Juan José Arreola (1918–2001) was an influential Mexican writer and academic best known for his experimental and fantastic short stories. Jorge Luis Borges described his work as the “freedom of an unlimited imagination, governed by a lucid intelligence.” A master of the humorous story-essay, Arreola has been compared to satirical writers such as Jonathan Swift, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Edgar Allan Poe. Trained as an actor, Arreola had a fervent belief in the spoken word, which shaped the style of his fiction, which usually takes the form of short-shorts.
Notorious for appearing in the late-1960s Alejandro Jodorowsky movie Fando y Lis that was censored in Mexico, Arreola redeemed himself in the 1970s as the recipient of the National Prize in Letters in Mexico City. Other awards include the Literatura Latinoamericana y del Caribe Juan Rulfo Prize, the Alfonso Reyes Prize, and the Ramón López Velarde Prize. By the 1960s and 1970s Arreola wrote less and less and was largely forgotten as other more influential Mexican writers came onto the scene. Some of his work now seems dated and/or portrays women in less than exemplary ways (for example, “Anuncio” [México en la cultura, 1952], about the Plastisex, an artificial woman).
Some of Arreola’s more typical tales are short enough to include in an author note—for example, “A Theory on Dulcinea,” which, translated here by Larry Nolen, skewers Cervantes.
In a lonely place whose name is beside the point there was a man who spent his life avoiding real women. He preferred the solitary enjoyment of reading, and he congratulated himself smugly each time a knight errant in those pages challenged to a fencing duel one of those vague feminine phantasms, made of virtues and overlapping skirts, that awaits the hero after four hundred pages of exploits, lies, and nonsense.
At the threshold of old age, a woman of flesh and bone besieged the hermit-like knight in his cave. Under some pretext she entered his chamber and filled it with the strong aroma of sweat and wool typical of a young peasant woman overheated by the sun.
The knight lost his head, but far from being trapped by the woman in front of him, he instead threw himself headlong in pursuit, through pages and pages, of a pompous fantasy monster. He walked many leagues, speared sheep and windmills, pruned a few oaks, and did three or four leaps into the air, clapping his shoes together.
Upon returning from this fruitless endeavor, however, death awaited him at the door of his house. The knight only had time to dictate a cavernous will, from the bottom of his parched soul. A shepherdess’s dusty face was washed with true tears, but it was a useless gleam before the tomb of the mad knight.
Arreola preferred fantasy and wrote very few science fiction short stories but built them, like the rest of his work, using detailed prose and a taste for the bizarre, combined with elements of magic realism and satire. Three of them appear in his best-known collection, Confabulario (1952), including “En verdad os digo” (“In Truth I Tell You”), about a scientist who promises the salvation of rich people’s souls because he is able to disassemble a camel and make it pass through the eye of a needle in a stream of electrons, defying the words of the Bible.
The other two stories criticize consumerism—in particular the tale reprinted here in a new translation, “Baby HP,” in which Arreola offers up a way for every family to take advantage of their own children’s excess energy.