The “most impressive mark” of Euclidian prose is an operation only apparently executed with symbolic components. The notion of “iconic calculation” allows us to understand how the control exerted over certain patterns — arrangements of items distributed consistently beneath the prose — is based on diagrammatic operations. Pignatari (2004, p. 119), in an approach aligned with this one, states that the “peculiar anagrammatic, hypogrammatic, and anaphonic” method of Edgar Poe requires a “process of semiotic transcoding to ‘reveal’, “the iconic nature of the poetic sign, contradicting the predominantly symbolic nature of the verbal sign, so that the jakobsonian poetic function is no more than the iconization of the symbolic sign, that reveals in fact the tangible aspect of signs.” If an icon is examined as consisting of interrelated parts, and if these relations are subject to experimental changes controlled by rules or laws, we are operating with a diagram. In the case of the diagram, what is communicated is the structure of the sign itself — its internal arrangement. The diagram is a scheme of its object in terms of the relations between its parts, but it is only suitable for experimentation because it is built from intelligible relations. Through the operational criterion of the icon, we can appreciate the function of discovery achieved through the manipulation of diagrams. While icons focus on aspects associated with the physicality of the sign, diagrams emphasize its relational aspects — the part-part and part-whole nature of which it is composed. In my argument, the “physicality of the sign” in the passages “pregnant with poetry” in Euclidian prose has an iconic-diagrammatic nature.

The Poética de Os Sertões (Poetics of Rebellion in the Backlands, 2010), featuring essays by Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, uncovers complex “poetic layers” within the prose of Euclides da Cunha. For the poet and translator Augusto de Campos, there are metrical verses in Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), “subterranean poems” within the prose — which I interpret here as “hidden diagrams.” The distinctive “tone” of Euclides’ text, characterized by its “rhythmic density, plasticity, and sound,” results from an operation that can be described as typically diagrammatic (sensu Charles S. Peirce). My analysis suggests that Euclides employs a form of “iconic calculation,” where the interplay of interrelated prosodic, phonetic, and syntactic structures generates a distinctive tension between the temporal act of reading and the spatial organization of the text. I aim to offer a framework with implications that can be generalized to various instances of diagrammatic reasoning in literature. In my argument, the “physicality of the Euclidean sign,” or the “pregnant areas of poetry” in his prose, has a diagrammatic nature.