Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture

Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture

Edited by Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-23422-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-30767-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements List of Contributors Introduction: Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Persistence of the Gothic

xi xiii xv

1

I N É S O R D I Z A N D S A N D R A C A S A N OVA -V I Z C A Í N O

SECTIOn I

(Re)Visions of History 1 Civilization and Barbarism and Zombies: Argentina’s Contemporary Gothic

13

15

I N É S OR DI Z

2 Rural Horrors in Chilean Gothic

27

OLGA R I E S

3 Fragmented Gothic Identities in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo

41

A N TON IO A LCA L Á GONZ Á LE Z

SECTIOn II

Displacement, Transposition, Tropicalization 4 Machado de Assis’s nightmarish World: Displacements of the Gothic in Brazil

55

57

S A N D R A G UA R D I N I VA S C O N C E L O S

5 Duplicitous Vampires Annihilating Tradition and Destroying Beauty in Froylán Turcios’s El vampiro CAR MEN SERR ANO

71

viii Contents 6 Liberation and the Gothic in Carlos Solórzano’s Las manos de Dios

84

DAV I D DA LT O N

7 Gothic in the Tropics: Transformations of the Gothic in the Colombian Hot Lands

96

G A B R I E L E LJ A I E K- RO D R Í G U E Z

SECTIOn III

Occupation and Incarceration 8 “I’ll Be Back”: The United States’ Occupation of Puerto Rico and the Gothic

107

109

S A N D R A C A S A N OVA -V I Z C A Í N O

9 Marie Vieux Chauvet’s World-Gothic: Commodity Frontiers, “Cheap natures” and the Monstrous-Feminine

122

K ERST I N OLOFF

10 Casa por cárcel: Incarcerating Homes in Costa Rican Life and Fiction

138

ILSE BUSSI NG

SECTIOn IV

Science, Technology, and the Uncanny

153

11 Shadows of Science in the Río de la Plata Turn-of-the-Century Gothic

155

S O L E DA D Q U E R E I L H AC

12 Aura, “Constancia,” and “Sleeping Beauty”: Carlos Fuentes’s Little History on Photography

172

A DR I A NA GOR DI LLO

13 Media, Shadows, and Spiritual Bindings: Tracing Mexican Gothic in Óscar Urrutia Lazo’s Rito terminal E N R I Q U E AJ U R I A I B A R R A

189

Contents

ix

SECTIOn V

Contemporary Gothic Paradigms

203

14 The Vampiric Tradition in Peruvian Literature: A Long Journey from Modernist Conventions to Gothic Postmodernism Ruptures

205

RO S A M A R Í A D Í E Z C O B O

15 Cultural Cannibalism: Gothic Parody in the Cinema of Ivan Cardoso

222

DA N I E L S E R R AVA L L E D E S Á

16 Pedro Cabiya’s Caribbean Grotesque

235

PERSEPHON E BR A H A M

17 Towards a Darker Reality: The Post-Gothic Simulacrum in Edmundo Paz Soldán’s Los vivos y los muertos

248

S E RG I O F E R N Á N D E Z M A RT Í N E Z

Index

261

11 Shadows of Science in the Río de la Plata Turn-of-theCentury Gothic Soledad Quereilhac

In his thorough study of nineteenth-century Argentine fantastic literature, Carlos Abraham provides an extremely important document for tracking the presence and circulation of European Gothic narrative in the Río de la Plata: the catalogs of the major bookstores in Buenos Aires, issued between 1839 and 1899. Both the author’s detailed compilation of titles and its analysis show an early circulation not only of the novels by Ann Radcliffe and Charles Maturin, among other writers of the classic Gothic period1—in their original language and in French translations— but also later works which extended the Gothic mode well into the later part of the nineteenth century, by authors such as E. T. A. Hoffman, Edgar Allan Poe, jules Verne, and Henry Guy de Maupassant. A number of false attributions were also listed in the catalogs, 2 as well as a great number of titles from Spain, where a considerable part of the books that arrived to these shores were printed (and translated). According to Abraham, these catalogs prove: …that the dissemination of the literature of the unusual was much greater than what can be estimated by studying the references and quotes made by writers of the period. The main reason for this is that a great part of that material was second-rate works, which would hardly have been considered good enough to quote; as a whole, this corpus reveals that the average reader enjoyed an easy access to the genres we study. (717) The critic finds that, during the first half of the nineteenth century, “Gothic or Gothic-like novels, which in some cases constitute an essential part of the catalogs narrative sections, were plentiful,” while in the second half of the century, Gothic narrations, though still persistent, “are displaced by more modern versions of the fantastic” (717). It is only between the 1870s and 1880s that some vernacular titles related to Gothic, uncanny, or fantastic literature (such as Eduardo Wilde’s Prometeo y Cía [Prometheus and Co.]) begin to appear in the catalog. While Abraham considers this as a sign of the “foreign or exotic

