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Horacio Quiroga
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Horacio Silvestre Quiroga Forteza (31 December 1878 19 February 1937) was an Uruguayan playwright, poet, and short story writer. He wrote stories which, in their jungle settings, use the supernatural and the bizarre to show the struggle of man and animal to survive. He also excelled in portraying mental illness and hallucinatory states.[1] His inuence can be seen in the Latin American magic realism of Gabriel Garca Mrquez and the postmodern surrealism of Julio Cortzar.[2]
Horacio Quiroga
Contents
1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 Training and travels 1.3 Inconsistory of the Gay Science and early works 1.4 From Chaco back to Buenos Aires 1.5 Love and the jungle 1.6 Buenos Aires 1.7 New love and some hobbies 1.8 Back to the jungle 1.9 Disease and death 2 Work 2.1 Analysis of work 3 Selected works 4 Notes 5 External links
Horacio Quiroga Born Died December 31, 1878 Salto, Uruguay February 19, 1937 (aged 58) Buenos Aires, Argentina Nationality Uruguayan Spouse(s) Children Ana Mara Cires (1909-1915), Mara Elena Bravo (1927-1934) Egle Quiroga (1911), Dario Quiroga (1912), Mara Elena Quiroga (1928)
Biography
Early life
Horacio Quiroga was born in, in 1878[3] as the sixth child, and second son of Prudencio Quiroga and Pastora Forteza, a middle-class family. At the time of his birth, his father worked for 18 years as head of the ViceConsulate Argentine Break. Before Quiroga was two and a half months old, on March 14 of 1879 his father accidentally red a gun he carried in his hand and died. Quiroga was baptized just about three months later in the parish of his birth town.
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his stays in the jungle. In addition, his sister introduced him to pedagogy, and found him work as a teacher under contract on the board of examination for the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. He was appointed professor of Castilian in the British School of Buenos Aires in March 1903.He wrote the story el hijo.
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The following year Ana Maria gave birth to a son, named Darius. Quiroga decided, just as the children were learning to walk, that he would personally take care of their education. Stern and dictatorial, Quiroga demanded that every little detail was done according to his requirements. From a young age, his children got used to the mountains and jungle. Quiroga exposed them to danger (risk-free danger) so that they would be able to cope alone and overcome any situation. He even went as far as to leave them alone one night in the jungle, or another time made them sit on the edge of a cliff with their legs dangling in the void. The daughter learned to breed wild animals and the son to use the shotgun, ride a bike and sail alone in a canoe. Quiroga's children never refused to be part of these experiences and, actually, enjoyed them. Their mother, however, was terried and exasperated. Between 1912 and 1915 the writer, who already had experience as a cotton farmer and herbalist, undertook a bold pursuit to increase the farming and maximize the natural resources of their lands. He began to distill oranges, produce coal and resins, as well as, many other similar activities. Meanwhile, he raised livestock, domesticated wild animals, hunted and shed. Literature continued to be the peak of his life: in the journal Fray Mocho de Buenos Aires Quiroga published numerous stories, many set in the jungle and populated by characters so naturalistic that they seemed real. But Quiroga's wife was not happy: although she had become well adapted to life in the jungle the relationship between her and her husband was fraught with discord. Clashes between the couple occurred frequently and although the cause was usually trivial their excessive arguments became daily setbacks. These incidences, accentuated by Quiroga's volatile nature, excacerbated his wife so greatly that she became severely depressed. So Ana Maria would become a new tragedy in Quiroga's life when, after a violent ght with the writer, she ingested a fatal dose of "sublimado" or Mercury(II) chloride. Unfortunately, the poison did not kill her instantly; instead she was forced to endure terrible agony for eight days before nally dying in her husband's arms on December 14, 1915. The tragedy of Ana Maria's painful death left Quiroga and his two children, ve year old Egl and four year old Daro, plunged into dark despair.[4]
Buenos Aires
