An unexpected return

The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse (New Directions, 1996)



W. G. Sebald's subjects in The Emigrants, and elsewhere in his fiction, seem to be not themselves. They are loners and eccentrics, old and weary. Exiled souls wandering through life as if already dead. Take the first of four character portraits in The Emigrants. At the twilight of his life, Dr. Henry Selwyn starts to confide to the narrator certain moments of his life. (The best summary of Dr. Selwyn's story is contained in the review of Gabriel Josipovici in the Jewish Quarterly, reprinted in the Vertigo blog, here).

I think of Dr. Selwyn as a continuation of the Sebald persona in "Il ritorno in patria", the final section of Sebald's first novel Vertigo, the prose work immediately preceding The Emigrants. The narrator of that section, when he finally visited his village W. after a long time, was able to remember the past with stunning clarity (just like Dr. Selwyn). The eponymous character in Sebald's final novel Austerlitz, too, suddenly remembered all the obscured details of his transport on a train at a very young age. So, in a sense, Dr. Selwyn is a representative Sebaldian figure who was jolted from his zombie-like reverie, confronted by momentous events of the past, every fine detail of his recollection recalled in all its hyper-real color, contour, and texture. Memory lapse was lifted like a veil, or a dam releasing huge amounts of water.

Max Sebald's stories are often about memory and storytelling. For him, forgetting is like losing the substance of one's humanity. Put in another way, if one was without memory then one might as well be dead. As long as we commemorate the dead, they are alive within us or in us. Throughout the narrator's several encounters with him, Dr. Selwyn was depicted almost like a ghost already. His ghostly presence, however, is belied by the fascinating stories of his past. Up to a certain point, the doctor seems to resist death through remembering. And in imparting his story to the narrator, the doctor is now a part of the narrator's memory and so he (the narrator) remembers the old man and he (Dr. Selwyn) is fully alive in the narrator's memory.

Dr. Selwyn yearns for the past that was initially like a blank wall to him. But gaps in his memory are suddenly being filled with details he thought he'd lost. He has fond memories of his friend Johannes Naegeli, a mountain guide who went missing and was believed to have met a certain accident by falling into a crevasse of a glacier.

Yet the transference of memory does not stop between the narrator and Dr. Selwyn. The narrator is also passing it on to us, enlisting our confidence. Sebald has implicated us, the reader, in the old man's story. We become privy to Dr. Selwyn's past, and so even if he's dead (in the story), things that concern the doctor concern us now too.

Naegeli is one of the dead who returned in the story, but miraculously through an accident too, a natural process at that – the melting of the glacier that covered him for more than seventy years. At that point of the discovery of the frozen body, no one would have remembered the long buried Naegeli anymore (the only one who had the capacity to do so – Dr. Selwyn – was already dead, by his own hands, at that point in the story) were it not for the remembrance imparted by Dr. Selwyn to the narrator. And from the narrator to us, readers.  – "Certain things, as I am increasingly becoming aware, have a way of returning unexpectedly, often after a lengthy absence."

We now remember the dead, his humanity, even if we didn't know him personally because we have learned a part of his history. In a way, Sebald here demonstrated the power of sharing stories, of storytelling, of fiction in general, to preserve memories. To memorialize history and people against the eternal forgetting. Against the irreversible.

Poems (in conversation)

Poems from two poetry collections I read in the last two days: Marginal Annotations and Other Poems (Giraffe Books, 2001) by Edith L. Tiempo and To the Evening Star (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013) by Simeon Dumdum Jr.


From Spelling It Out
Edith L. Tiempo

How like a spell the dusk falls
On the jaded eyes.
It's not day or dark, in that deviant time
When the ways of rhyme
And the ways of reason
Do not play the sorcerer's part;
Just disarray, the random, distortions,
The turns and twists, surprise, surmise,
When the wavery decibel calls
The world to intimations,
In this twilight of the heart
Where a freakish glimmer reinvents,
And we startle
Into a place of perpetual
Sheer astonishments.


