In the Company of Animals: Otherness, Empathy, and Community

in De fronteras by Claudia Hernández

Sophie Esch

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Tomo 51, Número 3, Octubre 2017, pp. 571-593
(Article)

Published by Washington University in St. Louis

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/rvs.2017.0057

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/679152

Access provided by Syracuse University (26 Dec 2017 14:09 GMT)

Shortened Title 571

SOPHIE ESCH

In the Company of Animals:

Otherness, Empathy, and Community in
De fronteras by Claudia Hernández

The grotesque short stories De fronteras (2007) by acclaimed Salvadoran writer

Claudia Hernández depict a context where violence and distrust reigns. Full of
cadavers, shitstorms, and animalized, displaced, grieving creatures, the stories
appear to invite yet another reading of Central American postwar literature
in relation to disenchantment and cynicism. This article, however, highlights
the humanist idealism that lurks within the stories and—taking into account
different ideas about humanity/animality, compassion, and recognition—
proposes both localized and universalist readings of the stories. Playing on Hegel’s
and Fanon’s ideas on the dialectic of recognition, the article shows that under-
neath the bleakness and desolation depicted in Hernández’s stories hides a pro-
found yearning for recognition, restoration, and restitution. The only difference
is that in the stories, recognition cannot be found in human relationships, but
rather through animal-human relationships. In the stories, being in the company
of animals or becoming an animal is a means for envisioning humaneness and
empathetic processes of community-building. The stories expose the fallacies of a
neoliberal citizenry reduced to an entrepreneurial morality, and instead yearn for
acceptance of Otherness, empathetic recognition, and restorative justice.

˙˙˙˙˙

“After all, perhaps it’s we who need saving.

Perhaps we’re the abnormal ones.”
—Eugène Ionesco (Rhinoceros)

“Me acompaña. Me da su compañía bajita y gris y me

acaricia siempre con ese su cuerno que apunta hacia
el futuro.”
—Claudia Hernández (De fronteras)

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 51 (2017)

572 Sophie Esch

Strange creatures inhabit the world of Claudia Hernández’s
stories: angels, demons, vulture-humans, and beings with scales. Her
aptly-titled short story collection De fronteras features beings at their
limit: hurting, grieving, beings in precarious or marginalized situations,
humans that want to emasculate themselves or become cows or living
cockroach traps. The stories are a long procession of afflicted and dis-
enfranchised semi-human or animalized beings.
Among her books, these stories—first published as Mediodía de
frontera (2002), then revised and republished as De fronteras in 2007—
have received most critical attention.1 Despite being published by small
Salvadoran and Guatemalan publishers with limited distribution in the
region and abroad, her work has been recognized in Latin America and
Europe, and scholarship on the topic is growing.2 Currently an illustra-
tion and translation into English of De fronteras is under way, funded
by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and it is sure to in-
troduce Hernández to a bigger audience, especially since her fantastic-
grotesque stories invite myriad readings.
The stories of De fronteras take place in a deterritorialized set-
ting, without any distinctive geographical or regional linguistic markers.
There are no references to Central American locations or idioms; only
one story employs the voseo (Hernández 30), while another has a vague
reference to the tropics and to houses with “muros gruesos y rejas”
(68). Both the voseo and gated communities are common in Central
America but are not exclusive to the region. Yet because Hernández is
Salvadoran, the stories have generally been read in relation to El Salva-
dor or Central America, while acknowledging that they could also be
read differently (Kokotovic, “Telling” 53; Rincón Chavarro). Kokotovic
argues that “as fantastic and enigmatic as Hernández’s stories may be,
as much as they may aspire to be read as universal literature rather than
national literature, they nonetheless remain rooted in Salvadoran and
Central American social reality” (“Telling” 53–54). Since the stories
tell of violence and desolation in a deadpan tone, they have also been
read in relation to the cynical and disenchanted traits of contemporary
Central American literature. They have been interpreted as either an
expression of said cynicism (Aparicio 92) or a resistance to cynicism
(Jossa 37; Kokotovic, “Telling” 57).
My reading of her works goes a step further. I argue that the
disengaged tone of the stories only barely conceals their idealist outlook.
In the Company of Animals 573

I see a yearning for a different convivencia, a different form of living-

together, as the driving force of the book. And while I also partly read
the short stories against the background of recent Central American his-
tory, my reading focuses more on the universalist outlook of the stories:
both a revitalization as well as a critical examination of what it means to
be human(e) in the context of violence, past or present. In De fronteras,
animal-human relationships are key for these endeavors.
As such, the stories open up a range of questions with regard
to humanism and animality. In many European philosophical and
religious texts, animals appear “when the essence of humanity is being
defined” (Avelar 110). Often being or becoming human has been de-
fined and imagined as purging the human of its animality, domesticat-
ing and civilizing the human being (Avelar 110; Ludueña Romandini
217). Yet running parallel to this idea is another philosophical current
critical of anthropocentrism. Giorgio Agamben in particular argues
that the distinction between humans and animals is not a given but
rather was historically created and propagated within Western thought
(36, 80). Meanwhile, Amerindian cosmovisions have always harbored
different conceptions, for example that animals represent co-essences
of humans (Blume 346), or that all animals are humans because every
being is defined by perspective, e.g. the human animal is prey for the
jaguar, who thus sees himself as “the one endowed with attributes of
personhood” in relation to his prey (Avelar 114). Furthermore, in cur-
rent cultural theory, the topic of emotion, especially compassion, often
enters through the animal, be it Derrida’s post-humanist compassion
or Haraway’s relational compassion between different species (Arnould-
Bloomfield 1468; Derrida 122; Haraway 17, 20, 32).
The intersections between humanity, animality, compassion,
and violence also circle through current Central American literature.
Yansi Pérez argues that in several postwar texts turning into an animal,
becoming a monster, becoming inhumane, or embracing the abject
are often the only means to express the strong feelings of the postwar
times: the anger, the desire for revenge, the violence but also the love
(“Historias de metamorfosis” 164, 179). In contrast, in Hernández’s
stories, the animal is the necessary figure to recuperate a sense of com-
munity and compassion. Yet the stories are not simple moralist fables
either, like those of Aesop in which anthropomorphized animals stand
in for humans and function as didactic examples to enlighten and guide
574 Sophie Esch

