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The Ambiguities of Authenticity in Latin America: Doa Brbara and the Construction of
National Identity
Author(s): Julie Skurski
Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 15, No. 4, Loci of Enunciation and Imaginary Constructions: The
Case of (Latin) America, I (Winter, 1994), pp. 605-642
Published by: Duke University Press
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TheAmbiguitiesof
Authenticityin LatinAmerica:
DoinaBarbaraand the Constructionof
National Identity
Julie Skurski
Anthropology, Michigan
Aspects of this research formed part of ajoint project, undertaken with Fernando
Coronil, which was partly supported by the Spencer Foundation. The Centro de
Estudios Latinoamericanos R6mulo Gallegos (CELARG)in Venezuela offered me its
hospitality while I was working on this project. For their insightful suggestions
concerning the issues I develop here, I would like especially to thank Lauren Ber-
lant, Fernando Coronil, Geoff Eley, Roger Rouse, and David Scobey. I have also
benefited greatly from discussions with Crisca Bierwert, Raymond Grew, Yolanda
Lecuna, Roberto da Matta, Sabine MacCormack,Sherry Ortner, Doris Sommer,
Ann Stoler, Rebecca Scott, and the members of the women's history discussion
group at the University of Michigan.
PoeticsToday15:4 (Winter 1994). Copyright ? 1994 by The Porter Institute for
Poetics and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/94/$2.50.
606 Poetics Today 15:4
AmbiguousFoundations
Dona Barbara addresses the expansion of the polity and the legitimacy
of authority in a nation ruled by regional caudillos and prey to for-
eign incursions. As Doris Sommer argues in her innovative analysis,
this novel is a populist version of the national romance. It allegorically
depicts the political union between the state and the popular classes
as simultaneously reflected in and dependent on the achievement of a
romantic union between lovers of disparate class and racial origins. By
bridging vertical class differences to create a bond based on love, the
couple ultimately legitimizes the "nation-family." While sharing the
concerns and narrative structure of the nineteenth-century national
romance, which addressed the problem of fissures within the elite and
depicted the union of lovers who had relatively equal status and flex-
ible gender roles, the populist romance reinforces gender boundaries
and reiterates social hierarchies. Concerned with legitimating an ex-
panded state and pacifying an unruly populace, it seeks to establish
closure and hierarchy and to impose boundaries from a position of
authority (see Sommer 1991: 286-89). Sommer's earlier analysis ex-
plored how the populist narrative helped to prepare the culture of
populism by fixing categories and heroizing male authority (see Som-
mer 1990: 90). This focus highlights an important dimension of the
novel's effectiveness: its naturalization of the nation as a bounded unit
that inspires passionate attachments.
On this unstable postcolonial terrain, however, neither unity nor
authority could be secured. My discussion here foregrounds the ambi-
guity underlying this unity which at once destabilizes authority and
authorizes its renewal through the ongoing need to assert fluid bound-
aries.' This process recreates the appeal of authority, making it seem
both desirable and necessary. It thus establishes a model for legiti-
mate rule which rests on the power to negotiate the contradictory
allegiances and claims of the populist elite.
Literary commentary on Dona Bdrbara reflects the growth and de-
mise of the promise of progress for Latin America. During the rise of
economic nationalism and of modernization theory, critics praised the
1. See Carlos J. Alonso (1990) for discussion of allegorical excess and fluid mean-
ings in Dona Barbara.
608 Poetics Today 15:4
5. Pratt cites examples from studies of linguistic communities in which Black En-
glish is essentialized as authentic and the impact of power differentials on gendered
differences in speech behavior is ignored.
Skurski * Ambiguities of Authenticity 611
ogy, far from expressing our concrete historicalsituation, concealed it. Thepolitical
lie was virtually constitutionally installed among our peoples" (his emphases).
9. Bhabha (1985: 150) links this division within the colonized to that within the
colonizer: "The colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its appear-
ance as original and authoritativeand its articulationas repetition and difference."
10. Chatterjee elaborates here on the contradictory dynamics of nationalist dis-
course, which, in its quest to deny the alleged inferiority of the colonized people,
asserts the nation's abilityto undertake modernizationon its own and thus endorses
the premises of "modernity"on which colonial domination was based.
