Modern Language Association

The Red and the White: The "Indian" Novels of Jose de AlencarAuthor(s): Renata R. Mautner WassermanSource: PMLA, Vol. 98, No. 5 (Oct., 1983), pp. 815-827Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/462261Accessed: 10/10/2008 14:42

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RENATA R. MAUTNER WASSERMAN

The Red and the White: The "Indian" Novels of Jose de Alencar

D ISCUSSIONS of the "ideological" dimen- sion of a work-ideology taken to mean belief disguised as, and disguising, fact-

often have a moral undertone: assuming that the author of the work is unaware of the reality covered up by the ideology or, worse, unwilling to speak of the reality, the critic takes the writer to task, more or less gently. If the concealed facts peep through anyway, the critic ascribes that emergence to an underlying pressure of ir- resistible truth or to an almost unconscious hon-

esty of the writer's. "Real" reality exists in the

portrait unawares, unasked, like the latencies in the photograph of Cortazar's "Blow-Up"; critical

analysis rescues the great nineteenth-century real- ists (who are the most frequent objects of the ap- proach) for readers with doubts and certainties different from theirs. The approach is enormously stimulating: it discovers nexus and connection, and it seems to create as many novels out of one old one as there are frames of reference-politi- cal, economic, psychological, mythical, philo- sophical, null.

This essay aims to take part in one such res- cue operation, but with a difference: the argu- ments pertain mostly to two divergent lines in Alencar's "Indian" novels but defend neither as truer than the other; the meaning and truth of the two lines is in their contradiction. The criti- cal effort consists not in searching for a co- herence that underlies the surface disparities of the text but in acknowledging the necessity of

disparities.

Jose de Alencar (1829-77) was a journalist, state representative, minister of justice for two

years under the Brazilian emperor D. Pedro in, and a generally active participant in the public life of the empire; he was a shareholder in one of the country's first railroads (see Amoroso Lima,

55-56), thus signifying his interest in Brazil's economic life and progress; he was also a novel- ist, dramatist, polemicist, and critic who set out

consciously to found a recognizably Brazilian literature (see Alencar, Como e Porque sou Romancista, also his "Bengao Paterna"). He is

generally considered to have succeeded in that aim; regardless of how individual critics judge his works, nearly all describe him as preemi- nently, primarily, radically, a Brazilian writer.' He wrote novels set at various points in Bra- zilian history and in various parts of the rural backlands; he wrote urban novels and psycho- logical novels; he wrote plays for a stage till then

mainly dependent on imports (for a discussion of Alencar's formulation of a national identity as seen in his plays, see Aguiar); he speculated on the proper language for a truly Brazilian litera- ture (see, e.g., his "Carta ao Dr. Jaguaribe"); he looked abroad and adapted or transplanted themes and thoughts developed in other litera- tures by other novelists: Herculano, Chateau- briand, Cooper, Dumas, Balzac.2 In the process he became both chronicler and propagandist of some of the central cultural beliefs of the nation. It seemed he was trying to substantiate

Schlegel's thought-popularized in Brazil by Ferdinand de Denis, a French critic who had lived in and written about the country a genera- tion earlier-that "every nation, so to speak, secretes a literature in accordance with the

genius of its people" (see Antonio Candido de Mello e Souza, Formacao 2:315), for to a large extent Alencar's work followed the early roman- tic program of "the establishment of a literary genealogy, the analysis of the creative capacity of autochthonous races, and [the use of] local

aspects as stimulants to the creative imagina- tion" (Formafao 2:317). In the series of news-

paper articles in which Alencar criticizes the

815

The "Indian" Novels of Jose de Alencar

"indianist" epic Confederafao dos Tamoios by Gongalves de Magalhaes (Cartas sobre A Con- federaqao dos Tamoios), he sets out directives he then followed in writing the first of his "In- dian" novels: O Guarani is to be more than an adventure romance; it has the dual program of showing how one writes the true Brazilian epic, centered on the formation of the nationality, and how the nationality differs from the European civilization that provided part of its origin and most of its language and ideas. According to Antonio Candido, Alencar largely fulfills his

purpose:

[he defines] the literary universe of the Brazilian writer, and classifies three families of themes, which correspond to three moments of our social evolution: the life of the primitive man; the historical forma- tion of the colony, characterized by the contact between Portuguese and Indian; contemporary so- ciety, which in turn comes under two aspects: the traditional life of rural zones, and the life of the big cities where the vivifying contact with the lead- ing peoples of Western civilization frees us from the narrowness of our Portuguese heritage.

(Formafao 2:362)

The unusual congruence between how Alencar saw himself and how he is and was seen by his public and most of his critics indicates his close- ness to the temper of his time and readers; he is a kind of cultural prism, refracting the lights of his place and age.

One of these lights-which is strongest in the three "Indian" novels, 0 Guarani, Iracema, and Ubirajara3-is the commonplace that Brazilians as a people reflect the fortunate combination of the races inhabiting the land. What Silviano San- tiago calls the "value of hybridism" ("Roteiro" 5) winds its way through any consideration of national history, culture, or letters, of any at- tempt to define what distinguishes productions of the spirit in Brazil from the productions of other cultures. Alencar, characterizing a national literature, says: "What can it be other than the soul of the fatherland, which migrated to this virgin soil with an illustrious race, was impreg- nated with the American sap of the land that sheltered it, and becomes richer by the day as it makes contact with other peoples and suffers the influx of civilization?" ("BenSao Paterna" 697). Silvio Romero expresses the idea when, in the

section on romanticism in his Historia da Litera- tura Brasileira, he says that the purely white Brazilian, an ever rarer phenomenon, would be hard to tell from his or her European ancestor and that to preserve the distinction between the two peoples, "it is indispensable to agree that the type, the perfect incarnation of the genuinely Brazilian person, as produced by biological and historical selection is, for the time being, in the vast class of mestizos of all kinds, in the im- mense variety of their colors" (214; Romero's emphasis). The notion underlies the work of Gilberto Freyre, whose success at home and abroad signifies the acceptability, if not the truth, of his formulation: "There arose in tropi- cal America a society whose structure was agrarian, whose economic development was based on slavery, and whose population was a hybrid of white and Indian at first, with the sub- sequent adjuncture of negroes." He traces this

particularity back to the Portuguese, who, he

says, were "an undefined people, between Eu- rope and Africa" (1:5, 6). Thus he establishes a difference between Brazilian and European based on a similarity between Brazilians and one kind of European, finding in the discontinuity of American history a continuity with European history, as if differences, like color, exist only as a gradation. In a vein similar to Romero's, he concludes, much later, "every Brazilian, even the whitest, blondest, has in his soul and in his body . . . the shadow, or at least the hint of Indian or negro."4