156 Soledad Quereilhac character of those genres” for the reader community, it should also be noted that a significant part of the Argentine literature related particularly to Gothic and, more broadly, to fantasy,3 began to be published mostly in newspapers and magazines, within the slow, gradual process of literature becoming autonomous in Latin American countries (Ramos 82–111). A considerable part of Wilde’s stories, and almost all the stories by Eduardo L. Holmberg, Leopoldo Lugones, and Horacio Quiroga, were originally published in the turn-of-the-century press, and it would only be later (in some cases, posthumously) that an area of this production became part of the books we currently know. Their scarce presence in the catalogs is not then a sign of a meager cultivation of this type of narrative, but rather a result of the fact that the new short narrative, which incorporated certain Gothic or fantastic elements, was developing mainly in the periodical press—a medium with a much larger reach than books—which proposed different reading protocols and shared an inescapable bond with contemporaneity.4 As Claudia Roman holds in her study of the modernization of the press in Río de la Plata, “the popular novel and the high-culture novel, the chronicles, the memoirs, the literary controversies, and even some ‘experimental’ genres such as Lucio V. Mansilla’s causeries were molded in the frictions caused by the inclusion of literature in the daily press” (36). The short story and the short novel—or nouvelle—did not only find in newspapers and magazines a publishing space and a great mass of readers, but also a wide range of themes for their plots, as well as formal conditions such as word economy, the quest for sensational effects and the reconstruction of the frame of enunciation of the story. In his study of Rubén Darío’s and josé Martí’s chronicles, julio Ramos has observed that “the periodical press was the necessary condition for literary modernization, though it was also a materialization of the limits of autonomy” (106). His perspective is also helpful when it comes to the development of the short story, another small genre that—as the chronicle—found its place in the press and incorporated, in an engaging but certainly more oblique and stylized manner, topical cultural issues. If the chronicle was the privileged form for portraying the changes in the sociability, the mobility and the habits of modern Latin American cities with a diurnal, enlightened yet critical sensibility, we believe that the non-mimetic short story and the nouvelle assumed a darker perspective, driven by an interest in the mysteries that lurked in the real. In this regard, there was an area of great prominence in the press and the debates of the period: the popularization of science and its usual overlapping with fin-de-siècle pseudoscientific and occultist topics, as we will see later. Articles about “weird cases” of biology, uses of electrical energy, chemical experimentation, but also about the “scientific” approach to spiritualism and other paranormal phenomena, which were quite usual in the Río de la Plata press of this period, configured an imaginary of

Shadows of Science in the Río de la Plata 157 popular science taken up and boosted in its most uncanny, fantastic or frightening aspects by the short narrative. 5 The perspective through which these new science realities were assimilated to the short story updated a sensibility inherited from the Gothic tradition. Therefore, in the turn-of-the-century years, it is possible to trace a relatively homogeneous and cohesive cycle in the development of the short story, which had as a distinct operation the assimilation of science and pseudoscience topics, intersected with spiritualism and occultism, from a fantastic perspective and with a Gothic sensibility. In these intersections, short stories sought to enhance the horrific or uncanny nature of certain events, assimilating the aura of magic, superstition, and mystery that the new scientific theories—in some cases linked to spiritualism—seemed to have inherited. The fact that all the plots were set in the readers’ “here and now” is a sign of the strong link between this literature and the culture of its time, as well as of the contaminations between literary forms and journalistic formats. From that persistent space-time correspondence, it can also be deduced that the uncanny, the dark, and the mysterious should no longer be sought in the past but in everyday reality. In this chapter, I will analyze a corpus of short stories that updated and adapted recognizable Gothic elements for the Argentine cultural environment: Wilde’s “La primera noche en el cementerio” [The First Night at the Cemetery], an ironic take on the undead from the perspective of a hygienist doctor; “Nelly” (1896), by Eduardo L. Holmberg, which replaces the typical haunted castle for a country estate in Buenos Aires and incorporates tools of scientific measurement; Leopoldo Lugones’ “Un fenómeno inexplicable” [An Unexplainable Phenomenon] (1898), which presents the figure of a ghostly double through the lens of Darwinism and Theosophy; and finally, Horacio Quiroga’s “El almohadón de plumas” [The Feather Pillow] (1907), where vampirism is expressed in zoological terms. Although these stories are not the only ones in which the aforementioned characteristics are present, they synthesize thematic lines and textual strategies which meant a modern renovation for the Gothic, and that can be found in other stories by these and other authors. These consist, for example, in a material conception of the abstract or spiritual (life, spirit or soul conceived as bodies or particles, or as having some kind of materiality), but also in the conception of ghosts and other apparitions as empirical and verifiable phenomena. Likewise, there are frequent traces of a correspondence between an occultist belief (“astral doubles,” the “strength of the mind,” “telepathy”) and scientific notions such as atavism, or technical inventions such as the telegraph; finally, a distorted or altered view on the natural (animals, instinct) through a perverse, hyperbolic, or ominous prism also appears persistently. Differently in each case, and according to each author’s narrative project, these four short-stories bear witness, by means of their formal and thematic traits, of a certain historical sensibility, certain way of

158 Soledad Quereilhac processing the secularization of mysteries, and a subtle understanding of the obscure and terrifying dimension of the unveiling attributed to the development of scientific knowledge. It is not a question of anti-scientific reactions, nor of representing the ethically negative aspects of science; rather, in a quite different direction, these stories have delved into a series of common questions: What if science were as successful as optimists predict and could advance towards the terrains of the after-death, the world of ghosts, and phenomena that are considered supernatural? What would science find there? Would the world then be more pleasant, or would the veil drawn by science only reveal a terrifying panorama? Before embarking on the corpus analysis, we should define some boundaries for the fantastic and Gothic genres, and inquire about their specific combinations in Argentine narrative.

