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Toxic Nature in Contemporary Argentine Narratives

Chapter · November 2019

DOI: 10.4324/9781003001775-3

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2 Toxic Nature in Contemporary
Argentine Narratives
Contaminated Bodies and
Ecomutations1
Gisela Heffes

I would like to begin this chapter with what can be defined as the “rural
turn” taken by recent Argentine narratives. Contrasting with a literary
production that throughout the twentieth century has mainly prioritized
the urban landscape, in the last few years, Argentine literature (and I
venture to say films as well) has been produced such that the primary
featured setting is the countryside. At the beginning of the twenty-
first century, the pampa, a space that harbors so much in the Argen-
tine imaginary—from debates about national constitutions to disputed
heritage and traditions—acquires the traits of a reconfigured and rese-
manticized space. A few examples of this phenomenon are the novels La
inauguración (2011) by María Inés Krimer; El viento que arrasa (2012) by
Selva Almada; La omisión (2012) and Desmonte (2015) by Gabriela Mas-
suh; Matate, amor (2012) and La débil mental (2015) by Ariana Harwicz;
La vi mutar, by Natalia Rodríguez (2013); Distancia de rescate (2014)
by Samanta Schweblin; Un pequeño mundo enfermo (2014) by Julián
Joven (pseudonym of Cristian Molina); Las hamacas de Firmat (2014)
by Ivana Romero; El rey del agua (2016) by Claudia Aboaf; and Las
estrellas federales (2016) by Juan Diego Incardona, among many others.
Significantly, all of these novels were published in the years between 2011
and 2016. Nonetheless, Pedro Mairal’s novel El año del desierto (2005)
prefigures some of the topics that recently became more visible in the
Argentine cultural scene. With this, I refer to a certain dissolution of the
classic dichotomies faced antagonistically by spaces and ideologies—and
here I am thinking of Argentine literary critic Josefina Ludmer’s formula-
tion of “islas urbanas” (“urban islands”). If, at the beginning of the nine-
teenth century, urban spaces constituted the key locus for rebuffing and
cleansing the “barbarity” deeply rooted in rural territories, as emerged
in paradigmatic texts like Domingo F. Sarmiento’s Facundo (1845), this
disjunction changed by the end of the twentieth century and the begin-
ning of the twenty-first. As Ludmer accurately suggested in her article
“Territorios del presente: En la isla urbana” (2004), contemporary lit-
erature is now urban: it absorbs rurality and becomes barbarous.2 While
Ludmer considered a wide number of narratives in which the privileged
56 Gisela Heffes
diegetic site is the Latin American city, the juxtaposition that blurs and
redefines the traditional boundaries that confronted urban and country-
side spaces may be read, as well, as a twofold mechanism where the rural
also absorbs urbanity, becoming a disciplined and tamed territory. There-
fore, if the city becomes “barbaric” and erases spatial frontiers, likewise
the rural landscape is no longer untamed; rather, it has become domesti-
cated by the unfettered use of monocultures, be they soy or wheat, and
by the use of pampean soil as an artificial laboratory where the global
economy and an increasingly unregulated state intervene, thereby objec-
tifying it. This reversal, which marks the emergence of a new rurality,
one in which the countryside is anthropogenically intervened, trimmed,
exploited, and domesticated, questions assumptions that assign both the
urban and rural landscape defined and exclusive traits. Not only is it the
case that contemporary Argentine literature is no longer urban, but it
is also true that aesthetic expressions that define the rural depart from
previous representations of the pampean landscape, thus reconfiguring
the natural world.
How is the countryside—the country, rurality, the pampa—represented
in contemporary Argentine literature? What specific traits emerge along-
side the implementation of neoliberal policies in a space that has long
served as a symbolic reservoir of wishes and projects and as a site of cul-
tural disputes? And, even more importantly, what happens to the bodies
traveling through this space of erasure and intersections? What is their
physiognomy? What are they made of?
Some recent works of criticism, such as those of Lucía de Leone and
Dinorah Cossío,3 explore the transformation of the natural countryside
and rural spaces into a setting traversed by what Lawrence Buell has
defined as a toxic discourse. Buell attributes the origin of contemporary
toxic discourse to Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (1962). In Buell’s
words, the first chapter of Carson’s book, “A Fable for Tomorrow,” intro-
duces one of the key discursive motives for understanding this idea of
toxicity. In the book, a town in the heart of the United States wakes up
one fine spring day without any birds or insects. This fictionalized town,
according to Carson, “might easily have a thousand counterparts in
America or elsewhere in the world” (3); affected by a “grim specter” that
arrives inadvertently, a tragedy can become a cruel reality about which it
is necessary to create awareness (3). It’s well-known that Carson’s invec-
tive was against the use of DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), along
with other pesticides that have left an indelible mark on both flora and
fauna. The reception of Carson’s work was immediately very significant.
Not only did her book sell more than 2 million copies, but it also ren-
dered visible a problem that until then had never been presented so sim-
ply and concisely: if humanity poisons nature, nature will in due course
poison humanity (Griswold). For Carson, both the destructive actions of
humans and ordinary day-to-day blunders enter into the vast cycles of the
 Toxic Nature in Argentine Narratives 57
earth,  such that they eventually come back, adding threats and danger
to our lives. Without a doubt, Carson’s legacy is the dissemination of
modern ecology.
In the Argentine rural landscape, the discourse of toxicity Buell refers
to is articulated through the emergence and increasing predominance
of agrochemicals. For example, as Leone suggests, the cultivation of
transgenic soy has become both a profitable (albeit monopolistic and
short-term) business and a source of environmental and collective health
problems. It redesigns the “use of fertile land, interpersonal and affective
relationships, practices and social mobility,” in cases such as unemploy-
ment and migratory issues, and establishes “new thematic repertoires”
