| 223 La Voragine . Dialectics of the Rubber Boom OR MANY READERS THE MYSTERY of José Eustasio Rivera’s La vordgine (1924) is the fate of its protagonist, Arturo Cova, who disap- pears in the Amazon jungle somewhere near the Rio Negro in northwest- ern Brazil. The only explanation in the text is in the novel’s famous last words, presented in the form of a telegram from the Colombian Consul in Manaos: “Hace cinco meses biiscalos en vano Clemente Silva. Ni astro de ellos. jLos devoré la selvat” (385)! [For five months Clemente Silva has searched for them, Not a trace remains. ‘The jungle devoured them!) "Though I cannot claim to have recovered the lost steps of Arturo Cova, I find myself more intrigued by a different disappearance: that of the scan- dalous Peruvian Amazon Company, which La vordgine at once exposes and almost entirely conceals. ‘As many of its readers know, La vordgine combines two different sto- ries, one largely fictional and the other closely based on documentary sources. The first is the personal odysscy of narrator Arturo Cova, a well- known poet who flees Bogota and an incipient scandal with his lover Ali- cia. After the pair spend several weeks on a caitle ranch in the rustic prov- ince of Casanare, Alicia leaves with the notorious slave trader Narciso Barrera, and Cova pursues them into the jungle, accompanied by a small party of ranch-hands. As Cova enters the jungle, his personal, fictive nar- tative becomes intertwined with the second, largely historical story, which is based on the scandal of the Peruvian Amazon Company, a con- sortium of British and Peruvian interests that in the early twentieth cen- tury was accused of exploiting the indigenous tribes of southwestern Co- | lombia. The Peruvian Amazon Company, which began in the last years of wR YS my ee the nineteenth century as a small rubber-trading outfit run by Julio C. Arana, took brutal advantage of the lawlessness of the region known as 2IL2 bY 208YLa vordgine: Dialectics of the Rubber Boom 113 the Purumayo—a stretch of disputed land on the Peru-Colombia border— to terrorize both would-be competitors and local indigenous tribes, grad- ually establishing a monopoly on labor and natural resources there. In 1907 Arana’s business became multinational: it registered on the London Stock Exchange, received more than one million pounds sterling in invest- ment, and became formally known as the Peruvian Amazon Company. Several Britons held seats on the company’s boatd of directors and others were installed as local agents in South America when accounts of atroc- ities began to appear in the British press in September 1909. Britain’s For- eign Office sent Sif Roger Caen the Tsk hua jumanitarian who had been instrumental in exposing the horrors of imperialism in central Africa, to | _jivestigaté the Company's Tabor practices. The report he ultimately sub- mitted to Parliament describes a pseudolegalistic system of debt-peonage that was enforced by terror and violence: as Casement attests, workers were tortured and murdered for failing to bring in enough latex, for refus- ing to surrender their women and children to the company’s thugs, or merely for the sadistic pleasure of their oppressors. ‘What surprises and intrigues me is the contrast between the initial de- nunciations of the Peruvian Amazon Company written by Casement and others and Rivera’s representation of it in La vordgine. British accounts of the Putumayo scandal emphasize the responsibility of the London inves- tors who supported and profitted from Arana’s activities; La vordgine, on the other hand, does not mention a single Englishman or even allude to company’s investors overseas, What is more, Rivera’s “oversight” was alimst certainly intentional, as much of the British material was translated and published in Bogota between toro and 1915 and Parliament's investi- gation of the Peruvian Amazon Company sely followed by the Co- “the exploitation ofthe Pu- “Jombran press, From Casement’s point of tumayo was a particularly cruel and uncontrolled instance of Europe’s depredation of non-Western peoples and territories, differing only superfi- cially from formal imperialism? Casement had been instrumental in drawing international attention to the atrocities committed in King Leopold’s Congo Free State, which he investigated in 1890, briefly cross- ing paths with the future author of Heart of Darkness (1899), Joseph Conrad, Like W. E. Hardenburg, the young American engineer who first broke the story in the British press, Casement repeated) es the Pu- tumayo to the Congo: ‘This Purumayo Slavery is, indeed, as Hardenburg said, and as I laughed at when I read it a year ago in Truth, a bigger crime than that of the Congo, alchough committed on a far smaller stage and affecting only a few thou- sands of human beings, whereas the other affected millions.II4 NATURE, NEQ-COLONIALISM The other was Slavery under Law, with Judges, Army, Police and Off- cers, often men of birth and breeding even, carrying out an iniquitous system invested with monarchicaf authority, and in some sense directed to public, or so-called public ends. It was bad, exceedingly bad, and, with all its so-called safeguards, it has been condemned and is in process, thank God, of passing or being swept away. But this thing I find here is slavery without law, where the slavers are , personally cowardly ruffians, jail birds, and there is not authority within 1200 miles, and no means of punishing any offense, however vile. Some- times Congolese “justice [sic] intervened, and an extra red-handed ruffian was sentenced, but here there is no jail, no judge, no Law.