Gothic Manifestations in the Río de la Plata Literature “I read Latin American fantastic literature as a manifestation of Gothic literature,” holds María Negroni in her prologue to Galería Fantástica [Fantastic Gallery] (9), providing a synthetic but accurate statement on how an aesthetics, a narrative imaginary, and a sensibility from other lands and other periods can take roots in peripheral countries. The idea of the fantastic as a transmutation of Gothic has its origins in Cortázar’s pioneering “Notas sobre lo gótico en el Río de la Plata [Notes on the Gothic in Río de la Plata]. Both critics conceive the Gothic as an inheritance, a transmuted legacy, and, at the same time, as a latent presence in other forms. In a sense, it can be said that the role of this genre in the local literary system emulates one of its classic characters—the ghost, a spectral, shadowy return from an ancestral past that can be seen against the light of its living doppelgänger, the fantastic. The idea of the survival of Gothic in other narrative modalities is also found in other recent works. Nadina Estefanía Olmedo (2010) talks about “echoes” of the Gothic in the literature and the cinema of the Southern Cone, with the hypothesis that throughout the twentieth century there is a “reinvention” of certain classic Gothic themes (7). For her part, and with more formal accuracy, Inés Ordiz AlonsoCollada tackles a sharp revision of the Gothic and the fantastic aimed at defining their specificity in textual terms yet in close relation with their context. Acknowledging the frequent hybridization and overlapping of the Gothic and the fantastic throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the author defines their distinguishing traits: while “the presence of the supernatural, the collision between worlds, the feelings of anguish/fear produced by the unknown” are key in the fantastic genre, the main Gothic trait is the “evocation of fear,” of “an intrinsic horror instilled in the reader by ominous events, be them supernatural or not”

Shadows of Science in the Río de la Plata 159 (153–54). However, this distinction does not prevent addressing texts in which the Gothic and the fantastic intermingle and complement each other, that is to say, texts in which the supernatural provokes horror (as in the case of the four stories we will analyze). In any case, her critical review of every possible Gothic combination provides solid arguments for the study of the specific forms that hybridization took at certain points in history. In this sense, it should be added that Sandra CasanovaVizcaíno, following Robert Mighall, also widens the definition of Gothic beyond its classic period and in close relation with history, presenting it “not as an ‘essence’, but as a ‘process’ or ‘rhetoric,’ an attitude both towards the past and the present” (131). We believe that the corpus of turn-of-the-century stories can be described based on its two constituting branches: on one hand, its insertion in the Gothic and fantastic narrative tradition, whose European and North American models circulated in Buenos Aires; on the other hand, its close relation to science and pseudoscience topics popularized by the press. A horror instilled by the secular knowledge of the world seems to show its face in these stories—a horror much more related to the reordering of the world promoted by science than to the mere rejection of science. What these stories explore is the transformation of phenomena previously related to magic and the supernatural—rays, microscopic life, the mechanical reproduction of sound—into something natural and explainable. There is a certain fascination with the experimental potential of science, and in this regard, there is a historical piece of information that cannot be underestimated—the link these authors shared with the scientific field. Both Wilde and Holmberg graduated from the College of Medical Sciences, although only the first one practiced the profession. Holmberg dedicated himself to the natural sciences, wrote numerous works on arachnids, birds and other species, went on several exploring expeditions and was the Director of the Buenos Aires zoo between 1888 and 1903; Wilde, along with his parliamentary work and having been in charge of the Ministry of justice, Religious Affairs, and Public Instruction during julio A. Roca’s first term as President, was also in charge of the National Department of Hygiene (an equivalent of what would later be the Ministry of Public Health), and wrote a variety of texts on social hygiene and legal medicine. For his part, Lugones had no formal education on science, but since his admission to the Theosophical Society of Buenos Aires in 1898 he became an avid reader of all kinds of scientific literature. He was actually commissioned by the Argentine Scientific Society and the College of Exact Sciences to write essays about the paleontologist Florentino Ameghino (1915) and Einstein’s theories (1921), where he indulged in mixing “materialist” science with his spiritualist ideas. Finally, Quiroga was an enthusiast self-learner of technical subjects such as photography, electrotyping, chemistry, pottery,

160 Soledad Quereilhac liquor distillation, and many more, and certainly knew how to craft ominous narrations out of these adventures. Thus, the four authors had, in different degrees, a scientific and/or technical training, academic or self-taught, and it may have been as an expression of their straightforward experience with these kinds of knowledge and practices that they conceived their nightmarish literary counterparts.

