Double or Nothing? The Fantastic Element in Silvina Ocampo's "La casa de azúcar"

Abstract

Silvina Ocampo began her career as a short story writer in 1936. Since that time, she has continued to publish at a steady and prolific rate, producing more than 175 pieces of fiction during the past 40 years. Rosario Castellanos refers to her as autora de una obra literaria en muchos sentidos excepcional (150) yet, as Castellanos quickly points out, Silvina Ocampo is rarely identified solely on the basis of her own talent as a writer. Most often, critics define her in terms of her relationship to her more famous friends and relatives: she is known as the younger sister of Victoria Ocampo, the founder and editor of the prestigous Argentine journal, Surx as the wife of the novelist and short story writer, Adolfo Bioy Casares; and as the friend of the literary giant, Jorge Luis Borges. The fact that Ocampo has lived most of her professional life in the shadow of others has led Castellanos to see her as the archetype of imagen tradicional y convencional de la mujer (150), one of those se disponen, pasivamente, a recibir lo que va a darse (149). Ocampo's literary world is, certainly, an intensely feminine one, yet it is a far cry from the traditional, conventional world we know. Those critics who have looked at Ocampo's short stories consistently focus on the fantastic elements in her work, on the grotesque nature of her narratives, on the cruelty and violence of her characters, and on the disturbing, disquieting effect which her stories have on most readers. In Silvina Ocampo's 64