All Green Shall Perish by Eduardo Mallea

First published:Todo verdor perecerá, 1941 (English translation, 1966)

Type of plot: Existential psychodrama

Time of work: The 1930’s and early 1940’s, prior to the rise to power of Juan Perón

Locale: Ingeniero White, Bahía Blanca, and Nicanor Cruz’s estancia (ranch) on the southern pampa near Bahía Blanca, Argentina

Principal Characters:

• Ágata Cruz, the protagonist, an intense and withdrawn young woman who is in search of herself
• Nicanor Cruz, her husband, an estanciero (rancher)
• Doctor Reba, Ágata’s father, a Swiss immigrant who settled in Ingeniero White
• Sotero, a lawyer and Ágata’s lover in Bahía Blanca after Nicanor’s death
• Ema de Volpe, a self-styled courtesan and Ágata’s companion in Bahía Blanca

The Novel

All Green Shall Perish is divided into two parts. Each depicts a crucial period in the life of Ágata Cruz, and virtually all the action of the novel takes place within Ágata’s anguished consciousness. The theme and tone are established in the somber description of the desolate landscape of Nicanor Cruz’s estancia at the beginning of part 1. The drought suffered by the barren land is mirrored in the barren relationship of Nicanor and Ágata Cruz, who remain childless after fifteen years of marriage and estranged from each other by their inability to communicate and by an ever growing sense of isolation and resentment. Nicanor has lost his battle with the sterile land, although he stubbornly refuses to admit the defeat which has transformed him into a withdrawn and bitter man. Ágata, more sensitive and intelligent than her husband, asks more from life than he does and would have liked to help him during the early years, but Nicanor’s pride would not allow him to accept her help. Ágata is suffering from depression and resents being condemned to live out a life that she would never have chosen.

From this vantage point in time, Ágata reexperiences her past life in a series of flashbacks: first, the lonely childhood with her alienated father in the small port of Ingeniero White; then, her precipitous decision to marry Nicanor Cruz, a limited and taciturn man whom she did not love but who provided her with an escape from the stifling atmosphere of her childhood and the dreary prospect of life with her widower father, whom she loved but with whom she had never been able to communicate; finally, a series of grim and ever worsening incidents from her fifteen years with Nicanor. The cumulative effect of this introspection only deepens Ágata’s depression.

In his unrelenting struggle with the land, Nicanor contracts pneumonia. While nursing him, Ágata reaches a crisis of desperation. Hoping to destroy herself and end her unhappiness, Ágata opens all the windows to let in the cold. Nicanor dies, but Ágata is found unconscious on the porch at the end of part 1.

The second part of the novel begins in the southern metropolis of Bahía Blanca, where Ágata has moved following the sale of the estancia. Through the intervention of Ema de Volpe, a predatory and superficial woman who insists on taking Ágata under her wing, Ágata meets the lawyer Sotero. Ágata passively allows Sotero to seduce her, and, to her own surprise, she enjoys a brief period of happiness with this charming but shallow opportunist. Sotero, however, is incapable of committing himself to anyone for long, and he coldly abandons Ágata, leaving her with a note as he departs for Buenos Aires on business. His desertion confirms Ágata’s worst fears, as she is again thrown back upon herself. After her happiness with Sotero, Ágata finds solitude even more difficult to bear, and she gradually withdraws still further into her own consciousness, caring nothing for those around her or for her surroundings. In her desperate obsession to understand what is happening to her, she is drawn irresistibly back to the Ingeniero White of her childhood. Having lost all sense of time, wandering the streets of Ingeniero White like a madwoman, she is attacked by a gang of vicious children, who taunt and chase her. At the end of the novel, Ágata has lost all contact with reality except for the increasing intensity of her suffering. Her plight is poignantly captured in the last sentence of the novel: “It was very late when she got up suddenly, as if called by a scream, and, without direction or discernment, started running against the darkness.”

The Characters

Mallea excels in portraying “closed” characters who are at war with themselves or somehow imprisoned within the confines of their own consciousness. The inner drama of Ágata Cruz is revealed and symbolized in her name (which translates literally as “agate cross”). What is cold and hard in Ágata is in conflict with her passion and her need for sacrifice. Ágata’s passivity, her limited emotional development, her narrowness of perspective, and, above all, her awkwardness and shyness, are at war with the intensity of her need to live life to the utmost and to make life meaningful. The grim circumstances of her life and the predisposition of her own nature doom her to defeat, but Mallea succeeds in making the reader identify with Ágata’s struggle and empathize with her. In spite of the melodramatic contrast between Ágata’s “extraordinary beauty” and her withdrawn and pessimistic character, Mallea succeeds in making Ágata a believable heroine.

