Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros41Partie II. Politiques écoféministesUnbounded Territories. New Narrat...

Partie II. Politiques écoféministes

Unbounded Territories. New Narrative Regimes in Contemporary Argentine Literature

Ana Marina Gamba
p. 111-124

Résumés

Cet article examine l’élaboration esthétique des territoires dans deux romans argentins contemporains, Las aventuras de la China Iron (2017) et No es un río (2020). D’après notre hypothèse, ces textes illustrent un mouvement esthétique plus large dans les récits latino-américains contemporains qui remettent en question les structures établies du roman moderne. Notre lecture interroge ces récits en tant qu’explorations d’un nouveau régime narratif, lequel trouble les discours traditionnels sur les paysages et les milieux tout en participant à la transformation épistémologique impliquée dans l’Anthropocène. Ces récits s’engagent dans des conceptions non instrumentales de la relation entre l’humain et le monde environnant en mobilisant différentes stratégies formelles ainsi que des imaginaires alternatifs. La convergence de ces explorations formelles constitue ce que je propose d’appeler une littérature perméable, c’est-à-dire une écriture qui déstabilise les frontières du texte littéraire en l’exposant à l’affectation des diverses matérialités qu’il rencontre.

Haut de page

Texte intégral

Comment se laisser toucher, affecter, et comment conférer à ce qui nous touche le pouvoir de nous faire penser ? Pour que cette question nous situe, humains civilisés si fiers d’assumer la solitude du maître retranché dans sa maison, il faut oser se laisser affecter par sa version tentaculaire.
Isabelle Stenger, Civiliser la modernité ? Whitehead et les ruminations du sens commun

  • 1 B. Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2017, p (...)
  • 2 D. Danowski and E. Viveiros de Castro, Há mundo por vir? ensaio sobre os medos e os fins, São Paulo (...)

1In the series of lectures that Bruno Latour gave in Edinburgh in 2013, published under the title Facing Gaia, the French philosopher describes the New Climate Regime as follows: “I use this term to summarize the present situation in which the physical framework that the Moderns had taken for granted, the ground on which their history had always been played out, has become unstable. As if the décor had gotten up on stage to share the drama with the actors. From this moment on, everything changes in the way stories are told”1. This new moment in geological history where humans have become a geological force, identified by many as the Anthropocene, or Capitalocene by others, has imposed a transformation in our relationship to the world and troubled the categories of nature and culture2. One of the main challenges of the literary production today is then to find ways to narrate this derangement while addressing its epistemological, aesthetic, and political implications. In the last decade, this task has been taken on by part of Latin American Literature with varying outcomes.

  • 3 L. Sabsay, “Permeable Bodies. Vulnerability, Affective Powers, Hegemony”, in J. Butler, Z. Gambetti (...)

2This paper examines the literary construction of territories in two contemporary Argentinian texts: Las aventuras de la China Iron (The Adventures of China Iron, 2017), by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, and No es un río (Not a River, 2020), by Selva Almada. In their rendering of landscapes, these works introduce literary forms that challenge the established spatio-temporal structures of the modern novel and destabilize the boundaries of the literary text by exposing it to the affectation by the various materialities that it evokes. In doing so, they conceive of the relationship between the human and its surrounding world in new ways. The epistemological transformation implicated in the New Climate Regime described above is articulated in these narratives through a new political and aesthetic understanding of literature itself, which I propose to analyze in terms of its permeability. As developed by Leticia Sabsay, permeability as a condition “highlights the impossibility of establishing a clear origin and destiny for the circulation of affect”3. By applying the notion of permeability to literature, we can broaden the political implications of the latter. In this sense, literature not only reflects on its context by addressing the issues and debates of its time, whether metaphorically, symbolically, or explicitly, but also exhibits traces of the contact between the text and the context in which it emerges and circulates. This generates a new aesthetic reflection that contributes to shaping how that context is understood, seen, and narrated.

  • 4 J. Rancière, Le Partage du sensible : esthétique et politique, Paris, Fabrique, 2000.

3The two novels examined in this paper adopt formal strategies to describe landscapes that place particular emphasis on the affective bond between the landscapes and characters, while challenging established notions of how narratives of territories have traditionally been told. This operation is crucial to produce ‘new distributions of the sensible’4 that can engage with the cultural transformations taking place in our times. To analyze these subjects, I will start by examining the forms of agency portrayed in the novels, by drawing on the relational model developed by feminist scholars in recent decades, in particular the notion of body-territory. Next, I will shift focus to the narrative strategies employed by the texts and explore their potential political implications. To conclude, I will situate these novels within the broader context of contemporary critical literature.

  • 5 The works of Gabriela Cabezón Cámara have been translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese (...)
  • 6 Almada is particularly renowned for her examination of feminicide in her non-fiction work, Chicas m (...)
  • 7 For an analysis of how Almada develops a “provincial narrative” that diverges from the standard Spa (...)

4Gabriela Cabezón Cámara and Selva Almada are two prominent authors in contemporary Argentina. Their novels have a sizeable readership at a national, regional, and international level, since they have been translated into multiple languages and published in various countries5. As authors that specifically deal with feminist subjects, particularly gender-based violence, they have received significant attention from critics and scholars specializing in this field6. Although quite different in their literary styles, they are both representative of an engaged literature that is concerned with narrating the precarious experiences of subjugated peoples in the heterogeneous Argentinian territory. Moreover, their work is characterized by an aesthetic and formal quest to address politically relevant issues, such as coloniality, gender violence, and social invisibility, in ways that subverts the conventions of canonical Argentine literature7.

  • 8 G. Giorgi, “Temblor del tiempo humano: política de la novela en Juan Cárdenas”, Cuadernos de Litera (...)
  • 9 J. Andermann, Tierras en trance: arte y naturaleza después del paisaje, Santiago de Chile, Edicione (...)
  • 10 Ibid.

