"Doña Barbara" by Rómulo Gallegos

[Betty]

I am reading this novel, translated by Robert Malloy and published by The University of Chicago Press. It is a good edition with a sharp print and a reader-friendly typeface.
The story is set in the "Venezuelan llano, or prairie" (back cover), its scenery depicted in descriptive passages. Among the several characters, the plot revolves around Doña Barbara's desire to keep the Altamira ranch from the hands of her city cousin Santos Luzardo.
Your thoughts or review about an aspect of the story, author, or history are welcome.

[James]

Doña Barabara is considered a classic of modern Latin American and world literature; it's on all the Internet lists and syllabi. The Ediciones Cátedra edition which I read, based on the 1954 revision, has an introduction of about a hundred pages by Domingo Miliani, which traces the history of Venezuelan literature from about 1900 to the time the first edition was written in 1929. (The novel was considerably revised the next year, perhaps as Miliani suggests to make it more accesible to non-Venezuelan readers since it was published in Spain, and revised again (and much expanded) for the twenty-fifth anniversary edition in 1954, returning to a more Venezuelan perspective.)

The introduction situates the novel in the context of five tendencies in Venezuelan literature: positivism (I know what this is in philosophy and in politics, but I have no idea what it means as a literary tradition, and Miliani doesn't really explain it); cosmopolitanism, which is largely urban and tries to be part of world literature; regionalism, which emphasizes the specifically Venezuelan experience and especially the experience of rural Venezuela; modernism, which apparently differs from cosmopolitanism in its choice of European models; and vanguardism, which is also not really explained, but seems to be more into symbolism. Doña Barbara is presented as a synthesis (in a very Hegelian sense) of the previous tendencies. This was all very interesting and perhaps I would have understood it better had I read some of the older novels he mentions as examples, but Doña Barbara is the earliest novel I have read so far from Latin America.

After reading the novel, from a North American perspective I think there is much more obvious way to consider the tradition in which this is written. I recall once having a discussion with a friend who had a very dismissive attitude toward "genre" literature (particularly I think in regard to science fiction) as being "not real literature", and I pointed out then, and still believe, that this is an artifact of our classification. If a book has all the characteristics and typical themes of a particular "genre", but has "literary quality" in some hard-to-define but easy-to-perceive sense, it is simply not classified with that "genre". For example, Frankenstein, 1984, Brave New World and Slaughterhouse 5 are not called science fiction novels; they're not usually discussed as science fiction, don't get the science fiction labels in the library, don't get put on the science fiction shelves at the bookstore and so forth, yet they are in fact science fiction. Likewise Pride and Prejudice is not shelved with the romance novels, The Name of the Rose isn't put with the detective novels, and so forth. So "genre" literature is just what remains after one subtracts the books that one considers as "literature".

From this perspective, Doña Barbara seems to me to be something even more rare: a literary-quality Western. It has many of the standard plot elements of a Western: the feud between two cattle-ranchers; the "bad guys" rustling the cattle of the "good guys"; the macho cowboys proving their manhood by breaking horses and lassoing stray cattle; the cattle roundups; the hapless (but beautiful) young woman who needs to be "rescued" by the hero; the displaced Indian tribes in the background; and even the cliché of fencing in the grazing lands. More importantly, there is the same theme of the "taming of the West", the hero who tries to replace the lawless violence of the "wild West" and bring in law and order. Of course the setting for Doña Barbara is not the North American prairies but the Venezuelan Llano, the Llanura, but this seems to have the same sort of culture and the same sort of topography; a land more suited to cattle than farming, located far from the centers of "civilization", given to violence but also to traditions of personal loyalty and honest dealing. The customs and culture of the Llano are described here more in detail and more realistically than in a stereotyped North American Western, though.

Of course there are differences. There are specifically Latin American elements; for example the novel begins with the protagonist, Santos Luzardo, travelling in a small boat up the river. This is almost a standard cliché of Latin American literature; I must have read at least half a dozen Latin American novels in the past year which feature a journey in a small boat or pirogue on an alligator-infested river, whether the Amazon, the Magdalena, the Orinoco, or in this case the Apure. There is the "magical" aspect, which is ambiguous; every example has two explications, magic and rationalization. (The Wikipedia article on the book calls it a forerunner of "magical realism", but that label is given to most Latin American writers before Garcia Marquez; the magic here does not seem to me to be treated in anything like a "magical realist" manner.) Most significantly, there is what I have called the "literary" aspect. The ideas and themes are both more explicit and more nuanced than in a genre Western. The antithesis between the "civilizer" and the "barbarian" is not only between but within the main characters, and doesn't follow the same lines as that between the heroes and villains. To quote a phrase used in the book, "we have to kill the centaur within us". Ultimately, there is an ambiguity about how much civilization is desirable, and at what cost. Then there is the obvious — perhaps at times too obvious — symbolism, as in the names of the main characters: Santos Luzardo, whose name recalls santo or saint, Doña Barbara whose name is literally the Spanish word for barbarian, and the North American Mister Danger (in English in the book). (I read on the Internet that Hugo Chavez used to refer to George Bush as "Mister Danger" alluding to the novel.) Finally, there is a great difference in the way violence is regarded; in the usual Western, it is taken for granted that it is a good thing that the hero defeats the villain in a gunfight, which is the standard climax; in Doña Barbara this is considered a defeat, a failure of the civilizing project. In that sense, we could call this an "anti-Western".

And of course, it's also a romance. And a psychological novel. And perhaps a tale of the supernatural. And maybe even a parable of redemption, in a non-religious sense. Although Santos is the protagonist and we see most of the action through his perspective, the novel is called Doña Barbara and perhaps we could consider it as a tragedy, the rise and fall (and perhaps moral rise) of Doña Barbara herself.

The novel begins with Santos Luzardo, a young man dressed in city clothes, travelling up the Apure; his purpose and destination are not immediately revealed. There is a mysterious and somewhat disreputable man aboard the boat, later identified as El Brujeador, the male witch. We are told second-hand about the other witch, the enigmatic Doña Barbara, the "devourer of men", more or less the incarnation of evil, and Santos is warned against coming into opposition with her. The novel then regresses to give us the background; in the second chapter we learn of the feud of the Luzardos and the Barraqueños, in the third we get the back story of Doña Barabara, and initially feel some sympathy for her, as a young girl who is abused and whose first love is murdered, but then we learn that she has become an enemy of society and especially of men. Santos arrives at his family hata, Altamira, and from the fourth chapter on the novel describes his attempts to rebuild and restore the property and recover whatever he can of the cattle that has been stolen by Doña Barbara and other neighbors such as Mister Danger. Even more than advancing his personal interests, however, he is attempting to subject the Llano to the rule of law.

This is the political content of the novel, the liberal criticism of Venezuelan politics: Doña Barbara represents the same arbitrary rule as the Venezuelan dictatorship, and Santos' emphasis on legality is the position of Gallegos himself. The dictator at the time the novel was set (Juan Vincente Gomez) was still in power at the time it was written and certainly saw the novel as an attack on his regime, and (after an unsuccesful attempt to "co-opt" him) Gallegos was forced into exile, returning after the fall of the dictator to run for President. He was in fact perhaps the first and certainly one of the very few legitimately elected Presidents in the long history of Venezuelan dictators, and was of course removed by a military coup after only serving a few months in office.

The edition I read follows the novel with an appendix comparing the order of chapters in the original and revised editions, and one listing the real persons on whom the fictional characters appear to be based.