Bodie, crime and literature: decadent appropriations by Lombroso and Morel in México in the era of Porfirio Díaz

Abstract

In the present contribution, I will be analyzing the short story “The Case of Pedro” by Ciro B. Ceballos. Through this analysis I am interested in exploring diverse counter-appropriation efforts made on documents of clinical and criminalistic nature attempted by several writers of the decadent movement in México. Specifically, these counteractions by the Mexican decadents sought to alter and redefine the main ideas initially presented by Cesare Lombroso and Bénédict Augustin Morel. With these actions, the decadent group attempted to question the dominant ideas of the end of the 19th century in Mexico, which relied heavily but imprecisely in scientism-type arguments. The rebellious appropriation of diverse documents by the decandentists came to be a mechanism to oppose the trends put forward by the groups in power, which were pushing towards a standardization of the writing profession. As a counter-measure, the decadentists promoted different lines of action for a much more exploratory and independent literature. In the cusp of the Dictator Porfirio Díaz’s regime, positivism was incorporated and adapted by the power groups of the country in order to promote several social and discursive practices. This included, as a crucial component, the medical narrative of the times. In fact, the word “Medicine” was a powerful term in those days, which did not refer only to the sciences and techniques for the treatment of diseases, but moreover, it encompassed different connotations, which, according to the formulation by Foucault in The birth of the clinic (2004), gave rise to the notion and definition of -The healthy individual-. That is, a category which would come not only to include the experience of not being sick, but also, a definition of the model-man, which would even go into the discursive constructions of other fields, including the legal one. The this was the discourse against which the Mexican decadents were acting through the efforts described in the present contribution.