The Violent Land Read Free Page A

(Kurtz) who embraces the savage world and dooms himself. This is certainly one way to understand the voyage that inaugurates
The Violent Land,
a shift into a reality where the ethical norms of civilization do not apply.
    Amado’s ship carries two kinds of passengers: Juca Badaró is returning to his plantation and, in the process, casting an eye over the human stock aboard to pick out both likely workers and attractive women. He will find both. The other passengers are laborers, eager to get rich but ignorant of the hell they are about to enter, and opportunists (cardsharps and con men) looking for potential victims and profit. We readers are on the boat with them, so we, too, are leaving behind our familiar reality and entering the world of cacao. When we move beyond Ilhéus to the town of Tabocas, we are beyond civilization.
    This very effective opening itself contains problems the author must solve. First, if the Ilhéus territory is different, it must have its own rules. It does: the colonels use raw, violent power or legal chicanery either to kill competitors or to cheat them out of property. Amado makes no specific references to actual dates, only to months and the growing season. Readers of Gabriel García Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude
(1967) will immediately recognize this technique. García Márquez reinforces the self-contained, fictional nature of the community he creates (Macondo) by eliminating all references to real history. In
The Violent Land,
when we are in cacao country, we live its reality and no other.
    And because everything is subordinated to cacao, there can be no dominant protagonist. This, too, is a technique used by García Márquez, who subordinates all his characters to the story of Macondo. At first glance this technique seems to contradict Amado’s ideological program: not having a protagonist to embody the contradictions of cacao society might seem an artistic error, but since everyone in the novel is smeared with the “cacao slime,” all are involved in the drama of the colonels. This is precisely the point Amado seeks to make: in submitting to the power of cacao, his characters willfully shed their individuality and become slaves to chocolate. Naturally their psychological development is compromised: Amado does not explore his characters’ inner lives, preferring to substitute action for deep personality.
    This technique of making characters embody ideas (cacao production, in this case) was pioneered in Brazil in the late nineteenth century by Machado de Assis (1839–1908), whose characters are also two-dimensional. Psychology gives way in his work, as it does in most of the Spanish American novels of the twentieth century, to stereotype. Amado cannot let his characters become too human, because that would make them interesting in themselves and not a reflection of the history of Brazilian cacao. His characters may have idiosyncrasies—they may believe in black magic, go insane, or become sexually infatuated with one another—but we do not find the narrator delving deeply into their minds to reveal hidden facets of their personalities.
    This reduction of character is also reflected in the plot. There can be only one story in
The Violent Land,
the clash of the colonels. And Amado pursues it relentlessly, passing from one colonel to the other, describing their foibles, their crimes, and the basic traits of all those who follow them. Complications are few, so once set in motion, the novel rushes inexorably to its climax. In this, too, Amado showed Latin Americans a way to write fiction that would define specific moments in national history. In such texts neither psychology nor plot intricacies has any place. At stake is defining a world as it passes from one phase to another.
    Amado ends his novel on an ironic note. The last colonel standing, Horacio da Silveira, announces the dawn of a new era made possible by his violence. Colonel