Mirador salvaje. Horacio Quiroga y un curioso zoológico de la selva en Caras y Caretas

Abstract

Since 1898, the Buenos Aires magazine Caras y Caretas was a pioneering publication in making available a wide variety of printed texts and images, offering a varied assortment of articles to a wide, heterogeneous and fundamentally urban readership. Between December 1924 and October 1925, Horacio Quiroga created for Caras y Caretas a collection of texts about animals of the Guaranític area of ​​the Paraná River where the writer lived for a decade. Two factors come together in the way in which Nature is presented there to the readers' gaze: the magazine as a great storehouse of texts and images and the expertise of a writer whose knowledge of the journalistic medium and his skill in the techniques of the trade guided his production between its principles of artistic autonomy and the demands of the market. The following year, the publishing house which had begun to publish Quiroga's books, organized a promotional campaign for his work that included a note in Caras y Caretas about the writer's life in the jungle. The area that these pages invited us to explore was a great quarry of resources, rich in rare and colorful specimens that renewed the illustrated weekly’s stock for the consumption and pleasure of its readers, at the same time configuring specific ways of seeing and reading literature.