The Devil to Pay in the Backlands     by Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Translated by J.L. Taylor and Harriet De Onis Original title: Grande Sertao: veredas Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Knopf Pub. Date: June 1963 Format: Hardcover ISBN: 9997555449 List Price: $10.00 Not available for ordering

One of the two towering figures of post-War Brazilian fiction (the other being Clarice Lispector), João Guimarães Rosa is best known for his great novel Grande sertão: veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) (1956), in which he singlehandedly reinvented the mythical and cultural significance of the sertão or backlands — the perennial Other of Brazil’s coastal, urban civilisation. In the wake of Euclides da Cunha’s Rebellion in the Backlands (1902) and the Regionalist fiction of the 1930s, the sertão had become synonymous with grinding poverty, cultural and economic backwardness and social exclusion. With The Devil to Pay in the Backlands Guimarães Rosa added a metaphysical and psychological dimension to that world, whose inhabitants, the sertanejos, now grapple with eternal forces: love, violence, good and evil. The sertão has become boundless, coterminous only with the universe itself; as his protagonist Riobaldo says, ‘the sertão is everywhere... the sertão is moving the whole time, you just don’t see it.’

Riobaldo, now an old man and a rancher in the valley of the São Francisco river, recites his ‘caso’, an infinitely extended campside tale, to an anonymous listener who stands both inside and outside the narrative (or inside and outside the sertão), for he might be an actual character, the author himself, or us, the readers. It is the story of his life’s journey as a jagunço, a gunman on the frontiers between northern Minas Gerais and southern Bahia, culminating in his leadership of a band of men and his confrontation with a rival gang leader, Hermogenes. Hermogenes has murdered Riobaldo’s predecessor and, in order to destroy him, Riobaldo must make a pact with the Devil, to whom he offers his soul in exchange for successfully crossing the deadly hostile region of Liso do Sussuarão.

As in the story ‘The Third Bank of the River’ translated in the collection The Jaguar, the idea of the ‘travessia’ or crossing takes on a complex symbolic significance at the heart of the narrative, incorporating a whole set of ethical, metaphysical and even psychoanalytical ramifications. One of the most fascinating of these is Riobaldo’s homoerotic attraction to a fellow gunman, Reinaldo, whom he addresses with feminine overtones as Diadorim. Diadorim’s transexual ambivalence is resolved only when, in his masculine guise, he dies confronting Hermogenes on his beloved’s behalf, a sacrifice that may well be the price exacted by the Devil for his pact. If you’re already intrigued by what sound like extraordinary Latin American variations on the mysticism of the chivalresque romances or the myth of Faust, then you’re well on the way to being hooked by some of the qualities (another is the daringly experimental language) that have made this one of the most studied and written about works of Brazilian fiction.

But Guimarães Rosa’s literary universe wasn’t only confined to the epic space of the sertão, with its cowhands, ranchers and feuding gunmen. In fact, as is clear from the short stories of The Jaguar, a brand-new collection, he was the master of an astonishing variety of narrative situations, registers and voices. These could range from a child’s bittersweet discovery of life’s beauty and transience, to the schizophrenic, stream-of-consciousness monologue of a half-Indian, convinced he is a blood relation of the wildcats he used to hunt; from a would-be scientist’s obsessive and ultimately insane pursuit of his own, elusive mirror-image, to poignant, disturbing and even grotesquely comical dramas of family conflict and disintegration, whether the anonymous folk of the rural interior or the oligarchic dynasties who rule over them. At the heart of all these stories, and of the extraordinary prose-poetry in which they are written, is a fundamental, unifying principle: the frontier, the borderland, the between-place — the ‘third bank of the river’ — where destinies, relationships, identities and words all exist in an endless state of flux.

Paradoxically, though, as well as symbolising the volatility of life, the ‘third bank’ also seems to hold out the possibility of a resting-place, a transcendant stillness within the maelstrom of existence. In one of many stories built around the theme of the journey — life’s journey of challenge and discovery, the existential journey into solitude, alienation and madness, or the journey towards the mystery of death — a small boy is taken to visit the enormous building-site that was the burgeoning new city of Brasília in the late 1950s. Nearly overwhelmed by this spectacle of inexorable change, which he cannot help associating with the prospect of his mother’s death, the boy nevertheless finds consolation in the belief that, like the doll he has mislaid, the things and people we lose do not therefore cease to be, but go on existing in a transcendant eternity, a ‘somewhere’ in memory or in the imagination:

No, his Little Monkey playmate wasn’t lost, in the dark, fathomless deep of the world, not ever. For sure, he’d just be strolling, happening along hereafter, in the other-place, where people and things were always coming and going. The Little Boy smiled at what he’d smiled at, suddenly at one with what he felt: outside the pre-primordial chaos, like the melting apart of a nebula.

Perhaps it is this between-place — ‘perpetually posing the possible’ — that the protagonist’s father is searching for in ‘The Third Bank of the River’ story of the collection, when he sets himself adrift in a canoe, never to come ashore again: a precarious still-point of equilibrium midway across the current, where real time is suspended, where he is gone but not departed, neither here nor there. Like Guimarães Rosa’s sertão, it lies at the threshold between mythical and historical time, between an ageless past and the encroaching, turbulent present. It resists the corrosive, dispersive forces of change yet equally refuses to be petrified within the inert, determinate confines of ordinary time and space. But to assume this condition of indeterminacy, of permanent flux, and seek to transcend the volatility of our existence by immersing oneself in it, is both a courageous and a perilous act, as the man’s son discovers when he offers to take his place in the boat. For one may be swept away and engulfed altogether or left suspended in a limbo of insanity, like the lost soul in ‘The Mirror’, drifting between his reflected self-image and an elusive essence, or the half-Indian Bacuriquirepa in ‘The Jaguar’, who cannot escape his dual identity: both the hunter and the hunted, both the wildcat and its human killer.

Only a special kind of narrative language could meet the challenge of this journey into indeterminacy, into the unceasing race of the river: a prose that constantly overflows into poetry, that wrestles with the task of objectifying human experience while remaining faithful to its irreducible mystery and fluidity, its ambiguities and contradictions. Analogous to its subject-matter, the substance of Guimarães Rosa’s fiction is language in a state of flux — and therefore essentially poetic —, strangely archaic, rustic and modern all at once, pushing insistently at the bounds of what is unsayable and meaningful. It is a challenge beautifully represented in the little girl Pixie’s endless efforts to tell, and re-tell, the improvised tale of ‘The Audacious Mariner’, in her playfully uninhibited experimentation with the magic of words.

The Aldacious Mariner, he did infirmly go off to discover the other places. He went in a ship, and skulduggery, too. He went on his own. The places were far-off, and the sea. The Aldacious Mariner at first missed his mother, his brothers and sisters, his father. He didn’t cry. He did duly have to go. He said: — ‘Will you forget me?’ His ship, the day came for it to leave. The Aldacious Mariner stood waving his white handkerchief, extrinsically, from inside the ship’s going away. The ship went from being near to being far off, but the Aldacious Mariner didn’t turn his back on the people, away from them. The people were actually waving white handkerchieves too. In the end, there was no more ship to be seen, there was only the sea that was left. Then one of them thought and said: — ‘He’s going to discover the places that we’re never going to discover...’ Then, so then, another person said: — ‘He’s going to discover the places, then he’s never going to come back...’ Then yet another one thought and thought, spherically, and said: — ‘So, he must be a bit angry with us, deep down, without knowing it...’ Then they all cried, ever so much, and went home sadly to have their dinner...