"La Voragine": Circling the Triangle
1976; American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese; Volume: 59; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/340513
ISSN2153-6414
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American Literature Studies
Resumoria and Frutos de mi tierra, La vordgine (1924) by Jose Eustasio Rivera (18881928) has often been wrongly faulted for its apparent lack of unity,x and for having spawned a whole series of geographical novels.2 La vordgine, however, should not be compared with the many unsophisticated telluric novels that followed in its footsteps. In addition to being a strong novel of social protest, La vordgine is also a complex pessimistic Christian vision of man's fall from Paradise and his punishment and ultimate death in the concentric circles of Hell. In realistic and historical terms,3 Rivera's Hell is located in thie rubber-producing Colombian jungle, but this does not preclude its identification with the dark wood of Dante's Inferno or with the black whirlpool of Vergil's Aeneid: By the Stygian stream of his brother, by banks full of pitch, / And that whirlpool so black. . . .4 In a kind of rebuttal to Dante's Divine Comedy in which the pilgrim-poet starts his journey in the Inferno and gradually works his way up through the concentric circles to Paradise, Arturo Cova descends from the Paradise of the cordillera, ambiguous as it may be, and does not stop spinning downward until he falls unredeemed into the bottomless pit of the infernal jungle, personified by Zoraida Ayram, the Jungian prototype of the Terrible Mother. If Dante is saved with the aid of his poet-guide Vergil and his idealized Beatrice, Arturo and his alteregos are condemned precisely because of women, while poets are considered utterly helpless in dealing with the problems of reality: Pobre fantasia de los poetas que s6!o conocen las soledades domesticadas.5 The importance of The Divine Comedy to the basic structure of La vordgine, as well as the clear presence of The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid,6 Orlando Furioso, and Don Quixote belie the regionalistic label often applied disparagingly to Rivera's novel.
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