Dangerous Illusions and Shining Utopias

Abstract

Jorge Amado (1912–2001) is arguably the Latin American fiction writer who has addressed the topic of outlaw rural violence and its role (or lack thereof) in class-based revolutionary social change with the most perseverance and coherence. As a whole, his work is a sustained (and totalizing) exploration of northeastern life, mainly Bahian. Nearly all walks of life have found a place in his work: urban elites (large exporters, bankers, industrialists and wealthy merchants, senators and governors); urban middle classes (professional, commercial, intellectual, conservative, liberal, and radical); urban workers and urban riff-raff of all sorts (prostitutes and pimps, out-and-out criminals and borderline malandros [rascals], the lumpen proletariat, con artists, thieves, beggars, and street urchins); larger-than-life planters as well as oppressed plantation workers, peasants and squatters, immigrants, popular and elite poets, sailors, fascist militants and Communist Party members, torturers and revolutionary martyrs, Roman Catholic beatos (devotees) and Afro-Bahian pais-de-santo (candomblé priests). In this rich cast of characters, rural outlaws play a paramount role. Amado’s literary production features all varieties of outlaws, from social bandits and avengers (cangaceiros) settling real or imagined old scores to hired gunmen (jagunços) who either are loyal to their masters (as in Terras do Sem Fim [The Violent Land; 1943]) or hold more duplicitous allegiances (as in Cacau [Cacao; 1933]).

It is Captain Corisco confronting the Dragon of Wealth.

—Corisco in Glauber Rocha, Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Black God, White Devil)¹