Aesthetic (pre)figurations of the anthropocene in Fernanda Trías’ Mugre rosa, a poetics in the flesh

Abstract

This essay analyzes the book Mugre rosa (2021) by Uruguayan writer Fernanda Trías as a fiction of the Anthropocene. I argue that this text belongs to a set of aesthetic artifacts that engages in the debates around the current geological era, suggests aesthetic figurations of the material and the living, promotes a perspective from Gaia and engages in the construction of a new sensibility and a new language to inhabit the Anthropocene. From my perspective, this narrative is situated at a temporal edge from which it observes and testifies to the peeling of a cultural imaginary of modernity that is incompatible with the social perception of the times in which we live. Thus, I argue that this book by Trías presents a series of modulations of skinning that point towards the same semantic gesture. By skinning I mean the act of flaying, that is, of removing an old skin or surface and leaving the body in the flesh. Through narrative techniques, tropes, stark language and its structure, the novel composes a Gaia, a temporality, and a writing that, once the skins have fallen off, are left red-hot.

In what follows, I develop the idea of fiction of the Anthropocene while referring to the state of current debates about this era. Then, I expose and justify the notion of skinning to account for an aesthetic and political operation of Mugre rosa that strives to take responsibility for our time and compose a new sensibility. Furthermore, I propose that the book takes on a Gaia perspective which prompts us to rethink humanity's relationship with earth systems and waste.