[In the following essay, Laraway discusses how the human body and the Revolution are linked in Martín Luis Guzmán's El águila y la serpiente and Azuela's Los de abajo.]

Ever since a moribund Artemio Cruz became an emblem of the fragmented, postrevolutionary history of Mexico, the individual human body and the Mexican body politic have been regarded as dual aspects of a single text, demanding a unifying act of interpretation even while the possibility of a seamless reading is perpetually undercut. However, it might well be claimed that the very synecdoche by which the human body and the Revolution are linked in Carlos Fuentes's novel is anticipated by earlier narratives of the Revolution, including, as this study aims to demonstrate, Mariano Azuela's Los de abajo and Martín Luis Guzmán's El águila y la serpiente. In each of these latter works, the individual human body—as the subject of medical diagnosis and treatment—becomes a clue to broader questions about the intelligibility of the Revolution itself as a historical phenomenon. While in Los de abajo the particular circumstances of Demetrio Macías's involvement in a local uprising take on a broader scope as they are refracted through questions of medical interpretation and authority, El águila y la serpiente questions the site of such a mediation as it raises profound questions regarding the possibility of diagnosing the causes of the Revolution and treating its wounds.

It is not surprising that critical discussions of Los de abajo have often turned on the novel's quasi-epic status and Demetrio Macías's fitness as a heroic figure; more puzzling, however, is the relative lack of attention given to Luis Cervantes, the former medical student and journalist who attempts to draw Macías out of his parochial concerns and into the more abstract and universal dimensions of the Revolution. Even otherwise careful studies of Los de abajo have devoted scant attention to Luis Cervantes's function in the narrative, and when he has been analyzed at all, there has been little agreement as to his role and significance. Seymour Menton, in a study that is as notable for its individualized treatment of the members of Demetrio's coterie as for its spirited defense of the protagonist's heroism, alludes only in passing to Luis Cervantes (1007-09). Another critic leaves no doubt as to the destructive role he sees Cervantes playing, identifying him as “la figura más despreciable y baja de la novela, a pesar de ser uno de los que tiene más educación” (Sánchez 186); a more temperate interpretation of his function in Los de abajo has been suggested by Rutherford (97-100).

Such critical ambivalence is not entirely unfounded and is in fact echoed in the text. As an outsider to the provincial world in which the seeds of uprising have been sown, Cervantes's status among the indigenous peasantry is never altogether certain. In his initial encounter with Demetrio and his men, he identifies himself as an educated sympathizer with the revolutionary cause—an “estudiante de Medicina y periodista” (93)—and describes how his ideals have landed him in his current plight. He quickly discovers, however, that his story does not carry the dramatic weight that it is intended to, for his rhetoric elicits little more than laughter. But if the account of Luis Cervantes's own persecution is initially found amusing, his attempt to demonstrate his sympathies for the revolutionary movement strikes his audience as altogether incomprehensible:

—Yo he procurado hacerme entender, convencerlos de que soy un verdadero correligionario …

—¿Corre … qué? -inquirió Demetrio, tendiendo una oreja.

—Correligionario, mi jefe …, es decir, que persigo los mismos ideales y defiendo la misma causa que ustedes defienden.

Demetrio sonrió:

—¿Pos cuál causa defendemos nosotros? …

(93)

Although he will later reflect on his initial failure to appreciate the distance between handling a scalpel and meeting the revolutionaries on their own ground (94), there can be little doubt that Luis Cervantes's medical successes, together with his talents for flattery and erudite expression, will come to be responsible for winning him the confidence of Demetrio and his group. It is, in fact, his distinctive knowledge of medicine that most definitively sets him apart from the pueblo and their traditional methods of healing. As he attends to a wound he received when taken captive by Demetrio's men, Camila, the ingénue who has fallen in love with him, watches him quizzically: “¡Oiga, ¿y quién lo insiñó a curar? … ¡Mire, mire, cuánta curiosidá pa todo!” (100). A similar gap between the educated Luis Cervantes and the uneducated peasants will be yet more dramatically underscored as Señá Remigia attempts to heal Demetrio by slaughtering a dove and applying its blood to his abdomen. Although the procedure appears to bring temporary relief, the following day, once again beset by chills and a fever, Demetrio is finally persuaded to let Cervantes attend to him. The treatment is immediately successful and Luis Cervantes begins to win Demetrio's grudging respect (106).

