The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by Joo Guimares Rosa (trans. James L.

Taylor and Harriet de Ons). Knopf (1963).

[Into] the wilderness we rode; we were going to invade the serto, breast the oceans of
heat.
I.
Joo Guimares Rosas Grande serto: veredas, titled in one of the sole editions
in English, from 1963 (with a reprint published in 1971), as The Devil to Pay in the
Backlands, is a novel in which events unfold like those in dreams. The subjects of the
novel are described with the intensity of a painting, with shifting points of reference
built on and woven into one another: characters within the narrative change names and
identities, pass from life into death with little comment or examination; landscapes
transfigure shape and color like shifting clouds (one character implores others to head
north: the face of the earth there is more to my liking). The total effect of the narrative
is that of a trail of memory spiraling away into the ether, the narrator of the novel
parsing over this trail in order to examine more deeply philosophical questions of great
significance. In passages of beauty and violence, Rosa describes an almost feudalistic
world, one overrun by hired guns fighting for power in a desolate region of Brazil so
intertwined with nature that the novels setting becomes mythological, its inhabitants
experiencing their lives through a filter of strange mysticism.
The novel itself is structured as an extremely long (500 pages in English),
uninterrupted monologue of an old man describing his life to an unnamed listener; the
narrator is known only as Riobaldo, or by his nicknames, Tatarana (a spiny insect), and
Urut-Branco (white rattlesnake). Riobaldo was once, as he tells it, a jaguno, a
member of several renegade mercenary groups fighting against one another in the serto
(hinterland, or backlands) in the northeast of Brazil. (Rosa was himself from the Minas
Gerais state within this area of the country, and in addition to his profession as a writer,
he worked there as both a doctor and diplomat.). Riobaldo describes the serto as a
place so desolate that it is almost a space of nightmares, where the grazing lands have
no fences; where you can keep going ten, fifteen leagues without coming upon a single
house; where a criminal can safely hide out, beyond the reach of the authorities. . . . God
himself, when he comes here, had better come armed! His life exists primarily between
axes of love and violence: he has left behind, in his travels, a woman named Otaclia,
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whom he has promised to marry; he also feels a great, perhaps homosexual, affection
for a fellow jaguno named Diadorim. The love of these two people spurs Riobaldo
onward and down a path of reflection in his wanderings while he traverses through his
experiences as a jaguno at the psychological edge of society.
For a work of such high literary value, Grande Serto: veredas is, regrettably,
widely unavailable in English translation; the editions from Knopf are both difficult to
find and expensive. Contemporary artists whose work might bear comparison to the
combination of ante modern or rural human violence, power, and philosophical
discourse used by Rosa within the novel might include Glauber Rocha; Akira
Kurosawa, especially in films such as Ran; Kagemusha; Throne of Blood; and Seven
Samurai; as well as an author Kurosawa adapted to the screen, Rynosake Akutagawa;
but the landscape of Rosas novel seems to share more with the Old Testament, Homer,
Herodotus, the Gospels, Dante, Poe, Conrad, and Kipling, than it does with
contemporary literature. Over the course of the novel, for example, we encounter such
scenes as: a strange confrontation with a leper in an orchard deep in the backlands; an
attempt by Riobaldo to sell his soul at a crossroads to the devil; a place where the earth
was burned and the ground made noises, and where, in the Brejo do Jatobzinho, in
fear of us, a man hanged himself; a knife fight to the death with a man thought to be
the devil; a jaguno named Ataliba, who, with his big knife, nailed [a] backlander to
the wall of [a] hut; he died quietly, like a saint; and vicious bandit-warriors preparing
for future battles described as such:
it soon became clear to me . . . that they wanted to be known as one
hundred percent jagunos, not alone in deed but in looks as well. I
even saw some of the men off in a corner engaged in a strange
operation: they were chipping off their own teeth, sharpening them to
a point! Can you imagine! The tortures they endured would cause
vomiting, the agony enough to drive you mad.

