An Ecocritical Analysis of The Old Man Who Read Love Stories by
Luis Sepúlveda
Copyright © 2005 by Camilo Gomides and Joseph
Henry Vogel
Support provided by The Institutional Research Fund
(FIPI) of The
Office of Dean of Graduate Studies and Research (DEGI)
of
The
Camilo Gomides, PhD Joseph Henry Vogel,
PhD
Assistant Professor Director,
Research Unit
Department of Foreign Languages Department
of Economics
University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras
Introduction
The Old Man Who
Read Love Stories by Luis Sepúlveda is a polemic about Amazonian deforestation. Readers
will be reminded of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(UTC) by Harriet Beecher Stowe for a variety of reasons that will be developed
in this article. Obvious among them is that an old man is the literary vehicle
to flesh out the intricacies of an horrific system. The central message of The Old Man is that no moral alternative
exists but to change the system. One can say that preservation is for Sepúlveda,
what emancipation was for Stowe, a considered judgment and non-negotiable. Also
like Stowe, Sepúlveda does not suggest what will be the solutions to the
problems that will arise under a new system. Instead, the story instills faith
that still unknown solutions are within our lens of resolution.
We will make the argument that the challenge for
Sepúlveda is the same one that faced Stowe: how to motivate an unsympathetic
and inured reader to take action on a personal level as well as in the
political sphere. Stowe’s answer was to delve into the complexity of slavery
and show how it penetrates and degrades all aspects of society. “Slavery is
despotism,” she wrote, and the nation would not be absolved from its sin
(Chapter XV The Key). The victims were not just the slaves but also the
damned slaveholders and society-at-large. In our more secular times, such an
appeal would probably not work. Nevertheless, Sepúlveda does something
reminiscent of Stowe; he shows that deforestation is madness and the victims
are not just the people, flora, and fauna of the Amazon but also man’s
humanity. To win over readers, he sets the story amidst a natural wonder which
is beautifully captured on the bookjacket (Figure 1). Against a glossy black
background is a Rosseau-like collage of the non-human cast. Any biophobia that
the reader may harbor against the jungle quickly dissipates and morphs into a
biophilia for the rainforest.
Figure 1. The
Old Man Who Read Love Stories (Un
Viejo que leía novelas de amor) (Design by Guillemot-Navares, 47th
printing, Tusquets Editores,
A Key to The Deforestation Genre
For any polemic to be taken seriously, the story must
be verisimilar. Stowe understood this and immediately answered her critics who
claimed that the characters of UTC were overdrawn and the story, impossible
(Gilbertson 147-148). Within a year of publishing UTC, she assembled A Key to Uncle Tom’s
Cabin Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon which the Story is
Founded together with Corroborative Statements verifying the Truth of the Work. Stowe felt that The Key was necessary to
preserve the purpose of the book: abolition---the issue of her day. Many would say that the issue of our day is
mass extinction. E.O. Wilson, the illustrious Professor Emeritus of
If
Stowe dashed off The Key to answer her critics;
because Sepúlveda does not have analogous critics, he probably has felt no need
to dash off an analogous key. But this does not mean that the vested interests
of the deforestation system will not some day feel threatened by a genre of art
that attacks the system. As UTC demonstrates, well written books have a long
shelf life (N.B. UTC has never gone out of print). Therefore, a key to
the genre of tropical deforestation can become a preemptive tool should any
particular work of art about the deforestation system some day take off.
In making this argument, we hasten to add that
assessing the verisimilitude of The Old
Man is a far more difficult task than the one which confronted Stowe. She
could rely on newspaper accounts and court verdicts to substantiate the
atrocities that befell poor Tom and his fellow slaves. A single documented
event was enough to make her case that the slave system was responsible. The frequency
of atrocities (e.g., brutal whippings, forced prostitution, separation of
families on the slave block, etc.) was not a necessary condition to make the
case for abolition in the mid-nineteenth century. Would that be the case for
Amazonian deforestation! Statistical analysis has become the sine qua non
of science and, insidiously, leads the technocracy to deprecate individual
atrocities as “anomalies” or, in the vernacular, “anecdotes.” Less
sophisticated spokespersons for the vested interests pick up the rhetoric and
further dumb it down to “a few bad apples.” Once classified as an anomaly, an
anecdote, or a bad apple, consciousness withers and a “percepticide” emerges
where spectators “deny what they [see] and, by turning away, collude with the
violence around them” (
One can assess the
verisimilitude of The Old Man by comparing different aspects of the story with the
statistical interpretations of the data regarding the causes and effects of
deforestation. Sven Wunder, an economist with The Center for International
Forestry Research (CIFOR), has identified three schools of thought by which the
voluminous literature about Amazonian deforestation can be classified. The
schools answer six core questions about deforestation (Table 1). A key to the
deforestation genre can be constructed by simply assessing its verisimilitude
according to each of three schools on the six questions identified by Wunder.