There can be no mistaking the functional distance that Azuela establishes between folk medicine—an apparently syncretic mix of tradition, superstition, and intuition—and modern medicine, characterized by ostensibly universal scientific principles amenable to public verification. To be sure, as Luis Leal reminds us, such concerns are never far from the surface of Azuela's work, for he was himself a practicing doctor. In what continues to be a crucial study of Mariano Azuela's profession as a physician and his literary art, Leal concludes:

podríamos decir que Azuela ve la realidad, en todos sus aspectos, con ojos de médico. No puede olvidarse de su profesión y del mundo de la medicina al interpretar, en su obra novelística, los problemas personales de los pueblos y aun del país entero. A través de su obra encontramos innumerables reminiscencias del intelecto médico del autor. Su obra novelística, como su profesión, se encamina hacia una meta bien definida y que nunca pierde de vista: mejorar la salud de su México, de ese México que tanto le dolía y que tan bien supo captar en su obra.

(303)

Of course there is much in Leal's reading that remains at a precariously general level, but the point that Azuela approaches his material in Los de abajo with “ojos de médico” is well taken. Although Azuela's narrative is remarkably free of the sort of medical jargon that might well have become cumbersome in the hands of a lesser novelist, a number of crucial details not only betray his training and sensibilities but fuel the subtler questions about diagnosis and interpretation that the novel explores.

The scene of Luis Cervantes's treatment of his own wound before an inquisitive Camila is worth returning to in more detail. Not only do her persistent questions about Cervantes's activities belie her romantic interest in him, they also tacitly reveal crucial details about modern medical thought and its foreign, exotic quality in the eyes of the physician's provincial audience. A number of Camila's comments make unmistakable reference to procedures designed to ensure a proper sterilization of medical implements and an awareness of the dangers of bacterial infection: “¿Y pa qué jirvió la agua? … ¿Y los trapos, para qué los coció? … ¿Aguardiente de veras? ¡Ande, pos si yo creiba que el aguardiente no más pal cólico era güeno! … ¡Quesque animales en la agua sin jervir! … ¡Fuchi! … ¡Pos cuando ni yo miro nada!” (100-01).

Such questions should not be regarded as signals of either simple ignorance or inattentiveness on Camila's part. On the contrary, her surprise at learning of the presence of microbes in the water simply underscores the point that the history of medicine cannot be summed up in terms of a narrowly-defined visual given. To the extent that modern medical discourse employs some form of empiricism in its methodology, it must recast its criteria as to what is to count as observational data. And if it is to be claimed that the dividing line between modern and folk medicine is determined by the former's ability to deal with data hidden to the untrained eye, we might expect an explanation of how such a reconfiguration of the visual field has taken place. The question of the evolution of medical perception has been taken up in some detail by Michel Foucault. In his account, the institution of medicine in its modern form came to reorganize the very structure that was to constitute its methodological empiricism:

The clinic—constantly praised for its empiricism, the modesty of its attention, and the care with which it silently lets things surface to the observing gaze without disturbing them with discourse—owes its real importance to the fact that it is a reorganization in depth, not only of medical discourse, but of the very possibility of a discourse about disease. The restraint of clinical discourse (its rejection of philosophy; all so proudly proclaimed by doctors) reflects the non-verbal conditions on the basis of which it can speak: the common structure that carves up and articulates what is seen and what is said.

(xix)

It is precisely this sort of shift in “the common structure” of clinical discourse that reorganizes the bounds of perception and accounts for what Luis Cervantes is later able to perceive in Demetrio's wound even as the other characters remain blind to it:

Vino Luis Cervantes, descubrió la pierna, examinó detenidamente la herida y meneó la cabeza. La ligadura de manta se hundía en un surco de piel; la pierna, abotagada, parecía reventar. A cada movimiento, Demetrio ahogaba un gemido. Luis Cervantes cortó la ligadura, lavó abundantemente la herida, cubrió el muslo con grandes lienzos húmedos y lo vendó.

