In his pioneering study on the picaresque novel, Frank Wadleigh Chandler (Reference Chandler1899) describes picaros as characters immersed in refuse. Whereas their chivalric literary predecessors strive to reach the upper stratosphere of heroism and hygiene, picaros attend instead to humanity’s scraps and unpleasant odors: “Blatant sounds, pungent odors, what was crude to the touch and strong to the sight, appealed to him. No refinement could be expected from his story, nothing but a scrutiny through eager senses of what best would give them immediate satisfaction. The picaresque novel was thus grossly real and usual; more than that, it emphasized and made prominent in all ways the lower elements of reality” (Chandler Reference Chandler1899, 15). Picaros, Chandler informs us, are most interested in elements of reality readily apprehended through the bodily senses. They are thus characters deeply perceptive of and responsive to their environment. Rather than concentrating on social qualities associated with hygiene, they are drawn to the physical remains that people conceal, discard, and ignore.

Though traditionally associated with the early modern period, particularly in Spain, the picaresque is by no means confined to it. The purpose of this article is to study the Brazilian writer Santiago Nazarian’s novel Mastigando humanos: Um romance psicodélico (Chewing Humans: A Psychedelic Novel, 2006) through a picaresque lens. Doing so may enable us to understand how its main character, a mischievous alligator named Victório, associates his life with the sewage system in which he learns how to read and write. Narrated from the first-person point of view, he recounts his experience eating trash in the sewers while coexisting with humans and other animals. Moreover, he details his abduction by a team of researchers who attempt to introduce him to civilization by giving him a teaching position at a university. He, however, fails to adapt to the hypocrisy of civilization and ultimately becomes an anonymous being within an urban setting. The protagonist is attentive to his own perspective, to social divisions, and to the act of writing itself, all of which are major qualities of the picaresque novel. More importantly, the narrator is a nonhuman being who narrates his own misadventures. This article asks the following: How does Nazarian’s novel exhibit elements of the picaresque from a nonhuman perspective and in tandem with trash? More broadly, how does the novel’s portrayal of an alligator who writes an autobiography within an industrialized society broaden our understanding of the picaresque as a genre that expands beyond the human?

Published more than fifty years after Chandler’s study, Claudio Guillén’s (Reference Guillén1971a) seminal essay “Toward a Definition of the Picaresque” provides an insightful analysis of the picaresque novel and its afterlives in the twentieth century. He argues for an understanding of the picaresque in terms of four concentric circles. At the center lie the emblematic Spanish picaresque novels of the early modern period: the anonymously published Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599), and Francisco de Quevedo’s La vida del Buscón (1626). The second contains novels that strictly adhere to the formal patterns of the genre set forth by these three Spanish texts. The third circle includes novels that, in a broader sense, may be considered picaresque. Finally, the fourth and final circle contains those novels that exhibit what he calls “the picaresque myth,” or an archetype of human existence that reverberates across time periods (Guillén Reference Guillén1971a, 71).

What distinguishes the picaresque myth, Guillén argues, is that it emblematizes a condition of human existence in which dissimulation and appearances prevail over honesty due to the marginalization of certain social groups. “Left without a father, or a mother, or both,” he explains, the picaro “is obliged to fend for himself (‘buscarse la vida’) in an environment for which he is not prepared” (Guillén Reference Guillén1971a, 80). Picaros become isolated figures in the face of a relentlessly corrupt society in which appearances take precedence over moral authenticity and from which they cannot escape. They develop what Guillén (Reference Guillén1971a, 88) calls a “half-outsider” mentality, or a form of double consciousness in which individual expressions of authenticity recede in favor of façades and disingenuousness. This form of straddling between outward conformity and inward estrangement, expressed through a first-person narrative, prefigures, for him, the development of the individual conscience in the modern novel.

One of Guillén’s most discerning strategies was to approach the picaro not only as a literary character but also as a literary myth, one that exhibits central tenets of human experience, such as the relationship between individuals and their local environment. Alexander Blackburn’s Reference Blackburn1979 book The Myth of the Picaro: Continuity and Transformation in the Picaresque Novel, 1554–1954 further underlines the significance of the picaresque myth in literary history. Following in Guillén’s footsteps, Blackburn defines picaros as characters steeped in isolation and embedded within a morally disintegrating society from which they are ostracized. Beneath a comical and clever persona, he affirms, lies the soul of an agonizing individual who yearns for community but is forced to live a life of connivance and deception. For Blackburn (Reference Blackburn1979, 25), picaros assume the mantle of assimilation while internally becoming skeptical and estranged from the corrupt society in which they are embroiled. So pervasive is the picaresque presence in literary history across the centuries, he asserts, that Western civilization itself may be considered picaresque because it harbors “a modern man without a living faith.” Blackburn identifies the picaro as the emblem of the modern individual who yearns for a sense of communal care in a society indifferent to the lives of its peripheral members.

