Ellen Boyd
“If cultures are defined by what they eat,” posits Maggie Kilgour, “they are also stereotyped by how they speak” (8). This confluence of food and language—and how they play into defining people—is taken up by Agustina Bazterrica in her 2017 novel Tender is the Flesh. The novel takes place an unspecified time after the “transition” (4)—when all animals developed a disease that made their consumption lethal to humans. The government legalizes cannibalism to—allegedly—meet protein demands and sets aside certain populations (“immigrants, the marginalized, the poor”) of people to be bred for human consumption (7). To aid in this “transition,” the government also rolls out a vocabulary of dehumanization—people bred for human consumption become referred to as “head” or “special meat”—which is upheld by inspectors, journalists, scientists, and academics and maintains the border between people who eat and people who are eaten.
Readers follow Marcos, manager at and son of the former boss of one of the main slaughterhouses. Marcos has been separated from his wife Cecilia since their infant son died of a SIDS-like accident, and he experiences increasing depression living on his own. One day, he is gifted a “head” and names her Jasmine. Jasmine has been bred to be “first generation pure,” or, among the first to be “born and bred in captivity” (17) to suit the taste of a white supremacist, misogynistic society. Like all “head,” Jasmine is made silent by having her vocal cords removed. This paper follows Jasmine’s arc through the book, examining her fluxing status as both domestic product (meat) and domestic animal—but it begins with the ways that Marcos conceptualizes meat and animal, because it is Marcos who ultimately determines Jasmine’s fate.
The way that Marcos views Jasmine—she is meat because she cannot speak—is representative of the third element of the slaughterhouse novel, outlined by Xavier Aldana Reyes as “objectifi[ing] the body of the victim through its transformation into meat, something that happens both at literal/physical and linguistic levels” (98). But beyond objectifying Jasmine as “meat” to eat or assault, after her forced pregnancy Marcos also sees Jasmine as the raw material to nurture his future child, reunite him with Cecilia, and restore his sense of domestic bliss. In bringing this future child into personhood, Marcos and Cecilia replicate the dehumanizing and capitalistic practices of the slaughterhouse in order to (re)produce their own family unit. Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh offers a vivisection of the ways that governmental systems of dehumanization via language and physical violence feed familial reproduction.
Though a slaughterhouse manager, Marcos is presented as someone who is fond of animals. He is not afraid of them like his sister is, refusing to carry an umbrella to protect himself from birds (94). Nor can he stomach watching teenagers torture and kill a litter of puppies found in an abandoned zoo (151-53). Rather, as Sebastian Williams points out, Marcos mourns for a past that was populated by animals, and he is “acutely aware of the ‘silence’ created in a world where nonhuman animals have been almost entirely eradicated” (307). Here, it seems, Marcos longs for the noises and songs of animals as opposed to silence, which he often ties to the absence of animal life.
Yet despite this longing, Marcos himself recalls tuning out the noises of animals he used to slaughter: “the screams of a pig could petrify you, but hearing protectors were used and eventually it became just one more sound” (4). In other words, Marcos picks and chooses what animals are worth listening to and which are not, and thus what animals are worth mourning (the birds whose sounds he likes) and which are not (the pig whose screams he doesn’t like). The animals that Marcos does mourn are birds and dogs, animals that, as far as Marcos is concerned, create purposeful songs or clearly respond to his commands. To Marcos, these animals produce and understand languages, as opposed to the mute meat of the “head.” The pig’s scream, on the other hand, is an unintelligible “sound” to Marcos, and its lack of concrete words or speech patterns becomes a signifier that the pig is, perhaps, good for nothing better than consumption. Marcos’ use of hearing protectors is an attempt to disengage with the pig during its slaughter and falsely characterizes the animal as “silent meat” when he fails to distinguish the pig from other background noises. Thus, while “the novel emphasizes the language and ideology that construct the boundaries between ‘human’ and ‘animal’” (Williams 302), there seems to be another division between ‘animal’ and ‘meat,’ where meat is defined by the unintelligible sound of pain before the silence of death. This is reinforced later when Marcos recounts an injury from trying to slaughter a pig, and he uses “pig” and “meat” interchangeably to describe the animal (5). It seems that Marcos takes part in a familiar hypocrisy, whereby the killing of livestock animals like cows, pigs, etc. is deemed to be necessary, but, if the same treatment were given to animals that are typically pets (cats, dogs, horses, etc.), he would see it as cruelty (as he did with the puppies).
