UNDER THE SHADOW OF CATASTROPHE: NEW MILLENIUM ARGENTINIAN SCIENCE FICTION / FRAGMENTO DE UN PAPER DE ALEJANDRO SOIFER

Broken Brotherhood: Portrait of a Self-eating Country

"One often-cited passage of El gaucho Martín Fierro, a canonical nineteenth- century Argentinian poem turned bonding narrative and pillar of the nation’s identity, states:

 

Los hermanos sean unidos, / porque esa es la ley primera; / tengan unión verdadera / en cualquier tiempo que sea, / porque si entre ellos pelean / los devoran los de ajuera

 

[Brothers should stand by each other / because this is the first law. / Keep a true bond between you / always, at every time / because if they fight among themselves, they will be devoured by those outside.] (Hernández lines 4726-4731)

 

It is fair to assert that any attempt to mock, rewrite,8 or contradict in any form the poem is almost always taken as a direct defiance to the most basic shared union and consensus in the country. The poem, originally published in 1872 at the dawn of the countriy’s civil war period and the start of the national organization, has been held up since 1910 as the most accomplished and representative literary work in Argentina.9

The beforementioned passage is so often cited because of its simple didactism that states the obvious: for any nation to thrive, there needs to be union. Brotherhood stands in this case as the glue for a nation that was just beginning to form. With a vast territory and a diverse population, the final transition from a century of wars, first to gain independence and then civil conflicts, needed an idea that could mark the bonding of those people. Adding to this situation, a continuous influx of immigrants coming from Europe starting at the end of the nineteenth century and expanding until the first third of the twentieth century needed a national narrative that could hold everyone, the long established and the just arrived as well, under the same umbrella. For a set of reasons that exceed the scope of this paper, Martín Fierro became one of those Argentinian foundational fictions. The passage cited became one of the most memorable and repeated both in intellectual circles as in everyday speech from the popular classes.

This is the reason why it is not surprising that emerging from the corrosive and dissoluting 2001 crisis, a theme of cannibalism can be clearly be read in Argentinian science fiction. These fictions do not portray how external forces destroy the country but how it destroys itself once people start eating each other. These fictions, I will demonstrate, invert the advice of Martín Fierro as they show brothers eating each other, destroying the nation without the need for external enemies.

Gustavo Nielsen’s 2010 novel El corazón de Doli [Doli’s Heart] is the most clear case where this trope can be read in contemporary Argentinian science fiction and stands as a clear desecration of the Martín Fierro national poem and all that it stands for regarding the Argentinian national myth. The narrative revolves around Víctor, the cloned brother of a teenager named Sergio. In this brave new Argentina (recognizable in the satirical representation of popular TV hosts and local brands), human cloning has been perfected, and it is now being used as a pre-emptive measure in case the “original” from which the clone sprouts ever needs an organ transplant. In that case, the clone will be harvested (and if the need is for a vital organ, killed) so that the original can continue living. The barbarism inherent in this practice is a first glimpse of how the novel will treat the relationship between brothers. If the 2001 crisis pushed the country as near to a civil war as it had been since the end of the nineteenth century, the depiction of this system mocks the idea of brotherhood and, in consequence, of national unity. Not only do people not question the procedure but they happily accept the fact that their brothers/sisters/clones are disposable humans that can save them money in health insurance. The most notorious development of the cannibalistic trope in the novel arrives when Victor ends killing his brother, the “original” Sergio, after a fight. To hide the body, Victor processes the corpse of Sergio into a hamburger, which he then eats. At this point, the novel presents a total subversion of the cited passage from Martín Fierro and thus of one of the pillars in national consensus: these brothers fight and end with one eating the other. While the novel goes on in its harsh criticism of the country’s mediocre TV star system, unchecked capitalism, greed, and other absurdities, it is this passage that most clearly intervenes in the dystopian portrayal of the post-2001 crisis in Argentina.

The topic of subversive forms of eating also shows prominently in other dystopian fictions from the era, and these also have to do with an aspect of the crisis: the economic collapse pushed many people into poverty, some of whom had no option but to rely on pets to feed themselves to avoid starvation.10 In Nielsen’s novel, apart from the evident subversion of Argentina’s national poem in the form of the brother killing and eating his older sibling, there is a constant mention of the widespread consumption of a form of genetically modified lab-grown chicken without limbs or eyes. The fact that these lab- grown animals do not have any of the particularities that could identify them as living beings erases the sense of culpability of killing them to convert them into food.11

Nielsen’s novel clearly shows the self-harm to Argentina’s national identity in a satirical form. A more somber representation of the same subversion of the national poem is clear in another cannibalistic Argentinian novel from the 2000s, Agustina Bazterrica’s Cadáver exquisito [Tender is the Flesh, as it has been published in English]. This one, in particular, is prone to be read in the horror science fiction subgenre that critic Xavier Aldana Reyes has called “Slaughterhouse Novel” (2014). Aldana Reyes describes this as a series of contemporary novels12 centered around slaughterhouses and in converting humans beings into meat for consumption, as in Joseph D’Lacey’s Meat. This novel centers around a post-apocalyptic town (Abyrne) located in the middle of nowhere that has embraced the consumption of human flesh as a religious duty. The novel describes in gory detail the processing of human beings in stockyards and slaughterhouses as if they were cows or other animal cattle.

Similarly, Bazterrica’s slaughterhouse novel tells of a future Argentina in which an animal-transmitted disease has made all forms of meat uneatable. Bazterrica pushes the boundaries of the world-recognized Argentinian passion for meat consumption and stretches it to the point that people have started to eat other human beings to replace animal meat. The shared narrative premise between Bazterrica’s and D’Lacey’s novel allows us to read in Cadáver exquisito some of the topics that Aldana Reyes finds in Meat:

 

Meat’s horrific premise is based on the possibility of humans being reduced to their flesh and on the subsequent loss of their rights as individuals. The process whereby one becomes meat in Abyrne is directly connected to a stripping down of a citizen’s rights in a manner reminiscent of Giorgio Agamben’s discussion on bare life and the victims of the Holocaust. (116)

 

Cadáver exquisito centers around a seemingly dubious, dull, low-scale executive in a human slaughterhouse.13 The industrial killing of these people, who have been stripped of their citizenship and converted into meat, plays with the same tropes that Aldana Reyes has proposed for the narratives he has named “Slaughterhouse Novel”:

 

The slaughterhouse novel relishes the “transmut[ing] of life into meat,” namely, the transformation of the individual into a dehumanized object fit for consumption and exchange. The moment of horror is not just triggered by the realization that one is about to be eaten, or even by a regression into an animalistic state of being, but by the contemplation that the body is the only plane of empiric certainty. (121)

 

While it is impossible to read Bazterrica’s novel without the context of the tropes of the slaughterhouse novel genre, it is also impossible to read it without the larger context of Argentinian literature. Apart from the Martín Fierro subversion that I have already referred to in Nielsen’s novel and that repeats in this novel, we need to consider another canonical Argentinian text. In 1871, El matadero [The Slaughter Yard], written by Esteban Echeverría between 1838 and 1840, was published for the first time. The narrative, told in a Romantic/Gothic style, revolves around a group of low-life butchers and their daily routine of slaughtering cattle in a slaughter yard in old Buenos Aires. In Echeverría’s short story, the butchers are so used to slaughtering cattle in perverse, sadistic ways that when they come across a political rival, they take him to a shack at the end of the slaughter yard and proceed to torture and kill him. Thus, the idea of transforming human flesh into something resembling meat, while not entirely developed by Echeverría, is to be found in the origins of Argentinian literature."