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Alejandro Ferrari
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Fantastic literature
Artificial Life in Horacio Quiroga. Commercial Advertisements, Cinema, and the Prompted Suspension of Disbelief
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2022-11-24
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Alejandro Ferrari
2022/11/24
10.13125/2039-6597/5183
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University of Wuppertal
2039-6597
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Fantastic literature
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Artificial Life in Horacio Quiroga. Commercial Advertisements, Cinema, and the Prompted Suspension of Disbelief
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/5183/5260
12
       Artificial Life in Horacio Quiroga:
         Commercial Advertisements,
          Cinema, and the Prompted
             Suspension of Disbelief

                    Matei Chihaia - Alejandro Ferrari

Abstract
      The fictional works of the Uruguayan-Argentinian writer Horacio
Quiroga allow for a case study on how media shape the image of artificial
life. While “El hombre artificial”, one of his early novellas, follows a nine-
teenth-century scheme of electromagnetic transmission of consciousness, lat-
er texts choose “N-rays” (“El vampiro”) or cinematographic projection (“El
espectro”) as grounds for spectral life. This is not, however, the only differ-
ence between his early and later fiction. On the one hand, the models of liter-
ary invention follow the history of technology and the author’s own passion
for science and cinema; on the other hand, they can be related to forms of
publication, such as the serialized novellas of the illustrated magazine, and
the way illustrations and commercial advertisements pervade literary cre-
ation. The approach to artificial life in Quiroga’s work sheds light on his own
constitution as an author: behind the making of the artificial being stands the
making of the artist.

Keywords
     Quiroga; Publicity; Magazines; Illustrations; Fantastic Literature




Between, vol. XII, n. 24 (novembre/November 2022)
issn: 2039-6597
doi: 10.13125/2039-6597/5183
Matei Chihaia - Alejandro Ferrari, Artificial Life in Horacio Quiroga




          Artificial Life in Horacio Quiroga:
            Commercial Advertisements,
             Cinema, and the Prompted
                Suspension of Disbelief

                      Matei Chihaia - Alejandro Ferrari



                                                 I.
     When Jean Baudrillard, in the early 1980s, coined the term ‘simula-
crum’, he had a thriving industry of advertisements and mass media in
mind that had already gained the attention of Marshall McLuhan a gener-
ation earlier. What characterizes Baudrillard’s approach is his interest in
designing a comprehensive philosophy of the image, which he defines in
terms of «successive phases of the image», each of which orbits farther off
a centre that would be «basic reality»:

             [1] It is the reflection of a basic reality.
             [2] It masks and perverts a basic reality.
             [3] It masks the absence of a basic reality.
             [4] It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure
          simulacrum (Baudrillard 1988: 170).

      The result of world-making based on simulacra is «hyperreality», that
is, a sign that is out of touch with this «basic reality». There are good rea-
sons to link this idea to the dynamics of advertisement, and it has already
been done by Baudrillard himself as well as by the theory of publicity
(Grad - Frunză 2019: 250). While literary criticism has applied the concept
of the “simulacrum” to recent fiction, such as that of César Aira or Esteban
Sapir1, it might seem anachronistic to read modernist or avant-garde clas-


      1
           Cfr. Chauvin 2014 and Page 2016 respectively.


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sics such as Horacio Quiroga in the light of this postmodern concept2. Nev-
ertheless, we think that Baudrillard’s analysis of cultural production helps
grasp the links between the topic of artificial life in his novellas and short
stories and their original context of creation, that is, illustrated magazines,
the pages of which are ridden with commercial advertisements. Our thesis
is that the production of simulacra not only threatens, as Joanna Page puts
it, «the boundaries between the human and the machinic» as well as those
between life and death (Page 2016: 111), but also challenges the boundaries
of the literary work of art, along with those between fictional and non-fic-
tional assertions. This, of course, has us reconsider the idea of “fantastic
fiction” and even that of “scientific fantasy”, which tend to blend out the
commercial frames and the imaginary that surround Quiroga’s stories in
their first places of publication.
      The first text we would like to consider is “El hombre artificial” (“The
artificial man”)3, which was published in 1910, at a time when Quiroga
was not yet a well-known author. He was thirty-two years old, and he had
published his first collection of short fiction as well as a quite impressive
horror story, which would turn out to be one of the most famous texts
of Latin American literature, “The feather cushion” (“El almohadón de
plumas”). This story appeared in 1907 in Caras y Caretas, an illustrated
magazine founded in 1898 which contained practical advice on drawings,
photographs, and many advertisements. It also contained literary texts: its
founder, José Sixto Álvarez (Fray Mocho), was a writer himself, and the
editor in chief, Luis Pardo, a humorist. Much could be written about the
post-autonomous4 stance of the artists and authors who contributed to this