Thank You
Simeon Dumdum Jr.

To think that I owe you my deepest thanks,
And I have done nothing except sit here,
As though expecting someone to appear
Suddenly on the path between the banks
Of flowers, but the glare of noontime blanks
The eyes, and happily the inner ear
Catches your voice ever present and clear,
Calls on the mind and the heart to close ranks,
And begs the mouth to mutter something true,
And hands to reach for the path and to pick
A rose or two before someone arrives,
And then who knows if that someone is you
Because you're in my mind, and I am quick
To celebrate the linkage of our lives.

On the telling of a tale and the singing of verses

Nowadays, when certain book reviewers and blurb-spitters describe a book as an "epic novel", more likely than not it means that the book is too long to finish in a few sittings. Say, 500 pages at the minimum, in small print. Maybe the story continues through the next installments, each book in the now-expanding series stretching the story in ridiculous directions. More likely it's a sprawling historical romance or intergenerational family saga, maybe a space opera, populated by a dozen characters (humans or aliens) whose individual stories intertwine and whose destinies collide in an extravagant, show-stopping ending.

Such "epic stories" are more or less the bestseller kind; it may even be full of sobering surprises and shattering exposés about the human condition. But ultimately devoid of richness in the telling, of a rhythmic and singing prose style. A story that was just that: without linguistic intent. The epic in epic novels has been turned into a soap-like slipperiness, predictable in its unpredictability. The epic is robbed of its essential qualities, disabused of its traditional conceptions, becoming now a genre based on page count and spine thickness. This species of the novel, if it exists, must be returned to its literal rendering. The epic has to seek its epicenter.

In an epic lecture—third in a series—called "The Telling of the Tale", Borges, again:

If we think of the novel and the epic, we are tempted to fall into thinking that the chief difference lies in the difference between verse and prose, in the difference between singing something and stating something. But I think that there is a greater difference. I think the difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero—a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character.

Borges believed that there are only a few patterns or finite number of metaphors in rhymed verses. From this idea he also deduced that there are only a few templates for the plot of an epic story. The first requirement is the hero, along with the well-used elements—villains, heroine, sidekick, insurmountable odds, true tests of character and strength, stupendous fight scenes. The second is the form. It is in verse, and it must be sung.

The modern hybrid "epic novel" therefore must integrate the conventional epic requirements into prose. The hero is easy to come by, but telling the tale in a singing prose, not a prosaic prose, is another species of telling altogether. Predictably, Borges finds the modern novels are an epic fail.

We come now to our time, and we find this very strange circumstance. We have had two world wars, and somehow no epic has come from them—except perhaps The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. But in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom—and I find many epic qualities there—in The Seven Pillars the book is hampered by the fact that the hero is the teller, and so sometimes he has to belittle himself, he has to make himself human, he has to make himself far too believable. In fact, he has to fall into the tricks of a novelist.

The need for the epic (or for the mode of the epic) to weave into the fabric of fiction is necessary for Borges because he sees in the novelistic literature the possibility of gaining a heroic quality. But postmodern narrative tendencies irritate him.

I think that the novel is breaking down. I think that all these very daring and very interesting experiments with the novel—for example, the idea of the shifting of time, the idea of the story being told by different characters—all those are leading to the moment when we shall feel that the novel is no longer with us.

It may not be surprising that the old man prefers the grand style and the great storytelling tradition of heroes and deeds and the singing of them. His brand of fiction romanticizes the mythopoetic tradition. He almost apologizes for his preference, saying he may be an old-fashioned man from the nineteenth century. But myth-making has been with us since time immemorial. As long as the tales are being spoken and sung, handed down from singers to listeners, myths are created and recreated, over and over. After the words of the painter Whistler, Borges proclaims: "Art happens every time we read a poem." Which can be tweaked in this case: A myth is reborn every time we sing an epic novel.

