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Tales of Identity in theShadow of the Mass Media:Populist Narrative in 1930sVenezuelaRaquel Rivas RojasPublished online: 03 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Raquel Rivas Rojas (2001) Tales of Identity in the Shadow ofthe Mass Media: Populist Narrative in 1930s Venezuela, Journal of Latin AmericanCultural Studies: Travesia, 10:2, 193-204, DOI: 10.1080/13569320120068266

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Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2001

Tales of Identity in the Shadow of the Mass Media:Populist Narrative in 1930s Venezuela1

RAQUEL RIVAS ROJAS

Convenientemente hemos trazado los criollos una l õ nea divisoria imag-inaria entre los que destruimos ayer y admiramos hoy, y quienesdestruimos hoy sin admiracion alguna. (German Carrera Damas)

… en este momento lo mejor de la identidad consiste en nuestrarenuncia a ella. (Carlos Monsivais )

In Venezuela between the 1930s and 1940s, literature as an institution displayeda certain anxiety, the signs of which can be observed in the changes thataesthetic projects were undergoing at the time. This anxiety was producedby—among other factors2—the development of the mass-media industry. How-ever, before this development could displace literature as a centre for theemission of national identity tales, populist regionalista novels were battling fortheir survival in the cultural realm.3 In this period the novel as a genreappropriated by national intellectuals minimized its epic and tragic componentsin order to admit other narrative forms and discursive registers—chronicles,reviews, travel tales, humour, parody—that might compete with mass-mediagenres.

This change was accompanied by the construction of problematic, confusedand disintegrating characters that were a far cry from the civilizing, purposefulheroes of national epic narratives. A fragmented national territory was alsoportrayed in these novels with the aim of revealing the distinctive features of theregional space—rural or semi-urban—where those problematic characters wereintervening, shaping the landscape with their perceptions and attitudes, andwere no longer trapped in the kind of coercive Nature that was the principalterritory of criollista narratives. The forces subjugating these new confusedsubjects were social injustice, their incapacity to articulate themselves in aproductive process, and the violence generated by highly con�ictive and exclu-sivist social relations.

To some extent, the most signi�cant novels published in the short periodbetween 1935 and 1941 contained the seeds of those diverse paths that nationalnarratives would follow for the rest of the twentieth century. Their commonground was an obsessive reasoning on the function of identity tales, at a momentwhen mass-media discourses were threatening the stability of the written word.This threat, however, was incorporated into Venezuelan identity tales in theform of certain discourses that ran through the �ctions, laying bare the discur-sive hybridization of modernity. Gallegos’s texts retained the incorporation and

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appropriation of certain popular discursive genres from costumbrista tradition, ascan be noticed in the representation of rural speech with its sayings andlinguistic particularities in Canaima, and the use of oral tradition in the repro-duction of folkloric tales in Pobre Negro. However, the other novels drove thisintertextuality beyond the limits of criollista tradition, incorporating discursivegenres until then not considered suitable for literary purposes. This is not—as incriollista literature—merely the representation of the folkloric aspect of thenational, in order to permeate the identity tale with an ‘authentic’ aura. Here, thedisparate discursivities that enter the �ction derive from different matrices. Theymay derive from private oral discourses, such as gossip and doubles-entendres,but also from the mass media and popular literature, such as chronicles, folletinesand melodramas.

Through these narratives, the national novel recovered its centrality by con-structing a new voice for the narrator of the regionalista identity tale. This is a‘ubiquitous’ narrator—as Francoise Perus has termed it4—who replaces thetraditional omniscient narrator. That is, a voice which gives over its own spaceto the voices of others, just as the radio microphone is made available tobroadcast the voices of new social subjects. The appropriation in nationalnarratives of this mass-media device allows the novel to open lines of interpel-lation to a broader community of virtual readers.

At the same time, this device relocated populist intellectuals in an ‘anti-intel-lectual’ position which provided them with a new form of articulation with thesocial imaginary of the period.5 The centrality of this new intellectual as the mainsubject of the populist identity tale can be seen from the use of the educative orformative narrative as the principal form of almost all the novels studied. Thatis to say, in all these novels the main characters make a journey from childhoodto maturity, a trajectory whose �ctionalization was a way of representing thesame process of relocation that national narratives were experiencing at the time.The traumas and tensions that marked the growth to adulthood of new nationalsubjects embodied the process of rede�nition that now faced the nationalinstitution of literature.