    2
        Indeed, it appears in the context of transhistoric comparison, for instance
between Quiroga’s cinematographic horror stories and Japanese horror films (El-
jaiek-Rodríguez 2018), or Adolfo Bioy Casares, La invención de Morel (Page 2016:
115). Rodés-Clericó (1998) is probably the first to use the term in her interpreta-
tion of “El espectro”.
     3
        “El hombre artificial” was first published in the section “Folletines de Car-
as y Caretas” in Caras y Caretas, Buenos Aires, XIII, 588- 593, 8 January to 12
February 1910, in six issues, with 12 illustrations by Josef Friedrich.
     4
        The concept of «post-autonomous literature» has been coined by Josefina
Ludmer in her famous article “Literaturas postautónomas” (2017). However, she
uses it for a differentiation between contemporary Latin American literature and
former modes of writing, especially that of the boom. In spite of the intuitive
definition of this concept, which is probably at the basis of its success in recent
literary criticism, the historical distinctions it posits do not hold true. The case of


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Matei Chihaia - Alejandro Ferrari, Artificial Life in Horacio Quiroga



magazine. Let us simply focus on Quiroga, who bought a farm in 1906, in
the wilderness of Misiones, near the jungle of Brazil, and was in desperate
need of money. This need explains why he conceived “The artificial man”,
together with six other short novels, as a prosperous serial, and why he did
not dare to sign them with his own name.
     For “The artificial man” Quiroga gives life to his alter ego, “S. Fragoso
Lima”, a composite alias that points towards Brazil (Fragoso sounds Por-
tuguese) and the Andes (Lima, the capital of Peru) while keeping the first
name, and thus making a mystery of his precise nationality. This invented
author’s unknown origin completes the multiple origins of the scientists
represented in the serial novella – Donissoff, a Russian, Sivel, an Italian,
and Ortiz, an Argentinian. Quiroga seems fascinated by the local colour
every one of them brings to the laboratory, and the story of the individual
destiny that leads them to Argentina takes up five of the twelve sections
of the novella. For the two immigrants, their date of arrival is specified:
Donissoff, an orphan Russian prince who reads the same books as Kro-
potkin, joins the revolutionary youth and is involved in a terrorist attack
against his tutor, flees his country and ends up in Argentina in 1905. Sivel,
an Italian from a poor family, is tortured and finally abandoned by his
father; then, he becomes a surgeon and, by generously donating blood to a
patient, suffers sepsis, survives horribly disfigured, and is left by his bride,
while his patient, who has fallen in love with him and is disappointed by
his frank denial, commits suicide. Sivel arrives in Buenos Aires in 1904.
Thus, they have both recently arrived in South America, after experiencing
a serious drama in their lives. The case of Ortiz is slightly less heart-break-
ing: he is a member of the ‘porteño’ bourgeoisie who studies electrical
engineering in Buffalo, and then returns to his country; the hopes of his
family had been that he would become the head of the family business, but
he neglects business over research, and, when his father cuts his livings, he
starts working as a math and English teacher. This leads to a total break-up
with his family; after the death of his father, Ortiz rejects the inheritance.
     The three stories do not only create suspense as they postpone the
point of attack – the Faustian attempt at creating artificial human life – but
they also portray three characters who all struggle with their fathers and
with abandonment, thereby creating a psychological probability for the



Caras and caretas is a perfect example of a fictional authorship that exits the realm
of literature and enters foreign ground, such as that of the advertisement, politi-
cal satire, travel reports, and the like.


