Horacio Quiroga

Writer

• Born: December 31, 1878
• Birthplace: El Salto, Uruguay
• Died: February 19, 1937
• Place of death: Buenos Aires, Argentina

Other literary forms

Though famous to readers of Spanish American literature exclusively for his short fiction, Horacio Quiroga (aw-RATH-you kee-ROH-gah) wrote, to a limited degree and with equally limited success, in other forms. He published two novels, Historia de un amor turbio (1908; story of a turbulent love) and Pasado amor (1929; past love), as well as one theatrical work. He included poems in his first book, Los arrecifes de coral (coral reefs), a work written in the fin de siècle tradition of Spanish American modernism and completely anti-Quiroga in both style and content. He also wrote literary criticism and theory. His most famous (at least among experts in Spanish American fiction) foray into this particular area was a handful of articles that he wrote for the magazine El Hogar (the hearth), in which he discussed the theory and practice of writing short stories.

Achievements

Horacio Quiroga holds much the same position in Spanish American literature as does Edgar Allan Poe in North American letters. Like Poe, whom Quiroga admired and who influenced the Uruguayan writer’s work significantly, Quiroga dedicated his literary efforts almost entirely to the short-story genre, and in the process he not only penned some of the most famous and most anthologized stories to be found in Spanish-American literature but also wrote about the genre, even offering a decalogue of suggestions to other writers on how they should approach writing the short story. These suggestions appeared in his essay “Manual del perfecto cuentista” (manual for the perfect short-story writer), published in El Hogar on April 10, 1925.

Quiroga is without a doubt one of the most highly regarded and most widely read short-story writers in the history of Spanish American literature and is considered by most to be the foremost Spanish American short-story writer prior to the arrival of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and other writers of the so-called new narrative on the Spanish American literary scene. While critical interest in Quiroga diminished during the Borges and post-Borges eras, the Uruguayan writer’s popularity among readers did not—all of which, perhaps, is just as well, for Quiroga’s stories, with rare exception the highly polished gems of a consummate short-story writer, lend themselves far more to reader enjoyment than to literary criticism.

Biography

Two elements play significant roles in Horacio Quiroga’s life and also frequently find their way into some of the writer’s most famous stories. These two elements are tragic violence and the Uruguayan author’s fascination with the jungle-filled Misiones region of northern Argentina. The first of these elements, tragic violence, punctuates Quiroga’s life—so much so, in fact, that were his biography offered as fiction, it would almost certainly be roundly criticized for being unbelievable, for no one’s life in the “real world” could be so tragically violent, especially when a good portion of this violence comes through accident. The author’s fascination with the harsh jungles of Misiones cost him at least one wife and possibly a second, while this unforgiving environment provided him at the same time with the setting and thematic point of departure for many of his most famous stories.

Horacio Silvestre Quiroga y Forteza was born on December 31, 1878, in El Salto, Uruguay, the youngest of four children born to Prudencio Quiroga and Pastora Forteza. Three months after Horacio’s birth, don Prudencio was killed when his hunting rifle went off accidentally as he was stepping from a boat. Quiroga’s mother, doña Pastora, ashore with infant son Horacio in her arms, witnessed the tragic event and fainted, dropping her son to the ground. Later the same year, doña Pastora moved the family to the Argentine city of Córdoba. She remarried in 1891, taking Ascencio Barcos as her second husband, and the family moved to Montevideo, Uruguay. On a September afternoon in 1896, don Ascencio, having suffered a cerebral hemorrhage earlier, took his own life with a shotgun. Seventeen-year-old Horacio was the first to arrive on the scene.

