Childhood fever. Beginnings of a pathological imagination in El orden alfabético of Juan José Millás

Abstract

This article analyzes the novel El orden alfabético (1998) by the Spanish writer Juan José Millás and read there one of the inflections with which the discursivization of the disease is manifested. The hypothesis in this work holds that the narration of the disease leads us to read the construction of an inaugural myth: this myth articulates fever, childhood and reading under the figure of the sick child as elements that synthesize the beginning of a pathological imagination. This type of imagination makes feverish symptoms a fertile area for the production of fiction and tells us a reader origin. On the one hand, this origin myth relates an approach to reading conditioned by the disease, and, on the other hand, makes visible a metapoetic element of Millás’ novels that shows the materiality with which he constructs his narrative universe. In this way, the article traces a journey through the relationships between illness and literature, and childhood and feverish reading, to elucidate the appropriations with which in this novel Millás turns a common topic into an area of fictional productivity.