The entangled pen
The fusion of science and literature has generated a new form of Mexican energy. Review: Science Fusion in Contemporary Mexican Literature, Brian Chandler, by Gavin O'Toole
Science Fusion in Contemporary Mexican Literature, Brian T Chandler, 2024, Bucknell University Press
It is probable that few people have heard of Miguel Alcubierre, but as the human race ventures away from its home planet he may one day be regarded as the greatest thinker in the history of space travel.
Alcubierre is best known for the proposal of the “warp drive”, a theoretical—and at this stage in our technological evolution, speculative—model envisaging a means by which spacecraft can achieve faster-than-light travel.
It is a complex concept under the existing understanding of general relativity by which a volume of flat space can be transported inside a “bubble” of curved space, driven forward by the expansion and contraction of space-time.
The notion has been taken up extensively in science fiction and, while it remains controversial and unlikely to become reality in our lifetimes, it has not been entirely spurned in the corridors of theoretical physics and has been discussed by agencies such as NASA.
What is particularly interesting about Alcubierre, however, and a fact that challenges transatlantic prejudices about the source of some of the world’s most innovative, game-changing science, is that he is a Mexican.
The achievements of Mexican science and its role in culture have rarely been given their due outside the country, yet have been historically significant since pre-Columbian times.
Mayan and Aztec advances in mathematics, medicine and astronomy were centuries ahead of their time, and their practical technologies solved major problems of water management and construction.
While the colonial era was largely one of complementing developments in Europe, even if New Spain was the origin of scientific pursuit in Latin America, the early independence period and 19th century were blighted by instability, delaying significant progress in scientific development until after the Revolution, when public education and scientific bodies were institutionalised.
Mexican scientists have made important contributions to astronomy, biology and ecology, the Green Revolution, genetic research, neuroscience and atmospheric chemistry. In 1995, the Mexican Mario José Molina Henríquez won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on the ozone layer, and today the country is a significant exporter of high-tech goods.
Given this, it should be no surprise that science has formed an important backdrop to cultural pursuits, from the visual arts to literature, and Brian Chandler’s fascinating study explores its influence in works of contemporary fiction.
A problem the author identifies immediately is how it has been less common to use an explicitly scientific perspective to study literature when considering Spanish-language works than in Anglo-American, French and other traditions—a fact that runs contrary to the sheer number of authors and poets writing in Spanish who overtly incorporate scientific thought into themes, structures, and language.
Chandler argues that we can easily find examples of how science, culture and literature are entangled in Mexico, and provides a fascinating history of this relationship in the thought and practice of writers from Octavio Paz to José Emilio Pacheco, Arturo Azuela and Salvador Elizondo.
Given the long and established role science has played in Mexican literature, Chandler is concerned less with science fiction—the speculative and inventive use of science with which to imagine future worlds—as science fusion (ciencia-fusión), works that employ scientific discourse and concepts in fiction to address issues in biopolitics, historiography, metaphysics, and ecology.
He writes that while works of science fusion take up disparate themes and use scientific knowledge in different ways, they share “a common characteristic of explicitly fusing science and literature together to problematise humanist dualisms such as subject-object, nature-culture, and human–non-human and, of course, the longstanding divide between science and literature.”
In particular, they offer a lens on different forms of humanism and on the Eurocentric perspective of knowledge, ultimately nurturing the possibility for Latin American post-humanisms to open up new dimensions in debates about identity, globalisation and coloniality.
Chandler examines key themes that recur in this genre, beginning with “entanglement” between matter and human experience, a motif that has been central to the work of Alberto Blanco, a chemist by training and one of Mexico’s most acclaimed poets.
Blanco’s work, says Chandler, lays bare how ciencia-fusión transposes analogous scientific concepts to non-scientific contexts, embraces metaphor in scientific and literary discourse, and refutes binary or dualistic imagery to reposition humans within an intra-active universe.
Jorge Volpi’s novel En busca de Klingsor (1999) is arguably the most well-known work of Mexican ciencia-fusión thanks to its commercial and critical success, with a narrative steeped in the fundamental unpredictability of quantum mechanics.
By this understanding, there is a clear limit to the precision with which pairs of physical properties can simultaneously be known, and the novel’s main character grapples with the concepts of causality and probability that challenge a deterministic view of history.
As Chandler notes, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle offers a rich and deep seam of potential meaning for authors to explore themes in 20th century history and challenge the confidence humanity places in science.
He writes: “The crux of this groundbreaking discovery strikes at the long-held idea that science could provide humanity with certainty of knowledge in an increasingly uncertain world.”
The short stories of Ignacio Padilla are examined for his treatment of themes of automation and autonomy and the subjugation of women and nature, by which the writer reveals the ways in which science, knowledge, and commerce are harnessed to marginalise and control women and non-normative subjects.
Padilla is very much an author for our era, his fascination with automata and the moral questions that they provoke coinciding with key contemporary issues—from drones to artificial intelligence. But he extends this to consider these as analogous to how patriarchy controls marginalised subjects, in particular women, rendering them like androids.
Until his untimely death in 2016, Padilla was a prolific writer with expansive interests who put his pen to a broad range of themes—using imaginary dimensions to “disrupt the convention of what is real”. It is notable that both Volpi and Padilla were founding figures in the Crack generation aiming to escape the obvious limitations of magic realism and return to a complexity of plot and style.
Chandler examines the more polemical works of Sabina Berman, perhaps best known as a dramatist, outlining a science of good and evil built upon Darwinian ideas as opposed to a morality constructed upon theology or ethical philosophy.
The poetry of Maricela Guerrero is considered for its depiction of the relationships between scientific knowledge, language, and humanity’s destructive impact on the ecosystem, to which Chandler applies the concept of “autopoiesis”.
This was proposed by two Chilean neurobiologists in 1972 to describe a living system capable of producing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts—but is a scientific term that nonetheless owes its origin to fiction, in this case Don Quixote.
Chandler builds upon autopoiesis in his final discussion of Elisa Díaz Castelo’s poetry in which she combines technical and medical discourse with verse to communicate the human experience in space and time—a fusion of themes of memory, family, love and death with phenomena in the physical world to present a subjectivity arising from the interplay of forces.
The scholar’s aim is to demonstrate how these authors use scientific knowledge, concepts, and discourse to position humanity’s origins in physical matter, forces and universal phenomena as a means to confront the sociocultural and ecological issues of our civilisation.
The underlying motifs are those of entanglement and fusion which—like its atomic counterpart—releases enormous energy while challenging us to contemplate an uncontrollable, dynamic reality.
Chandler writes: “The authors of ciencia-fusión meld and entangle science and literature in new discourses that reorient the human and non-human as emerging from and integral to non-human physical matter, forces, and phenomena…
“These literary fusions bring together the human and the material to render reality and all human activity as a continual process of becoming, an exploration not only of forces and matter, but also of what in this universe it truly means to matter.”