When it comes to Jasmine, Marcos’ logic of people (verbal language) vs. animal (intelligible sound) vs. meat (screaming and silence) continues, as he believes in treating Jasmine ‘humanely’ rather than as human. Just as the pig became meat because it cannot, according to Marcos, demonstrate its emotions or thoughts outside of a fearful scream, Marcos sees little worth in thinking of Jasmine as more than meat: “what’s the point if she can’t speak and will never be part of a society that sees her as only an edible product?” (126). The apathy that Marcos feels may be surprising, yet makes sense upon later revelations that he worked for the government outlining the rules and regulations for the proper treatment of ‘meat’ (154). Marcos knows that the systems he and Jasmine live and operate in are constructed by spoken language, yet he is unable to imagine an existence outside of it. In a sense, he is using society’s ideals and government regulations to tune out any sort of ‘humanity’ that Jasmine may have, just as he used his hearing protectors to tune out the pigs’ scream in order to continue to conceptualize them both as meat.
But over time Jasmine does, slightly, transform under Marcos’ eyes: she becomes a sort-of domestic animal that helps quell his nostalgia for his dogs and abate his loneliness. However, being animal in a society that survives upon the total extermination of animals (5-6) is still a precarious position. Jasmine’s consistent state of disposability becomes even more evident when Marcos finds out that she is pregnant from his repeated sexual assaults. Initially the fetus causes ontological problems for Marcos:
At first he’d felt happiness, or something like it. Then it was fear he felt. Then confusion. What was he going to do? The baby couldn’t be his, not officially, not if he didn’t want them to take it away, put it in a breeding center, and send Jasmine and himself straight to the Municipal Slaughterhouse. (132)
Marcos’ confusion, here, stands out: is the potential baby meat, like Jasmine, or is the baby human, like him? His questioning of these boundaries—and their permeability—could be productive. After all, if he, a ‘half-human’-’half-meat’ fetus, and Jasmine can all be so easily slaughtered like meat by government law, where does the line of ‘humanity’ that ostensibly separates himself and Jasmine really begin and end? But, though Marcos can imagine himself becoming meat, he seems incapable of imagining that ‘meat,’ or Jasmine, could ascend the food chain enough to become human. Rather, Marcos attempts to alleviate his categorical confusion by overcompensating for the fetus’ humanity with language. As seen in the lines below, this also involves aligning the baby solely with Marcos:
But he couldn’t think of anything other than the baby, his child. The child that was really his…For the first few months, the baby will sleep by his side, next to his bed, in a temporary cot. (132-136, emphasis mine)
Jasmine has to completely disappear from the equation if the fetus is to enter into full, legal personhood. When she begins to have complications during labor, Marcos doesn’t bother trying to talk with Jasmine—he assumes that she cannot understand—but goes to whisper through her stomach, to “his baby” that “Everything’s gonna be just fine, little one, just fine, your birth’s gonna go well” (206). Even unborn, Marcos believes the fetus has the perceived capacity for language because he has theorized it to be a legal person. Jasmine, on the other hand, has become a flesh container, persisting only as a piece of living meat that nourishes the future child citizen.
The fetus’ final rite of passage into personhood happens at the climax of the book, when Marcos calls his estranged wife Cecilia to help with Jasmine’s difficult birth. Once the baby is born, Cecilia immediately begins thinking of names—some of her first words to the baby being “What are we going to call you?” (208). If Tender’s systems of legalized cannibalism are scaffolded on language, then naming is the foundation that holds it all together, that maintains the border between who can and cannot be eaten. As Marcos explains, “If a person with a first and last name can be eaten legally, and they’re not considered a product, what’s stopping anyone from eating anyone else?” (130, emphasis mine) While Jasmine has been given a first name, she does not have a last name that would prevent her from being eaten or killed and allow her to be mourned. On being forcibly adopted by Marcos and Cecilia, the baby will be given a first and last name. Thus, though Jasmine is the one who has just given birth, it is Marcos and Cecilia who are able to conceive the baby’s flesh into legal personhood. Of the slaughterhouse novel, Aldana Reyes writes “There is also, as in other body gothic texts, little hope of the possible transcendence of the body” (105-106). Though the body as fleshy prison aptly describes Jasmine’s situation, to Marcos and Cecilia, it seems that the baby has transcended its meatiness into a fully-fledged person, showcasing how language can transform the body just as much as a butcher’s knife when its arbiters choose to wield it that way.
