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Yuyos Are Not Weeds: An Ecocritical Approach to Horacio Quiroga

2009; Oxford University Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/isle/isn021

1759-1090

Beatriz Rivera-Barnes,

Literary and Philosophical Studies

The yuyo is in fact a weed. But the literary critic Emir Rodriguez Monegal recalls that Horacio Quiroga once told him that the yuyo was not a weed, but rather a plant that was not in its natural place. So, Rodriguez Monegal concludes that, away from the jungle, Quiroga felt like a yuyo, and that in the jungle he became a colossal tropical plant (11). In an initial attempt to conceptualize place-connectedness and to argue for the importance of place–sense in literary imagination, Lawrence Buell alludes to a passage in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man where Stephen Dedalus scribbles in his geography textbook first his name, then his class, his school, his county, his country, his continent, then finally the world and the universe (Writing for an Endangered World 64). This is Buell's first model for place-connectedness in a five-fold analysis. Regardless of the fact that he soon declares that first model to be partially obsolete, were a similar expanding/contracting succession to be applied to Horacio Quiroga, it could be much like this: Horacio Quiroga, his house, his patch of land between the Upper Paraná River and the town of San Ignacio, Misiones Province, Argentina, South America, the world, the universe. But the succession that interests me here begins with the province of Misiones and ends with Horacio Quiroga and his sense of place, that particular place.