Ownership of the Dead in Monstrilio: Contested Remains and the Rights of Mourners

The Thematic Claim: The Dead Body as Contested Territory in Monstrilio (2022) by Gerardo Sámano Córdova, Chapter 1: Begin Reading (pp. 1–12) — Theme Analysis: Ownership of the Dead — Study Guide for the Opening Chapter of the Novel — Part of the Monstrilio Themes Series — Return to the Book Overview — Magos · Joseph · Santiago — The Lung · The Owl · The Act of Preservation · The Act of Consumption — This analysis is grounded in the opening chapter of the novel and does not cover later plot developments. — Monstrilio is a 2022 novel by Gerardo Sámano Córdova, published in English. The following study guide examines the theme of ownership of the dead as it emerges in the novel's first chapter, where a mother's grief collides with her husband's horror over the fate of their son's body. — ## The Thematic Claim: The Dead Body as Contested Territory — In Monstrilio, the body of the dead is not a passive object awaiting burial but a site of active contestation. The opening chapter stages a collision between two competing claims on Santiago's remains: Magos's conviction that her love grants her the right to physically possess and alter her son's body, and Joseph's belief that the body of the dead must remain whole and untouched. The theme of ownership of the dead asks a disturbing question: does grief give a mourner license to treat the beloved's remains as property? And if so, what does that ownership look like—preservation, consumption, or something stranger? — The novel's answer is deliberately uncomfortable. Magos's act of cutting into Santiago's body is framed not as desecration but as the logical extension of maternal love. The lung that defined her son's brief life becomes a thing she can hold, and in holding it, she refuses to let death take everything. — ## The Fantasy of Public Mourning: Ownership as Performance — Before Magos ever touches a knife, the theme of ownership is already present in her imagination. Her fantasy of Santiago dying in a Mexico City mall is not really about her son at all—it is about her. In the fantasy, she becomes a Pietà, marble and gorgeous, an object of public sorrow. The mall-goers surround her in hushed awe of her sorrow. This fantasy reveals that Magos initially understands ownership of the dead as a social performance: the mourner who owns the grief owns the narrative, and the audience validates that ownership. — But the reality of Santiago's death in the secluded Upstate New York house shatters this fantasy. There is no audience, only one whimpering man. The death lacks drama—no thunder, no angels, no cloaked Death. Magos's disappointment is not callousness but a crisis of ownership: without an audience, her grief has no recognized form. She cannot perform the role of the mourning mother, so she must find another way to claim her son. — This is the first movement of the theme: ownership of the dead shifts from a public, performative claim to a private, physical one. When the audience disappears, Magos's claim on Santiago becomes literal. — ## The Body as Territory: Two Modes of Grief — The opening scene establishes two competing relationships to Santiago's body. Joseph's grief is physical but reverent. He nuzzles their son, squeezes him with his whole body, smells him hard. His grief is an attempt to merge with the body, to hold it close without altering it. When Magos folds his body and walks him to bed, she treats her husband the way she will soon treat her son—as a body to be arranged. The parallel is deliberate: Joseph's body is manipulated by Magos just as Santiago's will be. — The line Their son is only hers now is the hinge of the theme. Joseph is asleep, defeated, and Magos claims sole ownership. The possessive hers transforms Santiago from a person into a possession. What follows is the logical consequence of that claim. — ## The Incision: Claiming the Lung — Magos's decision to cut into Santiago's body is grounded in a specific logic. She asks what part of a person is inextricably themselves. Not hair—too public. Not fingers or toes—she knows these too well. Not the heart—too quiet, too shared between her and Joseph. It has to be the lung. Santiago has only one lung, and that lung is the core of his Santiagoness. The lung is what carried him past his expected life span. It is both the thing that defined him and the thing that failed him. — The lung is the novel's central symbol of contested ownership. Magos loves it and hates it. She wants to thank it and spit on it. This ambivalence is crucial: her claim on the lung is not pure love but a tangle of gratitude, resentment, and need. She wants to see it, hold it, possess it. — The incision itself is described with clinical care. She uses a sharp knife—her husband's knife, a cook's knife. She cuts with the utmost care, lest Santiago wake up in a sudden rebirth. This is the novel's dark irony: she is careful not to hurt a boy who is already dead. The care is a vestige of maternal instinct, but it is also a form of denial. She is still thinking of Santiago as someone who could be hurt, even as she cuts into his belly. — The Lorca reference deepens the theme. In the play, the mother says of her son's blood, Because the blood is mine. Magos recalls this and smears Santiago's blood on her hands, licking it. The act of consumption—tasting her son's blood—is the most literal form of ownership. She is not just holding a piece of him; she is taking him into her body. — But Magos does not take the whole lung. She decides her son should keep his lung and takes only a nugget, the downmost tip. This is a compromise between possession and respect. She