Don’t make the mosquitoes angry. Actually it’s probably too late. Mosquitoes worldwide think the human race is inferior to them and we don’t amount to much more than a food source for this insect we consider to be a pest. In fact the mosquito population has a plan to enslave humanity to make food production more efficient for them. There is only one small problem; without a common language between people and these flying bugs, their plan is impossible to carry out. This is the natural dilemma posed by Mexican author Rafael Bernal in his quasi-science fiction novella His Name Was Death.
Actually, the mosquitoes are only half the story. In the center of it all is a man without a name. He wants to be an author so all of humanity can praise his genius, but they reject his works and he descends into a nightmare of alcoholism, homelessness, and humiliation. After getting fed up with the human race, he heads out into the jungle in southern Chiapas, Mexico where he encounters two villages of Lacandon people, a sub-branch of the Mayan Indians. He kicks his drinking habit and the Lacandon people take a liking to him. They give him the name Wise Owl. They convince him to become a shaman and then, while listening to the buzzing of mosquitoes in his hut, he notices patterns to their sounds. Wise Owl records these sounds as musical notations in a notebook and begins imitating them using a wooden flute. Eventually he learns to communicate with the mosquitoes.
Meanwhile, Wise Owl gets chosen to be the chieftain of the Lacandon people because he convinces the mosquitoes to leave them alone. At this point his intentions are beneficient. He commands the two villages to stop fighting and unite into one. When they are reluctant to follow his orders, he directs the mosquitoes to harass them until the villagers agree to obey. Otherwise Wise Owl leaves the Lacandons free to do as they please.
Wise Owl signifies colonialism in New Spain. Like Wise Owl, the Spanish kingdom was in turmoil when the conquistadors arrived in the Americas. Unannounced and unnamed, they landed and the native Toltecs and Aztecs welcomed them, believing them to be the prophesied arrival of the sun god Quetzalcoatl. After Wise Owl appears out of nowhere and becomes leader of the Lacandons, they designate him as Kukulman which is the Mayan name for Quetzalcoatl.
But the mosquitoes are not simply passive subjects to Wise Owl, the pretender to the throne of his own invented Mexican kingdom. As Wise Owl communicates with them, he learns about the structure of their society. It is a rigidly hierarchical society led by an unknown mosquito king and ruled by a governing council supported by an intellectual class and a military. At the bottom of the hierarchy is a class of slaves. The mosquitoes claim to be more advanced on the evolutionary scale than humans and they are furious because people have polluted the waters and deforested most of the Earth. Their plan is to eliminate most of humanity and breed what remains as a food supply, a lot like how humans breed cattle and other farm animals. Since Wise Owl is the only person who can communicate with them, they offer him unlimited power over humanity if he acts as their spokesperson. And that offer is too good for him to refuse.
This novella was written in 1946, so it is possible that Bernal intended the mosquitoes to be a representation of the fascist state of Nazi Germany, though you could easily insert any totalitarian system into that metaphorical slot. Their ideology, rigid political hierarchy, and conspiracy to dominate the world certainly resonate with the trappings of fascism the world was familiar with at the end of World War II. The mosquitoes are a strong counterpoint to the Lacandons in the story and by placing Wise Owl in the center of the two, a connection can be made between the project of colonialism in New Spain and the fascist political movements of modern Europe.
While Wise Owl pursues grandiose fantasies of domination, just like Hitler, a third element enters into the story. A team of anthropologists arrive along with a company of loggers representing the encroachment of modern science and education into the world of the colonized while profiteering modern industry disrupts the natural environment that the colonial subjects depend.
The loggers are one weakness in the story. After introducing them, Bernal does not have them do anything. He misses an opportunity to further explore the conflict between modernism and environmental destruction, a major point of contention for both the Lacandon and the mosquitoes.
