A new order in madness: dissipative structures in Desde los blancos manicomios, by Margarita Mateo Palmer

Abstract

This essay analyzes the novel Desde los blancos manicomios, by Cuban author Margarita Mateo Palmer, using some scientific concepts, such as Ilya Prigogine’s dissipative structures, entropy, and Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractals. This analysis will show how the protagonist’s main characteristic, its madness, as well as the fragmented structure of the novel, the different narrative voices and the intertextual play, allow a critical and feminist reading of Cuban and Caribbean literature. In addition to that, the protagonist’s madness can be interpreted as an expression of a social disorder and a fractured world. That fractured world coincides in the novel with the Cuban reality of the 90s and the 2000s, years of a profound economic crisis after the fall of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc. Finally, the essay will argue that the novel can be read as a reaction of the protagonist to search its feminine intellectual agency, in order to confront a normalizing and chauvinistic society.