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"Doctoring" in QuirogaAuthor(s): Norman S. HollandSource: Confluencia, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Spring 1994), pp. 64-72Published by: University of Northern Colorado
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"Doctoring" in Quiroga
Norman S. Holland
Hampshire College
In these pages I will be concerned with a
cluster of anxieties at once sexual and aes
thetic, that marks the writing of Horacio
Quiroga. I will concentrate on the following
stories: "El almohad?n de pluma" (1907),
"La gallina degollada" (1909), "Una estaci?n
de amor" (1912), and "El solitario" (1913),
first collected in Cuentos de amorde locura y de
muerte (1917).1 I want to suggest that in
these achievements, Quiroga devises a
counter-model of (pro)creation that incorpo
rates and extends the debunking of natural
ism begun by modernista writers such as
Rub?n Dar?o and Amado Nervo. Not sur
prisingly, two of these stories explicitly turn
on the figure of the doctor, ("el m?dico",2 the
naturalist marker par excellence. Quirogas
turn to the doctor must be read as an effort
to find a language in which (male) writer's
could once again express and control an
obsession?the female body?whose power
was rapidly being lost throughout the conti
nent to the medicalization of women and
childbirth.
The ending of "El almohad?n" invokes the
crisis I have briefly designated above. Even
as procreation was being translated into a
means of producing scientific truth and
managing bodies, Quiroga was translating
the doctor and his work into sensationalist
fiction. At the end of what first reads as a
traditional Frankenstein legend are two para
graphs that shift the tale back onto the scien
tific domain. According to these concluding
paragraphs, the protagonist is tormented
and killed by the creature she bestows life
on?a parasite that is found inside her pillow.
Estos par?sitos de las aves, diminutos
en el medio habitual, llegan a adquirir
en ciertas condiciones proporciones
enormes. La sangre humana parece
serles particularmente favorable, y no
es raro hallarlos en los almohadones de
pluma. 37)
Through this ending, a scientific
sounding discourse is endowed with a truth
bearing power. Science completes the
fiction and hence stands over fiction. This
outcome is paradoxically part of the Frank
enstein legacy as long as the "original" is read
not as the seminal, science fiction novel, but
rather as staging a rivalry between two tech
nologies: science and fiction.3 In re-enacting
this legacy, Quirogas story moves beyond
the library into the realm of the daily in order
to stress its strangeness. In other words, the
story begs to be taken as a faithful recon
struction of a normal occurrence, as a sam
ple of naturalist aesthetics. Yet the sample is
so exquisitely constructed that it needs to be
read anew as artifice, consistent with the
aesthetics of el modernismo. No longer is mo
dernismos exotic located elsewhere, it resides
in the most familial situations.
"El almohad?ns" protagonists live in a
house whose marble columns and statues
recall the palaces that house Dar?o's prin
cesses
La casa en que viv?an influ?a un poco
en sus estremecimientos. La blancura
del patio silencioso- frisos, columnas
y estatuas de m?rmol- produc?a una
oto?al impresi?n de palacio encantado.
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Dentro, el brillo glacial del estuco, sin
el m?s leve rasgu?o en las altas
paredes, afirmaba aquella sensaci?n de
desapacible fr?o. (34)
In the hands of Quiroga, Dar?o's house turns
into Nervo's "ice box." Acutely cold, neither
spouse speaks. Jord?n loves his wife without
being able to articulate it. Furthermore, his
personality freezes Alicia's girlish dreams
("sus so?adas ni?er?as de novia" [34]). She
dares not speak, afraid that whatever she
might say, no matter how mundane, will ex
pose her desires. Instead, the newly-wed
bride copes with her awakened, but still dor
mant sexuality by either acting hysterically
crying upon being touched by Jord?n, or
perversely-giving in to the parasite.
Both ways reaffirms her societal status:
woman as daughter of Eve. Her discovery
that she is a doubly fallen being, an Eve that
desires Jord?n, is a discovery that she is a
monster. As such she releases her own mon
strosity, her own vampire. When Jord?n an
swers her calls for help, she screams. "Jord?n
corri? al dormitorio, y al verlo aparecer Ali
cia dio un alarido de horror." (35) Her
scream defines not only their relation, but
also herself. She accepts herself as a filthy
mess and submits to punishment. "No quiso
que le tocaran la cama, ni aun que le arre
glaran el almohad?n." (36) Her punishments
are sadomasochistic. For it is she after all
who languishes helpless and alone while Jor
d?n works. And it is she in whom desire is
awakened but not satisfied, causing her to
turn to the parasite as a form of fulfillment as
punishment. When she finally dies the maid
observes blood on the cushion/pillow. Inside
it, lives a parasite, "the Frankenstein," who
sucked Alicia dry.
In this reading, Dario's house no longer
serves as a stage to liberate language in the
form of a princess awaiting her prince
charming. Put another way Quiroga's text
has lost faith in Dario's project of creating
through literature a technology that can pro
ductively counter a gendered, scientized
body and its corresponding textual economy
of a unified, aesthetic body. In its place,
Quiroga activates a deliberately fictionalized
body which remains materially effective.
Both accounts are deployed to "move" the
reader. As the reader animates the textual
body, the story slides away from the notion
of bodily effects into the realm of bodily
differences, giving rise to fear of the female's
pro-creative powers. A threatening female
productivity is certainly a significant part of
the story.
Both the science and the fiction at work in
the story remove the female body from nat
ure and set it at odds with nature. Husband
and "scientist" narrator react to Alicia in sim
ilar ways; neither recognizes desire. Their
refusal puts into play the logic of host and
parasite. It also, and unexpectedly, fore
grounds the theme of art's vampirization of
the very effect?"lifelikeness"?which the
prose purports to convey. The monster in
the pillow is not the only physical specimen
offered by the prose; the text itself is a para
site.
Quiroga's writing effectively vampirizes
the conventional and privileged modes of
literary praxis of its day for the sake of dialec
tically resuscitating the poetical topic or gen
erative trope of a dead beautiful woman in its
more original, should I dare say Poe-esque?,
version.4 In reflectively re-enacting the kill
ing of the young woman in its projected
verisimilitude, the text's complicity with the
victimizing effects of a society that impri
sions young women and perverts their sexu
ality comes into question.
Both parasite and host activate anxieties
that implicate sexuality and production. Just
as Alicia's social deformity is doubled by the
parasite's physical malformation, the mon
ster's physical being is refracted by the writ
ing's fragility. Their intertwined logic calls
attention to the figure of the writer. Despite
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the narrative frames, it is not hard to sense
Quiroga s hand at work here and in the sto
ries that follow containing female generative
power with an alternative practice, at once
male and aesthetic. For Quiroga, engender
ing begins and ends in the act of writing.
Through Alicia s body, he recovers a discur
sive model that incorporates and works to
manage the linked, although not at all equiv
alent, issues of production and reproduc
tion. His technological breakthrough allows
the writer once again to occupy a more pro
ductive role in relation to the "doctor."
In her book on Juan Carlos Onetti, Jose
fina Ludmer traces the birth of modern
River Plate narrative to the poetics of the
naturalist doctor-narrator.5 As a specialist
this narrator occupies a privileged position
viz-a-viz his or her interlocutor. This privi
leged voice tells the ignorant reader the
story and its causes. This figure informs ac
counts that display instances of the acquisi
tion and transmission of knowledge. The
doctor consistently locates this process in
heredity. As long as the fundamental site of
the transmission of genetic characters from
parents to offsprings is the female body,
there is a desire to take charge of the (pro)
creative function, an area in which the au
thor, traditionally male, is also heavily in
vested. What follows remarks on how this
competition already woven in "El alhoma
d?n" is refracted in three other stories writ
ten before Quiroga s move to Misiones.
Under cover of a familial horror story, "La
gallina degollada" restages the contest be
tween science and fiction as a battle be
tween doctor and narrator. This time the
contest is not part of the narrative frame
work; it is built into the figure of the narrator.
He displays an ability to translate and com
municate physical sensation between many
different bodies, almost like an actual dis
ease. The narrator literally employs a disease
to terrify the reader.
Initially a recently married couple con
ceive a healthy son. Suddenly one day he
succumbs to an unknown illness that leaves
him mentally incapacitated, an idiot. With
each successive male child born, the same
scenario repeats itself. Finally the couple
have a baby daughter. She grows up healthy.
Just when the Mazzini-Ferraz marriage
thinks they have escaped their previous mis
fortunes, the four brothers gang up and kill
their sister. The reader's unease on reading
this ending is overdetermined by the rivalry
between doctor and narrator as to where to
locate the "original" illness, in the body or in
a certain body of language.
When their first born becomes ill, the
couple seeks medical help. For the spokes
man of naturalism, heredity is the key to the
illness. The doctor does not search for the
cause in the child, but in the parents: "El
m?dico lo examin? con esa atenci?n profe
sional que est? visiblemente buscando las
causas del mal en las enfermedades de los
padres." (48) To be expected, he blames the
mother: "en cuanto a la herencia paterna, ya
le dije lo que cre?a cuando vi a su hijo. Res
pecto a la madre, hay all? un pulm?n que no
sopla bien." (48) According to the doctor,
the mother's body is the site of illness.
Through his comments and asides, the nar
rator reacts to this medical search for a un
ivocal source. If there is one, he posits, it is
within a certain discourse on love. The par
ent's illness resides in their talk about love,
in their desire to overcome their bodily dif
ferences.
After a lengthy description of the four
boys, a note of parental disillusionment
marks the narrative. Once upon a time, the
children had been their parent's darlings:
"Esos cuatro idiotas, sin embargo, hab?an
sido un d?a el encanto de sus padres." (48)
They fulfilled their notion of love: "?Qu?
mayor dicha para dos enamoradoss que esa
honrada consagraci?n de su cari?o, libertado
ya del vil egoismo de un mutuo amor sin fin
ninguno y, lo que es peor para el amor
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mismo, sin esperanzas posibles de reno
vaci?n?" (48) The outcome of the story un
derscores the questions irony. Four idiots
are not happiness and they certainly do not
eliminate "oneness" ("egoismo"). They ex
acerbate it. Before the girl's birth, the couple
begins to blame each other for the children's
condition. Their behavior is qualified as be
longing to inferior hearts: "...que es patrimo
nio espec?fico de los corazones inferiores."
(49) Through these comments, the narrator
emerges as a character hidden in the surface
of the discourse. He gains a voice which is
ultimately in opposition to the doctor's.
While the doctor looks for an answer to the
children's illness in heredity, the narrator
suggests that the Mazzini-Ferraz marriage is
punished because it involves a basic misun
derstanding of how language works, the
matized as a question of what is love.
If we follow the narrator's "logic," the
couple have children in order to escape their
oneness. In a sense, they believe literally the
commandment that "the two shall become
one." Mistaken about what love is all about,
they can only produce "mistakes." Unde
terred by their mistake, that is, swayed by
their desire to deny difference, they have a
daughter who paradoxically affirms differ
ence most clearly. "Pero en las inevitables
reconciliaciones, sus almas se un?an con do
ble arrebato y locura por otro hijo. Naci? as?
una ni?a." (50) Healthy, different from her
brothers, she is killed.
In being surprised by the ending, the
reader participates as accomplice in the en
terprise of building the figure of the narrator
as the able transmitter of bodily sensations.
While the story asks us to recognize the
production and consumption of fiction as a
"communications technology," it also marks
the narrator as effective and efficient anti
dote to whatever nervous energy the reader
releases in reading. In managing the reader's
unease, the narrator substantiates fiction's
claim of cultural power over medicine.
These apparently opposes registers are co
ordinated within the discursive pressures
that late nineteenth-century naturalist texts
place on the concept of the individual, in
suggesting that the individual is something
that can be made.
Having established in the previous two
stories that against science, and more specif
ically, medicine, fiction has its own powers,
three years later Quiroga rescues the doctor
as the hero of "Una estaci?n de amor." As we
shall see below, the doctor and its concomi
tant belief in heredity is deployed as a strat
egy of control that belies a constant fear of
the female body as a machine beyond regula
tion.
The manifest structure of "Una estaci?n
de amor" is again a love story. As the title
indicates, the affair is organized around the
seasons. The tale's fourfold structure sug
gests that the fundamental essence of narra
tive duplicates the seasonal changes within
the order of nature. The perception of nat
ure anticipates knowledge through our affini
ties with its repetitions. This idea which
enjoyed a revival among the romantics
gained a new currency among the natural
ists. On the surface "Una estaci?n" plays out
these affinities.
The first season?spring?is of course the
time to fall in love. So the narrative opens
with the young N?bel falling in love with
Lidia. Although the tale exploits this order
of things (a literary convention), its factual
ness (an implied universality) is bracketed
by the discourse's insistence on the protago
nist's age and the action's time frame. Spring
as the season for love gives way to a specific
human time-adolescence, and a calendar
date?carnival. Carnival, moreover, occurs in
the southern hemisphere at the height of the
summer. Consequently, these facts work
against what appears to be the organizing
trope.
Concealed behind the seasonal trope is a
battle between parents and offsprings.
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N?bel's father opposes his son's involvement
with Lidia. In turn, her mother tries to ma
nipulate the father-son conflict to her advan
tage. The generational conflict participates
in a more general economy about the (pro)
creative force of Carnival.6 As such, "Una
estaci?n" can be read as the battleground
between rival forces: Carnival and the Law.
The narrative is inscribed between the noise
of carnival (contamination) at the beginning
and the re-affirmation of the Law (purity) at
the end. The other three seasons trace the
outcome of this confrontation.
Although on the surface the plot's unfold
ing depends on the direction of the move
ment which traditionally has been depicted
as either upward or downward, Quiroga's
discourse will insist that the seasonal move
ments are cyclical, repetive. The text re
minds us of this fact by calling the love affair,
a childish infatuation ("infantil idilio" ). The
sliding of the seasons into repetition touches
the protagonists' character as well. Come
"summer," the son acts like the father.
After a four month hiatus, the younger
N?bel's love is rekindled by the young wom
an's aloofness. Alarmed by this develop
ment, the older N?bel's intervenes. He
warns him that Lidia can contaminate him
with the disease ("podredumbre" [69]) that
surrounds her. She potentially embodies her
mother's "sins" of being a kept woman and a
drug addict. Yet the father's fears are ground
less. For the son has not even sealed his love
with a kiss though he has not lacked oppor
tunity. Futhermore he shares his father's
concerns: "As?, la inquietud del padre de
N?bel a este respecto tocaba a su hijo en lo
m?s hondo de sus cuerdas de amante.
?C?mo hab?a escapado Lidia?" (69). Their
common concern with purity effectively
functions as a defense mechanism against
the spread of the disease that they both
dread.
It is a "dis-ease" with appearances and
ultimately, language itself. N?bel's father is
opposed to the marriage because of the kind
of (sexual) relations Lidia's mother has ("qu?
clase de relaciones tiene la madre de tu novia
con su cu?ado" [67]). Furthermore, though
Lidia is not contaminated yet, his fortune or
N?bel's inheritance will be if they marry:
"Pero si la madre te la quiere vender en
matrimonio, o m?s bien la fortuna que vas a
heredar cuando yo muera, dile que el viejo
N?bel no est? dispuesto a esos tr?fi
cos,...(68) When the young lover tells Li
dia's mother that his father will neither meet
her nor bless the marriage, she also recurs to
heredity as antidote. She insists that he find
out how his family made his fortune and how
many obstacles did his father have to over
come to sleep with his future wife.
-...?Preg?ntale de d?nde ha sacado su
fortuna, robada a sus clientes ...?Su
familia irreprochable, sin mancha, se
llena la boca con eso ... D?gale que le
diga cu?ntas paredes ten?a que saltar
para ir a dormir con su mujer, antes de
casarse (70)
Her hostile questions separate the lovers un
til Lidia's illness reunites them four days
later. Left alone with Lidia in her bedroom,
young N?bel suddenly suspects he is being
framed. He flees in the name of a pure love,
"un amor puro en toda su aureola de po?tico
idilio." (71) His concern with purity marks
him as his father's son. Their difference is a
generic necessity that arises from the same
Law which defines them as one. Their
sameness confirms the power of heredity,
the force of the doctor, not only to keep the
body healthy, but also language.
Eleven years pass before the lovers meet
again. During this time, that is, between
"summer" and "autumn," young N?bel has
become the father. His father died. And he
married and fathered children. When he ac
cidentally runs into Lidia's mother, he can
act as his own agent. Using Lidia's illness as
an excuse, she proposes that she invites
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them to his country house. He accepts her
proposal: "Ante el tratado comercial que le
ofrec?an, se ech? en brazos de aquella rara
conquista que le deparaba el destino." (74)
Nonetheless, come "winter," they travel in
separate railroad cars to his country estate.
Once there, he consumes his passion for
Lidia in an atmosphere reminescent of mas
ter and servant. Immediately afterwards, he
recalls Dostoevsky's words, "que hasta ese
momento no hab?a comprendido: 'Nada hay
m?s bello y que fortalezca m?s en la vida,
que un recuerdo puro.'" (76) His recollection
confirms his father's "truth:" One cannot
escape heredity. In confirming this truth's
irony, N?bel completes the medical studies
he interrupted when his father died. He be
comes the doctor.
When N?bel sees both mother and
daughter injecting themselves with mor
phine, he attempts to save Lidia by with
holding the drug from her mother. Although
he plays doctor, he does not define himself
as one. When Lidia asks him if there is a
doctor on the estate, N?bel answers no.
?No hay m?dico aqu??-murmur? [Li
dia].
?Aqu? no, ni en diez leguas a la re
donda; pero buscaremos. (77)
He never sends for a doctor though he
knows Lidias mother is dying because of his
decision to withhold the morphine.
Through N?bel, Quiroga energizes the fig
ure of the doctor and the embodiment of the
Law of the Father. And we are left to wonder
what that significance is, a question that is
given a provisional answer if we contrast
Dario's and Quiroga's "jewel" stories.
Of his many stories, "El rub?," first pub
lished in Azul..., 1888, distinctly marks
Dario's break with the aesthetics of
realism/naturalism. The opening lines dis
parage the recent invention of an artificial
ruby by the French chemist called Fremy.
The gnomes attack the invention as another
attempt to imitate, that is to falsify, nature.
The gnomes' exaltation of nature and the
concomitant idea that their culture precedes
from it forms part of a romantic ideology
which comes under attack when the eldest
gnome sets the record straight. The ruby, he
recounts, is not the result of nature's sponta
neous work, but came about through the
death of a captive woman.
This patriarchical narrator recalls observ
ing the woman at a noisy bathing feast. Al
though she and her companions are
supposed to be engaged in a form of ritual, a
kind of lawlessness easily insinuates itself in
the gnome's description: "Brazos, espaldas,
senos desnudos, azucenas, rosas,..., ecos de
risas ?ureas, festivas;...".7 He sees just parts
of the human body and only hears noises.
Their monstrosity is reinforced when his
listeners guess that the observed are
nymphs, not human beings, women: "?Nin
fas? -No: mujeres." (66) At the opportune
moment, the gnome carries one of them
away. Later, when the captive tries to escape
from the gnomes' cave and rejoin her be
loved she bleeds to death. Her blood stains
the diamond-encrusted opening; it turns the
stones into rubies. The storyteller signals
the end of the tale with a pause and then
with the rhetorical question: "?Hab?is com
prendido?" (68) The gnomes assert their
understanding by destroying the fake ruby
and then dancing frantically, "una farandola
loca y sonora." (69) While the others dance,
Pluck, who had brought back the fake ruby
in the first place, takes to the air. What the
reader had understood depends on how
Pluck's celebratory flight is interpreted.
In mid-flight, Pluck praises, among other
things, "el oro, y el agua diamantina y la
casta flor de lis." (69) His praise is not a
nostalgic yearning for an aristocratic ideol
ogy as Fran?oise Perus claims in her valu
able essay on Dar?o,8 but the staging of the
elder gnome's notion of writing. Pluck re
peats what has been said before: Beauty ("lo
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puro") is born out of woman Earth ("madre
Tierra"). (69) His words suggest that the
basic scence of writing is precisely a double
relationship or somebody assimilating what
has been left unsaid and as a result spoken.
The something left unsaid is both unneces
sary and pertinent. In repeating what has
been said before, Pluck posits that before as
the language of truth. It is not a truth to be
found outside storytelling. There is not out
side, no origin. The ruby and the tale it
engenders are both artifice, pure decor, but
veiling that artifice is repetition. Repetition
delineates the doube nature of authorship,
always two: one who tells and another who
profits from its excess. This delineation ef
faces what is said by the old gnome in favor
of the movement of telling, that is, of spac
ing.
In shifting our attention to the movement
of telling, the reader becomes a partner in
crime. We become the elder gnomes ac
complice. When he makes the gnomes be
lieve in their superiority over Fremy, he
calms them down. He channels the unrest
caused by the news of Fremy s discovery
into organized disorder, into a dance. In this
dance, Fremy's enterprise can be scorned
because it invokes a basic misunderstanding
of what mimicry and production are all
about. Fremy remains trapped in the na
ivetes of realism. Science is derogatorily dis
missed as the doings of the expert ("hechura
del sabio" [68]). So are the gnomes. Busy
celebrating their superiority, they ignore that
for the narration to succeed it also has to
eliminate the female body, a gesture which
mimics the chemist's act. The upshot of this
crime is that the elder gnome puts an end to
dissonance. No longer do the younger
gnomes pose a threat to this patriarchical
narrator. Through storytelling, fiction can
(re)imposes order. Pluck's flight celebrates
the old gnomes' triumph. Dario's writing
stages Pluck's celebration. His celebration
brakets the festive and religious character of
the women's bath. As a simulacrum of sacri
fice, Pluck's praise ceases to be a unique,
exceptional event, it pertains to Western cul
ture and there lies its uniqueness.
A consequence of a story like "El rub?" is a
radical emptying of the category of produc
tion that the critique of realism/naturalism
centrally requires. While Dario's story posits
that the copy is always other and dissolves
this otherness by suggesting that its effectss
belong to an eternal arranging of the artifacts
of Western culture, Quiroga maintains the
importance of an individual producer. By
taking account and offering accounts of pro
duction, Quiroga can incorporate the cri
tique of naturalism that a text such as "El
rub?" commences but cannot completely
carry out because the category of production
remains embedded in the female generative
sphere. By contrast, I want to close these
remarks by turning to Quiroga's own "jewel,"
"El solitario."
"El solitario" provides an almost diagram
matic instance of what I have traced so far: a
double writing by which (re)production is
displaced or disavowed or rewritten in an
other register. The story can be quickly
summarized. Maria, Kassim's wife, threat
ens his livelihood when little by little she
falls in love with the very profession to which
he exposed her: "la tarea del artifice." (101)
Her love exceeds the professional bounda
ries of propriety. She wants to own, to keep,
the jewels he makes. When she breaks the
unspoken, but always present codes of be
havior, Kassim has no recourse but to rees
tablish them by killing her. Unlike in "El
rubi," Maria's blood does not become the
tale's referent. The diamond solitaire does
not turn into a ruby but remains a murder
weapon. What is most perverse about the
story is, however, not its murderous treat
ment of the wife but the violence of its
symmetries : female/procreation/monster
versus male/creation/ artist, and the urgent
translation of these events into a didactic
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7/25/2019 Doctoring . Horacio Quiroga
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lesson.
As so many of Quiroga's stories, "El solita
rio" appears as if it were a sensationalist
piece ripped out of (or ripped off) a newspa
per. Like any news item, the tale is a space to
disseminate and implat the desires of a spe
cific social class. Kassim is an artist, "h?bil -
artista aun?". (101) When he kills his wife,
he does it in the name of the art. He kills to
reestablish order.
To return to "Una estaci?n de amor," the
lesson of "El solitario" is addressed to Lidia
and other young women who aspire to move
up the social ladder through marriage. Not
satisfied with what her husband earns, Maria
pushes Kassim to murder her when she
overssteps her place in the social hierarchy.
Lidia avoids Maria s fate by not appearing at
the train window.
El tren parti?. Inm?vil, Nebel sigui?
con la vista la ventanilla que se perdia.
Pero Lidia no se asom?. (78)
She deflates Nebel's expectations, while
recognizing his authority. Through this op
eration of negation and reinvestment,
Quiroga preserves the possibility that fiction
can speak in a "pure" voice. Yet, all these
stories depend and stress the impurity or
dissonance embedded in language and em
bodied by the female.
As I indicated, the narrative tactic that
supports Quiroga's writing economy is the
displacement or rewriting of the figure of the
expert doctor as a strategy of control over
the generative power of the female body.
Quiroga appears to fear what results from
dismantling the doctor's truth. Conse
quently, he fills the blank page up with the
same: an uncontrollable force embodied by
the female body. His representation extends
beyond the plot to the natural/unnatural rela
tionship between a (male) storyteller and a
(female) reader. This asymmetrical relation
ship sets forth an econmy of nervous energy
and imagination. In the process, these four
stories resist the easy unification and classifi
cation proscribed by both a naturalist and a
modernista poetics.
Thanks are due for research support from
the Hewlett-Mellon Fund of Hampshire
College.
Notes
1 I follow the chronology established by
Alberto F. Oreggioni for the Biblioteca
Ayacucho editon of Horacio Quiroga, Cuen
tos, ed. Emir Rodr?guez Monegal (Caracas:
Editorial Ayacucho, 1981). As the editor
notes, Quiroga did not give much thought to
the organization of his collections of stories.
All Quiroga citations will be from this edi
tion.
2 Throughout Spanish America, doctor
can designate any expert or educated per
son; "medico" is employed to refer to some
one who practices medicine. Quiroga plays
with this distinction at the end of "Una esta
ci?n de amor," as discussed below.
3 On science and fiction as communica
tions technologies, see, Donna Haraway, "A
Manifesto for Cyborgs," in Femenism/Postmo
dernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York:
Routledge, 1990). Another critic who has
elaborated on the complexities of literature
and gender in relation to science is Teresa de
Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on
Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington: Indi
ana University Press, 1987).
4 Quiroga read and admired Poe for having
grounded his writing in the nervous system.
I will address Quiroga use of sensation in
what follows. In thinking about the effects of
reading on the body, I am indebted to D.A.
Miller, "Cage aux Folles: Sensation and
Gender in Wilkie Collins' The Woman in
White? Representations 14 (Berkeley: Califor
nia University Press, Spring 1986).
5 See Josefina Ludmer, Onetti: Los procesos
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7/25/2019 Doctoring . Horacio Quiroga
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de construcci?n del relato (Buenos Aires: Edi
torial Sudamericana, 1977), p. 122-125.
6 A pathbreaking effort to rethink this
economy in terms of music can be found in
Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Econmy of
Music (Minneapolis: Universsity of Minne
sota Press, 1985).
7 Rub?n Dar?o, Azul..., (Madrid: Espasa
Calpe, 1972), p. 66. All Dar?o citations will
be from this edition.
8 See Fran?oise Perus, Literatura y sociedad
en Am?rica Latina: el modernismo, (M?xico:
Siglo XXI Editores, 1980), p. 129-130.
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