“Structures of Feeling”: On Tenderness and Other Sensations in Carlos Gamerro’s Fiction

Abstract: An important aspect of Carlos Gamerro’s novels is a subtle and nuanced focus on emotions. This paper begins by outlining the “affective technique”—precise, often metaphorical descriptions, of imprecise, hard-to-describe feelings—in his early works, in a nod to the “affective turn” in Latin American studies. Gamerro’s most recent novels— Cardenio and La jaula de los onas —offer funny and provocative digressions from known historical events, but rely on moving depictions of human frailty, pleasure, and interdependence. Gamerro links these through a central emotion: tenderness. Moreover, these novels display a “structural tenderness,” and with it, a relationship between the vulnerability of this emotion and a readerly response—an uncertainty or self-doubt—of being pushed into and out of fiction. La jaula de los onas uses this depiction of mutual vulnerability to tell a moving and politically acute story of violence and cultural erasure in the far south.