Arturo Uslar Pietri

Arturo Uslar Pietri (Caracas, May 16, 1906-Ibídem, February 26, 2001) was a Venezuelan intellectual, journalist, philosopher, writer, television producer and politician. One of the intellectuals and writers most important Americans of the XX century, innovator of literature in the Spanish language through what he called «magical realism » and responsible for the internationalization of American novels.

Cultor of the historical novel, the story, the essay, and creator of a prolific work considered one of the most important in his country.

Biography

Childhood and youth

Arturo Uslar Pietri was born in Caracas on May 16, 1906 in a house located on Av. Este No. 2, between Romualda and Manduca. He was the son of Arturo Uslar Santamaría and Helena Pietri Paúl de Uslar, daughter of the doctor and general Juan Pietri Pietri. Her ancestors include Johann von Uslar, a German officer who fought in the Battle of Waterloo and for the independence of Venezuela, General Carlos Soublette and Juan Pietri Pietri.

Although it is common to hear and read Arturo Uslar's surname as a serious or plain word ([úslar]), it actually comes from the name of his ancestor, the German soldier Johann von Uslar (1779-1866). In German, Uslar is pronounced as an acute word.

Uslar Pietri's first years were spent in Caracas, where he studied at a primary school - the Escuela Unitaria de Alejandro Alvarado - and then at the French Fathers' school - located on the corner of Mijares. In August 1916, the Uslar Pietri family settled in Cagua for a few months, his father had been appointed civil chief, and then they moved to Maracay, the city of residence of General Juan Vicente Gómez since 1913, which made it the center of the political-military power of that time. Uslar himself commented on the matter:

It was impossible not to see him. I don't remember exactly the first time I came to shook it. But we all knew he was going out twice a day. One walk in the morning and one at five in the afternoon. Crossing dusty roads. Visiting potters. His presence was inevitable. In a tourism car, with tarp. Less than 40 kilometers per hour. No escorts or motorcycles. No paraphernalia. Followed only by a car where his edecans were.

Pietri completed his primary studies at the Colegio Federal Felipe Guevara Rojas (1919) and attended most of his secondary school at the Colegio Federal de Varones, except for an interruption in 1921 when he was enrolled at the Colegio de los Salesianos in Valencia and in 1923 when he was in his last year of high school at the Liceo San José de Los Teques.

University stage

In the month of June 1923, the first narrative work of this author emerged, a story titled 'The Silence of the Desert', which found its first light in the pages of the magazine Billiken. In the month of October of the same year, he decided to return to the city of Caracas with the aim of undertaking studies in Law, which at that time was the only academic path for those individuals who had an inclination towards humanistic or literary disciplines. He enrolls in the School of Political Sciences, a renowned educational establishment attached to the Central University of Venezuela.

Like many other young people who came from provincial regions, during the first years of his university life, he lived in boarding houses. In January 1924, he reached a relevant academic milestone by obtaining his bachelor's degree in Philosophy, which was conferred upon him after the successful presentation and defense of his thesis called & # 34; Everything is subjectivity & # 3. 4;.

The university stage of his life was characterized by fervent and diverse activity: he actively joined the Law Student Center and the Venezuelan Student Federation. During the year 1925, he assumed the responsibility of librarian for the aforementioned federation, gave his first conference, which was titled "Ideas sobre una morphology of the history of Law", and sees his stories published in the magazine "La Universidad" in 1927. During this time, he established links with some of the individuals who would later participate in the emblematic student events of 1928.

In the workplace, between 1926 and 1929, he performed functions as a clerk in the Civil Court of First Instance of the Federal District, and sporadically, he held the same position in the National Congress. Like many young people of his generation, he immerses himself in the exploration of new literary currents and thought, finding in the & # 34; Literary Gazette & # 34; and the "Western Magazine" windows towards new ideological and aesthetic perspectives.

