quiroga and kipling_comparative study

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R ODGERS, Christy [2006]:Quiroga, Kipling, and the Exotic Frontier – A Comparative Study.

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Christy Rodgers San Francisco State University

Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937), Latin American master of the short story, was not hailed as such bythe literary generation that succeeded him. Jorge Luis Borges (compatriot of Quiroga's adoptedcountry, Argentina) summarily dismissed him by remarking that Quiroga merely "wrote stories thaPoe or Kipling had already written better" (qtd. in FLORES17). In fact, Quiroga, without thedisdain for literary apprenticeship that Borges appeared to demonstrate, did list both Poe andKipling as two of four masters of the form, in a much-cited manifesto on the art of the story, the"Manual del Perfecto Cuentista" ["Guide for the Perfect Storyteller"]. In the very first of his "tecommandments," Quiroga speaks explicitly of discipleship: "Cree en el maestro—Poe, MaupassanKipling, Chekhov—como en Dios mismo" (qtd. in L AZOxxxiv) [Believe in the master ... as in Godhimself].1 But as Raimundo Lazo, editor of the 1968Sepan Cuentos edition of Quiroga's stories andcriticism, points out in his introduction, this faith is clearly meant by Quiroga to be "estímulo, noimitación" (qtd. in L AZOxiv) [a stimulus not an imitation].

Quiroga wrote over two hundred short stories varying widely in quality and content. He set hishand to a variety of "tales of effect,"2 from the pure horror of "The Feather Pillow" or re-told tales

like "The Suicide Ships," which link him strongly with Poe, to psycho-dramas like "The SinglDiamond" which are closer to Maupassant. But it is almost universally acknowledged that his bestories are set in Misiones, the tropical borderland of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, which he havisited as a young man, and to which he continued to return for extended periods of timethroughout his life.

A later generation of critics, from Latin America and beyond, have restored Quiroga toprominence as a key figure. His work is more than merely derivative of any of his acknowledgemasters, and Borges was certainly unfair in the disparaging comparison with Kipling. Although boset fantastical tales of animals and men against a jungle backdrop, and Kipling's direct influence

traceable in a collection of Quiroga fables for children written in the style of the Jungle Books , this isnot really representative. Most of Quiroga's stories of Misiones represent something quite his own,combination of stylistic and thematic elements that individually may be teased out and traced, aleast in part, to particular sources, but that together form his own literary universe, one that iscompelling, and immediately recognizable to anyone with more than a passing familiarity with hwork.

However, in light of the fascination both Quiroga and Kipling demonstrate for exploring theborderlands between civilization (the problematic and contradictory nature of which is not lost onthem) and the ineffable lands beyond it, it is instructive to look at examples of their work in

1 All translations mine except where noted.2 This is the phrase Poe uses in his review of Hawthorne’sTwice-Told Tales , in which he presents his aesthetics of the

short story, but I am unaware whether he coined it or not.




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comparison. Kipling's relationship to the vast, dangerous and untamed landscapes in his imperiastories, and to the succession of rogues, misfits, adventurers and "natives" he finds within them, mseem, on the surface, to share some ground with Quiroga's Misiones stories, set in the raggedviolent, settler outposts of the impenetrable and ultimately unknowable Amazonian jungle. But thtwo authors' encounter with the "exotic," and their construction of its meaning, differs widely, andthis inevitably takes the reader on two very different journeys. Along the way, s/he will confroquestions of existential, imperial, and even ecological import, which will be explored in turn in thstudy.

It is worth pausing first to make a few brief comparisons with the othermaestros identified by Quiroga, because—as he plainly acknowledges—they each provided him with their own particulstimulus. With Poe and Maupassant, he shares a morbid and tragic biography, whose events arelike theirs, generated at least in part by the pathological complexities of his own character. Like Pohis relations with women, particularly his two very young wives, were definitively destructive. In case of his first wife, this is literally true: she took a fatal dose of poison six years into their marria

Other incidents of violence had dogged his earlier life. In 1902, Quiroga had caused the death of close friend in a shooting accident, which led to his self-imposed exile from Uruguay to ArgentinLike Maupassant, he was beset by degenerative disease and ultimately suicidal, though Quiroga wsuccessful in his attempt, and Maupassant was not in his. Literarily, this trajectory at the very leamay be seen as reinforcing the Latin American author's affinity for pathos and horror.

In terms of aesthetics, both Poe and Quiroga are ardent defenders of the short story form, andparticularly the story of effect, while they ultimately differ greatly in style and manifest contenQuiroga describes the short story as "una novela depurada de ripios" (qtd. in L AZO xiv) [a novelpurged of detritus]. Poe, of course, famously declared that the highest form of literary art is thawhich can be experienced in a single sitting. Both writers mention the necessity of an extraordinalevel of intention and control in the form. Quiroga's fifth commandment states: "En un cuento bienlogrado, las tres primeras líneas tienen casi la misma importancia que las tres últimas" (qtd. in L AZO xxxiv). [In the well-realized short story, the first three lines have almost the same importance as tlast three]. And Poe says of the author: "If his very first sentence tend not to the out-bringing of heffect, then in his very first step he has committed a blunder" (566).

