El viaje del héroe al espacio monstruoso: metáforas de un saber biopolítico hecho novela

Abstract

Drawing on the case of the Costa Rican communist writer Carlos Luis Fallas, this article explores political metaphors of the heroic, of the monstrous, and of the animal from two perspectives. The first, a contextual one, wherein areas of knowledge; such as that of political zoology and its criticism leveled at late 19th century liberalism together with that of biopolitics and its gaze at the monstrous body, become the signifiers of these metaphors; and the second, a subjective one, in which the heroic constitutes both the narrative and experiential forms of a militant and literary experience. The intertwining of metaphor and biography will be examined within the dual contexts of the Caribbean during the era of intensive banana farming and Fallas’ social novel Mamita Yunai.