Three of the earliest works of Latin American science fiction are “Mexico in the Year 1970” [México en el año 1970], hereafter “Mexico 1970” (Mexico, 1844), by the pseudonymous author Fósforos-Cerillos; Pages from the History of Brazil Written in the Year 2000 [Páginas da história do Brasil escripta no anno de 2000], hereafter Brazil 2000 (Brazil, 1868–72), by Joaquim Felício dos Santos (1828–95); and The Marvelous Journey of Mr. Nic-Nac to the Planet Mars (complete title: The Marvelous Journey of Mr. Nic-Nac in Which Are Recounted the Prodigious Adventures of This Gentleman and Are Made Known the Institutions, Customs and Preoccupations of an Unknown World: A Spiritist Fantasy [Viaje maravilloso del Señor Nic-Nac en el que se refieren las prodijiosas aventuras de este señor y se dan á conocer las instituciones, costumbres y preocupaciones de un mundo desconocido: Fantasía espiritista]), hereafter Nic-Nac (Argentina, 1875–76), by Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg (1852–1937). When they were originally published, readers would certainly have recognized the “loose bonds of kinship” between these texts and those written by the founding fathers and mothers of Northern sf (Stableford, Scientific Romance 4). The clearest indications of these kinships are the use of the tropes of time and space displacement, direct citations of the works and ideas of Northerners in the texts themselves, and the advertisement published by the newspaper El Nacional promoting the forthcoming book version of Nic-Nac as a narrative that would awaken “the same interest as any of the best novels of this genre coming from the pen of the popular Jules Verne” (Mar. 13, 1876). Only in the last fifteen years, however—after over a century of being lost and found and re-lost and re-found—have “Mexico 1970,” Brazil 2000, and Nic-Nac come to be definitively and universally recognized and retrolabeled as some of the first examples of the genre in Latin America.1 In recent years the three have frequently been cited as such; the individual texts have often been referred to in prefaces and articles—and occasionally been analyzed in greater detail—but they have never been considered in conjunction. Before continuing to a detailed examination of the uniqueness of each text, it might be useful to outline some of the parallels among these three works.2
Northrop Frye has said, “The utopia form flourishes best when anarchy seems most a social threat” (27). These three utopian texts all emerged during conditions of national unrest (with at least two of them published in specific response to political events) although, as has been discussed, a more ideal society seemed to lie just over the horizon. All of the tales set their utopian societies in locations remote either in time or in space, using these devices of displacement to achieve Suvin’s effect of cognitive estrangement of the writer’s own reality. All are, to use Lyman Tower Sargent’s terminology, satirical utopias, depicting “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as a criticism of that contemporary society” (“Three Faces” 9). As Suvin puts it, a utopia’s “pointings reflect back upon the reader’s ‘topia’” (51).3
These texts, then, sought to pinpoint areas that required improvement in order for their nations to join the forefront of world progress and take what their writers felt to be their rightful places near the center of the international stage. Thus, the oft-cited function of the science-fictional text as an agent to bring about change would have been especially attractive to our three writers, as all were active participants in the processes of nation building and consolidation in their home countries.4 All three writers were also abreast of the scientific and technological advances of the day, and they viewed these advances as one of the principal means to national progress. Lastly, all were writers for national or regional newspapers and magazines, and at least two of the three were also editors. All three were originally published in these rather ephemeral media and—even as utopias, futuristic fictions, or serial publications of fiction go—they are particularly localized both temporally and geographically. The works were in fact so narrowly time-stamped and place-stamped that they were less about showing the world a broad vision of utopia that happens to be set in or related to Latin America than about bringing Latin American nations forward, catching them up to Northern nations. Once this was accomplished, our writers appear to be saying, Latin Americans would be able to describe (or be described by) more general visions of what was to come.
As is often the case in utopian tales, all three texts are, to varying degrees, framed narratives. The nineteenth-century or Earth-based outer frames work together with other metafictional, realistic, and fantastic narrative devices—such as footnotes, epigraphs, sessions of Spiritism, and the inclusion of real, extrapolated, and fabricated texts, events, and figures—to emphasize their own fictionality while at the same time claiming the authority lent by their use of historical fact and scientific discourse.5 The narrative frames also create what Alkon has described as “a twofold narration that proceeds simultaneously along [two different] time tracks”: a “double temporal perspective” in the case of our two futuristic fictions, a double spatial perspective in the case of the planet-hopping Nic-Nac (Origins 125).6 It is no coincidence that Don Quijote is mentioned directly in two of the texts, not for the science-fictional episode of the cosmic voyage aboard the horse Clavileño described by Marjorie Hope Nicolson in her Voyages to the Moon (18–19), but rather for Cervantes’s magisterial use of the framed narrative and for the episode of the marvelous journey into the Cave of Montesinos.
The sociocultural, political, and literary influences of Europe and the United States are central to the form and content of these works. All of the authors portray the estranged, utopian versions of their own nations as strong, politically independent, culturally rich, and globally important,7 yet each text betrays in some way the legacy of the deeply ingrained culture of dependency: either the Latin American nation in question maintains this high level of “civilization” with some sort of European and/or North American support, or the authority or approval of the North is symbolically required to legitimize and seal the Latin American success. While the influence of Latin American writers is surely important in our three texts, that of Northern writers is at least as strong, particularly that of Northern writers of proto- and early science fiction. Flammarion is mentioned by name in Nic-Nac, and the works of Kepler, Mercier, Poe, and Verne, among others, likely influenced our writers in terms of their use of the fantastic voyage, of a specific future setting for utopia, of travel through time and space via medium or spiritist, of scientific detail and didacticism, of extrapolation from the present, and of the combination of real and fictitious characters and events. Other themes that appear in most or all of our texts reflect each writer’s vision of progress for his Latin American nation: individual merit to be valued more highly than one’s inherited title or class or race; the involvement or integration of different races and immigrant groups into national life; the importance of education and literacy; the political as well as the economic and cultural benefits of new technologies of transportation and communication; and the necessity of a free press.
But it is time to let each text speak for itself.
“Mexico 1970” was originally published in El Liceo Mexicano [The Mexican Lyceum]. Although the magazine stopped publication after only two issues (January and May of 1844), El Liceo Mexicano was part of a significant publishing phenomenon of the time: the literary magazine. Advances in the technology of typography and economies of scale contributed to the new look, content, and popularity of the “revista literaria” in 1840s Mexico. According to a study of publishing trends in Mexico during this time period, this type of magazine generally “reproduced the latest in letters, the sciences, and the arts from Europe and the United States,” and eventually works by national writers as well; the contents were “miscellaneous, instructive, and entertaining” (Suárez de la Torre 584). In the introduction to their first issue, the editors of El Liceo Mexicano declared their raison d’être to be nothing less than “to make the multitude . . . well acquainted with useful discoveries, with progress in the sciences, and with the steps being taken on the path that must lead to the perfection of man’s knowledge” (“Introducción” 3).
The two pages of “Mexico 1970” appeared amidst four-hundred-plus pages of other “perfecting” articles on topics ranging from railroads, the daguerreotype, aviation, and electricity to hygiene and education, to Mexican history, literature, and figures of note, to poetry, fashion plates, and musical scores. The editors of El Liceo Mexicano stated their intentions to emphasize Mexican topics and include “very few translations” (4). Because they wanted the magazine to be accessible to all and “a source of varied and very useful instruction” to their compatriots, they promised that the articles on scientific progress would be “written in a colloquial style . . . avoid[ing] the use of technical terms” (3). The ultimate proof that they give of the worthiness of their enterprise, however, was that Europeans recognized the value of this type of publication; the opening lines of the introduction are: “The utility of publications such as this one is universally recognized today. It is sufficient to peruse the voluminous list of publications of this type that are being produced in Europe in order to be convinced of the degree of acceptance which they have merited” (3). As has been noted, Fósforos-Cerillos can be credibly linked with the mission of El Liceo Mexicano, as he wrote a number of articles for both issues, varying in nature from the sociocultural to the scientific to the literary. In the opening paragraph of “Mexico 1970” itself, his protagonist don Próspero [Mr. Prosperous] criticizes the majority of literary periodicals from the past (nineteenth) century for lacking just those elements that El Liceo Mexicano prided itself for including: articles on scientific and historical themes.
“Mexico 1970” was published during particularly violent times. Between 1833 and 1855, Mexico’s presidency changed hands thirty-seven times, with Antonio López de Santa Anna of Alamo fame holding that office on eleven different occasions; this period in Mexican history can be summed up as “constantly teeter[ing] between simple chaos and unmitigated anarchy” (Meyer et al. 312). The text of “Mexico 1970” does not mention the political intricacies of 1844 directly. It takes the form of a dialogue between don Próspero, a man of ninety, and his nephew, Ruperto. They touch on a variety of topics in their short conversation: the importance of specialization in fields of study and work, the death of the governor of the Californias (with no implications that “the Californias” would soon be lost to the United States), a twentieth-century elopement via balloon in a well-lit neighborhood, the punishment of a corrupt politician, and the theater scene in Mexico City with its French acting troupes and Italian opera companies that pop over from Europe several nights a week to perform. The common thread running through this hodgepodge of themes is the writer’s desire to reveal the progressive national future that has replaced the retrograde national past. Mexico has left behind the superficial “encyclopedic spirit” of the nineteenth century (Fósforos-Cerillos 347). Sophisticated and efficient transportation and communication networks make it possible for the nation to hear of the death of a far-off governor and have governors of other states gather for his funeral on the same day. Advanced daguerreotype technology allows for life-sized images of the events to be viewed in other cities. Balloons—never mind trains or cars—are the principal means of private as well as public transportation. Corruption in the Mexican political system is now extremely rare, and perpetrators are given the death penalty. National institutions provide a wide range of cultural and educational opportunities as well as social services to the citizenry.
“Mexico 1970” is not a framed narrative per se. There is no actual journey through time, as in many utopias or futuristic fictions, and the dialogue format provides no room for a third-person narrator who might address comments to the contemporary nineteenth-century reader. And yet that “double temporal perspective” is clearly present: the text is, as the Mexican critic Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz points out, “more an X-ray of the Mexico of 1844 than a premonitory fiction about the Mexico of 1970” (“El futuro en llamas” 13). The creation of a de facto narrative frame is carried out via the character of don Próspero and by metafictional means.
Don Próspero’s first words lay the groundwork for the constant connection of past and present (or present and future) narrative threads throughout the story: “It is necessary to confess, my dear nephew, that the advances of the 20th century are gigantic in all areas” (347). Fósforos sets 1880 as the year of don Próspero’s birth and makes him an eyewitness to the reforms that have brought his nation out of its troubled past and into the mainstream of global progress. This potential great-grandchild to Mexicans of Fósforos’s generation is thus the ideal authority to contrast the utopian Mexican society of the twentieth century with the problems of the nineteenth and so to serve as mouthpiece both for Fósforos’s criticisms of his present and for his ideas about the correct path to a better national future. Don Próspero continually refers to the past during the conversation: to those inferior literary periodicals, to the bad old days when corrupt politicians were the norm, to the value of a coin collection a century earlier. His final pronouncement closes the frame he opened with his first lines. Here he describes the Mexico City of 1970 as seen through the eyes of a typical nineteenth-century Mexican leader, and he makes it clear that this utopian future is not due to the efforts of such men:
If one of our pseudo-great men from the past century were to come back to life and see in Mexico City 22 theaters, 43 libraries, 164 literary institutes, 32 hospitals; in short, if he were to see 800,000 inhabitants enjoying liberty, salubrity, and inalterable peace in the most beautiful city in America, he would ask to be returned to his tomb immediately for fear of finding himself confronted on all sides by the curses of men. (348)
Si uno de nuestros seudo hombres grandes del siglo pasado, resucitara y viera en México 22 teatros, 43 bibliotecas, 164 institutos literarios, 32 hospitales; en fin, si viera 800.000 habitantes disfrutar de libertad, de salubridad y de una paz inalterable en la ciudad más hermosa de la América, pediria se le volviese inmediatamente al sepulcro por temor de encontrarse por todas partes con la maldicion de los hombres.
The text of “Mexico 1970” also carries out temporal doubling on a metafictional level, in the epigraph and the footnote appended to the tale. The epigraph is attributed to J. J. Mora, one of the possibilities suggested for Fósforos’s true identity.
How many times our great-grandchildren will cross themselves
When they take the annals of this century
Into their hands! They will say: “Our grandparents
“Were discreet, cultured, theatrical:
“In conversing and writing, they were accomplished men;
“In self-praise, without equal;
“But in the midst of so many perfections
“They were great scoundrels.” (347)
¡Cuántas cruces se harán nuestros biznietos,
Cuando en la mano tomen los anales
De este siglo! Dirán: “Fueron discretos
“Nuestros abuelos, cultos, teatrales:
“En charlar y escribir, hombres completos;
“En alabanza propia, sin iguales;
“Pero en medio de tantas perfecciones
“Fueron unos grandísimos bribones.”
This sarcastic ditty is, then, a perfect gloss of the story itself, as it pokes fun at Mora’s contemporaries by referring to their great-grandchildren’s future poor opinion of them. It also foreshadows don Próspero’s concluding praise of the accomplishments of 1970 that have come about in spite of his predecessors. The other metanarrative connection to 1844 is a single but lengthy didactic footnote that Fósforos cannot resist including. He adds the note to explain that his portrayal of Mexico City in 1970 as illuminated at night is not so farfetched, as it was extrapolated from experiments with flammable hydrogen bicarbonate being carried out in Paris. Fósforos recounts the details and progress of the experiment, and completely abandons his technologically advanced fictional future to directly address his readers of 1844. “It seems ridiculous to say,” he begins, then acknowledges, “The project seems harebrained at first glance”—that is to say, ridiculous and harebrained to someone in 1844. Fósforos ends by assuring the unnamed French scientist that if he imitates the work ethic of Daguerre, his labors are sure to bear fruit.
If Fósforos’s primary purpose is to satirize the Mexico of 1844, his intent does not negate the fact that his vision of the national future is fairly optimistic. Although Mexico lacked the infrastructure and the political stability of Northern nations in his own time, a writer in Fósforos’s position could envision a leap in development driven by rapid advances in science and technology. Like many nineteenth-century Northern writers of science-fictional texts, Fósforos was up-to-date on new advances in contemporary science. All of the technology that appears in this story was extrapolated from the latest in nineteenth-century inventions: the daguerreotype process had been perfected in 1839, the telegraph was not put into use until the spring of 1844, and balloons would not serve as steerable methods of transportation until the early twentieth century (see also the articles by “F.C.” in El Liceo Mexicano on electricity [30] and the construction and use of the thermometer [61]). It should also be noted that despite his portrayal of Mexico’s tremendous progress in the text, there is a certain shortfall in the daring of Fósforos’s vision. As might be expected, not all groups are represented as participating equally in the utopian “liberty, salubrity, and inalterable peace” of Fósforos’s future: no mention is made of members of any but the governing class; the issues of race and racial minorities are not addressed; and the only woman in the story elopes to escape a forced marriage with a cousin interested in her dowry. What is somewhat more surprising is that Fósforos has been unable to free himself from the concept of—and possibly the belief in—European ascendancy. In the episode of the governor’s funeral, Fósforos shows that revolutions in transportation and communication have served to unite Mexico, but he gives just as much importance to the fact that these technologies also link Mexico more closely with Europe. Although at first glance it seems that the future Mexico is on a par with Europe, the only artists and scientists mentioned in the text are French or Italian, privileging Europeans as the purveyors of culture and science even in this imagined utopia. Perhaps Fósforos believed that national scientific and artistic contributions would come once Mexico had caught up with the North in terms of access to the products of scientists and artists. Don Próspero does speak early on of his hopes that the next Mexican generation “will cause a brilliant revolution in the sciences and arts,” now that specialization is the accepted method of study (347), but apparently Fósforos did not believe that 126 years would be enough time to complete that revolution.
