La voragine – translated by John Charles Chasteen for Duke University Press as The Vortex (2018) – Columbian poet  and diplomat José Eustacio Rivera’s dark and lyrical 1924 masterpiece about a big city poet who ventures into the Amazonian jungle in search of revenge, and instead discovers the horrifying truth about the rubber industry, is a book that operates on multiple levels as a work of art.

Here are two hasty comparisons I felt induced to make while reading this book: Part I sets up a kind of bloody Western-style revenge plot reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, as big city poet-turned-gaucho Arturo Cova gets left for dead and has his women stolen from him by the dandy rubber trader Barrera. (Although I find Cormac McCarthy more confused on the point of whether he is celebrating revenge-fantasy a la Tarantino, or like Rivera is more pointedly setting up his hero for a fall.)

This quest for revenge turns in the novel’s second half into a grim (and dramatically more shocking) exposé of the Amazon rubber trade which devastates both the environment and the lives of all those who get caught in, well, its Vortex; but even though the content of the second half of the book places it in the tradition of muckraking works of social protest like Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle, I find on rereading that La voragine indicts not simply an economic system or a particular industry, but it also—through the arc of its protagonist Arturo—constitutes a savage assault on a Pre-World War I idea of masculinity, which holds men out to be impervious to harm, protected by a tacit sense of bodily integrity and faith in the idea of the Byronic hero, that gritty man who rushes into danger, defeats the villain, rescues the damsel, and then escapes with his posse back to the safety of a normal life; La voragine takes a bloody machete to this myopic vision of manhood, with the novel’s first half constructing Arturo in the mold of a familiar archetype – the poet-gaucho, the romantic hero – partly so the novel’s second half can burn this myth down.

Trouble at the Hato Grande

The novel opens with Arturo fleeing from Bogota and the law with Alicia, a young woman who he has impregnated and abruptly married. At the beginning of the novel, we find Arturo alternately loving and disdaining the woman he has brought with him – a very cowboy attitude – thinking paternalistic thoughts about his responsibility towards Alicia:

She may not love me the way I wanted, but what of it? Wasn’t I the man who had rescued her from inexperience only to leave her in disgrace? How could she learn to forgive me and not fear abandonment? How could I earn her trust?

In a stereotypical Western love story, all of these questions get resolved by the end of the story in favor of the hero and the woman/damsel in distress, who ride into the sunset together in utter contentment; and I point such expected tropes out in order to draw a marker where this story will radically diverge both from our and the protagonist’s expectations; because while Part I of The Vortex sets up Arturo as a kind masculine anti-hero we normally would find sympathetic, despite his flaws, we don’t normally anticipate that the flaws could metastasize into something far more troubling.

Chasteen in his introduction identifies Arturo with a cadre of upper-class Latin American young men – “players,” to use his term – who grow up in the capital, write elementary poetry, and fool around with women; but Rivera also seems to intentionally cast Arturo as a kind of likeable anti-hero, the kind of rough-tough man who disdains to be dragging around the pretty but delicate Alicia, but is also fiercely protective of her – in one flashback, a general comes on to Alicia and Arturo beats him senseless with a shoe. At another point, one of the bad guy Barrera’s men approaches Arturo menacingly, and our hero levels him with a single punch. There is a young Johnny Depp-like quality to Arturo character: now indifferent, now tender, now resigned, now hot-blooded, a poet and a volatile drunkard but always ready for action. Arturo is what countless cowboy dime novels would characterize as an ideal man: he doesn’t stand on ceremony, he’s a city-slicker but not one of the dandified rich—unlike Barrera, who the first half of the novel leads us to believe will be Arturo’s traditional mustache-twirling main antagonist.

(It is notable that translator John Charles Chasteen chooses to use the word cowboy instead of gaucho, for how exactly is a Colombian cattle hand different from one in Texas? They both try to round up the steers with lassoes, they both get involved in bloody showdowns, and they both have encounters with loose women; a gaucho is a cowboy is a gaucho.)

