Inverting the Discourse of Civilization and Barbarism in Mundo del fin del mundo and Un viejo que leía novelas de amor by Luis Sepúlveda

American critic Raymond Leslie Williams has convincingly argued that a desire to be modern is a central characteristic of the 20th century Latin American novel. ¹ Williams's argument also coincides with Octavio Paz's assertion that modernity has been a topic of interest to Latin American intellectuals since the 19th century. ² A glimpse of the terminology used by authors and critics to name various Latin American movements over the past 125 years— modernismo, posmodernismo, avant-garde, modern novel, and postmodern fiction— gives us a sense of the persistent desire of Latin American authors to engage in a dialogue on Latin American subjects’ positions within modernity. Since the 1990s, a corpus of works has emerged in Latin America that suggests that it is already possible to speak of the environmental novel as an authentic subgenre of Latin American fiction. The development of the Latin American environmental novel can be understood as a further manifestation of the historical desire of Latin American intellectuals to engage with the concept of modernity. This new subgenre arises in the context of an order of global neocolonialism in which the authors elaborate counter-discourses to the economic models of modernity that have frequently been imposed by wealthy nations. In the present essay, I offer readings of two environmental novels by Chilean novelist Luis Sepúlveda—Un viejo que leía novelas de amor (1989) and Mundo del fin del mundo (1989) —as examples of the Latin American environmental novel’s engagement with the concept of modernity. Specifically, I analyze how Sepúlveda’s novels undermine the Eurocentric notion of modernity proffered by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in his 1845 treatise Civilización y barbarie o vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga. ³ Ultimately, I argue that Sepúlveda’s ironic inversion of Sarmiento’s concept of civilization and barbarism can be understood as a decolonial gesture.

Luis Sepúlveda (1949-2020), has been widely recognized by critics as one of the most prominent voices in contemporary environmental literature in Latin America. ⁴ Juan Gabriel Araya Grandón, for example, has briefly summarized the contributions of Sepúlveda's writings as follows:

In the present essay, I focus on two of his most noteworthy environmental novels: Un viejo que leía novelas de amor (1989) and Mundo del fin del mundo (1989). Un viejo que leía novelas de amor is the story of a conflict between the environmental ethics of foreign extractivism and those of the indigenous inhabitants of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Mundo del fin del mundo focuses on illegal whaling in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. In this essay I will establish important similarities between the two novels, specifically asserting that both novels interrogate the concept of modernity in Latin American fiction and insist on the need for a paradigm shift regarding the relationship between human beings and the environment. ⁶ I also suggest that in both Un viejo que leía novelas de amor and in Mundo del fin del mundo, Sepúlveda posits that literature has the unique capacity for fostering ecological awareness and imagining futures that privilege the wellbeing of ecosystems on the one hand, while resituating literary works of the past in the present moment of environmental calamity on the other.

​The protagonist of Un viejo que leía novelas de amor, Antonio José Bolívar Proaño, and his young wife move from the high mountains of Ecuador to the Amazon jungle in hope that the change of climate will help them conceive a child. Before long, however, his wife becomes infected with malaria and dies. When the narrator informs the reader that the protagonist, “wanted to take revenge on that cursed region, on that green hell that took away love and dreams,” it seems that the narrative is going to revolve around a struggle between humans and nature in the style of the Creole novels of the 1920s, but that notion is abandoned when the reader learns that “However much he tried to revive his old feeling of hatred, he did not stop feeling at ease in that world, and then the hatred faded as he was seduced by those vast expanses without frontier or owner” (34). ⁷ Proaño learns to hunt and fish from his Shuar neighbors, and acquires from them a deep knowledge of the jungle and its animals. 

As Scott M. DeVries points out in his study A History of Ecology and Environmentalism in Spanish American Literature, the wisdom and diligence of the Shuar with regard to nature stands in sharp contrast to the behavior of outsiders. ⁸ This is evident in the following passage:

While the Shuar only hunt and use what is necessary to sustain themselves, the gringos kill for sport, unaware of the ecological effects of their actions. The main conflict in the novel, therefore, is not a struggle between human beings and non-human nature but rather a clash between two different views of the relationship between humans and the environment. The sense of ecological disillusionment displayed in the protagonist’s description of the outsiders’ treatment of the jungle ecosystem is an example of what Jorge Marcone views as a central characteristic of Spanish American environmental literature. ¹⁰

