M. Elizabeth Ginway, J. Andrew Brown (eds.) - Latin American Science Fiction Theory and Practice-Palgrave Macmillan US (2012)

Latin American Science Fiction
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Latin American Science Fiction
Theory and Practice
Edited by
M. Elizabeth Ginway and J. Andrew Brown
LATIN AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION
Copyright © M. Elizabeth Ginway and J. Andrew Brown, 2012.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-1-137-28122-7
All rights reserved.
First published in 2012 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
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this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-44809-8
DOI 10.1057/9781137312778
ISBN 978-1-137-31277-8 (eBook)
Figures 9.1a, 9.1b, 9.2a, 9.3a, 9.4a, 9.4b, 9.5a, 9.6a, 9.6b, and 9.6c are used
with the kind permission of Fernando Araldi, Martín Mórtola, and Marina
López.
Figures 9.2b, 9.3b, and 9.5b are used with the kind permission of Cristina
Breccia, Enrique Breccia, and Patricia Breccia.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Latin American science fiction / edited by M. Elizabeth Ginway and
Andrew Brown
p. cm.
1. Science fiction, Latin American—History and criticism. 2. Latin
American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Literature and
society—Latin America—History—20th century. I. Ginway, M. Elizabeth.
II. Brown, Andrew, 1970–
PQ7082.S34L378 2012
863’.087620998—dc23
2012031261
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: December 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
List of Figures
vii
Acknowledgments
ix
1
1
Introduction
J. Andrew Brown and M. Elizabeth Ginway
Part I Speculating a Canon: Latin
America’s SF Traditions
2 Islands in the Slipstream: Diasporic Allegories in
Cuban Science Fiction since the Special Period
Emily A. Maguire
19
3 Time Travel and History in Carmen Boullosa’s
1991 Llanto, novelas imposible s
Claire Taylor
35
4 João Guimarães Rosa’s “A Young Man, Gleaming,
White” and the Protocol of the Question
Braulio Tavares
61
5
73
Bolaño and Science Fiction: Deformities
Álvaro Bisama
Part II On the Periphery of the Periphery:
Cyberpunk and Zombies in Latin America
6
Sexilia and the Perverse World of the Future:
An Argentine Version of Barbarella and Sade
Fernando Reati
93
vi
●
Contents
7 Ending the World with Words: Bernardo Fernández (BEF)
and the Institutionalization of Science Fiction in Mexico
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
8
Teenage Zombie Wasteland: Suburbia after the Apocalypse
in Mike Wilson’s Zombie and Edmundo
Paz Soldán’s Los vivos y los muertos
David Laraway
111
133
Part III Comics and Film: Latin American
SF across Genres
9
10
11
Oesterheld’s Iconic and Ironic Eternautas
Rachel Haywood Ferreira
155
Brazilian Science Fiction and the Visual Arts:
From Political Cartoons to Contemporary Comics
Octavio Aragão
185
Science Fiction and Metafiction in the Cinematic
Works of Brazilian Director Jorge Furtado
M. Elizabeth Ginway and Alfredo Suppia
203
Notes on Contributors
225
Index
229
Figures
9.1a Iconic image of the Eternauta, Et-57 (32)
158
9.1b Iconic image of the Eternauta, Et-57 (35)
159
9.2a
Opening scene, Et-57 (3–4)
161
9.2b
Opening scene, Et-69 (83–84)
162
9.3a
Transition to the tale of the Eternauta, Et-57 (5)
165
9.3b
Transition to the tale of the Eternauta, Et-69 (85)
165
9.4a Buenos Aires is hit by a nuclear bomb from
the North, Et-57 (287) . . .
168
9.4b
. . . the resulting nuclear wasteland in Et-76 (36)
169
9.5a
Initial radio broadcast about the deadly snowfall, Et-57 (17)
170
9.5b
Initial radio broadcast about the deadly snowfall
and alien invasion, Et-69 (91)
172
9.6a “Super” Eternauta, Et-76 (186)
9.6b
9.6c
177
The Ello abandons his “skin-suit” mano disguise
when captured by Juan Salvo, Et-76 (102)
178
The Ello, Et-76 (180)
178
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Acknowledgments
A
ll books depend on many more people than those whose names
appear on the covers, and this book in particular could not exist
without the help and goodwill of many friends and colleagues.
The editors are grateful especially for the goodwill and patience of
the contributors to the book. They have, in our consideration, written
excellent articles and dealt with the hurry up and wait of the process
with grace. We thank the anonymous reviewer for the notes that helped
us improve the project as a whole and the great staff at Palgrave for their
help throughout the publishing process.
Gillian Lord of the University of Florida came through with much
needed support at a critical time, and we would like to recognize the
help and support of both of our department chairs (Prof. Lord and
Prof. Harriet Stone) as well as our colleagues in our respective departments, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the
University of Florida and the Department of Romance Languages and
Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. We are also very
grateful to the graduate students at the University of Florida who
helped with the indexing and editing, especially Anne Lingwall and
Meagan Day.
Libby received a Faculty Enhancement Grant from the Office of the
Provost of the University of Florida and Andrew a Humanities Faculty
Research Award from the College of Arts and Sciences of Washington
University. We are both grateful for the support that these grants
afforded to the project.
Finally, and most importantly, we are grateful for the unflagging
support we receive from our spouses, David and Amy, as well as from
our respective children, Libby’s son Matthew and Andrew’s children
Adria, Colin, Eva, and Liam.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
J. Andrew Brown and M. Elizabeth Ginway
T
he study of science fiction (SF) in Latin America has been characterized by various contradictions over the years. As is the case
with genre studies in other parts of the world, SF and speculative fictions have often been relegated to a subordinate position when
compared to the realist fictions decrying various social and political
ills, from the mistreatment of the indigenous to the victims of military
dictatorships. SF was dismissed because of its lack of an obvious contemporary social or political referent, as well as its alleged inferiority to
magical realism, which occupied center stage in the connection between
fantastic literature and Latin America by critics in both hemispheres.
For these reasons, SF became viewed as foreign or inauthentic.
In spite of this, SF in Latin American has enjoyed a long tradition,
dating from at least the nineteenth century, and it has been cultivated by of some of Latin America’s most renowned writers, including
Leopoldo Lugones, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Jorge Luis Borges. The
canonical status of their respective works, Las fuerzas extrañas (1906),
La invención de Morel (1940), and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1941)
in Spanish America, together with Brazilian stories such as “O imortal”
(1882) by Machado de Assis and “A nova Califórnia” (1910) by Lima
Barreto, regularly made incursions into the “serious” literature of Latin
America, even earlier than in North America and Europe. The tension
between the critical dismissal of Latin American SF as unserious and
its enthusiastic acceptance by some of Latin America’s most renowned
authors has motivated a series of attempts to show SF’s importance in
the history of Latin American literature.
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J. Andrew Brown and M. Elizabeth Ginway
In the brief history of Latin American SF as an academic field, the
primary focus of scholarship has been the “archeological” phase, that of
finding representative works and writing the history of the genre. This
was undertaken in earnest by US-based scholars beginning in the 1990s,
and can be characterized as a period of recovery of neglected texts.1 For
this reason, most of the extant scholarly work in Latin American SF
tends to belong to the recovery phase, as academics, writers, and fans
have been intensely engaged in identifying texts, compiling bibliographies, and translating seminal works in order to establish a literary history. The aim of this anthology of critical essays is to initiate a more
theoretical phase, applying a range of literary and cultural theories to the
Latin American SF corpus. In particular, given the region’s history of
social and political discontinuities, we suggest that concepts such as
“fragmentation”—as seen in use of the tropes of time warps, alternate
histories, and the erosion of the canon—“divergences”—as exemplified
by Latin America’s brand of sexualized or embodied cyberpunk and
apocalyptic violence distinguishing it from Anglo-American forms—
and “unlikely combinations”—as found in the mix of social realism
with mutants and zombies or the merging of dissonant genres such as
SF, humor, and horror—prove fruitful in the study of Latin American
SF. Before moving on to discuss these concepts in the essays in the collection, however, it is important to survey the field to provide an overview of Latin American SF scholarship from a historical perspective.
Methodologies of Recovery
In her 2008 article “Back to the Future,” Rachel Haywood Ferreira
reports that most bibliographic data cited in critical works in the field,
previous to the 1990s, have been generally of uneven quality and reliability (353). 2 Between 1990 and 2007, she notes that several significant bibliographies of SF works have been produced, each offering
lists of works published in various countries of Latin America. The
first is the 1993 entry on Latin America written by Mauricio José
Schwarz and Braulio Tavares in Clute and Nicholls’s Encyclopedia of
Science Fiction . The second is the bibliography in Spanish by Yolanda
Molina-Gavilán et al., entitled “Chronology of Latin American SF,”
which first appeared in 1999 in the journal Chasqui , and the third is
this item’s reappearance in a revised English version in Science Fiction
Studies in 2007, with introductory overviews countrywise.3 Haywood
Ferreira’s survey concludes that “retrolabeling,” that is, going back and
establishing a body of SF works in various countries in Latin America,
Introduction
●
3
serves to expand the field. In a sense, it could be said that it also contests the Anglo-European hegemony in SF studies, thus showing that,
since ideas circulate more rapidly than technology, countries throughout Latin America, even those without the strong industrial bases of
the global North, could still imagine technological change, alternate
futures, and utopian societies.
Haywood Ferreira’s article centers on three key moments in SF production and scholarship. The first of these periods, the late nineteenth
century, features the landmark works that establish the genre throughout Latin America. The second phase, the 1950s and 1960s, is a type
of Golden Age for publishers and fans, while the third, centered on the
year 2000, witnesses the recognition and growth of SF as a legitimate
field of academic study. The nineteenth century produced no critical
scholarship per se, but during the so-called Golden Age, for example,
Latin American scholarship did produce academic introductions to SF
as a world genre, such as Pablo Capanna’s El sentido de la ciencia ficción
(1966) in Argentina and André Carneiro’s Introdução ao estudo da “science fiction ” (1967) in Brazil. Unfortunately, both of these fail to analyze SF production in their respective countries in an in-depth manner.
In 1977, Ross Larson published Fantasy and Imagination in the Mexican
Narrative, where he mentions several important early SF writers,4 but
devotes most of his study to works of fantasy. In the case of Brazil, with
few exceptions, the focus on Anglo-American SF predominated until the
late 1980s.5 Braulio Tavares’s annotated bibliography, Fantastic, Fantasy
and Science Fiction Literature Catalog (1991), published by the Biblioteca
Nacional, is aimed at the recovery of Brazilian SF, cataloging some 135
Brazilian works with summaries in English. Other more recent introductions to the genre include Ramón López Castro’s Expedición a la
ciencia ficción mexicana (2001), in which a lengthy history of the genre
is followed by a brief discussion of contemporary Mexican SF authors
in its final chapters, Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz’s Biografías del futuro: la
ciencia ficción mexicana y sus autores (2000), which discusses some 40
authors and their works, and the handbook entitled Latin American SF
Writers: An A-Z Guide, (2004)6 edited by Darrell B. Lockhart. These
last two offer bio-bibliographical materials to readers, with the latter
work including entries from various contributors, but with limited
Brazilian content.
Haywood Ferreira points out that the year 2000 appears to be a
starting point for scholarship exemplified by full-length monographs
about Latin American SF. Among the first published is Trujillo Muñoz’s
Los confines: crónica de la ciencia ficción mexicana (1999), Yolanda
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J. Andrew Brown and M. Elizabeth Ginway
Molina-Gavilán’s Ciencia ficción en español: una mitología ante el cambio
(2002), and Francisco Alberto Skorupa’s Viagem às letras do futuro
(2002). While Trujillo Muñoz focuses exclusively on the history of
genre in Mexico, Molina-Gavilán offers a thematic approach to SF
in Spain and Spanish America, identifying and discussing important
texts by period, and Skorupa looks at Brazilian SF from the 1960s primarily to theorize about science and society in Brazil, with most of
the textual analysis of literary works appearing in footnotes. In 2003,
Roberto de Sousa Causo published Ficção científica, fantasia e horror
no Brasil 1875–1950 , a loosely structured monograph that showcases
his vast knowledge of a large number of Brazilian works from a variety
of genres and periods, as well as his solid grasp of Anglo-American
critical paradigms of SF. In the United States, M. Elizabeth Ginway’s
Brazilian Science Fiction (2004), a largely chronological study of SF
production from 1960 to 2000, studies Brazilian SF through the prism
of cultural myths and their interplay with the iconography of SF and its
subgenres, including dystopian fiction, alternate histories, cyberpunk
and hard science fiction, as well as women’s contributions to the genre.
J. Andrew Brown’s Test Tube Envy (2005) traces the discourse of science
in Argentine literature from Sarmiento’s Facundo through Roberto Arlt,
Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Angélica Gorodischer, Ana María
Shua, and Mempo Giardinelli, highlighting the power and tensions of
scientific and antiscientific attitudes toward topics ranging from phrenology to scientific doubt and quantum physics.
Other important contributions to SF criticism in Latin America
tend to focus on the Southern Cone. Among these are Luis Cano’s
2006 Intermitente recurrencia: La ciencia ficción y el canon literario
en Hispanoamérica , an apt exploration of canon formation in Latin
American SF and its links with the SF of other national traditions,
and Fernando Reati’s 2006 Postales del porvenir, in which he establishes links between what he calls literatura de anticipación and the
neoliberal realities of 1990s Argentina. Brown’s more recent Cyborgs
in Latin America (2010) looks at contemporary works from Spanish
America and explains how writers, including Alicia Borinsky, Carmen
Boullosa, Eugenia Prado, Rafael Cortoisie, Carlos Gamerro, Edmundo
Paz-Soldán, Alberto Fuguet, and Rodrigo Fresán, construct or deconstruct cyborg bodies either to deal with postdictatorial trauma, or to
understand the culture composed of hackers, the media, and neoliberalism in Latin America.
In contrast to these studies on Latin America’s contemporary SF,
Haywood Ferreira’s book The Emergence of Latin American Science
Introduction
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5
Fiction (2011) examines mainly nineteenth-century SF from Argentina,
Brazil, and Mexico. It challenges the myth that Latin American writers were entirely antitechnological and antiscience, and like Brown’s
Test Tube Envy, highlights the important role of scientific discourse in
Latin America’s intellectual history. Haywood Ferreira examines the
works of Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg, Amado Nervo, Joaquim Manuel
de Macedo, Leopoldo Lugones, and Horacio Quiroga, among others.
It could be said that her study subverts the model outlined by Doris
Sommer in Foundational Fictions (1991), where she argues that biology and marriage produce “national romances” that predominate in
the nineteenth-century narrative of Latin America. Haywood Ferreira’s
study implicitly exposes the discord and discontinuities that science,
technology, and urbanization provoke, issues that canonical foundational fictions often attempt to mask in their use of marriage and mythical origins of nationhood.
Anthologies of SF stories are also key in legitimizing the genre, as
they provide for the dissemination of SF as literature. The landmark
anthology that has had the greatest impact on teaching the genre in
the English-speaking world is Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology from
Latin America and Spain (2003), edited by Andrea Bell and Yolanda
Molina-Gavilán. The editors begin with an introductory overview of
Latin American science fiction, then offer a representative sampling
from various periods ranging from the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries to the year 2001, with introductions on each author and text.
Bell and Molina-Gavilán offer balance and variety in their selection of
works, including important writers from Spanish America, Brazil, and
Spain.7
Most anthologies published in Latin America tend to be more synchronic than diachronic, generally focusing on texts of a period or,
more recently, centered on a theme or subgenre. As Haywood Ferreira
states, among the most reliable and complete histories and anthologies
are to be found in Argentina. Several of these offer stories representing
different periods, including early works, such as SF author Eduardo
Goligorsky’s Los argentinos en la luna (1968), Jorge Sánchez’s Los universos vislumbrados (1978) with its annotated chronology, and Marcial
Souto’s La CF en la Argentina (1985). Anthologies such as Bernard
Goorden and A. E. Van Vogt’s Lo mejor de la ciencia ficción latinoamericana (1980) offer a variety of stories from different countries in
Latin America from the 1960s on, while Augusto Uribe’s Latinoamérica
fantástica (1985) includes mainly Argentine texts mostly from the late
1970s and early 1980s. Pablo Capanna’s El cuento argentino de ciencia
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J. Andrew Brown and M. Elizabeth Ginway
ficción (1995) and Adriana Fernández’s Historias futuras: antología de la
ciencia ficción argentina (2000) are more contemporary works along the
same lines.
In other countries of Latin America, such collections or retrospectives
are part of the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Federico Schaff ler’s Más allá de lo imaginado (1991 and 1994), a
three-volume anthology of contemporary Mexican authors, and his Sin
Permiso de Colón (1993), a thematic anthology centered on the “discovery” of the New World, are landmark works. Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz’s
El futuro en llamas: breve crônica de la ciencia ficción mexicana (1997)
and Miguel Ángel Fernández Delgado’s Visiones periféricas: antología de
la ciencia ficción mexicana (2001) are more accessible and offer a more
historical selection of writers. More recently, Bernardo Fernández’s Los
viajeros: 25 años de ciencia ficción mexicana (2010) focuses, as the title
suggests, on Mexican stories published from 1985 to 2010. In 2008,
the SF author known as Yoss (José Miguel Sánchez Gómez) organized
Crónicas de la mañana; 50 años de cuentos cubanos de ciencia ficción , a
retrospective of the genre in Cuba. In Chile, recent science fiction and
fantasy collections include Marcelo Novoa’s overview entitled Años Luz:
Mapa estelar de la CF en Chile (2006) and the collection of contemporary fantasy edited by Angela González, Alucinaciones: Nueva antología
de cuentos de la literatura fantástica chilena para el siglo XXI (2007).
In Brazil, Roberto de Sousa Causo anthologized representative SF
texts from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century in the
first two volumes of his Os melhores contos brasileiros de ficção científica (2007, 2009), and he also edited a 2010 compilation of novellas,
As melhores novelas brasileiras de ficção científica , all of which offer substantial introductory material to the genre in Brazil. Braulio Tavares
has also worked to provide a historical perspective of the subgenre in
Páginas de Sombra: contos fantásticos brasileiros (2003). Beginning in the
1990s, small Brazilian presses in São Paulo begin to publish a variety of
thematic anthologies focusing on aliens, dinosaurs, time travel, soccer,
erotic themes and sexuality, and women’s SF, as a way to attract readers.8
Brazilian anthologies from the last five years focus more on subgenres,
with commercial presses such as Draco, Tarja, and Devir publishing volumes dedicated to alternate histories, steampunk, cyberpunk, political
science fiction, and anthologies of new and established writers. Nelson
de Oliveira, a mainstream writer interested in SF, has asserted that new
collaborations and cross-fertilizations by mainstream and SF writers may
stimulate narrative renewal, as seen in his own anthology Futuro Presente
(2009), which gathers stories from both sides of the literary divide.
Introduction
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7
SF and the Mainstream, Cyberpunk, and Other Media
While these studies and anthologies are important in establishing the
parameters and legitimacy of the field, there has been a tendency to
document rather than analyze. Many of the earlier mentioned scholars who have published studies in scholarly venues—thus bringing
increased visibility to the field of Latin American SF—now feel that it
is time to turn from historicizing to theorizing. The importance of this
book of essays is that it addresses the genre, including canonical authors
and new works, from a perspective infused with intertextual analysis,
critical theory, or theoretical approaches. The studies invite a consideration of Latin American SF as a whole, including an amply represented
Brazil, and offer a variety of perspectives on Latin American SF in one
volume, covering different periods, subgenres, and media.9 It encompasses contemporary trends such as SF written by mainstream writers,
cyberpunk, film, graphic novels, and comics.
Organized under general headings, each section addresses a separate
theme: SF and the authors of the literary canon, cyberpunk, and apocalypse, and SF and the visual media of comics and film. The essays within
each section often invite dialogue with each other. The first grouping,
“Speculating a Canon: Latin America’s SF Traditions,” examines the
f low between mainstream authors and SF writers, leading to a recognition of the slipstream phenomenon, that is, the incorporation of SF into
new forms of writing in Latin America. This trend is primarily due to
the strong impact that technology, especially cyberspace, has had on
Latin American sensibility. In the late twentieth century, it has become
clear that SF and the global reach of technology extend all the way from
Cuba to Chile. With the rise of the Internet and increased migration,
Latin American writing has become infused with technological overtones ref lected in stories about travel in space and time. For example,
in “Islands in the Slipstream: Diasporic Allegories in Cuban Science
Fiction of the Special Period,” Emily A. Maguire articulates how SF captures Cuba’s unique situation. Caught in a type of time and information
warp, Cuba’s informal networks of migrants and exiles living abroad
engage in an exchange of information with those who remain, challenging the regime’s official story. The tension produced by this exchange
is most evident in Vladimir Hernández Pacín’s 1999 cyberpunk story
“Mar de locura” and in two stories from Anabel Enríquez Piñeiro’s Nada
que declarar (2007), which use cyberspace and space travel to ref lect on
the disjunctions between the Cuban diaspora and the island community left behind. In “Time Travel and History” in Carmen Boullosa’s
8
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J. Andrew Brown and M. Elizabeth Ginway
1992 Llanto, novelas imposibles,” Claire Taylor examines the time travel
trope in Boullosa’s construction of historical figures (Moctezuma, in
this case), not in order to offer a revisionist perspective on past events,
but rather to dismantle certainties and create alternate relationships to
the past and comment on contemporary perceptions of embodied time
and consciousness. In the essay “‘A Young Man, Gleaming, White,’ and
the Protocol of the Question,” Braulio Tavares examines a 1962 story
by canonical Brazilian author João Guimarães Rosa from a SF perspective. He develops two distinct protocols for understanding SF texts by
contrasting Rosa’s model of the open-ended story—which seeks to provoke—with the closed or problem-solving model of SF, which seeks to
explain. In “Bolaño and Science Fiction: Deformities,” Chilean novelist
and critic Álvaro Bisama charts connections between Roberto Bolaño’s
novels—especially Los detectives salvajes (1998) and 2666 (2004)—and
the work of American SF writers James Tiptree Jr. (pseudonym of Alice
Sheldon) and Philip K. Dick, highlighting the surprising intertextual
links between Sheldon’s work and life and how they function as an
organizing principle in the works by the well-received Chilean author.
This grouping of essays could be said to illustrate the concept of “fragmentation,” be it social, literary, or historical, which turns away from
tradition, the nation, and conventional notions of history and inf luence. Here the examination of intertextuality and the presence of SF in
canonical works enrich our understanding of the Latin American canon
and attests to the power of SF as a genre.
In the essays grouped under the second heading, “On the Periphery
of the Periphery: Cyberpunk and Zombies in Latin America,” we also
see dialogue among the subgenres of cyberpunk, zombie fiction, and
horror or the “new weird” from different countries, with each offering a different perspective on the interrelationships among the city,
the body, and apocalypse in their respective societies. Fernando Reati’s
study, “Sextilia and the Perverse World of the Future: An Argentine
Version of Barbarella and Sade,” offers a view of dehumanization and
violent eroticism as a critique of neoliberal schemes in postdictatorship
Argentina. In Reati’s view, Roberto Panko’s Sextilia (1998) makes use
of both allegory and literary realism by developing mirror-like parallels among scenes from its futuristic dystopia, f lashbacks to Argentina’s
Dirty War (1976–1983) and the apocalyptic urban landscapes of the
1990s. In “Ending the World with Words,” Ignacio Sánchez Prado
focuses on award-winning Mexican writer Bernardo Fernández, “Bef,”
whose SF engages the theme of apocalypse and the broader issues of
historical, political, and literary import within Mexican culture. “Bef ’s”
Introduction
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9
cyberpunk writings are a critique of Mexico’s corporate capitalism and
portray a high-tech world bent on exclusion and elitism, with unexpected
twists on Anglo-American cultural assumptions. In “Teenage Zombie
Wasteland: Suburbia after the Apocalypse in Mike Wilson’s Zombie and
Edmundo Paz Soldán’s Los vivos y los muertos ,” David Laraway takes a
look at Wilson’s Zombie, which appeared in Chile in 2010, and Bolivian
Paz Soldán’s Los vivos y los muertos (2009), in order to create a “zombie
hermeneutic” that allows us to understand the intersection of SF, horror, and social realism. Laraway outlines how pop culture erodes traditional concepts of nationality, propagating a hive mentality of empty,
zombie-like consumerism that defines the existence of characters faced
with violence or meth addiction, in an apocalyptic setting with no hope
of redemption. These texts emblematize “divergence,” since the experience of Latin American cyberpunk characters is a far cry from those that
are powered by implants and navigate cyberspace in William Gibson’s
Neuromancer (1984). At the same time, zombie tales and pop culture
references also diverge from entrenched notions of national identity
and clearly defined political struggle, one of the mainstays of the Latin
American literary tradition.
The third grouping, “Comics and Film: Latin American SF across
Genres,” shows how science fiction is gaining a foothold and receiving more critical attention in media beyond narrative. While graphic
novels, films, and comics are often associated with Hollywood and the
American publishing industry, Latin America has produced its own
variants. An iconic series of graphic novels dating back to the 1950s is
the topic of Rachel Haywood Ferreira’s “Oesterheld’s Iconic and Ironic
Eternautas,” with emphasis on its last two installments from 1969 and
1976. Her essay examines how these later installments convey a more
politically charged message using experimental pop-culture visuals than
its first iconic installment from 1957. As the novels become increasingly
engaged in criticizing the military action of Argentina’s Dirty War,
the series sets aside some of its earlier innovations, especially the creation of a collective or group hero. Octavio Aragão’s “Brazilian Science
Fiction and the Visual Arts: From Political Cartoons to Contemporary
Comics” offers an overview of Brazil’s visual iconography, examining
it by using theories of mimesis and poeisis, adapted by Robert Scholes
and applied to the genre of SF. Aragão traces the evolution of the image
from pure social satire to a cultural critique of consumer values through
SF elements in works by contemporary cartoonists Laerte Coutinho
and Luiz Gê from the late 1980s and early 1990s. In “Science Fiction
and Metafiction in the Cinematic Works of Brazilian Director Jorge
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J. Andrew Brown and M. Elizabeth Ginway
Furtado,” M. Elizabeth Ginway and Alfredo Suppia examine the director’s classic short films from the late 1980s and more recent featurelength films, to illustrate Furtado’s use of metafiction and cognitive
estrangement as well as to the SF tropes of time travel, cyberspace, and
mutants. The allusions to monster movies and SF connections are generally overlooked in the work of Furtado, who is considered a master of
contemporary Brazilian cinema. All of these essays illustrate the concept
of “unlikely combinations”—such as the mixing of political subversion
with superhero comics and the uneasy fusion of homage and parody
paid to American film and television, in order to carry out social and
political critique using popular forms of SF and visual media.
Theory and Practice
This anthology seeks to go beyond a historical, archival, or descriptive
view of Latin American SF, to showcase authors, the Latin American SF
sensibility, and critical thought circulating in the American academy.
As the secondary title of the collection “Theory and Practice” suggests,
theory is used in conjunction with the practice of analysis, tailored to the
Latin American context. The broad comparative nature of most of the
articles, together with references to studies by Latin American scholars,
engage theories of allegory, intertextuality, metafiction, pornography,
utopia, cybernetics, and cyberspace. Thus, the critical tools deployed
are wide ranging. Contributors engage the ideas from diverse theorists,
among them, Walter Benjamin, Erich Auerbach, Guy Debord, Darko
Suvin, Fredric Jameson, Benedict Anderson, Linda Hutcheon, Donna
Haraway, Frank Kermode, and Slavoj Žižek, among others, covering a
broad spectrum from the traditional to the postmodern, ranging from
the formalist to the Marxist, from literary to cultural and anthropological studies, while never losing sight of SF as the main focus. This
collection offers a rich cadre of contributors, from scholars to writers
and critics, who hail from the United States, the United Kingdom, and
Latin America, both Spanish America and Brazil.
While it is difficult to generalize about SF in Latin America, perhaps
we can say that there is a Latin American SF sensibility. We know that
SF cannot be captured in a single definition: rather we know what it is by
what it does. Written with a national audience in mind, Latin American
SF often relies on the particularities of settings, context, and perspective
to convey its message, yet as a popular genre with global roots, it offers
an alternative to the hegemony of national narratives of identity. The
essays contained in this volume demonstrate this new status, capturing
Introduction
●
11
the SF sensibility with a Latin American twist, of an embodied culture
that is struggling to reconcile technological advances with continued
social disparities resulting from dictatorships and neoliberalist policies
within its social fabric. This collection should be seen more as a first
incursion into a promising field for future research and less as a definitive or all-encompassing paradigm. As Anglo-American SF reassesses its
colonialist legacy,10 perhaps Latin American SF, long aware of cultural
and social discontinuities, can begin to show the way.
Notes
1. Susan Gubar outlines the “methodologies of recovery” in feminist studies
and later describes the more theoretical phase that she calls “engendering
difference,” concepts related to emergent fields of study. See “What Ails
Feminist Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 24.4 (Summer 1998): 1–4. Web.
2 . Rachel Haywood Ferreira, “Back to the Future: Expanding the Field of
Latin-American Science Fiction,” Hispania 91.2 (2008): 352–362. Print.
3. Another more synchronic source of information is Andrea Bell’s section on
Latin American science fiction in “Current Trends in Global SF: Science
Fiction in Latin America: Re-awakenings,” Science Fiction Studies 26.3
(1999): 441–446. Print.
4 . Larson cites Juan José Arreola, Dr. Atl (pseudo. Gerardo Murillo), Diego
Cañedo (pseudo. Guillermo Zárrega) Alejandro Cuevas, Amado Nervo,
Carlos Olvera, Carlos Toro, and Carlos Fuentes.
5. There are some five works along these lines, see Elizabeth Ginway, Brazilian
Science Fiction (Lewisberg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004), 27–28.
Print.
6 . Darrell B. Lockhart, Latin American SF Writers: An A-Z Guide (Westport,
CT: Greenwood 2004). Print.
7. Eduardo Jiménez Mayo and Chris N. Brown also have edited an anthology
of Mexican short stories in an English translation, Three Messages and a
Warning (2011). Most can be characterized as fantasy, with only a handful
of the 30 qualifying as SF.
8 . Among the thematic anthologies are: Octavio Aragão, Intempol (2000)
and Martha Argel, Lugar de mulher é na cozinha (1999); Marcello Simão
Branco, Outras copas, outros mundos (1998) and Assembleia Estelar: histórias
de ficção científica política (2011); Roberto de Sousa Causo, Dinossauria
tropicalia (1994) and Estranhos contatos (1998); Gianpaolo Celli, Steampunk
(2009) and Cyberpunk (2010); Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro, Phantastica brasiliana
(2000), Como era gostosa a minha alienígena (2002), Vaporpunk (2010), and
Dieselpunk: Arquivos confidenciais de uma bela época (2011).
9. Edgar Cézar Nolasco and Rodolfo Rorato Londero’s 2007 Volta ao mundo
da ficção científica is a collection of essays on SF focused mainly on Brazil,
12
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J. Andrew Brown and M. Elizabeth Ginway
with essays on cyberpunk, film, SF in “literatura de cordel,” the short
story collection Intempol, and works by Brazilian authors André Carneiro,
Clarice Lispector, Rubens Teixeira Scavone, and the American author
Philip K. Dick.
10. Among these studies are: John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of SF
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan 2008); Patricia Kerslake, Science Fiction and Imperialism (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), print; Science Fiction,
Imperialism and the Third World. Essays on Postcolonial Literature and
Film, ed. Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal (Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2010.)
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———. Ficção científica, fantasia e horror no Brasil, 1875–1950 (Belo Horizonte:
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———, Steampunk: Histórias de um Passado Extraordinário (São Paulo: Tarja,
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Clute, John and Peter Nicholls, eds. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1995).
Enríquez Piñeiro, Anabel. “Deuda temporal.” In Nada que declarar (Havana:
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Fernández, Adriana and Edgardo Pígoli, eds. Historias futuras : antología de la ciencia
ficción argentina (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2000).
Fernández, Bernardo. Los viajeros: 25 años de ciencia ficción mexicana (Mexico:
Ediciones SM, 2010).
Fernández Delgado, Miguel Ángel. Visiones periféricas: antología de la ciencia ficción
mexicana (Mexico: Grupo Editorial Lumen, 2001).
Gibson, William. Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984).
Ginway, M. Elizabeth. Brazilian Science Fiction: Cultural Myths and Nationhood in
the Land of the Future (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2004).
Goligorsky, Eduardo, ed. Los argentines en la luna (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la
Flor, 1968).
Goorden, Bernard and A. E. Van Vogt. Lo mejor de la ciencia ficción latinoamericana
(Barcelona: Ediciones Martínez Roca, 1980).
Gubar, Susan. “What Ails Feminist Criticism.” Critical Inquiry 24.4 (1998): 1–4.
Web.
Haywood Ferreira, Rachel. “Back to the Future: Expanding the Field of
Latin-American Science Fiction.” Hispania 91.2 (2008): 352–362.
———. The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan UP, 2011).
Hernández Pacín, Vladimir. “Mar de locura.” In Nova de cuarzo (Havana: Ediciones
Extramuros, 1999).
Hoagland, Ericka and Reema Sarwal, eds. Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third
World. Essays on Postcolonial Literature and Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010).
Jiménez Mayo, Eduardo and Chris N. Brown. Three Messages and a Warning:
Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic (Easthampton, MA: Small
Beer Press, 2011).
14
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J. Andrew Brown and M. Elizabeth Ginway
Kerslake, Patricia. Science Fiction and Imperialism (Liverpool: Liverpool UP,
2007).
Larson, Ross. Fantasy and the Imagination in the Mexican Narrative (Tempe:
Arizona State UP, 1977).
Lockhart, Darrell, ed. Latin American SF Writers: An A-Z Guide (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 2004).
Lodi-Ribeiro, Gerson. ed. Como era gostosa a minha alienígena: Antologia de contos
eróticos fantásticos (São Caetano do Sul: Ano-Luz, 2002).
———. ed. Dieselpunk: Arquivos confidenciais de uma bela época (São Paulo: Draco,
2011).
———. and Luís Filipe Silva, eds. Vaporpunk: Relatos Steampunk publicados sob as
ordens de Suas Majestades (São Paulo: Draca, 2010).
———. and Carlos Orsi Martinho, eds. Phantastica Brasiliana: 500 Anos de
Histórias Deste e Doutros Brasis (São Caetano do Sul: Ano-Luz, 2000).
López Castro, Ramón. Expedición a la ciencia ficción mexicana (Mexico: Editorial
Lectorum, 2001).
Lugones, Leopoldo. Las fuerzas extrañas. 1906 (Madrid: Cátedra, 1996).
Molina-Gavilán, Yolanda. Ciencia ficción en español: una mitología moderna ante el
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———. et al. “Cronologa de cf latinoamericana: 1775–1999.” Chasqui 29.2 (2000):
43–72.
———. et al. “Chronology of Latin American Science Fiction, 1775–2005.” Science
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científica (Campo Grande, MS: Editora UFMS, 2007).
Novoa, Marcelo. Años Luz: Mapa Estelar de la ciencia ficción en Chile (Valparaíso:
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Paz Soldán, Edmundo. Los vivos y los muertos (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2009).
Reati, Fernando. Postales del Porvenir. La literatura de anticipación de la Argentina
neoliberal, 1985–1999 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2006 ).
Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of SF (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan,
2008).
Sánchez Gómez, José Miguel. Crónicas de la mañana; 50 años de cuentos cubanos de
ciencia ficción (Cuba: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2008).
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1978).
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Ventos, 2002).
Schaffler, Federico. Más allá de lo imaginado: antología de ciencia ficción mexicana.
3 vols. (Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1991–1994).
———. Sin Permiso de Colón (Guadalajara, Mexico: Dirección de Publicaciones,
1993).
Introduction
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15
Simão Branco, Marcello, ed. Assembleia Estelar: Histórias de ficção científica política
(São Paulo: Devir, 2010).
———. Outras copas, outros mundos (São Caetano do Sul: Anos Luz, 1998).
Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America
(Berkeley, CA: UP of California, 1991).
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———, ed. Páginas de Sombra: Contos Fantásticos Brasileiros (Rio de Janeiro: Casa
da Palavra, 2003).
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———. El futuro en llamas. Cuentos clásicos de la ciencia ficción mexicana (Mexico:
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Wilson, Mike. Zombie (Santiago de Chile: Alfaguara, 2010).
PART I
Speculating a Canon:
Latin America’s SF Traditions
CHAPTER 2
Islands in the Slipstream: Diasporic
Allegories in Cuban Science Fiction
since the Special Period
Emily A. Maguire
I
n The Matrix , the 1999 Wachowski brothers film, a computer
hacker who calls himself Neo is awakened to the fact that what
he had previously understood to be “reality” is an elaborate, technologically created façade, constructed to hide the fact that in actuality people are imprisoned by machines that use their body heat while
holding their minds captive. I had the ironic good fortune to see The
Matrix , for the first time, while in Cuba in the summer of 2001, where it
was presented on one of the country’s (then) two national television
channels. The juxtaposition created by viewing this high-concept science fiction (SF) film in the Socialist island setting was ironic for two
reasons. First, I was keenly aware of the contrast between the futuristic,
high-tech environment of the film and the average Cuban’s access to
technology. Cuba has the lowest rate of Internet access for its citizens
of any country in Latin America.1 While Cubans are now permitted to
have personal email accounts, few have regular access to the Internet
outside of their place of work, due to both the lack of availability of
home Internet service and the prohibitive cost of even basic computers. 2
The biggest barrier to Internet access in Cuba, however, is the country’s
server; despite an announced 10 percent improvement in Internet connectivity in January 2010, the satellite connection to Cuba still operates
at an entry speed of only 379 mbs.3
Second, technology aside, the essence of the situation described in
The Matrix at times felt very close to the Cuban context. I do not mean
20
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Emily A. Maguire
to suggest that all Cuban citizens are held mentally or physically captive
by the Revolutionary government; rather, Cubans exist in a world in
which the “official” picture of life on the island and what is mandated
as “legal” sometimes stand in contrast to how Cubans actually live,
both in terms of what they must do to survive, and in terms of what
they choose to do to make life pleasurable and worth living. Hidden
within (outside of?) the “official Matrix” are many unofficial or clandestine networks that allow goods, services, and other kinds of material
and symbolic commodities to circulate. In this sense, Cubans know all
about matrices: they operate within (and outside of ) them all the time.
The Matrix analogy is particularly appropriate with regard to how
information circulates within different spheres of Cuban society.
Since many Cubans do not have regular access to the Web, and since
many books, newspapers, and magazines have only limited circulation (whether for reasons of censorship or, more commonly, because
economic conditions simply do not allow large numbers of them to be
printed), Cubans rely on informal networks of friends and coworkers to
access (or create) these texts, often via f lash drives, text-messaging on
borrowed cell phones, and other kinds of multimedia maneuvers that
take place beyond the “legitimate” spaces of work-registered Internet
accounts. In many instances these flows of information combine multiple “technologies”: bloggers write posts by hand before sending them
to a friend who will upload them on the Internet via another friend’s
computer. Copies of bootleg movies and online journals are stored and
shared on flash drives. Cubans living in the diaspora also participate
in these informational flows, using technology to both access and disseminate news and information from the island and to participate in
dialogue with other Cubans, both those still in Cuba and those living
abroad.
As my Matrix anecdote reveals, Cubans are simultaneously aware
of the constant innovations in computers and other technologies and
extremely limited in their own access to them. Given this almost paradoxical situation, it is interesting that Cuban SF (and its subgenre cyberpunk) has seen a rise in production and popularity since the beginning
of the Special Period, the Cuban government’s name for the period of
economic crisis and material scarcity that began with the collapse of
the Soviet Bloc in 1989–1991. SF was a popular genre in Cuba in the
first years following the Cuban Revolution (1959), and the 1960s saw
the publication of a number of important SF novels and short story collections, among them Oscar Hurtado’s La ciudad muerta de Korad [The
Dead City of Korad , 1964], Miguel Collazo’s El libro fantástico de Oaj
Islands in the Slipstream
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21
[The Fantastic Book of Oaj, 1966], and El viaje (The Journey, 1968). By
the early 1970s, however, SF and other literatures of the fantastic were
officially discouraged in favor of Socialist realism. It was not until the
late 1980s, and in particular the 1990s, following the social and economic changes brought about by the end of the Soviet Union, that a
new generation of SF writers began to emerge.4
This reemergence of SF in Cuba has been shaped by these sometimes
contradictory practices of information circulation and distribution. On
the one hand, this new wave of SF writing has achieved a certain level
of institutional support and recognition: the annual Premio Calendario
is awarded to a book (novel or short story) that can be considered SF,
and the prestigious national press Editorial Letras Cubanas chose to
include a volume of SF short stories (Crónicas del mañana , 2009) in
the series of short story anthologies it published in celebration of the
fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution. Many of the recent generation
of SF writers got their start in state-sponsored writing groups: Yoss,
Raúl Aguiar, Michel Encinosa Fu, who all began to publish in the late
1990s, from the group “El Establo,” and more recently Leonardo Gala,
Haydee Sardiñas, Erick Mota, and Anabel Enríquez Piñero from the “El
Espiral” workshop at the Centro Jorge Onelio Cardoso.5 On the other
hand, SF writing in Cuba must deal with many of the same publishing
and distribution challenges faced by literature in general: publishing
runs are limited, and texts frequently continue to circulate in electronic
form, particularly through online journals such as Qubit and Disparo
en Red , to which Cubans themselves have uneven levels of access. These
conditions may explain the popularity of the short fiction in recent SF
and fantasy literature, since short stories can be shared as single documents, published easily in journals or anthologies and then published as
a collection when the author has the opportunity to do so.
While Cuban readers on the island may find it difficult to read SF
online, the use of digital media has allowed Cuban SF to achieve significant visibility within the broader community of Spanish language SF
writers and fans (particularly in Mexico, Argentina, and Venezuela). 6
Cuban SF writer Yoss contrasts what he calls “First-World science
fiction” with the literature produced by this (principally) pan–Latin
American community: “Es una literatura escrita por y para el Tercer
Mundo y que pesa a cierto experimentalismo y juego con el folklore,
tiene tan pocas posibilidades de retroalimentar a las altaneras capitales mundiales de la CF como el criollísimo juego de domino de llegar alguna vez a ser deporte olímpico” (“Los cuatro lados” 12). [It’s a
literature written by and for the Third World, one that, in spite of a
22
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Emily A. Maguire
certain experimentalism and playing around with folklore, has as little
chance to inf luence the first world capitals of SF as the down-home
game of dominos has of becoming an Olympic sport.]7 For Yoss,
the difference between First World and Third World SF has to do with
the experience and expectations of First and Third World readers. First
World readers, with easy access to “extreme” technology, are accustomed to the “hyperreal,” while Third World readers, who may only
glimpse this technology, retain their “sense of wonder” with respect
to scientific and technological innovation. As his statement indicates,
however, the inclusion of certain “folkloric elements” is part of what
sets this “Third World science fiction” apart. In a similar vein, writer
Vladimir Hernández Pacín asserts that his work has a fundamentally
“Cuban” quality “sin decir compay, sin hablar de palmas, ni de gallos.
No pudiera ser Moscú, ni New York, definitivamente no pudiera ser
Tokio. Es La Habana. Lo es por los ambientes, el entorno, la utilización
del lenguaje” [without using local colloquialisms, nor speaking of palm
trees and chickens. It couldn’t be Moscow, or New York, it definitely
couldn’t be Tokyo. It is Havana. And that is because of the feel, the
settings, the use of language]. 8 Yoss and Hernández Pacín’s statements
ref lect a tension between writing for a global audience and speaking to
local (or at least regional) readership, between SF as a “universal” genre
and a SF production that can ref lect the particularities of certain cultural or national contexts. They insist on the presence of “Cubanness”
in Cuban SF, even as these texts ref lect other inf luences and speak to a
wider audience.
It should be noted, however, that it is not merely Cuban texts that
travel, but Cubans themselves. The conditions of economic hardship initiated by the Special Period have produced a new wave of Cuban exiles,
many of whom have left—and continue to leave—Cuba for economic,
rather than political, reasons. According to the 2000 US Census,
approximately 234,681 Cubans emigrated to the United States between
1990 and 2000; thousands of Cubans have also emigrated (legally and
illegally) to Europe, and to other countries in Latin America (Tafoya).
Recent Cuban emigration has allowed for the circulation of new ideas
and images of Cubanness; unlike previous generations, many of these
recent additions to the diaspora want to stay connected to the island and
to friends and family they have left behind. This has meant that Cubans
both on and off the island are looking for ways to forge a new idea of
what it means to be Cuban across distance and national boundaries.
Benedict Anderson posits that the modern nation is an “imagined
community,” a communally held fiction constructed in part through
Islands in the Slipstream
●
23
print culture. However, the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, elaborating on Anderson’s concept, argues that in today’s globalized world, many
people live not in “imagined communities” but “imagined worlds,” constituted not around a notion of geographic or political space but by the
“historically situated imaginations of people and groups spread around
the globe” (29). According to Appadurai, these worlds “are able to contest and sometimes even subvert the ‘imagined worlds’ of the official
mind and of the entrepreneurial mentality that surround them” (29).
Instead of being territorially constituted, these worlds are marked by
“electronic mediation” and “mass migration,” which for him are not new
forces, but “ones that seem to impel (and sometimes compel) the forces
of the imagination” (4). Cuba (and its diaspora) would seem to be just
such a world, and electronic mediation is one tool that Cubans use to
construct the “imagined world” of a greater Cuba. Taking into account
the potentially liberatory (and/or subversive) nature of these “imagined worlds” and the people, technology, and information that help
constitute them, this chapter examines how these f lows of people and
information (both the humanscape and the mediascape, for Appadurai)
are ref lected in recent Cuban SF and cyberpunk short fiction. As they
themselves circulate through various information pathways, I argue that
these texts attempt to portray a certain kind of Cubanness through the
figure of circulation itself, in particular, through the use of the allegoric
representation—and reconfiguration—of ideas of diaspora.
Allegory, or the Matrix in the Text
From the point of view of rhetoric, allegory, understood as an extended
metaphor, operates from multiple levels simultaneously. As Angus
Fletcher explains, while an allegorical narrative can be understood quite
successfully on a literal level, it also contains “a structure that lends
itself to a secondary reading, or rather, becomes stronger when given
a secondary meaning as well as a primary meaning” (7). Craig Owens
describes allegory as “when one text is doubled by another” (68), an
image that identifies allegory as a kind of matrix, since it offers the possibility of narrative displacement, an opening up of the text to multiple
readings (and dimensions). Owens adds that allegory is “an attitude as
well as a technique, a perception as well as a procedure” (68). That is,
allegory is read as such not merely because it can be, but because the
text itself demands that it be; it is, as Northrop Frye observes, prescriptive, containing within itself a guide to how it might be read (54). It
is thanks to this interpretive signposting that allegory has often been
24
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Emily A. Maguire
criticized as working against the aesthetic possibilities of a work of art.9
Yet, it can be through this signposting that allegories speak to other
political or cultural dimensions of a text.
The use of allegory in Cuban SF is one element that allows for a
reconfiguration of the presence of the local, this touch of cubanía . As
narratives that present events that “have not happened,” Cuban SF texts
appeal to a general SF readership. At the same time, they signal to a
community of Cuban readers through prescriptive readings that speak
to peculiarly Cuban experiences. By gesturing to these “Cuban experiences,” they also communicate certain ideas about Cuba to a non-Cuban
readership. Walter Benjamin argues that allegory as a mode comes to
prominence in times of social upheaval and disintegration; since the
crisis of the Special Period, allegory has returned as a significant and
visible trope in Cuban writing as a way to explore, explain, and outline the conditions of that crisis.10 The stories I analyze here—Vladimir
Hernández Pacín’s “Mar de locura” [Sea of Insanity] ( Nova de cuarzo,
1999), and Anabel Enríquez Piñeiro’s “Deuda temporal” [Time Debt]
and “Nada que declarar” [Nothing to Declare] (both from the collection Nada que declarar, 2005)—offer an allegorical treatment of issues
relating to the Cuban diaspora. (They were also, significantly, written
while their authors were in Cuba; that is, they are a treatment of the
experience of travel by writers who themselves had had little opportunity to travel beyond the island.) The figure of the exile or the adventurer is a common archetype in SF, and in keeping with that trope,
these texts deal with adventurers, refugees, or travelers who venture out
from a well-known environment into the possibility of a new life. Read
as allegories of the Cuban situation since the Special Period and/or as
explorations of the Cuban diaspora, however, these texts present a dark
and ambivalent view of human circulations.
Into the Labyrinth
Vladimir Hernández Pacín’s short story collection Nova de cuarzo
(Quartz Nova , 1999) was one of the first Cuban examples of cyberpunk, the dystopic, antiauthoritarian subgenre of SF that became identified with the 1980s novels of English-language writers such as Bruce
Bethke and William Gibson.11 Sharp, the hacker protagonist of “Mar
de locura,” the first short story in the collection, is a freelance pirate
from “Neoland,” part of “la megalópolis antillana Ciudad Habana” (9)
[the Antillean megalopolis Havana City], who makes his living hacking
into secure cyberspace sites and stealing encoded information. Sharp
Islands in the Slipstream
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25
reunites with two old friends—Sting, a North American, and Ilieva,
a Russian woman nicknamed “Scanny”—to try to solve the mysterious death of Ferrer (“the Cobra”), a master hacker and a kind of mentor to Sting and Sharp. The hackers must enter the Matrix (the term
Hernández Pacín adopts to describe the virtual world created through
computer technology) to confront the Minotaur, a powerful artificial
intelligence. If the Minotaur is responsible for Ferrer’s death, as they
think, the group plans to infiltrate the system in order to deactivate it,
simultaneously avenging their friend’s death and eliminating a threat to
the security of cyberspace.
Hernández Pacín locates his story in Cuba, but his futuristic island is
part of a global reality dominated and organized by corporations rather
than national governments or political borders. (In fact, the island is
no longer really an island, thanks to the “autopista transcaribeña.”)
Yet Sharp never really experiences Neoland in the same way that he
does cyberspace, which is for him the most fully realized, fully experienced environment: “Mientras perdía gradualmente la noción de su
propio cuerpo, su conciencia parecía proyectarse a través de las fibras
ópticas que lo conectaban al mundo virtual de . . . las infoestructuras
empresariales, que como enormes edificaciones luminosas se extendían
en todas las direcciones de la Matriz formando intrincados laberintos
de geometrías multicolores” (9). [As he gradually lost the sense of his
own body, his consciousness began to travel through the optic fibers
that connected it to the virtual world of . . . business info-structures,
which like enormous luminous buildings extended in all directions of
the Matrix, forming intricate labyrinths of multicolored geometries.]
Indeed, despite a certain affinity between the three protagonists, the
hackers live mostly solitary lives within both the luminous geometry of
the Matrix and the postindustrial city outside. Their liminal relationship to society is replicated in the ambivalent position that the virtual
world itself occupies. In spite of its influence over physical society, the
Matrix is a territory without substance, a labyrinth in which the hackers
exist neither physically nor legally.
Things do not work out as the trio has planned. After Sting and
Scanny both enter the Matrix, only to end up “brain-dead” in the
outside world, Sharp decides to go in alone after them. He successfully establishes contact with an entity that declares itself to be the
Minotaur, only to discover that it is not an individual artificial intelligence, but rather a collective identity operating within the Matrix.
Scanny’s voice—for she is apparently part of this collectivity—explains
to Sharp that the Minotaur is not a being but a place, “donde homo
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Emily A. Maguire
sapiens puede liberarse de las cadenas sociales y dar el salto evolutivo
que lo lleve a conquistar lo inimaginable . . . Esta es la puerta a la inmortalidad” (37–38) [where the homo sapien can free himself from social
bonds and make the evolutionary jump that will lead him to conquer
the unimaginable . . . This is the doorway to immortality]. As Scanny’s
voice tells it, the Minotaur is not a monster but a cybernetic utopia; seen
this way, there is no danger, rather, the promise of liberation through
the virtual world. Choosing between the “world of the flesh,” in which
he is an outsider by choice, and joining the Minotaur to try to establish contact with other worlds, Sharp, following his intuition, decides
to leave his present solitude. As the story ends, he begins to move “en
dirección a la luz, hacia la libertad de un nuevo renacer” (40) [in the
direction of the light, towards a new rebirth].
The collective unity proposed by the Minotaur could be the utopian
alternative to the outside society, in which the hackers feel marginalized and isolated. However, in spite of the hopeful tone of the last sentence (reminiscent of descriptions of dead people who “move towards
the light”), the story does not offer a completely optimistic ending. The
Minotaur’s name suggests that this collective route to immortality may
simply be a trap invented by the artificial intelligence in order to trick
the hackers. If the Minotaur is what it appears to be, then Sharp is
the enemy, an individual whose desires—such as they exist within the
world of the Matrix—threaten the possibility of collective change that
the Minotaur offers. The Minotaur declares its intention to discover a
new reality that exists beyond the Matrix, yet this reality is only a possibility. To join the Minotaur in the hope of realizing that possibility,
Sharp has to sacrifice the power that his talent gives him in order to
occupy a more marginal positional (at least initially) than the one he
occupies now. The Minotaur’s offer contains the hope for a radically
different future, but this hope could just as easily prove to be false, and
Sharp’s decision to leave physical reality to launch himself into the void
could easily trap him in a labyrinth of the Matrix.
Sharp’s journey into the Martix suggests other kinds of more prosaic journeys. It is possible to read the story’s ending—as Juan Carlos
Toledano Redondo does—as a rejection of state control (458–460).
Certainly Sharp, in navigating the dangerous pathways of the Matrix,
is attempting to evade both government and corporate control of this
virtual space. But the Minotaur is not a revolutionary that wants to subvert corporate power but an expression of collective escapism, and the
pessimistic side of this allegory lies in the fact that the story does not
necessarily offer a viable alternative to this society. Deciding to enter
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27
the Matrix permanently is also a kind of exile; once Sharp joins the
Minotaur, he will no longer be able to return home to the physical world
or his own body but will remain in the Matrix. In this way, Hernández
Pacín’s story replicates the experience of leaving Cuba from the perspective of those on the island. Having never traveled, it is impossible, while
still in Cuba, to know what life outside is like. To decide to leave is to
take the risk and believe that things can be better elsewhere. But to
leave—particularly if one leaves illegally—is in a certain way a definitive kind of leaving. While the reader wants to hope that Sharp, aware
of potential risks, is beginning a glorious new journey, all signs suggest
that this new phase may be nothing more than a chimera, sending him
in unexpected or even dangerous directions.
Dispatches from Home
Anabel Enríquez Piñeiro’s short story collection Nada que declarar
[Nothing to Declare, 2007) is an example of the way in which SF is
finding a niche within Cuban publishing. The winner of the 2005
Calendario Prize, Enríquez Piñeiro’s slim volume explores a number
of familiar SF tropes—alien invasion, relationships between different
alien species, interplanetary exploration—through intimate, largely
first-person narratives. While the imagined planets and sophisticated
spaceships in which her stories are set may be unfamiliar, Enríquez
Piñeiro focuses on the more commonplace emotional contours of the
fictional experiences she explores.
“Deuda temporal” [Time Debt], the first story of the collection, deals
with stellar exploration and the challenges of space-time travel. In this
case, however, the story is told not from the point of view of the explorer,
but from the perspective of the one left behind. Miranda, the deaf female
narrator, is five years old when her mother decides to leave their planet,
Serena-Ceti, and with it her husband and small daughter, to travel to
distant parts of the galaxy as part of a biological exploration team.
Throughout her daughter’s lifetime, she returns only infrequently to her
home planet. Given the difference between the speed of light at which
the spaceship travels and the passage of time on Serenta-Ceti, Miranda
grows up, marries, becomes a successful astronomer, raises a family, and
becomes a grandmother, while only a few months have passed for her
mother. Although her mother attempts to return for the major events
in her daughter’s life, small miscalculations of even seconds result in
her arriving on Serena-Ceti years after she had planned to visit. At the
end of the story, Miranda’s mother dies in an accident, and her body is
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Emily A. Maguire
finally returned to the daughter for burial. Miranda is over a hundred
years old; her mother looks barely older than when she first set out.
While the differences in the passage of time are literally the result of
the limitations of space travel, it is clear that they are also representative
of personal and philosophic differences between mother and daughter.
When Miranda’s mother tries to explain her decision to be part of the
mission, it is apparent that she feels trapped on Serena-Ceti, and that the
opportunity to explore other worlds is a kind of escape: “‘Serena Ceti es
un mundo sin futuro’”—agitabas con vehemencia los dedos y señalabas al
cielo nocturno sobre la terraza—‘Mira arriba, cuántos mundos por visitar . . . cuántas oportunidades en el salto por pliegues para vivir la experiencia casi exacta de la eternidad’” (5). [‘Serena Ceti is a world without a
future,’ you waved your fingers vehemently as you pointed to the night sky
over the terrace, ‘Look up there, so many worlds waiting to be visited . . . so
many opportunities in folding time to live an almost exact experience of
eternity.’] Miranda’s mother wants to escape her home planet, but her
statement also reveals that she wants to escape some of the other aspects of
her life: aging, parenthood, perhaps emotional connection itself. Indeed,
as Miranda grows, matures, and accepts new responsibilities, she comes to
see her mother as the child. Listening to her mother speak about her travels, she observes, “Un discurso lleno de entusiasmo, pero yo sólo percibía
a la adolescente inmadura que yacía debajo de él” (9). [A speech full of
enthusiasm, but I only perceived the immature adolescent lying beneath
it.] On her last trip home to see her daughter, Miranda senses her mother
is actively disturbed by her age; Miranda has become an old woman, what
her mother has most feared.
The physical absence of Miranda’s mother serves to highlight her
emotional absence from Miranda’s life. Miranda spends a good part of
her life searching for a way to make contact with her mother, even as
her mother absents herself, breaks promises, fails to appear, or simply
fails to understand who Miranda has become. Miranda’s decision to
become an astronomer can be seen as an attempt to establish a connection with her absent parent. Yet when her mother returns for a visit
while Miranda is on a university fellowship, Miranda observes, “A fin
de cuentas, somos dos extrañas conocidas” (8). [At the end of it all, we
are two known strangers.] At the very end, as she prepares her mother’s
body for burial, she notes that she can finally rest, because “[Y]a no
tengo que mirar al cielo y preguntarle en cuál estrella estás” (11). [I no
longer have to look at the sky and ask it which star you are on.] Her
declaration suggests that even though her mother has not been present
in her life, there is a part of Miranda that never lets go of her mother.
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Miranda’s deafness highlights the emotional and communicative
distance between mother and daughter. In Miranda’s first description
of her mother, she is looking away from Miranda, having eyes only for
the stars: “Tú no ves mi cara, estás parada en la terraza y ves caer estrellas” (5). [You don’t see my face; you are standing on the balcony and
watching the stars fall.] Since Miranda must rely on sign language and
visual cues, this gesture signals not only her mother’s turning away from
the life she has known but also a refusal to fully communicate with
Miranda, despite Miranda’s effort as a five-year-old to understand what
her mother is saying. Sign language is another language, and the need
to use it suggests that spatial, emotional, and linguistic distances complicate the communication between the two women. While Miranda’s
mother never completely forgets sign language, Miranda notes that with
each visit she seems less f luent; her ability to speak in signs also remains
frozen in time.
Within this context of travel, dislocation, and miscommunication,
the names in the story have an ironic resonance. The name Miranda
is a clear reference to Shakespeare’s The Tempest . As Prospero’s daughter, Miranda is the “heir” to his adopted island kingdom. Yet, in
Shakesperare’s text, she is also a traveler, journeying to the island as a
small child and leaving it at the end of the play, after both father and
daughter are rescued. Enríquez Piñeiro’s Miranda is also left alone with
her father on an island (her home planet), but this is an island from
which she will never leave, and her inheritance is less a kingdom than
a sense of loss. While Miranda’s mother is unnamed in the story, the
spaceship on which she sets out is The Persephone, named for the queen
of the Underworld in Greek mythology. In the classical myth, Hades,
king of the Underworld, abducts Persephone, and her mother, Demeter,
comes to rescue her. In Enríquez Piñeiro’s story it is the daughter, not
the mother, who is left behind; yet the journeys do represent a kind of
death, as the mother’s travels absent her from the natural course of life
on the island, allowing her to seem eternally young. While Miranda’s
mother is away, she is, in a sense, dead to her daughter, a state that
foreshadows the ending of the story, when the daughter’s final, and in
some ways most intimate, contact with her mother is the preparation of
her body for burial.
While travelers today do not (yet) have to deal with the difficulties
of space-time jumps, one can easily recognize the relationship between
Miranda and her mother as an allegory of a certain experience of the
Cuban diaspora. To leave a place and come back to it is to feel emotionally that you have missed years of experiences. People age and move
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Emily A. Maguire
on, while our memories of them do not change. On the other hand, in
the experience of material technology, Cuba remains, in a certain way,
stuck in time. New cars, dishwashers, computers, all arrive in the hands
of ordinary Cubans on the island extremely slowly, and older models
are made to last much longer than they are in other parts of the world,
particularly in the United States and Europe, where many Cubans leaving the island have settled. Items that have already become obsolete
in other parts of the world—1950s American cars, Soviet refrigerators
from the 1970s—continue to be commonly used. In terms of visual and
material culture, Cubans returning to the island see decaying versions
of the 1950s and the 1970s, as if these eras were getting older without
moving forward in time.