11. See Berlant's (1991) innovative analysis of national fantasy and the state-
mediated construction of identities.
Skurski * Ambiguities of Authenticity 613
Fraternityand Matrimony
The concept of the nation as the source of collective authority and
identity was only marginally related to the political practices and be-
liefs that prevailed during the founding period of the Venezuelan
republic. Political independence from Spain, achieved after a long,
devastating war (1811-1821), raised the issue of the arbitrary colonial
divisions among the empire's territories and foregrounded the fra-
gility of the local state and the lack of attachment by the populace to
the nation.12 While the ruling elites elaborated a rhetoric of national
progress and popular sovereignty, they nevertheless continued to im-
plement and defend an exclusionary system of class and ethnic rela-
tions throughout the nineteenth century. The symbols and regulatory
practices of nationhood emerged more as a result of their internal con-
flicts and efforts to attract foreign capital than from the establishment
of promised reforms.
By the post-World War I period, civil order and state consolidation
had been achieved under the autocratic rule of General Juan Vicente
Gomez (1908-35). Political demands for the removal of G6mez and
for the modernization of the state then arose, with implications at the
ideological level of a need to endow the nation's past and its pueblo
with positive cultural content. In the context of domestic as well as
hemispheric challenges to oligarchic control, the effort made by some
sectors of the intelligentsia to find value and promise in the racially
mixed population had great political significance.
This quest for national identity did not entail validating Venezuela's
cultural origins, but rather forging a synthesis of elite reason and
popular energy through the taming of the nation's social and physical
terrain. The discourse of authenticity posited a distinct Latin Ameri-
can path to civilization marked by the ascendancy of spiritual and
telluric forces, guided by reason, over mere rationalist determinism.
Central to the effort to renegotiate the relationship between Latin
America and the metropolitan powers, this discourse inverted the
terms of dominant ideology, aligning materialist progress with spiri-
tual debasement and coercion, and spiritualism with universality and
humanism.
Gender was to play a crucial role in configuring this project. During
12. Venezuela was not a separate administrative unit during most of the colo-
nial period. Sim6n Bolivar, leader of the independence struggle in Venezuela and
northern South America, attempted to reunite the territories that had once been
joined to create a new nation, Gran Colombia, composed of Venezuela, Colombia
(including Panama), and Ecuador. The union disintegrated in 1830, along with
Bolivar's dream of Pan-American unity, at the time of his death. See Arturo Ardao
(1978) on the idea of Gran Colombia.
614 Poetics Today 15:4
13. Bolivar's persistent efforts to abolish slavery and to redistribute the land, in
particular, met with failure. See Miguel Izard's (1979) discussion of the conserva-
tive Creole elite's resistance to reform and the popular rebellion that it provoked.
14. For a pathbreaking discussion of the virtual deification of Bolivar, see German
Carrera Damas (1969).
15. Pagden (1990) underlines Rousseau'sinfluence on Bolivar, as regards his con-
cept of democracy and the popular will, so that by "the people" Bolivar meant
616 Poetics Today 15:4
those who had sufficient standing and education to engage in the political process
as citizens.
16. Bolivar proposed a hereditary Senate divided into two chambers: Morality
and Education. He claimed as models for this entity the British Parliament and the
governing bodies of antiquity to be found in Athens, Sparta, and Rome (Bolivar
1951: 192). An electoral division between "active" and "passive" citizens, which
was not based on clear class distinctions, would allow the select few to check the
"popular will" and promote "popular enlightenment." This proposal was rejected
by Congress. Bolivar feared the divisive actions of a conservative elite that wielded
power but was unprepared for leadership, so he sought a structure that would
educate the elite as well as the masses.
Skurski * Ambiguities of Authenticity 617
19. See Fernando Coronil (in press) for an analysis of the transformations that
occurred in the definitions of value and national identity with the rise of the
petroleum industry.
20. Vallenilla Lanz, positivist sociologist, president of the Senate, and editor of
the regime's newspaper, wrote articles on social evolution and history that were
collected in his influential CesarismoDemocrdtico (Vallenilla Lanz 1952 [1919]). See
Charles A. Hale (1986: 413) on the intellectual context of Vallenilla'sthought.
