Rodó’s Gaze on Europe

The paper studies José Enrique Rodó’s attitude towards Europe in the light of his experience during his only sojourn there in the last nine months of his life. It begins with a discussion of his theoretical writings on the subject of travel in his most ambitious work, Motivos de Proteo (1909). Next I consider his vision of the ideal journey as expressed in his correspondence and which his death prevented him from achieving fully; subsequently I explore the effect that the experience of travel had on him as shown in the columns he sent from Europe and in his private diary of the journey. The article is part of a Festschrift for Peter Beardsell and so my second aim is to be mindful of Beardsell’s most ambitious book, his last, which deals with the subject of the cultural relations between Europe and Latin America, and thus the second section relates my findings to Peter’s conclusions in Returning the Gaze. This is done through the analysis of the official speeches given at the time of the unveiling of the busts of Rodó and Ruben Darío in Paris, which show a subtle interaction between representatives of the Old and the New Worlds in which can be detected a mutual respect that would have been much to Rodó's liking.