Abstract
El mundo alucinante by Reinaldo Arenas was often interpreted as a nueva novela histórica with clearly political intentions in so far as the story of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, who was persecuted by the Spanish state and the Church in the late 18th century, serves to denunciate the contemporary Cuban dictatorship. The present article analyses the novel from another perspective, namely with regard to the spatial dimension as well as the issue of homosexuality. Based on the American Queer Studies and the theory of the epistemology of the closet developed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the spaces of homosexual desire shall be examined: the narrow chamber, such as the monastic cell or prison cell. The epistemology of the closet assumes that heteronormativity represents a norm that governs social life and public discourses so that those who diverge from this norm need to make a decision for or against the admission of their homosexuality in every social situation all over again. In this sense, the cell becomes either a shelter and hiding-place of homosexual desire or a place of discipline, torture and punitive confinement. However, the chambers and hideaways of desire not only play a vital role as motifs in the novel but also determine its narrative structure. Hence, the three distinct narrative voices in El mundo alucinante become an expression of the social and discursive conflict of homosexuals considering the choice of concealing or exposing their sexual inclination. Thus, there exists a parallel between the narrator, who cannot be located either within or beyond the diegesis, and the oscillation of the homosexual between inside and outside the closet.
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