Critics have noted correctly that both authors are drawn to the scientific and rational asmainstays against the maelstrom of the tormented psyche and the horrifying presence of thesupernatural. Margo Clantz has examined Quiroga's debt to Poe, above all in his early storiesparticularly his second collection,El Crimen de Otros , published in 1904 (FLORES93-118). She

argues that he is explicitly experimenting with duplicating Poe's effects in these stories: "Quirogworks deliberately to learn Poe's methods in literary practice itself" (97). But there is little of Poeprolix romanticism in Quiroga's best work, which is characterized by deadpan, almost clinicadepictions of madness and death, his two most constant themes. And as we will see, Poe's overainfluence attenuates after Quiroga's seminal move in 1910 to San Ignacio, an outpost in thenorthern jungle. Here he finds his primary subject, one which has no direct equivalent in theexperience or the imaginations of any of hismaestros.

Poe undoubtedly also contributes something to the atmosphere of dread which inhabits manyof Quiroga's stories, early and late, but not the naturalism of his domestic settings—this is more

likely Maupassant's gift. Quiroga's few good stories of desperate marriages full of spite anvengefulness, missed romantic chances, and other forms of bourgeois despair, probably owsomething—possibly too much—to Maupassant. Finally, Chekhov is certainly the master of the




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detached, subtly ironic narrative voice, and Quiroga's application of this voice in his stories osurvival and death on the jungle frontier is one of his signature touches.

In making the reference to Kipling, Borges may have been dismissively referring to QuirogaCuentos de la Selva , vivid little fables for children which recall the Just So Stories or The Jungle Books .But there is another possibility for more fruitful comparison. The collectionLos Desterrados [The Exiles ], alone among the eleven anthologies published in Quiroga's lifetime, is a group of interrelated stories, unified in tone, setting and subject matter. All these stories are set in afictionalized San Ignacio and environs. The "master" here may well have been Kipling: Quirogstrikes a reportorial, or raconteurial tone in a number of the tales, found intermittently in hisfrontier stories, which reminds one immediately of the British chronicler of the outposts of empirLazo calls this collection "the only one to achieve artistic unity" (133), and American translator anscholar J. David Danielson informs us that many regard it as the author's best work (155).

The Desterrados stories are almost all drawn directly from Quiroga's experience as a landholderin Misiones. Several are portraits of fellow inhabitants, whose models were identified by thQuiroga scholar Emir Rodríguez Monegal, when he visited the author's former homestead in 1949(FLORES 233-243). Some are descriptions of Quiroga's own homesteading or entrepreneurialactivities, displaced onto other his characters.

Los Desterrados is divided into two parts: the first part is called "El ambiente" (the"environment," or "surroundings") and the second "Los tipos" (loosely taken to mean "thecharacters"). The first section consists of one story only: "The Return of Anaconda," an animal fabwhich is actually the sequel to an earlier tale. This story takes Kipling's conceit of the jungle as tlocation of moral instruction and deals with it in an interesting way, which I will examine belowThe second section has seven tales, and these, with one exception, are "colorful" reportoria

narratives of the eccentric residents of the settlement. The exception, "The Dead Man" representone of Quiroga's unique achievements, and I will also consider it more at length further on. Therest of the tales of the "tipos" will be looked at collectively.

It is not an easy task to choose a particular selection of Kipling's tales to compare to this workHowever prolific Quiroga may seem—like Kipling he also wrote in other genres, including poetrnovels, plays and criticism—Kipling's output was vaster by far. And tales of Kipling's exotfrontier—colonial India—are to be found throughout his 38-volume collected works. I have lookeat a selection of the India stories fromThe Portable Kipling , Plain Tales from the Hills , which is thefirst volume in the Outward Bound series of Kipling's works, andThe Phantom 'Rickshaw and Other Stories , the fifth. (Two of thePortable's nine selections are fromPlain Tales , two fromPhantom'Rickshaw , and two fromThe Jungle Books .)

All of these stories, with the exception of the Jungle Book selections, were written while Kipling was living in India. They are early stories; at 17, Kipling returned to the colony, where he had spenthe first six years of his life. He remained there for another seven years, working mostly as correspondent and editor for Anglo-Indian newspapers, after which he left again, and neverreturned to India for any extended period. The stories he wrote during his stay gave him an earlyfame the scope of which Quiroga did not share at even the highest point in his career. Kipling, borthirteen years earlier than Quiroga, was also more precocious than the latter, who in his twentiewas still mired in a derivative Modernism. At the same time, it has been argued that Kipling's worin the short story form never showed any consistent development, that his best and worst stories arscattered almost randomly throughout his huge production (M ALLETT viii). However, the




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inspiration Quiroga received from his contact with the jungle frontier, unmatched by any othersubject, is certainly comparable to that which India as subject offered Kipling.