(65). In a recent article about interspecies war, especially between soy
and amaranth, Katarzyna Beilin and Sainath Suryanarayanan point out
that Roundup Ready (RR) soy is genetically modified to resist the herbi-
cide called Roundup, which is produced by the Monsanto Company, the
main ingredient of which is glyphosate.4 What is remarkable about this
herbicide is that it eliminates all undesired plants except for the primary
crop, which mutates into an immunologic one. The “magnificent” crop
not only tolerates both insecticides and herbicides alike but also causes
the chemical substances to increase their intensity as the crop becomes
more resistant. If the soy is genetically modified, so is the milieu where
this practice takes place. In addition to the recurrent spraying of the soil
with fumigants, the landscape itself is being altered by deforestation. In
order to make room for more farming, the physical space is transformed,
as its waters, soil, and air are being contaminated (Cossío 10).
The connection between the human and nonhuman world consists of
relationships inextricably tied to varied cosmovisions and epistemologies.
These visions neither merely correspond to a specific historical moment
nor reflect a particular ecological concern that may not always be pres-
ent. For a naturalist like Alexander von Humboldt, the earth consists
of a single great living organism within which everything is connected
and whence an audacious vision of the natural world is conceived. This
perspective, as Andrea Wulf suggests, still influences to a degree the way
in which we understand the natural world (2017). It isn’t that Humboldt
lacked a fascination for scientific instruments, systems of measurement,
or processes of observation but rather that he thought nature, aside from
being analyzed and cataloged, should also be protected. If the natural
world is seen as a web made of interconnected threads, its vulnerability
becomes obvious: everything works together to form a framework, and if
one of the threads is torn, the entire structure could collapse (5). For this
reason, Wulf highlights that, when Humboldt visited Venezuela in 1799
and saw the devastating environmental effects of the colonial plantations
on Lake Valencia (or Lake Tacarigua), he became the first scientist to
expose the dangers of climate change caused by human actions: deforesta-
tion had left the earth sterile, the water levels in the lake were decreasing,
58 Gisela Heffes
and, with the disappearance of the undergrowth, torrential rains washed
and pushed the earth from the slopes around the mountains (5). Thirty
years later, in 1829, Simón Bolívar also realized the danger hiding in the
exploitation of the forests and emphasized that “throughout the region
we are experiencing excessive harvesting of wood, dyes, quinine, and
other substances, especially in the forests belonging to the state, with
disastrous consequences” (199).
Sarmiento’s vision, temporally not too distant from Humboldt’s, offers
an ideological project that distances itself from Humboldt’s position.
Obsessed with a national agenda, Sarmiento attempts to preserve the
scientific aspect we saw in Humboldt but discards the synergy between
the natural and the human worlds. For the sanjuanino, the fundamental
problem was that natural space, the rural territory of the countryside,
lacked res publica (71). Instead, it constituted, in the nineteenth-century
dichotomy he had founded in Facundo: Civilización y barbarie (1845),
a barbarous space where “wild nature” resided, making it part of the
“uncultured plains” (68). According to Sarmiento, in the natural land-
scape of the grasslands there were no vestiges of civilization. He con-
ceived of this space as governed by “the predominance of force, the
preponderance of strength, the limitless, irresponsible authority of those
in command” and as one in which justice was administered “without
form nor argument” (63). To sum up, this rural space forges a literary,
historical, and cultural genealogy to which the Argentine imagination
returns like a charm to ward off civilization, to protect against immi-
grants, and to defend against the city. It also serves as a repository for a
nostalgia and lament for an ever more inexistent past,5 which will now
become, as I’ll demonstrate, the space where a different violence resides,
one that is invisible and slow and that will destabilize national meta-
phors, proposing imaginary alternatives without precedent. What’s more,
at a time when an eschatological discourse has come to be a recurrent
aesthetic and mediatic account, I will inquire on the fate of the body, the
subjective and objective body that inhabits this chemically contoured ter-
ritory, and suggest that both human and nonhuman bodies have become
an “economic resource,” a disturbing metaphor of an enduring exploita-
tion of the also modified natural world.
While Mairal’s El año del desierto is not centrally relevant to the nar-
ratives I analyze in greater detail, it functions as a precursor to the four
texts I will analyze in more detail later, insofar as it displays key charac-
teristics and predicts some of their most relevant features. The protago-
nist of El año, María Valdés Neylan, narrates her experience during
the year in which Argentina is razed by a strange phenomenon called the
Intemperie.6 In the story, the Intemperie refers to a peculiar occurrence
during which “the narrative chronology advances (covering a year from
the novel’s onset to its conclusion),” but history “insensibly ‘moves back-
ward’” from the “tumultuous beginning of the twenty-first century” to
 Toxic Nature in Argentine Narratives 59
the sixteenth century, as Juan Pablo Dabove and Susan Hallstead observe
in the new critical edition of the novel (Dabove and Hallstead X). With
the emergence of this new regressive phenomenon, the Intemperie arrives
“desde el fondo de la pampa” (“from deep in the pampa”) and surrounds
“el centro de la ciudad” (“the center of the city”), advancing upon it (IX).
Because of this sweeping experience, María crosses paths with events,
places, and figures of the past, while symbols of civilization and prog-
ress, which were clearly present at the start of the novel, begin to vanish.
Thanks to the Intemperie, “the city begins to disappear and the desert
commences to reconquer,” as Dabove and Hallstead suggest, “that which
always belonged to it” (IX). This allusion refers specifically to the urban
disposition of Buenos Aires, with its neoliberal economy and technology
at the service of big international corporations. Under these conditions,
María struggles to survive in an increasingly hostile environment. As the
