In contrast to British writers of scientific romances and French writers of early science fiction, Stableford tells us, “American writers after the turn of the century were much less disposed to adopt premises from evolutionary theory, and early American speculative fiction was mostly content to steer clear of this particular war of ideas” (Scientific Romance 6). Unlike the U.S. writers to whom Stableford is referring, Latin American writers regularly included evolutionary themes in their science-fictional texts, though they often espoused theories of evolution alternative to that of Darwin. Latin American ties to France and to French scientific thought have been discussed in chapter 1 with regard to eugenics; the same affinity for Lamarck’s ideas can be found in Latin America in the broader context of evolution. In nations seeking to progress, to become more “civilized,” to “evolve,” the appeal of concepts such as the inheritance of acquired characteristics and the perfectibility principle is readily apparent.1 These ideas would also prove to be particularly attractive to adherents of Spiritism, Theosophy, or other alternative belief systems—including a number of prominent Spanish American modernists—who sought to extend the scope of evolution beyond the earthly or physical plane. Writers of early Latin American science fiction explored evolutionary themes using settings that ranged from the distant past to the far future, envisioning Latin America as the locus for realities that varied from Edenic utopia to apocalypse.
The impact of evolution on conceptions of time is especially notable in Latin America and in early Latin American sf. Typical tensions between cyclical and linear visions of timeflow, between evolution and its counterpart devolution, between progress and degeneration or decadence are exacerbated in a context in which, as we have stated in the introduction, discussions on these themes were often displaced reenactments of the eternal Latin American debate on civilization versus barbarism. Latin Americans sought scientific solutions for promoting the civilization/evolution of their societies and for ameliorating the barbarism/degeneration they found in them. Scientific Darwinism was not long in arriving in Latin America, but Social Darwinism, with its scientific veneer, also proved to be particularly persistent and insidious there. Cyclical theories of history such as that proposed by Nicolai Danilevsky in his Russia and Europe (1869) were also popular in Latin America well in advance of Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918), as they allowed non-first-world regions such as Russia and Latin America to push influential Europe toward the past and claim the future as their own.
As the century turned, trends in non-utopian Latin American science fiction included a general movement away from optimism toward pessimism, and from technophilia to technophobia. With utopias as well as some tales of artificial humans (see chapter 4) among the notable exceptions, science fiction tended to be based less on the canonical sciences. A broader definition of science was gaining acceptance among many Latin American writers, as the academic sciences failed to unravel all of life’s mysteries. The nation-building, overtly political nature of much of Latin American sf of the late nineteenth century also began to change in the first decades of the twentieth. Issues of national identity, influence, and politics were woven more subtly into geographies of setting, into characters’ nationality or social class, and into choices to pursue noncanonical alternatives to traditional sources of authority.
In his discussion of Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Bud Foote makes a provocative connection between travel through geographical space and travel through time in North American culture, stating, “Americans have a peculiar tendency to identify past, present, and future time with location; as one travels to the past in space, one can generate the idea of doing so in time” (65). Foote goes on to trace the multiple geographic-temporal currents present in the United States, with the Western frontier representing the future and the East the past, the past of the agricultural South playing against the future of the industrial North and, somewhat more problematically, the nation as a whole symbolizing the future versus Europe as the past. He describes the U.S. position toward Europe as “contradictory and ambiguous,” with images of Europe as the sentimental motherland competing with those that assign it to a past beyond which we have progressed. Foote argues that such time-place associations cannot exist in the same way for Europe, where past, present, and future must coexist in the same geographical space.2 Foote further differentiates North America from South America in this regard, stating that, “in South America, since the Spanish tended to colonize from the west, the Portuguese from the east, the future never got to lie in any particular direction” (65). It is with this statement that I want to take issue. With the help of two early writers of Latin American science fiction and their texts, we will see not only that there is a Latin American variation to this geographic-temporal theme, but that Latin America’s science-fictional representations demonstrate an even more problematic relationship with Europe while exemplifying the efforts of Latin American countries to consolidate their own histories and national identities as they struggle to locate—or relocate—the geography of the future.
While specifying the location of the future vis-à-vis Latin America is a somewhat thorny issue, the past is not quite so elusive, though as in North America it is associated with more than one geographic location. A glance at any map of colonial Latin America shows the great majority of early Spanish and Portuguese settlements established on the coasts. Current population-density maps reveal that, in much of Latin America, the coastal cities retain their importance. The heavy concentrations of commerce, industry, and political and cultural institutions in the coastal centers pinpoint them as the general location of the geographic present, if not the future. In contrast, the past has generally been located in the interior of Latin American nations, or beyond other frontiers that separated “civilized” regions from those that were more sparsely settled and less known. To this day, the Amazonian interior is internationally known for harboring remnants of primeval forest as well as some of the last blank spaces in terrestrial cartography.
With his seminal Civilization and Barbarism or The Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga [Civilización y barbarie o vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga] of 1845, Sarmiento canonized the popular perception of the Argentine pampa as linked with the barbarous gaucho-caudillo-rural-backward past in contrast with the civilized-populous-urban-modern capital, the port of Buenos Aires. Other representations of Argentine national pasts can be found in the Misiones province of the short stories of Horacio Quiroga, in the pampa of José Hernández’s Martín Fierro, and in the South of Borges’s “The South” [El Sur]. In Brazil, Euclides da Cunha’s Rebellion in the Backlands [Os Sertões] of 1902 represents the relationship between a (then) coastal national government and a group of sertanejos from one of Brazil’s interiors. Alongside these typical nineteenth-century associations of Latin American interiors and frontier regions with a retrograde past, however, we often find a “rebranding” of that relationship. These regions are also portrayed as areas of untrammeled natural beauty and bountiful natural resources, as well-springs of national history and identity, and as potentially containing the keys to the most significant scientific puzzles of the day.
As we have seen, a relatively large proportion of the earliest texts of Latin American science fiction depict fantastic voyages to outer space or to the future. Concurrently, however, some of these same writers were publishing tales of marvelous overland journeys set in contemporary Latin America—journeys to a nation’s natural, historical, and cultural pasts. The Brazilian Augusto Emílio Zaluar (1825–82) and the Argentine Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg each produced one such work in 1875. Both Zaluar’s Doctor Benignus [O Doutor Benignus] and Holmberg’s Two Factions Struggle for Life: A Scientific Fantasy [Dos partidos en lucha: Fantasía científica] were based on the travel narratives of European naturalists and Latin American expeditionaries, including the authors themselves. Zaluar had published Peregrination through the Province of São Paulo (1860–1861) [Peregrinação pela Província de S. Paulo] in 1862 and, among other such accounts, Holmberg published Travels through Patagonia [Viajes por la Patagonia] in 1872. Despite marked dissimilarities between the backgrounds and world views of their authors, the two works in question share a number of common elements. Both Doctor Benignus and Two Factions were influenced by the works of Jules Verne, Camille Flammarion, Darwin, and Sarmiento, and among the central themes of both are scientific and pseudoscientific uses of evolutionary theories, national progress through the spread of scientific knowledge, and the representation of South America as the locus for a utopian future.
Born in Portugal in 1825, Zaluar arrived in Brazil in 1849 and became a naturalized Brazilian citizen in 1856. He spent a portion of his professional career as a professor of pedagogy at the Teacher Training College; he was also a journalist. Zaluar produced texts in a variety of literary forms and genres: poems, short stories, at least one play and one novel, plus the aforementioned travel narrative, for which he is best known. In politics he was a staunch supporter of the status quo, a conservative monarchist who upheld Dom Pedro II’s policies and his claim to the throne of the Brazilian Empire. He was a member of the Auxiliary Society for National Industry [Sociedade Auxiliadora da Indústria Nacional], the closest thing to a scientific society in Brazil and, though not a scientist himself, he has been described as “reasonably informed about the scarce scientific activities of the time” (Carvalho 9). Zaluar’s writings reveal a belief in the alliance of scientific and religious principles and in an undifferentiated evolutionism with aspects reminiscent of the arguments of Lamarck, Spencer, Darwin, Haeckel, Huxley, and Wallace.
Although several Brazilian texts of a science-fictional nature were already in existence in 1875, the editors of the first edition of Doctor Benignus called it Brazil’s “first exercise in writing a scientific or instructive novel” (qtd. in Zaluar 27). The publishing company’s assertion is evidence that early Latin American works of science fiction did not constitute a coherent local tradition, and that writers’ connections with the genre tended to be either exclusively or primarily with Northern European and North American authors and works. Zaluar himself affirms his scientifically enriched novel to be “the simple presentiment of the new phase that contemporary literature must necessarily enter,” part of a trend which he claimed was already in evidence in “the most advanced societies” (he mentions England, Germany, and the United States specifically; 28).
The eponymous protagonist of Doctor Benignus is a Brazilian scientist and a “true wise man” (33). So devoted is he to the pursuit of knowledge that he vows in the first chapter to leave the bustling and worldly capital city of Rio de Janeiro for the relative isolation and tranquility of a country estate in the neighboring province of Minas Gerais. Upon the eve of his departure, the good doctor describes himself as a Brazilian version of one of the contemporary science-fictional heroes of Jules Verne:
I do not know if you have read a clever book by Jules Verne, which has for its title From the Earth to the Moon? Well, I am the Michel Ardan of that daring expedition, with the difference that, instead of going to the Moon, I am going to the interior of Brazil; instead of being transported by a cannon ball, I will be transported by a burro, an animal less dangerous than a projectile, and which has biblical tradition—so highly recommended by the orthodox church—in its favor. (Zaluar 43)
Não sei se já lestes um espirituoso livro de Júlio Verne, que tem por título Da Terra à Lua? Pois eu sou o Miguel Ardan dessa arrojadíssima expedição, com a diferença que, em lugar de ir para a Lua, vou para o sertão; em lugar de ser transportado por uma bala, sê-lo-ei por um burro, animal menos perigoso que um projetil, e que tem a seu favor a tradição bíblica, tão recomendada pela igreja ortodoxa.
The value of exploring the Brazilian interior is placed on a par with exploring the great Vernian unknowns. Despite the overt analogy between Ardan and himself, however, Benignus links the European hero with the latest of futuristic technologies while, in contrast, his own method of transportation belongs to the past.
Benignus soon establishes another connection with Europe, writing a letter to the French scientist, writer, and popularizer of science, Camille Flammarion. The two of them are, Benignus ventures, “two souls that understand one another” (55). He expresses particular interest in Flammarion’s works, from his The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds [La pluralité des mondes habités] (1862) to his Stories of Infinity [Récits de l’infini] (1873) because, he reasons, if Flammarion’s theory that there is life on other worlds is correct, it would then follow that “there will be beings on other worlds that are more perfect than we, and, in consequence, closer to absolute unity, to the originary principle” [haverá em outros mundos entes mais perfeitos do que nós, e, por conseqüência, mais próximos da unidade absoluta, do princípio originário] (49–50). This allows a transitional evolutionist to claim the existence of evidence of the perfectibility of the human species, a religious man to believe that his striving to become more like God may yield tangible results on Earth as well as in heaven, and a Brazilian Social Darwinist to hope that his own nation might aspire to “evolve” industrially, scientifically, culturally, and racially and to reach the heights already attained by European civilization.
Indeed, in his letter Benignus proposes to “extend the hand of America to Europe,” but he does not see the relationship as one in which America merely imports scientific knowledge and other civilizing influences from Europe (56). Brazil, Benignus emphasizes in various ways, does not come to the table empty-handed. Throughout the letter he extols the fecundity and the diversity of Brazilian flora and fauna and the optimal conditions of the unspoiled, crystalline Brazilian skies for astronomical observation. He invites Flammarion to come to Brazil in search of “new and more fertile inspiration from these favored regions of sun and of liberty” (53). González Echevarría has written that in the nineteenth century, “To travel to Latin America meant to find history in the evolution of plants and animals, and to find the beginning of history preserved—a contemporary, living origin” (110). Benignus repeatedly links Brazil’s natural riches not with the backward, uncivilized past, but with the past of antiquity and the roots of humanity: the Brazilian sky is “like the mythological sky of the ancients,” the forests are composed of “trees coetaneous to those of the first centuries of creation” (54, 51). He portrays Brazilian nature not as a barbarous opponent but as a “fecund laboratory” of unspoiled beauty and untapped potential (69). In making these connections Benignus seeks to establish Brazil’s bona fides as a locus of cultural and historical significance in its own right, as an active participant in the creation of its own national identity. Europe is thus not the only source of humanity’s—and Brazil’s—past, and it is not the only arena in which scientific progress can be made. Zaluar represents the Brazil of the 1870s as less evolved than Europe, but he also emphasizes his adopted nation’s associations with a privileged past that owed nothing to the Old World, and he stresses Brazil’s potential as a contributing partner in the construction of the future.
