The Vortex and the Map:
Cartographic Illusion and Counter-Mapping in La vorágine (1)
Amanda Mignonne Smith
How
many maps, in the descriptive or geographical sense, might be needed to deal
exhaustively with a given space, to code and decode all its meanings and
contents? It is doubtful whether a finite number can ever be given to this sort
of question.
–Lefebvre
José Eustasio Rivera (1888-1928) saved a final half-page of the notebook where he drafted the first part of La vorágine (1924) to specify where he was when he scribbled the text:
Este cuaderno viajó conmigo por todos los ríos
Orinoco, Atabapo, Guaviare, Inírida, Guainía, Casiquiare, Ríonegro, Amazonas,
Magdalena—durante el año 1923 cuando anduve
de Abogado de la Comisión Colombiana de Límites con Venezuela y sus páginas fueron
escritas en las playas, en las selvas, en los desiertos, en las popas de las
canoas, en las piedras que me sirvieron de cabecera, sobre los cajones y los
rollos de los cables, entre las plagas y los calores. (85r)
So
integral was the mapping of this riverine frontier to the genesis of the novel
that the Colombian poet returned to the first page of the manuscript and
penciled the names of the rivers there as well, below his first entry (1r). In
protest of what he saw as a debacle of mismanaged resources and unrealizable
expectations, he had formally withdrawn from the mixed border commission that
was to update the landmarks of Colombia’s eastern limits. While rejecting the
work of the official border commission, though, he engaged in his own
cartographic reconnaissance, traveling along rivers and interviewing Brazilian,
Venezuelan, and Colombian tenant farmers as well as members of indigenous communities
to exchange geographic information (2). Notebooks and papers housed at
the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia show that he sketched
rudimentary maps, documenting the routes and names of major rivers and their
tributaries (3). This urge to map spills over into the pages of La vorágine in what Jennifer French
refers to as its “topographic drive,” which she considers key to the text’s
structure and thematics (133). Besides French’s brief discussion, though, the
intersection of literary and geographic mapping in this now canonical novel has
mistakenly remained unconsidered.
This
article bridges that critical gap in detail to reexamine La vorágine’s intellectual legacy in Latin American literature.
Since its first publication, critical ambivalence and controversy have
surrounded the novel. One of its most vehement critics, Colombian journalist Ricardo
Sánchez Ramírez, using a pseudonym, chided the text for both its perceived
literary shortcomings and what he viewed as hyperbolic depiction of the violence
of the Putumayo Rubber Boom of earlier decades (1870-1910) (4). Not
coincidentally, though, Sánchez Ramírez was also a former Colombian consul of
Manaus, a position named directly in La
vorágine as being ignorant to the country’s geography (Rivera 361). Decades
later in 1969, Carlos Fuentes further disparages the novel as a novela de la tierra, “más cercana a la geografía que a la literatura” (9). Relatively recent studies
by Carlos Alonso (1990), Jennifer French (2005), Charlotte Rogers (2012), and Ericka
Beckman (2013) have insightfully argued that the text’s perceived provincialism
in fact functions as a critical response to modernity in the forms of the
literary avant-garde, British neocolonialism, madness, and export-led
modernization, respectively. Yet as I show, in the immediate context of
Rivera’s writing, he experienced modernity as the imposition of the fixed lines
of a map onto a space that resembled a vortex. What Fuentes refers to
pejoratively as the text’s closeness to geography merits attention as part of
that spatial confrontation. In the geocritical analysis that follows, La vorágine serves as a point of
departure into the ways that science and fiction have clashed in representing
and shaping Amazonia (5).
I
argue that Rivera’s narrative representation of the jungle in La vorágine exposes Colombia’s maps as a
kind of fiction themselves, a cartographic illusion, that nevertheless causes
devastating consequences in the real spaces that the maps depict (6).
