States of Exception on American Frontiers: Biopolitics, Violence, and Nation in Blood
Meridian, Martín Fierro, and Os Sertões
by
Heath Wing, MA and BA
A Dissertation
In
Spanish
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty
of Texas Tech University in
Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for
the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Approved
John Beusterien
Chair of Committee
Sara Spurgeon
Antônio Ladeira
Earl Fitz
Julián Pérez
Mark Sheridan
Dean of the Graduate School
August, 2015
Copyright 2015, Heath Wing
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would first like to thank the members of my dissertation committee. To the
director of my dissertation, John Beusterien, who contributed to my interest in the US
Southwest, and who encouraged me to specialize in Comparative Literature. A special
thanks goes to Antônio Ladeira, who introduced me to the beauty of the Portuguese
language. To Earl Fitz, I thank you for so wisely suggesting I include Os sertões in my
project. I also greatly appreciate Sara Spurgueon’s expertise and help regarding Blood
Meridian. And many thanks to Julián Pérez, a man well-versed in everything gaucho.
I owe a special thanks to Lynne Fallwell for tirelessly helping me during the
application process of all those fellowships. Without her input and help with
proposals, this project would not have become what it is. To my friends in Brazil and
Argentina, I cannot express my gratitude enough. First to Décio Torres from UFBA, I
am grateful for all the help navigating Salvador and the libraries. I will never forget
the trip out to the sertão. You are always welcome in West Texas. To Gloria Chicote,
who so graciously received me in La Plata and made sure I had access to any sources
needed. And finally, a highly deserved thank you to the Wallau family in Santana do
Livramento: to Marcelo and Carlos, as well as to Rodrigo and the most gaucha of
them all, Ana, and to grandfather Carlos Huberto Wallau, who entertained me with
wonderful stories about Rio Grande do Sul from his home in Porto Alegre. I thank
“y’all” for taking me into your fazenda and letting me see how real gauchos get work
done.
ii
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
I would like to also thank Professors Carmen Pereiera, Sara Guengerich, Idoia
Elola, and Curtis Bauer, who in some way or another, during my studies at Texas
Tech, helped shape my education: whether it meant a tough class that demanded
excellence, very useful advice, or attending my first academic presentation, your
efforts certainly did not go unnoticed or unappreciated.
Last but certainly not least, I am grateful to my parents and family, who have
provided nothing but support and love in every harebrained thing I do.
iii
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................... II
ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... VI
INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1
CHAPTER I CORMAC MCCARTHY’S BLOOD MERIDIAN: STATE RACISM, STATE OF
EXCEPTION, AND THE SOVEREIGN FOOL .................................................................... 27
1.1 On Violence........................................................................................................ 29
1.2 US Frontier Myth ............................................................................................... 37
1.3 Captain White and State Racism ........................................................................ 43
1.4 Secularized Theology ......................................................................................... 55
1.5 The Sovereign Exception ................................................................................... 60
1.6 Creaturely Life ................................................................................................... 72
1.7 The Sovereign Fool and Iustitium ...................................................................... 84
1.8 Leviathan’s Body of Corpses ........................................................................... 103
CHAPTER II STALKED BY THE WOLF: BANDITRY, THE CAMP, AND CREATURELY
SHAME IN JOSÉ HERNÁNDEZ’ MARTÍN FIERRO ........................................................ 110
2.1 Voice and Body ................................................................................................ 118
2.2 People and people ............................................................................................ 128
2.3 The Levas as the Exception .............................................................................. 140
2.4 The Fortín as the Camp ................................................................................... 152
2.5 Creaturely Shame ............................................................................................. 164
2.6 The Wolfman Bandit ........................................................................................ 175
CHAPTER III BRAZIL’S STRUGGLE FOR A BODY: EUCLIDES DA CUNHA’S OS
SERTÕES AND GRIEVABLE LIFE ................................................................................ 187
3.1 Background ...................................................................................................... 200
3.2 Conselheiro and the Threefold Struggle for the Body ..................................... 206
3.3 Anthropology, Colonialism, and Eugenics ...................................................... 227
3.4 Governmentality and State of Exception ......................................................... 247
iv
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
3.5 Grievable Life .................................................................................................. 259
3.6 The Original Banditry of War .......................................................................... 272
CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................. 288
NOTES ........................................................................................................................ 291
WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................ 309
v
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
ABSTRACT
The primary focus of my research is in Comparative Literature. Through an
analysis of landmark literary and journalistic works from an English, Spanish, and
Portuguese context, my dissertation focuses on frontier studies, biopolitics, state
racism, and human rights. This project is concerned with nation-building in the
Americas and the processes by which the bodies of a population are sifted out, some
integrated into the nation-state while others are made the exception, disposed of their
rights and often violently excluded.
The geographical scope of my dissertation project is inter-American, and
concerned with nineteenth century state violence on American frontier spaces as
represented in national literatures from Argentina, Brazil, and the United States. To
give context to my comparative reading of Martín Fierro (1872, José Hernández), Os
Sertões (1902, Euclides da Cunha), and Blood Meridian (1984, Cormac McCarthy), I
interpret the nineteenth century frontier spaces in these works as border regions not
just between civilization and so called “barbarism” (or between sovereign law and
natural law), but also as thresholds that mark the transition from colonial methods of
violence to those of the new and emerging American nation-states of modernity.
During their period of expansion, these three nation-states rationalized the extirpation
of certain ethnic and social groups through discourses based on exceptionalist and
positivist ideologies: in the United States, “Manifest Destiny” argued democracy’s
divine purpose to “civilize the savage,” whereas in South America, “civilization and
vi
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
barbarism” was the political discourse that endorsed civilization's “rightful” dominion
over barbarism.
Relying on what has been observed by scholars such as Hannah Arendt,
Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe, Roberto Esposito, and Judith
Butler, I acknowledge that colonial practices of violence would, at the cusp of
modernity, be integrated into the process of nation-building on the basis of
anthropological and biological discourses of exclusion, often determined by race. In
the Americas, nowhere was this more evident than on nineteenth century frontiers,
where new nation-states endeavored to complete the colonial project of the European
empires from which they had become independent. In search of national identity, such
efforts of conquest would mean certain bodies would be included in the nationbuilding project, while others would be excluded from citizenry.
Whether the government orchestrated gaucho and Indian conflicts portrayed in
Martín Fierro, the military massacre of the Canudos village in Os Sertões, or the
legalized scalp-hunting of Apaches in Blood Meridian, my comparative reading of
these works highlights the couplet between the life of marginalized frontier subjects
and sovereign violence. Ultimately, I conclude that this relationship is one of
exception, where excluded political life is caught up in a space of suspended law
imposed by the sovereign. Frontiers in these three works are thus portrayed as spaces
of legalized lawlessness, or states of exception, where their narratives and the very life
therein are brought about, moved even, by the sovereign exception.
vii
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
INTRODUCTION
My literary inquiry into the nature of state-sanctioned violence on American
frontiers, as represented in Blood Meridian, Martín Fierro, and Os sertões, can be said
to adhere to an inter-American perspective. Indeed, when I use the term American
frontier, I am not simply referring to the U.S. American experience in the nineteenth
century American West, save the experiences and literary representations of
Americans on both the North and South American continents. More specifically, my
approach to this topic is concerned with the geographic regions of the US and Mexico
borderlands, the Argentine pampas, and the backlands of Brazil known as the sertão.
On a broad scale, my work contributes to the inter-American project
concerning the commonality that the people of the Americas share, beginning with
pre-Colombian times, to the colonial period and into the modern era of today. The
historiographical aspects of the inter-American project can be attributed to Herbert E.
Bolton and his Wider Horizons of American History (1939).1 On a literary playing
field, we find inter-American perspectives on literature to be in full swing, beginning
with the anthology Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? (1990), and most
certainly we must consider Earl E. Fitz’ extensive bibliography dedicated to interAmerican literature such as his Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American
Literature in a Comparative Context (1991), and more recently his Translation and
the Rise of Inter-American Literature (2007), written with Elizabeth Lowe.
1
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
On the other hand, I am specifically concerned with bringing into focus a
perspective on inter-American frontier literature through a comparative lens. The topic
of nineteenth century American frontiers, both on a historical as well as a literary
plane, has also received much attention. Bolton himself, in all his inquiry into the
collective experience of inter-continental Americans, could not do so without first
facing the topic of frontiers, as his The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old
Florida and the Southwest (1921) so indicates.2 Undoubtedly, Bolton reminds us that
the first political border established by Europeans in the Americas was demarcated by
the once Spanish empire, which extended from Florida to the American Southwest and
down to the Patagonia of Argentina. This topic has been taken up more recently in the
anthology Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern
Edges of the Spanish Empire (1998), which provides a comparative approach to
eighteenth and nineteenth century Latin American frontiers throughout North and
South America.
Pertinent to my study is Where Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin American
History (1994), edited by David J. Weber and Jane M. Rausch. This anthology
considers frontiers throughout Latin America as well as the United States. Though
frontiers in Latin America differ from one region to the next and, most certainly,
contrast with the frontier experience of the United States, there are still many common
threads to be found. Of the American nation-states as we know them today, Argentina,
Brazil, and the United States are the three whose foundation for nation-building and
national character is born out of their nineteenth century experience of frontier
2
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
expansion and conquest.3 During this period of expansion, these three nation-states
rationalized the extirpation of certain ethnic and social groups (often indigenous)
through discourses based on exceptionalist and positivist ideologies. Such ideologies
justified the notion of the “racial superiority” of those economically and
technologically more powerful: in the United States, “Manifest Destiny” argued
democracy’s divine purpose to “civilize the savage,” whereas in South America,
“civilization and barbarism” was the political discourse that endorsed civilization's
“rightful” dominion over barbarism. As Weber and Rausch explain in their
introduction, “Indeed, in parts of Argentina and Brazil the similarities to the North
American experience seem as remarkable as the differences” (xiii). Taking into
consideration both the similarities and differences, it is precisely the frontier as the
defining space for nation-building in US American, Argentine, and Brazilian
literatures that concerns me. More directly, I am interested in the political path of
frontier violence that leads to the founding of a nation, in conjunction with the
expression of that violence in these national literatures. In short, my concern is with
frontiers as a political space for the sifting out of bodies, of those who will form part
of a nation from those that will be excluded.
To date, academics have correlated the epic military struggles in the US and
Mexico borderlands with the Apache and Comanche to the violent conflicts between
the Argentine government and the Araucanians of the pampas.4 Several scholars have
even observed the Argentine ex-president Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s nineteenth
century Indian policies in view of the influence of the United States’ own policies of
3
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
extermination and displacement, as well as his visits to the US.5 Many have also
highlighted the tradition of banditry and violence in Latin-American literature and its
ties to nation-building, connecting Argentine literary texts like Martín Fierro with
other Latin-American literatures such as Brazil's Os sertões.6 Undoubtedly Euclides da
Cunha, the author of Os sertões, had read Sarmiento’s Facundo and was highly
influenced by the notion of civilización y barbarie.7 Likewise, Samuel Putman has
identified the nineteenth century North American extirpation of Native Americans as
the event in U.S. history that most relates to the Canudos Massacre in Os sertões.8
Two-way parallels are typically drawn in ways that cross borders either from Spanishspeaking Latin America to the United States, or between Spanish and Portuguesespeaking Latin America. Rarely are all three borders crossed as my project proposes to
accomplish.
Furthermore, when we speak of frontiers of the United States, Argentina, and
Brazil, we ultimately must take into account the rural lifestyles of American cattlemen
and their role as a national archetype.9 I am speaking of the American cowboy who
will come to occupy nationalist themes in dime novels and America cinema; the
gaucho of gauchesque literature in Argentina; and lastly, the jagunço of the Brazilian
sertão, who is proclaimed the bedrock of a nation in Os sertões, and who will continue
as a common figure in Brazilian literature, most notably in João Guimarães Rosa’s
masterpiece Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956).10 The inter-cultural connection of diverse
American cowmen has not been missed by academics, as Richard Slatta’s Comparing
Cowboys and Frontiers (1997) verifies; nor has this figure’s persistence in literature
4
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
gone unnoticed. We may consider, for example, Edward Tinker and his The Horsemen
of the Americas and the Literature They Inspired (1967).
Yet I recognize that my comparative approach to distinct American frontier
literatures first requires a definition of frontier. In the context of my project, and the
nineteenth century Americas, I suggest that frontier implies various interconnected
definitions on numerous planes. First, temporally, nineteenth century frontiers marked
a threshold, indeed, a frontier itself that is at once in flux between colonialism and
modernity; a transition, I would argue, from where the former colonial practices of
subversion and violence so common to frontiers spaces shift (or evolve) to those
methods and technologies of state violence so predominant in modernity. Indeed, we
may say that modernity’s apparatuses of state violence are only a continuation and
reconfiguration of those of colonial times, as maintained by Hannah Arendt.11 I would
thus argue that nineteenth century frontiers in the Americas mark this transition.
Second, socially, frontiers in the Americas can be understood as a point where two or
more cultures or peoples converge, interact economically, exchange with one another
culturally, religiously and, at times, even violently. Finally, on a political plane,
American frontiers imply that inscrutable space where so-called civilization converts
into barbarism, often denoting the violent encroachment of civilization into
barbarism’s “dark” regions. Thus it is a space where state military campaigns are
carried out against the supposedly savage or backwards frontier peoples, against those
whose bodies are marked as incompatible with modernity and the nation-states’
5
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
conceptualization of citizenry, be it the United States’ conquering of the West, Roca’s
Conquista del desierto in Argentina, or the Canudos War in Brazil.
It is within this understanding of frontier that I place the violent settings found
in Blood Meridian, Martín Fierro, and Os sertões. Indeed, each work’s setting
corresponds to the abovementioned definitions of frontier in terms of the temporal,
social, and certainly political aspects. This is especially true regarding frontiers as
politically created military spaces for violence and extirpation: Blood Meridian
correlates to the US empirical expansion into the western frontier, Martín Fierro to
Argentina’s conquest of the desierto, and Os sertões as a witness to the carnage of the
Canudos War.
Ultimately, these three works may be categorized as commentaries on the
discourse of “civilization and barbarism.” Earl Fitz, in his work on inter-American
literature, identifies the conflict between civilization and barbarism as one of New
World literature’s most definitive themes, persisting ever since European discovery of
the Americas in 1492, and ranging from Canadian to Brazilian literature.12 However, I
would also state that in the case of Blood Meridian, Martín Fierro, and Os sertões, we
encounter literary works that in some way or another critique and question the
barbarous acts of civilization, suggesting a discourse that undermines the dichotomy
of civilization and barbarism, thus revealing the barbarism of civilization.
As it is with any comparative literary study, one must be prepared to account
for his or her selection of chosen works. In my case, it was important to me that the
three chosen works come from the United States, Argentina, and Brazil, given that the
6
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
nineteenth century frontier of these three American nation-states was, more than any
other American country, the building site for national identity and the nation-state
itself; and second, the inversion of the theme “civilization and barbarism” in these
books was relevant in that they ultimately unveil the political clockwork of the state
war machine in American frontiers. So whereas other works that could be categorized
either as frontier literature or as literature concerned with the theme of “civilization
and barbarism,” such as Sarmiento’s Facundo, Rómulo Gallegos’ Doña Bárbara, or
even Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, they do not, in my view, amply expose the
barbarism of civilization. On the other hand, as is the case of the Venezuelan novel
Doña Bárbara, the work does not come from an American country whose frontier
plays a vital role in their formation and conceptualization of nationality.
Lastly, my choosing of these three works has much to do with the number
“three” itself. I am referring to Comparative Literature as a practice (not as
methodology or theory). As a practice, Comparative Literature has traditionally
adhered to the unspoken guideline known as the Rule of Three. This rule infers not
just the inclusion of three distinct literary works, but to three different literary works
from three different languages. This, according to Haun Saussy, creates a “third
language effect,” which originally precipitated a sort of questioning that the traditional
practice of single national-literature programs did not satisfy. Furthermore,
comparison between two languages only works like a standard model of translation
between two poles, meaning it is only adequate for formulating and answering
questions of historical influence or typological similarities of the texts. However, this
7
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
only demonstrates a sort of nearsightedness. Comparative Literature, as Saussy
explains, identifies the things omitted from a two-language pattern, pointing out what
a dyadic explanation leaves unaccounted for.13 The third language furnishes
counterexamples, frustrating “the progress to universal literature—to the delivery of
the same thing in different languages, ad infinitum” (340). In short, it creates an
unsettling in the analysis, maintaining an imbalance that is in fact desirable. In such a
way, Comparative Literature as a practices is a process of the construction of an
object, much like the geometrical creation of a triangle, whose apex is a point from
where new angles open for measurement. Since the three languages keep things from
settling down, an equilateral triangle is not the object sought nor obtained. Thus, of the
possible 180 degrees, the Rule of Three guarantees that each comparative study
produces innumerable possibilities of varying degrees of angles, constructing each
time a triangle that is wholly unique.14 By placing Blood Meridian, Martín Fierro, and
Os sertões within a comparative context, the varying nature of the works themselves
guarantees disruption which maintains the triangular object I attempt to construct in a
constant, incongruent assembly. In short, there are many ways in which the works
relate, as well as elements that create what is unsettling about their comparison.
To begin, when we consider the time period of publication of these three
works, we find that José Hernández’ Martín Fierro, published in 1872, and Os sertões
in 1901 (though Euclides da Cunha began writing in 1897), go together in that they
both fluctuated within the realm of Latin American romanticism and realism;15
whereas Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian disrupts this as a much more
8
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
contemporary and postmodern work, published in 1985. However, based on the
nineteenth century chronicle by Samuel Chamberlain, titled My Confession:
Recollections of a Rogue, as well as many other nineteenth century sources,
McCarthy’s novel can be defined as historical that is undoubtedly rooted in the
nineteenth century.16 In the end, however, Blood Meridian, on the literary timeline,
remains the “odd book out,” and we must remember that while José Hernández and
Euclides da Cunha were contemporaries to the subject matter of their texts, McCarthy
is not.
In terms of genre we also find unsettling dynamics of these three texts.
McCarthy’s work can best be described as a novel; Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões, on
the other hand, is problematic, often defined as a hybrid text that is a chronical, a
novel, journalistic, and an anthropological and geological account all at once;
furthermore, Martín Fierro is Hernandez’ long narrative gauchesque poem that has
been described by Leopoldo Lugones as the Argentine epopee or, given its realistic
nature, a novel that happened to be written in verse, as Jorge Luís Borges suggests.
One thing remains despite these divergences: each work is ambitious in its
undertaking and most certainly epic in scope.
In matters of language, time and again both Blood Meridian and Os sertões
are identified for employing a richly baroque and complex style of narrative. Here it
would seem that Martín Fierro unsettles the three books’ relation in that its entire
narrative—related from Fierro’s first person perspective—employs a highly colloquial
and rustic Spanish voice that imitates the common speech of the gaucho. However, it
9
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
is important to point out that both da Cunha and McCarthy are also interested in
portraying an authentic version of the rustic language of their frontier characters as
well. Indeed, da Cunha, in the attitude of an anthropologist, records the rustic
Portuguese vernacular of the jagunços.17 Without a doubt, McCarthy is likewise wellknown for his impressive dialogue that captures a rustic US southern dialect—
language that is very present in Blood Meridian, and which contrasts with the
narrative’s baroque voice.
Both Martín Fierro and Os sertões coincide with the nation’s attempt to define
nationality, in the case of Argentina and Brazil. Both works are canonized as iconic
national masterpieces, literary treasures of the patria, and the defining and most
representative literary works of their country. The texts emerged in a timeframe
analogous to when both Argentina and Brazil, as new nations, sought to modernize the
country, define the national archetype, and construct a nationalist discourse of what it
meant to be Argentine, what it meant to be Brazilian. Yet they emerge in resistance to
prevailing nationalist discourses of identity. Both Martín Fierro and Os sertões are
interestingly also examples of literatures of reassuring fratricide, when the nationalist
discourse of their time excluded certain groups (fellow brothers) from the nation.
Nevertheless, by representing the traumatic violence against the excluded—the gaucho
and the jagunço— Martín Fierro and Os sertões trump the nationalist discourse of
Argentina and Brazil at the time, and effectively rewrite the national narrative by
resurrecting and now including the gaucho and the jagunço as national heroes of the
patria, whose death and sacrifice found the nation’s identity. In these terms, Blood
10
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Meridian does not qualify. Though the book certainly follows the tradition of Moby
Dick as a critique of US Imperialism, McCarthy’s novel is written too far ahead of the
establishment of US nationalist discourse and identity that came from its frontier
experience. It is a work that is anti-mythical, anti-Western, in that it subverts in
retrospect the national myths of the nineteenth century American West. It would seem
that, unlike Latin America, US frontier myth, so embedded in American
exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, was too potent to overcome in its time. It would
not be until Vietnam that such discourses about the American western frontier would
pass from supposed history to a debunked national myth, making room for Blood
Meridian.18
Though there are certainly disruptions in the comparative construction of an
analysis of these works, as I have highlighted, there are nevertheless many points
where I believe all three converge. These points are pertinent to my reading of the
works, as will become more and more evident. First, all three are ultimately about
banditry, their characters’ juridical status undoubtedly tantamount to that of outlaws.
In José Hernandez’ gauchesque poem, Fierro himself and many other gauchos, such as
Cruz, are matreros. The narrative is the first gauchesque poem whose central figure is
the gaucho malo, establishing the bandit narrative in gauchesque literature. In Os
sertões the entire city of Canudos itself is described as a cave of bandits, the very term
jagunço becoming synonymous with banditry. Blood Meridian presents a world where
quite literally every character in the book is a coldblooded killer. At some time or
another the players in the narrative become outlaws; first the Apaches are outlawed by
11
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
governor Trias’ scalp contract with the Glanton Gang, meant for their extermination.
Then, after slaughtering entire villages of Mexicans, the Chihuahua government places
a bounty on Glanton’s head.
All three works likewise confront positivist and Enlightenment thinking of the
nineteenth century. In Blood Meridian, positivist and Enlightenment ideas are
expressed through the educated and bellicose character known as the judge, whose
intellect and perverse thinking presses such ideology into the most bloody of
conclusions that justify slaughter and genocide. In Os sertões, positivism and
Enlightenment thinking proceed from the book’s author himself. Da Cunha’s positivist
convictions of progress and racial determinism conflict with the new Brazilian
Republic’s bloody atrocities committed during the Canudos War he witnesses, leaving
the writer utterly distraught over the failures of what he believes civilization should
be. Hernandez, on the other hand, addresses positivism in total opposition to its
excluding discourses.19 Martín Fierro is the work that opposes Sarmiento’s notion of
civilization and barbarism; it is, as Estrada notes, the anti-Facundo,20 a work that
believes in the power of the individual and does not adhere neither to the racial
determinism nor the social Darwinism of its time.
Furthermore, all three works are extremely violent in general. I would in fact
add that violence is what moves the narratives of these texts. Violence reaches
extremes such as infanticide: babies hang dead from trees in Blood Meridian, da
Cunha tells of jagunços performing human sacrifices with babies, and in Martín
Fierro the captive woman’s child has his throat slit before her eyes, her hands then
12
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
bound with his intestines by her captor. Violence seems to proceed from multiple
sources in each text; indeed, everyone it would seem is capable of violent atrocity. We
must remember that even Fierro himself, so shamed by political abandonment,
becomes a murderer. Yet I would argue that at its core, violence is represented as a
political expression of the State, and the bodies caught up in the State’s violent
designs—be it the gaucho and the indio, the jagunço, or the vast range of those who
fall victim to the Glanton Gang’s chaotic rampages—are forced into extreme
situations where to counteract with violence becomes the only option.
Consequentially, all three texts graphically detail the most grotesque of scenes which
are the byproduct of state violence. The great scenes of slaughter carried out by the
Glanton Gang are triggered by their lucrative scalping contract with the Chihuahua
government in Blood Meridian, giving the narrative itself the primary motor for
violence. Martín Fierro is taken from his home and pressed into military service and
war on the frontier by the government. When he abandons his post, he is then deemed
a bandit and enemy of the state, only to be hunted by the government as a deserter.
The entire narrative of Os sertões is entrenched in the bloody representation of the
four military campaigns against the rural bandit community of Canudos.
Finally, all three works take place on that political fringe space known as the
frontier. Each frontier setting can be likened unto Euclides da Cunha’s description of
the sertão backlands in Os sertões: they are spaces separated from civilization by a
coordinate of history and time, where certain frontier “types” are destined to be
vanquished by the excluding exigencies of modernity and “relegated to the realm of
13
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
evanescent or extinct traditions.”21 Frontier spaces are, in other words, zones of
political exception and exclusion. Indeed, Martín Fierro, Os Sertões, and Blood
Meridian set the stage where a diverse cast of actors―Native Americans, soldiers,
bandits, mestizos, and pastoral cattlemen—play out scenes of violence made possible
through lawlessness imposed by the sovereign, and not through a preexisting state of
sovereign law in absentia, as is erroneously presumed. I am thus suggesting that the
“wildness” and “lawlessness” so often identified with American frontier spaces is not
a sort of Hobbesian state of nature that precedes the establishment of positive law,
save a zone of lawlessness created by the encroachment of sovereignty itself that is
much more analogous to Agamben’s notion of state of exception than anything else. In
all three of these works the frontier is overrun with state representatives, marked as
state military zones by the presence of soldiers, police, judges, alcaldes, governors,
and of course those antithetical bandit figures excluded from the State.
Martín Fierro, Os Sertões, and Blood Meridian are ultimately about the dark
side of nation and empire in that they critique the political discourse of “civilization
and barbarism” and the consequential violence caused on the nineteenth century
frontiers of their respective nation-states. Regarding civilization and barbarism, Fitz
comments: “American literature has manifested this theme to the extent that it can
now be said to constitute a defining feature of life and letters in the New World”
(Rediscovering the Americas 211). As a political discourse of exclusion, civilization
and barbarism interestingly defines both life and letters in the Americas. What this
ultimately signifies is a biopolitical and literary relationship: biopolitics traces where
14
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
the very life of the individual become an issue of politics and politics comes to inform
the very nature of life—all of which, as I argue, can be found transcribed in frontier
literature that confronts the topic of civilization and barbarism. In other words, this
political discourse, so characteristic in American literatures, does not demonstrate
merely a justification for civilization’s territorial invasion of supposed “barbaric”
frontiers, but a biopolitical discourse for the regulation and control of the body, of the
very life of excluded frontier inhabitants. With life at the center of its calculations, it is
here that politics determine who qualifies for citizenry and who will be excluded from
the nation-state project. Martín Fierro, Os Sertões, and Blood Meridian are works that
expose the excluding process expressed through the violent elimination of those
bodies who do not qualify politically, often because they are deemed as “savages,”
bandits, or the racially inferior: all unfit for civilized life. In doing so, I argue that
these literary works interpret frontier spaces as the lawless space of Agamben’s state
of exception, producing the consequential animal-like political subject who inhabits
said space.
The current prevailing conceptualizations and variations of biopolitics derive
from Foucault. It is interesting to note, and vital to point out, that biopolitics begins
with the care of the body, and not destruction. Foucault notes that at the cusp of
modernity, beginning in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, and only growing all
the more prevalent during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there is an everincreasing concern of the State to regulate and control the very bodies of their
populations. What was once pastoral power, or pastoral care of the general populace,
15
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
where the Church was concerned with the welfare of body and soul of a people, now,
during the secularization of theology in modern society, shifts and comes to occupy
the primary function of the State in the form of what he calls biopower. Biopower is
verified in the State’s growing concern to prolong and enhance life, proven in the
State’s tracking of birth and death rates, the emergence of public health departments,
the census itself, and the State’s attempts to now regulate the body’s sexuality or drug
consumption, for example. As the modern nation-state emerges, politics thus becomes
more and more entrenched in biopolitics and the body will more and more become the
primary locus for political action and policy.
Biopolitics, for Foucault, also marks the diminishment of the old notion of
sovereignty, a “cutting off of the king’s head,” as he puts it, and indicates the
emergence of what he calls governmentality. Governmentality is a structure of power
concerned with managing and restricting bodies and populations through policies and
departments, bureaucracies and institutions, and through law as a strategy and tactic,
not a sovereign absolute. Controlling the circulation of goods and services insofar as it
maintains and restricts the life of a population, is governmentality’s mode of power,
which can be expressed through forms of state and non-state institutions of power. It
can be said that governmentality is an almost Kafkaesque feature of modern living.
Indeed, many of his characters suggest a political subject hopelessly pressed beneath
the weight of the never-ending labyrinth of bureaucratic institutions which ultimately
determine the destiny of their bodies, such as K.’s unjust juridical situation in The
Trial.
16
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
I might at this point pose the question: at what point does biopolitics,
supposedly concerned with the care and prolonging of life, become a politics of death?
For Foucault, biopolitics becomes thanatopolitics the moment the State takes the
notion of race into consideration. This is what he calls state racism, which ultimately
approaches the life of man as a species, determining who may live and die and thus
maintaining the old sovereign right over death. Furthermore, the political calculation
of race implies that life can be regulated genetically to optimize the national race. The
emergence of eugenics as a focus of political policy is a prime example of biopolitics’
state racism. The idea that the State might racially engineer its body politic to produce
a supposedly superior cast is best exemplified in Nazi Germany’s efforts to produce a
purely Aryan race, thus racially cleansing the country of Jews and other marginal
populations. We find similar ideology of state racism in the nineteenth century
positivist discourses of nationalism in the new American nation-states such as
Argentina and Brazil. I am speaking of both countries’ immigration policies of racial
whitening, which sought to attract immigrants from European Germanic and AngloSaxon descent in hopes that their supposedly “superior” genes would purge the nation
of its indigenous and African heritage, eventually creating a completely white society.
It has even been suggested that South American immigration policies of racial
whitening were the first case of the political practice of eugenics known to
modernity.22 Racial whitening as a practice of eugenics in fact informs our reading of
both Martín Fierro and Os sertões, given that both texts confront the topic, as I
17
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
highlight in chapters two and three. Furthermore, Blood Meridian captures state
racism in Captain White’s dialogue with the kid, also covered in chapter one.
While Foucault identifies state racism to be the way in which governmentality
maintains the old sovereign’s right to take life, even he has recognized that
governmentality has not entirely eliminated the notion of sovereignty in the modern
nation-state. Indeed others, such as Judith Butler and certainly Giorgio Agamben, have
recognized the persistence of sovereignty through the exception or, in other words,
through the State’s continual recurrence to the declaration of state emergencies: those
exceptional situations when law is ultimately suspended and sovereignty is
paradoxically exercised through lawlessness. In fact, Butler points out that sovereignty
resurfaces in the modern nation-state as one of the tactics of governmentality. 23
However, for Agamben, who perhaps has done more to further the field of
Foucault’s biopolitics than any other scholar, sovereignty still remains the primary
structure of political power in that it survives precisely in the persistence of the
exception. What this means is that Agamben’s definition of sovereignty is, taken from
the words of Carl Schmitt, he who decides the exception.24 Thus sovereignty is, in an
integral sense, exercised through the state of exception, is expressed in its defining
feature to suspend law and not, as is presumed, to enforce law. Though Agamben does
not necessarily refute the notion of state racism, for him, all life is transcribed into a
politics of death on the basis of the sovereign state of exception. All life may therefore
be eligible to paradoxically be included in the State through its exclusion. Thus
biopolitics becomes thanatopolitical not necessarily by way of state racism, but at the
18
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
point where state of exception comes to define the sovereign decision, which
ultimately determines the political and ontological standing of all life. In effect, this
opens the field for biopolitical exclusion and extermination not just based on notions
of race, save on the basis of the entirety of humanity itself. This accounts for Nazi
Germany’s practices of exclusion not just based on race, but on the grounds of
supposed social abnormalities, which also targeted the insane, homosexuals, gypsies,
etc. Under state of exception, politics may therefore hand select bodies unfit for
inclusion in the nation and exclude them from the normal juridical practice of the law,
stripping them of their basic human rights and creating bare life. Thus the criteria for
exclusion may supersede biology and race, branching out to fields such as psychology
or sociology.
If the exception is the structure of the sovereign, then Agamben concludes that
state of exception “is the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it
in itself by suspending it” (HS 28). It is therefore within the state of exception that
modernity’s primary biopolitical subject is produced: nuda vita, or bare life.
Agamben’s notion of bare life is the subject abandoned by the law and whose
existence mirrors the outside and inside topography of state of exception. It is here that
inside and outside do not exclude one another but blur together, and bare life is the
political existence of paradoxically inhabiting a space both inside and outside the
juridical order, becoming a body that is included in the sovereign’s calculations of
power by way of exclusion. To give evidence for his conceptualization of bare life,
Agamben traces the existence of bare life throughout western politics in the figures of
19
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
bandits and outlaws, locating its origin in homo sacer (sacred man). Homo sacer
comes from an obscure Roman juridical text which states homo sacer is he who may
be killed and yet whose death does not signify neither homicide nor sacrifice.
Agamben concludes that homo sacer’s double exclusion from civil and religious
ceremony places him in a sort of limbo between qualified political life and the
existence of animals. He illustrates this through the two notions of life found in the
Greek, of zoē, which means the simple act of living common with humans, animals
and gods, and bios, which is life that is qualified politically and as such has political
rights. Bare life is thus caught up in an intermediary space between zoē (exclusion)
and bios (inclusion), since it is life qualified politically by way of disqualification
(inclusion by exclusion). An example of this would be the easily recognizable wanted
poster of the Wild West, which states the subject’s name, followed by “wanted, dead
or alive.” The outlaw in the poster finds himself in the curious position of being
included, or “wanted” by the State, but whose life forgoes any right to trial by jury as
the law states. He may be killed and his death will not be considered a murder,
meaning his being wanted (inclusion) only alludes to his exclusion from constituted
law.
For Agamben, as the modern nation-state has developed in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, the state of exception has increasingly become the normal
practice of sovereign law. The consequences of this are twofold: first, this means bare
life has become the political body of modernity; and second, when the rule of law
depends on the exception and is normalized thusly, the space of the camp opens up.
20
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
The camp, such as Nazi concentration camps, Japanese camps in the U.S. during
World War II, contemporary refugee camps, and the Guantanamo Bay detention
camp, are all examples of the modern nation-state’s tendency to house bare life in one
designated location that is tantamount to the inside and outside topography of state of
exception. In other words, like the state of exception, the camp is literally a space
within the sovereign realm of juridical order—within the State—that is also outside
said juridical order. It is a place of permanent state of exception, where political being
means being bare life.
Though Agamben’s theories of state of exception and bare life generally reflect
on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, others, most notable Achilles Mbembe and
Hannah Arendt, have pointed out that contemporary structures of biopolitical violence
had their testing ground in the colonial world. Mbembe compares the colonial usage of
the word “savage” to Foucault’s notion of racism as biopower’s calculating factor for
determining who lives and dies.25 Furthermore, he identifies slavery to perhaps be the
first instance of biopolitical experimentation, and plantations to be emblematic of the
paradoxical state of exception. He ultimately qualifies the colony itself as the site
where sovereignty fundamentally consists of an expression of power outside the law.26
Within this context I situate nineteenth century American frontiers found in Blood
Meridian, Martín Fierro, and Os sertões. They are spaces in transition from the world
of colonial conquest, slavery, and the plantation, to the twentieth and twenty-first
century worlds of the camp. The conquering of American frontiers was a continuation
21
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
of Old World colonialism now carried out by the independent New World nations and
their incentive to modernize.
The frontier is undoubtedly where the sovereign suspends the law; American
frontiers were synonymous to lawless lands, but as I argue, lawless lands created by
sovereignty. Politically I therefore classify frontiers as states of exception, the life
therein as bare life. Nineteenth century American frontiers were the last corners of the
world to where the politically marginalized such as Native Americas, ex-slaves,
people of socially outcast religions, bandits and outlaws fled.27 Frontiers, like the
camp, were the most extreme political spaces to where those who could be licitly
killed were pursued and persecuted by the State. Interestingly, as American frontiers
began to close (the US officially closed the frontier in 1890, Argentina in 1917),28 we
perceive a political demand for new places to house bare life. The colonies gone,
frontiers closed, the State would thereby adopt the camp. I would suggest that for this
reason, as the western frontier in the US became more and more reduced in the
nineteenth century, politics turned to displacing Native Americans on reservations,
essentially a form of concentration camp.29
Biopolitics has not gone unnoticed in literary theory either, though I believe
there is yet much to be said about the topic. Most notably is Eric Santner’s Creaturely
Life (2006) and Arne de Boever’s two books: States of Exception in the Contemporary
Novel (2012) and Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel (2013). Furthermore,
Judith Butler’s Grievable Life (2004) is a reflection on the representation and
exclusion of political bodies in media. Each of these works focus on the way in which
22
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
bodies are written in relation to sovereign powers of exception in literature or in media
such as newspapers. Santner observes how the capturing of state of exception, in
Kafka for example, reinterprets the fictional character’s bare life into a creaturely state
of existence both in representation and psych. De Boever, on the other hand, develops
a theoretical framework for biopolitics and sovereign exception in the novel. This
genre is an ideal medium for biopolitics given that by definition the novel attempts to
capture the everyday, real life existence of ordinary people, thus revealing the modern
subject’s exceptional condition before the a law. In my following chapters on Blood
Meridian, Martín Fierro, and Os sertões, I will draw from Foucault, Agamben and the
abovementioned scholars.
In chapter one, I discuss the episode of Captain White in Blood Meridian in
relation to US frontier myth and Foucault’s notion of state racism. I demonstrate how
the Virgin Land myth of the American wilderness and the national discourse of the
adversarial Other are undermined by Captain White’s dialog with the kid, unveiling
state racism as the driving factor for US occupation of what was once Mexico.
Subsequently, I shift the focus of the chapter to an interpretation of the Blood
Meridian’s setting as a state of exception. Here, I first identify the Glanton Gang’s
scalp-hunting contract with Governor Trias as a declared state of emergency.
Following this, I highlight the work’s infamous character, the judge, as a living
analogy of the sovereign exception. As a trickster character in the story, the judge’s
involvement with the governor of Chihuahua represents the relationship between the
23
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
king and his fool so often found in literature, and one that implies the chaos of
lawlessness inherent in the sovereign.
In chapter two, I identify Martín Fierro as not just political-literary, as the
gauchesque is defined by Ludmer, but a work that contributes bio to its politicalliterariness. Martín Fierro is essentially about the experience of a man before the law
and his poetic expression of life and song joined together in unison. In the telling of
his life, Fierro takes the reader on a journey to get acquainted with the various stages
of his political life: from gaucho to soldier, and then to the abandoned state of the
outlaw. During this transition, I identify the draft law that initially recruits Fierro for
military service to be an illegal force of law. The frontier itself in Martín Fierro is a
space of exception and political elimination. Furthermore, I identify the frontier
military post to where Fierro is sent to war as a type of camp, a fringe zone both inside
and outside the nation. It is here, and subsequently when Fierro escapes the post and
becomes a bandit, that I interpret the expression of his body and his shame—his penas
he sings about—in terms of Agamben’s bare life. The chapter concludes with a
biopolitical observation of the bandit figure in Martín Fierro.
Finally, in chapter three, I first provide a reading of the positivist ideas and
convictions of racial determinism expressed in Os sertões in light of Foucault’s state
racism. I then identify the Canudos conflict to be a threefold struggle for control over
the body of the people of Canudos. Here we find the three oligarchical powers of state,
church, and landowners working together as institutions of governmentality, seeking
to bring the people back under their control. Furthermore, I likewise argue that
24
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Euclides da Cunha points to state of exception being utilized as a strategy against the
Canudos people, as the government increasingly reverts to unconstitutionally violent
methods of extermination against its own citizens. Finally, I juxtapose my reading of
Os sertões with numerous nineteenth century newspaper sources that covered the
conflict. Here I refer to Judith Butler’s notions of grievable life, and the refusal to
represent certain deaths in newspapers in a light that renders them worthy of being
mourned. In a sense, the refusal to represent certain bodies, while others are portrayed
as grievable to the nation, is an instance of a sort of state of exception in journalism. I
conclude that while newspapers at the time show soldier deaths to be great losses to
the nation, they refuse to represent jagunços as grievable life in newspapers. What
Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões achieves in humanizing the jagunços, is accomplished
through a discourse that dehumanizes the representation of Brazilian soldiers during
the war, reducing them to the level of bandits like the jagunços. In doing so, Euclides
ultimately achieves the grievability of jagunço life in his masterpiece.
In short, I propose there is a connection between American nation-states born
from their nineteenth century frontier experiences of exclusion and the persisting
models of sovereign exclusion still found today in the Americas and beyond in world
politics. National literatures from the US, Argentina and Brazil, founded on the
frontier, thus become ideal mediums for the investigation of biopolitics and state of
exception. Nineteenth century nationalist discourses like “civilization and barbarism”
and Manifest Destiny excluded frontier inhabitants from the national project and
inform us today about the continuation of sovereignly excluded bodies. Indeed, in a
25
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
post 9/11 world, one suspected of terrorism has become synonymous to the life of
bandits, matreros, and jagunços found in the worlds of Blood Meridian, Martín
Fierro, and Os sertões. Under the pretext of the War on Terror, it would seem all life
has the potential to become bare life. We only have to consider the current US policy
that forgoes constitutional rights in declaring the use of drones to kill American
citizens (and those of other countries) as permissible when in the name of fighting
terrorism. Thus, functioning as the new “savagery” of old colonialism, terrorism is a
continuation of civilization’s conquest against barbarism.
26
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
CHAPTER I
Cormac Mccarthy’s Blood Meridian: State Racism, State of
Exception, and the Sovereign Fool
“You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.”
-Davy Crockett
“It makes no difference what men think of war . . .
War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone.
War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him.
The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
-the judge, Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy’s epic novel Blood Meridian (1985) is a sort of sinister and
perverse bildungsroman, a dark and violent coming-of-age tale that follows a pseudo
protagonist, the kid, as he joins a scalp-hunting gang in the US-Mexico borderlands
during the nineteenth century and embarks on a bloody year-long campaign hunting
and slaughtering Apache and Mexicans, amongst others. Based loosely on Samuel
Chamberlain’s nineteenth century chronicle My Confession: The Recollections of a
Rogue, McCarthy’s novel is both a witness and verdict to the violent history of U.S.
expansion into westward frontier territories.
Blood Meridian is often deemed McCarthy’s masterpiece, “his magnum opus,
and one of American literature's darkest odysseys into the westering impulse” (Owens
xii). Harold Bloom calls McCarthy's novel “a canonical imaginative achievement,”
and ventures to say that no other living author “has given us a book as strong and
memorable as Blood Meridian” (1). For Bloom, the novel’s infamous character, and
possibly true protagonist, Judge Holden, “is a villain worthy of Shakespeare, Iago-like
27
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
and demoniac, a theoretician of war everlasting. . . . the book's magnificence―it's
language, landscape, persons, conceptions―at last transcends the violence, and
convert goriness into terrifying art” (1-2).
Since its publication, this piece of terrifying art has undergone a myriad of
critical analyses, categorization of genre, literary praises, and criticism. The sheer
depth and complexity of the novel is no doubt daunting, and consequently,
McCarthian scholarship has produced a body of relating academic literature which in
itself can be equally daunting. In fact, Blood Meridian has solicited more academic
attention and interpretations than any other work in McCarthy’s oeuvre, leading some
critics like Timothy Parrish to conclude that “Blood Meridian defies interpretation
altogether” (82). I would argue that while it defies any one, all-encompassing
interpretation, it certainly does not defy interpretations. The transcendence of the book
lies precisely in the fact that it invites us to interpret and reinterpret its content.
Transcendent dexterity is what best describes literary masterpieces such as this novel
and should not discourage our willingness to prod and poke its content.
My concern with McCarthy’s novel (as well as with Martín Fierro and Os
Sertões in the following chapters) is the role sovereignty plays in relation to frontier
violence on nineteenth century American frontier regions. Blood Meridian is a work
that exposes violence caused by U.S. sovereign expansion into the US-Mexico
borderlands. Yet it is not simply the mere identification of the sovereign in the novel’s
pages that interests me but the unveiling of the very gears and cogs of sovereignty in
relation to human life.
28
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
The clockwork of sovereignty and human life I speak of begins with
Foucault’s modern conceptualization of biopolitics. Biopolitics is the exercise of
sovereign power over the literal biological body of a population—the couplet of life
and politics. As Eric L. Santner explains, biopolitics “names the threshold where life
becomes a matter of politics and politics come to inform the very matter and
materiality of life” (12). I am interested in what form of life is at stake in literature that
projects the thanatopolitical—politics of death—extremes that biopolitics can reach
when it strips human life bare of its rights. I interpret Blood Meridian as a novel that
can first be understood as a biopolitical analogy for the modern sovereign state, and
second, that as such the biopolitical subject found in the text is best defined as
creaturely, caught up in a threshold between human life and animal life. In short, the
novel harbors literary frontier characters whose existence is tantamount to life defined
by its capacity to freely be killed.
1.1 On Violence
Without a doubt it is the overwhelming shock of violence that stands as the
largest obstacle when confronting McCarthy's novel. Blood Meridian is a tour de force
when it comes to violence. From the very beginning the reader is thrust into an orgy of
human brutality that does not mitigate until the very last sentence. One simply cannot
speak of Blood Meridian without speaking of violence; it permeates the pages,
embellished with a prose so syntactically complex and poetically rich that the
narrative is often said to recall Faulkner, Milton, Shakespeare, Melville, and
Dostoyevsky, while the voice resounds with that of the King James Bible and the
29
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Divine Comedy.30 McCarthy's capacity to describe violence with such eloquence and
authorial might creates an experience for the reader that is both aesthetically pleasing
and contextually appalling all at once. As Susan Kollin notes:
[Blood Meridian’s] treatment of violence is in no way restrained or
confined, but anarchic and pushed to the extreme . . . McCarthy's
portrayal of American brutality rips the lid off sentimental
understandings of the past; page after page, as bodies pile up, readers
marvel at McCarthy's ability to imagine new means of describing
human atrocity. The book's unrelenting focus on the violent history of
American expansion has been denounced as excessive. Blood Meridian
has been accused of being both “pornographically” violent and “terribly
beautiful” (Jarrell 32; Winchell 309); it has been criticized for its
obsessive detailing of the horrific depravity of the gang of mercenaries
while overindulging in Faulknerian prose (Shaviro 149; Arnold and
Luce 1). (562-63)
Such a pornographic display of violence initially subjected the book to an uneasy
reception. Simply put, critics found it hard to see past the violence. Caryn James, in
the New York Times Book Review, states that Blood Meridian “comes at the reader like
a slap in the face, an affront that asks us to endure a vision of the Old West full of
charred human skulls, blood-soaked scalps,” and even cope with the image of a tree
“hung with the bodies of dead infants” (31).
30
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Readers often struggle with mixed feelings, at once admiring the prose while
despising the fact that the book is about slaughter and gives no signs for hope in the
human race.31 “What do we make of this phenomenon,” as Sullivan questions, “a mind
that dwells unremittingly on evil and a prose that conveys these thoughts with the
tongue of an angel?” (652). It has even been suggested that McCarthy is perhaps both
a genius and a bit insane.32 Yet perhaps what Sullivan, James and others should have
initially been questioning was not the violence itself, nor the insanity of McCarthy,
save the insanity of colonialism, of the conquest of the West itself. McCarthy
obsessively researched for ten years the history of this period and, as Sepich’s
historical inquiry into the novel suggests, he actually toned down the level of violence
found in the historical record.33 This makes early critics who take his work as a “slap
in the face” or exhibition of insanity, rather than reflect on the violent insanity of
colonialism, seem like apologists for a history they prefer in its whitewashed form.
Indeed, it would seem that the agglomeration of violence and philosophical
pronouncement which initially disoriented readers of Blood Meridian, and those of
McCarthy's novels in general, demanded order and explaining. Scholars who at first
grappled with the sheer violence in his works initially divided themselves into two
camps. The first thesis, established by Vereen Bell in his The Achievement of Cormac
McCarthy (1988)—the first scholarly book on McCarthy's oeuvre—argues that
McCarthy's novels reveal a “nihilistic mood” (1). The second thesis comes from
Edwin T. Arnold. Those who side with Arnold argue that McCarthy is in fact a
31
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
moralist. Arnold affirms that McCarthy's novels contain “moral parables” and a
“belief in the need for moral order” (44).
Amongst the attempts to construct a paradigm of morality in Blood Meridian,
Leo Daughtery's gnostic approach stands out.34 He defines Blood Meridian as a
gnostic Greek tragedy and the kid as the tragic hero. The judge therefore is the
embodiment of evil whereas the kid represents goodness. Yet Owens points out “two
counts” against Daughtery: “first, because it diverts attention away from the grand
theme of primal violence, and second, because he exaggerates the kid's supposed spark
of goodness” (12). Indeed, throughout the novel the kid is no less a mindless murderer
than other characters. There is little to redeem the kid.
From such moralistic and nihilistic approaches, Phillips has observed the
manner in which another divide has formed based on assumptions regarding the two
regions which serve as focal points in McCarthy's oeuvre. Readers who view
McCarthy's works as southern try to claim him the heir of Faulkner and O’Connor and
therefore search for “something redemptive or regenerative” in his works instead of
nihilistic (435). For Phillips this is an error, especially when considering Blood
Meridian, a book whose “violence tends to be just that” (435). Phillips explains that
McCarthy's fiction recalls O’Connor’s where violence is concerned, but lacks
resolutions in the plot. “The “Southern” camp,” concludes Phillips, “therefore wants to
defend McCarthy from the heinous charge of nihilism, to make him seem more like
O’Connor than he really is” (435).
32
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
On the other hand, Phillips identifies how ““Western” readers see in the
trajectory of McCarthy's career a move toward wider relevance and a broader
worldview. For these readers, Blood Meridian marks McCarthy's progress toward
addressing not just the Wild West but Western culture as a whole, especially its
philosophical heritage” (435). As such, according to the Western camp, “McCarthy's
“nihilism” is not, therefore, something he must counter by crafting a symbolic
redemption of the fallen world or narrating the moral regeneration of his characters.
On the contrary, it is just what one would expect from a writer who has fed on such
corrosive, demystifying influence” (435).
Phillips then gives us perhaps one of the more convincing frameworks
regarding violence in Blood Meridian, one that breaks from the Bell and Arnold
debate. Recurring to the idea of “optical democracy” (a term coined in Blood
Meridian), he recognizes that the novel contends that people and things are equal.
Bell, who finds Blood Meridian to be “a critique of our culture's anthropocentrism”
(qtd. in D. Phillips 443), does not, according to Phillips, “recognize how radically
unanthropocentric it is” (446). Whereas Bell deduces competition to be the force
which opposes people to things, Phillips claims that human beings and the natural
world are not antagonists, but “part of the same continuum” (446). To support his
claim, Phillips quotes Blood Meridian: “Above all else they appeared wholly venture,
primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock
and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and
doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time
33
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
before nomenclature was and each was all” (qtd. in D. Phillips 453). Phillips
concludes that the “lack of human implication” is the novels' “most disturbing feature.
It is precisely in the raw orchestration of the book’s events, the world of nature and the
world of men are parts of the same world, and both are equally violent and indifferent
to the other” (447). Blood Meridian therefore, according to Phillips, does not narrate
but describes, “showing” us that “[v]iolence and death . . . are the more or less
objective truths of all human experience” (439). In short, Blood Meridian “treats
darkness, violence, sudden death, and all other calamities as natural occurrences-like
the weather, which can also be vicious in McCarthy's border landscape” (439). When
men and things are equals, violence is the indifferent result of natural law. Thus, “For
McCarthy, the history of the West is natural history” (453).
Phillips’ thesis, as stated above, has continued to be reworked. Barcley Owens,
in his book Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels (2000), provides a naturalist study of
Blood Meridian. For Owens, “Critical attempts to explain away the violence of Blood
Meridian begin to appear apologetic” (12). Any effort to divert our attention away
from the violence “may very well cloud the initial and recurring shock of witnessing
man’s atavistic nature” (12). The violence is there precisely to appall the reader, to be
thrust upon him, and so we “must face it head-on” (12). Along the lines of Phillips,
Owens also identifies natural law, or a sort of “Darwinian law,” to be the root of
violence. Violence, in terms of Darwinian natural law, accounts for the novel’s
indifference towards human brutality. Owens employs the primal setting for violence
to argue that Blood Meridian forms part of the American literary tradition of
34
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
naturalism, established by the likes of Steven Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London,
and Upton Sinclair.35
It seems that to date, the moralistic approach to Blood Meridian has been, for
the most part, abandoned. Critical focus on the novel now seems to be largely directed
toward topics surrounding the nation and myth. After all, as Sara Spurgeon states in
her Exploding the Western: Myths of Empire on the Postmodern Frontier (2005),
“McCarthy is interested in myths, not morals” (25). McCarthian scholarship has
finally come to terms with the amoral nature of Blood Meridian. In effect, once morals
are removed from the equation, it becomes more apparent that the novel utilizes
violence for the shattering and subverting of U.S. national myth in a critique of the
empirical process of nation-building; and second, that violence is the expression of a
natural and almost Darwinian law of human existence, an amoral and
unanthropocentric view that places humans in a violent context with the natural
world.36 Perhaps de Groot summarizes it best when he states: “[Blood Meridian]
undermines the myths of the American west by reminding the reader that the amoral
nation was founded upon death, violence, rape and domination” (141). What follows
in this chapter, is the role biopolitics plays in violence related to the anti-mythical
nature of Blood Meridian and to the book’s amoral sense of natural law. With so many
interpretations of violence regarding myth, the nation, and empire in McCarthian
scholarship of Blood Meridian, it is curious to note the scarcity of academic works that
investigate the novel through political theory, or at least a framework that highlights
the sovereign analogy presented in its pages.
35
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
I will therefore tease out the following: first, how Blood Meridian deconstructs
U.S. nation myth through violence by exposing the biopolitical technique of State
racism to rationalize state-sanctioned violence. I will argue that the episode of Captain
White and his filibusters, in its undermining of frontier myth, ultimately reveals the
biopolitical discourse of Foucault’s State racism. In doing so, this episode captures the
modern nation-state’s violent, biopolitical process so often occluded by national myth.
Second, I will argue that the kid’s integration into the Glanton gang marks a transition
into a space of legalized lawlessness known as state of exception, a lawless state
emblemized by the judge himself. In this section, I will analyze the already observed
relationship between natural law and violence in Blood Meridian and interpret this
argument in new light regarding the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s state of
exception. For Agamben, state of exception is the sovereign’s topography for
biopolitical extermination and violence. This likewise opens up space for
understanding what form of life the characters in the novel take on—what qualities
human life possesses in a state of exception.
My approach will not be simply to apply biopolitical theories to Blood
Meridian, rather, I see biopolitics as a lens through which we can create a dialogue
between such theory and the novel, in hopes of coaxing out what allegories,
conclusions, and questions such a consideration may enable me to raise. In doing so, I
hope to raise questions in general about our preconceived notions of frontiers that all
too ostensibly define them as spaces void of sovereign law, thus taking for granted that
though the periphery, frontiers were vital to nation-building in the Americas given that
36
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
they served as the stage for sovereign expansion. The clash of nineteenth century
encroaching nation-states with the very lives of frontier peoples makes frontier spaces
ideal for the field of biopolitics, and Blood Meridian, whose stage is precisely set on
the frontier, is very much an adequate medium for elucidating the threshold where life
becomes an issue of politics and politics comes to determine the ontology of life.
1.2 US Frontier Myth
To speak of biopolitics in Blood Meridian, we must first confront national
myth. Throughout its pages Blood Meridian consistently debunks the myth of the
western frontier, inverting mythologies which have come to form part of the larger
national myth of American exceptionalism: “McCarthy's novel reorganizes the
received histories of the West,” says Neil Campbell, “is concerned with the notion of
conquest, and is obsessed by the continued consequence of this process. Engaging in a
dialogue with the myths of the West, McCarthy follows their strange logic to dark
conclusions, to the point where the myths turn in on themselves, implode and begin to
deconstruct” (“Liberty beyond its proper bounds” 218). Therefore, McCarthy does not
attack the myth of the West through the conventions of reason and realism, but
through a contradictory mythical voice; he fights fire with fire: “McCarthy recasts
myth to attack what he sees as the false and destructive cultural constructs of
American Exceptionalism in particular” (Cant 6).
“A mythology,” as Richard Slotkin surmises, “is a complex of narratives that
dramatize the world vision and historical sense of a people or culture, reducing
centuries of experience into a constellation of compelling metaphors” (6). Myths
37
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
therefore, “are what we wish history had been—a compressed, simplified, sometimes
outright false vision of the past but a vision intended to serve a specific purpose in the
present and, just as importantly, to bequeath a specific shape to the future” (Spurgeon
3). It was precisely the American West, a foundation for nation-building, which
provided a stage for the creation of U.S. national myths. From the movement
westward of pioneers, frontiersmen, gold prospectors, cattlemen, Indian fighters,
trappers and buffalo hunters, narratives would be born to express the history of the
United States as Americans wanted their history to be. Neil Campbell states, “Out of
migration and movement comes a new rooted identity as the focus for the epic
narrative that gave coherence and authority to the westward urge of nation-building
and provided America with its own creation of myth” (Cultures of the New American
West 3). This myth would be multi-layered and multi-faceted, complex and sometimes
even contradictive. The myth of the American West “has been a series of dominant
stories or myths told over time and endowed with massive cultural power, such as the
Promised Land, Manifest Destiny, Turner's frontier thesis, each of which sought to
encompass and define the West” (Cultures of the New American West 6).
The myths most commonly associated with the American West are the JudeoChristian tradition of the Promised land, also a Virgin Land, unoccupied by
inhabitants, pristine and fertile—an Edenic garden, and the myth of the heroic lone
man in the wilderness who must regenerate himself through violence.37 Also known as
Joseph Campbell’s “monomyth,” the heroic lone man involves the rite of passage,
initiation in the wilderness and return of the young male hero.38 The myth of the
38
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Promised Land and that of the monomyth converge on democracy, giving purpose to
the hero in the wilderness and justification for his actions. As Spurgeon observes:
Part of the traditional American myth of the frontier holds that the
frontier experience created a land of freedom-loving individuals
dedicated to bringing democracy, not imperial conquest, to the rest of
the world. Thus part of this myth is a narrative that must carefully
ignore or disguise American imperialism abroad, as well as the reality
of invasion, conquest, and colonization that made possible the
European settlement of the Americas. (4)
The quest for spreading democracy was the “Manifest Destiny” of the United
States, which attributed the “divine right” of dominion to those who were supposedly
racially and technologically “superior.” Such political discourse justified the
extirpation of indigenous groups as providence’s errand to “civilize the savage,” and
acted as a façade for the imperialist endeavors of the United States. Likewise,
Manifest Destiny allowed for the creation of an adversarial “Other” in anyone who
opposed the nation’s democratic mission. This “Other” was first engendered in the
Indian in frontier literature, but as Megan Riley McGilchrist points out, has since then
“recurred in every conflict in every generation: Mexican, Filipinos, Cubans,
Panamanians, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans, Iranians” (12). This
continual reincarnation of the Other in the succession of American wars likewise
marks a correspondence to the repeated rejuvenation of frontier myth as means of
justification for these wars. Edward Said comments:
39
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
A correspondence is evident, but frequently disguised or forgotten,
between the nineteenth-century doctrine of manifest destiny . . . the
territorial expansion of the United States, the enormous literature of
justification (historic mission, moral regeneration, the expansion of
freedom: all of these studied in Albert K. Weinberg's massively
documented 1958 work Manifest Destiny), and the ceaselessly repeated
formulae about the need for an American intervention against this or
that aggression since World War Two. (288)
Though evident, the correlation between nineteenth century frontier myth and
American intervention foreign policy “is rarely made explicit, and indeed disappears
when the public drums of war are sounded and hundreds of thousands of tons of
bombs are dropped on a distant and mostly unknown enemy” (288). As observed by
Said, recognition of the national mythology of the United States has been slow to
catch hold in the American conscious, and when it does surface, said recognition is
repeatedly silenced by new wars and buried in a resurging battle cries. Thus, Slotkin
notes, “American attitudes toward the idea of a national mythology have been
peculiarly ambivalent. There is a strong antimythological stream in our culture . . .”
