Language, Rationality, and the Limits of Humanity in Leopoldo Lugones’s Yzur

	Abstract This essay analyzes Leopoldo Lugones’s Yzur through four interpretive lenses: (1) the crisis of Enlightenment rationality, using Descartes’s mechanistic animal doctrine alongside Nietzsche’s critique of intellectual arrogance and Bergson’s concept of intuitive vitality; (2) a psychoanalytic reading grounded in Lacanian theory of the mirror stage, desire, repression, and the Symbolic order; (3) the Promethean and biblical allegories of transgression, exile, and the fall from original language; and (4) a postcolonial interpretation in which Yzur’s suffering mirrors the violence of cultural assimilation imposed on colonized subjects. Through these frameworks, the essay argues that Yzur exposes modernity’s tragic contradictions: reason becomes a tool for domination, language becomes a mechanism of repression, and the pursuit of humanity paradoxically destroys the very life it seeks to elevate. Lugones’s story thus emerges as a philosophical and ethical indictment of rational pride, revealing the human desire for mastery as a path toward moral exile.	Key Words: Leopoldo Lugones, Yzur, rationality, Lacan, Animal-Machine, Nietzsche, Bergson, Promethean Myth, Psychoanalysis, Postcolonialism, Language, Cultural Assimilation
	Resumen Este ensayo examina Yzur de Leopoldo Lugones a partir de cuatro ejes analíticos: (1) la crítica a la racionalidad ilustrada mediante el concepto cartesiano del animal-máquina, la desconfianza de Nietzsche hacia la soberbia intelectual y la intuición vital bergsoniana; (2) una lectura psicoanalítica basada en las ideas de Lacan sobre el estadio del espejo, el deseo, la represión y el orden simbólico; (3) las alegorías prometeicas y bíblicas de la transgresión, la caída y la pérdida del lenguaje edénico; y (4) una interpretación poscolonial que entiende el sufrimiento de Yzur como una metáfora de la violencia cultural ejercida sobre los pueblos colonizados. Desde estas perspectivas, el ensayo argumenta que Yzur revela las paradojas de la modernidad: la razón se convierte en instrumento de dominio, el lenguaje en mecanismo de represión, y la búsqueda de “humanizar” produce destrucción. La muerte de Yzur, así, funciona como una denuncia ética de la soberbia racional moderna.
	Resumo Este ensaio analisa Yzur, de Leopoldo Lugones, por meio de quatro abordagens críticas: (1) a crise da racionalidade iluminista, a partir do conceito cartesiano do animal-máquina, da crítica de Nietzsche à arrogância intelectual e da noção bergsoniana de intuição vital; (2) uma leitura psicanalítica inspirada em Lacan, especialmente o estádio do espelho, o desejo, a repressão e o ingresso no simbólico; (3) as alegorias prometeicas e bíblicas relacionadas à transgressão, à queda e à perda da linguagem original; e (4) uma leitura pós-colonial que interpreta o sofrimento de Yzur como metáfora da violência cultural da assimilação imposta aos povos colonizados. O ensaio conclui que Yzur revela as contradições da modernidade: a razão torna-se instrumento de dominação, a linguagem se converte em repressão e o impulso de “humanizar” conduz à destruição. A morte de Yzur emerge como um espelho crítico da soberba racional e do exílio ético do ser humano moderno.

The Fallacy of Rational Supremacy: Lugones and the Crisis of Reason

In the short story Yzur, Leopoldo Lugones constructs a modern fable of scientific arrogance. The narrator’s obsession with teaching an ape to speak embodies the Cartesian legacy of mechanistic thought, a worldview that reduces living beings to automatons devoid of consciousness or soul. René Descartes famously asserted that “the animal-body is a machine” and held that animals are “without feeling or awareness of any kind” (Cottingham, 2009, p. 551) referencing the doctrine of the bête-machine. Descartes wrote in the Discourse on Method: “the animal body … as a machine which, having been made by the hand of God, is incomparably better ordered … than any of those … invented by human beings” (Descartes, 1637/1985, p. 56). Lugones’s narrator, trained in that positivist spirit, treats Yzur as both object and hypothesis. The ape’s body becomes a laboratory for the scientist’s metaphysical ambition, a test case for his belief that humanity’s essence lies in speech, and it looks like the narrative voice in the story wants to bestow humanity into Yzur. It is the narrator’s idea that, motivated by the idea that monkeys were once humans who, by giving up speech, descended on the evolutionary scale to their current state, he wants to bestow Yzur with humanity.