story unfolds, she finds herself ever more tied to the cruelty of nature and
subject to the will of men. El año makes evident that, when it comes to
narrating rurality, the contours of a space that emerges and reemerges
within the Argentine literary tradition, what is at stake is the “invention
of a cultural past” both as the construction of “a cultural mythology” as
well as a “personal aesthetic project,” as Graciela Montaldo has accu-
rately asserted (14).
In the three narratives, Distancia de rescate, Las estrellas federales, and
La vi mutar, as well as the poetry collection Un pequeño mundo enfermo,
which form the center piece of this analysis, the representation of bodies
defines a relationship between a subject and the natural world, replacing
a discourse about Buen Vivir (good living) with a narrative about what I
call bad living (mal vivir). While the notion of Buen Vivir is understood as
part of a long search for alternatives of life forged in the heat of human-
ity’s struggles for emancipation and survival, what these narratives make
evident is that a rurality anchored in the notion of Nature does not neces-
sarily adhere to Buen Vivir’s postulates.7 Uruguayan sociologist Eduardo
Gudynas specifies that this concept is not traditional but rather new and
that the diversity of meanings attributed to Buen Vivir aims to create an
alternative to the dominant idea of development, as well as to support
the idea that Nature is a right-bearing subject capable of contesting the
founding principles of Western anthropocentrism and capitalism (17).
On the contrary, the narratives to be analyzed in this chapter consist of
a refutation of this notion, demonstrating that the Argentine rural space
has become a locus that not only seeks economic growth but also does
so to the detriment of all living organisms (people, soil, air, water) that
reside nearby.
The aesthetic production analyzed in this chapter effectively appeals to
a reflection about environmental justice that considers the damage and
imminent deterioration of all bodies (be they human or not, from plants
to animals, both organic and inorganic). The first work, by Samanta
60 Gisela Heffes
Schweblin, tells the story of Amanda and her daughter Nina, who come
from the city to spend their summer in the countryside, and that of Carla
and her son David, who live in the countryside. David has been poi-
soned before the beginning of the narrative, and his story sets off the
conflict. David was intoxicated by coming into contact with water from
a stream where herbicides and pesticides had been disposed of, albeit
this is never described directly in the novel. Such poisonings occur fre-
quently, and they also take control of the bodies of Amanda and Nina.
A conversation with David on the novel’s first page, which sets the story
in motion, describes the effect of the poison as “gusanos” (worms); that
is, an invisible substance all the town’s residents experience, describing
it as “gusanos, en todas partes” (11; “worms, everywhere”). As a result
of being poisoned, Amanda’s body, reclined and prostrate, is immobi-
lized and unresponsive. Like that of the horses, ducks, dogs, or any other
animals in the surrounding area, Amanda’s body is inserted into a space
“rodeado de sembrados” (“surrounded by cultivated fields”) where there
is a town in which children wait to be admitted to a precarious and
doctorless hospital since they can no longer write because “no contro-
lan bien sus brazos . . . su propia cabeza, o tienen la piel tan fina que, si
aprietan demasiado los lápices, terminan sangrándoles los dedos” (86;
“they can’t control their arms . . . their head, or their skin is so fine that
if they hold their pencils too tightly, their fingers start to bleed”). This
is a story of altered chronologies. By this, I refer to the temporal dimen-
sion of these spatial effacements, a both temporal and spatial chronology
that alters the environment, as well as the divisions and/or similarities
between spaces: the city and the countryside, the notion of civilization
and barbarism, the body and the landscape. It is a chronology where pes-
ticides like diazinon and malathion and herbicides like glyphosate infil-
trate through all the channels necessary for human survival. They pervade
the bodies (both human and nonhuman), altering their physiognomy, the
landscape, and the constructed environment by denaturalizing them. It
is a space and a time in which the “chicos son extraños” (“children are
strange”), very few are born healthy, and most are deformed—“no tienen
pestañas, ni cejas, la piel es colorada .  .  . y escamosa también” (108;
“they don’t have eyelashes nor eyebrows, and their skin is colored . . .
and scaly too”). David’s body, in spite of being treated by a local healer,
becomes—according to the story—a “monstrosity,” an aberration caused
by the implacable and invisible machine of wild biocapitalism. Note that
here is where the “wild” should be, no longer in a Sarmientian notion of
“nature”—which pushes both humans and nonhumans toward an abyss
of mutations and possessed bodies.8
In Juan Diego Incardona’s novella, Las estrellas federales, the “mutants”—
the name is attributed to them from the start—are part of a circus caste
that inhabits the province of Buenos Aires. The story, which begins in
1989, takes place in the past, but it also represents a dystopian future.
According to Incardona, it is a postapocalyptic world of discards and of
 Toxic Nature in Argentine Narratives 61
ruins, where mutations from an environment that suffered a crisis mainly
make do with the nature of the place, especially the loss of work. Besides
unemployment, the crisis is also characterized by foreclosures and mar-
ginality.9 The novel alludes to a “phenomenon” which, like the Intemperie
in Mairal’s novel or the reference to the “worms” in Schweblin’s, occurs
unexpectedly. However, “[n]o se sabe si las semillas ya estaban esparci-
das desde antes o si el viento matancero las levantó, desterrándolas del
campito” y creando las condiciones favorables para que una plaga de
poinsettias o estrellas federales cubran la vasta zona de Villa Celina
"con un rojo furioso" o “punzó” (Incardona 21–2; “it is unknown
whether the seeds were already sown beforehand or if the wind from
Matanzas lifted them up, unearthing them from the fields,” creating
favorable conditions for a plague of poinsettias to cover the vast area
of Villa Celina “with a furious red” or “punzó”). 10 The fabulous event
consists of an apocalyptic spectacle that announces not only the
expected presence of “un hongo nuclear” (“a nuclear mushroom”) but