Riobaldos long monologue itself describes a number of battles and travels

within and around the serto, between chiefs of rival factions of jagunos, and
Riobaldos involvement with, reactions to, and comments on them. Within the novel
there is a fierce law among the jagunos, who exist almost wholly outside of society:
here, the one sentence that means anything is the bullet from a gun. The battles
between rival factions Riobaldo takes part in, moreover, occur for any number of
reasons: revenge; attempts to seize power over a region; or in the case of a minor
warlord named Z Bebeloa jaguno chief who has aspirations in politicskilling and
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imprisoning rivals in order to court favor with the government. Allegiances to different
chiefs can shift in the serto in an instant; Riobaldo himself almost assassinates Z
Bebelo after abandoning him and joining a rival gang, later saves his life in another
battle and impromptu trial, and then joins him again when the chief Riobaldo has left Z
Bebelos group for is in turn assassinated.
II.
This heightened speed with which life at the metaphorical limits of society
represented by the serto can both move and violently end provides a concentrated
philosophical backdrop within the novel. A manner of philosophical discourse occurs
via Riobaldos narrative in two main forms: firstly, there is a physicality to the
descriptions of the actions of the jagunos as they give themselves up to, or take what
they need from, a merciless world, their lives serving as a sort of memento mori for the
reader by illustrating the ephemeral quality of life; secondly (and a point to which I will
return) an emphasis on spiritualism expressed in Riobaldos reflection on the events he
describes exists as a form of Socratic overcoming of the limitations of that physicality
and baseness of human life.
Indeed, physical description of human existence, and its corollary within the
novel of a spiritual overcoming and understanding of the physical aspect of life, serve to
express an idea of human culture as above all else a physical process: we are born,
mature, and die, like all living things, and our lifespans cannot possibly give us enough
time to thoroughly understand the world in which we live. Moreover the physical
process of living isin its impermanenceunknowable and essentially inexpressible in
anything other than the most restricted terms of our conscious thought. It is as though
Riobaldo is conveying, in the heightened state in which he lives his life, a primal aspect
of humanity which is too often overlooked in day-to-day existence, a purely physical
mode of survival of human beings which also serves as a metaphor for that part of our
minds which does not understand the world around us and interprets that world only
through instinct. Rosas novel questions in a mimetic way: to what extent are we like
animals, going about our lives as though in a dream, truly unaware of what goes on
beyond our awareness of the world around us?
This concept of the human body as a physical, transient object within an
environment it cannot understand is overtly reaffirmed in passages describing
inescapable, primal aspects of human society such as war and lust. The many battles
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between groups of jagunos that occur, in particular, emphasize the physical aspect of
human life with great intensity, as in this example from a brutal gunfight between two
rival factions:
The hours were endless. The sun was pouring down on the back of our
necks. The sun, the burning sun, under which I sweated; my hair was
wet, and the inside of my clothing, and I had an itch in the middle of
my back; parts of my body were numb. I kept on shooting.

