Revolution, Affects and Corporalities in Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho: Relatos de la lucha en el norte de México

Abstract

Written by Nellie Campobello and published for the first time in 1931, with a second and definitive edition in 1940, Cartucho: Relatos de la lucha en el norte de México constitutes one of the most unique and innovative literary works of the so-called novel of the Mexican Revolution, not only because of the historical and political content of its stories, but because of the narrative structure, the generic hybridization and the complex representation of daily experience in the context of war, all of them linked to the unfolding of childhood testimony and adult remembrance. Thus, this article proposes a critical review of its inclusion in the canon of the Revolution novel, and the need to think of it as a revolutionary narrative in terms not precisely historical, but aesthetic and cultural. Likewise, it problematizes a reading mostly shared by literary criticism that recognizes a kind of naturalization and objectification of violence in the stories that make up Cartucho; in opposition to this, the article proposes a different approach that considers the manifestation of affects and emotions as one of the main elements of the narrative and testimonial construction of the work, without which the com- plexity of the revolutionary experience recounted, the recovery of the community experience, and the representation of the different corporalities that inhabit the context of war cannot be understood.