The Trauma of Nature: Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama as Ecological Noir

This paper suggests a reading of Zama (1956), the acclaimed debut novel of Argentine writer Antonio Di Benedetto, from an eco-critical perspective. In light of a remark by Sergio Chejfec, it will look at how the novel’s eponymous protagonist, a colonial-era bureaucrat based in Asunción, encounters the natural environment as traumatic, engendering cognitive upheaval. On this basis, it will go on to consider how the work conforms to a variant of Bildungsroman, or, in this case, novel of ecological apprenticeship, insofar as the protagonist undergoes a process of cognitive re-orientation as his experience of the environment comes into conflict with Old World epistemologies. It will be argued that the temporal setting is, for this reason, significant, as it sets the action against the backdrop of then-emergent geological and proto-Darwinian discourses. In the final sections, the paper aims to contextualise the novel’s publication in 1956 in terms of its affiliations with film noir, and to assess the grounds for considering noir as a paradigm for understanding latter-day iterations of the Bildungsroman, as well as an exemplary modality for the working-through of post-World War II epistemological trauma. Finally, and within the same broadly eco-critical framework, some reasons will be suggested for the renewed interest in Di Benedetto’s novel in recent years.