The Slaughter Yard

The Slaughter Yard (Spanish El matadero, title often imprecisely translated as The Slaughterhouse, is a short story by the Argentine poet and essayist Esteban Echeverría (1805–1851).

Written in exile and published posthumously in 1871, it is an attack on the brutality of the Federalist regime of Juan Manuel de Rosas and his parapolice thugs, the Mazorca.

A matadero need not be a building and in Echeverría's time cattle were slaughtered in Buenos Aires in open stockyards, as described by William Henry Hudson[4] and depicted by Emeric Essex Vidal[5] (title image).

We are given to understand that the young man is about to be sodomised with a rod (verga) or a corncob (Spanish mazorca, also the nickname of Rosas' parapolice thugs).

According to the American editor, translator and Borges collaborator Norman Thomas di Giovanni, "Esteban Echeverría's El matadero, written towards the end of the 1830s, is chronologically the first work of Argentine prose fiction….

"[6] For Borges himself, who wrote a foreword to one edition, "In Echeverría's text there is a sort of hallucinatory realism, which can recall the great shadows of Hugo and Herman Melville".

[7] "If one text has exercised a decisive influence in Argentine literature and art, it seems to be The Slaughter Yard, spearhead of a large number of editions and studies, and seed of a still-prevailing movement where new readings and meanings are sought.

[9][note 1] Echeverría's oeuvre extends to five printed volumes,[10] but his literary prestige chiefly depends on this single short story.

[16] Further, according to Gutiérrez[17] The scene of the "savage unitario" in the power of the Judge of the Slaughter Yard and his myrmidons is not an invention but a reality that happened more than once in that ill-fated era.

The only thing in this picture that can have been the author's invention would be the moral appreciation of the circumstances, the language and the victim's conduct, which functions as the noble poet would have done himself in an analogous situation.

But he pointed out that Gutierrez had a habit of unilaterally "correcting" the works of the authors he edited (for editors of that era, his was a not uncommon failing); supplying copious examples.

And the proof is in the story's last paragraph: In those days the throat-cutting butchers of the Slaughter Yard were the advocates who spread the rosista Federation by rod and dagger ...

There is endless discussion about the literary type or genre to which "The Slaughter House" belongs: story, novel of manners, essay or hybrid.

[24] For German scholar Christian Wehr, "The Slaughter Yard" is the foundational text of an autochthonous Latin American genre he called Diktatorenromans : the dictator novel.

However all sorts of interpretations or symbolic meanings have been sought: Freudian,[27][28] as a necessary ritual sacrifice,[29] as an item in "Argentina's necrophilic catalogue",[30] as a racist attack on Rosas' Afro-Argentines,[31] from a feminist perspective,[32] and as Echeverría's (and indeed his political school's) crisis of masculinity.