If “Mar de locura” allegorizes diaspora as a jump into the unknown,
“Nada que declarar,” the final (and eponymous) story in Enríquez
Piñeiro’s collection, reframes the experience of undocumented
(national) border crossing as undocumented interplanetary travel. The
story’s unnamed child narrator, his younger brother Soulness, and little
sister Anela have all been smuggled onto a cargo ship to escape from
their home planet, Io, where their father is an “autómata” (disposable
slave labor) in the planet’s toxic metal mines. Their destination is Earth,
their ancestral home planet, about which they have heard nostalgic stories from both their father and grandfather. From their hiding place
in the spaceship, the children dream about Earth’s wonders: snow, ice
cream, a chance to escape from “la continua lucha de sobrevivir en un
mundo que se deshace constantemente bajo los pies” (58) [the constant
struggle to survive in a world that is constantly falling apart under our
feet]. Their fantasies articulate classic immigrant hopes for a better life,
with the added twist that they are not venturing into the unknown but
returning to a place of origin.
Enríquez Piñeiro centers her narrative on the physical, emotional,
and psychological experience of this dangerous journey, rather than on
political complexities or technological marvels. As children, Soulness,
Anela, and the narrator understand the experience through their own
physical and emotional needs. (The very name “Soulness,” which appears
in English in the text, suggests a kind of essential being, rather than a
distinct personality.) Supposedly alone on the ship, they are bored and
hungry. They simultaneously desire human contact and worry that they
will be discovered by “cibers” watching the ship’s halls. As they begin
to experience what they assume to be the side effects of interplanetary
travel—fever, nausea, vomiting, and sweats—their hopeful fantasies of
Islands in the Slipstream
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31
arrival contrast with the loneliness, anxiety, and physical discomfort of
their experience as human cargo.
Things grow worse when Soulness discovers the decomposing bodies of four other “peces pega” (child stowaways) in a nearby compartment. Searching the ship in an attempt to reach the control room to get
help, the narrator makes the terrifying discovery that they are not on
board an Earth-bound cargo vessel, but instead are traveling to a solar
trash dump, “junto a los deshechos tóxicos de todas las colonias” (62)
[together with the toxic waste of all the colonies]. What awaits them is
death from chemical poisoning, most likely long before they arrive at
the ship’s fatal final destination.
This painful and claustrophobic narrative opens itself to a number
of possible readings. On the one hand, it recreates subaltern experience:
despite all precautions (and all hope), the three children were doomed
from the beginning. Coming from a marginalized situation, they are
treated, quite literally, like trash. This story of a scam human smuggling operation “in space” resonates with actual tragic news stories of
recent years—Mexican border crossers found suffocated in train cars,
Chinese immigrants discovered dead in shipping containers. The text
also contains an implicit environmental critique; its dedication, “To
the memory of Leide das Neves Ferreira,” refers to a six-year-old from
Goiâna, Brazil, who was fatally poisoned by radiation in 1987 when her
father, a scrap metal collector, brought home a capsule containing the
highly radioactive isotope caesium-137.12 Like the young Brazilian girl,
the three stowaways of Enríquez Piñeiro’s story suffer and die as the
result of toxins they have not produced. They are not responsible for
their tragic end; their presence on board the trash ship has been determined by others, most immediately by their father and ultimately by the
system, which does not recognize their humanity. (In the end, there is
no one to whom the children can appeal to on the pilotless ship.) They
are the true, unintended victims of the situation.
Read from another perspective, however, “Nada que declarar” can
also be read as a more metaphorical commentary on the risks of diaspora;
as in “Mar de locura,” travel to what promises to be a better life results
in a dead end, this time literally so. The child travelers will never learn
whether or not what their father has told them about life on Earth is
true, or even whether Earth itself really exists. Rather than revealing
Earth to be less than a paradise, Enríquez Piñeiro’s story frustrates,
truncates the very journey itself. It is possible to read this as a commentary on the dangers—if not the impossibility—of returning home
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Emily A. Maguire
again. In the last scene of the story, the narrator and his brother and
sister find their way to the spaceship’s control room and seat themselves
in the chairs of the command center. The narrator imagines himself as
the commander “que alguna vez llevó vida a la Tierra” (62) [who at some
time brought life to Earth], yet this make-believe is an ironic distraction,
for even as he imagines this, he is struggling to stay conscious. The land
of his father’s nostalgia is a fantasy, and in this case, even disillusionment
is unattainable.
Circular Journeys
While they open themselves to multiple readings, the stories examined
here can be read as commentaries on the Cuban diaspora through the
ways in which they describe the emotional and psychic experience of
leaving home, and the effects of that kind of travel on those who stay
behind. In their focus on young and/or disenfranchised protagonists,
these texts speak particularly to younger Cubans, the inheritors of a
Revolution (a “new world”) that they did not make, but into which they
have been born. To remain on the island as friends leave and as technology changes is, like Miranda in “Deuda temporal,” to be left to carry
on, to explore what might be possible with what remains.
Hernández Pacín’s and Enríquez Piñeiro’s explorations of these
experiences seem to contradict Yoss’s argument that what “Third
World science fiction” shares is the recreation of a sense of wonder;
despite the use of virtual technologies in “Mar de locura” and the
elaboration of space travel in “Deuda temporal” and “Nada que declarar,” their narratives speak to readers not through the excitement of
new and different technologies but through allegorized social critique
and (potentially shared) experiences of isolation, disenfranchisement,
and exploitation. They are not celebrations of utopian discovery but
examinations of the sense of loss, the lack of communication, and the
sheer risk that journeys can entail. In this sense, their allegories are
relevant to both the particular Cuban community of readers and to
other diasporic “imagined worlds,” since they speak to the emotional
challenges faced by groups of people who, despite symbolic and affective ties, have become separated by distance, technology, and national
boundaries. Rather than being drawn to the “new,” these stories reach
out to readers through the commonalities of these emotional experiences, regardless of the technological trappings. For readers in this
globalized world and its multiple matrices, these texts have plenty to
declare.
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Notes
1. Ray Sánchez, “Cuba Cutting Internet Access.” Sun Sentinel May 7, 2009.
2 . Cubans can check email from kiosks at post-office centers, but these are
subject to long waits. Another option is hotel business centers, but these
can cost up to 10 CUC (almost half a month’s salary for some) for an hour
of Internet time. As of June, 2012, only 2.6 of the islands 11.2 million
inhabitants had used the Internet in the past year, a number up 40 percent from the previous year (http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/14
/cuba-telecommunications-idUSS1E85C00720120614).
3. Toocam.com. While fiberoptic cable was laid between Cuba and Venezuela
in February, 2011, as of June 2012, there is no indication that the cable is
operational (http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/14/cuba-telecommunications-idUSS1E85C00720120614).
4 . For more information on the history of science fiction writing in Cuba, see
Toledano Redondo, Yoss, “Prefacio,” and Lockhart.
5. An active writing scene has also generated an enthusiastic community of
fans, who attend formal book presentations and lectures at such venues as the
annual Havana Book Fair (Feria del Libro de La Habana) and conferences
organized specifically around science fiction and fantasy interests, such as the
annual Behique. http://www.maximrock.com/2010/05/08/behique-2010/.
6 . The Argentine science fiction magazine Axxon has published numerous
stories by Cuban writers, and in recent years there has been some collaboration and exchange between Cuban writers and the science fiction community in Venezuela, primarily centered around the publications of Ubik,
the Venezuelan Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy.
7. This and all translations mine, unless otherwise noted.
8 . Interview Gerardo Chávez Spinola, 11 de abril 2004. Publicado en El guaicán
literario. http://www.cubaliteraria.com/guaican/. Translation by Daniel
Koon as it appears on his website: http://it.stlawu.edu/~koon/cuba
/CFCubana/Interviews02.html#Hern%E1ndez.
9. See Owens for a review of some of the significant critiques of allegory as
aesthetic form.
10. Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama offers a deep exploration
of allegory, particularly in relation to the German baroque.
11. “Mar de locura,” the first short story in the collection, owes a great deal to
these cyberpunk predecessors, Gibson in particular. See Toledano Redondo’s
excellent comparison of “Mar de locura” to Gibson’s novel Neuromancer,
458–460.
12 . See “Brazil Deadly Glitter,” Time, Monday, October 19, 1987, http://www
.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,965762,00.html, and “Goiâna
Accident,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_
accident. A more recent commentary on the incident, to date the worst
radiation disaster in Brazil’s history, can be found at http://animavitae
.blogspot.com/2007/08/leide-das-neves-o-anjo-de-luz-das.html.
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Emily A. Maguire
Bibliography
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama . Trans. John Osborne
(London: Verso, 1998).
Collazo, Miguel. El libro fantástico de Oaj (Havana: Editorial UNEAC, 1966).
———. El viaje (Havana: Instituto del Libro, 1968).
Enríquez Piñeiro, Anabel. Nada que declarar (Havana: Editorial April, 2007).
Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1964).
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism (New York: Atheneum, 1969).
Hernández Pacín, Vladimir. “Mar de locura.” In Nova de cuarzo (Havana: Ediciones
Extramuros, 1999), 8–40.
Hurtado, Oscar. La ciudad muerta de Korad (Havana: Ediciones Revolución,
1964).
Lockhart, Darrell B. Latin American Science Fiction Writers: An A-Z Guide
(Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 2004).
Owens, Craig. “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism.”
October 12 (Spring 1980): 58–80.
Tafoya, Sonia. “Shades of Belonging.” Pew Hispanic Center Report (December 6,
2004) http://www.pewhispanic.org/2004/12/06/shades-of-belonging/.
Toledano Redondo, Juan Carlos. “From Socialist Realism to Anarchist Capitalism:
Cuban Cyberpunk.” Science Fiction Studies 32 (2005): 442–466.
Yoss. “Los cuatro lados de una crisis fecunda: La ciencia ficción en los albores
del tercer milenio,” Paper presented at Ansible: III Encuentro Teórico del Género
Fantástico, Centro Onelio Jorge Cardoso, Havana, May 2006.
———. “Prefacio.” Crónicas del mañana (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 2009), 5–20.
CHAPTER 3
Time Travel and History in
Carmen Boullosa’s 1991 Llanto,
novelas imposibles
Claire Taylor
T
his chapter examines one of Mexican author Carmen Boullosa’s
most intriguing and complex fictions: the short novel, Llanto,
novelas imposibles of 1992.* The title I have chosen to give to this
chapter is deliberately ambiguous; we may choose to insert a hyphen,
making the discussion about time-travel, or, on the other hand, we
may insert a comma, making the discussion about the epistemological categories of time, travel, and history. This deliberate ambiguity is
precisely to bring to the fore the interplay of all these elements in this
work of Boullosa’s, namely, how time-travel—the transportation of the
figure of Moctezuma1 to the present day—raises questions about the
fundamental concepts of time and travel. This novel, at once a travel
narrative, a historical narrative (or, to use Linda Hutcheon’s term, a
“historiographic metafiction”), and a science fictional fantasy, engages
in a deconstruction of the various discourses that it cannibalizes. In the
course of this chapter I will argue that Boullosa’s use of the device of
time-travel in this novel is a strategic one, in which time-travel is used
to interrogate the established meanings of history and time, and, it also
functions as a shorthand for the postmodern condition. My argument,
thus, is twofold: first, that time-travel is a device employed by Boullosa
in order to interrogate the ways in which historical figures are recuperated and decontextualized by historical accounts; and second, that
time-travel stands for the postmodern era of space-time compression.
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Claire Taylor
Llanto, in its play with historical intertexts, can be situated within
wider trends in Latin American literature broadly speaking, and
Mexican fiction more specifically. It falls into the broad category of the
New Historical Novel, a trend identified by Seymour Menton in his
seminal work of 1993, and which, according to Menton, has become
the “dominant subgenre” of Latin American fiction since the late 1970s
(Menton 15). Menton distinguishes the “New Historical Novel” from
the “Traditional Historical Novel,” which preceded it in that the latter was “primarily identified with romanticism” and contributed to the
“creation of a national consciousness” (18). The New Historical Novel,
by contrast, is marked by the distortion of history through omissions,
exaggerations, and anachronisms; the use of metafiction; intertextuality; and parody, among others (22–24)—all features that are present
in Boullosa’s Llanto. More specifically with regard to the publication
date of Llanto, the run-up to, and period immediately after the 1992
quincentenary commemorations saw a spate of works, both literary and
cinematic, exploring the period of the conquest in particular. These
include Nicolás Echeverría’s Cabeza de Vaca (1992), a filmic portrayal
of the Naufragios ; Carlos Fuentes’s El naranjo (1993), which reworks
historical figures including Cortés, La Malinche, and Columbus; and
Julián Meza’s La huella del conejo (1991), which recreates the era of the
discovery. We may therefore locate Llanto within the more specific classification of the “new Latin American novel of the Conquest” (López 1),
novels that according to Kimberle S. López, “reinvent the New World
by turning their eyes back towards Europe, but identifying marginal
voices within the imperial enterprise” (12), and that “deconstruct the
imperial enterprise indirectly” (14). 2 These novels, just as Llanto does,
share a focus in their recuperation of history, but this is a recuperation
which is never innocent, and they engage instead in the questioning of
historical sources and the privileging of alternative viewpoints.
Llanto, novelas imposibles (1992) is Boullosa’s fifth novel, and, arguably, one of her most intriguing.3 In terms of narrative style, the novel
is complex, fragmented, and lacking any one unified narrative voice;
indeed, some critics, such as Inés Ferrero Cándenas in her excellent article
on the novel, have gone so far as to argue that Llanto is in fact four novels,
not one.4 In terms of plot, the novel loosely tells the story of a group of
three women who, in September 1989, discover Moctezuma in the Parque
Hundido in Mexico City, and proceed to take him on a journey around
the city.5 In addition to this, several sections of the novel are historical,
referring back to the early 1600s and the era of Moctezuma II, while yet
other sections provide a reflection on historical discourse, and on the
possibility—or impossibility—of writing the novel we are reading.
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With regard to narrative style, one contributory factor to the fragmented nature of this novel lies in the frequent insertion of other texts
into the narrative, texts that, primarily, are historical sources. Excerpts
from several codices, namely, the Aubin, Florentine, and Ramírez codices, from Cortés’s Cartas de relación , and from other historical works,
are included in this text. This novel thus has in common with other of
Boullosa’s novels an almost obsessive preoccupation with history, 6 one
that has led critics such as Erna Pfeiffer to argue that, by the end of
the 1990s, “Carmen Boullosa era la novelista histórica por excelencia
en México” (Pfeiffer 259). Yet it is not only the presence of historical
intertexts that makes this a complex novel; what perhaps differentiates
Llanto from the slightly more conventional Son vacas, somos puercos,
which precedes it, or Duerme, which was to follow it some two years
later—and I use the term “conventional” rather lightly here, aware that
Boullosa’s novels, in their literary style, manipulation of time frames,
and questioning of historical truth are anything but conventional—is
its much more experimental style. Indeed, as the title tells us, this is
less a novel in the conventional sense than “novelas imposibles.” Thus,
the title itself informs the reader that this work fails to conform, and
we can interpret this lack of conformity in various ways. First, this is
a novel impossible in terms of style: that is, can the limits of the novel
be stretched to such an extent? Can these fragments, by differing narrators, and differing actual authors (in the case of the insertion of historical accounts), make up a novel as such? It is also a novel impossible
in terms of content—is it ever possible to recuperate the “real” figure
of Moctezuma? Can the “truth” of this historical figure ever be recovered from the notoriously unreliable accounts of his life? These overriding questions proposed by the epithet “imposibles” permeate the novel,
and I will suggest in the course of my analysis that Boullosa is more
interested in the generation of questions than in answers. Through
the manipulation of time-travel—itself a literary trick/trope, a truco
imposible —Boullosa interrogates these issues. Time-travel, therefore, is
employed in order to raise questions and to interrogate fixed certainties,
rather than to establish an alternative world.
Time-Travel and History
The basic premise underlying this novel, then, is the reappearance of
Moctezuma in modern-day Mexico City, some 468 years after the fall of
Tenochtitlán to the Spanish forces.7 This speculative event, a fantastical
moment of time-travel, provides Boullosa with the opportunity to engage
in a series of ruminations on the truth-claims of history. Boullosa’s choice
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of Moctezuma over any other historical figure lies, arguably, in his status
within Mexican historiography; accounts of his speeches, actions, and, in
particular, his death, are frequently biased, and in many cases contradictory. Right from the start, Moctezuma was deliberately misrepresented
by chroniclers of the time; as early as Cortés’s Segunda carta de relación
of 1520, the purported speech of Moctezuma as transcribed by Cortés is
clearly slanted to further Cortés’s own interests. With regard to the representation of Moctezuma in historical accounts—specifically, that of
Cortés—the historian Hugh Thomas has commented on aspects such as
the “slowness of translation,” the fact that “the expression of friendship
could be so twisted,” and that indeed, what Moctezuma actually said is
“a matter of controversy” (Thomas 1993: 281), factors that cast a doubt
upon the veracity of Cortés’s account.
While these inconsistencies over Moctezuma’s words and intentions
relate to the first encounter with Cortés, accounts of Moctezuma’s subsequent actions are similarly biased. Moctezuma often ends up being
vilified in Spanish (and, to a certain extent, Mexican) historiography as
the person who misinterpreted the intentions of the Spanish, and thus
led to the downfall of the Aztec empire. 8 Such accounts, however, are
frequently one-sided, or have a particular agenda to support; as Edwin
Williamson has noted, suppositions regarding Moctezuma “must be
treated with caution” (Williamson 1992: 18).
Thus, Boullosa has chosen a historical figure whose representation through official accounts is vague, ambiguous, and contradictory.
Herein lies the focus of Boullosa’s interest in history: her aim is not,
through the citation of historical figures, to recreate, painstakingly, a
particular episode in history and to provide us with a definitive version of events, but rather to examine and then challenge the norms of
historiography. Llanto purposefully plays on the ambiguity surrounding
Moctezuma, exploring through this temporal transportation issues of
historical truth, as she constructs an alternative Moctezuma, challenging accepted historical discourse. In this way, as much as an examination of Moctezuma himself and an attempt to, in Priscilla Gac-Artigas’s
words, search for the “personaje de carne y hueso” (Gac-Artigas 189)
[character of flesh and blood], this novel examines historiography in
itself, and its mechanisms for attempting to convey historical truth.
In this sense, Llanto reveals, pace Gac-Artigas, the impossibility of ever
recuperating the “personaje de carne y hueso.”
Within the wealth of biased and contradictory accounts surrounding
the figure of Moctezuma, one of the most striking instances of partiality and contradiction comes in the reports of Moctezuma’s death. What
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is historically certain is that Moctezuma died while in the hands of
the Spaniards; exactly what caused his death, however, remains unresolved. It is not surprising, therefore, that the moment of Moctezuma’s
death is one of the focuses of Boullosa’s investigation and reworking, as
she includes excerpts from several sources dealing with this event (69,
73–74, 83). The first of these, from the Ramírez Codex , suggests that
Moctezuma’s death may have been caused by the Spanish, relating the
following details:
fue que al cuarto del alba amaneció muerto el sin ventura Motecuzuma,
al cual pusieron el día antes en un gran asalto que les dieran en una
azotehuela baja para que les hablase con un pequeño antepecho, y comenzando a tirar dicen que le dieron una pedrada; mas aunque se la dieron
no le podían hacer ningún mal porque había ya más de cinco horas que
estaba muerto, y no faltó quien dijo que porque no le viesen la herida le
habían metido una espada por la parte baja. (69)
It was at a quarter till dawn that the unlucky Montezuma woke up dead,
he whom the day before they had placed in a great assault where they
put him in a low patio so that he spoke to them from a small window
sill, and they said that they began to throw stones at him, but no matter
what they did, they couldn’t hurt him as he had already been dead for
five hours, and there was no lack of those that noticed the sword wound
in his lower regions.
The Ramírez Codex from which these lines are taken, is named after its
discoverer, the historian José Fernando Ramírez, and is a manuscript of
some 169 folios. It is presumed to be the work of an indigenous scribe
and illustrator, although using European script, and includes text in
Spanish and Náhuatl. As Franch notes, according to Ramírez himself,
“el autor del códice debió ser un indio mexicano, ya que destaca siempre cualquier triunfo de los indígenas” (Franch 123) [the author of the
codex must be a Mexican Indian, since it always highlights any indigenous victory], a statement that clearly reveals the partiality of historical
accounts. With regard to Moctezuma’s death, this codex gives a version
of events that would lay the blame on the Spaniards, and portrays the
indigenous population as the unwitting victims of the perfidy of the
Spanish. Moreover, in this extract, we are already presented with a prior
falsehood; this account sets out to discredit another one in which “ dicen
que le dieron una pedrada” [they said that they began to throw stones
at him] (my emphasis). From the outset, thus, Boullosa is fronting up
the lack of veracity in historical accounts, rather than the events themselves, as the focal point for our attention.
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Subsequently, in direct contradiction of the version recounted by the
Ramírez Codex , a later section of the novel reproduces part of one of
Cortés’s Cartas de Relación that deals with the same incident. Here,
Cortés’s version declares:
E yo lo hice sacar, y en llegando a un pretil que salía fuera de la fortaleza,
queriendo hablar a la gente que por allí combatía, le dieron una pedrada
los suyos en la cabeza, tan grande, que de allí a tres días murió. (Boullosa
1992: 83; Cortés 157)
And I made him come out, and when he arrived at a short wall that came
out from the fort and, wanting to speak to the people that were fighting
there, his people threw stones at his head, so severely that he died within
three days.
In Cortés’s version, Moctezuma’s death was at the hands of his own
people, thus absolving Cortés himself from any blame in the matter.
This extract clearly creates tension when taken with the previous citation from the Ramírez Codex . It is significant that Boullosa chooses
to cite the Ramírez Codex first; that is, first we read an account that
negates the historical truth of the account, which then follows it. Thus
the novel here is bringing to the fore the negation of historical truth,
rather than historical truth in itself, thus drawing out attention to the
inconsistencies and contradictions of historiography.
Boullosa’s choice of these two extracts and their positioning within
the text lay bare the tensions underlying the functioning of historical discourse, and ref lect what Robert Holton has argued regarding
the construction of history. Holton has noted that narrative history
is constructed in such a way as to elide discrepant accounts of what
he terms “jarring witnesses,” since “acts of narrative representation
necessarily exclude as well as include information” (Holton 9). If this
is the case, then Boullosa’s selection and manipulation of historical sources aims to reveal precisely these discrepancies; while each
individual account she selects would appear to be providing a coherent version of events in its own right, when taken together, they are
evidence precisely of this “jarring” that narrative history attempts to
avoid.
Whilst these two extracts deal with the same event, a further extract
is included in the novel, located between the two, but dealing with
the aftermath of the event. This time, from the Florentine Codex , the
abstract describes the disposal of Moctezuma’s corpse after his death:
“Y mientras se quemaba, impulsados únicamente por la cólera, ya no
había muchos que lo llevaran en su corazón; otros le hacían reproches,
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decían: ‘¡Ese malvado! ¡Por todo el mundo sembraba el terror!’” (73–74)
[And whilst he burned, there were few that held him in their hearts,
driven only by anger; others reproached him, saying ‘That cursed
man, he sowed terror throughout the world’]. In the context of the
earlier extract from the Ramírez Codex , which implied solidarity with
Moctezuma and concern over his death, this extract appears suspect.
The rage and fear expressed here, in a scenario in which all witnesses are
“impulsados únicamente por la cólera” [driven only by anger] jars with
the earlier extract that revealed different emotions in the witnesses. The
reason for the contrast between these two accounts can perhaps best
be explained by considering the production of the latter. The Florentine
Codex is widely believed to be the work of indigenous illustrators working under the supervision of the Spanish Fray Bernardino de Sahagún,
who, as Peterson has put it, were “exposed to a European curriculum
with Christian indoctrination” (284).9 Such conditions of production
have led Franch to describe the Florentine Codex as belonging to a group
of “códices colonials” (233). Due to the manner in which such colonial
codices were produced, Franch argues that many “son en realidad documentos provocados por la ‘investigación’ de los españoles, especialmente
de los evangelizadores” [are, in reality, documents provoked by the
investigation of the Spanish and especially by the evangelists], and as
such these works reveal “un cierto espíritu europeo” [a certain European
spirit] (ibid.; emphasis in the original). The veracity of the account told
by this codex is therefore under question, and certainly its status in
conveying anything approaching an indigenous point of view of events
is strongly under question.10
Moreover, it is interesting to note, regarding the manuscript itself,
that the Florentine Codex is a text that reveals in its very inscription
the processes of producing history that Holton defined above. Peterson
has described the Florentine Codex as a “work in progress” since there
are additions and deletions to the text (Peterson 1988: 278). Such additions and deletions provide clear evidence of the overt construction of
historical discourse, in which the deleted sections represent the “jarring
witnesses” of which Holton talks. Holton argues:
Narrative accounts of the past, however successful in their establishment
of a smooth surface coherence and continuity, can be interrogated like
palimpsests for traces of the competing (but excluded) narratives which
remain at some level embedded. (10)
The palimpsest as described by Holton can stand as an image for the
codex: written and over-written, the codex, with areas that have been
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scratched out and patched over, represents in physical form the voices that
have been ignored or silenced in historiography. The purportedly smooth
surface in fact hides scratchings out and erasings, representing the historical layers embedded in the codex, and exposed by Boullosa’s novel.
Boullosa’s choice of historical intertext thus brings to the fore the
issue of historiography, highlighting the construction of historical narrative and the selection and rejection of sources. Moreover, by employing a parallel and yet contrasting technique—by selecting her own
historical sources that function not to smooth over these jarring witnesses but precisely to draw attention to them—Boullosa’s fragmented
text provides a mirror image of the codex in the process of creation, yet
that chooses to highlight, rather than smooth over, these competing
narratives. That is, if the codices represent palimpsests that need to be
interrogated in order for the erased, scratched-out voices to be recovered, then Boullosa’s novel enacts such a constant interrogation.
Clearly, therefore, Boullosa’s selections of historical excerpts invite
the reader to question historical veracity, and illustrate what Chorba has
asserted regarding the functioning of the historical texts in this novel,
namely:
Llanto does not assimilate its historical intertexts: whole blocks of documents from Cortés’s Cartas de relación , Bernal Díaz’s Historia verdadera ,
and the codices Aubin, Florentino, and Ramírez are pasted between the
fragments of the novel, letting the texts speak for (and contradict) themselves. (175)
While Chorba’s observation about the contradictory nature of the
extracts chosen by Boullosa is illuminating, it is, however, not strictly
true that Boullosa does not assimilate the historical intertexts she uses.
In fact, in addition to the extensive citation of historical documents,
several of the fictional sections of the novel do indeed rework the events
described in these sources, as Boullosa engages in an active reworking
and reinvention of historical events.
Again, the particular focus of this reworking lies in the controversial
moments of Moctezuma’s death, as Boullosa proposes an alternative point
of view—both in the literal and figurative sense—on this event. Boullosa
at once attempts to voice an alternative perspective on events, and also
conveys this perspective through an alternative subject who records the
events. This new point of view comes not from outside observers of
events, as in the Cartas de relación of Cortés, or in the accounts of the
anonymous writers and illustrators of the codices. Nor, however, does
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this point of view come from an internal vantage point of Moctezuma’s
inner thoughts as he faces death. Instead, it is the body itself in death that
is afforded a voice: not an interiority inhabiting the body, but the actual
body.11 This insistence on the body is significant because it is the body
that is precisely the source of confusion and contradiction in the historical excerpts included in the novel—that is, the truth of what happened
to Moctezuma’s body, and who caused his death, has never been conclusively agreed upon by historians. From this innovative point of view,
Boullosa reveals the falsity of accepted historical discourse:
Cuando sacaron al cadáver para engañarlos con que iban a oír las palabras
de su emperador, olvidaron poner la música que antecede su aparición,
los tambores, la invocación [ . . . ]. Todo era falso, y el cuerpo que alguien
detenía para que no cayera (pues si era un muerto) se repetía a si mismo
las palabras que le habían sido dichas el día de su coronación: “¿Qué hará
si en su tiempo se destruye su reino, o nuestro señor enviase sobre usted
su ira, enviando pestilencia? ¿Qué hará si en su tiempo se destruye el
reino y sus resplandor se volviese en tiniebla?” Pero dejó el orden de sus
recuerdos cuando sintió sobre su carne muerta, en la frente, una piedra
lanzada desde allá abajo y se dijo: “No es para mí, es para Hernán Cortés,
porque quién no se dará cuenta de que me han matado, pero me ha atinado a mí, en la frente” y cuando terminó de decirse esa frase, cambió el
curso de su pensamiento y dejó que sus venas de sangre ya inmóvil y un
poco descompuesta babearan sangre en el lugar en que habían aventado
la piedra. (32)
When they brought out his corpse in order to make them believe that
they would hear the words of the emperor, they forgot to use the music
that is supposed to announce his appearance, the drums, the invocation . . . Everything was false, and the body that someone held so that
it would not fall (because it was, indeed, dead) repeated to himself the
words that had been said the day of his coronation, “What will you do if,
in your time, your kingdom is destroyed, or if our lord sends over you his
ire, sending pestilence? What will you do if in your time your kingdom is
destroyed and its brilliance be turned to darkness? But he left the order
of his words when he felt, on his dead f lesh, on his forehead, the stone
thrown from below and said “This isn’t meant for me, it’s for Hernán
Cortés because who won’t realize that they have killed me, but that they
have hit me, on the forehead” and when he finished saying the phrase,
he changed the course of his thought and allowed his already unf lowing and decomposed veins to trickle out blood from the place where the
stone had struck.
This passage proposes a series of challenges to historiographical norms.
The first of these lies in its reworking of history, since the passage
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proposes that history is falsehood, with the “todo era falso” standing
for historical accounts as a whole, as much as this particular episode. If
Hayden White has famously argued that narrative history is the form in
which “the conflicting claims of the imaginary and the real are mediated, arbitrated, or resolved in a discourse” (4), then Boullosa’s text lays
bare the mediation of these conf licting claims, rather than resolving
them in a discourse. Second, it is significant that this falsehood lies not
just in the retrospective recording and reworking of events in accounts,
textbooks, and so forth—instances in which “real” events are rewritten
and distorted to comply with a particular agenda. Rather, Boullosa
takes this notion one step further, as she suggests that history—at least
in the case of Moctezuma—is already falsehood in the moment of its
enactment. That is, Boullosa’s play with historical intertexts not only
lays bare the “conflicting claims” that narrative history would conceal,
but also, crucially, shows how the “real” itself is staged. For, as this
extract reveals, the appearance of Moctezuma, purportedly to speak to
the crowd, was in itself a staged event. Thus, history was already being
manipulated in the moment of its making; the manipulation of historical truth, Boullosa suggests, lies not just in the fact that the victors
wrote their own version of events afterward to suit their own ends, but
in that the very facts in themselves were staged.12 Boullosa’s narrative
therefore questions the entire foundation of historical discourse—the
notion that the actual events took place, even if subsequent accounts
may falsify—and moves toward erasing the distinction drawn by White
between the imaginary and the real.
This innovative take on history is also accompanied by an innovative
role for the body within the development of historical events, as this
passage reveals. The falsified historical event takes place through the
manipulation of the body, as the corpse of Moctezuma is made to function as if it were alive, in order to fulfill the role that Cortés wanted it
to play. Yet, at the same time—and perhaps, we may surmise, as a result
of this outrage—in Boullosa’s version, the dead body is shown to resist
classification as dead. Here, the corpse of Moctezuma refuses to conform to expected behavior, as it repeats words to itself, evokes memories, and controls bodily f luids, in a seemingly endless f low of verbs— se
repetía a si mismo, dejó el orden de sus recuerdos, sintió, se dijo, cambió
el curso de su pensamiento [he repeated to himself, kept the order of his
memories, felt, told himself, changed the course of his thought]—all
verbs that require an active human subject. These activities constitute
a reworking of the conventional functioning of the body, as the dead
body still feels, speaks, and has memories—features that are exclusive
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to living bodies. Moreover, this corpse is no conventional human body;
in addition to the magical extension of its capacities beyond death, it
is capable of feats beyond that of living humans. In its ability to let its
blood f low at will, the corpse reveals even greater control over corporeal functions than the conventional living body does, and shapes the
course of historical events. The corpse then, for Boullosa, becomes the
ultimate example of a jarring witness: a witness that refuses to conform to accepted versions of events, to accepted norms of historiography (which clearly would not classify the dead as reliable witnesses),
and to accepted norms of corporeal conduct. Moctezuma’s corpse here,
thus, becomes another of the posthuman bodies that inhabit many of
Boullosa’s works,13 bodies that fail to comply with the conventional
functioning of the human body, and, as such provide disruptions to
established categories of understanding.
As this sequence progresses, the corpse takes center stage. As it is
shown to the crowd, it attempts to hear what they say: “¿Le decían algo
a él? ¿insultaban la Malinche? ¿Sabrían cómo hacer a estos bárbaros
extraños la guerra?” (Boullosa 1992: 32). [Did they say something to
him? Were they insulting the Malinche? Did they know how to make
war against these strange barbarians?] This passage continues Boullosa’s
investigation into historical truth since in this sequence, even the participant in the events—the corpse that would provide the ultimate
vantage point from which to tell the truth of Moctezuma’s death—
is unable to hear what is being said by the crowd. Here what would
be the most informed witness about the death—the corpse itself—can
only comment on not knowing, on not hearing. Thus even participants
in the events, Boullosa suggests, are unable to verify historical truth,
and the nature of historical discourse is constantly under question. The
accretion of interrogatives in this extract is significant, suggesting that
historical accounts raise questions, but do not offer answers. These and
other examples within the novel provide a wealth of fictional reworkings
of historical events that come to challenge some of the central tenets of
historical discourse.
In addition, significant within this extract is the reversal and reuse
of terminology, since, from the point of view of Moctezuma’s corpse,
the bárbaros are the Spaniards. Such an appellation reverses the conventional use of this term, in which colonizing Iberians denoted the indigenous populations as barbaric. The depiction of the native inhabitants
of the Americas as barbarous beings—a depiction that was frequently
used as justification for waging war upon them—can be traced back
as far as Columbus’s journal, in which inhabitants of certain islands
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in the Caribbean were purported to be monstrous beings, “hombres de
un ojo y otros con hocicos de perros que comían los hombres” (Colón
1985: 166; journal entry November 4, 1492) [men with one eye and
others with canine snouts that ate men]. This tendency to categorize the
indigenous populations as barbarous continued throughout the colonial
period, during which, as historian Santa Arias notes, “colonialist representations such as those of Vespucci, Gómara and Oviedo perpetuated
the myth of the existence of the ‘wild man,’ ‘savage’ or ‘barbarian’”
(Arias 1993: 165). The term “bárbaro” is, therefore, highly charged,
carrying with it European connotations, and implying a process of othering. In Boullosa’s narrative, however, Moctezuma’s corpse reverses the
direction of this nomenclature, taking up the European term and turning it against the Spaniards’.
In addition to these fictional reworkings and questionings of historical events in the novel, there is yet another layer of fictionalizing taking
place that comes about in the self-conscious ref lections on the reworking of these events. Boullosa’s investigation into history thus has three
layers in all: first, the inclusion of actual historical accounts; second,
her own fictionalized versions that take figures from these accounts
as their basis; and third, her fictionalized author figure who ref lects
upon this fictionalization process. Indeed, we could even go so far as to
argue for four levels, if we divide the first of these—the inclusion of the
actual historical accounts—into two distinct levels, comprising on
the one hand the events that took place, and on the other the biased
(fictionalized?) historical account that was written on these events. Or
we could even divide the first of these into three: the events themselves;
the fictionalized events (i.e., Cortés creating his own fiction in the
moment of historical enactment by using a corpse to imitate the living
Moctezuma); and finally, the fictionalized historical account given of
the events that have taken place. Boullosa’s narrative thus reveals layer
upon layer of fictionalizing, as history is shown not to be a final truth,
but instead each account implies another layer beneath.
If the layers beneath—those of historical accounts and Boullosa’s
fictional reworking—constantly raise doubts and interrogations, the
final, upper layer—that of the self-conscious ref lection on the attempts
to create a fiction based on these historical sources—similarly engages
in questioning, and in a refusal to provide answers. Moreover, as an
extra layer of textuality, these self-conscious sections provide another
example of the multiple narrations and fictionalizations that characterize historical accounts. These self-conscious reflections on the writing
process appear at several points within the novel, and are preceded by
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the heading “fragmento de novela” [novel fragment].14 These metafictional episodes, which are enclosed in inverted commas, are ruminations on the process of writing a novel, one of which, in the seventh
fragment, is directly identified as the novel we are reading (96).15 The
fourth of these fragments comments on the status of Moctezuma within
the fictional process:
Y entonces alguien escribió lo siguiente:
(cuarto fragmento de novela)
“Pero, ¿qué se me ha vuelto Moctezuma? La posibilidad de hacer una
novela ‘fantástica’. Novelaría la cosmovisión nahua: manera tan distinta
de ver el mundo que es simplemente fantástica. E imbricaría lo fantástico
con el relativo ‘realismo’ de los otros personajes.”
Las líneas anteriores estaban tachadas, con una raya ahorcando por el
centro a todas las palabras, de la que sólo se salvaba un párrafo. (67)
And then someone wrote the following:
(fourth fragment of the novel)
“But what hasMontezuma turned into? The possibility of making a
fantastic novel. I would novelize the nahua cosmovision, such a different way of saying the world that is simply fantastic. I would overlay the
fantastic with the relative realism of the characters.
The lines above were crossed out, with a line strangling the center of
all the words from which only one paragraph was saved.
This fragment, as with the other fragmentos de novela within Llanto,
comments on the writing process itself, and makes specific reference to
the novel we are reading. Significantly, this reflection on the process of
writing this novel also raises the issue of authorship, with its reference to
the fact that “alguien escribió lo siguiente.” The person behind the writing of these lines is never clearly identified, and the first-person narrator
of this fragment is distanced from the fictitious writer of these lines. As
with Boullosa’s later novel, Cielos de la tierra ,16 the figure assumed by
Boullosa’s narrator-author figure is thus more of the compiler than the
author. The tactics employed by Boullosa here recall those used by Roa
Bastos in his complex masterpiece Yo, el supremo (1974)—a novel that
also engaged in close interrogation of historical intertexts—in which
unidentified writings in the margins began to appear, writings whose
ownership was never clearly identified, and never clearly distinguished
from the narrator himself. Here, in Boullosa, we have a similar situation, as, instead of the fictionalized author figure writing the lines that
we read, there is a mysterious third party who writes and also crosses
out sections within this novel. Neither the fictionalized author nor the
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reader can be certain of the identity of the writer of these lines. The
questions that Boullosa raises in this extract have implications for the
issue of authorship in the wider context of this novel: just as we question who is doing the writing behind these fictional lines that we read,
so too we should question who is doing the writing behind the historical accounts we read. These writings and crossings out are reminiscent
of the Florentine Codex , with its insertions and deletions, and remind
us constantly to question the source and authenticity of the various
texts—both historical and fictional—that make up Llanto.
Further on in the text, the ref lections on the writing process are
again interlinked with the figure of Moctezuma and the issue of historical truth:
Es una necedad estúpida querer escribir una novela de Moctezuma II.
Sabios quienes al contar nuestra historia olvidan disertar acerca de las
razones de su raro comportamiento [ . . . ]. Son sabios, porque sólo del
mundo que arrasó hay suficientes indicios. Tenemos con qué saber qué
sintió, pensó, opinó Felipe II o Carlos V, pero en cambio de Moctezuma
no quedaron indicios. [ . . . ] Los juicios siempre son obtenidos mirando
de afuera. En torno a su persona ocurre lo mismo que en torno a su
muerte: unos dicen que murió apedrado por los mexicas, otros que asesinado por los españoles, la verdad es que no se sabe. (75–76)
It is a stupid foolishness to want to write a novel about Montezuma II.
Those who narrate our history without holding forth on the reasons for
his strange behavior are wise. They are wise because only of the world
that they destroyed are there sufficient indications. We have what we
need to know what Phillip II or Charles V felt, thought and opined,
but of Montezuma there was nothing left. The judgments are always
obtained by looking in from outside. What happens with his person is
the same as what happened with his death. Some say he was stoned by
the Mexicas, others say that the Spaniards killed him, but the truth is
that no one knows.
In this section, the narrator/compiler figure provides us with specific comments on historiography that could well serve as a guide to the practice
of the novel we are in the process of reading. The comments here on
the partiality of historical sources, on the impossibility of accessing any
real truth regarding the figure of Moctezuma, and on the way in which
the winning side writes history, can all be taken as comments on the
historical extracts from codices and journals that Boullosa has included
in this novel. Moreover, the insistence on forgetting and deleting—
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with the ironic praise for the “sabios” who refrain from discussing
Moctezuma’s motives—highlights that history is as much a process of
omissions and deletions as of verifiable truths.
These various layers of fictionalizing and questioning of historical
events reach their culmination in the contemporary story that runs
throughout the text, in the shape of Moctezuma’s transportation to
modern-day Mexico City. In what could perhaps be seen as the ultimate in fictionalizing Moctezuma, he is transported through time—
although, significantly, not through space—into the present, to be
discovered by three women, Margarita, Luisa, and Laura, who, after a
night of drinking, are strolling through the Parque Hundido in Mexico
City. Moctezuma then spends a period of time with the three women
before disappearing once again. This ambiguous science fiction (SF)
narrative runs alongside the historical sections in the novel, in such a
way that the narrative switches abruptly from a contemporary setting
to historical citation, from ruminations on the status of this novel to
fictionalized versions of historical events. The constant intrusion of the
SF narrative into the historical story functions to relativize the historical documents, and to suggest a link between this contemporary
fictionalization and its predecessors. If, as Boullosa’s novel shows, the
Moctezuma of historical record is already falsified, and was mobilized
in the interests of biased historical accounts, then Boullosa’s fictionalized Moctezuma, traveling to the twentieth century, serves to highlight
the continued appropriation of historical figures for contemporary purposes. Whereas in the seventeenth century, Moctezuma was mobilized
to suit the interests of the Spanish and indigenous scribes, respectively,
over the course of time he has similarly been mobilized by a variety of
political regimes and discourses, ranging from the Porfiriato, to contemporary textbooks. His appearance in modern-day Mexico City, as
I shall argue below, is thus an ironic commentary on the propensity of
politicians to recuperate figures from the past for their own ends.
Within the narrative describing this twentieth-century version of
Moctezuma, geographical location and the landscape of the city take
on a special significance, as the women who discover Moctezuma take
him on a tourist jaunt around Mexico City, showing him the sights.
Yet, as this unorthodox travel narrative progresses, some of the norms of
travel writing become challenged by the cross-contamination of spatial
travel with temporal travel. For it must be remembered that Moctezuma
is a time-traveler: he has traveled not through space but through time,
and, as such, his journey through Mexico City disrupts the norms of
the geographical features he encounters. Toward the beginning of their
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travels through the city, the three friends show him the typical cityscape
of contemporary Mexico City, as seen from the slopes of the Parque
Hundido:
De ahí se veían los edificios frente al Parque, los altos que hay en Porfirio
Díaz, las casas, los automóviles estacionados, los cables de luz, los laboratorios Frontera, un salón de belleza y pasaron dos coches en dos distintos
sentidos. Sin nombrar nada, él miró: sus pupilas se habían vuelto huecas
de la impresión.
Él no pudo contenerse y estalló en llanto. (53)
From there they could see the building in front of the park, the tall ones
that are on Porfirio Díaz, the houses, the parked cars, the electrical lines,
the Frontera laboratories, a beauty parlor and two cars went by in different directions. Without saying anything, he watched, his pupils wide
with amazement.
He couldn’t contain himself and he broke out in a cry.
Boullosa here makes use of, and ironizes, what is now a standard and
rather clichéd trope of travel writing, that of conveying the exoticism of
the new. This trope has particular relevance for Latin America, given the
frequency with which travel accounts of Europeans visiting the Americas
described the continent in terms of marvels and wonders (see Williams
and Lewis 1993), forming part of what Zavala has termed an “imperial
gaze” in which the New World was assigned the status of “exotic object”
(326, 325). Yet Boullosa’s assumption of this trope works to destabilize it as, through the injection of time -travel into this travel-narrative
scenario, our contemporary world is othered. What is exoticized here
are precisely the everyday elements of Mexico City that, for the women
who guide him through the city, are so commonplace as to be virtually ignored. Moreover, and more importantly, this episode demonstrates
the collapsing of time frames implied by time-travel, and inherent to
the postmodern era, since the view that Moctezuma has of the Colonia
del Valle kaleidoscopes the Porfiriato (represented by the Calle Porfirio
Díaz, named after the dictator) with the hypermodern (represented by
the edificios altos and the salones de belleza , the latter representing our
late capitalist obsession with the image). This image, thus, represents the
condensation of historical time—something that is already enacted in
the recuperation of a historical figure in contemporary contexts, and that
emblematizes the postmodern era in which Boullosa is writing. To use
David Harvey’s famous phrase, time-travel in this novel thus represents
“space-time compression.” Harvey has argued that in the late capitalist,
postmodern era, the meanings of space and time have shifted, since we
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are experiencing “an intense phase of space-time compression that has
had a disorienting and disruptive impact upon political-economic practices” (284). The science fiction trope of time-travel—where time and
space are quite literally transposed—thus stands, in this novel, for the
postmodern era of which Harvey talks.
The three women and Moctezuma then continue their trip through
Mexico City by car, stopping in the Paseo de la Reforma, one of the main
thoroughfares in central Mexico City that has several monuments and
statues along its length. Among these is the monument to Cuauhtémoc,
the last Aztec emperor, erected in 1887 at the height of the Porfiriato,
and part of what Ann de León has described as the científicos ’ appropriation of “pre-Hispanic and colonial indigenous material culture” in
order to “present Mexico as a modern nation” (León 40). Cuauhtémoc,
for the Porfiriato, thus served to represent a “legacy of native resistance,
culminating with Mexico’s present independence from Spain” (42).
Crucially, de León argues, Porfirio Diaz’s científicos “did not promote
the pre-Hispanic past in order to glorify the living indigenous peoples’
but ‘aimed to link the present government to the past by appropriating
these re-discovered ruins and material culture” (40). What took place,
then, in the construction of this statue as in other works of the Porfirian
era, was an appropriation of historical figures, their decontextualization, and their mobilization in the service of contemporary discourses
and concerns.
This statue of Cuauhtémoc, embodying as it does the ambiguous
recuperation of historical figures for contemporary purposes, appears
in Boullosa’s text, with the narrative voice representing Margarita,
stating: “Paseo de la Reforma. Vamos a enseñarle a Cuauhtémoc, a ver
qué dice. Pero se paró frente a la estatua y no dijo nada” (56). [Paseo
de la Reforma. We’re going to show him Cuauhtémoc, to see what
he says. But he stood in front of the statue and didn’t say anything].
The terse statements by Margarita are reminiscent of a tourist itinerary, but the functioning of this itinerary is disrupted by Moctezuma.
Instead of reacting to the statue of Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec emperor,
Moctezuma shows no response and does not recognize its iconic value.
This monument, intended to emblematize Mexico’s nationhood, fails
to convey its meaning to the viewer, and this failure is a comment on
the process of historiographic recuperation. Here, we have Moctezuma
confronted with a concrete example of the process to which he has been
subjected throughout the course of history: the decontextualization of
historical figures and their remobilization for contemporary concerns. In
Cuauhtémoc’s case, this mobilization was in service of the consolidation
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of the nation-state under Porfirio Díaz, and mirrors what has happened
to Moctezuma himself, decontextualized and made to stand for something completely other. Moctezuma’s reaction to the statue is, then, a
rejection of historical discourses (whether textual or plastic) that aim to
recuperate historical figures for their own ends.
Furthermore, in an attempt to continue this tourist trail, the women
then take Moctezuma to see the series of statues that run along the
Paseo de la Reforma,17 and stop in front of a statue of one of the writers of the constitution. Again Moctezuma’s reaction fails to matchthe
women’s expectations, as, instead of interpreting the statue according
to its representational and symbolic value, he considers the constituent
elements of it:
Me di cuenta que él veía todas nuestras estatuas iguales, la inmensa que
reproduce a Cuauhtémoc con un raro penacho vertical y una lanza a
punto de escapársele de las manos, y las pequeñas estatuas que bordean
el Paseo de la Reforma, vestidas con casacas y pantalones entallados,
usando lentes y barbas de candado, algunas con libros en las manos y las
manos atrás de la espalda. Las estatuas le parecían iguales; no las diferenciaba, el bronce de que fueron forjadas era más importante que la forma
que reproducían. (57)
I realized that he saw all our statues as the same, the huge one that reproduces Cuauhtémoc with a strange, vertical plumage and a lance that is
about to fall out of his hands and the small statues that run along the
sides of the Paseo de la Reforma, dressed in jackets and trousers, wearing
glasses and beards, some with books in their hands, or with their hands
behind their backs. The statues all seemed the same to him, he didn’t tell
them apart. The bronze with which they were made was more important
than the forms that it reproduced.
Again, Moctezuma’s actions as he views the statues refuse to comply
with the conventional functioning of monuments—monuments stand
in for national identity, representing different moments in Mexico’s history. He refuses to relate to them for their symbolic value as national
icons and to engage with their implied purpose of consolidating a
sense of nationhood. Monuments, as Lefebvre has noted, function by
“effect[ing] a ‘consensus,’” and this in the strongest sense of the term,
rendering it practical and concrete” (220). In Boullosa’s text, the functioning of the monument is contested; here, values are not shared by the
viewers of the monument, and a consensus is not reached. While the
three women of contemporary Mexico understand the implications
of these statues and the values they represent, and thus constitute the
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ideal consensus of people assumed by the monument, Moctezuma
does not share their reading. In this way, Moctezuma’s refusal to enter
into the assumption of shared values challenges what Janice Monk has
defined as the power relations that infuse monuments (Monk 1992).
Moreover, such a challenge to the status of the monument has implications for the status of the body. As Pile, commenting on Lefebvre, notes,
“monuments ‘speak’ of a particular spatial code, which simultaneously
commands bodies and orders space” (Pile 212). In this way, it is significant that the nonconformist body of Moctezuma—a time-traveled
body thathas defied death and that maintained its own subjectivity
even as a corpse—should refuse to submit to the monument’s aim of
commanding bodies. Indeed, Moctezuma’s reaction—“veía todas nuestras estatuas iguales”—is an apt judgment on the statues in the light of
what Boullosa’s historiographic play has shown: that is, these statues
are in a sense, “todos iguales”—they are all decontextualized historical figures who are made to stand for something else. The statue, thus,
represents historiography, and at the same time, I would argue, it represents space-time compression. That is, the statue is history, rendered
spatially, and as such is emblematic also of the space-time compression
of the postmodern era.
Some pages later in the narrative, the group moves on to Bellas Artes,
and shows Moctezuma the imposing building commissioned by Porfirio
Díaz:
Margarita disminuyó la velocidad del automóvil cuando llegamos al
Palacio de Bellas Artes y él pidió con la mirada que nos detuviéramos. Se
bajó del automóvil, se acercó a las paredes de mármol y tocó el edificio,
se retiró unos pasos y miró los ángeles esculpidos, las figuras que están
en el edificio del Palacio de Bellas Artes. (62)
Margarita slowed the car when we arrived at the Palacio de Bellas Artes
and asked, with a look, that we stop. He got out of the car, approached
the marble walls and touched the building, he backed up a few paces and
looked at the sculptured angels, the figures that were on the building of
the Palacio de Bellas Artes.
Here Moctezuma privileges the tactile in his approach to the moments,
as he approaches and then touches the building. Whereas travel and
tourism conventionally function through the visual, in which, as Pitman
has pointed out “prominence [is] given to the faculty of sight” (Pitman,
np), Moctezuma’s actions here refuse to comply with the preeminence of
the visual in the travel enterprise. Instead, his insistence on the tactile
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could be seen as a refusal to engage with the scopophilia of conventional
traveling, and a refusal to engage in what Pratt has aptly termed the
“monarch-of-all-I-survey” trope common to European imperialist travel
accounts (202). This insistence on the tactility of the building, in preference to a visual reading, is a refusal of the “monarch-of-all-I-survey”
trope, and is commensurate with this new, SF body who reacts otherwise to the scenarios it encounters.
Moreover, the conventions of the travel narrative are further dislocated
by the nature of the travel that Moctezuma is taking; Moctezuma has
not traveled any distance, but has instead traveled temporally, moving
through several centuries to the present moment. This temporal rather
than spatial travel leads to disruptions in the expected understanding
of geography, as he views Mexico City: “Laura le contestó entonces,
tomándolo de la mano, ‘Está usted en Tenochtitlan, pero mucho tiempo
después,’ y como él pareció no escucharla, ella repitió, ‘Estamos en
Tenochtitlan, en otros tiempos, en otra era, en otros años’” (62). [Laura
answered him then, taking him by the hand, “You are in Tenochtitlan,
but much later.” And as he seemed not to hear her, she repeated, “We
are in Tenochtitlan, but in other times, in an other era, in other years”].
The fixed points that give a sense of locatedness are, for Moctezuma,
gone, and Laura’s words are both true and untrue. This is Tenochtitlán,
and yet, clearly, not Tenochtitlán, for we are now in Mexico City, the
modern-day megalopolis of 20 million inhabitants. The experience of
Moctezuma as he finds himself a traveler and stranger in his own land
suggests that, although geographical location is purportedly fixed, temporal succession in fact enacts a series of changes to geographical fixity. Thus, if standard travel narratives assume travel through space to
be the norm, travel through time such as that which Moctezuma has
experienced, disrupts travel narrative conventions. Again, these disruptions caused by time-travel convey at the same time the compression of
historical depth enacted in the recuperation of historical figures, and
the compression of historical depth representative of the postmodern
era. This episode, then, in its emphasis on the disruptions caused by the
time-traveling of Moctezuma, provides a ref lection once again on the
way that time and space are compressed in the postmodern era.
Time-traveling is precisely the trope that represents this postmodern
phenomenon, because time has been displaced onto space.
In these various ways, Boullosa’s novel enacts a series of disruptions
to historiography, to the status of the body, and to the travel narrative. As we have seen, through this transportation of Moctezuma to
a modern-day Mexico City, the novel enacts a reworking of historical
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discourse that also entails a parallel reworking of narrative structure,
and of the body, as jointly, narrative progression, historical veracity, and
the functioning of the body come under attack within the novel. These
various disruptions are all explored through the central trope of timetravel, as Boullosa uses time-travel as a device both to explode historiography and to represent the postmodern era. Time-travel, then is a way
to explore both the constituent concepts of which this hyphenated term
is composed: to explore time (in the sense of the veracity of historical
time, and postmodern collapsing of time), and travel (in the sense of the
depiction of geographical space, and the postmodern spatiality).
Notes
*I would like to thank participants at the Department of Latin American
Studies Research Seminar, University of California, Irvine, in particular Lucía
Guerra Cunningham, Juan Bruce-Novoa, and Jill Robbins, for their helpful
comments on an earlier version of this chapter given as a research paper in
2006.
1. Boullosa alternates within her text between various spellings of the Aztec
emperor’s name, using “Motecuhzoma” when the character refers to himself (e.g., p. 54), “Moctezuma” when the women of modern-day Mexico
City refer to him (e.g., p. 63), and several variations in direct citations of
codices (e.g., “Montezuma,” p. 37; ‘Muctuzuma,” p. 83). I will, however,
use the one term “Moctezuma” to standardize use in my article, except
when directly quoting from the novel itself.
2 . In her study, López identifies dozens of such novels, from countries ranging from Costa Rica to Argentina, and provides an in-depth analysis of five
of these (Juan José Saer’s El entenado ; Homero Ardijis’s Memorias del Nuevo
Mundo and 1492: vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón de Castilla ; Herminio
Martínez’s Diario maldito de Núñez de Guzmán ; and Abel Posse’s El largo
atardecer del caminante).
3. Llanto could be counted as Boullosa’s fourth or fifth novel, depending on
whether the earlier works, Son vacas, somos puercos (1991), and El médico
de los piratas (1992) are considered two distinct novels, or the latter an
abridged version of the first. While some critics such as Goosse consider
El médico to be “una version reducida del primero en un lenguaje comprimido” (Goosse 1999: 134) [a reduced version of the first in a compressed
language], thus making Llanto Boullosa’s fourth novel, I am here following Boullosa’s own classification of El médico as a distinct work in its own
right, since, according to the author, these works, while dealing with the
same subject, have “dos acercamientos y estilos diferentes para narrarla”
and as such are two distinct novels (personal correspondence with the
author, October 2005).
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4. Ferrero Cándenas argues that there are four novels within this text: “First,
there is the main plot where three women in contemporary Mexico City
encounter Moctezuma II. Second, nine metanovelistic fragments narrated
by multiple fictional authors who report on the difficulties of writing the
main plot. Third, there is a narration in which it is made explicit how certain bodies wish to transcend their ‘dust particle condition,’ being carried
by a wind that stands as a metaphor for history. Finally, there are some fragments named ‘Otra voz’ that concentrate on the different historical versions
available of the death of Moctezuma” (Ferrero Cándenas 2008: 109).
5. The date can be surmised from p. 120, where it is stated that Moctezuma
disappeared a month later, in October 1989.
6 . Of Boullosa’s historical novels, four of these, in addition to Llanto, revisit
prior historical periods of the Americas: Son vacas, somos puercos (1991) and
El medico de los piratas (1992), which rework seventeenth-century piracy
in the Caribbean; Cielos de la tierra (1997), which of its three time frames,
includes that of Hernando de Rivas, narrating a chronicle of the Colegio
de Santa Cruz de Tlateloco in the sixteenth century; and Duerme (1994),
which recounts the exploits of the cross-dressing protagonist Claire in New
Spain. Others, such as La otra mano de Lepanto (2005) and La virgen y
la violín (2008), take episodes from European history as their intertexts
(the 1571 Battle of Lepanto, and the life of the sixteenth-century artist
Sofonisba Anguissola, respectively).
7. Carrie Chorba has pointed out the significance of this time span, noting
that, “significantly, the date is August 13, 1989, the anniversary of the
fall of Tenochtitlan to the Spaniards. 468 years have passed, marking nine
full cycles of 52 years (equivalent to an Aztec ‘century’)” (Chorba 1999:
174, n. 3).
8 . See Chorba, pp.174–175 for some examples of recent Mexican textbooks
that either distort or virtually ignore the figure of Moctezuma.
9. Peterson’s article then goes on to give several specific examples of how this
codex imitates European styles of illustration.
10. Anna Reid, in her article on Llanto, has taken this idea further, and considered other accounts not included in Boullosa’s novel. Reid points out
that even within the versions given by one side of the conflict, the accounts
do not coincide: “dos de los españoles que fueron testigos de la muerte de
Moctezuma nos dan dos relatos contradictorios” (Reid np). [Two of the
Spaniards that were witnesses of Montezuma’s death give us two contradictory stories.]
11. Boullosa’s fascination with bodies that speak beyond their death is also evident in Son vacas, somos puercos of 1991, in which the narrators of the novel
are dead, and in Duerme of 1994, where the protagonist Claire’s dead body
is miraculously revitalized and continues living.
12. In this interpretation, Boullosa’s argument concurs with the version given by
the Ramírez Codex .
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13. Other examples of posthuman and/or cyborg bodies in Boullosa’s novels can
be found in the characters Lear in Cielos de la tierra , and Claire in Duerme
(see my 2003 and 2006 articles for more on the cyborg in these novels).
14. Reid has commented on the significance of the number of fragments, noting that: “el hecho de que son nueve los fragmentos es significativo, dado
que al final del libro Boullosa escribe que es una novela ‘que las musas me
decidieron imposible’” (Reid np). [The fact that there are nine fragments is
significant, given that at the end of the book Boullosa writes that it is a novel
that the muses decided were impossible.].
15. This is revealed by the use of the novel’s title in this fragment, as the author
figure comments, “deserté del que me convocó a escribir Llanto” (Boullosa
1992: 96).
16. Cielos de la tierra starts with a fictitious “Nota del autor,” which declares
that “este libro está formado por tres diferentes relatos. Por razones que
desconozco, fue dado a mí para que yo intentara hacer de él una novela”
(Boullosa 1997: 13). Of course, the creation of a fictitious author/narrator
figure is an established literary trope, dating back at least as early as Cervantes’s Don Quijote, with its fictional narrator Cide Hamete Benengeli.
What differentiates Boullosa’s embedded author figure from earlier fictional
authors such as Cide Hamete is in the constant intrusions of the comments
of her unidentified author figure into the text.
17. In addition to the larger monuments (including the statue of Cuauhtémoc),
the Paseo de la Reforma also has 77 smaller statues running along its length
and that represent prominent figures in Mexico’s political, military, and
intellectual life.
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Work of Bernardino de Sahagún, Pioneer Ethnographer of Sixteenth-Century Aztec
Mexico (New York: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, 1988), 273–293.
Pfeiffer, Erna. “Las novelas históricas de Carmen Boullosa: ¿una escritura postmoderna?” In Sara Castro-Klarén, ed. Narrativa femenina en América Latina:
prácticas y perspectivas teóricas/ Latin American Women’s Narrative: Practices and
Theoretical Perspectives (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2003), 259–275.
Pile, Steve. The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity (London:
Routledge, 1996).
Pitman, Thea. “¿Un encuentro de miradas? Africa in the Eyes of Mexican Women
(Travel-)Writers.” Unpublished paper presented at the Institute of Latin American
Studies Research Seminar, University of Liverpool, October 6, 2005.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London:
Routledge, 1992).