At the center of Nazarian’s novel lies a narrator, Victório, who constantly emphasizes his solitude as the only alligator living in a sewage system within an urban setting. There, he ruminates on the essence of hunger, the ubiquity of trash, and the idea of devouring humans. What is particularly curious about this specific picaro is that he is an alligator who has developed the ability to communicate in Portuguese. The novel’s deployment of anthropomorphism to describe the misadventures of an alligator living in a society filled with trash makes it relevant to the field of animal studies. Kari Weil (Reference Weil2012) situates animal studies as a critical field that questions the boundaries between humans and other animals. In particular, she advances the concept of critical anthropomorphism, or the attribution of humanlike traits to individuals of other species as an empathetic practice of the imagination. She proposes an interpretation of anthropomorphism “in the sense that we open ourselves to touch and be touched by others as fellow subjects and may imagine their pain and need in anthropomorphic terms, but stop short of believing that we can know their experience” (Weil Reference Weil2012, 21). In gazing at animals, she emphasizes, they also gaze back at us, prompting us to question our own humanity, or how well we think we know ourselves and each other.

Weil thus follows a philosophical trajectory on relationality developed by Emmanuel Levinas and subsequently by Jacques Derrida. In his book Time and the Other ([1979] 1987), Levinas argues that the relationship with the other is shrouded in mystery, even as it participates in communal existence. “The relationship with the other is not an idyllic and harmonious relationship of communion, or a sympathy through which we put ourselves in the other’s place.” Instead, he writes, “we recognize the other as resembling us, but exterior to us; the relationship with the other is a relationship with a mystery” (Levinas [Reference Levinas and Robert1979] 1987, 75). Published over two decades later, Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am expands this definition of the other beyond the human, arguing that seeing other animals who return our gaze reveals their mysterious existence in relation to our own. The act of looking and being looked at reveals a contact zone in which empathy becomes speculative as it attempts to apprehend the vulnerable existence that we share with other beings. In Nazarian’s novel, Victório becomes an anthropomorphized other who asks his readers to ruminate on the implications of sharing a polluted planet with other animals, whether human or nonhuman. The novel itself becomes an imaginative platform that dwells on the meaning of compassion as well as the mysteriousness of each individual in a world submerged in trash.

As a picaresque alligator with a passion for writing, Victório’s narrative describes a society in which populations are either protected by the law or exposed to violence. As such, Nazarian’s novel evinces a form of biopolitical thought in which the protagonist interprets his own life while witnessing the brutality and negligence inflicted upon other characters. The novel approaches biopolitics, or the administration of life, as a social project that extends beyond the human and encompasses other species living in close proximity to trash. As Cary Wolfe (Reference Wolfe2012, 105) writes, “the biopolitical thought … is no longer ‘human’ vs. ‘animal’: the biopolitical point is a newly expanded community of the living and the concern we should all have with where violence and immunitary protection fall within it, because we are, after all, potentially animals before the law.” As the ultimate system of rules, the law can deprive any population of personhood, thereby creating scenarios in which anyone may become disposable.

In the case of Latin America, Gabriel Giorgi (Reference Giorgi2014) argues that the insurgence of animals as literary characters in twentieth-century literature may be attributed to an expansion of biopolitical thought. He affirms that, beginning in the 1960s, a new level of symbolic proximity between literary characters across species lines emerged in Latin America. Whereas the animal formerly occupied a marginalized space outside literary discourse, it now finds itself enmeshed in questions of desire and the body (Giorgi Reference Giorgi2014, 12). This proximity of marginality, violence, and the human also recalls Juan Pablo Dabove’s (Reference Dabove2007, 285) study on banditry in which figures such as bandits and outlaws expose the limits of the legal order and reveal zones of exception where certain lives become expendable as part of nation-building projects. Like the bandit in Dabove’s study, the picaro inhabits a space where legality and violence intersect, making visible the instability of the categories that separate civilization from barbarism. In the specific case of Brazilian literature, Antonio Candido (Reference Candido and Howard1995, 96) argues that the literary figure of the malandro, or rogue, has affinities with fairy-tale tricksters, some of whom are animals, and who are then transplanted into a realist setting of dissimulation and marginalization. As such, distinctions between the human and the nonhuman become unsettled in a context in which the administration of life is never stable.

It is within this biopolitical framework that trash acquires significance as an ever-shifting cultural label that marks what a given society designates as disposable. In his study of trash and ontology, Greg Kennedy (Reference Kennedy2007, 162) argues that, unlike waste, which is “obvious and offensive,” trash possesses “an intrinsic ability to conceal itself and deceive,” unsettling the apparent transparency of systems that separate the useful from the useless. Following Mary Douglas’s (Reference Douglas1966, 50) well-known definition of dirt as “matter out of place,” trash destabilizes classificatory structures and exposes relations that extend beyond the human, revealing the fragility of the boundaries through which social order is maintained. Trash also discloses otherwise hidden dimensions of personal and collective life, thereby challenging the very notion of privacy. As Elizabeth V. Spelman (Reference Spelman2016, 19) observes, “trash speaks of us … even as its status as trash signals a significant distance between it and us. We can get rid of our trash, but it doesn’t quite get rid of us.”