These remarks by Freyre and Romero and similar ones by scores of others are not deroga- tory. But having a national ideology that makes every Brazilian embody the harmonious con- junction of all human races does not guarantee social, political, or economic harmony.5 The dicta of Romero and Freyre, statements of both essence and value, say what Brazilians like to think about themselves and what they see as being good about themselves. The belief in the positive value of hybridism, implying a distaste for definite distinctions and a search for the harmonious combination of heterogeneous ele- ments, constitutes one of the great arguments in the literature of and about Brazil. The vicis- situdes of the belief help create the tensions in the literature and thought, and its setbacks are viewed with sadness, as evidence of the difficulty

816

Renata R. Mautner Wasserman

of achieving ideals in an imperfect world, or with indignation, as the betrayal of an ideal, but not as a reason to abandon the ideal. Similarly, in North American literature, liberty and in-

dividuality remain ideals that determine action and ground judgment no matter how often they are defeated. The great images of Ahab tied to the whale or of Jim tied up at the Phelpses warn

against oversimplification or self-satisfaction but do not convey despair.

As Alencar went about his task of translating into literature the gamut of Brazilian life-earn-

ing the epithet "our little Balzac" from Antonio Candido (Forma!ao 2:229; see also Montello) -he incorporated into his novels not only how his

country explained itself to itself but also how it contradicted this self-view either in simply enun-

ciating it or in practicing it. In discussing Alen- car's urban novels, Roberto Schwarz observes that Brazilian literature displays a certain char- acteristic incoherence, a discontinuity between

thought and plot. According to Schwarz, this lack of cohesion comes about because writers tend to accept the latest ideologies of the more

powerful and more developed nations and, in

trying to incorporate the imported ideas into lit-

erary works and into social and political analy- ses, twist and bend national reality. As a result, writers often radically misread the national situ- ation or, as Schwarz sees it, develop an almost inherent and necessary critique of these ideas. Thus, for instance, Brazilian literature came to

present European liberalism as one among sev- eral possible stances toward reality rather than, following the European view, as the most cor- rect way of interpreting the world and organizing empirical data. In Europe liberalism covered and disguised the conditions of burgeoning capi- talism, but in Brazil, where the economy de-

pended on slavery and work could not therefore

represent an ethic, liberalism did not conceal a

thing; it did not contradict an existing situation but simply became an idea among many to be worn by the fashionable.6 Schwarz's account turns an incongruity into an advantage, like a blind man's acuity of hearing or an outsider's

clarity of vision; the inescapable, radical criti- cism of Western ideologies entailed by their mis-

application turns into a subject of farce the tenets that gave European romanticism and re- alism their high seriousness. Similarly, Augusto

Meyer speaks of another discontinuity, of the inevitable "existential" stance of Brazilian litera- ture in general, Alencar's in particular, that arises from the realization of the tenuousness of all efforts, including the literary, to recover the vast emptiness of the nation with words and fic- tions (145-58). In Meyer something like Schwarz's necessary incoherence is a neces-

sary estrangement: like Iracema, all Brazilians are strangers in their own country, the Indians made so by contact with the Europeans, the

Europeans and Africans made so by contact with the land. And Antonio Candido, dealing with the same phenomenon, observes the devel-

opment of a "literature of roguery" ("Dialetica da Malandragem"). In this literature, defined by a discontinuity in characterization, a "realistic" set of familiar secondary characters is peculiarly at odds with the more modern, "Realistic" pro- tagonists of nineteenth-century novels, who ap- pear somewhat ridiculous and out of place as

they wrestle with the problems that give their

European counterparts the look and feel of real life (Schwarz, ch. 2, builds on Antonio Can- dido's analysis, Formaaio 2.218-32). Thus the newer Alencar criticism aligns itself with the ear- lier one in considering his works an accurate

expression of Brazilian reality, if only because their incongruities appear in such close cor-

respondence. In his Indian novels, however, Alencar deals

not with the contemporary urban scene, on which Schwarz centers his analysis, but with the

past; the novelist is toiling not in Balzac's but in Chateaubriand's vineyards, telling of the early relations between the European conquerors of the new land and its original inhabitants. He is

creating myths of origin for his nation, and by affirming the value of hybridism, he will forge a link between the first phase of colonization- when the Portuguese took Indian women and started peopling the land, inviting whole Indian tribes to settle around the new forts and trading posts to help defend the land against French and Dutch incursions7-and the European view of the unspoiled inhabitant of the New World as an

example and a hope for redemption for a cruel and decadent civilization. Alencar's novels do not present great literary or philosophical prob- lems: they are an American offspring of the works of Montaigne and Rousseau, Chateau-

817

The "Indian" Novels of Jose de Alencar

briand and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. They gain support from the work of Ferdinand de Denis and continue a national literary tradition of "in- dianists," like Goncalves de Magalhaes and Gongalves Dias, despite Alencar's harsh criti- cism of Magalhaes (see Alencar, Cartas s6bre A Confederacao dos Tamoios). The compli- cation arises when Alencar presents the second

phase of the history of white-Indian contact. In that period, the Portuguese began to settle into

farming communities, enslaving the Indians and

killing them when they resisted. Because the In- dians preferred death or displacement to en- slavement, the newly independent nation was

spared, at least in the more densely settled parts, the stresses of acculturation. At the same time, the new nation took the Indians for its heroes: their refusal of slavery became a prefiguration of

independence. It was as if they too had signed with their blood and sealed with countless bod- ies the "Independence or Death!" D. Pedro I is

supposed to have shouted as he declared an end to the ties linking Brazil and the colonial

power.8 Historical events thus reinforce the lit-

erary tradition but also trouble it, for they cou-

ple with death the heroism that should bring the new nation and its people to life, and they make

responsible for that death those who should have been redeemed in the new nation.

