Edgar Allan Poe by Eduardo Mendoza: Poe Revisited in El asombroso viaje de Pomponio Flato

Abstract

The Spanish novelist Eduardo Mendoza, who defined fiction as “the combining exercise of elements taken from tradition and put to work for story,” blends in his novels elements belonging to the detective and Gothic genres with the ultimate purpose of subverting them through satire. It is my purpose here to prove that one of Mendoza’s referents is Edgar Allan Poe, whose tales and poems he affirms to have read at different points in his life. He overtly expressed his opinion about the American author who, he stated, deserves the highest praise for being the founder of the detective story genre and for the poetic atmosphere he created in his tales of mystery. This article is aimed at tracing the presence of E. A. Poe’s works in Eduardo Mendoza’s El asombroso viaje de Pomponio Flato (2008), where echoes of several of Poe’s tales and poems can be seen.

In Edgar Allan Poe’s bicentennial year, Spain was not oblivious to the American author but paid him due homage. During the year 2009 there was an outburst of a variety of events, musicals, operas,¹ academic conferences, and publications, all centered on the writings and creative impulses of the mind behind “The Raven,” as well as some reprints and rewritings of his works. Volume 10, number 2, of the Edgar Allan Poe Review (2009), which includes eleven articles written by Spanish scholars delving into Poe’s presence in Spanish literature, is but one example of the interest aroused that year among Spanish academics. In addition, in the aftermath of the celebration, several monographs came out gathering a selection of papers from those presented at the various conferences on Poe held at Spanish universities.² It is within this frame of homage paid to the American author in this country that I have interpreted Eduardo Mendoza’s El asombroso viaje de Pomponio Flato.³ Eduardo Mendoza Garriga (1943–) is one of Spain’s contemporary best sellers, who in the year 2010 received the Premio Planeta, one of the most recognized Spanish literary awards. The popularity of his works, four of them adapted for the screen, makes him an influential force and, therefore, a good vehicle for the transmission of his referents. The novel mentioned above, which was conveniently published in March 2008, can be read as the Spanish novelist’s personal and peculiar tribute to one of his major literary sources, Edgar Allan Poe. In its pages, as we will see, echoes of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” “Ligeia,” “Berenice,” and “The Raven,” among others, are to be found.

Mendoza started his literary career in the 1970s, a decade marked by the end of Franco’s regime and a resulting openness to foreign literature, ideas, and culture in general. One of the outcomes felt in the literary sphere was the appearance of a great wealth of translations of American detective novels. Authors such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler became well-known and detective fiction significantly grew in popularity. It was therefore a favorable context for the reception of E. A. Poe, the rightly acknowledged father of the detective genre.

This is not to say that Poe was unknown in Spain before the 1970s.⁴ The history of Poe’s reception in Spain started more than a century earlier, in 1858, with the publication of a critical essay by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, in which he praised the American author’s work, which he had read in Baudelaire’s French translation, as well as with the appearance of the first collection of Poe’s tales in Spanish.⁵ As Rodriguez Guerrero-Strachan solidly defended in his work on the presence of Poe in Spanish literature during the nineteenth century, elements from his tales permeate the works of some Spanish authors belonging to the Realist and Naturalist movements.⁶ Poe’s influence did not wane during the first decades of the twentieth century. On the contrary, some major poets, such as Miguel...