wants to own a piece of him, but she also wants to leave him whole enough to be buried. The act of preservation is therefore partial, incomplete. She places the lung tip in a jam jar—a child's pencil jar, repurposed. The jar transforms the body part into an object, something that can be kept, displayed, saved. — ## The Contested Aftermath: You've Destroyed Him — Joseph's return is the moment the theme becomes explicit. He freezes at the scene, trying to make sense of what he has walked into. His words are stark: You've destroyed him. — Magos's response is a philosophical counter-claim: she has destroyed nothing; nothing was left to destroy. For her, the body of the dead is already empty. Santiago is gone; what remains is matter. To alter that matter is not destruction because there is nothing left to destroy. — Joseph's horror suggests a different ontology. For him, the body of the dead still carries meaning. To cut it is to violate not just the corpse but the person. The word destroyed implies that Santiago's body was still Santiago in some meaningful sense—that the body is not just matter but identity. — This is the central contradiction of the theme. The novel refuses to resolve it. Magos's act is both an act of love and an act of violence. She is careful, reverent, even tender—and she is also cutting open her dead child. The jam jar is both a shrine and a grotesque object. The lung tip is both a keepsake and a piece of meat. — The owl adds another layer. Santiago loved the morning owl, his tiny body wound in rapture. The owl is a symbol of the living boy—his joy, his attention, his aliveness. Magos listens for the owl but may have missed it. The owl's absence mirrors Santiago's absence. The living boy is gone; only the body remains, and the body is what Magos can claim. — ## Complexity and Contradiction — The theme of ownership of the dead in Monstrilio is deliberately unresolved. The novel does not tell us whether Magos is right or wrong. Instead, it presents her act as the product of a specific kind of love—a love that refuses to let go, that insists on physical possession even after death. — The contradiction is that Magos's claim on Santiago is both selfish and selfless. She wants the lung for herself, but she also wants to honor what made him Santiagones. She takes only a small piece, leaving the rest for burial. She tries to put his body back together, wiping blood with her saliva. She is both desecrator and caretaker. — Joseph's claim is equally complex. His grief is reverent, but it is also passive. He squeezes, nuzzles, smells—but he does not act. His ownership of Santiago is emotional, not physical. When Magos acts, he is horrified, but his horror does not undo her act. The contest is not resolved; it is simply lived. — The novel's title—Monstrilio—hints at the monstrous consequences of this act of preservation, suggesting that claiming the dead may produce something that cannot be controlled. The act of preservation becomes an act of creation, and ownership of the dead transforms the beloved into something new. — ## Study Questions — 1. What does Magos's fantasy of Santiago dying in a Mexico City mall reveal about her understanding of grief and ownership? — Magos's fantasy reveals that she initially understands mourning as a public performance. In the fantasy, she becomes a Pietà, an object of public sorrow, and the mall-goers validate her grief with hushed awe. The fantasy is about being seen as a mourner, which is a form of owning the narrative of death. When Santiago actually dies in the secluded house with no audience, this public claim collapses, and Magos must find a private, physical way to claim her son. — 2. Why does Magos choose the lung as the part of Santiago she wants to possess? — Magos reasons that the lung is the core of his Santiagoness. Santiago has only one lung, and that lung carried him past his expected life span. It is unique to him in a way that hair, fingers, toes, and even the heart are not. The lung is both what defined him and what failed him—she loves it and hates it. Taking a piece of the lung is a way of claiming the essence of who Santiago was. — 3. How does the Lorca reference (Because the blood is mine) complicate Magos's act? — The Lorca reference gives Magos a literary precedent for claiming her son's blood as her own. In the play, the mother's claim is metaphorical—she speaks of blood spilled on the ground. Magos makes the claim literal by smearing and licking Santiago's blood. The reference suggests that Magos's act is not unprecedented but is an extreme version of a common maternal claim. It also complicates the act by framing it as both literary and visceral, both performed and real. — 4. What does Joseph mean when he says Magos has destroyed their son, and why does Magos disagree? — Joseph means that Magos has violated the integrity of Santiago's body, treating it as something that can be cut and altered. For Joseph, the body of the dead still carries the person's meaning. Magos disagrees because she believes nothing was left to destroy—Santiago is already gone, and the body is just matter. Their disagreement is the central conflict of the theme: is the dead body a person or an object? — 5. How does the jam jar function as a symbol of contested ownership? — The jam jar transforms the lung tip from a body part into an object. It is a child's pencil jar, repurposed for a grotesque purpose. The jar is both a shrine—a way of preserving and honoring Santiago—and a container that reduces him to a specimen. It represents the ambiguity of Magos's act: she is both preserving her son and objectifying him. The jar is the physical embodiment of the theme's central tension.