Descriptions such as these reveal the underlying fatalism governing the lives of
the novels characters. Although death can come at any moment, Riobaldo says of the
possibility of dying in battle: Death? The thing was only a whish and a bullet. At any
rate, you had no choice in the matter. For the jaguno, the time of ones death is
believed to be predetermined, and so it follows that one cannot die in battle unless ones
time for death has come. The inverse of this idea is that if one is not meant to die within
a particular battle, one is invincible, thus reaffirming for the jaguno that warfare is a
natural part of existence, its consequences not the product of the will per se but of an
outsideand more importantly, unknowableforce.
It is as though death, for Riobaldo, is an ineluctable fact whose occurrence
within the present, near, or distant futurewhen compared against the sum total of time
is utterly arbitrary: at one point in his narrative, Riobaldo describes a man who,
worried that he has become afflicted by leprosy, fastidiously cleans his body, but who
also puts himself, to a suicidal extent, in great danger in battles. Riobaldo tells us that
this man courted death because of his fear of leprosy, and at the same time, with the
same tenacity, he strove to heal himself. Crazy, was he? And who isnt, even I or you,
sir? But, I esteemed that man, because at least he knew what he wanted.
In one sense, much like the man who takes care of himself out of fear of his fate
and yet embraces the idea of death, we are each aware that one day we will die, and we
strive to put our destruction out of our minds through ritual or denial. And yet the man
described by Riobaldo is also different to most human beings in his attitude toward life
because in his recklessness he acknowledges that there is no escaping death, and he
confronts, whether consciously or unconsciously, its possibility.
Such a feeling of ambivalence between a state of living or of dying serves to
express a side of human existence which is purely animal; Riobaldo himself earns
respect among the jagunos, and eventually a chiefdom, because he is a perfect
marksman, making death, as it were, an extension of his personality:
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At two-hundred feet I could put a bullet in the socket of a tin candleholder. Not just onceevery time. In this way I put a stop to the thing
that was burning me up, the tittle-tattle. If anyone says anything bad
about me, I dont care. But let them do it behind my back. Anyone
who comes to me blabbing and tale-bearing is a dirty dog, and Ill
teach him the name of the whore who bore him. I let them know. . . .
I can tell when a man only appears to have been killed, when he
doubles up from a wound, or when he falls because he has been
slaughtered. Did I feel pity? Is one going to feel sorry for a wild cat,
or have compassion for a scorpion?

Through such bare physicality Rosa expresses the aspect of the corporeal part of
human life, the idea that we are a living part of a living world, and thus subject to that
worlds consequences; moreover, because we are conscious beings, we may become,
tragically, even more violent than the already destructive world into which we are born.
When Riobaldo chooses to become a deserter from one jaguno gang, he becomes
overwhelmed with fear as he realizes he has given himself up to the destructive power
of men, who act as a violent force far more threatening than nature:
I could not help remembering other tight spots, and recalling what I
knew of those mens bloodthirsty hates, of the cruelties of which they
were capable, drawing out their vengeance with all possible tortures. I
wasnt thinking clearly, I couldnt. Fear would not let me. My head
was in a fog, my brain was spinning. My heart changed position. And
our journey through the night continued. While I suffered the tortures
of fear.

This episode, and the idea that Riobaldo exists at this point between two violent
alternatives within his lifethe violence of nature and exposure, and the violence of
mankindis also important in what it has to say about how human culture creates
outcasts, and the hopeless existence such a state involves. The human being or animal
cast out of society exists, as it were, in a very real hell from which there is almost no
escape. (A literary example of this idea might be found in Thomas Hardys character of
Tess Durbeyfield.) It is one thing to support a war, for example, from the winning side;
quite another to be against that side.
Thus in Rosas attempts to define, as much as possible, exactly what constitutes
human life, and whether we can as human beings understand our own destructive
nature, he leads the reader to a manner of spiritual contemplation about the extent to
which we exist at the mercy of others, and of the world; Riobaldo at one point likens
5