With recourse to European ideas and facts from Brazilian history, Alencar's Indian novels

help define and strengthen a national ideology of

identity and value. He gives voice to the idea that what is distinctive and good about the na- tion is its ability, which becomes a kind of defi- nition, to make heterogeneous elements join in

harmony and to the idea that to be fully and

proudly Brazilian one has to be a little, and

proudly, Indian.9 His voice rings true: the names he invented for his Indians still flood the

country's birth registries, and Iracema went

through more than one hundred editions in the first hundred years after its publication (see Plinio Doyle). In the course of development, however, the clear and simple idea of a heroic nation, formed by a great but decadent Euro-

pean people revitalized by American purity, loses simplicity and clarity.10 It has to incor-

porate the violence of that genesis and the rejec- tion of the real Indian, and it has to make itself readable in a world that does not automatically

see as good the harmonious blending of hetero-

geneous elements. Thus each of the three novels under discussion centers on the beneficial mar-

riage of different nations, but the conditions pre- sented as necessary for this union to take place and its unhappy consequences deny the overt

message: that the merging is both possible and desirable. The dream of virtue and of differentia- tion from Europe that Alencar's novels present and according to most interpretations defend be- comes fuzzy under scrutiny. This fuzziness gives even his Indian novels some of the incongruity that Schwarz had noticed in the urban novels, while the use of historical and social data makes the Indian novels less a veil over nothing than a

complex record of the interaction between dream and reality, between a mythical and a real definition of a nation."1

If one stretches the definition far enough, one can classify Alencar's Indian novels as histories: in various forms they tell myths of origin. Oddly, their order of composition reverses their chrono-

logical order-a progression that Santiago men- tions but links only to Alencar's increasing knowledge about Indian life, language, and cus- toms ("Roteiro" 5). O Guarani, first published as a serial in 1857, is set at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the settlers had built towns and whole families had established resi- dence in the new colony; it is an action-packed, fairly traditional romantic novel, in the historical vein of Scott, some of whose characters are his- torical figures, some fictional (for a comparison of Alencar and Scott, see Araripe, Jr. 46-47). Ubirajara, published in 1874, is set in the time before the arrival of the Portuguese, and though it aims at factual accuracy, contains elaborate footnotes reflecting Alencar's extensive reading about Indian customs and language, and con- ducts a running polemic with old travelers and chroniclers who misunderstood and misrepre- sented what they had seen, both its action and its characters are fictitious. Iracema, published in 1865, is set around 1603, when the Portu-

guese were founding the first forts and villages in what is now the state of Ceara. Subtitled a

"legend," the book could also be called a myth of place, since it tells how certain topographical accidents received their names-what stories

give them meaning-and since it expresses a cer-

818

Renata R. Mautner Wasserman

tain "Brazilianness" rooted in the land, its beasts, flowers, and voluptuous fruits, its seduc- tive force and its frailty. As in O Guarani, some of the characters of Iracema are historical, but

they are better known than those of the first novel, and one of them, the Indian hero of the war against the Dutch, is familiar to every schoolchild. These permutations between the historical and the fictional, the variations on known literary formulas and the invention of new ones, and the backward movement in time are some of the more explicit ways Alencar deals with the disjunction between ideology and historical or social fact-an incongruity that

provides the tension and helps guarantee the ap- propriateness of the three novels.

In O Guarani the noble D. Antonio de Mariz has established himself, with all his lares and

penates, on lands granted him for faithful service

by the king of Portugal and situated a couple of

days' distance from Rio de Janeiro. In the wil- derness, on the natural ramparts of a rock beside a river, he has built a house for his family and retainers and lives like a feudal lord. He had moved from Portugal so he could be politically, if not economically, independent of the colonial

power, which he considers of doubtful legit- imacy, the crown then being, for dynastic rea- sons, in the hands of the Spanish king. D. An- tonio has a stiff wife, a noble son, a beautiful, blond, blue-eyed daughter, and an illegitimate daughter by an Indian woman. As the story be-

gins, he receives in the house a noble young man, Alvaro, an appropriate suitor for his legit- imate daughter Ceci. Attached to the household is the Indian Peri, who once saved Ceci's life and has since abandoned his tribe and his fam-

ily. Peri is treated as a friend by D. Ant6nio and Ceci, as an imposition by Mrs. de Mariz and the half-Indian Isabel. With Alvaro there appears a classical Italian villain, the former monk Lore- dano, who, having shed his cassock and got hold of the map to a silver mine around the Mariz

property, insinuates himself into the household and immediately starts subverting D. Antonio's vassals, plotting his destruction, and lusting after the gentle Ceci.

The situation is eminently recognizable. Noble lords, heroic youths, helpless sweet maid- ens, and defrocked Italian villains are common-

places of the European imagination, and novels

featuring them enjoy the artistic status of, say, paint-by-numbers canvases. But a good part of Alencar's achievement lies in the oddities he in- troduces into the commonplace, which suddenly acquires a double reference as it is used to make the new intelligible and take away its strangeness by clothing it in the old language and concepts. D. Antonio is not just a noble lord: he is also both a loyal Portuguese subject and a rebel, for he has crossed the ocean to avoid paying al-

legiance to the Spaniard then occupying the Por-

tuguese throne. His independence depends on, and is protected by, the new land, since he could not claim such freedom anywhere else. In this mixture of loyalty and autonomy one can read, with the hindsight of the novel's first public, a

prefiguration of the great Independence com-

promise, when the legitimacy of blood ties off- sets the illegitimacy of severing political links with the metropolis, since it was the son of the

king of Portugal who became the first ruler of the newly independent country.