In the Latin American context, the cultural and political force of waste has left a particularly visible imprint on literary production. As Gisela Heffes (Reference Heffes and Grady2023, 9) argues, the region’s aesthetic practices are often permeated by “a rhetoric of waste” that foregrounds discarded objects, toxic environments, and residual subjects as central components of modernity. Waste, in this sense, refers not only to discarded materials but also to a network of relations marked by inequality and environmental degradation, revealing how certain populations are forced to inhabit contaminated spaces while others remain protected (Heffes Reference Heffes and Grady2023, 67). Heffes (Reference Heffes and Grady2023, 70) further situates these representations at the intersection of biopolitics and ecocriticism, where the distinction between what is valuable and what is disposable becomes inseparable from the classification of subjects themselves.

Micah McKay likewise underlines that trash in Latin American cultural production is not merely material refuse but an aesthetic figure that discloses the biopolitical boundaries through which modern societies organize populations. In Trash and Limits in Latin American Culture (2024), he argues that the presence of trash in urban settings often breaks down the boundaries between human and nonhuman, as well as between value and residue. Trash, he writes, signals “a series of crucial theoretical limits: normative notions of the human, community, waste management, and environmental activism” (McKay Reference McKay2024, 4). Because discarded objects blur distinctions between people and their material environments, they compel us to question how urban spaces protect certain populations while excluding others. Consequently, narratives of trash in Latin America frequently explore how violence, urbanization, and environmental pollution intersect in spaces where humans live alongside the materials they discard.

Nazarian’s novel can therefore be read as a picaresque narrative situated within a landscape defined by trash, one in which refuse operates both as material residue and as a discursive force. In his study on the long-term environmental consequences of pollution, or what he terms “slow violence,” Rob Nixon (Reference Nixon2011) argues that the picaresque is a literary genre particularly suited to discuss environmental degradation. “This passion for interrogating the hypocrisies of criminality,” he affirms, “makes the picaresque a promising fit with the priorities of the environmental justice movement” (Nixon Reference Nixon2011, 55–56). Likewise, Nazarian’s novel, I argue, centralizes the picaresque precisely for its ability to bring forth the environment. Victório’s location in the sewage system constitutes a threshold where the frontiers between human and animal, subject and object, and protection and abandonment become unstable. By situating an anthropomorphized alligator in direct contact with garbage and hunger, Nazarian’s novel foregrounds what Heffes (Reference Heffes and Grady2023, 67) designates as the agency of refuse. In the novel, living beings and the discarded objects with which they coexist invite readers to approach the world otherwise and, in doing so, to understand how the urban environment produces protection for some while exposing others to violence.

An exemplary case attesting to the persistence of trash in contemporary environments is the proliferation of animals that have adapted to living among it. These so-called trash animals have incorporated waste into their everyday survival and, in doing so, have developed ingenious ways of bypassing human-made structures to secure food. Their presence, however, often provokes collective disgust, precisely because they inhabit spaces associated with what human societies seek to discard and render invisible. As Kelsi Nagy and Phillip David Johnson (Reference Nagy and David Johnson2013) argue, trash animals have historically unsettled normative notions of cleanliness, order, and hierarchy. Because they resist domestication, blur the distinction between wild and domesticated, and interfere with human attempts to reorganize the landscape, they become figures onto which cultural anxieties about disorder and contamination are projected. As the authors note, such animals “carry the myths, symbolisms, stories, and violence of human history because they have historically resisted domestication, because they transgress the boundary of domesticated or wild, or because they have been a hindrance to larger human efforts to reorganize the landscape” (Nagy and Johnson Reference Nagy and David Johnson2013, 2). The terms myths, symbolisms, and stories suggest that trash animals function not only as biological organisms but also as narrative agents that reveal the instability of the categories through which humans define themselves. By inhabiting spaces of refuse, trash animals expose the artificiality of the culture-nature divide, as well as the arbitrary project of differentiating what is valuable from what is expendable. In this sense, trash animals participate in emergent ecologies, or assemblages formed by discarded materials and animals that have adapted to urban infrastructures.Footnote ¹ Emergent ecologies in cities demonstrate that environments shaped by waste can become sites of unforeseen forms of coexistence. Trash animals reveal that humans are not isolated beings but just one element within a larger network of relations that respond to consumption and disposal.

It is this process of kinship making across species, objects, and environments that lies at the heart of Nazarian’s novel. By portraying an alligator who survives within a sewage system and learns to interpret the world through trash, the novel foregrounds a form of relationality in which discarded objects, urban infrastructures, and life become inseparable. Victório’s existence among refuse discloses how modern urban life constantly produces new ecological assemblages in which interspecies relations alongside waste are constantly renegotiated. Through this lens, Nazarian transforms the figure of the picaro into a trash animal, a being whose survival depends on navigating the spaces that society neglects.