Joaquim Felício dos Santos was a member of a prominent family from the state of Minas Gerais. A lawyer by training, he also worked as an educator, a businessman, a politician, and a newspaperman. He wrote in multiple genres, but he is best known for his historical text, Memoirs of the Diamantino District [Memórias do Distrito Diamantino], and for the Indianist fiction Acayaca; he himself considered his greatest work to be his multivolume project rewriting the Brazilian civil code. Felício dos Santos was the writer, editor, and “the principal person responsible” for O Jequitinhonha (pronounced “Zhe-kee-chee-NYO-nya,” named for a mesoregion in Minas Gerais), a four-page weekly newspaper based in the city of Diamantina and serving the northern part of the province of Minas Gerais (Teixeira Neves 21). Here he published Brazil 2000 in almost weekly installments between 1868 and 1872. An ardent Liberal-cum-Republican, Felício dos Santos wrote Brazil 2000 in direct response to specific political events of the day. It was a biting satire against the Brazilian emperor and his regime, a sort of fictional complement to or “gloss” of the contents of the newspaper’s front and editorial pages (Eulálio, “Páginas” 104).
Some historical background is necessary to understand the driving force behind the work of this early writer of Brazilian science fiction. Brazil’s path to independence, and the resulting political situation, are unique among Latin American nations. When Napoleon’s forces invaded Portugal, King João vi and the Portuguese royal court fled with sixteen thousand of their closest friends to Rio de Janeiro, a move that was, as Skidmore points out, “unprecedented not only in the history of the Americas but in the whole history of colonial exploration” (35). From 1815 to 1822, the state of Brazil enjoyed equal status to Portugal in a united kingdom. In 1821 Dom João returned to Portugal, leaving his son Pedro as prince regent of Brazil; in 1822, with his father’s blessing, Pedro declared Brazilian independence and was crowned Emperor Pedro I of Brazil. After his father’s death in 1831, Pedro I returned to Portugal to assume the Portuguese throne, leaving his five-year-old son, the Brazilian-born Pedro II, to rule Brazil. The reign of Pedro II, referred to as the Second Reign, lasted for most of the nineteenth century, and is often compared to that of Queen Victoria for its length and stability. The violent rebellions against the colonizer and the internal upheaval that preceded independence and national consolidation in Hispanic America had virtually no counterpart in Brazil.
Brazilian development during the Second Reign looked good on paper: factories were built at an increasing rate, railroad tracks and telegraph lines expanded rapidly, and the steamship reduced what had been a two- to three-month trip up the Amazon to a mere nine days.8 A look beyond the numbers, however, reveals that this economic growth benefited only a wealthy few; independent Brazil continued the colonial pattern of dependency both within its borders and in its relationship with Europe. Land ownership remained in the hands of an elite minority and the expanding railroads, instead of serving to unify the far-flung provinces of the vast Brazilian empire, “generally ran between plantation and port. Thus, they helped to speed exports to market rather than . . . to create an internal economic infrastructure” (Burns, History 160–61). Brazil extended telegraph lines to Europe (1874) before sending lines to its nearest neighbors (Montevideo in 1879, Buenos Aires in 1883) or to many of its own provinces. This process of quantitative growth without real qualitative development contributed to the phenomenon of unequal modernity that persists in Brazil today. The Second Reign lasted until 1889, when Pedro, much weakened physically and politically, ceded power to junior military officers who rose up in a nearly bloodless coup.
Felício dos Santos had halted publication of O Jequitinhonha in order to attempt to change the Brazilian political situation from within. He was elected to a term in the legislature of the Empire of Brazil for 1864–66, but left government in frustration after only a few months, as his attempts at political reform were virtually ignored. By the late 1860s the first cracks in the national political situation were already becoming visible. Brazil was embroiled in a costly war with Paraguay (1865–70) for which Dom Pedro II took much of the blame at home. When Pedro II invited the Conservative rather than the Liberal Party to form a government in July of 1868—in order to consolidate support for a less conciliatory Paraguayan policy than that supported by the Liberal majority in the Chamber of Deputies—Felício dos Santos resumed publication of his newspaper with a vengeance. On August 23, 1868, the first installment of Brazil 2000 appeared in its pages.
Despite the independence enjoyed by the press at that time, the degree to which Felício dos Santos felt free to attack Brazil’s political system and the figure of her monarch in Brazil 2000 seems surprising. The text has, in fact, been called “the best critique of the monarchy in our country” (Magalhães 252). Some of Felício dos Santos’s favorite targets were the alleged nonconstitutional intentions of the constitutional monarch; the institution of the lifelong senate term; the lack of any real difference between the Conservative and Liberal parties; corruption among legislators; the centralization of political power and economic infrastructure to the detriment of outlying provinces such as his own; the war with Paraguay; and the prevailing custom of determining a person’s worth based on social class, economic means, royal favor, or race rather than on individual merit. This list is quite particular to the Brazilian milieu, yet has marked similarities to Fósforos’s targets in “Mexico 1970.” The mordancy of Felício dos Santos’s satire can be attributed to his belief that he was publishing in the relative “anonymity” of O Jequitinhonha, and consequently that Brazil 2000 would not reach farther than the newspaper’s regional mineiro audience (Eulálio, “Páginas” 104). The work was “ephemeral” by design, which perhaps explains why he never republished it in other newspapers or in book form, as he did several of his other serialized works (Eulálio, “Páginas 103). By all accounts, however, this impassioned literary editorial did not go unnoticed at court, and it is likely that his attacks on the monarchy in O Jequitinhonha, and particularly in Brazil 2000, were the deciding factor in Pedro II’s rejection of Felício dos Santos’s projected revision of the legal code (Teixeira Neves 26; Eulálio, “Páginas” 107–8).
Brazil 2000 eventually sank into relative oblivion. A few historians and literary critics have revealed knowledge of the text, but only Alexandre Eulálio has written about it in depth. The fragility of the medium on which the text was printed meant that not even Eulálio had access to the complete work (“Páginas” 106n5); for the purposes of this study I have been able to read the majority of the text and Eulálio’s summaries of most of the remainder.9 Although we do not have either the beginning or a true ending to the text of Brazil 2000—Eulálio tells us that the text peters out in late 1872, rather than ending definitively (“Páginas” 103)—we do have something almost as good. On November 22, 1862, Felício dos Santos published a short story in O Jequitinhonha entitled “A History of Brazil Written by Dr. Jeremias in the Year 2862” [A História do Brasil escrita pelo Dr. Jeremias no Ano de 2862], which I have examined in greater detail elsewhere (“Emergence” 155–63). According to Eulálio and to my own reading of the text, “Dr. Jeremias 2862” is the seed of what eventually became Brazil 2000 (“Páginas” 106). Both “Dr. Jeremias 2862” and Brazil 2000 are futuristic utopias, and the narrative premise of each involves a nineteenth-century re-(pre-)edition of a history of Brazil brought back in time from the twenty-ninth or twenty-first century (with notes, excisions, and commentary by sundry historians, narrators, translators, and historical or fictional authorities from the two time streams). Eulálio goes as far as to call Felício dos Santos a “Jules Verne from the Brazilian sertão region” [Júlio Verne sertanejo] (“Páginas” 103), but he does not analyze either of these texts as science fiction. Brazil 2000 was only definitively reclaimed for the genre by Braulio Tavares in the early 1990s, most visibly in the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
The text can be divided into two clearly defined parts or, to use Eulálio’s term, “phases” (“Páginas” 105–6). Phase one runs from August 23, 1868, through December 5, 1869, and phase two from December 12, 1869, through late 1872. The second phase of the text is referred to far more often by both historians and literary critics for several reasons: it is “more action oriented” (Eulálio, “Páginas” 105); it contains the actual time-travel journey to the year 2000; it is the more utopian half of the tale; and it contains Felício dos Santos’s often accurate or “prophetic” predictions about the Brazil of the future (Magalhães 252). The installments of the first phase of Brazil 2000 do not devote a great deal of space to life in the future, but they do not have to in order to be considered sf since they are purportedly from the future. These time-traveling pages do not proclaim the progress and scientific advances of the coming years so much as they describe the anti-scientific forces working against progress in nineteenth-century Brazil. We are not shown the wonders of the future republic, but rather the evils of empire which hold Republican forces in check.
Phase one of Brazil 2000 is an unofficial, nonestablishment version of the events of 1868–69, a version written from the periphery of national power—though not, it should be remembered, from a position of complete powerlessness—and revelatory of the darker side of the empire. What Felício dos Santos’s science-fictional history of Brazil’s present is able to do (which his historical text, Memoirs of the Diamantino District, cannot) is to claim for itself the authority of the ultimate victors, to say that this will be the official history, this will be how today’s people and events are remembered in the future. Despite the literary realism of phase one, with its heavy emphasis on dialogues and diatribes, there is also a great sense of metanarrative play. As Alkon has observed, “Where fantasy is avoided, various metafictional devices often play an equivalent role in moving futuristic fiction away from unselfconscious realism” (Origins 193). Figures such as a nineteenth-century editor and a translator of the history book from the year 2000 leave clear and deliberate editorial scissor marks and opinions scattered throughout the text. Their interjections provide constant connection with the future-time perspective of the text from 2000 by reminding readers that this is not simply a nineteenth-century history book narrated in an omniscient style, but rather a mediated, retrospective view of nineteenth-century history whose writer and mediators know which facts and information have become most pertinent and which opinions and attitudes have proven to be the correct ones. Yet Felício dos Santos is so blatant about his narrative manipulation in Brazil 2000 that the reader never forgets that this is a projected history written with an overt nineteenth-century agenda. Felício dos Santos’s satire—as well as his sense of humor—extends to the very notion that an unmediated, ultimate, and true history is possible, and to his own endeavor to persuade the reader that this text is just such a work.
Phase one of Brazil 2000 is a dystopia in which Felício dos Santos portrays the evils of Brazil’s political system, the Paraguayan war, and the usurpers in the new Conservative cabinet. He focuses on the figure of Pedro II as the personification of corrupt, nonprogressive forces that arrogate all power to the central government. To support his criticism, he links Dom Pedro with the outmoded past in a number of ways, using both metanarrative and plot.
First, the writer makes it known that Brazil’s monarchical system of government has fallen before the year 2000, and has the emperor himself betray his “true” motivations and character. This is done both in the outer framework of the year 2000 history—in a footnote, one Dr. Sckwthrencoff cites a tradition that “was preserved until the fall of the Brazilian monarchy” (Dec. 5, 1869)—and within the text itself. At one point, the fictional monarch recognizes that the Brazilian people will inevitably unite against him—“Wretches, who one day will decide to rise up and contest the divine prerogatives of royalty!” (Feb. 28, 1869)—although it is never made clear how the year 2000 historian gained this fly-on-the-wall perspective. At other points in the narrative, Felício dos Santos prefers to place this type of insider’s view within a citation of a text written by someone else. Most but not all of the writers of these intercalated texts share names with real people. Conversely, most but not all of the texts are completely or partially fictional. On several occasions, for example, Felício dos Santos “cites” from a play, The Ceará Elections [Eleições do Ceará], supposedly by the well-known writer and newly minted Conservative José de Alencar (1829–77); in scene thirty-seven of this one-act play, Pedro II admits his tendency toward the accumulation of power to one of his ministers:
In monarchies the nation is a great head on a rickety body, all the vitality of the extremities should flow to a single point, the capital. . . . Paris is France; London, England; Saint Petersburg, Russia; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Washington goes unnoticed on the world map: it is the capital of a savage, degenerate people, the scourge of nations, who disdain the supreme happiness of government by a crowned brow! (Dec. 5, 1869)
Nas monarchias o paiz é uma grande cabeça em um corpo rachitico, toda a vitalidade dos extremos deve affluir para um ponto unico, a capital. . . . Pariz é a França, Londres a Inglaterra, S Petersburgo a Russia, Rio de Janeiro o Brasil. Washington passa desappercebido no mappa-mundo: é a capital de um povo selvagem, degenerado, a escoria das nações, que desdenhára a suprema felicidade do governo de um testa coroado!
The passage is of further interest for its association of Dom Pedro with Europe (the Old World) rather than the United States (the New World); Pedro II is repeatedly shown seeking approval and recognition from Europe and speaking against the decentralization of power in the United States, a political model that is the bane of his existence.10 This inversion of Felício dos Santos’s own ideas is another example of how he uses the king’s view of the world as a foil for his own.
Felício dos Santos also relegates Pedro II and his monarchy to the past by portraying Dom Pedro as anti-scientific and therefore anti-progress, unable to function in the modern world. Felício dos Santos makes this accusation in spite of the fact that Pedro II was a patron of the sciences and something of an amateur scientist in his own right.11 In Brazil 2000 Pedro II is represented as a presumptuous dabbler who uses science as an instrument of imperial control, a vain man who believes that a scientific veneer will grant him status and respect from the European monarchs he longs to impress. One of many examples of the king’s complete ignorance of all things scientific is given in a (fictional) passage cited from a (fictional) scientific text by a (nominally real) writer. Here Dom Pedro favors a new technique he has read about in a pamphlet claiming it is possible to produce detonators from roasted coffee beans (Feb. 21, 1869). Thus, instead of bringing Brazil to the higher level of technological sophistication required to produce detonators from the usual fulminate of mercury, the king invests national resources in low-tech quackery.
Phase two of Brazil 2000 functions as an antidote to phase one; it is as much an anti-dystopia as a utopia. Here Felício dos Santos draws an even tighter connection between the two temporal threads of his narrative. In addition to bringing a text back in time, he sends a person traveling into the future. But he does not take the more usual course of choosing someone sympathetic to his own vision; rather than sending a person to admire, learn about, and bring ideas back from his ideal future, Felício dos Santos sends his fictionalized Pedro II.12 This rather abrupt turn of events begins in the episode of December 12, 1869, which opens with these words from the nineteenth-century editor:
We owe the reader an explanation of our title—Pages from the History of Brazil Written in the Year 2000. How, in the year of our Lord 1869, can you publish fragments of a history book that will not be written for another 131 years?
Devemos ao leitor uma explicação do nosso titulo—Paginas da Historia do Brasil escripta no anno de MM. Como no anno de graça de 1869 publicais fragmentos de uma historia, que ainda hade [sic] ser escripta um seculo e trinta e um annos depois?
The editor insists that a text that travels through time should not seem absurd in a world of instantaneous communication through space between America and Europe. He then makes a connection that would resonate with contemporary Brazilian readers: the text of Brazil 2000 has been brought from the future by a medium. Spiritism had arrived in Brazil via France in the 1850s, and by the 1870s it was enjoying wide popularity among the Brazilian elite (see Machado 68, 92). It is important that Felício dos Santos’s choice of Spiritism as a method of time travel be viewed in this context and in the context of typical science-fictional methods of travel through time and space prior to Wells’s Time Machine (see, for example, Nicolson and the entries on “Time Travel” by Edwards and Stableford and “Sleeper Awakes” by Clute in the Clute/Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction). Felício dos Santos was clearly not a believer in Spiritism himself, and his inclusion of Spiritism in the text should not be construed as a third-world, low-tech alternative to travel via technological means nor as evidence for the common and only partially correct characterization of Latin American sf as tending toward the “soft” sciences and the fantastic.
