El asesinato como creación estética en "Blanco y rojo" de Bernardo Couto Castillo: Un ejemplo de violencia narrativa en el decadentismo literario en el México porfiriano

Abstract

This article reviews murder as an aesthetic creation in the short story 'Blanco y Rojo' by Bernardo Couto Castillo. It discusses the different functions that violence can play in narrative as well as the relationship between literature and morality. To understand the specific role of murder in Bernardo Couto's 'Blanco y Rojo', we review the aesthetic proposal of the Mexican decadentistas of the late nineteenth century, who were frequently labeled as immoral by their contemporaries. We will see that, in the case of Couto’s story, the violence does not lie so much in the content, the narration of a murder, but in the fact of violating the moral and literary creation norms of his time, the Porfiriato.

Keywords

• murder
• decadentism
• mexican literature
• modernism
• 19th century
• narrative violence