From the beginning, Victório makes clear that he has composed an autobiography to recount his misfortunes and adversities as an alligator living among humans. With the benefit of temporal hindsight, he narrates his origin in a swamp and his decision to let the current carry him toward the underground sewers of a large urban center. In the opening pages, he attributes the ability to read and speak to the chemical substances circulating through the sewage system. Trash, he claims, has endowed him with the capacity to reflect upon his own existence and to converse with others, even at the cost of mental impairment due to chemical exposure. Each discarded object becomes for him part of an assemblage of readable signs. “Everything it wanted to say, the information it wanted to convey, and I became enchanted by the possibilities of reading,” he writes, “first for its exoticism, the mystery of human passions, then as an exercise, to keep the mind working, decoding signals, interpreting letters. In a short time, living among garbage, anyone can learn how to read” (Nazarian Reference Nazarian2006, 14).Footnote ² The narrator suggests that literacy itself emerges from waste. Reading arises at the margins of urban infrastructure, where refuse is refashioned as a pedagogical tool. For Victório, garbage contains a collection of wisdom available only to those who know how to interpret it. He finds his vocation as a writer by deciphering the debris that human civilization has buried underground. The sewers become for him an agent of change in his existence, which will eventually compel him to activate his appetite for mischievous adventures. An archaeologist of sorts, he is interested in reading those artifacts that society has displaced but that provide a rich source of information about the violent contradictions of modernity.

Victório’s incisive attentiveness to the environment as the source of his intelligence is an inherently picaresque trait. As several critics have noted, picaresque narrators study their surroundings to devise strategies of survival and to study social patterns (Lázaro Carreter Reference Lázaro Carreter1972, 66–67; Dunn Reference Dunn1993, 117–118; Guillén Reference Guillén1971a, 78; Rico [Reference Rico, Davis and Sieber1969] 1984, 16). The environment is not a neutral background but a major agent in the constitution of picaresque voices. As Peter Dunn (Reference Dunn1993) states, the picaresque world is always an intercession of external forces and self-reflection. In his analysis of Lazarillo de Tormes, he observes: “The center of interest in Lazarillo’s story, that which generates the plot, is not the self as source and motor of actions, nor is it the external world as determinant of the self and its actions. Rather, it is the relation between self and world as Lazarillo wishes to fix it” (Dunn Reference Dunn1993, 173). Furthermore, he emphasizes that picaresque fiction orchestrates a narrative setting in which the environment becomes an active participant in the formation of picaros’ consciousness and their relation to the world. Rather than projecting a temporally distant and exoticized setting typical of heroic narratives, the picaresque’s fictional world is recognizably contemporary. In such a world, the protagonists respond to the concrete exigencies of hunger, violence, and economic precarity (Dunn Reference Dunn1993, 47). In Nazarian’s novel, Victório, like his early modern counterparts, must learn how to survive under the weight of civilization’s infrastructure, even if it means resorting to unethical tactics.

Once he becomes familiar with the sewers, an essential element of Victório’s literary persona comes to the foreground: hunger. From the beginning to the end of his autobiography, the narrator repeatedly emphasizes an insatiable appetite for food as well as for other forms of sensory and bodily pleasure. The characters he encounters in the underground world gradually become potential sources of nourishment, prompting him to meditate on hunger as a universal condition shared by all living beings. “I think I need to describe a little better the characteristics of my hunger,” he writes, “the characteristics of our hunger, the characteristics of the hunger of us animals, who do not have and do not get lost in more abstract concerns” (Nazarian Reference Nazarian2006, 23).Footnote ³ In this passage, the first-person narrator pronoun expands into an undefined collective that includes other animals, the inhabitants of the sewer, and implicitly the reader, dissolving the division between individual experience and shared biological necessity. Hunger becomes not just a physical sensation but an alternate mode of apprehending the world and one that cuts across species lines. The emphasis on hunger is, of course, a central element in picaresque narrative as it drives the protagonist’s actions. Victório follows the same pattern but also extends it beyond the human by describing hunger as a universal condition that links living beings from different species but who exist within the same ecological system. His insistence on declaring that all living things are as hungry as he is turns the novel into a shared zone of vulnerability in which we, as readers, are also implicated. Those who live with a full stomach, he argues, lose the ability to perceive their own privilege, whereas those who starve beneath the city are keenly aware of what it means to live at the margins of prosperity. Hunger is thus a legitimate form of knowledge production, one that reveals the otherwise concealed atrocities of the city.

At the same time, however, hunger also establishes affective bonds among the sewers’ inhabitants and creates a network grounded in urgent necessity rather than hypocrisy. Victório recognizes that his own narrative impulses emerge from starvation: “It is the medium that makes me original. It was the opportunity that gave me this, this opportunity to tell my story, my interests, my point of view. And the hunger that makes me wonder. It is hunger that brought me true enlightenment” (Nazarian Reference Nazarian2006, 30–31).Footnote ⁴ For him, hunger is inextricable from the act of writing. It is the underground environment filled with waste and populated by creatures trying to survive that compels the narrator to develop an artistic point of view. His autobiography is not the product of leisurely education but the effect of immediate necessity within a society indifferent to its peripheral inhabitants, both human and nonhuman.

