Where are the galaxies fleeing to?: writing and disease in Severo Sarduy

Abstract

In his essay on literature and illness, Roberto Bolaño builds an intimate triad of experience that guides us through the fundamental motivations behind all poetry: travel, sex and books. I inted here to inquire how this triad works in the texts by Severo Sarduy, especially in the essays of El Cristo de la rue Jacob and Pájaros en la playa, late texts within his production. These are materials in which the disease redirects the trajectory of the journey and the writing happens under the sign of collapse, of disaster, in the sense that Maurice Blanchot gave to this term. Thus, like an aging Robinson, Sarduy returns to his island to deal with a series of materials that shows the persistence of the body traces, the persistence of the remains of the matter. My essay will then delve into the strategies that will allow the Cuban author to keep his gaze on the unspeakable and build an alternative temporality and a scenario where the oscillation between the organic and the inorganic, the relationship with the universe and the stars, become a possible way of questioning oneself about the exceedances of the living.