Narratives about the atavistic frontier: mysteries, experiments and primates in The Strange Forces of Leopoldo Lugones

Abstract

In his first two collections of poems, The Mountains of Gold (1897) and The Twilights of the Garden (1905), Leopoldo Lugones appealed to an extensive and heterogeneous series of animal figures to address various topics. In this regard, the intersections between these animal rhetorics and the poetic reflections that motivate Lugones' esoteric and metaphysical concerns stand out. From there emerges, precisely, one of the most compelling images of The Mountains of Gold: the image of an “atavic frontier” drawn in the human soul, behind which a primitive, animal element is confined. This article contemplates the projections of that image and the associated questions in the narrative fictions that Lugones wrote during the same period and that he compiled in The Strange Forces (1906). In particular, the proposal consists of analyzing the ways in which two stories, “An inexplicable phenomenon” and “Yzur” appeal to an imaginary that combines the scientific and theosophical theories that were on the rise during the period to design fictions in which human life finds identifications and discontinuities compared to another with which it has multiple similarities: the monkey.