One of the characteristics of image-based cultural production today is the prominence of intellectual property, which manifests itself in the unabating flood of sequels, prequels, reboots, remakes, and spin-offs. Rather than attribute any ‘decline in the rate of originality’ to an exhaustion of ideas or imagination among Hollywood executives and TV moguls, Jason Read links the prevalence of such content to a desire among audiences and studios alike for a ‘repetition of the same’. With its familiar characters, worlds, and established lore, intellectual property appeals to investors as a safe bet, a relatively cheap, pre-existing asset which can be strip-mined for every last ounce of nostalgia. Audiences, on the other hand, crave these cinematic outings as they seemingly represent an opportunity to experience once more the pleasures of childhood.
A related gesture within text-based cultural production is the retelling of a classic tale or myth, an operation which similarly activates the memory of previous encounters; however, its emphasis rests on difference and divergence. Frequently told from the perspective of marginal or elided characters, such narratives alter, revise, and contest culturally dominant or majoritarian values and sentiments. Canonical works of literature are thus estranged, displaced, and decentered, reawakening the voices, hopes, and histories of minority subjectivities otherwise effaced or forgotten by tradition. Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s The Adventures of China Iron (2019) belongs to this revisionist approach to national mythologies, a novel which adapts and queers one of the foundational narratives of Argentinian popular culture, the gaucho epic ‘Martín Fierro’.
Set in the 1870s, The Adventures of China Iron is simultaneously a coming-of-age story of its eponymous hero, who is immersed in the ‘aura of newness’, and a novel that self-consciously reflects on its status as a work of comparative literature. That is to say, Cabezón Cámara’s novel takes as one of its structuring principles the core-periphery relationship, encoded both in terms of the transnational relay between an emergent Argentinian nation and a hegemonic British Empire, but also internally too: the narrative unfolds in the ‘languid time’ of the remote Pampas, where Indian territory has not yet been fully cleared. The British, China learns, ‘try to overcome’ their island insularity ‘by dint of force, making ourselves the centre, organising the world around us, being the motor, market, and matrix of the world’. ‘Beating the clock, trailblazing, cutting production times’, Great Britain is the leading edge of modernity’s mechanised acceleration of time, a nation whose earthly appetites have established a colonial ‘network of veins that runs from all over the world to the voracious heart of the Empire’. National epics, then, are perhaps always already determined by their incorporation within the pathways of the world-system, whose channels circulate libidinal desires and fantasies about the future as much as they move material commodities and resources.
In contrast to London, ‘the all-devouring mouth of Krono … where everything becomes fuel for its own insatiable speed’, the pampas is a zone of underdevelopment where ‘everything was still possible’. The synchronicity of non-synchrous forms of life is crucial for the historical novel which, as a literary form, typically geographizes history, transforming provincial regions into temporal backwaters that lag behind more advanced administrative centres or industrial hubs. For Georg Lukács, the historical novel progresses history forward by supplying the present with the story of its emergence, registering first contact with the nascent technologies and ideas that will differentiate our present from earlier modes of social organisation. As a feminist counter-myth to the straight narration that strives to become identical with the present, The Adventures of China Iron breaks with an historicist framework and searches out differences that cannot be absorbed into regimes of capitalist accumulation and exploitation. Cabezón Cámara could be said to bend the genre of historical fiction: even the legendary cowboy troubadour Martín Fierro undergoes a transition and embraces the process of becoming-woman.
Given its preference for differences that differ, perhaps it is not a surprise that the novel eschews familial bloodlines in favour of found family as its unit of collectivity. The abused and mistreated teen bride of the recently conscripted gaucho rouge, China Iron seizes an opportunity to escape a lifetime of domestic servitude by partnering up with Elizabeth, a Scottish planter, who opens ‘the door of the world’ to China. This enlargement of perception begins with China’s name, which is the vernacular noun used to refer to all anonymous serving women, who are simply the possessions of their male employers. Liz herself has voyaged to Argentina in order to make her fortune overseeing the establishment of a rural estate, a project which has stalled in the wake of her husband’s impressment into the Argentinian army. Along their route to emancipate the beleaguered Oscar, China and Liz are joined by Estreya, a dog who radiates a ‘kind of brightness’ which renews the world, and the wandering cattle herder Rosario, affectionately known as Rosa. Framed within a counter-fantasy of late nineteenth-century Argentina is a bildungsroman of sorts, one in which China becomes other to the reproduction of the same. ‘To leave you have to become another person’, China reflects as she feels herself ‘becoming someone else’. For Cabezón Cámara, the bildungsroman is a formal device for bifurcating subjectivity from subjection, enacting a deviation from socially oppressive versions of the self.