(3). For many years, well into the twentieth century, the myth of the West, as
portrayed in dime novels and Hollywood Westerns, has been tantamount to history.39
The current U.S. passport best highlights just how much frontier myth persists
in our concept of history and national identity. Upon recently renewing my passport, I
immediately noticed the new background images on the visa pages. Of the roughly ten
40
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
images in the passport, six in some way refer to the western frontier. The prints
include the Rocky Mountains, the desert, buffalo, cowboys on a cattle drive, a steam
locomotive, and a grizzly bear and totem pole. On the inside of the cover there is even
an image of a lunar mission, highlighting how western frontier lives on in twentieth
and twenty-first century’s space exploration.
Part of the reason for the United States’ strong adherence to its myths in place
of history has to do with its colonial past. Simply put, American independence from a
British Empire forged utopic ideas which diverted Americans’ focus from the
empirical agenda of their newly formed republic. The colonists freed from an empire
did not wish to view the new republic as an aspiring empire itself. Consequently, the
complexities of U.S. imperialism—beginning with nineteenth century western
expansion, the cultural and material extirpation of Native Americans, sovereign
conquest and land grabbing—are reduced to very two dimensional, mythical narratives
such as Manifest Destiny, Promised Land, and the lone hero (narratives which go
largely unnoticed as mythical by the American public since they are generally
perceived as historical). As summarized best by Roland Barthes, “[Myth] abolishes the
complexity of human acts . . . it does away with dialectics . . . organizes a world which
is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and
wallowing in the evident” (143).
According to Owens, it took the Vietnam War to produce the unraveling of
American mythology back to the original complexities of nation-building and
imperialism:
41
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
In popular wars, American defeats have been quickly reformulated into
national sacrifices, part of the framework of mythic progress, and are
usually followed by a popular call to arms: “remember the Alamo,”
Buffalo Bill's “First Scalp for Custer,” and Pearl Harbor's aftermath.
But no such calls rang forth for Vietnam. Instead, antiwar forces at
home organized protests […] In the revised frontier myth, the Indians
became good and the cowboys bad, while progress and its
accompanying technology were evil, full of military, chemical, and
nuclear hazards. (25)
Published in the wake of Vietnam, Blood Meridian flows from the severed
vein of frontier myth exposed during the backlash of the war. The novel shatters and
subverts the myths of the American west by divulging to the reader that the United
States was founded on violent slaughter and domination. McCarthy is aware that
“nations themselves are narrations” (Said xiii). He knows, as Homi Bhabha states,
that “[n]ations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully
realize their horizons in the mind's eye . . . but it is from those traditions of political
thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in
the west” (1). When we consider the frontier myth of the Virgin Land in light of
Bhabha’s words, for example, we find revealed a narrative which depopulates the
frontier, enabling “the American people to replace the fact that the land was already
settled by a vast native population with the belief that it was unoccupied. And the
substitution of the national fantasy for the historical reality Americans to disavow the
42
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
resettlement and in some instances the extermination of entire populations” (Pease
63). Such mythical rationalizations serve to “soften the blow” of the reality of the
events they replace. It is this human tendency that leads Slotkin to claim that “man is
essentially a myth-making animal” (7). Yet national myths are highly political. They
rationalize nation-building and sovereign expansion; ultimately, myths create a
pleasing story of the nation’s history to justify its political and sovereign actions. I
argue that inasmuch as he is a “myth-making animal,” man is also, as stated by
Aristotle, “by nature a political animal” (4). It is the point where the myth-making
man and the political animal converge that interest me. Blood Meridian peels myth
away from the man layer by layer with violence, and in the process, reveals the
underlying biopolitical empirical strategies beneath the myth, unveiling the political
animal in all its appalling savagery. In the Episode of Captain White, his expedition is
fueled by frontier myths such as the Virgin Land and the Adversarial Other. Yet when
his expedition is met with violent disaster, such myths are radically deconstructed. It is
precisely the contact between frontier myth and violence that the biopolitical method
for extermination, known as State racism, becomes evident.
1.3 Captain White and State Racism
Whereas sovereignty once preoccupied itself with the control of borders and
territories throughout the Middle Ages, for Foucault there is a shift at the cusp of
modernity, during the decades of the Enlightenment. This shift no longer focuses on
territorial control, but on the regulation of the political body. Foucault identifies
governments’ emerging fixation with birthrate, death-rate, the control of epidemics,
43
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
public health programs, the illegalization of drugs, and even the control of sexuality in
the seventeenth and eighteenth century as evidence of this deviation.40 Political
power’s newfound concern for biological life is dubbed by Foucault as “biopower.” In
effect, such power is one that blurs the very lines of the public and private realm,
where power’s main concern consists of prolonging and enhancing the biological
existence of its subjects. This may very well lead one to question how a paradigm of
government founded on prolonging life may also destroy life. Foucault makes it very
clear that whereas the term biopower constitutes a concern with enriching the
biological lives of its citizens, it also implies a dark side. In keeping with the king’s
(sovereignty) longstanding power to take life, biopower also maintains the right to end
life in the emergence of the modern nation-state. It does not give up the king’s sword.
According to Foucault, in his Society Must be Defended, the right to end life becomes
embedded in a State racism:
At this point [in the early nineteenth century], the discourse whose
history I would like to trace abandons the initial basic formulation,
which was “We have to defend ourselves against our enemies because
the state apparatuses, the law, and the power structures not only do not
defend us against our enemies; they are the instruments our enemies are
using to pursue and subjugate us.” That discourse now disappears. It is
no longer: “We have to defend ourselves against society, but “We have
to defend society against all the biological threats posed by the other
44
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
race, the subrace, the counterrace that we are, despite ourselves,
bringing into existence. (61-2)
Foucault goes on to explain that “we see the appearance of a State racism: a racism
that society will direct against itself, against its own elements and its own products.
This is the internal racism of permanent purification” (62). Therefore, the biological
concern poised in politics to take life is one based on race, on man as a species.41
There is little coincidence between the common usages of “body” in political
terms as well as in biological ones: thus the “body” of the person, of the people, or the
body of a nation. Within the political body of a populace, we may imagine that once
the State’s function becomes concerned with the biology of that body, a need to
eradicate all biological irregularities is created so that the body can reach optimal
health. This eradication, or purification as Foucault puts it, is based on race. The State
thus maintains a “healthy” political body of subjects by eliminating those whose race
is deemed inferior and does not comply with predetermined nationalist ideas of how
that body should appear and act.
In chapter three of the novel, after the kid has left Tennessee and made his way
into Texas, he joins a group of filibusters under the command of Captain White. Here
White, as a captain, can clearly be understood as an embodiment of the endeavors of
the U.S. nation-state. His voice is one that echoes the call for sovereign expansion on
the frontier through the political scapegoat of race. During the process of his
recruitment into the Captain’s army, we find men acting as both a political and mythmaking (or myth-sustaining) animals.
45
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
The episode begins with the kid, in rags and poorly equipped, having left
Nacogdoches on a mule. He later attacks and robs a Mexican barman in Bexar,
smashing two bottles over his head and gouging an eye with one of the broken bottles.
Afterwards, he lies naked under a tree when a man awakes him. He first assures the
kid that he’s white and Christian, aligning himself with cultural signifiers that
exponentially signify goodness, honesty, civilization, democracy.
The man then asks the kid if he was “the feller knocked in that Mexer’s head
yesterday evenin?” (29). When the kid asks, “Who wants to know?” the man replies,
“Captain White. He wants to sign that feller up to join the army” (29). The immediate
irony of the man identifying himself as “white and christian” now comes into play.
The kid’s violent acts against a Mexican interest Captain White (whose name alone
alludes to “white and Christian”). His violent actions are absolved and in fact desired
since they were enacted against the adversarial “Other,” a Mexican, against whom the
United States has been at war. The white Christians’ civilized goodness apparently
reaches its limit at the juncture where people are racially different. Here, the myth of
the adversarial Other, initiated with Native Americans and now passed to Mexicans,
intersects the discourse of State racism, the biopolitical method which harbors the
State’s right to take life.
The man then inquires if the kid wants to join the army and “whip up on the
Mexicans” (29). When the kid asks what the wages will be, the man replies, “Hell fire
son, you wont need wages. You get to keep everthing you can raise . . . Aint a man in
the company wont come out a big landowner” (30). He then takes the kid to see
46
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Captain White, explaining, “If I’d not run up on Captain White I dont know where I’d
be this day. I was a sorrier sight even than what you are and he come along and raised
me up like Lazarus. Set my feet in the path of righteousness” (30). At this point, this
man’s “path of righteousness” appears analogous to the reader with contradictory
mission to “whip up on the Mexicans.” Yet both the man and the kid are blinded by
such contradictions due to the discourse of myth employed by the man, both that of
the Promised Land, which will make them all rich landowners, as well as that the
adversarial “Other.” The complexities of empirical expansion and the historical
implications of a republic waging a bloody war over territory on the basis of race are
whittled down to culturally powerful metaphors of Promised Land and the racial
Other, which justify the war and eliminate all contradictions of these white Christians’
actions.
When the kid interviews with Captain White, these cultural metaphors become
even stronger, wrapped not only in myth, but also in law. The kid enters the captain’s
quarters in the hotel, where he sits in his makeshift office, at a “wickerwork desk
writing letters” (33). After a period of silence, he begins to interrogate the kid, asking
him from where he came, his age, and then how he came to be in such conditions. The
kid responds that he was robbed, to which Captain White queries, “Were they
Mexicans?” The captain is prodding, trying to poke out the adversarial Other in
attempt to give justifying context, provide evidence before the kid of the need to
invade and subject the Mexicans. He is searching for proof of their barbarism, in effort
to juxtapose it with the white Christians’ civilization. The kid’s answer, or lie, is in
47
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
part satisfying when he says “Mexicans and niggers. They was a white or two with
em” (33). If he is referring to the cattle drovers composed of “crossbreeds,” free
slaves, and Indians who shared a meal with him, his lie is twice as offensive; yet the
offense, the true contradiction, is that in all his travels, the only thief has been the kid
when he attacked the Mexican barman and stole a bottle of alcohol. The captain’s
immediate act of throwing the adversarial Other into the middle clouds the true
happenings of the events lived by the kid, maintaining an image of the good and
civilized white Christian as well as that of the adversarial Other, instead of the actual
and truthful inverse.
The captain continues. Speaking of the battle of Monterrey, where U.S. army,
along with volunteer fighters, took the city, only to later hand it back to Mexico upon
the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. The captain explains:
We fought for it. Lost friends and brothers down there. And then by
God if we didnt give it back. Back to a bunch of barbarians that even
the most biased in their favor will admit have no least notion in God’s
earth of honor or justice or the meaning of republican government. (33)
The captain first categorizes the Mexicans as barbarians. This is significant because
barbarians, according to Foucault, are different from savages. A savage, “once he
enters a relation of a social kind, he ceases to be a savage” (Society 195). However, a
barbarian is and always will be an enemy to civilization. He can only exist in relation
to civilization:
48
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
There can be no barbarian unless an island of civilization exists
somewhere, unless he lives outside it, and unless he fights it. And the
barbarian's relationship with the speck of civilization—which the
barbarian despises, and which he wants—is one of hostility and
permanent warfare. The barbarian cannot exist without the civilization
he is trying to destroy and appropriate. (Foucault, Society 195)
The reason the Mexicans haven’t an inkling as to the meaning of a republican
government, according to White’s argument, is precisely because of their barbarian
status; they are the natural enemy of civilization.
Yet his argument which identifies Mexicans as the adversarial Other does not
stop at barbarism. He continues, now speaking in terms of race, which in turn, in his
words, delegates certain rights of dominion to the Americans:
What we are dealing with, he said, is a race of degenerates. A mongrel
race, little better than niggers. And maybe no better. There is no
government in Mexico. Hell, there’s no God in Mexico. Never will be.
We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing
themselves. And do you know what happens with people who cannot
govern themselves? That’s right. Others come in to govern for them.
(34)
What captain White is doing is declaring his “rights” and those rights of every white
Christian capable of governing comprehending a republican government. He is
expressing the discourse of rights, identified by Foucault and Stathis Gourgouris,
49
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
which emerged during the Enlightenment. Whereas the subject tied to the sovereign
had traditionally been bound to the figure of the king or even God himself, the
Enlightenment argues that “society will no longer be linked by allegory to a divine
universe but will be exclusively a worldly affair, guaranteed by a series of sentences
that hand society the gift of acting as a subject” (Gourgouris 55). These sentences are,
as Foucault explains, ones where the subject “speaks the discourse of rights . . . he is
demanding and asserting “his” rights—he says: “We have a right”” (Society 52).
Hence there is a shift in the meaning of subject, from that of the medieval sense of
being subjected to a Lord or king (subjectus), to the political subject (subjectum), or
the citizen.42 The modern idea of the citizen is therefore one where the subject is a
double-subject, one who is subject to law, but who also must bear the burden of the
law. This is the “burden” of law which Captain White bears. He is a citizen and
captain of a nation, a nation he imagines in terms of a republican government, and in
effect, it is his rights, his burden, to bring government and democracy to the Mexicans
who are incapable of such imaginings. The declaration and upholding of his own
rights ultimately depletes Mexicans of their own, in a sort of check and balance of
legal rights.43
Foucault explains that in order to fulfill these rights, be them conquest,
invasion, the maintaining or acquisition of property, the position of the subject leads
him to establish a truth that is not the truth of the philosopher or the jurist, it is a truth
which generates a constant war, even in times of peace. This truth cannot not place
itself between two adversaries or above them, but must always chose a side with the
50
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
subject who is speaking of rights and assume a “combat position.”44 This truth of
dissymmetry is irrational and brutal and ultimately, becomes the discourse of the
dominion of a “superior” race over an “inferior” one. Thus Captain White’s
declaration of his right to invade and conquer Mexico is inevitable coupled with the
argument of race. The Mexicans are, according to the truth fomented by his rights, an
inferior “mongrel race,” and thus he rationalizes the Americans’ rights of invasion and
acquisition of property from the inferior race, claiming that “we will be the ones who
will divide the spoils. There will be a section of land for every man in my company”
(34). Captain White exemplifies Foucault’s formulation of biopower, which, in the
words of Achille Mbembe, “appears to function through dividing people into those
who must live and those who must die.” Biopower operates “on the basis of a split
between the living and the dead” and “presupposes the distribution of human species
into groups, the subdivision of the population into subgroups, and the establishment of
a biological caesura between the ones and the others” (166). Captain White’s
discourse ultimately demonstrates that “race has been the ever present shadow in
Western political thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the
inhumanity of, or rule over, foreign peoples” (Mbembe 166).
At this point in the novel, even though the Mexican American War is over, the
treaty signed, White is still waging war based on the question of race. Foucault
identifies “a race war” to be the “war that is going on beneath order and peace, the war
that undermines our society and divides it in a binary mode” (Society 60). In the
nineteenth century Americas, and most specifically on frontiers and in Latin America
51
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
as well, this binary mode is commonly known as “civilization and barbarism,” which
states that “our civilization has a right over their barbarism.” In a biopolitical context,
we may also see this binary opposition in terms of State racism: our “civilized race”
has a right over the “inferior” racial Other, the savage.
Ultimately, I propose that the frontier myth of the adversarial Other is born out
of biopolitics’ State racism. As is customary of national myth, that of the adversarial
Other simplifies the biopolitical techniques for violence employed by the State. Here
myth attempts to hide State racism, cover-up the very biopolitical workings of
conquest and empire. With Captain White, however, McCarthy is prodding out and
exposing State racism. Indeed, as highlighted in White’s words, a large part of his
filibuster campaign is based on race. This campaign even receives political support, as
White explains, “We have the tacit support of Governor Burnett of California” (34).
More than any other rationalization, White recurs to State racism as a tactical resource
to siege the Mexicans’ land and eliminate them if necessary. Within the political body
of the republic that White so envisions, there is no place for the Mexican race. They
present a threat to the health of the body of the U.S. nation for two reasons: first, they
are “mongrels,” racially impure, “little better than niggers,” and like a disease or any
other biological irregularity of the body, said corpus must be “purified” (using
Foucault’s term) from such “abnormalities.” Second, their supposed racial inferiority
makes them incapable of democracy, according to White. Such an incapacity to
govern means they are all the more a threat to U.S. democracy and its political body.
52
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
As such, measures are taken by White to violently exclude or extract the Mexican race
from integrating into the political body of the U.S.
If my argument for State racism does not prove convincing up to this point, let
us consider for a moment the resurgence of frontier myth concerning the adversarial
Other. As already stated, the Indian as the adversarial Other in frontier literature has
been transplanted in each subsequent U.S. generation and conflict: Mexicans,
Philippines, Cubans, Japanese, Vietnamese, Russians, Iraqis, etc. The continuation of
the adversarial Other is highly dependent on race, and only resurfaces in U.S. culture
and politics when the enemy can be identified as racially different from what the
national body of citizens is idealized to be. McGilchrist observes:
It is notable that during the Second World War, Germans, though they
were military enemies, were not regarded with such fear and loathing
as the more alien-seeming Japanese. Japanese Americans were interned
in the United States. German Americans were not. Apparently the true
“other” had to be, like the Indians, a different racial type. (12-3)
McGilchrist’s gives a prime example here of what is undoubtedly State racism in
terms of frontier myth. The fact that Germans were not interned like Japanese is
ultimately a question of race, just as White’s argument for his military expedition is,
more than anything, founded on race. State racism thus justifies actions of political
extremes such as displacement, war, and even genocide within the thanatopolitical
extreme of Foucault’s biopower.
53
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Foucault’s prime example of State racism is the Nazi Holocaust, and one
cannot help but consider the notions of genocide and concentration camps in terms of
nineteenth century Indian removal and placement on reservations. Such extremes of
U.S. State racism have undoubtedly resurged in American history, as exemplified by
McGilchrist’s quote of Japanese prison camps. More contemporarily, we may also
consider the “War on Terror” and current U.S. toleration of Guantanamo in light of
State racism. Those interned, simple put, are racially different, and given the strong
tow of frontier myth’s adversarial Other still found in U.S. culture and politics, the
reenactment and permissibility of similar discourses and situations will continue.
However, the role state racism plays in Blood Meridian lasts about as long as
Captain White does as a character. Leading up to their slaughter, the filibusters’
traversal of the American desert presents a world anything but a pristine Virgin Land,
much less one we could call promised. The further into Mexico they travel, the less
likely it seems that each filibuster will receive his partial of lush grassland. The harsh
environment which leaves animals in the expedition dying by the wayside and men
praying to God for rain can be best described as a “terra damnata” and a “purgatory
waste.” In such a way, McCarthy contradicts and subverts preconceived notions and
myths about the American West. Indeed, when Captain White and his crew of
filibusters are routed by Indians in the next chapter and slaughtered by “death
hilarious,” he is drawing in the reader to consider frontier myth as a sinister and
almost laughable matter. The adversarial Other, White’s usage of State racism, he
himself the “lone hero” on democracy’s errand, are in every literal sense violently
54
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
subverted and deconstructed when he and his band of filibusters are slaughtered in the
most heinous fashion possible by the barbarian—by the enemy civilization is destined
to overcome. They are conquered by the racial Other who they, the white Christians,
were to rightfully subdue.
1.4 Secularized Theology
Just as I have highlighted the biopolitical underpinnings of violence through
State racism found in McCarthy’s subversion of frontier myth in Blood Meridian, I
will now turn to violence as the atavistic and amoral expression of natural law. Here I
will interpret the relationship between violence and nature in biopolitical terms, this
time in light of sovereignty’s state of exception. I argue that what many have
interpreted as a state of nature setting, should in fact be viewed as evidence for
violence sanctioned by the sovereign’s exception.
After the early episode with Captain White, race plays little part in sovereign
violence. Indeed, White’s rhetoric of State racism is an isolated example. Characters in
the novel from all races are ultimately all killers who likewise murder any person with
impunity regardless of his or her race. The Glanton gang itself is comprised of men
who are white, Indian, Mexican, and Black. As a whole, as Owens notes, in Blood
Meridian “[t]he references to “all races, all breeds” and the child's innocence and the
ape motif reveal McCarthy's thesis: mindless, atavistic violence is the true nature of
mankind, a genetic heritage in common with apes and wolves” (4). Thus, for Owens,
“Primal violence is the novel's common denominator, the leitmotif, the horrible
adumbration” (6). I feel that here there is something missing when we view violence
55
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
simply as a natural, primal part of nature. After all, what violence is not primal? And
does not denoting violence as such at the same time give privilege to a less primal
violence, perhaps suggesting that there exists a more civilized violence? Within
McCarthian scholarship, and most certainly with respect to how we approach violence
in Blood Meridian, there is a missing link. The provenance of violence in the novel
cannot simply be explained through natural law but requires that we look at another
element in the book that has, until now, been largely ignored: violence as the product
of positive law as well—a violence which is no less primal than that of natural law.
The novel’s concern with empirical expansion, nation-building, and national
myth, suggests in itself a political and sovereign world. Undoubtedly present in Blood
Meridian are government and law, details which are easy to overlook given the
lawless stage where the action takes place. As I will argue, lawlessness in Blood
Meridian is not due to a sovereignty in absentia, but is a space of exception opened up
by the sovereign itself, which serves as the paradigm for the extirpation of frontier
people the sovereign is unable to internalize.
The sovereign lurks within the pages of Blood Meridian, embodied in
governors, alcaldes, sargentos, lieutenants, soldiers, lawmen, and even their outlaw
and the bandit counterparts. The politico-juridical implication of the judge’s name
alone implies sovereignty. There is also continual reference to the “citizenry” in the
novel—talk of jurisprudence and case law; the judge cites “cases civil and martial” to
the lieutenant in the bar and quotes “Coke and Blackstone, Anaximander, Thales”
(239). Why, in all of the judges philosophical mutterings, is the only bibliography he
56
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
cites full of Enlightenment era British politician-philosophers? Why, when the world
of Blood Meridian seems so devoid of law and so entrenched in a state of nature? It is
not a cruel joke, nor a contradiction. McCarthy is highlighting something vital to our
understanding of what sovereignty means. What McCarthy understands, is that the
Enlightenment, with all its secularization and reason (from which emerged our modern
concept of sovereignty), managed to monopolize violence and chaos in the law.
McCarthy is contrasting all the reason and philosophy of law, embodied in the judge,
with law’s hidden dark side: its violence—also embodied in the judge. In essence, the
judge is living proof “that the progress of legal procedures is embarrassed by the
shadow of violence that attaches itself to the law and cannot be shrugged off”
(Haverkamp and Vismann 223). The words of jurisprudence are, in effect, empty
when placed in context with the real life practice of the law. As Robert Cover observes
in his article, “Violence and the Word,” the pain and fear suffered by those subjected
to law unveils the “unredeemed reality” with law’s inescapable shadow of violence:
“Between the idea and the reality of common meaning . . . falls the shadow of the
violence of law, itself” (1628-29). There is a philosophy of law, a jurisprudence, but
then there is the practice of law, and McCarthy shows us just how violent and alien it
is to our imaginings of what law should be.
From the very beginning of Blood Meridian, the reader is thrust into a brutal,
secularized world. Everywhere the kid (and the gang) goes, all churches are described
as abandoned and in ruins, filled with dead bodies and hermits. Owens interprets the
decay of religion as evidence for a primal setting of violence: “Throughout the novel,
57
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
violence overwhelms the tabernacles of Christianity, lending the primal theme an
iconoclastic aura” (4). However, the ruins of churches and religious temples in the
novel are evidence for a secularized world and not a primal one—a world where the
church has been replaced by the State. Such a scene alludes to Carl Schmitt’s Political
Theology and his famous quote that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of
the state are secularized theological concepts” (36). In Blood Meridian, religion has
been secularized and made sovereign, and there is no longer a place for theology in
this secularized world. Nineteenth century U.S. nationalism and the push for westward
expansion of the nation-state has replaced religious fervor, reminding us of
secularism’s triumph, of sovereignty’s place in what was once God’s.
According to Schmitt, secularized theology replaces religious doctrine with
political theory, God with the sovereign nation-state. In a sense, we have new names
for a secularized version of theology, yet the same reverent and fanatical attitude.
Therefore, Foucault’s observation that “politics is the continuation of war” (Society
15) sheds light on the judge’s infamous declaration that “war is god” (249). If
sovereignty (or the State) is the new god, then the judge is ultimately proclaiming
what has been observed: that the greatest achievement of the modern sovereign State
is that it holds a monopoly on war. Foucault highlights the verification of this
monopoly during the Enlightenment through the emergence of “the army as
institution” (Society 49), going on to explain that “[w]ar is the motor behind
institutions and order” (50). For this reason, after his declaration that war is God, the
judge then also charges the expriest Tobin as follows: “For the priest has put by the
58
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
robes of his craft and taken up the tools of that higher calling which all men honor.
The priest also would be no godserver but a god himself” (250). The expriest, in
joining the gang and waging war, has abandoned religion for secularism and, like the
judge, has become a maker of war. Consequently, Tobin has sought to become a god
in that he is enacting sovereign’s violent function.
Thus the world of Blood Meridian is one where the violence of religious fervor
experienced during the medieval crusades has been replaced with the violence of
nationalism, and in the United States, this means the cry for westward expansion of a
sovereign power guilty of slavery in the South, and which now seeks to displace and
exterminate the native population in the West.45 Violence that was once enacted in the
name of God, is now carried out in the name of the sovereign, encapsulating Benedict
Anderson’s observation: “The century of the Enlightenment, of rational secularism,
brought with it its own modern darkness” (11). The judge is the promoter of this
modern darkness. With his extremist rationalism—convinced of its omnipotence like
that of the Enlightenment—he therefore “can justify the most totalitarian and
barbarous behavior” (Pughe 379). In effect, Bell observes that “what the judge says
and he and his confederates act out eventually seems like an only slightly and
demented revival of Enlightenment philosophy” (124).
In short, the judge’s god is the sovereign and the sovereign means war. The
two are one and cannot be separated. The judge’s name is in fact no coincidence, as he
acquires more and more the semblance of his god throughout the novel. “Made in his
59
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
image,” the judge slowly reveals his own sovereign character as he himself comes to
embody sovereignty.
1.5 The Sovereign Exception
The judge makes it clear that, in all his recordings and documentation of
artifacts, plants and animals, and even humans, he is a seeker of absolute sovereignty.
As he explains: “Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each
last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly
suzerain of the earth” (198). When he then expounds to Toadvine that suzerain is a
“keeper or overlord,” Toadvine asks, “Why not say keeper then?” (198). Though the
question may seem trivial, the judge does not think so. Considering Toadvine’s
inquiry, he answers, “Because he is a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules where
there are other rulers” (198). The judge’s insistence on the usage of the words
“suzerain,” a word whose origin lies the term sovereign, confirms his desire for
absolute sovereign dominance. The judge’s drive for absolute sovereignty over man
and nature is expressed after Toadvine tells him, “No man can acquaint himself with
everthing on this earth.” Tilting his great head, the judge reasons:
The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden
lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. . . . But the
man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from
the tapestry will be the decision alone have taken charge of the world
and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate
the terms of his whole fate.” (199)
60
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Holden affirms that his very act of documenting all things in nature, asserting his
dominion over all life, animal and human, places him in charge of the world. He
wages war on nature and man, and in doing so, makes himself the ruler of rulers.
The bellicose judge seeks to accomplish this through “an only slightly and
demented revival of Enlightenment philosophy” (Vereen 124), and so, “With the
moral universe shrunk to reflect merely the will’s desire for absolute sovereignty over
the external (whether of man or nature), the judge is spokesman for an extreme
paranoid of individualism as Melville's Ahab” (Jarrett 79). The Enlightenment
rationalization that the judge utilizes to establish his sovereignty is ultimately what
engenders violence in Blood Meridian. He is a fictional character whose function in
the novel upholds Max Horkheimer and Theodor W Adorno’s thesis in their Dialectic
of Enlightenment: “In the most general sense of progressive thought, the
Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their
sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant” (3). How is it
then, that Enlightenment rational, in seeking to establish men’s sovereignty, ultimately
radiates disaster?
To answer this question, and to further understand the judge, we must first
understand what definition of the sovereign the Enlightenment gave us, and to what
form of the sovereign the judge adheres. Schmitt’s definition: “Sovereign is he who
decides on the exception” (5), has universally been the foundation for our modern
understanding of the sovereign, and though differing on many issues, the likes of
Franz Kafka, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, Gilles Deleuze, and of course Giorgio
61
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Agamben, concur with Schmitt that what is at stake in the honoring of the rule of law
is an operation which is in play both outside and inside sovereignty—in other words,
the exception. Thus sovereignty is defined by its ubiquitous nature of inside and
outside, its paradoxical function to enforce and suspend its very laws. Law depends on
lawlessness, ultimately operating though chaos. In essence, what defines sovereignty
is the paradoxical domain where the sovereign decision is based on the exception,
enacting a suspension of the law in order to validate the sovereign. This space in
juridical order is known as the state of exception—a space of suspended law or
legalized lawlessness—the threshold where law and violence meet.46 In the
secularized world, “The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in
theology” (Schmitt 36). Just as a miracle is an event in opposition with the very laws
of nature, a state of exception promotes and allows sovereign actions, especially
violent ones, which contradict the very rule of law. Ultimately, the judge’s secular
reasoning, his “intellectual imperialism” can be understood as an “instance of what
happens if Enlightenment doctrine is pressed into its logical conclusion” (Vereen 124).
This logical conclusion, in imperialist and sovereign terms, is precisely the state of
exception. It is in this sense that the judge ultimately creates disaster; he does so as the
sovereign state of exception.
The judge’s very outward appearance, which often shift from a man of civil
refinement to that of a savage, corresponds to the state of exception’s definition as the
point or threshold where the sovereign nomos and anomie meet (nomos, understood as
the Greek mythological term for the spirit or god of law, and anomie as the very
62
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
antithesis of nomos—literally meaning without nomos, or without law). The judge’s
appearance marks this point of convergence between nomos and anomie: at times he is
dressed in the fineries of civilization, in linen suits and Panama hats, signifying law
and order, whereas other times he trades in such attire for “a woven wreath of desert
scrub about his head like some egregious saltland bard” (219), alluding to anomie.
Furthermore, the judge voices the contrary ideology to Irving’s argument that “[m]ight
does not make right” (250). Sovereignty, like Judge Holden, aligns itself through the
exception with what the seventeenth-century fabulist Jean de la Fontaine knew all too
well: “The strong are always best at proving they are right” (Qtd. in State of Exception
and the Contemporary Novel 16). This statement, correlated by Boever to the
conditions of not just a state of nature but a state of exception,47 is the reason why the
judge retorts to Irvine, “Decisions of life and death, of what shall and shall not be,
beggar all question of right” (250). According to Holden, moral law only weakens the
strong and strengthens the weak. For this reason, questions of right and wrong become
irrelevant when the order of state of exception, which he so embodies and promotes,
permits all question of “right” to be simply determined by the strongest.
In his article “Demystifying the Judge: Law and Mythical Violence in Cormac
McCarthy's Blood Meridian,” James Dorson verifies, up to this point, my claim. He
too recognizes the relationship between law and violence in Blood Meridian to be that
of a state of exception, and likewise, draws a line between state of exception and the
judge:
63
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
We may further understand the fusion of law and violence in Blood
Meridian in the light of what Giorgio Agamben in State of Exception
described as the “articulation between life and law, between anomie
and nomos” in the legal limbo of the state of exception. . . . in Blood
Meridian, the unholy matrimony between law and violence is
consummated in the figure of Judge Holden. His very presence in the
novel is the “substantial articulation” between law and violence. (111)
The sovereign’s presence in the judge, articulated through the state of exception,
presents a new angle from which we may reconstruct the amoral sense of violence so
often observed in Blood Meridian. Instead of attributing the violent world of the novel
to a state of nature, “a Hobbesian war of all against all” (159) as Cant does, as well as
others, we can now consider this state of nature as in fact, a state of exception. The
Hobbesian notion of a state of nature is man’s existence prior to established
sovereignty, or positive law. It is a world where man is subjected to natural law, where
there is a continual war of all against all, when any man can intrude on another’s
territory or dwelling to pillage or kill him.48 Thus, according to Hobbes, man recurs to
an artificial barrier that protects him from the conditions of natural law: positive law.
This is what Max Horkheimer and Theodor W Adorno speak of: the Enlightenment
sought to liberate man from the fear of such a free-for-all state of nature and establish
their sovereignty. However, what Hobbes does not recognize, and what many
philosophers have pointed out since, is this only spells more disaster for the subject
because in the process of establishing sovereignty, violence itself is brought into the
64
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
sovereign and internalized there. Ultimately, the sovereign monopolizes violence. This
violence is then expressed through the exception, which in fact necessitates the
conditions of a state of nature that preceded it. Roberto Esposito explains:
The idea of the impossibility of a true overcoming of the natural state in
that of the political emerges in opposition to the modern conception
derived from Hobbes that one can preserve life only by instituting an
artificial barrier with regard to nature, which in itself incapable of
neutralizing the conflict (and indeed is bound to strengthen it).
Anything but the negation of nature, the political is nothing else but the
continuation of nature at another level and therefore destined to
incorporate and reproduce nature’s original characteristics. (Bíos 17)
The political barrier man uses to overcome the state of nature only continues the war
of all against all on another reorganized level of lawless play. In other words, as
Agamben explains, the Hobbesian state of nature and its violence, are the being-inpotentiality of the law, “the law’s self-presupposition as natural law” (HS 36).
I do not rest my thesis entirely on Judge Holden’s symbolic representation of
the sovereign state of exception. Violence’s adherence to the political and the
sovereign in Blood Meridian goes far beyond the judge. It can be said that the very
plot for the novel’s violence is fixed on the political. Indeed, the motor for violence in
the book is precisely a legal action: the Chihuahua government's legalization of scalphunting and the sanctioned payments on the bloody receipts. As Steven Frye explains,
“The gang works directly in the interest of the civil body politic, clearing away the
65
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
violent and uncivilized natives that stand in the way of progress and civilization” (7475). It is thus not injudicious to state that sovereignty engenders violence in the novel.
Would the Glanton gang have formed were it not for the government-sanctioned
campaign of scalp-hunting? Would we have scene after scene of bloody scalping were
it not for governor Trias’ lucrative incentive of payment on scalps? The gang’s bloody
crimes, in large part, are due to the contract they have with the Chihuahua
government, a contract which makes their actions, which would normally be
considered illegal and criminal, permissible and licit.
The exchange of this sovereign contract is represented early in the novel. The
kid, after surviving the slaughter of Captain White’s crew of filibusters, lands himself
in a Mexican prison where he finds Toadvine. From the prison in Ciudad Chihuahua,
both the kid and Toadvine see the elegant governor, the representative of the
sovereign, in all his grandeur and civility, counterposed with all the savagery and
primitiveness of the Glanton gang. It is interesting to note that the first time the kid
witnesses the gang, they are viewed in relation to the governor, suggesting the tie that
binds the two together:
They saw the governor himself erect and formal within his
silkmullioned sulky clatter forth from the double doors of the palace
courtyard and they saw one day a pack of viciouslooking humans
mounted on unshod indian ponies riding half drunk through the streets,
bearded, barbarous, clad in the skins of animals stitched up with thews
and armed with weapons of every description, revolvers of enormous
66
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
weight and bowieknives the size of clay-mores and short twobarreled
rifles with bores you could stick your thumbs in and the trappings of
their horses fashioned out of human skin and their bridles woven up
from human hair and decorated with human teeth and the riders
wearing scapulars or necklaces of dried and blackened human ears and
the horses rawlooking and wild in the eye and their teeth bared like
feral dogs and riding also in the company a number of halfnaked
savages reeling in the saddle, dangerous, filthy, brutal, the whole like a
visitation from some heathen land where they and other like them fed
on human flesh. (78)
The kids then spots the Judge, “the foremost among them” (79), and then this
barbarous and motley crew of scalp hunters pass through the open doors of the
governor’s palace.49
When they enter and the doors close behind them, Toadvine says to those
watching from the prison, “Gentlemens . . . I’ll guarangoddamntee ye I know what
that there is about” (79). What is Toadvine referring to other than the confirmation that
the governor of Chihuahua is in league with these savage men? Toadvine is clearly
aware of their murderous business which has become common practice in the
borderlands. From the very beginning of the novel, McCarthy is highlighting the very
words of Walter Benjamin: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the
same time a document of barbarism” (256). Hence, the contract (or document)
concerted between the barbarous gang and the governor embodies Benjamin’s words.
67
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
The contract binds civilization to barbarism, illustrating that no violence can ever be
purely civilized. No matter how much violence is bound up in laws or contracts,
barbarism is always skulking somewhere in the fine print, reminding us that whether
of natural law or positive law, violence in and of itself is primal by definition.
McCarthy makes clear the fact that law and government do exist in the world of Blood
Meridian by portraying the Glanton gang’s partnership with sovereignty through a
bloody contract sanctioned by the governor. This situation in effect nullifies a state of
nature, which can only exist prior to the establishment of positive law. Governor’s
Trias’ contract can therefore only be understood in terms of a sovereign declaration of
state of exception.
When we call a space “lawless,” we can refer to two things: that the lawless
region is so because no sovereign power has ever set foot on said terrain, and is
thereby in a state of nature where, according to Hobbes, every man is against every
man in a free-for-all, or, that a place is lawless because the existing sovereign has
declared it so and instituted a state of exception, where law is dissolved and all crimes
go unpunished. Many preconceptions about the nineteenth century American frontier
adhere to the former definition of lawlessness to define the “Wild West.” Yet such
adherence merely conforms to frontier myth, to that of the pristine and untouched
Virgin Land. Part of this myth defines the West as uninhabited, preexisting in a state
of nature, waiting to be civilized by white man’s sovereign law. The myth of
lawlessness in relation to state of nature is what is taken for granted in Blood
Meridian, a book which in fact debunks such myth. The West conceived as lawless, in
68
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
a wild state of nature, is a strong cultural metaphor that is instinctively yet erroneously
presumed when we read a book that takes place in the West. By considering Governor
Trias’ contract in Blood Meridian, we can invert such perceptions by identifying the
sovereign as the architect of lawlessness and violence.
The closest Owens comes to identifying sovereign law in Blood Meridian is
when he states, “McCarthy's amoral vision of frontier violence is one of mankind
running amok, subverting law at every bend in the trail and rendering all moral
questions “void and without warrant”” (7). The subversion of law Owens observes in
Blood Meridian is precisely, as we have discussed, the definition of sovereignty. The
honoring of the rule of law is an operation which is in play both outside and inside
sovereignty—in other words, the exception. Law depends on lawlessness, operates
through both order and chaos; it necessitates the conditions of a state of nature that
preceded it, and thus sovereignty is defined by its ubiquitous nature of inside and
outside, its paradoxical function to enforce and suspend its very laws. Consequently,
the suspension of law does not revert back to a state of nature, but creates a state of
exception.
State of exception’s close proximity to state of nature is what makes the two
concept so easy to confuse, and is part of the reason sovereignty is so overlooked in
Blood Meridian. State of nature and state of exception are both, according to
Agamben, zones where “everything is possible” (HS 36). What distinguishes state of
exception from Hobbes’ pre-sovereign state of nature is precisely the existence of
sovereign law prior to the anomic state. Arne de Boever states, “Unlike a state of
69
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
nature, a state of exception is a situation or state in which the legal and political order
has disintegrated and become dissolved” (State of Exception in the Contemporary
Novel 16). Such a disintegration of law, represented in the scalp-hunting contract
between Trias and the gang, best defines the realm of Blood Meridian, a book which
takes place within the sovereign realm of established nation-states such as Mexico and
Texas (U.S.), nation-states upheld by constitutions and sovereign law.
The novel’s setting is one of chaotic space of suspended law, law disposed of
by governor Trias’ gruesome contract with the Glanton gang. Unlike many American
constitutions, the Mexican constitution of 1824 maintained the liberal racial
philosophy of the 1812 Law of Cádiz, which meant “race could no longer be legally
used to prevent Indians, mestizos, and free afromestizos from exercising the
citizenship rights enjoyed by Whites” (Menchaca 161). The constitution names all
indigenous ethnic groups as citizens who enjoy all the rights of sovereign protection
that such a title entails. In effect, Trias’ contract employs what Agamben calls a “force
of law”—a force acting without law since it contradicts the law—given that it negates
the very rights of the Apache as declared by the Mexican constitution.50 The act of
sanctioning the extermination of Apache follows suit with sovereignty’s paradigm of
eliminating perceived threats within its own citizenry (in this case the Apache)
through a declared state of exception. Indeed, when McCarthy utilizes the term
“citizenry” in Blood Meridian (both citizen and citizenry appear regularly throughout
the novel), he does so with inevitable irony. There is a lack of sovereign care of
citizenry in the novel; few rights seem to be possessed by the so called “citizens,”
70
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Apache or otherwise. The root of such irony is located in the Glanton gang’s sovereign
contract with the governor. This accord is not one of territorial “land-grabbing”—as is
commonly associated with frontier expansion—but of sovereign power over the living
bodies of a population: the extirpation of Apache whom the sovereign has deemed a
“threat,” and therefore excluded from citizenry. This contract, however, does not
simply exempt Apache from their rights of citizenry, but consequently anyone who
crosses paths with the Glanton gang. Thus, what so many have interpreted to be a
Hobbesian state of nature, is in reality a state of exception which engenders a similarly
anomic space.
Interestingly, state of exception gives new meaning to the common assumption
that the “West was where anything could happen” (Murdoch 24). It furthermore opens
new avenues for the way we approach the Judge’s same words:
The truth about the world . . . is that anything is possible. Had you not
seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would
appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered
dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor
precedence, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate
destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable
and calamitous beyond reckoning. (245)
All the reasoning of the Enlightenment and its ordering of the world, its organizing of
society with sovereign law, has yet to eradicate the chaos in the world—that which is
“strange,” like “a fevered dream,” or an “itinerant carnival” still persists and in fact
71
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
forms part of man’s sovereignty inasmuch as the sovereign is simply man’s reworking
of that anomic world.
1.6 Creaturely Life
Perhaps no other philosopher has done more to advance Foucault’s work on
biopolitics than Giorgio Agamben. Whereas Foucault identifies the emergence of
biopolitics during the Enlightenment, for Agamben, biopolitics has always formed part
of Western politics.51 Yet for Agamben, the point where biopolitics no longer
enhances life but reverts to a thanatopolitical mode to destroy life is not State racism,
but is in fact founded upon the state of exception. In his interpretation of Schmitt,
Agamben defines the sovereign exception as a borderline concept or a threshold.
For Agamben, it is modern sovereignty’s paradoxical nature of inclusion and
exclusion, inside and outside, which has become so entrenched in the biological lives
of its citizens. State of exception’s topography is the paradoxical zone of inside and
outside, where the sovereign “is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical
order” (HS 15). This is because in suspending law and juridical order to protect the
state, the sovereign exception places itself outside of law. However, since according to
the law there can be nothing outside the law, the exception is an exclusion which
includes, or an inclusive exclusion, whereby that which is outside law is brought
inside the rule of law while remaining outside: “[T]he sovereign, having the legal
power to suspend the validity of the law, legally places himself outside the law. This
means that the paradox can also be formulated this way: “the law is outside itself,” or:
“I, the sovereign, who am outside the law, declare that there is nothing outside the law
72
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
[che non c' è un fuori legge].” (HS 15). Therefore, “what is excluded in the exception
maintains itself in relation to the rule in the form of the rule's suspension. The rule
applies to the exception in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it. The state of
exception is thus not the chaos that precedes order but rather the situation that results
from its suspension” (HS 17-18).
From the sovereign topography of state of exception emerges Agamben’s
biopolitical notion of life. The form of political life produced in a state of exception,
and that resides therein, is the inhuman kind of life in between human and animal that
Agamben calls “vita nuda”—bare life, or at times called naked life. This life is what is
formed between the split of the two Greeks concepts of life: zoē and bios. Zoē is
existence, the simple fact of living found in animals, mankind, and gods. Bios is life
that attempts to go beyond zoē; it is a collective or qualified life, the political body or
life of a people.52 Yet when the rule of the exception can no longer be distinguished
from the rule of law, upon the threshold of state of exception, neither zoē nor bios can
exist. As the sovereign excludes life of rights, it is attempting to politicize zoē,
conceptualize the political subject as life in mere existence. Yet zoē by definition is
life in the absence of political qualification, and on the other hand, life stripped bare of
rights cannot be bios, because bios is life qualified politically and upheld by law and
rights. Therefore, what we are left with is bare life, neither one nor the other, a life of
depleted rights that is not fully animal but not entirely human either.
In his genealogy of bare life, Agamben traces this biopolitical figure back to
homo sacer (sacred man). Based on an obscure Roman political text, homo sacer is he
73
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
“who may be killed and yet not sacrificed” (HS 8). Thus homo sacer corresponds to
the sovereign exception given that the “sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is
permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice”
(HS 81). This double exclusion of homo sacer from the religious and political realm is
congruent to the outside and inside topography of state of exception, an appropriate
position for Blood Meridian, a novel whose author “lovingly writes the voices of the
excluded into his discourse of America” (Cant 6).
Homo sacer’s exclusion to a domain outside of law, like the sovereign
exception, is what paradoxically includes him in the political realm, where the
capacity of law applies in no longer applying. To illustrate this, Agamben recurs to
Jean-Luc Nancy’s conceptualization of abandonment, or the ban:
The relation of exception is a relation of ban. He who has been banned
is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but
rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold
in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. It
is literally not possible to say whether the one who has been banned is
outside or inside the juridical order . . . It is in this sense that the
paradox of sovereignty can take the form “There is nothing outside the
law.” (HS 28-29)
Homo sacer’s relationship to law is therefore one of abandonment where, like the
blurred inside and outside fringe zone of the state of exception, it is impossible to
74
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
distinguish whether the subject is outside or inside the law. Bare life is in essence
abandoned by the law to the state of exception.
In literature, Eric L. Santner observes that literary characters’ experience with
the law often places them in a creaturely existence; they take on a creaturely form of
life. This creaturely life, as he explains, is none other than bare life: “creaturely life is
life abandoned to the state of exception/emergency, that paradoxical domain in which
law has been suspended in the name of preserving law” (22). To give an example,
Santner refers to Kafka: “When, at his execution at the end of The Trial, Josef K.
exclaims “like a dog,” Kafka is thus referring not only to the pathetic scene of K.’s
execution but also to the larger structure of K.’s experience with the law, one that
renders him, precisely, “creaturely”” (22). In the same way I have identified both
Judge Holden as the embodiment of the sovereign exception and Governor Trias’
scalp-hunting contract as the sovereign declaration of state of exception in Blood
Meridian, we can also expect that life in the novel related to the Holden and this
contract to likewise be the creaturely life of homo sacer. We may consider, for
example, the slaughter of the Gileño Apache after the gang forges the bloody contract
with Trias as that which allows their killing without being considered a homicide.
When Glanton and his gang reach the Apache’s camp, he orders his men, “Dont leave
a dog alive if you can help it” (155). The statement here is ambiguous. Is Glanton
commanding his gang to kill all life, including the literal dogs in the camp, or is he
literally calling the Apache dogs? Is this dog animal or dog man? Either way, the
ambiguous proximity of human life to that of the animal life of a dog places the
75
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Gileños in the category of creaturely life. Under Trias’ contract, the Gileños have been
abandoned to the state of exception and their life occupies the threshold between
human and animal, a point where Glanton makes no distinction between the two.
Yet it is not just the Apache who are homo sacer. As Agamben explains, under
the regime of biopolitics all life is potentially homo sacer.53 For this reason,
throughout the entire novel, humans are continually associated with and given animal
qualities. There are constant references to wolves in the novel; they continually haunt
the passage of the kid and the gang throughout their bloody exploits with their shapes,
shadows, footprints, and howls. Indian and white alike are often described as caninelike: Yumas “squatted on their haunches like wolves” (280), and the kid and Sproule
“slept like dogs” in the cave (65). Creaturely life seems to be expressed most sharply
when violence is involved. For example, when the alcalde and his wife are tied up and
left with a pan of water “they drank like dogs and they had howled at the booming
surf” (71). When Glanton is killed by the Yuma, they toss him into a bonfire having
“tied his dog to his corpse and it was snatched after in howling suttee” (274). Here, in
Glanton’s death, the union of his body with that of his dog undoubted mark him as
creaturely. More specifically, Agamben even relates the cultural relevance of wolves
and the wolf-man to be a brother to homo sacer.54 Glanton being tied to his dog
expresses his wolf-man status: evidence that his life is creaturely and defined only by
its capacity to be freely killed.
Creaturely life also haunts the characters in the novel through an association
with apes. The noises men emit in the novel are described as the “grunting of apes”
76
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
(4), the Mexican bandits “pummel one another like apes” (65), the prisoners “picked at
themselves like apes” (74), dead men “gazing up with ape’s eyes at brother sun”
(153). Once again their creaturely status is often expressed through moments of
violence or death, reminding us of bare life’s exposure to all sorts of licit violence in
the state of exception generate by Trias’ contract.
Here, on a speculative note, I ask, might we consider the “optical democracy”
in the novel to be attributed bare life in a state of exception? In Phillips thesis already
mentioned, the following passage from Blood Meridian exemplifies how extremely
unanthropocentric the novel’s world is:
In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a
strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of
grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these
articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on
some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another
and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such
landscape all preferences is made whimsical and a man and a rock
become endowed with unguessed kinships. (247)
Aside from attributing the novel’s unanthropocetric view to simply a fact of nature, I
would suggest that this “optical democracy” (democracy itself a political creation) is
the biopolitical process of exception that produces bare life. What makes humans so
equal to animals and the things of nature, what makes them creaturely, is the process
of state of exception that maintains the characteristics of a state of nature when it
77
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
suspends law in order to protect sovereignty. Santner explains that “human beings are
not just creatures among other creatures but are in some sense more creaturely than
other creatures by virtue of an excess that is produced in the space of the political and
that, paradoxically, accounts for their “humanity” (26). Part of our humanity is that we
are political beings, and as such, we are in fact more creaturely that creatures
themselves. Mankind’s political paradigm of the sovereign produces what is creaturely
within us, and in Blood Meridian, accounts for the novel’s unanthropocentrism, one
that is so extreme that humans are in fact more creaturely than creatures. As the judge
argues, “Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of
man not more predacious yet?” (146). Humans are precisely creaturely in that, more so
than wolves, we cull ourselves. We do this par excellence on a political level, where
the sovereign exception culls out unwanted or threatening political subjects from the
sovereign through abandonment of bare life, stripping subjects of their rights, placing
them outside of law, and in effect, including them in the sphere of the sovereign. We
see this with governor Trias, who sees the Apache as a threat. Though constitutional
citizens of Mexico, he lays the Apache bare before the law, depleted of rights, and
exposed to be killed without legal repercussions. There can be no clearer example of
the sovereign exception and its relation to bare life, no clearer instance where the
unanthropocentric mood in the novel opens up to biopolitics, to an optical democracy
that places all life on the same playing field as bare life.
Creaturely life’s relation to the sovereign is especially evident when we
consider the Glanton gang itself. Interestingly, the gang is described as “without . . .
78
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
camaraderie any more than banded apes” (148). This is particularly important because
the text suggest that the gang acts in relation to one another like bare life, whose
relationship is, as I have already highlighted, one of abandonment, where creaturely
life is abandoned by law to the state of exception. The members of the gang are quite
literally the bandit figure of homo sacer, the outlaw whose exclusion from the law
paradoxically includes him.55 The way bare life is included in its exclusion through the
ban, or abandonment. The judge is the ultimate keeper of this code. As the living
exception he is the enforcer of the ban.
Just as the sovereign captures bare life through the ban, this gang of bandits
capsulates its members through abandonment, imitating the relationship of bare life to
sovereignty. Indeed, throughout the novel, members of the gang who cannot continue
due to injury or circumstance are simply abandoned, left to their own fate or killed in
the moment. In effect, McGill, “skewered through with a lance” during the battle with
the Gileños (157), is shot in the head by Glanton. Though this could be interpreted as
an act of mercy towards a man who would suffer and die anyway, the subsequent case
involving David Brown suggests otherwise. Brown’s injury is not necessarily lifethreatening; an arrow has pierced his thigh during the slaughter. He is unable to
remove it and consequently asks the judge for help first. The judge replies that he will
not, and jokes that he will write a policy for Davy’s life “against every mishap save
the noose” (161). Brown curses him and the judge simply laughs. He then turns to the
rest of the gang and all refuse succor save the kid. This scene first and foremost
79
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
highlights how the gang allegorically functions as a paradigm of the sovereign
exception.
Like bare life’s relation to law, the members are bound to their gang through
abandonment. This is the gang’s code, and all the men follow the code, refusing
Brown any help. Everyone understands and follows the code of abandonment, that is,
except for the kid. He is the one who agrees to help him remove the arrow and thus
refuses to abandon, denies the fulfillment of the sovereign exception’s paradigm. The
kid’s propensity to not abandon is consistent throughout the novel. Early on, the kid
refuses to abandon Sproule, though mortally wounded. Sproule even orders him to
abandon him, but the kid silently accompanies him until he ultimately dies of
gangrene. The gang abandons Grimly; they abandon six men during the shootout in
chapter fourteen. Despite this pattern, though, the kid does not abandon, even when
the gang draws lots and he is left with Tate to kill the wounded Shelby and the others
who cannot continue. He has been ordered to put a bullet in Shelby’s head, but cares
for him instead, gives him water and, only according to Shelby’s desires, leaves him.
Again, when Tate’s horse becomes lame, the kid does not abandon Tate, he remains
with him, and in the process, is left behind by the gang, abandoned.
In terms of abandonment the judge and the kid are opposing forces. This is
what establishes the enmity between them. After helping Brown, the expriest Tobin
hisses, “God will not love ye forever,” warning him against the judge, who he says
would’ve “took you, boy. Like a bride to the altar” (163). Yet the kid constantly
declares that he is not afraid of the judge, defying him in his refusal to abandon. For
80
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
this reason, the judge is watching the kid when he draws lots to find out who will have
to kill the wounded. Under his gaze, the kid chooses the arrow that indicates he is the
one to kill Shelby, but when he immediately looks at the judge, this time he acts as
though he noticed nothing. But the judge is watching; he is continually aware of the
kid’s actions—the only member of the gang who does not follow the code of
abandonment.
When the gang is broken up by the Yuma attack at the ferry, the kid and Tobin
are left to wander the desert together. Here too the kid, as is his custom in the novel,
does not abandon Tobin, even though he possesses the pistol and has no need of him.
For this reason the judge charges the kid of being “mutinous” and having “reserved in
your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen” (299), or later that “our tribe you
have betrayed.” The kid’s betrayal is to the gang because of his clemency towards and
refusal to abandon the heathen, which in this case is bare life. Instead of abandoning
bare life as he should, as the judge demands in his symbolic representation of the
sovereign exception, the kid is loyal and cares for the injured gang members. As such,
we can understand the kid and the judge as the two opposite extremes of biopolitics. If
we understand the gang as a sort of micro nation-state, a model for modern
sovereignty, then the kid is the part of biosovereignty whose politics is concerned with
life to the extent of preserving and prolonging it (only within the gang; outside this
circle the kid is an obvious killer). On the other hand, the judge is the other
thanatopolitical extreme of biopolitics. For him, the members of the gang and any
81
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
foreign entity outside the gang are creaturely, bare life, whose relationship to the gang
is one only that includes them through an exclusion, through abandonment.
To conclude this section, I would like to briefly consider the Holden’s
proximity and interest in the imbecile towards the end of the novel. The judge, who
emblematically represents the sovereign exception, is consistent in his treatment of all
life as bare. Regardless of race, gender, and age, he mercilessly kills since for him
human life’s biopolitical value is defined by its to-be-killed-ness. However, he
curiously takes a unique interest in the so-called idiot, or imbecile, he rescues, who has
been kept caged-up as a sort of freak-show attraction. The imbecile is the one
character whom the judge does not abandon when the Yuma attack nor when they are
forced to cross the desert, which begs the question, why? We do not know what
ultimately happens to the imbecile, whether Holden kills him like he has done with
previous human toys of his (I’m thinking of the Apache child he scalps after three
days of treating him as a sort of plaything). We do not even know if he abandons the
imbecile in the end, even though he amongst the gang exemplifies this practice best.
The imbecile is no doubt creaturely in status. As he and the judge cross the dessert he
is described in animalistic terms, as a lemur and a sort of tracking blood hound. We
read: “The imbecile squatted on all fours and leaned into the lead like some naked
species of lemur. It swung its head and sniffed at the air, as if it were being used for
tracking” (298). The judge’s fixation with the imbecile can possibly be understood as
the sovereign exception’s production and harboring of bare life, as though the two
depended on each other. Yet I suggest that there is something more here, something
82
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
hidden that alludes to a grander scope of the biopolitical cosmology in Blood
Meridian.
Parting from the creaturely and the sovereign, there is another aspect in the
relationship between the judge and the imbecile. As they cross the desert together,
they are also described as “[the judge] pale pink beneath his talc of dust like
something newly born, the imbecile much the darker, lurching together across the pan
at the very extremes of exile like some scurrilous king stripped of his vestiture and
driven together with his fool into the wilderness to die” (282). Here we may think of
Shakespeare’s King Lear, stripped of his kingdom and wandering the desert with his
fool. Like King Lear, the naked judge embodies the sovereign’s propensity to strip
itself bare of its very laws and legitimacy and follow the fool, an action which can
only lead to its own exile and death in that it is the death of the citizens who recognize
its rule, a mutual death caused by a sovereign mass-murder and consequential suicide.
