Enrique Gomez Carrillo, intermédiaire culturel entre la France, l'Espagne et l'Amérique espagnole, 1873-1927
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Abstract EN:
Enrique gomez carrillo, who was born in guatemala in 1873 and died in paris - where he had been living since the age of nineteen - in 1927, was throughout his life an extremely important cultural go-between. His extrovert personality facilitated social contacts while his inveterate wanderlust enabled him to discover new worlds and to engage in new ac- tivities. Bewitched by the mirage of the city of light he was to spend his who- le life extolling fin-de-siecle paris and the symbolist literary move- ment which was set in it. His polymorphous professional life (journa- list, gossip-writer, translator, director of magazine, novelist) is e- choed by the thematic eclectism of his work and he gives a picture of life in paris - filtered through his own esthetic and ideological op- tions - which is multifarious and multiform. He remained, however, a prisoner of his adolescent dream, building up a mythical paris as he created a mythical image of the east. His rhetoric, respecting both its function of transmitting informa- tion and his personal, mythical and poetical vision of the world, cons- tantly oscillates between poetry and persuasion, a movement which is repeatedly resolved by fiction-making. The semantic structure of his speech reveals a dichotomous thought pattern. In fact, gomez carrillo's ideas, like his writings, seem to be rooted in myth and thus belong to the bourgeois mentality. Gomez carrillo's intellectual immobility is fully borne out by a comparison between his text and the context. His works were widely circulated during his lifetime when he was con- sidered as one of the most important representatives of spanish-american modernism. The neglect he has suffered since should not obscure the e- normous task of information and explanation that gomez carrillo, a me- diator between cultures, accomplished.
Abstract FR:
Enrique gomez carrillo, ne au guatemala en 1873 et mort a paris - ou il reside des l'age de dix-neuf ans - en 1927, remplit tout au long de sa vie un role d'intermediaire culturel de premier plan. Son extraver- sion psychologique facilite les echanges sociaux, de meme que son no- madisme chronique favorise la decouverte d'espaces nouveaux et elargit son champ d'activite. Fascine par le mirage de la ville-lumiere, il exalte jusqu'a sa mort le paris fin-de-siecle et le symbolisme litteraire auquel celui-ci sert de scene. Son polymorphisme professionnel (chroniqueur, echotier, tra- ducteur, directeur de periodique, romancier) allant de pair avec l'e- clectisme thematique de sa production, il transmet de la vie parisienne une image- passee au filtre de ses propres options esthetiques et i- deologiques - extremement variee. Cependant, bloque dans son reve d'a- dolescent, c'est un paris mythique qu'il construit dans son discours, tout comme il elabore une image mythique de l'orient. Obeissant a la fois a sa vocation informative et a une vision per- sonnelle du monde, poetisee et mythique, son systeme rhetorique oscil- le constamment entre une fonction persuasive et une fonction poetique, mouvement qui se resout de facon recurrente dans des effets-fiction. Quant a la structure semantique de son discours, elle revele une struc- ture de pensee dichotomique. En fait, la pensee de gomez carrillo, tout comme sa parole, semble participer de la pensee mythique et se ratta- cher par la a la mentalite bourgeoise. La confrontation entre le texte de carrillo et le contexte ne fait que confirmer le statisme mental du chroniqueur. Largement diffusee, son oeuvre est, de son vivant, appreciee comme l'une des plus importantes du modernisme hispano-americain. La defa- veur qu'elle connait par la suite ne doit pas faire oublier l'enorme tache d'information, de divulgation et de mediation culturelle qui fut celle de gomez carrillo.