GLOSSARY OF KEY TECHNICAL TERMS
A.I.A.S.: This is an acronym. The letters stand for "acontecimiento insólito aparentemente sobrenatural." The English equivalent is S.A.S.E. (strange, apparently supernatural event). To qualify as a short story of fantasy, a story must narrate an AIAS (SASE). A story that has an AIAS is a short story of fantasy even if the supposed supernatural event it narrates is explained away as a natural occurrence (e.g., as a dream or hallucination) at the end of the story.
El género : Genre or literary category. A narrative which involves an AIAS (SASE) belongs to the genre of fantasy ("el género fantástico").
El subgénero: Subgenre or literary category. If it is determined that a story has an AIAS, and therefore qualifies as a short story of fantasy ("cuento fantástico"), the next step is to place the story in one of three subgenres (described below).
1) El cuento maravilloso: A short story of fantasy whose AIAS can only be explained in supernatural terms is a "cuento maravilloso" (short story of the marvellous); it belongs in the subgenre of the marvellous. In this kind of short story of fanatasy, the textual evidence suggests that the ghost really is a ghost, that the tree really does bear magical apples, etc. Fairytales are classic examples of narratives of the marvellous, but any story can qualify if its AIAS (SASE) turns out to be incontrovertibly supernatural.
2) El cuento extraño: A short story of fantasy whose AIAS can be explained in natural (scientific) terms is a "cuento extraño" (short story of the uncanny); it belongs in the subgenre of the uncanny. Here the textual evidence suggests that the ghost was actually an optical illusion or the figment of someone's imagination, that the magical apples are actually just Macintosh apples. If you watched the cartoon series, "Scoobie Doo", as a child, you are familiar with this subgenre. In a typical episode of "Scoobie Doo", a ghost in an old mansion turns out to be an unscrupulous real estate agent with a sheet over his head, or what have you.
3) El cuento fantástico puro: A short story of fantasy whose AIAS might or might not have a supernatural explanation is a "cuento fantástico puro" (short story of fantasy proper). Here the evidence is not conclusive (and often contradictory), with the result that the reader experiences a hesitation ("vacilación"); the story will not allow him or her to make up his or her mind. The short story of fantasy proper is a relatively recent development (about 200-225 years old) and is perhaps the most rare and complex expression of the fantastic. A small but very important subgenre.
El cuento extraño puro: There is a certain kind of story which resists classification. Such a story does not have an AIAS (SASE), but the events it recounts are bizarre and verge on the implausible, and the story uses devices that often crop up in works of fantasy. Most of Edgar Allan Poe's famous stories are like this, and in fact we are talking about a surprisingly large category. This kind of story is called a "cuento extraño puro" (short story of the pure uncanny); it belongs to a subgenre of realism (not fantasy), because the supernatural is not, strictly speaking, involved.
Las evidencias texuales: Textual evidence which governs our response to the AIAS (SASE). Such evidence can vary, but there are usually eyewitnesses ( including, at times, the story's narrator) and sometimes physical evidence as well. In a way, reading a work of fantasy is a bit like attending a trial and assessing the evidence presented in court. The extent of the evidence, as well as its reliability, control our response, as readers, to a given story.
La verisimilitud: In English, this is called verisimilitude; the concept is similar to that of plausibility or believeability. Verisimilitude is the extent to which a work of fiction creates the illusion of reality for readers. Since readers tend to be skeptical about the supernatural, works of fantasy are crowded at one end of the spectrum of versimilitude, while works of realism occupy the other. The subgenre of the marvellous is, of course, squarely on the fantasy side of the spectrum. The subgenre of fantasy proper straddles the line between realism and fantasy. The subgenre of the uncanny is located just on the realism side of the line; and the special subcategory of the pure uncanny is located just next to it on the realism side.
Verosímil: Plausible --- that is, believeable. A narrative which lends itself to credence and tells a believeable story is "verosímil". The antonym is "inverosímil".
El personaje: A fictional character in a narrative. It is important to note that a given story's narrator is a character in that story. Do not confuse the narrator with the author. The first sentence of the novel, "Moby Dick," introduces us immediately and dramatically to the narrator ("Call me Ishmael.") But, of course, the author of "Moby Dick" was Herman Melville --- not Ishmael. There is no necessary connection between author and narrator. Even if I sit down and write a story with a narrator named Nico, the fundamental distinction will remain. As an author, I will inevitably alter Nico in order to make the story function properly and to present myself in a favorable or compelling light, and Nico will end up being a distortion, a fictional construct.
El narrador representado: In English, a homodiegetic narrator. This kind of narrator participates directly in the action of the story like any other character; he or she is explicitly represented (depicted) in the text. If the narrator says, "I did this, that and the other thing," the use of the first person pronoun is a telltale sign that a "narrador representado" is involved.
El narrador no representado: In English, a heterodiegetic narrator. This is the traditional, third-person narrator who tells a story but is not directly involved in it.