Time Travel and History
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Reid, Anna. “La re-escritura de la conquista de México en Llanto, novelas imposibles
de Carmen Boullosa,” Espéculo: Revista de estudios literarios 24 (July-October
2003), Web, April 2010, 22.
Roa Bastos, Augusto. Yo, el supremo (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Argentina
Editores, 1974).
Taylor, Claire. ‘Cities, Codes and Cyborgs in Carmen Boullosa’s Cielos de la tierra,”
Bulletin of Spanish Studies 80.4 (2003): 477–493.
———. “Geographical and Corporeal Transformations in Carmen Boullosa’s
Duerme,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 83.3 (2006): 225–239.
Thomas, Hugh. The Conquest of Mexico (London: Hutchinson, 1993).
White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1987).
Williams, Jerry M. and Lewis, Robert E., eds. Early Images of the Americas: Transfer
and Invention (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1993).
Williamson, Edwin. The Penguin History of Latin America (London: Penguin,
1992).
Zavala, Iris, M. “Representing the Colonial Subject.” In René Jara and Nicholas
Spadaccini, eds., 1492–1992: Re/Discovering Colonial Writing (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 323–348.
CHAPTER 4
João Guimarães Rosa’s “A Young
Man, Gleaming, White” and the
Protocol of the Question
Braulio Tavares
Translated by M. Elizabeth Ginway
T
he vast oeuvre of Guimarães Rosa includes many tales of the
fantastic, but perhaps the only one that can readily be described
as science fiction is “Um moço muito branco” [“A Young Man,
Gleaming, White”], one of the 21 stories of the 1962 collection Primeiras
Estórias [First Stories]. In 1872, in the interior of Minas Gerais, during a
storm, what appears to be a meteor is seen falling from the sky. Days later,
a very pale young man, apparently having lost his memory and his ability to speak, suddenly appears in the region. A local rancher takes him
in and begins taking care of him, turning the young man into an object
of local curiosity. He is taken to mass and to other events where he
evokes strong feelings of well-being in those who approach him, and he
later provokes a series of small inexplicable events suggestive of paranormal powers. One night, with the help of an older black man, the
young man goes to an area of higher elevation, where he lights bonfires,
attracting a flying machine that takes him away.
This is the basic plot for many stories about alien visits to Earth, from
John Carpenter’s Starman (1984) with Jeff Bridges, to Steven Spielberg’s
E.T. (1982). First we have the alien’s arrival, then a rapid sequence of
small magical events, misunderstandings, and other inexplicable phenomena followed by a departure arranged by the mysterious visitor.
Guimarães Rosa takes up this line of narration in his own intricate
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elusive style, such that things are narrated in an indirect way, and many
of the story’s short episodes, though clearly described, seem to remain
unexplained. The overall impression is of a story full of unknowns, elements to which we can attribute different meanings upon subsequent
readings. One of the greatest qualities of Rosa as a narrator is his capacity to make his stories seem different each time we read them.
The Historical Chronicle
The primary element that contributes to this ambiguity is the fact that
the author opens his narrative using the tone of a historical chronicle
of a bygone era. Although this tone is muted after the first few paragraphs, the opening functions like the first chords of a song, hurling us
toward the emotional atmosphere planned by the author: “Na noite de
11 de novembro de 1872, na comarca do Serro Frio, em Minas Gerais,
deram-se fatos de pavoroso suceder, referidos nas folhas da época e exarados nas Efemérides” (86).1 [“On the night of November 11, 1872, in
the district of Serro Frio in Minas Gerais, there occurred eerie phenomena, which were referred to in contemporary newspapers and registered
in the astronomical tables” (99)]. 2 This tone of a historical event is the
author’s first rhetorical trick leading us to shifting ground where we
are never quite certain what we are being told, because we are dealing
with indirect or filtered narrative, numerous instances of recall, and
the inevitable metamorphoses that a story undergoes over a century of
retelling.
This gives us a story muddied or obscured by narrative, for as clear
as the details may be, we are still confronted with a typical case of the
unreliable narrator, a storyteller who repeatedly reminds us that his
tale has been altered by the accounts of previous generations and by the
passage of time: “ainda hoje se conta, mas transtornado incerto, pelo
decorrer do tempo” (87). [“They talk about him to this day, though
with a good deal of confusion and uncertainty because it was so long
ago” (100)]. Furthermore, some of the written account was interpreted
by the local priest who then sent his testimony in a sealed letter to
his superior, the canon Lessa Candaval. Two other works of Brazilian
science fiction (SF), “Da mayor speriencia” by Nilson Martello in the
anthology Além do tempo e do espaço [Beyond Space and Time] (1965)
and the novelette O 31º peregrino [The Thirty-First Pilgrim] (1993) by
Rubens Teixeira Scavone, also depict encounters with aliens described
in the heavy-handed and obscure style of a historical chronicle of
bygone eras.3
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The Young Man
From the beginning, the character of the visitor is characterized as a
marooned survivor of some type of accident. He is seen trying to hide
behind a cow pen, naked, rolled up in a blanket that he found by pure
luck. The narrator lets it be known that he shows indications of having
suffered a terrible misfortune: “ perdida a completa memória de si, sua
pessoa, além do uso da fala. Esse moço, pois, para ele sendo igual matéria o futuro que o passado? Nada ouvindo, não respondia, nem que não,
nem que sim” (87). [“ He had completely lost his memory and even his
use of speech. In his condition perhaps the future was indistinguishable
from the past: since he had lost all sense of time and could understand
nothing, he answered neither yea nor nay” (101)]. Having taken him to
mass, Father Bayão gets a sudden inspiration and shows him the sign
of the cross, which he accepts with utmost tranquility. It is repeatedly
implied by the narration that the youth possesses an angelic aspect,
given that the majority of people feel an inexplicable, almost divine,
affection for him:
Tão branco; mas não branquicelo, senão que de um branco leve, semidourado de luz: figurando ter por dentro da pele uma segunda claridade.
Sobremodo se assemelhava a esses estrangeiros que a gente não depara
nem nunca viu; fazia para si outra raça. (86–87)
[He was of an amazing whiteness, not at all sickly or wan, but of a fine
paleness, semi-gilded with light, which caused him to gleam as if he had
a source of brightness inside his body. He seemed to be a foreigner of
some kind, never met with before in those parts, almost as if he constituted a new race all by himself. (100)]
As soon as he is found, the young man is “adopted” by Hilário Cordeiro,
the rancher who first takes him under his wing. All the people who go
to the farm, curious to meet the outsider, have an instant sympathy for
him, except for the rancher Duarte Dias, whom the narrator describes
at length as angry, overbearing, and unjust.
Yet the most notable events involving the very pale young man are
centered on Duarte Dias and his daughter Viviana, who is beautiful
but isolated in her own world. Upon seeing her, the youth goes directly
over to her, and, to everyone’s dismay, rests his hand on her breast.
Duarte Dias has an outburst, claiming that the stranger must marry his
daughter for such an offense, but after much pleading, the priest and
others manage to convince him of the outrageousness of his demand.
However, soon a different type of miracle occurs: “Também a moça
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Viviana, com radiosos sorrisos, o serenava. Ela, que, a partir dessa hora,
despertou em si um enfim de alegria, para todo o restante de sua vida,
donde um dom” (90). [“Young Viviana soothed him, too, by her radiant
smiles; from the moment of the youth’s touch there was awakened in her
an unending joy, a pure gift which she enjoyed for the rest of her life”
(105–106)]. Duarte Dias is involved in another episode on the fifth of
August, after the youth has spent some ten months in the region, when
he arrives at Hilário Cordeiro’s ranch with a strange request. Duarte
Dias had demanded custody of the young man soon after he was found,
alleging that he seemed related to the Rezendes, his distant relatives.
Cordeiro did not agree at the time, and after much debate, managed
to keep the young man under his protection. Months after the incident
with Viviana, Duarte, moved to tears, begs Hilário to allow the young
man stay at his house, where he leads Duarte’s workers to an abandoned
kiln:
E lá indicou que mandasse cavar: com o que se achou, ali, uma grupiara
de diamantes; ou um panelão de dinheiro, segundo diversa tradição. Por
arte de qual prodígio, Duarte Dias pensou que ia virar riquíssimo, e
mudado de fato esteve, da data por diante, em homem sucinto, virtuoso
e bondoso, suspendentemente, consoante o asseverar sobremaravilhado
dos coevos. (91)
[There he made signs for the men to dig, and they found a diamond
deposit—or maybe a big pot of gold, as another story has it. Naturally,
Duarte Dias thought he would become a very rich man after this, and
he changed from that day on into a good, upright man, so his awestruck
contemporaries claim. (106)]
The Ship
The black man, José Kakende, is a key figure in the story. In his notable
preface to Primeiras estórias , Paulo Rónai observes that the two classes
of people favored by Guimarães Rosa are children and the mildly insane
(xxvi). One of the first people to feel affection for the pale young man
is Kakende, who is said to have witnessed an extraordinary event on the
night preceding his strange appearance. Presented as an unreliable witness, Kakende is described as a:
escravo meio alforriado de um músico sem juízo, e ele próprio de idéia
conturbada; por último, então, delirado varrido, pelo fato de padecidos
os grandes pavores, no lugar do Condado: girava agora por aqui e ali, a
“A Young Man, Gleaming, White”
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65
pronunciar advertências e desorbitadas sandices – querendo por em pé de
verdade portentosa aparição que teria enxergado, nas margens do Rio do
Peixe, na véspera das catástrofes. (87)
[former slave of a half-witted musician . . . touched in the head ever since
a shock he had suffered during the calamities in the country, so that he
began to wander from place to place, shouting warnings to the people
and crying out wild lunatic tales about a portentous apparition that he
swore he had seen on the banks of the Rio do Peixe, just before the cataclysm. (101–102)]
And it befalls Father Bayão to describe, in his letter to the canon of
Mariana, the events Kakende is said to have seen that night, as the narrator quotes from the letter:
o rojo de vento e grandeza de nuvem, em resplandor, e nela, entre fogo, se
movendo uma artimanha amarelo-escura, avoante trem, chato e redondo,
com redoma de vidro sobreposta, azulosa, e que, pousando, de dentro,
desceram os Arcanjos, mediante rodas, labaredas e rumores. (88)
[a dragging wind and majesty of the cloud full of spendor, and in it,
swirled round by fire, a dark-yellow moving object, a f lying vehicle, f lat,
with rounded edges, and surmounted by a glass bell of a bluish color.
When it landed, there descended from it archangels, amidst wheels, f laring f lames, and the pealing of trumpets. (103)]
It is a trick of Guimarães Rosa to set up for us a type of discourse that
resonates in this way, since the description by the black man Kakende
would mean very little to his contemporaries in 1872, but to us as
present-day readers it reveals, without a shadow of doubt, the classic
image of the flying saucer. As if to minimize any such doubt, the image
appears in the drawings done by Luís Jardim for the first edition of
Primeiras estórias —often unpardonably missing in contemporary editions of the book—confirming the image.4 In fact, Primeiras estórias
may be one of those rare books to have an illustrated table of contents, in
which each title of the story has a corresponding horizontal illustration,
a series of small images off to the side done by Jardim, following the
instructions of Guimarães Rosa. The alien ship was seen only by the
most unreliable of narrators, whose discourse, filtered by the vocabulary of Father Bayão, ends up being similar to the famous visions of the
prophet Ezekiel, in the Old Testament: shimmering splendor, wheels,
fire, and the faces of mysterious creatures.5
José Kakende also becomes the constant companion of the pale young
man during his outings over those several months, when he observes the
stranger’s talent for mechanical tasks, repairing all types of machinery
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Braulio Tavares
in the cleverest way, as well as his interest in astronomy, as he often
watched the sky both during the day and at night. Kakende, just as he
had unwittingly seen the thunderous arrival of the first ship, serves as a
helper to the visitor, who has managed to convey directions to a second
ship that then arrives to rescue him:
José Kakende contava somente que o ajudara a acender, de secreto,
com formato, nove fogueiras; e, mais, o Kakende soubesse apenas repetir aquelas suas velhas e divagadas visões—de nuvem, chamas, ruídos,
redondos, rodas, geringonça e entes. Com a primeira luz do sol, o moço
se fora, tidas asas. (91)
[All José Kakende would say was that he had secretly helped light nine
bonfires in a pattern. Aside from that, he only repeated his old wild
descriptions of a cloud, f lames, noises, round things, wheels, a contraption of some sort and archangels. With the first sunlight, the youth had
gone off on wings. (107)]
Yet another clue about the alien origins of the youth is given to us, more
or less in the middle of the narrative, when the young man, going to
mass with Hilário Cordeiro’s family, runs into the blind man Nicolau,
a beggar who asks for alms at the door of the church. Upon seeing him,
the youth goes toward him and gives him something, which the blind
man feels, trying to see if it is money, and, discovering that it is not,
puts it into his mouth. The guide warns him that it is a type of seed
from a tree, but it turns out to be not of earthly origin:
deu um azulado pé de f lor, da mais rara e inesperada: com entreaspecto
de serem várias f lores numa única, entremeadas de maneira impossível,
num primor confuso, e, as cores, ninguém a respeito das concordou, por
desconhecidas no século; definhada, com pouco, e secada, sem produzir
outras sementes nem mudas, e nem os insetos a sabiam procurar. (89)
[From the seed sprouted a rare and unexpected bluish f lower, several
contraposed f lowers in one, all commingled impossibly in lovely confusion. The tints were of a kind not seen in our times; no two people could
even agree on precisely what the colors were. But soon it wilted and
withered away, producing no seeds nor shoots; even the insects had not
had the time to learn to seek it out. (103–104)]
The Final Facts
I take a certain amount of caution when I cite a story such as this one by
Guimarães Rosa as an example of science fiction (SF), since more radical readers of the genre run the risk of feeling disappointed. They can
“A Young Man, Gleaming, White”
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67
end up dissecting the story, line by line, looking for SF motifs, and in
the process, leave out or ignore what remains. This approach is an error
of reading that afflicts readers of all kinds of fiction, not just readers of
SF. Anyone who approaches a literary text with an agenda or checklist
of ideas and dedicates himself or herself to finding said ideas can hardly
manage to have a clear vision of the actual text, unless it has been written by someone with the same checklist. These theoretical criteria can
be used as type of “Procrustean Bed” to which the text is subjected; one
leaves out all that does not fit into the theoretical model, overemphasizing the elements that do fit. In the present analysis I may be doing this
here and there myself, without even realizing it.
The objective of a story like “A Young Man, Gleaming, White” is
not to explore the figure of the alien nor the civilization that he supposedly represents, but rather the human environment in which he lands,
as if by parachute. Studying the alien and “alienness” is a staple of
hard SF, whose main focus is scientific speculation. In the literature of
Guimarães Rosa, the alien is of interest only as a disturbing factor to the
environment, a catalyst of human reactions, and the source of a special
mystery that the story seeks to intensify more than to resolve.
Two other narratives come to mind in reading this story. The first is
the novel Sarah Canary (1991) by Karen Joy Fowler, a work that John
Clute, in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction , claims “may be the finest
First Contact novel yet written” (443). 6 The novel, curiously enough,
takes place in 1873, around the same time as Guimarães Rosa’s story.
A woman who neither speaks nor understands any human language
is first found wandering around a migrant workcamp in the Western
United States. She later attracts the sympathy of various characters,
among them a Chinese worker, a psychiataric patient recently escaped
from an asylum, and a feminist leader who is traveling throughout the
country giving speeches. The “alien” woman is given the name Sarah
Canary, and various individuals become her protectors, taking her with
them wherever they roam throughout the country, even though they
cannot communicate with her. No one know knows how she got there,
and words like “alien” or “extraterrestrial” are never mentioned. Perhaps
a mainstream reader would not even come up with this interpretation
of the story.
The other narrative that is comparable is Píer Paolo Pasolini’s film
Teorema (1968), a work that caused one of the great cinematic scandals of its era. A young visitor, handsome and mysterious, arrives at the
house of a bourgeois Italian family, and in the space of a few weeks ends
up having sexual relations with the entire household: the two children,
the mother, the maid, and finally the father. There is no mention of
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Braulio Tavares
who the stranger is, and no one calls him by name, although he seems
to be a friend of the family (and in certain moments, if I recall correctly, it is as if the family knows him only by references, and is thus
meeting him for the first time). After giving themselves to him, the
various members of the family break away from the life they have been
living up to that point. Critics saw several things in the character: an
erotic Christ, a destabilizing angel, a bisexual hippie, or an allegory of
Freudian-Marxist subversion.
The Protocol of the Question
It is irrelevant if Sarah Canary has actually come from another planet
or if the stranger in Teorema is in fact an angel. The mystery of their
origins is essential to the narrative, and it is essential that this mystery
have no answer. The same goes for the mysterious protagonist of “A
Young Man, Gleaming, White.” Why?
There are two “protocols” for reading narrative that I can call, for lack
of better terms, one of answering and one of questioning. In the first
case, the writer and the reader make an implict agreement as to a series of
questions, doubts, and mysteries that will be raised throughout the narrative, and, after a series of events and counterevents, these are answered in
a satisfactory way by the end. A reader decides to engage a book, a film,
a play, knowing that there is some type of answer awaiting him or her at
the end of the experience. There are at least two genres that rely totally on
this protocol: hard SF (by Arthur C. Clarke, Issac Asimov, etc.) and the
classic detective novel (by Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, etc.).
As for the other protocol, the final objective is not the answer, but
the question. A satisfactory resolution for this type of narrative does
not claim to answer these issues nor to clarify the mysteries presented,
but rather to give them a texture of multiplicity or difference. In this
way, each reexamination or rereading of the narrative makes it seem
that the text raises different questions. This happens because the work
is interwoven with tiny traces, allusions, and subtle suggestions, whose
numbers are so great and whose internal underpinnings are so complex
that it is impossible for a reader to keep them all in mind at the same
time. With each rereading, some of these elements grab the attention
of the reader, and others, which before seemed to be the most important, take on a secondary position. A narrative conceived and executed
according to this type of protocol cannot, and should not, offer a final
or definitive answer. It proposes to generate an inexhaustible number of
questions and mysteries.
“A Young Man, Gleaming, White”
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69
I have seen readers who are used to one of these protocols react to
the opposite one with considerable perplexity, impatience, frustration,
and irritation. Those who cultivate the “Answer Protocol” get irritated
by the “lack of meaning,” and “the lack of objectives” of narratives that
do not give them the answer they need. The others, when faced with a
story whose ending “ties up all the loose ends,” shrug and think, “Is that
all there is? Yes, but . . . so what?” And the book becomes immediately
dismissable, because all there was to learn was exhausted by the first
reading.
It may be that, although I am talking mainly about books and
authors, the earlier mentioned arguments are valid for all narrative
forms, which includes not only literature, but film, theater, comic
books, and other narratives. In film, for example, some of those specializing in the “Question Protocol” would be David Lynch, Raul Ruiz,
Luis Buñuel, etc.
It is natural that readers become accustomed to or feel a certain
attraction for a determined type of narrative throughout their lives,
and that books written in the opposite mode do not interest them. It
is, however, a common error, even among critics, to condemn a work
clearly conceived of in the parameters of one protocol, simply because it
does not satisfy the demands of the other.
The Imagined Past
In a study comparing the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Edgar Allan
Poe, American critic John T. Irwin calls attention to the fact that we
often have little sense of our knowledge of the past, which is often based
largely on imagination (135–136). We have the tendency to think of the
future as unpredictable, unknowable, and mysterious, while the past
is something dead and gone, everything having already happened, all
being known, and therefore irrevocable. It has been documented and
is available at libraries. In reality, it is not like that at all. Our knowledge of even what has happened to us directly is deformed by our own
forgetfulness and selective recall; our knowledge of what has happened
outside our presence is totally second hand. All we have, in fact, are
footprints, vestiges, traces left by events, and the stories of people who
have examined these traces in depth.
It is at this point that we return to one of the most important aspects
of “A Young Man, Gleaming, White,” which is the use of narrative
voice in a chronicle of past events. In Karen Joy Fowler’s Sarah Canary,
the chapters that narrate the adventures and ups and downs of the
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characters alternate with “documentary” chapters in which the author
relates extravagant facts, historical events, and other sensational occurrences of the times. These episodes recall the strange facts collected
by Charles Fort in The Book of the Damned (1919) and others, such as
the curiosities that Robert L. Ripley began publishing in journals that
same year under the title of Ripley’s Believe it or Not , which cultivated
the “strange, bizarre and unexpected.”
Karen Joy Fowler inserts the following extravagant events, among
others, into her narrative: a boy raised in a tunnel by badgers, patients
in a psychiatric hospital who are cured by an earthquake, the marriage
of the “Ugliest Woman in the World,” and a teacher who gives lectures
to lumber jacks defending the female orgasm. These bizarre and historically important facts are woven into the chapters about Sarah Canary,
giving us the feeling that the past is a territory yet to be explored, of
fantastic and unrealistic things that could have in fact occurred in
the world without our knowing it. Aliens could have come to investigate; they could have been stuck here after an accident and mingled
with the population; they could have been turned into crazy people,
mystics, eccentrics, or enchantresses. Stories like those of Guimarães
Rosa, Pasolini, Karen Joy Fowler, Nilson Martello, and Rubens Scavone
could have happened, and, without our realizing it, may have been
reported, as in Rosa’s story: “referidos nas folhas da época e exarados
nas Efemérides” (86) [“in contemporary newspapers and registered in
the astronomical tables” (99)].
All of these works were written in the same spirit and style. They
uncover buried facts of imagination encrusted in a real past, and in
doing so they do not bring us answers, but rather raise questions and
mysteries in an area of knowledge, which, for our own sense of comfort
and arrogance, we prefer to think of as settled. The past is just as unpredictable and unknown as the future, which never ceases to bring us new
discoveries about the past. The literary position richest in possibilities
to explore this immense and intact archeological site is the protocol of
the question, with its implicit recognition that mysteries will always be
more numerous and more interesting than their solutions.
Notes
1. João Guimarães Rosa, Primeiras estórias . 1962 (Rio de Janeiro: José
Olympio, 1981), 86–91.
2 . “Um moço muito branco” has been translated as “A Young Man, Gleaming
White” in The Third Bank of the River and Other Stories , trans. and intro.
“A Young Man, Gleaming, White”
3.
4.
5.
6.
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71
by Barbara Shelby. (New York: Knopf, 1968), 99–108. All subsequent
translations will be from this edition. All other translations are that of the
translator. Note by translator (henceforth will be mentioned as N of T).
Martello’s story is told by Dom Fernando, who, in the fourteenth century,
witnesses the landing of a spaceship, and, seeing the devil before him,
stands his ground, telling the visitor to be off. Nilson Martello, “Dea
mayor sperientiae” Além do tempo e do espaço (São Paulo: Edart, 1965),
57–61. Rubens Teixeira Scavone’s O 31º peregrino, (São Paulo: Estação
Liberdade, 1993), is also mentioned by Ginway, who notes that the text is
based on The Canterbury Tales : “[t]he novella tells of a woman impregnated
by an alien entity. Given the medieval setting, the characters interpret the
events they witness—a large disc or ring in the sky, the woman’s dead body
with its opened and empty womb—as evidence of demonic possession,”
Brazilian Science Fiction : Cultural Myths and Nationhood in the Land of the
Future (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2004), 74–75. N of T.
The above cited 1981 edition of Primeiras estórias does have the cover and the
table of contents with Luís Jardim’s drawings carried out according to JGR’s
specifications. In the article, Tavares laments the fact that some newer editions do not have these illustrations. The flying saucer over the church is clear
on both the back cover and the index of the edition cited here. N. of T.
Peruvian José B. Adolph’s “El falsificador” [“The Falsifier”] (1972) is
also a tale told by descendants of the Incas to a Spanish chronicler who
changes the details of extraterrestrial visitors in order to avoid heresy and
the Inquisition. See José B. Adolph, “The Falsifier,” in Cosmos Latinos: An
Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain , Andréa Bell
and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán, eds., (Middletown CT: Wesleyan UP, 2003),
153–157. N. of T.
See John Clute’s entry on Karen Joy Fowler in The Encyclopedia of Science
Fiction , John Clute and Peter Nicholls, eds. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995),
443.
Bibliography
Adolph, José B. “The Falsifier.” In Andréa Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán, eds.
Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 153–157.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Cantebury Tales (Edison: Chartwell Books Inc., 2007).
Clute, John and Peter Nicholls, eds. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1995).
E. T. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Universal Pictures, 1982 . Film.
Fort, Charles. Book of the Damned . 1919 (New York: Garland, 1975).
Fowler, Karen Joy. Sarah Canary (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991).
Ginway, M. Elizabeth. Brazilian Science Fiction: Cultural Myths and Nationhood in
the Land of the Future (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2004).
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Irwin, John T. Poe, Borges and the Analytic Detective Story (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1994).
Martello, Nilson. “Da mayor speriencia.” In Além do tempo e do espaço (São Paulo:
Edart, 1965), 57–61.
Rosa, João Guimarães. “Um moço muito branco.” In Primeiras histórias. 1962
(Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1981), 86–91.
———. “A Young Man, Gleaming, White.” The Third Bank of the River and Other
Stories. Translation and introduction by Barbara Shelby (New York: Knopf,
1968), 99–108.
Scavone, Rubens Teixeira O 31° Peregrino (São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 1993).
Starman. Dir. John Carpenter. Columbia Pictures, 1984. Film.
Teorema. Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini. Actos Produzione Cinematofiche, Euro
International Film, 1968. Film.
CHAPTER 5
Bolaño and Science Fiction:
Deformities
Álvaro Bisama
Translated by Sara Potter
-01946. Marcel Duchamp abandons his chess game for a moment and
begins work on “Étant donnés” (Given), a work in which, through two
holes, we may contemplate the image of a woman’s body on a moor,
holding a lit lamp in her left hand. We cannot see her face. We do not
know if it’s a body, nor can we tell if the woman’s skin is artificial or
not. Duchamp died in 1968. Shortly thereafter, in 1969, “Étant donnés”
was exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
-11976. The photo shows a group of young men and women on the patio
of the Lake House in Chapultepec. It seems to have been taken during
a carefree moment. In the background, the photograph can be read as
a parody of a school yearbook picture, of a graduation portrait. It is a
photo of young people on the verge of adulthood; they look happy and
relaxed. All are poets. All are avant-gardists. The photo is a record of
their existence, their certificate of origin. Some of their names have survived through time: Mario Santiago, Bruno Montané, Roberto Bolaño.
Infrarealism, the avant-garde movement to which they belonged, is perhaps the last of the twentieth century. Or at least, that’s what they want
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to believe. They want to assume that condition of terminal novelty.
They call themselves “Cowboys que brotan en el crepúsculo / Y quieren
saltar sobre el público intacto” (14) [Cowboys that show up at dusk /
And want to jump over the audience], according to Vicente Huidobro’s
epigraph that opens Birds of Heat (1976), their first published anthology
of infrarealist poetry. Or, in their own words, in the only issue of Infra
Correspondence, which would be published the following year:
francotiradores, los llaneros solitarios que asolan los cafés de chinos de
latinoamérica, los destazados en supermarkets, en sus tremendas disyuntivas individuo-colectividad; la impotencia de la acción y la búsqueda (a
niveles individuales o bien enfangados en contradicciones estéticas) de la
acción poética. (Bolaño 5)
snipers, the solitary plainsmen who raze Chinese cafés in Latin America,
the slashers in supermarkets, in their tremendous individual-collective
dilemmas; the impotence of action and the search for poetic action (at an
individual level or completely besmirched by aesthetic contradictions)
The infrarealists already had the sort of attitude that Ricardo Piglia
once held up as a conspiracy theory. They read the avant-garde as an
issue of tone or style, of how to consider the camera thinking that in it,
the conf lagration of the future is suggested as literary utopia. They had
already published Birds of Heat , which would establish them for posterity. Two years before, they kicked out the director of their literary workshop, got lost in bars, and clashed with each other in the vertiginous
metropolis that could only be the D. F. (Mexico City). Their referents
are evident: the Peruvian Zero Hour; the beatniks; and a ground-level
poetry that does not avoid the insolent manifesto, violence, and the celebration of life, seeking the ecstatic or political epiphany of the present
within the vertigo of the real.1
While this was happening in Mexico, Alice B. Sheldon 2 wrote in
Washington: “The Forsette Funeral Home regretfully announces that it
will no longer accept female cadavers” (80).3 The quote belongs to a disturbing story called “The Screwfly Solution,” in which a man returns to
his home in the United States from Colombia at the exact moment that
a femicidic epidemic attacks North America. The man reads his wife’s
letters and newspaper articles about the murderous virus while he contemplates dead bodies f loating off the coast of North Carolina; he later
discovers a body in a bathroom and fantasizes about killing his wife and
daughter. That, perhaps, is Sheldon’s specialty: mucking about in the
mechanisms of intimacy until all complacency has disappeared. That is
why she became famous, or rather made her pseudonym famous: James
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Tiptree Jr., the pen name with which she signed her previous work and
erased herself and her biography as a painter, writer, CIA agent, and
behavioral psychologist. All this has disappeared thanks to Tiptree Jr.,
who wins prizes, regularly publishes stories in which he tries to use a
kind of Nabokovian prose to describe strange sexual cycles, and is happy
to have a prologue by Robert Silverberg, who writes about the enigma
of his/her identity in the prologue: “It has been suggested that Tiptree
is female, a theory which I find absurd, for there is to me something
ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing” (Philips 9). It all ended
in 1976, in the middle of a period of depression and the public discovery
of her literary identity. It all ended, perhaps, in “The Screwf ly Solution”
(which would be published as a work by Racoona Sheldon, the other
pseudonym the author had created previously to dilute the overwhelming success of her alter ego Tiptree),4 which deals with the key issues
of the feminine liberation movement, cultural fantasies of masculine
domination, and the eschatological imaginary of a cultural apocalypse.
Of course, there is a symbolic reading of the text—Tiptree/Sheldon has
had intense epistolary debates with Ursula K. LeGuin and Joanna Russ
about issues of gender, feminism, compromise, and literature—but this
does not overshadow the terrifying images that unfold in “The Screwf ly
Solution.” Thus, the viral behavior of genocide is established as a counterpoint to the scenes of startling tranquility in the masculine world,
in which life continues untroubled. “They’re frightened,” he thought.
“Afraid of attracting notice. Even that gray-haired matron in a pantsuit
resolutely leading a flock of kids was glancing around nervously . . . The
men seemed to be behaving normally; hurrying, lounging, griping, and
joking in the lines as they kicked their luggage along” (Sheldon 78).
In this way, Sheldon’s science fiction (SF) is most disturbing just
when it takes a break from itself (from its desire to seem plausible, from
its anxious need to offer anthropological explanations) and sets about
observing, almost in spite of itself, that which is beyond the realm of the
story. Hers is a paranoid fiction that, instead of speeding up, ends up
following the rhythm of the downtime of murder, of the daily routine
of disaster.
-21977. Roberto Bolaño leaves Mexico and heads to Spain, after serving as
coeditor of the first and only issue of Infra Correspondence, the official
journal of the infrarealists. On page 10 he writes: “El riesgo siempre está
en otra parte. El verdadero poeta es el que siempre está abandonándose.
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Nunca demasiado tiempo en un mismo lugar, como los guerrilleros,
como los ovnis, como los ojos blancos de los prisioneros a cadena perpetua.” [The risk is always somewhere else. The real poet is the one
who always gives in and follows it. Never spending too much time in
the same place, like guerrilla warriors, like UFOs, like the blank eyes of
prisoners serving a life sentence.]
That same year, “The Screwf ly Solution” is published in the June
edition of the magazine Analog and wins the Nebula Award for best
short novel. Also that same year, in a conference paper read in Metz, the
SF writer Philip K. Dick claims to have discovered the secret of reality,
affirming that he is capable of remembering the events that take place
in his novels. Dick, it must be said, had had a strange and bitter epistolary exchange with Sheldon and is one of Bolaño’s favorite authors,
who perhaps—according to the confession of Bruno Montané, another
infra—was the only member of the group who read SF. In his conference presentation, Dick says:
In novel after novel, story after story, over a twenty-five year period, I
wrote repeatedly about a particular other landscape, a dreadful one. In
March of 1974 I understood why, in my writing, I constantly reverted to
an awareness, in intimation of, that one particular world. I had good reason to. My novels and stories were, without my realizing it consciously,
autobiographical. It was—this return of memory—the most extraordinary experience of my life. Or rather I should say lives, since I had at
least two: one there and subsequently one here, where we are now. (Dick
245)5
Bolaño would later remember those readings in The Romantic Dogs
from the viewpoint of a young, clearly drawn version of himself, as if
the passion of his avant-garde movement had another origin, another
starting point; as if it went beyond the desire to unseat his poetic forefathers by way of a new art form. Thus, SF rerouted the lyrical infrarealist gesture from a secret drive to turn it into something stranger
and more complex, more dense but also perhaps more innocent, as if
Dick were actually a secret father of infrarealism, an avant-gardist that
was as radical and important in the mythic story of the bildungsroman as the Mexican Stridentists, Huidobro, or the beatniks, if not
even more so:
En la sala de lecturas del Infierno En el club/ de aficionados a la
ciencia-ficción /En los patios escarchados En los dormitorios de tránsito /En los caminos de hielo Cuando ya todo parece más claro / Y cada
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instante es mejor y menos importante /Con un cigarrillo en la boca y con
miedo A veces/ los ojos verdes Y 26 años Un servidor. (Bolaño 2000 : 14)
In the reading room of Hell In the club / for science fiction fans / On
the frosted patios In the bedrooms of passage / On the iced-over paths
When everything finally seems clearer / and each instant is better and
less important / With cigarette in mouth and with fear Sometimes /
green eyes And 26 years Yours truly. 6
-31979. “The Screwfly Solution” is published in Spanish for the first time
as “El eslabón más débil” (“The Weakest Link”), in No. 116 of the
Spanish journal Nueva Dimensión . Its translator is Elías Sarhan, who
also translated the rest of the stories in the journal. On the cover of that
issue, illustrated by Boris Vallejo, is an Amazon woman on a winged
horse in outer space.
1980. Bolaño reads James Tiptree while he is writing Amberes.7
1982. Philip K. Dick dies.
-41987. Thomas M. Disch, in an interview for No. 54 of the journal
Crisis , tells Ricardo Piglia that “paranoia is, perhaps, a specific trait
of science fiction” (Link 21). That same year, Alice B. Sheldon kills
her husband Ting and then kills herself. The previous years had not
been good years for her. 8 Ting had gone blind. Without the mask of
Tiptree, Sheldon had lost her literary inspiration. Depression, anguish,
and the consumption of amphetamines and tranquilizers had mentally
and morally destroyed her. At some point, she and her husband established a suicide pact. The details of the crime are simple and chilling:
she shoots the sleeping Ting, calls the executor of his estate and his
stepson, and then kills herself, but not without first wrapping a towel
around her head.
In The Savage Detectives (the 1998 novel in which Bolaño reconstructs the rise, fall, and death of real visceralism , an avant-garde movement that all too closely resembles infrarealism), there is only one entry
that refers to the year 1987: the architect Joaquín Font leaves the mental
hospital to which he had been committed and gets his life back again.
Amid the chaos and in his precarious new state, he sees the old Impala
that he lost in the mid-1970s. In the novel, the car was a metaphor
for the full-speed race of the lives of the young poets of the 1970s. In
the false memory of 1987, the Impala is a phantasmagoric vision that
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disappears into thin air and transfigures the character. The vision of the
phantom Impala cures him, restores his sanity:
Mi Impala se había ido. Yo, de alguna manera que no terminaba de comprender, también me había ido. Mi Impala había vuelto a mi mente. Yo
había vuelto a mi mente. Supe entonces, con humildad, con perplejidad,
en un arranque de mexicanidad absoluta, que estábamos gobernados por
el azar y que en esa tormenta todos nos ahogaríamos, y supe que sólo los
más astutos, no yo ciertamente, iban a mantenerse a f lote un poco más
de tiempo. (Bolaño 1998: 383)
My Impala was gone. And in some sense that I couldn’t quite understand, I was gone too. My Impala was back inside my head again. I was
back inside my head again. Then, humbled and confused and in a burst
of utter Mexicanness, I knew that we were ruled by fate and that we
would all drown in the storm, and I knew that the only the cleverest,
myself certainly not included, would stay af loat much longer.9
-51993. In January, the first dead women appear in Ciudad Juárez.10 That
same year, the hematopathologist Victor Vargas diagnoses Roberto
Bolaño with a liver disease that later turns into pancreatitis. The theme of
that illness would be central to his essay “Literature + Disease = Disease,”
in which the Chilean would analyze the various literary derivations
of his illness. In short, his text is the negation of the kind of romantic idealization that Susan Sontag would expound upon in Illness as
Metaphor.
But wait, there’s more: the progression of his body’s dying agonies
could be read from the writing of 2666 , his magnum opus about the
dead women of Juárez, which he would never finish. Nevertheless, the
novel’s long center is made up of a series of forensic reports, which may
be read as a key to reading the stigmata on the body of the text as an
indication of the outbreak of the plague. It’s interesting, this process: if
a large part of Bolaño’s work has delved into the sanguinary echo of the
epic of his generation and the remains of the defeat of their collective
project, 2666 focuses on Bolaño himself, on his illness and exhaustion.
Perhaps we may make a suggestion here: perhaps it is here that 2666
really begins to be told, which would make it possible to revise it as
the diary of an illness whose progression is represented by the dead
women of the book. Thus, the victims of 2666 may be understood as so
many entries in a death diary, annotations about the deterioration of the
writer’s body. However, what does 2666 symbolize? Does it represent
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the dead women of Juárez, or does it really detail the progression of illness, the traces of which are on the body of the one who writes? What
illness is it about? The answer is a disagreeable one. It is impossible here
to have the same political and literary security as Sontag, who writes
about tuberculosis, cancer, and AIDS as a way to dilute and modify its
stigma, to cure it as a cultural malady. Or, in fact, it might be better to
recur to Alice Sheldon: the first outbreak of illness, perhaps, is in “The
Screwf ly Solution.” Juárez—or Santa Teresa—and Bolaño’s body are
its mutations, the roots in which the virus is incubated and evolves. All
the same, if the femicide that Sheldon wrote about in “The Screwfly
Solution” is an illness—be it an epidemic, or worse yet, a pandemic—
what does it represent? Does it turn in on itself? Isn’t it really an allusion to what Enrique Lihn, another of Bolaño’s teachers, described in
his Diary of Death as an annihilation of the senses, the desperation of a
poetic word that has lost all compassionate meaning?: “nada tiene que
ver el dolor con el dolor / nada tiene que ver la desesperación con la
desesperación / Las palabras que usamos para designar esas cosas están
viciadas / No hay nombres en la zona muda” (Lihn 13). [pain has nothing to do with pain / desperation has nothing to do with desperation
/ The words we use to designate those things are empty / There are no
names in the mute zone.]
-61996. Seix Barral publishes the novel La literature nazi en América [Nazi
Literature in the Americas], a fictitious collection of the brief lives of fascist writers with whom Bolaño plays in order to construct a parody of
the problems of the Latin American literary canon. Formulated under
the shadow of a tradition that includes Wilcok, Borges, Alfonso Reyes,
and Marcel Schowb, the text ironically presents a possible deformed
reading of the canon in a retrospective sequence indicated by the author
himself.
Before going farther, it must be noted that at this point Bolaño’s
method of adopting genres had already been well established. He did this
in two ways. The first has to do with the use of themes and places that
are common to a particular genre as material for certain poetic texts. The
clearest examples are the use of disaster sci-fi in “Godzilla in Mexico,”
and cryogenic suspension in “My Life in the Survival Tubes,” texts that
appear in The Romantic Dogs and The Unknown University, works that
had already been written or that were being revised during the 1990s.
The direct use of these themes almost always plays out on the level of
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his poetry: exercises of style, digressive annotations, and commentaries
about the value of its use as a decorative object.
The second method is a kind of prolongation of Jorge Luis Borges’s
systems of bibliographic parody. In this case, the narration strays from
literary tradition as a way of delving into its detours and footnotes. The
master model is, of course, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and the notes
in the margins of an encyclopedia that can build or destroy a world, a
problem that Alan Pauls has explored thoroughly in The Borges Factor
and that, seen from another angle, established the stylistic precision of
the Argentine author as opposed to, say, that of Macedonio Fernández
in The Museum of Eterna’s Novel . The interesting thing in the book is
the suggestion of dystopia as a possible world: if writing from the canon
is the utopia of a tradition preserved for posterity by a parodic hagiography of monsters, Bolaño constructs a miniature version of the same
dystopia. This dystopia is almost imperceptible, minimal; it configures
itself as a mere bibliographic problem in order to hide in the invisible
margins of literary history to the point of replicating and deforming
it. Of course, it’s a question of intertextuality. Bolaño produces two
architexts : that which competes with the historiography of Hispanic
American literature and that of the canon of the false encyclopedists
like Borges and Wilcock. In both cases, he politicizes the rereading of
these architexts in order to finish it by showing the trivial nature of the
characters’ lives in Nazi Literature in the Americas, by dealing ironically with authoritarianist iconography, rendering it banal and caricaturesque. If infamy is a literary issue for Borges, for Bolaño it has to do
with something more akin to ideology: how the aesthetic experience
dilutes and disorders literature, requiring it to be read from the failure
of its hegemonic discourses. On the other hand, it is impossible not to
think of the irony—so like that of Philip K. Dick—that the unlucky
Alice B. Sheldon may well have worked as a character in a book, one that
exploits the possibilities of parallel lives and the play of pseudonyms to
the limit. To do this, one need only recall what has been mentioned
before: her life as the wife of a CIA agent, the sad and terrible fantasies
of sexual violence in her writing, the masks in her writing, the progression of mental illness, and her terrible final crime.
-71998. The infrarealist poet Mario Santiago is struck by a car and killed
in a Mexico City street at the exact moment that Roberto Bolaño is finishing up editing the manuscript of The Savage Detectives , which would
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win that year’s Herralde Prize. At the time of Santiago’s death, Bolaño
had reconstituted his own memory through the novel, constructing an
epic that slowly became a collective elegy. A choral novel, The Savage
Detectives is constructed halfway between parody and documentary (or
rather, as the parody of the possibility of a documentary) and may even,
thanks to the convocation of dozens of voices, fit into the “oral biographies” genre that has been popularized by authors as diverse as George
Plimpton, Elena Poniatowska, or Legs McNeil.
In Bolaño’s book, these voices are interwoven with care—and nostalgia—
about the spaces that separate political memory and parodic fiction at
the hand of the two heroes that recreate Bolaño’s memories of Santiago
and himself in the mid-1970s: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. With
them, we return to Chapultepec, to the Lake House, to the photo taken
in 1976: the distance between it and the present is the obstacle-filled
zone from which the novel unfolds. Since Bolaño fictionalizes the
image, he creates possible destinies for it. He satirizes it and mourns it.
The novel unfolds as a palimpsest written on that old photo, constructs
above it a locus amoenus that is now abandoned, freezing it as the last
happy moment of a massacred generation.
It is in this place where Bolaño’s third method of writing SF as a
genre appears. By this I mean the feeling of distortion, in the sense
that the situationists Guy Debord and Gil Wolman used the term in
the year 1956, in Les Levres Nues , no. 8: a rewriting that intervenes in
and recomposes an original story to give it new meaning. In this way,
the mention of one of Theodore Sturgeon’s short novels represents the
way in which some of the mechanisms of The Savage Detectives work.
Arturo Belano, quoted by Felipe Müller, reconstitutes one of Sturgeon’s
old texts, “When You Care, When You Love” from 1962, a love story
in which a desperate lover has herself cryogenically frozen to be able to
meet the clone of her dead lover and so have a new life with him. Of
course, Bolaño introduces variations into Sturgeon’s work. He twists
it, edits it, changes it, and unfolds variations of diverse origin about it.
Thus, where there was once a love story, he introduces a millenaristic
plan: the lovers end up projecting themselves to the end of time.
The distortion of Sturgeon’s story miniaturizes and reveals the
major plan of the work: Belano distorts Sturgeon and Bolaño does the
same to the 1976 photo. To understand the mechanism of the quote
is to understand the way in which memory acts to reinscribe itself
as myth. In the same way, perhaps there is a clue as to how Bolaño
deforms the materials that nourish his fiction: the constant use of
parodic quotes, playfulness crossed with intertextual obsessions, and
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the abuse of the elegiac tone when recounting a series of events. And so,
we return to the unlucky Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, whose literary
fame—or rather, the possibility of his being read—appears as late as
it is paradoxical, as novelesque as it is sad. In life, Santiago had barely
published a few plaquettes ; he lived a life that was as anonymous as
it was poetic, and he died in the middle of the street, the remains of
a shadowy myth of an avant-garde whose existence nobody remembered, seconds away from the new millennium, turned into a hero
of the turn-of-the century present, into an action figure for future
generations.
-81999. At the moment when Auxilio Lacoutre hallucinates in Amuleto
(which is derived from a fragment of The Savage Detectives), she predicts
the future of Western literature by speaking of Alice Sheldon. “Alice
Sheldon será una escritora de masas en el año 2017” [Alice Sheldon shall
appeal to the masses in the year 2017], she says, and then adds: “Alice
Sheldon firma sus libros con el seudónimo de James Tiptree Jr., decía yo
temblando de frío. No lo he leído, decía la voz. Escribe cuentos y novelas de ciencia ficción, decía yo. No lo he leído, no lo he leído, decía la
voz y yo podía oír claramente cómo le castañeteaban los dientes. ¿Tenes
dientes?, le preguntaba asombrada” (Bolaño 1999 136).11 [Alice Sheldon
publishes her books under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr., I said, shivering from the cold. I haven’t read them, said the voice. She writes science
fiction, stories and novels, I said. I haven’t read them. I haven’t read
them, said the voice, and I could distinctly hear the sound of chattering teeth. Do you have teeth? I asked incredulously]. In the same
prophetic sequence—the visions of a stark future—Alfonso Reyes and
Marguerite Duras are there too. In that same sequence of prophecies,
a possible future is codified: the utopia of a literature that could well
be the magnificent dream of Nazi Literature in the Americas. A future
that is sacrificial, heroic. A promise of a canon. A paranoid future, perhaps. Whatever the case, in an interview for the journal Comala , Bolaño
responds: “mi escritor de ciencia-ficción favorito es Philip K Dick. Y
un olvidado: James Tiptree Jr., que en realidad es una mujer, una de las
más grandes de USA, llamada Alice Sheldon” (Bolaño 1999 136). [My
favorite science fiction writer is Philip K. Dick. And a forgotten one:
James Tiptree Jr., who’s really a woman, one of the greatest in the USA,
named Alice Sheldon].
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-92003. The circle begins to close. Roberto Bolaño dies in Spain at the age
of 50. He was writing 2666 , his most important work, a roman-fleuve not
only about the dead women of Juárez but also about the entire twentieth
century. Before dying, he gives his editor a disk with The Insufferable
Gaucho, his last corrected book of stories. “Literature + Illness = Illness”
is the penultimate text. Bolaño is sick and thinks of illness literarily.
This essay may perhaps be read as a prelude to a farewell, to the dramatic actual conclusion in which Bolaño says goodbye to everybody:
an essay about the destiny and the ideologies of Hispanic American
narrative. Days later, it becomes a myth. When they announced his
death on a Chilean television program, they described him as Mexican
child actor from the 1970s. The tragedy becomes a joke. The themes are
there, served up as confusion, as sitcom, as psychotronic science fiction,
as myth.12
-102004. It is impossible not to read some aspects of 2666 without thinking that it is the inverted mirror image, the exponential multiplication,
of “The Screwf ly Solution.” What was science fiction in 1976 becomes a
realist work in the year 2004. We have the proof: Bolaño never stopped
reading Sheldon, never stopped reading Tiptree. In a way, 2666 is not
only a hypertrophy of Sheldon’s story, but also the end of the road of that
1976 photo. Here, the misunderstanding that modulated the romantic commentary of Sturgeon’s story is no longer possible in The Savage
Detectives, nor is the avant-garde as a system of resistance or conspiracy. 2666 closes off all these possibilities by delving into the epidemic
that Sheldon described and traveling through it like a labyrinth. The
field reports that the narrator of “The Screwfly Solution” reads from
a safe distance are here the novel’s chapters, fragments that detail the
progression of the femicide epidemic. What was once SF is distorted
into a realist novel. What was once a short story is reshaped into a
roman-fleuve. What happened in the United States now plays out along
its border, at the exact edge where the dead bodies of Santa Teresa may
be read as the identity of Sheldon/Tiptree: categories in which nature
and culture, memory and abandonment, identity and its disappearance
all clash. In that sense, the detour is obvious. The path toward 2666 is
the abandonment of infrarealism, even as poetics. The 1976 photo has
already been burned, the ones who appeared in it are now characters in
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the novel. Their names have been replaced by the names of those who
shaped the myth; the conspiracy has failed. Mario Santiago was hit by
a car and killed. The infrarealists haven’t changed literature; literature
has changed them.
At the same time, 2666 is a novel that reveals the failure of SF as
utopian genre. The sordid nature of the violence of the real makes fantastic melancholy banal; its need to be written becomes contrafactual.
The novel’s suggestions—most of all in “The Part About the Crimes,”
the chapter that lists more than a hundred dead women in Santa Teresa, the
small town in the novel—are obvious: any writing that touches on the
present must treat reality like forensics, reporting the damage to which
the social body has been subjected, tracing a clear and orderly exposition that may give some sense to events that have none. This sense is
almost always a false explanation, a parody a posteriori that solves nothing and that makes us turn our perturbed attention to “Étant donnés,”
where we saw the body of a woman lying on a moor with a lit lantern
in her left hand. In 2666, the violence is narrated from the antipodes
of the creative vertigo from which the avant-gardes are exploited, and
it also underlines the futility of the intrigue of parascientific fantasy,
making it visible as a form of terminal and apocryphal language, of
forensic prose.
Alice Sheldon captured this in the 1970s. She wrote about the profound melancholy of a world in which violence is not the catharsis of
anything and is only configured as an atrocious epidemic that distorts
but does not interrupt everyday life. In this way, the woman’s light in
Duchamp’s diorama is purely sarcastic. “Étant donnés” is read literally
by Sheldon and later interpreted in a similar method by Bolaño. The
diorama has become a virus, a sign of a culture, of an epoch. Roberto
Bolaño—who quoted Duchamp in 2666 —knew to read this idea from
its starting point and recognized a precursor in Sheldon in the Borgesian
sense: a shadow that repeats itself over the years, a kind of secret line that
joins dissimilar elements until they clearly become part of the same genealogy, no longer created by tradition, but by the reader’s memory. With
this quote, Bolaño, who came back to Sheldon over and over—clinging
to her as if to a private reading that only he could discover—creates the
obituary of a generation and the chauvinist celebration of the past, of the
youthful literati. He knew that had always been there and that its origin was the reverse drive of the avant-garde vertigo: its rapid extinction,
the precarious status of its possible future. 2666 , already stripped of all
romanticism, updates “The Screwfly Solution” by distorting it. The SF
of the 1970s forms the moral girders of the foundational novel of the
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present century, it seems to say. In this way, we can see everything that
we have been talking about up to this moment as layers of a terrible and
essential process: SF of the 1970s, which now looks like so much awful
rubble, has laid the groundwork of the last total Latin American novel.
Thus, we arrive at the no future as to the last stage of the canon, violence
as language, bodies as twisted signs, fiction or SF as a private room of
infernal readings, like autobiography infected with fear.
Notes
1. The history of infrarealism—for which the convergence and resolution of
The Savage Detectives serves as a kind of roman à clef —can be recounted as
a tragedy or as a picaresque novel. In terms of public visibility, it is about
a series of writings, beginning with the publication of Roberto Bolaño’s
The Savage Detectives , that operate retrospectively but which suppose the
presence of an anterior threshold: the codification of markers of style
from 1970s poetry, not only in Mexico but in Latin America as well. The
problem in reading them now is an important and perhaps paradoxical
one: resolving their contradictions—or rather, establishing their canonic
value—means putting a lot of issues on the table: the problematic nature
of the periodization of the Latin American avant-gardes, the discourses
of the mythification of the market, ways of defining and reading certain
marginal writings, as well as wondering how criticism acts upon the establishment of mediation systems within the literary field.
2 . Translator’s note: Bisama explains here which translation he consulted of the
work into Spanish; any quotes that appear from Sheldon are from the original
English text: Tiptree, James and Jeffrey D. Smith. “The Screwfly Solution.”
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (San Francisco, CA: Tachyon Publications, 2004,
9–32).
For these effects, we will use Carlos Gardini’s translation (“El eslabón
vulnerable,” “The Weak Link” ), which appeared in the journal El Péndulo
No. 6, in which the text appears alongside works by Ballard, Jacques Tardi,
Levrero, and others. Regarding this journal, one need only look at the publishing concept of its editor Elvio Gandolfo, who launched the publication
from the exact place where the tastes of fandom intersect with the suspicion
of the same fandom. In this way, he established a waterline of instrumental texts belonging to the new wave of Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard,
and Norman Spinrad, alongside Angélica Gorodischer or Mario Levrero.
I am suggesting that it is possible to see a connecting thread here through
Latin American science fiction: the complexity of its plotlines, its traumatic dialogues with science fiction written in English, the presence of a
(excentric or decentered) literary matrix against the technological exhibition of hard fetishism, the gestures that connect it with the canonical and
the suggestion of a kind of continuity in the heat of a common zeitgeist.
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3. The common narrative of Sheldon’s biography is extracted from Julie
Phillips’ book, Alice B. Sheldon . Two things about this book: the first is
that it is interesting as an exercise of an explanation of a life that works
in terms—perhaps allegorical ones—of the relationship between science
fiction and gender in the 1970s. We are not going to analyze the implications of that issue here, since it involves a series of debates about feminist
theory and literary criticism over the last 40 years. What we can conclude,
and this is the second idea, is that Phillips’s writing operates from the need
for a biography as didactic example, as a history lesson: the possibility to
read the summation of women’s writing in Sheldon’s work that could, for
example, be contrasted with Janet Malcolm’s work on Sylvia Plath and
Ted Hughes. In both cases, the literary biography is something more than
a hagiography to the past or an academic essay. On the contrary, it is an
examination of nature and the relationships between work and life, both
read from the shadows and the interstices, perhaps as political cases rather
than clinical portraits in which the moral sense of a biographical examination expands to trace a complex panorama of the cultural field that it
depicts.
4 . We will not spend much time on this, but it is important to evaluate the
problem of pseudonyms and noms de plume in reference to gender. In
Phillips’s case, it’s a slippery issue and suggests a reading similar to that of
the Portuguese [poet, translator, and literary critic] Fernando Pessoa: an
explanation that is based on a clinical condition that slides toward a point
of no return. Also, for Sheldon and Tiptree Jr., it is more than a game: it
is a journey along the borderline of the tensions between major and minor
literary genres as well as the relationship between sexuality and writing.
5. It is necessary to read the sad genius of the work of Philip K. Dick in a
Latin American context. In terms of local impressions, drawn from the
translations of his books by the Minotauro publishing house, Dick always
appeared to be a strangely empathetic writer, someone who wrote from
a neighborhood like that of the Latin Americans, from a frontier where
the canonic culture had been torn to pieces and the only thing left to do
was pick up the pieces and put them back together as best one could, and
by doing so—as with one who looks at the false dregs of a cup of instant
coffee—try to understand the broken promises of the future, or of literature. Thus, Dick’s paranoia was neither all that strange nor literary: in
these parts, the Third Reich did win the war. So, on this imprecise edge of
South America, he seemed to us like Mr. Childan, who at the beginning
of The Man in the High Castle is buying and selling memorabilia from a
West in extinction, transforming the pieces of an extinguished domestic
life into our commedia dell’arte. In this way, by building an unending number of broken utopias, Dick’s work seemed to sketch the Latin American
present in spite of itself: a place that is reinvented every so often, made
with secondhand technology, saturated with nationalist and authoritarian
discourse—a paranoid fiction designed upon multiple versions of national
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7.
8.
9.
10.
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histories that contradict each other until they lose all meaning. Thus,
unfortunately, Dick was right: in order to talk about the continent, one
had to resort to an obsessive kind of writing, to describing innumerable
dystopias without giving value to the experience. Given that the type of
suspicion and paranoia that Dick proposed could seem, without too much
effort, like a way to read Latin America, a world that doesn’t exist except
in the dreams of its literature or the nightmares of its politics, both written from the incessant traffic of these transitory truths about identity and
deteriorated revelations about the possibility of utopia.
Translation: Bolaño, Roberto. The Romantic Dogs: 1980–1988. Trans.
Laura Healy (New York: New Directions Pub, 2008).
In the prologue to Amberes , he writes: “Naturally, I met interesting people, a product of my own hallucinations. I think it was my last year in
Barcelona. The disdain that I felt for so-called official literature was enormous, but only a little greater than that which I felt for marginal literature.
But I believed in literature: that is, I didn’t believe in scrupulous ambition,
opportunism, or courtesan murmurings, but I did believe in useless gestures, in destiny. I didn’t have children yet. I was still reading more poetry
than prose. In those years (or those months), I felt a predilection towards
some science fiction authors and some pornographic ones, sometimes contradictory authors, as if the cave and the light bulb excluded one another. I
was reading Norman Spinrad, James Tiptree, Jr. (whose real name is Alice
Sheldon), Restif de la Bretonne and Sade” (Bolaño 2002: 10).
It is interesting, at least in narrative terms, the way in which Phillips tackles Alice Sheldon’s final days. I am referring to what may be the only structural issue of the book. In narrative terms, it would seem that it is just
here—where a literary life becomes a criminal case—where the biography
accelerates into Sheldon’s last years, as if the emphasis on the analysis of
the case was only nominal. She assembles a chronological recounting of a
series of related actions from a certain compassionate distance, as if she was
no longer interested in the excision in the life and work of the author, and
the only thing left to do was to relate these final years, only interrupted by
the inconvenient appearance of the crime.
Translation is: Bolaño, Roberto. The Savage Detectives. Trans. Natasha
Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 360.
To understand the extent of the femicide in Ciudad Juárez, one need only
recall Bones in the Desert (Huesos en el desierto), the chronicle in which
Sergio González Rodríguez described the issue that same year. In González
Rodríguez’s text, he describes the problem as a kind of story in which he
perplexedly explores the limits of the genre in which he writes. By this, I
mean that what begins as a journalistic text ultimately turns into a kind
of memorial. Beyond the overwhelming research of facts and figures, the
text imposes itself as a kind of exercise in memory determined by a moral
imperative: the threat of forgetting. From this perspective, the text becomes
more than the simple mediation of the complexity of a case: it begins with
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an enigma as terrifying as it is labyrinthine and is also the exposition of
that enigma as a document. A daring novelist and cultural critic, González
Rodríguez suspends all fiction here to impose himself as a memoirist, someone who immerses himself the complexity of the untellable to return to
that transfigured place: “The country houses a great infamous daring, which
glows, phosphorescent, under the complacence of the authorities . . . Thus,
remembering this became a mandate for me, something rather difficult to
complete. Because we carry our own demons inside and we make this world
our own hell that someone else always wants to take over. For those same
reasons, I told myself, remember. You’re already part of the dead men and
dead women. You’re drawn to them. Yes, remember. For now, just remember, although in these times it might seem excessive and even improper to
remember. Let others know that you remember. And let them be able to read
that which is written in red ink in order to understand what is written in
black” (González Rodríguez 286).
11. Translation is: Bolaño, Roberto. Amulet. Trans. Chris Andrews (New York:
New Directions, 2008).
12. Bolaño’s posthumous success has been accompanied by a saturation of news
and stories reconstructed in absentia. I’ll list just a few: the fights over the
publishing rights to his books, the overwhelming success of the translations into English, the diverse chronicles of his romantic entanglements, the
interviews with his mother, his wife, his son, his friends, his doctor, with
people who knew him only slightly and who knew him well; reconstructions
of the moment of his death; the epigrammatic appropriation of his now unimputable declarations as legitimate criticism (an author blessed by Bolaño
can die happy: as far as marketing goes, heaven has already been promised
to him); the suspicions and certainties of the interpretations of his relationship with the canon and the recent Latin American novel, of his relationship
with the revision of manuscripts and the sudden appearance of hard disks,
diskettes, drawers, libraries, and testimonials about his time in Chile; and
critical essays about his role in the Spanish, Argentine, and Mexican novel,
about his precursors and his legacy. In this entire process, this mythification
needs to be reread starting from The Savage Detectives but also Between
Parentheses , the posthumous book of essays that Ignacio Echevarría compiled
for the Anagrama publishing house. Here it offers an image of Bolaño’s work
that complements and deepens the one that might appear in the reading of
his literary texts. For a novelist whose specialty was writing novels that dealt
in all kind of uncertainties, the portrait that Between Parentheses sketches of
Bolaño is disturbingly regular, as romantic as it is modelic: an impenitent
reader, a master of his generation in the style of an anarchic José Enrique
Rodó, a careful polemist, a man tied to the tragedy of history. The book’s
disposition may be read as utopian, as a closed-off life, circumscribed and
condensed into the five years that the text compiles. Those five years of fame
replace a life of misery and avant-gardism. The writer of a well-known work
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loses any relationship with the avant-gardes to become a global hero. His
writing is never shown as in progress but rather must be read as a finished
product. Thus, the life is not the same as the work: the precariousness of the
tragedy that the intersection between Chilean and Latin American history
supposes is marked by the happy end that these final years—or should I say
terminal years—suppose. In this way, Between Parentheses makes Bolaño
the producer of epigrammatic knowledge, resumes his unfinished work, and
makes his unexpected death more bearable. Bolaño says goodbye to his readers from the great beyond by way of his book. Or, I should say, Echeverría
was opposed to the unfinished nature of his work, to the suggestion of a
plan that could take charge of it. Thus, in terms of the effects on any reading of Bolaño, everything seems to have become apocryphal, since it refers
to truths revealed in absentia, secrets that are impossible to reconstruct,
whose authenticity is suspended, truths that are peripheral to the official
version that not only transform it in a certain way but also confirm it. Thus,
Bolaño’s visible work is followed by an invisible one. Both should be read
together, stitching together a posthumous literature fed by other works that
are unfinished or have been rescued from who knows what desk drawers,
the suspicion that these materials are only the blurry shadow of an infinite
corpus, a void, the glint of something we will never see. Between Parentheses
would be the example of that movement: the invention of a story that was
never there, the mutation of an absence into pure fiction.
