Notes on the fantastic in La saga/fuga de J.B.

Abstract

 Although he affirmed the fantastic character of La saga/fuga de J.B., as in other of his novels, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester expressed on several occasions his disagreement with the academic definitions of the fantastic and in particular with the French definitions of the genre. The Galician writer developed his own very personal conception of the fantastic. This conception does not prevent most of the unusual events that take place in La Saga/fuga de J.B. from being described using the categories that serve to describe the irruption of the supernatural in fantastic literature, since they imply a rupture of the laws of personal identity, time and space. However, if, as theorists claim, the fantastic rests not only on the coexistence of the possible and the impossible within the fictional world, but also (and above all) on the questioning of that coexistence, Torrente is right to reject academic definitions to qualify his novels and La saga/fuga de J.B. excludes himself from the realm of fantastic literature. Perhaps the novel’s resistance to conforming to academic definitions of the fantastic can be resolved by interrogating the notion of genre. If one accepts the fact that the relationship of a text to a genre is not a binary relationship of inclusion or exclusion but one of gradual participation, then the fantastic can be considered as one of the multiple narrative modalities of La saga/fuga de J.B.