As we will show, distinct aspects of The Old Man illustrate one or more
of the schools. Curiously, some aspects imply answers that are not to be found
in any of the three. In other words, The Old Man takes us beyond a
simple synthesis of known interpretations. This is a startling conclusion for
the science of Amazonian deforestation and exemplifies what we will call an
“Ecocritical School of Deforestation,” where ecocriticism is defined as
The field of enquiry that
analyzes and promotes works of art which raise moral questions about human
interactions with nature while also motivating audiences to live within a limit
that will be binding over generations. (Gomides)
Table 1. Key to The Deforestation Genre: Three deforestation
schools from Wunder (49) and our ecocritical alternative
|
Questions |
‘Impoverishment’ School |
‘Neoclassical’ School |
‘Political
Ecology’ School |
‘ |
|
1. What main, single
factor is responsible for deforestation? |
‘The growing number
of poor’ |
‘Open-access property rights’ |
‘Capitalist
investors crowd out peasants’ |
Percepticide:
‘Denial of the multiple atrocities (e.g., genocide, forced prostitution,
political assassinations, and ecocide’) and intrinsic worth of conservation’ |
|
2. Who is the
principal deforestation agent? |
‘Smallholders’ |
‘Various agents’ |
‘Capitalists entrepreneurs’ |
Proximate
causation-road construction, resource exploitation, etc.; ultimate
causation-those who choose ignorance or are inured by the atrocities and the
heads-of-state who lack leadership |
|
3. What is driving
the dynamics of deforestation? |
‘A gradual push with
deterministic, vicious circles’ |
‘Optimising agents
react to pull incentives’ |
‘Capitalist pull, land expulsion and
small-holder push’ |
Irrelevant question
in the light of the exigency of limits |
|
4. What are the
impacts of demographics and labour absorption? |
‘Absorption is low;
labour abundance boosts deforestation’ |
‘Labour mobility is
high and labour supply very elastic’ |
‘General labour
scarcity at frontier causes deforestation’ |
Beyond our lens of
resolution and also irrelevant in light of the exigency of limits. |
|
5. What are the
effects of a rise in the peasant’s farm output prices? |
‘Causes lower farm
production and less deforestation’ |
‘Causes higher farm
production and more deforestation’ |
‘Causes lower farm
production and less deforestation’ |
A nefarious question
given its tacit acceptance of a trade-off between the multiple atrocities and
money |
|
6. What are the most
promising policy options to effectively enhance [ameliorate] |
‘Alleviate poverty,
stimulate the rural economy, agricultural intensification, close resource
gaps (food, energy), promote population policies |
‘Establish private
and secure property rights, eliminate policies providing distortive
deforestation incentives, correct market failures’ |
‘Strengthen
community-based management, secure smallholder’s land rights, eliminate
frontier expansion policies, reduce Northern consumption |
Conscience-raising
on a massive and unprecedented scale to
inspire political support for binding limits on land use while also
internalizing the externalities which could make the limits palatable in the
short-run; re-formulate education in the light of evolution to make
preferences sustainable in the long-run |
An Ecocritical Analysis in Five Acts
Act One: Mise-en-Scene
The story begins on a river wharf in a remote
Amazonian town called El Idilio where a dilapidated boat, named the
What do we first learn of the book’s protagonist,
Antonio José Bolívar Proaño, referred to simply as “the old man”? (7) First,
that he is fit and of good humor as he jokes about his longevity. The dentist
asks Antonio why he doesn't use his dentures, to which Antonio replies “I’ll
pop them in right away. I wasn’t eating or talking, so what was the point of
wearing them?” (8). Surely, the dentures of the old man would outlive the old
man. Antonio puts away his dentures because his nature is to conserve! From
this scene, the reader may deduce a fundamental lesson of sustainability that
lies in the formation of preferences: internalize conservation as a habit---use
something only when it is needed. Precisely because the metaphor is reminiscent
of the Marxist aphorism to each according to his need, this and other
messages in The Old Man will be associated with political movements that
are leftist in nature. As a metaphor for what the North should be doing in
behalf of the South, the philosophy of Antonio fits neatly into the mosaic of
options to ameliorate deforestation provided by the “political-ecology school,”
viz., “reduce…consumption” (Question #6).
