Magical Realism and Catholic Sacramentalism in Arturo Uslar Pietri's "The Rain"

Abstract

Magical Realism and Catholic Sacramentalism in Arturo Uslar Pietri's "The Rain" Adam Glover (bio) Pietri, Magic Realism, Sacramentalism in Literature, Venezuelan literature I. Introduction Though largely unknown outside the Spanish-speaking world, the Venezuelan novelist Arturo Uslar Pietri (1906–2001) is among twentieth-century Latin America's most important and celebrated writers. The author of more than a dozen novels, scores of short stories, and several collections of essays, Uslar Pietri came of age during the first three decades of the twentieth century, when the European avant-garde had begun to displace the modernismo and criollismo that defined late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Latin American literature, and when what Uslar Pietri himself called an "unbelievably isolated" Venezuela began to take its first tentative steps into the modern world.1 As for so many other Latin American authors of the period, the avant-garde was central to Uslar Pietri's artistic development.2 And yet even during a transformative stay in Paris in the early 1930s, his attention rarely strayed from a set of preoccupations about national and cultural identity that would define his generation. "In a Paris spring," Uslar Pietri would later recall, "[I was] besieged by visions of my homeland. … It was the first time my creole spirit managed to give itself over with delight to the unrestricted expression [End Page 87] of its being."3 In time, the idea that the "creole spirit" might be best expressed in the experimental forms of the avant-garde would come to characterize not only a substantial portion of Uslar Pietri's own work, but also large swaths of the so-called Latin American "boom" of the 1960s and 1970s.4 Uslar Pietri's quest to blend the artistic sensibilities of the avant-garde with a set of social, political, and cultural concerns specific to Latin America runs like a thread through his work, but here I would like to explore its implications in a single story, "La lluvia" ("The Rain"), first published in Red (Net) in 1936.5 Uslar Pietri's most anthologized piece, and arguably his best, "The Rain" tells the story of Jesuso and Usebia, Venezuelan peasant farmers who, in the midst of a devastating drought, find their lives upended by the sudden arrival of a mysterious child. Although the child's identity remains deeply ambiguous throughout the narrative, his presence effects a radical transformation both in Jesuso and Usebia and in the natural environment. After a series of strange, dreamlike episodes in which the couple's arid, loveless marriage takes on unexpected shades of tenderness and optimism, the boy disappears just as inexplicably as he had appeared—and it begins to rain. From one angle, "The Rain" retains clear echoes of the criollista tradition: the rural setting, the extensive regional vocabulary, the relentless degradation of human characters at the hands of a pitiless natural world are all representative criollista tropes. Yet despite the unmistakable presence of such motifs, the story's criollismo is inflected at every point by what José Rivera Silvestrini calls "an atmosphere of mystery" that lends the entire narrative an aura of magic and fantasy.6 Silvestrini's observation is by now a critical commonplace. Like many other Latin American writers of the early and mid-twentieth century, Uslar Pietri has long been associated with "magical realism," a literary genre popular throughout the continent in which "reality is presented as if it were magical" and "everyday objects appear enveloped in such a strange atmosphere" that "they shock us if they were fantastical."7 "The Rain" fits comfortably within this tradition. The [End Page 88] Venezuelan critic Domingo Miliani calls it "a small masterpiece" of the genre.8 What has gone largely unnoticed, however, is that many of the features that align Uslar Pietri's narrative with magical realism also align it with a specifically Catholic conception of eucharistic sacramentalism. This oversight is not entirely surprising. Uslar Pietri is not a Catholic writer in any straightforward sense. In fact, although he was baptized into the Church as a child—his godparents were no other than Venezuela's then-president Cipriano Castro (1858–1924) and first lady Zoila Rosa (1868–1952)—there is no...