The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction by Ferreira Rachel Haywood; Ferreira Rachel Haywood;

Author:Ferreira, Rachel Haywood; Ferreira, Rachel Haywood;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2011-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

EXPANDING THE LIMITS: CASTERA’S SEARCH FOR SYNTHESIS

“A Celestial Journey” [Un viaje celeste] (Mexico, 1872) opens with an epigraph by Flammarion: “We are all citizens of the heavens” [Nous sommes tous des citoyens du Ciel]. The narrator declares, “I could not tear my eyes away from this line, whose letters shone with magical light” (430). He continues to ponder Flammarion’s thought, concluding, “The infinite is the veil with which God covers himself, and sooner or later the Supreme Ideal will have satisfied the constant yearning of our spirit” (430). The narrator’s concentration is such that he falls into a state of “spontaneous somnambulism,” and his soul begins to separate from his body (430). He thanks his Creator for the sweetness and ease of what he assumes has been his own death and, through his newly heightened senses, perceives that, much like Flammarion’s unmentioned Lumen, he can travel immense distances with a thought. He launches himself into the heavens and realizes with awe that the planets of our solar system are all worlds inhabited by “humanities like our own, equal to us or more perfect” (431). Thanking God again for revealing His omnipotence in His works, the newly liberated spirit briefly explores his celestial neighborhood from the Eden that is Jupiter to the far reaches of Neptune. He is then caught up in a comet’s tail and whisked through countless systems of worlds, filled with beings who worship God and with suns and planets whose song forms “the sublime, magnificent, divine concert of universal harmony” (431).

Humbled by his own insignificance amid such grandeur, the traveling soul comes to a stop. His home galaxy is a small silver ribbon in the distance, and he searches in vain for Earth. Realizing with terror that a beam of light would take fifteen thousand years to circle the Milky Way, that Earth is but a “paltry atom” in this immensity, the little lost soul cries out to God, “Return me to my atom and forgive me my mad pride” (431). His rapid course through the heavens begins again, he feels vertigo, and “at that moment Manuel de Olaguíbel gave my arm a strong shake; I found myself seated at my desk with my hair somewhat burned, my hands convulsed, a multitude of papers in disarray, and the above lines written” (432). His friend Olaguíbel tells him he has been gesturing and writing in a “veritable delirium” for some time (432). Olaguíbel has been reading the pages as they were finished and has finally awakened his friend out of fear he would end his “fantastic journey” in the madhouse (432). The disturbed and exalted traveler can only repeat, “The heavens, the heavens” (432). Olaguíbel remonstrates with him—somewhat unjustly—for devoting little space in his writing to how the heavens “manifest to us and teach us the Supreme Omnipotence of God” and much to “scientific, axiomatic, irreducible truths that form the patrimony that this impious century leaves to the future” (432). The fresh night breeze calms the narrator’s thoughts,

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