Rómulo Gallegos was a chronicler of his place and time. The charm projected on his spirit by the stories of an optimistic modernity led his firm hand in the design of an image of a modern nation for Venezuela, inspired by the possibility of progressive knowledge, social and moral improvement, and the re-establishment of a policy associated to virtue and law. An acknowledgement of foundations was inherent to that charm, as well as the notion of model, so dear to the western tradition that demanded quality, insisted on values, and recommended or prescribed lifestyles, two axes of a project that could be achievable due to the best regulatory device, Education. In this article I examine how writing was for Gallegos a cultural practice essentially associated to these axes and to that device because of its mission character and its possibility to organize multiple or complex realities. This cultural practice was also the way to canalize its programmatic pulse through performative statements that showed the Venezuelan reality and made the public believe what that reality was like in the view of a group that even standing against-power, enjoyed part of the monopoly of the discursive production of that reality. From this position I focus on Pobre negro (1937) and I establish its connection to some XIXth century scholars through the élan pédagogique or bequest of the Illustration, in the deep conviction that “education could do everything”.
La literatura se acompasa a la nación. Rómulo Gallegos y su Venezuela moderna