How is it possible that Brazilian writer João Guimarães
Rosa’s 1956 novel Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands)
has been out of print in English for half a century and remains all but unknown
in the Anglophone world except to a small circle of academics and those
fortunate enough to have been initiated into its cult?
Able at last to count myself among the latter, I can
scarcely begin to touch on all this complex book has to offer, especially given
my almost complete ignorance of Brazilian literature and the not insignificant
matter of having read the book in translation.[i]
Those disadvantages do not, though, stand in the way of recognizing that Grande
Sertão: Veredas is neither of marginal, esoteric interest nor so dauntingly
erudite as to be forbidding. On the contrary, it’s the rare kind of work that
might serve as the reward for a lifetime of reading, offering potentially
endless exploration in its expansive cosmos, resisting reduction along its
boundless curvature, with myriad points of entry for myriad potential audiences
despite qualities that could well be intimidating. Among these is a linguistic
complexity that has spawned lexicons in Portuguese nearly as voluminous as the
novel itself and includes word variants, neologisms, regionalisms, catalogues
of flora and fauna, utterances, portmanteau names fabricated from multiple
languages, slang, even animal cries. A recursive, digressive narrative jumps
about in time and pursues paths as numerous as the “veredas” - the oasis-like
depressions and the rivulets that connect them - that figure in the book’s
title. Guimarães Rosa also draws from an unusually deep and broad aquifer of
influences to irrigate his tale: from modernist peers to the ancient Greek
tragedies and epics, Augustine’s Confessions to Don Quixote,
Dante to the Tao-Te-Ching, the natural sciences to moral philosophy,
archaic backlands superstition to contemporary global realities.
Yet Grande Sertão: Veredas comes across as a
supremely engrossing work, and one that makes a great effort not to wear its deep
erudition on its sleeve. Rather, not unlike Dante choosing to make his “Divine
Comedy” more accessible by writing in vernacular Italian, Guimarães Rosa takes
his wealth of knowledge and thoroughly emulsifies it into an ensorcelling,
vital narrative in which these cultured elements seem to propagate naturally
and organically from the irresistible pull of knowledge and a feverish,
infectious love of language (in “Woodlands Witchery,” a revealing story from Guimarães
Rosa’s earlier work, Sagarana, a character is obsessed with the sounds
of words and refers to their “song and feathers”). Those who heed the
narrator’s appeal will likely be amply rewarded:
…think hard about what I have been
telling you, turn it over in your mind, for I have related nothing idly. I
don’t waste words. Think it over, figure it out. Build your own plot around it.
But in Guimarães Rosa’s world the privilege of language and
knowledge is not to be abused by constructing a wall between writer and reader,
and his narrator gently concludes the advice above with a gesture of patience
and good will: “In the meantime, we’ll have some more coffee, and smoke a good
cigarette.” With an openness, immediacy and intimacy that invites trust and
humbles one into listening, this captivating voice - rising and falling,
emphasizing, warning of zones difficult to talk about and even superstitious to
mention, following its own dictates in the way William James described the flow
of thought as “like a bird’s life, seeming to be made of an alternation of
flights and perchings” - calls upon readers to engage existential and moral
questions, fundamentally and recognizably human in a “world beyond
control.”
This beguiling voice belongs to Guimarães Rosa’s unusual
choice of narrator, Riobaldo, “an ignorant man,” an unschooled wanderer of the
great Brazilian sertão, a retired jagunço (“a member of a lawless band of armed
ruffians in the hire of rival politicos, who warred against each other and
against the military, at the turn of the century, in northeastern Brazil”[ii]),
with a down-to-earth affability, sharp natural intelligence and tremendously
inventive, poetic gift for language that invites rather than intimidates. An
implicit sympathy with and respect for the practical knowledge and native
intelligence possessed by people whom urbanites and academics might regard as
simple pervades Grande Sertão: Veredas. Self-effacing and modest about
his remarkable narrative skills, which spring directly from his experience,
Riobaldo knows that storytelling can only approximate life: “To relate stories
full of surprises and deeds of daring may be much more entertaining, but hell,
when you are the one who is doing the everyday living, these fancy turns of
events don’t work.”