Personal tragedy followed Quiroga in 1901 with the death of both his brother Prudencio and his sister Pastora. Then in 1902, the budding writer, who had published his first book, Los arrecifes de coral, the previous year, accidentally shot and killed one of his closest friends and literary companions, Federico Ferrando. After teaching off and on for several years in Buenos Aires, in September, 1909, Quiroga married Ana María Cirés and moved with her to San Ignacio, in the Misiones section of Argentina. Quiroga had first visited this jungle hinterland in 1903 with friend and Argentine writer Leopoldo Lugones. Enamored of the region, he bought land there in 1906 and divided his time between Misiones and Buenos Aires for the rest of his life. In 1915, unable to cope with the hardships of living in the jungle, Ana María poisoned herself, leaving Quiroga a widower with the couple’s two children. The following year, the writer returned to Buenos Aires, and over the next ten years he saw the publication of his most famous collections of stories, Cuentos de amor, de locura y de muerte (stories of love, madness, and death), South American Jungle Tales, Anaconda, and The Exiles, and Other Stories, all the while moving periodically between the backlands and the Argentine capital. He remarried in 1927, when he was forty-nine years old, taking a nineteen-year-old friend of his daughter as his second wife. Quiroga and his new wife moved to Misiones in 1931, but she returned to Buenos Aires with their infant daughter the following year. Quiroga’s health deteriorated significantly in 1934. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1936, where he was diagnosed with cancer the following year. He took a lethal dose of cyanide to end his life in February, 1937.

Analysis

Horacio Quiroga published approximately two hundred short stories, many of which are considered classics within the Spanish American literary canon. Most of the author’s stories, classics or not, fall within one or more of the following three general categories: Poesque stories of horror, often punctuated by madness and/or genetic defect; stories of human beings against a savage and thoroughly unromanticized nature; and Kiplingesque animal stories that frequently contain an underlying moral message. The vast majority of Quiroga’s stories are dramatic, intense, even memorable tales that captivate the reader and in general reveal a true master of the genre at work.

Some of Quiroga’s most popular stories come from the first of the three categories listed above, that of Poesque stories of horror, often featuring madness and/or genetic defect. Two widely read and exemplary stories from this category are “El almohadón de plumas” (“The Feather Pillow”), first published in 1907, and “La gallina degollada” (“The Decapitated Chicken”), first published in 1909.

“The Feather Pillow”

“The Feather Pillow” is the more purely Poesque of these two stories. In it, a newlywed woman falls mysteriously ill and quickly progresses toward death. Her husband and doctor are at a complete loss as to what ails her and what to do to help her. Finally, she dies. Shortly thereafter, a servant finds what appears to be two small punctures in her feather pillow. Further examination reveals that the pillow is inordinately heavy. The husband cuts the pillow open and in it finds a swollen creature (later identified as a bird parasite), which had been sucking the blood out of its victim for some time, literally draining the life out of her.

This story is both classic Poe and classic Quiroga. It is classic Poe in large part because of the horrific nature of its content. It is classic Quiroga for numerous elements, almost all of which have to do with the manner in which the writer presents the content. The story runs only three to five pages (depending on the print of the edition), yet in this short span the narrator takes the reader from an introduction of the characters to the conflict itself to the horrifying ending. As in most of Quiroga’s stories, not a single word is wasted, as each contributes not only to the tale being told but also to the overall effect of the story. This story is also a classic Quiroga story because of the inclusion of a seemingly insignificant detail, which at the time it is mentioned is almost overlooked by the reader (the narrator mentions rather offhandedly after several paragraphs about the couple’s relationship that the woman had taken ill); the dramatic and surprise ending (featuring the blood-laden anthropoid); and the foreshadowing of this ending (the narrator states that the woman had seen an “anthropoid” staring at her from the carpet, but the reader is told that this is a hallucination), even though the first-time reader is not aware that this is indeed foreshadowing at the time that he or she encounters it. Also typical of Quiroga in this story is the writer’s ability to turn a tale that deals with specific characters and apply its situation to the world of the reader. Quiroga accomplishes this in “The Feather Pillow” by adding a paragraph after the action of the story has ended in which the narrator states, matter-of-factly, that such creatures, bird parasites, are frequently found in feather pillows. In this way, the narrator makes the previously distanced and protected reader a potential victim of the same fate as the woman in the story. As a result, certainly more than a few readers of “The Feather Pillow” have checked their own pillows before sleeping on the night they read this story, an effect on the reader that would please both Quiroga and his chief influence for this story, Poe, to no small degree.