5Drawing on the work of Gabriel Giorgi, I propose to read these two novels as part of a “new narrative regime”8, which seeks to make the relationships with our surroundings politically and sensibly intelligible. From this perspective, literary texts as well as other artistic forms of expression increasingly take on the task of creating new, alternative images, without attempting to find a definitive representation – a ‘true image’ – of the relationship between nature and culture. Instead, they engage in a more complex search for ways to challenge the established forms of perceiving, seeing, and understanding. The “literalizing urge”9, that the critic Jens Andermann recognizes in certain modern Latin American artistic productions, underlies this new narrative regime. The quest is no longer to go from materiality to the abstraction of representation, but rather to recover, in an always partial and incomplete manner, the singularity of the narrated matter10.

  • 11 As advanced by J. French and G. Heffes, in the present, the region “is the locus of important ecolo (...)
  • 12 C. Rivera Garza, Escrituras geológicas, Madrid, Frankfurt am Main, Iberoamericana, Vervuert, 2022, (...)
  • 13 Ibid., p. 9.
  • 14 Ibid., p. 14.

6In the Latin American context, these debates cannot be detatched from historical and contemporary struggles for the sovereignty of territory11. The relationship between bodies and territories, both as means to emphasize a continuum of violence, and as a complex site of resistance is a key political and epistemological articulation for these struggles. Feminisms, ecologism and anticolonialism, while specific in their practices and demands, are in constant dialogue and converge in common practices. A situated narrative, then, of the derangement of our times arises from these latitudes. This narrative is concerned not only with the transformations that the New Climate Regime imposes on the present, but also with a deeper interrogation of the traces that the history of landscapes – understood here as a territory and the human and non-human actants that dwell there – continues to impress on the present. In this sense, Cristina Rivera Garza speaks of geological writings12 in order to describe a series of Latin American texts that understand writing as a critical gesture that is marked by the act of re-membering the bodies and territories in their different temporalities. These writings actively oppose “the strategic forgetting of the matter that sustains us and thar we are of”13. For Rivera Garza, writing geologically means relating the present with Others, recollecting the existence of people, animals, plants, rocks, and all other beings, and acknowledging their future. To achieve this, it is necessary to recognize the experiences of oppression and suffering that historical geological discourses and praxis have concealed, but which still prevail as sediments in the present14. The narratives I will discuss tell the stories of these residues; they offer a literary reconstruction of the material presence of these restless sediments, whose unearthing unsettles established ideas.

Unbounded landscapes

  • 15 The term monte in Spanish can refer both to an elevated terrain or to an uncultivated piece of land (...)
  • 16 Amitav Gosh, building on Franco Moretti’s ideas, argues that the novel’s modern form is accomplishe (...)

7In her 2020 novel, No es un río, Selva Almada tells the story of a community that dwells next to a river. Or rather, of two communities: one that lives on an island in a river and one that lives on the mainland. Locals and visitors are divided by a body of water inhabited by ghosts of human and non-human animals but also by haunting dreams and a force that eludes rational depictions. Las aventuras de la China Iron, by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, is a rewriting of the 19th century epic poem, El Martín Fierro, where the contemporary author imagines the journey of two women through the Argentinian desert. The geographies covered by these two women are politically and culturally saturated, and the narration builds upon this to create a symbolic but also material space where other bonds between the living and the non-living can appear. The desert, the pampas, and the Paraná River, as well as imagined lakes, and the monte15 permeate these two narratives imposing a rhythm and a sense of time and space that strains the traditional structures of the bourgeois novel16. They prompt a reflection on what binds together the members of a community by questioning its creation and constitution. Above all, the aesthetic modulation of these particular landscapes stages the violence that has historically shaped them. Rather than trying to suture this violence, these novels give it a voice and a body.

  • 17 G. Cabezón Cámara, The Adventures of China Iron, Edinburgh, Charco Press, 2019, p. 144; p. 10; p. 5 (...)
  • 18 Ibid., p. 6. “Primero luchaban hombres, perros, caballos y terneros huyéndole a lo que asfixia, a l (...)
  • 19 J. Andermann, op. cit., p. 14.

8In her reinvention of José Hernández’s epic poem, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara imagines the destiny of the gaucho’s wife, abandoned along with her children by Martín Fierro. The different territories that give name to the three parts of the novel are not simply the setting for human drama to unfold but actants in the dénouement, and the different elements that compose them are described as suffering, desiring, and changing beings. The earth awaits breathless for the rain, the pampas reawaken when it finally comes, the sun caresses and then sticks to the bodies, the pasture ripples and curves, the stalks surrender and froth17. There is a sense of uncertainty, beauty and violence that sets the tone in the description of the surroundings. Far from the image of a romanticized, benevolent nature, the narrative voice is emphasizing here it’s “power to kill”18. The resistances, negotiations, and losses in the face of this power are presented as a central element of life in this territory. Nature is not a reassuring locus where the faults of modern culture can be atoned. The new rapport to landscapes that the narrative builds is not a redemptory path to a restored innocence, since violence is not understood here as foreign to nature. The non-human surroundings are not presented, as explained by Jens Andermann, as an “ethical model of harmonious coexistence with difference expressed in that which, precisely by that realization of non-identity with the human, also becomes an external image of the social”19. Violence is consubstantial to every interaction, including its narration, since narrating something, naming it, necessarily means imposing a series of categories and definitions onto that relationship. The political proposal of the novel challenges the distribution of this violence and recognizes certain forms of resistance and agency that have historically been neglected.

  • 20 S. Almada, Not a River, Edinburgh, Charco Press, 2024, p. 15. “Este hombre no es del monte y el mon (...)
  • 21 S. Almada, Not a River, ibid., p. 79. “Tiene miedo. Le parece que algo los sigue y por más que gira (...)

