THE AVATAR IN PANAMA - Theses - Flinders University

2.2 Modernismo and its Masters: Darío and Quiroga The Avatar in Panamaexistences are seen through time travel in “Ofertorio” and “Primerareunión”.In introducing the fourth edition of Duplicaciones, ÁngelaRomero Pérez claims all forty-five stories are fantastic, of a similarambience, and their general theme is defined as the complexity ofcharacters’ interior world in relation to their external reality experiencedfrom differing perspectives. The stories relate the repeated failure ofintercommunication between humans. The loss of physical and psychicidentity is woven throughout these themes and is present in each storywith, in some cases, resulting corporal transformations. She supportsthis unity by citing Fernando Burgos who asserts Duplicaciones can beread as “un solo gran texto”. However, Romero Pérez believes thecharacteristics of Jaramillo Levi’s stories are radically different fromtraditional fantastic tales, which instil fear and horror in the reader. 21 Hisstories rouse tension and anxiety, and provoke anguish, produced bythe psychic impossibility of decoding what has happened by rationalmeans. This is in fact the structuralist definition of fantasy literature andironically harks back to Todorov: inner anguish, tension or anxiety isuncanny, which is very traditional. There may be nothing patentlymonstrous or diabolical about a story, just insidious feelings of “algoextraño”, something intangible and eerie in the characters, whichgenerates conflict. She proposes Jaramillo Levi’s characters have aprofoundly altered reasoning capacity due to their mental instability, yetif working within the confines of fantastic literature, there is no evidenceof the protagonists’ madness, for assessing them with real world criteriais not a valid option in the literary criticism of the fantastic. Wellek andWarren argue that everyone and everything that happens in a story istrue except the whole story itself. Inadvertently, characters and plots inliterature are judged psychologically true or untrue; however, applying areal set of criteria to fantasy literature or fiction for that matter is startingwith a handicap. 22 Given this, what is the option? The fantastic isgrounded in the familiar and quotidian and opens other perspectives notnecessarily new but inverted. Jaramillo Levi's stories tend towards theunexplored zones of reality by showing the fissures and cracks in thenormal objectivity that one accepts as real. 2321 That stated, Romero Pérez does acknowledge the traces of Borges and Cortázar,Poe, Kafka, and Stoker in her prologue to Duplicaciones (14). Incidentally, Stoker andStevenson were contemporaries who were influenced by Poe who was translated byCortázar who was discovered by Borges who was influenced by Kafka.22 René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1966) 91.23 Romero Pérez, “Prólogo”, 12-13.98