“The Decapitated Chicken”

“The Decapitated Chicken” is less purely Poesque and more in the naturalist tradition, but it is no less horrifying in content. The story opens with a couple’s four “idiot” (the word used by Quiroga) sons seated on a bench on a patio, their tongues sticking out, their eyes staring off into space. The narrator recounts how, with the birth of each son, the couple had hoped for a “normal” child and how each had blamed the other for the defective genes (a naturalist element) that produced the “idiot” sons. Finally, the couple’s fifth child, a daughter, is “normal.” She receives all the couple’s attention, while the sons are relegated to the less than loving care of a servant. One day, the four sons wander into the kitchen as the servant is cutting off the head of a chicken to prepare it for lunch. Later, by accident, both the sons and the daughter are left unattended. The daughter attempts to climb the garden wall on the patio, where her “idiot” brothers sit, her neck resting on the top as she works to pull herself up the wall. Captivated by the sight, the four sons grab the daughter, drag her into the kitchen, and behead her just as the servant had beheaded the chicken.

This story features several classic Quiroga traits that are also on display in “The Feather Pillow.” Chief among them are the early and rather offhand mention of something that will be of tantamount importance later in the story (the decapitation of the chicken) and the presence of subtle foreshadowing (the narrator mentions that though believed incapable of true learning, the four sons do possess at least a limited ability to imitate things that they see—again the decapitation of the chicken), though once again this foreshadowing is almost certainly missed by the first-time reader. This story also demonstrates Quiroga’s penchant for surprise and horrifying endings, endings that place Quiroga among the best writers of this type of tale.

Man versus nature

Some of the most famous stories from the second of the aforementioned categories—that concerning man against savage and thoroughly unromanticized nature—share many of the characteristics found in the stories referred to above: dramatic and detailed narration, the inclusion of an often seemingly insignificant detail or event that will eventually cause a character’s demise, subtle though undeniably present foreshadowing, death and/or surprise in the end, and no small amount of irony, particularly as it pertains to fate (an element that, though present in “The Decapitated Chicken,” is even more prominent in stories in this category). If Quiroga’s stories, particularly those of this second category, are any indication of his philosophy, then he saw human beings as anything but the masters of their own destiny, particularly in the harsh and unforgiving environment of the author’s beloved Misiones, where even the most careful person (and particularly the least careful) was at the mercy of the jungle. The slightest misstep or false move could spell disaster, and, in fact, it almost always did, if not in real life then at least in Quiroga’s stories. In this environment, Quiroga’s stories demonstrate, there is little or no room for error, and accidents befall even the most diligent of individuals. This is fairly vividly illustrated in some of the author’s most famous stories, such as “A la deriva” (“Drifting”), “La miel silvestre” (wild honey), “El hombre muerto” (“The Dead Man”), and “El hijo” (“The Son”).

“Drifting”

The first of these stories, “Drifting,” tells of a man who, by accident (and in the very first sentence of the story), steps on a snake and is bitten. A few pages later, after considerable (and detailed) effort to make his way by canoe downriver for help, he is dead. Near the end of the story, briefly, it seems as though the protagonist’s condition is improving, but his apparent improvement is but the illusion of a dying man, for a few sentences later he dies, another victim of the unforgiving environment in which he has lived. The protagonist of “La miel silvestre” (wild honey), an accountant, sets out to conquer the jungle, a world totally foreign to him. At one point, he stops to sample some wild honey. Within seconds, he is paralyzed, a result of the particular type of honey that he has eaten. Almost immediately thereafter, an army of carnivorous ants (skillfully foreshadowed by Quiroga earlier in the story) begins making its way toward him. His skeleton is found a few days later. The protagonist of “The Dead Man” is nearing the end of his work for the morning, clearing his banana grove with his machete and self-satisfied in his work, when suddenly, and quite by accident, he falls. He falls well, he believes, except, he soon discovers, for one significant detail: He has fallen on his machete. For the rest of the story, he watches as the rest of the world, from which he is suddenly and unexpectedly separated, goes on as usual around him, as he, helpless and unable to seek help, slowly dies, ironically, within sight of the roof of his own house.

“The Son”

In “The Son,” a father sees his son off as the latter heads into the jungle to hunt alone. While he is gone, the father thinks of his son and even imagines what he is doing at every moment. The reader is told that the father suffers from hallucinations (an important piece of information later in the story) and has often even envisioned the violent death of his son. When the father hears two shots in the distance, he believes that his son has killed two doves. Later, when his son does not return home on time, he sets off looking for him. While searching, the father imagines finding his son dead. The narrator suggests, however, that the father has found the son safe and sound. A final paragraph, though, separated from the rest of the text, reveals that this has been a hallucination and that the son, in fact, has died, much as his father had earlier envisioned, accidentally, by his own hand, his dead body entangled in a wire fence.

