Unraveling the Real: The Fantastic in Spanish-American Ficciones (review)

Although fantastic literature has been marginalized historically by Latin American critics as a kind of literary amuse-bouche, the high literary quality and relevance of fantastic literature in Latin America are today indisputable. Cynthia Duncan's Unraveling the Real offers a welcome update to the existing criticism on the genre and some useful speculation as to its future. Duncan begins her study with a methodical and illuminating appraisal of the critical trajectory of the fantastic. She points out that the majority of theories about the unreal, the supernatural, or the fantastic are based on a priori assumptions about the nature of the real, while agreement as to what constitutes reality is neither universal nor constant. In addition, Latin American voices, often with substantial contributions to make, have frequently been left out of a critical mainstream dominated by Europeans and North Americans.

Throughout its development, there has been a lack of consensus not only on the merit, but on the exact parameters of the fantastic in Latin America. Rather than trying to reconcile the various critical perspectives, Duncan embraces the "elaborate buffet" of perspectives as appropriate to the dialogic nature of the genre. The fantastic in Latin America does not fit a single mold, because the effects of the fantastic[mdash, hesitation[mdashom their obverse: the reality and expectations of the implied reader. Hence, Duncan argues, the fantastic does indeed serve a social function in exposing the cracks in a given order, and fantastic literature's variations respond to the questions arising at differing points in time and culture.

This useful framework allows Duncan to investigate the historical development of fantastic literature in Latin America as a series of challenges to dominant ideologies via the construction of an implied reader. The modernist short story, she argues, represented a reaction against the extremes of Positivism in the late nineteenth century, when writers felt impelled to explore the logical extremes of scientific and technological modernity and the realms of the spiritual and the occult. Duncan examines stories by Rubén Darío (often anthologized but little studied heretofore), Leopoldo Lugones, and Horacio Quiroga (whose fantastic stories are also under-studied) to show how they draw into question both the authority and the morality of science. By presenting the reader with ambiguous situations recounted by "scientific" narrators of suspect morality or reason, these writers called into question the nature of authority, textual and otherwise.

Chapter two, on Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and José Emilio Pacheco, continues the investigation into textual authority, originality, and the construction of meaning. Stories by Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and Elena Garro are analyzed in the following chapter, which shows how the fantastic allows writers to collapse temporal boundaries and reveal hidden continuities between the past and present in Mexico/Tenochtitlan. Chapter 4 four brings a Lacanian lens to stories by Cortázar, Silvina Ocampo, and Adolfo Bioy Casares to explore male subjectivity, narcissism, and romantic love. Fuentes' Aura and María Luisa Bombal's La última niebla allow Duncan to expose the menace ascribed to female desire. A chapter on women writers returns to the question of authority, specifically that of the male narrative voice. The final chapter, on film, adds a welcome dimension to our understanding of the fantastic, with visual and narrative analyses of films by Eliseo Subiela (Argentina) and Pastor Vega (Cuba). Duncan's conclusion explicates Fuentes' Inquieta compañía to project possible future paths for the fantastic as a mirror of twenty-first century conflict and uncertainty.

Some possible criticisms: a greater focus on less-explored works would have added value, and in places the book seems carelessly edited. However, the literature covered is substantial, and all major critical perspectives are well represented. This is a highly readable and useful book for students, scholars, and others interested in the fantastic literature of Latin America.