(106)

It might be said that the implicit connection between Luis Cervantes's examination of the wound and knowingly shaking his head in reaction—the point at which he alone of the novel's characters is able to link the visual data with purposeful and successful medical treatment—signals a fundamental shift in the observational criteria relevant to diagnosis and prescription, away from the folk remedies that characters such as Camila and Señá Remigia have available to them. This is not to claim that Camila does not see the bacteria and the others do not see what Luis sees in Demetrio's wound simply because their powers of observation are not up to the task; rather, they have not been initiated into a world in which those entities are both meaningful and discernible in the requisite way: “one now sees the visible only because one knows the language; things are offered to him who has penetrated the closed world of words; and if these words communicate with things, it is because they obey a rule that is intrinsic to their grammar” (Foucault 115).

The problems of diagnosis and treatment—with their dependence on a reconfiguration of the visual field—are further deepened by a fundamental tension between the particulars of a given set of observations and the broad laws that would spell out their relevance in terms of appropriate medical care. On the one hand, medicine sets itself to the task of establishing a methodological rigor in harmony with universal law, while on the other its effectiveness leans heavily on accurate local diagnoses. Foucault points out that a crucial tendency in the development of modern medicine has been to regard the individual patient as an instantiation of a more general pattern. “This conceptual transformation,” he claims, “gave to the clinical field a new structure in which the individual in question was not so much a sick person as the endlessly reproducible pathological fact to be found in all patients suffering in a similar way; in which the plurality of observations was no longer simply a contradiction or confirmation, but a progressive, theoretically endless convergence” (97).

Although the general interpretive model and the particular cases may never fully justify one another, it seems clear that the former comes to acquire a sort of probabilistic support each time an individual case seems to bear it out. After Luis Cervantes successfully treats his own wound, he gains an opportunity to heal Demetrio: “—¿Por qué no llama al curro pa que lo cure, compadre Demetrio?—dijo Anastasio Montañés al jefe, que a diario sufría grandes calosfríos y calenturas—. Si viera, él se cura solo y anda ya tan aliviado que ni cojea siquiera” (105). His treatment of Demetrio is likewise successful: “Demetrio pudo dormir toda la tarde y toda la noche. Otro día despertó muy contento. Tiene la mano muy liviana el curro—dijo” (106).

It goes without saying that from a contemporary vantage point, Luis Cervantes's medical procedure is unimpeachable, especially when compared with the alternative treatments offered by Señá Remigia and other characters in the novel. What is of more immediate interest to this study, however, is the rationale that governs and sustains his practice, especially when that same rationale is applied to questions bearing on the interpretation of the Revolution. Venancio offers this prescient caveat to defuse Demetrio's enthusiasm after Luis's healing process has begun to take its hold: “Por los curros se ha perdido el fruto de las revoluciones” (106).

It is only with the successful treatment of Demetrio and Luis Cervantes's acceptance into the revolutionary ranks that the relation between the medical treatment of the individual body and a diagnosis of the revolutionary state comes to fruition. Medical discourse, underwritten by its pragmatic successes in the case of the individual human body, is thought to enjoy a universal interpretive privilege and comes to regard its extension as essentially boundless. Foucault describes the intimate connections that follow between clinical experience, objectivity, language, and world:

The clinician's gaze and the philosopher's reflexion have similar powers, because they both presuppose a structure of identical objectivity, in which the totality of being is exhausted in manifestations that are its signifier-signified, in which the visible and the manifest come together in at least a virtual identity, in which the perceived and the perceptible may be wholly restored in a language whose rigorous form declares its origin. The doctor's discursive, reflective perception and the philosopher's discursive reflexion on perception come together in a figure of exact superposition, since the world is for them the analogue of language.

(96)

Once medical discourse has staked its claims in universal terms and bolstered them through successful diagnosis and treatment on a local level the way is paved to an interchangeability of levels of discourse. Luis Cervantes is consequently able to listen to the particulars of Demetrio's uprising and then provide what could without exaggeration be called a diagnosis as well, proceeding from a sort of bedside candor, to the diagnosis proper, to, eventually, the suggestion of a course of treatment:

Permítame que sea enteramente franco. Usted no comprende todavía su verdadera, su alta y nobilísima misión. Usted, hombre modesto y sin ambiciones, no quiere ver el importantísimo papel que le toca en esta revolución. Mentira que usted ande por aquí por don Mónico, el cacique; usted se ha levantado contra el caciquismo que asola toda la nación. … No peleamos por derrocar a un asesino miserable, sino contra la tiranía misma.

