Elementos de lo grotesco en algunas narraciones de Francisco Ayala

Francisco Ayala is a Spanish author who belongs to that generation of writers forced to live in exile following the Spanish Civil War of 1939. Since some of his most important literary work was written while in exile, it was some time before it became available to most of his countrymen. Nevertheles, it was not long afterwards that he was acknowledeged as an extraordinary writer of Spanish fiction. Witness the fact that he has received some of the most prestigious literary awards of Spanish letters, is a member of the Spanish Royal Academy and has often been considered by some of his peers as a veritable candidate for the Nobel Prize of Literature. His narrative work has been the subject of several books and nearly 200 scholarly articles.

As witnessed by several of the aforementioned books and articles, Ayala is a master of narrative technique and literary device. One outstanding feature of some of Ayala's works is what is known as the "grotesque." His critics often refer either directly or incidentally to what seems to be this pervasive aspect of some of his narratives. Nevertheless, few if any critics have truly attempted an in-depth study of the grotesque in Ayala's fictions.

This study seeks to demónstrate the fundamental importance of the grotesque in stories which appear in the following collections of Ayala's fiction: Historia de Macacos; El as de Bastos; and El jardín de las delicias. In doing so, this study attempts to cali attention to the grotesque as one of the most important elements of many of the narratives of Ayala.