Attend various clubs, environments conducive to the flow of ideas, the communion of aspirations and the meeting between generations from different eras. In these circles of discussion and analysis, the past, present and future of the literary and philosophical tradition are intertwined. Similarly, in the Vargas typography - publishing entity of the prestigious magazine "Elite"- congregates with the new literary generation, particularly with the exponents of avant-garde, a movement that sought break with traditional structures and explore new forms of expression in art and literature.

Beginning of his literary career

In 1930 two events occurred that marked Venezuelan literary and political history. In the first, Uslar Pietri plays a leading role: on January 5 of that year, the first and only issue of Válvula magazine is published, in which, although 29 collaborators participate, Uslar writes four of the included texts, among which the editorial Somos and the article Forma y Vanguardia, considered the programmatic pieces of the avant-garde movement; and in September he publishes his first book of stories, Barabbas and other stories . Specialists agree that both publications constitute a demarcation point in Venezuelan literature. On July 29, 1929, he received the title of Doctor in Political Science from the Central University, after presenting a thesis titled The principle of non-imposition of nationality of origin and on August 6, that of lawyer, granted by the Supreme Court of the Federal District.

In 1931 he published his first novel, Las lances coloradas ―a historical story set during the independence of Venezuela―. The work was very well received and marked the beginning of a fruitful career.

Uslar Pietri and magical realism

Uslar Pietri is considered by critics to be one of the precursors and creator of the term magical realism.

The term magical realism, which was used by an art critic, the German Franz Roh, to describe a painting that demonstrated an altered reality, and came to the Spanish language with the translation in 1925 of the book Magical Realism (Revista de Occident, 1925), was introduced to Latin American literature by Arturo Uslar Pietri in 1948 in his essay Letters and men of Venezuela (1948). Uslar points out:

What came to predominate in the story and to mark his footprint in a lasting way was the consideration of man as a mystery in the midst of realistic data. A poetic divination or a poetic denial of reality. What in the absence of another word can be called a magical realism.

Years before, in 1935, Uslar Pietri published his story The Rain, in which he recounts in a realistic and mysterious way, the arrival and disappearance, with the rain, of a strange visitor. This story is considered the first example of magical realism before the term was coined.

The critic Víctor Bravo points out that the notion of magical realism was born almost simultaneously with that of marvelous real: "The initial formulation of both notions—as a reference to a Latin American mode of literary production—is made almost simultaneously. In 1947, Arturo Uslar Pietri introduced the term "magical realism" to refer to Venezuelan short stories; In 1949 Alejo Carpentier speaks of "the wonderful real" to introduce the novel The kingdom of this world, and some consider it to be the initiating novel of this literary trend.

Political life

In 1936, Uslar Pietri became very active in the political debate with the death of the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez. In 1939, at the age of 33, he married Isabel Braun Kerdel, with whom he had two children, Arturo and Federico Uslar Braun. That same year, he became Minister of Education. He founded the Venezuelan Democratic Party and was a Congressman from 1944. In 1945 he was appointed Minister of Interior Relations by President Isaías Medina Angarita.

The coup d'état of October 18, 1945 forced him to leave the country and move to New York. During his stay in New York he taught at Columbia University. Five years later he returned to Venezuela. Between 1950 and 1958 he worked at the ARS advertising agency alongside Alejo Carpentier and as a literature professor at the Central University of Venezuela. He was elected senator for the Federal District in 1958 on the lists of the Democratic Republican Union, as an independent candidate. At this stage of Venezuelan politics it can be noted how, from his youth, Arturo Uslar Pietri distanced himself from the social democratic, Marxist and social Christian ideologies in Venezuela. If anything can be verified, it is that the person in question refused to join the AD, Copei and PCV parties, placing himself within a secular conservative and liberal space, a platform that is observed more clearly in the framework of his presidential candidacy in the year 1963. In 1963, he was a candidate for the Partido Independiente Pro Frente Nacional (CIPFN) party for the presidency of Venezuela, but was defeated by Raúl Leoni.