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will to substitute the laboratory as an artificial and clean birthplace to
the family with its potential for toxicity. This outset provides three genre
models for serious drama that point to possible negative outcomes of the
experiment and showcase the narrative skills of the pseudonymous au-
thor. Donissoff’s destiny is that of the noble tragic hero, who is torn up
between two contradictory allegiances – his relationship with the Duque,
his tutor, whom his friends attempt to assassinate, is truly oedipal, and
his flight from prison to London and then, without further explanation,
to Argentina leaves this conflict unresolved. Sivel’s tribulations belong to
a different genre, that of romantic melodrama – the kid that stands up to
his abusive father, the surgeon who becomes a patient, the man who both
loses his bride because of his generosity and kills the woman he has saved
from death because of a gesture that is no less pure… This is a hero of a
new kind, ethically perfect and crushed by this sinful world. Ortiz, finally,
evolves into a realistic manner, and his quarrel with his family is the result
of pride – on his side – and prejudice – on that of his father; the loss is con-
siderable – he gives up his family’s fortune – but voluntary and somehow
deprived of tragic effect, especially if compared to the two life stories that
have been told before. We can gather that the three do come not only from
different nations, but indeed from different literary worlds – those of an-
cient tragedy, romantic melodrama, and the realistic novel. The order in
which they are presented does not follow the chronology of their arrival
in Argentina (for Sivel arrives one year before Donissoff, and Ortiz is born
there), but rather that of literary history. One could argue that the main
character comes first, or that there is a sociological dialectic that leads from
the aristocrat to the marginal man, and then to the bourgeois; however, the
functional hierarchy, as well as the social hierarchy of characters, ultimate-
ly leads back to the literary genre system showcased by Quiroga, which
includes precisely these functional and social distinctions.
      The three short background stories delaying the start of the proper ar-
tificial man-making could be considered as a spurious form of exposition.
Although playing for whole pages might have been part of the authorial
intention, Quiroga gets additional gains through this way of negotiating
authorship. We have already mentioned the psychological motivation of
the experiment – the struggle with fatherhood as an explanation of the in-
tense concern with creation – , and the display of narrative proficiency in
different genres, together with the advertisement of the unknown author’s
writing skills. There are two further approaches, maybe less compelling,
and already better explored than the first two, for autobiography and tech-
nical imagination are long-standing paradigms in scholarship on Quiroga.


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Matei Chihaia - Alejandro Ferrari, Artificial Life in Horacio Quiroga



Obviously, the author has lent a few of his own traits to the three scientists.
This Uruguayan man who had travelled to Paris and had lived in Buenos
Aires before settling on the borderland between Paraguay, Brazil, and Ar-
gentina, has a lot in common with Ortiz, of course – he is passionate about
research and engineering, and he feels impoverished (Brignole-Delgado
1939: 203, 237). He shares Donissoff’s sympathy for anarchists (Tarcus 2021:
9-26); and, just like Sivel, he has a tragical acquaintance with severe illness
and suicide (Rodríguez Monegal 1968: 288). These biographical details can
be read as hints connected with the identity of an author who hides behind
a pseudonym but still wishes to declare who he is.
      If we read this group of three as a figuration of Quiroga, this entails
a very specific view of literary creation. For the artificial man to come to
life, more than one father is needed, not only the romantic genius, but the
modern group of scientists; this might be the most striking difference with
respect to Frankenstein as a model. The novella portrays an ideal of creation
which is not only international, but also interdisciplinary, as Donissoff is an
expert in chemistry, Sivel is a physician, and Ortiz is an expert in electricity.
The fact that engineering – in this case, biological engineering – becomes a
model for the imagination and a metaphor for literature has been suggested
more than once. Sarlo has discussed “El hombre artificial” as one of the first
instances of “science fiction” in Argentina (1992: 41), a category called into
question by Soledad Quereilhac, who rather considered it to be one of the
last instances of the genre of “scientific fantasy”, which bloomed in the sec-
ond half of the nineteenth century and up to 1910 (Quereilhac 2010: 17, 229).
The heterogeneous combination of disciplines and backgrounds reflects the
very blend of knowledge that Quiroga gathered through curiosity, conver-
sation, reading, and solitary research rather than through academic study:
unsystematic bits and pieces of science and technology that Quereilhac lik-
ens to the herbariums assembled by the author (ibid: 322).
      Quereilhac uses the illustrations by Josef Friedrich to point out that
the scientists look serious and – in contrast to naturalist fiction, which in-
sists on the hereditary deficiency of immigrants – lack any flaw of charac-
ter, which allows for the tragic finale (ibid.: 336-337). What her fine analysis
misses, though, is that these images, together with the alias, weaken the
writer’s authority over this story and fragilize the text’s unity and its ca-
pacity to distinguish itself from the signs that surround it. Indeed, the ideal
of literature as an autonomous art is challenged by the way the novella is
presented in the magazine. The illustrations may enhance the effects of
the text, of course, and they are commissioned to excellent and renowned
artists such as Friedrich (Ferrari 2020). However, they blur the borders of