9An act of violence inaugurates the novel No es un río, and its effect ripples throughout the narrative. Three men spend hours on a boat trying to catch a ray. Once it is on the hook, they have to stir up the water to make the animal emerge. When it does, they shoot at it three times. What appears to be classic scene of man versus nature – accentuated by the fact that the actual killing is done with a gun, the human-killing-device by definition –later is revealed to be an affront against a community. The issue is not the act of killing itself, but the fact that the death of the ray was in vain, since the three men threw its corpse back to the river. That transgression is what expels the men from the island: the monte, the river, and the islanders evict the outsiders from their territory. Prior to the fishermen returning the dead ray to the water, the monte had accepted their visit: “This man isn’t from these woods and the woods are well aware. But they leave him be. He can come in, he can stay for as long as it takes to gather kindling. Then the woods themselves will spit him out, his arms full of branches, back to the shore20”. But their presence there becomes unbearable after the event, when the surroundings assume a hostile and threatening character: “He’s afraid. It’s like something’s following them and he keeps looking over his shoulder but all he ever sees is the woods [el monte]”21.

  • 22 S. Almada, Not a River, ibid., p. 55. “Conoce mejor el monte de lo que se conoce él” (S. Almada, No (...)
  • 23 S. Almada, Not a River, ibid., p. 87. “El monte los conoce desde gurisitos” (S. Almada, No es un rí (...)
  • 24 Since childhood, Enero dreams of the Ahogado [the drowned man], a ghostly figure that announces the (...)

10The community that shapes the landscape of the island in the novel is not depicted as Edenic and does not revert to a state of ‘being one with nature’. Existence in that territory is filled with scarcity and loneliness. Death is constantly lurking. The tie that seems to hold that community together is one of shared knowledge: Aguirre knows the monte “better that he knows himself”22, the monte knows him and his friends “since they were yea-high”23 and the river knows it is going to take Eusebio’s life and foreshadows the event in his friend’s dreams for years24. It is not a scientific type of knowledge, but one that is built through shared practices and shared matter, marked by interdependence and reciprocity, but also by desire and violence.

  • 25 S. Almada, Not a River, op. cit. p. 24. “A veces los sueños son ecos del futuro” (S. Almada, No es (...)
  • 26 G. Giorgi, op. cit., p. 4.
  • 27 S. Almada, Not a River, op. cit., p. 39. “Siempre queda algo de uno donde uno muere” (S. Almada, No (...)

11When telling the story of this landscape – and in this novel, community and landscape are synonyms – the text creates a temporality that is very different from the linear, cohesive model of the modern novel. Past, present and future are not consecutive stages, but rather coexisting layers that irrupt into each other. This is particularly evident in dreams, described as “echoes of the future”25. The constant prolepsis of the narration loses its effect as the story unravels, since the succession of brief scenes starts to appear following no apparent order. By crafting a non-linear temporality, the text aims to establish a different space-time configuration, one that is not govern by the clockwork of capital. The narrative search for alternative temporal configurations is crucial when attempting to describe other modes of being in the world. As argued by Gabriel Giorgi, the question of the temporal scales that structure narratives is a matter of “the forms of individuation: what type of individual, of relational networks, of interdependence nets or separation devices, what forms of multiplicity are invoked to populate tales, to mobilize times, to weave sequences and events”26. To come up with non-linear, but most importantly, non-progressive temporalities is to open the possibility to narrate bonds that do not fit into prevailing notions of the human as a sovereign and autonomous being. Even death is portrayed as an experience shared with the territory. When he is navigating the river where his father died, Eusebio’s son reflects: “It must be that part of a person stays behind in the place where they die”27. The ghosts of Lucy and Mariela are trapped on the island, haunting locals and visitors alike.

  • 28 J. Butler, Precarious life the powers of mourning and violence, London, Verso, 2004, p. 21.
  • 29 M. Puig de la Bellacasa, "‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’: Thinking with Care", The Sociological (...)
  • 30 S. Almada, Not a River, op. cit., p. 87.
  • 31 G. Cabezón Cámara, The Adventures of China Iron, op. cit., p. 33. “… de ser reducidos a eso que tam (...)
  • 32 N. Tuana, “Viscous porosity: Witnessing Katrina”, in S. Alaimo and S. Hekman (dir.), Material femin (...)
  • 33 J. Butler, op. cit., p. 24.
  • 34 G. Cabezón Cámara, The Adventures of China Iron, op. cit., p. 94. “Nos abrazábamos, nos queríamos a (...)

12The literary articulation of these bonds requires new structures, new narrative techniques that can feature the complex interwovenness between beings with heterogenous existences and material compositions. The narratives are not solely concerned with the effect that the different actants have on each other; rather, they seek to identify ways of making the tie by which they are differentiated and related intelligible28. As María Puig de la Bellacasa has shown, an understanding of the ways in which relationships are formed and maintained is crucial, since “how we relate affects the building of positions and relational ecologies”29. The attachment between these various actants constitutes each singularity: between the islanders, the plants and the animals that were their cribs30 in No es un río; between the “trinity” formed by China, Liz and Estreya the dog, and the soil, the birds of prey, and the “structure of bones and minerals, like stones” that they also are31. Highlighting this interdependence means acknowledging the agency of materials as well as the porosity of entities32. As stated by Judith Butler, the contingency of the circulation of affects is an underlying feature of vulnerability, defined as “a way of thinking about how we are not only constituted by our relations but also dispossessed by them as well”33. Interdependence and exposure are necessary to one another, exposure to touch and to violence. Bodies and territories, landscapes and the entities that conform them not only constitute one and the same fiber but also haunt each other, creating a permanent state of being undone and becoming unbounded. China and Liz come to this realization when they arrive at the military fort on the border: “We embraced, we loved each other all the more amidst the stench of death in the vicinity of the fort. Our love grew stronger as we realized our precarious situation, our fragility heightening our desire”34. Narrating this relationality, then, also demands a narration of the historical and unequal distribution of this vulnerability.