Bibliography
Anaya, Juan Vicente, Roberto Bolaño, et al. Pájaro de calor: Ocho poetas infrarrealistas (Mexico City: Ediciones Asunción Sanchíz, 1976 ).
Bolaño, Roberto. “Déjenlo todo nuevamente,” Correspondencia Infra. 1 (1977):
5–11.
———. 2666 (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2004).
———. Amberes (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2002).
———. Amuleto (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1999).
———. Los detectives salvajes (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1998).
———. Entre paréntesis. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2004.
———. El gaucho insufrible (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2003).
———. La literatura nazi en América (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1996).
———. Los perros románticos (Barcelona: Lumen, 2000).
Bolognese, Chiara. Pistas de un naufragio: Cartografía de Roberto Bolaño (Santiago
de Chile: Editorial Margen, 2009).
Debord, Guy and Gil Wolman. “Métodos de tergiversación.” sinDominio.net.
Originally published in Les Levres Nues8 (May 1956). Web. April 22, 2010.
http://www.sindominio.net/ash/presit02.htm.
Dick, Philip K . The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick. Ed. Lawrence Sutin (New
York: Vintage, 1996).
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Espinosa H., Patricia . Territorios en fuga: Estudios críticos sobre la obra de Roberto
Bolaño (Santiago: Frasis, 2003).
González Rodríguez, Sergio. Huesos en el desierto (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2002).
Lihn, Enrique. Diario de Muerte (Santiago: Universitaria, 1989).
Link, Daniel. Escalera al cielo: Utopía y ciencia ficción (Buenos Aires: La Marca
Editora, 1994).
Malcolm, Janet. La mujer en silencio: Sylvia Plath y Ted Hughes (Barcelona: Gedisa,
2003).
Manzoni, Celina. Roberto Bolaño: La literature como tauromaquia (Buenos Aires:
Corregidor, 2002).
Moreno, Fernando. Roberto Bolaño: Una literatura infinita (Poitiers: Université
de Poitiers, CNRS, 2005).
Paz Soldán, Edmundo and Gustavo Faverón. Bolaño salvaje (Barcelona: Ed. Candaya,
2008).
Phillips, Julie. Alice B. Sheldon (Barcelona: Circe, 2007).
Piglia, Ricardo. Teoría del complot (Buenos Aires: Mate, 2007).
Sheldon, Racoona. “El eslabón vulnerable,” El Péndulo 6 (1982): 73–85.
Sontag, Susan. La enfermedad y sus metáforas: El SIDA y sus metáforas (Barcelona:
Taurus, 1996).
Sturgeon, Theodore. “Cuando hay interés, hay amor.” In Lo mejor de Fantasy and
Science Fiction (Barcelona: Ed. Martínez Roca, 1976).
Sutin, Lawrence. The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and
Philosophical Writings (New York: Vintage, 1995).
Tiptree Jr., James. Mundos cálidos y otros (Barcelona: Edhasa, 1985).
PART II
On the Periphery of the Periphery:
Cyberpunk and Zombies in Latin America
CHAPTER 6
Sexilia and the Perverse World of the
Future: An Argentine Version
of Barbarella and Sade
Fernando Reati
Translated by Bonnie Taylor
Quería soñar un hombre: quería soñarlo con integridad minuciosa e
imponerlo a la realidad
He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him in minute entirety
and impose him on reality.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Circular Ruins”
I
t is March 40, 2694, in the city of Sexopolis on the planet known
as Plano Terráqueo.1 A litter carrying the beautiful, seductive, cruel
Sexilia makes its way toward “SlaveRevelry 94,” a yearly fair where
those who can afford them exultantly snatch up the choicest sex slaves.
Sixteen half-naked porters shoulder the litter, whipped onward by
another slave, as schoolchildren and passersby look on in amusement.
The whip strikes the genitals of the hapless slaves, making them cry out
in pain. All around the marketplace, crowded with tents and food-laden
tables, a bizarre scene of unimaginable acts of humiliation and sexual
perversion is unfolding:
Mujeres borrachas arrastraban de cadenas a tres o cuatro esclavos en
cuatro patas y se reían a carcajadas con sus amigas, cuando alguno de
ellos, atemorizado, era obligado a exponer públicamente sus partes más
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Fernando Reati
íntimas como una res. Viejos decrépitos como orinales llevaban de la
mano a muchachitas y muchachitos hacia lugares más oscuros y solitarios
[ . . . ] Algunos, con dinero en las manos [ . . . ] aprietan senos como quien
prueba frutos de un árbol que le pertenece y eventualmente, cuando colmando su abyecto apetito toman su decisión, deciden sus compras, aseguran al infeliz a los alambres y claman a los alaridos por algún atareado
sub-mercader para que tome sus pedidos. (10–11)
Drunken women drag groups of chained slaves along on their hands and
knees. They join their friends in gales of laughter when one or another
of the terrified captives is forced to expose his private parts, like a bull
at market. Doddering, decrepit old men take little boys and girls by the
hand and lead them off to darker, more private places [ . . . ] Clutching
fistfuls of cash [ . . . ] buyers proprietarily squeeze breasts like ripening
fruits from one of their own trees. To satisfy their depraved appetites
they finally make a decision, tie one of the poor wretches up and haul
them off clamoring and howling to some over-worked salesclerk to close
the deal.
Sexilia reaches her destination and steps down from the litter onto the
nape of a kneeling slave. The tight skirt and leather straps she wears
barely cover her splendid body.
The next 30 pages of this first chapter of Sexilia depict a dizzying succession of humiliating acts and sexual perversions worthy of the Marquis
de Sade at his most graphic, or Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 film, Salò or
the 120 Days of Sodom. Slaves of both sexes bury their faces in their masters’ genitals to satisfy them orally under a shower of blows and insult.
They are violated with every sort of object, forced to eat excrement, and
beaten with riding crops and chains. Situations fluctuate between being
unbearably graphic and oddly humorous in their ironic allusion to typical
fantasies from sadomasochistic pornography, or to what one might find
being played out in the window of an Amsterdam porn shop: “una prostituta avejentada hacía las veces de ama de la casa, y tres o cuatro esclavos en cuatro patas con solo un delantal de puntillas como vestimenta,
se arrastraban en fila india lamiendo el ano del que lo precedía bajo una
lluvia de latigazos (24). [Looking far older than her years, a prostitute
acts out the role of housewife. Several slaves on all fours, dressed only
in lace-trimmed aprons, line up single file, each licking the anus of the
one in front of him, as a continuous barrage of whiplashes rains down
on them.] The growing crescendo of abuse and perverse acts reaches
its paroxysm a few pages later when Sexilia’s favorite slave jumps out
of a window and is impaled on the spikes of a fence below. He has finally
put an end to the sexual torture inflicted on him by his master.
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Erotic fantasy and dystopian science fiction (SF) are woven together
in this strange, provocative novel by the virtually unknown Argentine
novelist, Roberto Panko. 2 These two genres have not taken hold in
Argentina to the extent that they have in other countries, although in
recent years they have seen considerable growth. Erotic literature is well
suited for the interpretation of sexual politics and the mechanisms used
to control the human body; in other words, it lends itself to an ideological analysis of sexuality and its social uses. The genre has become
increasingly popular in recent years: “La novela erótica de corte barroco
y la literatura de viajes han empezado a ocupar un lugar destacado en las
preferencias de los lectores”(Lorensin 60).3 [Both travel literature and
the baroque erotic novel, have become much more popular with readers
today.] With respect to SF, a number of Argentine novelists have begun
to show a preference for speculative SF, which, according to Angela
Dellepiane, “deja de lado la tecnología como fin en sí mismo, subordinando consecuentemente la imaginación científica a un interés focal
en las emociones y actitudes humanas personales así como también en
problemas sociales” (515)4 [leaves aside technology and scientific imagination as ends unto themselves, opting instead to focus on emotions,
human attitudes and social problems].
However, it is not my intention here to ascertain whether Panko’s
novel formally falls within these genres. A work that resists categorization of any sort, its personal, anarchic style incorporates the indiscriminate use of capital letters, arbitrary onomatopoeia, and unusual word
spellings. A cry is written as “aaaaAAAAAAA!!! Aa!! aAAAAaaaaaaaaa”
(192); the phrase “rascando la puerta” (scratching at the door) spoken in
mid-yawn becomes “rasc . . . ascandolapuer. . . . s c a n d d d m m m m n
n . . . l a p u e r r r r r t t t t t. . . . aaahhhhh” (50). Panko also uses unconventional metaphors and unusual avant-garde images: “su sexo erecto
le recorría la espalda como un trolebús” (16) [His erect sex ran along
her back like a trolley bus]; “[she looks at a person] como quien mira
un animal, una planta exótica, un cajón recién llegado de Groenlandia”
(108) [as one might look at an animal, an exotic plant, or a package
recently arrived from Greenland]. What I would rather consider is how
this strange novel fits into the landscape of Argentine literature in the
1990s. And, how, in the context of the successive crises facing the country, did it parallel the relative growth of nonrealist literary genres like
SF and eroticism?
The book’s SF ambience owes more to a playful, ironic use of recurrent themes of the genre than to a genuine intent to depict a futuristic
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reality. Certain traits commonly found in SF writing are predictably
present. The coexistence of elements from the past and future technologies—for example, the juxtaposition of the slaves shouldering Sexilia’s
litter with “veloces vehículos deslizándose sobre colchones de aire” (9)
[swift, air-cushioned vehicles]—is reminiscent of typical postapocalyptic settings we have grown accustomed to from movies like Blade
Runner and the many films that followed it. Also found in the novel
are the usual staples of classic dystopian SF like Aldous Huxley’s Brave
New World, or Yevgueni Zamiatin’s We. These include a central story
line featuring individuals in confrontation with an omnipresent, repressive central power, and a technologically advanced city is contrasted
with backward, distant territories where those excluded from the system
take refuge. Sexilia boasts airships that travel 250,000 miles per second,
thought-controlled weapons, and electronic collars capable of inflicting indescribable pain on disobedient slaves. But most of the novel’s
futuristic elements are presented in a humorous, tongue-in-cheek manner, as though the narrator is winking conspiratorially at a reader who
has read a lot of space adventure comic books, or seen too many movies
about androids and mutants. For example, the eager tourists who f lock
to Sexopolis travel on the airline “Sexair.” Half-fish, half-horse amphibians glide along the rivers, propelled by feet and fins. A frontier barkeep
tries to disguise his machine-like appearance, because more than 60
percent of his body is metallic, and people doubt that he is truly human:
“Tiene viridio, níquel, antimonio, baquelita y acero entrelazados con
sus células [ . . . ] ahora maquilla sus partes menos afectadas con polvo de
oxido como un travesti antes de salir a la calle” (177). [He has viridium,
nickel, antimony, Bakelite and steel mixed in with his cells [ . . . ] Now
he makes up his less-affected parts with an oxide powder before going
out, like a transvestite.]
The novel is full of logical inconsistencies, which reinforces the feeling that the narrator is not trying to convince us of what is plausible;
on the contrary, the SF register is all play and artifice. For example, the
protagonists skim across the surface of the flat planet in a flying saucer under a sky that is “ahí nomás, asfixiante de proximidad, a escasos
metros de sus cabezas” [right on top of them, oppressively close, scant
yards above their heads], yet the narration refers immediately afterward
to their need to avoid “inmensos árboles de casi un centenar de metros
de altura” (126) [immense trees, hundreds of feet tall]. The language of
both the narrator and the characters is sprinkled with anachronisms and
Argentine slang, further undermining the pact of credibility one might
expect from a true work of SF: “lindas pendejitas” [nice hot babes] (15);
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“¿Pero qué carajo estabas pensando?” (24) [Did you have your head up
your ass?] In this regard, Sexilia , like other Argentine novels of the past
decade and a half— Los misterios de Rosario (1994) by César Aira, Planet
(1998) and En esa época (2001) by Sergio Bizzio, Auschwitz (2004) by
Gustavo Nielsen, Oliverio Coelho’s trilogy, Los Invertebrables (2003),
Borneo (2004), and Promesas Naturales (2006)—dabbles in the futuristic genre while using a deceptively careless narrative style. These authors
are freely adapting the characteristics of SF with the goal of using it for
ironic political and cultural critique.
Likewise, eroticism, pornography, and ritualized sadomasochism
appear in Sexilia as genres that have been ironically adapted from
well-known classical models, ranging from the writings of the Marquis
de Sade to popular novels in collections like La sonrisa vertical .5 It is not
coincidental that the protagonist’s name vaguely recalls a pop-culture
icon associated with erotic SF—Barbarella. The broad inf luence
Barbarella has had on popular art since she first appeared in a French SF
comic book by Jean-Claude Forest in 1962 is widely acknowledged. In
1968, she resurfaced in Roger Vadim’s film, Barbarella , played by Jane
Fonda. This popular story featured space travel and erotic adventures
peppered with violence, sadism, and torture, including an encounter
with an evil genius and his sexual torment machine. 6 The name Panko
has chosen for his protagonist evokes heroines in other works of eroticism and antiestablishment rebellion, as well. Cecilia Roth plays a nymphomaniac named Sexilia in Almodovar’s 1982 Spanish film Laberinto
de Pasiones. A quick search of Google’s infinite universe reveals that
innumerable blogs have been dedicated to a provocative Venezuelan
singer named Sexilia. It is also the title of a 1960s comic by Hector
Adolfo de Urtiaga, an SF video game, a transvestite theater drag queen’s
name, and a “Sexilia the Sex Witch” Halloween costume. The Mexican
press even bestowed the nickname Sexilia on Cecilia Soto, an attractive
candidate from the small Labor Party who ran in the 1994 presidential
election. She won few votes, but apparently inspired fantasies in more
than one male journalist.7
The most cruel and perverse sexual fantasies are fulfilled in the world
of Sexopolis, a kind of Sodom and Gomorrah of the future, except that
in Sexopolis there is no enthroned God to punish excesses. Thousands
of tourists from all over the planet come to the sex clubs to buy bedroom
slaves trained in highly exquisite techniques of submission: “Jóvenes
musculosos y lascivos tomaban a una adolescente esclava recién capturada y la iniciaban en los más libidinosos juegos antes de violarla
bajo los f lashes de los turistas” (89). [Muscular, lascivious young men
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initiate a recently-captured adolescent girl in the most libidinous of
games before raping her for the tourists’ cameras.] In this world, absolute power lies not just in the appropriation of worldly goods, but also
in the subjugation of human bodies themselves as objects of pleasure:
“seres en cautiverio, seres en su poder, seres a su merced”(29) [beings
in captivity, beings under her power, beings at her mercy]. This power
is exercised with no legal or moral restraint, a futuristic fantasy “que
podría haber imaginado el Marqués de Sade: una sociedad de amos perversos y esclavos sexuales en persecución de un mejor orgasmo para la
clase explotadora” (Blanco 79) [that the Marquis de Sade himself might
have imagined—a society of perverse masters and sex slaves in pursuit
of a better orgasm for the ruling class].
Much to the reader’s surprise, however, power can change hands in
unforeseen, arbitrary ways. Today’s master becomes tomorrow’s slave,
like an extreme version of the medieval wheel of fortune. This intensifies the pleasure of power at the same time as it magnifies the horror
of its loss. For example, Sexilia’s porters had been masters, but are now
slaves:
Todos habían sido hombres libres hasta hacía poco tiempo; todos conservaban en su memoria, a pesar del duro adiestramiento a que Sexilia los
había sometido, algún recuerdo de ellos mismos riéndose a carcajadas de
una esclava siendo violada públicamente, o de alguna rica y caprichosa
niña haciendo lamer en el piso las gotas de mostaza que resbalaban de su
hot dog a un corpulento esclavo. (9)
They had all been free men until recently. Despite Sexilia’s rigorous
training, they all retained some memory of themselves bellowing with
laughter as a slave was publicly raped. They could still recall the sight of
a spoiled little rich girl making a burly slave lick drops of mustard off the
f loor where they had spilled from her hot dog
There are many other scenes in the novel that exemplify the twists and
turns of fate. In one, a woman Sexilia has recently acquired trembles
when she sees Sexilia push the button that activates the electronic control collar. She remembers how she herself had “sostenido con descuidada mano el pulsador y sonreído excitada en infinidad de ocasiones
contemplando el rostro aterrado de otrora indómitos esclavos” (35)
[held that button down with a careless hand, and the countless times
she had smiled with satisfaction as she looked into the terrified faces
of once-incorrigible slaves]. In another scene, a young woman recognizes among the slaves for sale the former head of the Institute for the
Initiation into Slavery. Recalling that this woman had once abused her
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sister, she takes revenge by buying the slave and defecating into her
mouth before a cheering, applauding crowd. Not even loved ones are safe
from the random twists of fate. One person recalls a “patético . . . aunque
gracioso” (26) [pathetic, but funny] incident in which she had taken an
unfamiliar slave wearing a mask to the mansion’s bathrooms to make
her eat the guests’ excrement; all of a sudden she realizes that the slave
is, in fact, her own mother. The more arbitrary absolute power is in
its execution, the greater the force of its impact. And, the horror—but
at the same time, the pleasure—of boundless humiliation lies in the
knowledge that power can change hands at any moment. “[T]uvo que
reprimir un sollozo, pues en las imágenes (de otra época) que inundaban
irónicas su mente ella ocupaba el otro extremo de la línea: era ama y no
esclava” (105). [She had to repress a sob, because in the ironic images
that f looded her mind (from another time), she saw herself at the other
end of the totem pole—she was a master, not a slave.]
Only when Sexilia falls in love with a slave who mysteriously appears
out of nowhere does it occur to her that there might exist a different
kind of pleasure—one that isn’t based on humiliating and torturing
others. For some inexplicable reason, this new slave, Rafael, does not
arouse in her the usual desire to be abusive. On the contrary, she finds
herself wanting to experience enjoyment with someone else instead of
through them. A new kind of interpersonal relationship is revealed to her:
“Nunca antes la entrega había sido tan entera, tan plena y desprovista en
absoluto del sentido de poder con que ella había embadurnado sus ocasiones anteriores [ . . . ] llegó con sus manos a la cabeza de Rafael, y no
horadó con sus uñas histéricas su cuero cabelludo, no; ni enroscó pequeños mechones de su pelo en el dedo y los arrancó con fuerza, ni torturó
sus orejas” (58). [Never before had surrender been so complete for her,
so full, so totally devoid of the feeling of power that had besmirched her
previous encounters [ . . . ] Her hands found Rafael’s head, but she did
not hysterically dig her nails into his scalp—no. She didn’t twist little
tendrils of his hair around her finger and ferociously yank them—no.
Nor did she cruelly twist his ears.] Later, Rafael confesses to Sexilia
that neither she nor Sexopolis exist—they are nothing more than an
erotic fantasy he has invented during interminable nights of reverie.
With this, the system of absolute power surrounding Sexilia completely
crumbles. “Durante años he soñado contigo” [I have dreamt about you
for years], he explains to her. “Me he pasado noches y noches enteras
mirando el mundo que te rodea, como un voyeurista; agregando una
inclinación acá, doblegando un poco más el torso de una esclava allá;
puliendo tu crueldad y tu sadismo como una gema” (54). [I have spent
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whole nights watching the world that surrounds you, like a voyeur—
making this slope a little steeper; positioning that female slave’s body a
little more humbly; polishing your cruel sadism like a jewel.] She dismisses this as a joke or a feverish delusion, for, if Rafael’s assertions are
true, Sexilia’s cruel way of life would be nothing more than the mind
games of a dreamer compensating for the sterility of a monotonous daily
existence. And she—like the character in Borges’s “The Circular Ruins”
who is conjured up by a magician and remains forever unaware of his
spectral condition—would be a mere ghost, stripped of all real power
and free will.
Sexilia’s ghostly status as the supposed slave’s mere erotic dream
turns out to be true. In the third chapter we unexpectedly find Rafael
living in a cold, dirty little room in an impoverished city. Wrapped in
tattered layers to keep from freezing to death and longing for a cigarette
or something to eat, he is a bohemian writer fighting to survive in a
materialistic society that cares nothing about artistic dreams. Although
there is no specific reference made to a country or year, certain textual clues lead us to believe that the setting is present-day Argentina.
Sexilia is the nightly fantasy Rafael uses to comfort himself from a
harsh reality in which supermarket cashiers eye his unshaven appearance distrustfully. A long-time friend is the only one who offers to
assuage his hunger with an invitation to coffee: “No podía comprar ni
vender nada, ni ser empleado; no podía pedir limosna ni delinquir; no
podía lucrar, pertenecer, asociarse, formar parte, militar, estudiar, fundar una pequeña industria” (69). [He could not buy or sell anything or
be employed. He couldn’t beg for alms or commit a crime. He couldn’t
make money, belong to, associate with or be a part of anything. He
couldn’t be an activist, enroll in school, or start a small business.] In
short, Rafael is excluded—someone who has been left outside the system. As he explains to Sexilia: he is “un desclasado, casi un paria podríamos decir: un ‘autoparia’” (127) [classless, nearly a pariah; a self-made
pariah, you might say].
In this—the only chapter apart from the last that takes place in
present reality as opposed to the fantasy future of Sexopolis—Rafael
wanders through a city filled with prostitutes, transvestites, and beggars. He encounters drug dealers in the alleys, an old friend who has
renounced the bohemian life to become a corporate executive, and
corrupt police officers who rob people and threaten them with guns.
More and more, this is a world that looks suspiciously like neoliberal
Argentina in the mid-1990s. It was during this time that the reduction of government-provided services, the privatization of state-owned
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companies, and the opening up of the domestic market to global competition drove half the country’s population into the ranks of poverty, while others rapidly—and often illicitly—became wealthy. In
an Argentina known for its strong middle class, suddenly there were
“más pobres y cada vez son más pobres” (Bermudez and Viglieca 5)
[more poor people and they are poorer all the time], and shady business
deals, the fraudulent purchase of public assets, and the birth of new
political-economic mafias became everyday occurrences. 8 In the face of
this reality, Rafael opts for escaping to a dream world: “No quería ya
más transa con este mundo en que vivía. Estaba decidido. Iría a pasar
una temporada con Sexilia” (86). [He didn’t want anything more to do
with the world he lived in. It was totally clear to him—he would go
spend some time with Sexilia.]
Sexilia asks Rafael if there are slaves in his world, like there are on
Plano. He replies that, yes, there are, “sólo que nosotros los llamamos
pobres, asalariados, carenciados, trabajadores, postergados, marginados,
empleados, excluidos, obreros” (115) [only we call them poor people,
wage-earners, worthless, workers, disregarded, marginalized, employees, outsiders, laborers]. In his world, just as on Plano, people rise and
fall at the whim of the wheel of fortune. When they are up, they are like
the mountain climber who never looks back: “alpinistas de la riqueza,
del poder [ . . . ] creen que su única misión en la vida es llegar a esa
cima, no importa el precio que tengan que pagar ni las cabezas que
deban segar” (115–116) [they scale peaks of wealth and power [ . . . ]
they believe their only mission in life is to get to the top, no matter what
the price or whose heads might have to roll]. At this stage, it becomes
obvious that Plano is Argentina and Argentina is Plano. This allegory
about the corrupt, capricious nature of power is not only explicit, it
is autoironic, as the author makes no attempt to disguise the didactic purpose of the double meaning intrinsic to all allegory. In other
words, the brutal system of sexual oppression ruling Plano needs to be
viewed as a purposely transparent and humorous allegory that to some
extent parodies two narrative styles—eroticism and dystopian SF. For
example, we learn that thousands of years before the ironclad system
of slavery was established in Plano, in 200 or 300 of the Computed
Era, a peasant uprising against the Centrifugal Power took place and
was mercilessly quashed. In response to another rebellion thousands of
years later, a great leader arose, who later invented the magnetic collar
used to achieve total domination over the slaves. His name was The
Great Adolph Hitler. Still alive hundreds of years later, the Great Hitler
is omnipotent and omnipresent. Every year, “su expansivo y constante
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apetito de sojuzgamiento agrega todos los años por lo menos tres o cuatro
nuevos pueblos conquistados que aportan el material, la mano de obra
imprescindible que sustenta nuestra economía” (119) [his insatiable,
constant appetite for subjugation absorbs three or four newly conquered
nations—people needed to provide the goods and labor essential to sustain our economy]. Hitler is also the inventor of the marvelous paint
used to coat the masters’ f lying saucers. Made from the blood of a conquered people from a faraway place called Nazareth, this indescribable
tint is reverently called “the color of God” by the slaves.
Having broken the principle taboo in Plano forbidding love between
masters and their inferiors, Sexilia and Rafael find that they must now
embark on a journey. Such odysseys represent the eternal struggle of
the individual against absolute power, and frequently appear in classical SF. The lovers decide to strike out for the Line, a frontier area
millions of miles from Sexopolis, nearly out of reach of the VEGA
(“Vanguardia de Expansión del Gran Adolfo,” or The Great Adolph’s
Expansionist Force). From the Line, they f lee to a region known as
The Other Side, where the inhabitants are so technologically backward
they still use gunpowder and internal combustion engines. A series of
intergalactic, Star Wars–type adventurers come to their aid: a giant who
buys and sells second-hand spaceships, a saloon keeper who is half-man,
half-robot, and another barkeep named Montaña de Chatarra (Scrap
Metal Mountain) because of the amount of metal he has in his body.
With their help, the fugitives manage to evade police patrols and penetrate the bowels of a mountain through an iron tunnel, where they do
battle with metallic tentacles. They finally escape in a strange vehicle
that travels across space and time, until a sudden explosion yanks Rafael
out of Plano and deposits him once more in his earthly dimension.
There are multiple indications throughout these strange adventures
that Argentina and Plano are mirror images of each other, and that Rafael
is trapped in “una suerte de paralelismo que su inconsciente trazaba entre
ambos mundos” (207) [in a kind of parallelism that his unconscious
mind kept tracing between both worlds]. For example, when a robot
security patrol accosts them during their flight to The Other Side, the
military operation is referred to as a “pinza” [pliers], a name commonly
used for random street searches by the police during the military dictatorship in the 1970s. They circumvent the pinza by bribing the robots
with a mixture of fuel and additives that they use to get drunk. This
makes Rafael think of the word “coima” [bribe], which reminds him
of similar situations in his world: “el recuerdo de su lejano, diezmado,
sojuzgado, saqueado, postergado, explotado, expoliado, mancillado,
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masacrado, empobrecido, empequeñecido, desmembrado, mutilado,
pisoteado, domesticado, condenado a la ignorancia y la desesperanza,
subdesarrollado país lo llenó de nostalgia” (189) [the memory of his faraway, dominated, subjugated, plundered, forgotten, exploited, pillaged,
blemished, massacred, impoverished, insignificant, dismembered, mutilated, trampled, domesticated, underdeveloped country condemned to
ignorance and despair filled him with nostalgia]. In another flashback
during the battle with the tentacles, Rafael remembers a youthful incident from his other life. Driving a car, he was trying to avoid the police
and his friend yelled at him that they were approaching “la catorce”
(196), the name commonly used for the well-known 14th police precinct in the city of Cordoba. Likewise, the description of the robots that
labor tirelessly in underground workshops building ships and machines
as “bees,” “ants,” “bacteria,” and “a colony of microbes” (180), reminds
him of the poor wretches who ceaselessly, hopelessly toil in his other
world. Even their destiny to become food for their own kind once they
reach the end of their useful life—“una obligación macabra que los lanza
a devorarse unos a otros como único alimento” (181) [a macabre instinct
propels them to devour each other as their only source of food]—has
echoes of the individualistic, antisocial, every-man-for-himself philosophy promoted by neoliberalism in the 1990s in Argentina.
The novel ends with Rafael once again in his world, delirious in a
psychiatric clinic. Desperate at having lost Sexilia after the explosion
catapulted him back to the present, he stuffs himself with barbiturates
so he can get back to sleep and return to Plano. He resolves to “revolver
entero el Universo y sus Dimensiones hasta encontrarla” (209) [scour
the entire Universe and all its Dimensions until he finds her]. The drug
overdose causes him to cross the “la onírica barrera” [dream barrier]
and reach the “otro lado del espejo” (211) [other side of the mirror],
in a reference to the mirrored dimensions and perhaps also to Alice in
Wonderland. To his surprise, this time the dream-like state transports
him to some sort of cave or underground chamber. He hears voices clamoring against The Centrifugal Power and The Great Adolph, and finds
himself in the midst of a horrific scene: “Una decena de seres andrajosos
(ancianos, mujeres, niños; Rafael no vio ningún hombre joven) apenas
alumbrados por un farol a gas de kerosene, atestaban un reducido espacio circular” (216). [A dozen ragged people (old people, women, and
children—Rafael saw not one young man) were packed together around
a small circular area, dimly lit by a kerosene lantern.] Sexilia lies in
agony on a filthy cot in the middle of this setting reminiscent of Dante’s
Inferno. Then a child comes in and announces that everything outside
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has been completely annihilated—that all that remains of the city of
Aivosrav (“Varsovia,” or Warsaw, spelled backward) are piles of burning
corpses. When the henchmen of VEGA come bursting in and machine
gun the refugees without mercy, the allegory is complete: the system
of sexual slavery on Plano and the racial, political, and economic violence on Earth—for which Nazism and the Warsaw Ghetto are primary
symbols—are two faces of the same eternal, universal reality.
In Marxist economic theory, all goods eventually become fetishes
under capitalism. As Thomas Peterson points out in an article on sexual
allegories of repression, the logical conclusion of that process would be
the commoditization of human flesh (228). A system of sexual slavery
like that imagined in Sexilia would be, then, the most pure form of the
commoditization of human labor as goods. Hypothetically, this would
be the ultimate outcome of subordinating human beings to the needs of
the marketplace, carried to the extreme. Sexopolis represents the dark
face of our world, and Panko intuitively merges sexual perversion and
technological futurism in a union of genres perhaps less curious than it
might seem—the Marquis de Sade shaking hands with Barbarella in the
time of neoliberal Argentina.
Nothing would seem more removed from perverse sexual practices
than technology. Yet, a 2007 collection of essays, Marquis de Sade and
the Scientia and Techne of Eroticism, studies precisely how advances in
science and technology of the era inf luenced Sade’s erotic imagination:
new medical and surgical instruments and their similarity to instruments of sexual torture; reproductive physiology and advances in public
health; and, above all, the guillotine—punitive mechanism of a bureaucratic, depersonalized state. Day in and day out, the Marquis watched
it operating from the window of his prison cell and, as he did, he imagined many of his violent fantasies (McCallam 56).
If all sexual practices are a barometer for the social structures
framing them, including Sade here is not fortuitous. In The Sadeian
Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, a seminal study of Sade’s use
of pornography as a tool for social criticism, Angela Carter maintains
that sadism is an apt metaphor for people’s cruelty to one another and
the regimes that allow such behavior. Pornography that reinforces
prevailing social values is tolerated, whereas pornography that does
not is punished. Sade was persecuted for being what Carter calls “a
moral pornographer”: “A moral pornographer might use pornography
to critique current relations between the sexes” (19). Sade, the “terrorist” pornographer (Carter 22), imagines a system of total moral
licentiousness where anything is permissible, in order to reveal the
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perversions and excesses of not only the decadent French ancien
régime, but also the new revolutionary regime of Terror. Therefore,
his work should not be interpreted as prescriptive , but rather as descriptive . It is more a diagnosis of a violent, corrupt society than a bid
to convert his fantasies into reality. In the Marquis’s writings, says
Carter, the sadist’s whip and cruel perversity are metaphors used as
a last resort to denounce an oppressive regime. “He describes sexual
relations in the context of an un-free society as the expression of pure
tyranny [ . . . ] the one constant to all Sade’s monstrous orgies is that
the whip hand is always the hand with the real political power and
the victim is a person with little or no power at all” (24). Carter’s
quote sums it up perfectly: the hand that brandishes the whip is the
same hand that holds the power. David McCallam rightly points out
that the Marquis de Sade should not be read literally; the same man
who filled page after page with graphic scenes of torture and death
was, in fact, vehemently opposed to the death penalty and the use of
the guillotine (56).
Something similar could be said with regard to the 1975 film Salò
or the 120 Days of Sodom , whose influence can also be felt in Sexilia.9
Director Pasolini sets one of Sade’s novels in Mussolini’s Italy during
the last months of Fascism. Salò has aroused as much repugnance as
admiration because of its stark, graphic depiction of torture and sexual
abuse suffered by young prisoners at the hands of people who represented power in Fascist Italy: a president, a duke, a judge, and a monsignor. Many critics admit to barely being able to tolerate the film’s
repeated scenes of sodomy, necrophilia, and coprophagia (the ingestion
of feces), and wonder if these hold a perverse fascination for the Italian
director. They may be judging the book by its cover.10 Within these
perverse acts, rightly points out Thomas Peterson, lies deep allegorical meaning whose purpose is to critique the modern manifestations of
political power:
By setting the reenactment [of the Marquis de Sade’s work] in a sumptuous palace near Salò, the center of Fascism’s last official holdout, Pasolini
intends to attack not only Fascism but the current Italian State and institutions—including the Church, the media, the political parties. His dire
and sarcastic cry to the Italian national conscience fuses the political and
psycho-sexual repressions into a single, tightly controlled and monstrous
repression. (220)
In fact, the torture and abuse in Pasolini’s film are highly ritualized.
The violence being enacted on its victims seems almost dispassionate
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and is staged with those in power as spectators. According to Peterson,
their presence as onlookers is an allusion to the bureaucratic way the
state carries out its own aberrant acts.
As noted earlier, Sade was a privileged witness to impersonal, ritualized
acts of violence by the state, as he watched from his cell while the guillotine mechanically performed its day-to-day function. Not coincidentally, the same is true in Sexilia —there is almost an air of indifference
or boredom in the way masters repeatedly humiliate their inferiors.
Certain gestures associated with power appear over and over in the
novel until they begin to seem like mere rituals: forcing someone to eat
excrement, planting a foot on the nape of a neck, or kicking someone
in the mouth.
At the end of Sexilia, Rafael has been admitted to a psychiatric clinic
after an overdose of barbiturates. He is surreptitiously attempting to
write the very text we are reading. On the last page of the story, the
bohemian writer takes a pencil and a wrinkled prescription found in
a wastebasket—both items strictly forbidden for patients—and writes,
“Cargada por dieciséis esclavos” [Carried by sixteen slaves]. This is also
the opening line of Panko’s novel, which reminds us of the not-uncommon technique of the text that bites its own tail—the last Aureliano
reading in A Hundred Years of Solitude Melquiades’s manuscript, which
is identical to A Hundred Years of Solitude. But even more telling is the
fact that the Marquis de Sade, who spent 25 years in jails and mental hospitals and died an inmate in an insane asylum, wrote his most
important pornographic work in seclusion and was forced to hide his
writings to avoid censure. Like the Marquis, Rafael gives free rein to the
monsters of his fantasy, but he must hide what he writes because these
look too much like the real monsters surrounding us. Perhaps this is
the fate of any author who turns to pornography and sexual violence in
order to expose other perversions no less cruel, but accepted as natural—
to become the messenger who must be eliminated because his message
proves intolerable to us.
Notes
1. Translator’s note: literally “Earth map” but also a play of words with
“Tierra Plana” or “Flat Earth.” Throughout the novel “Planeo Terráqueo”
is often referred to as just “el Plano.”
2 . Roberto Panko was born in Buenos Aires in 1948. He has lived in the
foothills of the state of Cordoba for several years, purposely distancing
himself from literary circles in the Argentine capital. He is the author of
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3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
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the novel El Entrecasa de los Heroes (Alcion Editora, 1995), as well as of an
unpublished science fiction novel, Julieta y Romeo, set in a feminist world.
Maria Elena Lorenzin specifically mentions three recent works that
illustrate the growing presence of erotic literature in Argentina: La Venus
de papel: antología del cuento erótico argentino , compiled by Mempo
Giardinelli and Graciela Gliemmo (1993; 1998); the literary history
Erótica argentina by Alejandra Zina (2000); and the anthology Se miran,
se presienten, se desean: Erotismo en la poesía argentina , by Rodolfo Alonso
(1997).
In my book, Postales del Porvenir: La literatura de anticipación en la
Argentina neoliberal (1985–1999) (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2006), I examine
a dozen futuristic novels published between 1985 and 1999 that are bitterly
critical of the neoliberal economic model imposed on Argentina after the
military dictatorship of the 1970s.
Translator’s note: La sonrisa vertical (The Vertical Smile) is a well-known
collection of erotic narrative published in Spain that includes classic titles
translated from various languages as well as recent erotic fiction from the
Spanish-speaking world.
The scientist in the film is named Durand Durand, and Durand is also
the name of one of the Marquis de Sade’s heroines—a sterile, androgynous
woman with an enormous clitoris who is an expert in poisons and sexual
torture (see Carter 111 and ss.)
Roberto Panko emailed me that the name Sexilia was a product of his
own imagination and that not until shortly after his novel was published
did he learn of Almodovar’s film and its similar-named nymphomaniac
heroine. He also said he had not consciously thought of the film Barbarella
although he had indeed watched it admiringly years ago. All of which
illustrates, as Jorge Luis Borges would assert, that ideas do not exclusively
belong to anyone; rather they empower themselves by manifesting through
people. Or perhaps we work with unconscious associations and traces of
works we have read and experiences we have had that lie buried in our
memory.
In 2000 an observer noted that by the end of the decade, Argentina had
quickly managed to amass over 2 million people subsisting on the equivalent
of a dollar per day, along with a half million malnourished children. There
were no medical or retirement benefits for 37 percent of seniors over 65 years
of age, and there were 4 million unemployed workers (Lopez 2). Foreign
debt, which stood at USD 80 billion at the start of the decade, had risen to
almost USD 160 billion by 1999—the end of Carlos Menem’s presidency.
And, although in the 1970s the wealthiest 20 percent of the population laid
claim to 40 percent of the country’s total revenue, by the end of the 1990s
their slice of the pie had increased to 53 percent (Bermudez 22).
In the previously cited email, Panko indicated that although he did not
consciously think of Pasolini while writing Sexilia, he could have been
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inf luenced by the director’s work. He said that in fact he mentions Salò in
a text he is currently writing.
10. A typical example is a review of the film that appeared in The New York
Times in August 2008, originally published in 1977. The film critic writes
that he rationally understands the director’s intention, but even so, he
cannot bear his crude images: “For all of Mr. Pasolini’s desire to make
‘Salo’ an abstract statement, one cannot look at images of people being
scalped, whipped, gouged, slashed, covered with excrement and sometimes eating it and react abstractedly unless one shares the director’s
obsessions [ . . . ] so repugnant on the screen that it further dehumanizes
the human spirit, which is supposed to be the artist’s concern” (Canby).
I can offer a personal anecdote along the lines of what the columnist is
expressing. In 1981, when the military dictatorship was still in power,
my parents brought back some movie magazines from Spain containing
stills from films censored in Argentina. One of them was about Salò. It
showed scenes of naked boys and girls having their tongues cut out, on all
fours being forced to eat excrement, and being subjected to all manner of
torture and humiliation. I didn’t know anything then about Pasolini or
Sade, much less had I seen the film. But those images that so disgusted
me yet did not allow me tear my eyes away from them are etched into my
memory forever. Even today, almost three decades later, I can still recall
every detail about them, along with the graphic style of the magazine and
the satiny sheen of the paper.
Bibliography
Bermúdez, Ismael. “Los ricos, cada vez más ricos, y los pobres, cada vez más
pobres,” Clarín “Economía” (3 de noviembre de 1999): 22.
Bermúdez, Ismael y Olga Viglieca. “El país de la necesidad,” Clarín “Zona” (13
de junio de 1999): 4–6.
Blanco, Fabio. “Marqués de Sade futurista” (book review of Sexilia). Revista 3
puntos 187 (25 de enero de 2001): 79.
Burwick, Frederick and Kathryn Tucker, eds. Marquis de Sade and the Scientia and
Techne of Eroticism (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).
Canby, Vincent. “Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975).” The New York Times
(August 8, 2008). http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review.
Carter, Angela. The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. 1978 (New
York: Harper Colophon Books, 1980).
Dellepiane, Ángela B. “Narrativa argentina de ciencia-ficción: Tentativas liminares
y desarrollo posterior,” Actas del IX Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de
Hispanistas Frankfurt, 1989: 515–525.
López, Artemio. “Pobres en la madrugada,” Clarín “Zona” (23 de abril de 2000): 2.
Lorenzin, María Elena. El humor como resolución de lo imposible en la obra de Pablo
Urbanyi (Madrid: Editorial Pliegos).
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McCallam, David. “‘La Machine’: Sade, the Guillotine and Eroticism.” In Frederick
Burwick y Kathryn Tucker, eds., Marquis de Sade and the Scientia and Techne of
Eroticism (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 54–71.
Panko, Roberto. Sexilia (Córdoba, Argentina: Sol Negro, 1998).
Peterson, Thomas E . “The Allegory of Repression from Teorema to Salò,” Italica
73.2 (1996): 215–232.
CHAPTER 7
Ending the World with Words:
Bernardo Fernández (BEF) and the
Institutionalization of Science
Fiction in Mexico
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
I
n The End of the World as a Work of Art , Spanish philosopher Rafael
Argullol speaks of an artist who holds a special relation with the
end of times: “The Promethean artist needs to imagine the fall to
believe his challenge is entirely justified” (68). Apocalyse, thus, consists
of imagining the end of a particular social order, in which the hopeless
challenge of the hero may become a critical stance against the order
of the patriarchs. Yet we must not forget that the end of the world is a
task of writing. As Frank Kermode reminds us, “Apocalypse depends on
a concord of imaginatively recorded past and imaginatively predicted
future, achieved on behalf of us, who remain in the middest” (8). The
political and aesthetic implications of Armageddon must be kept in
mind when approaching new forms of Promethean writing, when new
literary heroes decide to engage in the task of destroying the social
order. In Mexico, an emerging cadre of science fiction and fantasy writers undertakes this task, emerging as representatives of new forms of
literary practice and subjectivity in the wake of neoliberalism. After
years of a postrevolutionary regime that actively sought to discipline
its citizens through a very restricted notion of the “Mexican,” and of a
“national literature” to represent it, a new caste of writers has emerged
from the fissures of urban popular identities. Consequently, literature
has been presented with the duty of providing spaces of representation
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and imagination to these new figures of the urban landscape, in order
to account for the new complexities of cultural subjectivities in a world
facing a collapse that makes it unable to impose its ideologies and representations upon its subjects.
Mexico offers a peculiar case study of the impact of genres like science fiction (SF) in the larger field of literature, mostly because of its
proverbially complex institutional system of literature. Over the past
20 years, the country has developed a structure that includes fellowships for writers in different age groups, a state-run editing system that
publishes and coedits a considerable percentage of literature books in
Mexico, a government-run bookstore chain (by far the largest in the
country), and a system for writers under 35 that finances fellowships,
provides awards, and publishes a magazine and book series that currently features over 450 titles.1 In addition, just like in other countries
in the Spanish-speaking world, large transnational companies, such as
Santillana and Grupo Planeta, control most private publishing. Thus,
the critical concern when approaching SF is not merely to state its existence or even to solely understand its formal developments. Rather, I
would argue that the development of SF is impossible to understand
without a clear perspective of the way it plays out in the institutional
network that defines “literature” in the country. To this end, I propose in what follows a study of the most iconic figure of contemporary
Mexican SF, Bernardo Fernández BEF (Mexico City, 1972), whose
work has successfully evolved from the niche of independent presses
that have historically sustained SF to a literary career fully inscribed
both in the state-run and the private entities of Mexican literature.
After a brief prelude on the early institutionalization of the genre in
Mexico, I will contend that BEF represents the forefront of a fundamental change in the notion and practices of literature in Mexico,
signaled by the insertion of SF into mainstream literary paradigms. I
thus hope to show that the role of SF in a highly institutionalized literary system is essentially of integration and replacement rather than
resistance or marginality. To achieve this, I will both propose readings
of BEF’s major works and discuss the consequences of their publication contexts. I will also contend that SF does not necessarily represent an “alternative” system in contemporary Mexican literature, and
that studying it as such falsifies its true nature. Rather, insofar as writers of SF born after 1960 have reaped the benefits of the institutional
system of so-called young literature (literatura joven), their works are
no longer legible outside the large context of Mexican mainstream
literature.
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Before entering the realm of institutional issues, it is important to
remember that SF’s prominence is directly linked, in a country like
Mexico, to the collapse of established notions of national identity, which
in turn allows for the creation of new urban subjectivities that articulate
youth to different forms of polity. These new urban subjectivities, particularly those related to youth subcultures, are at the heart of contemporary Mexican cultural studies. While, in the 1980s and 1990s, many
intellectuals engaged in the task of deconstructing hegemonic discourses
of Mexican identity and the “imaginary networks of political power” 2
that sustain them, in the past decade or so interest has shifted to the
cultural agents consistently excluded from the idea of nationhood. Youth
culture offers a prime example of this, because, since its origins in the
1960s, it has readily adopted subcultures and performativities from the
United States and Europe. As José Agustín points out, Mexican counterculture originally emerged as a response to the contradiction created by
the coexistence of a traditional concept of Mexico and a rapidly increasing rate of urban modernization in the late 1950s. This led to the successful introduction of rock and roll and hippie culture to Mexico city, as
well as to the emergence of the so-called literatura de la onda , which gave
a space, in Mexican literature, to the Americanized youth of the 1960s.
The contemporary literary subcultures, such as the ones embodied in
BEF’s work, are the result of a similar contradiction: a youth that faces
the last remnants of the nationalist apparatus in the context of a heightened cultural Americanization produced by NAFTA. BEF’s characters
are punks and skater boys, or members of a futuristic society ruled by a
rampant and monopolistic form of corporate capitalism.
Before delving into BEF’s work, a brief account of the presence of
SF in Mexican literary institutions is necessary to fully understand the
consequences of his work. Most accounts of the genre agree in identifying Eduardo Urzáiz Rodríguez’s 1919 novel Eugenia. Esbozo novelesco de
costumbres futuras as the first SF text. Until the 1980s, SF texts appeared
only sporadically in Mexican literature. This is clear in a 1974 state of
the field by critic Ross Larson: most of the authors cited between 1960
and 1974 (Raimundo Ramos Gómez, Héctor Gally C., Alfredo Cardona
Peña, or Carlos Olvera, to name the most notable examples) are completely unknown.3 While a similar claim could be made regarding the
SF writers of other Latin American nations, it is also true that Mexican
literature sidesteps the genre in a particularly drastic way. For instance,
Luis C. Cano’s recent account of Latin American SF relies heavily on the
Southern Cone, where writers as canonical as Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge
Luis Borges, Angélica Gorodischer, or Manuel Puig practiced the genre,
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or at least forms of writing tributary to SF, in the exact same time period
when Mexico’s SF landscape remained barren. A more analogous case
could be that of Brazil, but, as Elizabeth Ginway has shown, there were
important, identifiable Brazilian SF books as early as 1960, while the
only novel Larson can identify in the 1960s in Mexico is Carlos Olvera’s
Mejicanos en el espacio (1968). The fact is that well into the 1980s,
Mexican SF was scarce and completely absent from both the canon and
the main circuits of literary production and instutionalization.
The emergence of SF as a practice within the confines of Mexican
literary institutions took place in the mid-to-late 1980s thanks to two
major developments. In 1984, the National Council for Science and
Technology (CONACYT) and the Government of the State of Puebla
organized the “Premio Puebla de Ciencia Ficción,” a short story award.
While narrating the whole story of the award exceeds the purpose of
this chapter,4 mentioning a couple of its consequences is necessary to
understand the institutionalization process of SF in Mexico. Initially,
the Premio Puebla—which, incidentally, became a national prize for
SF and fantasy in 1998 and is still awarded—constituted the first
instance of institutional recognition of the genre by a government
agency. However, the two agencies involved, as well as Puebla itself,
were peripheral to mainstream Mexican literature. Puebla was a strange
place for such a development, considering it is one of the most culturally conservative cities in the country. Simultaneously, the CONACYT
is an organization dedicated to the financing of scientific research,
which oddly provided a publication space for the award in the magazine
Ciencia y desarrollo, a journal mostly devoted to promoting the natural
sciences. Nonetheless, the Premio Puebla became instrumental in the
construction of official literary spaces for SF writers, and it became, in
effect, the launching pad for most of the major SF writers born in the
1960s, including Mauricio José Schwarz, Gerardo Horacio Porcayo, and
José Luis Zárate. In addition, when the jury decided not to award any
participating stories in 1987, the money was used to put together the
first ever national conference of SF writers, fostering the construction of
literary relations between SF practitioners that last until today.5
The establishment of the Premio Puebla was instrumental for the other
central development of the late 1980s and early 1990s: the creation of the
Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro, a government-funded program aimed at
the publication and promotion of Mexican writers under the age of 35.
This made the program an ideal space for the promotion of previously
undervalued literature genres (such as detective fiction and fantasy, along
with SF), given that writers that age are usually not part of mainstream
literary groups or institutions, and are thus not as constrained by the
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aesthetic imperatives of national literature. In addition, Tierra Adentro’s
mandate to publish authors from the interior of the country made it possible for those gathered around the Premio Puebla (born, besides Puebla,
in places like Tijuana and Tamaulipas), to garner access to it, thanks to
the fortuitous circumstance that placed the first national SF award outside of Mexico City. While the Premio Puebla allowed for the emergence
of a new generation of writers, Tierra Adentro became the first institutional vehicle for the publication of SF within the larger frame of Mexican
literature. This was particularly the case with the three-volume anthology
Más allá de lo imaginado, compiled by Federico Schaffler, which provided many young authors with an unprecedentedly visible publication
space, with a circulation of a thousand copies (a very significant number
in Mexico) and nationwide distribution through the government’s bookstore and library system. In the 2000s, Tierra Adentro was responsible for
publishing some landmark SF books, such as Porcayo’s La primera calle
de la soledad (1993) and Ricardo Guzmán Wolffer’s Que Dios se apiade de
nosotros (1993).6 In the late 1990s, this work continued through emerging
independent presses, like Ficticia and Lectorum, which keep publishing
Puebla circle writers to this date.7
BEF’s career emerges in the latter part of this history, when SF was
no longer such a ghettoized production, and when Lectorum and Tierra
Adentro had granted a certain degree of market circulation to the genre.
However, it is also true that a considerable amount of SF publishing
took place in fanzines and presses outside the national mainstream, and
a young SF writer in the late 1990s was still bound to a certain degree
of marginality. BEF’s first book, ¡¡Bzzzzzzt!! Ciudad interfase, was thus
published by Times Editores, a very short-lived collection of SF and
fantasy books. Still, this book is extremely significant because it shows
the ways in which SF in Mexico would overcome its self-referentiality
and become a more integrated part of the literary landscape. Unlike
the Puebla writers, BEF does not necessarily present his work as purely
science fictional. Authors like Porcayo would create elaborate mythologies that sought to dissociate themselves from Mexican historical and
political issues. Conversely, BEF’s fiction assumed early on that it had
clear space of enunciation. ¡¡Bzzzzzzt!! has a very significant epilogue,
“Post-Data,” in which BEF clearly lays out these ideas:
Este es un libro de historias de ciudad. No pudieron haber sido escritas
en otro entorno, ni siquiera en otra ciudad.
El DF es quizá la urbe más gandalla de todo el mundo, al menos de
este lado del planeta y le debo la inspiración del entorno de todos estos
cuentos. (109)
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[This is a book of city stories. They could not have been written in a different environment, not even in a different city.
Mexico City is perhaps the toughest city in the whole world, at least on
this side of the planet, and I owe it the inspiration for the environment
of all of these short stories.]
This quote is quite meaningful in contrast with Mexican 1990s SF.
First, it reclaims Mexico City as a site and inspiration for SF, against the
grain of earlier generations, who developed the genre in the country’s
interior. Furthermore, as Trujillo Muñoz emphasizes (Biografías 297),
BEF in fact defines his literature as urban before labeling it as “science
fiction.” In other words, rather than understanding himself as a “genre”
author committed primarily to SF, as practitioners devoted to exercises
like fanzines may be characterized, BEF aspires to be a writer in a larger
sense, establishing a clear distance with what he polemically perceives
as SF’s constitutive ephemeral nature:
Siempre he pensado que dentro de veinte años las historias de ciencia
ficción escritas hoy serán tan vigentes como los poemas de Marinetti
dedicados a la radio de bulbos. Y será así mientras la tecnología de la que
hablemos sea perecedera. Es decir, siempre. Sólo la anécdota salvará a las
historias. (111)
[I have always thought that, in twenty years, science fiction stories written today will be as current as Marinetti’s poems on the tube radio. And
it will be so as long as the technology that we talk about is perishable.
That is, always. Only plot will save the stories.]
This disquisition articulates an implicit critique of authors from the
previous generation: they constructed a space specific to SF at the
expense of achieving literary status. One may even speculate that this,
and not merely the marginality of the genre, can at least partly account
for the lack of canonical writers in Mexican SF: many of their books
were based on perishable imaginaries that lost their cultural meaning as
SF soon thereafter. 8 Thus, BEF lays early on a wager for a SF narrative
that could properly operate within the confines of canonical literature
by taking the emphasis away from the genre itself and focusing instead
on properly aesthetic concerns such as the quality of the plot and the
writing style, or even on the use of SF as an instrument to decipher the
present.
!!Bzzzzzzt!! is a preliminary text in this regard, mostly because of its
publication in a press that circulated mostly in SF circles. Nonetheless,
besides the manifesto, the book establishes some of the bases of his
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future work. BEF’s early fiction interweaves the uncertainty created by
the neoliberal economic model in Mexico in the wake of the 1994 crisis
with the narrative language of SF in order to construct a retrospective
view of the origins of the disaster to come. In other words, BEF constructs his fiction along the lines of the trope Fredric Jameson recently
termed “Archaeologies of the Future,” namely a prophetic archaeology
that establishes the ruins and traces of the future in the present time.
Nonetheless, BEF’s work does not articulate the utopian stance set forward by Jameson, but rather sets forth a clearly dystopian model that
establishes contemporary Mexico City as the origin point of a disaster
to come. The book starts with an epigraph question that clearly enunciates the anxiety behind his fiction: “¿En qué momento nuestro futuro
dejó de parecerse a los Supersónicos y se convirtió en Blade Runner ?”
(8) [When exactly did our future stop looking like the Jetsons and
become Blade Runner ?]. In this tone, stories like “Wonderama” project
a future of a computer-based microphysical power disrupted by a virus
that allows the narrator to remember the origin of the dystopia: a coup
in 2012 (18), while “Sólo se recuerda el primero” presents a drug-fueled
future in which memory is a haunting ghost that must be exorcized
(33). BEF’s SF is remarkable in part due to its focus on memory. Rather
than obsessing over the details of its mythology, his work is consistently
haunted by a present transformed into past by the narrative, translating
the indiscernible anxieties of contemporary Mexico into a past to be
remembered in order to make sense of the dystopian future. By virtue of
this, BEF’s SF attempts to be as much a record of the present as it is an
imagination of the future, crafting its own legacy through its capacity
to use SF as a reflective instrument of the Zeitgeist of Mexico City.
It took nearly six years for BEF to publish his second book, El
llanto de los niños muertos , in 2004.9 By this time, his work had already
appeared in the first major anthology of Mexican writers born in the
1970s, Nuevas voces de la literatura mexicana (2002), as well as in
Visiones periféricas (2000), the most comprehensive and visible anthology of Mexican SF to date. El llanto de los niños muertos was published
by Tierra Adentro, placing BEF on the same trajectory as other SF writers before him. Nevertheless, this book is not properly an SF collection,
but rather a catalog of short stories, some of which belong to SF, some to
apocalyptic or even fantastic literature, that may be read as an attempt
to place within the confines of canonical Mexican literature a set of subgenres usually not present in literary discussions. Once again, BEF concludes the book with a programmatic epilogue in which he characterizes
it as complementary to ¡¡Bzzzzzzt!! and, more importantly, in which he
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clearly spells out his attempt to write books within certain genres, to
the point of explaining to the reader the meaning of terms such as cyberpunk (161–166). In other words, BEF uses his first publication outlet
in a mainstream press to showcase his range of work with genre. This
is a clear stance for both the institutionalization of SF in itself and for
the recognition of an ample range of literary writing within a widening
notion of “Mexican literature.”
Perhaps the most instructive example in the book is “La bestia ha
muerto” [The beast is dead], to my knowledge the first and only work
of steampunk published in a Mexican literary press.10 The exceptional
nature of the text is clear in the story of its conception. According to
BEF, the story was written for a proposed Mexican steampunk anthology,
but only two or three authors actually delivered a text, thus shelving the
idea. This anecdote is telling regarding the practice of SF in Mexico.
Steampunk is a genre that, due to its historical referentiality, tends to
establish clearer dialogues with literary canon. Therefore, the incapacity of Mexican SF writers to even deliver a book-full of steampunk works
points toward the lack of ties between the genre and canonical fiction
in the country. “La bestia ha muerto” is a speculative short story focused
on an alternative Mexican nineteenth century in which Maximilian of
Habsburg prevailed: on the first page we are confronted with a giant
screen that reads “1863–1873 Diez años de prosperidad” (93). The title
of the story is the phrase used by an informant to let Maximilian know
that Benito Juárez had passed away. As the story develops, we learn
that the juarista faction, exiled in New Orleans, meets with Jean-Marie
Charcot,11 a renowned nineteenth-century neurologist, and his assistant, Sigmund Freud, for a secret project involving the agonizing Juárez.
At the end of the story, as Juárez emerges in all the television screens
that surround Maximilian, we learn the nature of the project: the creation of a virtual Juárez that infects the empire’s media as a computer
virus, thus assuring the reemergence of the ousted Mexican president
in the middle of the celebrations of Maximilian’s tenth anniversary as
a ruler. The story is, like most major steampunk trilogies, peppered
with three kinds of historical characters: political (Maximilian, Juárez,
Lerdo de Tejada, Mariano Escobedo), scientific (Freud and Charcot),
and literary (Baudelaire is cited as a supporter of the juarista resistance,
while Jules Verne appears as an inspiration to Charcot).
The choice of Maximilian’s rule is not fortuitous. On the one hand,
insofar as the conf lict between Maximilian and Juárez is at the base
of the formation of the modern Mexican liberal state, “La bestia ha
muerto” is an attempt to inscribe a speculative work of SF into the
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formational narrative of hegemonic Mexican liberalism. As Peter Brigg
suggests when commenting on a work by Kurt Vonnegut, the creation
of alternative lives for historical characters is a device that allows both
to “comment upon their actual lives” and to “offer a sharp critique on
the outcome of a world dominated by whatever pattern drawn from history has come into power and authority in the alternative world” (164).
This works in a peculiar way in the story: while Maximilian’s rule is
presented in representational parameters similar to the rule of the PRI
(the billboard touting ten years of prosperity is modeled right out of
priísta political language), the allegory used to show Juárez’s omnipresence and inevitability in Mexican history is that of a computer virus, a
legacy that is both impossible to eradicate and capable of self-reproducing ad infinitum .12 The fact that the posthuman incarnation of Juárez
is the job of a neurologist and of the father of psychoanalysis is also
an implied commentary on the ways in which the Mexican political
psyche is clearly defined and designed by the juarista foray into liberal
ideology, announcing the positivist hegemony in which science would
become an instrument of political power. This is also part of the ideology
of historical inevitability that underlies steampunk. As Steffen Hantke
argues,
The prototypical plot [of steampunk] centers upon the uncanny by staging the return of the repressed as the drama of social recognition through
disillusionment. Though traumatic to the protagonist and illuminating
to the reader, the moment in which the plot uncovers the real social
order seldom leads to a historical upheaval comparable to the therapeutic
breakthrough of the Freudian patient or the political revolution of the
exploited classes. Power merely rearranges itself before our eyes, adapting
and accommodating. The f low of history is not rerouted so that a connection is created between the text’s fictional universe and the reader’s
historical experience. The steampunk universe remains both coherent
and strangely stable. The plot’s violently dramatic convulsions, though
written into a narrative about the uncanny, fail to produce the expected
results. The only noticeable effect on the reader is yet another moment
in which transformation without telos reveals the artifice of the text.
