A giant for the purity and elegance of his prose writing and a giant for his physical stature, it is said—and confirmed by photographs from the period—that José Enrique Rodó was almost two meters tall, with a quixotic figure and awkward gait. It is also said that his reserve and self-absorption, the misanthropy and misogyny of his final years, and his contempt for certain ideas of Anglo-Saxon democracy, which, in its North American variant, he perceived as a system that corroded freedom and the elevation of the “human person” in modern Uruguay, were of similar proportions.
Rodó was born into a wealthy family linked to Colorado liberalism in the stately Montevideo of 1871. Like so many of his compatriots, his father was an immigrant, a tough Catalan merchant willing to make his way in a country of possibilities. And as was also common in post-colonial Uruguay, his mother belonged to the deep nation: Catholic, conservative, and with aristocratic pretensions.
His first teacher remembers him as a withdrawn, pale, thin, and tall child. And already, from childhood, he was given to compulsive reading and writing. When his father died when he was 15, Rodó suffered the first of many emotional crises that would plague him for the rest of his life. From then on, he took refuge in his home, where he lived with his mother and his siblings, who were also unmarried. He never left that home, either physically or spiritually, except to go into exile in Europe at the end of his life. He finally died, alone and abandoned, in a boarding house in Palermo, Italy.
If we stick to Jung’s character typology, that is, his “psychological types,” Rodó is a “reflective introvert.” If we look at him through the classification that Aldous Huxley uses in his now classic book The Perennial Philosophy, Rodó was a “cerebrotonic.” In both definitions: a human being more attentive to his own intellectual constructions of reality than to reality itself. For both: the “human type” who creates religious, philosophical, and aesthetic systems; and in an order perhaps more attached to the empirical, the visionary and innovative scientist.
Due to his intellectual training and personal character, Rodó was a supporter of a democracy of elites, but intellectual and spiritual elites, never economic or political ones. Thus, in the Platonic manner, he believed in the philosopher-king and wise man who rules the utopian city of Caliopolis. In his case, he was Prospero, regent duke of an inner kingdom: a lookout, a watchtower, and never an ivory tower, from where he controlled with a firm hand the rhythm of his prose, as well as the images that sprang from it.
A self-confessed Platonist, he was consequently more Hellenistic than Christian. And like all Platonists, Rodó was ultimately a dual being for whom matter and life were a fall into a hole, a mired state, a damage to the incorruptible being of man born for knowledge and the contemplation of ideas resolved in Beauty and the marble forms of language. Needless to say, neurosis, hyperesthesia, aestheticism, and dualism (in the manner of the ancient Gnostics and other Eastern-based cults) are a very common combination from Romanticism to the avant-garde movements of the 20th century.
Because of his political and social ideas, his cult of style, and his “analogical conception of history,” Rodó has that vibe that brings him closer to right-wing, reactionary, and anti-modern intellectuals, as described by Ernesto Hernández Busto in his book Mito y revuelta, fisonomías del escritor reaccionario (Myth and Revolt: Physiognomies of the Reactionary Writer). Perhaps what Hernández Busto points out in the afterword to the book, with regard to the reactionary writer, can be applied to Rodó: “to be read as phenomena of style, authors of a psychodrama of visionary prose or symptoms of a phantasmagoria that can only be understood in terms of literature.” Here too: phenomenon and cult of style in writing and in life; rejection of everyday and historical reality seen as a prison, as swamps and prisons of the soul, is another combination that—in an alchemical way—links up with the previous paragraph.
For this reason, given the hierarchical and vertical impulse with which he handled his rhythmic and visionary prose, it is not surprising that his thinking was incorporated by some of the right-wing military and authoritarian governments in Uruguay in the 20th century. As an example, see the educational credo of the dictatorship in 1978, “El educador oriental: su fe” (The Eastern Educator: His Faith), published in the magazine El Soldado. In this creed, faced with internal subversion in Uruguay and the ideas of “international communism,” Rodó is one of the leading figures as a defender of the “Hispanic tradition” and Latin culture, as well as of the “Spanish language” seen as the unifying bond of Hispanic American culture and the great Hispanic American nation. Yes, because it should not be forgotten that there is also an authoritarian and imperial tradition in Latin culture, of which Julius Evola, the traditional Italian philosopher and Hermeticist, is the leading figure.
