The territories of the hospice and the domain of madness in the literary imagination of Guillermo Rosales

Abstract

The biographical trajectory of the cuban writer Guillermo Rosales is transversed by an extensive history of violence, maladjustments and frustrations. Pursued by the voices and visions that plagued him, Rosales was diagnosed with schizophrenia during his adolescence, having gone to asylum institutions throughout his life. Part of these experiences are exposed in his most prominent work, the novel Boarding Home, originally published in 1987. In the book, Rosales gives voice to his alter ego, the character William Figueras, an exiled writer from the island of Cuba who narrates his routine in his condition intern in a private sanatorium in the United States. The character exposes the abuses, the precarious situations of the hospice and the constant physical and psychological agressions to wich he and other patients are subjected, describing a scenario in which the subjects become progressively stripped of individuality. Based on the asylum space and its context of annihilation of subjectivities, this article seeks to reflect on the dynamics of identity deterioration in the inmate’s world and the processes of personal disfigurement applied to the home confinement regime. In this perspective, the theoretical assumptions of canadian sociologist Erving Goffman (1987) are mobilized in discussions about total institutions and the main mechanisms of mortification associated with such establishments. The analyzes were carried out based on the original edition of the novel, published by the spanish publisher Siruela, in 2003. It is argued that the Boarding Home, as a supposed mental health home, seriously deviates from its therapeutic purpose, as the characters incorporate and reproduce the violence of the institutional sctructure that pleads whit them. In these circumstances, it is understood that the asylum space does not operate as a place of reception or care, but as a gear of opression, abandonment and extermination of human lives.