After this tragedy, Quiroga quickly left for Buenos Aires with his children where he became an UnderSecretary General Accountant in the Uruguayan Consulat, thanks to the efforts of some of his friends who wanted to help. Throughout the year 1917 Quiroga lived in a basement with his children on Avenue Canning, alternating his diplomatic work with setting up a home ofce and working on many stories, which were being published in prestigious magazines. Quiroga collected most of the stories in several books, the rst was Tales of Love, Madness and Death (1917). Manuel Galvez, owner of a publishing rm, had suggested that he write it and the volume immediately became a huge success with audiences and critics, consolidating Quiroga as the true master of the Latin American short story. The following year he settled in a small apartment on Calle Agero, while he published Jungle Tales (1918, a collection of children's stories featuring animals and set in the Misiones rainforest). Quiroga dedicated this book to his children, who accompanied him during that rough period of poverty in the damp basement. 1919 was a good year for Quiroga, with two major promotions in the consular ranks and the publication of his new book of stories, The Wild. The next year, following the idea of "The Consistory", Quiroga founded the Anaconda Association, a group of intellectuals involved in cultural activities in Argentina and Uruguay. His only play, The Slaughtered, was published in 1920 and was released in 1921, when Anaconda was released (another book of short stories). An important Argentine newspaper, La Nacin (The Nation), also
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began to publish his stories, which by now already enjoyed impressive popularity. Between 1922 and 1924, Quiroga served as secretary of a cultural embassy to Brazil and he published his new book: The Desert (stories). For a while the writer was devoted to lm criticism, taking charge of the magazine section of "Atlantis, The Home and The Nation". He also wrote the screenplay for a feature lm (The Florida Raft) that was never lmed. Shortly thereafter, was invited to form a School of Cinematography, by Russian investors, but it was unsuccessful.
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Work
Follower of the modernist school founded by Rubn Daro and being an obsessive reader of Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant, Quiroga was attracted to topics covering the most intriguing aspects of nature, often tinged with horror, disease, and suffering for human beings. Many of his stories belong to this movement, embodied in his work Tales of Love, Madness and Death. Quiroga was also inspired by British writer Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book), which is shown in his own Jungle Tales, a delightful exercise in fantasy divided into several stories featuring animals.[5] His Ten Rules for the Perfect Storyteller, dedicated to young writers, provides certain contradictions in his own work. While the Decalogue touts economic and precise style, using few adjectives, natural and simple wording, and clarity of expression, in many of his own stories Quiroga did not follow his own precepts, using ornate language, with plenty of adjectives and at times ostentatious vocabulary. As he further developed his particular style, Quiroga evolved into realistic portraits (often anguished and desperate) of the wild nature around him in Misiones: the jungle, the river, wildlife, climate, and terrain make up the scaffolding and scenery in which his characters move, suffer, and often die. Especially in his stories, Quiroga describes the tragedy that haunts the miserable rural workers in the region, the dangers and sufferings to which they are exposed, and how this existential pain is perpetuated to succeeding generations. He also experimented with many subjects considered taboo in the society of early twentieth century.
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Analysis of work
In his rst book, Coral Reefs, consisting of 18 poems, 30 pages of poetic prose, and four stories, Quiroga shows his immaturity and adolescent confusion. On the other hand, he shows a glimpse of the modernist style and naturalistic elements that would come to characterize his later work. His two novels: History of a Troubled Love and Past Love deal with the same theme that haunted the author in his personal life: love affairs between older men and teenage girls. In the rst novel Quiroga divided the action into three parts. In the rst, a 9 year old girl falls in love with an older man. In the second part, it is eight years later and the man, who had noticed her affection, begins to woo her. The third part is the present tense of the novel, in which it has been ten years since the young girl left the man. In Past Love history repeats itself: a grown man returns to a place after years of absence, and falls for a young woman he had loved as a child. Knowing the personal history of Quiroga, the two novels feature some autobiographical components. For example, the protagonist in History of a Trouble Love is named Egle (the name of Quiroga's daughter, whose classmate he later married). Also, in these novels there is a great