The speed of bodies: market, dystopia and waste in Los días de la peste, by Edmundo Paz Soldán

Abstract

Edmundo Paz Soldán is one of the Latin American narrators who has most daringly explored the topic of the transformation of the real into simulacrum as well as the change that technological proliferation that the current century brings about in human psyche. In his works an archaeological predominant element can be read, which is frequent in the dystopian genre, irrespective of whether his fictions, perhaps except for Iris and Las visiones, cannot be labeled as science fiction. In this paper I focus on his last published novel. Los días de la peste can, in principle, be construed as a return to realism after a narrative cycle exploring science fiction. Nevertheless, in this novel, the material presence of bodies, the reflection on their condition as problematic objects, as it was the case in Iris or in Las visiones, is obsessive and central. The novel seems to address the question that was raised by Santiago Alba Rico, among others, in his essay Ser o no ser (un cuerpo) (2017): What is the speed of bodies today? What is their status under contemporary capitalism? What do they have to say or claim? Paz Soldán thus offers in the novel the colophon to a reflection on the condition of the body and subjectivity in our time, articulated from science fiction, and a contemporary realism fraught with his topics.