Writing Aids: (Re)Conceptualizing the Individual and Social Body in Spanish American Literature by Jodie Parys (review)

While the intersection of disease and literature is both a fecund and well-mined field of research, until the last decade there was a paucity of critical material dealing with the treatment and import of HIV and AIDS in Latin American literature. In 2012, two books entered this void: Lina Meruane’s Viajes virales, which gives a theoretical and historical context to the appearance of the disease in society and then in literature in the 1980s; and Jodie Parys’s Writing AIDS: (Re)Conceptualizing the Individual and Social Body in Spanish American Literature. The latter, through close readings of a number of short works, engages with literature’s power to change social perception. It does so by analyzing facets of the relationship between AIDS and literature which move from a personal level to a societal one: from violence and eroticism, to dynamics of isolation and community. Its theoretical basis is grounded in the presentation of disease as a military attack or an apocalypse, and of carriers of a disease as inherently dangerous, which are drawn from Susan Sontag’s AIDS and its Metaphors (1988).

Parys’s first chapter, “The Body as Weapon: HIV as Revenge,” examines three short stories: “Luna negra de noviembre” (1992) by Ana Solari, “El secreto de Berlín” (1988) by Ramón Griffero, and “El vuelo de la reina” (2002) by Tomás Eloy Martínez. These works are described in terms of their usage of sexually transmitted disease as the (biological) weapon used to exact revenge in two different trajectories: a jilted lover seeking reparations for emotional trauma, and a diseased protagonist taking revenge on a healthy population in an attempt to reclaim control of his body. The treatment of both the disease and the diseased in these works suggests a temporal progression that would have given the chapter a cohesive narrative, if the stories included were referenced by date or presented in chronological order, which was not the case. Additionally, Parys critiques the authors that she studies for failing to affect cultural change by resorting to “stigma-laden metaphorical language that refuses to challenge cultural stigmas” (55), and for the perpetuation of negative social perceptions through the depiction of disease as a weapon of revenge, even though that is the thematic thrust of the chapter.

Departing from the previous chapter’s depictions of the negative interactions of an HIV positive protagonist and a lover, the second chapter, “Eroticism and Aids: The Confluence of Desire, Death, and Writing,” discusses works that vindicate the sexuality of similar protagonists. The two texts discussed are the poetry collection “Invitación al polvo” (1991) by Manuel Ramos Otero, and the short story “Adiós, Ten-Ying” (1993) by Andrea Blanqué. The discussion of the first of these works lauds the poet for openly expressing eroticism without focusing on the incipient doom that physical or sexual contact could incur, though it simultaneously questions the efficacy of literary representations that ignore that darkness. Through this contradiction, the poetic voice’s ownership of his sexuality, in spite of or because of the disease that he is afflicted by, is at least tentatively presented as a positive. This positivity is bolstered by the treatment of the other work in the chapter, which gives a positivist reading of a symmetrical female character.

Between the second and third chapters, Parys’s focus shifts from the micro to the macro, moving towards societal rather than personal relationships. The third chapter, “Isolation and Exile: AIDS and the Solitary Body” sets up isolation, either emotional or physical, as the sole outcome of the virus. In it, Parys examines “Pecados mínimos” (1981) by Ricardo Prieto, which, while it does exhibit increasing isolation on the part of the never-seen protagonist, is discussed as a revenge narrative, though a thematic connection to the first chapter is never mentioned. The chapter also treats Nelson Mallach’s short story “Elefante” (1996), which...