Background
José Enrique Camilo Rodó Pineyro was born in Montevideo on July 15, 1872, to a Catalan father who died when José was twelve.
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essayist literary critic writer
José Enrique Camilo Rodó Pineyro was born in Montevideo on July 15, 1872, to a Catalan father who died when José was twelve.
José attended primary school but left secondary school for part-time employment. He was largely self-taught.
José read broadly in the library left by his father and in the library of the Ateneo of Montevideo. An intellectual center in the arts and humanities, the Ateneo also provided the atmosphere that nourished Rodó's growth. He was greatly influenced by the works of French, Spanish, and British essayists and paid much attention to works on the United States. Rodó's youth was a period of great, and occasionally violent, change in Uruguay.
In March 1895, together with several other young men, Rodó founded the Revista nacional de literatura y ciencias sociales. Sixty issues appeared before its closing.
His work was unique to the extent that without a signature it was recognized even in Spain for his control of ideas and of the modernista literary style. The spiritual and intellectual unity of Latin America with Spain and Europe was Rodó's principal concern; he regarded even Brazil as a variation of this principle, and his main work, Ariel (1900), discussed his views in much detail.
In 1897 a revolution overthrew the President, and Rodó closed his journal in the interests of political peace and shortly after accepted a professorship in literature in the National University. Indicative of the open atmosphere was Rodó's recommendation by Samuel Blixen, publisher of an avowed anti-Catholic newspaper, for his own post.
In 1902 Rodó accepted election to the national Chamber of Representatives, where he served for 8 years.
Ariel was the third in a pamphlet series entitled La vida nueva. Other titles were El que vendrá (1897) and Rubén Darío (1899); the latter is a critical analysis of the work of the famed Nicaraguan poet. In 1906, reflecting his political experience, Rodó wrote Liberalismo y jacobinismo, a pamphlet.
In 1909 he published a book, Motivos de Proteo. A posthumous work is El camino de Paros, a collection of pieces written in 1916 and 1917.
On July 14, 1916, he left for Europe as foreign correspondent for publications in Montevideo and Buenos Aires. He died in Palermo, Italy, on May 1, 1917.
As a result of his refined prose style and the modernista ideology he pushed, Rodó is today considered the preeminent theorist of the modernista school of literature.
Rodó is best known for his essay Ariel (1900), drawn from The Tempest, in which Ariel represents the positive, and Caliban represents the negative tendencies in human nature, and they debate the future course of history, in what Rodó intended to be a secular sermon to Latin American youth, championing the cause of the classical western tradition. What Rodó was afraid of was the debilitating effect of working individuals' limited existence doing the same work, over and over again, never having time to develop the spirit. Among Uruguayan youth, however, he is best known for Parque Rodó, the Montevideo park named after him.
For more than a century now, Ariel has been an extraordinarily influential and enduring essay in Latin American letters and culture due to a combination of specific cultural, literary, and political circumstances, as well as for its adherence to Classical values and its denunciation of utilitarianism and what Rodó called "nordomanía" (explained below).
Rodó's influence on the young intellectuals and idealists of his time and Latin Americans up to the 1940s was enormous.
José opposed the government's open anti-Church position under José Battle but made no headway.
A stylist and moralist, José aimed especially to maintain Latin American thought and society on a basis of respect for traditional European humanistic and ethical values. Rodó's concerns for traditional values and proper use of the language were reflected in his publications. Since he never visited the United States, many of his ideas were less than accurate. But he stated strongly the principle of Latin uniqueness in contrast with the United States and set a standard that has retained importance. Rodó admired some aspects of American life: its technology, spirit of personal liberty and open society, respect for useful labor, and rapid growth of political greatness.
