José María Rivas Groot: un acercamiento a la dimensión pragmática de su narrativa breve en «Rocinante» y «Día de inocentes»

José María Rivas Groot: an Approach to the Pragmatic Dimension of his Short Stories in «Rocinante» and «Día de inocentes». Having a multiform intellect, José María Rivas Groot (Bogotá, 1863-Rome, 1923) stood out as a public figure and a man of letters. Acting director of the National Library, senator, minister of state, plenipotentiary minister of Colombia to the Holy See, journalist, editor and writer, vocation this latter forged in the family bosom and in which his conservative and Christian thought, defender of tradition, is manifested. His intellectual production covers a wide variety of literary genres: poetry, novel, short stories, theater and historical essays, among others. Although his short stories have remained, in a way, on the sidelines of anthologies and studies, it is a faithful testimony of his style and thought, in a time of turmoil, affected by strong social and political transformations, framed by the transition from the 19th to the 20th century. Through two of his short stories classified as unpublished, Rocinante and Día de inocentes, this article offers an approach to his short stories from a pragmatic perspective with the purpose of revealing its meaning and intentional value, in which transtextuality, symbolism and irony are resources to which he turns, as a faithful representative of the lettered city, to express his position in the face of circumstances, behaviors and attitudes typical of his space -time, which remain in force until today.

Modernity and Its Ruins in Of Love and Other Demons

In Of Love and Other Demons (1994), García Márquez presents a tableau of daily life in the city of Cartagena de Indias in the eighteenth century with the opening paragraphs of the novel, situating the center of the action in the harbor and a ship with slaves that had arrived from Guinea. In order to depict the city and its inhabitants, the narrator adopts the point of view of a chronicler, positioning himself within the discourses of power of the metropolis in colonial Latin America. This article analyzes the subversion of those discourses of power that the narrative voice carries out from within, as it seemingly anchors the action in an identifiable space and time, only to dismantle the pretension of progress, historical or otherwise. The narrator-chronicler—an extension of the author-journalist in the introductory pages to the novel—intertwines competing philosophies and ideologies not through the all-encompassing view of magical realism but by laying bare the binary oppositions enacted by “the lettered city.” Having been born from the bones discovered in the crypt of the convent, the whole narrative becomes a memento mori, its development punctuated by instances of illness and demise, such as the corpses of the slaves afloat in the harbor, or the annihilation of reason, both literally and metaphorically, signified in a diagnosis of rabies. Thus, the novel cannot but be an extension of death, an ironic chronicling of a progress arrested by its material and moral ruins.