In the Heart of the Heart of Darkness

On Rafael Bernal's "Death Was His Name" (translated by Kit Schluter)

Nature is a wonderful antagonist, but it rarely gets to give its own side of the story. It can be cruel, capricious, indifferent and irrepressible, and part of its sheer terror is its opacity, its resistance to human logic. Nature can have its patterns, its refrains, a certain consistency, but there is always something unknowable between humanity and the world that we’re not-so-slowly destroying.¹ Moby-Dick, title character, no lines, total victory (save one floating coffin.)² I guess Richard Powers tried to make the trees talk in The Overstory? I don’t know, never read it, finally got rid of the copy that was sitting on the shelf for years, sorry. Even amid the 2010s boom of ‘climate fiction,’ as wishy-wash autofictional narrators wanly considered the coming uninhabitable Earth, nature doesn’t speak, it just gets worried over. And of course nature wouldn’t talk! It’d be flatly ridiculous if Moby-Dick himself popped out of the water, delivered a soliloquy, and then hit Ahab with “Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime doll” on the way out. Unless… ha ha… what if nature could talk back? Absurd, of course, but maybe the perfect grounds for a novel?

Rafael Bernal’s 1947 novel His Name Was Death (released in Kit Schluter’s English translation in 2021) is a book that, like the best work of Kafka or Borges, literalizes the absurd and then mines the depths of the concept in order to further illuminate the contours of reality. The novel is framed as the last writings of a nameless, misanthropic drunk shunned by Mexican society, so much so that he self-exiles to the jungles of Chiapas to live with the native population. “Whoever would live inside her can find peace, so long as he submits to her laws and doesn’t mind being a lowly admirer of such magnificence,” he writes, “so long as he doesn’t mind setting aside his human pride and becoming no more than an unwelcome guest, a fledgling stripped of his rights, content to vegetate in the shadows of the jungle’s goodwill.” After a protracted illness – whose cure causes him to kick the booze – he begins to sense a pattern in the whine and drone of the mosquitos that torment him at night, and, with nothing better to do, begins to fashion a kind of dictionary of the tonal language he dubs “Mosquil.”

From these and other observations, I deduced that Mosquil verbs uttered in the bass range are always declarative; in baritone range, negative; in tenor, interrogative; and in the very high-pitched soprano range, either imperative or exclamatory. I had also observed that the verb is always some compound of the note E, that when the verb is singular a natural note is employed, while plural verbs call for the sharp: thus, “I go” is “E-natural, rest, E-natural, bass,” and “we go” is “E-sharp, rest, E-sharp, bass.”

With the aid of a local craftsman, he fashions a flute and begins sounding out his own messages to the mosquitos, gaining their confidence and eventually becoming embroiled in what at first seems like a prospective truce between humans and mosquitos and instead turns out to be a vast mosquito conspiracy to take over the world.

You read a book like this and expect progress to be slow, for the guy – dubbed ‘Wise Owl’ by the local Lacodón tribe because of his seeming communion with the spirits, good and evil – to be slowly making progress with the mosquitos over a hundred pages or so, but Bernal’s narrator gets right to it, in communication with the so-called High Council of mosquitos within thirty pages. If you have a somewhat bonkers premise like Bernal, better to just get the setup out of the way early and just get to it. That’s all the more time to get into the complicated planned-society structure of the mosquitos, and also for the narrator to devolve further and further into annihilative madness, as the mosquitos offer ‘Wise Owl’ their own version of the Devil’s offer to Christ in the desert: total control of bedraggled and sinful humanity, for better or for (much) worse. As the Supreme Council of mosquitos explains:

You have already heard the two ways we can solve the human problem and we believe the second is easiest for everyone.If asked to choose between slavery and death, many claim to prefer death, but in general slavery is preferable, above all the kind we would impose, which would be relatively light: we don’t intend to destroy the human race, which can be of use to us, just as you don’t kill off all your livestock because one animal might one day hurt or kill a man. We have learned, from what you have told Good Sun, that man men say they prefer death, that your poets sing the praises of the few who have died in the pursuit of liberty; but we also know the majority of humans already live in a king of slavery, often much harsher than the kind we would impose. Keep in mind that wealth and poverty would come to an end under our regime, since we would feed and clothe all equally, limiting the population to what can be properly maintained in each region. To do this, we need a government of men to assist us. And this is where you, human, can be of use to us – and you must. Know that we would make you the most powerful human on Earth, that all others wold be subject to your command and will.

While the mosquitos most immediate allegorical function is as a stand-in for the vast power of nature eventually destroying humanity – payback for all that mucking up we’ve been propagating since at least the Industrial Revolution – the other simultaneous allegory is for the colonial project. ‘Wise Owl’ despises the white men that he used to live among; what the mosquitos plot out for the world is nothing less than a recreation of the colonial project, and at his most anomic moments, ‘Wise Owl’ feels justified in aiding the mosquitos because he’ll be giving the colonizers a taste of their own medicine, with his Lacodónian friends as one of the few beneficiaries from this reversed world order. The mosquitos parasitic logic, honed over apparent eons of thought, is abhorrent and also all-too-human, a laying bare of the base aims of the project that immiserated and subjugated millions under the guise of progress.

Through crossbreeding, they would attempt to create a strong race of good blood, but of the lowest intellectual capacity possible, so as to avoid a human uprising that could force the mosquitos to exterminate the species. Naturally, there would be no schools or anything of the sort; writing would be lost and the arts would come to an end, along with everything currently known as culture.

There’s a grim irony in the mosquitos’ plan being one of the elimination of writing and culture, because the narrator’s chief aim in his maniacal drive for power is a kind of literary posterity borne out of revenge, one that is coterminous with the colonial drive, a kind of propagation of the self across time and history. (There’s also a woman involved, but that’s secondary.)

I see it clearly now, and I weep for having ruined it all, for how my crazed ambition for power overcame the kindness that was only just beginning to dwell in my heart […] And now, with death closing in on me as I write this, the book I had wanted to write for the benefit of my friends, I realize that I am still filled with hatred and motivated only by the fear of total annihilation […] I hereby deliver to humanity this dictionary (which I once considered destroying to prevent it from falling into the hands of any man at all) as proof that I have forgiven you for all the awful things you did to me, on the one condition that you never forget me.

Well, the opposite of this kind of deranged narcissism is a charitable love and empathy for others, even if you despise them, and if you’ll remember, Christ rejected the Devil in the desert. Here too God plays something of a role, pushing our narrator away from the brink of total madness, though Bernal is not content to let there be a quite literal deus-ex-machina to neatly forestall human destruction. Instead, God is used as an idea to upend the mosquito society, which is itself racked with inequality (who do you think are going on the suicide missions to collect blood?). With religion’s interest in the individual, a large horde of mosquitos are introduced to the idea of freedom and equal representation, which, Bernal being the trickster he is, leads to a bloody (excuse the pun) civil war within the mosquitos, yet another in-text instance of colonial struggle that disproportionately effects the subjugated class. Whatever hope this late swerve allows for is squashed (excuse another pun) by another lever of power operating from above, a series of concentric circle of lives that portends doom for all living creatures. It’s enough to almost make you want to welcome nature’s next great destruction, whether we’ll be able to understand its coming or not, or to at least not so quickly and thoughtlessly swat away that next skeeter that buzzes by your ear: the next life you save might just be your own.

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1. Check out The Nature Book for more!

2. Don’t worry, Melville makes up for this silence with pages upon pages on the whiteness of whale, the whiteness of white, etc.