Fantastic Short Stories by Women Authors from Spain and Latin America , livre ebook

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES
Fantastic Short Stories by Women Authors
from Spain and Latin America
FSS.indd 1 22/07/2019 10:45:26Series Editors
Professor David George (Swansea University)
Professor Paul Garner (University of Leeds)
Editorial Board
Samuel Amago (University of Virginia)
Roger Bartra (Universidad Autónoma de México)
Paul Castro (University of Glasgow)
Richard Cleminson (University of Leeds)
Catherine Davies (University of London)
Luisa-Elena Delgado (University of Illinois)
Maria Delgado (Central School of Speech and Drama, London)
Will Fowler (University of St. Andrews)
David Gies (University of Virginia)
Jo Labanyi (New York University)
Gareth Walters (Swansea University)
Duncan Wheeler (University of Leeds)
FSS.indd 2 22/07/2019 10:45:26IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES
Fantastic Short Stories
by Women Authors
from Spain and
Latin America
A Critical Anthology
EDITED BY
PATRICIA GARCÍA
AND TERESA LÓPEZ-PELLISA
UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS
2019
FSS.indd 3 22/07/2019 10:45:26© The Contributors, 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material
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1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce
any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales
Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff, CF10 3NS.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library CIP Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78683-508-6
e-ISBN 978-1-78683-509-3
The right of the contributors to be identifed as authors of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
Typeset by Marie Doherty
Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Melksham
Cover image: Shiori Matsumoto, Private Time (2016), oil and acrylic on
canvas. By permission.
FSS.indd 4 22/07/2019 10:45:26Contents
Acknowledgements  vii
The Fantastic: Towards a Feminist Perspective  1
Emilia Pardo Bazán  25
‘La resucitada’ (1912)
Amparo Dávila  45
‘El huésped’ (1959)
Rosario Ferré  63
‘La muñeca menor’ (1976)
Cristina Fernández Cubas  87
‘El ángulo del horror’ (1990)
Ana María Shua  113
‘Vida de perros’ (2000)
General Bibliography  139
Temas de debate y discusión  145
Selected Vocabulary  147
Index  155
FSS.indd 5 22/07/2019 10:45:26this page has been left intentionally blank Acknowledgements
his critical anthology was made possible by fnancial support Tfrom the University of Nottingham, the Universidad Autónoma
de Barcelona, the Institute of Modern Languages Research and the
British Academy project Gender and the Fanstastic in Hispanic Studies
(2017–18). For their advice and encouragement, we thank Prof.
Catherine Davies as well as the Grupo de Estudios de lo Fantástico,
directed by David Roas. For their help with the translations, we want
to express our gratitude to our colleagues Simon Breden, Rocío
Martínez and Steve Roberts, and specially Míde Ní Shúilleabháin for
her invaluable thoroughness when reading the entire manuscript.
Finally, this project would not have been completed without the
time and space that the EURIAS programme at Helsinki Collegium
for Advanced Studies has facilitated during 2018–19.
FSS.indd 7 22/07/2019 10:45:26this page has been left intentionally blank The Fantastic: Towards
a Feminist Perspective
Patricia García
his introduction discusses the etymology of the term fantas-Ttic and outlines different critical approaches as well as formal
characteristics. This is followed by a brief transcultural historical
overview on the evolution of the fantastic since its Gothic origins,
including the often ignored relevance of women writers in this
tradition.
Defnitions of the Fantastic
The boundaries of the fantastic have long been the subject of
controversy in literary criticism and in popular culture. We can
nonetheless outline some theoretical parameters that allow for a
better understanding of this narrative form. The fantastic often
appears as a synonym of fantasy, of the supernatural or even
associated with aesthetic representations of horror, the unusual, exotic or
strange. In the Cambridge Dictionary Online the word is accompanied
by the rather unhelpful explanatory label of ‘not real’; in the Oxford
Dictionary of British and World English by the formula ‘remote from
reality’. The etymology of the word is, however, more revealing. The
adjective phantastikos is related to the Greek phantos and phainein,
‘visible’ and ‘to show’ respectively. The verb phantazein means ‘to
make visible’. These etymological roots suggest that the fantastic
relates to the action of articulating and expressing (by rendering
visible) something concerning our imagination. This type of logic
corresponds with the etymology of what might be the best-known
fantastic concept: the monster. From the Old French monstre (closely
related to the verb montrer, in Spanish mostrar, to show) and the
Latin root monere (to warn), the monster was traditionally thought to
be the physical embodiment of a divine message sent to earth, a bad
FSS.indd 1 22/07/2019 10:45:26Patricia García
omen. The warning from the gods would take the shape of
something unnatural, be this extraordinary size or a physical deformity.