“La primera noche en el cementerio” As Guillermo korn reconstructs in his prologue to the most recent edition of Prometeo y Cía, this story by Wilde had four versions: two of them were published in newspapers and the other two in books (27). Published in El Sud-americano on 20 August 1888, the first version interests us most, since it is the only one with a feature that would be removed in later versions: a digression about the composition of life which hybridizes materialism and spiritualism. Since the story tells the first twenty-four hours of a corpse in the cemetery, this scientific-occultist digression gives a new meaning to the whole piece. The story begins with a description of the graveyard in the “noches tempestuosas en que el viento silba en todos los tonos de su orquesta” [stormy nights in which the wind blows in all its orchestra tones] (Wilde 292). The Gothic appears in the landscape description, recognizable as trope. However, this is not the central element, since the narrator will quickly focus on a living man’s corpse who, on hearing a woman moaning, feels “una ráfaga loca de sensualismo cadavérico” [a mad gust of cadaverous sensualism] (293) and decides to slip into the coffin of a young woman whose body is in an advanced stage of decomposition, and whose “ex blancos” [formerly white] shreds of clothing evoke the image of a dead bride. The corpses consummate an erotic encounter— “vistiendo de carne con su imaginación los huesos desnudos” [dressing with their imagination the naked bones in flesh]—and eventually seem to dissolve. At this point, the narrator begins his digression on the transmigration of souls with a language that intends to combine the material and the spiritual, filling with phantasmagoria scientific notions such as atoms, viruses, and seeds: Yo creo a pie juntillas en esa especie de inmortalidad; creo en una individualidad atómica o molecular, corpúsculo, célula, grupo gaseosos, qué sé yo, pero algo material que es capaz de llevar dentro de sí la personalidad de un ser o función, como lleva el virus la rabia, el pus la úlcera, la semilla el árbol y, por último, un óvulo y un germen el cuerpo humano con su parecido y su distintivo de familia; creo en que un conjunto de átomos orgánicos puede escaparse del cuerpo de un hombre, antes o después de su muerte, y servir para perpetuarlo, dando su fisonomía parcial o total a otros seres vivientes.

Shadows of Science in the Río de la Plata 161 [I blindly believe in that kind of immortality; I believe in an atomic or molecular individuality, corpuscle, cell, gas groups, I don’t know, but something material capable of carrying within itself the personality of a being or a function, just as the virus carries the rabies, the pus the ulcer, the seed the tree and, finally, an ovule and a germ the human body with its resemblance and its family distinction; I believe that a set of organic atoms can escape a man’s body before or after his death and perpetuate him, giving his partial or total physiognomy to other living creatures.] (294) The narrator attributes that set of particles to “life,” taking the story to the realms of a fantasy with scientist echoes. The end proves that this first version was almost a draft: after the erotic encounter, the man’s corpse regains his composure and finds a group of fellow corpses, with whom he shares a kind of bizarre parliamentary debate. The Gothic tale in the graveyard, the digressive scientific ramblings and the tone of political satire at the end speak of a still structurally unstable narrative form; but that miscellany also informs of a certain period sensibility— the reflection on life and death phenomena leads to the realms of a materiality which is fused, as it is soon revealed, with a spiritual dimension. The question about the afterlife and the undead cannot be reduced to poetry or fantasy; the scientific domain should reformulate old concerns in a new language. Interestingly enough, the image of “life” spreading from the cemetery in tiny particles that will instill life in other beings (a kind of molecular reincarnation) is not comforting in any way, neither it exorcises the fears regarding death or rotting bodies. The language of science is not relieving; it only provides new dimensions for the uncanny. On the other hand, it should be added that this story’s original publishing context—a newspaper—influenced the way in which the uncanny was built: the author did not turn to pure mystery, or to the question about the great beyond, but rather to the kind of pseudoscientific explanations which could be frequently found in the media that dealt with strange or paranormal phenomena, with which readers were already familiarized.6 The links between journalistic and literary discourses are clearly evinced in the way Wilde conceived this tale about the after-death by turning an anecdote into a phenomenon of “this” world, which makes it even more disturbing. If science was advancing in the discovery and characterization of microscopic life— with the public figure of Louis Pasteur leading the way—why not making speculations about material, actual particles that can be carriers of life, personality, spirit? The story of Dr. Wilde—a connoisseur both of literature and science—seems to elaborate a fantastic speculation about that question.

