In the poem Mr. Sludge, “the Medium”, Robert Browning tells the story of a bogus medium who defrauds a recently widowed American millionaire obsessed with communicating with the dead woman's spirit. Eventually, Mr. Sludge is discovered by the millionaire, who threatens to go to the police if the impostor does not explain his story and the circumstances that led to the fraud.

Borges, in one of his lectures given at the UBA (published later as Curso de literatura inglesa en la Universidad de Buenos Aires), reviews the work of the Victorian and ends up summarizing the poem like this: “and the other man [Sludge] says he heard about spiritualism and thought he could take advantage of it, that it is not difficult to deceive people who are willing to be deceived. That in reality those deceived by him—without excluding the irate gentleman himself who threatens him—have been accomplices, they have closed their eyes to gross lies”. Finally, the impostor shows that he had the letters of the deceased woman hidden in the sleeve of his jacket and that, despite everything, he believed there was something true in spiritualism, he believed in the other world.

Browning is just one more name added to a long list of authors who have come close in work and sometimes in body to the occult sciences: Conan Doyle, Yeats, Pessoa, some of the most popular; Manuel Otero, Eduarda Mansilla, Miguel Cione, Horacio Quiroga, here, on both sides of the Río de la Plata; Claudia Aboaf, Daniel Guebel, Mercedes Araujo, Selva Almada, Mariana Enríquez, here, and today.

Recently, Mardulce published El demonio telepático, the work of the Argentine narrator, essayist and translator Diego Vecchio, which deals with the work of one of the great Uruguayan weirdos: Mario Levrero. Telepathy, esotericism and parapsychology in Levrero, the phenomena present in his books manifested in the appearance of ghosts, telepathic contacts, automatic writing, premonitions and levitations, show that a literary tradition inaugurated in the mid-nineteenth century in the Río de la Plata was still in force. And it is not surprising that these concerns have emerged in the literature at that period of time, "after Christianity and before psychoanalysis", as Piglia once jokingly said. Vecchio, now residing in Paris (where he teaches Hispanic American Literature and workshops on the creation of imaginary and spectral languages) returns to those origins and comments: “spiritualism is a 'religion' invented in the 19th century, founded on something new: the possibility of conversing with the dead. Until then it was very difficult to communicate with the inhabitants of the world beyond the grave to the extent that with Christianity, once a deceased person passed over, they were immediately transferred to heaven, hell or paradise, and there was no possibility of return. We had to wait for Christianity to withdraw as the hegemonic religion to set free the voices of the dead”.

Soledad Quereilhac, a specialist in the relationship between literature, scientific dissemination and the occultism during the entresiglos period (and author of Cuando las ciencias despertaban fantasías. Prensa, literatura y ocultismo en la Argentina de entresiglos), emphasizes the possibility offered by spiritualism as a scientific science, as a way of expanding the horizons of knowledge in that period. She tells us that “starting in the second half of the 19th century, what at the time was included in the occult sciences gained increasing public visibility—she explains—. Its proliferation as a practice and as a discourse within the broad spectrum of social discourse is incomprehensible if it is separated from scientific development in general, and from the place of prestige and legitimacy of science and scientists in the 19th century in particular”.

According to the novelist Mariana Docampo (actively interested in esoteric practices and customs, and author of Estrella negra, recently published by Leteo), in Western culture there was always a fear of the occult, but those "ancestral practices and knowledge that circulated outside of the devices for legitimizing beliefs, today, they are easily accessible”, adding that today “tarot, astrology, sacred geometries, everything is available to us on the internet, whether we want to learn it or practice it”.

With a similar vision, in El demonio telepático, Vecchio, based on a quote that Levrero forcibly attributes to Freud (the epigraph at the beginning of Fauna, from 1987: "If I lived again, I would dedicate myself to parapsychological research and not to psychoanalysis”), comes to the conclusion that the Uruguayan presents himself as a kind of “Robin Hood of the unconscious that steals prestige from rich theories, let's say psychoanalysis, to give it to needy theories, let's say parapsychology". So this has always been a kind of Baron Frankenstein’s creature, a collection of residual knowledge, built, as Vecchio affirms, "from the remains unassimilable by other sciences". This has once been commented on, more or less, by Hamlet: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, that are dreamt of in your philosophy".

