Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream: watery toxicity, percolating disquietude

Journal article

In Fever Dream (Distancia de rescate, 2014), Samanta Schweblin interweaves contemporary anxieties around ecological disaster and environmental toxicity with a feeling of unremitting maternal dread, in a narrative whose pace is dictated by the impending onset of death. This article seeks to elucidate the multiple and dynamic interconnections between emotion, toxicity, and literary form in this text. Engaging with an eclectic theoretical apparatus – comprising thought on affect, emotion, and material ecocriticism— and by means of a series of close readings, I argue that Schweblin’s is a tightly knit yet also porous world, with its various linguistic, technical and thematic layers enacting, expanding and reinforcing the dread concomitant with the leaky toxicity that runs through it. At the same time as crafting a powerful model of emotional readerly solicitation, however, the novel’s formal self-reflexivity results in the de-naturalising of those very processes of sympathetic or ‘contagious’ affect upon which the text premises its aesthetic operations. It is only through an appreciation of this tension that the critical potency of Fever Dream can be fully elucidated.

Authors: Vázquez-Medina, O

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Journal: Contemporary Literature
• Volume: 62
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 1-34
• Publication date: 2022-03-08
• Acceptance date: 2021-02-19
• DOI: 10.3368/cl.62.1.1
• ISSN: 1548-9949
• Language: English
• Keywords: FFR