Cultural Leadership

With all these changes, appropriations and reappropriations, the national litera-ture made it possible for a place to be con�gured for the traditional intellectualwhere he could compete with media professionals—such as journalists, publi-cists, broadcasters, radio dramatists and popular songwriters—who were emerg-ing in the national cultural �eld as producers of a popular-based discourse.6

These new communications professionals had distinctive characteristics: theydid not see themselves as the bearers of those ethical values attributed to thetraditional man of letters, with his supposed disregard for material matters. Onthe contrary, they were workers, people who earned their living in the same wayas any other popular subject. This is why the populist intellectuals had topresent themselves as a voice among other voices, in the same way as mass-me-dia discourses do, and as a group who earned their living ‘by the sweat of theirbrow’, as any worker might say. The very survival of a national narrative wasat stake in this process of becoming popular. The particular case of RomuloGallegos as a cultural and political leader illustrates this transition.

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One of the reasons why this period was overshadowed by the �gure ofRomulo Gallegos was his formative role as the political leader of a wholegeneration. It could be said that his leadership derived from the fact that hismost widely read novel Dona Barbara (1929) was instantly recognised as cultur-ally representative. It was with this credential that Gallegos leaped from almosttotal anonymity as an obscure high-school headmaster to national prominence asa political leader. It was his role as a narrator of accounts of national identitythat alone served as the endorsement sustaining his �rst candidacy for thepresidency of the Republic, at the end of the period of Lopez Contreras.

The speech made by Andres Eloy Blanco (1897–1955)—a poet also recognizedas representative of the voice of the people—on the launch of Gallegos’spresidential candidacy offers an example of the way in which the reformulationof national identity tales in populist terms functioned as a means of legitimisingthe political—and cultural—representativeness of the new intellectuals. Blancoannounced Gallegos’s candidacy at one of the most popular meeting places inCaracas in the �rst decades of the twentieth century, the Nuevo Circo—a placefor bull�ghting but also for a wide range of other cultural and sporting events.It was 5 April 1941. The opposition forces that were proposing Gallegos knewthat this was a token candidacy, for the government had already appointed itsown successor. As Blanco said in the Nuevo Circo, the opposition knew thatGallegos was ‘una baraja derrotada’ (‘a losing hand’).7 However, this politicalparticipation offered the opposition the opportunity to present their cultural andpolitical leaders and the new political project.8 It is signi�cant that the candidatewas presented as ‘un hombre que no tiene otra cosa que un libro bajo el brazo’(‘a man who has nothing but a book under his arm’, p. 120). This cultural andpolitical leader was ‘one of the forgers of Venezuela’, but at the same time hewas considered to be ‘one of Venezuela’s achievements’ (idem). The processthrough which Gallegos abandoned the ‘ivory tower’ (p. 121) and became apopulist leader is recounted by Blanco to the enthusiastic applause of the crowd:

Vereis como Gallegos, que hace pueblo, es hecho por el pueblo.Figuraos el rincon de una escuela; all õ , junto a una mesa, un hombresolo escribe; es una lucha oscura. El se va desbastando como piedra,dejando sangre y unas en la busca desesperada del estilo. Hay en el unafan de revelarse. Anda buscando su camino. (Aplausos).

Y salen cosas que no le satisfacen, hasta que un d õ a abre la puerta yecha a andar. Va por los campos, cruza las cordilleras, llega a lasllanadas; all õ encuentra una mujer enferma a la puerta de un rancho yun hombre triste sobre un caballo �aco. Un hombre y un rancho. Undolor a caballo y otro a pie. Y aquel hombre le da el camino quebuscaba. (Grandes aplausos) (p. 121)

[You will see how Gallegos, who makes the people, is made by thepeople. Picture to yourselves some corner in a school; there, at a table,a man is writing, alone; it is a sombre struggle. He is wearing himselfdown like a rock, shedding blood and nails in the desperate search fora style. There is within him a longing to reveal his true self. He goes insearch of the right path. (Applause).

