La anarquía y las facciones tienen múltiples cabezas. La alegoría de la Medusa y la Hidra en el lenguaje decimonónico rioplatense

Abstract

Similar to what occurred in the Iberian Peninsula with the assimilation of Napoleon Bonaparte as the multi-headed biblical monster, cultural manifestations in Río de la Plata during the first decades of the xix century adopted the use of ancient images —classical and Catholic— to bestow a delegitimizing figure upon the adversaries of this region. As a result of a merge between historiography and discourse analysis, this work seeks to scrutinize the use of classic language features in the political culture of Río de la Plata region at the beginning of the xix century through texts such as Metamorphosis, by the Roman poet Ovid, or General Estoria, by Alfonso X “the wise.” xix century publicists from Río de la Plata put into circulation the metaphor of anarchy and its factions in terms of a permanent regeneration of their heads, thus establishing a kind of political pedagogy where it was convenient to root out the opposing elements, emulating the heroic character of Perseus and Hercules in the ancient myths of Medusa and the Lernaean Hydra. An approach to this scarcely addressed subject is inserted in a corpus of works that try to observe the way in which social actors at Río de la Plata gave meaning and intelligibility to the changes that occurred in this region during the first decades of the XIX century.