El loco
and the Pedagogy of Margins: Madness, Justice, and Transformation
Dr. Barbara Gabriella
Renzi,
Senior Lecturer,
Berlin School of
Business and Innovation (BSBI),
Berlin, Germany.
Abstract: This article offers a creative-academic reading of Alberto Manzi’s
El loco (1979), a novel originally written as youth literature but deeply
relevant to contemporary debates on mental health, marginality, and resistance.
The story of the madman in Tiuna—whose fragile gestures, from throwing stones
at a tin can to laughing at the wrong moment, unsettle the town’s
order—resonates with lived experiences of psychological vulnerability. Drawing
on theories of labeling and stigma (Becker; Goffman), resilience and
post-traumatic growth (Masten; Tedeschi & Calhoun), and Jungian archetypes,
the article interprets El loco as both fragile survivor and wise fool.
Philosophical perspectives illuminate how madness exposes tensions between
freedom, justice, and institutional power. A feminist lens reveals how madness
has been inscribed as pathology on women’s bodies while also reclaiming
vulnerability as a form of agency. Ultimately, the article argues that
fragility and marginality emerge not as deficits but as creative disruptions
that open space for solidarity and transformation.
Keywords: Alberto
Manzi, El loco, Madness, Resilience, Pedagogy
Prologue:
The Center at the Margins
The town does not remember when the
madman arrived. He was simply there, as though he had always been: a man with a
strip of red cloth tied around his head, throwing stones at a tin can. The
clang of stone against metal echoed through Tiuna’s dusty streets, a rhythm
that irritated some, amused others, and unsettled nearly everyone. Children
laughed at him. Elders muttered that he was cursed. Yet something in that
repetitive gesture cracked the surface of Tiuna’s certainties. It was absurd,
useless, fragile — and therefore unforgettable.
For many readers, this scene may
appear as a curious portrait of eccentricity. But for those of us who live mental health
challenges, the madman’s stones ring familiar.
They echo the rhythms of survival we know all too well. Counting steps to quiet
racing thoughts, scrolling through endless feeds to escape loneliness,
restricting food as a way to feel control, holding silence like a fragile
shield against the world’s noise — all these behaviors, so easily dismissed as
meaningless or pathological, can be the only rhythms that make life bearable.
Like El Loco’s stones, they do not solve the problem of existence. They
mark it. They endure it. They make it possible to breathe.
Society calls these gestures
“symptoms.” Psychiatry names them disorders. The neighbors of Tiuna called him loco.
In both past and present, the label carries a similar weight: dismissal,
exclusion, ridicule, fear. Howard Becker’s labeling theory1 reminds
us that deviance is less about intrinsic behavior and more about the judgments
society casts upon it. To be named “mad,” “anxious,” “depressed,” or
“disordered” is to be fixed into a role, silenced before one can speak. Yet
labels also reveal something about those who impose them: their need for order,
their fear of disruption, their inability to face fragility.
But there is another truth beneath
the surface. Fragility is not simply weakness. Fragility can be survival. El
Loco’s laughter, misplaced and uncomfortable, is not nonsense but
resistance. His silence, perceived as emptiness, is another kind of language.
His repetitive, useless gesture of throwing stones is not a pathology but a
rhythm of life. This is resilience as psychology describes it: not the absence
of suffering but the ability to persist within it, to create meaning in the
cracks. Ann Masten (2001) calls this “ordinary magic” — the
everyday alchemy by which broken lives generate strength.2
From the perspective of the margins,
El Loco is not absurd. He is kin. He reminds us that fragility can hold
wisdom, that repetition can be ritual, that silence can be speech. He embodies
what Carl Jung described as the archetype of the fool: one who appears
irrational but channels truths the collective has repressed. To his community, he is a disturbance. To those of us who know the weight of
stigma, he is recognition.
