The Cacti and the Titans: Producing the Concept of “Sertão”

Abstract

The concept “sertão”, generally used to refer to certain spaces in Brazil characterized by distance from large cities, a drought landscape, political conditions of violence and misery and a context of folkloric and religious culture, is a cultural construction. Therefore, literature played an important role in its development, with emphasis on the name of Euclides da Cunha. At the time of writing Rebellion in the Backlands, however, the writer had few theoretical and artistic references that would offer him a tradition of how to aestheticize the caatinga landscape and country culture. So, when he was in Belo Monte and wrote his main work, Euclides developed procedures to symbolize, in an unprecedented way, that space, seeking inspiration in the scientism of the 19th century, in the classicist aesthetics of the first chroniclers of the “New World”, as well as carrying Rebellion in the Backlands of a typically baroque “adjectivism”. The aim of this article is to investigate how the writer developed ways of abstracting the sertão and, also, how his book instituted certain literary conventions from which the space and country culture began to be traditionally symbolized.