As is the case in Cormac McCarthy’s novels, the elaborately described landscape is very much an active character for Rivera, who has long been lauded by Latin American critics for providing some of the most picturesque descriptions of the llanera and (what he is most known for) the selva, the jungle. The former, the grassy plains region of Colombia and Venezuela that played host to their cattlemen and gauchos, is depicted in beautiful and non-threatening language that John Walker in his full-length study of the novel likens to the nature sonnets Rivera produced before writing La Voragine. Here’s a sample (with Chasteen’s translation):

Y la aurora surgió ante nosotros: sin que advirtiéramos en el momento preciso, empezó a flotar sobre los pajonales un vapor sonrosado que ondulaba en la atmósfera como ligera muselina. Las estrellas se adormecieron, y en la lontananza de ópalo, al nivel de la tierra, apareció un celaje de incendio, una pincelada violenta, un coágulo de rubí. Bajo la gloria del alba hendieron el aire los patos chillones, las garzas morosas como copas flo tantes, los loros esmeraldinos de tembloroso vuelo, las guaca mayas multicolores. Y de todas partes, del pajonal y del espa cio, del estero y de la palmera, nacía un hálito jubiloso que era vida, era acento, claridad y palpitación. Mientras tanto, en el arrebol que abn’a su palio inconmensurable, dardeó el primer destello solar, y lentamente, el astro, inmenso como una cúpu la, ante el asombro del toro y la fiera, rodó por las llanuras enrojeciéndose antes de ascender al azul.

And dawn rose up before our eyes. Without our realizing exactly when, a lightly blushing haze had ascended from the long grass to float above it like an undulating veil. The stars faded away to sleep, and on the opal horizon, the sky caught fire—a brushstroke of violet, then a glowing clot of crimson. Across the glory of the dawning sky shot whiny ducks, followed by darting, emerald-green parrots, egrets floating like snowflakes, and multicolored guacamayas. And from everywhere, from the grassy plains and the diaphanous atmosphere, from the vast wetlands and the clumps of palms, arose a breath of joy, a subtle scent, a kind of clarity and palpitation. Meanwhile, the first ray of the sun streaked across the enormous sky, and slowly, the dome of the sun emerged from the horizon before the amazed eyes of man and beast, to roll there redly before climbing into the blue.

As is the case in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, the male protagonist of La voragine is set on his violent trajectory by a lust for revenge, his desire to strike it rich, and a certain quasi-poetic feeling of rejuvenated manfulness, what the historian of the American West Richard Slotkin famously labeled the late 19^th-early 20^th century ideology of “regeneration through violence”. But he is also set on this course by his hostile attitude toward women like Alicia, who he brings with him even though by his own admission he doesn’t really love her, and Griselda, the exotically beautiful wife of Fidel Franco, an old gaucho who Arturo becomes a compadre with and who like Arturo is also dismissive of his wife’s desire not to be stuck out in the Colombian hinterland. Arturo’s troubles on the llano begin with quarrels with these two women living with him at Franco’s country house of La Maporita. He arrogantly tries to seduce Griselda in order to arouse the jealousy of Alicia, then is surprised when neither woman is drawn towards him [Ed. note the fact that this is surprising demonstrates the Rochester-like hold the Byronic hero has on us as readers] but Alicia and Griselda instead seem to be intrigued by the dandy rubber trader Barrera, who upon first encountering Arturo, presents himself as an admirer of Arturo’s poetry and a refined man of culture. His dialogue is written in a comically flowery prose that the reader is clearly meant to see as insincere. On first meeting Arturo, he says,

“Praise be to the creator of such precious stanzas, a balm to my soul they were, during my stay in Brazil, making me sigh with nostalgia for Colombia. To bind errant sons to their native land, that is the privilege of true poets!”

It should be noted that each time Rivera refers to Bogota or to the country of Colombia, he signals that the conflicts to come are not merely disputes between gauchos out on the plains, but rather power struggles between people of differing social positions in the cosmopolitan context of Bogota. In the vaguely hostile interaction that follows, Barrera subtly tries to recruit Arturo to join him and states that he is “merely an employee who earns two thousand pounds sterling a year, plus expenses.” (Looming in the background is his employer, the immense international rubber cartel known as Casa Arana, evidently meant as a fictional stand-in for the Peruvian Amazon Company of Julio César Arana.) Upon leaving, he gives Alicia a bottle of perfume, which further emphasizes his wealth and cosmopolitanism. Arturo grabs it from Alicia and smashes it on the ground.

As Arturo becomes increasingly abusive and unhinged in his behavior towards both women, he hatches a plan with Don Rafael to strike it rich out on the llano by rounding up and purchasing the scattered steers of Zubieta, the proprietor of the nearby cattle ranch and gambling den Hato Grande; Arturo privately engages in elaborate fantasizing about how easily he will become a wealthy man and return to Bogota, patching up all the nastiness of the past with the glory of his newfound wealth.

I envisioned myself back among my university classmates, telling of my adventures in Casanare, exaggerating my sudden enrichment, seeing them congratulate me with surprise and envy on their faces. […] Alicia would excuse herself frequently to attend to the wails of our little one, named Rafael, in memory of our traveling companion. […] Little by little, my literary success would win [Arturo’s begrudging family] over, eventually resulting in a full pardon.