21. On the still inadequately studied G6mez regime, see B. S. McBeth (1983), Elias
Pino Iturrieta (1988), Tomas Polanco Alcantara (1990), Yolanda Segnini (1982),
Arturo Sosa (1985), and William Roseberry (1986).
22. See Mario Torrealba Lossi (1979: 63-94) for an account of these events, and
Skurski(1993) for an analysisof the actions taken and speeches made at the student
demonstrations.
Skurski * Ambiguities of Authenticity 619
broad expressions of support from across social classes, and the im-
prisonment of sons of the middle and upper class disturbed even the
regime's allies. Out of this experience the nuclei of future political
parties were conceived, led by those who became collectively known as
the "Generation of '28."
Romulo Gallegos wrote Dona Barbara in dialogue with these pro-
tests and with the suppressed dissent to the regime that they revealed.
Many of the students who were arrested had studied with him at the
Caracas high school where he not only taught, but was the director,
and regarded him as their mentor. Throughout his career as an es-
sayist, fiction writer, and educator, Gallegos expressed his belief in the
need to govern the pueblo by law rather than by force. In a political
culture characterized by violent competition for power, he sought to
construct a model of the virile reformer of nonviolent means.
Following the protests, Gallegos revised the manuscript of his latest
novel, which concerned a female rural boss on the llanos.23With these
changes, it became a tightly structured mythic tale, an allegory of the
nation's rule by despotism and of the projected triumph of the lib-
eral, modernizing state. Uncertain as to the reaction of the repressive
Gomez regime, Gallegos published Dona Barbara in Spain, at his own
expense, while he was in Europe. It won a literary prize, and Spanish
critics hailed it as an authentic expression of Latin America's human
drama. This recognition by Europe at once validated the work in the
view of the Venezuelan public and defined it as an expression of a
Latin American reality for readers elsewhere. Critics in Latin America
hailed Dona Barbara as a work of "universal literature," deeming it
"classic" in style, resonant of Cervantes and Tolstoy, and free of the
"parochial descriptions" (costumbrismo) found in much of the region's
literature. These critics in Spain and Latin America accorded Dona
Barbara literary greatness because it had turned its gaze inward toward
the rural heart of the nation, yet had adopted a narrative position
of distance from and mastery over the scenes it presented.24 It was
23. Gallegos began to write essays on civic affairs and public morality in 1908,
with G6mez's ascent, for a journal optimistically titled La Alborada(The Dawn),
which was soon closed down by the regime. See Rafael Fauquie Bescos (1985),
on Gallegos's early writings. For an account of the circumstances under which he
wrote-and revised-Doha Bdrbara,see Juan Liscano (1969), D. L. Shaw (1972),
and John E. Englekirk (1948).
24. Critics widely viewed Dona Barbaraas a nationalist reworking of prevailing
positivist notions of progress and regarded it as a descendant of Domingo Sar-
miento's 1845 denunciation of rural caudillismo, Facundo.Sarmiento, an Argen-
tine reformer and statesman, had also promoted popular education and was once
president of his country. However, he sought to imitate and import European and
U.S. models of progress and disparaged the rural population (see Sarmiento 1985
[1845]).
620 Poetics Today 15:4
25. On the trends that were popular among the literary vanguard of this period,
see T. Nelson Osorio (1985).
Skurski * Ambiguities of Authenticity 621
FluidIdentities
Beneath Dona Barbara's didactic narrative voice, which persistently
seeks to establish unambiguous categories, lies an unsettling recogni-
tion of the instability of meanings. Opposing forces traverse land and
people, dissolving moral boundaries and awakening transgressive de-
sires, thereby revealing the arbitrary marks of colonizing authority.
26. See S. R. D. Baretta and John Markoff (1978) for an innovative study of the
cattle plains' associations with Independence and with violence.
27. In a public letter from his preliminary exile in New York, Gallegos refused his
appointment to the puppet Senate and denounced the G6mez regime as unconsti-
tutional (see Liscano 1969: 120).
28. Acci6n Democratica came to power in a contradictory fashion, namely, through
a military coup against the elite-controlled but reformist Medina regime. See Steve
Ellner (1980) on AD'S expansion during this period.
29. For discussion of Dona Barbara's appropriation by official and opposition dis-
course and the populist project's construction of authority, see Coronil and Skurski
(1991), and Skurski and Coronil (1993).