This is why Manzi’s novel feels
urgent today. Written in 1979 as youth literature, El loco was meant for
adolescent readers — yet it speaks across decades and identities. It confronts
us with a character who is at once fragile and disruptive, broken and wise,
excluded and indispensable. His presence unsettles Tiuna’s certainties just as
the presence of the marginalized unsettles society today. He does not fight
battles with weapons or speeches. His resistance is quieter, stranger: he
“merely lives.”
And perhaps this is the most radical
act. For those of us at the edges of mental health, survival itself becomes
political. To wake up, to repeat rituals, to breathe despite despair, to endure
in silence — these are not failures, but transformations. They crack open the
surface of what society calls normality. They show that order is fragile, that
justice is incomplete, that humanity is larger than the categories imposed upon
it.
The madman of Tiuna is not a hero,
not a genius, not a savior. He is something more unsettling and more human: a
figure who carries both pain and possibility in his fragile body. His presence
teaches us that the true center of the story is not found in the rebellion, the
courtroom, or the speeches of power. The center is found at the margins — in
the fragile persistence of a man who throws stones at a tin can, and in all of
us who survive by gestures others fail to understand.
2.
Manzi’s Pedagogical and Social Vision
To understand El loco, one
must first understand Alberto Manzi the educator. Before he was a novelist,
Manzi was a teacher who believed that learning was inseparable from freedom. In
postwar Italy, he became a public figure through Non è mai troppo tardi
(“It’s Never Too Late”), a televised literacy program (1960–1968) that enabled
thousands of adults to learn to read and write. It was not merely an
educational experiment; it was a social revolution. Manzi refused the
authoritarian pedagogy of his time, insisting that education must begin with
respect for the learner and unfold through curiosity, dialogue, and
participation (Manzi 2024, Fernè 2003).
In his writings, Manzi frequently
returned to the metaphor that teaching is not about filling a vessel but about
lighting a fire (Manzi, 1980, Fernè 2017, 2011).
Knowledge, in this vision, is not a static deposit but a living process. This
perspective aligns with Paulo Freire’s concept of conscientização, or
critical consciousness, whereby education should awaken learners to question
power, inequality, and their own potential (Freire, 2017).3
Both Manzi and Freire envisioned education as inseparable from liberation, a
process by which marginalized individuals and communities gain not only skills
but dignity and voice.
When Manzi turned to fiction, he
carried this pedagogy into narrative. El loco (1979) is not a
traditional adventure story, though it was marketed for young readers. Instead,
it is a parable about freedom, community, and the transformative potential of
marginality. The town of Tiuna rises against the injustice of mining
exploitation, yet the heart of the story is not the rebellion itself but the
presence of a madman at its margins. He does not lead, command, or strategize.
He disturbs, provokes, and destabilizes. In this way, El Loco embodies
Manzi’s philosophy of education: knowledge and transformation do not arise from
authority but from the disruptive spark that challenges accepted truths.
This approach reveals Manzi’s
broader political sensibility. His travels in Latin America during the 1970s
exposed him to contexts of social inequality, exploitation, and resistance (Fernè 2003, 2011,
2017, 2020). The fictional Andean setting of
Tiuna reflects his engagement with Latin American struggles, while his
narrative echoes the radical pedagogy emerging from that continent. Manzi’s
madman thus stands in dialogue with Latin American figures of resistance: not
the armed revolutionary, but the disruptive presence who embodies a critique of
oppression by living otherwise.
Seen in this light, El loco
is both literary and pedagogical. It invites readers — especially young ones —
to rethink what counts as knowledge, who counts as a teacher, and how
communities change. The madman does not provide answers; he opens questions. He
destabilizes certainties; provoking what Freire (2017)
would call a “pedagogy of the question” rather than the “pedagogy of the
answer.”4 He embodies education as a collective process of inquiry,
rooted in contradiction and dialogue.