Riobaldo’s account (an oral, even oracular, tale perhaps
best read aloud) is a kind of apostrophe to a vaguely sketched listener, an
educated visitor from the urban coast who has come to explore the sertão.
Having in his old age “invented this hobby, of speculating about ideas,”
Riobaldo finds in this newcomer the sounding board that enables his discourse
(that a story depends upon both teller and audience, or writer and reader, is a
given in Grande Sertão: Veredas): “To talk like this with a stranger,
who listens well and soon goes far away, has a second advantage: it is as
though I were talking to myself.” And in finding his auditor to be a learnèd
outsider, Riobaldo expresses a simple faith in education as a tool for better
managing life’s vicissitudes:
How many really fine ideas occur to a
well-educated person! In that way they can fill this world with other things,
without the mistakes and twistings and turnings of life in its stupid
bungling….In real life, things end less neatly, or don’t end at all.
Riobaldo’s recitation of the “real life” he has led - “like
a live fish on a griddle” – begins with the intonation of a single word –
“Nonada” (“It’s nothing”) - an alpha
that will find its omega in another
single word and an infinity symbol some 500 pages of uninterrupted monologue
later. He seeks to reassure his visitor that the gunshots he’s just heard were
not the notorious violence of the backlands, but just Riobaldo himself,
practicing to keep up his finest skill, marksmanship. This division between
violence and innocence, expectation and reality, will hang like a shimmering
curtain throughout Grande Sertão: Veredas. Insisting with magnanimous
hospitality, and perhaps a desperate need to unburden himself, that his guest
stay - “A visit here, in my house, with me, lasts three days!” - Riobaldo
weaves an intricate account of his jagunço life in the sertão: his adventures
and trials under various jagunço chiefs; the brutal battles he and his comrades
have fought; episodes of violence alternating with moments of great tenderness;
dreams of revenge and power vying with a desire to escape the violent hand that
life has dealt him; doubts and struggles, both particular and universal, in
trying to make sense of a life in which, as Riobaldo repeatedly asserts, “the
whole world is crazy.” Two other repeated phrases punctuate his speech: an
acknowledgement that “to live is a dangerous thing” and reluctant references, sometimes
briefly trailing into reflective silence, to “the devil in the whirlwind, in
the middle of the street,” hinting at critical moments of confusion, “memories
of things worse than bad,” that still weigh so heavily on Riobaldo that in the
first moments of his tale he gets to the point that obsesses him most: Does the
devil exist?
Far from being a matter of idle curiosity, Riobaldo’s appeal
is the central existential question that plagues him, a need to understand his
responsibility regarding the two great entwined forces that have shaped his
life: the pact with the devil that Riobaldo may - or may not - have made one
cold night alone in the haunting Veredas
Mortas in hopes of extinguishing “an irrational evil,” the murderous jagunço
Hermogènes; and Riobaldo’s profound love for Reinaldo, or Diadorim, the
“different” jagunço companion he has known since a transformative moment of
Riobaldo’s youth. These forces come together almost exactly halfway through the
novel (the elegant structure of Grande Sertão: Veredas probably merits a
dissertation) when two events occur almost simultaneously: the murder by the
mutinous “Judases,” Hermogènes and Ricardão, of jagunço hero Joca Ramiro,
revealed now to be Diadorim’s father; and immediately preceding this shock,
Riobaldo’s first acknowledgment to himself that what he has felt for Diadorim –
a desire “to place my fingers lightly, so lightly, over his soft eyes, hiding
them, to keep from having to endure their fascination. How much their green
beauty was hurting me; so impossible” - goes beyond fraternity and friendship, and
is in fact genuine love, a feeling that “had been dormant, unperceived by me,
in our everyday living. But now it was springing to life, like day breaking,
bursting. I lay still a moment, my eyes closed, thrilled and glowing in my
new-found joy” (another dissertation topic: Grande Sertão: Veredas as
one of the great depictions of male love in modern literature).
“Am I telling things badly? I’ll start again.”