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the text and draw attention to other visually striking elements, such as the
advertisement banners at the bottom of the page. It is difficult not to in-
terpret the position of these ads as a strategic one: the first two episodes
of the novella lead thus to a banner that functions as a commercial break
after a cliff-hanger. While the following three episodes are free from that
component, the last page of the sixth and last episode is divided between
the dramatic final scene of the story and a large perfume advertisement.
      It is not only their placement at the end of an episode that draws at-
tention to the advertisements and makes it difficult to leave them out of the
analysis. These advertisements also convey topics that are not entirely un-
related to the story. To push the anachronism further, they might be some-
thing comparable to the publicity that we receive through social media,
although less clearly targeted as they are nowadays. What really strikes us
is that they suit the subject of artificial life extremely well, and vice versa.
While one would be tempted to view Quiroga’s story as “science fiction”
or “scientific fantasy”, the promises at the bottom of the page or before and
after the story give the reader a sense of a material possibility for biological
engineering that is only different in degree from the creation of an “arti-
ficial man”. The narrated simulacrum of life is framed by the non-fiction-
al simulacra of the magazines. Or, to put it in a less Baudrillardian way,
the willing suspension of disbelief when facing fantastic fiction blends in
with the opportune suspension of disbelief that is the goal of commercial
culture. If ads have us trust in barely everything, why not imagining the
creation of an artificial man?
      Let us look at the commercials in detail. Many of them address the
artificial improvement of the human body. For instance, by making it
brighter, whitening the skin and thus indirectly serving the obsession of
Argentinians with the Caucasian look; an obsession that thrived precisely
through the challenge of south European mass migration at the turn of
the century (Ramos 1994). The advertisement stresses the ideal of classi-
cist sculptural perfection – that is, spotless skin – that also pervades the
novellas’ Pygmalion-like approach to artificial life. Donissoff, the main
character, is not only Caucasian and blond, but also angelic (he looks like
an «arcángel», his beauty is a «belleza angelical», Quiroga 2019 [1910]: 57),
and one of his first mentioned traits is his white hands holding a dead rat
(which will be brought back to life). Later on, his white and contrived face
(«su rostro blanco y contraído», Quiroga 2019 [1910]: 51) shows his noble
feelings (Chihaia 2019). He is also compared to a sculpture («una estatua»:
ibid. 41). Even Sivel, the Italian disfigured by a generalized infection that
has attacked his skin and left him disfigured like a true romantic hero,


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Matei Chihaia - Alejandro Ferrari, Artificial Life in Horacio Quiroga



