A myth in decline and the decisive drift of the collective actant in the story “The Twilight of the Devil”, by Rómulo Gallegos

Abstract

Analysts of the work of the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos affirm that the author's stories were experiments for the creation of novels and that all his work is dominated by the barbarism/ civilization dichotomy. But the semiotic analysis of the story The Devil's Twilight shows that the tension between such values has inflections beyond the consolidated parameters. This follows the idea that the analysis of semiotic objects can be subject to parameters and conventions that are difficult to question, but rereading can detail how the text summons elements of the cultural heritage and makes present situations from the life of the current reader. This would understand the content of what is narrated by the significant object but would also recognize the agitations of the present reality. Here, the research has been carried out with two reading modes of reciprocal impact. In the studium, the internal organization of the text is addressed to establish, with Greimasian semiotics, the correlations between figures, actions and values contained in the narrative predicate. The punctum observes how the constituents of the verbal statement summon the cultural tensions that underlie the work, but also those that the reader can infer by correlating the statement with the surrounding reality. Both procedures support the hypothesis that history is about the decline of a myth that depends on the decisions of a people who are hesitant and coerced in the face of the project of modernity.