Sometimes I ask myself why literary masterpieces like Les Fleurs du Mal could cause such scandals. I think to myself then that the contemporaries of Charles Baudelaire could have been somewhat more tolerant. After reading Rima, this strikes me as rather arrogant, for I too could not appreciate the literary quality of this novel because the values conveyed in it do not fit our time today.
Rima. A Love Story from the Tropical Forest is the best-known novel of the Argentine-British author and ornithologist William Henry Hudson. He is regarded in Argentina as a national poet and was in the past admired by writers such as Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway.
The plot of Rima no longer fits our worldview: Abel, after all his efforts to earn money or at least fame have failed, seeks out the solitude of the Gran Chaco. In these forests he lives with an indigenous tribe until he meets Rima, a girl who seems not to be of this world. Rima lives alone with an old Spaniard in their own little paradise. There she sets the rules, forbidding the consumption of any flesh because she cannot bear the death of animals. Abel -- whose name is not without reason the same as the biblical fratricide whose animal sacrifice did not please God -- does not wish to give up meat, any more than the old Spaniard and the neighbouring Guarani do. Filled with passion for the untouchable Rima, Abel intrudes into her idyll and destroys it -- idyll and Rima alike -- through his curiosity and his egocentric tactlessness. Rima dies at the hands of the Guarani, who want to hunt in their game-rich forest. Abel avenges his beloved by killing a Guarani himself and inciting the neighbouring village to annihilate his former hosts -- which they do. Nothing but ashes and bone fragments remain of Rima, the Spaniard, and the Guarani, while Abel returns to civilisation.
If one could just barely endure the story were Abel to show even a little remorse, Hudson's descriptions of the 'savages' cause one genuine nausea. The generous hospitality that Abel receives he does not perceive at all. Although Hudson does characterise the Guarani quite differently from one another, he stamps them all with the labels 'savage,' 'primitive,' and 'inferior.' This is all the more astonishing when one knows that the author must have personally known many indigenous people and received their help. For before his move to Great Britain he roamed the unexplored expanses of Argentina to collect bird skins for sale. That is why his descriptions of nature are so detailed, so naturalistic, and in places almost empathetic. While the well-known ornithologist can empathise with the nature of birds and butterflies, for him people belong in pigeonholes. On the one side there is Rima, the saint, the perfect, the ethereal being, who embodies everything that is good about humanity. Of course she has white skin. After all, she is the last member of a long-lost tribe. Opposite her stands the Spaniard, also white, but a criminal doing penance who nonetheless continues to sin by killing animals against Rima's commandment and secretly consuming their flesh. And then of course the 'savages,' for whom Rima is a demon with supernatural powers who prevents them from entering the forest.
Finally there is Abel, the narrator, who is supposed to win our sympathy but only repels us with his arrogance and self-centredness. He cheerfully destroys the complex balance that existed between Rima, the Spaniard, and the Guarani. His actions lead to catastrophe -- a guilt that is never addressed; on the contrary: Abel becomes the only one who truly understood Rima.
For me, raised with the values of our time today, it was a torment to read this book. I kept asking myself what Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway found so remarkable about it. The empathetic descriptions of nature were wasted on me, perhaps just as the beautiful language of Les Fleurs du Mal was wasted on its bourgeois contemporaries. Probably prostitution was for them as shocking as arrogance toward indigenous peoples is for me.
And it is precisely here that my form of tolerance comes in. It compelled me to read the book to the end. I did not enjoy it. I do not share the author's view of indigenous peoples. But I endured his divergent opinion. For that is all that tolerance means. After all, this word comes from the Latin tolerare, the term for enduring, putting up with, bearing.
Had I had the chance to meet William Henry Hudson personally, I would gladly have discussed with him to tell him my opinion. And perhaps in that discussion both of us would have learned to understand each other better.
