El gusano (The Worm), a New Weird novel by Colombian writer Luis Carlos Barragán, presents a world in which the interpenetration of bodies becomes inevitable after a mysterious event. In it, skin has become a permeable boundary and people can cross, penetrate and merge with each other acquiring their physical and psychic characteristics. Many entangle among themselves and feel the absence of the other, or others, with whom they have merged, as the absence of something of their own; a beautiful metaphor for lost love and religious communion.
In one of the most harrowing scenes of the novel we see a mysterious figure emerging from the sea to a Greek beach near the site of a Syrian refugee shipwreck.
Those who remained on the beach could see a giant, whose size was was unheard of until then, slowly walking toward the shore. A humanoid more than five meters tall, muscular, firm, walking not like an athlete, but a weary creature. A closer look, with semi-professional cameras, revealed that its body was composed of many bodies. The skin of many people formed its skin, perhaps this was why it had so many nipples and hairy areas in unusual places, hair of Syrian women coming out of the elbows, tits and arms lined up on the buttocks, legs tied together that looked like a bunch of pencils tied with a rubber band, a cluster of testicles and penises that looked like small bananas […] When the creature was closer, it was surprising to see that other species were part of the giant: fish, coral and octopus. The creatures were embedded between the elbows, tentacles emerged from the wrinkles, armpits crammed with fins [...] Their properties were mixed together. The fish were able to breathe air for the first time and were not afraid to be outside of the water: the giant was amphibious. His enormous and voluminous legs, full of strange volumes, like a collection of knees and heels in odd places, captured the attention of bathers. Some terrified, others not as much, took pictures from every angle. The giant, who seemed exhausted, uttered in a multiple-toned voice some words in Arabic: Awez(a) Akol Haga, Ana Gaen(a) Awi, which recorded by cell phones and translated, meant: “I want food” or “I’m hungry” with gender alteration.1
Barragán condenses into a single, powerful image the idea of the other and its relationship to the uncanny (0.24, 7.6). Battered by the sea and given over to the horrors of the overcrowded provisional settlements of the Mediterranean, the refugees become the very embodiment of that which is “familiar and old—established in the mind [but] estranged only by the process of repression,” a gigantic mass of the bodies of the forgotten, the sum of the other, human and animal who, exhausted, cry out for food. Like the frontispiece of Leviathan (1.9, 1.14), this image reproduces, on the same scale as that of the sovereign, the social body in its true face, without the masks with which modernity, incapable of dealing with this figure, has sought to disguise it.
This image is reminiscent of another verse in the same chapter of Job that Hobbes uses to describe his sovereign:
When he [the other] raiseth himself up, the mighty are afraid: by reason of consternation they are beside themselves.2
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