Civilización, violencia y barbarie en la novela de la Revolución Mexicana (1915-1931)

Abstract

The objective of this article is to analyze how the links between the triad of civilization, violence, and barbarism are represented in three novels of the Mexican Revolution of the period 1915-1931: Los de abajo by Mariano Azuela; La sombra del Caudillo by Martín Luis Guzmán; Cartucho by Nellie Campobello. Our main findings consist of specifying how, in these works, the authors use a code of light and shadow to express the complex relationships of this triad. Thus, they use terms, metaphors and discourses that aim to exalt the civilizing process as a path that leads us to greater luminosity and elevation as human beings. In contrast, when referring to barbarism, they rely on rhetorical figures that emphasize a path towards darkness and depths that degrade us as human beings. In the narratives, violence appears on both the civilizational side and the side of barbarism. In the former, it is presented as creative, ordergenerating, legitimate, sacred, and endorsed by the community. In the latter, it is depicted as destructive, impure, brutalizing, and illegitimate. However, each author uses a different focus to account for the triad. Campobello does so from the minutiae of observing the human body shaken by the ravages of civil war. In Azuela, the focus is on the insurrection that rises and falls in the tide of armed struggle. In Guzmán, the center is on the use of power by the revolutionary elite. To reinterpret the passages or moments of the plot in each novel where the triad of interest is most commonly appreciated, the article relies on the concepts of civilization, violence, and barbarism by the sociologist Norbert Elias, which are relatively absent in Mexican research.