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Tzvetan Todorov's well-known definition of the fantastic is that it teeters on the boundary between two modes - the uncanny and the marvellous - creating an impression of being in two worlds at once, and of hesitating between them. However, several short stories by the contemporary writer Rosa Montero do not precisely conform to Todorov's model. Rather than hesitate, some of her characters re-enchant reality through forms of imaginary thinking which are enabling (though not always upliftingly so). Montero's characters, like experienced readers, prove capable of harnessing uncanny scenarios, thereby rendering their worlds more knowable and homely. Such reactions can be genuinely renovating and epiphanic, yet may equally be instances of bad faith. This article examines five of the author's realist short stories with fantastical trappings, two in each category ('El monstruo del lago' and 'Él'; 'Un tumulto de ahogados' and 'La otra'), and another, 'Retrato de familia', where psychology falls short of metaphysics and a more classically Todorovian sense of limbo ensues.
Keywords: the fantastic, Montero, Todorov, the uncanny
At the beginning of his influential study, Introduction à la littérature fantastique [Introduction to Literature of the Fantastic], Todorov nimbly sidesteps Popper's warning against assuming that all swans are white, based on the observation of a finite number of swans, and duly proceeds to elucidate what he understands to be the essential characteristics of the genre. Todorov's well-known definition of the fantastic is that it teeters on the boundary between two modes - the uncanny (suggestive of mental perturbation) and the marvellous (that is to say, the otherworldly) - creating a sensation of breached realism, of being in two worlds at once, and of hesitating between them: is the main character unhinged or are we in the realm of the supernatural?1 Todorov's 'trail-blazing book' (Cornwell 1990: 3) remains an obligatory departure point for all studies of the fantastic, even though its author regarded the fantastic as historically delimited and his own theory as unequal to the task of elucidating more modern manifestations of the genre. Indeed, at the end of his study, the critic produces a variegated swan of his own in the shape of Franz Kafka, whose anomalous work, he says, does not promote any hesitation between the real and the supernatural...