice of domination, even if it was not the chief characteristic of the empire’s presence in Latin America. On the other hand, the novel shows that it is not possible for Lamb to reassume English nationality upon setting down his arms: his engagement in war (and, symbolically, forsaking his nationality) is yet another journey from which there is no return. War grants a fundamental fluidity to Lamb’s already shifting identity. After his participation in the war, Lamb will become a fugitive, although in fact from the start of the novel he has been constantly fleeing: from his family, from the law, from the state, from marriage, from the other Englishmen he encounters, and from a variety of elements (women, political and moral causes) that threaten to hold him back. The text rejects permanence and stability and celebrates their opposites. In the moments before his participation in the battle is decided, Lamb is compared to a real “Oriental” (that is, Uruguayan) by General Santa Coloma, who is also trying to convince him to fight: “‘Richard, you were made for an Oriental,’ he said, ‘only nature at your birth dropped you

W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land  107 down in the wrong country. … [T]he Castilian gravity you have recently assumed is, I fancy, only a passing mood’” (p. 145, emphasis added). Thus, that which is not Uruguayan in Lamb is merely transitory; this is, as we have seen, precisely the opposite idea from that expressed by the protagonist himself before going off to war. The reference to “Castilian gravity”, “to which the General had satirically alluded” (p. 146), as the narrator later recognizes, should be read, I think, as a reference to the protagonist’s uncanniness (or the uncanniness of his origins). Castilians are Europeans, and associated with empire, but they still speak Spanish. The fact that Lamb is playfully characterized as a Castilian indicates that he is “one of us”, but not completely. His Uruguayan friends also cannot understand Lamb’s assertion that he is a complete other, something they just cannot see in him. The Battle of San Paulo is also important because of its outcome. The previous long discussion of identity and the presence of that uncanny foreigner on the battlefield contribute to increasing reader expectations that a narration of the conflict is imminent. Yet a limit appears here, since the actual combat is barely narrated. The only account of events related to the war consists of a conversation between Lamb and an enemy soldier who offends him by calling him French, adding humorously to the national identities in play. Then comes the retreat, a common occurrence during the Revolution of the Lances: “Skirmishes between cavalries extended the conflict indefinitely because they never produced a clear winner: the armies would flee before they were hemmed in.”67 Lamb’s participation remains in the shadows: I am utterly unable to give any clear account of what followed immediately. … [H]ow I ever got out of it all without a scratch is a mystery to me. More than once I was in violent collision with Colorado men, … and several furious blows with sword and lance were aimed at me, but somehow I escaped them all. I emptied the six chambers of my Colt’s revolver, but whether my bullets did any execution or not I cannot pretend to say. In the end I found myself surrounded by four of our men who were furiously spurring their horses out of the fight. (pp. 150–51) The moments of attack and of defense are equally inexplicable. There is no confrontation narrated as such; the attacks are hastily improvised and their targets unknown, as are their consequences. No details are given. In The Purple Land, war appears only as a blurry disarray. The protagonist’s mix of impulsiveness and cowardice, his confusion and inexperience, make war seem to be a brief prolegomenon to a hastily decided flight, the only thing Lamb distinctly remembers. The narrator comes through the conflict unscathed and remains ignorant of how

108  W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land to fight. Lamb recognizes the insufficiency of his description, and his ignorance and inexperience (p. 151). There is no discipline in this nomadic warrior.68 Escape, flight, desertion. Abandoning the war. This is the definitive deviation that prevents his return: taking on the role of the fugitive, the vanquished, the persecuted. His ever-postponed goal was always the city; now, the city becomes the ultimate enemy, the place that must be avoided. As Santa Coloma explicitly advises Lamb: “Do not attempt to return immediately to Montevideo, as that might be dangerous. Make your way by Minas to the southern coast” (p. 146). This time the deviation is forced, as Montevideo is linked to the law of the land. What prevents him from returning is also the impossibility of determining his nationality. Lamb is told that only once he can obtain an English passport, will he be able to return. And, in fact, the moment when he obtains a passport and, as a result, all uncertainty regarding origin and belonging seems to end, he is able to go back to Montevideo. The city is associated, then, with the end of Lamb’s nomadic travels: “At length the piece of paper so long waited for came from the Lomas de Rocha, and with that sacred document, testifying that I was a subject of Her Britannic Majesty, Queen Victoria, all fears and hesitation were dismissed from my mind and I prepared to depart for ­Montevideo” (p. 206). The passage is in fact ironic, since the passport is described as an enormously powerful “piece of paper”, as it supposedly transforms the very experience of travel, Lamb’s relationships to the state, and in fact his relationship with all Uruguayans. He is no longer a fugitive, but an imperial subject. However, nationality is here no more than another disguise, another form of concealing his immersion in the political turmoil and revolutionary violence ubiquitous in the country. The novel (for example, with Lamb’s second ascent to the Cerro) will go on to suggest that even if the protagonist obtains his passport, he increasingly rejects what Britain stands for. Thus, war marks the moment of violent rupture with the law, the consequence of a concrete act of sedition against the state. The text proposes war and the possibility of individual agency to countervail both that violence and the emergence of the modern state, which is seen as part of the same phenomenon. This war, then, is one that is waged not by the state but against it; it is a realm of resistance. The Battle of San Paulo is not, however, the protagonist’s first violent experience, nor will it be his last. When he escapes after the swift defeat of Santa Coloma’s troops in battle, at a store where he stops to eat he is recognized (significantly, as a rebel from the Partido Blanco) and attacked by a man who threatens to kill him. The man asks Lamb not to move while he sends someone to look for the local Alcalde (sheriff). Lamb takes advantage of his adversary’s momentary distraction, probably killing the man with his revolver (before leaving, Lamb asks whether the man is dead or not, and the man’s friends say “it appears

W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land  109 so” [p. 176]). This is his definitive embrace of violence. Lamb never questions his own behavior; indeed, he is proud of his reaction: [N]ot a shade of regret did I feel at his death. Joy at the terrible retribution I had been able to inflict on the murderous wretch was the only emotion I experienced when galloping away into darkness— such joy that I could have sung and shouted aloud had it not seemed imprudent to indulge in such an expression of feeling. (p. 176) There is no longer any turning back, and the darkness into which he travels is clearly symbolic, even if it is a darkness that he has longed for and sought out. This murder is an emancipating act, the affirmation of a violent individual agency opposed to the institutionalized violence of the state and imperial power (he is being attacked as a fugitive from the state). Technically, the narrator has been a fugitive from the start, but that category now becomes definitive. And so the darkness is also a space of self-discovery; it is, despite the apparent contradiction, a moment of enlightenment, an epiphany. From now on, darkness, understood as the absence of the law, is precisely where Lamb will dwell. This liberation is also presented as the sign of a link between nature and violence. When he is exultantly celebrating his killing, Lamb justifies his reaction as a primitive one: “the instinct of self-preservation comes out in all its old original ferocity” (p. 176). Thus, reacting like this is for Lamb spontaneous and entirely natural. As he embraces violence, he embraces also a more primitive state that situates him closer to nature. In his second ascent of the Cerro he recognizes precisely that the dive into violence that he experienced in his travels is also a form of return to nature: I should prefer to remain in the Banda Orientál, even though by so doing I should grow at last to be as bad as any person in it, and ready to “wade through slaughter” to the Presidential Chair. For even in my own country of England … I have been long divided from Nature, and now in this Oriental country … I have been reunited to her. (p. 247) In this sense, if, in Hudson’s logic, violence and nature are identified with each other, violence can therefore be read as a liberating experience through which the subject constitutes himself in opposition to the law. That “natural violence” manifests itself in this scene as an instinctive tendency that in Idle Days in Patagonia is posited as an authentic reaction that modern society strives to repress. Here Hudson explains the original character of violence; it is part of his primitive,

110  W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land animal essence, a return to which is salubrious: “[T]he return to an instinctive or primitive state of mind is accompanied by this feeling of elation, which, in the very young, rises to an intense gladness, and sometimes makes them mad with joy, like animals newly escaped from captivity.”69 The jubilant shout that nearly escapes Lamb after the crime is a sign of this sincere, necessary, and “mad” reencounter with the primeval. The Purple Land is an eminently rural novel in which the city is merely the place where the journey begins and ends. Synecdochically, the text identifies the entire country with its rural areas, and Uruguayans with the gauchos (and attractive women) Lamb meets on his travels. This conception of the country leaves no room for the modernizing project: in Lamb’s primitive paradise, there is no place for the city and its liberal intellectuals and merchants. Unemployment and the appalling conditions in which the proletariat lived and worked, along with mass migration from the country to the city, had been hallmarks of the previous century’s Industrial Revolution and had had significant consequences in England. Though the countryside had become invisible for many of the English, Hudson declares rural life a necessary and healthful presence for the nation. Lamb himself mentions that the country life actually exists in England too: “Even in our ultracivilised condition at home we do periodically escape back to nature; and, breathing the fresh mountain air and gazing over vast expanses of ocean and land, we find that she is still very much with us” (p. 244).70 And we should keep in mind, in this context, that the implied reader for this novel was always English, as Lamb himself tells one of the characters, right after telling her that he is writing a novel about his trips in Uruguay: “You will never read it, of course, for I shall write it in English, and only for the pleasure it will give to my own children” (p. 234).71 Throughout the novel, the erasure of urban spaces can be read as a way of blotting out the state. Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, in his exquisite intellectual biography of Hudson, notes that “he wasn’t interested in any of the institutional, judicial, or economic methods that structure the nation, the state, and wealth. … One might say that all his life Hudson has chosen to disregard the elements that constitute the nation, the state, and citizenship.”72 In the same way that Lamb never mentions Argentina as the country where he was raised, in Far Away and Long Ago (1918), the autobiographical narrative of Hudson’s childhood in the Argentine pampas and one of the last books he published, the I does not refer to his country of origin in political or national terms, giving scarce indications of Argentine identity. His world is that of the pampas (“the wide, empty, treeless plain”), where he had relationships mostly with the English community that lives there and with nature.73 Argentina is mentioned only once by name in the entire book: at one point he just refers to “that southern country of great plains

W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land  111 or pampas”.74 This consistent erasure of nationality in Far Away and Long Ago goes in concert with the horror that the narrator of The Purple Land feels toward the modern state.75

Nostalgia and the Elusive Home The text opens with an act of expulsion, with the protagonist’s abrupt departure from Buenos Aires, the familial and, more broadly speaking, institutional space. Indeed, there is not even a clear origin in the narrative itself, which begins abruptly when the characters arrive in Montevideo, in mid-flight, their story, their motivations, and their characteristics all remaining unclear: “I need not linger on the events which took us to the Banda” (p. 3). This beginning in medias res does not describe the departure, but only the arrival. The expelling home remains invisible; the reader learns nothing about it (the second expulsion—and the subsequent erasure of the other city—will be caused by the urgent need to find work, to be productive). Uruguay is the space of refuge, and also of ostracism from the family, since it is the home of an aunt of Paquita who has utterly and permanently abandoned the family nest in Buenos Aires after a fight with Paquita’s mother. Yet there is also an erasure of the causes of that fight: “though Doña Isadora had evidently been nursing her wrath all those years to keep it warm, she could not, for the life of her, remember how the quarrel originated” (pp. 5–6). Naturally, Paquita sees herself in this aunt, who embodies the definitive nature of exile. Forgetting the origin of the conflict (which is the origin of the journey) is also a form of displacing the oikos and affirming the impossibility of homecoming. Doña Isadora, the aunt, in some sense “adopts” Paquita. Lamb will flee once more from this new familial space—or will be expelled once more, as the narrator suggests: “probably she knew that this letter would really lead to nothing, and gave it merely to get me away into the interior of the country, so as to keep Paquita for an indefinite time entirely to herself” (p. 11). The theme that runs through the opening pages of The Purple Land is, then, that of the loss of the home, to which it will not be possible to return: “she yearned for reconciliation, and her present sorrow rose from her belief that they would never, never, never forgive her” (p. 4). The first page of the novel merely confirms this: the return to Buenos ­A ires would mean prison for Lamb and death for Paquita (pp. 1–2).76 I have read the subsequent deviations that mark Lamb’s travels—his geographic detours, for sure, but also his gradual adoption of the way of life of the people of the Uruguayan interior and his embrace of violence, along with his increasingly frank and erotic flirtations with various Uruguayan women—as arising from a desire to put off his return, to make it impossible. The Banda Oriental is also a space that remains outside the law, which comes into force once more with the return to Buenos Aires.

112  W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land The lack of geographic precision and of an exact name to describe the location of Montevideo adds to the many uncertainties or instabilities of the territory: I sat down on a bench beside the sea, or river—for some call it one thing, some the other, and the muddied hue and freshness of the water, and the uncertain words of geographers, leave one in doubt as to whether Montevideo is situated on the shores of the Atlantic, or only near the Atlantic. (p. 6) This oscillating geography of the country and the difficulty in naming some of its main features immediately install uncertainty and illegibility in it. While Hudson’s tale complicates the protagonist’s national identification and disregards the specificity of each state, the territory he calls the Banda Oriental is portrayed as a space of liberation or protection from the state—as if it were, indeed, more of a banda than a state.77 We can associate the frequent topic of homecoming (or maybe that of its impossibility) in Hudson’s text with the fact that he wrote all of his books (many of which have Latin America as their theme) in Britain, and in English. His texts about Latin America (and The Purple Land is not an exception) share a powerful nostalgic tone. We can see here an incomplete return, a wish to return in another language, a longing that nevertheless maintains distance as a condition of writing itself. In fact, the equivocal operation of characterizing or situating home is made explicit at a crucial moment in Hudson’s autobiography. As he is leaving the Americas, the narrator of Far Away and Long Ago describes a single moment of disquiet centered on the concept of “home”. He notes his brother’s reaction at the instant of departure on “the ship in which I had taken my passage ‘home,’ as I insisted on calling England, to his amusement”.78 What is the status, for the narrator, of the place he’s leaving for good after 33 years? Why does he call the completely unknown world he’s traveling to home? Hudson records his brother’s reaction in the ­moment of their parting perhaps as a gesture toward the illogicality of his decision to leave, as a sort of mirror that calls it into question. To declare as home what is not known also produces surprise and bewilderment, as his brother’s response suggests: “Of all the people I have ever known you are the only one I don’t know.”79 But crucially, this scene confirms what I have been arguing happens in The Purple Land: for Hudson, nationality is a disguise, a (sometimes capricious) construction. This chapter has shown that, through different strategies, the return becomes impossible in The Purple Land. The author writes out of a desire to return via memory, but the novel does not recount a concrete return; it never truly arrives. The only satisfactory homecoming for Hudson is in fact the return to a life in nature. In Idle Days in Patagonia, referring to

W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land  113 the natural world, he says that “to see it all is like returning to a home, which is more truly our home than any habitation we know”.80 And this is exactly what Lamb claims has happened to him throughout his travels in Uruguay. Hudson, then, was always a foreigner, someone who was partially in several places. Svetlana Boym has referred to what she calls “reflective nostalgia” as that which “does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places and imagining different zones”.81 If Hudson is reflectively nostalgic, perhaps that is owing to the fact that he wrote through memory, attempting to make present what had been lost, and nostalgia requires that what is remembered be kept at a distance. Desiring something without having it is a condition of nostalgia, as Boym, again, suggests.82 The final chapter of Idle Days in Patagonia discusses this deep dive into memory, this desperate and fruitless effort to return through memory and writing. The scent of a flower, described by the narrator as “a link with the past” that “summons vanished scenes to my mind”,83 leads him to describe different scents. He is then able to conclude, “I am actually a boy again.”84 When he holds that flower in his hand, distance in time and space evaporates, and with it the English garden he’s sitting in: “I am again on the grassy pampas, where I have been sleeping very soundly under the stars.”85 The repetition of the olfactory action renews both his memory and the awareness of distance. The sensation is made clear with a beautiful comparison that perfectly illustrates this conjunction between memory and the certainty of loss that characterizes Hudson’s nostalgic narrator. When the flower has lost its fragrance and it is no longer possible to be transported by smelling it, he nevertheless still insists on sniffing it, “just as a person might always walk along a certain path with his eyes fixed on the ground, remembering that he once on a time dropped some valuable article there, and although he knows that it was lost irrecoverably, he still searches the ground for it.”86 The Purple Land is also a text permeated by distance; that displacement in time and space is part of its very structure, its origin. Hudson’s prose is a good example of what I have called a rhetoric of vanishing, since vanishing is in fact a theme that recurs throughout Hudson’s writing. Far Away and Long Ago has its origin in the inevit­ ability of the disappearance of the places where he was raised: “that very spot is now, I dare say, one immense field of corn, lucerne, or flax, and the people who now live and labour there know nothing of its former beautiful inhabitants, nor have they ever seen or even heard of the ­purple-plumaged trupial”.87 The present in which the statement is made is cast in a negative light because it implies that the referent has been erased. In Far Away, he refers to the spaces of his childhood as “these vanished scenes”.88 “I only know that the old place where as a child I first knew him … is now possessed by aliens, who destroy all wild-bird life and grown [sic] corn on the land for the markets of Europe.”89

114  W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land In The Purple Land, the protagonist arrives at a similar conclusion after having traversed the Uruguayan territory, met numerous people, and participated in various episodes of violence. This experience of displacement casts a different light on his place of origin and the territories visited. Lamb is narrating this story from a distance, using only memories of a time that is now lost, irretrievable. He refers to a world that no longer exists. Robert Ginsberg suggests that “Nostalgia is a taste for ruins. It takes its reflective pleasure in the recovery of fragments from the past for which significant continuity to the present is lacking. The past for which we are nostalgic has no place in the present.”90It is noteworthy that this novel, written precisely upon memories—that is, fragments of the past—includes some interesting scenes involving ruins. Ginsberg ­further explains the metaphorical connections between memories and ruins: “To remember is to dig up ruins from the underground of mind. … Memory is one of the highest arts of ruin, for it selects and redeems. It deems what is worthy of appearing to mind.”91 In fact, in The Purple Land ruins and other types of remains are present at some crucial moments. We saw for example how the narrator gathers traces of war in his first strolls through the city. In the first pages, when Lamb climbs the Cerro for the first time, he gazes at the landscape and pronounces his invective against it from a ruined fortress (p. 8). But he also imagines that his condemnatory speech could somehow grow and solidify itself after being uttered, and hence destroy—and ruin— Montevideo: he only wished that the malediction I was about to utter could be rolled down in the shape of a stupendous rock, loosed from its hold which would go bounding down the mountain, and, leaping clear over the bay, crash through the iniquitous city beyond, filling it with ruin and amazement. (p. 8) The invective originates in a ruin and also generates ruins, although the first ones are the result of the passing of time, while the effects of the violent speech are closer to rubble, the result of sudden and concrete destructive event. Then, in chapter 12, Lamb arrives at a crumbling estate where disordered nature has taken possession of the space and a spectral tone holds sway: “The old, half-ruined house in the midst of the dusky desolation began to assume in the moonlight a singularly weird and ghost-like appearance” (p. 198). This ruin is also a metaphor for the nation itself under Partido Colorado rule, since the family that owns the place—­ traditionally Partido Blanco supporters—lives surrounded by neglect and has fallen into disgrace. The narrator chooses the ruins as a place

W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land  115 of refuge (p. 200), instead of trying to transform them into exploitable objects or expressing aesthetic rejection of them, as Jean Franco explains some British travelers to South America did in the first decades after independence.92 Furthermore, to a certain extent, the protagonist becomes part of that ruined family, since the elderly and demented father mistakes the newcomer for his son returning from a war in which he actually perished. Lamb eagerly participates in this performance of homecoming, since it gives him the opportunity to recount—or to shout, rather—as fact tales of victory in battle, his own valor, and the violent death of the enemy: I began to talk madly as himself. … Everywhere, I cried, we had defeated, slaughtered, scattered to the four winds of heaven, the infamous Colorados … we had captured them in thousands, only to cut their throats, crucify them, blow them from guns, and tear them limb by limb to pieces with wild horses. (p. 193) In a frenzy, Lamb adopts a hyperbolic and delirious discourse. Of course, there is no turning back here either. This is obviously a simulacrum of return, of a particularly uncanny return, since the narrator himself becomes a ghost. In fact, the ghostly connotations are not just a manifestation of the powerful Romantic rhetoric that runs through much of Hudson’s novel; they are also, in equal measure, evocative of the ­rhetoric of vanishing and the images of ruins or―in more general terms―­remains that appear in varying forms in all of the texts examined in The ­Desertmakers. In this sense, this, too, is a book about ghosts— ghosts that siege modern rationality, specters of the postcolonial world that give shape to modernity’s guilty conscience.

The “Consolidated Vision” The ideas that inform The Purple Land imply the rejection of the imperial project. Toward the end of the book, Lamb longs for the future absence of British “civilization” in the territory: I cannot believe that if this country had been conquered and re-­ colonised by England, and all that is crooked in it made straight according to our notions, my intercourse with the people would have had the wild, delightful flavour I have found in it. And if that distinctive flavour cannot be had along with the material prosperity resulting from Anglo-Saxon energy, I must breathe the wish that this land may never know such prosperity. (pp. 243–44).

116  W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land This Romantic discourse was, in the last years of nineteenth-century Britain, almost unreadable. As Edward Said has noted, during that period the world was not conceivable in terms other than those of empire. It is a case of what Said called “consolidated vision”: the notion that, even if English writers in the second half of the nineteenth century were able to recognize imperial domination as being oppressive and unjust, their texts could offer no alternative to the system. Empire, in their novels, seems to be inevitable: [T]he nineteenth-century English novels stress the continuing existence (as opposed to revolutionary overturning) of England. Moreover, they never advocate giving up colonies, but take the long-range view that since they fall within the orbit of British dominance, that dominance is a sort of a norm, and thus conserved along with the colonies.93 If there is an interdependence between novel and empire, if “the novel, as a cultural artifact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other”,94 then the operation that takes place in The Purple Land is notable in the way it rejects the legitimacy of the neocolonial project in Uruguay. Jean Franco points out some limits to this and claims that it is actually “an idealized version of British imperialist policy, which granted Uruguay apparent independence to the extent that it ensured the country’s economic dependence”.95 Franco argues that informal empire sought primitive, violent societies that would guarantee large markets and could be exploited without meeting resistance. Yet violence and war were undeniably perceived from the metropolis as significant obstacles.96 Franco also asserts that Hudson “did not realize that anachronism did not constitute real opposition to the system”.97 It should be acknowledged that there might be a certain ingenuousness to Hudson’s premise: the novel is largely apolitical, refusing to propose specific, much less collective, solutions. The narrator’s idealization of the colony and nineteenth-century Uruguay, and praise for its so-called justice can only be read as a knee-jerk rejection of the present. This is related to the didactic, Romantic tone of the text in a baldly antiromantic age. Yet Hudson’s Romanticism is not narcissistic; although written in the first person, it does not create personal worlds centered solely on the self. In reality, Hudson’s nostalgia requires progress. While Hudsonian rhetoric casts the destructive logic of progress as the enemy, progress nevertheless is also the condition that makes his writing possible. Perhaps that need to maintain a distance from South America as it exists in his memory and in his writing, along with the notion of time as being unrepeatable and irreversible, can explain Hudson’s decision never to go back. He chooses to write from memory, from the intimate remains of

W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land  117 his Latin American experience, certain that the spaces he is describing have now been transformed. There is no longer a place to return to. In Far Away and Long Ago, referring to the lands of his childhood, he confesses, “I am glad to think I shall never revisit them, that I shall finish my life thousands of miles removed from them, cherishing to the end in my heart the image of a beauty which has vanished from earth.”98 Hudson’s use of the rhetoric of vanishing justifies his decision not to return; thus, it is an act of preservation of the self and of memory, a nostalgic form of resistance. There is another relevant element to the idea of “consolidated vision”. Such a vision is based largely on the notion of the colonized territories as something that cannot entirely be grasped, as something radically different from the narrative voice, unspecific, distant, and unknown: For the British writer, “abroad” was felt vaguely and ineptly to be out there, or exotic and strange, or in some way or other “ours” to control, trade in “freely”, or suppress when the natives were energized into overt military or political resistance. The novel contributed significantly to these feelings, attitudes, and references and became a main element in the consolidated vision, or departmental cultural view, of the globe.99 The perspective of the narrator in The Purple Land, the manner in which he shares his experience with those he encounters, and the powerful presence of the first person produce the sensation that this territory is not “out there”, that the vision being communicated is not one of domination but is instead constructed from within. It is not a “consolidated” vision but a mobile perspective, fundamentally deterritorialized. Said explains that in nineteenth-century England, this “departmental view” of the world was not limited to the novel, and that it involved travel writing and ethnography, for example. In this, Hudson is an exception, although he had this in common with some of his contemporaries: “Not until well after the mid-century did the empire become a principal subject of attention in writers like Haggard, Kipling, Doyle, Conrad”.100 Hudson, however, focused his books on regions that were not part of the formal British Empire, but on other regions where its presence was less noticeable. Perhaps this double marginality of the South American lands with respect to the imperial imagination could explain Hudson’s relative invisibility in the British canon. It was certainly difficult for a text that examined questions of empire in this critical manner, published in London, to generate much attention. As Hudson confesses on the occasion of the publication—almost 20 years later—of the second edition of the text, the novel remained unacknowledged after its first publication, having a decidedly tepid reception.101 The public’s attention was focused not on the “there” of  territorial

118  W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land possessions but on the “here”, the imperial center. The Purple Land, though written in English and with English-language readers in mind, nevertheless destabilizes neocolonial discourse. Perhaps that is why it is read, even today, as part of the Uruguayan literary canon rather than the British one.

Notes 1 William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”, in The Complete Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Andrew J. George (Boston: Broughton Mifflin Company; Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1932), pp. 353–54. 2 Gallagher and Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade”, pp. 9–10. Alan Knight briefly explains the importance of Great Britain in nineteenth-­ century Brazil: “Threatened by Napoleon, protected and prompted by Britain, the Braganza royal family fled to Brazil. Trade was liberalized and the British ­secured a highly favourable commercial treaty. In 1821–22, the ­Braganza dynasty bifurcated when Pedro I proclaimed Brazil’s independence, ­founding a new world empire which endured to 1889. Brazil thus won its independence by means of a peaceful, monarchical transition, aided and abetted by British diplomacy and maritime power; as a result, for the next generation Brazil displayed an unusual combination of political ­stability and successful British economic penetration” (Alan Knight, “Britain and Latin America”, in Andrew Porter, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume III. The Nineteenth Century [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], pp. 122–45 [at p. 127]). 3 Gallagher and Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade”, p. 9. 4 William Henry Hudson, The Purple Land: Being the Narrative of One Richard Lamb’s Adventures in the Banda Orientál, in South America, as Told by Himself [1904] (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), p. 234. Further references are included parenthetically in the text. 5 Luis Costa Herrera, Un viaje por “La tierra purpúrea” (Montevideo: Ediciones M, 1952), p. 12. I thank Jean-Philippe Barnabé for providing me a copy of this image, as well as the reference. 6 Jorge Luis Borges, “About The Purple Land”, in Borges, A Reader. A Selection from the Writings of Jorge Luis Borges, ed. Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Alastair Reid (New York: Dutton, 1981), pp. 136–39 (at p. 138). 7 Jorge Luis Borges, “Nota sobre La tierra purpúrea” [1941], in Textos recobrados. 1931–1955 (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2001), pp. 186–88 (at p. 188). 8 Graciela Montaldo has referred to Hudson as a nomad but used the term to evoke the instabilities that marked his figure from the beginning, from birth itself, rather than the political and spatial connotations suggested by Deleuzian theory: “as the son of immigrants in a republic that had not yet become a nation and that had not remotely settled vital questions about its territory and its sovereignty—whether internal or external—and as, too, the inhabitant of an insecure space, called desert, that was traversed mainly by nomadic indigenous and gaucho populations, Hudson becomes yet another example of nomadism in the plains” (Graciela Montaldo, Ficciones culturales y fábulas de identidad en América Latina [1999] ­[ Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2004], p. 122). The use of the term is suggestive, but it refers instead to the biographical circumstances that complicate the figure of the writer. Here I am more interested in exploring a certain active

W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land  119 connotation of the figure of the nomad in the way it occupies space and in its relationship to the state. Fermín Rodríguez uses this notion in a similar sense to my usage here, but without linking it to violence and the state, and without placing it in dialogue with Deleuze and Guattari: “The geography of adventure is made up of borders and of movements across those borders. Upon this nomadic space, made of shifting lines and fluctuating trajectories, the coordinates of identity also oscillate” (Rodríguez, Un desierto para la nación, p. 96). 9 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 368 (original emphasis). 10 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 361. See the book’s introduction for a discussion of these notions. 11 Emilio Irigoyen has studied the presence of the parents’ birth country with regard to the notion of deviation, placing it in dialogue with the importance that the Banda Oriental holds in Hudson’s writing: “The presence of this other territory, which is neither of his homelands but which to some extent plays a role in the origin of his public work (his novels), is symmetrical to the absence of that other origin and that other (family) homeland: the United States” (Emilio Irigoyen, “El tiempo de una visita, el espacio de un desvío”, in Beatriz Vegh and Jean-Philippe Barnabé, eds., William Henry Hudson y La tierra purpúrea. Reflexiones desde Montevideo [Montevideo: Linardi y Risso, 2005], pp. 79–90 [at p. 89]). In dialogue with Irigoyen, I find it interesting to think of the USA as a sort of cleaving of Englishness; to have US heritage is also, in a sense, to stop being English, to be another English. It is important to keep this other origin of Hudson in mind as critical in reading his works. Hudson’s departure for England can thus be read as a deviated return. As a return to an origin that is and yet is not. 12 Roberto Ignacio Díaz’s Unhomely Rooms discusses problems of linguistic displacement with regard to the demarcation of a national or Hispanic American literature. In his chapter on Hudson he suggests that The Purple Land transfers its interstitial quality to its implied reader, who, like the author, remains caught between two cultural spaces (Roberto Ignacio Díaz, Unhomely Rooms: Foreign Tongues and Spanish American Literature [Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002], pp. 124–42). Sylvia Molloy has discussed the importance (and the mystery) of bilingualism in Hudson’s life and works. See Molloy, “Mansiones verdes y tierras purpúreas”, in Vivir entre lenguas (Buenos Aires: Eterna cadencia, 2015), pp. 53–55. 13 Ana Inés Larre Borges has recently edited the first diary written by Hudson. See William Henry Hudson, Diario de su viaje a bordo del Ebro, trans. Ana Inés Larre Borges and Virginia Brown, prologue Ana Inés Larre Borges (Montevideo: Cal y Canto, 2017). 14 Ana Inés Larre Borges, “Fuera de lugar: Hudson y La tierra purpúrea”, in Vegh and Barnabé, eds., William Henry Hudson y La tierra purpúrea, pp. 29–40 (at p. 35). 15 Throughout this chapter, I will make some mentions of both Idle Days in Patagonia and Far Away and Long Ago (1918), Hudson’s narrative of his childhood in the pampas, since both books illuminate some aspects of The Purple Land. 16 Felipe Arocena, De Quilmes a Hyde Park. Las fronteras culturales en la vida y la obra de W. H. Hudson (Montevideo: Banda Oriental, 2000), pp. 116–17. 17 Jason Wilson, W. H. Hudson: The Colonial’s Revenge (London: University of London, Institute of Latin American Studies, n.d.), p. 4.

120  W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land 18 In her 1921 essay “Modern Fiction”, she expresses moderate praise for Hudson, when compared to Conrad or Hardy: “we reserve our unconditional gratitude for Mr. Hardy, for Mr. Conrad, and in much lesser degree for the Mr. Hudson of The Purple Land, Green Mansions, and Far Away and Long Ago” (Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction”, in Andrew McNeille, ed., The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4: 1925 to 1928 [London: The Hogarth Press, 1984], pp. 157–65 [at p. 158]). For a study of the connections between Woolf and Hudson see Diane F. Gillespie, “‘The Bird Is the Word’: Virginia Woolf and W. H. Hudson, Visionary Ornithologist”, in Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman, eds., Virginia Woolf and the Natural World (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), pp. 133–42. JSTOR www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1gn6c4h.21. 19 Apparently, Conrad obtained from Cunninghame Graham important information that he used to write Nostromo, while Hudson seems to have done the same in order to write Green Mansions, published the same year. On the relationship between Conrad and Cunninghame Graham, see Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch. Joseph Conrad in a Global World (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), pp. 244–52. See also T. Watts, ed., Joseph Conrad’s Letters to R. B. Cunninghame Graham (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969). Hudson’s correspondence with Cunninghame Graham is a good source to see the former’s place in Britain’s literary life. See W.H. Hudson’s Letters to R. B. Cunninghame Graham with a Few to Cunninghame Graham’s Mother, Mrs. Bontine (London: Golden Cockerel Press, 1941). 20 David Miller briefly discusses praise for Hudson’s literary work when he was alive, and highlights the absence of interest in it in several critical books on the literature of the period (David Miller, W.H. Hudson and the Elusive Paradise [London: Macmillan, 1990], pp. 1–6). 21 Arocena, De Quilmes a Hyde Park, p. 45. 22 Ruben Cotelo, “El libro que Inglaterra perdió” [1992], in W. H. Hudson, ed., La tierra purpúrea (Montevideo: Banda Oriental, 1999), pp. 5–22 (at p. 12). 23 Jean Franco, “William Henry Hudson”, in Guillermo Enrique Hudson, La tierra purpúrea – Allá lejos y hace tiempo (Caracas, Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1980), pp. ix–xlv (at p. xxxiv). 24 Süssekind, O Brasil não é longe daqui, pp. 11–34. 25 This edition went nearly unnoticed by critics and the reading public. In his introduction to the second edition, Hudson alludes to a misreading in the book’s reception, since the novel had been reviewed (unfavorably, he notes) in the travel and geography sections of the newspapers (p. ix). See also W. H. Hudson, The Purple Land That England Lost, Two Volumes (London: Sampson Law, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1885). 26 Great Britain invaded Buenos Aires in 1806 and held the city from June to August, when the British forces were driven out by criollo militias from Montevideo. Nevertheless, in February 1807 the British occupied Montevideo, only to be defeated shortly afterward when they attempted to recapture Buenos Aires (John Lynch, “The Origins of Spanish American Independence”, in Leslie Bethell, ed., The Independence of Latin America [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], pp. 1–48 [at p. 23]). 27 Knight, “Britain and Latin America”, p. 123. 28 Winn, “Informal Empire in Uruguay”, p. 103. 29 “It has been claimed more than once that independent Uruguay was born of the imagination of British diplomacy. While it is true that the establishment of the nation owed a great deal to Lord Ponsomby’s agile gamesmanship, it is also indisputable that … the process of its historical life gave the region a different physiognomy, one that was more distinct than that of other

W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land  121 regions of the viceroyalty. … Just as Great Britain did not invent the emancipation of Spanish America, despite the support it constantly provided, and just as Lord Strangford did not lead the revolution in the Platine region, despite the crucial role he played in its development, neither were the machinations of British diplomacy determinative in the emergence of this new republic, despite the substantial support the empire offered it” (Blanca París de Oddone, “Colonia y revolución”, in Blanca París de Oddone, Lucía Sala de Touron, and Rosa Alonso, De la colonia a la consolidación del Uruguay [Montevideo: Banda Oriental, 1973], pp. 7–62 [at pp. 48–49]). 30 Gallagher and Robinson, The Imperialism of Free Trade, pp. 9–10. 31 In José Pedro Barrán, Historia de la sensibilidad en el Uruguay. Tomo 1. La cultura “bárbara” (1800–1860) (Montevideo: Banda Oriental, 1989), p. 40. Barrán adds, “The Constitution of 1830 established the term for the President of the Republic at four years. If we consider the 17 heads of Executive Power between 1830 and 1876 … the average term of those leaders was barely two years and eight months. Of these 17 individuals, 100 percent of them had to deal with armed uprisings and 35 percent were overthrown by uprisings in Montevideo or rural rebellions” (Barrán, Historia de la sensibilidad I, p. 40). 32 The probable—and surprising—coincidence of Hudson’s and Burton’s 1868 visits to Montevideo has already been mentioned in the previous chapter. Unlike Hudson, Burton provides a detailed account of the events that culminated in Flores’s assassination (Letters, pp. 110–17). Burton’s documentary instincts are quite different from Hudson’s fictionalizing approach, which avoids specific references and historical names at all times (except for some mentions of Uruguayan topography, as we have seen). Yet Burton shares Lamb’s initial horrified response to the violence that permeates the city (just as Sarmiento did, Burton sees the barbarity of the city as aberrant): “the daily danger of revolution, of battle, of murder, and of sudden death. … In these fair lands the slaughterer of a stranger, even if seized red-handed, is never punished” (Letters, p. 92). Lamb changes his views throughout the novel, as we shall see. 33 José Pedro Barrán, Historia uruguaya. Tomo 4. 1839–1875. Apogeo y crisis del Uruguay pastoril y caudillesco [1974] (Montevideo: Banda Oriental, 2007), p. 123. However, there is no real indicator in the text that the battle is actually a reference to the Revolución de las Lanzas. Pablo Rocca, for example, explicitly rejects this connection. See Rocca, “Un escritor fronterizo”, in El País Cultural, Año XII, n° 586 (01/26/2001), pp. 1–3 (at p. 2). 34 Uruguayan historiography has repeatedly used the adjectives “pastoral” and “caudillesco” [run by caudillos] to refer to independent Uruguay previous to those years. See Barrán, Historia uruguaya. Tomo 4, and Lucía Sala de Touron, “El Uruguay pastoril y caudillesco (1830–1875)”, in París de Oddone, Sala de Touron, and Alonso, De la colonia a la consolidación del Uruguay, pp. 63–96. For more on the country’s mode of production during this period, see Lucía Sala de Touron, “El Uruguay caudillesco y pastoril: un ‘modelo’ de país dependiente y de estructura precapitalista”, Latinoamérica 11 (1978): 159–77. José Pedro Barrán partially rearticulated the changes in Uruguayan society in referring, in Foucaultian terms, to the “disciplining” that took place after the 1860s in the second volume of his essential text, Historia de la sensibilidad en el Uruguay. In it, Barrán also redeploys Sarmiento’s famous dichotomy to differentiate the “barbarian” Uruguay of the first years post-independence from the “civilized” version that came after. José Pedro Barrán, Historia de la sensibilidad en el Uruguay. Tomo 2. El disciplinamiento (1860–1920) (Montevideo: Banda Oriental, 1990).

122  W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land 35 Winn, “Informal Empire in Uruguay”, p. 123. 36 Méndez Vives, Historia uruguaya. Tomo 5, p. 13. 37 Méndez Vives, Historia uruguaya. Tomo 5, pp. 12–16. 38 Franco, “A Not So Romantic Journey”, p. 139. 39 Franco, “A Not So Romantic Journey”, p. 139. 40 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 146. 41 The laudatory tone glorifying the capitalist enterprise continues in the next lines. The narrator refers ironically to the appropriation of the Malvinas Islands as meager compensation for the never-achieved appropriation of Uruguay: “A splendid conquest and a glorious compensation for our loss! … We left the sunny mainland to capture the desolate haunt of seals and penguins; and now let all those who in this quarter of the globe aspire to live under the ‘British Protection’ … transport themselves to those lonely antarctic islands to listen to the thunder of the waves on the grey shores and shiver in the bleak winds that blow from the frozen south!” (p. 10). As I see it, the novel contains a powerful dose of irony in the construction of the imperialist discourse, as if Hudson were emphasizing the fact that imperial exaltation is always a sort of performance. The discourse is exaggerated, like an assemblage of clichés that merely reveals the extent to which the concepts employed had been codified at the time. Leila Gómez refers to this performative attitude as the “carnivalesque deployment of imperial discourse” (Gómez, Iluminados y tránsfugas, p. 70). 42 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 197–209. 43 Richard Burton also climbs the Cerro de Montevideo, whose low elevation causes him to muse ironically on Latin American “misnomers”: “The ‘Orientals’ are not Easterns. The Argentines are, if aught of silver, German silver. The Plate River has nothing platine, and for Buenos Aires the local Joe Miller reads Malos Aires. The Cerro is no more a mountain than is ‘Roseberry Topping,’ the highest hill in all Yorkshire” (Letters, p. 101). His view is much more limited than that of Lamb, describing only the city. He offers no appropriative fantasies that spread to encompass the entire territory. Yet if naming is the ultimate act of domination and appropriation, the joke takes on new meanings. It is as if there were in Latin America a certain deficiency in the ability to name, a gap between words and things that can be read as an inability to exploit and dominate. And which, of course, makes a corrective imperial gaze necessary, one that establishes a real power relationship through naming. The same thing occurs in the description of the Paraguayan jungle examined in the previous chapter: if the Paraguayans do not know how to exploit their own resources, then giving those resources Portuguese names is equivalent to recognizing the legitimacy of the conquest. 44 Repeatedly in texts of discovery and conquest, we see a representation of territory as virgin, since the lands are presented as unknown and absolutely new. It is an instance of what Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have called the trope of “Adam in the Virgin Land”: “the garden metaphor evoked growth, increase, cultivation, and blissful agricultural labor, and implied that the land, prior to Western penetration, was empty …, uncultivated, undomesticated, without a legitimate (that is, settled European) owner. Within this larger topos, subliminally gendered tropes such as ‘conquering the desolation’ and ‘fecundating the wilderness’ acquired heroic resonances of Western fertilization of barren lands” (Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media [London: Routledge, 1994], p. 141). 45 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 204.

W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land  123 46 Akeel Bilgrami refers to this as a consequence of the scientific rationality that began in England in the seventeenth century and that largely explains, he argues, colonial expansion: “the colonized lands too were to be viewed as brute nature that was available for conquest and control. This hypothesis is wholly plausible so long as one was able to portray the inhabitants of the colonized lands in infantilized terms, as a people who were as yet unprepared—by precisely a mental lack of such a notion of scientific ­rationality—to have the right attitudes towards nature and commerce and the statecraft that allows nature to be pursued for commercial gain” (Akeel Bilgrami, “Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on the Enlightenment and Enchantment”, 3 Quarks Daily, 8 September 2008 http://­3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2008/09/occidentalism-t.html [15 December 2013], original emphasis). 47 Montaldo, Ficciones culturales, pp. 62–63. Also Michel Foucault refers to idleness as deviation (which has particular connotations in Hudson’s own apology to deviation, especially apparent in his celebration of the concept of idleness in his book on Patagonia) (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”, p. 25). 48 This notion is also present in Deleuze and Guattari’s previously discussed characterization of smooth space as being that space whose features “do not meet the visual condition of being observable from a point in space external to them” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 371). 49 Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 3. 50 On the tropes of empire, see David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). 51 Uruguay had not been called the Banda Oriental since 1828, some 40 years before the approximate date of Hudson’s journey through the country. 52 Sara Castro-Klarén has proposed approaching the worlds of Hudson and José María Arguedas by reading this proximity between subject and nature in both as a common theme, as a sort of shamanism they both shared, though obviously with differences. Castro-Klarén argues, “The exceedingly sensorial quality of the language, the synesthetic force of that ‘powerful and melancholy current’ commingled with pleasure and joy of Arguedas’s rivers is what critics recognize in Hudson by calling it the aesthetic emotion of memory” (Sara Castro-Klarén, “Cámac y la memoria emocionada: entrecruces de William Henry Hudson y José María Arguedas”, in Leila Gómez and Sara Castro-Klarén, eds., Entre Borges y Conrad. Estética y territorio en William Henry Hudson [Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2012], pp. 351–65 [at p. 354]). 53 Another good example of this appears on page 136: “A few more days of adventure, all the pleasanter for being spiced with danger, and I would be once more in Montevideo”. 54 Porter, Haunted Journeys, p. 11. 55 The poetics of idleness reaches its zenith in Idle Days in Patagonia, in which, thanks to an injury, the traveler is forced to rest and spends his time writing. In this book, “idleness”, the epitome of unproductivity, is cast as a new way of thinking about travel: as contemplation and communion with nature. With regard to this latter sense, the celebration of uselessness is also applied to the scientist’s work. In Idle Days the narrator refers to his duties as a naturalist as “useless researches” and notes, “[I]f there is anything one feels inclined to abhor in this placid land, it is the doctrine that all our investigations into nature are for some benefit, present or future, to the human race” (Hudson, Idle Days in Patagonia, p. 130). For more on this book and its relationship with The Purple Land, see the

124  W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land insightful analyses of Rodríguez, Un desierto para la nación; Jean-Philippe Barnabé, “Días de ocio en la Banda Oriental”, in Vegh and Barnabé, eds., William Henry Hudson y La tierra purpúrea, pp. 187–98; and Ernesto Livon-­Grosman, “Willian Henry Hudson: un transcendentalista en la ­Patagonia”, in Geografías imaginarias. El relato de viaje y la construcción del espacio patagónico (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2003), pp. 153–86. 56 By rejecting those routes that have already been marked out, by avoiding moving in a linear fashion, by refusing to adopt a steady pace for his journey, and by embracing the unpredictable and deviant as the foundation of that journey, Lamb conceives of Uruguay as a smooth space. 57 It is interesting to note that even the characteristics of the women the narrator is drawn to change over the course of the novel, as does his increasing interest in erotic attraction. The first girl he encounters, Margarita,“was not that kind of beauty so common in these countries … [She had] a marvellously clear white skin, on which this bright Oriental sun had not painted one freckle. … [H]er golden brown hair hung in two heavy braids behind, almost to her knees. As I approached, she looked up to me out of sweet, grey-blue eyes” (pp. 50–51). The narrator is initially interested in what most closely resembles him, in what is familiar and recognizable. This attraction, defined as “a sacred ethereal kind of affection” (p. 54), seems quite devoid of sexual connotations. Lamb’s advances become significantly more explicit, and his adulterous intentions more obvious, over the course of his successive encounters, which also suggests his gradual forgetting of the oikos and the institutionality of marriage that he left behind in the city, as we will discuss further. The clearest example is that of Dolores, who also demands that Lamb become more involved in the country’s political affairs. 58 Jorge Luis Borges, “La tierra cárdena”, in El tamaño de mi esperanza [1926] (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1993), pp. 33–37 (at p. 33). 59 On Hudson’s reception in Argentina, see chapter 4, “Criollo Legacies”, in Eva-Lynn Alicia Jagoe, The End of the World as They Knew It, pp. 128–68; and chapter 3, “Hudson en el canon argentino”, in Leila Gómez, Iluminados y tránsfugas, pp. 73–105. Nevertheless, my own work seeks to shift the focus of the discussion to the civil wars and the modernizing process being carried out by the Uruguayan state. 60 Jorge Luis Borges, “Nota sobre La tierra purpúrea” [1941], in Textos recobrados. 1931–1955 (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2001), pp. 186–88 (at p. 188). 61 Jorge Luis Borges, “About The Purple Land”, in Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Alastair Reid, eds., Borges, a Reader: A Selection from the Writings of Jorge Luis Borges (New York: Dutton, 1981), pp. 136–39 (at p. 138). 62 Emir Rodríguez Monegal cites an eloquent description of Uruguay from Borges: “Everything I experienced … was so primitive, even barbarous, that it made mine more a journey into the past than a journey through space” (Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography [New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1987], p. 259). This is unquestionably also the Uruguay we see in The Purple Land, and this portrayal is not unlike the way Paraguay, Patagonia, and the Brazilian sertão were imagined in the texts I discuss in this book. 63 W. H. Hudson, “A Flight to the East”, in The Purple Land That England Lost, vol. I, pp. 1–9. 64 The description of Montevideo as “modern Troy” is a reference to the socalled Guerra Grande (1839–51), an international conflict in which governments and political parties from Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, France, and the UK were involved at various moments (Giuseppe Garibaldi also had an important role in it). It included an eight-year (1843–51) siege of

W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land  125 Montevideo (not a ten-year siege, as Lamb wrongly states), to which the previous quotation specifically alludes. 65 In her study of the ways in which The Purple Land deals with the figure of the gaucho through translation (that is, the way the text explains mores and cultural elements and objects from the Latin American countryside to an English readership), Ariana Huberman states that the text undermines all strong national identifications, as “Lamb trades his national identity as easily as he buys and borrows horses and food throughout his journey” (Ariana Huberman, Gauchos and foreigners: glossing culture and identity in the Argentine countryside [Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013], p. 49). 66 Rodríguez, Un desierto para la nación, p. 97. 67 Barrán, Historia uruguaya. Tomo 4, p. 123. 68 Deleuze and Guattari write in fact that the war machine is characterized by “a fundamental indiscipline of the warrior, a questioning of hierarchy, perpetual blackmail by abandonment or betrayal, and a very volatile sense of honor, all of which, once again, impedes the formation of the State” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 358). 69 W. H. Hudson, Idle Days in Patagonia [1893] (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co, 1917), p. 215. 70 There were other writers in Great Britain who turned to rural subjects during and after the Industrial Revolution. I do not mean to suggest that Hudson’s view is unique in this sense, though it certainly was not the norm. For more on this topic, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 71 Hence, the text’s invisibility in England, which I will return to later. See, above, my reference to Roberto Ignacio Díaz’s work on the interstitial narratee suggested by the novel. 72 Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, El mundo maravilloso de Guillermo Enrique Hudson [1951] (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2001), p. 326. 73 W. H. Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago [1918], intr. by John Galsworthy (London: Everyman’s Library, 1967), p. 156. 74 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, p. 15. 75 In Far Away and Long Ago war is a threatening presence that never becomes real. At the same time, political events occur as if they had no consequences for the protagonist and are described as distant phenomena, without details or proper names—Juan Manuel de Rosas himself, to whose fall an entire chapter is devoted, barely appears in the account. In addition, the city represents the origin of the war and the modernizing, space-­ producing process. Hudson explains this hatred for the city by pointing to the forms of the domestication and conquest of nature that the urban space implies: “In large towns … nature has been tamed until it appears like a part of man’s work, almost as artificial as the buildings he inhabits” (Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, p. 195). The city is the great enemy, the place of disease, filth, and confinement. After a visit to Buenos Aires, the narrator expresses his joy at returning to the countryside: “glad to escape from the noisy dusty city into the sweet green silences, with the great green plain glittering with the false water of the mirage spreading around our shady oasis” (Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, p. 95). 76 Silvia Rosman has studied the articulations of the notions of origin and homecoming in this novel, focusing mainly on the way the Argentine critics have read it, and on the relations between travel and translation in the book. See Rosman, “Las vueltas de William Henry Hudson: errancias de la crítica y desplazamientos de la memoria”, in Vegh and Barnabé, eds., William Henry Hudson y La tierra purpúrea, pp. 41–54.

126  W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land 77 See “Banda”, Diccionario de la Real Academia Española http://dle.rae.es /?id=4wmsqHs|4wo9Bd6|4woiJnY (11 December 2013). The word banda, when applied to a territory, suggests an indefinite or unstable status, that of a frontier or a band (or stripe) of land between two other entities, a kind of parenthesis over which the law of the state does not hold sway. 78 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, p. 272, emphasis added. The oikos becomes the most unreal place, the source of disorientation and uncertainty, of de-familiarizations. 79 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, p. 273. 80 Hudson, Idle Days in Patagonia, p. 217. 81 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. xviii. 82 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. xiv. 83 Hudson, Idle Days, p. 231. 84 Hudson, Idle Days, p. 234. 85 Hudson, Idle Days, p. 233. 86 Hudson, Idle Days, p. 234. 87 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, p. 230. 88 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, p. 230. 89 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, pp. 162–63. 90 Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins, p. 362. 91 Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins, p. 420. 92 Franco, “A Not So Romantic Journey”, p. 138. 93 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 74 (original emphasis). 94 Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. 70–71. 95 Jean Franco, “William Henry Hudson”, p. XXXVII. 96 For more on the inconvenience of disorder within the capitalist logic of investment, see Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism; Gallagher and Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade”; and Knight, “Britain and Latin America”. A good example might be the aforementioned British intervention in the conflict between Brazil and Argentina over what would become—thanks to that very intervention—­ Uruguayan territory, with the aim of securing the free navigation of the rivers. This logic also appears in novels such as Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, in which uprisings, mobs, and revolutions are depicted as destabilizing and detrimental to capitalist interests. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo [1904], ed. Ruth Nadelhaft (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1997). 97 Franco, “William Henry Hudson”, p. XXXVII. 98 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, p. 230. 99 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 74. 100 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 74. 101 As stated above, Hudson only became better known in literary circles, and managed to sell more books, in his last years. After his death, and partly up to the present, he has remained quite understudied in the context of British literature. For example, he is never mentioned in Said’s Culture and Imperialism, while he is only mentioned once, and in passing, in Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, two books that have in fact much to do with Hudson’s interests, as this discussion has showed.

3 Making Museums, Making Deserts Francisco Moreno in Patagonia

la cuestión fronteras es la primera cuestión para todos, y hablamos incesantemente de ella aunque no la nombremos [the frontier question is the most important question for everybody, and we incessantly speak about it even without naming it] Nicolás Avellaneda, President of Argentina (1874–80)1

In Idle Days in Patagonia, William Henry Hudson frequently returns to the relationship between the individual and nature. It can be said that Patagonia represents, for him, a virgin, resistant space, one that he conceives of as a place of refuge for a self that feels assaulted by modernization. In his reflections, he denounces the battle waged by humans against nature. It is as one form of that battle that the narrator then categorizes the Conquest of the Desert (1879–85), the systematic war of extermination carried out by the state against the indigenous populations of southern Argentina. While he never adopts an indigenous perspective, he does criticize the war of “these white aliens” against the southern native peoples: war not only with the wild tribes that cherish an undying feud against the robbers of their inheritance, but also with nature. For when man begins to cultivate the soil, to introduce domestic cattle, and to slay a larger number of wild animals than he requires for food … from that moment does he place himself in antagonism with nature. 2 This perspective is unquestionably nostalgic: Hudson often writes about what no longer exists or what is undergoing an irreversible process of vanishing. When he discusses indigenous people, his use of the rhetoric of vanishing becomes even stronger: “During the last decade the desert places have been abundantly watered with [their] blood, and, before many years are over … [they] will have ceased to exist.”3 But according to Hudson’s logic, in a sort of resurgence of what has been repressed,

128  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia nature remains resistant and wages war against the conqueror. As in The Purple Land, war is a form—perhaps the ultimate form—of resistance. Francisco Pascasio Moreno (1852–1919), another traveler, a scientist, and an explorer, is considered to have “discovered” southern Argentina’s Patagonia region on behalf of the state. Moreno traveled there on various occasions between 1873 and 1912. Some of his travels, then, preceded the Conquest of the Desert, while others were contemporary to it, and others came after the indigenous peoples had been killed or displaced from those territories. Whereas for Hudson Patagonia is a place of refuge from modernization, Moreno uses the opposite logic, attempting to “dis-cover”, to measure, to describe that region. While making the land visible, mappable, while turning it into a place where it will no longer be possible—as Hudson wanted—to hide, his writing conceals the war, making use of a series of techniques (analyzed in this chapter) in order not to name the war, to make it invisible. Nicolás Avellaneda’s words that serve as an epigraph to this chapter suggest that the issue of war was on everybody’s minds in the 1870s (even Avellaneda himself does not name war, but refers instead to the “frontier question”). War was actually a question of naming; it may not always have been explicit, but it was a central issue of the political discussions of the time. So, even when Moreno explicitly opposed the war of extermination against the native peoples of southern Argentina, it is war that accompanies and complements his project as a tool for making spaces visible. Moreno “denaturalizes” Patagonia, reading it as a collection of resources. Unlike Hudson, whose attitude toward the state gradually turns from disengagement to pure horror, Moreno writes (although with some interesting ambivalences) from the perspective of the state, whose institutional apparatus was undergoing a key consolidation process during that period. This chapter focuses on different accounts of his visits to Patagonia: Viaje a la Patagonia austral [Journey to Southern Patagonia] (1879), which describes his trip in 1876–77; and Reminiscencias [Reminiscences], published posthumously in 1942, which contains miscellaneous texts written between 1906 and 1919 that narrate various travels, including Moreno’s first visit to cacique Valentín Sayhueque’s camp in 1875–76 (this trip is also briefly recounted in Viaje a la Patagonia austral), and the account of his adventures as a prisoner of the same cacique in 1880.4 It is important to stress here that all of the texts included in Reminiscencias were written well after the war against the indigenous peoples was over, and its consequences visible. This clearly influences how these trips are remembered and, in some cases, rewritten. Reminiscencias also includes letters by and to Moreno, and some articles published in newspapers, which help illuminate his views on the aftermath of the war, on the policy of land distribution in Patagonia, and on his complicated

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  129 relationship with the state. Finally, I will also discuss Apuntes preliminares sobre una excursión al Neuquén, Río Negro, Chubut y Santa Cruz [Preliminary notes on an excursion to Neuquén, Río Negro, Chubut, and Santa Cruz], published in 1897 by the La Plata Museum but only rediscovered (and republished) in 1999 in the library of Argentina’s National Parks Administration. This book narrates a trip Moreno made in 1895 to territories he had already visited in the previous decades. These last two texts have received much less attention than the first. In my approach to them, I will examine how Moreno discusses the changes that took place in those lands after his 1876 trip, when the Conquest of the Desert was seen as perhaps a looming and inevitable future though it lacked concrete form. I will look in depth at the explorer’s participation in the war (the abovementioned account of his imprisonment—and the subsequent flight—is fundamentally an account of war) and also refer to his experiences in the 1890s, when he describes the desolate landscape of southern Argentina after the war. In short, his writings evince a shift from the desert as a fantasy, as the invention of a conquerable void, to its construction as another void, now the result of said conquest. In what follows, therefore, I will suggest that it is in connection to war that Moreno should be read; his texts cannot be understood without reference to it. The association between Moreno’s explorations narrated in Viaje and the Conquest of the Desert is clear. Their role in laying the groundwork for military invasion has been well established by various scholars.5 The discourse of exploration, like that of war, implies the logic of conquest: in all of his texts, Moreno claims the space he describes and its inhabitants on behalf of the Argentine government. This appropriative act, this ­Argentinization of the landscape, is relevant (and was necessary to the state) for another reason. Moreno is still commonly referred to by the nickname “Perito” (in fact, most people do not know his first name) because, thanks to his repeated journeys through Patagonia, in 1896 he was named an “expert” (perito in Spanish) on the issue of Argentina’s border with Chile. Thus, Moreno represented the Argentine state in the negotiations with Chile over the demarcation of the border in Patagonia. The negotiations ended with an agreement, signed in 1902 by both nations, after which Argentina gained 42,000 square kilometers of land.6 While not officially working as a Perito in his first journeys, one of the preoccupations of the traveler during his successive trips dealt with this looming conflict over the border, to which he explicitly refers in Viaje. The project of establishing a stable border with the neighboring country, and the imminence of war between the countries in the final decades of the century are constitutive elements of Moreno’s writings on southern Argentina. Over the course of his various travels, Moreno describes himself as competing with European travelers and surpassing them on behalf of

130  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia the patria [homeland], reaching territories where, as he understood it, no one had ever set foot before.7 He is also referred to in similar terms by the Argentine intellectual and political elites. In seeking funding from the Sociedad Científica Argentina [Argentine Scientific Society] for his 1876 journey, he obtained a letter of support from Bartolomé Mitre, one of the most important political figures in the years following Juan Manuel de Rosas’s fall in 1852, and a former president of Argentina (1862–68).8 The letter, dated from 1875 but published in 1879, the year the Conquest of the Desert began, gives several clues to the official motive for Moreno’s travels.9 For one, it refers to the importance of the museum: “his best work is a museum of anthropology, archeology, and paleontology that he has established in his house, with objects he has collected, including more than 400 skulls from Indian races, which is unquestionably the largest American craneological collection in existence”.10 This is no minor point: between 1885 and 1906 Moreno was the head of the Museo General de La Plata, a natural sciences museum whose collection was built from Moreno’s private collection, mentioned by Mitre.11 The ­museum—its logic, its perspective, its institutional ­character—­substantially shapes Moreno’s writings and travels, and I will pay special attention to it throughout this chapter. The―not always evident, and sometimes ambivalent―links between war, the museum, and the state are essential to the ways in which Moreno describes, appropriates, and transforms Patagonia. Other elements that Mitre highlights are Moreno’s courage and “his passion for travel”, which would allow Moreno (and the state, naturally) “to explore unknown regions” (Reminiscencias 21). Moreno paratextually reciprocates the official support for his trip, since the first edition of Viaje explictly mentions his sponsor in the subtitle: “Emprendido bajo los auspicios del gobierno nacional” [undertaken under the auspices of the national government] (see Figure 4). On the book’s second page, the dedication is even clearer: “dedicado a S. E. el señor Presidente de la República, Doctor Don Nicolás Avellaneda” [dedicated to His Excellency, President of the Republic, Doctor Don Nicolás Avellaneda].12 In this sense, I am interested in exploring the role of the state in Moreno’s writing, in how this traveler imagines the state throughout his journey, and how he marks or writes the territory on behalf of the state. Moreno’s trip, I argue, employs strategies to produce space in the sense suggested by Henri Lefebvre. For the French sociologist, one of the essential operations in the production of space precisely entails leaving a mark: “social space is the result merely of a marking of natural space, a leaving of traces upon it.”13 These ways of looking that produce or politicize a space that Moreno employs on his travels are articulated in terms of war against the indigenous populations as the key manner of reconfiguring spaces.

