La imaginación como estorbo. Modulaciones de lo fantástico en tres cuentos de Eduardo Antonio Parra

Abstract

In 1958, Roger Caillois published his an anthology of fantastic tales and horror, in which he proposed a way to classify the stories of the volume: the pact with the devil, the personified death, the vampires, the statue that comes alive… For the French scholar, these manifestations of the supernatural can be found in many literatures, combined in a very diverse way. In books like Los límites de la noche (1996) y Tierra de nadie (1999), Eduardo Antonio Parra configure conflicting spaces, in which stories of betrayal and revenge take place in a realistic way, as in “El pozo”; or, in the same way, portraits of life on the border as “El escaparate de los sueños”. However, other texts, such as “Traveler Hotel” and “Los últimos”, represent a change of modality towards the fantastic, genre in which Parra ventures radically through Nadie los vio salir (2001). In the words of a Bioy Casares’ character, the real obstacle to happiness is imagination, so, in that line, we propose to see if the human faculty of imagining it’s decisive when interpreting the experiences of the characters in these stories as supernatural. Finally, we try to classify Parra’s stories in accordance with Caillois’ classification: the spectrum doomed to wander, the confusion between dream and reality, as well as the house erased from space.