While Quiroga’s stories of horror seem to be intended principally for the entertainment of the reader, these stories of human beings versus the jungle unmistakably communicate the dual themes that human beings are indeed no match for nature and that life, ironically, can be whisked away not only suddenly but also by the slightest of accidents. This latter aspect of the writer’s thematic intent is nowhere more apparent than in “The Dead Man,” in which one moment the protagonist is working happily on his land and the next he lies dying, his life suddenly coming to an end, with neither pomp nor circumstance, as a result of a simple fall.

Animal stories

The third and final category in which one may easily classify Quiroga’s stories—that of Kiplingesque animal stories that frequently contain an underlying moral message—features, from a technical standpoint, probably some of the weakest of the Uruguayan author’s most famous stories. These stories are generally far less tightly structured, narratively less compact than those found in the first two categories, and in part, as a result, do not possess the dramatic intensity present in the other stories. Even the narrative voice is frequently different from that found in most of Quiroga’s other stories. While “The Feather Pillow,” for example, or “The Dead Man” features a distanced, omniscient narrator, these stories often read more like fairy tales, with the narrator’s voice more like that of an old storyteller. Their technical differences from Quiroga’s other stories aside, however, many, and in fact some of the author’s most widely read works, fit into this category and display, even more so than his other stories, the vivid imagination of their author.

Anaconda and “Juan Darién”

Two of the most famous stories from this category are Anaconda, the story (almost novella in length) of a group of snakes that band together in an attempt to kill the team of scientists who have invaded their territory and whose work to develop an antivenom serum threatens the snakes’ very existence; and “Juan Darién,” the story of a tiger cub that, through love, turns into a boy, a human, only to turn into a tiger once again and return to the animal world when he is rejected by humans for being different. The first of these two stories, Anaconda, is interesting, if nothing else, for its imaginative description of the snake world, complete with interspecies prejudice and a congress for debating issues of concern to the group. The second story, “Juan Darién,” with its Christ-figure protagonist, sends an obvious moral message concerning human intolerance and cruelty and with its magical reality in some ways serves as a precursor for the works of “new narrativists” such as Borges and Cortázar.

Quiroga is one of the most widely acclaimed and most popular short-story writers in the history of Spanish American literature. He is known, for the most part, for intense, even dramatic narration, the offhand inclusion of a pivotal detail or event, skillful foreshadowing, and surprising and frequently horrific endings. If Quiroga has one significant defect, it may be that his stories are a bit too predictable. A veteran reader of Quiroga can often identify the seemingly insignificant detail and the foreshadowing and immediately thereafter discern exactly where the story is going. This potential flaw, however, is hardly a defect at all since even if one can predict the story’s direction, even its outcome, the story is still entertaining and interesting, because of how Quiroga gets the reader to the outcome. In other words, much like an old joke for which one already knows the punch line but which one never tires of hearing, Quiroga’s stories, even his most predictable ones, are true pleasures to read. While literary fashion, particularly among critics, may come and go, Quiroga’s stories, given both their content and their skillful presentation, will always, it seems, have a wide audience. They are, after all, plainly and simply, good stories, and as such they will probably never lose their appeal to readers.

Bibliography

Borge, Jason. “Hollywood Revisions: Cinematic Imaginary in Quiroga and Monteiro Lobato.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 10, no. 3 (December, 2001): 311-323. Examines Quiroga’s writings about American cinema, focusing on his short story, “Miss Dorothy Phillips, Mi Esposa.” Borge argues that in this story about an Argentine bureaucrat determined to marry a Hollywood film star, Quiroga uses the American film industry as a theme while simultaneously imitating cinematic form.

Brushwood, John S. “The Spanish American Short Story from Quiroga to Borges.” In The Latin American Short Story: A Critical History, edited by Margaret Sayers Peden. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Brushwood dedicates most of the first four pages of this twenty-six-page chapter to Quiroga. He comments on Quiroga’s place in the Spanish American short story, discusses Quiroga’s decalogue for the perfect short-story writer, and considers various aspects of the stories “The Decapitated Chicken,” “Juan Darién,” and “The Dead Man.” Contains interesting although brief commentary.