(116)

Having acquired interpretive authority from his healing of Demetrio, Luis Cervantes becomes the privileged interpreter of the political condition as well. Just as the individual human body proves amenable to the diagnosis and treatment made available by modern medical discourse, that same discourse—which in turn becomes authoritative by virtue of its apparent adherence to law-like general principles—becomes the privileged site for the passage from the interpretation of bodily particulars to political universals.

A great deal of the dramatic force of Los de abajo can be attributed precisely to the inability of this system of exchange to sustain itself in any kind of satisfying way. Clive Griffin has convincingly argued that questions about the internal coherence of the novel—long a topic of critical debate—take on a different tenor once we realize that the novel's very structure reveals the entropic forces that come into play as the Revolution begins to take shape. The second part of the novel, he affirms, “is increasingly pessimistic, and the gradual process of degeneration which it portrays serves again to convey Azuela's thesis that the Revolution has been betrayed” (30). The balance that Luis Cervantes had once tried to strike between empathy for the patient under his care—“los dolores y las miserias de los desheredados alcanzan a conmoverlo” (95)—and the clinical disinterest appropriate to his task—“¿Yo qué me gano con que la revolución triunfe o no?” (99)—is all but forgotten as greed and opportunism take hold.

It is, then, of little consequence whether Luis Cervantes's motives are regarded as initially sincere or not; what is certain is that the universal standard of impartiality which modern medical discourse must presuppose rapidly deteriorates once his diagnosis acquires normative force for Demetrio. It is not insignificant that the particular events of Demetrio's own evolving case-history, once they have been recast in universal, mythic terms, will become virtually unrecognizable to him, although he will quickly opt for this favorable new version of his own past: “Y Demetrio, encantado, oía el relato de sus hazañas, compuestas y aderezadas de tal suerte, que él mismo no las conociera. Por lo demás, aquello tan bien sonaba a sus oídos, que acabó por contarlas más tarde en el mismo tono y aun por creer que así habíanse realizado” (135).

It is worth noting that this transformation takes place as Demetrio and his men meet up with Pánfilo Natera. Alberto Solís, a disaffected intellectual from Natera's group, offers a second opinion, giving his own competing diagnosis of the condition of the Revolution, and it is sharply at odds with the mythic version. Far from the confidence that Luis Cervantes blithely expresses in the mythic discourse that has begun to generate around Demetrio, Solís offers a considerably more pessimistic prognosis, for he no longer regards the events of the Revolution as following determinate, predictable laws that might be amenable to scientific models of prediction and control. To be sure, Solís detects symptoms as well, but he does not regard them as providing much hope for systematic “medical” treatment. When asked what events have induced him to such skepticism about the Revolution, he replies:

¿Hechos? … Insignificancias, naderías: gestos inadvertidos para los más; la vida instantánea de una línea que se contrae, de unos ojos que brillan, de unos labios que se pliegan; el significado fugaz de una frase que se pierde. Pero hechos, gestos y expresiones que agrupados en su lógica y natural expresión, constituyen e integran una mueca pavorosa y grotesca a la vez de una raza … ¡De una raza irredenta!

(134-35)

He does not suggest that one is therefore obliged to withdraw from the revolutionary process; on the contrary, involvement in the Revolution continues to be obligatory, only in Solís's view it is not the intellectual who controls historical forces but rather the other way around. Once unbound, historical processes spin out of the control of those who would attempt to tamc them: “La revolución es el huracán, y el hombre que se entrega a ella no es ya el hombre, es la miserable hoja seca arrebatada por el vendaval” (135). Since the Revolution becomes a unitary, comprehensible movement only to the extent that it may be configured as the topic of a universalizing, general discourse, then the very conditions that make possible such a redescription will also undo it, exposing it to the vicissitudes of a raw, arbitrary power, beyond human control. This, then, is the paradoxical state of medical discourse in Los de abajo: medicine, in its modern guise, has become a pharmakon, bearing within itself the seeds of both remedy and poison (cf. Derrida 95-117).

