The Natural Catastrophe in the Sertão: Reading Some Brazilian Novels of the Twentieth Century (Guimarães Rosa, Graciliano Ramos)

In Romantic literature, the region of sertão in the Brazilian Northeast is represented as the heart of Brazilian identity, because conceived as a place having preserved an authenticity lost in the rest of the country in the face of the advance of European civilization. Since the great droughts at the end of the nineteenth century, this same region has fostered a completely opposite literary imagination: that of an universe of catastrophe, destruction and misery. The protagonists, as if by mimicry with the hostile and arid landscape that surrounds them, are also described as hostile to each other, arid in their emotions, in their thoughts, in their words. Why then persist in living in these places that dry out the soul and the body? What is the relationship that binds the characters to their environment? Are climate and « nature » the only factors responsible for reducing man to the state of an animal, or even a plant?
We will attempt to answer these questions through an ecocritical approach to two Brazilian novels: Vidas Secas (1938, translated into English as Barren Lives) by Graciliano Ramos and Grande Sertão Veredas (1956, translated into English as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) by Guimarães Rosa.