To place Rodó in his historical context, and in this space in South America, it is worth noting his contemporaneity with the Argentine Leopoldo Lugones. Both belong to the generation that was torn between the anarchism of the late 19th century and the socialism of the early 20th century. In fact, as was often the case with many of these modernist intellectuals, they were both anarchists and socialists, even though this might seem contradictory.
The following variables can be considered here: in the new era of global capitalism, in its monopolistic phase of concentration of power and covert violence, there is a rejection in intellectual and artistic circles of any idea of the state, authority, and government; a rejection of the ideas of liberal democracy and its legitimate and parliamentary mechanisms of domination through control in all its forms. Consequently, many of these intellectuals, so often declassed, are attracted to socializing ideas, which are confused with corporatism, statism, and totalitarianism of the left or right at the level of society as a whole.
Thus, given these political and mass movements of the first half of the 20th century, it is not unreasonable to think that, had he lived long enough, Rodó might have taken a path similar to that of Lugones in “La hora de la espada” (The Hour of the Sword), his famous and controversial speech of 1924 commemorating the centenary of the victory of Ayacucho. That speech, it has been said, is the precursor to the coup d’état by Lieutenant General José Félix Uruburu in 1930 against the democratic government of Hipólito Yrigoyen. Let us see how Lugones writes it: it is “the hour of the sword” that “will establish the indispensable hierarchy that democracy has ruined until today, fatally leading, because it is its natural consequence, to demagoguery and socialism.” Reading Lugones and his military and literary messianism, one cannot help but think of the key ideas that would shape Rodó’s essay, “El que vendrá” (He Who Will Come): prophecy, nostalgia, inner voices, dawn, purifying fire, archangel, and sword.
However, note that in the previous paragraph, I say “perhaps” when referring to the possible authoritarian drift in the Uruguayan’s political thought and actions. In reality, knowing that political passions on this side of the Plata have always been more measured and moderate than in Argentina, there is no way to confirm this authoritarian idea in his political and social ideas. However, there is also his essay on the caudillo Simón Bolívar, the “hero,” but as conceived by the Scottish conservative writer Thomas Carlyle.
Because of his marble-like, austere, elevated prose, I read José Enrique Rodó with devotion back in Havana in my youth, in the 1990s: prose of a modernism that was already post-Rubendarian or, better, post-Rubendarian, because “Rubendarian” is a thing of the past. Years later, I reread him in his entirety to write my master’s thesis, “Literature and Decolonization: Lamming, Cesaire, Retamar. Three Rereadings of La tempestad.” Of course, thinking now about my thesis, I am referring only to his essay “Ariel” and his other metaphors and conceptual characters on which much of 20th-century Latin American thought has focused: Ariel, Caliban, and Prospero, characters who would be joined years later, in the age of feminism, by the witch Sicorax, Caliban’s own mother.
Today, walking on any Sunday through old Montevideo in search of its popular fair on Tristán Narvaja Street, the cold and stately Montevideo, sober and gray in tone, I think I understand this man who seems to have lived without affection, without feminine warmth, and with a mute placed over his “sentient viscera.” And I can also understand, better, the relationship between literature and the “production of places,” and how, obliquely, the internalized city—a locus—also produces literature. Today, as a consequence of a minimalism in language—a minimalism that is misunderstood, poorly assimilated, and even worse employed—and when it seems that language has been thinned out by running a steamroller over it, it is worth pausing to consider the life and work of this being whom the universal Andalusian, Juan Ramón Jiménez, saw as “statuesque and fixed”; it is worth pausing to consider the almost perfect pages of this giant of literature.