And nothing that issues from his pen leaves him satis�ed, until oneday he opens the door and sets off on foot. He walks through �elds,

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crosses the mountains, and reaches the plains; there he meets a sickwoman at the gate of a shack and a sad man on an emaciated horse. Aman and a shack. One suffering being on horseback and another on foot.And that man shows him the path he was seeking. (Loud applause)]

The journey of the intellectual from the school to the dusty paths of thehomeland where he learns about the pain and sufferings of his people was tobecome a foundational episode for the populist intellectual.9 These new intellec-tuals present themselves as those who relegate creative work—that is, theelaboration of �ctions—to a secondary status so as to engage in the representa-tion of an already latent national identity that they alone are capable ofrevealing. This revelation is, then, an act of identi�cation and mediation. Thefoundational scene of the ‘conversion’ of traditional intellectuals into populistones represents an aesthetic and ethical programme for the committed writers ofthe period. Their function is de�ned here as being that of consensual mediators.This scene also signals the displacement of the criollista discursive formationfrom the school—as the hegemonic institution of this project—to political life,the public sphere considered here as the place of cultural democratisation andconsensual action. In this way, the writer and the people become one, because—according to this representation—Venezuela:

… ve en Romulo Gallegos al hombre que se interno por sus dolores,que se froto con su vida, que condeno sus vicios, que exalto susvirtudes, que poblo libros de seres venezolanos. Ella sabe que personaslejanas llegan a juntarse cuando miran la misma estrella; y as õ es laintegracion que dan los libros, cuando un hombre de oriente y otro dela cordillera se hacen uno, cuando los dos se sienten el mismo personajede un libro. Por eso Gallegos signi�ca unidad venezolana. (pp. 122–123)

[ … sees in Romulo Gallegos the man who immersed himself in itssuffering, who chafed his skin raw upon its life, who condemned itsvices, who exalted its virtues, who �lled books with Venezuelancharacters. It knows that people who are separated from each other willgather together when they gaze at the same star; and that is the veryintegration that books can afford, when one man from the coast andanother from the mountains become one, when they both feel them-selves to be the same character in a book. That is why Gallegos meansthe same as Venezuelan unity.]

The populist intellectual emerges legitimized from this scene of integration:¿Y que de extrano tiene que una vez que a el le dieron su camino lepidieran caminos? ¿Y que de extrano tiene que una vez que a el lohicieran, quieran usarlo para bene�cio de todos?

¿Y que de extrano que el que desbrava el potro, lo ensille y locabalgue, y el que arbolo el balandro, lo tripule y el que le dio el caminoal hombre que lo buscaba, lo ponga ahora de baquiano a sabanearlerumbos? Este trabajador es obra de los trabajadores de Venezuela. Elloslo hicieron como un muro de cal y ahora quieren ponerse al sol paraque la sombra de ellos de en el muro. (Aplausos) (pp. 121–122)

[And what is strange about the fact that having shown him his waythey should ask him to show them theirs? And what is strange about

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Populist Narrative in 1930s Venezuela 197

the fact that having made him, they should want to use him for thebene�t of all?

And what is strange about the one who breaks the colt also saddlingand riding him, and the one who �tted out the sloop manning it too,and the one who showed the way to the man seeking it now turninghim into the guide to put him on the right track. They made him likea wall whitewashed in lime and now they want to stand in the way ofthe sun so that their shadow will be cast on the wall. (Applause)]

The theme of the integration of populist intellectuals and the people theyrepresent is depicted as a dual commitment. The workers—as the privilegedsubjects of this populist discourse—shape the intellectual and then ask him tolead them as a teacher, as a civilizing leader. It is signi�cant that this scene inwhich the intellectual is constructed as the natural leader of the working peopleis based on traditional criollista scenes, one of which is the taming of the wildhorse. The populist turn of this discourse is situated in the representation of areciprocity that transforms the intellectual into a worker among workers, whosetask as representative is assumed with ‘admirable … disinterestedness’ (p. 122).From then on, the populist intellectual will be represented through this image inwhich residues of the patriarchal matrix of criollista tradition are merged withthe emergent features of a democratic matrix.10

Gallegos represents the intellectual in transition between these two projects,with a formative background nearer to nineteenth-century tradition, under therule of the didactic function. However, he is the self-made intellectual, who hasundertaken a journey towards cultural and political leadership. Gallegos’spolitical campaign and the manner in which he was presented to the public asa political leader demonstrate how populist intellectuals placed themselves inthe struggles of the period. Other intellectuals who were part of the samemovement made similar journeys. They were intellectuals who—with few excep-tions—ended up as civil servants: diplomats, ministers, senators. Their relation-ship with the institutions of the state was not always peaceful, and there wereextreme cases such as the permanent exile of Antonio Arraiz. Nevertheless, ingeneral, they engaged in a political activism that gave them considerablepolitical and cultural in�uence after 1958, when the democratic period actuallybegan.

