Andrés Felipe Solano's The Days of Fever: Pandemic, Panoptism, and Disciplining

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze Los días de la fiebre (2020), by the Colombian writer Andrés Felipe Solano, which we identify as a border narrative that retains elements of diary, chronicle and testimony. As one of the first examples of how literature recreates events related to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are interested in pointing out that Los días de la fiebre, while maintaining certain thematic recurrences with pandemic narratives, introduces us to a society in which, in the name of a discourse of biosecurity, with the assistance of a sophisticated system of computer networks and geo-referencing, violates the right to privacy. We start from the hypothesis that the new forms of daily monitoring and control of individuals coincide with the techniques of panoptism studied by Michel Foucault, which, although they operate outside the architectural structure conceived by Jeremy Bentham, have the effect of disciplining, through introjection, the feeling of being constantly watched, even if we do not know by whom. Parallel to the above, we are confronted with a society in which asepsis in the face of death and pain overwhelms.