I'm not sure whether Borges will consider João Guimarães Rosa's Grande Sertão: Veredas an epic novel. I'm almost sure he did not even read it. In the exacting terms he give for his type of novel, it fails in several respects. For one, it is told by the hero Riobaldo. And it is full of time shifts, with the muddled Riobaldo criss-crossing time and space in an always apologetic telling. He withholds information from the reader. He deliberately delays the story for—it's really rather irksome—the full impact of the outcome of—the way he always breaks off his narrative—every staggering showdown.

Ah, but hold on, wait a minute: I'm getting off the track. I was about to forget Vupes! My story would be neither accurate nor complete if I left out Vupes, for he comes very much into the picture.

Riobaldo is always getting off the track, circling around his long-drawn out story like a thirsty vulture to the corpse of his memory. Random thoughts assail him. Riobaldo, the hero, the ceaseless teller, belittles himself. He almost surely falls into the tricks of novel writing, making himself too believable.

I know that I am telling this badly, just hitting the high spots. I ramble. But it is not to cover up; don't think that. About serious matters, the normal ones, I have told you almost everything. I have no hesitation. You are a man who judges others as you would yourself; you are not one to censure. And my past deeds have been invalidated, proscribed. My respectability is solid. Now I am like a tapir in a pool; nobody can catch me. Little of my life is left to me. I am talking foolishness.

His words can be endearing and exasperating at the same time. They often linger like an unspoken commentary on the poverty and brutality of people around him. But whether his story ultimately describes the "breaking down of a man" or "degeneration of character" (as Borges cites Mencken) is debatable. I'm not even sure if Riobaldo is the hero of the novel.

Yet in many ways Guimarães Rosa tips the balance of the novel toward epic proportions. There is singing, and there are songs of old excerpted in it, ballads and lyrics. Riobaldo names his horse after a singer whose song haunts him. There are myths, myth-making from his own mouth, bygone stories of great jagunço chiefs. His is not a totally scripted tale. The seeming spontaneity underpins the deep sorrows of his heart. His stories follow the course of a river from the headwaters to the rapids, feeding into countless tributaries, according to the dictates of a compassionate memory.

As I think of them that is how I relate them. You are very kind to listen to me. There are hours long past that remain much closer to us than other more recent ones. You know yourself how it is.

The trickery of the modern novelist usually lies in the handling of memory and in the investigation of a hero's fallibility. And the modern novel, epic or otherwise, is full of these tricks.

The modern epic novel that Borges described is probably a hypothetical one. It was once possible, but modern writing has split the two tasks—the telling of a tale and the singing of verses as mutually exclusive ways of storytelling. Nowadays epic singing in prose is an ideal, like a perfect translation, impossible to write. But he is just too full of hope to give up his dream of the epic. His prophecy of its inevitable comeback, in the form of a novel, is a challenge both to writers and the readers who will sing them.

I think that if the telling of a tale and the singing of verse could come together again, then a very important thing might happen.

...

I have optimism, I have hope. And as the future holds many things—as the future, perhaps, holds all things—I think that the epic will come back to us. I think that the poet shall once again be a maker. I mean, he will tell a story and he will also sing it. And we will not think of those two things as different, even as we do not think they are different in Homer or in Virgil.

That is from his lecture of 1967 or 68. Riobaldo, his precursor, is amenable on the aspect of songs bearing the heroes out. In his own novelistic way, Riobaldo sings his own tale.

"The war was a big one, it lasted a long time, it filled this sertão. Everybody is going to talk about it, throughout the North, in Minas and the whole of Bahia, and elsewhere, for years to come. They are going to make up songs about the many deeds."

...

Sô Candelario looked up with wonder on his face, and in an oddly quiet way spoke from his heart, in a pleasant voice:

"Let there be fame and glory. Everybody will talk about this for many years and in many places, giving praise to our honor. They will make up verses about it in the market places, and it might even be written up in city newspapers."

And maybe in novels too—who can say?

On Diadorim

The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by João Guimarães Rosa, translated by James L. Taylor and Harriet de Onís (Knopf, 1963)


SPOILERS. LOTS.


