The Squid and Its Ink: Unreality, Fantasy, and Irony in a Fantastic Story by Adolfo Bioy Casares

Abstract

Adolfo Bioy Casares’s Fantastic Stories present a wide range of techniques for creating a fantastical atmosphere, from the juxtaposition of parallel spaces and times (“The Celestial Plot”) to the invention of a machine to attain the eternity of the mind (“The Pursuits”). However, the thematic clichés of traditional fantasy literature and that which borders on science fiction (as in the case of “El calamar opta por su tinta” [: 119–212] with the appearance of an extraterrestrial being) conceal a metafictional layer—that is, reflections on the literary act itself and on the playful nature of fiction. This is how Rosalba Campra defines the fantastic in the 20th century, when she discusses ruptures at the syntactic level, where ambiguity is determined by discursive gaps in the organization of content (:78–81): it is no longer the ghost that defines the fantastic, but rather the textual voids that highlight the narrative technique based on a series of enigmas generated by the omission of information. As Ana González Salvador notes, the monster no longer originates from the outside, nor even from our consciousness, but is a product of language (: 76), interpreted by Francisca Suárez Coalla as the infinite mirror of the universe (: 104).