* The map reproduced here (figure 1) dramatically represents the correla- tion between imperialism in Africa and Asia and the situation Hardenburg referred to as “The Devil’s Paradise: A British Owned Congo.” It is repro- duced from a document known as E! libro rojo, the anonymous “Red Book” that was first published in London in 1913, translated into Spanish and republished in Bogotd soon after. The map shows the Putumayo region, located on the border between Colombia and Peru, bounded by the Putumayo and Caquetd Rivers and . near the headwaters of the Amazon. Although the only city on the map is - Iquitos, in northeastern Peru, the map shows the degree to which rubber stations were established throughout the Putumayo. The rivers are dotted with them, squeezed closely together to absorb the intensive activity among traders and che Indians who did most of the work of harvesting rubber from trees scattered throughout the jungle. What fascinates me about this map are the heteroglot names inscribed upon it, names that create a verbal and visual history of the region. The rivers are still called by the names given them by indigenous societies long ago—Caqueté, Pu- tumayo, Igaraparan4, Caraparané—perhaps so that native guides could more easily be used to navigate the regions’ bafflingly complex waterways. Most of the rubber stations, on the other hand, bear Spanish names like Nueva Granada and Santa Barbara. Some, like Esperanza, Providencia, and Encanto, unendingly recite the ambitions and expectations of their fong-dead settlers; Matanzas (Killings) evokes some bloody event of the past. But two even stranger names are found on the lower Igaraparan4, a” and “Indostan’ \d straight to the north of “Africa” is a place a Re Te a eee tee eerie ine are unmistakably colonial, as if selected out of some nineteenth-century atlas of European empires. ‘What are Africa, Hindustan, and Abyssinia doing on a 1913 map of the Putumayo? Casement, who also mentions a place called “La China,”QUIEDS Ss Rio & mazonay aT CAHUINARS FIG. r. "Principales secciones caucheras” [Principal rubber-gathering areas]. From El ibro rojo del Puturayo (Bogota: Arboleda & Valencia, 1913), xi. Courtesy of Stanford University Libraries.116 NATURE, NEO-COLONIALISM remarks that the rubber stations were “capriciously named.” Today we have little way of knowing who was responsible for these names, how long they had Gren n place, or why they were selected. But the names re- 4 colonial or, moze appropriately, neo-colonial dynamics of the rubber-boom, explicitly Tocatin he trading posts of the Peruyian Amazon Company within the context of the plundering of tropical jungles in Af rica aie-ASRA Whoever chose those names did not follow the usual colo- ‘nial practice of naming the newly founded cities in the New World after beloved places in the Old; instead they created an appropriately neo- colonial toponomy by borrowing the riames of Europe’s long-established official colonies. The miniature “colonies” of the Peruvian-Amazon Com+ 9 i epeat. the names of oth ‘Names on a map, as J. Hi layer of inscribed meanings that can tell the history of a place: “All the place names on a map in their systematic interrelation tell obscurely the story of the generations that have inhabited that place. In living they have left the traces of their lives behind in tombstone inscriptions and in names given to houses, villages, fields, roads, or streams.”5 Miller’s assurance that the landscape will honor the memory of the dead sounds like wishful thinking when applied to the bloody and chaotic history of the Putumayo, the site of a frenzied holocaust in which tens of thousands of Indians were killed by rubber traders and the private armies they maintained in the first decade of the twentieth century. But as Miller suggests, the science of “to- pology,” the knowledge of places, includes both the study of its physical features, or topography, and the study of the names inscribed upon it, its toponomy.§ Combining both studies, perhaps, we may get a more com- plete story, one that tells us how heterogeneous human populations have explored, settled on, and harvested the natural resources of the region, suggesting if only vaguely the social relationships—cooperative and rela- tively benign or bloodthirsty and exploitative—that have developed among and on those many rivers and in the dense tropical jungles. In order to understand better the carefully constructed topography of La vordgine, let us compare the map included in FI libro rojo with one printed in La vordgine, as the text traditionally includes a map of south- ern Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, and Peru, showing Cova’s circuitous path from Bogoté to the Rio Negro. This second map (figure 2) is from the ninth edition of La vordgine, which Rivera closely supervised up to the time of his death in New York City in 1928. It shows at least as much detail as the map from El libro rojo, but the toponomy, in contrast, is en- irely Latin American: all the place-names on Rivera’s map are of clearh‘=-Ruta ve Apruro Cova YY sus COMPANEROS. . Fic. 2. Ruta de Arturo Cova [Arturo Cova's route]. Map from José Eustasio Rivera, La vordgine (New York: Editorial Andes, 1929}, 341. Courtesy of University of Minnesota Libraries.1x8 NATURE, NEO-COLONIALISM Englishmen were involved in the region at all, or that the cumultuous and tragic Putumayo so closely eaeinbled He aeog iphy of empire. lames on a map describe the human history of a given place, then | clearly the maps presented in FI libro rojo and La vordgine are telling two | different stories. One locates the exploitation