Two taboos permeate Riobaldo's telling of his adventures. The first is the devil, its questionable non-existence, the evil power it gives those who are willing to make a pact by selling their souls. The second is his love for his fellow jagunço Diadorim.

Diadorim loved me too. So much that his jealousy of me spilled over. After a sudden satisfaction, that other shame arose in me, a strange revulsion. [29]

It is a love that revolts him, that he cannot openly acknowledge in a society where strong men are supposed to desire only women. And so he represses it.

I was crazy about Diadorim, and at the same time, underlying this, was a dull rage at it not being possible for me to love him as I wanted to, honorably and completely. [30]

He denies expression of that love in countless ways. For Riobaldo, it is an evil thing that must not be given due course. It cannot be named, much in the same way that the devil's name cannot be freely uttered. Riobaldo is afraid that the two taboos—his attraction for a fellow man and the existence of the devil—are interlinked.

Always when we begin to love someone, in the normal run of things, love takes root and grows, because, in a way, that is what we want to happen, and so we seek it and help it along in our mind; but when it is predestined, all-embracing, we love completely and fatefully, we have to love, and we come upon one surprise after another. A love of this sort grows first and bursts forth later. I am talking a lot, I know: I am being a bore. But it can't be helped. Well, then, tell me: can love like that come from the devil? Can it possibly? Can it come from One-Who-Does-Not-Exist? Your silence indicates agreement. Please don't answer me, or my confusion will grow. [117]

The novel then appears as a mashup of a violent action adventure and a tender love story, with the restraints of the larger society and its religious/folk beliefs—the dominant arbiter of morals—impinging on individual desires and happiness. But since this is a (LGBT) novel about transformations and perpetual self-inventions carefully worked out, the revelation about Diadorim's sexuality at the end compels the reader to reassess Riobaldo's self-questioning narrative.

Though the novel is often likened to a Western, an Eastern reading gives some insights into the most radical transformation in the book. Eclipsing Riobaldo's transformation from a simple bandit to a formidable jagunço chief is Diadorim's transformation into (or impersonation as) a man. Why did she do it?

The role of Joca Ramiro, her father whom she revered so much, is significant in understanding Diadorim's taking on the duties of an obedient son. Explaining her bravery to Riobaldo when they first met, the Boy (as Diadorim was then known to Riobaldo) explains: "I am different from everyone else. My father told me that I had to be different, very different."

In "The Death of a Disciple" (1918) by the Japanese writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, a young girl impersonates the life of a boy (Lorenzo) in order to enter the church and serve God the father: "Whenever he was asked about his origins, Lorenzo would parry all questions with a guileless smile and offer only the vaguest of replies: his home, he said, was Paraiso, his father Deus."

The deep love for her old father is also the reason the legendary Chinese woman warrior Hua Mulan escaped her home to enlist as a soldier after her father was drafted into the army. Her heroic exploits are recorded in the poem “Ballad of Mulan”.

Last night I saw the army notice, The emperor is calling a great draft.
A dozen volumes of battle rolls, Each one with my father's name.
My father has no grown-up son, And I have no elder brother.
I'm willing to buy a horse and saddle, To go to battle in my father's place."

First transcribed in the 6th century and the basis of the popular 1998 Disney animated movie Mulan, it is said to be one of the first poems in Chinese history to support gender equality. After fighting battles for ten years, Mulan and her army visited the emperor who showered the victors with rewards. When the emperor asked Mulan what she desires, she replied that she only wanted to come back home. Her family, learning of her return, joyously welcomed her.

"I open my east chamber door, And sit on my west chamber bed.
I take off my battle cloak, And put on my old-time clothes.
I adjust my wispy hair at the window sill, And apply my bisque makeup by the mirror.
I step out to see my comrades-in-arms, They are all surprised and astounded:
'We travelled twelve years together, Yet didn't realize Mulan was a lady!'"

The male rabbit is swifter of foot, The eyes of the female are somewhat smaller.
But when the two rabbits run side by side, How can you tell the female from the male? 