man to a weak thing in himself, soft even, skipping between life and death among the
hard rocks. The world exists to us, Rosa suggests, as something which we perceive
aspects of but cannot totalize; each person perceives a different part of the whole, but
never the whole, and each persons perception of the world, is, for them, the universe,
and a universe which can exclude the possibility of all others, an exclusion that can
manifest itself in symbolic or literal violence. 1 [1] Interacting with a woman who has
just given birth, Riobaldo notes: In taking my leave, I said aloud: My lady, madam: a
boy has been bornthe world has begun again!
III.
In a wider sense the question of the novel becomes: if each persons version of
life is simply the sum total of their perceptions of the world, what exists outside of the
world that we call our perceptions?
Related to this question is the very underlying motivation of Riobaldos
narrative, in that Riobaldo seems primarily moved to tell the unnamed listener his tale
by his preoccupation with the existence or non-existence of the devil. For Riobaldo, a
sense of spiritual crisis is played out in his concept of an afterlife and the potential state
of his soul in such an afterlife: throughout the narrative he repeatedly and overtly
questions the possibility that the devil exists because he has been in a profound state of
psychological stress following an attempt to sell his soul (an episode of great
importance and much ambiguity within the novel), after which his personality has
grown inexplicably stronger and allowed him the confidence to become a jaguno chief,
and to begin a war against another chief named Hermgenes (also rumored to have
made such a pact). Thus, Riobaldo believes, if the devil exists he is damned; however, if
he can reassure himself by the telling of his narrative that the devil is merely an absurd
concept, then he is saved. Riobaldo says in a moment of reflection, [Were] we with
God? Could a jaguno be? A jagunoa creature paid to commit crimes, bringing
suffering down upon quiet communities, killing and pillaging? How could he be
forgiven?
Moreover, Rosa as a novelist would seem to create, via Riobaldos ruminations
on the devil, some sort of definition for the forces beyond our grasp, and thus an
1 Jacques Derrida once said of animals that the linguistic separation of
man from animals in itself creates and allows the actual violence
shown to them.
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expression of the limitations of human knowledge. It is as though Rosa is exploring

whether or not human beings can come to terms with the state of ignorance into which
they are born, and how such a coming to terms must be accomplished. He tries to dimly
outline a concept of what we cannot know in our limited human perception. In other
words, if we can take Riobaldos recounting his tale as a metaphor for Rosas writing of
his book, we can perhaps compare the exploration of the existence of the devil, as a
motivation for Riobaldos telling of his narrative, with the exploration of the limitations
of human knowledge as a motivation for Rosas writing of his novel; Riobaldos
narrative would become in this way a metaphor for, and a reflection of, the novel itself.
It would thus be through the mystic outlook on the part of Riobaldo that Rosa
completes a literary metaphor for the way in which we apprehend the world around us:
as human beings we are unable to perceive the nature of our lives, and we live in an
uncertain state in which truth is obscure, but is a concept of which we can conceive the
existence. Conscious thought creates the idea of evil, and yet what if, the novel seems to
ask, evil does not have any intrinsic meaning, for at least in the concept of the selling of
a soul there lies the inverse idea that the soul at one time belonged to the seller, and is
thus meaningful at representative of the possibility of salvation, an original point of
goodness to which human beings can return. It is as though Rosa is asking which is the
worse scenario: that we have a soul that is possible to be sold, or have no soul at all? At
one point Riobaldo asks his listener, Doesnt everyone sell his soul? I tell you, sir: the
devil does not exist, there is no devil, yet I sold him my soul. . . . That is what I am
afraid of, my dear sir: we sell our souls, only there is no buyer. Perhaps Rosa suggests
that whether we explain the world beyond us through mysticism or superstition, as
Riobaldo does, or through the superior understanding of science, we are ultimately
deluding ourselves; there is simply too much that we cannot understand or hope to
understand within the universe. Perhaps also in becoming conscious we have given
away some part of ourselves that is irreplaceable and unknowable. In The Seventh Seal,
the knight asks Death if, at the hour of his own passing, Death will reveal his secrets to
him. Death replies, I have no secrets. The knight inquires as to whether Death in fact
knows nothing, to which Death replies, I am unknowing. A similar burden and
paradox of consciousness is expressed in Grand Serto.
Three scenes within the novel in particular are striking symbols of the limits of
what we can know as human beings. In one, the jaguno group that Riobaldo is a part of
is under siege within a house, thick cowhides around the interior walls of the building
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serving as their only protection by absorbing the impact of thousands of bullets fired at
them. In a moment of quiet after they are fired on, a butterfly comes in through a
window, which Riobaldo says appears to be peace itself. The butterfly, in its lack of
consciousness, is unaware and incapable of understanding the situation of great violence
occurring all around it. As though to reaffirm this symbol, in the same battle, the
opposing sideunable to kill their rivals through the buildingbegin shooting those
rivals (including Riobaldos) horses. The horses cry out against the slaughter and are
left suffering on the ground as their masterswho cannot leave the house because they
will themselves be shotcan only listen. Riobaldo and the other men passionately
desire to go out of the building to kill the horses out of mercy, but they know that they
will also be killed.
The horses, like the butterfly, are profound symbols of what it means to perceive
the world as a human being; they do not understand why destruction occurs on all sides
of them, or causes them pain, or comes down on them at random; something that is so
meaningful and perversely rooted in reason to men as a battle is for the animals
something bringing death with no explanation and no meaning. This is very much like
our existence in the natural world; we simply cannotas much as we delude ourselves
understand either ourselves or the violent forces that surround us, much less their
meaning, if there is any, however much we may believe that we do. Like the knight in
Bergmans film, we strive after secrets which do not exist, and long to understand the
very negation of understanding.
In a third symbol, a jaguno gang has taken up in a brothel, and after a heavy
meal and drinks one of their younger members falls asleep at a table. Riobaldo notes
that the boy is carried in his sleep to a soft bed by beautiful women, but never knows
that this event has occurred. This is another profound symbol of what it means to be
human: we exist in life as though we are asleep, unaware of what is beyond those things
of which we are able to understand in the dimness of our consciousness, whether it is
that we are, in a symbolic sense, brought to violent ends by devils, or unknowingly
carried to rest by angels.
Here again it is not just that Grande serto is describing Riobaldos exploits; it is
describing a person who exists at the limits of human existence and who functions as a
sort of everyman, expressing in his travels what he has discovered about human nature
at those limits. Ribaldo tells his listener, I am an ignorant man, but tell me, sir, is life
not a terrible thing? Still another reason Riobaldo would seem to put forth his narrative
8

