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

Rogers’s Jungle Fever is a fascinating account of five twentieth-century adventure novels, both European and Latin American: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, André Malraux’s La voie royale (The Way of the Kings), José Eustasio Rivera’s La vorágine, Rómulo Gallegos’s Canaima, and Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos. As well as an introduction and conclusion, the book consists of five chapters, each dealing with a separate novel, unified by its common attention to the presence of medical theories and terminology in the texts, specifically relating to madness in the tropics. This eponymous “jungle fever”—known in the Latin American tradition as “mal de la selva,” in English as “going native,” and in Dutch as “tropenkollered” ‘maddened by the tropics’—became a significant literary trope around the turn of the twentieth century in response, Rogers shows, to a wider questioning of colonialism and the supposed superiority of Western culture, particularly after World War One. Rogers argues that whilst an earlier generation of tropical adventure novels, particularly from the Anglophone tradition, tended to revolve around a white man’s journeys to exotic locales, where he would subjugate wild nature, often exterminate non-European peoples, and return home unscathed to “civilization,” the twentieth-century adventure tale is more gloomy and introspective. In particular, she shows how in this later tradition the journey to the tropics is both a physical and psychological process, often leading to the mental unravelling of the urban protagonist who discovers that the irrational and uncivilized behavior normally credited to non-Western places and people can lie within rather than without. As such, she classifies these novels as “subversive texts because they demonstrate that all that separates the mad from the sane is the veneer of rationality afforded by human society” (28).

As is fitting for a book which is so wide-ranging, Rogers is careful to contextualize each novel and differentiate between them, particularly between the European and Latin American texts. Although these share a common preoccupation with medical discourses, as she convincingly and repeatedly demonstrates, whilst the European works are concerned with an inability to articulate madness, in the Latin American tradition the protagonists’ insanity or irrationality is the creative spark for writing and that which lends the texts their peculiar lyricism. The book makes important insights into both traditions, supported by forays into such subjects as eugenics, surrealism, and syphilis, and by cross-referencing a large number of related tropical texts, from Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios to the popular television series Lost. At times, this desire to further exemplify her argument leads to a slight loss of focus; Rogers’s decision in the conclusion, for instance, to give detailed plot outlines of a number of previously unmentioned works, including Wilson Harris’s The Palace of the Peacock, a Travel Channel series entitled Mark and Olly: Living with the Machiguenga, and Jorge Luis Borges’s “El etnógrafo,” risks losing sight of the important earlier observations on medical discourses (a focus which dissipates somewhat in the final two chapters in any case, notwithstanding their intrinsic interest). The book also includes a rich seam of biographical material, which affords some fascinating and convincing interventions in the established critical reception of the novels. This is particularly the case with the discussion of Rivera, who died in New York in 1928, aged forty, having suffered throughout his life from a range of conditions, including “espíritu nublado” (which Rogers renders, in modern parlance, as “depression”) and neurasthenia (a kind of nervous exhaustion, thought to afflict mostly women). In her deft interweaving of sections on the illnesses of Rivera, his fictional protagonist Cova, and European and Latin American concerns about tropical degeneration and sexually-transmitted diseases, Rogers demonstrates the significance of medical discourse in the novel, including disease imagery in key passages from La vorágine, such as the oft-cited description of the “selva inhumana,” in which Cova refers to...