of the Putumayo within the : context of-European imperialism and the other reads the same events within the history of Hispanic penetration and colonization of the South ‘American interior. Rivera, will argue, chose to.tell-one_version of the story rather than the other, deriving his historical information from sourets close to Cascment while electing to suppres she British presence in the Putumayo altogether. | ~~“Sinilaily troubled by the novel’s historical inconsistencies, Carlos J. Al- onso has raised the issue of why Rivera would bother so zealously to de- nounce labor practices that had all but ended a decade before, when Brit- : ish consumers shifted their interest to the plantations of southeast Asia, where a cheap and reliable supply of rubber was being produced on British-owned plantations. Alonso suggests that Rivera develops an im- plicit contrast between the economic and ecological rationalism of the plantation rubber industry—which had been established using specimens of hevea brasilensis surreptitiously exported from the Amazon and culti- vated in London’s Kew Gardens—with the relatively unprofitable and un- sustainable wild rubber industry in South America,” Undoubtedly the effi- ciency of the Asian plantations contributed as much as the moral outcry against the Peruvian Amazon Company to British stockholders’ en masse divestment in 1912. Nevertheless, Rivera’s nonliterary writings—to which we shall soon turn—show that the economic, social, and environmental shine southein Colonia were stl Himely concern ipa jlo Fania Contmted fo operate in the region long after the liquidation of the Peruvian Amazon Company, Roberto Simén Crespi has also suggested thar the European crisis of World War I lowered the humanitarian stan- dards of the British government, which hypocritically fed its insatiable wartime demand for rubber with “the black and bloody gold of Arana.”* Crespi, one of the first to dedicate his investigation exclusively to an analysis of La vordgine’s contradictory politics, is clearly frustrated by the absence of the Peruvian Amazon Company: “Neither Cova nor Rivera nor the countless others who had condemned the crimes of the Putumayo understood that, among other supports, the Peruvian, Colombian, and Furopean investors and other businessmen were the trué benefactors and defenders of Ktana and the system they had helped to construct.”? Crespi's vigorous Marxist analysis criticizes Rivera for failing to grasp the signifi- cance Of the international capitalist market and individual investors’ re- sponsibility for the exploitation of the Putumayo. The present analysis, Se owWoRe FeLa vordgine: Dialectics of the Rubber Boom 119 which in many respects builds on Crespi’s, must nevertheless begin by as- serting that many of Rivera’s cofttemporaries, and certainly many of those who denounced the Putumayo abuses, did understand the relationship Further- between capitalist investment and neo-colonial exploitation. more, there is considerableevidencs so uggest- thar Biver.h If ha that information by the de be ware La ordgine In 1939 Eduardo Neale Silva, author of what remains the definitive bi- ography of Rivera, wrote that Casement’s report was “one of his main sources for the section dealing with the Putumayo.”10 Whether or not Rivera had access to that very document, information on Casement’s mis- sion and the inhumane practices of the Peruvian Amazon Company was disseminated in Colombia in exposés including El libro rojo del Putumayo and Putumayo caucho y sangre. The story was closely watched in Colom- bian newspapers, including the Bogota dailies E! Tiempo and El Especta- dor, both of which were popular among Rivera’s liberal intellectual asso- ciates.!1 On November 23, 1912, for example, El Tiempo published an article with the sensational headline, “La barbaric inquisitorial del hom- bre blanco. Crimenes monstruosos y horrorosas atrocidades” [The inqui- sitorial barbarism of the white man: Monstrous crimes and horrific atroc- ities]. The lengthy article enumerates in considerable detail Casement’s accusations against the Peruvian Amazon Company, at times quoting di- rectly from the Blue Book. Many of the accusations repeated in the article, and attributed to Casement, will appear again in La vordgine: En su informe, dice Sir Casement, que varios empleados de la Compatiia mataron a tiros, por distraerse, a nifios indios, que mujeres y nifios han sido azotados con litigos, hasta que murieron hechos una pura Ilaga; que se hace morir de hambre a hombres y mujeres; que cuando los empleados estan aburridos, atan a estacas a los indios y los convierten en blanco de sus rifles; que otras veces entretiénense dichos empleados en cortar las orejas a los trabajadores indigenas, y cuando un indigena no eva a la Compafia el caucho que se les habia encargado, se le dan doscientos palos, o se le hace sufrir una espantosa y dolorosisima mutilacién. .. Enel Alto Amazonas, Distrito del Putumayo, la Compaiiia tiene 45 centros, donde trabajan unos 50,000 indigenas. Estos se dedican a la recoleccién del caucho; ese caucho que, como dice Luis Bonafoux, sirve para los automéviles en que banqueros y cocotas atropellan al campesino ena ruta y al obrero en la calle. {In his report Sir Casement [sic] writes that several employees of the com- pany amused themselves by shooting Indian children to death, that women and children had been whipped uatil they died, utterly covered with wounds;120 NATURE, NEO-COLONIALISM. that men and women are starved to death, that when the employees are bored they tie the Indians to posts and make them the targets of their rifless that