human behavior. Hernández’s stories are focused on animal-human

relationships and on the fronteras of humanness. The stories never re-
solve the relation between animality and humanity as entirely indistinct
or as clearly demarcated nor do they aim to do so, rather they merely
point to tensions and fringes. As such, they form part of the tradition
of “thinking through animals” (Blume 358), of thinking about human-
ness through animals.
The stories depict an indifferent, violent humanoid society with
little to no sense of community, but through animal figures they try to
imagine a different type of convivencia. The stories question the idea of
convivencia based on a narrow understanding of community as humans
behaving as so-called good citizens of a state, which in the context of
a receding state in a neoliberal order translates to being a depoliticized
citizen displaying a civil, entrepreneurial bourgeois morality.3 While
the good, civil citizen is unable to give true empathy and recogni-
tion, animal figures point to other forms of convivencia. At the core of
these animal-human relationships are questions of Otherness, of being
different, and of empathy. Empathy—“the ability to inhabit the feelings
of fellow beings”—is a tool for survival shared by many species since
being able to sense fear, hunger, or sorrow in another being has a lot
to do with the “fabric of a community” (Siebert), just as com-passion
is about the ability to relate with another being (Arnould-Bloomfield
1471). In Hernández’s stories, it is in the company of animals—being
recognized through the animal’s gaze and company or through trying to
conceive of themselves as animals—that humans can find recognition,
come to an acceptance of wounds, or a renewed sense of community.
Some might frown upon such idealist-optimist talk of humane-
ness and compassion since disbelief, the end of the grand narratives,
and cynicism are dominant intellectual discourses and aesthetics of our
postmodern times, also far beyond Central America. Yet it is precisely
the idealism that appears in the stories that I want to highlight here.
Hernández’s stories are cloaked in a cynical, resigned aesthetic but un-
derneath that cloak the stories harbor and nurture an idealist humanism
that goes against the surface text. The stories question the lack of hu-
maneness in a humanity reduced to civility and recuperate empathy and
grief as a means for building a community, be it human or interspecies.
In the Company of Animals 575

The Dangers of Civility Amidst Shit Storms

and Ubiquitous Violence

Generally told in first-person singular or plural narrations,

the stories of De fronteras speak of loneliness, aggression, and severed
social ties. Civil society and the state appear to have collapsed. Stories
describe a desolate state of affairs: lynch law, xenophobia, resignation,
omnipresence of violence in everyday life, and an absent state. These de-
pictions of social decomposition express a yearning for a different con-
vivencia. The stories expose the dangers of neoliberal discourses around
citizenship and civility, when citizens are no longer conceived—
or conceive of themselves—as political agents, but only as persons
behaving in a civil manner. In Hernández’s stories, these discourses
appear as depoliticizing and as promoting a flawed understanding of
community, based only on a shallow entrepreneurial bourgeois morality.
This critique also corresponds to a general trend in contemporary Cen-
tral American literature, in which, as Ignacio Sarmiento argues, works
express a crisis of the concept of national community but also the pos-
sibility of building community outside the often repressive parameters
of the modern nation-state (“Comunidad y catástrofe” 19, 31).
Violence and social decomposition are common topics of
Central American postwar texts.4 Werner Mackenbach and Alexan-
dra Ortiz Wallner note that recent Central American literature deals
with “las (im)posibilidades de la convivencia humana con la violencia”
(82). There has been a surge in fictional texts in the postwar years that
explore the legacy of the war years and the violence in a region that
nominally has been at peace since the respective peace agreements for
Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala in the early 1990s, but which
in the last twenty years has suffered periods of pervasive violence, often
more diffuse and multifaceted than the politically-motivated violence
of the Cold War (Kurtenbach 95; Pearce 589). In contrast to the testi-
monial voices and the hopeful optimism of the revolutionary prose and
poetry that dominated during the war years, a sharp, unsparing fiction
has emerged, experimental and iconoclastic in nature, that paints a
desolate picture of postwar Central America.
Disenchantment and cynicism are labels that have been
attributed to this type of literature—which already started during the
war years but became the most prominent form in the postwar period
576 Sophie Esch

