Language and Pain in Camilo José Cela’s Pabellón de reposo : Reading and Writing Therapy in the Age of Consumption

O'Donoghue, Samuel (2022) Language and Pain in Camilo José Cela’s Pabellón de reposo : Reading and Writing Therapy in the Age of Consumption. Journal of Romance Studies, 22 (4). pp. 503-527. ISSN 1473-3536

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Abstract

Set in a sanatorium and narrated by patients suffering from tuberculosis, Camilo José Cela’s Pabellón de reposo (1943) was published during the twilight years of consumption, when effective antibiotic treatments for the disease were on the horizon and sanatoria were on the verge of obsolescence. Cela’s novel captures the end of an era in the history of medicine: it is heir to a Romantic aestheticization of tuberculosis but at the same time exhibits an enlightened understanding of the experience of illness. This article explores how the novel anticipates recent areas of inquiry in the medical humanities. Situating Cela’s work as a companion text for a critical medical humanities concerned with the ways in which pain is constituted and palliated through literary forms, it examines how suffering is articulated in Pabellón de reposo and disentangles Cela’s ideas about the therapeutic value of reading and writing as means of coping with illness.