In addition to being a place of starvation, Victório is quick to emphasize that the sewers are also sites of violence where those who lack protection become easy targets. He recounts, for instance, the murder of Tiradentes, a homeless man who descends into the sewers to collect empty bottles that he later sells. On one occasion, a truck carrying large quantities of beer overturns directly above the underground tunnels, causing dozens of bottles to fall into the sewer system. As Tiradentes gathers the bottles, a group of teenagers also enters through the drain and stabs him to death. Witnessing the murder are the narrator and a talking frog named Vergueiro, who survives by smoking cigarette butts. Among the group of homeless children present is Artur Alvim, who befriends Vergueiro and shares drugs with him. At first, the narrator wonders why Artur shows no surprise at his ability to communicate with other animals, but he concludes that the boy must be too intoxicated to question reality. More significantly, however, Tiradentes’s murder and Artur’s addiction to drugs lead Victório to develop a broader reflection on trash as a product of social hypocrisy, since human beings inevitably return to the very spaces they attempt to hide. “I would say that the sewer is the natural habitat of humans,” he writes, “who try to escape it, their ecological niche, by flushing the toilet like a child running away from home. All it takes is for the toilet to flush, for a truck to turn over, and they come back running here. To collect their remains” (Nazarian Reference Nazarian2006, 39).Footnote ⁵ Echoing Spelman’s assertion that trash always returns to those who discard it, Victório suggests that the sewers constitute humanity’s true ecological environment, for they contain the material residue of all human activity. Rather than existing outside the human sphere, trash appears here as an intrinsic and unavoidable feature of human life.

The narrator’s effort to connect people with their refuse frames waste as a concept through which social relations and moral contradiction may be analyzed. Tiradentes’s murder occurs when beer bottles (a sought-after commodity) enter the sewage, bringing consumption to the subterranean world of disposal. As such, capitalist desire confronts its own refuse while the teenagers, mirroring the bottles themselves, also descend to the sewers to once again violently seize what others have discarded. Victório’s assertion that the sewer is the “natural habitat of humans” negates the Romantic vision of nature as a pristine realm untouched by human civilization. Instead, it emphasizes nature as an ecological assemblage composed of debris, bodies, toxic materials, and precarious lives. Vergueiro’s obsession with cigarette butts and Artur’s dependence on drugs underscore a hybrid ecology in which existence depends on refuse and toxins. Their friendship highlights a vision of waste not as the end of the commodity but as the beginning of new forms of intimacy across bodies and materials. Tiradentes, however, reveals that violence is also part and parcel of waste production. His death shows that the difference between trash and human life is always unstable, since the same city that produces waste also generates dead bodies. Victório’s understanding of trash as constitutive, rather than external, to the city’s inhabitants makes it an active facilitator of social relations beyond the human.

In an effort to understand his own destiny as an alligator living in the sewers, the narrator destabilizes the nature-culture divide by arguing that the city’s polluted waters did not originate in the urban underground but instead reached him while he was still in the swamp. Instead of portraying the swamp as a pristine environment untouched by human intervention, he constructs a contact zone in which the rural landscape and the sewer system are materially intertwined:

Trash, he suggests, first came to him, not the other way around. By overturning the expected direction of movement between city and countryside, he redefines what counts as natural. Pollution connects the swamp and sewage system, thereby undermining the assumption that the city’s trash is confined to its perimeter. His trajectory from swamp to river is not a tragic fall from primeval nature to decadent urbanity, but the logical continuity of both spaces made possible by the sewage system. Victório invites those who would like to see the countryside to plunge themselves into the toilet and witness how extensive the sewage system is as it disperses beyond the city. It is a bidirectional pathway connecting two spaces that humans understand to be oppositional. The sentence “from the field to the sewer, from the sewer to the field” underlines the cyclical nature of trash, in which disposal is transformed into circulation. In this sense, the narrator’s thought resonates with Timothy Morton’s concept of dark ecology. Morton (Reference Morton2016, 9) rejects the notion of nature existing outside human influence, emphasizing instead the realization that people are bound to the ecological damage that they produce. Like Morton, Victório’s approach to trash is darkly ecological because it may disappear, but it always reappears in unexpected ways.

It is against this backdrop of transformation, violence, and communication across species that the narrator confronts his hunger: by killing and eating his first human victim, a transgender woman named Ana Rosa. He first encounters Ana Rosa when he notices her feet through the opening of a storm drain. What begins as a fleeting glimpse soon develops into a compassionate exchange. After discovering that an animal inhabits the drain, Ana Rosa begins to feed him leftovers, and the narrator learns that she works as a street vendor. The drain becomes a space of contact where two marginalized characters establish an economy of care. Soon thereafter, however, a massive flood inundates both the street and the sewers. During the storm, Ana Rosa loses her crocodile-patterned high-heeled shoes in the drain. When she descends into the sewers to recover them, she crosses the boundary between the urban surface and the underground world. Though astonished by the presence of a talking alligator, she nevertheless accepts his offer to help locate her shoes, which he claims may have been deposited in the sewer’s “lost and found” room. The existence of a “lost and found” signals a major restructuring in the underground world. Immediately prior to the flood, the rats organize themselves into a collective devoted to instituting social order and commerce within the sewers. Under the leadership of a squirrel known as “The Patriarch,” they establish a system of accumulation, gathering valuable objects swept down from the surface. Once a chaotic collection of trash, the sewer begins to resemble a distorted image of urban society, one in which property and commercial exchange are major forces.

