Introduction

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Putumayo generated a wealth of writing, from travelogues and ethnography to the testimonial accounts of the rubber boom. While Colombian travel writing on the region can be related to attempts to inaugurate a national literary tradition, especially one which could accommodate the tropical areas at the boundaries of the nation, it was only from the 1920s that explicitly literary representations of the Putumayo began to emerge. Two landmark Colombian novels of the 1920s and 30s, José Eustasio Rivera's La voragine (1924) and César Uribe Piedrahita's Toá: narraciones de caucherias (1933), are set partially in the Putumayo and seem to revisit many of the political and aesthetic concerns of the earlier wave of travel literature on the region, as well as the testimonial drive of writing from the rubber boom. While late nineteenthand early twentieth–century geographers and explorers in the Putumayo looked to literary models, with the publication of La vorágine and Toá things seem to come full circle. Both of these novels about journeys from Bogotá to the Amazon embody a strong geographical drive and were an important source of information for contemporary readers about what remained a little–known region. Given the concern with geography in La vorágine, it is hardly surprising that Rivera, whose other literary legacy to the nation was Tierra de promisión – a collection of telluric sonnets celebrating Colombia's mountains, plains, and jungles – has been credited by one critic as having contributed to the nation's unity by writing about regions and landscapes that were previously unknown to many of its citizens. At the time of his death in 1928, Rivera was involved in the preparation of a fifth edition of La vorágine, which contained a map of the main character's route along Colombia's border with Venezuela, Brazil, and Peru – a hazy and disputed frontier about which Rivera had gathered first–hand knowledge from a number of expeditions he had undertaken in the Amazon at the beginning of the 1920s.