The novel presents those consequences as local realities effaced and,
therefore, denied by scientific mapping. If a map colonizes space by dividing,
quantifying, and simplifying a territory in order to render it finite, uniform,
knowable, and ready for use,
in a Foucauldian sense, Rivera’s vertiginous vortex counter-maps. La vorágine presents confusing and
interconnected space that amplifies local realities elided in Colombia’s
cartographic representations, and in doing so, it also undermines the
supposedly universal applicability and objectivity of scientific approaches to
mapping the jungle. That this problematization of geographic representation
unfolds in a novel—as opposed to Rivera’s preferred genre, poetry—speaks to the
critical potential of the novel as a literary form. For Bakhtin, it “is genre
that is ever questioning, ever examining itself and subjecting itself to
established forms of review” (39). Not only does Rivera’s novel question a
variety of forms of mapping, but in counter-mapping, it also challenges the resulting
knowledge encoded in those forms. This analysis of that critical
discourse begins with a consideration of the geopolitical stakes of fixing the
border in order to contextualize what the commission aimed to resolve and how
Amazonian topography frustrated those aims. With that physical reality in mind,
a close textual analysis of La vorágine reveals
not only the treachery of maps when navigating the vortex but also the ways in
which its poet narrator’s literary rendering of space closely resembles the
spatial abstractions of the maps he criticizes. What results is a revised
interpretation of the novel’s rich geographic detail as a critical framework
for understanding and using representations of space to make sense of
Colombia’s complex geographic realities.
The
1903 annexation of Panama by the United States was a humiliating spectacle of
Colombia’s failure to secure and defend the limits of its national territory.
With attention focused on the chaos of the Thousand Days’ War (1899-1902), U.S.
Forces had orchestrated Panamanian independence in order to resume construction
on the canal. Although Bushnell has dismissed this geopolitical amputation as a
non-issue for a country with what he deems a “relative weakness of national
sentiment,” his assessment fails to consider the anxiety produced by both the
economic implications of the loss and the international attention to Colombia’s
geopolitical fragmentation (143). The security, protection, and documentation
of national territory were key concerns driving the 1902 creation of the
Oficina de Longitudes y Fronteras (7). Established to create and
preserve a scientific record of Colombia’s national cartography, “levantar y
mantener la cartografía del país,” this institution was the government body
that organized and oversaw Rivera’s border commission and the one that he would
denounce in both his public life and in La
vorágine (Montáñez Gómez 19). Panama’s usurpation made the Oficina de
Longitudes’s mission more urgent, for it revealed—to correct Benedict
Anderson’s oft-cited definition—that the nation was in fact more than just
imagined (6); rather, its sovereign limits required physical demarcation for
the semblance of national presence. Lacking such cartographic markers,
Colombia’s ability to self-govern had publicly been called into question.
Neale-Silva insists that both the loss of Panama followed ten years later by
former U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt’s opposition to the proposed twenty-five-million-dollar
indemnity constituted a devastating blow to Colombia’s “honor nacional” (121).
Given this historical prelude to Rivera’s mapping commission, the task of
marking Colombia’s eastern frontier between the Amazon and Orinoco river basins
was a pressing exercise in territorial flag-staking.
The
borders between both countries were first negotiated verbally in Bogotá to
resolve questions of commerce and transit, but as an antidote to the
geopolitical pain of the loss of Panama, the physical work of the mapping
commission was largely symbolic. Matthew Edney, in his work on the British imperial
mapping of India, has keenly emphasized the importance of belief in creating
and maintaining the cartographic illusion of 1:1 correspondence in which the
map materializes the “epistemological ideal of cartographic perfection” (24).
Colombia’s long-standing border dispute with Venezuela, which began with the
dissolution of Gran Colombia in 1831, had failed to produce the illusion of
that ideal. Instead, faulty maps based on colonial records’ ambiguous narrative
descriptions undermined Colombia’s cartographic illusion (8). Rather
than resolve these issues with careful topographic survey—a logistically and
economically daunting undertaking given the difficult terrain found along the
eastern border—the mapping commission would attempt to erect landmarks
corresponding to key geometrical points on the map. Methodologically speaking,
this aim was common practice in border mapping. As Paula Rebert explains,
boundary maps move through three stages—negotiation, delimitation on paper,
locating and marking the boundary—only the last of which involves actually
going to the disputed territory. In the last stage, the map, a representation
of space, becomes the referent for the land and not the other way around. In
the territory itself, the participation of Venezuelan and Colombian geographers
and engineers alongside Swiss arbiters staged the appearance of a scientific
process involved in the resulting maps; however, as a material undertaking,
very little changed on the ground. The mapping commission did not set out to
gather information for Colombia’s geographic record but rather to establish a
precedent for believing that the national maps corresponded to the land. In
this way, belief in cartographic illusion would neutralize territorial claims
and visualize national sovereignty.