appears as «whiter than marble» («más blanco que el mármol»; ibid. 51) on
one occasion. The first episode of the serial is framed between two adver-
tisements that focus on skin perfection; while these attempts at altering the
body are strongly gendered («especial para las damas»)5, the fiction leads
the eye towards a fragile white masculinity that can be perceived just as
much as a simulacrum as the four lady heads in the first ad.
      Of course, the gender divide remains valid for the definition of au-
thorship, or creatorship – that is, all-male – , while the reader of the mag-
azine and addressee of the advertisements, and thus also of the story, is
mostly female (Rocca 2007: 91-100). In the context of commercial framing,
even the three professions of the inventors make sense, as Sivel can count
as an expert in the field of medicine, while Ortiz contributes to the celebra-
tion of modern engineering such as it also appears in the presentation of
the «invincible» Schacht automobile. From the invention of the automobile
to the invention of self-moving limbs, there are no boundaries for the art
of the engineer. Again, there is a sharp contrast between the universe of
male authority – the Papas and the Professors that appear in the advertise-
ments – and the scientists in the narrative, who are depicted as tortured
and eventually as torturers.
      On the one hand, the frame does not determine the content, but rath-
er offers a backdrop of what would be socially acceptable, of what would
be “real authorship”; on the other, it provides a discourse that shapes the
idea of how simulacra could come into being. Not only do these therapeu-
tic devices and machines seem hyperbolical, but the “world-famous” pills
for breast enhancement and firmness that are imported from Paris already
cross the line between cosmetic self-care and a fantastic approach to the hu-
man body. Even closer to the subject of “El hombre artificial” and its use of
blood is the liquid that promises to restore human blood. The possibilities
of biological engineering seem unlimited; one might say that those who
have faith in such medicine are likely to believe in the creation of artificial
life. The illustration by Friedrich focuses precisely on this element when it
shows Donissoff in contemplation of a blood-filled vessel («Donissoff extra-
jo de las venas del animal unas gotas de sangre, y se hundió en su análisis»,
Quiroga 2019 [1910]: 35). Visual cues like this one establish the link between
the universe of advertisements and that of fiction, and both stage the hu-
man body as a work of imaginative engineering, i.e. a work of art.
      In addition to these thematic links that define “artificiality” through a


      5
          See Image 1.


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non-fiction frame, the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, literature
and advertisement is further undermined through the genre of narrative ads
that tell short stories related to the product, and are provided with illustra-
tions just as artistic as the novel. A good example of this product placement
is a specific soap that introduces the third episode of “El hombre artificial”
through an entire story of commercial intent. Even the arrangement of the
visual elements in the magazine pages seems calculated to combine stress
and satisfaction. For instance, at the end of the story the bottom-up face of
Donissoff, who died of torture and looks horrible, is framed by an image
of pleasure and gratification: not only Cologne Water but also the gift that
goes with it and belongs to the sphere of science, a thermometer. The divide
in male authorship is brought to its climax by these two illustrations: in the
upper part, fiction shows an image of suffering and madness, while the
lower part promises real-life ideals, the royal gift («regalo regio»)6 of sen-
sual refinement and precision in measure. While it is not possible to create
artificial life without causing death and despair, magazines and hardware
stores offer artificial means to improve life just as much as necessary.
      Our reading of “El hombre artificial” in its original context, which
includes not only illustrations but also commercial advertisements, might
be considered a distortion of the literary text as such. Indeed, the art of
criticism itself is to establish relevant contexts, and it can be argued that
the thematic resemblances of the commercials with Quiroga’s fiction are
a result of pure coincidence or editorial strategy and that there is no need
to take them into account when discussing the author’s literary work. This
is a reasonable point, and it is not our intention to overinterpret thematic
similarities. These do, however, draw attention to the functional similarity
of the text as a selling product, and which therefore uses techniques that
come from the world of advertisement, rather than that of literature: this
is the case with the background stories of the three scientists’ characters,
a showcase of different genres that are meant to provide the reader with
specimens of Quiroga’s writing skills. It is this art that receives the alias “S.
Fragoso Lima” as a trademark.

                                      II.
     While the creation of the artificial man depicted in 1910 is mainly driv-
en by the ideal of mechanical, biochemical and electrical engineering, later


    6
        See Image 2.


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Matei Chihaia - Alejandro Ferrari, Artificial Life in Horacio Quiroga