Alvaro, the heroic youth, is just the sort James Fenimore Cooper likes to marry to his heroines. In Alencar's novel, however, Alvaro and the half-Indian Isabel fall madly in love.

They are doomed to die their separate lovers' deaths, but their passion does not meet with dis-

approval from the other characters or from the narrative voice: Ceci, for instance, who should be the injured party, is all blushing smiles and serious concern for their happiness when she learns about their love for each other. The ac-

ceptance of the relation prefigures the end of the novel, when Ceci and Peri go off, presumably to

repeople the land. Isabel's bitterness, born of her

ambiguous position in the household, and the death of the lovers are part of the pessimistic countercurrent to Alencar's racial optimism. Is- abel would have died in any conventional nine-

teenth-century novel, but only in Alencar's could she have died happy in reciprocated and finally guiltless love.

The maiden, Cecilia (called Ceci by Peri be- cause in his language "ceci" means "to hurt" and by Alencar because he can then join in one name Christian saint and Indian sensibility), also seems a stock figure of sentimental fiction. She "was the goddess of this little world, which she lit up with her smiles, and cheered with her

819

820 The "Indian" Novw

playfulness and her charming fancies" (2:39; all

quotations from Alencar's three Indian novels are taken from Obra Completa). But Alencar modifies the conventional purity of the stereotype by surrounding her with signs of voluptuousness and sensuality that hint at the link established in the end between her and the fruitful land and at the function she will ultimately fulfill. Here is how the villain of the story finds her:

Cecilia slept wrapped in pure white sheets; her little blond head lay on the finest lace, over which were spread her lovely golden ringlets .... Her shift had fallen open, half-showing a neck of the purest lines, whiter than the cambric around it, and the slight movement of her breath revealed, under their dia- phanous veils, her delicate breasts. (2:243)

Her innocence, underscored by the Virgin's colors of the blue coverlet and white sheets, is

strong enough to stay the villain's hand for a crucial moment, but at the same time the overt

sensuality of the tableau prepares the later scene in which she accepts and desires Peri as a man, thus making it plausible that she should, with him, repopulate the land. The sensuousness is, however, but a small oddity in the characteriza- tion-it has precedents-the great one is the

development of her relation with Peri, which constitutes Alencar's first and most optimistic statement on the theme of hybridism as the de-

fining trait of the new men and women in the new land.

Only the hero and the villain, Peri and Lore- dano, are of a piece, unmitigated and relentless in their heroism and villainy. Their oddity lies not in their characterizations but in the contexts

they establish and in the oppositions they help construct. Loredano's evil and D. Antonio's or Alvaro's nobility are defined within an Old World context, according to the criteria of an old culture; their models are the Christian knight and the renegade monk of romantic fiction if not of medieval reality. Peri, who is as intensely good as Loredano is intensely evil, functions in the context of the wilderness, where he is king. Appearing "like the beneficent genius of the Bra- zilian forests" (2:136), he is the unspoiled natural man, and his opposites in this context are the aimores: the depraved, barbaric, savage Indians (2:269, 291) that besiege D. Antonio's

els of Jose de Alencar

house and represent the other, menacing face of nature. It is true that in each culture, the defini- tion of otherness complements that of self and the definition of evil complements that of good: Alencar's good and bad Indians are products of Western imagination just as his heroes and vil- lains have their counterparts in all the most ac- cessible works of European imagination. But in his manipulation of their relations with one an- other, Alencar is attempting to broaden or in any case to modify these definitions and to create an as yet unexplored combination of elements, claiming it as characteristic of a nation that would and would not be part of the Western world. (For a detailed structural analysis of O Guarani, see Affonso Romano de Sant' Anna, ch. 3.)

After a suspenseful sequence of events (Alen- car knows how to end chapters just as the villain raises his hand to touch the sleeping virgin) in which Peri and the noble whites save each oth- er's lives several times, the novel arrives at the grand crisis: the aimores can no longer be turned back; Alvaro dies in Isabel's arms after being wounded in a sortie against the besiegers; Isabel poisons herself with curare inherited from her mother; and Peri is at his wit's end because his scheme to defeat the aimores by poisoning himself, letting himself be captured and eaten, and thereby poisoning them has been thwarted. Peri finally decides to get baptized so that at least he will be able to carry Cecilia away and save her. D. Ant6nio performs the sacrament by touching him on the shoulder: Peri is now Chris- tian and knight not only in substance but in form.12 As he leaves with Ceci, the aimores scale the defenses of D. Antonio's stronghold, and as Peri and the sleeping Ceci float down the river in their escape boat, her father shoots his

gun into a powder keg and blows up the house and everyone in and around it.

In the forest Ceci sees her friend with new

eyes, "the eyes of the soul." In her father's house he had been "an ignorant Indian, born of a barbarous race . . . a friend, but a slave friend." But as he regains his freedom, he is "the

king of the desert," and nature bestows on him the insignia of power: "The tall mountains, the clouds, the waterfalls, the great rivers, the

century-old trees were his throne, his canopy, his cloak and his scepter" (2:378). She also sees

Renata R. Mautner Wasserman

him as a real male; her unconscious attraction to him, which had dampened her enthusiasm for Al- varo, begins to show itself; she blushes and flut- ters and finally, in a displacement of meaning, calls herself his "sister." Back in the forest, Peri recovers all his former power, but he has also made an exchange: he has won the white woman and will become the founder of a people, but his conversion to Christianity definitively separates him from the tribe he used to lead.