Cohesive Tales

During the postdictatorship period, the press constituted the forum whereintellectuals disseminated their versions of identity tales. Debates in the newspa-pers and other journalistic genres offer an idea of the consensual foundationupon which the reader’s horizon for these regionalista novels rested. Throughthese widely disseminated texts populist intellectuals assembled images andidentity scenes that built a certain symbolic consensus. Juan Bimba, as theembodiment of the rural character who enters the urban space, was one of themost enduring of those images.11 Behind this unifying image it is possible to seethe symbolic consensus achieved by intellectuals that, beyond their strategicdifferences, produced a coherent �ctional universe in which the limits forinclusion and exclusion seemed clear. Even the most ground-breaking texts of

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the period—such as Puros hombres and La galera de Tiberio—built their effects offracture in opposition to this stabilized identity tale.

From the political positions occupied and from the cultural capital accumu-lated, populist intellectuals consolidated the aesthetic project that would be thebasis of the Venezuelan cultural �eld for at least half a century. This projectrelied on the central function of representativeness implied in the restoration ofthe authority of cultural leaders. With this aim, national narratives producedthree consecutive moves. In the �rst place, the reconstruction of collectivememory on a new form of oblivion: the portrayal of the rural as the territory ofthe past, and the appropriation—as literary raw material—of the symbolicfeatures of that past. In the second place, the recon�guration of urban territoriesand their subjects as the locus of the ambiguous promises of modernity.12 In thisterritory the construction of an emergent urban subject was crucial: this charac-ter is not the popular one, but the lettered and politicised subject that repre-sented the rising middle classes. The popular features of the national imaginarywere rebuilt and integrated into the imagined community of these middleclasses. This rearrangement of spaces and subjects of national narratives placedthe populist project at a considerable distance from criollista tradition.

In constructing a distance from the forms of representation of the nationalinherited from the criollista tradition, the populist identity tale was representedas ‘actually’ related to its referent, as an ‘authentic’ representation of nationalselfhood. This is why the �gure of the lettered subject was constructed as themessenger of what was postponed and unknown, in the face of a tradition basedon postponement and denial. From this almost messianic function, the populistintellectual elaborated allegories and Utopias of the homeland that could estab-lish the regime of truth of the populist national project. Hence the insistence onthe construction of ‘morality tales’, allegories with a didactic purpose, in orderto establish the truthfulness of the political project.13 Hence, also, the embarrass-ment aroused in contemporary literary critics by this direct political engagementof the intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s with the populist state and itsinstitutions.

Dispersive Tales

The construction of allegorical tales—in texts closer to the nineteenth-centurytradition—was complemented by the production of Utopian texts in novels thatwere pursuing new forms of representation. The conception of Utopian tales canbe considered as part of the same representative function mentioned earlier.14

However, this was not an emergent feature, but one inherited from a previousdiscursive formation, that of the nineteenth-century narrative, as Renato Ortizhas pointed out. For that narrative ‘la nacion se situaba … en el futuro, era algoinacabado; su con�guracion idealizada contrastaba con el presente, con elsubdesarrollo y las imposiciones colonialistas o imperialistas’ (‘the nation wassituated … in the future, it was something un�nished; its idealised con�gurationwas at odds with the present, with underdevelopment and with colonialist orimperialist impositions’). Nation had in this context a particular ‘Utopian force’,able to embrace ‘men’s hearts and minds’, because ‘utopias open a window onthe future for us’.15 Utopian tales offered, then, a tense solution because theyimplied the construction of a margin, a place of enunciation condemned to a

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Populist Narrative in 1930s Venezuela 199

permanent dissociation from the referent that they should regulate. However,this Utopian space allowed the entrance of lines of �ight and rupture16 from themimetic pact of traditional narratives.

Allegorical and Utopian representations were the two central and complemen-tary narrative forms of the aesthetic project of populist intellectuals. Theycertainly did not produce mimetic tales. Mimesis did not enter into this projectapart from the appropriation of discursive devices of disparate matrices—popu-lar or mass-media ones—that were circulating in the period. Only a laterreading, made by literary critics interested in the construction of a nationalliterary canon, would present these regionalista texts as mimetic.17 In transform-ing the texts of populist Regionalismo into the canon of a national literature,literary criticism that was related to populist State institutions depoliticised thenational cultural �eld and the con�icting representations of national identity.18

This gesture of depoliticising the regionalista narrative legitimized as ‘essential’those identity effects produced by the most traditional texts of the period—thatis, Pobre negro, Canaima, Fiebre, and Campeones—even when they were in factallegorical and Utopian texts.

