Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom (Liverpool UP, 2021). By Felipe Martínez-Pinzón

In her book Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom, Amanda M. Smith renews the critical readings about the corpus canónico of the 20th-century novels about the Amazon.  And she does it from the perspective of a double wager:  on one hand, from the angle of an original methodological angle that privileges a reading from the point of view of a cultural critique of these novels to show how they make up part of a large framework of written texts and practices such as mission reports, legislative bills concerning national parks or tourist literature about the Amazons. On the other hand, Smith’s investigation focuses rigorously on the aesthetic complexities of these texts to demonstrate how, in a way even the authors themselves sometimes do not suspect, new ways arise of understanding their power of eco-criticism.  

Mapping the Amazon covers a period of a little more than fifty years of literary production about the Amazon in the 20th century. Chronologically, Smith begins with the regionalism of J.E Rivera’s La vorágine (The Vortex, 1924) and Rómulo Gallegos’ Canaíma (1935), then goes on to consider Boom novels with Mario Vargas Llosa’s La casa verde (The Green House, 1966) and El hablador (The Storyteller, 1987), and continues with two novels that have acquired cult-status César Calvo’s Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo de César Calvo (The Three Halves of Ino Moxo, 1981) and concludes with Marcio Souza’s Mad María (1980).

Smith’s journey through the corpus amazónico manages to draw geographies and languages closer—naturally the nations of the Amazon Basin, Spanish and Portuguese—but also the indigenous communities that live in its deepest corners—the Pemón in Brazil and the Yanomami in Venezuela, the Ticuna in Colombia and Perú. She also underscores the lack of communication, through what she calls “mapping and countermapping” (10-11), between São Paulo and the Brazilian state of Roraima or Bogotá and the Barracas of Guaracú. To understand this enormous region, through rapprochement and distancing, Smith makes use of an innovative concept, one that she makes very real as we read her book: she develops a literary cartography of “novel maps” (202) to show how these literary works have contributed to—or resisted—the devastation of the Amazon.

Smith focuses on a period that has been examined in literary criticism about the Amazon region, the post-Rubber Boom, a period that ends, in its most terrifying stage, around 1920, according to the historian Barbara Weinstein. Although the novels she analyzes have been the subject of a great body of critical work, its corpus has never been placed —at least to my knowledge—in succession with unexpected materials that enormously refresh its reading.  Of particular importance—for its originality and strength—is the critical decision to read the works of Vargas Llosa in the context of the archives of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) to demonstrate how the vision of the Peruvian novelist—sometimes unexpectedly, even by him—is shaped by the “ideological cartography” that Christian missionaries in the Peruvian Amazon had constructed in the decades of the 50’s and 60’s. Thanks to Smith’s analysis, Vargas Llosa’s novelistic foundation is revealed to us—as well as his general vision of the American indigenous world—as a copy of the perspective of North American missionaries who have intervened in the region since the mid-20th century. Constructing an archaeology of Vargas Llosa’s ideology, Smith explains how his idea of the indigenous world as an “archaic” one—to use the adjective the Peruvian novelist employs in his essay on the Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas— that ought to be “incorporated” into the present, can be related to the contacts Vargas Llosa had, since his youth, with both the SIL and the network of travel infrastructure facilitated by the Institute.  The reader cannot help but notice that in a writer who likes self-representing as (neo)liberal, his vision of the Amazon region has been greatly influenced by religious communities.

The proximity between diverse archives—novels and documents from religious communities, as in this particular case—is present in each one of the chapters. Another example that was very exciting to my as a reader was the truly original reading of Rómulo Gallegos’s canonic novel, Canaíma. From her fine-pointed investigation emerges an eclectic body, reflecting what happens in the Amazon itself, in which  Warao knowledge about Canaima as a changeable and malignant spirit (82) contrasts with textbooks and congressional debates in Gallegos’ time, as well as later successful state initiatives to create a national park with the name of the novel, not taking into account the significance of what the local residents want for themselves and their territory.  

To read these regional fictions against the grain—putting them into the historical context of the indigenous world from which the writers “extract” their materials— frees them from the romantic notion that nations have made of these literary works, whether it’s to name national parks or to produce novels to give credibility to that which has no basis in regards to state administration of these territories. Thanks to Smith’s analysis, books like Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo, for example, are not only texts from which to construct a moral x-ray of the horrors of civilization in the region, but also are revealed as fictions that contribute to perpetrating these horrors.   César Calvo’s novel has been read as a proposal to experience in another manner, perhaps less utilitarian, the relations between the human world and the more than human through the knowledge imparted through ayahuasca. His explorations of circularity and repetition—of what is not completed and what does no progress—although they can be read as a manner of understanding the Amazon as that territory that is not, as Smith says,  “a means to an end” (155), reveal to us in his analysis as an accomplice, precisely, of the Amazon as a transitional space that permits urban tourists to continue to view the territory through an exotic lens and to separate it from its relation with more material (and terrible) forms of global capitalism.

The connection between the world of images —or a history of the representations of the Amazon— and the world of events, and how each feeds on the way we see the others is, after all, one of the principal tenets of literary and cultural studies. However, Smith in her book makes this framework of “representation-reality-representation” the black thread woven through her five chapters. In her first chapter, Smith shows how La vorágine is a novel tied to the author’s frustrating experience as a member of the Border Commission between Colombia and Venezuela and the denunciations of its failure in the Colombian Congress.  However, Smith goes beyond this fact to underline how this failure emerges aesthetically from the novel in a double-fold way: an impulse to demonstrate how the novel is a “cartographic illusion” in producing the image of the Amazon as a space susceptible to being appropriated by cartography—with all the ensuing complications—and at the same time is an “ecological ensemble” that is impossible to determine with Western conventions.

With Mad María, the last of the chapters in the book, Smith also demonstrates how Marcio Souza represents the Dantesque  construction of the  Madeira-Mamoré (EFMM) train system at the beginning of the century, on one hand, as a way of criticizing in a coded fashion the construction of the Trans-Amazónica Highway during the Brazilian dictatorship and, on the other hand, a way of  showing the contradictions of urban poets, at the same time making the Amazon a central place of origin for Brazilian literature that shows the consequences of creating “a symbolic nativizing of geography in literature” (196).

To sum it up, at the same time these canonic novels are fueled by history, Smith, rather than focusing on the nation-state as its main protagonist (through action or omission), emphasizes indigenous communities, whose histories, beliefs and nature are close to these texts, or indeed as a way of using this history in an “extractive” fashion for their fiction or to show the ignorance that still persists in this world. Thus, Smith’s work follows in the footsteps—and imagines new paths built on their forays—of the foundational studies of the relationship between literature and indigenous knowledge such as Rainforest Literatures de Lúcia Sa or Entangled Edens by Candace Slater. Smith’s contribution is this call, like few today, to awaken new energies in the literary and cultural criticism about the Amazon precisely because she has her feet grounded in the harsh history of the region, while her eyes are focused on different future possibilities for the region.