other times they entertain themselves by cutting off the indigenous workers? ears, that when an indigene fails to bring the company the quan- tity of rubber he was ordered to collect, he is given two hundred strokes, or made to suffer a horrific and extremely painful mutilation. .. In the Upper Amazon, District of the Putumayo, the company has 45 centers, in which 50,000 indigenes labor. They dedicate themselves to the collection of rubber; that rubber that, as Luis Bonafoux says, serves for the automobiles in which bankers and prostitutes run over the peasant in the road and the laborer in the stceet.] The article quoted above is part of a long series dedicated to the Putumayo scandal and official attempts to improve the situation. In November rgtr, El Tiempo ran an article describing plans to liquidate the Peruvian Ama- zon Company as investment trickled out. On September 6, 1913, El Tiempo’s “Paginas Literarias” were dedicated to an essay by R. B. Cunnin- ghame Graham, the radical Scottish aristocrat who as a member of Parlia- ment had witnessed Hardenburg’s testimony. What is more, El Tiempo presents the revelations about the Peruvian Amazon Company in the context of growing public mistrust of Great Brit- ain: its pages suggest that Britain’s nineteenth-century image as a seem- ingly benign financial “partner” to a developing Colombia was wearing thin. The paper’s most prominent advertisers during the years investi gated, it should be noted, are merchants offering British imports ranging from genuine “Collins” tools (on sale at the Casa Inglesa) to Dr. Williams's “Pildoras Rosadas” (pink pills) and the latest in London tailor- ing for men and women. Much of the news, especially during the crisis of ‘World War I, comes from Europe and particularly London. There are re- ports from British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, a regular column entitled “Noticias del Gobierno inglés,” and human interest stories such as a note on the “fearsome” suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst. If El Tiempo’s interest in and access to the news from London seem surprising, this ap- parent goodwill is countered by a number of articles that are skeptical, even suspicious, of Britain’s interest in Latin America. In August and Sep- tember 1911, while Parliament continued its investigation of the Peruvian Amazon Company, El Tiempo reports conflicts between the Colombian government and two British companies, the London and South Western Bank, Ltd, and the Santa Marta Railway Company, Ltd, which failed to construct major railway lines for which the Colombian government had already paid. The news of British business imperialism is reflected in Ef Tiempo’s features and editorials. “La Republica esta sola,” written byLa vordgine: Dialectics of the Rubber Boom 121 Jaime Gutiérrez and published May 8, 191, suggests that Colombia’s Eu- ropean allies are unwilling to protect the country from U.S. aggression, and cites reports from the London Daily Mail and Daily Chronicle that support Washington’s deployment of North American troops in Mexico and the Caribbean. “La guerra europea y el porvenir de Colombia” [The European war and Colombia’s future] (August 12, 1915, anonymous) contests the common belief that once the war is over the influx of foreign capital will develop Colombia’s natural resources to such a degree that “in a word, we will find ourselves in circumstances similar to those of Argen- tina in the first stage of its economic bloom.” It suggests, in contrast, that “competition in everything and for everything will eventually mean the dominance of the strongest with grave consequences for the weak. And are we prepared for that?” ‘The sharpest accusations are formulated in an anonymous editorial ti- tled “Inglaterra contra nosostros,” published November 18, r915. The au- thor writes in response to a complaint filed by one Guillermo [sic, prob- ably William] Boshell, a British subject who accuses the Colombian government of fraudulent practices in the Caqueta region cight years ear- lice. Boshell’s charges and his claim to 250,000 pesos in damages, deter- mined to be spurious by a special committee of the Colombian Senate, are aggressively backed by the British Foreign Office and its agent in Bogota. The editorialist, linking the current action to the Foreign Offices’ support of the London and Southwestern Bank in the ongoing Puerto Wilches scandal, accuses the British government of using its unmatched military power to support “adventurers” intent upon robbing “a poor, weak coun- try.” The article’s forceful conclusion is worth quoting at length: En el gran drama que hoy se juega en el mundo, la opinién colombiana ha sido en su mayoria favorable a los aliados, y nosotros no hemos ocultado la viva simpatia que su causa nos inspira, simpatia que no nos impide sentir una inmensa admiracién por las energfas y la fuerza gigantesca del pueblo alemén, Pero debemos reconocer que Inglaterra nada hace por merecer nuestro afecto y muy al contrario, llegara con sus procedimientos a hacer- 1nos odioso un pafs cuyo gobierno es el principal sostén de quienes tratan de cebarse en nuestra debilidad y de explotar ferozmente nuestros errores nvestras ligerezas. Y en estas circunstancias, debemos recordar que antes que ninguna otra cosa, estamos en el deber de ser colombianéfilos, de negar nuestro apoyo moral a quienes s6lo tratan de hacernos mal y no se acuerdan de nosotros sino para imponernos su voluntad y para chupar nuestra escasa sangre. {lin the great drama being played out in the world today, Colombian opin- ion has largely sided in favor of the