Soledad Querilhac tells us something similar: “The occult sciences are direct daughters of the great scientific discoveries and above all of that effect of astonishment in the face of the discovery that what had previously been believed to be part of the magical was now a reality: the phonograph, X-rays, life glimpsed through the microscope, electricity management, knowledge of the sky and the stars. If all that, they wonder, so magical, so, at the same time, phantasmagorical, was a verifiable reality, why wouldn't telepathy or communication with the afterlife be?”.

The point is that, like all fantastic stories, the occult sciences take care of otherness. For this reason, Docampo contends that the literary genre par excellence that can give an account of that other side is fantastic literature.

We could say, very very roughly, that in the fantastic story, otherness bursts into everyday life, while in the occult sciences, otherness is sought from everyday life. Vecchio may refer to this when he talks about how Levrero, in Desplazamientos (1987), París (1980), or El alma de Gardel (1996), "seeks to perceive an unknown dimension of the world, which is not reduced to the three known dimensions, nor is it limited to a purely sensible substance, nor does it allow itself to be captured in the concepts of space, time or causality”. In this sense, Levrero himself writes: "During my twenty-five years, a door to the spiritual world had opened in me, and then little by little, extraordinary experiences occurred that made me know that reality has many more dimensions than I thought."

Docampo recounts something similar about hes own experience: when she remembers how esotericism entered her life and her work, she specifically thinks of visiting a medium on one of her trips to Iceland; a visit that, although it was not her first one to a medium, was the definitive one. When she returned, she wrote Estrella negra, and at the same time began to study tarot, draw geometries, mandalas, practice meditation, akhashic records. “There was always a mystical concern in my life—she recalls—. I was raised in the Catholic religion, with all the bad things that it has (dogma, morality, censorship) but also, with the positive: an experience of the symbolic, spiritual readings, connection with a higher meaning, experience of the faith, and a hope, a sense”.

Argentina, having been born in the 19th century, contains the positivist gene from its origins, and having its literature born in mid-century, it has also absorbed the spiritualist gene, with both spheres overlapping more than one would initially think.

Let us take that passage from Una excursión a los indios ranqueles (1870) in which the sister of Sergeant Gómez appears before Lucio Mansilla upon learning, through a dream, that her brother had died: "Gómez's sister's dream had taken place precisely at the time he was in the chapel, receiving spiritual aid. An invisible and magnetic thread unites the existence of loving beings who live unified by the most tender bonds of the heart”. Or let us also think of Sarmiento (I am choosing two non-fiction works on purpose) so as not to lose track of the telepathic possibilities that our nineteenth-positivist-century statesmen saw. In La vida de Dominguito (1886), the biography of his son killed in battle the same morning in which his mother wrote a farewell letter to him, Sarmiento writes: “Today the existence of the ether is admitted, which we could never have even imagined, so thin that it fills the universe, transports light and electricity in waves at will and is therefore within ourselves, as if we lived within a sea that penetrates us and unites us at the same time. Why shouldn't their brains touch each other like this and shake the same idea in two out of sympathy?”.

Some of that torch has endured in the literary transfer, and it happens that, as Quereilhac tells us, after several decades, "the practice of hypnosis in social gatherings or literary groups was not uncommon. It is worth remembering that in the novel Adán Buenosayres (1948), by Leopoldo Marechal, whose plot takes place in the 1920s, hypnosis games occur in the room of the Amudsen sisters, attended by the alter egos of Borges, Scalabrini Ortiz and other important figures”. On top of this, in the archives and treasures of different libraries in Buenos Aires, Quereilhac has been able to read “handwritten narrations of spiritualist sessions by Miguel Cané and Ricardo Rojas; I have found Leopoldo Lugones in the theosophical magazine Philadelphia, whose articles he signed as "Miembro de la Sociedad Teosófica", in its Argentine branch "Luz", and he emphasizes that “Arlt himself debuts in the Buenos Aires newspapers with his text Las ciencias occultas en la ciudad de Buenos Aires (1920)”.