(Cortez 23–5). Beatriz Cortez has coined the term “aesthetic of cyni-
cism” to describe this literature and has criticized this same aesthetic as
flawed and self-destructive (26, 38). In the meantime, other critics have
highlighted the ethical and political dimensions that Central American
literature still has: distrustful of the revolutionary rhetoric but critical
of neoliberalism and still committed to the hope of social change, as it
denounces the unbearable postwar situation (Aguirre 14; Kokotovic,
“After the Revolution” 24; Perkowska 6, 22).
Told in a laconic tone, the violent, absurd stories of De fronteras
appear to ooze cynical disillusionment. “Lluvia de trópico,” for example,
relates how excrement suddenly rains on a city and, after a time of
vexation, everyone learns to love it and does not want it to go away.
The interpersonal relationships described in the story are antagonistic
and distrustful, and the state appears as a bureaucratizing entity, absent
when it comes to effectively dealing with the excrement. It is a scathing
allegory of the postwar neoliberal regime: People are left living in shit,
nobody does anything about it, least of all the government, and then
people learn to love the shit and ask for more.
Indifference towards the extraordinary and the outrageous
appears in many characters of De fronteras. The stories operate in the
“realm of extreme realities or the fantastically mundane” (Rodríguez,
Dividing 227); in a “deadpan tone” characters are described “doing fan-
tastic things in the most mundane ways” (Kokotovic, “Telling” 72). Yet
behind this representation lies a critique of normalization. Kokotovic
argues that this “representation of the fantastic, or the grotesque, as if
it were mundane, raises questions about what passes for ordinary and
unexceptional in El Salvador’s postwar social order” (“Telling” 72). In a
similar vein, Catalina Rincón argues that De fronteras is a critique of the
normalization of violence, because the stories make the reader question
the protagonists’ indifferent behavior towards the omnipresent violence.
As such, Hernández’s stories share certain traits of Central
American postwar literature—they express disenchantment and decry
a violent neoliberal context—but the disengaged tone ultimately
expresses a profound desire for a different form of living together. This
convivencia can be interpreted in relation to either Central America
or the human condition in general, not localized. At the center of
this longing lies the question of what it means to be human and what
it means to be humane. Hernández’s stories blur the limits between
In the Company of Animals 577

animality and humanity, and point to how animalization is used to

exclude. At the same time, the stories hold on to humanist notions, in
particular the idea of humanness as humaneness. In the stories, there is
a desire to recuperate the idea of being compassionate and being con-
cerned for the suffering of others within the word human/e or humano.5
Yet social bonds among humans appear so fraught in De fronteras that
this dimension of empathy and relationship can only be recuperated
through animals.
The story, “Fauna de alcantarilla,” explores the question of what
it means to be human and what it means to be humane. It is a story
about a family of humanoid beings with scales who live in the sewage
system and hunt the dogs and cats of the neighborhood. The neighbors
hear both their cries for food as well as the chomping sounds of their
pets being consumed by the hungry family. The private security guard
of the neighborhood is put in charge of catching them since the police
will not take up the case. After unsuccessful attempts to get rid of the
scaled beings, the neighbors band together and seal the family into the
sewage system where they slowly perish, their cries heard throughout
the neighborhood.
The beings with scales evade common classification of animal
classes, since generally scales are only associated with fish and reptiles
and not mammals (even though mammals with scales exist, such as the
pangolin). These humanoid creatures with scales escape clear categories
and the question of their humanness poses a problem. When the neigh-
bors try to get a zoo to catch and take them, the zoo refuses because
these beings are not clearly identifiable as animals. They do not want
to take in humans because of their past experience with incarcerating
a man: “Ya antes habían acogido a un hombre y les resultó molesto
porque incomodaba a los animales y además exigía demasiado” (64).
This explanation is a humorous take on the question of humanness—a
cause for chuckle in an otherwise bleak story. But the zoo also does not
want to take them in because they do not want to care for an entire
family. The unclassifiable, dehumanized condition of the beings with
scales is then ultimately only an allegory of their marginalization within
dominant society—not because they are not human but because they
are different and because they are poor (Cortez 162).
Dominant society—the neighbors, seemingly upright, civil
citizens, possibly middle- or upper-class—exclude the precarious Other,
578 Sophie Esch

thus revealing their own inhumanity. They put the life of their pet
animals before the life of the other beings and only in the aftermath
of the family’s painful death do they think that they could have also
tried to relocate them. They never consider integrating them—their
xenophobic actions always go unquestioned. They are entrepreneurial
citizens who, in the absence of the state—“en la delegación de policía
. . . no se encargaban de casos como esos” (64),—take matters into their
own hands and eliminate that which is Other and that which disturbs.6
The two stories “Hechos de un buen ciudadano” I and II offer
a similar critique of the neoliberal citizen—utilitarian, entrepreneurial,
and possibly inhumane—who fills voids left by the state. The stories
narrate the pragmatic deeds of a “good citizen” when cadavers suddenly
appear in his home. In “Hechos de un buen ciudadano I,” the corpse of
a woman appears in the man’s kitchen out of nowhere; she appears to
have died a violent death, but there is no perpetrator, no weapon: the
“good citizen” puts an ad in the newspaper in order to find the owner of
the cadaver and the state apparatus only calls to make sure he assumes
responsibility for any hygiene issues or “una epidemia de muertos” that
might result (18). Another woman who seems to work in a state office
calls him to congratulate him on his deeds: “‘Ya no hay ciudadanos
como usted’” (18). After nobody claims the body, he decides to give
it to another man who was looking for a dead male relative and they
make the female body stand in for that of the missing relative by put-
ting heavy objects in the coffin. In “Hechos de un buen ciudadano II,”
others find cadavers in their homes and call the “good citizen” to ask for
advice. He tells them to bring the corpses to him, shows them how to
clean them and together they place another ad in the newspaper for a
total of twenty cadavers. With glee, they sit together and wait for calls.
Seven bodies are never claimed and the protagonist ends up convert-
ing them into a stew for the poor. Again people applaud him for his
contributions to society.
The appearance and treatment of the corpses points to the
economic logic permeating social relations. Catalina Rincón argues:
“el cadáver es un producto del acto de violencia y un producto de uso.
Es por esto que el narrador intercambia un cádaver de una mujer por
la identidad de un hombre como si fueran productos equiparables, del
mismo modo que el mercado intercambia sus productos.” And as such,
the good neoliberal citizen does not deal with the cadavers in a political
In the Company of Animals 579

