Narrative, nature, society: The network of waste in Andrés Neuman's Bariloche

Refuse is a key theme, image, and structural device in the Spanish Argentine writer Andrés Neuman's novel Bariloche (1999), whose protagonist is a waste collector in Buenos Aires. The article's contention, though, is that waste not only fulfils a narrative function, but in fact constitutes what Bruno Latour terms a 'network', a web of interactions between discursive, natural, and social processes. Bringing together close literary analysis with insights from environmental criticism (Stacy Alaimo and Jane Bennett) and sociology (Zygmunt Bauman and Martin O'Brien), this paper reveals the complex interactions between the human and non-human world in the novel's urban setting.