On the naturalist’s first sally into the Brazilian countryside, Dr. Benignus and his chef, Katini, a Peruvian Indian, “descendant of the Incas,” discover a crude Indian mortuary urn containing a piece of papyrus that bears the legend “À pora” underneath an image of the sun (62). Upon discovering that “À pora” is Tupi for “ECCE INCOLAE: here there are people, this place is populated, here there are inhabitants!” (91), the good doctor interprets the inscription to be a sign of the merit of Flammarion’s theory on life on other worlds. He decides to mount another, larger scientific expedition that will take advantage of the superior celestial viewing conditions of the Brazilian interior in order to prove that there is more advanced life on the sun. Secondary reasons for the expedition are provided by the other two men who join Benignus as its leaders: Fronville, a Frenchman, will study the riches of Brazilian nature, while a young British man, Jaime River, will try to rescue his anthropologist father, William, from the clutches of the savage Carajá Indians of Tocatins. Two other Northerners will be incorporated into this group during the course of the expedition. Frei Custódio, an Italian priest, embodies Zaluar’s desired link between science and religion: “Blessed be your name, Lord,” elucidates the priest, “for making science one of the greatest instruments of your power!” (334). James Wathon, an engineer and iron-foundry millionaire from Philadelphia who had once been cured of a near-fatal illness by Dr. Benignus, also joins the expedition in the interior after a record-breaking balloon journey of several thousand kilometers. In Doctor Benignus, Europe and the United States represent examples of possible futures for Brazil; Europe is the model for culture, religion, and science, while the United States sets an example of industrialization, the Protestant work ethic, and practical Yankee applications of technology in transportation and communication. But other, higher futures for all of humanity are possible—beyond Earth, on other planets and stars—and Benignus intends to claim first contact with representatives from these more distant futures for Brazil and Brazilian science.
The joint Brazilian-European venture departs from Benignus’s estate in southeastern Minas Gerais. From there, the expedition proceeds in a northwesterly direction across Minas, through Goiás, culminating in a visit to the Ilha do Bananal [Banana Grove Island] in the region of Tocatins on the western border of Goiás (see figure 2.1). The journey’s trajectory is summarized by the Frenchman, Fronville, in terms that illustrate our extension of Foote’s theory, linking geographical and temporal travel in the Southern hemisphere:
We are traveling, to put it one way, in the inverse direction of the evolutionary march of civilization. First we depart from the frontiers of the inhabited world, which are actively engaged in its intellectual and moral emancipation; we then move into the vast province of Minas Gerais, which marks, in a certain way, the transition between social activity and the primitive indolence of less advanced peoples; and finally, we are going to enter the wilderness which is still inhabited by the savage but picturesque types belonging to the families of the first humans! Our excursion could not be more singular or more instructive. (271)
Vamos seguindo, por assim me exprimir, em sentido inverso à marcha evolutiva da civilização. Partimos primeiramente das fronteiras do mundo habitado e ativo na obra de sua emancipação intelectual e moral, penetramos depois na vasta província de Minas Gerais, que marca de um certo modo a transição entre a atividade social e a primitiva indolência dos povos menos adiantados, e vamos entrar finalmente nos desertos ainda habitados pelos tipos selvagens, mas pitorescos das primeiras famílias humanas! A nossa digressão não pode ser nem mais curiosa nem mais instrutiva.
The population-dense Brazilian coast from which Benignus has come, then, forms the last bastion of the inhabited/emancipated/advanced world connected to Europe and the future. Again, the city has historically been associated with civilization and progress in Latin America, and the Brazilian frontier, unlike that of the nineteenth-century United States, did not tempt the average inhabitant to “Go West, young man” and create a future in the freedom of open spaces.
The semi-civilized longitudes of Minas Gerais and Goiás have been held back, Benignus and Fronville lament, by the very mineral riches that first brought them to prominence. “Gold,” they say, “is the origin of ostentation and debauchery”; its presence discourages the development of renewable sources of wealth such as agriculture and cattle ranching (156). Iron, they tell each other, would historically have been much better for these provinces because its properties make it “the safeguard of civilization . . . the grave and holy instrument of work, the generator of the economy and the counselor of morality!” (155–56). Fortunately for the future of Brazil, Benignus tells of recent discoveries of iron in these areas, and Fronville discovers a new deposit during the expedition. According to these two men of science, it is precisely such “conquests of science over the natural riches of the soil” which, together with industrial development, will bring “happiness and civilization” to cure the “decadence” of Brazil’s interior (276).
Zaluar depicts the far interior using contradictory terms and images in a continuing effort to locate a silver lining in the region his character describes as most distant from the “march of civilization” (271). Fronville characterizes the inhabitants of the sertão as “savage but picturesque types,” describing them as “primitive” and “less advanced,” while claiming that they belong to the “first human families,” thus usurping the distinction of “cradle of humanity” from Africa.3 At one point during the expedition, the scientists think they have located the missing evolutionary link, but it proves to be a false alarm. Zaluar appears to be far more interested in the implications of Social Darwinism than in the work of Darwin or his disciples. He subscribes to the view that sentient beings fall along a linear evolutionary continuum and—despite his expressions of interest in elevating the status of indigenous peoples—he clearly believes that, at present, they belong at the lower end of what his narrator describes as the “unequal series of the human family” (310). Reconstructed from clear assertions and assumptions throughout Doctor Benignus, Zaluar’s racial hierarchy lists, in ascending order: apes, the fabled “missing link,” black slaves,4 Brazilian Indians, members of the great indigenous civilizations such as the Inca, free men of Brazil, Northern Europeans/North Americans/enlightened Brazilian elites, scientists, and finally, beings on other orbs who have evolved beyond humanity and beyond material form.
FIGURE 2.1. Journey of Doctor Benignus from Rio de Janeiro, through Minas Gerais and Goiás, to the Ilha do Bananal in the interior of Brazil. Details of the “Map of Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay.” Mitchell’s New General Atlas. Philadelphia: S. Augustus Mitchell, Jr., 1865. Courtesy of the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries, Map & Imagery Collection
Zaluar does believe in the possibility of moving up in this hierarchy, through education and the subsequent passing on of acquired traits to one’s descendants. Fronville’s location of the evolutionary past in Brazil’s interior, therefore, complements as well as contrasts with Benignus’s search for the evolutionary future. After carrying out his observations of sunspots and reviewing the supporting scientific authorities, Benignus is more convinced than ever that there is life on the sun. When a meteorite lands near the camp during their travels in Goiás, Benignus falls asleep atop it and a luminous being appears to him. This Sun Being tells Benignus that he has deigned to visit such an insignificant world as Earth due to Benignus’s “thirst for knowledge, so rare among your fellows” (293), and he lauds and encourages Benignus’s efforts to make this knowledge accessible to others, declaring:
Among the efficacious means of elevating man, your fellow creature, to his spiritual perfection, which is also morally his objective goal, lies the principle of the fruitful and noble mission that you have taken upon yourself, that is, to popularize scientific issues and by that means to raise the intellectual level of the people. (295)
Entre os meios eficazes de elevar o homem teu semelhante ao seu aperfeiçoamento espiritual, que é também moralmente o seu ponto objectivo, consiste o principal na fecunda e nobre missão de que te encarregaste, isto é, vulgarizar os resultados da ciência e fazer subir por esse meio o nível intelectual do povo.
The Sun Being further recognizes Benignus as “the symbol of the alliance and the fraternization of the civilized nations on this part of the American continent” (295). Although the ultimate objective is the evolution of the entire human race, Benignus’s immediate mission is to raise the evolutionary level of Brazil by spreading the gospel of science and serving as a link between a multitemporal Brazil and the more future-oriented, evolved, and “civilized” (Europeanized, westernized, modernized) nations of the world.
Zaluar reaffirms Benignus’s mission at the lower end of his evolutionary scale as well. When the expedition reaches the Ilha do Bananal to rescue the British anthropologist, William River, Chief Koinaman of the Carajá tribe tells Benignus that they have kept River a prisoner in order to learn from him, declaring: “I am the first to recognize his superiority over us” (317). Here, in the heart of the Brazilian darkness, Benignus decides to establish a utopian settlement to be led by the Brazilian, French, British, and North American expedition members and their families. The island’s original inhabitants, the Carajá Indians, will be elevated from wild savages to workers on the new estates and in the new factories of this agricultural and industrial colony. The emissaries from the civilized Northern hemisphere and Brazilian coast will bring concrete advances in iron-working, industry, and agriculture, “attracting the races still immersed in indolence and barbarism to civilization through the holy communion of labor” (346). Transportation and communication with the North will be improved as well, with the steamships that had formerly run between New York and Rio now supplanted by the Wathon-improved balloons.5
Less tangible civilizing benefits include a work ethic, Christianity, peace with near neighbors and distant coastal authorities, and education in subjects from languages to the sciences. By strong implication, the higher evolutionary status of the newcomers will also benefit the natives by example, by association, and, perhaps, by miscegenation or branqueamento [racial whitening]. Those Latin Americans who thought of race in terms of Social Darwinism were avid proponents of “improving” the indigenous races by intermarriage; as Doris Sommer has written, “Miscegenation was the road to racial perdition in Europe, but it was the way of redemption in Latin America, a way of annihilating difference and constructing a deeply horizontal, fraternal dream of national identity. It was a way of imagining the nation through a future history” (39). It is noteworthy in Zaluar’s case that he does not specifically discuss racial mixing. The only marriage that takes place at the end of Doctor Benignus is between two Europeans residing in Brazil: the Frenchman, Fronville, and the British daughter of William River. This is most atypical for a text that purports to be a foundational fiction for Latin America, but it is likely explained by Zaluar’s belief in the possibility of intellectual and moral evolution, his Portuguese roots, and/or his support for the Brazilian but Eurocentric monarchy of Pedro II. As a conservative monarchist, Zaluar could not envision an ideal future that entailed any changes in the national political or economic power structure.
González Echevarría writes that “scientific exploration brought about the second European discovery of America, and the traveling naturalists were the new chroniclers” (11); he further discusses the ways in which “scientific discourse presumably establishes a distance between naturalists and the world they study” (107). If we reframe these concepts in science-fictional terms, these scientific expeditions in the New World were no longer “first contact” situations, but situations of second contact and beyond. In our text, Benignus, a Europeanized member of the Brazilian upper class, brings about a second or final subduing of the indigenous population that is less violent than the first but just as colonial. Benignus uses the distancing—or estranging—lens of science to analyze his own nation; this perspective allows him to envision a solution for pulling the backward Brazilian interior out of the past and into the future. Although Zaluar may locate the future in Brazil, he does not represent it as belonging to Brazil alone. His vision must be achieved in partnership with North America and Northern Europe, and can only be accomplished once the barbaric aspects of the Brazilian past have completed their transformation.
The Argentine Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg was a medical doctor by training, a naturalist by vocation, and an educator by primary profession. A member of the third generation of one of Argentina’s leading families, he was also a translator, the writer or editor of countless scientific and literary works, and an explorer of his country’s remotest provinces. His grandfather Eduardo Kannitz, Baron of Holmberg, had left Europe in 1812 to fight alongside San Martín in Argentina’s wars for independence; his father, don Eduardo Holmberg y Abalbastro, fought with Lavalle’s armies and subsequently accompanied Sarmiento into temporary exile in Chile. Our Eduardo Holmberg followed the family tradition of taking part in national life by working at the “noble civilizing projects that the country would undertake once the difficulties of its own organization were surmounted” (Pagés Larraya 10).