In a somewhat confused plot twist, the editor’s promised explanation of how he obtained the year 2000 history morphs into an account of Pedro II’s trip to the future. The monarch’s journey through time in Brazil 2000 is immediately preceded by a (meta)literary experience:
It was 14 minutes and 23 seconds after 11 o’clock at night. Profound silence reigned in the palace of St. Christopher, everyone slept; only H.R.M. the emperor remained awake. Reclining near a table, H.R.M. was attentively devouring the marvelous adventures of Don Quijote of la Mancha . . . the reading of which is permitted only to great monarchs.
“Oh! If only a prince were allowed to read about the history of his reign in the future!” His majesty broke off. Through the shadows of his thoughts he discerned the pallid figure of a man. It was not an illusion. The man advanced, bowed, and kissed the imperial hand.
“Who are you? Where did you come from? What do you want?” the emperor asked.
“Dr. Tsherepanoff, your majesty’s most humble servant. A native of Russia, I have just come from France; I have traveled 9,645 leagues today.”
“No, Sir, I am not a madman. I am a medium.” (Dec. 12, 1869)
Erão 11 horas, 14 minutos e 23 segundos da noite. Reinava profundo silencio no palacio de S. Christovão, tudo dormia; só velava S.M. o imperador. Recostado junto a uma meza, S.M. devorava attento as portentosas aventuras de D. Quichote de la Mancha, . . . cuja leitura é só dada aos grandes monarchas.
Oh! fosse dado á um principe ler no futuro a historia do seu reinado!
S.M. interrompeu-se. Através das sombras de seus pensamentos enxergou a figura palida de um homem. Não era uma illusão. Este avançou, curvou-se, e beijou a mão imperial.
—Quem és? Donde vieste? O que queres? Perguntou o imperador.
—O Dr. Tsherepanoff, humillissimo servo de V.M., natural da Russia; venho da França, percorri hoje nove mil seiscentas e quarenta e cinco legoas.
—Um louco!
—Não, Senhor, não sou louco. Sou um médium.
After Dr. Tsherepanoff gives further evidence of his credentials as medium-to-the-monarchs, he puts the emperor into a hypnotic sleep.
Dom Pedro awakens on January 1, 2000. Instead of discovering the greatness of his legacy, he finds that a Republican government has decentralized Brazil and made it a federation. In the “confederation of the United-States of Brazil,” transportation by “aerostatic packet” [paquete aeróstatico] and communication via “electrical telegraphy” [telegraphia electrica] allow for power and influence to be shared equally among all Brazilian cities, towns, and villages, uniting the entire country rather than concentrating power in the capital (Dec. 12, 19, and 26, 1869). In the text of this author from the provinces, Rio is reduced to a virtual ruin, and a statue of Pedro I has been replaced with one of Tiradentes, a Republican hero. Pedro II learns that he was deposed at some point, and that his body lies in a modest tomb in Italy, where most of his descendants are now hard-working farmers. When Pedro II happens to meet a Brazilian descendant, the man knows nothing of the former glories of his line and barely remembers that Brazil had ever been an empire.
Despite a few errors and exaggerations, Felício dos Santos was surprisingly successful in a number of his predictions for the year 2000. Brazil would indeed become a republic in his own lifetime. He also predicted the relocation of the national capital to the geographic center, an end to slavery in Brazil (1888), the population of Brazil in 2000 (within 20 million people), and the creation of a United Nations. But, as Fredric Jameson has noted, “the most characteristic SF does not seriously attempt to imagine the ‘real’ future of our social system. Rather, its multiple mock futures serve the quite different function of transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come” (“Progress” 152). Felício dos Santos’s device of a history of the nineteenth century written in the year 2000 is a literalization of this transformative process. He was far less invested in representing an idyllic future in his text than in using that text to plant seeds of change in his own time. With another of his predictions, for example, he sought to prepare his countrymen for a change he believed to be inevitable. Although he was unable to predict the presidency of Lula, Felício dos Santos did imagine a president of mixed Indian and African ancestry, which was for his time and place an extremely unlikely possibility. Anticipating his readers’ rejection of the idea of such a president, he has his fictional nineteenth-century editor argue his case:
Peace, friend reader; our poor imagination does not come into this at all; it is reality. . . . Other times, other customs. Peoples are like individuals: their ideas, their principles, their tastes, their character change with the eras. The nineteenth century in which we live is not the same as the twenty-first. We say with Voltaire, “what things, what marvels our children will see!” In the twenty-first century color and birth are purely accidental qualities; people consider things from a rational point of view, they heed only the personal qualities of the individual. (Brazil 2000 139–40)
—Paz, amigo leitor; aqui não entra em nada a nossa pobre imaginação; é a realidade. . . . Outros tempos, outros costumes. Os povos são como os indivíduos; suas idéias, seus princípios, seus gostos, seu caráter mudam-se com as épocas. O século XIX em que vivemos não é o mesmo que o século XXI. Diremos com Voltaire—que coisas, que maravilhas verão os nossos filhos! No século XXI, a côr, o nascimento, são qualidades puramente acidentais, consideram as coisas debaixo de um ponto de vista racional; só atendem-se as qualidades pessoais do indivíduo.
Felício dos Santos uses his chosen science-fictional narrative technique to particular advantage here: this is not supposition or invention, it is reality; this is not literary imagination (claims the author’s literary invention, the nineteenth-century editor), but historical fact. This is one of the beauties of the time-travel narrative; as Scott Mc-Lemee has pointed out in his analysis of Bellamy’s Looking Backward, the future may be radically different from the time traveler’s present, but “there is also the evidence of [the time traveler’s] senses: you can’t argue with success” (23).
In comparison with Fósforos’s vision of a twentieth-century Mexico, Felício dos Santos projects a Brazil that is far more secure in its sense of national identity and far less dependent on the North. Once the Brazilian republic has recovered from the backward conditions Felício dos Santos blames on the monarchy, it finds itself “rivaling the cultured nations of old Europe” (Brazil 2000 137). Brazil and other nations of the nineteenth-century periphery are now producers of science and of culture: the mechanism for steering dirigibles has been discovered by an African engineer from Timbuktu (Dec. 26, 1869); Pedro II reads a scientific treatise by Dr. Japoti, a celebrated chemist from the Macuné Indian tribe (139); more newspapers in African languages than European languages are available in the future Brazilian capital (Dec. 26, 1869); and European and North American students come to study at superior Brazilian universities (Mar. 19, 1871). But even though Brazil has become the future and Europe the past, Felício dos Santos cannot quite rid himself of the last vestiges of the mindset of dependency. In what is perhaps an unconscious slip into nineteenth-century rhetoric, a transportation engineer in the year 2000 explains the benefits of connecting Brazil’s interior with the coast with the phrase, “Duty-free passage down the river was promoted, opening it [the republic] to the sea, to foreign commerce, to light and civilization” [promoveu-se a navegação franca do rio, abrindo-a (república) para o mar, para o comércio estrangeiro, para as luzes e civilização] (143). Felício dos Santos can see Brazil helping European and other central nations financially, politically, and even educationally, but he still refers to “light and civilization” as coming from without rather than from within.
Felício dos Santos’s decision to transform a future history into a time-travel narrative reflects his increasing optimism about the future of Brazil. He himself went from Liberal to full-fledged Republican during his years of writing for O Jequitinhonha, whereas Pedro II went from an evenhanded user of his moderating power to a conservatively biased monarch at the head of a long and costly armed conflict. Still, the author of Brazil 2000 had to live through nearly twenty more years of monarchy, waiting for his country to take what he firmly believed was the key first step along the way to realizing its true potential. Felício dos Santos was a nation builder, but as he began to run out of time to build as he saw fit, he created his own time in which to do so:
A patriot in a nation that was taking its first steps, surrounded by difficulties of every order, having its aspirations to become a great power curbed by the naturally inferior situation that we [Brazil] occupied in international politics, he turned to the blank page of the future where he would draft his dreams of greatness. In this way he sublimated his disenchantment and his dissatisfaction with contemporary reality at the same time as he spiritedly served his political faction. (Eulálio, “Páginas” 107)13
Amid his musings on the wonders of his utopian future, Felício dos Santos writes rather wistfully, “Oh! if only some fairy, medium, or spiritist could prolong our lives until then!” (140). Before Joaquim Felício dos Santos died in 1895, he participated in the industrialization of Brazil, witnessed the abolition of slavery (1888) and the fall of the monarchy (1889), and was elected to a term in the Republican senate (1890).
Our third text, Nic-Nac, was published by Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg in weekly installments in the Serials [Folletín] section of the Buenos Aires newspaper El Nacional between November 29, 1875, and March 13, 1876. At this time, Argentina was just emerging from a period of national unrest. The domination of national politics by the caudillos of the mid-nineteenth century had been broken, and the aftershocks of the rebellion of Bartolomé Mitre, the losing presidential candidate in the elections of 1874, were almost over. National institutions were being founded left and right, and the watershed year of 1880, commonly cited as the point at which Argentina achieved national consolidation, was almost in sight. This was a time of great optimism about Argentina’s potential for development. “Compared to other Latin American countries,” Julia Rodríguez writes in Civilizing Argentina: Science, Medicine, and the Modern State, “Argentina was surging ahead. It appeared that the nation had a chance to reach the levels of prosperity and development of its northern neighbor, the United States” (2). The hegemony of scientific discourse was at its height and—as science was perceived as one of the keys to national progress—was accompanied by a pragmatic drive to improve scientific education. Argentina’s greatest educational reformer was Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the republic’s second president (1868–74). As part of his efforts, Sarmiento brought foreign scientists to Argentina. These scientists, however, usually published their findings in Europe, in languages other than Spanish, and did not generally devote significant time or energy to training students. It fell to the Argentine Generation of 1880 to improve national scientific literacy and to build the foundation of an Argentine scientific establishment.
Holmberg was a prominent member of the Generation of 1880, although he was also well known in the modernist circles of the subsequent generation. This “shining star of early Argentine natural science” was a licensed medical doctor (Rodríguez 29), an Argentine Linnaeus who worked to catalogue the national flora and fauna, an educator who taught in most branches of the sciences from anatomy to zoology, and the director of the national zoo. He was also a poet, a prolific writer of fiction short and long, and the person often credited with introducing three genres in Argentina and/or Latin America: the fantastic tale, detective fiction, and science fiction.14 He was instrumental in importing scientific and literary ideas and trends from the North through his professional work and his translations of documents from English, French, and German. He was also a key figure in the movement for scientific and literary autonomy, a founder of the first scientific periodical written and published in Argentina by Argentines (The Argentine Naturalist [El Naturalista Argentino]), a contributor to a project on national variants of the Spanish language (the Dictionary of the Argentine Language [Diccionario del lenguaje argentino]), and the author of Lin-Calél, an epic poem in the Indianist tradition. Holmberg was not merely interested in introducing the rest of the world to Argentina, but in introducing Argentina to itself. Perhaps Holmberg’s “transitional/border character” [carácter de frontera] (Ludmer, Cuerpo 173, translation mine), his location “in between”—between generations, between intellectual disciplines, between national traditions—was what made him such an important national literary innovator and popularizer of science.
For Holmberg and his generation, national development was inextricably linked to the creation of a scientifically informed population. As he wrote in the “Note to the Reader” [Advertencia] of the first issue of The Argentine Naturalist in 1878, “The natural sciences, the sciences of observation, should be considered the foundation of modern progress” (qtd. in Pagés Larraya 18). Holmberg saw literature and science as natural partners in this process. “In order to awaken a love for Natural History in the Argentine public,” he said in 1876, “it is indispensable to use fairly literary language to present the material, to love science, and above all to always combine the useful with the pleasant” (qtd. in Luis Holmberg 76). It is therefore no surprise that when Holmberg became the one to present Darwin’s theories to the Argentine reading public, he chose to do so in a work of fiction, Two Factions Struggle for Life: A Scientific Fantasy [Dos partidos en lucha: Fantasía científica] (1875; discussed in chapter 2). In addition to defending Darwinism in Two Factions, Holmberg also recognizes a number of Northern writers for making science more accessible and more palatable. He cites scientists such as Flammarion and Figuier for their contributions toward putting science “within reach of all levels of intelligence” (70). He also cites writers of adventure and science-fictional tales such as Jules Verne and Mayne Reyd (or Reid) for making science seem more attractive and appealing (70).
The influence of all of these writers is also clear in Nic-Nac, which Holmberg wrote during the same period as Two Factions. In the tale, Nic-Nac, a doctor, and a supposedly German medium called Friedrich Seele travel together to Mars. Not unlike the Europeans arriving in the New World, two of Nic-Nac’s first actions on Mars are to name geographic features after familiar places and to worry that the inhabitants might be cannibals. Nic-Nac and the doctor soon become acquainted with the landscape, beings, customs, and institutions of the red planet. Before Seele—who turns out to be a Martian15—leaves the other two to their own devices, he endows each with a phosphorescent aura that will function as a protective shield against any aggression by the natives as well as overcome any language barriers, a sort of nineteenth-century version of the universal translator in Star Trek or the babel fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. A series of adventures follow, including an interspecies love affair between the doctor and a Martian girl, Nic-Nac’s visit with the local Martian leaders, and a flight via some unnamed means to the capital city. At many points in the tale the Martians appear to be an advanced, utopian civilization; at others they seem to possess flaws with marked similarities to those of their terrestrial counterparts. The text ends with Nic-Nac’s return to Earth, where his efforts to share the lessons of his journey result in his being treated like a modern version of the proverbial prophet in his own country: he is confined to an insane asylum.
The tale of Nic-Nac’s fantastic journey has two distinct narrative frames. The outer narrative takes place in Buenos Aires on November 19, 1875, a week before Holmberg’s Nic-Nac began to appear in El Nacional. In this frame we hear the voices of the inhabitants of Buenos Aires reacting to the news that Nic-Nac claims to have returned from a trip to Mars, and we read the latest news bulletins on the matter. Some citizens believe Nic-Nac, calling him “the daring Livingstone of outer space” (3); others refer to his supposed journey as “his harebrained and fantastic excursion” (4). The authorities are in agreement with the latter group,16 and Nic-Nac is declared mad. Over the next three days Nic-Nac writes the tale of his adventures in order to defend their veracity and his own sanity; his book, The Marvelous Journey of Mr. Nic-Nac to the Planet Mars [Viaje maravilloso del Sr. Nic-Nac al planeta Marte], is published on November 22. As this frame closes, the third-person narrator turns to address the reader directly, employing language similar to that which Holmberg had used to laud Verne’s talents as a popularizer of complex scientific ideas. “In our times,” the narrator says, “serious ideas do not fulfill their destiny except when they are wrapped in the mantle of fantasy . . . let us then read Mr. Nic-Nac’s book; it may resolve some important matter” [En nuestros tiempos las ideas sérias no cumplen su destino sino envueltas en el manto de la fantasía . . . vamos pues á leer el libro del Sr. Nic-Nac,—quizá resuelva alguna cuestion importante] (7).