The judge’s coupling with the imbecile, his proximity and fixation with the fool, is
precisely because he himself is “both a master of ceremonies who orchestrates his
environment and a reckless Lord of Misrule, he is the spitting image of anomie and
law,” when they “coincide in a single person” (Dorson 111). As an incarnate
representation of the sovereign exception, the point where violence and law converge,
the judge also embodies the figure of the fool, the trickster and master of folly and
ceremonies. The events involving governor’s Trias’ contract with the gang, his own
relationship with the judge and the continual presence of creaturely life in the novel,
produce a broader allegorical narrative and warning of what can happen to the people
83
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
of a nation so deeply invested in the thanatopolitical paradigm of the sovereign
exception. The interplay and exchange between Trias, the gang, and the judge-fool’s
ceremonial actions symbolically reveal the imminent threat to a nation’s people posed
by an overproduction of bare life or, as I like to call, a biopolitical bankruptcy of life.
Just as the judge leads the gang to a bloody end, so too does the folly of the sovereign
fool lead the politically excluded to tragic destruction.
1.7 The Sovereign Fool and Iustitium
Upon securing their scalp-hunting contract with the Chihuahua government,
the kid and Toadvine are freed from prison and join the gang to take part in their
violent and lucrative exploits. The gang departs and several days later, after spending
the night in the plaza of a town called Corralitos, a group of Mexican jugglers, or
travelling gypsies, asks to accompany the gang upcountry to Janos for protection.
Glanton reluctantly consents and the gypsies fall in line with the Glanton’s band as
they leave town.
That night, as the gang and gypsies camp, Glanton asks the head juggler if he
can tell fortunes. The man quickly produces a deck of Tarot cards and calls the woman
fortuneteller to join them. Black Jackson’s card, the harlequin, el tonto, or the fool, is
the only card the judge comments on, telling Jackson that “in your fortune lie our
fortunes all” (93). John Sepich, in his article “Blood Meridian and the Dance of
History,” identifies how the various elements of the Tarot fool do indeed distribute
themselves among the members of the gang. However, most importantly, Sepich
concludes that in the larger context of the novel, “the card of the fool is meant to be
84
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
found embodied in Judge Holden” (22-23). Though Glanton is the gang’s captain and
leader, there can be no doubt that the judge is the true puppet master, directing and
manipulating the bloody destiny of each of their lives.
Therefore, the card of the fool, which “is the most powerful of all the Tarot
Trumps" (Nichols 23), best represents the judge. Of the fool, Butler writes: “In a sense
it is the spirit of The Fool which animates the entire Tarot deck. In the earliest deck
known he is shown towering over midget human figures, a Giant of Folly and of
super-rational sanity” (23). We can easily understand the judge in these terms, of him
towering over the imbecile in the desert. His amorality and strange philosophy
“rationalizes” the gangs actions, “animates” them to deadly action and to folly, for, as
Tobin says, “He appeared to be a lunatic and then not” (127). The fool is the
“wanderer, energetic, ubiquitous, and immortal. He is the most powerful of all the
Tarot Trumps. Since he has no fixed number he is free to travel at will, often upsetting
the established order with his pranks” (Nichols 110). The judge likewise is a wanderer,
ubiquitous, “Every man in the company claims to have encountered the sootysouled
rascal in some other place,” says Tobin (124).Tobin goes on to explain how he is
found by the gang sitting upon a rock in the middle of the desert, “Like he’d been
expectin us” (125). His pranks are constant: he fools the Apache on the volcano,
feigning to have shot the gang, holding up a white shirt for surrender, only to lead
them into an ambush. He and Glanton fool the Yumas to attack at the ferry-crossing.
The fool, immortal, “dances through the cards each day” (Nichols 27) just like the
judge who, at the end of the novel “[s]ays he will never die […] He is dancing,
85
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
dancing. He says that he will never die” (335). The gang member’s fortunes
undoubtedly lie in that of the fool in that they lie with the judge. In his footnote,
Sepich even identifies that “[i]n the Ozarks, Mencken relates, “Judge or jedge is used
to mean a fool or clown, and there is even an adjective “jedgy”” (Qtd. in Sepich 2223). However, linking the fool to the judge does not explain exactly how their
fortunes are bound to him.
The answer to this inquiry is found in the relationship that the fool shares with
the sovereign. This relationship is precisely that of the king and the fool. The king’s
court is continually occupied by the fool, as Louise Amoore and Alexandra Hall
observe, “Whether in the form of ‘natural idiots’, professional buffoons or deformed
mascots of ancient courts, or the famous court fools or fool societies of the Middle
Ages, or even the archetypal Elizabethan jesters, the fool enjoys a distinct place in the
sovereign court” (100). In the same manner, Blood Meridian reveals to the reader that
the judge has a privileged seat alongside the king in his court. Tobin informs us that
the evening the judge and the gang dined in the governor’s palace, “Him and the
governor they sat up till breakfast and it was Paris this and London that in five
languages, you’d have give something to of hear them. The governor’s a learned man
himself he is, but the judge…” (123). Like the fool, the judge “acts as a counterpoint
and touchstone to the follies and vanities of those round him, and his wisdom and
insight are proved greater than those of his ‘superiors’” (Amoore and Hall 101). It is
the judge’s place by the governor where the gang member’s fortunes lie. Though it is
Glanton who “clapped for entrance” (79) at the governor’s palace, it seems that the
86
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
judge is the one who entertains the governor and mediates the scalp-hunting contract.
He is, after all, the man really in charge of the gang’s fate. Pulling at Glanton’s strings,
he is the master of their fortunes. He is the one who is well versed in legal matters, the
fool who saved them from the Apache by forging gun powder out of a volcano, and he
appears to be the fool who has led the men to the governor’s palace and placed them in
alliance with the sovereign.
The judge’s identity as the fool means that he also occupies a position both
outside and inside the sovereign realm. He is in the king’s court but not of the king’s
court. His presence during the forging of the contract between the governor and the
gang further strengthens the argument that a state of exception is being declared and
that Holden is its keeper, for the fool
occupies a privileged, protected position, and the license that he enjoys
allows him to speak and act in a way that no one else can . . . His
association with a disordered ‘outside’ (madness, chaos, nature)
threatens the king, but his expanded line of sight makes him necessary .
. . The fool, then, like Agamben’s topology of the exception, ‘beingoutside, and yet belonging’, expresses something of the indistinction
between inside and outside that plagues, but is necessary for, the
exercise of sovereign power. In this specific sense, sovereign power
requires the slippery figure of the fool, who embodies the blurred
distinction between inside and outside, and who speaks from a place
87
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
and with a voice that is otherwise unavailable to the king. (Amoore and
Hall 102)
The judge, as rightfully described by Owens as he who acts “as a composite of
Hobbes’ First Man and Fukuyama’s Last Man” (57), is able to impress upon the
governor all his “wisdom” of the “Last Man” and his democracy, entertaining him
with his discussion of Paris and London, the great “civilized” nations of the West; but
at the same time, his association with the gang—the savage “First Man,” a man
without law in a state of nature—enable him to give the governor what he both
despises and needs: lawlessness. The governor “needs” the Apache threat to be
eliminated, and to do so, he needs the chaos and disorder offered by the judge and the
gang in order to ironically “keep the peace,” and through the resulting state of
exception, maintain power and keep sovereignty intact. The judge fool provides the
“voice” the governor king cannot have without him, the savage voice of the exception
necessary to validate sovereign power—the voice of extermination and of genocide.
The gang’s fortune’s lie in the card of the fool inasmuch as they are associated with
the judge fool, and as far as they share in his voice, they too stand in the king’s court
to complete the sovereign paradigm of inside and outside, they being that lawless
outside needed to eliminate the Apache. The judge is therefore the two-faced
representation of law and chaos, a living metaphor of how the two must coexist in the
sovereign so that, as Agamben argues, state authority may validate itself through force
and violence. In creating the state of exception, what is as stake is a process where
“the sovereign ‘creates and guarantees the situation’ that the law needs for its own
88
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
validity” (HS 17). Governor Trias is validating his sovereignty through the violent
extermination of the Apache who threaten the State.
After the slaughter of the Gileños, the gang returns triumphant to Chihuahua
City and receives a hero’s welcome:
Hundreds of onlookers pressed about as the dried scalps were counted
out upon the stones . . . There were one hundred and twenty-eight
scalps and eight heads and the governor’s lieutenant and his retinue
came down into the courtyard to welcome them and admire their work.
They were promised full payment in gold at the dinner to be held in
their honor that evening at the Riddle and Stephens Hotel and with this
the Americans sent up a cheer and mounted their horses. (167)
The governor’s lieutenant and his retinue’s admiration of their gruesome work is the
most horrendous aspect of this passage. Their admiration, combined with the scalphunter invitation to dine with the governor as guests of honor, reiterate the sovereign’s
need for the exception and illustrates the paradoxically lawless side of law. We are
then told that
This Angel Trias who was governor had been sent abroad as a young
man for his education and was widely read in the classics and was a
student of languages. He was also a man among men and the rough
warriors he’d hired for the protection of the state seemed to warm
something in him. (168)
89
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Two factors are significant here. First, that anyone could feel warmth towards these
pack of man-hunters is repulsive. The reader has just finished passages about the
gang’s slaughter of the Gileños, turning perhaps the most bloody and difficult pages to
read in the book, only to find them well-received, celebrated, and embraced warmly
by the governor. The paternalistic affection is significant in that it demonstrates Trias’
dependency and even an emotional bond to the rough warriors, elucidating
sovereignty’s reliance on chaos and violence in order to validate its power.
McCarthy’s specific reference to the governor’s hiring of the scalp-hunters to “protect
the state,” implies his rationalization for the suspension of law.
Agamben, in his genealogy of state of exception, locates a parallel, or
origin, of the modern paradigm for state of exception in the Roman notion of iustitium.
As explained by Agamben:
Upon learning of a situation that endangered the Republic, the Senate
would issue a senatus consultum ultimum [final decree of the Sentate]
by which it called upon the consuls […] and, in some cases, the praetor
and the tribunes of the people, and even, in extreme cases, all citizens,
to take whatever measures they considered necessary for the salvation
of the state […] At the base of this senatus consultum was a decree
declaring a tumultus (that is, an emergency situation in Rome resulting
from a foreign war, insurrection, or civil war), which usually led to the
proclamation of a iustitium . . .The term iustitium--which is constructed
90
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
exactly like solstitium—literally means “standstill” or “suspension of
the law.” (State of Exception 41)
During the years of the Roman Republic, state crises would be followed by the senate
declaring an eventual iustitium in the name of preserving and protecting the state.
Agamben points out that later, during the age of the Roman Empire, the iustitium takes
on a meaning of public mourning, instituted upon the death the emperor while the
inauguration of a successor was pending. Thus the iustitium marks the hiatus between
one sovereign order to the next, and ultimately, “becomes an effective instrument of
the emperor, to be turned on or off at will” (Humphreys 682). In contemporary terms,
one can think of the United States president’s ability to declare an executive order in
times of crisis and war. Yet Agamben points out that iustitium, in terms of public
mourning, also has its parodic inverse and can be traced throughout the long history of
carnivalesque feasts in Western culture, “which have in common a suspension and
complete reversal of the juridical and social relations that define the normal order”
(“The State of Exception” 296).
Here, Governor Trias’ actions in Blood Meridian take on a striking
resemblance with iustitium, and not solely in his declaration of a sovereign “standstill”
of law in order to eliminate the Apache threat to the state, rather, even more salient is
the carnivalesque feast which ensues when the gang returns to Chihuahua City. The
feast the governor holds in the gang’s honor symbolizes what Agamben comes to
associate with iustitium: the western tradition of anomic, topsy-turvy feasts: “those
periodic feasts (such as the Anthesteria and Saturnalia of the classical world and the
91
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
charivari and Carnival of the medieval and modern world) that are characterized by
unbridled license and the suspension and overturning of normal legal and social
hierarchies” (State of Exception 71). Though these feasts are generally accredited to
agrarian celebrations of solar cycles, Agamben draws on Karl Meuli’s explanation that
they are remnants of legal issues related to law, given their inexplicable tolerance by
religion and law in civil societies that has so baffled scholars. Agamben takes up this
explanation to place these carnivalesque feast in context with iustitium:
If Meuli's hypothesis is correct, the “legal anarchy” of the
anomic feasts does not refer back to ancient agrarian rites, which in
themselves explain nothing, rather, it bring to light in a parodic form
the anomie within the law, the state of emergency as the anomic drive
contained in the very heart of the nomos.
That is to say, the anomic feasts point toward a zone in which
life's maximum subjection to the law is reversed into freedom and
license, and the most unbridled anomie shows its parodic connection
with the nomos. In other words, they point toward the state of exception
as the threshold of indifference between anomie and law. In showing
the mournful character of every feast and the festive character of all
mourning, law and anomie show their distance and, at the same time,
their secret solidarity. (State of Exception 72-73)
The parody of governor Trias’ state of exception is inaugurated when Glanton’s gang
arrives for dinner, when this “civil” feast is quickly transformed into a chaotic one,
92
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
enacting a symbolic parody of anomie’s connection with the nomos, or the lawless
character of law. Interestingly, as is common in carnivalesque feasts, where “men
dress up and behave like animals, masters serve their slaves, males and females
exchange roles” (State of Exception 71), the gang arrives in costume. Roles are
subverted and savages dress like civilized men: the Delawares appear “strangely
austere and menacing in their morningcoats . . . Soldiers attended them, fetching extra
glasses, pouring the wine, lighting cigars …” (168-69), and the Kid finds himself
dressed “in the first starched collar he’d ever owned” (169). The parody here lies in
the subverted roles of the governor and his soldiers serving men no different than the
supposed savages they fight on the frontier. These barbaric men, normally the wouldbe-enemies of the state, are dressed in civilized fashioned and catered to by
representatives of the sovereign, signaling through parody the zone where anomie and
chaos reside in the sovereign nomos.
The judge comes in to dine last of all. The man who days before killed and
scalped the Apache boy the gang had played with as a sort of mascot is now “dressed
in a well-cut suit of unbleached linen that had been made for him that very afternoon .
. . His feet were encased in nicely polished grey kid boots and in his hand he held a
panama hat . . .” (169). Trias sees him when he enters, and immediately the fool-jester
takes his right-hand place in the king’s court: “[N]o sooner had the governor seen him
than he rose again and they shook hands cordially and the governor had him seated at
his right and they at once fell into conversation in a tongue none other in that room
spoke at all . . .” (169).
93
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
With the one true fool in counsel with the king, the foolish gang begins the
anomic feast:
Cigars were presented and glasses of sherry poured . . . and there was a
tandem run of dishes, fish and fowl and beef and wild meats of the
countryside and a roast shoat on a platter and casseroles of savories and
trifles and glaces and bottles of wine and brandy from the vineyards at
El Paso. Patriotic toasts were drunk, the governor's aides raising their
glasses to Washington and Franklin and the Americans responding with
yet more of their own country's heroes, ignorant alike of diplomacy and
any name at all from the pantheon of their sister republic. (169)
The gang’s ignorance of diplomacy adds humor to this parody of the sovereign
exception. The comedic scenes continues and any sense of civilization and order is
lost when the men’s appetite is impossible to satisfy and food becomes scarce:
They fell to and they continued to eat until they had exhausted first the
banquet and then the larder of the hotel altogether. Couriers were sent
abroad through the city to fetch more only to have this also vanish and
more sent for until Riddle's cook barricaded the door with his body and
the soldiers in attendance took to simply dumping great trays of
pastries, fried meatskins, rounds of cheese—whatever they could
find—out upon the table. (169-70)
When the governor attempts to make a toast, his “well-phrased english” is
drowned out by the “bloated and belching mercenaries” who “were leering about and
94
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
were calling for more drink and some had not ceased to scream out toasts, now
degenerated into obscene pledges to the whores of various southern states” (170).
Glanton then cuts the governor short and “dumped the gold out onto the table among
the bones and rinds and pools of spilled drink and in a brisk drumhead disbursement
divided out the gold with the blade of his knife” (170). The judge, as entertaining
jester and master of this ceremony, takes charge of the feast and ushers the skiffle
band “into the adjoining ballroom where a number of ladies who had been sent for lay
already about the wall on benches and fanned themselves without apparent alarm”
(170). The judge, the eternal dancer, is “in close conference with the band and soon a
quadrille was struck up” (170). The dance begins, and the “scalphunters stood
grinning at the dames, churchishlooking in their shrunken clothes, sucking their teeth,
armed with knives and pistols and mad about the eyes” (170). The dance reaches its
climax when “[b]y midnight the governor had excused himself … A blind street
harpist stood terrified upon the banquet table among the bones and platter and a horde
of luridlooking whores had infiltrated the dance. Pistolfire soon became general . . .”
(170-71).
The riotous feast continues and like a state of exception of pure anomic space,
where all crime is licit, McCarthy painstakingly illustrates the chaotic feast:
Fights broke out. Furniture was disassembled, men waving chairlegs,
candlesticks . . . Jackson, pistols drawn, lurched into the street vowing
to Shoot the ass off Jesus Christ, the longlegged son of a bitch . . . At
dawn the shapes of insensate topers lay snoring about the floor . . . A
95
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
family of thieves were tiptoeing through the wreckage turning out the
pockets of the sleepers. . . .(171)
Common characteristics of carnivalesque celebrations are confirmed in McCarthy’s
relentless description: societal taboos become acceptable—thus Jackson can “shoot of
the ass of Jesus Christ”—and “criminal behavior is considered licit” (State of
Exception 71), whereby thieves take advantage of the parodic iustitium to pillage the
drunken sleepers.
Yet McCarthy does not stop here, the scene of anomic feasting escalade and
repeats:
These scenes and scenes like them were repeated night after
night. The citizenry made address to the governor but he was much like
the sorcerer’s apprentice who could indeed provoke the imp to do his
will but could in no way make him cease again. The baths had become
bordellos, the attendants driven off . . . Cantinas were evacuated . . .
horses ridden indoors . . . as the gold began to dwindle away
shopkeepers found themselves presented with debits scrawled on
butcherpaper in a foreign language for whole shelves of goods . . .
Charcoal scrawls appears on the limewashed walls. Mejor los indios.
(171)
Baths have become bordellos, savage scalp-hunters and whores the king’s magistrates
and ladies of the court, and barn animals inhabit homes in a world turned upside down.
The citizens of the town plead to a governor who has lost control as Glanton’s gang
96
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
spreads chaos and unchallenged, anarchic rule. Our understanding of the judge’s role
as the fool in relation to carnival is vital here, for the
fool as a ‘jovial ring-leader’ and ‘mischief-maker’ (Welsford, 1935:
197) creates an inverted and upturned world. We see this clearly in the
long-running association of foolery with carnival. For example, in the
heyday of misrule – the medieval Feast of Fools – the religious
ceremonies of the cathedrals and churches were parodied by improper,
bawdy and grotesque merriment (Bakhtin, 1968: 74). The fool became
king, the normal order of things was reversed. . . . (Amoore and Hall
99)
This scene of carnivalesque celebration, where the fool “becomes king,” is what has
precisely taken place: a “complete reversal” of the juridical order. McCarthy’s analogy
of the governor enacting the sorcerer’s apprentice who cannot control the imp he has
provoked, mirrors his beckoning of the judge. The governor—the apprentice or
representative of sovereignty—has recurred to the fool in his court. The judge, in turn,
has introduced him to the lawless gang, to the anomie so vital for the function of the
sovereign. However, once the contract has been fulfilled and the Gileños slaughtered,
there is no controlling this anomic force; it will continued unbridled. The gang has
arrogated the governor, and in effect, the judge has declared himself the new king. The
carnivalesque feast in Blood Meridian represents the iustitium in that it marks the
hiatus and subsequent shift from one sovereign ruler to another.
97
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
The judge has become the sovereign and, consequently, the governor is now
the fool. He can no longer help the citizens he originally was to protect. The scrawls
on the walls, “Mejor los indios,” are a testament to his newfound place as the fool.
Their roles are reversed, like King Lear who, abandoned by his family and stripped of
his title, descends into madness, verifying his fool’s foretelling: “Thou wouldst make a
good fool” (55).
After leaving Ciudad Chihuahua, the gang continues their rampage under the
banner of the sovereign fool. Personified by the judge, the sovereign exception reaches
extremes. The gang no longer follows a contract to determine who is bare life, but now
revels in a space of pure anomie where the state of exception designates all life as
bare. All are now homo sacer, since in a state of exception the potentiality of
becoming bare life eventually haunts all forms of life.56 Chaos spirals out of control
and the criteria is no longer Apache scalps, but the scalps of anyone that can be said to
resemble those of the Apache, qualifying most everyone in Northern Mexico.
And so, the gang slaughters a “band of peaceful Tiguas” and, subsequently,
enters the town of Nicori and overtakes the cantina there. While in the cantina, a
funeral procession rounds the corner and the juggler leading the procession releases a
rocket into the plaza where it explodes. Then, “[t]wo more rockets exploded in the
street and now the rest of the procession had swung into view, a fiddler and a
cornetplayer leading with a quick and lively tune” (177). I do not believe it is a stretch
to say that the timing of this scene in Blood Meridian is interesting, to say the least.
First, the funeral scene immediately follows the topsy-turvy feast with governor Trias,
98
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
alluding to iustitium’s connection to public mourning observed upon the death of the
Roman Emperor. If the carnivalesque feast with the governor demonstrates the
reversal of roles between the king and the fool, marks the transition from one
sovereign to the successor—from the governor and the judge—then the funeral
procession signals the public mourning of the “death” of the previous ruler, of Trias.
Though it is not his physical death, it is certainly the death of his sovereign power, for
he can no longer control Holden and the Glanton Gang, nor the state of exception that
is spiraling out of control. The way McCarthy presents the procession is curiously
twofold. On the one hand, the juggler and the fiddler—popular participants in
carnivalesque celebrations and associates of the fool—do not seem to be in mourning.
They are, in fact, celebrating the judge’s rule of utter and chaotic license. The juggler
fires off rockets, while the fiddler and his cornet-playing companion lead with a
“quick and lively tune” (177). Hardly an appropriate beat for a funeral, the music is far
from the solemn, mournful litanies associated with such occasions. On the other hand,
their celebration contrasts with the mournful countenance of the citizens participating
in the procession: “At the rear advanced a company of mourners, some of the men
drinking, the old women in their dusty black shawls helped weeping over the potholes
and children bearing flowers who looked shyly at the spectators in the street at they
passed” (178). What is reason for celebration for the carnivalesque figures of the
juggler and the fiddler, is ample reason for the citizens of Chihuahua to mourn, for
under the judge’s rule, where the state of exception is no longer the exception to the
rule of law but now the rule itself, all life is qualified as bare life and therefore
99
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
exposed to a death which cannot be considered homicide. Anomie reigns: good news
for those who cast in their lots with the fool, but bad for citizens who depend on law
and order to uphold their rights.
The second timely event related to the funeral procession is what confirms the
reason for the citizen’s mourning: their loss of rights as bare life and exposure to be
killed with impunity. In the moment that the rockets explode, members of the gang
happen to be contesting insults muttered to them in the cantina. Thinking the rockets
are gunshots, we read that “the entire company of Americans made for the floor”
(178). In this moment, in the calm before the storm, the fiddler and the cornetist make
satisfied “little bows to each other” (178), as though anticipating an applause. The
applause that ensues is a chaotic brawl in which men brandishing knives are cut down
in a gunfight with Glanton’s gang. Twenty Mexicans lie “shot to pieces among the
overturned chairs and the tables with the fresh splinters blown out of the wood” in the
cantina, and four more are shot down in the plaza and streets by Tobin. By the time the
smoke settles, the gang, out of habit, “had scalped the entire body of the dead” (180).
The episode is concluded when the townspeople reappear thirty minutes later
and a man who has been scalped, but still alive, emerges from the cantina “like a
bloody apparition . . . he was holding shut a huge hole in his chest where a pink froth
breathed in and out” (181). Then we read that “[o]ne of the citizens laid a hand on his
shoulder. A dónde vas? he said. A casa, said the man” (181). The ending of this
massacre is accentuated by the final action and words in the scene. Here, of all places,
McCarthy utilizes the term “citizen” to describe the man who places his hand on the
100
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
shoulder of the scalped man. The close, physical contact of the “citizen” with the bareheaded and bloody man creates a curious image of the Mexican citizenry’s current
political status as bare life. Thus, when the “citizen” asks where he is going, the
scalped matter-of-factly replies, “A casa.” Bare life he has no other choice but to go
home. In a state of exception, he occupies a political void, and therefore, what has
happened to him carries no juridical connotation, but can only be considered as mere
facts:
If we wanted at all costs to give a name to a human action performed
under conditions of anomie, we might say that he who acts during the
iustitium neither executes nor transgress the law, but inexecutes
[inesegue] it. His actions, in this sense, are mere facts, the appraisal of
which, once the iustitium lasts, they will be absolutely undecidable, and
the definition of their nature--whether executive of transgressive, and,
in the extreme case, whether human, bestial, or divine—will lie beyond
the sphere of law. (Agamben State of Exception 50)
He was shot, scalped—end of story. The scalped man’s matter-of-fact attitude—when
he simply replies that he will go “a casa”—reflects the same indifferent, factual way
the narrator recounts the violent events throughout the novel. Indeed, the amoral and
matter-of-fact narrative voice in Blood Meridian capitulates a space environed by a
state of exception, where “no act is lawful; but, reciprocally, neither is any
“transgression” possible” (“The State of Exception” 287). The gore and violence in
101
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Blood Meridian are presented simply as they are: facts—bare, raw actions narrated
through a voice of indifference all too appropriate for state of exception.
Two days after the shootout in Nicori, the gang slaughters a Mexican village of
“mud huts.” The creaturely citizenry flees before the gang like “harried game,”
seeking asylum in their church “where they knelt clutching the altar and from this
refuge they were dragged howling one by one and one by one they were slain and
scalped in the chancel floor” (181). Having reached such terrible heights, the state of
exception instituted by Governor Trias has ironically brought about the slaughter of
his own people, further consolidating himself as the fool. The judge on the other hand,
now reigns in complete anomie and chaos, and all life before the gang is bare.
The irony of the Governor’s fate is reinforced as the gang once again returns to
Ciudad Chihuahua, this time cashing in the scalps of Mexicans:
They entered the city haggard and filthy and reeking with the blood of
the citizenry for whose protection they had contracted. The scalps of
the slain villagers were strung from the windows of the governor's
house and the partisans were paid out of the all but exhausted coffers
and the Sociedad was disbanded and the bounty rescinded. (185)
We are then told that “a week of their quitting the city there would be a price of eight
thousand pesos posted for Glanton’s head” (185). State of exception in Blood
Meridian only generates more states of exception, in a sort of Girardian cycle where
only sovereign violence can put an end to sovereign violence, entrapping its players in
a perpetual continuum of mimetic violence and revenge. Yet just as the governor’s
102
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
associated with the judge led to his demise, so too will the gang’s fortune with that
“sootysouled rascal” spell their catastrophic end.
1.8 Leviathan’s Body of Corpses
To recapitulate what I have discussed in this chapter, let us consider the
following points: violence and the amoral, unanthropocentric environment in Blood
Meridian cannot be explained away as a Hobbesian state of nature. The presence of
sovereign law in the novel forces us to reconsider violence in political terms. When we
do, state of exception emerges as a more relevant construct for violence and amorality
in McCarthy’s novel.
The state of exception is literally represented in the figure of Judge Holden, a
man where the nomos and anomie meet, where violence and law reside. As the
incarnate sovereign exception, the judge entices Governor Trias, enacting the fool in
his court, to bind himself to the gang with a scalp-hunting contract. This contract is a
declaration of a state of exception. The state of Chihuahua and its governor turn to the
exception to eliminate the Apache, a part of their own citizenry, in order to validate
sovereignty.
The state of exception introduced by Governor Trias and upheld by Judge
Holden creates a fissure which continually splits, breaks and grows throughout the
novel. This fracture in the novel is impossible to mend, and from it spills a continual
flow of violence that eventually engulfs all life in the novel, including the members of
Glanton’s gang. By deciding on the exception and suspending law, Governor Trias
hands his sovereign power over to the judge, to the exception. As the state of
103
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
exception spirals out of control, McCarthy employs the analogy of the sovereign fool
and the iustitium to demonstrate how a state of exception, which was initially aimed at
solely the Apache, spreads like wildfire and consumes all citizenry in bare life status.
Eventually, the sovereign exception will devour the gang itself and the state of
exception, as it becomes the normal procedure of law, can only spell catastrophe:
The sovereign, who should decide every time on the exception, is
precisely the place where the fracture that divides the body of the law
becomes impossible to mend: . . . between power and its exercise, a gap
opens which no decision is capable of filling.
This is why, with a further shift, the paradigm of state of
exception is no longer the miracle, as in Political Theory, but a
catastrophe. (Agamben State of Exception 56)
Thus the miracle on the volcano, when the judge miraculously forges gun powder to
save the gang at the hands of the Apache, becomes the catastrophe at the Yuma river
crossing later in the novel. Blood Meridian is a prophetic tale of what can befall a
people of a nation under the paradigm of the sovereign exception. The demise of the
gang at the hands of the Yuma is an allegorical warning to the U.S. nation-state and its
quest for empire. The disregard for life, the suspension of constitutional human rights,
can only lead to disaster for the people.57
The gap spoken of by Agamben, the fissure which cannot be mended when a
nation-state divides its body of law and functions through the exception, can only lead
to catastrophe and the swallowing up of citizens’ rights. Violence and anomie
104
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
eventually consume and overpower the nomos of the sovereign, casting it off into the
abyss created by the exception. This is ultimately what the judge represents, he is, as
Dorson notes, that great empty space:
[Judge Holden] has no solid core, no “atavistic egg” to substantiate his
presence. Like the groundless violence of the law that he embodies, the
judge hovers just above the abyss. He is a “great ponderous djinn” (95)
called out of the void, appearing in the desert “out of nothing at all”
(125) . . . this also strengthens the comparison between him and what
Agamben writes about the hollow articulation that unites law and
violence in the state of exception: . . . that the state of exception is
“essentially an empty space.” (114)
Within this moral void and “empty space” of confused nomos and anomie, the judge
exemplifies how, through state of exception, “the juridico-political system transforms
itself into a killing machine” (Agamben HS 86). The judge’s great white body, like the
great white whale in Moby Dick, is quite literally Hobbes’ Leviathan in every sense of
its political meaning. As depicted on the original title page of Hobbes’ Leviathan, the
king’s body is only made up of only more bodies. In the same manner the judge is the
“great metaphor of the Leviathan, whose body is formed out of all the bodies of
individuals” (HS 125). Yet the judge’s body is made of corpses, not the living, and as
such the judge proves that the “absolute capacity of the subjects’ bodies to be killed
forms the new political body of the West” (HS 125). In the final scene of novel,
several decades after the gang’s bloody exploits, the judge finally kills the last
105
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
member: the kid. He does so waiting for him in the jakes, by precisely taking him up
into his great white and naked body: “He was naked and he rose up smiling and
gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh” (333). The judge
completes the catastrophe. By finally absolving all bare life into his immense and
terrible flesh—the body of the sovereign—the judge has given us a terrible and
prophetic narrative for the “new political body of the West,” which has been all too
prevalent throughout the 20th and 21st century, a body which is built upon its insistence
of internalizing bare life, life which may be freely killed.
According to Agamben, the eventuality of the sovereign paradigm of the
exception (which he considers to be the predominant paradigm in all modern
democracy) can only lead to detainment camps. For Agamben, the camp is the
ultimate end to state of exception; it is the space that is opened up in the fissure
created by the exception we just discussed. As such, it is by nature the political space
most representative of a state of exception; for the camp, like the exception, is a space
set outside of law, where law applies in no longer applying and is therefore an
excluded space included in the law: “The camp is the space that opens up when the
state of exception starts to become the rule. In it, the state of exception, which was
essentially a temporal suspension of the state of law, acquires a permanent spatial
arrangement that, as such, remains constantly outside the normal state of law” (Means
39). In the camp, life itself is defined as bare life:
Inasmuch as its inhabitants have been stripped of every political status
and reduced completely to naked life, the camp is also the most
106
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
absolute biopolitical space that has ever been realized—a space in
which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without
any mediation. The camp is the paradigm itself of political space at the
point in which politics becomes biopolitics and the homo sacer
becomes indistinguishable from the citizen. (Means 41)
One has only to briefly consider the past one hundred fifty years of U.S. and world
history to confirm the persistence of the camp, starting in the nineteenth century and
becoming prevalent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Native Americans
and Apache in Blood Meridian will subsequently be displaced and concentrated on
reservations, a form of concentration camp, where their life is defined best as bare life,
stripped of political status. Mark Rifkin, in his article, “Indigenizing Agamben:
Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the “Peculiar” Status of Native Peoples,” in fact
has already provided a unique biopolitical interpretation of U.S. indigenous removal to
reservations.58 One immediately thinks of the Nazi concentration and extermination
camps of Jews in World War II, of the simultaneous Japanese detainment camps in the
U.S., and of the Argentine prison camps during the Dirty War in the 70s and 80s.
Biopolitics reverberates with post 9-11 exceptional spaces like Guantánamo and Abu
Ghraib.59 Such a correlation between camps and the exception, when considered in
relation to the judge, gives credence to the kid’s words when he asks, as he and the
expriest Tobin are being hunted by Holden in the desert, “Will it not stop?” (290). The
answer would seem that even in the twenty-first century it has yet to stop; the judge
continues to stalk the West’s paradigm of nation and empire.
107
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
McCarthy does not appear to be too optimistic either. The unique ending to the
novel seems to imply that the sovereign exception, which “has today reached its
maximum worldwide deployment” (State of Exception 87), is what gives some who
are not yet born to “curse the Dauphin’s soul” (327). Those born in the modern nation
state are born into a political space where citizen and bare life have blurred together.
The modern political subject, in the form of the illegal immigrant, the refugee, the
political prisoner, etc., is under constant threat of exclusion from the juridical order.
The continual play between bare life and the citizen, between legality and the
exception, in the political care of life and its propensity to be licitly killed, is the dance
Judge Holden speaks of: “Plenty of time for the dance” (327), he claims. The judge as
the sovereign fool, the king of mayhem, the dancer, is curiously described in the
concluding paragraph of the novel as “[t]owering over them all . . . he is naked
dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the
ladies, huge pale and hairless, like an enormous infant” (335). Mark Franko, in his
article “Dance and the Political: States of Exception,” explains that the carnivalesque
roles of the king where he plays the androgyne signals, in seventeenth century
burlesque ballet, “anti-normative figures of force that imply the exception implicit in
sovereignty. Thus, the king’s performance of anti-normative roles is both an assertion
of legitimacy and a threat of legitimacy’s suspension” (12). The judge’s androgyny is
verified in his masculine size, “huge” and “towering,” yet at the same time he is
hairless like a woman (even though McCarthy compares him to an infant) and his feet
are femininely “small” and “quick.” Thus the judge’s dance is that of the androgyne
108
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
king, the dance which asserts the judge’s sovereign legitimacy through the sovereign
exception and the suspension of law, threatening, as he towers above over them all, to
reach down and scoop up bare life into his terrible embrace. The judge’s continual
dancing footwork between the assertion of his legitimacy as sovereign king and with
the fool’s suspension of law, is the beat to which he steps and keeps rhythm. This is
the dance he has danced all through the United States’ empirical history, and in an
eerie conclusion, McCarthy warns us almost prophetically that this dance will never
end, for the judge “is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die” (335).
109
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
CHAPTER II
Stalked by the Wolf: Banditry, the Camp, and Creaturely Shame in
José Hernández’ Martín Fierro
“porque el ser gaucho…¡barajo!
El ser gaucho es un delito.”
Martín Fierro
In his chronicle, Una expedición a los indios ranqueles (1870), Colonel Lucio
Mansilla records his expedition to the Argentine frontier and his time spent with
Pampean natives and gaucho outcasts. During his stay on the frontier, Mansilla
interviews a well-known bandit by the name of Rufino:
—¿De dónde eres?
—No sé.
—¿Dónde has nacido?
—No sé.
—¿Quiénes son tus padres?
—No sé.
—¿En qué trabajabas antes de ser soldado?
—En nada. . . .
—Dicen que eres ladrón, cuatrero y asesino.
—Así será.
—Pero, ¿tú qué crees?
—Yo no soy hombre malo.
—¿Qué eres entonces?
110
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
—Soy hombre gaucho. (204)
As the interview implies, by 1870 the term gaucho had almost come to be synonymous
with bandit, if and when he was not being used by the Argentine government as a sort
of enslaved frontier soldier. Soldier and bandit: the two opposing poles that seem to
denote the gaucho’s existence on the nineteenth century pampa, a figure split between
defender of the motherland and excluded outlaw abandoned by law and country.
A gaucho was a free roamer of the South American pampa, a hybrid figure
caught up somewhere between barbarism and civilization, a man whose ethos
fluctuated between that of the Pampean native and his Andalusian and Arabic
ancestors. A criollo, and native Argentine, he also often came from a mestizo origin.60
As a whole, however, the exact details of his origins remain a mystery, though it is
most likely he emerged in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as a hunter
of the wild cattle that proliferated along the banks of the Río de la Plata. Throughout
the centuries the gaucho remained aloof of the landowning elite and the State,
preferring his life of freedom over that of the peon herder or the man of arms that the
urban elite would have him be.
If his social origins are vague enough, then the etymology of the word gaucho
is even more complex. Without referring to a montage of theories, the likeliest origin
of the term, and the one preferred by the likes of Richard Slatta and Ezequiel Martínez
Estrada, stems from an indigenous background, possibly the Araucanian word huachú
or from the Quechua, huak-cha, both meaning orphan.61 This is certainly a title
appropriate for Rufino, who confirms in his interview with Mansilla that he neither
111
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
knows his place of birth nor his parents. In political terms as well, there could not be a
more suitable word to describe the gaucho. A truly political orphan, a sort of refugee
in his own country, the gaucho remained on the fringe of Argentine political
integration for centuries. Often viewed as posing as much of a threat to civilization
and progress as the Pampean natives, the term barbarism was used as a pretext to
justify violence against both.62 Consequently, the gaucho was utilized time and time
again as a soldier, his blood spilled in Argentines wars for independence, spilled in the
long line of ensuing civil wars and frontier struggles against the indigenous
populations, only to quickly be abandoned and claimed by no one—often
marginalized as a bandit and enemy of the state when he resisted, like Rufino.
According to Julie Skurski and Fernando Coronil, “In the official histories of
Latin American and European nations, bandits and other frontier populations appear as
an obstacle to the nation’s progress, while the structural conditions that shaped them
and the moral codes they lived by are ignored” (19). Not until the publication of
Martín Fierro will a voice be given to this orphan and the political abuse that turns a
gaucho bueno into a gaucho malo made fully visible; the work will investigate the
moral code Fierro lives by and most importantly, demonstrate that the structural
conditions which shape the gaucho bandit originate in the State itself.
José Hernández’s Martín Fierro (the first part published in 1872, known as La
ida de Martín Fierro, and the second in 1879, called La vuelta de Martín Fierro) is
not only unanimously praised as the culmination of the genre known as gauchesque
poetry, but also a universal masterpiece of Latin American and world literature. “Si
112
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Italia tiene su Divina Comedia, España su Quijote, y Alemania su Fausto,” proclaimed
Pablo Subieta as early as 1881, “la República Argentina tiene su Martin Fierro” (qtd.
in Anderman 221).
Considered the representative work of Argentine nationality and culture, it is
difficult to express to what extent Martín Fierro is considered to entail “everything
Argentine.” The greatest of the gauchesque genre, according to Menéndez y Pelayo, it
is also for Azorín and Lugones the greatest contribution Latin America gave to the
nineteenth century literature. Furthermore, Unamuno has argued that the work,
following in the footsteps of Don Quixote, is an exemplary continuation of
“everything Spanish.”63
Borges, reflecting on the nature of Argentine literature, states: “En cenáculos
europeos y americanos he sido muchas veces interrogado sobre literatura argentina e
invariablemente he respondido que esa literatura . . . existe y que comprende, por lo
menos, un libro, que es el Martín Fierro” (El Martín Fierro 95). To add a North
American context to the topic, John B. Hughes explains that neither Moby Dick nor
Huck Finn, nor any other book, is for the U.S. American what Martín Fierro is for the
Argentine.64
It is perhaps somewhat curious that in a country like Argentina, with its high
culture literary tradition that boasts the likes of Borges, Cortázar, Puig and Sábato, a
popular work of so called low brow literature, as the gauchesque was defined in its
time, has remained at the peak of Argentine literary representation and reference.
Though the point of this chapter is not to discuss how Martín Fierro became
113
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
canonized as the bedrock for Argentina’s national literature, I will briefly point to
several factors concerning this question.65
Not to be confused with gaucho poetry—a rustic oral tradition descended from
medieval Spanish romances and sung on the pampas by illiterate real gauchos in the
18th and 19th centuries—the gauchesque is a published popular genre written by the
lettered elite of Southern Cone urban cities centers who imitate the rustic oral poetry
and speech of gauchos in their poems for political motives. Given their political and
popular nature, gauchesque poetry was often published in newspapers and pamphlets.
Hernández, as it is often pointed out, was far superior to his lettered predecessors in
his usage of gauchesque metaphors and accurate imitation of their rustic speech.
Simply put, his poetic talent, combined with his familiarity of gaucho culture and
lifestyle, put him ahead of the rest with his Martín Fierro.66 As Jens Andermann
argues, Martín Fierro is true art because there is coherence between voice and
argument, as well as between form and content. The work thus gives the reader
immediate access to the phenomenon it represents, a voice that is in its origin.67
Apart from its aesthetic value, according to Alfredo A. Roggiano’s pivotal
essay “Personal Destiny and National Destiny in Martín Fierro,” Hernández’ work is
a national masterpiece in that is represents the destiny of a nation in conflict with that
of the individual:
It is precisely that, due to the success with which a poetic voice is
achieved, as well as for the vision which it gives of a reality that
constitutes the decisive circumstance of the destiny of a country in
114
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
formation, and of the human element that must survive or perish with
that destiny. Thus, the work of José Hernández is representative of a
unique literary mode, and, at the same time, the most effective
document to testify to the formation of a nationality. . . . as a work
which transcends mere verbal song and directs itself toward the center
of a truth of life which is, for us Argentines, the first step of an
individualizing search, as well as the reason for being of a nation that,
paradoxically, attempts to become, to found itself, while in conflict
with a fundamental part of its people. For that reason, Martín Fierro
aptly expresses what we have proposed for these reflections: a personal
destiny struggling against the destiny which the country must assume.
(37)
Roggiano goes on to observe that national destiny in Martín Fierro is based on a
policy of doing: “doing by annihilation, or, at least, by a process of exclusion. Doing
in this dialectic would be equivalent to national destiny, and annihilation or exclusion
that which determines the individual destiny.” (38) The destiny of the nation to which
Roggiano refers, or the doing by annihilation and exclusion, in the context of Martín
Fierro, is the gaucho and Indian wars on the frontier in which Fierro is violently
forced (“recruited”) to fight, as well as his exclusion from the nation when he deserters
said post and becomes a bandit. These wars primarily sought to annihilate the
indigenous populations that inhabited the country’s fringe spaces and, since gauchos
were also excluded from the nation-building process—often classified as “primitive”
115
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
as indigenous groups—his forced military service on the frontier to war against the
natives can be interpreted as an effort by the state to “kill two birds with one stone.”68
“In certain ways,” says Shumway, “the gauchos faced problems similar to those of the
Indians since, although Spanish-speaking and in some sense Christian, they also lived
on the margins of society, and were slowly being pushed from lands they once roamed
freely. Moreover, like the Indians, the gauchos held no place in liberalism’s vision of
Argentina” (255). In short, Fierro’s personal destiny, to live a free and peaceable life
as a gaucho on his small ranch with his family, is in constant conflict and interruption
with the destiny of the nation, which at the moment is expanding its territory into
frontier regions and sifting out the life that will be excluded from that which will be
included in the nation.
Destiny can be understood here in terms of legal rights as well. Denying Fierro
of his destiny is to negate his fundamental human rights, rights denied him by the very
state that should protect him. The gaucho lacked any legal representation;69 his
history, as Dabove notes in Nightmares of the Letter City, “embodied for generations
to come the political predicaments of the subject “before the law”” (166). This
political predicament is one whose status before the law is null and void, one who
bears the burden of the law without any rights of citizenship guaranteed by the law,
“[P]orque el gaucho,” as Fierro himself recognizes, “no tiene ningún derecho” (La
vuelta 313). Fierro is essentially caught up in the sifting process of the state, which
helps define the moral categories and standards of civilized life on
which practices of inclusion and exclusion are based and identities
116
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
constructed, and it buttresses the norms of civility against which
respectability and belonging are measured and by which marginality
and transgression are established.” (Skurski and Coronil 9-10)
The gaucho is a victim of this process, his construed identity established on the basis
of banditry, which deprives “the culprit of the rights and guarantees derived from
citizenship” (Dabove 32). As the bandit, Fierro is the one who is in constant
transgression and therefore must be excluded.
Such a paradigm of exclusion models precisely the Agambenian biopolitical
workings of the modern nation-state, one by which the lives of a people are sorted out
on the basis of suspended law—the state of exception—some included while others
are excluded. Ultimately, in this chapter I will argue that Fierro, as excluded bare life,
comes to occupy a state of exception embodied by the frontier, where he is first
excluded by way of his forced military service and, where he later roams as the
excluded bandit—in a zone paradoxically both inside and outside the law. It is there
that his bandit status may be interpreted in terms of Agamben’s bare life, or homo
sacer—he whose death can neither be considered homicide nor sacrifice, and whose
death is so necessary, so fundamental for the founding of the modern nation-state.70
Just as the nation is founded on the excluded, Martín Fierro is an example of a
nation’s literature that imitates this processes, not just in its representation of the
excluded, but also in the fact that such a work should come to represent that nation as
it’s iconic literature. Martín Fierro is a testament to the strange case where the
117
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
excluded and marginalize, upon their death, are resurrected as symbols of a nation: the
gaucho Fierro as a national figure, his canto a nation’s literature.71
2.1 Voice and Body
As a genre, it can be said that gauchesque poetry is undoubtedly born from
politics. For Josefina Ludmer, the gauchesque is a genre that she calls
“políticoliterario” (political-literary). Martín Fierro is not only the culmination of the
gauchesque, but also the work that marks the end of the political cycle of the genre.
Angel Rama, in his Los gauchipolíticos rioplatenses, identifies the various postcolonial stages and evolutions of the gauchesque concerning this political cycle.72 The
first political purpose the gauchesque serves is one of revolutionary epicenter for
independence, starting in 1810 and continuing until 1828-30, with the Uruguayan poet
Bartolomé Hidalgo and his patriotic cielitos as the central representative of this stage.
Just as Hernández marks the close of the genre, Hidalgo, in fact, is often identified as
the poet who initiated the gauchesque.
From roughly 1832 to 1852, the second stage is marked by Juan Manuel de
Rosas and the power struggles in the Argentine provinces between political caciques
(chieftains). Rosas’ reign was made possible by his alliance with frontier peoples,
specifically through his “gaucho army” and ability to keep peace with native Pampean
Indians. During this stage, Hilario Ascasubi is the central poet who, like many other
writers contemporary to him, enters into the service of the political parties of the time,
fulfilling a role of mediator between party representatives and the illiterate masses.
118
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Posterior to 1852, and lasting until 1870, the third political stage of the
gauchesque has the progressive imposition of a liberal economic order as the historical
backdrop, with the presidency of Bartolomé Mitre playing the central act. Estanislao
del Campo’s Fausto is a culminating example of this period, where the gauchesque
now combines cultured poetry to the popular genre and, in this case, becomes a tool
for ridicule and satire of the supposedly simpleminded gaucho of the nation’s
provinces. During an era that supported the economic privilege of elite landowners,
del Campo’s satire about a gaucho who attends an opera for the first time and believes
the story to be real, demonstrates the distance that Argentine urban society had
established between itself and the reality of its frontier and rural regions. Such
representation of the gaucho’s “inorancia” of civilization only fortified the argument
for the subversion of their social potential, stifled to nothing more than that of a peon
labor force to the elite proletarian, or to frontier soldier for the military.
It is the fourth stage in the development of the gauchesque that the social
realities of Argentine frontier life, and specifically the political abuse of gauchos,
become exposed by the genre. At the peak of this stage of social critique, “de rara
intensidad y de escasa duración” (Rama 62), is Hernández’ Martín Fierro. This long
narrative poem, as observed by Roggiano, “was the first outcry for social justice in
Argentina” (41). In short, the purpose of the genre is inverted on itself, and what was
once a political self-serving dialog, now becomes one of protest against political
injustices. In this stage, the gauchesque no longer subverts gaucho characters to speak
as the lettered elite desire in the name of progress, nor does the genre ridicule and
119
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
satirize the gaucho’s ignorance of civilization; instead, Hernández allows the gaucho
to speak in his own voice and with his own words, from his perspective. If, for the
urban elite, the gaucho bueno was the patriotic soldier and submissive laborer to the
landowning elite, the gaucho malo was the deserter and the outlaw—the gaucho who
roamed free and refused to be subjected to the whims of the nation. Hernández
innovatively chooses the gaucho malo as his character: “The gaucho malo as the axis
of the narrative,” explains Dabove, “does not appear in the guachesque genre before
Martín Fierro. However, his figure would occupy the genre almost in its entirety from
that point on” (167). Contrary to the genre up to that point, Hernández innovatively
demonstrates that the gaucho malo, and banditry as a whole, is ultimately the
byproduct of political abuse and state violence.73 Martín Fierro is where, as Julián
Pérez points out in his Los dilemas politicos de la cultura letrada, we find a radical
transformation of the gaucho character in the genre, one that endows him with new
social, human, and political meaning,74 where the gauchesque becomes a “literatura de
ideas que critica seriamente al sistema político vigente” (209).
“[A] cada alma dolorida,” says Martín Fierro, “le gusta cantar sus penas” (La
ida 144). Fierro’s penas, his shame and his pain, are the product of political abuse:
first in his suffering at the hands of political parties seeking votes, second, as a
potential soldier to be pressed into military service, and third, as a deserter and marked
outlaw. Martín Fierro is a social mirror to its time, one that reflects what Shumway
summarizes:
120
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
They [gauchos] were ignored, outcast, and marginal; necessary only for
rigging elections and fighting wars. In short, Hernández sees his
primary mission as that of giving voice to the voiceless, of making a
place for the excluded, of inscribing the gaucho into Argentina’s
guiding fictions. (276-77)
In the first part, La ida, Martín Fierro presents himself to us as a payador (gaucho
minstrel), who strums up a cord on his guitar to tell his story: “Aqui me pongo a cantar
/ al compás de la vigüela” (111). Uniquely narrated in the first person, he tells us with
his own voice—the voice of the excluded and marginalized—that he will reveal “una
pena estrordinaria, / como la ave solitaria, / con el cantar se consuela” (111). And so
Fierro consoles himself by singing first about his once peaceful life on the pampa,
where he lived free, with a small piece of land, a wife and children, only to then
inform us about when, not having voted for the right man, he is taken from his home
and pressed into military service to defend the frontier from Indian attacks. He is
assigned to his post at a fortín (military outpost on the frontier, or fort, much like the
19th century U.S. military frontier forts in the West). There he suffers all forms of
misfortune: hunger, neglect, torture and the violence of war.
After three years of living in the worst conditions without pay (he was
originally assigned 6 months of service with pay), his only option and way out is to
desert, an act which will immediately place him outside the law, making him a traitor
to the State, an outlaw matrero and gaucho malo. He escapes and returns to his home
121
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
to find his property no longer his; his wife, out of necessity, is with another man; and
his children have been forced to live as wandering peons.
Fierro ultimately shows us that the criminal status often associated with the
gaucho is a product of the state, a social phenomenon produced by the military’s abuse
of gaucho soldiers. Fierro explains:
Yo he sido manso primero
y seré gaucho matrero
en mi triste circunstancia:
aunque es mi mal tan projundo
nací y me he criao en estancia
pero ya conozco el mundo. (La ida 149)
Fierro, who was first submissive and docile to the law, has been introduced to a world
where the law has gone beyond its bounds, and now, in his only option of resistance,
swears to be a gaucho matrero and fight back. What follows is a series of violence and
killings, as Fierro lives up to his word, earning a truly bandido status and reputation. A
wanted man, Fierro eventually forms an alliance with his newfound friend and fellow
outlaw, Cruz, and realizes that the only place they can exist in peace, away from the
long arm of the law, is to return to the frontier. This time, however, he and Cruz
choose to live with the Indians they once fought, coming to the conclusion that there is
no place for them in the new emerging Argentine society and nation.
Fierro closes La ida by explaining, “he relatao a mi modo / males que conocen
todos, / pero que naides contó” (190). These evils that everyone knows about but no
122
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
one ever told, first have at their center the body of the gaucho, used politically as a cog
in the state’s war machine, and second, they are made known by Fierro himself, in his
own way and with his own voice. Body and voice, two points of convergence where
Ludmer finds a parallel regarding the gauchesque as a genre. This crossroad is marked
by usage: the use of the gaucho’s body by the army and the use of his voice by the
lettered elite. In such a way, “Las dos instituciones, ejército y poesía, se abrazan y
complementan” (18). As a political-literary genre, the gauchesque therefore oscillates
between meanings of usage: between war and a war of words.75 Fierro is engaged in a
literal war, and Hernández, in giving a voice to the voiceless, engages him in a war of
words as well; yet this time, unlike the gauchesque works of his predecessors, who
sought to promote their own political ideology no real gaucho would ever harbor, the
voice is authentic and one in defense of the gaucho. To do so, Fierro’s voice is
constantly remitting itself to the abuse of his political body, as Ludmer explains: first
his body as a soldier, then as a deserter, and finally the body as a bandit criminal.76 In
the following sections, it is my intention to understand these bodies: the soldier, the
deserter, and the bandit, through a biopolitical context.
The usage of Fierro’s body and his voice provide a point of departure for my
argument that Martín Fierro, beyond forming part of the political-literary tradition of
the gauchesque, is precisely, in its joining of body and voice, a biopolitical text, a sort
of example of what Arne de Boever would call “bioart”—the union of body and art.77
In this case, art is Fierro’s payada, or his canto (song) about his life, expressed
through his voice in reference to his body—a body that is first and foremost a political
123
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
one. “Canto y vida,” as Andermann points out, “son una misma cosa para Fierro
quien, de esa manera, se inscribe en la continuidad genérica pero en términos de
superación: es el primer cantor que no canta otra cosa que su propia vida” (208). Song
and life are the same thing for Fierro, and it is in this way that he surmounts the
gauchesque and goes beyond the genre. What were once two gauchos conversing with
political words implanted by the urban elite, words no real gaucho would have ever
uttered, their patriotic voices used to argue political matters for independence in
Hidalgo, for instance, has now become one voice whose sole purpose is to sing about
his life’s misfortunes before the law. Gone is the gaucho of exaggerated satire in
Fausto, and in his place we find a real body.
The first part of Martín Fierro reinvents the genre in that finally it presents a
real gaucho and a believable man. The gaucho is no longer a puppet figure invented by
the lettered elite, who acts and speaks as dictated by the political intentions of the poet,
save a man who acts and speaks of his own accord. Thus Hernández, in his social
concern for the gaucho, cuts the strings and gives us the real man, that “pobre
gaucho,” as he states in his prolog, “con todas las imprerfecciones de forma que el arte
tiene entre ellos” (la ida 105). It is precisely the realist aspect, to the point of
imperfection, that leads Borges to argue contrary to Leopoldo Lugones’ pivotal
conclusion in El payador (1916). Is his essay of a book, the modernist writer and poet
likens Martín Fierro to a Homeric epic such as The Iliad, declaring it the Argentine
epic, which in turn contributed a great deal to the secular acceptance of the work as a
national masterpiece.78 Borges, however, in his El Martín Fierro, argues that though
124
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
the work is epic in proportion, it cannot be classified as an epic in the sense of the
Greek genre. The heroic and mythical characters in epics are infallible and unrealistic,
unlike Fierro who, given his moralistic ambiguity, for some can be seen as good and
others bad. Unamuno phrased it best when he said, “¡Pobre gaucho! “Él es bueno y
parece malo.”79 Fierro as a character is simply too real and believable, to abstruse and
even tragic, for us to consider Martín Fierro to be an epic poem.80 The poem’s realism
is the reason why Borges instead classifies the work as a novel, one that just happened
to be written in verse.81
The novel as a genre, in all its endeavors to narrate the lives of real people, is
also Arne de Boever’s point of departure for his theoretical framework regarding the
novel and biopolitics in Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel. Quoting Foucault,
who identifies the rise of biopolitics as a political structure markedly modern, taking
place during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and especially the nineteenth centuries,
Boever goes on to suggest that the rise of the novel during the same timeframe as
modernity’s predominant literary form is no coincidence, and that the two are
related.82 “[I]t makes sense to consider that the novel,” he says,
as a characteristically modern genre, might be the literary expression of
a political logic that developed simultaneously to it. I argue that
something had to break within human beings’ political imagination in
order for the novel as a literary form to become possible—in order for
the human being to try its hand at a form of fiction that would concern
the lives of ordinary people. It is a major shift in the imagination if one
125
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
comes to think of it: from the lives of mythical, historical, and
legendary figures or the lives of characters of older stories, the human
imagination moves to the creation of everyday characters, people like
us, and the fates of their private lives (their births and deaths, their
happiness and their sickness, their loves, their work, and so on). It is as
if what used to be merely an exercise of fiction suddenly becomes real.
(67)
It would seem that as politics became more and more concerned with regulating the
private lives of everyday people—their births and death, their sicknesses, their
sexuality (love) and even their happiness—so too did everyday human lives and their
private struggles become the focal point for the novel. This is undoubtedly the
narrative foundation in Martín Fierro, one that is centered on the (fictional) private
life of its characters, as Pérez notes, but where the public world and the dehumanizing
“civilization,” with its corrupt authority of arbitrary judges and thieving civil servants
(so common in Kafka), determine the trajectory of the private life of the gaucho.
Though focused on the individual life of the gaucho and his family, the politics of the
State condition the relation of the characters to their society.83
Yet the relation between the gaucho and his society is one created out of
constant political negation of his body, not inclusion nor political care of the body,
suggesting what Agamben would call the inclusion of life into the political by way of
exclusion.84 At every turn the State’s decisions regarding Fierro’s private life mean
exclusion and depravation. For work, he is sent to the frontier to fight; concerning his
126
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
health, he is deprived the basic necessities for living while housed in the fortines; he is
even excluded from happiness and love, as his family is taken from him. Fierro may
be the protagonist, but there is, according to Pérez, a constant chorus of judges,
legislators, soldiers and police that act as a collective voice in the background of the
narrative, determining the destiny of the poor paisano’s life.85
The concern to present Fierro’s life and body in such a realistic manner is how
Hernández captures his biopolitical condition before the law. In the traditional sense,
the gauchesque was a political-literary genre where the political aspect was transcribed
directly into the literary through the patriotic voices and words of caricature gauchos;
whereas in Martín Fierro we encounter a voice that transcribes within itself the story
of the same life and body that give it utterance. In this case, the political is therefore
indirectly inserted in his voice as it is carried along in the story of Fierro’s life and in
the destiny of his body as a political subject. Political matters are never directly
discussed like previous works of the genre do; there is only song, the telling of a life.
