Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Mar 2018)
A shelter for the excess. The narration as a counter-map in Jorge Consiglio’s Hospital Posadas
Abstract
Regarding the series of fictions based on the narration of events linked to the last dictatorship, Hospital Posadas, by Jorge Consiglio (2015) is distinguished, in first place, by the exhibition of a figure that, connected to the practices of terror of the dictatorial period, continues its dark action in the time of the incipient democracy. The story of this subject ties three decades: the 70s, the 80s and the contemporary moment to the publication of novel, and concerns part of the history of the hospital that gives the book its title. But another peculiarity of Consiglio's novel emerges if we consider the nature of the articulation between fiction and politics proposed in there. In Hospital Posadas this link can´t be resolved from the opposition between realistic mimesis and aesthetic distancing, but rather, following Jacques Rancière, as a distribution of the sensible. This reorganization of the visibility regime operates through the appeal to ambiguity, the uncertainty of identity, the dispersion and multiplicity of senses that triggers the narrative structure. Hospital Posadas is a political novel insofar as it distances itself from what is understood as a post-dictatorship novel and produces an overflow of multiple meanings due to parallel histories, unusual anecdotes and lives that hold a remnant of mystery.