Through the use of a flashback disguised as an old
man’s penchant to reminisce, Sepúlveda juxtaposes Antonio’s ethics with one of
the dentist's most memorable patients: a gold prospector who has no ethics
whatsoever, not even toward fellow gold prospectors. “They were gold
prospectors of no fixed adobe. People called them the wanderers, and they
weren’t fussy they found gold in rivers or in other people’s saddlebags” (8-9).
The gold prospector visits the dentist not because he needs dental care but
because he has waged a bet that he can have all his teeth pulled without
flinching; when the dentist objects, the prospector threatens his life with a
machete. The exchange is a stunning metaphor for the devastation of the Amazon:
the pursuit of the ugly through violence as well as the need for limits on
human choice (Question #6 of the “
The recurrent theme in such vignettes is that the
lives of those who do violence to the Amazon (the colonists, the miners, etc.,)
are undesirable compared to those of their primary victims (the indigenous
peoples). To the extent that the indigenous way of life reflects a markedly
better alternative (even evident in native’s teeth), we can infer the need for
conscience-raising on a massive and unprecedented scale (Question #6 of the “
In short, a land ethic changes
the role of homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member
and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow members, and also respect
for community as such. In human history, we have learned (I hope) that the
conqueror role is eventually self-defeating. Why? Because it is implicit in
such a role that the conqueror knows (ex cathedra) just what makes the
community clock tick and just what and who is valuable and what and who is
worthless in community life. It always turns out that he knows neither, and
this is why his conquests eventually defeat themselves (Leopold 239-240).
Act
Two: Mixing Metaphors
The relationship of the characters with their
environment is a rich mix of metaphors for the complex system of deforestation.
The narrator makes the sweeping statement that “both the settlers and the gold
prospectors made all kinds of stupid mistakes in the jungle” (49). The
stupidities include felling trees on riverbanks thereby causing sedimentation
and hunting peccaries in heat, thereby turning them into miniature monsters.
Special contempt is reserved for the foreign tourists who: “…unleashed
themselves on the ocelots, cubs and pregnant females alike, and then, before
clearing off, they photographed each other beside dozens of skins staked on
poles” (49). The killing of the young becomes a frightening metaphor of how the
Amazon is currently being abused---as if there were no tomorrow. From the
perspective of the
The ecocritic may even go so far as to say that the
persona of Antonio is one huge metaphor for the School. For example, Antonio
can read but cannot write.
Like the opening scene with the
dentist and the violent miner, other flashbacks lend themselves well to our Key to The Deforestation Genre.
Outstanding among them is the reason Antonio migrated to the Amazon: "The
government was promising large tracts of land and technical help in exchange
for settling the territories disputed with
One may want to say that fate has been unkind to
Antonio and Dolores Encarnación del Santísimo
Antonio’s fantasies of arson go unrealized and his
anger subsides as he adapts to Amazon by reverse assimilation. This is pure
irony and pure “political ecology”---the only way to survive is community-based
management (Question #6); in this case, learning from indigenous cultures. Such
assimilation not only defies government policies that go back to colonial
times, but also makes mockery of such attempts. With reference to the Shuar
community, Antonio relates “They taught them to hunt, fish, build solid huts
that would withstand the rains, and distinguish between edible and poisonous
fruit. Above all, they taught them how
to live in harmony with the jungle” (33).
