The pessimistic tradition in the Venezuelan intellectual discourse as object of study (approach of art's state)

Abstract

There is a general consensus that Venezuelan reality has been recurrently interpreted from fatalism or pessimism by the majority of the national intelligentzia. This situation allows to speak of a pessimistic tradition that is traceable from the early stages of the country’s Republican life. The following work gathers, through a documentary research, the main studies that have traced these pessimistic approximations of the national reality from the intellectual discourse, Specifically, a group of researchers is described finding in the contemporary intellectual discourse, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy of national failure by linking it with the negative self-image of being Venezuelan, problems of national identity and/or recurrent national crisis. This review brings together, mainly, the precursory works of Augusto Mijares (1952) and Luis Beltrán Guerrero (1962); as well as, the ones done by Maritza Montero (1991), Thamara Hannot (1996, 1997) and Aníbal Romero (2002), who are relevant in the content’s analysis of different texts and describe in detail the pessimistic intellectual discourse that consolidated throughout the 20^th century in Venezuela.