There
was no room in this symbolic process to deal with any discrepancies encountered
in situ, whether lack of resources or
physical impediments to marking the land, and yet outcries against the
unfeasibility of the mission account for a great deal of correspondence and
press regarding the commission. Rivera himself returned to Bogotá, and in an
open session of congress, accused Minister of Foreign Affairs Jorge Vélez of
deceiving commission members by sending them without scientific equipment or tents “a pesar de que en telegramas y correspondencia apremiante de
toda clase le informamos de nuestra desairada situación” (ctd. in “Se hacen”
4). Other reports of
terrain incompatible with designated landmarks almost overshadow Rivera’s
concerns. Even if the commission members had had the necessary scientific
instruments, they would not easily have been able to employ them in the
tropical ecology they traversed. On July 23, 1923, P. Lardy, a Swiss arbiter
reports in a telegram to Garzón Nieto, chief of the commission’s northern
section, “la imposibilidad material absoluta en que la
Comisión Suiza de Expertos se encuentra de recorrer la mayor parte del
territorio litigioso comprendido entre Catatumbo y el Zuila, que la selva vírgen
[sic] hace impenetrable sin grandes gastos y con pérdidas infinitas de tiempo.” Where human passage was
possible, rivers, the physical feature that defined the area where Rivera’s
team worked, swelled with precipitation, altering the landscape and moving
borders. Commission members observed firsthand the ways in which rivers belied
the static lines of the maps they were helping to create. Garzón Nieto reports
in an October 14, 1927 letter to the minister of foreign affairs an instance in
which rising and falling water levels would cause a small island to change
jurisdiction throughout the year. These reports called into question the
cartographic assumptions authorizing the national maps, and the fact that Vélez
failed to respond to them suggests a disinterest in acknowledging local geographic
realities. Instead, landmarks were placed, however absurdly, as in the case of
a hermetically sealed bottle placed beneath a toppled trunk or written on a
rock in the middle of a river (Álamo Ybarra 116-17). The border commission’s
work shows how mapping pitted the universalizing tendencies of scientific
survey against regional variations.
All
maps necessarily smooth over the textures of local realities, for abstraction
and reduction are necessary maneuvers in a science that aims to scale the
immensity of space to a user-friendly format. This quality of maps becomes an
important theme in La vorágine
articulated by Clemente Silva: “¡Cuánta diferencia entre una
región y la carta que la reduce! ¡Quién le hubiera dicho que aquel papel, donde
apenas cabían sus manos abiertas, encerraba espacios tan infinitos, selvas tan
lóbregas, ciénagas tan letales!” (306).
However, Rivera’s published comments aimed at critiquing the incompleteness of
Colombia’s cartography in fact point to a more challenging problem: the maps
not only lack crucial information, but their cartographic framework contains an
urban bias that cannot account for the fluvial realities of Colombia’s eastern
frontier.
In a
series of articles he published in El
Tiempo under the headline “Falsos postulados
nacionales,” Rivera
corrected erroneous statements made by Venezuelan diplomat Hermes García
regarding the navigability of border rivers. Having both spoken with people who
made daily use of those rivers as well as navigating them himself, Rivera was
armed with extensive knowledge to rebut García. Likewise, when protesting the
Colombian government’s failure to follow through on demands to protect the
border from encroaching Peruvians such as those working for Casa Arana, Rivera
emphasizes the government’s utter ignorance of jungle geography. On April 13,
1924, he writes, “¿Imaginaría nuestro Canciller que es empresa
posible andar por las selvas interminables y por ríos y desiertos en busca de
los invasores para hacerle a cada cuadrilla nómade la notificación del señor
Prefecto?” (“Penetraciones” 64).
In the same article, he notes in detail the number of days required to traverse
the areas in question by river, underscoring both his extensive knowledge of
Amazonian geography as well as the government’s lack thereof. As French has
indicated, Rivera’s censorious statements point to the need for “internal
colonization” to protect Colombia’s citizens and territories (135). However, in
calling attention to a geography that undermines and contradicts information
available on maps—information needed to understand, navigate, and govern these
borderlands—Rivera exceeds neocolonial rhetoric to imply that cartographic
standards developed outside of Amazonia simply could not account for salient
aspects of Colombia’s eastern geography.
