Ending the World with Words: Bernardo Fernández (BEF) and the Institutionalization of Science Fiction in Mexico

Abstract

In The End of the World as a Work of Art, Spanish philosopher Rafael Argullol speaks of an artist who holds a special relation with the end of times: “The Promethean artist needs to imagine the fall to believe his challenge is entirely justified” (68). Apocalyse, thus, consists of imagining the end of a particular social order, in which the hopeless challenge of the hero may become a critical stance against the order of the patriarchs. Yet we must not forget that the end of the world is a task of writing. As Frank Kermode reminds us, “Apocalypse depends on a concord of imaginatively recorded past and imaginatively predicted future, achieved on behalf of us, who remain in the middest” (8). The political and aesthetic implications of Armageddon must be kept in mind when approaching new forms of Promethean writing, when new literary heroes decide to engage in the task of destroying the social order. In Mexico, an emerging cadre of science fiction and fantasy writers undertakes this task, emerging as representatives of new forms of literary practice and subjectivity in the wake of neoliberalism. After years of a postrevolutionary regime that actively sought to discipline its citizens through a very restricted notion of the “Mexican,” and of a “national literature” to represent it, a new caste of writers has emerged from the fissures of urban popular identities. Consequently, literature has been presented with the duty of providing spaces of representation and imagination to these new figures of the urban landscape, in order to account for the new complexities of cultural subjectivities in a world facing a collapse that makes it unable to impose its ideologies and representations upon its subjects.