In any case, the anthropologists are led by a professor named Wassell. Accompanying him are his secretary Ms. Johnes and an ehtno-musicologist named Godinez. Ms. Johnes and Godinez are engaged to be married although Wassell wants her for himself. This love triangle proves to be their undoing.
Wise Owl tells them of his ability to communicate with the mosquitoes. They think he is insane, but Ms. Johnes finds him interesting nonetheless. He appears to be a benevolent eccentric who has tricked the Lacandons into thinking he is a god which is ironically only partially true because he didn’t make any attempt to take over their villages; they thrust him into that position and he just accepted it.
In fact, as a reader you may wonder if Wise Owl’s pact with the insects is merely symbolic or hallucinatory until the scientists refuse to believe his story about the mosquitoes conquering the world. Wise Owl convinces the mosquitoes to eliminate the competition for Ms. Johnes since he has also started having feelings for her. Even after proving that he can command the mosquitoes to kill for him, they still refuse to believe Wise Owl is sane and end up paying the ultimate price for their disbelief. However, their disbelief is also the undoing of the mosquitoes’ plan for world domination since if no one believes Wise Owl, their plot amounts to nothing. Through this complex of events and ideas, Bernal informs us that one weapon in the fight against fascism is to simply disbelieve that the authoritarian ruler has a right to their authority. The authoritarian’s power is diminished when people refuse to acknowledge their superiority. A king is only a king because people define him as such and not because there is anything in his nature to make him superior.
Finally, Wise Owl has a moral awakening when he sees Ms. Johnes suffering after the death of Godezin. He decides to sabotage the mosquitoes’ conspiracy by secretly meeting with the mosquito slaves. He uses religion and belief in God to convince them to rebel against their masters in order to set themselves free. But it all goes horribly wrong. This is one of the worst parts of the book because there is so little description of the battle. Bernal could have taken a cue from Henry David Thoureau who described a fight between ants in such minute and vivid language in Walden. Bernal’s lack of visual input makes the narrative fall off a cliff.
Where does all this lead? Recall the title. Just like Jim Morrison sang, “no one here gets out alive.” No one, that is, except for the worst of the mosquitoes and some of the Lacandons. Wise Owl accomplishes nothing but destroying almost everything he touches.
Bernal’s novella raises a range of interesting topics. One is the psychology of tyranny in the person of Wise Owl. He is a loser at the bottom of society so he pursues power in order to be at the top of society for compensation. Bernal is saying that there is an internal weakness and insecurity that motivates people to seek out positions of strength. Another theme is that of our place in the universe. The mosquitoes are a reflection of humanity even though we might be inclined to think of them as evil for plotting to conquer the world and farm humans as a food source. But how can they be evil when their goal is to do what humanity has done? What makes it wrong for them to do what is right for us? We look at mosquitoes and see nothing more than a pest that carries diseases like malaria. Yet we never stop to consider that we carry diseases that harm nature and we could very well be considered a pest by the vast majority of nature’s inhabitants. And maybe we aren’t justified in hating the mosquitoes for conspiring to kill most of humanity when we have been attempting to exterminate the mosquito population ever since pesticides were invented. We haven’t even been clever enough to succeed. Maybe we aren’t any better than them after all and if so, what does that say about our place in the natural world? Do we even have a metric of judgment that takes nature from nature’s point of view into consideration? Maybe such short-sightedness is a weakness on our part, one that could do us irreparable harm in the end. Finally, the story poses the question of what ethical responsibility supposedly advanced people have in our treatment of supposedly inferior indigenous people. Bernal doesn’t propose an answer to that question in this story, but the theme hangs heavy over the whole book.
His Name Was Death is jam-packed with a lot of complex ideas. Despite being a quick and easy read, it is the kind of story you have to analyze long after you finish reading it to flesh out everything it has to offer. It has a few clunky parts in the writing, but the wealth of ideas and their presentation override any of its imperfections. It should make you uncomfortable in subtle ways if you give it the time to allow its philosophical implications to sink in.
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