For the of�cial national memory, then, the regionalista narrative of the 1930sand 1940s would be a reconstruction of ‘the illusion of totality that underlieseach use of the effect of the real’ as Raul Antelo has pointed out.19 This is atotalizing effect that must dissolve differences and make the coexistence ofdifferent versions of the identity tales proposed by populist narratives possible.20

In this sense, the trend constituted by Gallegos’s novels condensed a way ofimagining the national as a space in which contradictions—no matter howthreatening they could be—can eventually be solved on the basis of a sharedcommon ground; that is, a homeland that unites its subjects through the feelingof belonging. The consensual function of these �ctions was reinforced by aliterary criticism that, as mentioned earlier, emphasised the reading of commonfeatures while silencing dissimilar proposals within those texts. However, it isclear that these novels, in their attempt to recon�gure a legacy of Criollismo,actually opened up gaps in the discursive formation that sustained nationalidentity tales, exposing some of its contradictions.

While Gallegos’s tendency, as a conciliatory formula for the identity tale,owed some residual debts to traditional Criollismo, the Utopian and dispersivetendency of the populist identity tale exhibited the institutional limits of at-tempts to represent silenced and marginal subjects. This tendency examined thelimits of the representation of the national in order to expose the very task ofrepresentation as unrealizable. The search for the marginal space and thepopular subject that was the main responsibility of populist intellectuals was,then, located in the territory of the impossible, for the institution itself that wastrying to represent the marginal side of national identity was connected with theenlightened national project of the nineteenth century. This close relationshipbetween the modernising project of the nineteenth-century republic and litera-ture—as one of its most reliable conciliatory devices—made the novel, as agenre, a con�icting space from which to disseminate a new populist regionalistaidentity tale.

This is why the most extreme texts in this ‘dissolving’ tendency—such asPuros hombres and La galera de Tiberio—displayed this tension by constructingstories of defeated heroes in spaces in which inequality was the norm. These

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200 R. Rivas Rojas

characters, however, were not trapped in the interpellation made by the identitytale. They could �y away through the gaps of a representation that was morepreoccupied with its own boundaries and its own collapse: the failure of thecriollista project that imagined the national state not as a place for the negotiationof postcolonial con�icts, but as a place for capturing and silencing the popularsubject. Those �gures in �ight were not captured in conciliatory endings oncethe dispersive threats were reversed. On the contrary, these �ctions that showedthe limits of their own locus of enunciation—through constant self-reference—exposed the incapacity of the literary narratives of identity to represent andcapture those characters that were related to a different discursive formation.

A New Intellectual

This was also a con�ict for those populist intellectuals trying to present them-selves as the new subjects of national identity tales. Intellectuals of this momenthad to decide between competing with mass-media professionals or constructinga new kind of narrative detached from the task of the representation of thenational subject. At this point, it was possible to notice in the dispersivenarratives of populist Regionalismo the construction of some of the pillars of whatwould become the hegemonic trend of national literature after the 1970s: theexploration of an individual conscience and the detailed examination of thepossibilities of aesthetic language, as the only spaces in which literature can befounded.

This was the way forward announced by texts such as La galera de Tiberio, inits obsessive exploration of meta�ctional narratives, as a symptom of therenunciation of the task of representing other cultures, whether considered athreat or not. In its transition to this space of aesthetic autonomy, the nationalliterature also abandoned the social function that had been acknowledged for itthroughout the nineteenth century and the �rst decades of the twentieth century.This function was imposed on the national literature out of a need to legitimizeits belligerence and its will to constitute itself as the locus of enunciation oflegitimate identity tales. At the moment when the populist regionalista novelopened the door to this kind of narrative, the Utopian impulse took on a desireto rectify History by attempting to cancel the debts inherited from a past—anda present—marked by profound inequalities. However, this was a failed at-tempt, for in displacing the �ctional solutions to another place—and perhapsanother time, the future—the tensions and responsibilities of representing thenation were eluded. In this way the intellectual who was charged with dealingwith the dissemination of new forms of identity would end up free of theburden of national representation.