At the same time, this book reflects Manzi’s critique of the institutionalization of
knowledge. Just as he resisted rote memorization and hierarchical schooling, in
the novel he resists the idea that justice can be reduced to institutional
procedures. The very debate over whether the madman should be confined to an
asylum or executed exposes the absurdity of institutional logic: both choices
erase difference in the name of order. This recalls Foucault’s (2006) analysis
of how institutions construct madness as a category of exclusion. For Manzi,
true knowledge and true justice cannot emerge from institutions that silence;
they must arise from encounters with difference.
It is significant El locowas written for adolescents. Youth literature often simplifies,
offering clear moral lessons. Manzi does the opposite: he offers ambiguity,
contradiction, and discomfort. This pedagogical choice reflects his belief that
education is not about protecting learners from complexity but about equipping
them to face it. As can be inferred from his writings, freedom is something
that is learned through living freely.By
presenting adolescents with a madman who is fragile, disruptive, and yet
indispensable, Manzi cultivates a pedagogy of freedom — one that teaches
readers to see in the margins the possibility of transformation.
From today’s perspective, Manzi’s
pedagogical vision remains strikingly relevant. In classrooms, students labeled
“difficult” or “disruptive” often carry perspectives that unsettle the order
but enrich the community. In clinical settings, patients stigmatized by
diagnosis may embody resilience that challenges reductive categories. In both
cases, Manzi’s philosophy reminds us that the margin is not a place of
deficiency but a site of potential. El Loco dramatizes this truth: he is
not outside the story but at its center, precisely because he inhabits the
margins.
.
3.
Psychological Mirrors: Madness and Survival
In El loco, the madman is
neither a villain nor a hero; he is a mirror. His fragile gestures — laughing
at the wrong time, collapsing into silence, throwing stones without aim —
reflect not only his own brokenness but also the hidden fractures of the
community around him. To understand him, and to understand why he resonates so
deeply with contemporary readers who live with psychological challenges, we must turn to psychology. Here, the novel anticipates
insights that scholars and clinicians have articulated for decades: that
madness is not simply an inner pathology but a phenomenon shaped by labeling,
resilience, and archetypal meaning.
The people
of Tiuna call him “loco.” With that single word, he is fixed in place:
dismissed, feared, silenced. Becker’s (1963) labeling theory reminds us that
deviance is not an inherent quality but the result of social definitions. To be
called “mad” is to be excluded from the realm of meaningful speech. Similarly,
Goffman (1986) describes stigma as a “spoiled identity,” in which the
label becomes heavier than the person. In Tiuna, the madman is not recognized
as a man with history, pain, or insight; he is only “the madman.”
Beneath the
label lies another truth: fragility can also be survival. El Loco is
shattered, but he endures. His laughter, misplaced and uncomfortable, is not
merely a symptom but a release valve. His silence, judged as emptiness, is a
shield. His repetitive gesture of throwing stones at a tin can is,
paradoxically, a rhythm of endurance.
Contemporary psychology has begun to
recognize such dynamics. Masten (2001) describes resilience as “ordinary
magic”: the everyday processes by which individuals adapt to adversity.
Tedeschi and Calhoun (1995) developed the concept of post-traumatic growth,
showing how suffering, while painful, can generate new forms of strength and
meaning. From this perspective, El Loco embodies resilience. His
gestures, stigmatized as useless or pathological, sustain him in an environment
of exclusion.
For those living with mental
illness, this representation resonates. Compulsive rituals, long silences, or
erratic behaviors may not be cures, but they can be forms of survival. They are
ways of marking time, creating rhythm, or asserting minimal control.
On another level, El Loco is
more than an individual: he is archetype. Jung (1968)
described the “wise fool” as a paradoxical figure whose apparent irrationality
conceals insight. In myths and folktales, the fool often speaks truths others
cannot or will not articulate.
For the town of Tiuna, El Loco
functions as a mirror of the unconscious. He reflects the community’s repressed
contradictions: its exploitation, its injustices, its silenced doubts. Jung (1968) would describe this as the projection of the “shadow”: the
parts of the collective psyche disowned and cast onto an outsider. By carrying
these projections, El Loco destabilizes the social order. His madness is
not only personal suffering but also collective symptom.