The narrator’s injunction is followed by the text of Nic-Nac’s account, which is a framed narrative in its own right. The frame to Nic-Nac’s tale is his own explanation of the mechanism he used for the first known space trip from Earth. Like Felício dos Santos’s Pedro II, Nic-Nac achieves his displacement, or “transplanetation” [transplanetacion] (122), with the help of a foreign medium. Also, as with Brazil 2000, this method of transportation in Nic-Nac should not be read as an avoidance of technology in Latin American sf. Rocket ships were not de rigueur for space travel in early science fiction, and Holmberg undoubtedly modeled the voyage in Nic-Nac after that in Flammarion’s Lumen (1872).17 Under the guidance of the medium, Seele, Nic-Nac decides to induce the separation of his “spirit-image” [espíritu-imagen] from his material body by depriving himself of “all that might debilitate the spirit by strengthening the material being,” that is to say, by starving himself (Nic-Nac 18). His declared purpose is to gain a new perspective on the great questions of this life and the next: “It is necessary . . . to liberate the spirit from the weight of the material being and to elevate it essentially to those regions that may serve to resolve the most difficult issues of the Universe” [Es necesario . . . libertar el espíritu del peso de la materia y elevarlo sustancialmente á aquellas rejiones que puedan servir quizá para resolver los puntos mas difíciles del Universo] (10).
The invitation by the narrator to look below the surface of Nic-Nac’s fantastic journey for a more serious subtext also has a literary echo in Nic-Nac’s choice of reading material during his initial preparation for his trip. Immediately after making the decision to starve the body to feed the soul, he sits down with the same book that Felício dos Santos’s Dom Pedro was reading prior to his displacement: “As proof of my determination,” Nic-Nac tells the reader, “I spent the rest of the day reading the description of the wedding of Camacho” (18). In the second volume of Don Quijote, this wedding is immediately followed by the famous episode of the Cave of Montesinos. Upon being lowered into the cave, don Quijote says, “I was, all of a sudden, overpowered by a most profound sleep” (Cervantes 485). Don Quijote goes on to describe awakening in front of Montesinos’s castle and the many marvelous things he witnessed in the company of Montesinos over the next three days, although Sancho Panza informs him he was gone only an hour and that a number of the events his master has described could not have happened. When Sancho doubts don Quijote’s sanity aloud, the good knight rejoins: “As thou art not experienced in the events of this world, every thing that is uncommon, to thee seems impossible” (491). In addition to the comedic value of a starving man reading about a feast and to an interest (also seen in Brazil 2000) in Cervantes’s use of narrative frames, Holmberg includes this reference to the Quijote as a second injunction to the reader to look beyond Nic-Nac’s apparent insanity to the sense that lies beneath. Holmberg directs our attention from Mars to Earth, from fictional situations to real ones, from utopia to “topia.”
Holmberg’s Mars fluctuates between a direct analogy for Earth and a representation of a more advanced, utopian society that Terrans would do well to emulate. Chapter 7 of Nic-Nac, the first chapter that takes place on Mars, ends with a direct statement that each continent of Mars has an equivalent on Earth (31). Chapter 8 then commences with a declaration of Martian superiority: “Their advances, superior to those of the Earth, have been conquered by means of numerous sacrifices that today place them at the first level among planetary civilizations” (31–32). Nic-Nac again implies that Martian society is the more advanced when he later uses the nebular hypothesis (as H. G. Wells also did over twenty years later in War of the Worlds) to state that because Mars is an older planet than Earth, Martian life evolved earlier (61). On the next page, however, he brings the Martians back to the level of Terrans, saying that Martians have evolved at a slower pace (62). The utopian Mars continues to reappear throughout the narrative. There is no illness on Mars; love on the red planet is “more elevated, more sublime” than on Earth (120); Martians are more generous (126). Indeed, at one point Nic-Nac laments the need ever to return to his inferior home planet:
Ah! What a shame! . . . to arrive at the pedestal of glory and of hopes on the rosiest of the planets, and to return to Earth to contemplate the same storms, the same valleys, the same faces . . . . . . What a shame! To rise so high only to sink so low! (84)
Ah! qué desgracia! . . . llegar al pedestal de la gloria y de las ilusiones en el mas rosado de los planetas, y volver á la Tierra á contemplar las mismas tormentas, los mismos valles, los mismos rostros. . . . . . ¡qué desgracia! subir tan alto para hundirse tanto!
When Nic-Nac arrives at the twinned Martian cities of Theosophopolis (city of God and of the wise; 48), his visit to the Sophopolis section seems to confirm the utopian characteristics of the planet’s inhabitants. Sophopolis is the embodiment of Frye’s characterization of utopias as “elite societies in which a small group is entrusted with essential responsibilities, and this elite is usually some analogy of a priesthood. . . . The utopias of science fiction are generally controlled by scientists, who of course are another form of priestly elite” (35). In Sophopolis, the Academy of Sciences functions as the seat of government. It is also a substitute for a religious institution; weddings are held there rather than at a church because, Nic-Nac tells his readers, the academy is “a more worthy temple, a more sacred building” (128). At the same time as he elevates the sciences, however, Holmberg turns a critical eye on scientists. He portrays the scientists in Nic-Nac as myopically focusing on their special fields of interest and as tending toward interdisciplinary squabbling. Upon witnessing an astronomer and a zoologist bickering, Nic-Nac exclaims, “Poor wise men! . . . They are the same everywhere; always ill-humored, and not infrequently irrelevant!” (82). Eduardo Ortiz has persuasively compared the Sophopolitan scientists in Nic-Nac with Burmeister and the younger generation of German scientists that Sarmiento had brought to Argentina, whom Ortiz terms the “Córdoba Six.” If Holmberg was indeed a “keen supporter of the German scientists” in their disagreements with Burmeister (Ortiz 60), he was also critical of them for staying inside their ivory towers and failing to spread scientific knowledge throughout their host country.18 Holmberg was more overt elsewhere in his criticism of Argentina’s scientific dependency on the North and in his advocacy of his country’s becoming a producer of science (Two Factions 90, 113, 133; Luis Holmberg 4). In Nic-Nac he limits his commentary on the matter to the above-mentioned rather negative characterization of scientists and to the fact that, in the narrative, all scientists—canonical and occult, fictional and actual, identified and implied—are associated with the North: Seele, Gould, Flammarion, Burmeister, and the “Córdoba Six.”
But if Nic-Nac describes Sophopolis, the semi-utopian “city of the wise,” as a place where “the light is of a white or rosy cast, and a pleasant yet at the same time rigorous majesty seems to have traced the lines of the buildings” (49), he does not characterize Theopolis, “the city of God,” as such a model: “The doors of the houses almost never open; a profound silence reigns during the day, interrupted only by the creaking, or rather the lamentations of some instruments that the inhabitants of Earth would call bells . . . and by the sacred choirs that no one understands, because if they were understood they would lose their eminently mystical character” (48). To the Argentine reader of Holmberg’s time, as well as to the alert reader of today, Theosophopolis clearly represents the Argentine city of Córdoba, famous as the seat of the Jesuits in Argentina and home of the Academy of Sciences of Córdoba, founded in 1874. In his personal life Holmberg was a skeptic; publicly he attacked religious hypocrisy and intolerance rather than religion itself. In Nic-Nac he is not interested in placing science above religion, but rather in mutual respect between the two, a respect he saw as one-sided in Argentina at that time: “The Sophopolitans viewed the inhabitants of Theopolis as their equals, but the latter, in their heart of hearts, saw an inferior in each Sophopolitan” (75). Holmberg’s criticisms of religion in Nic-Nac are limited to the ostentatious, opaque, intolerant brand of Christianity practiced by the Theopolitans; unlike other Martian Christians, Seele explains to Nic-Nac,
the characteristic feature of their life is the exaltation of an abominable quality: hypocrisy; and this quality, converted by them into dogma, has brought more evils to Mars than all of the Martial/Martian wars and abuses. (73)
el rasgo característico de su vida es la exaltacion de una cualidad abominable: la hipocresía; y esta cualidad, convertida por ellos en dogma, ha derramado mas males sobre Marte que todas las guerras y abusos Marciales.
As for his own beliefs, Nic-Nac sums them up with the words, “I am a Christian, but in my own way” [Soy cristiano, pero á mi modo] (97).
From Theosophopolis, Nic-Nac and Seele cross an unpopulated plain bearing a strong resemblance to the Argentine pampa in order to reach the capital city of the country of Aureliana (argentum becomes aurum) on the coast. They find the unnamed capital city, much like the Buenos Aires of the time, divided by the factional squabbling that is, Seele tells Nic-Nac, “so common in countries that have not yet consolidated their internal organization” (145). Nic-Nac claims to have the most impartial view of the situation due to his outsider’s perspective; the critical distance of “an extranatural being like myself, yes, I, Nic-Nac . . . who is ruled by the single desire to learn and to judge” (165). Nic-Nac tries to convince the two major factions to value peace and national unity as a route to progress, explaining, “The progress of nations is the favorite son of Peace” (146). He tries to make the factions realize that they are not two groups (on Mars they are given names other than “Nationalists” and “Autonomists”) but one (never quite called “Argentines”). Although this situation is not resolved in the narrative, there is a sense of optimism at the end of the episode. As Nic-Nac and Seele leave the capital to return to Theosophopolis, Seele promises positive changes to come: “Later, when all is calm, we’ll return, and you will see such a metamorphosis!” (173).
Once he has read Nic-Nac’s account, the narrator, who now refers to himself as the “publisher,” declares that he is disillusioned and concludes that Nic-Nac suffers from “planetary mania” [Mania planetaria] (186). The publisher does, however, explicitly and implicitly rescue some of Holmberg’s “serious ideas” from underneath the “mantle of fantasy” of Nic-Nac’s Martian odyssey in this closing frame of the text. Rather tongue-in-cheek, the publisher rejects the veracity of Nic-Nac’s means of transportation, but insists that Nic-Nac is to be believed on the existence of life on other planets. Further, he cites the testimony of “brilliant spirits like that of Flammarion” to support Nic-Nac’s story (184), and declares in his own right: “The plurality of inhabited worlds is not a fantasy born of a fevered brain, it is a necessity, a conquest of the human spirit, an homage to the greatness of the Universe” (184–85). The publisher also indicates that he sees the Argentines reflected in the Aurelians and understands Nic-Nac’s criticisms of them. But why, he asks, must Nic-Nac insist upon presenting his story using “that indefinable vagueness of the concepts, those luminous forms, those indecisive glows” (185–86)? The same could be asked with regard to Holmberg’s choice of using a science-fictional “mantle of fantasy” to speak to his audience. The publisher provides answers to both questions when he admits that “all of those elements that constitute the whole tale could not, perhaps, have been expressed in any other way” [todos aquellos elementos que constituyen el conjunto, no habrían podido expresarse, talvez, de otra manera] (186).
The heading “The Next Generation(s)” reflects both the period in which the three texts considered in this section were written (1891–1919) and also one of the key themes of their authors: the composition, nurture, and education of the next generation of Argentines, Brazilians, or Mexicans. The three texts in question are In the Thirtieth Century [En el siglo XXX] (Argentina, 1891) by Eduardo de Ezcurra (1840–1902), São Paulo in the Year 2000 or National Regeneration (A Chronicle of Future Brazilian Society) [São Paulo no Anno 2000 ou Regeneração Nacional (Chronica da Sociedade Brasileira Futura)] (Brazil, 1909) by Godofredo Emerson Barnsley (1874–1935), and Eugenia (A Fictional Sketch of Future Customs) [Eugenia (Esbozo novelesco de costumbres futuras)] (Mexico, 1919) by Eduardo Urzaiz (variously Urzais, Urzáiz, and Urzaiz Rodríguez, 1876–1955). Each text is the only known work of long fiction that its author produced. The optimism of the three utopian texts discussed earlier in this chapter contrasts with the notes of uncertainty that begin to creep into these turn-of-the-century novels. During the period in which Ezcurra, Barnsley, and Urzaiz were writing, projects of national consolidation had begun to reveal weaknesses, and the modernization process seemed less inevitable or purely beneficial. All three writers consciously engage in the global science fiction tradition, with direct literary influences such as Poe, Hoffmann, and Verne being joined by more recent Northern writers such as Edward Bellamy and H. G. Wells. Scientific discourse continues to hold sway as an indicator of authority in these science-fictional texts. All three works also demonstrate attitudes of technophilia, although science and technology are often portrayed as not being used to their best potential. Each text utilizes the cognitive estrangement of displacement in time to extrapolate present tendencies or to posit the benefits of change. The authors use the didactic options of utopia and dystopia to educate readers while at the same time expressly seeking to attract the interest of a wider public by writing in a fictional mode.19
Despite emerging from national realities that differed in terms of politics, economic situation, racial or ethnic composition, and class distribution, these next generations of futuristic fiction are permeated by the discourse and concerns of eugenics. None of our authors were known eugenicists, and I do not consider that these works’ primary motivation was the promotion of the movement. It is important to note, however, that many topics of concern to the field of eugenics were of eminent importance in Latin American nations during these years. Those concerns—particularly as they relate to national progress and national identity—are reflected to some degree in each text; thus, the topics and discourse of eugenics can be useful tools for analyzing each work’s roadmap to utopia.
In her groundbreaking study of eugenics in Latin America, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America, Nancy Stepan provides a useful overview of the science of eugenics in the Anglo-Saxon world as well as a detailed comparison of its selective adaptation in Latin American nations. Stepan provides the following definition(s) of eugenics:
As a science, eugenics was based on supposedly new understanding of the laws of human heredity. As a social movement, it involved proposals that society encourage the constant improvement of its hereditary makeup by encouraging “fit” individuals and groups to reproduce themselves and, perhaps more important, by discouraging or preventing the “unfit” from contributing their unfitness to future generations. (1–2)
Anglo-Saxon eugenics was based on the Mendelian, or “hard,” tradition of genetics, in which “human ability was a function of heredity and not of education,” but in Latin America, ideas regarding eugenics were by and large based on “an alternative stream of Lamarckian hereditary notions,” a “softer” brand of eugenics in which “there was a place for traditional, environmental approaches to the reform of human heredity” (23, 8, 34). Stepan emphasizes that this basis for Latin American genetics was not due to deficient scientific knowledge—indeed, she says, it “was often hidden, even from themselves” (65, 83).20 Rather, this neo-Lamarckian outlook arrived in Latin America via France, the traditional source for Latin American scientific ideas (72), and perhaps more importantly, this approach to genetics was attractive to Latin Americans because it posited that there were acceptable scientific solutions to their problems. As Stepan explains:
Politically, neo-Lamarckism also often came tinged with an optimistic expectation that reforms of the social milieu would result in permanent improvement, an idea in keeping with the environmentalist-sanitary tradition that had become fashionable in the area . . . [and it] justified the belief that human effort had meaning, that improvements acquired in an individual’s lifetime could be handed on genetically, that progress could occur. (73–74)
This apparent route to “civilization” would have been particularly welcome in a world in which “Latin Americans were, to most eugenists situated outside the region, regarded as ‘tropical,’ ‘backward,’ and racially ‘degenerate.’ Not eugenic, in short” (8).
The three principal Latin American issues addressed by neo-Lamarckian-based eugenics that are of interest here were “racial poisons,” population, and national identity. Examples of racial poisons believed to affect the heredity of the next generation were alcohol, drugs, venereal disease, and tuberculosis. Latin Americans widely accepted that social welfare legislation and programs to improve public hygiene would result in the leeching of such poisons from the national genetic makeup.21 The primary population-related concern in Latin America during this period was underpopulation, stemming both from the historical notion encapsulated by Alberdi as “to govern is to populate” [gobernar es poblar] and also, in the case of our Mexican text, from the huge loss of life suffered in the Mexican Revolution (1910–20).22 Of secondary importance, a Malthusian concern for overpopulation also appeared to affect several of our future-oriented writers.