Arturo and Don Rafael toast “to fortune, and to love!” though Arturo darkly foreshadows, “How deluded. We might as well have toasted to suffering and death.” Although the remainder of Part I contains entertaining action scenes such as one might find in a Western – there is a scene where a boy tames a wild bronco, foul play in provoking a cattle stampede, and a climactic gun fight at the gambling den of old rancher Zubieta at Hato Grande – it is fairly telegraphed in this section of the novel that Arturo is not going to strike it rich, that his encounter with Barrera is not going to end heroically, and that eventually the story is going to drag us into the jungle, where Barrera has been recruiting young men and women to work as rubber tappers with promises of riches well in excess of anything to be achieved by outmoded cattlehands like Zubieta.

John Walker argues that the prettified nature of the novel’s first half contrasts with the terrifying depiction of the jungle in the novel’s second half, and that the change also reflects the change in Arturo’s mental condition. But I think the set-up for this change in mental state is clearly Arturo’s failed gambit to possess both Alicia and Grizelda: it is his perceived betrayal by these women he considers his, and the romantic triumph of the prettified dandy Barrera (who embodies wealth and cosmopolitanism, rather than the traditional, gritty masculinity represented by Arturo) that precipitates his mental turn towards insanity. At the end of Part I, Rivera shows this cause-and-effect clearly:

So blinded was I by fury and jealousy that only after a couple of hours did I realize that I was actually galloping behind Franco. Within minutes we arrived at La Maporita and found it deserted. Alicia was really gone, probably lying in Barrera’s hammock, riddled with concupiscence, at that very moment.

Immediately following this, Arturo and Fidel Franco torch the entire area which constituted the scene of Part I, including “the house where I’d cherished my fond dreams of domestic bliss” where “within the still-standing walls of what had been Alicia’s bedroom, the flames rocked back and forth like a cradle.” He then “proclaimed that we should both hurl ourselves into the conflagration,” before Fidel Franco “reminded me of our duty to pursue the harlots and avenge the incredible offense that they had done us.” As everything burns in a fiery maelstrom, Arturo tells us that this experience of betrayal had essentially obliterated his sense of humanity and turned him insane: “God and love had both abandoned me. Surrounded by flames on all sides, I uttered a satanic laugh.”

So to recap: Arturo goes insane because two women, exercising their own independent preference, chose an unmanly dandy over this hypermasculine, mentally unstable poet-turned-gaucho. This putative betrayal means that all vestiges of civilization – the social forces that push women into the arms of either an Arturo or a Barrera – are a lie that need to be burned to the ground; just as in other works by male authors of the turn of the 20th century like August Strindberg’s The Father and Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, the sexual independence of women is an existential crisis so severe that it destroys men’s faith in God and rules out any possibility of domestic bliss. Got all that?

Another element of Part I that foreshadows what we will see in Part II is what I will call the transgressive violence of the death of Millan, the mean-looking acolyte of Barrera’s who Arturo earlier leveled with a punch at Hato Grande. Both Arturo and Barrera’s men team up towards the end of Part I to recapture the wild steers that had been scattered in the stampede Arturo had provoked with Clarita, a woman who was with Barrera that Arturo was trying to win over. (My goodness; you and these women, Arturo!) During the round-up, Millan gets killed while approaching a particularly large and angry bull. His death is depicted in extremely gruesome terms: the bull impales his head on a horn and rips it apart. Even after they succeed in wrangling the bull, Arturo feels a profound sense of disquiet, not at the death of his enemy, but at the sheer violence of it:

I did not want to look at the corpse. I felt only revulsion at the thought of the livid, broken, incomplete body that had housed an enemy spirit, one that I’d had to discipline with my own hand. I recalled those nasty little bloodshot eyes that had hounded my every move, waiting to catch me without a revolver in my belt.

As long as the adversarial relationship between himself and Millan still existed in the traditional boundaries of the Western – where good guys and bad guys might die of a gunshot wound, or fall off a cliff, thereby placing limits on the graphic quality of their death – Arturo was not disturbed by this framework. What shocks him is this violence which transgresses the former limits: dismemberment, the violation of bodily integrity, the idea of the body as a shell housing either a noble or a wicked spirit. It signals to both the reader and to Arturo that this novel may not follow the traditional rules.

Into the Vortex

We are hurtled into the jungle in Part II, as Rivera has Arturo beautifully apostrophize this threatening physical environment, which of course is a female:

Oh jungle, wedded to silence, mother of solitude and mist! What malignant spirit left me to languish in your emerald prison?