Through Antonio’s reverse assimilation, Sepúlveda
demonstrates various cost-effective alternatives to deforestation. For example,
to catch parrots, Antonio ferments papayas with ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi) and lets the parrots come drink the mixture
and get drunk. "He caged a pair of blue-and-gold macaws and another of
shapul parakeets, prized as good talkers, and left the rest, wishing them a
happy awakening. He knew their drunken stupor would last about two days. "
(58). In accord with Shuar culture, he does not harvest all the birds, which
reflects sound wildlife management (“
Many examples of ethics lie in apparently trivial
details in The Old Man. Antonio's preference for monkey meat deserves
special mention. It is a well known fact that the transformation of the Amazon
for cattle-grazing is the single worst proximate cause of deforestation. Wunder puts cattle-grazing in historic
context:
The continent’s colonial
heritage encouraged extraction strategies possessing four distinct
characteristics:
·
ecologically uniformed land-use technologies
·
new consumption patterns causing ecological degradation
·
short time-horizons in resource exploitation
·
the continuous generation of open access to virgin agropastoral land.
Cattle, the prime deforesting
sector in Latin America, potentially unites all these four notions: the
introduction of an exotic, heavy-hoofed species to fragile lands, frequent meat
consumption as a land-consuming ‘Westernized habit,’ the objective of rapid
investment returns in a commercial system, and the adoption of land-extensive
pastoral systems (82).
As Wunder implies in the above quote, the ultimate
cause of deforestation lies not in the heavy-hoofed species, etc. but in
consumption patterns (“Westernized habit”). With respect to The Old Man, Antonio's preference for
monkey meat is environmentally friendly. By calling into question consumer
preferences over, say, beef, The Old Man departs radically from the
Neoclassical School which is founded on the premise that “individuals’
preferences are to count” (Samuelson 223) and should not be a control variable. For the
Within a scant five years of having settled in the
Amazon, Antonio knows he will never return to the highlands. When a Shuar asks
him how do the people of the highlands eat if they do not hunt, his reply “They
work. From sunrise to sunset. What fools! What fools! Pronounced the Shuar”
(35). In the reply of the Shuar, one sees a poignant philosophical commentary.
The Amazon is not something to be worked but something to live with, in
harmony, enjoying its bounty within its limits. To do the contrary, as Antonio
learned the hard way, brings misery and death; living with the land brings
peace and well-being.
Recalling that
Sepúlveda wrote the book to help end deforestation, one can interpret Antonio
as a role model for the engaged individual. The joy that accompanies
psychological growth is the reward for having endured an horrific system. Stowe
did something analogous in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (UTC) and it is worthwhile
to return to our previous analogy. One can find a parallel to Antonio in Miss
Ophelia. She hails from
Whipping
and abuse are like laudanum; you have to double the dose as the sensibilities
decline. I saw this early when I became an owner; and I resolved never to
begin, because I did not know when I should stop,---and I resolved, at least,
to protect my own moral nature. The consequence is, that my servants act like
spoiled children; but I think that better than for us both to be brutalized
together. You have talked a great deal about our responsibilities in educating,
cousin. I really wanted you to try with one child, who is a specimen of
thousands among us (274).
In the trials and tribulations of educating Topsy,
Miss Ophelia recognizes and overcomes her own deep-seated prejudices.
She requests that St. Clare draw up a deed of slave ownership, carefully making
sure that the title is duly witnessed. The purpose of the purchase is to
prevent the slave girl from being sold should St. Clare accidentally die. Miss
Ophelia’s caution proves prescient and shortly after securing ownership, St.
