ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the structural role that illness plays in the making and the unmaking of utopia through readings of Alejo Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps) and Severo Sarduy's Pajaros de la playa (Beach Birds). In spite of their differences, The Lost Steps and Beach Birds present parallelisms at three levels: the foundation of a new community outside civilization, the presence of illness in a utopian paradise, and the marginalisation of disease-bearing individuals. Revolutionary Cuba provides a possible background for Severo Sarduy's novel Beach Birds, written while he was dying of AIDS in France. The social character of illness is more visible in leprosy, the treatment for which consists in the isolation of the ill person, and in AIDS, an illness in which contagion cannot be dissociated from everyday practices. However, illness produces meaning mostly within the system of intelligibility provided by medicine.
