J.M. Ferreira de Castro and the Green Hell of Amazonia: On the Origins of the Literary Tradition

Abstract

The article is devoted to the origin and formation of the so-called green hell literature — a variety of Latin American tellurism. The origins of this phenomenon are associated with the work of the famous Brazilian writer and journalist Euclides da Cunha. The novels of the Portuguese-Brazilian regionalist writer José Maria Ferreira de Castro The Jungle (A selva, 1930) and the Colombian José Eustasio Rivera The Vortex ( La vorágine, 1925) are considered as a continuation of the tradition laid down by da Cunha. The paper considers typical features and differences in the approach to the material in The Jungle and The Vortex. The genetic memory of the pioneers is analyzed as a means of recreating the image of the rainforest, which allows Ferreira de Castro to demonstrate the inversion of the traditional myth of the American Eden. The analysis allows to bring out some new features in the image of the Amazonian selva, which were subsequently developed and / or rethought by other writers of the green hell literature: overreaching (going beyond limits), a specific sense of closed space, irrational cruelty, chaos of the self-reproducing primordial nature. It is emphasized that not only heaven and hell, but also many other Biblical and Christian images are recoded and desacralized. The Portuguese-Brazilian tradition of understanding the green hell of da Cunha and Ferreira de Castro with its reliance on the personal experience of the writer, the poetics of testemunho, can be viewed as the first contribution to the concept of marvelous Latin American reality.