2024 marks 100 years since the publication of La vorágine (The Vortex) by José Eustasio Rivera, one of Colombian and Latin American literature’s most important novels. Still widely read and studied in Colombia and throughout the Spanish-speaking world, La vorágine remains arguably the definitive example of the “jungle novel”.

José Eustasio Rivera was born in 1888 in Huila in the southwest of Colombia. He graduated in law and published his first book, Tierra de promisión (a collection of 150 sonnets), in 1921. The year after this, Rivera travelled to the Amazon rainforest, which would form the setting of La vorágine, while working as part of a government commission to clarify the limits of the Venezuelan-Colombian border. This was soon after the height of the first Amazonian “rubber boom”, when extraction of rubber in the region expanded massively to meet the demands of global capitalism and industrialisation. Like his novel’s semi-autobiographical narrator-protagonist, Arturo Cova, Rivera was greatly affected by his experiences of the jungle, and La vorágine is famous for its poetic descriptions of the environment:

Oh Jungle, wedded to silence, mother of solitude and mist! What malignant spirit left me to languish in your emerald prison? Your lofty cupolas perpetually block my aspirations for an open sky that I now glimpse only fleetingly, in your anguished twilights, when unquiet evening breezes stir the treetops and shards of light break through the canopy far above my head. […]

You are a somber cathedral, where unknown gods whisper endless liturgies, promising your majestic trees, ancient as the Garden of Eden, that they will surely live forever. Your tribe of growing things is the most variegated of the earth, and the most fraternal. Creepers and vines complete the universal embrace that the massive limbs cannot give. You share the distress of each falling leaf. A multitude of echoes, as one voice, laments a falling trunk, and a multitude of new green life sprouts on the forest floor in the clearing opened by its fall. Unyielding as a cosmic force, you are a mystery of creation. […]

Oh Jungle, let me escape your sickly shadows, your living cemetery, your primordial kingdom of agony and resuscitation, where one breathes the miasmas of all your dead and decaying former subjects.

However, the primary purpose of La vorágine is to highlight the horrific abuses that took place during the rubber boom. Enslavement, brutalisation and even genocide of local indigenous populations was widespread. The novel’s basis in reality is reflected by the references to two key “rubber barons” of the period, Julio César Arana and Tomás Funes, by their real names. Immigrant workers who flooded the region were also often trapped in indentured slavery and similarly brutalised, and Rivera’s main focus is on the exploitation of Colombian workers by those of other nationalities or their own treacherous countrymen.

^{Some of the UL’s holdings of different editions of La vorágine and books about the novel and author}

In its rejection of romanticism and focus on local life and concerns, La vorágine contains elements of the Modernismo and Costumbrismo literary movements that preceded its publication. However, with its nationalistic viewpoint and its realistic depictions of life in the jungle (not forgetting the very different environment of the Colombian llanos, where the first third of the novel takes place), La vorágine best fulfils the role of the regionalist “novela de la tierra”. Novels such as this aimed to forge a distinct literary national identity, in this case for Colombia, by focusing on remote and relatively undeveloped regions of Latin America. Aspects of this may date the novel quite severely to modern readers, as may the self-centred machismo and misogyny of Rivera’s narrator-protagonist and the feminisation of the jungle. However, what still remains highly relatable and relevant are the descriptions of human rights abuses and environmental destruction brought about by colonisation and capitalist greed, all of which continues in the region to this day.

All those who enter the green hell looking for black gold are ultimately damned. The jungle seduces them, the jungle retains them, and if they try to escape, the jungle brings them back. Those who have experienced the jungle cannot afterward be satisfied with city life. The jungle has left its mark on them, changed them. Away from it, they feel old, listless, and depressed, thinking only of the jungle, and of going back, even though they know that death awaits them there. Indeed, their fate is already sealed. Should they ignore the call to return, they will not survive for long in the city. They will be racked by mysterious diseases—a legacy, their doctors will say, of time in the jungle— the ultimate revenge of a natural world that they had heedlessly exploited.

Rivera died only four years after the publication of La vorágine, possibly due to health complications resulting from his time in the rainforest. However, his novel had already had a huge impact. Indeed, when Rivera passed away, he was in New York arranging the novel’s first English translation and negotiating film rights. Since then, La vorágine has been translated into multiple languages (the quotes I use here are from the newer English translation by John Charles Chasteen), been adapted for cinema and television, and never gone out of print in the Spanish-speaking world.

Unsurprisingly, there has been a great deal of activity in Colombia to mark the centenary of La vorágine, particularly at the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia, which holds part of Rivera’s original manuscript. The BNC has hosted an exhibition about the legacy of both the novel and the rubber boom itself, and published a collection of freely downloadable books approaching La vorágine from many different angles. Another excellent resource is the Banrepcultural project about Rivera, which has digitised and made freely available much of the author’s work, including his early publications in various journals and newspapers.

The earliest copy of La vorágine held by the University Library is an Argentinian edition from 1959, though Jesus College holds an earlier edition from 1940. The number of editions of the novel since then available just in Cambridge (and the number of titles held here about the author and his work) is testament to its continuing importance and relevance.

Christopher Greenberg