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Juan Darién is the story of a tiger nursed and brought up among men. Juan Darién becomes a "Jungle Book" in a reverse sense. Quiroga shows us the other side of the coin: the cruelty, intolerance and annihilation that a natural being is the victim of when it falls into the hands of civilization. While Moogli, the boy of "The Jungle Book" is well received by almost all the animals that he meets in the wild, Darién is instead a victim of the violence of the inhabitants of a village that is frightened by his presence. Juan, the tiger boy, behaves "like a man" but is considered a dangerous being because of his different origin. Only a woman, a mother, protects him. She is the only one who understands that "one life equals another before the supreme law of the universe". Quiroga maintains that in this way, just as man often uses the jungle and wild animals as an example of cruelty and violence, so too the animals could use the civilized world and human beings as an example of the same thing. "The wild forest - said the tigress, hearing a rifle shot in the distance - is the world of men. They hunt, kill and slaughter." Juan Darién is a story that belongs to the genre of "fantastic Latin-American literature". Sometimes it is grotesque and tragic, but it also has moments of incisive humour. It is a story of intolerance and of the refusal to accept what is different. These are violent phenomena that have reappeared recently in our society. The work is therefore a modern one even if it was written in the first decades of the 20th century. This is further proof that Quiroga was one of those personages who were gifted with great intuition. He was a visionary capable of having premonitions in an epoch when the forest was not a priority in the list of human interests, a place where we human beings were able to learn something. At most it was a place where one could give vent to his desire for exoticism. Quiroga, instead, put it in the foreground and made it become literature in which he could express the intense experiences that he had between 1903 and 1937 at Sant'Ignacio di Misiones, a lost region in the subtropical forest located in the extreme north of Argentina. We made it our task to bring to life with our play that exuberant world, so mysterious and full of dreams, which Quiroga presents to us. |
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