Editor’s Note: We are pleased to continue sharing the work of the finalists of our third annual literary essay contest. In our thirty-eighth issue, in bilingual edition, we present the essay “Cartography of Bodies in Transit” by Venezuelan writer, university educator, and researcher Maikel Ramírez: “Those who have deemed dystopia to be the opposite of utopia are legion. Nonetheless, this much-vaunted antonymy falls into a negligent omission of the fact that, while we conceive of utopias as impossible to bring about, dytopias, in contrast, are seen as possible worlds, as states of affairs that run the risk of coming true in the short- or long-term future.”
I
Once, the human imagination concocted the highest order of existence.
II
In the year 1516, a few decades before Shakespeare took his first breath, a story by an Englishman named Thomas More gave rise to a series of works that told of the miraculous discovery of paradisiacal lands on the perilous transatlantic voyages of his adventurous countrymen. The source of his later fame, More’s Utopia would lay the groundwork for a Renaissance genre that not only dreamed of a state of affairs in counterpoint to the real, but also offered glimpses of lands governed by ideal ways of life, social orders, and politicians. Utopias like that of Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1623) and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) were imbued with the same feverish daydream of a state elevated to a stage of perfection, a land whose inhabitants had devised formulas with which to root out the social conflicts and other afflictions that held the human species in their grip. To speak plainly, the utopians held tight to the idea of founding a heavenly kingdom, but one of earthly making.
The utopias’ preferred deictic, we should recall, was not “here” but “there.” There was no hope of the utopia’s someday arriving, as its conventional setting lay beyond the horizon of our sight and the space we occupy. To put it scrupulously, the utopia is extraterritorial by nature. It takes place in the ostensible far distance from the place we actually inhabit. Thus, statism runs counter to the utopia, such that attaining it implies embarking on an active pursuit. In and of itself, the utopia relies at its conceptual core on the ideas of the journey, the voyage, the trip, movement, pilgrimage, displacement, and any other concept that allows us to understand bodies that leave behind their country of origin in order to put down roots in a foreign soil that guarantees their happiness.
III
“After the impact of the Discovery of America, the Renaissance presents us with its utopian imaginary,” wrote Venezuelan critic Víctor Bravo in his remarkable essay on the utopia. Like this scholar, critic M. H. Abrams has expressed his belief that Columbus’s arrival in the New World in 1492 oiled the imagination of Renaissance authors with new material and renewed stimuli. Perhaps the clearest example of this influence landed in Bacon’s New Atlantis, whose European seamen set sail from Peru and settle in a neighboring land. At any rate, the exploration of the vast and exotic ecosystem of the Americas, as well as the otherness of the continent’s natives, sparked in the utopians’ minds an optimism for an alternative, perfect society: a receptacle into which to pour the ideas and values of Europe’s flourishing humanism, fertile ground for ways of life and government that might become no more than new sandcastles stacked atop Europe’s decadence.
From this angle, we recognize that the American continent—the land across the sea from a distant Europe—had the potential to make the utopian imaginary a reality. In short, America became the quintessential utopian continent. Thus, any effort to found and solidify a utopia necessarily implied the body’s transit from its native Europe to some extraterritorial site on the vastness of American soil.
IV
Borges placed the Renaissance utopias among the dense foliage of science fiction’s family tree. In his view, utopian stories sat atop the branches that sprouted what he called “scientific fiction,” as they closed their eyes to dream the pleasant, comforting dream of ideal societies where science’s possibilities materialized for the betterment of citizens’ lives. In accordance with this notion of genre, Borges pointed to New Atlantis as the prototype of scientific fiction, since, on this imaginary island, the extraordinary is common currency. We read: “There are apples whose very fragrance is curative, there are botanic gardens and zoos that bring together, through crossbreeding experiments, all possible species.” We can only concede that Borges does indeed identify distinctive traits of science fiction in its particular form as a fictional complement to the positivist paradigm of the nineteenth century—a form in which, whether to encourage or to warn, science fiction speculates about the future feats of science and technology and their impact on the wellbeing of the human species.
For Isaac Asimov, the primordial work of modern science fiction was Frankenstein (1818) by English writer Mary Shelley, whose compositional elements and processes reveal an appropriation of scientific and technological discourse in order to speculate on the creation of an artificial being. Setting the scientific component aside, it is worthwhile to note a couple of aspects with natural links to the Renaissance utopias: first, transit is a key element of this tale, starting with the itinerant life of the author herself, who in 1816 left stifling English society behind and made her way, alongside poet Percy Shelley, to the idyllic Villa Diodati in Switzerland, where they would be welcomed by Lord Byron. Despite the long distances traversed by the Shelleys, their journey pales in comparison to the boundless and far-ranging travels undertaken by her masterpiece’s characters, who, whether on horseback, by carriage, on foot (as in the monster’s case), or by any other means of transport, move between Switzerland, Germany, England, Scotland, Ireland, and the North Pole.
Another key element is this: when appealing to his father and creator in the heights of the Swiss Alps, the monster promises Victor that, if he builds him a companion in his own horrific image, he will destroy neither Victor nor any other human being; instead, he will go away and live with his partner in South America. Here we find a being who considers himself more reviled than the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost, having been shunned and battered by every human society he has encountered, but who foresees a place to live in peace on South American soil. Shelleys’ memorable monster hopes to cross the waters of the Atlantic to settle in a land he perceives as promised, free of the defects and predilections of the Old World, as he has learned from the books that turned him into a conscious subject.
