The representation of the unusual in José María Roa Bárcena's Lanchitas

Abstract

Fantastic narrative from Hispanoamerica offers a wide panorama, from the Colonial era to the current day. This paper is a literary analysis of the unexpected fantastic in "Lanchitas," published by the Mexican writer José María Roa Bárcenas (1827 - 1908). The story, which appears toward the end of the 19th century (1878), when positivism and spiritualism lived together in abandon, is based on an urban ghost-story legend. The story reports a series of supernatural events which transform the priest protagonist. More than verify whether the text under analysis is a perfect example of fantastic literature, we want to establish the narrative guidelines and meanings of the story itself, to a certain profundity. By means of a method based in the sociocriticism of Edmond Cros, we discover that when we analyze the representations of the fantastic in the literary utterance, and thus in the esthetic utterance, we are analyzing as well the representation of the real; we bring to light not only the rules of the literary material, but we become capable of organizing a series of social practices and underlying ideas of concern in the material. The issues addressed in this approach to "Lanchitas" are the following: sequentiality, narrator, space, time, intertext, religion and the obsession to explain. All these are conducive to the production of meaning in the story. In other words, we attempt to answer the question: "What are the roots of the unexpected in the re-creation of a ghost legend?