162 Soledad Quereilhac

“Nelly” There is a similar coexistence of elements from traditional Gothic and from that emerging sensibility which translated old fears into a scientist language in the nouvelle “Nelly,” originally published as an eleveninstallment feuilleton in La Prensa between 21 january and 6 February 1896 (that same year, Holmberg published it in a book, keeping the heading “a feuilleton of La Prensa”). In his long dedication to a friend, the naturalist Holmberg recreates the setting where the story was crafted: in an autumnal night at the zoo, while listening to the “bramidos de los leones y leopardos enjaulados” [roars of caged lions and leopards], he feels invaded by “una sensación extraña… un soplo de misterio que bien podría llamarse aura poética” [an uncanny feeling… a blow of mystery which might well be named poetic aura] (Holmberg 237). The nocturnal quality of his workplace—the zoo, a grafting of wild nature in the heart of the city—summons mysteries and allows peeking into a hidden dimension of the visible. It is not by chance, then, that this story is filled with typical Gothic elements, both in a residual and in an emergent direction (Williams 143–48), that is to say, it includes both classical topics— enclosed rooms inhabited by ghosts—and new ones, in which the ominous is referred to in a scientist key. “Nelly” takes place in a Buenos Aires country estate during the winter season, when only two servants remain. The large house, which had belonged to an old General, has reminiscences of the headquarters it once was and, since the beginning, the narrator hints at the traces inscribed on the wall by previous dwellers. The trope of the haunted castle is replaced by a Creole version linked to the landowning elite and the wars of independence.7 Only the grandson of the General, a young positivist, visits the estate with a group of young learned Creoles and an Englishman who has a strange look in his eyes and a phantasmagoric name: Edwin Phantomton. On a cold stormy night, the young men gather in a circle and tell mysterious tales, until the quiver of a woman interrupts them—it is Nelly, the late wife of the Englishman, who has sworn to haunt him from the great beyond until he fulfills the promise made on her deathbed. The story follows the origin of this supernatural phenomenon and the life stories related to that “case,” until a happy and sentimental solution is reached, in agreement with feuilleton conventions. The novelty of Holmberg’s story certainly lies in the merging of diverse imaginaries and traditions into the new forms of fantasy. On the one hand, the use of traditional Gothic figures is evinced in the ghostly apparitions of the main character’s grandfather, who comes back to tell part of the family’s history and prevent an incest between siblings (Edwin and his granddaughter). The mysterious airstreams, the candles that go off and the uncanny noises can also be included here. On the other hand, the elements related to an emergent sensibility regarding the

Shadows of Science in the Río de la Plata 163 horror and the fantastic are introduced with Nelly and the particular illness she suffered while alive: “histerismo telepático” [telepathic hysteria]. This combination of psychiatric and occultist terms, pronounced in the story by doctors, composes a conceptual hybrid, an authentic narrative ideologeme (jameson 95–95),8 which sets up a dialogue with the popularization of cases of telepathy and haunted houses in the press;9 on the other hand, it points out that horror is more powerful if conveyed in a scientific discourse. In this line, Nelly’s ghost is very different from the grandfather’s, and constitutes another figure of spiritual-material synthesis, another ideologeme. The positivist young men decide to corroborate the apparition of Nelly’s ghost empirically and, for the surprise of all, succeed. Some get to touch her feet and hands, others her hair, and, as if this was not enough, while measuring her temperature, they remark: “el termómetro de mínima señalaba ocho grados” [the thermometer indicated a minimum of eight degrees Celsius]. The narrator adds: El objetivismo de la aparición se imponía…. [A]unque la materialización de Nelly tuviera todos los caracteres de una monstruosidad, no lo es menos que, en tal ocasión, los actos que habíamos realizado pertenecían por su forma al empirismo más simple y no podíamos negar que los resultados concordaban con el sentido común, independientemente de la cosa en sí. [The objectivism of the apparition prevailed… [A]ltough Nelly’s materialization presented all the traits of monstrosity, it was no less that the acts we performed in such an occasion belonged for its nature to the simplest empiricism, and we couldn’t deny that the results matched with common sense, independently of the thing-in-itself.] (284–85) Thus, the reference to the “objectivism” of the apparition signals that the uncanny in this story lies in the scientific verification of the existence of the ghost. The question of the will, taken literally as “fuerza física” [physical force], is a link to the structuring motive of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” (1838) and the topic of guilt over infidelity. Unlike Poe’s story, the return of the woman’s ghost is not just hinted at, but explicitly verified by means of touch and a thermometer. The reading horizon of ghost stories has undeniably changed; in order to reach the desired effect, it was necessary to raise the stakes by infusing into the world of the unknown the disturbing certainties provided by scientific methods. In a telling manner, the hypothesis of suggestion or hallucination held initially by many leads the narrator to remark: “aquella realidad palpable era más grave” [that palpable reality was graver] (255). At that time, the disturbing, the dreadful, even the ominous, seemed to emerge from

164 Soledad Quereilhac facts confirmed by science rather than from speculation or fraudulent theories. With a certain similarity to Wilde’s case, Holmberg reserved the representation of speculations that were excluded from his scientific practice for his literature of imagination. Unlike other internationally renowned naturalists—such as the British Alfred Russel Wallace, who did not hesitate in admitting his spiritualist practices—Holmberg did not belong to any of the spiritualist and theosophical circles that began to proliferate in Argentina in the 1870s. However, undoubtedly charmed by that imaginary, his stories did not only incorporate references to spiritualism (for instance, mentioning names such as William Crookes, a renowned physicist and a declared spiritualist, as well as Cosme Mariño and Felipe Senillosa, local frontrunners of the Spiritualist Society Constancia),10 but also indulged in playing with the possibility of science finally accomplishing to explain the spiritual world. His “telepathic hysteria,” his 8°C ghost, and his verifiable otherworldly voices are all players in a mixing game that hybridizes cultural fields which were in a disquieting tension at the time. In this sense, regarding secular knowledge, the Gothic is nourished by a sensible horizon of the period and processes fears of its historical present.