These “civilizing projects” took several forms. In politics Holmberg supported a democratic system, a “Republic governed by knowledge” ruled by an educated but permeable “select minority” (Luis Holmberg 104). As a naturalist Holmberg was responsible for collecting and categorizing samples of Argentine flora and fauna as part of the scientific inventory of the fledgling Republic of Argentina. These activities also formed part of Argentina’s nineteenth-century transition from “source of raw scientific data” (as it was of raw materials), sent to Europe for analysis and processing, to “producer of knowledge” (Rodríguez 29). As Rodríguez elaborates:
The first science in Argentina had been colonial in its methods and purposes. Specimens gathered had been sent to Europe for inspection and classification. Diseases were fought with the goal of protecting the European colonists. But now, decades later, the flow of information was in the other direction: scientists focused on the needs of the nascent nation, though they were still dependent largely on European theories and models. (30)
In his own life, then, Holmberg was an active participant in a process that seemed destined to reverse or at least alter the polarity of these European-Argentine associations (Europe-science-future and Argentina–raw data–past).
In his capacity as a scientist and professor of science, Holmberg founded scientific journals, participated in Argentina’s first scientific societies, produced scientific textbooks, and taught virtually every known branch of science to the nation’s future teachers. Holmberg’s strong desire to popularize the sciences was founded in a belief, similar to that of Zaluar, in the connection between scientific knowledge and national progress, and in the use of education to move from the past into the future. Like Zaluar, Holmberg is voluble in his praise for Jules Verne. Holmberg particularly appreciates the Frenchman’s gift for contributing to the scientific education of his readers by making science more understandable and more palatable: “[Verne,] with his powerful imagination, has sheathed the mysteries of science with a vaporous mantle that is full of attractions” (Two Factions 70). It should be noted that Holmberg’s oft-expressed admiration was not necessarily due to Verne’s specific interpretations of contemporary scientific theories. Where Verne was an opponent of Darwinian evolution, Holmberg was one of its staunchest defenders.
FIGURE 2.2. Arachnids [Arácnidos] by Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg. Drawings accompany Holmberg’s article in the report of a national scientific expedition, published in Informe oficial de la comisión científica agregada al estado mayor general de la expedicion al Río Negro (Patagonia) realizada en los meses de Abril, Mayo y Junio de 1879, bajo las órdenes del general d. Julio A. Roca. By Julio Argentino Roca, Adolf Döring, Carlos Berg, Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg, P. G. Lorentz, and Gustavo Niederlein. Vol. 1. Buenos Aires: Imprenta de Ostwald y Martinez, 1881. Zoology, Plate 3.
Although he was a pioneering writer of fantastic literature and maintained a lively interest in the alternative sciences, Holmberg’s world-view and belief system were most heavily informed by the empirical sciences. He was a strong proponent of Darwin’s theory of evolution, never giving credence to the tenets of Social Darwinism (Ortiz, “Transmission” 113). Holmberg was not the first Argentine to show interest in Darwin’s ideas. In 1868 Sarmiento wrote: “Darwin’s theory is Argentine, and I propose to nationalize it via Burmeister” (qtd. in Marún, “Introducción” 13).6 As mentioned in chapter 1, Sarmiento brought a number of European scientists to Argentina during his presidency (1868–74), as part of his campaign to improve the national education system and to raise the nation’s level of scientific knowledge and production. At the head of this group was Karl Hermann Burmeister, a respected German scientist. Unfortunately for Sarmiento’s plans, Burmeister was an ardent creationist at the time.7 It thus fell to homegrown scientists such as Holmberg to propagate Darwin’s revolutionary theories among the general public. As a professor of the history of science, Marcelo Montserrat, tells us: “It is not strange for Darwinism to knock on the doors of a Republic avid for the latest novelties at that time; what is unusual is for the first public profession of the Darwinist credo to be expressed through a work of fiction written by a twenty-two-year-old medical student” (25). That work of fiction was Holmberg’s novel, Two Factions Struggle for Life.
In the outer frame of Two Factions, dated December 1874, a narrator named Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg explains that the “true author of the literary diversion”—that is, the manuscript of Two Factions—is his friend Ladislao Kaillitz, a Darwinist.8 The narrator claims that Kaillitz entrusted him with the pages of Two Factions before setting out across the Atlantic, for parts unknown, in September of that same year. Kaillitz’s first-person tale contains two main geographical-temporal journeys, the first within Argentina itself, the second from Europe to Argentina.
In the first journey, which takes place in 1872, a young Kaillitz travels south from Buenos Aires to Río Negro, a region associated at the time with the “barbaric” and backward past. This trip echoes a southern journey made by Holmberg in the same year.9 More significantly, it is a re-creation of the young Charles Darwin’s original journey to Latin America aboard the Beagle in the 1830s. In the narrative, Kaillitz and his party come across the vestiges of one of Darwin’s camps. The ship’s captain, who served on the Beagle while Darwin was aboard, is inspired to teach Kaillitz the basic principles of evolution. By this device, Holmberg enables Kaillitz to retrace the English scientist’s discoveries of forty years earlier, while taking his first steps toward becoming a leading Argentine Darwinist.
The central events of the narrative are two fictional debates between evolutionists and creationists, set in Buenos Aires in 1874.10 The Argentine Darwinist faction is led by Kaillitz’s new mentor, Pascasio Griffritz. Like Kaillitz, Griffritz is a semiautobiographical character, but one with ten more years of seniority and credentials than our young author.11 The local creationists are represented by Francisco P. Paleolitez and Juan Estaca. Although Paleolitez’s evocative name consigns him to the prehistoric strata of scientific thought, his name is also likely an allusion to the scientist Francisco Pascasio Moreno, a disciple of Burmeister and an adversary respected by Holmberg (Montserrat 27n18). Burmeister himself is not a principal actor in the story, but his name is invoked as the major authority behind the creationists. Estaca [literally, a stake, post, or cudgel] exemplifies the brand of creationist that Holmberg does not respect; the superficial nature of Estaca’s scientific understanding is evidenced by his recitation, at every opportunity, of a memorized list of 323 Latin names of botanical species in lieu of a reasoned argument.
The novel’s second journey is set up by the real political subtext behind the fictional debates.12 Nicolás Avellaneda defeated Bartolomé Mitre in the Argentine presidential elections of February 1874, but he was not inaugurated until October of that year. During the intervening months, which encompass both of Holmberg’s debates, Mitre led a revolt; the ensuing national unrest did not subside completely until December. Holmberg’s “dos partidos” [two parties, or two factions] are political as well as scientific. While Holmberg hoped to bring the creationists among his reading public over to the Darwinist camp, he also used the text as a vehicle for the condemnation of political violence and an affirmation of the recently restored national unity, saying: “The colors of the political parties had merged in the blue and white of national unity after the electoral battles had been resolved with the almost-naming of the new president of the Republic” (11).
The capacity both to achieve political stability and to debate the latest scientific issues is touted in Two Factions as evidence that Argentina was prepared to take a more prominent place on the world stage, to be a locus for the future. As a debate organizer tells a crowd gathered in the Plaza Victoria: “The moment, long awaited by all of us, has finally arrived for us to show Europe and the world that we know how to maintain universal equilibrium with the peace that we enjoy and with the enlightenment that our ancestors bequeathed us” (14). This same quotation is also evidence, however, that Holmberg’s Argentina has not completely broken free of its colonial relationship with Europe. Simply declaring the end of Argentine dependency is not enough; Argentina must prove her worth in the eyes of Europe, and the legitimacy of her new status requires recognition by the other nineteenth-century powers. The continuing primacy of European scientific theories in nineteenth-century Argentina is embodied both in Holmberg’s characters and in the authorities he cites: all of the novel’s acknowledged scientific—and literary—models are European, and all of its scientists (except for the false one, Estaca) possess European ancestry and surnames.
The ambiguity of the future’s location in the text reaches its height in the second scientific debate. Although the Darwinists do fairly well in the first debate in Buenos Aires, they fail to convince the creationists of the superiority of their way of thinking. Holmberg then imagines a second journey to Argentina by an aging Darwin. Since Darwin had already landed once on Argentine shores, as part of the voyage on the HMS Beagle, why should he not then return—this time aboard the HMS Hound—to defend his theory? If Holmberg feels the need for Darwin’s authority to bolster his case for Argentina’s recognition as a progressive scientific nation, he refuses to acknowledge the debt; his narrator declares: “Not only do we owe [the English] nothing, we do not want to owe them anything” (90). This brash assertion is undermined, however, when Holmberg proceeds to make full use of his purloined Englishman to vouch for Argentine scientific legitimacy.
This second voyage does provide some evidence that the temporal currents have been reversed, however. Upon his arrival in Buenos Aires, the fictionalized Darwin proceeds to give his blessing to the Argentine Republic in the person of its president-elect, saying: “Permit me to take advantage of this glorious opportunity to wish you all the blessings to which an old man can aspire for the next government of the young President-elect of the Argentine Republic” [Permitidme aprovechar esta gloriosa oportunidad para desearos todas las bendiciones que un anciano puede anhelar para el próximo gobierno del jóven Presidente electo de la República Argentina] (113). With this benediction, Holmberg presents the passing of the torch from Europe to the New World—and specifically to Argentina, under this stable and progressive political leadership—as the new locus for cutting-edge scientific research, discovery, and debate.
During the second debate, Holmberg’s Darwin completes the relocation of the future to Argentina and the relegation of Old World Europe to the past. He defers to an Argentine scientist, saying, “Mr. Griffritz will make known his opinions, which are more advanced and daring than my own” (133). Toward the end of the debate, Griffritz declares the transfer to be part of a Hegelian natural progression:
The evolution of human society followed its progressive course from the Orient to the Occident. . . . And if it is true that for many centuries the Enlightenment has been linked to Europe, the dawn of the world Empire is already being divined in none other than America. (136)
La evolucion de la sociedad humana siguió su curso progresivo de Oriente á Occidente. . . . Y si es verdad que durante muchos siglos la ilustracion ha estado encadenada á la Europa, no lo es menos que en la América se presienten ya los albores del Imperio del mundo.
In a further extrapolation by Holmberg, Two Factions culminates with new evidence of Argentina’s scientific primacy, with Argentine scientists providing physiological proof—to the creationists and the world—that the Akka (an African pygmy tribe) represent the elusive missing link, a definitive verification of Darwin’s theory of evolution.13
At the end of Kaillitz’s account, the Holmberg-narrator returns to contribute an appendix to Two Factions, entitled “The Akkas: A Pygmy Race of Central Africa” [Los Akkas: Raza pigmea del Africa central]. This appendix is a real translation (by Holmberg) of a real article (by respected French anthropologist Paul Broca) about a real scientific issue of the day: the place of the pygmy, or Akka, in human evolution.14 In an introductory epigraph to the appendix, the narrator declares that “This article . . . more than eloquently explains the suppositions of Mr. Kaillitz,” adding, however, that “It does not need to be read as an integral part of Two Factions Struggle for Life, but rather only by those who desire to illuminate themselves somewhat about one of the most important anthropological events of the nineteenth century, if not of the modern age” (140).15 Because the article reveals that the Akkas have not yet been proven to be Darwin’s missing link, the appendix seems to cloud Holmberg’s vision of the new Argentina. This interplay of the real, the fictionalized, and the imaginary in the frame of the appendix, however, mirrors that in the body of the novel. Although the real article partially undermines the extrapolated fictional finale, by showing that real scientists were making the same suppositions as his fictional characters, the author supports their defense of Darwinism and, by association, their dreams for Argentina’s future. Holmberg’s journey toward a geographical relocation of the future is complete.
For these two nineteenth-century Latin American writers, the geography of the past—whether it is represented as lying in a “barbaric” interior or in national scientific backwardness—was not invulnerable to change. While Zaluar manages a science-fictional relocation of a utopian future to Brazil, this relocation is only possible—or desirable—in open partnership with Europe and the United States. Holmberg attempts to wrest ownership of the location of the future from Northern hands, yet he too requires European aid (through a fictional Darwin) to do so. By burro or by Beagle, these tales represent some of the early steps by Latin American science fiction writers to stake a claim on the geography of the future.