but in an economic fashion, disguised as charity. The cadavers are fed to

the poor. The utilitarianism of all these actions exposes the perversion
and inhumanity of the so-called good citizen’s civility.
The cadavers also point to the question of the legacy of vio-
lence. Gairaud argues that the cadavers are “la materialización de la me-
moria pública y privada de quienes fueron víctimas de violencia” (96).
In a similar vein, Kokotovic argues that the stories point to the lack of
accountability by the state for its war crimes since “individuals are left
to deal privately, on their own, with the legacy of wartime violence”
(“Telling” 56). He points out that during the war years the Salvadoran
state used to leave tortured and dead bodies in the public sphere as a
warning, but that now, in the story, they turn up in the private sphere
(60). He notes that being a “good citizen” means not notifying the
police or the media but dealing privately with the problem, depoliticiz-
ing and covering it up: “In the end, the evidence of wartime violence,
the dead woman’s body, is literally buried, under false pretenses, in a
conscious and deliberate act of unknowing” (61).
Overall, Kokotovic’s reading is very compelling, but I believe
that his argument that the story is only about the “effects of state-
sponsored terror” during the war years is too limited (“Telling” 60). I
read the stories as pointing to the sensation of a diffuse violence, the
kind of violence that has characterized Latin America after the Cold
War, a violence that brings forth cadavers everywhere, even though no
official war has been declared. Thus the violence is far more ambiguous
and difficult to read than the politically-motivated violence of the war
years. That the story points to the lack of state involvement in deal-
ing with the cadavers does not immediately imply that the state is the
culprit of the crimes. Rather than dealing with the war legacy or state
terror alone, I read these stories as dealing with the persistence and the
trivialization of death in current times.
In this violent context, the story yearns for a different kind of
state and civil society, one that is less concerned with buenos modales
and responds to the appearance of cadavers with outrage rather than
polite conversation: “La espera fue agradable. Ellos llevaron té, café,
galletas y otras bebidas y bocadillos para acompañar la conversación. La
pasamos muy bien” (Hernández 40). These idyllic, bourgeois scenes are
contrasted with the absurd fact that these people are sitting cheerfully
with twenty cadavers dressed in colorful clothes while waiting for the
580 Sophie Esch

victims’ relatives to call. To highlight the flagrancy, the text does not use
the irreverent language Magdalena Perkowska observes in other postwar
texts, but the calm, controlled language of civility (22).
The good citizens of these stories maintain or worsen the hos-
tile, violent circumstances, and indicate no intention to change them.
Ultimately, then, these stories point to the error of equating being a
good human with being a good citizen or with being civil. Being a good
human, they seem to say, goes beyond appearances, manners, and filling
voids left by the neoliberal state. In Hernández’s stories, it is difficult to
find a sense of humaneness, empathy, and community in humans, but
it is possible in the company of animals.

The Compassionate Gaze of the Animal: Recognizing the Other

Many of Hernández’s beings share a common desire: to be

recognized in their suffering. Mutual recognition becomes a form of
healing, not by sweeping aside painful experiences and memories, but
by acknowledging physical and psychological wounds and by accepting
Otherness. Throughout the stories, an idealistic desire for a convivencia
appears that emerges from a process of recognition based on reciprocity
and empathy. Hegel’s dialectic of recognition puts forward arguments
on how human beings become self-aware through recognition. Hegel’s
master-slave dialectic from the The Phenomenology of Spirit holds that
we need the Other to become self-aware. Hegel first stresses the need
of the slave/bondsman (Knecht) to fight the master (Herr) to become
recognized (156–58). This idea is also taken up by Frantz Fanon, who,
in Black Skin, White Masks, says that “man is human only to the extent
to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to
be recognised by him” (216). Foreshadowing his justification of anti-
colonial violence in The Wretched of the Earth, he argues that a violent
struggle is necessary for the oppressed subject to become human in itself
and for itself (73, 84).
However, along with the idea of struggle, both Hegel and
Fanon also point to a second dimension that stresses the need for mu-
tual recognition and reciprocity. Hegel writes that self-awareness can
only happen through both gestures; it is dependent upon the actions
of the self and the Other: “weil, was geschehen soll nur durch beide zu
In the Company of Animals 581