The definition of national identity continued to be an issue in Latin American nations during these years, with writers often urging greater national unity or national sentiment. National identity seemed threatened by political and class divisions, by waves of immigration (Argentina and Brazil), or by national minorities (Brazil and Mexico). What seemed lacking was, in the words of Stepan, “a common purpose, a shared language and culture, and a homogeneous population” (105). Several solutions to these woes were proposed, ranging from racial hybridization to a Latin American version of negative eugenics. Racial hybridization was particularly popular in Brazil and Mexico. In Brazil it was expressed as mestiçagem, a concept that reached its full development in the work of the sociologist Gilberto Freyre in the 1930s. In Mexico it culminated in José Vasconcelos’s concept of a superior mestizo race, or “cosmic race” [raza cósmica]. Underlying the melting-pot ideals of these times, however, lurked the desire to “whiten” the national population, a concept expressed as branqueamento in Portuguese and blanqueamiento in Spanish. As Stepan summarizes the Mexican case: “Equality with diversity was far from being the eugenic goal. . . . the aim was rather to create one racial type” and in the process “a satisfactory myth of nationhood” (151, 147). Negative reproductive eugenics—the aforementioned “discouraging or preventing the ‘unfit’ from contributing their unfitness to future generations”—rarely took the more extreme forms of sterilization, abortion, birth control, or euthanasia in Latin America as it did in a number of Northern nations (most notably in Nazi Germany but also in the United States); rather it consisted of proposals such as prenuptial tests or certificates for marriage that were designed to prevent unions between—and thus reproduction by—those judged to be less fit (102–7, 122–24, 133–34).
All three of our science-fictional texts contain laundry lists of various racial poisons that must be eliminated to improve future generations. All address problems of underpopulation or uneven population density. All express concern about the composition of the population and about who would marry whom. It is no accident that all three novels end in weddings or unions either celebrated or negated, thus securing a superior genetic heritage and progress for the next generation.
Eduardo de Ezcurra was a lawyer by profession, specializing in customs law, and his treatise Customs Legislation: Concordances, Jurisprudence and Commentaries [Legislación aduanera; concordancias, jurisprudencia y comentarios] went through two editions (1896, 1900). Little information is readily available about Ezcurra’s literary production. He is known to have been within the literary circle of Rubén Darío in Buenos Aires; he wrote for the newspaper La Lira Argentina [The Argentine Lyre], subtitled “Periodical of Literature, the Sciences, and Fashions” [Periódico de literatura, ciencias y modas]; and he dedicated In the Thirtieth Century (hereafter Century XXX) to Lucio V. López, calling him “my old teacher and friend.”23 Like Holmberg, Ezcurra belonged to the Argentine Generation of 1880, but his Century XXX belongs to a later moment in national history. Century XXX portrays a generally dystopic Argentine future that reflects the increasingly dire national economic and political situation. President Miguel Juárez Celman’s economic policies had led to the crisis of 1890, which was exacerbated by the financial crisis in Britain.24 Related political unrest had begun to ferment in 1889 with the formation of the Civic Union [Unión Cívica], and this culminated in the Revolution of 1890 in July of that year and in Juárez Celman’s resignation.
In response to this national climate Ezcurra composed Century XXX, moved, he says in his preface, by “a spirit of true sadness in the presence of the evils that still rule us and the profound discouragement of desperation that weighs upon the morale of men of good judgment” (xi).25 In his preface and throughout the novel Ezcurra repeatedly speaks of the irony that this terrible situation in Argentina should be occurring “amid the tumult of progress of truth and of analysis of the end of this astonishing century, which has excited universal public spirit” (xiii). He is motivated to write his self-described “essay of criticism and social philosophy” by the very real fear of Argentina’s falling further behind, of not participating fully in global progress after the promise of the previous decade (xi).
Ezcurra declares that he is writing in an established—though unlabeled—literary form that suits his purposes, which he lists as: “truth that is allegorical, harsh, raw, naked, but sincere and with patriotic intention” (xiii). Both these purposes and this literary form are repeated in something of an inverted mirror image within the text itself. The apparent frame of Century XXX contains the formulation and development of the plan of the protagonist, Andros Cosmos, and his good friend, Filos Sofos, to write their own work of criticism of their nation and society. These erudite and therefore unusual inhabitants of the city of Fisiocrata [Physiocrat] (formerly Buenos Aires) in the thirtieth century had originally intended to write a work of ancient history, but they modified their plan, realizing that such a book would attract only the handful of readers who possess the thirst for learning. Andros begins the following discussion of the parameters of the work:
—Let us consider the material or plot.
—The spirit that rules, of the present thirtieth century, in our country.
—I understand. And the means of conveying this?
—The nineteenth century.
—As discussed. Our century transported to that one. And the observations?
—Criticism.
—And the commentaries or reflections?
—To say that in those times everything was going backward, indirectly referring to our times, which, relatively speaking, are not going any better. (17–18)
—Veamos la materia ó argumento.
—El espíritu que domina, del actual siglo XXX, en nuestro país.
—Comprendo. ¿Y el medio de desarrollo?
—El siglo XIX.
—Lo dicho. El nuestro transportado á aquél. ¿Y las observaciones?
—La crítica.
—Y los comentarios ó reflexiones?
—Decir que en aquellos tiempos todo andaba al revés, indirectamente refiriéndose á los nuestros, que relativamente no andan mejor.
Rather than being presented with a true inner frame consisting of the text of this work, entitled In the Nineteenth Century [En el siglo XIX], we read of Filos and Andros’s thirtieth-century fieldwork and witness their discussions about the displacements to the nineteenth century they will carry out in their project. We travel with the two friends from the mysterious, museum-like building where they reside with Andros’s wife Parelia and their two children Adamiro and Evalinda to various representative points and events of interest in the city of Fisiocrata. We begin at the theater, where they attend a new comic opera version of Hamlet, now titled Hamlet or the Crazy Prince of Damselmark [Hamlet ó el Príncipe loco de Doñamarka], by the playwright Worse N. Worse [Wors I. Wors]. Next they go to a conference series at the Academy for Mutual Admiration, where they comment on papers given on themes such as journalism in the nineteenth century, women in the nineteenth century and today, and current fashions from the political to the artistic.26 Other destinations are a public park where they are the only family group with children, a charity ball so lavish that it pushes the charity into the red, and a salon [peluquería] that at first appears to be just another hub of gossip, typical for such locales. In the end this salon yields up don Pedro, the owner, who has been forced into this ignoble profession by political factionalism, and his lovely daughter, Angélica. Century XXX ends with the completion of In the Nineteenth Century, the retirement of don Pedro, and the wedding of Filos and Angélica.
Ezcurra employs the tools of his “established literary form” throughout the novel. He sets his dystopian society over a thousand years in the future in order to show the consequences of present actions extrapolated to their fullest extent, or as Carlos Abraham puts it, “A recurring idea in Ezcurra is that current problems . . . if not solved, will hypertrophy in the future” (“Género utópico” sec. 4). Filos and Andros reiterate this mission as they discuss the text of In the Nineteenth Century, hoping that by indicating the “latent symptoms of disorganization and degeneration” in the past, they will alert their compatriots to the need for change in the present (247). The immediate target of their finger pointing will not, of course, be their contemporaries, as they show themselves to be fully cognizant of one of the principal uses of cognitive estrangement: “No one complains or quarrels because of seeing his vices and his evils attributed to someone else” (247). The two, like Ezcurra, are aware that they are following in the literary footsteps of others, though they note the original structural twist they are contributing; as Andros declares: “I understand, Filos, that something similar was done or written in that remote century, although in place of looking backward, they advanced to our times . . . imaginatively” [Tengo entendido, Filos, que algo parecido se hizo ó se escribió en aquel remoto siglo, aunque en lugar de retroceder, avanzaron á nuestros tiempos . . . imaginativamente] (16, ellipsis in original). Although it is not so clear in the original as in my translation, the allusion here is almost certainly to the enormously influential and widely translated Looking Backward from 2000 to 1887 (1888) by Edward Bellamy. Ezcurra refers to Northern writers of proto- and early science fiction by name throughout the novel, among them Rabelais, Voltaire, Hoffmann, and, most frequently, Poe. Although he paints a largely negative picture of the future, Ezcurra does not cite technology as a contributing cause. He speaks favorably of factories as “monsters of progress” (278). He shows a technophiliac’s delight at inventing advances in transportation and communication such as the “automatic car” [autómata], the “aerial train” [ferro-carril aéreo], the “electric trolley” [tramvía de tracción eléctrica], and the “tele-phonograph” [telefonógrafo]. He illuminates the streets of the future Buenos Aires with “luminescent asphalt” [asfalto luciente] and gives his characters time-saving gadgets such as the “automatic pen” [pluma automática]. His only technology-related criticism is that its Argentine beneficiaries do not use these conveniences or this extra time to elevate themselves or their nation. In thirtieth-century Fisiocrata, a fire does major damage because of the lack of individual and institutional organization necessary to put it out, and socialites use the twenty-lane avenues to parade their trappings of material wealth in their automatic cars and to pass the time in shallow gossip. Ezcurra was eminently aware of the opportunities that the science-fictional/dystopian genre placed at his disposal, as he displaced, extrapolated, satirized, and technologized, courting readers’ attention by casting a Holmbergian “mantle of fantasy” over contemporary events.
The primary targets of Ezcurra’s satire were those national characteristics he believed had led to the economic and political crises of his day, or could potentially impede future progress. In the economic sphere his criticism carries religious overtones: he condemns his society’s “moral decadence,” as evinced by, for example, the prevalence of a philosophy of “you are what you own” and by the national government’s bad credit (8, 7). In politics Ezcurra laments factionalism, the disregard for republican ideals, and the concentration of power, saying “The tunic of the republic . . . had remained in the power of a few, when it belonged to all” (9). He denounces electoral fraud and corrupt rulers living off graft while “the Sovereign Populace slept the sleep of hunger in the tubing of the telephonograph wires or in some water main” (167–68). Despite Ezcurra’s ardent defense of the rights of the people here and elsewhere in Century XXX, his aim—typical of the Generation of 1880—was not the reform of national class structure. Abraham explains that in Century XXX, “The questioning of the upper classes does not have the objective of opening its ranks to the popular sectors, but rather it constitutes only a self-critique leading toward a better consolidation of the prevailing system” (“Género utópico” sec. 4). To correct Argentina’s course away from dystopia, Ezcurra advocates rule by a reunited Argentine elite—meaning the old money “patricios,” or founding families. Andros and Filos are provided as good examples of those fit to lead. They are educated, independently wealthy, maintain a large home with servants, and are “uniters not dividers,” as evidenced by Filos’s wedding to Angélica, through which they are rejoined to representatives of an elite faction that had fallen out of favor.
Ezcurra saw Argentina’s lack of national identity—also described as national sentiment, spirit, or unity—as the chief cause of its current political and economic woes, with additional potential for bringing future disaster. From the perspective of the thirtieth century, Andros and Filos observe “the beginning of a race in decline [literally “decadence”] . . . that has no fixed notion or feeling of nationality” [el prinicipio de una raza en decadencia . . . que no tiene una noción, ni un sentimiento de la nacionalidad fijos] (117). At many points in Century XXX, the term “degeneration” [degeneración] is used interchangeably with “decadence,” i.e., “the degeneration in individuals today” [la degeneración en los individuos de ahora] (106). At the time, the concept of degeneration had close ties to eugenic concerns such as racial poisons and population size and content. In the late nineteenth century, as Nancy Stepan tells us, “‘Degeneration’ replaced evolution as the major metaphor of the day, with vice, crime, immigration, women’s work, and the urban environment variously blamed as its cause” (Hour 24). Virtually all of these sources of degeneration concerned Ezcurra to differing degrees, and Century XXX provides clear evidence of the discourse of eugenics beginning to creep into nineteenth-century texts.27 “Vice” or racial poisons are specifically mentioned by Ezcurra only in passing, as he contrasts the factory worker who “brings the races closer to the future of their always longed for perfection . . . moving the complicated machinery of progress” [acerca las razas al porvenir de su siempre anhelado perfeccionamiento . . . moviendo la complicada maquinaria del progreso] (278) with people who do not work, whom he characterizes as “sickly beings” and drunkards (278–79). Of greater concern to Ezcurra was the heterogeneity of the national population; many residents of Argentina “had barely a notion of their own nationality: newcomers some, foreigners others, indifferent the rest” (35). The “newcomers” [advenedizos] he referred to were those Argentines who migrated from country to city and also to the nouveau riche among the elite (“advenedizos” can also be translated as “upstarts,” and Ezcurra also uses the word in this context). By “foreigners” he clearly meant the huge numbers of immigrants who were pouring into Argentina at an ever-accelerating rate.28 Immigrants are described at multiple points in Century XXX as uneducated, materialistic, degenerate, and corrupt, and they are associated with antirepublican values as false pretenders to European titles of nobility. Finally, the “indifferent” were those who should have felt the national sentiment most keenly but did not—those involved in political factionalism or those too superficial to think beyond the materialism of the times to the greater good. Racial heterogeneity is not directly addressed in Century XXX, as it was less an issue in Argentina than in Brazil or Mexico. When Ezcurra uses the term “race” [raza], he is referring to the symbolic idea of an Argentine national race.29
In truth, Century XXX does not have a strong dystopian flavor but functions more as a satire of the present, a science-fictional extrapolation of present-day tendencies, and as a roadmap to utopia. The protagonist Andros is described as a “dreamer of utopias” in the early pages of the novel (8), and rather than the nightmare future of the dystopia, Ezcurra presents the reader with a satirized exaggeration of a nightmarish present and indicates, if not a complete recipe, at least the main ingredients necessary for progressing toward perfection.30 Some of the solutions Ezcurra proposes for the national problems he identifies are “time, experience, schooling, and morality” (139). Time and experience were needed to allow for a greater degree of national consolidation, morality would combat rampant materialism, and education meant academic study for the upper class and work for the populace.31 Furthermore, he instructs, the immigrant must acculturate, and all Argentines must stop being “imitators of evils from abroad and indifferent to what was good that belonged to them” (244). French-inspired laws permitting civil marriage and divorce, for example, were foreign ideas that Argentine society did not need. Ezcurra characterizes America as the “most modern” of the continents, and as promising “a newer, purer, more tranquil life and a future . . . more in harmony with one’s hopes” (14). “The good elements had not disappeared completely,” Ezcurra tells the reader, and Andros’s utopian dream might just come about if Argentines can only unite and rediscover the strength of their “noble, great, active, and creative [race], as the Argentine has always been” (9).