  • 35 L. Cabnal, “De las Opresiones a las Emancipaciones: Mujeres Indígenas en Defensa del Territorio Cue (...)
  • 36 V. Gago, Feminist international: how to change everything, London, New York, Verso, 2020, p. 85.
  • 37 S. Alaimo, “Trans-corporeal and the ethical space of nature”, in S. Alaimo and S. Hekman (dir.), Ma (...)
  • 38 Ibid.
  • 39 V. Gago, op. cit., p. 83.
  • 40 J. Andermann, op. cit., p. 15.
  • 41 V. Gago, op. cit, p. 85. Emphasis in the original.
  • 42 G. Cabezón Cámara, The Adventures of China Iron, op. cit., p. 179.
  • 43 Ibid., p. 209. “Ya me había hecho del aire en el desierto” (G. Cabezón Cámara, Las aventuras de la (...)
  • 44 S. Almada, Not a River, op. cit., p. 31. “El río es más negro que la noche” (S. Almada, No es un rí (...)
  • 45 S. Almada, Not a River, ibid. “Espesa, oscura” (S. Almada, No es un río, ibid., p. 43).

13The continuity of violence between bodies and territories is a relationship that has been specifically underscored and problematized by Latin American feminisms in the recent decades. Under the banner of the idée-force body-territory, a number of activists and academics have sought to describe and analyze the material, historical and symbolic entanglement between these two elements. The indigenous communitarian feminist Maya-Xinka Lorena Cabnal argues that the idea of body-territory speaks of a specific cosmogonic and political interpretation of the relationship between bodies and their material, situated existence. It is also a revision of how multiple oppressions have been layered over certain bodies, of the historical and structural effects of patriarchy, colonialism, racism, and neoliberal capitalism that have given place to different and complex forms of pacts and mandates35. The history and the present of that relationship are inextricable, and its conceptualization is a necessary tool for a critical understanding of contemporary struggles. For the feminist scholar Verónica Gago, body-territory is a concept that underlines how the exploitation of common territories enacts a violence upon singular and collective bodies by means of dispossession. It shows that it is impossible to “isolate the individual body from the collective body, the human body from the territory and landscape”36. As a theoretical site, and without losing its practice-situated root, body-territory can help feminist thinking to overcome what Stacy Alaimo describes as feminist theory’s “accelerated ‘flight from nature’ fueled by rigid commitments to social constructionism and the determination to rout out all vestiges of essentialism”37. Although she acknowledges that predominant paradigms do not deny the material existence of the body, she argues that “they do tend to focus exclusively on how various bodies have been discursively produced, which casts the body as passive, plastic matter”38. In historical terms, the concept body-territory provides insight into how subordination of women, nature and colonized peoples is a necessary condition of capitalist accumulation39. In Western tradition, the representation of a virgin, undisturbed, nature was symbolically associated with the female body; both were available to the colonial and patriarchal gaze40. Challenging that specific distribution cannot only be a matter of proposing new representations but must also include subverting that gaze. The concept of body-territory yields a transformation, an expansion according to Gago, of the “way of seeing, based on bodies experienced as territories and territories experienced as bodies”41. This reshaping of the gaze entails new forms of inhabiting the world, and of perceiving it. Cabezón Cámara imagines what it could be to narrate from the bodies experienced as territories when the Selk’nam people tell the newcomers that they are the desert42, and when her protagonist claims, “I’d already become air in the desert”43 as a way of preparing to be part of the Iñchiñ people. Territories are bodies in No es un río as they claim a right to opacity: the river is described as “blacker than the night”44, “dark, thick”45. It is unfathomable.

New narrative regimes

  • 46 G. Giorgi, op. cit., p. 2.

14The history of narrating landscapes and territories in Latin America is made up of a heterogenous body of discourses and traditions, including indigenous tales, chronicles of the conquest, accounts of European naturalists, the romantic and costumbrist movements of the 19th century – which took specific features in the region –, and the novela de la tierra. The different geographies that I am proposing to study here – the desert, the pampas, the littoral – are saturated by these cultural imprints, sedimented upon them throughout history. These traces are not innocuous symbolic presences, but layers that determine the shape of the surface. Considering that we are referring to a postcolonial territory, it is evident that this inscription is framed in a traumatic collective experience. Landscapes, as natural, cultural, and historical compositions, can be understood as archives of this violence, as well as of the forms of resistance that it has encountered. Adopting a new narrative regime to portray these landscapes means reorganizing the structures under which they are perceived and understood, it means creating a new distribution of “the vectors of affections, of the display of relationships between bodies and materials, which is the terrain where aesthetic work operates”46.

  • 47 Following the declaration of independence from the Spanish Crown in 1816 and the subsequent seven d (...)
  • 48 G. Cabezón Cámara, The Adventures of China Iron, op. cit., p. 153.

15Cabezón Cámara’s act of rewriting the Argentine desert, a territory that was the site of one of the most brutal genocides perpetrated by the Argentine state47, cannot be separated from the search for new forms of narrating its historical and contemporary violence. By troubling the boundaries between history and fiction, character and author, historical past and imagined future, Las aventuras de la China Iron challenges the dominant national narrative, while at the same time building new communities formed by the specters that have always haunted that very narrative. The novel depicts various experiences that challenge the divide between civilization and barbarism, the structures of gender and sexuality, and the anthropocentrism of modern societies, showing how these paradigms are fundamental to the construction of modern capitalism and coloniality. New forms of being emerge from and against these violences, and their symbolic and material imprint. The narrative finds the cracks of those dominant discourses and uses them as its own writing material. The Selk’nam people’s assertion that they are the desert48 is an act of resistance that rewrites the historical invisibility to which indigenous peoples were subjected. This claim materializes at the end of the novel, when the whole community relocates to the Paraná River, fleeing from the Argentine army. As a practice of surviving, they learn to ‘disappear’ when they need to:

  • 49 Ibid., p. 188. “Hay que vernos, pero no nos van a ver. Sabemos irnos como si nos tragara la nada: i (...)