In sharp contrast to the llano, the selva (jungle) is a hostile and forbidding place, and Arturo immediately expresses regret at the hubris which led him into it:

Oh jungle, let me escape your sickly shadows, your living cemetery, your primordial kingdom of agony and resuscitation, where one breathes the miasmas of all your dead and decaying former subjects. Le me go back to my own land. Let me unwalk the path of blood and tears that brought me here. […] How was it that, in pursuit of a woman, I came here seeking Vengeance, the implacable goddess who only smiles over tombs?

He describes feeling “defenseless” as the party abandons their horses. His identity is completely tied up with the llano, making the venture into the selva a kind of mythical overreach:

I always imagine my soul’s final, fluttering ascent toward the supreme constellation amid the pink and opal brushstrokes of a sunset on the llanos.

But as their boat passed down the river into the selva, “all nature seemed to morn.” Throughout the book, to this point, Arturo has had fleeting glimpses of the savagery of life in the selva. He is joined on his journey by Fidel Franco – whose named literally means “frank” and “loyal”; Don Rafael, who he had previously planned to grow rich with; Antonio Correa, the half-Indian, half-black son of Sebastiana, Don Rafael’s servant woman, who we’ve previously seen wrangling a bronco, and who tells of the back and forth massacres committed alternately by the native tribes and by the white settlers; and lastly by Pippa, a notorious horse-thief who Arturo previously encountered on the road (when he made off with Arturo and Alicia’s horses), and who is captured near the end of Part I and narrowly escapes being castrated by some angry cowboys by the intercession of Arturo, who views this crafty thief as a useful guide.

Pippa is also among the first purveyors of a common device in La voragine, the story-within-a-story. He provides a glimpse of the extremities of life out on the frontier, telling of how as a boy he would hide underwater and disembowel the dogs of his various pursuers. Pippa is always living on the margins, using his craftiness to get by, working for some cowboys on the llanero who treated him with contempt, forced to work for the cook, and then narrowly escaping execution after he murdered his mistress’s domineering boyfriend. Afterwards Pippa became a man of the wilderness for some 20 years, “helping all the major tribes resist the depredations of the white man in the regions of Capanaparo and Vichada.” Of course, Pippa’s self-presentation is unreliable, just as virtually every other character’s self-presentation in La voragine is unreliable. He abandons the party after his companions turn on him and Arturo, turning delirious, has him whipped. He appears again briefly in the hellish final scenes of the novel, suffering a gruesome end which is preceding by an Indian calling into question the veracity of his former tale of being the Indians’ friend. But at the beginning of Part II, Pipa brings Arturo and his friends into contact with the Indians of the rainforest, where they hear folktales of evil forest goddesses, get exposure to the tribe’s belief in magical cures, and the women of the tribe attempt to sleep with and then marry each of them. The theme recurs that the natives, as with the rainforest they live in, are characterized by wonderment, magic, and femininity, though these things are as much of a threat as they are a source of intrigue.

The natives also, by virtue of where they live, have easy access to untold wealth (another theme which goes back to tales of conquistadors chasing gold.) They take the travellers to Las Hermosas, a garcero or “a place where the birds flock so incredibly that their feathers carpet the ground.” These feathers are incredibly valuable on the international market, but in order to gather them the party has to pull them off the surface of alligator and piranha-infested waters. A rich reward can be gotten, but with it comes the danger of sudden and gruesome death. “None came to harm on this occasion,” Arturo muses, “although some plumes cost many lives, along the way, before decorating the hats of fashionable women across the ocean.” The plumes, in this way, are similar to the rubber trade that the reader is soon to be introduced to: an abundant resource being exploited by the greedy, but at tremendous human cost.

Pippa also delivers one of the multiple dreams and visions that appear in the story while under the influence of a hallucinogenic drug given him by the natives.

The voyager’s visions were bizarre, indeed. He saw processions of alligators and turtles, flowers that shouted, swamps full of people. He reported that the trees of the forest were paralyzed giants that talked and gestured to each other in the dark. The trees wanted to fly away with the clouds, but the earth held them firmly by the ankles, so that they could never go anywhere. These formidable beings were condemned to be perpetually motionless victims, casually felled and burned by thoughtless human beings, condemned to sprout ever anew, bloom and grow anew, ignored or misunderstood, only to be cut down again and again.

We can see hear an element of eco-criticism of man’s exploitation of the rainforest, the perpetual torture of the trees. But Pipa’s vision also ends with a warning, a vision of the ultimate triumph of the forest.

Pipa had heard the trees’ appeal to occupy pastures and fallow fields and vacant lots until a single, great canopy of interwoven tree limbs could cover the surface of the entire earth. One day, all would be, again, as it was in the beginning—in the age of Genesis, when God floated like a mist over the endless sea of green.

