The Becoming-Animal as Questioning of the Human in Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s 'El Rey de la Habana' and Rafael Pinedo’s 'Plop'

Abstract

This paper intends to reveal different modes of how the concept of the human is questioned in two representative works of the contemporary Latin-American literature, in Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s El Rey de la Habana, and Rafael Pinedo’s Plop. Although the baseline of this paper is literary, our approach to the novels will be interdisciplinary, considering that literary criticism will be combined with cultural analysis and aesthetics. We will handle a varied theoretical background including texts of Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Gabriel Giorgi, and Georges Bataille. After an introduction where we will present the distinction between ‘human’ and ‘non-human’, we will continue to investigate a series of ‘zones of indeterminacy’ (Giorgi 2012, 2014) where the ‘animal’ interferes with the ‘human’, among others, the eschatological (and the scatological), the corporal and the sexual. All that is to show how these two novels subvert, with a critical gesture, the boundaries of human culture. One of the most important intentions of this paper is to examine the function of, on the one hand, dehumanization and animalization of human body and subjectivity, and on the other, obscenity and vulgarity as countercultural discourses in the questioning of the human, that reveals itself even in the decay of the (literary) language.