Narrating the Red Tide or Harmful Algal Blooms as Climate Change: The Uses of Temporality in Fernanda Trías’ Mugre rosa and Scientific and Policy Reports

Abstract

This article examines the discourses of Harmful Algal Blooms at sea, popularly known as “red tide”, in the Uruguayan novel by Fernanda Trías, Mugre rosa [Pink Slime]. While the novel has already received rich critical attention, scholarship has not paid sufficient attention yet to the uses of “red tide” as a climate change phenomenon. The article argues that Mugre rosa deploys the red tide to interrogate the climate change catastrophe that the fictional city is experiencing. The red tide helps familiarize and nuance the catastrophe’s temporality, covering the narrative from beginning to end thereby achieving to merge past, present and future. The use of a double spectacular and subjacent catastrophe works towards representing uncertainty and questioning the uses of temporality in climate change and red tide discourses. The article examines the novel’s narrative discussion in four scientific reports that face the uncertain temporality of this marine phenomenon in various and sometimes contradictory ways, associating the red tide with climate change and leaving in a second degree of importance other factors such as eutrophication. This comparative exercise shows the uncertain waters in which we speculate about climate change and its causes in fiction and in scientific and management realms.