Having taken advantage of Jasmine as both a domestic animal and as a domestic product in order to restore his home life to domestic bliss, the logical next step for Marcos is to slaughter Jasmine. This is partially practical, because, without Jasmine around, the baby cannot be identified with meat. But it is also paternal: just as Marcos’ father provided a future for his children by slaughtering meat, so too does Marcos create a future for the baby when he kills Jasmine. In this carnal restoration of Marcos’ nuclear family, Tender is the Flesh invokes other cannibalism texts such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), and Raw (2016), all of which depict families who sustain themselves by eating others. But while Marcos may work in a slaughterhouse like the Sawyer family, he is not like the proletariat Chop Top or Leatherface who can be replaced by automation. Rather, he is a high-ranking manager and boss’s son whose salary can afford the state-of-the art nursing home for his father, a house, and various infertility treatments for his wife. In this schema, he perhaps shares more in common with the family in Raw, who are depicted as upper middle class and who have established a dynasty in France’s most elite vet school. Even without their cannibalistic leanings, they are (or are learning to become) economic and social apex predators.
While Marcos despises his sister for trying to raise her social status via consumption—she purchases a private ‘head’ to keep in her house—he too raises his economic and social status through meat, reinstating his status as patriarch via slaughter. Consumption and killing are just two sides of the same coin in this society, and Tender dissects how the family unit rivals the slaughterhouse as a “heartless machine concerned with productivity and not humanity” (Aldana Reyes, 118). Production and reproduction of future children (to economically viable, largely obedient citizens) takes precedence over the humanity of those who are exploited around them currently—ironic when characters theorize that the change to cannibalism was to control overpopulation in the first place (6). The children that Marcos, Cecilia, and Marcos’ sister produce will not only reproduce their parents’ dehumanizing consumptive and linguistic patterns, but also inherit the social and economic prosperity that their parents reaped from systemic slaughter.
The restoration of the heterosexual, middle class nuclear family is the horror text’s most basic return to normality.[i] Yet Bazterreca skillfully undermines any sense of normalcy that we, the readers, might receive from Marcos’ reinstated domestic bliss by illustrating how much bloodshed and how many deaths go into the creation of that family unit. Horror centered on the body often tends to focus on transformation—the human body pushed to its limits (Hellraiser, 1987), transformed into some kind of human animal hybrid (The Fly, 1986), Gingersnaps, 2000), or turned into meat (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Raw). Yet the horror in Tender stems from the fact that none of the characters really transformed at all: Jasmine is never realized as a person, and Marcos continues to adhere to government regulation and his linguistic standards of personhood. “Normality,” as it is in Tender is the Flesh goes largely undisrupted, and serves as a warning that the pursuit of individual happiness, when achieved through systems of exploitation, comes with a high body count.
Notes
[i] In his “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” Robin Wood broadly identifies normality as “patriarchal capitalist ideology” (108) and views the monster as that which constantly threatens the bourgeois nuclear family.
Works Cited
Aldana Reyes, Xavier. “The Slaughterhouse Novel.” Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film. University of Wales Press, 2014, pp. 97-121.
Bazterrica, Agustina. Tender is the Flesh. Trans. Sarah Moses. Scribner, 2020.
Kilgour, Maggie. From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation. Princeton University Press, 2016.
Williams, Sebastian. “Self-Consumption: Cannibalism and Viral Outbreak in Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 30.2 (Summer 2023), pp. 302-320.
Wood, Robin. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” The Monster Theory Reader. Ed., Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. University of Minnesota Press, 2020, pp. 108-135.