La vorágine, in the final entry of the
narrator Arturo Cova, takes up this urban bias directly; for his final act of
writing, he sketches a “croquis imaginado” of his location, which fails to lead
rescuers to him and his party who have presumably been devoured by the jungle
(383). As a metonym for geographic knowledge produced by outsiders, Cova’s
ineffective imagined map points to the limits of the urban intellectual
imagination in understanding Amazonian space. Cova’s map is not unique in this
sense, for each of the text’s paper maps fails to orient the men. When Cova and
his companions put a plan in motion to officially denounce the crimes of the
rubber economy to the consul in Manaus, he blames the Oficina de Longitudes for
what he sees as political inaction:
Tal vez, al escuchar la relación de don Clemente,
[nuestro Cónsul en Manaos] extienda sobre la mesa aquel mapa costoso,
aparatoso, mentiroso y deficientísimo que trazó la Oficina de Longitudes de
Bogotá, y le responda tras de prolija indagación: ‘¡Aquí no figuran ríos de
esos nombres! Quizás pertenezcan a Venezuela. Diríjase usted a Ciudad Bolívar.’
(361)
Although
Cova is under duress when he writes this impassioned reproach, he nevertheless
shrewdly articulates the connection between faulty cartography and the
unsanctioned violence of the rubber economy. In Clemente Silva’s reliance on
maps, the text zooms in on the personal impact of this cartographically caused
violence. He becomes lost with his companions after fleeing the horrific
conditions at the Naranjal rubber plantation and tries to evoke his memory of a
map on the wall at Naranjal, which he has meticulously studied. Just as he used
to run his finger along the lines of the map, observing the geography from above,
he climbs a tree to try to separate himself from the land below and gain
perspective. This man, known for his navigational intuitions as Brújulo and
Rumbero, cannot orient himself, though, by trying to separate himself from the
jungle, as in looking at a map. His companions die gruesome deaths: friends
turn against each other, sudden and unapologetic fratricide ensues, a man dies
grotesquely of hemoptysis bathing himself in a vomit of blood, and the
remaining men are devoured, down to the bone, by carnivorous ants. Life is lost
in each of these instances in which jungle space is conceived outwardly as
lines on a page.
The
first mechanism of the counter-map is to show an absence of such lines in its
chorographic description. As Cova relays his experiences of traversing rivers
and swamps, he also transcribes the narratives of those he encounters along the
way, leading to a confusion of discourse that Silvia Molloy has aptly named “contagio
narrativo” (489). The effect of this narrative contagion is a spatial confusion
and expansion; through the act of recording others’ stories, the narrative
transposes the space of the present narrative onto distant spaces from others’
stories, expanding the geographic breadth of the text. The resulting narrative descriptions
erase any traces of lines, demanding alternative ways of conceiving of space.
Moving from the wide, open llanos,
where the urban spatial design of vanishing points and linear perspective is
more easily superimposed, Cova and his companions venture off into the closed
jungle, nightfall coinciding with their entry beneath the canopy (9). Cova describes the river’s
trajectory as moving circularly “hacia el vórtice de la nada,” a reference to
the novel’s title as well as its vertiginous leitmotif (195). The swirling
geography emphasizes that this new space has all at once precluded linear ways
of understanding positionality: “Sobre el panorama crepuscular fuese
ampliando mi desconsuelo, como la noche, y lentamente una misma sombra borró
los perfiles del bosque estático, la línea del agua inmóvil, las siluetas de
los remeros” (195).
Significantly, in this passage the travelers lose sight of the fixed lines that
separate and quantify things in space—profiles, riverbanks, and silhouettes.
Rather than distinguishing between countable entities, Cova’s sight only tracks
an enmeshed darkness. His grief (desconsuelo) grows, then, because dividing
lines are his only means of understanding his relationship in space, and they
are no longer available to him. Likewise, at no point do the characters—who
move from Colombia to Peru to Brazil to Venezuela—encounter any physical
delimitation of national borders. Only Montserrat Ordóñez’s footnoted
geographical annotations reveal when they cross borders. Indeed, borders are
illegible in the dense jungle; as one of Cova’s companions Helí Mesa explains,
one crosses into another national territory unwittingly: “El Palomo y el Matacano estaban acampados con quince hombres en un
playón, y cuando arribábamos, nos intimaron requisa a todos, diciendo que
habíamos invadido territorios venezolanos” (219). These absent lines and markers undermine the
mimetic illusion of the map by pointing to the absurdity of cartographic
linearity in a space that Rivera describes as a vortex.
