Abstract

MARTINS DE VASCONCELLOS, Ellen Maria. The contiguity of time in Los días de la peste, by Edmundo Paz Soldán. Desde el Sur [online]. 2019, vol.11, n.2, pp.61-73. ISSN 2076-2674.  http://dx.doi.org/10.21142/DES-1102-2019-61-73.

In the novel Los días de la peste, by the Bolivian author Edmundo Paz Soldán, a disaster approachs the «La Casona» prison: an unknown and deadly plague which attacks everyone, regardless of whether they are a prisoner, guard, doctor or governor. However, the novel does not depict the characters as a formless and condemned mass. They are a community of individuals who have nothing in common, save their imminent tragic fate. In this essay, we will analyze the concept of time expressed by the narrative, which appears to emerge from the interaction between different, conflicting tenses, capable of invading and modifying the present. Against the linear history of the experience of plague in «La Casona», the interaction of temporalities, like a progress of development, causes the present to be configured as a place of resistance and power, where voices are not silenced, separatisms are not subordinated to others, and bodies are not reduced to numbers. We will employ the concepts of community and immunity espoused by Roberto Espósito (2017), in order to observe how separate individuals interact and seek to survive in the face of death. And we will look to Hartog (2015) in our analysis of the contiguity of the past, present and future: time without time, where other links between the precariousness of life, territory and memory are seized upon, so that the plague cannot consume them, and time itself does not crush them.

Keywords : time; disaster; body; community; contemporary literature.

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