For Charlotte Rogers, the disillusionment that Marcone observes can be partially attributed to the failure of the promise of El Dorado as an imagined place that could satisfy the economic demands of sixteenth-century Europeans. She explains,

In Un viejo que leía novelas de amor, the foreigners wreaking havoc on the local flora and fauna are precisely gold and oil prospectors who represent the continued practice of international extractivism that began with the European colonization of South America.​

In spite of the anthropocentric vision implied in the myth of El Dorado and evidenced in the behavior of the foreigners in the novel, several images reinforce the text’s ecocentric orientation. For example, when a group of North American tourists is attacked by monkeys on an expedition into the jungle and one of them is killed, the narrator describes the sight of his remains as follows: “The ants had done a magnificent job, leaving their bones as smooth as plaster. The American’s skeleton was receiving the last attention of the ants. They were carrying away his straw-colored hair strand by strand, like tiny women woodcutters felling coppery trees to strengthen the entrance tunnel to their anthill” (84). ¹² The anthropocentric worldview represented by the tourists is undermined in this passage in two ways. First, they are violently reminded of their lack of a privileged status in the natural world as they are attacked for having encroached on the monkey’s territory. Second, the image of ants systematically dismantling the remains of the deceased is a stark reminder to the reader that while the death of the human character is a tragedy to his fellow humans, to the rest of the ecosystem, the human is merely life-sustaining nutrients for a variety of animals, plants, and microbes. ¹³​

The distance between the anthropocentrism of the foreigners and the ecocentricsm of the Shuar is clearly seen in the novel's denouement when Proaño is forced to shoot a female ocelot that has killed several men in revenge for the death of five of her cubs. Saddened and furious by the death of a prohibited species, Proaño curses "the gringo responsible for the tragedy, the mayor, the gold prospectors, all those who whored on his virgin Amazonia” (131). ¹⁴ Thus, the novel ends with a denunciation of those who unbalance ecosystems for their own benefit without considering the destructive consequences of their actions.

Despite this severe criticism, there is also a glimpse of hope in the last image of the novel in which Proaño wishes to return to “his novels that spoke of love in such beautiful words that sometimes they made him forget the barbarity of man” (131). ¹⁵ With this parting image, Sepúlveda brings to the fore the importance of literature in current ecological crises and, according to Laura Barbas-Rhoden, suggests its ability to “awaken a love for nature” in the reader. ¹⁶ The novels that Proaño reads deal with romantic love and the suffering that accompanies it, with “the delights and torments of love that outlasted time” (61). ¹⁷ The implicit question in the last image of the novel is whether human beings will find the altruistic love that will be necessary to change the barbaric and destructive route that our relationship with the planet is currently taking. Through the heroic character of Antonio José Bolívar Proaño, Un viejo que leía novelas de amor suggests the need for a paradigmatic shift towards sustainability in both individual actions--such as hunting and fishing--and extractive behaviors in industries such as petroleum and mineral mining. ¹⁸ With regard to the destruction of the Amazon, deforestation as a result of colonization has not slowed since the publication of Un viejo que leía novelas de amor. As Matt Sandy reports, “Today their logging yards, cattle enclosures and soy farms sit on the fringes of a vanishing forest. Powered by murky sources of capital and rising demand for beef, a violent and corrupt frontier is now pushing into indigenous land, national parks and one of the most preserved parts of the jungle.” ¹⁹ Despite the integration of environmental rhetoric into mainstream Latin American political discourse since the 1980s, the forces of coloniality unleashed more than five centuries ago continue to wreak havoc on the Amazon. If, as Sepúlveda’s novel suggests, there is hope for a change of course, time is quickly running out. “With as much as 17% of the forest lost already, scientists believe that the tipping point will be reached at 20% to 25% of deforestation even if climate change is tamed. If, as predicted, global temperatures rise by 4 [degrees Celsius], much of the central, eastern and southern Amazon will certainly become barren scrubland.” ²⁰

​Mundo del fin del mundo displays a similar ethic to Un viejo que leía novelas de amor regarding the commodification of nature but with a change of scenery. The novel is divided into three parts. In the first part, the protagonist recalls that in his childhood in Chile, inspired by the novels of Jules Verne, Emilio Salgari, and Jack London that he received from his uncle, he had always longed for an adventure on the high seas aboard a whaling ship. At the age of sixteen, during his summer holidays, in search of adventure, he sets out for Patagonia in the hope of participating in a whaling expedition.