The
novel further undoes maps’ functionality by showing the horrific violence that
marks the lives of people found off the map. Silva, who came to the jungle in
search of his runaway son, becomes entangled in a web of violently enforced debt
peonage. Silva’s back is scarred from overseers whipping him. Newspaper
articles—an allusion to those written by Peruvian journalist Benjamín Saldaña
Rocca in 1907—arrive to the rubber camps reporting similar abuses happening
elsewhere at the hands of Casa Arana. Even those who manage to escape these
slave-like conditions resort to violence to survive. Cova’s group learns of a “tribu cosmopolita”
of deserters who live defensively, away from the panoptic eye of the rubber
economy (231). These conditions create violent obstacles to Cova’s travels
because, as one of Cova’s companions explains, “si
dábamos con los prófugos nos tratarían como a enemigos; y si con las barracas,
nos pondrían a trabajar por el resto de nuestra vida” (121). As the men dodge these
unmarked violent grooves of the earth, the narrative also tells of violence
enacted on the jungle ecology by this socio-economic upheaval. The men come
across litter in the jungle that includes canned fish and empty bottles,
inorganic materials discarded by men working for rubber companies (240). These
noxious remains mark the transit of people in remote areas of the jungle. Other
ecological havoc is more pronounced and devastating. Cova compares human
intervention in Amazonia to a mudslide in its devastating and reorganizing
potential: “Y es de verse en algunos lugares cómo sus huellas
son semejantes a los aludes: los
caucheros que hay en Colombia destruyen anualmente millones de árboles. En los
territorios de Venezuela el balatá desapareció. De esta suerte ejercen el
fraude contra las generaciones del porvenir” (298, my emphasis). Cova emphasizes not only the
drastic reconfiguring of the landscape caused by the rubber economy but also
its lasting effects. The novel’s maps, those of the Oficina de Longitudes, do
not account for any of these geographic changes—the regulation of men’s
movement and behavior or ecological destructions—but La vorágine records them as part of Colombia’s spaces.
The
nonlinear narrative vortex that occupies those spaces at first inspires its own
horror. For example, early in the men’s adventures two Maipurean men are
knocked into the water and sucked into the current by a gyrating whirlpool when
attempting to straighten a canoe. This scene is rife with words that reference
the novel’s title, structure, and principle leitmotif: “tormentoso torrente,”
“vórtices,” “torbellino,” “girando en el remolino” (233). In a state of shock,
Cova is so traumatized by the spinning waters that quickly swallow the men that
he watches them sink beneath the surface of the water unable to act. He prefers
to let them die a “bello morir,” which for him means a form of death that does
not spill blood but rather hides death’s abject horror beneath the surface of
the water (233). Silva, too, when lost finds himself haunted by the circularity
of the jungle space: “Por tres veces en una hora volvió a salir a un
mismo pantano, sin que sus camaradas reconocieran el recorrido” (306). The other men, believing
they are walking in a straight line, fail to understand the relationship of
their bodies in space. Only Silva is dismayed at being trapped in a circle that
he is trying to escape. Inattention to the shape of the vortex spins men into a
nightmare in which space repeats itself and traps them.
Yet
the perceived violence of the jungle’s circularity amounts to a perspectival
problem, one that has made its way into much of the critical literature on the
text. Nielson, Rueda, and Wylie, for example, affirm Cova’s depiction of the
jungle as a hostile space, but Rogers and Beckman have shifted away from that
colonialist rhetoric to emphasize that the horrors experienced and projected
onto the jungle in fact originate not in “nature” but in the imposition of
modernization onto a perceived natural space. Unknowingly, Cova records
information that hints to the regenerative potential of circularity as well.
Because Cova is so focused on death as a frightening telos, he misses the rejuvenating potential of the Maipureans’
demise. Their hats swirl beneath “el iris que abría sus
pétalos como la mariposa de la indiecita Mapiripana” (233). Told earlier in the
text, the legend of Mapiripana personifies the jungle’s cruel punishment of unwanted
outsiders. However, Mapiripana’s murderous revenge against a lustful missionary
was only one part of the story. She also symbolizes life, “exprimiendo nubecillas, encauzando las filtraciones, buscando perlas
en la felpa de los barrancos, para formar nuevas vertientes que den su tesoro
claro a los grandes ríos. Gracias a ella, tienen tributarios el Orinoco y el
Amazonas” (225-26).
In other words, the blossoming flower at the site of truncated life—far from
serving as a symbol of destruction—is rather a reminder that the jungle’s
destructive forces give way to life. When later removed from the immediate
threat of death, Cova, too, recognizes that the movement of the jungle “[e]s la muerte, que pasa dando la vida” (297). Cova is horrified by being pulled into the
vortex because his focus is linear, with death as the end of his life. He is
unable to see his participation as a small part of a complex circular ecology
around him. The vortex is only threatening to Cova because he wishes to
distinguish himself from it, a subject position constantly threatened by
circular regeneration.