(251–252)
This argument points to the fact that steampunk ’s interventions into history are ultimately literary, an exposure of the representational devices
of “official history” through the narration of the same story, including
the return of “repressed” elements such as Maximilian’s desire to modernize Mexico, through the estrangement created by the technological
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anachronism. Insofar as “La bestia ha muerto” is a text in which the
intervention in literary history is more relevant to its writing than any
claim on history itself, BEF uses his work to present a commentary
on the representational aesthetics of Mexican literature and culture. In
these terms, the choice of the Habsburgian Empire has a second implication, in that it connects “La bestia ha muerto” with the single most
important historical novel in Mexico, Fernando del Paso’s Noticias del
Imperio (1987). Furthermore, Maximilian’s rule in Mexico is part of a
larger history of literary and visual culture, in which this particular episode plays a role both in the imagination of empire and in the elucidation of paradigmatic changes in representational politics. Kristine Ibsen
has documented this point extensively in her recent book Maximilian,
Mexico and the Invention of Empire. A side-by-side reading of this book
with “La bestia ha muerto” shows that BEF uses steampunk to intersect
with a major line of cultural history, which involves memory, history,
and literary and visual strategies of representation. By virtue of this, this
unique steampunk story shows one of the main mechanisms of canonization deployed in BEF’s work, an active dialog with political memory,
literary tradition, and sociocultural history that seeks to transcend the
generic limits of SF in Mexico.
In addition to this, BEF’s short stories strongly inscribe themselves
into the SF mood that Tom Boylan termed “the dystopian turn.” Boylan
argues thus:
An important result of the reappropriation of language by the dystopian
misfits and rebels is the reconstitution of empowering memory. With
the past suppressed and the present reduced to the empirica of daily life,
dystopian subjects usually lose all recollection of the way things were
before the new order, but by regaining language they also recover the
ability to draw on the alternative truths of the past and “speak back” to
hegemonic power. (149)
These devices emerge clearly in the opening text of the book, “Las últimas horas de los últimos días,” an apocalyptic short story in which the
Promethean sense of hopelessness translates into the emergence of new
subjects in the context of a cataclysm. This text narrates the story of
two punk teenagers, Wok and Aída, traversing the city on the eve of
a catastrophe, a massive earthquake that is bound to destroy not only
Mexico City but, presumably, the world at large. Surrounded by the
bleak setting of the end of times, these punks skate all through a city
consumed by madness and desolation. The story is constructed in such
a way that the skater boys are the only voices of reason: they survive
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the hopelessness brought about by the sense of an ending. From this
experience of survival, the punks are invested with a sense of empathy
and love that none of the other inhabitants of the city retain. In a very
telling moment of the story, Wok and Aída run into a crazy man who,
in the face of Armageddon, simply states: “Los mexicanos somos más
grandes que cualquier desgracia. Ya lo vivimos en el temblor del 85”
(17). [We Mexicans are greater than any disgrace. We already lived it in
the 1985 earthquake.] This assertion reactivates a moment of civil society organization, where the tragedy of an earthquake that overwhelmed
government response resulted in an unprecedented wave of nonstate
social organization.13 As Wok and Aída take this message and internalize it, with all the political implications the earthquake had, they are
able to skate into destruction with the sense of hope and solidarity that
grants them the only political position possible in this context. Memory
emerges here, yet again, as a central redeeming feature when facing
the destruction of the world. It is relevant to note here that this story
is part of a larger wave of apocalyptic narratives that emerged in the
latter part of the 1990s and the first part of the 2000s, which includes
novels by authors such as the Crack group and the chronicles of Carlos
Monsiváis.14 BEF’s fiction is thus inscribed not only in SF, but also
in the general concerns and representational politics of contemporary
Mexican fiction.
In these terms, BEF’s use of cyberpunk can be read as part of the
larger reaction of Mexican fiction to the trials of the neoliberal years.
BEF includes in El llanto de los niños muertos a significant cyberpunk
story, “Las entrañas elásticas del conquistador.” In this text, BEF inaugurates his cyberpunk mythology, centered on HumaCorp, a major
transnational (and interplanetary in some cases) business organization
that overpowers national states. BEF’s cyberpunk world responds to
some canonical descriptions of the genre. Thomas Michaud writes:
Cyberpunk literature is a way to criticize the social order and the potential threats linked to the domination of multinationals on the world.
Cyberpunk societies are dominated by a hypercapitalism in which states
have mostly disappeared. People live in networks of virtual reality, the
real has been transformed by the incursion of cybernetics. Cyberpunk
philosophy is also prospective. It describes what could become of societies if multinationals create a second world founded on virtual reality. It
is also a mirror of contemporary technological societies. (78)
Within this language, BEF’s cyberpunk strongly focuses on the consequences of a corporate capitalism that became part of Mexico’s public
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imaginary in the wake of the signing and implementation of NAFTA.
In “Las entradas elásticas del conquistador,” which is mostly an illustration of the genre itself in the larger context of the book, BEF explores a
somewhat generic version of corporate cyberpunk by presenting a polyphonic narrative centered on the attempt of HumaCorp to colonize a
planet in order to exploit its mineral wealth. The plotline of this particular story is so conventional that it falls quite close to the narrative
told half a decade later by James Cameron’s blockbuster movie Avatar.
Beyond this, the story does display some of the most fascinating elements of BEF’s cyberpunk work. First, his characters, particularly those
linked to HumaCorp, represent a postnational power represented by
mixed ethnicities and global identities. The CEO of HumaCorp, for
instance, is Cuitláhuac Kobayashi, a half-Mexican, half- Japanese man
who combines the ruthless and efficient grip of the corporate world
with consistent memories of his past in Mexico and nightmares that
express a regret hidden in his unconscious. The name is not gratuitous
either: Cuitláhuac was a short-lived Aztec emperor, who died of smallpox during the early years of the Conquest; Kobayashi is the name of
the Keyser Soze’s lawyer in Bryan Singer’s film The Usual Suspects. The
name therefore combines the ruthlessness of a corporate imaginary with
blurred relationships with crime and a foundational link to the colonial
legacies of Mexico at the beginning of the capitalist-imperial enterprise.
While traditional cyberpunk tends to center on the figure of the hacker
as hero in the postnational world, BEF keeps the focus tightly on the
corporation itself, balancing the harm it does to human life with the
hubris inscribed in the workings of its CEO.
The true power of BEF’s cyberpunk universe is more visible in a later
story, “Bajo un cielo ajeno,” collected in the anthology Grandes Hits
vol. 1. BEF’s presence in this anthology is in itself meaningful, since it
is so far the most visible publication compiling fiction by writers born
in the 1970s. Unlike SF writers born in the 1960s, who had to rely on
Tierra Adentro and peripheral independent presses to develop a career,
BEF’s inclusion in Grandes Hits shows an unprecedented capacity by
an SF writer to be part of a literary construct supported by a major
commercial publishing house. Almadía, the publisher of the book, is
currently one of the most visible and prestigious fiction publishing
houses in Mexico, with commercial presence not only in major bookstores, but also in establishments like the ubiquitous Sanborn’s stores.
By participating in an anthology like this, BEF not only advances his
agenda of creating a space of major literary and cultural relevance and
persistence to SF, but also, and perhaps more importantly, inscribes his
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work in parameters more properly defined by Mexican literary practice and aesthetics rather than staying in the narrower confines of SF.
“Bajo un cielo ajeno” responds to these concerns by addressing one of
the most current topics in contemporary Mexican society, immigration.
The story focuses on Juan Brigada, a Zapotec man from Oaxaca, who
is part of a HumaCorp workers program in Mars, extracting rare minerals from the Martian f loor. The capital of Mars in this story carries
the name of “Ciudad Esperanza” (Hope City), a multinational, multilingual city populated by First World businessmen and a Third World
working class. Juan Brigada is a unique character for a cyberpunk story
given that he is never granted the hacker role to expose this society.
All we see is Juan living his everyday life as a worker, and the struggle
between the dehumanizing nature of his status as an immigrant and his
struggle to remain human through his conversations with the family
he left behind on Earth. An interesting trait of Juan’s migrant status is
that it lacks the right of return. He is no longer the immigrant to the
United States who is unwelcome in the new society, but, conversely, a
worker whose second-class status is created by the loss of his right to
a homeland and to a culture. Juan and other workers from countries
like Perú, Korea, and Armenia present us with nostalgia, and constant
conversation of the affairs on Earth. The story grants Juan a rich inner
life, based on the memories of his homeland:
Se imaginó alargando la mano, tocando las mejillas de su mujer. Se vio
a sí mismo caminando junto a los dos mientras chupaban una nieve de
limón. Recordó el sabor del mezcal y los chapulines, de las tortillas recién
hechas en comal de barro y el aroma del café de olla. Se saboreó del mole
negro y los frijoles caldosos, del queso fresco y los tamales de iguana
envueltos en hoja de plátano, sintió el viento de su pueblo acaricarle
ardiente el rostro y las aguas heladas del río envolverrlo en un abrazo al
momento de zambullirse. (70)
[He imagined himself extending his hand, touching his wife’s cheeks.
He saw himself walking next to both of them, while sucking on a lemon
sorbet. He remembered the taste of mezcal and grasshoppers, of freshly
cooked tortillas from the clay grill and the aroma of sweetened coffee.
He tasted the black mole and the soupy beans, the queso fresco and the
iguana tamales wrapped in banana leaves, he felt the wind of his town
burningly caressing his face and the frozen waters of the river wrapping
him in a hug at the moment of diving into it.]
BEF’s literary repertoire in this passage is far from the traditions of
Mexican SFs: his language of nostalgia is closely linked to certain
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strands of costumbrista literature that populated literary nationalism.
Of course, my contention is not that BEF attempts a “return” to such
paradigm. Rather, his SF escapes self-referentiality and genre conventions by integrating, as relevant, a wide array of literary languages that
allow it to participate in Mexican literary discourse not merely as SF but
as literature proper as well.
An important consideration here is that, regardless of BEF’s growing
presence in mainstream literary circles and of his sophisticated literary
skills, he still had to circumvent the limitations and constraints faced
by SF in mainstream literary publishing. The most significant indicator
of this issue is the fact that his first novel, Tiempo de alacranes (2005),
is not an SF text, but a narconovela , a picaresque story about an old hitman in Mexico’s drug-dealing underworld. In itself, the book is quite a
successful novel. It won the National Novel Award for detective fiction
in 2005 and was published by Joaquín Mortiz, a historic imprint now
owned by Grupo Planeta, with a long history of successfully publishing young Mexican authors. I will not delve into the analysis of this
book, since its topic exceeds the scope of thischapter. Nonetheless, it is
important to mention two things regarding this publication. First, the
book did grant BEF unprecedented access to a major press, something
that no major SF writer had achieved in the past. In the late 1990s,
Alfaguara, Santillana’s flagship literary press, published some SF novels
in its Mexican imprint: Carmen Boullosa’s Cielos de la tierra (1997 ),
Guillermo Sheridan’s El dedo de oro (1996 ), and Homero Aridjis’s ¿En
quién piensas cuando haces el amor? (1996 ). Still, all these books came
from authors known by their non-SF work: Boullosa as a rising star of
so-called women’s writing, Sheridan as an acerbic ironist closely related
to Octavio Paz, and Aridjis as a poet and environmentalist. Otherwise,
writers mainly known for their SF work were completely unable to
access such a visible platform. By publishing a book closer to the market
interests of Planeta, BEF created for himself a platform to introduce
SF to the literary mainstream in Mexico. Second, BEF’s SF is more
competently articulated to the genre and works a more complex literary
system than the one deployed by those three novels. The three books
were very clearly indebted to the apocalyptic paradigm of the 1990s,15
but were quite weak as SF. Aridjis and Sheridan in particular construct
a carnivalesque future that grotesquely ref lects their vision of the present, rather than creating a proper SF mythology like the one underlying the BEF’s HumaCorp work. In these terms, I believe BEF must be
credited as the first author of SF proper to enter the literary mainstream
in Mexico. This development has to do with the aesthetic openness
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brought about by the post–PRI cultural juncture, but BEF’s attempt to
make SF durable and canonical was undoubtedly a necessary element of
that achievement.
Once he established a presence in commercial publishing, HumaCorp
became the center of BEF’s novelistic work, and has been the subject of
three out of four of BEF’s novels ever since. The first one, published
by Almadía, is El ladrón de sueños , a young adult novel about a crazed
scientist who invents a machine that steals brain waves from children
using a videogame that generates nightmares. The book has a more
traditional cyberpunk plot given that the hero is a punk girl, Andrea,
who uses her skill at videogames to face the scientist. While young
adult fiction intersects BEF in a literary practice that requires different critical parameters than the ones presented here, I would still like
to highlight that, by integrating his mythology into a dimension of
young adult fiction, he follows the steps of authors like Neil Gaiman,
who have navigated those waters. This is also significant, because many
major “literary” authors of Mexican literature in the past 20 years have
ventured into young adult fiction (Juan Villoro, Ignacio Padilla, and
Francisco Hinojosa are perhaps the most well-known cases), which
means that BEF works within a professional habitus similar to that of
other Mexican mainstream writers.
The other two novels, Gel azul and El estruendo del silencio, were
written in 2004 and published together in 2009 by Suma de Letras, a
Santillana imprint devoted to genre fiction. Suma de Letras is in itself
a fascinating development in the economics of literary publishing, since
it grants a large array of productions—detective novels, SF, romance,
and many others—the same distribution resources of Alfagurara, its
literary fiction arm. Suma de Letras’s titles include, for instance, Eve
Gil’s Sho-Shan y la dama oscura , the first Mexican nongraphic novel
(and most likely the first one in Latin America) modeled after Japanese
manga. Suma de Letras demonstrates that, just like BEF has adapted his
work to become more identifiable as literary fiction, Mexican literary
institutions have modified themselves to give genre fiction first-time recognition as literature. Both novels show the ways in which BEF’s inventiveness has allowed him to create more innovative forms of cyberpunk
that transcend the codes of English-language production and exercise a
more organic relationship to their context of enunciation. Gel azul can
be characterized as a hard-boiled cyberpunk novel, in which the hacker
hero Crajales is actually a private eye who lives off the Internet grid.
Having been a successful hacker in his youth, Crajales was fixed by
HumaCorp so he could not have access to the Internet, which, in the
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novel’s world, has become a full-scale virtual reality experience. The
title refers to a use of the Internet by wealthy youngsters, in which they
submerge themselves in a blue gel tank that keeps their vital functions
running while surfing the web full time. The plot centers on a criminal
network, later exposed as a plot within HumaCorp, that extracts limbs
and organs from the youngsters in the blue gel tanks for traffic. Two
features stand out in this novel. First is the fact that it refuses to idealize
the hacker character and invests Crajales with a nature as corrupt as the
corporation he is facing. In fact, what Crajales seeks through his involvement in the case is not the overthrow of the system, but his return to it,
the ability to connect back to the Internet. BEF puts the anarchic ideologies of cyberpunk under erasure to create a world where, like contemporary Mexico, corruption permeates even the likely heroes. The second
element of note is the persistent presence of a postapocalyptic Mexico
City, which echoes the “gandalla” nature of the city expressed ever since
¡¡Bzzzzzzt!!. In this sense, BEF’s work remains deeply inscribed within a
precise tradition: the representation of the Mexican capital as a character, clearly within the post-1990s parameter of a city on the brink of ruin
whose disaster is always part of that future to be. In these terms, it is
possible to read Gel azul in dialogue with another Latin American foray
into cyberpunk: Edmundo Paz Soldán’s El delirio de Turing. Andrew
Brown has shown that this novel “develops the triangular relationship
between the posthuman, past dictatorship, and present neoliberal policies by focusing on the figure of the hacker, a body whose own slippery
virtual identities provide a site in which these three forces come into
contact” (133). In other words, Paz Soldán’s narrative uses a similar
historical backdrop to BEF’s, a Latin American society dealing with the
consequences of the transition between twentieth-century authoritarianism and the emerging liberal paradigm, by embodying in the hacker
a site of articulation of the present. BEF’s Crajales, on the other hand, is
characterized precisely by his incapacity to constitute this embodiment,
mostly due to his failure to become a cyborg, that is, to his inability to
connect to the machine.
El estruendo del silencio is a unique postextinction novel. The novel
opens with a striking situation: a robotic insectoid and a self-conscious
mainframe computer operating a vessel carrying two frozen human
beings, a man and a woman, in a millennia-long trip to the Épsilon
Erdani constellation. As the narrative advances, we learn that the man
is Kobayashi, the CEO of HumaCorp. Here, the CEO’s name is Koji
rather than Cuitláhuac, but he still retains the half-Mexican heritage. The novel alternates between the perspective insectoid, named
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Ká in a Kafkian wink, as he ponders whether he is the repository of
Kobayashi’s soul, and the perspective of Kobayashi himself, who once
again is caught in the tension between his nostalgia of origin and his
ruthless rule as a financial capitalist. In the end, we learn that the male
human being in the pod is a clone Kobayashi and Ká simply a machine
programmed at his service. Also, the Kobayashi clone learns that the
mainframe preserves the self of Akiko, an assistant who was in love with
him, and killed him on his wedding day. The final scene of the novel is
an interesting narrative of becoming: Ká takes the place of Kobayashi
in the blue gel that preserves his sleep, thus humanizing itself. “Errare
posthumanum est” is the last thought he has before submerging himself
into the dream.
In Cyberfiction , Paul Youngquist has argued that the development
of telecommunications and financial capital has made SF possible, and
that the histories of the future created by SF are a combination of the
“secular and religious practices of prophecy” and the future as “an economic practice” (11). In these terms, the two novels included in Gel azul
explore different moments of the future to come that result from the
advanced capitalism that engulfed Mexico in the neoliberal period. Gel
azul invokes the gradual decay resulting from the creation of technologies that divide the rich and the poor in a deeper and more insurmountable way. The blue gel tanks are a mark of the distinction between the
haves and the have-nots. It is no wonder that Crajales wants to be able
to reconnect, even as he realizes the artificial nature of such paradise: it
is the only possible way to reenter the social from his position of marginality. Nonetheless, the organ traffic, which introduces into the novel
an urban myth connected to the alarming kidnapping rate in Mexico,
appears as a testament that in a society defined by the most brutal and
unriddled capitalism, not even the elite is safe from the consequences of
corruption. This idea is carried over to El estruendo del silencio, in which
corruption taints even the escape route devised by the most powerful
human being in the HumaCorp world. The fact that Akiko ruins the
utopia where Kobayashi placed himself and his wife as the foundational
men and women in a new, faraway world is perhaps the most compelling
illustration of an irreedemable future. In BEF’s SF, the only redemption possible is that of Ká, the mechanical insectoid who becomes the
repository of the last shred of humanity left after the extinction of the
species.
The avenues opened by BEF’s fiction in contemporary Mexican narrative are quite clear in his recent, non-SF novel Ojos de lagarto. This
book is a multiperspective historical novel set in the 1920s, across a wide
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geographical spectrum that includes China, Africa, the United States,
and Mexico, focused on the discovery of live dragons and the consequences it has in creating a network of greed and scientific interest. This
book, a true masterpiece, shows how the aesthetics that BEF refined
through his work in SF can have a strong impact on Mexican literature at
large. In a period in which, due to the bicentennial, Mexican bookstore
shelves are full of anodine and opportunistic historical novels, BEF provides the most refreshing example of the genre since Fernando del Paso,
mostly by recreating the mixture of history and fantasy previously used
in his steampunk foray and through the construction of adventurer characters and bandits with ethical and psychological stances close to Andrea
and Crajales, his hackers. In a national tradition that has grown stale due
to its insistence on constraining itself to so-called high literature, BEF’s
gradual achievement of mainstream statute illustrates the enormous and
still untapped potential of so-called genre fiction in renewing Mexico’s
literary language. Furthermore, BEF’s career shows the potential of
Latin American SF when connected to other forms of writing: rather
than a self-referential genre, as practiced by the Puebla circle or, even, a
genre overly focused on metaliterature, in the style of Borgesian lines, SF
is in BEF a language that captures the urgencies and pains of Mexico’s
neoliberal moment. As BEF rose through the ranks of the Mexican editorial world, he gradually constructed a literature that links common
languages with many practices of mainstream fiction, while introducing
into it a series of innovative components and ideas. As Ojos de lagarto
already attests, an SF institutionalized in the canon of Mexican literary
practices can help in overcoming some of the impasses created by a tradition that spent nearly a century working within a narrow set of imperatives and expectations. Whether BEF’s fiction will be able to overcome
the ephemerality of SF is yet to be seen, but his aesthetic innovations will
undoubtedly play a role in a Mexican fiction to come.
Notes
1. I have studied this system in detail in my article “La generación como
ideología cultural.”
2 . I take this term from the work of Roger Bartra, see Las redes imaginarias
del poder politico.
3. Larson himself expands his list in the 1977 book Fantasy and Imagination
in the Mexican Narrative, where he devotes a chapter to the barely existing
science fiction genre. Besides the unknown writers credited with the writing of science fiction, a few familiar names (Amado Nervo, Julio Torri,
or Doctor Atl, for instance) appear with references to some of their least
Ending the World with Words
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5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
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canonical works. Larson thus has really no choice but to conclude, “There
is no established tradition of utopian and science fiction in Mexico” (60).
The Premio Puebla is a subject of every major analysis and memoir on
Mexican science fiction. See Martré 147–151, Trujillo Muñoz, Confines
183–190, and López Castro 141–143.
I owe my anecdotal knowledge of this and other facts of Mexican science
fiction to a Q&A session with science fiction writer and editor Pepe Rojo at
the 2010 Conference on Mexican Literature at the University of California,
Irvine. I want to thank him for his generosity in sharing his ideas and experiences on science fiction at that event.
For a snapshot of the aesthetics underlying this science fiction, see Juan
Ignacio Muñoz Zapata’s suggestive reading of La primera calle de la
soledad .
An excellent overview of the state of science fiction right before BEF’s first
publications is offered by the anthology Frontera de espejos rotos , where
many consolidated writers from both Mexico and the United States use
science fiction to narrativize border issues and concerns. One may also
take into consideration Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz’s Los confines , the most
cited critical work on the genre in Mexico.
This is at the very least the case of Olvera’s Mejicanos en el espacio, which
was written in the wake of the first trip to the Moon and became anachronic once the first Mexican astronaut, Rodolfo Neri Vela, participated
in a shuttle mission in 1985. Beyond its interest as a novelty, it is a very
limited book both aesthetically and narratively.
One should keep in mind here that being a fiction writer is only part of
BEF’s intellectual pursuits. He is a nationally recognized graphic designer
and illustrator, one of the most important comic book writers in the country, and a successful writer of children and young adult novels. A future
study of BEF should undoubtedly take into consideration all this pursuits
in an assessment of his work. I have decided not to do this in this text to
avoid arguments tangential to my current analysis of the institutionalization of science fiction in Mexico.
For those not familiar with the term, steampunk refers to stories set in
the nineteenth century, but with futuristic technology interwoven into the
life presented in them. In the English language, steampunk is mostly set
in the Victorian era and usually claims authors like Jules Verne and H. G.
Wells as precursors. Most accounts identify K. W. Jeter’s Morlock Night
(1979) as the first major text in the genre, which now includes major representatives such as Paul DiFilippo’s Steampunk Trilogy (1995) and Alan
Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999), perhaps the most widely known steampunk book.
Charcot is considered the father of modern neurology, thanks to his work
with conditions such as Parkinson’s disease. While some of his major work
(like that on hysteria) was discredited, he had an ample legacy, thanks to
his disciples, which included Freud and William James.
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12 . In here, one may refer back to the virus as a privileged trope of identity in
science fiction. See Bukatman 72–74, where the virus is both a symbol of
proliferation and invasion and a way of constructing virtual identities. His
example is Max Headroom, which could undoubtedly be cited as a model
to BEF’s Juárez.
13. An account of 1985 in these terms may be found in Monsiváis, No sin
nosotros.
14 . I have discussed this topic in detail in my article “La utopía apocalíptica
del México neoliberal.” For a more ample discussion of Apocalypse as a
topic for Mexican fiction, see López-Lozano. For a larger discussion of the
relationship between science fiction and the visions of the Apocalypse, see
Paik.
15. In fact, the aforementioned study by López Lozano studies both Boullosa
and Aridjis as authors of two of the the most representative apocalyptic
books in the period.
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Larson, Ross. “La literatura de ciencia ficción en México,” Cuadernos americanos
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———. Fantasy and the Imagination in the Mexican Narrative (Tempe: Center for
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CHAPTER 8
Teenage Zombie Wasteland:
Suburbia after the Apocalypse
in Mike Wilson’s Zombie
and Edmundo Paz Soldán’s
Los vivos y los muertos
David Laraway
A
wit once remarked that the surest sign that a cultural trend is
dead is that Newsweek has finally reported on it. It’s scarcely possible these days to broach the topic of the zombie in pop culture
without feeling something like a hapless Newsweek editor trying to meet
a deadline. Once the exclusive province of B-movie connoisseurs and,
rather more exotically, philosophers of mind, the zombie as a trope had
no doubt jumped the shark long before Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
had rocketed up the New York Times best-seller list. Of course, the theorization of the zombie has proceeded apace as well, even if it has yet
to find its definitive critical articulation: to date, nothing comparable
to Donna Haraway’s work on the cyborg has appeared with respect to
the zombie, even if some interesting work has been done in that vein.1
Perhaps this is because the zombie has seemed to so many readers and
film viewers an almost self-interpreting figure, an embarrassingly literal incarnation of the drive to cannibalize and consume that seems to
ref lect, perhaps a little too neatly, our own late capitalist moment. 2 But
if the ubiquity of the zombie in popular culture suggests that the trend
may be somehow exhausted, that’s no problem either, since the whole
point of the zombie is that you can’t really kill something that’s already
dead in the first place.
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At the risk of overkill, I do think there’s something to be said for
exploring the political and economic dimensions of the zombie trope,
and certainly the moment appears to be ripe for doing so. After all,
what better metaphor could we hope to encounter for our own current
cultural epoch—one in which we feel ourselves now more than ever
to be automatons of production and consumption—than the figure of
the zombie? While one might regard the zombie as just one more competitor in an already crowded field of parahuman entities—alongside
cyborgs, ghosts, vampires, and so on—there is reason to think that it
may end up consuming or at least outliving all its posthuman predatory
rivals, if only because of the increasingly salient material, political, and
economic aspects of the zombie myth.3
As has been widely noted, the familiar figure of the pop-culture
zombie can be traced back to the folk-magic practices of African slaves
in Haiti, who imagined themselves conjuring up undead workers who
could take their places carrying out backbreaking agricultural labor
under the watchful eye and ready whip of their colonial overlords.4
There is something discomfitingly familiar about this notion of zombie
labor, if only because it taps into our suspicions about the economic
forces that we sense everywhere around us. Indeed, despite the yawning
chasm between the plantation culture that formed the backdrop of the
Haitian revolution and our own late capitalist society, it is not hard to
see how the folk-magic roots of the Haitian zombi could metamorphose
into its current pop-culture avatar. In its evocation of mindless labor
and mindless consumption, the zombie is a monster made to order for
an age in which the myth of endless economic expansion is necessarily
complemented by the myth of an endless capacity to consume. Undying,
unconscious, the embodiment of pure Lacanian drive, infecting everything it touches, the zombie fittingly embodies our collective anxieties
about losing ourselves in a frenzy of labor and consumption.
Dawn of the Dead , George Romero’s 1978 sequel to his 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead , offers perhaps the most canonical cinematic expression of this idea. The film’s most memorable scenes take
place in a suburban shopping center: predictably, virtually all academic
criticism of the film has noted that it must be read as a meditation on
contemporary consumer culture.5 A group of human survivors of the
zombie onslaught has managed to occupy temporarily an abandoned
mall and in one of the film’s most memorable sequences, they live out
their shopping fantasies in this bastion of American consumerism. Of
course, zombies, being zombies, will return, as the humans themselves
are well aware. As one character remarks to another, as they await the
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inevitable, “they’re after the place. They don’t know why, they just
remember. They remember that they want to be here.” Of course, this
is not any kind of cognitive memory—given that the zombies have no
higher brain functions—but rather something like involuntary bodily
memory. At any rate, we could think of Romero’s film as a staging
of pure Lacanian drive as the dim-witted but persistent march of the
zombie horde toward their human prey. It is hard for the viewer to miss
the point: the compulsion of the zombie to consume without ever being
satisfied is strictly analogous to the drive of the late capitalist consumer
to shop: we don’t consume in order to satisfy any need per se; rather, we
consume in order to continue consuming. Shop ‘til you drop, indeed.
And after you drop, get back up and keep shopping.
If Dawn of the Dead makes explicit the allegorical dimensions of the
trope of the zombie consumer, Mike Wilson’s recent novel, Zombie, goes
a step further, inviting us to consider the possibility that the zombie
might be regarded not simply as an allegory of drive and consumption
per se, but rather as a means of thinking about how the cultural objects
that we consume are themselves constituted as such. Although Wilson’s
Zombie is set in a postapocalyptic world that is obviously far removed
from our own in many respects, it nevertheless provides us with a useful
key for reading another recent novel, which, while at first glance a world
away from it, nevertheless grapples with a similar theme: Edmundo
Paz Soldán’s Los vivos y los muertos , published in 2009. Indeed, what
is most interesting about Wilson’s novel is the way it lends itself to the
development of what we might call a “zombie hermeneutic,” a distinctive set of questions and interpretive strategies that can be used to guide
our reading of Los vivos y los muertos as well. Like Zombie, Paz Soldán’s
novel also raises questions about not only the mindless consumption
of popular culture but also mourning and loss. To be sure, the novels belong to different universes in terms of genre—Wilson’s Zombie
straddles the line between postapocalyptic SF and narrativa weird ,
while Paz Soldán’s novel is more true crime—but there is a case to be
made that the zombie trope helps us to bridge the chasm between small
niche SF and popular social realism. In fact, an important consequence
of reading the two novels together—an enterprise justified in part, by
the real-world ties between the two novelists and their works 6 –is the
unsettling realization that in fact there is no principled distinction to be
made between zombie fiction and contemporary social realism.
To anticipate, my argument will hinge on a simple but crucial point
about the zombie trope. As Lauro and Embry have noted, if we ourselves were to turn out to be zombies, we could never know it, since one
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of the distinguishing features of the zombie universe is precisely the
fact that a zombie cannot be aware of its own condition (108). It
follows that there is no more a clear line to be drawn between postapocalyptic SF and social realism than there is between the trope of
the character-as-zombie on the one hand and, on the other, ostensibly
rational agents who nonetheless find themselves driven by dark and
inexplicable forces to consume popular culture. But I shall argue that
each novel—as bleak as each may be—should not be read as unremittingly pessimistic. In fact, both Wilson and Paz Soldán suggest that if
we, as participants in the early twentieth-first-century global economy,
have become something like zombie consumers—perpetually drawn
en masse to objects of cultural consumption—we might nevertheless
discover in our very enslavement a surprisingly profound capacity to
mourn what we have lost.
Wilson’s Zombie was published by Alfaguara in Chile in early 2010,
and it not only has been warmly received by critics, but has also boasted
strong sales as a prime example of contemporary Chilean narrativa weird .
It would be a mistake to seek a clear-cut definition of the latter term, as
it suggests less any shared, systematic program or vision on the part of
its associated authors than a field of shared cultural references, including graphic novels, video games, anime, horror and sci-fi texts and films,
alternative music, and an attraction to subaltern or alternative mythological frameworks as diverse as Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos and Buddhist
cosmologies.7 Generally marginalized by mainstream literary critics and
organizations, narrativa weird has nevertheless managed to carve out for
itself a modest but increasingly important and influential niche in the
Chilean literary ecosystem, no small achievement in what remains a very
conservative literary and cultural milieu dominated by straightforward
literary realism and a preoccupation with social questions.
In many respects, it is unsurprising that Wilson has become a leading voice in such a heterogeneous literary field, given his own personal
background. The son of an American father and an Argentine mother,
Wilson’s childhood and youth were divided between Latin America and
the United States, and his personal frame of cultural reference encompasses not only mass-produced and alternative US cultural products but
the unique ways those products were disseminated, adapted, welcomed,
modified, and subverted in Argentine circles in the 1980s and 1990s. His
integration into peripheral literary and cultural networks in Santiago,
Chile, since arriving there in the early 2000s has further ensconced him
as a leading figure in a literary circle that regards the creation and consumption of cultural artifacts as less a general topic of interest than as an
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enabling premise of their storytelling. Zombie, like Wilson’s well-regarded
previous novel, El púgil (2008), demands not only to be decoded in terms
of a system of cultural references per se, but also to be taken as an exploration of the motif of cultural consumption itself.8
Just as El púgil was an ambitious and complex SF novel that had
addressed the theme of machine subjectivities in provocative ways,
Zombie likewise belongs to a SF milieu, rather than, as the title alone
might suggest, horror or camp per se. Specifically, the setting for the
novel is a postapocalyptic world in which a major city (unnamed, but
bearing an unmistakable resemblance to Santiago, Chile) has been devastated by a nuclear attack. The city itself, which the characters refer
to as El Pozo, has been reduced to kilometer after kilometer of black
ash. Anyone venturing into El Pozo disappears, never to return again,
as the novel hints that dark, Lovecraftian forces now control the zone.
Only the once tony suburb of La Avellana has survived, populated now
by a number of adolescent orphans, most prominently represented by
a responsible young character named James. In the woods beyond La
Avellana, another small group of survivors endures, a group of homeless drug addicts led by a meth cook named Frosty, his face grotesquely
disfigured by an accident suffered while preparing the drug.
There are no Hollywood-style zombies in the novel, but as James
notes, this hardly matters, since the term designates the orphans’ ontologically homeless state as well as any other:
Contando los huérfanos, no somos más de ochenta sobrevivientes.
Asumimos que estamos solos, que el mundo se ha acabado y que nosotros
somos un error. Pienso que somos zombies. No del tipo que antes se
veían en las pantallas del Savoy, pero de una categoría más trágica y
patética. Sobrevivimos el fin del mundo. Suena raro decirlo. Se supone
que no hay nada que exista más allá del fin del mundo, por eso se llama
fin. Persistir en un planeta muerto es algo poco natural . . . como lo es
ser un zombie. (16)
Including the orphans, weren’t not any more than eighty survivors.
We assume that we’re alone, that the world has ended and we are a mistake. I think we’re zombies. Not the kind that you used to see on the
screen at the Savoy, but a more pathetic and tragic kind. We survived the
end of the world. It seems strange to say it. One would think that there’s
nothing left after the end of the world, that’s why it’s called the end.
Continuing on a dead planet is not natural, just like it is to be zombie.9
James’s ref lections give precise expression to the fundamental question
par excellence of postapocalyptic SF: What would it mean for one to
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think of oneself as having survived the end of the world? But at the same
time his thoughts hint at a still more intimate and haunting question,
one by no means limited to the conventions of SF, traditionally defined:
How are we to know that we ourselves have not similarly survived the
end of the world and are yet to fully realize that we are already dead?
For that matter, it may well be that the time has passed for repudiating or dismissing Francis Fukuyama’s notorious thesis about the end of
history. Perhaps, as Žižek has suggested, we ought rather to radicalize
Fukuyama’s claim, asking how are we to know that we have not already
lived through the end of the world without realizing it.10
For all the existential questions that naturally arise about the characters’ ontological homelessness, one cannot help but notice that their
experiences continue to be structured by a set of cultural artifacts.
Consider the opening lines of the novel that describe James’s recollection of the night five years’ back when he slipped out of his bedroom
and witnessed the missile strike on the city from a nearby hill:
Una cuadra tranquila. Medianoche. Se supone que mañana temprano
comienzan las clases, sin embargo, hay un niño que no duerme. Aguarda
bajo las sábanas, en silencio. Mira el reloj sobre el velador y abandona
la cama. Sale por una ventana y desciende por el roble que crece a un
costado de su casa. Mientras baja, su pijama se engancha en una rama.
Queda suspendido por unos segundos hasta que el género cede. Cae de
bruces. El pasto lo amortigua. Sabe que bajo otras circunstancias su
mamá se enojaría por las manchas verdes que ahora tiñen sus rodillas.
Vuelve a enfocarse. Corre por la acera hasta llegar a las orillas del vecindario. Asciende una colina. No es fácil. Se resbala con frecuencia. Sigue,
determinado. Los suburbios se alejan hasta quedar regazados en el valle.
El niño se detiene cerca de la cumbre. Desde ahí logra ver el centro de la
Capital. Las redes de calles y luces parecen una maqueta. (9)
A tranquil block. Midnight. The classes should start early tomorrow
morning, but there is a child that isn’t sleeping. He’s waiting under the
sheets, quietly. He looks at the clock on the nightstand and gets out of
bed. He leaves through the window and goes down the oak that grows
by the side of the house. As he goes down, his pajamas get caught on a
branch. He hangs there for a few seconds until it gives way and he falls.
The grass cushions his fall. He knows that under other circumstances his
mom would get upset because of the grass stains on his knees. He focuses
again. He runs along the sidewalk until he reaches the edges of the neighborhood. He climbs a hill. It’s not easy. He slips frequently. He continues,
determined. The suburbs move farther out until they end up seated in the
valley. The child stops near the top. From there he can see the center of
the Capital. The networks of streets and lights look like a model.
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The stylistic sensibilities on display in this passage are undeniably
visual and suggest a deep familiarity with the tropes and vocabulary of
film and pop culture—from the commonplace of the pajamas getting
caught on a branch to the final iconic image of the city lights shining in the distance.11 Indeed, if the novel’s characters are worldless is
some metaphysical sense, they pointedly continue to occupy a cultural
space structured by remnants of American and global popular culture.
Wilson’s characters are zombies because they inhabit a no-man’s land
between the old world and whatever is to come. But more to the point,
they are zombies because they live in a world structured exclusively by
the remnants and ruins of a culture whose other material, social, and
economic supports have now vanished.
A similar point is brought out more clearly still in Los vivos y los muertos. Paz Soldán’s text is essentially a loose novelization of a true crime
story from the mid-1990s in upstate New York, in which a number of
teenagers from a rural high school died violent deaths, from murder
and suicide to horrendous car accidents. As the body count in the novel
rises, the reader can hardly avoid the impression that any and all of the
remaining characters are themselves the “walking dead.” The tenacity
with which the survivors cling to the rituals and consolations of ordinary life in their mourning is matched only by our growing suspicion
that their days too are numbered. The title of the novel is richly ambiguous in that it calls our attention to the uncertain status of characters
who, while still living, are for all intents and purposes dead and who, in
their death, will continue to haunt the living.
One of the most striking features of Paz Soldán’s retelling of his characters’ intertwined stories—which he chooses to set in the mid-to-late
2000s—is the privileged role that he assigns to modern consumer culture in showing us how those lives unfold. Of course, one would expect
a contemporary realistic novel protagonized by high-school-age characters to make ample reference to current music, movies, and fashion.
But what is immediately striking about Los vivos y los muertos is the way
such references permeate the novel from start to finish. For example, the
opening pages of the text introduce us to Tim, one of the main characters, through a stunning pastiche of references to popular and corporate
American culture. In fact, in the first few pages alone, Paz Soldán mentions Starbursts, Raisinets, Gatorade, Mac computers, Madden football, Winning Eleven, the Simpsons, Abercrombie, Hollister, Banana
Republic, Rite Aid, Wells Fargo, Snow Patrol, The Magic Numbers,
Collin Farrell, Nintendo, and Power Rangers, to mention a few examples
(Paz Soldán 11–18).
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The cultural references in Los vivos y los muertos serve not only to
ground the novel in a plausible way in contemporary US culture: they
are in fact indispensable in describing the world inhabited by the novel’s
characters precisely because those references effectively constitute that
world. While we might reasonably expect any given novel to make some
reference to a character’s fondness for candy or gum, for instance, Paz
Soldán’s preference is to namecheck brands and products in order to
underscore the ways in which the desires of his characters are inseparable from the specific contours of the field of consumer culture in which
they are embedded. Consider, for instance, the following passage, which
describes how football player Tim had mastered all the behaviors and
mannerisms of his twin brother Jem, with an eye toward assuming his
brother’s identity and sharing in his sexual conquests:
Había estudiado los movimientos de Jem, la forma que gesticulaba con
las manos al hablar, los Starbursts y Raisinettes que no cesaba de meterse
a la boca. Incluso le copiaba la forma de vestirse, las ajustadas poleras
grises de Abercrombie o de Hollister, los jean negros de Banana Republic
(boot cut !), los shorts Puma holgados hasta la rodilla. A veces me miraba
en el espejo y me decía, yo soy él, ¿o es él yo? ¿O somos uno los dos? (14;
italics in original)
He had studied Jem’s movements, the way in which he gestured with
his hands when he spoke, the Starbursts and Raisinettes that he never
stopped popping in his mouth. He even copied his style of dress, the
tight gray sweaters from Abercrombie or Hollister, the black jeans from
Banana Republic (boot cut! ), the Puma shorts hanging to his knees.
Sometimes I looked in the mirror and said to myself I am he. Or is he I?
Or are we both one?
Rarely has a novel seemed so much like an exercise in product placement.
But that, of course, is precisely the point. The questions with which the
passage concludes should not be taken rhetorically: In a world where
social meanings are conveyed precisely through a constellation of cultural objects, how is it possible to meaningfully differentiate between
two characters that inhabit that world in exactly the same way, at least
from the standpoints of branding, advertising, and consumption?
This is not to say that all the characters in Los vivos y los muertos
inhabit the same cultural universe in quite the same way. In fact it is
critical to note that the cultural matrix inhabited by the cheerleaders and
football players at the heart of the novel is not entirely congruent with
the social spaces occupied by marginalized figures such as Webb—the
psychopath responsible for the murder of two cheerleaders—and Colin,
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the lonely and disturbed young man known simply as el Enterrador—
who is responsible for the murder of another girl, Christine, and her
father, the football coach. Once in love with Yandira, El Enterrador
had made her a mixtape consisting primarily of songs by emo bands
such as Dashboard Confessional, Jimmy Eat World, and so on. Yandira,
although initially attracted to him, nevertheless acknowledges that “el
estilo no me da para más de tres canciones” (72) [the style loses interest
for me after three songs], finally breaking things off with him when it
becomes clear that the worlds that they inhabit are too far apart.
The case of Webb is still more striking. An older, married ex-serviceman discharged from the US Navy for sexual misconduct and currently unemployed, he lives next door to cheerleader Hannah and grows
obsessed not only with his young neighbor but the cultural universe she
inhabits. He frequents her MySpace page, making a deliberate attempt
to penetrate the references to music and movies that structure her relationships with her peers (67). His incapacity to bring his own cultural
world—characterized principally by his habit of regularly visiting the
same porn websites—into alignment with hers is powerfully underscored
in a conversation he imagines having with her, even as he tries, and fails,
to make small talk with her before she can dodge into her house:
¿Se incomodaría si menciono que he visitado su página en MySpace?
¿Qué por eso sé que le gustan The Killers, Anna Nalick, Dashboard
Confessional?
¿Qué lee a un tal Philip Pullman, a una tal Cornelia Funke y a Isabel
Allende?
¿Debería decirle que ese VampireFreak que coquetea con ella enviándole al menos dos mensajes al día soy yo?
Y ella responde, dice cosas cosas como “me voy, piensa en mí dándote
un handjob.”
Y luego muchos ſſſ!!!!!!!!!
Debo resignarme a que se escape, abra la puerta de su casa y su cocker
la reciba con ladridos efusivos. (28; italics in original)
Would she be uncomfortable if I tell her that I visited her MySpace
page? That that’s why I know that she likes The Killers, Anna Nalick,
Dashboard Confessional? That she reads Philip Pullman, Cornelia
Funke and Isabel Allende? Should I tell her that that VampireFreak who
f lirts with her sending her at least two messages every day is me? And she
responds, she says things like “I’m leaving, think about me giving you a
handjob.” And then several ſſſ!!!!!!!!!
I should resign myself to the fact the she is escaping, that she opens
the door to her house and that her dog greets her with lots of barking.
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This exchange—partially imagined, partially real—between Webb and
Hannah succinctly articulates a fundamental tension in the novel. Given
that social meanings are mediated exclusively through the artifacts of
pop culture, the inevitable fissures and gaps between the characters’
distinctive mappings of their social worlds serve to reveal a dark, latent
potential for violence. Indeed, Hannah’s unthinkingly naïve and f lirtatious sexual innuendo maps on to Webb’s social world in an entirely
different way than she had intended, and, soon enough, the relationship
between the two will be marked precisely by Webb’s sadistic refusal to
resign himself to letting Hannah escape from him again.
As crucial as these exchanges are, it wouldn’t be entirely accurate to
say that the point of either novel is simply to describe how zombie-like
characters consume, and are consumed by, popular culture: in my view,
we miss the point if we simply read Zombie and Los vivos y los muertos as allegories of the perils of cultural consumption á la Dawn of the
Dead . A rather more interesting question concerns the ways in which
the novels address the question of how the artifacts of popular culture
are constituted as such. Rather than regard Wilson and Paz Soldán as
offering us mere depictions or representations of consumer culture per
se, it would be more fruitful to read them as exploring how the objects
of pop-culture consumption come to acquire their distinctive capacity
to signify. And since the cultural world inhabited by their characters is
a fortiori the same cultural world that we readers inhabit, the very act
of reading and interpreting the novels requires us to employ a peculiar
set of hermeneutic strategies, which, it turns out, have a lot to do with
the zombie trope that Wilson’s novel explicitly highlights and which Paz
Soldán’s novel implicitly embodies.
Consider, for instance, one of the most touching moments in Zombie :
James’s friend Ana has decided to give herself over to the dark forces
that govern El Pozo. She walks to the edge of the wasteland and carefully removes her Hello Kitty sneakers, leaving them at the edge of the
black ash:
Me saco las zapatillas.
Las dejo juntas, los cordones desatados, a la orilla de El Pozo.
Repiro.
Respiro.
Miro por sobre mi hombro. El bosque no me ofrece nada. Tengo
miedo.
La figura me espera. Se ha detenido a unos pocos metros de la orilla.
Al pisar el suelo negro me acuerdo de la letra de una canción que dice
“No more going to the Dark Side with your f lying saucer eyes.” ( Zombie
12–13)
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I take off my sneakers.
I leave them together, laces untied, at the edge of The Pit.
I breathe.
I breathe.
I look over my shoulder. The forest offers me nothing. I am scared.
The figure waits for me. It has stopped a few meters from the edge. As I
step on the black ground, I remember the words of a song that says “No
more going to the Dark Side with your f lying saucer eyes.”
The reference here is to Thom Yorke’s song, “Atoms for Peace.” It’s a fitting
allusion, given the song’s multilayered references to nuclear destruction,
the tearing apart of a personal relationship, and the singer’s desperate
desire to take refuge in a lover’s arms. Set against a backdrop of utter desolation, the song is the perfect emblem of total surrender and effectively
renders intelligible—in a paradigmatic pop-culture idiom—an otherwise ineffable and inexplicable passage into nothingness. Ana is already
one of the walking dead, a zombie, twice over: the soundtrack to her
disappearance into nothingness takes us as readers—already familiar,
Wilson assumes, with performers such as Radiohead and Thom Yorke—
perhaps as far as we can go toward understanding what this kind of
nothingness might consist in.
A similarly moving moment in Los vivos y los muertos can be found
at the conclusion of the funeral services commemorating the deaths of
Hannah and Yandira, the two cheerleaders brutally murdered by Webb:
Todo terminó con las canciones favoritas de Hannah y Yandira, las que
no se cansaban de escuchar en nuestros viajes en bus cuando había un
partido en Syracuse o Albany. “Wake Me Up When September Ends”
(Green Day) y “I Miss You” (Blink 182). Alguien colocó una radio
sobre el féretro de Hannah y la encendió; cuando escuchamos los primeros acordes, algunas chicas del equipo se pusieron a llorar de nuevo.
Cantamos todas juntas; hubo también risas, debíamos despedirnos bien.
Así, de pronto, sin que nadie lo planeara, un par de canciones se transformaban en himnos. (Paz Soldán 133)
It all ended with Hannah and Yandira’s favorite songs, the ones that
they never got tired of listening to on our bus trips when there were
games in Syracuse or Albany. “Wake Me Up When September Ends”
(Green Day) and “I Miss You” (Blink 182). Someone put a radio on
Hannah’s coffin and turned it on; when we heard the first chords some of
the girls on the team starting crying all over again. We all sang together,
there was laughing as well, we needed to say goodbye well. In this way,
suddenly and without anyone planning it, a couple of songs were transformed into hymns.
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Not only is this a beautifully written passage, it provides us with an
invaluable insight into how popular culture indelibly structures even
our most intimate and vulnerable moments. Note the way in which crucial elements of that culture are constituted as such without any forethought or planning on the part of individual subjects. Key elements of
the scene somehow come together—the radio placed upon the coffin
by anonymous hands; the spontaneous singing and shedding of tears;
the totally undirected, unguided way in which the teenagers mourn—
without any deliberate planning at all: “sin que nadie lo planeara.”
The point is worth closer examination. The spontaneous, anonymous, self-organizing activity of the teenage mourners configures
these songs as a particular kind of social object, investing them with a
determinate social meaning. In fact, the scene calls to mind one of the
most uncanny elements of zombie subjectivity in an intriguing way. It
is important to recall that zombies, taken individually, are incapable of
reasoning or deliberation from a cognitive standpoint: their movements
are guided by forces that must appear totally obscure, at least at the
level of the individual organism. But zombies nevertheless exhibit, collectively speaking, a remarkable capacity for coordinated, goal-directed
behavior. Indeed, we may go so far as to say that the zombie horde possesses a peculiar kind of collective subjectivity—something analogous
to a hive-mind or collective intelligence—that allows it to self-organize
in surprisingly complex ways.12 So, while there’s obviously no such
thing as individual zombie consciousness, it does not follow that a collective of zombies cannot behave in ways that suggest intentionality.
One of the most unsettling characteristics of the zombie trope is not so
much the way that zombies traverse the border between the living and
the dead, but precisely the purposiveness with which they seem to act
as a whole, given that they individually lack any degree of subjectivity
whatsoever.
The insight may help us to think about consumer behavior and
popular culture as well. The idea is that those elements of popular culture that “go viral” (and of course, for something to really belong to
the sphere of popular culture proper, it must have gone viral to some
degree) need not be accounted for in terms of the preferences of rational
individual consumers, which are somehow communicated to others
and subsequently aggregated. Rather, our consumption of this particular bit of pop culture or that one can be thought of in terms of
what game theorists refer to as “correlated conventions.” Brief ly, the
idea is that individuals need not be seen as rationally examining their
tastes and preferences and then sharing them with others who may or
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may not agree: correlated conventions, rather, can be regarded as an
emergent feature of spontaneous social interaction (Skyrms 63–79).
Consumer behavior in this regard is “zombie-like,” not just in the sense
that we unthinkingly consume a given product but rather in the sense
that the objects of consumption are themselves constituted as such by
spontaneous, and for that matter mostly unconscious, mechanisms of
coordination.
The social encounters that constitute the objects of cultural consumption turn out to have a recursive dimension, since prior agreement is invariably taken as a basis for the spontaneous generation of
new social meanings. When the equilibrium of a social system or set of
relationships is disturbed by some external force—when noise is randomly generated in the system or some new datum is introduced—
the coordinated equilibrium is broken and is typically reestablished by
precisely the same mechanisms that were successfully used to generate
equilibrium in the first place (Skyrms 71–75). In fact, the social world
writ large may be regarded as a series of iterations of this same process. For that matter, one of the most striking features of this kind of
game-theory model is that it can account for social coordination and
the constitution of cultural objects without positing individual rational
agents or even, for that matter, individual subjectivity—such rationality
or intentionality as we may wish to ascribe to a given social world may
be regarded as an emergent property of countless minor social interactions, rather than a crucial feature of that world at the level of conscious
individual agents.
The transformation of rather ordinary, blasé pop songs into farewell
hymns in Los vivos y los muertos offers us a marvelous case in point.
It is fair to say that the characters’ musical tastes had previously converged in the case of songs by bands such as Green Day and Blink 182
(“las que no se cansaban de escuchar en nuestros viajes en bus cuando
había un partido en Syracuse o Albany”). But it would seem that specific songs such as “Wake Me Up When September Ends” and “I Miss
You” only become tokens of mourning among the characters insofar
as no one character in particular is responsible for somehow designating them as such. The cultural dynamic that this passage describes is
indeed analogous to the notion of the hive-mind: the novel invites us
to regard intentionality as a kind of emergent phenomenon of collective
consciousness rather than a mental state associated with any particular individual. Consciousness, then, is distributed among a number of
individuals and cannot be precisely located in any single one of them at
any given time.
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Now given what I’ve said about the meth-ravaged survivors of Zombie
and the shell-shocked survivors of Los vivos y los muertos , it might seem
that both novels leave us stranded in something of a cultural wasteland.
For if one of the key features of the zombie motif is precisely the fact
that a zombie cannot be aware of its own condition—“they are us,” as
one of George Romero’s characters memorably puts it in Dawn of the
Dead —then we as readers must own up to the possibility that, blind to
our own zombie-like condition, we likewise blunder through a cultural
wasteland, oblivious to the forces that organize and structure it. But I’d
like to conclude by introducing one more twist into our zombie hermeneutic, one that I believe both accounts for the unrelenting pessimism
of each work and yet hints at the possibility of an ethical subtext in each
work, if not a moment of redemption.
Edmundo Paz Soldán notes in a postscript to Los vivos y los muertos
that he regards his book as “una meditación sobre la pérdida” (205)
[a meditation about loss], and I think that the same could be said for
Zombie. Consider, for instance, one of the hauntingly beautiful motifs
that recurs throughout Wilson’s novel: whenever a character heeds the
call of Cthulhu, as it were, and walks out into the nothingness of
El Pozo, he or she is commemorated by the survivors by means of a
simple yet elegant ceremony. Just as we saw with Ana, the character
removes his or her shoes, and abandons them at the edge of the abyss.
The remaining characters will later tie the laces together and drape the
shoes over a nearby telephone wire. The image remains one of the most
poignant of the book. Just as the characters of Los vivos y los muertos had
spontaneously converted innocuous, mindless pop songs into suitably
deep tokens of mourning, the characters of Zombie spontaneously invest
a simple, inherently meaningless ritual with a strange and beautiful
power to commemorate the dead.
These rituals of mourning and loss reveal a perhaps unexpected
dimension of the zombie trope, one that may ironically help us to recapture something of our own humanity even as we are obliged to acknowledge the role played by mindless coordination in the constitution of
our social world. The unswerving persistence of the individual zombie
in pursuing its objective is not only a fitting emblem of the fundamentally arational or antisubjective aspects of popular culture: its fealty and
devotion to a particular cause or person offers, oddly enough, the possibility of rethinking the possibility of ethical comportment.
We might recall a point that Žižek has often made: that love is distinguished by its unswerving devotion to a person or cause to the exclusion
of all else; the truly ethical dimension of our being is revealed precisely
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in our determination to follow our object of devotion to its final destination, without relinquishing it, embracing it not in spite of its disturbing, accidental features but rather because of them (Taylor). If there is
something deeply ethical in the figure of the zombie, it is to be found
here, in its mute persistence, in its undeviating attachment to what cannot be entirely possessed, or consumed, in its excessive devotion.
This is, of course, a sword that cuts both ways. No character in Zombie
better exemplifies this obstinate steadfastness of purpose than Frosty.
Unable to win over James’s friend Andrea—who, despite belonging to
the upper-class neighborhood of La Avellana, he has secretly loved for
years—Frosty brutally rapes her and leaves her for dead. A self-styled
priest of Cthulhu, he then directs his efforts to detonating the dormant
“Misil Clavado,” the unexploded nuclear warhead that has become the
image and icon of the cult of the meth-addicted characters that surround him: “Consumo mis últimos cristales. Cierro los ojos y me vuelvo
a palpar la cara, esta vez mis dedos sienten algo distinto, el rostro de un
dios, el Dios Destructor. Soy el Omega, el Fin, el Caos y la Muerte”
(112). [I take my last crystals. I close my eyes and start touching my face
again, this time my fingers feel something different, the face of a god,
the Destroyer God. I am the Omega, the End, Chaos and Death.]
It is not that, as the old cliché would have it, Frosty would follow
Andrea to the ends of the earth. Rather, his devotion to her is made
much more palpable in his willingness to literally bring the earth to
an end for her. In Frosty we have the paradigmatic figure of the zombie: from his deformed appearance and drug habit—which cannot help
but call to mind the zombie-like appearance of meth addicts featured
so prominently in antidrug campaigns—to his unrelenting determination to follow his desire through to the end, a determination sealed by
the detonation of the missile at the novel’s conclusion. Indeed, there is
something about Frosty’s utterly excessive and hyperbolic devotion to
the object of his desire that recalls something of the troubling excesses
of Antigone, that figure of Greek tragedy regarded by both Hegel and
Lacan as the paradigmatic figure for modern ethics. Žižek’s appraisal of
Antigone’s ethical significance could also be applied to Frosty, precisely
on account of Frosty’s willingness to embrace his own monstrosity in
unthinkable ways:
What gives Antigone such unshakeable, uncompromising fortitude to
persist in his decision is precisely the direct identification of her particular/determinate decision with the Other’s (Thing’s) injunction
or call. Therein resides Antigone’s monstrosity, therein resides the
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Kierkegaardian madness of decision evoked by Derrida. Antigone does
not merely relate to the Other-Thing, she—for a brief, passing moment
of, precisely, decision—directly is the Thing, thus excluding herself from
the community regulated by the intermediate agency of symbolic regulations. (“Melancholy” 669; italics in original)
Just as Antigone’s most distinctive trait, at least on Žižek’s telling of the
story, is her willingness to reconfigure the entire ethical field by maintaining an absolute fidelity to the Thing, Frosty likewise is willing to overcome every obstacle that separates him from the object of his desire, even
if this means that he must become a god, a being by definition outside of
any possible community and even outside the symbolic order itself.
This rigor and exactitude with which Frosty comports himself—it
is perverse and monstrous, obviously, but undeniably ethical and circumspect in its own way—finds a foil in James. This is no surprise,
since the one is really a mirror image of the other, a point we are better
able to appreciate once we learn of the circumstances in which each
experienced the initial holocaust ( Zombie 104). Now as Andrea, having
been raped and nearly killed by Frosty, stumbles toward El Pozo, James
watches from a window as their mutual friend Fischer vainly struggles
to reach her. James, in turn, follows them both into El Pozo, crossing
the threshold into the void. Like the others, James presses on, abandoning any hope of personal redemption as he searches for his friends:
“esta vez no será como la otra. No habrá ni refugio ni esperanza, ni será
necesario mantener la ilusión de un mundo falso” (117–118). [This time
won’t be like the last. There will be no shelter and no hope, and it won’t
be necessary to maintain the illusion of a false world.]
It is James’s zombie-like persistence and his utter disregard for his
own fate that imbue his actions with a kind of desperate nobility, all
the more admirable, perhaps, precisely because it is so pointless. If the
final pages of Wilson’s novel are about anything, they, like Los vivos y
los muertos, are about mourning and loss: the loss not only of James’s
friends, but of even the vestigial world that had somehow remained even
after the actual world had for all intents and purposes ended. All that
really endures, both for the characters of Zombie as for the characters of
Los vivos y los muertos , is the bare act of mourning, of commemorating
a loss while relinquishing any hope of redemption.
What is left, then, after the end of the world? I hope that I have made
the case that the question belongs not only to SF, but to fiction that
we often confidently identify as contemporary social realism as well. To
be sure, the figure of the zombie is likely to continue to populate horror
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films and books for a long time to come: at least, that is, for as long as
we turn to marginal genres such as horror and SF to deal obliquely with
questions that are too painful or taboo to address directly, and as long
as we remain at least vaguely troubled by the injustices and inequalities
endemic to late capitalism. But perhaps the greatest legacy of the figure
of the zombie will be to inspire us to reread books that we thought we
knew. Just as the zombie traverses the boundary between the living
and the dead, a zombie hermeneutic can show us how the boundaries between SF, horror, and traditional social realism are much more
porous than we might have ever imagined.
Notes
1. Lauro and Embry offer the most self-conscious attempt to do for the zombie
what Haraway did for the cyborg, but in spite of the fact that their “Zombie
Manifesto” makes some valuable points, it seems to me unlikely that their
article will match Haraway’s in terms of its inf luence.
2 . For a brief and engaging sketch of the cultural history of the figure of the
zombie, see Dendle.
3. Although Marx famously invoked the trope of the vampire to describe the
parasitic nature of capital, he could have just as easily been speaking of the
zombie: “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking
living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during
which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes
the labour-power he has bought from him” (342).
4. Of course, these same zombi laborers would later come to play a key role in the
imaginary of the emancipatory struggle in Haiti, curiously coming to occupy
the subject position of both slave and rebel (see Lauro and Embry 87).
5. The film’s socioeconomic subtexts have been discussed by an array of
scholars. See, in particular, Bishop, Loudermilk, Philip, and Walker.
6 . Mike Wilson was Edmundo Paz Soldán’s doctoral student at Cornell
University, and the two are close friends, with Paz Soldán serving as a
mentor to Wilson, advising him on the publication and promotion of his
own work.
7. Other notable figures alongside Wilson who move in the same circles of
contemporary Chilean narrativa weird include Francisco Ortega, Álvaro
Bisama, and Jorge Baradit, whose novel Ygdrasil is a good example of the
fusion of distinctive mythological frameworks.
8 . This seems to be an important theme of Wilson’s work in general. Regarding
Wilson’s earlier novel, Brown has observed that “El púgil funciona como un
procesador de textos culturales en que canciones, películas y novelas entran
en el texto y, a través de las combinaciones y alteraciones, en una palabra,
a través de los mashups , produce narraciones que son a la vez conocidas y
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9.