I wish you could see us; but no one will. We know how to leave as if vanishing into thin air: imagine a people that disappears, a people whose colours, houses, dogs, clothes, cows and horses all gradually dissolve like a spectre: their outline turns blurry and insubstantial, the colours fade, and everything melts into the white cloud. And so we go49.

  • 50 It could also be categorized under the genre proposed by Donna Haraway, “SF”. Although the acronym (...)
  • 51 G. Giorgi, op. cit., p. 7.

16The phantasmatic presence of those excluded from the Argentine nation is not a passive existence but a transmutation that strains the boundaries between life and death, it creates a way of being that reconfigures the notions of time and space. The journey of this people from the desert to the littoral, changing the pampas for the Paraná River and, above all, their ability to disappear in the fog when autumn arrives is a crystallization of the new form of relationality between territory and bodies put forward in the novel. This queer and ecological utopia50 is not based on a common knowledge about how to better relate to nature, how to be more respectful or sustainable. These characters are the territory where they live, they are the historical violence and discourses that inhabit it, and the practices and power that it exerts. Being the desert here is not merely surviving, it is a condition that opens the possibility to embody a common life where the common holds different classes, races, nations, genders and even harbors the limits of the human51.

17In No es un río, Selva Almada takes a different path to that of speculative fiction, or utopian creation, to argue against entrenched discourses about the territory. The negated indefinite article in the novel’s title already announces a resistance to the abstraction of rational though, especially in its relationship with nature. Aguirre’s meditations, submerged in the breath of the monte as the wind blows through the trees’ branches, are a trenchant statement about the bond between language and nature:

  • 52 S. Almada, Not a River, op. cit., p. 56. "No son solamente árboles. Ni yuyos. / No son solamentes p (...)

They’re not just trees. Not just bushes. 
They’re not just birds. Not just bugs.
The quitilipi isn’t a wildcat, though perched on a branch it might look like one.
They’re not just any guinea pigs. It’s this guinea pig.
This yarará.
This bromeliad, unique, its centre red like a woman’s blood.
If he looks farther on, to where the road slopes down, he can just about see the river. A glint that makes his eyes water. And again: it’s not a river, it’s this river. He’s spent more time with it than with anyone
52.

18The gesture of reintroducing the deictic each time a different being is named aims to reclaim a singularity for those situated existences. The narrative refuses turning them into an object of geography or biology, a shapeless res extensa waiting for the res cogitans to come and turn them into an intelligible, studiable, and exploitable entity. This river that is not a river is singular in its material and historical existence, in its relationship with the various actants who interact with it and in its specific affective power. It’s not a matter of essence but rather one of shared praxis.

19Both novels share a common concern for the rhythm of their narrations, a poetic quest for a certain sonority that opens the narrative to other entry points. Each territory has its own cadence, where the distance of representation is troubled – although never fully collapsed – and the traces of the material experiences are articulated in the situated sounds and words of those who inhabit them, that are them. As Almada’s fishermen rock their boat to peel the ray from the bottom of the river, the narrative adopts a cadence that submerges the reader in that movement:

  • 53 S. Almada, Not a River, ibid., p. 8. "Muevanlá, muevanlá. Zaraden, zaranden. Que se despegue que se (...)

Pump and reel, pump and reel. She’s hugging the bottom. Get her up, get her up.
After two, three hours, tired and almost through, Enero repeats the instructions in a murmur, like a prayer.

All good. You guys keep going. Pump and reel, pump and reel. She’s hugging the bottom. Get her up, get her up
53.

  • 54 F. Garramuño, La experiencia opaca: literatura y desencanto, Buenos Aires, Fondo de Cultura Económi (...)

20The rhythm echoes the experience of the river. Following the work of Florencia Garramuño, one could say that these rhythms are “opaque residues, already elaborated and, therefore, something other than that exteriority”54.

21In Las aventuras de la China Iron, the desert and the territory beyond the border, around the Kultral-ko lake, are told using different strategies. While the narration of the desert focuses on the interplay between the various layers of meaning sedimented in the historical and literary construction of this specific geography, the narrative of the territory beyond the border confronts the reader more directly with a reflection on the affective dimension of writing. When narrating these collective experiences of the Kutral-ko lake and its surroundings, the novel becomes watery, adopting both the fluidity of water as a substance, and its capacity to permeate bodies and surfaces:

  • 55 G. Cabezón Cámara, The Adventures of China Iron, op. cit., p. 180. “A mí la indecisión de la laguna (...)

The indecision of the water made me giggle, shyly at first, and then helplessly till I was in stitches: Kutral-Có doesn’t know what colour to be, it’s alive, the lagoon is an animal, look Estreya, I called my dog over, our sister the lake can’t make her mind up! Look Kaukalitrán, look how my Estreya has the sun inside him! Look Liz, look what a beautiful puma Kaukalitrán is! Watch me run on my two ñandú feet, look how no one can catch me, Rosa, not even you with your lightning young horses. Look puma, see me outrun you! Come on Kauka, I want to swim55.

  • 56 F. Garramuño, op. cit., p. 46.

22The poetic cadence of Selva Almada’s writing is also very fluctuant. The short sentences that mark the oral-like rhythm of the narration, at times, resemble verses out of a poem, each one occupying its own space, calling for a different, more spaced-out, reading time. Like the waves created by a boat cruising a river, the narrative sets a pace that follows the different densities and consistencies of the landscapes. The sparsity of the writing, coupled with a markedly regional lexicon, exhibits a local specificity without falling into folkloric glorification. The cadence of the text is not a mimetic impression of the sounds of that region, but a poetic articulation of the situated experiences that take place there, of the bonds and ties that conform those singular landscapes. The literary form can be understood in these two novels as a “heteronomous manifestation of those heterogenous logics on which it reflects”56. The form is heteronomous in the sense that its meaning is found outside of itself; its intelligibility is not provided by its own terms but, rather, by the singular, specific formulation of a relationship in which, nonetheless, it is also part.

Conclusion

  • 57 M. Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds, Minneapolis (...)