Allies, and we have not hidden the122 NATURE, NEO-COLONIALISM lively sympathy their cause inspires in us, sympathy that does not prevent vs from feeling an immense admiration for the energy and the gigantic force of the German people. We must recognize that England does nothing to metit our affection and on the contrary, will commit such acts as to make hateful to us a country whose government is the principal support of those who try to feed on our weakness and ferociously exploit our errors or our shortcomings. And in these circumstances, we raust remember that above all we must be Colombianophiles; we must deny our moral support to those who try only to do us harm and who remember us only to impose their will on us or to suck what little blood we have.] ‘The idea that Rivera was unaware of the links between the Putumayo. scandal and the British government or the growing Colombian resentment against Britain is untenable, not only because of the similarities between Casement’s report and La vordgine, but because of the prominence of the story in the Bogoté press during the years when Rivera was living in the Colombian capital as a law student and a fledgling poet. An individual who was completely withdrawn from public life might have managed to miss the scandal as it unfolded in late 1913, but Rivera was consistently engaged in politics and current events. What is more, he published the sonnet “Ticrra de Promisién” in the October 11, 1913, edition of El Tiempo’s “Paginas literarias,” just three wecks after the same feature ran Cunninghame Graham’s essay on Hardenburg. Surely Rivera was not un- aware of the British ties to the Peruvian Amazon Company, nor of the gen- eral climate of public outcry against Britain’s informal imperialism in which the scandal developed. Nevertheless, the British-owned Peruvian Amazon Company disappears from Rivera’s jungle even more mysteri- ously than Cova himself.12 In this regard La vordgine is very different from the texts we have ex- amined in the previous chapters. Whereas Quiroga and Lynch overtly criticize the actions of British neo-imperialists in the Rio de la Plata, expli- citly engaging Britain’s colonial literature to draw out parallels between the situation in their countries and in the formal cmpire, Rivera instead has detailed information on Britain’s involvement in the exploitative rub- ber industry, and yet refuses to introduce it into his novel. His decision to occlude this seemingly vital information from La vordgine is closer to An- drés Bello’s response to the work of Spaniard Juan Maria Maury y Benitez. As I explained in the introduction, Bello rewrote Maury’s “La agresin britanica” (1806) as his famous “Oda a la agricultura en la zona térrida” back in 1826, building on Maury’s idyllic images. of the Latin American countryside while suppressing what the Spaniard recognized asLa vordgine: Dialectics of the Rubber Boom 123 Britain’s neo-colonial desire to control the region. To Hee Rivera’ ’s decision, we should take into account the dramati difciinistances of Colombia and the countries of the Rio de la Plata. In both cases-Britain had built up a strong economic presence in the last quarter of the nineteenth century: although Colombia’s political instabil- ity prevented investment from reaching the same proportions as in Argen- tina and Uruguay, the telegraphs, railroads, and other infrastructure that supported the flourishing coffee industry were largely built using British technology and labor, while imported manufactures and luxury goods were almost entirely supplied by British merchants, as the pages of El Tiempo and El Espectador attest. Mbile dependence on Brish capital and- technology undoubtedly weakened the Colombian economy and exacer- bated class differences, at the same time, Colombia and the other nations ‘ofthe Caribbean and- Central Americ "vulnerable toa much more di- id ifimediaté threat to national gnty: the United Statex-For these nations; Britain and the United States presented very diffecent threats: in contrast to the subtle economic dominance exerted by the Invis- ible Empire, the United States all too often meant military force, territorial invasion, and direct political control. Like Andrés Bello, Rivera might have chosen to occlude the British threat in order to concentrate his compatriots’ energies on more immediate enemies; he might have even had some aspiration of enlisting British aid against both the hemispheric tyrant and the more local problem of Peruvian and Venezuelan incursions, I suspect, however, that his motives were quite different. As reported in the pages of El Tiempo, El Espectador, and El libro rojo, the story of the Peruvian Amazon Company is almost as much about the power and pres- tige of English law as it is about informal imperialism or capitalist exploi- tation. The first significant reports feature Sir Roger Casement firmly at the helm of the investigation; subsequent reportage details the atrocities committed by agents of the Peruvian Amazon Company, but always in the context of the British Parliament’s pursuit of justice, which eventually led to the dissolution of the corporation. While the board of directors may have been made up of Englishmen, the individuals most directly accused of murder and mutilation were South Americans. Thus Rivera, in writing about the Putumayo scandal, faced a catch-22: either write the British into the story and run the risk of polishing up Britain’s somewhat tarnished reputation for justice and moral rectitude, or write them out altogether. It little mattered, under the circumstances, that Casement’s work in the Pu- tumayo and the Congo were, in the words of Edmund Morel, “the only two [occasions] in which British diplomacy rose above the common- place.”