Luis Goytisolo as a “fabulist”

Abstract

Published between 1970 and 1978, gathered in El atasco y demás fábulas in 2016, Luis Goytisolo’s “fables” offer us ruthless portraits of the ongoing changes that Spanish society suffers between Franco’s death and the Transition. Through satire and black humor, the narrators of these “fables” offer us a cruel portrait of the vices of some social classes tamed by the arising capitalism in this period. Along the same time span in which Luis Goytisolo was meeting the challenge implied by the writing of Antagonía, he used “brief story” and “micro fiction” to publish narrations that both re-invent the concept of “fable” and force the reader to position himself in front of certain sketches or tragicomic scenes. If, on the one hand, these sketches manage to let out a smile or an explicit (and almost cathartic) laugh, on the other, they force the reader to reflect on such universal subjects as violence and human stupidity, sex and money, power and its influence in everyday life.