10.
11.
12 .
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David Laraway
completamente nuevas, copias de originales que habían empezado desde ya
como simulacros” (243). [El púgil functions like a cultural word processor
in which songs, films, and novels enter the text, and, through combinations and alterations, in a word, through mash-ups, produce narrations
that are at once familiar and completely new, copies of originals that had
begun as simulacra.] The same is true, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent,
of Zombie.
Translations by Andrew Brown unless otherwise indicated.
One of the fascinating ironies of contemporary political theory has to be
the fact that Slavoj Žižek seems to be single-handedly keeping alive neo-con
Fukuyama’s thesis about the end of history (even if Fukuyama himself
would appear to wish to forget it). Of the many places where Žižek invokes
the specter of Fukuyama, see, for example, his “Censorship Today.” For a
succinct discussion of Žižek’s oft-repeated point that we generally find it
easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, see Living
334.
It is interesting to note that an earlier draft of Zombie called attention still
more explicitly to the pop-culture genealogy of the paragraph’s concluding
image. The final line originally read, “Desde ahí logra ver el centro
de la Capital. Las redes de calles y luces parecen una maqueta salida de una
película de Spielberg o de aquel sobrevuelo nocturno que precede los estrenos
de HBO ” [From there he can see the center of the Capital. The networks
of streets and lights seem like a model out of a Spielberg film of that night
f light that announces the openings of HBO] (italics added. Copy in possession of the author).
It is worth noting that some of the lessons we have learned about
self-organizing groups in the natural world are now being applied to fields
such as artificial intelligence and robotics. See, for example, Bonabeau et al.
Bibliography
Bishop, Kyle William. “The Idle Proletariat: Dawn of the Dead , Consumer Ideology,
and the Loss of Productive Labor,” The Journal of Popular Culture 43.2 (2010):
234–248.
Bonabeau, Eric, Marco Dorigo, and Guy Theraulaz. Swarm Intelligence: From
Natural to Artificial Systems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Brown, J. Andrew. “Estéticas digitales en El púgil de Mike Wilson Reginato,”
Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 14 (2010): 234–245.
Dendle, Peter. “The Zombie as Barometer of Cultural Anxiety.” In Niall
Scott, ed., Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil
(Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2007), 45–57.
Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The
Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–181.
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Horne, Philip. “I Shopped with a Zombie.” Critical Quarterly 34.4 (1992):
97–110.
Lauro, Sarah Juliet and Karen Embry. “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman
Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism,” boundary 2 35.1 (2008):
85–108.
Loudermilk, A . “Eating ‘Dawn’ in the Dark: Zombie Desire and Commodified
Identity in George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead,” Journal of Consumer Culture
3.1 (2003): 83–108.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One. Trans. Ben
Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990).
Paz Soldán, Edmundo. Los vivos y los muertos (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2009).
Romero, George A . Dir. Dawn of the Dead. The MKR Group, 1978. DVD. Anchor
Bay, 2004.
Skyrms, Brian. Evolution of the Social Contract (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1996).
Taylor, Astra. Žižek! DVD. Hidden Driver Productions, 2005.
Walker, Matthew. “When There’s No More Room in Hell, The Dead Will Shop
the Earth: Romero and Aristotle on Zombies, Happiness, and Consumption.”
In Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammed, eds., The Undead and Philosophy
(Chicago: Open Court, 2006), 81–89.
Wilson, Mike. El púgil (Santiago de Chile: Forja, 2008).
———. Zombie (Santiago de Chile: Alfaguara, 2010).
Yorke, Thom. “Atoms for Peace.” The Eraser. Producer Nigel Goodrich. XL,
2006.
Žižek, Slavoj. “Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium for the
Masses. Part 1.” http://www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm.
———. Living in the End Times (New York: Verso, 2010).
———. “Melancholy and the Act,” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 657–681.
PART III
Comics and Film:
Latin American SF across Genres
CHAPTER 9
Oesterheld’s Iconic and Ironic
Eternautas*
Rachel Haywood Ferreira
The Eternauta as Icon in Argentina
When speaking of Héctor Germán Oesterheld and his Eternautas series
of comics, we are speaking of multiple and interlocking levels of icons.
Oesterheld first began the historieta [comic] about the time-traveling
Juan Salvo, known as the “Eternauta,” in the late 1950s, later revisiting
it in the 1960s and 1970s. In the three Eternauta narratives in question,1
a group of intrepid technologically savvy individuals struggle against a
deadly phosphorescent snowfall and a series of alien species only to have
the news of their local victory obliterated by nuclear devastation and alien
treachery. Attempts to avoid this near-future reality for Buenos Aires
and/or the reconstruction of the city occupy the later installments of
the series. This chapter will examine the evolution of Oesterheld’s use
of science fiction (SF) icons within the Eternauta narratives over three
decades in order to discuss the cultural assumptions underlying the SF
genre, Argentine attitudes toward technology, SF and political strife,
and national and global power dynamics.
Throughout the saga, Oesterheld makes original use of classic SF
icons, particularly those of the wasteland and the alien, with nods to the
city and the robot. In Gary K. Wolfe’s landmark 1979study, The Known
and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction , he identifies and
analyzes these icons, calling SF “a vast and complex body of fiction
that nevertheless often rests upon the assumption of reader familiarity
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with the fundamental icons of the genre” (xiv). Latin Americanists and
others who work with SF written in the periphery have since demonstrated that when SF icons are deployed away from their Northern centers of origin, they have a tendency to change or mutate as they are
adapted to their environment, adding depth and alternative viewpoints
and thus, in the process, transform the science-fiction continuum. 2 To
illustrate this, we will explore the iconic status of the character of the
Eternauta himself, whose story constitutes such a powerful symbol that
it still resonates in mainstream Argentine culture beyond the confines
of the SF and adventure communities from which it originated. Further,
we will consider both the SF icons within the Eternautas and the icon of
the Eternauta in light of political struggles and what can be described
as the posthumous iconization of Oesterheld himself.
Héctor Germán Oesterheld (1919–1978), originally trained as a
geologist, became a pivotal figure in both Argentine SF and Argentine
comics at the dawn of the “Golden Age” of each in the late 1950s. He
formed an integral part of the seminal SF magazine Más Allá [Beyond]
(1953–1957), and his founding of the magazines Hora Cero [Zero
Hour] and Frontera [Frontier], for which he was also the principal
guionista [writer for comic books], is largely credited with bringing
Argentine comics into their own (Trillo and Saccomanno 96). The
first Eternauta (Et-57 ), drawn by Francisco Solano López (1928–2011),
was an immediate popular and subsequent critical success. I have written about Et-57 and the era out of which it emerged at greater length
in the article “Más Allá , El Eternauta , and the Dawn of the Golden
Age of Latin American Science Fiction (1953–1959).” For our present
purposes, suffice it to say that, though Oesterheld was not blind to the
potential negative consequences of nuclear power (see Nicholls 891),
the Eternauta of the 1950s was largely the product of the optimism
of the early days of the space age when the universe was the limit
and appeared to be open to all. With Et-57, Oesterheld and Solano
López produced a homegrown group of heroes and made Argentina
into an “adventurable” setting (Sasturain, “Oesterheld” 122–123). At
the same time, the first Eternauta has universal as well as local appeal
with its battle of good versus evil, the memorable resourcefulness of its
characters, the multifaceted horrors of its alien creatures, and, most
particularly, for its debunking of stereotypes—both actual and science
fictional—in its staunch refusal to settle for simplistic conceptions of
our world or what lies beyond. Et-57 had an estimated distribution of
180,000 issues a week during its two-year run in Hora Cero, and the
bibliographies in both this essay and my Más Allá article are indicative
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157
of the extensive commentary (primarily in Spanish) generated by the
Eternautas.
To illustrate iconicity of the Et-57 series, we note that we have group
heroes who are Argentines, but, more importantly, they are members
of the human race. They try to unite with other groups in the fight of
humanity versus the aliens invading the Earth. When they are recruited
by surviving members of a military battalion, Juan Salvo and his friends
join willingly, viewing the army as the only hope for an organized resistance. They battle a series of alien races: the insect-like cascarudos ,
giant gurbos , and the “manos ” [“hands”] who give orders to the other
two species as well as to humans who have been captured and turned
into “hombres-robot” [robot-men]. When the SF icon of the monster is
incarnated in beings such as these aliens, Wolfe tells us, “the unknown
becomes an iconic ‘Thou’ rather than an abstract formulation” (Known
186). Oesterheld plays with reader assumptions about the icon of the
alien. He first allows the reader to prejudge the series of monstrous
aliens as other, as enemy, as unknown, by using them to threaten his
characters with physical and mental domination. Then, almost halfway
through Et-57, we find out that the cascarudos, gurbos, and manos are
not so much enemies as fellow victims, forced to fight for a never-seen
race called los Ellos [Them]. Los Ellos are famously described by a dying
mano: “Ellos son el odio . . . el odio cósmico” [They are hatred . . . cosmic hatred] (Et-57 164; this phrase is repeated in Et-69, though it is
spoken by Juan Salvo [127]). Oesterheld does not allow us the comfort
of a tangible “Thou”/defeatable enemy. As represented by Oesterheld
in the 1950s, then, true evil is quite abstract. Although it is not difficult to make associations between los Ellos and real-world oppressors,
still, in Et-57, Oesterheld leaves such identifications to the reader, at the
same time envisioning many shades of gray amid the white-black of the
Us-Them dichotomy, more typical, perhaps, of the Cold War.
By the time Oesterheld returned to the Eternauta comic ten years
later, the Juan Salvo character was an established cultural icon. The
Et-69 was published in the mainstream, nongenre magazine Gente, and it
contained changes that reflected the radicalization of Oesterheld’s political views and his dissatisfaction with the military government as well
as with Argentina’s international relations. In the end, Oesterheld’s own
biography became inextricably linked with the icon of the Eternauta.
“The medium of comics has had its geniuses and its mountebanks, its
noblemen and its toadies, occasionally its heroes,” writes Maurice Horn
in The World Encyclopedia of Comics , “but very rarely has it had its
martyrs, which makes Hector Oesterheld perhaps unique in the field”
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(579). In what were to be the final months of his life, Oesterheld wrote
the sequel to Et-57, El Eternauta segunda parte [The Eternaut, Second
Part, (here Et-76 )], while in hiding from the military police. In 1977,
during the publication run of Et-76 , Oesterheld was detained by government forces. He died at some point in 1978 while in custody, one
of the thousands “disappeared” by the military dictatorship during the
Dirty War (1976–1983) waged on the Argentine people.
The Eternauta has outlived Oesterheld. The adventures of Juan Salvo
continue in historietas written and/or drawn by others, as well as in other
media. Various versions of the comic have been published in Europe
from Italy and Spain to France, Croatia, and Greece (Chinelli). In the
mid-1990s Solano López reclaimed graphic control of the Eternauta,
producing further tales with other guionista s.3 The Eternauta has also
been the subject of museum exhibits, theatrical works, a potential film,
and at least one public service announcement. His image and words
can be seen in more formally sanctioned venues such as subway station
murals in Buenos Aires and in more spontaneous graffitied calls for
solidarity and resistance to oppression.4
From the Iconic to the Ironic Eternauta
Et-57 remains the most iconic of the Eternauta narratives. The image
most commonly associated with the Eternauta is Solano López’s 1957
Juan Salvo clad in the isolation suit protecting him from the deadly
“snowfall” sent by the alien invaders (see figures 9.1a and 9.1b).
The script of the Eternauta that is most often quoted and analyzed
is also that of Et-57. The decision to make Et-76 a continuation of the
Figure 9.1a
Iconic image of the Eternauta, Et-57 (32).
Oesterheld’s Iconic and Ironic Eternautas
Figure 9.1b
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159
Iconic image of the Eternauta, Et-57 (35).
Et-57 rather than that of Et-69 is further confirmation of the lasting
impact of the original narrative on the Argentine imagination. Yet as we
shall see, the Eternauta moves beyond the first historieta from the 1950s
to incorporate all of the other Eternauta versions as well as the real and
fictionalized figures of Oesterheld himself.
A useful tool for thinking about the icon of the Eternauta is the
concept of irony as discussed by Linda Hutcheon in Irony’s Edge (1994),
in particular her examination of how circumstantial, textual, and intertextual contexts (functioning as the unsaid) can affect our understanding of the work we are reading/hearing/viewing (the said) (143–159).
According to Hutcheon, irony emerges from the “the superimposition
or rubbing together of these meanings (the said and plural unsaid)
with a critical edge created by a difference of context,” resulting in a
triple-voiced, simultaneity of meanings (19, 58–63).5 In the case of the
Eternauta series, the “ironic” meaning ref lects the “iconic” meaning.
While the functioning of irony is most directly applicable to the Et-57
and Et-69 texts because the latter is a rewriting of the earlier story,
the ultimate or iconic significance of the Eternauta includes a constant
oscillation among a larger group of “unsaid” contexts.
Circumstantial contexts from 1957 to 1977 include an Argentine government increasingly oppressive in nature, changing circumstances surrounding an increasingly politicized Oesterheld, shifts in global power
dynamics, scientific and technological developments, and the growing
popularity and recognition of the Eternauta series itself. Among the
textual contexts present in the Eternautas are the frequent incorporation
of music lyrics, references to classic adventure tales such as Robinson
Crusoe, and the presence of objects in the foregrounds and backdrops
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of Juan Salvo’s Buenos Aires. The intertextual context for the Eternauta
today includes each installment of the series, the SF continuity with
its familiar icons, the adventure comic (Northern and Argentine) with
its textual and graphic conventions, and finally, documents detailing
the disappeared, such as Nunca más.6 The icon of the Eternauta that
emerges from such polysemia encompasses many apparent contradictions, such as the wonder of the dawn of the space age and the tensions
of the Cold War, the initial optimism of the early years of industrialization under civilian president Frondizi (1958–1962), and the subsequent
disillusionment with politics and power relations at home and abroad
(Wynia 86–90). Other tensions emerge in the struggles between globalism and localism, the group hero and an individual (super)hero, and
finally, within the multifaceted Oesterheld himself as author, militant,
and martyr.
Hutcheon indicates that irony can exist exclusively in the eye of the
beholder or in the eye of the creator, or, as in the case of the Eternautas,
in both. Whether and where a reader perceives irony will be affected by
the discursive communities to which s/he belongs. My interpretation of
irony among the Eternautas may well differ from that of another reader,
but it will almost certainly vary to some extent from the intentions of
Oesterheld. Because Oesterheld deliberately chose the unusual course
of rewriting himself, we can assume a fair degree of intentional ironic
reverberation among his texts. Due to the circumstances and timing
of his death, however, Oesterheld could not have apprehended the full
range of irony or the scope of the iconicity his Eternautas would attain,
especially in light of the aftermath of the Dirty War and the disappearance of thousands.
The First Eternauta(s): Initial Ironies
In 1969, in a very different Argentina, in a very different world, a very
different Oesterheld began to rewrite the Et-57, publishing it with very
different artwork by Alberto Breccia (1919–1993). Yet the opening episodes of both Et-57 and Et-69 follow an almost identical course (see
figures 9.2a and 9.2b).
A guionista is working alone at night when the chair across from his
worktable creaks and a man appears in it. Juan Salvo, the Eternauta, has
arrived in the comic writer’s studio, one of many stops on his journey
through time and space. Eternauta appears, writer is shocked and questions his senses, the visitor looks around and says his same famous first
line: “Estoy en la tierra, supongo” [I’m on Earth, I assume].
Oesterheld’s Iconic and Ironic Eternautas
Figure 9.2a
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Opening scene, Et-57 (3–4).
Despite marked similarities, differences in style and tone between
the two versions are immediately apparent. The Et-69 is darker, more
condensed, and more personalized than Et-57, and from the beginning
the later text reveals itself to be constantly and ironically aware of its
iconic predecessor. The later work is literally darker, as Breccia makes
far greater use of shadow than does Solano López in Et-57. Although in
both versions of the comic the episode is three pages long, in the 1957
edition each page contains an average of 7–9 frames, while in the 1969
version, 3–5 frames are more typical. From the first creak of the chair
to the Eternauta’s first line occupies 13 frames in the earlier version
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and only 6 in the later, as if using a shorthand referencing the earlier
work. Varying publication venues and formats aside, there is also significantly more text in Et-57, though there is also more silence. When
the Eternauta appears in Et-57, all four frames that trace his materialization in the chair offer a world-weary Juan Salvo with his distinctive
Figure 9.2b
Opening scene, Et-69 (83–84).
Oesterheld’s Iconic and Ironic Eternautas
Figure 9.2b
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Continued
light-colored hair dressed in vaguely futuristic garb. In 1969, it only
takes the Eternauta two frames to materialize, and despite the changes
in his features wrought by Breccia’s pen, Juan Salvo looks much as he
did ten years before. In the first of the two frames, however, the semimaterialized Eternauta is wearing his isolation suit, a clear evocation of
the best-known image of the Eternauta figure and a tacit acknowledgment—or claim—of its iconicity. Yet where in 1957 Juan Salvo uses a
diving mask in the construction of his isolation suit, in 1969, in ironic
differentiation, he wears the more sinister WWI gas mask, and when
the suit disappears somewhere in the gutter between the two frames,
the reader is left with the idea that something is amiss or slightly off
center.
In this first episode, the reader can already sense that Et-69 will be
darker than Et-57 in worldview as well as in palette. Oesterheld explicitly
identifies this darker worldview as his own in Et-69, as the tale becomes
increasingly autobiographical. In Et-57 the narratee significantly but
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simply shares the same profession as Oesterheld, but in the novelized
episodes of 1962–1963 (Et-62 ), the guionista mentions “hijitas” [little
daughters] sleeping in the next room, a likely allusion to Oesterheld’s
own four small daughters (8). In 1969 the guionista is drawn in the
likeness of Oesterheld himself, though he is never named.7 Breccia
also draws the guionista in a distinctly Oesterheldian textual context,
since a signed drawing of Mort Cinder, an Oesterheld-Breccia character (1962–1964), is hanging on the wall of his studio (figure 9.2b).
In the same frame, Oesterheld’s text also supports this closer identification of writer and character, as the text box contains a summary of
Oesterheld’s own oeuvre: “I’m writing the same thing as always, a comics script. An adventure in the South Pacific, treasures found and lost
among algae and coral and tough guys, and a friendship to the end, and
a girl with eyes the color of forever” (83). By the end of this first episode,
the reader is clearly meant to understand that this story is not “the same
thing as always,” but rather a different one from the adventure tales of the
guionista’s past—it is told to him by an eyewitness, and it is real, urgent,
and serious.
Hutcheon’s ref lections on the triple-voiced simultaneity of meanings
come into play here as the autobiography, political context, and intertextuality work together throughout the text. As the frame story of the
two versions of the Eternauta make their transition to the main story, it
becomes apparent that Oesterheld was writing Et-69 with a copy of Et57 in front of him. At the transitional moment depicted in figures 9.3a
and 9.3b, the Eternauta tries to convince the guionista to allow him to
stay and rest for a while from his journeying by promising to tell him
his story.
Oesterheld revisits the same exchange, but he keeps so much of the
wording that the changes that he makes come across as all the more
deliberate, setting up ironic resonances for the reader familiar with
Et-57. In contrast to the text of Et-57, not only is the text in Et-69
somewhat abbreviated, it is more telegraphic in style, a pattern that
continues throughout the work. The Et-69 gives the impression of containing gaps through which Et-57 echoes. Because of his spare rhetoric,
the Juan Salvo of Et-69 comes across as a more abrupt, even aggressive
character than in Et-57. He is a somewhat less sympathetic hero overall,
foreshadowing the metamorphosis of the character in Et-76 . The switch
from using the “tú” form to the more distinctly Argentine “vos” form
likely ref lects changing linguistic customs in Argentina, though it may
also represent a desire on the part of Oesterheld for a greater degree
Figure 9.3a
Transition to the tale of the Eternauta, Et-57 (5).
The Eternaut: I know what you are thinking. Before refusing me, before telling me
no, let me tell you my story. When I tell it to you, you will understand everything, including my strange way of appearing. And I am sure you will want to help me . . . Listen . . .
Writer: I listened; all the rest of that night I did nothing but listen. Just as he said,
when he finished everything was clear. So clear as to fill me with terror. So clear as to
make me feel great pity for him. But I will not get ahead of myself: I want to tell the story
of the Eternauta just as he told it to me!
Figure 9.3b
Transition to the tale of the Eternauta, Et-69 (85).
The Eternaut: I know what you are thinking. But let me tell you my story. You will
understand everything, even my way of appearing. And surely you will want to help me.
Listen . . .
Writer: I listened. All the rest of that night I did nothing but listen. And yes, when
the Eternauta finished everything was clear. So clear as to fill me with terror. And with
great pity for him, for me, for you, reader. But I will not get ahead of myself . . . The story
of the Eternauta must be told just as he told it to me!
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of connection with people, especially young people (Chinelli). Finally,
perhaps the most notable change from 1957 to 1969 in this transitional
passage is the extension of the guionista’s pity from the Eternauta (“pity
for him”) to himself and to us (“for him, for me, for you, reader”). This
short addition hints at the ultimately darker message of the Et-69, as if
to foreshadow the deteriorating political situation, or at least a sense of
foreboding about Argentina’s political future.
The majority of Et-57 and Et-69 consist of Juan Salvo’s story of the
alien invasion that he has lived through. In the final episode of both versions, we return to the frame story of the Eternauta and guionista and discover that this invasion will take place in the near future. The historieta
readers hold in their hands is the guionista’s recounting of the Eternauta’s
tale in an attempt to prevent or at least mitigate the apocalyptic future
described by him. By including himself and the reader as objects worthy of pity at the outset, the guionista furthers his efforts to impress
the importance and immediacy of his tale upon readers. But at the same
time, with the extended pity expressed at the moment of transition into
the Eternauta’s account, he also holds out less hope that his warning can
make a difference, change fate, and help avoid catastrophe.
The First Eternauta(s) in City and Wasteland:
The Group Hero and Technology
Both Et-57 and Et-69 share the same general definition of hero and
the same setting for heroism. With El Eternauta Oesterheld famously
brought to fruition his concept of the group hero, as opposed to the
individual superhero of Northern comic book renown. Although the
Eternauta is the only member to survive to tell the tale, Juan Salvo had
survived as part of a group during the invasion of Buenos Aires. The
group consisted of everyday people: some friends and neighbors and
the few other survivors of the initial deadly snowfall. The one defining characteristic of the members of Salvo’s group is the tendency to
be tech savvy. Juan Salvo is the owner of a small transformer factory
(Et-57 ) or of a television factory (Et-69 ). His friends Favalli and Lucas
are a physics professor and a banker, respectively, and both have electronics as a hobby. Polsky, the fourth friend, is retired, and uses Salvo’s
home workshop to make violins. With a high value placed on technical
knowledge, Polsky, not surprisingly, does not last past the fourth and
third episodes (Et-57, Et-69 ). The surviving members are later joined by
Franco, a factory worker, and avid reader of SF, the preferred genre of
the techie. It should be noted that Salvo himself only occasionally plays
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a leadership role within the group, and that Favalli, the scientist, is most
often the voice of authority. There is also a significant political shift in
Et-69, when Franco, as a representative of the working class, is increasingly the one to initiate action. 8 Thus, when it comes to constructing
an isolation suit to venture out into the wasteland that Buenos Aires has
become in order to acquire provisions and arms, those with knowledge
of technology prove most able to build reliable suits and use the weapons effectively, and only they possess the initiative and imagination to
understand events and act accordingly.
It could be said that Et-57 and Et-69 maintain a positive view of
technology, since those familiar with it are best able to resist the alien
invasion and the ensuing disaster. In this sense, technology is not
blamed for converting the city into a nuclear wasteland, rather, it offers
the characters power and a sense of self-determination. For Wolfe, the
city icon often represents a center of political oppression and social conformity, and disaster narratives transform it into “an environment as
unremittingly hostile as the environments our ancestors faced, an environment that is in most ways the polar opposite of the city” (Known
147). Thus, the Eternauta series is not about technology gone wrong
but rather consists of tales in which Argentines use technology in order
to try to save their own city. The Argentine characters’ familiarity with
modern technologies helps them to preserve themselves and to understand the principles of the more advanced nuclear technologies of the
North, allowing them to figure out what is happening to them, and, in
Et-57 and Et-62 , to attempt to work with the Northerners. Significantly,
the city, as exemplified by Buenos Aires—almost a protagonist in and
of itself—is represented neither as a technological den of iniquity nor
as a politically repressive technological society. The destruction of the
city is mourned, and its rebuilding eventually becomes a priority in
Et-76 .9 The respect for technology and the city is present even in the
more pessimistic Et-69. The guionista displays a model of the Saturn 5
rocket prominently in his studio, and the group heroes profit from their
updated scientific and technical professions and hobbies. The overall
enthusiasm for technology does become somewhat muted in Et-69, with
slightly less elaboration on the technical backgrounds of the characters
and the knowledge gleaned from SF. For example, Franco no longer
attributes his technical bent and know-how to SF; his job as a worker
appears to have provided the needed skills.
Although the group hero and the city of Buenos Aires as a wasteland
are common to both Et-57 and Et-69, the later text makes significant
moves toward greater isolation of the Argentine capital. Oesterheld
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adapts the parameters of hero and villain, “us” and “them,” in accordance with his own changing sociopolitical landscape.10 In Et-57,
Salvo’s small group feels connected to and representative of the larger
group of humanity, acting on a world stage. In Et-69, our heroes are
no longer portrayed as a planetary species but are now members of the
larger national group of Argentines and of the geographical bloc of
Latin America. Et-69 also marks the beginning of a trajectory that will
culminate in Et-76 of increasing specificity with regard to the enemy.
In the original Et-57, when military forces ultimately prove ineffectual against the alien and robot minions of los Ellos,11 the remaining members of our group hero go on alone to gain intelligence on
the enemy and eventually destroy the local command post of los Ellos
by using “reason and scientific ingenuity” (Wolfe, Known 200).12
An unfortunate side effect of this victory is that, now that the alien
defenses for the region have been eliminated, nuclear warheads
launched against the invaders by the Northern superpowers are able
to reach the ground, and Buenos Aires becomes a nuclear wasteland
(see figures 9.4a and 9.4b for cause and effect images from Et-57 and
Et-76 ). Salvo, Favalli, Franco, and Salvo’s family escape with a few
others, and they attempt to get their information on enemy weaknesses and their own successful tactics—an Argentine contribution to
the global effort of humanity versus los Ellos—to the technologically
superior North ( Et-57 ).
The group fails to get far from Buenos Aires, falls into an alien trap,
and all become robot-men except for the Salvo family, who attempt to
escape in an alien vehicle. Yet, because he is unable to operate the alien
technology properly, Salvo presses a button that sends him to another
Figure 9.4a
Buenos Aires is hit by a nuclear bomb from the North, Et-57 (287) . . .
Oesterheld’s Iconic and Ironic Eternautas
Figure 9.4b
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169
. . . the resulting nuclear wasteland in Et-76 (36).
space-time continuum, separating him from his wife and daughter. In
this new place, called “Continum [sic] 4,” he learns from an old mano
of the higher solidarity of all “good” species such as their own who must
continue to resist the evil that is los Ellos. Salvo becomes the Eternauta,
a man condemned to search throughout space and time for his lost
family.
The First Eternauta(s) and the Eternauta Novel:
Local and Global Politics
Comparisons of Et-69 and Et-57 invariably characterize the later text
somewhere between the poles of “more politically engaged” and “propagandistic.” International politics play as overt a role as galactic power
dynamics in Et-69, making this version of the first Eternauta text less
universal in both senses of the word. Although the alien invaders remain
the principal “Them” to the protagonists’ “Us,” the role of the Northern
nations changes drastically from that of Latin American ally (“Us”)
in Et-57 and also Et-62 to that of betrayer of Latin America (“Them”) in
Et-69. This change ref lects Oesterheld’s political radicalization and his
increasing perception of the relative isolation of Latin America, that is,
of the inability of nations of the periphery to have an impact on global
policies being set by the nations of the center.13 Oesterheld establishes
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Figure 9.5a
Rachel Haywood Ferreira
Initial radio broadcast about the deadly snowfall, Et-57 (17).
Argentina’s relationship(s) with the North early on in Et-57 and Et-69
in a set of parallel radio broadcasts.
In episode five of Et-57, Salvo and company manage to tune in to
a radio broadcast from the BBC (figure 9.5a), and they hear that the
United States has been trying to establish contact with South America
since the start of the deadly snowfall to no avail, and that French scientists have affirmed that the snowfall is not related to nuclear testing.
This broadcast serves to establish a sense of a global community, of
a planet-wide disaster, and of Northern efforts to come to the aid of
an apparently harder-hit Southern hemisphere. Later, once the group
discovers that the snowfall was the opening salvo of an alien invasion,
Northern intercontinental nuclear weapons are seen as a great hope.
The complete absence of even a hint of blame at the nuclear bombing of
Buenos Aires is perhaps the most telling evidence of the representation
of a cooperative North-South relationship in Et-57.
A few years later in Et-62 , Oesterheld expands upon this spirit of
international cooperation and also on Argentina’s ties with the North.
While he largely posits a continuation of the good relations of Et-57, he
significantly chooses to emphasize both the value of Argentina’s contributions to the war effort and the ultimate superiority of the Argentine
over the Northern characters. On a trip back to Earth from the alternate “Continum 4,” Juan Salvo is able to save Favalli from slavery as a
robot-man, and they travel to New York with a group of US military
scouts to provide valuable intelligence on resisting the invaders. When
the North is hit by advanced alien weaponry, it is the two Argentines
who prove themselves to be the most able. As US soldiers collapse under
the pressures of their new wasteland environment, Salvo and Favalli
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fight successfully until they are captured by the forces of los Ellos. Even
then, they do not suffer the fate of most who fall to this enemy; as a
mano explains to their select group of prisoners:
No los hemos convertido en meros hombres robots porque ustedes han
demostrado iniciativa, capacidad de resistencia, un fabuloso deseo de
vivir [ . . . ] porque demostraron ser los mejores entre los terrestres. ( Et-62
117)
[We have not turned you into mere robot-men because you have shown
initiative, capacity for resistance, a fabulous desire to live [ . . . ] because
you showed yourselves to be the best of the Earthlings.]
He explains further: “Quienes nos interesan son los que lucharon, los
que se salvaron por algo, no sólo por cuidar el pellejo” (121). [Those
who interest us are those who fought, those who saved themselves for
something, not just to save their own skins.] Nowhere in the Eternauta
saga are the iconic characteristics of the Eternauta described better than
in this mano’s speech: it is not physical power, superior weaponry, or
even victory that determines human worthiness, but rather the will to
resist and to fight for beliefs. In Et-62 , then, we have plot developments
largely in line with the Et-57 worldview, including Oesterheld’s further development of the qualities of the Argentine group hero. Here we
should also note the absence of any US soldiers among “the best of the
Earthlings,” another cultural transformation of typical SF paradigms.
By 1969, however, there is no longer even a semblance of international solidarity in El Eternauta . In Oesterheld’s rewrite of the initial
radio broadcast, the transmission comes not from the BBC but from
somewhere in South America. This broadcast is best viewed in Breccia’s
original rendering (see figure 9.5b); in my translation I add ellipses
where radio static and interference by alien technologies are written or
implied by Breccia’s textual graphics:
[commander will be provisional leader . . . lethal snowfall . . . vast zone
Latin America ruthless extraterrestrial attack . . . inconceivable betrayal
superpowers . . . South America handed over to the invader to save themselves . . . we will fight all the same. However alone we may be and as
terrible as the initial blow may have been we will fight all the same . . . in
the emergency survivors should . . . sacrifice.] (Et-69 91)
Once again Et-57 functions as a palimpsest for Et-69, with Oesterheld
setting up deliberate as well as less conscious ironies for the reader of
the later work. The size of the group of “Us” has shrunk from global to
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Figure 9.5b
Et-69 (91).
Initial radio broadcast about the deadly snowfall and alien invasion,
regional in size in Et-69, “humanity” has become “Latin Americans.”
The opposing forces of “Them” have also increased proportionally and
are no longer quite so nebulous. The alien slave races are still on the
front lines and los Ellos remain just offstage, like the central nations of
the North that must now be counted among their ranks.
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Postcolonial undertones are also present to a lesser degree in Et-57.
For example, Favalli compares their fighting the alien invaders with the
struggle of American Indians fighting against the Spanish conquistadors (Et-57 109). In Et-69, however, his more specific affirmation that in
Latin America, “Somos como los incas o los aztecas peleando contra los
europeos” (105) [we are like the Incas or the Aztecs fighting against the
Europeans] now resonates more hollowly as the alien-Northern enemy
repeat errors of the past in a second conquest—or a third. For, as Favalli
points out in 1969, the Northern powers had really always been “Them”:
Si en verdad los grandes países nos tuvieron siempre atados de pies y
manos . . . El invasor eran antes los países explotadores, los grandes consorcios . . . Sus nevadas mortales eran la miseria, el atraso, nuestros propios pequeños egoísmos manejados desde afuera . . . Por nuestra propia
culpa sufrimos la invasión, Juan. Nuestra culpa es ser débiles, f lojos, por
eso nos eligió el invasor. [ . . . ] Teníamos que habernos defendido antes,
Juan, cuando todavía era tiempo. Antes debimos odiar lo que nos debilitaba, lo que nos entregaba al enemigo. (Et-69 106, 110; all ellipses in the
original except for those in brackets)
[In truth the big countries have always kept us tied hand and foot . . . In
the past the invaders were the countries that exploited us, the great consortiums . . . Their lethal snowfalls were misery, backwardness, our own
small egotisms manipulated from the outside . . . It is our own fault that
we are being invaded, Juan. It’s our fault that we are weak, lazy, that
is why the invaders chose us. [ . . . ] We should have defended ourselves
before, Juan, when there was still time. We should have hated what
weakened us, what delivered us to the enemy.]
Favalli’s affirmations that some of the blame for Argentina’s situation
lies at her own doorstep in these passages are tellingly interwoven with
indications that there may also be more specific enemies within: the
military. This conversation between Favalli and Juan Salvo is intercalated with the description of the arrival of the military at Juan’s doorstep. In 1969 the group members are not volunteers but join the army
under threat of their opening fire on Salvo’s home (109). Salvo is then
promoted from corporal to lieutenant, as he is in Et-57. However in
Et-69, written during the de facto presidency of General Juan Carlos
Onganía (1966–1970), Salvo is not promoted for his skills but after the
captain in command kills his own lieutenant for daring to suggest an
alternate battle plan (112–113), in an act of senseless violence reminiscent of that used by the Argentine military government against students
and other groups at the time.14
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We do not know a great deal more about what else Oesterheld may or
may not have intended the Argentine military or the Northern nations to
do in Et-69 because Gente magazine forced him to abbreviate the historieta drastically after 14 episodes due to reader reception of Oesterheld’s
political content and Breccia’s experimental artwork. Oesterheld was
allowed three episodes to summarize over two-thirds of the content of
the tale (based on the amount of material covered from Et-57 ). The trajectory remains roughly similar to Et-57, with divergences continuing
to produce ironic meanings. Rather than taking their information to
the North once they defeat los Ellos, the group plans to seek out centers of resistance in Latin America. Once Salvo arrives in Continuum
[sic] 4 there is no inspirational speech on the need for expanding his
ideas on the solidarity of humanity to include other species in the universe (Et-57 348–349), but only a brief hope/condemnation that he will
have eternity to search for his family/have to search for his family for
eternity.
Oesterheld uses one of the final three episodes of Et-69 to reproduce
as much as possible of the classic closing frame of Et-57. As in 1959,
when Et-57 came to an end, Salvo realizes that the invasion has not
yet happened in the guionista’s world—in Et-57 there are four years
until the invasion; in the less certain times of Et-69 those four years
have shrunk to two. In both versions Salvo returns home to his family, forgetting everything that has happened/will happen/might happen
to him. The historietas end with the guionista expressing his hope to
avert tragedy by publishing the Eternauta’s story as a cautionary tale for
humanity (Et-57 ) or for Latin Americans (Et-69 )—though, as we have
seen in the opening frame, there is less hope that this will be possible in
the darker narrative of 1969.
The Second Eternauta
In 1975, when Ediciones Record republished Et-57, such was its popularity that the publisher launched the continuation of the adventures
of the Eternauta II (here Et-76 ) the following year in Skorpio, one of
Record’s comic magazines. With Solano López once again doing the
artwork, the historieta regained its visually iconic look. The script also
took up where Et-57 left off, ignoring the changes in storyline brought
up in Et-69, though continuing and amplifying the changes in textual
tone. Where in Et-69 Oesterheld wrote of the need for taking action
against the oppressor/invader before it was too late, Et-76 is the tale
of taking that action. The ironic echoes of Et-57 for readers of Et-69
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become jarring ironic reverberations for those now reading Et-76 . By
this time Oesterheld was so active in the Montonero guerilla group in the
struggle against the repressive regime of the military junta (1976–1983)
that he wrote the majority of Et-76 while in hiding from government
forces. The second half of Et-76 was published using the backlog of
Oesterheld’s scripts after he had been captured by the military. In this
historieta Oesterheld focused on transmitting a more specific, localized
message, putting his iconic character’s status to political use.
Characterizations of Et-76 tend toward the “propagandistic” end of
the spectrum. While Oesterheld used the iconic status of his character
and his narrative for what he clearly perceived to be a higher purpose,
this came at both a high personal and artistic cost. In the case of the
latter, the critic and guionista Juan Sasturain has written that “El crecimiento de la conciencia del instrumento que manejaba y la necesidad
de formular explícitamente una propuesta debilitaron a El Eternauta
II, en el cual ya es imposible ese fenómeno de identificación con los
protagonistas que suscitaba la primera parte” (“El Eternauta no tiene”
192). [[Oesterheld’s] growing consciousness of the instrument that he
wielded and his necessity to explicitly formulate a proposal weakened
El Eternauta II [here Et-76 ], in which the phenomenon of identification
with the protagonists of the first part is no longer possible.] The icon
of the Eternauta manages to survive the narrative narrowing and lack
of identification that take place in Et-76 . In retrospect, once the life of
Oesterheld himself becomes incorporated into the icon, the Et-76 regains
something of the nuance and humanity of the earlier Eternautas.
When a character or story becomes iconic, it is larger than its original self and its creator(s) and attains a life of its own, since, in the words
of Gary K. Wolfe, “An icon often retains its power even when isolated
from the context of conventional narrative structures” (Known 16).
With Et-76 Oesterheld seeks to harness the power of the icon that exists
independently from him. He first does this by choosing to continue the
well-received Et-57 rather than the more problematic Et-69, including
direct verbal and visual quotations from the historieta of the 1950s, and
by inserting himself more deeply into the story itself. While the guionista narrator of Et-57 shares a profession with Oesterheld, in Et-62 ,
the guionista shares a biographical feature or two with his creator, and
by Et-69 the guionista looks exactly like Oesterheld. Because of the
return to the narrative timeline of 1957, the guionista in Et-76 no longer
resembles Oesterheld physically, but, when he introduces himself here
for the first time in the comic series, he informs Juan Salvo, his family,
Favalli, Lucas, and Polsky, that his name is Oesterheld, though they
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should call him by his middle name, Germán, which was Oesterheld’s
nome de guerre in the resistance. No longer content with the passive role
of narrator in the outer frame of the story, Oesterheld/Germán becomes
a main character in the central narrative itself, fighting alongside Juan
Salvo as his right-hand man. Oesterheld uses these narrative strategies
to assert his right to write the Eternauta. Yet his attempts to “wield” or
adapt the icon meet with only partial narrative success.
There is a high price to pay for pressing the Eternauta into the service
of a political cause. In addition to a widely acknowledged decline in the
quality of the writing itself, this price can be seen most in the changes
in the characterization of heroes and villains, good and evil, and in the
more obvious delineation between them. Among the most oft-cited contributions of the Eternauta series to Argentine SF are the creation of an
Argentine collective or group hero, with its attendant value of solidarity,
characters who are Argentine yet universal, and situations representing
the complexities of the shades of gray between “Us” and “Them” that
question the very dichotomy itself.
In Et-76 , there are no shades of gray. This Eternauta’s exposure to
radiation and the time-altering technology called the chronomaster
make him into a mutant with superhuman powers. This changes the
entire tone of the work, even though familiar elements remain. Once
Germán has sat down with Juan Salvo and friends to play a hand of
the card game truco in 1959, the same game played at the beginning
of Et-57, the Salvo house is mysteriously transported several hundred years into the future to the nuclear wasteland that is Buenos
Aires. It is later revealed that an “Ello amigo” [friendly Ello] has
brought them here with time-travel technology to help defeat an evil
Ello trapped on Earth after the invaders had left. Favalli, Lucas, and
Polsky do not exist in this time, so it is only Juan Salvo, his family,
and Germán who meet the surviving inhabitants of Buenos Aires,
now living in nearby caves and ruled by the remaining evil Ello from
a fortress. Salvo, with his superpowers, becomes an individual hero
who supplants the group hero. Although Salvo fights the Ello in a
group with the cave people, he is clearly their leader and their superior; Germán is not his equal but a secondary character. Once an
ordinary small business owner, Salvo now becomes one of the typical
North American superheroes Oesterheld had worked so hard to move
beyond in his historietas.
He possesses inhuman strength (figure 9.6a), telepathic powers, and
the ability to immediately understand the workings of any technology.
Scientific ingenuity is no longer needed to defeat the superior alien
Oesterheld’s Iconic and Ironic Eternautas
Figure 9.6a
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177
“Super” Eternauta, Et-76 (186).
technology of los Ellos as in Et-57 and Et-69, rather the Eternauta’s
mutant abilities win the day. He is totally in control, decisive, with the
self-doubt and humanity of the Juan Salvo of yesteryear gone.
Since this Juan Salvo immediately knows what to do at every turn, he
is frequently described as “inhuman.” The human race, Latin Americans,
or even his own group of friends lose primary importance for him, and
this Juan Salvo sacrifices the lives of others—including those of his own
wife and child—for the cause with apparent ease, saying “Su sacrificio no
será vano. [ . . . ] ¿Qué importan unas cuantas vidas? ¡Lo que importa es
salvar al Pueblo de las Cuevas!” (169–170). [Their sacrifice will not be in
vain. [ . . . ] What do a few lives matter? What matters is saving the People
of the Caves!] However, these lines become more poignant rather than
callous when viewed in light of Oesterheld’s own situation at the time he
wrote them.15 Still, according to Solano López, in Et-76 “el personaje se
desvirtuó. Yo ya no sentía al personaje [ . . . ] hacía y decía cosas que no
encajaban” (qtd. in Accorsi 69) [the character was adulterated. I didn’t
feel the character anymore [ . . . ] he did and said things that did not fit].
In Oesterheld’s need for certainty, to express the rightness of his cause, he
used all means at his disposal, including the icon of the Eternauta. But by
gaining super powers, ironically, the Eternauta loses his iconic power.
Even the enemy, once universal, abstract, mythic in dimension and
unknown in proportion, becomes specific, local, and concrete in Et-76 .
Los Ellos become one Ello, since the good Ello is killed early on. It can
incorporate, taking the shape of a mano at one point (figure 9.6b), and
it is itself corporeal, albeit somewhat nebulously so, appearing in its
space/environmental suit in the final confrontation of good-and-evil
(figure 9.6c).
Figure 9.6b The Ello abandons his “skin-suit” mano disguise when captured by Juan Salvo,
Et-76 (102).
Figure 9.6c
The Ello, Et-76 (180).
Oesterheld’s Iconic and Ironic Eternautas
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179
No Wellsian microbes can do away with this Ello; the Eternauta
must use his mutant-gained understanding of the Ello’s own atomic
technology to kill it. Once the evil Ello and its minions are defeated, the
Eternauta helps the People of the Caves redevelop steam technology to
rebuild Buenos Aires, completing the cycle of the icon of the wasteland
from total devastation to renewal.16 Just as Germán had begun to settle
into an idyllic existence in this future, the chronomaster mysteriously
starts up and transports him in time and space. Germán finds himself
sitting on a city park bench in December 1976 surrounded by children playing and others going about their business. As Juan Salvo walks
by, he calls, “¡Eh, Juan! ¡Voy contigo!” [Hey, Juan! I’ll go with you!].
“Sabía que vendrías, Germán” [I knew you would come, Germán], the
Eternauta tells him in the final lines, “Te necesito” (208) [I need you],
and they set off down the road together.
Oesterheld paid the ultimate personal price for his political militancy, not the least part of which was writing guiones such as Et-69, the
Vida del Ché [Life of Ché Guevara] (1968), and Et-76 . On April 27, 1977,
Oesterheld disappeared, and he died in a clandestine military detention
center some months later. Specific details regarding his death and the
whereabouts of his body remain unknown. Since his disappearance and
death, Oesterheld has become something of an icon in his own right.
Certainly his own life narrative has become inextricably intertwined
with the Eternauta as historieta and the Eternauta as icon. When Solano
López wrote me that the next project under discussion with Oesterheld’s
widow, Elsa Oesterheld, was an historieta about “el emblemático caso de
HGO [Héctor Germán Oesterheld] y sus hijas” [the emblematic case of
HGO (Héctor Germán Oesterheld) and his daughters], who were also
involved in the resistance movement, it seemed a natural progression,
the missing piece of the Eternauta saga (Solano López, “Re: Artículo”
and “Re: Una pregunta”).
When the Eternauta series is discussed, Et-57 is virtually always
accorded primacy of place in the pantheon. Today the Eternauta icon
retains the more universal f lavor established in 1957, but the later
Eternautas have been integrated into the icon in several ways. The Et-69
of Oesterheld-Breccia occupies an important place in the Eternauta
saga. The genius of Breccia’s artwork is now recognized, and the work
as a whole provides a transition in the trajectory of the narrative and
of the icon from its more “universal” precepts to the more emphatically
local or political incarnarnations.17 Clearly Et-62 , Et-69, and Et-76 add
more of a Latin American, national, and political content to the icon.
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Rachel Haywood Ferreira
The Et-62 novelization also elucidates that it is the Argentines’ ability
and willingness to fight for a cause that places them among “the best of
the Earthlings.” The darker worldview expressed in Et-69 and Et-76 is
in line with the Argentine reality of those years, when citizens were confronted by actual oppressors in the national sphere who were no longer
so faceless.18 The personal tragedy of the Eternauta, a resistance fighter
and eternal seeker, mirrors that of Oesterheld, of his family, becoming an icon for all of the families of the “desaparecidos,” and of the
Argentine nation that lived through the tragedy of the Dirty War and
other oppressive governments. As a group Oesterheld’s ironic Eternautas
have given us an iconic Eternauta that has ref lected the times, changed
with the times, and endured for over 50 years. It promises to endure for
many more. The Eternauta is both old school SF hero and incarnation
of new possibilities for the genre; he is master and victim of technology;
casualty of a political regime while enduring as a potent force against it;
powerful and powerless; Argentine yet universal. As Oesterheld wrote
in one of the many true versions of this tale, “Cada uno a su modo
todos somos Eternautas” (Et-69 131). [Each in his own way, we are all
Eternautas.]
Notes
*I am grateful to Francisco Solano López for his time and his insights; he is
sorely missed. I am also grateful to Fernando Araldi and Martín Mórtola,
grandsons of Héctor Germán Oesterheld, Marina López, daughter of Francisco
Solano López, and Cristina Breccia, Enrique Breccia, and Patricia Breccia,
children of Alberto Breccia for kindly granting permission to reprint excerpts
from the Eternautas. I would like to thank my colleagues Elisa Rizo and Kevin
Amidon for suggestions and discussions of things ironic, iconic, and beyond.
Additional thanks to Mariano Chinelli, a fount of information on all things
Eternauta, and to Marta Lence, Josefina Ludmer, and Mariano Chinelli for
consultation on the Argentine “voseo.” All translations are mine.
1. Oesterheld’s principal three Eternautas are:
El Eternauta (Oesterheld-Solano López; published September 4,
1957–September 9, 1959 in Hora Cero Semanal ), hereafter Et-57;
El Eternauta (Oesterheld-Breccia; published May 29, 1969–September
18, 1969 in Gente), hereafter Et-69 ;
El Eternauta II (Oesterheld-Solano López; published December
1976–April 1978 in Skorpio), hereafter Et-76 .
A novelized Eternauta (hereafter Et-62 ) was published from 1962 to 1963
in a science-fiction magazine called El Eternauta founded by Oesterheld
in 1961. Et-62 recounts further adventures of Juan Salvo after Et-57. In
its original form, Et-62 had some illustration. It contains episodes near
Oesterheld’s Iconic and Ironic Eternautas
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
●
181
Buenos Aires, in New York, and in outer space, but it was left unfinished
when the magazine folded. The Eternauta III (1983) is widely considered
apocryphal by readers and critics.
Ginway’s examination of Brazilian science fiction in Brazilian Science
Fiction is the critical work that most directly explores the use of Wolfe’s
icons in a non-Northern context (see especially Ginway 14, 39). Her monograph is a new landmark in the study of science fiction written in the
periphery.
Today the Eternauta is registered as a brand, with half of the rights
to it owned by the family of Oesterheld, and half by the family of Solano
López (Solano López qtd. in Accorsi 70). Shortly before his death, Solano
López completed artwork for the approximately one thousand pages of
the Eternauta saga drawn by him; he was also to direct a collection titled
“Universo Eternauta” [Eternauta Universe] (Solano López, “Re: Una
pregunta”).
See Haywood Ferreira, “Más Allá,” n. 19 for specific references. Mariano
Chinelli states that the image of the Eternauta has frequently appeared in
Argentine graffiti, including in stencil, a medium Chinelli describes as a
true “street art” form (Skype interview).
Hutcheon’s discussion of the ironic “rubbing together” of the Olivier
and Branagh productions of Henry V reveals some of the key choices in
play when remaking a work: the cuts (or additions) that will be made;
the tone, emphasis, and focus to employ; the manner of juxtaposition of
image and dialogue/text; and the use or absence of narrative framing. “For
me,” Hutcheon concludes, “irony happened when Branagh’s said echoed
in some way Olivier’s different unsaid (in my memory), and the resulting
edgy oscillation between the two created a new meaning—the one I think
is the real ‘ironic’ meaning” (88).
The document Nunca más includes references to Oesterheld’s disappearance and final days among the information of thousands of other desaparecidos [disappeared persons] (See 339, 374).
To my knowledge it is not known whether the decision to draw the guionista as Oesterheld was made by Oesterheld himself or by Breccia. Chinelli
points out that the connection of the narratee to Oesterheld in Et-57 was
unlikely to have extended into the artwork given that in the same year in
the same magazine another of Oesterheld’s characters, the eponymous narrator of the comic Ernie Pike was drawn in Oesterheld’s likeness (first by
Hugo Pratt, and later by other artists, including both Breccia and Solano
López). The extent of the “Oesterheldization” of the Eternautas becomes
fully apparent only when the texts are considered as a group.
Franco plays a slightly more prominent role in Et-69 than in Et-57. He, rather
than Favalli, is now the one to figure out how to fire the cascarudo’s weapons (i.e., alien technology). Further, in a 1975 interview Oesterheld does
not respond to the interviewers’ probing comments about his group hero but
rather states: “el héroe principal es Franco, un obrero” (qtd. in Oesterheld
182
9.
10.
11.
12 .
13.
14 .
15.
●
Rachel Haywood Ferreira
en primera persona 23) [the main hero is Franco, a worker]. The worker is an
important character in both the Eternautas , but with small changes in storyline such as this one and with the more obvious rhetoric from Oesterheld
himself, the rise in importance of Franco seems a further indication of
Oesterheld’s own political radicalization.
The positive representation of the city in the Eternautas is in keeping with
the historical Latin American identification of the city with “civilizing”
inf luences. This association also frequently applies to futuristic Latin
American cities; Ginway has characterized the icon of the city in Brazilian
science fiction as “an oasis of civilization which nurtures order and cultural identity” (77).
See Sasturain, “El Eternauta no tiene,” 188.
The initial positive, unifying role of the military in Et-57 reflects the ending of the rule of president de facto General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu
(1955–1958) and the democratic election of President Arturo Frondizi
(1958–1962). The military began to exert an ever-greater influence in Frondizi’s government, however, and he was eventually deposed by a military
coup. The increasingly negative representation of the military in the narrative reflects Oesterheld’s view of the changes in the role of the military in
Argentine national life. For further discussion of the representation of the
military in Et-57 see Haywood Ferreira, “Más Allá ” n. 14 and n. 16.
Wolfe notes that “It is almost a rule of thumb in science-fiction films that
the monster cannot be subdued by the conventional weapons of the hero;
even the atomic bomb fails to stop the Martians in George Pal’s film of
Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1953).” I judge it highly likely that Wells’s
novel and/or this film were inspirations for the method of the local defeat
of los Ellos in Et-57. Los Ellos can put up a barrier over the city of Buenos
Aires that nuclear warheads from the North are unable to penetrate. They
also have a smaller protective sphere, likely containing the atmosphere they
need to breathe. This sphere is pierced by toppling the Monument to the
Two Congresses, which is felled by a relatively low-tech bazooka shot by
Franco. Much like Wells’s Martians’ death by microbe, los Ellos are killed
by something in our atmosphere (Et-57 276).
As Ginway has discussed with regard to Brazil, when Northern-dominated
phenomena such as the Cold War and the arms race are represented from
the periphery, the predominant reaction is often a feeling of powerlessness,
that one is “a witness with no real voice” (Ginway 85).
One such act was the Noche de los Bastones Largos [Night of the Long
Batons/Sticks/Truncheons] on July 29, 1966. At the University of Buenos
Aires, a protest of students and faculty against Onganía’s elimination of
university autonomy was repressed by Federal Police, who wielded their
police batons with great brutality.
Two of his four daughters had been “disappeared” and killed by the military in June and July of 1976 along with a son-in-law and an unborn
grandchild. María, one of the sacrificed young fighters from the Pueblo
Oesterheld’s Iconic and Ironic Eternautas
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183
de las Cuevas, was the nome de guerre of Beatriz, the first of Oesterheld’s
daughters to disappear (García, “De frente” 4). His remaining two daughters were disappeared soon after Oesterheld himself, in late 1977.
16 . For further details on the cycle of the city, see Wolfe, “The Remaking of
Zero.”
17. Many other artists have since drawn their own interpretations of the characters of the Eternautas. A number of them can be found in places such as
in the front matter of the Record edition of Et-57 (El Eternauta [edición
integra de lujo] ), (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Record, 1998) or the “Imágenes”
link of the website www.eternauta.com.
18 . A list of the status of the 12 Argentine heads of state from 1966 to 1983
(from the term of General Onganía to the election of Raúl Alfonsín) provides a brief but telling explanation for a negative Argentine outlook, since
the vast majority were nonelected de facto military presidents.
Bibliography
Accorsi, Andrés. “Reportaje: Francisco Solano López,” Comiqueando 5.12 (1995):
67–71.
Chinelli, Mariano. Skype interview. January 9, 2010.
García, Fernando Ariel. “De frente a la esfinge.” In Héctor G. Oesterheld and
Francisco Solano López, El Eternauta II (Buenos Aires: Doedytores, 2007), 3–4.
Ginway, M. Elizabeth. Brazilian Science Fiction: Cultural Myths and Nationhood in
the Land of the Future (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004).
Haywood Ferreira, Rachel. “Más Allá , El Eternauta , and the Dawn of the Golden
Age of Latin American Science Fiction (1953–59),” Extrapolation 51.2 (2010):
281–303.
Horn, Maurice. The World Encyclopedia of Comics. Vol. 5 (Haverford, PA: Chelsea
House, 1999).
Hutcheon, Linda. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London: Routledge,
1994).
Más allá: Revista mensual de fantasía científica [Buenos Aires] 1.1–4.48
(1953 –1957).
Nicholls, Peter. “Optimism and Pessimism.” In John Clute and Peter Nicholls,
eds., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995),
891–892.
Nunca más: Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas
(Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1984).
Oesterheld, Héctor G. “El Eternauta.” El Eternauta y otros cuentos de ciencia ficción.
1962–1963 (Buenos Aires: Colihue, 1996), 5–122 [Cited as Et-62].
———. Oesterheld en primera persona. Vol. 1 of HGO, su vida y su obra (Buenos
Aires: La Bañadera del Cómic, 2005).
——— and Alberto Breccia. El Eternauta in El Eternauta y otras historias. 1969
(Buenos Aires: Colihue, 1998), 81–132 [Cited as Et-69].
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——— and Francisco Solano López. El Eternauta: 1957–2007, 50 años. 1957–1959
(Buenos Aires: Doedytores, 2007) [Cited as Et-57 ].
———. El Eternauta II. 1976–1978 (Buenos Aires: Doedytores, 2008). [Cited as
Et-76 ].
Sasturain, Juan. “El Eternauta no tiene quién lo escriba.” 1985. In El domicilio de la
aventura (Buenos Aires: Colihue, 1995), 179–192.
———. “Oesterheld y el héroe nuevo.” 1982. In El domicilio de la aventura (Buenos
Aires: Colihue, 1995), 103–126.
Solano López, Francisco. “Re: Artículo sobre El Eternauta.” Message to the author.
August 25, 2009. Email.
———. “Re: Una pregunta para nuevo artículo sobre El Eternauta .” Message to the
author. January 19, 2010. Email.
———. Solano López en primera persona: 100% El Eternauta (Buenos Aires:
Ancares Editora, 2001).
Trillo, Carlos and Guillermo Saccomanno. Historia de la historieta argentina
(Buenos Aires: Ediciones Record, 1980).
Wolfe, Gary K . The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction
(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1979).
———. “The Remaking of Zero: Beginning at the End.” In Eric S. Rabkin, Martin
H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander, eds., The End of the World. Alternatives
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 1–19.
Wynia, Gary W. Argentina in the Postwar Era: Politics and Economic Policy Making
in a Divided Society (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978).
CHAPTER 10
Brazilian Science Fiction and the
Visual Arts: From Political Cartoons
to Contemporary Comics
Octavio Aragão
Translated by M. Elizabeth Ginway
Introduction
This chapter traces the evolution of science fiction (SF) motifs in political cartoons from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to
those found in the work of contemporary Brazilian cartoonists and
comic strip artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It illustrates that early SF cartoons use mainly satirical methods,
as per critic Robert Scholes’s concept of mimesis, while contemporary
cartoonists employ the SF mode of speculation, exemplifying Scholes’s
definition of poeisis.
As the chapter demonstrates, stories and images appearing in weekly
periodicals that were originally meant to inform and entertain actually
undermine the advance of science and technology through disinformation. This, in turn, served to reinforce the ideology that a technological
future was out of Brazil’s reach. While early works anticipate and confirm
the popularization of certain technological concepts and a yearning for
a better, utopian future, contemporary cartoonists Luiz Gê and Laerte
Coutinho’s critique the technological society resulting from Brazil’s modernization policies during the later decades of the twentieth century. They
imbue their dialogue and imagery with elements of SF, using the genre’s
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Octavio Aragão
narrative strategies by borrowing from SF television series and comic book
styles. Thanks to these pioneers and the advent of digital and online culture, current comic book artists and designers in Brazil are in a position
to receive both unprecedented financial support and cultural recognition
for their work.
The Origins of Science Fiction in Cartoons:
Drawing the Future with Irony
We can trace the first appearance of comics employing SF motifs
to 1920, when Amazing Stories distributed a comic strip to various
American newspapers via the National Newspaper Service Syndicate,
thereby transforming space hero Buck Rogers into an icon of mass
culture.1 SF imagery can also be found in European graphic narratives of the nineteenth century, as in Dutch cartoonist Rodolphe
Töpffer’s comic lithographs, replete with f lying machines and fantastic
voyages akin to those of the American series. Proto–science fiction such
as A Voyage to the Moon (1656) by Cyrano de Bergerac included f light and
extravagant tales, and Töpffer’s Voyages et aventures du Docteur Festus
(1829–1840) involves similar escapades and misadventures (Horay 5). 2
Festus’s adventures are set in imaginary countries such as Gouvernais,
the kingdoms of Vireloup and Roundeterre, where he and fellow adventurers experience surprising events such as the discovery of a planet and
space travel. There are also several frustrated attempts to reach a star
via a f lying telescope, whose design actually anticipates today’s manned
space rockets, complete with divisions in stages.
German Wilhelm Busch, a contemporary of Töpffer and creator
of the Max und Moritz series (1865), enjoyed considerable commercial success in Brazil, having been translated by poets Olavo Bilac and
Guilherme de Almeida (Fonseca 96).3 Busch apparently had a significant inf luence on European artists working in Brazil during the same
period, including German Henrique Fleuiss (1824–1882), editor of the
magazine Semana Ilustrada (1860–1875). Busch’s inf luence on Fleuiss
is so clear that the latter was accused of plagiarism by Angelo Agostini
(1843–1910),4 a cartoonist who would later be considered the pioneer of
comics in Brazil (Aragão 89).
Agostini may have been right about Fleuiss and Busch. The similarities between their works are striking, but perhaps we can consider
Fleuiss less a plagiarist than someone well versed in the European cultural imaginary of his time. Agostini, although an Italian immigrant,
fully identified himself with Brazil—to the point of admitting that he
Brazilian Science Fiction
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187
was inf luenced by French and German artists. His view of Brazilian
identity included the questionable premise that Brazilian identity stems
from the supposed “perfectability” of the three races—white, black,
and Indian—along with positivist views of technology and scientific
advances (Agostini 4–5).
