Bio-politics and great national narrative: the spectral presence of the Aboriginal world in three novels about the jungle

Abstract

Written during the first half of the 20th Century, Canaima, La vorágine, and Sangama are three novels about the jungle which construct a representation of the indigenous world of the Amazonas or the Orinoco. It has been repeated that these are progressive novels which enclose a critique of the era’s social system and, more particularly, of the genocide carried out by rubber exploitation during the “rubber boom” (ciclo da borracha in Portuguese). Nevertheless, these stories provide us with an ambiguous focus regarding the indigenous reality. A vision imbued with the same nineteenth century ideas that favored the excesses, abuses and massacres that these novels seek to denounce. This essay aims to analyze the scientific matrix of these representations, which refer to the racialist paradigm of the 19th Century, derived from evolutionary theory and the ideology of progress. The Indians in these stories move like ghosts in a magical, bewitched, or hellish universe that lacks reality. This romantic stamp is the literary projection of a bio-political strategy which occurred in the societies of the era: the question revolves around the construction of the national populace. The “spirits” of the novelistic space are a moment in the more widespread discursive strategies: that of building national homogeneity from a fictitious ethnicity which requires the rejection of the “other backward one”. The specter is the trace or witness of this founding violence.