Clare is stabbed to death trying to break up a barroom brawl. Tom, his most
beloved and loyal slave to whom he had promised freedom, ends up being
auctioned by St. Clare’s widow. The new owner, Simon Legree, eventually orders
his other slaves to whip Tom to death for Tom’s insolence in having refused to
whip a fellow female slave. Stowe makes perfectly clear that through the
reasoned and deliberate actions of Miss Ophelia, Topsy has been spared a
similar fate. By the end of the book, Topsy has become an upstanding woman of
faith who lives free in
Comparing UTC and The Old Man, one can say that
Antonio and Miss Ophelia serve the same didactic role: the seemingly powerless
can psychologically and philosophically grow and confront the horror of the
system in which they are immersed. With enough Miss Ophelias or Antonios, there
would never have been slavery in the
Returning to the storyline of The Old Man, the
narrator tells the reader that Antonio never re-marries and the reason why is
somewhat obvious: any prospective wife would either have to be another
assimilated colonist (rare or non-existent) or a Shuar woman. The latter is not
an option because Shuar women do not marry non-Shuar men. Antonio respects this
custom and is not sexually frustrated. He accepts the polygamy of the Shuar
culture and sees nothing salacious in the gift by a husband of the sexual
favors of one his wives. To the contrary, Antonio realizes the purity of the
Shuar attitude toward sex and love:
It was pure love with no other
end than love itself. Without possession and without jealousy. Nobody can tie down a thunderbolt and nobody
can take for his own the rapture of the other at the moment of abandon. So his friend Nushiño once explained to him
(42).
Acceptance of cultural differences in matters of sex
can also be viewed as a metaphor for acceptance of the environment in its natural
state. Just as Antonio has difficulty imaging the backdrop of a love story set
in a medieval city of canals and gondolas, the reader is probably faced with
his or her own poverty of imagination and misinterpretations regarding the
Amazon, its native inhabitants, and the once sustainable system of land use
that predated the conquest. Without hailing from the Amazon, one can probably
never fully imagine it, and may be easily mislead by misconceptions 'to write
upon it'. The central message of the metaphor of “books of love” is that one
should take delight in the possibilities of one’s own imagination and, by
recognizing one’s limitations, be respectful of the right to existence of
another reality.
The drowsy afternoon enveloped
him, lost in such thoughts, and he stretched out on his hammock, smiling wryly
as he imagined people opening their front doors, stepping outside, and falling
straight into the river (74).
Such emphasis on the enjoyment derived from acceptance
of differences goes beyond the established schools of thought and helps define
what is the
Act III: Catharsis
The wonder of the Amazon and its sustainable uses are
poignantly illustrated in the vignette of the snakebite. A poisonous snake,
known simply as the X, bites Antonio; Nushiño, his Shuar friend, nurses him
back to health with various medicinal plants. These medicines are the result of
thousands of years of coexistence with the rainforest and experimentation with
its biodiversity; it is one of many utilitarian reasons that the cultures of
the Amazon must be protected from the system of deforestation. As Carl Sagan
perceived: "Absolutely essential, life-saving information can be acquired
from folk medicine and in no other way” (251-252).
The near-death experience proves cathartic and
illuminates the intrinsic value of the Shuar way of life. To celebrate life,
Antonio drinks an infusion of the hallucinogenic natema (the Shuar term
for the species Banisteriopsis caapi more commonly known by its name in
Quichua ayahuasca). His senses are sharpened and
...thinking and feeling like a
Shuar; then, wearing the garb of a skilled hunter, he was following the tracks
of a mysterious animal, without shape or substance, smell or sound, but endowed
with two bright yellow eyes. (38)
Antonio learns how to hypnotize snakes by confusing
them with certain movements and sounds, grabbing them below the head to milk
the poison from their fangs. “Every six months an agent turned up from a
laboratory where they prepared antisnake serum, to buy the lethal vials” (40).
The verisimilitude of Antonio’s ophidiophobia/ophidiofilia can be gauged by a
well-known hypothesis in evolutionary psychology:
1. Poisonous snakes cause
sickness and death in primates and other mammals throughout the world.
2.
3. Human beings are
genetically averse to snakes. They are quick to develop fear and even
full-blown phobias with very little negative reinforcement...
4. In a manner true to their
status as
5. People in diverse cultures
dream more about serpents than any other kind of animal, conjuring as they do
so a rich medley of dread and magical power. When shamans and religious
prophets report such images, they invest them with mystery and symbolic
authority. In what seems to be a logical consequence, serpents are also
prominent agents in mythology and religion in a majority of cultures (Kellert
and Wilson 33-34).
