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

Charlotte Rogers’ Jungle Fever: Exploring Madness and Medicine in Twentieth-Century Tropical Narratives is situated at the intersection of comparative literature (Latin American and European literature in English, Spanish, and French) and postcolonial studies. Jungle Fever is an illuminating study of early twentieth-century fictional narratives of journeys into the tropical wilderness that deftly exposes the citationality of these narratives: the jungle is not real, but a textual jungle, the “mythical jungle” of the European imagination. Discussing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), André Malraux’s The Way of the Kings (1930), José Eustasio Rivera’s The Vortex (1924), Rómulo Gallegos’ Canaima (1935), and Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps (1953) in five consecutive chapters, Rogers compares three Latin American novelists of European descent (Rivera, Gallegos, Carpentier) with two European contemporaries (Conrad, Malraux). She shows that, whereas the Latin American writers certainly appropriate and resignify the European discourse of the tropics as a timeless place, a “place devoid of history” (15) that figures as the primitive Other of European civilization, to the point of succeeding in reversing its polarities, they nevertheless remain caught within the Western textual web. Thus, Rogers’ analysis of postcolonial works by Latin American writers—as of their European counterparts—remains centered on the critique of Western discourse in them. As such, Rogers’ findings broadly concur with the by now classic critique by historian Alan Knight of Mexican post-revolutionary ideologies of mestizaje and indigenismo (José Vasconcelos) in “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910–1940”: in overturning late nineteenth-century positivist and Social Darwinist ideologies of scientific racism of the superiority of white races over non-white and mixed races, and privileging instead mestizo over pure races, as well as celebrating indigenous cultures, Vasconcelos (like fellow Latin American authors of early twentieth-century state ideologies of racial hybridity such as Brazilian Gilberto Freyre) did not abdicate Western discourse. They merely shifted from a “rightist Westernism” to a “leftist Westernism.” Broadly speaking, “leftist Westernism” is also the position where Rogers locates Rivera’s Vortex, as well as, especially, Gallegos’ Canaima and Carpentier’s The Lost Steps.

Jungle Fever is a valuable study because of its carefully historicized and thoroughly researched analysis of how the colonial discourse of (Western) civilization vs. (non-Western) wilderness is translated into the literary genre of tropical quest fiction, and how the latter is further transmitted from Europe to Latin America through adaptations by writers of a specific time and place and ethclass. Noteworthy also are the careful choice of primary texts and the deft organization of the book, which allow the author to make an original contribution to a well-traveled field. Jungle Fever identifies and analyzes a particular sub-field of tropical wilderness fiction—those that end in the failure and defeat of the white protagonist, thus depicting an “unheroic” (19) protagonist acting in a tragic or parodic (rather than romantic) plot. In the colonial mythology that juxtaposes Western civilization to the tropical wilderness dating from the early modern period, Rogers begins her account of the tropical adventure novel at the turning-point in the 1890s (at the post-Kipling moment after the publication of Kipling’s The Jungle Books) when the imperial project is beginning to be questioned and, in the wake of Conrad’s work, the Western traveler no longer dominates nature but is dominated by nature: if Kipling’s Jungle Books “are an allegory of empire in which the British tame and subjugate ‘The Jungle’” (12), in “the novels discussed in Jungle Fever, the quest is ultimately a failure, and this failure is what sets them apart from earlier tropical adventure novels” (13).

Among these failed tropical adventure narratives, premised on the crumbling of the Western imperial project and therefore dominated by “madness, illness, and the specter of death” (17), Rogers detects an interesting constellation of works as she shifts from European to Latin American writers that sheds fresh light on Latin American innovations on the...