Once Victório learns from Artur that Ana Rosa is transgender, he begins to contemplate the possibility of eating her and speculates about how her flesh might taste. His meditation on consumption quickly shifts into a reflection on bioaccumulation, or the accumulation of toxic materials within a body. In doing so, he merges his critique of trash with a disturbingly transphobic discourse. He writes: “So, what would the taste of that flesh that presented itself as female, but had grown inside a man be like? Modified by hormones, injections, silicone. Would it be just another industrialized food, contaminated by cosmetics, pharmacies, and toxins?” (Nazarian Reference Nazarian2006, 71–72).Footnote ⁷ Here, Ana Rosa’s body is framed not as a living being but as a chemically altered product, analogous to processed food within consumer capitalism. Victório’s awareness of bioaccumulation is inseparable from a dehumanizing gaze that reduces her to toxic matter.

When they arrive at the “lost and found” room and encounter a human skeleton covering the door, the narrator’s appetite intensifies. He reminds readers that the bones belong to Tiradentes, whose body was stripped clean by the rats but that “The Patriarch” places at the entrance as a scarecrow to intimidate any potential robbers. Victório then reminds readers that, in the sewage’s economy, Tiradentes’s skeleton is just one more of the Patriarch’s collective objects. After Ana Rosa recovers her shoes, Victório can no longer restrain himself and devours her alive. He then devises a clever solution: He will offer her skeleton to the Patriarch in exchange for relief from the taxes imposed upon him. After negotiating the terms, he concludes: “I was learning to play the game. Some people have to die for us to survive. That skeleton was the forgiveness of my debts, the payment of my fines. And I even got a small supply of human flesh” (Nazarian Reference Nazarian2006, 75).Footnote ⁸ In this moment, Victório becomes an active participant in the very system of violence and hypocrisy he repeatedly denounces, which is a central tenet of the picaresque tradition. As Anne Cruz (Reference Cruz1999, xv) observes, the picaro’s ironic discourse permits both a critical reading grounded in dissent and a sense of complicity that ultimately reaffirms the prevailing order. Similarly, Joan Ramon Resina (Reference Resina and Moretti2006, 300) argues that in picaresque fiction “the individual is free to acquiesce or to rebel, but he lacks the power to alter the cosmic order in which society is inserted.” Victório’s earlier complaints about the rats’ bureaucratic control diminish into compliance. He internalizes the capitalist logic of exchange that structures the sewer and learns that compliance is indispensable to survival. More importantly, he recognizes that his passion to write was born in an atmosphere marked by murder and deceit. Like the picaro, he learns that urban civilization is a varnish covering the cycles of violence and unethical transactions that occur under its seemingly clean surface.

Victório’s confrontation with the world on the surface reaches a climax when a private company purchases the land directly above the sewers to construct an amusement park. When the workers find the alligator amid the trash, they contact a local university, which sends a team of technicians who capture and transport him to a research facility. No longer an invisible subterranean observer, he has now been embroiled above the city’s surface. The disconcerted narrator relates his abduction by technicians who were interested only in his body as a specimen, and not in what he had to say about his own life. He writes: “They were ‘technicians,’ as they called them, they tied my mouth shut and immobilized me. That was the only way to keep me quiet. They didn’t want to hear what I had to say either. They had their own methods, theses, and theories. They gathered answers on microscopic slides. They didn’t want to know my biography, only my biology” (Nazarian Reference Nazarian2006, 113).Footnote ⁹ Seen from his point of view, this scene becomes a speculative act of critical anthropomorphism. Endowed with the ability to record his own story, the alligator reveals otherwise unnoticed layers of human practices against animals subjected to involuntary experimentation. Writing becomes for him an imaginative platform to question not only human relations with other animals, but also societal carelessness hidden under the veneer of civilization.