A final hope for the nation’s future lies in the important contributions women can make to the development of national spirit. In Century XXX the focus is on the woman as the foundation of the national family (in our next two texts, the woman’s role is discussed at greater length and in more eugenic terms). Ezcurra takes what he views as pernicious tendencies in the typical nineteenth-century woman and extrapolates them into a thirtieth-century female devoid of charm, maternal feeling, and patriotism. In Fisiocrata most women dress and wear their hair in masculine styles much decried by Andros and Filos; such women see motherhood as “disguised slavery” and turn their children over to “nursemaid establishments” [establecimientos de amas] to be raised (201, 150). When women like these stray from what Ezcurra views to be their prescribed role, they do not flourish as intellects or in the professions but degenerate into shallow, materialistic socialites—doing irreparable harm to subsequent generations in the process. For Ezcurra, preparation for citizenship begins at the mother’s knee: “After the mother, who educated the soul of the child, came the school, which fortified his faculties, and then the man came to the gigantic idea of the motherland, which he honored and dignified” [Después de la madre que educaba el alma del niño, estaba la escuela que fortificaba sus facultades, y luego aperecía (sic) el hombre ante la idea gigante de la patria, que honraba y dignificaba] (107). Parelia, the epitome of femininity who raises and educates her own children, is touted by Ezcurra as “that woman who should serve as a model to many mothers” (197).
When the family of Andros and Parelia (whose progeny, after all, are Adamiro and Evalinda) is joined by that of Filos and Angélica, the little utopian oasis in degenerate Fisiocrata has been expanded, and the foundation for “the future national family” has been strengthened (320). The wedding with which the novel closes produces “the new family, formed with the precious elements of truth, love, and law [that] would take charge of carrying out, making flesh, the ideals of the moral man and the pure and beneficent principles of the philosopher” [la nueva familia, formada con los preciosos elementos de la verdad, del amor y del derecho (que) se encargaría de realizar, de hacer carne, los ideales del hombre moral, y los principios puros y benefactores del filósofo] (320). Thus the novel ends with hope for the future: for correcting the national path, unifying Argentines as a people, and rejoining the progress “of the end of this astonishing century” (xiii).
Godofredo (né Godfrey) Emerson Barnsley was born in Quartis, Brazil, in 1874, the third child of George Scarbrough Barnsley and Mary Lamira Emerson.32 George Barnsley was originally from Georgia, a second-generation member of the cotton aristocracy of the North American South. He had been a surgeon in the Confederate Army during the U.S. Civil War, and in 1867, after refusing to sign the oath of allegiance to the Union, he was one of a number of Confederate veterans to emigrate to Brazil. There he married the daughter of another such veteran from Mississippi. In addition to practicing medicine in Brazil, George invested heavily in a gold mining venture. When that venture failed, he returned with his family, including fourteen-year-old Godofredo, to Woodlands, the family’s estate in northwest Georgia, now the site of Barnsley Gardens (see “Godfrey Barnsley and Barnsley Gardens”). At sixteen Godofredo left Woodlands and rode the boxcars to Philadelphia, where he put himself through dental school by working as a dishwasher and at sundry other jobs. Upon completing his education he returned to Brazil to set up practice. Godofredo Barnsley married Alzira Montfort, daughter of a well-known doctor in Campinas, and he became a very successful dentist and professor of dentistry at the Universidade de São Paulo. He died of yellow fever in 1935.
Barnsley remained, to some extent, a man between two countries. Although he spent less than a decade of his life in the United States, his personal and familial ties with that nation were never completely severed. His grandson, Godfrey Barnsley, notes that his grandfather spoke English with a strong Southern accent and that his spoken Portuguese always betrayed his North American roots. He took his wife to visit Woodlands in the year before his death, and the family maintains connections to the United States to this day. When Barnsley wrote São Paulo 2000 he wrote in Portuguese, published the book in São Paulo, and focused on Brazil and Brazilian topics. The city that he portrays is a Brazilian utopia, but Barnsley constructs significant aspects of this future society in specific comparison to the United States and to a North American work of science fiction, Bellamy’s Looking Backward from 2000 to 1887 (1888).
Barnsley wrote São Paulo 2000 two decades after the founding of the First Republic (1889–1930), at a time when Brazil faced “the first seriously contested presidential election of the Republic” and when the national economy was threatened by a crisis in the all-important coffee market (Skidmore 88). Despite radical changes—the elimination of slavery, the abdication of the monarch, the establishment of the Republic, the increase in the number of immigrants—Brazil was still far from becoming the progressive world power envisioned by Felício dos Santos. Stepan summarizes some of the continuities from the days of the empire:
Brazil entered the twentieth century a highly stratified society, socially and racially—a society that, though formally a liberal republic, was governed informally by a small, largely white elite and in which less than 2 percent of the population voted in national elections; a society in which the majority of the people were black or mulatto and could not read or write; in which, though there was technical separation of church and state, Catholicism had considerable cultural influence; and in which democratic liberalism was seen by many intellectuals as irrelevant or harmful to Brazil’s future. (Hour 37)
At the same time, Brazil continued to enjoy a greater degree of political stability than did many of its Spanish American neighbors. The beginning of the twentieth century also saw important strides taken in the development and application of Brazilian science, through the establishment of research and teaching institutions such as the Butantã Institute and the Oswaldo Cruz Institute and through increasing importance given to public health programs (see Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science; Barnsley 353).
São Paulo 2000 is a product of these times. Barnsley’s immediate reasons for writing the novel were Brazil’s economic and political situations—principally the latter, as attested to by fervent passages in favor of the candidacy of Ruy (modernized spelling “Rui”) Barbosa for president. The process of writing, editing, and publishing the novel was rushed, Barnsley tells the reader in the errata pages. These corrections to the text are dated October 22, 1909 (394), and Barnsley had been working on the manuscript as late as August 22 of that same year, the date upon which Barbosa was officially nominated to run for the presidency and which is specifically mentioned in the text (366). Other issues that motivated Barnsley to put pen to paper were national agricultural practices, poor public health, immigration policy, and improving the composition and education of the Brazilian population. São Paulo 2000 is the only work of fiction or nonfiction that Barnsley is known to have written, and he financed the publication himself. Family history has it that the book was not a commercial success and that critics advised Barnsley to stick to dentistry. Whatever its critical reception may have been, São Paulo 2000 provides an important gauge of the status of Brazilian politics, society, and literature of its day.
São Paulo 2000 is a tale of “adventures so singular and extravagant that they would be worthy of the plume of a Jules Verne or a Baron Münchhausen,” a first-person narrator tells the reader at the outset (1). He then introduces himself as Jeremias Serapião Pacifico de Santa Cruz Barbuda, a young paulista [person from the province of São Paulo] just coming of age in the first decade of the twentieth century. “It matters little to you to know if I descend from princes, bootblacks, warriors, or from peaceful burghers” [Pouco te importa saber si descendo de principes, engraxates, guerreiros ou de pacificos burguezes], he begins his self-introduction,
Physiologically, the knowledge of one’s genealogy is of great importance due to the transmission of the ascendents’ physical and moral qualities through heredity; socially, nevertheless, it does not deserve great interest in a republic in which an individual’s value is assayed based on merit, on personal attributes, and not on fleurs de lis and noble robes. (1–2)
Physiologicamente, o conhecimento da genealogia é de grande importancia na transmissão pela hereditariedade das qualidades physicas e moraes dos ascendentes; socialmente, porém, não merece grande interesse numa Republica em que o valor individual se aquilata pelo merito, pelos atributos pessoaes e não pelas flores de liz e mantos fidalgos.
With this statement Serapião reveals an Ezcurra-like disdain for archaic European notions of nobility as well as a belief in Lamarckian heredity. He soon discloses that he comes from elite stock, as his father is a recently bankrupted coffee plantation owner (rather like an economic version of Ezcurra’s don Pedro, a member of the elite who has temporarily come upon hard times). Luckily Serapião has also acquired a fine education, which he believes will both support him economically and improve the genetic qualities he will pass on to his descendants.
While sitting in one of São Paulo’s gardens, pondering the downturn of his fortunes, Serapião picks up a newspaper and reads about the other national crisis, “the political crisis brought on by the question of the presidential candidacies” (3). He is clearly a supporter of Senator Rui Barbosa, since he compares Barbosa’s opponent, Marshall [Marechal] Hermes da Fonseca, to Napoleon and speculates that any government under a military man would involve “coups d’état, gaucho justice [justiça á gaúcha], that is, throat cutting, falls into the Paraná River, and other heinous things characteristic of military presidencies” and would keep Brazil down at the level “of a Nicaragua or an Honduras” (7, 6). Turning away from such negative topics, Serapião consoles himself with thoughts of his future bride, the “dear little cousin” [querida priminha] who is “the supreme hope of my life” (8), and begins to relax:
The purity, the benevolence, the tranquility of those places produced an easy lethargy in me, and, as I closed my eyes to the world of realities, another, entirely imaginary world populated with marvelous visions presented itself to me. Little by little, imperceptibly, the scene, the trees, the objects were transformed, as in cinematographic films. (9)
A candura, a benignidade, o socego daquelles sitios produziu em mim um suave torpor e, fechando-me os olhos ao mundo das realidades, apresentou-me um outro mundo inteiramente imaginario, povoado de visões maravilhosas. Pouco a pouco, insensivelmente, o scenario, as arvores, as cousas, foram-se transfigurando, como nas fitas cynematographicas.
Serapião awakens on the same park bench, but the trees seem larger and he spies several gracious pavilions he does not recall seeing before. Several young women of splendid but, to him, singular toilette pass by, and he says to them “I am experiencing the sensations of one who awakens from an extraordinary dream. I even find this place strange which I thought I knew so well! . . . Can I be dreaming?!” (10). The young women present him to their grandfather, Dr. Orecnis Ocitirc, from whom Serapião learns that he is still in São Paulo, but in the São Paulo of the year 2000.
Dr. Orecnis is the ideal cicerone to guide a young man from 1909 through the intricacies of the future. At age 110, he is an “eyewitness and vast repository of so many events of national history” as well as a widely traveled person who has worked and studied in many places in the United States, Europe, and Brazil (330). The thinly disguised “Sincere Critic” [Crítico Sincero] has received this name not for his descriptions of Brazilian society in the year 2000, but for his explanations of what changes have been necessary in the intervening years in order to create this twenty-first century utopia. The nineteenth-century customs indicated as hindering Brazil’s progress vary from ladies’ fashions and health regimens, to marriage between near relations, to a tendency to be overly influenced by ideas and objects from abroad and its corollary “disdain for anything that was national” (42). Through the course of the three-hundred-page day, which we eventually learn is none other than September 7—Brazilian Independence Day—the conversations between Dr. Orecnis and Serapião also cover progressive changes on the national scene: Rui Barbosa’s victory in the 1910 election, the Revolution of 1920, and Brazil’s subsequent rise to the forefront of world politics, commerce, and culture.
In the evening, Serapião accompanies the whole Ocitirc family in their airplane (“Airplanes are as common today as automobiles were in the past,” thanks to their invention by the Brazilian Santos Dumont, Serapião is told)33 to an Independence Day celebration at Ipiranga, where Pedro I had declared Brazilian independence with his famous “I will remain!” [Fico!] on September 7, 1822 (267). From the airplane they watch a reenactment of Dom Pedro’s declaration. The confluence of the three 7 Septembers—that of 1909, of 2000, and of 1822—is too much for Serapião; he is so moved that his echoing cry of “Independence or death!” causes the airplane’s propeller to crack (390). As the plane begins to plunge downward, Serapião describes what happens next:
Overcome by vertigo, immobilized by terror, I saw the ground rushing upward with incredible rapidity to meet the vehicle. I closed my eyes and was waiting for death, when I felt a collision, and, readers, I had . . . fallen from the bench where I had been dreaming in the Forest Garden! . . .
All a dream, illusion! I did not find myself in the year 2000, but, like the poor mortals, my contemporaries, in the middle of the night of September 7, 1909. (390, first ellipsis in the original)34
Tomado de vertigem, immobilizado pelo terror, via o solo subir com incrivel rapidez para se encontrar com o vehiculo; fechei os olhos, esperei a morte, senti um choque e, leitores, tinha . . . cahido do banco onde estivéra a sonhar no Jardim da Floresta! . . .
Tudo sonho, illusão! Não me achava no anno 2.000, mas, como os pobres mortaes, meus contemporaneos, em plena noite de 7 de Setembro de 1909.
Regardless of whether Serapião has experienced actual time travel or merely a dream, he will never be the same. In seeming compensation for the realization that he must call off the biologically unwise marriage to his cousin, Serapião is imbued with a renewed faith in Brazil’s future possibilities: “Such are the consequences of the wanderings of my ambitious spirit among other worlds” (391).
To make the year 2000 the setting of one’s national utopia or dystopia was to write a near- (rather than far-) future narrative, and the symbolic meaning of this chosen year changed as the millenium approached. As we have seen, Eduardo de Ezcurra set Century XXX in the more distant year 3000 to allow for the hypertrophy of national problems. Bellamy too had originally set Looking Backward from 2000 to 1887 in the year 3000, as he explained in an invited essay the year after the book was published:
In undertaking to write Looking Backward I had, at the outset, no idea of attempting a serious contribution to the movement of social reform. The idea was of a mere literary fantasy, a fairy tale of social felicity. There was no thought of contriving a house which practical men might live in, but merely of hanging in mid-air, far out of reach of the sordid and material world of the present, a cloud-palace for an ideal humanity. (“How I Came” sec. 2)
Once Bellamy hit upon the military as the prototype for his projected world-altering national industrial service, he changed the temporal venue from the year 3000 to the year 2000. Once that imagined future became for him a possible and even inevitable one, “Instead of a mere fairy tale of social perfection, [Looking Backward] became the vehicle of a definite scheme of industrial reorganization” (sec. 6). Both Brazil 2000 and São Paulo 2000 were envisioned by their authors as vehicles with comparable—if not so wide-ranging—purposes.35 Despite similarities in the titles, motivations, and predictions of their texts, Felício dos Santos and Barnsley had different attitudes toward the republic, and there is a shift in the quality of optimism with which each regarded the future of Brazil. For Felício dos Santos, writing during the Second Reign, the republic was a goal, an ideal in itself, and he constructed his utopia in strict opposition to his present reality. Barnsley, on the other hand, was writing twenty years after the fall of the monarchy, amid growing national disillusionment with the republic. It was becoming clear that “the ambitious republican promises of the late 1880s had not been fulfilled” and that “Brazil had fallen behind in the struggle for modernity” (Skidmore 102–3). As Dr. Orecnis explains it, “The republican form of government is the best of all of the political regimes; but . . . there is an abyss between theory and practice, and never was there a more stupendous, more impressive demonstration of this than in Brazil” (286). In addition to the differences in their temporal perspectives on the Brazilian republic, Felício dos Santos’s and Barnsley’s attitudes toward the future destination of their time-traveling characters were affected by their relative proximity to the date of their projected utopia, the year 2000. As the second millenium drew closer, there was “a shift in the focus [from one of fascination with the year 2000] to one with a more ‘real’ sense about it. Works . . . began to examine the coming landmark date in a more concrete fashion” (Kopp sec. 5). When Pedro II visits the year 2000, his descendants are so far removed from his time that they have forgotten key points of family history, and it is necessary for him to speak with engineers, lawyers, politicians, and a variety of “men on the street,” in addition to his principal cicerone, Dr. Tsherepanoff, in order for him to begin to understand and accept this future. Kopp cites “an increasing number of studies that began to forecast with a focus on the year 2000” in the years after World War I. “Clearly,” he writes, “the year 2000, which was now within the life span of those being born, was becoming more of a reality” (sec. 5). By stretching the limits of longevity Barnsley manages to provide Serapião with a cicerone in the year 2000 whose life spans the entirety of the republic. Dr. Orecnis, at 110, would have been born in 1889 or 1890, around the same time as Serapião himself. Thus, just as the utopian republic of the year 2000 represents the maturity of the young republic of 1909, Dr. Orecnis represents the man our narrator could grow up to be.
