B0040702LQ EBOK (2 page)

For this anthology, we based our choice of stories (including
four extracts from longer works) on a broad definition of
fantasy, as being any fiction depicting events which depart
from what is possible or plausible in reality. We were looking
too for that frisson one gets from the best literary fantasy, be it
of fear, surprise, shock or pleasure. Such stories offer the reader
new perspectives on reality by defamiliarising the familiar.

As well as major contemporary writers, such as Bernardo
Atxaga, Juan Benet, Juan Goytisolo and Javier Marias (all of
whom are available in English translation), and classics, such
as Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, Emilia Pardo Bazan and Ramon
del Valle-Inclan (either patchily translated or with translations
long out of print), we have included writers who, though
widely read in Spain, are entirely unknown to an Englishreading public.We also discovered some excellent writers,
whose books were much read in Spain in the 1920s and
1930s, but whose names are now little known even there,
for example, Noel Claraso, Wenceslao Fernandez Florez and
Alberto Insua. Inevitably, there are omissions - because of
personal taste and the inevitable limitations of any anthology
- but in the case of two fine Galician writers of fantasy, Alvaro
Cunqueiro and Xose Luis Mendez Ferrin, it is because a
number of their stories are, gratifyingly, already available in
English translation.

Both Cunqueiro and Ferrin (like Dieste and Fole in this
anthology) write in Galician, one of Spain's four official
languages. Other stories included here were originally
written in Basque (Bernardo Atxaga), Catalan (Pere Calders,
Pere Gimferrer, Quim Monzo, Joan Perucho and Merce
Rodoreda), and the remainder in Castilian. Galicia is a
region particularly rich in fantasy, a land of storytelling and superstition (see Valle-Inclan's atmospheric tale `My sister
Antonia'). Writers like Dieste and Fole were keen collectors
of oral folk tales and drew on this fertile source in their own
writing.

Folk tales, fairy tales and ghost stories have, of course, been
around for centuries and, in Spain, in the late medieval period,
and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these provided
the literary bedrock of the innumerable works of literature
dealing with miraculous and supernatural events. However,
one would hesitate to use the term `fantasy' to describe such
works, because then both author and reader inhabited a world
of religious belief in which the supernatural and the miraculous were considered part of reality. Spanish fantasy really
came into its own in the mid-nineteenth-century Romantic
period and continued to flourish up to the 1930s, under the
influence of such movements as Symbolism, Expressionism
and Surrealism, all of which posed a challenge to rationalism
and realism. However, while there were a few notable
examples of fantasy literature in the early post-Civil War
period down to the late 1950s, it was common for writers,
particularly those opposed to the Franco regime, to feel that
realism was the more appropriate mode to deal with the situation in Spain at the time. It is only since the 1960s and, in
particular, since Franco's death in 1975, that Spanish writers
have felt confident that fantasy would not be dismissed as
mere escapism. This reacceptance of fantasy as a valid literary
genre might be taken as a healthy sign of Spain's reintegration
into the European mainstream.

Other writers, of course, used and still use fantasy as a way
of approaching reality from a metaphorical or symbolic angle.
Amongst the stories here, Pilar Diaz-Mas' tale of a wingless
child in a world of bird-people becomes a reflection both on
disability and on the ambiguous nature of motherhood; Juan
Goytisolo's cobbler, on the other hand, sprouts wings in order
to win back his wife, and the story can be read as a meditation
on the human cost of emigration; in his highly original story,
Alfonso Sastre probes another of the key Spanish experiences
of this century, political exile; and Julio Llamazares summons up the haunted landscape of one of the many deserted villages
in an economically threatened rural Spain. Fantasy can also
provide the reader with a `Martian' view of social and
religious rituals, literally Martian in the case of Eduardo
Mendoza's `No News from Gurb' and, more obliquely, in
Quim Monzo's `Family Life'.

