Looking closer at microbiota: material representations of the microscope in Spanish-language literature

This essay examines the representation of the microscope in three literary works in Spanish: Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s Cuentos de vacaciones (1905), Agustín Fernández Mallo’s poetry collection Antiobiótico (2012), and Mónica Nepote’s electronic work Lengua parásita (2022). Drawing on thing theory (Brown; Ingold; Plate, Munteán, and Farahmand), theories of visuality and power in “matters of care” (De la Bellacasa; Morente; Ruiz-Gómez), and materialist approaches to glass as medium (Garrison), the essay traces how the microscope’s representation is entangled with narratives of diseased bodies, taking Cajal’s nineteenth-century work as both a precursor of inter-species poetics and a representative of so-called “romantic positivism.” In Cajal’s narratives, the microscope mediates between the human and the non-human, subtly suggesting a holobiontic conviviality, while framing illness through a pedagogical ideal of scientific mastery that transforms diseased bodies into objects of appropriation and colonial subjects into illness vectors. Fernández Mallo repositions illness as sensorial and affective experience, reconfiguring the microscope’s glass as a figure of fragmentation and precariousness, blurring boundaries between organic and inorganic. Nepote’s post-pandemic piece dissolves clinical distance, reframing the pathogen as a site of holobiontic kinship and decolonial thought, in which the coloniser becomes an agent of contagion.