Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America by Victoria Saramago

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America by Victoria Saramago Carolyn Fornoff Keywords Ecocriticism, Latin American Literature, Deforestation, Conservationism, Developmentalism, National Parks, Sertão, Mimesis, Realism, Nostalgia, Memory, Juan Rulfo, Clarice Lispector, João Guimarães Rosa, Mario Vargas Llosa, Alejo Carpentier, Victoria Saramago, Carolyn Fornoff saramago, victoria. Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America. Northwestern UP, 2021, 288 pp. At the close of 2020, I came across a virtual art competition called Itsï: una llamada de alerta, which takes its title from the Purépecha word for water. The exhibit brought together artists across media to engage with Lake Cuitzeo, Mexico's second largest lake and a central site in preclassical Chupícuaro culture. Due to a variety of factors, including deforestation, the construction of a highway, drought, overuse, and rising temperatures, Lake Cuitzeo is dying. Nearly half is dry; the water that remains is contaminated. This desiccation is devastating for surrounding communities, cutting off Purépecha access to potable water, decimating sustenance fishing, and threatening endemic species. Scientists predict that within a decade Lake Cuitzeo will disappear. As I scrolled through the Itsï festival on Instagram from the comfort of my home, I thought about the central conceit of Victoria Saramago's recent monograph, Fictional Environments. In it, Saramago argues that in the era of accelerating environmental devastation, art is a space where environments are conserved, and that "more than representing reality, fiction becomes reality's endpoint" (46). [End Page 315] The devastating loss of ecosystems like Lake Cuitzeo have fueled what Saramago diagnoses as a "mimetic rift": a crisis of the imagination catalyzed by the loss of real-world referents. In response, narrative modes like elegy, tragedy, and nostalgia take hold, fueling the "desire for a reversal of mimesis … by which these referents might somehow be recovered and maintained" within the body of the literary work, as well as through conservation projects like national parks (13). Fictional Environments sits with this "impossible desire for a fusion between text and context," which Saramago explains is shaped by "increasingly nostalgic views of environmental realities prior to accelerated deforestation, the mechanization of agriculture, or the rise of megalopolises" (14, 15). Building off Lawrence Buell's idea of "environmental memory," which posits that literature can counteract collective denial of environmental crisis, Saramago argues that through mimesis, literature can be "put in the service of conserving certain views of the environment that may offer a counterpoint to perceived degradation" (84). Focusing on canonical mid-twentieth-century Latin American authors, Fictional Environments traces the representation of nonhuman habitats, from the Brazilian sertão to Venezuela's Gran Sabana, and literary critiques of developmentalism in the decades preceding the explicit environmentalism that emerged in the 1970s, as well as these works' reception. Fictional Environments investigates the agency of literary works, not just as objects that reflect environmental degradation or preserve portraits of how certain habitats "used to be," but also as objects that shape real-world conservationist efforts. This novel methodology is put to exemplary work in the first chapter dedicated to João Guimarães Rosa, which attends to Grande sertão: Veredas as an example of "normative realism" that "sets standards for a reality perceived as lost" (33). Saramago reads Guimarães Rosa in tandem with conservationist efforts to show how his novel legitimized the sertão as a space deserving of protection and tourist attention at a time when this ecosystem was widely considered unproductive. Saramago's ecocritical interpretation of Guimarães Rosa's cosmopolitanism is fascinating; she makes the case that his international success justified the founding of the Grande Sertão Veredas National Park and continues to frame its importance to visitors, including the many visitors who have never read his works. If a busy reader had time to only read one chapter from Fictional Environments, chapter one is [End Page 316] a tour de force, and a dynamic example of the book's theorization of "reverse mimesis," or the idea that realist fiction doesn't just reflect the environment, but actively shapes how that environment is understood and preserved. This argument is carefully nuanced. Saramago points out that tourists to the Guimar...