To sing the Territory. Birds and Things in W.H. Hudson’s work

Abstract

Between biographical fiction and literary criticism, Viaje a las cosas (Edhasa, 2023) is a critical narrative by Argentine writer Miguel Vitagliano (Buenos Aires, 1961-), built upon correspondences, intersections, and resonances between the work and lives of H.W. Hudson, Joseph Conrad, and Robert Cunninghame Graham. However, what drives Vitagliano’s novel is the associative life of things that speak in terms of forces and interactions—the vibratory materiality of birds, horses, and ships, moving back and forth along living dialogical threads woven by a relational way of thinking about the biological and the literary, the geographical and the biographical, the human and the non-human, the semiotic and the material, biopolitics and the neocolonial dynamics of capital. The Hudson recovered by Vitagliano is an animist writer devoted to weaving sensitive connections with living territories. More interested in “the who of things”—as Guimarães Rosa would say—than in the “what” of science and taxonomies, Hudson engages in dialogue with contemporary bio/cosmopolitics and vitalist epistemologies, in which agents and histories, times and territories, assemblages and voices multiply.