The relationship between Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg and Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938) provides a rare example of direct literary influence in early Latin American science fiction.16 Holmberg was “friend and mentor” to Lugones (Alter-Gilbert 17), and Lugones’s admiration for Holmberg and his work is clear from his review of Nelly in El Tiempo on September 18, 1896. He refers to Holmberg as “one of the most complete intellectuals in Argentina” and notes that “Nelly constitutes a true novel in our meager literary world, . . . it has real value for its plot, for its style, for its originality” (qtd. in Pagés Larraya 87). Unlike Holmberg, whose work is only recently being exhumed from near oblivion, Lugones enjoys a firm place in the pantheon of Argentine authors; the national Day of the Writer is celebrated on the date of his birth. As Borges wrote in a biographical essay: “Leopoldo Lugones was and continues to be the greatest Argentine writer,” and “American literature still gains nourishment from the work of this great writer; to write well is, for many, to write in the style of Lugones” (Leopoldo Lugones 95, 10). Beyond the disparity in their literary reputations, the commonalities and divergences in the lives and works of Holmberg and Lugones are generally illustrative of the changes that Argentine sf was undergoing at the turn of the twentieth century.
Education and science played an important role in the careers of both men. Holmberg was a secondary school inspector, the author of textbooks, and a teacher; Lugones also held a school inspector’s post, wrote about education, and was the director of the Library of the National Education Council. Although Holmberg undoubtedly had superior scientific training, Lugones was, as Ortiz describes it, “warmly received in the tertulias [gatherings, circles] of the scientists” (“Transmission” 113). He wrote on scientific themes as a young journalist, represented Argentina at the Latin American Scientific Congress in Montevideo in 1904, and was instrumental in bringing Albert Einstein to Argentina in 1925 (Ortiz, “Transmission” 113–16; Scari 169–70). Both men had a tendency to be scientifically didactic in their literary works, though Lugones based more of his arguments on the non-canonical sciences, which he embraced more wholeheartedly than did Holmberg. Both wrote on a diverse range of topics in a wide variety of genres, although each had his own areas of expertise.
Whereas the older Holmberg perched on the fence between romanticism and modernism, Lugones belonged far more to the modernist movement. As Borges wrote, “The story of Leopoldo Lugones is inseparable from the story of modernism, although his work, as a whole, exceeds the limits of this school” (Leopoldo Lugones 13). Modernism was a global movement, and it marked the first instance in which literary influences moved from the Hispanic New World to the Old World. For Lugones, as for many of his contemporaries, it meant “an effort to incorporate Hispanic American literature in the western tradition with its own voice, without a loss of identity” (García Ramos 35). At the turn of the century, modernists were attempting to recover from, as Cathy Jrade expresses it, “the anxiety of their age as generated by fragmentation: individuals were out of touch with themselves, with their companions, and with Nature.” She explains further: “They longed for a sense of wholeness, for innocence, for the paradise from which they had been exiled by the positivist and bourgeois emphasis on utility, materialism, and progress” (12). Modernists sought either to evade or to fill the void left by the crisis of belief that had resulted in Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God. Although they sought to express this new totality for which they searched in the language of science, the modernists found traditional science to be lacking as a substitute for religion:
They maintained a respect for science, its breakthroughs, and its contributions to progress; they rejected it, however, as the ultimate measure of all things. Despite the promises made, it became clear that, far from becoming more understandable, life appeared more enigmatic, and the great inventions and discoveries had not provided answers to the fundamental questions of existence. (Jrade 11)
While Holmberg managed to be both scientist and “a Christian, but in my own way” (Nic-Nac 97), Lugones was profoundly anti-Christian. He turned to Theosophy as an extension of the scientific spectrum from the canonical sciences into the regions of the occult, in order to allow both his belief in a spiritual existence and his respect for modern science to coexist—in order, as Moore puts it, to “make religion rational” (7). Lugones was a member and sometime secretary general of the Theosophical Society in Buenos Aires. In an article in its official journal, Philadelphia, he delineates his position clearly:
Science encompasses a much vaster concept than is attributed to it today. Today it is defined as the aspiration to truth; he who only knows facts is not a wise man; he is, if you will, an erudite man. In order to be wise it is necessary to know the laws of the universe, to feel beauty and to practice moral principles, to know, in a word, the whole, and to proceed in light of it. This means the possession of the Truth. . . . if something is still needed in order to justify [the Theosophical doctrine], the scientific movement which it has originated would be the most brilliant proof. Theosophy aspires to synthesis, demonstrating in moral principles, the common origin of all religions; in science, the single law that comprehends all knowledge; in sociology, the solidarity that will be the definitive triumph of peace. (qtd. in Marini Palmieri 39–40)
Not all of the twelve stories in Lugones’s Strange Forces [Las fuerzas extrañas] (1906; revised 1926) can be considered science fiction, and the claims that science fiction stakes on the works discussed in this book are not uncontested.17 Cano has described three significant science-fictional aspects of the tales in Strange Forces: “the appropriation of the rhetoric of scientific discourse, the narrativization of the figure of the researcher and his methodology, and the deconstruction of the two prior concepts that Lugones carries out using alternative scientific principles” (116). Lugones’s deconstructions include a wide range of targets, from scientific objectivity to the laws of planetary attraction and molecular cohesion. In the texts discussed in this chapter, Lugones focuses on Darwinian evolution, with its sequential conception of time. Lugones views time as cyclical, and he paints the ape-faced threat of devolution lurking behind the mask of progress and civilization. In the absence of tangible, universally acceptable, or corroborated evidence to support the theories expounded in Strange Forces, ultimately it is not science but literature—science fiction—that is presented as the route to truth.18
With his “Essay on a Cosmogony in Ten Lessons” [Ensayo de una cosmogonía en diez lecciones, hereafter “Cosmogony”] (1906) Lugones places himself between the known and the unknown, the provable and the unexplainable, “an intermediate position, if only in terms of distance, between materialism and supernaturalism” (“Cosmogony” 274).19 “Cosmogony” rounds out the collection of stories in Strange Forces, and provides the basic themes of which the stories are variations. “The Origin of the Flood: Narration of a Spirit” [El origen del diluvio: Narración de un espíritu] (1906) is the story with the closest ties to “Cosmogony,” functioning as a partial, more literary, restatement of it.20
Both texts contain detailed descriptions of chemical reactions during Earth’s formation, side by side with accounts of lunar beings that travel to Earth via a “cone of shadow.” Both texts reveal Lugones’s view of Earth’s formation as a cyclical process (“When the matter of the planet has reached its maximum stability, the process of disintegration of this matter begins”), rather than as a linear process such as evolution (“The Darwinian ladder is thus totally inverted. Man is, then, the progenitor of the animal kingdom . . . thus if man was no more than a step, there was no reason for him to be the superior and the top one, but rather one of many”; “Cosmogony” 262, 276). Lugones justifies his anti-Darwinian stance by citing Adam’s naming of the animals in Genesis as proof that man preceded the other species. Although man is not the result of an evolved perfection, Lugones tells us, as Earth is presently in the process of rounding the bend from integration into disintegration, the point of maximum stability for our planet seems to coincide with the age of modern man (“Cosmogony” 276, 263).21
Lugones’s conception of the universe uses the language of science to demystify the Bible, myths, and natural phenomena alike. God’s activities in the biblical first six days are analyzed in terms of chemistry, physics, and biology, although the theosophical lens through which Lugones views these processes leads to conclusions unacceptable to academic scientists both of our times and his.22 The flood, or “the catastrophe which men afterwards called the flood,” he explains as a consequence of Earth’s increasing attraction for the moon’s atmosphere and the subsequent evaporation of the lunar seas, which then recondensed on Earth (“Origin” 82; 175).23 Huge, gelatinous beings that Lugones posits as an early form of organized life which later disappeared “were the giants of which the legends speak” (“Origin” 81; 174). The “fish with human faces” of the “Cosmogony” (279) are elaborated in “Origin of the Flood” into “beautiful monsters, half fish, half women, later called sirens in mythology” [monstruos hermosos, mitad pez, mitad mujer, llamados después sirenas en las mitologías] (85; 178).24 These sirens (or mermaids) were, we are told, the first human beings after life arrived on Earth from the moon, and they knew certain moon secrets that modern humans have lost: “They possessed the secret of the original harmony, and they brought to the planet melodies of the moon which contained the secret of death” [Ellos dominaban el secreto de la armonía original, y trajeron al planeta las melodías de la luna que encerraban el secreto de la muerte] (“Origin” 178).
“Cosmogony” is the only text in Strange Forces to include numerous footnotes supplementing an already dense quotient of scientific content. These footnotes, as well as the ten lessons that form the body of the text, are addressed to the reader in the first person by the same narrator who appears in the framing preface and epilogue. This narrator purports to be transmitting the words of a mysterious “wise man” [sabio]—not, he makes clear, a mere “scholarly man” [erudito], whose training is limited to the canonical sciences—whom he meets in the Andes (282). The first-person narrator of the scientific core of “Origin of the Flood,” however, claims to be a witness to the events described, though not a human or an earthly witness:
And thus have you called forth my memories, across millions of years, evoking human sentiment, summoning me here to speak from the dimension where I dwell—the earth’s cone of shadow. For there I am condemned to abide, throughout the ages, so long as the planet endures. (85)25
He aquí lo que mi memoria, millonaria de años, evoca con un sentido humano, y he aquí lo que he venido a deciros descendiendo de mi región—el cono de sombra de la tierra. Os añadiré que estoy condenado a permanecer en él durante toda la edad del planeta. (178)
Upon hearing this revelation by the moon being, one Mr. Skinner gives this reaction: “Outlandish fakery, charlatanism,” he says (85; 179). Eventually we learn that the moon being has come to Earth and conversed with eight people, including Skinner, who are attending a medium’s séance. Although the séance scene appears rather abruptly at the very end of the story, it has been prefigured by the story’s subtitle, “Narration of a Spirit.”
The lunar spirit proceeds to demonstrate where its own interests lie. Upon concluding its account, it begins to escape from the body of the medium who had been serving as its mouthpiece. Skinner and the rest of the company freeze in fear. A new first-person narrator, another of the eight observers, describes the being in monstrous terms, as a gigantic tentacled spider, and compares the effect it created to that of an enveloping glue: “It didn’t have definite form in the darkness made more dense by its presence,” he says, adding “but if horror can be objectified in some fashion, this was horror” (86, modified; 179). The medium manages to call for light, and when the narrator reaches the switch, the ensuing rays cause the “shadowy mass” to explode, covering the company with something resembling a freezing mud (86; 179). As the narrator and Skinner engage in the mundane activity of washing the mud off themselves in the medium’s washbasin, the situation seems to be returning to a state of normalcy. But they are soon presented with a final piece of evidence designed to convince doubters like Skinner (and any reader not yet overwhelmed by the logic of Lugones’s narrators): when they look into the bottom of the basin, they find a small, dead mermaid. Perhaps this miniature of the story’s earliest form of human is but proof that the moon being’s tale was not a figment of their séance-primed imaginations. Or perhaps she is a remnant, the original essence of what had become the shadowy moon being. And perhaps mermaids had eventually been confined to the cone of shadow because they knew the secrets of original harmony that humans are no longer meant to possess.