stande kommen kann” (“because what has to happen can only come
about through both”, my translation 153). It is through this reciproc-
ity that the human can, in the end, attain “consciousness-in-itself for
itself,” as Fanon puts it (Black Skin 222). Fanon indicates that the ini-
tial struggle could lead to the loving embrace of the self and the Other
(222). He also highlights that this coming together, this encounter, is
dependent on the recognition of “alterity” (222) or, as we might say
today, difference. Later postcolonial thinkers such as Homi K. Bhabha
deplored Fanon’s “deep hunger for humanism” dismissing it as an
“existentialist humanism that is as banal as it is beatific” (120). It is,
however, precisely this idea of mutual recognition dependent on the
acknowledgment of difference that I want to emphasize here in relation
Hernández’s stories.
The idea of recognition and embrace of the Other comes to the
forefront in the short story that opens De fronteras: “Molestias de tener
un rinoceronte.” It is a story of suffering and recognition, about a man
who has lost his arm and since has become the involuntary owner of a
small rhinoceros. His missing arm refers us to a possible war trauma, as
it is a wound often inflicted by firearms and landmines, both of which
were employed in the Salvadoran conflict. The text makes no direct
mention of the war or specific places. We only know that the two now
roam the streets of “ciudades bonitas y pacíficas” (11). Nonetheless, the
story can be read as dealing with an ex-combatant, given his physical
and psychological trauma and his anger that clashes with his seemingly
peaceful surroundings, which could be a US city to which the man
migrated or a Central American postwar city. The small rhinoceros ap-
peared on the day the man lost his arm and has followed him ever since.
They cause quite a spectacle on the streets: “La gente de estas ciudades
bonitas y pacíficas no está acostumbrada a ver a un tipo con un brazo
de menos y un rinoceronte de más saltando a su alrededor” (11). People
congratulate the man on his rhino, but he always tells them that he
does not want the animal, that it is not his and that they can have it.
Since the strangers do not want to accept the animal, he tries to lose
it through other means. He leaves it at his grandparents’ place but the
rhino only wants to follow him. Annoyed, he tries to abandon him
in “una región dominada por la noche” (12) but again the rhino runs
back to him and finally the man accepts the rhino’s company and love.
Ultimately, he, who has gone through great pains to establish that he
582 Sophie Esch

does not need anyone’s company or help, finds comfort in the fact that
it is he whom the animal chooses to follow: a man with a mutilated,
hurt body, rather than the other humans who “están completos” (12).
To use a rhinoceros in the story that opens De fronteras, not
American but Asian or African fauna, is certainly another attempt to
inscribe the story within the universal—as is the intertextual nod to
Ionesco’s theater of the absurd, Rhinoceros, in which a crisis of
humanism manifests itself in the transformation of the village’s popula-
tion into rhinoceroses. Hernández also feasts on the absurd, since the
man receives tenderness and compassion from a large wild animal,
known above all for its aggressive and solitary nature. It is through the
recognition of the rhino—through its love and its acceptance of the
man’s difference—that the man can become whole again. He talks of
others as people who “están completos” (12), implying with the use of
the verb estar that his state, that of estar incompleto, is somehow transi-
tory or not usual for him. It is only at the end, when he has accepted
the rhino’s love and can admit his fondness of the animal that he talks
about himself, using the verb ser to talk about his “incompleteness.” At
this point, the incompleteness or woundedness—ser incompleto—have
become an inherent quality, an identity marker: “me escogió a mí a
pesar de ser incompleto” (13). He has come to accept his trauma, his
alterity, first through the struggle with the rhino and then through the
rhino’s love, which signifies a tender recognition of the man’s existence
and suffering. The man thus is able to move from an unstable state of
estar to a stable existence of ser. Significantly, the rhino does not return
the man to a pre-trauma state, just as Hernández’s stories do not yearn
for a society that could conceal its scars or return to some lost identity.
Rather, still aware of his trauma but in acceptance of it, he has attained
a “consciousness-in-itself for itself,” as Fanon would call it (Black Skin
222).
Although the protagonist calls the animal names such as “pro-
blema con cuerno,” in my reading, the rhino represents the emergence
of hope (Hernández 13).7 The man always caresses the rhino with “su
cuerno que apunta hacia el futuro” (12). But it is not the goat’s horn—
cuerno de chivo, the nickname for the AK-47—that leads toward the
future as it did in revolutionary times. Instead, it is the loving rhino’s
horn. There is deep sadness in the story but also great tenderness as the
In the Company of Animals 583

man starts to develop a relationship with the animal and starts to re-
ciprocate its love: “me alegré al oír su pasos pequeños atropellándose en
mi búsqueda” (12) and later “sonrío cuando lo veo” and “[l]o acaricio
al llegar a casa con los dedos que no tengo y le permito dormir bajo mi
sombra” (13). The unconditional love of the rhino helps the trauma-
tized man and gives him self-worth; he becomes himself again: “Vino
solo y me escogió a pesar de ser incompleto” (13). It is not a relation-
ship of pet and owner, but one built on the free will of the rhino: “No
es mío. Yo no lo llamé” (13).
As previously mentioned, Hernández’s stories can also be inter-
preted outside the context of Central America. The allegorical nature
of the story allows it to resonate in almost any country where former
combatants, weapons arsenals, and war trauma still permeate daily life.
With some guidance, students of mine in the US were able to interpret
the story in relation to post-traumatic stress disorder, the companion
animal programs for US veterans from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars,
or the imaginary friend of a disturbed mind. The story thus ultimately
can also speak to and speak of the deep war trauma of the heavily mili-
tarized United States. Next to the issue of trauma, it is then also a story
about the reintegration of former combatants within society. How
willing is a society to engage with ex-combatants and their wounds?
In the story nobody wants to know about the lost arm, only about the
rhino. Society leaves the man alone to deal with his trauma. Only the
rhino recognizes the man in his suffering, and with its sheer size pushes
people to engage with the man and his trauma (Kokotovic, “Telling”
58f ). As Ana Patricia Rodríguez puts it: “the appearance of the rhinoc-
eros signifies the magnified spectacle of living trauma in everyday con-
texts” (Dividing 227). The rhino is the elephant in the room: the guilt
of a society that pushes individuals to war, dehumanizes them through
military training and war, and then refuses to recognize their mental
and physical trauma and truly engage with them. The rhino leads the
way for a different form of engagement: recognizing the man in his
loneliness, suffering, and thus enabling him to recuperate a sense of self.
In De fronteras, humans oftentimes find solace only in the ani-
mal, as is the case in “Mediodía en la frontera.” It is a pivotal tale be-
cause it was the title story of the first edition, Mediodía en la frontera. It
also appears to be the source of the title of the second edition, De fron-
teras, making it a crucial story about the border as a physical space, but
584 Sophie Esch