​Above all, his journey is inspired by Moby Dick, a book, he says, that changed the trajectory of his life: “I was fourteen when I read that book, and sixteen when I could no longer resist the call from the south. [. . .] Through other readings I learned that several small fleets of whaling ships anchored in the pre-Antarctic continental confines, and I was eager to meet those men whom I imagined were heirs of Captain Ahab.” ²¹ When he reaches the port from which the expedition embarks and finds himself in the restaurant of an inn with the captain and the first officer of a whaling ship, they ask him about his reasons for wanting to join the expedition, to which he responds, “Because… because… the truth is that I read a novel. Moby Dick. Are you familiar with it?" ²² Learning that they are unfamiliar with Melville's novel, he proceeds to narrate his own version over the next two hours, drawing more and more listeners from the tables around him. He reflects on his storytelling, suggesting that "Herman Melville would have forgiven me if that version of his novel had something of my own making, but at the end all the men had pensive faces, and after patting my shoulders they returned to their tables.” ²³ The next morning, he is on board when the ship leaves the port.

​His experience on board, however, affects him in an unexpected way. He had set out in search of the excitement of an epic battle between man and nature in the style of a Melville or London novel, but he could not have foreseen his reaction to the success of the mission. He describes in great detail the image of the whale carcass on the seashore:

​

Upon returning to port, the young man decides that although he enjoys being at sea, he does not want to be a whaler. The captain responds: “You know, paisanito, I'm glad you didn't like hunting. Every day there are fewer whales. We may be the last whalers in these waters, and that's fine. Time to leave them alone. My great-grandfather, my grandfather, my father, they were all whalers. If I had a son like you, I would advise him to chart another course.” ²⁵

​In the second part of the novel, the reader learns that the protagonist eventually moves to Germany and starts an independent news agency with three freelance journalists. He describes how the creation of the agency was the result of a fortuitous encounter:

This passage is an excellent example of what Gisela Heffes, in her study Políticas de la destrucción / Poéticas de la preservación, identifies as a fundamental element in Latin American environmental writing, “the garbage dump as a trope of a global biopolitics.” ²⁷ Moreover, the protagonist's argument that the richest nations are ultimately looting the resources of their global neighbors also supports Laura Barbas-Rhoden’s thesis in her study Ecological Imaginations in Latin American Fiction that, in large part, Latin American environmental fiction is a denunciation of the economic model of neoliberalism in which Latin American governments frequently grant wealthier and more powerful countries access to their local resources through agreements that lead to the destruction or depletion of those resources. ²⁸ In this sense, Sepúlveda's novel clearly stands in opposition to the economic model of modernity proposed by neoliberalism.

What is striking about the change from Part I to Part II of Mundo del fin de mundo is that the main conflict is no longer between humans and non-human nature, as suggested in the intertextual references to Melville and London at the beginning of the novel. Due to the protagonist’s transformation, in the second part, similar to Un viejo que leía novelas de amor, the focus becomes a battle between opposing human interests and the exploitation or protection of natural resources. That is, the conflict is now between environmentally conscious citizens and the forces of global capital. The battle turns violent when a Puerto Montt journalist, Sara Díaz, is hit by a car and robbed of the photos she had developed after photographing the Japanese whaling ship, the Nishin Maru. The assailants leave her on the road with a broken leg and two broken ribs, threatening her with death while she recovers in the hospital. When the protagonist is notified of this attack, he immediately leaves Hamburg to return for the first time in several years to the southern region of Chile which he refers to as the world at the end of the world.

The captain of a local fishing boat, Jorge Nilssen, greets the protagonist and tells him about the various forms of environmental destruction that he has witnessed over the years. Recalling an encounter with a Japanese whaling ship, Nilssen describes the following:

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Given the brutal attack against Sara Díaz and the unscrupulous plunder of the sea described in this passage, it is not surprising that the protagonist frames the conflict as a form of barbarism. Describing the Greenpeace fleet tasked with patrolling the sea for illegal whaling ships, he reflects that, “Yes, it was a small fleet in the face of the magnitude of modern barbarism.” ³⁰ The use of the phrase "modern barbarism" is reflective of the way in which Latin American environmental novels not only engage in a dialogue about the discourse of modernity but also point to the failure of capitalist models of modernity to protect Latin America’s ecosystems. 

