Carlos Real de Azúa (March 15, 1916 – July 16, 1977) was a Uruguayan lawyer, professor, essayist, sociologist and historian.[1]
Biography
Real de Azúa Real was born into an old Uruguayan family, the first Real de Azúa having arrived at the Río de la Plata in 1794. He was a Catholic and, in his youth, an enthusiastic fascist and anti-liberal, an admirer of the Falange Española (a Spanish Fascist movement that was active in 1933-34), a fan of the right-wing journalist and politician Benito Nardone (who would later become president of Uruguay in 1960-61), and an outspoken critic of Batllism (the statist and redistributionist political philosophy of José Batlle y Ordóñez, president of Uruguay from 1903 to 1907 and 1911 to 1915).
In his later life, Real described his early ideological journey as a beginning with “antitotalitarianism” and then progressing to “tercerismo” (i.e. “thirdism,” a via media between SovietCommunism and Western democratic capitalism), to “the left and autonomous action,” to “the balanced left,” and ultimately to “advocate for the devil of the left and Marxism.” In 1948, he began to write for Marcha, an influential leftist weekly edited by Carlos Quijano. His writings for Marcha indicated a movement from the right to the left, although he was always viewed as retaining elements of his reactionary youth.[2] He also joined the Popular Union, a left-wing party.[3]
His writings have been described as conveying a “horror of the void” and can be categorized variously as belonging to the genres of history, political essay, cultural criticism, and “criticism of customs.” His prose style was extravagant and complex, “made up of a slow chaos of periods that wind endlessly through the paragraph, and where the subordinates and parentheses are encapsulated within each other like Russian dolls.” One critic considers him one of the three leading members of his generation of Uruguayan writers, the other two being Rama and Monegal. His work was frequently described as “arborescent,” which means “resembling a tree,” but which in his case was used by critics in the sense established by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, namely “to characterize thinking marked by insistence on totalizing principles, binarism, and dualism.” The critic Roberto Echavarran called him “the baroque historian.” Rama praised him as a first-rate example of the “sociological imagination.”[2]
From 1937 to 1966, he taught literature at the secondary-school level. From 1954 to 1967, he was a professor at the Instituto de Profesores Artigas, teaching courses in Ibero-American literature and in the literature of the Rio de la Plata region. From 1952 to 1976, he taught Literary Aesthetics at the same institution. He was also a professor of Political Science at the Faculty of Economic Sciences from 1967 to 1974.[6]
Real de Azúa never married. A centenary tribute described him as “a solitary gentleman” and noted that while he did not write explicitly about sexual orientation, he emerges in his work as an “elegantly melancholic” figure who is “like a character out of Luchino Visconti.”[2]
Selected works
El patriciado uruguayo (1961)
Problemas de la enseñanza literaria: la elección de autores (Asir. 1961)