If Los de abajo topicalizes medical discourse as a means of raising questions about interpretive authority and the Revolution, Martín Luis Guzmán's El águila y la serpiente questions the site at which such discourse would naturally appear to be most readily consolidated: the hospital. The episode of Guzmán's work most relevant to this study—“En el Hospital Militar”—does not depart from the line of investigation that Los de abajo initially pursues; rather, it deepens and further draws out the consequences of appropriating medical discourse in order to interpret the Revolution. It has already been shown that Azuela's work explores the apparent link between the diagnosis of the wounded individual and the mechanisms that permit that diagnosis to become a normative guide for interpreting the Revolution in its broadest outlines. “En el Hospital Militar” investigates just such a possibility and, like Solís's alternative diagnosis, finds it wanting. Guzmán's vignette questions the very possibility of speaking of a unified, identifiable patient in the aftermath of the Revolution's destruction. Not only does it become increasingly difficult in Guzmán's work to define the terms that medical discourse must presuppose, the site of their deployment is completely undone.

The story line of “En el Hospital Militar,” such as it is, can be briefly summarized: the narrator, together with Eduardo Hay, arrives at the Hospital Militar of Culiacán in order to improve its working conditions. Guzmán describes how bullets have ravaged the human bodies with which they have come into contact, almost as if possessing a will of their own. The episode concludes with a general commentary on the lack of adequate hospital facilities for the soldiers, as well as an ironic description of the many indignities that the troops perpetually endure.

But despite its apparently straightforward character, “En el Hospital Militar” is dramatically conditioned by the narrative frame established in the first segment of the episode. The narrator describes the enthusiasm that both he and Hay felt upon undertaking the project, and, as if to foreshadow the “moral of the story” that would presumably follow, he offers a general reflection about the character of the Mexican soul. Opposed to the natural Mexican tendency toward idealism, he claims, is a stark, unforgiving reality: “el hijo de México … compensa su debilidad acogiéndose a una ilimitada fe en la potencia del espíritu frente a frente de la fuerza bruta” (425). The opposition of idealistic spirit and brute matter—and the Mexican identification with spirit—leads to a crisis in the search for stable foundations, for despite implacable optimism, the result can only be failure, “mata[ndo] en la cuna todo impulso a construir, por falta de cimientos reales, seguros” (425).

The spirit/matter opposition of these lines recalls the tension in Los de abajo between folk medicine, with its roots in an entire set of pre-modern cultural practices and beliefs, and scientific medicine, with its appeal to universal principles of diagnosis and treatment. Again, as in Azuela's novel, the difference between the terms is not to be found at the level of simple observation or through a piecemeal modification of belief but rather by means of an initiation from one world into another through the institutions that fix the terms of discourse. Guzmán is thus able to speak of convictions that unite Mexican thought in the face of what would clearly be, to a positivist, absurdities: “¿hay algo más nuestro que la convicción de que todas las cosas pueden, en un momento dado, surgir del seno mismo de la nada?” (425). The tension implicit between these distinct modes of discourse is powerfully underscored in an image that will later take on a critical significance: “Los mexicanos creemos, por ejemplo, que una fila de pechos heroicos es bastante a cerrarle el paso a una batería de cañones de 42. ¿Quién negará que nos equivocamos? Pero, esto no obstante, es un hecho que nuestra creencia, al fin y a la postre, es lo único que nos salva” (426).

Once the general categories that establish the narrative frame for the episode have been set up, Guzmán is prepared to describe his first contact with “la imaginación de las balas” (426). His experience in the hospital soon gives the lie to a number of commonsense beliefs that he had previously held. He discovers, for instance, that while he had always believed that firearms were subject to the will of the human beings that operated them, the bullets themselves were actually of a number of different classes. Without excluding the possibility that many bullets followed their deadly trajectories according to plan, the text insists that there were others that did not: “balas imaginativas y fantaseadoras—las que apenas sueltas en el curso de su trayectoria, ceden al ansia universal de jugar, y jugando jugando [sic] cumplen su cometido” (426). It is the latter category of bullets that interests Guzmán throughout most of “En el Hospital Militar,” and he attempts to provide a taxonomy of the distinct personalities that the “balas imaginativas” seem to display. In addition to the “balas serias, las balas concienzudas,” which kill or maim with certainty (426), there are, he observes, “proyectiles risueños,” “balas traviesas,” and “balas de dinamismo alegre,” among others (427-28).