also the arrival of the “criaturas más fantásticas del mundo” (“most
fantastic creatures in the world”): the “Circo de las Mutaciones” or
“Circus of Mutations” (22–3). The year the narration took place,
1989, is significant, as it marks the beginning of the presidency of
Carlos Saúl Menem, who inaugurated a neoliberal agenda in Argentina
based on economic adjustments, deregulations, and an obsequious
relationship to the International Monetary Fund.11 During the emergency
caused by the phenomenon, the narrator-protagonist of the story seeks
refuge under the circus’s tent, where he finds employment work-ing for the
“Hombre Regenerativo” (“Regenerating Man of La Tablada”), a man
who cuts off his own limbs, which then grow back as if he had never lost
them. Other mutants also inhabit the circus: for instance, the “Mujer
Lagartija” (“Lizard Woman”) “con su cola larga y puntiaguda” (“with her
long and pointy tail”); the “Infracaballos” (“Underhorses”), “dos equinos
del tamaño de hormigas” (“two equines the size of ants”); and the “Petiso
Orejudo” (Big-Eared Small Man), among many others (23–4).
References to Peronism abound, and the histories of Argentina—
social, economic, literary, and cultural—are interwoven into the plot like
return-ing ghosts who never really left. The story features a game of
ambivalences where the red punzó of the poinsettias (better known in
Argentina as “estrellas federales” or [“federal stars”]) 12 articulates a
series of emblem-atic relations. On one hand, red is reminiscent of
“blood,” “fire,” and “liv-ing flesh,” elements that together allude to the
ecological disaster caused by the “phenomenon”: “explotaban hongos
químicos sobre la Matanza, rompiendo bielas, pistones y cojinetes,
desatándose correas y engranajes para finalmente derrumbarse y caer,
en bloques de hierro y fundición, sobre nuestras casas, nuestras
escuelas, nuestras iglesias y nuestros clubes” (56) (“chemical
mushrooms exploded over La Matanza, break-ing cranks, pistons, and
bearings, untying straps and gears until finally collapsing and falling,
in blocks of iron and foundry, over our houses, our schools, our
churches, and our clubs”). On the other hand, the red punzó
62 Gisela Heffes
is reminiscent of the nineteenth-century symbol that defined the federal
party led by Juan Manuel de Rosas, the mortal enemy of Sarmiento. Thus,
this broad metaphor can be read on various levels, although, undoubt-
edly, irony and sarcasm prevail as discursive critiques.13
In Las estrellas, the environmental disaster becomes devastating with
the arrival of sulfuric acid rain. With explicit references to the “rain of
fire” from the eponymous story by Argentine writer Leopoldo Lugones
(La lluvia de fuego), the “nubes saturadas de dióxido de azufre” (“clouds
saturated with sulfur dioxide”), which form an “arcoíris petroquímicos”
(“petrochemical rainbow”), ambush the suburbs of Buenos Aires and melt
all the houses, parks, people, and animals in their path (55). This cata-
strophic phenomenon has a clear origin: “gases escapados de los depósitos
sin mantenimiento, de los tanques abandonados por las empresas, de las
fugas del cementerio de fábricas” (“gases escaped from deposits in disre-
pair, from tanks abandoned by companies, from the leaks in the factory’s
cemetery”), the industrial residues that have been partially dismantled
and that transform the neighboring populations into “risk societies,” as
defined by Ulrich Beck. For Beck, in late modernity, the social production
of goods is systematically accompanied by the social production of risks.
Therefore, problems and conflicts related to distribution in a society of
scarcity are juxtaposed with the problems and conflicts that emerge from
the production, definition, and distribution of risks created through tech-
nological and scientific means (Beck 19). It’s no coincidence, then, that in
a society of risk, both the unknown and unintended consequences become
historically and socially dominant forces (22).
The disparity between the social production of goods and its opposite,
the social production of risks, reinforces the idea that neoliberal biocapi-
talism has consequences, as suggested by Kelly Fritsch, that are connected
to the way we think about toxicity and corporeity. This applies even more if
bodily representation implies both paralysis and disability. Grandjean and
Landrigan engage the correspondence between the distribution of goods
and risks, along with the question of which populations do and do not
become weakened in relation to it (cit. in Fritsch 360). Even though their
investigation is based on the United States, the problem of distribution and
the weakening of populations constitutes a similar, even worse problem in
Latin America and, more specifically, in Argentina. The lack of standards
and laws that regulate the production of chemical substances, along with
the distribution and environmental exposure to specific toxic particles, can
have noxious long-term effects, such as the debilitation of certain popula-
tions in relation to others (Fritsch 360). If in Distancia disability appears
in Amanda’s immobility as she lies prostrate, as well as in the blindness of
the contaminated characters (“todo está tan blanco” [109; “everything is
so white”]), the deformations (“la nena de la cabeza gigante” [108; “the
girl with the giant head”]), or even the “dolor de cabezas” (“headaches”),
“náuseas” (“nausea”), “úlceras de la piel” (“skin ulcers”), “vómitos con
sangre” (“bloody vomits”), and “abortos espontáneos” (23; “spontaneous
 Toxic Nature in Argentine Narratives 63
abortions”), then in Las estrellas, the effect of paralysis is even more vio-
lent. Subjectively, it’s “la estampa de un hombre quemándose vivo” (56;
“the imprint of a man being burned alive”); in spatial terms, it’s the conse-
quent disappearance of the Buenos Aires suburbs (known as el campito),
whose existence ends after the exodus of the subjects dismembered by the
effects of the sulfuric acid rain: “La comunidad caminaba al sudeste hasta
que se le caía la piel, la carne, los huesos, y ya no quedaba nada para la
fuerza de gravedad: en matrimonio con la nada, el conurbano se derretía a
la hora del reloj de plastilina” (84; “The community walked southeast until
their skin, their flesh, their bones, were falling off, and nothing was left to
suffer gravity: married to the void, the suburbs melted to the ticking of a
clay clock”). Similarly, the rural space vanishes in Distancia, although in
a very different modality. It is Amanda’s husband who returns to the city,
turning his back on the countryside and, without looking back, wanting to
perhaps erase it from his memory forever:

No ve los campos de soja, los riachuelos entretejiendo las tierras secas,

los kilómetros de campo abierto sin ganado, las villas y las fábricas, lle-
gando a la ciudad. No repara en que . . . hay demasiados coches, coches,
y más coches cubriendo cada nervadura de asfalto. Y que el tránsito
está estancado, paralizado desde hace horas, humeando efervescente.
(124)
He doesn’t see the soy fields, the creeks interweaving the dry earth,
the kilometers of fields without cattle, the villages and factories,
upon reaching the city. He doesn’t notice that . . . there are too many
cars, cars and cars covering every asphalt nerve. Or that the transit is
stopped, paralyzed for hours, effervescently lingering on.

As in El año en el desierto, Schweblin’s and Incardona’s novels allegori-

cally appeal to a phenomenon that stalks the characters and obliterates
the spatial-temporal contours that divide, fragment, and classify origins,
classes, genders, and races—a phenomenon whose scale transcends tra-
ditional borders or, we could say, modern borders. Similarly, Natalia
Rodríguez’s novel La vi mutar revolves around Vito, a young boy whose
mother mutates into a “monstrosity” that places her in the hospital, mys-
teriously disfigured and all covered with flowers. Witnessing the meta-
morphosis that culminates with her death, Vito notices that the same
phenomenon occurs with a group of women whose husbands work in the
same factory as his father. The story takes place in an unknown town, in
the neighborhood of Los álamos (The poplars), although sarcastic refer-
ences to the irony of the name abound in the novel, since what was sup-
posed to be a grove has become a poor village without trees:

Yo vivo en un lugar que se llama Los Álamos, porque en un tiempo

había muchos álamos que se cortaron para hacer casas y muebles y
64 Gisela Heffes
papel. Mamá dice que los árboles esos fueron mutilados, que es como
cortados pero dejándoles la raíz . . . Yo creo que en algún momento
las raíces y los árboles van a volver a crecer y a mutilar todas las
casas y a todas las personas, de bronca.
(20)
I live in a place named Los Álamos because a long time ago there
were many poplars which were then cut down to make houses and
furniture and paper. Mom says that the trees were mutilated, that
they were sliced through but their roots left in the ground . . . I think
one day the roots and the trees will grow back and will mutilate all
the houses and the people, out of rage.

While the cause of the mutation in the town is unknown, some clues sug-
gest chemical exposure. Vito’s best friend, El Guille, has his house raided
by the police several times because his father allegedly has a clandestine
laboratory. Although it is unclear, a number of scenes imply that the ill-
ness produced by exposure to the chemicals is contagious. Vito’s mother
rests in a confined room, and, like Amanda in Distancia, she is unable to
move. Entering the room where she is being monitored requires wear-
ing “un traje de astronauta” (26; “an astronaut-like outfit”). Right after
Vito’s mom’s death, several women from the same town begin to mutate.
Their husbands have become unemployed due to the authorities’ shut-
ting down of the factory where they worked. Laid off and poor, the men
decide to open a freak show, similar to the one in Las estrellas, where
they display their wives in cages. While it is not explicit whether the
town is near cultivated land, several cues suggest as much. For instance,
when the mutated women attend a meeting at Vito’s house organized
by his father, Vito notes the “olor raro” (“strange smell”), like “tierra
mojada” (“moistened soil”), the same smell he sensed when he sat with
his friend Julieta in the courtyard of her house and they watched “la
misma nube” (“the same cloud”) over and over, experiencing that “olor
a caracol, a tierra revuelta” (“smell of snail, of stirred soil”) and “aire
podrido” (445; “rotten air”). In the same vein as Las estrellas, the apoc-
alyptic end leaves the characters in chaos. Nature comes back to avenge
its mutilations; now toxic, it “[e]xplotó” (“exploded”) and “sangró” (76;
“bled”) ceaselessly. According to Vito’s account, the “desastre” (“disas-
ter”) came from the “desechos mutantes . . . los mismos líquidos putre-
factos que el papá de Guille daba de tomar todos los días a las señoras”
(76; “mutants’ residues . . . the same putrid liquids that Guille’s father
gave to the women every day to drink”). The mutated women were pre-
sented in the circus as an outcome of “nature,” a dead, contaminated
and polluted nature, deeply rooted in the soil of a town, any town, as
the one allegorically described in Carson’s essay. Nature’s toxicity in La
vi mutar challenges a long-standing engrained imaginary that traverses
Argentine cultural tradition from the nineteenth century. Toxicity, not
 Toxic Nature in Argentine Narratives 65
modern subjectivity, alters bodies and landscapes alike. Furthermore,
if a rural cultural production has functioned as a “residue,” as Graciela
Montaldo has shown in her now classic De nuevo el campo, not only is
that “excess” now gaining presence within the national literary imagi-
nary, but it is also embodying, literally and metaphorically, an objecti-
fied and experimentalized space that serves both the local and global
economy. Similarly to neoextractivism, a practice that both progressive
and neoliberal governments have been exploiting all over Latin America,
the soy boom, along with other forms of agriculture and crop growing in
Argentina’s rural areas, will have an enduring effect on the nature of the
landscape, and the landscape of nature, as well as on the organic bodies
that inhabit it.14
Julián Joven’s poetry collection also makes reference to another “phe-
nomenon”: this time, “el Mal,” or “Evil.” The collection of poems engages
in opportune dialogue with previously analyzed novels. From its onset,
the poetic voice establishes a connection between the rural space, the
body, and toxicity:

Abrieron el cajón
y salieron moscas
de la nariz del cadáver.
No había nada que dijera qué
o quién
solo una plaquita metálica con él
empotrado en un sombrero de paja
y con una pala en la mano.
El campo atrás.
Soja
mucha mucha Soja.
Y Trigo.
(12)
They opened the coffin
and flies came out
from the nose of the body.
There was nothing that said what
or who
only a small metal plaque with him
built-in with a straw hat
and a shovel in hand.
The field behind.
Soy
lots and lots of Soy.
And Wheat.
66 Gisela Heffes
The “small sick world” alluded to in the title is a world where cancer,
asthma, and other illnesses related to agricultural production and the
use of agrochemicals slowly take over the characters, weaving another
framework, one of toxic discourse, which renders visible that which for
many lies forgotten or lost in darkness. In an interview soon after the
release of Joven’s book, the poet referred to a “metaphorical and literal”
cancer that is more and more present, especially “en los pueblos, o en
el campo, espacios que ya no están tan alejados de la ciudad en ningún
sentido” (“in towns, or in the countryside, in spaces that aren’t that far
from the city anymore, in any sense”), and points out that these are the
same spaces that, also until recently, seemed to have disappeared from
the agendas of contemporary writings, absorbed by the eminent pres-
ence and interest in urban spaces (Molina). According to Joven, there are
still those who live in little towns or in the countryside in the twenty-first
century, and there too are “malestares que los atraviesan . . . que no son
ya los del corral decimonónico o de inicios del siglo veinte: el crecimiento
inaudito de las tasas de cáncer es uno de ellos y es también uno de los
malestares de nuestra cultura—aunque no el único” (Molina; “malaises
abound, and these aren’t the discomforts of the nineteenth century cor-
ral or the start of the twentieth century: the silent growth of cancer rates
in one of them is also one of the ailments of our culture—although not
the only one”).
In his poetry collection, Joven registers these high “rates” in the con-
crete bodies of the characters (the pa, the ma, the aunt, but also the
horse, and many dead, and flies, and worms) to whom his poems give
voice.15 As in the multiple episodes that reemerge again and again in
Distancia, the “caballo apareció reventado en medio de las vía” (“horse
appeared as if it had burst on the rails”), and inside it, the veterinarians
found “una pasta verde/idéntica a la de las Chinches” (37; “a green paste/
identical to that of the Chinches”). But the small world in the poetry col-
lection is an expanding world, with a sickness that attacks and encom-
passes entire populations. Those who daily suffer its effects must “run”
to avoid being contaminated:

Ella destendía la ropa

y de golpe
un aluvión de olores empezó a sofocarla
las chinches caían y explotaban en el césped
como la plaga de Egipto
y con sus ácidos verdes y pegajosos
en los pelos y en la ropa.
(73)
She unfolded the clothing
and suddenly
 Toxic Nature in Argentine Narratives 67
an alluvium of smells began to suffocate her
the beetles were falling and exploding on the grass
like an Egyptian plague
and with their green and sticky acids
in her hairs and on her clothing.

