Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937)

The Tragedy, Born and Made

Horacio Quiroga’s tragic life is as famous as his stories. At least at its most general and morbid aspects. As someone wrote last February, seven decades after his death “counting all the people that died around him is inevitable” (1).

When he was two months old, his father died after his shotgun accidentally went off. In 1981, his step father, paralytic, hemiplegic, blew off his head with a shotgun in front of Horacio. A decade later, two of his brothers died of typhoid fever and a few month later, Quiroga himself accidentally kills his friend Federico Ferrando of a bullet shot directly to the mouth. Years later, his first wife would decide to take her own life with poison dying on 6 December 1915 after eight days of agony. The same decision that would take Quiroga, on 18 February 1937 by consuming cyanide. The tragedy had finally reached him (2).

His most famous stories can be arranged the same way: El Almohadón de Plumas (The Feather Pillow), La Gallina Decapitada (The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories), El Hijo (The Son), El Hombre Muerto (The Dead Man), A la Deriva (Adrift), all with the same homogeneity and causality that marked his personal tragedies that had to do with money, and the writer’s life.

The literary value of his artwork has been as questioned the happenings of his life. As merciless as usual at the time of criticizing a colleague, Borges said, “Horacio Quiroga is actually a Uruguayan superstition. His stories are bad, emotionless and with an incomparable silliness” (3).

However, Lugonés “names him as the first American youth `prosiest`” (4). Precursor of Modernism in Uruguay, the value of his artwork cannot be discussed, being one of the pillars of the Uruguayan literature at the academic field seventy years after his death.

Despite some old conservators that read his modernist poems and stories with disgust and strongly rejected his work, skin-deep influenced by Poe, Chéjov and Maupassant, Quiroga managed to win a spot on the literary circuit of the Rio de la Plata (Buenos Aires and Montevideo). Arrecifes de Coral (Coral Reefs) was his first book; a poetry collage, poems in prose and tales, published in 1901 was read as a “finished proof of the Northern Europe neurotic tendencies” (5).

By that time, two major events would change his life’s path. First, the death of his friend Ferrando, from which he runs away to Buenos Aires terrified. The next year, he goes on an expedition with Lugonés to San Ignacio in the Misiones territory. Nothing would be the same again.

The mark left by the fateful happenings he had to suffer all his life was not as strong as the mark left by the discovery of the jungle, the place where his life and his work would be focused on since then on. The imitation of his teachers’ technique, which were sometimes on the verge of plagiarism, and the demands of the magazines that published his stories shortening them to a little bit more than 1,000 words, were essential for his growth as a writer. As he would later write “the story could not be longer than a page. Characterizing his characters, setting them in the scene, ripping the reader away from the usual apathy, to interest him, impress and shake him, all in one narrow page.”

Such influence and more specifically the one Poe left as well as his sick taste for horror, was “a matter of ability, not soul for it” (6).

The jungle would give him the soul; for his life, his stories and maybe even for his deaths.

Well into the art of writing, his tales were set in an unknown environment most of his readers did not know, which was key for many of his greatest stories.

The wide, detailed, precise descriptions of the environment in addition to an abundant torrent of information about the animals and people that live in it make the anecdotes stronger; and the reader, ignorant to what awaits on an unknown habitat, resigns to be taken “by the hand (…), firm until the end,” as Quiroga intended to take his characters in Decálogo del perfecto cuentista (The Perfect Story Teller Decalogue).

Quiroga worried about his characters, but did not overlook his readers. His highest virtues have to do “probably, with how he manages the suspense he cultivates and perfects when writing his tales and the language and style simplicity; but basically with how Quiroga takes care of the receptors’ interests” (7).

Back in Buenos Aires, he finds out that his stories are being published everywhere; stories that would later on become his most significant works: Cuentos de amor, de locura y de muerte (1917); Cuentos de la Selva (The Magic Jungle stories)” (1918); Anaconda (1921) and The Exiles and other Stories (1926), among other stories and tales that magazines constantly publish.

He is still as poor as he was back in Misiones and by that time he writes “whenever he needs money” which was one of his worse true tragedies, which was not to be able to live from what he writes.

He would marry once again at 49 years of age (his spouse was 20), and would have another daughter. Later on, with the release of his novel Past Love he sold 40 copies and quit writing. “I wrote a hundred stories, and have said everything I had to say,” he said. He went back to Misiones only to see his wife go away because she couldn’t get used to the way of life there. He also lost the only economically decent job he ever had. However, his friends got him a decent retirement. Soon after, he was diagnosed with cancer.

In 1929, 40 people were able to read: “Destiny isn’t blind. It’s fatal relationships obey to a still inaccessible harmony for us, a superior happiness hidden in the shadows, that we don’t notice yet.”

Notes:

1. Ñ Magazine, 02/24/2007
2. And it would chase him even after his death. A year later, his dear friend Argentine poet Alfonsini Storni left and walked to the sea with her pockets full of stones. That same year another of his dearest friends, Leopoldo Lugonés. His daughter’s time came in 1939 and his son’s years after.
3. Quoted in Ñ magazine, 24/02/2007
4. H. A. Murena, “El Horror”, in “Aproximaciones a Horacio Quiroga”, from Ángel Flores (editor), Monte Ávila, Venezuela, 1976
5. Quoted in El País Cultural # 654
6. H. A. Murena, ídem.
7. María de los Angeles González, El País Cultural # 664