also about liminality: about beings at their limit, beings at the margins
and dividing lines. What divides us from other beings? What makes us
human/e? “Mediodía en la frontera” is a story in which a skinny street
dog discovers a woman about to commit suicide in a public restroom.
Although the dog is disgusted at first, it decides to accompany her
without asking questions. When she hears its growling stomach, she
gives him her tongue, which she just cut out (in order not to look ugly
after she hangs herself ). Only after she insists, does the dog eat her
tongue. As Pérez argues, despite its ironic and cold tone, the story has
a “profound humanity” (“Memory”). The woman without a tongue
and the dog somehow communicate with each other and understand,
recognize each other; she caresses and hugs it and then hangs herself as
planned. The dog decries her death and stays with her long after she is
dead—possibly like a white cadejo, a Mesoamerican mythical hoofed
dog creature that protects travelers from harm (Rodríguez 226). They
mutually recognize one another and engage in a reciprocal embrace of
suffering without violently imposing their existence on the other being.8
Through the company of animals, humans can recognize
themselves. They see themselves reflected in the actions of the animals
towards them. In “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” the French-
Lithuanian philosopher Emmanuel yg recounts the dehumanizing ex-
perience of being a Jewish prisoner of war in Nazi Germany. He recalls
how they were “stripped of . . . [their] human skin” by the gazes of pass-
ersby: “We were subhuman. A gang of apes.” (48). He then recounts
the arrival of a stray dog they name Bobby who starts to live with
them in the camp, waiting for them, barking, and welcoming them:
“He would appear at morning assembly and was waiting for us as we
returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight. For him, there
was no doubt that we were men” (49). Hernández’s stories about the
rhinoceros and the dog as well as Levinas’s stirring anecdote point to a
different perspective on the Hegelian conception of humanness through
recognition. In a dehumanizing context—brought on by different
violent ideologies and forces, be they capitalism, neoliberalism,
militarism, colonialism, or fascism—recognition through another
human is often out of reach. It is in the animal—through its gaze or
company—that people can recognize themselves and recuperate a sense
of humanness. Furthermore, the animal’s company restores a sense of
community and empathy in beings who before were alone in their suf-
fering.
In the Company of Animals 585

Voids and Forensics: Grief, Imagining the Other, Restoring Justice

The question of convivencia and community relates to the ques-

tion of grief and guilt. Several stories of De fronteras depict a society
who finds the act of mourning enormously difficult. But one story
delineates a path for restorative justice, which would enable people to
better express both guilt and grief. Restorative justice can take many
forms but generally involves victims, offenders, and the community,
with a focus on repairing and empowering the community and holding
it accountable for helping in this process (Johnston and Van Ness 7).
Restorative justice is “geared less towards stigmatizing and punishing
the wrongdoer and more towards ensuring that wrongdoers recognize
and meet a responsibility to make amends for the harm they have
caused” and on “tangible ways” to address the injury and needs of the
victims (Johnstone and Van Ness 7).
Ana Patricia Rodríguez has called Hernández’s stories “foren-
sic” since they dissect both corpses as well as animal and human forms
(Dividing 226). Many stories point to disrupted processes of mourning
(Gairaud, “Rutas”; Pérez, “Memory”). There are the stories of the cadav-
ers that appear and get cleaned in the “good citizen” stories. There is the
story, “Melissa: juegos 1 al 5,” in which a little girl both plays dead and
plays with the dead. She pretends to be the corpse of her grandmother,
of a cat hit by a car, or of a dove killed by a stone, and she creates an
entire morgue of dolls in her room. In another story, “Abuelo,” a boy
exhumes his grandfather because he misses him so much. Here an inter-
rupted process of mourning translates into a curious, forensic interest
in the corpse. The tension between mourning and forensics comes most
vividly to the fore in the story “Manual del hijo muerto.” The story is
written in the form of an instruction manual, which gives instructions
for putting together one’s child if it returns home dead, tortured, and
mutilated. It is narrated in a “bureaucratically euphemistic language”
(Kokotovic, “Telling” 64): “Causa especial emoción reconstruir el
cuerpo del niño (24–25 años) que salió completo de la casa hace dos
o seis días” (Hernández 107). The forensic gaze and dehumanizing
bureaucratic prose amplify the unbearable situation. Underneath that
language festers a profound sadness, suffering, pain, and outrage. Yet
the story presents a numb society that has forgotten how to mourn, as
the manual also has to supply instructions for this act: “Llore cada vez
586 Sophie Esch

