49 pages • 1 hour read
Agustina BazterricaTender Is the Flesh
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Commodification of Humanity Under Capitalism
Content Warning: The source text includes graphic depictions of cannibalism, sexual assault, mass human suffering, incarceration, misogynistic violence (including reproductive violence), and death by suicide.
Through the normalization and proliferation of cannibalism as a legitimate corporate enterprise, Bazterrica figuratively demonstrates the way that capitalism dehumanizes people, reducing them to products and incentivizing them to feed on each other, literally or otherwise.
In imagining a world where people are raised and slaughtered as livestock, Bazterrica draws attention to the mass manipulation of people through governmental and economic systems. As one of the teenagers puts it when he posits that the alleged virus is a hoax, “Can’t you see they’re controlling us? If we eat each other, they control overpopulation, poverty, crime. Do you want me to keep going? I mean, it’s obvious” (153). These tensions also play out on a personal level in the lives of those who work at Krieg. For instance, though Tejo dreads his work and considers it unethical, he fulfills his duties out of a desperate need to provide for his father and other family members. Nor is he alone in following that line of reasoning, as Sergio’s explanation of his work as a stunner makes clear. The taller job applicant exemplifies how people fall into this cycle of violence; while he is repulsed by processes at the slaughterhouse, he applies for the job after his girlfriend becomes pregnant. Again and again, the capitalist system forces employees to choose between meeting their needs and maintaining their integrity. In the end, necessity almost always wins.
Expanding on this theme, Bazterrica presents cannibalism as a natural outgrowth of capitalism, not a new or separate phenomenon. From this perspective, the Transition only reveals the rottenness that was already present in the system more clearly. As Urlet tells Tejo, “After all, since the world began, we’ve been eating each other. If not symbolically, then we’ve been literally gorging on each other. The Transition has enabled us to be less hypocritical” (142). Urlet’s comment suggests that the forms taken by human oppression over millennia are many and varied. As social commentary, this passage invites readers to consider ways in which modern societies facilitate—but also hypocritically cover up—systemic violence.
As a further result of the commodification of human life and labor, Bazterrica highlights hierarchal divisions that lead marginalized people to be further oppressed. For instance, when the truck carrying a shipment of head is capsized and overtaken by the Scavengers, Mari, the secretary, asserts that the “worst part” of the incident is the death of the driver, Luisito. In so doing, she arbitrarily disregards and devalues the humans raised as livestock who, setting aside environmental factors, are virtually identical to the privileged class of people who are not designated to be turned into meat. She also disregards the plight of the Scavengers, who are impoverished and starving. Similarly, through Tejo’s use and abuse of Jasmine, Bazterrica demonstrates the potential for women in particular to be commodified as sex objects and breeders, only to be cast aside as soon as their utility has expired.
Overall, the novel demonstrates the tendency for a system that views human beings as mere objects to be bought, sold, and manipulated to devolve into ever-greater patterns of destruction and abuse.
The Ethics of Meat Consumption
By presenting the processing of human beings for meat in ways typical of livestock farming, Bazterrica invites readers to empathize with animals and consider whether the same ethical standards should apply to them as apply to humans.
Bazterrica establishes continuity between the livestock farming of the past and the cannibalistic industry of the novel’s present. In fact, Tejo’s expertise within the industry arises because of his past experience working at his father’s meat processing plant before the Transition. Looking back, Tejo describes the difference between slaughtering animals and humans as follows: “With cows and pigs it was easy. […] True, the screams of a pig being skinned could petrify you but hearing protectors were used and eventually it became just one more sound” (4). In other words, Tejo did find the animals’ plight disturbing at first, but he adjusted and accepted it over time. Similarly, over time, he finds himself taking the slaughtering of humans in stride, however disturbing it may have been at first, though his uneasiness never fully fades.