622 Poetics Today 15:4
32. Gonzalez Echevarria (1985: 54-55) regards Barquero as having "the final
authority in the novel," for his insight into the nonreferentiality of language de-
constructs signification. However, the dissolution of meaning that Barquero enacts
can be seen alternatively as the sterile response of an imitative elite that refuses to
ground its knowledge in engagement with social reality. Luzardo is ratified in the
novel as a creator of meaning through his efforts to link word and deed.
33. For an illuminating discussion of the formation of the bourgeois subject
through the differentiation and mutual constitution of high and low, see Peter
Stallybrass and Allon White (1986).
624 Poetics Today 15:4
"If I had encountered men like you in my path before, my story would
be a different one" (ibid.: 654). From this insight follows her attempt
to undo her life of despotism. Her spirit familiar tells her, in what the
narrator calls "Kabbalistic" words, "Things return to the place from
whence they came" (ibid.: 709). She rids herself of her henchmen,
her stolen lands, and her masculine demeanor, and she grants her
abandoned daughter the inheritance due her. Yet she cannot become
another in the eyes of Luzardo, for he regards her transformation as
but a change in appearance.
With an act in which she returns to her origins as the hate-filled
Dona Barbara, she achieves authentic change. Upon seeing Marisela
and Santos Luzardo in affectionate conversation, Dona Barbara is
seized by an impulse to shoot Marisela and eliminate her rival. But she
suddenly "sees," as in a vision, her former self incarnated in the per-
son of Marisela and decides instead to leave the llanos. By renouncing
her desire to possess through violence, she makes it possible for the
parallel domestication of the llanos to begin. As she recedes downriver
to her place of origin, the barbarous currents within Luzardo and
Marisela subside as well, and they agree to marry. But as the ambigu-
ous ending suggests, with its evocation of indigenous beliefs in hidden
water spirits, Dona Barbara remains as a submerged presence. She
lives on in legend and fantasy, a symbol of seductive primal instincts
within leader and pueblo alike. As she returns to her riverbed, in the
novel's last line, she leaves behind the llanos, where "a good race [raza]
loves, suffers and hopes."
Metaphysical Nationalism
This relational construct of identities mediated by mythic forces and
intuitive comprehension draws on the critique of rationalism and de-
terminism that gained acceptance among the intelligentsia during the
interwar period. However, largely because of their modernizing as-
sumptions, accounts of nationalism's consolidation in Latin America
tend to present a genealogy of ideas divorced from their social con-
text and from their role in the production of the social order. Such
accounts devote little attention to nationalism's cultural dimension,
abstracting it from the religious beliefs and historical memories that
inflected political concepts derived from European contexts. Secular-
izing assumptions and reductionist notions of power have thus been
projected onto nationalist movements and projects, obscuring dimen-
sions of meaning that have been refracted through the experience of
colonialism.
The prevailing currents of nationalist thought in Latin America
after World War I involved a critique of determinist theories of racial
Skurski * Ambiguities of Authenticity 625
34. For discussions about the diverse thinkers who contributed to the cultural
nationalist critique, see Martin S. Stabb (1967), H. E. Davis (1963), Nicolas Shum-
way (1991), Leopoldo Zea (1944), Ofelia Schutte (1993), Richard M. Morse (1989),
and Charles A. Hale (1986).
35. Positivist evolutionism was built on the theories of Darwin and Spencer, which
dominated Anglo-American scientific discourse of the late nineteenth century. See
Nancy Stepan (1982) on the British development of theories of racial determinism.
36. Ann Stoler (1992) offers an insightful analysis of the politically charged pro-
cess by which those of mixed race are defined.
626 Poetics Today 15:4
37. These ideas, although common to many, became closely associated with Jose
Enrique Rod6. This Uruguayan writer'sinfluential 1900 essayArieldefined an elit-
ist brand of idealism in which Anglo-Saxon culture was regarded as lacking in the
aesthetics and vision that characterized Latin culture and which posited the right-
ful leadership by a natural meritocracy composed of the intellectual elite (Stabb
1967: 35-42).
