Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Protecting Ourselves With Words

Those old enough will remember the confident chants at the Woodstock Festival in 1969: “No rain. No rain.” ( it rained buckets). Or many younger folk might have had the experience of being tucked in bed while saying their prayers at their parents’ direction: “… and God bless Mummy and Daddy and please help cure Grandma’s liver cancer.” (She died the next week). And we all know about the standard line by the hero in Westerns and B-movie Adventures: “Don’t worry Ma’am, it’ll be all right, I promise.” (of course it never is).

There is a deep impulse to believe that our words can change the world. Hence our fascination with incantations, magical spells, arcane knowledge, religious ritual, and obdurate idealism. Of course words don’t change the world. But they sure do change the users of words. We pretend to have some control over the world by speaking about it with confidence and decisiveness. Actually we’re whistling in the dark. It’s an evolutionary compensation I suppose. Consciousness of our own mortality and its constant fear would be detrimental to our survival. So we have words to protect us. We explain things. We rationalise our fragile and insignificant existence as something of cosmic and eternal importance.

Words allow us to rationalise, to normalise, absolutely any set of circumstances if we think it’s in our interests to do so. We call this morality, when all that term means is that we have found the words to make us feel safer, more secure, less bestial, in short, that we are able to live with each other without constant fear. Words allow this. Our actions may be abysmally horrid, intensely, anti-social, entirely self-serving even self-destructive, but we’re comfortable with that as long as the words justify, or at least don’t forbid, what we do.

Tender Is the Flesh takes our rationalising talent very seriously. I feel confident to say that it goes beyond the bounds of any other literary or cinematic experience any of us has ever had. The book makes Orwell’s 1982 look like a fairy story. The infamous film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre doesn’t touch it for horror. Soylent Green becomes a euphemistic appetiser. Documentaries of the Holocaust come closest I suppose, but even they don’t depict the systematic breeding of victims, their mutilation to prevent self-abortion, the casual mass slaughter, butchering, distribution, and sale of the resulting cuts of meat to the social elite.

Yes, the book is about industrialised cannibalism. It is meant to shock. It clearly intends to show how we use language to do whatever we think necessary to live comfortably. Victims are not human; they are product. Their hands are front trotters; ears and fingers are mixed brochettes; and there’s tongue à la vinaigrette as a delicacy. The most expensive cuts deserve time and care in preparation: “It’s the most tender kind of meat, there’s only just a little, because a kid doesn’t weigh as much as a calf… It melts in your mouth.”

This is a world created by words. Or rather it is a world in which words have progressively transformed the people who use them. Words have allowed them to enter a new reality and “to reaffirm this reality through words, as though words created and maintain the world in which they live.” It is true that “words construct a small, controlled world that’s full of cracks. A world that could fracture with one inappropriate word.” So certain words referring to victims as human, for example, are punished severely. But some still remember when the words meant something different. Marcos, the protagonist, is one such, and the new words “are words that strike at his brain, accumulate, cause damage. He wishes he could say atrocity, inclemency, excess, sadism.”

I am reminded by this book of the many ways we justify the cruelest action. One in particular strikes me as apposite, the Massacre of Béziers in the year 1209. A force of crusading knights were ordered by Pope Innocent III to root out the heresy of Catharism from the South of France. Commanded by his legate, Arnaud Amalric, the abbot of the great Benedictine monastery of Citeaux, the force laid siege to the place. When the citizenry refused to give up the small band of Cathars in the town, the abbot gave his infamous order: Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. - “Kill them all. God will know his own.” About 20,000 inhabitants were slaughtered. The abbot was rewarded with a bishopric.

This was a case in which profoundly inhumane horror was not only permitted but promoted by the words, the necessity, of religious doctrine - ‘heretic’ dehumanised people as completely as ‘product.’ It could just as well be military, political, racial, or gender words. Expediency can become our morality almost instantly. There are indeed no limits to our ability to invent such words and to rationalise such behaviour. The horrors recounted in Agustina Bazterrica’s novel are themselves justified by this sad fact. It says what no one says often enough.

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