The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories, by Horacio Quiroga
To master the short story is to possess the ability to tersely describe the critical moment, the veritable crux of events, ideas, and emotions—and to capture that moment so that readers can contemplate and appreciate the revealed profundity in these smallest of prose packages. Hector Quiroga—a South American author well-known to those who know such things, and less than anonymous to the rest of us—was just such a master craftsman, creating jewels of narration which still scintillate today, even in translation. His deceptively simple stories defy easy categorization, for all that he is usually described as an heir of Edgar Allan Poe and as a progenitor of so-called ‘magic realism’. [Full disclosure: I am not a fan of most ‘magic realism’, though I have found it compelling in small doses (which may explain my love for Quiroga, I suppose). To confess in full, I only managed to make it through fifty years of solitude.] But Quiroga’s stories speak quite forcefully for themselves, and will amply reward the reader who picks up these polished gems from the shelf to peruse them at her leisure.
As mentioned above, Quiroga is most often associated (by English language readers, at least) with Edgar Allan Poe, and the Uruguayan-born author even explicitly referenced the putative creator of the detective story as a model in the first of his “Ten Rules for the Perfect Storyteller”. But to my mind—though both Poe and Quiroga evince a fascination with death and dying—a more apt comparison would be with Ambrose Bierce. Both the North and the South American writer penned lucid, succinct sentences and stories of power; both were masters of precision, concision, and incision. But in addition to complete command of language, both Bierce and Quiroga had another possession of inestimable value for a writer, actual experience. While Poe might maunder about with tales of madness and menace (and, to be fair, mental aberration is an actual experience), Bierce could write with conviction about war and battles, having lived the warrior’s life during the Civil War. Horacio Quiroga, similarly, wrote with love and understanding about the jungle of the Rio de la Plata Basin, a wild land he knew intimately, spending over half of his life in the Misiones province of Argentina. The Paraná appears in several of the dozen stories in the collection hereinunder reviewed, and some three quarters of the selected stories take place in the jungle or that limbic verge where ‘civilized’ man tries to wreak his will upon nature.
I. Cree en un maestro —Poe, Maupassant, Kipling, Chejov— como en Dios mismo.
Quiroga’s first rule for storytellers
Most of these stories are short, very short. In the selected dozen, the longest tale is a fantasy of a congress of snakes gathered against a common enemy: man. “Anaconda” runs only thirty-three pages, and this extended fable still manages to stay true to snakes, and the tragic end caused a pang sharper than the proverbial serpent’s tooth. The title story, “The Decapitated Chicken”, is a gruesomely creepy tale of perverted parental desire, where the fantastic elements blend seamlessly with the anxiety of every bad parent everywhere. (And of course, we must all be bad parents, as is apparent from merely glancing around at the world today.) The opening story, “The Feather Pillow”, manages in merely four pages to biopsy the tumor of diseased relationships, though of course the patient dies.
Though the elements of fantasy are present in most if not all of these tales—”Sunstroke”, for example, is told entirely from the perspective of the five dogs living on the ranch Mister Jones hews from the jungle—such elements serve only to make the stories more true. Indeed, one of the striking tropes used by Quiroga is to undercut his own fantastic accounts by revealing the sheer banality of much real life, as in “In the Middle of the Night”, where a bourgeois couple recount an act of the most noble heroism (or is it heroinism?). Similarly, “The Incense Tree Roof” demonstrates how even our boldest adventures can wither under the regard of an uncaring audience. And unlike Poe, almost none of these stories leave the reader befuddled. Instead, a sharp scission is made in the reader’s mind, and we are left in awe of both Quiroga’s craft and his deep understanding of the human race and our folly.
This volume appeared as one of The Texas Pan American Series of books published by the University of Texas at Austin; some readers may have first encountered Borges in the same series, through their translations of Dreamtigers or Other Inquisitions. The stories seem excellently translated by Margaret Sayers Peden—as far as this ignorant cracker redneck who can barely speak English (and thus cannot compare with the Spanish) can tell. The illustrations by Ed Lindlof are very nicely done, and are a positive accompaniment to the lucid prose. The biggest drawback of the entire book is the flaccid introduction by one George D. Schade, who obviously had some standing in academe (he translates two of the other volumes referenced on the back cover of The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories), but whose opening two paragraphs almost compelled me to put the book aside, due to the mostly useless and padded prose devoted to Horacio Quiroga. Perhaps Mr. Schade was being paid by the word, perhaps he’d forgotten that the paper was due today, but there’s really no excuse for sentences such as “Quiroga stands apart from the bulk of his contemporaries in Spanish American literature and head and shoulders above most of them.” Or for “Certain thematic designs run through Quiroga’s life and also through his stories.” Fortunately, after the introduction, almost every other sentence exhibits perfection and pithy power. Plus, the stories are almost all very short, so you really can’t lose. Please do yourself a favor and check out The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories, even if you skip the introduction.