The couplet between politics and the literary in Martín Fierro is expressed through the
ontological definition of his body in relation to the law: first soldier, followed by
deserter and bandit. In short, just as we can say biopolitics is the couplet of life and
politics, we can likewise say that in Fierro’s narrative, the political-literary aspect of
his song, forges a link between his life and politics—an act carried out in the
expression of his voice and body working in conjuncture. The political is expressed
through his body’s subjection to and abuse by the law. For this reason, I believe
Martín Fierro is a wholly unique work in the gauchesque genre. Hernández breaks
127
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
with the genre by giving Fierro a voice and a real political body; he adds bio to the
political-literary.
2.2 People and people
Fierro’s life and body represent, as Shumway notes, “the story of all gauchos .
. . [where] his task is not only identifying himself but speaking for the people” (266).
For this reason, Fierro, in telling his story, refers to the paisano or el gaucho in
general, implying a first person plural. He does so when he speaks of the Golden Age
of gaucho living, before being taken by the state and pressed into military service:
Yo he conocido esta tierra
en que el paisano vivía
y su ranchito tenía
y sus hijos y mujer…
Era una delicia el ver
cómo pasaba sus días. (La ida 115)
We continue to see the plurality of Fierro’s speech in his description of various
gauchos’ daily chores: one tying his spurs, another singing as he goes, one saddling
his horse and another securing his lasso and whip. He is saying, “This is how we used
to live”:
Éste se ata las espuelas,
se sale el otro cantando,
uno busca un pellón blando;
éste, un lazo; otro, un rebenque;
128
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
y los pingos, relinchando,
los llaman dende el palenque. (La ida 116)
Then the Golden Age is shattered by the intervention of the law, and the gaucho is
forced on the run:
Estaba el gaucho en su pago
con toda seguridá;
pero aura… ¡barbaridá!,
la cosa anda tan fruncida,
que gasta el pobre la vida
en juir de la autoridá. (La ida 120)
It is here, where Fierro tells of what happens to the gaucho when caught by the
alcalde, that he shifts from the suggestive “we” to an unequivocal second person
“you”: “[Y] que usté quiera o no quiera, / lo mandan a la frontera / o lo echan a un
batallón” (La ida 121). The direct “you,” in referring to the reader at the moment of
social injustice, means the gauchos’ misfortunes could easily be the possible
misfortunes of an entire people before the law.86 Fierro is saying “this is what can
happen to you, you could just as easily be sent to the frontier or forced into a
battalion.” This all-inclusive voice is what leads Pablo Subieta to suggest that Martín
Fierro is not a man, but a class and a race, “casi un pueblo” (almost a people).87
Fierro’s body as representative of the people, the body of a people, is
imbedded with political undertones suggesting his excluded status. “Any interpretation
of the political meaning of the term people,” notes Agamben, “ought to start from the
129
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
peculiar fact that in modern European languages this term always indicates also the
poor, the underprivileged, and the excluded” (Means 29). Fierro, in La ida, clearly
represents the people in that he embodies the potential all people share to be politically
excluded—that excluded political subject necessary for nation-building. On the other
hand, as Agamben goes on to explain, there is a duality in the term people, split
between the body politic and the body of the excluded—something very strongly
implied in Latin languages such as Italian’s popolo and Spanish’s pueblo, as well as
their adjacent adjectives populare and popular, whose Latin roots imply citizenry as
well as an inferior class at the same time:88
It is as if, in other words, what we call people was actually not a unitary
subject but rather a dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles:
on the one hand, the People as a whole and as an integral body politic
and, on the other hand, the people as a subset and as fragmentary
multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies; on the one hand, an
inclusive concept that pretends to be without remainder while, on the
other hand, an exclusive concept known to afford no hope; at one pole
the total state of the sovereign and integrated citizens and, at the other
pole, the banishment—either court miracles or camp—of the wretched,
the oppressed, and the vanquished. (Means 31)
On this basis, Agamben notes that already within the word people, we can recognize
what he considers to be the conceptual pair that defines the category of the original
political structure, upon which foundation the sovereign state forms itself; namely,
130
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
upon the “sifting out” of naked life (people)—or life stripped bare of its rights, from
the life of political existence (People), or the citizen. Thus in the word people we find
a teetering between exclusion and inclusion. Agamben then concludes regarding this
split in biopolitical terms, the point where the life and body of the individual becomes
an issue of politics, and where politics comes to inform the very nature of life:
[T]he constitution of the human species into a politic comes into being
through a fundamental split and that in the concept of people we can
easily recognize the conceptual pair identified earlier as the defining
category of the original political structure: naked life (people) and
political existence (People) . . . the concept of people always already
contains within itself the fundamental biopolitical fracture. It is what
cannot be included in the whole of which it is a part as well as what
cannot belong to the whole in which it is always already included.
(Means 32)
To complete our understanding of Martín Fierro’s embodiment of the people,
we may therefore consider the first part, La ida, as the expression of his body as the
people, the excluded and the oppressed. In the second part, La vuelta, however, we
may interpret Fierro’s return to civilization and his integration back into Argentine
society emblematic of the People, as he becomes part of the included and integral
body politic. With the rapid demographic, social, and technological changes of
modernity, there is simply no more room in society for the gaucho in the traditional
sense of the vagabond and free roamer that we find in La ida. Written seven years
131
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
after the first part, the world has become considerably calmer, the frontier in control.
Roca’s “Conquest of the Desert” comes to a conclusion just a month after La vuelta’s
publication. The mistreatment of gauchos in the frontier wars, criticized in part one,
has now become a thing of the past. Yet gauchos still remain on the political margin of
Argentine society. In the advancing liberal economy, Hernández determines the
gaucho’s place in society. Instead of rebellion, we now have concession. Given that
Argentina is an agricultural nation, the “hijo natural” of the country, argues
Hernández, with his knowledge of the countryside, should be included, protected as a
resource to help develop the agricultural wellbeing of the country. What was a cry for
social justice in the first part, the work’s iconoclast spirit, as Martínez Estrada calls
it—the antigovernment and antipolitical protest,89 now in La vuelta becomes a how-to
handbook for the gaucho’s integration and place in society as a citizen, as part of the
People.90
Yet to do so, Hernández must tie strings to Fierro and this time employ him as
a puppet. Fierro must be and must say precisely what he is not; and so, in La vuelta we
have, as Shumway notes, “the virtual disappearance of Martín Fierro as a possible man
of flesh and blood; so intent is Hernández on proclaiming moral values that he
preempts his character, forcing him to say what Hernández wants to say and not what
would render him convincing” (285-6). Instead of a free roamer of the pampa, he must
now, as Hernández advocates in La vuelta, work—integrate himself in the workforce
of the agricultural sector.
132
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Part narrative, part moral lecture, the second part argues that through educating
the gaucho with good books, as Hernández states in his prologue (and implying a selfpromotion of La vuelta), the gaucho should be taught that all honorable work is the
way to improve their wellbeing.91 In a voice that is more a renewed Hernández than
the old Fierro, Martín Fierro, in La vuelta, having miraculously encountered his lost
children, gives them advice, recognizing that in the new economically liberal
Argentina,
El trabajar es la ley
porque es preciso alquirir . . .
Debe trabajar el hombre
para ganarse su pan. (La vuelta 345)
All men should work, and by working they are in accordance with the law and thereby
admitted as productive members of society. The man who once rebelled against the
law and lived in disobedience, is now contending for adherence and obedience to the
law, which means to work.
Another reason for the shift from resistance and rebellion to concession and
defeat in Martín Fierro, between the publication of La ida and that of La vuelta some
seven years later, has to do with the changes in Hernández’ personal life as well.
Though I certainly am making no claim to interpret the life of the author (and his
intentions) in relation to that of his character in absolute terms, the parallel between
Fierro and Hernández is a long discussed topic in Hernandian scholarship, and indeed
forms an integral part to our understanding of the work.
133
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Hernández and his Fierro suggest a relationship where the life of the creator
and that of his creation seem to fall into one another, trapped in a sort of reciprocating
mise en abyme, where fiction mimics reality and reality comes to inform fiction. To
rapidly highlight this phenomenon, we must remember that Hernández himself wrote
the first part of Martín Fierro as an exiled man, an outlaw who had been on the run in
Uruguay and southern Brazil. Hernández, a journalist and a long-time critic of
President Sarmiento, had been a victim of censorship by Sarmiento’s government,
having his newspaper El Río de La Plata shut down. Throwing his cards in with the
provincial movement, Hernández fled to support the caudillo in an uprising. Upon
failure, he subsequently found himself, much like Fierro, an exile. Hence in the La ida
we have author and character, two bandits, on the fringe of the law, engaged in
rebellion against the State. Hernández, the man of letters and his Fierro, the illiterate
gaucho, mark a relationship where, for the first time in the history of the gauchesque,
there is briefly “a collusion between letrado and rural outlaw whereby one could serve
as a metaphor for the other . . . and this relationship would not be repeated in
Argentina culture. The collusion was possible since both letrado and outlaw were
subjects “before the law”” (Dabove 167).
By the time he writes La vuelta, however, life had drastically changed for
Hernández. He himself had gone from the marginalized to the integrated, from a
subject before the law, to one in accordance to it. No longer in conflict with the
Argentine government, Hernández’ life had experienced a drastic change. Having
returned to Buenos Aires in 1875, Hernández, now with a calmer life and a family,
134
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
became a successful business man, first as a land agent and then on the board of a
mortgage bank.92 Essentially, he contributed to the same problem of land
concentration in the hands of elite landowners he had once condemned. Likewise, no
longer the provincial rebel, Hernández had become a civil servant, and was even
elected senator to the province of Buenos Aires. In short, Hernández’ return from exile
and integration into Argentina’s liberal economy and politics, becomes Fierro’s return
as well in La vuelta.
In the La ida we have a man whose actions, words, body and morals all
coincide in a believable character, one so believable he even seems to take control of
Hernández at times, as Borges suggests, such as the case of the episode of Fierro’s
cruel murder of the negro, where the internal logic of the fictional character pushes
Hernández beyond his conscious intentions even at the risk of the reader’s sympathies
towards Fierro as a victim or hero.93 In La vuelta, however, Hernández pushes back,
forcing Fierro to be and say what he is not, forcing him to concede to the law and
economic liberalism just as he himself has. For this reason Estrada states that in the
first part, Hernández is Martín Fierro, and in the second, Martín Fierro is Hernández.94
Fierro had in fact become so real, so much a part of Hernández, that as senator, he was
referred to as “el senador Martín Fierro,” and even signed his name as such.95
Hernández and his Fierro present a perfect example of life and art transcribed one onto
the other. Hernández’ passage from marginalized people to integrated People marks
Fierro’s passage as well, a passage that more than anything, is truly a defeat. National
triumph means personal defeat for Fierro and Hernández.
135
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Fierro’s journey from the excluded people to the included People, the negation
of everything he is during the transition from part one of Martín Fierro—his ida or
sojourn out to the fringe of the law, to part two—his vuelta or return back to the realm
of sovereign law, marks the contradiction and aporia that the term people, according to
Agamben, implies every time it is brought into play on a political stage. Fierro, in
becoming the People, must shake off the bandit and abolish everything he was prior as
the people, and in this sense, he defines the road to Argentine “peopleness” and
national identity, for people
is what always already is and what, as well as what has yet to be
realized. It is the pure source of identity and yet it has to redefine and
purify itself continuously according to exclusion, language, blood, and
territory. It is what has in its opposite pole the very essence that it itself
lacks; its realization therefore coincides with its own abolition; it must
negate itself through its opposite in order to be. (Means 32)
Within this parameter, Agamben associates the split and conflictive meaning of the
term people with the aporias of workers movements, which at once turn towards the
people while trying to abolish it.96 In other words, a workers’ movement defends the
people by eliminating class difference marked by the People. For Agamben, the
fracture in the word people is a more original split for popular conflict, civil war and
revolution, than enemy and friend, suggesting an incessant civil war that at once
divides and keeps [a nation] united.97 Thus, what Marx calls class struggle, is nothing
other than the civil conflict that divides all people, one which can only come to an end
136
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
when people and People coincide in a classless society, where people and People are
on equal civil and legal terms.
I do not believe, however, the second part of Martín Fierro represents a
Marxist workers’ movement. In La vuelta there is no argument for workers’ rights and
equality, save a discourse for the right to work and receive citizenship within this
capacity. Indeed, Hernández does not attack the class system. His concern is to simply
gain the most basic human rights for the gaucho, who should, as he concludes in the
second part, have a house, a school, a church, and rights. 98 To do so, he must become
a worker. In effect, Hernández is advocating for the change of the juridical legal status
of the gaucho, from the abused soldier and excluded bandit, to an integrated worker
citizen with basic legal rights. Only in this sense does Fierro go from people to People.
However, it is as if this comes at a price of give and take. On the social economical
level, in terms of class, his transition from people to People must remain incomplete,
as he will have to submit to the landowning elite. His gaining of legal rights is
obtained through the subjection to a subversive economic liberalism.
We may, in the context of people, come to one last conclusion. In this regard, I
am referring to the demographics of the book’s success. It is interesting to note that
Hernández’ targeted audience for La ida, as he implies in the prologue, is the lettered
elite. As he explains, Martín Fierro is not like Fausto; it is not like the burlesque story
of a gaucho who has visited the wonders of the city who then goes back to the
countryside to refer to other gauchos what he has seen, but the story of the gaucho’s
life in the country side, of his hardships and “los azares de su vida de gaucho” (La ida
137
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
106). Hernández’ intention for Martín Fierro is that the true story of the gaucho living
in the campaña reach those in the city. He could not have, however, miscalculated any
further from the real outcome of the first part’s publication. Published November 28,
1872, the first edition of El gaucho Martín Fierro received limited critical attention
from Buenos Aires, but in the rural countryside it was a booming success. For the first
time in the history of the gauchesque, which was a genre read amongst the literate
urban class, the book became popular amongst real gauchos themselves—many of
whom, due to illiteracy, would memorize parts of the poem from those who could
read, thus integrating the written work into their own oral tradition.
To illustrate the impact of the poem on real gauchos, the Uruguayan poet Silva
Valdés narrates that as a child, he tried reading Fausto to a group of gauchos in the
mess hall of an estancia. When he was done, one of the gauchos told him, “¡Eso es
cosa de dotores! Oiga esto, que es cosa de gauchos…” and he began to recite by
memory various sextillas of Martín Fierro. From then on, Valdés only read Martín
Fierro to the gauchos, and concluded that in those days, Fausto’s place was the sitting
room and the desk, whereas Martín Fierro’s was the mess hall. He goes on to explain
that now, in Argentina, Fausto continues on the desk, but Martín Fierro occupies the
whole house.99
Certainly to Hernández’ surprise, in less than two years the book went through
seven editions (something unprecedented in Latin America at the time), and parts of
the poem were printed and reprinted in newspapers throughout Argentina and
Uruguay. A testament to Hernández’ realistic portrayal of the gaucho, the popularity
138
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
of the book amongst gauchos was due to the fact that they related to the work because
it accurately “recounted in their own language the alienation, hardship, and frustration
that were constants of their existence” (Shumway 277).
For this reason, Hernández, recognizing the first part’s popularity amongst
gauchos, now destines La vuelta specifically to gauchos, explaining how the book can
help instruct them to live right in society, through the institutions of family, religion,
education, and work. In as much as he misjudged his preconceived target audience in
La ida, so too does he erroneously presume who will be attracted to La vuelta. The
true audience certainly was not the same gauchos who could be found reciting the first
part. The patronizing tone, the long moral discourses and preachy voice in the second
part, were simply too high and mighty for the common gaucho. If anything, the book
gained more respect amongst the lettered elite at the time, as it advocated the same
national project of which they were a part.
La ida, therefore, whose subject is the downtrodden people, though intended to
call the attention of the included urban elite (the People), only attracted the people
whom it represented, those who could sympathize and truly understand Fierro’s lot in
life. On the other hand, La vuelta, in instructing its subject how to “return” to the
nation and become the People, was unable to connect with the people for whom it was
intended and, instead, found appreciation amongst those already considered the
People.
In closing, the relationship of contradiction between La ida and La vuelta is
congruent to the very contradicting split implied in the term people. Borrowing from
139
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Andermann, we can say that the first part of Martín Fierro is concerned with the
dispute over the usage of his body in war and its consequential social interpretation
into banditry, whereas the second part disputes the use of his cadaver.100 In La vuelta,
the gaucho from La ida is dead; Fierro must deny himself, cease to be who he was and
become the only thing society will accept him to be: a worker. Thus the second part
disputes the usage of his cadaver that is left behind. As the people, though excluded
and mistreated, Fierro could still resist and fight to live free of legal oppression,
whereas his surrender and integration into Argentine society, his transition to
becoming the People, means he is the defeated cadaver that must be what society
demands of him, integrated into the system he once fought, a sort of living dead, a
puppet on a string—the drone worker bee in a hive. Cruz was not the only one left
behind dead on the frontier in La vuelta; the Fierro that returns is in no way the Fierro
that sojourned out.
2.3 The Levas as the Exception
Without the frontier in Martín Fierro, observes Pablo Ansolabehere, we would
have no story; Fierro and his “pena estrordinaria,” his pain, his sorrow and his shame,
all have their origin in the frontier, a source that both begins and ends with
suffering.101 Yet frontier can be and is defined in so many different ways; it can be a
political border between two countries, a space were two cultures meet or a fringe
space where so called civilization simply comes to an end.
Most importantly, and often overlooked in frontier studies, is the definition of
frontier as a wholly political space, a space where bodies are regulated by an
140
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
encroaching state power, included and excluded. In the case of Martín Fierro, we have
in a sense, two frontier spaces. The first, as Estrada has insisted, is the frontier as the
natural habitat of the gaucho, an intermediary space between city and toldos (Indian
camps), with elements of both civilization and barbarity, where fortines are present,
but also the rural zones where initially Martín Fierro lives and works in peace and
happiness, and where later he will return to roam as a bandit. 102 I would suggest that
this frontier is a private one, one where Fierro lives out his private life with his family
and works on his own small plot of private land, before having it all disrupted.
The second frontier in Martín Fierro is the one identified by Ansolabehere.
This is an invasive frontier, and certainly the most present in the poem. It is not the
natural habitat of the gaucho, save a condemnation to which he is submitted.
Ansolabehere describes this frontier as a state-military space where the gaucho is
destined to war, a state institution even, and one that inundates the rural zones where
gauchos live, invading their private lives and forcing them into the public service of
war. Once introduced, this frontier determines the entire ideological narrative of the
poem.103
According to Ansolabehere, the government, through its representatives in
Martín Fierro, intervenes in his private life, inserting him as another cog in the
machinery of the state. This begins with forced displacement, taking him from his
natural habitat and family—the first frontier in the poem—and sending him to that
other space, un “espacio estatal” (space of the state), which is the [second] frontier.104
The first frontier, a sort of paradise, contrasts dramatically with the hellish second
141
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
frontier. Thus the gaucho goes from a frontier inhabitant who initially occupies a
private and rural space, to one who forcedly comes to inhabit a space of the state as a
figure of the state: first a soldier, then the bandit.
The legal process by which Fierro is taken from his home and sent to the
frontier was known as the levas, or draft quotes. This political practice of forcedly
drafting gauchos into frontier military service has a long history in Argentina,
spanning almost the entire nineteenth century. Beginning with the struggle for
independence in 1810, a rigorous draft was implemented, called the “Proclama y
reglamentación de la milicia,” which included all men between the ages of eighteen
and forty who were considered vagrants and vagabonds. This law would continue in
some form or other to maintain Rosas’ private gaucho army throughout his reign.
Upon the fall of Rosas, two more pieces of legislature would appear: La Ley de Levas
(The Law of Draft Quotes) in 1858 and the Código Rural in 1865, both of which
would build upon the drafting tradition.105 Though not entirely congruent, it is
interesting to note the relationship between these draft laws and Rama’s political
stages of the gauchesque. Just as the gaucho’s body is being used by the political to
fight wars, so to do the lettered elite employ his voice as a patriotic tool to rationalize
the political endeavors the drafts are being implemented to achieve (i.e. independence
or the Paraguayan War). To the Argentine public, the gaucho’s body is used to fight
for ideals that coincide with his patriotic voice in the gauchesque.
In reality, the gaucho felt not political nor ideological sense of duty. As
Hudson in his Tales of the Pampa puts it, the “gaucho is, or was, absolutely devoid of
142
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
any sentiment of patriotism and regarded all rulers, all in authority from the highest to
the lowest, as his chief enemies, and the worst kind of robbers, since they robbed him
not only of his goods but of his liberty” (247).106 The government was oppressive, and
the gaucho’s liberty was lost first and foremost due to the imposition of a draft law not
in harmony with the law. Forced conscription of soldiers for the frontier army,
explains Estrada, consisted of almost the entire armed forces at the time, and “revestía
siempre tal carácter de arbitrariedad y de violencia, que despertaba en el hombre del
campo un espíritu de repulsión” (I: 198). The draft was a despised power that abused,
discriminated, a law that in fact marked a suspension of the law due to a continual
state of war: “Argentina suffered perpetual warfare from its struggle for independence
through the federalization of Buenos Aires in 1880. . . . Civil wars, continual battles
against fierce Pampean Indian tribes, and conflicts with Spain, Brazil, Paraguay,
France, England, and José Artigas in the Banda Oriental, took an immense human and
economic toll” (Slatta Vanishing Frontier 126). Duncan Beretta and Markoff explain
the result of such constant conditions of political and civil unrest meant “a kind of
continuous warfare . . . which was also systematic” (36). Continuous warfare required
the incessant need for soldiers, meaning the constant need for a systematic draft that
preyed on the poor and the marginalized. The continuous warfare in the world of
Martín Fierro excludes, first directly the Pampean indigenous groups being attacked,
and secondarily, the gauchos who are pitted against them in war. Therefore, two
undesirables are violently and systematically eliminated.
143
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
This is readily observable in Fierro’s own inscription into the military. He is
systematically taken by a force of law that is in opposition to the law and to Fierro’s
constitutional rights. Since the state of exception is “not the chaos that precedes order
but rather the situation that results from its suspension” (HS 18), it is important to
point out that Fierro inhabits a constituted nation of laws and order. As Slatta explains,
“The resulting legislation [El Código Rural], passed in November 1865, proved even
more restrictive . . . The code’s broadly construed vagrancy clause utterly nullified for
rural citizens those civil rights granted under the national Constitution of 1853”
(“Rural Criminality” 459). In an article published by Hernández himself in El Río de
la Plata on August 20th, 1869—a period of his journalistic writing for gaucho rights
that would lead to Martín Fierro some three years later— he states that “el servicio de
fronteras es inconstitucional, arbitrario, y que no puede exigirse con justicia, del
habitante de nuestra compaña” (200).107 He goes on to explain that the gaucho “no ha
conocido hasta ahora los beneficios de un orden regular y constitucional . . .” because,
we may infer, the constant legal irregularities of war in the provinces have become the
norm, “como un fenómeno de vida” (203). It is the continuous pressure of war that
keeps the laws in flux—and the state of exception in effect.108 The ley de levas is the
primary evidence of the exception in constant play, and the central outcry of injustice
found in Martín Fierro, an outcry already summarized by Hernández years prior when
he asks in his newspaper if the government believes it is licit to part ways with the law
and assault civilians’ rights: “¿O cree el gobierno que es lícito alguna vez apartarse de
la ley, desviarse de la justicia y atentar contra los derechos del ciudadano?” (201).
144
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
The ley de levas is no law at all, as Hernández notes, save its suspension in a
state of exception, where Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty is verified:
sovereign is he who decides the exception.109 The levas, as a law of exception, creates
“an anomic space in which what is at stake is a force of law without law (force-oflaw)” (State of Exception 39). Fierro is the exception to the law, a victim to a lawless
force acting is if it were law, as we find when he is taken by the government from his
home and family.110 Fierro makes it clear that he is not a vagrant and so not eligible
for the draft:
Tuve en mi pago en un tiempo
hijos, hacienda y mujer;
pero empecé a padecer,
me echaron a la frontera. (La ida 122)
He is a sedentary gaucho, “Sosegao vivía en mi rancho, / como el pájaro en su nido”
(La ida 122), with a ranch and a family, not a vagrant; yet he is made an exception to
the rule and sent to the frontier anyway.
The episode of his capture occurs in the pulpería (a sort of trading post
saloon), where Fierro is playing his guitar and singing when the juez de paz enters
with his draft posse:
cantando estaba una vez
en una gran diversión,
y aprovechó la ocasión
como quiso el juez de paz:
145
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
se presentó y ay no más
hizo una arriada en montón. (122)
Fierro tells us that the real vagrants in the pulpería are the first to escape: “Juyeron los
más matreros / y lograron escapar” (122). Fierro likewise wants to make a run for it,
but as he says, “soy manso y no había por qué. / Muy tranquilo me quedé / y ansí me
dejé agarrar” (La ida 122). Fierro claims he remained calm and did not flee because
there was no reason. His having “no reason” to flee is based on the fact that Fierro is
expecting the “normal” application of the draft law, and since he is not a vagrant, he
presumes he has nothing to worry about. However, and unbeknownst to him, his
relation to the law is not application, but suspension and exception, which “is a kind of
exclusion,” remarks Agamben. “What is excluded from the general rule is an
individual case. But the most proper characteristic of the exception is that what is
excluded in it is not, on account of being excluded, absolutely without relation to the
rule” (HS 17). Fierro’s individual case, the man before the law, is a relation to the law
through the exception. He may in effect be taken regardless of being a vagrant or not.
We then find out the real reason Fierro is taken by the draft party. Simply put,
he did not vote for the right man in the last elections:
A mí el juez me tomó entre ojos
en la última votación . . .
y él me dijo que yo servía
a los de la esposición. (La ida 124)
146
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
The anomic space that is created in the state of exception, the conditions where
anything is possible, means the judge may do as he pleases, enforce a “force of law”
under any pretext he finds satisfying.
Emilio Carrilla explains that in order to create the authentic, true character in
Martín Fierro, Hernández does not refer to a gaucho of the past, but to one of the
present, because “la realidad que vale es la inmediata, caliente, viva” (70).
Hernández’s social and political concerns for the wellbeing of the gaucho were
immediate and contemporary matters of his time, meaning around 1870, or, as Carilla
more specifically points out, during Sarmiento’s presidency from 1868 to 1874.111 It is
by this time, after more than sixty years of forced military service under rural codes
and draft laws (more if we were to consider Spanish colonial practices), that the
practice of draft laws has reached an extreme sense of exception.
In what may resound with the Argentine Dirty War and the desaparecidos, or
with the negation of the right to trial to Guantanamo Bay detainees in the United
States’ War or Terror, as early as 1853, a decree empowered national guard
commanders to enter private homes and draft for two years any male there not in a
local unit, though they usually served indefinitely, or more often until they deserted.
During the coming years, even the ceremonial trials that had been previously required
to judge vagrants and “suspicious people,” became superfluous.112 All that was needed
for conviction was a verbal testimony from a judge; no appeals were allowed, and
though towards 1870 the unpopular war with Paraguay was over, there was still a
constant demand for soldiers to occupy and defend the fortines on the frontier against
147
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Indian attacks.113 This meant rural police “could almost always “create” a vagrant and
send him off to fill the country’s conscription quota” (Slatta “Rural Criminality” 460).
By Fierro’s time, such boundless practices of the draft laws were anything but
exceptional and had undoubtedly become the norm. In 1872, the same year Martín
Fierro was published, a man by the name of José Ortubia, having been held for several
months based solely on suspicion, put his situation in the following context: “For the
poor, like me, constitutional guarantees are dead letters”.114 Like Fierro, Ortubia does
not realize that his relation to the law is the exception, and that furthermore, what
sustains the law is not its enforcement, save its suspension:
The statement “The rule lives off the exception alone” must therefore
be taken to the letter. Law is made of nothing but what it manages to
capture inside itself through the inclusive exclusion of the exceptio: it
nourishes itself on this exception and is a dead letter without it. . . . The
sovereign decision traces and from time to time renews this threshold
of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion,
nomos and physis, in which life is originarily excepted in law. (HS 27)
What for Ortubia signifies the dead letters of his constitutional rights, means
nourishment for the law, for without the exception, without the suspension of
Ortubia’s constitutional rights, the law cannot validate itself. Law is made of the
exception, strengthened as it captures inside itself Ortubia, Fierro, and any other body
included through its exclusion. Their lives, and especially Fierro’s, as demonstrated
148
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
throughout La ida, are the lives excepted in law. Only without their exclusion,
paradoxically, would the law be a dead letter.
We may therefore further presume, given what happens to Fierro, that even the
matreros in the draft episode who do escape from the pulpería, had at one point been
in the same position as Fierro: mansos and sedentary gauchos with families and land
unjustly taken from them, sent to the frontier, then turned deserters and bandits. Being
a gaucho matrerero in Martín Fierro, after all, is undoubtedly a cyclical creation of
the state, and in later pulpería episodes in the poem, Fierro will be the matrero who
flees. Thus we have a sort of never-ending creation of gauchos buenos turned by the
state into matrero bandits. Duncan Beretta and Markoff explain:
In short, wars, forced recruitment, the continuous expansion of great
estates, and the judicial repression of vagabonds continuously created
new wanderers and kept the old ones in movement. It is then not
unlikely that many people in these areas would have been vagrants at
least once in their lives, and that they would have shared social ties and
cultural norms with the nomadic sector of the population. (47)
In Martín Fierro, the people, the poor and marginalized—and here I am referring to
Agamben’s lower-cased “people”—are potentially subjected to the illegality or the
draft. Their lives are exposed to the state of exception, caught up in it; and as such,
their ontological and political status becomes bare life: the inhabitant of the state of
exception, the type of human existence made possible in a lawless space.
149
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Here it is important to point out just how systematic the draft was. The frontier
army was almost entirely comprised of rural criollos; the rural private spaces of the
frontier were emptied by the draft in order to fill the military spaces of the frontier.115
Cruz reports to Fierro:
Le alvertiré que en mi pago
ya no va quedando un criollo;
se los ha tragao el oyo,
o juido, o muerto en la guerra,
porque, amigo, en esta tierra
nunca se acaba el embrollo. (181)
As a whole, the urban population—here we may presume the People with a capital
P—was exempt.116 The draft represented an exception in the law that only targeted the
poor rural inhabitants (people) of the country, not the urban elite. Hernández protests
this fact in several articles in El Rio de la Plata. On August 19th, 1869, he writes:
Parece que las leyes protectoras no se hubieran hecho para el
territorio sino para la ciudad, asiento de las autoridades centrales, y que
éstas creyesen admirablemente desempeñada su misión con sólo
extender hasta ellas las garantías con que ampara la ley, el hogar del
ciudadano. (198)
Again just days later, on August 21st, he states:
Nuestros compatriotas de la compaña son perseguidos como
delincuentes que debieran caer bajo el duro peso de una ley implacable.
150
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Entretanto los hijos de la ciudad reposamos tranquilamente en
nuestro hogar inviolable.
¿Qué ley puede autorizar ese monstruoso privilegio y desoír el
clamor y la protesta hiriente de la campaña martirizada? (204)
The “monstrous law” directed at Argentina’s frontier inhabitants, but that saves city
dwellers, leads Hernández to beg the question: “¿Acaso la ley ha consentido que haya
hijos y entenados en el territorio argentino?” (199). “Hijos y entenados,” sons and
stepsons of the State—those citizens qualified for political life, and those excluded
from it and marked as bare life: Hernández detects the two possible relationships life
may have with the sovereign.
Agamben’s nuda vita, translated as bare life, naked life, and traced through his
genealogy of the Latin term homo sacer,117 is the original activity of sovereignty and
its consequential production of a biopolitical body. Through the exception, sovereign
power places biological life at the center of its calculations, where in the anomic space
created it may do with life as it pleases.118 For Agamben, the exception is the structure
of sovereignty, the negating force through which nations are built and maintained, and
most importantly “the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in
itself by suspending it” (HS 28). It is the process by which law, in its suspension,
threatens life by placing it on the fringe of the judicial order, abandoning the subject to
a threshold where life and law, inside and outside, become indistinguishable.119
Therefore, the nation in Martín Fierro, in its effort to establish sovereign
validity on the frontier and maintain it, internalizes the bodies of frontier subjects in its
151
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
exception where life, no longer possessing legal status or rights, may be killed with
impunity, or forced to the frontier military camps without any normal process of law.
This gives new meaning to the transition from gaucho to soldier in Martín Fierro, in
the sense that being the soldier substantiates being bare life. “In the official view,”
points out Slatta, “the frontier inhabitant was de facto the frontier soldier, so that even
private life had to be controlled by a “truly military regimen”” (Vanishing Frontier
133-34). As a frontier inhabitant, he is a soldier in potential, and therefore potentially
bare life: “the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially
homines sacri” (Agamben HS 84). Thus once made the soldier, his potential realized,
he truly becomes bare life.
2.4 The Fortín as the Camp
I believe the consumption of the gaucho’s private life by a military regime, his
pre-soldier life of peace on the pampa turned a living hell on the frontier, marks his
passage to consequently inhabit a space even more sinister: the camp. I am suggesting
here that the fortín to where Fierro is sent to serve can be interpreted as his
displacement to a form of concentration camp, where the bodies of bare life are
concentrated in one lawless location. Here I argue that the frontier military camps
were precisely that: camps.
In his compelling article, “The Archaeology of the Gaucho,” Facundo Gómez
Romero analyses the frontier army as a form of disciplining power, with methods such
as the stakes, whipping, the stocks, and public executions. He then interprets the
frontier outposts in terms of prisons, that given their architectonic structure and
152
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
surveillance system from the magrullo (watchtower), they represent an “imperfect”
version of Foucault’s panopticon.120 He refers to the forts as an imperfect panopticon
precisely because gaucho-soldiers themselves were made to keep watch from the
tower and not the cyclopean eye of power.121 Gauchos were to keep watch first for
Indian attacks, and second, for deserting comrades. Failure to fulfill duties as a
watchtower guard meant extreme forms of punishment, and abandonment from the
post or failure to fire their rifle in alarm of someone deserting could mean death.122
However, much more than an imperfect panopticon prison, the military fort
represents a faultless camp. The very element that makes the panopticon imperfect in
the fortín—a guard who is not a professional agent of power but the prisoners
themselves—in fact alludes to the state of exception and the camp. Agamben explains
that “[a]t the two extreme limits of the order, the sovereign and homo sacer present
two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative” (HS 84). The
first figure is the relation all man have with the sovereign in that they are potentially
homo sacer, and since bare life inhabits the sovereign exception where he may be
killed and not considered a homicide (by anyone), then likewise “homo sacer is the
one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns” (HS 84). In short, once corralled
in the military camp, gauchos, as homo sacer, are exposed before a force-of-law which
they are also burned to carry out.
Furthermore, real criminality has nothing to do with gauchos’ placement in the
military camps and therefore cannot be categorized as prisons nor power’s disciplining
techniques. Fierro himself is the perfect example of this. What qualifies him to be
153
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
displaced to the frontier camps is that he is poor, oppressed, the wretched and the
vanquished. He represents the opposing pole of what it means to be the politically
integrated People; he represents the excluded people, who are abandoned by the state
through “either court miracles or camp” (Means 3). We know Fierro was taken to the
fortín on the frontier without trial or conviction of any crime. The juez performs a
court miracle, and through his word alone Fierro and the others are assigned six month
to the military camps:
El juez nos jue a ploclamar
y nos dijo muchas veces:
—“Muchachos, a los seis meses
los van a revelar. (La ida 124)
Upon arriving to the forts, it becomes more and more clear that the court miracle has
assigned him to a form of concentration camp, where his conditions are dire at best.
Fierro explains that “a nadies le dieron armas” for their own protection (La ida 126).
The Coronel keeps the weapons locked up and swears he will hand them out when an
Indian invasion comes. When they are attacked, however, the gauchos must fight the
Indians without weapons, having to use their boleadoras and facones because as it
turns out, the rifles have no ammunition. As bare life, the welfare of the gauchosoldier’s body is neglected; they are not paid and are forced to beg:
Del sueldo nada les cuento, . . .
nosotros de cuando en cuando
solíamos ladrar de pobres;
154
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
nunca llegaban los cobres
que se estaban aguardando. (La ida 134)
Their hygiene is anything but healthy:
Y andábamos de mugrientos
que el mirarnos daba horror
le juro que era un dolor
ver esos hombres ¡por Cristo!
En mi perra vida he visto
una miseria mayor. (La ida 134)
It becomes immediately apparent the animal-like conditions of the gauchos. Their
humanity has been reduced to bare life, their lives’ ontological value placed
somewhere between human and animal. So Fierro and the others bark instead of beg
for charity in a state of misery that Fierro, in all his “dog life,” has never seen. To even
look at the gauchos, explains Fierro, is horrific, resounding perhaps with the effect
modern images of concentration camp refugees can have on a viewer.
So abandoned are the gauchos in the camp, that the only sustenance they are
allowed to acquire are the ñandú (wild ostriches) they are allowed to hunt, only in the
mornings. Yet this is apparently not enough. Poor, naked and starving is the gauchosoldier’s fortune in the military camps:
Afigúrese cualquiera
la suerte de este su amigo
a pie y mostrando el umbligo,
155
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
estropiao, pobre y desnudo. (La ida 135)
The image of the gauchos, poor and naked, showing each other their bellies,
summarizes the absolute refusal of any political care of the soldiers’ bodies. As Fierro
says, “Ni un pedazo de tabaco” do they give to the poor soldier, “y lo tienen de delgao
/ más lijero que un guanaco” (La ida 139). When Fierros finally does go to his
superior, humbly suggesting, “Tal vez mañana / acabarán de pagar,” the response he
receives is “—“Qué mañana ni otro día!”. . . / La paga ya se acabó, / Siempre has de
ser animal”” (La ida 137). Fierro will not be paid, he will continue to suffer and starve
because there is no political obligation to care for a body void of any rights. The major
defines him politically, stating he will always be an animal, always be haunted
throughout the poem as the excluded bare life of the sovereign exception—that
barbarous human tribute sacrificed to the state.123
Agamben identifies various other characteristics of the camp that mark the
fortín in Martín Fierro as such. First he distances camps from prisons, explaining that
the camps
were not born out of ordinary law, and even less were they the
product—as one might believe—of a transformation and a development
of prison law; rather, they were born out of the state of exception and
martial law.” (38)
There is no doubt that frontier military camps were first born from the unordinary
draft law, if not at least maintained by this lawless law we have already identified as
evidence of the state of exception. Second, I believe it is apparent that martial law is
156
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
related directly to both the draft laws and the frontier army camps, especially given the
continual state of warfare in nineteenth century Argentina. What further places the
fortines in the category of an Agambenian camp is that
[t]he camp is the space that opens up when the state of exception starts
to become the rule. In it, the state of exception, which was essentially a
temporal suspension of the state of law, acquires a permanent spatial
arrangement that, as such, remains constantly outside the normal state
of law. (Means 39)
The prolonged state of the draft laws and frontier wars means the state of exception
gradually became the rule, especially by Fierro’s time. The forts then become the
“special arrangement” outside the normal state of law, where sovereignty houses bare
life and does with it as it pleases.
Essentially, “the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception
and in the consequent creation of a space for naked life as such,” meaning we are
“facing a camp virtually every time that such a structure is created, regardless of the
nature of the crimes committed in it and regardless of the denomination and specific
topography it might have” (Means 41-42). As the materialization of a permanent state
of exception, any and everything may happen in the camp and no crime is really a
crime. The vilest act (masked as a punishment) to which the gaucho could be subject
in the camps, was torture. This included being “staked,” whipped, placed in the cepo
(stocks) or even execution. Fierro himself falls victim to the stakes, a form of torture
in which a man is laid prostrate on the ground, his members tied to stakes with wet
157
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
leather. As the leather then dries, his body is pulled and stretched out in excruciating
pain.
Having returned drunk to the fortín late at night, Fierro is caught trying to
sneak back in by the gringo (Italian immigrant) who was placed on guard duty. Not
recognizing Fierro, the gringo sounds the alarm and fires upon him, missing his target.
The commotion gets Fierro caught and in trouble with the major. When it is all over,
Fierro tells us: “quedó en su puesto el nación / y yo fui al estaquiadero” (142). Fierro’s
disdain for the gringo immigrants includes a bibliography of academic commentary in
and of itself. What concerns us here is the term he uses: “el nación.” The only time we
see the word nation in La ida is when Fierro refers to this immigrant he so despises,
literally calling him “the nation.” His disgust for the gringos lies in their lack of
equestrian skills, courage, and that “no sirven pa carniar” (La ida 142). They are
“delicaos” and “parecen hijos de rico. . . . / solo son güenos / pa vivir entre maricas”
(La ida 143). Yet beyond the fact that gringos lack everything Fierro considers to be
“manly” and of value for life on the pampas, a great part of his disdain lies in the fact
that the nation has made room for the immigrant while excluding its own native
criollo, the gaucho. Calling the gringo “el nación” is a critique of Sarmiento’s
immigration policies, which sought to Europeanize the Argentine population—a
biopolitical policy if ever there was one.124
This immigration policy sought to advance Argentina’s progress by inserting
Aryan and Anglo-European immigrants into Argentine society, thus engineering the
population with a “superior” race. Sarmiento’s positivist immigration efforts,
158
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
however, attracted more southern Europeans than anything, such as Italians.125
Regardless, we may consider this a precursor to politicized eugenics, and a racial
engineering that is seeking to replace Fierro’s blood, with a supposedly “better” one.
“No trate de economizar sangre de gauchos,” states Sarmiento in an 1861 letter to
Mitre. “Este es un abono que es preciso hacer útil al país. La sangre es lo único que
tienen de seres humanos” (Obras Completas XXV: 260-61). Gaucho blood, according
to Sarmiento, needs not be saved; it is useful to the country only as fertilizer to be
spilled over the land.126 His death is for the growth of the nation. Sarmiento’s
dehumanizing attitude toward the gaucho, one that favors the European immigrant for
nation-building, is why Fierro disdainfully calls the gringo “el nación”. Thus the
gringo gets a pat on his back for denouncing Fierro and remains in his post as the new
body upon which Sarmiento’s politics are forming the nation; while Fierro the gaucho,
the native criollo and the “hijo natural” of the country, is tortured and put in the
stakes, his blood replaced by the gringo he curses:
De la manos y las patas
Me ataron cuatro sinchones;
les aguanté los tirones
sin que ni un ¡ay! se me oyera,
y al gringo la noche entera
lo harté con mis maldiciones. (La ida 142)
Based on his own experience in the military camps, Fierro does not see a
correlation between the supposed function of the fortín and what it really is:
159
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Aquello no era servicio
ni defender la frontera:
aquello era ratonera
en que solo gana el juerte. (La ida 139)
In Fierro’s own words, life in the fortín is not military service nor is its function to
defend the frontier, for the military camps are nothing but mouse traps that capture and
imprison; they are traps that dehumanize the gauchos—the designated space on the
frontier where bare life is held. The fortín is a place where the strongest impose their
will and triumph; it is a camp which has no specific topography save it harbors the
conditions of a perpetual state of exception, where people move “about in a zone of
indistinction between the outside and the inside, the exception and the rule, the licit
and the illicit, in which every juridical protection had disappeared” (Means 40-41).
Could there be a more ideal space for the localization of the camp than the frontier? A
frontier is a territory already by definition a fringe space, a zone somewhere between
outside and inside, lawful and lawless. Thus I would suggest here that we may
consider the frontier in Martín Fierro as the zone of exception and continuous war,
and the fortín, which exists within that indeterminate frontier threshold of inside and
outside the law, functions as an assigned space of perpetual state of exception.
I would also like to suggest that the nineteenth century frontier in the Americas
also marks a zone of indistinction between the methods of power used in colonial
times and those marked by the emergence of the modern nation-state. Zilly notes that
during the nineteenth century many new nation-states in Latin America enforced
160
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
politics of conquest and colonization in their interior—such as the Argentine pampas,
the Brazilian sertão, and the Venezuelan llanuras—similar to those used by the
colonizing European powers in Africa, Asia, and previously in the Americas.127
For Mbembe, “the colony represents the site where sovereignty consists
fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law. . . and where “peace” is
more likely to take on the face of a “war without end”” (171). He goes on to note:
In the same context, colonies are similar to the frontiers. They are
inhabited by “savages.” The colonies are not organized in a state form
and have not created a human world. Their armies do not form a
distinct entity, and their wars are not wars between regular armies.
They do not imply the mobilization of sovereign subjects (citizens)
who respect each other as enemies. They do not establish a distinction
between combatants and noncombatants, or again between an “enemy”
and a “criminal.” It is thus impossible to conclude peace with them. In
sum, colonies are zones in which war and disorder, internal and
external figures of the political, stand side by side or alternate with each
other. As such, the colonies are the location par excellence where the
controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended—the zone
where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the
service of “civilization.” (172)
Frontiers share with colonies the characteristics of a state of exception in continual
warfare. However, I would suggest that beyond sharing this criteria with the colonies,
161
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
the frontier we find in Martín Fierro adds something else which is wholly a product of
the modern nation-state: the camp. The frontier is therefore in political flux between
colonialism and modernity.128
To arrive to my conclusion, we will turn to Hernández. In Rio de la Plata,
August 19, 1869, Hernández states:
Parece que lo menos que se quisiera fomentar en la población laboriosa
de la campaña o que nuestros gobiernos quisieran hacer purgar como
un delito oprobioso el hecho de nacer en el territorio argentino y de
levantar en la campaña la humilde choza del gaucho. (198)
Hernández’s observation here, I believe, captures various elements vital to our
understanding of the camps role in the modern nation-state. He explains that it would
seem like the government wishes to “purge” the ignominious crime of having simply
been born in the Argentine territory and constructed his humble shanty on the frontier.
In his statement we find the three elements that form the structure of the nation-state:
territory, order, and birth. Yet Hernández realizes that something is not working here.
Despite his birth in the nation’s territory, the gaucho is being purged as though his
existence were a crime. As Agamben explains, when the political system of the
modern nation-state founded its function on a determinate localization (territory) and a
determinate order (the state), it did so on the mediation of the automatic inscription of
life into citizenship by way of birth. However, birth as the new marker for inscription
into citizenry is synonymous to the inscription of bare life (birth is the pure biological
sense of life and not political, meaning for Agamben it may coincide with bare life).
162
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Thus bare life’s inscription into the nation-state’s configurations of power from birth
means an oscillation between inclusion byway of qualification as political life, or
inclusion byway of exclusion, which creates a rupture in the relation between territory,
order, and birth. Inscription of bare life into the state (order) means that a new space,
or territory, outside of the nation must open up.129 What is produced is the camp:
The political system no longer orders forms of life and juridical norms
in a determinate space; rather, it contains within itself a dislocating
localization that exceeds it and in which virtually every form of life and
every norm can be captured. . . . The camp is the fourth and inseparable
element that has been added to and has broken up the old trinity of
nation (birth), state, and territory. (Means 44)
Therefore, when Hernández accuses the government of purging the gaucho from the
State simply for having been born within the nation’s territory, it is because as bare
life—an unqualified political body—even his birth can be a crime; birth in the nation’s
territory cannot guarantee him citizenry nor the right to any rights. His naked life
ruptures the system of order, territory, and birth, and replaces them with inscription
into the state by way of the state of exception. Consequently, the camp is born from
this rupture and, as I have noted, the camp is made manifest in the fortín, a dislocating
localization that finds its home on the frontier. The fortín is the space where the
purging takes place. In short, the frontier in Martín Fierro can be seen a transitional
space between the colony and the modern nation-state; a threshold where the colony’s
163
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
characteristics of the state of exception are in play alongside modernity’s emerging
fourth element of the national trinity: the camp.
2.5 Creaturely Shame
Within his extensive bibliography dedicated to Martín Fierro, Ezequiel
Martínez Estrada, considered one of Argentina’s greatest essayists and literary critics,
identifies a Kafkaesque condition of existence in the poem; he locates in Fierro a sense
of isolation and helpless resignation beneath the weight of line after line of political
authorities piled upon his shoulders, the weight of which he cannot escape. All the
characters in Martín Fierro are extremely poor, comments Estrada, and there is a
redundancy of individual suffering, a tone of misery and an environment of laments
and misfortunes profoundly transmitted throughout the work; there is a sense of
abandonment in adversity and even a sense of impotence in resisting the abuses and
mistreatment that overwhelm the destitute.130 The misery in the poem, the “penas”
suffered by Fierro and the others can be traced to a long line of “predators,” and that
detrás de ellos hay otra fila de depredadores, detrás de ésta otra, cada
vez más elevada y poderosa, como si los recursos de apelación por esta
clase de calamidades estuvieran absolutamente vedados, a lo largo de
infinitas jerarquías como en La muralla china o en El castillo, de
Kafka. Quiénes sostienen al juez, al comandante, al comisario, no se
sabe ni se averigua; pero deben ser otros comandantes, jueces y
comisarios más influyentes, a su vez aparados por otros de mayor
influencia. (II: 279)
164
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Continually lurking in the poem, hovering above Fierro, is an endless chain of
command composed of judges, police commissioners, and commanders; and above
them, only more judges and police commissioners, each one more powerful and
influential than the last. It is under the weight of such a long line of political
corruption and bureaucracy that Fierro’s must resign himself to the ever-present and
almost omniscient authorities that determines his destiny.
Roggiano, in reference to Estrada’s observation, comments:
Estrada has been able to find in Martín Fierro a Kafkaesque concept of
existence: that of confinement and postponement without hope. Martín
Fierro is a displaced person, a social and political outlaw, a person alien
to his habitat; the others have violated his being like an impotent
creature or a mere object which is unnecessary and undesirable. (45)
It is precisely Fierro’s helpless condition as an “impotent creature”—his
“creatureliness”—that concerns us here. Martín Fierro projects a political world much
like that found in Kafka’s works, one where, as Eric L. Santner points out, “the law is
everywhere and nowhere” (22). Santner, in his On Creaturely Life, goes on to explain
that Kafka’s world, much as I have described Fierro’s world on the frontier, is a state
of exception:
In Kafka’s universe, the “natural historical” dimension of law that gives
rise to the allegorical sensibility comes to be registered as a chronic
state of agitation and disorientation, a perpetual state of exception
165
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
/emergency in which the boundaries of the law become undecidable.
(21)
In literature, the capturing of this chronic state of agitation, or the state of exception, is
what produces literary representations of “creaturely” characters and protagonists: “To
bring it to a formula, creaturely life is just life abandoned to the state of exception
/emergency, that paradoxical domain in which law has been suspended in the name of
preserving law” (Santner 22). Santner therefore draws a biopolitical conclusion to the
creaturely representation of existence so often identified in the works of Kafka, stating
that “[t]he “essential disruption” that renders man “creaturely,”” for Kafka and writers
like him, is “a distinctly political— or better, biopolitical— aspect” (12). What makes
the characters in Kafka creaturely is not their relationship to other animals nor their
location in a state of nature, save their proximity to other humans with political
authority that places them in a state of exception. Essentially, Santner’s argument for
creaturely life resides in Agamben’s state of exception, concluding that creaturely life
is simply the literary interpretation of Agamben’s notion of bare life.
It is precisely within this same parameter of creaturely life that Estrada
connects Kafka to Martín Fierro. Fierro and the other gaucho characters are
continually represented in this light, both in their struggles on the frontier and in the
military camp, and like in Kafka, their creatureliness is attributed to their status before
the law, as the subject caught up in a state of exception. Just as Santner’s thesis argues
that creatureliness in Kafka is the biopolitical existence of Agamben’s bare life, so too
is Fierro’s creatureliness this same biopolitical product of the state of exception. As
166
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
bare life, Fierro demonstrates the point where sovereignty places biology at the center
of its calculations, where the differentiation between the political and biological body
can no longer be identified.
For this reason, Estrada not only refers to the Kafkaesque in Fierro’s helpless
subjection to a never-ending line of abusive political authority, but also in regards to
biology. According to Estrada, Hernández, like Kafka in his The Penal Colony or The
Burrow, treats life like the biologist in his microscope beholds the fly and the toad, or
even human sperm. Hernández does not disfigure life, save with great delicacy and
tact he manifests life by illuminating it in foreshortened perspective and bringing it to
scale, demonstrating all its significant details and creases.131 Such scrupulous details
are brought to light in the faithful representation of Fierro’s creaturely existence in the
state of exception, embodied by the frontier and the military camps which are, like
Hannah Arendt’s description of concentration camps, “the laboratories in the
experiment of total domination, for human nature being what it is, this goal can be
achieved only under the extreme circumstances of human-made hell” (Essays 240).
“¡Quién aguanta aquel infierno!” cries out Fierro. “Si eso es servir al gobierno, / a mí
no me gusta el cómo” (127). Infierno, hell: perhaps one of the most consistent words
Fierro uses to describe the world he lives in: a hell that is human-made and thrust upon
him by the government.
Undoubtedly, there is something creaturely in the representation of the
characters in the “human-made hell” of Martín Fierro. In describing the life of the
errant gaucho matrero, Fierro states:
167
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Sin punto ni rumbo fijo
en aquella inmensidá,
entre tanta escuridá
anda el gaucho como duende; (161)
The gaucho roams the vastness of the pampa like a “duende” (best translated as an
imp, a goblin or gremlin), a form of life that harbors something human and at the same
something of the animal, producing a wholly monstrous figure.
Fierro is ultimately about the subject “before the law,” and in effect, gives us
the figure of what that subjects represents. We therefore find that it is in the moments
when he is most exposed to the law that his creatureliness becomes most apparent.
While on the run, after having deserted the fortín and killed both the negro and the
guapo, Fierro literally finds himself before the law when the police surround him. In
this instance Fierro gives us a truly creaturely description of himself: “Como a perro
cimarrón / me rodiaron entre tantos” (164). Like a feral dog he is surround by the
police, alluding to the familiar final scene of Kafka’s The Trial. Right before his
senseless execution, K. exclaims that he is being sentenced to death “like a dog!” The
novel then concludes with the following: “it seemed as though the shame was to
outlive him” (231). Here we find the creaturely in K.’s identification with his pathetic
situation “like a dog” before the law. However, as Santner explains, “Creatureliness is
also at issue in the reference to shame that immediately follows upon Josef K.’s
exclamation (“like a dog”) and provides the last words of the novel as we know it”
(22-23). Shame is therefore the psychological effect of being creaturely, the trauma
168
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
suffered by one before the law, by one subjected to the state of exception. We
encounter this same sense of shame in Fierro’s experience with the law. At every turn
Fierro’s becoming, his being, is marked by helplessness before the law, which leads to
shame. His becoming the soldier and his subsequent being the outlaw are humiliating
experiences for him, shameful even—the psychological condition of bare life. In
Martín Fierro, “The will of the government is cruel,” explains Roggiano, “the illegal
draft, a source of mockery and degradation; the outpost, a chain of injustices and the
most humiliating of infamies” (44). Citing a nineteenth century governor, Slatta
explains: “Manuel Dorrego, who became provincial governor in 1828, condemned the
levas, or draft quotas, as an evil that “demoralizes and humiliates the people” (127).
The “illegal” draft and life on the outposts are the expressions of a cruel government
that demoralizes and humiliates the subject, rendering it creaturely not only on a
physical plane of one who is made animal-like, but also on a psychological plane
where the creaturely is he who has suffered the trauma of shame like an abused
animal.
This is the extraordinary pena that Fierro carries with him throughout the
poem. Fierro’s greatest concern, and the reason why he sings about his life, is to relate
to us his penas: his pain, his sorrow and his shame suffered at the hands of the
government. A versatile word in Spanish, pena implies a range of meanings. In
Hernández’ work, when Fierro tells us, “Ninguno me hable de penas, / porque yo
penando vivo…” (La ida 115), he is not only stating that he lives in sorrow, in pain
and in suffering, but that he also lives in shame. Within this complex word Fierro is
169
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
alluding to his embarrassment before his hopeless situation. His inability to control his
destiny at the hands of the law, as a “real” man would, is shameful.
I would reason this is why, after he deserts the outpost and finds he has lost his
land and family, he swears to be the most ruthless bandit and gaucho matrero possible.
Ashamed, and realizing all he has lost, facing a future that means a life on the run,
Fierro proclaims: “Yo juré en esa occasion / ser más malo que una fiera!” (La ida
146). He does not let the reader down, and in fact proves himself to be meaner than a
wild beast to a point of cruelty that the reader cannot condone. I am speaking of the
episode in the pulpería where Fierro murders the negro. It would seem that here, an
ashamed Fierro rages against his own helplessness by asserting his supposed
superiority over someone whom he and society has deemed as inferior to his own cast.
To overcome his shame, Fierro is set on shaming the negro at the pulpería. It is
important to note that before he murders the black man, he first seeks to embarrass
him through insults. A man who has been unable to keep his own wife, Fierro insults
the negro’s girlfriend first. Through a play on words, he calls the negra a cow, saying
“[v]a…ca…yendo gente al baile” (La ida 151). After more insults to his mujer, and
several more racist comments directed at the negro himself, Fierro and his victim
engage in a knife fight, where Fierro emerges as the victor and the negro is left behind
dead and crumpled like a sack of bones.
Shumway explains that “to prove that he is not entirely impotent, Fierro must
insult and kill, choosing as his victim people he views as his racial inferiors. So
reduced are his pride and circumstances that only in violence can he affirm himself”
170
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
(273). Perhaps most disturbing about this episode is that afterwards it appears Fierro
feels little remorse, neither toward the dead man nor his now wailing girlfriend who
kneels over his dead body. He describes her laments as a “bellowing wolf,” to which
Fierro’s only response is he would like to give her a slap to shut her up. Instead, he
says with a sense of disgust, “Limpié el facón en los pastos” (La ida 155), and on he
rode. Perhaps what is most shocking to the reader is that Fierro’s own cruelty mimics
that of the cruel government to whose actions he has been a victim, though he seems
to be oblivious to this irony. He shames the negro as he has been shamed, reduces his
girlfriend to a creaturely state: like a wolf she howls in her state of hopelessness
against what has befallen her, in a creaturely condition similar to that hopelessness in
which Fierro had lived at the outpost.
In regard to this episode, Shumway notes:
If we confine ourselves to the political, the scene suggests how much
society’s mistreatment of Fierro has brutalized and alienated him,
making him a criminal of the most vile sort. . . . Whether so intended or
not, the scene reveals extraordinary psychological perception into
Fierro’s need for violence as a means of denying his inability to control
his own destiny. Although the fight and murder lend uncertainty to
Hernández’s political agenda while risking loss of the reader’s
sympathy, this scene more than any other makes Fierro believable.
(273)
171
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
The loss of control over his destiny, for a gaucho who prides himself in his freedom
and carefree life, is perhaps the most shameful fate he can face. Losing his wife and
family, as a man, is perhaps the other misfortune that diminishes any trace of pride
Fierro once had.
