The life marked by the tragedy of Horacio Quiroga
The tragedy is seen as a difficult event, funesto or as a misfortune, and if a tour of the life of Horacio Quiroga is taken, it can be clearly seen that since he was just a child he lived tragic events, such as the death of his father. Already as an adult lived love disappointments, failures and losses both in the familiar, as in his circle of friendships;consequence of tragic accidents, diseases and accidental homicides;All these bitter events can be appreciated in their writing.
When his literature is reviewed, it is easy to analyze that he feels a special interest in death, tends to write sordid and gloomy events setting an example, the slaughtered chicken shows clearly as he sees the structure of a family as a tragedy, to theprinciple can be seen a loving atmosphere and with the desire to have children. But then this environment becomes disappointments and despair for having a healthy child;And finally it becomes tragedy. Quiroga (1917) affirms in a fragment of the story: “Son, my dear son! —The waned, on that frightful ruin of his firstborn. The father, desolate, accompanied the doctor outside. "You can tell you;"I think it’s a lost case. You can improve, educate yourself in everything that allows your idiotism, but not beyond.two)
And before an event that has the minimum ray of hope and happiness, it is eliminated, in the same way that his life was taken from death, through death. An example of this is when his daughter Bertita is born and is born healthy without the "idiots" disease, after growing up, such joy leaves when the father finds his daughter dead in a great pool of blood and is being horrified beforeSuch revelation, so that the wife does not see such a scene tells him not to enter to see all that, but the wife sees the floor full of blood and intuits what happened (Quiroga, 1917).
We see how in this story you can discover the negligence of parents towards sick children, treating them with indifference and heartbreak. And for the opposite, the excess of pampering offered to the healthy daughter. All this makes the brothers want to get their parents’ attention through their sister, which leads them to respond in opposition and finally kill their little sister.
In this story, one of the many tragedies that he tells in his writings is related, as he is marked by much despair, disappointment and finally a great tragedy that is tarnished by the murder of his youngest daughter by his fourbrothers. His writings are bathed in funeral moments as in the story "Las flos" where the central axis is the suffering that a man has before dying, and that can only expect this event, very similar to what Quiroga lived with his stepfather,a broad suffering before deciding to kill yourself;To that point he has characterized himself by somehow reflecting his life’s misfortune and tragedy in everything he writes.
Undoubtedly, this story is an approximation and exemplification of the impossibility of escaping the natural and social conditions that guide the whole life of the human being. We see how there is a bold look with the comparison between flies as intuitive animals, capable of sniffing the arrival of death, and man, knowledgeable about his destiny, whose desire for escapism and evasion of reality make him reach the pointto feel free and with the ability to fly just like a fly, during his surrender and delirium, or at the time of expiration.
The above reveals Quiroga’s intention for bringing the reader closer to a universal reality in which we are all deadly, unable to escape the destiny that has already been drawn up. Quiroga (1920) affirms: they are the ones who buzz. Since I have fallen they have come without delay. Amoded in the mountain in the field of fire, the flies have had, I do not know how, knowledge of a safe dam in the neighborhood. They have already smelled the next decomposition of the sitting man, by invaluable characters for us, perhaps in exhalation through the meat of the corted spinal cord. They have attended without delay and flutter without hurry, measuring with their eyes the proportions of the nest that luck has just brought to their eggs. (p.two)
We see how misfortune predominates in the passing of the story, the weakness of man, who previously knows his tragedy, and convinces himself of the speed of life in the face of the pressing arrival of death, introduces a deep sadness, affliction and anxiety that he givesAs a result a conception of indifference for life. This story shows an openly similar style to that of the literary work "Axolotl" by Julio Cortázar, where the narrator begins talking about himself and suddenly continuously with his story as if it were another being, which appreciates and visualizes from the outside towho at the beginning was the same.
There is also a wide similarity, between this story of Quiroga and the works of Edgar Allan Poe, regarding its dramatic gender focused on the relationship of nature with the human being. We can also observe how to drift has similarity to this story because it shows the anguish of a character and nature is very important in the story of the story. We see that just like flies, man feels not having the tiny hope to survive.
Drift is another story that tells the anguish of a character in his fight to survive. This story develops in a peaceful jungle land, where man lives with his family. Suddenly the fact occurs: a very poisonous viper bites man and with it changes his situation, everything changes, death is present everywhere, which was once beautiful becomes hostile. The described landscape is of great beauty, but aggressive, and reigns in it a silence of death;"The man" is dying and begins to hallucinate.
The character here tries to grab life desperately so as not to succumb to the death that looks closely. When he begins to feel the effects of the poison, he decides. When observing that his help does not work he decided to embark on a canoe to go to Tacurú Pucú, the place he meant for him, his only salvation. “But the man did not want to die, and descending to the coast he went up to his canoe. Sentos in the stern and began to stick to the center of Paraná. There the stream of the river, which in the immediate vicinity of the iguazú runs six miles, would take it to Tacurú-Pucú (Quiroga, 1917, P.two). But we see how the journey does, he feels worse and worse, until he turns to his compadre alves but that does not work either. Finally, we see how the character agonizes and tries to flee death through memory.