After his defeat, he remained active as a senator. In May 1964, in a turbulent political context, he proposed to the elected president Raúl Leoni the formation of a Broad-Based government, of which the National Democratic Front (FND) was a part until March 1966 when it withdrew due to differences in the leadership of government policies. In the 1968 elections, together with Wolfgang Larrazábal of the FDP and the Independent National Electoral Movement (MENI), Uslar supported the new political enterprise of Jóvito Villalba of URD, the so-called Victory Front, whose presidential candidate was Miguel Ángel Burelli Rivas who he ended up losing to Rafael Caldera from Copei. Uslar resigns from the general secretary of the FND and gradually distanced himself from political life.

He became director of the newspaper El Nacional from 1969 to 1974, the year in which he moved to Paris as Venezuelan ambassador to UNESCO. When he returned in 1979, he concentrated on working on his writing and education, leaving active politics.

In 1972, in El Nacional and in response to Kenneth Clark who, in his work Civilization, converted into a series by the BBC, left Hispanic countries out of the creators of Western civilization, he published « Los expelled from civilization" for which he won the Miguel de Cervantes Spanish-American journalism prize (1973).

Uslar Pietri was a very familiar figure on television due to the weekly television program called Human Values, focused on History and the Arts, which began broadcasting on November 25, 1953 on Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV). On Venevisión he produces Raíces and Cuéntame a Venezuela about the historical development of the country. In 1983 he resumed his program Human Values , but this time produced by Venezolana de Televisión and broadcast by the latter channel and Televisora Nacional.

During the second government of Carlos Andrés Pérez, Uslar Pietri headed the group of Los Notables, a group of intellectuals who proposed the implementation of several public reforms. The group would later demand the implementation of its proposals, demand the resignation or dismissal of Carlos Andrés, and criticize other state institutions. On August 25, 1991, Uslar Pietri proposed the creation of the figure of prime minister, and on December 3, the group of Los Notables published a second document in which they complained about the Executive and the political parties for not taking into account his demand for single-member elections and judicial reform. Uslar Pietri declared on November 17 in an interview with El Nacional that if answers are not given to the Venezuelan crisis, a coup d'état could occur. On December 1, Uslar Pietri again declared on the RCTV program Primer Plano that “it would be idiotic to deny the possibility of a coup.” After the coup d'état of February 1992, Uslar Pietri declared that "it would be very serious to think" that the rebel military were just "crazies who threw the stop" since with other Venezuelans they shared "a sovereign distaste for the way the government worked."

Death

Uslar Pietri died of an acute myocardial infarction in his home in the La Florida sector, Caracas, on February 26, 2001 at the age of 94. He was close to Hugo Chávez before he came to power. power but progressively began to warn about the direction his country was taking since it had socialist ideas, and opposed the Chávez government. The latter would publicly mourn the death of Uslar Pietri.

Uslar Pietri wrote throughout his life about the political development of his country. From the pages of the national newspapers he was a harsh critic, especially from his well-known column El Pizarrón (from the newspaper El Nacional), which he stopped writing in 1998. Uslar Pietri owned, together with his Florida neighbor, the writer Pascual Venegas Filardo, one of the most extensive personal libraries in Venezuela. This library was donated to the Metropolitan University of Caracas. The fact of belonging to four National Academies simultaneously is a very rare case of erudition, only equaled in Venezuelan history by Blas Bruni Celli.

Legacy

In the opinion of Jorge Luis Borges, Uslar Pietri "can say like Walt Whitman: I am broad and I contain multitudes." Gustavo Guerrero agrees, describing him as "the last of the great intellectuals." Venezuelans who, in the best tradition of modern humanism, harbored the illusion of being a homo universalis".

