Manuel González Prada
Encyclopedia
Peru
Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....
vian politician and anarchist, literary critic and director of the National Library of Peru
Biblioteca Nacional del Perú
The Biblioteca Nacional del Perú is the national library of Peru, located in Lima. It is the country's oldest and most important library. Like the majority of Peruvian libraries, it is a non-circulating library.- History :...
. He is well remembered as a social critic who helped develop Peru
Peru
Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....
vian intellectual thought in the early twentieth century, as well as academic style known as modernismo
Modernismo
Modernismo is Spanish for modernism, however the term Modernism also indicates a more specific art movement:* Modernismo refers to a Spanish-American literary movement, best exemplified by Rubén Darío...
.
Early life and literary contributions
He was born on January 6, 1844 in LimaLima
Lima is the capital and the largest city of Peru. It is located in the valleys of the Chillón, Rímac and Lurín rivers, in the central part of the country, on a desert coast overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Together with the seaport of Callao, it forms a contiguous urban area known as the Lima...
to a wealthy, conservative, Spanish family. His education began at the English school in Valparaiso, continued in a seminary, and once his father refused to let him travel to Europe, he enrolled at the University of San Marcos in Lima, studying law. He was an original partner in the Lima Literary Club and he participated in the foundation of the Peruvian Literary Circle, a vehicle to propose a Literature based on science and the future. His most famous book, Free Pages, caused a public outcry that brought González Prada dangerously close to excommunication
Excommunication
Excommunication is a religious censure used to deprive, suspend or limit membership in a religious community. The word means putting [someone] out of communion. In some religions, excommunication includes spiritual condemnation of the member or group...
from the Catholic Church. His mother, a devout Catholic, died in 1888 and his criticism became more vitriolic afterwards. He said the Church "preached the sermon on the mount and practiced the morals of Judas." In fact González Prada was part of a group of social reformers that included Ricardo Palma
Ricardo Palma
Manuel Ricardo Palma Soriano was a Peruvian author, scholar, librarian and politician. His magnum opus is the Tradiciones peruanas.- Biography :...
, Juana Manuela Gorriti
Juana Manuela Gorriti
Juana Manuela Gorriti was an Argentine writer with extensive political and literary links to Bolivia and Peru.-Biography:Juana Manuela Gorriti was born in Salta near the Bolivian border. She came from a wealthy upper class family, and attended a convent school when she was eight...
, Clorinda Matto de Turner
Clorinda Matto de Turner
Clorinda Matto de Turner was a Peruvian writer who lived during the age of the Latin American independence movements. Her own independence inspired women throughout the region as her writings sparked controversy in her own culture.- Biography :She was born and raised in Cuzco, Peru...
and Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera. These important authors were concerned with the enduring influence of Spanish colonialism in Peru. González Prada was perhaps the most radical of them all. The most radical work he published during his lifetime was Hours of Battle, translated as Hard Times.
Besides being a minor philosopher and a significant political agitator, González Prada is important as the first Latin American author to write in a style known as modernismo
Modernismo
Modernismo is Spanish for modernism, however the term Modernism also indicates a more specific art movement:* Modernismo refers to a Spanish-American literary movement, best exemplified by Rubén Darío...
(modernista in Spanish, different from Anglo-American modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
) poet in Peru, anticipating some of the literary innovations that Rubén Darío
Rubén Darío
Félix Rubén García Sarmiento , known as Rubén Darío, was a Nicaraguan poet who initiated the Spanish-American literary movement known as modernismo that flourished at the end of the 19th century...
would shortly bring to the entire Hispanic world. He also introduced new devices such as the triolet, rondel and Malayan pantun which revitalized Spanish verse. Besides his poetry, he cultivated the essay, and most recently Isabelle Tauzin Castellanos has published some of his hitherto unknown fiction. His intellectual and stylistic footprint can be found in the writing of Clorinda Matto de Turner
Clorinda Matto de Turner
Clorinda Matto de Turner was a Peruvian writer who lived during the age of the Latin American independence movements. Her own independence inspired women throughout the region as her writings sparked controversy in her own culture.- Biography :She was born and raised in Cuzco, Peru...
, Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, José Santos Chocano
José Santos Chocano
José Santos Chocano Gastañodi was a Peruvian poet who is also known as "The Singer of Americas", because the first line of one of his most celebrated poems: "I am the singer of the America, Autochthonous and Savage""...
, Aurora Cáceres
Aurora Cáceres
Zoila Aurora Cáceres Moreno was a writer associated with the literary movement known as modernismo. This European-based daughter of a Peruvian president wrote novels, essays, travel literature and a biography of her husband, the Guatemalan novelist Enrique Gómez Carrillo.Her life itself is...
, César Vallejo
César Vallejo
César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza was a Peruvian poet. Although he published only three books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language. Thomas Merton called him "the greatest universal poet since Dante"...
, José Carlos Mariátegui
José Carlos Mariátegui
José Carlos Mariátegui La Chira was a Peruvian journalist, political philosopher, and activist. A prolific writer before his early death at age 35, he is considered one of the most influential Latin American socialists of the 20th century...
and Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquis of Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian-Spanish writer, politician, journalist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading authors of his generation...
.
The Question of Sources
To talk about González Prada’s sources and influences would be to write an encyclopedia of European and Latin American thought during his lifetime. Suffice to say that some of his major influences were Auguste ComteAuguste Comte
Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte , better known as Auguste Comte , was a French philosopher, a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism...
, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French politician, mutualist philosopher and socialist. He was a member of the French Parliament, and he was the first person to call himself an "anarchist". He is considered among the most influential theorists and organisers of anarchism...
, Ludwig Gumplowicz
Ludwig Gumplowicz
Ludwig Gumplowicz, born March 9, 1838 in Kraków, then a republic, now part of Poland, died August 20, 1909 in Graz, Austria, was one of the founders of European sociology. He was also a jurist and political scientist who taught constitutional and administrative law at the University of...
, Ernest Renan
Ernest Renan
Ernest Renan was a French expert of Middle East ancient languages and civilizations, philosopher and writer, devoted to his native province of Brittany...
, Juan Montalvo
Juan Montalvo
Juan María Montalvo Fiallos was an Ecuadorian author and essayist.Born in Ambato to José Marcos Montalvo and Josefa Fiallos, he studied philosophy and law in Quito before returning to his hometown in 1854. He held diplomatic posts in Italy and France from 1857 to 1859...
, Clorinda Matto de Turner
Clorinda Matto de Turner
Clorinda Matto de Turner was a Peruvian writer who lived during the age of the Latin American independence movements. Her own independence inspired women throughout the region as her writings sparked controversy in her own culture.- Biography :She was born and raised in Cuzco, Peru...
, Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was a well-known Russian revolutionary and theorist of collectivist anarchism. He has also often been called the father of anarchist theory in general. Bakunin grew up near Moscow, where he moved to study philosophy and began to read the French Encyclopedists,...
and many, many others. One way to put it—and perhaps oversimplify it—is to say that González Prada was first a positivist following Auguste Comte, but that later in life, as he took up the working class's cause and anarchism
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
, he came closer and closer to thinkers such as Renan, Proudhon and Bakunin.
Politics
He was a member of the Civilista PartyCivilista Party
The Civilista Party was a conservative political party in Peru.Founded as a counter measure against the growing power of the military in Peru during the first half of the Republic, the party's sole purpose was to establish a civilian rule in the country...
but left to found with his friends, a radical party known as the National Union
National Union (Peru)
National Union was a political party in Peru.It was originally called the Radical Party by one of its founders Manuel González Prada. That name seemed too confrontational to many in the party and thus it became known as the National Union...
, a party of "propaganda and attack." This party named him as a presidential candidate, but he fled to Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
following persecution
Persecution
Persecution is the systematic mistreatment of an individual or group by another group. The most common forms are religious persecution, ethnic persecution, and political persecution, though there is naturally some overlap between these terms. The inflicting of suffering, harassment, isolation,...