Despite our common evolutionary heritage in
biophilia/biophobia, illustrated so dramatically in the case of snakes, limits
do exist in the ability of any adult individual to acculturate. Such limits are
an unwelcome fact for advocates of community-based management (Question #6
Life in the jungle
tempered every inch of his body. He
acquired feline muscles that hardened with the pasaje of time. He knew the jungle as well as a Shuar. He could track as well as a Shuar. He swam as well as a Shuar. In short, he was like them, and yet was not
one of them. That was why he had to go away from time to time; as they
explained to him, it was good for him not to be one of them. They wanted to see
him, have him with them, but also wanted to feel his absence, the sadness of
being unable to talk to him, and the joy in their hearts when they saw him
again (40-41).
Proof of the impossibility of complete acculturation
comes when Antonio avenges the murder of Nushiño. Antonio tracks down and
shoots the murderer, a gold prospector. By not having killed him with a poison
dart, Antonio has foreclosed the possibility of capturing the murderer’s dying
expression through the shrinking of his head. According to the Shuar religion,
only that shrunken head could free Nushiño’s spirit. So, the community is
heartbroken that Nushiño in death will bump around in the jungle like a blind
parrot. Antonio is shunned and exiled. “He was like them, and yet was not one
of them” is the refrain repeated in the text; it serves as a powerful metaphor
for land use. The sustainability of the Amazon cannot be achieved simply by
acquiring and applying a subset of indigenous techniques of land management.
Something critical will always be missing and it is hubris to think that
science will know enough about indigenous land management to simulate the
sustainability that indigenous people achieved for millennia. Antonio’s
gracious acquiescence to the exile is a powerful metaphor that Western peoples
should also allow the indigenous people to manage the Amazon as they have for
millennia.
Act IV: The Juxtaposition of Characters as a Metaphor
for Land Use
Accompanied by the obsequious
mayor who is always seeking personal gain, American tourists barge into
Antonio's humble home. One takes a fancy to the portrait of Dolores Encarnación
del Santísimo
A few days later, the mayor returns. He needs Antonio
to find the tourists who have now gone missing in the jungle. They suspect that
the gringos are the victims of the same female ocelot who earlier killed the
other gringo who had skinned her cubs. Antonio is coerced to join the hunting
party otherwise he will lose his home (a loss reminiscent of the shack in the
title of Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Although the role of corruption can be
understood by the neoclassical school as “optimizing agents react[ing] to pull
incentives” (Question #3), the pervasiveness of corruption or “rent-seeking
behavior” is usually lost on neoliberal interpretations of “establish[ing]
private and secure property” (Question #6). The scene should also give pause to
advocates of greater government regulation which often ends up enabling
rent-seeking behavior. The scene captures the double whammy suffered by the
poor inhabitants of the Amazon. Whereas the gringos are there to appropriate
Antonio’s possessions through a forced sale (viz., the fistful of money for the
beloved photo of his departed wife), the State is there to exploit his labor
through blackmail (viz., condemning his house). By linking the failure of both
the private and public sectors to the absence of ethics, The Old Man
reminds us of a comment made by Wilson with respect to mass extinction: “in the
end, I suspect it will come down to a question of ethics.” (17). The best
solution to deforestation seems to be conscience-raising on a vast, almost
unimaginable scale (Question #6 of the
Act V: The Denouement
The pace of the story quickly builds, as Antonio
deploys indigenous knowledge to trace the path of the gringos. There is both
irony and realism in the fact that a troop of monkeys killed the gringos
because of their attachment to the material:
Just imagine the
gringos, with their cameras, watches, silver chains, belt buckles, knives, were
a shining incitement to the monkey’s curiosity...if you have the slightest
thing to attract a monkey’s attention and one swings down from the trees to get
it, you’d better hand it over, whatever it is.
Because if you resist, the monkey will start screaming and in a few
seconds hundreds, thousands of the furry little devils will swoop furiously
down on you (82-83).
Other organisms of the jungle devour the prey clean to
the bone, even making use of the hair in the anthill! Taking in the scene, Antonio
spots one of the culprits, a monkey with a camera around his neck.
The murder scene is a fantastic metaphor of holism;
the entire jungle defends its top predator---the ocelot. As a metaphor, the
indivisibility of the whole goes to the heart of what is wrong with the
neoclassical school approach to land use in the Amazon. Neoclassical economists
look at the problem of deforestation as one of determining how much to fell as
if there were tremendous redundancy and uniformity (López). From biogeography,
one knows that critical minimum habitats are tremendously large expanses of
forest cover (MacArthur and Wilson). So, when one attacks part of the
rainforest, one is attacking a much larger whole.
