Review: Natural History, by M. Yuszczuk
You have to be a child (and not just a person) to know how far one will go to achieve the acceptance and approving gaze of a parent. Especially when the parent possesses not only the attributes bestowed upon them by their offspring but also those bestowed upon them by a cruel and conservative society. And when, to make matters worse, one is the son—or daughter, in this case—of someone like Francisco P. Moreno, the founder of the La Plata Museum of Natural Sciences, things can become somewhat more thorny.
We're talking about Virginia Moreno, the young narrator and protagonist of Natural History , a novel by Marina Yuszczuk (Buenos Aires, 1978); a singular heroine whose imagination—woven with positivist aspirations but also with superstitious fears—conceives an era—the late 19th century—in which Progress advances, unchallenged, devastating all forms of humanity that dare not to submit to its designs. It is well known, however, that what is repressed, whether in the personal or historical sphere, returns sooner or later, and not always in the best way.
Virginia lives in a La Plata that, in the eyes of her aristocratic mother, seems little more than a wasteland. She lives, in truth, in the Museum, a sort of Gothic mansion, darkly enchanted. She wanders through its concentric rooms, imagining scenarios in which her father finally detects her, recognizes her, and legitimizes her. For her, the light (which is also the light of reason) shines too brightly on the high glass walls and shelves, but it nevertheless retreats easily at night, thanks to a romantic sensibility that transforms the Museum, as one character states, into an inverted cemetery.
The arrival of Tehuelche Indians sponsored by Moreno (who will be little more than living exhibits) excites Virginia's imagination. Dark, ritual voices pierce the nights; dead gazes lurk everywhere; brown bodies can be distinguished in the nooks and crannies. But if otherness frightens, it fascinates equally. Thus, the object of terror can turn into desire.
Unlike a certain contemporary Gothic, which finds a juicy source of terror in middle-class social phobias, Yuszczuk goes back to nineteenth-century thought and imagery (Echeverría, Mansilla, Sarmiento) to show us that while the face of fear may undergo some alterations, its essence seems to remain unchanged. With a capacity for condensation, the author interweaves various identities into the figure of a working-class girl who demands the love of a tyrannical and icy father: personal, familial, national, and that of a dominant culture. And she suggests that while the natural order of things can be elaborated in various ways over time, the results—the benefit of some at the cost of the lives of others—are always the same.
Natural history
By Marina Yuszczuk
Blatt & Ríos
288 pages, $23,500
lanacion
