The Cost of Progress: On Juan Cardenas’s “Ornamental”

Though originally published in 2015, Juan Cardenas’s Ornamental arrives in the States at a remarkably apt time for a novel that explores the link between science and politics. Coming during a pandemic that disproportionately affects more impoverished populations, Ornamental speaks to people’s anxieties about medical authorities and their motives. Cardenas’s novel, translated by Lizzie Davis, can be framed as a thought-experiment: what would happen if a recreational drug had no hangover and only affected women? But Cardenas doesn’t pursue the premise to its logical conclusion (whatever that may be). Instead he creates a freewheeling narrative more focused on inspiring prickly questions than on providing pat answers.

The book’s main character is the unnamed researcher of the drug trials (Everything in the book is nameless. They are evocations rather than actual things, outlines not meant to be filled in).  The drug originates from a flower that rural, likely indigenous, women use for a soap to wash their clothes. It seems to have no medical purpose, but the flower brings the washerwomen to a “collective ecstasy” and the manufactured drug delivers “euphoria and lubricity.” Eying maximum profit, the company persuades politicians to legalize their drug while continuing to ban other substances, a reflection of real-life efforts by drug companies to ben laws to their advantage. Moreover, the drug’s origins and the pharmaceutical company’s efforts to profit from it evoke real-life work by bio-tech companies to copyright nature, going so far as to patent human genes.

From the first page, when the researcher describes the four female participants in the drug trial as coming from “inferior classes,” the book tips us off to his underlying elitism and prejudice. Through the researcher’s dehumanizing language, Cardenas and Davis unveil the researcher’s objectifying vision of the world and its people. For one participant in the trials, he focuses on her “enormous bust” and describes her face as having “lips like sausages” and the “nose of a teacup.” The drug’s purely recreational effects and his complete uninterest in finding its therapeutic uses, furthers his standing as an unsympathetic figure and makes one immediately suspicious of his interest in participant number 4.

Though nameless like the other characters, number 4 distinguishes herself via her initial reaction to the drug. Before modifications, the pill puts the other patients to sleep, but number 4 performs long, discursive, and somewhat haunting, monologues. The researcher records her speech like it’s an exciting datapoint and takes it as proof that she, unlike the other trial subjects, is “no ignorant woman.” In a dreary manifestation of the Pretty Woman trope, he dresses her up in his wife’s clothing, the clothing of the upper classes. He tries to uncover her cultured and educated self and disbelieves her stated lack of education, saying, “But you are no ignorant woman.” Having dressed her, he now shows her off, at his wife’s art show no less, and the event goes better than he could have planned as she dazzles the room and snags his wife’s attention, leading to a long-term threesome between them.

Number 4’s monologues focus on her mother, whose many plastic surgeries have led to skin depleted of natural moisturizers, requiring constant reapplication of creams and lotions. At one point, number 4 says of her mother, “She likes to receive us this way so we can admire her, likes us to take in her beauty, which endures, which lasts and lasts like the living dead, she likes to be the thing in the house, the house in the thing: for a time, the houses were built in accordance with stylish prototypes, neoplasticism, functionalism, rhinoplasticism, rational tropicalism, my mother, tropical beauty, reaper of sighs.” Here, number 4’s blend of figurative and literal language swells beyond the constraints of formal grammar and diction and hums with its own symbolism. It’s her speech, reflective of a distinct interiority, that gives her such sway in the novel, allowing her disappearance to rupture the novel’s momentum and leave the researcher and his wife perplexingly bereft.

In this class-conscious book, number 4 becomes the representative for the lower middle classes. She planned on attending college but never finished because of financial instability and filial duties. She is a single mother of a young child and has no permanent home—temporarily staying with her mother, then the researcher and his wife, then subject number 2, before disappearing from our view. Along with her addiction to the researcher’s pills, these circumstances place him in a thrilling position of power, but one of the novel’s subtle triumphs lies in number 4’s selfhood, which extends beyond the researcher’s lens. Her monologues shine with a surreal liveliness that the researcher and his wife never match, with their stilted, sterile phrasings.

In one constrained view, Ornamental is about the modern visages that exploitation and inequality can take. Cardenas’s narrative style hangs on outlines and sketches that give the short novel an allegorical heft surprising for its slimness. It is fitting, for a novel with a natural suspicion of authority figures, that Cardenas refuses to tie up loose threads. It also suits the novel that its primary focus is less on the political or sociological effects of the drug than its effects on the individual. For all their socioeconomic differences, the greatest rift between the researcher and number 4 is that the former looks outward at everything with an avaricious and simple gaze while the latter constantly turns inward and to the past, remembering and analyzing her life. It’s in the unexpected reversal of focus, from the researcher to number 4, from the moneyed to the impoverished, that Ornamental commits its boldest act and reminds us of the people sacrificed and ignored by the progress of science.