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  131

Figure 4  C  over of the first edition (1879) of Viaje a la Patagonia austral.14

War and the Consolidation of the Modern State in Argentina The modernization process in Argentina began in earnest after the fall of Juan Manuel de Rosas in 1852, and was a hotly debated topic through the end of the century. Yet the key push toward the centralization of power took place after the Battle of Pavón (17 September 1861), when the country, which had been divided between the State of Buenos Aires and the Argentine Confederation for nearly a decade, was permanently unified after the victory of the former. In 1862, Mitre—who had up to that point been the governor of Buenos Aires—became ­president of Argentina. Oscar Oszlak explains that it had become imperative to establish order “because of the lack of guarantees regarding property, the stability of productive activity, and even life itself—consequences of the ongoing civil war and indigenous attacks—that posed practically insurmountable obstacles to private initiative”.15 The logic was the same one that governed that of informal empire: disorder implied lack of certainty about the economic future, which led to a lack of investment. Over the course of the period between 1862 and 1880, the state did manage to establish what Oszlak calls a “relatively stable ‘pact of domination’”, but those 18 years would also see the consolidation of “the material attributes of the state—that is, an institutional system with national reach”.16

132  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia That powerful configuration of the state apparatus came in part from an effort to construct the nation.17 Though various methods were used to bolster state power, the most important one was repression, linked to the establishment of a national army. This approach involved what Oszlak defines as “repressive penetration”, which “consists of the application of physical violence or threats of coercion, tending to achieve obedience to the will of whoever wields them and to suppress all eventual resistance to his authority”.18 Around the time that Moreno made the trip recounted in Viaje a la Patagonia austral, one of the main problems being debated by the political and economic elites had to do with those zones known as “frontiers” and with the need to “populate them”—that is, to conquer them or occupy them, thereby wresting them from indigenous control. In fact, in 1879 the Indian Territory was conquered, and General Julio Argentino Roca, who had been in charge of the campaign, became president of the country the following year.19 The publication of Viaje (and not the actual trip described in the book), then, coincides with the year in which the most important part of that war of annihilation was completed. Both Moreno’s journey and the wars occurred during the administration of Nicolás Avellaneda (1874–80), who succeeded Sarmiento (1868–74) and preceded the first term of Roca (1880–86), who led the campaign’s final operations. That state, whose construction culminated, Halperín claims, with Roca’s victory, and whose interests coincided with those of “the sectors that dominate the Argentine economy and take best advantage of its advances”, began a definitive modernization process during the last quarter of the century. 20 The motto “paz y administración” [peace and administration, equivalent to the Brazilian Ordem e progresso] characterized the Roca administration. In addition to the modernization of the army, there was an even bigger push to develop the railroads and the telegraph. 21 One of the goals achieved was to defeat the “espíritu de montonera” [rebellious gaucho spirit] and populate—actually repopulate—the territories whose inhabitants had been killed or displaced in the Campaign of the Desert. The role of the state, as Roca saw it, was to offer guarantees of life and property. 22 In 1875 Nicolás Avellaneda (in the same text from which this chapter’s epigraph is taken) described the methods by which his government’s objectives would be met: This is the synthesis of our economic policy, elements of which include the immigrant, the living force applied by the nation to production through labor, the development of rural industries, and the spreading of the population, in addition to the sword of the soldier who clears and flattens paths, who protects and defends the civilized frontier. 23

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  133 These words encapsulate the central elements in the project of modernization that took place in Argentina toward the end of the century. On the one hand, it makes clear that the issue of the frontier was fundamentally economic in nature and had to do with the need to construct the nation as a capitalist unit; on the other, war, alluded to— ­synecdochically—as “the sword of the soldier”, appears to be an accessory event that may or may not take place, when in fact it is a necessary condition so that everything else (immigration, production, industries, expansion of the population) can happen. Avellaneda also points to war’s ultimate objective when he explains that “suprimir a los indios y las fronteras no implica en otros términos sino poblar el desierto” [suppressing the Indians and the frontier merely implies, in other words, populating the desert]. 24 The official discourse employs a verb whose connotations (similar to “erase” or “eliminate”) nevertheless avoid mentioning war as the best way (or perhaps the only way, according to this logic) to accomplish this goal, though, as Avellaneda himself admits, war was already on everybody’s mind. Naturally, the solution of “populating the desert” is rooted in a profound contradiction. The “desert”, on the one hand, appears as an ideological construct, since in the early nineteenth century texts had already deemed those lands “desert”, even as they described their inhabitants. 25 The most famous formulation of this is Juan Bautista Alberdi’s dictum “To govern is to populate” (also quoted by Richard Burton, as seen above). This is particularly interesting in the case of the Argentine pampas and Patagonia, since those lands were not only populated but, contrary to what has been sometimes argued, many of the indigenous communities living there were actually sedentary, and, most importantly, had well-structured forms of government and had established robust networks via which news, people, and texts circulated: many of the caciques and their secretaries wrote in Spanish and routinely exchanged letters with government officials, which were then preserved by these communities. 26 There was a rhetorical effort not to see or to eliminate those populations discursively, as well as a certain expression of desire: a “desert” is what those lands should have been. Being deserted was a necessary precondition for the possession of lands, a goal that, in the first half of the century, was still in the distant future. Yet in this context the references to the desert acquire a sinister cast. Note that the structure of Avellaneda’s sentence suggests an idea of equivalence, or of cause and effect: the method of carrying out the suppression would be by populating the territory. The reader could therefore imagine that the arrival of immigrants, laborers, and businessmen would mean, in ideal circumstances, automatic and harmonious dominion over the territory, which would lead, almost as a natural consequence, to the disappearance of the indigenous populations. In 1876, however, the sentence had ominous connotations, since the desertification of those territories had already become part of the national project: in reality

134  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia there would be no equivalence between “suppressing the Indians” and “populating the desert”, but rather a relationship of one following on the other. The erasure or displacement of the indigenous population was a necessary condition for the (re)settling of those lands. Once again, however, the silencing of war in the discourse obliquely makes it present, signaling its inevitability. 27 On the other hand, this is a matter not just of “suppressing” indigenous populations, but also of suppressing a space that is associated with them. What does it mean to “suppress the frontier”? Why is it necessary to do so? Silvio R. Duncan Baretta and John Markoff point out that one of the characteristics of the frontier is that it is a territory in which “no one has an enduring monopoly on violence”. 28 The frontier could be defined, then, as “boundaries beyond the sphere of the routine action of centrally located violence-producing enterprises”. 29 These definitions help us understand the need in the official discourse to make that space, which eludes the rule of state law, disappear. If one of the bases of state power resides in its exclusive ability to legitimately employ violence, it is clear that the frontier is not under its control. That area, as such, will never be part of the state: its incorporation into state logic implies its “suppression”. The kind of sociability most common at the frontier conceives of violence as an everyday and necessary phenomenon that circulates in a number of directions and can be understood in multiple ways and be employed by various agents. In these areas, racial or national identity was marked by instability, the relationship with the land was volatile, violence was just a fact of everyday life, temporary work was the norm, and centralized power was always resisted with attempts to impose the draft met by flight.30 On the ground, frontier and desert are not clearly differentiated, their primary distinction lying in the condition of absolute exteriority that characterizes the desert in intellectual discourse, while the inherently changeable frontier remains, in the state’s view, opaque and not yet subject to its laws.31 The Conquest of the Desert, also known as Campaign of the Desert, transformed the territory of modern Argentina in definitive ways. It also had important consequences in the symbolic understanding of nationality in relation to origin and race. This war was not critically approached until the final decades of the twentieth century, around the years in which Argentina was celebrating the centenary of this moment of notable military “glory”. The previous approaches had tended to see this war of extermination as a necessary step in the process of modernization and, most important, as a natural prolongation of the centuries-­ old wars between Spanish conquistadors and the native peoples of the continent. A classical study dedicated to this campaign, Juan Carlos Walther’s 1947 La conquista del desierto, has as its subtitle “Historical Synthesis of the Main Events and Military Operations That Took Place in the Pampas and Patagonia against the Indians (Years 1527–1885)”.32

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  135 The well-documented book, written from the perspective of military history and whose first edition was published by the Círculo Militar—the army’s publishing house—refers to the war of extermination in celebratory terms, reading it as a heroic war between civilization and barbarism.33 For the purposes of this study, however, it is important to consider the repeated wars against indigenous peoples once the wars of independence ended, since these wars accompanied the subsequent process of state consolidation. Prior to the conclusive push that took place in 1879 under the command of General Roca, there were a number of moments worth mentioning. One came under Juan Manuel de Rosas, who led a campaign against indigenous peoples in 1833–34. The significance of Rosas’s campaign is explained by Enrique Hugo Mases: the expedition led by Juan Manuel de Rosas in the years 1833 and 1834 was for many reasons the most significant, not only of Rosas’s government [roughly 1829–52] but of the entire independent period. It was characterized by ample social support, especially among ranchers, and by the aptitude of its leader, based on the knowledge Rosas had of the terrain and his relationships with indigenous people. Although not all of its objectives were achieved, its results were the advancement of the interior frontier, the rescue of numerous captives, and the submission of important indigenous communities. Thus, by the end of the campaign effective control of the frontiers up to Bahia Blanca and Carmen de Patagones had been established.34 After Rosas’s fall, skirmishes and moments of tension continued, as the rural population increasingly complained about the abandonment in which the state left them, as indigenous raids into white territory, referred to as malones, increased. The malón consisted of mounted surprise attacks against white population or settlements, with the objective of obtaining horses, provisions, valuables, and captives, usually young women. They constituted a singular way of waging war. It was during the government of Avellaneda that the “frontier question” was faced in a more decisive way. Minister of War Adolfo Alsina (1874–77) proposed a strategy for facing the indigenous peoples which included the construction of a ditch that would traverse Argentine territory from Bahía Blanca, by the Atlantic Ocean, to La Amarga Lake (Laguna La Amarga), in what is today the province of Córdoba (approximately 730 kilometers).35 The ditch was criticized because it was merely a defensive strategy that sought to stop the Indian raids, to “contain” them.36 The premature death of Alsina in 1877 saw the appointment of Roca (an outspoken critic of his project) as his successor. After taking office as War Minister, Roca designed an offensive plan that consisted of successive attacks against different indigenous tribes. For this, Roca employed the malón as the state’s war strategy: that is, he appropriated

136  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia

Figure 5  G  eneral Roca’s 1879 expedition to the Neuquén and Negro rivers. 39

the enemy’s way of waging war, a logic that was completely alien to the professional army that he led. In fact, Fermín Rodríguez describes this contradictory logic of waging war as a “nomadology of the state”. What the official army specifically borrowed from the malones was the way of understanding movement, imitating the indigenous peoples’s rapid surprise attacks.37 The first expeditions took place in 1879, defeating the communities living in the Pampas (for example, the Ranquel Indians) to reach the Negro River. Successive additional expeditions took place in 1880, 1881, and 1882–83, until the last caciques (notably, Sahyhueque) were finally defeated in 1885, when the total territory of Patagonia was conquered (see Figures 5 and 6).38 The last military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–83) celebrated the centennial of the Conquest of the Desert, reading the conflict as a moment of glory for the army; a conflict that, in a way, the dictatorship’s own “war” against “subversion” had continued.41 The first systematic critical counterargument was David Viñas’s Indios, ejército y frontera, published in exile in 1982. Viñas in fact accepts the

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  137

Figure 6  E  xpeditions to the Nahuel Huapi lake (1881), to the Andes (1882–83), and to the interior of Patagonia (1883–84)40

two traditional frames through which the Conquest of the Desert had been read: as a prolongation of the Spanish conquest (chapter 3 of his book is titled “The Campaign of the Desert as the Higher Stage of the Spanish Conquest”), and as an antecedent of the regime that ruled Argentina when the book was published. Viñas shows that the link with the Spanish conquest was not a creation of the conservative historiography that preceded him, as he quotes various texts from the protagonists of the campaigns in the nineteenth century that make this connection explicit.42 His book changed the perspective on these continuities: according to Viñas, these were all instances of systematic wars or operations of extermination (Viñas talks about “genocide”) against resisting peoples. In fact, Viñas expresses this effective comparison with the following question: “the Indians, were they the disappeared of 1879?”43 He also situates these wars with respect to parallel genocidal campaigns against resistant peoples elsewhere on the continent (Chapter 2), a perspective that The Desertmakers seeks to recover and rethink.

138  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia

Shifting Territories and Identities in Viaje a la Patagonia Austral Moreno’s 1879 book does not narrate his first trip to Patagonia. He had already been there on several occasions. In 1873 he visited Carmen de Patagones and the Negro River (today the border between the provinces of Buenos Aires and Rio Negro), more than 900 kilometers from the city of Buenos Aires. He followed the Negro and the Limay rivers from their mouths to their sources in Nahuel Huapi Lake, close to the Andes and the border with Chile, approximately 1,600 kilometres from Buenos Aires. From August to December of 1874 he visited Carmen de Patagones again, continuing south to reach the mouth of the Santa Cruz River (more than 2,000 kilometers to the south of Buenos Aires), which he nonetheless was unable to explore in detail. These earlier trips are briefly recounted in the first chapters of Viaje a la Patagonia austral as a way to prepare the ground for Moreno’s greatest “discoveries”. Viaje focuses on a trip that begins on 20 October 1876 and ends on 8 May 1877. This trip takes Moreno to the Santa Cruz River, which this time he follows from its mouth at the Atlantic Ocean to its sources in the Andes, traversing some regions not reached by previous travelers, close to the border with Chile. He goes all the way to Lake Argentino and Lake San Martín, to which he gives those names, and to Lake Viedma.44 Moreno drew a map of his trip, which he included in his book as an appendix (see Figure 7). One of the book’s longest chapters discusses Moreno’s visit to Sayhueque’s headquarters in 1875, where he stayed for some time, although he was not allowed to continue all the way to the border with Chile. He was instead allowed to visit Nahuel Huapi.

Figure 7  M  ap of Moreno’s 1876–77 trip, narrated in Viaje a la Patagonia austral.45

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  139 In a text written in 1916 (three years before his death), and included in Reminiscencias, Moreno revisits this encounter with the Tehuelche tribe. In this text it becomes clear that the frontier was a place governed by alien logics and laws to which Moreno was forced to submit, suggesting a recognition of a realm in which state laws did not hold sway. The rhythms of travel are governed from the “outside” by a force that is opposed to the state that Moreno represented: “No me era permitido avanzar más, … eran terminantes las órdenes de quien todo lo podía en aquellos lugares” (Reminiscencias 45) [I was permitted to go no farther, … the orders issued by him who was all-powerful in those places were absolute], he says, referring to the cacique Sayhueque. Moreno had to request permission to move around, and especially to travel to Chile, which was his journey’s eventual objective.46 This involved: interminables conferencias, tenidas dentro del gran toldo del cacique para obtener el permiso de pasar a Chile, en las que sus taimados consejeros los mestizos chilenos, Loncochino … y Valdés … lo convencieron del peligro que para los mapuches había en que los argentinos conocieran los caminos a través de la cordillera en momentos, en que se hablaba de avanzar las fronteras, esto, en circunstancias en que los chilenos proyectaban igual cosa con las suyas. (Reminiscencias 35)47 [interminable meetings, held inside the cacique’s large tent to obtain permission to cross over to Chile, in which his wily mestizo Chilean advisers, Loncochino … and Valdés … convinced him of the threat posed to the Mapuches by the possibility that the Argentines might learn the roads through the mountains, in times when there was talk about pushing the frontier outward, even as the Chileans discussed doing the same with their own.] The refusal to let Moreno continue his trip all the way to Chile came on the part of the cacique, though he seems to have been pushed to take a firm stand by his “Chilean advisers”. It is worth examining the mingling of racial and national identities in connection with the circulation of people implied here. Moreno, in general, did not trust Sayhueque’s advisers and secretaries, probably because, as Julio Esteban Vezub suggests, they were literate (and thus, for Moreno, presumably more knowledgeable) people.48 In Viaje a la Patagonia austral Moreno explicitly shows less confidence in mestizo advisers: “La mayor parte eran indígenas puros, y otros, en sus facciones y su carácter, indicaban mezcla con sangre de blancos … Doy preferencia a los primeros: son más nobles y más apuestos que los segundos, que tienen estatura menos elevada y carácter taimado” (Viaje, p. 108) [Most of them were pure indigenous, and others, in their features and character, appeared to be

140  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia of mixed white blood … I give preference to the former: they are nobler and more handsome than the latter, who are shorter in height and have a wily personality]. The two concerns that guide Moreno (settling the frontier, marking the border) and the two potential enemies of the state (Tehuelches, Chileans) are identified in these scenes in which “Chileans” advise the cacique. Indigenous tribes, then, were in close relationships with Chileans, as there was an intense traffic of merchandise and people across the southern border. Historian Mónica Quijada explains the various aspects of this complex circulation that profoundly worried the Argentine state. She notes three major concerns with regard to the free circulation of goods and persons in the south: First, the traffic across the mountains of livestock stolen from Argentine ranches, which weakened local commerce, was abetted and approved by the Chilean government. Second, the activities of hostile tribes hampered the occupation of that territory, impeding the application of the principle of utis posedetis to assert Argentine sovereignty over them. And third, the constant movement of Chilean Mapuche Indians into Patagonia and the gradual Araucanization of the local indigenous populations bolstered Chilean claims on the region.49 Indigenous peoples from the Araucania, sometimes also known as Mapuches, migrated eastward and ended up influencing the Tehuelches, although cultural influences were actually mutual. This is why today these peoples call themselves Mapuches-Tehuelches (not now, nor at the time of Moreno’s visit, would these communities describe themselves as Chileans). However, Moreno frequently (though not always) distinguishes the Mapuches from the Tehuelches. 50 Quijada’s explanation makes clear the economic issues involved in this traffic, and how entangled the conflicts with Chile and with indigenous peoples were. The scene in which Moreno is denied permission to continue on to his desired destination makes it clear that both the Chileans and the indigenous population have reasons to be suspicious of Moreno’s unfettered movements. The fact that a white man has entered and explored the territory in a time of elevated tensions is understandably a source of concern. The state that a few years later would succeed in wiping the local indigenous populations from the map also made extending the roads a vital tool for its own foundation, thanks in part to the concessions occasionally (in this case, only partially) obtained by Moreno to travel through territories that remained outside the state’s purview. Moreno tries to “Argentinize” not only the territory, but also (at times) the indigenous peoples who inhabit it. It is interesting, however, that, in his 1875 visit, he is suspected of being Chilean by the Tehuelches.

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  141 Thus, he must prove he is not Chilean to save himself and his mission. This moment marks a digression in the narrative, since this episode happened one year before the trip that constitutes the focus of the book. The episode allows Moreno to show the arguments (often outright lies, and at other times forged documents) he used to outwit the Tehuelches and convince them of his friendly intentions. Ultimately, his friendship with Sayhueque helped him avoid punishment and preserve his good relationship with the community.51 Moreno, for whom differentiating himself politically (and, specifically, territorially) from Chileans is a central preoccupation, constructs a complicated argument in order to show that he himself is no Chilean.

Articulations of the Home(land) So, in these lands of shifting identities and constant circulation, where is the modern state? The instabilities that we have been seeing allow Moreno to assert, when, on 10 February 1877, his expedition penetrates into supposedly unknown territory, that “canciones alegres nos recuerdan la patria y las diversiones que en estos momentos contentan la amistad lejana” (p. 335) [joyous songs remind us of our homeland and of the amusements that in such moments cheer up our distant friends]. Just a few days after this, when he arrives at the lake he will call Lago Argentino, Moreno and his men open a bottle of cognac and “brindamos por la patria lejana cuyo recuerdo nos ha dado ánimo para llegar hasta aquí” (p. 348) [we toast our distant homeland, the memory of which has spurred us on to reach this place]. Given that the experience of travel is often determined by the “home”, the point of departure and arrival, it is noteworthy how this element of reference is problematized throughout Viaje a la Patagonia austral.52 When Moreno writes of “patria”, he seems to be thinking of the place of origin of his trip, an entity he represents but that is nonetheless absent. Like any traveler, Moreno describes the spaces he passes through with the tools he’s brought with him from his point of departure, the elements that the city and the central institutional apparatus have given him. It is from there that Moreno reads the territory. That identification of the homeland with a far away place relegates the spaces he visits to an inherently problematic status. Moreno refers to the “distant homeland” the way any exile or traveler who yearns for his place of origin would upon finding himself in a foreign territory. As a result, the spaces he travels through always retain a certain degree of foreignness, since the “homeland” is not there. However, in these examples the word patria also takes on a more intimate or familiar meaning, quite close to that of home. Moreno uses the word patria on many occasions, but he also uses the term hogar, which means, more straightforwardly, “home”. Patria suggests that the trip is part of an official mission, while hogar seems to refer specifically to the

142  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia loved ones the travelers have left behind, to their family and friends. In Viaje both notions are close, and while in the citations above we read patria, other similar sentences use hogar instead. In describing a visit to a Tehuelche camp on the last day of 1876, Moreno expresses revulsion at the celebratory orgies that take place at these tolderías. Then he reflects, using, as he often does, the third person to refer to himself: “Allí, presenciando ese espectáculo, el viajero recordaba la familia y las personas queridas que en esos momentos quizás pensaban en él; aquello era una antítesis formidable a la tranquilidad del hogar lejano” (p. 234) [There, witnessing that spectacle, the traveler remembered the family and loved ones who at that moment might have been thinking of him; the scene was a striking antithesis to the tranquility of the distant home]. In Moreno the origin of the trip is understood as both patria and hogar, both described as “distant”. Not only do they serve to differentiate Patagonia from the hogar/patria, but the use of patria in the previous scenes describing moments of clear homosocial intimacy also has domestic connotations (such as the references to joyous friendship). This last quotation suggests an insurmountable distance between the Tehuelche culture and Moreno’s own: he feels repelled by what he witnesses and bluntly reaffirms that he does not belong among his “friends”. Thus, this moment replicates the well-known distinction between civilization and barbarism, which Moreno’s texts never seriously question.53 The hogar is a place of tranquility and harmony, and its memories are evoked not only by moments of violent chaos, such as the indigenous orgy, when the home(land) is radically absent, but also when elements of Patagonian reality might seem to bring home closer. So, for example, while looking for objects to enlarge his collection, Moreno finds the ruins of an orchard that seems to have been planted by Francisco de Viedma, an explorer who visited Patagonia on behalf of the Spanish Crown in the eighteenth century.54 This space, modified by the hand of “civilization”, triggers in the traveler memories of home: Estos restos del antiguo jardín, plantado, quizás, por la mano de Viedma, noventa años antes, y que gracias a la fertilidad del suelo se ha reproducido sin ayuda del hombre, tiene infinitos atractivos. Cada vez que el viajero, lejos del hogar, encuentra algo que le sugiere un recuerdo de él, experimenta un bienestar indefinible y con sentimiento se aleja de donde su espíritu lo transporta a puntos queridos. (Viaje, p. 158) [These remains of the old garden, perhaps planted by Viedma’s hand ninety years ago, and which thanks to the fertility of the soil has reproduced itself without any help from man, contains infinite appeals. Every time the traveler, being far from home, finds something

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  143 that triggers a memory of it, he experiences an indefinable comfort, and with his feelings he leaves the places from which the spirit transports him to beloved sites]. In spite of the cumbersome style, it is clear that the description of the abandoned but living orchard serves the narrator to emphasize the fertility of the land, thinking of possible future settlements: this rhetoric of futurity is one of the most salient features of Moreno’s style. This quotation is similar to the previous one in that it indicates that the oikos is akin to “civilization”, understood either as education and calmness opposed to the “barbarian” behavior of indigenous peoples, or as domesticated nature, as landscapes that can be associated with productivity. Moreno’s assertion of the productivity of the land is misleading: Susana Bandieri explains that the region of Puerto Deseado (being ­visited by Moreno here) was abandoned by the state in the beginning of the nineteenth century, even after the Spanish Crown deemed its presence in them geopolitically important.55 Sometimes patria and hogar are juxtaposed, heightening the suggestion that Moreno regarded them almost as synonyms. In the second chapter of Viaje, when describing his previous trip to the Nahuel Huapi Lake, he expresses his feelings on being alone in a remote and deserted land: “Horas enteras pasaba gozando de esa quietud que desde tan remotos parajes me permitía pensar en la patria y en el hogar, agradables recuerdos que evocaba a la vista de los alegres jilgueros, ratonas y chingolos, esos pajaritos vivarachos que animan tanto nuestros jardines” (Viaje, p. 25, original emphasis) [For hours at a stretch I would enjoy that stillness that from such distant climes allowed me to ponder my homeland and my home, pleasant memories evoked by the sight of the cheerful jilgueros, ratonas, and chingolos, those lively birds that bring so much delight to our gardens]. Here the passage moves swiftly from the “distant climes” to the birds of “our gardens”. The wilderness is quickly transformed by the imagination into a garden: in Deleuzian terms, the smooth space is made striated. Patagonia is suddenly made familiar. Desire, in making the equally longed for homeland and home present in “remote” lands, functions the way Moreno’s own travel does in that it consists of leaving symbolic and material marks of the state across the Patagonian regions. The homeland and the home are always present and yet always deferred, always evoked but always absent.

Naming, Looking, Writing: Appropriating Patagonia The traveler’s movement itself brings with it the idea of the state to territories where there is no awareness of such a concept. When Moreno traverses Patagonia, he brings his homeland with him, depositing it

144  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia upon arrival in certain places through various symbolic and material strategies. Symbolically, naming is the boldest way of making conquest happen. Moreno gives names to several geographical elements: Lake Argentino, Lake San Martín, Mount FitzRoy, Porteña Rock (monoliths), Mount Félix Frías, and Mount Avellaneda (named after the country’s president at the time), among others.56 Stephen Greenblatt has studied how christening constitutes a central element of Columbus’s rhetoric on America: “Christening then is the cuminating instance of the marvelous speech act: in the wonder of the proper name, the movement from ignorance to knowledge, the taking of possession, the conferral of identity are fused in a moment of pure linguistic formalism.”57 These are performative speech acts—that is to say, moments in which something is actually accomplished through discourse; in the case of Moreno’s Viaje, specifically, words change the landscape. These acts of identification/ possession symbolically incorporate mountains, lakes, and other geographical elements into what Moreno repeatedly calls the “geografía de la patria” [geography of the homeland] (Viaje, pp. 260, 477). The last time this expression appears is on the very last page of the book, when the narrator summarizes his achievements: “en fin, los lagos Argentino y San Martín … habían sido revelados a la geografía de la patria” (p. 477) [finally, the Argentino and San Martín Lakes … had been revealed to the geography of the homeland]. That is, Moreno is a “revealer” who nationalizes geography, integrating it into a national narrative. When he names Lake Argentino (Viaje, pp. 349–50), we see these operations on full display, the jingoism of the name being explained by opposition to the threatening proximity of the Chilean state: ¡Mar interno, hijo del manto patrio que cubre la Cordillera en la inmensa soledad, la naturaleza que te hizo no te dio nombre; la voluntad humana desde hoy te llamará Lago Argentino! ¡Que mi bautismo te sea propicio; que no olvides quién te lo dice el día que el hombre reemplace al puma y al guanaco, nuestros actuales vecinos! ¡Cuando en tus orillas se conviertan en cimientos de ciudades los trozos erráticos que tus antiguos hielos abandonaron en ellas; cuando las velas de los buques se reflejen en tus aguas como hoy lo hacen los gigantescos témpanos y dentro de un rato la vela de mi bote; cuando el silbido del vapor reemplace al grito del Cóndor que hoy nos cree fácil presa: recuerda los humildes soldados que en este momento pronuncian el nombre de la patria bautizándote con tus propias aguas! (Viaje, pp. 349–50). [Internal sea, son of the patriotic layer that covers the Andes in immense solitude, the nature that created you did not give you a name, but human will from this day forward shall call you Lake

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  145 Argentino! May this baptism be favorable to you; may you not forget, on the day when man replaces the puma and the guanaco, our current neighbors, the one who has christened you! When on your shores erratic blocks of ancient ice are transformed into the foundations of cities; when the sails of ships reflect on your waters as do today the gigantic icebergs and soon will the sail of my boat; when the whistle of the steamboat replaces the cry of the condor who thinks us easy prey: remember the humble soldiers who at this moment pronounce the name of the homeland, baptizing you with your own waters!]58 This scene of total inauguration encapsulates several of Moreno’s obsessions. Moreno is not simply telling the reader that he is giving a name to the lake: he is directing his speech (as Lamb did in Hudson’s The Purple Land) at the territory upon which he is gazing. This narrator is undoubtedly conscious of the importance of his act, and makes a performance of it: he constructs a solemn, almost sacred, powerful moment of appropriation. This moment marks his awareness of the uniqueness of his act, of the fact that he is uncovering the land to the state. This ceremonial declaration, as Patricia Seed points out, was also an important element of Columbus’s performance upon his arrival in what later came to be known as America. Thus, Moreno not only repeats a naming gesture with a long tradition, but also mimicks the very formal act of uttering a solemn speech upon arrival as an act of possession. Seed refers to this as an example of what she calls “ceremonies of possession”, and states that the act of pronouncing a solemn speech was a specific element of the Spanish conquest, different from how other European colonial nations claimed possession of the New World.59 Moreno, who explicitly praises Columbus in Viaje (p. 222), is, when performing this speech, inserting himself within a specific tradition of discovery and conquest. This is even more significant in the context of this study if we recall the traditional association that historians have drawn between the Conquest of the Desert and the colonial wars of the Spanish Crown against indigenous peoples in the Americas.60 At the same time, however, something is not completely new: the expression “son of the patriotic layer that covers the Andes in immense solitude” refers to the permanent layer of ice, to the glaciers that are the source of the lake (these regions are known as the Southern Patagonia Ice Field, where the border remains―even today―undecided). It indicates that, in fact, the homeland was already there, had been perhaps always there. “Human will” only confirms it, making objective a reality that existed before Moreno’s visit. Nature was already Argentine. The real protagonist of the scene is, unsurprisingly, the anything but “humble” explorer. He repeatedly implores the lake (but in reality he implores us, his readers, and particularly the state, presumably his

146  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia main reader) not to forget who is christening it. The “minister” is looking to insert not just the lake, but also himself into the “geography of the homeland”.61 In addition, the central character here is the traveler because he is portraying himself as the one who inaugurates a new era for the lake. The symbolic act of giving a name is complemented by the concrete fact that Moreno’s ship will imminently navigate the lake; by doing so, it inaugurates a modernizing age in which other ships will sail those waters every day. What is now exceptional will become quotidian. It is also worth pointing out, especially in the context of this study, that the narrator characterizes himself and his men as “soldiers”. According to Eva-Lynn Jagoe, “that he calls himself a soldier … points to a rhetoric that tends away from that of gentleman/naturalist and toward a conflation of explorer, scientist, and warrior.”62 Moreno’s discourse makes clear the distance between a modern science, which makes use of an increasingly formal terminology and longs for “objectivity” while situating itself closer to the official discourse, and the more intimate and subjective way of approaching nature that we see in many of Hudson’s texts, for example. These explorers are also soldiers because they have fought against nature, and they are succeeding in dominating or transforming it. Moreno’s account of his navigation of the Santa Cruz River (which ends with his arrival at Lake Argentino) is full of obstacles that, one by one, are overcome in order for him to reach his final destination, where he utters this proclamation of victory. This notion of waging war against nature (he speaks of “el combate que vamos a librar contra la ‘Llanura misteriosa’”, p. 262 [the combat we are about to put up against the ‘Mysterious Plain’]), suggested by the word “soldier”, should not let us forget the impending war against indigenous peoples in which Moreno would be involved a few years after completing this journey, and to which he obliquely refers in Viaje. He will eventually demonstrate that he can fight different wars on behalf of the state. The indigenous peoples, however, are absent from this scene. The suggestion of a deserted land is strong, as the narrator enumerates the elements―all of them natural―that will disappear from it while being replaced by man-made elements, in general indicators of modernization. The powerful operation of substitution that the discourse projects is a key component of Moreno’s rhetoric, and we will see other cases in which it is used, sometimes to refer to the erasure of indigenous peoples. This operation describes a landscape that needs to change, as he prioritizes an imagined and desired future of “progress” that seems inevitable. The mechanisms through which these changes might happen are not made explicit, probably because, as Avellaneda explains in the epigraph to this chapter, war, as the ultimate legibilizing tool of the frontier, did not even need to be named. The way Moreno looks at Lake Argentino constitutes another example of the “monarch-of-all-I-survey” trope. Right before his act of

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  147 naming, Moreno describes his feelings when awakening after sleeping on the shore, and seeing the lake: “por lo que gozo ahora comprendo los encantos de Livingstone al dominar el africano Tanganika. Juzgad, lectores” (Viaje, p. 349) [my pleasure now helps me understand Livingstone’s delight when he looked out over the African Tanganyika. Judge for yourselves, readers]. The panorama here is like an African landscape, utterly external, and Moreno is a foreigner who makes it his, “dominates” it. Moreno compares himself, via the innocent trope of “delight”, to David Livingstone, one of the heroes of British imperial discourse.63 To be precise, Moreno was not the first white man—not even the first Argentine—to arrive at the lake’s shores: Valentín Feilberg had reached those lands in 1873, although he had not navigated or given a name to the lake. In the Spanish rhetoric of conquest, the naming of places, rather than being the first to arrive at or gaze upon them, is the ultimate act of taking possession (the example of Columbus is perhaps the clearest in this sense).64 And, perhaps more important, Feilberg had not produced a written account of his journey.65 In his comparison, Moreno transforms himself discursively into someone who completely dominates the landscape and possesses it. It should be remembered that Livingstone did not “discover” Lake Tanganyka either.66 Livingstone is nonetheless Moreno’s hero, and for many reasons, mostly pertaining to Livingstone’s figure and its connotations. In Viaje a la Patagonia austral the latter is mentioned six times, always in the most laudatory terms. For example, in the first chapter’s opening paragraphs we read: “Livingstone, ese verdadero apóstol que tan bien supo conciliar las ideas de Cristo con las de la ciencia …” (p. 10) [Livingstone, that true apostle who knew so well how to reconcile the ideas of Christ with those of science]. Moreno replaced Christ for his patria (in his writing science and the homeland go hand in hand), but still the notions of sacrifice and generosity, so closely linked to the figure of Livingstone, mark his patriotic understanding of travel and his own role within the state apparatus. This mention is crucial, as in the book’s first pages the narrator builds a lineage for himself, constructed of travelers and scientists. He begins by making reference to his childhood readings of Marco Polo and Sinbad the Sailor, and the accounts of missionaries in China and Japan, done at his Catholic school, but he concludes that his readings of Livingstone constituted his main influence (Viaje, p. 10). Toward the end of the book, he calls Livingstone a “glorioso mártir” [glorious martyr] (Viaje, p. 461).67 The British colonial enterprise in Africa was surely an apt model for Moreno, since exploration (and the heated debates surrounding it) focused on the navigation of the main rivers in search of their sources. Roy Bridges explains: “The travel-reading public were fascinated with snow-covered mountains on the Equator, large inland lakes (on which surely one could use steamboats) and, above all, speculations on the source of the Nile.”68 If we erase the Equator from this phrase,

148  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia and change the Nile for the Santa Cruz, this could be an adequate description of some of the landscapes and considerations about them that appear in Viaje a la Patagonia austral. Moreno is gazing as Livingstone does, but, notwithstanding the obvious differences, he is rhetorically describing an equivalent geography. One additional aspect links Viaje to the travelogues about Africa published in the second half of the nineteenth century (many of which—and arguably the most influential— were published between the 1850s and the 1870s): the abundance of drawings incorporated into the book. The first edition of Moreno’s Viaje includes 37 illustrations (see Figure 8). All in all, Moreno’s reference to Livingstone when looking at the lake is a good indicator of the close parallels between the rhetoric of the modernizing Latin American state and that of colonialism. Latin American discourses, like Moreno’s, attempt to imitate and appropriate imperial rhetoric by linking it to a nationalist and nationalizing logic. If Livingstone is the example that Moreno follows, the routes he follows are those of Charles Darwin and Robert FitzRoy, who visited ­Patagonia between 1833 and 1834 as part of the five-year voyage on HMS Beagle, of which the latter was captain.70 In 1839 Darwin published The Voyage of the Beagle, which Moreno repeatedly quotes and discusses, but it should be remembered that by the time Viaje a la Patagonia austral was

Figure 8  A  Tehuelche camp. Drawing by Alfredo Paris based on a sketch by F. P. Moreno.69

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  149 published, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), arguably the book that most decisively transformed the history of science in the nineteenth century, had been circulating widely. Moreno and Argentine science in general were deeply influenced by Darwin’s theories, and this makes the British scientist a strong presence in Moreno’s writings.71 In Viaje a la Patagonia austral the traveler either confirms some of FitzRoy’s and Darwin’s findings or corrects their errors. But Moreno’s main objective is to surpass them, to reach beyond the points where their explorations ended (that is, basically, to reach Lake Argentino). As frequently occurs in travel narratives, the protagonist uses previous accounts of similar voyages as guides, but these powerful intertextual moments constitute above all forms of self-legitimation. The new travelogue is in many ways a response to those texts that, at the beginning of the journey, appear as authoritative. Regarding the events of 15 December, when Moreno is close to Puerto Deseado, he quotes a long and quite gloomy description by Darwin emphasizing the desolation and emptiness of the landscape. Moreno disagrees with the British scientist, and tries to offer a more positive perspective on the landscape: Pintura exacta, pero sombría. Con cuarenta y tres años de intervalo, en la misma estación, y con una semana de diferencia, visito este punto y, francamente, el espectáculo que aquí se desarrolla no me causa una impresión tan desfavorable. Quizá la costumbre ya adquirida y el mayor conocimiento de la región patagónica me hacen encontrar alegrías donde Darwin solo halló tristezas. (Viaje, p. 163) [An exact, if gloomy, depiction. After a forty-three year interval, at the same station, and with one week’s difference, I visit this site and, honestly, the spectacle that unfolds here does not provoke such an unfavorable impression in me. Perhaps my habits already acquired and my superior knowledge of the Patagonian region make me find joy where Darwin found only sadness.] Nowhere does Moreno say what he sees here, or exactly how his sight differs from what Darwin describes in detail. Darwin’s description is followed by this rebuttal, but what the reader gets is only the narrator’s cheerful gaze, supported by a claim of superior knowledge of the region. Also, Moreno’s response seems to indicate that something is going on in the “spectacle” that is “unfolding” (or is developing) before his eyes; the traveler thus infuses the scene with movement, exactly the opposite of what Darwin was pointing out as its most salient feature. In this case, nationalist rhetoric is particularly important vis-à-vis imperial rhetoric. Gabriela Nouzeilles claims that Moreno’s discourse differs from that of Darwin, for whom Patagonia was an inhospitable place not worth the

150  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia effort it would take to conquer it. Nouzeilles notes that “Moreno not only manufactured pragmatic representations of Patagonia; he also infused them with positive meanings and values. One of the central goals of this semantic adjustment was the modification of the imperial image of Patagonia as ‘accursed land’”.72 In a way, Moreno corrects the imperial gaze so he can describe Patagonia from that same perspective. While imperial travelers sought usable and potentially exploitable territories (and had dismissed Patagonia in that regard), Moreno describes and imagines these territories according to that same logic. The distance between the travelers has to do, in fact, with the meanings attributed to the surveyed landscapes, and not with the logic that molds the gaze. What Darwin dismisses and finds uninteresting, Moreno, on the same grounds, appropriates and describes as beautiful. The fact that Moreno is looking from the perspective of the patria is what makes a difference here. The references to these earlier travelers abound: Moreno quotes Darwin again (p. 155), or visits the site where Darwin probably pitched his tent (p. 163), but they become competitors as the traveler approaches his destination. Here he visits, for example, “este rincón aislado que escapó a la observación de Darwin” (p. 320) [this isolated spot that escaped Darwin’s observation] or “el paraje donde FitzRoy suspendió su exploración” (p. 333) [the site where FitzRoy ceased his exploration]. And, finally, me imagino qué tristes reflexiones harían y con qué disgusto retrocederían los infatigables exploradores de 1834 al verse obligados por la necesidad de suspender la marcha adelante; me impresiona pensar a qué corta distancia del lago almorzaron FitzRoy y Darwin, seguramente bien tristes, tratando de indagar con la mirada los nebulosos horizontes del oeste antes de volver hacia atrás. (Viaje, p. 340) [I imagine what sad reflections the indefatigable explorers of 1834 would make, and with what disappointment they would go back when being forced by necessity to suspend their forward march; I am struck when I think how close to the lake FitzRoy and Darwin had lunch, probably very sad, seeking to interrogate with their gazes the cloudy horizons to the west before turning back.] This poignant tone of defeat constructs the earlier expedition as a failed one and sets the scene for the great achievements that are going to take place in the following pages. These two British travelers are not able to see while looking in the direction of the lake, as they are not aware of their closeness to their destination when they decide to go back. One of the “discoveries” that take place is precisely Mount FitzRoy: Como este volcán activo no ha sido mencionado por los navegantes ni viajeros, y como el nombre de Chalten que le dan los indios lo

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  151 aplican también a otras montañas, me permito llamarle volcán FitzRoy, como una muestra de la gratitud que los argentinos debemos a la memoria del sabio y enérgico almirante inglés que dio a conocer a la ciencia geográfica, prestando al mismo tiempo inmensos servicios al comercio, las costas de la América austral. (Viaje, p. 434) [Since this active volcano has not been mentioned by sailors or travelers, and since the name Chalten that Indians use is also used for other mountains, I dare to call it the FitzRoy volcano, as a demonstration of the gratitude we Argentines owe to the memory of the wise and energetic English admiral who revealed to geographical science, at the same time extraordinarily serving commerce, the shores of southern America.] This scene of naming is different from the one seen previously because here Moreno explicitly erases the supposedly equivocal indigenous name and imposes a new one, linked to the British colonial and capitalist project. Moreno gives this name to a peak that FitzRoy did not see (situated in a spot he did not visit), which is not the norm in these cases. This mountain is today one of the most emblematic sights of southern Patagonia, and part of many touristic routes through the region. Thus, the name of the foreign explorer (and competitor) is imposed on the territory alongside those of Argentine heroes (see, for example, the Lake San Martín) or of the president of the country (Mt. Avellaneda), or even just nationalistic ones (Lake Argentino). Moreno’s travel can be read as a space-transforming practice because it consists of sowing the territory with marks of the state. In these scenes, Moreno isn’t content just to look: he is constantly seeking to intervene. The traveler himself also acquires a synecdochal value, since he represents an entity that explains his journey, but whose potential remit his journey will help to fulfill. The most concrete element that embodies this symbolic and material intervention in space is the national flag. There are numerous mentions of the flag, which the traveler carries with him: he sometimes shows it to the indigenous peoples, and sometimes plants it in the places he “discovers”. This last act is of particular significance: “emprendemos el regreso, después de dejar como signo de nuestro paso, clavada sobre un enorme fragmento de roca testigo mudo de la poderosa erosión de los hielos, y rodeada de verdes helechos y rojas fucsias, la bandera patria” (Viaje, 447) [we headed back, after leaving, as a sign of our passage, planted upon a massive fragment of rock, mute witness to the powerful erosion of the glaciers, and surrounded by green ferns and red fuchsias, the flag of our homeland]. This is of course a frequent gesture of appropriation by all kinds of explorers, but in the context of this travelogue it has some interesting connotations. In this rather colorful scene of complete harmony, the flag is inserted into the natural

152  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia landscape. The adjectives emphasize the colors of the plants and flowers next to the newly planted flag, which adds its own three colors to the landscape. This can be read as a methaphor for Moreno’s operations of transformation of Patagonia. Also, the flag is planted on a rock, not in the sand or in the ground, which seems indeed hyperbolic. The mention of the process of erosion adds temporal connotations to the scene. Moreno usually situates “mute” nature in the realm of the past, and his modifications bring new temporal dimensions to it. Now that there is a flag, the rock is no longer “mute”. The flag is not a mere national symbol, but also stands for the desire for modernization of those places. In reality, this scene is another example of the strong temporal continuity that the traveler creates between nature and the homeland. In Moreno’s text, desire is what leads him to continually see in space what is not there: “Una nube celeste y blanca oculta el agudo pico de un atrevido cerro muy elevado, cubierto de hielo eterno y la ilusión del deseo me dice que es la gigante bandera patria que flamea gozosa saludando nuestra llegada” (Viaje, 332) [A light-blue and white cloud hides the sharp peak of a very high mountain capped with eternal snows, and in the illusion of desire it seems to me as if it were the enormous flag of our homeland joyfully fluttering and greeting our arrival]. This strong deseo de la patria places the state where it does not exist and foreshadows the material act of transformation. Quite similarly to what happens in Moreno’s speech directed at Lake Argentino, the process of “Argentinization” of the landscape consists of saying that it was already “Argentine” when the traveler arrived. In addition, here the presence of the “eternal snows” topped by the flag, ancient elements overtaken by the present, anticipates the flag-planting scene. The marks left on the land not only create routes that can be traveled again later on, but also introduce a new way of reading the territory.73 But the most meaningful mark may be that of the man of letters. Moreno writes himself onto the landscape: “Por no permanecer ocioso pongo mis iniciales con grandes piedras para señalar nuestro paso por este punto” (Viaje, 282) [So as not to remain idle, I use large stones to form my initials in order to mark our passage through this spot]. Leaving a signature is not a mere frivolous act: it produces meaning and transforms space. In Patagonia, to sign one’s name with stones is to mark one’s precedence, one’s authority over that territory.74 The gesture is also interesting precisely because Moreno appears to downplay its importance, stripping his act of its symbolic and political power (“so as not to remain idle”). But at the same time the expression reveals his ideological commitment to productivity, the traveler’s constant need for action. In fact, one of the most salient features of the trip narrated in Viaje is the insistence on physical work, on bodily effort in order to achieve the destination. This is seen on the occasions when the expedition is forced, due to the characteristics of the river, to portage their boats. Moreno explains that an external witness to their voyage “hubiera creído empresa

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  153 de locos el trabajo que estamos haciendo: desnudos, con medio cuerpo en el agua helada con la cabeza calentada por el ardiente sol, arrastramos la blanca embarcación sin nombre que lentamente avanza, gracias a los refuerzos que trae consigo una pequeña ambición de gloria” (Viaje, p. 334) [would have viewed the work we are doing as a crazy venture: naked, with half our bodies in the freezing water and our heads heated by the burning sun, we drag along the nameless white boat which slowly moves forward, thanks to the increased strength that a modest ambition for glory brings with itself]. Effort, movement, work is what gives meaning to the traveler’s mission. When there is nothing better to do, writing can constitute a good way of keeping idleness at bay.75

The “Immense Tomb” In his first book, much more so than in the later texts, one of the ways that Moreno manages to give his discourse authority is through his use of scientific language. At the beginning of Viaje a la Patagonia austral, he asserts that he embarked on his endeavor “en provecho de la patria y de la ciencia” (p. 7) [to the benefit of the homeland and of science], a phrase that illustrates the connection between the two in late nineteenth-century Latin America, when positivism (and its obsession with the idea of progress) was a crucial component of the ideology that drove the construction of national states. Over the course of Viaje, the patriotic and scientific discourses work in tandem, with science serving as an element that justifies Moreno’s description of the territory and its inhabitants as things of the past. On 4 February 1877, Moreno arrives at a spot that he affirms has not been visited by Darwin (whom, according to the explorer, would nonetheless have loved to see it). The scientist-collector then proceeds to describe the landscape, acting subsequently upon it: La historia de generaciones pasadas yace sepultada en las entrañas arenosas de este gris zócalo de meseta. La superposición de las capas han conservado entre ellas restos de seres que la naturaleza colocó en ese lecho … Esos animals, cuyos restos han hecho rodar las aguas marinas y fluviales hasta dejarlos sepultados bajo la superficie del suelo patagónico, muestran la riqueza y la variedad de seres que ostentaban sus curiosas formas en los paisajes terciarios. Esta inmensa tumba que conserva un mundo que la erosión desentierra y revela al feliz observador, guarda los vestigios de la vida de miles de años. He investigado sus ruinas, he recorrido sus paredes y al menor indicio las he atacado batiéndolas con el martillo y el pico; y entre esa árida soledad he encontrado la animación de las épocas perdidas, ¡han resucitado a mi vista los extinguidos vertebrados de los tiempos de la aurora del terciario! (Viaje, pp. 320–21, emphasis added)

154  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia [The history of past generations lies buried in the sandy bowels of this grey plateau base. The layers, in their superposition, retain between them traces of beings that nature placed upon that bed … Those animals, whose remains marine and fluvial waters have rolled and left buried under the surface of the Patagonian soil, show the wealth and variety of creatures that manifest their curious forms in Tertiary landscapes. This immense tomb, which contains a world that erosion unearths and reveals to the lucky observer, conserves traces of life from thousands of years ago. I have investigated its ruins, I have explored its walls, and at the slightest indication I have assaulted them, striking them with hammer and pickax; and amid that arid solitude I have found the spirit of lost eras—the extinct vertebrates from the dawn of the Tertiary Period have been resurrected to my sight!] The passage initially describes a space of death, of silence; this is a desert (“árida soledad”) into which Moreno violently (see the verbs ­“assault” and “strike”) infuses meaning. There, what is visible are only the traces (which Moreno calls “ruins”) of something that must be brought to “life”—that is, to the collection, to the museum—by the traveler.76 Throughout his travels in Patagonia, Moreno continuously gathers different objects to be added to the Buenos Aires Public Museum collection. The institution is constantly mentioned in Viaje a la Patagonia austral; in fact, the very first chapter is titled “First Trials. Results. The Museum”. In the paragraph that follows the above quotation, for example, the narrator exclaims, “mi colección paleontológica se enriquece con los despojos de variadas formas vivientes …” (p. 321) [my paleontologic collection enhances itself with the remains of different living forms …]. This museum (also known as the Buenos Aires Anthropology and Archeology Museum), which he directed at the time of the book’s publication, was founded with Moreno’s personal collections (Viaje, p. 13). The role of museums has to be considered in the context of the changes in the discourse of science during the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly after the enormous influence of Darwin’s theory of evolution. McClintock discusses the importance of museums within the new considerations of the relations between time and space brought by Darwin’s theory: “The middle class Victorian fixation with origins, with genesis narratives, with archaeology, with skulls, skeletons and fossils― the imperial bric-a-brac of the archaic―was replete with the fetishistic compulsion to collect and exhibit that shaped the musée imaginaire of middle class empiricism.”77 It is important then to pay attention to which objects are gathered and added to the collection in Moreno’s travels. Here, the archeological work helps bring two different time periods closer to each other: the prehistoric objects come to life when they enter the present—that is to say, when they are placed into a more general

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  155 narrative of evolution at whose end stands the very archeologist who unearths them. Patagonia is here seen as a space belonging to the past and needing to be resignified by the traveler, who, like a geologist, “lee en el gran libro de la naturaleza” (Viaje, p. 320) [reads from nature’s mighty book]. The scene bears similiarities to the one in which the flag is planted on a rock showing strong signs of erosion. But the role that the patriotic symbol plays with respect to the soil and nature, here is attributed to the work of the archeologist (Moreno is in turn geologist, archeologist, and, as we will see, anthropologist). In Moreno, then, science is transformed into a component of the nationalistic discourse. Museums were a central component of the modernizing project of the Latin American state. Together with the construction of botanical gardens, zoos, and urban parks, museums, built during these years in the context of important urban reforms in various Latin American cities, were not just part of the spaces of leisure for the middle classes, but were viewed as central components of the education of the modern citizen. These new spaces of leisure were also given prominent situations in the newly built cities. The case of La Plata is a good example: the city was founded in 1882, and the La Plata Museum was inaugurated in 1884, occupying one of the city’s most emblematic buildings (see F ­ igure 9). Andermann explains that in Argentina museums respond to two new strong presences in the last years of the nineteenth century: the state and the masses; museums seem to offer a narrative that constructs a

Figure 9  F  açade of the Museum of La Plata. Photo by author.

156  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia continuity between the nation’s past and the rapidly changing present; that is, they make the masses feel like part of the modern state.78 Moreno’s exhumation and collection of objects constitutes an appropriative rereading of the territory as part of the museum’s new national narrative. Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia deals with museums’ superimposition of time periods and the positivist narrative of the nation that they propose, specifically in the nineteenth century. For him, the heterotopia is often linked to what he calls “heterochrony”—that is, a space that encompasses multiple and sometimes infinite time periods, which encloses a world that has been reconstructed with an eye toward being all-encompassing.79 The natural history of the homeland is built through the disposition of various objects, dead and alive, natural and man-made, and coming from different epochs, in a new order that establishes new relationships between these heterogenous objects. This also implies a new understanding of time. Traveling in Patagonia is, for Moreno, to survey the nation’s past, while the museum offers a narrative of progress, one that moves constantly forward. However, Moreno reads Patagonia as something that can be museumified, inserting it, in his discourse, within the temporal logic of the museum. The violence of the gathering logic, seen in Moreno’s words as an assault on the soil, is also connected to the looming war (in his later texts, the war is a concrete presence). Moreno does not only collect traces of invertebrates, but also collects indigenous objects, and bodies of recently dead (or killed) native people. The war against indigenous peoples therefore provided the museum with many new “objects” that “enriched” its collection. The gathering exercise is intimately connected to death (hence the idea of “returning objects to life”), and it is only of secondary importance when and how this death occurred. Referring to the La Plata Museum once it had been established, Andermann emphasizes a continuum between the various objects found there, affirming that “[t]he violence of conquest that had allowed the formation of the museum’s collection was thus simultaneously disavowed and restaged in the encounter with a ‘dead’ nature”.80 This “dead” nature—another version of the “immense tomb”—is itself a form of museum. This is a good example of the links that Moreno establishes between the Patagonian space and the museum. In a way, for Moreno, Patagonia—as a space of death—is already a museum. The traveler seems to be satisfied only when he manages to read this land as what it will become, or as a past that can be incorporated into his narrative. The present, for its part, is only an “arid solitude”, an “immense tomb”. We should go beyond the immediate meaning that Moreno gives to these expressions and think of them as presages of the war that had reached its most frenzied peak when the book was published but that had already been portended several years earlier, during Moreno’s journey (and in fact had been taking place throughout the

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  157 entire century in the form of skirmishes and isolated incidents, which increased in frequency in the 1870s). From this perspective, Patagonia is in fact a space of death. A space of death that gives life to the museum.

Travel as Nature’s Transformation Obsessed with gathering up anything that seems old (and new for his collection), the traveler-collector’s perspective turns nature into a space that must be domesticated, as the narrator insists that the seemingly inhospitable lands (he calls them, employing a foundational trope in the lettered descriptions of Latin American space, “a desert as inhospitable as the sea” [p. 150]) will become productive. He also repeatedly indicates, making use of an age-old colonial trope, that the different places he describes are awaiting modern man’s arrival to exploit them. For example, while exploring the landscape right after naming Lake San Martín, he refers to “los bosques lejanos que esperan al hombre para convertirse en construcciones cómodas” (Viaje, p. 423) [the far-away woods that wait for man in order to turn themselves into comfortable constructions].81 This trope of awaiting nature appears explicitly several times in the book’s very last chapter, centered on the ways in which the surveyed territories can be made productive, thereby becoming part of the modernizing state’s capitalist logic. In Unthinking Eurocentrism, Robert Stam and Ella Shohat refer to this in the context of colonialism: the metaphoric portrayal of the (non-European) land as coyly awaiting the touch of the colonizer implied that non-European continents could only benefit from colonial praxis. The revivification of the wasted soil evoked a quasi-divine process of endowing life and meaning ex-nihilo, a Promethean production of order from chaos, plenitude from lack.82 The idea of revivification is an apt way of approaching the scene (discussed above) in which Moreno chips at a rock to unearth the remains of vertebrates. Unlike what we see in Hudson, nature is regarded as part of a past that is valuable to the extent that it can be transformed—that is, as pure potentiality. Nature is interesting to the traveler as long as it be thought of as something else, as what it will become.83 It is in this context that the idea of predestination becomes powerful: natural resources exist only to be discovered and exploited. Nature, for Moreno, is an entity that can achieve its full self only through progress and modernization. The image of the unconquered territory as lacking or incomplete is crucial in Moreno. This is what explains not just the images of the waiting land, but also the rhetoric of substitution.84 The unbridgeable distance between the texts and travels of Moreno and Hudson lies precisely in their differing undergirding conceptions of

158  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia nature.85 For Moreno, nature is at bottom something external, an entity that is separate and distinct from man. It is a form of what Neil Smith calls an external nature “waiting to be internalized in the process of social production”.86 This conception of naturalness is based on a particular kind of science, evident in Moreno’s perspective. Nature, as “an object to be mastered and manipulated”, is part of the Baconian scientific discourse whose transformative effort is directed at the production of goods.87 That quality of separateness, radically other from natural space, originates in the rationalist discourse of science, which has held sway in Europe since the seventeenth century.88 This perspective is one that permanently introduces desire into the consideration of space, projecting the future benefits (generally—though not always—material and economic in nature) that can be extracted. This projection into the future is linked, in Moreno’s understanding of travel, with the very concrete and present notions of adventure, risk, and fighting against a challenging nature. In December 1876, when Moreno visits what is known today as Monte León Island, in the Atlantic Ocean a few kilometers south of the mouth of the Santa Cruz River, he reflects, while gazing at the sea, on his own task. He thinks of the dangers of life at sea, and the courage it demands, and then he begins to think, in general terms, of men in unexplored territories. The definition of “traveler” given at this point is telling: Un peligro lo liga a otro mayor, al cual se acerca con fe. Jamás desfallece. … La pusilanimidad no penetra en quien nace marino o viajero en tierras nuevas. … Entiendo por viajero no sólo el que camina leguas con sus pies en busca de adelantos, sino también el que las recorre, con su imaginación, haciendo progresar los conocimientos que han de ir sometiendo a nuestro imperio los demás elementos de la naturaleza. Si bien un día, los Colón, los Magallanes, los Cook, los Franklyn, los Livingstone, que descubrieron casi mundos y que murieron al revelárnoslos no encontrarán ni modestos imitadores por falta de scenario, y que la tan grandiosa como pequeña esfera terrestre nos será familiar en sus más lejanos rincones, los que sigan las huellas de los Galileo, los Voltaire, los Humboldt, serán inagotables. Ellos concluirán el conocimiento de los mundos; todo lo que existe nos será revelado por su estudio … (Viaje, p. 222) [One danger links him to a greater one, which he approaches with confidence. He never gives up. Faintheartedness does not afflict the born sailor or traveler. By traveler I understand not only a man who walks many miles on his feet in search of progress, but also one who explores those miles through his imagination, advancing the forms of knowledge that will gradually enable us to establish

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  159 dominion over the other elements of nature … Even when, one day, the Columbuses, the Magellans, the Cooks, the Franklyns, the Livingstones, who discovered what are almost worlds and who died while revealing them to us, do not find even humble imitators due to the lack of new context to explore, and even when the most distant corners of our grandiose yet small terrestrial sphere are familiar to us, endless numbers will still follow the tracks of the Galileos, the Voltaires, the Humboldts. They will complete our knowledge of the world; everything that exists will be revealed to us through their investigations.] Physical movement is not required in order to travel; it is enough to use the imagination. Just as it was for Lamb early in Hudson’s The Purple Land, who surveyed Uruguay from atop the Cerro de Montevideo, traveling is for Moreno a matter not just of seeing but of imagining, of projecting into the future. Above all, though, travelers are not just people who travel, but also those who write about the “discovered” lands, regardless of whether they visited them or not. Those other travelers, those who move knowledge forward, are, of course, scientists. Moreno knows that his readers are aware that he himself is both. He shares these two complementary lineages almost uniquely. He follows the routes forged by those men of action who risked their lives in their search for new lands, but also those intellectuals who worked with the materials gathered by the former. At the same time, and given the success of these travels of “discovery”, the text indicates that the first lineage is close to extinction, for the world will soon be known in its entirety (again, the mission on which the narrator is embarked clearly contributes to this extinction). Moreno here might be suggesting that, after the very trip he is narrating, there will be no more travelers—understood in this particular way—in Argentina. At the same time, in another moment in which Moreno’s discourse mimics and adapts that of the European powers, knowledge produced in these enterprises is clearly destined to “dominate” these lands. This discourse, then, highlights strength and force on the one hand, while on the other privileging knowledge and science. However, if travel as “discovery” will end, travel as the production of knowledge might never do so. This implies, also, a very interesting understanding of the future of travel (he does not consider here the possibility of conceiving of travel as tourism, since travel is connected to the unknown, not to the visits to well-known places upon which the practice of tourism rests).

A Rhetoric of Substitution Yet the intensity with which the longed-for future is anticipated conceals the erasures demanded by its arrival. In a text written in 1916,

160  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia and included in Reminiscencias, Moreno remembers his first trips to northern Patagonia in 1875–76 as he praises the changes that “progress” would supposedly bring, thereby extinguishing the desert. He refers to “la senda por donde la civilización llegara a los Andes y reemplazara al indio holgazán por el hombre de trabajo” (Reminiscencias, p. 23) [the path by which civilization would reach the Andes and replace the indolent Indian with the man of labor]. A rhetorically effective antithetical and substitutive parallelism is apparent here: progress entails substitution. We have here an ideological operation that creates both elements of the parallel. The clear opposition thus produced between the expressions “of labor” and “indolent” expands considerably if the corresponding nouns are also in opposition: labor seems to imply a greater degree of humanization of the subject. A few pages later, Moreno defends the presence of institutions by positing formal education as the element that leads to the region’s true ­progress—as yet unachieved. Here, again, desire functions through this same logic of substitution: Ansío para esos lugares, una escuela donde se aprenda a aprovecharlos, levantada quizá en el mismo sitio donde en la vieja modorra de hace muchos años, vegetaba aquel robusto algarrobo, el ‘Walichu’, que vi coloreado todo con jirones de ponchos y otros objetos colgados en sus ramas por los indios. … El ferrocarril y los automóviles han borrado los rastros del saqueo y del degüello. (Reminiscencias, pp. 27–28) [I long for those places, a school where one learns to take advantage of them, perhaps erected in the same spot where, in the old torpor of many years ago, there grew that robust carob tree, the “Walichu”, which was red with ponchos and other objects hung from its branches by the Indians. … The railroad and automobiles have erased all traces of pillaging and throat-slitting.] In these passages Moreno is no longer wishing for the transformation of nature; here the rhetoric of substitution squarely involves the indigenous peoples. Although similar moments appear in Viaje a la Patagonia austral, the fact that the Conquest of the Desert has already taken place in all the texts included in Reminiscencias is of great relevance.89 There is a revealing shift from desire (“I long for”) to an already transformed modern present (“have erased”). But the text also suggests an almost grammatical substitution. The erasure is systematic and precise: modern railroads and automobiles in exchange for Indian pillaging and throat-slitting. Another substitution is carried out here, one that may be more seamless and more subtle. Through a series of rhetorical operations, the carob

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  161 tree becomes by extension an Indian space: the space of religious life (as suggested by the word “Walichu”) and the storehouse for clothing and everyday objects. Naturally, the ideologically constructed substitution leads to a deceptive diversion, since the school, work, and modes of transportation do not explain the disappearance of the indigenous presence. Thus, civilization does not arrive by a “path”, as the first quotation suggests. These substitutions, which elliptically attempt to conceal Moreno’s approval of the genocidal war that makes them possible, also deposit violence in the native, always as a trace (what is erased are merely the “traces of pillaging and throat-slitting”). A few lines earlier Moreno refers to “los rastros dejados por las lanzas al arrastrarlas sobre la arena” (p. 26) [the traces left by the spears as they are dragged across the sand].90 The association between the indigenous people and violence only legitimizes the notion that they are already merely traces. But this is not just a question of what Andermann has described so lucidly: “violence is embedded in frontier literature not only—perhaps not even mainly—because that literature anticipates, promotes, and recounts the eradication of the Indians but because it ratifies, celebrates, and finally ‘forgets’ this ‘solution’, eradicating violence.”91 After that first step of erasing the war itself, the violent agency is shifted to the other party, as the factor that justifies the “substitution”.92 The only thing that can be recovered of indigenous cultural practices has to do in this context with their violent existence, while the civilizing conquests are portrayed as smooth, inevitable, and satisfactory, without making explicit the war that lurks, silenced, in between.

