El médico frente a la barbarie: "Pedro Arnáez" de José Marín Cañas

In this paper we propose to reflect on the peculiar conceptual relationship between civilization and barbarism that José Marín Cañas develops in his novel Pedro Arnáez (1942). The epic dimension of this American ideological struggle always suppose the challenge between a exponent of the literate city and a metonymic subject of the American nature (Doña Bárbara, Don Segundo Sombra etc.): in the novel of Cañas, the parties in struggle are a doctor, narrator of the novel, and Pedro Arnáez, representative of an archaic and tenacious world. The ‘civilizing’ mission that the proponent of modernity proposes, is not related strictu sensu with economic production, but with the management, by the State, of the productive forces and the national manpower. This concept, involves both the general literary discourse of the relationship between civilization and barbarism, and the studies of biopolitics in Latin America.
Thanks to the vicissitudes that the two subjects live, the novel allows us to reflect on a key concept to read modernity in Latin America from a different methodological framework: there will be no emphasis on ethnic or legal issues, but the issue will be analyzed from a biopolitical point of view. Taking as landmark classic studies on the concept of biopolitics (from Foucault to Lemke or Esposito) and the Latin American studies related to the subject, it is our intention to evaluate the level of the biopolitical debate in Central American literature around 1940.