23The novels Las aventuras de la China Iron and No es un río build complex experiences between human and the more than human worlds57 that complicate conventional notions of subjectivity and autonomy. They participate in the contemporary uncertainty of the New Climate Regime that faces a growing destabilization of apparently established truths, in particular the opposition between nature and culture, with its various political, epistemological, and cultural implications. Nonetheless, these texts do not try to create new stable moorings. Instead, they build on this derangement to raise questions about the status of literature and writing in this particular context.

  • 58 G. Heffes, Políticas de la destrucción, poéticas de la preservación: apuntes para una lectura (eco) (...)

24The formal explorations that I describe in my analysis are the articulations of these questions. Following Gisela Heffes, one could say that they reflect a new “aesthetic praxis”, that engages “a new critical episteme”58. Almada and Cabezón Cámara multiply the images, the rhythms and the grammars to narrate different ways of existing in the world, while foregrounding the force of literature in forging and imagining new relationships between subjects, objects, beings, and their environment. From this endeavor emerges a literary text that is more permeable, and that seeks to poetically construct this permeability. These novels are concerned with their form in terms of the affective relationships that it establishes with its context. They put forward a permeability of the literary writing, in its inevitable unboundedness, as unpredictably affected by the various sensible and material surfaces that it comes in contact with. This may be their greatest contribution to the ongoing derangement.

25By recasting how territories are narrated, the new narrative regime that these novels adopt makes a strong political and aesthetical statement. The territories related in these texts are not metaphors nor symbols, and they are not mere reflections. These novels create a poetics of the material agency of beings and actants that have historically been dismissed as passive or, at best, merely plastic, such as lakes, rivers, or the sky. They shake the grounds of modern identities, both in their ideological content, and in the literary, scientific, and political discourses that have contributed to create them. At the heart of this critique, we find the questioning of rigid divisions, and the setting in place of more fluid and permeable relationships between the characters and their environment, as well as between the text and its context.

Haut de page

Bibliographie

Alaimo S., « Trans-corporeal and the ethical space of nature », in S. Alaimo and S. Hekman (dir.), Material Feminisms, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2008.

Almada S., Not a River, Edinburgh, Charco Press, 2024.

Almada S., No es un río, Buenos Aires, Penguin Random House, 2020.

Andermann J., Tierras en trance: arte y naturaleza después del paisaje, Santiago de Chile, Ediciones Metales Pesados, 2018.

Butler J., Precarious Life the Powers of Mourning and Violence, London, Verso, 2004.

Cabezón Cámara G., The Adventures of China Iron, Edinburgh, Charco Press, 2019.

Cabezón Cámara G., Las aventuras de la China Iron, Buenos Aires, Penguin Random House, 2017.

Cabnal L., “De las Opresiones a las Emancipaciones: Mujeres Indígenas en Defensa del Territorio Cuerpo-tierra”, Revista Pueblos, 6, 2015.

Croce M., “Provocaciones al canon: género y crítica acicateados en Las aventuras de la China Iron”, Palimpsesto, 10(17), 2020.

Danowski D. and Viveiros de Castro E., Há mundo por vir? ensaio sobre os medos e os fins, São Paulo, Cultura e Barbárie, 2017.

French J. and Heffes G. (dir.), The Latin American Ecocultural Reader, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2021.

Gago V., Feminist International: How to Change Everything, London, New York, Verso, 2020.

Garramuño F., La experiencia opaca: literatura y desencanto, Buenos Aires, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2009.

Ghosh A., The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Giorgi G., “Temblor del tiempo humano: política de la novela en Juan Cárdenas”, Cuadernos de Literatura, 24, 2021.

Gómez F., “No es un río de Selva Almada: persistencias e inflexiones de una narrativa de provincia”, Literatura: teoría, historia, crítica, 25(1), 2023.

Haraway D., Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, Duke University Press, 2016.

Heffes G., Políticas de la destrucción, poéticas de la preservación: apuntes para una lectura (eco)crítica del medio ambiente en América Latina, Rosario, Viterbo, 2013.

Latour B., Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Cambridge, Polity, 2017.

Puig de la Bellacasa M., “‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’: Thinking with Care”, The Sociological Review, 60(2), 2012.

Puig de la Bellacasa M., Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Rancière J., Le Partage du sensible : esthétique et politique, Paris, Fabrique, 2000.

Rivera Garza C., Escrituras geológicas, Madrid, Frankfurt am Main, Iberoamericana, Vervuert, 2022.

Sabsay L., “Permeable Bodies. Vulnerability, Affective Powers, Hegemony”, in J. Butler, Z. Gambetti and L. Sabsay (dir.), Vulnerability in Resistance, Durham, Duke University Press, 2016.

Tuana N., “Viscous porosity: Witnessing Katrina”, in S. Alaimo and Hekman S. (dir.), Material Feminisms, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2008.

Haut de page

Notes

1 B. Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2017, p. 3. Emphasis added.

2 D. Danowski and E. Viveiros de Castro, Há mundo por vir? ensaio sobre os medos e os fins, São Paulo, Cultura e Barbárie, 2017; B. Latour, ibid.

3 L. Sabsay, “Permeable Bodies. Vulnerability, Affective Powers, Hegemony”, in J. Butler, Z. Gambetti and L. Sabsay (dir.), Vulnerability in resistance, Durham, Duke University Press, 2016, p. 286.

4 J. Rancière, Le Partage du sensible : esthétique et politique, Paris, Fabrique, 2000.

5 The works of Gabriela Cabezón Cámara have been translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Danish. Similarly, the works of Selva Almada have been translated into English, French, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, and German. The English version of both novels, published by Charco Press, were shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020 and 2024, respectively.

6 Almada is particularly renowned for her examination of feminicide in her non-fiction work, Chicas muertas (Dead Girls) (2014). As for Cabezón Cámara, she has specifically addressed gender violence in the nouvelle Le viste la cara a Dios (You Saw the Face of God) (2011) that she then adapted, in collaboration with the illustrator Iñaki Echeverría, into the graphic novel Beya (Le viste la cara a Dios) (2014).

