Argentina: Tusquets. 2022, 256 pages.
There is an urgent question to be asked of science fiction, its urgency dictated by the forward rush of the present. This question is: to what extent do genre stories change as we approach the moment at which they come true? As we know, all distopias are the same: in our avarice, we human beings render our village uninhabitable. How does science fiction fit together when we have irrefutable evidence of this disaster’s occurrence? What might the future of futurist fiction hold when the future has been excised from it, under threat of the present?
At the start, as when anything first takes shape, the future of science fiction was laid out ahead of us. So much so that those first sci-fi storytellers could make out the field from end to end with a single glance (Frankenstein is the classic example of how a pioneering story can make a genre shine and, at the same time, exhaust all its possibilities). But, as this space started filling up with new stories, it got harder to see the forest for the trees. Not because each new book, with its specific take on the apocalypse, left less space for other imaginations, but because technological advances themselves (which is to say, the specific methods of man’s self-destruction) necessitated a new subtlety in our ways of imagining the end.
Lately, the distance between the end and our imagination of the end, between the past and the future, has lessened at a dizzying pace (this lessening, of both history and time, can be dated back to 2020, with the coronavirus pandemic). The sensation—produced by the official abolition of one’s fellow man by virtue of “virtual presences”—is not that of a present constantly succeeding itself, but rather that of a future violently superimposed, wrenching out the present by its root: possibility.
In El cuerpo es quien recuerda, the new novel by Paula Puebla (Buenos Aires, 1984), there is a clear awareness of these problems. The action is set in 2025, evoking an imminence set upon by the also close-by topic of the subrogation of wombs. Both the subject matter and the date’s closeness show the author is working with matters that have almost come to pass, just a scarce distance off from their inevitable ends. This inevitability is warped into the plot that connects the three women involved—the producing mother, the consuming mother, and the daughter produced—to each of whose voices the narrator grants a separate section.
“ANY STORY IN THE FIRST PERSON RELIES LESS ON PLOT AND MORE ON PATHOS, AND FOR THIS TO SUCCEED, PATHOS MUST BE IN PLAY”
But these sections are narrated in the first person, and as everyone knows, when a story is built out of its characters’ voices, the plot no longer matters: what matters now is the impact of these voices, not the story itself. What’s more, the story, when told by its own voices, has already taken place; the book is the tale of its consequences. In brief, any story in the first person relies less on plot and more on pathos, and for this to succeed, pathos must be in play. This pathos, which the novel unfurls as its overarching background, is the great evil of its time: the lack of desire.
Rita, the daughter, who becomes the story’s protagonist as she brings its cardinal points together, is a beautiful girl, a millionaire, whose father has told her she “has no right to have problems.” She did not go to college and she has had no job besides one she fell into (taking care of luxury apartments after minding one for a friend, who then recommended her). She is bonded to Héctor, her middle-aged boyfriend, not by love or fear, but rather by strained boredom.
Rita calls herself a “daughter of technique,” which in the novel’s big picture means not only having been cast out into the world from the womb of a “gestation worker.” If such things happen, if the last bastion of resistance to commodification has fallen, it is because the conditions have come about to make gestation a business. The triumph of technique makes the unthinkable probable, and even expectable (to be perceived as a collective achievement).
So what are these conditions? They have been produced by “an airborne virus that turned capitalism on its head and killed anyone in its path.” After that, China became the global axis, providing the world with “beyond excellent” internet and making what once seemed a simple service seem like “just another element, like air or fire.” China dominates the planet by virtue of owning that which “passed through the air unseen to us: our information.”
Between there—the monopoly on information, concentrated under a single will—and the conquest’s ultimate aim of an inoculated lack of desire is a negligible distance bridged by the algorithm. The familiar sensation of a secret longing suddenly projected into an Instagram ad is perceived fearfully by Rita: “they know what I’m thinking, and that hits my neurotic ego where it hurts the worst.” Behind the algorithm is a new, unknown God, to whom we hand over “what little we have left inside.”
If anything remains inside, that is; if the algorithm has not impoverished that inner self to the point of complete erasure. Anymore, subjects do not go toward what they want (they never know what they were looking for); rather, they think they see what they wanted in that which is coming toward them. Desire never blossoms because, before it has the chance, an artificial desire foreseen by the algorithm is imposed. And subjects accept this prosthetic desire, believing through this reduction they are getting hold of the most prized of currencies: time (although you soon get bored, like Rita). But in reducing the time of desire, we forget that this time spent is the pound of flesh that love requires in exchange for some value. This is the time lost and gained by the subject, in the constitution of their own singularity.
When this singularity is lost, all will be for naught. They can subrogate wombs or legalize organ sales or condemn one country as the world’s dumping ground—it’s all the same. Because if desire is not defended in the first place, if life is not organized around its cultivation, there will be nothing to defend beyond it. And in order to lose the tracks of desire, one need not be a beautiful, wealthy young woman: one need only be exposed to the radiation of the algorithm.
This is the consummated apocalypse that Paula Puebla has so lucidly captured, imprinting it with a tone that does it justice: the viperous tongues of three pessimists who speak with all the title’s whiplash (for example, Robert, Rita’s father and a “self-made man,” is “a man who could suck oil out of a flower pot”). She means to tell us that new science fiction has turfed imagination out of its old spot as the genre’s characteristic activity, replacing it instead with observation (which reminds us that technology turning against mankind is an old subject, now that we have lived through its consequences). What is at stake today, according to El cuerpo es quien recuerda? The proscription of the only necessary responsibility—the one that unleashed my power, my joy, my madness. Losing it, by omission or distraction, leads us into the most pitiful form of cowardice (“cowardice is the pandemic of the day,” Rita tells us. “I hope it kills us all”).