Narrated in the first-person, China speaks her truth and organizes the novel into three parts: ‘The Pampas’, ‘The Fort’, and ‘Indian Territory’. As with the orphans of Victorian literature whose plight she sympathizes with, China embarks on an education in the ways of the world, a world whose ways both amplify and distort conventional conceptualizations of the 1870s. With its frontier setting, Part One is more of a trail story than a road trip, a journey in which the wagon shapes ‘another world’ intellectually and establishes ‘a birds-eye view’ over the pampas. Internally, China receives instruction from Liz into the notable discourses of the era and her account fizzes with reference to technological breakthroughs, scientific knowledge, merchant trade, travelogues, naturalism, and the perceptual revolution found in the work of JMW Turner. Political economy and aesthetics are yoked together by a lyrical style which pauses on the ephemerality of light, the sensations of the body. A discourse on discourses, China elaborates a multi-perspectivalism of form which acknowledges and mediates ‘other perspectives’ – such as the difference between the Queen of England, ‘monarch of all she sees’, and the lowly gaucho who ‘burns dung to keep warm’. The relationship between perspectives – the perspective of the other – stalks the remainder of the novel, which questions the capacities for discursive and material antagonism.
If Part One is refracted through a poetics of space, Part Two swivels towards a poetics of labor, to the cadences which violently discipline the body and imprison the soul. Superintended by the garrulous drunkard Colonel Hernandez, the Fort (Las Hortensias) constitutes an outpost of modernity, one that is simultaneously enlisted in the slaughter of indigenous people and the metamorphosis of the gaucho into a regimented industrial worker. Colonel Hernandez shares Lukacs’s belief that the primary mission of the historical novel is the invention of the people: ‘it was no easy task … having to form men for this century’. An Anglophile who wants to ‘invent a new speed’ in the pampas, Hernandez coordinates processes of primitive accumulation and formal subsumption, ‘transforming a mass of larvae into a workforce’. Territorial consolidation and industrial intensification are combined as the army fulfills dual objectives, pacifying land that needs to be ‘conquered’ and conquering ‘a workforce for the nation’. A macabre labor camp, the peasant gauchos circulate different levels of hell as their bodies and desires become ‘the lifeblood of the estate, the spearhead of the nation … progress penetrating the desert’. The linear, progressive, and evolutionary philosophies of history debated abstractly in the wagon ride across the pampas are given concrete articulation here in the sadistic practices of a brutal disciplinary regime bent on modernizing the gaucho.
Through the spectacle of monstrosity enunciated on the bodies of the gauchos, Cabezón Cámara draws attention to the ways in which the technical re-organization of labor relies on forms of barbarism. Blurring the distinction between artistic composer and scientific experimenter, Hernandez explains that ‘we are putting the music of civilization into the flesh of these larvae, they will become a workforce whose hearts beat to the rhythm of the factory, our bugles play the rhythm of production to discipline their anarchic souls’. The production of subjectivity overhauls the gestational gaucho and assembles them into the body-men of factory work, laborers who are fragmented and broken down into repetitive tasks, who labor to the military tattoo of pistons and steam engines. This laboratory refrain of creation and submission also refers back to China’s earlier affinity with another of modernity’s tortured creatures, Frankenstein’s monster, a floating signifier for the proletariat summoned into existence by an exploitative bourgeoisie. Culture, in its capacities to affect bodies, belongs to the infrastructure through which oppression is organized and subjects condemned to work are produced. Yet the cultural sphere is also a site of appropriation in its own right. Hernandez, the historical writer of the epic poem ‘Martín Fierro’, concedes that he has borrowed and refined verses originally written by China’s low-life husband. The creation of national myths, like workforces, hinges on forms of enclosure and expropriation, where the voices and energies of the people are extracted from them by apparatuses of state capture.
Part Three documents China’s encounter and convergence with the Inchin. Whilst realist historical novel narrates the invention of a nationally demarcated people, China’s narrative secedes from reality as she folds herself into the Inchin, who become ‘my people, my nation’. In contrast to Colonel Hernandez, whose ‘purpose in life is to bring trains, the engines of progress, to Argentina’, China assimilates into a community who do not seek to dominate nature and sweat a profit from its pores. Unattached to work as an ideal, tasks ‘are divided according to the simple criteria of ability, desire, and need’. The historical novel intent on building the tracks from a past-present into the future is dislocated in this final part, which registers an ecologically inflected nomadism that is not bound by fixed labor routines, gender identities, or kinship structures. Freedom is deterriotrialized from state projects and reterritorialized through the consumption of psychedelic drugs and ritual practices. As the plot diverges from a story of national becoming, so to does China’s bildungsroman. The civilizing mission is interrupted and China comments that she no longer thinks or feels that she is ‘becoming English’. If England ‘spurs the planet’s onward motion’, China falls out of synch and is drawn to an altogether different rhythm, one that does not scar or pulverize the land but seeks to harmonize collective need with sustainability. Industrial smog is supplanted by the ‘white cloud’ of a ‘people that disappears’, that vanishes from the scene. Yet, perhaps as something airborne, such a people might re-materialize in the coming future-present and radically alter the trajectory of the species.