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan books (1914+), and the Planet of the Apes movies (1968+) are only a few of the many examples of ape stories in proto-, early, and recent science fiction. A veritable flurry was published in Argentina in the first decade of the twentieth century. Howard Fraser has identified Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) as key literary influences on these works (“Apocalyptic Vision” 14), but he also cites frequent fictional and nonfictional accounts involving apes published in the popular magazine Caras y Caretas [Faces and Masks] at the turn of the century as contributing factors to this phenomenon (“Apes and Ape Lore,” particularly 69–71, 73–75; “Apocalyptic Vision” 13).26
“Yzur” (1906) is perhaps the best realized of all of Lugones’s science-fictional tales; not only does the story showcase his basic scientific premises, but it does so by showing rather than telling the reader what they are. Unlike the narrators in many of his science-fictional works (see chapter 3), the narrator in this tale is not the “initiate confidant” to whom the scientist reveals his discoveries, but the scientist himself (Barcia 31).27 He is an independently wealthy amateur who reads about a Javanese belief that monkeys are silent not because they cannot speak but because they will not, so that no one can force them to work. He converts this belief into an “anthropological theory” that monkeys are humans who for some reason stopped speaking and eventually devolved into animals who are virtually unable to speak (111; 199).28
The scientist then describes how he acquired a trained chimpanzee, Yzur, from a disbanded circus, and how—through the strict observance of the scientific method—he set about teaching the ape to speak again. It is important to note that this narrator, unlike most of his brethren in Strange Forces, refrains from the exaggerated employment of what would later become known as technobabble. He is methodical and even didactic in his explanations, but does not descend into the technical minutiae of chemical compounds or the wavelengths of various light and sound waves, nor does his narrative become mired in the constant citation of corroborating scientific authorities. Carefully and objectively, he outlines the steps he has taken toward proving his postulate. After five years spent in exhausting the pertinent bibliography, he concludes “that there is no scientific explanation for the fact that apes do not speak” (112; 200). He then proceeds to work on developing Yzur’s phonic apparatus, a prelude to getting the ape to produce words, and finally attempts to elicit meaningful speech. Lugones’s use of the clinical tones of the scientist to describe the physical brutality of his methods marks an early example of the story’s “subversion of scientific discourse” (Fraser, “Apocalyptic Vision” 14). After a further three years of effort, Yzur is able to produce only isolated vowel sounds and a limited number of consonants.
The reader gradually becomes aware that, despite our narrator’s appropriation of scientific method and scientific discourse, his pretensions to objectivity are undermined by evidence of his partiality in interpreting his subject’s development. Initially there are numerous and fairly understandable (in that era) comparisons of Yzur to humans: his walk is like that of a drunken sailor, his brain like that of a human idiot; his attention span compares—favorably—to that of a child, and his youthful capacity for learning to that of the negro.29 Eventually, we witness the narrator completely cross the line into subjectivity in the space of a single paragraph:
For all the slowness of his progress, a great change had come over him [Yzur]. His face was less mobile, his expression more serious, his attitudes were those of a creature deep in thought. He had acquired, for instance, the habit of gazing at the stars . . . . And at the same time his sensibilities had developed: I noticed that he was easily moved to tears. (107, ellipsis in the translation only)
Por despacio que fuera, se había operado un gran cambio en su carácter [de Yzur]. Tenía menos movilidad en las facciones, la mirada más profunda, y adoptaba posturas meditabundas. Había adquirido, por ejemplo, la costumbre de contemplar las estrellas. Su sensibilidad se desarrollaba igualmente; íbasele notando una gran facilidad de lágrimas. (205)
It becomes more and more apparent that the narrator’s increasing attribution of human reactions and emotions to his subject is the result of his own paranoid inability to handle his frustrations. Like the narrator of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” his sanity appears more and more in question as the tale proceeds.30 Based on his cook’s terrified, incoherent, and far from reliable assertion that he has heard Yzur speaking complete words, the narrator begins to claim that Yzur is giving him “hypocritical winks” and sees irony in the ape’s facial expressions as it stubbornly refuses to speak for him (115; 206).
At the same time he describes the humanizing of Yzur on the ape’s path to re-evolution, however, the narrator’s words betray a certain devolution or animalization on his own part. He describes his fruitless efforts to get Yzur to speak as a “painful obsession,” revealing that, “As time went on I felt inclined to resort to force. The failure was embittering my disposition, filling me with unconscious resentment against Yzur” [Poco a poco sentíame inclinado a emplear la fuerza. Mi carácter iba agriándose con el fracaso, hasta asumir una sorda animosidad contra Yzur] (115; 205–6). Eventually he whips the chimpanzee, who responds with complete silence. Yzur’s supposedly civilized master interprets this silence as a form of passive resistance in the face of “despotism of darkest barbarity” [despotismo de sombría barbarie] (208). The narrator speaks of such despotic behavior in terms of ancient history, linked to the apes’ original enslavement, but it is clear that his beating of Yzur—an episode he now refers to as his “exasperation” [exasperación] (207)—is just such a case of “barbarous injustice” [bárbara injusticia] (208).
As Yzur lies on his deathbed—due, we are told, to mental as well as physical suffering—his master humanizes him to an ever greater degree, eventually conceding, to a certain extent, his own partiality: “In my great solitude, he [Yzur] was rapidly assuming the importance of a person” (116; 207). In spite of this realization, the narrator’s self-acknowledged “perversity” leads him not to a more friendly relationship with the ape, but to a resumption of his attempts to get Yzur to speak (116; 207).31 He uses language to re-impose the same superior-inferior relationship he posits as the cause of simian devolution millenia ago, as he tries to get Yzur to respond to the phrases with which he has begun every lesson: “I am your master” [Yo soy tu amo] and “You are my ape” [Tú eres mi mono] (116; 207). His efforts are to no avail until, with an expression that is “so human that I was seized with horror,” the dying Yzur speaks: “Water, master. Master, my master” [AMO, AGUA. AMO, MI AMO] (117; 209).32
With these final sentences, Lugones gives us an ending that follows a familiar pattern in his stories: a researcher fails in his attempt to share his access to higher planes of knowledge with the world (in this case, with even a single witness). The narrators of the other scientific tales in Strange Forces (discussed in chapter 3) are observers who have managed to achieve some sort of closure following the events they recount, and thus have some pretensions to objectivity. But the narrator of “Yzur” lacks this perspective. Ultimately he is unable to prove his postulate to the scientific world or even to himself. Rather than administering large doses of supporting evidence and steamrolling the reader into agreement, Lugones leaves the ending open to interpretation, and this greater degree of ambiguity magnifies the story’s power. Indeed, did Yzur produce words at all? The narrator’s account reveals his own doubts as he protests too much: “He murmured—I am sure—he murmured . . . these words” [Brotaron—estoy seguro—brotaron en un murmullo . . . estas palabras] (209). Were Yzur’s “words” merely the rote reproduction of sounds? Perhaps the narrator’s desire to hear what he has longed to hear supplies the links that now connect Yzur’s previously isolated vowels and consonants, as all of the sounds used in the deathbed utterance (in the original Spanish) do fall within the ape’s stated range. Even if Yzur has somehow advanced to the production of linked sounds or entire words, any meaning in the phrases is at least partially imparted by the narrator’s choice of punctuation. Could Yzur’s speech be more than a tacit admission of the truth of the narrator’s postulate, and also carry an acknowledgement of the narrator as his “master” and superior? This is certainly the narrator’s hope, as he designates Yzur’s murmurs as “these words, whose humanity reconciled our two species” (117; 209).
Or, as the narrator suspected, has Yzur been able to speak all along, providing evidence only when his “master” could no longer use a speaking ape to his own advantage? Herein lies the genius of Lugones’s multiplicity of possibilities: the interpretation that poetic justice tempts even the staunchest of evolutionists to choose is also the one which upholds the narrator’s theory of devolution. This version allows Yzur the dignity of the passive resister and the ultimate revenge against his oppressor. According to the narrator, Yzur’s final words “at once crowned and blasted all my hopes,” proving him correct and then denying the scientific validation of a corroborating witness (117; 209). For the narrator, as for all who stress the “science” in “occult sciences,” success can come only with recognition by the scientific community. He knows that the testimonies of his cook and himself are insufficient evidence without a walking, talking Yzur. Because Yzur’s death removes the source of scientific proof, our narrator turns to writing as a last resort: “And the last afternoon, the afternoon he died, the extraordinary thing occurred that decided me to write this account” (117; 209).
Fraser has described the stories in Lugones’s Strange Forces as “eschatological texts which document the decadent phase of the cosmos, the millennial Apocalypse” (“Apocalyptic Vision” 18). A small but varied group of early works of Latin American science fiction goes one step beyond documenting decadence to documenting the final days of human life on Earth. Catastrophes that bring about the end of the world generally fall into two categories: natural and man-made. A natural catastrophe might originate on the planet itself (Noachian flood, earthquake, volcano, ice age, plague) or come from the heavens (solar flare, comet, death of the sun). Agents of apocalypse created by humans include war, overpopulation, machines/technology, and ecological devastation. Prior to World War I, natural catastrophes are more prevalent but, after the war that brought the nineteenth century to a close, man-made catastrophes predominate (Wagar, “Rebellion” 141). The means of destruction reflect the present-day concerns of the writer or, as Eric Rabkin expresses it, “the agency of the end of the world as we know it, the mechanism employed, indicates what we are to think of our own imaginings” (ix). At the same time, the end of the world is rarely definitive: “When the world ends, what really ends is not all of creation but—only—the world as we know it” (Rabkin viii).
The apocalyptic corpus of early Latin American sf includes tales that take place in the present, the far future, and the recent past. Dreams and madness are prevalent. In each case the narrative is transmitted by the last man alive, after the rest of the population has been eliminated by a passing comet, a global war, or an undefined disaster that may or may not have been caused by humans. In these texts a fresh start for life on Earth seems doubtful . . . but not entirely impossible. Contrary to what often happens in end-of-the-world narratives, no utopias emerge from the ruins of these razed societies (Wolfe, “Remaking of Zero” 3–4), nor are any future utopias specifically projected. (Indeed, none of the utopias discussed in chapter 1 come about as a result of catastrophe; Latin Americans had experienced too much violence first-hand for this to be an attractive option.)
Of our four disaster narratives, only “Demons” [Demônios] (Brazil, 1893) by Aluísio Azevedo (1857–1913) and “The Last War” [La última guerra] (Mexico, c. 1898)33 by Amado Nervo (1870–1919) deal directly with the themes of this chapter: civilization and barbarism, evolution and devolution. Like Lugones in “Yzur”—but unlike our 1875 texts—both of these works represent civilization as but a veneer masking an inherent barbarism. In both there is some (d)evolution toward perfection and/or an ultimate understanding of the universe, though with atypical consequences. The other two apocalyptic narratives are “The End of the World” [O fim do mundo] (Brazil, 1857) by Joaquim Manuel de Macedo (1820–82) and “How the War Ended in 1917” [Cómo acabó la guerra en 1917] (Mexico, 1917) by Martín Luis Guzmán (1887–1976). Though not strictly evolutionary texts, they form chronological book-ends for this section. They also can help us trace other trends in Latin American science fiction, such as the progression toward technophobia during the extended nineteenth century; the use of science fiction for social, economic, and political satire; and the trope of the alternate or future history.
In 1857, two years before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a German astrologer predicted that a comet would strike the earth on June 13, causing widespread if not total destruction. “This disturbing news was published in an almanac and the bogus prediction spread rapidly throughout Europe, particularly Paris,” Donald Yeomans explains in Comets: A Chronological History of Observation, Science, Myth, and Folklore (187). Word of the imminent threat also arrived in Brazil, occasioning no small degree of panic among the population. It also inspired Joaquim Manuel de Macedo to publish a tale entitled “The End of the World” in the Jornal do Commercio [Business Journal] on the appointed day.34
Macedo was a prolific, best-selling writer who epitomized his times. His work, The Little Dark-Complexioned Girl [A moreninha] (1844), is regarded as “the first major Brazilian novel” (Stern 187). If Macedo’s writing is considered superficial and reductionist today, it remains appreciated for its documentary value, and Macedo is recognized for his pioneering work in portraying both the customs and the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro (Cândido 145). He obtained a degree in medicine—one of the few fields of study offered in Brazilian higher education in the nineteenth century—but never practiced. He taught Brazilian history at the Colégio Pedro II, served as tutor to the emperor’s grandchildren, and occasionally held political office as a member of the conservative wing of the Liberal party, though he had no great political ambitions. Although Cândido’s description of Macedo as “conformist and discreet” is undoubtedly apt (143), the satirical vein running through works like “The End of the World” left few egos unpricked. This earliest of the retrolabeled works of Brazilian science fiction pokes fun at the local response to the comet scare, but its primary goal is economic and political satire.