Fierro is not alone in his creaturely shame. When he joins up with Cruz, the
two gauchos find they share a common pena. Cruz explains to Fierro that he too has
hopelessly suffered cruelty at the same hand of that long line of political predators.
Once Cruz had had a beautiful china (girl) whom he deeply loved: “¡La pucha, que la
quería!” (La ida 172). When a commander of the militia takes notice of her, his lust
leads him to find any excuse to separate Cruz from her. He begins to employ Cruz “de
chasque,” having him run errands and deliver messages for the military that take him
to the farthest corners of the frontier. Though the commander treats Cruz like a friend,
the gaucho explains that he did not trust him, and since “era el gefe,” Cruz’s situation
is hopeless, because “ya se ve, / no podía competir yo” (La ida 172). Cruz is not idle,
however. He narrates: “No me gusta que otro gallo / le cacaree a mi gallina,” and so,
in his suspicion of the commander, he finally catches the man “abrazándome a la
china” (La ida 173). Enraged, a fight ensues and Cruz beats up the commander, and
later killer one of his men, forcing him to flee from the law and, like Fierro, live life
on the run “como vicho sin guarida”—a creaturely existence, because “es esa vida /
como vida de animales” (La ida 177).
Yet a man who loses his china to another man is impotent in the eyes of others,
and Cruz’s shame follows him. Later, as he is dancing in a pulpería, the guitar player
172
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
recognizes Cruz and, knowing his shameful story, begins to insult him in his canto:
“Hay gauchos que presumen / de tener damas” he sings, “y a lo major los dejan /
tocando tablas” (La ida 178). The payador’s insults confirm that having “lost” his
woman is for Cruz a source of shame in nineteenth century rural Argentina. Unable to
bear the insults, Cruz, like Fierro, turns to violence in an effort to reconcile his
embarrassment. In a rage he slices the payador’s guitar strings with his facón and then
cuts open the man’s belly, leaving him with his tripas in hand to restring his guitar.132
In the second part of the poem, when Fierro reunites with his children, we find
that they too have only known suffering and shame to that never ending line of
predatory authorities of the landowning elite and the State. Perhaps in the case of the
eldest son we find the most illuminating example. Filling in the timeframe from when
Fierro was sent to the frontier in the first part, to when they are reunited in the second,
the eldest son tells us that he lived an abandoned orphan, who is no different than a
“sabandija.” He grew up “desnudo a veces y hambriento,” never finding compassion,
living “como los bichos” (La vuelta 252). Finding himself working as a peon at an
estancia, he is, much like K. in The Trial, accused of a crime he did not commit.
However, though K. never finds out the nature of his supposed crime, Fierro’s oldest
son knows he is accused of murder. Since, as the son says, “El que manda siempre
puede / hacerle al pobre un cautiverio,” he is brought to trial and accused by those who
committed the crime. The judge, finding the situation suspicious, but never fully
clearing up the confusion, simply sends them all to prison. What concerns him most
about his situation, is precisely expressing to those listening to his tale his absolute
173
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
shame and embarrassment of being grouped with those who really committed the
murder:
Piensen los hombres honrados
en la vergüenza y la pena
de que tendría la alma llena
al verme ya tan temprano
igual a los que sus manos
con el crimen envenenan. (253)
Helpless and powerless, he serves time in prison, where conditions are
incomprehensively inhumane. “La justicia muy severa / suele rayar en crueldá,” he
says, and “no esiste pior martirio / que esa eternal soledá” (La vuelta 259-60). They
are not allowed to do any of the things gauchos hold so dear: sing, drink mate, smoke,
and in their solitary confinement, two things are taken from the son that gauchos most
esteem: words and friendship. With only the bars of their cell with which they have to
converse, the prisoner “se convierte en animal, / privao del don principal / que Dios
hizo a los mortales” (La vuelta 260).
If, as Larraya identifies, the most illuminating idea in the world of Hernández
is the rendition of the gaucho as human, then I would suggest that Hernández does so
in a manner contrary to what we would expect to be human.133 He illuminates
humanistic traits in gauchos not in what is laudable or exemplary about humanity, but
by demonstrating the deplorable effects of excessive political abuse that leads to a
creaturely state of shame, and which will eventually produce the vilest of criminals.
174
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Hernández does not just give us the subject before the law, save one who is pushed
outside the law and treated as a mere creature. He highlights for us the human
condition by way of an understanding of man as a political animal. Human for
Hernández means the politically marginalized and the creaturely. He ultimately shows
us that “human beings are not just creatures among other creatures but are in some
sense more creaturely than other creatures by virtue of an excess that is produced in
the space of the political and that, paradoxically, accounts for their “humanity””
(Santner 26).
2.6 The Wolfman Bandit
In essence, via the capturing of creatureliness, Martín Fierro is a literary
inquiry into the human condition of the bandit, or the outlaw, and a testament to the
longstanding tradition of banditry in Latin American culture. It is important to note
that being the bandit does not imply any specific crime; he is not the thief, the cattle
rustler, the vagrant, or the murderer. He can be all of these things and none of them.
This means, as Dabove explains, that “since no particular action is deemed banditry,
any action could be (and was) deemed banditry, a catchall word use much in the way
that “terror” is currently used in the United States” (4). This word designates those
who were to be abandoned by the sovereign, a scapegoat term that excludes
undesirables from the nation-state in the name of progress, civilization and the
validation of the nation-state: “This labeling process (of bandit) played an integral part
in the legitimation of an elite-led project of nation-state building in Latin America and
thus was a defining feature of the Latin American historical experience” (4). The term,
175
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
much like the contemporary usage of terrorist, meant the exception and a denying the
subject of constitutional and human rights, for “the bandit trope appears initially from
the state gesture of expulsion” (8). The enactment of expulsion in Martín Fierro, as
we have covered, takes place on the frontier—a fringe space already marked by an
inside and outside paradigm, much like the sovereign state of exception. It is here that
the political subject (gaucho) emerges as bare life, a state of creaturely, animal-like
existence that we will now trace through banditry.
The bandit is a juridical figure of the State who like bare life is included in the
calculations of sovereign power through exclusion, and is a figure that has been
translated into a strong literary trope in Latin American literature. This trope carries
with it heavily charged biopolitical elements regarding Agamben’s state of exception
and his notion of bare life. Turning to an often overlooked and little understood
passage in Martín Fierro, but one that I believe is the pinnacle moment in the work,
we will examine the bandit trope in light of the figure of the wolf-man in relation to
the bandit.
In his genealogical investigation of homo sacer (sacred man), taken from an
ancient roman text that defined such a man as he who could be killed and neither
considered a sacrifice nor a homicide—and which for Agamben is synonymous to
bare life and, in our case, we may add Santner’s creaturely life—Agamben correlates
the recurring legal phenomenon of banditry with the figure of the werewolf, or the
wolf-man, in western cultures’ folklore. This correlation, for Agamben, highlights the
persistence of bare life throughout the political history of western society. Like the
176
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
bandit, homo sacer is life devoid of any legal rights, he who inhabits a state of
existence outside the law and who can thus be freely killed. In such a way, his
inclusion in the workings of sovereignty is marked by his exclusion or death.
Agamben points out:
In the bandit and the outlaw . . . Germanic and Scandinavian antiquity
give us a brother of homo sacer beyond the shadow of any doubt. . .
Germanic and Anglo-Saxon sources underline the bandit’s liminal
status by defining him as a wolf-man . . . the life of the bandit is the life
of the loup garou, the werewolf, who is precisely neither man nor
beast, and who dwells paradoxically within both belonging to neither.”
(HS 104-5)
In Martín Fierro, we find the same allusion to the wolf-man as a representation
of the bandit. This comes at the end of the first part, when Cruz explains to Fierro that
they will live as bandits (matreros) together:
Andaremos de matreros
si es preciso pa salvar;
nunca nos ha de faltar
ni un güen pingo para juir,
ni un pajal ande dormir,
ni un matambre que ensartar. (La ida 182)
When in need of clothing, and for their choice of poncho against the elements,
he suggests:
177
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Y cuando sin trapo alguno
nos haiga el tiempo dejao
yo le pediré emprestao
el cuero á cualquiera lobo
y hago un poncho, si lo sobo,
mejor que poncho engomao. (La ida 182)
The curious image of Fierro and Cruz dressing themselves in wolf skins adheres to
their current, and now permanent condition as bandits. Consequently, in their wolf
skins, it becomes as if one cannot tell where Fierro and Cruz begin and the wolf ends.
The government will not care for them, never embrace them nor clothe them. So they
must depend on what they have become as bandits to survive. Their coming choice in
the next chapter to live with the Indians reflects their decision to wear the wolf skin, to
embrace their bandit status and to choose barbarism over civilization. Life with the
natives means they can run from their shame, escape their sorrows: “puede que allá
veamos luz / y se acaben nuestras penas” (La ida 188). To declare that the wolf skin
will make a better poncho than a waterproof one is to say that life with the Indians is
better than anything the city, or civilization, has to offer them. They are embracing
their banishment.
Cruz’s suggestion to dress in wolf skin ponchos has baffled scholars given the
blatant fact that on the pampas, in the gauchos’ world, there exist no native wolves.
Efforts to explain this usage of imagery so alien to their world have reached extremes.
Santiago Lugones, for instance, has even suggested that the wolf skin is really the skin
178
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
of a seal, like those found on the Argentine coast (seal is translated as lobo marino in
Spanish).134 Far from a literal explanation, I would suggest that, conscious or not,
Hernández’s reference to the wearing of wolf skins is embedded in the strong social
significance the figure of the wolf-man shares with banditry in western cultures. In the
moment of artistic creation, Hernández pens Cruz’s illustration as the recipient of a
collective conscience of the banditry connotation implied by lupine imagery.
Furthermore, Cruz does not say they will actually kill and skin a wolf, but says they
will “borrow” the skin (or leather) from a wolf, alluding to an actual transaction and
agreement between man and beast. The wolf skin serves to accentuate the trope of
banditry precisely when the two characters officially recognize themselves as bandits.
It is thus no coincidence that the usage of such imagery coincides with the exact
moment when the two come to terms with their being bandit matreros.135
We find persistence of canine proximity to gaucho bandits in Juan Moreira
(1880) as well, a popular gauchesque novel written by Eduardo Gutiérrez. Often
compared to Martín Fierro, the narrative follows the infamous exploits of Juan
Moreira, a gaucho bueno who, wronged by a judge who lusts after his wife, becomes a
bandit much in the same way Cruz does. During his years as a bandit, the narrative
places special attention on Moreira’s relationship with his horse and dog. Their own
fame rivals that of his own, and the narrative continually praises his animals,
emphasizing how important both are to the gaucho. Interestingly, after the chapter
titled “Un castigo terrible,” when Moreira is officially banned, we find the following
chapter is completely dedicated to his dog, Cacique. In this chapter, we are presented
179
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
with the diverse breeds of dogs that accompany gauchos, as well as their strong points
and uses. Cacique is a cuzquito (basically a mutt), but this breed is called the “policía
del gaucho.” In the case of Moreira, Cacique serves as a watchdog, keeping vigilant
when his master sleeps the siesta, growling and waking Moreira if someone
approaches, or helping him when in a fight. He is Moreira's only constant companion
and the two seem to be so bound together, that we are told Cacique could even sense
the sadness that would envelope Moreira on the lonely Pampa and, "haciéndole abatir
la cabeza sobre el pecho a impulsos de un recuerdo amargo, se veía al Cacique sentado
sobre sus patas traseras, mirando a su amo con una expresión patética y tristísima . . .”
(68). The close relationship between Moreira and his dog gives the impression that the
two are one, the one depending on the other for survival. Cacique is ever present in the
novel, continually serving his master and helping him escape danger. The proximity
that these two share coincides with what Agamben points out about the bandit in
relation to the wolf-man. In Juan Moreira, we literally find a bandit defined by his
dog, the actions of the one are indistinguishable from the other. When danger
approaches, Cacique serves as Moreira's ears; when the two find themselves
surrounded by the law, Cacique has his teeth and Moreira his knife, but in the frenzy
the two are one, combating with the same purpose.
Gutiérrez based his literary Moreira on a real, historic gaucho also named Juan
Moreira, who had gained fame in Argentina as a bandit. Though pure coincidence, it is
beyond curious that both the historical and, in effect, the literary Moreira, are killed by
the police in a small pueblo whose name is all too fitting for the death and burial site
180
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
of a bandit: Lobos (the historic Juan Moreira was killed by a posse in 1874). Even in
death, and sealing their wolf-man relationship, Gutiérrez writes that Moreira’s dog
Cacique would not part from his grave site in the Lobos cemetery. Refusing food and
nourishment, the dog soon dies on his master’s grave, where he had stood guard until
death.
In conclusion, if in the first part of Martín Fierro the gaucho is the bare life
figure of the bandit, the one excluded from the nation-state for the purpose of building
the nation, in the second part he is the one integrated as a legitimate juridical citizen
who will finally form part of the nation. Yet his inclusion also marks the decisive
exclusion of the likes of the negro and the indio. As Heffe has observed, in the
gauchesque, while the gaucho finally acquires a voice as a juridical figure (beginning
with Martín Fierro), the voice of the negro and the indio disappears from the genre.136
We undoubtedly witness this process in the transition from the first part to the second
in Martín Fierro. Though I would say the negro is never represented as an equal to
Fierro, the native in the first part is. Ansolabehere points out that in La ida both
gaucho and indio come from the same rural universe, and that if the native is an
enemy (because the enemy is unquestionably the government), it is because he is an
equal and worthy opponent to the gaucho.137 Indeed, he has characteristics that to the
gaucho are laudable and that are of import for life on the pampas: bravery and skill
with the lance and bolas, and most certainly, equestrian skills. The indio possesses all
of these skills and rivals those of the gaucho, creating an air of respect for this
adversary. The indio, however, is not the Other in the first part; the Other who truly
181
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
comes from a different world than the gaucho, according to Ansolabehere, is the
gringo immigrant, who possesses none of the qualities cherished by the gaucho. In
fact, Fierro’s disgust for the gringo is evident throughout La ida, an attitude never
expressed toward the indio in the first part of the poem.
At the end of La ida, Fierro, along with Cruz, enters into that other frontier
space, one beyond the limits of the fortines and supposedly out of reach of the State’s
hellish clutches he has known. They journey to share that frontier zone inhabited by
the indios. Both gauchos not only sojourn out to share this space with the natives, but
also to share in their status as official enemies of the State. In Hernández’s 1869
articles published in El Rio de La Plata, it is evident that he envisions an Argentine
utopia following Sarmiento’s formula that to conquer the frontier means to populate.
Yet unlike Sarmiento, Hernandez’s vision of this utopia incorporates both the gaucho
and the indio.138 Therefore, when Fierro and Cruz decide to live as far away as
possible from civilization with the Pampean natives, he is grouping gaucho and indio
together as outcasts from the State, revealing the injustice of their political condition
in hopes of advocating their inclusion. For this reason, the true Other—the gringo who
occupies the inside—is so criticized by Hernández. He sees a political world that has
gone topsy-turvy, where a nation is creating orphans of its native sons to adopt foreign
ones.
This paradigm, however, will change. Ansolabehere observes that in the
second part of Martín Fierro we have the complete inverse of the first part. Fierro will
return to civilization and integrate into the nation along with the gringo immigrant,
182
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
meaning in La vuelta it is now the indio who is marked as the Other and left alone on
the outside.139 Whereas at the end of La ida it appears Fierro and Cruz are parting to
the frontier to live in a safe haven where they will be accepted by the indio, Hernández
throws the reader a curve ball from the get-go in part two. As it turns out, and contrary
to the perception of part one, life with the Indians is even more of a hell than life in the
military camps. To demonstrate this, Hernández must swim against the current of his
ideology not only in the first part of Martin Fierro, but also against that of much of his
extensive body of journalistic writings as well.140 To paint this hell and illustrate the
indio’s otherness, we find over twelve hundred verses in the beginning of La vuelta—
roughly from chapter two to chapter ten—where the indio and the frontier space they
inhabit are portrayed again and again in the most horrid fashion, as though Hernández
is attempting to unravel every ideological thread he has knitted in La ida.
Throughout these verses the native is animalized, marked as inhuman and
limitless in cruelty. Like Glanton’s men in Blood Meridian, they are beings who wear
necklaces beaded with the teeth of Christians they slaughter.141 The culmination of the
indio’s savagery in La vuelta is revealed in the episode of the white captive woman.
Having her young son ripped from her arms by her captor, his throat is slit before the
cautiva’s eyes and her hands then bound with his intestines. With Cruz now dead,
Fierro hears the cautiva’s cries and alone comes to her aid. He finds her bound and
covered in blood from a whipping she is receiving with a lasso at the hands of her
captor. A fight ensues and, after killing the Indian and helping the cautiva collect “en
unos trapitos / los pedazos de su hijito” (La vuelta 241), Fierro finds himself now an
183
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
outlaw amongst the Indians for having killed one of their own. For this reason he must
flee with the cautiva back to civilization.
Ultimately, what Hernández’s shift to an almost demonic representation of the
indio demonstrates is his own defeat to and acceptance of Argentina’s state-building
project he had once resisted. As Shumway explains,
These verses served one purpose only: to justify the brutal
extermination of Argentine Indians currently in process under General
Roca and President Avellaneda. To rationalize genocide, its victims
must be viewed as subhuman, bestial, inferior by nature, unopen to
improvement. (287)
Unlike his previous outside location of resistance to Sarmiento’s presidency when he
wrote La ida, Hernández is now inside and in conformance with President
Avellaneda’s state policies, including General Roca’s 1879 Conquest of the Desert
campaign which ultimately exterminates Argentina’s native populations. This
campaign was coming to an end within the timeframe of writing and publishing La
vuelta. Fierro himself mentions their extermination as he lives amongst them:
Las tribus están deshechas;
los caciques más altivos
están muertos o cautivos,
privaos de toda esperanza,
y de la chusma y de lanza
ya muy pocos quedan vivos. (La vuelta 220)
184
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Yet the indios are not the only ones hunted by the State. It would seem that even
amongst the Indians in the most far-reaching confines of the frontier Fierro cannot
escape the long arm of the law; still he is persecuted by the State: “Pues allí a los
cuatro vientos / la persecución se lleva; / naide escapa de la leva” (La vuelta 213).
Fierro never fully escapes the haunting of the draft law, and explains that the leva
follows him, possibly for recruitment in Rocca’s campaign.
With the indio all but lost, it would seem Hernández abandons him, turns on
him whom he once praised for harboring gaucho refugees.142 By dehumanizing the
indio in La vuelta, he justifies Roca’s campaign. Yet never relenting in his defense of
the gaucho, he brings Fierro back to the nation and uses the second part to argue for
his integration into society as a worker. Thus Fierro sheds his wolf skin for peon
clothing in La vuelta, while the Indian maintains his bandit status and, unlike
Hernández’s judgement of the bandit gaucho, is condemned for it and hunted like the
wolf unto extermination. Heffes suggests that in La vuelta Hernandez frames his own
voice in the redefinition of Fierro’s, thus constituting the gaucho as lawyer and
judge.143 He is the lawyer who now prosecutes the Indian, placing before the jury all
his creaturely traits (everything Fierro once was in La ida), as well as the judge who
condemns him to death.
If Henández’s vision for the gaucho to live on as an agricultural worker saves
him from political abandonment, it saves him only in his death, for the new gaucho
lives on only in the death of the once free gaucho who roamed the pampas like the
natives. Only in this way, through concession to the whims of modernity and
185
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
liberalism’s emerging new order, can the gaucho becomes a national symbol and
protagonist in the narration of a new nation, while the Pampean natives will truly
perish in their death; they will be forgotten and excluded from the historical narrative
of Argentine national consciousness. I believe David Viñas puts it best when he
questions if perhaps the indios were really Argentina’s desaparecidos of 1879.144
186
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
CHAPTER III
Brazil’s Struggle for a Body: Euclides Da Cunha’s Os Sertões and
Grievable Life
“Deus o dissera—em mau português, em um mau italiano
e em mau latim. Estava farto dos desmandos da terra...”
Os sertões
“Aí, e as horas não acabavam. O sol encostava na nuca
da gente. Sol, solão, debaixo eu suava, transpirava dos
cabelos, e pelo dentro das roupas, de sentir as cócegas
grossas no meio do lombo; e essas dormências
numas partes do corpo. Então, eu atirava.”
Grande Sertão: Veredas
Amidst the chaos of Brazil’s Canudos War in 1897, a journalist and war
correspondent by the name of Euclides da Cunha records the following scene in his
personal journal:
9 horas da noite – Escrevo numa cômoda mesa na farmácia
anexa ao Hospital Militar . . . Em frente alevantam-se as barracas
cheias de feridos e doentes – e cheias de lamentos e exclamações, mal
abafadas, de dores cruciantes. No fundo da farmácia, ressona
estentoricamente o correspondente da Notícia resguardado por uma
barricada enorme de caixas cirúrgicas vazias. E sobre a cobertura de
couro do casebre passam, sibilando, as balas.
Já me vou acostumando a essa orques.145 (Caderneta 67)
This curious description allows for a unique analogy of nation-building all too
accurate in the context of the Canudos conflict. Euclides da Cunha, a journalist
187
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
charged with reporting the progress of Brazilian civilization’s war against its
backwards rural citizens in the best light possible, is essentially writing the story of the
nation. In the passage above, and by way of introduction, it is precisely from where he
writes this story that interests me: a pharmacy.
In Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy,” the French philosopher provides a reading of
Plato’s Phaedras that deconstructs his usage of the Greek word pharmakon (drug) to
its dual meaning of being at once the remedy and the poison, for there “is no such
thing as a harmless remedy” (99).146 The topic of the pharmakon matters greatly for
Plato within the context of life and memory’s relevance to the techné of writing. Since
the pharmakon is artificial, “it goes against natural life: not only life unaffected by any
illness, but even sick life, or rather the life of the sickness” (100). Furthermore, “under
the pretext of supplementing memory, writing makes one even more forgetful; far
from increasing knowledge, it diminishes it” (100). In relation to the writing of a
nation, Derrida comments on the Republic. Here Plato sees writing, sculpting, and
painting as immoral for politics and philosophers because they are “artificial”
imitations of the “natural” truth. Thus, the “magic of writing and painting is like a
cosmetic concealing the dead under the appearance of the living. The Pharmakon
introduces and harbors death” (142). This makes sense when one considers how the
story of a nation’s origin always implies death and exclusion occluded somewhere in
the fine print. However, Plato also notes that the pharmakon of storytelling might be
utilized to govern the ideal city, when ontological knowledge, the knowledge of the
true nature of things, is introduced as a “pharmaceutical force opposed to another
188
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
pharmaceutical force” (138). Thus, writing the story of the nation can imply both
remedy and poison, according to how it is administered.147 In the case of Brazil and
the Canudos War, war correspondents for Brazilian newspapers write about the nation
from within the confines of a wartime pharmacy, emblematic of the pharmakon being
administered both literally to the life of a people, as well as literarily in their writing
the story of a nation.
Undoubtedly, da Cunha’s scene in the pharmacy is not one that implies
remedy, though at the time he may have viewed the war as a cure for what ailed the
new republic, seeing his journalistic coverage as a curative pharmakon that tells of the
“ideal city.” However, his words only disguise the dead as the living. Indeed, while he
writes, bullets fly overhead like a poison being administered to the inhabitants of the
town Canudos. From within, even the Republic’s soldiers suffer, writhing in pain and
crying out in the night. Likewise, da Cunha’s colleague, the correspondent from the
newspaper Notícias, seems to shout in fear from where he is hiding. War
correspondents like da Cunha were diminishing the memory of the war’s true
happenings and diverting the reader to a story that was favorable to the public along
the Brazilian urban seaboard. Not until da Cunha looks back in retrospect to the war,
will he recognize it as a crime and massacre—a poison that was administered to the
life of a nation, portrayed in the guise of the Republic’s glory and modernity’s victory
over barbarism. As if to undo the poisonous pharmakon of writing and storytelling he
and other journalists had published throughout Brazil during the war, Euclides sets out
189
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
to provide the curative pharmakon and give a “true” account, ultimately publishing his
masterpiece, Os sertões, and rewriting the story of a nation.148
Os sertões: campanha de canudos (Rebellion in the Backlands in English) is
da Cunha’s full account of the tragic Canudos War fought in the isolated desert region
known as the sertão (translated as backlands or hinterland) in the northeastern
Brazilian province of Bahia. At its core, the Canudos conflict was a war waged by the
Brazilian Republic against its own rural citizens of an obscure town, a case of national
fratricide. The conflict was civilization’s attack on rural backwardness, modernity’s
affront against primitiveness. Euclides da Cunha, a fervent supporter of the Republic
and a man of science, began writing Os sertões in 1897, the same year the war ended,
and it was published in 1902. A war correspondent for the newspaper O Estado de São
Paulo, da Cunha was a firsthand witness to the brutality of the Republic’s fourth and
final expedition against Canudos, a campaign that ultimately burned the rural village
to the ground and massacred its inhabitants: men, women and children.
Os sertões is the artistic product of an author, both “poet and scientist,” who
attempts to reconcile the tragic horrors of a senseless war with scientific meaning,
assign signifiers to a violence wholly in opposition to representation and reason.149
The work is, as José Guilherme Merquior describes it, that “great book, part scientific,
part literary,” a book that has survived in the Brazilian canon for so long because of its
“poetic energy and style,” as well as for its “illuminating sociological brilliance”
(198). The phenomenon of Canudos, the violence and war, could not and cannot be
captured in words, nor explained through the scientific ideologies that Euclides
190
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
assigned to the very land of the Brazilian sertão, to its people and to their conflict with
the Republic. Consequently, if the phenomenon of the historical Canudos War proves
difficult enough to encapsulate, Euclide’s epic work inspired by the conflict becomes
even more enigmatic. The narrative is replete with nineteenth century positivist
ideology and racial determinism of his time, and at once given to artistic and literary
tendencies. Leopoldo Bernucci states that da Cunha’s conscience is split between the
tendencies of an imaginative romanticism and a pullulating naturalism.150 Divided in
three sections, A terra (The Land), O homem (The Man), and A luta (The Conflict), da
Cunha attempts to explain the horror of the war itself, through a scientific, socioanthropological argument based on social Darwinism. His political thinking, his
scientific convictions, in the end cannot reconcile what he sees.
To put it blatantly, Os sertões is an unorthodox book, difficult to categorize,
much like Sarmiento’s Civilización y barbarie.151 The book in reality is many things:
an epic chronicle of war, a socio-anthropological essay, a geological record, an
historical account, journalistic literature, a poetic work of art, fiction—a novel.152 It is
a book that is a testament to the science of its time and an artistic monument. Da
Cunha, himself an engineer, and called many other things—naturalist, ethnologist,
geologist, sociologist, anthropologist, journalist, novelist, poet, artist—seems to have
invested all these qualities into his masterpiece.153
In this chapter, I will demonstrate that Os sertões, despite being so many
things, is par excellence a biopolitical text, what Boever would call a work of “bioart.”154 I do so with the purpose of indicating what new conclusions we may draw
191
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
from some of the work’s more conflictive characteristics that have for so long been
debated. It is almost baffling that a book so concerned with the body, so wrapped up in
nation-building and in the politics of violence and death, has not yet been viewed
through a biopolitical framework.
As Natalia Brizuela points out, in Euclides’ newspapers articles about the war,
his “pen initially traces—much as the Republic itself had been doing—an undesirable
space of geographic, political, social, and physical bodies: this space and its people are
frightful and revolting, the geography utterly uninhabitable” (156). Subsequently, in
Os sertões, those bodies and spaces will continue to be terrifying and repulsive; yet
unlike his newspaper reports, this time da Cunha will expose the true nature of the
Brazilian republic to be just as frightful, more barbaric even, than the supposed enemy
they are fighting. He furthermore demonstrates, in his criticism of the Republic, that
the undesirable and bellicose space is ultimately created by the State, and not by the
people of Canudos as shown in newspapers of the time. Therefore, I believe Euclides’
pen, in Os sertões, labels the Republic’s actions to be like those of Agamben’s
exception, of a process that sets aside an undesirable space (the sertão and Canudos
itself) that functions much like a concentration camp: a zone for extermination and
exclusion of certain people(s) so the ideal archetype of a nation may solely inhabit the
nation-state.155 This space harbors the frightful and revolting, political bodies that are
made inhuman, placed on the threshold between animal and man, and—like
Agamben’s notion of bare life—these unsightly bodies are defined inasmuch as their
stock value equates the capacity to be killed licitly. However, in his book, da Cunha
192
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
inverts the paradigm found in newspapers, and the frightful space and its repulsive
inhabitants will be for the condemnation of the State and its war crimes.
Given that his pen first imitates and then labels the actions of the Republic, we
may very well view Euclides himself as a sort of authorial sovereign figure. We can
easily discern the correlation sovereignty and its subjects share with the author and his
or her characters. Boever, in his theorizing of the novel as a genre in relation to
biopolitics, does just this, explaining that the “author, then, becomes aligned with
government . . . the characters with modern subjects” (Narratove Care 43). He goes
on to note that
the situation of the character can said to allegorize the modern, biopolitical condition—that is, the condition of being subjected to the
government of life in its most intimate details . . . One’s pull into
literature could then be explained from two directions: from above—we
all enjoy being authors, being in the position of government, and seeing
how character-lives unfold within the novel's programmed regulations;
and (second) from below—we identify with characters, we recognize in
their governed lives our own biopolitical condition. (Narrative Care
47)
Considering Boever’s words, I would argue that reading Os sertões precisely involves
the experience he describes: we are able to place ourselves in Euclides shoes, from
above, as the author in control of the lives and bodies of the characters, while on the
other hand, we understand what it means to be governed like those characters.
193
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Ultimately, when reading da Cunha’s book, we “experience the essentially modern
condition of both being the subject and being subjected to” (Narrative Care 47). Why
we experience this modern condition in Os sertões lies in the duality of the work. On
the one hand, da Cunha, with his usage of anthropology and racial determinism, with
his vision of the Republic’s motto Ordem e Progresso, functions much like the
Republic, and so too does the reader share in this vision and enact sovereignty from
above; yet on the other hand, his moments of admiration for the stubborn resistance of
the people of Canudos and his criticism of the Republic, allow us to also recognize
their situation from below, relate to the politically subverted subject.
Without a doubt, Os sertões displays a broad biopolitical spectrum; it is a
testament to the modern biopolitical forms of power and government in relation to
state violence and death. Da Cunha’s writing of bodies, of the inhabitants massacred at
Canudos, combined with his secular and political convictions, imitates the sovereign
and provides us insight into how life can ultimately be politically devalued and
destroyed.
Why Os sertões affords us such an opportunity can be reduced to two reasons.
First, on a historical and political plane, the Canudos War takes place on the cusp of
and in reaction to Brazil’s shift from a Monarchy to a Republic, marking the
separation of church and state, and thus the change from theological politics (i.e. God
is sovereign) to a politics of secularized theology (i.e. the sovereign nation-state is
now God). This book literally highlights the transition (by capturing the conflict of
that transition) from what Foucault calls the “pastoral” care for the body of a
194
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
population—care consigned to the church and God—to a care and regulation of the
body that is headed by the state: a biopolitical care of the modern subject. Second, the
very nature of the text itself favors biopolitics. What I mean by this is the journalistic
qualities of Os sertões inevitably catch up in its pages the biopolitical existence of its
characters—bodies taken from real life and transformed into writing. As discussed in
the previous chapter, Boever, in his Narrative Care, identifies the novel as the ideal
medium of writing for the representation of the biopolitical experience of human
beings, in that it portrays, or at least seeks to represent, the everyday real life existence
of its characters, and no longer the epic heroes and mythological stories of antiquity.156
These real-life characters carry the burden of the modern political body. For this
reason, concludes Boever, newspapers (journalism) are the most extreme expression
of language’s relation to biopolitics. Journalists do not tell real life stories, he explains,
but create stories out of real lives.157 This is why we enjoy reading novels, and why in
modern times the newspaper has been so predominantly read: in reading the quotidian,
the narratives of everyday lives put into a spectacular format, be it some case of police
brutality, health-care failures, refugees of war, desperate immigrants, prisoners of war,
we, the everyday readers, indulge in the everyday biopolitical struggles of our fellow
man. To a great extent, Os sertões as a literary work, presents an impasse between
being a novel and an extensive work of journalism, a sort of conjuncture where the
two meet. In order to write Os sertões, and concerned with representing what he
understood as the truth, Euclides had to rely on newspapers, magazines, interviews
with soldiers and sertanejos themselves (inhabitants of the sertão); not to mention his
195
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
own notes he had taken from the field of battle (published as Caderneta do campo), as
well as his own newspaper articles he published in O Estado de São Paulo during the
last campaign of the war and later published as Diario de uma expedição.158 Many of
these elements, including interviews, war reports, letters, and even quotes from
newspapers, make it into Os sertões, giving the reader the impression of reading at
once a novel-like narrative and a text that could also be found in a newspaper. A book
that reads like fiction and a news report, this hybrid work borrows from two mediums
or writing so characteristic of modernity—the novel and the newspaper—and as such,
is a prime example of a text that creates a narrative from the real lives of a nation:
from bodies that compose the sovereign (officers, politicians, soldiers) and those
bodies excluded from the sovereign (the people of Canudos). What we have before us,
in conclusion, is a unique text that is a thanatopolitical example of bioart.
The Canudos War, as Brizuela points out, “would be, knowingly or
unknowingly at the time, the event that would become the symbol for the new
Republic's arrival into modernity” (151). Dabove elaborates: “Canudos was a
reassuring fratricide, and as such it is the cornerstone of the Brazilian national
imaginary and the indelible mark of its modernity” (219). Here, Dabove is alluding to
Benedict Anderson with his coining of the “reassuring fratricide.”159 Anderson’s term
defines the process by which nations imagine their genealogies by forgetting certain
violent happenings essential to their history and reconstructing them with a national
narrative unknown to the real participants of the events. Often those participants,
especially in Latin America, who were violently excluded (bandits, outlaws, rural
196
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
rebels) from the nation-state in the past, persist in the present, redefined as national
symbols, heroes and the national archetype, thus reassuring that their death was not in
vain.160 When the historical outcome of an event is considered good, but the means to
get there recognized as bad, according to Walnice Nogueira Galvão, the way to cope
with such a dilemma is that the dead must pass on as brothers and be incorporated into
nationality.161 Such is the case of the Canudos inhabitants, whose massacre and death
has continually been reconstructed in the present as, borrowing from Berthold Zilly’s
phrasing, “a ground zero for Brazilian history”—that the vast cemetery left behind
would become a national monument and cornerstone for Brazilian national identity.162
This reconstruction is foremost indebted to Euclides’ Os sertões. Through his
representation of the sertão, the Canudos conflict, and the actors in his work, Euclides
ultimately and unknowingly determined the understanding and interpretation of
Brazilian nationality for generations to come.
Though the Canudos conflict took place eight years after the formation of the
Brazilian Republic (1888), it was the event which validated its sovereignty, manifested
through the forced exercise of biopower over the body of a population—the power
over life and to determine death. The Brazilian Republic’s beginning “is necessarily
linked to death . . . That social and political death—history, which is always a type of
death—was necessary for the consolidation of the Republic that had been proclaimed
only eight years before” (Brizuela 151). Da Cunha’s Os sertões is a literary work that
investigates Renan’s words; written in immediate retrospect to the war, such an
exhaustive examination into the conflict means the book’s “[h]istorical investigation,
197
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
in fact, brings to light the deeds of violence that took place at the origin of all political
formations, even of those whose consequences have been fortunate. Unity is always
achieved by brutality” (45-6). Da Cunha, despite his dedication to the Republic,
cannot avoid coming to this conclusion. He cannot help but find the nation’s origins
entrenched in the same violent brutality he originally assumes it is fighting against.
For this reason he states: “Estamos condenado à civilização. Ou progredimos, ou
desaparecemos. A afirmativa é sergura.” (OS 157). Euclides knows that affirming
civilization can also be a condemnation. Inevitably he exposes this in the pages of Os
sertões, especially through his representation of the sertanejos themselves. Ultimately,
though he portrays them as primitive, ignorant, savage, backwards, racially inferior, as
cases of “historical atavism,” and less-than-human—less than capable of participating
in the Republic and in civilization—he recognizes that the sertanejos are “o cerne de
uma nacionalidade. Atacava-se a fundo a rocha viva da nossa raça. Vinha de a
dinamite...Era uma consagração” (OS 766). Canudos, a case of “reassuring fratricide,”
demonstrates that the bedrock of a people must be blasted away with gunpowder and
dynamite so that a foundation for the nation may be consecrated. The people of
Canudos and the space they inhabit, excluded from that nation, in fact become the
symbol of this nation. In Agambenian biopolitical terms, those citizens victim to
fratricide, whose lives are stripped of any political rights, are none other than his homo
sacer (bare life)—the life of a nation who has “the peculiar privilege of being that
whose exclusion founds the city of men” (HS 7).
198
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
By marking Brazil’s introduction into modernity, Canudos would also be the
first Brazilian war highly publicized in Brazilian newspapers, and as such, “the war
would be a spectacle of sovereignty—but above all else, a spectacle of modern
sovereignty” (Brizuela 143). As a spectacle of modern sovereignty in writing, my
reading of newspaper articles covering the war will tease out of the vast landscape of
biopolitical mechanisms that give impetus to the violent conflict, manifested through
the political body’s ties to state apparatuses such as the sanitary departments for the
war (hospitals and pharmacies), to technology, economy, and ultimately, to the
sovereign war machine itself. In newspapers, these apparatuses were portrayed by da
Cunha and his fellow journalists in a positive light, in an attempt to demonstrate the
validity of the sovereign Republic they supported that in reality was anything but
competent. Here I am essentially concerned with the relationship between Os sertões
and journalism. I will therefore juxtapose my reading of war coverage in newspapers
with my reading of Os sertões in order to demonstrate the shift in da Cunha’s thinking.
Ultimately, I argue that Euclides da Cunha, in his book, completely inverts the
national discourse that justified the war in newspapers by identifying the workings of
suspended law in the war, leading to incomprehensible acts of violence and terror. By
comparing and contrasting the journalistic with the literary, I seek to explain, through
a biopolitical framework, how the excluded bare life of a nation, after its death, may
be resurrected as the nation’s archetype.
In short, I will first demonstrate that the Canudos conflict was a three-way
struggle for control of the body between the oligarchy powers of church, state, and the
199
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
elite landowners. This will be followed by an interpretation of Euclide’s sense of
anthropology and racial determinism in terms of colonialism, Foucault’s biopower,
and his state racism. Here I will show this to be Cunha’s primary defect, in that he is
never able to identify his own sense of racial determinism as part of the biopolitical
motor for the war he condemns. Next, I will juxtapose da Cunha’s identification of
state of exception in Os sertões with numerous sources of nineteenth century
newspaper coverage of the war. In newspapers, the representation of the apparatuses
of Foucault’s governmentality is remarkably evident, as well as Judith Butler’s notion
of grievable life, which deals with biopolitics in relation to the representation of the
body (or lack thereof) in newspapers and other media. I argue that though newspapers
portrayed the people of Canudos as ungrievable life, unfit to be mourned like the life
of the Republic’s soldiers, in Os sertões da Cunha achieves their grievabiliity by
paradoxically dehumanizing the soldiers to their level, thus raising the people of
Canudos to the status of “the bedrock of a nation.”
3.1 Background
One of the most notable characteristics of Os sertões is that it is a bipolar
work, an almost schizophrenic book with many voices. This is first evident in the
representation of the inhabitants of the sertão, whom Euclides goes to great lengths to
describe, physically, sociologically, culturally, etc. Composed of rural vaquieros
(cowboys) and peasants referred to as sertanejos and jagunços (Putnam often
translates them as “backwoodsmen”), the harsh climate of the sertão, for Euclides, is
what produces what is both laudable and deplorable in the jagunço. Perhaps the title
200
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
“Hercules-Quasimodo” da Cunha gives the sertanejos best represents the contradictive
nature of his writing. On the one hand, the sertanejo is weak, “desgracioso,
desengonçado, torto,” whose “andar sem firmeza, sem aprumo, quasi gingante e
sunuoso, aparenta a translação de membros desarticulados” (OS 207). While on the
other hand, when forced to act in his natural habitat, he is the copper-hued Titan, “num
desdobramento surpreendente de força e agilidade extraordinárias” (OS 208).
Many sertanejos were caboclos and mulatos—northeastern Brazilians of mixed
African, Ameridian, and European origin.163 The term jagunço was synonymous to
sertanejo, but with the proliferation of the Canudos conflict throughout Brazil, the
term “jagunço took on a pejorative connotation, that of cangaçeiro or outlaw—one
among many ways in which Canudos burrowed into the national psyche” (Levine
“Mud-Hut Jerusalem” 528). In what follows, for the sake of clarity, the terms
sertanejo, jagunço, and cangaçeiro will be used synonymously.
Furthermore, da Cunha’s portrayal of the Brazilian Republic becomes more
and more ambiguous, and eventually more critical as the book goes on. In the end,
despite his loyalty to the Republic and his own positivist thinking, Cunha’s allegiance
and convictions give way to a critique of the barbarity of civilization, as he calls the
military campaign “um crime inútil e bárbaro” (OS 682). His “livro vingador”
(avenging book), as Euclides would call it, was more an attack against the Republic
than it was a defense of the sertanejo,164 for the war “foi, na significação integral da
palavra, um crime. Denunciemo-lo” (OS 67). However, he would, in contradiction to
his own words, later declare himself a lawyer to the poor sertanejos, who were
201
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
murdered by a criminal and blood-thirsty society.165 Be it what may, though he
certainly denounces the Republic, the sertanejo will, in da Cunha’s work, seemingly
be left to fend for himself. Though da Cunha at times esteems the sertanejo, even
places him as the archetype of Brazilian nationality, he nonetheless categorizes the
backlander as a “racial degenerate,” an inferior species of the human race. And though
he attacks the Republic, one cannot help be sense in Euclides’ writing a persisting
belief in the European model of civilization, an echo of what he previously wrote as a
war correspondent for O Estado de São Paulo, that the “República é immortal!”
(Diário 68). Though this vision slowly crumbles as we read Os sertões, it would
appear, according to Euclides, that Brazil simply got it wrong, erred in its path to
democracy and civilization.166 More than anything, this is what da Cunha seems to
criticize, what he considers the crime. Not once does he connect this crime of violent
fratricide with the very racist and degrading discourse both he and the Republic use
against the sertanejos. In the end, as Patrícia Cardoso Borges puts it, Euclides’
inability to fully understand the Other, be it another culture, another religion and
beliefs—his impossibility of being open to differences, makes the Euclidian text a “sea
of contradictions” (203).
Yet despite its racism and contradictions, despite the positivist sense of
progress in its pages, Euclides’ book has persisted for more than a century as the
iconic emblem of Brazilian literature and nationality. To account for this, Gilberto
Freyre, the celebrated Brazilian intellect, explains that in his descriptions of the sertão,
Euclides the scientist would err in his details of geography, in geology and
202
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
anthropology, as well as in his social diagnostics. However, what redeems his
technical errors is that in Euclides da Cunha we find the poet, the prophet, the artist
full of intuition.167 Adelino Brandão reminds us that Euclides’ “scientific prejudices,”
his “scientism,” while they should be rightfully condemned, we should do so
remembering that such thinking was characteristic of the time in which the book was
written. What today we call scientism, was science for Euclides and his era.168
Os sertões has been heralded by Brazil’s great abolitionist and intellect
Joaquim Nabuco as the “the Bible of Brazilian nationality,” and alluding to the
authenticity of the work, declared that Euclides wrote the book “com cipo,” or with a
liana stalk, a plant native to the arid sertão.169 Samuel Putnam, academic and first
translator of the book in English, explains:
There can be no doubt that Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões is a work
that is unique not only in Brazilian but in world literature as well. In no
other instance, probably, has there been such unanimity on the part of
critics of all shades of opinion in acclaiming the book as the greatest
and most distinctive which a people has produced, the most deeply
expressive of that people’s spirit. (iii)
Regarding Euclides da Cunha, Putman goes on to note that “[Euclides] emerges,
alongside the nineteenth-century novelist, Machado de Assis, as one of the two
outstanding figures in all Brazilian letters” (iv). The book was an immediate success
when published, making da Cunha a celebrity overnight.170 In 1994, almost a century
after the book’s publication, the journal Veja and a committee of 15 intellectuals
203
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
created a list of the top 20 most influential Brazil works in any genre, placing Os
sertões in the number one spot, followed by Casa grande e senzala (1933) by Gilberto
Freye and Guimarães Rosa’s Grande sertão: veredas (1956).171
Bernucci explains that reading the work is like falling into a complex snare,
that when read as a book of history or a socio-anthropological essay, the reader will
simultaneously be driven by the literary impulses imposed upon him page after page,
and vice-versa.172 This complex trap is in part what has drawn in readers and
academics for so long. Levine comments:
Called the hallmark of Brazil's intellectual coming of age, it has
become a sacred text-leaving its interpretation of Canudos, in turn,
virtually untouchable. Da Cunha intermixes a passionate description of
the events, colored by his anguish over what he saw as an urban
southerner and a war correspondent, with his deep ambivalence over
the nature of the fanatical backlands peasantry, the national-racial
question, and the peasants’ tenacious struggle to preserve their lives.
(“Mud-Hut Jerusalem” 526)
The “livro número um” of Brazilian nationality can attribute its aura as a “sacred
book” to critics like Roquette-Pinto, who have compared it to Cervantes’ Don
Quixote, Camões’ Os Lusíadas, a peer to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In effect, there are
over 4,700 references to Euclides da Cunha alone at the Biblioteca Nacional in Brazil
as of 1995 (the number would be even higher now).173
204
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
However, I believe there is another snare we step into when reading Os
sertões, another reason why the book has enigmatically come to signify Brazilian
nationality and thus been placed atop the Brazilian literary canon. First, it is precisely
the work’s biopolitical nature as a text, as both novel-like and journalistic, that
fascinates its readers much like CNN war coverage captivates its audience. Euclides’
book stands as a monument to modern-day journalism and its hold on the public.
Violence sells, and the sensational “spectacle of sovereignty” that journalism displays
in the war-torn refugee, in the scenes of mutilated bodies piled up in the conflicts of
war, is ultimately what people tune into. The initial public reaction to Os sertões and
the persistence of the work to our day (over thirty editions and counting), was
something new and inherently modern to its original readers, and something that
continues to intrigue today’s readers. By modern, I am speaking of the thanatopolitical
spectacle of totalitarianism and the modern biopolitical forms of government that have
come to define our times and captivate us in the media and, yes, in literature as well.174
The modern condition exposed in Os sertões—being subject and subjected to—best
defines our existence within the modern nation-state, and what better form of literature
to represent nation and people than a book founded on these grounds? In Os sertões,
we are coaxed in to the uninhabitable spaces that Euclides’ pen traces, and for a
moment we live the thundering cannonades and the sulfurous smell of gunpowder.
Intrigued and appalled at once by the frightful bodies he sketches before us, we look
not wanting to look.
205
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
3.2 Conselheiro and the Threefold Struggle for the Body
To confront the Canudos phenomenon, and in order to discuss Os sertões here
in this chapter, we must begin with Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel, more commonly
known as Antônio Conselheiro, or, Counselor. Conselheiro was one of many sertanejo
beatos, a wandering hermit and religious leader of the sertão backlands, but one who
would reach unprecedented fame and renown. In the backlands he would be known as
a man of God, a saint and savior, whereas for the Republic and in the newspapers from
the Brazilian city centers, he would be depicted as a fanatic, a degenerate and a crazed
monarchist. For two decades during the second half of the nineteenth century,
Conselheiro wandered the isolated desert backlands of Bahia. Working without wage,
he preached and repaired neglected chapels, church walls, cemeteries, shines and other
religious edifices. Legend and myth followed Conselheiro, and eventually so too
would a large population of sertanejo peasants and penitent bandits. Not an official
Catholic priest, Conselheiro’s relationship with the Church was precarious. Though he
did enjoy positive relations with certain clergy in the remote regions of the sertão—
who allowed him to repair their churches and preach—in 1882 the Church hierarchy
officially prohibited him from preaching in any church.
In 1888 Brazil absolved its monarchy, became a republic and abolished
slavery. Marked by positivist tendencies of the time, this pivotal moment in Brazilian
history created a fervor along the urban costal hubs for the triumph of secularism, a
push to define Brazilian nationality, the racial Brazilian type, and to modernize the
country. Hence the neglected and isolated rural regions of the interior, where
traditional and religious tendencies flourished, and where monarchist sentiment still
206
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
existed, would suddenly be remembered, thrust into the national spotlight and marked
as backwards and primitive, as the antithesis to everything that defined the new
Republic. Consequently, the inhabitants of rural Brazil would embody the adversarial
Other, and nowhere is there found a better example of this than the sertão. The city
centers of coastal Brazil would pit their civilization against the barbarism of Brazil’s
isolated northeast regions, and Conselheiro and his Canudos, the sertão itself, would
emerge as the epicenter of this conflict.
Conselheiro himself was a sympathizer to the old Brazilian Monarchy and a
fiercely traditional Catholic.175 Just as he had been banned by the Catholic Church, so
too he would be opposed and condemned by the new Republic. With the emergence of
the Republic in 1888, Conselheiro’s conflict with established order would only
intensify. In 1893, Conselheiro staged his one and only spectacle of public protest,
which was against taxes to the Republic (he burned tax edicts in a public square).
Though similar acts of rebellion—the burning of tax edicts—would occur in other
parts of Brazil, it would seem that this would eventually give Conselheiro’s enemies
the tinder necessary to start their own fire.176 After the protest, Conselheiro and a
group of devoted followers would make their way to the most isolated and
ecologically harsh region of the sertão to resurrect the old town of Canudos.
Far from the reaches of the Republic, Canudos was an arraial, or country
hamlet tied to a ranch whose proprietor had since abandoned. Canudos would be a
religious refuge from the republic and its secular laws Conselheiro and his followers
opposed, such as the separation of state and church, verified by the Republic’s
207
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
introduction of civil marriage. In just two years, the town would grow to become the
second largest city in the state of Bahia, which at the time was the second most
populated state in the whole country.177 This would mean Canudos became a citadel of
over 5,000 mud-hut homes, and that at its height, it would boast of an estimated
25,000 inhabitants, with lower estimations around 20,000 and others suggesting as
much as 35,000.178
The larger the town grew, the more far-fetched the rumors became:
Conselheiro was a religious fanatic, a fervent millenarianist preacher of
sebastianismo—the Portuguese myth that the 16th century king Dom Sebastão, lost
fighting the Moors in 1578, would return to free the poor and oppressed, and once
again bring glory to the Portuguese crown. Conselheiro had begun a fanatic cult, it
was said, bent on destroying the Antichrist: the Republic. During the yearlong conflict
from 1896 to 1897, these rumors would grow into political discourses that would
incite the public to fear of and rage against Canudos, thus gathering public support for
the war effort. It was said that Canudos was attempting to stage a rebellion, that their
religious fanaticism and sebastianista beliefs meant they sought to overthrow the
Republic and reestablish Brazil’s fallen monarchy. Rumors stated weapons from
Argentina were arriving to arm the people of Canudos; troops were supposedly being
sent from the United States and Austria to aid in the fighting.179
Da Cunha, on the other hand, does not merely rely on rumors of sebastianismo
and millennialism but, adhering to the British psychiatrist Henry Maudsey, gives these
phenomenon a socio-anthropological and psychological touch in Os sertões.180 He
208
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
explains such extremist religious fanaticism and criminality as a sort of “side effect” to
racial miscegenation and the isolated, harsh conditions of the sertão, and even
conducts a psychological analysis of Conselheiro, diagnosing him not only as
psychotic, but as a prime example of what he calls “historic atavism.” Hence Euclides
da Cunha can attribute Conselheiro’s backwardness to insanity, and not only is he
madman, but a Gnostic who exemplifies historic regression in his ways of thinking.
His historic atavism and insanity, like a disease, infects his followers who, due to their
degenerate and inferior racial makeup, are susceptible to primitive superstitions and
backward ways of life. This meant that in the Conselheiro’s own life, and
consequently within Canudos, reigned sexual promiscuity, unbraided violence,
disorder, starvation, and rampant alcoholism. Ventura explains that Euclides
essentially imposes upon Conselheiro many of his own obsessions, such as his fear of
irrationality, sexuality, chaos and anarchy, thus creating a tragic character overcome
with obscurantism and hereditary defects that lead him to insanity and conflict with
social order.181 For this reason, Euclides gives us various accounts of Conselheiro’s
early life, helping explain how he became the fanatical religious leader. To do so, he
tells the story of a long-lasting family feud in which his father was involved, how
Conselheiro’s wife left him for another man, all of which lead to an insane criminal,
suggesting he violently attacked, with the rage of a madman, a relative who had
provided him lodging during his nomadic wanderings.182 These same characteristics
da Cunha invests in Conselheiro are likewise transferred to Canudos, as though the
city itself were an urban personification of the man.
209
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Suffice it to say, da Cunha’s psychological analysis of Conselheiro and his
followers is far from accurate. The truth was, as many scholars have pointed out,
neither Conselheiro nor his followers were fanatic sebastianistas.183 They may have
held certain religious tendencies towards the belief, as was common in the backlands
at the time, but it was never to the scale suggested by Conselheiro’s opposition.
Furthermore, the function of millenarianism in sertanejo culture had more to do with
the volatile climate prone to drought that anything. Millenarianism for sertanejos was
“a practical social framework for coping with environmental instability” (Davis 189).
In short, the hope of a better future, of a prosperous paradise, gave the people of the
sertão hope and strength to make it through drought years.
In all of Euclides’ interviews during the war, not once did he ever prod out of
a jagunço any indication of sebastianism nor any of the other common assumptions
relating to the conselherists’ fanatic beliefs. Dated August 19, 1897, Euclides
published his interview with a captured adolescent jagunço named Agostinho in O
Estado de São Paulo. Speaking with Euclides, the kid negates to have seen any of the
supposed miracles of Conselheiro, and says in fact he had never even heard that the
Conselheiro performed miracles. When asked by Euclides if it was true Antonio
Conselheiro promised the jagunços resurrection if killed in battle, Agostinho once
again answers no. Possibly a bit frustrated at this point, Euclides then asks him what it
is that Conselheiro promises. The boy replies with what is described as an unexpected
answer: “Salvar a alma.” (Diário 110). It is interesting to note that this interview did
not make the cut for Os sertões. Here we can see an example of da Cunha’s inability
210
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
to comprehend the Other and access the jagunços’ real way of thinking. His own
preconceptions nullify what he hears from the source itself, and he will continually
impose his own scientific reasoning on something that is not even there.
There was, however, no doubt Antonio Conselheiro was a tradition Catholic,
his doctrine conservative and rigid. There was no doubt he opposed the Republic in
things such as civil marriage, that in his own writings he referred to the Republic as a
“great evil for Brazil.”184 He followed a strict dichotic belief of good and evil,
preached a fire and brimstone message, and certainly had an influential hold on the
people, who likewise followed a strict moral code. Yet perhaps the greatest tragedy of
the entire conflict is both he and his followers were peaceful. They never had
intentions for a rebellion, nor did they seek to bring back the monarchy.
It would be, however, Euclides’ insane Conselheiro, his Canudos and his
version of the conflict that would triumph in the end, determining for generations how
the Canudos phenomenon would be viewed. As Sara Castro-Klarén points out, in the
same way that Sarmiento invented the Facundo Quiroga we know in order to conceive
a conquering truth for his ideals, we may also say that “[t]o a very large extent, the
Conselheiro that we know . . . was the Conselheiro that Euclides produced in Os
sertões” (“Santos and Cangaceiros” 396).
In both his Vale of Tears and ““Mud-Hut Jersusalem”: Canudos revisited,”
Robert M. Levine provides comprehensive looks into the historic Conselheiro, as well
as into the environmental and social factors that pushed him and his followers to
establish Canudos. Though it is not the intention of this study to compare and contrast
211
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
truth with fiction in Os sertões, it is relevant to point out a few realities pertaining to
Canudos. To help us better understand Canudos, and contrary to what was often
assumed, Levine highlights what the village was not:
[T]here was no enforced standard of communal behavior, religious or
otherwise, even though Conselheiro constantly reminded his
congregants of the obligation to live according to God’s laws. There
was no drunkenness, no prostitution, no hunger caused by lack of food.
Canudos’s inhabitants never suspended their rational understanding of
the realities of backland life. Those who wanted to remained in
constant touch with neighboring communities; they came and went at
will. People visited Canudos, did their business, and left. Many
conselherists worked outside the community every day. They were not
prisoners. They came to Canudos to preserve their Catholicism, not to
exchange it for a cult or deviant sect. (Vale of Tears 133)
What Canudos was, on the other hand, was a refuge against the harsh sertão
environment, as well as a social refuge where the sertanejos could freely live out their
religious convictions. Susceptible to extreme conditions of drought and hardship, the
sertão can best be described as a feast and famine type climate. Under the continual
threat and pressure of drought, this one factor shaped nineteenth century hinterland
life. During extreme drought years, inhabitants were displaced and forced to flee for
the coast, the lives of loved ones often lost to famine. Canudos was an attempt to
communally hedge against such an environment. Mike Davis, in his Late Victorian
212
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Holocausts, notes that, after having already suffered decades of drought, followed by
fleeting relief, dry conditions and famine “returned with a vengeance in 1891, one of
the most intense El Niño years in modern South American history” (189). The drought
would be coupled with economic depression in 1893, but this time, instead of fleeing
the hinterland, many sertanejos would seek out a new survival option: flock to the
“drought ark” being constructed by Conselheiro at Canudos and remain in the
interior.185 Thus, as Conselheiro considered how to care for his ever increasing
number of followers in dire times, “Canudos was a rational response to the relentless
chaos of drought and depression. In the face of the inability of the state to develop, or
even slow the decline, of the sertão, it exemplified the practicality of a selforgnanized, “socialist” alternative, even if its official ideology was Marian and
monarchist” (191-92). As Levine explains, “Conselheiro’s vision inverted the harsh
reality of the impoverished backlands: the weak, strengthened by their faith, would
inherit the earth. Nature would be transformed: rains would come, bringing forth the
earth’s bounty” (Vale of Tears 2). Canudos was to be, and in fact achieved becoming,
a communal refuge against the harsh conditions of the sertão. Conselheiro “chose
Canudos as his locale because of its capacity to support agriculture, not, as was
claimed later, for its defensive capabilities” (“Mud-Hut Jerusalem” 540). Conselheiro
chose Canudos because, though a ruined fazenda, it was fertile land, “well defended
by rugged mountains and watered by seasonal rivers and reliable springs” (Davis 191).
