Part II: Twentieth Century – Prowling for Pathways Toward a New Future
In the beginning of the twentieth century, Hispanic literature experienced two strong trends: the dehumanization of political adversaries through animal embodiment, and a resurgent interest in human-animal dynamics. Both come from the futurism with which authors and their societies contended in places such as Cuba and Chile. In fiction, works including Leopoldo Lugones’s Fuerzas extrañas (1906), Horacio Quiroga’s Cuentos de la selva (1918), and later works like Julio Cortázar’s Bestiario (1951), Clarice Lispector’s A Paixão Segundo G.H. (1964), Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña (1976), and Copi’s La ciudad de las ratas (1979) demonstrated the fine line between the human and animal. These canonical works set the tone for the use of animals and eventually monsters in Hispanic literature, and in addition to futurism, they also become decidedly critical at this point. Literature in particular found itself within the post-humanist tradition and contended with the implications of equating humans with animals, from the rabid dictator to the proverbial top dog, granting the animal an incredible sense of agency and power over humanity. This is a remarkable contrast to the early modern period explored in the first four chapters of this book, during which time animals were controlled, monitored, and confined.
The dehumanization of political adversaries is closely linked to one of the stronger currents underpinning the instrumentalization of animals as tools, symbols, and witnesses of both the colonial and postcolonial projects. In the assumed hierarchy that structured the Spanish-speaking colonial world, in which the European decidedly sits at the top, new and hybridized hierarchies abound, and categories delineate who or what occupies which position, giving way to someone other than the European dominating others. Colonial subjects by and large resided closer to the animals than they did to colonists in the hierarchy, a reality cemented by the language used to refer to these populations, and these colonial ruins inform postcolonial literature. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon identifies the colonizer’s depiction of colonized subjects as animals, as demonstrated by the zoological terms used by the colonist:
Allusion is made to the slithery movements of the yellow race, the odors from the “native” quarters, to the hordes, the stink, the swarming, the seething, the gesticulations. In his endeavors at description and finding the right word, the colonist refers constantly to the bestiary. The European seldom has a problem with figures of speech. But the colonized, who immediately grasp the intention of the colonist and the exact case being made against them, know instantly what he is thinking. (7)
Both the bestiary and zoological tradition become referents through which hierarchies are upheld and those marginalized by colonialism and its successor are and can remain disenfranchised. The gradual recognition of marginalized populations’ relegation to and dismissal by nonhuman names and labels is palpable. The dismissal, engagement, or extermination of fictional, nonhuman creatures becomes a powerful means of commemorating, questioning, and battling real events and injustices.
This dismissal of human beings through language borrowed from the zoological tradition is not limited to remembering the colonial contours of a post-empire world. Animal metaphors are still used in contemporary society to denounce violent, deplorable, or unwelcome behavior, which brings forth other questions, among which the most pressing is: why use nonhuman referents to insult others? Jacques Derrida explores this very phenomenon in The Animal that Therefore I Am. In the 2002 work, Derrida analyzes Western culture’s treatment of the animal, as well as their philosophical reduction, if not outright dismissal, as seen especially in the thought of Descartes, Kant, Lacan, and Levinas. The ramifications of a tradition that places the European man above all others has a domino effect in which animals fall first, followed by all other categories of humanity. Within these dichotomies, one half is always “in” and the other “out.” As Ailén Cruz has established, “In the human/animal dichotomy, the I belongs to the human. In the colonizer/colonized dichotomy, it belongs to the colonizer, and so on. The I/other is fluid and unrestricted in the restrictions it places” (Cruz 348). These animalian labels exclude by design. At the same time, they ask us to reconsider their uses in order to move into an era that does not disenfranchise the animal or human.
The four chapters in this section reveal the fundamental questions facing human-animal relationships in the post-industrial and postcolonial twentieth century. The first of these, “Uncanny Urodeles: The Case of Julio Cortázar’s ‘Axolotl’” is by Ailén Cruz. Her chapter uses Freudian theory of the uncanny to examine the role of the axolotl in Julio Cortázar’s famed short story, “Axolotl,” first published in 1952 in the magazine Buenos Aires Literaria. Her chapter offers a new look at the narrative, focusing less on the plot development and more on the uncanny atmosphere Cortázar manages to weave in his story. Through different mechanisms of the uncanny, her analysis demonstrates that the sensation of the uncanny, which is to say, the sensation of the repressed familiar emerging when it can no longer be contained, serves to demonstrate the repressed Indigeneity of the narrator at a pivotal time during the twentieth century. Cortázar thus joins writers including Aldous Huxley, Giorgio Agamben, and René Daumal who have relied on axolotls to explain theories of infancy, immaturity, and societal liberation, bestowing more meaning than ever onto the tiny salamander.