And if we take into account that Miguel Cané has written stories such as “El canto de la sirena” (where he picks up that epigraph from Poe, who took it from Thomas Browne, that says: "What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture”); that Ricardo Rojas has written, for instance, “La psiquina”; and that Leopoldo Lugones has given us, among many other relevant stuff already mentioned, the extraordinary Las fuerzas extrañas, one might think that this period of overlapping knowledge, overlapping knowledge and ignorance, practices and imaginaries, has been a hotbed of fantastic narratives that make the period between 1870 and 1910 one of the most fruitful in our literature. As Quereilhac puts it, “the literature of these authors and of many others—Juana Manuela Gorriti, Eduarda Mansilla, Ricardo Rojas, “Raúl Waleiss” (Luis V. Varela’s pseudonym)—took an existing overlap in the culture of their time and through a somewhat fantastic or early science fiction logic, strengthened that crossover, enlarged it, took it to still unexplored terrain”.

And it is that, indeed, we could say that the fantastic and the supernatural are born as a strangeness in the reformed, scientific and industrial countries. Vecchio explains: “the old gods have withdrawn from the world and God is dead. We apparently live in an increasingly disenchanted world, which has replaced magic with religion and religion with science and technology, in a process of increasing rationalization. But magical beliefs persist and resist conflictively, transformed into knowledge or literary fictions”. And in the end, Vecchio takes up, like Quereilhac, the pioneering figure of Arlt: "The occult tradition that existed at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, which can be read in a booklet like Las ciencias ocultas en Buenos Aires, which Arlt published in 1920, continues in the second half of the 20th century in texts such as Levrero's Manual de parapsicología, but also in Laiseca's El jardín de las máquinas parlantes or Los muertos no mienten by Luis Gusmán”.

Therefore, we can think that fantastic literature with a scientific topic was one of the means of approaching that dilemma that afflicts or seduces any language potter: how does language apply to the "beyond"? How do we illuminate the shadow without losing its occult oddity? What is lost in all this?

Docampo does not believe that there is a way to faithfully present the esoteric experience or mystical revelation through language: “by being translated into language, the experience diminishes. It's like coming back from a wonderful trip with three scrawny little sticks. There is a very nice story by Silvina Ocampo that accounts for that, a bit humorously, but it is as it is: ‘Los sueños de Leopoldina’. A woman who can bring things from dreams, and she brings pebbles, leaves, little straws that are worthless, instead of bringing jewels and riches”. Docampo, author of La fe, Tratado del movimiento and V adds: “In my experience, when I wrote Estrella negra, it was like coming back from a wonderful trip and then opening your hand and having those three scrawny little sticks. The experience of the esoteric is outside of the process of literary writing itself, and there is a return to that area, a wealth of tools, to be able to work with them and recover something of what has been seen”.

For Vecchio, it's a matter of listening to the demons, not in their Christian sense as an evil king, but in their most ancient notion, to which the book's title is due, El demonio telepático. It is the daimon, through which the gods intervened on earth: “they were in charge of encrypting the messages in dreams, governing the flight of birds, inspiring the prophets, and—Vecchio emphasizes—inspiring the poets. The daimon is a tutelary genius that brings messages from another world, the sacred world, if you will, or, if you prefer, the unconscious world”. And he adds that “writing consists of transcribing these messages, full of wit and spark, that the telepathic demon dictates to us from time to time. A writer who disregards the telepathic demon of his is a mere typist".

On the other hand, for Quereilhac, the fictions that address the intersection between science and the occult in the turn of the century are not cases of pure literary invention, but rather it is a fictional reworking of existing materials on the real plane and in social discourse: “literature builds new ideologemes, where tensions that come from the extratextual world appear represented and symbolized in an original way, unresolved tensions in culture such as the ambition to unite the sciences with the afterlife and ghosts—she says—.The literature of the time gives life to that utopian dream, but also covers it with terrors, with nightmarish outcomes and with that dark intensity that comes from flirting with death”.

Some say that to write Mr. Sludge, "the Medium", Browning was inspired by a personal experience: he appeared with his wife at a seance held by Daniel Dunglas Home (of whom Vecchio talks about in Chapter IV of his book) and, that when discovering that the apparition of his dead son (which by the way no son of Browning had died) was nothing more than the bare foot of the false medium, he was totally indignant. However, at the end of the poem, one sees that things are not so simple, and that it is not a mere criticism of spiritualism, but something deeper that brought together the deceived man and the medium, the artists and the spiritualists, all as seekers of hidden truth, comparing the session to a play, the passing entertainment in a hut:

In a dream, lethargic kind of death in life,
That helps the interchange of natures, flesh
Transfused by souls, and such souls! Oh, ’t is choice!

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Browning asks, then: "The real world through the false,—what do you see?".

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