Contagious Becomings: Carmen Stephan’s Mal Aria

Abstract Carmen Stephan’s debut novel, Mal Aria (2012), is notable not least of all for its surprising narrator: the much-maligned mosquito. Given our shared history, this perspective could easily devolve into misanthropy. However, the narrator’s relationship with Carmen, her malaria-stricken victim, is in fact deeply ambiguous. Although gifted with the power of self-reflection, she struggles in vain to save Carmen as doctors repeatedly fail to recognize the disease ravaging her body. This article argues that the physicians’ failure, read through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming-animal, stems from the blind application of their expertise and subsequent refusal to engage meaningfully with the world on which that knowledge is predicated. Entranced by a hierarchical epistemology based on chimeric individuality and thus unable to unite theory with an openness to the world, they are rendered at best ineffectual, and at worst, complicit in Carmen’s eventual death.