An Unhomely Museum, or the Other Side of War Moreno does not only collect remains of paleozoic beings: there is a continuity between those buried vertebrates that Moreno finds and these signs that are now just traces. In addition, the living Tehuelches themselves become remains. Throughout Viaje a la Patagonia austral, present-­day indigenous populations are not seen as being any different from plants or animals in that they are always objects of research, ready to be classified and measured: “Igual obsequio hago a los demás indios, conquistando así su voluntad para cuando tenga lugar la medición de sus macizos cuerpos, operación que es uno de los motivos de mi viaje” (Viaje, p. 239) [I make the same gift to the other Indians, thereby gaining their agreement to allow me to measure their emaciated bodies, which is one of the purposes of my trip]. According to the scientific discourse of the time, skull measurements indicated the level of “primitivism”, intelligence, or criminality of the different races.93 In the pages of Viaje, we encounter an actual “harvesting” of skulls. The act of measuring does not distinguish between the living Indian and the buried one. In fact, the protagonist exhumes not only skulls but also entire bodies. He even

162  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia desecrates indigenous graves on several occasions. The most macabre of these moments comes with the exhumation of the corpse of his own “friend”, Sam Slick. The Tehuelche Sam Slick consintió en que hiciéramos su fotografía, pero de ninguna manera quiso que midiera su cuerpo y sobre todo su cabeza. No sé por qué rara preocupación hacía esto, pues más tarde, al volver a encontrarlo en Patagones, aun cuando continuamos siendo amigos, no me permitió acercarme a él … y un año después … le propuse que me acompañara y rehusó diciendo que yo quería su cabeza. Su destino era ése. (Viaje, pp. 105–06) [agreed to let us take his photograph, but he adamantly refused to allow me to measure his body and especially not his head. I do not know out of what peculiar concern he refused, and later, when I ran into him again in Patagones, although we continued to be friends, he did not allow me to go near him … and a year later … I proposed that he accompany me and he refused, saying that I wanted his head. That was his fate.] After the death of Sam, who seems to be aware of the classificatory logic associated with skull measurements, the narrator continues, “averigüé el paraje en que había sido inhumado y en una noche de luna exhumé su cadáver, cuyo esqueleto se conserva en el Museo Antropológico de Buenos Aires; sacrilegio cometido en provecho del estudio osteológico de los Tehuelches” (p. 106) [I learned where he had been buried and one moonlit night exhumed his corpse, whose skeleton is preserved in the Anthropological Museum of Buenos Aires, a sacrilege committed for the sake of the osteological study of the Tehuelche people]. It seems that Sam had good reason to be suspicious of Moreno, and his unease was not as “peculiar” as the traveler pretended, supposedly surprised but in fact decidedly cynical. It is also clear that Moreno’s notion of friendship is not shared by Sam, who, in a gesture of “friendship” that Moreno does not consider problematic, would not allow Moreno to get close to him.94 Without a doubt, indigenous people are merely pieces of history to be preserved and exhibited. Sylvia Molloy notes Moreno’s “dual vocation” as both an archeologist and an anthropologist.95 On the one hand, he sees the Indians as national subjects (though ones who are always degraded, marginal, subaltern), while on the other he views them “as an object of study, preferably in pieces, as a specimen or fragment from a collection”.96 Thus, in the traveler’s preservationist discourse there is a continuity between living and dead, or, according to Molloy, a “confusion between living subjects and exhibition objects”.97 In that confusion, everything can be exhibited and studied. As a result, Moreno is able to transform living Indians into the past, into pieces of “living history”.98

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  163 Tehuelches are history because they are seen as having reached a lower degree of evolution. The trope of infantilization is frequently used throughout Viaje a la Patagonia austral: “El único modo de comprender la vida primitiva, [para] quienes estudiamos el remoto pasado del hombre, es admirarlo y observarlo en sus primeras impresiones que en la Patagonia, como en África y en otras partes, reflejan la infancia de la humanidad” (p. 244) [The only way to understand primitive life, [for] those of us who study man’s distant past, is to admire and observe it in its first manifestations which, in Patagonia, like in Africa and elsewhere, reflect the infancy of humanity]. The Tehuelches live, for Moreno, in another time. This is an example of what Johannes Fabian has called “denial of coevalness”: “By that I mean a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.”99 The same trope appears at different points in Viaje. When a group of Tehuelches protest because Moreno has not brought them what he promised, he quickly solves the inconvenience: “Pero, como niños, pues son niños moralmente (exceptuando sus vicios que son de hombres), se calman al fin y concluyen por contentarse con lo que les doy …” (Viaje, p. 382) [But, like children, because morally they are children (except for their vices, which are typical of men), they finally calm down and end up by contenting themselves with what I give them …]. The notion of being stuck in a different stage of evolution instantly transforms the Patagonians into “ancestors” of the supposedly more evolved white men who study them as their own past, even if the former are indisputably the latter’s contemporaries. This trope of infantilization was an important component of the discourse of colonialism, as it legitimized forms of domination that would supposedly be beneficial to those peoples who could not govern themselves.100 In the case of Patagonia, the perceived problem was that the native peoples supposedly did not know how to (or did not want to, or could not) exploit the lands where they lived. Infantilization is then a trope that makes legitimate the state’s claims for domination over the other’s lands and bodies. There is no doubt that Moreno’s texts make some room for indigenous voices (except, surely, in Apuntes, his description of Patagonia after the war, in which there are no more Indians). Many of the scenes depict meals, parties, discussions, and fights (sometimes all of these happening as part of the same event, which Moreno would call an “orgy”) that the narrator participates in with the natives. On several occasions an indigenous person is able- to some degree - to respond to Moreno or question his presence, thereby achieving a degree of agency. In Viaje a la Patagonia austral, when natives suspect that Moreno is Chilean, or when they show they do not trust him or the state he represents, or in the reactions of Sam Slick with respect to the traveler’s supposed friendship, we can see that they are aware of his project, or that they see him as a potential enemy. Yet, as is evident in the Sam Slick episode, the narrator

164  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia offers distorted interpretations of those attitudes, which have no effect on his convictions or his conception of the subjects he views as objects of research.101 Dead or alive, the indigenous communities have only one possible “fate” (a word Moreno actually uses to refer to his exhumation of Sam’s body, as seen above), even if they do resist it. The fact that they must be “preserved” places them in the past, outside the project of building the state apparatus, which looks obsessively toward the future. Once again, establishing different temporalities functions as a strategy of symbolic exclusions for the nation. At the time of the first trip he narrates, Moreno opposed the “final solution”. The other texts, written after the desert-making war, reaffirm this perception. Furthermore, Moreno even denounces the “excesses” of the war. In Apuntes, from 1897, he writes, “En la dura guerra a los indígenas se cometieron no pocas injusticias, y con el conocimiento que tengo de lo que pasó entonces, declaro que no hubo razón alguna para el aniquilamiento de las indiadas que habitaban el sur del lago ­Nahuel-Huapi” (p. 107) [In the harsh war against the indigenous people, no small number of injustices were committed, and with the knowledge I have now of what happened then, I aver that there was no reason at all for the annihilation of the Indian populations inhabiting the southern shore of Nahuel-Huapi]. He also talks about “el resto errante que quede de esas tribus” (p. 107) [the wandering remainder that is left of those tribes], and explicitly mentions their extermination.102 This reference to the wandering vestige is a powerful one and encompasses unforeseen meanings: nomadism, which was for many a form of resistance to the logic of the modern state, becomes a wandering without aim or purpose as an effect of its territorializing policies. The problem with the perspective Moreno adopts here lies in the distance between what is explicitly stated and what the text hints at, through silences and concealments. In Moreno, it is these silences that legitimize the war. From the point of view of the Argentine government at the time, the ideology of progress and the museum was irreconcilable with opposition to indigenous genocide. This is what Bandieri has referred to as Moreno’s “dual, and often contradictory, nature, playing a very active role in the new state project while also being moved by a paternalistic feeling toward the Indian”.103 Few alternatives remain for the indigenous people in this project beyond their “destiny” in the museum. Transformed into objects, they can only be included in the official project by being turned into a productive force, thereby entering the logic of capitalism. Their presence within the space of the nation would thus acquire meaning. In Viaje Moreno believes that when the Tehuelches “conozcan nuestra civilización antes que nuestros vicios y sean tratados como nuestros semejantes, los tendremos trabajando en las estancias del Gallegos, haciendo el mismo servicio que nuestros gauchos” (p. 469) [learn about our civilized ways rather than our vices and are treated as our peers, we will have them working on the ranches in [Río]

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  165 Gallegos, performing the same service as our gauchos]. In the world imagined by the traveler, indigenous people will be given subordinate, menial work.104 There is, in Moreno’s sentence, a clear grammatical distinction between an “us” and the group of indigenous people and gauchos, which is different from the group as a member of which the traveler speaks. There seems to be, on the one hand, a capitalist “Argentine” group and, on the other, the group of marginal subjects, who have been incorporated into the national project as a work force, as cheap labor for the benefit of the first group. So, state formation during this period can be read as the establishment of capitalist relationships of production. There is in this projection a sort of precariousness within the national space, a sphere made up of everything that has been outside it and is now incorporated in a conditional manner, with a limited and precise function. In this imaginary projection the indigenous population is seen as sharing the workspace with gauchos, who were an element of barbarism in Sarmiento’s Facundo but, 35 years after that book’s publication, have now been fully incorporated into the national project, even though—or perhaps precisely because—the nomadic gaucho, strictly speaking, has also disappeared and been integrated into the nation as a productive force.105 One passage that appears in both Viaje and Reminiscencias, with only minimal changes, shows the indigenous role as being different from that of the gaucho. In Moreno’s 1875–76 visit to the Sayhuque camp (a trip recounted briefly in the first chapters of Viaje, and whose account is later included in Reminiscencias), when he is viewed with suspicion by many, the cacique Chacayal, Sayhueque’s relative, gives a speech trying to incriminate him (by saying, basically, that he is Chilean). Moreno quotes Chacayal as saying that since “San Antonio” he had not eaten a white man’s flesh, but that he now felt like doing so. In parentheses, Moreno explains that this probably refers to ancient cannibalistic habits that no longer exist in the 1870s. What he says immediately afterward nonetheless perpetuates the connection: “Conozco casos en que en el vértigo de la matanza algunos indios han bebido sangre y comido el corazón del blanco enemigo” (Reminiscencias, p. 50) [I know of cases in which, in the frenzy of the massacre, some Indians have drunk the blood and eaten the heart of their white enemy]. He then explains Chacayal’s reference to San Antonio: es el nombre de una estancia al sur de esta provincial (San Antonio de Iraola), donde tuvo lugar, en 1855, una espantosa carnicería de soldados y gauchos argentinos en la que ese cacique [Chacayal] y Shaihueque tomaron parte. Las escenas que ellos me contaron a ese respecto, horrorizan. De esta matanza escapó un solo soldado y éste presta actualmente, servicio de guardián en el Museo Histórico Nacional. (Reminiscencias, p. 50, emphasis added)

166  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia [it is the name of a ranch to the south of this province (San Antonio de Iraola), where, in 1855, a horrifying slaughter of Argentine soldiers and gauchos took place, in which that cacique [Chacayal] and Shaihueque participated. The scenes they described to me from that incident are blood-curdling. A single soldier escaped that massacre, and he is at present serving as a guard at the National History Museum.] On the one hand, the discourse grants the gauchos Argentine nationality, and so clearly distinguishes them from the natives, pushing the latter farther away from the space shared by soldiers and gauchos. Thus, this quotation seems to contradict the previous one, in which Moreno viewed indigenous peoples as being able to work alongside gauchos in the ranches of Patagonia. There is a shift in the symbolic border of the nation, which here differentiates between Indians and gauchos, barbarizing the former and placing the latter on ranches, the basic unit of capitalist production in southern Argentina. These words evoke the intrusion of indigenous violence into the harmonious, unfragmented space of productivity, where “soldiers and gauchos” is used as a synecdoche for the homeland. As Oszlak has explained, in the early nineteenth century in the province of Buenos Aires, the ranch was a “productive unit and at the same time a sociopolitical unit, a nucleus that organized life in the countryside. It included … the military organization needed to defend themselves from the Indians and act as a rural police force”.106 In this sense, the consolidation of the state meant, right after the Conquest of the Desert, the definitive ranchification of Patagonia. The ranches brought new relationships of production. Now, thanks to the war, there would at last be land, work, and capital. The identification between state and ranch arose because the space-producing logic of the former became concrete in the latter: the ranch was the unit of capitalist production in Patagonia par excellence, marking the appropriation of territories by the state and the annihilation of the indigenous communities (and the “recycling” of the gaucho as a rural laborer). The establishment of the ranch required prior “pacification” and “settling”, two euphemisms that also function as ideological operations that produce state space.107 The last sentence of the passage is the only one that the 1915 rewriting of the episode adds. It provokes reflection on the exhibition methods used by the museum in the final years of the nineteenth century. In this case, in a macabre twist, it is not the Indian who ends up on display in the museum but the survivor of the indigenous “massacre”. In reality, his situation doesn’t change much: he switches from one menial job to another, while the new place implies a continuity with the marginality of the previous one, since it forces him to continue sharing the space of history with indigenous people. Inclusion in the capitalist nation’s work force takes place here not on the ranch but in the museum. At the same

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  167 time, it seems as if, according to the official logic, a sort of contagion must be at work in indigenous violence: everything that is touched by that violence, that suffers it, that witnesses it, becomes part of the story about it. In this new, liminal place there is a certain continuity with the indigenous sphere; the survivor, too, is now “museifiable” as a trace of the Indian “past”. At the same time, indigenous people are not placed in the museum merely in the form of their skeletons or skulls; the institution also performs a “preservation” function with living specimens. In an 1886 letter included in Reminiscencias, Moreno says, “He obtenido del Ministro de Guerra, que permita que ese Cacique [Foyel], y sus familias comprendiendo sus hermanos y lenguaraces, en todo quince personas, vengan a vivir conmigo a este Museo, mientras no se les envíe a sus campos” (pp. 261–62) [I have obtained from the Ministry of War permission to have that cacique [Foyel] and his family members, comprising his siblings and native interpreters, fifteen people in total, come to live with me at this museum until they are sent to their fields]. Jens Andermann has remarked on the decision to “lodge” indigenous people in the museum, specifically with regard to the cacique Inacayal and his clan: Lodged at the museum … the natives were submitted to anthropometric measurements and photographic sessions, so as to collect the anatomical evidence of their evolutionary proximity to “prehistoric man.” On entering the museum, Inacayal … had become a specimen, a living sample of the hombre fósil (fossil man). Upon his death in 1888, his skeleton, brain, scalp, and death mask were preserved and put on display alongside the other exhibits of “indigenous anatomy”.108 There is a subtle identification between the archeological object that is found and put on display and the living subject being exhibited with the excuse of preserving it. This was also the case with the gauchos who supposedly escaped indigenous massacres: the museum is the place of the survivors, of those who are not entirely inside. It is a space for those who retain traces of their own death or the death of other people, a place midway between life and death. In the case of the indigenous communities, survival in the capitalist nation is no longer possible except in the museum (not even on the ranches), the only possible or “natural” place for them at the beginning of the twentieth century. Moreno did in fact send someone to look for indigenous people: “envío al portador de ésta Sr. Telémaco Arvelli empleado de este Museo, que empleará el tiempo, que Ud. juzgue conveniente para hacer entrega de dichos indios … en coleccionar objetos de historia natural en aquellos alrededores” (Reminiscencias, p. 263) [I am sending the bearer of this letter, Mr. Telémaco Arvelli, employed by this museum, who will

168  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia use the amount of time that you consider appropriate for delivering said Indians … to collect objects of natural history in the surrounding ­areas]. This journey would thus offer a twofold benefit for the museum’s ­collection: Arvelli would not only look for specimens of live indigenous people to “preserve” but could also, while waiting for them, look for (other) elements “of natural history” for the collection. Once more, the text establishes a continuity that identifies the different elements that the emissary has been sent to gather with one another, thereby fossilizing indigenous people. This shift from Moreno the archeologist to Moreno the anthropologist appears without warning, as a fact. In looking at the indigenous people (even before their killing and displacement) Moreno always sees them as objects to be “preserved”. Uncannily, he cannot look at them without the shadow of their disappearance hanging over them, almost as if they were ghosts or living dead. Again, this is a good example of Fabian’s “denial of coevalness”. The view of the indigenous populations in Reminiscencias, when the war allows Moreno to write about his journey in terms of its results, in terms of its medium-term consequences, clearly incorporates a rhetoric of vanishing. While Viaje evinces a tendency to establish beginnings (the traveler is constantly constructing himself as the quintessential pioneer, one who, although following the routes of previous travelers, lauds, corrects, and surpasses them), and although the narrator of this book is an initiator, an absolute discoverer (always from a perspective that ignores and erases the knowledge of those who already inhabit the supposedly new territories), Moreno’s Reminiscencias is in a certain sense the narrative of an ending. Certainly, the inescapable shadow that runs through all of the episodes recounted in this book and that makes the use of this language possible is that of the Conquest of the Desert and indigenous genocide, which are contemporary not with the book’s publication (as was the case with Viaje) but with some of the journeys recounted. Here the encounters with indigenous people often serve to anticipate their imminent disappearance. At the time of Moreno’s writing, war is already a certainty that shapes his language. When he talks about the objectives of his first visit to Shayhueque in 1875, he claims that in addition to studying the territory and reaching Chile (which is perhaps the more important strategic mission from the official point of view), he sought to “ver al indígena en su medio, lejos de la civilización, y vivir en el toldo para recoger entre aquellas tribus próximas a desaparecer, documentos que sólo conocía de oídas” (Reminiscencias, pp. 33–34, emphasis added) [see the indigenous person in his milieu, far from civilization, and live in the tent in order to gather, from among those tribes on the brink of vanishing, documents that I had only heard about]. Moreno wants to visit the tolderías to gather the remains of a tribe that was flourishing at the time: Shayhueque was, by then, the most powerful cacique in Patagonia, and a strategic ally of the Buenos Aires government. In the account of this visit

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  169 included in Viaje a la Patagonia austral, no reference to the “disappearance” of this group is made.109 The war against the indigenous tribes is in fact what allows Moreno to adopt this anachronistic perspective. He even begins to name, to the point of hyperbole, other things as being “last”: “Vi allí la última máscara de madera que se haya usado en festejos indígenas en esas regiones, objeto etnográfico de la más alta importancia” (Reminiscencias, p. 37) [There I saw the last wooden mask to be used in indigenous ceremonies in those regions, an ethnographic object of vital importance]. In what sense is this mask “last”? Even if he were talking not about a specific mask but about a type of mask, the tone of the sentence, its forcefulness, suggests that Moreno is discussing a specific single object. The rhetoric of vanishing is what allows the object to become an “ethnographic object” for the person describing it. Note, too, that the distance in time is largely “museifying”: the object the traveler describes, which has a concrete use and function, can only be conceived of as a museum piece. As Susan Stewart has showed, the uniqueness of the object is essential for it to be valuable as part of a collection. If, as she says, “this finitude becomes the collector’s obsession”, then the Conquest of the Desert is what makes the La Plata Museum’s collection so unique. The collection is not just “the antithesis of creation” in the cases I have studied here; it is the very result of destruction.110 Later, as he is leaving an indigenous settlement, the narrator says, with evident historical perspective, “perdimos de vista el aduar del buen Pitchualao, casi convencidos de que éramos los últimos viajeros que veían a los gennakenes, llevando su vida nómade. Algunos días de distancia separaban para nosotros millares de años, en la vida social, la edad de la piedra de la civilización moderna.” (pp. 152–53) [we lost sight of good Pitchualao’s camp, almost convinced we would be the last travelers to see the Gennakens living their nomadic lifestyle. Only a few days of travel separated for us thousands of years, in social life, the stone age from modern civilization]. Moreno’s writing, again, is not the clearest, but the last sentence of course means that he traveled thousands of years in just a few days, going from prehistory to contemporary times. Moreno’s language mingles distances in time with those in space. And, of course, the certainty of indigenous death can be explained only by the proximity of war.

On the Battlefront War remains one of the core themes in Reminiscencias. Whereas in Viaje war is a preordained certainty, given that the travels described take place before the open and systematic beginning of the Conquest of the Desert, the later book reunites texts written many years after the conflict was over, including accounts of journeys that Moreno took during the war. Thus, conflict and violence become an all-consuming, inescapable

170  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia presence, and the traveler ends up taking stances almost without realizing it, becoming immersed in the conflict even though that is not his explicit intention. The Reminiscencias chapter titled “Prisoner of Cacique Saihueque in the Caleufú camp” is particularly pertinent in this sense. It narrates an episode from 1880, the year after the first great offensive of General Roca against the indigenous peoples of the Pampas took place. This attack extended to the Negro River but did not yet include the Tehuelches. However, from 1879 the relations between Sayhueque and the state rapidly deteriorated. As Vezub explains, in the intense exchange of correspondence with state officials the hostile tone is palpable: the cacique began to be treated as an enemy.111 And this is precisely what Moreno tells Sayhueque and his secretary Loncochino when they are worried that their envoys (carrying Moreno’s letters) might not be well received at the closest national army fort: “‘es probable que si los sienten [llegar], les hagan fuego. Uds, son enemigos ahora.’ Cacique y secretario quedaron confundidos con esta lógica tremenda” (Reminiscencias, p. 189) [“it’s likely that, if they hear them [arrive], they will fire. You are enemies now.” The cacique and his secretary were startled by this blunt logic]. Also, immediately after this episode, while Moreno and his men are in the camp, they learn of the army’s movements: “Esa noche llegó aviso de que la división del Coronel Ortega se preparaba a invadir” (Reminiscencias, p. 190) [That night we got word that Colonel Ortega’s division was preparing to attack]. Moreno then gives an account of the war council organized by the tribe, and of the reunion of hundreds of warriors in preparation for a possible indigenous attack on the frontier (which in this case means the forts established by the state). All of this happens at Sayhueque’s camp, where Moreno is a prisoner. That is to say, he is a prisoner of war, so the indigenous people want to exchange him for prisoners held by the Argentine government. Though at no point does he reflect on this fact, the territory that Moreno is moving through is (or will soon be) part of the battlefront, and he is on one of the sides. At a certain point, he is judged by a war council, composed of various caciques. He is certainly nervous in front of the group of ­“savage-looking” natives, and his uniform constitutes for them a reminder of war episodes: “El uniforme de Sargento Mayor que vestía, recordábales combates en que más de un ‘peñi’ (hermano), había caído” (Reminiscencias, p. 181) [The sergeant major’s uniform I wore reminded them of battles in which more than one “peñi” (brother) had fallen]. In the near total absence of references to his body and physical appearance, one of the only elements that Moreno highlights is his dress, which places him in the army and grants him a position in its hierarchy. Moreno is not just an emissary of the state but also part of its war enterprise. As he himself says in a letter published in La Nación newspaper in 1879, at the peak of the war of extermination, and included in one of the appendices in Reminiscencias: “vestíamos el uniforme de ese ejército

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  171 y éramos los primeros blancos que, desde el Atlántico, llegaran hasta las altas cordilleras, para revelar sus riquezas e indicar con la brújula el camino que más tarde seguirían las armas argentinas” (p. 259) [we wore that army’s uniform and were the first white men who, from the Atlantic, had reached the high peaks, to reveal their riches and, with our compass, indicate the route that Argentina’s armies would later follow]. During the conflict, which enjoyed strong popular and official support, the traveler’s role is conceived of as little more than forging a path for the army, announcing it through his garb. The compass and weapons complement each other, synecdochally representing, respectively, Moreno’s group and the army—that is, science and war. The letter from Minister of War Roca to Moreno from that same year, which also appears as an appendix in Reminiscencias, suggests an identical parallel: “Ya me imagino el recibimiento que le habrá hecho el Gefe de la línea militar del Río Negro al valiente Gefe de la esploración científica de la Patagonia” (p. 233) [I can already imagine the welcome that the commander of the Río Negro military unit will have given the brave commander of the scientific exploration of Patagonia]. Moreno is one of two men whose parallel missions are part of a shared project, helmed by a single leader, who relishes imagining their meeting. Moreno’s forerunners may be Darwin, Musters, and FitzRoy—that is, explorers or naturalists—but those who will follow in his footsteps are soldiers. In observing a geological feature, he notes, “Este fenómeno, que creí descubrir, lo han corroborado más tarde, el Coronel Obligado, el Teniente O’Connor y mi compañero en la expedición del ‘Vigilante’, el piloto Moysés” (Reminiscencias, p. 210) [This phenomenon, which I believed I had discovered, was later corroborated by Colonel Obligado, Lieutenant O’Connor, and my travel companion on the “Vigilante” expedition, the guide Moysés]. The account produces a new genealogy, more prestigious within the framework of the new state, which is consolidated through a military campaign and adopts the discourse of conquest. This introduction of military discourse into the text, creating a warlike atmosphere, constitutes an additional example of the ways Moreno’s narrative goes along with, complements, and legitimizes the logic of extermination, which the text at other times criticizes with pragmatic arguments, as we have seen. Also, in the same chapter, which narrates Moreno’s desperate escape from Sayhueques’s camp, travel, war, and nation appear as an inseparable triad, practically made flesh in the traveler’s body: “Querían trepar por las rocas y salvar a pie. Me opuse; tenía sobre mí un enorme peso relativo: el tirador con 40 cartuchos, el revólver, la bandera, los diarios de viaje, el sebo y las tres cajas” (Reminiscencias, p. 208) [They wanted to climb over the rocks and continue on foot. I objected. I was loaded down with an enormous relative weight: a bandolier with forty cartridges, a revolver, a flag, my travel diaries, tallow, and three crates]. The flag, the

172  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia travel diaries, and the revolver seem to be inseparable from the narrator’s body: they accompany him and determine his movements. The mention of guns and munitions here evinces how there has been, even as the war raged, a shift with respect to the opening sentence of Viaje, which placed the book at the service “de la patria y de la ciencia” [of the nation and of science]. Now science has been displaced by war. A footnote, unusually signed with the initials E. V. M. (corresponding to Eduardo V. Moreno, Perito’s son), describes Moreno’s revolver: [E]n el revólver que conservo, aunque muy poco legible y escrita con una aguja, aparecen su firma y los siguientes puntos de referencia: Las Flores, Azul, Roldán, Indio Rico, Bahía Blanca, Punta Alta, Nueva Roma, Salinas; río Colorado, Patagones, Bahía San Blas, Aguada de los Loros, Guardia General Mitre, Bajada de Balcheta, e Isla Choele Choel, Chichinal, Cheynal geyú, río Limay, Chaleun geyú, Choica geyú, Fuen geyú, Ranquil, Trimnao, Collón Curá, Caleufú, Nahuel Huapi, F.P. Moreno 1875, Chilchiuma, Quem quim Luen, Chimehuin, Octubre 4–80, Pilcan, Pungei Lien, Quelen geyú, Buenos Aires. [On the revolver I have kept as a memento, though barely legible and scratched into the metal with a needle, his signature and the following points of reference appear: Las Flores, Azul, Roldán, Indio Rico, Bahía Blanca, Punta Alta, Nueva Roma, Salinas; Colorado River, Patagones, Bahía San Blas, Aguada de los Loros, Guardia General Mitre, Bajada de Balcheta, and Choele Choel Island, Chichinal, Cheynal geyú, Limay River, Chaleun geyú, Choica geyú, Fuen geyú, Ranquil, Trimnao, Collón Curá, Caleufú, Nahuel Huapi, F. P. Moreno 1875, Chilchiuma, Quem quim Luen, Chimehuin, October 4 – ’80, Pilcan, Pungei Lien, Quelen geyú, Buenos Aires.] Even if it is difficult to imagine how someone could write such an extensive list of names on a revolver, could there be a more perfect way to combine the experiences of violence and travel? Moreno must have carried the gun with him for years (some inscriptions are from 1875, while others seem to be from 1880), inscribing his itinerary onto it. The revolver thus becomes itself a travel diary. Indeed, as in a diary, the engraved words retain the association between the places visited and particular dates. It is another way to narrate the journey, to conceptualize it, to record it. The revolver can be read, synecdochally, as a version of Moreno himself: these marks are traces left on the gun by its passage through particular lands, the enumeration of the places the revolver has traveled. Many of the places recorded on the revolver still exist today. The itinerary corresponding to 1875 is quite precise; it begins in the province of Buenos Aires (Las Flores is around 200 kilometers south of the city of Buenos Aires), and ends in Nahuel Huapi (see the

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  173 approximate contemporary route according to Google Maps, Figures 10 and 11). Like an actual document, the first itinerary ends with the author’s name (which works as a signature) and the date. The list ends, quite abruptly but significantly, with Buenos Aires. It is as if the journey were documented all the way to the oikos; Buenos Aires suggests a reassuring return, as it also interrupts the list of indigenous names.112 In a narrative that harps on the hardships Moreno experiences in attempting to leave traces of the state on the land and that at the same time strives to collect, gather, and preserve traces of others, the use of the revolver functions as a form of collecting: the spaces are appropriated through the writing on the surface of the firearm. Moreno’s son’s note appears in Reminiscencias when Moreno is being taken prisoner at Sayhueque’s camp, and when many different caciques are meeting to decide his fate while looking suspiciously at him. The narrator then explains that he has a revolver hidden at his back that will help him to defend his mission, if attacked (p. 181). In Viaje, the revolver is used only for killing animals, be it guanacos for food or in order to enlarge the museum’s collection. These two examples show that in Reminiscencias the revolver is directly linked to the threatening presence (for the traveler) of the native peoples; it has become an instrument of self-defense.

Figure 10  Approximate map created from the inscriptions on Moreno’s revolver, including likely current names of places visited on his 1875 journey. Source: Google Maps.

174  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia

Figure 11  Map that continues the previous one, including the remaining places visited by Moreno on his 1875 trip, as suggested by the inscriptions on his revolver. Source: Google Maps.

War, Land, and Indigenous Peoples in Reminiscencias Almost all the texts included in Reminiscencias were written after 1906, the year in which Moreno, after strongly opposing the government’s decision to make the museum dependent on the University of La Plata (as its School of Natural Sciences), stepped down as director, a position he had been given for life. This represents a crucial moment in his life and in his relationship with the state he had represented not just in his travels but also in the conflict with Chile regarding national borders. His tone, in these writings, is much more critical of the state’s decisions, although he seeks to praise his own mission and service to the official project. In Reminiscencias, Moreno expresses some doubts and concerns about the ways in which the conquered lands were distributed by the state. Moreno sees the war as useless because the land remained unproductive, becoming the property of a few. The war was financed partly by those who would benefit from it: the state would pay back loans given by private citizens with lands obtained by force. The new landowners were authorized to complete the extermination of indigenous groups. As the Italian traveler Corrado Zoli noted years later, one of the great beneficiaries was the army.113 Many of the lands distributed by the state

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  175 were rapidly resold by their recipients at much higher prices. The most important aspect of the land distribution is that it turned out to benefit large cattle companies supported by foreign capital and the families of political elites from Buenos Aires.114 The global market’s demand for primary resources required the Argentine economy to occupy more and more land in order to increase production. As Bandieri explains, the persistence of the internal frontier had become the main obstacle to the expansion of the dominant segments commercially and financially linked to the economic powerhouses of the period, particularly England.115 At the same time, there was no systematic effort on the part of the state to “populate” Patagonia. The predominance of extensive ranching made the foundation of cities very difficult. Moreno viewed the process of land concentration with deep suspicion, for it contradicted his dreams of Patagonia as an urbanized region bustling with cars, ships, and commerce. In a text written in 1916, he also denounces the war as a pointless endeavor, especially unfair regarding the indigenous peoples (at least the Tehuelches, who were Moreno’s “friends”, and who had been peaceful and allied to the state): treinta y cuatro años han transcurrido desde que el cacique Ñancucheo desapareció defendiendo el suelo en que nació, desde que con medios violentos, innecesarios, quedó destruida una raza viril y utilizable, y desde esa fecha … estorban su progreso concesiones de tierras otorgadas, a granel, a potentados de la Bolsa, … lo que hace que decenas de leguas estén en manos de un solo afortunado … Busque el lector un mapa de aquel territorio y con asombro verá que gran parte de la región del Este y Norte de Nahuel Huapi … ­pertenece a muy pocos dueños, que la obtuvieron en su mayoría por vil precio y por condescendencia de los amigos en el gobierno. (Reminiscencias, pp. 39–40) [thirty-four years have passed since the cacique Ñancucheo disappeared defending the land where he was born, since through violent and unnecessary means, a manly and useful race was destroyed, and since that date … the progress of the land is obstructed by concessions of lands that were given, in large quantities, to magnates from the stock markets, which means that tens of leagues are in the hands of just one fortunate person … The reader should look at a map of that territory and be shocked to see that a great portion of the region to the east and north of Nahuel Huapi … belongs to a very few owners, who obtained it mostly at giveaway prices due to the favoritism of the government’s friends.] Passages like this alternate with some that are clearly more hopeful about the future of the territory (and with others that, as we have seen,

176  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia emphasize indigenous violence as a way to legitimize the war). But these passages establish a stark contrast to the positive imagination, full of futurity, that the traveler displayed in Viaje. Although in Viaje the war against indigenous peoples loomed on the horizon, there are no explicit references to it, let alone a full-throated opposition to it. In this passage, the war is viewed as unnecessary on account of its results and, in this context, the reference to the natives’ “usefulness” is important. In a text written in 1917–18 (Moreno died in 1919), Moreno questions that the “solution” adopted for the “Indian question” had been the Remington, and he says that fewer “Christians” were killed in Indian raids than natives as a result of the war waged by the former. He exclaims: “¡Lástima que la patria haya perdido así a miles de sus hijos, útil elemento de trabajo, cuando se le ha sabido dirigir!” (Reminiscencias, p. 122) [It is a shame that the nation has thus lost thousands of her sons, a useful labor supply if she had known how to deploy it!]. Moreno says that instead of being warred upon, indigenous peoples could have been used as workforce, and that (presumably after their defeat) they could have been put into reserves, as happened in the USA (Reminiscencias, p. 128). The most striking scene regarding the aftermath of the war included in Reminiscencias appears in an article Moreno first published in the newspaper El diario in 1885. Here Moreno narrates his visit to the imprisoned Tehuelche caciques Inacayal and Foyel, and their families, in Buenos Aires.116 In this piece, he seems moved at seeing once more his “antiguos amigos del desierto” [old friends from the desert], particularly because they are now in modern Buenos Aires. Moreno decides to visit his “friends” while he is on his way to Palermo, where he is going for a stroll in the park, a space of leisure for the urban bourgeoisie. This detour turns out to be not so much a spatial one but, more strikingly, one in time. Going to the park (like going to the museum) was a leisure activity typical of urbanized upper classes of turn of the century Argentina. The article presents an interesting focus on the natives’ clothes, seen as external signs of this “other time” to which the indigenous populations supposedly belong and marking a notable contrast to the elegance associated with the social gathering at the park. However, the article’s tone, when describing the natives’ clothes (and particularly the sadness of some of the women he encounters), seeks to reduce this distance: “el quillango que los envuelve es la primera prosaica faz del elegante traje que realza la belleza que íbamos a admirar al paseo, belleza de que también es precursora … la china que llora el perdido toldo, bajo el cobertizo del cuartel” (Reminiscencias, p. 224) [the fur blanket that covers them is the first prosaic face of the beauty that we were going to admire during our stroll, a beauty of which the Indian woman weeping, in the shelter of the barracks, for her lost village, is also a precursor].117 The nature of the paseo has been transformed, but it still takes place in a way, since the

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  177 text implies that Moreno finds a past version of what he was planning to take part in. The account gives temporal connotations to the natives’s clothes, distancing the chinas from the urban ladies the narrator was going to admire at the park. In Moreno’s frequent descriptions of indigenous women (and their manner of dress) in their camps, the most common impressions are utterly negative.118 Here, though, the previous emphasis on ugliness is gone; these defeated women are now the origins of beauty. The clothes are mentioned again toward the end of the article, after Moreno enumerates the ways in which Inacayal showed his intention to “civilize” himself; for example, how he taught his peoples to cultivate the land. This time clothes are understood as a kind of disguise that hides Inacayal’s and Foyel’s true civilized nature: “Inacayal y Foyel son hombres civilizados, ocultos bajo el quillango o la manta pampa” (Reminiscencias, p. 228) [Inacayal and Foyel are civilized men, hidden under the quillango or pampa blanket]. This is the only occasion on which Moreno calls indigenous peoples outright “civilized”; elsewhere he maintains a clear-cut distinction between civilization and barbarism. The sentence constructs “civilization” as being easily atteinable to them, as easy as changing clothes. Moreno also urges others to see beyond the natives’ appearance. However, if we think of the clothes as a synecdoche of the natives’ world or culture, changing them might not be as simple as the sentence suggests. Like the lands they inhabited, the Tehuelches continue to be potentially or conditionally productive. In this encounter Moreno appears as someone who represents the defeated natives before the government and public opinion. He requests clemency for the group he meets, underscoring not just their supposedly civilized character but also their peaceableness, reminding his readers that they never harmed him, but treated him with respect. In order to do this, he closes the article by distinguishing the Tehuelches from other groups: “Inacayal y Foyel merecen ser protegidos; y que no se les confunda con los Pincén y Namuncurá. No han asesinado, han dado hospitalidad. Que no lleven, pues, el desgraciado fin de la tribu de Orkeke” (Reminiscencias, p. 229) [Inacayal and Foyel deserve to be protected; and they should not be likened to Pincén and Namuncurá. They have not killed; they have showed kindness. They should not meet, then, the same miserable ending as Orkeke’s tribe]. Orkeke was not a bellicose cacique, though. He was also a Tehuelche, one who was allied to the goverment and accompanied the explorer George Musters to visit Sayhueque in 1870. He was taken prisoner in 1883 (so, his community did end up like those of Inacayal and Foyel). Manuel Namuncurá was perhaps the most famous of the Mapuche caciques; he did organize and participate in several bloody raids against white settlements, and he valiantly fought the Argentine state until he was finally defeated and, in 1884, turned himself in to the authorities. Pincén was a Ranquel Indian, who lived in

178  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia the pampas, and who also resisted and fought the government. He was captured in 1878. Moreno’s distinction and his forceful plea are not then a critique of the campaign, but only of its “excesses”. They address what to do with the natives once they have been defeated, but they do not question the process that made them prisoners of war. These caciques and their people ended up living in Moreno’s museum, which turned out to be the “protection” demanded in this article (only two years later, Inacayal died there).119 Pictures of these caciques, either as prisoners in Buenos Aires or as exhibits at the La Plata museum, serve to document the forms of displacement and labor that were imposed on them (see Figure 12 and 13). Before concluding his article, Moreno again refers to his stroll in Palermo, which he later accomplished, notwithstanding the unplanned detour: De vuelta de Palermo, donde más de una vez, entre los mil goces de la vista y del espíritu que produce un medio social elevado, ha cruzado la visión de la raza que se extingue y de la que me ha sido dado presenciar sus últimos días de libertad, escribo estas líneas para que los lectores de El Diario sepan cómo se concluye una tribu buena. (Reminiscencias, p. 229) [Having returned from Palermo, where more than once, amid the thousand delights of sight and spirit produced by an elevated social sphere, a vision of the extinguishing race whose last days of freedom I had the opportunity to witness crossed my mind, I write these lines so that the readers of El Diario know how a good tribe ends.]

Figure 12  G  roup of indigenous prisoners, including the caciques Inacayal, Foyel, and their families.120

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  179

Figure 13  Margarita, daughter of the cacique Foyel.121

Moreno’s insisistence on going back once again to the scene of leisure that the encounter disrupted is eloquent. The contrast between the two worlds observed by Moreno on the same day constitutes an effective way to situate him as an honest inhabitant of both, or, at least, as someone able to navigate these opposed social contexts. By going back to this deviation toward the end of the article, he situates himself socially in the midst of upper-class Buenos Aires as he makes use, with a clarity not seen in his other texts, of the rhetoric of vanishing. The meeting evidently does not affect him to the point of making him change plans, for he still goes to the park afterward, but it seems that his contemplation (recalling here his descriptions of Lake Argentino would not be farfetched) of the privileged classes of Argentina makes him reflect on his own privileged condition as ultimate witness. Finally, although there are some references to “positive” changes in the landscape, Moreno’s comments in Reminscencias about the absence of maps and of population in the region become more frequent, suggestive of disappointment, discouragement, and frustration. The ultimate assessment is ambivalent: on the one hand, Argentina would seem to be the most successful model of the modernization project, but on the other, it seems equally certain that Patagonia has not yet fully joined that model. At the moment of writing, the narrator seems disappointed by how “empty” the map of Patagonia still is: “Triste es decirlo, el mapa argentino, por lo que respecta a esa parte de nuestro territorio, está actualmente tan en blanco como cuando yo lo cruzara en 1879”

180  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia (Reminiscencias, p. 137) [Sad as it is to say, the map of Argentina, with regard to this part of our territory, currently remains as blank as it was when I crossed it in 1879].122 In texts in which the references to Argentina’s central government are shot through with disappointment, the map is one of the places that estrange Moreno from the state. It is likely that he considered the mapping of the region a natural consequence of his travels of exploration (and of the war that accompanied them). The drawing of maps was of course necessary in his logic because it is there that the political border (with Chile) could obliterate the frontier, making the state’s appropriation of land definitive.

Apuntes Preliminares: A New Landscape of Desolation Apuntes preliminares [Preliminary Notes] was not conceived as a book by the author. It is a report on an 1895 exploratory trip by a research team from the La Plata Museum. The way in which Apuntes, published by the museum two years later, deals with the aftermath of the military campaigns is different from Reminiscencias in that it is the narrative of a journey that took place when Moreno was still the director of the Museo de La Plata, with publication coming soon after the travels related. He describes his purpose like this: me proponía apreciar las modificaciones que el transcurso de veinte años había producido en las regiones del Sur. En esos veinte años, había desaparecido el indio indómito; ya no existían fuertes ni fortines que se opusieran a sus depredaciones; … los alaridos de las juntas de guerra y de los parlamentos habían callado para siempre; … deseaba ver todo eso y darme cuenta si lo obtenido era lo bastante, si el esfuerzo hecho correspondía a la conquista alcanzada sobre el salvaje. (p. 35) [I set out to identify the changes that had taken place in the southern regions over the past twenty years. In those twenty years, the indomitable Indian had disappeared; there were no more forts and fortresses that opposed his pillaging; … the whoops of the war councils and parliaments had gone forever silent; … I longed to see all of that and note whether the results were enough, whether the effort made corresponded to the conquest over the savage.] The theme of the book is, in short, the end of the desert as it had been conceived during the independent life of Argentina until 1879. The passage seems to announce a description of a space where peace and ­modernization—the former conceived of as dependent on the latter— reign. However, instead of seeing peace, Moreno in fact finds a disquieting abandonment; instead of novelty, he sees ruins, not just of the

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  181 indigenous presence but also of the army’s forts and camps. He finds, in a word, the ruins of war. Indeed, in Apuntes there is a constant association between military presence and ruins: “el Fortín Chacabuco, o más bien sus ruinas” (Apuntes, p. 80) [Chacabuco Fort, or rather its ruins]; “el antiguo campamento militar de Ñorquin, que ha pasado a manos de particulares” (p. 53) [the old military camp in Ñorquin, which is now in private hands]; “las ruinas de los fortines chilenos Lonquimai y Liucura” (p. 60) [the ruins of the Chilean forts Lonquimai and Liucura]; “el viejo Fortín Maipú, hoy inútil, situado a orillas del arroyo Loncohuehum …” (p. 72) [the old Maipú fort, now useless, located on the shores of the Loncohuehum stream]. The examples are numerous, and they give a good idea of the extent to which the geography of Patagonia was marked with the signs of war; Patagonia was in reality a battlefield. At some points, this abandonment is described more clearly as a desert: “El ancho valle de Collón-Curá está hoy menos poblado que veinte años atrás … El fortín Sharples está en ruinas, deshabitado, habiendo terminado su misión” (Apuntes, p. 76) [The wide Collon-Curá valley is today less populated than twenty years ago … The Sharples fort is in ruins, deserted, its mission having finished]. The military strongholds are now part of the past, abandoned and destroyed. Apuntes portrays the landscape after the battle. Traces of that war, marks it has left on the land and its inhabitants, are visible. If the text narrates the end of the desert, it also describes a new desert, the most important outcome of that war. There are also traces of various indigenous camps, whose descriptions coincide with more uplifting scenes: acampaba en el mismo sitio donde tuve mi carpa en 1876 y en 1880. Las tolderías de Saihueque no habían dejado más rastros que cenizas de huesos y las ruedas de piedra y tierra quemada de los fogones … En cambio, pasaba en ese momento una gran tropa de ganado que de Nahuel-Huapi se dirigía a Victoria, en Chile. Donde antes estaban los toldos [indígenas] hay dos puestos de ovejas y una pulpería. (Apuntes, p. 77) [I camped at the same spot where I pitched my tent in 1876 and 1880. Of Saihueque’s camp only ashes of bones and stone wheels and soil burnt in the fires were left … Instead, at that moment a great cattle troop was passing, going from Nahuel-Huapi to Victoria, in Chile. Where the [Indian] camp was previously located, now there are two sheep posts and a grocery store.] This poignant example of the rhetoric of substitution is different from the ones analyzed earlier in that it does not deal with desire or with imagination. Now, the narrator’s presence at a spot he knows well (the references to his two previous stays there are rhetorically effective), the

182  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia description of the remains of the indigenous camp (with the intriguing reference to the bone ashes), and the spontaneous presence of cattle and commerce breaking into the scene show that the substitution is definitive, and beneficial. These moments of hopeful findings alternate with those in which the territory remains, to the narrator’s dismay, unmapped, deserted, ruinous, unexploited, or appropriated by very few hands. The text describes a frustrated search, a series of disappointed expectations: 15 years after Moreno’s last visit, the landscape is unchanged. In protest, the narrator, too, repeats himself: “como el paisaje general no ha cambiado desde 1880 y no tengo tiempo para una nueva descripción, no creo aquí fuera de lugar traer algunas reminscencias de mi viaje anterior” (Apuntes, p. 84) [as the general landscape has not changed since 1880 and as I lack the time for a new description, I do not think it inappropriate to include a few reminiscences of my previous journey]. There is nothing new worth describing now. The traveler decides to no longer look at the present landscape, choosing instead the supposedly empty original space that preceded the ruins he now encounters along the way. He adopts, in fact, the exact opposite descriptive strategy: whereas in his previous texts he used imagination and desire, and looked insistently toward the future with a powerful desire to transform the landscape, he now looks into the past. Certifying that the transformations have not been the expected ones, he concludes that his efforts, and the war that accompanied them, were pointless. He notes, for example, that some of the places visited are still as violent as they were before the war, due to the presence of fugitive criminals coming from Chile: “Y pena da el ver abandonados tales prados y pensar que en tiempos en que el indio salvaje ocupaba esas tierras la vida del blanco no tenía allí mayores zozobras que hoy” (p. 50) [It is sad to see these meadows abandoned, and to think that, when the savage Indian occupied these lands, the life of whites was not riskier than today]. The issue of danger is a consequence of the state’s abandoning these lands. The absence of indigenous peoples does not always mean an actual substitution: here savagery is no longer replaced by different aspects of modernization. Moreno’s other reaction in Apuntes to what he encounters is completely contrary. He engages in a frenzied imagining of what those lands might contain, doing so with greater intensity and frequency than in Viaje. The use of adverbial structures that insist on the inevitability of change, along with the future tense, is one of the strategies which this discourse deploys in order to reject the present state of things. For example: “Indudablemente, en esa tierra desamparada hoy, se desarrollarán industrias productivas …” (Apuntes, p. 41) [Undoubtedly, in this land, now deserted, productive industries will develop]; “Indudablemente, no pasará largo tiempo sin que un ferrocarril cruce los Andes …” (p. 43)

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  183 [Without a doubt, it won’t be very long before a railroad traverses the Andes]; “Esa región de Pulmari … bien aprovechada por la Nación sería, a no dudarlo, en breve tiempo, un centro de actividad …” (p. 62) [That Pulmari region … if well exploited by the nation, would be, no doubt about it, in a short time, a hub of activity]; “Quemquemtreu… será, a no dudarlo, asiento de pueblo una vez que se colonice el valle del Collón-Curá, y también estación del ferrocarril” (pp. 76–77) [Quemquemtreu … will be, doubtless, the base of a town, and also a railroad station, once the Collón-Curá valley has been settled]; “No tengo la menor duda de que si se procede a esta colonización con prudencia, ella será un hecho en breve tiempo” (p. 149) [I have no doubt that if this colonization is done with prudence, it will be a reality in a short time]. The statements emphasize certainty and rapidity, announcing the transformations as imminent, but this insistence produces the opposite effect: the underlying narrative is one of absence; nothing has changed in the traversed territories in two decades. The traveler’s exasperation is understandable to a certain point: the new deserted landscape he finds offers a devastating confirmation of the utter fruitlessness of his previous journeys. This way of referring to the landscape is complemented by a utilitarian conceptualization of beauty: things are beautiful as long as they are exploitable. These are just some examples: “Todo el trayecto, hasta el pueblo de Chosmalal … es hermoso y fértil” (Apuntes, p. 49) [The entire route, up to the village of Chosmalal … is beautiful and fertile]; “la hermosísima quebrada poblada por los colonos de 16 de Octubre  y de una fertilidad exhuberante” (p. 114) [the extremely beautiful ravine inhabited by the settlers from 16 de Octubre and of a lush fertility]; “El valle del Carrenleufú es tan hermoso y tan fértil como el de 16 de Octubre” (p. 122) [The Carrenleufú Valley is as beautiful and fertile as the 16 de Octubre one]. Perhaps the most striking version of this bucolic rhetoric ­appears when Moreno recounts his visit to a ranch. This is a veritable scene of contemplation, in which beauty and ­harmony impact the traveler: “Al anochecer llegamos a la estancia del señor Juan Jones, … ­rodeada de praderas hermosísimas. Sus haciendas de raza alegran la vista y el espíritu.” (p. 80) [At dusk we arrived at Mr. Juan Jones’s ranch, … surrounded by extremely beautiful meadows. His possessions of good-race cattle delight the eye and the spirit.] The traveler is no longer struck by the majestic views of wilderness, as with his arrival at Lake Argentino; now the breathtaking landscape is that of the flourishing ranch, owned by a US rancher.123 Moreno mentions that Juan Jones actually settled his ranch at the same spot where the camp of cacique Inacayal was ­located, and Juan M. Biedma adds that the farmer made use of the cacique’s farmyards. Moreno goes on to explain that these “industrious”

184  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia lands that he is now visiting had previously been a forbidden territory for him; these were some of the places Sayhueque did not allow him to visit in 1875 (p. 81). In fact, “Tequel-Malal”, the name of the ranch, was also the name of Inacayal’s tolderías. The rhetoric of substitution that characterizes this writing is here again on full display; as in the previous example, the replacement of indigenous presence is now a—necessary—fait accompli. This is also a blatant admission of the transformative power of war in these regions, and it stands in contrast to most of Moreno’s assertions in Apuntes. Moreno, as a way of thanking Jones for his hospitality, lobbied the government to give the rancher 10,000 hectares of land.124 Again, here we see a strong difference between Moreno’s actions and his claims in this book; namely, that the concentration of land in a few hands is unproductive and prolongs the deserted condition of Patagonia, and that this was not what he hoped the region would become. We have seen examples of this disappointment in Reminiscencias. In Apuntes, the impressions are shifting, productive of a certain uneasiness in the traveler: Agradables evocaciones éstas cuando la comparación del pasado con el presente arroja un saldo favorable para el país. Sin embargo, debo confesarlo, esperaba encontrar más progreso en estos parajes; pero, ¿cómo obtenerlo cuando la tierra entre Junín de los Andes y Caleufú tiene sólo dos dueños, y la población no alcanza a un hombre por cada cien kilómetros? (pp. 77–78) [These are pleasant memories when the comparison of past to present produces a positive balance for the country. However, I must confess, I hoped to find more progress in these places; but, how to achieve it when the land between Junín de los Andes and Caleufú has only two owners, and the population is less than one man per every hundred kilometers?] This is the true desert, not the one that existed before the war: “Más población había en las tolderías indígenas sometidas a los caciques Inacayal y Foyel, que la que hoy vive en la región andina del Chubut, a pesar de las extensas zonas solicitadas y concedidas para colonizar” (p. 107) [More people lived in the indigenous camps under the caciques Inacayal and Foyel, than today in the Andean region of Chubut, despite the vast zones requested and granted for settlement]. Under these caciques the land was cultivated and populated by sedentary farmers. Moreno nonetheless remains ambiguous on these matters, since at the same time he praises some of the ranches he encounters on his travels. Still, in Apuntes the critical view is prevalent, and it often becomes clear that, for him,

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  185 the result of the war is the desert, which has been not conquered, but constructed.

The Final Journey: Narrating the Scar On the very last page of Apuntes, in offering conclusions and recommendations, Moreno praises the railroad construction that followed the conquest of the west in the USA. References to the US experience of expansion are frequently found in his prose. For him, the northerly country is an example to follow in terms of how the land was conquered, distributed, and exploited. He refers to the USA as “la nación que pretendemos imitar” (Apuntes, p. 27) [the nation we seek to imitate]. In Reminiscencias, the traveler-memorialist praises the system of reservations to which indigenous peoples were sent in the USA after they lost their lands (Reminiscencias, p. 128), and in Viaje he repeatedly compares Patagonia to US landscapes (Viaje, pp. 301, 385, 456). The Conquest of the Desert was explicitly modeled upon the so-called Indian wars that accompanied US westward expansion, as Roca himself declared.125 As Ángel Rama explained, though, the difference was that the mythical figure of the pioneer, with its democratic connotations, was mostly absent from the Argentine experience, in which an alliance between oligarchs and the army carried out the war.126 Moreno returned to Patagonia for the last time in 1912, accompanied by none other than Theodore Roosevelt, former president of the USA, consummate hunter and adventurer, and advocate of the big stick ­policy, as well as, most important, a fervent supporter of the war against indigenous peoples in the USA, which had taken place during the second half of the nineteenth century. And, significantly, Roosevelt was also the main proponent of the policy of national parks in his country. This is perhaps the strongest link between these men, since Moreno too encouraged the creation of national parks in Argentina. On 6 November 1903, Moreno wrote an official letter to the Ministry of Agriculture donating three square leagues to the state in the Nahuel Huapi region with the explicit condition that they be made into a National Park.127 In a 1917 report to the Ministry of Agriculture, Moreno explicitly names the US president as he discusses forms of “preserving” the national space: “Hagamos un movimiento como el que iniciaron en Estados Unidos sus presidentes, Roosevelt y Taft, buscando el medio de manejar nuestros recursos naturales sin gastarlos…” (Reminiscencias, p. 276) [Let’s organize a movement like the one initiated in the United States by their presidents Roosevelt and Taft, looking for the means to manage our natural resources without wearing them out]. When he visited Nahuel Huapi with Moreno, Roosevelt, who had been corresponding with the Argentine for some time, referred to the importance that a strong policy of national parks had for a modern nation (Reminscencias, p. 273).128

186  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia In his Through the Brazilian Wilderness (1914), Roosevelt on numerous occasions refers to Moreno, his guide and travel companion, in glowing terms.129 The anecdotes included in the book have to do primarily with Moreno’s role as an adventurer. It all starts because of a scar that Moreno acquired from the puma attack recounted in Viaje a la Patagonia austral (pp. 434–35). The scar proves to Roosevelt that pumas do attack human beings, something the former president previously believed not to be the case. Now an old man, striving to remember and to be remembered, having left marks scattered across Patagonia, having sought to build roads there, Moreno pauses to contemplate the mark that the desert has left on him. Now it is merely an anecdote told to a man who persists in referring to South America as a “wilderness”. On Moreno’s body, the desert—capricious, stubborn— still remains.