Cova’s
struggle to separate himself from the surrounding geography comes very close to
imitating the mechanisms of the maps that he so disdains. As he approaches his
demise awaiting Silva with Alicia and his newborn son, his Cartesian
subjectivity comes into acute crisis with the looming threat of becoming
forever lost in the immensity of the jungle. At this moment, he writes more
frequently and self-consciously. Suddenly, after hundreds of pages of narrative
and spatio-temporal contagion, Cova begins acknowledging the act of writing in
the present tense by starting his entries with statements such as “Esto lo escribo aquí, en el barracón de Manuel Cardoso” (381). Left to navigate the
jungle on his own, Cova ceases to tell an entangled collective story and
instead carefully marks his subject position, as if plotting fixed coordinates
on a map. Timothy Morton identifies these sorts of “as I write” statements as a
form of ecomimesis, a characteristic of nature writing that “is implicitly saying:
‘This environment is real; do not think that there is an aesthetic framework
here’” (Ecology 35). According to
Morton, while ecomimesis serves functionally to draw the reader into the
environment, the act of “as I write” in fact prohibits this, turning the
environment into an object of discourse, separate from the writer, and therefore
the reader. In the case of Cova, however, calling attention to the surface of
his writing serves not only to draw his rescuers into the immediacy of his
desperation but also as a coping mechanism. Through writing, he asserts his
geographic position and distances himself from the space around him, in an
effort to protect himself from any threats to his subjectivity. As Tittler
summarizes, “Cova’s attempts to save his life by escaping from the jungle are
tantamount to his trying to escape from nature itself” (22). However, contrary
to Tittler’s suggestion that Cova’s dissolution within the jungle’s “viscera”
results from the fact that Cova “lacks an identity apart from his
surroundings,” Cova disappears because he tries to maintain an identity
separate from his surroundings (22). He is lost in his writing, which prevents
him from observing and learning from his immediate environment: Cova’s
ecomimesis is the discursive equivalent of holding out a paper map and
dissociating oneself from the land that it represents. He, too, substantiates
the cartographic ideal of the faulty, deficient, lying maps he has so scorned
by claiming to pen his route over the land precisely and objectively. Even as
he penetrates deeper in the jungle, he remains stubbornly separate from it, and
with this perception fallacy, his fate is sealed.
Silva,
on the other hand, goes through dramatic changes during his long stay in the
jungle and acquires a different relationship to the forest that allows him to
cease relying on maps. After gruesomely losing his men in the jungle, he
wanders two months “ausente de sus sentidos” (314). In other words, he
ceases to rely on the accustomed epistemological paradigms to make sense of the
world around him. In this state, Silva must learn from others how to survive.
He becomes a “bestia herbívora,” imitating monkeys’ eating habits in order to
sustain himself (314). This key moment in which Silva leaves behind his
humanness to become a beast himself is followed by a “repentina revelación”
that saves his life (314). He suddenly remembers the legend of the cananguche palm that describes the path
of the sun and begins to orient himself. Then, crucially, he is able to
communicate with a palm tree:
La secreta voz de las cosas llenó su alma. ¿Será
cierto que esa palmera, encumbrada en aquel destierro como un índice hacia el
azul, estaba inclinándole la orientación? Verdad o mentira, él lo oyó decir. ¡Y
creyó! Lo que necesitaba era una creencia definitiva. Y por el derrotero del
vegetal comenzó a perseguir el propio. (315)
Following
the anthropomorphized palm’s instructions, he arrives at a stream and
instinctively throws leaves into it to determine its direction. From an
ecocritical perspective, Silva has encountered “strange strangers” in the
jungle (Morton, The Ecological 41).
According to Morton, such encounters involve a Freudian sense of the uncanny
because they reveal likeness and interconnectedness across species (The Ecological 81). Silva’s ability to
relinquish a perspective of difference with his surrounding environment and
instead strangely and uncannily recognize himself as like the monkeys and the
palm saves him. He begins to navigate the jungle, and a group of Albuquerques
finds him and nurses him back to health. Through these experiences of becoming
lost and losing access to urban ways of knowing space, Silva is able to access
geographical information directly from the world around him. His integration
with his surrounding space depends on intuition and integration with Amazonia,
possibilities denied by the distance implied in holding out a map to study
geography.