que alguien mencione su nombre” (109). Again the violent death of
people is relegated to the private sphere, where citizens must dutifully
make the body presentable, assembling it and brushing over torture
marks with clothes and make-up. It is a story with a detached gaze,
worried about keeping up appearances instead of raging or wailing like
a hurt or angry animal.
Despite the forensic gaze, generally the question of culpability
is absent in the stories. Ana Patricia Rodríguez has argued that Central
American fiction has tried to offer “symbolic acts of reparation” in a
context where state institutions have failed to offer political and eco-
nomic reparation (“Diasporic Reparations” 33). The stories by Claudia
Hernández do not attempt to have the literary text function as such
an aesthetic substitution. Generally they only display a context where
violence and impunity reigns. One story, however, does think about
reparations. “Carretera sin buey” offers a reflection about questions
of mourning, guilt, and restitution through a process of restorative
justice—and once again the animal figure is key. “Carretera sin buey”
tells the story of a man who tries to absolve himself of striking and kill-
ing an ox with his car by becoming an ox.9 The story is told in a first
person plural narration by people who, while driving in a car, encounter
a man standing on a road pretending to be an ox. They stop, listen to
his story, and then offer suggestions on how he can deepen his trans-
formation. They recommend he put on horns, undress himself, dull his
gaze, and castrate himself. He does so willingly in order to free himself
of the pain of having killed the ox by replacing it. Yet the people in the
car, the narrators, are concerned that he might never manage to become
fully animal because his eyes still have a certain shimmer and a gaze that
evokes his human soul and intellect. In the end, they drive on, leaving
the man to his endeavor.
The story displays a hostile, cynical human society since the
narrators only stopped their car because they thought the man was an
animal. They are horrified to learn that he is in fact human since, as
the narrators tell us, they would have never stopped for a human (23).
The faith in humanity is shattered, distrust reigns, but the actions of
the oxman present a different logic. Although, as the implicit wordplay
suggests, the story implies that the man is indeed an ox or an idiot for
wanting to turn himself into an animal by means of emasculation, there
is also an urgency in his task to become the Other. He yearns to feel the
In the Company of Animals 587

Other, recognizing the void that the death of the other being, the ox,
has left. He does not seek vindictive, punitive justice for himself, but
seeks to replace the loss he has caused. Yansi Pérez argues that this story
subverts mourning by making literal “what mourning proposes at a
more metaphorical and symbolic level” and says that this story presents
“a perverse fantasy of a mourning that only accepts total restitutions”
(“Memory”). One can certainly read the story as yet another example
of these disrupted, helpless attempts of mourning displayed in the other
stories mentioned above, but I read the literalization more positively, as
proposing a different form of justice that confronts the reality of death
in all its details and accepts one’s guilt by trying to fill the void. The
logic appears in the telling of the ox-man’s motifs:
Miraba el vacío del animal y no podía continuar tranquilo aunque él
mismo se había encargado de hacerle compañía y de hablarle mien-
tras estuvo en el trance de la muerte, de acariciarlo cuando pareció
necesitarlo, de cerrarle los ojos, de espantarle a las aves de rapiña que
quisieron devorarlo, de darle sepultura, de no dejarlo a la intemperie y
de sembrar flores y lágrimas sobre su tumba. (24)

Such restorative justice represents a concept that differs con-

siderably from modern justice systems. It is not a justice of revenge
nor does it fit with the modern principle of incarceration. Instead of
exclusion through state-ordered death or prison, it is concerned with
integration. This logic also differs from many other Central American
postwar texts, especially demobilized combatant novels such as El arma
en el hombre by Horacio Castellanos Moya and Y te diré quién eres by
Franz Galich. These novels are concerned with settling old feuds from
the war and annihilating the opponent. In “Carretera sin buey,” which
can also be read as dealing with a former combatant and his guilt, a dif-
ferent logic comes to the fore, one of recognition and restitution instead
of revenge and annihilation.
Many critics have read “Carretera sin buey” more as a critique
than a proposal, as a story critical of powerful elites or outside agen-
cies defining and commanding the marginalized being (Cortez 155,
158; Kokotovic, “Telling”, 67; Ortiz Wallner 8). Kokotovic reads the
story as referring to the “unacknowledged cost of pacification,” during
which the poor majority in Central America was “called upon to pay
for restoring” peace (67, 69). While it is possible to read “Carretera sin
buey” within a framework of empire and domination, such a reading
588 Sophie Esch

overlooks the potentially radical proposal of the story, which advocates
healing through a particular form of restitution.10 Then the text can
be read as a story about the reintegration of combatants or culprits in
general. It creates an acute awareness and appreciation of the void left
by a violent act. The story asks the question of what it would mean to
truly accept the guilt of having taken the life of another being. What
would an individual or a society have to do in order to engage with the
personal and collective guilt accrued in the context of war?

Animal Lines of Inquiry

At the beginning of this article, I mentioned that Hernández’s

stories form part of the tradition of thinking about humanness through
animals. And certainly, the focus of the stories is the state of humanity.
However, the strange liminal creatures of the stories also put into ques-
tion a sole focus on the human being. Thus if one takes into account
Hernández’s literary reflections and moves more towards conceptual
ideas about the indistinction of humans and animals, several lines of
inquiry about animals emerge.
In the stories, the relationships with animals offer humans
recognition, empathy, or an outlet for pain and guilt. Yet at the same
time, the animals themselves occupy precarious positions in the stories:
hunted and killed; struck by cars, hungry on the street, abandoned by
their human companions. In the story about the scaled beings, the
murder of the family in the sewage system points us to the capitalist,
colonialist, and fascist practices in which animalization has been used
to oppress, exploit, or exclude groups of humans on the basis of race
but also of class, gender, and sexuality. The fact that the neighbors put
the life of their domestic animals above that of the humanoid creatures
is seen as an expression of these tendencies (Cortez 162). Yet the story
further complicates our understanding of the value of life, whether it
be human or animal. The story depicts the violence of the killing of
the cats and dogs and the violence of the killing of the scaled humans.
Throughout the story the family’s desperate shrieks of hunger and agony
resound; but the story is also haunted by the crunching and grinding
sounds of the bones of the pets being devoured by the scaled family:
In the Company of Animals 589

“Tres veces al día se escuchaba el sonido de las cuatro mandíbulas tri-

turando huesos de animales” (63). Just like the story about the forensic
games of the little girl Melissa, this story juxtaposes human and animal
death. Thus while the stories circle around humans and their cadav-
ers, around the violence committed against and among humans, they
also pose the question of the animal as subject of history. Who will
recognize them, grieve for them? Do animals enter history only in the
company of humans?

