for example, is that of ‘toldos de razas abyectas,’ of ‘un gran continente abandonado a los salvajes incapaces de progreso’. For such a vision, the act of governing, of creating a nation is one of destruction and conquest. To govern is to subject the supposedly barbarous elements of America to the rule of a civilisation defined solely on European terms. And this is exactly the logic we follow when we speak of the “Third World” or of “underdeveloped” nations. 1.4 Nationalism and the founding of nations has therefore been primarily a criollo concern (remember the criollos are Europeans born on American soil). Some exceptions aside it is not really until the Mexican Revolution that we see the prominent political involvement of indigenous and mestizo America and its non-European concerns in the forging of the nation. Even where an indigenous past is celebrated, such as that of the Aztecs in 19th century Mexico, its primary purpose has been to provide an equivalent to the civilised antiquity of Europe’s Greece and Rome, civilisation still being understood on European terms. For a criollo ruling elite, as we shall see with Rodó’s writing in a moment, the threat of engulfment by an autochthonous American barbarism appears ever present. Civilisation remains something implanted with difficulty on this ‘other’ world, and lives a potentially tenuous existence in the cities and on the margins of a still savage continent. 1.5 The perspective of these criollo elites reveals an essential ambivalence in the quest for cultural and national identity in Latin America. As both Ernst Gellner and Benedict Anderson point out, the nation-state suffers the contradictory desire to both affirm its modernity while at the same time attesting to an authenticity grounded in a distant autochthonous past. In America this contradiction is amplified as the ‘civilised’ Latin American nation, as part of the process of self-legitimation, must somehow risk locating its foundations in precisely those ‘barbaric’ elements it has previously expelled in the process of becoming a nation. Yet the consequent attempt to dominate the ‘wild’ aspects of these autochthonous elements can only leave the nation struggling to conceal the rupture that divorces it from its own putative essence. 1.6 Thus the fundamental problem for both Rodó and Fernández Retamar is narrating and constructing the American nation’s identity. They both attempt to resolve in very different ways the question of what is an American nation, what are the ideals such a nation should be moving towards. Can a ‘civilised’ nation be created on a ‘barbarous’ continent? What is the relationship between the nation and modernity and progress in America. Can you have an authentic American nation modelled on European ideals of civilisation, modernity, and progress? These questions remain problematic, especially for Rodó, hence his desperate attempts and ultimate failure to resolve the opposition between the civilised and the barbarous, the foreign (European) and the autochthonous, and as we shall see, Ariel and Calibán. 2
So who or what are Ariel and Calibán for these two American authors? We shall begin with Rodó’s Ariel. This essay, published in 1900 and dedicated to ‘la juventud de América’ takes the form of an end of year lecture by a venerable old teacher ‘Prospero’ to his departing students. It is through this valetudinarian conceit that Rodó expounds his particular solution to the protracted Latin American search for identity and Ariel