The Lost Steps

The Lost Steps relies on a dichotomy between the natural world and human-created environments, emphasizing the conflict and struggle to find a balance between the two. The novel explores the impact of urbanization on the natural world and reflects on the human desire to return to a more authentic, natural state, often idealized as purer and more harmonious than the complexities and artificiality of urban life. It highlights the challenges of integrating with nature, the limitations of trying to dominate it, and the realization that nature operates on its own terms, independent of human control.

The narrator perceives modern civilization, especially in the aftermath of World War II, as a source of peril rather than progress. This is evident in his grim portrayal of urban landscapes. Describing the scene outside his window in New York, he says,  “Solid and silent, the funeral parlour with its multiple corridors seemed a replica in gray of the immense maternity hospital a synagogue and concert hall away” (14). The institutional buildings, despite their varied purposes, have a crushing sameness about them. This imagery describes the dehumanizing aspects of civilization, where spaces of mourning are indistinguishable from those of birth and celebration.

For the narrator, nature stands as a retreat, a symbol of purity, restoration, truth, and beauty. This admiration for nature’s resilience and supposed authenticity is illustrated during the Revolution he witnesses in an unnamed South American city, where he notes, with a sense of wonder, how quickly nature reclaims human spaces: “[A] few hours of neglect, of man’s vigilance relaxed, had sufficed in this climate for the denizens of the slime to take over the beleaguered stronghold” (58). However, this idealization falters when confronted with the raw reality of nature, as his discomfort with a dead alligator and annoyance with the mimicry and overwhelming presence of insects reveal: “Everything here seemed something else, thus creating a world of appearances that concealed reality, casting doubt on many truths” (165). The real nature he finds in South America is stubbornly unlike the idealized “nature” that exists in his mind. It resists his efforts to transform it into a symbol. The tropical profusion of plant and animal life confounds his efforts to understand it.

The narrator’s perspective is closely related to that of European colonialists, who perceived the American wilderness as a wild, untamed space that needed to be conquered and civilized, equating untamed land with desolation and danger. This is made explicit when the narrator, traveling deeper into the jungle, begins to imagine himself as a Spanish conquistador. After reaching Santa Monica de los Venados and hearing Fray Pedro’s Mass, he feels himself transported back to the moment when Christianity first arrived in the Americas:

Yesterday it had amused me to imagine us as Conquistadors searching for Manoa. But it baffles me now to recognize no difference exists between this Mass and the Masses heard in these climes by the Conquistadors of El Dorado. Time has stepped back four centuries (141).

The narrator imagines that, in this turning back of the clock, civilization can return to the wellspring of nature and be reborn, but the Adelantado, the nascent city’s founder, dismisses any idyllic notions about it:

[The Adelantado] did not pretend that this was the Garden of Eden, as stated on the old maps. There were diseases here, plagues, venomous serpents, insects, wild beasts that devoured the domestic animals reared with such hardship (193).

This perspective contrasts with Indigenous views that the narrator claims to advocate for, in which the ideal is harmonious coexistence with nature, not its conquest through the importation of architectural, political, and religious traditions from Europe. Yet, the narrator doesn’t seem to notice that colonialist attitudes permeate even the most remote areas of the jungle, even as he encounters the environmental degradation of oil fields dubbed the “Valley of Flames.”

For the narrator, women symbolize the complex interplay between civilization and nature. His relationship with Ruth, worn down to a dull routine after several years of marriage, represents the mundane and artificial constraints of urban life, highlighting the narrator’s struggle with societal expectations and his feeling of emasculation. Mouche, though offering an escape from Ruth’s conventionality, appears to him as an embodiment of intellectual inauthenticity, signaling his disillusionment with the pretensions of urban intellectual circles.

If the narrator sees both Ruth and Mouche—his wife and his lover—as representing different aspects of the spiritual emptiness of the modern city, he sees Rosario as the embodiment of his idealized image of nature—a nature he longs to dominate rather than coexist with. Her portrayal as nurturing yet submissive aligns with the narrator’s need to assert his masculinity through control. This is evident in his romanticized perception of her as connected to nature, yet fundamentally under his dominion:

She was a woman of the earth, and as long as she walked the earth, and ate, and was well, and there was a man to serve as mould and measure, with the Compensation of what she called “the body’s pleasure,” she was fulfilling a destiny (179).

The narrator’s need to dominate the natural world rather than find harmony within it underscores his search for control. This irony is evident as nature, like Mouche and Rosario, ultimately rejects him, but he gains self-awareness of his disconnection at the end: “The one who made too much of an effort to understand [...] was vulnerable because certain forces of the world he had left behind continued to operate in him” (273). This realization marks his acknowledgment that, through his efforts to comprehend and conquer, he has brought with him into nature the very forces of civilization he sought to escape.