!3 Nor did it matter that by 1917 Casement was dead, executed by the British government on charges of treason for his work on behalf of124 NATURE, NEO-COLONIALISM Irish home rule. Neither of those pieces of information could be'accomo- * dated within the scope of Rivera’s novel, and so he chose to write the Brit- ish out altogether, suppressing the profit-mongering of company share- holders along with the humanitarian labors of Casement. (Hardenburg, the U.S. citizen who first exposed the situation in the British press, was an even less likely candidate for Rivera’s novel.) The photographer Eugenio Robuchon is the one European who does make it into the text, as the hu- mane “mosié” murdered by Arana’s henchmen; it is logical that Robu- chon should appear, given the contrast hetween the neo-colonialism of the ‘Anglo-Saxon countries and the relatively unaggressive agenda France was pursuing in Latin America in the same period. — In other words, if Rivera had tried to give a more complete version of the Putumayo scandal in La vordgine, he would have found himself in the undesired position of propping up a narrative that in Colombia and other parts of Latin America was already on the verge of collapse, a narrative of heroic Anglo-Saxons bringing justice and the rule of law to the barbaric peoples of the tropical jungles. Given Rivera’s patriotism and his sensitiv- ity to the ongoing tisk of neo-colonialism, that possibility was unaccept- able to him, so he told a version of the story in which a Colombian intel- lectual, Arturo Cova, plays the role that historically belonged, collectively, to the British: chat of the exploiter turned whistle-blower. At the same time, Rivera is far from turning a blind eye to the international or transat- lantic issue of informal imperialism: the narrative account of Cova’s trans- formation is constructed so as to dismantle almost completely the ideolog- ical structures that had supported Britain’s economic hegemony for nearly acentury—by which I mean both the Latin American elites’ cultural Euro- centrism and the colonial relationship to the continent's indigenous people and natural resources that for decades had enabled them to mediate etween those resources and British capital. . In order to do justice to the ideological and rhetorical complexities of La vordgine—and more completely situate the novel in its equally com- plex historical context—I should say that the novel offers two somewhat contradictory responses to the problem of informal imperialism, one of which may be called a liberal response, and the other a radical one. The liberal response, characterized by a desire to extend national soveriegaty into Colombia’s geographic periphery, is apparent in Rivera’s collection of ‘sonnets (Tieria de Promision), his nonliterary work as a government offt- cial sent to investigate the Venezuelan border, and La_vordgine’s topo- graphic drive. Rivera's liberal response, while aimed at fortifying Colombia’s borders against foreign incursion such as occurred in Panama and the Putumayo, offers little protection against the more insidious inva- sion of British capital. On the contrary, incorporating more of theLa vordgine: Dialectics of the Rubber Boom 125 country’s outlying territories under the sway of a Eurocentric and profit- driven national government would only perpetuate the interlocking struc- tures of internal and external colonialism that, as I have argued, character- ize British hegemony in Latin America. So La vordgine also articulates a contradictory radical response that aims at undermining the Eurocentric and capitalist assumptions of the Colombian elite and establishing a new, nonexploitative relationship between the country’s government and its human and natural resources. In order to understand how this uniquely positioned novel responds to U.S. ard British informal imperialism, in- cluding the problem of internal colonialism, we shall look first at Rivera’s liberal response and then at the moe radically anticolonial, anticapitalist critique of La vordgine. Losing Ground: The Topographic Response ‘As Hilda Soledad Pach6n Farias writes, Rivera’s provincial origins made him particularly sensitive to the vast differences—geographic, economic, cultural—that separated the southern and eastern regions from the Co- fombian capital.14 He was born in 1888 in the region known as Huila, a remote ranching area south of Bogoté that did not become an official de- partment until 905 and remained isolated from the rest of the country until the 1950s. According to Pachén, during Rivera’s childhood Huila was conservative, staunchly Catholic, and financially desolate after the events of the Thousand Days’ War. Rivera was expelled from the local pri- vate school he attended and then sent to boarding school in Bogota. He re- turned to Huila with a college degree in 1909 and served as school super- visor of Ibagué and Neiva until 1911, when he was fired for criticizing the district’s conservative policies on female education. At that time Rivera re- turned to Bogoté, matriculated as a law student, and began his successful career as a poet. In 1919, soon after graduating from law school, Rivera made the famous journey to Casanare in Colombia’s eastern plains where he (unsuccessfully) argued his first legal case and gathered material that would later be incorporated into the first section of La vordgine.'5 These peregrinations must have made Rivera particularly aware of the isolation and vulnerability of