Yet the narrative progressively undermines this mechanistic worldview. Yzur’s gradual demonstration of intelligence, empathy, and emotional depth defies the notion of animal automatism. He responds to affection, displays loyalty, and even exhibits what the narrator interprets as conscience. In this reversal, Lugones anticipates Nietzsche’s assertion that “life itself is WILL TO POWER; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most infrequent consequences thereof” (Nietzsche, 1886/1998, sec. 13). Moreover, Nietzsche also states: “The ‘will’ can naturally only operate on ‘will’ … in short, the hypothesis must be hazarded, whether will does not operate on will wherever ‘effects’ are recognized—and whether all mechanical action … is not just the power of will” (Nietzsche, 1886/1998, sec. 2). The scientist’s insistence on proving his theory reflects this Nietzschean critique of modern hubris: the belief that through intellect alone humanity can master life’s mysteries.

In addition, Bergson’s philosophy of intuition contrasts the mechanical intellect’s rigidity with élan vital, the creative force of life. He argues that “intellect is always a ready-made instrument … it cannot grasp what is new; whereas intuition can embrace the flow of life in its continuity” (Bergson, 1907/1944, p. 89). The narrator’s experiment, driven by method and calculation, fails because it denies this intuitive vitality. In his attempt to force Yzur into the mold of rational speech, he kills the very life he sought to elevate. The ape’s muteness becomes not a sign of inferiority but of resistance, the voice of what Bergson might call “life’s inexpressible continuity.” By the story’s end, Lugones’s narrative dismantles the Cartesian paradigm and exposes the moral bankruptcy of reason detached from compassion. In Yzur’s death, rational progress culminates in ethical regression; knowledge triumphs only by destroying what it sought to understand.

The Psychoanalytic Double: Desire, Repression, and the Mirror of Language

From a psychoanalytic perspective, Yzur dramatizes the tension between desire and repression through the narrator’s relationship with his subject. It can be stated that Yzur becomes a mirror of the narrator’s unconscious, his need to affirm humanity through the reflection of an “other.” In Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, “the Mirror Stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification” (Lacan, 1949/2006). Lacan writes: “This form [the Ideal-I of the mirror stage] situates the agency of the ego … in a fictional direction” (Lacan, 1949/2006). The scientist’s (or narrator’s) fascination with Yzur mirrors this process: he sees in the ape both his evolutionary past and his desired reflection, a creature that can confirm humanity’s uniqueness by reproducing it.

However, this identification quickly becomes pathological. The narrator’s sense of self depends on Yzur’s progress; his failure to elicit speech from the ape threatens his symbolic identity as a rational subject. In Lacanian terms, Yzur becomes the objet petit a, the unattainable object of desire that structures the narrator’s pursuit of knowledge. The ape’s silence functions as repression, the unspoken remainder of the narrator’s own unconscious guilt and lack of tenderness.

Lacan’s concept of the Symbolic order, the realm of language, law, and social identity, illuminates the tragedy at the story’s core. Entry into language entails separation from instinct and immediacy; language means being “humanized”, something the scientist is looking for. The narrator’s experiment thus represents humanity’s endless compulsion to reassert its entry into the Symbolic, to reaffirm that the Word distinguishes man from beast (or from ape, in this very case). Yet ironically, this obsession exposes the emptiness behind the signifier. Yzur’s inability to articulate words does not mean he lacks humanity; rather, it reveals that human speech itself may be a defense against the inexpressible truths of emotion and empathy.

In the end, Yzur’s death can be read as the ultimate return of the repressed. The creature’s silence transforms into a final act of communication: a gesture of sacrifice that says more than language ever could. The scientist’s tears and guilt confirm the psychoanalytic reversal; he has projected his own unconscious fragmentation onto the creature, and through Yzur’s destruction, he has come to recognize the abyss within himself. The mirror shatters into a million pieces, leaving behind only a broken reflection of reason’s self-inflicted wound.

Promethean Ambition and the Allegory of the Fall

On a mythic plane, Lugones’s scientist inherits the Promethean archetype, the overreacher who dares to rival divine creation. Prometheus’s theft of fire symbolizes humanity’s quest for knowledge and autonomy, but also the curse of perpetual suffering. As Viscoli (1974) explains, “The core of the archetype – that man must pay a price for fire – suggests that, although greater awareness is available, man must suffer for it.” Lugones re-imagines that myth within the modern laboratory: the “fire” here is speech, the sacred medium of consciousness and creativity. To give speech to an ape is to replay the act of divine rebellion, to attempt to recreate humanity in one’s own image.

Yet the experimenter’s aspiration carries within it the seeds of damnation, quite like what happens to Dr. Frankenstein with his creature. Yzur’s suffering, culminating in self-destruction, mirrors Prometheus’s torment on the rock. Knowledge becomes punishment for Yzur; enlightenment, a form of enslavement. The scientist’s ambition to bestow language on the voiceless turns into a metaphysical transgression, a violation of the natural and moral order. Lugones’s narrative thus transforms the laboratory into a modern Olympus, where humanity plays god and confronts the tragic consequences of its pride.