Unlike in the Chinese poem, the revelatory ending of The Devil to Pay in the Backlands is a tragic affair, all the more poignant for dashing all hopes of potential future happiness between Riobaldo and Diadorim. In a kind of Buddhist sense, it may be part of Riobaldo's karma, part of the settling of accounts in the sertão, the final reckoning of his "pact".

One other interesting character in the book who seems to refract everything Riobaldo is narrating to his silent interviewer is his compadre Quelemém, an absentee commentator to the proceedings. Quelemém is a sort of guru to Riobaldo, "a person of such rare quality, that just being near him, everyone becomes calm, smiling, kind. [491]" Riobaldo derives several religious notions from him—karma, meditation, penance, self-denial—although he cautions against accepting them wholesale.

In this world or the next, each Jazevedão, when he has finished what he has to do, stumbles into his time of penance until he has paid in full what he owes—my compadre Quelemém will bear me out. [13]

He answered me that as we near Heaven, we become cleansed and all our ugly past fades into nothingness, like the misbehaviour of childhood, the naughtiness. Like there is no need to feel remorse for what we may have divulged during the turmoil of a nightmare. So—we become clean and bright! Maybe that is why they say getting to Heaven is so slow. I check these matters, you understand, with my compadre Quelemém, because of the belief he holds: that one day we pay to the last penny for every evil deed we have committed. A fellow who believes that would rather get up before daybreak three days in a row than make the slightest misstep. Compadre Quelemém never talks for the sake of talking, he means what he says. Only, I’m not going to tell him this: one must never swallow whole others tell us—that is an unbreakable rule! [16-17]

In his retrospective telling of his violent past, Riobaldo is all the more concerned about the afterlife and the salvation of his soul, repeatedly invoking God, Heaven, and Our Lady of Abadia. Here we find the abiding presence of religion that was the backdrop of Akutagawa's short story (and also, notably, of Endo Shusaku's novel Silence). For another reading of Grande Sertão's ending, I'm quoting from translator Charles De Wolf's notes to "The Death of a Disciple".

The surprise ending points to a mélange of traditions. In the minds of the story's first readers, Lorenzo would surely have evoked a non-Christian figure with a nonetheless specifically Christian association: Kannon [Guanyin]. A well-known subterfuge of the "hidden Christians" [Kakure Kirishitan] during the centuries of persecution was to use images of this enormously popular bodhisattva ... to represent the Virgin Mary. Kannon, as it happens, was originally male, becoming female along the journey to Japan from India via China. In a story that was surely known to Akutagawa, she is born Miào-Shàn, the daughter of a rich king in Sumatra, who seeks to thwart her in her desire to become a Buddhist nun, even to the point of setting fire to the temple in which she resides. She miraculously puts out the flames but in the end is put to death.

If this precursor sounds too esoteric, try a very modern variation of the story, in the 2007 Korean hit TV series Coffee Prince, which has a remake in the Philippines last year.

Of God and devil, trigger and weapon

The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by João Guimarães Rosa, translated by James L. Taylor and Harriet de Onís (Knopf, 1963)


"The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors," wrote Borges in an essay on Kafka. "His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." Borges the literary critic just defined his own exploratory style of literary criticism. For how can someone be entirely sure which particular authors and books a certain writer has read or was influenced by? A reader could know, for example, that the writings of Author A was influenced by Author B in terms of aspect X. Yet he might not be aware that Author B was influenced by Author C on that same aspect X. And there's really no way to fully know the web of influences because there are now just about infinite books written by infinite authors and containing infinite aspects. It's very likely that the anxiety of influence was felt both by readers and writers. At most, readers could only rely on gut feel and guesswork, just like Borges: "After frequenting [Kafka's] pages a bit, I came to think I could recognize his voice, or his practices, in texts from diverse literatures and periods." The text then is the thing. "If Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality [his idiosyncrasy]; in other words, it would not exist."

