The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction

4. THE DOUBLE: FROM SCIENCE TO TECHNOLOGY

172 THE DOUBLE FROM SCIENCE TO TECHNOLOGY The figure of the artificially generated human double permeatesthe science fictiongenre from proto-science- fictional times to the present. The methods of creation or re-creation, and the forms that the double takes, reflect the technology of the day. They also serve as a gauge of society’s reactions to that technology, and as a vehicle for further exploration of the age-old question of what makes us human. The current fascination with the clone, for example, has been incarnated in years past in the cyborg, the android, and the robot. Because the term “robot” was not coined until 1920 (by Karel Čapek in r.u.r.: Rossum’s Universal Robots), we must look even further back—to figures such as the automaton , the golem, and the homunculus, and to works such as Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” [Der Sandmann] (1816) and Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—to locate the literary influences on the texts discussed in this chapter: Holmberg ’s “Horacio Kalibang or The Automatons” [Horacio Kalibang o Los autómatas] (1879), Alejandro Cuevas’s “The Apparatus of Doctor Tolimán” [El aparato del Doctor Tolimán] (c.1911), and Horacio Quiroga’s The Artificial Man [El hombre artificial] (1910), “The Portrait” [El retrato] (1910), and “The Vampire” [El vampiro] (1927).1 Cultural and technological influences, particularly from the United States, also are important issues in these works. Practical North American engineering and inventions , also seen in Doctor Benignus, make multiple appearances, and the exports of Hollywood’s popular culture industry begin to gain a foothold in the Latin American imagination. In these texts on the double, we will see the modernization and the Latin Americaniza- T H E D O U B L E 173 tion of earlier Northern works as well as the transition of Latin American science fiction from a more elite, science-centered genre to one with a broader, more popular audience garnered through the increasing presence of technology in daily life. Whereas any doubles appearing in the more fantastical texts discussed in chapter 3 are evoked through the powers of strange forces, the doubles here are produced by less overtly mysterious means. In these works of relatively hard science fiction, there are mechanically and biologically constructed doubles, revivified doubles, and two- and three-dimensional doubles reproduced or incarnated via emerging technologies. All of the scientists and inventors in these texts are men. When their creations are male, the predominant issues are generational : the creator’s own father, the creator’s self-image, or his descendance (“Horacio Kalibang,” “Doctor Tolimán,” The Artificial Man). Females are created less often; in these cases, frustrated love and subsequently stunted biological reproduction are sometimes at issue (“Horacio Kalibang”), or the story is concerned with the degree of a past or present emotional attachment (“The Portrait,” “The Vampire”). All of these texts consider two other topics common to this subgenre : the definition of humanity and the line of separation between life and death. When the power to erase the line of demarcation between life and death is posited as achievable in a text, overtones of technophobia often ensue (though they tend to dissipate under close scrutiny), as do religious questions regarding the morality of usurping the position of God as Creator. The question of what it means to be human was also a central topic in the evolutionary tales of chapter 2, and the Latin American tendency toward Lamarckian interpretations of the laws of heredity revealed in those texts continues to appear in texts of the double. Rather than looking back along the Scala Naturae for missing links and racially based vestiges of past barbarity, however, these texts look toward the future, seeking to construct and reconstruct life forms that will imitate and improve upon humanity as we know it. An analysis of this corpus of texts reveals something of an inventor’s “to-do list.” First, make the created being look human, then make it move/function like a human. Next, in an ever-important mark of humanity , the creation must be able to speak like a human. Beyond this, it must have the capacity to reason like a human and, finally, it must possess that special ingredient, variously defined as a soul, emotion, or the experience of humanity as a species. T H E E M E R G...