Jungle Fever: Exploring Madness and Medicine in Twentieth Century Tropical Narratives by Charlotte Rogers (review)

In Jungle Fever: Exploring Madness and Medicine in Twentieth Century Tropical Narratives, Charlotte Rogers writes a stunningly erudite and insightful critical and historical interdisciplinary analysis of medical discourse in five twentieth-century tropical novels. Chapter 1 studies the British classic Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, while chapter 2 treats The Way of the Kings by Frenchman André Malraux. The book’s final chapters examine the jungle madness theme in three well-known Spanish American novels: La vorágine by Eustasio Rivera, Canaima by Rómulo Gallegos, and Los pasos perdidos by Alejo Carpentier. I will limit this review to these three chapters, which I found exceptionally fascinating.

Rogers’s introduction is as useful and brilliantly written and researched as the rest of the book. Here she skillfully reviews the genre of tropical or adventure novels in which European white males of the Industrial Age could still live out their fantasies of dominating nature. She also tackles with ease the complex stereotypical, etymological, and literary histories of the words “tropic,” “forest,” and “jungle” as exotic, prehistoric, barbarous, and sublime places from which one could only return “mad.” She then articulates her book’s theme that all humans are inherently savage, not contaminated from a “primitive” source from outside human history. The introduction masterfully prepares the reader for the rest of the book. I particularly liked the explanation that all the books studied here are pessimistic about Western narratives of imperial expansion, all question the notion of “progress,” and all invent the trope of madness in order to use Western medical lexicon to make the wilderness “literary” and accessible to the urban reader. Such early Spanish American writers as Domingo Sarmiento and Andrés Bello accepted that their societies were inherently deficient, outside of human history, and in need of domestication and civilization by outsiders. However, as Rogers highlights, the tropical novel offers no conquering heroes.

The fear of racial degeneration, or racial mixing, as Rogers points out, changed the idea of the tropics from a sublime place to a place of evil. Medical discourse of the day, still void of modern germ theories, feared that this tropic miasma could contaminate civilized people and infect future bloodlines. But Rogers explains that, at the same time, the madness of the tropics started to be perceived as an “inspiration,” an inspiration soon illuminated by medical discourse. What I find brilliant again is Rogers’s subtle way of simplifying the most beguiling of historical and literary issues into compact, readable facts. Here she illuminates how medical discourse from the eighteenth century forward “treated” madness by silencing it. Conversely, premodern medicine not only did not “treat” it, but did not identify it as a problem at all. Her book examines novels that search for that “premodern space” before binary oppositions of sane versus mad existed.

In chapter 1, “Medical Discourse and Modernist Prose in Heart of Darkness,” Rogers shows how European fear of the African jungle is manifested in the protagonist’s madness. However, this madness cannot be articulated in the English language. Heart of Darkness is, therefore, what a failed narrative looks like. As Rogers point out, medical theories, at the time, perpetuated European colonialism by identifying the colonial subject as pathological. Since Conrad shows that this menacing “degeneration” could be passed onto colonizers, Rogers insightfully concludes that he ironically dismantles the belief of European superiority. Although it may appear for this reason that Conrad was ahead of his time, he still believed Africans were a link between the human and the unintelligible. The author explains that even though on one hand Conrad insists that only the controls of European society can ward off the threat of tropical degeneration, madness is within all humankind: the tropics just trigger what is already there. Through extensive close readings and quotations from Conrad’s text, Rogers shows how at the same time this madness gives special insight into life and artistic...