Because João Guimarães Rosa had written some good lines in Grande Sertão: Veredas, and because the novel was translated in various languages, then we can freely write about it. One could make, for example, an observation that Cormac McCarthy created a precursor in the Brazilian writer, he of Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West. Blood Meridian was of course that horrific ballet of blood and viscera and violence, featuring two unforgettable characters: the kid and the Judge. It was the Judge—extra-large, hairless, and enthusiastic peeler of human scalps—who cut a really nasty figure, the embodiment of the devil to pay in the wild west. The Judge was malignity itself, the author of genocides, disembowelments, and infanticides. What in Guimarães Rosa's "Matraga" story was described as "something God doesn't order and the devil doesn't do". The lawlessness and evil-doings in Guimarães Rosa could not compare to the graphic descriptions of McCarthy. But we get the idea when the narrator said, "You know, sir, the sertão is where the strong and the shrewd call the tune. God himself, when he comes here, had better come armed!"

Two characters in The Devil to Pay in the Backlands resembled the Judge in Blood Meridian. The clownish Zé Bebelo, himself formidable and talkative like the Judge, was a bandit leader who never sleeps—"Work hard to sleep well," he would say. With relish: "After I'm dead, you can rest." Then laughing: "But I'm not going to die [76]." The Judge also never slept. Right after a blood-curdling scene at the end of the book, the Judge was triumphant and hyper: "He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die."

The figure that was closer to the Judge's temperament, however, was Hermógenes, the arch-enemy of the narrator Riobaldo's band of jagunços. Hermógenes betrayed the brave Joca Ramiro, upright chief of the jagunços. He was believed to have a pact with the devil. Luck seemed to be always on his side as it was hard to catch him. And Hermógenes's cruelty, like the Judge, knew no bounds. There was a scene where a victim was tied and left for him to torture and kill slowly while he relished the man's suffering.

The novel was a haphazard record of Riobaldo's tale of his adventures as a member of a jagunço outfit under different leaders. He was speaking to an unnamed man, a learned person, almost certainly a writer who was interviewing the retired bandit in order to write about his exploits. The tale was told out of order, following the unpredictable courses of winding rivers, branching out into various tributaries. Characters crossed and re-crossed each other. The sertão contained a world, and that world was small. The tableau of scenes made for a jumbled telling but the compositional choices—the details and images, the succession of surprises one after another, the reappearances of characters—were calibrated, perfectly timed, in a narrative that was seemingly without letup in its spontaneous flow.

The elegiac tone of the narration was a hymn to a vanishing land; that is, Brazil in the first half of nineteenth century, at a time when the government was starting to compartmentalize the region by building roads. The bandit wars in the sertão region of Brazil were being fought by private armies funded by the landed class (owners of fazendas) against government troops who were harassing them. We caught the story during during the heydays of vigilante fighting when different factions of armed militias went at cross purposes and even fought each other. Food rations, weapons, and horses were sourced out by exacting tributes from fazendeiros.

The breakdown of law led to more groups being formed to "impose justice" and bring order to the world. They had “taken up arms in the cause of justice and honest government” and to protect friends (their benefactors) who were persecuted by government soldiers. It's not really that different to some regions today which are at war or in conflict or to the most violent cities in the world. Then, as now, warlords and their armies ruled the world.

War strategies and the politics of warfare figured prominently in the novel. They were tempered by the melancholic voice of Riobaldo who was recounting his violent past, sweet loves, and disappointments. Reflecting on the several successions of leadership in his jagunço army, Riobaldo was able to examine his own peripatetic life and give a glimpse of the personal and public lives of jagunços in peace and war.

The imposition of "order and justice" in the sertão was best exemplified by a key scene in the book. It was during the trial of Zé Bebelo, who made war in the pay of government against Joca Ramiro's group, that the ideas for the dispensation of justice were explored. Parliamentary procedures were carefully observed during the trial. It made for a riveting courtroom drama, in fact. It turned out that in a world of chaos and war, jagunços could still be bound by certain codes of conduct.