. After the War of the Pacific
War of the Pacific
The War of the Pacific took place in western South America from 1879 through 1883. Chile fought against Bolivia and Peru. Despite cooperation among the three nations in the war against Spain, disputes soon arose over the mineral-rich Peruvian provinces of Tarapaca, Tacna, and Arica, and the...
, he returned to Peru in 1898. He stood as his party's Presidential Candidate in the Presidential election of 1899 and came third with 0.95% of the vote. After Peru's defeat in the War of the Pacific, he stayed in house for three years, refusing to look at the foreign invaders.
After his failure in the Presidential election he was asked to work for the newly formed government. He took up the post of director of the National Library of Peru, in the Abancay Avenue and helped to improve and reorganise the library to one of international stature. He died of a cardiac arrest on the 22nd of July 1918.
Although he didn't consider himself a Communist, Gonzalez Prada was close to Marx in economic theory. He opposed the Russian Revolution in 1917 and rejected the rigidity of the Communist party. He criticized the aristocratic class (of which he was a member) for its crimes and its wasting opportunity. Gonzalez Prada called on workers, students and Indians to take over reform Peru.
Quotes by Gonzalez Prada
on Peru:"We have never initiated a reform, never announced a scientific truth, nor produced an immortal book. We do not have men but mere echoes of men, we do not express ideas but repetitions of decrepit and moth-eaten phrases."On Revolution: "Revolutions come from above but are carried out from below. Their way lighted by the gleam on the surface, those who are oppressed in the depths see justice clearly and thrust forward to conquer it, without hesitating as to the means nor feeling fear as to the consequences. While the moderates and theoreticians imagine geometric evolutions or get all tangled up in the details of form, the multitude simplifies matters, taking them down from the nebulous heights and confining them to earthly practice. They follow the example of Alexander; they do not untie but cut the knot which binds them."
On Liberty: believed "that all liberty was born bathed in blood...Rights and freedom are never granted; they must be taken. Those who command give only what they must, and nations which sleep trusting their rulers to arouse them with the gift of liberty are like fools who build a city in the midst of a desert hoping that a river will suddenly flow through its barren streets."
Secondary bibliography
- Rufino Blanco Fombona, Grandes escritores de América, Madrid, 1917.
- Eugenio Chang-Rodríguez, La literatura política: De González Prada, Mariátegui y Haya de la Torre, Mexico, 1957, esp. pp. 51–125.
- John A. Crow, "The Epic of Latin America," Fourth Edition, pp. 636–639.
- Joël Delhom, "Ambiguités de la question raciale dans les essais de Manuel González Prada", en Les noirs et le discours identitaire latinoaméricain, Perpignan, 1997: 13-39.
- Efraín Kristal, Una visión urbana de los Andes: génesis y desarrollo del indigenismo en el Perú, 1848-1930, Lima, 1991.
- Robert G. Mead, Jr., Perspectivas interamericanas: literatura y libertad, New York, 1967, esp. pp. 103–184.
- Luis Alberto Sánchez, Nuestras vidas son los ríos…historia y leyenda de los González Prada, Lima, 1977.
- Isabelle Tauzin-Castellanos, ed., Manuel González Prada: escritor de dos mundos, Lima, 2006.
- Marcel Velázquez Castro, Las máscaras de la representación: el sujeto esclavista y las rutas del racismo en el Perú (1775-1895), Lima, 2005, esp. pp. 249–264.
- Thomas Ward, La anarquía inmanentista de Manuel González Prada. New York, 1998.
- Thomas Ward, “González Prada, la mente y las manos”. Revista Peruana de Filosofía Aplicada, año 9, núm. 11 (1999): 46-54.
- Thomas Ward. “González Prada: soñador indigenista de la nación”, en su Resistencia cultural: La nación en el ensayo de las Américas, Lima, 2004: 160-177.
External links
- Manuel González Prada page. Daily Bleed's Anarchist Encyclopedia (English)