The route to “national regeneration,” the alternate title given for São Paulo 2000, might begin with the voters’ choice in the next elections, Barnsley suggests, but also necessary are continuing efforts at reforming public health, bolstering traditional family values, and fostering a biological and cultural melting pot. Other, overarching contributors to solving Brazil’s problems are scientific and technological advances and education. As Stepan tells us, regeneration was seen as the answer to degeneration in Latin America (Hour 91), and Barnsley wastes no time in identifying “the five greatest factors causing national degeneration”: “syphilis, tuberculosis, alcoholism, marriage between blood relations, and the corset” (93–94). Dr. Orecnis tells Serapião that these national evils had been defeated in much the same way that yellow fever had been eradicated by Brazilian scientists in the first decade of the twentieth century, through national health campaigns (95).36
The elements of national health upon which Barnsley dwells at greatest length are those that most immediately impacted the next generations of Brazilians. In one chapter he preaches the genetic evils of “consanguineous marriage” which, according to Dr. Orecnis (M.D.), is “a violation of biological laws . . . an attempt against the progress of society” (56). This chapter is followed by extended treatment of issues related to women’s health and what Stepan has termed “reproductive poisons” (Hour 81). In the chapter titled “Physical Education for the Young Woman” [Educação physica da moça], Barnsley recommends that Brazilian women take up “European and American gymnastics” (even providing a photo of a group of women performing such exercises) in order to be “physically up to their elevated purpose in the propagation of the species” (69, 80). A later chapter contains a diatribe against the corset, along with a chart detailing the evils the corset produces in a woman’s body—such as asthma, weakened intelligence, and an inability to produce milk to nurse infants—and in her children, including hereditary rickets and various monstrous deformities (102; see figure 1.1). Like Ezcurra, Barnsley believes a mother is responsible for “the private education of children, from a physical, intellectual, and moral standpoint” (47). He also connects that education to national progress, explaining that “the preservation and progress of societies” depends upon a mother’s successful completion of this “extremely important social function” (47). The pernicious idea of women pursuing advanced degrees and working outside the home is eliminated from the advanced Brazilian society in Barnsley’s future utopia; as a female character in the novel tells Serapião: “It is an absurdity here in Brazil and is only justified in miserable Europe, where the struggle for life is more intense than among us and demands that a woman aid her husband. This story of women pretending to exercise the same professions as men only contributes to the disorganization of the family” (74).
Dr. Orecnis tells Serapião that, by the year 2000, a single Brazilian national identity and unity of national spirit have been forged through the gradual emergence of a racially and culturally homogeneous population:
Here we are not like the United States or Europe: we no longer have races. The majority of the families that you see here are composed of the national element, descended in part from foreigners; but, if they appear to be of different racial origins, origins which the years and crossbreeding are gradually abolishing and rendering unnatural, they are brothers of the same family because they were born in the same land and they live under the same sky, under one flag, and are governed by identical customs and by a single constitution. (54)
Aqui não é Estados Unidos nem Europa: não temos hoje mais castas. A maioria das familias que aqui vês, compõe-se do elemento nacional, descendente em parte de estrangeiros; mas, si se mostram differentes pela origem de raças, origem que os annos e o cruzamento vão apagando e desnaturando aos poucos, são irmãos de uma mesma familia, porque nasceram numa terra commum e vivem sob um mesmo céo, debaixo de uma mesma bandeira e governados por identicos costumes e por uma mesma constituição.
FIGURE 1.1. Chart on the Evils of the Corset, São Paulo in the Year 2000, p. 102. “The corset (or physical mutilation of the body) and the young woman’s lack of physical fitness produce atrophy of the organs and the following pathological conditions . . .”
Over the course of Serapião’s day in the future, it becomes increasingly apparent that the ultimate goal of Barnsley’s melting pot is a eugenic whitening of the Brazilian population.37 Barnsley virtually ignores the large Afro-Brazilian segment of the population in the novel, but passing comments make it clear that their genetic contributions are among those that require improving. Barnsley’s views on race are more evident in his representation of indigenous groups. Dr. Orecnis denounces the extermination and enslavement of the Indians by the Europeans in former times in no uncertain terms, but the Indians are also depicted as saying to Brazilians of European origin, “We know that we are condemned to disappear, because you are infinitely stronger, and this law is very old” (117). The law of the survival of the fittest does not operate in the short term, however; in the meantime—circa 1960 according to Dr. Orecnis—it is acceptable and desirable for Brazilians from São Paulo and Rio (“Portuguese people” [portuguezes], the Indians call them) to hop in their aeroplanes, fly to the rich but previously inaccessible interior of Brazil, and carry out the “colonization” and acculturation of tribes such as the Chavante and the Canoeiro (271). As in Ezcurra’s Argentina, Barnsley’s Brazil experienced massive waves of immigration dominated by arrivals from Italy; by 1907 Italians outnumbered Brazilians in the city of São Paulo by two to one (Stepan, Hour 38). Unlike Ezcurra, however, Barnsley welcomes this union of the “sons of the land of the sublime Dante” and the “descendants of the land of the ingenious Camões” (254), calling the Italians “the greatest factor in our progress” (248). These immigrants could help to populate the sertão, fill shortages in qualified labor, and contribute both a strong work ethic and the practice of polyculture (rather than monoculture) in farming. Dr. Orecnis encourages Serapião—and all Brazilians—to marry foreigners (61, 66), and lauds the Italians’ willingness to intermarry with Brazilians “for the even greater purification of our race” [para mais ainda apurar a nossa raça] (252). His praise for the “Latin race” [raça latina] that would result from these unions anticipates Latin American eugenicists’ use of this term by more than two decades (254).38
Barnsley summarizes the key to national progress under the heading “education,” following the tradition identified by Frye, “Nearly all [utopia-writers] make their utopias depend on education for their permanent establishment” (37). Addressing his visitor from 1909, Dr. Orecnis exclaims, “The lack of NATIONAL EDUCATION! This, Jeremias Serapião, was the supreme source of all of our misfortunes, of the weakness of our development” (292). On the most basic level, improved access to education had removed the epithet “Illiteracyland” [Analpha-betolandia] from the Brazil of the year 2000 (291). A shift in emphasis from the theoretical to the practical in higher education had improved Brazilian competitiveness in agriculture, manufacturing, business, and industry (301). Every potential educational venue—from newspaper to pulpit to cinema—had been used to inform the twentieth-century public of the applications of science to their daily lives in the areas of personal and public hygiene (105–6). Finally, Dr. Orecnis tells Serapião, the presidency of Rui Barbosa had turned out to be a springboard for the Regenerative/Reform Party [Partido Regenerador], whose national education platform was the “precursor of our political regeneration and economic renaissance” (304).
The United States generally functions as the model for Barnsley’s construction of the future; in the novel’s final pages, he refers to his extrapolated Brazil as “a new United States of South America” (391). Throughout the book he expresses admiration for the Yankee work ethic, commercial operations, and educational system, though he criticizes the United States for its acceptance of divorce, its high crime rate, and its sensationalistic press. The clearest indication of how Barnsley views not only the United States but also Brazil can be seen by comparing São Paulo 2000 to Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Although Barnsley never mentions the U.S. writer or his utopian work by name, he frequently uses Bellamy’s text as a specific point of departure for his own.
The deliberate alterations that Barnsley makes to elements from the Northern work reveal his views as to how Brazilian reality did and should differ from that of the United States. These alterations also serve as an example of how Brazilian writers were already adapting—rather than adopting—elements of the Northern science fiction tradition to suit their own needs. Whereas Bellamy integrates women into his “industrial army” (with allowances made for relative physical strength and childbearing), Barnsley values the maintenance of a more traditional family structure. While there is virtually no race question in Looking Backward, Barnsley makes multiple references to race, reflecting its relative importance in the construction of Brazilian national identity. In the political arena, Barnsley is happy to stop Brazil’s leftward trajectory at republicanism, rather than continuing on to Bellamy’s more Marxist vision, and he connects his political stance to these very un-Bellamian views on class structure, as Dr. Orecnis expounds to Serapião:
Let it not be inferred from this that I approve of Communism, because that would be to negate the work, the effort, the aptitude of some to the benefit of others who are less active, diligent, and competent. If nature has made men unequally intelligent and competent, if their education has given them diverse qualifications and different inclinations, it is natural that they do not enjoy the same happiness and well-being. (33)
Não se infira dahi que approvo o communismo, porque seria negar o trabalho, o esforço, a aptidão de uns em proveito de outros, menos activos, diligentes e capazes; si a natureza fez os homens desigualmente intelligentes e capazes, si a sua educação lhes deu habilitações diversas e inclinações differentes, é natural que elles não gozem da mesma felicidade e bem estar.
Later in São Paulo 2000, Barnsley describes Brazil’s social classes by modernizing Bellamy’s metaphor of society as a coach. “By way of attempting to give the reader some general impression of the way people lived together in those days, and especially of the relations of the rich and poor to one another,” Julian West remarks in Looking Backward, “perhaps I cannot do better than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road” (3). The “prodigious coach” of nineteenth-century society was pulled by the masses; the coachman was hunger, and the wealthy rode in the comfortable seats on top, doing their utmost to remain there. It is necessary for West to explain these things to his readers because, in the twenty-first century, everyone is equal. In a chapter entitled “The Social Automobile” [O Automovel Social], Barnsley’s Dr. Orecnis describes a “gigantic vehicle . . . which carries in its belly almost all of the social classes”: Brazil’s independently wealthy elite ride in first class, the educated professionals in second, and the middle class in third (155). The masses, which he refers to as “the dregs of society” [o Rebotalho social], are left to run after the social automobile, but only rarely, by herculean effort, does a member of this group manage to get into the third-class section (161). Where this vehicle’s motor formerly produced only 1,909 horse-power, it now churns out 2,000, and where it previously used steam power, it now runs on electricity. There are many such vehicles, Dr. Orecnis explains to Serapião, and each country has its own: “They advance, at different velocities, but in a progressive gear that is always increasing” (155). Rather than mimicking Bellamy’s use of a vehicle as a metaphor for outdated past inequalities, Barnsley’s vehicle continues to move forward with class divisions intact. In his Brazilian utopia, the goal is not equality for all but the elevation (increased horsepower) of the whole social structure.
In the final chapter of Looking Backward, West appears to reawaken in the nineteenth century, which he now sees as a backward, wretched reality. To his great relief, that reawakening turns out to be only a nightmare; he remains in the future and marries the granddaughter of his former fiancée, a thoroughly modern version of the same woman. Because Bellamy saw his utopia as virtually inevitable, West does not need to share his knowledge of the future with the present. As the author noted in the conclusion to his retrospective essay: “The more advanced nations, ours surely first of all, will reach the summit earliest and, reaching strong brotherly hands downward, help up the laggards” (sec. 7). As a member of one such “laggard” nation, Barnsley must needs end his tale on a different note. As Del Fiorentino describes the message of São Paulo 2000, “the future society glimpsed through the utopia is revealed to be the result of a project requiring immediate attention” (149). Serapião’s experiences in the year 2000 have been only a dream. He needs to awaken in his own time in order to help the Brazil of 1909 to become the future that he has seen so clearly. His decision not to marry his cousin will be the first contribution to the construction of that future.
The first discussion of Urzaiz’s Eugenia (A Fictional Sketch of Future Customs) as science fiction appeared in Ross Larson’s Fantasy and Imagination in the Mexican Narrative (1977; 55). Since then this work has often been described as a utopia that gradually descends into a dystopia, anticipating Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). To the modern reader, this seems a fairly accurate description. A purportedly near-perfect future society has been achieved at the expense of turning control of human reproduction over to the state, which employs practices such as forced sterilization and euthanasia, while a distinctly unheroic hero abandons a strong female character for the rather insipid Eugenia. When we consider the author’s intentions or the work’s reception at the time, however, it is less clear that this characterization of the novel is accurate. “Some texts intended (and internally marked) as utopian or dystopian (or perhaps not written within a utopian/dystopian strategy at all) can be received by readers as utopian or dystopian according to their own aesthetic and political judgments,” writes Moylan (155). And since such value judgments often reflect individual beliefs, as well as a specific time and place, one person’s dystopia may be another’s utopia. An exploration of authorial intent in Eugenia, along with initial reader reception, can reveal much about Latin American reactions to eugenic ideas. An examination of the novel itself further demonstrates how texts in the science fiction tradition—no matter how distant the future setting or different the society portrayed—are uniquely suited to reflecting the realities from which they emerged.
Eugenia appears to have been perceived as a completely dystopian work by Urzaiz’s contemporaries. As Peniche Vallado writes in his preface to the third edition:
In its time, Eugenia upset the critics and the public and was, perhaps, the work by Dr. Urzaiz that most contributed to people viewing him as having an undesirable reputation and regarding him with the precautionary distrust reserved for eccentrics and the unbalanced. He anticipated popular consensus when he announced in the prologue: “I am certain that many individuals . . . will exclaim, scandalized, upon reading my book: ‘But this is the work of a madman!’” (22)
Urzaiz’s son and biographer, the obstetrician Carlos Urzaiz Jiménez, writes in a milder vein that, with the publication of Eugenia, “without a doubt his fame as an eccentric grew” (42). The strong negative reaction to the book in 1919 was undoubtedly related to the drastic alterations Urzaiz portrayed in traditional family structure, social customs, and religious values, and to the more Mendelian-driven aspects of his approach to eugenics.
It is less evident how Urzaiz himself judged his projected society. Urzaiz Jiménez calls Eugenia “the most candid reflection of his uneasiness of spirit” (42). In his own prologue to the novel, Urzaiz states that it is intended to represent a positive reality: “a vision—even if pale and imprecise—of that future humanity of my dreams and hopes” (3). The author’s selected path to humanity’s perfection was clearly influenced by his own professional background.
Eduardo Urzaiz Rodríguez was born in 1876 in Guanabacoa, Cuba, and emigrated with his family to the Yucatán at the age of fourteen. His son summarizes his fields of interest as “medicine . . . , teaching, art, and politics” (37). After earning degrees in pedagogy (1894) and medicine (1902) in Mexico, Urzaiz continued his studies in psychiatry and obstetrics in New York (1905–6). Early in his medical career, he did a great deal of work as an obstetrician, specializing in performing Cesarean surgeries. From the beginning of the twentieth century he taught pedagogy and literature, and at different times he also taught English, French, sociology, history of religions, psychology, and biology (López Cortes 32). In the years before or immediately following the publication of Eugenia, he held positions as founding director of a psychiatric hospital, the Ayala Asylum [Asilo Ayala] (1906–30); head of the Yucatán Department of Public Education (at several points in the 1920s); head of the State Board of Health (beginning in 1926); and first president of the National University of the Southeast [Universidad Nacional del Sureste], later the Autonomous University of the Yucatan [Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán] (1922–26, 1946–55).39 In addition to scientific papers on psychiatry and biology (including a paper on reproductive hormones), Urzaiz wrote on a wide variety of topics from Cervantes to Mexican and Cuban history to religious history. He also translated Longfellow’s poem Evangeline and was locally well known as an artist (he illustrated his translation of Evangeline, and the illustrations for Eugenia are thought likely to be his). In a prologue to the second edition of the novel, Menéndez Díaz connects certain aspects of Urzaiz’s imagined advances in reproductive engineering, specifically the possibility of male gestation, to his research on hormones (14–16). In the prologue to the third edition, Peniche Vallado refuses to confirm or deny this assertion, but joins Menéndez Díaz in comparing Urzaiz to H. G. Wells, genetic manipulator extraordinaire in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). It seems evident that Urzaiz’s work in obstetrics also had a significant impact on the medical aspects of the work. Eugenia is Urzaiz’s only novel.