On their second day away from the destroyed house, a great flood comes rolling down the river that, according to the original plan, would have carried them to civilization. But Ceci unties their boat and sets it adrift, out of reach, because, she

explains, "she had been raised in the desert" and "was a Brazilian virgin, not a girl of the court" (2:389). As the waters rise, the girl and the Indian climb a palm tree; in its crown he lets his breath touch her face and she swoons, in one of those pretty scenes that suggest sexuality without

shocking gentle female readers. He also tells her the story of Tamandare, an Indian Noah, who survived a flood by climbing into the crown of a palm tree and who, once back on dry land, repopulated the earth. She says they will die and meet in heaven with the little angels. As the book ends, he has uprooted the tree in a super- human effort to keep it from being covered by the rising waters, and they float toward the horizon.

Most critics believe the ending indicates that Peri will be the second Tamandare, that the issue of his union with Ceci will populate the land, and that this union removes the flaws of forest and civilization, since its precondition is the death of Loredano and the aimores, as well as Ceci's affirmation of her Brazilianness and Peri's Christianization.13 The issue of their union promises improvement by differentiation and makes the New World, specifically Brazil, into the ideal place for achieving a harmony that had always eluded other nations. But even leav-

ing aside the ambiguity of the ending and the

dependence of this univocal interpretation on the same national ideology that the ending rein- forces, it should be noted that the promised re-

generation by combination of races takes place not in house, city, tribe, or any other European or Indian social organization but in the forest and in Christianity-the two forces that underlie

(or transcend) social organization-and at the

price of a catastrophe that eliminates barbarism

together with civilization (see Wasserman). Alencar uses the forms of romantic fiction,

the stereotypes of plot and characterization, to set up and then tame a radical, utopian scenario in which desired harmony is predicated on de- struction. He uses historical figures, like D. Ant6nio de Mariz, and the techniques of histori- cal fiction to replace the narrative of history with that of desire: the only dead Indians are the bad Indians; the forest wins because even D. An- t6nio, who is good but Portuguese, dies; but the

good D. Ant6nio wins too because his heroic death eliminates all the villains and because his child and his religion live on and form an alli- ance with the land where his independence led to his death. In searching for the proper expression of the originality and value of the new nation for whom he writes, Alencar uses and transforms

history and literature, creating a myth of things as they must have been to become what they are not in his day, finding a language for the real dreams of his readers.

Iracema, subtitled A Legend, takes up once

again the theme of the formation of the new

people and the new nationality. The title gives away the intention: Iracema, the name of the heroine, is a word Alencar invented following rules of word formation in Guarani, the pre- dominant Indian language along the Brazilian coast (see 3:237, n. 2), and it is also an ana-

gram of America.l4 The work uses highly figura- tive and stylized language (in fact, the opening line, "Verdes mares bravios da minha terra natal, onde canta a jandaia nas frondes da carnauba" 'Wild green seas of my native land, where the jandaia sings in the fronds of the carnauba,' is the language not of literature but of common speech aspiring to be literature) and strives for the poetry of the primitive, for the mode of the great romantic epics, genuine and fake. Thus the novel inscribes itself into the curious tradition marking the point in European literary history when civilization gave form to its civilized desire to be primitive. At the same time it tries to come to terms with the new problem of what to do with civilization in a primitive con- text-in this case, with Europe thrown into con- tact with what is truly non-European.

821

The "Indian" Novels of Jose de Alencar

The hero of the tale, Martim, is a historical

figure, a founder of the first effective Portuguese settlement in what is now the state of Ceara, where Alencar was born. The tale itself is

loosely based on historical events. A series of footnotes that anchor the poetic text to a reality of archives, annals, chronicles, and anthropolog- ical observations recount and document events, figures, and information about the Indian popu- lation of the region. But with the same move- ment that ties fiction to truth, Alencar chooses the part of the truth he will use to buttress im-

portant points of his story. For instance, the his- torical model of Martim disappeared for a few

years into an Indian tribe; he was next seen naked and painted, when he was captured with his companions by a Portuguese expedition (see ref. to Pedro Calmon, n. 7). Only after that did he go back into the service of the king and take

part in the process of settlement. But Alencar

preserves the difference between Indian and

European by not inserting the incident into his tale, even though the meeting with Iracema must have taken place during that period of contact with the Indians (Alencar does refer to the inci- dent in Ubirajara 3:240, n. 16). It is as if Alen- car did not want to speak of the loss of cultural

identity by his protagonists. Instead, he wanted to create a cultural identity for those whose ex- istence is not fictional: his readers.

Martim's character and adventures are only the frame of the tale; the focus is Iracema, and the argument her encounter with him. He sur-

prises her asleep in the forest; startled, she shoots an arrow at him, which grazes his cheek; they are attracted to each other. She is described

entirely in terms of native plants, birds, and animals: she is slender and pliant like the palm tree; her voice is like the murmur of the hum-

mingbird; the touch of her body is sweet like the wild amaryllis and soft like the hummingbird's nest (3:44); she obeys her man's summons like the native doe and suffers like a whole series of

tropical plants pierced for their sap or torn from their bulbs. She is also the daughter of the tribe's medicine man and the virgin who guards the sacred wood and knows the secret of ritual nar- cotic and hallucinogenic plants. In her self, her

knowledge, and her ritual function, in her de- mand for a pledge of blood before she can be known, she represents the land and signifies the

harmony between her people and the land and also the toll the land takes; the pull she exerts over Martim is the pull of the new land, and his

disruption of that harmony the disruption the settlement brings.