deal of emphasis on the opposition of the girls' parents, rejection that Quiroga had accepted as part of his life and that he always had to deal with. The critics never liked his novels and called his only play The Slaughtered "a mistake." They considered his short stories to be his most transcendent works, and some have credited them with stimulaing all Latin American short stories after him. This makes sense as Quiroga was the rst to be concerned about the technical aspects of the short story, tirelessly honing his style (for which he always returns to the same subjects) to reach near-perfection in his last works. Though clearly inuenced by modernism, he gradually begins to turn the decadent Uruguayan language, to describing the natural surroundings with meticulous precision. But he makes it clear that Nature's relationship with man is always one of conict. Loss, injury, misery, failures, starvation, death, and animal attacks plague Quiroga's human characters. Nature is hostile, and almost always wins. Quiroga's morbid obsession with torment and death is much more easily accepted by the characters than by the reader: in the narrative technique the author uses, he presents players accustomed to risk and danger, playing by clear and specic rules. They know not to make mistakes because the forest is unforgiving, and failure often means death. Nature is blind but fair, and the attacks on the farmer or sherman (a swarm of angry bees, an alligator, a bloodsucking parasite, etc.) are simply obstacles in a horrible game in which the Man tries to snatch property or natural resources (reecting Quiroga's efforts to in life) and Nature absolutely refuses to let go; an unequal struggle that usually ends with the human loss, dementia, death, or simply disappointment. Sensitive, excitable, given to impossible love, thwarted in his commercial enterprises but still highly creative, Quiroga waded through his tragic life and suffered through nature to construct, with the eyes of a careful observer, narrative work which critics considered "autobiographical poetry". Perhaps it is this "internal realism" or the "organic" nature of his writing that created the irresistible draw that Quiroga continues to have on readers.
Selected works
Coral Reefs (Los Arrecifes de Coral, poetry 1901)
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The Crime of Another (El Crimen del Otro, stories 1904) The Feather Pillow (El almohadn de plumas, short story 1907) History of a Troubled Love (Historia de un Amor Turbio, novel 1908) Stories of Love, Madness, and Death (Cuentos de Amor, de Locura y de Muerte, stories 1917) Jungle Tales (Cuentos de la Selva, stories for children 1918) The Wild (El Salvaje, stories 1920) The Slaughtered (Las Sacricadas, drama 1920) Anaconda (stories 1921) The Desert (El Desierto, stories 1924) The Beheaded Chicken and Other Stories (La Gallina Degollada y Otros Cuentos, stories 1925) Exiles (Los Desterrados, stories 1926) Past Love (Pasado Amor, novel 1929) Native Soil (Suelo Natal, fourth grade reader book 1931) Beyond (El Ms All, stories 1935) The Chair of Pain (El sillon del dolor, stories 1937) Drifting(Horacio Quiroga (1879-1937))
Notes
1. ^ Horacio-Quiroga (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/487543/) 2. ^ Del George, Dana (2001). The supernatural in short ction of the Americas: the other world in the New World. Greenwood Publishing Group, p. 81. ISBN 0-313-31939-1 3. ^ Chang-Rodrguez, R. and Filer, M. (2004). Voces de Hispanoamrica. Tercera Edicin. Boston: Heinle. 4. ^ Brignol, Jos (1939). Vida y Obra de Horacio Quiroga. Montevido: La Bolsa de los Libros. pp. 211213. 5. ^ Quiroga, Kipling, and the Exotic Frontier: A Comparative Study (http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~clsa/portals/2006/rodgers.html) by Christy Rodgers, San Francisco State University
External links
Works by Horacio Quiroga (http://www.gutenberg.org/author/Horacio+Quiroga) at Project Gutenberg Horacio Quiroga Biography at LitWeb.net (http://litweb.net/biogs/quiroga_horacio.html) Review: Peter Beardsell (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Quiroga-Cuentos-Locura-CriticalSpanish/dp/0729302474) Complete text of Cuentos de Amor, de locura y de muerte (http://www.polyglotproject.com/books/Spanish/cuentos_de_amor_de_locura_y_de_muerte) Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Horacio_Quiroga&oldid=593272724" Categories: 1878 births 1937 deaths People from Salto, Uruguay Uruguayan people of Galician descent Suicides by cyanide poisoning Uruguayan short story writers Uruguayan horror writers Writers who committed suicide Suicides in Argentina Uruguayan dramatists and playwrights Uruguayan poets Uruguayan expatriates in Argentina This page was last modied on 31 January 2014 at 13:19. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-prot organization.
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