Talking to the Monster: Poisoned Bodies, Youth, and Animals in Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream and Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season

Abstract

Current Latin American literature is populated by social anxieties in the face of contemporary crises. Figures such as the monstrous child when linked to non-human animals serve not only as resources of the Latin American Neo-Gothic, but also raise questions about how human-animal boundaries are represented and how they are destabilized by the monstrous. Authors Samantha Schweblin in Fever Dream (Distancia de rescate, 2014) and Fernanda Melchor in Hurricane Season (Temporada de huracanes, 2017) create David and Brando, respectively—strange children who interact with non-human animals and, by extension, with the natural world. Using Sowon Park’s concept of anthropomorphic gaze, this paper aims to explore how David and Brando are marginalized by normative gazes that construct them as monsters, while said factor also allows them to achieve an imaginative sympathy with which to communicate with non-human animals. Through a comparative analysis with an ecocritical lens, this work seeks to string the commonalities and differences between both young boys. Finally, it is interpreted that anthropomorphizing the gaze functions as a field of possibility in which empathy dis- and re-articulates the human-animal binary by building bridges of recognition and understanding of the other—or, rather, the monster—that are revolutionary against systems of biopolitical regulation and exploitative dynamics that damage the lives and spaces in both novels.