A Short Prelude - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 11

Bolivianclaims( Peru vs Bolivia ,1908),andanextensivecorrespondencethataddresses
his travel to the headwaters of the Purús and the politics (and personal disaster) of his
return. But these are unintelligible and simple fragments without a unifying theme. And
there certainly was a unifying theme. Virtually all of da Cunha's Amazonian writing can
be seen as, and indeed, much of it was explicitly produced for, a nationalist/imperial
narrative to justify Brazil's claims in the upper Amazon. That he completed his task by
linkingittohisowndreamsofanemergenttropicalcivilizationthroughthemovingrev-
elations of social history and nature writing speaks to his artistic ambitions and his bril-
liance.
His Amazon work integrated his practical concerns (an income), artistic impulses,
political yearnings, and geopolitics with his longing for a new type of Brazilian society
andnationthatvaluedits“bronzedbackwoodstitans”asmuchasitsgildedcoastalelites.
It revealed his desire to show the force and beauty of the forest and to uncover a lost
social history obscured by the meanders of the rivers, languishing in dusty archives, and
couched in the twangs of his sertanejo informants. The moving elements of Os Ser-
tões —his empathetic descriptions of land and life, his attention to history, folklore, and
landscape—are all present in his Amazonian work.
As a man of letters and part of the rebellious literary coterie of Brazil's Belle Époque,
hewasinterestedinnationalthemesratherthantheartisticpossibilitiesofthetransposed
FrenchgenreofthenovelofmannersortheimitationsofAlexandervonHumboldt'sex-
travagant style. Euclides felt the “lexicon of science” was most evocative of the region
because most exact. Of the prose of botanist Jacques Huber he writes, “The eloquence
and brilliance were imparted by the extraordinary display surrounding him. . . . I . . .
could not find in myself the choice vocabulary which to describe it, but he could, using
only the language drawn from the austere lexicon of technical diction.” 24 On the writing
of his friend and land surveyor Alfredo Rangel (and he might as well have been writing
abouthimself):“Thedreameralignedhiswayoncompasscoordinates.. . .Andhismost
touching insights were written on the last pages of field notebooks.” 25 And indeed, da
Cunha'sownnotebookofstudiesfortheunwritten“Paraisoperdido”engagemostlysci-
entific annotations from the British Royal Geographical Society, on the work of the first
formal explorer of the Purús River, William Chandless.
Who is Euclides, and why is he there? What is really going on behind the powerful
texts, petty bitching about bureaucracies, complaints about the climate, and yearning for
friends and family? His aim, of course, is to come up with a truly Brazilian narrative,
a Brazilian epic and a New World Lusiad. He is not given to the romantic sublime or
the picturesque although he is possibly the best writer on Amazon nature, nor is he a
chronicler ofoddities suitable forretelling in fashionable salons. It wasn't exotic to him:
it was Brazilian . He is part of the “writing of empire,” as the cliché has it, but his pos-