Silva’s
relationship to the space of Rivera’s mapping commission directly contrasts
with Cova’s. Silva has already undergone these transformations when he meets
Cova and his group, and when he first appears to them, he graphically embodies
his acceptance of his place in the jungle’s ecology. When the men examine his
wounds, they discover worms living off of Silva’s rotting flesh. Silva’s
reticence to show his wounds suggests that although he feigns surprise—“¿Será posible? ¡Qué humillación!”—he
is probably already aware of the parasites living off of his body (246). He
even knows when he became infected, “¡Y fue que un día me
quedé dormido y me sorprendieron los moscones!” (246). For Silva, his condition is perfectly
logical if not inevitable. He has already confronted the uncanny experience of
recognizing himself in the forest monkeys and understanding the language of the
palm tree, and he knows that the jungle is as much inside of him as outside. He
seems almost amused by his liminal state between life and death—“¡Engusanado, engusanado y estando vivo!” (246). Cova makes every effort to avoid such
blurring in his writing and he perishes. Silva, though, walks the line between
life and death and survives.
The
way out of the jungle is unexpectedly the way in—to become part of it and move
with it. Silva saves himself by listening, communicating with, and learning
from other species how to be part of the space around him. For this reason Jean
Franco errs when she suggests that in La
vorágine, “El hombre es castigado por sus ilusiones pero lo
que contribuye a su derrota es su propia naturaleza, su instinto animal” (144). Certainly, men are
punished in the novel for their illusions—or rather, delusions—however, animal
instinct, grounded in the surrounding space, would in fact protect Cova from
these illusions. Cova uses rationality to try to control the jungle and
himself, using words to impose a binary between him and the surrounding space.
As Lefebvre asserts, though, “Man does not live by words alone; all subjects
are situated in a space in which they must either recognize themselves or lose
themselves, a space which they may both enjoy and modify” (35). Cova’s tactics
of non-recognition lead to losing himself, to becoming literally lost. By
contrast, Silva abandons rationality and by the end of the novel, moves freely
in and out of the jungle, finally avoiding detection, trapping, and getting
lost, and he has done so by going so far into the jungle so as to slough off
linear ways of trying to grasp space. Despite the fact that Cova has carefully
related Silva’s story in his diary, he fails to internalize its lessons.
Instead, Cova clings to an urban linearity that leads him nowhere.
The
fact that Cova’s strategies so closely resemble cartographic tendencies blurs
the differences between maps and Cova’s narrative description as
representations of space, but these modes of representation do not become
equivalent. Cova’s faulty map results in a misrepresentation of Amazonian
geography and the disappearance of a small group of people. The government
maps, on the other hand, obscure slavery, torture, murder, and the ecological
destruction of the rubber economy; the stakes are not the same. Furthermore,
though, La vorágine is after all a
work of fiction, narrated by en emotional and volatile poet and prefaced with a
prologue by Rivera who claims, “respeté el estilo y hasta
las incorrecciones del infortunado escritor” (75). In other words, it calls attention to its
representational abstractions, allowing the text to do what the map cannot:
reflect on and criticize them. Lefebvre—referring to scientific processes—reminds
that reduction is necessary to deal with the complexity and chaos of
observation: “This kind of simplification is necessary at first, but it must be
quickly followed by the gradual restoration of what has thus been temporarily
set aside for the sake of analysis” (105). The maps in La vorágine do not allow for such a restoration, turning reduction
into reductionism. The text itself, though, encourages readers to see beyond
the representational reductions of mapping. In this way, La vorágine marks a subtle distinction between fiction and
non-fiction, art and science; whereas both employ mechanisms of abstraction,
science hides those abstractions, and art can call attention to them.
As a counter-map, La vorágine does not supplant one method of reductionism for
another, but rather compels the expansion of one’s spatial perspective beyond
the map—to step back from the representational frame and see it as such.
Jennifer French mistakenly concludes, then, that La vorágine “is a new, verbal map to replace the antiquated
government maps of which the characters repeatedly complain” (132). The problem
is not that the government maps are antiquated but that they are based on
scientific epistemologies insufficient for navigating Amazonia. Far from trying
to dispense with maps altogether—an equally deficient method for understanding
and protecting Amazonia—La vorágine
compels a different approach toward understanding Amazonian space, one
exemplified by Silva’s methods. It also urges new methods for using and
understanding spatial representations. The counter-map, then, is not another
map but a different way of approaching maps that makes them more useful by
taking their cartographic illusions into account and suggesting that other
realities and sources of geographic knowledge may exist beyond the page.