The story takes place in the jungle. So this story belongs to a collection of stories that Quiroga wrote during his stay in Misiones. The jungle and their experiences were its greatest inspiration and refuge. The dead man is another story in which death is considered a main theme, this story tells the agony of a man who, not being careful when crossing a spike wire, stumbles and buries his machete in his entrails causing death. In the first two elements mentioned in the story, the narrator already presents us with the protagonists of the tragedy that will develop before the reader: man and the machete and does so with the greatest economy of expressive media, throughThe simple stark mention of both. Only in the first paragraph describes an absolutely normal and even pleasant situation: "The man threw, consequently, a satisfied look at the brushed bushes, and crossed the fence to lie for a while in the gramilla" (Quiroga, 1920, p. two). But the tragedy is immediately unleashed through a situation that is not objectively narrated but suggested by means of a subjective impression of the protagonist: “While falling, the man had the extremely distant impression of not seeing the machete flat in thesoil ”(Quiroga, 1920, P. two).
Death is so unexpected for this character, that he comes to believe that in reality that never happened, that he is simply lying on the ground because he needed to rest, and he thought it was impossible for such a skillful person to the machete and that he knows that place sowell would have died that way. Unfortunately, it was and the story ends with his family approaching the body to lunch together as usual. The son is Quiroga’s most emotional story, this story tells the story of a widower father and his son who had a very good relationship, apart from father and son were very good friends. The son used. After a while, the father hears a shot and mysteriously everything becomes silent. “A shot, a single shot has sounded, and a long time ago. After him, the father has not heard a noise, he has not seen a bird, he has not crossed the open a single person to announce that when crossing a wire, a great misfortune … ”(Quiroga, 1928, P.3). The man looks at the clock and realizes that his son should have returned a long time ago and decides to go looking for him through the forest. Unfortunately he finds his dead son and this causes him to suffer from hallucinations back home, with a raw and shocking end for the reader, which I will mention below: ‘Man returns home with his son … and although broken body and soul, smile from happiness. Smile from hallucinated happiness … well that father goes alone.
No one has found, and his arm is based on the void. Because after him, at the foot of a pole and with his legs up, huge in the barbed wire, his well loved son lies in the sun, dead from ten in the morning ‘(Quiroga, 1928, p.3). The death of the son is impressive and devastating causing in the father a pain only comparable with the one he suffered when losing his wife, mentioned in this story. Quiroga has done it again, he has ended the life of the firstborn of the protagonist in a crude and cruel way. The son’s story demonstrates how Quiroga was able to create such an emotional environment, that he even compromises the reader to read the slightest detail, causing the consequence that the reader implies the death of the son first than the same father, this is dueto the psychological construction of what is happening inside the jungle by the father, who to evade the ghost of concern is raised in his routine activities. On the other hand, another relevant story of Quiroga is the pillow of feathers alludes to a strange disease suffered by a woman on her honeymoon. Day after day, the woman’s health worsened without having the most remote idea that it happened to her, to the point of suffering hallucinations and desiring death to end her suffering. "Among his most porfiada hallucinations, there was an anthropoid, leaning on the carpet on the fingers, which was fixed in her eyes" (Quiroga, 1917, P.3). After his death, the maid and the husband, they discover that a parasite resided in the pillow of feathers where Alicia rested day and night, sucking her blood to the point of provoking her death. Quiroga (1917) affirms in a fragment of the story: night by night, since Alicia had fallen into bed, her mouth had applied her tube, rather to the temples of that one, sucking her blood. The bite was almost imperceptible. The daily removal of the pillow had prevented without giving its development, but since the young woman could not move, the suction was dizzying. In five days, on five nights, Alicia had emptied. (p.4) This story is the faithful sign that when someone writes something it is inevitable to leave a part of the same author embodied in the work.
Quiroga’s life is really marked by love problems and death and in this story these two themes predominate, for example, the fact that the personalities of the husbands are not compatible is reflected in the life of Quiroga, since thisI was unable to hold relationships for a long time. In addition, like Jordán, Horacio possessed a personality too dominant in love with love relationships. Death is the central theme of this story, both physical and emotional death, since Alicia through her illness presents significant spiritual deterioration, so much so that Alicia went from being a delicate and dreamy woman to wish death to endWith his suffering, slowly falling into a state of depression where he plunged until his death.
Finally it is easy to see that the events of Quiroga’s tragic life are in their writings, which makes you appreciate the way it uses those painful feelings and personal suffering in their stories. It is to admire a person like him, who turns the tragedy, a good story. Quiroga seems to give a little of his being in each of his writings, in the way he feels death, as Mazzini does before entering the house, when he feels that the worst happened, and that simply for hopes heTo the kitchen and realize what I knew before entering the house, it is that characteristic, that I tried to demonstrate throughout this work, the omnipresence of death, which can even reach our entrails and let us know thatIt passed, and that only the crying and pain of a son, a man in a thicket, a husband in a canoe, a small surrounded by idiots will remain from her. I end this text holding that Quiroga is for me, one of the teachers of the short story and a genius in the description of this transcendental subject as the life marked by the tragedy of Horacio Quiroga.
References
- Quiroga, h. (1917). Adrift. In h. Quiroga, drifting (p. 3).
- Quiroga, h. (1917). The feather pillow. In h. Quiroga, the feather pillow (p. 5).
- Quiroga, h. (1917). The slaughtered chicken. In h. Quiroga, the slaughtered chicken (p. 7).
- Quiroga, h. (1920). The dead man. In h. Quiroga, the dead man (p. 4).
- Quiroga, h. (1920). The flies. In h. Quiroga, the flies (p. two).
- Quiroga, h. (1928). The son. In h. Quiroga, the son (p. 5).
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