Vargas Llosa would say of him that "as a novelist, historian, essayist and journalist he has produced a very vast work of creation and dissemination that has had a huge audience in all Spanish-speaking countries" and precise that his novel Las Lanzas Coloradas "opened the door for what would later be the recognition of the Latin American novel throughout the world"

For Enrique Anderson Imbert, the story The Rain, belonging to the Red anthology, "is the best example avant la lettre of magical realism" Gustavo Guerrero insists on this story: "The emotion that reading it still produces is far above that or any other categorization. I think it is simpler and fairer to say today that “The Rain” is a classic of our language, a small and exquisite gem of major art.

Miguel Gomes, for his part, considers that beyond his novels and essays, La Lluvia is precisely the "masterpiece" by Uslar, in which 'he deploys a sigil capable of suggesting metaphysical dimensions in the miserable Latin American fields and the small and fragile beings that inhabit them. The link between the child of unknown origin and the arrival of rain to a land hit by drought will remain mysterious once the reading is finished: between fragmented sequences, the convergence of the alchemical boy Manneken pis who urine on the ants – and the life that was denied to the hedgehog – also tinged with myth: it is not difficult to suppose in it a new concretion of the “waste land” – raises an aura that is both luminous and numinous that comes out to meet us, perfect, finished, in the opening sentence of the story: “The moonlight entered through all the cracks of the ranch and the noise of the wind in the cornfield.” The dull nocturnal glow is that of our wavering understanding of the keys to the anecdote: the secret ends up getting the best, even if we obscurely possess it."

Uslar Pietri and oil

On July 14, 1936, he published an article titled Sowing oil in the newspaper Now.

In this article he exposed Venezuela's growing dependence on oil and proposed that we had to get out of that scheme. Uslar Pietri declared that oil had to be used not to pay for more imports, but to seek new sources of income for the country and create sources of production that would contribute to sustained development.

In his article «Balthazar's Feast», Uslar Pietri mentions the biblical episode of King Balthazar's feast, when Daniel has to decipher the words written on the palace wall. Uslar Pietri wrote:

Until that mysterious hand writes on the wall the enigmatic sentence that announces the inevitable catastrophe and begins with the word "mene". A word that the people of Lake Maracaibo know well and know how to decipher.

In fact, the word "mene" meant "oil" in the language of the indigenous people of that area so rich in oil deposits. Uslar wrote:

Our prices are no longer the result of supply and demand in world markets. The price of coffee or meat or maize do not rise in Venezuela because the economic forces play this way, but because the producers demand the increase and the complacent state remembers them.

Later he wrote:

How long can this feast last? Until the boom of oil exploitation lasts. The day she declines or declines, if we continue in the current conditions, the time for one of the most frightening economic and social catastrophes will have sounded for Venezuela.

His idea of "sowing oil" as a source of income for Venezuela was spread by the writer on numerous occasions, exposing his arguments about the rational use of said energy source.

If, at this time, for the unfortunate chance of fate, oil prices would drop significantly in the world market, Venezuela would be a case for the International Red Cross. Soups would come here in the corners.

Featured awards

Some of the most notable awards obtained by the author are the following:

• 1935: First third contest of Elite magazine for the story The rain.
• 1949: First annual fairytale contest of the newspaper El Nacional for The drum dance.
• 1950: Arístides Rojas Award for novel The Way of El Dorado.
• 1954: National Literature Prize (1952-1953) by The clouds.
• 1971: National Journalism Award.
• 1972: Mergenthaler Award of the Inter-American Press Association.
• 1972: Maria Moors Cabot Award (Columbia University Journalism School).
• 1973: Hispanic American Press Prize Miguel de Cervantes.
• 1979: Enrique Otero Vizcarrondo Award for the article My first book.
• 1981: Venezuelan Writer Association Award for Robinson Island.
• 1982: National Literature Award Robinson Island.
• 1988: Rafael Heliodoro Valle Award in Mexico.
• 1988: José Vasconcelos Award in Mexico.
• 1990: Prince of Asturias Award for Letters in Spain.
• 1991: Premio Rómulo Gallegos for the novel Visiting time.
• 2000: Alfonso Reyes International Prize in Mexico.