38. Many of these ideas had been developing since the mid-nineteenth century.
Argentine thinkers and political leaders in particular formulated conflicting theo-
ries of the civilization/barbarism opposition with reference to the clash between
centralists and federalists. For example, Alberdi lauded regional life and attacked
the artificial "barbarieilustrada"in writings with which Gallegos was familiar. See
Jose Luis G6mez-Martinez (1980: 492), and Shumway(1991).
39. For examples in relation to Mexico, see Zea (1944); for those pertaining
to Argentina, see Shumway (1991). Mabel Morana (1984) discusses the impact
of changing center/periphery and class relations on political thought during
the period. On the continuing engagement with authenticity in Latin American
thought, see Mario Samborino (1980).
Skurski * Ambiguities of Authenticity 627
40. On the impact of the Kabbalah on Hegel and other European thinkers, see
Bruce F. Campbell (1980: 13), and Gershom Scholem (1941: 203; 1974: 200).
41. See Gonzalez Echevarria's (1977: 52-61) discussion of thejournal's impact and
its influence on the rise of the Afro-Cuban movement in the arts. "Despite its name
the Revista de Occidente disseminated in the twenties theories of culture in which
Western civilization no longer occupied a privileged place." He cites references to
the Kabbalah in the writings of Alejo Carpentier, a leading Cuban novelist active
in the European avant-garde, as an expression of this period's strong interest in
the hidden dimension of reality.
628 Poetics Today 15:4
Ortega y Gasset asked how Spain could join, yet not be marginalized
by, Europe's stifling civilization. Influenced by Hegel and Nietzsche,
he argued that an enlightened elite must guide the impulses of the
masses in order to develop a nation's vitality. Latin America, he con-
cluded, offered the vigorous barbarism that Europe needed, one that
promised to restore Europe's greatness.42
The journal also published Spanish translations of major books on
these subjects, which circulated widely in Latin America. Two of these
are relevant to this discussion: Oswald Spengler's (1926 [1918]) Decline
of the West,in 1923, and Count Hermann Keyserling's 1932 SouthAmeri-
can Meditations, in 1933.43 Spengler, who was read avidly by a broad
public, drew on theorists of the unconscious and historical idealists to
inform his argument that cultures follow independent paths of growth
in cyclical rhythms and evolve through unique racial syntheses of cos-
mic and psychic forces. Like Nietzsche before him, Spengler believed
that only an injection of energy from primitive sources could halt the
decline of the materially advanced West. His influential work not only
inspired the Latin American intelligentsia to explore autochthonous
cultural expressions, but his ideas, appropriated from the margins of
the metropolitan West, were seen as ratifying Latin America's iden-
tity as an original, synthetic civilization derived from the mixing of
different races on American soil.
Count Keyserling synthesized the diverse currents of Eastern, spiri-
tualist, and esoteric thought, which were enjoying a widespread re-
vival at that time in Europe. A member of the German aristocracy
in Estonia, he wrote for and lectured to a largely elite audience in
Western Europe on the future of civilization, the nature of cosmic
order, and the path to enlightenment. More optimistic than Spengler,
Keyserling predicted the birth of a vigorous civilization on the South
American continent, although at present, he noted, this region had
reached only "the third day of creation." The continent was still at a
primordial stage, he declared, as shown by the Andean people, who
were "mineraloid men," and life there was driven purely by telluric
energy and was still devoid of spirituality (Keyserling 1933 [1932]:
14-41).44
42. Ortega y Gasset expressed these ideas in his 1926 essay "Hegel and America"
(Ortega y Gasset (1957 [1926]). He first visited Latin America in 1914 (Stabb 1967:
70-71).
43. Keyserling's (1927) World in the Making was well-known in European intel-
lectual circles. Essays by these authors appeared in the journal as well (see, e.g.,
Spengler [1924] on "race" and "people").
44. According to Keyserling (1933 [1932]: 238), "It is possible and even probable
that the next rebirth of that spirit which made possible in ancient times the Greek
miracle ... will arise in South America, for the salvation of all men and to redeem
Skurski * Ambiguities of Authenticity 629
them from savagery." One of Keyserling's followers noted with surprise that South
American readers were not alienated by this book despite its unflattering portrayal
of the people there. Because South America had "a continental inferiority com-
plex," she reasoned, readers there were "extremely flattered to have Keyserling
write a whole thick volume about it, declaring it to be the most important and
significant continent in the world, even if only in a creepy, slimy, reptilian sort of
way" (Parks 1934: 272).
