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In short, my characters have taken seriously the saying that 'truth is stranger than fiction' and I have failed in my attempts to convince them of the contrary.xi, Prologue, Locos
Mark Twain's elucidation of the adage "truth is stranger than fiction," namely that "Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't" (155), is suggestive but also puzzling. It implies that we cannot place limits on truth, whereas fiction is bound to the possible or probable. It is true, to be sure, that science (especially the physical sciences), as a method or mode of truth-seeking, determines what is possible and probable in the realm of truth, thus making it, in an important sense, unpredictable. Yet is not human thought, from which literary creativity—fiction—emerges, too, unlimited? Cannot fiction take on a strangeness, be(come) something so rich and fuller than life—and in this sense, unpredictable—in its infinite possibility, where what is uncertain is always within reach?
Felipe Alfau's undeservedly obscure Locos: A Comedy of Gestures (1936) (henceforth, Locos) dares readers to tackle the force of the contrary to the common phrase "truth is stranger than fiction." Granting fiction a creativity of unusual dimensions, Locos is composed of short stories that are probable, though not actual, and hence not imagined easily by strict truth seekers or the literal-minded. A commercial failure, Locos is, according to its author, an "unreadable" book (Stavans, "Anonymity" 147; henceforth "Anonymity"). Despite praise by the few who have read it for its charm and comedic brilliance, its style and intelligence that anticipates the postmodernist mode of Nabokov's Pale Fire or the narrative exercises of Cortázar, Borges, Calvino, and Flann O'Brien, Alfau insisted he could not comprehend how anyone could "like" or "even understand" his novels ("Anonymity" 147). Locos' stories are primarily set in Madrid and host a series of "strange people and distorted phenomena" (xii) in which nonsensical characters agree, disagree, trust, mistrust each other, fight and make-up throughout, say absurd things and battle with the author for narrative control. Through disorienting temporal jumps, narrative jerks, unreliable characters, and a contradictory author, Locos is, indeed, a recalcitrant work that is aggressively resistant to classification, interpretation, or even superficial comprehension.
The 'madmen' or 'fools' of the book's title are an authorial...