The crescendo of the hunt is rich in ecological
detail. For example, the light of the mayor’s lantern frightens the bats
triggering the physiological response of defecation. If that were not bad
enough, the members to this party must quickly clean themselves otherwise the
next line of defense will be the mosquitoes and ants. Antonio deploys his
acquired indigenous knowledge to guide the party day and night. The utility of
that knowledge reinforces Antonio's respect for the existence of the Amazon as
it is. This is contrasted to the behavior of the mayor who is easily frightened
and kills indiscriminately, even the anteater:
They followed a
clear trail of blood that increased the mayor’s euphoria, and came upon an
animal with a long nose quivering in its death throes. The handsome mottled yellow coat was covered
with mud and blood (98-99).
Antonio reprimands the mayor “Why
don’t you look before you fire your damned toy?
It’s bad luck to kill an anteater.
Even fools know that. It’s the
most harmless animal in the whole jungle” (99). When the party finally
discovers the bodies of the gringos, they all decide that it is best that
Antonio alone track down the ocelot.
The denouement is now in full play. Antonio and the
female ocelot are two trajectories put in collision by forces outside their own
control: (1) the ocelot crazed by the brutality of the gringos who have killed
its young and (2) Antonio by the brutality of a system that makes him kill what
is also an innocent victim, namely, the ocelot. However, the scene is
unexpected. The ocelot senses Antonio’s “land ethic” and lures him to her mate
who is writhing in pain having been shot by one of the tourists. After Antonio
performs euthanasia on the male ocelot, the female then turns on Antonio (one
daresay with the neoclassical economic logic of marginal benefits/marginal
costs). The fact that Antonio survives and not the female ocelot, is didactic.
One sees the message by considering the alternative---any victory of the ocelot
would imply that the forest will prevail. By having Antonio survive, the
urgency of ending an horrific system is put into high relief
The old man
stroked her, ignoring the pain in his injured foot, and wept tears of shame,
feeling unworthy, degraded, not at all the victor after the battle…Then, in a
fit of rage, he threw in the gun and watched it sink without glory. A metal monster despised by all living
creatures (130-131).
Antonio curses “…the gringo
responsible for the tragedy, the mayor, the gold prospectors, all those who
whored on his virgin
Conclusion
Many of the causes of deforestation that run the
course of The Old Man correspond
closely to what scientists have concluded from careful measurement and
statistical analysis of tropical deforestation. The convergence reminds us of
the distinction that
We have focused on the verisimilar aspects that appear
in The Old Man, but one could also focus on the erroneous clichés about
deforestation that do not appear in Un Viejo. For example,
Sepúlveda has only one passing mention of logging and focuses overwhelmingly on
colonization. The implicit weighting of Sepúlveda’s representation is exactly
what many experts would assign. Jeffrey Sayer, the Director General of CIFOR
writes:
I think that [logging’s]
negative effect has been greatly exaggerated by lobbying groups who saw it as a
convenient stalking horse....The major problem has always been agriculture
expansion and it was just politically easier to target logging when one was
campaigning for tropical forests---you couldn't target poor farmers (Wunder 9).
In a magazine interview, Sepúlveda makes plain that
the verisimilitude of The Old Man was no accident "From the outset,
I want to avoid inserting my role of writer into the protagonist. I am a
chronicler of what the protagonists of the environment were telling me…I wanted
to maintain that fidelity..." (Quemain 21 translation ours). Like Stowe,
he wanted to give voice to the oppressed:
...I intended to write something
that was a metaphor for the possibility of living in an environment different
from one’s own, that harmony is possible in a culture that is not one’s own,
and that this possibility is defined and is decided only when a deep respect
for other exists....The main character is a man who lives in exile, not in his
place of origin, who had to migrate for various motives and faces life’s
challenges without trauma, transforming the experience into one huge metaphor
of life and beauty (Queiman 21 translation ours)
There is much ecological pragmatism in Sepúlveda’s
“militancy in the promotion of reading” (Irigoyen): through reflection and
philosophical growth, society can stop the onslaught.
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