| Sumario: | Rosalía de Castro's final novel, El primer loco , appeared alongside public debates regarding Galicia's first psychiatric hospital. It relates the titular character's failed romantic adventures and reveals the growing severity of his mental illness preceding his institutionalization. The mentally ill protagonist narrates the story, which introduces disproportion within the narrative frame. Besides dismantling the basis for the narrative construction of psychiatric truth, her text also invites a reading that undermines the text's own reliability. Much like the mal d'ollo suspected of causing the narrator's mental decline, the reader's eye is forced to confront the lyrical temporality of a fractured narrative. Informed by Derridean conceptualization of hospitality, this article examines the lyrical operations through which the narrative exhibits a poetics of mental illness. The author draws from spiritualist traditions to produce an intimacy with mental illness and address the epistemic violence of late-nineteenth-century psychiatric interventions defined by dynamics of scrutiny and abandonment. Rosalía de Castro's later literary output occurred alongside public debates regarding Galicia's first psychiatric hospital in Conxo. Her final novel, El primer loco , relates the titular character's failed romances and the progression of his mental illness preceding his institutionalization. The mentally ill protagonist narrates, which introduces instances of disproportion. As it dismantles the basis for the narrative construction of psychiatric truth, her text also invites a reading that undermines the text's own reliability. Much like the mal d'ollo suspected of causing the narrator's mental decline, the reader's eye is forced to confront the lyrical temporality of a fractured narrative. Informed by Derridean conceptualization of hospitality, I examine the lyrical operations through which the narrative exhibits a poetics of mental illness. The author draws from spiritualist traditions to produce an intimacy with mental illness and address the epistemic violence of late-nineteenth-century psychiatric interventions defined by dynamics of scrutiny and abandonment.
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