All types of fiction originate in the writer’s imagination, yet some works inevitably strike the reader as more imaginary than others. Almost automatically, we tend to categorize stories and novels in terms of the reader’s perception of reality; if the narrative describes a recognizable and verisimilar world, we think of it as realistic, but if the work presents a world which varies so greatly from our own that it appears more invented than familiar and true, we are apt to talk about it as a product of the writer’s imagination. In Spanish America, realistic fiction has provided a particularly useful...

Critics and readers who insist on a strong dose of “reality” in literature have often dismissed the fantastic in Latin America as an evasion and an irresponsible disregard for the many political and social problems that confront people on a daily basis in many parts of the New World. Even in the context ofmodernismo, a movement that elevated art and artifice to a new level in Latin America in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the fantastic has not occupied a central place.¹ José Olivio Jiménez has written that the fantastic short story is “una de las más...

The fantastic, born as it is of ambiguity and contradiction, takes an equally indeterminate stance about its own position as literature. On the one hand, it draws readers into a situation in which the willing suspension of disbelief is an essential part of the reading strategy: they must be willing to entertain the notion that certain things, although inexplicable, are possible so that they do not dismiss the fantastic too rapidly, before some degree of doubt has taken root in their minds. On the other hand, they must hold onto the idea that there are certain laws that govern their...

In Latin America, the notion of realism in literature has often been tied to the examination of social problems stemming from centuries of colonization, racism and class struggle, and the development of realist fiction parallels the growth of nationalism during most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jean Franco recognizes that literature in Latin America has been “deeply implicated in the process of national formation and its attendant problems of national and cultural identity” (204). However, she also acknowledges that it is the failure of most of these young nations to provide adequate systems of meaning that undermines referential...

Fantastic narratives that call attention to the indeterminacy of language, to the impossibility of capturing reality in words, to the relative nature of concepts like “true” and “possible,” and that seek to undermine some of our most commonly held notions about literature, the narrative process, the act of reading, and our relationship as readers to a written text open the door to the interrogation of a notion that lies at the very heart of our conception of the world and our place in it, that of “selfhood” and the way in which we come to identify ourselves as subjects. The...

Critics have tended to view gothic romances and the literature of the fantastic as closely related genres, sometimes erasing boundaries altogether in their treatment of eighteenth– and nineteeth–century European texts. Seen as a product of romantic sensibilities, this type of fiction reveals “a preoccupation with themes, events, incidents, or characters normally described as impossible, implausible, incredible, uncanny, fanciful, imaginary, delusory, or mad, and with experiences that are excluded from so–called realistic literature” (Jackson,Miss Darrington, xvi). Gothic romances such as Radcliffe’sThe Mysteries of Udolpho(1794) and Lewis’sThe Monk(1796) are often cited as examples of the...

Whenever an author sits down to write a piece of narrative fiction, one of the first issues he or she must face is the question of who will tell the story and from what perspective. More than a mere technical detail, the choice of narrative voice and the vision that gives rise to that voice implies an ideological stance on the part of the writer, for as Michel Foucault has taught us, no aspect of the enunciation process can be regarded as an innocent and neutral practice. When an author settles on a given way of seeing and speaking, he...

Film criticism has tended to regard the fantastic as a broad category that encompasses horror, science fiction, and fantasy, with little attempt to differentiate between the various subgenres. Beneath this tendency lies the supposition that film, as a visual art, differs from the fantastic in literature and cannot be expected to produce the same kind of effect. Theorists like Todorov, Caillois, and Jackson have argued that the fantastic is born from hesitation or doubt on the reader’s part about the nature of the story being told; he must vacillate between a natural and supernatural explanation. In literature, the fantastic element...

In the 1970s, Julio Cortázar urged Latin Americans to identify reality in their own terms and to leave room for the fantastic in their conception of the world. According to him, the fantastic assumes the important function of “taking us for a moment out of our habitual little boxes and showing us, although it might only be vicariously, that perhaps things do not end at the point where our mental habits fix them” (527). This observation links fantastic literature as a genre to the infinite possibilities of human imagination, and suggests that our mental habits can always benefit from occasional...