The Dead Man
In Horacio Quiroga’s ‘The Dead Man’, the central character slips on a fence and finds his machete lodged in his stomach. He waits to die. That really is about it, as we might wonder how much mileage is to be had out of misfortune as opposed to deliberation. Imagine if in a detective story, the inspector works out that the wealthy victim was merely a victim of circumstance, and the circumstances were that she tripped on the front door step, and smashed her head on the marble flooring. A two-hundred-page detective novel has been reduced to flash fiction. While coincidence is often seen as a problem when a writer seems to be pushing their work along with the aid of it, the sort of happenstance Quiroga introduces kills his story as quickly as his character. If EM Forster could say of Thomas Hardy that “he has emphasised causality more strongly than his medium admits” (Aspects of the Novel), Quiroga, in this instance, introduces chance in a manner that doesn’t allow the story to develop at all. What if this man with a banana plantation had a rival who wanted his land, and what if this person put on this post a grease that led our eponymous character to slip and die? We would have a plot and a variation of Forster’s notion of it as he discusses the king dying and the queen then dying. This is not a story, Forster says. The king dying, and the queen dying of grief, happens to be. We might add that the king dying and the queen not dying of grief is close to the plot of Hamlet, while the husband dying, and the wife responding with suppressed glee, is the plot of many a detective fiction.
But if Forster was dismayed by Hardy’s reliance on coincidence, as we find evident in such great short stories as ‘A Mere Interlude’ and ‘A Withered Arm’, then what would he make of ‘The Dead Man’, which is pretty close to the King dies, and the Queen dies? It even gives away its ending in the title. While Hardy was well-known as a great writer of fatalism, giving his coincidences almost a cosmic inevitability, then we could say Quiroga is, while not impervious to the pull of fate, finally much more of a pessimist. Fatalism is a doctrine, resting on a “disposition to accept all conditions and events as inevitable” (Online Etymological Dictionary), while pessimism comes from the Latin root, pessimus, meaning the worst. There have been plenty of literary pessimists, from Fernando Pessoa and his great tome of hopelessness, The Book of Disquiet, to Quiroga’s fellow Uruguayan, Juan Carlos Onetti, from Mexico’s Juan Rulfo to Italy’s Cesare Pavese. Fatalism tells us that whatever we do, our actions are inevitable, which is a little different from pessimism’s claim that all our actions are pointless. Sometimes the difference between the two isn’t always easy to discern, but seeing life as a futile struggle, rather than one manipulated by powers beyond our control, is a useful start. Pessimism has the advantage of paranoia’s absence, though it also has the disadvantage of assuming there is nothing greater than the immediate despair to offer a dubious consolation.
Yet let us imagine Quiroga’s life as a fictional work. Think of a story about a man whose father dies not long after he is born, in a hunting accident, and whose mother later remarries, and where the boy witnesses his stepfather’s suicide, as the man blows his head off with a shotgun. How to recover from such tragedies? Perhaps by finding solace outside the family. In good friendships, for example, and by proving you are loyal to others. You insist on being by your friend’s side when they accept a duel, and, in making sure the gun is safe and in good working order, you accidentally end his life before the duel even gets started. Best to give up on friendship and devote yourself to love, far from the madding crowd. But the woman you marry becomes increasingly unhappy in the jungle locale in which you have chosen to live. After one terrible fight between you, she ingests mercury fluoride, and you have yet another death on your hands.
Best to return indirectly to the family, as Quiroga eventually marries the school friend of his daughter, thirty years Quiroga’s junior. Where does he decide to take her to live? The jungle. It doesn’t turn out well, but at least nobody dies: the girl takes her and her child back to the city. Quiroga moves back there, too, but only after serious prostate problems, eventually ending up in a hospital that has in its basement Argentina’s equivalent of the Elephant Man, the terribly deformed Vicente Battistessa. Quiroga insists the man share his room and they become friends. But Quiroga is dying and wishes for this poor freak of nature to help him, as Quiroga takes some cyanide and dies, in obvious torment, a few minutes later.
This is the stuff of fiction, albeit absurd, melodramatic, and the sort Forster may have treated dismissively. If everyone has a novel in them, most of us would hope this wouldn’t be it, however enthralling it might be for the reader who likes a bit of schadenfreude. Flaubert may have proposed ‘be regular and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work’, but it would have been difficult for Quiroga to match that level of violence and originality in his fiction. Why even try?
Let’s not pretend all of Quiroga’s stories are as deliberately un-narrativised as ‘The Dead Man’. ‘The Feathered Pillow’ leaves us initially wondering why a recently married woman is left increasingly lethargic and soon enough unable to get out of bed. In ‘The Son’, a father frets over his thirteen-year-old offspring, who has gone out with a gun and hasn’t come back. But these too are pessimistic stories rather than fatalistic ones. The young woman ends up dead when we discover “…a monstrous animal, a living, viscous ball. It was so swollen one could scarcely make out its mouth…Night after night, since Alicia had taken to her bed, this abomination had stealthily applied its mouth—its proboscis one might better say—to the girl’s temples, sucking her blood.” Near the end of ‘The Son’, it looks like the father has found the boy alive, only for the narrator to tell us that the dad has hallucinated his son being discovered safely. He hasn’t just lost his son; he has lost his mind. The boy is dead, and the father has gone mad.