Decorations and distinctions

• 1940: Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Puerto Rico
• 1941: Order of the Liberator, to the degree of Grand Cordon.
• 1943: Colombia grants it the Order of Boyacá, in the rank of Grand Officer.
• 1943: Bolivia gives it the order of the Condor de Los Andes, in the rank of Grand Officer.
• 1952: Colombia grants it the Order of Boyacá, to the degree of Grand Cross.
• 1956: Doctorate Honoris Causa Economic and Social Sciences Universidad Central de Venezuela.
• 1959: Corresponding Member of the Royal Spanish Academy.
• 1965: The governments of France and Italy grant the Order to Merit, in the rank of Grand Officer.
• 1967: Nicaragua grants it the Rubén Darío Order.
• 1967: Receive the order Ciudad de Caracas.
• 1972: Argentina grants it the Order of May, in the rank of Comndador.
• 1973: Brazil grants it the Order Rio Branco, in the rank of Comndador.
• 1973: Order Francisco de Miranda, First Class.
• 1974: Mexico grants it the Order of the Aztec Eagle.
• 1978: Argentina grants it the Order of May, to the degree of Grand Cross.
• 1979: Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Paris X Nanterre.
• 1981: Order Diego de Losada, First Class.
• 1981: Honorary Professor of Simón Rodríguez University in Caracas.
• 1984: Doctorate Honoris Causa, Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas.
• 1984: Spain grants it the Order of Isabella the Catholic, in the rank of Knight Gran Cruz.
• 1985: Honorary Member of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
• 1985: Doctor Honoris Causa, Universidad de los Andes, Mérida Venezuela
• 1986: The Institute of Hispanic Culture in Madrid promotes the "Semana del autor"
• 1989: Doctor Honoris Causa of the Metropolitan University, Caracas, Venezuela.
• 1990: France is granted the Legion of Honor, to the degree of Grand Cross.

Works

Tests

In the middle of the century, Uslar Pietri recovers and affirms the notion of the "sleep sense". All their discursive virtues—long and precise lexicon, clear and unsophisticated prayers, expositive fluidity, varying between the analytical, sensitious and anecdotal character of the text—they owe their form to an opposite principle that does not allow them to be extralimited: the essay is a piece of containment, not the radicalization of their resources.

Alberto Paredes

Travel books

Jesus Snow Montero, regarding the work The colored balloon, stated the following: “Here we find an immense assessment of the return. Not because what we know [...] is intrinsically better, but because after the end of the journey the immediate realities are [...] learned in some dimensions that perhaps we could not suspect from within».

• 1950: The city of nobody.

• 1954: The otone in Europe.
• 1955: A tourist in the nearby east.

• 1971: Round the world in ten corners
• 1975: The colored balloon.

Poetry

• 1972: Manoa: 1932-1972.
• 1986: The man I'm going to be.

Theatre

With both works—reference is made to the first two plays he published in 1927 and 1928 respectively—Uslar Pietri brought to Venezuelan theater the dramatic value of being absolute in situation with others, something unknown in the theatrical discourse of the time. He wrote two works in which the trivial and irrisory sustains the action without order or sense; hence he went away from the scenic habits of the time.

Leonardo Azparren Giménez

• 1927: E Ultreja.
• 1928: The key.
• 1958: Antero Alban's day. The Tebaida. The invisible God. Miranda's escape.
• 1960: Chuo Gil and the weavers. Drama in a prelude and seven times.

Literature

• Johansmeier, Herta (2011): Verschlüsselte Botschaften und suggestive Techniken in den Romanen Arturo Uslar Pietris (‘encrypted messages and suggestive techniques in the novels of Arturo Uslar Pietri’). Marburg, Germany: Tectum, 2011. ISBN 978-3-8288-2500-0.