Toxicity, Transgenics, and the Flesh of Fiction in Samanta Schweblin

Abstract

Toxins lurk in the soy fields around a small Argentine town in Samanta Schweblin’s 2014 novel Distancia de rescate. On the surface, Schweblin’s novel appears to use supernatural phenomena to criticize industrial soy production and its use of toxic herbicides. Current criticism, in turn, sees the novel as an extension of the Latin American fantastic, filtered through an ecocritical or Anthropocene lens. However, I argue that Schweblin’s novel, read alongside her short story “Conservas,” portrays a more complex relationship between flesh and the environment. Drawing on the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I argue that the chiasm, or crossing over, of flesh mimics the structure of transgenic organisms so that the characters resemble genetically modified soy. I show how Schweblin portrays flesh as reversible, interconnected, and increasingly intoxicated. Following Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida, she uses an abject counteraesthetic to blend nature and artifice and to question traditional distinctions between human and environment, subject and object that emerge from Kantian philosophy and continue into the aesthetic tradition of the sublime. In their place, Schweblin suggests an already intoxicated flesh that forms the basis of the categories of subject and object and an abject, toxic sublime, present in flesh and fiction.