Iracema is pure (and hence a more acceptable nineteenth-century romantic heroine), but her

purity does not come from the suppression or the absence of passion. She is the "brown virgin of ardent love," in opposition to the "blond vir-

gin of chaste affections," Martim's childhood sweetheart (3:266), and, having seen and loved him, Iracema sets about, with characteristic

generosity, to seduce him. She gives him a green potion to make him dream, intending it as a gift that should take him home to his beloved. At first it has the predicted effect, but then, working according to his desire, it brings him back to the forest and to Iracema. Later, on the last night he

spends as a guest under her father's roof, he demands another potion, hoping it will again bring him Iracema, whose chastity he respects as much as he does her father's hospitality: he is a

gentleman. She gives him the draught; he sleeps; he calls her name; she goes to him. She rises, as Alencar puts it, his spouse: there is a natural

marriage, the consequence of desire, the effect of the powerful attractions and secret substances of the land. Neither of the spouses' social groups sanctions the marriage; Iracema's father had said that if she made love to the foreigner she would die, and Martim has to be unconscious when they make love, because otherwise he would be violating the code of conduct that makes him a worthy representative of his peo- ple. The wording of the passage, however, does not even hint at any authorial disapproval of either Iracema's or Martim's action. This may be in part because of the implied homage to the

Portuguese conquerors, which relieves Martim of the guilt of possession, and in part because the sequence of events speaks to some male dream of perfect feminine compliance; within the overt context, however, the "marriage" of Martim and Iracema defines and sanctions the

genesis of the new man and woman of the

tropics, born of nature and civilization, freed of constraints.

In fact, Alencar's way of setting up these mar-

riages between white and Indian seems to imply not only a relaxation of social constraints but

822

Renata R. Mautner Wasserman

also a weakening of all boundaries of being. The integration of D. Antonio's house into the rock where it stands fits into this pattern, as does Ceci's decoration of her room with Peri's gifts of feathers, straws, flowers, and whole stuffed birds, which turn it into a tropical nest; so, too, do the substitution, at the end of the novel, of the palm tree for the canoe and the constantly threatened

absorption of Iracema into the natural world. In the same process, the lines between masculine and feminine become blurred: specifically, the men become feminized. Strangers in the realms where they are led by their women-Peri in the house, Martim in the forest-the men go through a period of disorientation and lose some of the qualities that defined them in their worlds. Both recover, so to speak, with different results, since Peri's reassumption of the title of king of the forest allows him to win and protect Ceci, whereas Martim abandons Iracema for the "mas- culine" pursuits of warfare and colonization; the loss does not determine the destiny of the characters who suffer it. It is as if, with this blurring of differences, Alencar were toying with the creation of a true alternative to European culture, one that would fulfill the promise of re- newal but that demanded a restatement of estab- lished distinctions between nature and culture, male and female. But as is probably inevitable, he keeps coming up against those definitions, which permeate the language he tries to recreate and which limit his imagination. He also comes

up against the purpose of writing history, of cre- ating a usable past, which lies at the point of

inception of many of his novels. In O Guarani Alencar tries to assign victory

to the ideal of renewal, but the preconditions for the marriage that should achieve that outcome are catastrophic. In Iracema the marriage does not destroy two peoples, but Martim and Ira- cema can live with each other only for as long as

they live apart from their cultures, and the world

they build together cannot replace what they have left.15 The marriage works for a while: they live idyllically in a cabin by the sea, and when she tells him she is carrying his child, he kneels at her feet and otherwise shows his de-

light. But she knows and Alencar knows that their sacrifices are not symmetrical-only the

explosion of D. Antonio's powder keg could

produce such symmetry-that she has become a

stranger in her own land, whereas he can always go back to his job. She senses his restlessness and at one point counts the ways in which he no

longer loves her:

When you walk in the high fields, your eyes avoid the fruit of the jenipapo and search for the cactus flower; the fruit is sweet but it has the color of the tabajaras; the flower is white like the face of the white virgin. When the birds sing, your ears refuse to listen to the melodious notes of the grauina, but your soul opens to the call of the japim, because it has golden feathers like the hair of the one you love! (3:294)16

She knows too that she will die like the abati, a plant that withers as soon as it has given fruit. Her first surmise is wrong, since Martim longs for work, not for woman. But by the time her son is born, she is completely alone, and she calls him Moacir, "son of my sorrow."17 Soon after his birth she dies of loneliness and of a broken heart in the arms of Martim, who has turned up to see how she is doing and who takes the son to be raised abroad. But if Iracema has lost, that does not mean Europe will keep the spoils forever. In an epilogue set four years later, we learn that Martim returns to Ceara, filled with bitterness at his loss and longing for the beaches and breezes of the land where he had been happy (3:303). He touches the earth where his wife lies buried, his sorrow melts into abundant tears, and his soul is made whole. He has come with an expedition, and they build a village, erecting a church near Iracema's grave. The coastal Indians transfer their huts to the new settlement, and Martim's friend Poti is bap- tized and given the name under which he be- comes the hero of all history books, the defender of the Portuguese colony against foreign in- vaders, operating the passage from Indian

legend to white history-something Iracema could not do and Peri did not need to do.

0 Guarani and Iracema both uphold the value of hybridism and both, in the end, draw up an account of its cost. In O Guarani the cost is buried in a whirlwind of action: Ceci requires only a few minutes of prayer beside the river to reconcile herself to the loss of her entire family and to get ready to go off with Peri into the forest. In Iracema the cost is wrapped in lan-

823

824 The "Indian" Nov4

guage, in a highly stylized poetic idiom Alencar invented for the purpose: short sentences, short

paragraphs, great density of imagery, and in-

cantatory rhythms and repetitions of Indian names that, within an almost classical syntax, allow the language to carry out the combination of American and European elements, accom-

plishing what the plot shows to be only imper- fectly possible. In the process, Martim's loss of Iracema is translated into the acquisition of an

important distinction between the colonial

power and the new nation: the characteristic ex-

pression of the new land's history in its own

language. The feelings of nostalgia and melan-

choly aroused by the language keep one from

thinking about the conditions of its creation, even though Alencar does not exclude these conditions from his tale: the reality of domina- tion, conquest, and death remains hidden mainly because of the ideology of harmony that the text

conveys, in an elaborate game of hide-and-seek set up with all apparent good faith.