The research institute into which Victório has been thrust is both a microcosm and a satire of academic life. He discovers that he is not the only nonhuman species with an intellectual mind, for he meets several other animals-turned-academics who have assimilated themselves into the institute’s hierarchy. Among them are Kébler (a gharial), Dr. Goncourt (a tortoise), Dr. Blanche (a heron), Dr. Charonne (a rattlesnake), Prof. Garibaldi (a salmon), and Jasmine (an anaconda). All his new colleagues, he tells us, have supposedly constrained their savage desires and adapted to the refined behaviors of intellectual life. Soon enough, however, he discovers that they also frequent the sewers at night to indulge their pleasures while submerged in trash. It is only in the sewers that they can carry out their desires beyond the eyes of decorum. As Jasmine tells him: “‘How naive you are, alligator. Do you really think we don’t make our escapes? What keeps us here? The windows are open, the drains are free, the toilets are unclogged. We always find a way to get out … and then go down’” (Nazarian Reference Nazarian2006, 152).Footnote ¹⁰ The narrator, who was beginning to accept this new stage of his life as an ascent of higher intellect, is astonished at this level of insincerity. The use of the word naive implies that Victório still has a lot to learn about the complexities of the world for which he is not prepared. In Jasmine’s response, the sewage system represents a form of disposal as well as a source of escape from the institute’s sterile normativity. By returning to the sewers, the supposedly civilized animals reawaken pleasurable but forbidden experiences. The narrator is unable to sustain this hypocritical mode of living and succumbs to his unrelenting appetites by devouring one of his students, for which he is fired.

It is after leaving the research institute that the main protagonist truly begins to think about his career as a writer. He claims to be doing so at a time when literature, once understood as a pedestal of intellectual advancement, struggles to secure readers amid a fiercely competitive market. Unable to return to his original sewers, he secures a room at a motel with the institute’s severance money. Submerged in solitude and surrounded by sexual encounters in neighboring rooms, he begins to embody what Guillén terms the “half-outsider” element of the picaresque novel. For Guillén (Reference Guillén1971a, 80), the picaro is a half-outsider because, acknowledging that there is no bucolic life beyond the urban setting, he can “neither join nor actually reject his fellow men.” Focused exclusively on finishing his novel, he isolates himself from society while remaining unable to escape it. Once he has amassed a partially completed draft, he contacts, via email, a writer named Sebastian Salto, whose works Victório discovered while still employed at the university. When Sebastian responds and asks for the full manuscript, the narrator points out that it is not yet finished because the events of his life are still ongoing. “Since it was a kind of memoir, or a kind of diary,” he writes, “I wrote as things happened. I would probably even put him—Salto—as a character” (Nazarian Reference Nazarian2006, 183).Footnote ¹¹ The topic of the picaro’s unfinished memoir figures most prominently in the case of Ginés de Pasamonte in the first volume of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s novel Don Quixote (1605/1615). A criminal sent to the galleys, Ginés is in the process of writing an autobiography titled The Life of Ginés de Pasamonte. When Don Quixote asks him whether his book is finished, Ginés responds that his life is not yet finished, and neither is his book: “‘How can it be finished,’ answered he, ‘since my life is not yet finished? What is written is from my cradle to the moment of my being sent this last time to the galleys.’” Furthermore, he boasts that his autobiography will surpass even the fame of Lazarillo de Tormes, “and all that have written or shall write in that way” (Cervantes Saavedra [1605/1615] Reference Cervantes and Jarvis2008, 169). In his essay “Genre and Countergenre: The Discovery of the Picaresque,” Guillén (Reference Guillén1971b, 151) argues that Ginés’s autobiography emblematizes a writer who has identified a class of literary works to which he both wants to contribute and seeks to surpass through innovation. Likewise, Victório is an aspiring writer who wants to foreground the originality of his memoir, the story of a nonhuman picaro, against other competing works.

The narrator abruptly concludes his novel by recounting how he encounters Sebastian at the motel where he is staying. Specifically, he finds him with an unexpected sex worker: Artur, who managed to escape from the sewers before the private company sealed them. Furthermore, he discovers that Sebastian is a large spider about to feed on Artur. After devouring the young man and consuming him together, Sebastian and Victório discuss the quality of the latter’s novel. Within a metafictional framework, they debate the marketability of the very story we are reading, which may induce some readers to question whether these two characters are actually animals or just humans under the influence. It is precisely this ambiguity, shuttling between the literal and the figurative, that makes Mastigando humanos a decidedly contemporary novel (Mendes Araújo et al. Reference Mendes, Alexandre and Machado Pereira2022, 9–10).

Whereas Victório appears enthusiastic about his novel’s prospects in the literary market, his colleague is far more skeptical. Sebastian’s main concern is that the protagonist’s story reads more like an unfinished diary. More importantly, he asks the narrator whether he is more interested in the art of writing than in the pursuit of commercial success, offering the following advice: “That’s not how it should be. Just look, what a rush. Sending out a work in progress like that. You seem more concerned with the result than the writing itself. You want to be rescued by the ocean liner of the cultural industry” (Nazarian Reference Nazarian2006, 218).Footnote ¹² Sebastian thus poses a serious question regarding the potential conflict between the time required for artistic invention and the pressure from the cultural industry to deliver finished products. Although attentive to his writing process, Victório is clearly eager to complete his manuscript and send it to potential presses. In his study of the picaresque in Mexican literature, Jorge Téllez (Reference Téllez2021, 15) argues that writers have sought to portray themselves and their literary works as picaresque due to stiff market competition. In a cultural context in which writers no longer benefit from the formerly prestigious status of letrados, Téllez affirms that the picaresque framework provides a convenient venue for expressing the financial hardships and emotional struggles of being a writer in Mexico. Similarly, Victório employs a picaresque framework to describe not only his adversities as an alligator who learned Portuguese while submerged in trash, but also his struggles as an aspiring writer in an austere and competitive literary world.

