Feral Ecologies and the Toxic Sublime: Intermedial Narratives of Contamination in Fever Dream
Feral Ecologies and the Toxic Sublime: Intermedial Narratives of Contamination in Fever Dream

Summary/Abstract: Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream (Distancia de rescate, 2014, trans. 2017) presents a harrowing vision of ecological crisis through a deeply interior, disorienting, and sensorially immersive narrative. Avoiding the grand spectacle of climate catastrophe or the distanced realism of traditional environmental fiction, Schweblin instead offers a claustrophobic, affect-laden portrayal of slow violence, contamination, and maternal anxiety. Through its fragmented structure, second-person address, and atmosphere of dread, the novel transforms ecological emergency into a psychic and corporeal event, an embodied aesthetic experience that gestures toward intermediality. Drawing on the tonal registers of horror cinema, speculative fiction, sound art, and oral storytelling, Fever Dream unfolds as a toxic dreamscape where the boundaries between self and environment, human and nonhuman, become porous and unstable. This paper positions Fever Dream as a work of intermedial ecological fiction, with its 2021 Netflix adaptation by Claudia Llosa functioning not merely as a narrative transposition but as an intermedial intensification of the novel’s eco-horror poetics. As such, the adaptation reveals what the novel can only suggest: the aesthetic entanglement of horror and ecology, dread and beauty. Both the novel and the film foreground feral ecologies, landscapes and bodies destabilized by agrochemical exposure, rendered ungovernable and mutagenic. These are not distant disasters, but intimate emergencies experienced through children, mothers, animals, and contaminated water. The Argentine countryside in Fever Dream is not a passive setting but an agent of mutation, producing hybrid life forms and altered perceptions. This paper argues that Fever Dream, in both its literary and cinematic expressions, radically reimagines environmental crisis as an aesthetic and affective entanglement. It refuses the redemptive arcs and explanatory frameworks typical of climate fiction and instead inhabits the terrain of spectral uncertainty, perceptual breakdown, and toxic intimacy. Environmental emergencies here are not narrated through spectacle but whispered in hallucinated fragments, buried in soil and breath, seeping slowly into the body and the screen alike.

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