Though the founding of the Portuguese- Indian village at the end of the novel seems to bode well for the formation of the hybrid society that Freyre, for instance, discusses as characteris-

tically Brazilian, the love stories in both novels

suggest that for the happy mixing to occur it is

necessary to separate the lovers from their social matrices. In effect, only the essential man or woman can freely choose to marry someone who has skin of a different color, worships different

gods, obeys different laws. Iracema and Martim are happy only when they are alone together and when no duties to king or medicine man occupy them; on such a vacation from society their child is conceived. But Moacir is "the first cearense" (3:303), and with him Alencar shows the har- monization of heterogeneous elements to be both possible and impossible on either the social or the personal level and reinforces the only level where it is unequivocally possible: the

ideological one. Freyre's hybrid society appears, in O Guarani, in a world of the imagination, swept clean of the civilizations that mark the difference between the heterogeneous elements to be conjoined; it appears in Iracema after the heroine, representing the natural world, becomes a memory, her son goes to Europe to be edu- cated, and the Indians, now baptized, merge into the official history of the country founded by the

els of Jose de Alencar

Portuguese. Finally the hybrid society becomes a sign, among others, of the reality and the dif- ference of the Brazilian enterprise, with the sign's peculiar independence from the thing signified.

In Ubirajara Alencar goes back to the Indians for the third and last time. The novel is set at the earliest time, before the Portuguese arrived on Brazilian soil. It tells the story of Ubirajara, a

young warrior of the araguaia tribe who goes out into the world to make a name for himself-

literally, since in the course of the story he

changes names in accordance with his feats and

purposes. In fair combat he vanquishes the most renowned warrior of the tocantins, an enemy tribe, then goes to live among that tribe as a

stranger, wins the hand and heart of its most desirable virgin, and finally, by marrying both her and the young girl whom he had loved in the

village of his birth, effects the union of the tribes, peace between them, and prosperity for all.

There is a hybrid marriage in this novel too, but the terms have changed; the tocantin woman

Ubirajara marries is alien not because of her color but because of the long-standing enmity between her tribe and his-a hatred symbolized by their differences in dress. When the young virgin of the tocantins first sees Ubirajara, she

recognizes him as an araguaia by the red feather in his headdress: her tribe's color is blue. At the end of the novel, when he signifies the union of the two tribes, Ubirajara puts on both colors. The joining of the feathers allows combination

by juxtaposition and does not demand the in- termixture of different substances. The alliance benefits both sides and, far from demanding the destruction of either the partners or their soci- eties, ensures the tribes' survival in a kind of

golden age up to the time, known but not men- tioned in the story, when the conquerors arrive.

But Alencar does not entirely eliminate the

European element. It exists, of course, in the

language, brought by the settlers and charged with European meanings even as the language strives to adapt to what it conceives as Indian

thought. Most clearly, however, the European element appears in a veritable cotext of foot- notes, where Alencar more or less gives direc- tions on how his story is to be read and conducts a running argument against earlier historians

Renata R. Mautner Wasserman

and chroniclers of Indian customs, specifically against their notion that the Indians were a tabula rasa, ignorant of any culture, so that Eu-

ropeans had to fill a void. He also argues against the notion that the Indians were savages and, worse, anticivilized, so that Europeans had to

fight them. Alencar presents Indians as proto- civilized, similar in some ways to Europeans in the Middle Ages and in other ways to Greeks, Romans, and Jews of classical and biblical times. The idea of Hercules, Jacob, Cato, and Lancelot clad in feathers seems odd, but then

any confrontation with otherness dislocates

meanings and shifts contexts. Alencar tries to translate the otherness into European terms and to forestall its outright rejection by making it valuable in those terms. Like other nations in the Americas, Brazil must define itself, in part, according to how it conducted the confrontation between European and American. Alencar's translation of the American components has the double advantage of rescuing Indians from con-

tempt and providing Brazil with an au- tochthonous past as respectable as that of the former colonial power.18 Both the text and the footnotes of Ubirajara argue the value of the Indian component of the new, tropical nation: the story does it for the individual Indian by creating a hero; the footnotes do it for the Indi- ans as a whole by drawing parallels between their culture and Western civilization. But the division of the text keeps in abeyance the vio- lence attending the historical contact between the two. The European element is close at hand but harmless, radiating its transforming strength from outside the story, where it cannot tilt the

plot toward death. In Ubirajara Alencar can

present the ideology of mingling untainted, its

utopian consequences unclouded by memories of destruction and guilt. The violence that occurs in the novel is always ritual-even cannibalism is

presented and justified as a ritual, structurally akin to the Christian Eucharist (Ubirajara 3:356, n. 37), that is, motivated, predictable, and controlled. But because of the way the novel relates history and myth, Ubirajara, like its

companion volumes, underscores both the

strength and the impossibility of the dream that animated its creation.

Alencar's Indian novels both state and criti- cize the ways his readers see themselves. His

voyages backward in time represent successive

stages in his dramatization of this tropical civili- zation for which he had set out to construct a

language and to formulate an ideology. This civ- ilization defined itself as European and as set in the New World, heir to European dreams of

starting afresh and unencumbered by old guilts and failures; it saw itself as capable of respecting the population it had found in the new land, absorbing the Indians' regenerative innocence and in turn rescuing them from paganism with the gift of Christianity; and it prided itself on

actually arising from this process of mutual re-

generation and salvation and on having mixed

ancestry, original in its double source, distinct from its European past, and projected into a model future. But the first novel concludes that the achievement of newness on those terms en- tails the destruction of whatever had existed be- fore, except for the minimum number of indi- viduals needed to create a new people. The second novel envisages a compromise: only the Indian part is sacrificed, its continuing regenera- tive influence ensured by its absorption into the blood or into the history of the settlers in the new land. In the third novel the primitive survives on its own and even prospers, but the other element that should have taken part in the hybridizing process moves to a different level of discourse, from plot to commentary. Together, the novels stand as an apt monument to the dream that founded them. Valued, as the dream is, for cre-

ating an and-and in a world that finds it difficult to think in any terms but either-or, the works allow the imagination to extend the limits of ac-

ceptable reality and to chip away at them in the name of an idea of a different good.19

