It is not often that I allow the internet to persuade me to read things. Given that my reading is governed primarily by whim, it is often difficult for even my friends to convince me to pick up a book. And yet, there was so much hype online about Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh that when I found a water-damaged copy in a neighbourhood little library in early October, it seemed like fate to pick up this horror-ish novel for a spooky autumnal read.
If you listen to the internet, the primary draw of the book is how grotesque it is. I’m hesitant to refer to it as outright horror, but the story does take place in a post-apocalyptic world in which animals have become inedible. Prior to the opening of the book, there’s a deadly virus that spread through animals, resulting in a pet genocide and a radical reimagining (sort of) of the meat industry. You guessed it: the new, “special meat” is people and factory-farmed cannibalism is the norm.
I described Tender is the Flesh earlier as a “horror-ish” novel, but I think some elements of the structure take away from the horrific power of the text. Let’s talk first about focalization. The novel centres on Marcos, a downtrodden and apathetic employee at a processing plant for human meat. This allows Bazterrica to lay her world bare for readers, staging a plant tour for prospective new employees. The scene is certainly grotesque—it gets graphic on how people are killed, dismembered, packaged, and soon. The worst of all, I think, is the room of impregnated women whose arms and legs have been removed; they existed as bloated bellies with heads. The imagery is revolting, but it’s horrific in the same way that a safety training video at work is horrific. There’s no mystery or subtlety to drive the tension.
Actually, the horror is less like a safety training video and more like undercover footage of factory farmed animals. The horror here isn’t speculative, just displaced. Everything that is done to humans in this book is already perpetuated against animals: being forcibly sterilized and inseminated, being pumped full of chemicals, being dismembered for the convenience of their captors, being stunned and murdered, and so on. I’m not sure how many instances there are of animals having their vocal chords torn out, but that’s another element of this novel. The descriptions of factory farms in Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer could be transplanted into Tender is the Flesh and, if it weren’t for the mentions of hooves and beaks, nobody would notice.
If you’ve done some reading or thinking around the consumption of animals, you’re likely already familiar with the obfuscating effect of language when discussing the ethics of meat. For instance, the way we transform “cow” into “beef” or “baby cows” into “veal” or “pig” into “pork” or “bacon” or “ham” or any number of words that disguise what we’re actually doing. While I don’t have the capacity to discuss the linguistic nuances for the ethics of eating animals here, language is critical to Bazterrica’s work.
The first hint of Bazterrica’s interest in language is in the epigraph for the text. She includes an epigraph from Gilles Deleuze, which reads “What we see never lies in what we say.” The second half of the book begins with an epigraph from Samuel Beckett, who also (in my mind) is a writer obsessed with language and animality: “...like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage, born and then dead, born in a cage and then dead in a cage, in a word like a beast, in one of their words, like such a beast…”.
There are clear references throughout the text about how language normalizes practices we would normally see as unethical. The fact that humans destined for consumption are called “heads” creates a separate class of existence for them, and nobody eats human meat: they eat “special meat.” Moreover, there are a number of references to Marcos’ perception of language. Bazterrica’s reflections are presented as both ethical and poetic, sometimes to an excessive degree. In the span of a few pages where Marcos eats with his sister, niece, and nephew, there are at least three references to how words feel: “Estebancito looks at him with a sparkle full of words like splintered trees and silent tornadoes” (99), “Her words get stuck inside her as though trapped in vacuum-packed plastic bags” (101), “His sister’s words are like dry leaves piled up in a corner, rotting” (103). The persistent metaphors are evocative, though I’m not sure if it quite gels with the obfuscating nature of language in the ethical discourse of the text.
The conversation around language works, though, because it operates in conjunction with a critique of the visual language of our culture. For one, if the book is horrific, it is because that which we are regularly able to ignore when it is within the walls of a factory farm. Bazterrica presents the gruesome conditions with vivid detail. This is an overgeneralization, but the first half of the book seems to focus on establishing the language that hides horror and the second half explores more of the implications of visual representations. For example, the first chapter in part two begins when Marcos “turns on the TV, presses the mute button, and flips through the channels without paying attention” (123). I think it’s significant that Marcos turns off the sound—words are erased and replaced with image alone. Moreover, the images on the screen are themselves depictions of depictions. It’s footage of when “People had started vandalizing urban sculptures of animals. The program shows a group of individuals throwing paint, rubbish, and eggs at the Wall Street Bull. Then it cuts to other images, a crane raising the bronze sculpture that weighs more than three thousand kilograms, the bull moving through the air while people look on in horror, point at it, cover their mouths” (123). The Wall Street Bull is such an iconic image of an animal. Without getting into too much of the symbolism, I think it’s significant that a bull—an animal routinely toyed with and murdered before onlookers for sport—is the image here, particularly since Wall Street is a symbol of economic interest. The bull, supposedly an image of strength, is doubly reduced to a metaphor of consumption. The visual language takes over as people “look on in horror, point at it, [and most notably] cover their mouths.” The same passage then discusses the iconography of animals in art museums being destroyed, including paintings by Goya and Klee.
