René Marqués
René Marqués was a prominent literary figure in mid-twentieth century Puerto Rico, recognized for his diverse body of work that includes plays, short stories, novels, and essays. Born in 1919 in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, he grew up on a farm which shaped his agrarian values and beliefs in independence and self-reliance. Marqués's life was marked by contradictions; he was a revolutionary advocating for Puerto Rican independence while also embracing aspects of urban life, having studied in Spain and the United States. His most famous play, "La carreta" (The Oxcart), poignantly explores the challenges faced by rural families forced into urban environments, highlighting themes of colonialism and the impact of American domination on Puerto Rican identity.
Marqués was part of a literary movement known as the Generation of the Forties, which critiqued the dehumanizing effects of urbanization. His writing often employed allegorical and magical realism to convey complex themes of isolation and alienation. Despite enjoying significant acclaim in the late 1950s, including multiple awards for his works, he faced declining recognition towards the end of his life, especially as younger writers began to adopt new ideological influences. Marqués passed away on March 22, 1979, leaving behind a rich legacy as a vital voice in Puerto Rican literature.
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Subject Terms
René Marqués
Writer
- Born: October 4, 1919
- Birthplace: Arecibo, Puerto Rico
- Died: March 22, 1979
- Place of death: San Juan, Puerto Rico
Biography
René Marqués was a leading literary figure in Puerto Rico in the mid-twentieth century. He wrote in numerous genres, producing plays, short stories, novels, and essays. Marqués’s life and personality were filled with contradictions. On the one hand, he was a revolutionary calling for Puerto Rican independence; on the other, he was a reactionary espousing the simple values of an agrarian society. He denounced American and European culture, but he studied in Spain and the United States and adopted literary styles from European and American writers. He extolled a farmer’s rural life, but he became a man of letters living in the city. From the late 1940’s to the early 1960’s, he was virtually lionized in Puerto Rico, but he was largely ignored in the last fifteen years of his life.
Marqués was born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, in 1919 and grew up on his grandparents’ farm. He later pursued a course of study in agronomy at the Colegio de Agricultura y Artes Mecánicas in Mayagües, graduating in 1942. He championed agrarian values, including independence and self- reliance within a patriarchal society. In keeping with these views, he saw the city as a place of degradation and corruption. Nevertheless, he spent all of his professional life in the cities of Arecibo and San Juan, Puerto Rico; studied for a year at the Universidad de la Madrid in Madrid, Spain; and lived for a year in New York City, studying at Columbia University and the Piscator Dramatic Workshop.
His literary career had its beginnings in his column “Crónicas de España,” written while he was in Madrid and published in the Puerto Rican newspaper El Mundo. He came to be regarded as a member of the Generation of the Forties or the Desperate Generation, along with other writers such as Lorenzo Homar, José Luis Gónzales, Pedro Juan Soto, José Luis Vivas Maldonado, and Emilio Diaz Valcárcel. These writers spoke out against colonialism, the dilution of Puerto Rican society by American domination, and the dehumanizing effects of urbanization.
These convictions appear vividly in one of Marqués’s earliest and best-known plays, La carreta (The Oxcart, 1969), written in the late 1940’s and produced in San Juan in 1951. The play follows the struggles of a rural family forced by circumstances to move to the slums of San Juan and then to New York. The play later was produced in New York in 1954 and 1965 and in Madrid in 1957.
La carreta, however, differs in style from most of Marqués’s other work. Generally, he adopted a style that departed from literal realism, opting instead for a kind of allegorical poetic realism. This is evident in his play El hombre y sus sueños, which borrows its allegorical style and some of its effects from La vida es sueño, a play by the seventeenth century Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca. More typical of Marqués’s work is the Magical Realism found in Los soles truncos, one of his most frequently produced plays. The drama is the story of three elderly sisters, one of whom is dead but appears in the memories of the others. The short stories in his collection, Otro día nuestro. and in two of his novels, La víspera del hombre and La mirada (1975; The Look, 1983), reflect an existential theme of isolation and alienation using the techniques of dreams and flashbacks.
The year 1958 was the peak of Marqués’s career. He received first prize in a contest sponsored by the Ateneo Puertorriqueño in four categories: short story (“La sala,”), drama (Un niño azul para esa sombra), novel (La víspera del hombre), and essay (“Pesimismo literario y optimismo politico: Su coexistencia en el Puerto Rico actual”). Marqués’s writing in the late 1960’s and 1970’s tended to use historical, biblical, or legendary material treated allegorically, as exemplified by his plays Sacrificio en el Monte Moriah, David y Jonatán, and Tito y Berenice. However, by the 1970’s, many younger writers had turned to Marxist ideologies and turned their backs on the old master. Marqués died on March 22, 1979.