El artista modernista y el discurso psiquiátrico: Los Raros de Rubén Darío y la mirada médica finisecular

Abstract

This article focuses on the relationship between literary discourse and psychiatric discourse in the late 19th century; especially, in what refers to the establishment of knowledge about the abnormal and the configuration of artistic genius as a pathology. Furthermore, the work aims to examine the construction of a “rhetoric of the disease”, their strategies and functions, in Los Raros (1896-1905) by Rubén Darío, from the analysis of the normal/abnormal conceptual binomial and the emergence of psychiatric discourse as power of normalization in end-of-century artistic productions. The author proposes that the literary portraits that Darío draws in his work reveal a tension between two types of gaze on the normal and the pathological. On the one hand, the artistic gaze of end-of-century artists with an ambivalent discourse that informs about a use of a pathological genius as an artistic ideal; on the other, the psychiatric gaze, which establishes a series of diagnostic and classification devices for abnormal subjects. Darío will face this clinical gaze from the pages of his literary portraits through a discourse that dismantles the episteme of the medical-psychiatric discourse and questions the fluctuating place that modernist writers occupy in the incipient Buenos Aires consumer society.