The events of June 12–13, 1857, are recounted by a first-person narrator who shares the name of a famous Brazilian actor (and acquaintance of Macedo): Martinho Corrêa Vasques (modernized as “Correia”; 1822–90). The narrator describes himself as “the new Noah who survived the new flood” (51). He lives through the passing of the comet by building “a staircase that would take me a short distance from the moon” out of a pile of the recently created Brazilian banks, with the Bank of Brazil as the first step (“with its high interest rates, that bank alone was worth a thousand steps”; 60, 61). The comet passes rather quickly, so Martinho discards his original plan of proceeding to the moon and other planets via balloon. He returns to Earth, almost colliding with the ground at the end of his descent because the banks have “broken.”35 Back in Rio de Janeiro, Martinho finds that the comet’s heat has apparently killed every living being. Despite the previous hysteria, the inhabitants are portrayed not in a tableau of mass panic but as engaged in fairly typical daily activities. In keeping with the satirical tone, the narrator comes across Macedo himself dead in the offices of the Jornal do Commercio, with a smile of satisfaction on his face, because he will not have to write his column for the next day’s paper. Martinho also stops by theater rehearsals, his club and favorite café, a police station, city hall, and the national senate—allowing the author to direct barbs at the self-interest and poor qualifications of a wide range of public officials, from local politicians to ministers of state, and to poke fun at the cooperation among Liberal and Conservative senators during this final year of the Period of Conciliation in Brazilian national politics.36
Martinho begins to appreciate the magnitude of his desolation, describing himself as “a sort of Adam without an Eve, and on top of that an Adam who, instead of living in Paradise, must live in an enormous cemetery!” (78). He enters another theater, where he finds a chorus girl still alive, and rejoices: “She was the Eve that I, poor Adam, ardently desired for the good of humanity, that it might not be extinguished” (82). At first the chorus girl is less than excited at the prospect of spending eternity with Martinho (they have been lovers in the past), but she apparently reconsiders, running from him with a “flirtatious giggle” (85). He sets off in pursuit but soon finds himself on the ground groaning in pain: he has fallen out of bed. “In spite of the pain,” Martinho concludes, “I give thanks to God; because today is June 13, and the world is not coming to an end” [Apezar da dôr . . . dou graças a Deos; porque hoje é o dia 13 de Junho, e não ha de acabar-se o mundo] (86). As would prove to be the case in the real world, the comet in the story is a false alarm. Everything we have read has been a dream.
The story’s narrative frame complicates the typical conclusion to the end-of-the-world tale, in which the end leads to a new beginning. A fresh start is possible in Macedo’s “The End of the World” only insofar as his fellow citizens profit from seeing their customs, institutions, and fears satirized. Still, the story does include many of the elements commonly found in narrations of catastrophe and apocalypse: a comet as agent of doom, a study of people’s reactions when the end is nigh, the narration by a “last and first man” (a Noah, an Adam), and even the present-day setting. Many of these elements will appear in later Latin American narratives of the end, though the repercussions of the theories of evolution and devolution will echo throughout each of them.
Aluísio Azevedo enjoyed the rare distinction of being able to live on the proceeds of his writing for a significant period of time in late nineteenth-century Brazil. He was best known for naturalist novels such as The Mulatto [O mulato] (1881) and The Brazilian Tenement [O cortiço] (1890), for his anticlericalism, and for his denunciation of racial prejudice. In his science-fictional work “Demons,” Azevedo combines a naturalist’s eye for detail with a romantic’s penchant for the macabre.37 The tale opens in the chambers of a writer in Rio de Janeiro. The young man tells us that he has awakened to utter darkness and silence, after an apparent long night’s sleep. Thinking that dawn is about to break, he sits at his desk and begins to write page after page, “and the ideas came boiling toward me like a band of demons, devouring one another in a delirious rush to arrive first” (21). When the frenzy subsides, he finds he does not remember anything he has written. Ten hours have passed, yet the world is still dark. He seeks out the other boarders in his pensione and discovers them dead in their beds, “as if those lives had been extinguished in a single breath; or as if the earth, suddenly overcome by a great hunger, had gone mad and devoured all of her children at once” (29).
An unknown but apparently natural—not man-made—catastrophe has left our narrator alone. Like Martinho in “The End of the World,” his city has become a giant cemetery. He expresses the faint hope that Laura, his betrothed, might have survived too, becoming the Eve to his Adam, living with him “in an eternal self-centered paradise, helping to recommence the creation . . . to form the world anew, to bring forth life anew” (31). He sets out for Laura’s home, but only his familiarity with the route keeps him from losing his way. No light can penetrate the primeval darkness, and thick layers of mold and mud are starting to cover buildings and streets. He finds Laura’s family dead, but hesitates before entering her bedroom saying, “I had never dared penetrate that chaste maiden’s chamber . . . such a pure and religious asylum of modesty” [Nunca houvera ousado penetrar naquella casta alcova de donzella . . . tão puro e religioso asylo do pudor] (44). Valor overcomes discretion. Although Laura appears to be dead, she revives in the young writer’s embrace.
Just as the mysterious darkness has negated all light, the enveloping silence has negated all sound. The couple is unable to speak aloud and must communicate via some form of telepathy. The mud and mold begin to engulf the city. Amid these worsening conditions, the writer and Laura resolve to seek death in the waters of the sea. Strangely, however, the mud begins to repel them less, and they find themselves losing not only the ability to use language, that benchmark of humanity, but also the ability to think coherently. “Our brains began to become beast-like” [Nossos cerebros principiavam a bestialisar-se], the narrator says (63). Soon it is not only their minds but their bodies that transform. They grow some sort of hair or fur, snouts emerge, teeth lengthen, and they become quadrupeds. As they gain strength, they are overcome by the need to fight, to establish physical dominance. They lose their human memories and with them their inhibitions:
Laura threw herself at me in a savage and plethoric caress, seizing my mouth with the strong lips of an irrational woman. She clasped me to her sensually, biting my shoulders and arms as if wanting to awaken in me the desires of the flesh. (66)
Laura atirava-se contra mim, n’uma caricia selvagem e pletorica, apanhando-me a bocca com os seus labios fortes de mulher irracional, e estreitava-se commigo sensualmente, mordendo-me os hombros e os braços, como se me quizesse acordar os desejos da carne.
The narrator is unable to say how long they lived this animal existence, but they awaken one day, still in the darkness, to find that their claws have softened and their feet feel “numb, heavy, and as if they were inclined to bore deep into the earth” (74). They undergo a second metamorphosis, becoming two giant trees, “tranquil and entwined in our silent happiness” (78). After another unspecified length of time, they transform again, a further step down the developmental scale, into a single rock.
Centuries pass, and the ever-present mud dissolves them into a liquid, which then evaporates into a gas. The narrator compares this “general gasification” to the one at Earth’s beginning, when “the first two molecules . . . found one another and were joined and became fruitful, only to begin the interminable chain of life, from atmospheric air to mineral, from Eozoon to biped” (80). Rather than begin the process of rebuilding that chain of life on Earth, the writer and his lover, now literally reduced to the most elemental state, find their gaseous selves dispersing and rising into the vacuum of space: “We began to traverse the firmament, revolving around one another like a pair of errant and loving stars that goes through space in search of the ideal” (80–81). This sentence ends the narration of events that followed the catastrophic darkness, but it does not quite end our tale. A final sentence reads:
Here in these dozen silly chapters, patient reader, lies what I wrote on that cursed night of insomnia in my bachelor’s quarters while waiting for His Highness the Sun to deign to open his morning audience with the birds and the flowers. (81)
Ora ahi fica, leitor paciente, n’essa duzia de capitulos desenxabidos, o que eu, n’aquella maldicta noite de insomnia, escrevi no meu quarto de rapaz solteiro, esperando que Sua Alteza o Sol se dignasse de abrir a sua audiencia matutina com os passaros e com as flôres.
With this explanation of the text as words that had come “boiling toward me like a band of demons,” the narrator establishes that the cycle of devolution has been metaphorical rather than literal, despite the extensive details provided and scientific terms employed.38
Although this narrative frame might initially appear to undercut the interior text by openly denouncing it as fiction (and a “silly” trifle produced on little sleep at that), it serves several useful purposes. First, it provides Azevedo with a means of exploring the (d)evolutionary process from within the mind and body of a character, as a firsthand account. At the same time, he uses this not-quite-the-end-of-the-world mechanism to juxtapose his characters’ reactions to impossibly different social settings: civilization and barbarism. This dichotomy is typically used in Latin American fiction to examine national composition, national politics, or technological or educational progress. Azevedo, by contrast, uses it to show that the “civilized” but strictly codified expressions of romantic love between a respectful young suitor and a chaste young maiden mask an elemental imperative to express more “barbaric” physical, emotional, and intellectual desires and needs. Only the extremity of an end-of-the-world scenario could allow a young couple to completely escape the rigid morality of their own culture—in this case by providing a setting in which the larger society that maintains laws, rules, and customs has disappeared.
Like Macedo’s story, “Demons” contains many elements common to more completely apocalyptic narratives. Within the framed text, several possibilities arise for new beginnings for life on Earth. First the narrator and Laura are proposed as a second Adam and Eve, but this option is ruled out by subsequent events. After the devolution of their humanity down to the molecular building-blocks of life, it is suggested that the couple might come full circle and regenerate life on Earth beginning at the first stages of an evolutionary cycle. But this, too, proves to be a false lead. The ultimate implication within the framed text is that—as with Flammarion’s Lumen, Holmberg’s Nic-Nac, or Zaluar’s Sun Being—these virtually noncorporeal spirits have (d)evolved into something more advanced than “civilized” humanity, something that has come closer to attaining the ideal.
Amado Nervo was born in Tepic in western Mexico. After abandoning early intentions to join the priesthood, he worked as a journalist in his hometown and in Mazatlán before moving to Mexico City in 1894. In 1900 the newspaper El Imparcial sent him to Paris, where Nervo completed a modernist’s ideal apprenticeship, living a bohemian lifestyle, getting to know the French literary scene, and becoming friends with Rubén Darío, that ultimate exponent of Spanish American modernism. By the time he returned to Mexico in 1904, Nervo had published several collections of poetry and a work of prose and was gaining literary renown at home and abroad. After joining the Mexican diplomatic corps in 1905, Nervo was sent to Spain, where he would be posted until 1918. Although, as Manuel Durán tells us, “His diplomatic position would sharpen his political and sociological sensibility even more,” Nervo intervened very little in matters political throughout his life (84, 108). Because he lived abroad during virtually the entire span of the Mexican Revolution, for Nervo “the Revolution was not an active ingredient in his experience or in his development” (Durán 24). In 1918 Carranza’s government sent him to Argentina and Uruguay as its special envoy and plenipotentiary minister. He received great acclaim as a poet in New York, en route to the River Plate, and upon his arrival. Because of worsening chronic health problems, Nervo died less than a year after assuming his post. His funeral celebrations were the stuff of a García Márquez tale, taking place over a period of six months and including a convoy of warships from multiple nations to escort his body, international homages along the route home, 300,000 attendees at his burial, and numerous re-editions of his works. Notwithstanding Nervo’s undeniable qualities as a person and as a writer, Durán attributes the scale and scope of these events to the times, to the public’s regret at not having sufficiently celebrated other modernists at their passings, and to the fact that Nervo was—of all of the modernist poets—“perhaps the most ‘presentable,’ the most socially acceptable,” due to his political neutrality, the fine figure he cut, and the nicety of his manners (107–8).
Like Lugones, whose work he admired, Nervo was a member of the second generation of Spanish American modernists and one of the most important national literary figures of his time. Again like Lugones, he was known more for his poetry than his prose, even though his professional earnings as a writer derived largely from his work as a journalist. Nervo also shared with Lugones what Fraser has termed the modernist’s “apocalyptic vision of the future as revealed in the movement’s ambivalent attitude toward scientific discourse” (“Apocalyptic Vision” 9), seeking answers both within and beyond the canonical sciences, and exploring a “wide variety of unorthodox belief systems” (Jrade 50). In Nervo’s case this exploration was especially extensive, including “pantheism, mysticism, theosophy, spiritualism, Bergsonian Vitalism, Buddhism, and Hinduism” (Jrade 50). Blanco-Fombona has aptly described this former aspirant to the priesthood as a man who “lacks faith and does whatever he can to find it” (264). Finally, Lugones and Nervo both examined their beliefs and their realities through the vehicle of the nascent science fiction genre, producing texts that ranged from the more scientifically oriented to the fantastic.