Perhaps more critical is that a significant portion of the second part of the book takes place at a now decrepit zoo. The animals were all killed off long ago, but Marcos finds a family of puppies, with whom he finds affinity. Despite his own life being at risk when the pack finds him, he still goes to great lengths to ensure the dogs can survive after his escape. The zoo is symbolic of the way we use our power of perception to reduce others to the level of consumption. Zoos themselves are built for spectators, and Marcos notes the defaced signs at the zoo where images are paired with derogatory words about the animals.
All this to say, I think that Batzerrica is putting forward an argument for animal rights and recognizing the twofold reduction of our animal counterparts via language and imagery. By substituting in humans for animals, Bazterrica points to the absurdity and cruelty of our extant system but there are a few details that complicate the matters.
A key complication here—and one of the few that is not given a clear answer in Bazterrica’s straightforward world-building—is a layer of conspiracy. There are several references throughout the text that, perhaps, this resorting to cannibalism may not be necessary at all. Rumours that it’s a government plot to reduce overpopulation, to create a more consistent food supply, and so on, abound. There are suggestions that the virus infecting the animals is a sham. For instance, when it comes to the dogs in the zoo, Marcos goes to visit them and finds that a group of teenagers are torturing and murdering the puppies. When one of them gets bit, the boys in the group toy with the idea of killing him. It’s a tense moment where the boy has to convince them that the virus isn’t real and that he won’t get sick and die. Similarly, Marcos’ sister insists on providing him with an umbrella with the implication that all rain is beyond acidic—possibly parasitic? Marcos continually refuses the umbrella and yet experiences no ill-effects, possibly giving credence to the idea that there is misinformation about the health-effects the government has advertised.
That’s an area that is potentially more controversial. I won’t touch Covid conspiracy theories with a ten foot pole, but it’s interesting that this novel, originally published in 2017, makes the connection between conspiracy theories, a mysterious virus, and the mass slaughter of animals who bear the blame for it. When it comes to the real world, politically, it’s a little dubious to suggest that this post-apocalypse is spurred on by fake news about meat consumption. But I’ll leave that be for now. There’s another conspiracy at the end that’s more straightforward to comment on: towards the end of the novel, the Scavengers that lurk outside the slaughterhouse, figure out how to tip a truck. They then murder the driver and eat him before laying claim to the “heads” he was transporting. The whole issue of the Scavengers is a little unclear: it’s like they’re zombies, but still humans—a third caste on the fringes. In response, the slaughterhouse decides it will give them poisoned meat to make them think people died from the stolen meat.
There are other ethical issues that arise in such a context that exist at the more personal level. For instance, Bazterrica explores the implications of selling humans for meat consumption with respect to law and religion. Legally, measures have to be taken to prevent the mistreatment of “heads.” Being a blend somewhere between regulations for legal slave-owning and the bare minimum of animal protection laws, “heads” cannot be legally sexually assaulted and they are treated as literally branded property (branding = language + visual?). Protections need also to be put in place to establish a separate class—humans need to be protected from being eaten after their deaths, while “heads” are eaten regularly as “special meat,” sometimes even being raised in suburban homes and eaten piece by piece while being kept as a kind of pet. When Marcos is eating dinner with his sister’s family, she yells out that they don’t eat people—it’s a darkly laughable moment of cognitive dissonance.
Another implication for the human meat market is that those in debt can subject themselves to a hunt. Taken up mostly by celebrities, there’s a scene where people pay to be part of the hunt or supervise it as entertainment for a famous rock star who descended into debt. The scene where Marocs and others feast on his body is described with some gross blunt descriptions of them eating him.
Meanwhile, people pay for extra protection to ensure their bodies are not stolen or dug up after their deaths—a protection regularly ignored and guaranteed only to receive extra payment for funerals. Religious characters in the novel, by contrast, will sometimes offer themselves as sacrifice. It becomes somewhat of a death cult, for whom Marcos has no patience. The meaning of an afterlife becomes more difficult to justify when we’re all “just meat.”