The women ran “desesperadas dentro de la casa” (“desperately inside the

house”) from fear because “las partículas vaporosas” (“vaporous parti-
cles”) and some “semilla pelada” (“peeled seed”) “se les iba a meter aden-
tro” (“were going to get inside them”) (75). The poison penetrates the
body through the air, the same air that intoxicates the pa, “atacado
sin respiración en pleno asma” (“"without breath during an asthma
attack"”), who ironically attempted to “aspirar el aire fresco” (“breathe
fresh air”) while in the background “se oían los motores . . . de las
cerealeras en la madrugada” (29; “one could hear the motors . . . of the
grain silos in the early morning”).
In Las estrellas , the air’s toxicity also acquires a certain ubiquity:
“un sol contaminado despidiendo luces hacia el espacio, cargadas de
venenos químicos” (“a contaminated sun radiating light toward space,
charged with chemical venoms”) such that “en las orillas de otras
cuencas y riachuelos . . . las plantas hicieran fotosíntesis de nuestros
desechos” (701; “on the shores of other basins and creeks . . . the
plants conduct photo-synthesis with our waste”). The ecological
principle that characterizes the ecosystem, meaning the chain of
relations that interconnects different elements that was notably
described by Humboldt, reveals in these tales—narrative and
poetic—that the nineteenth-century disjunction that civilization
once faced with barbarity now reemerges in a new form, no
longer inverse or confronted like a binomial but instead juxtaposed. If
the ecological crisis is a trans-spatial, transnational, and trans-
continental crisis, then con-temporary Argentine narratives allow
us to glimpse a toxic discourse that calls into question tra-
ditional stigmatizations, offering instead new corporeal ones: be
they the stigma of illness, of deformity, or of monstrosity.
The descriptions examined here signal a displacement within the aes-
thetic representations of the ecological crisis. It is remarkable that
the global imaginary portraying the environmental catastrophes we are
now facing has adopted an eschatological tone anchored in a discourse
about the end: the end of species, the end of forests, the end of
glaciers, the end of the mountains, and the end of clean oceans. It is
not the end of nature as the end of a world “in which the natural
environment disappears,” as British sociologist Anthony Giddens has
defined it, but the end of nature itself, as there are now “few if any
aspects of the physical world untouched by human intervention” (206).
Stemming from “the intensification of technological change” (206),
the natural world has been thus replaced by a “postnatural” one
(McKibben 126).
68 Gisela Heffes
The devastation this now postnatural world has suffered has been
documented by photographers such as Edward Burtynsky and Chris
Jordan. Both Burtynsky and Jordan have portrayed the impact that the
production of oil, extractivism, and other modern manufactures (Bur-
tynsky) and the ongoing production of waste (Jordan) have had on the
global environment and on human and nonhuman lives. The images cap-
tured by Argentine photographer Pablo Ernesto Piovano also reveal the
materiality of the catastrophe. The same year that Schweblin and Molina
published their texts, Piovano embarked on three journeys that covered
15,000 km in order to show the effects of direct contact with pesticides
(though not indirect contact, as can occur, for example, through food).
In a photo series titled El costo humano de los agrotóxicos (2014–17),
Piovano attempted to break the vow of silence the media has established,
which omits the effects of spraying pesticides on the bodies and lives of
neighboring populations, keeping in mind that, according to the photog-
rapher, 370 million agrochemical products are used per year, a fact that
goes unnoticed by the general public.16 Images such as the “crystal boy”—
the caption says his name is Lucas Techeira and he is three years old—
reveal the slow destructive effect of the agrochemicals, rendering visible
what remains by and large invisible. These toxins resist being captured by
the eye, but their continuous employment—while impalpable or presum-
ably immaterial—pierces the materiality of the body, all bodies alike, to the
extent that they resurface as a physical distortion. Lucas Techeira was born
with ichthyosis, a disorder that causes dryness of the skin. His mother was
in contact with glyphosate during her pregnancy. While not intended to
be morbid, the images are disturbing, fluctuating between horror and sur-
realism. Toxicity, one may argue, entails a materially eschatological framed
reality. The images are living examples of the effects of agrochemicals on
the human body. They visualize bodies that have been exposed, both meta-
phorically and literally, to a “large material world” that, as Stacy Alaimo
states, is “penetrated by all sort of substances and material agencies that
may or may not be captured” (4).17 Paradoxically, while invisible, these
substances emerge in the body as a protuberance, turning the invisibility
of the spraying into a material, concrete, and physical reality. Furthermore,
the exposure of these bodies conveys a “state of total unprotectedness”
similar to those exposed to nuclear explosions and analyzed by Adriana
Petryna in Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl (Alaimo 4).
However, unlike Petryna’s examination of a fast and devastating violence,
the exposure to agrochemicals permeates slowly and sharply the contours
of the material body as well as the physical landscape to the point of an
outright tangible, measurable both deformation and mutation.
The immateriality of the slow destructive effect of the agrochemicals
reminds us of what Ursula Heise has described as “riskspaces.” Heise
refers to chemical toxins as the most crucial of these risks, “as agents that
 Toxic Nature in Argentine Narratives 69
effectively blur the boundaries between body and environment, domestic
and public spheres, and between beneficial and harmful technologies”
(177). By turning the impalpable or immaterial into a physical visible
reality through the representation of a mutated human and nonhuman
organism, the images captured by Piovano do not only connect to Rob
Nixon’s conceptualization of slow violence but also to the notion of
hyperobjects, theorized by Tim Morton.
Rob Nixon defines slow violence as “a violence that occurs gradually
and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across
time and space” (2). While violence is usually conceived as an event “that
is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space,” slow violence,
on the contrary, is not frequently “viewed as violence at all” (2). It is
through this gradual mechanism of violence that the immateriality and
invisibility of toxins grow into a tangible, palpable phenomenon whose
main imprint is a disfigured organism. In the same vein, Morton refers
to hyperobjects as objects that, due to their immensity, transcend the
specificity of space and time; these encompass emissions in the atmo-
sphere and oceans, as well as the global use of pesticides by the agricul-
tural exportation industry. They are hyper because they don’t allow for a
clear division between the global, the local, and the body. The hyperob-
jects Morton refers to emerge in a moment of ecological crisis and erase
material boundaries. To an objectified space are now added objectified
bodies, bodies rendered exposed and vulnerable by these hyperobjects
through Nixon’s slow violence. In a time when the very notion of the
future is open to speculation, when a discourse of the ends has become a
frequent aesthetic and mediatic narrative, what happens with the body,
the subjective and objective body that inhabits this chemically mani-
cured space? What happens when environmental decay permeates both
bodies and landscapes until it transforms corporeality itself into a muta-
tion? Illnesses, deformities, monstrosities, aberrations, othernesses: they
all emerge discursively and cross the space of the natural world, dividing
healthy and sick bodies. Facing this ecological crisis that modernization
has unleashed and continues to exacerbate, can we talk about a corpo-
real crisis, understanding that our body constitutes the first environment,
as has been argued by Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara? Taking into
account the relationship between the subject and its habitat, I would like
to propose, perhaps tentatively, possibly in a search for a new definition,
that bodies that have come to be a mere “economic resource” consist of
horrifying metaphors of the continued exploitation—agricultural, min-
ing, oil, floricultural, nuclear, among many other kinds—of a natural
world that has also been reconfigured. In this sense, it’s important to
preserve alongside these notions the concept developed by Rachel Carson
of the ecology of the human body, which can serve as a starting point for
reflecting on the relationship between humans and the environment. For
70 Gisela Heffes
Carson, bodies do not constitute limits; on the contrary, they are vulner-
able and affected by the global use of chemicals (agricultural or not), in
the same way the human and nonhuman worlds are. In this sense, all
forms of life are more similar than dissimilar.
The novels of Samanta Schweblin, Juan Diego Incardona, and Natalia
Rodríguez, along with the poetry collection of Julián Joven, all predict,
through the representation of transformed and mutated bodies, varied
bodies (young and old, feminine and masculine, rich and poor), the dete-
rioration of the latter as part of the last boundary of environmental pol-
lution, be it through the increasing amount of urban pollution or the
use of agrochemicals in agricultural production within contemporary
rural spaces. Not only is the correlation between the subject and his nat-
ural environment redefined, but landscape—like the body itself—bears
witness to this metamorphosis. Bodies ravaged by diseases (respiratory
ailments, migraines, cancer) are also incapable of reproducing, hence
aborting the idea of a future. These are bodies that exacerbate the apoca-
lyptic speculations the Anthropocene warns us about and that therefore
incarnate the same aberration of human intervention within the largest
framework in history.