Who are the great pessimists in literature we have wondered. It is a crowded field, and we have offered a few, but the one who was clearly an influence on Quiroga was Edgar Allan Poe. “Poe was at the time the unique author that I read” Quiroga insisted. “This damned madman had succeeded in completely controlling me; there was not on the table any book that was not his. My head was entirely filled with Poe.” (Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge). The delirium that overtakes the father at the end of ‘The Son’ wouldn’t be out of place in a Poe story, and someone feeling safe and comfy in their bed, only to discover a beast in the pillow, sucking their blood, could have been a Poe tale, the sort of nightmare one wakes up into rather than out of. Yet Quiroga’s work often seems less exaggerated than Poe’s, less given to the exclamatory that leaves a Poe character frequently astonished by the situations in which they find themselves. The urgency in the narration creates a suspense of its own. In Quiroga's stories, like the three we have mentioned, it seems more that, on a bad day, you will find yourself with an axe in your stomach, after a series of bad nights, find your blood has been sucked out of you, and that, after giving your teenage son a firearm, he will promptly end up dead. Poe’s stories make you fear the worst; Quiroga’s have you expecting it.
Quiroga is the sort of writer well-respected but not so internationally well-known, as though this Uruguayan figure was always going to be discovered by modern readers after Borges and Cortazar, after Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Yet he is seen as useful for various fields today, including eco-criticism, animal studies and neo-colonialism. If Fuentes could see in The New Hispano-American Novel that Quiroga was a pivotal figure, according to Jennifer L French, then she notes as well that Cortazar had already come to a similar conclusion. Cortazar names “…Quiroga along with Ricardo Giraldes and Benito Lynch as the three Rio de la Plata writers who had most helped his own generation define their narrative praxis.” (Latin American Literary Review). It appears now he is proving influential among academics searching for less well-known names who can illuminate their field of study. A story like the beautiful ‘Adrift’ gives us as vivid an impression of someone dying as ‘The Dead Man’, but also a wonderful evocation of the Parana. The man is drifting in his boat, dying from a snake bite, in an “immense canyon whose walls, more than a hundred meters high, mournfully boxed in the river.” The narrator notes that, “from the river banks, lined with black spires of basalt, rose the forest, black as well. In front of him, behind the banks of the river, the eternal melancholy wall of the forest went on forever; in those depths, the swirling river rushed in violent, incessant waves of muddy water. The landscape is unforgiving, yet in him reigned the silence of death. As dusk approached, without fail, the calm and sombre beauty of the forest formed a unique majesty.” We could be in a Werner Herzog film, but for Quiroga, the jungle isn’t a source of vain glory, but at best pragmatic survival, no matter if he himself was a city man as drawn to the environment as Fitzcarraldo, or greedy conquistadors.
While the neo-colonialists might muse over Quiroga and the land, it also makes sense for Animal Studies to come calling, with Quiroga writing a series of anthropomorphised tales under the title Jungle Stories. Bridgette W. Gunnels, writing on the story ‘Juan Darien’, says: “as I interpret it, both human and animal rights are seriously contravened in Quiroga's story, and yet this tale offers more than a surface interpretation of animal rights or welfare. It leads readers to question their own humanity as well as animality.” (‘Blurring Boundaries Between Animal and Human’) Writing from an eco-critical perspective elsewhere, Gunnels reckons “Quiroga's experience in Misiones instilled in the author an acute awareness of the issues surrounding ecologists and ecocritics today, and specifically the unmediated destruction of a natural environment based on the Western notion of human superiority over the natural world. Quiroga's work presents various interrelationships between animals and other animals, humans and animals, and humans and other humans.” (Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal)
Yet what links the human, animal, and the plant isn’t just life but, more specifically for Quiroga, death. Pessimism is surely a human characteristic, and if Quiroga had it in abundance, one may wonder if he went into nature to discover himself or to uncover the misery he was inclined to find there. Whether by a machete, a gun or a snake, there are plenty of opportunities for a man to die. We might think that if a man returns to the jungle with a second wife, after the first has died horribly there, he has an unusual relationship with the death instinct. Patrucua A. Niece says, “in the jungles of Argentina Quiroga at last found a home—and a profound creative source” (‘Horacio Quiroga: The Poe of Latin America’), yet it’s as though the place’s unlivable conditions gave way to deathable ones.
This is an odd adjective, perhaps, yet one that helps us understand the life and work of this Uruguayan writer. But while his life was the unfortunate collocation of circumstance, the work was a grim and deliberate exploration of likely despair. One needn’t have led to the other, but it’s as if the fiction wished to propose that while few will live a life quite as unfortunate as Quiroga, all of us will meet the same end. From a certain point of view, that might not be much use for narrative, but it is an undeniable, if pessimistic, fact.
© Tony McKibbin