In Professor Stark’s reading for this week, Horacio Quiroga
was mentioned. I was excited to see this because in my high school Spanish classes
we read a couple of stories by him, including “A la deriva” (“Adrift”) and “Anaconda.”
Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937) was a Uruguayan playwright, poet, and short story
writer. The jungle featured prominently in his works, as did death and despair and,
frankly, some of his stories are quite bizarre.
In “A la deriva,” a man is walking in the jungle, when all
of a sudden he is bitten by a venomous snake. He and his wife live alone in the
jungle, and so he has to take a canoe down the Paraná to get to a town or
somewhere he can get medical attention. The venom has made his leg swell up
like a balloon, and is quickly killing him. Alas, he cannot reach help in time,
and dies in his canoe, left adrift in the Paraná.
This was an extremely difficult story to read in high school because there was a lot of Spanish vocabulary I didn't know. However, once I had decoded it enough to understand it, I remember thinking, “What the heck kind of story did my teacher assign us?” It was an incredibly bizarre story, and only when we researched Quiroga a little more did it make sense.
Quiroga loved very much and lived for a while in the jungle,
so he was no stranger to its wild animals and other dangers. Additionally, he
led a pretty traumatic life: his father accidentally killed himself when Quiroga
was just a child; in 1899, his stepfather committed suicide and Quiroga found
the body; his two brothers died of typhoid fever in 1901; later that year, he
accidentally shot and killed his friend; and his first wife killed herself by
ingesting poison, but only died after eight days of agonizing pain. Thus,
Quiroga’s life was fraught with death and tragedy, so it makes sense that his
stories would be filled with death and despair as well.
Anyway, I decided to make this blog post about Quiroga
because he was an important author of South America during the time period we
are discussing now in class, the early 1900s. His works are important, perhaps because
they document life in the jungle, a life that not many intellectuals have led. Even
though his stories are very strange, I would recommend them because they are
still very interesting.
Awesome blog! Thanks for this interesting post! It is no wonder his stories were about death and despair if his life was like that! I wonder if his fascination with the jungle stemmed from this as well. There are wild animals and few people. Seeing as all those who were close to him died and/or committed suicide, he may have blamed himself. That is the sad thing about suicide - it oftentimes hurts those who are still living more than the person that commits suicide. Younger children, especially, tend to blame themselves. He may have found an escape in the jungle.
ReplyDeleteI like how you connected this class with your high school Spanish class! As I was reading your blog I thought that the story was a little bizarre, violent, and depressing as well. This seems to be a bit of a running theme with the pieces that we read in class. I wonder if this shows us something about Latin America though. That their lives were/are full of atrocities like these, and that is why they write about such horrible things. Our lives are so great here in America, I believe we often don't think about the lives of people somewhere else.
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