texts of Quiroga choose an entirely different model. Valeria de los Ríos has
dedicated a book to the Latin American context of what she calls «spec-
tral modernity», with Quiroga’s fictions about photography and cinema as
central evidence7, while Laura Utrera has emphasized the importance of
cinema for the turn of the author towards literary realism (Utrera 2020). The
pursuit of artificial life might well adapt itself to the new media. This might
bring with itself a radical break with the sphere of goods and advertisement
– as instruments and products of mechanical, biochemical and electrical
engineering – and a turn towards a new model of fiction and authorship.
However, this is not entirely so; while the possibility of artificial life fades
from the realm of the visible, the author steps out onto the empty stage. This
continuous fascination with publicity might have something to do with the
fact that Quiroga kept writing for illustrated magazines and journals.
      While the magazines themselves might not change in their essence,
Pablo Rocca emphasizes the change in their audience: the two decades
between the turn of the century and the twenties have seen an advance
in alphabetization, and while El Hogar – the magazine that published “El
espectro” in 1921 – has a similar look to Caras y Caretas, readers are dif-
ferent (Rocca 2007: 75). This is even clearer for La Nación, which combined
serious information with entertainment and served as a magazine for the
entire family. This is, then, the readership of “El vampiro” in 1927. Another
change concerns the author, of course: instead of hiding behind an alias,
he has become visible. In the wake of the First World War, Quiroga turns
out to be one of the most fertile film critics in Argentina, and he also starts
to work on a screenplay of his own. This visibility as a spectator goes as
far as one caricaturist even showing the writer in front of the big screen8,
overwhelmed by a close-up female emotion: an observed observer.
      This mise en scène is not the whim of an illustrator, but simply an en-
dorsement of the way Quiroga stages his authorial persona in his stories.
The heterogenous identity that was embodied through the three scientists
of “El hombre artificial” gives way to a unified alter ego named “Guillermo
Grant” with homogenous initials and unambiguously Anglo-Saxon origins.
This character is the narrator of “Miss Dorothy Phillips, mi esposa” (1919)
as well as of “El espectro” (1919) and “El vampiro” (1927). While the first
fiction ends reasonably well, the two others have catastrophic outcomes



      De los Ríos 2011. The chapter dedicated to Quiroga is on pp. 141-174.
      7

      See the vignette by Sirio for Quiroga’s “Los estrenos cinematográficos”
      8

(Image 3).


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(death and neurasthenia), which makes it difficult to read the stories as
three episodes of one man’s life. “Grant” thus functions as a simulacrum,
an alias or – as we have suggested before – a trademark within the frame
of narration, a playful way to suggest that an actor can die in a movie and
come back to life for the next one. Indeed, as if to stress this interpretation
of his return to the stage of fiction, in “El espectro”, Grant is a professional
actor.
     Many of Quiroga’s film essays emphasize the ability of the cine-
matographic technique to create “life itself” and thereby elude death:

         As if in daylight, they run across the electric screen, so alive, so of
     the moment, that if they were to stretch out their lips or hands, they
     would reach out to touch us. They really live in that instant. They are
     not wardrobe photographs or old family albums: they laugh, undress,
     embrace each other with the carnal intensity of life itself, because
     Clarine and Harron really embraced and continue to do so despite the
     photographic illusion... Through the box, through the earth, through
     the beyond the dark mystery, the lovers meet night after night, vivid
     and blatant in the face of electricity. […] Spectral as the screen itself
     ... they persist in running, in laughing, in embracing, just as they did
     once – and forever – in Puro corazón.

        Como a la luz del día, corren por la eléctrica pantalla, tan vivas, tan
     del momento, que por poco que extendieran los labios o las manos,
     alcanzarían a tocarnos. Viven realmente en ese instante. No son
     ellos fotografías de ropero o de vetusto álbum de familia: se ríen, se
     desvisten, se abrazan con la intensidad carnal de la vida misma, pues
     Clarine y Harron se abrazaron de verdad y prosiguen haciéndolo a
     despecho de la ilusión fotográfica.... A través de la caja, de la tierra,
     del más allá del tenebroso misterio, los amantes se encuentran noche a
     noche, vívidos y flagrantes ante la electricidad. […] Espectrales como
     la pantalla misma ... persisten en correr, en reír, en abrazarse, tal como
     lo hicieron una vez–y para siempre–en Puro corazón (Quiroga 2007
     [1922]: 286-287).

      This magical ability to restore life is a topic of early film criticism and
film aesthetics, and it already appears in Hugo Münsterberg’s Photoplay
(1916) as well as in the cinema of attractions such as in Méliès’ short film
entitled Pygmalion et Galathée (1898) (Chihaia 2011: 62-69). The new me-
dium replaces the old technology in its attempt to create new life. Cin-
ematographic authorship is not imitation, but creation for Quiroga: this



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fundamental conviction emerges in the stories, where the images on the
screen are not simply likenesses or shadows of the actresses and actors, as
platonic definitions of the cinema in the key of the cave myth would have
it (García Bacca 1954), but have life in themselves. From here, it might be
interesting to turn back to the introduction of the concept of the “simula-
crum”, which had already been used by Mariel Rodés-Clericó to interpret
“El espectro” in 1998. Indeed, the immortal appearances on screen are sim-
ulacra of light and not shadows of essential bodies.
     Joanna Page has quoted Baudrillard in order to explain the uncanny
dimension of this idea:

         Reproduction is diabolical in its very essence; it makes something
      fundamental vacillate. This has hardly changed for us: simulation... is
      still and always the place of a gigantic enterprise of manipulation, of
      control and of death, just like the imitative object (primitive statuette,
      image of photo) always had as objective an operation of black magic.
      (Baudrillard 1988: 182, as cited in Page 2016: 115).