A dire prophecy indeed.

Immediately following this vision, Rivera depicts the forest essentially fighting back against our heroes. They are beset by a cloud of mesquitos, then by dry spells that leave them without a source of water, followed by massive downpours that cover the ground under “a vast sheet of water.” They come down with malaria, and the hostile conditions starts to drive Arturo mad:

Now, evil feelings competed with kind ones, and my brain conceived the morbid plan of murdering my companions to save them from the torture of a lingering death by starvation. Then I would take my own life. My hand counted the bullets in my pocket. Which of my friends should I kill first?

The friends begin to fight with each other, Pippa gets beaten and then run off, and Arturo begins hallucinating, and suffers under delirium even to being on the point of death:

My mental problem emerged clearly one day on the banks of the turbulent Inirida, when I heard the sands supplicating:

‘Oh, don’t step so hard, please! Your step packs us together unbearably. We’d rather be moving. Take pity on us and fling us into the wind!’

But the nightmarish qualities of the selva are more than matched by the nightmarish cruelty of the rubber trade. A good thirty pages of Part II are taken up by the story-within-a-story of Clemente Silva, an old man who Arturo and company rescue from the service of the rubber traders, who then proceeds to describe a torturous (and inconclusive) odyssey to rescue his son from the rubber traders; Silva’s story is as incredible as anything of the story-within-a-stories in Dostoyevsky, and readers will become even more horrified as they hear the origin stories of rubber traders like Barrera, Cayenne, and General Vaquiro, who are in fact part of the much larger rubber trading syndicate of Casa Arana, a vast system that employs torture, kidnapping, and debt-bondage that serves as functional enslavement to tether all those unfortunate enough to fall into its clutches inescapably to the trade. Their ruthlessness is more than matched by the tale Silva tells of the rise of General Funes and his large scale massacre of a recalcitrant governor and his supporters in a large territory of Venezuela, which turned Funes into a powerful warlord as well as a ruthless rubber trader. Silva also tells the tale of his attempt to enlist government inspectors to put a halt to the abuses of the rubber industry, only to discover that the government is largely in cahoots with the rubber traders. When in the last section of the novel, Arturo finally meets with these rubber traders, the action that results shows him to be more helpless and subject to the whims of chance than we would normally expect from a cowboy hero. And although each of the bad guys does ultimately meet a suitably gruesome end—I don’t want to spoil these moments, because they are quite shocking—I observe that they are killed as much by the action of the selva as they are by Arturo.

A decent measure of the complexity of this book is how I easily wrote 5,000 words attempting to summarize its 200-pages, and I still feel there are numerous aspects of the plot which could bear closer scrutiny. For example, in the frame that sets up the story – the story itself is a story-within-a-story – Jose Eustacio Rivera is also the diplomat who sends a cable reporting the disappearance of this young man, for that too reflects a phase of the author’s life. Before writing La voragine in the 1910s, Rivera spent copious amounts of time as a surveyor and a diplomat in the llano and the selva negotiating disputes over the precise frontiers of Columbian and Venezuelan borders. During this time he saw both the life of the guachos and the horrifying human abuses being engaged in by the barons of the rubber tapping industry and the sufferings of the common people. Upon its release in 1924, La voragine became an overnight success in the Spanish-speaking world, and it preceded a number of other novels depicting the struggles of the common people of South and Central America against the wealthy and the powerful. Rivera died in 1928 while he was in New York trying to find an English language translator for the book, and he appears to have spent these years after the publication of La voragine engaged in an international campaign to raise awareness about the abuses of the rubber industry – however, I would agree with John Walker that the psychological and lyrical depth of the book gives it universal appeal beyond simply a Sinclair-like denunciation of the abuses of capital.

Perhaps because of the beauty of its depictions of the land and the Colombia-centric focus of the narration – all the talk about contacting the Colombian consul and getting the (fictional) book-within-a-book into his hands seems always aimed at creating a sensation back in the polite society of Bogota and the outside world – the book has come to be seen as a “national epic” of Columbia in the way Martin Fierro is considered a “national epic” of Argentina. It is considered so important (John Walker points out) that the Biblioteca Ayuda, a collection of Latin American classics printed in the 1970s—which I am glad to have learned about, since it has added a number of books to my mental TBR—published La voragine as #4 in that series. I have begun reading another book in this series, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, to see if that book’s treatment of the savagery and “death drive” of gaucho can better help me understand La voragine, which as I stated at the top, is a book (like the multi-canopied jungle) which can yield many layers of interpretation.