V
It should come as no surprise that the Jews, the first people to go in search of the Promised Land in the Judeo-Christian tradition, should be the model for one of the most relevant contemporary theses on dehumanization. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben explains that homo sacer serves as a category to designate a killable person, one who can be exterminated with impunity, having been deprived of human rights, paradoxically, within a legal framework. Put simply, there can be no punishable crime where there is no subject of rights. The figure of homo sacer—”sacred man,” in etymological terms—originated in ancient Roman law, where it represented a person who had been expelled from human dominions and could therefore be murdered with no legal repercussions.
In light of this ancient notion, Agamben finds in the Jewish people a prototypical example of how a state can make use of laws to subject a group to dehumanization and extermination, reducing them to a merely biological condition, or to what we might call “flesh,” in the sense developed by Spanish philosopher Santiago Alba Rico. In the latter’s essay Ser o no ser (un cuerpo), evocatively titled after a line from Hamlet, he claims that a body combines flesh and language and transcends the physical, inasmuch as the flesh is a basic and material manifestation of existence, a simply animal condition comparable to that of a slaughtered pig or canned meat, unmediated by political significance. Through this lens, following Agamben, we can understand the operations of power and contemporary sovereign states in which law and life are pitted against one another in perennial states of emergency.
One of the paradigmatic documentaries of Nazism, The Eternal Jew, synthesizes this discussion: as a propagandistic parallel, the migration of Jews to Germany is metaphorically conceptualized through images of the arrival of millions of foul stowaway rats. Ultimately, this movement of bodies signifies not a step toward utopia, but rather a descent into dystopia.
VI
Those who have deemed dystopia to be the opposite of utopia are legion. Nonetheless, this much-vaunted antonymy falls into a negligent omission of the fact that, while we conceive of utopias as impossible to bring about, dytopias, in contrast, are seen as possible worlds, as states of affairs that run the risk of coming true in the short- or long-term future. In fact, we might hazard guesses as to which real-world inspiration gave rise to any given dystopia we face. Was George Orwell writing about a looming future in 1984, or simply depicting Soviet Stalinism in a speculative key? Did Ray Bradbury create a future in which books are banned and burned by “firemen” out of whole cloth, or did he simply put his own spin on book-burning in societies like Nazi Germany and the witch-hunts of McCarthyism? Perhaps our own perception of dystopias grows all the more transparent in memes that circulate on social media, where we wish 1984 was fiction again or lament that we live at a time when this book seems to intersect with A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, The Hunger Games, The Matrix, and Lord of the Flies. We feel that the age of dystopia has already come about and that, at the most, works of fiction alert us to possible repetitions or some sort of future variation. The first entry under the term “utopia” in the Diccionario de la lengua española outlines our understanding of the concept: “Ideal plan, project, doctrine, or system, seemingly very difficult to bring about.”
Naturally, the question of the foreigner is by no means irrelevant to science fiction; rather, it has become one of the genre’s core interests, given the present worldwide crisis of migration. In dystopian terms, the foreigner can represent a problematic figure, personifying a peripheral otherness that threatens a closed, central society. Framed in metaphorical concepts, the foreigner is an infectious agent from the chaotic outside world, capable of devastating the communal immune system. Turning to Zygmunt Bauman’s rebuttal of Michel Foucault, we might say the model of control that dystopias exercise over migration is not panoptical, but banoptical. In other words, dystopian societies deploy high-tech apparatuses in order to keep the foreigner outside city limits. The doors may sometimes be opened, of course, but this tends to carry the price of transforming the body into mere flesh. Through this animalization of the outsider, the dystopian society’s governing power makes use of him as a resource to be exploited at will.
At the center of this reflection lies the South American continent as propitious ground on which to erect the utopian project. Today, however, we bear witness to a double-edged dystopia: on the one hand, precarious conditions and proliferating dictatorships push millions of people to chase utopia to other regions and continents, where they are brutalized and mistreated; on the other, migrations in pursuit of utopia take place toward locations within Latin America itself, where, putting in place the ideas of South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, the foreigner finds no hospitality: an unequivocal sign of the politics of beauty and a manifestation of universal reason.
A peerless example of the politics of ugliness is the dismal dystopia of Tender Is the Flesh by Argentine writer Agustina Bazterrica, translated to English by Sarah Moses. This novel takes place after a pandemic that wiped out all animals, leaving human beings to suffer a lack of proteins with which to nourish themselves. Governments seek to offset this crisis through laws that allow for the consumption of purpose-bred human flesh. Taking into account all the trappings of dystopia, it should come as no surprise that the first flesh on Argentina’s radar belongs to its Bolivian neighbors, and that other countries also rely on the flesh of foreigners: transhumant human bodies reduced to juicy meat on the grill.
VII
In the final pages of The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, one of the pioneering works of Latin American science fiction, the narrator-protagonist finds comfort in hope. This character, an archetypal Venezuelan like so many others who have migrated to flee political persecution, dreams of redemption from his rootless stance on a distant island.
And how could we not long to dream once again of the most sublime parts of existence?
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
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