Colorado State University

NOTES
1
Mediodía de frontera also contained three more stories: “Trueque,” “Estampa,” and
“De obsequio.” All references in this article are to De fronteras.

2
Hernández has won the Juan Rulfo prize of Radio France in 1998 and the Anna
Seghers prize in 2004. In 2007, she was also invited to Bogotá39, a gathering of 39
young writers deemed to have the potential to define Latin American literature in the
future (Ortiz Wallner 3). Scholarship on her work includes Cortez; Craft; Gairaud,
“Rutas”, “Sistemas”, “Trayectorias”; Haas; Jossa; Kokotovic ,“Telling”; Lara Martínez;
Ortiz Wallner; Padilla, “Of Diosas”, “Setting”; Pérez; Rincón; Rodríguez, Dividing
the Isthmus, “Web of Impunities”; Rodríguez Corrales; Rojas González; Sarmiento,
“Claudia”, “Comunidad”; Zuñiga Bustamante. While her stories have been compared
to those of Franz Kafka, Julio Cortázar, Nellie Campobello, and Virgilio Piñera (Ko-
kotovic, “Telling” 53, 57; Ortiz Wallner 3; Pérez), she herself sees Hans Christian
Andersen as her biggest influence (Menjívar Ochoa).

3
I understand neoliberalism as a set of public policies aimed at market
liberalization—privatization of public services, free trade agreements—as well as a
permeation of culture by an entrepreneurial logic.

4
Scholars have questioned the periodization as “postwar literature” (Cortez 23–25;
Mackenbach 288). I, nevertheless, use it as a broad descriptor for a literature that is
in numerous ways impacted by the wars and their aftermaths. This postwar literature
includes the more experimental, oftentimes dark fiction about the postwar situation
as well as the often nostalgic memoirs by former militants. Even the surge of historical
novels in the last two decades can be seen as a form of escapism or soul-searching that
looks toward the distant past in order not to have to face the present.
590 Sophie Esch

5
“Humane,” originally just a different spelling of the adjective “human,” over time
acquired different meanings, first referring to civil, and then taking on the current mean-
ing of being compassionate and being concerned for the suffering of others (Oxford
English Dictionary). Spanish does not have this distinction between human and hu-
mane; rather, being compassionate is one of the meanings of the adjective “humano/a”:
“Comprensivo, sensible a los infortunios ajenos” (Real Academica Española).

6
For a more detailed discussion of the topic of precariousness in Claudia Hernández
see Sarmiento “Claudia Hernández y la escritura de la precariedad.”

7
As usual in Hernández’s abstract and fantastic stories, there are multiple ways of
interpreting the story. Rincón, for example, offers an original reading in which she
reads the rhinoceros as an allegory for the imposition of the neoliberal regime “que se
presenta inofensiva y hasta agradable.” She notes that the rhino does not act violently
but that it imposes “su presencia pasivamente.” Ultimately the rhino cultivates a de-
pendency (as the man grows fond of it).

8
Also in “La han despedido de nuevo” from Olvida uno by Claudia Hernández animals
appear as possible helpers or companions but their role is more ambivalent.

9
The title of the story, “Carretera sin buey,” plays on the Central American legend of a
“Carreta sin bueyes,” about a cart without oxen that can be heard roaming the streets
at night. It tells the story of a witch who tries to fulfill the last wish of her partner to be
buried at the Catholic cemetery. She puts his corpse on a cart and commands oxen to
pull it, but the priest refuses to receive the man’s body because of her evil, blasphemous
witchcraft. The priest forgives the oxen for their participation and they are released,
whereas the cart, corpse, and witch continue to roam the streets for eternity. Similar to
many of Hernández’s stories, this folk tale deals with interrupted processes of mourn-
ing; this intertextual reference thus adds an additional layer to the story by pointing
to the difficult interplay between individual and society when it comes to mourning.

10
While my reading differs from those of Kokotovic and Cortez, it is undeniable that
in the story the people who stop only hesitantly, give recommendations, and then
drive off play an odd role. In this sense, I agree with Kokotovic’s and Cortez’s critique
of the role of elites. If a society is truly invested in facilitating the reintegration of
its violent perpetrators, then people have to engage with them, just as they have to
engage with their own guilt. They cannot merely say a few words from a position of
power and then drive off. The concern for reintegration and reconciliation cannot be
a fleeting concern.

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27 Mar. 2016.

Keywords: Central American literature, postwar, Claudia Hernández, animal-human

studies, compassion, civility, recognition, neoliberalism.

Palabras clave: literatura centroamericana, posguerra, Claudia Hernández, estudios

de animales y humanos, compasión, civilidad, reconocimiento, neoliberalismo.

Date of Receipt: March 27, 2016

Date of Acceptance: November 20, 2016