That it has taken half the book to get to this point is in
part due to Riobaldo’s revision and reorganization of his thoughts,
occasionally moving backwards or sideways to render important points or
informative anecdotes. About a sixth of the way into his narrative, he abruptly
halts his story, which has so far focused on his hunt for the Judases with the
band of jagunços led by Medeiro Vaz up until the group falls under the
leadership of the reform-minded jagunço chief, Zé Bébelo, intent on ridding the
sertão of lawlessness. Riobaldo then begins re-telling it starting from his
childhood and not returning to where he left off until some 200 pages later.
Such temporal recursions find a parallel in the spatial dimensions of the novel
as Riobaldo wanders about the great sertão, at times retracing paths he has
taken before.
A coherence to the narrative is nonetheless sustained by the
unswerving attention Riobaldo concentrates on his listener (in one sense, we
remain in a fixed place and time: at Riobaldo’s ranch, enraptured by the spell
he casts with his tale) as well as by the constant swarm of questions and
ruminations he expresses about his place in the world, his relationship to
violence and love, obligation and responsibility, even his own identity and
existence:
“Where does my guilt come from?”
“Isn’t nearly everything one does
or doesn’t do, treachery in the end?
“Who knows for sure what a person
really is?”
“When did my fault begin?”
“Do you suppose there is a fixed
point, beyond which there is no turning back?”
“Was I thinking?”
Questions that might in isolation sound ponderous instead
become, enveloped in Riobaldo’s earnest inquiry and voluptuous discourse,
matters of importance to ourselves because of Riobaldo’s having involved us
fully in his life, enlisting our help in seeking answers to questions that
resonate universally. Through the words of this complex, simple man of the
backlands of Brazil, a mercenary warrior so ostensibly different from
ourselves, who has done “deplorable” things but has “come there, to the sertão
of the North, as everyone does sooner of later…almost without noticing that I
was doing so, compelled by the need to find a better way of life,” we’re unable
to turn away our gaze, or escape our essential, human commonality.
Guimarães Rosa’s concentration on the essential renders aspects
of fiction such as plot and dénouement almost entirely subordinate
to the pointedness of the book’s existential inquiries and the ebullient freshness
and newness of the language with which they are delivered. Whether one knows
ahead of time the “surprise” revelation of the end of the novel is much beside
the point (especially in a book that ends with an infinity mark). In terms of
plot, Riobaldo’s story in the novel’s second half winds along the tension
between growing acceptance of a love he fears to admit and the burning, hateful
vengeance he feels compelled to pursue and justify. These entangled but
competing forces, this “devil in the whirlwind, in the middle of the street,” literalized
at the end in an almost cartoonish fusion, but also forming a kind of quantum
spin-liquid state in which Riobaldo’s ability to make sense of his life’s
choices attains a pitch of constant instability - leave him closer to an answer
but still asking the question that has dogged him from the beginning. Does the
devil exist? This may seem the simple question of an uneducated person, and it
is far from being the only question the novel asks. But if we heed Riobaldo’s
advice, to “…listen beyond what I am telling you, and listen with an open
mind,” it reveals itself as a question of great importance and enduring
relevance, however sophisticated or unsophisticated the manner in which we may
phrase it. Is not the world that offers beauty, goodness and love filled with
jagunços and all who must deal with them, with persons born to or entrapped in
violence and conflict, whose struggles to seek a better life involve us in
their existence, whose stories demand that we question our own complicity and
responsibility?
“The sertão,” as Riobaldo says, “is everywhere.”
I am immensely grateful
to my co-hosts for this group reading of Grande Sertão: Veredas: Richard, Rise and Miguel.
[i] Having read
about 90 pages of the French translation, I switched, without prejudice, to the
English translation when it suddenly became available. These translations approach
the novel quite differently, with the English translators electing to emphasize
clarity over an attempt to recreate fully, as does the French translation,
Guimarães Rosa’s linguistic inventiveness.
[ii] Glossary to
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, by João Guimarães Rosa, James L.
Taylor and Harriet de Onís, translators, Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1963.