“Un fenómeno inexplicable” As in the previous story, Leopoldo Lugones’s “Un fenómeno inexplicable” is set in a desolate house in the countryside, in the border between the provinces of Santa Fe and Córdoba. The main character is a lonely English widower that has been to India, a piece of information which summons the fin-de-siècle Orientalist imaginary. The narrator is a visitor to his house, which he describes as a “un sepulcro nuevo en el emplazamiento de un antiguo cementerio” [brand-new sepulcher at the site of an old graveyard] (126), a sentence that acquires a particular meaning on the light of our hypothesis, since it synthesizes in a single image the common trait of these turn-of-the-century Gothic fantasies: the emergence of new forms of terror (“sepulcro nuevo”) within a recognizable tradition (“antiguo cementerio”). Indeed, in this setting which reworks the topic of the lonely and mysterious house, Lugones conceives the irruption of the uncanny as a certainly innovative hybrid between Darwinism and occultism. The story was originally published in the theosophical magazine Philadelphia on 7 September 1898, with the title “La licantropía” [The Lycanthropy]. The change both in the title and the medium—from a magazine for the initiated in the occult sciences to the 1906 book Las fuerzas extrañas [Strange Forces]—has an impact on the sense of the story. A case of “licantropía” is presented in the Theosophical Society review, of which Lugones was a member himself; however, the

Shadows of Science in the Río de la Plata 165 replacement of the wolf for the monkey in the fateful self-duplication suffered by the main character leaves a trace of irony and explicitly sets up a dialogue with certain popularized notions of the theory of evolution. Among theosophists, Lugones seems to imply that the only result of the introspective spiritual journey (which the character learns from the yoghis) is an encounter with a trivial monkey, which blocks any spiritual dimension. In agreement with the theosophist rejection of Darwin’s theory of evolution, considered as an aesthetic and philosophic atrocity by Helena Blavatsky and Annie Besant (two of the main figures of theosophy), Lugones’ fiction portrays that atrocity with a Gothic sensibility. However, in Las fuerzas extrañas—a book targeted at a broader public and influenced by the idea of unknown forces disrupting everyday life—another meaningful dimension appears in the story. The duplication suffered by the Englishman is a strange, rare, “unexplainable” phenomenon that addresses the social terrors of the period: fears of atavic regression, of sensing the animal in the man,11 of knowing that, as a species, we are connected to those distorted “doubles” of ourselves, according to a popularized conception of apes held by the press and certain literature (despite the fact that they are not our ancestors but a contemporary species). Likewise, the theosophical figure of the “astral double” is merged with the notion of the antecessor in the evolutionary tree. The third element in this fantastic synthesis is the literary figure of the double, defined by Sigmund Freud as a modern solution to certain primitive fears such as the animation of shadows (27). With that synthetic mosaic, the story narrates the irruption of a “strange force:” the sinister ghost of an atavic animality coming back from the interior of man. The final image portrays that regressive threat in a plastic, visual sense, when the narrator (skeptical at first) captures a precise simian profile in the Englishman’s shadow. As with Nelly and the thermometer, horror is not the result of a suggestion or a hesitation regarding the supernatural; on the contrary, it is the product of empiric verification.

“El almohadón de plumas” “El almohadón de plumas” is paradigmatic of the discursive, aesthetic, and imaginary combinations that constitute Quiroga’s narrative: an expressionist naturalism (Romano 1312) mixed with the fantastic, and a taste for horror combined with the rhetoric of science popularization. Originally published in Caras y Caretas, on 13 july 1907 (included in Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte [Stories of Love, Madness, and Death] in 1917), this story sets up a dialogue with the journalistic corpus of “weird cases,”12 while it is also marked by modernist rhetoric and has a clearly Gothic setting. From the outset, the relationship between Alicia and jordán is described with the semantic field of coldness: “Su luna de miel fue un largo