For modern readers, this archetypal
dimension is equally powerful. Those of us who live at the margins often feel
we carry the projections of others: their fears, their prejudices, their need
for scapegoats. In the classroom, the “difficult” student embodies what the
institution refuses to face. In the clinic, the “noncompliant” patient becomes
the mirror of medical limitations. El Loco shows that to be labeled mad
is also to become society’s shadow — a role painful, but potentially
transformative.
4.
Philosophical Provocations: Justice, Freedom, Power
Jean-Paul Sartre (2020) argued that human beings are condemned to be free, unable to escape the responsibility of making choices. Human beings cannot escape responsibility for their choices, even when they seek refuge in conformity. El Loco, with his refusal to conform to Tiuna’s norms, dramatizes this existential truth. His laughter in the courtroom, his disregard for authority, his insistence on living differently — these are not mere symptoms of madness, but expressions of authenticity. He chooses to live on his own terms, even if the community deems him irrational.
He also
resembles Camus’ stranger. In The Stranger (Camus, 2012), Meursault unsettles society not by committing murder
alone but by refusing to perform expected emotions. His indifference to social
rituals makes him unintelligible, and thus dangerous, to those who require
conformity. El Loco occupies a similar role: not revolutionary leader,
not criminal, but disruptive outsider whose authenticity destabilizes the
collective. For Sartre and Camus alike, such authenticity is scandalous because
it exposes the artificiality of social norms.
If existentialism frames El Loco
as authentic, Foucault helps us see him as political. In History of Madness,
Foucault (2006) argues that madness is not a natural fact but a historical
construction, produced by institutions that define and confine. In Discipline
and Punish (2020), he extends this analysis to show
how institutions — prisons, schools, asylums — normalize behavior through
surveillance and control. The book raises the question: should El Loco
be confined in an asylum or executed? Both options reduce him to an object of
management. Neither seeks to understand his humanity. This is an echo of Foucault’s claim that confinement creates the
very pathology it claims to treat. El Loco thus becomes a symbol of
institutional violence: the attempt to erase differences in the name of order. Through
this lens, he is not only a personal figure but a critique of biopolitics
— the management of bodies and lives by systems of power. His resistance is not
active rebellion but stubborn survival. He refuses to disappear, and in doing
so he exposes the limits of institutional control.
The book
also raises the question of justice. Aristotle defined justice as the condition
that allows communities to flourish (Aristotle, trans. 2009). John Rawls (1971)
sought justice as fairness: principles that ensure equality and liberty for
all. Yet in Tiuna, institutional justice appears as caricature. Nobody asks whether El
Loco has been wronged, nor whether the community has failed him. The
institutions are only interested inmanaging
the disruption he represents.The book
illustrates what happens when law loses contact with ethics. Justice, in its
institutional form, becomes a mechanism of exclusion. El Loco’s
existence reveals the distance between legal order and ethical truth. His
fragile, disruptive presence embodies a justice beyond institutions — one rooted
not in procedure but in recognition of difference. In this sense, El Loco
recalls the provocations of Diogenes the Cynic. Ancient accounts describe
Diogenes living in poverty, mocking conventions, and exposing hypocrisy by
embodying an alternative way of life (Branham & Goulet-Cazé, 1996). Like
Diogenes, El Loco unsettles not through argument but through existence.
His gestures — absurd, repetitive, disruptive — become philosophical acts. They
show that justice cannot be reduced to rules, freedom cannot be confined to
norms, and power cannot fully suppress difference.
El Loco is a
philosophical provocation, asking each of us: What does it mean to live
authentically? What systems of power silence our differences? What kind of
justice do we seek — procedural order, or the recognition of fragile humanity?
5.