the distant provinces. The threat of U.S. im- perialism was unavoidable: like all his generation, Rivera had come of age feeling the weight of the 1902 partition of Panama, which was kept alive in Colombian politics by he controversy over treaties to legalize the sep- aration. (et, Rivera's political activism seems to have begun in 1909, ‘when he led his classmates in protesting against General Rafael Reyes’ ap- | proval of a treaty that legalized the separation, granting the United States| ad: 1 126 NATURE, NEO-COLONIALISM the right to drill in Colombian oil fields in exchange for the twenty-five , million dollars originally’ promised as reparations. ™ Pachon Tightly em- phasizes these two pieces of biogtaphic information—Rivera’s childhood on Colombia’s geographic periphery and his adolescent protest against the ratification of Panama’s secession—because they indicate his early and profound sensitivity to Colombia’s vulnerability to territorial dismember- ment. By the same ne logic, she understands Rivera's Rivera’s literary achievement as nse fo this is ereatness lies in having contributed unity of the nation by inteprating vast territories that remaine "Tierra dé Promision, the collection of poems Rivera published in 1927, may be considered his first attempt to create a literary topography of Co- lombia in response to neo-colonialism. Its very title, which translates into English as “The Promised Land,” announces the text’s intention of rhe- torically claiming at last the vast unsettled stretches of Colombia’s na- tional patrimony. Its fifty-four sonnets are divided, like the map of Colom- bia, into three sections, corresponding to the jungle, the mountains, and the plains. Each of the sonnets represents a different scene in the wild, de- scribing animals, plants, and topography in intimate detail and emphasiz- ing the minute interactions among them with a scopophilic pleasure to rival contemporary nature programs on television.18 Sobre el musgo reseco la serpiente tranquila falge al sol, enroscada como rica diadema; yen su escama vibratil el zafiro se quema, Ia esmeralda se enciende y el topacio rutila. Tiemblan lampos de nécar en su roja pupila que columbra del buitre la acechanza suprema, y regando el reflejo de una palida gema, silbadora y astuta, por la grama desfila. ‘Van sonando sus crétalos en la geuta silente donde duerme el monarca de la felpa de raso; un momento relumbra la ondulante serpiente, y cuando gil avanza y en la sombra se interna, al chispar de dos ojos, suena horrendo zarpazo yun rugido sacude la sagrada caverna.!? [Upon dry moss the tranquil serpent lies resplendent in the sun, coiled like a rich diadem; and among its vibrating scales the sapphire burns, the emerald ignites and the topaz glows.La vordgine: Dialectics of the Rubber Boom 127 Flames of nacre tremble in the red pupil that spies out a buzzard, the supreme snare, and strewing the reflection of a pale gem, whistling and astute, it files through the grass. Its rattles arc heard in the silent grotto where the monarch of silken seclusion sleeps; the undulating serpent pauses, dazzling, for a moment, and when it agilely advances and penetrates the shade, winking its two eyes, a horrendous blow is heard and a cty shakes the sacred cavern.] Critics often attribute the contrast between the orderly and highly aes- theticized depiction of nature in Tierra de Promisién with the chaotic and hostile environment of La vordgine to the fact that Rivera did not visit ei- ther the plains of Casanare or the Amazon jungle until after the poems were completed. Rivera’s shock—and perhaps embarrassment—at the contrast is reflected in these oft-quoted lines of Arturo Cova: “jNada de ruisefiores enamorados, nada de jardin versallesco, nada de panoramas sentimentales!” [No loving nightingales, no garden of Versailles, no senti- mental vistas!] (296).2° While that is undoubtedly true, the poem quoted above also demon- strates a lordly and colonial attitude toward nature that parts 2 and 3 of La vorégine will thoroughly subvert. Like nearly all the sonnets OF Tierra de Promisién, this one represents a space that is devoid of human inhabi- tants, scarcely populated by two wild animals. This emptiness allows the imaginative power of the speaker to dominate the scene.?! The speaker, standing alone, maintains an aloof distance from the conflict that devel- ops; yet his gaze penetrates the space to take in details of the animals’ ap- pearance. As a result the scene described is an extraordinary combination of mode?nista acstheticization and a naturalist’s attention to ecological de- ? In that regard some of these affin- ities, such as the modernist flight from the metropolis, the Dantesque jour- ney into the depths of hell, or the imaginative chronotope that figures the voyage into the jungle as a journey back to prehistoric times*!—all of which may be considered derivations of the Western “ideological map” that Ordéiiez astutely identifies??