Loving Nature in João Guimarães Rosa: The Non-human as 'amável'

Abstract

In the present article, I locate an implicit environmentalism João Guimarães Rosa’s writing from the 1950s and 1960s. This sensibility is easy to miss, in part because it transposes political debates on damage inflicted in the name of development and progress onto the affective-ethical plane; however, it does so in a way that resists sentimentality or projecting a misplaced innocence onto the non-human world. Focusing on emotional relationships between humans and non-humans, I read “As margens da alegria” and “Os cimos” as expressing an eco-critical discourse that was already latent in Grande sertão: veredas. Recasting the natural world as a site of both unfathomable otherness and relations of tenderness, Guimarães Rosa presents the emotional hold that nature has on humans and the cost of cleaving oneself from it—a cost that includes diminishing the human capacity for delight, wonder, and eros.