The etymology of both the fantastic and of the monster points to
an important defning aspect of the supernatural: it is employed
to render visible something hidden. As detailed in the following
paragraphs, this feature has served as the point of departure for
psychoanalytical and cultural theories of the fantastic, theories that
regard the fantastic as a manifestation of something repressed in
our psyche or in our culture. Regardless of the approach chosen
to explore this form, its etymology remains relevant in the
contemporary context: the fantastic is a way of expressing our fears
and voicing our anxiety, as a society or as individuals, by means of
an imaginary creature that transgresses the boundaries of what a
culture considers the norm.
There are two main academic approaches to the fantastic in the
arts: one that regards the fantastic as a synonym of the
supernatural, while the other conceives it as a specifc form (a subcategory)
of the supernatural. The frst of these approaches is dominant
among scholars in English-speaking traditions, for example Eric S.
Rabkin (1977), Kathryn Hume (1984), Neil Cornwell (1990), Brian
Attebery (1992) and Lucie Armitt (1996). It is also the general
approach adopted by the International Association of the Fantastic
in the Arts in the United States. As a generic concept, ‘the fantastic’
features interchangeably with that of ‘fantasy literature’ to refer
to any texts that deviate from realism. By this understanding, it
embraces a variety of forms including horror, the Gothic, fables,
the marvellous, science fction, magical realism, fairy tales and
myths. Scholars employing ‘the fantastic’ as an umbrella term for
all forms of the supernatural have tended to focus on the common
denominator of all these forms. Some studies, for example, have
approached the supernatural as a way of investigating the legacy of
myths and folklore in our aesthetic construction of otherness and
subversion. This point is made by Lucie Armitt, who regards the
fantastic as a form transgressing boundaries, concerning itself with
‘the world of the “beyond” (beyond the galaxy, beyond the known,
beyond the accepted, beyond belief)’ (1996: 4). Therefore the
fantastic ‘should immediately alert us to the attendant diffculties it has
2
FSS.indd 2 22/07/2019 10:45:26The Fantastic: Towards a Feminist Perspective
coping with limits and limitations’ (1996: 4). Other studies examine
the ability of fction to construct a self-enclosed reality that violates
our codes of logic. Most scholars claim a further integration of the
supernatural as a narrative form within the exclusive canon of great
literature and emphasise the importance of magic in storytelling as
a means of taking control of an otherwise unmanageable reality.
As Attebery remarks in this respect, ‘[w]hen you convert history
into story, you end up with precisely and only that – a story. And
yet stories, by being different from nature or history, make nature
accessible and history meaningful’ (1992: 141).
While agreeing on the inherently subversive discourse of the
fantastic, this general approach is contested by another group of
scholars, who champion a more precise aesthetic understanding
of the fantastic in opposition to other forms of the supernatural.
In this anthology, we follow this interpretation of the fantastic. We
defne the literary fantastic as a realistic text featuring an
exception – a confictive, supernatural element. The key term here is
confictive. By this defnition, the fantastic differs from fantasy or the
marvellous in that those two narrative forms present the
supernatural as being normalised in their narrative world. The fantastic, in
contrast, is always presented as a confict within the fctional world:
not only a moral violation, but also an ontological and
epistemological impossibility. To emphasise this exceptional status within the
norm, several tropes typically recur: for example, the negative
discourse used to defne the fantastic element (un-natural, im-possible,
extra-ordinary) and formulas expressing how its very presence
challenges rational explanation.
In order better to appreciate the differences between
nonmimetic genres (the marvellous vs. the fantastic, in this case),
compare the following opening passages of three different works:
The Mole had been working very hard a