Notes
1. This chapter is an augmented version of “Narrativas del ‘mal vivir’ en
América Latina: cuerpos inóculos y ecomutaciones,” in La invención de la
naturaleza latinoamericana. Genealogía discursiva y funcionalidad sociocul-
tural, eds. Wolfgang Matzat and Dr. Sebastian Thies (Iberoamericana/Vervuert
Verlag), forthcoming. I am extremely thankful to my dear friend Ryan Long,
who has reviewed the essay more than once and sent me invaluable feedback
to improve the chapter both aesthetically and argumentatively. I am also
thankful to Rice University undergraduate student Mariana Nájera for help-
ing me with the translation of this chapter. All the translated quotations are
mine unless indicated.
2. According to Ludmer, contemporary literature has become urban, has absorbed
the rural, and has become “barbarian,” contesting the old traditional opposi-
tion civilization versus barbarism.
3. The work of Dinorah Cossío is currently unpublished. Her work is the quali-
fying paper presented during the process of obtaining her doctorate degree
from the University of Texas at Austin, where I am a member of the evalua-
tion committee.
4. The World Health Organization (WHO) said glyphosate was “probably car-
cinogenic” in 2015, which was merely a confirmation of what the scientific
community already knew. Now that glyphosate has to be relicensed in the
European Union, the WHO has decided to take a step backward. How come
the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)—which is part
of the World Health Organization—retracts something it earlier claimed?
How reliable does the WHO demonstrate itself to be? See interview with
photographer Pablo Ernesto Piovano: www.lifegate.com/people/news/pablo-
ernesto-piovano-interview
 Toxic Nature in Argentine Narratives 71
5. A good example of this imagination would be Don Segundo Sombra, by
Ricardo Güiraldes (1926).
6. This term is not directly translatable but is similar to “wilderness” or “out-
doors.” The term conveys the notion of “exposed to the elements” with a
strong connotation of being “battered by the weather.”
7. I capitalize “Nature” to echo Alberto Acosta’s call that “Nature” with a capi-
tal letter addresses a major issue, much larger and transcendent than just
naming it and what we understand in the Western world: namely, to assign
nature a mere economic resource role. “Nature” with a capital letter refers
thus to Nature as an entity with political rights (11–19).
8. I use the concept of “biocapitalism” following Kelly Fritsch’s definition in
reference to the economization of life, which leads to a manner of speaking
about different lives as having more or less value in more economic than
exclusively biological terms (368).
9. See “Hoy estamos nuevamente en una época de mutaciones,” an interview
with Juan Diego Incardona in Página 12 (October 17, 2016): www.pagina12.
com.ar/diario/suplementos/espectaculos/4-40309-2016-10-17.html. Accessed
March 22, 2019.
10. Please note that “punzó” is a Gallicism for bright red.
11. In the story, references to the Peronist movement crisscross the narrative
from start to finish, constituting an indelible mark of its literary produc-
tion. The presence of Peronism and, more specifically, “la patota menemista”
(referring to Carlos Saúl Menem) as “emblematic of the violence of 90’s lib-
eralism, which attacks authentic Peronism” was analyzed in depth by Sandra
Contreras (5).
12. In the United States, the “poinsettias” (Euphorbia pulcherrima) are known as
Christmas Star.
13. However, because this concerns a saga whose narrative locus is Villa Celina
(The attack on Villa Celina [2007], Villa Celina [2008], El campito [2009],
and Barrial Rock [2010]), these metaphoric mutations can be understood
using the explanation and hypothesis presented by the author in the intro-
duction: “Many tales about Villa Celina occur in the 90’s, pre-2001, and I
think there lies the explanation about why the stories break with realism and
become fantastic narratives where ghosts, monsters, and mutants appear. The
entire era is a great metamorphosis” (Incardona 13; the emphasis is mine).
14. In Derechos de la naturaleza, Eduardo Gudynas argues that these neoextractiv-
ist policies have inspired new conflicts, in which progressive governments
are confronted with their former allies. Furthermore, in Latin America, these
ecoterritorial conflicts (sometimes called social-environmental conflicts) have
become the main reason for conflict in the continent, reflecting how the dispute
over common goods and territories are defining the future of the region (9).
15. The “pa” is a colloquial reference to the “padre” or “papá,” the father of
the poetic voice, in the same way that the “ma” refers colloquially to the
“madre” or “mamá,” the mother of the poetic voice.
16. See note 5. In addition, Argentine filmmaker Pino Solanas just released a
documentary on the same topic, Viaje a los pueblos fumigados.
17. It should be noted that these pesticides are often illegal in Europe and the
United States. However, the latter is not exempt from the risks and catas-
trophes we have just described: just the classic Steven Soderbergh film, Erin
Brockovich (2000), which is based on a real story and tackles similar prob-
lems, is a very good example; the more recent case of Flint, Michigan, which
suffers from a water contamination crisis, constitutes another paradigm of
negligence and environmental injustice.
72 Gisela Heffes
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