The sign healer. On Homeopathy and other fantastic medicines in the narrative of Julio Cortázar

Abstract

In light of recent studies in the field of semiotics, the esthesic-sensory dimension of literary texts, my interest turned to "dissect" with these new tools, the body narrative of some key texts by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, in which inability to translate the varied experience of illness and physical pain it gives rise to a therapeutic narrative of fantastic charactersymptom that violates "the order of discourse" medical. Using the code of the symptoms of homeopathic medicine, Cortázar metaphorizes code language, both being regulated, in semiotic terms, by ratio facilis (Eco, 1979). The Human language for the writer has proved obsolete interoceptive to express the world of each individual, imprisoned in a body unable to communicate its meanings.