“But Cooper, say the critics, describes American nature. And what was he to describe if not the scene of his drama? Walter Scott before him had provided the model for these pen landscapes that form part of local color.
“What should be investigated is whether the descriptions of Guarany show any relationship or affinity to Cooper’s descriptions; but this is what the critics fail to do, for it means work and requires thought. In the meantime the comparison serves to show that they resemble each other neither in genre nor style.”[18]
The Brazilian novelist, presenting thus his own case, hits precisely upon those two qualities—sea lore and realism—for which Cooper only yesterday, fifty years after Alencar wrote this piece of auto-criticism, was rediscovered to United States readers by Professor Carl Van Doren. “Not only did he outdo Scott in sheer accuracy,” writes the critic of the United States novel, “but he created a new literary type, the tale of adventure on the sea, in which, though he was to have many followers in almost every modern language, he has not been surpassed for vigour and swift rush of narrative.”[19]
Alencar is no realist nor is he concerned with sheer accuracy. Guarany, the one book by which he is sure to be remembered for many a year, is, as we have seen, a prose poem in which the love of the Indian prince Pery for the white Cecy, daughter of a Portuguese noble, is unfolded against a sumptuous tapestry of the national scene. Alencar wrote other novels, of the cities, but in Brazilian literature he is identified with his peculiar Indianism. From the stylistic standpoint he has been accused of bad writing; like so many of his predecessors—and followers—he plays occasional havoc with syntax, as if the wild regions he depicts demanded an analogous anarchy of language. Yet Costa, granting all this, adds that “before José de Alencar the Portuguese language as written in Brazil was, without exaggeration, a horrible affair. What man today possesses sufficient courage to brave with light heart that voluminous agglomeration of verses in the Confederacão dos Tamoyos, in Colombo, in Caramurú or Uruguay? In prose … but let us rather not speak of it. It is enough to read the novels of Teixeira de Souza and Manoel de Almeida.”[20] This same style is viewed by others as a herald of the nervous prose of another man of the sertões, Euclydes da Cunha, who has enshrined them in one of the central works of modern Brazil.
Sertanismo itself, however, was initiated by Bernardo Joaquim da Silva Guimarães (1827-1885) in such works as Pelo Sertão, Mauricio, Escrava Isaura. He was followed in this employment of the sertão as material for fiction by Franklin Tavora (1842-1888) and particularly Escragnole Taunay (1843-1899), whose Innocencia, according to Verissimo, is one of the country’s few genuinely original novels. Mérou, in 1900, called it “the best novel written in South America by a South American,”—a compliment later paid by Guglielmo Ferrero to Graça Aranha’s Chanaan. Viscount Taunay’s famous work—one might call it one of the central productions of Brazilian fiction—is but scant fare to the contemporary appetite in fiction, yet it has been twice translated into French, and has been put into English, Italian, German, Danish and even Japanese.
The scene is laid in the deserted Matto Grosso, a favourite background of the author’s. Innocencia, all that her name implies, dwells secluded with her father, a miner, her negress slave Conga and her Caliban-like dwarf Tico, who is in love with Innocencia, the Miranda of this district. Into her life comes the itinerant physician Cirino de Campos, who is called by her father to cure her of the fever. Cirino proves her Ferdinand; they make love in secret, for she is meant by paternal arrangement for a mere brute of a mule-driver, Manecão by name. Innocencia vows herself to Cirino, when the mule-driver comes to enforce his prior claim; the father, bound by his word of honour, sides with the primitive lover. Innocencia resists; Manecão avenges himself by killing the doctor. A comic figure of a German scientist adds humour and a certain poignant irony to the tale.
Students of Spanish-American letters are acquainted with the Colombian novel Maria by the half-Jew Jorge Isaacs; it has been termed a sister work to Innocencia and if it happens to be, as is my opinion, superior to the Brazilian, a comparison reveals complementary qualities in each. The Spanish-American work is rather an idyll, instinct with poetry; Innocencia, by no means devoid of poetry, is more melodramatic and of stouter texture. Taunay, in Brazilian fiction, is noted for having introduced an element of moderation in passion and characterization, due perhaps to his French provenience. His widely-known account of an episode in the war with Paraguay was, indeed, first written in French.
Manoel Antonio de Almeida (1830-1861) in his Memorias de um Sargento de Milicias had made a premature attempt to introduce the realistic novel; his early death robbed the nation of a most promising figure.