Intellectuals who produced populist identity tales tried to conceive of theirfunction as an act of restitution. They attempted to bridge the distance thatseparated them from the referents they had to represent. This implied theelaborating of a foundational scene depicting the actual expression of an identitydiscourse through which the intellectual had searched for and found an ‘es-sence’—the national identity—that had to be restored and disseminated. Scat-tered spaces, subjects, objects and narratives did not by themselves produce thestabilised effect of national identity. In order to produce and regulate this effect,the mediation of the intellectual was required. That is why, in the 1930s and

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1940s, Venezuelan literature had—once again—to be ‘nationalised’. The identitydiscourse revealed here its desire for projection and its normative character. Itsfunction was displaced from the restitution of a given ‘essence’ to the productionof a discourse capable of regulating dispersed fragments and submitting them toa totalizing economy.

Hence the allegorical impulse of populist Regionalismo. In order to capture thephenomenon of dispersion, identity tales had to produce a discourse of differ-ence, to expose boundaries, to establish penalties and punishments for theoffenders; to expel the transgressors. Identity tales produced more a map oftransgressions than a space for identi�cation. This was their function and, at thesame time, their fundamental limitation. Therefore, in their most audaciousexpressions, populist novels took �ight in Utopian solutions. The only trans-gression that the identity tale actually accepted—even generated and encour-aged—was this Utopian escape that dismissed the enunciatory instance of itsnormative character. In their �ight to a non-place the populist intellectuals couldconceive themselves as liberators or, at least, as liberated subjects. And it wasthere that the aporia emerged: the normative agents of national identity, in thefoundational period of populist Regionalismo, escaped from their own regulatorymachine, revealing the impossibility of their enterprise. This is why each one ofthe escapes represented in the novels studied could only end up in a return—asin Canaima and La galera de Tiberio—submission—as in Pobre negro and Tierratalada—or, eventually, in the death of the intellectual—as in Puros hombres.

From that point onward, the national literature travels through a territory ofrisk. This �ight from the limits of identity tales concludes in the production ofintimate and self-referential narratives, seen as the space in which an aestheticof ‘universal’ value must be located. In the act of founding and consolidating theautonomy of the aesthetic realm, national literature detaches itself from thepossibilities of representation of the nation.21 Even taking into account thetensions produced in this period by the limits on the intellectual function ofrepresenting the national, it is possible to say that regionalista novels assembleda wide range of images that represented excluded sectors in a dialogic form. Thisoption has not been retrieved by the hegemonic trend of contemporary nationalliterature. Even now, Venezuelan literature has an unsettled debt with vastsectors of the national imaginary.

Notes

1. A �rst version in Spanish of this text was published in Ciberletras, Vol. 4:www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras. I wish to thank Catherine Boyle, Elisa Sampson Vera Tudelaand David Treece for their invaluable help in the translation and editing of this text.

2. Mass-media industries were not the only threat to the institution of literature at the beginningof the twentieth century. Since the last decades of the nineteenth century, changes in theeconomic, political and social realms have produced a rearrangement in social institutions,among which the �eld of art in general has been questioned. See Burger (1992, pp. 13–29). Fora discussion on Burger’s concept of Institution of Art–and particularly Literature as Institution–in the Latin American context, see Ramos (1989, pp. 82–111).

3. The novels on which this analysis is based are the following: Canaima (1935) and Pobre negro(1937) by Romulo Gallegos, Mene (1936) by Ramon D õ az Sanchez, Tierra talada (1936) by AdaPerez Guevara, Puros hombres (1938) by Antonio Arraiz, La galera de Tiberio (1938) by EnriqueBernardo Nunez, Madrugada (1939) by Julian Padron, Campeones (1939) by Guillermo Meneses,Fiebre (1939) by Miguel Otero Silva and Mar de leva (1941) by Jose Fabbiani Ruiz.

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4. See Perus (1991, pp. 417–472).5. Cultural populism, as a form of anti-intellectualis m that attempts to erase the distance between

producers and ‘popular’ receivers, has been investigated as a crucial issue of contemporaryculture. See Jameson (1995, pp. 11–14; 1996, pp. 210–222) and Ross (1989).

6. I am following here the ideas of Jesus Mart õ n-Barbero on the popular matrixes of some of thediscourses that circulate through mass-media industries. See Mart õ n-Barbero (1991). Mart õ n-Bar-bero’s proposal has a Bakhtinian foundation which I endorse throughout this article, in the sensethat genres of high culture, like the novel, are nourished by popular genres. See Bajtõ´n (1993).