This mythic dimension deepens when the story is read through the Edenic and Babelian motifs. In the biblical account of Babel, language becomes fragmented and humanity’s attempt at unity through speech is punished. Nietzsche himself criticized “positivism, which stops before phenomena saying ‘there are only facts,’ I would say: no, facts are precisely what there are not, only interpretations” (Nietzsche, 1886/1998). Lugones’s narrator, in attempting to teach Yzur to speak, seeks to recover that lost Edenic language, to heal the separation between human and animal, nature and culture. Yet, as in the biblical narrative, the attempt ends in failure and exile. Yzur’s silence echoes humanity’s expulsion from paradise: the impossibility of absolute communication.

The story’s allegorical undertones also evoke the fallen angel motif. Like Lucifer, the narrator aspires to divine knowledge, only to be cast down by his own arrogance. Yzur’s death functions as both punishment and revelation: the recognition that divine creation cannot be replicated without moral ruin. Lugones, steeped in Symbolist aesthetics and metaphysical speculation, crafts in Yzur a fable of ontological exile, the eternal distance between the Word and the world, between intellect and life. Based on Silva-Rojas, Armijo, and Nuñez (2015), “Exile has been something permanent throughout the history of mankind. In ancient times, it may be found the idea that this world dwelled by human beings is not our own home, which has been a mythic vision widespread in various cultural traditions (1). Exile has been viewed as a paradigm in which the notion of human life, at least in western culture, is interpreted as being exiled (2).” The experimenter in Lugones’s story is in search of breaking the paradigm and share his “exile” with Yzur, a part of being human, exiled.

The Violence of Cultural Assimilation: Yzur as the Colonized Other

Beyond its philosophical and psychological layers, Yzur can be read as a profound commentary on colonial power and cultural violence. The narrator’s attempt to teach Yzur a human language parallels the historical imposition of European culture and reason upon colonized peoples in Latin America. Just as the scientist demands that Yzur abandon his natural form of communication, colonial systems demanded that indigenous peoples renounce their languages, rituals, and ways of knowing in favor of Western rationality.

This act of “civilizing” the ape mirrors what postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak (1988) terms epistemic violence: the silencing of subaltern voices through the imposition of dominant discourse. Yzur’s muteness, therefore, becomes both literal and symbolic, the enforced silence of the colonized other whose humanity is recognized only when it imitates the colonizer. The scientist, despite his affection for Yzur, embodies the paternalistic logic of empire: benevolent in intention, destructive in outcome, punitive when being, let’s say, disobeyed.

Yzur’s suffering and final death dramatize the price of assimilation. Forced into a linguistic system that negates his essence, he ultimately destroys himself rather than betrays his nature. This act can be interpreted as a silent rebellion, a refusal to submit to the oppressive structure of imposed civilization. The narrator’s remorse at the end reveals his own complicity in this moral tragedy. In destroying Yzur, he has reenacted the violence that modernity inflicts upon all forms of otherness: the animal, the indigenous, the emotional, and the intuitive.

Through this lens, Lugones anticipates later critiques of anthropocentrism and colonial modernity. His story exposes the dark underside of the “civilizing mission”, whether scientific or imperial. By giving the ape the role of the colonized subject, Lugones destabilizes the very categories of “human” and “animal”. The supposed elevation of Yzur to humanity becomes instead a descent of humanity into brutality, revealing that civilization itself can be a form of barbarism when built on domination and erasure.

Conclusion

Leopoldo Lugones’s Yzur stands as a prophetic allegory of modernity’s paradoxes, a tale that intertwines philosophy, psychology, mythology, and history to question what it truly means to be human. Through the interplay of Cartesian mechanism and Nietzschean skepticism, the story dismantles the illusion of rational supremacy; through Lacanian psychoanalysis, it exposes the unconscious desire and repression underlying humanity’s quest for mastery; through Promethean and Biblical allegory, it reveals the tragic cycle of transgression and fall; and through postcolonial interpretation, it denounces the cultural violence implicit in the drive to civilize and dominate.

In Yzur’s death, Lugones crystallizes a universal irony: the more humanity seeks to affirm its superiority through reason and speech, the more it betrays the compassion and humility that define true consciousness. The ape’s silence reverberates as a moral indictment of modern civilization, a silence that speaks of pain, loss and the enduring need to reconcile intellect with empathy. Ultimately, Yzur becomes a mirror in which readers confront the abyss of their own rational pride, reminding us that knowledge without love leads not to enlightenment but to exile.

📚 References

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Silva Rojas, M., Armijo, J., and Nuñez, G. (2015). Philosophical and Psychological Perspective of Exile: On Time and Space Experiences. DOI:10.3389/fpsyt.2015.00078

Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). University of Illinois Press. https://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Can-the-subaltern-speak-by-Gayatri-Spivak.pdf

Viscoli, L. (1974). The Promethean Archetype. UNM Digital Repository. https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds/406/