45. Rojas, a leading Argentinian literary critic, made nativism a metaphor for
domestic culture, which he associated with the aesthetic, the land, and freedom,
and called for its integration with cosmopolitan culture, which he associated with
material advancement and political organization. Their synthesis would create a
national culture, "Eurindia."
46. Vasconcelos, Mexico's Minister of Education in the post-Revolutionary period,
influenced the turn in the arts and education toward the glorification of indigenous
elements in Mexican culture. In his Spenglerian work La raza c6smica (Vasconcelos
1948 [1925]), he envisioned the development of a cosmic race in the tropics, near
the site of the lost continent of Atlantis, that would revive the ancient Egyptian
ideal of harmony among three states: the intellectual, the aesthetic, and the ma-
terial. See Ronald Stutzman (1981) for a discussion of mestizaje as an ideology of
cultural "whitening." On the promotion of cultural "whitening" in Venezuela, see
Winthrop Wright (1990) and, in Brazil and Mexico, see Richard Graham (1990).
47. Haya de la Torre was the founder of Peru's Alianza Popular Revolucionaria
Americana (APRA) movement and a major voice in the reconfigured nationalist
630 Poetics Today 15:4
ticism, Eastern philosophy, and occult beliefs derived from his studies
in Europe, particularly of Count Keyserling's work, Haya formulated
a theory of "historical space-time" on which he based his vision of
civilization's regeneration in the Americas. This rebirth would depend
on the intervention of spiritually prepared leaders who, through their
access to special sources of knowledge, would be able to synthesize the
forces associated with the different civilizations then at odds in the
hemisphere: the Anglo-European, and the Indo-American. This task
could be accomplished only by leaders who had attained the highest
levels of consciousness.48
These thinkers all assumed that the unformed pueblo could attain
consciousness as a historical subject through the mediation of its en-
lightened leadership. Yet they offered no explanation of how either of
these subjects would emerge. Their discourse exemplified what Terry
Eagleton (1990: 28) refers to as "the metaphysics of nationalism,"
which speaks of "the entry into full self-realization of a unitary subject
known as the people." This monadic subject, curiously, is assumed to
"preexist its own process of materialization," to be equipped with "de-
terminate needs and desires, on the model of the autonomous human
personality." And it was to the human personality that this discourse
turned.
The AuthenticLeader
In light of this discussion, we can better locate Dona Barbara within
the intersecting currents of social and intellectual life that framed its
production. During the forced quiescence of political and cultural life
under Gomez, buttressed by elite support for his project as well as by
his effective system of repression, opposition discourse slowly devel-
oped between the lines of official political discourse. It incorporated
49. For Liscano (1985: 202), Gallegos became the incarnation of Santos Luzardo
when in 1948, while serving as Venezuela's president, he refused to compromise
with the military and was overthrown. Humberto Garcia Arocha (1985), a close
associate and friend of Gallegos, has claimed that Gallegos identified with Luzardo
(an assertion that Garcia Arocha repeated in a personal interview, June 1989).
632 Poetics Today 15:4
ian vision of social reform that was rooted in the nation's origins and
incarnated in heroic figures, a cultural foundation for the populist
project whose language spoke to broad social sectors. The parallels be-
tween the personas of Gallegos and Bolivar are striking. Both leaders
represented themselves as educators of the unformed pueblo. They
spoke as moral guides from an elevated plane of existence who sought
to channel the people's unruly spirit toward a higher degree of devel-
opment. For Gallegos, Bolivar the civic reformer and moral educator,
rather than the military leader, was his model and the source of his
reformist ideas. He wrote extensively on educational reform and on
the role of the leader as an educator in terms that resembled Boli-
var's writings on these subjects. Publicly known as "El Maestro" ("The
Teacher") until his death, he played the role of a moral leader, not
a politician, and found in Santos Luzardo the literary representation
of this role. Through his conduct and his literary characterization, he
made the exemplary individual his Bolivarian answer to the problem
of authority on a postcolonial terrain.50
In an early essay of 1912, "La Necesidad de Valores Culturales,"
Gallegos defined the intellectual as a product of a superior culture
who helps bring about the evolution of the masses by channeling their
"vital energies," which are "instinctual forces like rivers overflowing
their bed" (Gallegos 1954: I, 95-97). For in Venezuela, he argued in
1931, strikingly foreshadowing Count Keyserling, the "sixth day of
creation" had not yet ended; in this unfinished, seething land, satanic
forces shaped souls into barbarism, and men hastily formed from the
residue of creation emerged from the earth to don uniforms and exert
their rule (ibid.: 116-19). As a writer, he explained in 1954, he did
not seek to depict this landscape for purely creative purposes, but to
symbolize through his characters the "intellectual or moral forms of
[his] concerns with regard to the problems of the Venezuelan reality
within which [he had] lived." He grounded his symbols in his experi-
ence and created them to help alter his society, he explained, for the
nation needed myths through which to recognize and represent itself.
