The Juridical Personhood of Nature in El jardín de Nora

• In Event: Narrativa contemporánea I: Espacios cruzados y los lindes de lo humano

Abstract

Roughly ten years before the Plurinational State of Bolivia promulgated its National Constitution, Blanca Wiethüchter’s short novel El jardín de Nora (1998) appears prescient of several of its tenets. It is a partly autobiographical story of Austrian immigrants in the altiplano who try to plant a European garden there, an operation that leads, literally, to the fracture of the ground under their feet. In this talk, I analyze this rich text as an avant la lettre thematization of new Bolivian political subjectivities. In particular, I consider the juridical personhood of Nature implicit in the work. I follow this problematic throughout the narrative’s ample lithological and tectonic detail. Conventional interpretations could easily dismiss this aspect as secondary by ignoring the agency of earth the novel strives to capture. In conversation with new materialism, and particularly Timothy Morton’s notion of hyperobjects, I also ask the question about Latin American literature’s contribution to our understanding of geological things, which transcend a human scale and life span.

Author

• Héctor M Hoyos Ayala, Stanford University