Of Cattle and Men: Interspecies Encounters in Ana Paula Maia’s De Gados e Homens.

The novel De Gados e Homens (2013) takes place in a provincial slaughterhouse situated on a polluted valley. Its author, Ana Paula Maia, depicts the interspecies encounters that take place in this context and suggests possible, albeit troubling, means of acknowledging nonhuman agency. This article examines how Maia’s novel De Gados e Homens (2014) develops a zoopoetics of the slaughterhouse through the eyes of Edgar Wilson, the slaughterer protagonist. The first section analyzes the polluted valley and the slaughterhouse, which jointly serve as the novel’s setting and offer the conditions of possibility for the interspecies encounter. The second section studies how, in that marginal and isolated environment, the slaughterhouse worker’s ethical encounter with the cow’s face renders him response-able. Through the lenses of Levinas’ ethics and the Derridian critique of his anthropocentric limitations, it will be possible to address the ethical complexity of the relationship between the slaughterer and his cows. Finally, the third section examines how Maia’s novel suggests bovine agency and communication and explains why the slaughterer is the only character psychologically open to this possibility. This reading of the novel aims to elucidate the relationship between environmental degradation, Edgar’s distinctive perspective, and the portrayal and behavior of cows within the narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]