The rhetorical force of Guzmán's essay resides precisely here, in his description of the personalities of the projectiles, not according to any grouping of natural kinds, as a rigorous scientific method might require, but in terms of the damage that they have done to particular human bodies:

Las balas que primero arrancaban de sobre el cráneo mechones de cabello, y luego, para sembrar los pelos otra vez, abrían un surco a lo largo de la espalda, eran balas propensas a recrearse en un virtuosismo excesivo. Las balas que de una parte rozaban la yema de un dedo o afilaban el corte de una uña y de la otra destrozaban una clavícula o pulverizaban un codo, eran balas que se complacían en afinar hasta la sutileza su capacidad activa y en robustecerla hasta el estrépito. Las balas que mutilaban una oreja rebanándole cuidadosamente el lóbulo; que luego alojaban el lóbulo bajo la carne de la nuca, y que por último iban a incrustar la piel de la nuca en el talón, eran balas traviesas, balas que se entretenían en cambiar de sitio cuanto hallaban al paso y que describían, para lograr mejor su objeto, trayectorias inverosímiles entre los puntos más irrelacionados.

(427-28)

The description of the bullets in anthropomorphic terms is doubtless more than a poetic flourish: by characterizing them as being driven by human-like whims, without those caprices ever being rendered systematic, Guzmán cuts off any sort of appeal to a quasi-scientific method of controlling or predicting their behavior. Indeed, the only way to account for each of them is through rote enumeration, for each human body is distinctly impacted by the particular bullet that strikes it. Talk of any universally binding causal laws would be unintelligible here and the point of Guzmán's treatment of the matter seems clear: it is as if he were mocking the pretensions of modern medicine to deduce the laws explaining the wounds that each individual body has received in the course of fighting in the Revolution. Instead of providing useful rubrics that would organize the wounded into discrete categories, the narrative actively works against the hospital's tendency toward the sort of classificatory neutralization that Foucault describes:

By means of the endless play of modifications and repetitions, the hospital clinic makes possible, therefore, the setting aside of the extrinsic. But this same play makes possible the summation of the essential in knowledge: in fact, variations cancel each other out, and the effect of the repetition of constant phenomena outlines spontaneously the fundamental conjunctions. By showing itself in a repetitive form, the truth indicates the way by which it may be acquired.

(110)

No such repetitive patterns are in fact available in the Hospital Militar of Guzmán's description. Each case is sufficiently particular to resist any kind of ordered grouping of the type that the modern hospital must presuppose. Any move to extrapolate from the individual human body to more general observations that would underwrite the sorts of knowledge-claims that modern medicine might wish to make is blocked: the narrative breaks definitively with the movement that Luis Cervantes had initiated in Los de abajo—towards a general interpretive authority on the basis of local diagnostic success—and that Alberto Solís had already called into question.

But there is little comfort to be taken from the implicit critique of the discourse of modern medicine that the text provides. If the patients in the Hospital Militar are not mere instantiations of wound-categories, neither are they, for the most part, human beings. They are, rather, fragments of persons and fragments of bodies, and, with few exceptions, they are named only in terms of the wounds that they have received. To be sure, the text leaves no doubt that the “cimientos reales, seguros” (425) that scientific discourse might aspire to establish are simply not available: the sort of foundationalism that would bolster such a project is simply obviated by Guzmán's disjoint taxonomies. But on the other hand, the sort of showdown that the narrator envisioned at the outset between a “batería de cañones de 42” and the legendary “fila de pechos heroicos” of the Mexican spirit never quite takes place either. For the bullets never confront “pechos heroicos”; they are intercepted, rather, by less romantic regions of the body: a heel, an eye, a fingertip, an elbow (427). The point is brought home most tellingly in the description of the wound that Obregón himself has suffered: “en lugar de hacer la herida opulenta que el general sonorense anhelaba como timbre indeleble de su heroísmo … le produjo apenas, en la epidermis, un moretón despectivo. … Durante varios días no dejó de decir a todas horas—¡Pero qué ridícula ha estado mi herida!” (428-29). The cardinal opposition between spirit and matter that was set up at the outset of “En el Hospital Militar” has become irrecuperably debilitated.

