NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE SHORT STORIES
OF EDGAR ALLAN POE AND HORACIO QUIROGA
by
MARIA DEL PILAR OJEDA, B.A.
A THESIS
IN
ENGLISH
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty
of Texas Tech University in
Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for
the Degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
A r»r»t»r>i7oH
May, 1999
M..-
13
MO
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^ 1999, Maria del Pilar q e d a
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-
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The amount of work done for this thesis would not have been possible without the
generous collaboration of a group of people to whom I am indebted for their
contributions.
First, I thank Dr. Wendell Aycock and, in his name, the scholarship committee of
the Department of English at Texas Tech University. His unconditional support for my
project, economically as well as morally, has been enormously influential since the day I
first entered at Texas Tech University.
I should especially mention Dr. Allan J. Kuethe for his sympathy, kindness, and
complete support. He afforded me necessary bibliographical help, as well as contacts,
and the means to further my investigation.
I am grateful for the support given by some professionals of literature in the
Spanish Department. First, Dr. Roberto Bravo, who is my professor and friend. He has
encouraged my work from its early stages and has offered all kinds of help. I must thank
the altruistic contributions offered by my advisor Dr. Bryce Conrad, who has
significantly improved this work with his advice and technical contributions. Needless to
say, I am enormously thankful to my friends, Ruben Rodriguez, Pablo Rios, Hiedra
Castillo and Enrique Porrua for their moral support and technical advice.
I shall not forget the support and help offered by other members of the
committee, such as Dr. Sydney Cravens who has been my guide these years. Also, out of
the committee Dr. Janet Perez for her advice, interest and support.
11
Last but not least, many and especial thanks to Lourdes Kuethe and Diane Aycock
for their understanding. More importantly, their moral support has helped me to sustain
constant enthusiasm for the research.
To all I am dedicating this work, hoping that it repays the help and support they
have given me.
Ill
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ii
ABSTRACT
v
CHAPTER
L
INTRODUCTION
1
n.
HUMOR AND SATIRE
5
m.
WOMEN CHARACTERS
25
IV.
NATURE AND DEATH
36
V.
THE NARRATFVE STYLE
58
VI.
CONCLUSIONS
79
WORKS CITED
82
IV
ABSTRACT
This work attempts to be a comparative analysis between two different authors
and some of their work. The authors are: Edgar Allan Poe and Horacio Quiroga, the first
being a guide for the second one. This work will focus on a comparisson of the
American writer with the Uruguayan and indicate the main points of divergence between
both. In order to accomplish this purpose, I will analyze some of their tales and I will
also focus on the genre of short story as the main vehicle used by them to work and
develop their theories throughout their narratives. For this analysis, I take four topics in
order to compare Poe and Quiroga's tales and their approach to these topic since they
recur in all these short stories. In every chapter I selected some tales that show some
kind of resemblances between both writers, and, in many cases, these tales appear in
more than one chapter. The chapters and tales presented in this study are the following:
- Chapter II. Humor and Satire: "Nuestro primer cigarro" (1917), "El alambre de
piia" (1917), "The Tell-Tale Heart"(1843), "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846), "The
Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845) and "Eleonora" (1842).
- Chapter HI. Women Characters: "EI almohadon de plumas" (1917), "La
meningitis y su sombra" (1917), "Ligeia" (1838), "Eleonora," "Berenice" (1835) and
"Morella"(1835).
- Chapter HI. Nature and Death: "El hombre muerto" (1920) "Las moscas"
(1933), "A la deriva" (1917), "Una bofetada" (1926), "La insolacion" (1912), "El hijo"
(1917), "Eleonora," "Ms Found in a Bottle" (1833), "Metzengerstein ' (1836),
"Berenice," "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Cask of Amontillado."
- Chapter IV. The Narration Style: "La bofetada," "La insolacion," "Los
perseguidos," (1908), "The Premature Burial" (1821), "The Oval Portrait" (1842),
"Metzengerstein," "The Man of the Crowd" (1840) and "The Assignation" (1834).
VI
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) influenced many of the Latin-American wnters at
the end of the past century, because through some French translations by Baudelaire and
other French positivists, the works of Poe became very familiar to the first generation of
the Latin-American Modernists. Among all these writers Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937)
was the one that, according to a number of critics, adopted more rapidly and directly
Poes's style as his own, especially during his first years as a writer; some critics still
question if Quiroga really ever got free from the influence of the American writer.'
Thus, when one reads both sets of collections of tales, it is easy to identify common
characteristics through their narrations.
One of these characteristics involves the way the two writers present the
narrator/protagonists in their stories. They are described as tormented persons that have
to face the idea of disappearing from this world. In both writers the attitude toward
death/time/solitude is crucial in the understanding of their character's psychological
development, and even in the understanding of the story itself In Poe this narratorprotagonist is already tormented, even before confronting his last moments. This is so
because Poe deals with unbalanced and destructive characters that are more concerned
about death and life beyond death than about their existence. Quiroga's protagonists, on
the other hand, are common people who only become tormented during their last
Jose L. Martinez. Horacio Quiroga. 27.
1
moments, seeing that life will go on without them anyway. These characters, then, w ill
appreciate life more than before and they will try to take hold of their ordinary lives, as
they see the prospect of life vanishing right before them.
The protagonists in the stories of both writers try to analyze and reason out the
tragic situations that they are confronting from analytic points of view and in uncommon
methodological maimers. In Quiroga's stories these characters' auto-analysis is
presented as less desperate than in Poe, at least in language, since the way Quiroga uses it
in order to express his characters' fears is so current and natural. This style of his is
actually his weak point for many critics; they accuse Quiroga of being too simple and
concise, and of not taking interest in the language itself Poe, in contrast, has been
criticized precisely for the opposite. The type of prose he uses matches the Gothic
enviroimient he describes, and thus many critics define his prose as Gothic mannerism.
The prose of these two writers is tinted with sadness and desperation in
acconcordance with their personal lives. Among many other themes, love/madness/death
appear recurrently in their tales; actually this is the title that Quiroga gives to one of his
most famous collections {Cuentos de amor, locura y muerte). Those three topics are
internally related in a background presented as extremely dangerous to the characters,
who are trapped in a completely irreversible situation. According to John E. Englekirk,
there are other points in common between the development of Poe and Quiroga's
narration such as; the appearance of a mysterious fate; an improbable event that takes
place-like the strange death of young women--; superstition and fatality that fly all
around the whole narrative; and the sense of horror that the narration itself leaves in the
9
reader (356). In Quiroga, this horror is reflected by his natural way of presenting a fatal
event that develops the drama in the story; Poe presents this horror in a more intentional
way-his prose and the Gothic background of the story are intended to create horrordetaching the current event from the strangest event happening to the narrator.
There are also great differences in the narrator/protagonists presented by both
writers. Poe depicts a very sophisticated and educated one, who dedicates his life to the
reading and learning process (especially by the observation of events). On the other
hand, Quiroga describes a working person involved with current activities for the
working class and surrounded by nature. Nature becomes an issue of enormous
importance for this Uruguayan writer; for Poe, in contrast, almost all the settings are
urban, where the person, instead of becoming more and more integrated in his society,
becomes completely alienated. Poe's protagonists are presented as individuals, they are
unique with proper names and specific backgrounds which make them different from the
others. Quiroga, however, uses anonymous characters—most of them namelessrepresenting any man; for Quiroga importance is given to the event that can occur to
anyone and not just a specific person. While in Poe the deaths of his characters affect the
whole world around them, in Quiroga the fact of dying does not affect at all the normal
course of life around the characters, and that is precisely the drama of the event.
Both writers also share the same aesthetic ideas about the concept of art. Quiroga
follows not only Poe's structure of the tales but also his theories about the very process
of writing, especially concerning the concept of the short story, which brought him to
write his famous "Decalogo del perfecto cuentista." In this writing he strongly affirms:
'>
J
"Cree en un maestro-Poe, Maupassant, Kipling, Chejov -como en Dios mismo" (cited
by Martinez, 27). They also agree about the concept of art as a direct representation of
life that the creator of any object of art has to suggest to his audience, and this is
something that they reflect in all their tales.
In this thesis I selected some of Poe's most popular short stories and from
Quiroga I have chosen from some different collections: from Cuentos de amor, locura y
muerte (1912), £"/ salvaje (1916) and Los desterrados {1920). I analyze them, trying to
see the similarities and the departure points in the themes of both writers, keeping in
mind that the Uruguayan consciously directs himself to follow the one who was his great
master, Edgar Allan Poe.
CHAPTER II
HUMOR AND SATIRE
Poe's use of humor is rather complex, complicated primarily because of the
gravity of subjects he deals with. But despite the seriousness of his stories there are
instances in which he depicts characters or situations that are so unusual that they
represent humor or satire within the stories. Charles E. May gives a brief classification
of Poe's stories in which the author displays some kind of humor. Among them, he cites:
"How to Write a Blackwood Article," "A Predictament," "The Masque of the Red
Death," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "Never Bet the Devil Your Head," "Bon-Bon," and "The
System of Dr. Tarr and Prof Fether." May also affirms that, "it is often difficult to tell
when Poe is being serious and when he is playing" (28). The character's voice
representing irony of statement or the scene itself— amounting to irony of situationconstitute the irony, humor, or satire, but this voice or scene does not in the end interfere
with the general tone of the story. Instead, these instances make the reader smile for a
while and release him a bit from the great tension of the story's structure; G. R.
Thompson has named it "romantic irony" (12 ). Stephen L. Mooney establishes a
classification system in order to understand Poe's comic intent, and he bases his
argument not on the motifs of the different stories themselves but rather on the way Poe
develops those motifs. According to this critic Poe's comic tales fall under one of these
five motifs: "ascending or descending motion," which includes tales like "The Balloon
Hoax," "Hop Frog," Metzengerstein," etc.; "group action," which contains tales such as
"King Pest" or "Hans Pfaall;" "machine-motions," with tales such as "Hop Frog" or
"Some Words with a Mummy;" "structural proportion and avoidance of proportion,"
with tales such as "The Mask of the Red Death" or "The Cask of Amontillado;" and
lastly, "the devil," which includes tales such as "Bon-Bon" or "The Devil in the Belfi^"
(433-4). Mooney also affirms that apartfromthe recognized humor tales of Poe, some of
those classified as serious and tragic should be reviewed again, maybefromanother
perspective (432).
Quiroga's use of humor is somewhat different from Poe's. Quiroga is rather
explicit and intentional, meaning that the author consciously uses humor in order to
create a funny situation, to provoke laughter and, unlike Poe, he uses irony and humor as
a part of the neurotic development of his character's personality. This is quite evident in
the use that his characters make of the language itself As James W Gargano points out
in this sense, referring to Poe's much criticized style, "there is often an aesthetic
compatibility between his narrators' hypertrophic language and their psychic
derangement... [the narrator] cannot be expected to consider his dilemma in coolly
rational prose" (23). Quiroga's use of humor deals directly with the presence of children
and animals in his stories. There is, at the same time, the idea of adventure that goes
against the established rules. The characters are willing to break the rules, even though
they know all the possible consequences of that break. In any case, the humor is revealed
in the tension created by a new situation, one in which the character has to face and solve
an imminent danger in order to save his self-esteem. In all cases, the reader knows more
than the characters themselves because Quiroga provides him with all kind of details.
This IS why the action can be seen as comical by the reader. This method of providing
all these clues to the reader in order for him to judge and see cleariy the character's
action is just the opposite of the technique Poe uses. Poe does not provide enough details
for the reader to clearly determine what is happening, and, even when he does give
enough details, suddenly, there is something in the narration itself that makes the reader
doubt the sincerity of the narrator. Poe is famous for his unreliable narrators. Both the
characters and the reader, thus, are trapped in the same situation. The only option is to
speculate about the event itself As Gargano maintains, "Poe intends his readers to keep
their power of analysis and judgment ever alert; he does not require or desire complete
surrender to the experience of the sensations being felt by his characters" (23). Thus, the
comic or ironic effect does not comefromthe reader's knowing more than the characters
themselves, as is the case in Quiroga's stories, butfromthe narrative situation so
uncommon that the reader can only guess what the end most probably will be.
Therefore, when the readers compare the presentation of the events at the beginning with
the final results, they can laugh, confirming their expectations about the failure of both
the character and the situation.
In "Nuestro primer cigarro" Quiroga presents a family quarrel that occurs because
of the father's death and the attempt of an uncle to take over the father's role in the
family. The children, of course, resist this new father. This situation, from the start,
involves clear divisions. On one hand, the kids-and especially the boy more than the
giri-think that their young uncle has norightto try to educate them, even though they
had lost their dad some time ago. They are enjoying theirfreedombecause their mother
is a widow with too many worries. They can therefore have more fiin than children in a
more normal situation. But, when the uncle appears, he tries to restore the void left by
their father's death, and he sincerely wants to help his poor sister with the education of
the kids. The uncle responds to all the hostilities that his niece and nephew show him
with more anger. He even behaves in a childish manner, like the kids themselves. Then,
an open quarrel develops between the two sides, children and the uncle, to see who
prevails on imposing his will.
At the very beginning both children are enjoying a sense offreedomthat they
actually know is not normal. They are conscious of their peculiar family situation;
however, for them, it is more important to have a good time than it is to question the
special situation that exists. According to Eduardo, the young boy, they are like
"heroicos robinsones, arrastrados a nuestro destierro por una desgracia de familia" (123).
All their worries are about the exploration of the new territory where they live, which is
savage and unknown to them. Obviously, this terrain is much more attractive than
anything else, especially because there is danger around them all the time. This danger
was the presence of a well, "El pozo tambien suscitaba nuestras preocupaciones
geograficas. Era este un viejo pozo inconcluso, cuyos trabajos se habian detenido . . .
Era, sin embargo, menester explorarlo" (123). This well and the surrounding
environment is the entertainment for the children as they escape from the problems of the
house.
However, the difficulty of reaching this well makes the children search for a
better place to hide themselves. This place is in the forest. There, both create their own
8
worid far away from the family: "bien juntos y mudos en la semioscuridad. gozamos
horas enteras el orgullo de no sentir miedo" (124). The place itself gives them a kind of
power because they are not afraid of being there, and for them, this power is something
to be proud of Proving their braveness in this desolate place is important to them.
Although they have to face the fact of their father's death, they are children and are not
supposed to talk about his death. They therefore project their anxieties into that place; if
they can resist their fear of being alone there they can really exorcize their fears caused
by the loss of a dad. This place is like a sacred place for both of them, mainly because it
is close to the well, yet surrounded by all kind of plants. At this place, they can share a
secret; they start smokingrightthere: "Fue alii donde una tarde, avergonzados de nuestra
poca iniciativa, inventamos fumar" (124).
They have to do something extraordinary in order to react against outside
problems. They feel that they need to be in control; i.e., if an important thing happens to
them without their planning, they feel they need to react by doing another great event that
can be equal to the first one. Knowing that losing their father was something that
destabilized their family, they decide to break other rules. Thus, smoking becomes the
reassurance of being strong in hard times. At the same time, it is a reaction to a bad
situation. The uncle also represents a bad situation that one must react against. He
becomes a target. This invader figure is seen in a very comic way for both children.
This comic quality is reflected in the name that they give him, "Maria y yo, por de
pronto, profesabamos cordialisima antipatia a\ padrastrillo'' (124).
This use of the diminutive is especially comic in several ways. First, a child is
the one who first uses it, so it is the child who makes the the step-father look smaller and
unimportant. Second, this diminutive has an opposite effect. The word itself "padrastro"
is full of pejorative connotations; however, when the child adds the Spanish suffix -illo,
the word appears more familiar and lovely. It even implies a kind of pity to his figure,
which is basically the way that the uncle appears to others: "Este tio de veinte anos, muy
elegante y presumido, habiase atribuido sobre nosotros dos cierta potestad que mama,
con el disgusto actual y su falta de caracter, fomentaba" (124). The situation itself, in
addition to the character of the uncle is very comic: a young man coming into his sister's
house to solve her need for a man in the family. He thinks that it is his duty to act like a
father, even when he himself is just an adolescent. Instead of trying to restore the father
figure he should probably be playing with his niece and nephew. And, in a way, this is
what he does. Both, he and the children are playing roles of someone else.
The young uncle is the one who provides the children with the cigarettes, so he is
not only a figure who threatens to destroy-when he plays the role of their father-but at
the same time, he is a model for them—when he plays the role of his uncle— because they
start smoking as he does. In fact, only when he appears at the house do the children get
the idea of smoking. Near the end of the story, the anger of the uncle toward the boy
grows. The child, miming to escape a beatingfromhis uncle, hides himself in the forest.
He threatens to throw himself into the well: "fue en ese momento cuando la idea del pozo
y su piedra surgio terriblemente nitida . . . - jMe voy a tirar al pozo!-- aulle para que
mama me oyera" (127). In this climatic scene the uncle's response is even more childish
10
than the threat of the nephew. He says: " Yo soy el que te voy a tirar!" (127). The reader
must grasp this funny situation and the completely inappropriate behavior of the young
man running after the child. It is as if they were playing, and both of them attempt to
scare the other one.
The situation becomes even furmier when the uncle becomes really frightened at
the possible suicidal action of his nephew- for which he is directly responsible. The boy
enjoys seeing all of the remorse that the young man has because of his action. Thus,
while the one (the uncle) is struggling over how to tell the mother about the death of her
son, the other (the boy) is celebrating his triumph over the invader figure by smoking one
of the uncle's cigarettes and enjoying everything happening around him. The boy
realizes, however, that all the worries of his uncle are not for him but for his mother,
something that disappoints him very much: "Justo es decir que para mi, el pequefio
heroe, martir de su dignidad corporal, no hubo una sola lagrima. Mama acaparaba todos
los entusiasmos de aquel dolor... Lo cual, hiriendo mi doble vanidad de muerto y de
vivo, avivo mi sed de venganza" (129). Then, although he is not even dead, he is able to
cause sorrow for his uncle.
The situation reminds readers of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry
Finn; these young heroes are like picaros. They are, at the same time, heroes and victims
of their own adventures. They create a situation that, at first, it is considered a great
adventure but, gradually, this situation becomes such a problem that instead of a triumph
it is like a defeat, and they become prisoners of their own adventure. That is exactly
what happens to this young hero in the end; he becomes intoxicated with the cigarette
11
and he is finally discovered. With the threat of his uncle of telling everything to his
mother, he answers, "— jSi le cuentas algo a mama, lo que es esta vez te juro que me
tiro!" (131). Again threat after threat, and in the end the uncle behaves like a mature
man and says,
"-Me parece que mejor haria en ser amigo de este microbio" (131).
The whole situation is like a race. The uncle wants to be the father figure and gain all of
the attention of the mother; however, the mother does not pay attention to any of them.
For her, both uncle and nephew are just children who cannot handle the uncommon
family situation produced by the death of her husband. In contrast with this family plot
that Quiroga creates, Daniel Hoffman highlights the absence of that kind of plot in Poe's
stories, "There are no parents in the tales of Edgar Poe, nary a Mum nor a Dad. Instead
all is symbol. And what does this total repression of both childhood and parenthood
signify but that to acknowledge such relationships is to venture into territory too
dangerous, too terrifying, for specificity" (226). Poe, in contrast to Quiroga, does not
want to exorcize his own demons through his writings, and, as a matter of fact, family
relationship is a forbidden subject because of his personal experience.
Although throughout "Nuestro primer cigarro," despite what seems to be the
children's clear hatred for their uncle, there also seems to be, especially near the end, a
love/hate relationship developed through the adventure itself The uncle is the cause of
the uncomfortable situation at home, but, at the same time, he provides the boy with an
experience that he will never forget, including hallucinating for the first time in his life
due to the tobacco: "Solo recuerdo que al final el caiiaveral se puso completamente azul
y comenzo a danzar a dos dedos de mis ojos" (130). The uncle, thus, is indirectly
12
responsible for the initiation of the kid into new experiences in life; that initiation also
works in reverse since the child teaches a lesson too to the young, confident man that
appeared at the beginning. Finally, the child had to grow up to see everything as a big
joke, just as his mother was probably seeing it all.
In "El alambre de pua," instead of children, Quiroga makes the protagonists of his
story animals, specifically horses that have the capacity of speech. These horses decide
to escape from the customar>' territory where they are allowed to roam, and they begin to
explore what it is further away from their home. During their short trip the narrator
develops the different personalities of both characters, one being the leader of the
adventure and the other one the follower. After wandering around, they find a group of
cows that tell them the story of a bull called Barigui, who can pass through any type of
wire fence. The bull then appears and demonstrates his skills in trespassing on any
property that he desires to. The horses are delighted to see the strength of the animal but
they also see the anger of the man that owns the property that the bull threatens. This
man plans to place a new wire fence around his land. Since the threat of the man sounds
really interesting to the horses, who believe that the bull cannot possibly win the
challenge, they decide to go again the next day and see what will happen.
For both horses the act of breaking the rules and being free for just a couple of hours is a
great event that will change the way they will see themselves.
Hay que advertir que el alazan y el malacara poseian desde esa
madrugada alta idea de si mismos . . . ni alambrado, ni monte, ni
desmonte, nada era para ellos obstaculo. Habian visto cosas
extraordinarias, salvado dificultades no creibles y se sentian gordos y
13
facultados para tomar la decision mas estrafalaria que ocurrirseles
pudiera. (78)
This feeling of individual freedom is similar to what the children in "Nuestro
primer cigarro" experience when they find the dangerous place in which to hide
themselves, thinking they can do whatever they want, that there are no frontiers in this
world for their desires. The comic situation occurs when these two horses, thinking that
they are brave and courageous, meet a group of cows all infatuated with the great bull.
The whole dialogue between them concerns who is the strongest. It is a contest about
who can pass through the wire fence; the cows act as the judge: "-Son los caballos.
Querian pasar el alambrado. Y tienen soga. - jBarrigui si paso! .. . -Son flacos" (82).
The horses are forced to reverse their self-image. They had thought that they
were so brave, but their vision is destroyed when they meet the bull. They must agree
that he actually acts as the cows affirm. There is, on one hand, a sense of admiration
towards this animal that can break all the rules that man can possibly invent; but at the
same time, there is also hate towards this bull that makes the horses appear as cowards
and as weak as the cows. It is just like the padrastrillo who is both things, a model to
follow and an enemy to destroy at the same time: "De pronto las vacas se removieron
mansamente: a lento paso llegaba el toro. Y ante aquella chata y obstinada frente dirigida
en tranquila recta a la tranquera, los caballos comprendieron humildemente su
inferioridad" (80).
The end of the story exhibits a kind of tragic humor. After presenting the great
figure of the bull in contrast with the horses, Quiroga explains that the bull dies in front
14
of all of his audience as he tries to pass through the wire fence. The great hero becomes
a victim of his own pride because of the multitude around him. Thus, thinking that no
one notices his deadly wound, "La bestia, presa de estupor, quedo un instante atonita y
temblando. Se alejo en seguida al paso, inundando el pasto de sangre, hasta que a los
veinte metros se echo, con un ronco suspiro" (86). And so, the prophecy of the owner of
the land about his new wire fence was fulfilled. Ironically, at the end of the story the
body of the great bull is transported to be chopped into meat by one of the horses, "Y al
dia siguiente le toco en suerte al malacara Uevar a su casa, en la maleta, dos kilos de
came del toro muerto" (86). It is a kind of poetic justice since the bull is responsible for
ruining the self-steem not only of the horses but also of the owner of the land. Now,
however, they can be proud of transporting the dead body of the admired bull to be
transformed into steaks.
This story also brings to mind themes in Swift's Gulliver Travels, not only
because of the representation of the horses as wise animals with the ability to talk and
judge, but also because, as Swift does magnifically, Quiroga puts in the animal mouths
some critical remarks about man's behavior, thus creating a satirical image of the
relationship between man and beast. When the two horses see the man who just helped
the owner to make the new wire fence coming,ridinga horse, one of them says,
"-jCurioso! -observe el malacara despues de largo rato-. El caballo va a trote y el
hombre al galope" (83). This remark on behalf of the horse gives the idea of the
inadequacy of both characters, the man and the horse; while the horse was walking
relatively calmly, the horse, the rider, maybe due to the sense of culpability for placing a
15
killer wire, goes more quickly. This remark can only come from another horse, knowing
perfectly what both the horse, and the person riding it can feel. There is another instance
where both horses make a remark of this type. This occurs when they hear the threat of
the owner about the new fence he is building. The cows do not believe the threat. They
think that the bull will simply pass through whatever the man builds. The horses,
however, have been around men more, and they do believe. They can discern the evil
inside man-as confirmed at the end, "El caballo, por mayor intimidad de trato, es
sensiblemente mas afecto al hombre que la vaca. De aqui que el malacara y el alazan
tuvieran fe en el alambrado que iba a construir el hombre"(83). The gullible cows,
acting as if they were a feminine group championing the strongest animal, are comically
contrasted with the horses, who know that man can really do harm—they have
experienced it with their own bodies.
Both stories contain a great number of comic scenes whose effects from a wider
perspective can be interpreted as a satire. Quiroga satirizes a common situation, such as
family problems, as in "Nuestro primer cigarro," in which someone tries to restore the
role of the father and does so in an inadequate manner. He also creates a caricature
illustrating the dangers of pride, for in "El alambre de pua" it is preferable to die like a
great person than to live as a common human being. In this sense, the technique that Poe
uses is the same. In some of his stories he creates an unreliable narrator and, through
him, uses irony to satirize and caricature the narrator himself, at times showing, for
example, inconsistences in a gentleman's actions that produce in the reader a little smile
because of the difference between the beginning of a tale and whatfinallyoccurs in
16
reality at its end. In "Eleanora," a young man promises to love his lady forever, but there
is a change in the narrator's attitude when, after she finally dies, the protagonist is
married happily to someone else. Therefore the same person reverses his emotional
commitment.
Yet the promises of Eleonora were not forgotten [. .. ] What,
indeed, was my passion for the young girl of the valley [Eleonora] in
comparison with the fervor, and the delirium, and the spirit-lifting ecstasy
of adoration with which I poured out my whole soul in tears at the feet of
the ethereal Ermengarde? (376)
This drastic shift illustrates how naive the narrator is, for he lives, atfirst,in the
world of dreams and then, suddenly, he realizes that he has to live in a real world. That
is why he goes from one extreme, the romantic one, to the other, the realistic one. Here
is a clear caricature of the young man trying to conquer the world with idealistic dreams
and facing the opposite, the reality of life, that does not at all fit with the ideas that he
formally had; he is very much like ihe padrastrillo in Quiroga's story.
In "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Cask of Amontillado" there is a similar irony and
humor, black humor, that cause the reader to laugh, even though the end is really tragic.
Both stories depict the same kind of unreliable narrator, a kind of monomaniac that tries
to convince his reader that he is doing therightthing although the act itself indicates that
he is completely mad. The narrator tries to appear as a reasonable character, and he has
to convince the reader about the correctness of his action; however, in doing so, he
actually produces the opposite effect on the reader. As Daniel Hoffman affirms
concerning the madness displayed at the very beginning in Poe's characters: "When a
17
narrator commences in this vein, we know him to be mad already. But we also know his
author to be sane" (227). Because of this duality of perspective, one of the author and
the other one of the character, David S. Reynolds points out that the final idea of the tale
itself is not very clear: "Is the tale a moral exemplum of the wages of crime, or is it a
gleeful portrait of a successful murder?" (107). The narrator insists so much on his nght
to do whatever crazy action he prefers-especially in "The Tell-Tale Heart"-and he also
insists on his perfect state of mind to the point that the reader starts wondering about the
very nature of the narrator. In the end, in both stories, the speculation about the madness
of the character is confirmed. In both cases, the reason why the narrators have to kill
their victims lack from the outset strong arguments and seem to be more a matter of
childish anger rather than the reasonable acts that they try to maintain they are. "The
Tell-Tale Heart" features a narrator who simply does not like his victim's eye. For the
narrator-murderer, the eye is a disgusting thing and makes him very nervous. He even
admits that he loves his victim: "I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had
never given me an insuh" (445). He cannot, however, stand his eye. Hoffman affirms
that, even though Poe does not create a family within his stories, the victim in this tale
can be seen as a kind of father-figure to the narrator who, in order to be free, has to get
rid of him (229). In the same sense, he is much like Eduardo in "Nuestro primer
cigarro." His eye seems to be the only reason for the narrator to commit the murder;
however, as he clearly points out, he is not sure either about the very reason of his action,
"I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture . . . Whenever it fell
upon me, my blood ran cold" (445). There is something about his victim that he
18
obviously does not like, but he cannot discern exactly what this is supposed to be, and it
seems that, while he is telling the story, he finds out what disturbs him most about his
victim. However, Hoffman also refers to the pointlessness of the murder itself, "The
crime he is about to commit will be all the more terrible because apparently gratuitous"
(227).
The same kind of absurd reason for killing someone is established in the other
story. In "The Cask of Amontillado," the narrator says that he has suffered an offense
from his victim-possibly verbal offense. He decides, therefore to take the ultimate
revenge: "The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he
ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge . . . I must not only punish, but punish with
impunity" (666). The reader has no clue about what kind of offense Fortunato has
committed. "It must be understood that neither by word nor deed had I given Fortunato
cause to doubt my good will" (666). In any case, the narrator, as in the other story,
maintains that he has therightto take revenge. Nevertheless, from the beginning, the
reader might justly question the narrator's sanity. He appears to be an extremely
sensitive person-so sensitive that just a look can disturb him. Like a child, he overreacts
to events. Thereareanumberofexamplesof irony in this story. Fortunato's name is
clearly ironic, for he is clearly the opposite; he is unfortunate. The story's setting is
ironic. The murder occurs during the gaiety of carnival. And there are a number of
ironic statements. For example, Fortunato declares: "I shall not die of a cough" (668).
The overall effect of the story is finally ironic, much like "Nuestro primer cigarro." Both
stories emphasis incongruity. In the case of "The Cask of Amontillado," the mad
19
narrator still maintains, after fifty years, that he has gotten revenge by killing Fortunato.
Readers can see, however, that the madness of the act amounts to a killing of the narrator
himself
In both stories, but mostly in "The Tell-Tale Heart," the narrator constantly
addresses the reader; and in all these interventions that momentarily stop the plot of the
story, he refers to his condition of sanity, which he says should not be in doubt:"but why
will you say that I am mad? . . . How, then, am I mad?" (445). Then he says: "-would a
madman have been so wise as this?" He insists over and over: "And now have I not told
you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses?" (447). This
insistence has the reverse effect, and the reader's mind begins to question the sanity of
the person who will kill someone only to escape his eye. He really wants to kill only a
part of his victim's body, but not the whole body. When he performs the crime he
claims, "His eye would trouble me no more" (447).
The inappropriate punishment that the narrator provides for his victim is also a
matter of comic effect. It appears to be that there is a great lack of proportion between
the real offense and what the narrator interprets from that action. He presents himself as
someone trying to restore his lost honor in both stories. In the "The Cask of
Amontillado" there is a plan very well conceived with all kind of details that must have
had him working on them for a long time, "At length I would be avenged; this was a
point definitely settled-but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved, precluded
the idea of risk" (666). Above all, it is the idea of doing a justifiable action from the
narrator's point of view: "A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its
20
redressed. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to
him who has done the wrong" (666). The way he talks about revenge seems to come
from eariier times when a nobleman had to fight energetically, even to the death in order
to repair his honor and fame; however, the situation here is murky, and the reader
becomes suspicious about the narrator's motives. The murderer wants to see himself as a
hero and, in this sense, the story can be paralleled with Quiroga's "Nuestro primer
cigarro" when Eduardo threatens to throw himself into the well because of the family
quarrel. It is funny because the suicide action he wants to undertake has no
correspondence at all with the familiar conflict they already had; however, Quiroga is
dealing with a child, so the inappropriateness of the situation is more understandable
than it may be in the case of the murder of Fortunato.
Thus, while in Quiroga we have a normal situation takenfromdaily life, that is a
child misinterpreting and overacting to an entire event (something very predictable by the
reader), in Poe there is an abnormal situation where the character thinks and understands
like a child but acts like an insane adult. And this insane behavior is not only obvious at
the end where the narrators in both of Poe's stories perform their horrible crimes—in
contrast to Eduardo, in that he actually never goes further than a simple threat- but also
in the way the murderer interacts with the victim- and uses irony of statement.
Determined to kill Fortunato, Montresor lures him to the crime scene where everything is
ready for the murder. The place itself is cold, something that makes the victim feel a
little bit sick. Montresor's reaction is a feigned concern about the possible consequences
of his victim catching an illness: " 'we will go back; your health is precious . . . We will
21
go back; you will be ill, and 1 cannot be responsible' " (668). Reynolds also recognizes
this cynical attitude toward the whole scene by the narrator: "Other tokens of Poe's
craftsmanship are the puns and double meanings that abound in the tale, puns that take
on full significance only in retrospect, when we reach the gruesome ending" (106).
The reader also has other clues that make him/her wonder about the sanity of the
narrator. Among them is the joy that he is supposed to experience in perpetrating these
crimes. This joy not only confirms the insanity of the main character but also sets the
tone of the story and reveals a kind of black humor. The action is cruel but, at the same
time, involves irony because of the killer. In "The Tell-Tale Heart," when the narrator is
telling the reader all about the details of the murder, he cannot help expressing a bizarre
kind of joy, and he laughs: "I had been too wary for that. A tub had caught all-ha! ha!"
(447). In "The Cask of Amontillado" the protagonist buried his victim alive behind a
wall and, although he is working really hard at the burial, he pauses for a moment to
delight in the anguish of his victim: "The noise lasted for several minutes, during which,
that I might hearken to it with the more satisfaction, I ceased my labors and sat down
upon the bones" (670). The horrible crimes that they perform do not transform these
characters into monsters, though; because of their insanity and their almost childlike
attitudes there is black humor in the story. The murders are horrible, but they are not
performed in an usual or professional manner. The murderers are not experts at all. As
Charles E. May suggests in reference to "The Tell-Tale Heart" and other stories, Poe uses
a motif that he also uses with other more serious tales, "the device of a character being
22
caught in an extreme situation, yet having the presence of mind to contemplate his
predicament in a calm and interested way" (30).
In "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," Poe makes humor out of the
experiments done by M. Valdemar. Right before he dies, M. Valdemar is hypnotized in
order to experience personally the other worid; afterwards, he affirms that he is actually
dead and that the words from his mouth are intended to give a chance for all people to
hear him. The narrator seems to be making fun of this experience and of the chariatans
who were very popular at the time, people who claimed to be mediums between this
world and the other one. The humor results because the other men in the room really
believe that M. Valdemar is dead because he says so. When they try to bring him back
from his hypnotized state he actually fails to speak, because then, he is really dead.
Charles E. May points out the problem of the situation:
The central assertion in the story, as has been pointed out by
Roland Barthes, is Valdemar's paradoxical statement, T am dead,' when
he is actually in a mesmeric trance. As Barthes says, the phrase asserts
two contraries at the same time: 'the signifier expresses a signified
(Death) which contradicts its utterance.' (47)
In all of these examples of humor, irony, and satire in both Poe and Quiroga's
stories, there are characters who try to either teach or prove something, not only to
themselves but also to others. Finally, however, the characters realize that there are
failures in their effort to teach the desired lesson. The reader is conscious of this
imminent failure of the purpose of the main character from the very beginning. In
Quiroga's works, the author himself provides the reader with all the details that he needs
to understand the true situation. Poe, however, leaves the reader with a feeling of a bad
23
omen that will destroy the previous expectations of the main character and, toward the
end, that omen becomes a fact. But, even though Poe's characters are depicted as full of
evil which lead them to commit horrible crimes, that evil, as Gargano recognizes, comes
from a deep grievance that ultimately drives them to self-destruction (25). The reader,
therefore, tends to sympathize somehow with these amateur murderers who end up
killing themselves too. Quiroga also makes his characters sympathetic with the reader
but from a different perspective. His characters are easy to identify with, for any reader,
because Quiroga presents real people in the process of learning to grow up. Thus, their
errors are completely understandable and they form part of the normal process for them
to become integrated into life. From the perspective of an already grown narrator that
relates the story in retrospect, those errors are tenderly criticized, and Quiroga thus
depicts these people as more realistic and human than Poe does with his.
24
CHAPTER ni
WOMEN CHARACTERS
There is in some of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Horacio Quiroga the same
pattern of portraying female characters. Beauty is the most remarkable characteristic of
all of them according to the narrator's point of view; however, this physical beauty is
threatened by the appearance of a strange disease that makes beauty fade away in a slow
and continuous way. As Poe himself declares in "The Philosophy of Composition," "the
death then of a beautiful woman is the most poetical topic in the world" (982 ). Both
writers use the imminent death of a beautiful woman as a meaning of creating that
background of mystery and nostalgia so popular toward the end of the nineteenth century.
J. Gerald Kennedy notes this fact too when he points out that "To such an extent were
Beauty and Death looked upon as sisters by the Romantics that they became fused into a
sort of two-faced herm, filled with corruption and melancholy and fatal in its beauty-a
beauty of which the more bitter the taste, the more abundant the enjoymenf (63).
Although this topic is the same in both writers, their approaches are quite different.
In Poe's stories the narrator's position has a great impact because it is through his
eyes that the reader knows about the feminine character as well as the events; so in order
to understand the characterization of the female protagonists, first there has to be an
approximation to the narrator. The narration is infirstperson in almost all the stories
concerning the death of a young woman- although not in "The Oval Portrait"- where
the narrator plays the role of the female's companion. The psychological side of the
25
narrator thus changes drastically either before the sickness affects his belov ed or nght
after the young lady is already losing her life; in the first case, as in "Morella" or
"Berenice," there is a sense of culpability at the end by reason of his being an active part
in the development of the disease: he wishes her to die. Morella was the narrator's wife,
a very learned woman that suddenly got sick. Mysteriously, the narrator s complete
devotion toward his wife, shifts to an intense hatred that cannot hide even at her very last
moments. However, before she expired she gives birth to a girl that grows up being the
image of her mother. When the narrator finally decides to give her a name, he chooses
the one that her wife had, and the girl ends up dying. He buries his own daughter in the
tomb of his wife, so that there is no trace of thefirstMorella. Berenice was the cousin of
the narrator and both were living together in the same house. She is described atfirstas
a very active girl that suddenly becomes ill and decline in beauty and health. Once she is
ill, the narrator develops a great interest in her cousin whose special attraction for him
are her teeth. At the end Berenice dies and in a strange night in which he is not sure if he
is conscious or not, a servant notifies his master that her tomb has been violated. The
narrator, shocked by the news, finds that he is the one that violated her cousin's tomb and
took her teeth.
In "Ligeia" and "Eleonora" there is a progressive degradation of the background
and even of the narrator because of the loss of his companion, but at the same time that
she is dying, as Gerald Kennedy remarks, "fated woman seem invariably to grow more
beautiful as they approach their last hour" (68). There is a kind of pleasure and
expectation on seeing the fatal scene. In any case, the world aroimd the narrator is
26
completely affected, due not so much to the dying woman herself as to the unforeseen
consequences of that loss which change the perspective of the narrator. Ligeia was the
narrator's wife, a very educated and attractive women that was the object of her
husband's affection. She, in the same way as the others, got a strange disease and finally
died to the complete desperation of the narrator. Trying to start over, he moved to
another country and married a foreigner, but his second marriage turned out to be a hell;
he constantly thought of his previous wife. At the very end, the second wife got sick too
and when the narrator approached her to see if she was dead, what he found was the face
of Ligeia. The story of Eleonora is the only one with happy ending. It is the same
pattern; she was the narrator's partner whom he swore to love forever, but she died. He
moved to another country and married a very gentle woman, forgetting the promise that
he made once to his first love. One night he woke up hearing the voice of Eleonora who
releases him from any pain or punishment so that he could live happy the rest of his life.
The personality of the male character is rather complex. He is a very learned
person with great curiosity for knowledge and a natural tendency toward introspection;
he is also reserved and in some instances exhibits some kind of monomania. He is, then,
an unreliable narrator with lapses of memory and with doubts about what is reality and
what is fiction. This is obvious at the beginning of "Eleonora"when he begins to tell the
story: "Therefore, what I shall tell of the earlier period, believe; and to what I may relate
of the later time, give only such credit as may seem due; or doubt it altogether" (372-3).
According to Charles E. May, "The narrator cannot remember when he first met her
[Ligeia], nor does he know her paternal name . . . Like Poe's many other male
27
protagonists, he is a man of vigorous fancy whom men have called mad" (62, 66).
Bettina L. Knapp refers to this narrator in "Berenice" as "suffering from a morbid disease
which has been diagnosed as 'monomania' and consisted of mental irritability" (123).
Thus, it is clear that the very nature of the male character is by itself rather extraordinary,
so all the events that he perceives are charged with a tone of mystery that goes far beyond
a reasonable explanation.
Moreover, he is an isolated character. In fact, all the characters in Poe's stories
appear to be imprisoned in their own world they have created, and this new world has
nothing to do with the outside. Female characters too share this world with the narrator,
creating an interdependency between them, extremely dangerous, where they appear to
be completely alienated from society. In "Eleonora" the male character tells us about the
ideal background that they both share, "Thus it was that we lived all alone, knowing
nothing of the world without the valley" (373). In "Morella" he specifies that it was she
who sacrifices the outside world to be part of the narrator's life, "She, however, shunned
society, and, attaching herself to me alone rendered me happy" (152). In "Berenice" the
same situation occurs; he is the one who is alienated and she the one who has to sacrifice
the outside world, "I, living with my own heart, and addicted, body and soul, to the most
intense and painful meditation" (146). He, therefore, has the power to attract these
young women to the point of forgetting about society and so to trap them in his alienated
envirormient where they have the specific role of supplying him with their beauty and
intelligence. As Leland S. Person explains, "in nearly every tale a male character's
28
attempt to create an aesthetic effigy of a female character ends conspicuously,
terrifyingly, in failure" (23).
Quiroga, on the other hand, presents a more reliable narrator. Most of his stories
are not told in first person but rather in the third, as in "La muerte de Isolda" and "El
almohadon de plumas," where the male characters are mere shadows that play their part
at the very end-as in the second one, where the husband is the one that helps to resolve
the enigma. The Uruguayan writer does not develop his character deeply; instead, he is
concerned with the events. Significantly, these protagonists do not have the
psychological side that is so important in Poe; the male characters in Quiroga's stories
can be identified as simple young men with aspirations, but above all with no intention at
all of making difficult their daily lives by trying to be part of the outside world. The
most remarkable characteristic is their practical sense of life, which leads them to avoid
any difficulty, even if it is the very women they adore. In "La meningitis y su sombra"
the male character refuses to keep seeing his female friend because he is in too much
pain, " Me voy—le dije bien claro— porque estoy hasta aqui de dolor,ridiculezy
vergiienza de mi mismo! ^Esta contenta ahora?" (154).
In contrast with Poe's male characters, Quiroga's may be criticized for being
more passive, in that they simply accept the events as they come; they do not try to
understand the circumstances behind them and they do not indulge themselves in that
enjoyable self- inflicted pain that tortures all of Poe's narrators. Quiroga's protagonists
do not fight against nature to overcome it, they accept the rules that nature imposes on
them even if these are unfair-as the death of the beloved-or incomprehensible. In "Una
29
estacion de amor" the protagonist accepts the imposition of his parents of not seeing the
girl and so he does nothing more than suffer, "Nebel levanto y dejo caer los brazos con
mortal desaliento. jSe acabo todo! Su felicidad, su dicha reconquistada un dia antes,
perdida de nuevo y para siempre! Presentia que esta vez no habia redencion posible"
(26).
The visions that both writers display about women through the narrator are very
different too. Again, in Quiroga, women are pictured more humanely with no mystery at
all; it is the event itself that gives the Gothic atmosphere to the tale. Even more, after her
disease and death, he does not develop her character, ending everything up with the
coming of the death and the logical explanation of why this happened, as in "El
almohadon de plumas." Or, if there is no death, everything returns to the way it was
before, as if the past were just a bad dream as in "La meningitis y su sombra." Poe, by
contrast, makes everything more complex. To begin with, there is always a kind of omen
or curse that determines the actions of all the characters, placing them in extreme
circumstances. Then, there is a transfiguration of the surroundings according to the
disintegration of the body of the woman, that is, there is a projectionfromthe character's
inside to nature, "A change fell upon all things. Strange, brilliant flowers, star-shaped,
burst out upon the trees where no flowers had been known before. The tints of the green
carpet deepened" (374), and finally-and this is what Quiroga lacks the most-there is the
experimentation after death.
Poe enjoys playing, speculating with life after the body expires, and that is the
dimension lacking with respect to all the feminine characters in Quiroga, v^o are so
30
earthly that they vanish and disappear at the very first mishap. In Poe's female
characters, as Charles E. May points out, there is a "body/spirit dichotomy, for they all
deal with the transformation of the female character into a metaphoric function-usually
as an embodiment of the bodiless Idea . . . 'Morella' is actually a double story;
'Berenice' is a grotesque horror story; 'Ligeia' is an allegory; and 'Eleonora' is a
parable" (61).
Poe's feminine protagonists are characterized by more than simply a pretty face;
actually these women are rare in the sense of possessing an immense knowledge that is
transmitted. In "Ligeia" the heroine is described as, "I have spoken of the learning of
Ligeia: it was immense—such as I have never known in woman" (225). In "Morella" "her
talents were of no common order~her powers of mind were gigantic. I felt this, and, in
many matters, became her pupil" (152). In "Eleonora," "she examined with me its
inmost recesses as we walked together in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass, and
discoursed of the mighty changes which had lately taken place therein" (374). These
learned and beautiful women are the representation of the ideal love and stability that the
narrator is searching for, but, at the same time, they also represent the cause of the
desperation and frustration of this male character when he sees them dying-or even just
before it. These ideal women cannot escape to death. They cannot even bear the action
of the disease on their bodies, and, all these, as a sign of the earthly material that they are
made of, they cause the narrator a kind of pain and fright. He loves them, but at the same
time he hates and betrays them; there is a love/hate relationship between them that makes
him adore and fear them even after their deaths.
31
Quiroga's female protagonists are also characterized by their beauty but, far from
being mysterious, it is the standard beauty of the epoch: in "El almohadon de plumas"
she is "Rubia, angelical y timida" (61). In "La meningitis y su sombra" the narrator
refers to Maria Elvira as "una joven de dieciocho afios, muy bella sin duda alguna" (138),
and in "Una estacion de amor" she is "muy joven aun . . . el cabello muy oscuro, un
rostro de suprema blancura . . . ojos azules ..." (152). In all the cases he refers to a very
young, beautiful girl, but with no remarkable characteristic among all the attributes to
leave a trace and make her appear as a unique and special beauty. Poe, on the contrary,
paints on his female characters something particular that makes her different from the
others, and, at the same time, appears as an enigmatic attraction to the narrator. In
Ligeia, for instance, he points out her eyes, "The 'strangeness,' however, which I found
in the eyes was of a nature distinct from the formation, or the color, or the brilliancy of
the feature . . . they become to me twin stars of Leda, and I to them devoutest of
astrologers" (223-4). In Berenice, her teeth represent that mysterious and powerful
attraction that the narrator cannot avoid wondering about, " the teeth of the changed
Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to my view. Would to God that I have never beheld
them, or that, having done so, I had died!" (150).
The behavior of the women in Quiroga is also quite different from those of Poe;
the former makes his heroines out to be completely childish and so they are spoiled,
completely defenseless-they need protection eitherfromtheir mother or husband-and
very weak in health and spirit-not at all like the strong personalities displayed by Poe's
woman. In "Una estacion de amor" the young heroine is always under the protection of
32
her mother, who guides her life; in "El almohadon de plumas" she suffers from
depression and she cannot resist crying and fainting at every moment: "Alicia rompio en
seguida en sollozos, echandole los brazos al cuello. Lloro largamente todo su espanto
callado" (62). In "La meningitis y su sombra," Maria Elvira is depicted as a frivolous
girl flirting and playing with everybody and only showing disdain to all her suitors.
Quiroga presents the girls trying to fit the expected role of women in society as wives,
and obviously, there is a lack of accommodation between their immature nature and the
importance of the role that they now have to fit in to.
The relationship between male and female characters in Quiroga is just a matter
of adjustment to society. Marriage was required for young girls coming from wealthy
families, and, although love and physical attraction was something to have in mind too,
they were not the most important issues. In almost all the tales of Quiroga, there is the
question of social status in order to marry; sometimes the woman is the one who lacks it,
as in "Una estacion de amor" or "El almohadon de plumas," and sometimes it is he, as in
"La meningitis y su sombra." In Poe, by contrast, this relationship is rather complex, in
the sense that the woman reaches a point in the narrator's mind where she is no longer
human, becoming, thus, a memory or a ghost, half angel (like Eleonora) half vampire
(like Ligeia); half masculine (strong personality) and half feminine (glamorous beauty),
being eternal in the narrator's consciousness. As Leland S. Person notes in relation to
Poe's female characters, "his [Poe] women are little more than wraith-like charactersrevenants, haunting and continually metamorphosing spirits, anatomized ideals-who are
mirrors for men" (19). That is why Poe deals with them as if they were some kind of
33
fetish, and, in possessing parts of them (like the teeth), the narrator possesses them
forever. As a result, there is an obsession for these women that goes beyond earthly life.
Both writers reflect in the male attitude a search for stability, in the case of
Quiroga social stability and in Poe mental stability. This stability is threatened by the
strange diseases that the women suffer, and, logically, the reaction to this fact is
notoriously different between the writers. Quiroga's male characters see death as a part
of life: it is just another step that has to be accepted in nature's cycle; there are no doubts,
nor inquiries or even lamentations for a reasonable explanation. Poe's characters do not
accept death as the final end; in fact, upon the loss of the woman's beauty, the narrator
projects his mental deterioration. Women represent for this narrator not only mental
stability but also something divine, like a religion, where he can find the answers to his
existence in this world. Because of this dangerous dependence up on them, the narrator,
in some cases, actually wishes for them to die. Daniel Hoffinan claims that Ligeia is
much more than a simple human being, "As Muse, as Mother-Figure, Ligeia resembles in
several aspects that mythical abstraction come to life in a particular woman whom
Robert Graves has revived yet again in our time and called The White Goddess" (251).
Poe's feminine characters thus have two sides: the earthly and the divine-or as
many critics say the body and soul-that makes them appear as glamorous and mysterious
persons in life, and tormented and melancholic after death. These attributes are also to
be found in the narrator, who is really a person tormented by many and different fears,
and who projects all these fears onto his women who end up, at the end of the stories,
becoming like him. Quiroga is more naive, and all of his characters, apart from being
34
terribly charming, are flat. They simply follow the pattern that society shows them, and
so they are common people without many troubles or worries; they just worry about
living the best according to their possibilities. Both writers share a preoccupation with
death, and they experiment with it through their characters. While Poe torments all of
his characters with this fear, Quiroga releases them, and thus death, far from being a
punishment, in the case of Quiroga is a relief
Leland S. Person cleariy identifies Poe's female characters with the idea of
writing itself; that is, Poe in his writing escapes from this material world, creating a new
reality more mysterious and interesting than the reality around him, and so "the
anatomization of women and the deification of selected body parts that can be observed
in Poe's tales seem to reflect a desire to transcend mortal limitations, to realize ideal and
idealizing states of mind, and to avoid the contingencies of relationship" (20).
35
CHAPTER IV
NATURE AND DEATH
Quiroga conceives nature as a life-and-death struggle that is part of a complete
circle. He presents not only the death scene itself but also the natural background that
envelopes the dying person. At the time of death, the body of the person and nature itself
become one thing. In other words, there are two different stages in nature that involve
man's death. First, nature is a witness to what is happening to the character. Nature is a
passive element, yet it is also an accomplice at the time of man's death. Second, nature is
an integral part of the living process. The dying body of man at a certain point stops the
process of decomposition in order to begin regeneration into something new. Man
becomes a part of nature. Nature, however, is not depicted as ideal by any means;
actually, as Leonor Fleming affirms, "la relacion de Quiroga con la selva es ambigua, de
gozo y de espanto. La describe como bestial y llena de peligros, pero esta
irremediablemente unido a ella porque la necesita ..." (17). The same critic classifies
the different approaches to death that Quiroga depicts throughout his tales. He describes
death in some of the stories as being caused by an accident, something that happens
suddenly and with the intervention of fortune. In this category, she includes "El hombre
muerto," "Las moscas," "A la deriva." The second treatment of death is described as
"una lenta degradacion en la que el cuerpo, impertinente, sobrevive a una personalidad
ya desgastada por la potencia de un medio aniquilador..." (22). In both classifications
nature is not only the backgroimd but also the cause of death.
36
Fleming also describes Quiroga's arrangement of nature into four separate stages;
each one is pictured in a different color:
la vegetacion: que Quiroga no ve de color verde sino negro, lo que
transfiere a la fronda fantasias de terror y de muerte; el sol excesivo y
decolorante [that goes from green to silver to white in "La bofetada" and
"La insolacion"], que produce efectos de delirio y desestabilizacion; la
tierra colorada, como un cerco referencial amenazante; yfinalmenteel
agua .. . de colores velados yfluctuantes. . . que promete salvacion o
huida y termina, por lo general, siendo mortal. (32)
Fleming's chromatic technique emphasizes a crucial point. Quiroga uses color to
warn the reader that something extraordinary is about to occur. This technique is clearly
developed in some passages of "Una bofetada," where an Indian worker, after being
humiliated by his master, seeks revenge. Many of Quiroga's stories concentrate upon a
particular day—usually on a very sunny and hot day. The workerfindsthe perfect
moment for his revenge and he exacts it without compassion for his master. He causes
his death by whipping him, just as his master used to do to him. When the moment of his
revenge is taking place, Quiroga describes the background with a special emphasis on the
colors that nature displays at that very moment: "Hacia ese dia mucho calor . . . el
camino rojo deslumbraba de sol" (178). Later, when the Indian places his dying master
in a boat and throws him into the river for his burial, the forest is described: "tenia una
frescura y quietud funebres. Bajo el cielo aun verde, la jangada derivaba girando . . . "
(181).
Similarly, in the stories "A la deriva" and "La insolacion" the natural
environment that the characters are involved in seems to change gradually according to
the seriousness of the situation of the dying person. In the first story, a man is bitten by a
37
poisonous serpent in the forest, and he tries desperately to run to the closest place to save
his life. During his voyage by boat through theriverthe whole forest alters its nature and
becomes more mysterious and frightening. The woods are described:
El Parana corre alii en el fondo de una inmensa hoya, cuyas
paredes, altas de cien metros, encajonan fiinebremente el rio. Desde las
orillas, bordeadas de negros bloques de basalto, asciende el bosque, negro
tambien. Adelante, a los costados, atras, siempre la etema muralla
lugubre . . . El paisaje es agresivo y reina en el un silencio de muerte."
(67)
While he is getting sicker and sicker, nature itself is becoming unfamiliar and
strange. All of the adjectives Quiroga uses to describe the background are related to
death: "fiinebremente," "negro," "lugubre," etc. It is difficult to believe that this type of
tropical forest in the northern part of Argentina could be described as black, especially
when we know that the sun is still out. It is also difficult to believe that there is no noise
at all: "En el silencio de la selva no se oyo rumor" (67). It is thus a different nature, not
the same one as it was at the beginning of the story. Roberto Paoli, discussing the same
tale, also refers to this transformation of nature infrontof the narrator's eyes:
Todo lo que el narrador dice del Parana lo sabe tambien el
personaje, no solo porque es un conocedor de estos parajes, sino porque,
ante todo, proyecta sobre el paisaje sus presagios funebres . . . Sin
embargo, aunque no sabe expresarlo, el personaje advierte esa
agresividad, esa belleza sombria, esa majestad. (955)
In the other story, "La insolaci6n," Quiroga represents nature in an unusual way.
The setting for this tale is a ranch where, on a very sunny day again, the master of the
house has been working hard, while the dogs of the house, completely unable to do
anything, see the imminent death of their master. In this story, not only the environment
38
changes (the sky appears to be silver), but there is also a shift in the sensations of the
F>eople on the ranch, and especially in the dogs. The following quotation suggests the
reason the narrator speculates about the negative consequences that are going to come:
"Bajo la calma del cielo plateado, el campo emanaba tonicafrescura,que traia al alma
pensativa, ante la certeza de otro dia de seca, melancolias de mejor compensado trabajo"
(69). From the beginning, an omen of a melancholic nature suggests that some kind of
tragedy will occur on the ranch. As time passes, these signs are more and more
recognizable. Something strange is going to occur. Nature acts as a kind of thermometer
of human life. When something is wrong or when man's time is up, nature forecasts this
by specifying the victim. This language of nature is written in the climate, plants and
animals around man. The very first ones to notice it in "La insolacion" are the dogs of
the house: "Los otros, sin responderle, rompieron a ladrar con fiiria, siempre en actitud
temerosa" (71). They continue: "La noche avanzaba, y los cuatro perros de edad,
agrupados a la luz de la luna . . . continuaban llorando su domestica miseria" (72). Little
by little the air and the sun begin to alter and, almost at the end of the day, the
atmosphere changes so much that there is not enough air to breath:
Al calor quemante que crecia sin cesar desde tres dias atras
agregabase ahora el sofocamiento del tiempo descompuesto. El cielo
estaba bianco [from silver moments ago now the sky is becoming pale] y
no se sentia un soplo de viento. El aire faltaba, con la angustia cardiaca
que no permitia concluir la respiracion. (74)
The change that nature undergoes prepares the reader for the tragic end. At the
same time, the death shocks the reader because of "su causa inmediata." According to J.
Luis Martinez,
39
Sorprenden porque los personajes no son unos inexpertos del
habitat misionero y saben de que cuidarse y a queriesgosestan expuestos.
Sin embargo, sucumben por causas totalmente nimias, y de alii que su
dimension adquiera visos de fatalidad. Quizas porque sea la muerte el
unico hecho fatal que el hombre no puede evadir, a pesar de que le oponga
toda su fuerza de voluntad como el personaje de 'A la deriva.'" (52)
The characters themselves seem to be aware of the movement towards death. In
these two stories the characters look up to the sun just as they expire. In "A la deriva,"
this moment occurs "tras un nuevo v6mito-de sangre esta vez-dirigio una mirada al sol"
(66). And it occurs in "La insolacion," as "se detuvo un momento en la esquina del
rancho y miro el sol, alto ya" (70). The coincidence in these events can be interpreted as
a sign to be aware of time. It could be said, therefore, that the characters are disoriented.
It is, of course, normal to be disorientated when one has been bitten by a poisonous
serpent. It is also understandable to confuse time when one is working for a long time on
a sunny day. Nevertheless, it seems more than a mere coincidence that both of them look
up to the sky minutes before they fall down dead. The action could be interpreted as a
kind of reflective act, like the last imploration to the heavens about their destinies. They
feel that something is wrong, and they try to look for an answer in nature itself Maria
Kodoma is very explicit when she affirms that Quiroga chooses that specific time in all
his stories just because it is then when nature-the forest of Misiones-features the highest
level of living beings, and it is at that point when the Uruguayan writer decides to end his
characters' lives. She continues with her arguments about the question of why Quiroga
chooses noon in the tropics as the background for his characters' deaths:
40
Quiza porque esto ayuda psicologicamente a lo que parece ser una
de las principales ideas de Quiroga sobre la muerte humana. En el hombre
la muerte es el agotamiento de los proyectos del futuro. Es el angostarse
de la accion. En "A la deriva" puede verse como el hombre deja de
preocuparse por si llegara o no a Tacuni-Pucu. Se aferra insensiblemente
a los recuerdos. Ya no tiene futuro y es ahi, perdido en sus divagaciones,
que el hombre 'ceso de respirar.' (17)
This action of man looking at the sky is not unlike Poe's characters when they try to
answer the enigma of life itself by metaphysical theories. Whatever the comparison may
be, in Quiroga's stories the act of looking up is full of meaning.
In "El alambre de piia"death comes from that part of nature that man actually
controls, not from the wild forest. The wire fence separates savage nature from artificial
nature, or what man manipulates according to his will. It is also significant that the wire
fence is mentioned in "La insolacion," where death also occurs. Through this wire fence,
the dogs see the image of the death coming to take their master: "Fue en ese momento
cuando Old, que iba adelante, vio tras el alambrado de la charca a mister Jones, vestido
de bianco, que caminaba hacia ellos. El cachorro, con subito recuerdo, volvio la cabeza a
su patron y confronto. - jLa Muerte, la Muerte!-aull6 (75).
It is exactly the same type offence where the father finds his son trapped dead,
after his child was out trying to hunt in "El hijo." In this story, the father gives
permission to his son to go to the forest to hunt. When the son is late and the father
realizes that he is late, the father becomes extremely worried and enters the forest to
discover that his son is dead: "al pie de un poste y con las piemas en alto, enredadas en el
alambre de pua, su hijo bien amado yace al sol, muerto desde las diez de la maiiana"
(88). The story called "El hombre muerto" deals with the same thing, a man who dies in
41
a place that is surrounded by a wire fence. Thus, in these examples the wire fence is the
instrument that accounts for the death of the characters. In "El alambre de pua" and "El
hijo" the wire fence itself is the mortal weapon, whereas "La insolacion" and "El hombre
muerto" use the fence as a background for death. Paoli also focuses on this wire fence,
"Sin embargo, ese acto [of trespassing the territory through the wire fence] puede
percibirse, en una lectura arquetipica, como la infraccion de una prohibicion, a la que
sigue, como necesario castigo, la muerte del culpable" (969).
Nature serves as a warning and an answer for man's concerns, but nature may
also cause the concerns since it is the forest itself that either kills the son (by accident) in
"El hijo" or lets him commit suicide-there is no clear explanation about his death. In
any case, as Fleming claims, nature "sobrepasa al hombre en todas sus dimensiones: lo
atrae, pero no para acogerio sino para devorario" (32). Fleming states, though, that there
is not a process of integration between both but only a destruction on nature's behalf of
the body of the man. It could, however be argued that some of the stories suggest that
nature melds with the dead body and forms only one thing. In "El hombre muerto,"
Quiroga describes a man's accident and death in the woods. His death is seen and felt by
him, even to the point that he comes out of the body and sees himself as another element
of the background watching his own work during all the years: "puede [this man] si
quiere abandonar un instante su cuerpo y ver desde el tajamar por el construido, el trivial
pasaje de siempre: el pedregullo volcanico con gramasrigidas;el bananal y su arena
roja
." (312). In this tale, as J. Luis Martinez points out, "la muerte . . . cumple aqui
un papel de inminente riesgo que hara valorar la vida en un sentido mucho mas
42
profundo" (43). The protagonist sees himself as "un pequeiio bulto asoleado sobre la
gramilla" (312). He is not flesh and soul any more. He is just a bulk over the green. The
same green little by little gets into his mouth, becomes a part of himself Finally, his
horse, who was scared atfirstabout passing by where he was lying, now has no problem
in trespassing the area, for he sees him as part of nature: "Pero el caballo rayado de
sudor, e inmovil de cautela ante el esquinado del alambrado . . . no se atreve a costear el
bananal. . . y tranquilizado al fin, se decide a pasar entre el poste y el hombre tendido.
Que ya ha descansado" (312). In "Las moscas,"a replic of "El hombre muerto" (where
man experiences his own death in a forest), this transformation into an organic material
is different from the previous story. In this one, the metamorphosis it is even more
explicit:
No me siento ya un punto fijo en la tierra, arraigado a ella por
gravisima tortura. Siento que fluye de mi, como la vida misma, la ligereza
del vaho ambiente, la luz del sol, la fecimdidad de la hora. Libre del
espacio y el tiempo, puedo ir aqui, alia, a este arbol, a aquella liana . . . el
sol dilata desmenuzando mi conciencia en un billon de particulas, puedo
alzarme y volar, volar .. . (350)
After he dies the man is transformed into other living material that is accidentally
around him during his last moments: the flies. The point that Quiroga makes is that there
is no such thing as complete destruction of oneself Instead, humans change into another
element that permits them to live, if not forever, at least a little longer. Paoli, in this
sense, points out that Quiroga's characters once they know they are about to die "
acelera[n] el ritmo de su vida a fin de ganar la carrera con la muerte" (953). The tension
of the situation, Paoli continues, is the fact that the world will not stop its normal course
43
for that death and it will just be something that the rest of the world will not even notice
(960). It is an act where man really realizes that he is completely alone. Leonor Fleming
remarks about the writer himself "Quiroga . .. imagine su propio fin 'regando mis
plantas y plantando el mismo dia de morir'... como un hecho mas del cielo de la
naturaleza" (51).
Poe's approach to nature is somehow different. For him, nature is just another
chaos that the narrator can perceive through his eyes. Nature may be transformed
because of the tragic events that the narrator undergoes. Instead of nature regenerating
the main character, however, Poe presents an alienated nature that reminds man that he
does not belong to it. G. R. Thompson also notices this changeable world around the
narrator and says that
The universe created in Poe's fiction is one in which the human
mind tries vainly to perceive order and meaning. The universe is
deceptive; its basic mode seems almost to be a constant shifting of
appearances; reality is a flux variously interpreted, or even created, by the
individual human mind. (165)
In "Eleonora," as soon as the narrator notices the sickness of his beloved, the
whole background is transformed into a phantasmagoric scene. He cannot control the
events in his life, and, in the same way, he cannot control all the changes produced in
what previously was his environment. He appears as an outsider that can only look
around him and realize all of the transformations that are taking place. Not only does he
not participate in these changes but he also does not even want them to happen. He does
not feel comfortable with all of these metamorphoses because he cannot recognize
44
himself He loses all perspective and expectation that he had previously conceived. In
"Eleonora," nature therefore is extremely hostile and perverse:
The star-shaped flowers shrank into the stems of the trees, and appeared
no more. The tints of the green carpet faded; and, one by one, the ruby-red
asphodels withered away; and there sprang up, in place of them, ten by
ten, dark eye-like violets, that writhed uneasily and were ever encumbered
with dew. And life departed from our paths. (375)
This same hostile nature appears in "Ms. Found in a Bottle." Just as in
"Eleonora," the destructive nature changes. From a calm and pacific sea at the beginning
of the story, the narrator suddenly finds himself caught in a terrible storm that makes the
boat lose its way. During this wandering through different seas, he and other passengers
are the only survivors. They finally find a ghost boat and get into it in a race against the
forces of nature to survive. The important thing is that, as in the other story, terrifying
nature seems to prophesy their own death. From the very beginning, changes on the sea
are interpreted by the narrator as "a full presentiment of evil" (130). Later, what they had
suspected at the beginning begins to take place and the boat goes to its fatal destiny: "It is
evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge-some never-to-beimparted secret, whose attainment is destruction" (135-6). The narrator suspects that the
way nature has communicated its designs is through those drastic changes in the weather
or in the flora and fauna. The narrator decodes a message little by little until he finally
realizes that what nature has prepared for him is death.
The narrator's mutant world parallels the world of the narration itself Poe
creates in the readers the same kind of feeling. The readers are lost in a world formerly
recognizable, but they no longer know what is going on around them. The readers, then,
45
as the narrator, perceive that not only do appearances not correspond to reality but also
that reality sometimes is not reality anymore. G. R. Thompson says that "Poe plays a
constant intellectual game v^th his reader; he tries to draw the reader into the 'Gothic'
worid of the mind, but he is ready at any moment to mock the simplistic Gothic
vision"(106).
"Metzengerstein," presents not only the environment but also an animal, an
untamable horse, one that represents those uncontrollable forces of nature that break
down the narrator's own world. The young nobleman of this story, after being extremely
evil with the other nobles, finds a horse that seems to come from nowhere. The strange
horse has a special relationship with his new master since both go for long rides. In one
of those rides, the young noble appears to be dead at the same time that the whole castle
where he lives is on fire. The night that he comes home dead is a stormy night, and he
had "descended like a maniac from his chamber, and, mounting in hot haste, bounded
away into the mazes of the forest" (99). Later, afterridingthroughout the woods, he is
back in a demonic appearance. Nature has transformed not only his character but also
his physiognomy: "bearing an unbonneted and disorderedrider,was seen leaping with an
impetuosity which outstripped the very Demon of the Tempest" (100). This case strays
far from representing a regenerated nature with good qualities, as is sometimes the case
with Quiroga. Poe presents a diabolic nature whose goal is to depress and even
annihilate the characters. At the end of this Poe story, the master appears dead on the
horse in a very dramatic scene infrontof all his servants who cannot believe what they
are actually seeing: "... a cloud of smoke settled heavily over the battlements in the
46
distinct colossal figure of-a horse" (100). They seem to be a single body, somewhat
like what Quiroga does with "El hombre muerto" and "Las moscas." In this case,
however, the horse is the destroyer who takes over the man. At the end of the story, the
characters can only see the figure of the horse because his master's figure has vanished.
In Quiroga's story, instead of complete destruction, there is an harmonious fusion of both
elements. Paoli refers also to this idea in "El hombre muerto," where he sees a shift in
the perspective of the narration. From the narrator at the beginning, he shifts into the
horse's perspective at the very end when the man has now passed away (968). In any
case, there is still someone living in the narration that takes the legacy of the one that has
already gone and continues with the tale.
In the very last scene of "Metzengerstein," there is a cloud that envelops the main
character with the horse when he shows up for the last time in front of his people. This
cloud acts as a symbol that reveals the final end—death. The cloud, then, is for Poe's plot
what the sun is for Quiroga's story. They represent the last natural element that the
characters are involved with. The main characters find out what nature has been
preparing for them during the whole event that has been developed. In "Ms. Found in a
Bottle" this cloud appears at the very begiiming, like an omen that something wrong will
happen. Later, about the fatal storm, Poe writes: "One evening, leaning over the taffrail,
I observed a very singular isolated cloud . . . In the next instant a wilderness of foam
hurled us upon our beam-ends, and, rushing over us fore and aft, swept the entire decks
from stem to stem" (129-130). A similar cloud appears in "Eleonora." In this tale,
however, the cloud that appears at the beginning has positive connotations for the lovers;
47
its departure is what provokes their doom: "And then, lastly, the voluminous cloud
uprose, and, abandoning the tops of the mountains to the dimness of old, fell back into
the region of Hesper, and took away all its manifold golden and gorgeous glories from
the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass" (375). It serves, in any case, as the prelude to the
coming of a storm, but refers to more than the weather. It is also a metaphoric storm, an
anguished battle that the narrator has deep inside himself
All of these characters, in the stories of both Poe and Quiroga, are facing death.
However, their disposition or preparation for their deaths are treated in different ways by
the two writers. Since the very nature of the main characters in Poe and Quiroga are not
the same, their deaths are going to be somewhat different. Poe's main characters are
usually presented as learned persons who are in a constant search of knowledge; this
search is what tends to make them very nervous and rather restless. The narrator in
"Berenice" is a good example:
that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely
general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with
which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically)
busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most
ordinary objects of the universe. (147)
Quiroga's characters, on the contrary, are simple and common men. Most of
them are workers, like the man in "La insolacion." Even though he is the owner, he
works on the land just like his servants. Quiroga has his personal view about working;
Ezequiel Martinez Estrada recalls Quiroga's words: "Trabajar era para el pensar y no
pensar, sustituir una forma discursiva por otra activa . . . Tambien Gandhi-y otros antesconsidero al trabajo como una higiene mental, un deber social, una necesidad fisiologica
48
primaria y una catarsis" (66). Paoli also remarks that it is precisely this fact of working
that brings them to their deaths since their accidents were produced during their working
time (968). Fleming further develops this argument about the relationship between
working class people and death, "Nativos o extranjeros, criollos o indios, todos los
personajes deben pagar, de una u otra manera, el impuesto a un ambiente devastador que
les dificulta la subsistencia a la vez que los retiene sin permitir escapatoria" (31). So
basically there is a clear distinction between both sets of characters. On the one hand,
Poe presents his protagonists in a more philosophical and metaphysical sphere; their
concerns tend to involve those two subjects. On the other hand, Quiroga presents his
protagonists in a more earthy way. His characters deal with daily problems that are not
transcendental. As Fleming says, a Quiroga protagonist's working the land creates an
unbreakable relationship between the individual and his environment that most of the
time ends up in the death of the character (17).
Characters in Poe are constantly obsessed with death. Sometimes they are
concern about their own deaths, as in "The Premature Burial," but most of the time, it is
someone else's death that the narrators want to study and analyze, as in "The Cask of
Amontillado," "The Oval Portrait," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Imp of the Perverse"
and all of the stories about dying women such as "Eleonora," "Berenice," "Morella" and
"Ligeia," (as discussed in the previous chapter). Concerning the subject of death in Poe's
tales, Daniel Hoffman says:
49
Poe became more circumspect and skillful in the treatment of his
pervasive theme. He puts a mask upon red death, as it were, and contrives
at least two disguises for the self s will to destruction: a) by dividing the
ego into a self and a double, he enables one to murder the other in a
dramatization of the suicide-wish; b) without resort to such doubling, Poe
contrives that the self undergo obsessive and repeated, but involuntary,
mortal dangers, particulariy by accidental and premature entombment. . .
c) in which he doubles his character and then arranges for one self to
murder the other by burying him alive. (218)
Imminent death seems to be a great secret for which that the narrator must
desperately search even if he is to lose his life in doing so. Death is the price that man
has to pay in order to have complete knowledge. As Thompson says, "In searching for
the key to unlock the secrets that lie just beyond appearances, the "Poe" persona finds
(just as do the characters in Poe's tales) that the great discovery is of nothingness, of
illusion only" (165). For Quiroga's characters, however, imminent death makes them
value life even more. Poe's narrator, therefore, seems to be a kind of medium between
this world and the other, trying to understand what he is feeling and realizing the
impossibility of expressing himself by words. In "Ms Found in a Bottle," the narrator
claims "A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul-a
sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of by-gone time are
inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key" (133). The same
character later sees that his boat is going to be destroyed, and so, at the same time that
he discerns his immediate end, he shows a morbid excitement about the tragic event that
is coming. G. R. Thompson sees this tale as "a voyage of 'discovery' of what lies
beyond the normal world or beyond death, for the tale abruptly ends at the very verge of
50
revelation in apparent final destruction and silence . . . so the caricatured narrator of
'Ms. Found in a Bottle' discovers nothing" (168).
The excitement displayed by the narrator in that tale is the same kind of
excitement that the narrator reveals in "Berenice." He is in love with herrightbefore
she gets sick. Then, when she becomes ill, instead of continuing his love for her, he
develops a sickly admiration for the traces of the coming death on her physical aspect.
He enjoys seeing her vanishing little by little, and he devotes his time to the study of her
coming end,
. . . and in the silence of my library at night-she hadflittedby my
eyes, and I had seen her~not as living and breathing Berenice, but at the
Berenice of a dream; not as a being of the earth, earthly, but as the
abstraction of such a being; not as a thing to admire, but to analyze; not as
an object of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse although desultory
speculation. (149)
This quotation itself can be interpreted as a clue to the main difference that can
be established between both writers, Poe and Quiroga, when they present characters
facing death. What the narrator does not want to see in Berenice is precisely what
Quiroga wants to see in his characters. In the above paragraph, there is a distinction
between the earthly characters and the sublime ones. The sublime characters interest not
only the narrator but Poe himself throughout his stories.
Poe's characters have a psychological dimension that Quiroga's do not have;
almost all of Poe's characters, even the ones with no education andfromthe lowest
social class levels, seem to be aware of a transcendental dimension that cannot be
51
explained and that involves all of their feelings without a reasonable explanation. In
reference to Poe's characters, Daniel Hoffman points out:
Birthplace, parentage, ancestiy-these are the attributes of body.
To the soul they are inessential accidents. And the direction of Poe's
mind, the thrust of his imagination is-may I restate the obvious?-away
from the body and toward the spirit, awayfromthe 'dull realities' of this
world, toward the transcendent consciousness on 'a far happier star.'
(206)
In "The Tell-Tale Heart," even though the murderer can be classified as
completely mad, there is that question about the nature of his feelings that he is not able
to answer. Actually, in this particular story there is a role switch between murderer and
victim. The killer confesses to knowing exactly what his victim is feeling when facing
his final destiny. He does because he has been a victim sometime before. Thus, there is
a sense of pity and understanding, coming ironicallyfromthe killer. Once he is in his
victim's room the narrator hears the old man wake up and breathe in a restless way; the
narrator says, "Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up
from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I
say I knew it well. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him" (133).
In "The Cask of Amontillado" the murderer does much the same thing to his
victim. At first, he seems to be afiriendrather than a killer. When Fortunato finds out
the plan made by his friend in order to kill him, he begins crying and shouting; in return,
his killer replies to him in exactly the same way. He seems almost to respond to his
grief, to comfort him, to try to understand his feelings, "I re-echoed-I aided-" (671).
But, on the other hand, he also has the morbid impulse to see how the death of Fortunato
52
is progressing, and, right before hefinishesburying him alive, he throws a torch into the
tomb to see with his own eyes whether his friend is dead. Finally, once he places the last
stone to the grave, he starts calling his name, waiting for a possible scream or an
anguished answer from his comrade. Until the very last moment the narrator childishly
enjoys the whole situation. At the same time, he analyzes and tests his victim like a
personal experiment. Partly because he now sees things from a different perspective and
he, instead of being the one who is subjugated, is the oppressor. Thus, the sense of
having the power to decide about someone else's fate gives the murderer to feel about
himself a sense, maybe for the very first time, of importance. He enjoys that feeling.
Readers must realize, however, that Montresor is truly insane, for he has been reliving
the details of the murder for fifty years.
When Quiroga's characters understand the importance of the moment that they
are facing, that it is the final moment of their lives, they do not enter into any speculation
in order to solve the great enigmas of life. They do not even worry about what is to
come. They simply try to go on with their known world as best as they can. They do not
pay any attention to the unknown world, because, for them, it does not exist. Fleming
states that "La muerte no es, en la escritura de Quiroga, una materia abstracta de
reflexion . . . Quiroga no teoriza sobre la muerte" (22-3). That is why "A la deriva" ends
as it does. When the main character knows that he is losing his breath his only
preoccupation concerns the day that he met some fiiend, someone completely irrelevant
for the plot of the story: "Al recibidor de maderas de mister Dougald, Lorenzo Cubilla, lo
habia conocido en Puerto Esperanza un Viemes Santo . . . ^Viemes? Si, o jueves . . . El
53
hombre estiro lentamente los dedos de la mano. -Un jueves .. . Y ceso de respirar" (68).
The main character in "El hombre muerto" displays a similar attitude. He sees
everything around him as if it is just another day: " Pero es uno de los tantos dias, trivial
como todos, iclaro esta! Luz excesiva, sombras amarillentas, calor silencioso de homo
sobre la came, que hacer sudar al malacara inmovil ante el bananal prohibido . . . Muy
cansado, mucho; pero nada mas" (312). Quiroga, in contrast to Poe, trivializes the fact
of dying to such an extent that sometimes the very face of death is humanized. As
Nicolas Bratosevich points out conceming "La insolacion:" "Y que ese fantasma de la
Muerte (que ademas tiene la misma apariencia que sus victimas de came y hueso), sino
la contracara alucinatoria de un fenomeno organico real. Nada de apariciones de figura
peregrina y brotadas del acaso . . . " (166).
In "Las moscas" and "El hijo," however, the attitude towards death is slightly
different from the other stories mentioned above. These latter ones also present the
sensation of the daily routine in the character's perception, but this routine is clearly an
invention to enable the characters to withstand the truth. The reader feels the fear of the
character when facing death, so the daily routine is the only weapon that he has to face
the new situation. In the previous stories the main character either is not aware of his
end or he rather seizes it as another step in his life. In any case he does not show fear or
nervousness when facing death. In "Las moscas," however, he begins to have
hallucinations and tries to interpret everything in a comic and sarcastic way: "Quiero
cerrar los ojos, y no lo consigo ya. Veo ahora un cuartito de hospital, donde cuatro
medicos amigos se empeiian en convencerme de que no voy a morir. Yo los observo en
54
silencio, y ellos se echan a reir, pues siguen mis pensamientos" (349). In "El hijo," the
father is so shocked at the discovery of his son's death that he invents what he would like
to be the end of the story. He creates a whole dialogue between himself and his son.
They comment on the day's hunt, as if they had been any other day:
- ^Como no te fijaste en el sol para saber la hora? . . .
- Me fije, papa . .. Pero cuando iba a vol ver vi las garzas de Juan y
las segui. ..
- jLo que me has hecho pasar, chiquito!. . .
. . . el hombre vuelve a casa con su hijo . .. sonrie de felicidad....
Sonrien de alucinada felicidad . . . Pues ese padre va solo. A nadie ha
encontrado, y su brazo se apoya en el vacio. Porque tras el, al pie de un
poste y con las piemas en alto, enredadas en el almabre de pua, su hijo
bien amado yace al sol, muerto desde las diez de la manana. (356)
According to Fleming, it is also possible to find in the writings of Quiroga a
switch or an alternate role between the characters, as in Poe, "Solo sefialo el acierto de
un punto de vista fluctuante sobre un mismo conflicto y la altemancia de los papeles de
los actores que pasan, sucesivamente, de victima a victimario" (32). In "Una bofetada,"
the way the Indian worker gets revenge in exactly the same as the way that he has been
punished-by whipping. He has experienced whipping with his own flesh. Because he
has suffered this type of punishment, he decides that his master deserves whipping too.
From being the victim at the beginning of the story, this Indian now becomes the
executioner who actually applies the same kind of pain that was imposed on him. This
switch that the critic points out reflects also the character's desire to dominate his natural
environment, to escape being the victim of his own background, as happens in "El hijo,"
"El hombre muerto," "Las moscas," "A la deriva" . . . Basically, it is the same
altemation that Poe describes in some of his stories between the killer and his victim.
55
Having experienced in the past the first role, the character then experiences the second
one. Quiroga does the same thing, but in most cases nature appears as the killer. At first,
man has the illusion of being the master and the controller of his own environment, of
creating a routine that he himself has made. This perception, however, is merely a
dream, one that ends with an unexpected accident that completely destroys his routine.
Even in "Una bofetada" the native worker is closely identified with nature since he has
always lived in contact with it and since he is the only one that survives in the forest. He
kills his enemy but he also offers him to nature. He ties his master in the boat and throws
him into the immensity of the Parana river. After walking through the woods for a long
time to find the river (that becomes his master's cemetery), he not only survives in that
background, but he also hides himself there in order to escape from justice for the rest of
his life. This Indian, then, becomes a personification of nature.
Quiroga's characters retum to nature after they die. The very body itself is
trapped in nature. In "Una bofetada," the body serves as man's coffin. The scene
appears to be a rite that the Indian seems to understand clearly. The rite requires that he
take care of the dead body of his master. Instead of leaving the body where it is, he
prepares a kind offimeralwhere the body retums to nature through the great immensity
of the Parana river; Fleming identifies this river as the "incuestionable axis mundf^ in
Quiroga (36). It is not an accident that the boat is precisely there at the moment of his
death. Everything has been planned for a long time by the Indian, since his master
whipped him. His death has already been settled even before the master can imagine it.
At the same time, this Indian knows that he is also killing himself because, after the
56
murder, he will probably leave that land for ever: "Voy a perder la bandera, murmuraba,
mientras se ataba un hilo en la mufieca fatigada .. — jPero ese no va a sopapar mas a
nadie, gringo de un aiia membui!" (181). This constant contact with nature is the daily
life of these characters. They live in areas that are completely uncivilized, unlike the
settings for Poe's works. The latter usually sets his stories in great urban centers. There
is little nature around them, and they are buried in crypts, that is, a small artificial place
built by man according to his preferences and taste, as in "The Premature Burial." These
small, closed spaces are in contrast to the vastness of Quiroga's nature.
Almost all Quiroga's characters are obsessed with maintaining a daily routine
which is in itself a synonym of life. They really want to be in contact with their
environment and that is why they remember their past-family, friends, work, travels . . - during their last moments because the past is the only connection that they have with
life since thefiiturehas already vanished. Thus, any destmction of that routine means
the destmction of the characters. Therefore, they try to keep thinking and acting as if the
day is a routine day in their lives and not the last one as it is in fact. There is nothing
transcendental in these last moments that they go through. The character's behavior
when facing his death is not different from any of the other days in his life. Poe, on the
contrary, presents the anxiousness of his characters when they face death. They
overreact when they feel that death is close. They consciously separate daily life from
the very last moments they go through.
57
CHAPTER V
THE NARRATFVE STYLE
Poe and Quiroga display two different styles in their stories. Poe has a very
omamented style in opposition to Quiroga who shows a more simple one with fewer
words, a style that goes straight to the point. Poe's style suits well the gravity of the
subject he is dealing with in his tales; he writes about philosophical, psychological and
metaphysical matters. This variety of subjects presented "under" the story itself makes
the critics search Poe's stories from different perspectives. As Bmce L. Weiner points
out: "Much recent scholarship seeks to rescue Poe from his reputation as a writer of
popular horror stories by finding philosophical import in his Gothic tales" (59). In their
works both writers insert the supematural event in a different manner. Poe makes a great
deal over the extraordinary event that he presents in a story, while Quiroga tries to
present it as natural as possible, as being something common belonging to the daily life
of the characters. Both writers share, however, a predilection for details, and the stories
of both writers contain exhaustive lists of details that help the reader to identify better
with the characters and background.
Poe, as Weiner says, introduces a philosophical background in almost all his tales
as a kind of prologue for the story itself There is the sense of something theoretical
behind every single narration he wrote. Nothing is either offhand or the result of
improvisation; instead, his stories reflect the hard work of research about the different
58
ideas fashionable during his epoch. G. R. Thompson also notices that there is something
else than the mere plot.
As in the works of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, there is often
in a Poe tale a tale within a tale within a tale; and the meaning of the
whole lies in the relationship of the various implied stories and their
frames rather than in the explicit meaning given to the surface story by the
dramatically involved narrator. (106)
In this sense. Glen A. Omans understands that Poe introduce in his writings the
principles of the German Idealist philosophy, "The common source of this philosophy
was the distillation of the ideas of Kant, Schelling, and A. W. Schlegel, provided by
Samuel Taylor Coleridge" (2).
According to the same critic the basis of this aesthetic theory is based on:
A dualistic conception of existence: phenomenal reality, perceived
by the five senses, and conceptualized by the human reason or
understanding; and transcendent ideas, or noumena, perceived by what
Kant called the mental faculty of Vemunft, variously translated in English
as "Reason," Imagination," or "Intuition." (3)
Poe's stories do not feature such a natural development as the stories of Quiroga,
stories that have no purpose to demonstrate or theory to prove. Quiroga's narrations
seem to be more related to the oral tradition in that they develop like a natural stream.
The purpose of Quiroga in all his tales is the search for a "natural style" in opposition to
an omamented one. As J. Luis Martinez says, Quiroga deletes from his own work what
he considers decoration, so thatfromhis first writings, which ascribed to the Modernism
movement initiated in 1880 by Ruben Dario, up to the last tales, there is a gradual
purification of his style in order to get to the most simple way to tell the story (58). J.
59
Luis Martinez says that this depuration, for some critics such as H. Murena, can be seen
as a defect:
Del rebuscamiento de su primera epoca se lo ve pasar, poco a
poco, a una mayor naturalidad, y luego a una parquedad que concluye casi
en el descuido. . . . Y a medida que aumenta el dramatismo de sus obras, a
medida que los estremecimientos que narra son mas entranables, mayores
deterioros va sufriendo la escritura, el estilo, como si un monstmo
implacable se lo fiiera devorando sin remision. (58)
This purification of the style simplifies the narrative. Poe, when describing
man's anxieties, uses an "affecting style . . . glutinous prose and with ludicrous stageGothic decor" (Thompson, 98). His theories and difficult concepts are presented before
the tale itself For Quiroga, the same topic is a matter of a simple gesture, as when, in
"La insolacion" and "El hijo," both characters address their gazes to the sky. In one
action Quiroga summarizes what Poe uses pages to explain. Nicolas Bratosevich
exemplifies this natural style: " [Quiroga writes] marginando exigencias de sus propios
consejos teoricos sobre el arte de narrar... y escribe 'dintel' por 'umbral', o 'umbral'
por 'marco de puerta', o se permite extranjerismos mal aclimatados ('bizarro rancho')"
(149). Whether he uses it or not, Poe values that "natural style," as he says in his
writings conceming Hawthome. There he declares: "In the whole composition there
should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one preestablished design" (950).
In Poe's delineation of his narrator, hefrequentlysets up a psychological profile
that will give a specific pattem to the whole narration. As G. R. Thompson points out,
"In a deceptive universe that does not provide for individual immortality, Poe's heroes
60
and heroines stmggle vainly to find order and to preserve their lives" (175). In "The Imp
of the Perverse," the narrator starts his tale by explaining his theory about man's free
will. He does so from a scientific point of view, giving way, afterwards, to a perfect
accommodation of his plot to what he has just introduced:
Induction, a posteriori, would have brought phrenology to admit,
as an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical
something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more
characteristic term . . . Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong
for the wrong's sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior
elements. It is a radical, a primitive impulse-elementary." (638)
This introduction works as a microcosm of the whole narration itself At the
same time, it sets the basis for a real interpretation on the reader's behalf since the plot
can be proven by scientific theories. This kind of prologue to the stories can also interact
among them, they complement each other or even they can be replaced for another
without losing the whole meaning. According to Daniel Hoffman, Poe always presents
the same pattem for the main character in all these stories:
His protagonists are all attempting to get out of the clotted
condition of their own materiality, to cross the barrier between the
perceptible sensual world and that which lies beyond it. And so they
undertake hazardous voyages, either into the stratosphere or to the moon;
or by descending into dungeons and vaults in the earth . . . (206)
Sometimes, Poe uses historical accounts to support the story he is about to tell
and so the very beginning of his narration turns out to be a record of different cases taken
from the papers about real cases that happened to common people. Consequently, his
own narration, it can be argued, is perfectly believable because it is something that
occurred. As Daniel Hoffinan points out in relation to the tales that deal with being
61
buried alive, "Poe invokes the cloak of tmth-telling, as had Defoe, Swift, and Richardson
before him" (219). In "The Premature Burial" the narrator starts by giving supposedly
real material that has a direct relationship with the case he is about to present:
In the year 1810, a case of living inhumation happened in France, attended with
circumstances which go far to warrant the assertion that tmth is, indeed, stranger than
fiction. . . "The Chirurgical Joumal" of Leipsic-a periodical of high authority and
merit, which some American bookseller would do well to translate and republish, records
in a late number a very distressing event of the character in question (533-4).
Quiroga's documentation of a story seems to be simply an identification of names
and places that makes it easily recognizable for any person that has ever been in that part
of Argentina. In "La bofetada" the narrator describes his environment as follows:
Misiones, como toda regi6n defrontera,es rica en tipos
pintorescos. . .. Asi Juan Brown que, habiendo ido por solo unas horas a
mirar las minas, se quedo 25 afios alia; el doctor Else, a quien la
destilacion de naranjas llevo a confimdir a su hija con una rata;... el Alto
Parana sirvio de campo de accion a algunos tipos ricos de color,. . . (288)
Thus, setting and characters are already known by the reader, and the story is
therefore more familiar and less weird. As Nicolas Bratosevich says, in relation to the
landscape of "La insolacion:"
pertenece a un mundo geograficamente delimitado y tambien
verificable: son los algodonales del Chaco argentino, es el pajonal del
Saladito, al que se describe no solo en relacion inmediata con la anecdota
sino tambien mediante un lenguaje de intencion documental que pretende
enteramos de las caracteristicas de ese precisorincondel continente . . .
(159)
62
Quiroga creates a well-known background for his readers. Then he introduces
the extraordinary event, but always without any mystery, just as a common thing. As
Bratosevich says, Quiroga takes out "los fantasmas del delirio y [accede] francamente a
lo fantastico." (138). The same critic points out the fact that both the reality and the
supematural element interact at the same level "por esa capilaridad en la que la realidad
se hace fantastica y vice-versa" (142). Poe, on the contrary, sets all of his stories in
strangers' houses and nocitumal environments. His characters are very uncommon
people. These gothic features prepare the readerfromthe very beginning to expect the
abnormal and unusual. Quiroga, unlike Poe, sets all his stories during the daytime,
usually during a very hot season and with the characters performing their daily. Poe's
characters, on the other hand, are not very well defined insofar as their daily activities
are concemed. The story themselves begin most of the time in media res, as in "The
Assignation" or "The Oval Portrait." There is usually some information missing so that
a complete picture of the main characters' lives and personalities is not available. As
David S. Reynolds says in relation to "The Cask of Amontillado:" "The tale is
remarkable for what it leaves out... Like a painter who leaves a lot of suggestive white
canvas, Poe sketches character and setting lightly, excluding excess material" (102-3).
However, both authors have in common their interest in presenting many details so they
both give exhaustive accounts of the most trivial items that surround their characters
and enhance their plots. J. Luis Martinez says:
De la aficion que Horacio Quiroga tuvo por la fotografia y su
interes por el cine, aprendio a especular la realidad concentrando su
atencion en detalles que comunmente pasan desapercibidos, pero que
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pueden ser de gran significacion cuando se convierten en imagenes bien
dosificadas en un relato. (70)
Regarding his interest in details, Poe focuses on an art object and then tries to
describe what he sees. On this topic, Charles E. May recalls what David Halliburton says
about stasis and motionlessness in Poe regarding art: "the oxymoronic sense we get in the
story of motion shot through with stasis~an oxymoron that Halliburton says is typical of
ekphrastic poetry where the 'spatial object seems about to free itself into the flow of
time" (26). In stories like "Metzengerstein" or "The Oval Portrait," Poe starts his
narration by fixing the narrator's mind on an artistic object that he has before him—the
tapestry, in the first case, and the portrait of the young lady on the second one. The
object is something completely static that was unnoticed by the narrator at first. It is a
common object that one might expect to find in a bedroom, and it is finally found by
accident. As Leland S. Person says:
The narrator characteristically fixes images of people and things
and stores them up like so many photographs in his album-memory. .. He
lives in a world perceived as so many mimetically rendered statues,
paintings, and mental photographs - a worid explored and known more by
sense and sense-based understanding than by imagination or insight. (26).
In "The Oval Portrait" the narrator recounts how he finds himself mysteriously
attracted by the portrait: "I thus saw in vivid light a picture all unnoticed before . . . I
glanced at the painting hurriedly, and then closed my eyes . . . In a very few moments I
again looked fixedly at the painting" (382). Departingfromthat discovery, he gives life
to the object in order to narrate the whole plot. The story is basedfirston visual art and
secondly on historical facts that he recollects from other sources, mainlyfrombooks.
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With these ingredients, Poe creates an atmosphere of mystery that the reader and the
narrator immediately feel attracted to. Using Richard Wilbur s terminology, Leland S.
Person named this relation between Poe and the artistic object a '"hypnagogic state," a
'condifion of semi-consciousness in which the closed eye beholds a continuous
procession of vivid and constantly changing forms" (20).
From the static vision of a drawing, then, the narrator gets all the information
necessary for him to be stimulated in order to invent, or in this case reinvent (since the
story was already there), the plot. Omans, in an essay which compares Poe with
Washington Allston, one of the first of American symbolist painters, says:
The key element by means of which the artist achieves a vision of
ideal beauty is the symbol, a sense-perceivable, beautifiil object that has
the power to suggest pure beauty because it partially and imperfectly
embodies the idea. To designate the symbol, Allston used the term
'objective correlative,' a term that T. S. Eliot made popular 120 years
later. (4)
Poe creates the mystery in his stories in the same way he creates diabolic feelings
in all his characters, so his writing works as a kind of witchcraft for him, one in which he
uncovers the worst aspects of his society. In "The Man of the Crowd" he rejoices at
having found a person that was the very "incamations of thefiend"(311). Artistic
objects function as fetishes that interact with the observer and create an especially
supematural bond between them. There are also certain parts of the body that develops
such a fetish action to the narrator; as Hoffinan points out, "Poe . . . seems to be obsessed
with the eye to the point of fetishism" (228). By contrast, as Fleming affirms conceming
his writings in general, Quiroga wrote as an exercise to exorcize all his ghosts in life.
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la escritura que, ademas de tener caracter sagrado, es tambien un ntual exorcizante
. . Quiroga escribe sobre el mundo . . . para quitarle el misterio amenazante, para
humanizarlo" (28). This effort explains why he avoids any philosophical theory in his
work. Poe, on the contrary, was more concemed with transporting all of his fears from
his personal life to his writings. Instead of trying to humanize the world around him, he
distorts his own familiar environment through his works, giving in almost all his tales an
introduction conceming psychological, philosophical and literary matters. Actually,
Quiroga did not write about writing or mention anything about the process of writing as a
topic in his stories. One of these tales, "Los perseguidos" deals with a character who is a
writer, but, even though he is a real person and a good fiiend of the author, and even
though he chooses this character for his plot, he never mentions the act of writing at all.
Poe takes the process of writing as a current activity in many of his characters. In
"Ligeia" or "Ms Found in a Bottle," or in many other stories, there are characters
involved in activities related directly to literature (either they themselves write or they
are compulsive readers). There are stories featuring other artistic representation, "The
Oval Portrait," "Metzengerstein," "The Assignation" etc. As Leland S. Person says: "
Poe's sense of anonymity, of being forgotten or, worse, never known at all, causes him to
replace the self with language, with 'characters' that the self has created out of its love.
Language becomes a mirror in which he can recognize himself (22).
From an artistic object, Poe is able to connect to the sublime idea, that according
to him the author is intended to depict. Then, he stimulates his imagination and creates
the plot of the narration itself A good example occurs in "Metzengerstein," where the
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young man looking at the tapestry recreates the history of his ancestors: "Here [in the
tapestry], rich-ermined priests, and pontifical dignitaries, familiariy seated with the
autocrat and the sovereign, put a veto on the wishes of a temporal king . . . -his eyes
became unwittinglyrivettedto the figure of a enormous, and unnaturally colored horse"
(95-6). Later, that history comes to life through the mysterious horse that suddenly
appears in his castle. With it, he develops a deep relationship as they have known each
other forever. In the same way, the narrator in "The (3val Portrait" feels an attraction for
the young lady's portrait. Among all the pictures, he finds in it something familiar that
demands all of his attention. That explains the necessity that he feels to know more about
the lady, filling out all his intrigues. In the end, he realizes that the familiar thing that
shocks him about the lady are the signs of life itself that are depicted in that object of art.
As Leland S. Person points out:
'Killing women into art' (in Gilbert and Gubar's terms) became
almost a prerequisite for the highest form of creativity. Joseph
Moldenhauer argues, in fact, that Poe's protagonist-artist 'murder their
beloved and lovely women, who already resemble works of art, in order to
fiirther their perfection as objets de virtu.' (19)
Sometimes Poe does exactly the reverse. Instead of focussing on an object in
order to reach life, he uses life itself and describes the characters in terms of an artistic
object. In "The Assignation" this method is used by the narrator. This story is about the
mysterious Marchesa who tries to rescue her childfromthe Venetian canals. Finally,
someone from an unexpected place and who no one seems to know solves the problem
and takes the child alive from the water. This strange character invites the narrator to his
house which seems like a palace with an enormous collection of art inside. He reveals to
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the narrator that he is in love with the Marchesa -who is already married. After the
conversation, both men find out the news about the death of the woman, so the lover kills
himself with a poisonous wine that the narrator has also been drinking. The narrator
describes this woman as if she were a sculpture: "... the entire woman thrills throughout
the soul, and the statue has started into life! The pallor of the marble countenance, the
swelling of the marble bosom, the very purity of the marble feet, we behold suddenly
flushed over with a tide of ungovemable crimson" (138-9). In this house, as in other
stories, he also discovers a painting that was at the begiiming hidden and that suddenly
appears before his eyes as a extraordinary thing. It is the portrait of the Marchesa that the
strange character has in his house: "Human art could have done no more in the
delineation of her super human beauty. The same ethereal figure which stood before me
the preceding night upon the steps of the Ducal Palace, stood before me once again"
(144). From the beginning, the real woman is described as a statue, and the lady in the
portrait is now described as a real woman. As Leland S. Person says: "Not satisfied with
the contemplation of the Marchesa's image in the painting, the artist wishes to remove
all barriers between his imagination and its object-to transform the woman herself into
an image of woman" (27). About this same topic, Daniel Hoffman says that "The reason
may readily be inferred why Poe's fictions so often resemble tableaux vivants, his
tableaux vivants so readily becoming tableaux morts"' (208). Throughout the story, the
narrator does not seem to be able to distinguish between the two perspectives, reality and
the representation of reality. At least he places both at the same level. The same critic
says:
68
Despite his narrator's comparisons of women to art objects, Poe's
heroines seldom remain in such a static form. Even as male characters
work to transform women into aesthetic objects, female characters'
attempt to create an esthetic effigy of a female character ends
conspicuously, terrifying, in failure. (23)
Curiously enough, "The Assignation" is one of the few tales in which the narrator
has a very passive role. He is not directly involved in the action of the plot. Instead he
acts as a spectator that at the very end of the story suffers the same consequences as the
protagonist: he dies too.
In "The Man of the Crowd," Poe uses the same technique as in the previous story.
He begins with a concrete and real setting- a crowd in a London street. He describes it
as if it were a painting, highlighting what he considers most important and ignoring the
rest: "I gave up, at length, all care of things within the hotel, and became absorbed in
contemplafion of the scene v^thouf (309). In this picture, he focuses on a particular
man who does not conform to the kind of analysis that he is doing on the crowd.
Because the man is unique and unclassified he decides to follow him. In this curious
pursuit the narrator discovers parts of the city that he has never been before, and, for one
day, he follows this man who seems not to belong anywhere; he belongs to the people of
the city. The narrator, sitting in his chair in the coffee-shop, discovers what he actually
has had before him the whole day. Now, however, it seems even more attractive to him
(like the paintings in the other stories discovered almost by accident) because of the fact
that "the darkness came on" (308). The darkness enhances his interest in the crowd of
the beginning and so
69
. . . my observations took an abstract and generalizing tum. I
looked at the passengers in masses, and thought of them in their aggregate
relations. Soon, however, I descended to details, and regarded with minute
interest the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and
expression of countenance. (309)
After that, he starts making a very exhaustive classification of the different
characters on the street, as if they were motionless. He notes details that are almost
impossible to catch in a normal scene like the one he is experiencing. The crowd acts
like a mass in motion, and it is difficult to distinguish and record all the data that the
narrator provides to the reader with: "in my peculiar mental state, I could frequently read,
even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years." (311). Thus, m a way,
he simply pictures in his mind the whole scene that he has been looking at for hours, and
he decomposes it little by little. He does the same kind of thing in "The Oval Portrait"
when he has to close his eyes first to draw the painting in his mind before analyzing it. In
"The Assignation" the scene that he is involved with also is in motion. The narrator is
seated in a gondola, and the Marchesa is desperately looking for help around her. There
is complete motion surrounding him, and even though this is so, he is able to keep her in
mind and describe her beauty in detail. The same situation can be found in Quiroga's
"Las moscas," when the dying man abandons his body to describe and analyze in detail
the picture of his own death, although in this case the situation is static precisely because
it is his own death.
In "The Man of the Crowd," Poe focuses his attention on the daily routine around
him. It is evening time on normal working day. He is enjoying a cup of coffee and a
cigarette as he looks at all of the people around. However, he notices that undemeath the
70
normal situation of the daily routine of common people that shows at the surface he is
able to go deep inside the hearts of the people in crowd and take out everything about
their personalities. Suddenly, the picture changes from an ordinary working day in a big
city into something personal and distinctive. Instead of reflecting on the crowd as a
whole, he is able to draw a exhaustive picture of these people and distinguish different
groups so that all of them receive a great deal of attention:
Still all were distinguished by a certain sodden swarthiness of
complexion, a filmy dimness of eye, and pallor and compression of lip.
There were two other traits, moreover, by which I could always detect
them: a guarded lowness of tone in conversation, and a more than ordinary
extension of the thumb in a direction atrightangles with thefingers.(310)
Poe does the same kind of introspection about the crowd as in other stories where
he looks for more than the picture he hasrightinfrontof him-as in "The Oval Portrait."
He searches for the uncommon in an ordinary scene. He likes to place his human
characters in extreme, completely dehumanized situations which he himself invents for
them. An example occurs in this story when he is able to know almost everything about
the strange man that he sees just by looking at his face, his clothes and the way he walks
Poe says:
As I endeavored, during the brief minute of my original survey, to
form some analysis of the meaning conveyed, there arouse confusedly and
paradoxically within my mind, the ideas of vast mental power, of caution,
of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness,
of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense-of supreme
despair.. . 'How wild a history,' I said to myself, 'is written within that
bosom!" (311)
The narrator's imagination is quite prodigious in creating the character's
backgrounds. He also does not forget to parallel his physical description of their
71
characters with those artistic objects that are always in his mind. For him art is equal to
life, and sometimes he has troublefiguringout which is one and which is the other.
Describing the crowd at night, he says, "All was dark yet splendid~as that ebonv' to
which has been likened the style of Tertullian" (311). When he is describing the strange
old man, he points out that "I well remember that myfirstthought, upon beholding it, it
was that Retszch, had he viewed it, would have greatly preferred it to his own pictural
incamation of the fiend" (311). The narrator cannot avoid having in mind the artistic
objects, so everything surrounding him has to be related to them, hi the same way, when
he is exposed to an art object, he cannot forget the living person who has inspired it.
Instead of looking for the uncommon and mystery in daily routine, Quiroga does
the opposite. He tries to normalize an uncommon situation. In his story "Los
perseguidos," one man pursues another. The narrator feels that something strange
happens to that weird man called Diaz Velez, so, after meeting him at a friend's house,
he decides to follow him through the streets of a big city. Because he knows a few things
about him, such as the fact that he was in medical treatment for being mad, the narrator
becomes interested in getting to know more about him. The narrator does not really
speculate about the stranger without evidence since his fiiend has already advised him
about the condition of Diaz Velez. The narrator, then, when confronted by a mad person,
describes him in much the same terms as Poe does with the old man in "The Man of the
Crowd." He is mysterious, distinguished above all by the way he looks around him, " Su
ropa, color trigueno mate, cara afilada y grandes ojos negros, daban a su tipo un aire no
comiin. Los ojos, sobre todo, de fijeza atonita y brillo arsenical, llamaban fuertemente la
72
atencion" (139). In this story, Quiroga also sets his encounter with this man on a rainy
night, as Poe usually does: "Una noche .. . sacudia el agua que empaiiaba en rachas
convulsivas la luz roja de los faroles" (139).
This tale is most nearly like Poe's tales in content and approach to the subject.
The end is open to reader's speculation and even the whole narrative is rather ambiguous
because it is not clear who is mad in the story. Quiroga does not write an introduction
based upon materials that he has researched; i.e., his introduction does not involve
philosophy, psychology, or history. Like Poe's "The Man of the Crowd," the narrator in
Quiroga's story feels a morbid curiosity for the other person and like Poe he gives an
impressive account of the people around him when he is initiating the pursuit:
un inidividuo gmeso, de magnifico porte, barba catalana y lentes
de oro. Debia de haber sido comerciante en Espana . . . y lo vi inmovil
aiin, mirandome con una de esas extranezas de hombre honrado,
enriquecido y burgues que obligan a echar un poco la cabeza atras con el
ceiio armgado. (146)
In this case, there is also a general speculation about people's background,
exactly as in Poe's story. Without much evidence they judge and classify people
according to the way they look. Thus, they create, in both cases, a kind of painting of
manners. They both paint a picture of their own societies of the moment. They are not
the main characters in the stories. On the contrary, they are mere observers who describe
the drawing, at first, from outside. Later, however, they cannot be unmvolved any
longer, and they decide to jump into the picture and take an active part in the story
through the pursuit of the other. As Poe's narrator says: "These observations heightened
my curiosity, and I resolved to follow the stranger whithersoever he should go" (312).
73
In Quiroga's story there is also the revenge factor. When the narrator and Diaz
Velez meet for the first time in a friend's house, the latter appears to be completely sane.
He even tells the narrator and his fiiend a story of a mad person. Later, when Diaz Velez
leaves, the narrator leams from his friend that the story was Diaz Velez's own story and
that this strange character has just deceived the narrator. Then, the narrator wants
revenge for that trick, and his plan is to make Diaz Velez believe that he too is mad and
thus trick him: "Cuando lo vea me va a tocar a mi divertirme" (144). Quiroga goes
further than Poe in this tale, and the narrator is not content to merely follow Diaz Velez
throughout the city, but he also wants to prove to him that he (the narrator) is superior.
He is able to fool not only him but also the crowd around:
Cuando lo [Diaz Velez] senti a mi certisimo alcance todas mis
inquietudes se fueron para dar lugar a una gran satisfaccion de mi mismo.
Sentiame en hondo equilibrio. Tenia todos los nervios conscientes y
tenaces. Cerraba y abria los dedos en toda extension, feliz
Diaz Velez
continuaba caminando y pronto estuve a dos pasos detras de el. Uno mas y
lo podia tocar. (145)
In both of these stories by Poe and Quiroga, the narrators feel themselves superior
to the persons they are following. Poe's story involves someone belonging to the lowest
class of society and Quiroga presents a person with completely unbalanced mental
faculties. Not only do these narrators feel superior, they also feel pity for their
antagonists. These strangers are hard to classify in any society group, so they become
marginal people. As soon as Poe's narrator realizes the nature of the man, he gives up
his pursuit and ends the story: "'This old man,' I said at length, 'is the type and the
genius of deep crime. He refiises to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in
74
vain to follow; for I shall leam no more of him, nor of his deeds" (314). However, with
Quiroga it is something different. The narrator starts a relationship with him in the same
way that Poe's narrators do with art objects. There are strange bonds between them that
make the narrator more and more curious, and the relationship reaches a point where
their personalities become contagious. During their next encounter, the narrator begins
to feel different because he has in front of him someone that everybody has called mad:
Y mis ideas, en perfecta fila hasta ese momento, comenzaron a
cambiar de posicion y entrechocarse vertiginosamente. Hice un esfuerzo
para rehacerme y me acorde subitamente de un gato de plomo, sentado en
una silla, que yo habia visto cuando tenia cinco afios. ^Por que ese gato?..
.(148)
Each of them influences the other. When they part, the narrator notices a kind of
complicity between them, as if they had a deep understanding of each other. The
narrator finds out to his surprise that they both have more things in common than he
could have imagined: "Al apretamos la mano no pudimos menos de miramos en los ojos
y nos echamos a reir al mismo tiempo, por centesima vez en dos horas. . . A los pocos
metros pise con fuerza dos o tres pasos seguidos y volvi la cabeza; Diaz se habia vuelto
tambien" (153).
The pursuer becomes the pursued. The title "Los perseguidos," does not clarify
to whom it refers. While the narrator in Poe's story, at the end, just wanders around the
city itself, the travel that the narrator in Quiroga's story does is more than simply
geographic. In this story there is an introspective trip in the narrator's conscious because
someone is theoretically unbalanced. This joumey represents the argument that Quiroga
presents in his story. Was Diaz Velez really mad or was he very intelligent and just
75
pretending to be mad? Thus, the question about madness is a sociological issue, one that
must be decided by the society itself In any case, the narratorfindshimself pretending
to be a mad person just because he wants to demonstrate to himself exactly the opposite,
that he is sane and the other not, and so he is the superior, the one in control of the
situation. And the situation that the narrator himself provokes makes him wonder
whether Diaz Velez was not doing exactly the same as he actually does, just pretending
in order to deceive society. When Diaz Velez is brought to a mental clinic, the doctor
finally recognizes that he is not mad, but before he leaves they have to keep him there
just for precaution. He does not know how he can demonstrate that he is not crazy, so he
says so to the doctor: "Pero, justed no cree que sera imposible, absolutamente imposible
conocer nunca cuando estare cuerdo, sin precaucion, como usted dice? No puedo, yo
creo, ser mas cuerdo que ahora!" (162). The roles of both characters begin to reverse,
and he ends up like the narrator in Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." By trying to convince
others of his sanity, he simply demonstrate his mental unbalance. During their second
encounter in a coffee shop, the narrator starts confiising fiction and reality. In his mind,
he is having a conversation that they actually are not having, so suddenly the narrator
ends up yelling at him: "jSe equivoca com-ple-ta-men-te!-le dije, poniendo los codos
sobre la mesa y la cara entre las manos" (149). He is thinking that Diaz Velez was trying
to deceive him again and that is why he finds himself completely excited about
something that can only happen in his mind. The other man just responds in a very
relaxed and calm way: "Pero, ^a que diablos se refiere? Es posible que me equivoque,
pero no se .. ." (149). This kind of hallucination that the narrator undergoes can be
76
parallel with the one expressed in "El hijo," when the father after finding his son dead
creates in his imagination a whole dialogue that he wishes would happen but that can
only occur in his head. In "Los perseguidos," then, the roles are reversed and the one
who is sane and judges the other as someone who is crazy acts like an insane person.
The one who is classified as mad acts completely balanced. The irony of the tale occurs
at the very end, right after the conversation with the doctor, whenfinallyhe demonstrates
his high degree of intelligence and his capacity to pretend to be mad. After all of this,
the narrator firmly believes that Diaz Velez is completely healthy and that society has
condemned him for not following the normal pattems. However, in the last scene, when
the narrator comes to say goodbye to his friend, he then finds his friend "palido, los ojos
dilatados de terror y odio..." (163). And with the intention of causing injuries to the
narrator as if he were someone that Diaz Velez was planning to hurt him a long time ago,
" - jAh, bandido!-me grito levantando la mano-. jHace ya dos meses que te veo
venir!.. "(163).
Quiroga, using that natural style that characterizes him, describes exactly the
same topics as Poe but from a more humanized perspective. The Umguayan writer
transforms the deep worries of the sophisticated narrator's in Poe into the anguish of the
common, working people. The topic is the same (the stmggling about life and death) but
from different angles. Poe's narrative gives to his story a taste of intellectual and
sensationalist writing. At the same time, that style identifies Poe's characters in the
sense that through the prose the reader can interpret their arguments and analyze them
according to their own language-and not only according to their actions. Part of these
77
characters' problems is either the fact of having too much knowledge or the search for
that knowledge; in any case, knowledge seems to be the favorite excuse for them to hide
from their fears. Because of that knowledge Poe's characters cannot be accused of being
flat, rather the opposite. They have a personality that is discovered only through the
development of the plot and the interpretation of their language. The reader, thus, has to
know how to read between lines, and with his own clues and the ones provided by the
character himself, the latter's personality then is revealed.
In Poe narrator and protagonist coincide, but not in Quiroga. That is why the
latter does not develop that much his characters; and that is why the character surprises
the reader who actually does not know about his tme personality-was Diaz Velez mad or
not? At the end of "Los perseguidos," the reader does not have an answer because he
does not have enough proof to either condemn or relieve Diaz Velez. Until the end his
personality has not been revealed to the reader. Quiroga's vision of the worid, thus, is
transferred first to the narrator before it gets to the reader, while Poe makes the reader to
have a conversation tete a tete with his narrator/protagonist.
78
CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSION
Horacio Quiroga knew how to take from Edgar Allan Poe that gothic. mysterious
atmosphere about the enigmas of life and use it as the perfect background for his short
stories. From Poe's sophisticated and refined prose, the Umguayan wnter shifts into a
more simple and natural language, where topics, in general, are the same as Poe's topics,
but they are developed differently. The concems that both writers present throughout
their narrations and characters reflect that their anguish is also the same: fear not only of
death but also of life. That subject takes shape in Quiroga's stories in the body of
common and working people within a savage environment. Poe, however, is just the
opposite; he presents uncommon, intellectual characters, within a "civilized"
environment. Poe's environment is supposed to be "civilized" since Poe deals with
educated people in large cities; however, the actions of these characters can be described
as more monstrous than the ones occurring in Quiroga's forest-where there are no mles.
Quiroga's characters lack that knowledge and continuous questioning about
transcendental problems that characters in Poe constantly show; the former ones are too
worried about how to survive daily life. Therefore, Quiroga's protagonists are closer to
the reader just because of that simplicity and spontaneity.
Quiroga himself began his life by being like one of Poe's characters-searching
desperately for knowledge. Little by little, however, he outlived everything that was
artificial on his life (even his wife and children), and, thus, he escaped to the forest in
79
order to have a basic and simple life for his last years. There, he had to fight with one of
his greatest fears: loneliness. He feared it but, at the same time, as Poe's characters hide
themselves in the search of knowledge, Quiroga looked for that solitude as much as he
feared it. His characters, then, are all marked with the sign of being alienated, even when
they are around a crowd. Poe's characters also share the same characteristic-Poe
himself fears solitude as well. In all of his tales the protagonist has to face the tragic
event alone; there is no one that can offer help or understanding. Even the tales about
couples do not seem to give much support to each other but rather the opposite, only
instability. Thus, in conclusion, the stories of both writers are definitely frightening
tales, but not only for the supematural event that they deal with. In addition, these
characters are above all alienated. The man in "A la deriva" prefers to die alone in the
boat rather than let his wife help him; the protagonist in "The Imp of the Perverse" has
to shout out his own crime because he cannot share his feeling of guilt with anyone.
These are only two examples of what I consider the most scary vision in Poe and
Quiroga's narrative: the solitary image of the character's life that the reader intuits from
the very beginning. Although this is a common subject for both writers, it is more evident
in Poe than in Quiroga. The latter, in some of his stories, uses the family circle in order
to solve the tragic moments the character goes through. Although they died, as in "El
hombre muerto" and "El hijo," they have at least the memones of their own family as
their companion for the last voyage. Poe could never deal with the very cause of his
solitude: a constant family crisis. Thus, the fact of not presenting it in his tales is a clue
80
to understanding one of his greatest traumas, reflected in his literature precisely because
of its absence.
As I have tried to demonstrate in this work, there are many common points in the
narrative of both writers, since one borrowed from the other, and also there are different
approaches to the same topic. One of the most significant of those differences is the
concept the two had about literature itself Quiroga believed that literature was in fact a
way to exorcized those ghosts that everyone has deep inside-literature as a kind of
mental therapy—thus, his characters show a humanized side. Poe, on the other hand,
always lived with all those ghosts around him, which made him a miserable human
being, but a famous writer; his characters, then, show a supematural side. Thompson
points out that there were no writers in the nineteenth-century in America, England or
France that "went so far in his vision of deshumanized man" (97).
81
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Espaiias, 1934.
Fleming, Leonor. Horacio Quiroga. Cuentos. Madrid: Catedra S. A., 1991.
Gargano, James W "The Question of Poe's Narrators." Eddings, Dennis W. The Naiad
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Kennedy, J. Gerald. Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing. New Haven: Yale University
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