And flourish it did. As already noted, in two years it would grow to support between
25,000 and 35,000 inhabitants. Visitors were stunned by its prosperity: river banks
213
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
lined with vegetable gardens, corn, beans, watermelons, squash, sugarcane, and
potatoes.186 Life in Canudos was essentially “pastoral, and centered around seasonal
planting and daily religious ministrations” (Levine “Mud-Hut Jerusalem” 540). In
effect, Canudos arose from a vision and desire to establish a community independent
from the Republic, an autonomous and self-reliant community that could support itself
spiritually and economically. If ever there was a social project to live disconnected
from the ties of established social institutions, Canudos was it. Upon arriving to the
village, settlers gave up their worldly possessions to the community and dressed in
simple cotton pants, roughhewn shirts and leather sandals.187 Indeed, even white
inhabitants who were small landowners had sold their assets for the good of the
community, and they too dressed and lived in a humble manner.188 The city did not
use Republican money (for lack thereof) and was supported by its own barter system
and transactions made by script.189 Levine goes to show that compared to most
hinterland hamlets, and despite the drought, life in Canudos was reasonably improved.
Matters of health and poverty received attention, the needy and sick aided with
provisions. It was a community that cared for one another, worshiped together and
even improved Canudos’ infrastructure and housing. Overnight some 2,000 houses
would be built and, unlike in most sertanejo villages, many were painted (some had
tile roofs).190 The old church was repaired and a larger and more improved new one
was under construction; there was a cistern built, a warehouse and armory.191 A public
school was even established, and many who otherwise would never have the
opportunity, in Canudos had access to education.192 In the end, though public opinion
214
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
would say otherwise, Canudos was not inclined to violent rebellion against the
Republic. In fact, though distanced from society and the Republic, Canudos before the
war proved perfectly willing to cooperate with authorities. Such is the example of a
murderer found in the town who was turned over to the police in Monte Santo to be
tried in Salvador.193
In reality, it was the war itself that would create fanaticism, both on behalf of
the Republic as well as Canudos. During the war soldiers would continually cry out
their “vivas” to the Republic, whereas the jagunços fighters would counter with their
own “vivas” to the “bom Jesus” or to Conselheiro himself. The rumors that Canudos
was a cradle for end-of-the-world fanaticism and revolution was never true, as Levine
explains:
Before Canudos was attacked, most of its residents were too busy
following Conselheiro's austere precepts of daily behavior to be crazed
by end-of-the-world (or other) fantasies. Deprivation and Conselheiro's
spellbinding explanations about the evilness of encroaching modern life
brought them together, but they were not “fanatics” until circumstances
united them in common defense against armed outside attack. (“MudHut Jerusalem” 572)
Inevitably, backed by rumors of fanaticism and revolution, conflict would knock on
Canudos’ doorstep. The rumors themselves would also become even more
exaggerated and widespread with each failed military expedition. There were four
expeditions in all, four military campaigns sent to crush the supposed uprising. The
215
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
first took place in November of 1896, and involved 100 men and their lieutenant sent
to capture Conselheiro. Before they could complete the mission, they were intercepted
and routed by Conselheiro’s jagunços at Uauá (a victory, even though the 150 jagunço
casualties far outweighed that of the troops). With each new campaign the number of
the soldiers would increase, as well as the fire power. By the third expedition, led by
the war hero Coronel Moreira César, the army attacked with 1,300 men, 15,000,000
rounds of ammunition, a squadron of cavalry, and an artillery battalion with 70 rounds
of cannon shot.194 A total disaster, the third campaign seemed to only confirm the
rumors. How else could a ragtag group of jagunços defeat a modern army with their
guerilla tactics and primitive weaponry unless they were receiving outside help,
reinforcements and equipment from say, Argentina or Austria? How else could the
Republic’s great Moreira César have died in battle if not for something bigger than
just a backland resistance? All of Brazil, now crazed with patriotic fervor, launched
the fourth and final expedition in June 1897, utilizing all the resources of the Brazilian
army. It would be a spectacle of modern warfare and technology. Over ten thousand
soldiers from all corners of Brazil made their way to Canudos, from local sertanejos
themselves who were pressed into service, to a cavalry of gaúchos from the
southernmost parts of the country. They would be backed by the latest technology in
European warfare, with names like Manulicher, Mauser, Kropatchek, and Krupp
inscribed on the steel of their rifles, machine guns, and cannons. Yet despite such
extremes, both in firepower and manpower, the final expedition would not come to an
end until October 1897, after four months of bombardment and continual fighting.
216
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
The jagunços were able to miraculously hold out for so long due to various
factors. I will name a few, though they certainly are not all. First, the land was on the
jagunços’ side. As Euclides continually points out, the jagunços knew the sertão
hinterland and all its secret paths and roads, they were familiar with the landscape and
the caatingas (word used to describe the thick underbrush of cactus and other
vegetation that congested the sertão). Their crude rawhide clothing, their breastplates
and leg guards protected them from the heat and caatingas. The army, on the other
hand, was ill adapted in every sense of the word.195 Their modern military tactics they
refused to abandon were useless, their wool and cotton uniforms torn to shreds after a
day in the harsh sertão, and their basic supplies (besides ammunition) continually ran
out. By the time each expedition completed the long trek across the backlands to reach
Canudos, they were in a sense already defeated, exhausted and suffering the pangs of
thirst. Furthermore, the jagunços were able to upgrade their armory with each failed
expedition. They managed to capture various munition trains and thus exchanged their
18th century muskets, blunderbusses, and cattle prods for the same modern rifles
formerly used to attack them. As da Cunha notes, after the failed third expedition,
“Levaram para o arraial os quatro Krupps; substituíram nas mãos dos lutadores da
primeira linha as espingardas velhas e de carregamento moroso pelas mannlichers e
Comblains fulminantes” (OS 491). If anything, the only thing the previous expeditions
accomplished was to supply the jagunços with unlimited ammunition, ensuring an epic
fourth and final battle. When it was all over, da Cunha notes:
217
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Canudos não se rendeu. Exemplo único em toda a história,
resitiu até ao esgotamento completo. Expungnado palmo a palmo, na
precisão integral do termo, caiu no dia 5, ao entardecer, quando caíram
os seus últimos defensores, que todos morreram. Eram quatro apenas:
um velho, dos homens feitos e uma criança, na frente dos quais rugiam
raivosamente cinco mil soldados. (OS 778)
Prior to Euclides’ first-hand experience in the fourth expedition, he had
published an article about the Canudos conflict titled “Nossa Vendéia” (Our Vendee),
referring to the French Revolution revolt of the rural peasants of Vendée.196 In favor of
the Catholic Church and the Monarchy, the people of Vendée opposed the
revolutionary government, bringing about a bloody conflict from 1793 to 1796. The
peasants fought a guerilla war that ultimately ended with over 200,000 lives lost. Da
Cunha, highly influenced by French romanticism, the likes of Hugo and the French
Revolution, initially romanticizes the conflict (for this reason too, he was assigned as
war correspondent to the fourth expedition, since only strong sympathizers to the
Republic were allowed to report, and de Cunha’s zeal at the time was ideal).197 In Os
sertões, however, after having witnessed the fourth expedition, da Cunha attempts this
analogy once again; but this time there is doubt, as if he realizes such a comparison is
flawed. Still he forces the analogy: “Malgrado os defeitos do confronto, Canudos era
nossa Vendéia” (OS 365). Trying to still make it work, da Cunha fails because as he
admits, the Canudos situation was defected. Vendee really is not apt because the
parallel between the two is incongruent. The Vendée resistance really was a
218
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
monarchist effort to battle the French Republic; Canudos, defected, was not. Behind
the rumors of religious fanaticism and revolutionary uprising, we begin to detect in the
pages of da Cunha’s book the real reason for the war, in the bodies and spaces he
writes. Lurking on the other side of the façade, behind the conspiracies regarding
Canudos, we inevitably encounter the real struggle: a fight for sovereignty, a struggle
for control over the body of a people.
It would precisely be Canudos’ autonomy that would so threaten the Republic
and incite it to violence. This power struggle, in essence, was a three-way struggle
between Brazil’s oligarchies: the Republic, the Church, and powerful land-owners,
each wanting its own piece of sovereignty over the body of the conselherists for their
own means and purposes. Though it sounds contradictory, their concern for the body,
who cares for it and how, and is what leads to the conflict that destroys Canudos and
the body of its population. Conselheiro had appropriated the body of his followers,
provided spiritual and temporal care for his people outside the bounds of the
economic, spiritual, and political institutions designated to do so; and in its autonomy,
Canudos was therefore a threat to state, church, and landowners, producing a threefold
struggle for the body: for care of the political body, salvation of the soul of the body,
and the body as a unit of agrarian production.198 Davis summarizes that
there was no “rebellion in the backlands” . . . only an attempt at
peaceful withdrawal into millenarian autonomy. Like earlier quilombos
(slave republics) in the Nordeste, however, Canudo’s simple desire to
be left alone in peace was perceived as a dire threat to social order. On
219
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
the one hand, the holy city drained the surplus of cheap labor otherwise
available to local oligarchs . . . Canudos signified successful resistance
to the new order that the Paulista elites and their republican allies were
attempting to impose across Brazil . . . it also contradicted the church’s
project of subduing backlands Catholicism. As a result, Conselheiro’s
premature experiment in a “Christianity of the base” was denounced by
Salvador’s savants as “communism,” by the ultramontane bishops as a
“political religious sect,” and by the federal government as “seditious
monarchism.” The Jeremoabos and other big landowners demanded
Canudo’s prompt destruction. (192)
The Brazilian oligarchy of sertão landowners, church, and state unite in a common
cause to reestablish societal order regarding bodily care, though their reasoning might
be slightly varied. For the landowners, their concern for the body is in its capacity as a
unit of production, as “mão-de-obra”—the body as manpower and labor force. The
landowners interests in bodily care go as far as the cheap wages they pay, measured so
long as their investment is “just enough” to keep the body alive and able to work the
land, no doubt a political-economical approach to the body.
On the other hand, both church and state have a common stake in bodily care,
one that is an inherited legacy—a shared archeological line traced between the two,
leading to our modern concepts of biopower and biopolitics. The Church’s concern
with the body, as observed by Foucault, is one that is rooted in what he calls “pastoral
power,” that is, the governing of the souls of men to lead them to salvation. This is the
220
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
origin of biopower. Though Foucault does track a sense of pastoral power back to the
Greeks, it is Christianity and the formation of the Church that will institutionalize this
power: “[A]s a Church, that is to say, as an institution that claims to govern men in
their daily life on the grounds of leading them to eternal life in the other world, and to
do this not only on the scale of a definite group, of a city or a state, but of the whole of
humanity” (Security 148). Thus humanity is the flock, the Church the shepherd who
cares for and guides the flock to safety.
Inevitably, a government of souls implies the governments of bodies, for the
body houses the soul, and to care for the inner vessel you must likewise care for the
outer:
Salvation is first of all essentially subsistence. The means of
subsistence provided, the food assured, is good pasture. The shepherd is
someone who feeds and who feeds directly, or at any rate, he is
someone who feeds the flock first by leading it to good pastures, and
then by making sure that the animals eat and are properly fed. Pastoral
power is a power of care. It looks after the flock, it looks after the
individuals of the flock, it sees to it that the sheep do not suffer, it goes
in search of those that have strayed of course, and it treats those that are
injured. (Security 126-27)
Pastoral power is one of care, one that not only saves souls through the sacraments and
teachings of the church, but that also cares for the literal body of that soul: feed the
hungry, clothe the needy and administer to the sick.
221
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Conselheiro threatens the church because he, a man unauthorized by the
church, is fulfilling its function. Yet he was not the only one. Conselheiro was in no
way a unique phenomenon to the backlands. For decades wandering sertanejo beatos
had taken up the slack for the church. Official church priests were far and few in
between on the sertão, and in the more isolated regions of the hinterland they were a
rare sight indeed. Furthermore, when drought struck, the priests, usually foreigners,
would flee for the coast, leaving their flock to fend for themselves. Therefore,
backland hermits and holy men like Conselheiro filled in and functioned as spiritual
guidance when the flock was in the direst of needs. They became the unofficial
caretakers of the flock. In the case of Conselheiro, and there are examples of other
beatos doing the same, this also meant that he provided subsistence for the body of his
followers as well.199 Canudos was in every sense of the word self-sufficient in spiritual
and temporal terms, existing independently of church authority. What is interesting,
however, is that the Conselheiro in no way undermined that authority. His influence
over the people was always within the bounds of church doctrine. Never did he even
attempt to act as priest or administer sacraments.200 Yet Canudos’ spiritual autonomy
nullified the need for the Church, posing a threat in the sense that a people subsisting
without sacraments was damnation.
This is why the Church, in 1882, banned Conselheiro from preaching or even
repairing churches. The influence of the beatos was overriding church authority, and
he, the most influential of them all, had to be reined in. Though many sertanejo priest
tolerated Conselheiro, his condemnation by the church would come from the
222
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
archbishop of Bahia. Euclides da Cunha does not miss any of this, and even includes
the archbishop’s letter of address to the pastors, which states that there is an
individual, “Antônio Conselheiro, pregando ao povo, que se reúne para ouvi-lo,
doutrinas supersticiosas e uma moral excessivamente rígida com que está perturbando
as consciências e enfraquecendo . . . a autoridade dos párocos destes lugares . . . lhes
proibimos , absolutamente, de se reunirem para ouvir tal pregação” (OS 280). As da
Cunha explains: “Foi inútil a intervenção da Igreja. Antônio Conselheiro continuou
sem embaraços a sua marcha de desnorteado apóstolo, pervagando nos sertões” (OS
280).
Upon the secularization of theology marked by the shift from the sovereign
church to the sovereign state, a transition which began in the 17th and 18th centuries,
reaching its peak in the nineteenth century, pastoral power will evolve into biopower,
and slowly the question of modern healthcare, of a state invested with function to care
for the health of its population—the welfare state—will take shape and form modern
biopolitics. If Conselheiro threatens the church, it is in that he assumes the Church’s
pastoral role and thus nullifies their authority, a sort of indirect and undeliberate threat.
It is against the Republic that his opposition is undoubtedly direct and intentional. The
most compelling reason for his anti-republicanism is that he opposes the Republic
precisely because he opposes biopower and the biopolitical agenda. Ventura explains
that he considered the Republic the Antichrist, and that he criticized civil marriage and
the state registration of deaths and births (the census) introduced by the 1891
constitution.201 Foucault traces these same trends, the State’s concern with sexuality
223
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
(marriage), as well as registering death rate and birth rate, as evidence for the
emergence of biopower.202 Essentially, for Conselheiro, marriage is a sacrament to be
conducted by the Church alone, and birth and death—life itself—likewise belong to
the Church. The Antichrist, one who is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and the antithesis of
Christ, will nonetheless seek to lead the people away with Christ’s own doctrine. It is
no wonder Conselheiro considered the Republic to be the Antichrist; here was an
institution that had replaced (illicitly for Conselheiro) the Church (Christ) regarding
the care of the flock. This is his resistance to modernity: he cannot accept the
secularization of the care of the body, and consequently, he opposes the Republic’s
insistence on governing aspects of life that for him belong to the Church. He himself
takes the pastoral care of the sertanejos upon his own shoulders, but he never sought to
undermine or speak against church authority. Against the Republic’s secularized
authority over the body, however, he would speak against, though never in terms of
revolution or violent rebellion.
In May, 1895, a year before the war, accompanied by a friar and a curate, a
Capuchin missionary by the name of João Evangelista de Monete-Marciano visits
Canudos with the intention of reporting on the conditions there. This report, however,
is not solely intended for the church, save he was sent as an emissary for the
government as well, a request made by the State to the Church.203 In this case, the
objective of both church and state is to regain control of the Canudos population and
reestablish their sovereignty, both over the soul and the body.
224
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Da Cunha does not miss the importance of church and state working together
for the same cause, and includes the Capuchin’s visit in Os sertões, along with
fragments of his official report. As a testament to Conselheiro’s support of the Church
itself, the Capuchin remarks on how amiably he is treated by the beato, who offers to
be their guide for the new church they were building. He was, however, alarmed by
the sure number of people in the town, concerned with “o espectáculo dos infelizes
que acabava de encontrar armados até aos dentes” (OS 321). What was yet more
disagreeable to them, were the “8 defuntos levados sem sinal algum religioso para o
cemitério, ao fundo da igreja velha” (OS 322). In his representation of both Church
and State, we can understand the Capuchin’s horror: here was death being handled
without the sacred rites of Church, without a state death certificate.
What appeared to go so well at first, takes a quick turn for the worst. Hastily
the Capuchin speaks to the people of Canudos to explain his mission. In his report, he
admonishes them, saying he was surprised to find armed men there (although sertanejo
backwoodsmen commonly carried arms), that he disapproved of families living in
lewd and idle conditions, and was shocked that eight to nine people died a day in the
town (something not uncommon in other sertanejo towns of the time, especially during
drought years). He goes on to say: “Por isto, de ordem, e em nome do Sr. Arcebispo,
ia abrir uma santa missão e aconselhar o povo a dispersar-se e a voltar aos lares e ao
trabalho no interesse de cada um e para o bem” (OS 323). Asking the people to leave
Canudos, to go back to the homes from whence they came, is his “holy mission” to
restore social order, give back to the landowners their workforce, but most of all, to
225
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
release them from the clutches of Conselheiro and place their bodies back in the care
of church and state. All this is said in the name of their supposed “bem geral,” or
welfare—for their own care.
The people of course refuse, telling him, “Nós queremos acompanhar o nosso
Conselheiro!” (OS 324). The Capuchin tries to explain that the church condemns
revolts and teaches that the “poderes constituídos regem os povos em nome de Deus”
(OS 324). The people will not hear it, and Conselheiro tells him he will not recognize
the Republic. The Capuchin is not hindered in anyway by Conselheiro, who lets him
preach as he would like, and allows “55 casamentos de amancebados, 102 batizados e
mais de 400 confissões” (OS 326). In no way does the authority of the church offend
Conselheiro or his people; however, on the fourth day, when the Capuchin returned to
the touchy subject of politics, the people of Canudos cry out that he is a spy, an
“emissário do governo e que de inteligência com este ia abrir caminho à tropa que
viria de surpresa prender o Conselheiro e exterminar a todos eles” (OS 326). Indeed,
their words are spot on, prophetic in that they see exactly what is happening. There is
no doubt about the influence the Capuchin’s report had over the Bahia oligarchy. His
findings would only add fuel to the fire that eventually led to their extermination.
This episode shows that the mission to convince the people to depopulate
Canudos was ultimately argued to be for their welfare. The Capuchin’s reports of how
the dead were buried without ceremony shows that their “bem geral” was centered on
the body, and that they were cared for “properly.” Needless to say, on the seventh day
the Canudenses would come knocking on the Capuchin’s door and force him and his
226
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
two companions to leave town, “fazendo-lhes sentir que deles não careciam para a
salvação eterna” (OS 326). A body that does not need institutional ministrations, for
salvation or care, is a body no longer in possession of its rights, and is thus to be
eliminated, for autonomy will not be tolerated by the new Republic.
3.3 Anthropology, Colonialism, and Eugenics
I believe that ultimately, to a large extent, Conselheiro opposed the Republic
because it was contrary to everything he and his Canudos stood for. This is especially
true in terms of racial equality. Though da Cunha describes the inhabitants of Canudos
as predominately mestizo, this was only true to an extent. Canudos was in reality a
heterogeneous community. Even freed slaves, who after emancipation were left
without a place in society, without land and the means for independent survival, found
their place in Canudos. As Davis notes, “Canudos was a broad ethnic cross-section,
and many previously outcast and marginalized groups found themselves in civil and
military leadership positions, such as descendants of fugitive slaves, former outlaw
cangaçeiros, and even the aboriginal Kiriri people—whose last two chiefs would die
fighting for Canudos” (191). Canudos was a safe haven for people of all races,
something the nineteenth century positivist Brazil Republic was not. The new
Republic’s nineteenth century Eurocentric vision for its own national identity and
character, meant privileged went to the white elite.
In the Republic’s search for the national archetype, in its struggle for the body,
what ultimately determines that fight is biology. Canudos was the shining example of
this: “Perhaps the most important lesson that Canudos offers is that it confirmed the
227
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
elites’ attitudes of rigid biologic determinism, of latent fear of the rural underclass, and
reveals the fragility of the First Republic and the brutal lengths to which its officials
were willing to go to crush discord” (“Mud Hut” 528). The elites’ biological
determinism was deeply rooted in race. These racial sentiments stemmed from
nineteenth century notions of social Darwinism and positivist conceptualizations of
progress.
Without a doubt, Darwin’s work on natural selection and his Origin of Species
would have a profound effect on not only biology, but on vast scope of sciences,
especially on social sciences like anthropology and sociology. It would in fact be the
motor behind the formation and acceptance of many of the human sciences within
nineteenth century academics (including anthropology). From a Darwinian hypothesis,
Spencer would extend survival of the fittest to human society, thus marking the
process through which humanity progresses. Sociologists such as Bagehot would
reason that stronger civilizations would always conquer the weak and consequently
preserve the most desirable “civilized” qualities of a people. Karl Pearson would
reason that there has always been a struggle between races and nations. Others, such
as the faithful Darwinian disciple Huxley, would oppose such propositions, as well as
Wallace, because of the ethical implications of such principles. Once put into practice,
such thinking could only mean political doctrine for colonialism and conquest.
Both Europe and the Americas were highly influenced by such thought, and
nowhere was this truer than in nineteenth century Brazil, specifically with regards to
Canudos.204 Gerald Greenfield notes that “Brazil during the latter portion of the
228
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
nineteenth century embraced the tenets of positivism, enlightenment notions of
progress, and the concomitant scientific racism of thinkers like Buckle and Spencer,
the backlanders became not merely curiosities from a bygone age, but detriments to
the nation’s progress” (83). The notion that “racial inferiority” and racial
miscegenation were to blame for the country’s supposed lack of morality, intellectual
progress, and ultimately any degree of perceived “social backwardness,” was
supported by the sciences of the time amongst Brazil’s elites and integrated into its
politics, especially into the new Republic’s sense of nationality. This is the world in
which da Cunha wrote Os sertões, a work notable marked by positivist ideas and tones
of social Darwinism. The anthropologically based panorama of superior and inferior
races, the civilized versus the primitive, is what forges da Cunha’s mind, as well as the
rest of Brazil’s intellectuals of the time. And we cannot omit the positivist influence of
Augusto Comte, who coined that “freedom is a right but equality a myth” (qtd. in Vale
of Tears, 15). The so called political myth of equality was “debunked” by racist
arguments supported by biology, meaning inequality was a biological fact of race. 205
In the section titled O homem (The Man), da Cunha demonstrates most
blatantly his biological and scientific racism, classifying natives, African Brazilians,
and mestizos as degenerate.206 The mix of “inferior” races (native and African
Brazilian) with “superior” European one, creates “casos de hibridez moral
extraordinários: espíritos fulgrantes, às vezes, mas frágeis, irrequietos, inconstantes,
deslubrando um momento e extinguindo-se prestes, feridos pela fatalidade das leis
biológicas, chumbados ao plano inferior da raça menos favorecida” (OS 200). In an
229
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
attempt to explain the Canudos resistance, da Cunha claims that according to
biological laws, the sertatejo’s isolation in the harsh backlands, his continual fight
with the environment, means he is a fatalist, able to withstand any conflict and
suffering for long periods of time—thus they were able to withstand the four military
campaigns of the Canudos War. Furthermore, he is “o homem primitive, audacioso e
forte, mas ao mesmo tempo crédulo, deixando-se facilmente arrebatar pelas
superstições mais absurdas” (OS 238). In this way, due to their supposed biological
aptness for superstition, the people “[p]recisava de alguém que lhe traduzisse a
idealização indefinida, e a guiasse nas trilhas misteriosas par aos céus...” (OS 268).
This someone would be Conselheiro, the “monstrous being” and “automaton” created
by the multitude, whose admiration drove him to heights of self-indulged grandeur fed
by his own madness. Therefore, the Conselhero was a puppet who at once controlled
and was moved by a mass of puppets.207 When all is said, he was doing no more than
condense the “obscurantismo de três raças” (OS 268). However formidable in his own
society and environment, “nômade ou mal fixo à terra, o sertanejo não tem, por bem
dizer, ainda capacidade orgânica para se afeiçoar à situação mais alta” (OS 237-8). On
a political plane, the sertanejo mestizo race, concludes da Cunha, “é tão inapto para
aprender a forma republicana como a monárquico-constitucional” (OS 316). Here we
discern that when taken to political levels, such biological racism leads to discourse
which may exclude certain “inferior” races from the nation-state. Conclusion: one
cannot participate in the Republic if unable to understand the most basic forms of
government.
230
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
As we observed in the previous section, a struggle over the right to care for the
body of the sertanejos is what marked Conselheiro as a threat to the Brazilian
Republic. If Antonio Conselheiro’s resistance to modernity and ultimately his
reluctance towards the nation-state’s biopolitical endeavors threatened the Republic,
then it is precisely the biologic concept of race that leads the government to conflict
against Canudos, the rationalization needed for state violence. Biopolitic’s primary
agenda is the biological politicization of the body. As Edward Ross Dickinson
highlights, biopolitics composes the “extensive complex of ideas, practices, and
institutions focused on the care, regulation, disciplining, improvement, and shaping of
individual bodies and the collective “body” of national populations” (3). Regulating
bodies, shaping and improving them, is carried out by biopolitics, through the couplet
of biological and political means such as medical practices, public hygiene and health
campaigns; social welfare programs and tax policies intended to encourage certain
demographic outcomes; and finally, the whole of racial sciences, anthropology and
racial theories such as eugenics and human heredity. A governing system formatted to
care for the biological body, therefore, reserves a place for eliminating that body based
on the racial sciences, through what focault calls “state racism”:
Given that this power's [biopower] objective is essentially to make live,
how can it let die? How can the power of death, the function of death,
be exercised in a political system centered upon biopower?
It is, I think, at this point that racism intervenes […] It is indeed
the emergence of this biopower that inscribes it in the mechanisms of
231
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
the State. It is at this moment that racism is inscribed as the basic
mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States. As a result,
the modern State can scarcely function without becoming involved with
racism at some point, within certain limits and subject to certain
conditions.
What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a
break into the domain of life that is under power's control: the break
between what must live and what must die. (Society 254)
It is on the basis of racism that biopolitics ceases to be a politics of life and became
one of death, of thanatopolitics. Canudos disrupted social order in that the regulation
of the sertanejos’ bodies fell out of the state’s hands, and when social order was not
restored—when the people did not disperse back to their homes, as requested by the
Capuchin—they ultimately refused to be internalized into state care. The next step was
forced removal and elimination. Destroying Canudos would put an end to the threat,
and death would be rationalized politically through the discourse of state racism.
In this way more than any other, Euclides’ pen imitates the Republic itself. As
a stanch believer in the Republic, though highly disillusioned by the war, he elucidates
state racism in Os sertões, expressed through his own biological conceptualization of
race. Euclides’ scientific reasoning, what we now call scientism, more than anything
demonstrates how he as an author functions in the capacity of the sovereign of his
book, for “[s]cience must be sovereign, a “total” system of knowledge; it could only
do its work if it were completely free to pursue its own logic. Many historians refer to
232
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
this belief as a commitment to “instrumental rationality” or sometimes “scientism””
(Dickinson 3). Much of what drives his narrative in Os sertões is Euclides’ belief that
he can encapsulate the whole of the conflict into a system of scientific knowledge—
socially, biologically, geologically, and anthropologically. Yet much like sovereignty,
his subjects escape his control, he cannot fully contain nor explain within the bounds
of his scientific convictions the horrible atrocities that take place in Canudos. And
perhaps the greatest bit of irony is that the very biological racism he utilizes in his
attempt to explain Canudos, is precisely the contributing factor to the political
violence and atrocity he so despises. Euclides simply cannot see past his own
ideology. It blinds him. He is appalled by the barbarity of civilization and cannot
comprehend how the new Brazilian Republic can be led to commit such a crime like
that of Canudos. Yet it is his own racism, embedded in positivist thinking, that
promotes the political exclusion of certain ethnic groups through violent means once
said groups are dehumanized and deemed racially inferior.208 His own thinking, the
ideology transcribed in the pages of his Os sertões, on the biopolitical level of state
racism, is responsible for Canudos’ exclusion and termination. The reason—the
discursive motor for civilization’s barbarity itself—is in front of his nose, and it would
seem during his lifetime he never puts two and two together, or that if he does, he
refuses to do so.
Sara Castro-Klarén suggests that Vargas Llosa, in his historical novel about the
Canudos War, La guerra del fin del mundo, substitutes Euclides da Cunha’s
conscience directly present in Os sertões, for one that is divided and articulated into
233
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
three characters in Llosa’s book: the Baron, the nearsighted journalist, and the
positivist idealist and phrenologist Galileo Gall.209 This observation provides insight
regarding the discursive conflict in Os sertões. Da Cunha is never fully able to give a
coherent account of Canudos because he cannot reconcile his own fragmented
mindset, represented by the three mentioned characters. On the one hand, he is like the
elite Baron who sees Canudos as a disruption to the social order, whereas at the same
time, like Galileo Gall, he is an idealist, a fervent believer in the progress of
civilization, and a scientist who believe biology determines the “superiority” and
“inferiority” of races. It is important to note that these two characters are never in
Canudos and never witness the battle. The one who does, however, is the nearsighted
journalist. Tragically, with his glasses broken, his handicap is that he does not see the
war clearly, like the journalist da Cunha, who also has a blurry view because he will
not fully allow the atrocities witnessed there to override his social and scientific
convictions and “clear up” his vision; da Cunha will not rethink his positivist and
racist ideology, and therefore he never fully sees Canudos for what it is, never detects
that his convictions of social elitism and race are a big part of the puzzle to explaining
the terrible violence. Galileo Gall and the Baron are never allowed in Canudos, and
therefore are never impacted nor influenced by the war so as to go through any sort of
character development or change. And so da Cunha remains a nearsighted witness to
the carnage, his masterpiece fragmented and contradictory.
I would suggest that there is also something beyond Euclides’ biological and
racist approximation to the sertanejo that is subversive. In his anthropological
234
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
approach and treatment of time regarding the people of Canudos, he enacts the
relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. He approaches his subject in the
present, as the modern man, the civilized—the colonizer; whereas the sertanejos
remain in the past, distanced from him, as the primitive and the savage. It is upon his
civilization, his modern political notions, that they are judged. As Salvadori de Decca
and Gnerre point out, the inexplicable trauma of fratricide described in Euclides da
Cunha’s work is much like the impetuous genocide of Spanish conquistadors in
Cabeza de Vaca. In Canudos, the colonial dispute is repeated between two factions of
a nation, a people, that have recently exited the colonial period.210 Canudos stands
upon the threshold between the colonial era and modernization. Brazil has yet to leave
behind entirely its colonial past, nor has it entered fully into the postcolonial modern
world. Within this fringe space, both colonial and biopolitical forms of power
converge.
Da Cunha’s anthropological account of the sertanejos, his attempt to construct
its object—the Other, reveals anthropology’s political act of power over its subject.
Fabian Johannes, in his Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object,
exposes anthropology’s usage of Time in relation to power over the Other:
Anthropology’s claim to power originated at its roots. It belongs to its
essence and is not a matter of accidental misuse. Nowhere is this more
clearly visible, at least once we look for it, than in the use of Time
anthropology makes when its strives to constitute its own object—the
savage, the primitive, the Other. It is by diagnosing anthropology’s
235
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
temporal discourse that one rediscovers the obvious, namely that there
is no knowledge of the Other which is not also a temporal, historical, a
political act. (1)
Johannes argues that under the paradigm of human and social evolution rests a
secularized version of Time that is spatialized. Thus, “anthropology’s efforts to
construct relation with its Other by means of temporal devices implied affirmation of
difference as distance” (16). As a consequence of distancing itself both spatially and
temporally, anthropology became a tool of colonialization:
Anthropology contributed above all to the intellectual justification of
the colonial enterprise. . . . It promoted a scheme in terms of which not
only past cultures, but all living societies were irrevocably placed on a
temporal slope, a stream of Time—some upstream, others downstream
. . . the “primitive”; it thinks, observes, studies in terms of the
primitive. Primitive being essentially a temporal concept, is a category,
not an object, of Western thought. (17-18)
Euclides’ approach to sertanejo culture and society places them in past, distancing
himself and the reader from the sertanejos in a temporal and spatial sense. As an
anthropologist, da Cunha assumes the role of the colonizer, dehumanizing his subject
and its culture by placing them on the downstream slope of the past. His very attitude
towards his travels to Canudos as a war correspondent assumes that he is travelling
back in time. In his Preliminary Note to Os sertões, da Cunha recognizes Time’s
important role and informs the reader that “àqueles extraordinários patrícios [os
236
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
sertanejos] . . . deles de todo nos separa uma coordenada histórica—o tempo” (OS 66).
Like an anthropologist in a primitive and foreign land, da Cunha explores the past,
attempts to bridge the gap between the reader and another age of humanity. He keeps
notes of his travels to Canudos and the backwards, “primitive” people he meets along
the way in his Caderneta de campo (Field or Camp Notebook), essentially a
travelogue—the new literary discourse engendered by anthropology to synthesize the
science of man through travel accounts.211 Notes from his Caderneta de campo, his
anthropological notebook, reveal the nineteen century belief that scientific knowledge
could be accessed through observation made while traveling. Caderneta de campo
would be one of da Cunha’s sources for Os sertões, attributing to the air of having
traveled far away both temporally and spatially when the reader negotiates
descriptions of Canudos and its people. As he says, the campaign itself was like
staging “uma invasão—em território estrangeiro” (OS 679). Da Cunha takes the reader
into this foreign world, a primitive and dangerous heart of darkness.
First we will take into account Canudos, the city itself. Throughout the book
Euclides refers to Canudos as the “Tróia de taipa [mud walls]” (OS 192) and the
“acrópoles desmanteladas” (OS 510), placing the city in a contextual past as a city
already in ruins. However, this is not just a historic past, but one that is prehistoric and
primitive, that creates curiosity for the archeologist: “Sob tal aspect era [Canudos],
antes de tudo, um ensinamento e poderia ter despertado uma grande curiosidade. A
mesma curiosidade do arqueólogo ao deparar as palafitas de uma aldeia lacustre, junto
a uma cidade industrial da Suíça” (OS 503). He places the primitive village in contrast
237
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
with the modern European city—the past and the present side by side in contrast.
What’s more, are the dwellings themselves, the huts where the jagunços live are a
“fase transitória entre a caverna primitiva e a casa . . . equiparado ao wigwam dos
Peles-Vermelhas” (OS 292). The city itself takes on “a feição media entre a de um
acampamento de guerreiros e a de um vasto kraal africano” (OS 294).212 Here, da
Cunha places them in an evolutionary context of being somewhere between the cave
and the house in their social development. He compares Canudos to a kraal—later he
will even call the huts “African wadies.” In doing so, da Cunha utilizes strong imagery
associated with colonization, thus relying on tropes the reader already recognizes and
then may employ to interpret Canudos as a town and people in need of “civilizing.”
Da Cunha’s treatment of the sertanejos themselves is no different from that of
the city they dwell in. The jagunços are continually referred to as primitive and
savage. They are not a people but a clan, “o clã tumultuoso de Antônio Conselheiro”
(OS 294). They are of the past, distant and separate from modern Brazil. Euclides
explains that the modern cities of Brazil left behind those of their interior:
Vivendo quatrocentos anos no litoral vastíssimo . . . Ascendemos, de
chofre, arrebatado na caudal dos ideais modernos, deijando na
penumbra secular em que jazem, no âmago do país, um terço da nossa
gente. . . . mais fundo o contraste entre o nosso modo de viver e o
daqueles rudes patrícios mais estrangeiros nesta terrado do que os
imigrante da Europa. Porque não no-los-separa um mar, separam-nolos três séculos. (OS 317)
238
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Trapped three centuries in the past, the Canudos campaign seems to be a battle with
Time. The rest of Brazil has progressed, modernized, and those left behind can no
longer be tolerated.
Da Cunha attempts to tie the sertanejos’ primitiveness to the land itself and to
natural evolution; the harsh conditions of a dessert, the isolation from civilization
meant the “força portentosa da hereditariedade, . . . arrasta para o meios mais
adiantados . . . trogloditas completes” (OS 501). He then explains that in the normal
course of social progress, civilization contemns such primitive beings, “os domina, e
os manieta, e os inutiliza, e a pouco os destrói, recalcando-os na penumbra de uma
existência inútil, de onde os arranca, às vezes, a curiosidade dos sociólogos
extravagantes ou as pesquisas da psiquiatria” (OS 501). Civilization may drive the
primitive man back into the darkness because as a thing of the past, his existence is
meaningless. He has already been, already existed and therefore cannot inhabit any
meaningful state of existence in the present. The primitive man is a dark void of
nothing, only fit to be brought out of obscurity and studied as the object of science. De
Cunha sees himself as the socio-anthropologist and the psychiatrist of the sertanejos,
the one who plucks them out of the darkness and places them on display for
civilization. He diagnoses Conselheiro as a lunatic and victim of “historic atavism,”
his people suffering from a lowered mental condition prone to superstition. In Os
sertões he studies them, gives an account of their backwards culture, their religion,
superstitions, folklore, even the vaqueiro’s clothing, his work habits and his cattle
round-ups.
239
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Essentially, what all this means is that the primitive sertanejos, distanced in the
past from modern Brazil, are already dead. Their historical self, their bodies, belong to
another time and place. As such, their lives have already been lived. They are dead,
and their city, Canudos, “já feito ruínas. Nascia velho” (OS 291-92), is also dead,
suited more for the archeologists shovel than for life in the Republic. So the Republic
may cannonade the city, pepper its inhabitants with bullets, and there is no real
damage because they are attacking a “necropolis” full of the living dead. Da Cunha
therefore illuminates, through his anthropological discourse of Time, the intellectual
justification for colonization. A people of the past must be replaced by a people of the
present. Already dead, they cannot be killed; there is no crime, no genocide in their
destruction. Euclides knows that civilization will continue to push into the sertão
backlands and relegate the jagunço to “tradições evanescentes, ou extintas” (OS 66).
With this knowledge he enters the sertão as the anthropologist and writer, with the
eyes of a colonizer. He travels through the hinterland showing the reader the
“necrópoles vastas,” whose “estrutura se desvenda em pontiagudas apófises, em rimas
de blocos, em alinhamentos de penedias, caprichosamente repartidos, semelham, de
fato, grandes cidades mortas,”and that city of the dead Euclides imagine therin lives
“uma população silenciosa e trágica de almas do outro mundo” (OS 390).
The Canudos phenomenon is likewise not without its colonial fears and myths.
As is common with colonization, the colonized are dehumanized to such a degree they
become monsters, the places they inhabit the dark unknown that haunts the cities of
men. Canudos is not just primitive, but for the new Brazilian Republic it becomes the
240
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
“A urbs monstruosa, de barro” the product “a civitas sinistra do erro” (OS 291). Da
Cunha notes and records in Os sertões how the sertanejos themselves become
subhuman monsters. Much like the colonial fears of the native cannibal, as the
Canudos conflict intensifies, so to do the rumors about the jagunço. Da Cunha
explains:
Urdiam-se estranhos episódios. O jagunço começou a aparecer como
um ente à parte, teratológico e monstruoso, meio homem e meio trasgo;
violando as leis biológicas, no estadear resistências inconceptíveis;
arrojando-se, nunca vista intangível, sobre o adversário; deslizando,
invisível, pela caatinga, como as cobras; resvalando ou tombando pelos
despenhadeiros fundos, como espectro; mais leve que a espingarda que
arrastrava; e magro, seco, fantástico, diluindo-se em duende, pesando
menos que uma criança, tendo a pele bronzeada colada sobre os ossos,
áspera como a epiderme das múmias... (OS 647)
The jagunços go beyond the biological laws of evolution that Euclides employs to
diagnose their primitiveness. Transgressing these laws, they become the monster who
resists the Republic and refuses to be subdued with unnatural power. Dehumanized,
the battle against them is no longer a war of so called civilized humans versus
primitive ones, but one where primitiveness and savagery become synonymous with
monster. The colonial subjection of the Other thus becomes a war against monstrosity.
Nineteenth century colonial anxiety with dark frontier territories and the
monsters they harbor correlates to modernity’s own preoccupation with the hereditary
241
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
degeneracy. In this section, what began with modernity’s state racism, transitioned to
colonialism’s tie to anthropology in the appropriation of the Other through Time, and
has now led us back full circle to biopolitics. This is because early colonial fears of
primitiveness and savagery would be transcribed, in the nineteenth century, into fears
of racial degeneracy. The mechanisms for colonial violence against the savage would
evolve into modernity’s state racism. The most defining characteristic of modernity
has been labeled “the biologization of the social”; a process that would take place
from the 1860s to the Third Reich.213 According to Arendt, colonial conquest exposed
a potential for violence formerly unknown. Nazism, for instance, did not happen in a
test tube, nor was it an isolated explosion of unbridled racial violence, save the
continuation and intensification of the “civilized” European methods originally
reserved for “savages”.214 As Mbembe explains, biopolitics’ mechanisms and
technologies of Nazism— subjugation of the body, health codes, social Darwinism,
eugenics, legal theories on heredity, degeneration, and race—would derive from
colonial practices.215 As he states, most instances of race like “the selection of races,
the prohibition of mixed marriages, forced sterilization, even the extermination of
vanquished peoples are to find their first testing ground in the colonial world” (171).
Totalitarianism, like colonialism, dehumanizes the Other. Hence, there is a direct link
between colonization and modernity: the former utilizes anthropology to rationalize
violence against the primitive other, whereas the later integrates biology to engender
the racial other. In this way, according to Arendt, “Race is, politically speaking, not
the beginning of humanity but its end . . . not the natural birth of man but his
242
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
unnatural death” (Origins 157). Da Cunha’s Os sertões seems to expose both sides of
the coin, both colonial fears of the primitive other and, in an even more “front stage”
spotlight, modernity’s fear of racial degeneracy. Perhaps in this way more than any
other, Os sertões exemplifies, as so many academics have noted, Brazil’s crossing of
the threshold from colonialism into modernity.
The Canudos conflict was a fight against race, a racist war against the State’s
own “degenerate” people. Da Cunha’s racial thinking, his conviction of the inferiority
of some races to others, his own fear of degeneracy, implies a recognition for the need
to correct this “race problem,” much like one would cure a sickness or improve the
stock in a bloodline of horses by introducing a purebred stallion. Canudos was an
appendage of the Republic that had supposedly become festered and degenerate with
backwards ways of life and thinking. Amputating the infected member and excluding
Canudos from the state organism—much like Conselheiro was decapitated in the
end—was one way to fight degeneracy. It was, for da Cunha, also the inevitability of
social Darwinism that the stronger races would overcome the weak:
Retardatários hoje, amanhã se extinguirão de todo.
A civilização avançará nos sertões impelida por essa implacável
“força motriz da História que Gumplowicz, maior do que Hobbes,
lobrigou, num lance genial, no esmagamento inevitável das raças fracas
pelas raças fortes. (OS 66)
Euclides’ reference to Gumplowicz’s genius over Hobbes’, lies in the fact that
between the two political commentators, Gumplowicz was a social Darwinist who
243
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
transcribed race into sociology and politics. Canudos was, on the one hand, the
verification of something bigger than race struggle, politically broader than any war to
physically eradicate degeneracy. The war itself was the product of a modern nationstate who had adopted an immigration policy of eugenics, a platform of national racial
cleansing. After all, the Brazilian army fighting against the “degenerate” mestizo
sertanejos was itself composed in part of mestizo soldiers. Their own hereditary makeup, according to Brazils’ long-term project of so called racial improvement, would
also have to be purged from the nation.
Perhaps nowhere does biopolitics’ mission to regulate the body become more
evident than in eugenics. As Arendt recognizes, Social Darwinism, on a political level
“offered two important concepts: the struggle for existence with optimistic assertion of
the necessary and automatic “survival of the fittest,” and the indefinite possibilities
which seemed to lie in the evolution of man out of animal life and which started the
new “science” of eugenics” (Origins 178). As defined by Dickinson, eugenics is “the
study of the (alleged) inheritance of physical, intellectual, and social characteristics in
human populations,” and as such, it
has occupied a key place in this emerging model [biopolitics]. The fear
of degeneration neatly summed up the moderns’ sense of crisis, and at
the same time eugenics expressed the almost religious sense of
possibility at the heart of modernity, by holding out the promise of
transcendence, of improving the actual material of humanity itself.
Thus, eugenics can be seen as a kind of transmission belt directly
244
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
linking Darwinist evolutionary science to the project of social
engineering. (3)
Social engineering in nineteenth century Brazil meant immigration, and Brazilian
policy was one based on the “teoria brasileira do branqueamento racial” (racial
whitening).
Adelino Brandão points out that racial whitening was very much an Euclidian
discourse, and one also shared with many Brazilian intellects, including the likes of
politician and writer Coelho Netto.216 This theory originates from theses formulated by
the likes of Europeans such as Agassiz, Chamberlain, Gustave L. Bon, Lapouge,
Spencer, Gobineau, and other scientists, each one racist, as well as equally racist
Brazilian scientists and thinkers such as Nina Rodrigues, Sílvio Romero, Batista de
Lacerda. Each tried to resolve national problems by resolving the “race problem”. This
fomented a political immigration policy in Brazil (and in other parts of Latin America,
most notably Argentina) to attract “loiros,” Anglo-Saxon and Germanic Europeans so
that they might “whiten” the Brazilian population. According to their theories, the
“superior and stronger” white blood would purge the “weaker” African and Native
American blood from the population, thus resulting (over time) in a predominantly
Anglo and Germanic nation. This would happen as the “inferior” races would
succumb and be “thinned out” by infirmities, low birth rates, poverty, and hereditary
expulsion through marriages to whites, or by the process of evolution itself. Thus the
conclusion could be drawn that the diverse Brazilian races would be forged into one
“superior” white race.217
245
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Brazilian political policy for immigration means that the Brazilian Republic
“was probably the first government anywhere explicitly committed to large-scale
“positive Eugenics”” (Davis 383). It is interesting to find, that in da Cunha’s
Preliminary Note to Os sertões, he specifically refers to immigration and racial
whitening, as though the Canudos war is simply a violent footnote to the larger racial
project of Brazil. He explains that his book will sketch “ante o olhar de futuros
historiadores, os traços atuais mais expressivos das sub-raças sertanejas do Brasil,” a
noble cause for Euclides, because due to the “deplorável situação mental em que
jazem,” modernity will soon render them “efêmeras, destinadas a próximo
desaparecimento ante as exigências crescents da civilização e a concorrência material
intensiva das correntes migratórias que começam a invader profundamente a nossa
terra” (OS 65). Due to his conviction of social Darwinism and civilization’s progress,
for Euclides, the disappearance of the “subraces,” whether through violence or not,
was inevitability a fact of natural selection. The government’s immigration policy to
“whiten” Brazil was an effort to force natural selection, harness it to engineer their
nation into one normative, homogenous and “superior” race.
In retrospect, however, it is the sertanejos themselves who get the last laugh.
Brazil has never been a racially homogenous country of European stock, save a
country of “morenos e mulatos,” of an interracial outcome totally opposite to that of
the racist theses and Arianism prevalent during end of the nineteenth century and
beginning of the twentieth.218
246
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
3.4 Governmentality and State of Exception
For Foucault, the State, traditionally vitalized by a sovereignty that legitimated
law, begins to shift in modernity to what he calls governmentality, as sovereignty
losses its credibility. On a broad scale, governmentality is a mode of power concerned
with managing and restricting bodies and populations through policies and
departments, bureaucracies and institutions, and through law as a strategy and tactic,
not a sovereign absolute. Controlling the circulation of goods and services insofar as it
maintains and restricts the life of a population, is governmentality’s mode of power,
which can be expressed through forms of state and non-state institutions of power,
something I believe we find in the case of Canudos. We have already seen how Brazil
oligarchies such as landowners, church, and state, strategically sought to undermine
Canudos’ autonomy and reestablish traditional social order. The example of the
Capuchin working bureaucratically in conjuncture with a state and non-state
institutions (Church and State) to persuade the sertanejos to abandon Canudos,
demonstrates governmentality.
Furthermore, newspaper correspondents (including da Cunha) reporting on the
war seemed to be almost obsessed with demonstrating the diverse departments of state
power in order to stress the competence of the Republic and restore public confidence.
The Brazilian public was continually informed in newspapers regarding the excellent
health of the soldiers, and how well provisioned they were. Names of the government
departmental heads become common place in newspapers, especially the Minister of
War Marshal Carlos Bittencourt, the Chief of Public Safety Dr. Félix Gaspar, the
pharmaceutical directors such as Captain Isaías Pinto da Silva, Artur Martins Torres,
247
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
and Alferes Antônio Fonseca, the chief of health service Dr. Major José Lopes da
Silva Júnior (“chefe do corpo sanitário” and also called “chefe do serviço sanitário),
and the long lists of other doctors, pharmacists, academics and pharmaceutical and
medical students that enlisted in the war effort. Indeed, it would seem the majority of
the Republics’ departments focused their full attention on the conflict. Most
interesting is that the health and sanitary departments will converge on war;
departments intended to improve and prolong life’s biological health are somehow tied
up in an endeavor to eliminate it.
To a large extent, the war correspondents were charged with portraying to the
Brazilian people a competent government, one that was organized and in control,
capable of handling the conflict as well as protecting the people. This was something
surprisingly easy to accomplish. As Zilly explains, most of the journalists had good
relations with the military officials, and there was strict collaboration between the
press and the army, with many journalists who were officials in the reserve to begin
with, like Euclides da Cunha himself.219 Moreover, they shared likeminded ideology
and radical republican conviction of “order and progress,” meaning few journalists
questioned the war, overlooking the atrocities and crimes committed.220 Even Euclides
is silent regarding war atrocities in his newspaper articles, something that changes
drastically when he writes Os sertões. As Ventura points out, any critique of the
Republic was heavily censured by the military before being dispatched by telegraph
anyway.221 Consequently, journalism itself becomes another institution of
governmentality and the management of bodies.
248
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
The conditions of the Brazilian soldiers were portrayed in newspapers, at
best, as confusing and contradicting. The dire state of starvation and deprivation
of the most basic provisions during the fourth expedition was not fully made
clear to the public. It’s true that it was often reported that hunger and thirst were
the two greatest enemies of the war; yet at the same time, many other reports
undermined such claims. Da Cunha himself reports from Bahia on August 20th,
before reaching the battleground, that the most difficult conditions of the
campaign come from “um inimigo que morre e revive todos os dias . . . a fome”
(Diário 114). Later, on September 2, when in the town of Queimadas, the
military post closest to Canudos with telegraph, he reports: “Não há epidemias; o
estado sanitário das forças é, até hoje, o melhor possível” (Diário 142). Closer to
the action in Monte Santo, he comments that the Republic doesn’t lack men to
die by bullets, but that it should not expect them to die of hunger.222 Another
correspondent for the Rio de Janeiro based Jornal do Brasil, also reporting from
Monte Santo, well into the fighting on August 16th, will exaggerate: “As forças
estão animadas e em boas condições” (232).223
Overriding the truly dire state of affairs of the war in the press was an effort to
portray the Republic, through its departments of war and health, in the best light
possible. This was done by reporting on the success of delivered supplies, specifically
food rations and medical drugs, as well as commenting on the organization of military
hospitals and pharmacies. At every turn the names of state representatives in these
departments are praised for circulating the goods necessary for the care of soldiers and
249
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
civilians alike. In Jornal de Notícias, for example, on September 6th, the correspondent
Lelis Piedade reports from Quiemadas that “o Estado . . . tem feito esforços que o
honram. O Dr. Félix Gaspar, Chefe da segurança Pública . . . tem prestado os melhores
serviços. É assim que a Coluna Girard weguiu com cerca de 300 animais, fornecidos
pelo Estado e isto com prontidão” (341-2). Then, in an ironic attempt to show the
“benevolence” of a government feeding its own troops sent to war, the correspondent
explains that the number must be added to the 1,000 animals already supplied by the
state.
There is also an effort to show the State cares not only for its troops, but for its
citizens as well. With the failing public confidence in the Republic, by proving the
government can care for the soldier, journalists are attempting to convince the people
of Brazil that the State can likewise care for them. In a Rio de Janeiro paper, A
Notícia, it’s reported on July 26th from Queimadas that the pharmacy, headed by the
“infatigável” Captain Isaías, has the “medicamentos precisos para socorrer às
necessidades locais e às da expedição” (404). Later on August 3rd, from Monte Santo,
it is reported that “[o] estado sanitário do lugar, antes da ocupação das forças, era
péssimo, graças à desídia das autoridades locais e à proverbial incúria dos sertanejos”
(407). The poor conditions of healthcare are precisely explained away as a local
sertanejo problem. Once state officials and the health department arrive, we find that
“devido aos esforços do dr. chefe do serviço sanitário, o arrial apresenta aspecto mais
agradável, notando-se já alguma limpeza nas ruas e casas, que são de contínuo
visitadas pelos médicos” (407). The war itself—the presence of the state military—is
250
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
being used (though it sounds contradictory) to promote confidence in the State’s
function to care for the body of its population. Thus, sanitary and health conditions are
so improved in Monte Santo, the State so invested in their well-being, that doctors
continually make house calls to administer to them, while in the meantime, republican
soldiers administer lead and steel to their sertanejo brothers of Canudos just down the
road.
Though it is readily reported that in Canudos both republican soldiers and
sertanejos suffer from hunger and thirst, and that their greatest needs are basic
supplies, journalists generally do so in passing and lacking detail. Details in
newspaper reports are reserved to display the “humanity” and heroism of the Republic
and, as we will soon see, to dehumanize the sertanejos themselves. Humanizing the
Republic means reporters focus on the sanitary care afforded to both soldiers and
sertanejos, especially in the towns of Quiemadas and Monte Santo, where hospitals
and pharmacies are reportedly put into the best conditions by the State.224 Even the
treatment of sertanejo prisoners who turn themselves over to the commander-and-chief
General Artur Oscar, are reportedly treated by him “com todas as regalias de
prisioneiros de guerra” (410). This means that “[m]ulheres, crianças e homens são
tratados com humanidade, nada lhes faltando, nem mesmo a comiseração de que são
dignos” (410). Those familiar with the history of the Canudos conflict, and with Os
sertões, might find such reports hard to believe, provided the execution of the 300
prisoners at the end of the war, mostly women and children, who had been promised
amnesty if they turned themselves over. Though never reported in the press at the
251
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
time, in Os sertões, da Cunha, unable or unwilling to put the event into words, makes
reference to the massacre through silence: “E de que modo comentaríamos, com a só
fragilidade da palavra humana, o fato singular de não aparecerem mais, desde a manhã
de 3, os prisioneiros válidos colhidos na véspera, e entre eles aquele Antônio Beatinho
que se nos entregara, confiante” (OS 779).
It should be noted, however, that certain newspapers did report the poor
conditions on the frontlines. Supplies, rations, and medical care for the soldier in
Canudos, where the fighting was taking place, could not have been worse. The Rio
based newspaper Jornal do Comércio was probably the most accurate in reporting the
true conditions of the war: reports of injured soldiers starving to death, no established
supply trains, rations being cut to a handful of flour a day, the poor sanitary conditions
of the hospital (“hospital de sangue”) at Canudos, not a single doctor, nurses scarce,
the infections and gangrene, the absolute lack of medicine and sterilizers, aguardiente
being used to clean wounds, etc.225 This is very much the Canudos War that da Cunha
illustrates in Os sertões, considerably different from his own reports as a war
correspondent. In his book we find constant hunger, the unsanitary conditions,
deprivation abounding in every sense. He includes stories of the soldiers becoming so
desperate for food that many would sneak out of camp and risk the danger of the
caantinga in search of stray livestock, many never to return. The gaúcho Calvary was
organized as a “round-up” party to search for and herd stray cattle to camp while they
simultaneously fought off jagunços hiding in the brush. He recounts that the crafty
jagunços began to wear goat bells around their neck and crawl through the caantigas,
252
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
luring in soldiers in hopes of finding a meal, but instead, they found themselves
staring down the barrel of the enemy and shot.226 Only at the very end of the fourth
expedition does the army even establish a sustained supply train, thanks to Marshal
Carlos Bittencourt. This single fact, later recognized humorously by da Cunha, is what
finally won the war:
De feito, aquela campanha cruenta e na verdade dramática só
tinha uma solução, e esta singularmente humorística.
Mil burros mansos valiam na emergência por dez mil heróis. A
luta com todo o seu cortejo de combates sanguentos descambava,
deploravelmente prosaica, a um plano obscuro.
Dispensava o heroísmo, desdenhava o gênio militar, excluía o
arremesso das brigadas, e queria tropeiros e azêmolas. (OS 665)
In short, what these episodes demonstrate is an encounter with a new Republic
exercising numerous facets of governmentality to circulate goods and information—
from state and non-state institutions like the church, the press, state war and health
departments—all in an effort to manage one body of their population while restricting
another in modernity’s primary feature: the biologization of society. However, I do not
think human life’s exposure to the techniques of governmentality in the Canudos
conflict is what ultimately derives life’s ontological meaning. There is another form
of state power—a negating form—that is at work.
Though Foucault attempts to claim a “cutting off of the King’s head,” placing
governmentality subsequent to and in place of sovereignty, many scholars like Judith
253
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Butler and especially Giorgio Agamben, have pointed out that the old model of
sovereignty has never really gone away, specifically sovereignty founded on the
exception. Furthermore, Foucault himself has recognized that the two forms of power,
both sovereignty and governmentality, can coexist.227 Sovereignty traditionally has
been a legitimizing power of the force of law, but as what Butler calls the “petty
sovereigns” reign through the bureaucratic tactics and institutions of governmentality,
the sovereign’s function to legitimize diminishes. Still, it does not vanish save
reintroduce itself in the very acts by which the State suspends law, emerging precisely
when law is withdrawn. Suspended law, the sovereign state of exception, can be used
as a tactic of governmentality to preserve the state, and therefore “the suspension of
the rule of law allows for the convergence of governmentality and sovereignty;
sovereignty is exercised in the act of suspension” (Precarious Life 55). The
“anachronistic” sovereignty of legitimacy resurges in modernity in a “ghostly” and
structurally inverse relation to the rule of law. It is a negating and excluding power,
the lawless “rogue” power of sovereignty that for Agamben, constitutes the “originary
structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending it” (HS 27).
The state of exception suspends the ontological status of life, deprives it of legal
rights. Neither dead nor alive, life is no longer a citizen, no more a political animal in
a community, but placed outside the rule of law. This is the sertanejos’ relation to the
Republic; this is the terrifying, lawless space they inhabit, in which their bodies have
become unreal. Neither dead nor living, they are bare life.
254
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Euclides da Cunha perceives the Republic’s suspension of law in Os sertões.