Sociopolitical Modernity in the Imperial
Capital: Angelo Agostini
As a political cartoonist, Angelo Agostini satirized Emperor Dom Pedro
II’s passion for science by establishing a direct relationship between the
monarch’s pastimes and the decadence of public institutions. In two
of Agostini’s famous political cartoons, the emperor is seen either as a
distracted old man, with his head in the clouds and his eyes fixed on a
telescope while all sorts of pilfering is going on around him, or asleep
on his throne with the newspaper O País [The Nation] forgotten on his
lap.5 The irony is obvious, but perhaps a bit off target. Pedro II was an
advocate of the causes of modernity and a lover of technology, a frequent
visitor at international science fairs, and supporter of scientists such as
Alexander Graham Bell and antimonarchists like Victor Hugo. Yet we
can speculate that Brazilian politicians of the time feared the country’s
loss of its agricultural economic base, and did not truly believe Brazil to
be worthy or capable of industrialization. Thus, despite technological
innovations put forth by the Viscount of Mauá—an entrepreneur and
banker—and by inventor Santos Dumont, 6 none were taken seriously at
the time by self-respecting Brazilian artists or intellectuals. While technology inspired serious speculative fiction by Verne and Wells, it had
no such effect in Brazil. Thus, in comparing Brazil’s status with that of
Europe, Brazilian cartoonists used SF elements in their work for satirical purposes, often portraying the scientist as a delirious and fantasyobsessed madman, with no sense of reality. At the time, Brazil, far from
being the “land of the future” as predicted by Stefan Zweig in 1941,7
seemed to be a country of the “eternal present.” Anyone who thought
the future meant progress could hardly be taken seriously. According to
historian Renato Lemos:
A modernidade republicana paga um tributo às suas raízes. No Império,
bancara a avestruz, para não se envolver na luta contra a escravidão,
que poderia lhe custar o apoio das fazendeiros republicanos escravistas.
Agora, comprometida até a medula dos ossos com o poder oligárquico,
revela-se incapaz de incorporar os principais valores gerados pelas sociedades então consideradas modernas: a igualdade e a democracia. (31)
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Octavio Aragão
[The government of the Republic paid a high price for its “modernity.” 8 During the Empire, it played the role of the ostrich so as not to
get involved with the struggle against slavery, which might have cost
it the political support of the slaveholding landowners. Committed to
the hilt to the power of the oligarchy, it showed itself to be incapable
of incorporating the principal values of modern societies: equality and
democracy.]
It is in this elitist climate that the political cartoons and comic book
stories of Agostini, Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro (1846–1905), Max Yantok
(1881–1964), and Juó Bananere (1892–1933) appeared.9 These artists
appropriated Vernian imagery for satire and mockery, since they had no
concern for science itself. The fantastic machines that appeared in their
drawings were not meant to have the slightest hint of realism. Fantastic
voyages are envisioned in ways that recall Voltaire and Swift—with only
one intent: to criticize society. And whenever automatons or mechanical men appear, they are portrayed either as Frankenstein-like monsters, threatening the status quo, or as monolithic representations of
the “people.” These artists help create a visual imaginary of their time,
familiarizing the public with icons that would later come to be associated with science fiction.
Modes of Representation: Satirical vs.
Speculative, or Mimesis vs. Poeisis
Robert Scholes recalls that literature can be separated into mimesis
and poiesis, cognition and sublimation, mainly via the representation
of milieu or time period. If the theme of a work ref lects the present, its
construction of reality is perceived through the senses, using mimesis
or cognition. If, on the other hand, the text does not establish a clear
identification with the “here and now,” and seeks some type of speculation or escapism (and Scholes regrets the connotation of this term), it is
a work that employs poiesis or sublimation (5). SF, since it deals almost
exclusively with the future, would clearly be poiesis. However, political cartoons, because they deal with a specific situation in the present, would be classified as mimesis. Voltaire’s Candide (1759) or Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels (1726), despite their use of fantastic elements, are satires aimed at their respective times and take aim at specific targets, and
in this sense, they are not “escapist” or speculative. On the other hand,
the SF of Jules Verne rarely engages in explicit social criticism (perhaps
with the exception of Captain Nemo, and his anticolonialist attitudes as
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189
expressed in Twenty-Thousand Leagues under the Sea [1870]), choosing
pure extrapolation instead. Verne, with his focus on “what if,” imbues
his speculative exercises with plausibility.
Many of the Brazilian cartoons that employ elements of SF involve
only a veneer of science, since the intention is to take aim at the present
moment as measured only by the senses, or mimesis. Auerbach postulates that the use of humor in this way demonstrates the limitations of
representing the real, that is, the limitation of historical consciousness.
In this case, satire—a critique of social norms—is mere storytelling, not
speculation, since it depends largely on the viewer’s knowledge of actual
events and historical references.
There are exceptions to this tendency in early Brazilian political
cartoons, such as the unsigned example that appears in the magazine
Tico-Tico in 1912. It ridicules a future air shuttle service between Rio
de Janeiro and São Paulo via zepplins. Although its satirical targets are
the elite and the government, its visual impact has withstood the test
of time. By showing beggars catching objects falling from the airship,
mostly discarded items of the rich—such as top hats and champagne
bottles—it superimposes the past onto our perception of the present via
poiesis. Here the rules of SF come into play, since its depictions of air
travel, airplanes, and balloons—including a police-car dirigible—are
familiar to us, and the humor becomes timeless. This type of illustration is different from traditional political cartoons that require considerable background knowledge about the customs of the time and the
people portrayed in order to be understood. However, a skilled political
cartoonist can attain complex and significant objectives via a humorous disjunction, according to Violette Morin, precisely through the use
of familiar instruments and simple signs. Political cartoons are meant
to offend, provoke, or transform not only through their images, but
also through stereotypes that suggest wider meanings, thereby stirring
up the public and, for better or worse, raising awareness about public
institutions.10
Max Yantok’s As Viagens de Kaximbown
[The Voyages of Kaximbown]
Max Yantok (1881–1964), who began his career as an illustrator for
Tico-tico,11 developed plots worthy of his friend Jules Verne, and even
H. G. Wells. In 1910, Yantok began his series “As aventuras de Kaximbown,
Pipoca, Pistolão e Sábado em Fantasópolis, na Pandegolândia, na
G’astronomia, no Pólo Norte ou no fundo do mar” [The Adventures
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of Kaximbown, Popcorn, Big Gun and Saturday in Fantasopolis in
Pandelgoland, G’astronomy, at the North Pole or the Bottom of the
Ocean], which lasted for four decades. It is Yantok’s description of
the North Pole and the Earth’s Axis, an enormous subterranean machine
responsible for the Earth’s rotation that recalls passages from Verne. In
Yantok’s story the axis is a machine maintained by the “Companhia
Elétrica da Rotação Terrestre” [Electric Company of Earthly Rotation].
And, as we shall see, despite the superficiality of the scientific description and the difference in media (a cartoon vs. novel), the images in
Yantok’s text and a passage from Twenty-Thousand Leagues under the Sea
are quite similar. First we have the text by Yantok:
De repente Kaximbown chegou à beira de um abismo, e ficou cheio
de surpresa. Viu um enorme eixo movido a eletricidade, com tantos
maquinismos complicados que o deixaram tonto. É preciso notar que
Kaximbown nunca estudou geografia, apesar disso, ele logo disse que
se tratava do Eixo da Terra, que ele julgava fosse imaginário. (Qtd. in
Lima 126)
[Suddenly, Kaximbown arrived at the edge of an abyss, and found himself full of awe. He saw an enormous axis moved by electricity, with so
many complex mechanisms that it left him dizzy. It is necessary to note
that Kaximbown had never studied geography, and yet despite this, he
said that it was the Axis of the Earth, which he had previously thought
to be imaginary.]
Now a passage from Verne’s Twenty-thousand Leagues under the Sea as
the narrator Arronax learns of the ship’s mechanisms:
I followed Captain Nemo through one of the gangways situated along
the sides of the ship, and arrived at its center. Here there was a sort of
open shaft between two watertight compartments. An iron ladder, fixed
firmly to the wall, led to the top of the stairwell. (79)
The engine room was brightly lit, and more than 20 meters long. It was
divided into two clear parts. The first contained the devices for producing the electricity, and the other, the mechanism for transmitting the
movement to the propeller. (81)12
Besides the inf luence of Verne and Wells, we see Yantok’s inadvertent
Swifitian tone in the ironic and critical attitude toward the society of
his time. Far from attempting to offer any scientific insight, Yantok
structures his adventures mostly on unbridled fantasy, with an eye on
the satirical and contemporary. However, since children are his main
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audience, his social criticism is not as harsh as that found in works
aimed at adults.
In another adventure, Kaximbown undertakes an interplanetary
voyage, which does not show any scientific knowledge of the stars, but
rather represents Mars as a tomato, Saturn and the moon as types of
cheese, and Venus as a cookie. Unlike Verne, who sought scientific
verisimilitude, Yantok mentions science for special effects, and in one
example, he describes microbes as members of high society, who frequent salons where they reveal the boudoir secrets of the bacteria and
the protozoa. Despite these absurd and surreal images, the author does
provide information about astronomy, zoology, physics, and navigation.
In contrast to this fanciful representation of astronomy and biology,
Yantok’s drawings of giant gears and complex machines recall the illustrations by George Roux for the first editions of Jules Verne. Here we
have another example of mimesis in the satirical tone of his work, along
with poeisis in speculative aspects of children’s literature. Later, Yantok
would go on to gather this series of cartoons and publish them in 35 volumes, but despite their success at the time, few, if any copies remain.
Another humorist who drew on technological iconography to criticize the social and political issues of the 1930s was Alexandre Ribeiro
Marcondes Machado, known as Juó Bananere.13 A satirist of great success already in 1911, he specialized in parodies of Brazilian literary stylists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Machado
de Assis, Rui Barbosa, Gonçalves Dias, Casimiro de Abreu, and Olavo
Bilac,14 and for this reason, he can be considered a precursor to Brazilian
Modernism.15 One of his parodic poems, “O Gorvo,” written in a macarronic Italo-Portuguese, takes aim at Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”
(Bananere 22). However, in 1933, in the Diário do Abax’o Piques, a
satirical, mainly political, newspaper, Bananere uses a visual image
close to SF, proposing that trains might be coupled to zepplins and run
by automated systems. Drawn in elaborate detail in a way that anticipates today’s exploded images and infographics,16 the entire invention
is designed as a means to escape from the tolls charged by the national
electric company on vehicles that pass through the railroad crossings of
the São Paulo neighborhood of Brás (Saliba 244).
Let us conclude this section by noting that although the interests
of these Brazilian cartoonists and comic-book authors from the first
decades of the twentieth century were more satirical than speculative,
and invested more in mimesis than poiesis, this did not prevent them
from exercising a type of scientific anticipation, motivated by social criticism. The use of images that eventually become defining elements of
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traditional SF (elaborate machines, automation, utopian visions) is clearly
present. Unfortunately, because of the emphasis on social criticism, the
growth of true SF comics, with elaborate artwork and more profound
texts, would have to wait until the 1960s, when works by Flavio Colin,
Nico Rosso, Mozart Couto, and Shimamoto17 would finally include SF
within their horror plots, producing comic-book series similar to those
published in the French magazine Metal Hurlant . The series Paralelas by
Couto is a good example of this, echoing Dadaist experiments of French
comic-book illustrators such as Moebius, Bilal, and Druillet.18
One exception to this rule can be found in the 1930s, with the
SF-based images in the magazine Suplemento Juvenil in series such as
Aventuras de Roberto Sorocaba [The Adventures of Roberto Sorocaba]
by Monteiro Filho and O enigma das pedras vermelhas [The Enigma of
the Red Stones] by Fernando Dias da Silva.19 However, both of these
comics are derivative, inspired by works by Americans Milton Canniff
and Alex Raymond, 20 and fail to distinguish between science and pure
fantasy. Nowadays, the work of Edgar Franco, Patati, Allan Alex, and
Manoel Magalhães demonstrates how SF has filtered into the cartoon
genre in Brazil, since it includes dream-like fantasy worlds, time travel,
and futuristic noir imagery (Cirne 37). The beginning of the integration of SF into comics can be traced to the work of Luiz Gê and Laerte
Coutinho, 21 whose cartoons merit an in-depth examination, since they
use SF without resorting to pure satire, thereby avoiding clichés from
American movies and comic books.
The Shifting Ground of Laerte Coutinho
(1951–) and Luiz Gê (1953–)
For Laerte Coutinho and Luiz Geraldo Ferreira Martins, best known
by their respective pen names Laerte and Luiz Gê, the future is not
an ideal place. These cartoonists came of age during the 1970s and
1980s, publishing in the pages of underground magazines such as Balão
[Balloon], Circo [Circus], and Chiclete com banana [Chewing Gum with
Bananas]. Their repertoire includes imagery from sci-fi cinematography along with elements of high and low culture, existentialism, literature, and music. Two of their works deserve extensive analysis for their
SF themes: Laerte’s “O insustentável leveza do ser” [The Unbearable
Lightness of Being] published in the third issue of the magazine Circo
(1987), and Luiz Gê’s “Perdidos no espaço” [Lost in Space], part of a
book called Território dos bravos [Territory of the Brave] (1993) that was
later reprinted in Circo. 22
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Laerte’s 1987 “O insustentável leveza do ser,” echoing Milan Kundera’s
novel of the same title, appropriates the theme of the fictional nature
of reality, a favorite theme of Philip K. Dick, one of SF’s most cited
and popular authors of the New Wave. 23 Laerte’s six-page narrative tells
the story of Renato, a young man who discovers that nothing in his
reality is actually real, not even the world itself. In successive series of
reversals tied together by narrative skill and boldness in drawing style,
Laerte peels away the layers of Renato’s life, revealing that his parents
are merely actors in drag, and his sister is a call girl whose white skin is
a synthetic epidermis. In a metafictional shock that anticipates director Peter Weir’s Truman’s Show (1998) by some 11 years, Renato learns
about the nature of reality the hard way. Critic Moacy Cirne has called
Laerte’s work, “uma estória que já nasceu antológica em sua crueza contra os valores da classe mérdia [sic] branquicela” (Cirne, 82) [a story that
is worthy of anthologizing in its raw critique of the sickly white middle
crapss (class, sic)]. The piece is noteworthy for its narrative force, visual
quality, and social criticism, all of which work together to create its
message about the illusory nature of reality, a common theme in works
by Philip K. Dick and other recent feature films. 24
Luiz Gê’s 1993 “Perdidos no espaço” narrates the misadventures of
a crew in a miniscule arthropod-shaped space vehicle as it explores the
rooms of an apartment as if it were an alien landscape.25 Just as Laerte
makes reference to Kundera’s novel, Luiz Gê alludes to Irwin Allen’s successful television series Lost in Space, (1965–1968), though its narrative
structure also has parallels with Allen’s Land of Giants (1968–1970) and
Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek (1966–1969). Here the visual impact of
art takes the foreground, since the high quality and detail of the images,
the elaborate anatomy of the insects, and the daring visual perspectives
steal the reader’s attention away from the text, which ends up playing
a secondary role. This is unfortunate because it is the expressionistic
images in black and white, the dramatic use of shading, and the melodramatic dialogue working together that provoke a sense of wonder and
estrangement typical of hard SF. It is interesting to note that the aspects
of hard SF—that is, detail and acuity—are not found in the written text,
but in Gê’s exacting drawings that construct and deepen a believable, yet
fantastic reality, often recreating wide-angle camera images first seen in
Land of the Giants, and, to a lesser extent, in the vivid, yet sometimes
somber and surreal nighttime adventures of Little Nemo in Slumberland
by turn-of-the-century cartoonist Winsor McCay.26
Gê’s dialogue can be interpreted as a parody of certain Star Trek scripts
in which the crew members attempt to calm a panicked lieutenant while
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the captain deals with the pressures of working in a hostile environment. In Gê’s story, we never see the crew (via dialogue, however, we are
led to understand that they have 20 eyes), nor do we see the man who
lives in the apartment, only his hands and feet. This creates a distancing
effect for readers, reinforcing the sense of isolation and estrangement.
At the same time, readers themselves begin to feel that they represent
a menace to the tiny vehicle, though they do not identify themselves
entirely with the figure of the giant human. Without the drawings, Gê’s
dialogue would be a collection of clichés and technobabble, and without
the dialogue, the drawings would be no more than an elaborate exercise.
All in all, the lack of depth in the dialogue is a small price to pay for
the ironic and scatological ending, in which the vehicle descends into
the depths of the toilet bowl. Most of the sense of estrangement is carried out via images of labyrinthine blocks of ice and giant grasshoppers,
comparable to the estranged or distorted images of everyday objects in
novels by Stanislaw Lem or in films by Stanley Kubrick.
By transforming a typical residence into a hostile environment by
altering the proportions of the set and the reader’s point of view, Gê
also recreates a sense of horror, similar to that found in works such as
H. G. Wells’s Food of the Gods (1904), Richard Matheson’s The Incredible
Shrinking Man (1956), and even in A chave do tamanho [The Sizing
Key] (1942) by Brazilian author Monteiro Lobato. There is one important difference; Gê achieves this effect via visual images that have a
clean, modern, objective look, a far cry from heavy-handed gothic style
used by the illustrators Alvin Correa, Steve Niles, and André LeBlanc
and in the works of Wells, Matheson, and Lobato, respectively. Gê
brings a new look and an originality that separates “Perdidos no espaço”
from the common iconography of the gothic nightmare associated with
the above-mentioned narratives, thus achieving an original commentary on the banal sterility of São Paulo’s middle class of the period.
Gê transforms the “Icon of the Spaceship,” which, according to Gary
K. Wolfe (73), represents domestic space, by inserting a microscopic
spaceship into an apartment. M. Elizabeth Ginway uses this icon to
discuss Brazilian SF from the 1960s stating, “since the ship ref lects the
society from which it originates, its crew is often a mock family, or a
ref lection of domesticity and the home, as I view it, a microcosm of traditional Brazilian male-female relations” (70). Unlike the domesticity
of the American TV series, the crew of the iconic ship in Gê’s “Perdidos
no espaço” ref lects a dysfunctional family, with a father/commander
suffering a crisis of authority and making questionable decisions, and a
lieutenant/mother trying to stage a mutiny.
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In this way, both Luiz Gê’s and Laerte’s stories can be seen (although
with different tone and intent) as an analysis or criticism of the institution of the family. While they ref lect distinct approaches to social
satire, they both rely on the language and iconography of SF, showing
a sophisticated use of the genre. It can be affirmed that if we were to
eliminate the SF elements from their plots, this would greatly reduce
their intelligibility and enjoyment.
The subject matter of these two cartoonists is as Brazilian in essence
as that of Agostini and Yantok, yet within the context of globalized
cultural production, they show a new cultural sophistication that places
their work in the realm of the creative arts. The result is SF whose high
quality makes a defense of the genre unnecessary. As far as they are
concerned, SF is a way to tell stories about middle-class reality, rich in
allegories and subtexts, lending poetic force to their narratives. Their
work captures what Jameson discussed as the middle class in search for
its past and future (288). Laerte and Luiz Gê, along with other comic
book artists and cartoonists of their generation, occupy an intermediate
space between mass and elite culture, and perhaps for this reason, their
work is neither purely commercial nor artistic, neither entirely pop nor
high culture, rather caught between both. Today, thanks to their work,
we can affirm that mimesis has finally become poeisis, as the satirical
and the speculative successfully overlap.
Conclusion: The Future Is Forever
The joining of SF and comics, both targets of prejudice by high culture,
made the topics that these authors address a matter of public debate.
While few comic-book artists in Brazil can say that they make a living
with their work, there are some national prizes like HQ Mix and Prêmio
Angelo Agostini that recognize comic-book artists of merit. At the same
time, the subgenre of SF comics is less acknowledged by the public, but
at least artists have a freedom of experimentation that would not be possible if a real market for sci-fi were established and functioning according to preestablished parameters. On the other hand, we can point to
several mainstream comics with SF motifs (but without a full-f ledged
commitment to the genre) that are slowly gaining acceptance by the
public.
With more buying power, Brazilian consumers have contributed to
the popularity of comics, changing the attitudes of traditional publishing houses. The São Paulo–based publisher Companhia das Letras,
for example, which previously repudiated SF, has published comics like
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Tintin , by the Belgian Hergé, whose Flight 714 to Sydney (1968), is a
clear example of how SF is gaining newfound visibility hitching a ride
on comics. Because of this, the contemporary scene has allowed previously unheard of experiments to appear from time to time and even to
gain recognition among the public and critics.
Despite being tied to historical themes or to the adaptation of literary classics, several Brazilian comics use the vocabulary of SF, that
is, time travel, parallel universes, and genetic manipulation, though
not the traditional Golden Age icons such as the robot, the alien, and
the city or the wasteland, as outlined by Ginway in the discussion of
Brazilian SF of the 1960s. Among the latest comics that embrace the
SF genre are Marcelo Campos’s 1983 Quebra-queixo [Jaw-Breaker],
about a futuristic superhero, 27 Patati and Allan Alex’s 2003 O segredo
de Jurema [The Secret Potion], a mix of alternate history and native
legends, André Diniz’s 2002 31 de fevereiro [31st of February], the winner of the 2002 Science Fiction Argos Prize, and Osmarco Valladão
and Manoel Magalhães’s 2005 The Long Yesterday, which mixes time
travel and police procedurals. None of these contemporary works uses
the traditional icons that permeated Brazilian SF in the 1960s, instead
preferring to use a thematic mix in which SF is a defining element, but
not the only one.
SF comics and graphic novels have prospered not only in bookstores, but
also on the Internet, a fertile territory for the most diverse manifestations
of digital art. According to Scott McCloud, the Internet could become the
major venue of comic books, provoking a revolution in the enjoyment and
consumption of the genre: “When I talk about digital delivery, I’m referring to comics that travel as pure information from producer to reader”
(163). This now means that, thanks to Internet, the digital union of print,
image, and distribution has reached a new level, costing almost nothing
while reaching a larger public that any magazine can aspire to.
In Brazil, this new form of production seems to be in full swing, with
various artists deciding to distribute their comics in conventional and
virtual formats, making possible diverse and radical new ways of reading. The themes are also varied, and, as would be expected, SF occupies
a key role. There are many good examples, beginning with the hard SF
comic by Gian Danton and Jean Okada, Exploradores do desconhecidos
[Explorers of the Unknown], 28 which uses SF to teach about science.
Okada’s style is deliberately designed to echo the aesthetics of the 1950s
and 1960s, creating a look that Jameson has called “post-nostalgic”
(293). Another innovation is the partnering of technological venues
with the comic-book genre, as in the case of between Oi, a cellular
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phone company whose comic-book site houses five different series,
three of which are about superheroes who fit within SF parameters. 29
In this venue, the authors themselves finally gain recognition, legitimacy, and adequate remuneration for their efforts. Another member of
this generation, Edgar Franco, posts allegorical short stories (along with
psychedelic and art-nouveau inspired comics) in the line of French artists Duillet and Caza.30
In sum, it seems that with this new venue, SF comics in Brazil are
now beginning to receive greater visibility and even respect. If they can
avoid reinventing the wheel, they may blaze new technological and economic trails never imagined by previous generations of artists, resulting
in new possibilities of distribution and consumption, new themes, and,
above all, the creation of new worlds.
Notes
1. Based on Philip F. Nowlan’s novel Armageddon 2419, Nowlan had to be
convinced to write the text for the drawings of Dick Calkins and the adventures of Anthony Rodgers (whose name was later changed to “Buck”). See
Duin and Richardson, 62.
2 . Horay, 5.
3. See Fonseca, 96.
4 . See Cagnin, 6 for details of the accusation.
5. For an illustrated overview of the history of political cartoons in Brazil, see
the book review by Lucila Soares, “O traço que açoita.” Accessed December
8, 1999. http://veja.abril.com.br/081299/p_208.html October 26, 2010.
N of T.
6 . The Visconde de Mauá, Irineu Evangelista de Sousa (1813–1889), was
one of Brazil’s innovators in the area of business and finance, undertaking the construction of Brazil’s first railroad. He was among the few to
believe in investing in labor and infrastructure, and struggled his whole
life against the conservative oligarchy and Dom Pedro II. See http://www
.nossosaopaulo.com.br/Reg_SP/Barra_escolha/B_ViscondeDeMaua.htm.
Accessed October 18, 2010. N of T. Santos Dumont was an inventor and
avid balloonist, who, in 1906, f lew his airplane, the 14-Bis, around the
Eiffel Tower. http://www.vidaslusofonas.pt/santos_dumont.htm Accessed
October 18, 2010. (For Brazilians, Dumont is considered the father of
aviation, and has been the topic of literary works such as Márcio Souza’s
O brasileiro voador: um romance mais leve que o ar (Rio de Janeiro: Marco
Zero, 1986) [The Flying Brazilian: a novel lighter than air] N of T).
7. Author and biographer Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) left his native Austria
for fear of Nazi persecution. After becoming an English citizen in 1938,
he traveled to South America in 1940, deciding to reside in Brazil. While
198
8.
9.
10.
11.
12 .
13.
14 .
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Octavio Aragão
in Rio de Janeiro he wrote Brazil: A Land of the Future (1941), in which he
saw a future in the country’s racial tolerance and in its natural resources.
Pessimistic about the potential spread of Nazism, he committed suicide in
Rio de Janeiro in 1942. Because of his importance in promoting Brazil, the
populist president at the time, Getúlio Vargas, had his funeral paid at state
expense. See Stefan Zweig, Brazil: A Land of the Future. N of T. http://
kirjasto.sci.fi/szweig.htm Accessed October 18, 2010.
From 1889 on, the First Republic inherited a government that had been a
monarchy with a thin veil of democracy, since Dom Pedro II had the power
to dissolve congress at will. N of T.
For a brief overview of Portuguese Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro’s work see
http://www.lambiek.net/artists/p/pinheiro_r_b.htm. Max Yantok is the
pen name of Nicolau Cesarino (1881–1964). One of his cartoons from
Kaximbown can be found at the following URL about the children’s magazine Tico Tico : http://www.universohq.com/quadrinhos/2005/ticotico.cfm.
Juó Bananere was the pseudonym of Alexandre Marcondes Machado
(1892–1933), who also wrote parodies in a macarronic dialect of Portuguese
and Italian. His most famous work, Divina Increnca [Divine Mess], is a
parody of Dante’s Divine Comedy. For a short biography in Portuguese see:
http://movimentoculturalgaia.wordpress.com/2009/07/24/juo-bananere/
and http://www.carbonoquatorze.com.br/versaopaulo/primeiro. All sites
accessed June 18, 2012. N of T.
For further discussion of this, see Aragão, 59.
The following URL about the children’s magazine Tico Tico has a drawing by Yantok: http://www.universohq.com/quadrinhos/2005/ticotico.cfm
Accessed November 16, 2010.
The original passage in French from 20.000 Lieues sous les mers , Chapitre
12, “Tout par l’électricité,” reads as follows: “Je suivis le capitaine Nemo à
travers les coursives situées en abord, et j’arrivai au centre du navire. Là, se
trouvait une sorte de puits qui s’ouvrait entre deux cloisons étanches. Une
échelle de fer, cramponnée à la paroi, conduisait à son extrémité supérieure.
Je demandai au capitaine à quel usage servait cette échelle. . . . Cette
chambre des machines, nettement éclairée, ne mesurait pas moins de
vingt mètres en longueur. Elle était naturellement divisée en deux parties; la première renfermait les éléments qui produisaient l’électricité.
et la seconde, le mécanisme qui transmettait le mouvement à l’hélice.”
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/820kc10h.htm. Accessed July 26,
2011. N of T.
For images of zepplins and planes landing in and on iconic images of São
Paulo and other images by Bananere, see http://www.carbonoquatorze.
com.br/versaopaulo/primeiro/ Accessed October 26, 2010. N of T.
Machado de Assis (1839–1908) is one of Brazil’s major novelists, if not
its greatest novelist; Rui Barbosa (1829–1923), a politician, diplomat, and
intellectual, is recognized for his oratory and political speeches, while
Brazilian Science Fiction
15.
16 .
17.
18 .
19.
20.
21.
22 .
23.
24 .
25.
26 .
27.
28 .
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199
Gonçalves Dias (1823–1864) and Casimiro de Abreu (1939–1960) are two
of the great Romantic poets. Olavo Bilac (1865–1918) is Brazil’s iconic
Parnassian poet. N of T.
Brazilian Modernism is akin to Vanguardismo in Spanish America. It officially begins with the Semana de Arte Moderna in the Teatro Municipal
in São Paulo in February of 1922. N of T.
This is a term used for explaining concepts visually; similar to technical drawing, infographics yields a wide range of materials in an Internet
search. N of T.
For a brief biography and images of the following cartoonists, please consult
Flavio Colin, Nico Rosso, Mozart Couto, and Shimamoto; search this site
by the artist’s last name or pen name: http://lambiek.net/artists/ Accessed
October 26, 2010. N of T.
For images of Moebius, Bilal, Druillet, and Metal Hurlant see http://
lambiek.net/artists/. Accessed October 26, 2010. N of T.
For Monteiro Filho/Gutemburgo Monteiro and Fernando Dias da Silva see
http://lambiek.net/artists/m/monteiro_gutenberg.htm and http://lambiek.
net/artists/d/da-silva_fernando.htm. Accessed Oct.ober 26, 2010. N of T.
See Cirne, 37.
For a brief biography and images by Luiz Gê see http://lambiek.net/artists/
g/ge-luiz.htm and for Laerte see http://lambiek.net/artists/l/laerte.htm.
Accessed October 26, 2010. Also, http://www.burburinho.com/20050712.
html. Accessed Sept 3, 2011. N of T.
For images and comics appearing in Circo, see http://www.universohq
.com/quadrinhos/museu_circo.cfm. Accessed July 29, 2011. N of T.
See Science Fiction Lab at Georgia Tech about Philip K. Dick and the
New Wave: http://sciencefictionlab.lcc.gatech.edu/SFL/doku.php/new_wave.
Accessed July 26, 2011. N of T.
We could cite this motif in novels such as Simulacron-3 (1964) by Daniel
F. Galouye, The Flow of My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) by Philip K.
Dick, but it gained widespread popularity in movies at the end of the 1990s
in Josef Rusnack’s The Thirteenth-Floor (1999), Alex Proyas’ Dark City
(1998), and the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix trilogy: The Matrix (1999),
The Matrix Reloaded (2003), and The Matrix Revolution (2003).
Images of “Perdidos no espaço” can be found on this personal website:
http://j3l7va.multiply.com/photos/album/1#photo=10/. Accessed July 29,
2011. N of T.
See images Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McKay (1867–1934).
http://www.bpib.com/illustrat/mccay.htm. Accessed October 18, 2010.
N of T.
For new adventures of Quebra-Queixo see http://www.devir.com.br/hqs
/quebra_queixo.php. Accessed October 26, 2010. N of T.
For the Exploradores do Desconhecido see http://exploradoresdodescon
hecido.wordpress.com. Accessed October 18, 2010. N of T.
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Octavio Aragão
29. For Oi, see http://quadrinhos.oi.com.br/hqs-online.html. Accessed October
18, 2010. N of T.
30. For Edgar Franco: http://www.ritualart.net/ritual4b.htm. Accessed October
18, 2010. N of T.
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n.d. Web. Accessed October 18, 2010.
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1899).
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Revista da História dos Quadrinhos (São Paulo: CLUQ, 1996).
Cirne, Moacy. História e Crítica dos Quadrinhos Brasileiros (Rio de Janeiro: Edição
Europa, 1990).
Coutinho, Laerte. “A Insustentável Leveza do Ser,” Circo 3 (1987).
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October 18, 2010.
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Fonseca, Joaquim da. Caricatura, a Imagem Gráfica do Humor (Porto Alegre: Artes
e Ofícios, 1999).
Galouye, Daniel F. Simulacron-3. 1964 (Rockville, MD: Phoenix Pick, 2011).
Gê, Luiz. Território de Bravos (Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34, 1993).
Ginway, M. Elizabeth. Brazilian Science Fiction: Cultural Myths and Nationhood in
the Land of the Future (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004).
———. “A Working Model for Third World Science Fiction: The Case of Brazil,”
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Gutemberg Monteiro. http://lambiek.net/artists/m/monteiro_gutenberg.htm.
Lambiek. June 14, 2009. Web. Accessed October 26, 2010.
Hergé. “Flight 714 to Sydney.” The Adventures of Tintin. Comic Strip. Little, Brown
and Company. 1968. Print.
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anere/. Gaia Cultural . July 24, 2009. Web. Accessed June 17, 2012.
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mundo, na qual Emilia, sem querer, destruiu temporariamente o tamanho das oriaturas humanas (São Paulo: Editora Nacional, 1945).
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/new_wave. Science Fiction Lab. Fall 2004. Web. Accessed July 26, 2011.
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(Kent: Kent State University Press, 1979).
CHAPTER 11
Science Fiction and Metafiction
in the Cinematic Works of Brazilian
Director Jorge Furtado
M. Elizabeth Ginway and Alfredo Suppia
S
cience-fiction (SF) film in Brazil is indeed rare, and while the
genre has made occasional incursions into Brazilian cinema,1 here
we examine the SF sensibility of one of Brazil’s major directors,
Jorge Furtado, whose short- and feature-length films are award winning,
accessible, and entertaining. 2 Furtado, who began his career making
fictional films in the 1980s, 3 is recognized in Brazil as a director who
combines social criticism with humor, yet few have noted the presence
of SF tropes and cognitive estrangement4 in his work. This chapter will
show how these elements, embedded often in subtle or metafictional
ways, are key to understanding the deeper meaning of his films. While
Barbosa (1988), Isle of Flowers (1989), Basic Sanitation (2007), and his
contributions to the script for Lisbela and the Prisoner (2003) demonstrate Furtado’s SF sensibility and feature allusions to sci-fi cinema in
Hollywood and Latin America, his full-length features, The Man Who
Copied (2003) and My Uncle Killed a Guy (2004), use comic strip superheroes and cartoons, alongside encounters with technology and cyberspace, to highlight the science fictional aspects of everyday life.
Furtado uses metafiction, the form that most “self-consciously and
systematically draws attention to its status as artefact” (Waugh 2),
and a mix of high and low art, from Shakespeare to cartoons, in order
to showcase his comic sensibility and capture the contradictions inherent in Brazil’s modernization. Furtado’s work also reminds us of Linda
Hutcheon’s theories on parody and the transgression of genres in certain
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postmodern works, which can be both self-ref lective and politically
engaged (3). In this way, Furtado’s unique oeuvre breaks with conventional ideas of Third World political cinema, such that the seemingly
lighthearted, absurd, or even comedic tone of his work, along with his
references to SF, often belie or mask his pointed social criticism.
Barbosa (1988): Time Travel and
Historiographic Metafiction
Furtado’s sensibility, whether informed by satire or SF, conscious or not,
has led him to make one of Brazil’s most genuinely creative SF films,
the 13-minute short, Barbosa , with codirector Ana Luiza Azevedo. As a
tale of time travel based on Paulo Perdigão’s nonfiction book Anatomia
de uma Derrota [Anatomy of a Defeat] (1986), it is a time-travel story
of one man’s attempt to change a key event in the history of Brazil. In
Furtado’s film, the main role is played by the popular television actor
Antônio Fagundes, who constructs a time machine in order to prevent
Uruguay from scoring the winning goal against Brazil during the final
of the 1950 World Cup, which took place at the newly built Marcanã
stadium in Rio de Janeiro. The film’s use of documentary footage from
an interview with the game’s goalkeeper, Moacyr Barbosa, some 38
years after the fateful game,5 makes him as much a protagonist of the
film as the time traveler himself.6
In Barbosa , the themes of time, mortality, and history are present
at various levels, from the SF icon of the time machine to the film’s
opening quotation from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, act v, scene 5: “Life’s
but a walking shadow; a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour
upon the stage, / And then is heard no more” (1024–1025), using
high art to emphasize the drama of human powerlessness in face of
the relentless passage of time. The goalkeeper Barbosa, blamed for
years for Brazil’s humiliating defeat, personifies the haunting sense
of national loss and unrealized dreams. In Furtado’s film, on the fateful day of the match, the time traveler returns to change history, but
his warning ironically ends up distracting Barbosa, who allows the
winning goal to be scored, providing a lesson about the inexorable
nature of history. Unlike a typical Anglo-American time-travel story
in which the hero manages to change history or cause an unforeseen disaster—such as in Ray Bradbury’s paradigmatic “A Sound of
Thunder” (1952)7—our Brazilian hero’s actions have no impact on
the past. 8 In many ways this apparent powerlessness undercuts the
premises of the SF trope of time travel since, in the end, the time
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traveler becomes just as helpless as Barbosa. In fact, the framing of
the shots of Barbosa on television and the time traveler in the film
makes the two appear almost as mirror images. As we contemplate
the black Barbosa and the white time traveler played by Fagundes,
we see Brazil’s diverse racial and socioeconomic differences and the
country’s struggle with identity and modernity. Indeed the white time
traveler’s failure ultimately transfers Barbosa’s putative responsibility
onto himself, in a curious inversion of the “official story” that blames
the goalkeeper for Brazil’s defeat.
This final impasse reminds us of the problem of interpretation
regarding this film. Functioning as a type of “historiographic metafiction” (78), to use Linda Hutcheon’s term, Barbosa effectively undermines the use of documentary and narrative evidence commonly used to
reinforce a unequivocal view of history. In Barbosa , the juxtaposition of
television footage and documentary film clips with time travel destabilizes historical certainty, and history becomes multifaceted and not
causal. Here, the time traveler begins by wishing to replace a historical
defeat with a victory, yet in his failure, he is faced with a more nuanced,
complex view of the past by reframing the event in order to question
official versions of history and “national disgrace” as examined by
Jeffrey Lesser (1177). We also note that the time-travel technology does
not prevent the unfortunate incident from occurring—on the contrary,
it opens a type of Pandora’s box, a motif that recurs in Furtado’s later
films, in which technology and modernization often bring with them
moral dilemmas, and economic contradictions widen social divisions
instead of lessening them.
Although the premise of the film is the SF trope of time travel, the
machine itself does not provide the sense of purposeful exploration of
the future, as in H. G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895), whose complex
dials and controls allow the traveler to visit the future and then return
to his own time. In Barbosa , the machine is cybernetic and minimalist.
The time traveler, after using a computer, steps onto a small circular
platform and is “beamed” to the past, with no apparent mechanism for
return.9 The traveler now appears to haunt the past as Barbosa does
the present, continuing the dialectic of Brazilian culture that oscillates between white and black, rich and poor, present and past, modern
and traditional, questioning the rhetoric of modernity and nationalist sentiment. As one of the few films to combine high-tech machinery with the country’s foremost national obsession, Barbosa offers a
blend of fiction and documentary whose SF connection has long been
overlooked.
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Isle of Flowers (1989) and Cognitive
Estrangement
Even though Furtado claimed to have written the script for Isle of
Flowers as if he were teaching a Martian about the planet Earth10 —a
nod to SF—film critics have generally overlooked the SF techniques
and allusions in this film. Furtado’s Isle of Flowers (1989) has won
numerous prizes the world over and remains one of his most widely recognized works.11 This film traces the life and death of a single tomato
grown in Southern Brazil, which ends up in the garbage dump on an
island that gives the film its poetic name. Isle of Flowers is a highly
metafictional film that explores the ambivalence of the documentary
genre. In doing so, the film varies between fiction and documentary,
drama and history, essay and fait divers , comedy and tragedy.
The narration touches on topics from basic biology and zoology to
trade and capitalism, all in the didactic documentary style of an elementary school film strip, and its pseudoscientific “impartial” narration recalls the tongue-in-cheek style found in the works of Jonathan
Swift and other dystopian satires.12 In Isle of Flowers, the mixing of film
footage about war, illustrations from biology textbooks, and random
photo images of animals and paintings produces a disconcerting narrative style. As Hutcheon has pointed out, in this type of pastiche, “what
is called to our attention is the entire representational process—in a
wide range of forms and modes of production—and the impossibility of
finding any totalizing model to resolve the resulting postmodern contradictions” (95). Furtado’s use of narrative detachment, through the
use of science and factual information places the viewer at odds with
human subjects in the film, who illustrate the rational explanations of
human biology, nourishment, and trade.
Although the film is said to have a Monty Python–like sensibility,13
its technique is also reminiscent of Darko Suvin’s cognitive estrangement in that it makes us see our own society and its underlying assumptions in a new way. Thus, the film’s voiceover narrator expresses no
more interest in the women and children collecting food scraps in the
garbage dump other than their classification as bipeds, which differentiates them from quadrupeds such as pigs. In the film’s “narrative,”
a parody of the fantastic tale, the tomato, a protagonist of sorts, takes
on the hero’s quest to discover a magical island. In its leading role, the
tomato ties together the human characters and their situations, yet produces the dissonance of cognitive estrangement, since it defamiliarizes
us from everyday realities through reason.
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The film’s examination of the life and death of a tomato is clearly
a critique of neoliberalist policies, the predominant initiative of the
period that claimed that the principle of the free market would resolve
political divisions and help Latin America to become more globally
competitive.14 Thus, the spectator “learns” about the principles of
capitalism via Mr. Suzuki (Takehiro Suzuki), a tomato grower who
does not eat his produce but rather sells it for profit. One tomato,
purchased initially by a middle-class housewife, Dona Anete (Ciça
Reckziegel) to become part of a side dish for her pork dinner, ends
up in the dump as food for the pig instead. If rejected by the pig, the
tomato may become food for the impoverished women and children
who are allowed into the dump by the owner to pick through the
remains after the pig. The narrator explains that since they are not
“owned” like the pig, but are “free” as human beings, they, ironically, eat after the pig in an inversion of the conventional hierarchies
between humans and animals.
Film critics Robert Stam, João Luiz Vieira, and Ismail Xavier have
written that by linking the pork dish, the pig living at the garbage
dump, and the tomato, the film illustrates how the worlds of the haves
and have-nots operate “within a web of global rationality” (451). The
idea of capitalist accumulation is also parodied at the end of the tomato’s journey by a chain of pedantic definitions.15 Since the small groups
have only five minutes to scavenge in the dump, we are reminded that
a day is 24 hours, an hour is 60 minutes, a minute is 60 seconds, etc.,
and the film ends with the idea that the women and children, unlike the
pig, are not owned, but are “free” yet ironically cannot accumulate any
wealth to participate in the system.
In Isle of Flowers , the technique of cognitive estrangement, based
on rational premises, effectively dismantles the discourse of neoliberalism, with its concepts of “freedom” and “free-market.” Thus, while
those with the power of exchange have multiple and varied choices,
those without it, the women and children in the dump—despite their
classification as humans or “bipeds with a developed telencephalon and
opposable thumbs”—like the middle-class characters of Mr. Suzuki and
Dona Anete—are the discarded detritus of society. Even though Isle
of Flowers is not an SF film per se, it demonstrates an SF sensibility.
Furtado, by adopting an SF discursive strategy, so to speak, combines
scientific knowledge and film techniques in such a way that he alienates us from our own familiar planet, society, and settings. Thus, we
are transported to an alien world, which is, at the same time, the one
we live in.
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The Man Who Copied (2002) and the Iconography of Comics
While this heist film would seemingly have little to do with SF, in an
interview from the DVD version of the film, Furtado talks about the
connection between The Man Who Copied and Isle of Flowers because
they both share an absurd associative logic similar to that of cognitive estrangement. In The Man Who Copied , however, estrangement
occurs in the mind of the main character, André (Lázaro Ramos), a
twenty-something black man who operates a copy machine at a stationery store. His subjective thoughts are illustrated in the intercalated
video clips, cartoon segments, visual references to comics, and other
fantastic or surreal imagery taken from his everyday life and surroundings. Hutcheon reminds us how certain postmodern artists and authors
choose to portray subjectivity in ways that reflect conditions of race,
class, and ethnicity in order to challenge the political assumptions
behind “the dominant representations of the self—and the other—in
visual images and narratives” (40). In The Man Who Copied , the character of André destabilizes social stereotypes, raising issues of race and
class by contrasting society’s views of him with his own subjective inner
life, presented most often in the form of comics.
The comic-book imagery of André’s world is varied, but consists
mostly of his own cartoon drawings about his childhood that show the
conf lict between his incomplete formal education and rich inner life.
Even his love for Silvia (Leandra Leal), a young woman who lives across
the street from him, is presented in comic book–like panels. In his voiceover describing his passion for her, her room appears onscreen, split
in three separate images that scroll past following her evening routine.
As in comics, the tension resides in the gutters between the panels, as
André can never see her fully. The comic panel is also used in portraying André’s mother, whose nightly repetitive ritual before going to bed
is framed without focusing on her face in a style reminiscent of certain
cartoons.16 André portrays himself as a super loser in his own comic
strip Zeca-Olho [One-Eyed Zack],17 an unlucky schoolboy with one
giant eye. This character is derived in part from André’s own traumatic
experiences in school, especially his expulsion after punching a boy who
mocked André’s hope about the return of his father who had abandoned
him and his mother years before.
This detached, unsentimental approach to autobiography and heightened use of visual iconography in The Man Who Copied recalls the postmodern texts of cyberpunk, in which surface detail predominates over
depth, according to Veronica Hollinger (212). A proliferation of signs
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and surface detail is present in Furtado’s film, especially in the animation, mise-en-scene, costumes, and props. When André gives Silvia a
copy of a comic book, the book is only seen for a moment and appears
incidental, yet when examined further, it turns out to be a controversial award-winning underground comic called Dundum , founded by
cartoonist Adão Iturrusgaraí.18 This cartoonist was prosecuted for his
irreverent comic strips in the 1990s,19 demonstrating an underground,
anarchistic look and spirit that Furtado shares with the artist. Another
type of comic-book iconography appears when André’s coworker, the
voluptuous Marinês (Luana Piovani), sports a clingy shirt with a sexy
female comic book character on it, in the style of DC comics’ Wonder
Woman. André himself wears a T-shirt with the Marvel comic-book
hero, the Silver Surfer, a powerful alien who allies himself with the
Fantastic Four to save the world.
The distance between the idealized American superhero comics of
the Silver Surfer and the Fantastic Four and the crude style and reality
of André’s Zeca-Olho emphasizes the two distinct cultural realities. 20
At the same time, the cast of The Man Who Copied consists of four characters, Marinês and her boyfriend Pedro (Pedro Cardoso), and André
and Silvia, who together form their own local version of the Fantastic
Four. Ironically, instead of solving crimes, they resort to crime to right
personal wrongs and the failings of an economic system that condemn
them to lives of quiet desperation.
Although not an SF film per se, The Man Who Copied incorporates
fantastic and comic-book elements to evoke an SF sensibility. Even
everyday objects give the otherwise realistic narrative a surreal quality,
such as the figure of a giant gondolier that stands in front of an Italian
restaurant near André’s house, or a guardian angel figurine, both of
which seem to aid or protect him. We are not sure if André is simply lucky or magically helped by these superhuman agents. Ultimately,
there is a happy ending for André, who manages to pull off his heist,
kill the bad guys, and win the girl. While his feats are not those of First
World superheroes, the film illustrates a local story of a struggle against
the odds, in which the hero’s triumph consists of escaping a life of economic want, social immobility, and racial prejudice.
Lisbela and the Prisoner (2003): The Icons of
the Mad Scientist and the Monster
Although Jorge Furtado functions only as a writer for Lisbela and the
Prisoner, a film directed by Guel Arraes (who collaborates as a writer for
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Furtado’s 2004 My Uncle Killed a Guy), it is also a metafiction about
filmmaking whose key scene references Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous
horror/science fiction novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886). The film Lisbela and the Prisoner, based on Osman Lins’ 1964
play with the same title, adds to the original’s regionalist portrait of traditional northeastern society by vividly comparing its small-town reality to that of Hollywood movies. For Lisbela (Débora Falabella), who
longs for a life of excitement and romance, these black-and-white silent
Hollywood movie scenes motivate her inner life.
The key moment in the film occurs when Lisbela is watching a
black-and-white version of a movie reminiscent of Rouben Mamoulian’s
controversial Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), and is moved by the look
of love and compassion exchanged between the grotesque Hyde character (Carlos Casagrande) and his fiancée. While Mamoulian’s version has
been criticized for its ape-like portrayal of Hyde, 21 the choice is deliberate, since Lisbela later meets a hustler or malandro (Selton Mello), who,
disguised as a gorilla, gives her a similar look that pleads for love and
understanding.
The film version of Lisbela e o prisioneiro is a highly metafictional
work, in which watching films becomes a source of transformation for
the main character in the film, a device dating back to the era of silent
movies. 22 After seeing the love scene between the heroine and the beast
in the film, Lisbela decides to pursue her true love, the hustler, despite
social pressures to marry a member of the small-town elite. Here, in a
romantic comedy, we have references to horror and SF, an allusion to
Mamoulian’s controversial movie, and to the figures of the monster and
mad scientist, all of which can be added to Furtado’s SF repertoire.
My Uncle Killed a Guy (2004): Postmodern
Representation and Cyberspace
In this film, Furtado mixes the genres of romantic comedy and a whodunit, with nods to SF and technology. In the extra materials in the
DVD version of the film, Furtado mentions that the media giant Terra,
one of the corporate underwriters of the film, made a request to have
messaging, computers, and other digital media incorporated into the
plot. 23 Thus, technological references abound in the film, including
several scenes that place the audience in front of a computer screen in
order to see websites used by the films’ characters (Rocco 32). However,
the film’s use of computers, video games, instant messaging, and the
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Internet serve to undermine rather than facilitate the conventionally
neat resolution of the mystery found in the traditional detective genre.
This destabilization is suggested by the opening credits of the film,
which consist of shots of a videogame, whose icons of a gun, a keyhole, and a camera are shorthand for the key elements of the mystery
to be solved. It becomes clear that Duca (Darlan Cunha), the teenage
protagonist, will use the knowledge gleaned from playing the detective videogame to solve the crime. The first clue and icon is the murder weapon, a gun that has suspiciously been wiped clean. Because of
this, Duca decides to hire a detective to keep surveillance, a reference
to spying associated with the keyhole icon. The detective then takes a
series of photos as evidence, explaining the camera icon. The videogame is an interesting metonym for reading the film because in certain
types of games, players are often presented with multiple options, false
leads, dead ends, and even different strategies for winning. Videogames,
like other forms of hypermedia, 24 often follow a nonlinear model and
require active negotiation by the player. In order to find the truth, Duca
must employ the strategy of constant reassessment as in the videogame,
instead of the linear investigation methods based on cause and effect
and empirical evidence.
Throughout My Uncle Killed a Guy, this reassessment is emphasized
as viewers discover that the photographs and narratives used as evidence
are reinterpreted by the characters, resulting in a rather postmodern
detective story. As Hutcheon notes, while photographs and narrative
“have traditionally been assumed to be transparent media which paradoxically could master/capture/fix the real” (41), postmodern works
deliberately undermine the certainty of representation and consistency
of character.
These inconsistencies mount as Duca proceeds with his investigation. He suspects that Soraya (Deborah Secco) killed her rich husband
by manipulating her lover, his uncle Éder (Lázaro Ramos), to take the
fall. After obtaining photographic evidence proving that she is having
affairs, Soraya changes the order of the photos in order to prove her
innocence, but Duca knows that the angle of the shadows belies her
version of events. Duca’s photos also place Kid, his friend and classmate, at Soraya’s penthouse as one of her lovers. Once confronted, Kid
claims that he did not have sex with Soraya, since doing so would show
his betrayal of Isa, his high school girlfriend. In Kid’s retelling, viewers witness a scene where Soraya rejects him as her lover, pushing him
away. However, the film’s final scene makes an explicit reference to
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Mike Nichols’s film The Graduate (1967), which involves the seduction
of a young man by an older woman, implying that the opposite may be
true, undermining any definitive version of events.
Avatars and digital technology also provide us with clues to the film’s
message about representation and the hidden or multilayered nature of
the characters. Kid assumes a secret identity by using his given name of
Leonardo to go to Soraya’s penthouse as a pool boy. In another scene,
Isa appears wearing a T-shirt with a Playmobil toy figure on it, reminiscent of the avatars used in children’s videogames, indicating her
child-like innocence, in love with Kid and ignorant of his potential
betrayal with Soraya. When Isa and Duca try messaging to locate Kid
that day, he does not answer. Isa is also identified with the powerful
Japanese manga avatar of Pikachu, a figure on her lucky pen, which she
takes while accompanying Duca on a visit to see Éder in prison. After
the visit, Duca finds out that she is not as brave as her avatar, since
she panics and runs when approached by strangers in a poor neighborhood. 25 Thus, avatars reveal and hide identity and character, just as
instant messaging can supply or deny alibis, revealing the uncertainty
of visual and textual evidence.
The film thus shares characteristics with postmodern narratives that
are both, according to Hutcheon, “deconstructively critical and constructively creative, paradoxically making us aware of both the limits
and powers of representation” (98). By framing the story with a videogame, Furtado suggests how varied individual choices affect outcomes,
while also conveying the subjective or unstable nature of clues typically used as evidence. He also shows that new technologies are part of
global culture, often leading to complicated moral and ethical choices
resulting from the rapidly changing world of digital information and
communications.
Basic Sanitation, The Movie (2007): Third World
Mutants and Schlock Cinema
Although Furtado’s comedy Basic Sanitation, The Movie (2007) makes a
clear reference to SF in being about the making of an SF film within the
film, it also comments on how the blockbusters that we associate with
SF are generally out of reach for Third World filmmakers. Few critics
have focused on the “creature feature” SF film within this film, but
we believe it to be at the center of Furtado’s oeuvre, as a metafictional
commentary on First and Third World economic, artistic, and political
realities.
Brazilian Director Jorge Furtado
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213
A brief review of the frame story of Basic Sanitation is necessary
to explain the film’s ironies. When local leaders in a small town in
Southern Brazil seek funding to fix the town sewer, they learn that
the only funds available are for making a creative or fiction-based
film. Unfortunately, their final product—a video loosely based on Jack
Arnold’s 1954 Creature from the Black Lagoon —is so deficient that they
opt to use the remaining money to hire a professional editor/director
to “fix” it. Ultimately, the movie ends up being a success, but they still
have the sewer problem. Clearly, the basic thrust of the movie is to lampoon the Brazilian government’s priorities, which place promoting the
film industry ahead of providing necessities such as basic sanitation. In
the end, the mutant sewer monster “lurks” in the background, in the
form of the unresolved sanitation problem, showing us how the “escapist” SF genre can ref lect ongoing environmental and political concerns
of those living in rural Brazil.
This criticism of the public financing of the arts is made clear when
Marina (Fernanda Torres) tells her father (Paulo José) about the video
project only to have him mutter, “Imagina a pessoa fazendo filmes quando
não tem nem esgoto” [Imagine people making movies when they don’t
even have a sewer]. In this sense, the SF video becomes almost like an alien
invader or object in the community, and, in fact, it temporarily takes it
over as the characters become obsessed with it. Yet it also empowers them,
and through the apparent “madness” of SF, the character-filmmakers are
able to represent their own powerlessness and frustration.26 They begin to
shape their own symbolic story of ecological revenge, since like the fictional sewer monster, they have been ignored by the authorities for years.
The video made by the amateur film crew communicates this ecological message by using two stock characters from low budget Latin
American sci-fi films: the mad scientist and the scantily clad female
beauty. 27 In the film-within-a-film, the scientist, portrayed by Marina’s
skeptical father, gets carried away, improvising a long speech about the
inevitable destruction of nature at the hands of humankind. This is
the message typical of low-budget Mexican SF films beginning in the
1940s. According to Miguel Ángel Fernández Delgado, “Practically
all domestic science fiction pertains to the gothic genre, focusing on
mystery rather than knowledge, on the dangers that human beings
must face if they dare to play God” (141). He also notes the presence
of scantily clad women in these films, who, while often cast as aliens,
are never ordinary women but “veritable beauty queens” (143). In Basic
Sanitation , the attractive Silene (Camila Pitanga) appears in the film
dressed like a beauty queen before being attacked by the mutant swamp
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M. Elizabeth Ginway and Alfredo Suppia
creature. While she represents the beauty of nature rather than that
of an exotic alien, the use of female sexuality is similar to that seen
in Latin American “Golden Age” SF films. The video’s closing scene
of Silene posing seminude in homemade footage left on the original
cassette (in yet another film-within-the-film metafictional touch), 28 is
reused to convey the film’s ecological message to respect nature. While
the figure of the mad scientist and the beautiful woman pay homage to
the titillating clichés of early SF films, here they are adapted perfectly
to the situation of contemporary Brazil in an amusing commentary
on the public funding of the arts, the politics of ecology, and gender
stereotypes.
Another seemingly comic but semantically rich metafictional touch
is the discussion about the meanings of “fiction” vs. “science fiction” by the would-be filmmakers. Due to a common misconception
in popular Brazilian Portuguese that “ficção” (fiction) means “ficção
científica” (science fiction), Marina and her husband Joaquim (Wagner
Moura) argue whether or not an SF film is one with monsters or if it
is a movie set in the future. After seeing the word “chimera” associated
with fiction, they wonder if mythology is SF, and then whether or not
the presence of dinosaurs makes a film a work of SF. As the culturally
unsophisticated characters consider the word “chimera,” whose primary
meaning is a fantastic creature, a local choir in the background sings
about fantastic beings, “Um vampiro, um lobisomem e um saci pererê”
[a vampire, a werewolf and a Brazilian imp], which appears to influence
their decision to make a monster movie, usually considered an unserious “schlock” type of movie.
This brings up the issue of national cinema in Brazil and Furtado’s
role in it. While his approach is postmodern (making serious films
by mixing popular genres and other media), it conf licts with that of
auteur cinema and high art linked to Brazil’s political and experimental “Cinema novo” of the 1960s. Actor Paulo José, who plays Marina’s
father and made a name for himself during the Cinema Novo period,29
states in Saneamento Básico, “eu gosto de cinema. Filme de esgoto não
é cinema.” [I like cinema. A movie about a sewer is not cinema.] His
daugher Marina and her generation must operate under the new governmental policy for Brazil’s film industry that requires private sponsors and local directors when accepting federal funding. After Marina
hires a small-town videographer (Lázaro Ramos) to fix the film and it
turns out to be a success, the local filmmaker proudly declares, “Pra
fazer um filme e expressar sua arte, não precisa ir a Porto Alegre” [In
order to make a film and practice your art, it is not necessary to go to
Porto Alegre], the state capital. Here we see the promotion of local film
Brazilian Director Jorge Furtado
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215
production and a new popular use of cinema, far from the intellectual
urban centers of Brazil, perhaps a tribute to Furtado’s own roots as a
filmmaker of the video generation.
While Basic Sanitation is clearly a film about filmmaking, it is
not undertaken in the glamorous and soul-searching style of François
Truffaut’s Day for Night [La Nuit Américaine] (1973) or Federico Fellini’s
8½ (1963), but instead resonates with naïf cinema and the type of truly
independent filmmaking that seems to have inspired Michel Gondry’s
Be Kind Rewind (2008), in which two video-store employees remake
tacky versions of the store’s Hollywood blockbusters destroyed in an
accident. Basic Sanitation , on the one hand, is the portrayal of the making of a “trash” or “schlock” movie, meant to comment on the misuse
or drawbacks of national policies for endowing the arts in Brazil, while
on the other, is an example of the popular audiovisual production that
is currently flourishing throughout the country thanks to new inexpensive digital video technology.
In this way, Basic Sanitation sheds light on Brazilian semiprofessional or “hidden” film production that is invisible to the majority
of metropolitan film audiences. Regional filmmakers in Brazil regularly produce trash or schlock films, genre-emulation shorts and other
low-budget features. This semiprofessional film production serves small
to medium-sized communities. For example, there is a Brazilian Rambo
called Rambú (a combination of Rambo and bambu [bamboo]) from
the state of Amazonas, as well as an ersatz Bruce Lee who appears in the
films of Simião Martiniano in the state of Pernambuco. As extremely
low-budget films, they follow Hollywood trends and the global audiovisual industry, parodying, recycling, or simply paying homage to the
industry’s most celebrated genres. Thus, even today, melodramas, horror, SF, and action films are being made by truly independent filmmakers working outside the mainstream Brazilian audiovisual industry.30
While Furtado himself is now part of the Brazilian audiovisual mainstream, he pays homage to own artistic roots in all of his oeuvre, with
Basic Sanitation being among the most obvious examples. This comedy
shakes up our usual expectations about the language and culture of SF,
illustrating the dissemination of the genre into other cultural contexts
in an original way far from traditional Hollywood blockbusters.
Technology, Appropriation, and Neoliberalism
In general, Furtado’s characters tend to display an ambivalent relationship to technology at best. No matter how familiar with technology the characters may be, their expertise often comes at a high price.
216
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M. Elizabeth Ginway and Alfredo Suppia
For example, in Barbosa , the time traveler remains locked in the past,
in The Man Who Copied, André uses a copy machine to counterfeit
money, and in My Uncle Killed a Guy, Duca uses digital technology to
gain information only to discover moral failings in those around him.
In Basic Sanitation , the amateur filmmakers learn to use a video camera, but it ultimately proves unable to solve their everyday problems.
