Horacio Quiroga: la gesta del escritor spahi-americano

Abstract

This article analyzes Horacio Quiroga’s early amateur cycling career as performance, and it frames his athletic endeavors vis-à-vis his narrative. Drawing from both the pieces of sports journalism he wrote in his youth and the pseudonym he chose for most of his races – “Spahi”–, I suggest that his cycling performance is a kinetic adaptation of an orientalist novel by French writer Pierre Loti, Le roman d’un spahi, into a Latin American milieu. I claim that this young, modernista Quiroga uses the new technology of the bicycle to rewrite with his own body, at a new speed, a seminal work of travel literature that will nurture his writing and narrative imagination in the following years. Furthermore, I contend that in recreating the Senegalese desert of the novel, Quiroga’s cycling performance is working through the problem of Latin America’s place in a global scenario marked by colonial tensions.