Themes in this anthology include doppelgangers, people
returning from the dead or being buried alive, the transmigration of souls, people metamorphosing into other creatures,
inanimate objects becoming invested with human powers or
emotions, and fiction shading into reality. All these themes
touch on deep-seated fears and concerns - our fear of death
and what, if anything, lies beyond it, what it is that makes us
human, and the nature of time. Fantasy provides writer and
reader with a way of approaching these issues, for example,
Pardo Bazan's `woman who came back to life' is greeted by
her loved ones not with joy but with horror; in Javier Marias'
darkly comic `Gualta', the protagonist entirely loses his sense
of identity when confronted by a man identical to himself; the
anonymous narrator of Alonso Zamora Vicente's `A Poor
Man' slips in and out of his body and into another's as if souls
were fitted with a revolving door.

There is a fascination, too, with the narrow line that
divides us from our animal selves. People become transformed
into other creatures for all kinds of reasons: in order to escape
the cruelty of their fellow man (Bernardo Atxaga's `An
Exposition of Canon Lizardi's Letter' and Jose Angel
Valente's `The Condemned Man'); as part of a compact with
the Devil (Valle-Inclan's `My Sister Antonia'); for possibly
satirical motives (Sender's `Cervantes' Chickens'); and, in
Monzo's story `Gregor', in a reversal of Kafka's Metamorphosis.

Fantasy can also convey that deeply buried sense one has of
an animistic universe, in which houses harbour grudges and
wreak a terrible revenge (Enrique Vila-Matas), where statues
rise up to defend their long dead spouses (Gustavo Adolfo
Becquer) and where glass table tops become home to disembodied faces (Pere Gimferrer). As is only fitting, literary
fantasy also deals with our relationship with fiction itself and the power of the imagination to alter reality, eerily blurring
fact with fiction (Jose Maria Merino's `The Lost Traveller'
and Juan Jose Millis' `The One Where She Tells Him a
Story'). Part of the enjoyment of reading literary fantasy often
comes from recognition of familiar themes and of writers'
ingenious variations on those themes. In selecting stories that
we ourselves enjoyed, we hope also to have given some idea of
the variety of themes and styles in Spanish literary fantasy over
the last two hundred years.

The letter in question covers eleven sheets of quarto paper,
parts of which have been rendered illegible by the many years
it lay forgotten in a damp cellar, for it was never sent. The first
sheet, the one in direct contact with the floor, is in a particularly parlous state and so badly stained that one can scarcely
make out the canon's opening words at all. The rest, with the
exception of one or two lines on the upper part of each sheet,
is in an excellent state of preservation.

Although undated, we can deduce that the letter was
written in 1903 since, in the closing words that immediately
precede the signature, the author states that he has been in
Obaba for three years and, at least according to the cleric who
now holds the post, everything seems to indicate that Canon
Lizardi took over the rectorship of the place around the turn
of the century.

He was clearly a cultivated man, judging by the elegant,
baroque calligraphy and the periphrastic style laden with
similes and citations he uses to broach the delicate matter that
first caused him to take up his pen. The most likely hypothesis
is that he was a Jesuit who, having left his order, opted for
ordinary parish work.

As regards the addressee, he was doubtless an old friend or
acquaintance, even though, as mentioned earlier, the poor
condition of the first page does not permit us to ascertain
that person's name and circumstances. Nonetheless, we feel
justified in assuming that he was a person of considerable
ecclesiastical authority, capable of acting as guide or even
teacher in the very difficult situation prevailing in Obaba at
the time, if one is to believe the events described in the letter.
One should not forget either that Lizardi is writing to him in
a spirit of confession and his tone throughout is that of a frightened man in need of the somewhat sad consolation of a
superior.

On the first page, according to the little that one can read
at the bottom, Lizardi writes of the `grief paralysing him at
that moment and describes himself as feeling `unfitted to the
test'. Those few scant words allow us to place in context the
story that the canon unfolds over the subsequent ten pages
and prevent us being misled by the circuitous, circumlocutory style. Let us look now at the form the text referred to at
the very start of the letter might have taken. This is what
Lizardi writes on the second page, which I transcribe word
for word.

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