8 - Tying Loose Ends: Public Intellectual and Popular Pedagogue (c. 1910–1916)

Summary

This chapter engages with material, not included in Rodó's books, which was written around three years either side of El mirador de Próspero (1913). It aims to account for work done and dusted, as it were, up to the point when Rodó left for Europe, on 14 July 1916, to embark on a journey that represented a break with his Uruguayan past and a new phase in his life and career – notwithstanding the strong continuities in the work he produced during his nine-month sojourn in the old world, until his untimely death.

The material can be divided into two broad categories, corresponding to two main groups of texts, though naturally there are connections between them. The first is what we can call, using a modern designation, the work of Rodó as a public intellectual, as he engages both with matters of the day and with more permanent issues associated with his essays. The adjective “public” is justified by his awareness of the potential impact of his ideas in the world through education in its widest sense. The texts in this group come mostly from three sections in OC: what the editor calls “literary courtesy”, which includes reviews, prologues and letters supporting the work of fellow writers (983–1031); miscellaneous writings (1175–214); and notes about the First World War (1217–40).

The second category represents a little-studied side of Rodó's production, namely his collaboration on two large-scale publications that adapted, for the Hispanic world, multi-volume encyclopaedic works that had been successful in the English language. Rodó developed a relationship with the International Publishing Society, an Anglo-American publishing house that set up a branch in Buenos Aires, and he acted as editor and contributor to two of their most important works. This material is, again, quite consistent with his major writings.

The Public Intellectual

Rodó did not himself use the term “intellectual” as a noun in his major works (Ariel, Motivos, and El mirador de Próspero), though the collective expression “intelectualidad” does appear, but he did employ the label in a 1900 letter to the Venezuelan writer César Zumeta, who had sent him a copy of his El continente enfermo (The sickly continent) (New York, 1899).