      Page makes a fundamental point about the fact that «Quiroga’s sto-
ries attest to the power of cinema to reorganize perception and subjective
experience, far beyond the simple recording or projection of images» (Page
2016: 112-113). There is also a shift, of course, that leads from sculpturally
white flesh and skin to cinematographic projection: while “life itself” is
represented as electrical energy in “El hombre artificial” as well as in sci-
entific film fantasies such as “El vampiro”, the level of tactile materiality
is being replaced by a new paradigm that also functions below the senses.
Cinema opens the way towards a poetics of rays. The rays of lights that al-
low the projections on screen seem to suggest the existence of further types
of radiation that can convey other facets of reality. Especially the context
of “El vampiro” is not yet the material world of goods advertised in Caras
y caretas, but the invisible universe of radiation.
      Again, the magazines help to understand the bold techno-scientific
assumptions of Quiroga’s stories. For the theosophists, such as Leopoldo
Lugones, the discovery of X-Rays and almost any scientific innovation
brought scientific proof for his convictions. Quereilhac emphasizes the im-
portance of magazines as a heterogenous context: La Nación published arti-
cles on Röntgen’s rays together with other reports on spiritism and haunted




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houses9. Likewise, El Hogar included almost as many articles on radiation
as on film. Quiroga could rely on these contexts in order to interpret the
technology of cinema as a model that might be used to suggest the possi-
bility of soul-wandering and simulacra. While the rays of light reproduce
flesh and the material parts of the body, there might as well be other rays
that reproduce the soul and life and allow the spawning of artificial beings:

           If the retina impressed by the ardent contemplation of a portrait
        can influence a sensitive plate to the point of obtaining a “double” of
        that portrait, in the same way the living forces of the soul can, under
        the excitation of such emotional rays, not reproduce, but “create” an
        image in a visual and tangible circuit.

           Si la retina impresionada por la ardiente contemplación de un
        retrato puede influir sobre una placa sensible al punto de obtener un
        “doble” de ese retrato, del mismo modo las fuerzas vivas del alma
        pueden, bajo la excitación de tales rayos emocionales, no reproducir,
        sino “crear” una imagen en un circuito visual y tangible… (Quiroga
        1996 [1927]: 719)

      This analogy («del mismo modo») establishes a clear link between
rays and creation; the fact that these «emotional rays» are invisible to the
eye contrasts with the blunt visibility of the author and prompts us to ask
about the place of fiction in the medium. The periodical that contains “El
vampiro” is clearly less colourful than Caras y Caretas: the journal La Nación
is a conservative tabloid that offers political news together with social and
cultural journalism and entertainment. The text to image ratio is different,
as the journal is text-centred. Although there are many illustrations and
countless advertisements, they are less pervasive than those in Fray Mo-
cho’s magazine. In addition to this quantitative divide, the commercials
are directed towards a male, as well as female, readership – it is also about
motors, gifts, spirits and ‘mate’, rather than, such as in Caras y Caretas,
about beauty and household. Moreover, there is a neat separation between
the parts that contain advertisements and the “serious” articles, there is
less blurring of the difference between fiction and illustration, and there is
no product placement.
      For “El espectro” there is no need to share the page with publicity,
to hide behind the trademark of a pseudonym, or to connect with the val-