7 For an analysis of how Almada develops a “provincial narrative” that diverges from the standard Spanish spoken in Buenos Aires and addresses themes that are not often found in Argentine literature, see: F. Gómez, “No es un río de Selva Almada: persistencias e inflexiones de una narrativa de provincial”, Literatura: teoría, historia, crítica, 25(1), 2023. For a study on the relationship between the work of Cabezón Cámara and the Argentine national canon as evidenced in Las aventuras de la China Iron, see: M. Croce, “Provocaciones al canon: género y crítica acicateados en Las aventuras de la China Iron”, Palimpsesto, 10(17), 2020.

8 G. Giorgi, “Temblor del tiempo humano: política de la novela en Juan Cárdenas”, Cuadernos de Literatura, 24, 2021, p. 5. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Spanish are my own.

9 J. Andermann, Tierras en trance: arte y naturaleza después del paisaje, Santiago de Chile, Ediciones Metales Pesados, 2018, p. 18.

10 Ibid.

11 As advanced by J. French and G. Heffes, in the present, the region “is the locus of important ecological contests” (J. French and G. Heffes (dir.), The Latin American ecocultural reader, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2021, p. 8).

12 C. Rivera Garza, Escrituras geológicas, Madrid, Frankfurt am Main, Iberoamericana, Vervuert, 2022, p. 10.

13 Ibid., p. 9.

14 Ibid., p. 14.

15 The term monte in Spanish can refer both to an elevated terrain or to an uncultivated piece of land that is covered by vegetation of different kind. It is in this last sense that the term is employed in the novel No es un río.

16 Amitav Gosh, building on Franco Moretti’s ideas, argues that the novel’s modern form is accomplished by displacing the improbable towards the background and foregrounding the everyday. This symbolic movement is paired with a new perspective of nature that appears in the late nineteen century. According to this perspective, nature is moderate and orderly, devoid from the power to evoke that form of terror and awe associated with the sublime. For the Indian author, the establishment of this new outlook has a strong colonial rooting. Nature and landscapes, seen in this context as predictable and uneventful, are relegated to the status of setting. Moreover, argues Gosh, they are constructed out of discontinuities: since each setting is particular to itself, its connections to the world become inevitably less significant. This specific operation turns landscapes and territories, now understood as setting, into the « vessel for the exploration of that ultimate instance of discontinuity: the nation-state » (A. Ghosh, The great derangement: climate change and the unthinkable, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2016, p. 59). But discontinuities of space are accompanied by discontinuities of time, and the fixing of these boundaries transforms places into texts that can be read.

17 G. Cabezón Cámara, The Adventures of China Iron, Edinburgh, Charco Press, 2019, p. 144; p. 10; p. 53; p. 141.

18 Ibid., p. 6. “Primero luchaban hombres, perros, caballos y terneros huyéndole a lo que asfixia, a lo que chupa, a lo fuerte del agua que nos mata” (G. Cabezón Cámara, Las aventuras de la China Iron, Buenos Aires, Penguin Random House, 2017, p. 12. Emphasis added).

19 J. Andermann, op. cit., p. 14.

20 S. Almada, Not a River, Edinburgh, Charco Press, 2024, p. 15. “Este hombre no es del monte y el monte lo sabe. Pero lo deja. Que se meta, que se quede el tiempo que le lleve juntar leña. Después, el propio monte va a escupirlo, los brazos llenos de ramas, otra vez hacia la orilla” (S. Almada, No es un río, Buenos Aires, Penguin Random House, 2020, p. 21).

21 S. Almada, Not a River, ibid., p. 79. “Tiene miedo. Le parece que algo los sigue y por más que gira la cabeza sobre su hombro no puede ver más que monte” (S. Almada, No es un río, ibid., p. 109).

22 S. Almada, Not a River, ibid., p. 55. “Conoce mejor el monte de lo que se conoce él” (S. Almada, No es un río, ibid., p. 76).

23 S. Almada, Not a River, ibid., p. 87. “El monte los conoce desde gurisitos” (S. Almada, No es un río, ibid., p. 120).

24 Since childhood, Enero dreams of the Ahogado [the drowned man], a ghostly figure that announces the death of his friend Eusebio.

25 S. Almada, Not a River, op. cit. p. 24. “A veces los sueños son ecos del futuro” (S. Almada, No es un río, op. cit., p. 34).

26 G. Giorgi, op. cit., p. 4.

27 S. Almada, Not a River, op. cit., p. 39. “Siempre queda algo de uno donde uno muere” (S. Almada, No es un río, op. cit., p. 53).

28 J. Butler, Precarious life the powers of mourning and violence, London, Verso, 2004, p. 21.

29 M. Puig de la Bellacasa, "‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’: Thinking with Care", The Sociological Review, 60(2), 2012, p. 200. Emphasis in the original.

30 S. Almada, Not a River, op. cit., p. 87.

31 G. Cabezón Cámara, The Adventures of China Iron, op. cit., p. 33. “… de ser reducidos a eso que también somos, una estructura ósea, mineral, como las piedras” (G. Cabezón Cámara, Las aventuras de la China Iron, op. cit., p. 34).

32 N. Tuana, “Viscous porosity: Witnessing Katrina”, in S. Alaimo and S. Hekman (dir.), Material feminisms, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2008, p. 191.

33 J. Butler, op. cit., p. 24.

34 G. Cabezón Cámara, The Adventures of China Iron, op. cit., p. 94. “Nos abrazábamos, nos queríamos aún más en el hedor a muerte de las cercanías del fortín, el amor se nos consolidaba ante la percepción de la precariedad que somos, nos deseábamos en nuestras fragilidades” (G. Cabezón Cámara, Las aventuras de la China Iron, op. cit., p. 83).

35 L. Cabnal, “De las Opresiones a las Emancipaciones: Mujeres Indígenas en Defensa del Territorio Cuerpo-tierra”, Revista Pueblos, 6, 2015, p. 3.