—may be considered the kind of discur- sive correspondences that are likely to arise when authors responding to a shared cultural tradition write on similar subjects within a relatively short time of one another. The real issue, after all, is not to determine whether Rivera read Conrad, as Quiroga read Kipling and Benito Lynch read Dar- win, so much as to uncover and investigate his ambivalent relationship to the body of discourse of which Conrad was undoubtedly a part—includ- ing the parallel articulations of Latin American internal colonialism and British imperialism—and Rivera’s decisive turn away from the European orientation on which this ideological map is based. Reading these texts comparatively, then, or as Edward Said would say, contrapuntally, will en- able us to understand La vordgine as an atticulation of the shifting rela- ‘atin Américan intelligentsia and the British Em- i | La voragine in many respects runs parallel to Heart jut at a crucial juncture—in the encounter between Self and di ithi jungle—Rivera’s novel vi from its identification with metropolitan discourses to formulate an oppo- Vi sitional identification with the exploited indigenous societies.La vordgine: Dialectics of the Rubber Boom 135 & the difficulty of inte: g these texts may be summed up by saying that both criticize colonialist from a perspective that is. self-consciously lacated wi political, and social structures that have fostered it narrators repeat the dominant, colonialist cultural discourse so that it m: be diseradited by the events that unfold—but, as ina chamber of mirror: the only narrative the reader has to interpret is the product of that ve partial consciousness. Both texts show the breakdown of the rationalist and self-control of the would-be civilizing agents that occurs during ¢ course of an intense encounter with the jungle and its indigenous inhab tants, but both also represent the white protagonists’ identification wit the natives as the experience or emotion that ultimately redeems them. Ir each case an enormous quantity of colonialist material is rehearsed and subverted in the course of this rhetorical reversal. The jungle represented in Heart of Darkness draws on all of the cul- 4 tural myths that constructed Africa as the “dark continent,” a place of sav- \ age cannibals, poisonous plants, ferocious beasts, and a climate that H spawned deadly plagues of malaria and dysentery. As lan Watt has shown, Conrad developed Kurtz’s character out of the nineteenth-century lore about colonial agents who “go native” in the African jungle, preferring the primitive and sensual customs of the natives to civilized behavior." In Marlow’s depiction, then, Kurtz is not only an abusive European who ex- ploits the natives by “getting the tribe to follow [him]” in his ruthless quest for ivory: the myth of “going native” from which Kurtz is drawn combines a critique of the potentially limitless power of the colonial agent with racism and an implicit fear of miscegenation, ambivalently suggest- ing that he has both abused his power over the natives and betrayed the values of the civilization that educated and armed him to go among them. Marlow more than once suggests, therefore, that Kurtz has “succumbed” to the evil around him, as if “the wilderness had patted him on the head, and behold, it was like a ball—an ivory ball; it had caressed him and— Jo!—and he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the in- conceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation.”55 The explicit Eurocentrism of Marlow’s narrative, combined perhaps with the conseryatism of Conrad’s own political views, have made Heart of Darkness one of the most hotly polemicized texts in modern literature. One of the most famous criticisms is Chinua Achebe’s essay, “An Image of Africa.” in which he accuses Conrad of perpetuating all of the most vitu- lent racist stereotypes of the “dark continent” in his representation of Af- rica and Africans, “which in the final consideration amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two sentences, oneee ee ; 136 NATURE, NEO-COLONIALISM bout silence and the other about frenzy.”36 Several years later the Guya- nese novelist Wilson Harris took up the debate, and wrote “The Frontier n Which Heart of Darkness Stands,”3? In Harris’s analysis, Marlow’s in- istence on the “impenetrability” of the bush and even the “incomprehen- 'sible” behavior of the natives bears witness to the presence of an autono- mous existence and a cultural alterity that exceeds the limits of his own knowledge. Conrad’s novel, writes Harris, is thus an extraordinary achievement because it signals the limits and limitations of the “homoge- neous cultural logic” that legitimates imperialism. Even if Conrad does not actually cross the frontier, his work establishes a critical aperture in Jnovelistic form that, as Harris points out, is particularly attractive for lwriters engaged in forming a poetics of cultural crossings, as occurs “in South America where [he] was born.”38 One could choose from among dozens of textual examples to illustrate Harris’s point. Two of the most famous describe Marlow’s reactions to Af- ricans whose appearance distinguishes them from the others. Soon after his arrival at the Outer Station, Marlow sees a young man lying under a tree, obviously dying of starvation. After giving the man one of his bis- cuits, Marlow observes: “He had tied a bit of white worsted round his neck—Why? Where did he get it? Was there any idea at all connected with it?” (4). Much later, near the narrative’s conclusion, Marlow encounters a woman he takes to be Kurtz's African lover: She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous orna- ments, She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a hel- met; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnif- icent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced us. Her long shadow fell to the water’s edge. Her face had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve. She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose. (55-56) In contrast to Kipling, whose knowledge of Indian culture has often im- pressed readers of Kins and other works, Conrad was relatively ignorant of the colonized societies of which he wrote. Unlike Kipling’s natives,