(Neuro) Epigenetic Ecosickness and Plastic “Wounding” in Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream

Abstract

Ecosickness, as theorized by Heather Houser, entangles somatic experience and environmental damage by revealing how the material reality of sickness erodes the boundary between body and environment. This framework anticipates insights from epigenetic research that uncovers how environmental triggers create lasting patterns of gene expression, or epigenetic signatures, within and on the body. Through a critical reading of Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream (2017), the study examines how epigenetic ecosickness emerges from environmental toxicity and situates its representations of bodily vulnerability within Catherine Malabou’s theoretical accounts of neuronal plasticity. It argues that this narrative reconfigures subjectivity through environmentally induced forms of trauma and anxiety, producing what Malabou conceptualizes as the “new wounded.” Although the novel does not depict clinical neurological disorders, the study identifies narrative fissures in which environmental degradation co-imbricates with affective disturbances, giving rise to permanent or temporary states of indifference or disaffection. It understands “destructive plasticity” as an ontological variant of plastic “wounding” animated by epigenetic ecosickness with reference to the novel. It examines how the toxic sublimity of the Argentine soy fields in Fever Dream produces a transcorporeal overlap with the “toxic latency” of inorganic matter and how neuroplasticity functions as an index of the body’s (in)adaptability to toxic environments. The study also reads the maternal figures as staging two distinct registers of maternal anxiety triggered under conditions of environmental exposure. The first operates as an epigenetically transmitted behavioral disposition, while the second emerges as a post-traumatic guilt, a retrospective rupture produced by witnessing the destructive-plastic effects of epigenetic transformation.