How Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh Warps Your Brain with Language

How Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh Warps Your Brain with Language

How Agustina Bazterrica's Tender Is the Flesh Warps Your Brain with Language - 977

Editor’s note: spoilers follow for Tender is the Flesh.

Tender Is the Flesh warps your brain.

The 2020 dystopian novel by Argentinian author Agustina Bazterrica (translated into English by Sarah Moses) plunges us into a world where, due to a mysterious disease that affects all animals, humans decide to use other humans in place of animals for food and byproducts. Over the span of the book, Bazterrica recounts numerous depraved acts and twisted torments inflicted upon humans. It’s a deeply disturbing story, but not solely due to the world it describes.

That world is disturbing, to be sure, but the truly brain-warping thing about this book is the way the author naturalizes its awful world, using neutral language to slowly get the reader accustomed to the depraved concepts therein. From there, Bazterrica makes you question exactly where you would draw the line: how comfortable could you be in this awful, depraved society? And are the people who seem sympathetic for being “less bad” really all that much different from those they condemn? In the process, the book raises questions about belief, necessity, and exactly what people are capable of when they believe they have no other options–or worse, when they’re certain they’re in the right. 

But first, it’s good to have a plot synopsis so we know what we’re talking about. In the future, a disease called GGB infects animals. Even a scratch from an infected animal, or use of an animal product, could cause painful death in humans. Animals are instantly eradicated, and humans must either go vegan or die. The government instead implements “the Transition” to using captive humans as “special meat” to fill the animal-shaped void. Marcos is the man in charge of “meat runs” for Krieg Processing, tasked with buying herds of humans for slaughter and production so he can make ends meet and provide for his Alzheimer’s-stricken father. He remains detached, above the business he’s complicit in, dealing only with the business end and never with the humans that are bought, sold, and butchered. All until Marcos is gifted a woman, part of a special lot, as a “thank you” from one of his more loathsome suppliers, and suddenly his business takes a more personal–and dangerous–turn as he has to decide the fate of the living being in his hands.  

The genius of Tender is the Flesh is that it doesn’t force anything on you. Bazterrica introduces a concept in horrifying detail, allows that detail to sink in, gives the concept a more antiseptic and neutral term, and then just moves on, repeating that neutral term for whatever atrocious thing she’s just explained. After a paragraph or so, you have to remind yourself that “heads” mean humans used as cattle, and that FGP means “a human being bred in captivity since birth.” At the beginning, Marcos even says of one of his buyers, a creepy skin fetishist who owns a human tannery, “(his) words construct a small, controlled world that’s full of cracks. A world that could fracture with one inappropriate word.” This is a world woven around artificial language, the way things are naturalized, even the way the culture seems to accept cannibalism. When it comes to the actual process of using humans as meat, the novel handles things dispassionately and clinically, outlining the horror of the situation and then spending as much time getting you used to the terms as possible.

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The book speaks plainly of atrocity, laying out its plot through a series of middlemen–the main character just pushes numbers around and visits the actual farms on behalf of his sadistic employers, his local butcher Spinel just chops up the cuts of meat–and the characters who actually get their hands dirty are kept at a remove, if they appear at all. It allows you as the reader an out, of sorts, a way to further distance yourself from the atrocity. It’s clear a number of the main cast are somewhat punch-clock villains at best, simply doing what they have to so they can live. And the most insidious part is, it works. Marcos is in a tight spot with his bosses (he mentions that if he ceases to be useful they might just throw him in the municipal slaughterhouse themselves) and needs money for his ill father. He only reluctantly accepts Jasmine, the captivity-bred human he names and then keeps as a house pet. Everyone is simply “doing their jobs,” moving from one place to another. While there are certainly creepier characters in the upper echelons, it’s clear there’s something inhuman about them, from the owner of a game perserve who’s described in terms befitting a werewolf to the farm owners who are one step below grotesques in their portrayal. 

That isn’t to say the book doesn’t draw the mindset of its protagonists into question. There’s a subplot running throughout the book that shows the governments of the world are lying about the virus that caused the problem in the first place, for one thing (not that anyone cares at this point). For another, there’s the way Bazterrica plays with the line between “humans” and “heads,” with a religious cult that gives up its members to be butchered and fed to scavengers portrayed as repulsive. Marcos forces himself on Spinel the butcher in an excruciatingly detailed scene, but his rape and impregnation of Jasmine takes all of a sentence, even though it’s considered a capital offense that could get him sent to a slaughterhouse. It’s intriguing to see where each character draws their own line, especially Marcos, who is utterly repulsed at some of his nastier buyers but sees nothing wrong with working for the slaughterhouse and keeping a pregnant Jasmine at home. Tender is the Flesh dares you to draw your own line, decide who you side with, or if any of the monsters in the book are worth rooting for at all. By the end, it’s clear that the most sympathetic characters in all of this are just as awful and corrupt as everyone else, but have a (terribly misguided) sense of righteousness and necessity that keeps them from realizing that they, too, are participating in an unnecessary atrocity.

This is how evil generally works on a grand scale. Most of the time it’s not a thing fueled by hate; it works by convincing you that what you’re doing is less awful than it sounds and, most of all, is necessary. It gets you to agree that it’s justified to harm someone, because the alternative is worse or the personal consequences might be harsher if you choose to resist it. Slowly, it warps your brain until you find yourself thinking in the same terms the monsters do, gleefully dehumanizing and harming the out-group as if you came up with the idea yourself. Espousing it to other people, warning them that if they find themselves on the wrong side of you that they can expect the same dehumanizing treatment. Force them into the same decisions you had to make so the cycle can continue and you have one more person on your side. Every additional person who makes the same choice you did allows for the dilution of guilt. Atrocity rewrites the rules and social conventions, pressures people into making them the norm. It’s the way oppressive regimes do their work, make people afraid to dissent, normalize the social conventions, make everything as neutral-sounding as possible, and draw a distinct line between “us” and “them.” It’s downright Orwellian.

That quality is what makes Tender is the Flesh so disturbing. It warps your brain by naturalizing the awful things it depicts, presenting them in neutral and mundane terms that slowly make them sound less awful as the book goes along. It provides reasonable motivation for why its relatively innocuous protagonist might choose to participate in a deeply flawed dystopian society. It then shows you exactly how awful things are, challenging you to draw a line in the sand, to decide where your comfort zone is. It even gets you to sympathize at points with Marcos and with the people of this world, only to turn and show you how they, too, are monstrous for choosing to draw their own lines and participate in the world around them. It’s a book that dares you to fight against your own brain, fight against the artificial neutrality of fascism, and question your own morality and views in the process. It’s a ruthless satire, not of a dystopian society, but of society in general, and how it can force people to do the worst possible things just by altering the context. 

Because, after all, if something has to be done, it has to be done, no matter how cruel it seems. 

Right?


Tender

Tender

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