Notes 1 Nicolás Avellaneda, “Carta-prólogo a Actualidad financiera de la República Argentina, de Álvaro Barros”, in Halperín Donghi, ed., Proyecto y construcción de una nación, pp. 499–501 (at p. 499). 2 Hudson, Idle Days, p. 75. On the presence (or absence) of indigenous elements in Hudson’s work, see Gustavo Verdesio, “Entre el naturalismo, la antropología y la arqueología: los múltiples registros de W. H. Hudson en el marco del discurso de la ciencia y la nación”, in Gómez and C ­ astro-Klarén, eds., Entre Borges y Conrad, pp. 157–93. 3 Hudson, Idle Days, p. 75. 4 Sayhueque (his name is written in various forms) was a Mapuche-Tehuelche cacique of the northern part of Patagonia, in the Neuquén region, close to the Limay and Negro rivers. The territories over which he ruled, known as “Indigenous Governorship of the Apples” [Gobernación Indígena de las Manzanas], went from Nahuel Huapi Lake to the present-day cities of San Martín de los Andes and Junín de los Andes. He was one of the closest allies of the Buenos Aires government from 1860 on, but during the Conquest of the Desert he resisted and fought the goverment. He was defeated in 1885. His entrance into Buenos Aires as a prisoner marks, for most scholars, the formal end of the Conquest of the Desert. Before Moreno was taken prisoner by Sayhueque, he visited the cacique on various occasions. Viaje a la Patagonia austral narrates one such visit. A fine biographical essay on the indigenous chief, based on documentation found in the tolderías where he lived (among other sources), can be found in Julio Esteban Vezub, “El gobernador indígena de las Manzanas. Don Valentín Sayhueque”, in Raúl J. Mandrini, ed., Vivir entre dos mundos. Las fronteras del sur de la Argentina. Siglos XVIII y XIX (Buenos Aires: Taurus, 2006), pp. ­291–318. A more detailed study about Sayhueque’s life, his rule, and the particularly complex dynamics of his relationships with the Argentine state can be found in Julio Esteban Vezub, Valentín Saygüeque y la “Gobernación Indígena de Las Manzanas”. Poder y etnicidad en la Patagonia septentrional (1860–1881) (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2009). 5 Mónica Quijada, “Ancestros, ciudadanos, piezas de museo. Francisco P.  Moreno y la articulación del indígena en la construcción nacional

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  187 argentina (siglo XIX)”, E.I.A.L. Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 9, no. 2 (1998), www.tau.ac.il/eial/IX_2/quijada.html (3 July 2009); Gabriela Nouzeilles, “Patagonia as Borderland: Nature, ­Culture, and the Idea of the State”, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 8, no. 1 (1999): 35–48 (at p. 38); Claudia Torre, Literatura en tránsito. La narrativa expedicionaria de la Conquista del Desierto (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2010), p. 118; Rodríguez, Un desierto para la nación, p. 127; Andermann, Mapas de poder, p. 121; Sylvia Molloy, “De exhibiciones y despojos: reflexiones sobre el patrimonio nacional a principios del siglo XX”, in Mabel Moraña and María Rosa Olivera-Williams, eds., El salto de Minerva. Intelectuales, género y Estado en América Latina ­(Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2005), pp. 143–55 (at p. 143). 6 The negotiations ended only temporarily in 1902, though. They have periodically led to the brink of armed conflict since the last decades of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, two moments of significant tension between the two countries took place in 1978 and 1997. On this topic, see George V. Rauch, Conflict in the Southern Cone: The Argentine Military and the Boundary Dispute with Chile, 1870–1902 (London: Praeger, 1999). 7 Gabriela Nouzeilles refers to this as “an obsessive comparison with other people’s itineraries” (Gabriela Nouzeilles, “El retorno de lo primitivo. Aventura y masculinidad”, in Nouzeilles, ed., La naturaleza en disputa, pp. 163–86 [at p. 175]). 8 As we saw previously, Mitre signed the Treaty of the Triple Alliance with Brazil and Uruguay and led the country during the first years of the Paraguayan War. 9 It is important to clarify that the years given for the Conquest of the Desert, 1879–85, are somewhat arbitrary. There were continuous skirmishes between government forces and the indigenous communities in the pampas and Patagonia for many years before 1879. 10 Reminiscencias del Perito Moreno [1942], versión propia, ed., Eduardo V. Moreno (Buenos Aires: El Elefante Blanco, 1997), p. 21, n. 1. Further references included parenthetically in the text. 11 The first collections of the museum came from the Buenos Aires Museum of Anthropology, which had been created in 1877 from Moreno’s collection. Thus, the Buenos Aires Museum was created the same year Moreno came back from the trip he narrates in his Viaje. It is important to highlight this connection between the travels studied here and the origin of the La Plata Museum. Although the museum is known as “Museo de Ciencias Naturales de La Plata” [La Plata Museum of Natural Sciences], or just “Museo de La Plata” [La Plata Museum], its original name was General Museum of La Plata, according to the institution’s official webpage. See “Breve historia”, Museo de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo www.museo.fcnym.unlp.edu.ar/historia (14 July 2018). 12 Neither the subtitle nor the dedication appears in the edition published by El Elefante Blanco that I have used in my research. 13 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 141, original emphasis. Nouzeilles also reads the Argentine state’s view of Patagonia through the theoretical lens of Lefebvre’s notion of the production of space (Nouzeilles, ­“Patagonia as Borderland”, p. 37). 14 Source: Wikicommons, Mechanical Curator Collection, British Library https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Viaje_%C3%A1_la_­ Patagonia_austral_emprendido_bajo_los_auspicios_del_Gobierno_­

188  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia Nacional_1876-1877._Vol.1_(1879)_by_MORENO. On the cover we read “Tomo Primero” [Volume One], but the second one, which would have been a more detailed description of the findings that the voyage produced, was never published. 15 Oszlak, La formación del Estado argentino, p. 58. 16 Oszlak, La formación del Estado argentino, p. 97. 17 Halperín Donghi, “Una nación para el desierto argentino”, p. 196. The bibliography on the consolidation of the Argentine nation-state in the second half of the nineteenth century is quite long. Besides Halperín Donghi’s various texts and the one by Oszlak already cited, see, among many others, Gustavo Ferreri and Ezequiel Gallo, eds., La Argentina del ochenta al centenario (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1980); Lilia Ana Bertoni, Patriotas, cosmopolitas y nacionalistas. La construcción de la nacionalidad argentina (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001); Natalio Botana and Ezequiel Gallo, De la república posible a la república verdadera: 1880–1910 (Buenos Aires: Espasa Calpe-Ariel, 1997); Natalio Botana, El orden conservador: la política argentina entre 1880 y 1916 (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1977); Mirta Lobato, ed., Nueva historia argentina. Vol. 5. El progreso, la modernización y sus límites, 1880–1916 (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2000); López-Alves, “A Stronger State and Urban Military”, in State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, pp. 140–92. 18 Oszlak, La formación del Estado argentino, p. 104. 19 Halperín Donghi, “Una nación para el desierto argentino”, p. 100. Claudia Torre cites this famous essay by Halperín as an example of the progressive historiographical texts that do not analyze the Conquest of the Desert in any depth (Torre, Literatura en tránsito, p. 21). The reference included here is practically the only one to said conflict in the otherwise vital essay. I will return later to the approaches and silences of cultural critics and historians with regard to these events. 20 Halperín Donghi, “Una nación para el desierto argentino”, p. 100. Miguel Angel Centeno agrees on the importance of the Conquest of the Desert in the process of state centralization and control over the territory: “In Argentina, 1880 marks the last major regional rebellion within the political class and also the final conquest of the southern Indian tribe [which implied] the establishment of central authority as a final arbiter or goal for a political project”(Centeno, Blood and Debt, p. 109). ­ Britain, 21 Colin Lewis remarks on the “railway mania of the 1880s” (Lewis, “ the Argentine, and Informal Empire”, p. 111). 22 Halperín Donghi, “Una nación para el desierto argentino”, p. 100. 23 Avellaneda, “Carta-prólogo”, p. 500. 24 Avellaneda, “Carta-prólogo”, p. 499, original emphasis. 25 On treatments of the desert in Argentine literature, apart from Fermín ­Rodríguez’s Un desierto para la nación, see Montaldo, De pronto, el campo, pp. 33–49; Jagoe, The End of the World as They Knew It; and Andermann, Mapas de poder, among many others. Montaldo traces a lineage in the literary construction of that space that identifies Esteban Echeverría’s La cautiva (1837), Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo (1845), and José Hernández’s Martín Fierro (1872) as key texts. Claudia Torre, too, ascribes to La Cautiva and the entire Generation of 1837 a central role in this vision of the Argentine desert (Torre, Literatura en tránsito, p. 13). Regarding the importance of the desert in the political and aesthetic ideas of the Generation of 1837, see Jorge Myers, “La revolución de las ideas: la generación romántica de 1837 en la cultura y en la política argentinas”,

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  189 in Noemí Goldman, ed., Nueva historia argentina. Tomo 3. Revolución, república, confederación (1806–1852) (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1998), pp. 381–445. 26 The story of the cacique Sayhueque is a good example of this. See Vezub’s “El gobernador indígena de las Manzanas”. 27 The outbreak of the war was already foreseeable many years earlier. In Una excursión a los indios ranqueles [An expedition to the Ranquel Indians], published in 1870, Lucio V. Mansilla alludes in the opening pages to its proximity: “el deseo de ver con mis propios ojos ese mundo que llaman Tierra Adentro, para estudiar sus usos y costumbres, sus necesidades, sus ideas, su religión, su lengua, e inspeccionar yo mismo el terreno por donde alguna vez, quizá, tendrán que marchar las fuerzas que están bajo mis órdenes” (Lucio V. Mansilla, Una excursión a los indios ranqueles [1870] [Buenos Aires: Agebe, 2006], p. 8) [a desire to see with my own eyes the world they call tierra adentro, so as to study its customs and ways, its needs, its ideas, its religion and language, and to inspect for myself the terrain where the forces under my orders would perhaps one day have to march (Lucio V. Mansilla, An Expedition to the Ranquel Indians, trans. Mark Mc Caffrey [Austin: University of Texas press, 1997], p. 4)]. Mansilla’s text is in dialogue with Moreno’s Viaje in many regards, though war, in the former, seems a little farther off on the horizon. What Mansilla expresses here as a desire or project (recognizing the land for the armies that will come after him) is by contrast exactly what Moreno does. But both in the encounters with the indigenous communities it describes and in the relationship with the state it portrays, Mansilla’s text offers interesting contrasts with Moreno’s. 28 Silvio R. Duncan Baretta and John Markoff, “Civilization and Barbarism: Cattle Frontiers in Latin America”, in Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski, eds., States of Violence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 33–80 (at p. 35). 29 Duncan Baretta and Markoff, “Civilization and Barbarism”, p. 36. 30 Duncan Baretta and Markoff add that the frontier is characterized by “a frequent transition from settled to nomadic life”, “[a] movement between nomadism and permanent geographical stability” (“Civilization and Barbarism”, p. 47). This state-produced nomadism is at the core of the events narrated in José Hernández’s Martín Fierro. This definition of “frontier” also helps explain almost all of the political and aesthetic representations of the Uruguayan interior up into the 1870s. The practice of temporary work and the violence underlying social relations are characteristic elements of Richard Lamb’s travels in The Purple Land (see chapter 2). In Eduardo Acevedo Díaz’s historical novels, written mostly at the turn of the century but describing the country of earlier decades, the Uruguayan hinterlands are frequently referred to as the “desert”. See, for example, Eduardo Acevedo Díaz, Ismael (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1982). 31 This does not mean I intend to identify both concepts, which were, needless to say, quite blurrily defined or imagined in the nineteenth century. I have tried to establish the main differences between them in the introductory chapter. I nonetheless insist that this difference was not crystal clear. It was impossible to establish the point at which the frontier became a desert with any precision. Avellaneda himself tends to identify “desert” and “frontier”. After affirming that the frontier has to be suppressed, he adds: “We will not suppress the Indian until we suppress the desert that engenders him” [No suprimiremos al indio sino suprimiendo el desierto que lo engendra] (Avellaneda, “Carta-prólogo”, p. 500). I am interested

190  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia in these continuities that reveal fluctuations and instability. Torre understands that “the term desert was used to indicate what was not city and was not frontier, and even what was outside the world of nations” (Torre, Literatura en tránsito, p. 13). 32 Juan Carlos Walther, La conquista del desierto. Síntesis histórica de los principales sucesos ocurridos y operaciones militares realizadas en la Pampa y Patagonia contra los indios (años 1527–1885) [1947] (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1970). The book includes several (quite useful) maps; one of them refers to the military operations of the colonial times. 33 These historiographic approaches continued long after the 1940s or even the 1970s. In 2009 the Academia Argentina de la Historia published a collection of articles (indeed, the most appalling aspect may be the fact that it involved several authors rather than just one) titled La Campaña del Desierto. The blood-curdling back cover, unsigned, declares, “The Desert Campaign of 1878–80 seals General Roca’s honor as a military leader. It put a stop to the Indian war parties that were attacking the ranches and helpless villages. … This work is not merely a historical investigation but also an homage to the men who battled the war parties and expanded our borders” (Gastón Pérez Izquierdo et al., La Campaña del Desierto [Buenos Aires: Academia Argentina de la Historia, 2009]). Astonishingly, this is an example of nineteenth-century literature being produced well into the twenty-first. Or, perhaps more accurately, a despicable apologia for indigenous genocide. 34 Enrique Hugo Mases, Estado y cuestión indígena. El destino final de los indios sometidos en el sur del territorio (1878–1930) (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2010), pp. 35–36. 35 Only 374 kilometers were finished (Walther, La conquista del desierto, pp. 380–81). The remains of the ditch can still be seen today; they appear, for example, in Andrés Di Tella’s documentary El país del diablo (Secretaría de Cultura de la Nación, 2007). 36 Specifically on Alsina’s project, see Vanni Blengino, Il vallo della Patagonia. I nuovi conquistatori: militari, scenziati, sacerdoti, scrittori (Reggio Emilia: Databasis, 2003). 37 “Roca systematizes the movements of barbarism, strategically codifying them” (Rodríguez, Un desierto para la nación, p. 385). 38 A detailed account of the different expeditions that took place under the command of Roca can be found in Walther, La conquista del desierto, chapters 11 and 12, pp. 409–536. A more synthetic explanation appears in Bandieri, Historia de la Patagonia [2005] (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2009), pp. 142–45. 39 Walther, La conquista del desierto, annex no 6. 40 Walther, La conquista del desierto, annex no 7. 41 Claudia Torre explains that, from the point of view of scholarship, the central event in this celebratory rhetoric was a history conference specifically on this topic, which took place in 1979 in the Río Negro province. Torre characterizes this scholarship thus: “the acritical and racist reading of the event, due to the devastation of the field of academic social research caused by a terrorist and repressor state” (Torre, Literatura en tránsito, p. 22). 42 As one of the epigraphs to Chapter 2, Viñas quotes General Vinter, one of the leaders of the campaigns, who in 1885 said, “The secular war against the Indian, which began in the vicinity of this capital in the year of 1535, has forever ended” (Viñas, Indios, ejército y frontera, p. 45).

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  191 43 Viñas, Indios, ejército y frontera, p. 12. Viñas lost a daughter and a son during the dictatorship: they were desaparecidos too. 44 Lake Viedma had been surveyed and named before his arrival. Perhaps for this reason, Moreno decides not to describe it: “Como la falta de recursos me prohíbe recorrerlo personalmente, recomiendo al lector la parte del ‘diario’ de Viedma que se refiere a este lago; en otra ocasión trataré de completarla haciendo una exploración detenida en sus aguas y sus orillas” (Viaje, p. 431) [Since the lack of resources prevents me from personally traversing it, I recommend to the reader the part of Viedma’s ‘diary’ that refers to this lake; on another occasion I will seek to add what is missing in it by doing a detailed exploration of its waters and shores]. 45 Source: Wikicommons, Mechanical Curator collection (British Library) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Viaje_%C3%A1_la_ Patagonia_austral_emprendido_bajo_los_auspicios_del_Gobierno_ Nacional_1876-1877._Vol.1_(1879)_by_MORENO#/media/File:(1879)_ PATAGONIA.jpg. 46 In this twentieth-century rewriting of the episode he adds: “me decidí a atravesar sus mismas tierras provisto de un pasaporte por el que la civilización reconocía la autoridad de la barbarie. ¡Qué tiempos débiles aquellos!” (Reminiscencias, p. 26) [I decided to traverse their lands supplied of a passport through which civilization acknowledged the authority of barbarism. What weak times!] The successful war allows Moreno to describe the 1875 state as a weak one. More than 20 years after the final defeat of the native peoples, it probably seemed incredible to think of someone representing the state as acknowledging the power of the caciques. 47 The grammar and punctuation are not always clear in many of Moreno’s texts, as will become clear throughout this chapter. 48 Vezub says that Moreno probably understood the extent of Loncochino’s power (Loncochino was Sayhueque’s main secretary). He adds that Sayhueque and Loncochino worked closely together in designing a political strategy from at least 1874 on (Vezub, “El gobernador indígena de las Manzanas”, p. 305). 49 Quijada, “Ancestros, ciudadanos, piezas de museo”. Néstor Tomás Auza, in his poorly titled article “La ocupación del espacio vacío” [The occupation of empty space], expresses a similar unease: “a frontier into which the Araucanian tribes penetrated in fraternal association with the Argentine tribes and, after attacking the remotest ranches, went back with large herds of cattle and sheep, which they sold in that country. … Álvaro Barros calculated that 200,000 heads of livestock were stolen each year in the province of Buenos Aires alone” (Néstor Tomás Auza, “La ocupación del espacio vacío: de la frontera interior a la frontera exterior. 1876–1910”, in Ferrari and Gallo, eds., La Argentina del Ochenta al Centenario, pp. ­61–89 [at pp. 61–62]). Álvaro Fernández Bravo, who has worked on forms of representing the frontier in Chile and Argentina in a comparative way, explains that the instability of this liminal space is a source of anxiety for the state: “hybridization is one of the frontier’s greatest dangers in the eyes of the state: its ability to coopt dissidents, to shelter those who resist the state’s reasoning …, the potential alliances between different local ethnic groups or even with other ‘foreign’ political powers” (Álvaro Fernández Bravo, Literatura y frontera. Procesos de territorialización en las culturas argentina y chilena del siglo XIX [Buenos Aires: Sudamericana-­Universidad de San Andrés, 1999], p. 57).

192  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia 50 It is commonly believed that Mapuches live largely in Chilean territory while Tehuelches inhabit Argentina, but given the aforementioned intense migration and circulation of peoples throughout those lands, this differentiation is less clear than some people think. Moreno usually calls Tehuelches “Patagonians” [patagones] and “Araucanians” [araucanos]. Vezub, comparing a variety of indigenous and white sources (including, of course, Moreno’s texts), explores in extraordinary detail the various identities that different groups of native peoples gave themselves vis-àvis those given by the criollos. He explains that the ways in which some communities defined themselves changed over time, sometimes responding to different criteria, or other times engaged with—or even conformed to— the criollo expectations or understanding of what “Indians” were. See ­Vezub, Valentín Saygüeque y la “Gobernación Indígena de las ­M anzanas”, pp. 239–60. 51 This is another interesting difference with accounts such as that of Mansilla, which narrate almost contemporary encounters of Creoles representing the state with indigenous tribes. The Mansilla who protagonizes An Excursion to the Ranquel Indians is on several occasions fooled by indigenous people; sometimes they prove him wrong, they correct him, or they denounce the plain lies he uses as arguments. Mansilla is far less successful in trying to convince the Ranquel Indians than Moreno is with the Tehuelches. 52 The home or oikos is, for Van den Abbeele, a space that helps give the journey meaning, to define it as such. Thus, the traveler is the person who returns to the point of departure, from where his travel experience is read (Van den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor, p. xviii). On the contrary, for the emigrant or exile, for whom returning home is no longer desired (in the former case) or is seen as impossible (in the latter), return is not possible from the very moment of departure. Frances Bartkowski has compared different narrations—and forms of conceiving—of displacement. She focuses on the different motivations for leaving: “They all find themselves having left ‘home’ and ventured out, and having some new faces and places in the world tell them something about where they have come to and from” (Frances Bartkowski, Travelers, Immigrants, Inmates. Essays in Estrangement [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995], p. xxvii, original emphasis). 53 Again, the contrast with Mansilla’s Excursion, a text that, through the usage of humor and irony, systematically undermines this dichotomy, becomes evident. One of the few moments in which Moreno reduces this distance between the Tehuelches and “civilized” Argentines comes after he describes their beliefs: “Pero no culpemos al salvaje. Nosotros mismos, civilizados, estamos llenos de supersticiones … y nos hallamos generalmente en igual caso. Negamos lo palpable, para creer en lo impalpable” (Viaje, pp. 120–21) [But let’s not blame the savage. We, civilized, are ourselves full of superstitions … and find ourselves in the same situation. We deny the palpable in order to believe in the impalpable]. The subject (we, civilized) maintains the unwavering belief in Sarmiento’s foundational distinction. Moreno, in fact, here appears to be critizing not civilization, but religion. This was part of his profund commitment to science and should be read in the context of the importance that positivism acquired in those years in Argentina. For more on the “scientific culture” of fin de siècle Argentina, see Óscar Terán, Vida intelectual em el Buenos Aires finde-siglo (1880–1910). Derivas de la “cultura científica” (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2008). The book does not include a chapter on Moreno (although it discusses many of his contemporaries), but it is

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  193 essential for understanding the place of science in the Argentina’s process of state consolidation. 54 On the Viedma expedition see Bandieri, Historia de la Patagonia, pp. 59–66. 55 Bandieri, Historia de la Patagonia, pp. 62–63. 56 The first three are probably the most significant of these “discoveries”. The three of them preserve their names today. Moreno “‘baptized” (this is the verb he uses) several other elements, and not all of these acts of naming employ nationalistic or heroic names. Sometimes he baptizes places after events that just happened to him, such as the moment when he survives the attack of a lioness (actually a puma): “El río que Viedma creyó era el Santa Cruz recibe por este suceso … el nombre de río Leona” (Viaje, p. 436) [The river Viedma thought was the Santa Cruz is given, after this event … the name of Leona River]. The Leona River unites Lake Viedma and Lake Argentino. On these acts of naming, see Andermann, Mapas de poder, pp. 127–28. 57 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions. The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 83. 58 On this episode, see Jagoe, The End of the World as They Knew It, pp. 121– 22; Rodríguez, Un desierto para la nación, pp. 131–32; and Molloy, “De exhibiciones y despojos”, pp. 151–52. 59 Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 5. 60 Seed studies in depth the origins and characteristics of the Requerimiento, a text that Spanish conquistadors were instructed to read to indigenous peoples demanding that they submit to the Catholic Church or else be warred upon (Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, p. 70). Moreno is obviously not issuing a Requerimiento (as neither did Columbus, since the Requerimiento was established in the 1510s), but this discursive proximity between possession and war, a singular element of the Spanish understanding of discovery and possession, should be taken into consideration in the context of this study. 61 In a way, this operation was successful. Not many people know today who the “Perito”’ Moreno was, but many more have heard of the Perito Moreno Glacier, one of Argentina’s best-known tourist attractions, located just next to Lake Argentino. In Viaje a la Patagonia austral Moreno describes and visits the glaciers close to Lake Argentino. He even eats ice from an iceberg (an activity that today is an element of some tourist excursions to these lakes): “este hielo que masco y que si bien no debe ser muy provechoso para mi estómago, lo es para mi carrera de viajero; despierta en mí mayores aspiraciones; me dice que debo seguir el ejemplo, aunque de manera modesta, de los héroes cuya vista me ha recordado el témpano” (Viaje, 426) [this ice I chew now, while it probably isn’t good for my stomach, is good for my career as traveler; it sparks in me higher ambitions; it tells me that I need to follow, though modestly, the example of the heroes whose sight this ice floe has reminded me of]. The end of the sentence is unclear, and it likely means that the sight of the ice floe has triggered in the narrator the memory of previous travelers who, in other national contexts, explored similar surfaces. Here Moreno literally, materially incorporates this new patriotic geography into his body, and in this intimate scene the ice talks back to him, gives him advice (this is the reverse of his speech directed at the lake), placing him within a heroic narrative of explorers. 62 Jagoe, The End of the World as They Knew It, p. 122. 63 According to Tim Youngs, David Livingstone (1813–73) “was the first European to have made a documented crossing of Africa from coast to

194  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia coast. This he did from west to east between 1853 and 1856. His long campaign against slavery, often and ultimately without regard to his own health, endowed him with an aura of sainthood … But Livingstone had a worldly side, too. A proponent of the ‘three Cs’: commerce, Christianity, and civilisation, … [he] believed that ‘no permanent elevation of a people can be effected without commerce’” (Tim Youngs, “Africa / The Congo: The Politics of Darkness”, in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, pp. 156–73 [at p. 160]). This brief description is particularly helpful for understanding Moreno’s admiration for the British colonial traveler. 64 Patricia Seed explains the importance of naming for Columbus: “Beginning with a small strip of land renamed San Salvador, Columbus claimed to have named six hundred islands on his first voyage, leaving three thousand islands unnamed and thus unpossessed, ‘scattered on the waves’… Columbus’s practice of naming—or more accurately, renaming—rivers, capes, and islands as part of the ceremony of taking possession was repeated throughout the Spanish conquest of the New World” (Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, p. 175). 65 Feilberg had thought that he had reached Lake Viedma, when in fact he had seen what was going to be Lake Argentino. Moreno narrates the moment when he finds the remains of the Argentine flag left by Feilberg, as well as a bottle which contained a message telling of his “discovery” (Viaje, p. 343). Before leaving the region, Moreno proceeds to do exactly the same, leaving a flag and a bottle with a message in the same spot where he found Feilberg’s; he himself names this spot “Punta Feilberg” [Feilberg Point] (Viaje, p. 438). Moreno arrived at Lake Argentino on 13 February 1877, and continued exploring the lake and the surrounding region until 10 March. This prolonged stay constitutes an important difference with respect to Feilberg, as Moreno emphasizes the deep knowledge of the region’s characteristics he obtained. The river’s navigation, as the christening moment suggests, is another element that serves Moreno to surpass Feilberg. 66 The first white man to arrive there was no other than Richard Burton, in 1858. In fact, Burton’s account of this “discovery” shows the same topic of “delight” and the allusion to the many sufferings endured: “Advancing, however, a few yards, the whole scene suddenly burst upon my view, filling me with admiration, wonder, and delight … I felt willing to endure double what I had endured” (in Brodie, The Devil Drives, p. 155). See how Moreno narrates his first view of Lake Argentino in the distance: “trepo la oleada de arena y encuentro el grandioso lago que ostenta toda su grandeza hacia el oeste. Es un espectáculo impagable y comprendo que no merece siquiera mención lo que hemos trabajado para presenciarlo; todo lo olvido ante él” (Viaje, 342) [I climb the undulating sand and find, towards the west, the grandiose lake that displays all its mightness. It’s an inestimable spectacle and I realize that it is not even worth mentioning all the work we have done to behold it; standing before it, I forget about everything]. Burton did not know, when he reached the lake, that he had found the source of the Congo River; in fact, he spent 15 years arguing he had found that of the Nile. I have found no reference to Burton in Moreno’s books, unfortunately. 67 Livingstone died of malaria and internal bleeding due to dysentery while still in Africa. He refused to go back until his mission had been completed. After his death, his body was carried by his black African followers for 1,600 kilometers, and then shipped to England. These circumstances greatly contributed to his legendary character.

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  195 68 Roy Bridges, “Exploration and Travel outside Europe (1720–1914)”, in Hulme and Youngs, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, pp. 53–69 (at p. 65). 69 Francisco P. Moreno, Viaje a la Patagonia austral. Emprendido bajo los auspicios del gobierno nacional. 1876–1877. Tomo Primero (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de la Nación, 1879), p. 253. Most of the drawings are by Alfredo Paris, but there are other artists mentioned, and some drawings do not include an artist. Most of the illustrations’ captions state that they are based on drafts—or on information—provided by Moreno. The El Elefante Blanco edition I have worked with does not contain any images, though. On the importance of visual elements in travelogues of the classical period of European exploration in Central Africa, see Leila Koivunen, Visualizing Africa in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Accounts (London: Routledge, 2011). 70 Another important antecedent of Moreno was George Musters, a British traveler who spent a year in Patagonia in 1869–70. In 1871 he published At Home with Patagonians. A Year’s Wanderings over Untrodden Ground from the Straits of Magellan to the Rio Negro, a book that recounts his stay with the same Tehuelche people that Moreno visited in 1875–76. Moreno mentions Musters on several occasions. He sometimes quotes him extensively, but more often refers to places mentioned in his book. The most interesting scenes regarding Musters have to do with the Tehuelches: Moreno shows them pictures from Musters’s book, and he refers some episodes from it to a woman who remembers Musters in very good terms (Viaje, p. 238), and on other occasions he reads to the Tehuelches a letter by Musters, in English, provoking intense laughter (p. 121). 71 In the years 1880–82 Moreno made sustained efforts to prove that the origins of humanity were in Patagonia. As Quijada explains, “Moreno could then affirm, with the support of the most advanced scientific ideas of that time, that organic life could only have originated in the circumpolar, and more precisely in the southern portion of the Antarctic continent, that is to say, in what is today Patagonia” (“Ancestros, ciudadanos, piezas de museo”). Florentino Ameghino was another Argentine scientist who insisted on the Patagonian origins of humanity. For a comparative study of Darwin, Moreno, and Ameghino, see Fermín Rodríguez, “Prehistorias argentinas: naturalistas en el Plata. Charles Darwin, Francisco Moreno, Florentino Ameghino, Bruce Chatwin”, A Contracorriente 7, no. 1 (2009): 45–75. A book that discusses the repercussions of Darwin’s theories in Argentina is Leila Gómez, ed., Darwinism in Argentina: Major Texts 1845–1909 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2012). It is worth noting that also Hudson was an enthusiastic (and sometimes critical) reader of Darwin. On the temporal construction of Patagonian space in Moreno vis-à-vis that of Darwin, see the insightful third chapter of Jagoe, The End of the World as They Knew It, pp. 90–127. 72 Nouzeilles, “Patagonia as Borderland”, p. 39. 73 Jagoe has explained that sometimes Moreno’s marks are directed at himself, since he wants to go back to those modified spaces and see the results of his interventions. For example, this happens when he plants eucalyptus, a tree that is alien to the region: “Algún día volveré a visitar estos parajes, veré mis plantaciones de eucaliptos, … mis inscripciones en las rocas sombreadas por los cipreses que crecen sobre la lava de los antiguos volcanes en que están grabadas” (Viaje, p. 25) [One day I’ll revisit those spots, I’ll see my eucalyptus plants, my inscriptions on the rocks shaded by the cypresses

196  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia that grow on the lava of ancient volcanoes upon which they are engraved (the translation is Jagoe’s)]. A similar temporal operation to the one just analyzed with respect to the flag takes place here. Jagoe explains: “His intervention is part of this nature in which life grows out of ancient death, in which his writing is no less a part of the rock than are the trees which grow out of it. It is as if, in this circle, human time borrows permanence from arboreal time, which in turn borrows it from geological time” (Jagoe, The End of the World as They Knew It, p. 96). 74 On one occasion, Moreno also signs his name after others: “encontramos una caverna curiosa en cuya entrada han grabado sus nombres los marinos que visitaron esta bóveda natural; los imito, dejo mis iniciales” (Viaje 226) [we find a curious cave at whose entrance the sailors who visited this natural vault have carved their names; I imitate them and leave my initials]. Nevertheless, what in Viaje are acts of initiation, of transformation, in Apuntes, when the narrator returns to the same region in the 1890s, are ruins, remains, signs of death. 75 The patria appears in these moments as the engine of that work, as the source of strength and energy for the adventurers. As they advance against the currents of the Santa Cruz River, the thought of going back is rapidly dismissed: “Si retroceder, materialmente, es lo más fácil, moralmente es imposible abandonar el proyecto de ascender el río, por más descabellado que sea … Sería desdoroso para los que componemos la comitiva; esto solo hace que continuemos, confiando en que las fuerzas que el trabajo gasta, las recupere el patriotismo” (Viaje, p. 276–77) [Although going back is, materially, the easiest thing to do, morally it is impossible to abandon the project of ascending the river, however ridiculous it is … It would be dishonorable for those of us who are part of this expedition; this only spurs us on, hoping that patriotism will recover the strength expended through effort]. In this context, it is worth remembering the central place that idleness plays in Hudson’s conception of travel, and in his understanding of the relationships between humans and the environment. 76 As we will see in the next chapter, Euclides da Cunha, too, conceives of the present-day space of the sertão as one beneath which a prehistoric world lies hidden. The resurrection of this world, the bringing it back to life, comes for him—I argue—with the Canudos War. It is a life that still exists, even though it is buried. For Moreno, however, the life of those objects depends entirely on his gaze, which is what gives them meaning and inserts them into a larger (national) narrative. 77 She continues: “The museum―as the modern fetish-house of the archaic― became the exemplary institution for embodying the Victorian narrative of progress” (McClintock, Imperial Leather, p. 40). 78 Andermann, “Evidencias y ensueños”, p. 58. Andermann has worked extensively on the relationship between museums and progress in Latin America. Among his works, particularly pertinent in the context of this book is “Total Recall: Texts and Corpses, the Museums of Argentinian Narrative”, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (1997): 21–32. 79 “[T]he idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  197 heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century” (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”, p. 26). 80 Jens Andermann, The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), p. 52. 81 Here there are a couple of additional examples: “El valle del Shehuen … espera los ganados que han de fructificar esa tierra hoy improductiva” (p.  461) [The Shehuen Valley … waits for the cattle that will make that land, still today unprodcutve, bear fruit]; when exploring the region of Lake San Martín, Moreno finds an interesting spot: “Es un hermoso parque que la naturaleza ha formado sin ayuda del hombre y que espera a este para aprovecharlo” (p. 442) [It’s a beautiful park that nature has formed without man’s help, and that waits for him so that he might make the most of it]. The mention of the park should not be taken for granted, since Moreno was the proponent of the national park policy in Argentina. I shall return to this toward the end of the chapter. 82 Stam and Shohat, Unthinking Eurocentrism, p. 141. 83 In Idle Days, Hudson’s narrator insists that Patagonia is unmodifiable, unyielding to the modernization process: “It has a look of antiquity, of desolation, of eternal peace, of a desert that has been a desert from of old and will continue a desert for ever. … In Patagonia no such thought or dream of the approaching changes to be wrought by human agency can affect the mind” (Hudson, Idle Days, p. 221). This nostalgic and problematic desire for the desert stands in contrast to the forward-looking desire (for another desert) of Moreno, who cannot bear the lack of human presence and is constantly describing the changes to come in minute detail. I will return to this process of anticipating the future, which becomes more acute with each visit to southern Argentina, as Moreno grapples with the evidence that the projected changes to the landscape have not arrived. 84 As Lefebvre noted in his analysis of space in terms of the relationship with capitalist production, “The more a space partakes of nature, the less it enters into the social relations of production” (Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 83). Hence the need to subjugate nature and transform space, to denaturalize nature, as Lefebvre himself puts it. A logic is imposed that must visualize work and production in space, that views landscapes as products; the modification or domestication of space is therefore preferred rather than its independent existence, which is seen as an intolerable lack, as a state of incompleteness that seems to require the presence of man. 85 On this specific point, I am interested in building on the comparison ­between Hudson and Moreno made by Leila Gómez in Iluminados y tránsfugas, to establish a distance between them. According to Gómez, Hudson and Moreno share a “temporalizing obsession and privileged position that allows them to move through different times and spaces” (Gómez, ­Iluminados y tránsfugas, p. 49). She notes that for both authors “happiness lay in having lived in two worlds and historical periods” (p. 49). And, finally, and also on the same page, she claims that the “personal talismans of Moreno and Hudson become museum pieces that are publicly ‘conservable’ and ‘exhibitable’”. It is true that the descriptions of space in both authors have fundamental temporal connotations. As I attempt to argue here, the rhetoric of vanishing is apparent in both texts, though the form it takes is different in each. The point on which the two writers differ is their relationship with the advent—which both see as inevitable—of modernization. For Moreno, the museum and the state are the places from which he writes, as we have seen. These temporal logics are essential elements of his discourse.

198  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia Hudson’s books examined here, however, seem to reject all forms of institutionality. The museum remains beyond the scope of his concerns, though we should recall that he did work and write for institutions such as the Smithsonian and the Royal Society in London. Others of his works, such as The Naturalist in La Plata (1892), engage more with a ­museum-related ­discourse. On the role of the museum in Hudson’s work, see Álvaro Fernández Bravo, “La atracción de lo distante: la obra de Hudson como catálogo y museo”, in Gómez and Castro-Klarén, eds., Entre Borges y Conrad, pp. 195–223. Gustavo Verdesio discerns an(other) instability in Hudson’s discourse, this time with regard to institutionalized museological knowledge: “While it is true that up to now I have attempted to show that Hudson was linked in a manner that was, if not organic, at least ongoing to the institutions that produced and disseminated a kind of knowledge that came out of the natural sciences, it is also true that his attitude is substantially different from that of other naturalists and scholars of the period” (Verdesio, “Entre el naturalismo, la antropología y la arqueología”, p. 170). Verdesio then proceeds to contrast Hudson’s relationship with the state and with nature to that established by Moreno (pp. 177–81). With regard to the state, in the previous chapter I argued that it constitutes the primary threat against which Hudson’s writing rebels. 86 Smith, Uneven Development, p. 11. 87 Smith, Uneven Development, p. 14. Smith also discusses the way the ideology of nature exists in literary representations of the expansion of the frontier in the USA, which is particularly relevant to the Argentine process (and also partially explains the expansionist logic of the Chilean government in the same century, both in the War of the Pacific and in the so-called Pacification of Araucanía). The process entails a confrontation with nature that is the result of a nascent industrial capitalism (p. 19). The conclusion of Smith’s musings on nature serves to illustrate the principal problem that pervades all of the conflicts examined in this volume: “The wilderness [a word that can sometimes be an adequate translation of the Spanish desierto] and the savage were as one; they were obstacles to be overcome in the march of progress and civilization” (p. 20). 88 This conception of nature explains the very logic of the conquest: “It was this scientific rationality … that was later central to the colonizing mentality that justified the rapacious conquest of distant lands” (Bilgrami, ­“Occidentalism: The Very Idea”). Nevertheless, as Bilgrami argues, there is another scientific model, contrary to this one, that conceives of nature in terms of enchantment and with a sort of spirituality, and that demands the engagement of the subject. This schema offers an alternative to thinking in terms of a continuity or communion between man and nature within a particular scientific discourse. This is, I think, what happens in Hudson. Bilgrami’s reflections are controversial and have inspired a productive debate that can be read on the web page named 3 Quarks Daily. It is not my intention to examine the underlying argument in his text, since it—and the debate it sparked—fall outside the scope of my discussion here. But I should note that the way he conceives of nature in relation to man and man’s modernizing logic offers a point of view from which these travels, too, can be explored. The wars discussed in The Desertmakers are also, in large measure, waged against a particular natural space. It is therefore relevant to consider the conceptualizations of nature that undergird its descriptions. 89 One such moment comes toward the end of Viaje, in the chapter where the project of transformation of the “discovered” lands is articulated: “Los

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  199 paraderos tehuelches pueden convertirse en ciudades argentinas” (p. 462) [The Tehuelche places can be transformed into Argentine cities]. Significantly, Moreno does not just imply the disappearance (or, better, reappropriation) of the lands occupied by the native peoples, but also establishes a clear contrast between the Tehuelches and the Argentines. In spite of having called the Tehuelches “Argentines” on some occasions, now, in the book’s conclusion, he discursively displaces the symbolic borders of the nation to exclude them from any role in its future. 90 In these pages, Moreno is not referring to the Tehuelche tribes led by Shayhueque, but to other—more violent— groups. He mentions, for example, the cacique Pichun: “No olvido las ropas ensangrentadas de los troperos que asesinó Pichun, días después de mi paso por Romero Grande, y que encontré en aquel temible paraje meses más tarde al regreso del lago Nahuel Huapi, pero gozo en pensar en la transformación de esas regiones una vez que se realice la explotación racional del suelo …” (Reminiscencias, p. 28) [I can’t forget the bloodstained clothes of the troperos killed by Pichun, just days after my visit to Romero Grande, and which I found in that fearsome spot months later as I returned from the Nahuel Huapi Lake; I nonetheless enjoy thinking about the transformations of these regions once the rational exploitation of the soil takes place]. References to the indigenous violence are frequent in Reminiscencias, whereas in Viaje they are quite rare. In this latter book, the Tehuelches are seen as barbarians in the way they behave, and the narrator is repelled by their actions many times, but they are not seen as killers of white Creoles. 91 Jens Andermann, “Fronteras: la conquista del desierto y la economía de la violencia”, in Friedhelm Schmidt-Welle, ed., Ficciones y silencios fundacionales. Literaturas y culturas poscoloniales en América Latina (Siglo XIX) (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2003), pp. 117–35 (at p. 126), original emphasis. 92 In Moreno’s 1879 Viaje a la Patagonia austral, too, exterminatory violence is attributed to the indigenous community when the narrator describes “los pocos avestruces y guanacos que aún no han extinguido las boleadoras del indio” (p. 17) [the few rheas and guanacos that have not yet been snuffed out by the Indians’ bolas]. The problem is not that the aboriginal people kill, but that they do it as an exercise. The animals “son perseguidos por el gigante patagón o el guerrero araucano, que los atacaron no siempre para aprovecharlos con fin útil, sino para ejercitar sus ardides de cazador” (Viaje 47) [are pursued by the Patagonian giant or the Araucanian warrior, who attack them not always to make use of them but merely to practice their hunting ploys]. This book describes an endless and ongoing slaughter of animals carried out by the traveler, but that exercise of violence is legitimized by science and the museum. 93 According to the theories of Cesare Lombroso, skull dimensions also allowed scientists to identify the presence of an “innate criminality” in particular individuals. Regarding the use of that and other supposedly scientific theories in Argentina, see Gabriela Nouzeilles, Ficciones somáticas: naturalismo, nacionalismo y políticas médicas del cuerpo (Argentina 1880–1910) (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2000); Jorge Salessi, Médicos, maleantes y maricas: higiene, criminología y homosexualidad en la construcción de la nación argentina (Buenos Aires, 1871–1914) (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 1995); and Terán, Vida intelectual en el Buenos Aires fin-de-siglo (1880–1910). These theories were also prevalent in Brazil in this period. The head of Antônio Conselheiro, the leader of the Canudos revolt that I will discuss in the next chapter, was sent to the well-known scientist Nina

200  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia Rodrigues in Salvador so that he could study it and determine the level of criminality of the subject. About the issue of collective madness and the notion of the masses in Os sertões, see Javier Uriarte, “Ciudades y anti-ciudades en el fin de siglo brasileño: contagio y locura colectiva en Os sertões”, Cahiers ALHIM (Amérique Latine. Historie & Mémoire), 29, La transformation de l’espace urbain en Amérique Latine (1870–1930): discours et pratiques de pouvoir, Université Paris VIII, https://alhim. revues.org/5247. 94 In a letter to his father dated 13 October 1875, Moreno insists on this singular understanding of friendship: “Desde ayer han venido ya seis comisiones de indios a decir que son ‘buenos amigos’ … lo que me fastidia bastante, tanto más cuanto que no se dejan medir la cabeza” (Reminiscencias, p. 75) [Since yesterday six commissions of Indians have been coming to say they are ‘good friends’ … which I find all the more annoying given that they won’t let me measure their heads]. The Sam Slick episode has been studied by several scholars who have discussed Viaje a la Patagonia austral. See Andermann, Mapas de poder, p. 126; Molloy, “De exhibiciones y despojos”, pp. 147–48; Livon-Grossman, Geografías imaginarias, pp. 119–20; Jagoe, The End of the World as They Knew It, pp. 90–91; and Rodríguez, Un desierto para la nación, pp. 128–29. 95 Molloy, “De exhibiciones y despojos”, p. 147. 96 Molloy, “De exhibiciones y despojos”, p. 147. Quijada has also paid attention to how indigenous peoples are treated as “Ancestors, Citizens, and Museum Pieces” (this is in fact the title of her article). 97 Molloy, “De exhibiciones y despojos”, p. 148. 98 The difference between this museifying attitude and the hatred contributed by Estanislao Zeballos, the great apologist for and ideologue of the Conquest of the Desert and the author of La conquista de quince mil leguas [The Conquest of Fifteen Thousand Leagues] (1878), is merely one of degree. Andrés Di Tella describes Zeballos’s obsession with exhuming indigenous corpses: “Zeballos would hire Indian guides to locate Indian tombs, which he would proceed to plunder in order to take home the skulls, as scientific war trophies, to add to the collection housed in his private ‘museum’. Given that the Indian had been only very recently defeated, it is surprising how much Zeballos emphasizes that the Indians are a thing of the past, a past that may be studied with great dedication and respect, so long as it remains in the past” (Andrés Di Tella, “Ruins in the Desert: Field Notes by a Filmmaker”, in Michael J. Lazzara and Vicky Unruh, eds., Telling Ruins in Latin America [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009], pp. 87–94 [at p. 90]). Di Tella concludes with a quotation from Zeballos that sums up the fanaticism of the war: “La Barbarie está maldita y no quedarán en el desierto ni los despojos de sus muertos” (p. 90) [Barbarism is damned, and not even the remains of its dead will remain in the desert]. The work of exhumation becomes a rejection of peace, a way to prolong the war. Zeballos talks about emptying out the regions that the war has already transformed into a desert. This is a second desert-making process, erasing ruins as forms of resistance or preservation of memory. Nothing can remain there. I will return to these attempts to erase memory in the next chapter, on Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões. On this topic, see Di Tella’s documentary film El país del diablo. See also Perla Suez’s novel of the same title (Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2015). 99 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 31.

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  201 100 Stephen Jay Gould explains this line of reasoning in the imperial mind: “The adults of inferior groups must be like the children of superior groups, for the child represents a primitive adult ancestor. If adult blacks and women are like white male children, then they are living representatives of an ancestral stage in the evolution of white males. An anatomical theory for ranking races—based on entire bodies—had been found” (Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man [New York: Norton, 1981], p. 326). 101 In this sense, Moreno’s texts grant very little space to the voice of the other in relation to Mansilla’s Una excursión a los indios ranqueles, in which “violence is revealed in the voice of the other even before it has been carried out, a voice that reaches us refuting the conciliatory discourse” (Andermann, “Fronteras”, p. 125). But we should also note that Mansilla’s text was published almost ten years before Moreno’s Viaje, when the war of extermination was further off (though the need to “populate the desert” was present, more or less explicitly, in Argentine texts as early as Echeverría’s La cautiva, published in the 1830s). 102 In this text Moreno vehemently demands that indigenous communities displaced by the war be given land. 103 Bandieri, Historia de la Patagonia, p. 117. 104 As Sylvia Molloy has said, “Moreno sees the indigenous individual as a potential Argentine subject. A lesser subject, of course, … but ultimately a subject, whose way of life merits study and to whom he attributes a limited agency and a future subalternity” (Molloy, “De exhibiciones y despojos”, p. 147, original emphasis). 105 As Andermann has noted, 1879 also saw the publication of La vuelta de Martín Fierro: “We must read Vuelta against that background of a modern war of extermination” (Andermann, “Fronteras”, p. 123). Here, the destruction of the native peoples is a reality that makes the redemption of the gaucho and his incorporation into the nation’s labor force possible. The two parts of Hernández’s work trace new symbolic limits for the nation in narrating the shift from defending the actions of the bad gaucho against the government’s law and institutions to incorporating him into the state’s unit of production. Recall, for example, the lines “Debe el gaucho tener casa / Escuela, Iglesia y derechos” [the gauchos ought to have houses / and a school and a church and their rights] (José Hernández, El Gaucho Martin Fierro/The Gaucho Martin Fierro, trans. Catherine Elena Ward [Albany: State University of New York, Center for Inter-American Studies, 1967], p. 501). These lines are described by the young Borges in his essay on The Purple Land as “puro sarmientismo” [pure Sarmientism]) (Borges, “La tierra cárdena”, p. 35). In this shift, the native always occupies the place of the barbaric other, but while in the first part he possesses an aberrant otherness within an exteriority shared with the gaucho (which enables the legitimization of the gaucho’s violence by painting him as a victim), in Vuelta the Indian is constructed, because of the certainty of his disappearance, as absolutely, irredeemably Other. Some lines that eloquently point to this in Hernández’s 1879 book are: “Es tenaz en su barbarie / No esperen verlo cambiar; / El deseo de mejorar / En su rudeza no cabe” (José Hernández, El gaucho Martín Fierro. La vuelta deMartín Fierro, ed. Luis Sáinz de Medrano [Madrid: Cátedra, 1994], p. 217) [He’s set fast in his brutish ways— / don’t hope to see him change; / it doesn’t enter into his thick head  / to want a better life] (Hernández, El Gaucho Martín Fierro, p. 219). By the twentieth century, the transition from the bandit gaucho

202  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia to the (landholding) rancher is depicted in Ricardo Güiraldes’s Don Segundo Sombra (1925). 106 Oszlak, La formación del Estado argentino, p. 49. 107 As we will see, however, the ranch was not the exemplar of modernization that Moreno had in mind. 108 Andermann, The Optic of the State, p. 55. Bandieri confirms this point and remarks on this form of subordination: “Inacayal, the once powerful cacique of the Andes, was a member of the museum staff until his death in 1888” (Bandieri, Historia de la Patagonia, p. 117). Inacayal’s community demanded the return of his remains since the 1970s, but the restitution took place only in the 1990s. Inacayal’s remains were the first to be returned to the native peoples (in the following decades, this happened repeatedly). In Apuntes, Moreno himself mentions Rufino Vera, an “indio araucano que conocí como intérprete de Inacayal en 1880 y que está al servicio del Museo desde hace varios años” (Francisco P. Moreno, Apuntes preliminares sobre una excursión al Neuquén, Río Negro, Chubut y Santa Cruz [1897] [Buenos Aires: El Elefante Blanco, 2004], p. 153) [Araucanian Indian I met as Inacayal’s interpreter in 1880 and who has been working for the museum for several years]. Further references are included parenthetically in the text. On the “preservation” of living natives in the museum, see also chapter 3 of Blengino’s Il vallo della Patagonia. 109 It is interesting to point out the oblique ways in which the topic of war and that of extermination appear in Viaje. The only one to wage a “war of extermination” in this book is actually the native, against the guanacos (p. 387). Toward the end of the book the imminent extermination of ­natives is hinted at, but the causes are equivocal, or silenced: “Estos parajes son de gran porvenir, y es lástima que el tehuelche … se extinga rápidamente a causa del alcohol que los cristianos le venden. Así, estos indios, incapaces para la vida civilizada, no sacan resultados de ellos, convirtiendo en campos de labranza los que ahora son testigos de espantosas carnicerías. Se cree vulgarmente que para la población de Patagonia es necesario la extinción del indio” (Viaje, p. 469) [These places have a great future, and it’s a pity that the Tehuelches … are quickly becoming extinct due to the alcohol that Christians sell to them. Thus, these Indians, unable to lead a civilized life, do not obtain any products from them, [are not able to] transform into farms the lands that are now witnesses to atrocious slaughters. It is commonly believed that it is necessary that the Indian become extinct for Patagonia to be populated]. The text indicates some responsibility on the part of the whites regarding what now, in the last pages of his book, Moreno describes for the first time as an imminent disappearance. In Viaje he himself gives alcohol to the natives repeatedly in order to obtain objects or information, or to get them to trust him. In that sense, he can be seen as taking part in the practice of extermination he denounces here. In the passage, native peoples are described as exercising violence (there is an interesting lack of specificity with regard to what exactly these slaughters involved) instead of realizing productive activities. The Elefante Blanco edition I have used presents important differences from the 1879 edition. No explanation is given for such changes. As we have seen, in Reminiscencias the association between natives and violence will become more frequent. The final sentence is a more obscure allusion to the looming war, since the construction is impersonal (no agent of extermination is identified), again using the misleading trope of “populating” Patagonia. 110 Susan Stewart, On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 159, 160.

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  203 111 Vezub, “El gobernador indígena de las Manzanas”, p. 311. 112 The last names are particularly obscure to me. Chilchiuma seems to be a stream, and Chimehuin a river. Both are mentioned in Moreno’s Apuntes preliminares (pp. 178, 193). “Pilcan” could be what is today Pilcaniyeu, a town in the Río Negro province, 70 kilometers from Bariloche. “Quelen geyú” could actually be Chenqueg-geyú, which appears in the Appendix to Apuntes preliminares as a “false” stream. 113 Zoli, a Fascist traveler who went to South America in the 1920s, described Argentine territory as a series of generals’ names: “the country’s great landholdings are primarily military in origin. They are around a century old—that is, from when the ‘Conquista del Desierto’ began [referring to the 1833–34 war waged by Rosas against the indigenous populations]. All of the land conquered by the military columns was divided up as legitimate properties and in various sizes, among the state, military commanders, government officials, and soldiers.” (Corrado Zoli, Sud America. Note e impressioni di viaggio [Rome: Sindacato italiano arte grafiche, 1927], pp. 20–21). On this topic, see all of Zoli’s fourth chapter, titled “Origine della proprietà terriera in Argentina” [Origins of Land Property in Argentina]. 114 Susana Bandieri gives some poignant examples: various ministers, military men, and even Roca’s daughter received large portions of land; also, she mentions some of the international (mostly Chilean) cattle societies [sociedades ganaderas] that received lands: the Sociedad Comercial y Ganadera Chile-Argentina obtained 420,000 hectares and the Fremery and Hohmann Society had 53,200. These lands were divided into various ranches controlled from Chile. For more details about how lands were distributed, see Bandieri, Historia de la Patagonia, pp. 223–55. 115 “In the beginning of the twentieth century, approximately eighteenth British land companies operated in Patagonia with millions of hectares in property” (Susana Bandieri, “Ampliando las fronteras: la ocupación de la Patagonia”, in Mirta Zaida Lobato, ed., Nueva historia argentina. Tomo V. El progreso, la modernización y sus límites (1880–1916) [Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2000], pp. 119–77 [at p. 157]). 116 Inacayal and Foyel were among the main leaders of the Gobernación Indígena de las Manzanas, together with Sayhueque. In 1884 they tried to negotiate with the state forces but were instead taken prisoner. Moreno succeded in convincing the state to let him take both caciques to the museum, where Inacayal died in 1887, while Foyel was able to return to his lands (Museo de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo, “Inacayal: líder tehuelche”, www.museo.fcnym.unlp.edu.ar/inacayal [7 ­August 2018]). 117 The quillango was a blanket made of stitched-together scraps of fur used by native peoples in Argentina. 118 For example, in Viaje, the women who participate in what Moreno calls orgies are described in this way: “Es asqueroso el espectáculo que presentan estas terribles viejas, ya borrachas. Estas infernales brujas, repugnantes engendros, degradan la danza saltando borrachas alrededor del brasileño que, en el paroxismo del terror, se ve rodeado por estas mujeres de caras pintadas de negro y de melenas desgreñadas” (pp. 382–83) [The spectacle of these terribe and already drunk old women is disgusting. These infernal witches, repugnant monsters, degrade the dance leaping drunk around the Brazilian man who, in a paroxism of terror, sees himself surrounded by these women with their faces painted black and their hair disheveled]. The Brazilian mentioned here was one of the members of Moreno’s expedition.

204  Francisco Moreno in Patagonia 119 For a detailed study of the fate of the different indigenous groups after the Conquest of the Desert, see Mases, Estado y cuestión indígena. 120 Milcíades Alejo Vignati, “Iconografía aborigen. Los caciques Sayeweke, Ianakayal y Foyel y sus allegados”, Revista del Museo de La Plata, Tomo II, no 10, 1942, Image I. Vignati states that Moreno was responsible for this series of photographs (p. 16). This is very likely the same group that Moreno describes in the chronicle analyzed here. 121 Vignati, “Iconografía aborigen”, Image VIII. 122 And just a few pages earlier he had already said, “No conozco, y han transcurrido desde entonces treinta y cinco años, … mapa alguno de la región intermedia entre el Río Negro y el Chubut; no tengo la menor noticia de que se hayan practicado estudios verdaderamente geográficos” (p. 132) [I am unaware, and thirty-five years have passed in the meantime, … of any map of the intermediate region between Río Negro and Chubut; I have never heard that any truly geographical studies have been carried out]. 123 Juan Martín Biedma, in his Crónica histórica del lago Nahuel Huapi, includes a biografical sketch of Jones and a description of his investements in Patagonia. Yarred Augusto Jones was born in 1863 in Texas; in Patagonia, he was known as “Don Juan” (Biedma, Crónica histórica del lago Nahuel Huapi [Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1987], pp. 219–22). 124 Biedma, Crónica histórica, p. 221. 125 In a speech on the occasion of the formal beginning of the campaign on 18 April 1879, Roca said that the “cuestión de los indios” (the Indian question) had not been completely resolved in the USA, and that Argentina would “resolve” it in a more satisfying way. See the discursive transit from the “cuestión fronteras” to which Avellaneda euphemistically referred, to this explicit formulation. The problem is no longer the frontier, but “Indians”. Viñas quotes this speech and underlines the fact that this war of conquest was, for those who waged it on behalf of the Argentine state, a way of prolonguing and improving the US experience (Viñas, Indios, ejército y frontera, p. 14). Claudia Torre makes a detailed and useful comparison between the Argentine and US campaigns. See Torre, Literatura en tránsito, pp. 233–37. 126 Ángel Rama, The Lettered City [1984], trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 54. 127 Earlier that same year, Moreno had received a larger expanse of lands from the state, a portion of which he was now donating back. These lands constitute the origin of Nahuel Huapi National Park, which was officially declared so only in 1934, when the Dirección Nacional de Parques Nacionales [National Office of National Parks] was created. The park now occupies 710,000 hectares of land. Moreno’s letter appears as an appendix in Reminiscencias, pp. 281–83. On the history of the policy of national parks in Argentina, see Eugenia Scarzanella, “El ocio peronista: vacaciones y ‘turismo popular’ en Argentina (1943–1955)”, Entrepasados: revista de Historia 14 (1998): 65–84. 128 For a productive comparison between the notions of preservation used by Roosevelt and Moreno, see Perla Zusman, “Panamericanismo y conservacionismo en torno al viaje de Theodore Roosevelt a la Argentina (1913)”, Modernidades, 1, no. 11. https://revistas.unc.edu.ar/index.php/­ modernidades/article/view/8301/9178 (28 March 2015). Zusman argues that the politics of conservationism entered, via Roosevelt, the agenda of the Panamericanism proposed by the USA.

Francisco Moreno in Patagonia  205 129 Viñas has referred to the men’s meeting in his section on Moreno in Indios, ejército y frontera, assessing it in the context of the Conquest of the Desert: “On his visit to Argentina, besides being received by Zeballos and Roca, Theodore Roosevelt was, upon arriving in the lake country of the south, looked after by Francisco P. Moreno, who would act as his guide during his Patagonian sojourn” (Viñas, Indios, ejército y frontera, p. 228).

4 The Limits of Visibility and Knowledge Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed:, And though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea. Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Psalm 46, 1–31 In thee, O Lord, do I put my trust; let me never be put to confusion

Psalm 71, 1–22

In August 2010 I traveled to Canudos, today a tiny town in the sertão in Bahia, a state in northeastern Brazil. I made the journey by bus from Rio de Janeiro. It seemed practically endless. After nearly two days together, something resembling a sense of community had developed among the seven passengers. Perhaps because of that, at one point one of the women traveling on the bus came up to me and offered me a prayer card, a manifestation of popular religiosity that is abundant in Latin America. The lines that serve as the epigraph for this chapter come from that gift, which I still have as a keepsake (see Figure 14). These lines may have offered—I thought then and still think today—a good way of entering Canudos.

Desertifying the Sertão The Canudos War (1896–97) was one of the most tragic episodes in nineteenth-century Latin American history. It involved a faceoff between the enormous army (more than 10,000 strong) of the newly fledged Brazilian Republic (founded in 1889) and the numerous followers of Antônio Conselheiro, a mystic-cum-caudillo whose preaching appealed to the marginalized and starving masses seeking a solution to their miserable circumstances. O Conselheiro [The Counselor] railed against the new government, declaring it morally corrupt and

Figure 14  P  raying card given to the author in 2010, on his way to Canudos.

208  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões encouraging his followers not to pay taxes. 3 The cause for resistance in Canudos—the town was known as Belo Monte by its inhabitants— was not limited to the new government taxes, though; also under fire seem to have been civil marriage, the new population census, and the imposition of the metric system.4 After three failed attempts to subdue the uprising, Brazil’s central government sent an enormous contingent of troops, and the war ended in a huge massacre. 5 That state-imposed simplification (regarding taxes, marriage, and metrics) was, of course, equivalent to the desertification of Canudos, which was carried out by killing the men who survived and then burning down the entire settlement in an effort to wipe out all trace of it.6 Os sertões (Campanha de Canudos) (1902) [Backlands: The Canudos Campaign], which came out of Euclides da Cunha’s (1866–1909) experience as a correspondent for the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, offers an account of the origins, development, and outcome of this conflict. Yet the book goes far beyond mere reportage, and draws on a great multiplicity of varied sources, encompassing a range of topics, which makes it a text of great richness and complexity.7 Combining—among other things—newspaper reporting, anthropological essay, military history and strategy, travel literature, public policy, geological and supposedly scientific essay, fiction, and theories of mass psychology, Os sertões is an attempt to grapple with the ways the state seeks to construct itself through war.8 The Canudos War can be understood in economic terms, having partially arisen from the sertão dwellers’ refusal to adopt the role of taxable subjects and the fledgling republic’s need to incorporate the territory into the cadastral map of Brazil. James C. Scott repeatedly highlights the levying of taxes as one of the key objectives of the state’s efforts to create order. Such taxation must be imposed systematically; to that end, the territory must be divided, and each of the corresponding divisions must be identified, as well as the individuals that are included in it: “[State agents’] abstractions and simplifications are disciplined by a small number of objectives. … [T]he most prominent of these were typically taxation, political control, and conscription.”9 Mara Loveman, who has studied other nineteenth-century revolts in Brazil that also resisted state forms of ordering and measuring individuals and spaces, explains what these state interventions meant as part of the state consolidation process from the perspective of Scott’s theories: basic administrative foundations such as standardized naming practices (e.g., permanent patronyms), censuses, universal weights and measures, cadastral surveys, and maps, were crucial prerequisites to effective state intervention in society. Such ‘tools of legibility’ ­delivered pre-modern states from their blindness with respect to the natural and human resources they aspired to control.10

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  209 Berthold Zilly, along with several other critics and scholars, claims that an additional economic element that had a significant impact on the state’s exterminating violence was the fact that the Canudos residents’ adoption of communal living meant that local caciques would be unable to employ those individuals as cheap labor; that is, the founding of Canudos led to a drastic reduction in the availability of productive forces in the sertão.11 The Canudos rebellion posed an obstacle to the state’s consolidation process, since the town’s population ignored the law and government authorities, and attempted to establish a new regime within the boundaries of what the state considered to be its territory. Thus, the campaign that ended with an enormous massacre was an attempt to reappropriate a territory, reestablishing symbolic and geographic boundaries.12 War (like taxation) represents, in the approach that underpins The Desertmakers, an effort to make spaces visible. In Os sertões, I argue, Euclides’s great preoccupation is precisely with how to narrate (and so make visible) those elements—war, massacre—that, as we have seen, frequently elude representation. For this reason this chapter will focus on moments in which the narrator textualizes his difficulties in visualizing the enemy and the war, thereby representing his own struggle for representation. There are two elements that point to this struggle to see. First, there are frequent references to invisibility, to what, for the narrator, remains beyond his gaze and ability to explain. In Canudos, the narrator, who shares the state’s ideological and political perspective, finds a world that is for him entirely new, characterized by other forms of understanding movement and relating to space. I study modes of invisibility in connection with different ways of understanding displacement and the relationship with the land. This is important for thinking about war in broader terms since the multiple readings of a conflict (the strategies for waging it, its causes, its objectives) go hand in hand with the diverse ways of conceiving of movement as well as thinking about— and looking at—space. Images of emergence—that is to say, moments in which previously unseen objects or individuals rise from the depths of the earth, of the sea, or of the past—will be of particular significance. Second, in addition to referring to what is not seen, the narrator constantly evokes images of ruins. These images haunt the narrator and infiltrate his language despite his “scientific” language of explication. Images of ruination introduce elements of the past into the present, indicating a limit not just to the representation of otherness but also to everything that lettered knowledge is capable of representing. Ruins, and images of vestiges and remains, are present throughout the entire literary production of Euclides da Cunha, and they have for this reason been repeatedly studied by scholars.13 In Os sertões, however, the ­focus of my analysis falls on the specific relationships between ruins and war, on how war―which shares with ruins an essential relationship with

210  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões destruction―helps us rethink the spatiality and temporality of ruins. Of particular importance will be images of premature destruction, of elements that are destroyed or ruined even in their very origin.