The word "barbarism" inevitably evokes Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s 1845 essay Civilización y barbarie o vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga. Strongly influenced by the thought of the French enlightenment, Sarmiento proposes a highly Eurocentric notion of civilization in his vision to civilize the Argentine pampas. What Sarmiento posits is a model of modernity that is grounded in the positivist notion of an inexorable human march toward ever higher forms of civilization through scientific progress. By incorporating the phrase "modern barbarism," this passage ironically inverts Sarmiento's notions of civilization and barbarism. As portrayed in the novel, scientific advances unleashed by the forces of capitalism are now being used for the barbaric destruction of ecosystems. Nilssen's description of the Japanese ship is the most visible example in the novel of how scientific progress, the centerpiece of the Enlightenment model of modernity and the great hope of the positivists, can also be used for purposes that destroy the environment. 

The critique of the discourse of civilization and barbarism in Mundo del fin del mundo is also found in Un viejo que leía novelas de amor. For Sarmiento, the superiority of European culture is central to the notion of civilization, as evidenced in his perception of the urban/rural cultural dichotomy in Argentine culture. He maintains:

Sarmiento’s emphasis on education in this passage underscores the centrality of the transmission of Western knowledge in his model of modernity. As Catherine E. Walsh and Walter D. Mignolo remind us, “Western expansion was not only economic and political but fundamentally epistemic.” ³² In both of Sepúlveda’s novels, the supposed superiority of Western knowledge is undermined. In Un viejo que leía novelas de amor, it is the settlers and tourists whose knowledge is inadequate for success in the jungle, and in Mundo del fin del mundo it is technologically advanced whaling ships, propelled by the forces of capitalism, that are systematically destroying ocean life. 

The narrator of Un viejo que leía novelas de amor informs the reader, for example, that “the settlers destroyed the jungle building the masterpiece of civilized man: the desert.” ³³ This passage again presents an ironic inversion of Sarmiento's ideas, since for the Argentine it was necessary to civilize the pampas by importing and adopting European customs, and, in Sepúlveda's novel, the Western concept of progress turns out to be barbaric compared to the sustainability of Shuar indigenous culture. Furthermore, since the barbaric destruction of the jungle and its animals is carried out by people who come from supposedly civilized places, the last words of Un viejo que leía novelas de amor, "human barbarism," serve to contradict Sarmiento’s argument that wild spaces are what lead to barbarism. ³⁴ 

In Mundo del fin del mundo, the narrator's comment a few chapters after referring to "modern barbarism" clarifies the critique of the paradigm of modernity that is based on blind faith in scientific progress:

The vitriolic criticism unleashed in this paragraph suggests that humanity can no longer blindly trust that scientific progress will lead us to ever higher forms of civilization. This, of course, is not a new idea since the romantic writers of the nineteenth century often shunned what they saw as the evils of the industrial city and avant-garde authors of the twentieth century condemned the use of new technologies to destroy human beings in massive quantities during the first world war. However, by proposing a paradigm in which the protection of non-human nature is privileged over financial gains, thus rejecting the foundation of neoliberalism, Mundo del fin del mundo participates in the impulse of the Latin American environmental novel towards a heightened ecological awareness that will lead to environmental justice. 

In the third and final section of the novel, the protagonist finds himself once again aboard a ship in Patagonia. In his investigation of the assault on Sara, he comes across the site of an epic battle between the Japanese whaling ship, the Nishin Maru, and local wildlife. Nilssen and his partner Pedro Chico tell the protagonist the story of their encounter with the Nishin Maru, describing how a few days before their arrival, they had observed the Japanese ship lifting at least two dozen whales on board as the water filled with the blood and the remains of the animals. Pedro Chico decided to row a lifeboat towards the Nishin Maru knowing that they would attack it with the water cannons and that the whales would feel that he was in danger and would come to help him. As Nilssen recounts:

Several of the Nishin Maru's crew fall overboard during the battle and are left for dead by the fleeing captain. A few days later when the protagonist arrives at the battle site, he finds several whale skeletons on the water's edge and thousands of birds of prey hovering over the remains. The bloody description of the battle and its aftermath underscores the novel’s critique of the destruction wrought by a barbaric form of capitalism. 

In the novel's denouement, the protagonist returns to Germany with Sara, the wounded journalist. During the transatlantic flight he observes a young boy reading and, out of curiosity, leans over to see what he is reading. He discovers that the book is Moby Dick. The return to Melville's novel in the context of the protagonist’s transformation from whaler to environmentalist provides a glimpse of hope that future generations will be inspired to love and protect the sea like Pedro Chico and the other characters in the novel. 