It is necessary to confess at this point, before making any in-depth comparisons, that I franklyfound it more difficult to spend time with Kipling than with Quiroga.3 While attempts have beenmade to resurrect Kipling the artist from the critical death that his jingoistic politics brought himdecades before his actual death in 1936, they have not been particularly successful, and with gooreason. They are all attempts to sever the politics from the art, and there are few authors I can thinof for whom this is less possible. Eliot Gilbert's argument that if D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot cabe seen as transcending reductive ideology in their art, then why not Kipling? (The Good Kipling 7)falls apart on the first reading of even the best of Kipling's work, in the short story form at leasOne has to turn aside every other phrase, one simply has to ignore or argue away too much. Evepost-colonialist efforts such as Zohreh Sullivan's (in her 1993 study Narratives of Empire)to apply Homi Bhabha's ideas of colonial ambivalence andmestizaje to Kipling's thought are not really a vindication. The fact that Kipling exhibits contradictory attitudes towards his subject matter doe

not necessarily make him a more sophisticated thinker or a better writer; it is not contradiction bua mastery of complex thought that we look for in assessing the quality of a work.It is still, unfortunately, more enjoyable in many ways to read Kipling's critics, pro or con, than

to read any large amount of Kipling himself. After trying to keep an open mind through a numberof attempts at his reconstruction, I could only ponder that such dedicated efforts to extract artistimerit from work so compromised by a reductionistic world-view are rarely made in the case osocialist realist authors, and wonder why. Irving Howe argued in 1982 that as imperialism fadedinto history, it was possible to take up Kipling and find his ideas less threatening, making a purenjoyment of "the vibrancy of his language, the richness of his imaginings" possible (Portable Kipling xviii). His assessment was premature. If Anglo-American imperialist attitudes ever do trullose their grip on the daily lives of millions of souls, then perhaps we may try again.

But it is in fact difficult to argue for exceptional excellence of style in the case of Kipling. Thissue will recur on closer examination, but take one example from "The Phantom 'Rickshaw," onof his stories of the supernatural. On encountering the lovelorn ghost that will pursue him todistraction, Kipling's narrator is made to inform us: "From the horrible to the commonplace is buta step" (13). While this could be a summation of Quiroga's (but not Poe's) idea of effect, Quiroganever feels it necessary to explain this to his reader in the middle of a tale. Even the richestimaginings of Kipling are often brought low by thudding moments such as these.

However, I have reminded myself that it is notmy admiration, but Quiroga's that is the genesisof this study, and I will try to do justice to it.4 I have said that the concerns raised by reading thesetwo authors in comparison were existential, imperial and ecological. Let us begin with the existent

While Quiroga could not anticipate Hemingway, the latter's dictum that "every true story endsin death" has a zealous practitioner in him. Death is the terminus of the great majority of his bes

3 I regret not being able to hold myself to the standard demanded by Shamsul Islam, of Panjab University, who sayin his 1975 study Kipling’s Law (5): “an investigation of Kipling’s ideas must be based on a close study of his works intheir totality, and not on a few isolated pieces used as crutches for projecting one’s preconceived notions about him” ( With apologies, a “close study of his works in their totality” would conceivably have required more years than are likto remain to me on this planet.

4 I refer readers to George Orwell’s trenchant essay, in the collectionKipling and His Critics , which in 1942conveyed everything I could ever imagine wanting to say about Kipling, and makes me doubt that anything significahas been added to the debate since then.




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stories. In the most accomplished ones, "Adrift" or "The Dead Man," Quiroga becomes thechronicler par excellence of the experience of unnatural death (from snakebite in the former, a freaaccident with a machete in the latter). He examines the process from inside the mind of hisprotagonist and opens it out, temporalizing it, presenting dying with a level of detail that involvethe utmost economy of description (another of Quiroga's aesthetic precepts for storytelling) and yegives the reader an "agonistic" experience, in the literal sense of both contest and suffering (Flor273). These stories explore what one recent scholar has called "the eschatological frontier" (ZUÑIGA NORIEGA 109), and Quiroga spends more time on this border, and penetrates it more deeply, thanany of his literary mentors, with the possible exception of Poe in "The Facts in the Case of MValdemar."

In "The Dead Man," an unidentified homesteader is weeding his banana grove with a machete.He pauses to take a rest, stumbles as he crosses a barbed wire fence, and impales himself. Withfifteen minutes (the passing time is subtly but relentlessly noted in the narrative) he is dead. Hihorse, wishing to enter the field he has left to graze, but not daring while the man is alive, does so

the moment his death is confirmed. This constitutes the sum total of the story's action.The tone is extraordinarily concise, even for Quiroga, whose seventh storytelling

commandment is "No adjetives sin necesidad" (qtd. in L AZO xxxiv) [No unnecessary adjectives].There are moments of clipped and quiet irony: after falling on his machete, the protagonist "yaestaba tendido en la gramilla, acostado sobre el lado derecho, tal como el quería" (66) [was nostretched out on the grass, on his right side, just as he had wished]. His posture is "como hubierdeseado estar.... Sólo que tras el antebrazo, e inmediatamente por debajo del cinto, surgían de scamisa el puño del machete; pero el resto no se veía" (ibid.) [as he would have desired it to be. Except that behind his forearm, and just under his belt, the handle and half the blade of themachete protruded from his shirt. The rest could not be seen]. From the very beginning, as JoséEtcheverry notes (qtd. in FLORES270) the man and his machete are described as a team: "Elhombre y su machete acababan de limpiar la quinta calle del bananal. Faltábanles aún dos calles(Los Desterrados 66) [The man and his machete had just finished weeding the fifth row of thebanana grove.They had two rows left (emphasis added)]. Thus their extreme closeness after theman's fall is another level of bleak irony. The man clinically calculates the length of the blade thamust be inside his chest, and "adquirió, fría, matemática e inexorable, la seguridad de que acababde llegar al término de su existencia" (67) [acquired the cold, mathematical, inexorable certaintthat he had just arrived at the end of his existence].