    9
         See Quereilhac 2013.


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Matei Chihaia - Alejandro Ferrari, Artificial Life in Horacio Quiroga



ues of the cosmetic industry. The commercial drive of cinema is, in itself,
sufficient to avoid the erosion of authority. Again, as for the alias “S. Fra-
goso Lima” that is sucked into the narrative and becomes the protagonist
“Guillermo Grant”, the banners and commercials that burden “El hombre
artificial” are ingested by a story that refers directly to films and film the-
atres such as the “Grand Splendid” on Santa Fe boulevard. In “Miss Dor-
othy Phillips”, the protagonist even fakes a magazine in order to impress
the film star he loves; there could be no clearer way to show off the author’s
mastery of advertisement.
      This mastery also turned the prompted suspension of disbelief, which
is characteristic of commercials, to his own advantage. Quiroga’s cine-
matographic narrative was not only a way to draw attention to male and
female movie stars, films and cinemas he liked; it also sold a new mod-
el of fiction to the audience. “El vampiro” starts with a large explanation
of this scientific hypothesis on the possible effect of «N-Rays». These had
seemingly been discovered at the outset of the century by a physicist from
Nancy (hence the letter ‘N’) in parallel with X-Rays and radioactivity – an
emanation of light that is specific to certain bodies. However, the N-Rays
turned out to be a result of observation errors, and the original experiment
could not be reproduced (Klotz 1980)10. The inventor, Blondlot, had called
for a gaze that was shaped by intention. In his Academy report he asks the
observer to look at the experiment with the eye of an artist, rather than a
scientist:

           When viewing the screen or luminous object, no attempt at eye-
        accommodation should be made. In fact, the observer should accustom
        himself to look at the screen just as a painter, and in particular an
        “impressionist” painter would look at a landscape. To attain this,
        requires some practice, and is not an easy task. Some people, in fact,
        never succeed. (Blondlot 1905: 82-83)

      Of course, these last sentences are tinged with scepticism, as they ex-
pect an audience that is willing to be prompted to watch experiments with
a specific attitude and endorse the responsibility for failure: this is a sci-
entific version of The Emperor’s New Clothes. It is noteworthy that Quiroga
chooses a description of the spectral appearance of the actress that appeals


      10
           See also the excellent work on Quiroga’s reception of Blondlot by Boulle
1970.


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to the observer in a similar way to that described by Blondlot. The female
body is thought to leave the surface of the screen and approach the behold-
er. The narrator thinks that the death of the actress has turned her projec-
tion into a vampire and that the mad scientist has been sucked dry by his
creation. However, there is no objective observation that can confirm these
thoughts. This new form of authorship is all words and no evidence, all
imaginary projection and no material goods. The prompt works because it
addresses a male gaze that appreciates the new Pygmalion as a creator of
female beauty (while “El hombre artificial” is closer to the tragical myth of
Prometheus) – the fiction contains its own advertisement.
      We can conclude that Quiroga’s passion for cinema is in two ways
decisive for his self-shaping authorship. On the one hand, the new tech-
nique qualifies as new art, and on the other hand, scientific progress leads
back to artistic techniques of observation, such as the impressionistic gaze.
In contrast to “El hombre artificial”, this means a gain in control which is
coherent with the visibility of the author and his use of an alter ego as a re-
current protagonist. However, the new model of fiction does not embrace
an autonomous aesthetics or a return to a romantic ideal of production but
uses a form of control over the reader that is inherited from the practice of
commercial advertisements. This vision of literary creation and artificial
life is being prepared by its commodification in Caras y Caretas; for in “El
hombre artificial” there are no original and copy anymore, but a circulation
of vital power through mass media that can be condensed and unleashed
in literary fiction.




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                             The Authors
     Matei Chihaia

   Professor of Romance Literature at the University of Wuppertal (Ger-
many).

     Email: chihaia@uni-wuppertal.de

     Alejandro Ferrari

     Researcher and editor, Proyecto +Quiroga, Montevideo (Uruguay).

     Email: alejandroferrari@yahoo.com




                              The Article
     Date sent: 31/03/2022
     Date accepted: 31/07/2022
     Date published: 30/11/2022


                                                                               163
Matei Chihaia - Alejandro Ferrari, Artificial Life in Horacio Quiroga



                              How to cite this article
      Chihaia, Matei - Ferrari, Alejandro, “Artificial Life in Horacio Quiro-
ga: Commercial Advertisements, Cinema, and the Prompted Suspension
of Disbelief”, Entering the Simulacra World, Eds. A. Ghezzani - L. Giovan-
nelli - F. Rossi - C. Savettieri, Between, XII.24 (2022): 143-164, www.between-
journal.it




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