The prisoner's rights were protected, along with the right to defend himself in a court of war. The "fair" trial demonstrated some ethical considerations in pursuing the rules of war. Human rights, against torture and against death, were safeguarded. In context—and here we find an important "precursor" document—the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, eight years before the publication of the novel. Being a senior member of the Brazilian diplomatic community, Guimarães Rosa must have been familiar with the discussions on human rights prior to their international adoption.

But the novel was not just a platform for philosophical meditation on human rights. It also explored ideas about the individual as a free agency of good and evil, equipped with human feelings and human reason. The individual has seemingly unlimited capacity to change, to reform his ways, from one station in life to another, from one type of person to another. This individual political will to change was closely tied to Riobaldo’s metaphysical discussions on God and the devil, on saints, reincarnation, and the afterlife. Does the devil exist or not? Does God exist to thwart the devil's plans? How free are we to make a choice between good and evil? What is a "just" war? What compels a man to transform himself from good to bad and the other way round?

It was significant that Riobaldo had a special ability. He was an expert marksman. He held the life of his target enemy on his trigger finger. The latter's hearbeat depended on Riobaldo's error, but Riobaldo never made any. Choosing whom to mark out for death and whom to spare—was not that the same as playing God? How easily are we swayed by our own appetite for murder and destruction?

Those fellows there were really a gang of kind friends who helped each other at every turn, and who did not balk at sacrifices to that end. But the fact remained that, in support of some political feud, they would not hesitate to shoot up a village of helpless people, people like ourselves, with mothers and godmothers. And they found it quite natural to go out and do the same thing for the sake of health and exercise. I was horror-stricken—you know what I mean? I was afraid of the race of men. [332]

In several instances in the novel, Riobaldo was faced with a decision to choose between what he perceived as right and what he knew to be wrong. A single word from him could decide the fate of an innocent young woman. A single bullet could pass judgement on the life of a man or a horse or a dog. Every day, in battle or outside them, a jagunço may have to decide, one way or another, on things whose outcome may haunt him forever. "Living is a dangerous business", our apologetic narrator repeated many times, too many for one's comfort. When Riobaldo pulled the plug on someone, he knew his entire being decided it, not just his hand: "I tell you, this right hand of mine had fired almost by itself. What I know is, it returned Adam to dust. That's just my way of talking. [452]"

It didn’t help that Riobaldo often courted unreliability. In many instances he denied the existence of the devil, in others he subscribed wholly to the concept and was even willing to make a pact with the "dark side". The power to do good and evil resides in any one of us, but it is regulated not only by the societal rules and legal frameworks governing our actions, but by the God of our chosen religion. But in the sertão, where God has to come armed, the situation was not simple. "It is man who exists," Riobaldo reflected at one point. Are devil and God then mere labels for acts of men?

God exists, yes, slowly or suddenly. He acts, all right—but almost wholly through the medium of persons, good and bad. The awesome things of this world! The backlands are a powerful weapon. Is God a trigger? [283]

In Riobaldo's puzzlement we see the same conflict faced by Augusto Matraga. But the question was probably beyond good and evil, or their relativism.

If I wanted to make another pact, with God himself—I wonder if I can?—would this not wipe out everything that went before? ... What is needed is for God to have greater reality for people, and for the devil to amuse us with his own non-existence. One thing is sure, one alone, even though it differs for every person, and that is: God waits for each of us to act. In this world, there are all degrees of bad and good persons. But suppose everybody were bad; would not then everybody be good? Ah, it is only for the sake of pleasure and happiness that we seek to know everything, to develop a soul, to have a conscience. To suffer, none of this is needed. Animals suffer pain, and they suffer without knowing the reason. I tell you, sir: everything is a pact. Every road is slippery. [259]

Everything in the book could be seen as a setup for one final revelation. Rereading it revealed that hints were carefully dropped along the way. My next post is a look into Diadorim's character and more precursors of the novel—eastern, as opposed to western, writers.

OTHER READERS:

Richard / Caravana de recuerdos (multiple posts)
Miguel / St. Orberose (multiple posts)
Scott / seraillon

Rise / in lieu of a field guide (multiple posts)