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Manuel González Prada: Peruvian Judge of Spain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 March 2021
Extract
It is no exaggeration to say that in the mind of a large number of Spanish American intellectuals during the nineteenth century Spain symbolized the origin of many of the cultural, social, and political ills which afflicted the Iberian New World. And this in spite of the admitted influence of the advocates of Spain and the defenders of her official policies, neither of whom have ever been lacking in Spanish America. From the earliest stages of the Conquest the criollo (Spanish American Creole) and mestizo were treated as the inferiors of the native-born Span-iards, or peninsulares, and felt themselves to be different from the Iberian conquistador. In the course of time this feeling of social separatism deepened. In addition to the Indian and Creole uprisings against the peninsulares, which persisted sporadically throughout the Colonial period and frequently were motivated more by political convenience than by ideological differences, another type of rebellion developed during the latter part of the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth centuries. And it was the latter—promoted in its intellectual aspects by such figures as Rodríguez, Miranda, Nariño, and Bello—in which were established the ideological bases of the liberation carried out by San Martín, Bolívar, and the Mexican patriots.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953
References
1 Bolivar himself gives an excellent synopsis of the feelings of the creoles toward Spain in has “Reply of a South American to a Gentlment of this Island [Jamaica]”—better known as “The Jamaica Letter”—written at Kingston in Sept 1815. See Selected Writings of Bolivar, ed. Hamid A. Bierck, Jr. (New York, 1951), I, 103-122. Recent scholarship, however, has shown that the intellectual climate was freer and the circulation of books somewhat greater in the Spanish Colonies—especially after 1600—than was generally supposed during the 19th century. See José Torre Revello, Ellibro, laimprenta y el periodismo en America durante la dominación espaflola (Buenos Aires, 1940), and Irving A Leonard, Books of the Brave (Cambridge, 1949).
2 Dos etapas del pensamiento en Hispanoamtrica (Mexico, 1949), p 3
3 Î’ pensamiento hispanoamericano (Mexico, 1944), pp. 17, 36.
4 Alianzs Popular Revolucionaria Americana, founded in Peru in 1919 and led since 1925 by Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, is a liberal, pro-Indian, anti-imperialist popular movement for social justice in the Andean countries of South America. Frequently sup-pressed by the conservative regimes in Peru, APRA has again been outlawed by the gov-ernment of General Manuel Odría, which seised power in 1948. For Prada's role in the be-ginnings of the movement see Robert E. McNicoll, “Intellectual Origins of Aprismo,” HAHR, XXIII (1943), 425-440 passim, and Harry Bernstein, Modern and Contemporary Latin America (Philadelphia, 1952), pp. 675, 678.
5 El tonel de Diógenes (Mexico, 1945), p. 178. He repeats this concept on pp. 44-45
6 Algunas consideraciones sobre la literature hispanoamericana (Buenos Aires, 1947), pp. 81-85.
7 Due to space-limitations, we will consider here only the ideas concerning Spain which appear in his prose. Moreover, the ideas on the theme to be found in his poetry do not dif-fer materially from those be expresses in his essays and articles. See especially among his volumes of verse Presbiterianas (Lima, 1909), Grafitos (Paris, 1937), sad Libertaries (Paris, 1938).
7 Letter from Alfredo González Prada, son of Manuel, New York, 3 Dec. 1942.
9 His widow gives an excellent description of the impressions he received during his stay in Spain. See Adriana Verneuil de González Prada, Mi Manuel (Lima, 1947), pp. 241-284.
10 Visiones y comentarios (Buenos Aires, 1949), p 119.
11 Horas de lucha (Buenos Aires, 1946), p. 105; Anarquia (Santiago de Chile, 1940), p. 150.
12 Mi Manuel, p. 251.
13 Prosa menuda (Buenos Aires, 1941), p. 237.
14 Nuevas páginas libres (Santiago de Chile, 1937), p. 25.
15 Ibid., pp. 215-216, and Pájinas libres (Lima, 1946), pp. 259-261.
16 José Gaos has called Pradas critique of Spanish literature in “execution” of tir great 19th-century writers and point, out that it was repeated by the Spanish generation of 1898. El pensamiento hispanoamericano, p. 27.
17 Pájinas libres, p. 268. It will be noted that in this citation (and in all subsequent quo-tation from this book) the reformed spelling which Prada used and advocated in this pe-riod has bean retained.
18 Prada loved the old ballads of Spain, as Carlos García Prada notes, introd. to Antologta poética de Gonzáles Prada (Mexico, 1940), p. xlvii.
19 Pájinas libres, pp. 13-16. Apparently Genzález Prada was one of the first in the Span-ish world to appreciate the innovatory value of Bécquer's. poetry. His criticism, which might well be contemporary, dates from 1887.
20 Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (Paris, 1931), p. 18.
21 It should be noted here that Prada's criticism of the Spanish language extends even to the illogical aspects he finds in standard Castilian orthography and for which he suggests a whole series of reforms, as had already been done in Spanish America by such men as Simón Rodríguez, Bello, and Sarmiento. See Rufino Blanco-Fombona, “Estudio preliminar” to Prada's book entitled Figuras y figurones, (Paris, 1938), pp. 114-115, and Luis Alberto Sánchez, prologue to Pájinas libres, pp. vii-viii.
22 See Pájinas libres, passim, Horas de lucha, pp. 198-214, and Prosa menuda, pp. 115-118, as well as Baladas peruanas among his works in verse.
23 These two generations, the first led by such men as Sanz del Río and Giner de lot Ríos, and the second by Ganivet and Unamuno, were the fountainheads of the effort to develop a new Spain, baaed on liberal and lay ideals, and were immediately opposed by the clerical and traditionalist parties. Much of whatever progress Spain has made m recent decades is due in no small part to the influence of these groups on all fields of Spanish thought. See J. B. Trend, The Origins of Modern Spain (Cambridge, 1934); Pierre Tobit, Les éducateurs de l'Espagne contemporaine (Paris, 1936); Pedro Lain Entralgo, La generación del noventa y ocho (Madrid, 1945), and H. Jeschke, Die Generation eon 1898 in Spanien (Halle, 1934).
24 Propaganda y atarque (Buenos Aires, 1939), pp. 127-130.
25 French pott and thinker (1854-88), whose philosophy was one of the early reactions against positivism. Prada and many other 19th-century Spanish-Americans were at-tracted by Guyau's thought, which was essentially a sociological idealism poetically ex-pressed. See Enrique Molina, Das filósofos contemporáneos: Gnyau y Bergson (Santiago de Chile, 1948).