When Urzaiz published Eugenia in 1919, the world was trying to recover from the devastating losses of the Great War, and Mexico was enduring the final months of the first of the major twentieth-century revolutions. During the long and bloody Mexican Revolution, it is estimated that one in eight Mexicans died (about 1.5 to 2 million people in a population of 15 million), including hundreds of thousands of civilians, and there was large-scale destruction of property and infrastructure (Meyer et al. 532). Stepan traces these connections between the revolution and the form that eugenics took in Mexico:
The deaths and dislocations caused by the war and the staggering problems of poverty and sickness, combined with the growing nationalism of the revolutionary state, provided the setting for the appeal to eugenics. Ideologically, the revolution’s socialism, anticlericism, and materialism made Mexico receptive to new developments in science and social thought. (Hour 55)40
As we will see, Urzaiz was less motivated by nationalism than by an opposition to religious fanaticism and a concern for replacing and regenerating a diminished Mexican population. As with most writings that stem from the utopian tradition, the fictional plot merely serves as the underpinnings for the writer’s thesis. Urzaiz tells the reader in his preface that the “simple love story plot” provides a “pretext” for evoking a vision of the future of his dreams (3). He uses Eugenia as a literary platform to show how Mexico and the world might emerge from the violence of his times and (re)construct a superior society.
Urzaiz’s tale takes place in the year 2218 in Villautopía [Utopiaville], Subconfederation of Central America. By setting his novel three hundred years from his own time, Urzaiz effectively places his projected society in a fairly near future but beyond the reach of the present population or their immediate descendants. It is a reality that can be accomplished with extrapolated versions of existing scientific tools and methodologies, yet it is distant enough in time to be very unlike Urzaiz’s present. The novel begins with the arrival of an official letter for Ernesto from the Bureau of Eugenetics [Bureau de Eugenética],41 calling him up for a year’s reproductive service as an “Official Breeder of the Species” [Reproductor Oficial de la Especie] (9).42 He has been selected by the government to propagate the species due, as the letter says, to “the robustness, health, beauty and other qualities that are combined in you” (9). Until receiving this call-up, Ernesto had not been gainfully employed. He had won athletic competitions piloting his “aerocycle with a colloidal nitroglycerin engine” [aerocicleta de motor de nitroglicerina coloidal] (36), but has been essentially a playboy, maintained by his lover, Celiana, and the other members of their grupo [group], Miguel, Consuelo, and Federico. In 2218 the nuclear family has been replaced by the grupo, a communal arrangement in which adults choose to live together based on complementary goals, tastes, and “affinities of character” (23–24). The figure of Celiana—with her “disturbing and original beauty” [belleza inquietante y original], from her “Greek nose” and “high and spacious” forehead to the “porcelain transparencies” of the skin of her feet—graces the cover of the novel (see figure 1.2). She had been Ernesto’s teacher, but once they became lovers she had left teaching and achieved international success giving conferences on sociology and history. Due to her “insatiable and almost morbid thirst for acquiring knowledge,” or “excessive cerebrality,” Celiana had been judged in her youth to be “incapable of engendering perfectly sound and balanced products” and had been sterilized, as had Miguel (24–25). “Through such procedures, at that time common practice in all the civilized world,” the omniscient narrator concludes, “they had managed to build a secure dike against the progress of degeneration” (25).
Ernesto visits the Bureau of Eugenetics to learn about his new duties from the director, Dr. Serrato. Because Ernesto’s arrival coincides with that of two African doctors, who have come to learn about eugenics in hopes of reversing the degeneration of their own country, he ends up touring the whole bureau along with these men, who are described as having “formidable sets of cannibal teeth” and resembling “a tame chimpanzee” (54, 55). The practice of government-controlled artificial selection in humans had begun in more advanced nations when the wars of men and the growing tocophobia (excessive fear of childbirth) in women threatened to depopulate the world (23, 148). Advances in the hormonal sciences have made it possible for artificially “feminized” men to act as “gestators” [gestadores], or “selfless incubators of future Humanity” (70, 71). In a Lamarckian genetic extrapolation, the female uterus has adapted to this situation, and women in these “civilized” countries can no longer carry a child to term (88). Dr. Serrato tells the group that “those of the purely muscular type” are preferred breeders over the “cerebrals/intellectuals” [cerebrales], who make poor reproducers (62). Inherent or recidivist criminals, the mentally ill, and people who suffer from other racial poisons (such incurables as epilepsy or tuberculosis) are sterilized. Those who suffer terribly or are unconscious due to terminal illness are euthanized. Such harsh measures are required less and less every year, he tells them, concrete proof of the regeneration of the population. Once children are born, they are raised in state-run “Farm-nurseries” [Granjas-almácigas], then schools, until they leave to form grupos (12, 75–77).
FIGURE 1.2. Celiana with her customary cannabis cigarette. Cover of Eugenia. Used with permission of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Yucatán
As Ernesto commences his task of engendering twenty genetically superior children in one year, he and Celiana begin to grow apart. She seeks solace in her work and in debates with an old teacher and his circle. Topics for discussion include the changes in the family over the last three hundred years, archaic nationalisms and war, the likelihood of attaining complete economic equality, and the vestiges of organized religion that remain in 2218. Ernesto’s behavior becomes increasingly insensitive and brutish as a result of his new lifestyle. Though she cannot stop loving him, even Celiana realizes “the low moral value of the man whom she had placed so high in her esteem and her affection” (133). Her deteriorating relationship with Ernesto causes Celiana to retreat from reality through increasing abuse of cannabis cigarettes.
More than three-fourths of the way through the novel, Ernesto meets Eugenia, another chosen reproducer and, as her name might suggest, “an admirable example of the human species, the prototype of feminine beauty” (180). The attraction between them is instantaneous, and their “first, absolute, integral love” is described in biological terms: “already all the cells of their organisms, feeling themselves complementary, were inclined to join together with a force superior to all reason and to all conscious volition” (181, 182–83). Neither the intellectual and spiritual (but physiologically sterile) relationship Ernesto had with Celiana, nor the physical and biological (but emotionally sterile) unions with prior eugenic collaborators [colaboradoras], appears to provide the basis of a lasting and happy relationship: the ideal pairing must combine both of these elements. As Celiana’s mental and physical health continues to decline, Ernesto and Eugenia establish their own love nest on the outskirts of Villautopía. Within twenty days, the eugenically gifted pair have conceived a child, and Ernesto lovingly describes to his mate the “manner of incubating a child, by the scientific method in use at that time” (193). The proud parents of the future look forward to the “removal of the ovule,” the “implantation in the peritoneum of the gestator,” and the “final solemn surgical delivery”: “With what anxiety and anticipation they would await each of those steps; how intense their emotions would be as they witnessed them, clasped in each other’s arms!” (193).
FIGURE 1.3. The male gestators of the twenty-third century. Eugenia, p. 79. Used with permission of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Yucatán
The text does not close with this “happy” prospect, however. The last chapter of Eugenia belongs to Celiana. The once brilliant thinker and orator reads the “cruel and heartless” farewell letter that Miguel has forced Ernesto to write in an attempt to help her start anew (203). But Celiana continues to fall more deeply under the influence of degenerating drugs. In the novel’s final lines, Miguel mourns this loss, “one of the spoils that, on their triumphal march, Love and Life toss to the side of the road” (206).
“In my dreams, friend reader,” Urzaiz writes in his prologue to Eugenia, “I contemplate an almost happy humanity; free, at least, of the fetters and prejudices with which at present it voluntarily complicates and embitters life” (3). Some of the “fetters and prejudices” he addresses in the novel include social customs, religious values, war, and nationalism. While the extremity of his suggested remedies often provoked negative reactions among his compatriots, these remedies were products of Urzaiz’s own milieu.
Urzaiz found early twentieth-century morality impracticable and unprogressive. Once the gradual process of overcoming the “religious prejudices” and simplifying the “legal procedures” of his own times was completed, unrealistic demands for romantic fidelity would be replaced by the practice of free love and the traditional family unit by the grupo (22–23). Women, freed from the burdens of childbearing and child rearing, would attain equal status with men.43
Writing in the immediate aftermath of international war abroad and in times of great unrest at home, Urzaiz is less concerned than Ezcurra or Barnsley with the construction of a specifically Mexican national identity. Although he places his utopia in a recognizably Mexican setting—Villautopía is Mérida, according to Peniche Vallado (27), and the architecture is described as “in the neo-Mayan style” (Urzaiz 20)—the inhabitants of his twenty-third century disparage patriotism, national honor, and the flag. During one of the informal debates with Celiana’s old teacher, Matías Urrea—a character believed to represent Urzaiz himself (Peniche Vallado 27–28)—pronounces these three things to be “our great-grandparents’ convenient props, . . . the pretexts with which they covered up their collective crimes” (115). Urzaiz has little confidence that World War I has improved the global order; as Celiana says, “that triumph was very transitory and more apparent than real” (121). In the novel, World War I has led to a series of international wars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and these wars finally result in “universal disarmament and the disappearance of nationalities” (41). The Mexican Revolution is never directly mentioned, but it seems to permeate the narrative alongside the Great War. The series of world wars projected by Urzaiz are said to have ended not so much due to the fighting itself, but to “misery, hunger, epidemics, the lack of commerce, and the paralysis of industry” and to the ensuing “weariness and exhaustion of the warring peoples” (126–27, 147; see figure 1.5).
FIGURE 1.4. Eugenic couple, Ernesto and Eugenia, with aerocycles and other futuristic modes of transportation in the background. Eugenia, p. 184. Used with permission of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Yucatán
The Mexican Revolution also would appear to be a prime motivation behind the repeatedly expressed anxiety in Eugenia regarding depopulation, an anxiety that is far stronger than might be predicted by the notion that “to govern is to populate.”44 Compared with Century XXX or São Paulo 2000, the creation of a single national identity is of less importance in Eugenia. The desire for homogeneity remains, but is subsumed under the dual emphases of increasing the population and combating degeneration. As we have seen in Eugenia’s title, rhetoric, and plot, the application of eugenics is both more overt and more extreme in this novel. We can observe the persistence of Lamarckian hereditary thought, as improvement in the environment is expected to improve the population’s health and genetic makeup.45 Racial poisons are blamed for degeneration, Ernesto is prohibited from smoking or drinking alcohol while working as an official breeder, and the sterile Celiana’s downfall is symbolized by her increasing drug use. Urzaiz’s proposal to select the best human breeders, such as Ernesto and Eugenia, would have been acceptable within the tenets of the Lamarckian tradition of eugenics popular in Latin America at the time. On the other hand, his plans to “de-select” the unfit—sterilization for some, euthanasia for others—was undoubtedly a major cause of negative reaction to the novel in Mexico. Such actions targeted heredity rather than environment, incorporating methods more popular in Anglo-Saxon countries with their Mendelian-based eugenics.46
The novel does not directly address Mexico’s racial heterogeneity. In fact, the indigenous population is conspicuous by its absence (barring the passing reference to neo-Mayan architecture). The word mestizo is never used, as the “cosmic race” has not yet become the predominant paradigm. Ideas of superior/inferior races and of crossbreeding between races to combat degeneration do appear, however. The African doctors that visit the Bureau of Eugenetics tell the director: “In order to escape the evolutionary stagnation in which our people lie, we have tried to crossbreed with superior races,” but they have been unable to attract either white immigrants or those from more advanced African nations to mix with them because economic conditions in the home countries of these “superior” races are too good (89). Their only recourse, they believe, is to imitate the techniques of artificial selection in use in the Subconfederation of Central America and other civilized regions. Not coincidentally, in addition to sharing similar immigration issues, Africa is directly linked to the Mexico of Urzaiz’s time, as the doctors admit that, in comparison with the Subconfederation, their nation “is at least three centuries behind” (88–89).47
FIGURE 1.5. The end of war. The global wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries lead to global peace. Broken spears, remnants of the U.S. flag, and a crowned skull can be discerned on the pyre. Eugenia, p. 129. Used with permission of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Yucatán
“We must not forget, sirs, that the progress of Humanity is unlimited,” Urrea/Urzaiz tells his intellectual circle in Villautopía, and we must also remember that Urzaiz was writing about “an almost happy humanity” (146; 3, emphasis mine). Some imperfections remain in 2218, such as vestiges of social and economic inequality. As in a number of other early Latin American utopias, conditions for all have improved to the point that no one wants for any material necessities and the “poor” are those who, “due to laziness, lack of ambition, or lack of ability,” must go without nonessential luxuries (143). Once the practice of artificial selection has eliminated differences of “aptitude and merit” in humans, Urzaiz’s characters posit, a state of absolute social and economic equality may be attained (146).
Utopia or dystopia? Unless we can determine how Urzaiz viewed Eugenia, we are left with irresolvable inconsistencies in the narrative. Urzaiz says that the novel is a representation of his hopes and dreams, calls his city Villautopía, and closes the story with the union of an ideal pair that is soon to produce a still more perfect child. However, it remains difficult to call the novel utopian when considering the extreme degree of state control over private life—and indeed over a citizen’s right to live. To play the devil’s advocate, Urzaiz gives us two responses to these objections. First, the state alone did not control reproduction. “The reproduction of the species,” as Celiana writes in an article on the evolution of the twenty-third-century family, “was supervised by the State and regulated by science” (23)—science, that impartial, truth-bearing guarantor of progress. Second, as a scientist who had worked with the mentally ill, researched reproductive hormones, and studied in the United States, Urzaiz appears to believe that the ends justify the means. As the group touring the Bureau of Eugenetics contemplates the robustly healthy infants produced there, Urzaiz’s narrator makes the following Machiavellian observation:
That splendid flowering of life and health was enough in itself to justify whatever violent or immoral aspects there might be in the methods to which Humanity had been forced to resort to halt its degeneration and disappearance and continue steadily on its evolutionary march toward an ideal of perfection. (77)
Aquel espléndido florecimiento de vida y salud bastaba por sí solo para justificar cuanto de violento o inmoral pudiese haber en las medidas a que la Humanidad se había visto obligada a recurrir para detener su degeneración y acabamiento y seguir con paso firme su marcha evolutiva hacia un ideal de perfección.
Another possibility—one that always suggests itself when a scholar of Cervantes is involved—is that Eugenia is meant to be satire. But satirical passages are thin on the ground in the novel, and 1919 is historically too early in the trajectory of eugenics in Latin America (or anywhere else in the world) for either satire or dystopia based on fear of eugenics to be likely. Perhaps the most perplexing aspect of Eugenia in this debate is the degree to which the supposedly secondary love story undermines the novel’s utopian society. A reader cannot be entirely comfortable with the fact that all of the principal theses of Urzaiz’s utopia are expressed via the sterilized, genetically “unfit” characters, or that these characters are far more sympathetically portrayed than the insensitive Ernesto and the vapid Eugenia. Although the novel is named after Eugenia, readers begin with Celiana on the cover and leave with Miguel’s parting words ringing in our ears. Urzaiz may have thought he had envisioned a perfect world, but he could envision no perfect way to reach it.