The volume’s sixth chapter is by Odile Cisneros, titled “Animal Skins/Human Souls: Figurations of the Jaguar in Contemporary Brazilian and Spanish American Literature.” This chapter draws on Amerindian approaches to read the human/animal divide in modern and contemporary texts from Spanish America and Brazil from an ecocritical perspective. Indigenous belief in tonalli (“animal souls”) and nagualismo (“companion animals”) illuminate the connection between humans, animals, and destiny in Mesoamerican thought. From an epistemological perspective, this Amazonian view of the animal world unsettles western definitions of a seemingly fixed human nature relative to the nonhuman living world. By drawing both parallels and divergences between these two sets of Indigenous beliefs, the traditional western divide between humans and nature blurs and, on that basis, allows us to examine the meaning of animals in a new way. For example, the jaguar, a unifying figure in the region, holds a unique cultural place from pre-Columbian to contemporary times in traditional stories of shamans donning a jaguar pelt to transform themselves into the animal. Beginning with an examination of the jaguar in Amerindian mythologies, this chapter also considers how these notions about human and animal natures inform the literary productions of Brazilian authors such as Guimarães Rosa and Sérgio Medeiros, as well as Spanish American authors such as Horacio Quiroga, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, Homero Aridjis, and Humberto Ak’bal.
The next chapter, “Of Nahuals and Angels: Neoliberal Reinterpretations and Transnational Mythology in Édgar Clément’s Operación Bolívar” is by Alejandro Ramírez-Méndez. For centuries, angels and nahuals – the Mesoamerican shapeshifting tricksters – have cohabited in the cultural system established after the conquest. And yet, little has been established about their relationship during neoliberalism. After NAFTA, the symbolism and cultural heft of angels and nahuals in popular culture shifted, necessitating a re-understanding of Judeo-Christian practices and a revival of folk beliefs to cope with the hyper-violence, mass migration, drug trafficking, and sociocultural anxiety experienced by people living south of the US-Mexico border. Demonstrating this perfectly, Edgar Clément’s graphic novel, Operación Bolívar (1999), depicts a fictional world in which angels’ bones are used to produce drugs, and the descendants of nahuals are the only ones who can stop it. Operación Bolívar subverts the original archetypes surrounding these mythical creatures and explores the possibilities of neoliberal lore in which transnational politics, corruption, and drug trafficking become part of everyday practices in Mexico. Considering the representation of angels and nahuals while using decolonial and transnational methodologies allows him to address marginalized discourses and cross-border ties. This chapter reevaluates the cultural weight and mythification of these supernatural entities. It also examines how decolonial representations of angels and nahuals redefine Mexican folklore by adjusting to current issues such as violence, narcotraffic, and migration.
The final chapter in this section, “‘Fausto’ and Marina: Cats, Sickness, and Twentieth-Century Spain,” is by Samantha Penina Ruckenstein. Ana María Matute’s short story, “Fausto” (1956), and Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s novel, Marina (1999), both configure cats as a symbol of sickness and death within twentieth-century Spain. In both cases, the cats (Fausto and Kafka, respectively) have been encoded to represent the dark and tragic realities of the main characters’ lives. Looking to Pierre Nora and Astrid Erll as reference points on the role of memory, history, and culture, to better approach these literary works in light of Jacques Derrida’s framing of human-animal relationships, this chapter explores how these texts manipulate animals as a metaphor for sickness and societal struggles during and after the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. The chapter begins with an introduction to both authors, their texts, and their place in the contemporary Spanish literary tradition. This is followed by an analysis of the cats and their interactions with the main characters, highlighting how they affect the lives of Matute’s unnamed girl and Ruiz Zafón’s Marina. In tandem, Ruckenstein explores the socioeconomic and familial conditions experienced by the characters. This study seeks to demonstrate how the use of cats within literature aids the representation of sickness and solitude.
Each of these studies uncovers the instrumentalization of animals for exploring identity, the human condition, and the future.