By situating this metaliterary exchange towards the end of the novel, Nazarian underlines the tension between artistic integrity and capitalist pressure in the literary marketplace. More broadly, he frames the novel’s main protagonist as a nonhuman picaro whose story of survival amid adversity can only gain traction within a society that has commodified narratives of suffering into objects of consumption. As such, the novel itself may become refuse after readers finish reading it. It may not be surprising, then, that the narrator’s resentfulness toward society and longing for recognition are accompanied by an attentiveness to certain discarded objects that he imbues with meaning. Toward the beginning of the novel, he encounters an oil barrel in the sewers and names it Santana. In addition to designating it as female, he describes it as his first passion. “I knew we were beings of different species,” he writes, “that my desire was not entirely normal, nor could it be reciprocated or lead to procreation” (Nazarian Reference Nazarian2006, 20).Footnote ¹³ Nevertheless, he still longs to be with it because, like him, it has been ostracized due to its unattractive appearance: “Old and rusty, drunk, and dumped. Treating me with the indifference which only an old can is capable of. Colder-blooded than mine. A species more misunderstood than mine” (Nazarian Reference Nazarian2006, 21).Footnote ¹⁴ Victório refers to Santana as another being discarded by society. The main character, who came into existence through anthropomorphism, also uses the power of writing to anthropomorphize an object and animate it. The thing he animates, however, will never truly meet his expectations and will never truly know him. The process of attempting to recognize his own self in an object becomes a process of misrecognition, for he inadvertently acknowledges that his internal self is also a fragmented entity longing for connection with the world.

A similar situation arises with his notebook, which he names Stratford and purchases from a prostitute to finish his manuscript. Stratford, he claims, has been “traumatized by a history of abuse and neglect, poor thing” (Nazarian Reference Nazarian2006, 191).Footnote ¹⁵ In her book Persons and Things, Barbara Johnson (Reference Johnson2008) argues that at the heart of aesthetic engagement with objects lies a troubling inability to differentiate persons from things. Such inability, she affirms, emerges from the view that at the heart of human identity lies an unrecognizable object shrouded in mystery. Ours is a fragmented identity that we attempt to overcome by projecting our anxieties and desires onto others, even if it means treating other persons as objects. Our “self” becomes an uncertain object, and “it can only be known as an object among other objects, and not as a subject” (Johnson Reference Johnson2008, 47–48). Johnson’s analysis may illuminate our relationship with trash as one marked by the tragic quest to find wholeness in others, whether things or persons, which inevitably leads to frustration and disposal. Through his process of anthropomorphic projection, Victório reveals the biopolitical danger that anyone or anything is potentially at risk of being discarded.

Nazarian’s Mastigando humanos is, then, as its title implies, a rumination on what it means to live in a world marked by disposability. He becomes a picaresque trash animal, a half-outsider estranged from his own environment and yet unable to escape it. His last recourse for a distress signal in an abyss of solitude is writing, hence his urgent necessity to finish his autobiography for anyone interested in his life. In this sense, Nazarian’s novel belongs to a larger repertoire of Latin American cultural production focused on acknowledging the agency of multispecies assemblages. Mark Anderson (Reference Anderson2024) argues that Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors in Latin America have historically challenged Eurocentric notions of the human as separate and superior to other forms of life. The region’s literary history, he writes, is “a series of chronologically discontinuous literary works, written by Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors, that reflect on human encounters and relations of individuals of different species or with environments as multispecies societies, as well as on how to maintain ethical fidelity within the act of representation” (Anderson Reference Anderson2024, 15). Furthermore, Anderson (Reference Anderson2024, 8) underscores the centrality of literature as the aesthetic arena in which representation of and engagement with the nonhuman can be negotiated.

Highly conscious of his own literary formation, Nazarian’s narrator employs the first-person point of view as a testament to the importance of individual experience, as well as on writers’ relationship with their writings. More broadly, the novel is an invitation to conceive the picaresque as a myth extending beyond the human and encompassing emerging ecologies in human-made environments. It brings together the life of an outcast literary character with the outcast lives of animals that have made trash a part of their lives, often at the expense of danger, but with an unrelenting spirit to resist domestication. Picaros and trash animals, Nazarian’s novel suggests, are half-outsiders who have adapted to the perils of urban life while remaining unassimilated to its hierarchical structure. If J. A. Garrido Ardila (Reference Garrido Ardila and Garrido Ardila2015, 2) claims that the picaresque genre has evaded classification due to its “ambiguous nature,” then it becomes possible to frame it within an environmental framework, as Nixon (Reference Nixon2011, 55) has already suggested. Doing so may enable us to theorize its literary importance in challenging social prejudices, critiquing biopolitical operations, and envisioning ecological forms of living to confront a polluted world.