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It is a well-trodden topic in the critical literature on Os sertöes (1902) to consider it as a grand synthesis of the various textual modalities that nineteenth-century Latin American narrative mimicked, appropriated, and combined. The exemplary character of the book is due to its multilayered textuality. However, in such an unsettling superposition of discourses, the author found the motive to advance an embodied and vernacular knowledge on Canudos and the Brazilian reality. I claim here that Euclides's narration of the corporeal inscriptions on the walls echoed how his book explored the fluid relationship between lettered practices and embodied forms of knowledge production and transmission. I propose to read Os sertoes's take on those wall inscriptions as the lettered account of graffiti. Although graffiti has become intertwined with contemporary urban culture, the term has broader connotations in Latin American intellectual history. I will underline how Euclides found inspiration in anonymous and ephemeral wall inscriptions to reflect on the critical stances of his writing against the State violence. The following pages analyze the ideological milieu in which the manifold textuality of Os sertoes was produced and how the textual overlaps and the depiction of graffiti of the book intervened in that milieu. I first explore the epistemic regime of visibility in postmonarchical Brazil; then, the next sections examine how Euclides's skepticism towards that regime led him to engage with an alternative form of visibility that was grounded in the rhetoric of the superposition of layers. I refer to that rhetoric as the "palimpsestic imagination." After studying how this imagination unfolds in the first and second parts of the book, I move to comment on the graffiti of the last part. Finally, I conclude with a reflection on how the embodied pathos in the lettered account of those wall inscriptions helps challenge critical approaches that place the book within fixed literary genealogies.