Yet, Marcos retains some level of commitment to non-material idealism. Throughout the novel, Marcos cares for his senile father in a special old-age home, and when he passes he feels protective of his ashes. One might make the argument this is less sentimentalism than resentment for his sister, who never visited their father and who wants to hold a funeral for him. Instead, Marcos takes the ashes and dumps them at a place of special significance and replaces the ashes in the urn with random dirt and trash as a final act of rebellion against his sister.
The novel, in my mind, is more about establishing the world than fleshing out (pardon the pun) the characters in full. There are some nice character details, but Marcos as the main character leaves me somewhat cold. Marcos is not attributed much emotion, and his lack of affect prevent my full immersion in the story. He has what has come to be a rather lacklustre, since overused, trope. He has a child that died young, which strained the marriage to the point of separation, and he has very little motivation other than grief and very little outlet other than sex. I did not feel particularly invested in his backstory, though it does come together reasonably well in the final chapters of the book.
Before we get there, though, you’ll need some knowledge of the core subplot. Beyond the tours of the slaughterhouses, the central story is that Marcos receives a gift: essentially a “purebred” woman. Initially resisting the gift, Marcos ultimately ends up domesticating the woman, even giving her the name Jasmine. Initially, she lives in the barn, chained up and naked and provided with food and water. Over time, Marcos has her stay in bed with him, he starts clothing her, housetraining her, and so on. You may anticipate where this is headed. He impregnates her.
This is a more ethically complex issue in the book that the Internet hasn’t really discussed in full. Jasmine becomes a pet, a domesticated animal. The implications for Marcos having sex with her are much more controversial, in some ways, the “heads” are animals. There’s reference to other people using “heads” as non-consenting prostitutes and paying extra to murder and eat them. If “heads” are the same as animals, this whole situation gets much more disgusting to think about, and your sympathy, I think, should lie with Jasmine. Meanwhile, Marcos goes on to hide her pregnancy, knowing that he himself would be sent to the slaughterhouse if others found out.
The ending, if somewhat rushed, does hold an impact. When there’s a problem with Jasmine’s pregnancy, Marcos calls his estranged wife, a nurse, in desperation. The moment of revelation is rife with tension. Her horror, though, is quickly overcome by the need to take part in the birthing process. It’s surprising just how quickly she reserves judgement, but as the scene progresses it becomes clear to you that your predictions are likely right. Marcos and his wife hold the baby as Jasmine reaches out for it. As they continue to ignore her, it becomes clear that their interests are not hers.
The last dialogue in the text makes a dark moment darker and darker still. It becomes clear that Marcos is going to kill Jasmine—after all, how can he avoid being apprehended for this illicit birth? He shows her tenderness as she “wants to speak, to scream, but there are no sounds” (209). Marcos knocks her unconscious, preparing to murder her. His wife “jumps when she hears the thud and looks at him without understanding. ‘Why?’ she yells. ‘She could have given us more children’” (209). Cecilia’s objection is not a humanitarian one, but a self-interested one. It’s a dark turn that Cecilia envisions Jasmine’s continual exploitation. Marcos, though, who in just a few scenes previously stormed out of his father’s funeral when he accuses his sister of hypocrisy for having a ‘house-head’ in a makeshift fridge that they’re eating bit by bit, rejects his wife’s objection. When she demands to know why he’s going to kill their child-producer, though, Marcos’ response is chilling: “She had the human look of a domesticated animal” (209). The ending reinforces a class division between real humans and heads, but it intimates that the distinction has eroded. When recognizing the “human look” (again: perception), it’s too uncomfortable. The irony of a domesticated animal being more human than the real humans being exploited as “heads” is a wonderful web of inversions to conclude the novel. It’s an excellent final line to complicate the ‘argument’ of the text.
The Internet can be hit-or-miss on its recommendations. People were, briefly, obsessed with this book. I can see the value of the book if you’re looking for a discussion of ethics and morality. There are a number of aspects of the book to “sink your teeth into,” as it were. As a literary work, I would say my review is ultimately mixed. The style of writing has some nice lines, but it often is a direct matter-of-fact tone. I wonder if part of the sometimes stilted language is part of the translation, but I’m not qualified to answer that question. The characters are somewhat drab or uninteresting. There are some compelling moments, which are when Marcos is most contradictory to himself. Cold and apathetic throughout, the moments of tenderness stand out as bizarre inconsistencies in his spirit.
I’ll be curious to see the lasting impact of Tender is the Flesh. It’s an interesting book, but will it have the capacity to break through our collective cognitive dissonance to have an impact? Will it be seen as a literary classic? A classic in the realm of body horror? Time will tell, or if not time, then at least the Internet.
Happy reading!
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