36 V. Gago, Feminist international: how to change everything, London, New York, Verso, 2020, p. 85.

37 S. Alaimo, “Trans-corporeal and the ethical space of nature”, in S. Alaimo and S. Hekman (dir.), Material feminisms, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2008, p. 237.

38 Ibid.

39 V. Gago, op. cit., p. 83.

40 J. Andermann, op. cit., p. 15.

41 V. Gago, op. cit, p. 85. Emphasis in the original.

42 G. Cabezón Cámara, The Adventures of China Iron, op. cit., p. 179.

43 Ibid., p. 209. “Ya me había hecho del aire en el desierto” (G. Cabezón Cámara, Las aventuras de la China Iron, op. cit., p. 170).

44 S. Almada, Not a River, op. cit., p. 31. “El río es más negro que la noche” (S. Almada, No es un río, op. cit., p. 42).

45 S. Almada, Not a River, ibid. “Espesa, oscura” (S. Almada, No es un río, ibid., p. 43).

46 G. Giorgi, op. cit., p. 2.

47 Following the declaration of independence from the Spanish Crown in 1816 and the subsequent seven decades of civil war, the Argentine State initiated an expansionist campaign aimed at conquering the territory now known as Patagonia, the southernmost region of the continent, which was still under indigenous control. It then launched a series of military incursions under the name of The Desert Campaign, that ended in 1885 with the effective annexation of that territory. Far from being a mere description of the geography of the territory, the choice of the word ‘desert’ was motivated by the intention to construe said territory as empty, vacant, uninhabited. The objective was the physical and cultural obliteration of the indigenous dwellers of those lands. The specific construction of the indigenous as barbarians and of the desert as empty – and here empty should be better understood as voided of culture, of civilization, and therefore without possibility of progress – was a key element to the shaping of a national identity.

48 G. Cabezón Cámara, The Adventures of China Iron, op. cit., p. 153.

49 Ibid., p. 188. “Hay que vernos, pero no nos van a ver. Sabemos irnos como si nos tragara la nada: imagínense un pueblo que se esfuma, un pueblo del que pueden ver los colores y las casas y los perros y los vestidos y las vacas y los caballos y se va desvaneciendo como un fantasma: pierden definición sus contornos, brillos sus colores, se funde todo con la nube blanca. Así viajamos” (G. Cabezón Cámara, Las aventuras de la China Iron, op. cit., p. 185).

50 It could also be categorized under the genre proposed by Donna Haraway, “SF”. Although the acronym might firstly remit to science fiction, for her it also means, “speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far” (D. Haraway, Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, Duke University Press, 2016, p. 2). This could be very well what Cabezón Cámara is proposing in the final part of her novel.

51 G. Giorgi, op. cit., p. 7.

52 S. Almada, Not a River, op. cit., p. 56. "No son solamente árboles. Ni yuyos. / No son solamentes pájaros. Ni insectos. / El quitilipi no es un gato montés aunque de repente pueda parecer. / No son unos cuises. Es este cuis. / Esta yarará. / Este caraguatá, único, con su centro rojo como la sangre de una mujer. / Si alarga la vista, donde la calle baja, llega a ver el río. Un resplandor que humedece los ojos. Y otra vez: no es un río, es este río. Ha pasado más tiempo con él que con nadie” (S. Almada, No es un río, op. cit., p. 76).

53 S. Almada, Not a River, ibid., p. 8. "Muevanlá, muevanlá. Zaraden, zaranden. Que se despegue que se despegue. / Después de dos, tres horas, cansado, medio harto ya, Enero repite las órdenes en un murmullo, como si rezara. / … / No pasa nada. Ustedes sigan. Muevanlá, muevanlá. Zaraden, zaranden. Que se despegue que se despegue" (S. Almada, No es un río, ibid., p. 11).

54 F. Garramuño, La experiencia opaca: literatura y desencanto, Buenos Aires, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2009, p. 27.

55 G. Cabezón Cámara, The Adventures of China Iron, op. cit., p. 180. “A mí la indecisión de la laguna me hizo gracia, primero tímidamente y enseguida a las carcajadas: no sabe Kutral-Có de qué color ser, está viva, la laguna es un animal, mirá Estreya la hermana laguna indecisa, llamaba a mi perrito, mirá Kaukalitrán cómo tiene metido el sol mi Estreya, mirá Liz qué hermosa puma es Kaukalitrán, mirá cómo corro sobre mis dos patas de ñandú, mirá cómo no me alcanza nadie, Rosa, ni vos con los rayos de tus potros, mirá puma cómo te corro, Kauka, vení, me quiero bañar (G. Cabezón Cámara, Las aventuras de la China Iron, op. cit., p. 152-153). Note that in the original Spanish version, the reflection is all one long sentence where dialogues are not differentiated, and the narrator’s interlocutor shifts without any indication.

56 F. Garramuño, op. cit., p. 46.

57 M. Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

58 G. Heffes, Políticas de la destrucción, poéticas de la preservación: apuntes para una lectura (eco)crítica del medio ambiente en América Latina, Rosario, Viterbo, 2013, p. 21.

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence papier

Ana Marina Gamba, « Unbounded Territories. New Narrative Regimes in Contemporary Argentine Literature »Sextant, 41 | 2024, 111-124.

Référence électronique

Ana Marina Gamba, « Unbounded Territories. New Narrative Regimes in Contemporary Argentine Literature »Sextant [En ligne], 41 | 2024, mis en ligne le 20 décembre 2024, consulté le 10 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/sextant/11713 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/131oa

Haut de page

Auteur

Ana Marina Gamba

Ana Marina Gamba is a doctoral candidate at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). Her research, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SFNS), examines the discourses and aesthetics of vulnerability in contemporary Latin American literature written by women. Her articles on cinema and literature, studied from the perspective of gender theory, have appeared in Latin American, American, and European journals.

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search