Newness, Modernization, and Deception: Euclides da Cunha, Os sertões, and the First Republic (1889–1930) After becoming independent from Portugal in 1822, Brazil adopted a monarchical system called the Império (Empire). The country was ruled by an emperor until 1889, when this regime fell.14 The proclamation of the Republic, which took place through a military coup that same year, is one of the key political events in nineteenth-century Brazilian history. This proclamation, like the 1822 declaration of independence, did not involve any war or violence, or indeed the participation of the people at large, but it constituted an important moment in the modernization of the state apparatus. The beginning of the end of the Empire was the Paraguayan War (1864–70), which weakened the imperial system even as it bolstered the state apparatus (most fundamentally, its identification with the military).15 The state’s army would play a crucial political role during the early years of the Brazilian Republic: evidence of this is that the first two presidents of the republican period were military men, veterans of the Paraguayan War.16 This strong presence of the military in the political life of the country continued throughout the Republic, with no fewer than 12 military interventions.17 Even though it succeeded a monarchical regime, the Republic was in many aspects not a liberal one. While it did accomplish important secularizing reforms and adopted liberal economic measures, it was in fact one of the most repressive regimes in the history of Brazil. Maria de Lourdes Mônaco Janotti enumerates the forms of political persecutions inflicted on those who supported the monarchy, explaining that “the first republican years were characterized by several state of siege decrees, by arbitrariness and violence as ways of … ­neutralizing the manifestations of conflicts between social classes”.18 Brutal police repression was used to quash urban revolts. The first years of the Republic were characterized by the always looming threat of restoration: the Canudos revolt was construed in the press, utterly without evidence, as an international plot masterminded by monarchists.19 The massacre that brought an end to the revolt was perhaps the most eloquent example of the military violence that characterized the new regime. The unprecedentedly repressive character of the state should be read in concert with the infiltration of global (mainly British) capital into the country, a phenomenon that dominated the nineteenth century and which explains many of the economic and political events that followed the Paraguayan War. Brazil modernized and made a powerful entrance into global trade markets largely as a dependent and indebted nation. 20 This strengthening of the country’s role in the global economic scene

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  211 was due to the boom of commodities such as rubber (in the Amazon region) and coffee (in the interior of São Paulo). The growth in the external demand for raw materials greatly stimulated Brazil’s foreign trade. Internal modernization also took place, with the centralizing process intensifying as the government strove by military means to extend the power of the capital city throughout the national territory. This effective and stabilizing central control over the whole territory was necessary to guarantee the flow of merchandise, both internally and externally. 21 In Brazil, state consolidation took place mainly through military engagement, with the Paraguayan War and the Canudos War serving as watershed moments in the state’s surveying of national space. 22 In some respects the process of state consolidation in Brazil differed from those of most Spanish American countries since the empire was a functioning and rather stable regime, albeit one dependent on slavery until its abolition in 1888, just one year before the proclamation of the Republic. Brazil was the last country in Latin America to take this step, after even Cuba, which was still a colony. While the Brazilian elites parroted the bourgeois liberal ideas that had dominated European thought for almost a century, important portions of these ruling classes continued to—more or less tacitly—support slavery or accept it as a normal part of life from which many benefited personally. 23 In sum, neither the abolition of slavery nor the proclamation of the Republic brought significant structural changes. This capitalist, centralist, and militarist configuration of state power was also characterized by a relentless policy of territorial appropriation and control. There was constant preoccupation with the territory itself, whose borders were at the time considered vulnerable, since they were part of a large but uncertainly determined national space. In that push to dominate it entirely, one of the resources employed was the expansion of the railway network, in which British capital was heavily involved. 24 Territorial concerns included a constant fear of foreign invasion, which went hand in hand with a decidedly expansionist foreign policy: during the First Republic, Brazil consolidated its international borders in negotiations with its neighbors, acquiring some 900,000 square kilometers (the Paraguayan War proved to be a significant antecedent for this state-led aggressive expansionism). 25 Euclides da Cunha responded to this expansion by expressing a sincere wish to travel through all of the ­country’s immense territory, as part of a reflection on the meaning of nationality, on the need to come to understand “Brazilianness”. For Euclides, in this context of territorial reconfigurations, thinking about national identity also meant grappling with issues of power and communication. Alongside a militaristic and defensive approach to territorial issues in governing circles, Euclides da Cunha insisted on “the necessity

212  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões to get to know the country, colonize the interior, and construct an internal network of railway communication”. 26 The First Republic’s militaristic and repressive tendencies led to great disillusionment with the new regime in intellectual circles and among the general public. 27 As intellectuals felt increasingly excluded from the realm of political decision-making, the urban bourgeoisie took c­ ontrol of the political arena. 28 As a corollary to the increased distance between the cultural and political spheres, intellectuals were forced to professionalize, and journalism emerged as the new realm in which they could operate, albeit unenthusiastically. There was, then, an increased ­feeling of alienation within Brazilian intellectual circles at the turn of the century. 29 From the start, Euclides da Cunha was a staunch supporter of the Republic.30 In 1888 he began writing opinion pieces criticizing the monarchy in São Paulo’s most important newspapers. He continued to contribute to newspapers, periodically and intermittently, until 1907; perhaps the most notable part of these contributions were his 1897 dispatches from Canudos. Euclides’s relations with the Republic were complicated and shifting. He soon adopted a critical view of the new system, and openly expressed his disapproval of the authoritarian government of Marshal Floriano Peixoto, the second president of the Republic (1891–94). Nonetheless, Euclides still maintained his support for the Republic until the Canudos War, the event that definitely consolidated his disillusionment. This didn’t mean that he stopped all collaboration with the government, though. After the publication of Os sertões Euclides worked as part of an official commission to demarcate the Brazilian border with Peru in the Amazon region.31 He visited the Amazon in 1905, and wrote various pieces that were posthumously published under the title À margem da história (At the Margin of History, 1909).32 Euclides was quite exceptional compared to many writers of his generation, since he never left Brazil and expressed no desire to travel to Europe, the longed-for destination of the Latin American middle and upper classes. Critic José Brito Broca evocatively called this powerful pull of the interior for Euclides “hantise do sertão” [obsession with the sertão].33 His preference for the little-known lands of the country’s interior, and rural life in general, over the city was explicit in many of his letters and poems.34 Euclides lived for many years in the interior of Brazil, working as a military engineer. After his trip to Canudos, he wrote most of Os sertões in São José do Rio Pardo, a city in the interior of the state of São Paulo, where he was in charge of reconstructing a bridge. His profession molded his views on issues that were central to his writing, such as his understanding of spatiality, his projects for transforming and “taming” nature, and his conceptualization of movement and travel. In his letters, he often refers to his profession in ways that emphasize these elements.35

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  213 For many years Euclides struggled to gain recognition; it was difficult for him to obtain a permanent position as an educator or to join the most distinguished literary circles in Rio.36 But thanks to the immediate critical and popular success of Os sertões, in 1903 he was appointed a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, the most select circle of writers and intellectuals in the country, which he formally entered in 1906. In 1903 he was also inducted into the Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute [Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro], a scientific institution that dealt with the exploration of the national territory. The importance of science, and particularly of positivism, in Brazil during the last decades of the nineteenth century cannot be overstated. The ideas of positivism dominated the Brazilian military and the country’s elites, who saw the proclamation of the Republic as a sign of the triumph of ideas of progress and evolution. The most obvious sign of this was the adoption in 1889, immediately following the proclamation, of the new national flag, which displayed the motto Ordem e progresso (essentially the same flag Brazil has today). Euclides was strongly influenced by this philosophy of science, which purported to explain the differences between the races that composed the country.37 Os sertões is an ambitious and enormously complex book, and a very long one too: the first edition was of 635 pages. The book is divided into three sections, titled “The Land” [A terra], “Man” [O homem], and “The Battle” [A Luta]. These parts are distributed in accordance with a powerful geographical and racial determinism. In dividing his book thus, Euclides followed Hippolyte Taine’s idea, in his Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863), that there were three factors that determined the history of a people: the physical and geographical environment; race, having to do with hereditary or innate dispositions; and the specific moment, which was determined by the other two elements.38 The book’s first part describes the geology, the climate, the flora, and, in more general terms, the geography of the sertão of the region of Bahia. The description of the land slowly approaches the site of the war, describing the different regions from the Atlantic coast all the way to Canudos. The second part discusses the physical and social characteristics of the region’s inhabitants, offers a biographical sketch of Antônio Conselheiro, describes the type of relationship he created with his followers, and narrates the story of how Canudos came into being. Contemporary racial theories are a key element in these descriptions.39 The sertanejo (inhabitant of the sertão; backlander) is compared with other Brazilian “types”, such as the Portuguese immigrant, the mestiço (people from miscegenated backgrounds) living in the coastal cities, or the gaúcho from southern Brazil. Adriana Campos Johnson refers to the racist considerations that appear here as an expression of Euclides’s “positivist concepts of race in which stronger races triumph over weaker ones and miscegenation is largely a force of degeneration”.40 The section closes

214  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões with a description of Canudos and of life in the community founded by O Conselheiro. Here the narrative strives to explain both the type of religiosity and the kind of social and economic relations that characterized the Canudos community. The alternative conceptualization of spaces that seems to have existed there may have to do with the millennialist project that—as Euclides and others have claimed—the Canudos community was defending.41 This second part also discusses the relationship between the sertanejos, the rebellious settlement, and the nation. In this sense, Os sertões can be considered the foundational text of an important genre in Brazilian literature: the essay of national interpretation, seeking to offer a historical or social explanation of the specific features that characterize the country’s dynamics.42 The story of the war is narrated only in the third part. “A luta” is the account of all of the expeditions that were sent to quash the rebellion, and their successive failures, up to the final massacre after the fourth expedition succeeded in defeating the settlement. The total duration of the war was a little more than ten months, from the first assault by a 100man battalion from the state of Bahia on 24 November 1896, to the final fall of the resistant settlement on 5 October 1897. Thus, the perspective adopted in the book is not that of Euclides himself (considered as a single traveler), since he was in Canudos only during the final weeks of combat (from 10 September to 5 October), and did not himself traverse many of the regions described in the first part of the book.43 To create a narrative that transcended the limited episodes of the war he witnessed in person, Euclides worked with a wide variety of sources that included travel narratives, chronicles by other journalists and earlier witnesses; works of fiction; various treatises on geography, geology, and anthropology; and readings of European philosophers and scientists.44

Traversing the Sertão: Tensions, Deviations, Obstacles The map reproduced below appears, in the first edition, between the “Preliminary Note” and the first part of the book; that is, it effectively introduces the narrative. The beginning of the book offers a view of northeastern Brazil through what Leopoldo Bernucci has called a “ ­ telescopic perspective”, a powerfully descriptive one that, making use of a specialized language, seems to be taken from a geography book: “O planalto central do Brasil desce, nos litorais do Sul, em escarpas inteiriças, altas e abruptas. Assoberba os mares; e desata-se em chapadões nivelados pelos visos das cordilheiras marítimas, distendidas do Rio Grande a Minas” (p. 71)46 [Along the southern coast of Brazil the central plateau descends in high, steep escarpments. It towers over the waves and moves back in ridges, leveling off from the peaks of the coastal ranges, extending from Rio Grande do Sul to Minas Gerais (p. 7)]. This section gives the text a sense of movement toward a destination, even though the text is not the

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  215

Figure 15  Map included in the first (1902) edition of Os sertões.45

narrative of any particular trip. The first person is not used; instead, the narrator makes use of an impersonal tone: “De sorte que quem o contorna, seguindo para o norte, observa notáveis mudanças de relevos” (p. 71) [So that if one follows it along toward the north, one will observe notable changes in the relief of the land (p. 7)]. The reconstruction of the region where Canudos is situated is frequently made through references to other sources (the map reproduced above includes the names of various travelers who visited the region; among them, notably, is Richard Burton) (Figure 15).47 This first section of the book refers several times to the figure of the traveler, the walker, or the observer who roams the region of the sertão. For example, in an innovative rendering of the action of travel, the narrator incorporates his readership into his fictitious forward movement: “É a paragem formosíssima dos campos gerais, expandida em ­chapadões ondulantes—grandes tablados onde campeia a sociedade rude dos v­ aqueiros … Atravessemo-la” (p. 78, original emphasis) [This is the most beautiful landscape of the campos gerais, going off far and wide in a wave of hills – great platforms where the rugged cow herders roam… Let us cross through it (p. 11)]. The reader is didactically taken by the hand, as the narrator seems to be introducing the landscape. This powerful impression of forward movement is not represented by any concrete physical motion, though; there are no bodies here, just eyes, just words.48 The opening pages of the first section present an “observer”

216  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões who continuously—and sometimes frenetically—advances. On the contrary, the deserted, impenetrable, unknown, and motionless character of the places traversed is emphasized, as the sertão imposes its rhythms on the traveler: “E avançando célere, sobretudo nos trechos em que se sucedem pequenas ondulações todas da mesma forma y do mesmo modo dispostas, o viajante mais rápido tem a sensação da imobilidade. Patenteiam-­se-lhe, uniformes, os mesmos quadros, num horizonte invariável que se afasta à medida que ele avança” (p. 86) [Moving along quickly, especially on stretches where small rolling formations come one after the other, all of a similar shape and appearance, the speediest of travelers will get the feeling that he is not moving. These shapes, so uniform, present him with the same picture of an unchanging horizon that keeps on getting farther away as he advances (p. 17)]. The clear antithetical construction emphasizes mobility, but the desert ends up imposing its stillness on the traveler. The only vestige of mobility, the rolling formations (“ondulações”), which could be read as altering a near-­perfect linearity, are instead “small” and monotonous. In their unaltered ­succession, they do not seem to affect the idea of overall uniformity. The immobility is not truly of the territory but instead of the traveler. It is the territory that, stubbornly unvarying, “infects” the traveler with its immobility. The space thus deactivates the domination strategies employed (the ­all-encompassing eye, the map-drawing style, the frenetic movement forward), refusing to be transformed. The sertão retains the ideological connotations that the desert a­ cquired in nineteenth-century Latin America. It is conceived of as absolute exteriority and otherness, without inhabitants and without order. Yet Os sertões encompasses a variety of phases, from the description of a void (the first part constructs the space as if it were truly uninhabited) to the narrative of the inhabited desert (man, in the second part, seems indistinguishable from his surroundings), to the void that is brought back by war.49 It would be a mistake, however, to read these moments as somehow separate, since the war is present from the very beginning. The first symptom of disorder in the sertão is the absence of roads: according to the civilizing logic, space and movement must be regulated; defining through which channels movement takes place is as fundamental as the movement itself.50 The most palpable form of territorial domination is road building, and, in this respect and in this period in Latin America, the railway is the most effective means of ordering space. In this part of the sertão, however, the routes historically remained unchanging: “não a alteraram nunca. Não a variou, mais tarde, a civilização, justapondo aos rastros do bandeirante os trilhos de uma via férrea” (p. 83) [In no way did they change it. Nor did civilization, later on, as it put down railway tracks over the path of the bandeirantes (p. 15)]. The impenetrability of these regions takes on almost the quality of a force field. Roads

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  217 “contorneavam sempre, evitando-a sempre, a paragem sinistra e desolada, subtraindo-se a uma travessia torturante” (p. 83) [would always turn away here and there to avoid the sinister and desolate landscape and escape the torture of its crossing (p. 15)]. They encircle the territory without ever penetrating it. Here the adjectives describe not the landscape but rather the mood of a subject (a modern subject, related to the state) for whom this unincorporated geography is “sinister”, “desolate”, “torturous” (the literal translation of torturante). The narrator exhibits his disorientation in the absence of the state and in the face of stymied movement: it is not possible to travel there. He narrates successive attempts to move forward, all of which turn out to be futile. He then notes that “aquelas duas linhas de penetração, que vão interferir o S. Francisco em pontos afastados—Juazeiro e Santo Antônio da Glória—formavam, desde aqueles tempos, as lindes de um deserto” (p. 84) [“these two lines of penetration, touching the São Francisco at distant points—have been the boundaries of a desert ever since” (p. 15)]. The lines only highlight the apparent impenetrability of some regions. This deserted part of the sertão would seem to be that place that cannot be traveled.51 All of the previous rhetoric of forward movement comes to a halt in order to surround, to look from a distance or from the outside. If to travel is to see, then the desert is also that which remains invisible.

“O Sertão Vai Virar Mar”: The Return of an Original Sea The narrator even employs the trope of the land as sea, which has a long and distinguished pedigree in descriptions of the South American plains: it was used by Humboldt, then by the English travelers, and then again by Sarmiento.52 Yet the sea takes on other connotations in Euclides, being the sertão’s original form: the sertão is not only a sea in a metaphorical sense, a vast limitless plain, but also, for Euclides, quite literally: “Imaginamo-los há pouco … a emergirem, geológicamente modernos, de um vasto mar terciário” (p. 138) [Let us imagine them [the sertões] as they were a short time back … as they emerge geologically modern from a vast Tertiary sea (p. 48)].53 That is, where there is now a desert, there was once a sea. This helps reinforce the notion that these lands belong to another era. The sertão is an originary space, and entering it entails—as in the other three authors examined in this volume—a ­journey in time.54 For Euclides, the (impossible) solution to the conflict—­impossible because it emerges only after the disappearance of the other is all but c­ ertain—lies in bringing two eras closer together, reducing the temporal distance that would explain the incomprehensible character of the man of the sertão. Toward the end of the book, the narrator claims that violence was not the appropriate way to deal with the resistive inhabitants of the sertão, and that another war, one consisting of “propaganda”, would be more effective. What is needed, Euclides

218  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões believes, is “uma propaganda tenaz, continua e persistente, visando trazer para o nosso tempo e incorporar à nossa existência aqueles rudes compatriotas retardatários” (p. 682) [to draw these rude and backward fellow citizens into the mainstream of modern life and into the life of the country (p.  401)].55 Whether the passages refer to the Tertiary or to an unspecified antiquity, exact correspondences are not the point for Euclides, the idea being that different manifestations of the past are ­apparent, still today, in the sertão. One of the terms that indicate this belonging to another time is anacronismo [anachronism], frequently used to refer to the type of life led by the people of the sertão. Fundamentally, and similarly to what Moreno believed about indigenous peoples in Argentina, or Burton about Paraguayans, the sertanejos are situated in a different stage of evolution: Insistamos sobre esta verdade: a guerra de Canudos foi um refluxo em nossa história. Tivemos, inopinadamente, ressurreta e em armas em nossa frente, uma sociedade velha, uma sociedade morta, galvanizada por um doido. Não a conhecemos. Não podíamos ­conhecê-la. … Porque essas psicoses epidêmicas despontam em todos os tempos e em todos os lugares como anacronismos palmares, contrastes inevitáveis na evolução desigual dos povos, patentes sobretudo quando um largo movimento civilizador lhes impele vigorosamente as camadas superiores. (p. 316, emphasis added) [We must insist on this truth: The war of Canudos was a regression in our history. What we had before us was the unsolicited armed insurgence of an old, dead society, brought back to life by a madman. We did not recognize this society; it was impossible for us to have known it … These epidemic psychoses appear in all ages and all places as obvious anachronisms, inevitable contrasts in the unequal evolution of peoples, contrasts that become especially pronounced when a broad social movement pushes the people to a more advanced way of life.] (p. 168)56 The passage, again strongly antithetical, makes use of the image of a heretofore hidden object (in this case, a society, but sometimes a human body, or even the land itself) that heaves into view, or the very idea of a resurrected life that remains uncannily not recognized. Furthermore, the diagnose of the Canudos rebellion as an “epidemic psychosis” is a good example of the way in which Os sertões deploys the typical language of fin de siècle social psychology in order to build the topoi of contagion and collective madness in relation to the rebellion. 57 The fact that the past is physically present as one travels through the sertão appears at

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  219 some points with more clarity, such as when the idea of the emergence of another, ancient world is introduced. That extinct sea, which is for Euclides the soil of the sertão, is also a vast cemetery wherein lie the remains of that marine life. This combination of signs points to a previous life that can be detected only through its remnants: E por mais inexperto que seja o observador—ao deixar as perspectivas majestosas, que se desdobram ao Sul, trocando-as pelos cenários emocionantes daquela natureza torturada, tem a impressão persistente de calcar o fundo recém-sublevado de um mar extinto, tendo ainda estereotipada naquelas camadas rígidas a agitação das ondas e das voragens. (p. 91) [And no matter how inexpert the observer might be, as he leaves the majestic perspectives that unfold to the south and exchanges them for the impressive scenery of this tormented nature, he gets the persistent impression that he is setting foot on the recently arisen bottom of an extinct sea, the agitation of waves and whirlpools still copied in those stark hillocks.] (p. 20) This description recalls Moreno’s view of Patagonia as an “immense tomb”.58 As in the Argentine traveler’s account, in Euclides the idea of terrain that is already dead can be understood as prefiguring what that land will become as a result of the war. 59 In evidence here is the idea of nature “tormented” by a climate that continuously punishes it (the nature-climate binary is quite original, as if climate were not part of ­nature).60 The whole passage evokes powerful contrasts that, as is usual in Os sertões, anticipate the war toward which the narrative is directed.61 The passage alludes to different forms of movement taking place simultaneously; the central image is that of walking across the bottom of an extinct sea that is “recém-sublevado”. In Portuguese, “sublevar” evokes both the idea of revolt or rebellion and the broader notion of rising in space.62 In other words, that ancient seafloor has risen, has drawn nearer, and remains perceptible. The prehistoric (or premodern, which for Euclides is always the world of Canudos and the sertão) element seems to be, though dead, nevertheless still present. The same idea appears at the end of the passage: the waves and whirlpools of that dead sea seem as if they have been “estereotipados” (translated, not entirely satisfactorily, as “copied”), a term that means “converter em formas sólidas, por meio de um metal em fusão, páginas previamente compostas em carateres móveis” [to turn pages that were previously composed of movable type into solid forms by means of molten metal].63 The image is of making something fixed, inalterable.64 The land retains,

220  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões transformed into fixed lines, what once were sinuous, ­agitated, and rebellious elements. Thus, the text alludes to permanence, to returning, to the ­resistance of that which has been subjected to an effort to suppress it. The extinct element’s mark survives on the land, its undulations still perceptible. The image introduces the remnant as an element that is natural and primordial, and also as a form of resistance. The vestige is, like all origins, an emergence—an emergence and a whirlpool. It is in these terms that Walter Benjamin conceptualizes the notion of origin (Ursprung in German): “The term origin does not mean the process of becoming of that which has emerged, but much more, that which emerges out of the process of becoming and disappearing. The origin stands in the flow of becoming as a whirlpool.”65 The origin is not merely a beginning but also an outcome that is inherently mobile and unstable. It is the place where coming into being and vanishing coincide in a sort of incompleteness that is inherently wracked by violence and conflict. In precisely this way, toward the very end of the book the narrator claims that the men of the sertão are the initial core of the nation, “a rocha viva de nossa raça” (p. 766) [the very bedrock of our race (p. 454)] even as he attests to their disappearance through war. Euclides’s view of landscapes and ruins (sometimes remnants or vestiges) inverts the direction of the relationship between nature and the ruin, since in general it is nature that turns a particular construction into a ruin.66 That is, the buildings are generally transformed into ruins when vegetal elements (such as plants) emerge in them. It is as if the structure were returning to the natural realm.67 Here, Euclides takes the opposite tack: he introduces the ruin into nature; that is to say, he describes nature as a ruin in its very origins. The sertão is the result of a cataclysm, of an ancient earthquake, and it also encapsulates vestiges of ancient living forms. But the text also employs the more traditional image of vegetation penetrating a rock as a symbol of the ability to come back to life that resides in dead things, as a form of resistance: “Acredita-se que a região incipiente ainda está preparando-se para a Vida: o líquen ainda ataca a pedra, fecundando a terra” (p. 94) [It could be surmised that this incipient region is still making itself ready for life. Lichens still attack stones, fertilizing the ground (p. 22)]. The passage, again making use of a vocabulary reminiscent (or, in reality, anticipatory) of battle, indicates that this is the region of origins, a region that can begin, violently, to be alive. Once again, this is a moment of encounter between death and life, bringing the two meanings together. The moment in which the stone-like ground is fertilized by lichens is the moment that marks the origin of the ruin, represented as the triumph of life. The recurrence of images of resurrection is eloquent: the war is described as the return of dead customs and of an extinguished people, as the previous quotations have shown.

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  221 Moments such as this are crucial signs of an idea that undergirds the entire book, recurring again and again: the identification of the resistant vegetation (which the narrator in the next line calls “flora of great resistance”) with the Canudos rebels. Regarding the end of the war, Euclides titles one section with one of the most frequently quoted lines in the book: “Canudos não se rendeu” (p. 778) [Canudos did not surrender (p. 463)].68 Throughout the book, resistance emerges as the only positive (or at least surprising, formidable) meaning of the ruinous element, of all presences that are seen by the narrator as vestiges of the past. In the opening pages, however, what predominates is uneasiness in relation to the sertão, a notion that for Euclides has connotations akin to those of ruins. Indeed, he describes the landscape as being reminiscent of castles in ruins: “As mesmas assomadas gnáissicas caprichosamente cindidas em planos quase geométricos, à maneira de silhares, que surgem em numerosos pontos, dando, às vezes, a ilusão de encontrar-se, de repente, naqueles ermos vazios, majestosas ruinarias de castelos” (p. 88) [The gneissic summits, casually split into almost geometrical planes, like pediments, rising up at several points give the illusion sometimes that one has suddenly come upon the majestic ruins of a castle in those empty barrens (p. 18)].69 At some points, even more clearly, traversing the landscape around Canudos is compared to walking through ruins, through a land that is the result of sudden destruction: “Entretanto, inesperado quadro esperava o viandante que subia, depois desta travessia en que supõe pisar escombros de terremotos, as ondulações mais próximas a Canudos” (p. 98) [There is an unexpected vista awaiting the traveler crossing this region. He will get the feeling that he is treading the ruins from an earthquake as he climbs now up the hills closest to Canudos (p. 24)]. The sertão is the setting for what Euclides calls “o martírio da terra” (p. 87) [the martyrdom of the land (p. 18)], a battle between the land and the climate, which ravages and abuses it.70 This conflict in nature is a harbinger of the armed conflict, the war. The identification of the “land” with “nature” is gradually modified until, having started from the idea of a dull, unchanging nature, we arrive at the idea of a nature governed by conflict. The landscape changes and the vegetation becomes horrifying: at one point, various samples of the plant that Euclides calls “cabeças-de-frade” (monk’s heads) are described as having the appearance of “cabeças decepadas e sanguinolentas jogadas por ali, a esmo, numa desordem trágica” (p. 124) [decapitated and bleeding heads scattered about at random in tragic disorder (p. 40)]. Naturally, other heads—human this time—will appear later.71 This warlike language ­infects the narrator’s point of view and gradually permeates the text. The backlands are conceived of in their climatic and geographic characteristics as being “contrapostos a este critério natural” (p. 137) [contrary to the natural criterion (p. 48)]. They need, therefore, to be “corrected” in order to become productive, to be incorporated into the

222  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões logic of the modern state. For Euclides, man has created deserts (here he uses the expression fazedores de desertos—or desert makers—in which this book’s title is inspired), but he can also eradicate them (p. 134). Euclides introduces various examples of the ways in which humanity has, in the past, “corrected” nature by controlling the flow of water: he explains how in Tunisia it was possible to progress from a “povoado de traficantes ou númidas erradios” (pp. 143–44) [village inhabited by merchants and wandering nomads (p. 52)] to “a terra clássica da agricultura antiga” (p. 144) [the classic area of ancient agriculture (p. 52)]. Though the text describes the ravages caused by sun and drought, w ­ ater does not seem to be the solution: water’s arrival is excessive, out of control, and destructive, and it makes the soil barren and unsuitable for agriculture.72 The taming of the “savage waters” (p. 144) is a good example of Euclides’s logic of landscape transformation, which can certainly be read as a form of sustainable understanding of land production. Humans must then “civilize” nature, providing a “corretivo destas disposições naturais” (p. 146) [correction of these natural dispositions (p. 54)]. The section titled “A terra” culminates with this project: Abarreirados os vales, inteligentemente escolhidos, em pontos pouco intervalados, por toda a extensão do território sertanejo, três conseqüências inevitáveis decorreriam: atenuar-se-iam de modo considerável a drenagem violenta do solo e as suas conseqüências lastimáveis; formar-se-lhes-iam à ourela, inscritas na rede das derivações, fecundas áreas de cultura; e fixar-se-ia uma situação de equilíbrio para a instabilidade do clima, porque os numerosos e pequenos açudes uniformemente distribuídos e constituindo una dilatada superfície de evaporação, teriam, naturalmente, no correr dos tempos, a influência moderadora de um mar interior, de importância extrema. (p. 137) [Damming up the gullies after choosing them intelligently at closely spaced points across the extensive backland territory would bring about three inevitable results: It would narrow the violent damage to the soil and considerably reduce its woeful consequences; rich areas of cultivation would be formed in the web of its flow; and a state of balance would be maintained against the instability of the climate because the numerous small pools, in their uniform distribution, would constitute a wide surface of evaporation and over the passage of the seasons would be a natural and moderating influence like that of an inland sea, and this would be of extreme importance.] (pp. 54–55) In this passage, fluidity and mobility must be directed, organized. This recalls the reading offered by Deleuze and Guattari of the ways in which

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  223 the modern state transforms spaces: “the state needs to subordinate hydraulic force to conduits, pipes, embankments, which prevent turbulence, which constrain movement to go from one point to the other, and space itself to be striated and measured, which makes the fluid depend on the solid and flows proceed by parallel, laminar layers.”73 Euclides’s project is an attempt to stop movement in order to subsequently direct and resignify it, making it useful and productive. Ultimately, a situation of stability and uniformity is achieved. Regarding the modern state’s interventions in space in an effort to simplify it and make it “legible”, Scott notes, “The organization of the natural world was no exception. Agriculture is, after all, a radical reorganization and simplification of flora to suit man’s goals.”74 The importance of agriculture is therefore present in Os sertões: the need to organize the chaos of nature, to channel the waters’ course and, in doing so, turn them into “resources”.75 The simplification of movement extolled by this project reveals a subject who comes to profoundly reject that fluidity which is so alien to him and which must, as Deleuze and Guattari put it in the previous quotation, be thought of in terms of solidity in order to be controlled. At the end of the passage, the narrator states that the proposed changes will have a “natural and moderating influence like that of an inland sea”. Therefore, modern agriculture’s drive to domesticate would in a way recreate the sea that, according to Euclides, originated the sertão. If the sea is still latent in the space, as discussed above, then constructing a new sea will mean a reemergence. Paradoxically, the modernization process, in the context of the book’s rhetoric, can be read as bringing the past back. As has been frequently asserted, Os sertões is a text built upon contradictions, in which the argument is not always consistent and oxymoronic images are juxtaposed. In these juxtapositions, frequent throughout the book, several temporal dimensions appear together. This is why the ruin and images related to it such as that of remains or vestiges are particularly rich in the book. In addition, in a perhaps unforeseen way, Euclides’s project suggests the fulfillment of one of the prophesies that the narrator attributes to Conselheiro himself: “Em 1894 há de vir rebanhos mil correndo do centro da Praia para o certão; então o certão virará Praia e a Praia virará certão” (p. 277) [In 1896 a thousand herds will run from the coast to the backlands; then the backlands will become the coast and the coast will become the backlands (p. 142)].76 As we shall see, the references to the internal sea and to Conselheiro’s prophesy acquire, in the present day, unsuspected and unsettling meanings.

Conceptualizing Displacement: Builders of Ruins, or Desert Makers Later, the narrator applies the adjective “mobile” to this territory, and that mobility (parallel to the rebels’ own movements) will be the p ­ rincipal

224  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões obstacle to the troops’ advance and therefore the sertanejos’ principal ally. When the narrator refers to “território inimigo” (pp. 447, 448, 449) [enemy territory (pp. 250, 251); enemy land (p. 252)], he is speaking literally. The sertão is not only the territory of the enemy, where that enemy lives, but in fact is itself the enemy, remaining, like its inhabitants, resistant and external to the state. All of the vocabulary used to describe the sertão will later be applied to the war and to military strategies. In other words, even if the protagonists change, the same tensions pervade the entire book, and the nomadic quality of the territory is that of the inhabitants of Canudos and their defensive fluidity. In the second part of the book, the description of the sertanejos is again constructed in accordance with a space-time axis. This p ­ opulation’s nomadism turns out to be a consequence of drought and the ­unpredictable climate. The complicated, winding roads described in the first part are now translated into the sertanejo’s manner of walking, which is just as disorganized and undirected. The man of the sertão is described in contradictory terms: É desgracioso, desengonçado, torto. Hércules-Quasímodo, reflete no aspecto a fealdade típica dos fracos. O andar sem firmeza, sem aprumo, quase gingante e sinuoso, aparenta a translação de ­membros desarticulados. … Caminhando, mesmo a passo rápido, não traça trajetória retilínea e firme. Avança celeremente, num bambolear característico, de que parecem ser o traço geométrico os meandros das trilhas sertanejas. (p. 208) [he is unsightly, awkward, and hunched. A Hercules-Quasimodo, he expresses in his posture the typical ugliness of the weak. His shaky, indecisive, swaying, and slightly weaving gait makes him look loose jointed … When he is walking, even if at a brisk pace, he does not move forward in a straight line. He advances in a characteristic reeling, meandering way, as if following the twisted trails of the backlands.] (p. 96) This is an excellent example of the use of the oxymoron, and of the association between weakness and ugliness, part of the rhetoric of social Darwinism. The narrator seems uncomfortable because the sertanejo moves forward sinuously, which would be a sign of weakness, as the passage makes evident the continuities between the land and the way of traversing it.77 Numerous words here point to an unsteady way of moving forward. From the point of view that organizes the text, movement should have clear, firm directionality. At times, even that “enemy land” will move too, complicating the advancement of the troops and

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  225 representing a concrete threat: “O terreno inconsistente e móvel fugia sob os passos aos caminhantes; remorava a tração das carretas absorvendo as rodas até ao meio dos raios; opunha, salteadamente, flexíveis barreiras de espinheirais, que era forçoso destramar a facão; e reduplicava, no reverberar intenso das areias, a adustão da canícula.” (p. 446, emphasis added) [The terrain made walking difficult, as the shifting sand made the men slip, and the wagon trains sank to their axels. Sudden barriers of thornbushes would rise up before them, which they had to hack down with their machetes. All day the sand doubled the intensity of the heat (p. 249)]. The translation interprets Euclides’s description as referring to the characteristics of the terrain, but in fact there is no mention of sand or a slippery surface in the Portuguese version. Literally, the beginning of the passage states that “the inconsistent, shifting terrain fled under the walkers’ footsteps”. All verbs (fugia, remorava, opunha, reduplicava) in the passage refer to the soil as the agent of all actions: it is the land that moves away, and that actively opposes, through various actions, the movement of the troops. Toward the war’s end, the only ones who are able to gain access to the last bastions of the settlement’s resistance are a battalion made up of, precisely, sertanejos (the 10,000-man army was composed of Brazilians from all the regions of the national territory, including other parts of the backlands; the battalions were uniformly composed, each being formed by men coming just from one region).78 The troop’s movement is described in this way, reflecting once more the narrator’s insistence on the importance of straight lines: O batalhão de sertanejos avançou. Não foi a investida militar, cadente, derivando a marche-marche, num ritmo seguro. Viu-se um como serpear rapidíssimo de baionetas ondulantes, desdobradas, de chofre, numa deflagração luminosa, traçando em segundos uma ­listra de lampejos desde o leito do rio até os muros da igreja… O mesmo avançar dos jagunços, célere, estonteador, escapante à trajetória retilínea, num colear indescritível. … Coruscou um ­relâmpago de duzentas baionetas: o 5° desapareceu mergulhando nos escombros… (p. 762) [The advance of the battalion was not a closed formation. Instead it was a long, fast-moving line that suddenly burst into flame, unfurling a gleaming ribbon of steel from the riverbank to the walls of the church. It was a quick, stunning movement, typical of the jagunços [sertanejos], an indescribable serpentine motion … There was the glint of two hundred bayonets. Then the Fifth disappeared from sight into the ruins.] (p. 451)79

226  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões In this beautiful passage, all light and chaos, the narrator’s bewilderment in the face of the swiftness of the attack is a manifestation of the vertigo provoked in him by the sertanejo troops’ incomprehensible movement. Again, the movement is described as lacking a “trajetória retilínea”, the same expression seen above to characterize the sertanejo’s manner of walking. The velocity of the scene, the narration of war as a succession of lightning bolts and as incessant and disordered movement, accounts for the vertiginous impression caused in the narrator. At the end of the description the spatial logic of the sertão’s inhabitants prevails, as the battalion’s invasion is represented as its disappearance into the Canudos rubble, its merging into the resistant enclave. Like the space itself, that logic eludes the gaze and the rationality of the narrator; it demands a new technology of seeing. The obsession with straight lines appears as a personal characteristic that Euclides even acknowledges in himself, attributing it to his perspective as an engineer. 80 His correspondence contains phrases such as “a linha reta em que sempre estive”81 [the straight line I have always ­adopted] and “porei de lado todas as afeições para seguir retilineamente”82 [I will set aside all affections and continue on the right [literally, straight] path ahead]. There is a moral quality attributed to this straight behavior, as a result of which deviation, oscillation, and zigzagging are considered to be a sort of error, a sinful aberrance (Euclides makes a programmatic use of these associations, which exist in language). In the first part of Os sertões, the Vaza-Barris River, on whose shores Canudos was founded, is presented as a winding road that empties into Canudos: it moves forward “torcendo-se em meandros. Presa numa dessas voltas via-se uma depressão maior, circundada de colinas. … E atulhando-a, enchendo-a toda de confusos tetos incontáveis, um acervo enorme de casebres” (p. 99) [twisting and meandering. A larger hollow can be seen caught up in one of these curves, surrounded by hill. … Filling it completely is a crowd of shacks looking like a heap of roofs (p. 25)]. Although the river is sometimes described in Os sertões as just a dry riverbed (as a consequence of the periodic droughts), that is not the case here. The Vaza-Barris was ­actually Canudos’ main source of water. Here Euclides is explicitly describing “os pequenos cursos d’agua, divagando, serpeantes” [small watercourses [that] worm along slowly, scarcely visible, serpentine]. See how the Portuguese verb “serpear”, to wind or meander, is, in the passage transcribed above, used to describe the movement of the sertanejo battalion that, as part of the national army, later attacks Canudos. Here it is as if the river flowed into Canudos, as if the town were the only possible result of its disorganized movement. There is, then, a fascinating description and understanding of movement in Euclides, embodied in the contrasting dialogue between rivers and seas that his prose repeatedly puts forward. 83

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  227 Euclides’s corrective zeal reflects his aversion to sinuousness.84 A few months after the first publication of Os sertões, in a letter to the literary critic Araripe Júnior, one of the first reviewers of the book, Euclides thanks Araripe for his positive review, which transformed him, he says, from a “lettered engineer” into a writer. He refers to Os sertões as a sketch that was thought of as such, in order to be “corrected” more effectively. Here, in order to describe his own writing, he uses images of oscillation and rectitude: “O meu esboço fez-se desenho. No apagado das linhas vacilantes que tracei, e propositalmente eu tracei de leve para facilitar a correção, correram firmes, intorcíveis em rigorismo de traçado geométrico, os contornos reais da agitação sertaneja”85 [My sketch became a drawing. In the blurriness of the wavering lines I traced—and I traced them lightly on purpose to facilitate their correction—the true outlines of the sertanejos’ rebellion flowed steadily, unbending in their strict geometrical lines]. As in his descriptions of the sertanejo, Euclides seems to perceive weakness and strength in his own act of writing, where an initial sinuosity stands in need of “correction”. This description of the act of writing is also strikingly similar to the image of the stereotyped lines left by the moving sea in the sand discussed above, where the narrator significantly uses the expression “a agitação das ondas e das voragens”, employed here to refer to the rebellion. Writing is conceived of here as an extremely complicated and arduous effort, full of errors and erasures, in a word, ab-errant.86 The blurry quality of his writing (one of the meanings of apagado is “extinct”; it also means to have lost intensity—hence “blurry”) leaves an imprint on the resulting work, and its simultaneous presence/absence aptly represents the aberrant movement of the Canudos insurgency itself. As such, the writing of Os sertões comes close to representing, in its very materiality, the almost illegible movement typical of the rebels (this writing is described as “vacilante” [wavering, and also precarious]). In this letter Euclides seems conscious of the oscillating (for him, difficult to follow, as we have seen) character of his own writing, and, more generally, of the difficulties of representing the Canudos rebellion, often referred to as the “agitação sertaneja”. It is this blurriness, he suggests, that allows him, paradoxically, to offer a geometric and straight rendering of the events.87 In the second part of the book, Euclides presents Conselheiro as a nomad: “continuou sem embaraços a sua marcha de desnorteado apóstolo, pervagando nos sertões” (p. 280) [Throughout his wanderings of the backlands, Antônio Conselheiro continued his aimless career as an apostle without any obstacles (p. 144)].88 He errs, always disappearing and reappearing, and always founding something. In contrast with the foundation of nations, which operates at a symbolic level, he is a literal, material founder, since, in his perpetual movement, he is always setting things in place and building something: “Em quase todas deixava um traço de passagem: aquí um cemitério arruinado, de muros reconstruídos;

228  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões além uma igreja renovada, adiante uma capela que se ­erguia, elegante ­sempre” (p. 273) [In almost all of these places he left some reminder of his stay: in one place the ruined walls of a cemetery were rebuilt, in another a church had been repaired, and farther on a chapel had been constructed with a display of fine craftsmanship (p. 139)]. His attitude could be thought of as similar to that held by Moreno on his travels: he strives to leave traces of his own passage, to resignify space. These constructions are accompanied (as also happened, incidentally, in the case of Moreno) by words; these are, though, for the narrator, “ ­ barbaric and frightening” words (“uma oratória bárbara e arrepiadora” [p. 274]) spoken by a preacher who “está fora do nosso tempo” (p. 275) [is a being out of time (p. 140)].89 The material marking of the villages is accompanied by a constant preaching aimed at recruiting followers. There is no real newness in these constructions; or, perhaps more precisely, all that is new is also old, accompanied by discursive elements that, for the narrator, are typical of extinct societies. This movement from village to village culminates (both in Euclides’s account and historically) in 1893, with the founding of Canudos. The journey then comes to a halt, but there is no real immobility because food and other supplies continue to be brought in from the outside (and commerce with the surrounding area grows strong), which requires roads, travel, and movement. The dynamics upon which the community that rebelled against the Brazilian Republic was founded have not been easy for historians and scholars to understand or interpret. Historian Marco Antonio Villa, working with different sources, reconstructs the economy and the mode of life of the Belo Monte community.90 The very notion of community is important for understanding the way the settlement worked, as its economy was based on solidarity, sharing, and bartering. Villa suggests that Canudos had extensive commercial and social relationships with other communities in the sertão and that circulation of goods and peoples was intense. And he adds that the community established “commercial relations that were far from the traditional ones, characterized by exploitation”.91 Edmundo Moniz, a Marxist intellectual who studied the Canudos insurrection, understands the town as a utopian socialist community in which equality and sharing were pivotal; like Villa, he points out that the forms of land ownership predominant in the rebel town opposed the interests of the region’s powerful landowners.92 To simplify the territory through war meant also reinstating capitalist (but, in reality, almost feudal) forms of labor. While the etymology of the word sertão evokes the idea of the desert, in fact the association between the two terms is linked more to an ideological association than to the population statistics at the time: there is no doubt that the region of Canudos was no desert, being densely populated.93 The flow of people to and from Canudos was constant too; Os sertões later shows, when the state armies approach the settlement, how the

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  229 sertanejos continually move around them. According to Euclides, the troops remain oblivious to the ubiquity and perpetual movement of Canudos’ inhabitants—it is imperceptible to them. For Deleuze and Guattari, we should recall, the nomad opposes, through violence, the establishment of the nation-state. In opposition to the nation-state’s effort to suppress movement and pin down identities, the nomad presents movement, incessant flow, and heterogeneousness. Even if Canudos is a community established in one place, the sertanejos’s logic is clearly that of nomadism. Euclides himself describes the backlanders as nomads: Insulado deste modo no país que o não conhece, em luta aberta com o meio, que lhe parece haver estampado na organização e no temperamento a sua rudeza extraordinária, nômade ou mal fixo à terra, o sertanejo não tem, por bem dizer, ainda capacidade para se afeiçoar à situação mais alta. (p. 237–38) [The sertanejo lives in isolation in a country that hardly knows who he is. His existence is defined by constant warfare with the environment, which imprints an extraordinary ruggedness on his physique and his psychology. He is a nomad, with shallow roots in the soil and he does not, in truth, have the organic capacity to attain a higher position in life. (p. 116) For Euclides, the idea of nomadic life is intrinsically opposed to civilized or modern life. For him, as we have seen, the problem is not just that they move but also, above all, the ways in which they do so. The sertanejos’ resistance to the very end, their refusal to flee to save their own lives, indicates a determination to cling to a point in space, a defense of immobility.94 The residents’ obstinate insistence on remaining in Canudos is a key form of resistance.95 In fact, for Deleuze and Guattari, nomadism does not primarily involve movement: We can say of the nomads, following Toynbee’s suggestion: they do not move. They are nomads by dint of not moving, not migrating, of holding a smooth space that they refuse to leave … what distinguishes the two kinds of voyages [smooth and striated] is neither a measurable quantity of movement, nor something that would be only in the mind, but the mode of spatialization, the manner of being in place, of being for space.96 Perhaps this rebellion is, to be more precise, a demand for the freedom to occupy space, to move (or not) in a space that is one’s own. Thus, the sertanejos’ nomadism should not be understood as lacking

230  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões all forms of settlement. Instead, a certain nomadic logic shapes their relationship with space and transforms them into a war machine. As Juan Pablo Dabove notes, “Even though [Canudos] represents the end of wandering for Conselheiro’s followers (and life in a city is the opposite of nomadism), at its core it conserves a nomadic imprint, an air of the warrior’s headquarters.”97 Even though the rebels resist in their town, it is also true that they are constantly leaving it, constructing the sertão as a space of war. Euclides not only calls the men of the sertão nomads, but the nomadism is also (and mainly) seen in the way they move across the territory, and wage war. This different relationship that the sertanejos establish with the land has implications for thinking through the relationship between nomos and polis. Both from Os sertões and from the two historians’ accounts reproduced above, it is possible to infer that Canudos does not have a relationship of dominance over the rural areas such as the one that cities impose on countrysides—decisively through war—during this period. This relationship is, rather, one of belonging, one that erases clear boundaries between the settlement and the environment. As Dabove argues, the Latin American city was to be the denial of the space upon which it was built. … [I]ts relationship to its hinterland is … not one of belonging but one of domination. Canudos does not cancel the land from which it came, but it is an accomplished and faithful product of the land.98 In this book we have been seeing examples of how the different logics of domination over resistant or “backward” hinterlands are envisaged from the city. One of the important contributions of Sarmiento’s Facundo was the identification of cities with civilization and rural areas with barbarism. For Sarmiento, who was read and admired by Euclides, this tension between the two spaces would inevitably end up with the triumph of the city over the country. This operation of pitting one space against the other was a way to articulate a tension already existing in colonial times; this conceptualization acquired explanatory power and became more visible in different ways in the second part of the nineteenth century.99 Ángel Rama explains that “the city of letters was making a determined effort to integrate and dominate entire national territories, to domesticate Nature and subject rural cultures to the modernizing norms of capitaline society” as a “project of domination that, for the first time in a militant way, was carried out by the modernized cities, seeking to integrate the national territory under the norm of the capital city”.100 The conflicts around which the texts analyzed in The Desertmakers are constructed are to a large extent processes of internal conquest carried out by the capitalist elites from the cities. These wars are waged against

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  231 alternative ways of understanding the relationship with the land and with the national space embodied in notions of community founded on a different relationship with the environment, as well as different understandings of belonging and productivity. Canudos, then, like Conselheiro himself, is still the sertão. Hence the loathing of disorder that is apparent in Euclides’s description of the place. For him, Canudos is the anti-city. In it, there is no cleanliness, nor order, nor separation between dwellings. It is—and this is the p ­ roblem—a place that is not subject to the laws of the state, which strive to be all-­ encompassing; above all, the laws of the lettered city seek to be orderly: A urbs monstruosa, de barro, definia bem a civitas sinistra do erro. O povoado novo surgia, dentro de algumas semanas, já feito ruínas. Nascia velho. Visto de longe, desdobrado pelos cômoros, atulhando as canhadas, cobrindo área enorme, truncado nas quebradas, revolto nos pendores—tinha o aspecto perfeito de uma cidade cujo solo houvesse sido sacudido e brutalmente dobrado por um terremoto. Não se distinguiam as ruas. Substituía-as dédalo desesperador de becos estreitíssimos, mal separando o baralhamento caótico dos casebres feitos ao acaso … (pp. 291–92, original emphasis) [The monstrous aggregation of mud huts clearly defined the sinister civitas of wrongdoing. The new town arose in a few weeks, a city of ruins. It was born old. Seen from a distance, spread out over the hills over an enormous area, split by ravines and rugged slopes, it had the appearance of a city that has been shaken and thrown about by an earthquake. Streets could not be distinguished. Instead there was a desperate maze of alleys, barely separating the chaotic jumble of hastily built hovels.] (p. 151) Canudos is—in an almost systematic manner—the opposite of what Rama described as the lettered project of the city: the space reveals not a trace of what that critic called “razón ordenadora” [ordering reason]. Instead of an orderly city where it is easy to establish the spaces of power, Canudos is a city without streets, unplanned: “como se tudo aquilo fosse construído, febrilmente, numa noite, por uma multidão de loucos” (p. 292) [as if they had been feverishly constructed in a night by a crowd of lunatics (p. 151)].101 Disorderly, chaotic, it is perhaps a sort of favela within Brazil. I mention this not by chance, since this connection has some historical grounding. In fact, sociologist Lícia do Prado Valladares has affirmed that the descriptions of Canudos in Os sertões constitute the “myth of origin” of what later would be the favelas.102 The word favela refers

232  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões to a type of plant that Euclides describes in Os sertões as being aggressive and resistant, qualities that also characterize the rebels.103 He also describes the Morro da Favela [Favela Hill], one of the hills from which he looks out at the battlefields; he calls the place thus because the plant grows thickly there. And, in his writing, the hill becomes at times, synecdochically, a favela.104 Significantly, the people who founded the first favelas in Rio de Janeiro, at the very beginning of the twentieth century, had been members of the victorious army returning from the Canudos War. These soldiers decided to occupy one of the city’s hills when the government’s promise of housing upon victory was not kept. Furthermore, the favelas in Rio are typically associated with the morros or hills that characterize the landscape of the city. The first favela, the one created by these soldiers, was located on the Morro da Providência [Providence Hill], but upon being occupied by them, it became known as the Morro da Favela.105 The symbolic power of “infection” is at work in this phenomenon. While Canudos was construed by the media and the elites as a source of infection that threatened to spread across Brazil, it was their desperate and exaggerated reaction to the revolt which ended up prolonging Canudos in the very heart of the new Republic. The favela could be seen, in this sense, as a sort of ghost of Canudos, a ghost that has haunted the dominant Brazilian class ever since. Seen as disordered and dangerous, impenetrable and incomprehensible to the political elite, it remains a place with its own rules and dynamics. Many in the city, which turns its back on it, view it as a site to be wiped out completely; the favela is part of the city and, at the same time, its aberrant and disquieting contrary.106 The passage plays with oxymoronic structures such as “urbs monstruosa” (not rendered literally in English) and “sinister civitas” (similarly, on page 296, “cidade selvagem” [savage city, p. 154]): these Latin words evoke the very etymology of cidade. Like these expressions, Canudos is an oxymoron, an aberrant, chaotic, and incomprehensible monster. Its space cannot be read or codified through maps, as happens in the case of the surrounding lands, where maps are included in the hope of giving a more detailed representation of the region. According to Rama, “the notion that the statutory order must be constituted at the outset to prevent future disorder alludes to the peculiar virtue of signs: to remain unalterable despite the passage of time and, at least hypothetically, to constrain changing reality in a changeless rational framework.”107 Canudos is presented as being impossible to pin down through such processes. Chance, disorder, and spontaneity reign, as the community eludes the stabilizing power of the sign. As a result, Canudos is protean, changeable, resistant to planning and organization. And so it remains the exact opposite of modernity to Euclides, who rarely calls the settlement a city (in the passage above, he uses adjectives that work as ‘neutralizers’ of the

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  233 term’s associations with modernization). Instead, he uses frequently the Portuguese term arraial, which can be translated as a ‘hamlet’ or ‘small village’. Whatever the actual size of the settlement, it looks like the term is not historically apt to describe it (historians have suggested that the population of Canudos ranged from 10,000 to 35,000, over the course of its brief existence), so it is likely that Euclides was trying to diminish the size of the resistant enclave in his writing.108 And, in a few cases (the description above is actually one of perhaps three) Euclides would call it povoado—that is, ‘town’. It should be borne in mind that Canudos was formed through a massive migration to the interior of the sertão, thus creating an alternative population center to the coastal cities, which were by then booming. This new direction of migratory movement represented a deviation from the expected route produced by economic forces. The inhabitants of the sertão moved not toward the metropolitan centers of progress but toward something that the lettered elite considered their total nemesis. As viewed from the coast, this trajectory was not only off-course but heading in the opposite direction—“backward”—away from the “involuntary mobility” discussed by Pratt that has characterized the s­ ocial history of Brazil and most other Latin American countries.109 This was a subversive mobility that resignified migration, its causes, and its functioning. The description of Canudos as a “city of ruins” harks back to the vestiges found in the soil of the sertão while the traveler moved across it, also described as a ruin (seen above).110 The simultaneity between new and old is evident. It is as if the product of the sertanejos’ labor were itself ruin-like, as if the fact that those men lived in the past meant that everything produced by their hands would also have that archaic quality. The newest things in the sertão are also the most decrepit. The narrator therefore fixes the population of the sertão in time as a counterweight to their incessant movement in space. In addition, the description identifies the Canudos residents’ manner of building as being like an earthquake. This simultaneity of construction and destruction recalls the sertão’s very origin. In keeping with the text’s deterministic perspective, these men act the same way as the environment that fashioned them (and both through earthquake-like means): while the sertão is a desert produced by a natural cataclysm, the founding logic of the sertanejos produces ruins. There is, then, an equivalence in the way the desert and ruins are conceptualized in Os sertões, and throughout all of Euclides’s texts. According to Edgar Salvadori de Decca, “[In Euclides’s view,] just as the sertão is the degradation of nature over time, the sertanejo is the historical degradation of the race. Both are already ruins of time.”111 These ruined spaces remain outside the new modernizing order, which explains the narrator’s revulsion. Being outside of time is, for progress, being off the map. These territories

234  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões and constructions are, from their very origin, unmappable. While Euclides’s text, by describing them as space-time hiatuses, contradictorily situates them within the nation’s spatial imagination for the first time, he is simultaneously announcing a new erasure. This erasure will, of course, be carried out through war. But when the narrator realizes the inevitable outcome of the conflict, the massacre of the sertanejos at the hands of the government troops, he is no longer able to distinguish between these two groups of desert makers. This city, then, which is portrayed as unthinkable, over the course of the conflict is also conceived of as almost invisible. In the middle of the fighting, the city operates in a contradictory way. On the one hand, the houses are easily destroyed by modern weaponry; on the other, it is impossible to discern the enemy. The utterly fragile city is also utterly indestructible. This is consistent with the description of Canudos as ruined from its origins. If the city is a ruin, then it is already destroyed. How to destroy a ruin? The following description of the resisting city is eloquent: Canudos … tinha ilusória fragilidade nos muros de taipa que o formavam … Na história sombria das cidades batidas, o humílimo vilarejo ia surgir com um traço de trágica originalidade. Intacto— era fragílimo; feito escombros—formidável. Rendia-se para vencer, aparecendo, de chofre, ante o conquistador surpreendido, inexpugnável e em ruínas. (pp. 468–69) [The town, because of its mud construction, might have seemed fragile, but this was just an illusion. … This poor backlands village stands out as a sobering example of invaded cities. It was just a pile of mud huts. It yielded in order to conquer].112 (p. 262) This is why only soldiers coming from the sertão (sertanejos, themselves ruinous beings) can put up a fight against the town. Ruins are, significantly, another form of indecipherability. Thus, the town is invincible also because it is hard to read, since the enemy fighters are frequently nowhere to be seen. When they are, their appearances are fleeting and swift. Once again, the gaze that seeks to pin in place is made immobile by indecipherable movement.

Looking at War The problems of adapting to what is seen do not end in the city; a rhetoric of bewilderment accompanies the gaze. This trip “inland” is, more evidently than Moreno’s trip to southern Argentina, a movement through lands and men that are alien to the invaders’ understanding

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  235 of the nation. Close to the end of the book, a section titled “Fora da pátria” [translated as “In Another Country”] appears. The backlands are conceived of not even as a frontier here, but as an utter exteriority, as a desert. The notion also implies exclusion from the logic of the modern era (Euclides would famously refer to the Amazon as a “land without history” or as a space existing “at the margins of history”). In this section, the conflict is portrayed as a “discovery” of an unknown land: Convinha-se em que era terrivelmente paradoxal uma pátria que os filhos procuravam armados até os dentes, em som de guerra, despedaçando as suas entranhas a disparos de Krupps, ­desconhecendo-a de todo, nunca a tendo visto, surpreendidos ante a própria forma da terra árida, e revolta, e brutal, esvurmando espinheiros, tumultuando em pedregais, esboroando em montanhas derruídas, escanceladas em grotões, ondeando em tabuleiros secos, estirando-se em planuras nuas, de estepes… O que ia fazer-se era o que haviam feito as tropas anteriores—uma invasão—em território estrangeiro. Tudo aquilo era uma ficção geográfica. (p. 678) [Surely it was a paradoxical country whose own native sons invaded it, armed to the teeth, and gutted it with their Krupp cannons. They committed these acts knowing nothing at all about the land. They had never seen it before. They looked in amazement at the dry earth, its rugged, brutal contours and thorny vegetation. The alien land was strewn with heaps of rock and crumbled hills torn by caverns and ravines, and all around were the parched, barren tablelands and the rolling plains. They were being asked to do what troops before them had done: to invade a foreign territory. It was a geographical fiction.] (p. 400) The Portuguese version’s enumerative and chaotic structure effectively conveys the confusion in the minds of the soldiers entering a foreign land. It also suggests the difficulties for moving forward through a land that presents only obstacles to the troop’s advancement. The images that appear in the first part of the book are now more explicitly linked to the war: the land appears as an already destroyed surface, where conflict is inveterate. This last invasion, and its likely success in wiping out the rebellion, did not imply a better understanding of the enemy. The paradox appears again at the end: the image of a geographical fiction suggests that the war did not solve issues of belonging and nationhood that are, for the narrator, essential. But the sertão and the conflict also defy the narrator’s understanding of the world: he has no instruments with which to observe what

236  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões appears before his eyes. In Euclides’s travel diary from the front, published in newspapers and posthumously collected in book form with the title Canudos. Diário de uma expedição [1939; Canudos: Diary of an expedition], he confesses the inadequacy of his own training: Eu, porém, perdi-me logo, perdi-me desastradamente no meio da multiplicidade das espécies e atravessando, supliciado como Tântalo, o dédalo das veredas estreitas, ignorante deslumbrado – nunca lamentei tanto a ausência de uma educação prática e sólida e nunca reconheci tanto a inutilidade das maravilhas teóricas com as quais nos iludimos nos tempos acadêmicos.113 [I immediately and clumsily became lost amid the multiplicity of species, walking through the labyrinth of narrow paths, tortured as Tantalus, amazed at my ignorance—never had I lamented so acutely my lack of a solid and practical education, nor recognized more powerfully the uselessness of the theoretical marvels with which we are deluded in our academic years.] The sincerity of Euclides’s desire to understand shines through in his diary, which points to his willingness to acquire knowledge, even if this implies the extra effort of altering his conception of the process of nation building. This longing for knowledge is revealed in a sort of voluptuousness related to wonderment, a pleasure that is never satisfied, and the resultant suffering caused by the impossibility of taking in all that is before him. In the image of this self that becomes disoriented in the tangled, unruly vegetation around him, we witness the perception of a chaotic environment through a rhetoric similar to the one he will use later, when describing Canudos in Os sertões. The impossibility of seeing distinctly and the confusion that impossibility brings with it thus identify those two unsettling spaces, as the national lands are described as foreign.114 It is this bewildered look at the national territory that allows Leopoldo M. Bernucci to compare Euclides to foreign travelers: “Invested in his role as ethnographer and soil researcher, the author’s astonished gaze recalls important moments experienced by Léry, Saint-Hilaire, Spix, Martius, and others. What we have is a new discovery by a bold traveler, who ultimately discovers himself.”115 Os sertões inhabits the moment in which that foreignness is confirmed, both in terms of the inherently national that becomes alien, becomes other, and in terms of the self: the emergence of a certain internal foreignness within the most intimate space of the self. In this sense, too, Euclides’s travels and his subsequent writing offer an alteration of the self’s relationship with the state. Despite having been published five years after the conflict, Os sertões retains this transitive, metamorphic sense, as it shows the difficulties of making use of the interpretative instruments for understanding Canudos provided by state

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  237 institutions. Therein lies one of the text’s greatest complexities: having been conceived of as the account of a journey, it narratively preserves the learning that is the text’s true starting point but that emerges gradually, being represented in its final pages as a tragic discovery. Though the narrator’s voice largely adopts a learned and modernizing perspective, throughout the text that perspective is subjected to a constant self-critique that ultimately cuts through the homogeneity of the official discourse, which the author had originally identified as his own. The narrator’s voice therefore eventually achieves a new critical position. In this sense, Os sertões narrates an increasing shift away from the state’s legibilizing and simplifying discourse toward one of greater ambivalence and complexity. The convoluted and chaotic prose of Euclides, full of hyperbatons, is the material objectivization of this intellectual effort at interpreting (or seeing) and representing that is at the center of Os sertões.116 Herein lies a key difference between the narrator of Os sertões and the state whose destructive logic he seems set on reproducing. Whereas for the state war is the element that visibilizes the opaque space of the sertão, the crucial instrument for simplifying territory and population and making them legible,117 that same war leads the narrator to look at himself with bewilderment, losing all sense of orientation and ceasing to recognize himself in the state.118 This bewilderment leads Euclides to reconsider his relationship with the state, which can also be thought of as a starting place for travel. In this sense, to return becomes impossible in Os sertões because the starting point will no longer be the arrival point; one cannot return to the same origin, which has shifted, undergone an estrangement process that has made it alien.119 Returning will intensify that sense of distance from a “home” that has ceased to be such. Before his trip to Canudos, as we have seen, Euclides da Cunha was a strong supporter of the new republican system and saw the rebellion as a threat to it, one carried out by ignorant peasants opposing progress. In two articles published in O Estado de São Paulo on 14 March and 17 July 1897, both titled “A nossa Vendéia” [Our Vendée], he compares the Canudos rebellion to the 1793 War in the Vendée, in which peasants resisted the French Revolution. In the first of these articles he paints the Canudos rebellion as being akin to the monarchist forces that longed for restoration: “Como na Vendéia o fanatismo religioso que domina as suas almas ingénuas e simples é habilmente aproveitado pelos propagandistas do Império” [As in the War in the Vendée, the propagandists of Empire take advantage of the religious fanaticism that governs their [the sertanejos’] naïve and simple souls].120 There is no disappointment in these articles, whose author shows an unbridled optimism with regard to the end of the conflict: he is certain that the Republic, which he unwaveringly supports, will triumph. This enthusiasm disappears entirely once the conflict ends and the writer comes back. The first known text he wrote upon his return, a

238  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões poem dated 14 October 1897, is precisely about coming back from war. Euclides makes explicit the shock of having seen war, and the extent to which this experience affects his own writing.121 In a letter to his friend Francisco Escobar from December 1901, in which he says he has finished Os sertões, Euclides explicitly shows his distance from the triumphalism of the Republic: “vencidos somos todos nós. Neste país não há mais vitórias… Derrotas e esborrachamento em toda a linha … Porque afinal, és como eu, um dissidente … e nenhum de nós se pode escravizar a uma bandeira” [we have all been defeated. There are no more victories in this country… Crushing defeats everywhere … Because in the end, you are, like me, a dissident … and nobody can turn us into the slaves of any flag].122 The writer here portrays the Brazilian political situation as a widespread failure, reasserting his intellectual independence from any political project. Immediately after coming back from war, then, Euclides depicts writing as a painful task, devoid of all beauty; with Os sertões completed, he has become a true dissenter. In the “Preliminary Note” of his book, he calls the victory he had so longed for a crime, one that his book will vehemently denounce (p. 67). Euclides’s incorporation into intellectual society at the time was always a source of conflict in his relationship with that elite; always dissatisfied, always feeling misunderstood, he finally achieved his greatest successes and recognition only shortly before his premature death.123 This rhetoric of bewilderment becomes most tangible in the invisibility that protects the rebels and the space they defend. The enemy’s invisibility (“não se via o inimigo” [p. 537]) [The enemy was nowhere to be seen (p. 306)])124 is especially evident in the descriptions of scenes of war, and is perceived by the government army as evidence of its own vulnerability. There are 22 explicit mentions of invisibility in the book, most of them appearing in the third part. If seeing is a way of understanding and dominating, and even destroying (three operations that complement one another in war, though fissures among them become apparent over the course of Euclides’s text), the impossibility of seeing suggests that power cannot be wielded over unfamiliar territory. Thus, invisibility becomes the sertanejo army’s greatest weapon. In this sense, they resist because they do not fight conventionally, because they do not confront, properly speaking (there is no face-to-face combat). This new way of waging war is a significant source of unease for the national army. Invisibility is not, however, merely a guerrilla tactic; in Euclides’s writing the notion relates to different ways of understanding movement and the relationships between the subjects and the space they inhabit. References to invisibility are also an aspect of the book’s reflections on the technologies of seeing: on the one hand, following classical symbolism, seeing is related to understanding, to the acquisition of knowledge; on the other hand, these references are strategies for representing war.125 The men of the sertão participate in the war in order to avoid the actual

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  239 clashes.126 In the middle of the battle, Canudos’s inhabitants are described as invisible: Quinze ou vinte mil almas—encafurnadas naquela tapera babilônica… E invisíveis. De longe em longe, um vulto, rápido, cortava uma viela estreita, correndo, ou apontava, por um segundo, indistinto e fugitivo, à entrada da grande praça vazia, desaparecendo logo. Nada mais. Em torno o debuxo misterioso de uma paisagem bíblica: a infinita tristura das colinas desnudas, ermas, sem árvores. Um rio sem águas, tornejando-as, feito uma estrada poenta e longa. Mais longe, avassalando os quadrantes, a corda ondulante das serras igualmente desertas, rebatidas, nitidamente, na imprimadura do horizonte claro, feito o quadro desmedido daquele cenário estranho. (p. 592) [There were about fifteen thousand to twenty thousand people dug into the Babylonian weed patch. They were all invisible. Occasionally they [the state army’s soldiers] were able to see a narrow alley branching off from the huge empty square, but then they lost sight of it. All this in a biblical landscape, set against sadly barren hills, where there were no trees. A dry riverbed, winding around the town, was turned into a long, dusty highway. In the distance, commanding the four points of the compass, was a rolling line of mountains, also deserted. They stood out sharply against the bright horizon, like the giant frame of a huge picture.] (p. 342) Strangeness and mystery predominate. An infinite desert that stretches out around a cluster of people, protecting them and identified with them, a series of undulations that are the landscape’s most distinctive (and perhaps its only) feature, rejecting any hint of straight lines. There are no men or streets, only “vultos” [shadows] and “vielas” [alleys]. Above all, though, this is a ghostly realm in which, though there is life, no sign of it is visible to the describing eye; it remains “intangível” [intangible].127 The enemy’s movement, rooted in his knowledge of the territory, always seems deceptive. The passage also offers a good example of a scene of combat in Os sertões, where the clashes are in general absent from narration. From the perspective of the invading army, war is immobility, silence, and waiting. The inhabitants of Canudos never seek shelter in absolute stillness, though; they know the distances, the velocities, the nooks and crannies of the territory they are fighting to defend. It seems that despite the national army’s destructive drive, the military is unable to cause as much damage as it would like (see the example of the already destroyed ruin above), resulting in a space that hovers midway between life and death.