Amongst all the names and titles attributed to da Cunha—the anthropologist,
sociologist, poet, engineer, journalist, geologist, etc.—I would add political
philosopher or, at least, a political commentator.228 Upon the failure of the second
Febronio de Brito expedition, da Cunha observes the uncontrolled state of affairs
regarding the government. The defeat at Canudos only seems to deepen the abnormal
function of government, one that is debasing law. A process that he understands has
been underway for a time, and only worsening as the State confronts more and more
crises. The state of exception, the abnormal function of government, is becoming the
norm:
O governo civil, iniciado em 1894 . . . Encontrara o país dividido em
vitoriosos e vencidos. E quedara na impotência de corregir uma
situação que, não sendo francamente revolucionária e não sendo
também normal, repelia por igual os recursos extremos da força e o
influxo sereno das leis. . . . deixava que se verificasse o fenômeno
inverso: a significação superior dos princípios democráticos decaía—
sofismada, invertida, anulada. (OS 418)
He goes on to note the enigmatic nature of such a situation, an almost continual state
of revolution and war, where
um golpe de estado violador das garantias constitucionais, criara o
processo da suspensão de garantias; abraçado tenazmente à
Constitução, afogava-a; fazendo da Legalidade a maior sítese de seus
255
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
desígnios, aquela palava, distendida à consagração de todos os crimes,
trasmudara-se na fórmula antinômica de uma terra sem leis. (OS 418)
The dividing line between legality and illegality has become blurred,
undistinguishable, and the State has created that paradoxical space where sovereignty
is expressed through the suspension of law and setting aside the Constitution on which
it was founded. The Republic’s tactic is to illegally justify crimes with terms of
legality.
It should come to no surprise then, when the Republic turns to Moreira César
to lead the third expedition. A war hero who fought many wars for Brazil, da Cunha
describes that in his soul, “a extrema dedicação esvaía-se no extreme ódio, a calma
soberana em desabrimentos repentinos e a bravura cavalheiresca na barbaridade
revoltante” (OS 424). State of exception demands representatives that can at once
dress in robes of “civility” and noble bravery, while at the same time express the
indescribable barbarities of violence and war. All too appropriately, Moreira, like the
judge in Blood Meridian, exhibits the best and worst of the two-faced sovereign
actions of the State. Yet we learn in his case, that his embodiment of barbarity and
civility is due to an infirmity: “Tinha o temperamento desigual e bizarro de um
epiléptico provado, encobrindo a insestabilidade nervosa de doente grave em placidez
enganadora” (OS 424). Moreira’s epilepsy is a sickness of “delírios,” that lead Moreira
“a desencadear-se em ações violentas, que o podem atirar no crime ou,
acidentalmente, na glória, o potencial da loucura” (OS 429). There could be no better
disease to metaphorically represent a state of exception. Thus violence is hidden
256
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
beneath “deceptive placidity,” control falsified by suspended law, where crimes and
heroism are produced by the same uncontrolled convulsions. Da Cunha interestingly
gives a diagnosis to the condition of Brazil’s body politic: “a guerra de Canudos era . .
. sintomática apenas. O mal era maior. Não se confinara num recanto da Bahia.
Alastrara-se. Rompia nas capitais do litoral.” (OS 501) The “mal,” or malady of the
State, is like Moreira’s epileptic swing between order and chaos marked by the
sovereign exception.
I believe here as well, we can connect state of exception to colonialism. Once
again Canudos appears as a bridge between Brazil’s colonial past and its crossing over
into modernity. The cruelty of colonialism and slavery, a very real experience in
Bahia, is, as Mbembe has highlighted, expressed through a structure analogous to the
modern state of exception. The plantation system in particular, is a “concatenation” of
race, biopower, and state of exception.229 As the periphery in the Republic, Canudos is
a rural frontier, a region formerly rooted in colonial principles, in slavery and the
plantation system that must be subdued once more, civilized, “recolonized” again by
the State. Mbembe states that colonies, like frontiers, are zone were war and peace,
internal and external political figures, all stand side by side. Therefore colonies, are
locations were all juridical guarantees are suspending, marking zones where the state
of exception is the motor of violence in the service of civilization.230 Consequently,
“savage” is used to denote the almost animal existence of those who are bare life:
“That colonies might be ruled over in absolute lawlessness stems from the racial
denial of any common bond between the conqueror and the native. In the eyes of the
257
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
conqueror, savage life is just another form of animal life, a horrifying experience,
something alien beyond imagination or comprehension” (172).
During the fourth expedition, published in the Rio based Gazeta de Notícias on
August 27th, war correspondent Favila Nunes inverviews the ex-governor of Salvador,
José Golçalves da Silva (the first constitutional governor of Bahia). In the interview,
Golçalves explains:
Aqui, na Bahia, não há Constituição nem leis, garantia da liberdade
política nem civil: aqui reina o mais estúpido e brutal despotismo.
Canudos levantou a ponta do véu; sacudiu o torpor do país, que deve
estar hoje convencido de que urge mudar as normas da sua política
governamental. . . . Canudos e outros que forçosamente hão de
aparecer, prejudicando a pátria e a República. (156)
The ex-governor’s accusation of lawlessness is accredited to the mindset and
“stupidity” of the sertanejos themselves. If not reigned in, this mentality will spread
throughout the country. However, lawlessness exists in this region of Brazil as an
extension and continuation of a colonial model of rule, one that spreads like a disease
throughout the Brazilian seaboard, as da Cunha notes.231 Topics of savagery, race and
social inferiority still flourish in the backlands, the people’s lives seen as being little
more than animals. Ex-slaves have no more place in society than when in bondage. On
the other hand, despite the Republic’s emerging structure of governmentality, the
tactics of bureaucracies and state departments, the State holds to suspending law in
order to validate its sovereignty, keeping the sovereign alive through the exception.
258
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Thus the Republic’s clash with Canudos is one both colonial and modern: Bahia is the
space still trapped in its colonial past, brought to conflict with the new Republic whose
modern structure of state violence only reintroduces an “upgraded” political tactic that
creates the same conditions of suspended law tantamount to those of colonial times.
The war was, in Zilly’s words, the “illegal assault of legal troops against a community
of relatively peaceful vaqueiros and workers” (“Uma construção” 32). Canudos thus
becomes the focal point where a war “represents the site where sovereignty consists
fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law (ab legibus solutus) and
where “peace” is more likely to take on the face of a “war without end” (Mbeme 23).
This endless war is evident in the four expeditions against Canudos. If the town had
not fallen on the fourth attack, there would have been a fifth, a sixth, etc. The Canudos
conflict was a war that did “not establish a distinction between combatants and
noncombatants, or again between an “enemy” and a “criminal,”” and for this reason it
“is thus impossible to conclude peace with them” (Mbeme 24).
3.5 Grievable Life
On account of the war and the center stage Canudos took in the press, the
terms sertanejo and jagunço became synonymous in Brazil to the word cangaçeiro:
“an armed bandit on the payroll of the powerful landowners of the region. This was an
individual who would pillage and engage in all sorts of violent behavior” (AyalaMartínez 61). The entire community of Canudos had been transformed into criminals,
bandits and outlaws placed outside the law. There are thus no distinctions between
combatants and civilians, and as such there can be no collateral damage, no lamentable
259
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
deaths, neither women nor children. Canudos, as described by General Arthur Oscar,
the commander-in-chief of the fourth expedition, was a “bandit’s cave,” not even
considered a city in “civilized” terms.232 After Canudos was destroyed, the newspaper
Gazeta de Notícias declared it the “cidadela maldita, onde o banditismo, a ignorância e
o fanatismo estúpido e perverso acastelaram-se para eterna vergonha de nossa Pátria,
não existe mais,” the reporter coldly concluding as he parts: “Há um monte de ruínas,
atestado vivo das misérias humanas. . . . Subindo ao alto da Favela, perto das nossas
velhas trincheiras, encontrei umas mulheres mortas; aí me detive para lancar uma
último olhar para Canudos” (214). The indifference with which the reporter treats the
dead women is shocking to say the least. Almost in passing, they are simply there, a
detail to be given before he takes one last look at the “damned citadel.” There is no
indication of grief or mourning, as though their bodies do not form part of the human
family. The Canudos War was not a conflict between two regular armies viewed as
mutual sovereign enemies, but the sovereign elimination of a city declared
uninhabitable and life deemed unlivable.
Brizuela, in her exceptional article on the photography of the Canudos War,
holds that
through this war, and through, I believe, the central place that
photography and visibility played in articulating it, that the modern
State constituted itself by way of the forces of exclusion and inclusion:
some lives would be more worthy than others, some bodies would need
260
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
more cleansing and discipline than others, some bodies would be
visible and others invisible. (156-57)
Though Brizuel’s concern with Canudos is the photographic representation of
the Canudos War, brought to the public by way of an exposition which visited cities in
Brazil after the conflict (photography was not printed in newspapers at that point), the
horrors of the war are still undoubtedly presented as a written spectacle in printed
newspapers as well. Furthermore, do not narratives, especially those found in
newspapers, help the public “see” what is happening? In doing so, just like
photography, some bodies, some lives, are narrated and made visible, while others
remain invisible and excluded from representation to the public, through what Butler
calls a “a refusal of discourse that produces dehumanization as a result” (Precarious
36). This refusal to discourse, which occludes certain bodies or marks their death as
unqualified for grief, can be viewed as a journalistic state of exception that excludes
undesired bodies from representation.
To help give context to what Butler is speaking of, and to also give the
Canudos War a contemporary context, we will turn here to her books Precarious Life
and Frames of War. In these books, Butler expounds on the ontological representation
of life in media and newspapers in a post 9/11 world. She confronts the notion of
terrorism and the terrorist, and how media propaganda and even newspaper obituaries
censure certain life from being represented as “grievable,” or worthy of being
mourned. What is grievable is life that fits national ideology and identity, ungrievable
life being that which opposes the national project, i.e. those who meet a certain ethnic
261
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
and religious criteria associated to terrorism (Islam, Arabic culture, Middle Eastern
origins, etc.). This highly political action in media gives a country its own sense of
identity and, at the same time, designates the adversarial Other—what the national
populace is not. In Agambenian terms, life that is represented as ungrievable in media
is tantamount to bare life.
As Zilly has pointed out, in late nineteenth century Brazil, the terms atavistic,
jagunço, and especially cangaceiro, were used by journalists and da Cunha himself to
“slander” the Canudenses, “which in that time period were accusations as severe as
those of fundamentalists and terrorists now days” (“Uma construção” 33). To
dehumanize the sertanejos, they were framed as “cangaceiros, outlaws who, like
madmen, must live away from the normally constituted society. Neither the word of a
madman nor the “reasoning” of a cangaceiro could be accepted as authorized
discourse on reality, for they act and live outside the norm” (Castro-Klarén “Santos
and Cangaceiros” 372). In the same way today, “terrorists are like the mentally ill
because their mind-set is unfathomable, because they are outside reason, because they
are outside of “civilization”” (Precarious 72). Both terrorists and cangaceiros are
mentally ill because of their religious ideology and modes of thinking unacceptable
and “archaic” to the modern and secular world: “Only madmen or primitive people on
their way to extinction, such as Martin Fierro, the Conselheiro, etc., would make the
fatal mistake of addressing the new constituted forces of the republican states in terms
of the language and ideology contained in books such as Missão Abreviada or Las
horas de Santa María” (Castro-Klarén “Santos and Cangaceiros” 386).233 Likewise,
262
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
in a post 9/11 world, Islam becomes the basis for madness and, as Butler wonders, if it
is not just the extremist acts, “but rather all beliefs and practices pertaining to Islam
that become, effectively, tokens of mental illness to the extent that they depart from
the hegemonic norms of Western rationality” (Precarious 72). Consequently, all
sertanejos and all Muslims become terms analogous to “fanatics, extremists, who do
not espouse a point of view, but rather exist outside of “reason,” and do not have a part
in the human community” (Precarious 89). By nature, wars against fanaticism, against
terrorism in broad terms, and against a people for being “savage” and “dangerous,”
creates a state of emergency and exception where war has no end in sight, and in fact
become the normal situation of politics.234
To speak about how the “fanatic” sertanejos were marginalized from the
human community in Brazilian newspapers, we must first consider Butler’s concept of
what she calls “precarious life.” This term refers ontologically to humanity’s condition
of vulnerability, to life’s constant relation to its condition of subjection to the
possibility of social and political violence. As Butler explains: “Although precarious
life is a generalized condition, it is, paradoxically, the condition of being conditioned.
In other words, we can say of all life that it is precarious, which is to say that life
always emerges and is sustained within conditions of life” (Frames 23). This condition
of being conditioned to our own vulnerability, our own precarity as humans, can be
enumerated and measured in terms of “a hierarchy of grief.” Politically, to hedge up
against our own vulnerability, “Lives are supported and maintained differently, and
there are radically different ways in which human physical vulnerability is distributed
263
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
across the globe. Certain lives will be highly protected, and the abrogation of the
claims to sanctity will be sufficient to mobilize the forces of war. Other lives will not
find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as “grievable””
(Precarious 32). The way we frame life—be it in photography, fiction, journalism—
especially in times of war, reflects the “grievability” of life, demonstrating which lives
matter and which ones politically do not. Representations of imprisonment and torture,
mangled corpses of war, the stateless refugee and the immigrant, so acceptable in our
media, reflects those “whose loss is no loss, and who remain ungrievable” (Frames
24). The way we frame life creates the “differential distribution of grievability across
populations” and, in effect, “has implications for why and when we feel politically
consequential affective dispositions such as horror, guilt, righteous sadism, loss, and
indifference” (Frames 24). On this scale of distribution, loss of Afghani civilian life in
the Afghanistan War, for example, is found on the lower spectrum of grievability.
Their ungrievable status is a byproduct of the US response of “righteous” violence and
war after having suffered a tragic act of violence on 9/11. In similar fashion, the
“righteous” civilizing violence of the Brazilian Republic against the sertanejos found
them framed in such a way that to mourn their death was unthinkable: “They are the
one whose lives are not “regarded” as potentially grievable,” and are made to bear the
burden of “starvation . . . legal disenfranchisement, and differential exposure to
violence and death” (Frames 25).
Life’s distribution of grievability in Brazilian newspapers regarding Canudos is
highly reflected in the way deaths are reported. Some deaths matter and are given a
264
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
face, others omitted and will remain faceless and unknown, unreal, as though they
never existed. As one can imagine, officers and soldiers of the Republic are portrayed
as heroes, their deaths sacrifices, while sertanejo deaths of men, women, and children
are only occasionally expressed in numbers, in a mass of bodies used to measure the
success of the war, demonstrate that the Republic is winning.
Brazilian newspapers are meticulous in reporting the wounded and killed,
providing numbers and names of officers. A correspondent for O País by the name of
José Siqueira de Meneses, who wrote under the pseudonym “Hoche,” likewise a
military engineer, and highly esteemed by da Cunha himself, gives an account of the
operations performed by Dr. José de Miranda. We find 19 amputations at the thigh, 3
of the legs, 4 at the forearms, 2 entire arms, 24 fingers, 1 bandaging of the radial
artery, 4 of the femoral, and 246 extractions of bullets.235 Alfredo Silva does the same
in A Notícia, reporting the operations (all amputations), and also giving the names of
injured officers and the battalions they belong to.236 Most notably is the Rio
newspaper Jornal do Comércio that reports the injuries and deaths of all soldiers and
officers as of July 15th. The report is ordered by brigades and battalions, occupying a
considerable section of print in the newspaper.237 What these newspaper reports are
expressing is that the lost limbs, the extracted bullets, the injuries and deaths
accompanied by these names are great losses to the country, sacrifices in the name of
the Republic. The countless names meticulously reported are like abbreviated
obituaries of lives that matter, names that should be printed and mourned. The
obituary, explains Butler “functions as the instrument by which grievability is publicly
265
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
distributed. It is the means by which a life becomes, or fails to become, a publicly
grievable life, an icon for national self-recognition, the means by which a life become
noteworthy” (Precarious 34). The names of the soldiers and officers lost are reported
for public mourning, they become recognized nationally as fallen heroes. For the
sertanejos, on the other hand, life fails to become grievable through silence. Their
names are not reported. It is true that a few prominently known jagunço leaders of the
resistance, such as Pajeú, are reported dead, yet their death is not mourned save
celebrated, much like the death of known terrorist Osama Bin Laden was
celebrated.238 In this way, through the absence of jagunço representation,
“dehumanization emerges at the limits of discursive life, limits established through
prohibition and foreclosure,” which ultimately, as Butler puts it, “leaves a mark that is
no mark,” and so
[t]here will be no public act of grieving (said Creon in Antigone). If
there is a “discourse,” it is a silent and melancholic one in which there
have been no lives, and no losses; there has been no common bodily
condition, no vulnerability that serves as the basis for an apprehension
of our commonality; and there has been no sunder of that commonality.
(Precarious 36)
The jagunços do not share the common bodily condition of vulnerability with the
Republic’s soldiers; they are not mourned and so their lives cannot be considered
precarious like the rest.
266
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
The long lists of names of fallen soldiers are not accompanied with biographies
for obviously practical reasons. Simply put, there would be no room for so many
biographies. But this does not mean that we do not find many brief biographies
accompanying the reports of soldier casualties. In A Nóticia, war correspondent
Alfredo Silva reports: “Acabo de acompanhar à última morada o cadáver do inditoso
aluno de Faculdade de Madicina da Bahia, Joaquim Pedreira. Com 19 anos de idade
apenas, cheio de vida, o distinto acadêmico, filho do Coronel Afonso Pedreira ” (432).
We are told how after being shot, he “passou terrível noite de agonia,” and was then
found by Alferes Toscano, “cujo coração nobre, cujos sentimentos grandiosos
fizeram-no apear-se para dar-lhe o braço ate Jueté” (432). After the heroic efforts of
Dr. Major José Marques dos Reis and others to save Joaquim, his father was at his side
to see him “partir em busca da eternidade” (432). The report concludes that in the
simple cemetery of Monte Santo, “coberto de ervas e de flores silvestres . . . jaz hoje o
corpo de um dos distintos e abnegados heróis dessa cruzada terrível contra a horda de
fanáticos de Antônio Conselheiro” (432). In another example from O Estado de São
Paulo, Euclides da Cunha writes that Major Queirós, commander of the 29th, fell
mortally wounded: “Emoldurado o rosto arroxeado pela barba branca maltratada, o
aspecto do digno chefe comovia profundamente” (Diário 210). At his deathbed in the
hospital, “Rodeava-o a simpatia de todos,” and we are told “os soldados do 30o,
respeitavam-no como a um pai” (211). In newspaper reports like these, the public is
brought in to witness the hospital deathbed scene of those who are being framed as
national heroes. Just as Joaquim’s father is there to mourn him as a son, and Major
267
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Quierós’ soldiers are there to grieve him like a father, likewise is the reader able to
access grief for the lives of the sons and fathers of Brazil, the war heroes tragically lost
to the “crusade” against fanaticism. Obituary-like scenes such as these give the public
a body made personal, a familiar one they can mourn: the 19 year-old student, full of
life—the white-bearded Major, like so many fathers and grandfathers. The public’s
exposure to such reports is why Butler suggests “we have to consider the obituary as
an act of nation-building” (Precarious 34). The names and brief biographies of fallen
heroes create grievable life that comes to constitute the nation and its very identity,
while omitting the “fanatics” from having any part in public mourning excludes them
from the nation.
There are also public acts of grieving during the war, acts commemorating the
soldiers, actions that through their silence negate mourning to the nation’s sertanejo
brothers. Da Cunha notes throughout all of Brazil, after the defeat of the Moreira
César expedition, “Decretou-se o luto nacional. Exararam-se votos de pesar nas atas
das sessões municipais mais remotas” (OS 506). Furthermore, many religious
ceremonies are announced in newspapers to be held in memory of the dead soldiers.
On April 3rd, for example, it is reported in Gazeta de Notícias that the “partido
republicano autonomista manda celebrar, às 10 horas de hoje, na matriz desta cidade,
uma missa com Libera-me, pelo repouso eterno dos heróicos defensores da República,
vítimas dos assalariados monarquistas; para esse ato convida todos os que sabem
prezar o amor da Pátria” (34).239 It is interesting to note the usage of the word
“victims” here. The lost soldiers are considered victims of the sertanejo “monarchists.”
268
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
They are not the casualties of war, but are victimized—victims of crimes carried out
by outlaw cangaceiros. Victims are to be mourned. This sort of victimizing language is
consistent in Brazilian newspapers. During the action in Canudos, refering to the
soldiers, da Cunha reports he saw “cairem as primeiras vítimas sobre o acervo informe
das ruínas da igreja” (Diário 208). Another report states “coronel José Américo, nosso
amigo, como todos que o são, vítimas dos jagunços de Canudos” (106). The only time
the word “victim” is associated with the jagunços, is to show that their death is the
result of their own fanaticism, and not the Republic’s. When the army burns the
remaining sertanejos alive in their own village (using kerosene and dynamite), in
Gazeta de Notícias we are told: “Ficando soterradas, em suas ruínas, tudo
carbonizado, muitas vítimas do fanatismo e da exploração política.” (201).
Immediately following the description of these nameless deaths, the journalist Fávila
Nunes then reports the names and battalions of all injured and dead soldiers lost in the
assault, markedly delineating grievable victims from ungrievable victims of
fanaticism. Later, the same journalist states: “Os soldados lançavam lenha sobre as
fogueiras, o Tenente Dourado lançava dinamita e em poucos minutos todo o sitio
sitiado era um vasto incêndio, mal se ouvindo as agonias das vítimas do fanatismo”
(210). The sertanejos are thus not burning to death at the hands of soldiers who throw
gas and dynamite on the fire, but by their own hand; their own fanaticism brought
such an ungrievable and horrendous death upon them. In effect, “Uma mulher atirouse às chamas com uma criança ao colo,” as horrid as the image is, does not qualify as
grievable because “muitos jagunços morreram queimados dando vivas a Monarquia e
269
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
ao Bom Jesus Conselheiro, recusando peremptoriamente darem vivas à República”
(212). Such fanatic madness nullifies their lives, for lives worth living and worth
grieving shout their “vivas” to the Republic. These passages demonstrate that the
“violence that we inflict on others is only—and always—selectively brought into
public view” (Precarious 39).
The weaponry used in the war becomes an interesting focal point in
newspapers, and relates to the process of victimization. The modern technology of
machine guns and cannons are a thing of curiosity, symbols of progress and
civilization. The “armas de precisão, são manejadas com segurança, com as quais se
têm mostrado exímios atiradores” (485). Manuclicher, Mauser, and Kropatchek leave
no doubt to the “vitória das armas civilizadoras,”and when these “grandes inventos
modernos” are fired upon Canudos and its citizenry, they offer the “calmo observador
o quadro de sinistra beleza, grandioso e esplêndido, da terra abrasando-se ao som forte
e vibrante de mil trobetas de guerra,” impressing upon the sertanejos the biblical day
of vengeance brought by the “ango do extermínio” (487). It is no surprise that these
reports come from the military engineer José Siqueira de Meneses, a fervent believer
in the Republic and even greater admirer of modern technology. A segment of one of
his newspapers articles is quoted in Os sertões by da Cunha, highlighting the wonder
of the Republics’ modern weaponry:
Foi magnífico, esplêndido mesmo, o espectáculo que a todos vivamente
impressionou, vendo a artilharia com seus metais faiscantes e polidos,
altiva de sua força soberana, atravessar garbosa e impotente, como
270
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
rainha do mundo, por entre os fantásticos clarões de grandes fogos,
acesos no deserto, como que pelo gênio da liberdade, para mostrar-lhe
o caminho do deverm da honra e da glória. (OS 530)
These modern weapons bring liberty, inspire honor and glory. When fired they are
done so with precision. They are a civilized way of war, the correct and efficient way
to kill, whereas the sertanejos’ rustic and outdated weapons, called “rude and crude,”
continually noted for their sinister inferiority, “vomit projectiles” at the soldiers, who
are “cruelly gunned down.”240 The sertanejos’ acts of violence are cruel crimes. Words
like murder and slaughter accompany their violence against the soldiers, who in turn
become victims. Sinister and primitive, the jagunço’s ways of war are neither licit nor
civilized, and so their violence cannot be like that of the Republic’s. The governments’
“righteous” violence is licit, expressed as a “self-defense” of liberty and honor, and
therefore it cannot be cruel or a crime. Even their weapons are portrayed in a positive
light. Far more advanced in killing than the sertanejos’ weapons, it is as if the
Republics’ artillery capacity for mass extermination becomes a laudable symbol of
modernity and progress, much like praises for the mass production lines of
industrialization’s factories. Mowing down a line of sertanejos with a machine gun is
sadly presented as far more humane than the sertanejo who stabs a soldier to death
with a cattle prod.
In effect, the government’s own inhumane acts of violence do not receive
graphic coverage in Brazilian newspapers. They remain justified as a noble cause,
namely, in the rooting out of the monarchist rebels and the extinguishing of
271
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
fanaticism. Meanwhile, elaborating on the inhumane and criminal violence of the
sertanejos, they are dehumanizated as subjects and made ungrievable, meaning
“jounalists have accepted the charge to be part of the war effort itself, reporting itself
has become a speech act in the service of the military operations” (Precarious 36-7).
The differentiating allocations of grief in newspaper coverage of the Canudos conflict,
designating what life is grieved publicly, and what life isn’t, ultimately “serves the
derealization aims of military violence” (Precarious 37). What this means is there will
be neither protest nor public outcry against the death of the Other. Something not real,
that never existed, cannot be killed nor mourned. Mourning is for those who are real
subjects of a national community, grief over their lives reinforces their realness and
makes them the heroic symbols of a nation.
3.6 The Original Banditry of War
Ultimately, I believe the power of da Cunha’s Os sertões lies precisely in the
fact that he undermines the “speech act” established by Brazilian journalism during
the war, a discourse that had become all too familiar for the public.241 What I mean by
this, is that Os sertões, written and published so soon after the war, fills in the gaps of
events omitted by the press. He reveals to the public the horrendous crimes of what
they originally understood to be licit and just violence. I do not believe da Cunha’s
directly humanizes the sertanejos—far from it. The first three-quarters of his work
continually portrays them much like and other war correspondents did: primitive,
racially inferior, atavistic and fanatic. However, at the same time he will gradually
dehumanize the soldiers and mark them as primitive, fanatic, and racially equal to the
272
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
sertanejos, until in the last quarter of his book we find the masterpiece emerge, where
completes the inverse in his discourse to present an interpretation of Canudos entirely
novel. The soldiers will become no different than the sertanejos. The history and truth
established in newspapers are reversed into a reality in Os sertões that itself is
contradictive and even seems unreal. The scenes so horrifying, the acts so unthinkable,
Euclides, like McCarthy in Blood Meridian, exhausts the limits of language itself,
putting all his aesthetic and poetic effort into the expression of something so elusive
and “unreal.”
Everything leading up to the last expedition—his portrayal and interpretation
of the previous expeditions, of the sertanejos and the land—flow very much in the
same dehumanizing vein of previous articles and books written on the subject. It is
important to remember that everything prior to the fourth expedition, da Cunha did not
witness; he was not there. As the reader begins see what da Cunha saw, live the events
he lived, he or she enters into another realm entirely. It is as if there is a rupture in his
discourse; his narrative can no longer resist and must confess to the atrocities of war.
When da Cunha begins to be present in the text, when he narrates what he witnessed,
there is a shift in the way events are told compared to those when he was not present.
When he is there with us, saying “I witnessed for myself,” we finally begin to
understand why he claims earlier in the work that “a guerra é uma coisa monstruosa e
ilógica em tudo. Na sua maniera atual é uma organização técnica superior. Mas
inquinam-na todos os estigmas do banditismo original” (OS 379). Ultimately, war is
273
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
monstrous because it cannot shake off the original banditry that lurks behind its
formation.
Thus, as we will see, Euclides teases out acts of banditry committed by the
Brazilian army—he shows us that licit sovereign violence is no different than so called
illicit outlaw violence. In doing so, he reduces the soldiers, who were once so praised
as heroes in the press, to the same plane as the bandit jagunços. They become the
sertanejos, become the monster. As Dabove explains it, the Republican soldiers are
“devoured” by the bandit city:
Canudos devours the army. The devouring metaphor names the huge
death toll suffered by the army . . . It also names a more ominous thing.
As in many monster narratives, the monster hunter (the army) is
possessed by the monster and becomes a monster himself . . . The war
against the jagunços launches first the army and then the entire nation
on a time traveling journey toward the past, toward cannibalism . . . and
toward the original banditry (banditismo original) whereby the hidden
origin of the army reappears when the army reverts to the condition and
status of a horde. (225)
Euclides da Cunha observes how the extreme conditions of starvation in Canudos
transforms the soldiers into monsters, as though the colonizer has become the cannibal
he once so feared. He describes the starving soldiers, upon obtaining wild game, as
“acorcorados em torno das fogeiras, dilacerando carnes apenas sapecadas—
andrajosos, imundos, repugnantes—agrupavam-se, tintos pelos clarões dos braseiros,
274
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
os heróis infelizes, como um bando de canibais famulentos em repasto bárbaro” (OS
411). The soldiers are becoming that against which they came to make war.
Effectively, their becoming the monster means they are dehumanized, their
lives made just as unreal as the sertanejos’. It is precisely the dehumanization and
derealization of the soldiers, placed in context with the sertanejos, that gives the
sertanejos their humanity. Da Cunha never elevates the people of Canudos above that
of bandits in his entire work, but almost paradoxically, by contradicting the humanity
of the Republic army established during the war by newspapers, by lowering them to
the level of monsters and bandits, he gives a face to the faceless sertanejo, concedes
humanity to his own work and, finally, to the sertanejos.
No longer are those fighting for the Republic victims, save the ones who are
truly carrying out the slaughter. Os sertões rescued an obscure people from tyrannical
acts that da Cunha believed would have gone unperceived by History. As he explains,
“não havia temer-se o juízo tremendo do future. A história não iria até ali. . . . Nada
tinha que ver naquele matadouro” (OS 734). I believe da Cunha was right. If not for
his Os sertões, Canudos would have remained in obscurity as just another backlands
skirmish, another of many nineteenth century Latin-American rebellions. The Canudos
War and the sertanejos massacred there, if not for da Cunha, would have been
forgotten. Instead, his book exposes the “slaughterhouse,” brings to light the acts of a
government whose their army had entered into a “hiatus” and a moral “void,” a place
the military thought did not exist and would not be remembered: “Traposto aquele
cordão de serras,” which lead to Canudos, “ningém mais pecava” (OS 735). Da Cunha
275
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
denounces the sins of the Republic covered up by the press, sins he himself originally
occulted as a war correspondent. Almost as if in an act of penance for his sins of
omission, he gives us a terrible glimpse of sovereign violence in its true form, forces
us to look and see the jagunço subjected to such an extreme violence that makes even
bandits grievable. By doing so, he inverts the “nation-building” discourse established
by journalism, designating (intentionally or not) the sertanejo as the new national
archetype and symbol of a people.
In a space void of any moral standards, the soldiers who represent the nation
will become no different than the jagunços, and so the true archetype of the nation will
be passed on and revealed in the sertanejos themselves. The soldiers thus come to
abandon their “civilized” methods of war and employ the same “barbaric” strategies of
guerrilla warfare. In short, sovereign “licit” violence adopts “illicit” outlaw violence.
Da Cunha points out that the soldiers, after months of fighting, begin to adapt—evolve
even—to the bandit city. The soldier and the jagunço essentially become indiscernible,
as the former began “vestindo a pele do jagunço, copiando-lhe a astúcia requintada, a
marcha cautelosa acobertando-se em todos os sulcos do terreno” (OS 581). They cease
to even resemble a military organization, as da Cunha notes, most of the soldiers
having adopted the “hábitos do sertanejo, nem os distinguia o uniforme desbotado e
em tiras. E calçando alpercatas duras; vestindo camisas de algodão; sem bonés ou
barretinas, cobertos de chapéus de couro, figuravam famílias de retirantes
demandando em atropelo o litoral, fustigados pela seca” (OS 637). Da Cunha later
goes on to charge the Republic with the same fanaticism possessed by the jagunços:
276
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
“A luta pela República, e contra os seus imaginários inimigos, era uma cruzada. Os
modernos templários, se não envergavam a armadura debaixo do hábito e não levavam
a cruz aberta nos copos da espada, combatiam com a mesma fé inamolgável” (OS
617). Thus the fight against religious fanaticism has been fueled by the reworked and
secularized fanaticism of nationalism. Fire is being used to put out the fire.
In other words, “The Europeanized national army,” as Dabove points out,
has to dissolve itself in the sertão, become a multitude to actually win
the war (134-38, 222), cease being a disciplining machine, and become
a nomadic war machine. It has to become its enemy to defeat it, which
implies, paradoxically, the eventual (and invisible) triumph of the
jagunços, regardless of their empirical defeat. (225-26)
The evident “barbarism of civilization,” where the civilized army must become the
horde, act as the same nomadic war machine against which it is fighting, suggests
Roberto Esposito’s biopolitical paradigm of Immunity. For Esposito, the sovereign
continually takes a position of prevention in order to prolong the life of the body
politic, acting like a vaccine which seeks to immunize the body of the nation from any
unwanted pathogens. Tracing a link between the origin of the words communitas
(community) and immunitas (immunity), Esposito observes that a political community
protects itself from an excess of undesired parts of its own self though a power that
negates.242 This power is derived from his immunity paradigm, where a community
immunizes itself by introducing into its body politic a form of the original pathogen of
which it wishes to avoid an excess or even eliminate: “Just as in the medical practice
277
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
of vaccinating the individual body, so the immunization of the political body functions
similarly, introducing within it a fragment of the same pathogen from which it wants
to protect itself, by blocking and contradicting natural development” (Bios 46). To
give context to this paradigm, he argues that in order to maintain an overall state of
health of the body politic, observable “preventive prophylactic” tendencies have
accumulated into modernity:
Hence the need, increasingly emphasized, for immunitary barriers,
protection and apparatuses aimed at reducing, if not eliminating, the
porosity of external borders to contaminating toxic germs. How much
actual or threatened invasions contributed to this obsession with selfprotection, such as the Spanish one in England, or even contact with
unfamiliar cultures and ethnicities such as the Native American, not to
mention the growing Jewish immigration to Western Europe, is not
difficult to imagine: the greater the vulnerability of the body politic
must have appeared, the more urgent the need became to hermetically
seal the orifices that had opened up in its frontiers. (Immunitas 123)
Esposito’s immunization paradigm makes perfect sense in the context of Os sertões’
attack against the barbarity of the Brazilian republic.243 In order to prolong the lives of
the body politic the Republic sees as representative of Brazilian nationality, it
immunizes that body with the same pathogens seen as threatening to the health of
those lives. It is important to note that Canudos is literally situated on the geographical
frontier of the Brazilian body politic. The State, in an attempt to seal up the “orifices”
278
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
through which the “germs” of religious fanaticism, racial degeneracy, primitivism,
barbarism, and overall sertanejo backwardness may infect the national body, must
introduce these same pathogens to combat and essentially vaccinate the nation. Da
Cunha thus points out the proverbial “injection” of a national fanaticism in the body
politic similar to the sertanejo’s religious fanaticism; he concedes that in reality, the
majority of the soldiers were mestizos, of the same racial makeup as the
backwoodsmen,244 and he observes that they eventually don the jagunços’ same
primitive leather garb, becoming the monster, employing their same “barbaric” tactics
of war. In order to win the war, they must war in the fashion of the nomadic war
machine.245
The immunization paradigm in Os sertões essentially leads the reader to realize
that the soldier is no different from the sertanejo, and that he is, if anything,
civilization’s pathogen against barbarism that becomes increasingly more and more
ruthless, the soldiers’ barbaric cruelty even surpassing that of the sertanejos. Da Cunha
accomplishes this by first narrating Canudos as a void, a “terra incognita” not even
found on the Brazilian map, where all life, jagunço or soldier, is derealized and
negated any value. As the unreal, as lives never lived, there can be, in Butler’s terms,
no injury: “The derealization of the “Other” means that it is neither alive nor dead, but
interminably spectral” (Precarious 33). And so da Cunha give the readers scenes of
death where both soldiers and sertanejos are chillingly similar and spectral. During the
third expedition, dead sertanejos are described as “de bruços ou de supino sobre as
pedras, desenlapando-se à boca das furnas, esparsos pelas encostas, viam-se os
279
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
jagunços . . . Os companheiros sobreviventes passavam-lhes, agora, de permeio,
parecendo uma turba vingadora de demónios entre caída muldã de espectros…” (OS
409).246 After the army is driven off, the sertanejos take the dead bodies, decapitate
them and line them up along the highway to their town, faces turned towards the road.
Later, they impale the corpse of Colonel Tamarindo on a dried angiço bough. This
horrid scene should be given a cry of protest on da Cunha’s part, an act of grieving or
daring proclamation of heroism and tragedy of their terrible fate. Instead, he describes
the final state of the dead soldiers much like those of the sertanejos: dark and
grotesque. He does nothing to humanize their bodies. What he provides is an unreal
scene so extreme the bodies themselves have become spectral. Tamarindo’s corpse is
compared to “um manequim terrivelmente lúgubre, o cadaver desaprumado, braços e
pernas pendidos, oscilando à feição do vento no galho flexível e vergado, aparecia nos
ermos feito uma visão demoníaca,” and three months later, when the fourth
expedition arrives, they are met by “renques de caveiras branqueando as orlas do
caminho, rodeadas de velhos trapos, esgarçados nos ramos dos arbustos e, de uma
banda,—mudo protagonist de um drama formidável—o espectro do velho
comandante...” (OS 493).247
The favor will be returned in the fourth expedition when da Cunha reveals to
the reader that the soldiers begin to do the same, only more barbarically. Under the
presumption that the sertanejos believe that by being beheaded their souls could not
enter into heaven, the soldiers begin to exploit this superstition. Unlike the sertanejos,
however, who decapitated corpses, the soldiers decapitate their victims while still
280
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
alive. Two methods of execution were preferred, decapitation and gutting them with a
knife. As da Cunha explains it, as soon as an able-bodied jagunço was captured, the
soldiers’ motto becomes: “Degolava-se, estripava-se” (OS 729). He gives various
account of beheadings, describes how many prisoners had a rope run around their neck
and were dragged to the edge of camp, where “o infeliz perdeu-se com os sinistros
companheiros que o ladeavam no eio misterioso da caatinga” (OS 726). To describe a
jagunço as “unhappy” and a soldier as “sinister,” is a complete inversion of language
Euclide’s uses prior in his work, and contrary to the language used previously in
newspapers. “Sinister,” reserved time and time again for sertanejos, now inverts as we
see the tide shift. Before beheading, the soldiers “impunham invariavelmente à vítima
um viva à República, que era poucas vezes satisfeito,” then “[a]garravam-na pelos
cabelos, dobrando-lhe a cabeça, esgargalando-lhe o pescoço; e, francamente exposta a
garganta, degolavam-na” (OS 726). Once again we see the inversion of what has been
up to this point the common trope—the sertanejo is now, finally, the victim, because
“[a]pesar de três séculos de atraso os sertanejos não lhes [os soldados] levavam a
palma no estadear idênticas barbaridades” (OS 727).
Euclides does attempt to sound apologetic, explaining that “não se trucidavam
mulheres e crianças,” but he seems to say this with irony, for he goes on to explain the
proviso attached: “que não se revelavam perigosas” (OS 732). Apparently “dangerous”
is open to a broad array of interpretations. Immediately following, he describes an old
woman who refuses cooperate with soldiers, resisting their interrogations and telling
the soldiers they will be defeated. “Irritou,” says da Cunha with irony, as though
281
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
irritating were synonymous to dangerous: “Era um virago perigoso. . . . aquele
demônio de anáguas, aquela bruxa . . . foi degolada” (OS 733).
Da Cunha goes on to illuminate the real reason for the unbridled violence, the
reason why the conflict was not a military campaign, but a “slaughterhouse.” He
explains: “Não era a ação severa da lei, era a vingança. Dente por dente. Naqueles ares
pairava, ainda, a poeira de Moeriera César, queimado; devua-se quemar. Adiante, o
arcabouço decapitado de Tamarindo; devia-se degolar” (OS 734). He expounds that
revenge sought through “fire and knife” was justified with stories that each sertanejo
they killed were the ones responsible for shooting the Colonel or hanging up the
corpses of lost comrades like scarecrows. In such a way the soldier’s “selvageria
impiedosa amparava-se à piedade pelos companheiros morto. Vestia o luto chinês da
púrpura e, lavada em lágrimas, lavava-se em sanque” (OS 734). I find it fascinating
that da Cunha recurs to mourning as the source of violence. Mourning for their lost
soldiers means revenge, as though a nation must expunge violently those who have
given them reason to grieve. Tears shed means bloodshed, life mourned abnegates
another’s life who will not be mourned. Here we can detect his criticism of this
formula. He is deconstructing this pattern and slowing presenting us a new criteria,
where mourning becomes disassociated with the soldiers and invested in the
sertanejos.
Da Cunha ultimately levels the playing field, explaining that taking place was a
drama sanguinolento da idade das cavernas . . . Os atores, de um e de
outro lado, negros, caboclos, brancos e amarelos, traziam, intacta, nas
282
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
faces, a caracterização indelével e multiforme das raças—e so podiam
unificar-se sobre a base comom dos intintos inferiores e maus.
A animalidade primitiva, lentamente expungida pela
civilização, ressurgiu, inteiriça. Desforrava-se afinal. Encontrou nas
mãos, ao invés do machado de diorito e do arpão de osso, a espada e a
carabina. (OS 735)
Race no longer separates superior from inferior, the civilized from primitive. All men
in this “Stone Age” conflict reveal their most primal and animalistic instinct. But the
victors, those left standing, will be the ones to bear the weight of guilt for these
atrocities.
Da Cunha’s description of the prisoners and corpses is what tips the scale of
grievable life towards the end of Os sertões. His descriptions, often grotesque, reveal
the most detestable aspects of war. One of the most remarkable and shocking moments
is the episode of the child in the quepe (large hat). The quepe, far too large for the
child, covers his whole head, reaching his shoulders. Da Cunha, then relates to us the
soldier’s reaction to this seemingly humorous sight:
O quepe, largo e grande demais, oscilava grotescamente, a cada passo,
sobre o busto esmirado que ele encobria por um terço. E alguns
espectadores tiveram a coragem singular de rir. A criança alçou o rosto,
procurando vê-los. Os risos extinguiram-se: a boca era um chaga aberta
de lado a lado por um tiro! (OS 680)
283
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Da Cunha gives a face to the faceless in the sertanejo boy; he makes the reader look
and consider the poor child. The boy’s mutilated face, which stifles the war-hardened
soldiers’ laughter, is what makes the work powerful, what gives the book its
humanity—the fact that it concedes, finally towards the end, the humanity denied the
sertanejos in journalism. Just as the reader had contemplated the familiar face of
Joaquim Pedreira in the newspaper, the fallen student who could be anyone’s brother
or son; now, in Os sertões, the reader is forced to look into the wounded face of a
small boy, who could now likewise be anyone’s son. The whole series of nation
building published in Brazilian newspapers are trumped by da Cunha in Os sertões.
This sentiment is capitulated in the final pages of Os sertões. The war all but
over, the soldiers mount their final engagement into the rubble of the city. They expect
an easy final charge that will heroically vanquish and crush the remaining enemies.
They are, however, stopped dead in their tracks before a ditch of the dead:
Mas eram terríveis lances, obscuros para todo o sempre. Raro tornavam
os que os faziam. Aprumava-se sobre o fosso e sopeava-lhes o arrojo o
horror de um quandro onde a realidade tangível de uma trincheira de
mortos, argamassada de sangue e esvurmando pus, vencia todos os
exageros da idealização mais ousada. E salteava-os a atonia do
assombro... (OS 778)
The mutilated face of the sertanejo child, is enough to suffocate laughter; the horror of
a mass grave of putrefying bodies sufficient to paralyze soldiers on the charge, and in
place of the silence where laughter once was, in the empty space of a paralyzed attack,
284
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
the reader glimpses their grievability and even finds room to mourn them. The
republican soldiers fighting in the war, their death originally mourned, is overturned
by da Cunha’s masterpiece, and it is in fact the sertanejos whose fratricide will
become the bedrock of a nation.
Though representations of the injured and dead sertanejos in Brazilian
newspapers served as spectacles of war that sold newspapers,248 there is at least one
passage found in Diário de Noticias that contradicts this tendency. On October 20th,
1897, a report is given that very well may have inspired da Cunha’s descriptions as
well as his conclusion. Similar images are portrayed: cadavers in flames, thirsty
women with chapped lips, drizzling in pus. Yet the conclusion to this breaks with the
spectacle and brings the sertanejo, as Euclides does, into the nation. “Mas finalmente
são todos heróis,” states the journalist, “São todos brasileiros!” (138). It should be
noted that this newspaper was a Bahian one, and as such, seems much more
sympathetic, more disposed to recognize the people of the sertão as brothers of the
nation, unlike the far-reaching newspapers of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
The fighting finished, the soldiers find and uncover the buried body of
Conselheiro. Da Cunha narrates that his corpse was decapitated by the soldiers and his
head paraded around from city to city in celebration of their victory: “Trouxeram
depois para o literal, onde deliravam multidões em festa, aquele crânio. Que a ciência
dissesse a última palavra” (OS 780). Much like the epileptic delirium of Moeira César,
the delirium into which the State and its people have fallen marks an almost
carnivalesque celebration, where crime and glory are indiscernible, and this grotesque
285
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
head displayed on a pike as the centerpiece of their chaotic madness. Once again, the
State is reenacting the same fanaticism that lead the jagunços to decapitate the corpses
of the Republic’s fallen officers after the third expedition. Da Cunha’s curious
statement, that science should have the last word, is a reference to the final destination
of that head: the laboratories of legal medicine at the Medical School in Bahia.
Here the scene of seemingly barbaric ritual and delirium gives way to
modernity, biology, positivism, and politics. Adhering to Lombroso and Maudsley’s
theories, doctors concluded that the skull was normal and revealed no signs of
degeneration.249 The skull of the dead beato examined at the laboratories of legal
medicine implies the coupling of biology and politics in the new Brazilian nation state.
It designates the modern State’s ever-increasing concern with calculating biology in its
political objectives. In this case, by medically examining Conselheiro’s skull, the
political objective is to grant validity to the extermination of the people of Canudos. A
diagnosis of degeneration and madness means the state simply amputated an infected
limb of the body politic and thus improved its health. Yet the medical examiners’
conclusion of normality instead of degeneration implies a healthy limb had been
needlessly severed, indicating the Brazilian state is the true madman, for only an
insane man would self-mutilate a healthy part of his body. For this reason, Euclides da
Cunha reserves these final words to recapitulate his attack of the Republic: “É que
ainda não existe um Maudsley para as loucuras e os crimes das nacionalidades...” (OS
780).250 Had Maudsley’s same psychological theories been applied to the Brazilian
286
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
national body at the time of the Canudos War, the diagnosis would have been madness
and a state of sovereign order anything but normal: a truly exceptional state.
287
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
CONCLUSION
Aquí también. Aquí, como en el otro
confín del continente, el infinito
campo en que muere solitario el grito;
aquí también el indio, el lazo, el potro . . .
Aquí también esa desconocida
y ansiosa y breve cosa que es la vida
-Borges, “Texas”
In the epigraph above, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, after having
spent time Texas, compares its frontier setting to that of Argentina. He cannot help but
recognize that “here too,” as in Argentina, we find the Indian, the lasso, the mustang.
In this poem he titles “Texas,” he notes that we find the same “clamors of history,” the
same “mystic alphabet of stars.” He compares San Jacinto to that other Thermopylae,
the Alamo. Most importantly, he declares that here too, at both ends of the
hemisphere, on those endless plains where men’s cries die a lonely death, we find that
unknown and brief thing called life.
Certainly, though a more arid climate, the Texas plains compare to the
Argentine pampas, both as frontiers where cattlemen lassoed and Indians once road on
roughshod mustangs, but also as places where life was brief and often came to a
violent end. Indeed, we may say “here too” with respect to the Brazilian sertão, a
desert region of cactus and caatinga much like the US Southwest chaparral. Indeed, I
would say the US/Mexico borderland setting in Blood Meridian is much more similar
to the sertão region in Os sertões than the lush and green pasturelands found in Martín
288
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Fierro. Yet above all else, the sertão in da Cunha is another frontier where sertanejo
vaqueiros, jagunços, Indians, mestizos and mullattos were politically marginalized.
As demonstrated in my chapters concerning these three works, we may say that
“here too” we find frontier spaces violently encroached upon by the State, marking
them as the exception to the rule of law. Lawlessness in these works, therefore, is a
product of the sovereign state, defined as the state of exception. It is here that that
“brief thing called life” is abandoned to outlawry, designated as bare life that may be
licitly killed.
In Blood Meridian, all frontier life in relation to the judge as the embodiment
of the state of exception—Apache, Mexicans, and the gang members themselves—are
scooped up in the embrace of his great white body, included in the sovereign through
the his violent methods of exclusion. Like Hobbes’ great figure of the Leviathan, the
judge’s body is made of other bodies; yet the analogy of sovereignty in Blood
Meridian proves that the body of the judge is formed from the cadavers of the
excluded and not the living.
Martín Fierro presents the predicament of a man before the law. As a bandit
Fierro is bare life, the illegal military draft the state of exception, and the fortín on the
frontier a camp—the space that opens up when the state of exception become the
normal practice of the law. Ultimately, Fierro’s subjection to political oppression
produces a Kafkaesque form of creaturely shame, an existence of helplessness pressed
beneath the abuse of the sovereign exception.
289
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Finally, in Os sertões, da Cunha reveals the workings of governmentality,
where the Brazilian oligarchy comprised of state, church and landowning institutions,
struggles for control of the sertanejo’s body. This body will also become the victim of
banditry, a body whose death is ungrievable. Yet in Os sertões, the Republic and its
soldiers are derealized by da Cunha and the original banditry of war exposed.
Ultimately, the violent actions of the Republic, of civilization, are proved to be just as
savage as the supposed barbarism it attacks.
In conclusion, I hope to further build from this project in the future. I believe
much is yet to be said regarding biopolitics in both literature and frontier studies. I
find Agamben’s notion of state of exception to be an ideal framework for the political
conceptualization of American frontier spaces. I hope to expound on this notion in
showing that frontiers were preliminary to the forming of the camp. I believe that
frontiers were where emerging American nation-states first housed bare life, and that
as those frontier spaces began to grow smaller and eventually close, the modern State,
so entrenched in the exception and in need of a new space for bare life to inhabit,
ultimately created the camp. I would also like to further develop, through a literary
perspective, the notion of Latin America’s “civilization and barbarism” in the
biopolitical terms of Roberto Esposito’s immunity paradigm. I believe that this
discourse, so common in American literatures, ultimately demonstrates civilization’s
need to employ the same “savage” pathogen and means of violence supposedly found
in barbarism, in order to eradicate barbarism. This is an opportune framework which
will allow further discussion of and an accounting for the barbarism of civilization.
290
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
NOTES
I would also mention Bolton’s article “The Epic of Greater America,” which reflects
on a course the author taught for fifteen years at the University of California titled
“The History of the Americas.” This course marked his viewpoint for the need to
integrate an inter-American approach to our perception of American history.
2
We may also consider Bolton’s Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century: Studies in
Spanish Colonial History and Administration (1915), as well as Albert L. Hurtado’s
recent Herbert Eugene Bolton: Historian of the American Borderlands (2012).
3
David Weber and Jane Rausch put it this way:
For the last century the idea that the frontier experience shaped the
character of North Americans and their institutions has constituted the
most influential explanation of the distinctive character of the United
States citizens. Many parts of Latin America also experienced
processes of conquest and settlement by Europeans that seem, at least
on the surface, analogous to Anglo-Americans’ frontier experiences.
Nonetheless, with the exceptions of Brazil and Argentines, Latin
American intellectuals have seldom considered their own frontiers
central to the formation of national identities or of national institutions.
(xiii)
4
See Jones, “Comparative Raiding Economies,” in Contested Ground.
5
See Patton, Sarmiento in The United States. Also see chapter by Kristine L. Jones,
“Civilization and Barbarism and Sarmiento's Indian Policies,” and Michael Aaron
Rockland’s “Sarmiento’s Views on the United States,” both found in Sarmiento and
his Argentina.
6
See Dabove, Nightmares of the Lettered City: Banditry and Literature in Latin
America, 1816-1929.
7
See Berthold Zilly’s exceptional chapter titled “A Barbárie: antítese ou elemento da
Civilização? Do Facundo de Sarmiento a Os Sertões de Euclides da Cunha,” in De
sertões, desertos e espaços incivilizados, 271-301.
8
See Putman’s introduction to the English translation of Os Sertões titled Rebellion in
the Backlands, v.
9
This is also true for many other American countries such as Mexico and the vaquero,
as well as Venezuela and the llanero, each a frontier cattleman.
10
Here, in highlighting the jagunço as a national archetype, I am most certainly not
discarding that other frontier figure so often associated with Brazilian national
identity: the bandeirante—a sort of trailblazer and pioneer that explored and settled
Brazil’s far-reaching frontier spaces. Indeed, much has been said about the similarities
between bandeirantes and North American pioneers regarding their contribution to the
national pioneering spirit in both countries. See, for example, Moog, “Bandeirantes
and Pioneers,” in Where Cultures Meet. However, on a literary level, due in large part
to Os sertões, I would argue that the jagunço arguably comes to occupy the national
stage as an archetype of Brazilianess.
1
291
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
11
See Arent, Origins, 185-221.
See Fitz, Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a
Comparative Context, 211-32.
13
See Saussy, “Comparative Literature?,” 339-40.
14
Ibid., 340.
15
Both Hernández’ Martín Fierro and da Cunha’s Os sertões have received critical
commentary for harboring tendencies that stem from both romanticism and realism.
Martín Fierro certainly romanticizes the “Golden Age” existence of the gaucho’s
peaceful and pastoral lifestyle, while it very realistically captures his political abuse.
Da Cunha’s romanticized sense of Brazilian nationalism undoubtedly comes from the
French influence of Victor Hugo. Yet his description regarding the war itself is
grotesquely realistic and adheres much more to naturalism that romanticism. For more
about Victor Hugo’s influence on Os sertões, see Goeveia Fernandez, “Euclides e a
Literatura,” 52. I also recommend Raimundo Moreira Pereira’s “Victor Hugo e a
Vendéia em Os Sertões: historiografia e literatura em Euclides da Cunha.”
16
See Sepich, ““What kind of Indians was them?”: Some Historical Sources in
Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” in Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, as well
as his Notes on Blood Meridian.
17
For examples of Euclide’s imitation of the jagunço’s rustic speech, see the case of
the small lad in Os sertões, 681. Also see pages 771-73, where Euclides da Cunha
transcribes the case of Antônio the “Beatinho” from his own diary. Here he also
imitates Antônio’s supposedly ignorant Portuguese. In both examples, Euclides marks
their rustic speech and vocabulary with italics, also spelling according to the
pronunciation of their words.
18
See Owens, Cormac McCarthy's Western Novels, 38-43.
19
Roggiano states:
Hernández, who was a cultured man and from the city, more than the
gaucho himself, what he wanted was to retain a part of his native
virtues and nothing more, as a condition of the man of those lands,
according to romantic telluric theory and opposed to the alienations of
positivism, which was always avarous for the human being, and
excessively generous for the voracity of all industrialisms. Here it
seems opportune for us to remember that Martín Fierro was the first
outcry for social justice in Argentina, and also the greatest failure.
What grieved Hernández more than anything was the plunder carried
out against the native in the name of progress and civilization. (41)
20
See Estrada, Muerte y transfiguración, vol. I, 36.
21
This comes from Putnam’s translation, Rebellion in the Backlands, xxix.
22
See Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 383.
23
See Butler, Precarious Life, 51-54.
24
See Schmitt, Political Theology, 5.
25
See Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 166.
26
Ibid., 170-3.
12
292
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
27
Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski note that frontiers, which were once spaces of
freedom, were encroached by by way of capitalist interests. They explain that
the expulsion and flight of Indians, blacks, and mestizos to cattle
frontiers created ambiguous zones of freedom and economically and
ideologically constitutive of urban centers. Over time, the expansion of
capitalist relations meant that plains activities once viewed as
customary and legitimate, such as hunting wild cattle, became defined
as banditry and their practitioners classified as criminals (18).
28
See Guglielmini, 7. Here he discusses both the U.S. and Argentina’s closing of their
frontiers, continuing to highlight both countries’ frontier experiences in a comparative
context from pages 8-13.
29
For more about Indian reservations within an Agambenian framework, see Rifkin,
“Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the “Peculiar” Status of
Native Peoples.”
30
See Phillips, “History and the Ugly Facts of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian,”
434-35.
31
Writer Peter Josyph comments on his reading of Blood Meridian, stating that
when a highly charged, richly textured novel driven by some of the
most impressive American Prose of this century features no major
figure who is not, quite literally, a slaughterer, and offers scarcely a
single act to inspire hope for the race, it is natural to ask questions
about their talent and to wonder whether one is perceiving it rightly and
judging it fairly. One gluts upon a baroque of thieving, raping,
shooting, slashing, hanging, scalping, burning, bashing, hacking . . .
(170).
32
Ibid., 176.
33
See Sepich, “What Kind of Indians Was Them?,” in Perpspectives on McCarthy.
34
See Daughtery, “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy.”
35
See Owens, 46.
36
For scholars who focus on U.S. national myth in Blood Meridian see Spurgeon and
Cant. For examples of violence in context with unanthropocentric natural law see
Owens and Phillips.
37
For more on frontier myth and Promised Land, see McGilchrist, The Western
Landscape in Cormac Mccarthy and Wallace Stegner: Myths of the Frontier, 11-16.
38
See Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 30-1 and 245-6.
39
See Owens, 19-20. Also, for more on the myth-making impact of dime novels, see
McGilchrist, 14.
40
See Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 245.
41
Foucault further expounds on how “biopower,” a force that enhances life, can act
negatively through State racism in the following words:
Given that this power's objective is essentially to make live, how can it let die?
How can the power of death, the function of death, be exercised in a political
system centered upon biopower?
293
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
It is, I think, at this point that racism intervenes […] It is indeed the
emergence of this biopower that inscribes it in the mechanisms of the State. It
is at this moment that racism is inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as
it is exercised in modern States. As a result, the modern State can scarcely
function without becoming involved with racism at some point, within certain
limits and subject to certain conditions.
What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into
the domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what must
live and what must die. (Society 254).
42
See Balibar, “Citizen Subject.”
43
In his Immunitas, Esposito explains that laws are always partial and never provide
rights for everyone: “It is logically impossible to extend a right to all without
emptying it of meaning as a right. If it were extended to everyone, it would no longer
even be perceived as such” (24). Rights can only exist in a sense of privilege or
privation (24-5); where rights are extended to some they are taken from others. We see
this in Captain White’s discourse on race. The U.S. Americans declare they have a
“right” to govern the Mexicans, to take their land, thus nullifying their “inalienable
right” which are supposedly for all men, as is the common discourse of constitutional
democracies.
44
Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 52.
