Lab Cannibals: Resistance and Contagion in Sonhos Tropicais‪.‬

THE year is 1887. The precocious Brazilian medical student Oswaldo Cruz listens as his professor praises European achievements in microbiology. The lecturer pauses, takes a sip of Rio de Janeiro's drinking water, grimaces, then examines the cup against the light: "Esta com um gosto estranho esta agua. Aposto que se a examinarmos ao microscopio ... Melhor nao. Onde estava eu?" (20). This sardonic scene from Moacyr Scliar's Sonhos tropicais (1992) reflects the Belle Epoque Brazilian elite's view of their country as a pathogenic landscape barred from progress by its insalubrious environment. As a disciple of modern bioscience and director of public health policy, Oswaldo Cruz (1872-1917) would counter his compatriots' fatalism by focusing on elements of microbiology relating "closely to Brazilian problems," eventually developing a major medical research Institute that would evolve "self-referentially" rather than relying exclusively on European and North American paradigms (Stepan 122). In addition to representing resistance to Cruz's "European science," Sonhos tropicais presents a variant of the modernist cannibal motif by portraying Cruz's successful deglutination of foreign scientific influences via narratives of the protagonist's (and other scientists') deliberate consumption of infectious microorganisms. (1) Critic Luis Fernando Valente has noted that Sonhos tropicais serves as a reminder that Oswaldo Cruz and the imported notions of modernity he represented were "out of place" in early twentieth century Brazil, functioning less as a vehicle of true social transformation than as a justification for maintaining the status quo (91). (2) Sonhos tropicais does indeed note certain authoritarian elements of Cruz's curriculum vitae. Addressing popular and upper class opposition to heroic medicine's potential for tyranny, Scliar's narrative presents a Foucauldian informed "critique of the tendency of reform to translate into surveillance and coercion" (Burgan 4). The readers of Scliar's novel will learn (or be reminded) that, along with fears of contagion, many Brazilians viewed Cruz's sometimes draconian public health measures as an encroachment on their civil liberties. O povo resented the paramilitary invasions of vaccinators and public health inspectors, while upper crust positivists echoed Auguste Comte's hostility to compulsory inoculation on the grounds that the practice was despotic.