is to describe, over the course of his journey with the jagunos and his possible
encounter with the devil, is his overcoming of fear, via courage, as an act deeply
attached to an overcoming of ones perception. Riobaldo says at one point,
I would like to understand about fear and about courage, and
about passions that drive us into doing so many things, that give shape
to events. What leads us into strange, evil behavior is that we are so
close to that which is ours, by right, and do not know it, do not, do
not!

The world of Grande serto is unlimited in its dangers, and again, the dominant
types of human experience are basewar, lust, and fearand drive us into a sort of
madness. The only answer in confronting the latter, as Riobaldo would suggest through
his narrative, is to overcome animal instinct through courage, a force of action that
becomes an almost philosophical undertaking, similar to Socrates pitting of reason
against brute oblivion in confronting his own death sentence. Indeed, an important fact
within the novel is that what separates Riobaldo from his fellow jagunos is a Socratic
distance (however tempered by provincial fatalism and mysticism his outlook may also
be). He is unable, in his constant philosophical reflections on the nature of existence, as
unsophisticated as they might be at times, to fully immerse himself in the world of the
jagunos; he can only be swept along in the tide of life, as it were, so long as he can
view the process as a philosophical experience while others simply come to terms with
their place in the world.
Riobaldo concludes at one point within his narrative that Living is a dangerous
business, isnt it? Because we are still ignorant. Because learning-to-live is living
itself. Because we only live a single life, Riobaldo seems to say, we are born into a
world from which we have no other context to judge the nature of our existence, and no
other perspective from which to judge the lives of others except our owncreating
within this state of ignorance an arbitrary quality to the reasons and explanations we
ascribe to that existence. It is the expression of this idea, and the beauty with which
Rosa expresses it, that elevates the novel to a work of art.
Jordan Anderson is a writer living in Oregon whose main interests are the 19th century
and contemporary literatures. He can be reached at anders [dot] jordan [at] gmail [dot]
com.