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Science and the Creative Imagination in Latin America

2006; Duke University Press; Volume: 86; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2006-010

1527-1900

Frank Safford,

Latin American Literature Analysis

In 1959, C. P. Snow, in his famous lecture on “The Two Cultures,” lamented the gulf between the culture of scientists and that of “literary intellectuals” and also characterized the latter as being ignorant of the natural sciences. This lecture provoked heated denunciations from some leading litterateurs, but subsequent generations of literary folk have sought to prove that the world of letters in various ways has absorbed, made use of, or been touched by scientific concepts. This volume, edited by a specialist in Spanish American literature (Fishburn) and a mathematician interested in the relation of science to society and culture (Ortiz), for the most part seeks to demonstrate the role of science in Latin American writing.Three essays present examples of Argentine authors who incorporated scientists or scientific concepts into their fiction or poetry. Eduardo Ortiz discusses two novels of fantasy written in 1875 by naturalist Eduardo Holmberg (1852 – 1937), showing that both refer to identifiable persons in the contemporary Argentine scientific community. Alejandro Kaufman points to the metaphorical use of scientific terms in the work of Ezequiel Martínez Estrada. Norma S. Horenstein notes the appearance of Pythagorean-Platonic and Newtonian ideas in the verses of José Hernández’s Martin Fierro, written in 1872.In one of the more ambitious efforts, Alicia Rivero discusses the role of quantum theory in works of Argentines Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, and Mexicans Jorge Volpi and Carlos Fuentes. Rivero treats a number of themes, among them subjective aspects of research in the natural sciences: in particular, observer subjectivity in scientific writings. She ends with an interesting discussion of the central influence of Heisenberg in Carlos Fuentes’s Cristobal Nonato (1987), noting the analogy between the interference of instruments in experiments in particle research and Fuentes’s summoning of the reader as an active participant (Elector).Some of the essays, while exploring scientific themes in Latin American literature, also veer into discourse on dreaded globalization. Geoffrey Kantaris discusses Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novel La invención de Morel (1940), Eliseo Subiela’s film Hombre mirando al sudeste (1986), and Ricardo Piglia’s novel La ciudad ausente (1992), asking why all three “imagine technology . . . in its relationship to the production of simulacra” (p. 175). In Morel’s invention, which transforms bodies, “quite literally consuming the real to produce its hyperreal simulacrum,” Kantaris sees “an allegory for a new kind of technologically mediated colonization — that of globalization” (p. 178).William Rowe focuses on the “desert poetics” of Mario Montalbetti in Peru, in their intersection with Peruvian philosopher José Carlos Ballón’s Un cambio en nuestro paradigma de ciencia (1999). Rowe refreshingly notes that “different disciplines work with different definitions of evidence: the ‘facts’ in literary studies are not the same as the ‘facts’ in science,” one reason “why it is difficult to study literature and science as parts of the same field” (p. 192). Moving into a discussion of Montalbetti’s poetry, Rowe also remarks that the desert is a “necessity — or counter-necessity, against the necessities imposed by globalization” (p. 195).Globalization also rears its head in Patricia Murray’s analysis of Cienaños de soledad, in which she illumines quite thoroughly the theme of science in Gabriel García Márquez’s remarkable novel. Her initial assertion that it is “a novel about science” (p. 151) is true enough, though one might insert the qualification that the novel also does evoke other themes as well.Four of the essays deal with the writings of scientists. Claudio Canapero discusses 15 issues of the Buenos Aires journal Redes (1994), which sought to articulate “Latin American thought” on science but which (predictably) devoted much of its space to works written in Europe. More arresting is Sylvia Molloy’s analysis of an account by Francisco P. Moreno (“el Perito Moreno”) on his anthropological and archaeological research in Patagonia, which she depicts as a quest for appropriation, both for the scientist and for Argentina as a nation. Benigno Trigo’s discussion of themes of degeneration and anxiety in social descriptions of Colombia by Alexander von Humboldt, Gaspard Theodore Mollien, and the Expedición Corográfica is of particular interest to me, because it is at variance with my readings of the mid-nineteenth-century materials. Finally, and best of all, is the splendid lead essay by Dame Gillian Beer, which brilliantly limns the play of observation and imaginative synthesis in Darwin’s notebooks. Readers of this essay may well feel impelled to read everything else that Dame Gillian has written.