The aforementioned Spanish American modernist’s ambivalence about scientific discourse manifests itself in Nervo’s life and work in the form of concurrent impulses toward technophilia and technophobia. On the technophiliac side, Nervo was an avid amateur astronomer who belonged to the Astronomical Society of Mexico. In a pair of lectures he presented to the society in 1904, entitled “Lunar Literature and the Habitability of the Satellites” [La literatura lunar y la habitabilidad de los satélites], he dissertates upon the eight known planets and their satellites, talks of the possibility of extraterrestrial life (citing the theories of “our beloved teacher Camille Flammarion” and others to support his arguments), and discusses Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) and The First Men in the Moon (1901) in detail (506). Nervo also demonstrates a lively interest in technologies of the future with chronicles like “Airplanes: These Will Kill That—The Automobile Will Not Survive Long” [Los aeroplanos: Esto matará a aquello.—el automóvil vivirá poco]. Both here and in his science-fictional poem, “The Great Journey” [El gran viaje], he anticipates the time when technology will—literally—provide the vehicle to broaden the scope of humanity’s search for truth by making space travel possible. In other works Nervo shows marked leanings toward technophobia; Larson has indicated “One Hundred Years of Sleep” [Cien años de sueño] and “The Frozen Ones” [Los congelados] in particular (59). In the former, technology is incapable of solving a man’s true problems; in the latter, Nervo portrays a scientist’s abuse of the power he has acquired over life and death.
Still, as Nervo told the Astronomical Society, “My supreme aspiration would be to become the poet worthy of singing this celestial miracle, the cosmic poet” (“Lunar Literature” 512). He discusses the role that science might play in the literature of such a poet in a later essay, “Marvelous Literature” [La literatura maravillosa]. Here Nervo affirms that science was not, as many had feared, taking the mystery out of life but rather the opposite, it was opening up new avenues of the unknown: “We have wanted to kill mystery,” he writes, “but every day mystery envelops us, saturates us, penetrates us more . . . . We thought that science would destroy it, and yet science brings it by the hand and places it in front of us” (707, ellipsis in the original). Nervo’s list of writers of this “marvelous literature” reads like a Who’s Who of proto- and early science fiction: Lucian of Samosata, Ariosto, Rabelais, Kepler, Godwin, Wilkins, Cyrano de Bergerac, Kirchen, Holberg, Voltaire, Swedenborg, Alqueberg, Poe, Egrand, Corelli, Verne, Conan Doyle, and Wells (706–7). The most important influences on his own science-fictional works were Poe, Flammarion, and Wells.
Upon more than one occasion Nervo speculated about the end of the world and life in the distant future. In “The Last Goddess (A Tale of the Absurd)” [La última diosa (cuento absurdo)] a great cataclysm terminates much of sentient life on earth. The brief “Clouds” [Las nubes] is a far future reflection about living on Earth once the sun has cooled and the water supply diminished. Nervo’s best-known apocalyptic narrative and the one that concerns us here, “The Last War” (c. 1898), is also a far future tale. Whereas in a tale of the near future, the world “exists only imaginatively and hypothetically, but . . . is nevertheless a world in which (or something like it) we may one day have to live, and towards which our present plans and ambitions must be directed,” in a tale of the far future, “the far future tends to be associated with notions of ultimate destiny . . . its images display a world irrevocably transfigured” (Stableford, “Near Future” 856). The main events of “The Last War” take place in the year 5532, and against the norm outlined by W. Warren Wagar, the story is a pre–World War I account of the end of the world (as we know it) brought about by human rather than natural agency.39
“The Last War” begins with a recounting of the three great revolutions of humanity: the Christian Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Socialist (also called “Social”) Revolution of 2030. With each revolution greater progress, freedom, and equality are attained. The French Revolution is described as having paved the way for the Socialist Revolution. We learn that in 1916 Europe becomes the United States of Europe, modeled after the U.S.A. (“whose memory in the annals of humanity has been so brilliant”); the world’s last monarch dies in 1950 (240). Before the third revolution there remain “certain very visible signs that physically distinguished the then-called privileged classes from the proletariat” (240). The long, delicate fingers of the elite contrast with the six-fingered (and calloused) right hands of the workers. The lower limbs of those workers who drive vehicles such as the “aeroplanes, airships, aerocycles, automobiles, magnetic expresses, ultra-direct transetherealunars” [aeroplanos, aeronaves, aerociclos, automóviles, expresos magnéticos, directísimos transetéreolunares] have atrophied to the extent that, away from the workplace, they need “small electric space cars” [pequeños carros eléctricos espaciales] to get about (240). With the Social Revolution these differences begin to disappear. Humans finally become equal to one another, reaching a high level of peace and stability “both in the sciences, thanks to the definitive nature of the principles conquered, and in the social sphere, thanks to the marvelous wisdom of laws and the high moral level of customs” (241). In addition to their physical evolution, humans evolve mentally. They now dedicate themselves to intellectual and spiritual pursuits, leaving any remaining tasks requiring physical force or action of any kind to the likewise evolving lower animals. A summary of human progress is provided:
The natives of Europe disappeared before the Latin force; the Latin force before the Saxon force, which took over the world . . . and the Saxon force disappeared before the Slavic invasion; the latter, before the yellow invasion, which in turn was swept away by the black invasion, and so, from race to race, from hegemony to hegemony, from preeminence to preeminence, from domination to domination, man arrived perfect and august at the limits of history . . . (244, ellipses in the original)
Los autóctonos de Europa desaparecieron ante el vigor latino; desapareció el vigor latino ante el vigor sajón, que se enseñoreó del mundo . . . y el vigor sajón desapareció ante la invasión eslava; esta, ante la invasión amarilla, que a su vez fue arrollada por la invasión negra, y así, de raza en raza, de hegemonía en hegemonía, de preeminencia en preeminencia, de dominación en dominación, el hombre llegó perfecto y augusto a los límites de la historia . . .
Despite all of this perfection, humans forget the lessons of their own past and lose, we are told, “even the notion of what vigilance and caution were” (241). In 5532 the fourth of the great revolutions, the animals’ revolution, begins (Yzur’s passive resistance become active).
The causes of this fourth and last revolution are not new, we are told, but rather “the same that have caused, it can be said, all the revolutions: old hungers, old hereditary hatreds, the tendency toward equality of prerogatives and rights, and the aspiration, latent in the soul of all beings, to that which is better” (241). The rebels are the horses, dogs, monkeys, and elephants who carry out all nonintellectual tasks, who run the machinery, who still have not forgiven the interloping “species of blond monkeys” for usurping their ancient role as the rulers of the earth by using the spear to dominate them (243). As one revolutionary organizer, the dog Can Canis, puts it: “Man had invented the machine, and that pointed stick was his scepter, the king’s scepter that nature gave him” (243). There is no doubt that progress has been made, that in 5532 better people treat animals better. Humans are paternal(istic) toward animals, “much more paternal than the nobles were to the proletariat after the French Revolution” [muy más paternal de lo que lo fueron para el proletario los grandes señores después de la Revolución francesa] (241). Humans no longer use animals as food; they clothe and house them well and treat them with kindness. But animals still occupy an inferior position in society. They still perform the meanest tasks, and their rights are determined for them by humans. Can Canis summarizes the animals’ reasons for rebelling: “We are not free, we are not masters, and we want to be masters and free” (243).
Progress is the condition of all beings that breathe, Can Canis tells his co-conspirators via a secure form of global uplink. He reviews the “gradual emergence of humanity” within his brethren, saying, “Something divine that existed in our rudimentary spirits, a luminous germ of intellect, of future humanity . . . was developing in the most intimate recesses of our being” (243). Animals eventually acquired an understanding of human language and developed a language of their own. Perfected humanity considered the animals’ language primitive and refused to learn it. In 5532 the role of the animal language changes from an inferior workerspeak, to the secret code of the rebellion, to the lingua franca of power. Can Canis ends his speech, declaring: “The last revolution of the planet, the animals’ cry of rebellion against man, will explode, filling the universe with fear and defining the equality of all of the mammals that inhabit the earth” (243–44). And here, with the word “mammals,” is evidence that, like the first three revolutions, the fourth carries the seeds of its own downfall. Equality is attained by those next in line on the evolutionary scale but, in order to be “masters” as well as “free,” they exclude those on the rungs below.
Although the mammals’ revolution is global, Can Canis’s speech is transmitted from Mexico, one of the “great control centers” of the revolution “due to its geographic position in the middle of America and between the two great oceans, in the center of the world” (241–42). The mammals attack humans using the technology only they know how to use. Next to these “terrible machines,” the weapons that humans had used in the previous revolution—“the electric projectiles, the grenades filled with gasses, the horrifying effects of radium used to cause death in a thousand ways, the formidable blasts of air, the microbe-injecting darts, the telepathic shocks” [los proyectiles eléctricos, las granadas henchidas de gases, los espantosos efectos del radium utilizado de mil maneras para dar muerte, las corrientes formidables de aire, los dardos inyectores de microbios, los choques telepáticos]—were as nothing (244).
At this point in the story, the narrator’s identity is revealed: “Despite the cleverness of men, we were surprised in all areas of the globe” [Los hombres, a pesar de su astucia, fuimos sorprendidos en todos los ámbitos del orbe] (244, emphasis mine). Writing in 5542 as the fourth revolution comes to a close, he is “one of the few remaining men in the world” (244). The narrator suggests no hope that the last humans will become new Adams and Eves, however, appearing resigned to extinction. Despite—or because of—their highly evolved state, “Their mission came to be to disappear since, due to the absoluteness of their perfection, they were no longer capable of perfecting themselves further” [Su misión se cifraba en desaparecer, puesto que ya no era susceptible, por lo absoluto de su perfección, de perfeccionarse más] (244). Humanity will be eliminated to make way for the “humanized ones of the future” [humanizados del porvenir] (244). And despite his earlier intimations that the fourth revolution will be the war to end all wars, he now cites the cycle in which preeminence among humans has moved “from race to race” (244) and goes on to extrapolate that the mammalian animals “in their turn, perfected and serene, will die to make way for new races” (245). Once all of these levels of “inferior animality” have advanced in turn to occupy the top rung, this cycle will continue on younger worlds with new humanities, “so that,” as the narrative ends, “all can begin again!” (245).
We are not told the identity of the narrator’s intended audience, but we do learn something about the recording process. Early in the story, the narrator remarks that he must cut short his description of the first three revolutions, since he has already used “more than three phonoteleradiograph cylinders to think these reminiscences” [más de tres cilindros de fonotelerradiógrafo en pensar estas reminiscencias] (240). We also know something of the narrator’s reasons for making this recording, as he tells us of his hope that others will learn from his account, which “perhaps tomorrow will constitute an extremely useful piece of history” (244). The only evidence we have as to the identity of his first readers, the preparers of this manuscript/transmission, are their two brief editorial comments. The first is a footnote to the narrator’s mention of the “phonoteleradiograph.” In the note, the editors explain how the mechanism works before stating, “Today this apparatus has been completely reformulated” (240). They intervene again immediately after the description of the technology by which Can Canis’s speech is transmitted, clarifying that these special emitters were “now obsolete because they were not very practical” (242). We do not know if these editors are mammals, other classes of animals, or extraterrestrial beings, nor do we know if they have reissued this document as a historical oddity or as a valuable lesson, but we can make an educated guess.
