The Illegible Pampas: Space and Narration in Samanta Schweblin’s Distancia de rescate

Abstract

Distancia de rescate by Samanta Schweblin is part of a long tradition of texts about the Argentine pampas and undertakes a fundamental intervention by showing how this space has become illegible and proposing new ways to navigate and narrate it. The novel responds to the question of how to read a space that has undergone transformations that are imperceptible at first glance and were caused by agrochemical contamination. In its response, the novel questions the ability of the intentional subject to narrate an unfamiliar space and resorts to a second voice to assist it. What emerges then is a form of dialogic narration or ecological reading that moves away from the position of authority and approaches a form of listening, which not only stands in solidarity with the human but goes beyond the subject and reads from and with the environment. Distancia de rescate aims to address the aesthetic challenge of narrating forms of violence that resist representation, and, in this process, first-hand experience becomes the parameter that defines knowledge. At the same time, it proposes a function of fiction in the present: to make visible processes of violence that are imperceptible to our senses, to name new dangers, and to try to make the opacity of space legible through a new relationship with space and a renewed relevance and urgency of narration. Ultimately, what the novel shows is that space is not a backdrop upon which narration is inscribed but has specific, invisible forms of agency.