El narrador omnisciente: An omniscient (all-knowing) narrator. To be omniscient, a narrator must have access to the thoughts and/or feelings of the characters in his or her story.
El narrador no omnisciente: A non-omniscient narrator, who does not have access to the thoughts and/or feelings of the story's characters, and may, in fact, have a very limited understanding of the events and situations recounted. Occasionally, as in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, a narrator can even be a mental defective, struggling to make sense of the simplest events. In such extreme cases, the narrator is a narrador perplejo (perplexed narrator).
La diegética. In English, the equivalent is diegetic. A diegetic is a word or cluster of words which tells us something about the narrator. If, for example, the first sentence of a story is: "I arrived yesterday," that sentence provides us with three diegetics. The first one ("I") tells us that the narrator is a narrador representado. The second one ("arrived") tells us that the narrator is dealing with the past. The third one ("yesterday") tells us that the narrator is concerned with the recent past, and perhaps, by implication, with the present as well.
El argumento: The plot of a story.
El escenario: The setting of a story.
El comienzo: The beginning of a story.
El fin: The ending of a story.
El autor: The author.
El cuentista: The short-story writer.
La cuentística: Short-story writing; also, a body of short stories. E.g., "la cuentística decimonónica" means "nineteenth-century short-story writing".
El lector: The reader.
El tema: The theme.
El motivo: In English, this is known as a motif. For our present purposes, a motif is a basic fictional idea or concept used in various stories over time. Perhaps the best-known motif of all is the motif of the journey, used in a wide array of narrative works, including The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Pilgrim's Progress, Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn, and any road movie you care to name. The genre of the fantastic has a stock repertory of "motivos fantásticos" (motifs of the fantastic) which it uses over and over again. A case in point is "el motivo del visitante insólito" (the motif of the strange visitor), used frequently in popular films about ghosts, hauntings, and the like. Another common one is "el motivo de los mundos comunicantes" (the motif of communicating worlds). The incident in the Woody Allen movie, "The Purple Rose of Cairo," in which a character in a movie steps out of the screen and into the real world is a vivid example of the continuing use of this motif. We think of fiction and the real world as being distinct and non-communicating domains of experience, but in the Woody Allen movie it becomes possible to move from one domain to the other. My favorite motif is "el motivo del doppelganger" (the motif of the doppelganger or double) ---- mostly because I like the sound of the German word, doppelganger. E. A. Poe's famous story, "William Wilson," is about a student named William Wilson who likes to carouse and cheat at cards. It turns out that there is another student who was born on the exact same date as William Wilson and looks a bit like him; but this disquieting alter ego or double is a straight-laced character who keeps butting in and ruining William Wilson's fun. The second William Wilson is a kind of doppelganger.
El leitmotivo: In English, this is known as a leitmotif. A leitmotif is a multiple reference to something in a single work of art. In the popular song, "November Rain," there are repeated allusions to November rain; and therefore November rain is a leitmotif in the song. A story which makes several (more than one) references to the planet Jupiter or the color blue or wild horses or dentistry or the Drite is making use of a leitmotif. Leitmotifs can be very useful. When a story is very complex and difficult to interpret, the best strategy is frequently a careful analysis of the story's leitmotifs. The theme is sometimes encoded in the leitmotifs. Of course, sometimes a story refers repeatedly to plumbers or purple rocks for the simple reason that it happens to be a story about plumbing or purple rocks. A leitmotif is not necessarily the key to a story's meaning.
El realismo mágico. Magic realism involves a number of different concepts, but in Latin America it happens to have a particular and well-defined meaning. In a nutshell, "El realismo mágico" is the description of supernatural events as if they were natural events. This practice emerged in Brazil in the 1940's, and is linked prominently to the fiction of the celebrated Colombian writer, Gabriel García Márquez. However, if you have seen the movie, "Ghostbusters", you already have a partial sense of what it involves. For the protagonists of "Ghostbusters", the supernatural isn't frightening or even all that interesting; it's just something they have to deal with as part of their job; and so their whole attitude (flip, blasé) suggests that ghostly monsters are simply a humdrum part of normal, everyday life. While the movie uses magic realism for laughs, Spanish-American fiction uses it to expresses the exotic complexity of life in Spanish America. Anyone who has lived in Latin America knows how rich and bizarre the circumstances of everyday existence can be there. At times, ordinary life seems to verge on the supernatural. The underlying purpose of Spanish-American magic realism is to body forth and explicitly express this special quality. If you would like to read the últimate expression of "la ficción mágicorealista", I recommend Gabriel García Márquez's famous novel, Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), a vivid family saga and an extremely entertaining book --- in Spanish or English. If any one modern, Spanish-language book is going to survive and have a readership five hundred years from now, it is Cien años de soledad. Inexpensive editions of the novel are available in almost any bookshop.