This seems to mirror Furtado’s broader sensibility toward modernity
and the Brazilian concept of malandragem 31 [roguery], since in each
of his films, the protagonist appropriates technology in a way that
suits his or her purpose, but with varying degrees of success. Furtado
dismantles the old paradigm of malandragem , since his protagonists
must live with the consequences of their actions, unlike the traditional
malandro who usually escapes unscathed. In Furtado’s view, neoliberalism brings together new and strange combinations of information
and action, desire and economic necessity, art and politics, questioning
facile solutions and clear-cut ethical choices, themes first touched on in
Isle of Flowers. Furtado’s use of SF elements spurs this ethical debate,
and his postmodern sensibility serves as a powerful tool for scrutinizing economic, social, and political issues, as they relate to Brazil’s ethos
of modernity.
Thus, Furtado has an oeuvre, which, while not being explicitly classifiable as SF, is made up of references, gestures, and techniques from
this popular genre. Because of Furtado’s specific focus on Brazilian
issues, his SF sensibility is often overlooked. His use of SF filmic
allusions, estrangement, technology, comics, animation, and digital
media attests to his consistent interest in the SF genre and its iconography, which is then assimilated and reappropriated as social critique. Although visibly not as dark and nihilistic as cyberpunk and
other forms of contemporary SF such as the New Weird, Furtado’s SF
films employ a uniquely different arsenal of humor, estrangement, and
popular genres that contain sharp social critique for those who know
how to find it.
Notes
1. Alfredo Suppia’s dissertation is the most thorough examination of the SF
genre in Brazil, beginning with the comedic chanchadas in the 1940s,
1950s, and 1960s, to films such as Pieralisi’s 1962 thriller O Quinto Poder
[The Fifth Power] and the ecodystopias of the 1970s. For a summary of the
dissertation see: “Ficção científica, um alienígena no nosso cinema.”http://
www.unicamp.br/unicamp/unicamp_hoje/ju/setembro2007/ju372pag12
.html. Accessed June 9, 2012.
Brazilian Director Jorge Furtado
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217
2 . Furtado’s films are entertaining on many levels and are shown limited
release throughout Brazil. Many of Furtado’s feature films and collections
of shorts are available for purchase at the Casa de Cinema de Porto Alegre:
http://www.casacinepoa.com.br/os-filmes/.
3. Fictional cinema predominates in the work of Furtado, although many
of his short films incorporate a documentary feel and are based on actual
historical events or people as seen in his collection Curtas [Shorts].
4 . While critics argue about the definition of SF, most agree that cognitive
estrangement is one of the principal marks of the genre, along with Suvin’s
concept of the “novum,” a social or scientific novelty that estranges us
from our known reality. Deriving from the Brechtian sense of alienation,
Darko Suvin first elaborated the theory of cognitive estrangement and the
novum in his 1979 study Metaphorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics
and History of a Literary Genre, 3–15.
5. The footage is from Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s Garrincha: Alegria do
Povo [Garrincha: Hero of the Jungle], 1962.
6 . The concepts behind Barbosa also recalls Chris Marker’s SF film La Jetée
[The Jetty] (1962), which also mixes documentary and fictional footage, and
like the time traveler in Barbosa , Marker’s protagonist is obsessed with the
past. In Marker’s film, however, the protagonist is concerned with a murder
he witnessed at an airport, and is more of a crime story, while Furtado’s time
traveler revisits a childhood sense of loss and national pride.
7. This story, in which crushing a single butterf ly leads to dramatic changes
in history, originally appeared in Collier’s Magazine in 1952.
8 . Alternate history is an important subgenre in Brazil, and Furtado’s Barbosa
should be framed in this context. Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro’s “A Ética de
Traição,” first published in 1992 and republished in Outros Brasis (2006),
also has an active hero, notably one of color, who successfully alters the
course of history, by having Paraguay win the war of the Triple Alliance
(1865–1870). For more on this work and alternate histories, see Ginway,
Brazilian Science Fiction (200–201). For a study on the trajectory of
the passive to active protagonist in Brazilian SF, see Roberto de Sousa
Causo, Ficção Científica (145), and Ginway and Causo, “Discovering and
Rediscovering Brazilian Science Fiction” (14–16). While it appears that
the time traveler’s mission has failed on the historic level, for Brazilian
critic Jean-Claude Bernadet, the time traveler becomes an active agent of
history (194).
9. In Marker’s La Jetée (1962), time travel is induced by chemicals rather
than by mechanical means. It is not scientific curiosity but memory and
reconciliation with the past that provide the reason for time travel in both
La Jetée and Barbosa .
10. See Robert Stam, João Luiz Vieira, and Ismail Xavier, “Th e Shape of Brazilian
Cinema in the Postmodern Age,” in which Furtado is quoted as saying that he
made the fi lm as a “letter to a Martian who knows nothing of the earth and its
social systems” (qtd. in Johnson and Stam Brazilian Cinema , 450).
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M. Elizabeth Ginway and Alfredo Suppia
11. The film won, among other prizes, Best Short in the Festival of Gramado (1989), Brazil, and the Silver Bear for Best Short in the Berlin Film
Festival (1990), the Jury’s Special Prize and Audience’s Best Film in the
Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival (1991), and the Best in the No-Budget
Kurzfilmfestival in Hamburg, and the “Blue Ribbon Award” in the American
Film and Video Festival (1991), held in New York. See Telecine Brasil. http://
telecinebrasil.blogspot.com/2012/01/ilha-das-f lores-jorge-furtado-1989
.html.
12 . As Booker and Thomas have pointed out, satire is closely related to Suvin’s
theory of cognitive estrangement, such that “it is not surprising that some
of the most important science fiction novels ever written have been openly
satirical in their orientation” (98). We could cite that the most creative SF
films seem to have rediscovered the possibilities of satire, among them,
Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! (1996), Alex Rivera’s Why Cybraceros? (1997),
Kevin Willmott’s C. S. A.: The Confederate States of America (2004), and
Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009). The SF strategies employed by Furtado evoke this long-lasting and strong tradition of satirical SF, adapted to
the Brazilian context.
13. See Stam, Vieira, and Xavier, “The Shape of Brazilian Cinema in the Postmodern Age,” 450.
14 . Martín Hopenhayn, “Postmodernism and Neoliberalism in Latin America,” 93–109.
15. See also, Bernadet, who states that that the film accumulates a series of
definitions and paraphrases until it reaches the term “freedom,” which
cannot easily be explained, defined, or substituted for another (191).
16 . Debora Rocco mentions the Charlie Brown comic strip and Tom and Jerry
cartoons, both of which eliminate the presence of adults altogether or show
only parts of their bodies (28).
17. This is a play on words in Portuguese, since “caolho” means one-eyed, so
“Zeca Olho” may be André’s misspelling of “Zé Caolho.”
18 . For a brief biography and images of Adão Iturrusgarai, see http://lambiek
.net/artists/i/iturrusgaraI_adao.htm. Accessed October 26, 2010.
19. See Adão Iturrusgarai: http://adao.blog.uol.com.br/. Accessed May 19,
2010.
20. André’s cartoon strip is drawn by Allan Sieber, who appears to have
been inf luenced by Iturrusgaraí’s comics, especially in the use of simple
and bold lines and mocking criticism of social conventions. Sieber is an
award-winning artist in his own right, having won the most prestigious
award for a comic artist in Brazil in 2004, a year following his animation
work done in O homem que copiava . See Alex Caldas Simões, “170 anos de
caricatura no Brasil: personagens, temas e fatos.” Revista Linguasagem 15
Edição/www.letras.ufscar.br/linguasagem. Accessed June 3, 2011. Web.
21. While many consider Mamoulian’s adaptation to be one of the best, it does
have a problematic representation of Hyde. According to Russel D. Covey,
the 1931 portrayal of Hyde corresponds to ideas of scientific racism, racial
Brazilian Director Jorge Furtado
22 .
23.
24.
25.
26 .
27.
28 .
●
219
degeneration, and generalized fears of the black rapist, etc. See “Criminal Madness: Cultural Iconography and Insanity,” Stanford Law Review
61.6 (April 2009): 1389–1390. [1375–1427]. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3
/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1431613. Web. Accessed June 8, 2011.
The idea of a character being inf luenced by art is found as early as
D. W. Griffith’s classic 1909 silent A Drunkard’s Reformation , in which
viewing a play helps the main character to change; see Xavier, “Olhar,”
66–70.
Fernanda Mendes examines the role of new media in Meu tio matou um
cara and O homem que copiava in her 2010 MA thesis.
As Fernanda Mendes notes, in referring to My Uncle Killed a Guy, movies
do not as yet allow viewers the same type of interactive capabilities as videogames and online games, which “possibilitam ao gamer dispor de várias
opções, alternativas, trilhas que permitem ao jogador ter diferentes histórias
ao mesmo tempo e ainda decidir, no coletivo ou no individual, suas ações e
as de outros personagens” (50) [allow the gamer to choose among several options, alternatives or paths that allow the player to engage in diff erent stories
at the same time and decide, collectively or individually, his or her own actions and those of the other characters].
After returning to the prison for the forgotten Pikachu pen, Duca and Isa
fi nd themselves at a bus stop surrounded by a group of young men who ask to
see their recently purchased CDs. Intimidated, Isa takes off running. Later
at school, Isa exaggerates the danger of the confrontation, and Duca, who is
black like the young men who approached them, is reminded of her lack of
basis for judgment and the racial and social differences between them.
In Furtado’s short, Esta não é sua vida [This Is Not Your Life] (1991), when
a lower-class housewife is interviewed by Furtado for the film, she touchingly speaks of the film’s transformative experience in her life.
According to Miguel Ángel Fernández Delgado, “Beginning around
1945, when the national movie industry had to compete against American movies, Mexican filmmakers chose to target illiterate or semiliterate
audiences with films made in two or three weeks with very low budgets.
Commonly known as ‘churros,’ these movies were ignored by the middle
and upper classes who had declared their preference for foreign cinema
long before then” (137). Similar to “churros,” Brazilian “chanchadas”
include films such as Carnaval em Marte (1955) dir. Watson Macedo, O
homem do Sputnik (1959), dir. Carlos Manga, and Os cosmonautas (1962),
dir. Vitor Lima, all of which demonstrate a similar fascination with technology, the Cold War, and SF iconography, along with a marked female
presence. See the interview by Guilherme Kujawski with Alfredo Suppia,
“Brazuquinhas no espaço,” Encyclopédia Itaú Cultural, Arte e Tecnologia ,
October 16, 2007. http://www.cibercultura.org.br/tikiwiki/tiki-read_article
.php?articleId=57. Accessed June 7, 2012.
José Roberto Mendonça mentions this metafictional level of “found footage” of Silene posing for her boyfriend. See the review of Saneamento
220
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M. Elizabeth Ginway and Alfredo Suppia
básico: o filme, in Planeta sustentável , February 3, 2011. http://planetasustentavel.abril.com.br/noticia/estante/saneamento-basico-jorge-furtado-f
ernanda-torres-621164.shtml Accessed June 1, 2011. Web.
29. Paulo José is a well-regarded actor who has appeared in countless films, in
a career spanning some 40 years. He appeared as the eponymous protagonist of Macunaíma , a tropicalist Cinema Novo classic; see Randal Johnson,
“Cinema Novo and Cannibalism: Macunaíma,” in Johnson and Stam, ed.,
Brazilian Cinema ,178–190.
30. This parallel amateur film production (or metacinema) has received critical attention from a group of São Paulo–based academics interested in
mapping its aesthetic and sociological implications. See the essays in Cinema de Bordas 1, ed. Bernadette Lyra and Gelson Santana and Cinema de
Bordas 2 , ed. Gelson Santana, for results of this research.
31. Malandragem [roguery] is described as a tool for individual justice in the
mind of the popular classes. Given the strength of oppressive institutions
and individuals, “rogues” or hustlers survive by manipulating people and
situations, evading authority and legal codes in order to ensure their own
welfare. One example of a rogue figure as hero in Brazilian literature includes Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1928) and its film adaptation by
the same name, by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade; and in popular culture, the
folkloric figure of João Grilo in Brazil and Pedro Malasartes in Portugal
both represent the same phenomenon. See Roberto Da Matta’s Carnivals,
Rogues, and Heroes: An Interpretation of the Brazilian Dilemma (1991).
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Contributors
Octavio Aragão holds an MA and PhD in Visual Arts from the School
of Fine Arts of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro [UFRJ]. He
is currently an adjunct instructor in the School of Communication of
UFRJ. Author of the alternate fiction novel A mão que cria and editor
of the science fiction anthology Intempol (2000), his stories appear in
anthologies such as Outras copas outros mundos (2000) and Vaporpunk
(2010). He is also the coauthor of Imaginário Brasileiro e Zonas Periféricas
(2005), with professora Rosza Vel Zoladz, and has published articles in
Arte e Ensaios e Nossa História .
Álvaro Bisama is a writer and doctoral candidate at the Pontificia
Universidad Católica in Santiago, Chile. He has published in various
magazines and newspapers like La Tercera , The Clinic, El Mercurio,
Etiqueta Negra, and Rolling Stone. He was selected as one of the Bogotá
39 in 2007, a list of the most important young authors in Latin America.
He is the author of various novels and volumes of essays including Caja
negra , Música Marciana , and Postales urbanas.
J. Andrew Brown (coeditor) is associate professor of Spanish and
Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. He is
the author of Test Tube Envy: Science and Power in Argentine Narrative
(2005), Cyborgs in Latin America (2010), and editor of the volume
Tecnoescritura: Literatura y tecnología en América latina (2007). He
currently serves as the Latin American editor of Revista de Estudios
Hispánicos. Brown’s articles on science, technology, and literature,
posthuman identity, and science fiction have appeared in Comparative
Literature, Science Fiction Studies, Journal of Latin American Cultural
Studies, Hispanic Review, and Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos
among others.
Rachel Haywood Ferreira holds a doctorate from Yale University and
is currently associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Iowa State
226
●
Contributors
University. She is author of The Emergence of Latin American Science
Fiction (2011). Her research on Latin American science fiction has
appeared in the journals such as Science Fiction Studies , Extrapolation ,
The Journal of the Fantastic and the Arts, and Hispania . Her current
research interests include canonical and the occult sciences in Latin
American cultural production, the graphic novel in Latin America, and
science in periodicals.
M. Elizabeth Ginway (coeditor) is associate professor of Portuguese in
the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Florida,
where she teaches Portuguese language and Brazilian literature and culture. Her 2004 Brazilian Science Fiction: Cultural Myths and Nationhood
in the Land of the Future was placed on the “Recommended Reading List
for Non-Fiction” by Locus: Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy
World in 2005, and was also nominated for MLA Katherine Singer
Kovacs Prize by Bucknell University Press. She organized and hosted the
symposium “Latin America Writes Back: Science Fiction in the Global
Era” at the University of Florida in the fall 2005. In summer 2010 she
launched a collection of her essays in Portuguese on Brazilian science
fiction and fantasy, Visão Alienígena published by Devir. Her areas of
research include nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brazilian literature,
topics on which she has published articles in Hispania, Brazil/Brasil,
Modern Languages Studies , Extrapolation , Femspec, Foundation, Science
Fiction Studies, Luso-Brazilian Review, and Revista Iberoamericana, as
well as reviews in Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation and Utopian
Studies.
David Laraway received his PhD from Cornell University in Romance
Studies and is currently associate professor of Hispanic Literatures and
Cultures at Brigham Young University. He is a coauthor of Árbol de
imágenes: nueva historia de la poesía hispanoamericana and the author of
numerous articles on topics including Latin American poetry, Borges,
and contemporary Basque narrative.
Emily A. Maguire is associate professor in the Department of Spanish
and Portuguese at Northwestern University, where she specializes in
literatures of the Hispanic Caribbean. Her book Racial Experiments in
Cuban Literature and Ethnography is forthcoming from the University
Press of Florida.
Fernando Reati is professor of Spanish and chair of the Department
of Modern and Classical Languages, and codirector of the Center for
Human Rights and Democracy (Georgia State University). He is the
Contributors
●
227
author of “Nombrar lo innombrable: Violencia politica y novela argentina
(1975–1985)” (1992); and “Postales del porvenir: La literatura de anticipación en la Argentina neoliberal (1985–1999)” (2006). He coedited
“Memoria colectiva y politicas de olvido: Argentina y Uruguay, 1970–
1990” (1997); and “De centros y periferias en la literatura de Cordoba”
(2001). He is the editor of Autos, barcos, trenes y aviones: Modernidad,
transportes y lenguajes artísticos en América Latina (2011). His articles
on literature, film, theater, and memory have appeared in journals and
books in the United States, Argentina, Chile, Italy, Ecuador, Venezuela,
Mexico, Spain, and Germany.
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado is an associate professor of Spanish and
International Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis. His latest book, Naciones intelectuales. Las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana (2009), won the LASA Mexico 2010 Humanities Book
Award. He has published over 30 articles on Mexican literature and
culture and on Latin American cultural theory in journals and books
published in the United States, Latin America, Canada, and Europe. He
is currently working on a book on Mexican film and neoliberalism.
Alfredo Suppia is a professor of Film Studies at the Universidade
Federal de Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais. He holds a doctorate in film
and media studies from UNICAMP and has taught at the Universidade
Anhembi Morumbi in São Paulo. Author of over 40 articles in journals
such as Film International and SOCINE , with chapters in Cinema de
Bordas (2008) and Science Fiction: Critical Essays in Writing, Reading
and Teaching (2009), he is active in the areas of arts and communication, journalism, and science, specializing in science fiction film and
cinematic history and theory.
Braulio Tavares is both author and researcher of science fiction and
fantastic literature in Brazil, having published, among other works A
espinha dorsal da memória [The Spinal Cord of Memory] (1989), winner
of the Caminho Prize for Science Fiction, the novel A máquina voadora
(1994), O anjo exterminador (2002), a study on Buñuel, and A Pulp
Fiction de Guimarães Rosa (2008). He has also edited several short story
collections of the fantastic: Paginas de Sombra (2003), Contos Fantásticos
no Labirinto de Borges, and Freud e o estranho: Contos fantásticos do
inconsciente (2007).
Claire Taylor is senior lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University
of Liverpool, UK. Her research interests include Latin American women’s writing, with a particular focus on the novels of Albalucía Ángel,
228
●
Contributors
Carmen Boullosa, Laura Esquivel, Griselda Gambaro, and Angélica
Gorodischer; and Latin American cyberculture, with a particular
interest in the works of Belén Gache, Eduardo Navas, Marta Patricia
Niño, Guillermo Gómez Peña, Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez, and Marina
Zerbarini. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on these authors, as well as having published a single-authored
monograph and several joint-authored volumes. She is a project leader
on Latin American Cyberculture and Cyberliterature, a collaborative
project between Liverpool and the University of Leeds, and also leads a
project on Latin American net.art.
Index
8½, 215
31 de fevereiro, 196
31º peregrino O, 62, 71 n. 3
20.000 Lieues sou les mers, 198 n. 12
1492: vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón
de Castilla, 55 n. 2, 181 n. 2
2666 , 8, 78, 83–84
Abreu, Casimiro de, 191, 199 n. 14
Accorsi, Andrés, 177
Adolph, José, 71 n. 5
Agostini, Angelo, 186, 188, 195
Aguiar, Raúl, 21
Agustín, José, 113
Aira, César, 97
Além do tempo e do espaço, 62, 71 n. 3
Alex, Allan, 192, 196
Alfonsín, Raúl, 183 n. 18
Alice in Wonderland, 103
aliens, 6, 27, 61–62, 65–67, 70–71 n. 3,
155–158, 166, 167–173, 176, 181 n.
8, 193, 196, 207, 209, 213–214
Allen, Irwin, 193
Allende, Isabel, 141
Almeida, Guilherme de, 186
Almodóvar, Pedro, 97, 107 n. 7
Alonso, Rodolfo, 107 n. 3
alternate history, 196, 217 n. 8
Alucinaciones: Nueva antología de
cuentos de la literatura fantástica, 6
Amazing Stories, 186
Amberes, 87 n. 7
Amulet, 88 n. 11
Amuleto, 82
Anatomia de uma derrota , 204
Anderson, Benedict, 10, 22–23
Andrade, Joaquim Pedro de, 220 n. 31
Andrade, Mário de, 220 n. 31
androids, 96
Años Luz: Mapa estelar de la CF en
Chile, 6
anticolonialism, 188
Antigone, 147–148
Appadurai, Arjun, 23
Aragão, Octavio, 9, 11 n. 8, 185, 186,
198 n. 10
Aramburu, Pedro Eugenio, 182 n. 11
Ardijis, Homero, 55 n. 2, 124, 130 n. 15
Argentinos en la luna , Los, 5
Argullol, Rafael, 111
Arias, Santa, 46
Arlt, Roberto, 4
Armageddon 2419, 197 n. 1
Arnold, Jack, 213
Arraes, Guel, 209
Arreola, Juan José, 11 n. 4
Asimov, Issac, 68
Assembleia Estelar, 11 n. 8
Assis, Joaquim Maria Machado de, 1,
191, 198 n. 14
Atl, Dr., (pseudo. Gerardo Murillo),
11 n. 4, 128 n. 3
Aubin Codex, 37, 42
Auerbach, Erich, 10
Auschwitz , 97
Avatar, 122
avatars, 212
Aventuras de Roberto Sorocaba , 192
230
●
Index
Azevedo, Ana Luiza, 204
Aztecs, 38, 51, 122, 173
“Bajo un cielo ajeno,” 122–123
Balão, 192
Ballard, J. G., 85 n. 2
Bananere, Juó, 188, 198 n. 9, 198 n. 13
Baradit, Jorge, 149 n. 7
Barbarella, 97, 107 n. 7
Barbosa, 203, 204–205, 216
Barbosa, Moacyr, 204
Barbosa, Rui, 191, 198 n. 14
Barreto, Alfonso Henriques de Lima, 1
Bartra, Roger, 128 n. 2
Basic Sanitation: The Movie, 203,
212–215, 216
Bastos, Roa, 47
Baudelaire, Charles, 118
BEF, see Bernardo Fernández
Be Kind, Rewind, 215
Bell, Alexander Graham, 187
Bell, Andrea, 5, 11 n. 3
Benjamin, Walter, 10, 24, 33 n. 10
Bergerac, Cyrano de, 186
Bermúdez, Ismael, 101
Bernadet, Jean-Claude, 217 n. 8, 218 n. 15
“Bestia ha muerto, La,” 118, 120
Bethke, Bruce, 24
Between Parentheses, 88 n. 12, 89 n. 12
Bilac, Olavo, 186, 191, 199 n. 14
Bilal, Enki, 192, 199 n. 18
Biografías del futuro: la ciencia ficción
mexicana y sus autores, 3, 116
Birds of Heat, 74
Bisama, Álvaro, 8, 85 n. 2, 149 n. 7
Bishop, Kyle William, 149 n. 5
Bizzio, Sergio, 97
Blade Runner, 96, 117
Blanco, Fabio, 98
Blink, 182
Bolaño, Roberto, 8, 73–84, 85 n. 1,
87 n. 6, 87 n. 9, 88 n. 11, 88 n. 12,
89 n. 12
Bonabeau, Eric, 150 n. 12
Bones in the Desert, 87 n. 10
Borges, Jorge Luis, 1, 4, 69, 79–80, 93,
100, 107 n. 7, 113
Borges Factor, The, 80
Borinsky, Alicia, 4
Borneo, 97
Boullosa, Carmen, 4, 7–8, 35–40,
42–55, 55 n. 1, 55 n. 3, 56 n. 6,
56 n. 11, 56 n. 12, 57 n. 13,
57 n. 14, 57 n. 15, 57 n. 16,
130 n. 15
Boylan, Tom, 120
Bradbury, Ray, 204
Branco, Marcello Simão, 11 n. 8
Brave New World, 96
Brazil, Land of the Future, 198 n. 7
Brazilian Science Fiction, 4, 11 n. 5,
71 n. 3
Breccia, Alberto, 160, 163–164, 171,
174, 179
Brigg, Peter, 119
Brown, Chris N., 11 n. 7
Brown, J. Andrew, 4, 126, 149 n. 8
Bryan Singer, 122
Buck Rodgers, series, 186, 197 n. 1
Bukatman, Scott, 130 n. 12
Buñuel, Luis, 69
Burton, Tim, 218 n. 12
Busch, Wilhelm, 186
¡¡Bzzzzzzt!! Ciudad interfase,
115–117, 126
Cabeza de Vaca, 36
Cameron, James, 122
Campos, Marcelo, 196
Canby, Vincent, 108 n. 10
Cándenas, Inés Ferrero, 56 n. 4
Cañedo, Diego, 11 n. 4
Canniff, Milton, 192
Cano, Luis, 4, 113
canon and SF, 1–2, 4–5, 7–8, 79–80, 82,
85–86 n. 5, 88 n. 12, 113–114, 116–
118, 120–121, 125, 128–129 n. 3, 134
Canterbury Tales, The, 71 n. 3
Capanna, Pablo, 3, 5
Cardona Peña, Alfredo, 113
Index
Cardoso, Pedro, 209
Carnaval em Marte, 219 n. 27
Carneiro, André, 3, 12 n. 9
Carnivals, Rogues, and Heroes: An
Interpretation of the Brazilian
Dilemma, 220 n. 31
Carpenter, John, 61
Cartas de relación, 37, 40, 42
Carter, Angela, 104–105
Casagrande, Carlos, 210
Casares, Adolfo Bioy, 1, 113
Causo, Roberto de Sousa, 4, 6, 11 n. 8,
217 n. 8
Caza, Philippe, 197
Celli, Gianpaolo, 11 n. 8
CF en la Argentina, La , 5
Charcot, Jean-Marie, 118, 129 n. 11
Chave do Tamanho, A, 194
Chávez Spinola, Gerardo, 33 n. 8
Chiclete com banana, 192
Chinelli, Mariano, 166, 181 n. 4,
181 n. 7
Chorba, Carrie, 42, 56 n. 7, 56 n. 8
Christie, Agatha, 68
Cielos de la tierra, 47, 56 n. 6, 57 n. 13,
57 n. 16, 124
Ciencia ficción en español: una mitología
ante el cambio, 3
cinema, 9–10, 36, 67, 134, 192,
203–204, 212, 214–215, 217 n. 3,
219 n. 27, 220 n. 30
Cinema de Bordas 1 & 2, 220 n. 30
Circo, 192, 199 n. 22
“Circular Ruins, The,” 93, 100
Cirne, Moacy, 193
Ciudad muerta de Korad, La, 20
Clarke, Arthur C., 68
Clute, John, 2, 67, 71 n. 6
Coelho, Oliverio, 97
cognitive estrangement, 10, 203,
206–208, 217 n. 4, 218 n. 12
Colin, Flavio, 192, 199 n. 17
Collazo, Miguel, 20
colonialism, 11, 41, 46, 51, 122
colonial overlords, 134
●
231
Columbus, Christopher, 36, 45–46
computers, 19–20, 25, 30, 117–119,
126, 139, 205, 210
Conan Doyle, Arthur, 68
Confines: crónica de la ciencia ficción
mexicana, Los, 3, 129 n. 4
consumerism, 9, 134–136, 139–140,
142, 144–145, 194
Correa, Alvim, 194
Cortázar, Julio, 4
Cortés, Hernán, 36–38, 40, 44, 46
Cortoisie, Rafael, 4
Cosmonautas, Os, 219 n. 27
Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology from
Latin America and Spain, 5,
71 n. 5
Coutinho, Laerte, 9, 185, 192, 193,
195, 199 n. 21
Couto, Mozart, 192, 199 n. 17
Creature from the Black Lagoon, 213
crime, 77, 80, 87 n. 8, 100, 122, 135,
139, 209, 211, 217 n. 6
Crónicas de la mañana; 50 años de
cuentos cubanos de ciencia ficción,
6, 21
“Cuatro lados, Los,” 21
Cuento argentino de ciencia ficción, El,
5–6
Cuevas, Alejandro, 11 n. 4
Cuitláhuac, 122, 126
Cunha, Darlan, 211
Cyberfiction, 127
cyberpunk, 2, 4, 6–9, 12 n. 9, 20,
23–24, 118, 121–123, 125–126,
208, 216
Cyberpunk: Histórias de um futuro
extraordinário, 11 n. 8
cyborgs, 4, 57 n. 13, 126, 133–134,
149 n. 1
Cyborgs in Latin America , 4
DaMatta, Roberto, 220 n. 31
“Da mayor speriencia”, 62
Dante’s Inferno, 103
Danton, Gian, 196
232
●
Index
Dark City, 199 n. 24
Dashboard Confessional, 141
Dawn of the Dead, 134–135, 142, 146
Day for Night, 215
Debord, Guy, 10, 81
Dedo de oro, El, 124
Delirio de Turing, El, 126
Dellepiane, Angela, 95
del Paso, Fernando, 128
Dendle, Peter, 149 n. 2
detective SF, 68, 114, 124–125, 211
“Deuda temporal,” 24, 27, 32
Diário do Abax’o Piques, 191
Diario maldito de Núñez de Guzmán,
55 n. 2
Diary of Death, 79
Dias, Antonio Gonçalves, 191, 199 n. 14
Díaz, Bernal, 42
Diaz, Porfirio, 50–53
Dick, Philip K., 8, 12 n. 9, 76–77, 80,
82, 86 n. 5, 193, 199 n. 23, 199 n. 24
dictatorship, 1, 8, 11, 102, 107 n. 4,
108 n. 10, 126, 158
Diegues, Richard, 11 n. 8
Dieselpunk, 11 n. 8
DiFilippo, Paul, 129 n. 10
Diniz, André, 196
Dinossauria Tropicalia , 11 n. 8
Dirty War, 8, 9, 158, 189
disappeared, 158, 160, 179, 181 n. 6,
182–183 n. 15
Disch, Thomas M., 77
Divina Increnca, A, 198 n. 9
Divine Comedy, The, 198 n. 9
Don Quixote, 57 n. 16
Druillet, Phillipe, 192, 197, 199 n. 18
Drunkard’s Reformation, A, 219 n. 22
Duchamp, Marcel, 73, 84
Duerme, 37, 56 n. 6, 56 n. 11, 57 n. 13
Dumont, Alberto de Santos, 187,
197 n. 6
Dundum, 209
dystopia, 4, 8, 80, 87 n. 5, 95–96, 101,
117, 120, 206, 216 n. 1
Echeverría, Nicolás, 36
Embry, Karen, 135, 149 n. 1, 149 n. 3
Emergence of Latin American Science
Fiction, The, 4–5
Encinosa Fu, Michel, 21
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, The, 2,
67, 71 n. 6
End of the World as a Work of Art,
The, 111
En esa época, 97
Enigma das pedras vermelhas, O, 192
En quién piensas cuando haces el amor, 124
Enríquez Piñeiro, Anabel, 7, 21, 24, 27,
29–32
Entenado, El , 55 n. 2
“Entrañas elásticas del conquistador,
Las,” 121–122
Entrecasa de los Héroes, El, 107 n. 2
Ernie Pike, 181 n. 7
Erótica argentina, 107 n. 3
Escobedo, Mariano, 118
“Eslabón vulnerable, El,” 85 n. 2
Esta não é sua vida, 219 n. 26
Estranhos contatos, 11 n. 8
Estruendo del silencio, El, 125–127
E.T., 61
Et-57, 156–171, 173–177, 180 n. 1,
182 n. 12, 183 n. 17
Et-62, 164, 167, 169–171, 175,
179–180
Et-69, 157, 159–175, 177, 179–180
Et-76 , 158, 164, 167–169, 174–175,
177–180, 180 n. 1
“Étant donnés,” 73, 84
Eternauta (1957), see Et-57
Eternauta (1962), see Et-62
Eternauta (1969), see Et-69
Eternauta II (1976), see Et-76
Eternauta III, 181 n. 1
Eternautas series, 155–160, 167, 171,
176, 179–180
“Ética da traição,” 217 n. 8
Eugenia: Esbozo novelesco de costumbres
futuras, 113
Index
Expedición a la ciencia ficción mexicana, 3
Exploradores do desconhecido, 196,
199 n. 28
Facundo, 4
Fagundes, Antônio, 204–205
“Falsificador, El,” 71 n. 5
“Falsifier, The,” 71 n. 5
fantastic, 1, 21, 47, 61, 70, 117, 186,
188, 193, 206, 208, 209, 214
Fantastic, Fantasy and Science Fiction
Literature Catalog, 3
Fantastic Four, 209
fantasy, 3, 6, 11 n. 7, 21, 35, 111, 114,
115, 128, 192
Fantasy and Imagination in the Mexican
Narrative, 3, 128 n. 3
Farrell, Collin, 139
Fellini, Federico, 215
feminism, 11 n. 1, 67, 75, 86 n. 3,
107 n. 2
Fernández, Adriana, 6
Fernández, Bernardo (BEF), 6, 8–9,
112–113, 115–118, 120–128,
129 n. 9, 130 n. 12
Fernández, Macedonio, 80
Fernández Delgado, Miguel Ángel, 6,
213, 219 n. 27
Ferrero Cándenas, Inés, 36
Ficção científica, fantasia e horror no
Brasil 1875–1950, 4
film and SF, 7, 9–10, 12 n. 9, 19, 36,
67–69, 94, 96–97, 105, 107 n. 6,
7, 108 n. 10, 122, 133–136, 139,
148–150 n. 8, 11, 158, 182 n. 12,
193–194, 203–220
Fletcher, Angus, 23
Fleuiss, Henrique, 186
Flight 714 to Syndey, 196
Florentine Codex, 37, 40–42, 48
Flow of my Tears, the Policeman Said ,
The, 199 n. 24
Fonda, Jane, 97
Food of the Gods, 194
●
233
Forest, Jean-Claude, 97
Fort, Charles, The Book of the Damned, 70
Foundational Fictions, 5
Fowler, Karen Joy, 70, 71 n. 6
Franch, José Alcina, 39, 41
Franco, Edgar, 192, 197
Fresán, Rodrigo, 4
Freud, Sigmund, 68, 118–119, 129 n. 11
Frondizi, Arturo, 160, 182 n. 11
Frontera de espejos rotos, 129 n. 7
Frye, Northrop, 23
Fuentes, Carlos, 11 n. 4, 36
Fuerzas extrañas, Las, 1
Fuguet, Alberto, 4
Fukuyama, Francis, 138
Funke, Cornelia, 141
Furtado, Jorge, 10, 203, 204, 206,
207, 208, 209, 210, 212, 214,
215, 216
Futuro en llamas: breve crônica de la
ciencia ficción mexicana, El, 6
Futuro Presente, 6
Gac-Artigas, Priscilla, 38
Gaiman, Neil, 125
Gala, Leonardo, 21
Gally C., Héctor, 113
Galouye, Daniel F., 199 n. 24
Gamerro, Carlos, 4
Gandolfo, Elvio, 85 n. 2
García, Fernando Ariel, 183 n. 15
Gardini, Carlos, 85 n. 2
Gê, Luiz, 9, 185, 192, 193, 194, 195,
199 n. 21
Gel azul , 125–127
gender, 75, 86 n. 3, 4, 214
genetic manipulation, 196
Giardinelli, Mempo, 4, 107 n. 3
Gibson, William, 24, 33 n. 11
Gil, Eve, 125
Ginway, M. Elizabeth, 10, 11 n. 5,
71 n. 3, 114, 181 n. 2, 182 n. 9,
182 n. 13, 194, 196, 217 n. 8
Gliemmo, Graciela, 107 n. 3
234
●
Index
globalization, 7, 22–23, 25, 32, 101,
122, 136, 139, 160, 169–170, 195,
207, 212, 215
“Godzilla in Mexico,” 79
Goligorsky, Eduardo, 5
Gondry, Michel, 215
González, Angela, 6
González Rodríguez, Sergio, 87 n. 10,
88 n. 10
Goorden, Bernard, 5
Gorodischer, Angélica, 4, 113, 85 n. 2
“Gorvo, O,” 191
gothic, 194, 213
Graduate, The, 212
Grandes Hits vol. 1, 122
Green Day, 143, 145
Gubar, Susan, 11 n. 1
Guzmán Wolffer, Ricardo, 115
Habsburg, Maximiliano, 118–120
Hantke, Steffen, 119
Haraway, Donna, 10, 133, 149 n. 1
hard SF, 4, 67–68, 193, 196
Harvey, David, 50, 51
Haywood Ferreira, Rachel, 2, 3, 11 n. 2
Hegel, Friedrich, 147
Henry V, 181 n. 5
Hergé, 196
Hernández Pacín, Vladimir, 22,
24–25, 32
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, 85 n. 2
Hinojosa, Francisco, 125
Historias futuras: antología de la ciencia
ficción argentina, 6
Historia verdadera, 42
Hitler, Adolph, 101–103
Hoagland, Ericka, 12 n. 10
Hollinger, Veronica, 208
Holton, Robert, 40–41
Homem do Sputnik, O, 219 n. 27
Horay, Pierre, 196, 197 n. 2
Horn, Maurice, 157
Horne, Philip, 149 n. 5
horror, 2, 8–9, 136–137, 148–149, 192,
194, 210, 215; see also gothic
Huella del conejo, La, 36
Hughes, Ted, 86 n. 3
Hugo, Victor, 187
Huidobro, Vicente, 74
Hurtado, Oscar, 20
Hutcheon, Linda, 10, 35, 159–160, 164,
181 n. 5, 203, 205, 206, 208, 211, 212
Huxley, Aldous, 96
Ibsen, Kristine, 120
icons of SF, 4, 9, 51–52, 80, 97, 112,
155–161, 163, 167, 171, 174–177,
179, 181 n. 2, 182 n. 9, 186, 188,
191, 194–196, 198 n. 13, 199 n. 15,
204, 208–209, 211, 216, 219 n. 27
identity, 9–10, 25, 48, 52, 75, 83,
87 n. 5, 113, 130 n. 12, 140,
182 n. 9, 187, 205, 212
Illness as Metaphor, 78
“I Miss You,” 143, 145
“Imortal, O,” 1
Incas, 173
Incredible Shrinking Man, The, 194
Insufferable Gaucho, The, 83
Insustentável leveza de ser, O, 192, 193
Intempol, 11 n. 8, 11 n. 9
Intermitente recurrencia: La ciencia
ficción y el canon literario en
Hispanoamérica, 4
internet, 7, 19–20, 33 n. 2, 125–126,
196, 199 n. 16, 211
Introdução ao estudo da “science
fiction,” 3
Invención de Morel, La, 1
Invertebrables, Los, 97
Irony’s Edge, 159
Irwin, John T., 69
Isle of Flowers, 203, 206–207, 216
Iturrusgarai, Adão, 209
James, William, 129 n. 11
Jameson, Fredric, 10, 117, 194, 196
Jardim, Luís, 65, 71 n. 4
Jetée, La, 217 n. 6, 217 n. 9
Jeter, K. W., 129 n. 10
Index
Jimenez Mayo, Eduardo, 11 n. 7
Johnson, Randal, 220 n. 29
José, Paulo, 213, 214, 220 n. 29
Juárez, Benito, 118–119
Julieta y Romeo, 107 n. 2
Kermode, Frank, 10, 111
Kerslake, Patricia, 12 n. 10
Killers, The, 141
Known and the Unknown: The
Iconography of Science Fiction, The,
155, 157
Kubrick, Stanley, 194
Kujawski, Guilherme, 219 n. 27
Kundera, Milan, 193
Laberinto de Pasiones, 97
Lacan, Jaques, 147
Ladislao Holmberg, Eduardo, 5
Ladrón de sueños, El , 125
Lambiek Comiclopedia, 198 n. 9,
199 n. 17, 199 n. 18, 199 n. 21,
218 n. 18
Land of Giants, 193
Laraway, David, 9, 133
Largo atardecer del caminante, El, 55 n. 2
Larson, Ross, 3, 11 n. 4, 113–114,
128–129 n. 3
Latin American SF Writers: An A-Z
Guide, 3
Latinoamérica fantástica, 5
Lauro, Sarah J., 135, 149 n. 1, 149 n. 3
League of Extraordinary Gentleman,
129 n. 10
Leal, Leandra, 208
LeBlanc, André, 194
Lefebvre, Henri, 52
LeGuin, Ursula K., 75
Lem, Stanislaw, 194
Lemos, Renato, 187
León, Ann de, 51
Lesser, Jeffrey, 205
Levrero, Mario, 85 n. 2
Levres Nues, no. 8, Les, 81
Lewis, Robert, 50
●
235
Libro fantástico de Oaj, El, 20
Lihn, Enrique, 79
Lima, Victor, 219 n. 27
Link, Daniel, 77
Lisbela and the Prisoner, 203, 209–210
Lispector, Clarice, 12 n. 9
Literatura nazi en América, La, 79,
80, 82
Little Nemo in Slumberland, 193,
199 n. 26
Llanto, novelas imposibles, 7–8, 35–38,
42, 47–49, 54, 55 n. 3, 57 n. 13
Llanto de los niños muertos, El, 117, 121
Lobato, Monteiro, 194
Lockhart, Darrell B., 3, 11 n. 6
Lodi-Ribeiro, Gerson, 11 n. 8, 217 n. 8
Lo mejor de la ciencia ficción
latinoamericana, 5
Londero, Rodolfo Rorato, 11 n. 9
Long Yesterday, The, 196
López, Kimberle, 36, 55 n. 2
López Castro, Ramón, 3, 129 n. 4
López-Lozano, Miguel, 130 n. 14,
130 n. 15
Lorenzin, Maria Elena, 95, 107 n. 3
Lost in Space, 193
Loudermilk, A., 149 n. 5
Lovecraft, H.P., 136
Lugar de mulher é na cozinha, 11 n. 8
Lugones, Leopoldo, 1
Lynch, David, 69
Lyra, Bernadette, 220 n. 30
Macbeth, 204
Macedo, Joaquim Manuel de, 5
Macedo, Wilson, 219 n. 27
Machado, Alexandre Ribeiro
Marcondes, 191; see also Juó
Bananere (pseudo.)
Macunaíma, 220 n. 29, 220 n. 31
Magalhães, Manoel, 192, 196
Magic Numbers, The, 139
Maguire, Emily A., 7, 19
Malcolm, Janet, 86 n. 3
Malinche, 36, 45
236
●
Index
Mamoulian, Rouben, 210
Manga, Carlos, 219 n. 27
Man in the High Castle, The, 86 n. 5
Man Who Copied , The, 203,
208–209, 216
“Mar de locura”, 7, 24, 30–32, 33 n. 11
Marker, Chris, 217 n. 7, 217 n. 9
Marquis de Sade and the Scientia and
Techne of Eroticism, 104
Mars Attacks!, 218 n. 12
Martello, Nilson, 70, 71 n. 3
Martha Argel, 11 n. 8
Martínez, Herminio, 55 n. 2
Martiniano, Simião, 215
Marx, Karl, 10, 68, 104, 149 n. 3
Marxism, 10, 68, 104, 149 n. 3;
see also politics
Más Allá, 181 n. 4, 182 n. 11
Más allá de lo imaginado, 6, 115
Matheson, Richard, 194
Matrix, The, 19–20, 199 n. 24
Matrix Reloaded, The, 199 n. 24
Matrix Revolution, The, 199 n. 24
Mauá, Visconde de, 187, 197 n. 6, 202
Maximilian, Mexico and the Invention
of Empire, 120
McCallam, David, 104–105
McCay, Windsor, 193
McCloud, Scott, 196
McNeil, Legs, 81
media, 4, 7, 9–10, 20–21, 23, 105, 118,
158, 190, 210–211, 214, 216,
219 n. 23
Médico de los piratas, El, 55 n. 3,
56 n. 6
Mejicanos en el espacio, 114, 129 n. 8
Melhores contos brasileiros de ficção
científica, Os, 6
Melhores contos brasileiros de ficção
científica: Fronteiras, Os, 6
Melhores novelas brasileiras de ficção
científica, As, 6
Mello, Selton, 210
Memorias del Nuevo Mundo, 55 n. 2
Mendes, Fernanda, 219 n. 23, 219 n. 24
Mendonça, José Roberto, 219 n. 28
Menem, Carlos, 107 n. 8
Menton, Seymour, 36
metafiction, 10, 35–36, 47, 193,
203–206, 210, 212, 214, 219 n. 28
Metal Hurlant, 192, 199 n. 18
Meza, Julián, 36
Michaud, Thomas, 121
Misterios de Rosario, Los, 97
“Moço muito branco, Um,” 61, 67–70,
70 n. 2
Moctezuma, 8, 35–54
modern, 22, 37, 49–51, 54–55 n. 1,
105, 118, 129 n. 11, 139, 147, 167,
194, 205
Modernism, Brazilian, 191, 199 n. 15
modernity, 187–188, 205, 216
modernization, 113, 119, 185, 203
Moebius (aka Jean Giraud, cartoonist),
192, 199 n. 18
Molina-Gavilán, Yolanda, 2–3, 4, 5
Monk, Janice, 53
Monsilváis, Carlos, 121, 130 n. 13
monsters, 10, 26, 80, 106, 134, 157,
182 n. 12, 188, 209, 210, 213, 214
monstrosity, 147
monstrous, 46, 105, 148, 157
Montané, Bruno, 73, 76
Monteiro Filho, Gutemburgo, 192,
199 n. 19
Montoneros, 175
Monty Python, 206
Moorcock, Michael, 85 n. 2
Moore, Alan, 129 n. 10
Morin, Violette, 189
Morlock Night, 129 n. 10
Mota, Erick, 21
Moura, Wagner, 214
Muñoz Zapata, Juan Ignacio, 129 n. 6
Murillo, Gerardo, 11 n. 4; see also
Dr. Atl
Museum of Eterna’s Novel, The, 80
Mussolini, Benito, 105
Index
“My Life in the Survival Tubes,” 79
My Uncle Killed a Guy, 203, 210–212, 216
Nada que declarar, 7, 24, 27, 30–32
Nalick, Anna, 141
Naranjo, El, 36
nation, 4–5, 8–10, 22–23, 25, 32, 36,
51–52, 86 n. 5, 102, 105, 111–113, 115,
121–124, 128, 155, 157, 168–172, 174,
179–180, 182 n. 11, 187, 204–205,
214–215, 217 n. 6, 219 n. 27
National Newspaper Service Syndicate, 186
Naufragios, 36
neoliberalism, 4, 8, 11, 100, 103–104,
107 n. 4, 111, 117, 121, 126–128,
207, 215–216
Nervo, Amado, 5, 11 n. 4, 128 n. 3
Neuromancer, 9, 33 n. 11
New Weird, 8, 149 n. 7, 216
Nicholls, Peter, 2, 67, 71 n. 6, 156
Nichols, Mike, 212
Nielsen, Gustavo, 97
Night of the Living Dead, 134
Niles, Steve, 194
Nolasco, Edgar Cézar, 11 n. 9
No sin nosotros, 130 n. 13
Noticias del Imperio, 120
“Nova Califórnia, A,” 1
Nova de cuarzo, 24
Novoa, Marcelo, 6
Nuevas voces de la literatura mexicana, 117
Nunca más, 181 n. 6
Oesterheld, Héctor Germán, 155–160,
163–164, 166–167, 169–171,
174–177, 179–180, 181 n. 3,
181 n. 7, 182 n. 11
Oi (media company), 196, 197, 200 n. 29
Ojos de lagarto, 127–128
Okada, Jean, 196
Oliveira, Nelson de, 6
Olvera, Carlos, 11 n. 4, 113–114, 129 n. 8
One Hundred Years of Solitude, 106
O’Neill, Kevin, 129 n. 10
●
237
Onganía, Juan Carlos, 173, 183 n. 18
Origin of German Tragic Drama, The,
33 n. 10
Ortega, Francisco, 149 n. 7
Otra mano de Lepanto, La, 56 n. 6
Outras Copas, outros mundos, 11 n. 8
Owens, Craig, 23, 33 n. 9
Padilla, Ignacio, 125
Páginas de Sombra: contos fantásticos
brasileiros, 6
País, O, 187
Pal, George, 182 n. 12
Panko, Roberto, 8, 95, 97, 104,
106–107 n. 2 , 107 n. 7, 107 n. 9
Papasquiaro, Mario Santiago, 73,
80–82, 84
Paralelas, 192
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 70, 107 n. 9,
108 n. 10
Patati, 192, 196
Pauls, Alan, 80
Paz, Octavio, 124
Paz-Soldán, Edmundo, 4, 9, 126,
135–136, 139–140, 142–143, 146,
149 n. 6
Pedro II, Dom, 187
Perdidos no espaço, 192, 193, 194,
199 n. 25
Perdigão, Paulo, 204
Pessoa, Fernando, 86 n. 4
Peterson, Thomas, 41, 56 n. 9, 104, 106
Pfeiffer, Erna, 37
Phantastica brasiliana, 11 n. 8
Phillips, Julie, 75, 86 n. 3, 86 n. 4
Piglia, Ricardo, 74, 77
Pile, Steve, 53
Pinheiro, Rafael Bordalo, 188, 198 n. 9
Piovani, Luana, 209
Pitanga, Camila, 213
Pitman, Thea, 53
Planet, 97
Plath, Sylvia, 86 n. 3
Plimpton, George, 81
238
●
Index
Poe, Borges and the Analytic Detective
Story, 71 n. 7
Poe, Edgar Allan, 69, 191
politics; in Argentina, 101, 104–105;
in BEF, 111, 113, 115, 118–121; in
Bolaño, 74, 79, 80–81; in Boullosa,
49–51, 57; in Brazilian cartoons,
185, 187–189, 192; in Brazilian
director Furtado’s films, 207–208,
212–214, 216; in cinema, 204; in this
collection, 8–10; in Cuba, 22–25,
30; in Dick, 86–87; in El Eternauta,
155–157, 159–160, 164, 166–169,
174–176, 179–180, 182; in Latin
American literature, 1–2, 6; Nazism,
198 n. 7; in postmodernism, 10, 35,
50–52, 53–55, 204, 206, 208, 210;
sexual, 95, 97; zombies, 134
Poniatowska, Elena, 81
Porcayo, Gerardo Horacio, 114
Posse, Abel, 55 n. 2
Postales del porvenir, 4, 107 n. 4
postcolonialism, 173
postmodern, 10, 35, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55,
204, 206, 208, 210, 211, 212, 214, 216
Power Rangers, 139
Prado, Eugenia, 4
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, 133
Primeiras estórias, 61, 64–65, 70 n. 1,
71 n. 4
Primera calle de la soledad , La, 115,
129 n. 6
Promesas naturales, 97
Proyas, Alex, 199 n. 24
Púgil, El, 137, 149 n. 8
Puig, Manuel, 113
Pullman, Philip, 141
quantum physics, 4
Quebra-Queixo, 196, 199 n. 27
Que Dios se apiade de nosotros, 115
Quiroga, Horacio, 5
race, 63, 157, 172, 187, 208
Radiohead, 143
Ramírez, José Fernando, 39
Ramírez Codex, 37, 39–42, 56 n. 12
Ramos, Lázaro, 208, 214
Ramos Gómez, Raimundo, 113
“Raven, The,” 191
Raymond, Alex, 192
Reati, Fernando, 4, 8, 93
Reckziegel, Ciça, 207
Redes imaginarios del poder político,
128 n. 2
Reid, Anna, 56 n. 10, 57 n. 14
religion, 127
Reyes, Alfonso, 79
Rieder, John, 12 n. 10
Ripley, Robert L., 70
Ripley’s Believe it or Not, 70
Rivera, Alex, 218 n. 12
Robinson Crusoe, 159
robots, 102–103, 126, 150 n. 12, 155,
157, 168, 170–171, 196
Roddenberry, Gene, 193
Rodó, José Enrique, 88 n. 12
Romantic Dogs, 1980–1988, The, 76,
79, 87 n. 6
Romero, George, 134–135, 146
Rónai, Paulo, 64
Rosa, João Guimarães, 8, 61–62,
64–67, 70, 70 n. 1
Rosso, Nico, 192, 199 n. 17
Roth, Cecilia, 97
Roux, George, 191
Ruiz, Raul, 69
Rusnack, Josef, 199 n. 24
Russ, Joanna, 75
Saccomanno, Guillermo, 156
Sade, Marquis de, 94, 97, 98, 104–106,
107 n. 6, 108 n. 10
Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of
Pornography, The, 104
Saer, Juan José, 55 n. 2
Sahagún, Fray Bernardino de, 41
Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, 94, 105,
107–108 n. 9, 108 n. 10
Sánchez, Jorge, 5
Index
Sánchez, Ray, 33 n. 1
Sánchez Gómez, José Miguel (Yoss),
21–22, 32
Sánchez Prado, Ignacio, 8, 111
Santana, Gelson, 220 n. 30
Sarah Canary, 67, 69
Sardiñas, Haydee, 21
Sarhan, Elías, 77
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 4
Sarwal, Reema, 12 n. 10
Sasturain, Juan, 156, 175, 182 n. 10
Savage Detectives, The, 8, 77, 80–81,
83, 85 n. 1, 87 n. 9, 88 n. 12
Scavone, Rubens Teixeira, 12 n. 9, 62,
70, 71 n. 3
Schaffler, Federico, 6, 115
Scholes, Robert, 9, 185, 188
Schowb, Marcel, 79
Schwarz, Mauricio José, 2, 114
science fiction, definition of, 10, 217 n. 4
Science Fiction, Imperialism, and the
Third World, 12 n. 10
Science Fiction and Imperialism, 12 n. 10
scientific romance, 5, 125, 210
“Screwfly Solution, The, 75–77, 79,
83–84
Secco, Deborah, 211
Segredo de Jurema, 196
Segunda carta de relación, 38
Semana Ilustrada, A, 186
Se miran, se presienten, se desean: Erotismo
el la poesía argentina, 107 n. 3
Sentido de la ciencia ficción, El, 3
Sexilia (Venezuelan singer), 97
Sextilia, 8, 94, 96–97, 104, 106,
107 n. 9
Shakespeare, William, 203, 204
Shelby, Barbara, 71 n. 2
Sheldon, Alice. B., 8, 74–77, 79–80,
82–84, 85 n. 2, 86 n. 3, 86 n. 4,
87 n. 7, 87 n. 8
Sheridan, Guillermo, 124
Shimamoto, Júlio, 192, 199 n. 17
Sho-Shan y la dama oscura, 10, 114
Shua, Ana María, 4
●
239
Sieber, Allan, 218 n. 20
Silva, Fernando Dias, de, 192
Silverberg, Robert, 75
Simpsons, The, 139
Simulacron-3, 199 n. 24
Sin Permiso de Colón, 6
Skorupa, Francisco Alberto, 4
Skyrms, Brian, 145
Smith, Jeffrey, 85 n. 2
Snow Patrol , 139
Soares, Lucilia, 202
Solano López, Francisco, 156, 158, 161,
174, 177, 179, 181 n. 3, 181 n. 7
Sommer, Doris, 5
Sonrisa Vertical, La, 97, 107 n. 5
Sontag, Susan, 78, 79
Son vacas, somos puercos, 37, 55 n. 3,
56 n. 6, 56 n. 11
Soto, Cecilia, 97
“Sound of Thunder, A,” 204
Sousa, Irineu Evangelista de, see Mauá,
Visconde de
Souto, Marcial, 5
special effects, 191
Spielberg, Steven, 61
Spinrad, Norman, 85 n. 2, 87 n. 7
Stam, Robert, 207, 217 n. 10
Starman, 61
Star Trek, 193
steampunk, 6, 118–120, 128–129 n. 10
Steampunk: histórias de um passado
extraordinário, 11 n. 8
Steampunk Trilogy, 129 n. 10
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 210
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
The, 210
Sturgeon, Theodore, 81, 83
subgenre, 4–8, 20, 24, 36, 117, 195,
217 n. 8
Suplemento Juvenil, O, 192
Suppia, Alfredo, 10, 203, 216 n. 1,
219 n. 27
Suvin, Darko, 10, 206, 217 n. 4
Suzuki, Takehiro, 207
Swift, Jonathan, 188, 206
240
●
Index
Tafoya, Sonia, 22
Tardi, Jacques, 85 n. 2
Tavares, Braulio, 2, 3, 6, 8, 61, 71 n. 4
Taylor, Astra, 147
Taylor, Claire, 8, 35
technology, 3, 5, 7, 11, 19–20, 85 n. 2,
86 n. 5, 95–96, 102, 104; in Brazilian
society, 186, 187, 191, 196–197; in
Brazilian director Furtado, 203, 205,
210, 212, 215–216, 219; in Cuba,
22–23, 25, 30, 32; in El Eternauta,
155, 159, 166–168, 171, 176–177,
179–181 n. 8; in Mexico, 116, 119,
121, 127
Tejada, Lerdo de, 118
television, 10, 19, 83, 118, 166, 186,
193, 204–205
Tempest, The, 29
Teorema, 67, 68
Terra (media company), 210
Território dos bravos, 192
Test Tube Envy, 4–5
theory, 10; apocalypse, 111; cognitive
estrangement, 217 n. 4, 218 n. 12;
conspiracy, 74; critical, 7; feminist,
86 n. 3; game-theory, 144–145;
Marxist, 104; mimesis and poeisis, 9,
188–189; political, 150 n. 10; zombie,
134, 149 n. 1; see also metafiction;
postmodernism
Third Bank of the River and Other
Stories, The, 70 n. 2
Thirteenth Floor, The, 199 n. 24
Thomas, Hugh, 38
Tico-Tico, O, 189, 198 n. 9, 198 n. 11
Tiempo de alacranes, 124
Time Machine, 205
time travel, 6–8, 10, 27, 35, 37, 49–51,
53–55, 102, 155, 176, 192, 196,
204–205, 216–217, 217 n. 6,
217 n. 8, 217 n. 9
Tintin, 196
Tiptree Jr., James, 85 n. 2, 86 n. 4,
87 n. 7
“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” 1, 80
Toledano Redondo, Juan Carlos, 26,
33 n. 4
Töpffler, Rodolphe, 186
Toro, Carlos, 11 n. 4
Torres, Fernanda, 213
Torri, Julio, 128 n. 3
torture, 94, 97, 104–105, 107 n. 6,
108 n. 10
trauma, 4, 85 n. 2, 119, 208
Trillo, Carlos, 156
Truffaut, François, 215
Trujillo Muñoz, Gabriel, 3–4, 6,
129 n. 4, 129 n. 7
Truman Show, The, 193
Twenty-Thousand Leagues under the Sea,
189, 190
“Últimas horas de los últimos días,
Las,” 120
Universos vislumbrados, Los, 5
Unknown University, The, 79
Uribe, Augusto, 5
Urtiaga, Hector Adolfo de, 97
Urzáiz Rodríguez, Eduardo, 113
Usual Suspects, The, 122
utopias, 3, 10, 26, 32, 74, 80, 82, 84,
86–87 n. 5, 88 n. 12, 117, 127,
129 n. 3, 185, 192
Vadim, Roger, 97
Valladão, Osmarco, 196
Vallejo, Boris, 77
Van Vogt, A. E., 5
Vaporpunk, 11 n. 8
Venus de papel: antología del cuento
erótico argentino, 107 n. 3
Verne, Jules, 118, 129 n. 10, 187, 188,
189, 190, 191, 198 n. 12
Vespucci, 46
Viagem às letras do futuro, 4
Viagens de Kaximbown, As, 189–190
Viaje, El, 21
Viajeros: 25 años de ciencia ficción
mexicana, Los, 6
Vida del Ché, 179
Index
Vieira, João Luiz, 207
Viglieca, Olga, 101
Villoro, Juan, 125
violence, 2, 9, 74, 80, 84–85, 97,
104–106, 142, 173
Virgen y la violín, La , 56 n. 6
Visiones periféricas: antología de la
ciencia ficción mexicana, 6, 117
Vivos y los muertos, Los, 9, 135, 139–140,
142–143, 145–146, 148
Voltaire, 188
Vonnegut, Kurt, 119
Voyage to the Moon, A, 186
Wachowski, Andy and Larry, 19–20,
199 n. 24
“Wake Me Up When September Ends,”
143, 145
Walker, Matthew, 149 n. 5
War of the Worlds, 1953 film, 182 n. 12
Waugh, Patricia, 203
We, 96
“Weak Link, The,” 85 n. 2
Weir, Peter, 193
Wells, H. G., 129 n. 10, 182 n. 12, 187,
189, 190, 194, 205
“When You Care, When You Love,” 81
White, Hayden, 44
Why Cybraceros?, 218 n. 12
Wilcock, Juan Rodolfo, 79–80
Williams, Jerry, 50
Williamson, Edwin, 38
●
241
Wilson, Mike, 135–137, 142–143, 146,
148, 148 n. 8, 149 n. 6, 149 n. 7
Wolfe, Gary K., 155, 157, 167–168,
175, 182 n. 12, 183 n. 16, 194
Wolman, Gil, 81
women, authors, 4, 6, 86, 124; characters,
29, 36, 49–52, 55–56, 73, 78–79,
83–84, 88, 94, 103, 127, 206–207, 213
World Encyclopedia of Comics, The, 157
Wynia, Gary W., 160
Xavier, Ismail, 207, 217 n. 10
Yantok, Max, 188, 190, 191, 195,
198 n. 9, 198 n. 11
Ygdrasil, 149 n. 7
Yo, el supremo, 47
Yorke, Thom, 143
“Young Man, Gleaming White, A,” 8,
67, 68, 70 n. 2
Youngquist, Paul, 127
Zamiatin, Yevgueni, 96
Zárate, José Luis, 114
Zárrega, Guillermo, 11 n. 4
Zavala, Iris, 50
Zina, Alejandra, 107 n. 3
Žižek, Slavoj, 10, 138, 146–148, 150 n. 10
Zombie, 9, 135–137, 142, 146–148,
150 n. 8, 150 n. 11
zombies, 2, 8, 133, 135, 137, 139, 144
Zweig, Stefan, 187, 197–198 n. 7