Wayne State University Detroit, Michigan

825

The "Indian" Novels of Jose de Alencar

1 See, among others, Afranio Coutinho, "Alencar created Brazilian fiction, propelling it in the right direc- tion, that of a search for the expression of the nation- ality" (99); T. A. Araripe, Jr., "the undecided novelist determined then to be Brazilian" (18) or "Iracema is the most Brazilian of our books" (194); Machado de Assis, "It [Iracema] is also a model for the cultivation of an American poetry which, please God, will be reinvigorated by works of such superior quality" (li); Fabio Freixeiro, who quotes the obituary for Alencar in the Didrio Oficial, a publication whose main function is to record government business and activities, to the effect that deceased was "the first Brazilian man of letters" (36); Nelson Werneck Sodre, who links Alen- car's success in his enterprise and his continuous popu- larity (43-59) and says, "Alencar always intended to create a Brazilian literature, and to that end he wanted to change the process of literary composition in form and content, by choosing Brazilian motifs" (53).

2 In Como e Porque sou Romancista Alencar tells of

learning how to read French just to be able to read Balzac, whom he read before he did Chateaubriand (30).

3 Critics have argued over the classification of Alen- car's novels. Wilson Martins prefers to see O Guarani classed with the historical works rather than with Iracema and Ubirajara, the "indianist" ones (3:65). I agree with Martins that O Guarani is a "novel of na- tionality" (3:60), but I group it with those novels that have Indian protagonists, calling it "Indian" rather than "indianist."

4 Freyre 2:395. This view of Brazil is current out- side the country. Borges Pereira mentions almost two decades' worth of UNESCO-sponsored studies of "our interethnic experiences" (17).

? Borges Pereira's study, for instance, documents racial discrimination even in one of the most "open" fields of activity, radio broadcasting.

6See Schwarz, esp. ch. 1, "As ideias fora do lugar" 'Ideas out of their places,' 13-28. He mentions specifi- cally the ideas contained in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, transcribed into the 1824 Brazilian Constitution (14).

7 Freyre speaks of Portuguese "use of native popula- tions, especially women, not only for work but also as an element in the constitution of families" (1:23). Con- versely, every schoolchild learns about Joao Ramalho and other pioneers who went to live with Indian tribes, became prominent among them, and facilitated contact between them and later settlers. Pedro Calmon docu- ments the story of Martim Soares Moreno, the histori- cal hero of Alencar's Iracema, who was caught by a Portuguese expedition, together with the Indians Poti and Jacauna, and not immediately recognized as being non-Indian since he was "naked and tattooed like them" (2:36).

8 Cavalcanti Proenca, Jose de Alencar:

There is no point in asking . . . why Indians never became slaves . . . they fled, died, rebelled, or were

incompetent slaves.... The nationalistic spirit only saw in this the love of liberty, and an example which it took to heart, when it severed ties with the metropolis, making it into a lesson and into the heritage of the native land. (50)

9 Freyre reprints a drawing of "A [Mr.] Fonseca Galvao whose father, out of nativism, changed the family name to Carapeba" (1:cxiii). Cavalcanti Pro- enca, illustrating both Alencar's popularity and the common resort to Indian associations to signify identi- fication with the land, mentions a whole list of daugh- ters of immigrants called, for instance, Ingeborg Iracema Rann, Iracema Mueller, Iracema Jaeger, etc.: see "Transforma-se o Amador na Coisa Amada" 238. A well-known Sao Paulo family, of German origin, called itself Muller Carioba, the Indian word Carioba signaling the family's commitment to the land of im- migration and its desire for acceptance.

10 "To regenerate is the destiny of America within the destinies of humanity," Jose de Alencar, quoted by Cavalcanti Proenca in Jose de Alencar (42).

11 Some such evaluation underlies even negative as- sessments of Alencar's achievement: the anonymous author of "Jose de Alencar," Movimento Brasileiro, objects to Alencar's excesses but agrees that "America . . .has to continue on this path of fusion of cultures and infuse the resulting amalgam with its own new spirit" and concedes that Alencar's "falsified Indian be- comes an ideological reality" (5).

12 According to Martins, Peri becomes D. Antonio at this point, "a Portuguese, Christian gentleman, with- out ceasing to be Brazilian and Indian," in his person the perfect cultural hybrid and henceforth worthy of Ceci (3:67). Martins recognizes that the other Indian- white unions in the novels do not work out but does not conjecture about the reasons, saying only that the unions did not take place at the "appropriate historical moment" (3:69).

13 See "Jose de Alencar" 5: "Alencar's inspiration reaches its highest point . . . in Ceci's resolution to be- come Brazilian, a daughter of the desert...."

14 This is pointed out by Silviano Santiago, in "Lider- anga e Hierarquia em Alencar" 8; he refers to Afranio Peixoto, 1931, for the observation but gives no further details. Martins thinks it is ridiculous to attribute mean- ing to the anagram (3:220).

15 Darcy Damasceno points out that all the encoun- ters between Iracema and Martim include a moment of fear or rejection and most take place in a context of danger for the couple, thus qualifying the usual read- ing of the novel as idyllic.

16 The grauina is a black bird. "Hair as black as the wings of the grauna" has become a poetic cliche, a capsule parody of Alencar's style.

826

Notes

Renata R. Mautner Wasserman 17 Cavalcanti Proenca, in Estudos Literarios, points

out that Iracema's words at the birth and naming of her child echo those of Rachel giving birth to Benjamin (53). Alencar often introduces classical and biblical parallels to Indian customs and acts, forcing a revalu- ation of the Indian in relation to the classical and bibli- cal ancestry of European peoples. See also Wasserman.

18 See Antonio Candido: Alencar's heroic Indians "express the Brazilians' deep desire to perpetuate the

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19 Research for this article was funded, in part, by a Wayne State University Summer Research Grant (1980).

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