166 Soledad Quereilhac escalofrío. Rubia, angelical y tímida, el carácter duro de su marido heló sus soñadas niñerías de novia” [Their honeymoon was a long shiver. A blond, angelic and shy young girl, her husband’s rough character had chilled her childish bridal reveries] (Quiroga “Almohadón” 97). Coldness is transferred to the atmosphere as well: “La casa en que vivían influía no poco en sus estremecimientos. La blancura del patio silencioso— frisos, columnas y estatuas de mármol—producía una otoñal impresión de palacio encantado” [The house in which they lived influenced her chills to no small degree. The whiteness of the silent courtyard—marble friezes, columns and statues—produced the autumnal impression of an enchanted palace] (97). The house is an objectification of the lack of eroticism in the couple, and conveys the idea of a virginal princess locked in a palace; it also sets the tone for the irruption of vampirism, a form of perverse sexual possession, with the apparition of the hallucinated anthropoid, identified by Margo Clantz (106) as jordán—the husband. However, while Alicia’s progressive weakening initially seems a result of the lack of eroticism, the development of the story points at a different kind of mystery. The narrator says: “[p]arecía que únicamente de noche se le fuera la vida en nuevas oleadas de sangre…. Apenas podía mover la cabeza. No quiso que le tocaran la cama, ni aun que le arreglaran el almohadón” [it seemed only at night that her life drained out of her in new waves of blood…. She could barely move her head. She did not want her bed to be touched, not even to have her pillow arranged] (Quiroga “Almohadón” 99–100). Thus, the narrator focuses on the pillow and the blood, while the monsters hallucinations and her “terrores crepusculares” [crepuscular terrors] gradually anticipate the uncanny presence of the bug. The story may well have ended when, after Alicia’s death, jordán detects the “manchitas oscuras” [small dark spots] (100) in the pillow—the reader would have no trouble in interpreting that disturbing suggestion. However, the narrator does not only explain how the “bola viviente y viscosa” [living, viscous ball] (101) had emptied Alicia in five nights, but in a final paragraph in the style of a zoological description adds: “Estos parásitos de las aves, diminutos en el medio habitual, llegan a adquirir en ciertas condiciones proporciones enormes. La sangre humana parece serles particularmente favorable, y no es raro hallarlos en los almohadones de pluma” [These bird parasites, diminutive in their usual environment, can reach enormous proportions under certain conditions. Human blood seems particularly favorable to them, and it is not rare to find them in feather pillows] (101). Thus, the story suggests that this “animal monstruoso” [monstrous animal] is not a creature from the great beyond or a supernatural demon, but just a “parásito de ave” [bird parasite]—a louse, or a tick—which could be hidden in the feather pillow the reader is seated on while reading the story. In the cold tone of a scientific study, the description implies that these Creole vampires can perversely deviate from their taste to

Shadows of Science in the Río de la Plata 167 human blood. The key for the horror effect in “El almohadón de plumas” lies in the enunciation of the uncanny in a scientific jargon, which provides the case with an effect of verisimilitude based on discourse of the period. Although Quiroga introduces a clear explanation that banishes all mystery, this is even more disturbing than any insinuation of the supernatural, since it shows that nature itself harbors atrocious animals, little monsters that can take away human lives in a daily setting. Thus, the atmosphere of wretched love and marital coldness is merged with the “weird case,” a coexistence that heightens the disquieting effect, since both are products of a novel conception of vampirism. Twenty years later, in “El vampiro” [The Vampire],13 Quiroga will reimagine a story of deviated and mortal love, now merged with cinema. With authentic Gothic sensibility, Quiroga detects the phantasmagoria of cinema both in its technical and symbolic aspects. Ultimately, in all of his film stories (and even in his silent film reviews),14 the experience of the spectator in the screening room can be interpreted as an encounter with ghosts in the darkness. While these two stories have different themes and forms, they share a common Gothic sensibility, which finds an over-nature in nature and a renewal of primitive magic in technique. In short, a diurnal encounter with the threatening ghosts of the night.

Conclusion From the critical revision of these four turn-of-the-century Argentine stories, a common element arises: the supernatural event that provokes horror is always accompanied by an explanation of a scientist nature— an explanation that provides a biological materiality to “life” after death (Wilde); that identifies a ghost apparition through verifiable, measurable empiricism (Holmberg); that deciphers the atavist nature of an spectral double (Lugones); and that reveals the zoological nature of a monster hidden in a pillow (Quiroga). Far from the fantastic hesitation effect that would arrive later in Argentina, and would be represented by Silvina Ocampo, josé Bianco, or julio Cortázar (whose texts would be a little closer to Todorov’s classic definition [1982] or to Campra’s aesthetics of indeterminacy [1991]), the themes in these stories are conceived in the light of the period’s scientist imagery, and incorporate the rational and materialist explanatory rhetoric in order to banish any mystery. However, this unveiling, this rationalization of experience is not tranquilizing but exactly the opposite—the monstrous, the spectral, the beastly do not get to be conjured but rather revealed in all their material reality. The atrocious does not belong to the great beyond but rather to the “here and now,” and can be positively verified among us. In dialogue with the strong presence of sciences in newspapers and magazines (where they were originally published), these stories seem to constitute a literary answer to the questions, debates and hopes raised in