In addition to drawing attention to disturbing aspects of meat production, Bazterrica highlights the richness and beauty of animal life in various forms. Armando’s fascination with birds opens the possibility of enjoying animal life from a distance as an observer, while Tejo’s memories of his pet dogs illustrate the potential for a closer, even more rewarding bond. Even in the case of the dogs that pursue Tejo with hostile intent at the zoo, Tejo finds much to admire and realizes that he “doesn’t want to hurt them” (115). Extended to its logical conclusion, Tejo’s pacifist attitude toward the dogs would preclude the killing and consumption of animals for meat.
Bazterrica represents the decision to abstain from eating meat as a viable and worthwhile choice. Following the death of his son, Tejo decides not to eat meat, and he maintains that stance for months until he is induced to sample the food at Urlet’s dinner. Urlet, meanwhile, embodies an attitude totally opposed to vegetarianism or anything like it. For him, the fresher the meat, the better. He even expresses a preference for eating living things. His unbounded appetite for consuming the life force of other organisms contrasts with Tejo’s sensitivity and respect for animals. Although Tejo ultimately falls short of maintaining his idealistic stance, Bazterrica’s appraisal of the attitudes and assumptions that accompany meat consumption invites readers to reconsider their own consumption habits from a fresh, empathetic perspective.
Language Versus Reality
Throughout the novel, Bazterrica examines the relationship between language, perception, and reality, showing the potential for language to manage and alter perception and, therefore, behavior.
The regulation of language is a key aspect of the Transition to cannibalism. Tejo recalls his father’s development of dementia, which coincided with the Transition. At that time, Tejo “intuited without being certain that his father’s words were about to break, that they were held together by the thinnest of transparent threads” (44). Symbolically, Armando’s personal decline and loss of language mirrors the changes that were about to take place and his inability to comprehend this new, violent world.
Following the Transition, the language used to describe the newly legitimized cannibalism industry is heavily regulated, with heavy penalties for misspeaking. However, these regulations vary from country to country, which makes Egmont Schrei’s visit to Tod Voldelig particularly insightful. During the tour of the breeding center, Tejo describes El Gringo’s words as “light words, they weigh nothing” (19). El Gringo grows momentarily uncomfortable, however, when his visitor from Germany refers to the head with terms usually reserved for people. The reason for this is given later, when Tejo describes how in the early days of the Transition, the development of “euphemisms that nullified all horror” (35). In other words, horror accompanies the realization that the beings in cages are not mindless flesh but rather fully sentient, complex human beings, no different than those who are not designated as meat. Adaptations in language are designed to prevent this from occurring. When such barriers fail, discontent and even rebellion are likely to follow, as Ency’s case demonstrates.
Throughout, Tejo is consistently irritated by words that seem to obscure or distort the truth, while he appreciates direct language. Tejo approvingly considers his friend Sergio’s words to be “simple, clear. They’re words that don’t have sharp edges” (61). Even more fundamentally, during his tryst with Spanel, Tejo is gratified to hear her release a single, primal scream during sex, showing that some communication transcends language.
By contrast, he finds several characters’ use of language highly off-putting. He notably objects to Marisa’s language, which “smell[s] of detained humidity, of confinement, of intense cold” (96). Consciously or not, Tejo’s descriptors of her language also fit the cold room she installs in her home to raise domestic head. Later, when Marisa makes excuses for not visiting Armando, her words are “like dry leaves piled up in a corner, rotting” (103). Meanwhile, the words of Marisa’s cheeky daughter, Maru, are compared to “pieces of glass melting in extreme heat, like ravens pecking out eyes in slow motion” (100). Of Urlet, Tejo asserts that the man collects words much as he collects hunting trophies. Meanwhile, Dr. Valka’s words emerge “like lava from a volcano that doesn’t stop erupting, only it’s lava that’s cold and viscous. They’re words that stick to one’s body and all [Tejo] feels is repulsion” (182). Perhaps Tejo’s perception of others’ words reveals more about him than it does about those who formulate them, but this subjectivity of response is itself a central theme of Bazterrica’s novel.
In the end, language is a battleground, a site of persuasion, control, and, potentially, resistance. When, on the novel’s final page, Tejo speaks with a voice that is “radiant, so pure it wounds” (209), it is a hollow victory for him. He is no longer a hypocrite but only because he has learned to speak the awful truth about killing Jasmine.