He created the figure of Dofia Barbara so that through her "a dra-
matic aspect of the Venezuela in which [he had] lived [might] become
visible, and so that in some fashion her imposing character [might]
help us remove from our souls that part of her that resides in us"
(ibid.: II, 116-17).51
50. There is a common perception that Gallegos and Santos Luzardo are Boli-
varian figures. The spirit of Bolivar is considered in popular belief and religious
medium
practice to inspire national and popular struggles and to work through the
of superior individuals.
51. Liscano has argued that Gallegos had a mystical relationship to the land, which
he regarded as a site of cosmic forces and primordial creation. His symbols were
Skurski * Ambiguities of Authenticity 633
demands for democracy and reform arose primarily from the nascent
middle class. The incipient organization of labor in cities and among
petroleum workers also brought a new class component to the project
of political change.56
Dona Barbara presented a mythic construct in which presumably all
sectors of the population could see themselves reflected. This sym-
bolic construct at once imaged their present existence and envisioned
their future transformation within a hierarchical yet integrative social
order. It portrayed the demise of the elite in its role as an adjunct
to military and foreign interests and its rebirth as an enlightened,
civilizing force. The middle class's servility toward corrupt power was
exposed, but its future as a virile, conquering bourgeoisie was also pro-
posed. The popular sectors were depicted as the passive and degraded
subjects of despotism, but also projected as productive and devoted
citizens who would energize the nation. And the novel offered a vision
of men and women as no longer driven by untamed instinct under
barbarism's rule, but becoming fruitfully joined in familial union by
the forces of civilization.
Male leaders of the middle-class opposition explicitly identified
with the novel. For many, from both the center and the left, Santos
Luzardo became their unquestioned model. As Juan Bautista Fuen-
mayor, a petroleum union organizer of elite origins and founder of
the Communist Party, recalled in a personal interview (June 1989):
"We all wanted to be Santos Luzardo and to defeat tyranny." Similarly,
Domingo A. Coronil, son of a Gomez government official, student of
Gallegos, and a Supreme Court justice, stated that in that era, "We
saw in Santos Luzardo the future of the nation, and Marisela was like
the pueblo, a diamond in the rough" (personal interview, July 1989).
Mariano Picon Salas, author and leader of the AD, recalled that oppo-
nents of Gomez read Dona Barbara in jail and "planned to act against
the disastrous mess of the dictatorship just as Santos Luzardo had
done upon the ruins of Altamira," his abandoned hacienda (Karsen
1979: 501). And Raul Roa (1985 [1954]: 68-69), Cuban author and
political leader, recalled that, while jailed in Cuba in 1930 for opposi-
tion to the dictator Machado, the prisoners read Dona Bdrbara aloud:
"It was a revelation . . . a faithful image of a conflict which was our
own, but in a different setting."57
56. See Charles Bergquist (1986: 205-42) for a helpful discussion of labor orga-
nization and class relations during this period.
57. Torrealba Lossi (1979: 179) reported that the novel had a great impact on
young opponents of G6mez; they even began to reformulate reality in terms of
the novel's cosmic forces and symbolic characters. Although he noted the partici-
pation of young women in the 1928 protests, he did not indicate with whom they
identified.
Skurski * Ambiguities of Authenticity 635
61. On his visit to the llanos in 1947, Englekirk (1948: 270) was struck by the
impact that the film version of Dona Barbara had on the rural population, many of
whom regarded its characters as real.
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