The ultimate message of “The Last War” is ciphered in its representation of time. In his essay on cyclical time in eschatological fiction, “Round Trips to Doomsday,” Wagar discusses “ends that lead to fresh beginnings and further ends,” but he also finds that this circular pattern is often subjected to the competing force of chronological time (73). He calls the resulting pattern “spiraliform” (80), and he explains it thusly:
When science-fiction writers adopt cyclical conceptions of history, their strategy is often to combine elements of cyclicism with the dominant world view of modern industrial man, a positivist faith in science, technology, and human effort, culminating in an affirmation of progress. The paradigms of the cycle and linear progress are thus joined together, sometimes awkwardly and unconvincingly, with linear progress enjoying the last word. (74)
Nervo’s temporal strategy differs slightly from this norm. The technological advances he describes are linear. Nervo generally describes new forms of transportation and communication with a technophiliac’s joy in gadgetry, though technophobia eventually predominates in this tale of revolutions, as war machines advance in destructive capability from spear to telepathic shock and beyond. Humanity, too, has progressed—to utter perfection, the narrator affirms repeatedly—but little comes of this perfection. There are no intimations of higher planes of noncorporeal existence, leading ever closer to God or to some ideal form, as in “Demons,” Doctor Benignus, and several texts discussed in chapter 3. This is a predominantly cyclical tale in which there is apparently no degeneration, devolution, or barbarization—once humanity is perfected, we are told, “their mission came to be to disappear.” Yet at the same time there is an inherent barbarity in each dominant race, a blindness to the inequalities perpetuated by its “equalizing” revolution.40 Each new “humanity” is no better than the last, containing the same tragic flaw and repeating the same mistakes, but with bigger guns. The tale verges on the pure cyclicism that Wagar calls “an index to cultural fatigue and despair” (“Round Trips” 93). As a “race” ends, it does not leave a phoenix (or Adam and Eve) to rise from its own ashes. Each new revolution is represented as doomed from the start. No race has learned the lessons of the first three great revolutions, and it seems likely that this fourth revolution is not “the last war” but simply the last in which humans will participate. The only small note of hope lies in the text itself. At least someone in the future has read it. And passed it on.
Like Amado Nervo, Martín Luis Guzmán was a major literary figure in the Mexico of his time. He did important work in journalism, including founding the periodicals El Mundo (1922–24) and Tiempo, Semanario de la Vida y la Verdad [Time: Weekly Periodical of Life and Truth] (1942–98). For over fifteen years he lived abroad, chiefly in Spain and France. Guzmán belonged to a later generation than Nervo, however. He was not a modernist but a member of the Young People’s Literary Circle [Ateneo de la Juventud] and, as Guzmán scholar Emmanuel Carballo puts it, was a writer of the twentieth century “from head to foot” (“Dos textos” 5). Also in contrast to Nervo, Guzmán was deeply involved in politics throughout his life. He was elected to the national legislature, served as Mexico’s ambassador to the United Nations, and campaigned for several victorious presidential candidates. Guzmán is remembered most, however, for his work in and on the Mexican Revolution. During the war he attained the rank of colonel and worked closely with a number of commanders, most famously with General Francisco “Pancho” Villa. To escape Villa’s inner circle, Guzmán went into voluntary exile in Spain and the United States for the second half of the revolution (1915–20). While living in the United States, he worked as a professor of literature at the University of Minnesota and as a journalist. He wrote in many genres, but his best-known works are The Eagle and the Serpent [El águila y la serpiente] (1928) and The Shadow of the Tyrant [La sombra del caudillo] (1929), which recount his experiences of the revolution.
The only short story that Guzmán wrote, and his only work of science fiction, is “How the War Ended in 1917.”41 Guzmán published the story in the December 1917 issue of the Spanish-language Revista Universal while he was living in New York. According to Larson, Guzmán was “greatly impressed by contemporary technological achievements” and these impressions had an important influence on the story’s composition (59). This may well be the case, though the way in which technology is represented in the text smacks much more of technophobia than technophilia. Guzmán also was undoubtedly affected by the flood of violence around the world: the Russian Revolution, the U.S. declaration of war on Germany in the ongoing Great War, and continuing national upheaval in Mexico.
This tale of war and technology is narrated by a self-declared “last man alive.” He recounts the events leading up to Earth’s destruction, with no expectation of an audience. His dedication reads: “To the memory of the earth and her daughter the moon, beautiful heavenly bodies that have disappeared through the fault of human weakness, the last of men dedicates this singular work, which is condemned to remain unread” (191).
In the story, the world ends at 3:00 A.M. on November 22, 1917 (for Guzmán’s original readers, the subscribers of Revista Universal, this would have been in the previous month). We do not immediately learn the exact date and time; for several pages we know only from the title that the war has ended this year. First we are introduced to our narrator and to the machine. The narrator is a physical scientist, a former university professor, now a supervisor of the censorship machine at the Central Censorship Offices, Department of Romance Languages. All of the nation’s letters are fed through one of these great machines (though machines that process other languages are never mentioned directly). The machine collates the information in each letter with all previous input and spits out cards containing its “infallible conclusions” (192). For the government, the most valuable conclusions are those regarding the war: “trenches, troop movements, provisioning, personal valor” (192). For example, one war-related conclusion reads: “William Bechstein. Shameful germanophile. Author of secret project to militarize Mexico” (193). The name of the war and the country in which the narrator and censorship office are located are never specified. However, details such as “trenches,” “germanophile” (Germans are also referred to as the “enemy camp”), and “Mexico” (the narrator also later mentions “a certain Mexican poet . . . a friend of mine, to be sure”) imply that we are in the middle of something like World War I, in some sort of alternative Mexico in which a Big Brother–type government uses technology to monitor the lives of its citizens (193, 195). Guzmán does not differentiate Mexico economically, industrially, or politically from the rest of the world; rather, Mexico appears to be just another node for housing Central Censorship Offices in a non-combatant sector of the Allied bloc.
Our narrator owes his prestigious position to his invention of the “distribution center with alternating parallel perforations” [foco de distribución alternada por perforaciones paralelas] (192). This discovery has greatly improved the machine’s efficiency, an important contribution to the war effort. For the machine’s operators, however, its conclusions about the war are its least interesting output. The narrator’s colleagues live for tidbits of juicy gossip: “Don Juan de Armas, Count. He dyes his hair and claims ancient lineage. Parents unknown” (193). The narrator himself is most interested in what he terms “the great, important news”—rectifications in historical data, geographic locations of unexplored places, lacunae in bibliographies, astronomical observations, forgotten or unknown canonizations—that fills in the gaps in human knowledge and helps to inquire into the “ultimate human and cosmic destiny” (194, 191).
The narrator’s belief in the machine is complete, perhaps a last vestige of the nineteenth-century trust in the hegemony of scientific discourse, but more likely an anticipation of the “modern times” to come.42 “Who spoke of the submission of man to the machine, of the universal modern tyranny wherein the machine is the daughter of her own slaves, and they glorify her as the oppressed have always glorified their oppressors?” he asks in the first paragraph of his account (191). And he responds to his own question:
It does not matter. I was the slave of my machine: its grip seemed like glory to me, and I never rebelled against it because it never caused me pain. (Changing one’s point of view was the sole origin of rebellions on Earth: we believed a thing to be good and we enjoyed it until the moment we thought it bad. The thing remained the same.) (191)
No importa. Yo era esclavo de mi máquina: su garra me sabía a gloria, y nunca me rebelé contra ella porque nunca llegó a causarme tortura. (Cambiar el punto de vista fue en la Tierra el solo origen de las rebeliones: creíamos buena una cosa y la gozamos hasta el momento de creerla mala. La cosa permanecía idéntica.)
No one questions the machine’s authority or purpose, but others do not share the narrator’s utter submission to or faith in it. Thus it is he alone who understands when the machine warns of an impending “horrible catastrophe” of global proportions (194).
One day the machine begins to produce “unintelligible and strange cards” that others ignore but that contain, the narrator tells us, “an internal coherence so evident to eyes accustomed to reading those messages” (194). The first of the peculiar cards reads: “Lat. 41° 50′, Long. 87° 38′ W. Cat that flies. November 22, 3 A.M. The souls will die before the bodies” (194). He locates the geographic reference as the city of Chicago. The flying cat reminds him of a poem by his Mexican friend. The rest of the message he identifies as some sort of “terrible final sentence/judgment” [terrible sentencia final] (195). The machine produces more such cards. It seems to be achieving sentience: “The machine struggled to express something . . . guided by its acquired consciousness, it strove to exceed its creator’s designs, as men did, no more no less” (195). In addition to repeating the date and hour given in the first of the odd cards, subsequent cards announce enormous velocities, extremely high temperatures, inconceivable densities, extraordinarily complicated vibrations and waves (195). It becomes ever clearer that the narrator believes the machine is forecasting a great natural catastrophe (perhaps a comet striking Chicago?) that will destroy the world.
How, the narrator wonders, can simple letters written by men lead to a prediction of “immense supraterrestrial phenomena” and “impending interplanetary cataclysms” (195)? He pauses a moment to ask himself if men themselves might not be causing the disaster, with their letters carrying “destructive passion” throughout the world, especially to the warfronts (195). “Useless to try to investigate it,” he concludes, and instead reorganizes his department and adds workers in an effort to help the machine to reveal the “complete truth” (196).
“The machine appeared to reach maximum knowledge/consciousness” [La máquina pareció alcanzar el sumo conocimiento] in the final days before November 22 (196). On the twenty-first, the narrator warns his coworkers of the terrible fate that awaits them. They confuse him with their laughter and murmurs of “madman,” but do not report him to the authorities, allowing him to continue to monitor the machine. “Today I evoke the anxiety of those final moments in a confusing mixture with the changing and inexorable face of the clock,” the narrator confesses (197). Even in the wee hours of the twenty-second, the narrator never doubts the machine’s veracity, only wanting to be sure that nothing impedes the arrival of a “message of salvation” (197). He checks the machine’s contacts. He disassembles its master cylinders. When he is “almost in the entrails of the machine,” somehow parts get loose and begin to spill out onto the floor (198). With cries of “Betrayal!” his coworkers pry him out, still clasping “a handful of twisted and broken little pieces” (198). In the middle of the struggle, the clock begins to strike 3:00 A.M.
I tried to go toward the door; the clock struck a second time; suddenly a bright flash blinded me and I felt, as though inseparable from an internal explosion, a great pain in my forehead. (198)
Traté de ir hacia la puerta; dio el reloj la segunda campanada; bruscamente un vivísimo resplandor me cegó y sentí, cual si hubiese sido inseparable de un estallido interno, un enorme dolor en la frente.
Although this concludes the story of the events of November 22, the narrator appends a final framing paragraph, which opens, “How was this portion of the world in which I find myself spared? I do not know” (198). He seems to sense the passing of days and nights, but is convinced that this cannot be so because the machine could not have been wrong. He describes the place in which he now finds himself as a building filled with “distant but familiar noises” (198). One “being” who attends to his needs wears white; another dresses “like a woman” (198). He has dreams that leave him “painfully tired, with less desire to think about why I am here and why the light that shines on me seems so much like that of the sun” (199). He closes in confusion, wondering why the kind beings do not allow him into the garden.
To the readers of December 1917 and beyond, the world might appear to have ended in the mind of only one man. The narrator is not merely a solitary madman, however; he represents a world gone mad. The war (or wars) is not simply something being fought “over there” but is a pervasive violence that touches the lives of all. In Guzmán’s story, the world is not destroyed by technology; instead, humanity is destroyed by its relationship with technology. By accepting the authority of the censorship machines, people lose both their freedom and their souls, although their bodies have not yet died.
Stableford reminds us that “stories of disasters which come about because of new inventions usually stress that the real root cause of the disaster is the element in human nature which drives us to seek advantage over our fellow men” (“Man-Made” 118). At the beginning of the story, the narrator admits that humans had not built the censorship machine for the purest of motives, noting that the machine had been “created by base passion for evil ends” (191). But if the narrator consciously chooses to believe that a natural catastrophe, predicted by the machine, has destroyed his world, his unconscious betrays inklings that the “destructive passions” of men—the “human weakness” that has led to the disappearance of the earth and the moon—have been the ultimate cause (195, 191).
What hope, then, for a new beginning after this particular ending? In the story, society shows little inclination to talk of peace or to throw off the yoke of the machine (“Betrayal!” the workers cry as they defend the machine that the narrator has unintentionally/unconsciously slain). And the protagonist shows little sign of returning to any semblance of his former life, or of building a vigorous new life with these familiar yet alien “beings” who will not give him access to the garden, never mind providing him with an Eve. The war ends for the narrator in November of 1917, but the rest of the world fights on. As for the end of the world, Guzmán tells his readers, it has already happened. Do you know where your souls are?
