Abstract

DI BENEDETTO, Matías. Towards a poetics of illness in Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo y otros brujos de la Amazonía by César Calvo. Desde el Sur [online]. 2024, vol.16, n.1, e0005.  Epub Jan 31, 2024. ISSN 2076-2674.  http://dx.doi.org/10.21142/des-1601-2024-0005.

This article analyzes Calvo’s work based on his attempt to narrate the disease(s) outside the topics of biomedical discourse. His main objective is to explain how the main features of the jungle novel are subverted by making a vindication of the actions and rhetoric of the Amazonian healers. In this way, our analysis focuses on the healing practices that revolve around the ingestion of ayahuasca and how they are incorporated into Calvo's fiction not only as a dissemination of the knowledge of the vegetalistas but also resulting in the exposition of the core of the disease: the disharmonization of the subject and its breaking with the ties that, otherwise, would manage to grasp its macroscopic kinship with the animal and the plant. In conclusion, the record of the intimate that Calvo’s fiction puts into operation introduces not only another way of approaching the topic of illness but also transforming the travel diary through the jungle into a diary of the illness capable of stressing the sacred techniques of sorcerers and the imaginary of health understood from a secular perspective.

Keywords : Disease; peruvian literature; César Calvo.

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