240  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões That spectral quality is inherent in nature, people, and combat. An army unit takes fire from one spot, but when soldiers go out looking for the shooter, they cannot see him. The fruitless search and the repeated gunfire continue until, when the latter finally ceases, the patrol decides to give up the search: Volvem exaustos. Vibram os clarins. A tropa renova a marcha com algumas praças de menos. E quando as últimas armas desaparecem, ao longe, na última ondulação do solo, desenterra-se de montões de blocos―feita uma cariátide sinistra em ruínas ciclópicas―um rosto bronzeado e duro; depois um torso de atleta, encourado e rude; e transpondo velozmente as ladeiras vivas desaparece, em momentos, o trágico caçador de brigadas. (p. 361) [They return exhausted. The bugles sound. The troops continue their march, their numbers diminished. And when the last are out of sight, beyond the next hill, a figure rises up from the stone mounds—a sinister caryatid from cyclopean ruins—a hard, sunburned face, then the body of an athlete, covered in rude leather. He swiftly traverses the steep sides of the ravine and then disappears. The terrible tracker of soldiers is gone in seconds.] (p. 202) In this passage, the jagunço’s body remains beneath the soil, associated with it, as a continuation of it, and specifically of its undulation.128 This is yet another scene of an emergence, in which the body literally rises, as a ruin, from the soil. The identification between the land and the sertanejos is strongly suggested here. This is highlighted by the fact that, furthermore, the hills are alive (this meaning has not been preserved in the translation). The backlander’s velocity is paralleled by the moving territory. But perhaps the most important element of the account is that not only does a body emerge from the land, but that this is a body that comes from the past. The expression “sinister caryatid” is akin to the phrases used to describe Canudos (“urbs monstruosa”, for example); the adjective acquires more significance if read in contrast to the description of the body that comes immediately afterward, and which highlights its mobility and unpolished character. The expression “cyclopean ruins” might equally refer to the land—the sertão—from which the figure is emerging. The emergence is narrated progressively: the man himself is described as such only at the very end of the quotation, as he finally, once unearthed, moves away. A poetic passage in Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain describes the identification between the soldier and the land, to the point that there is no way of distinguishing between them. The passage, while discussing camouflage, evokes images similar to those

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  241 found in the scene quoted above, helping us understand the profoundly material character of the sertanejo’s belonging in the land: “he is the elms and the mud. … He is dark blue like the sea. He is light grey like the air through which he flies. He is sodden in the green shadows of earth.”129 This continuity is temporal as well as spatial. The ruin with which this man is metonymically related offers a way of introducing time into that ghostly space, which alludes to death without naming it. Though the sertanejo survives because of and in nature, that “natural” state prevents him from being integrated into the space of the nation, from being legible to the civilized eye.130 One of the most famous sentences in Os sertões (with biblical undertones), quoted also above, notes that the men who live there are “a rocha viva de nossa raça” (p. 766) [the very bedrock of our race (p. 454)] (the translation does not preserve this idea of living rock). It is the definitive discovery of the origin—but the origin as ruin (to the extent that a “living rock” conveys a simultaneity between life and death, as well as the image of the abandoned building on which vegetation grows). This sentence also stands in dialogue with that image, seen above, of the vegetation that is reborn in stone, and yet further introduces an impossibility that is encoded in the very idea of ruins: Os sertões points to the need to integrate the sertanejos into the national project even as it narrates their annihilation. The text inhabits that contradiction; this paradoxical quality gives rise to the text’s representational richness and facilitates its continual generation of incomprehensible and impossible images. Invisibility and ruins combine, then, to form an eloquent image: what is hidden emerges and appears to the gaze, making itself present. The dialectic between the invisible and what appears to view is a central pillar of the text. In the context of the discussion in this chapter, Os sertões is the narration of a crisis of meaning that leads to a radical visibilization, an encounter. Not unlike Walter Benjamin’s metaphor in “Excavation and Memory” that posits the search into one’s own past as a sort of excavation, Os sertões contains numerous images related to archeological activities and the discovery of buried objects. For Benjamin, “genuine memory must … yield an image of the person who remembers, in the same way a good archaeological report not only informs us about the strata from which its findings originate, but also gives and account of the strata which first had to be broken through”.131 This metaphor of excavation allows us to read the images of ruins alongside this theme of unearthing, the obsession with shedding light on what has been hidden, as it connects remains to the exercise of memory, to permanence. A petrified body, camouflaged by the earth, becomes—like the earth itself—a ruin. The best example of this is Antônio Conselheiro himself. In the pages of “The Man” dedicated to the founder of Canudos, images of ruination and death constantly reappear. Like the new church he builds in Canudos, the leader of the uprising is described in his youth as

242  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões being already an old man: “Ao abeirar-se das rancharias dos tropeiros aquele velho singular, de pouco mais de trinta anos, fazia que cessassem os improvisos e as violas festivas” (p. 267) [When this unusual man of about thirty years appeared at the ranches of the pack drivers, all festivities ceased (p. 135)].132 But, at the same time, he is represented as a corpse that travels through the sertão. The comparison with mummies is explicit (p. 269) [p. 136], and the character’s manner of walking carries ghostly connotations: “tornou-se logo alguma coisa de fantástico ou mal-assombrado” (p. 267, emphasis in original) [people thought of him as an apparition or a ghost (p. 135)]. On a few pages, the Conselheiro appears as an old man in spite of his youth, as a moving corpse, as a mummy, and as a ghost, all images that, like that of the ruin, have powerful temporal connotations, combining the old and the new, and sometimes life and death. The surface, that hard skin, the product of self-inflicted deprivations, conceals the absence of life: O asceta despontava, inteiriço, da rudeza disciplinar de quinze anos de penitência. … Não tinha dores desconhecidas. A epiderme seca rugava-se-lhe como uma couraça amolgada e rota sobre a carne morta. Anestesiara-a com a própria dor; macerara-a e sarjara-a de cilícios mais duros que os buréis de esparto; trouxera-a, de rojo, pelas pedras dos caminhos; esturrara-a nos rescaldos das secas; ­inteiriçara-a nos relentos frios; adormecera-a, em transitórios repousos, nos leitos dilacerantes das caatingas … (p. 271, emphasis added) [His ascetic tendencies arose in full force out of the crude discipline he had practiced for fifteen years, … His dried-out skin was a broken and withered shell over his lifeless flesh. Pain itself had become his drug. He bruised and injured his flesh with hair shirts more abrasive than any nettle. He dragged himself over stones, scorched himself in the embers of the drought, exposed himself to the rigors of the night air, and in his transitory moments of rest he slept on a punishing bed of brushwood.] (pp. 137–38) The chaotic enumeration of the Portuguese version gives a powerful impression of the accumulation of self-inflicted suffering. Each sentence begins with a verb whose direct object is the skin (“a epiderme”). It is Conselheiro’s traveling—or, rather, his erring—through northeastern Brazil, his ongoing contact with the parched soil—that other ruin—that makes his body deteriorate. It is as if, during those travels through the sertão, the territory somehow penetrated his skin and infiltrated his flesh. The first verb is eloquent: it refers to the emergence of an object’s tip, the gradual rising of a sort of iceberg that contains the resistive and suffering figure of the ascetic. Conselheiro is a destroyed object that arises out of a

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  243 fantastical space: “Ele surdia―esquálido e macerado―dentro do hábito escorrido, sem relevos, mudo, como uma sombra, das chapadas povoadas de duendes” (p. 267) [His squalid and emaciated figure, in a tattered robe, would emerge silently from the barren, haunted landscape, making the people think he was a ghost (p. 135)]. But that roving ruined body is itself the origin of the social phenomenon that produced Canudos. Thus, this journey through the desert gives rise to the very impulse that will found the city described above. That which is hidden in the body and has its origin in the territory is made manifest in a city described as a ruin. What is new is also old, even after the war. The image of what is half destroyed becomes blood-curdling in the description of a little girl being carried by a wizened old woman: Tinha nos braços finos uma menina, neta, bisneta, tataraneta talvez. E essa criança horrorizava. A sua face esquerda fora arrancada, havia tempos, por um estilhaço de granada; de sorte que os ossos dos maxilares se destacavam alvíssimos, entre os bordos vermelhos da ferida já cicatrizada… A face direita sorria. E era apavorante aquele riso incompleto e dolorosíssimo aformoseando uma face e extinguindo-se repentinamente na outra, no vácuo de um gilvaz. Aquela velha carregava a criação mais monstruosa da campanha. (p. 775, emphasis added) [She carried a small child in her thin arms, her granddaughter, great-granddaughter, or possibly her great-great-granddaughter. The child was in horrifying condition. The left side of its face had been torn away some time ago and the jawbone stood out from the wound. The right side of her face was lit up by a lovely smile, which obliterated the terrible gash on the other side. This was the most ghastly sight of the entire campaign.] (p. 461) The little girl, who in theory would represent youth next to her ageless grandmother, is in fact just like her: a decrepit novelty, another precocious ruin. She represents, as Ettore Finazzi-Agrò notes, “on the one hand, a deformed and unfinished future, and, on the other, a past that does not pass”.133 Again, incompleteness and what has been discarded coincide, as do the impossibility of the future—perhaps the nation’s ­future—and the persistence of the past. At bottom, that face is also a scar that continues to say, that hinders forgetting.134 The ruin, that realm of the unsayable, is also a macabre and contorted smile. The subaltern, it is true, does not speak in Os sertões—but she smiles. In Os sertões, then, everything seems to be already destroyed, in ruins: the space (the sertão, Canudos itself, the land), the men (the bodies of the sertanejos, Antônio Conselheiro himself), the conflict (the prisoners, the soldiers, even the manner of waging war). Ruins are, together

244  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões with various images of remains and of past destructions, an embodiment of the impossibility of expression provoked by war—or, rather, they are the unthinkable embodiment of the struggle for representation that is at the core of Os sertões. These images are sites of contradiction par excellence, where past and present, death and life, destruction and resistance coexist. They are forms of impossibility, loci of all that exceeds the grasp of rationality and logic.135

Dead Lakes: Precariousness and Contemporary Silences As we have seen in previous examples, Os sertões symbolically introduces the ruin into a landscape to which it was foreign; the space is turned into a ruin, “ruined” by the discourse, read as a ruin. For this reason, the ruin can be read as a trace left by war, even in places the war has not reached. It is as if the environment, the land, nature, were being described from the perspective of the conflict, as if the conflict had acquired cosmic dimensions. The war, in the first two sections of Euclides’s book, is always simultaneously before and after what is being narrated. Thus, in Os sertões there is a notable play of tensions: through the construction of a rhetoric of travel, the theater of war is approached gradually, appearing to be at once postponed and anticipated. In the same way, the ruin finds itself in an intermediate or dual place, being a sign of both a before and an after. This ambivalence between presence and absence is a central element in the representation of Canudos.136 There, the vengeful spirit that animated the conflict sought utter devastation, wanting to leave nothing behind, not even ruins. If ruins are also a type of permanence, a type of memory, their existence would indicate a partial, incomplete victory. Any trace might seem to threaten an attempt to create a supposedly homogeneous space, one form of which Lefebvre calls “abstract space”: “As a product of violence and war, it is political; instituted by the state, it is institutional. On first inspection it appears homogeneous; and indeed it serves those forces which make it a tabula rasa of whatever stands in their way, of whatever threatens them—in short, of differences.”137 Canudos was burned with the aim of making it definitively invisible, of making it vanish from the surface of the earth and from memory, like a disease, like a cursed or polluted place. The continuities between what remains and what vanishes are illuminating if we read Euclides’s text from the perspective of the present day. In the description of the landscape that appears in the first section, the narrator mentions certain “lagoas mortas” (p. 85) [dead lakes, p. 16] that he encounters in his travels. He describes them in this way: Algumas denotam um esforço dos filhos do sertão. Encontram-se, orlando-as, erguidos como represas entre as encostas, toscos

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  245 muramentos de pedra seca. Lembram monumentos de uma sociedade obscura. Patrimônio comum dos que por ali se agitam nas aperturas do clima feroz, vêm, em geral, de remoto passado. ­Delinearam-nos os que se afoitaram primeiro com as vicissitudes de uma entrada naquelas bandas. E persistem indestrutíveis, porque o sertanejo, por mais escoteiro que siga, jamais deixa de levar uma pedra que calce as suas junturas vacilantes. (pp. 85–86) [Some places have evidence of the efforts of sons of the backlands. Crude walls of dry stone can be found skirting them and standing there like dikes among the hillsides. They bring to mind the monuments of lost peoples. They are the common heritage of those who opened up that fierce region. Their origins have generally been left in the remote past. For those of us who have ventured into these parts they are a mark of those who made an entry with all the difficulties it entailed. There they stand, indestructible, because the sertanejo, the backlander, no matter how unburdened he might be traveling, always carries a stone to help shore up that precarious structure.] (p. 16) And, almost immediately, he asserts that these places are “imperfeita cópia das barrragens romanas remanescentes na Tunísia” (p. 86) [an imperfect copy of those stockades the Romans left behind in Tunisia (p. 16)]. This and many passages from Os sertões analyzed here (and, critically, also most of Euclides’s writings on the Amazon) can be read as essays on infrastructure, specifically on the politics and aesthetics of landscape and water management. This rhetoric is strongly informed by Euclides’s work as an engineer, naturally. In this case, the dead lakes are created by the inhabitants of the sertão through dams made of stone walls. The narrator previously notes that those places serve as an oasis in travels through the sertão, concluding that they are not dry. Nevertheless, the tone of the narrative immediately transforms them. The bushes on their shores become “espectros de árvores” (p. 85) [ghost trees (p. 16)]. This rhetoric of ghostliness runs through the whole book—­ including even the description of the women who have survived. The “monuments” that form the dam’s base are precarious structures that suggest ancientness and endurance. But even as that rhetoric turns the stones that the traveler encounters into ruins, it also introduces the idea of deterioration. The gaze ages those stones, making them ancient, fixed, permanent, and at the same time it describes them as constantly being restored, since the sertanejo, nomadic and on the move, always carries a stone with him. The monument is a sign of movement, of renewal; it is a manifestation of the presence of the men of the sertão, in their perpetual and ­ever-changing migration. This description is equivalent to that of

246  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões Antônio Conselheiro, who is represented as a true nomad who is also paradoxically a founder. But the stone walls that form these lakes lack any dynamism: they are deteriorating (infra)structures. Through a rhetorical operation, the adjective applied to the lakes is displaced, corresponding instead to what surrounds them, to what is beside them. As in the case of Canudos, it seems that the sertanejo has built only ruins and left behind traces of death. It is in this sense that war is present in Euclides’s writing. The “lagoas mortas” are also an unsettling phenomenon in the present day. A town called “Canudos” does exist today, but it is another town; Canudos was relocated. The town that had such a key role in the war no longer exists—it lies at the bottom of an artificial lake. In 1968, during the military dictatorship, the Cocorobó dam was built to combat drought, and the impounded water flooded the settlement. Today the place is a tourist destination for those looking for a day at the beach. A web page named Visite a Bahia, which promotes tourism in the state, informs us that the lake “is also used by the community for fishing, boat excursions, and swimming, and its waters still conceal the mythical village of Canudos and its history”.138 The macabre description, profoundly trivializing, invites us to swim in a tomb, in what now truly is a dead lake. In cheerfully mentioning that what has been submerged is not only the town of Canudos but also its history, the quotation grotesquely reveals the vastness of the state’s imposition of silence and erasure regarding this place. The image is practically the inverse of the one in which the traveler crosses an entombed sea. The sea here is not read as the ruin of a buried cemetery. Now, water covers the surface; the ruins are no longer fossils but are instead symbolic. Conselheiro’s prophecy has come true in a tragically ironic way: the sertão has become a sea. Yet even today, in the brutal summers of Bahia, when the drought is at its harshest, the ruins of the old church in Canudos emerge from the waters and stand visible to all, like a stubborn reminder of the massacre.

Notes 1 The Authorised Version of the English Bible. 1611, ed. William Aldis Wright, Vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), p. 106. I have slightly modified (modernized) the English in this and the following quotation. 2 The Authorised Version of the English Bible, p. 129. The Portuguese version of this psalm (at least the one on the prayer card I was given), would be translated as “never let me suffer/ the shame of defeat” [nunca deixes que eu sofra / a vergonha da derrota]. The necessity of avoiding defeat (and the imperative for resistance), evokes the war whose sites I was approaching more aptly than this English version. 3 The resistance to taxation, which might seem like an incidental detail, is, in Os sertões, the beginning of the end: “Decretada a autonomia dos municípios, as Câmaras das localidades do interior da Bahia tinham afixado nas tábuas tradicionais, que subsistem na imprensa, editais para a cobrança de impostos etc. Ao surgir esta novidade Antônio Conselheiro estava em

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  247 Bom Conselho. Irritou-o a imposição; e planeou revide imediato. Reuniu o povo num dia de feira e, entre gritos sediciosos e estrepitar de foguetes, mandou queimar as tábuas numa fogueira, no largo. Levantou a voz sobre o ‘auto-de-fé,’ que a fraqueza das autoridades não impedira, e pregou abertamente a insurreição contra as leis” (Euclides da Cunha, Os sertões [Campanha de Canudos], ed. Leopoldo M. Bernucci [São Paulo: Ateliê Editorial, 2001], p. 286. Further references included parenthetically in the text) [When the autonomy of the municipalities was decreed, local chambers in the interior of Bahia posted on the traditional bulletin boards, which were a substitute for the press, regulations regarding the collection of taxes … Antônio Conselheiro was in Bom Conselho when these new procedures were instituted. He was irritated by these new intrusions of the government and he planned a quick retaliation. He gathered the people on a market day and, amidst seditious shouts and the popping of firecrackers, he ordered the bulletin boards to be burned in a bonfire in the square. Raising his voice over this “auto-da-fé” that the authorities had neglected to prevent, he began to preach open insurrection against national laws (Euclides da Cunha, Backlands. The Canudos Campaign, trans. Elizabeth Lowe [New York: Penguin Books, 2010], p. 148. Further references given parenthetically in the text). A small group of soldiers, sent from Salvador to quell the uprising, was quickly defeated. Though this event took place in 1893, four years before the war, it was Conselheiro’s first defiance of the authorities’ efforts to construct the republican state. His rebellion was seen as a serious threat because it entailed a rejection of the levying of taxes, a crucial element in the modern conception of the state. 4 Roberto Ventura, “Canudos como cidade iletrada: Euclides da Cunha na urbs monstruosa”, in Benjamin Abdala Junior and Isabel M. M. Alexandre, eds., Canudos. Palavra de Deus, sonho da terra (São Paulo: Boitempo, 1997), pp. 89–99 (at p. 94). See also Bernucci, note 285, in Os sertões, p. 326. The state employed all of these strategies to emphasize its own presence by controlling and measuring bodies and movements within the national territory. 5 Robert Levine claims that the dead numbered some 15,000 (Robert M. Levine, Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1893–1897 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992], p. 185). 6 Levine, Vale of Tears, p. 184. In his examination of the relationship between images and text in Os sertões, Roberto Vecchi, working in the context of biopolitics and subaltern studies, refers to the desert-making operation imposed on Canudos (Roberto Vecchi, “Intermittenti presenze: la traccia, l’immagine, il subalterno”, in Silvia Albertazzi and Fernando Amigoni, eds., Guardare oltre: letteratura, fotografia e altri territori [Roma: Meltemi, 2008], pp. 195–213 [at p. 210]). Regarding the relationship between photography and text in Os sertões, see the section titled “The Optical Unconscious”, in Jens Andermann, The Optic of the State, pp. 195–202. In an insightful essay, Natalia Brizuela connects the presence of photography in Os sertões with the imaginary of ruins that is at the center of Euclides’s aesthetics and approach to the space of the backlands: “The temporality of photographs is always the ‘folded time’ of the ruin, or the image of history as ruins, but also because it may be the perfect image of immobility” (Natalia Brizuela, Fotografia e Império. Paisagens para um Brasil moderno [São Paulo: Companhia das Letras/Instituto Moreira Salles, 2012], p. 177). 7 Os sertões is without a doubt a central book in Brazilian literature. In a 1994 survey of Brazilian intellectuals published in the magazine Veja, it was named the most influential book in the country’s culture (Roberto Ventura, Os sertões [São Paulo: Publifolha, 2002], p. 11). See also Berthold

248  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões Zilly, “Sertão e nacionalidade: formação étnica e civilizatória no Brasil segundo Euclides da Cunha”, Estudos Sociedade e Agricultura 12 (1999): 5–45 (at p. 37). Going back to one of my preoccupations in this book, it is interesting to ask why a book about a war that involved the massacre of thousands of people is considered the most influential book in Brazilian literary history. What does this say about Brazil’s national imagination? This is not consistent with the extensive belief in the idea of Brazil as a peaceful country. 8 This enormous complexity has provoked an extensive and, in my view, largely fruitless debate over how to define the work’s discourse and genre. I understand that such discussions arise out of the relationships between literature and history (or the slippery concept of “reality”), issues about which Os sertões allows deep reflection and which are at the center of the author’s concerns. But I wonder whether the push to definitively assign the work to a genre (as carried out with impressive theoretical rigor by Luiz Costa Lima in Terra ignota) has methodological consequences for its study. The approach to the work as a literary text (which has been, after all, the most common way to approach it) should not be affected—even if it should be complicated—by the claim that literature is merely an aesthetic instrument, an “element that beautifies, or highlights scientifically arranged truths”, as Costa Lima puts it (Luiz Costa Lima, Terra ignota. A construção de Os sertões [Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1997], p. 264). I am interested in marking a theoretical distance between the attempt to establish an intrinsic genre category for a text and the possibility of approaching a text as literary. It is this latter approach that I choose here, being dubious of the methodological usefulness of classifications that disregard the consequences of Euclides’s discursive complexity for thinking about the relationships between history, science, literature, and society “outside” the text. On this topic, see Bernucci’s original concept of the “impasse euclidiano” [Euclidean impasse] (Leopoldo M. Bernucci, A imitação dos sentidos. Prógonos, contemporâneos e epígonos de Euclides da Cunha [São Paulo: Edusp, 1995], pp. 19–24). 9 Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 23. Charles Tilly, too, points to the role of taxation in the process of defining the European state, alongside war and the imposition of the logic of capitalism: “War making, extraction, and capital accumulation interacted to shape European state making” (Tilly, “War Making”, p. 38). This combination is applicable at least in part to the process of consolidating the Argentine, Brazilian, and Uruguayan states in the nineteenth century. Oszlak has done in-depth work examining the changes in the Argentine tributary system in the latter half of the nineteenth century. See in particular chapter 4 of La formación del Estado argentino. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a detailed analysis of the relationship between the state’s extractive capacity and war in Latin America, but it is interesting to wonder which of these two elements is the cause of the other. Arguments can be made for both possibilities: although the new taxes were the cause of the war in Canudos, it is undeniable that taxation is a central component of the state’s territorial appropriation that might follow a conflict (as happened in many of the cases studied here). We might read an individual’s ability to be taxed as a sort of state interpellation, in the Althusserian sense. I thank Juan Ariel Bogliaccini for his encouraging and illuminating comments on the pertinence of my reading of Tilly in this context. 10 Mara Loveman, “Blinded Like a State: The Revolt against Civil Registration in Nineteenth-Century Brazil”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 1 (2007): 5–39 (at p. 9).

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  249 11 Zilly, “Sertão e nacionalidade”, p. 15. I am using the word “cacique” here to indicate a powerful landowner, not a leader of an indigenous community (this was the meaning of the word in the previous chapter). 12 In this sense it is not unlike Argentina’s Conquest of the Desert (see ­Chapter 3 of this work), another act of expansion and appropriation at the cost of erasing other subjectivities that presented obstacles to the national homogenizing discourse and especially to the state’s monopolistic control of spaces and movements. I hope that the reading of this chapter helps reveal the similarities between the modernization processes in the two countries. 13 References to ruins are pervasive in Euclides’s poetry and his writings on Amazonia. Ruins are also present in many of his essays and articles published in newspapers, arguably most clearly in “Entre as ruínas” [Among the ruins], included in his 1907 book Contrastes e confrontos, immediately following “Fazedores de desertos”, the essay that inspired this book’s title (Euclides da Cunha, “Entre as ruínas”, in Contrastes e confrontos, pp. 192–97). Some scholarly works that discuss, at least partially, Euclides’s representation of ruins, are Edgar Salvadori de Decca, “Literatura em ruínas ou as ruínas da literatura?”, in Stella Bresciani and Márcia Naxara, eds., Memória e (res)sentimento. Indagações sobre uma questão sensível (Campinas: Editora Unicamp, 2004), pp. 149–73; Francisco Foot Hardman, “Brutalidade antiga: sobre história e ruína em Euclides”, in A vingança da Hileia, pp. 113–29; Luiz Costa Lima, “Euclides: ruínas e identidade nacional”, in Rinaldo de Fernandes and Trípoli Francisco Britto Gaudenzi, eds., O clarim e a oração. Cem anos de Os sertões (São Paulo: Geração, 2002), pp. 349–65; Juan Antonio Hernández, “Los residuos salvajes: multitud y máquina de guerra en Los sertones de Euclides da Cunha”, Revista Iberoamericana LXX, no. 207 (2004): 443–53; Carlos Eduardo Schmidt Capela, “Euclides ­ uiza Andrade, Rodrigo Lopes de Barros, e a escritura em ruínas”, in Ana L and Carlos Schmidt Capela, eds., Ruinologias. Ensaios sobre destroços do presente (Florianópolis: Editora UFSC, 2016), pp. 289–336. 14 Brazil was ruled by two emperors, Pedro I (1822–31) and Pedro II (1831– 88). The latter was pivotal in Brazil’s political history. On Emperor Pedro II, see, among several works, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, As barbas do imperador: D. Pedro II, um monarca nos trópicos (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012). A classic book about the history of the Brazilian Empire is Viotti da Costa, Da monarquia à república. On the fall of the empire and the characteristics of the economy, society, and politics during the República Velha, see Raymundo Faoro’s influential Os donos do poder. Formação do patronato político brasileiro. 2 [1959] (Porto Alegre: Globo; São Paulo, Edições da Universidade de São Paulo, 1975). 15 “After the war with Paraguay, Brazil placed its hopes for the future in a homogeneous image, with a single language, unified by a symbology that, from the palace, Emperor Pedro II strove to provide” (Lourival Holanda, “Os sertões: o nascimento de uma nação”, in Leopoldo M. Bernucci, ed., Discurso, ciência e controvérsia em Euclides da Cunha [São Paulo: Edusp, 2008], pp. 125–40 [at p. 132]). On the importance of the Paraguayan War in the history of the Brazilian army in the nineteenth century, see Peres Costa’s A espada de Dâmocles. On the consequences of the war among the Brazilian soldiers who fought it, see Rodrigo Goyena Soares, “Gênese dos veteranos da Guerra do Paraguai”, in Rodrigues and Gomes Pedrosa, eds., Uma tragédia americana, pp. 126–64. On the importance of the Paraguayan War in the context of this book, see the introduction and first chapter. 16 The First Republic, or “the Old Republic” [República Velha], also ended with another military coup in 1930: the one known as the Brazilian Revolution, which installed Getúlio Vargas as dictator. An in-depth analysis of

250  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões the role of the army during the Old Republic can be found in José Murilo de Carvalho, “As forças armadas na Primeira República: o poder desestabilizador”, in Boris Fausto, ed., História geral da civilização brasileira. Tomo III, pp. 181–234. 17 Carvalho, “As forças armadas na Primeira República”, p. 185. 18 Maria de Lourdes Mônaco Janotti, Os subversivos da República (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986), p. 8. 19 On the coverage of the conflict in the Brazilian press, see Walnice Nogueira Galvão, No calor da hora. A Guerra de Canudos nos jornais. 4ta expedição (São Paulo: Ática, 1974). In this superb archival work, the scholar collects and analyzes the debates about the situation in Canudos that took place over the course of the final months of fighting. 20 The astronomical increase in Brazil’s debt to Great Britain was the most immediate notable outcome of the Paraguayan War for the country. Richard Burton’s reports as Brazilian consul make this clear: “Brazil incurred war debts of some £14,000,000 to British financial institutions” (McLynn, From the Sierras to the Pampas, p. 111). Nicolau Sevcenko adds that “In the thirty-­ one years from 1829 to 1860, Great Britain gave the Brazilian government loans totaling £6,289,700, but that amount grew to £37,407,300 in the following twenty-five years, from 1863 to 1888, and reached the astounding sum of £112,774,433 in the twenty-five years between 1889 and 1914” (Nicolau Sevcenko, Literatura como missão. Tensões sociais e criação cultural na Primeira República [1983] [São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1985], p. 45). 21 Sevcenko, Literatura como missão, p. 49. 22 Natalia Brizuela highlights the importance of the Canudos War in the process of state consolidation: “It was through that war that the modern state was constituted, even employing photography and visibility to carry out its project” (Brizuela, Fotografia e Império, p. 173). Naturally, the Canudos War did not signal the end of the state’s territorializing logic. There was still the Amazon, frequently conceived of as the last frontier. Euclides dedicated his last book to the Amazon. In addition, several articles from Contrastes e confrontos explore the issue of borders in these regions, which Euclides himself visited on an official trip in 1905. In other words, the Amazon represents the persistence of the “problem” of the internal and external borders beyond the Canudos War. An essential book regarding Brazil’s historical and cultural relationship with its own frontier is Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s Caminhos e fronteiras (1957). 23 Roberto Schwarz, in a widely influential essay, has suggested that nineteenth-­ century Brazilian intellectual and economic elites suffered from a sort of schizophrenia, for the ideas they proclaimed were “misplaced”. Roberto Schwarz, “Misplaced Ideas: Literature and Society in Late-­NineteenthCentury Brazil” [1973], in Misplaced Ideas. Essays on Brazilian Culture, ed. John Gledson (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 19–32. 24 Sevcenko, Literatura como missão, p. 45. Regarding the railway’s arrival in the country’s most remote and unknown places, and the relationship of the railway to conceptualizations of travel and space, see Foot Hardman, Trem fantasma. 25 A central character in this process was José Paranhos, Baron of Rio Branco, who was foreign minister of Brazil from 1902 to 1912. The Baron of Rio Branco exchanged correspondence with Euclides da Cunha and supported him when he sought to enter the country’s intellectual circles. In 1904, Rio Branco appointed Euclides to lead the expedition to survey the territory of the Purus River, in the Amazon region, in order to demarcate the borders with Peru. Euclides continued to work for Rio Branco in Rio de Janeiro until the former’s death. 26 Sevcenko, Literatura como missão, p. 84.

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  251 27 A similar distance between intellectuals and politics has been studied, especially with regard to Hispanic American Modernismo, by Ángel Rama and Julio Ramos (among others). See Rama, “Los poetas modernistas en el mercado económico”, and Ramos, Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina. 28 Historian Décio Saes has called the structure created in the transition from Empire to Republic a “bourgeois state”. See Décio Saes, A formação do estado burguês no Brasil (1888–1891) (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1985). 29 Nicolau Sevcenko’s Literatura como missão describes the dissatisfaction caused by the increasingly bourgeois and mercantilist quality of social relationships at the end of the nineteenth century: “There appears in that whole process a curious shift from social value placed on the internal, moral, essential, ideal, to an emphasis on the external, material, superficial, mercantile” (Sevcenko, Literatura como missão, p. 96). Sevcenko also looks at the criticisms levied by several writers against a society that, in becoming more bourgeois and money oriented, relegated writers to the codified, routinized work of journalism—that is, they felt they were reduced to being “merely” journalists (Sevcenko, Literatura como missão, pp. 93–108). José Murilo de Carvalho also points to the “rapid growth of bourgeois values” and the “complete dominance of material values” as being characteristic of the First Republic (José Murilo de Carvalho, Os bestializados: o Rio de Janeiro e a República que não foi [São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1987], p. 42). 30 Most of the biographical information about Euclides comes from Roberto Ventura, Retrato interrompido da vida de Euclides da Cunha, eds., Mario Cesar Carvalho and José Carlos Barreto de Santana (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003). 31 Euclides worked in Rio for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1906 to his death in 1909. 32 Only the book’s first part focuses on Euclides’s writings on the Amazon. A recent partial English translation includes only the Amazon essays. See Euclides da Cunha, The Amazon. Land without History, ed. Lúcia Sá, trans. Ronald Sousa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 33 José Brito Broca, A vida literária no Brasil: 1900 (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1960), p. 100. On that subject, Francisco Foot Hardman remarks, “His reference was never the capital city, but instead the arid or humid backlands, from scrubland to forest, and their inhabitants, strange to the body of the narrow country that forgot them” (Francisco Foot Hardman, Trem fantasma: a modernidade na selva [São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1988], pp. 48–49). 34 See for example his 1903 poem titled “As Catas”: “Que outros adorem vastas capitais/ Aonde, deslumbrantes,/ Da Indústria e da Ciência as triunfais/ Vozes, se erguem em mágico concerto;/ Eu, não; eu prefiro antes/ As Catas desoladas do deserto,/ —Cheias de sombra, de silêncio e paz…”, and one stanza later: “Não invejo, porém, os que se vão/ Buscando, mar em fora,/ De outras terras a esplêndida visão…/ Fazem-me mal as multidões ruidosas/ E eu procuro, nesta hora,/ Cidades que se ocultam majestosas/ Na tristeza solene do sertão” [Let others adore vast capitals/ Where, captivating,/The triumphant voices of Industry and Science/stand in magical harmony;/ Not I; I prefer instead/ The solitary Catas of the desert,/ —Full of shade, silence, and peace…; I do not envy, though, those who go/out to sea, looking,/for the splendid vision of other lands…/ The noisy multitudes hurt me/ And I seek, in this moment,/ Majestic cities that hide themselves/ In the solemn sadness of the sertão] (Euclides da Cunha, Poesia reunida,

252  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões eds. Leopoldo M. Bernucci and Francisco Foot Hardman [São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2009], pp. 272, 274). 35 So, for example, in a letter sent a few months after the publication of Os sertões, he writes: “A minha engenharia rude, engenharia-andante, romanesca e estéril, levando-me em constantes viagens através de dilatado distrito, destrói a continuidade de quaisquer esforços na atividade dispersiva que impõe” (Euclides da Cunha, Correspondência de Euclides da Cunha, eds. Walnice Nogueira Galvão and Oswaldo Galotti [São Paulo: Edusp, 1997], p. 158). [My uncultured engineering, traveling, romantic, and sterile, taking me on constant journeys through vast lands, imposes a dispersive activity that destroys the continuity of any effort]. In a letter to literary critic José Veríssimo, he refers to a “tired and erring engineering” (p. 166). 36 He was named professor in 1908, being able to teach only 19 classes before his death. 37 On the role that these racial theories played in Brazil, see Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, The Spectacle of the Races. Scientists, Institutions, and the Race Question in Brazil. 1870–1930, trans. Leland Guyer (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999). While in his writings the presence of positivism is obvious, Euclides himself, in his letters, ironically denied his labeling as a positivista (Cunha, Correspondência, p. 93). Two important works dealing with the scientific versus the literary component of Euclides’s prose are José Carlos Barreto de Santana’s Ciência e arte: Euclides da Cunha e as ciências naturais (São Paulo: HUCITEC/Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana, 2001) and Costa Lima, Terra ignota. 38 Ventura, Retrato interrompido, p. 200. This structure recalls, in its descriptive zeal and its love of stereotypes, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo (1845). The frequent comparison made between Euclides’s text and Facundo is valid and relevant, though I will not focus on it here. On this comparison, see, among others, Bernucci, “Um continente chamado América Latina”, in A imitação dos sentidos, pp. 39–50; Miriam V. Gárate, Civilização e barbárie n’Os sertões. Entre Domingo Faustino Sarmiento e Euclides da Cunha (São Paulo: Fapesp/Mercado de Letras, 2001); Roberto González Echevarría, “A Lost World Rediscovered: Sarmiento’s Facundo and E. da Cunha’s Os sertões”, in Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 93– 141; Elías Palti, “Visiones de lo inasible. Sarmiento y Euclides da Cunha en las fronteras de la civilización”, The Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies 4 (2006): 19–33. In Os sertões, a good example of this is the section titled “Tipos díspares: o jagunço e o gaúcho” (pp. 211–16) [Different Types: The Jagunço and the Gaucho, Cowboy of the South (pp. 98–102)]. The two texts share a similar admiration for those beings whom the authors consider to belong to another era. The clear influence of the Argentine’s writings is apparent in Euclides’s ideas, and in his essay “Viação sul-americana”, included in Contrastes e confrontos, he refers to Sarmiento admiringly. In this book I seek in part to shift the focus of the comparison, positing that the comparison between Os sertões and the writings of Francisco Moreno gives rise to elements that permit an equally complex consideration of the relationships between state, territory, and war, though I have found no explicit evidence of mutual readings between the two authors. 39 Euclides’s clearest influence in this respect was the Polish sociologist Ludwig von Gumplowicz, whose Rassenkampf (1883) he read in its 1893 French translation (as La lutte des races). On this topic, see Zilly’s careful analysis as well as Barreto de Santana’s Ciência e arte. 40 Adriana Michele Campos Johnson, Sentencing Canudos: Subalternity in the Backlands of Brazil (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), p. 44.

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  253 41 In reality, the religious aspect of this community remained unknown to those who wrote about it, including Euclides. It is for this very reason that Berthold Zilly questions the notion that messianism was central to the community (Zilly, “Sertão e nacionalidade”, p. 16). Zilly’s view is shared by other critics. See, for example, Ataliba Nogueira, Antônio Conselheiro e Canudos: revisão histórica (São Paulo: Nacional, 1978), and Marco Antonio Villa, Canudos. O povo da terra (São Paulo: Ática, 1995). Many of the writings of Antônio Conselheiro have been recovered and published. This constitutes an interesting source for understanding the type of religiosity and beliefs that brought the Belo Monte community together. See Antônio Conselheiro, Apontamentos dos preceitos da divina lei de nosso senhor Jesus Cristo, para a salvação dos homens, ed. Pedro Lima Vasconcellos (São Paulo: É Realizações, 2017). 42 The long list of books that have been considered essays of national interpretation includes Paulo Prado’s Retrato do Brasil: ensaio sobre a tristeza brasileira (1928), Gilberto Freyre’s Casa grande e senzala (1933), Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s Raízes do Brasil (1936), and Caio Prado Jr.’s Formação do Brasil contemporâneo (1942); more recent works that follow this line include Darcy Ribeiro’s O povo brasileiro (1995) and José Miguel Wisnik’s Veneno remédio: o futebol e o Brasil (2008). 43 Marco Antonio Villa has disputed these dates, proposing that Euclides in reality remained in Canudos only until 1 October. This theory would imply that he did not see the eventful final days of the battle or the fall of the resistant enclave. 44 Among the contemporary narratives of the Canudos War, it is worth mentioning Afonso Arinos’s Os jagunços, Manoel Benício’s O rei dos jagunços, and Dantas Barreto’s Última expedição a Canudos, all published in 1898. Walnice Nogueira Galvão and Leopoldo Bernucci have examined the intertextual relations between Os sertões and Arinos’s book. See Walnice Nogueira Galvão, “De sertões e jagunços”, in Saco de gatos. Ensaios críticos (São Paulo: Duas Cidades / Secretaria da Cultura, Ciência e Tecnologia do Estado de São Paulo, 1976), pp. 65–85; see also Leopoldo M. Bernucci, A imitação dos sentidos: prógonos, contemporâneos e epígonos de Euclides da Cunha (São Paulo: Edusp, 1995), pp. 65–84. Adriana Campos Johnson has carried out a comparative study of Os sertões in relation to the works of Arinos and Benício, arguing that these two books give a very different representation of the rebellious town from the one found in Euclides’s work—one that is grounded in everydayness (while Euclides emphasizes exceptionality). See Campos Johnson, “Another Canudos”, in Sentencing Canudos, pp. 138–62. The European thinkers mentioned (and, in many cases followed) by Euclides are countless. In the two-page-long “Preliminary Note” alone, we find significant references to Gumplowicz, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and the French critic and historian Hippolyte Taine. 45 Euclides da Cunha, Os sertões (Campanha de Canudos) (Rio de Janeiro: Laemmert & C. Editores, 1902), p. 2. I consulted this edition at the Oliveira Lima Library of Catholic University in Washington, DC. I especially thank Thomas Cohen, the collection’s director, for his hospitality and availability while I researched there. I also thank Joan Stahl, who patiently guided and helped me with my specific requests for materials. 46 For the notion of telescopic perspective, see Leopoldo M. Bernucci, “Prefácio” to Os sertões (Campanha de Canudos), pp. 13–49 (at p. 17). Campos Johnson also notes the presence in this opening of “a panoramic geological view of Brazil under the authority of a Foucauldian ‘Speaking Gaze’: surveying, classifying, representing” (Sentencing Canudos, p. 120,

254  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões original emphasis). Although a telescopic gaze might seem like the contrary of a panoramic one, both critics are thinking of a powerful textual construction that seems to be in control of the territory it surveys, whether it gives a general view or a detailed one. A note about Euclides’s language: it is not just specialized but also makes use of numerous terms that were (and are) rarely used and, thus, are unfamiliar to Portuguese-language readers. Bernucci’s useful Brazilian edition continually gives meanings and uses for several words. 47 No indication of the specific book is given, but the reference must be to Burton’s Explorations of the Highlands of Brazil (1869). Euclides’s journey through the sertão toward Canudos was published in the newspapers contemporarily to his trip. The articles were published in book form posthumously (1939), with the title Diário de uma expedição. Regarding the mapping strategies in Os sertões and Euclides’s (manifold and sophisticated) political and aesthetic uses of geography, see Aarti Smith Madan’s chapter “Euclides da Cunha’s Literary Map, or Including Os sertões”, in Lines of Geography in Latin American Narrative. National Territory, National Literature (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 187–247. 48 There is even, at times, as part of this rhetoric of travel, an almost frenetic movement forward: “No entanto quem se abalança a atravessá-lo, partindo de Queimadas para nordeste, não se surpreende a princípio” (p.  84, emphasis added) [Nevertheless, one who is in a hurry to cross it, going from Queimadas to the northeast, will find no surprises at first (p. 15)]. 49 Roberto Vecchi has referred to what he calls a “metaphysics of the desert” as a feature present in all of Euclides’s literature (Roberto Vecchi, “Spazio, storia, classe nei Sertões euclidiani”, in Vincenzo Arsillo and Flavio Fiorani, eds., Sertão - Pampa: Topografie Dell’immaginario Sudamericano [Venice: Cafoscarina, 2007], pp. 25–44 [at p. 29]). 50 As Deleuze and Guattari argue, the establishment of channels and conduits seems necessary for the establishment of the modern state (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 363). 51 Both the idea of penetration and the construction of a territory that resists the very concept of travel are present in the way the Paraguayan space is imagined over the course of the nineteenth century, and are discussed in Chapter 1. 52 There are some references to Humboldt in Os sertões, and Euclides was a reader of Sarmiento. On the evolution of the use of this trope in Argentine literature, see Prieto, Los viajeros ingleses. For the Latin American context, see González Echevarría, Myth and Archive. 53 José Carlos Barreto de Santana has explained that these statements by Euclides were disavowed by geographers who influenced him (Barreto de Santana, Ciência e arte, p. 113). This author goes on to explain that Euclides read with attention many treatises on the geology, botany, and climate of the region, but that he sometimes distorted or hid specific information for the sake of constructing powerful literary images. 54 Johannes Fabian’s notion of denial of coevalness, discussed in the previous chapter, can also be read in Os sertões. See Campos Johnson, Sentencing Canudos, p. 116. 55 There is no translation for the word propaganda, which is referring to education as an alternative strategy to bridge the supposed temporal gap between the groups. I have shortened the English version so that it runs on grammatically from what precedes it. 56 This is another example of the use of “anachronism”: “Insulado no espaço e no tempo, o jagunço, um anacronismo étnico, só podia fazer o que fez—bater, bater terrivelmente a nacionalidade que, depois de o

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  255 enjeitar cerca de três séculos, procurava levá-lo para os deslumbramentos da nossa idade dentro de um quadrado de baionetas, mostrando-lhe o brilho da civilização através do clarão das descargas” (p. 502) [Isolated both in space and time, the jagunço could only behave as he did. He was compelled to put up a terrible fight against the country that, after having ignored him for three centuries, tried to civilize him at gunpoint (p. 281)]. Much like Moreno and his critical references to the Remington as the instrument used by the government to deal with the indigenous peoples, Euclides ex post facto ironically criticizes the war against these rebel peoples by using references to baionetas as the wrong arm of deterrence, their shots being the only “illuminating” element of the “civilizers”. 57 On this last issue, see the section “Euclides e a psicologia do fim do século”, in Costa Lima, Terra ignota, pp. 60–85. 58 See, for example, this quite similar passage from Viaje a la Patagonia austral: “Inmediato al pie del cerro de basalto se ven varios pequeños troncos de árboles petrificados destruidos e innumerables fragmentos de ostras … Éste es un descubrimiento precioso; estos troncos y estos moluscos … revelan que, miles de siglos ha, la árida planicie dominada hoy por la negra lava de rugosos flancos … ha alimentado frondosos bosques, y que estas tierras, donde hoy las negras Nyctelias se arrastran perezosas, fueron las riberas de un antiguo mar siempre agitado. Donde el viajero sediento no encuentra una sola gota de agua, se estrellaron inmensas olas contra murallas escarpadas. … en las profundidades inmediatas vivieron las parásitas ostras cuyos calcáreos esqueletos cubren el suelo y se quiebran con la presión de la pata del caballo” (p. 416) [Very close to the base of the basalt hill, one can see several small trunks of petrified trees as well as countless shards of oyster shell … This is an invaluable discovery; these trunks and these mollusks … reveal that, thousands of years ago, the arid surface now covered by a black, coarse-flanked lava … once fed leafy woods, and that these lands, where today the black Nyctelius idly crawl, were once the shores of an ever-rough old sea. Where the thirsty traveler can find not a single drop of water, immense waves used to crash against steep walls … in the nearby deeps used to live the parasitic oysters whose calcareous skeletons cover the land and shatter under the pressure of the horse’s hooves]. The horse crushes the different vestiges of past life here, while in Euclides’s description we see these remains, though paralyzed, still moving. The presence of the old “immense waves” is clearly haunting (or at least powerful) in Os sertões. This might be an indicator of how each of these writers grapples with war and its aftermath. 59 Other nearby expressions reinforce this idea: “os restos da fauna pliocena, que fazem dos caldeirões enormes ossuários de mastodontes, cheios de vértebras desconjunturadas e partidas, como se ali a vida fosse, de chofre, salteada e extinta pelas energias revoltas de um cataclismo” (p. 92, original emphasis) [the remains of Pliocene fauna, making enormous mastodon boneyards of the enormous potholes, full of disjointed and broken vertebrae, as though they had been unexpectedly attacked and their lives ended by the swirling energies of a cataclysm (p. 20)]. This is unquestionably a scenery of destruction, of original destruction, a field scattered with remains, with signs of death. I will return to the trope of the cataclysm below. 60 We will see how man attempts to intervene in this divide to correct it, interrupting the torturous rhythm of nature itself, which the narrator portrays as being aberrant, antinatural.

256  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões 61 When the war is finally narrated, however, that initial confidence in the power of progress and modernization to give order to and interpret spaces will have been lost. 62 The translator opted to convey only this last meaning in the English translation reproduced above. All of the Portuguese language-related matters in this chapter were consulted in the Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa, available online (www.priberam.pt/dlpo/dlpo.aspx). 63 “Estereotipar”, in Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa www.­ priberam.pt/dlpo/dlpo.aspx (12 August 2012). 64 The Real Academia Española’s dictionary offers a nearly identical definition of “estereotipar”: “Fundir en una plancha, por medio del vaciado, la composición de un molde formado por caracteres móviles” (http://dle. rae.es/?id=GqJNckO) [To melt on a metal plate, through casting, the composition of a mold made up of movable type]. This is not currently one of the meanings of the verb “to stereotype” in English, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. (See www.merriam-webster. com/dictionary/stereotype.) Something closer to this meaning existed in English in the nineteenth century, though. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, in 1819 the word was used with the meaning of “fix[ing] firmly or unchangeably”. See www.etymonline.com/index. php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=stereotype. 65 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama [1928], intr. George Steiner, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), p. 39. 66 As David Lowenthal claims in The Past Is a Foreign Country, “ruined buildings symbolized the triumph of nature over the transience of artifice” (David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], p. 140). 67 Georg Simmel, “The Ruin”, in Georg Simmel, 1858–1918. A Collection of Essays, with Translation and a Bibliography, ed. Kurt H. Wolf (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1959), pp. 259–66 (at p. 262). 68 The translation does not transcribe this sentence as the title of a section in the book, but as an ordinary sentence that opens a paragraph. Alfredo Bosi uses this sentence as the title of an article centered specifically on the issue of resistance. See Alfredo Bosi, “Canudos não se rendeu”, in Literatura e resistência (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2002), pp. 209–20. 69 This is perhaps the clearest example of intertextuality between Os sertões and Sarmiento’s Facundo, where we read the following: “Al sur, y a larga distancia, limitan esta llanura arenisca los Colorados, montes de greda petrificada, cuyos cortes regulares asumen las formas más pintorescas y fantásticas: a veces es uma muralla lisa con bastiones avanzados, a veces, créese ver torreones y castillos almenados en ruinas” (Sarmiento, Facundo, p. 86) [To the south, at a far distance, this sandy plain is bordered by the Colorados, mountains of petrified chalk, whose regular outline takes on the most picturesque and fantastic of forms: sometimes it is a smooth wall with projecting bastions, sometimes one can see towers and the battlements of castles in ruins (Sarmiento, Facundo, p. 103)]. 70 One section of the book is titled “O martírio secular da terra” (pp. 145–47) [the age-old martyrdom of the land (pp. 53–55)]. The martyrs later identified in the text are others, but they are foreshadowed in this conflict, in the suffering character of the very soil. 71 The fourth (and final) expedition will be greeted by the displayed heads of the dead soldiers from the previous expedition: “os jagunços reuniram os cadáveres que jaziam esparsos em varios pontos. Decapitaram-nos. Queimaram os corpos. Alinharam depois, nas duas bordas da estrada,

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  257 as cabeças, regularmente espaçadas, fronteando-se, faces volvidas para o caminho” (p. 492) [they collected the dead, decapitated them, and burned the bodies. They lined the heads up on both sides of the highway with the faces turned to the road (pp. 275–76)]. The leader of the doomed third expedition, General Moreira César, was known as “corta-cabeças” (p. 441) [Head Slicer (p. 246)]. Nevertheless, what this image prefigures most powerfully is the army’s systematically slitting the throats of all the Canudos prisoners when the war comes to an end. Antônio Conselheiro’s head “was taken to the School of Medicine in Bahia, where it was studied by Professor Nina Rodrigues, a phrenology expert. Antônio Conselheiro’s head was on exhibit in the institution’s Museum of Legal Medicine until 1905, when it burned in a fire” (“O corpo de Antonio Conselheiro”, Achados de Canudos www.josecalasans.com/downloads/achadosdecanudos.pdf [22 December 2016]). As with Argentina’s Conquest of the Desert, the museum serves as a continuation of the war, as a depository for its trophies. 72 On the importance of the theme of drought in Os sertões and in Euclides’s understanding of the sertão and the men who inhabit it, see Mark D. ­A nderson, “From Natural to National Disasters: Drought and the Brazilian Subject in Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões”, Hispania 91, no. 3 (2008): 547–57. 73 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 363. 74 Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 2. 75 Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 13. 76 The translation reads “1896” instead of “1894”. Also the first edition reads 1896. I transcribe certão as it appears in the version of Os sertões with which I have worked. The revolutionary or resistant undertones of these sentences are especially powerful in Glauber Rocha’s extraordinary film Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (Black God, White Devil, 1964). 77 Interestingly, the translation states that the backlander follows the trails of the sertão, while the Portuguese version suggests that these trails seem to be drawn by the backlander’s manner of walking. 78 Dabove has noted the canudization of the state army as the only way to achieve victory. To triumph, the army must renounce its own logic, dispersing among the enemy: “Canudos devours the army. … [T]his is the story of how the entanglement between the army and the jagunços meant the becoming-­ jagunço of the army” (Dabove, Nightmares of the Lettered City, p. 428). 79 For Euclides da Cunha, jagunço means largely man from the sertão. The term refers, more specifically, to an armed man who participates in battles. Perhaps for this reason, it also acquired a more negative connotation, close to that of bandit. The dictionary defines the jagunço as a person of bad character [pessoa de mau caráter]. The origins of the word are, according to the dictionary, unknown, but it was used originally in Brazil to refer to the people from the state of Bahia. The term is now not equivalent to that of sertanejo, though. When I visited Canudos in 2010 I used the word and was swiftly reprimanded by the woman who kept the very homely inn where I was staying, since that word was charged with negative undertones (at least in its popular use in Canudos). On the history of the term’s connotations, see the illuminating article by José Calasans, “Os jagunços de Canudos”, Caravelle. Cahiers du monde hispanique et luso-brésilien 15 (1970): 31–38. 80 Deleuze and Guattari mention the importance of the military engineer as a character who represents nomadic science and finds himself in an ambivalent position, nurtured by the war machine even as he is restricted by the orderly rationality imposed by the state (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 362).