7. Quotations are from Blanco (1976). However, I have quoted from a facsimile edition of this text(Blanco, 1985), originally published by Elite in 1941, entitled Programa pol õ tico y discursos delcandidato popular Romulo Gallegos, the response of the audience registered as applause and cheersin parentheses. In this facsimile the editors assure us that the speech was copied by astenographer present while the speech was delivered, in the Nuevo Circo.

8. Although his candidacy was symbolic at this particular moment, Romulo Gallegos was �nallyelected President of Venezuela in 1947 and he held of�ce from February to November in 1948.He was presented as a candidate for the political party ‘Accion Democratica’ [Democratic ActionParty], and was elected by the �rst universal, direct and popular election in the country. Thiselection was arranged after a military and civilian coup d’etat. Some of the of�cials who wereinvolved in the �rst coup in 1945 were the same who dismissed Gallegos in the military coupof 1948. It is important to notice that all the leaders involved in political movements at the timecan be considered as populists. This includes the of�cers of the army that brought downGallegos and wielded political power until 1958. Manuel Caballero (1999, pp. 93) has observedthat the military of�cers who overthrew Gallegos had obtained the approval of the masses inthe same process of populist political reform made possible in the years 1945–48.

9. I use here the concept of populism developed by Ernesto Laclau. In his view, ‘what transformsan ideological discourse into a populist one is a peculiar form of articulation of the popular-demo-cratic interpellations in it. … populism consists in the presentation of popular-democrati c interpella-tions as a synthetic-antagonistic complex with respect to the dominant ideology.… Populism starts atthe point where popular-democratic elements are presented as an antagonistic option againstthe ideology of the dominant bloc. Note that this does not mean that populism is alwaysrevolutionary. It is suf�cient for a class or class fraction to need a substantial transformation inthe power bloc in order to assert its hegemony, for a populist experience to be possible’ (1977,pp. 172–173, emphasis in the original). On populism as related to national literature, see Sommer(1983). In Venezuela, populism as a political experience was a crucial ingredient of the strugglesfor legitimisation of the emergent groups that attempted to prevail in the political realm afterthe death of the dictator, General Juan Vicente Gomez, in 1935. The options were reduced to apolitics of the centre-left or centre-right, since communism and anarchism were prohibited byconstitutional law. For a complete view of the emergence and development of populist discoursein Venezuela, in the political �eld, see Britto Garc õ a (1988, 1989). See also note 5 above.

10. The counter-�gure of the populist intellectual–or perhaps his complementary alter ego–is thesocial communicator. The paradigmatic �gure of this new communications professional inVenezuela around 1920s and 1940s is Edgar Anzola. Anzola was a pioneer chauffeur–hetransported the �rst automobiles to Caracas–he was a mechanical expert, sportsman, salesman,photographer, �lm maker, scriptwriter, broadcaster, actor, publicist, producer of records, �lms,and radio programmes … . This long list of just some of his occupations gives us an idea of thenew kind of knowledge that was used by communications professionals. These were the newprofessionals who produced and disseminated a different kind of identity tale through themass-media industry, related not only to the nation but also to a broader, international spacecalled modernity.

11. Juan Bimba was created by Andres Eloy Blanco during his years in prison (see Blanco, 973,pp. 289–325). The character was depicted for the �rst time in a cartoon in April 1936 by thecartoonist Mariano Medina Febres (Medo) in a caricature made for the newspaper Ahora. On thecartoonist known as Medo, see Liscano (1991).

12. ‘Las promesas ambiguas’ is the title of Bernard Lavalle’s (1993) book on colonial criollismo.13. Following Paul de Man, it is worth noting that allegorical narratives are based on calligraphic

techniques whose aim is the correct decodi�cation of messages that have to be transmitted withthe least noise possible. Hence their apparent realism. In De Man’s words, ‘Allegory is thepurveyor of demanding truths, and thus its burden is to articulate an epistemological order of

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Populist Narrative in 1930s Venezuela 203

truth and deceit with a narrative or compositional order of persuasion. In a stable system ofsigni�cation, such an articulation is not problematic; a representation is, for example, persuasiveand convincing to the extent that it is faithful, exactly in the same manner that an argument ispersuasive to the extent that it is truthful’ (De Man, 1981, p. 2).

