Our literary finale for this course, Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin is a contemporary story; and as befits a recent reading, the author carries a prescient message which often appears to transcend time. The narrative revolves around the use of pesticides in Argentinian crops: a poison which, in its driving of the story, is in many ways omnipotent. Through bypassing external physical boundaries, as well as the retention of its insoluble nature in the eyes of the novel’s participants, the driving element of the plot is also that which is most emblematic of trauma. According to this week’s lecture, the industrialisation of soybeans in Argentina displaced several family home businesses, preferring a homogenised process. It is therefore in the removal of the communal from farming through a figurative and literal “poisoning” of an entire lifestyle to be replaced by faceless manufacturing Schweblin offers an environmental protest as well as an expose of corruption in Argentina—emblematic of a greater climate of anxiety in the face of governmental encroachment.
The cataloguing of modern day experiences in pestilential times is what plagues this story. Birth defects and rising cancer mortality rates would be seen around this time, leading Schweblin to describe the appearance of the fields as a “perfumed green” (pg. 93). The connection between the natural and the unnatural struck me in a number of ways. Perfume can be seen as an obfuscation of true meaning, a mask one wears to hide a primordial scent which, for most of human history, has become undesirable. For all this, makeup is still seen as an object of desire for many despite its artificial nature. (This idea of the artifice can also be translated to the novel’s capricious tone as a whole, with its preferential treatment of allusion to outright explanation.) Another object of torment comes in the form of worms, emblematic of outside influence which has invaded the home of these characters. In the description that “something small and invisible that has ruined everything,” the small element is a decision from higher authority to use pesticides unbeknownst to the characters; the invisible nature of it makes it all the more pestiferous (pg. 160).
Concluding our final course reading, my question to the class is…
In the context of this reading and others, do you think Latin American literature is solely about capturing a certain moment and its mood? Or is it possible that the process is a subconscious one?
THANKS FOR READING! S
You have noticed something very curious in this novel: oscillation (or the game) between the Natural, the Un-Natural, the Super-Natural and the Anti-Natural. In this swing, the body is trapped by what it cannot control, it is an abandonment that breaks with the most basic parameters of meaning (such as time and space). Thus, language is also affected. What is the power of the tongue to capture facts and moods? The characters use language to find out but are faced with the impossibility of clarity, in an irresolvable aporia.
Hi Samuel, I really enjoyed your reading of the “perfume-y” nature of the environment. It struck this week that this is probably the most terrifying way to experience nature: when it ceases to be “natural.” This also stood out to me in descriptions of the dead silence of the homestead, pun intended; it communicated viscerally the artifice and threat of this environment. In this way, I think nature is one of the most terrifying “villains” an author can explore, its omnipotence and omniscience, as you say, are deeply threatening and impassable.