There follow two paragraphs of narrative digression, which will not recur in this short tale

They are a lyrical description of the romance with which "we" (the narrator adopts the first persoplural) imagine the inevitability of death when we think of it as remote: "solemos dejarnos llevplacenteramente por la imaginación a ese momento, supremo entre todos, en que lanzamos elúltimo suspiro" (67) [how pleasurably we tend to let ourselves be carried by our imagination to thamoment, supreme among all, in which we breathe our last breath]. There is irony here, but also thconvincing possibility that death is in a sense desirable, a culmination and a communion.

The point of view then returns abruptly to the protagonist, for whom death is imminent, andfollows him as his consciousness slowly dissolves. He does not pass through Elisabeth Kübler-Rofamous five stages, but he alternates between denial and acquiescence, mainly because he cann

accept that he is undergoing an irreversible transition, when nothing in the world around himreflects the change:




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"Es ése o no un natural mediodía de los tantos en Misiones, en su monte, ensu potrero, en su bananal ralo? ¡Sin duda! Gramilla corta, conos de hormigas,silencio, sol a plomo...Nada, nada ha cambiado. Solo él es distinto. (69)

Was this or not a normal midday like so many in Misiones, in his scrub land, his pasture, his sparse banana grove? Of course! The short grass, anthills, silence, the sun straight overhead...

Nothing, nothing has changed. Only he is different.

The clarity of the man's vision is stressed as he reviews all the familiar things around him antakes an inventory of the environment that he has created with his labor, of which he is evidentlyproud. He listens for the habitual approach of his wife and children, bringing his lunch. Rather thanaccepting his death as he did at the beginning, he ends by rejecting it, because the world remaintoo perfectly as he had known it, as he had created it. He sees himself merely napping "exactamencomo todos los días" [exactly as he does every day] at this hour, in this place. In his last consciothought he returns to his initial hope of "descansando, porque está muy cansado" (71) [resting,because he is very tired]. But the world is ultimately indifferent to the effort his consciousness makto persist, and in his languidity is his final submission. As the voices of the man's approachinfamily are heard, the horse, who has been waiting anxiously to graze, fearing the living manpresence, "vuelve un largo, largo rato las orejas inmóviles al bulto [turns his still ears for a long, lotime towards the heap] that the dead man's body has become, and finally, "tranquilizado al fin, sedecide a pasar entre el poste y el hombre—que ya ha descansado" (71) [reassured at last, decides pass between the fencepost and the lying man—who is now at rest].

This is a very personal vision, and there is nothing discernible of Kipling here. Also, incontradistinction to Poe, the horrific effect lies in the heavily emphasized normality of the situationits commonplace character. The man does not have an exceptional life for his surroundings, nor ihe in an exceptional circumstance in this instance. He has been doing exactly what he has doneevery day for the last decade—why should his unvarying actions result, in this case, in his deatThis normalcy implicates the reader in the effect, for if nothing is less exotic to us than our owdaily lives, then the death that can emerge out of these quotidian circumstances cannot be exoticizeeither.

Many of the Misiones stories foreground a particular death that, while generally surprising tothe victim, is ultimately made to seem inevitable by the context. There are so many ways thiforbidding environment can produce death: snakebite, fever, poisonous insects, sunstroke, exposurdrowning, to name a few that Quiroga describes. When we look at the ecological concerns we wsee, however, that nature is not strictly portrayed as hostile. Rather, nature is indifferent. Humanalso find their own ways to exterminate themselves: alcohol, explosions, gunshots, knives. No matwhat the initiating circumstance, the victim's experience, when it is explored at length, is frequentla process of resistance and resignation, and finally rest. "Adrift," from the collectionStories of Love

Madness and Death, or "The Immigrants" fromThe Savage , are fine examples of this type. Thereader is left to hold the irony of the specific incident: i.e., the "Dead Man" narrator seeking to res

for a few moments and resting forever—but the protagonist is released from all ironies, from all tharduousness of existence. Death, in these stories, is the only possible place for resolution in huma




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affairs. And the frontiers of life and death, far from being absolute, are porous, interpenetrableDeath is really the ground upon which life briefly and unsuccessfully takes place.

In "The Dead Man," and one or two other stories, such as "The Wilderness" or "The Son" itbecomes clear that Quiroga is engaging in a kind of personal eschatology, taking the concretcircumstances of his own life in Misiones and constructing out of them a fantasy of his death or, ithe case of "The Son," one of his children's. The romance his narrator describes deriving from thifantasy in "The Dead Man," is a curious achievement of mastery over the horror of death by thepassive and languid enjoyment of its contemplation: "dejarnos llevar por la imaginación a esemomento" (emphasis added, 67) [welet ourselves be carried by our imagination to that moment].

Death is also a frequent presence in Kipling's tales. But it is a more varied and diffuse presencmore often implied than described, happening offstage, as a backdrop, consequence or pretext of story's action, but not the action itself. In Kipling's highly Other-ed imperial world, it is as if deathrepresents the ultimate failure of mastery over the Other. This mastery is of course, in his view anFreud's, the impossible and necessary project of civilization (Portable Kipling ix). Natives in theIndia stories must succumb to death regularly, submissively, whether contemptibly or nobly, but foa member of the conquering race, death is a tragic mistake. And the tragic flaw which causes it is aunpardonable lapse of control.

"The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes," written when Kipling was 19, and apparently "suffering from weeks of insomnia, stomach cramps, and depression" (SULLIVAN 71), is a remarkable exception in Kipling's treatment of death, not in its thematic significance, but becausedeath is foregrounded here, and in a particularly interesting way. The story has received muchcritical attention and been anthologized widely. It is also a tale which Quiroga might well haveadmired, for the sheer vividness of scene and command of horrific effects that Kipling displays.

The narrator is an English engineer, who, suffering from fever and in a fit of anger after beinunable to stop a pack of dogs from disturbing his camp, rides out at night into the Indian desert andheedlessly stumbles into a large sand pit from which he cannot escape. The pit, it turns out, is thehome of more than sixty people, Hindu "undead" who have been banished there because they faileto die after suffering illnesses or coma from which they were not supposed to recover. Theinhabitants are filthy, fetid and near starvation. Trapped with them, Jukes' racial authority andcolonial moral code begin to disintegrate. He is mocked and betrayed by the living dead, andparticularly by a former civil servant and Brahmin, Gunga Dass, the only one who is capable ospeaking to him. They form a relationship of necessity, filled with mutual hatred and distrust, baseon the fact that both have an equally strong desire to escape.

This is clearly an infernal vision. It is an anti-social nightmare, as Jukes reports: "in the accursesettlement there was no law save that of the strongest. ... [T]he living dead had thrown out evercanon of the world which had cast them out, and I had to depend for my own life on my strengthand vigilance alone" (235). The fact that Gunga Dass considers himself Jukes' equal in this plactorments him, threatening the foundations of his identity. Later on, after Jukes' horse is killed forfood, Dass mocks him with the ultimate horror: "We are now Republic, Mister Jukes. You areentitled to your fair share of the beast" (239). In the same passage, he brokenly quotes JeremBentham: "greatest good of greatest number is political maxim" to justify the slaughter. It becomevery clear that hell is a place of anarchy, "a Republic of beasts penned at the bottom of a pit, to eaand fight and sleep till we died" (239). There may be no better expression in all of Kipling of whahe feared the civilizing project was up against.




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But this is an inferno into which the Englishman has stumbled through his own inexperienceand error, the suspension of his rationality. The error is ultimately corrected by a loyal servant (h"dog-boy," one instance of many where Kipling applies irony with a trowel and still misses the fuconsequences of his own effects) who tracks Jukes and throws him a rope, extricating him at hmoment of greatest weakness.

Jukes' identity and authority never fully disintegrate. Through him, the reader discovers what iis like to be in Kipling's idea of hell, but not to be dead, that is to have one's identity completelyerased, simply not tobe . The personal annihilation that Quiroga explores, the process of un-becoming, the final passivity before the inevitability of extinction is unthinkable in the context othe necessary imperial project.

The existential and the imperial are intertwined in Kipling in a way which has no directcorrespondence in Quiroga. Fully confronting one's existence means assuming, at whatever personcost (and, in Kipling's world-view, no personal benefit is necessarily imparted to those in thdominant position) one's proper role in the race-play of civilization. This, as he acknowledges istory after story, is something that humans are almost invariably incapable of doing.

"The Man Who Would Be King," written at 23, is probably Kipling's most enduring imperialstory. It is without a doubt the most ambitious, in the sense of both the author's attempted reach,and his protagonists'. As most readers will be aware, it is the tale of two English rogues, DaniDravot and Peachy Carnahan, who after being discharged from the army travel about India invarious guises, practicing a variety of con games, thuggery and near escapes. They decide that Inddoes not offer enough scope for their ambitions, so they will invade and conquer a country forthemselves, remote "Kafiristan," (the "dog-boy" brand of irony again), using the techniquesconveniently imparted to them during their military service, and their natural confidence in British

superiority. Through a series of chances and mischances, they succeed to such an extent that Dravois taken for a god, and begins to take his role as sovereign seriously. But he is finally unmasked, asummarily killed, and Peachy is severely tortured and then released, returning to India broken inmind and body. He shows the narrator Dravot's severed head, still wearing a tarnished crown, whehe comes back to tell the tale and die.

Many have seen this story as evidence of "the good Kipling," in Hemingway's phrase, becauseso vividly demonstrates the utter failure of an imperial project, compellingly portraying the garisviolence, absurdity and hubris that accompany conquest. But what is often overlooked is thatDravot and Carnahan arelumpen. Their distinctive forms of speech, complete with dropped finalconsonants, many oaths, and colorful colloquialisms, are used here, as Kipling uses them even mobroadly in hisBarrack Room Ballads , to hammer home class status for tragi-comic effect (seeORWELLin Kipling and His Critics 79-80). This means that their adventure, from the start, is anunderclass parody—really a burlesque—of empire-building. Their faulty knowledge of Freemasontakes the place, in their upside down world, of Divine Law. There is no question of theirsucceeding: if the best men can barely fulfill the task, the worst are bound to fail. Howeveinteresting he makes their journey, and however awesome their rise, Kipling sets these men up tfall just as far—literally, in Dravot's case—in the end. This is entirely consistent with his philosophof existence; it is not a splendid digression from, but rather a fulfillment of, his most essential visio

Kipling's moral logic does allow Dravot to become fully transformed by facing the inevitabiliof his death. He roars "D'you suppose I can't die like a gentleman?" (94) as he is being "prodded .like an ox" towards the rope bridge he ordered built, which will be cut, and the chasm into which




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his body will plunge. He asks Peachey's forgiveness, he retains control of his dignity, he acquires right comportment the nobility he had tried to assume by deception. Nothing in his life becomeshim like the leaving of it. This is the existential encounter as high romance.

What emerges most vividly in this tale is Kipling's idea of the exotic frontier, of a place trulbeyond the pale. It is not geographically defined, nor strictly confined to India, though it is OrientaIt is all "the dark places of the Earth, full of unimaginable cruelty, touching the Railway and theTelegraph on one side, and, on the other, the days of Haroun al-Raschid" (44). In this sentence,Kipling's narrator is referring to the Native States, but it is clear as he describes the transformationhe himself undergoes when in these places, "passing through many stages of life," that they, beyonbeing a fantasized Orient, are the psychic stage for existential encounters, locations of any geograpand of slippery and unstable temporality. The Kafiristan that Dravot and Carnahan must enter bystealth and murder, first passing through Afghanistan, never conquered by the British, is even morexotic; it is a frontier beyond the Northwest Frontier, the last frontier of civilization. In this landthey are (albeit briefly) transformed into kings and gods, and the inhabitants into "white people—

sons of Alexander—not like common black Mohammedans" (78), the citizens of an imaginedempire which will rival England's, in the unlimited fantasizing unleashed by the chimerical power crossing the ultimate boundary. Kipling's exotic spaces have all the raw power of projection; they aexamples of the mind's astonishing ability to colonize "empty" space and time, whatever violencedone to history, or to lived human experience in the process.

Perhaps Quiroga was capable of reading Kipling in the way Howe suggested, withoutimplication in the project of empire, with which the conscious Anglo-American reader must sticontend. The peculiar combination of condescension, bafflement and admiration that distinguishesthe imperial gaze is absent from Quiroga's work. His depictions of the Misiones "types" are nocolored by their relationship to an imperial project, or to a linguistic "worlding" enterprise. Whilthe setting would have been exotic to most of his readers, there is little exoticizing going on in hportrayal of it, or of the characters within it. The Misiones "exiles" are European and Latin American,mestizo, black and white, peons and landowners. Those who come to grief do so insimilar ways; there is a general egalitarianism of death. Those who survive are neither the high nthe low, the deserving or the undeserving, because such designations belong only to the world thehave left behind. Among them, the ones who held some kind of professional status in that world aroften referred to as "ex-men," a term suggestive of the death of a societally-sanctioned existence thQuiroga's exiles experience.

The title story of Los Desterrados begins with an explicitness, a hearty reportorial style, that

seems straight out of early Kipling:Misiones, como toda región de frontera, es rica en tipos pintorescos. Suelenserlo extraordinariamente, aquellos que a semejanza de las bolas de billar, hannacido con efecto. Tocan normalmente banda, y emprenden los rumbos másinesperados. (33)

Misiones, like all frontier regions, is rich in picturesque types. They seem to be extraordinarily so, of that kind who are born with spin, like billiard balls. They hit the bank straight on, and take off in the most unexpected directions.

In the next sentence three of the "types" are introduced:




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En el período de las plantaciones reconocíasele desde lejos por sus hábitospara carpir mandioca. Este trabajo, a pleno sol de verano, y en hondonadas a veces donde no llega un soplo de aire, se lleva a cabo en las primeras horas dela mañana y en las últimas de la tarde. Desde las once a las dos el paisaje secalcina solitario en un vaho de fuego.Estas eran las horas que elegía Tirafogo para carpir descalzo la mandioca.Quitábase la camisa, arremangábase el calzoncillo por encima de la rodilla, y sin más protección que la de su sombrero orlado entre paño y cinta depuchos de chala, se doblaba a carpir concienzudamente su mandioca, con la espalda lumbrante de sudor y reflejos. (39)

During the planting season, he was recognized from afar for his habits when it came to hoeing manioc. In the full heat of summer, and at times down in the hollows where not a breath of wind will reach, this work is typically done in the

first hours of the morning and the last of the afternoon. From eleven to two, the

empty landscape burns up in a fiery haze.These were the hours that a barefoot Tirafogo chose to hoe the manioc. He took off his shirt, rolled his pants up above the knee, and with no other protection thanhis hat, trimmed with cornstalk cigarettes stuck between cloth and hatband, he bent conscientiously to hoe his manioc, his back shining with sweat and reflected light.(Translation by Danielson, with slight alterations.)