14. As Fernando A õ nsa has pointed out, ‘a partir de 1865 y hasta 1914, el continente americanovuelve a ser la Tierra Prometida, la Jauja y la Cucana de las viejas tradiciones medievales.Combinada con estos mitos la utop õ´a reaparece en la motivacion y el esp õ´ritu “fundacional” delos vastos movimientos inmigratorios de �nes del siglo XIX y principios del XX.… La funcionde la utop õ´a en este perõ odo es nuevamente espacial y geogra�ca. Las ideas e ideologõ as sesubordinan a un renovado esp õ ritu de colonizar en la perspectiva de una America en la que sereconoce la Tierra Prometida. De golpe se descubren nuevos espacios para la conquista, nuevosterritorios donde grupos etnicos, religiosos o polõ´ticos pueden instalarse libremente. Las locali-dades que evocan el Paraõ so perdido desde su propio nombre, se multiplican, … Puerto Alegre,Ciudad Para õ so, Puerto Eden, Valpara õ so, pueblan la nueva geograf õ´a humana del continente. Ladialectica utop õ a-realidad de la inmigracion se simpli�ca y la idealizaci on de America se reducea los terminos de “hacer America”’ (1992, p. 21). In the case of Venezuela it is possible to saythat this Utopian idea of a territory open to conquest can be found in national narratives untilthe 1950s.

15. Ortiz (1996, p. 129).16. These novels have some of the characteristics of ‘minor literatures’ pointed out by Deleuze and

Guattari (1978) as counterbalancing a major or hegemonic cultural stream. Therefore, I use herethe images of fugitive �gures, erratic characters, escape and �ight.

17. This is a traditional reading that has been contested by contemporary criticism. See, amongothers, Barrios (1994), Gonzalez (1996), Lasarte (1992, 1995), and Silva Beauregard (1993).

18. Five out of the ten novelists studied in this article have been awarded the Premio Nacional deLiteratura, the highest award given in Venezuela to a writer. The authors are: Romulo Gallegos(who is also the only Venezuelan writer to be nominated for the Nobel prize in Literature),Ramon Dõ´az Sanchez, Miguel Otero Silva, Jose Fabbiani Ruiz, and Guillermo Meneses. Perhapsit is no coincidence that the �ve authors not awarded the Premio Nacional are precisely thosewho wrote the novels called here ‘dispersive’.

19. Antelo (1998, p. 89). Our translation.20. As Jose�na Ludmer has established: “Para el estado liberal que se autode�ne como tal, las

versiones polõ´ticas opuestas … son igualmente validas porque las absorbe o, mejor, porquepostula su novedad precisamente en la absorcion de las diferencias polõ´ticas de la nacion anterior a suconstitucion. Entonces el estado liberal … transforma las versiones alternativas en sus comple-mentos culturales, … en coalicion. Y los cuentos … [de esta generacion] se transformaron en‘clasicos’ de la cultura argentina.” (Ludmer, 1999, pp. 45–46).

21. This is the tendency of national literature that has become hegemonic in the 1990s. Luis BrittoGarc õ a has described this tendency as ‘the exquisite culture’: “La cultura exquisita es tensa.Dedicada al �ngimiento agotador de un poder que no tiene, su descanso es el estiramiento, sureposo aparentar. Monstruosa primordializaci on de lo accesorio, banalidad revestida con lasgalas de lo trascendente, la exquisitez fagocita y vindica todo aquello que por la ciscunstanciapierde funcion, … la chimenea y el tapado de pieles en el tropico, el maquillaje en la playa, elalmidonamiento en la pechera y en la literatura. La cultura exquisita rehuye todo cuestion-amiento de fondo: todo fondo.… Mientras la cultura a secas perfecciona, reelabora, enriquece osobrepasa lo natural, la exquisita lo excecra, impide la circulacion del aire en el tropico, la dela sangre en el corse, la de las ideas en la sociedad. La sublimidad es foranea y extemporanea,… abomina del aqu õ y el ahora, implacables marcos de toda creacion” (Britto Garc õ a, 1998). Thehegemonic role of this ‘exquisite culture’ does not mean that there are not counter-hegemonictendencies. Luis Britto Garc õ a is one of the contemporary authors who represents one of thesenon-hegemonic approaches. Another tendency, different from the dominant narrative, is thatrelated to testimony; see Ramõ rez (1998).

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