258  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões 81 Cunha, Correspondência, p. 121. 82 Cunha, Correspondência, p. 107. 83 This element also appears in Euclides’s reading of the Amazonian rivers in À margem da história. The problem those rivers pose is the way they move, their nomadic character, infecting the man who inhabits that space. The narrator of À margem da história is, now perhaps more clearly than in Os sertões, a military engineer, convinced that the aim of engineering is to overcome all natural difficulties (Euclides da Cunha, À margem da história [1909] [São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1999], p. 77). Reading Os sertões from the perspective of Euclides’s Amazonian writings, it is possible to visualize this connection between the meanders of the river and the production of barbarism. Regarding Euclides’s representation of movement in À margem da história, see Javier Uriarte, “Rios e ritmos indisciplinados: Uma leitura da oscilação em Euclides da Cunha e Alberto Rangel”, in Élide Rugai Bastos and Renan Freitas Pinto, eds., Vozes da Amazônia III. Investigação sobre o pensamento social brasileiro (Manaus: Universidade Federal do Amazonas, 2016), pp. 183–205. 84 For Lefebvre, too, the production of space—and its consequent legibility— is powerfully based on the imposition of geometry and straight lines: “In order to dominate space, technology introduces a new form into a preexisting space—generally a rectilinear or rectangular form. … A motorway brutalizes the countryside and the land, slicing through space like a great knife. Dominated space is usually closed, sterilized, emptied out” (The Production of Space, p. 165). The role that roads took on in the twentieth century was held by the railway in the nineteenth, a crucial element in that space-producing logic that sought to “striate” South American spaces. 85 Cunha, Correspondência, p. 154. 86 This adjective is key for reading not just Euclides but all of the authors discussed in this book. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “aberrant” means “straying from the right or normal way”—that is, it is a word that fundamentally has to do with movement. “Aberrant”, ­Merriam-Webster Dictionary www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ aberrant (13 September 2016). Etymologically speaking, the adjective is linked with the verb “to err”, in the dual sense of “to make a mistake” and “to stray”. “Err”, Merriam-Webster Dictionary www.merriam-webster. com/dictionary/err (13 September 2016). This preoccupation with what moves “badly” is repeated in Euclides, as we will see. At the same time, wandering or straying constitutes precisely the logic adopted by Lamb for occupying territory in The Purple Land. The Online Etymology Dictionary establishes that originally aberrant was the present participle of the Latin verb aberrare, “to wander away, go astray”. See “Aberrant”, Online Etymology Dictionary www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=aberrant (13 September 2016). 87 I thank Leopoldo Bernucci and Denilson Lopes for their generous comments on my interpretation of this difficult passage. 88 The adjective “desnorteado” means without a direction, but in the Portuguese version it refers not exactly to the Conselherio’s wandering, but to his supposedly apostolic role, to his prayers. This is because Euclides did not share them, did not find them serious (at this point in the book). 89 The possessive is missing in the translation, and it is important. Antônio Conselheiro is out of the narrator’s (and his readers’) time. The time of modernity, that is. 90 As explained above, the account produced by Euclides is not the only one about the war, and it differs substantially from others. Villa states that the

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  259 enormous influence of Os sertões on the ways the conflict was interpreted for decades actually posed an obstacle for a true historical approach to the community and its dynamics (Villa, Canudos, p. 7). Campos Johnson compared Euclides’s account of the conflict to that of his contemporaries, highlighting the important differences between them. 91 Villa, Canudos, p. 68. Villa adds that “the economic organization was based on communitarianism, that is, each individual was responsible for the upkeep of the community” (p. 65). Villa also explains that diverse crops were produced in the lands surrounding the settlement, that its main product was leather, and that money circulated and private property existed in it. 92 For example, Moniz explains: “But this attempt to create an egalitarian community would soon create uneasiness in local landowners, who lived off the exploitation of peasants. If Conselheiro’s ideas were to expand all over the hinterlands, with the likely existence of other Canudos, the new production and consumerism system would threaten traditional land ownership, undermining the landowners’ power” (Edmundo Moniz, A guerra social de Canudos [Rio de Janeiro: Civilização brasileira, 1978], p. 46). Villa criticizes this interpretation of Canudos as a socialist community. Nonetheless, these interpretations agree in highlighting the communitarianism and solidarity that characterized Canudos, as well as the town’s strong opposition to latifúndios and capitalist forms of exploitation. 93 There has been some debate regarding the exact population of Canudos, which remains largely unknown. Levine affirms that “[Canudos’s] population of 25,000 (at its height in 1895 probably closer to 35,000) made it the largest urban site in Bahia after Salvador, the capital” (Vale of Tears, p. 16). However, Marco Antonio Villa argues that such figures are impossible. He concludes not only that Canudos was not the largest city in Bahia’s interior but that it never had 25,000 residents, having reached a population of 10,000 at most (Villa, Canudos, p. 220). On page 16, Levine connects the word sertão to the notion of the desert, but only in passing. The origins of the word seem to be quite obscure, and its meanings have shifted through the centuries. Nísia Trindade Lima studies its uses in the discourse of the Brazilian social sciences, and refers to “the conservative character, resistant to change, that has historically been attributed to the term sertão” (Nísia Trindade Lima, Um sertão chamado Brasil, p. 23). Victoria Saramago has explored the uses of the word among sixteenth-century Portuguese travelers and has suggested that some of the connotations of the word in later Brazilian works (including Os sertões) are already present in these texts. She uses the expression “a moving category” to explain the shifting in meanings of sertão (Victoria Saramago, “Sertão dentro: The Backlands in Early Portuguese Writings”, Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies 27 [2015]: 254–72 [at p. 255]). What seems quite clear is the word’s connection with what is unexplored, unknown, impenetrable, and resistant to change or modernization, all notions that are central to the constructions of the desert that this book explores in relation to Patagonia, the hinterland of Uruguay, and the spatial imagination about Paraguay. 94 On the central issue of resistance in the Canudos War, present also in the epigraph that opens this chapter, see Bosi, “Canudos não se rendeu”. 95 In this respect, see Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of “stayer”, which offers a countervailing model to the idea— widespread in the west—of mobility as freedom. See Mary Louise Pratt, “Los que se quedan”, in Jean-Philippe Barnabé, Lindsey Cordery, and Beatriz Vegh, eds., Los viajeros y el Río de la Plata: un siglo de escritura (Montevideo: Lindari y Risso, 2010), pp. 356–78. Caren Kaplan has offered an insightful critique of the positive

260  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões contemporary reverberations of the notion of movement and travel as resistance and liberation as discussed by Deleuze and Guattari (Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995], pp. 85–91. James Clifford has also proposed the need to revisit the notion of the traveler (which is at its core built around notions of white male privilege and power) to make it more inclusive (James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997], p. 23). 96 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 482. 97 Dabove, Nightmares of the Lettered City, p. 223. 98 Dabove, Nightmares of the Lettered City, p. 222. 99 This tension and the ultimate triumph of the city toward the end of the nineteenth century are analyzed by José Luis Romero. He affirms that there was an evident disdain from the part of the city, which asserted its superiority and ended up subduing the countryside. According to Romero, the cities found it necessary to make peasants accept the authority of the state, or, more specifically, of the landowners, and force them into the new systems of production (José Luis Romero, Latinoamérica: las ciudades y las ideas [1976] [Medellín: Editorial Universidad de Antioquia, 1999], p. 228). 100 Rama, The Lettered City, p. 60. The Spanish version refers, more bluntly (and aptly), to “la extinción de la naturaleza y de las culturas rurales” [the extinction of nature and of rural cultures] (Rama, La ciudad letrada [1984], pról. Hugo Achugar [Montevideo: Arca, 1998], p. 69). 101 This apparent absence of order, the spontaneous construction, and the “madness” of Canudos may be its most alarming features to official territorial imagination, which in that same year, 1897, founded Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s first planned state capital and one of the most important ones in the country. In 1902—the year Os sertões was published—­ Francisco Pereira Passos became mayor of Rio de Janeiro, carrying out the city’s largest urban reform project, wiping out precisely the narrow streets that so worry the narrator in Canudos and constructing grand boulevards like those of Haussmann in Paris (Pereira Passos was known, in fact, as the Brazilian Haussmann). Another key aspect of this reform was sanitation. One consequence was an increase in the size of the favelas and in the city’s inequality and social tensions. Lefebvre offers a critique of the Haussmann reforms in Paris, which are interesting for understanding the way the modern city was being conceived and imposed in Latin America. He refers to these reforms as “an authoritarian and brutal spatial practice … the effective application of the analytic spirit in and through dispersion, division and segregation” (The Production of Space, p. 308). And he adds, in a vein similar to that expressed by Deleuze and Guattari, and central to my discussions of space here, “The space that homogenizes thus has nothing homogeneous about it” (p. 308). In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari note, “Homogeneous space is in no way a smooth space; on the contrary, it is the form of a striated space” (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 370). Scott also discusses the Haussmann reforms as being guided by the same modernizing state logic that carried out transformations in nature: “There was the same emphasis on simplification, legibility, straight lines, central management, and a synoptic grasp of the ensemble” (Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 59). Scott adds that military control and sanitation were essential parts of these reforms (p. 61). For more about urban reforms in Rio, see the poetic descriptions in appendix 1, note 1, “O bota-abaixo”, in Brito Broca, A vida literária no Brasil, pp. 277–81. Two contemporary research works on Rio’s urban reforms at the beginning of the last century are

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  261

102

103

104

105 106

107

Teresa Meade, “Civilizing” Rio: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889–1930 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), and Murilo de Carvalho, Os bestializados. About the cultural consequences of the bota-abaixo, see Bruno Carvalho, Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). An essential cultural analysis of the “Vaccine Revolt”, as the popular resistance to the city government’s sanitation campaigns are known, is Nicolau Sevcenko, A revolta da vacina: mentes insanas em corpos rebeldes (São Paulo: ­S cipione, 1993). In addition, Valladares claims that the first visitors to the favelas conceived of the city-vs.-favela binary as a prolongation of the centuries-old divide “coast vs sertão”, one that structured Brazilian society and economy (Lícia do Prado Valladares, A invenção da favela. Do mito de origem a favela. com [Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 2005], p. 23). This is the description: “As favelas, anônimas ainda na ciência—­ ignoradas dos sábios, conhecidas demais pelos tabaréus—talvez um futuro gênero cauterium das leguminosas, têm, nas folhas de células alongadas em vilosidades, notáveis aprestos de condensação, absorção e defesa. Por um lado, a sua epiderme ao resfriar-se, à noite, muito abaixo da temperatura do ar, provoca, a despeito da secura deste, breves precipitações de orvalho; por outro, a mão que a toca, toca uma chapa incandescente de ardência inaturável.” (p. 121) [The favelas, still without a scientific name and unknown to scholars, but only too well known to greenhorns, are possibly members of a future genus Cauterium of leguminous plants. They possess in their leaves cells elongated into fuzz, which are a notable tool for condensation, absorption, and defense. On the one hand, their skin, as it grows cold at night with a great drop in temperature, will in spite of the dryness of the air collect tiny drops of dew. And on the other hand, whoever touches it has touched a fiery sheet of constant flame. (p. 38)] See, for example, when Euclides narrates the movement of the national troops toward Canudos: “No último passo da ascensão se lhe antolhou um plano levemente inclinado, entre duas largas ondulações, fechado adiante por alguns cerros desnudos. Era o alto da Favela. Naquele ponto este morro lendário é um vale. Subindo-o tem-se a impressão imprevista de se chegar numa baixada.” (p. 535) [In the last stage of their climb they arrived at an inclined plain between two large elevations with a few bare hills obstructing the way ahead. They had reached the top of Mount Favela. At this point the legendary hill is really a valley. As one climbs it, the unexpected impression is of arriving in lowland (pp. 302–03)]. The Morro da Favela had already been mentioned by other witnesses and soldiers before Euclides (so, it is not Euclides who first gives it that name). Valladares, A invenção da favela, p. 29. On this fundamental relationship between Canudos and the favelas, see also Alba Zaluar and Marcos Alvito, eds., Um século de favela (Rio de Janeiro: Fundacão Getúlio Vargas, 1998), and Miriam Gárate, “Argirópolis, Canudos y las favelas. Un ensayo de lectura comparada”, Revista Iberoamericana LXIII, no. 181 (1997): 621–30. Rama, The Lettered City, p. 6. Marzena Grzegorczyk has called Canudos an “improper city”, analyzing Euclides’s description vis-à-vis Rama’s ideas of the modern Latin American city (Marzena Grzegorczyk, “Eclipse of Reason: Euclides da Cunha’s ‘Improper City’”, in Private Topographies. Space, Subjectivity, and Political Change in Modern Latin America [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005], pp. 115–29).

262  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões 108 By doing this, however, he would be highlighting the settlement’s extraordinary capacity for resistance and endurance—that is, its heroic character. It is also possible that, since Euclides witnessed only the very last weeks of the war, he might have actually seen a small village; that is, what at that point remained of Canudos. 109 Pratt, “Los que se quedan”, p. 363. 110 One passage can serve as an example that the sertão itself is seen as a ruin. Already in the first section of the book’s first part, when the narrator is explaining the orography of the sertões, he describes the mountains of those regions using this image: “aqui apontam, rijamente, sobre as áreas de nível, os últimos fragmentos das rochas enterradas, desvendando-se em fraguedos que mal relembram, na altura, o antiqüíssimo ‘Himalaia brasileiro’, desbarrancado, em desintegração contínua, por todo o curso das idades; adiante, mais caprichosos, se escalonam em alinhamentos incorretos de menires colossais, ou em círculos enormes, recordando na disposição dos grandes blocos superpostos, em rimas, muramentos desmantelados de ciclópicos coliseus em ruínas…….” (p. 77) [In one place they stand stiffly over the level areas and are the last fragments of the buried boulders unveiled in pieces. A feeble attempt to recall their height has named them the Brazilian Himalayas, even though they have collapsed through continuous disintegration all through the ages. More capricious farther on, they rise up along the broken lines of colossal menhirs or in enormous circles to mimic in their disposition of great superimposed fissured blocks the collapsed walls of some coliseum in ruins… (p. 11)]. The image of an emergent antique element, discussed above, appears here as well. This is also a good example of the meandering prose of Euclides, and its continuous use of enumeration and accumulation: the Portuguese version does not present a single full stop until the paragraph’s end. 111 Decca, “Literatura em ruínas”, p. 151. 112 The translation does not do Euclides’s wording justice. It works as a synthesis of the main ideas of the passage, but a number of sentences are omitted altogether. 113 Euclides da Cunha, Canudos. Diário de uma expedição [1939] (São Paulo: Martin Claret, 2006), p. 70. 114 It would be interesting to approach this intimate foreignness following Jacques Alain-Miller’s notion of “extimacy”, as proposed by Rachel Price: “Jacques-Alain Miller developed Lacan’s notion of ‘extimacy’, the strange position of otherness within us: an exteriority within or an interiority without; a fear of others within ourselves” (Rachel Price, The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868–1968 [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014], p. 102). 115 Bernucci, A imitação dos sentidos, p. 51, original emphasis. This foreignness with respect to the visited territories is also evident in Moreno, though he and Euclides engage in different rhetorical operations with regard to space. As I explained in the introduction, this shared foreignness in the face of their own countries facilitates these two travelers’ dialogue with Burton and Hudson, who wrote in English and constructed their narrators as foreigners. 116 I am not entirely convinced by the two most extreme perspectives I have read regarding the portrayal of Canudos and its inhabitants. For her part, Campos Johnson interprets Euclides’s position as being subalternizing, inserting the subaltern-constructing distance of an intellectual. This would erase all reference to what the author refers to as “everydayness” from the reality of Canudos, construing the massacre as an exceptional event and

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  263

117

118

119

120 121

condemning it to the immobility of history (Campos Johnson, Sentencing Canudos, p. 4). On the other hand, Nogueira Galvão, Ronaldes de Melo e Souza, and Luis Fernando Valente claim that Euclides succeeds in evoking the losers’ perspective. See Walnice Nogueira Galvão; “Os sertões: uma análise literária”, in Eduardo Diatahy Bezerra de Menezes and João Arruda, eds., Canudos: as falas e os olhares (Fortaleza: UFCE, 1995), pp. 23–30 (at p. 30); Ronaldes de Melo e Souza, A geopoética de Euclides da Cunha (Rio de Janeiro: EdUERJ, 2009), p. 49; Luis Fernando Valente, “Brazilian Literature and Citizenship: From Euclides da Cunha to Marcos Dias”, Luso- Brazilian Review 38, no. 2 (2001): 11–27 (at p. 16). I argue that the book’s most important achievement is precisely its account of a lack of understanding: it is the failure to recognize oneself, or to recognize oneself as being other, as unable to fully understand—the revelation of war as the inability to see. Scott does not work with specific moments of war, but he does consider war to be an auspicious moment for the ordering intervention of the state. This intervention requires the presence of “an authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high-modernist designs into being. The most fertile soil for this element has typically been times of war, revolution, depression, and struggle for national liberation” (Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 5). It is highly original, in this sense, that Mario Vargas Llosa decided to employ blindness as a narrative tool in his 1981 novel La guerra del fin del mundo, which rewrites—quite problematically, in my view—the Canudos War. The nameless character who may (or may not) represent Euclides da Cunha loses his glasses in the middle of combat (which he is not participating in, naturally) and can make out only blotches, shadows, blurry shapes. Indeed, this is one of the moments with the greatest narrative power in the whole book. Mario Vargas Llosa, La guerra del fin del mundo (Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 1982), pp. 340–41. As George Van den Abbeele has said, “the home that one leaves is not the same as that to which one returns. The very condition of orientation, the oikos, is paradoxically able to provoke the greatest disorientation” (Van den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor, p. xix). Cunha, Canudos. Diário de uma expedição, p. 124. The title of the poem is “Página vazia” [Empty page]: “Quem volta da região assustadora/ De onde eu venho, revendo inda na mente/ Muitas cenas do drama comovente/ Da Guerra despiedada e aterradora,/ Certo não pode ter uma sonora/ Estrofe, ou canto ou ditirambo ardente,/ Que possa figurar dignamente/ Em vosso Álbum gentil, minha Senhora……” (Cunha, Poesia reunida, p. 276) [He who comes back from the frightening region/ That I come from,/ still seeing in my mind/ Many scenes of the moving drama/ of relentless and appalling War,/ Certainly cannot write a sonorous/ verse, or an ardent song or dythiramb,/That could be worthy of being part/ of your noble album, my lady …]. In a letter dated 23 December 1897, one of the very few he wrote in the months that followed the conflict, he suggests he does not feel strong enough to write his planned book about the conflict. Here, again, the image of the empty page appears: “ando verdadeiramente acabrunhado e sem disposição para o trabalho—e olho para as páginas em branco do livro que pretendo escrever e parece-me às vezes que não realizaria o intento” (Cunha, Correspondência de Euclides da Cunha, p. 113) [I feel truly depressed and with no inclination to work—and I look at the blank pages of the book I intend to write and it seems to me sometimes that I will not accomplish the plan].

264  Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões 122 Cunha, Correspondência de Euclides da Cunha, p. 128. 123 On the subject of Euclides’s efforts to fit in and his ambivalent relationship with intellectual and political circles as evinced in his correspondence, see the commentaries of Skidmore and Holloway on their transcription of his letters to Oliveira Lima. Thomas E. Skidmore and Thomas H. Holloway, “New Light on Euclides da Cunha: Letters to Oliveira Lima, 1903–1909”, Luso-Brazilian Review 8, no. 1 (1971): 30–55. 124 I have selected this quotation at random, but the text contains countless references to invisibility. I will examine here only those that exhibit a certain dialogue between the gaze, space, and movement in the context of war. 125 Deleuze and Guattari, in comparing the games of chess and go, assert that the latter subverts the notion of open warfare: “Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a ­semiology” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 353). 126 The idea of guerrilla warfare can nonetheless help illuminate the sertanejos’ strategies in the first moments of the conflict. This was patent in the way that the rebel gauchos—and especially the protagonist, Richard Lamb—wage war in The Purple Land. This was also a characteristic of the Paraguayan army during the War of the Triple Alliance. The war testimony of the Paraguayan soldier Leandro Pineda shows the adoption of a strategy that avoids traditional clashes and organized warfare: “We continued our work mainly in guerrilla operations and ambushes” (Leandro Pineda, “A Chronicle of War”, in Peter Lambert et al., eds., The Paraguay Reader pp. 90–95 [at p. 93]). Martín Kohan has studied the ways in which Colonel Manuel Prado, from the Argentine army, narrates his combats against the indigenous peoples during the Conquest of the Desert: “They go far away—very far away—yet they might easily appear all of a sudden quite close by. What is distant does not gradually move toward proximity; it suddenly becomes it” (Martín Kohan, “Paisaje de guerra”, in Martínez-Pinzón and Uriarte, Entre el humo y la niebla, pp. 99–113 [at p. 101]). In all of these wars, the powerless, who resist the forces of the modern state and of global capital and empire, and end up being destroyed by them, resort to alternative ways of waging war, which surprise and disconcert those hegemonic forces. 127 Elizabeth Lowe translates this as “invisible”. But according to the MerriamWebster Dictionary, this can be “unable to be touched”. Ghosts abound in the pages of the texts analyzed in this book: the skinny dog that, in Burton’s Letters, wanders among the Paraguayan corpses scattered across the battlefields, and that escapes like an apparition when the narrator approaches; the dead son who comes back from war to his ruined house in order to narrate the fictitious story of victory in The Purple Land; the indigenous peoples described by Moreno as already dead, as spectral presences in their own lands as war approaches. Yet this spectrality, and its connection with a resistive force, is perhaps even stronger in Os sertões. 128 I find it useful to return to Jameson’s ideas on the representation of war in terms of space, since what is portrayed here is not really a battle but instead a space, known to some and indecipherable to others. Spatializing the conflict is in some way not narrating it: there is no confrontation, struggle, combat. One of the persistent elements throughout Euclides’s book is what Jameson calls “the complicity of nature in ambush … in concealment as well, camouflage being a way that humans acknowledge the primacy of scene” (Jameson, “War and Representation”, p. 1537).

Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões  265 129 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 83. Sara Castro-Klarén has discussed in detail the connections between the body and the land in Os sertões (Sara ­Castro-Klarén, “In-forming the Body of Man in the Caatinga”, The Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies 3 [2005]: 99–116). 130 This can also be read as a classical example of guerrilla warfare. In “War and Representation”, Jameson discusses the relationship between state war and guerrilla warfare, and the way he describes the latter would be apt to illustrate this specific passage of Os sertões (and, indeed, several others explored in this book): “the horror of guerrilla warfare (whether urban or rural) seems rather to lie in the unidentifiability of its actors, who emerge from their surroundings without warning and just as unexpectedly disappear again” (Jameson, “War and Representation”, p. 1533). 131 Walter Benjamin, “Excavation and Memory”, in Selected Writings, Vol. 2. (1931–1934), ed. Marcus Paul Bullock et al. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 576. 132 In the English version, velho is translated as “man”, when it actually means “old man”. Thus, the translation erases all contradiction. 133 Ettore Finazzi-Agrò, “‘Como se extingue o deserto’. O vazio da Origem e a invenção da Forma na história literária brasileira”, Tempo brasileiro 177 (2009): 5–24 (at p. 11). 134 In Sándor Márai’s 1970 novel Sąd w Canudos (I will refer to the Portuguese translation, Veredicto em Canudos), it is the head of Antônio Conselheiro himself that smiles at the triumphant officers. The mouth smiles because it recognizes a victory that goes beyond violence: “O certo é que a boca do Conselheiro começou a sorrir – não havia equívoco possível, a boca sorria irônica” (Sándor Márai, Veredicto em Canudos [1970], trans. Paulo Schiller [São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2002], p. 65) [What is true is that Conselheiro’s mouth began to smile. There was no mistaking it—the mouth smiled mockingly]. 135 As Edgar Salvadori de Decca puts it, “In Euclides’s literature, the ruin also marks the limit of one’s capacity to perceive the other. … Ruins reveal how the gaze of the civilized person observes them, and they are frightening in Euclides’s work because at every moment they confront him with that other who remained at the margins of history” (Decca, “Literatura em ruínas”, p. 158). Decca’s analysis is correct in describing ruins as “frightening” because they are, for the narrator, an aberrant construction, something that produces horror and admiration at the same time, a spine-chilling revelation. 136 It is, in fact, central to the rhetoric of vanishing. On this topic, see the introduction to this volume. 137 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 285. 138 Visite a Bahia www.visiteabahia.com.br/visite/atracoes/esportes/leia_pesca. php?id=1. 2004 (3 December 2009).

Afterword: What Is Left?

cidade acaba com o sertão. Acaba? [towns do away with the sertão. Or will they?] João Guimarães Rosa, Grande sertão: veredas1

A scar running across a face. A group of deserters somewhere in the Chaco. Ruins rising from the center of a lake of oblivion. Memories of a lost world that rise like meaningful fragments. These are signs of what is no longer, of what war has taken away. In short, forms of vanishing. But they can also be manifestations of memory and resistance. They are, yes, spectral forms—but, as with every specter, there is something that is still visible. They are evidence that in the desert construed as peace established at the end of the nineteenth century; there are subtle presences, words, actions, signs, gestures, sometimes nearly imperceptible, that remain irreducible to the conquering logics, resisting them. As Henri Lefebvre has said, “no space vanishes utterly, leaving no trace.”2 These stubborn persistences suggest that this book is not just about war, massacres, and extermination, but also about resistance and endurance. In these last pages, I think of remains in relation to this research: there are new deserts to visit, new journeys to embark on.

Looking at Rubble In this context of annihilation and erasure, The Desertmakers has focused on the way these four narrators look incessantly backward, even as they are dragged forward by progress, which assumes the form of war. Of course, I think here of Walter Benjamin’s well-known image of the angel of progress in his ninth thesis. According to Benjamin, A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees

268  Afterword: What Is Left? one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.3 These travelers, as we have seen, look back at modes of production and cultural practices that are becoming less and less visible, while war makes visible―that is, appropriable, readable―those frontier territories that the state finds utterly mysterious and alien. The four authors use different tones to represent those worlds that are being swallowed by fog―while another fog dissipates before the gaze of the state. We have seen Francisco Pascasio Moreno’s uncanny narrative in his repeated trips to Patagonia before, during, and after the Conquest of the Desert, which cloaks the violence and refers to the living indigenous peoples as spectral beings, construing them as part of the past in each encounter; the tragic view of Euclides da Cunha, who perceives the massacred rebels as compatriots even as he recounts their disappearance; the nostalgia of William Henry Hudson, who problematically romanticizes premodern times as being happy and fundamentally free (and definitely gone); and the ambivalence of Richard Francis Burton, who admires the rebellious “backward” Paraguayan people “doomed” to vanish. The inevitability or necessity of disappearance: this is a crucial point of agreement among the four authors, one that springs, perhaps, from the irresistible power of the idea of progress, whose current, toward the end of the nineteenth century, towed nearly everybody along with it. Despite the variety of ways the narratives grapple with describing the death of a population, they all share the conviction that death is inevitable. Or rather was inevitable, since the writing comes after the fact, when destruction has already been wreaked. War is, in these texts, an agent of that disappearance, which could also be called “genocide”. This is why I have spoken here of rhetorics of vanishing. In relation to this idea, the Benjamin passage is particularly relevant: the gazes of Hudson, Burton, Euclides, and Moreno remain—for very different reasons—fixed on the past even as they embrace progress as inevitable. This is why these travels have been read in The Desertmakers as journeys through remains, through ruins. They are an effort to survey the remains, the traces of the massacre, a massacre that, furthermore, becomes tangible, for the first time and with remarkable power, in what it has left behind. It is before that pile of wreckage that rises to the heavens, as Benjamin puts it, that the travelers pause. The traveler’s gaze, then, observes not exactly the battle but those things that continue to evoke it and make it present.

Afterword: What Is Left?  269

Deserters: Before and After the Battlefield What would it be like to look at war in terms of the figure of the deserter and his rejection of war? An essay that grappled—in these same texts or in others—with scenes of abandoning war could shed light on the state’s war-making logic from a new angle. These might be journeys away from the battlefield rather than toward or around it: rather than tirelessly pursuing the war, as Burton does, they would flee from it. As in the four journeys this book examines, war would produce new forms of not returning, of deviating. The deserter is someone who returns without having arrived. His desertion is an act of self-expulsion and is generally an intimate, solitary act, a reaffirmation of personal convictions or strengths over compulsory institutional or national loyalties. But this act of renunciation and of freedom may also bring about new encounters. Indeed, the passage from Richard Burton quoted at the end of Chapter 1 led to the compilation of Los conjurados del Quilombo del Gran Chaco (2001), which contains short stories contributed by Augusto Roa Bastos, Alejandro Maciel, Omar Prego, and Eric Nepomuceno (one writer from each of the countries that participated in the Paraguayan War).4 The book has to do with a utopian community whose historical existence was never confirmed. By participating in this project, Roa Bastos ends the narrative begun by Burton: not just by taking what is no more than a passing reference in Burton and stretching it out, making it productive and resistant (this is also what María Gainza does in her recent El nervio óptico), but also by taking Burton where the nineteenth-century traveler himself did not want or was unable to go in his Letters. In Roa’s novel El fiscal, Burton appears as a fictional character who encounters Solano López. So, here Burton finally reaches the war rather than merely witnessing the devastated battlefields that it leaves behind.5 And at last he is able to look, to understand. In a way, then, Roa Bastos finally leads Burton’s book to two destinations that remain elusive in it: in Letters, Burton never centers his narration on the desertions that empty the war, and he stops short of representing the actual fighting.

Shouting as Silencing How would these four travelers be viewed from the masculinist, warrior-­ like, and adventurer’s perspective of Theodore Roosevelt? Like the Burton chapter, the chapter on Moreno ends with the beginning of another journey, one that is related to all four writers examined here. In Through the Brazilian Wilderness (1914), Roosevelt recounts his journey through the Brazilian sertão and Amazon region.6 These travels take him close to territories visited by Euclides (who, we should remember, traveled not just the sertão but also the Amazon), though Roosevelt never mentions the Brazilian writer.7 His engagement with Moreno, Burton, and Hudson is more explicit. Roosevelt admired Hudson’s work—so much

270  Afterword: What Is Left? so that he even wrote an introductory note to the very popular 1916 US edition of The Purple Land.8 The Moreno constructed by Roosevelt is an adventurer who has fought a puma and whose scar gives him, in the narrator’s eyes, more authority than his research ever could. In an Appendix to Through the Brazilian Wilderness, titled “The Work of the Field Zoologist and the Field Geographer in South America”, Roosevelt outlines his theory on the types of travelers who can travel to the region’s wilderness. Here, he praises Burton and Hudson’s approaches to travel by putting them in the same category, that of those “who visit the long-settled districts and colonial cities of the interior, travelling over land or river highways which have been traversed for centuries but which are still primitive as regards the inns and the modes of conveyance”.9 What’s more, he has Moreno correct Hudson: “The doctor … stated to me that he had known Mr. Hudson, the author of ‘Naturalist on the Plata’ [sic], and that the latter knew nothing whatever of pumas from personal experience and had accepted as facts utterly wild fables.”10 The scientist and explorer is now, along with Roosevelt himself, a man of action, a born adventurer. One last image—a bizarre one, to be sure—is of Moreno and Roosevelt’s trip to Nahuel Huapi (see Figure 16). The absurdity began even before they met: Moreno sent Roosevelt a gift of Mylodon dung.11 Probably intrigued by this remarkable offering, Roosevelt traveled to the Nahuel Huapi region, where he met the Argentine. Two of Moreno’s biographers, Ygobone and Hosne, describe—quite hyperbolically—the moment when a crowd of indigenous people supposedly greet Moreno’s

Figure 16  “  Colonel Roosevelt and Dr. Moreno with Four Argentine Indians”, by Frank Harper.12

Afterword: What Is Left?  271 arrival. Inspired by this show of respect and eminence, Roosevelt responds enthusiastically, emitting a stereotypical Indian war whoop. Ygobone’s strident account is worth quoting in its entirety: It could be said that [at Moreno’s arrival] the crowd of Indians feel electrified, and in a sublime outburst of their rough soul, which indicates friendship and devoted submissiveness, would be capable of giving their lives for their esteemed protector. … As the glade echoes, one and a hundred times, with the sacred name, and the enthusiasm reaches a fever pitch, Theodore Roosevelt, who has been intently observing the scene, lets out the cry of the redskins, whose shared racial origins, lost though they may be in the darkness of time, serve as a symbol of brotherhood between the peoples of the two Americas. And the redskins’ cry, which has just boomed from the president’s lips, signals a fraternal greeting sent by the North American far west to Argentina’s remote south.12 There are two interesting operations at play here: first, the grouping together of all indigenous tribes, regardless of their specific cultural characteristics, their origins, or the vast distance between their geographical locations; second, Roosevelt appearing as a ventriloquist who appropriates, distorts, and silences the indigenous voice, shouting something that was no doubt unintelligible to everyone who heard it. Ygobone constructs Roosevelt’s whoop as a strand linking the two frontiers. In reality, what this text—written during the dictatorship and participating in the regime’s efforts to valorize the Conquest of the Desert—does not include are the other cries hidden behind the two extermination campaigns that this performance brings together. Roosevelt’s ridiculous shout thereby contributes simultaneously to the silencing and the exposing of indigenous subjugation in Argentina (and the USA).

Vanishings, Disappearances, Desertifications Moreno refers in his texts to the indigenous populations as being on the verge of disappearing (he says precisely that: the tribes are “close to disappearing” [Reminiscencias, p. 33]). This vanishing is the product of Moreno’s gaze, full of anticipatory desire, as we have seen: just as he describes the indigenous people as something like living dead, he also describes nature as having already been produced. David Viñas used the term “disappeared” again in 1982, now with more immediate and macabre connotations. As we have seen, his important musing “were the Indians the disappeared of 1879?”13 was a fundamental denunciation of a systematic war of extermination against the indigenous people who had been glorified by the dictatorship that was then in the process of collapsing and had itself systematically eliminated thousands of people.

272  Afterword: What Is Left? Viñas’s analysis was recently employed again in another context. “The difference between this museum and ESMA [Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, or Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics] is that here everything was recorded”, says Xavier Kriscautsky.15 But, contrary to what happened at ESMA, an infamous center of detention, torture, and disappearances during the last military dictatorship in Argentina, which is now a Museum of Memory, at the La Plata Museum that record has been hidden; it is only present as a silence, as a void. When I arrived in La Plata in 2009, I found nothing. Even before I visited the museum, I’d been informed that the correspondence notebooks for the period when Moreno was museum director were “not available for consultation”. Neither was the photographic archive, which was supposedly undergoing some kind of cataloging process. The archivist recommended that I look at his doctoral dissertation, since he had been able to access those documents. I could sense that my search for documentation produced a certain unease, put the museum staff “on guard”. I was allowed only a fleeting look at the Sala Moreno (the t­ raveler-director’s former office), of which I was not permitted to take any photos. Among the objects in the room was a photograph of Moreno with a group of indigenous men. He was pointing toward the horizon, showing them the direction to go in, directing them. Was he maybe pointing them toward the ranches where they could find work? On my visit, I was unable to locate the bones I had read about. I was aware that the museum had been compared to ESMA, but it was not clear what the effects of the comparison had been. The elderly museum guard who accompanied me to Perito’s desk told me that those remains were no longer around because “people” had started comparing the museum to ESMA. A large movement had begun, bringing together a number of social activists, and the government had listened.16 The museum had returned the trophies of war to the indigenous communities, to be taken back to their lands of origin. Upon arriving at the museum, then, I found yet another desert. This time, however, it was not the result of war but instead the outcome of a social and political movement that in some small—but significant—measure helped remedy war’s destructive force. I am pleased to be able to narrate at last, after so much discussion of deviation and disorientation, a possible return, an arrival that is in some way complete, a desirable desertification.

Notes 1 João Guimarães Rosa, Grande sertão: veredas [1956] (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1968), p. 129. João Guimarães Rosa, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, trans. James L. Taylor and Harriet de Onís (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), p. 140. 2 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 164. 3 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Press, 1969), pp. 257–58.

Afterword: What Is Left?  273 4 Augusto Roa Bastos et al., Los conjurados del Quilombo del Gran Chaco. 5 On Roa Bastos’s rewriting of Burton’s work, see Ana Inés Larre Borges, “El regreso de Burton en Roa, o el otro viaje de la escritura”, Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional 4, no. 6–7 (2012): 63–83; and Leila Gómez, “Viaje a los campos de batalla: Augusto Roa Bastos y la Guerra de la Triple Alianza”, MLN 125, no. 2 (2010): 305–25. 6 Theodore Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness (London: John Murray, 1914). The journey also included his visit to Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, and Chile, which makes it particularly interesting in the context of this corpus. Nevertheless, in Through the Brazilian Wilderness the references to those four countries are only fleeting and general. 7 Roosevelt traveled to the Amazon together with Marshal Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, who led numerous expeditions to the Brazilian interior and who had studied with Euclides at the Praia Vermelha Military School. 8 In his introduction, Roosevelt proposes himself as the ideal reader of The Purple Land: “To cultivated men who love life in the open, and possess a taste for the adventurous and the picturesque, they [Hudson’s writings] stand in a place for themselves.” Roosevelt performs an interesting misreading of Hudson, and especially of the book in question. In their understandings of nature and of what Roosevelt called “wilderness”, among other issues, the two men couldn’t disagree more (Theodore Roosevelt, “An Introductory Note”, in W. H. Hudson, The Purple Land: Being the Narrative of One Richard Lamb’s Adventures in the Banda Orientál, in South America, as Told by Himself [New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1916], pp. ix–xx [at pp. ix–xx]). 9 Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, p. 344. Roosevelt goes on to explain that these travelers “can give us most interesting and valuable information about quaint little belated cities; about backward country folk, kindly or the reverse, who show a mixture of the ideas of savagery with the ideas of an ancient peasantry; and about rough old highways of travel which in comfort do not differ much from those of mediaeval Europe. The travellers who go up or down the highway rivers that have been travelled for from one to four hundred years—rivers like the Paraguay and Paraná, the Amazon, the Tapajos, the Madeira, the lower Orinoco—come in this category. They can add little to our geographical knowledge; but if they are competent zoologists and archaeologists, especially if they live or sojourn long in a locality, their work may be invaluable from the scientific standpoint. … What Agassiz did for the fishes of the Amazon and what Hudson did for the birds of the Argentine are other instances of the work that can thus be done. Burton’s writings on the interior of Brazil offer an excellent instance of the value of a sojourn or tip of this type, even without any especial scientific object.” (p. 344). Gabriela Nouzeilles has looked at Moreno in terms of Roosevelt’s theory of travel, a perspective I find particularly interesting: “The travel books of Louis Agassiz, William H. Hudson, and Richard Burton are, Roosevelt insists, accounts that exemplify this kind of travel [going to remote places and enduring discomforts]” (Nouzeilles, “El retorno de lo primitivo”, p. 165). 10 Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, p. 28. It seems highly unlikely that Moreno ever met Hudson, but the suggestion is nonetheless fascinating. 11 Hosne, Francisco Moreno, p. 208. 12 The caption continues: “The Indians now remaining are, like our own Indians, fast becoming civilized, and there are but few now left in their savage state. Indeed, the Indian on abandoning paganism drops the title ‘Indian’ and calls himself in contrast ‘Christian’!” (The Outlook. A Weekly Newspaper 107 [New York: The Outlook Company, May–August 1914], at p. 182).

274  Afterword: What Is Left? 13 Ygobone, Francisco Moreno, pp. 341–42. 14 Viñas, Indios, ejército y frontera, p. 12. 15 Daniel Badenes, “Trofeos de guerra”, Archivo Chile: Historia político-­ social – Movimiento popular, www.archivochile.com/Chile_actual/02_ pueb_orig/chact_po0119.pdf (4 December 2018). 16 This is a social movement that is still very active today. One of the collectives working on the restitution of indigenous remains is the Colectivo GUIAS (Grupo Universitario de Investigación en Antropología Social, or University Research Group in Social Anthropology). Two of its members are Fernando Miguel Pepe and Marcelo Valko. In 2016, the La Plata Museum was still ­returning indigenous remains to their communities of origin. See, for example, “Ahora el Museo devuelve restos de cuatro indios onas: regresan a Tierra del Fuego”, El Día (9 March 2016) www.eldia.com/informacion-general/­ ahora-el-museo-devuelve-restos-de-cuatro-indios-onas-regresan-a-tierradel-fuego-120765 (24 December 2016). More information on this group’s research and achievements can be found on their blog, http://­colectivoguias. blogspot.it/. See also Colectivo GUIAS, Antropología del genocidio. Identificación y restitución: “colecciones” de restos humanos en el Museo de La Plata (La Plata: De la Campana, 2010).

Bibliography

“Absurdo tributo a un dictador”. La Nacion.com, 6 December 2007, www. lanacion.com.ar/968480-absurdo-tributo-a-un-dictador (accessed 21 July 2011). Acevedo Díaz, Eduardo. Ismael. Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1982. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. “Ahora el Museo devuelve restos de cuatro indios onas: regresan a Tierra del Fuego”. El Día, 9 March 2016, www.eldia.com/informacion-general/­ahorael-museo-devuelve-restos-de-cuatro-indios-onas-regresan-a-tierra-delfuego-120765 (accessed 24 December 2016). Altamirano, Carlos. “El orientalismo y la idea del despotismo en el Facundo”. In Ensayos argentinos. De Sarmiento a la vanguardia, edited by Carlos Altamirano and Beatriz Sarlo. Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1997, pp. 83–102. Amante, Adriana. “Sarmiento el boletinero: del diario de campaña al libro de v­ istas y paisajes”. In Historia crítica de la literatura argentina. Volumen IV. Sarmiento, edited by Adriana Amante. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2012, pp. 181–212. Andermann, Jens. “Total Recall: Texts and Corpses, the Museums of Argentinian Narrative”. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 6, 1 (1997): 21–32. ———. “Evidencias y ensueños: el gabinete del Dr. Moreno”. Filología, XXXI, 1–2 (1998): 57–66. ———. Mapas de poder. Una arqueología literaria del espacio argentino. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2000. ———. “El sur profundo: geografía, paisaje y conquista en la Campaña del Desierto”. ESTUDIOS. Revista de investigaciones literarias y culturales, 8, 16 (2000): 105–27. ———. “Fronteras: la conquista del desierto y la economía de la violencia”. In Ficciones y silencios fundacionales. Literaturas y culturas poscoloniales en América Latina (siglo XIX), edited by Friedhelm Schmidt-Welle. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2003, pp. 117–35. ———. The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. [1983] London: Verso, 2006. Anderson, Mark D. “From Natural to National Disasters: Drought and the Brazilian Subject in Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões”. Hispania, 91, 3 (2008): 547–57. Areces, Nidia R. Estado y frontera en el Paraguay. Concepción durante el gobierno del Dr. Francia. Asunción: Universidad Católica “Nuestra Señora de la Asunción”, 1988.

276 Bibliography Ares Pons, Roberto. El Paraguay del siglo XIX. Un estado socialista. Montevideo: Nuevo Mundo, 1987. Arocena, Felipe. De Quilmes a Hyde Park. Las fronteras culturales en la vida y la obra de W. H. Hudson. Montevideo: Banda Oriental, 2000. Authorised Version of the English Bible. 1611. Edited by William Aldis Wright, Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909. Auza, Néstor Tomás. “La ocupación del espacio vacío: de la frontera interior a la frontera exterior. 1876–1910”. In La Argentina del Ochenta al Centenario, edited by Gustavo Ferrari and Ezequiel Gallo. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1980, pp. 61–89. Avellaneda, Nicolás. “Carta-prólogo a Actualidad Financiera de la República Argentina, de Álvaro Barros”. In Proyecto y construcción de una nación (1846–1880), edited by Tulio Halperín Donghi. Buenos Aires: Ariel/­E spasaCalpe, 1995, pp. 499–501. Badenes, Daniel. “Trofeos de guerra”, Archivo Chile: Historia político-social – Movimiento popular, www.archivochile.com/Chile_actual/02_pueb_orig/ chact_po0119.pdf (accessed 4 December 2018). Bandieri, Susana. “Ampliando las fronteras: la ocupación de la Patagonia”. In Nueva historia argentina. Tomo V. El progreso, la modernización y sus límites (1880–1916), edited by Mirta Zaida Lobato. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2000, pp. 119–77. ———. Historia de la Patagonia. [2005] Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2009. Barnabé, Jean-Philippe. “Días de ocio en la Banda Oriental”. In William Henry Hudson y La tierra purpúrea. Reflexiones desde Montevideo, edited by Beatriz Vegh and Jean-Philippe Barnabé. Montevideo: Universidad de la República/Linardi y Risso, 2005, pp. 187–98. Barrán, José Pedro. Historia de la sensibilidad en el Uruguay. Tomo 1. La cultura “bárbara” (1800–1860). Montevideo: Banda Oriental/Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias, 1989. ———. Historia de la sensibilidad en el Uruguay. Tomo 2. El disciplinamiento (1860–1920). Montevideo: Banda Oriental/Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias, 1990. ———. Historia uruguaya. Tomo 4. 1839–1875. Apogeo y crisis del Uruguay pastoril y caudillesco. [1974] Montevideo: Banda Oriental, 2007. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Bartkowski, Frances. Travelers, Immigrants, Inmates. Essays in Estrangement. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Bartolomé, Miguel. “Antropología de las fronteras en América Latina”. AmeriQuests, 2, 1. http://ejournals.library.vanderbilt.edu/ojs/index.php/­ameriquests/ article/viewFile/41/30 (12 January 2016). Beckman, Ericka. Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Bell, David A. The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It. Boston, MA: Mariner Books, 2008. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Hanna Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Shocken Press, 1969.

Bibliography  277 ———. “Excavation and Memory”. In Selected Writings, Vol. 2. (1931–1934), edited by Marcus Paul Bullock et al. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 576. ———. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. [1928] Translated by John Osborne. London: Verso, 1998. Bernucci, Leopoldo M. A imitação dos sentidos. Prógonos, contemporâneos e epígonos de Euclides da Cunha. São Paulo: Edusp, 1995. ———. “Prefácio”. In Euclides da Cunha. Os sertões (Campanha de Canudos). Edited by Leopoldo M. Bernucci. São Paulo: Ateliê Editorial, 2001, pp. 13–49. Bertoni, Lilia Ana. Patriotas, cosmopolitas y nacionalistas. La construcción de la nacionalidad argentina. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001. Bethell, Leslie. The Paraguayan War (1864–1870). London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1996. Biedma, Juan Martín. Crónica histórica del lago Nahuel Huapi. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1987. Bilgrami, Akeel. “Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on the Enlightenment and Enchantment”. 3 Quarks Daily, 8 September 2008, http://3quarksdaily. blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2008/09/occidentalism-t.html (accessed 15 December 2013). Blengino, Vanni. Il vallo della Patagonia. I nuovi conquistatori: militari, scenziati, sacerdoti, scrittori. Reggio Emilia: Databasis, 2003. Bolle, Willi. grandesertão.br. O romance de formação do Brasil. São Paulo: Duas Cidades/Editora 34, 2004. Borges, Jorge Luis. “About The Purple Land”. [1941] In Borges, A Reader. A Selection from the Writings of Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Alastair Reid. New York: Dutton, 1981, pp. 136–39. ———. “La tierra cárdena”. In El tamaño de mi esperanza. [1926] Buenos ­A ires: Seix Barral, 1993, pp. 33–37. ———. “The Translators of a Thousand and One Nights”. [1936] Translated by Esther Allen. In Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger. New York: Penguin Classics, 1999, pp. 92–109. ———. “Nota sobre La tierra purpúrea”. [1941] In Textos recobrados. 1931– 1955. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2001, pp. 186–88. Bosi, Alfredo. Literatura e resistência. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2002, pp. 209–20. Botana, Natalio. El orden conservador: la política argentina entre 1880 y 1916. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1994. Botana, Natalio, and Ezequiel Gallo. De la república posible a la república verdadera: 1880–1910. Buenos Aires: Ariel/Espasa Calpe, 1997. Box, Pelham Horton. Los orígenes de la Guerra de la Triple Alianza. [1927] Translated by Pablo Max Ynsfrán. Buenos Aires: Nizza, 1958. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Bridges, Roy. “Exploration and Travel outside Europe (1720–1914)”. In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 53–69. Brito Broca, José. A vida literária no Brasil: 1900. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1960.

278 Bibliography Brizuela, Natalia. Fotografia e Império. Paisagens para um Brasil moderno. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras/Instituto Moreira Salles, 2012. Brodie, Fawn M. The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton. [1967] London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1984. Burton, Richard Francis. The City of the Saints and Across the Rocky ­Mountains to California. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1862. ———. Explorations of the Highlands of the Brazil; with a Full Account of the Gold and Diamond Mines. Also, Canoeing Down 1500 Miles of the Great River São Francisco, from Sabará to the Sea. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1869. ———. Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1870. Bushnell, David. “The Independence of Spanish South America”. In The Independence of Latin America, edited by Leslie Bethell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 95–154. Caballero, Herib, Mabel Causarano, et al. Más allá de la guerra. Aportes para el debate contemporáneo. Asunción: Secretaría Nacional de Cultura, 2016. Cain, P. J., and A. G. Hopkins. “The Political Economy of British Expansion Overseas, 1750–1914”. The Economic History Review, New Series, 33, 4 (1980): 463–90. ———. “Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas II: New Imperialism, 1850–1945”. The Economic History Review, New Series, 40, 1 (1987): 1–26. Calasans, José. “Os jagunços de Canudos”. Caravelle. Cahiers du monde hispanique et luso-brésilien, 15 (1970): 31–38. Cancogni, Manlio, and Ivan Boris. Il Napoleone del Plata. Milan: Rizzoli, 1970. Capdevila, Luc. Une guerre totale. Paraguay 1864–1870. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007. Capela, Carlos Eduardo Schmidt. “Euclides e a escritura em ruínas”. In Ruinologias. Ensaios sobre destroços do presente, edited by Ana Luiza Andrade, Rodrigo Lopes de Barros, and Carlos Eduardo Schmidt Capela. Florianópolis: Editora UFSC, 2016, pp. 289–336. Cardozo, Efraim. Urquiza y la Guerra del Paraguay. Buenos Aires: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1967. Carvalho, Bruno. Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. Carvalho, José Murilo de. “As forças armadas na Primeira República: o poder desestabilizador”. In História geral da civilização brasileira. Tomo III. O Brasil Republicano, 2 Volume, Sociedade e Instituições (1889–1930), edited by Boris Fausto. Rio de Janeiro: DIFEL, 1978, pp. 181–234. ———. The Formation of Souls. Imagery of the Republic in Brazil. [1990] Translated by Clifford E. Landers. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. ———. Os bestializados: o Rio de Janeiro e a República que não foi. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1987. Casal, Juan Manuel. “Uruguay and the Paraguayan War. The Military Dimension”. In I Die with My Country. Perspectives on the Paraguayan War, 1864–1870, edited by Hendrik Kraay and Thomas L. Whigham. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004, pp. 119–39.

Bibliography  279 Casey, Edward. Getting Back into Place. Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World, Second Ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Castro-Klarén, Sara. “In-forming the Body of Man in the Caatinga”. The Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies, 3 (2005): 99–116. ———. “Cámac y la memoria emocionada: entrecruces de William Henry Hudson y José María Arguedas”. In Entre Borges y Conrad. Estética y territorio en William Henry Hudson, edited by Leila Gómez and Sara Castro-Klarén. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2012, pp. 351–65. Centeno, Miguel Angel. Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. Chiavenato, Julio José. Genocídio americano. A Guerra do Paraguai. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1979. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Coelho, Alexandra Prado. “Entrevista. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: ‘Gostaria que o Museu Nacional permanecesse como ruína, memória das coisas mortas’”. Público, 4 September 2018, www.publico.pt/2018/09/04/ culturaipsilon/entrevista/eduardo-viveiros-de-castro-gostaria-que-o-museunacional-­p ermanecesse-como-ruina-memoria-das-coisas-mortas-1843021 (accessed 4 September 2018). Colectivo GUIAS. Antropología del Genocidio. Identificación y restitución: “colecciones” de restos humanos en el Museo de La Plata. La Plata: De la Campana, 2010. Colectivo GUIAS. Grupo Universitario de Investigación en Antropología Social. http://colectivoguias.blogspot.it (accessed 25 December 2016). Conrad, Joseph. Nostromo. [1904] Edited by Ruth Nadelhaft. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1997. ———. Heart of Darkness. [1899] Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & ­Company, 1916. ———. Letters to R.B. Cunninghame Graham, edited by Cedric Thomas Watts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Conselheiro, Antônio. Apontamentos dos preceitos da divina lei de nosso senhor Jesus Cristo, para a salvação dos homens. Edited by Pedro Lima Vasconcellos. São Paulo: É Realizações, 2017. Corominas, Joan. Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana. Madrid: Gredos, 1967. Coronil, Fernando. “Smelling Like a Market”. The American Historical Review, 106, 1 (2001): 119–29. Costa, Wilma Peres. A espada de Dâmocles: o exército, a Guerra do Paraguai e a crise do império. São Paulo: Hucitec/Unicamp, 1996. Costa Herrera, Luis. Un viaje por “La tierra purpúrea”. Montevideo: Ediciones M, 1952. Cotelo, Ruben. “El libro que Inglaterra perdió”. [1992] In W. H. Hudson. La Tierra Purpúrea. Montevideo: Banda Oriental, 1999, pp. 5–22. Crespo, Horacio, Juan Manuel Palacio, and Guillermo Palacios, eds. La guerra del Paraguay. Historiografías. Representaciones. Contextos. Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2012. “Cristina Fernández anuncia devolución de trofeos de guerra a Paraguay”. UPI Español. Cien años de excelencia periodística, 16 August 2013. http://

280 Bibliography espanol.upi.com/Politica/2013/08/16/Cristina-Fern%C3%A1ndez-anuncia-­ devoluci%C3%B3n-de-trofeos-de-guerra-a-Paraguay/UPI-21771376636880 ­(accessed 10 December 2013). Cuarterolo, Miguel Ángel. Soldados de la memoria: imágenes y hombres de la Guerra del Paraguay. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2000. Cunha, Euclides da. Os sertões (Campanha de Canudos). Rio de Janeiro: ­Laemmert & C. Editores, 1902. ———. “Entre as ruínas”. In Contrastes e confrontos. [1907] Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1975, pp. 192–97. ———. “Fazedores de desertos”. [1901] In Contrastes e confrontos. [1907] Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1975, pp. 186–91. ———. Correspondência de Euclides da Cunha. Edited by Walnice Nogueira Galvão and Oswaldo Galotti. São Paulo: Edusp, 1997. ———. À margem da história. [1909] São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1999. ———. Os sertões (Campanha de Canudos). [1902] Edited by Leopoldo M. Bernucci. São Paulo: Ateliê Editorial, 2001. ———. The Amazon. Land without History. Edited by Lúcia Sá, translated by Ronald Sousa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———. Canudos. Diário de uma expedição. [1939] São Paulo: Martin Claret, 2006. ———. Poesia reunida. Edited by Leopoldo M. Bernucci and Francisco Foot Hardman. São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2009. ———. Backlands. The Canudos Campaign. Translated by Elizabeth Lowe. New York: Penguin Books, 2010. Dabove, Juan Pablo. Nightmares of the Lettered City. Banditry and Literature in Latin America. 1816–1929. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. ———. Bandit Narratives in Latin America. From Villa to Chávez. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. Dawes, James. The Language of War. Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Decca, Edgar Salvadori de. “Literatura em ruínas ou as ruínas da literatura?” In Memória e (res)sentimento. Indagações sobre uma questão sensível, edited by Stella Bresciani and Márcia Naxara. Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 2004, pp. 149–73. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Degiovanni, Fernando. Vernacular Latin Americanisms. War, the Market, and the Making of a Discipline. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. De la Fuente, Ariel. “Federalism and Opposition to the Paraguayan War in the Argentine Interior: La Rioja, 1865–67”. In I Die with My Country. Perspectives on the Paraguayan War, 1864–1870, edited by Hendrik Kraay and Thomas L. Whigham. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004, pp. 140–53. De la Pedraja, René. Wars of Latin America, 1899–1941. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2006. DeLay, Brian. War of a Thousand Deserts. Indian Raids and the US-Mexican War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. [1980] Translated by Brian Masumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Bibliography  281 Díaz, Roberto Ignacio. Unhomely Rooms: Foreign Tongues and Spanish American Literature. Lewisburgh: Bucknell University Press, 2002. Díaz-Duhalde, Sebastián. La última guerra. Cultura visual de la Guerra contra Paraguay. Barcelona: Sans Soleil, 2015. Di Tella, Andrés. El país del diablo. Secretaría de Cultura de la Nación, 2007. ———. “Ruins in the Desert: Field Notes by a Filmmaker”. In Telling Ruins in Latin America, edited by Michael J. Lazzara and Vicky Unruh. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 87–94. Doratioto, Francisco. Maldita guerra: nova história da Guerra do Paraguai. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2002. Duncan Baretta, Silvio R., and John Markoff. “Civilization and Barbarism: Cattle Frontiers in Latin America”. In States of Violence, edited by Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006, pp. 33–80. Elden, Stuart. Understanding Henri Lefebvre. Theory and the Possible. London: Continuum, 2004. English Online Etymology Dictionary. www.etymonline.com/index.php? term=desert (accessed 1 May 2015). Ernout, Alfred, and A. Millet. Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine; histoire des mots. [1932] Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1952. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Faoro, Raymundo. Os donos do poder. Formação do patronato político brasileiro. 2. [1959] Porto Alegre: Globo; São Paulo, Edições da Universidade de São Paulo, 1975. Farwell, Byron. Burton. A Biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton. London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1963. Fernández Bravo, Álvaro. Literatura y frontera. Procesos de territorialización en las culturas argentina y chilena del siglo XIX. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana/Universidad de San Andrés, 1999. ———. “La atracción de lo distante: la obra de Hudson como catálogo y museo”. In Entre Borges y Conrad. Estética y territorio en William Henry Hudson, edited by Leila Gómez and Sara Castro-Klarén. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2012, pp. 195–223. Fernández Retamar, Roberto. “Cuba defendida”. In Cuba defendida. Buenos Aires: Nuestra América, 2004, pp. 199–228. Ferns, H. S. Britain and Argentina in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Arno, 1977. Ferrari, Gustavo, and Ezequiel Gallo, eds. La Argentina del ochenta al centenario. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1980. Finazzi-Agrò, Ettore. “‘Como se extingue o deserto’. O vazio da Origem e a invenção da Forma na história literária brasileira”. Tempo brasileiro, 177 (2009): 5–24. Fornos Peñalba, José Alfredo. “Draft Dodgers, War Resisters and Turbulent Gauchos: The War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay”. The Americas, 38, 4 (1982): 463–79. Foucault, Michel. “Space, Knowledge, and Power”. In The Foucault Reader,  edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 239–56.

282 Bibliography ———. “Of Other Spaces”. [1984] Diacritics, 16, 1 (1986): 22–27. ———. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. [1997] Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003. Franco, Jean. “William Henry Hudson”. In William Henry Hudson. La tierra purpúrea - Allá lejos y hace tiempo. Translated by Idea Vilariño. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1980, pp. ix–xlv. ———. “A Not So Romantic Journey. British Travelers to South America, 1818–28”. [1979] In Critical Passions. Selected Essays, edited by Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999, pp. 133–46. French, Jennifer L. Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2005. ———. “Martin Decoud in the Afterlife: A Dialogue with Latin American Writers”. Conradiana, 40, 3 (2008): 247–65. Gainza, María. El nervio óptico. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2017. Gallagher, John, and Ronald Robinson. “The Imperialism of Free Trade”. The Economic History Review, Second Series, VI, 1 (1953): 1–15. Gallo, Ezequiel, and Roberto Cortés Conde. La República conservadora. [1972] Buenos Aires: Hyspamérica, 1986. Galvão, Walnice Nogueira. No calor da hora. A Guerra de Canudos nos jornais. 4ta expedição. São Paulo: Ática, 1974. ———. Saco de gatos. Ensaios críticos. São Paulo: Duas Cidades / Secretaria da Cultura, Ciência e Tecnologia do Estado de São Paulo, 1976, pp. 65–85. ———. “Os sertões: uma análise literária”. In Canudos, as falas e os olhares, edited by Diatahy B. de Menezes and João Arruda. Fortaleza: UFCE, 1995, pp. 23–30. Gárate, Miriam. “Argirópolis, Canudos y las favelas. Un ensayo de lectura comparada”. Revista Iberoamericana, LXIII, no. 181 (1997): 621–30. ———. Civilização e barbárie n’Os sertões. Entre Domingo Faustino Sarmiento e Euclides da Cunha. São Paulo: Fapesp/Mercado de Letras, 2001. Gillespie, Diane F. “‘The Bird Is the Word’: Virginia Woolf and W.H. Hudson, Visionary Ornithologist”. In Virginia Woolf and the Natural World, edited by Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman. Liverpool University Press, 2011, pp. 133–42. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1gn6c4h.21. Ginsberg, Robert. The Aesthetics of Ruins. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Godsall, Jon R. The Tangled Web: A Life of Sir Richard Burton. Leicester: Matador, 2008. Gómez, Leila. Iluminados y tránsfugas. Relatos de viajeros y ficciones nacionales en Argentina, Paraguay y Perú. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2009. ———. “Viaje a los campos de batalla: Augusto Roa Bastos y la Guerra de la Triple Alianza”. MLN, 125, 2 (2010): 305–25. ———, ed. Darwinism in Argentina: Major Texts (1845–1909). Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2012. Gordillo, Gastón R. Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

Bibliography  283 Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton, 1981. Graham, Richard. Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil. 1850– 1914. London: Cambridge University Press, 1972. Grant, Ben. Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis, and Burton: Power Play of Empire. New York: Routledge, 2009. Grimson, Alejandro. Fronteras, naciones e identidades. La periferia como centro. Buenos Aires: Cicus-La Crujía, 2000. Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions. The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. Grzegorczyk, Marzena. Private Topographies. Space, Subjectivity, and Political Change in Modern Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Halperín Donghi, Tulio. Historia contemporánea de América Latina. [1967] Madrid: Alianza, 1986. ———. “Una nación para el desierto argentino”. In Proyecto y construcción de una nación (1846–1880), edited by Tulio Halperín Donghi. Buenos Aires: Ariel/Espasa Calpe, 1995, pp. 7–107. ———, ed. Proyecto y construcción de una nación (1846–1880). Buenos Aires: Ariel/Espasa Calpe, 1995. Hardman, Francisco Foot. Trem fantasma: a modernidade na selva. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1988. ———. A vingança da Hileia. Euclides da Cunha, a Amazônia e a literatura moderna. São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2009. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Hernández, José. El Gaucho Martin Fierro/the Gaucho Martin Fierro. Translated by C. E. Ward. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1967. ———. El gaucho Martín Fierro. La vuelta de Martín Fierro. Edited by Luis Sáinz de Medrano. Madrid: Cátedra, 1994. Hernández, Juan Antonio. “Los residuos salvajes: multitud y máquina de guerra en Los sertones de Euclides da Cunha”. Revista Iberoamericana, LXX, 207 (2004): 443–53. Holanda, Lourival. “Os sertões: o nascimento de uma nação”. In Discurso, ciência e controvérsia em Euclides da Cunha, edited by Leopoldo M. Bernucci. São Paulo: Edusp, 2008, pp. 125–40. Holanda, Sérgio Buarque de. Caminhos e fronteiras. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1957. Hosne, Roberto. Francisco Moreno. Una herencia patagónica desperdiciada. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2005. Hudson, William Henry. Idle Days in Patagonia. [1893] New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1917. ———. Far Away and Long Ago. [1918] Introduction by John Galsworthy. London: Everyman’s Library, 1967. ———. The Purple Land: Being the Narrative of One Richard Lamb’s Adventures in the Banda Orientál, in South America, as Told by Himself. [1904] Introduction by Ilan Stavanas. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. ———. The Naturalist in La Plata. [1892] London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1923.

284 Bibliography ———. The Purple Land that England Lost. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1885. 2 vols. ———. W.H. Hudson’s Letters to R.B. Cunninghame Graham with a Few to Cunninghame Graham’s Mother, Mrs. Bontine. London: Golden cockerel Press, 1941. ———. Diario de su viaje a bordo del Ebro. Trans. Virginia Brown and Ana Inés Larre Borges. Intr. Ana Inés Larre Borges. Montevideo: Cal y canto, 2017. Huberman, Ariana. Gauchos and Foreigners: Glossing Culture and Identity in the Argentine Countryside. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013. Hulme, Peter, and Tim Youngs. “Introduction”. In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 1–13. Huyssen, Andreas. “Nostalgia for Ruins”. Grey Room, 23 (2006): 6–21. Irigoyen, Emilio. “El tiempo de una visita, el espacio de un desvío”. In William Henry Hudson y La tierra purpúrea. Reflexiones desde Montevideo, edited by Beatriz Vegh and Jean-Philippe Barnabé. Montevideo: Linardi y Risso, 2005, pp. 79–90. Jagoe, Eva-Lynn Alicia. The End of the World as They Knew It: Writing Experiences of the Argentine South. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press: 2008. Jameson, Fredric. “War and Representation”. PMLA, 124, 5 (2009): 1532–47. Jasanoff, Maya. The Dawn Watch. Joseph Conrad in a Global World. New York: Penguin Press, 2017. Johnson, Adriana Michèle Campos. Sentencing Canudos: Subalternity in the Backlands of Brazil. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2010. Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Kennedy, Dane. The Highly Civilized Man. Richard Burton and the Victorian World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. ———. Review of Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire, by Ben Grant. Victorian Studies, 52, 1 (2009): 125–27. Knight, Alan. “Britain and Latin America”. In The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume III. The Nineteenth Century, edited by Andrew Porter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 122–45. Kohan, Martín. El país de la guerra. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2014. ———. “Paisaje de guerra”. In Entre el humo y la niebla. Guerra y cultura en América Latina, edited by Felipe Martínez-Pinzón and Javier Uriarte. Pittsburgh: IILI, 2016, pp. 99–113. Koivunen, Leila. Visualizing Africa in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Accounts. London: Routledge, 2011. Kraay, Hendrik, and Thomas L. Whigham, eds. I Die with My Country: Perspectives on the Paraguayan War, 1864–1870. Lincoln: University of ­Nebraska Press, 2004. Laera, Alejandra. “Sobre la guerra en el Paraguay (relatos nacionales en las fronteras)”. In Fronteras escritas. Cruces, desvíos y pasajes en la literatura argentina, edited by Graciela Batticuore, Loreley El Jaber, and Alejandra Laera. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2008, pp. 183–213. Larre Borges, Ana Inés. “Prólogo”. In Richard Francis Burton. Cartas desde los campos de batalla del Paraguay. Buenos Aires: Librería “El Foro”, 1998, pp. 14–48.

