By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
The writer Euclides da Cunha (1866-1909) he is considered, simultaneously, one of the greatest prose writers (that is, literati) and one of the greatest social thinkers that Brazil has ever had. This feat makes Euclid difficult to classify. However, it is essential for those who are interested in the history of Brazil to know and know the depth of this author's work and unravel the “Brasil de Euclides” .
Euclides da Cunha had a technical training in the field of engineering, a fact that led him to come into contact with great works of positivist philosophy and scientist, as a good part of the Brazilian intelligentsia of that time stopped. Scientism gave decisive tones to Euclides da Cunha's understanding of his country. In addition to this technical-scientific training, Euclides also had a huge inclination to read classical authors, especially literary ones.
Two of his greatest literary endeavors were also the result of expeditions in which he participated through the interior of Brazil from the turn of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. These expeditions, the first to Arraial de Canudos, where he was sent as a war correspondent in 1897, and the second to the Amazon, where he was sent in 1904 as head of a reconnaissance commission for the Alto Purus in order to demarcate the border between Brazil and Peru, provided Euclides with experiences that were immortalized in two works:“Os Sertões” (1902) and “A Margin of History” (published only in 1909, after the author's death).
In the book “Os sertões”, which is divided into three main parts (The Earth, The Man and The Fight), Euclides tried to analyze that Brazil that until then was unknown to Brazilians who lived on the coast. Euclides, more than portraying the intricacies of the fights of government troops against the jagunços allied to Antônio Conselheiro, sought to draw a comprehensive picture of the type of man who inhabited the bowels of Brazil and the way in which the environment (the sertão) shaped their habits and your soul.
In “On the margins of history”, Euclid's concern was the same:more than leading an official expedition for reconnaissance of the territory, he was interested in knowing and understanding what type of human and what kind of civilizational contribution the peoples who inhabited the Amazon gave or would give to Brazil. Both the figure of the sertanejo and the figure of the mestizos who inhabited the Amazon were dissected by Euclides and brought to the fore in the reflection on the Brazilian social and civilizational situation through his works. As evidenced by the Italian researcher specializing in Brazilian literature, Ettore Agró:
O Sertanejo, in this epos negative, is the monstrum, fascinating and terrible, which occupies a hideous Center where the national past is manifested and, at the same time, hidden:it is the rationalized myth of Origin, it is the irrational being that logically, like every foundation, “ goes to the bottom and disappears” leaving in its place only and always a void. Of this space that is at the beginning of time, of this primordial man who remains On the edge of history , only a geographer disguised as a chronicler, only an epic author masquerading as a scientist, tries to recover it, precisely, as a “figure”, that is, as the presence of an absence. (AGRÓ, Ettore Finazzi. Geographies of Memory:Brazilian Literature between History and Genealogy . The 90s:Journal of the Postgraduate Program in History of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Dec 1999 n. 12, p. 12)
* Image credits:Commons