Marginalization, the Body and Bare Life in Vicente Leñero’s El evangelio de Lucas Gavilán

Vicente Leñero’s novel El evangelio de Lucas Gavilán (1979) adapts the Gospel of Luke to mid-1970s Mexico.¹ Lucas Gavilán, the implied author of this adapted Gospel, re-imagines Jesus Christ’s birth, ministry and death through the life and work of a man called Jesucristo Gómez.² Leñero’s Gospel opens with a prologue and tells us that, like the biblical Gospel, it will present a historical account.³ Although the biblical Gospel of Luke is a religious text, Leñero’s is a secular reading grounded in the Mexican context, which is imbued with religious imagery and symbols. The novel also unmistakably reflects liberation theology’s preferential option for the poor, as it recreates Jesus Christ’s life in ways described by Latin American liberation theologians Jon Sobrino, Leonardo Boff and Gustavo Gutiérrez. All of these emphasize that salvation can be pursued on earth by combatting social injustice (9).⁴ El evangelio portrays this injustice by focussing on relationships between the Mexican State, its affiliated prisons, unions, and medical system, the Catholic Church, and the Mexican people. I propose that when characters in the novel are portrayed in a way that is consistent with Giorgio Agamben’s reading of bare life, they point to the oppressive effects of these relationships. At the same time, these characters’ bodies evoke one another and form an inter-corporeal entity, or connected body. This connected body challenges representations and representatives of the State, prisons, unions, the medical system and the Catholic Church within the novel.

El evangelio, and the related play, Jesucristo Gómez (1983), like many of Leñero’s novels and plays, deliberately represent their historical context. Indeed, Leñero is considered to be one of the pioneers of documentary theatre in Mexico, a genre which, according to critic Judith Bissett, allows the viewer to reflect on a play’s historical moment and its relationship to one’s life (72). Leñero’s plays and novels, moreover, reputedly result from his dedication to archives and documents. El evangelio’s inclusion of religion is not unique in Leñero’s oeuvre. Critic Miguel Ángel Niño, writing shortly before El evangelio was published, observes that religion pervades Leñero’s first short story collection, La polvareda y otros cuentos (1959) and frames how it portrays changes to rural society and migration to cities (Niño 31). A later novel, La voz adolorida (1961) uses religion to underline the privileged class’ rigid beliefs, and suggests that this rigidity makes people neurotic and crazy (Niño 55–60). Niño adds that El juicio (1972) proposes that the Church adapt to its context, abandon conservatism and pay attention to individuals’ needs (156). Later critics emphasize how it relates to religion in Mexico, the biblical text or to Leñero’s other novels. John Lipski’s “Vicente Leñero: Narrative Evolution as Religious Search,” for instance, points out the novel’s startling use of religion imagery. In “Vicente Leñero: Un autor evangélico,” José Luis Martínez Morales explains how the novel relates to the Bible and proposes that it is a fictional transfiguration of the body of Christ (8). In a later article, “Vicente Leñero: De San Lucas a Lucas Gavilán,” Martínez Morales underlines how the novel rewrites the Gospel of Luke (239). A chapter of Danny J. Anderson’s Vicente Leñero: The Novelist as Critic highlights the innovative relationship between literary and biblical text in El evangelio. For Anderson, the novel opposes isolating religion from daily life (137). These critical interventions leave room for interpretation. Ángel Martín Rodríguez-Pérez’s “El Evangelio de Lucas Gavilán: Vicente Leñero’s Adaptation of the Gospel to Contemporary Mexico” seeks to remedy this gap. He explains that the novel was first published in Spain by Seix Barral because it was controversial in Mexico (Rodríguez-Pérez). According to the critic, this is because the novel explicitly demythologizes Christianity through miracles that do not affirm Christ...