Successful Writer Blog

Three famous stories by Quiruga that represent three different points of view about death were translated into Hebrew by Tal Nitzan, respected translator. The first, Sunstroke, tells the tale of the death of a farmer called Jones in the area where Quiruga lived. No human in the story is aware that Death is approaching. The character of Death looks exactly like Jones and the only creatures that can see him and try to protect their master are the farmer’s dogs. What is so special about this story is the mixture of realism and spiritualism. In this short story we learn a great deal about the farmer’s life and if we have to answer the question of whether Death is evil or good. One can say that dying is as random as a spin of the roulette wheel and when it is draws nearer to you there will be no remorse.

Another story that seems to support this theory is The Dead Man, which tells of another farmer who dies in a freak accident when he trips over his machete. The author tries to understand what the dead man feels like while he is dying and describes his death in a very realistic way. The reader gets an insight into how he is trying to cling on to life and the usual things that happen every day. The moment of death is still something we do not experience from first-hand experience but from a point of view of an animal, in this case a horse that loses his reverence towards his master the moment he dies. As long as his master lived the horse dares not to leave the banana field, but the moment he dies the horse starts walking. This very much reminds me of another story by Quiruga, With the Stream, which describes the death of a person from snakebite, but in the last case the death is physical and sharp.

The third story I would like to mention is The Son, when we know about the death of the main protagonist from the very beginning. We know that death is expected but the dead kid continues to live on in the father’s mind and this idea of life after death is another option that could be examined and make a very fine opening for a story. 

I chose to finish this week with Horacio Quiroga, not only because he is one of the forefathers of modern Latino short stories, and not only because he wrote a manifesto of how to be the perfect storyteller, (he wrote for example: “believe in the master Poe, Maupassant, Kipling and Chekov, like god himself”), but also in order to show that the psychological understanding of a master like this can be defected by the spirit of his times. The horror story ‘The Butchered Chicken’, is about a family whose four mentally-disabled sons kill their young normal sister when they imitate the deeds of the kitchen servant a few hours before, would probably not be accepted today. On the other hand, there is more than meets the eye here; in the first reading or like Tal Nitzan, his translator into Hebrew writes in the conclusion of his selected stories book:

‘The Butchered Chicken’ from 1909, one of Quiroga’s most famous stories, was built with the confident hand of a ripe artist, a line of tensions between sick and healthy, whole and defected, loved and rejected, and a line of clues – the effect of the sunset colors on the children their imitation ability, the cruel technique of the butchering of the chicken – all lead the plot to the gruesome-monstrous, as much as it is an inevitable ending.

All this reminds me that Quiroga once wrote that “fate isn’t blind, only we can’t understand its logic.” I think that there’s something very religious in this point of view and very fatalistic, but perhaps this enabled Latino writers to view the world in a different manner to other writers. Maimonides, writing in 12th century Spain, said that everything is expected, yet still God has given us a choice to be good or evil, and to choose between heaven and hell.

One must remember while reading a story such as ‘The Butchered Chicken’ that psychology was only taking its very first steps in the world in the beginning of the 20th century. The way Latino writers were trying to understand the difference between madness and mentally-challenged people, is a very interesting subject to read and write about to this day, and I hope to have a chance to do that soon.

I think I’m going to stay with Quiroga for a little while longer, next week we shall deal with death in South American and Latino literature.