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.