Personal History Prevails over Fiction the Intersection between Life, History and Literature in the Cursed Autobiography of Horacio Quiroga and Géza Csáth

Abstract

The purpose of our study is to establish a long-distance dialogue between the narrative of Horacio Quiroga (Salto, 1878 – Buenos Aires, 1937) and the prose of the Hungarian journalist, doctor and writer Géza Csáth (Szabadka, 1887 – Kelebia, 1919). We will propose an examination of the forms that both artists adopt to transfer their personal History to literary fiction, emphasizing how this operation of transferring biographical elements to the textual plane leads to the creation of a literature that is characterized by: a) a kind of sui generis autobiography, which should be read as an exercise in moving from the subjectively real to fiction; b) the representation, even if biased, of the History of an era, which reproduces the socio-cultural realities in which both literary productions were conceived. In our comparative study, we will propose an analysis of the translation of Personal History to the literary imagination, according to the following four sections: a) stories created on reasons and themes of personal biography: widowhood, drugs, reverie; b) stories created on advance forecasts of the tragic outcome; c) stories created on the presence of mirages, ghosts, vampires and beliefs from superstitions; d) stories created on the representation of the facts seen from the perspective of a deviated psyche.