45
Evidence of biopolitics and state of exception in nineteenth century America is
exemplified in Slavery. Achille Mbembe notes:
Any historical account of the rise of modern terror needs to address slavery,
which could be considered one of the first instances of biopolitical
experimentation. In many respects, the very structure of the plantation system
and its aftermath manifests the emblematic and paradoxical figure of the state
of exception (169).
46
According to Agamben: “In truth, the state of exception is neither external nor
internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a
threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each
other but rather blur with each other” (State of Exception 169).
47
See Boever, State of Exception and the Contemporary Novel, page 16.
48
See Hobbes, Leviathan, 76-79.
49
Here, though I do not pursue the topic in this chapter, we might very well consider
Roberto Espsito’s biopolitical paradigm of immunity. For Esposito, politics’ concern
with life is one that works like a vaccine. The sovereign continually takes a stance of
prevention in this sense. In order to expel or prevent an unwanted pathogen from
taking over the body of the political populace (in Blood Meridian the unwanted
pathogen would be the Apache and “savegry”), a form of that original pathogen must
be introduced to the political body: “Just as in the medical practice of vaccinating the
individual body, so the immunization of the political body fucntions similarly,
introducing within it a fragment of the same pathogen from which it wants to protect
itself, by blocking and contradicting natural development” (Bios 46). Therefore,
Governor Trias needs “savagery” to put an end to savagery. The Glanton gang is
294
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
portrayed even more “barbaric” than the Apache Trias hires them to eliminate. His
contract with Glanton’s gang is representative of Espositos paradigm of biopolitical
immunization. As the gang enters the governor’s palace, Trias is introducing the
savage gang into the political Mexican body of Chihuahua in order to protect that
body from the same “savage Apache pathogen” that he wants to prevent from taking
over. It would seem that civilization can only protect itself from barbarism through
introducing barbarism into civilization, the often observed “barbarism of civilization.”
50
See Agamben, State of Exception, 39
51
See Agamben, Homo Sacer. 8-17.
52
See Agamben, Means without end, 3-11; and also his Homo Sacer, 1-3.
53
Agamben, Homo Sacer. 15
54
Ibid., 104.
55
Ibid., 104.
56
Ibid., 84.
57
We may consider here the Patriot Act, a political policy which infringes upon the
privacy rights of citizens under the guise of the greater good of the community.
58
Reservations were officially classified as POW camps, liking them even more to
modern detention camps like Guantanamo Bay. The Lakota South Dakota reservation
is frequently referred to as Prisoner of War Camp #334.
59
See Gregory, “The Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and the Space of Exception.”
60
For an extensive overview about the various theories regarding the social and ethnic
origin of the gaucho, see Slatta, Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier, 7-16.
61
Ibid, 9. Also see Estrada, Muerte y transiguración, Vol. 1, 241-6.
62
Silvio R. Ducan Baretta and John Markoff, in “Civilization and barbarism : cattle
frontiers in Latin America,” explain that:
Given their status as outcasts who did not belong to civilization, the
methods adopted were also old—similar, indeed, to those of the
colonial era . . . The ideology that saw gauchos . . . as uncontrollable
barbarians became an adequate framework for justifying the cruel
methods employed by the political elites as a response. (43)
63
See Borge’s quoting of both Unamuno and Menéndez y Pelayo in his El Martín
Fierro, 91-2.
64
See Hughes, Arte y sentido de Martín Fierro, 177.
65
Borges notes that Martín Fierro forms part of a shift in in the concept of the book
that took place in the nineteenth century. What had once been the canonical religious
conceptualization of sacred texts, such as the Koran, the Bible, etc., evolved into the
canonical national books, no less sacred, that represented a people and culture. Thus
the Divine Comedy best represented Italy, Don Quixote Spain. See Borges, El Martín
Fierro, 89.
66
See Leuman, El poeta creador, 135-143.
67
See Andermann, Mapas de poder, 209.
68
Antonio Pagés Larraya, in his Prosas del Martín Fierro, puts it this way: “Indio y
gaucho estaban hermanados por una misma condición de perseguidos” (63).
69
See Heffe, Gisela, “Martín Fierro ante la ley,” 13.
295
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
70
See Agamben, Homo Sacer, 7.
The same thing may be said of Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões regarding the
sertanejo, as we will see in the next chapter.
72
See Ramas, Los gauchipolíticos rioplatenses, 60-3.
73
Dabove, in Nightmares of the Lettered City, observes:
Martín Fierro was heralded as an expression for the vindication of rural
populations against the state. For Hernández, banditry as a historical
phenomenon was produced by the state. As such, it was considered by
Martínez-Estrada as the anti-Facundo. (170)
74
See Pérez, Los dilemas politicos de la cultura letrada, 207.
75
See Ludmer, El género gauchesco, 29.
76
Idib., 20.
77
See Boever, Narrative Care, 13.
78
For more on the impact of Lugones, gaucho myth, and the canonization of Martín
Fierro, see Franco, “Lugones y el mito gauchesco.”
79
See Unamuno, El gaucho Martín Fierro. Prólogo a José Hernández. Madrid: Giner,
1972. Page 58.
80
Borges states: “Martín Fierro es de índole realista, y es de común observación que
las obras de este tipo parecen evidentes y fáciles, sobre todo cuando están bien
ejecutadas” (El Martín Fiero 87). Interestingly, he goes on to note the relationship
realist works have with journalism: “Toda obra realista parece mera transcripción,
mero periodismo . . . (El Martín Fierro 87). In the next chapter we will observe how
these two modes of writing so prevalent in modernity, the novel and the newspaper, in
their representation of the lives of real people, by nature capture the biopolitical
condition of the modern subject before the law.
81
See Borges, El Martín Fierro, 96-97.
82
Op. cit., 43.
83
This is paraphrased from Pérez in his Los dilemas politicos de la cultura letrada.
The full quote is as follows:
El poema se centra en el mundo privado (y novelado) de los personajes,
pero el mundo público, “la civilización” deshumanizante (la autoridad
corrupta, los jueces arbitrarios, los funcionarios ladrones), determinan
los acontecimientos de la vida privada de los gauchos. . . . Si bien el
poeta se enfoca en la vida individual del gaucho y su familia, la política
del Estado condiciona la relación de los personajes con su sociedad
(120).
84
This is Agamben’s formula for bare life’s relation to the sovereign. See Homo
Sacer, 8-9.
85
Op. Cit. The quote reads: “El Estado nacional es el culpable de la situación del
gaucho, y su mano armada: su policía, sus soldados, así como sus jueces y sus
legisladores, son el coro, el personaje colectivo contra el cual se recorta el destino y la
suerte del paisano.” (210)
86
Martín Fierro, as representative of the people, is a common trope through Argentine
history. Peronism, for example, used Fierro as a battle cry against Argentine
71
296
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
liberalism. Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz, in a speech call “The Enemies of the Argentine
People,” given in July 3, 1948, states: “the oligarchy governed the country with no
concern beyond the ambition and selfishness of their own. . . . Martín Fierro is the
tragedy of the entire pueblo” (Qtd. in Shumway 277).
87
Quoted in Andermann, 221. Also, Ricardo Rojas states: “he ahí la vida de del
gaucho Martín Fierro; he ahí la vida de todo el pueblo argentina,” (qtd. in Borges El
Martín Fierro 90).
88
See Agamben, Means without End, 29-30.
89
See Estrada, Muerte y Transfiguración, Vol. II, 186.
90
Shumway, in The Invention of Argentina, puts it this way: “As a result, The Return
of Martín Fierro is both a justification for the new Argentina and an advice manual
written for gauchos on how to become good, productive, acquiescent citizens.” (284)
91
See Martín Fierro, 194.
92
See Shumway, The Invention of Argentina, 283-4.
93
See Borges, Obras completes, 195-97.
94
See Estrada, Muerte y transfiguración, Vol. 1, 74.
95
Ibid., 32.
96
See Agamben, Means without End, 32.
97
Ibid., 32.
98
See Martín Fierro, 350.
99
Silva Valdés’ story here is quoted in Enrique Herrero’s prolog to Prosas de José
Hernández, 10-11.
100
Op. cit., 222.
101
See Ansolabehere, “Martín Fierro: frontera y relato,” 234. In his essay, he estates:
“Sin frontier en Martín Fierro no hay historia.”
102
For more about the frontier in Martín Fierro, see Estrada, Muerte y
transfiguración, Vol 2, 105-187.
103
Op. cit., 235.
104
Ibid., 238.
105
See Dabove, Nightmares of the Lettered City, 170.
106
Slatta states: “the gaucho felt no pressing ideological or patriotic urge to sacrifice
himself in battle for a distant and oppressive government” (Vanishing Frontier 127).
107
All of Hernández’ newspaper quotes come from Larraya’s collection titled Prosas
del Martín Fierro.
108
Agamben notes the close relationship between war times and the state of exception:
One of the elements that make the state of exception so difficult to
define is certainly its close relationship to civil war, insurrection, and
resistance. Because civil war is the opposite of normal conditions, it
lies in a zone of undecidability with respect to state of exception, which
is state power's immediate response to the most extreme internal
conflict. . . . In this sense, modern totalitarianism can be defined as the
establishment, by means of state of exception, of a legal civil war that
allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but
297
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be
integrated into the political system (State of Exception 2).
109
See Schmitt, Political Theology, 5.
110
In Río de La Plata, August 20, 1897, Hernandez refers to the draft laws in
Argentina as the “artificial combinations of the law.” This artificial law destines the
gaucho, who was born free, to the military camps where he is forced, according to
Hernández, into “temporary slavery,” as he is pressed into manual labor and battles
against natives:
Las combinaciones artificiales de la ley, no persuaden a nuestros
gauchos, no pueden persuadirles de que sea lícito agobiarlos con la
pesada carga de una esclavitud temporal. Han nacido para vivir libres,
sus ante pasados han sabido romper los eslabones de la ignominiosa
cadena y les han enseñado el camino de la emancipación. (202)
111
See Carilla, La creación del Martín Fierro, 71.
112
See Slatta, Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier, 129.
113
See Slatta, “Rural Criminality,” 458.
114
Qtd. in Slatta, “Rural Criminality,” 470.
115
See Estrada, Muerte y transfiguración, second volume, 102.
116
Slatta explains:
Many in the urban population received exemptions from service,
including doctors, lawyers, students, scribes, and pharmacists.
Wealthier rural males, ranch foremen, and managers with capital
exceeding 4,000 pesos also enjoyed exemption. A poor man could be
spared only if he could prove that he was a sole surviving son.
(Vanishing Frontier 130)
117
See Agamben, Homo Sacer, 8.
118
Ibid., 6.
119
Ibid., 28-29.
120
See Gómez Romero, “The Archaeology of the Gaucho “Vago y Mal Entretenido,””
146-48.
121
Ibid., 147.
122
Ibid., 149.
123
“Barbarous human tribute” comes from Larraya, whose description of life in the
military camps is at par with Fierro’s, and who also points out the city inhabitants’
exclusion from the draft laws:
En la extrema frontera, frene a la constante amenaza del indio y
cercado por el desierto, vegetaba el gaucho en los fortines. Allí
subsistían pobres, mugrientos, sin paga, sin armas, semidesnudos,
estafados por el pulpero y el jefe que era su socio, y, de cuando en
cuando, convertidos en peones de la charca del coronel. . . . Ese bárbaro
tributo humano, en el que aparecían complicados jueces y
comandantes, jefes militares y comerciantes, iba devorando
irremisiblemente al gaucho. Este contestaba con su silencio, con su
abstención, con la malicia de algún gesto, débiles desahogos del
298
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
sacrificado…Sólo en último extremo afloraba la rebeldía, otra forma de
sacrificio. Lo más injusto del sistema consistía en que los habitantes de
la ciudad no estaban obligados a ese servicio. (60)
124
For more on eugenics and biopolitics, see Edward Ross Dickinson, “Biopolitics,
Fascism, Democracy.”
125
Roggiano explains Hernández’s firm opposition to modernity’s positivism, and that
he was if anything, a romanticist:
Hernández, who was a cultured man and from the city, more than the
gaucho himself, what he wanted was to retain a part of his native
virtues and nothing more, as a condition of the man of those lands,
according to romantic telluric theory and opposed to the alienations of
positivism, which was always avarous for the human being, and
excessively generous for the voracity of all industrialisms. . . . What
grieved Hernández more than anything was the plunder carried out
against the native in the name of progress and civilization. . . . In this
sense, Hernández was a romantic, perhaps the most idealistic and
lyrical of our romantics, because of his faith in the immanence of
individual rights and in the natural adaptation of man to his living
conditions. (41-2)
He goes on to relate positivism with national destiny:
The science of positivism assured the national Argentine destiny, with
the death of what remained of its Hispanic past: the romantic soul of
the gaucho, the presence of an absence which is the elegy of a lost
being and the irrecoverable song of love. Mitre, Sarmiento, Avellaneda,
Roca, forgers of the destiny of Argentina, gave their lesson of
modernity with firm determination and courage. Hernández gave his
lesson of humanity, as well as his Martín Fierro. (43)
126
The word “abono,” here, can be understood as payment or contribution. However, I
prefer to word’s alternative meaning, which can be understood as fertilizer. In this
context, we may allude to the words of Uruguayan poet Juan Zorilla de San Martín,
for whom the blood of the gaucho, instead of a fertilizer, is used to “water” the land:
“If he hasn’t’ learned to work much, it is because he had to fight much . . . [He is] not
very used to watering the land with the sweat of his brow because he has had to water
it for a long time with the blood of his veins” (Qtd. in Slatta Vanishing Frontier 140).
In both contexts, as fertilizer or water, the blood of the gaucho is spilled over the land
to make the nation grow. His sacrifice and death bring life to the nation.
127
See Zilly, “Uma construção simbólica da nacionalidade num mundo
transnacional,” 31-2.
128
Julie Skurski and Fernando Coronil in their introduction to States of Violence,
suggest: “State violence in the multiple forms that accompany nationalism and
colonialism, both internal and external, becomes normalized as the necessary hand of
modernity” (11).
129
See Agamben, Means without End, 42-3.
130
See Estrada, Muerte y transfiguración, Vol. II, 278-79.
299
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
131
Ibid. 199-200.
See Hernández, Martín Fierro, 178-179
133
See Larraya, Prosas del Martín Fierro, 58.
134
This is found quoted in the Cátedra edition of Martín Fierro, 182, footnote 251.
135
To validate his claim, Agamben provides examples of medieval law in reference to
werewolves and bandits:
Salic law and Ripuarian law use the formula wargus sit, hoc est
expulsus in a sense that recalls the sacer esto that sanctioned the sacred
man’s capacity to be killed, and the laws of Edward the Confessor
(1030-35) define the bandit as a wulfesheud (a wolf's head) and
assimilate him to the werewolf ( . . . “He bears a wolf's head from the
day of his expulsion, and the English call this wulfesheud”). What had
to remain in the collective unconscious as a monstrous hybrid of human
and animal, divided between the forest and the city—the werewolf—is,
therefore, in its origin the figure of the man who has been banned from
the city. (Homo Sacer 105)
136
Op. cit., 20.
137
Op. cit.,, 240.
138
Ibid., 241. A fine example where Hernández defends the indio is found in Larraya’s
compilation of his journalistic prose. Published August 22, 1869 in Rio de La Plata,
Hernández argues the following on behalf of the Indian in his newspaper article titled
“Qué civilización es la de los matanzas?”:
Nosotros no tenemos el derecho de expulsar a los indios del
territorio y menos de exterminarlos. La civilización sólo puede darnos
derechos que se deriven de ella misma. . . . ¿Pero qué civilización es
ésa que se anuncia con el ruido de los combates y viene precedida del
estruendo de las matanzas?
Las bestias se enfurecen y acometen, cuando son perseguidas de
muerte, y ¿cómo no esperar que los indios, que tienen al menos la
organización humana, se vuelvan contra nosotros sedientos de
venganzas, cuando no nos anunciamos a ellos sino como heraldo de la
muerta? (208).
139
Op. cit., 242.
140
Undoubtedly, Fierro and Cruz’s escape to live with the natives is presented in a
positive light in La ida, and the reader has the impression that their arrival to this
refuge space will finally mean a life of freedom and peace. Furthermore, Hernández
writes about gauchos’ seeking refuge with natives in Rio de La Plata. We can
certainly see this as a precursor to what will be Fierro and Cruz’s resolution at the end
of La ida. In the newspaper, Hernandez presents the topic of gaucho and indio
coexistence in a voice that praises the indio who takes him in and facilitates his
escape, while at the same time he demonstrates this necessity for gaucho survival as
civilization’s ultimate defeat. On August 20, 1869, he writes that news of the draft
spreads across the pampa with the speed of the telegraph, inciting the gaucho to saddle
his horse and escape civilization, preferring refuge amongst the tribes of barbarism.
132
300
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
He then cites the specific case of the a tribal chief Coliqueo’s involvement in aiding
the gaucho:
Los caciques se convierten en sus [los gauchos] protectores y se
produce ese fenómeno singular, esa derrota de la civilización. . . .
Los corresponsales se encargan de comunicarnos esos hechos y
ayer mismo en nuestro correo de la Campaña se ha dado la noticia de
que el cacique Coliqueo proporcionaba toda clase de facilidades a la
fuga de nuestros gauchos.
¿Y en nombre de qué principio no levantaremos nosotros para
condenar al hombre oprimido que corre en busca de aire, de espacio y
de libertad?
¿No es ésta la necesidad más imperiosa de nuestra condición
humana? (201)
141
See La vuelta, verses 1037-8, 231.
142
See endnote 139.
143
Op. cit., 21.
144
See Viñas, Indios, ejército y frontera, 18.
145
All primary sources in this chapter are left in the original Portuguese. However,
secondary sources are my own translation into English.
146
The source from which I quote here Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy,” is from
Dissemination.
147
Boever explains it this way:
Plato also notes that he drug of storytelling might at times be useful to
govern the ideal city he envisions. Statesmen . . . are in this sense like
doctors: with the proper training, they can learn how to administer the
drug of storytelling so that it becomes beneficial rather than destructive.
Storytelling is, then, characteristically pharmalogical: it can cut both
ways, depending on how it is administered (Narrative care 7).
148
Later, in Os sertões, Euclides will recognize the poisonous pharmakon in the
military hospital; it is a danger to life: “Fantasiara-se em casarão acaçapado e escuro
um hospital military. Mas este era o pavor e a condenação suprema de todos os feridos
e doentes” (OS 638).
149
Mónica Ayala-Martínez, in her “Euclides Da Cunha and the Trap of the
Republican Dream,” puts it this way:
Modernization, order, and progress are the concepts at the base of this
national ideal. In order to reconcile these, da Cunha resorts to various
scientific discourses popular during that period: biology, psychiatry,
ethnology, geography, and anthropology. He does this in order to
construct a complex frame of reference with which to interpret the war
of Canudos and its possible effects on Brazilian history. The text
continuously demonstrates da Cunha's ambivalence. The author
admires the people of Canudos while at the same time considering them
to be primitive. It is clear that his positivist vision led him to
301
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
understand, at least initially, the military campaigns as crusades against
the backwardness of the rural life of the Sertão (60).
150
See Bernucci, A imitação dos sentidos, 23.
151
For more about the influence the Argentine writer had on Euclides, as well as the
relationship between the two, see Bernucci, “Além do real, aquém do imaginario:
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento e Euclides da Cunha.” Also see Zilly, “A Barbárie:
antítese ou element da Civilização? Do Facundo de Sarmiento a Os sertões de
Cudlides da Cunha.”
152
For a comprehensive understanding of the multi-faced discourse of science, history,
memory, and fiction, as well as the intertextuality of Os sertões, see Bernucci, “A
ontologia discursive de Os sertões,” and his A imitação dos sentidos. Also refer to
Luiz Costa Lima, “Os sertões: História e Romance”; José Carlos Barreto de Santana,
“Os sertões: Aspectos da Construção do Discurso”; and Luiz Fernando Valente, Os
sertões: Entre a Memória e a história,” all found in Discurso, Ciência e Constrovérsia
em Euclides da Cunha.
153
The book and author’s heterogeneous natures have been the subject of comment
since the work’s very first literary review by José Veríssimo, in the Rio de Janeiro
newspaper Correio da Manhá in December of 1902. In a much cited quote regarding
the many faces of Os sertões and its creator, Veríssimo states:
Mr. Euclides da Cunha’s book, notable for so many titles, is at the same
time the book of a man of science, a geographer, a geologist, an
ethnographer; of a man of thought, a philosopher, a sociologist, a
historiographer; of a man of sentiment, a poet, a novelist, an artist, who
knows how to see and describe, who is touched by and feels so many of
nature’s aspects as well as the soul’s, moved to tears, in the face of
human suffering, whether from the fatal conditions of the physical
world, the “droughts” that devastate the backlands of the Brazilian
North, or whether from the stupidity and evil of men, like the Canudos
campaign. (45)
154
See Boever, Narrative Care, 13.
155
In his Narrative Care, Boever also speculates about an Agambenian theory of the
novel, one where characters are construed in the frightful image of bare life, trapped
within the pages of the novel which comes to embody a literary space much like a
concentration camp. I believe the space the sertanejos inhabit in da Cunha’s work
functions much like a literary concentration camp, where their lives are devalued and
bodies subjected to the most horrendous of state violence. Regarding this Agambenian
theory of the novel, Boever states:
Agambenian theory of the novel would not only align the novel with
the camp, but also the life of characters—character life—with bare life.
. . . This would be a theory of the novel as a camp, and of the character
as the bare life that is caught up within it. If Watt argues that the novel
is the characteristic political structure of modernity, and if Agamben
argues that the camp is the characteristic political structure of
302
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
modernity, should we not then also consider the argument that there
might be a connection between the novel and the camp? (72).
156
See Boever. Narrative Care, 43-45.
157
Ibid.,. 47, endnote 120.
158
See Castro-Klarén, “Locura y dolor,” 212.
159
See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 199-203.
160
The same may be said of Martín Fierro with regards to the reassuring fratricide. He
is the son of a nation, excluded from that nation, and who, upon his death, is later
reintegrated as a national archetype.
161
See Walnice, No Calor, 107-08.
162
See Zilly, “Uma crítica precoce à “globalização” e uma epopéia da literatura
universal,” 68.
163
See Levine, “Mud-hot Jerusalem, 527-8.
164
See da Cunha, Os sertões, Author’s Note 1, 783-4.
165
See da Cunha, Correspondência, 165.
166
As Adriana Johnson explains in her article “Subalternizing Canudos,” “It is
important to stress first that da Cunha is not criticizing the Brazilian state and its
action from either an anarchist or monarchist viewpoint, but measuring it against the
new republican state as he thinks it should be but is not” (373).
167
See Freyre, Perfil de Euclides e Outros Perfis, 25-6.
168
See Brandão, Euclides da Cunha e a questão racial no Brasil, 28.
169
See Olimpio de Souza Andrade, “’Os sertões’ numa frase de Nabuco,”
170
Da Cunha himself states that he fell asleep a nobody (desconhecido) only to wake
up famous the next day. See the preface to Bernucci’s edition of Os sertões, 15.
171
See Abreu, O enigma de Os sertões, 19. I recommend this book for further
understanding of the far reaching success of Os sertões.
172
See Bernucci, “Além do real, aquém do imaginario,” 53.
173
Ibid. 20-22.
174
Here we may think of the entire body of Kafka’s works, Tolstoy’s War and Peace,
the war novels of Hemmingway, etc.
175
Conselheiro’s rigid teachings can be found in two texts attributed to him. The first,
written in 1895 at Belo Monte, is called Preceitos, and confirms his loyalty to
traditional Catholic precepts. The second, Prédicas y discursos de António
Conselheiro, written amidst the turmoil of the Canudos War in January 1987, was
possibly written as a message to his adversaries and to confirm his legacy. Only after
the war were both books found in the rubble of his meager home in Canudos. For
more, see Levine, “Mud-Hut Jerusalem,” 544-5.
176
For more information about the Conselheiro’s burning of the tax edicts, see Levine,
“Mud-Hut Jerusalem,” 538. For da Cunha’s own version of this event, see Os sertões,
285.
177
As Levine explains, “Indeed, Canudo’s size was staggering for a backland religious
refuge: at its height the population was more than one-tenth that of the city of
São Paulo in the mid­1890s” (Vale of Tears 2).
178
See Levine, “Mud-Hut Jerusalem, 527.
303
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
179
Ibid., 558.
For more about da Cunha’s diagnosis of “historic atavism,’ and his tales about
Conselheiro, see Os sertões, 251-87.
181
See Ventura, “Canudos como cidade iletrada,” 166.
182
Ibd. 121-129
183
See Villa, “O Diáraio de uma expedição e a construção de Os sertões” in Os
sertões de Euclides da Cunha: releituras e diálogos, 38-9; as well as Ventura,
“Canudos como cidade iletrada: Euclides da Cunha na “urbs” monstruosa,” 171-72
and 178.
184
See Ventura, “Canudos como cidade iletrada,” 176.
185
See Davis, Late Victorian Holocaust. 190.
186
Ibd. 191.
187
See Levine, “Mud-Hut Jerusalem,” 551.
188
Ibd. 551.
189
Ibd. 564.
190
Ibd. 552.
191
Ibd. 547.
192
Ibd. 556.
193
Ibd. 556.
194
See da Cunha, Os sertões, 431.
195
Sevcenko elaborates:
The problem lay in the characteristics of the Brazilian Army itself. Its
officials were trained in French, by Belgian instructors, using Belgian
manuals and tactics appropriate to the territories of the Netherlands.
None of them had the slightest notion of typical conditions in the
Brazilian backlands. Their red uniforms offered easy targets for the
backlanders, their cannons sank in the sandy soil, and their woolen
clothes were a recipe for certain dehydration under the desert sun.
Euclides demonstrated that successive expeditions were defeated above
all by their total ignorance of the land, people, customs and Brazilian
popular culture. (83)
196
See da Cunha, O Diáraio de uma expedição, 44.
197
For more on this topic, see Ventura, ““A Nossa Vendéia”: Canudos, o Mito da
Revolução Francesa e a Constituição de Identidade nacional: Cultura no Brasil (18971902).”
198
For more about the complex struggle of oligarchical powers during the Canudos
campaign, see Sampaio, “Repensando Canudos: O jogo das Oligarquias.”
199
See Davis, Late Victorian Holocaust, 189.
200
See Ramos, “Interpretando o fenômeno Canudos,” 78-9.
201
See Ventura, “Canudos como cidade iletrada,” 166.
202
See Foucault, Society must be Defended, 245.
203
As Levine points out: “That the Church sent the mission at the request of state
officials despite the formal separation of church and state after 1889 was not unusual
in the Northeast, where republican-era secularism never fully took hold behind the
180
304
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
scenes as long as religious and political leaders shared common objectives” (“MudHut Jerusalem” 542).
204
See Brandão, Euclides da Cunha e a questão racial no Brasil, 56.
205
It is important to note, however, as Bernucci does, that Euclides’ usage of science
was not always textbook. In reality, he blurs the dividing line between science and art,
even erasing the limits established by positivist thinking, thus preferring to manipulate
positivism and thus enrich the concept in question and return it to the reader in all its
complexity. See “Cientificismo e aporias em Os sertões,” 24.
206
An example of Euclide’s conviction of the primitive degeneracy of mixed races can
be found in his description of the Canudos bandit Pajué:
Legítimo cafuz [half Native American, half African], no seu
temperamento implulsivo acolchetavam-se todas as tendências das
raças inferiores que o formavam. Ero o tipo completo do lutador
primitivo—ingênuo, feroz e destemeroso—simples e mau, brutal e
inantil, valente por instinto, herói sem o saber—um belo caso de
retroatividade atávica, forma retardatária de troglodita sanhudo
aprumando-se ali com o mesmo arrojo com que, na velhas idades,
vibrava o machado de sílex à porta das cavernas... (408)
207
Da Cunha calls him a “títere” and a “sombra.” See Os sertões, 268.
208
Much along my same thought line here, Mónica Ayala-Martínez explains:
The theoretical context in which he lived cannot offer him the tools to
definitively understand the anomaly represented by Canudos and the
failure of the modernizing function which the nation should perform for
the collective. To 19th-century thinking, it is possible to assume an
analytical and critical position. However, what remains out of reach of
this analytical paradigm is that every unifying principle is by definition
excluding and discriminatory. It is destined to abolish differences and
in so doing, includes contradictions and ambivalence. Neither can it
explain that violence, repression, and collective national amnesia are
necessarily a part of the definition of the national project. (62).
209
See Castro-Klarén, “Locura y Dolor,” 210.
210
See Edgar Salvadori de Decca and Maria Lucia Abaurre Gnerre, “Trauma e história
na composição de Os sertões,” in Releituras e diálogos, 58.
211
See Johannes, Time and the Other, 7.
212
In Diário da Cunha also refers to Canudos as a Kraal and a Biblical city, published
on September 10th , 1897. 177-8.
213
See Dickinson, “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy,” 3.
214
See Arent, Origins, 185-221.
215
See Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 171.
216
See Brandão, Euclides da Cunha e a questão racial no Brasil, 47.
217
This paragraph is a rough paraphrasing of Brandão, Euclides da Cunha e a questão
racial no Brasil, 47-8.
218
Ibd. 48.
219
See Zilly, “Canudos Telegrafado,” 107-8.
305
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
220
Ibid., 62
See Ventura, “Canudos como cidade iletrada,” 169.
222
See da Cunha, Diário, 171.
223
All newspaper sources not written by Euclides da Cunha come from Walnice’s
newspaper collection of the Canudos War entitled No calor da hora. Da Cunha’s
newspaper references come from his Diário de uma expedição.
224
For another example, see No Calor da Hora, 416.
225
Ibid., 280-281 and 290-293.
226
Da Cunha goes to great lengths to describe the desperation of soldiers to hunt and
aquire food. For more detail, see Os sertões, 581-5.
227
Foucault explains that governmentality and sovereignty coexist in the forms of
power connected to discipline. See Security, Territory, Population, 107.
228
For a full list of titles, see Adelino Bradão, Euclides da Cunha e a questão racial
no Brasil, 20-1.
229
See Mbeme, “Necropolotics,” 170-71. Furthermore, Mbembe states:
In many respects, the very structure of the plantation system and its
aftermath manifests the emblematic and paradoxical figure of the state
of exception. This figure is paradoxical here for two reasons. First, in
the context of the plantation, the humanity of the slave appears as the
perfect figure of a shadow. Indeed, the slave condition results from a
triple loss: loss of a “home,” loss of rights over his or her body, and
loss of political status. This triple loss is identical with absolute
domination, natal alienation, and social death (expulsion from
humanity altogether). To be sure, as a political-juridical structure, the
plantation is a space where the slave belongs to a master. It is not a
community if only because by definition, a community implies the
exercise of the power of speech and thought. (170)
230
Ibid., 172.
231
See Zilly, “Uma construção simbólica da nacionalidade num mundo
transnacional,” 31-2. Here Zilly explains that many of the new nineteenth century
Latin-American nation-states, and especially Brazil, practiced a sort of “internal
colonialism,” treating their rural provinces just as the imperialist powers treated their
colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
232
There term is “caverna dos bandidos.” See da Cunha, Os sertões, 541.
233
Fierro and Conselheiro are both incompatible with modernity. Fierro’s desire to
live free as a gaucho on the pampa and Conselheiro’s desire to freely practice his
religious convictions in the backlands both contradict what modern society demands
of them.
234
See Butler, Precarious Life, 79-80.
235
See Walnice, No Calor da Hora, 494.
236
Ibid., 442.
237
Ibid., 269-79.
238
Da Cunha himself, for example, reports Pajeú’s death in Diário, 106. Also see Os
sertões, 625.
221
306
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
239
Libera-me, or Deliver Me, is a Catholic responsory, or death chant, sung during a
service for the dead. Also, the sertanejos are called “salaried monarchists” because of
the belief that they were receiving foreign aid and supplies to restore the old Brazilian
Monarchy.
240
See Walnice, No Calor da Hora, 486.
241
Da Cunha directly admits to the inaccuracy of newspapers multiple times in Os
sertões. Undoubtedly he was aware of the exaggerations and twisting of truth in the
press. In the following, he points out the ingloriousness of supposed victories that he
states were in reality defeats:
A ordem do dia relative ao feito de 28 de junho caracteriza-o
“uma página tarjada de horrors, mas perfumada de glória”.
Mas fora franco o revés. . . . O “exército victorioso”, segundo o
brilhante eufemismo das partes oficiais armadas a velarem aquele
insucesso, apresentava na noite daqule dia o caráter perfeito de uma
aglomeração de foragidos. Triunfadores, que não podiam ensaiar um
passo fora da posição conquisrtada. (571)
242
See Esposito, Bios, 50.
243
Interestingly, Sevcenko compares the Canudos War to the 1904 Revolt of the
Vaccine in Rio de Janeiro some seven years after the Canudos conflict had ended. This
event was sparked in reaction to the government’s desire to modernize the port of Rio
de Janeiro, thus recurring to methods much like those used against Canudos. First, in
an effort to modernize the port, the government gave engineers unlimited power to
engineers which made them immune to judicial action. The mulatos and AfroBrazilians who inhabited the port were forced from the city center, forming the first
favelas. Furthermore, the Health Ministry, alarmed at the outbreak of smallpox now
rampant due to the unsanitary conditions where the displaced lived, unleashed a
massive vaccination campaign against them. Batallions of health visitors and armed
police entered the favelas and cheap hotels under the pretext of vaccinating the
residents. However, if signs of health risk were detected, they were authorized to order
the place be evacuated, condemning it to demolition with no compensation. Such
extreme State violence in the name of modernity and health led to the rebellion known
as the Reviolt of the Vaccine. For more, see Sevcenko, “Peregrinations, Visions and
the City,” 85-9.
244
See da Cunha, Os sertões, 483.
245
Mbembe explains the war-machine, through modern examples of conflicts such as
the Gulf War and the Kosovo campaign, as the point where military-technology can
attack the enemy and incur large-scale destruction through air raids, smart bombs,
laser-guided missiles, stealth capabilities, etc (think of the Bush administration’s tactic
of Shock and Awe in the Afghanistan War). Essentially, “This new moment is one of
global [military] mobility,” and “[i]n this sense, contemporary wars are more
reminiscent of the warfare strategy of the nomads than of the sedentary nations or the
“conquer-and-annex” territorial wars of modernity” (178). The same can be said of
nineteenth century frontier conflicts in the Americas. With more advanced technology,
the American nation-states warred against the natives or rural inhabitants of their
307
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
frontiers in the same manner as the nomads themselves. We can certainly consider the
US cavalry’s tactics against Native Americans. The Glanton Gang in Blood Meridian,
armed to the teeth, attacks the Apache in a sort of Shock and Awe strategy; gauchos in
Argentina were preferred as soldiers for their equestrian abilities to quickly strike
against Pampean natives; and in Os sertões, soldiers wore the clothing of the
sertanejos and adopted their ambush tactics of war. In closing, the military presence in
American frontiers is not just a technologically advanced war-machine, save a warmachine that adopts the nomadic strategies of the enemies they extinguish.
246
Later, Euclides describes sertanejos that “incinerados, se desenhavam,
salteadamente, nítidos, esbatida a bracura da cinzas no chão poento e pardo, à maneira
de toscas e grandes caricaturas feitas a giz…” (OS 749).
247
Though separated by two languages, English and Portuguese, I find the often
recognized baroque nature of the prose in Os sertões to be strikingly parallel to the
remarkable prose in Blood Meridian. This is especially true in regards to the
representation of life and the characters in both books. It seems both authors derealize
the life of the characters in their books, marking them as eerily spectral and primitive.
In Blood Meridian we read:
Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat.
Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional,
devoid of order. Like beings provoked from their own loomings to
wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the
brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and
each was all. (172)
248
Walnice, in the first three introductory chapters to No calor da hora, identifies
three principal ways the Canudos War was represented in newspapers: “galhofeira,
sensacionalista e ponderada” (comical, sensationalist and ponderous). In the
galhofeira, the journalist, as unthinkable as it is, makes fun of the simple sertanejos,
often portraying humorous ways they die (33-44). The sensacionalista presents the
war and violence against the sertanejos as a spectacle (54-75). Finally, the ponderada,
the rarest representation, takes the war into account through a critical and thoughtful
position (76-108).
249
See Brizuela, ““CURIOSITY!,” 162-3. For more about the positivist evaluations of
Conselheiro and his decapitated cranium, also see Levine, “Mud-Hut Jerusalem,” 55861.
250
Interestingly, Maudsley did in fact provide certain references to the formation of
nations, implying a certain sense of madness to the process, and one that describes
perfectly the Canudos conflict: “Have not nations,” he states, “owed their formation as
much to brotherly hate as to brotherly love—more perhaps to the welding
consolidation enforced by the pressure of hostile peoples than to the attractive forces
of their components?” (26).
308
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
WORKS CITED
Abreu, Regina. O enigma de Os sertões. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco Funarte, 1998. Print.
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen. California: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print.
---. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare
Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Print
---. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2005. Print.
---. “The State of Exception.” Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio
Agamben’s Homo Sacer. Eds. Hent Vries and Samuel Weber. Calif: Stanford
University Press, 1997. 284-97. Print.
Amoore, Louis and Alexandra Hall. “The clown at the gates of the camp: Sovereignty,
resistance and the figure of the fool.” Security Dialogue 44.2 (2013): 93-110.
JSTORE.
Andermann, Jens. Mapas de poder: Una arqueología literaria del espacio argentino.
Argentina: Estudios Culturales, 2000. Print.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Print.
Andrade, Olimpio de Souza. “‘Os sertõs’ numa frase de Nabuco.” Planalto 1.14
(December 1941): np. Print.
Ansolabehere, Pablo. “Martín Fierro: Frontera y relato.” Fronteras escritas: Cruces,
desvíos y pasajes en la literatura argentina. Eds. Alejandra Laera, Graciela
309
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Batticuore and Loreley El Jaber. Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2008.
235-60. Print.
Arendt, Hannah. Essays in understanding, 1930-1954. Ed. Jerome Kohn. New York:
Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1994. Print.
---. Origins of Totalitarianism. 7th ed. New York: Meridian Books, 1962. Print.
Aristotle. Politics. Trans. C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998. Print.
Arnold, Edwin T. “Naming, Knowing and Nothingness: McCarthy's Moral Parables.”
Southern Quarterly 30 (1992): 31-50. JSTORE.
Ayala-Martínez, Mónica. “Euclides Da Cunha and the Trap of the Republican
Dream.” Chasqui 34.1 (2005): 57-64. JSTORE.
Balibar, Etienne. “Citizen Subject.” Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Ed.
Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson. Tans. James B.
Swenson. New York: Routledge, 1994. 39-60. Print.
Barreto de Santana, José Carlos. “Os sertões: Aspectos da Construção do Discurso.”
Discurso, Ciência e Constrovérsia em Euclides da Cunha. Ed. Leopoldo M.
Bernucci. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2008. 141-56.
Print.
Barretta, Silvio R. Duncan and John Markoff. “Civilization and Barbarism: Cattle
Frontiers in Latin America. States of Violence. Eds. Fernando Coronil and Julie
Skurski. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006. 33-74. Print.
Barthes, Roland, and Annette Lavers. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.
Print.
310
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Bell, Vereen M. The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1988. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. 1968. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New
York: Schocken Books, 2007. Print.
Bernucci, Leopoldo M. A imitação dos sentidos. São Paulo: Editora da universidade
de São Paulo, 1995. Print.
---. “A ontologia discursive de Os sertões.” História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos 5.0
(1998): 1-12. Sielo. Web. 17 Abril 2015.
---. “Além do real, aquém do imaginario: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento e Euclides da
Cunha.” Brasil/Brazil: Revista de literatura brasilera 3.4 (1990): 51-68.
JSTORE.
---. “Ceintificismo e Aporias em Os sertões.” Discurso, Ciência e Constrovérsia em
Euclides da Cunha. Ed. Leopoldo M. Bernucci. São Paulo: Editora da
Universidade de São Paulo, 2008. 23-40. Print.
---. Prefácio. Os sertões: campanha de canudos. By Euclides da Cunha. Ed. Leopoldo
M. Bernucci. Brazil: Ateliê Editorial, 2002. Print.
Bhabha, Homi K. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. Print.
Bloom, Harold. Introduction. Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West.
By Cormac McCarthy.
Boever, Arne de. Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel. New York: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2013. Print.
311
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
---. State of Exception and the Contemporary Novel. New York: Continuum, 2012.
Print.
Bolton, Herbert Eugene. Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century: Studies in Spanish
Colonial History and Administration. New York: Russell & Russell, 1962.
Print.
---. “The Epic of Greater America.” American Historical Review 3 (1933): 448-74.
Print.
---. The Spanish borderlands: a Chronicle of old Florida and the Southwest. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1921. Print.
---. Wider Horizons of American History. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1967. Print.
Borges, Jorge Luis. El “Martín Fierro.” Ed. Margarita Guerrero. Madrid: Alianza
Editorial, 1983. Print
---. Obras Completas. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1974. Print.
Borges, Patrícia Cardoso. “A interpretação d’Os sertões, ontem e hoje.” Os sertões de
Euclides da Cunha: Releituras e diálogos. Ed. José Leonardo do Nascimiento.
São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2002. 191-204. Print.
Brandão, Adelino. Euclides da Cunha e a questão racial no Brasil (a antropologia de
Os sertões). Rio de Janeiro: Presença, 1990. Print.
Brizuela, Natalia. ““CURIOSITY! WONDER!! HORROR!!! MISERY!!!!” THE
CAMPANHA DE CANUDOS, OR THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF
HISTORY.” Qui Parle 15.2 (2005): 139-169. JSTORE.
312
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Butler, Bill. Dictionary of the Tarot. New York: Schocken, 1975. Print
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?. New York: Verso, 2009.
Print.
---. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso, 2004.
Print.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 3rd Ed. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005. Print.
Campbell, Neil. "Liberty beyond its proper bounds: Cormac McCarthy's history of the
West in Blood Meridian." Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac
McCarthy. Ed. Rick Wallach. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press,
2000. 217-226. Print.
---. The Cultures of the American New West. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers,
2000.Print.
Cant, John. Cormac Mccarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism. New York:
Routledge, 2008. Print.
Carilla, Emilio. La creación del Martín Fierro. Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1973. Print.
Castro-Klarén, Sara. “Locura y dolor: La elaboracion de la historia en Os sertões y La
guerra del fin del mundo.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 10.20
(1984): 207-231. JSTORE.
---. “Santos and Cangaceiros: Inscription without Discourse in Os Sertões and La
guerra del fin del mundo.” MLN 101.2 (March 1986): 366-388. JSTORE.
313
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Coronil, Fernando and Julie Skurski. “Introduction: States of Violence and Violence
of States.” States of Violence. Eds. Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski. Ann
Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006. 1-32. Print.
Cover, Robert M. “Violence and the Word.” The Yale Law Journal 95.8 (1986): 16011629. JSTORE.
Cunha, Euclides da. Caderneta de Campo. Ed. Olímpio de Souza Andrade.
Brasil: Editora Cultrix LTDA, 1975. Print.
---. Correspondência de Euclides da Cunha. Ed. Walnice Nogueira Galvão e Oswaldo
Galotti. São Paulo: EdUSP, 1997. Print.
---. Diário de uma Expedição. Ed. Walnice Norgueira Galvão. São Paulo: Companhia
das Letras, 2000. Print.
---. Os sertões: campanha de canudos. Ed. Leopoldo M. Bernucci. Brazil: Ateliê
Editorial, 2002. Print.
---. Rebellion in the Backlands. Trans. Samuel Putnam. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1964. Print.
Dabove, Juan Pablo. Nightmares of the Lettered City: Banditry and Literature in Latin
America. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Print
Daughtery, Leo. “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy.”
Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Eds. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C.
Luce. Revised Ed. Jackson: University Press of Missippi, 1999. 159-74. Print.
Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the
Third World. New York: Verso, 2001. Print.
314
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
De Groot, Jerome. The Historic Novel. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1981. Print.
Dickinson, Edward Ross. “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on
Our Discourse about “Modernity”.” Central European History 37.1 (2004): 148. JSTORE.
Dorson, James. “Demystifying the Judge: Law and Mythical Violence in Cormac
McCarthy's Blood Meridian.” Journal of Modern Literature 36.2 (2013): 105121. JSTORE.
Esposito, Roberto. Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2008. Print.
---. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Trans. Zakiya Hanafi. USA:
Polity Press, 2011. Print.
Estrada, Ezequiel Martínez. Muerte y transfiguración de Martín Fierro. 2 vols.
Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1948. Print.
Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New
York: Colombia University Press, 1983. Print.
Fernandes, Raul C. Gouveia. “Euclides e a literatura: Comentários sobre a "moldura"
de Os Sertões.” Luso-Brazilian Review Vol.2 (2006): 45-62. JSTORE.
Fitz, Earl E. Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a
Comparative Context. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. Print.
315
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
--- and Elizabeth Lowe. Translation and the Rise of Inter-American Literature.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. Print.
Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France,
1977-78. Ed. Michel Senellart. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave
McMillan: République Français, 2007. Print.
---. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France. Trans. David
Macey. New York: Picador, 1997. Print.
---. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978 – 79.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.
---. The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Book, 1978.
Print.
Franco, Rafael Olea. “Lugones y el mito gauchesco. Un capítulo de historia cultural
argentina.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 38.1 (1990): 307-331.
JSTORE.
Franko, Mark. “Dance and the Political: States of Exception.” Dance Research
Journal 38.1/2 (2006): 3-18. JSTORE.
Freyre, Gilberto. Perfil de Euclides e Outros Perfis. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria José
Olympio Editora, 1944. Print.
Frye, Steven. Understanding Cormac McCarthy. USA: The University of South
Carolina Press, 2009. Print.
Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1977. Print.
316
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Gourgouris, Stathis. Does Literature Think?: Literature As Theory for an Antimythical
Era. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2003. Print.
Greenfield, Gerald. “Migrant Behavior and Elite Attitudes: Brazil’s Great Drought,
1877-79,” The Americas 43:1 (July 1986): 69-85. JSTORE.
Gregory, Derek. “The Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and the Space of Exception.”
Geografiska Annaler 88.4 (2006): 405-427. JSTORE
Gutiérrez, Eduardo. Juan Moreira. Buenos Aire: Centro Editor de América Latina,
1980. Print.
Guglielmini, Homero M. Fronteras de la literature argentina. Buenos Aires: Editorial
Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1972. Print.
Guy, Donna J., and Thomas E. Sheridan, eds. Contested Ground: Comparative
Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire. Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1998. Print.
Hauns, Saussy. “Comparative Literature?.” PMLA 118.2 (2003): 336-341. JSTORE.
Haverkamp, Ansel and Cornelia Vismann. “Habeas Corpus: The Law’s Desire to
Have the Body.” Violence, identity, and self-determination. Eds. Hent Vries
and Samuel Weber. Calif: Stanford University Press, 1997. 223-35. Print.
Heffes, Gisela. "Martín Fierro" ante la ley: el problema del cuerpo, la voz y sus usos
específicos.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 37. 74 (2011): 923. JSTORE.
Hernández, José. Martín Fierro. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2007. Print.
317
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Herrero, Enrique. Prosas de José Hernández, autor de “Martín Fierro.” Buenos Aires:
Editorial Futuro, 1944. Print.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: Or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth
Ecclesiasticall and Civill. Ed. Ian Shapiro. New Haven: Yale University Press,
2010. Print.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York:
Herder and Herder, 1972. Print.
Hudson, William Henry. Tales of the Pampa. New York: Alred A. Knopf, 1916. Print.
Hughes, John B. Arte y sentido de Martín Fierro. Madrid: Castalia, 1972. Print.
Humphreys, Stephen. “Legalizing Lawlessness: On Giorgio Agamben’s State of
Exception.” The European Journal of International Law. 17.3 (2006): 677–
687. JSTORE.
Hurtado, Albert. Herbert Eugene Bolton: Historian of the American Borderlands.
Berkley: University of California Press, 2012. Print.
James, Caryn. “Is Everybody Dead around Here?” New York Times Book Review 28
(1985): 31. Print.
Jarrett, Robert L. Cormac McCarthy. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997. Print.
Johnson, Adraiana M. C. “Subalternizing Canudos.” MLN 120.2 (March 2005): 355382. JSTORE.
---. Sentencing Canudos: Subalternity in the Backlands of Brazil. Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. Print.
318
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Jones, Kristine L., “Comparative Raiding Economies.” Contested Ground:
Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish
Empire. Eds. Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan. Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 1998. 97-114. Print.
---. “Civilization and Barbarism and Sarmiento’s Indian Policy.” Sarmiento and His
Argentina. Ed. Joseph T. Criscenti. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993.
35-44. Print.
Josyph, Peter. “Blood Music: Reading Blood Meridian.” Sacred Violence: A Reader’s
Companion to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach. El Paso:
Texas Western Press, 1995.169-88. Print.
Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Trans. Breon Mitchell. New York: Schocken Books, 1998.
Print.
Kollin, Susan. "Genre and the Geographies of Violence: Cormac McCarthy and the
Contemporary Western." Contemporary Literature 42.3 (2001): 557-88.
JSTORE.
Larraya, Antonio Pages. Prosas del Martín Fierro. Buenos Aires: Editorial Raigal,
1952. Print.
Leudman, Carlos Alberto. El poeta creador. Cómo hizo Hernández “La vuelta de
Martín Fierro.” Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1945. Print.
Levine, Robert M. ““Mud-Hut Jerusalem”: Canudos Revisited.” The Hispanic
American Historical Review 68.3 (August 1988): 525-572. JSTORE.
319
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
---. Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 18931897. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Print.
Lima, Luiz Costa. “Os sertões: História e Romance.” Discurso, Ciência e
Constrovérsia em Euclides da Cunha. Ed. Leopoldo M. Bernucci. São Paulo:
Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2008. 63-76. Print.
---. Terra Ignota: A construção de Os Sertões. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira,
1997. Print.
Ludmer, Josefina. El género gauchesco: Un tratado sobre la patria. Buenos Aires:
Editorial Sudamericana, 1988. Print.
Lugones, Leopoldo. El payador. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1991. Print.
Mansilla, Lucio V. Una Excursión a Los Indios Ranqueles. Ed. Saúl
Sosnowski. Caracas, Venezuela: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1984. Print.
Maudsley, Henry. The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind. London: MacMillan,
1897. Print.
Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Biopolitics: A Reader. Eds. Timothy C Campbell
and Adam Sitze. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2013. 16192. Print.
McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West. 1984.
USA: Vintage, 1992. Print.
McGilchrist, Megan R. The Western Landscape in Cormac Mccarthy and Wallace
Stegner: Myths of the Frontier. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.
320
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Menchaca, Martha. Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and
White Roots of Mexican Americans. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.
Print.
Merquior, José Guilherme. De Anchieta a Euclides: breve história da literatura
brasileira. 2ª ed. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria José Olympio Editora, 1979. Print.
Moog, Clodomir Vianna. “Bandeirantes and Pioneers.” Where Cultures Meet:
Frontiers in Latin American History. Eds. David J. Weber and Jane M.
Rausch. Wilmington, Del: SR Books, 1994. 165-72. Print.
Moreira, Raimundo Nonato Pereira. “Victor Hugo e a Vendéia em Os Sertões:
historiografia e literatura em Euclides da Cunha” Universidade Estadual
Sudoeste da Bahia. ANPUH, 2007. Web. 21 May 2008.
<http://www.uesb.br/anpuhba/artigos/anpuh_I/raimundo_nonato_pereira_more
ira.pdf>
Murdoch, David H. The American West: The Invention of a Myth. Wales: Welsh
Academic Press, 2001. Print.
Nichols, Sallie. Jung and the Tarot: An Archetypal Journey. New York: Weiser, 1980.
Print.
Owens, Barcley. Cormac McCarthy's Western Novels. Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 2000. Print.
Parrish, Timothy. From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and
American Fiction. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. Print.
321
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Patton, Elda Clayton. Sarmiento in The United States. Indiana: The University of
Evansville Press, 1979. Print.
Pease, Donald E. "Between the Homeland and Abu Ghraib: Dwelling in the Bush's
Biopolitical Settlement." Eds. Ashley Dawson and Malini J.
Schueller. Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New
Imperialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 60-87. Print.
Pérez, Firmat Gustavo, ed. Do the Americas Have a Common Literature?. Durham:
Duke UP, 1990. Print.
Pérez, Julián. Los dilemas políticos de la cultura letrada (Argentina-siglo XIX).
Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor, 2002. Print.
Pughe, Thomas. “Revision and Vision: Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian.”” Revue
française d'études américaines 62. 80 (1994): 371-382. JSTORE.
Putnam, Samuel. Introduction. Rebellion in the Backlands. By Euclides da Cunha.
Trans. Putnam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964. Print.
Phillips, Dana. “History and the Ugly Facts of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.”
American Literature 68.2 (1996): 433-60. JSTORE.
Rama, Angel. Los gauchipolíticos rioplatenses. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de
América Latina, 1982. Print.
Renan, Ernest. “What is a Nation?” On the Nation and the Jewish People. Trans.
David Fernhach. Ed. Shlomo Sand. New York: Verso, 2010. 37-68. Print.
322
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Rifkin, Mark. “Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the
“Peculiar” Status of Native Peoples.” Cultural Critique 73 (2009): 88-124.
JSTORE.
Rockland, Michael Aaron. “Sarmiento’s Views on the United States.” Sarmiento and
His Argentina. Ed. Joseph T. Criscenti. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers,
1993. 45-50. Print.
Roggiano, Alfredo A. “Personal Destiny and National Destiny in Martín Fierro.”
Trans. William J. Straub. Latin American Literary Review 3.5 (1974): 37-49.
JSTORE.
Romero, Facundo Gómez. “The Archaeology of the Gaucho "Vago y Mal
Entretenido." International Journal of Historical Archaeology 9.3 (September
2005): 143-164. JSTORE.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. Print.
Salvadori de Decca, Edgar and Maria Lucia Abaurre Gnerre. “Trauma e história na
composição de Os sertões.” Os sertões de Euclides da Cunha: releituras e
diálogos. São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2002. 41-62. Print.
Sampaio, Consuelo Novais. “Repensando Canudos: O Jogo das Oligarquias.” The
World Out of Which Canudos Came. Spec. Issue of Luso-Brazilian Review
30.2 (1993): 97-113. JSTORE.
Santner, Eric L. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006. Print.
323
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Sarmiento, Domingo Fausto. Facundo: o, civilización y barbarie. Caracas: Biblioteca
Ayacucho, 1977. Print.
---. Obras Completas de Sarmiento. Tomo XXV. Buenos Aires: Editorial Luz del Día,
1952. Print.
Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology. Trans. George Schwab. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2005. Print.
Sepich, John. “Blood Meridian and the Dance of History.” The Southern Literary
Journal 24.1 (1991): 16-31. JSTORE.
---. Notes on Blood Meridian. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. Print.
---. ““What kind of indians was them?”: Some Historical Sources in Cormac
McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Eds. Edwin
T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Revised Ed. Jackson: University Press of
Missippi, 1999. 121-42. Print.
Sevcenko, Nicolau. Literatura como Missão: tensões sociais e criação cultural na
Primeira República. 3rd ed. São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1989. Print.
---. “Peregrinations, Visions and the City: From Canudos to Brasília, the Backlands
becomes the City and the City becomes the Backlands.” Through the
Kaleidoscope. Ed. Vivian Schelling. New York: Verso, 2000. 75-107. Print
Shakespear, William. Kind Lear. Ed. Burton Raffel. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2007. Print.
Shumway, Nicholas. The Invention of Argentina. Berkley: University of California
Press, 1991. Print.
324
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Slatta, Richard. Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1983. Print.
---. “Rural Criminality and Social Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires
Province.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 60.3 (1980). 450-472.
Print.
Slatta, Richard W. Comparing Cowboys and Frontiers. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1997. Print.
Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American
Frontier, 1600-1860. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.
Print.
Spurgeon, Sara L. Exploding the Western: Myths of Empire on the Postmodern
Frontier. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2005. Print.
Sullivan, Walter. “About Any Kind of Meaness You Can Name.” The Sewanee
Review 93.4 (1985): 649-656. Print.
Tinker, Edward L. The Horsemen of the Americas and the Literature They Inspired.
Austin: Published for the Humanities Research Center by the University of
Texas Press, 1967. Print.
Unamuno, Miguel de. “El gaucho Martín Fierro: Poema popular gauchesco de don
José Hernández.” Revista Española 1.1 (1894): 5-22. Print.
Valente, Luiz Fernando. “Os sertões: Entre a Memória e a história,” Discurso, Ciência
e Constrovérsia em Euclides da Cunha. Ed. Leopoldo M. Bernucci. São Paulo:
Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2008. 157-70. Print.
325
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
Ventura, Roberto. “Canudos como cidade iletrada: Euclides da Cunha na "urbs"
monstruosa.” Revista de Antropologia 40.1 (1997): 165-181. Print.
---. “A Nossa Vendéia”: Canudos, o Mito da Revolução Francesa e a Constituição de
Identidade nacional: Cultura no Brasil (1897-1902).” Revista da Crítica
Literaria Latinamericana. 12.24, (1986). 109-125. JSTORE.
Veríssimo, José. Estudos de literature brasileira: 5ª. série. São Paulo: Belo Horizonte,
Itatiaia, 1977. Print.
Villa, Marco Antonio. “O Diáraio de uma expedição e a construção de Os sertões.”
Os sertões de Euclides da Cunha: releituras e diálogos. São Paulo: Editora
UNESP, 2002. 11-40. Print.
Viñas, David. Indios, ejército y frontera. México: Siglo Veintiuno, 1983. Print.
Walnice Nogueira Galvão. No Calor da Hora: A Guerra de Canudos nos Jornais, 4ª
Expedição. 3rd edition. São Paulo: Editora Ática, 1994. Print.
Weber, David J, and Jane M. Rausch, eds. Where Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin
American History. Wilmington, Del: SR Books, 1994. Print.
Zilly, Berthold. “A Barbárie: antítese ou elemento da Civilização? Do Facundo de
Sarmiento a Os Sertões de Euclides da Cunha.” De sertões, desertos e espaços
incivilizados. Eds. Angela Mendes de Almeida, Berthold Zilly and Eli
Napoleão de Lima. Rio de Janeiro: Mauad, 2001. 271-301. Print.
---. “Canudos Telegrafado: A guerra do fim do mundo como de mídia na Europa de
1897” Ibero-amerikanisches Archiv 26 (2000): 59-96. JSTORE.
326
Texas Tech University, Heath Wing, August 2015
---. “Uma construção simbólica da nacionalidade num mundo transnacional: Os
sertões de Euclides da Cunha, cem anos depois.” Revista outros Sertões 3
(2009): 31-45. Print.
---. “Uma crítica precoce à “globalização” e uma epopéia da literatura universal: Os
sertões de Euclides da Cunha cem anos depois.” Os sertões de Euclides da
Cunha: Releituras e diálogos. Ed. José Leonardo do Nascimiento. São Paulo:
Editora UNESP, 2002. 63-72. Print.
327