In conclusion, Mundo del fin del mundo participates in the critique of modernity that is common among Latin American environmental novels. The protagonist’s transformation of ideals regarding the relationship between human beings and non-human nature represents a heightened ecological awareness that parallels the trend toward an increased presence of environmental issues in Latin American fiction of the 1990s-2020s. In contrast to nineteenth-century novels such as Moby Dick in which nature is presented as the adversary of humans, the contemporary environmental novel affirms an ecocentric vision of the world that perceives humans as one more element of a larger biological network and rejects the anthropocentrism of previous conceptualizations of modernizing projects. 

Barbas-Rhoden has astutely observed that Latin American ecological fiction suggests that “modernization has been predicated on the exploitation of natural resources and the marginalization or elimination of other ways of living on the planet.” ³⁷ For Walsh and Mignolo, this can be explained by understanding the inextricably intertwined relationship between modernity and coloniality. They maintain, “Coloniality is constitutive, not derivative, of modernity. That is to say, there is no modernity without coloniality, thus the compound expression: modernity/coloniality.” ³⁸ In this sense, Sepúlveda’s novels can be understood as continuing the representation of “the continent’s predominant economic forms and, as a result, its gradual incorporation into the international capitalist system” that Jennifer French observes in Spanish American regionalist writing of the 1920s and 1930s.³⁹ Similar to French’s argument that Spanish American regional narratives should be included in discussions of international literature on colonialism as they reflect “the global struggle for access to land and control of natural resources” in the context of the “invisible” British economic empire in Latin America, Sepúlveda’s novels portray analogous conflicts with more broadly defined neo-colonial capitalist forces at the end of the twentieth century. ⁴⁰ The whaling, gold, and oil industries in Sepúlveda’s novels exemplify the proliferation of extractivism in the late twentieth century in Latin America facilitated by the broad adoption of neoliberal policies that often allowed for the privatization of natural resources and the deregulation of environmental protections.

Returning to the attack on Sarmiento’s model of modernity in Sepúlveda’s novels, I would suggest that Sepúlveda’s inversion of Sarmiento’s notion of civilization and barbarism can be understood as a decolonial gesture that undermines the notion of Western epistemological superiority that is central to both coloniality and modernity. As Walsh and Mignolo assert, “you cannot decolonize knowledge if you do not question the very foundation of Western epistemology.” ⁴¹ Although his novels do not articulate a specific alternative, Sepúlveda’s suggestion that modernity itself is barbaric in its destruction of nature implies the need for a radical epistemological shift. Both novels’ critiques of the environmental damage wrought by capitalism are consistent with his participation in the Chilean Communist Youth, and his support of the socialist government of Salvador Allende. 

Elsewhere I have argued that the shift toward heightened ecological consciousness in Latin American environmental fiction can be understood as yet another manifestation of the desire of Latin American intellectuals to redefine modernity in a new context. ⁴² Read in this light, Un viejo que leía novelas de amor and Mundo del fin del mundo propose that being modern at the turn of the 21st century is no longer to demonstrate mastery over non-human nature as in the great novels of the 19th century and the early part of the twentieth century. Instead, the redefinition of modernity offered in Sepúlveda's novels would be a heightened ecological awareness in which capitalist surplus is no longer privileged over the well-being of ecosystems. However, assertions by scholars such as Walsh, Mignolo, and Aníbal Quijano regarding the inexorably entangled nature of modernity and coloniality give rise to the question of whether or not it is possible to radically redefine modernity and simultaneously move toward decoloniality or if the entire project of modernity must be abandoned. ⁴³ Is it possible, as suggested by Sepúlveda’s protagonist in Un viejo que leía novelas de amor, for Western and indigenous epistemologies to complement each other in ways that would deconstruct the colonial framework that has led to five centuries of social injustice and environmental destruction? In both novels, literature is portrayed as having the potential to inspire a respect for nature that will be necessary to alter human interactions with the planet. ⁴⁴

Adrian Taylor Kane is a professor of Spanish at Boise State University. He is the author of Central American Avant-Garde Narrative: Literary Innovation and Cultural Change (Amherst: Cambria, 2014) and editor of The Natural World in Latin American Literatures: Ecocritical Essays on Twentieth-Century Writings (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010). His research fields include Central American literature and Latin American environmental literature. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as Hispania, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana, Review of International American Studies, and Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas.