Too gruesome - Hiracio Quiroga and Uruguayan Doom

The Argentinean Literature of Doom, 2014 edition, is in progress at Caravana de recuerdas.  Richard has included Uruguayan literature, too, this year, because it seems Uruguayan literature is comparably Doom-laden.  I tried a couple of short story collections by Uruguayan Hiracio Quiroga, who must be one of the Doomiest authors of all time, and that is just in his fiction.  The number of violent deaths in his actual life is nightmarish.

Quiroga settled and worked in the Misiones district of Argentina, right across the Paraná River from Paraguay and also bordering Brazil and Uruguay.  It was a frontier forest region, wild and dangerous.  Every story I read was set in Misiones, bar one, which was in a similar area just a bit north.  Quiroga was a dedicated regionalist.  In some of his early stories, Quiroga shows the clear marks of Edgar Allan Poe, who he presumably read in Baudelaire’s French version, but he shed that influence and became something more original.  He reminded me quite a bit of Jack London, actually, with the Misiones forests in place of the Yukon.  Jack London with more snakes.  Way, way, way more snakes.

The two short books I read, which I believe covers most of Quiroga in English, were The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories (pub. 1976, tr. Margaret Sayers Peden) and The Exiles and Other Stories (1987, tr. J. David Danielson), both published by University of Texas Press.  They include stories from a variety of Spanish-language collections, dates ranging from 1907 to 1935.

The volumes, curiously, although I assume by design, create two Quirogas.  The Decapitated Chicken has Quiroga the horror writer.  The title story – eh, I don’t even want to describe it.  By the end I was thinking, why would you even write this?  It is in the tradition of Heinrich von Kleist, of “The Earthquake in  Chile” (1807) but in particular a horrible Kleist shocker that was published by some mistake as “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering” in the first (1812) edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales but was omitted in later editions because it was “too gruesome” (see note to the story in the Jack Zipes Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm).

Now no one knows what I am talking about.  “Too gruesome” describes many Quiroga stories.

The other Quiroga, the one in The Exiles and Other Stories, write about work.  Look at the titles: “The Contract Laborers,” “The Log-Fisherman,” “The Charcoal-Makers,” “A Workingman,” “The Orange-Distillers.”  Most of the rest are about labor, too, brutal, unforgiving labor, labor that kills.  There is as much death in this volume as in the other.  Maybe this is the horror volume.  Just try the scene in “Beasts in Collusion” where the two workers, one a peon, one skilled, are openly tortured (ants, etc.) by their monstrous boss, or for that matter the scene where with the help of a semi-tame puma – the one beast in the story who is not human – they get their revenge.

Quiroga makes fine Halloween reading.

I guess I need to write one more post with quotations and examples and so on, picked from stories that are not too gruesome.  I pulled the “literature of doom” line from an essay about Argentinean literature by Roberto Bolaño, and I originally assumed he was having his obscure joke, but no, it’s true, it’s true.  The more I get to know the region and its writers, the more I find it to be the most violent and strangest literary tradition I have ever seen.

The Best Books of the Year - 1811 - I shall not cease from Mental Fight

I love Best of the Year lists, and believe that they are valuable, even if they do not quite do what they think they are doing.  For example: let us look back 200 years and catalog the Best Books of 1811.

As usual for the first couple of decades of the 19th century, the bulk of the Top 10 action is in German literature, where three major, long-lasting books were produced:

1.  The second volume of Heinrich von Kleist’s short stories, which included his longest piece of fiction, the novella Michael Kohlhaas.  Kleist ended the year by shooting himself in the chest.

2.  The novella Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué.  Aside from the difficulty of the author’s preposterous name, I do not know why this story, among the greatest fantasies of the century, is so little known in English.  Fantasy stories are still popular, I believe.  This one, about a water spirit who falls in love and becomes more or less human for a while, is light and fluid and not burdened with allegories of Kant or Masonic flimflam like some fairy stories I could mention.  George MacDonald called it the ideal fairy tale, which it is.

3.  The first volume of Goethe’s autobiography, Poetry and Truth.  I do not remember how far he gets in the first part.  The childhood section is a marvel, even delightful.  Much of the recent movie Young Goethe in Love is presumably drawn from this memoir.  Goethe was 62 or so when this book was published.

German “Top 10 of 1811” lists, if there had been such things, would have regularly included these three books.  Kleist would be more common on the lists of young firebrands, who might well omit Goethe to declare their independence from orthodoxy.  The omission of Undine by the avant or rear-garde would simply have been a failure of judgment.

What else was going on in 1811?  Napoleonic France was for some reason bad for literature, so I do not know of anything there.  American literature, by which I mean lasting literature, had not quite been born yet, although I am sure a number of highly praised poems about Niagara Falls were published.

I wonder what the English Top 10 lists would have looked like?  Novels were not quite respectable yet, and crackpot visionary poets much less so, so the two greatest works of the year would have been omitted.

The image atop the post is the title page of William Blake’s Milton: a Poem.  One might note the 1804 in the lower left and wonder why I place the poem here.  My understanding is that Blake had been working on the poem since 1804, and that complete versions of these extraordinary handmade objects did not exist until 1810 or 1811.  And then I am arbitrarily picking the latter.  This is as good a place as any to remind myself that although I do double-check dates and so on, these year-end wrap-ups likely include some pretty grim errors.

Milton: A Poem is among the less complex of Blake’s mythological poems, which does not mean that I remember it well , or that the summaries I have used to jog my memory have been much help.  The spirit of Milton enters Blake’s foot and is united with his Female Principle?  ???*  Even if the entire poem is rarely read, the preface is the source of a genuinely famous poem, “Jerusalem” (see left):

I shall not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

As famous now, more famous, is the only English novel of the year whose title or author mean a thing to me.  Sense and Sensibility, by “A Lady,” was published in 1811, and I amuse myself thinking of how baffled all but a few readers of the time would be at the book’s life, that it is not only read 200 years later, which is rare enough, but hugely popular, both beloved and esteemed, while so many books that got so much more attention have been forgotten.

Which 2011 Top 10 list includes our contemporary Sense and Sensibility?

The Blake images are borrowed from the Milton page of the William Blake Archive.

*  ?????

The Best Books of the Year - 1810 - Horrors that Demons might be proud to raise

I have to start my year end roundup a bit earlier than I would like this year. Calendar, vacation, etc.

1810 was a thin year for great literature, quantitatively.  I count two books and a play that I know are worth reading, and scrounged up a couple more possibilities.

The star of the year is Heinrich von Kleist.  The play Prince Friedrich von Homburg, and his book of stories – “The Earthquake in Chile,” “The Marquise of O-,“ and “Michael Kohlhaas” – that’s the year’s bounty.  The play is the one where the characters, including the title’s prince, are constantly fainting.  Is that meant to be funny?  I think so.  Hard to tell, sometimes, with slippery Kleist.  In the stories, it’s the reader who is constantly fainting at the sight of blood, horror, and general moral outrage.  Fantastic stuff.

What else is going on in the world of literature?  Very little that has survived.  In English poetry, you can read Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake or the very young Shelley’s self-published juvenilia and tell me how they are.  I’ll read the one book I know is outstanding, The Borough by George Crabbe, a poetic tour of a country district, surprisingly weird and powerful.  Crabbe seems to have lost his audience.  I have theories, but who wants to hear them.  The Borough has survived because of the “Peter Grimes” canto, the source of the Britten opera:

    Cold nervous Tremblings shook his sturdy Frame,
And strange Disease - he couldn't say the name;
Wild were his Dreams, and oft he rose in fright,
Waked by his view of Horrors in the Night, -
Horrors that would the sternest Minds amaze,
Horrors that Demons might be proud to raise:
And though he felt forsaken, grieved at heart,
To think he lived from all Mankind apart;
Yet, if a Man approach'd, in terrors he would start.

Let’s see.  Madame de Staël’s On Germany, which I have not read.  Goethe’s short play Pandora, which I have read, although I remember nothing about it.  There must be more.  One source for these year-end posts is the handy year-in-literature Wikipedia pages.  Here is 1810 (and a separate page for poetry). What have I missed?  The Mysteries of Ferney Castle by Robert Huish?  Please note the usual Wikipedia limitations – no hint of Kleist, easily the Writer of the Year, on that page.*

There’s one more candidate for Book of the Year, although it’s not quite literature, and it was not actually published until 1863.  Francisco Goya began his Disasters of War etchings, a response to the horrors of the Peninsular War, in 1810.  A relevant example, “Against the Common Good,” is above.  I’ve said this before, but I’m amazed anyone was able to create anything during this period of destruction.  The work of Kleist, Crabbe, Goya – what extraordinary things to come from such a terrible time.

* My Kleist dates comes from the chronological tables in Robertson, J. G., A History of German Literature, Sixth Edition, ed. Dorothy Reich (1970), William Blackwood: Edinburgh, p. 693.