Bibliography  285 ———. “Fuera de lugar: Hudson y La tierra purpúrea”. In William Henry Hudson y La tierra purpúrea. Reflexiones desde Montevideo, edited by Beatriz Vegh and Jean-Philippe Barnabé. Montevideo: Universidad de la República/ Linardi y Risso, 2005, pp. 29–40. ———. “El regreso de Burton en Roa, o el otro viaje de la escritura”. Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional, Época 3, Año 4, 6–7 (2012): 63–83. Laurent, Christine. Transatlantique. Canal+; Gémini Films; Mandragora Filmes, 1996. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. [1974] Translated by Donald ­Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. ———. Le temps des méprises. sl: Stock, 1975. Leuchars, Chris. To the Bitter End. Paraguay and the War of the Triple Alliance. London: Greenwood Press, 2002. Levine, Robert M. Vale of Tears. Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1893–1897. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Lewis, Colin M. “Britain, the Argentine and Informal Empire: Rethinking the Role of Railway Companies”. In Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture, Commerce and Capital, edited by Matthew Brown. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008, pp. 99–123. Lima, Luiz Costa. Terra ignota. A construção de Os sertões. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1997. ———. “Euclides: ruínas e identidade nacional”. In O clarim e a oração. Cem anos de Os sertões, edited by Rinaldo de Fernandes and Trípoli Francisco Britto Gaudenzi. São Paulo: Geração, 2002, pp. 349–65. Lima, Nísia Trindade. Um sertão chamado Brasil. Intelectuais e representação geográfica da identidade nacional. Rio de Janeiro: IUPERJ/Editora Revan, 1999. Lisboa, Karen Macknow. “Olhares estrangeiros sobre o Brasil do século XIX”. In Viagem incompleta: a experiência brasileira, 1500–2000, edited by Carlos Guilherme Mota. São Paulo: SENAC/SESC, 2000, pp. 264–98. Livon-Grossman, Ernesto. Geografías imaginarias. El relato de viaje y la construcción del espacio patagónico. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2003. Lobato, Mirta, ed. Nueva historia argentina. Tomo 5. El progreso, la modernización y sus límites (1880–1916). Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2000. López-Alves, Fernando. State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 1810–1900. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Louis, W. Roger, ed. Imperialism. The Robinson and Gallagher Controversy. New York: New Viewpoints, 1976. Lovell, Mary S. A Rage to Live: A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. Loveman, Mara. “Blinded Like a State: The Revolt against Civil Registration in Nineteenth-Century Brazil”. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42, 1 (2007): 5–39. Lowenthal, David. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Lynch, John. “The Origins of Spanish American Independence”. In The Independence of Latin America, edited by Leslie Bethell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 1–48. ———. Caudillos in Spanish America. 1800–1850. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

286 Bibliography Maia, João Marcelo Ehlert. A terra como invenção. O espaço no pensamento social brasileiro. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2008. Mann, Michael. States, War, and Capitalism: Studies in Political Sociology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. Mansilla, Lucio V. An Expedition to the Ranquel Indians. [1870] Translated by Mark McCaffrey. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. ———. Una excursión a los indios ranqueles. [1870] Buenos Aires: Agebe, 2006. Márai, Sandor. Veredicto em Canudos. [1970] Translated by Paulo Schiller. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2002. Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel. El mundo maravilloso de Guillermo Enrique Hudson. [1951] Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2001. Martínez-Pinzón, Felipe, and Javier Uriarte, eds. Entre el humo y la niebla. Guerra y cultura en América Latina. Pittsburgh: IILI, 2016. Mases, Enrique Hugo. Estado y cuestión indígena. El destino final de los indios sometidos en el sur del territorio (1878–1930). Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2010. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge, 1994. McLean, David. War, Diplomacy and Informal Empire: Britain and the Republics of La Plata, 1836–1853. London: British Academic Press, 1995. McLynn, Frank. From the Sierras to the Pampas: Richard Burton’s Travels in the Americas. London: Trafalgar Square, 1992. Meade, Teresa. “Civilizing” Rio: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889–1930. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. Mendelevich, Pablo. “Francisco Doratioto: ‘No fuimos víctimas del imperialismo’”. lanacion.com, 6 January 2008, www.lanacion.com.ar/976408-franciscodoratioto-no-fuimos-victimas-del-imperialismo (accessed 26 December 2016). Méndez Vives, Enrique. Historia Uruguaya. Tomo 5. 1876–1904. El Uruguay de la modernización. [1975] Montevideo: Banda Oriental, 1987. Miller, David. W. H. Hudson and the Elusive Paradise. London: Macmillan, 1990. Molloy, Sylvia. “De exhibiciones y despojos: reflexiones sobre el patrimonio nacional a principios del siglo XX”. In El salto de Minerva. Intelectuales, género y Estado en América Latina, edited by Mabel Moraña and María Rosa ­Olivera-Williams. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2005, pp. 143–55. ———. Vivir entre lenguas. Buenos Aires: Eterna cadencia, 2015. Moniz Bandeira, Luiz Alberto de Vianna. O expansionismo brasileiro: o papel do Brasil na Bacia do Plata. Rio de Janeiro: Philobiblion, 1985. Montaldo, Graciela. De pronto, el campo. Literatura argentina y tradición rural. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 1993. ———. “Espacio y nación”. Estudios. Revista de Investigaciones Literarias, 3, 5 (1995): 5–17. ———. “Nuestro Oriente es Europa”. In Cultura y Tercer Mundo. 2. Nuevas identidades y ciudadanías, edited by Néstor García Canclini and Beatriz González Stephan. Caracas: Nueva Sociedad, 1996, pp. 201–20. ———. Ficciones culturales y fábulas de identidad en América Latina. [1999] Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2004.

Bibliography  287 Monteiro, Duglas Teixeira. “Um confronto entre Juazeiro, Canudos e Contestado”. In História geral da civilização brasileira. Tomo III. O Brasil Republicano, 2 Volume, Sociedade e Instituições (1889–1930), edited by Boris Fausto. Rio de Janeiro: DIFEL, 1978, pp. 39–92. Moreno, Francisco P. Viaje a la Patagonia austral. Emprendido bajo los auspicios del gobierno nacional. 1876–1877. Tomo Primero. Buenos Aires: Imprenta de la Nación, 1879. ———. Reminiscencias del Perito Moreno. [1942] Versión propia. Recopilada por Eduardo V. Moreno. Buenos Aires: El Elefante Blanco, 1997. ———. Viaje a la Patagonia austral. [1879] Buenos Aires: El Elefante Blanco, 2003. ———. Apuntes preliminares sobre una excursión al Neuquén, Río Negro, Chubut y Santa Cruz. [1897] Buenos Aires: El Elefante Blanco, 2004. Museo de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo. “Inacayal: líder tehuelche”, www.museo.fcnym.unlp.edu.ar/inacayal (accessed 7 August 2018). Myers, Jorge. “La revolución de las ideas: la generación romántica de 1837 en la cultura y en la política argentinas”. In Nueva historia argentina. Tomo 3. Revolución, república, confederación (1806–1852), edited by Noemí Goldman. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1998, pp. 381–445. Nogueira, Ataliba. Antônio Conselheiro e Canudos: revisão histórica. São Paulo: Nacional, 1978. Nouzeilles, Gabriela. “Patagonia as Borderland: Nature, Culture, and the Idea of the State”. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 8, 1 (1999): 35–48. ———. Ficciones somáticas: naturalismo, nacionalismo y políticas médicas del cuerpo (Argentina 1880–1910). Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2000. ———. “El retorno de lo primitivo. Aventura y masculinidad”. In La naturaleza en disputa. Retóricas del cuerpo y el paisaje en América Latina, edited by Gabriela Nouzeilles. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2002, pp. 163–86. ———, ed. La naturaleza en disputa. Retóricas del cuerpo y el paisaje en América Latina. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2002. “O corpo de Antonio Conselheiro”. In Achados de Canudos, www.josecalasans. com/downloads/achadosdecanudos.pdf (accessed 22 December 2016). Onions, C. T., ed. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966. Oszlak, Oscar. La formación del Estado argentino: orden, progreso y organización nacional. [1982] Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1997. Palleja, León de. Diario de campaña de las fuerzas aliadas contra el Paraguay. Tomo I. [1865] Montevideo: Ministerio de Instrucción Pública y Previsión Social, 1960. Palti, Elías. “Visiones de lo inasible. Sarmiento y Euclides da Cunha en las fronteras de la civilización”. The Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies, 4 (2006): 19–33. “Paraguay reclama a Brasil trofeos de la Guerra de la Triple Alianza”. Terra, 1 March 2013, https://noticias.terra.com.ar/mundo/paraguay-­reclama-a-brasiltrofeos-de-la-guerra-de-la-triple-alianza,6fb250a686f1d310VgnCLD200000 0ec6eb0aRCRD.html (accessed 12 December 2016). París de Oddone, Blanca. “Colonia y revolución”. In De la colonia a la consolidación del Uruguay, París de Oddone, Blanca, Lucía Sala de Touron, and Rosa Alonso. Montevideo: Banda Oriental, 1973, pp. 7–62.

288 Bibliography Pérez Izquierdo, Gastón et al. La Campaña del Desierto. Buenos Aires: Academia Argentina de la Historia, 2009. Penna, João Camilo. “A imitação da guerra”. In Entre el humo y la niebla. Guerra y cultura en América Latina, edited by Felipe Martínez-Pinzón and Javier Uriarte. Pittsburgh: IILI, 2016, pp. 315–40. Perus, Françoise. Literatura y sociedad en América Latina: el modernismo. Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1976. Ricardo Piglia, “Notas sobre Facundo”, Punto de vista. Revista de cultura. 3: 8 (1980), pp. 15–18. Pineda, Leandro. “A Chronicle of War”. In The Paraguay Reader: History, Culture, Politics, edited by Peter Lambert et al. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013, pp. 90–95. Platt, D. C. M. “The Imperialism of Free Trade: Some Reservations”. The Economic History Review, New Series, 21, 2 (1968): 296–306. Pomer, León. La Guerra del Paraguay: Estado, política y negocios. [1968] Buenos Aires: Colihue, 2008. Ponte, Antonio José. Un arte de hacer ruinas y otros cuentos. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005. Porter, Dennis. Haunted Journeys. Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Potthast, Barbara. “Protagonists, Victims, and Heroes. Paraguayan Women During the ‘Great War’”. In I Die with My Country. Perspectives on the Paraguayan War, 1864–1870, edited by Hendrik Kraay and Thomas L. Whigham. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004, pp. 44–60. ———. Review of Francisco Solano López and the Ruination of Paraguay: Honor and Egocentrism, by James Schofield Saeger. Journal of Historical Biography, 3 (2008): 182–85. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. ———. “Los que se quedan”. In Los viajeros y el Río de la Plata: un siglo de escritura, edited by Jean-Philippe Barnabé, Lindsey Cordery, and Beatriz Vegh. Montevideo: Universidad de la República/Lindari y Risso, 2010, pp. 356–78. Price, Rachel. The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868–1968. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. Prieto, Adolfo. Los viajeros ingleses y la emergencia de la literatura argentina, 1820–1850. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1996. Quijada, Mónica. “Ancestros, ciudadanos, piezas de museo. Francisco P. Moreno y la articulación del indígena en la construcción nacional argentina (siglo XIX)”. E.I.A.L. Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 9, 2 (1998), www.tau.ac.il/eial/IX_2/quijada.html (accessed 3 July 2009). Quin, Alejandro. Taming the Chaos: Nature, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Writing in Modern Latin America. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest/UMI, 2011. Rama, Ángel. La ciudad letrada. [1984] Introduction by Hugo Achugar. Montevideo: Arca, 1998. ———. The Lettered City. [1984] Translated by John Charles Chasteen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. ———. “Los poetas modernistas en el mercado económico”. In Rubén Darío y el modernismo. Caracas: Alfadil, 1985, pp. 35–79.

Bibliography  289 ———. La crítica de la cultura en América Latina. Edited by Saúl Sosnowski and Tomás Eloy Martínez. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1985. Ramos, Julio. Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina: literatura y política en el siglo XIX. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989. Rauch, George v. Conflict in the Southern Cone: The Argentine Military and the Boundary Dispute with Chile, 1870–1902. London: Praeger, 1999. Reyes Abadie, Washington, and Andrés Vázquez Romero. Crónica General del Uruguay. Tomo V: la modernización. Montevideo: Banda Oriental, 2000. Ribeiro, Ana. El caudillo y el dictador. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2005. ———. Los muy fieles. Leales a la corona en el proceso revolucionario rioplatense: Montevideo-Asunción, 1810–1820: estudio comparado. Tomo 1. Montevideo: Planeta, 2013. Rice, Edward. Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Secret Agent Who Made the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Discovered the Kama Sutra, and Brought the Arabian Nights to the West. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990. Richard, Nicolas, Luc Capdevila, and Capucine Boidin, eds. Les guerres du Paraguay aux XIXè et XXè siècles. Paris: Colibris, 2007. Roa Bastos, Augusto. El fiscal. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1993. ———. “Paraguay. Isla rodeada de tierra” [1977], www.lacult.unesco.org/docc/ oralidad_06_07_56-59-paraguay.pdf (accessed 15 December 2016). ———. The Prosecutor. Translated by Helene Carol Weldt-Basson. Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018. ———, et al. Los conjurados del Quilombo del Gran Chaco. Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2001. Rocca, Pablo. “Un escritor fronterizo”. El País Cultural, Año XII, n° 586 (01/26/2001), pp. 1–3. Rocha, Glauber. Deus e o diabo na terra do sol. [1964] São Paulo: Versátil Home Video, 2003. Rock, David. “The British in Argentina: From Informal Empire to Postcolonialism”. In Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture, Commerce and Capital, edited by Matthew Brown. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008, pp. 49–77. Rodrigues, Fernando da Silva, and Fernando Velôzo Gomes Pedrosa, eds. Uma tragédia americana. A Guerra do Paraguai sob novos olhares. Curitiba: Prismas, 2015. Rodríguez, Fermín. “La tierra purpúrea: los límites de un aprendizaje”. In William Henry Hudson y La tierra purpúrea. Reflexiones desde Montevideo, edited by Beatriz Vegh and Jean-Philippe Barnabé. Montevideo: Linardi y Risso, 2005, pp. 91–105. ———. “Prehistorias argentinas: naturalistas en el Plata. Charles Darwin, Francisco Moreno, Florentino Ameghino, Bruce Chatwin”. A Contracorriente, 7, 1 (2009): 45–75. ———. Un desierto para la nación: la escritura del vacío. Buenos Aires: Eterna cadencia, 2010. Rodríguez, Ileana. Transatlantic Topographies. Islands, Highlands, Jungles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Rodríguez Monegal, Emir. Borges: A Literary Biography. New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1987. Romero, José Luis. Latinoamérica: las ciudades y las ideas. [1976] Medellín: Editorial Universidad de Antioquia, 1999.

290 Bibliography Roosevelt, Theodore. Through the Brazilian Wilderness. London: John Murray, 1914. ———. “An Introductory Note”. In W. H. Hudson. The Purple Land: Being the Narrative of One Richard Lamb’s Adventures in the Banda Orientál, in South America, as Told by Himself. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1916, pp. ix–xx. Rosa, João Guimarães. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. [1956] Translated by James L. Taylor and Harriet de Onís. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963. ———. Grande sertão: veredas. [1956] Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1968. Rosa, José María. La guerra del Paraguay y las montoneras argentinas. [1965] Buenos Aires: Punto de Encuentro, 2008. Rosaldo, Renato. “Imperialist Nostalgia”. Representations, 26 (1989): 107–22. Rosman, Silvia. “Las vueltas de William Henry Hudson: errancias de la crítica y desplazamientos de la memoria”. In William Henry Hudson y La tierra purpúrea. Reflexiones desde Montevideo, edited by Beatriz Vegh and JeanPhilippe Barnabé. Montevideo: Universidad de la República/Linardi y Risso, 2005, pp. 41–54. Roth, Michael S. “Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed”. In Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed, edited by Michael S. Roth, Claire Lyons, and Charles Merewether. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute of Art and the Humanities, 1997, pp. 1–23. Rotker, Susana. La invención de la crónica. [1992] Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Translated by Franklin Philip. Edited by Patrick Coleman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Saeger, James Schofield. Francisco Solano López and the Ruination of Paraguay: Honor and Egocentrism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Saes, Décio. A formação do estado burguês no Brasil (1888–1891). Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1985. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. ———. Orientalism. [1978] New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Sala de Touron, Lucía. “El Uruguay pastoril y caudillesco (1830–1875)”. In Blanca París de Oddone, Lucía Sala de Touron, and Rosa Alonso. De la colonia a la consolidación del Uruguay. Montevideo: Banda Oriental, 1973, pp. 63–96. ———. “El Uruguay caudillesco y pastoril: un ‘modelo’ de país dependiente y de estructura precapitalista”. Latinoamérica, 11 (1978): 159–77. Salessi, Jorge. Médicos, maleantes y maricas: higiene, criminología y homosexualidad en la construcción de la nación argentina (Buenos Aires, 1871– 1914). Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 1995. Santana, José Carlos Barreto de. Ciência e arte: Euclides da Cunha e as ciências naturais. São Paulo: HUCITEC/Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana, 2001. Saramago, Victoria. “Sertão dentro: The Backlands in Early Portuguese Writings”. Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, 27 (2015): 254–72. Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino (attributed). Revelations on the Paraguayan War and the Alliances of the Atlantic and the Pacific. New York: Hallet & Breen Printers, 1866.

Bibliography  291 ———. Facundo o civilización y barbarie. [1845] Buenos Aires: Sopena, 1963. ———. Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism. The First Complete English Translation. Translated by Kathleen Ross. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Scarzanella, Eugenia. “El ocio peronista: vacaciones y ‘turismo popular’ en Argentina (1943–1955)”. Entrepasados: revista de Historia, 14 (1998): 65–84. Scavino, Dardo F. Barcos sobre la Pampa. Las formas de la guerra en Sarmiento. Buenos Aires: El cielo por asalto, 1993. Scheibe Wolff, Cristina. “L’historiographie brésilienne de la guerre du Paraguay”. In Les guerres du Paraguay aux XIXe et XXe siècles, edited by Nicolas Richard, Luc Capdevila, and Capucine Boidin. Paris: CoLibris, 2007, pp. 125–38. Scheina, Robert L. Latin America’s Wars. Volume 1. The Age of the Caudillo, 1791–1899. Washington: Brassey’s, 2003. Schwarcz, Lilia Moritz. The Spectacle of the Races. Scientists, Institutions, and the Race Question in Brazil. 1870–1930. Translated by Leland Guyer. New York: Hill and Wang, 1999. ———. As barbas do imperador: D. Pedro II, um monarca nos trópicos. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012. Schwarz, Roberto. “Misplaced Ideas: Literature and Society in Late-­NineteenthCentury Brazil”. [1973] In Misplaced Ideas. Essays on Brazilian Culture, edited by John Gledson. London: Verso, 1992, pp. 19–32. Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Seed, Patricia. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Segura Munguía, Santiago. Diccionario etimológico latino-español. Madrid: Ediciones Generales Anaya, 1985. Semmel, Bernard. The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism. Classical Political Economy, the Empire of Free Trade and Imperialism, 1750–1850. London: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Sevcenko, Nicolau. A revolta da vacina: mentes insanas em corpos rebeldes. São Paulo: Scipione, 1993. ———. Literatura como missão. Tensões sociais e criação cultural na Primeira República. [1983] São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1985. Sherry, Norman. Conrad’s Western World. London: Cambridge University Press, 1971. Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London: Routledge, 1994. Simmel, Georg. “The Ruin”. In Georg Simmel, 1858–1918. A Collection of Essays, with Translation and a Bibliography, edited by Kurt H. Wolf. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1959, pp. 259–66. Skidmore, Thomas E., and Thomas H. Holloway. “New Light on Euclides da Cunha: Letters to Oliveira Lima, 1903–1909”. Luso-Brazilian Review, 8, 1 (1971): 30–55. Slatta, Richard W. Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

292 Bibliography ———. Comparing Cowboys and Frontiers. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Smith, Neil. Uneven Development. Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. [1984] Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2008. Smith Madan, Aarti. Lines of Geography in Latin American Narrative. National Territory, National Literature. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Soares, Rodrigo Goyena. “Gênese dos veteranos da Guerra do Paraguai”. In Uma tragédia americana. A Guerra do Paraguai sob novos olhares, edited by Fernando da Silva Rodrigues and Fernando Velôzo Gomes Pedrosa. Curitiba: Prismas, 2015, pp. 126–64. Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions. The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar/Straus and Giroux, 1989. Souza, Candice Vidal e. A pátria geográfica. Sertão e litoral no pensamento social brasileiro. Goiânia: UFG, 1997. Sorensen, Diana. El Facundo y la construcción de la cultura argentina. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 1998. Souza, Ronaldes de Melo e. A geopoética de Euclides da Cunha. Rio de Janeiro: EdUERJ, 2009. Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Stewart, Susan. On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Suez, Perla. El país del diablo. Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2015. Süssekind, Flora. O Brasil não é longe daqui. O narrador, a viagem. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1990. Szlajfer, Henryk. “Against Dependent Capitalist Development in Nineteenth-­ Century Latin America: The Case of Haiti and Paraguay”. Latin American Perspectives, 13, 1 (1986): 45–73. Tacitus, Cornelius. The Works of Tacitus. Vol II. The History, Germany, Agricola, and Dialogue on Orators. The Oxford Translation, revised with notes. London: Bell & Daldy, 1872. ———. Tacitus Dialogus, Agricola and Germania. Translated by W. Hamilton Fyfe. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908. ———. The Agricola. With an introduction and notes by Duane Reed Stuart. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1909. ———. Tacitus’ Agricola, Germany, and Dialogue on Orators. [1967] Revised, Edited and Translated by Herbert W. Benario. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. Taunay, Alfredo d’ Escragnolle. A retirada da Laguna. Episódio da Guerra do Paraguai. [1871] São Paulo: Melhoramentos, 1963. Terán, Oscar. Vida intelectual en el Buenos Aires fin-de-siglo (1880–1910). Derivas de la “cultura científica”. [2000] Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2008. Tilly, Charles. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime”. [1985] In Violence: A Reader, edited by Catherine Besteman. New York: New York University Press, 2002, pp. 35–60. Torre, Claudia. Literatura en tránsito. La narrativa expedicionaria de la Conquista del Desierto. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2010.

Bibliography  293 Trojanow, Ilija. The Collector of Worlds. Translated by William Hobson. New York: Ecco, 2009. Uriarte, Javier. “Tyranny and Foundation. Appropriations of the Hero and Rereadings of the Nation in Augusto Roa Bastos and Jean-Claude Fignolé”. In Postmodernism’s Role in Latin American Literature. The Life and Work of Augusto Roa Bastos, edited by Helene Carol Weldt-Basson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 153–88. ———. “Ciudades y anti-ciudades en el fin de siglo brasileño: contagio y locura colectiva en Os sertões”. Cahiers ALHIM (Amérique Latine. Historie & Mémoire), 29, La transformation de l’espace urbain en Amérique Latine (1870–1930): discours et pratiques de pouvoir. https://alhim.revues.org/5247. ———. “Fora da ordem, or on Time and Travel in Euclides da Cunha and Claude Lévi-Strauss”. In Cultural Exchanges between Brazil and France, edited by Regina Félix and Scott D. Juall. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2016, pp. 100–16. ———. “Rios e ritmos indisciplinados: Uma leitura da oscilação em Euclides da Cunha e Alberto Rangel”. In Vozes da Amazônia III. Investigação sobre o pensamento social brasileiro, edited by Élide Rugai Bastos and Renan Freitas Pinto. Manaus: Universidade Federal do Amazonas, 2016, pp. 183–205. ———. “Disintegrating Bodies: The Undoing of the Discourse of War in Palleja’s Diario (1865–66)”. In Authoritarianism, Cultural History, and Political Resistance in Latin America: Exposing Paraguay, edited by Federico Pous, Alejandro Quin, and Marcelino Viera. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 19–36. Valente, Luis Fernando. “Brazilian Literature and Citizenship: From Euclides da Cunha to Marcos Dias”. Luso-Brazilian Review, 38, 2 (2001): 11–27. Valladares, Lícia do Prado. A invenção da favela. Do mito de origem a favela. com. Rio de Janeiro: FGV, 2005. Van den Abbeele, Georges. Travel as Metaphor: from Montaigne to Rousseau. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Van Marle, Hans. “Conrad and Richard Burton on Islam”. Conradiana, 17 (1985): 137–42. Vargas Llosa, Mario. La guerra del fin del mundo. Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 1982. Vecchi, Roberto. “Intermittenti presenze: la traccia, l’immagine, il subalterno”. In Guardare oltre: letteratura, fotografia e altri territori, edited by Silvia Albertazzi and Fernando Amigoni. Rome: Meltemi, 2008, pp. 195–213. ———. “Spazio, storia, classe nei Sertões euclidiani”. In Sertão - Pampa: Topografie Dell’immaginario Sudamericano, edited by Vincenzo Arsillo and Flavio Fiorani. Venice: Cafoscarina, 2007, pp. 25–44. ———. “A forma literária e o diagrama da Gewalt: exceção e excesso da guerra nos limiares modernos da cultura brasileira”. In Entre el humo y la niebla. Guerra y cultura en América Latina, edited by Felipe Martínez-Pinzón and Javier Uriarte. Pittsburgh: IILI, 2016, pp. 159–71. Veloso, Caetano. “Fora da ordem”. Circulado. Polygram, 1991. Ventura, Roberto. “Canudos como cidade iletrada: Euclides da Cunha na urbs monstruosa”. In Canudos. Palavra de Deus, sonho da terra, edited by Benjamin Abdala Junior and Isabel M. M. Alexandre. São Paulo: Boitempo, 1997, pp. 89–99. ———. Os sertões. São Paulo: Publifolha, 2002.

294 Bibliography ———. Retrato interrompido da vida de Euclides da Cunha. Edited by Mario Cesar Carvalho and José Carlos Barreto de Santana. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003. Verdesio, Gustavo. “Entre el naturalismo, la antropología y la arqueología: los múltiples registros de W. H. Hudson en el marco del discurso de la ciencia y la nación”. In Entre Borges y Conrad. Estética y territorio en William Henry Hudson, edited by Leila Gómez and Sara Castro-Klarén. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2012, pp. 157–93. Vezub, Julio Esteban. “El gobernador indígena de las Manzanas. Don Valentín Sayhueque”. In Vivir entre dos mundos. Las fronteras del sur de la Argentina. Siglos XVIII y XIX, edited by Raúl J. Mandrini. Buenos Aires: Taurus, 2006, pp. 291–318. ———. Valentín Saygüeque y la “Gobernación Indígena de Las Manzanas”. Poder y etnicidad en la Patagonia septentrional (1860–1881). Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2009. Villa, Marco Antonio. Canudos. O povo da terra. São Paulo: Ática, 1995. Vignati, Milcíades Alejo. “Iconografía aborigen. Los caciques Sayeweke, Ianakayal y Foyel y sus allegados”. Revista del Museo de La Plata, II: 10 (1942). Viñas, David. Indios, ejército y frontera. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1982. ———. De Sarmiento a Dios. Viajeros argentinos a USA. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1988. Visite a Bahia. www.visiteabahia.com.br/visite/atracoes/esportes/leia_pesca. php?id=1. 2004 (accessed 3 December 2009). Vitullo, Julieta. Islas imaginadas. La guerra de Malvinas en la literatura y el cine argentinos. Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2012. Walther, Juan Carlos. La conquista del desierto. Síntesis histórica de los principales sucesos ocurridos y operaciones militares realizadas en la Pampa y Patagonia contra los indios (años 1527–1885). [1947] Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1970. Weber, David J., and Jane M. Rausch, eds. Where Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin American History. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1994. Weber, Max. “Politics as a Vocation”. In Violence. A Reader, edited by Catherine Besteman. New York: New York University Press, 2002, pp. 13–18. Whigham, Thomas L. The Paraguayan War. Volume 1. Causes and Early Conduct. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. ———. “La guerre, détruit, la guerre construit. Essai sur le développement du nationalisme en Amérique du Sud”. In Les guerres du Paraguay aux XIXe et XXe siècles, edited by Nicolas Richard, Luc Capdevila, and Capucine Boidin. Paris: CoLibris, 2007, pp. 23–32. ———. “Autonomy, Authoritarianism, and Development”. In The Paraguay Reader. History, Culture, Politics, edited by Peter Lambert and Andrew Nickson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013, pp. 70–74. Whigham, Thomas L., and Barbara Potthast. “The Paraguayan Rosetta Stone: New Insights into the Demographics of the Paraguayan War, 1864–1870”. Latin American Research Review, 34, 1 (1999): 174–86. White, Richard Alan. Paraguay’s Autonomous Revolution, 1810–1840. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978.

Bibliography  295 Williams, John Hoyt. The Rise and Fall of the Paraguayan Republic, 1800– 1870. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Wilson, Jason. W. H. Hudson: The Colonial’s Revenge. London: University of London, Institute of Latin American Studies, n.d. Winn, Peter. “Informal Empire in Uruguay in the Nineteenth Century”. Past & Present, 73 (1976): 100–26. Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction”. In The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4: 1925 to 1928, edited by Andrew McNeille. London: The Hogarth Press, 1984, pp. 157–65. Wordsworth, William. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”. In The Complete Poetical Works of Wordsworth, edited by Andrew J. George. Boston: Broughton Mifflin Company/Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1932. Ygobone, Aquiles D. Francisco P. Moreno. Arquetipo de argentinidad. Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra, 1979. Youngs, Tim. “Africa / The Congo: The Politics of Darkness”. In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 156–73. Zaluar, Alba, and Marcos Alvito, eds. Um século de favela. Rio de Janeiro: Fundacão Getúlio Vargas, 1998. Zilly, Berthold. “Sertão e nacionalidade: formação étnica e civilizatória no ­Brasil segundo Euclides da Cunha”. Estudos Sociedade e Agricultura, 12 (1999): 5–45. Zoli, Corrado. Sud America. Note e impressioni di viaggio. Rome: Sindacato italiano arte grafiche, 1927. Zusman, Perla. “Panamericanismo y conservacionismo en torno al viaje de Theodore Roosevelt a la Argentina (1913)”. Modernidades, 1, 11, revistas.unc. edu.ar/index.php/modernidades/article/view/8301/9178 (accessed 28 March 2015).

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Academia Argentina de la Historia 190n33 Afoot in England (Hudson) 91 Agricola (Tacitus) 1 agriculture 185, 222–3 Alberdi, Juan Bautista 61, 133 Alsina, Adolfo 135, 190n36 Amante, Adriana 32n19 Ameghino, Florentino 195n71 anachronism 116, 218, 254n56 anachronistic space 20, 69 Andermann, Jens 59, 155–6, 161, 167, 196n78, 199n91, 201n105, 202n108 Anthropological Museum of Buenos Aires 162 Apuntes preliminares sobre una excursión al Neuquén, Río Negro, Chubut y Santa Cruz (Moreno) 14, 129, 185; final journey 185–6; new landscape of desolation 180–5 Argentina: modernization process 10–11; National Parks Administration 129; war and consolidation of modern state in 131–7; and War of the Triple Alliance 45 Argentine-Brazilian War 12 Argentine Confederation 131 Arocena, Felipe 91 Artigas, José 81n79 At Home with Patagonians. A Year’s Wanderings over Untrodden Ground from the Straits of Magellan to the Rio Negro (Musters) 195n70 Avellaneda, Nicolás 127–28, 130, 132–33, 135, 146, 189n31, 204n125

Bandeira, Moniz 43 Bandieri, Susana 143, 164, 202n108, 203n114 barbarism 177; authority of 191n46; civilization and 135, 142, 177, 230; gauchos and 165; indigenous peoples and 165, 191n46; Paraguay and 13, 69, 79n68; Paraguayan War and 44, 53, 62–3; rivers and 258n83 Bartkowski, Frances 192n52 Batlle y Ordóñez, José 11 Battle of Pavón 131 Battle of San Paulo 94, 105, 107–8 Beckman, Ericka 9 Bell, David 41, 70n4 Belo Monte community 15, 208, 228, 253n41 Benjamin, Walter 220, 241, 256n65, 265n131; “Excavation and Memory” 241 Bernucci, Leopoldo M. 214, 236, 248n8, 253n46, 258n87, 262n115 Berro, Bernardo Prudencio 63, 93 Bethell, Leslie 43, 56 bewilderment: in Os sertões 15, 23, 226, 234, 237–8 Biedma, Juan Martín 183, 204n123 Bilgrami, Akeel 123n46, 198n88 Blood and Debt (Centeno) 23, 35n44, 37n79 The Body in Pain (Scarry) 22, 240 Bonpland, Aimé 81n79 Borges, Jorge Luis 83n100, 89, 201n105; on The Purple Land 89, 103; on Richard Burton 76n41; on Uruguay 124n62 Bosi, Alfredo 256n68 Boym, Svetlana 19–20, 113

298 Index Brazil 208, 249n14; and British Empire 118n2; Burton’s support for 60; debt to Great Britain 250n20; independence from Portugal in 11–12, 210; internal modernization 211; invasion of Paraguay 66–7; nineteenth-century revolts in 208; and Paraguay border dispute 54; Treaty of the Triple Alliance and 187n8 Brazilian Academy of Letters 213 Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute 213 Bridges, Roy 147 British Empire: and Brazil 118n2; expansion of 86; informal imperialism 93; and Latin America 86; and Uruguay 87; see also England Brizuela, Natalia 247n6, 250n22 Broca, José Brito 212 Brodie, Fawn 76n37 Buenos Aires: Anthropology and Archeology Museum 154; Chile and 138; Great Britain invading in 120n26; Museum of Anthropology 187n11; Plate River and 122n43; Public Museum 154 Builders of Ruins, or Desert Makers 223–34 Burton, Sir Richard Francis 4, 6, 13, 16, 20, 46, 133, 194n66, 215, 254n47; background 41; on Brazil invasion of Paraguay 66–7; on characteristics of Paraguayan territory 59; critical views of allied forces 49; criticism by Mary Louise Pratt 52–3; criticisms of Solano López 49; on England’s role in Paraguayan War 43; on imperialism and individualism 48; on supporting Brazil 60; trips to Paraguay 47; visit to South American countries 64 Cabanagem Revolt 12 Campaign of the Desert 132, 134, 137; see also Conquest of the Desert Canudos: description of 231 Canudos. Diário de uma expedição 236, 254n47 Canudos rebellion 209, 218

Canudos War 3, 12–13, 16, 45, 206, 232, 250n22, 253n44, 259n94 Capdevila, Luc 41, 42, 70n5 capital: and landscape transformation 98; and modernization 9, 11; perspectives on 23–6; and ranches in Patagonia 166, 175; resistance to global 264n126; space, time, and 37n84; and violence 24; and war 8, 55, 58, 60 Capital Fictions (Beckman) 9 capitalism 34n35, 82n91; and appropriation of space 24; in Latin America 25 capitalist vanguard 82n92, 95 Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Secret Agent Who Made the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Discovered the Kama Sutra, and Brought the Arabian Nights to the West (Rice) 46, 76n37 Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de 30 Castro-Klarén, Sara 123n52, 265n129 Catholic Church 193n60 Centeno, Miguel Angel 19, 23, 35n44, 37n79, 188n20 “ceremonies of possession” 145 Cerro de Montevideo 90, 96–7, 99–101, 104, 108–9, 114, 122n43, 159 Chile 129, 138–41, 144, 163, 168, 174, 180–2, 273n6 Christians 176, 202n109 Círculo Militar 135 The City of the Saints and Across the Rocky Mountains to California (Burton) 76n39 civilization: barbarism and 135, 142, 177; modern 169 The Collector of Worlds (Trojanow) 75n36 colonialism 148, 157 Columbus, Christopher 144–5, 147, 194n64 communitarianism 259n91 Conquest of the Desert (1879–85) 2–4, 14–17, 21, 30, 45, 59, 74n29, 127, 134; see also Campaign of the Desert La conquista del desierto (Walther) 134, 190n32, 190n38 Conrad, Joseph 41, 63, 83n100, 91, 117, 120n19, 126n96

Index  299 Conselheiro, Antônio 21, 199n93, 206–7, 213–14, 223, 227, 241, 246, 246n3, 253n41 “consolidated vision”: and colonized territories 117; described 116; and The Purple Land 115–18 Contestado Rebellion 13 Costa, Wilma Peres 53 Cotelo, Ruben 91 Crónica histórica del lago Nahuel Huapi (Biedma) 204n123 Cruzada Libertadora 74n30 Cunha, Euclides da 3, 4, 15–16, 21, 28, 50, 84n103, 206–46; and First Republic 212–14; logic of landscape transformation 222; newspaper correspondent 208; use of ruins in his text 209, 220; see also Os sertões (Campanha de Canudos) (Cunha) Dabove, Juan Pablo 7, 39n99, 230, 257n78 Darwin, Charles 148–50, 153, 171, 195n71 Dawes, James 22 De Bourgade, E. 59 De Certeau, Michel 59 De La Pedraja, René 37n75 Decca, Edgar Salvadori de 233, 265n135 DeLay, Brian 3–4 Deleuze, Gilles 25–6, 27, 37n84, 260n95; Lefebvre’s critique of 38n88; military engineer 257n80; nomadism 89, 119n8, 229; smooth space 82n93, 90, 123n48, 260n101; state and space 60, 222–3, 254n50; striated space 102; war machine 38n92, 125n68; on ways of waging war 264n125 “denial of coevalness” 163, 168, 254n54 desert: in Apuntes preliminares 180–5; in Argentina 39n97, 80n69, 118n8, 188n25; bare life and 39n99; connotation of 1, 59; construed as peace 267; as deserted 2; and deserter 69–70; discursive creation of 98, 101; end of 180; etymology 1, 30n2; and frontier 27–9, 134, 189n31; hinterland of Uruguay as 189n30; Indian Wars and 3;

and indigenous peoples in Mexico 32n10; Latin American countries meaning of 2–3; makers of 234, 247n6; mapping and 58; meanings in Moreno 129; metaphysics of 254n49; museum turned into 272; as origin of Canudos 243; Paraguay as 13, 53–4, 69, 79n69; populating 133–4; produced by war 18, 26, 53, 62; and ruins in Os sertões 35n48, 233; and sertão 235, 239, 259n43; from smooth to striated 26; as solitudo 2; as unproductivity 98 deserter 269; defined 69; and desert 69–70; etymology 85n113 desertification 2–3, 271–2 desertifier 2 destruction: generative nature of 19 El diario 176 Díaz, Roberto Ignacio 33n28, 119n12 Díaz-Duhalde, Sebastián 33n20 displacement: builders of ruins and 223–34; Euclides da Cunha’s conceptualization of 223–34; Desert Makers 223–34 Di Tella, Andrés 190n35, 200n98 Doratioto, Francisco 41, 54, 56, 70n5, 72n13, 72n14, 72n15, 74n33, 79n69, 81n84 Duncan Baretta, Silvio R. 134, 189n28, 189n30 El Elefante Blanco 187n12, 195n69 England: Industrial Revolution 110; role in Paraguayan War 43–4; see also British Empire Escobar, Francisco 238 Estrada, Ezequiel Martínez 110 Una excursión a los indios ranqueles (An Excursion to the Ranquel Indians) (Mansilla) 189n27, 192n51, 192n53 Explorations of the Highlands of Brazil (Burton) 75n33, 254n47 exteriority, and state 27–8 Fabian, Johannes 163, 254n54 Facundo (Sarmiento) 6, 47, 65–6, 76n44, 84n108, 165, 188n25, 230, 252n38, 256n69 Far Away and Long Ago (Hudson) 110–13, 117, 119n15, 125n75 Farwell, Byron 50, 78n54, 78n55

300 Index “Fazedores de desertos” (Cunha) 3, 32n10 Feilberg, Valentín 147, 194n65 Fernández Bravo, Álvaro 191n49, 198n85 Fernández, Cristina 71n8, 74n32 Fernández Retamar, Roberto 80n70 Finazzi-Agrò, Ettore 243 First Brazilian Republic 249n16; armed rebellions during 35n47; Canudos and 228, 232; Euclides and 212, 237–8; material and bourgeois values in 251n29; militaristic and repressive tendencies 212; modernization in 210–13; Os sertões and 210–14; proclamation of 12, 45, 206, 210–11, 213; transition from Empire 251n28 The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Bell) 70n4 El fiscal (The Prosecutor) (Roa Bastos) 42, 71n9, 82n88, 269 FitzRoy, Robert 148, 150–1, 171 Flores, Venancio 45, 74n30; killing of 63, 93 Fonseca, Deodoro da 74n28 La formación del Estado argentino (Oszlak) 8 Foucault, Michel 18–9, 38n88, 123n47, 156 Foyel 176–8, 179, 185, 202n108, 203n116 Francia, José Gaspar Rodríguez de 10, 54–5, 71n9, 79n68, 80n70, 81n79, 83n96 Franco, Jean 80n78, 95, 115–16 French, Jennifer 44; invisible empire 44, 87 French Revolution 237 From the Sierras to the Pampas (McLynn) 46, 78n51, 78n57 Frontera: and desert 27–8, 190n31 Gainza, María 85n115, 269 Gallagher, John 44, 86, 93, 104 Galsworthy, John 91 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 12 gauchos 16, 94, 102, 103, 110, 213; Arab nomads and 66; and Brazilian gaúchos 213, 252n38; disappearance of 94; espíritu de

montonera and 132; and guerrilla warfare 264n126; and indigenous peoples in Argentina 118n8, 164–7; literature and 89; as rural laborers 166, 201n105; stories told by 102; translation and 125n65 genocide: indigenous 137, 164, 168, 190n33; in Paraguay 42, 72n17; state building and 19; war and 268 Ginsberg, Robert 36n65, 68, 114 Godsall, Jon R. 46 Gómez, Leila 81n83 Gordillo, Gastón R. 19, 21, 24 Gould, Stephen Jay 201n100 Graham, Robert Cunninghame 91 Grant, Ben 47 Great War see Paraguayan War Greenblatt, Stephen 144 Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest (Hudson) 91 Guattari, Félix 25–6, 27, 60; Lefebvre’s critique of 38n88; military engineer 257n80; nomadism 89, 119n8, 229; smooth space 82n93, 90, 123n48, 260n101; state and space 60, 222–3, 254n50; striated space 102; war machine 38n92, 125n68; on ways of waging war 264n125 Guerra Grande 12, 70n3, 124n64 guerrilla warfare 238, 264n126, 265n130 Gumplowicz, Ludwig von 252n39, 253n44 Halperín Donghi, Tulio 8, 132, 188n17, 188n19 Harvey, David 18, 37n84, 82n91 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 41, 63, 85n112 Hernández, José 188n25, 189n30 “heterochrony” 156 heterotopia 56, 156, 197n79 Histoire de la littérature anglaise (Taine) 213 HMS Beagle 148 homogenization: of space 18; of time 18 ‘horizontal’ conflict 34n42 Hudson, William Henry 4, 13–14, 16, 20, 50, 79n63, 87, 127, 186n2; background 90; nostalgia in The Purple Land 112; on

Index  301 reconfiguration of Uruguay 95; works 90–1 Hulme, Peter 50 Humboldt, Alexander von 95, 158–9, 217, 254n52 identities: racial and national 139; shifting array of 106; shifting in The Purple Land 101–11; shifting in Viaje a la Patagonia Austral 138–41 Idle Days in Patagonia (Hudson) 90–1, 109, 112–13, 123n55, 127 A imitação dos sentidos (Bernucci) 262n115 “immense tomb”: Patagonia as 153–7, 219 “The Imperialism of Free Trade” (Gallagher & Robinson) 44 “imperialist nostalgia” 36n62 Imperial Leather (McClintock) 20, 196n77 Inacayal 176–8, 178, 183–4, 202n108, 203n116 Indians 161–8, 202n109, 274n16 Indian wars 185 indigenous communities 164, 166–7, 187n9, 189n27 “Indigenous Governorship of the Apples” 186n4 indigenous violence 166–7, 176, 199n90 Indios, ejército y frontera (Viñas) 16, 35n51, 136, 190n42, 191n43, 204n125, 205n129 infantilization 163 informal empire 16, 43–4, 55, 73n23, 86, 98, 104, 116, 131; The Purple Land and 92–5 informal imperialism 93 invisible empire 44–5, 87 Irigoyen, Emilio 119n11 Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed (Roth, Lyons, and Merewether) 36n67 Islas imaginadas. La guerra de Malvinas en la literatura y el cine argentinos (Vitullo) 33n20 Jagoe, Eva-Lynn 146, 195n73 Janotti, Maria de Lourdes Mônaco 210 Jesuits 69, 83n99

Johnson, Adriana Campos 213, 252n40, 262n116 Jones, Juan (or Yarred Augusto) 183–4, 204n123 José Paranhos, Baron of Rio Branco 250n25 journalism 212, 251n29 Juazeiro Rebellion 13 jungle: described 79n68; and desert 79n68 Júnior, Araripe 227 Kennedy, Dane 47; Burton’s profile 70n1 Knight, Alan 92, 118n2 Kohan, Martín 33n20, 264n126 Laera, Alejandra 74n29 Lake Viedma 138, 191n44, 193n53, 194n65 Lake Argentino 149, 193n56, 193n61; arrival at 146, 183, 194n66; christening of 138, 144, 150–2, 194n65; descriptions of 179, 183; monarch-of-all-I-survey trope and 146 Larre Borges, Ana Inés 119n13; on Burton’s Letters 50; on Hudson’s writing 90 Latin America: and British Empire 86; capitalism in 25; history 206; ‘legible’ territory and war 29; modernization 6–13 Latorre, Lorenzo 45, 94 Laurent, Christine 84n103 Lefebvre, Henri 24–5, 37n84, 38n88, 56, 130, 187n13, 197n84, 244, 258n84, 260n101, 267 legibility: and war 29; and simplification 28–9; state maps of 55, 99 The Lettered City (Rama) 260n100, 261n107 Letters from the Battle Fields of Paraguay (Burton) 4, 13, 20, 46; and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento 48, 61; as post-war narrative 51; War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70) 41 Levine, Robert 247n5, 247n6 Lewis, Colin 188n21 The Life of Sir Richard Burton (Wright) 46, 75n34

302 Index Literatura como missão (Sevcenko) 250n20, 251n29 Livingstone, David 147–8, 158, 193n63, 194n67 Llosa, Mario Vargas 263n118 Lombroso, Cesare 199n93 Lopes, Denilson 258n87 López, Carlos Antonio 10 López-Alves, Fernando 7 Los muy fieles (Ribeiro) 38n95 Loveman, Mara 208 Lowe, Elizabeth 264n127 Lowenthal, David 256n66 Lucien de Brayer, Alfred 56, 57 Lynch, John 11, 35n43 McClintock, Anne 20, 69, 154 McLynn, Frank 46–7, 61, 78n51, 78n57 malones 135–6 Mansilla, Lucio V. 189n27, 192n51, 192n53, 201n101 Mapuches 139–40, 192n50 Mapuches-Tehuelches 140 Márai, Sándor 265n134 Marco Polo 147 À margem da história (Cunha) 212, 258n83 Markoff, John 134, 189n28, 189n30 Mases, Enrique Hugo 135, 190n34 Méndez Vives, Enrique 34n42, 94 Merewether, Charles 36n67 Merriam-Webster Dictionary 2–3, 258n86, 264n127 messianism 253n41 mestiço 213 Mexican Porfiriato 7–8, 33n28 Militarism (militarismo): in Uruguay 7, 11, 33n28, 45, 94 Miller, David 120n20 Mitre, Bartolomé 45, 47–8, 71n9, 77n45, 130–1, 187n8 “Modern Fiction” (Woolf) 120n18 modernization 16–20, 152, 180, 182, 197n85; Asunción 69; in Brazil 210–14; and consolidation national states 2; described 7; destruction in name of 3; and disposition to war in Brazil 35n46; and forms of displacement 59; Latin America 6–13; and militarism in Uruguay 45; nature and 157; and notion of sertão 259n93; in Os sertões 223,

233; Paraguayan War and 45, 62; Patagonia and 197n83; process in Argentina 10–11, 131–4, 179; process of 9; push toward 23; refuge from 127–8; and repression 8; and violence in The Purple Land 95; violence of 106; war and 54 Molloy, Sylvia 119n12, 162, 201n104 Moniz, Edmundo 228, 259n92 Montaldo, Graciela 6, 99, 102, 118n8, 188n25 Morais, Prudente de 74n28 Moreno, Francisco Pascasio 4, 14–15, 21–3, 28, 128, 195n69 Mouchez, Ernest Amédée Barthélemy 57–8, 58 Musters, George 171, 177, 195n70 La Nación 71n9, 74n33, 170 Nahuel Huapi: region 137–8, 172–3, 175, 181, 185, 270; Lake 138, 143, 164, 186n4, 199n90; National Park 185, 204n127 Namuncurá, Manuel 177 National Museum (Brazil) 30 national parks 129, 185, 197n81, 204n127 naturalism 10 The Naturalist in La Plata (Hudson) 90–1 “natural violence” 109 nature 4, 10, 22, 55, 63, 68, 112, 156, 198n85, 233, 240–1, 260n100, 271, 273n8; archeology and 155; as Argentine 145; capitalism and 98, 34n35; conflict and 221, 244; domesticated 125n75, 143, 230; ideology of 198n87; Lefebvre on 24, 197n84; legibilization and simplification of 28, 260n101; in Os sertões 219–23; relationship between humans and 91, 98, 100, 123n52, 123n55, 127; ruins and 20, 114, 220, 256n66; time and 152; torturous rhythm of 255n60; travel and transformation of 157–60; as violent 14, 89, 109, 128; war against 127, 146; western conceptualizations of 123n46, 198n88 neocolonialism 44 nomad(ic) 3, 66, 102, 108, 169, 222, 224, 227, 229–30, 245–6, 258n83;

Index  303 gaucho 94; and smooth space 25; violence 106; and war machine 25; see also nomadism nomadic science 257n80 nomadism 89, 118n8, 164, 189n30, 224, 229–30 nostalgia 111–15; imperial 92; progress and 19, 116; in The Purple Land 90, 112, 268; reflective 113; romantic 20; and ruin(s) 114; see also imperialist nostalgia Nostromo (Conrad) 83n100, 120n19 Nouzeilles, Gabriela 149, 187n7, 187n13 O Estado de São Paulo 208, 237 On the Origin of Species (Darwin) 149 Orientalism (Said) 47, 77n47 The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Benjamin) 256n65 “O Sertão Vai Virar Mar” 217–23 Os sertões (Campanha de Canudos) (Cunha) 3, 4, 15–16, 21, 32n10, 206–46, 247n7; dead lakes 244–6; and deception 210–14; and the First Republic 210–14; modernization theme 210–14; and newness 210–14; precariousness and contemporary silences 244–6 Oszlak, Oscar 8, 11, 24–5, 34n42, 131–2, 166, 248n9 oxymoron 224, 232 Pacification of Araucanía 198n87 El país de la guerra (Kohan) 33n20 El país del diablo (Di Tella) 190n35 Palleja, León de 78n59, 85n114 Paraguay 13; and Brazil border dispute 54; as heterotopic space 56; imagining and reconfiguring 53–63; invasion by Brazil 66–7; maps 56, 57, 58, 58–9; portrayal as desert 79n68; portrayal as jungle 79n68; as “terra incognita” 56; violence in 63–4 Paraguayan War 13, 16–17, 22, 28, 42, 187n8, 210, 250n20; role of England 43–4; see also War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70) Paris, Alfredo 195n69 The Past Is a Foreign Country (Lowenthal) 256n66

Patagonia: as an “immense tomb” 219; appropriating 143–53; capitalist production in 166; geography of 181; land distribution in 128–9; naming, looking, writing 143–53; pragmatic representations of 150 patria 130, 141–4, 147, 150–3, 172, 176, 196n75; deseo de la 152; fora da 235 Pedro I, emperor of Brazil 30, 249n14 Pedro II, emperor of Brazil 249n14 Peixoto, Marshal Floriano 74n28, 212 Peñalba, Fornos 77n48 Peru 63 Perus, Françoise 8–9 Pineda, Leandro 264n126 La Plata Museum 129, 155–6, 169, 178, 187n11, 272 Porter, Dennis 5, 101 positivism 10, 34n39, 153, 192n53, 213 Postcolonialism, Psychoanalisis and Burton: Power Play of Empire (Grant) 47 Potthast, Barbara 42–3, 53, 71n7 Pratt, Mary Louise 5, 52, 233, 259n95; capitalist vanguard 82n92, 95; monarch-of-all-I-survey 52, 97, 146; “travelees” 5 premature ruins 21–2 Price, Rachel 262n114 primitivism 161 The Production of Space (Lefebvre) 24, 38n88 Publico 30 The Purple Land (Hudson) 4, 13–14, 79n63, 87, 92, 97, 128, 145, 159, 189n30, 264n126, 264n127; civil war 92–5; informal empire 92–5; Jorge Luis Borges on 103; loss of home theme 111; nostalgia 111–15; oscillating identities 104–11; overview 91–2; protagonist’s character overview 87–8; on reconfiguration of Uruguay 95; as rural novel 110; Uruguay landscape 97–8; violence via economic channels 96 Quijada, Mónica 140, 195n71 quillango 203n117 Quin, Alejandro 79n68

304 Index racism 49, 78n51 Ragamuffin War 12 Railroad(s) 9, 41, 60, 160, 183; in Argentina 132; in Paraguay 10; in Uruguay 94; in the USA 185; war, modernization and 18–9 Rama, Ángel 8, 9, 185, 230–2, 251n27, 260n100, 261n107 Ramos, Julio 9–10 Ranquel Indians 136, 192n51 Rassenkampf (Gumplowicz) 252n39 Real Academia Española’s dictionary 256n64 Recuerdos de provincia (Sarmiento) 65 Remington 176, 254–5n56 Reminiscencias (Moreno) 14, 128, 160; Indigenous Peoples in 174–80; land in 174–80; war in 174–80 “repressive penetration” 132 repressive regimes 210 República Velha 45; see also First Brazilian Republic Revelations on the Paraguayan War and the Alliances of the Atlantic and the Pacific (Sarmiento) 53, 83n96 Revolução Praieira 12 Revolución de las Lanzas 94 rhetoric of substitution 146, 157, 159–61, 181–2, 184 rhetoric of vanishing 19, 113, 115, 117, 127, 168–9, 179, 197n85, 265n136, 268 Ribeiro, Ana 38n95 Rice, Edward 46, 76n37 Roa Bastos, Augusto 42, 56, 71n9, 82n88, 269 Robinson, Ronald 44, 86, 93, 104 Roca, Julio Argentino 8, 132 Rock, David 82n92 Rodríguez Monegal, Emir 124n62 Rodríguez, Fermín 2, 106, 119n8, 136, 190n37 Roman Empire 1, 2 Romans 65, 245 Romantic aesthetic 21 Romanticism 65, 101, 116 Romero, José Luis 260n99 Roosevelt, Theodore 91, 185–6, 204n128, 205n129, 269–71, 273n6–9 Rosa, José María 80n70

Rosas, Juan Manuel de 10–11, 130, 131, 135, 203n113; ousted due to England 86–7 Rosman, Silvia 125n76 Roth, Michael S. 21, 36n67 Rubble (Gordillo) 19 ruin(s): Cunha images of 84n103; in the desert 21; and incompleteness 68; Latin American landscapes 65; and nostalgia 114; notion of 20; premature 21–2; in The Purple Land 114; of remains and traces 20; in Western literature 21 Saeger, James Schofield 71n7 Saes, Décio 251n28 Said, Edward 47, 77n47; on Burton 48–9; “consolidated vision” 116 Santana, José Carlos Barreto de 251n30, 254n53 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino 6, 47–8, 65–6, 132, 165, 230, 252n38, 256n69 Sayhueque, Valentín 128, 139, 165, 170–3, 177, 186n4, 191n48 Scarry, Elaine 22, 240 Schwarz, Roberto 211, 250n23 Scott, James C. 28–9, 55, 68, 208, 223, 248n9, 263n117 Seed, Patricia 145, 194n64 Seeing Like a State (Scott) 28 sertanejo troops 225–6 Sertão: desertifying 206–10; deviations and 214–17; obstacles and 214–17; tensions and 214–17; traversing 214–17 Sevcenko, Nicolau 250n20, 251n29, 261n101 A Shepherd’s Life: Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs (Hudson) 91 Shohat, Ella 157 Sinbad the Sailor 147 slavery 194n63, 211 Smith, Neil 24, 34n35, 158, 198n87 smooth space 60, 82n93, 143; described 26, 123n48; vs. homogeneous space 260n101; and nomads 229; vs. striated space 25–6, 60, 90; Uruguay as 124n56 social Darwinism 224 Sociedad Científica Argentina (Argentine Scientific Society) 130

Index  305 Solano López, Francisco 10, 42, 53; Burton criticisms of 49; Cristina Fernández view of 71n8; death of 43; declaration of war on Brazil 45 solitudo 1–2, 4, 31n2 South America: English travelers in 95; violence in 63–4 space: of city vs. state 26; conflict in Uruguayan 104; erasure of urban 89; introducing progress or time in 78; mapping and 59; Paraguay as barbaric 53–5; perspectives on 23–6; production of 40, 130, 187n13; 258n84; Uruguay as lawless 111; see also anachronistic space; smooth space; striated space Spanish Crown 145 Stam, Robert 157 state: and destruction 19; and exteriority 27–8; Latin American and war 6–13; as system of domination 7; and territory 26; and violence 24 Stewart, Susan 169, 203n110 striated space 25–6; vs. smooth space 26; 102 Stroessner, Alfredo 42, 75n33, 82n88 Tacitus, Cornelius 1, 16, 32n12, 54, 96 Taft, William Howard 186 Taine, Hippolyte 213, 253n44 The Tangled Web (Godsall) 46 taxation 7, 208–9, 246n3, 248n9 Tehuelches people 140, 162 Tehuelche tribe 139, 142, 199n90 “telescopic perspective” 214 territory: characteristics of Paraguayan 59; ‘legible,’ and war 29; shifting in Viaje a la Patagonia Austral 138–41; and state 26 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari) 25 Through the Brazilian Wilderness (Roosevelt) 186 Tilly, Charles 7, 248n9 time, homogenization of 18 Torre, Claudia 188n19, 190n41, 204n125 Transatlantique (Laurent) 84n103 travel: Hudson’s conception of 196n75; as nature’s transformation 157–9; physical movement and 159

“travelees” 5 A Traveller in Little Things (Hudson) 91 Treaty of the Triple Alliance 54, 74n30, 187n8 Trojanow, Ilija 75n36 La última guerra. Cultura visual de la Guerra contra Paraguay (DíazDuhalde) 33n20 unhomely museum 161–9 Unhomely Rooms (Díaz) 119n12 University of La Plata 174 Unthinking Eurocentrism (Stam and Shohat) 157 Urquiza, Justo José de 47 Uruguay: and British Empire 87; creation of 12; economy 94–5; historiography of 93, 121n34; invasion of 74n30, 97; landscape 97–8; reconfiguration of 95; rural 94; and War of the Triple Alliance 45 Valladares, Lícia do Prado 231, 261n102 Van Den Abbeele, Georges 5, 192n52, 263n119 Vecchi, Roberto 254n49 Veloso, Caetano 84n103 Ventura, Roberto 247n4, 252n38 ‘vertical’ confrontation 34n42 Vezub, Julio Esteban 139, 170, 191n48 Viaje a la Patagonia austral (Moreno) 14, 16, 128, 165; illustrations in 148; map of Moreno’s 1876–77 trip in 138; Moreno praising Columbus in 145; shifting territories and identities in 138–41; violence attributed to the indigenous community in 199n92; war of extermination in 202n109; women participating in orgies 203n118 Viedma, Francisco de 142 Villa, Marco Antonio 228, 253n43, 258n90, 259n92, 288 Viñas, David 136, 205n129 violence: and capital 24; exterminatory 199n92, 209; and foreign incursion into Uruguay 95; gaucho’s 201n105; indigenous 166–7, 176, 199n90; military 210;

306 Index in Paraguay 63–4; and positive morality 100; in South America 63–4; and state 24; and war 89 Visite a Bahia web page 246 Vitullo, Julieta 33n20 Volney 65–6 The Voyage of the Beagle (Darwin) 148 La vuelta de Martín Fierro (Hernández) 201n105 Walther, Juan Carlos 134, 190n32 war: and Brazil history 12; and consolidation of modern state in Argentina 131–7; looking at 234–44; perspectives on 23–6; in Reminiscencias 174–80; and state 6–13; and violence 89; see also specific wars “War and Representation” (Jameson) 22 “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime” (Tilly) 7 War of a Thousand Deserts (DeLay) 3–4, 32n12

War of the Pacific 198n87 War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70) 4, 10, 13, 24, 264n126; described in Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay 41; and South American modernization process 45 Wars of Latin America, 1899–1941 (De La Pedraja) 37n75 Washburn, Charles 56 Weber, Max 7 Whigham, Thomas 42–3, 53, 61, 71n7; on Burton’s view of the Paraguayan War 62 Wilson, Jason 91 Winn, Peter 92 Woolf, Virginia 120n18 Wright, Thomas 46, 75n34 Youngs, Tim 50, 194n63 Zeballos, Estanislao 200n98, 205n129 Zilly, Berthold 209, 253n41 Zoli, Corrado 174, 203n113