Madness as Creative Disruption
Western culture has often oscillated
between two dominant images of madness: the romanticized genius and the tragic
patient. On the one hand, figures such as Van Gogh or Nietzsche are celebrated
as tortured visionaries whose suffering produced greatness. On the other,
psychiatric discourse frames madness as deficit, illness, and incapacity. Both
frameworks, though opposed, share a tendency to reduce the person to their
condition.
Manzi resists this binary. El
Loco is neither exalted nor erased. He is not a misunderstood genius
leading the community to enlightenment, nor is he a pitiable patient destined
only for confinement. He “merely lives,” and in doing so, he unsettles the
order around him. This ordinariness is precisely what makes him radical. His
refusal to conform is not heroic spectacle but everyday persistence.
In psychological research,
creativity is often defined as the capacity to generate ideas or behaviors that
are both novel and useful (Runco & Jaeger, 2012). While El Loco’s actions
may not appear useful in the conventional sense, they fulfill the deeper
function of creativity: breaking boundaries and opening new ways of seeing. His
laughter disrupts solemnity. His silence interrupts speech. His stones
punctuate the monotony of daily life. These are not solutions, but provocations
— and provocation itself can be transformative.
He embodies
what Rollo May (1994) described as the existential
dimension of creativity: the courage to confront chaos and bring forth
something new. The tin can, dented and scarred by his endless stones, becomes a
symbol of this process. It does not transform into something entirely new, but
it bears marks of disruption. Similarly, communities do not always change
through grand revolutions; they change when small cracks appear in their
surface, exposing fragility and possibility. Contemporary cultural
representations of madness often fall into cliché. In A Beautiful Mind
(2001), schizophrenia is redeemed only through the protagonist’s extraordinary
genius. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), madness becomes both
tragedy and rebellion, resolved only through institutional violence. In Joker
(2019), madness is aestheticized as chaos and violence, a spectacle of danger.
bell hooks (1999)conceives of marginality not only as a condition of lack
but also as a realm of transformative potential. Judith Butler (2006) argues that vulnerability itself can be a source of
political agency. El Loco resonates with this tradition: his fragility
unsettles, his vulnerability resists, and his silence speaks. Historically,
women’s madness has been medicalized as hysteria or pathology (Showalter, 1987; Chesler, 1972). Their disruptions were dismissed as
irrationality rather than recognized as critiques of oppressive norms. El Loco,
though male, functions symbolically as a stand-in for all silenced voices —
those who resist not with weapons or arguments but with fragile persistence.
His creative disruption reminds us that what is dismissed as “irrational” may
be the seed of transformation.
6. Conclusion: Survival as Transformation
At the end of Alberto Manzi’s El
loco, the madman does not become a hero, nor is he redeemed by society. He
is not cured, nor does he rise to lead the rebellion. Instead, he remains what
he always was: fragile, disruptive, absurd, and profoundly human. This refusal
of resolution is precisely what makes the novel powerful. By centering a
character who “merely lives,” Manzi reframes survival itself as a radical act
of transformation. El Loco merely lived. And so do we. That is enough to
transform.
Notes
1. Becker’s labeling theory argues that deviance
is not inherent in an act but results from society’s reaction and the labels it
assigns to individuals. Once labeled as deviant, people may internalize this
identity, which can reinforce and perpetuate deviant behavior (1963).
2. Ann Masten describes resilience as
“ordinary magic,” emphasizing that it stems from common human adaptive systems
rather than rare or extraordinary traits. She argues that strength often
emerges through everyday processes that enable people to recover and grow
despite adversity.
3. Paulo Freire’s concept of conscientização (critical consciousness) refers to
developing an awareness of the social and political forces that shape one’s
life. It emphasizes education as a process that enables learners to question
power and inequality while recognizing their own capacity to act and transform
their reality (Freire, 2017).
4. By “pedagogy of the question,” Freire
contrasts an education that encourages learners to ask, investigate, and
critically engage with knowledge, against a “pedagogy of the answer,” where
students passively receive ready-made truths. This distinction highlights his
view that genuine learning emerges through dialogue and inquiry rather than
rote transmission.
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