The hospital facility itself is defined in terms that are every bit as empty or useless as were the catalogues of bullet wounds. The hospital of Culiacán, we are told,

era hospital porque reventaba de heridos. Omitida esta circunstancia, iguales títulos había para llamarlo hospital que para llamarlo de cualquier otro modo. … Eran insuficientes las camas; no bastaba la ropa; faltaban las medicinas; se economizaba el algodón; la asepsia no se practicaba porque no había lo necesario; los instrumentos quirúrgicos, limitados, incompletos, inservibles, retardaban las operaciones o las malograban.

(429)

If medical discourse is to be characterized by the institutions that fix its governing terms, the hospital facility in “En el Hospital Militar” signals the vacuity of such discourse in the face of the violence actually wrought in the Revolution. That it is a hospital in name only, without any particular claim to the title beyond the fact that it is filled to overflowing with wounded bodies, undercuts definitively the interpretive privilege that the institutions of medical science would wish to claim. It is defined tautologically, in empty terms that can do no more than point out the individual wounded bodies that suffer inside of it. Just as the bullet wounds could only be catalogued disjunctively, the site of such an interpretive project is little more than the sum total of the terms which it should ostensibly organize according to general classificatory principles. Indeed, as if to emphasize the absurd scope of such empty signifying mechanisms, Guzmán extends the critique to take in the idea of the ejército itself. Just as the hospital can be defined only reflexively, the most basic conditions that the revolutionary enterprise must presuppose are conspicuously absent. In a memorable passage regarding the privations that the soldiers endure, a series of questions are raised whose answers are painfully evident:

¿Equipo? ¿Para qué equipo? Sin capote, sin zapatos, el soldado mexicano atravesará sierras y soportará inviernos para ir en busca del enemigo. ¿Avituallamiento? ¿Para qué avituallamiento? Sin pan ni agua las tropas mexicanas cruzarán desiertos interminables … y librarán en seguida, vacío el vientre, seca la lengua, batallas de La Angostura.

(429-30)

It might be suggested that the present study's reliance on “En el Hospital Militar” does not take fully into account the broader observations regarding the Revolution that Guzmán makes available throughout El águila y la serpiente. To be sure, the task here has been sharply focused on the motif of medical discourse as an entrée to the problem of interpreting the Revolution. Nevertheless, the case might well be made that the more frequently studied dimensions of Guzmán's text—his fascination with Pancho Villa, for instance—demonstrate similar sensibilities. Certainly, the fearsome charisma of los de arriba exercises a powerful influence on Guzmán, as he himself indicates in “Pancho Villa en la cruz”: “pasó esa mañana por mi espíritu, frente a frente a Villa, el mareo del horror y del terror” (624). And, although the question might be left to another study, it might well be claimed that just as the unpredictable trajectories of the bullets in “En el Hospital Militar” are, at bottom, inscrutable, so also are the deliberations of the cacique, following a logic as indecipherable as it is terrible: “A mí los fulgores de sus ojos me revelaron de súbito que los hombres no pertenecemos a una sola especie, sino a muchas, y que de especie a especie hay, dentro del género humano, distancias infranqueables, mundos irreductibles a común término” (623-24).

What does remain clear, however, is that to broach the question of the Revolution from the perspective of medical discourse is to seek the terms that would render it intelligible. And even if both Los de abajo and El águila y la serpiente block any simple answer to such questions, their persistence in raising them highlights the lack of interpretive tools that would domesticate the Revolution and permit univocal moral lessons to be drawn from it. For just as the “balas” and the “pechos heroicos” in Guzmán's narrative both dodge the dramatic encounter that would bring them squarely together once and for all, both Los de abajo and El águila y la serpiente present a vision of the Revolution that clearly reveals its scars and offers only the prognosis of a painful, difficult healing.

Works Cited

Azuela, Mariano. Los de abajo. Ed. Marta Portal. Madrid: Cátedra, 1989.

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.

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