Englekirk, John. “Horacio Quiroga.” In Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature. New York: Instituto de las Españas, 1934. In a lengthy study of Poe’s influence on numerous Spanish and Spanish American writers, Englekirk devotes his longest chapter (twenty-nine pages) to the work of Quiroga. He discusses Poe’s influence in some of the most obviously Poesque stories in Quiroga’s repertoire but finds elements of Poe in many other works not usually considered to be influenced by the American writer. An interesting read.

French, Jennifer. “The Freedom in the Field: Empire and Ecology in the Misiones Stories of Horacio Quiroga.” In Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers. Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2005. Analyzes the short fiction of Quiroga and works by two other Spanish American writers to describe how the writers’ fiction reflects the economic supremacy of Great Britain in the Misiones region from the early national period to World War I.

Gunnels, Bridgette W. “Blurring Boundaries Between Animal and Human: Animalhuman Rights in ‘Juan Darién’ by Horacio Quiroga.” Romance Notes 46, no. 3 (Spring, 2006): 349-358. Explores the relationship between humans and animals in this short story.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “An Ecocritical Approach to Horacio Quiroga’s Anaconda and ‘Regreso de Anaconda.’” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 39, no. 4 (December, 2006): 93-110. An ecocritical analysis of these two snake stories. Gunnells argues that Quiroga’s life in theMisiones region of Argentina made him conscious of ecological issues, including the Western belief that the superiority of human beings justifies the destruction of the environment. Gunnels demonstrates how Quiroga’s stories contradict this belief by “decentralizing” human experience while simultaneously “humanizing” nonhuman experience.

Peden, William. “Some Notes on Quiroga’s Stories.” Review 19 (Winter, 1976): 41-43. Peden reviews the chief characteristics of Quiroga’s stories and briefly refers to a number of stories that contain these characteristics. Succinct and on target, though perhaps equally if not more useful for its presentation in English translation of Quiroga’s decalogue of the “Perfect Short Story Writer.” Published as part of a twenty-page “Focus” section on Quiroga.

Pupo-Walker, Enrique. “The Brief Narrative in Spanish America: 1835-1915.” In The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. Vol. 1, edited by Robert González Echevarria and Enrique Pupo-Walker. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Provides a valuable historical and cultural context for Quiroga by charting the development of short narrative in Spanish America in the nineteenth century, from the early sketches of customs and manners and the influence of Edgar Allan Poe through the early part of the twentieth century.

Rivera-Barnes, Beatriz. “Yuyos Are Not Weeds: An Ecocritical Approach to Horacio Quiroga.” In Reading and Writing the Latin American Landscape, by Rivera-Barnes and Jerry Hoeg. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Examines Quiroga’s relationship to the jungle, the area in which he lived and the site of many of his stories.

San Roman, Gustavo. “Amor Turbio, Paranoia, and the Vicissitudes of Manliness in Horacio Quiroga.” The Modern Language Review 90 (October, 1995): 919-934. Discusses the theme of love in Quiroga’s fiction, focusing on the novel Historia de un amor turbio, commenting on the links between the story and paranoia. Argues that Quiroga’s texts are more the work of a victim than of a self-controlled author.

Schade, George D. “Horacio Quiroga.” In Latin American Literature in the Twentieth Century: A Guide, edited by Leonard S. Klein. New York: Ungar, 1986. Largely a three-page version of Schade’s introduction to Margaret Sayers Peden’s The Decapitated Chicken, and Other Stories (below). Provides concise discussion of Quiroga’s life, career, and chief characteristics and limited consideration of specific stories. Includes a list of Quiroga’s works and a brief bibliography (with most of the entries in Spanish).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Introduction to The Decapitated Chicken, and Other Stories. Edited and translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976. In this ten-page introduction to Peden’s English-language collection of twelve of Quiroga’s most famous stories, Schade provides an overview to Quiroga for the uninitiated reader, discussing the writer’s life and career, as well as the chief characteristics of his works. In the process, he comments briefly on the stories included in the collection, among them “The Feather Pillow,” “The Decapitated Chicken,” “Drifting,” “Juan Darién,” “The Dead Man,” Anaconda, and “The Son.”