168 Soledad Quereilhac those years by the approach to the scientific field of an area of pseudosciences, or the so-called “occult sciences” (spiritualism, theosophy, magnetology). If statements such as this were frequent in the press: “Alchemy was the precursor of chemistry; astrology, of astronomy. It shall also be expected then that occultism is the precursor of a currently ignored science, destined to open new horizons for the human spirit” (E. L. 3), it can be said that these stories played with the idea of achieving that horizon of possibilities, and transformed inventive scientificoccultist hybrids into certainties, empirical facts. It should be noted, however, that there is a remarkable aesthetic difference between these narrations: while Holmberg and Wilde (two men from the Argentine Generation of 1880 who wrote literature in their spare time) introduce texts with a less polished formal structure, and left more room to ironic and/or humorous digressions, Lugones and Quiroga (who belonged to the generation that followed and identified themselves with Latin American modernismo) build certainly more obscure fantasies without luminous compensations, and do not fear perverse deviations or radical estrangements. Likewise, their writing already exhibits a concern about style and form, something directly linked to the gradual professionalization of the literary activity in Río de la Plata. In any case, in all these stories it is possible to find direct allusions to certain tropes of Gothic literature: the graveyard setting (Wilde), the solitary, enclosed houses (Lugones) which evoke old edifications (Quiroga) where the ancestors seems to remain in portraits or inscriptions (Holmberg). Since castles are not common in the Southern Cone, the hint at that element, already identifiable by the Río de la Plata readership, is fulfilled with settings of a similar aura in the vernacular logic. Thus, the adaptation of a convention is accompanied by an election of motives classically linked to supernatural horror such as ghosts, the living-dead, doubles or monsters, but—as we have said—from a contemporary perspective. In this sense, it could be said, firstly, that the fusion of Gothic and fantastic is predominant and, secondly, that the updating of horror literature conventions is mostly realized through a vigorous effort to delve into, define, and verify the nature of the unusual, rather than through narrative strategies designed to create suspense or great effects. In Río de la Plata, the strong presence of sciences in the social imaginary stimulated an original manifestation of Gothic literature, in which horror was able to speak the language of its period.

Notes 1 Critics have situated this period between 1764 and 1820, that is to say, between the publications of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: a Gothic Story, and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. 2 The author detects, for instance, a great number of novels attributed to Ann Radcliffe which, in fact, she never wrote. Among these, he found El castillo

Shadows of Science in the Río de la Plata 169 de Nebelstein [The Castle of Nebelstein], of 1843, and Las visiones del castillo de los Pirineos [The Visions of the Castle of the Pyrenees], of 1839 (Abraham 685). 3 Following some of the classic works on the fantastic mode such as Rosemary jackson’s (1986), and more recent ones such as Ordiz Alonso-Collada’s (2014), we consider that the term “fantasy” comprises all the non-mimetic genres, or modes, which spread across the domains of the pure fantastic, the uncanny, the scientific fantasy, the marvelous, and the Gothic. Additionally, and as Irène Bessière claims, we consider that the fantastic mode cannot be conceived outside the cultural context from which it emerges and with which it sets up a dialogue: The fantastic story uses sociocultural frames and forms of understanding that define the domains of the natural and the supernatural, the trivial and the uncanny, not in order to reach a metaphysical certainty, but in order to organize the confrontation of those elements in a civilization which are related to phenomena that escape the economy of the real and the super-real, the conception of which varies according to the period. (1974)

4 5 6

7 8

9 10

Thus, in our view, history provides the backbone of fantasy, structuring its forms, its topics and its sensible dimension in each period. For an assessment of the remarkable difference in number between book and newspaper readers on the cusp of the century, see Adolfo Prieto and Geraldine Rogers. I have dealt specifically with these topics in Quereilhac, “Reflexiones” and Cuando la ciencia. Among the several examples, two significant ones deserve to be mentioned: the coverage by some of Buenos Aires’ newspapers (La Nación, La Crónica, La Prensa) of the 1881 and 1884 controversies between “materialists” and/or scientist intellectuals, and some members of the Spiritualist Society Constancia. In the first one, Dr. Miguel Puiggari, professor of Chemistry and Dean of the College of Physics and Maths, confronted Rafael Hernández, a declared spiritualist and brother of the Martín Fierro’s author, regarding the possibility of an empirical study, using scientific methods, of after-death phenomena. In the second one, Alejo Peyret, a professor of History and Free Courses in the National School of Buenos Aires, renewed the controversy with Hernández over a similar subject (Quereilhac Cuando la ciencia). It is worth recalling that the grandfather of the author, the baron Eduardo kaunitz de Holmberg, fought in those wars. For Frederic jameson, ideologemes are figures of synthesis, symbolic resolutions of conflicts or tensions that can be found within the historical series, that is, in the extratextual reality. jameson detects the presence of ideologemes in the way traditional fairytales construe notions of good and evil, oneness and otherness. In the case of the stories we are studying, the figures of synthesis resolve tensions between scientific and pseudoscientific discourses, and propose entities that are fusions of spirit and matter; for instance, the combination of a psychiatric diagnosis (hysteria) with a supernatural power, telepathy; also, as we shall see, the apparition of a ghost with a measurable temperature in °C. For example, “Algunos hechos curiosos” [Some Curious Facts] La Prensa, 10 july 1897, or “Hechos telepáticos” [Telepathic Facts], Constancia, 2 November 1906. In “Nelly” and “La casa endiablada” [The Devilish House] (1896) he includes these and other references to the occult sciences of the period.

170 Soledad Quereilhac 11 See Adriana Rodríguez Pérsico. 12 See the relation of this story with the note “Un caso raro” [A Weird Case] La Prensa, 7 November 1880, in Alfredo Veiravé. 13 Originally published in La Nación on 11 September 1927, and included later in Más allá, his last book, published in 1935. 14 See Quiroga (Arte).

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