Abstract:
The narrative of a young woman who, after experiencing painful losses in her family, embarks on a journey into the unknown, where she undergoes a strange mutation, ultimately transforming into a reptile, is the subject of the novel El animal sobre la Piedra by Daniela Tarazona, originally published in 2008. The protagonist’s metamorphosis sparks a discussion about monstrosity and normality, a split that marks our Western culture and is also the object of Michel Foucault’s reflections in Abnormal. The "monster" is, for Foucault, the first of the "figures" or "circles" framed within the concept of "abnormality", an idea that gained a more precise configuration in the nineteenth century. In addition to Foucault, the concepts of facialization and living body, developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and of metamorphosis, discussed by Emanuelle Coccia and Caroline Bynum, are of interest for the proposed reading. For Emanuelle Coccia, metamorphosis is a biological phenomenon that encompasses the antecedents of both the human and the non-human. The human body, in its historical process, was once that of a primate and this, in turn, also lived other previous life forms. Thus, the present study seeks to disarticulate the opposition constructed between humans and animals, perceiving how animality has always been a negative take on the Antropocene.
Keywords:
monster; normality; metamorphosis; Animal Critical Studies; Latin American contemporary prose