Tragically, then, after the publication of La
vorágine, people would often dismiss sensationalist non-fiction accounts of
abuses and devastation in the jungle as “cosas de La vorágine” (Rivera, “La
vorágine y sus críticos” 69). In this response, the delicate balance of
belief needed to understand representation becomes painstakingly urgent, for if
La vorágine exposes the dangers of
taking the cartographic ideal too seriously, its reception reveals the dangers
of not taking it seriously enough. La
vorágine suggests that the crimes and territorial usurpations of the rubber
economy would not have gone unchecked if people outside of Amazonia could see
beyond the map.
The
necessity of considering the geographic complexities elided by cartographic
lines remains a pressing concern in Colombia today. A recent article in El Tiempo describes a twenty-first
century instance of the use of maps to deny damage caused, this time, by
multinational companies. With a title that alludes to the final lines of La vorágine, the article “Los pueblos
que se tragó el carbon” discusses the forced displacement of approximately 2,000
people in three towns of Colombia’s César department along the northern border
of Venezuela due to unsafe contamination levels caused by mining (10).
Three multinational corporations, CNR, Drummond, and Prodeco, who in the
nineties promised to bring prosperity to the department, instead brought
devastating pollution that has threatened people’s health and access to food
and water. Colombia has the highest number of internally displaced persons in
the world, but the article explains that this is the first time “que se produce un reasentamiento (en las últimas, un desplazamiento forzoso)
por las críticas condiciones ambientales que ha generado la minería. A
Boquerón, Plan Bonito y El Hatillo se los tragó el carbón. Literalmente” (Escárraga) (11)In 2010 the minister of the environment ordered the three
multinational companies to relocate the populations. Drummond—in a statement
eerily similar to Cova’s ventriloquism of the Colombian consul in Manaus—says
that it will do so despite the fact that “ninguna
de las poblaciones queda dentro de nuestros contratos de concesión ni de
influencia directa” (ctd. in Escárraga).
An interactive map available through El
Tiempo supports this statement visually, showing that the three towns in
question are situated outside the purview of Drummond mining. The map’s
borderlines appear thick and stable and fail to show the way the ecological
effects of each corporation extend beyond the lines demarcating their
territories, affecting human lives. Long after the rubber boom, then, La vorágine beckons an urgent rereading
as an indictment of unchecked belief in cartographic illusion.
Notes
(1).
I would like to acknowledge Elsa, Gustavo, and Mauricio Patiño, and Tulia Peña,
who generously hosted me in Bogotá during my archival research for this
article.
(2). Rivera reports this activity
in his “Informe de la Comisión de Límites con Venezuela,” written with his
friend and colleague, Melitón Escóbar Larrazábal, who had also quit his
position with the commission.
(3).
I am referring to the manuscripts listed in the BNC’s catalogue as “Cuaderno de
notas,” “Mapa no. 1,” “Mapa no. 2,” Mapa no. 3,” and “Croquis del Ríos Isana.”
(4). Both Neale-Silva and Rodríguez
Arenas have thoroughly examined this controversy.
(5).
Bertrand Westphal and his translator Robert Tally have emphasized the need for
geo-centered literary analysis to excavate the ways in which literature shapes
space and mediates experiences of space. My analysis follows their imperative
and dialogues with a variety of different approaches to spatial analysis
including historical geography, Lefebvre’s sociological and
philosophical inquiries into space, and ecocritical theory.
(6). I borrow the term
“cartographic illusion” from Harley who uses it to refer to the “illusion of
cartographic objectivity” in the representation of space (82).
(7). This institution operates
today under the name Instituto Geográfico Agustín Codazzi in Bogotá.
(8). See Álamo Ybarra for a
thorough history of the problems with the geographic records of this border
since Gran Colombia.
(9). Lefebvre convincingly argues
that linear perspective is a construct that grew out of the urbanization of
Tuscany: “The artists ‘discovered’ perspective and developed the theory of it
because a space in perspective lay before them, because such a space had
already been produced” (79).
(10). Although the novel’s final
line is “¡Los devoró la selva!” it was famously misquoted by Carlos Fuentes as
“¡Se los tragó la selva!”—a line that continues to be popularly associated with
the novel (9).
(11). The Internal Displacement
Monitoring Centre estimates the number of IPDs in Colombia in 2012 to be
between 4,900,000 and 5,500,000. See “Global Statistics.”
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