Ágata is described in terms of death, recalling the parched landscape of the beginning: “While in bed, her slender body at rest, her face white against a bedspread a thousand years old, her eyes devoid of inner scenery, her limp fingers relaxed over the material they rested on, everything in her suggested a corpse, with the exception of that knot which from the depth of her being still insisted on having hidden rights.” In a conversation with Sotero, Ágata inadvertently reveals her inner awareness of futility: “I thought the world was an enormous flight of birds and that I had only to stretch out my hand to stop the one I wanted. Then one sees that the bird is oneself, and that the world is the hand that claims one.” Finally, according to Ágata, “each being is not like the water or the wind, subject to the influences and change. Each being is a single unmodified tendency. Each being is its tendency.” Thus, Ágata, as do characters in other Mallea novels, condemns herself with the bias of her own perspective.

While the author’s concentration on Ágata does not leave much room for the development of the other figures of the novel, these characters are clearly and believably drawn. The best realized is the taciturn but authentic Nicanor (the name means “without song”) Cruz, whose stubbornness and brutish stoicism invest him with a perverse integrity. The brazen and manipulative mediocrity of Ema de Volpe is convincing, as is the blatant inauthenticity and duplicity of Sotero and the rat-like slyness of his sinister friend Romo. Doctor Reba, Ágata’s pathetic father, is at best a shadowy figure, and Estaurófilo the imbecile was conceived as a symbol for the thwarted expression inherent in the human condition.

Critical Context

All Green Shall Perish has been Mallea’s most popular single work of fiction, as well as the novel that received the greatest critical acclaim. It was written at the peak of Mallea’s creative powers along with the autobiographical essay Historia de una pasión argentina and the novels Fiesta en noviembre (1938; Fiesta in November, 1942) and La bahía de silencio (1940; The Bay of Silence, 1944).

Mallea was an extremely prolific writer who continued to publish novels, short stories, essays, and plays up to his death. He enjoyed his greatest popularity during the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 1950’s, anticipating the “Boom” of the Latin American novel in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Mallea did not share the preoccupation with technical innovation of such novelists as Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa, although several of his works are innovative and experimental, most notably La ciudad junto al río inmóvil (1936; the city on the motionless river), Fiesta in November, and All Green Shall Perish. The themes of Mallea’s fiction did not change significantly in the course of his career, and, in general, his work has fallen from fashion since the 1950’s. Nevertheless, the titles cited in this article continue to enjoy a wide readership and are the subject of many critical studies.

Bibliography

Chapman, Arnold. “Terms of Spiritual Isolation in Eduardo Mallea.” Modern Language Forum 37 (1952): 21-27. An insightful study of Mallea’s use of metaphor.

Dudgeon, Patrick. Eduardo Mallea: A Personal Study of His Work. Buenos Aires: Agonia, 1949. Brief but useful for its discussions of Fiesta in November and The Bay of Silence.

Lewald, H. Ernest. Eduardo Mallea. Boston: Twayne, 1977. A sound introduction covering Mallea’s formative period, his handling of passion, his cosmopolitan spirit, his national cycle, and his last fictional works. Includes chronology, notes, and annotated bibliography.

Lichtblau, Myron I., trans. Introduction to History of an Argentine Passion, by Eduardo Mallea. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1983. This introduction to the first English translation of a Mallea essay provides an excellent overview of his place in Spanish American fiction. Lichtblau includes an excellent bibliography.

Polt, John H. The Writings of Eduardo Mallea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959. Polt discusses Mallea’s essays and fiction through the mid-1950’s. A thorough study.

Shaw, Donald L. Introduction to Todo verdor perecerá. Oxford, England: Pergamon Press, 1968. Cited as an outstanding interpretation.

Shaw, Donald L. “Narrative Technique in Mallea’s La bahía de silencio.” Symposium 20 (1966): 50-55. One of the few studies of this kind in English.

Stabb, Martin S. In Quest of Identity: Patterns in the Spanish American Essay of Ideas, 1890-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967. Although Stabb devotes a section mainly to Mallea’s essays, his comments provide helpful background for the fiction as well.