This is one of many instances where the most difficult or tedious labor is described withadmiration and understated lyricism. While various scholars have pointed out that Quiroga is not socialist, nor does he seemingly have an interest in any form of organized politics, his descriptions

work and of laborers are always informed by what one can only describe as sympathy. One of hbest stories, "The Contract Workers," describes the plight of laborers in the logging camps inclinical and relentless detail, and there are notable stories like "The Wild Beasts in Collusion," or "Slap in the Face" that recount remorseless acts of revenge by abused workers.

Again, however, Quiroga is revealed to be more concerned in his art with existential matterthan with social or political—or spiritual—ones. Labor, like death, is seen as a primary condition existence, its rationale is intrinsic and fundamental, rather than resulting solely from human evil osystemic oppression.

In fact, Misiones is never presented as the site of an imperial enterprise like Kipling's India. Thtype of conquest that Quiroga is most concerned with is, like Kipling's, also necessary andimpossible, but it is happening at a different level. It is the conquest of nature.

"The Return of Anaconda," the fable which begins theDesterrados collection, is not just a taleof the Misiones surroundings, but of the environment in the modern sense. Kipling's Jungle Book stories, while displaying the romance of their Edenic natural setting (Orel 77), are really about thmoral instruction of a boy, Mowgli, raised with animals, who must learn from them how to be aman. One of Quiroga's earlier fables, "Juan Darien," is a nice reversal of this conceit: it is about tiger cub, transformed into a man, who becomes so disgusted with the cruelty and indignity of thehumans among whom he lives that he opts to turn his back on them forever, and reverts to being a

tiger. But Anaconda's journey takes her out of Kipling's territory altogether.




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Anaconda, a giant boa constrictor, who in her youth participated in an uprising of snakesagainst men (the subject of an earlier story as mentioned previously) is now seen at thirty years oand at the height of her power. However, she is threatened by the encroaching presence of man:

Un hombre, primero, con su miserable ansia de ver, tocar y cortar había emergido tras del cabo de arena con su larga piragua. Luego otros hombres,con otros más, cada vez más frecuentes. Y todos ellos sucios de olor, sucios demachetes y quemazones incesantes. Y siempre remontando el río desde el Sur.(11)

First one man, with his miserable urging to see, touch and cut, had emerged beyond the sand spit with his long canoe. Then more men, with still others, more

frequently all the time. And all of them filthy smelling, filthy with machetes and constant brush burnings. And always heading up the river, from the south.

The boa calls on the other animals to help barricade the river so that men will no longer be ablto travel up it. The narrator remarks: "Muy poco costó a Anaconda convencer a los animales. Ehombre ha sido, es, y será el más cruel enemigo de la selva" (12) [It took little for Anaconda tconvince the animals. Man has been, is and will always be the cruelest enemy of the jungle]Quiroga is still walking in tandem with the Kipling of The Jungle Books here; both recognized thedeficiencies of humanity in the ugliness of its attitudes toward the natural world.

In this fable, Quiroga makes explicit the love for the jungle environment that has been impliedin all his Misiones tales. His stories do not generally indulge in description for description's sakthat would violate his maxim on concision. But the jungle's ineffable presence is always felt. Thqualities of light are described, the heat, the force of storms, the sound of rain on leaves. In "ThReturn of Anaconda," such description is more frequent and more extended. When a two-monthdrought breaks, the fantastical extremes of the climate come to the fore:

Diez noches y diez días continuos el diluvio cernióse sobre la selva flotandoen vapores; y lo que fuera páramo de insoportable luz, tendíase ahora hasta elhorizonte en sedante napa líquida. La flora acuática rebrotaba en planísimasbalsas verdes que a simple vista se veía dilatar sobre el agua hasta lograrcontacto con sus hermanas. (17)

For ten nights and ten days the downpour loomed over the forest floating in mist;and what had been a wasteland of unbearable light was now a soothing liquid skin, stretching to the horizon. The water flowers sprang up as flat green rafts,appearing everywhere, expanding across the water until they touched their sisters.

The giant boa travels down the flooding river on an uprooted cedar tree, to witness theconquest she hopes the flood will bring, blocking the Paraná with so much plant life that it will bimpassable. As her raft arrives in the Misiones area, it unexpectedly runs against "a floating islanon which she discovers a straw hut under which a man is lying, "pero enseñaba una larga herida ela garganta, y estaba muriendo" (21) [But he displayed a large wound in the throat, and he wasdying].

With this trope, the fable, like the river, breaks from any expected channels. The journeydownstream becomes increasingly complex metaphorically, as the jungle is transformed by the floand the snake guards the ebbing life of the man from other beasts, for reasons that she cannotexplain. The flood is finally absorbed in the vast landscape, the man dies without any discernibl




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change in his posture, or further explanation of his situation, the river is not blocked, the re-conquest is abandoned, and Anaconda realizes that she herself is dying.

In an extraordinary final turn, the boa decides that the decomposing corpse of the man is thebest place to deposit the eggs she must lay before she dies. As she does so a "victorious" boat ascethe river, and the passengers spot her. Guessing that she has killed the inhabitant of the hut, whomthey cannot see, they shoot her. Her failing consciousness is described in much the same way as thprotagonist of "The Dead Man," as a strange sense of painless fatigue pervades her thoughts"Inmensos y azulados ahora, sus huevos desbordaban del cobertizo y cubrían la balsa entera" (30Her "immense blue" eggs, viable, undamaged by her death, unnoticed by the passengers, now "spiout," covering not just the man but the entire raft. The last thing she sees "transparentándose sobreella, la cara sonriente del mensú" [hovering above her, is the smiling face of the dead laborer].

This is a supple and elusive piece of work. The notion of victory has become entirelyambiguous. Far from being a location of moral instruction, whose Law is comprehensible and mabe learned by Man if he receives proper guidance, Quiroga's jungle in this fable is a place oenormous and continual struggle, a constant exchange of life and death, by both animals andhumans, that none of its inhabitants fully understands. It is the site of recurrent failures of comprehension, a place at whose borders human civilization is held in check, always attempting advance but never really obtaining a solid advantage. Animals and men are both subjected to thoverall environment, whose precepts are inscrutable and mute. For Quiroga, the jungle's power ithat however intimately it comes to be known, it cannot be fully penetrated and colonized, even infantasy. Exoticism, as it exists in Kipling, is really about this type of imaginative conquest. InThe

Jungle Books , Kipling constructs a vivid and engaging primeval landscape within which the concernsthat haunt him with their lack of resolution in other settings can be mastered. All the nails arehammered into place, and unconstructed nature is sealed out. But the ironic interdependence thatQuiroga discovers between animals, humans, and the environment, the admixture of mortality andpersistence which characterize his vision, are the product of a different type of imagination, onwhich abdicates conquest, one which "lets itself" be carried, away, rather than towards, its owconstructive efforts, and not to an imposed resolution of impenetrable mysteries.

While I am unprepared to do more than raise the issue here, if one holds that there is validity tothe concept of écriture feminine , then Quiroga's work may be an example. His willingness toprotagonize a female consciousness in such a significantly positioned tale as "The Return o Anaconda" is perhaps significant. The omnipresence of water, not just in this, but in many of theMisiones stories, with its uncontrollable, transformative and life-giving capability, its power of flo

is also suggestive.In any case, Quiroga, far from being derivative of Anglo-American or European masters, can b

seen as a precursor of some of the trends that have been valiantly attempting to rescue the fictionprose narrative from irrelevancy since the mid-twentieth century. He anticipates the existentialisfiction of the mid-century, the surrealism of Cortázar, and the best of magic realism. His literaryrelationship to the natural world is still ahead of the times, and it remains to be seen whether hinuanced understanding of that particular and often-unexamined relationship, intimate, fatal andsustaining, will obtain the currency it deserves.




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Works Cited

FLORES, Angel, ed. Aproximaciones a Horacio Quiroga . Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, C.A.,1976.

GILBERT, Eliot, ed.Kipling and the Critics . New York: New York UP, 1965. ---.The Good Kipling . Oberlin: U of Ohio P, 1970. ISLAM, Shamsul.Kipling's Law . London: The Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1975. K IPLING, Rudyard.The Jungle Book . New York: Grosset and Dunlap, Inc., 1950. ---. "The Man Who Would Be King," "The Phantom 'Rickshaw," "The Strange Ride of

Morrowbie Jukes".The Phantom 'Rickshaw and Other Stories . The Writings in Prose andVerse of Rudyard Kipling, Outward Bound Edition, Vol. 5. New York: Charles Scribner'sSons, 1899.

---. Plain Tales from the Hills . The Writings in Prose and Verse of Rudyard Kipling,Outward Bound Edition, Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1899.

---.The Portable Kipling . Ed. Irving Howe. New York: The Viking Press, 1982. M ALLETT, Phillip, ed.Kipling Considered . New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. OREL, Harold, ed.Critical Essays on Rudyard Kipling . Critical Essays on British Literature.

Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1989. POE, Edgar Allan.The Portable Poe . Ed. Philip Van Doren Stern. New York: The Viking

Press, 1982.

Q UIROGA , Horacio.Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte . Mexico City: Editores MexicanosUnidos, 1995. ---. Cuentos / Horacio Quiroga ; selección, según orden cronológico, estudio preliminar y notas

críticas e informativas . Ed. Raimundo Lazo. 17 ed. Sepan Cuentos Núm. 97. Mexico, DF:Editorial Porrúa, S.A., 1992.

---.Los Desterrados . Biblioteca Contemporánea. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1956. ---. The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories . Ed. and Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Austin: U of Texas P, 1976.

---. The Exiles and Other Stories . Ed. and trans. J. David Danielson and trans. Elsa K.Gambarini. Austin: U of Texas P, 1987. SULLIVAN, Zohreh T.Narratives of Empire: The fictions of Rudyard Kipling . Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 1993. ZUÑIGA NORIEGA , Irina. "La frontera escatológica: vida y muerte en 'El hombre muerto' de

Horacio Quiroga."HipertextoI (2005): 109-115.

quiroga and kipling_comparative study

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