Environmental Apocalypse and Uncanny Technology: Gothic Visions of the Future in Three Mexican Literary Dystopias

Abstract

The reality of the production of literature that follows a non-mimetic code in Latin America is definitely a complex one. With the exception of Magical Realism, a mode of writing considered native to the territory and, therefore, respected and reinforced because of its necessary connection to (and acceptance of) the magic dimension of Latin American reality, the critics generally show a consistent lack of interest in narratives belonging to other forms of "the unusual". However, ignoring the great complexity of the several shapes that the "literary extraordinary" can take in the diverse fictions of Latin America, implies disregarding a great deal of hybrid fictions containing essential (yet distorted) reflections of the multifaceted reality of the territory.There are indeed several fictions that conform to a Magical Realist code; however, the narratives belonging to the fantastic genre, the Gothic, and science fiction should not be overlooked. We can think of these modes of representation as establishing an essential relationship towards a higher concept of non-mimetic literature that encompasses all of them, in a theory similar to the one presented by Rosemary Jackson:It could be suggested that fantasy is a literary mode from which a number of related genres emerge. Fantasy provides a range of possibilities out of which various combinations produce different kinds of fiction in different historical situations.Borrowing linguistic terms, the basic model of fantasy could be seen as a language, or langue, from which its various forms, or paroles, derive. Out of this model develops romance literature or 'the marvellous' (including fairy tales and science fiction), Ordiz Alonso-Collada 2 'fantastic' literature (including stories by Poe, Isak Dinesen, Maupassant, Gautier, Kafka, H. P. Lovecraft) and related tales of abnormal psychic states, delusion, hallucination, etc. ( 7)The modes of writing included in this higher conception of the fantastic are, especially in postmodern times, necessarily hybrid. In Lucie Armitt's words, fantasy is "constantly overspilling the very forms it adopts, always looking, not so much for escapism but certainly to escape the constraints that critics … always and inevitably impose upon it" (3). The hybridization of the different discourses of fantasy is directly connected with what Gary Wolfe has labelled "post-genre fantastic," or the essential mélange of horror, Gothic fiction and the recent "dark fantasy", that so well represents a confused (and confusing) contemporary reality marked by "globalized flows, strange interpretations and simultaneities" (Luckhurst 33)."Fantasy", "post-genre fantastic", "the literature of the unusual"; whatever the term we use to describe this postmodern crossbreed monster, it is already a reality of western literature in general, and of Latin American fictions in particular.It is not my intention to offer a detailed examination of all the different modes of the literary extraordinary in the Latin American territory, but rather to narrow down the scope of my ...