Writing as Shamanic Consciousness in DainaChaviano’s Fables of an Extraterrestrial Grandmother

Abstract

 Chaviano’s Fables of an Extraterrestrial Grandmother is a pioneering Cuban science fiction novel with four interconnected plots that manifest their separate worlds—the Havana of Ana, the protagonist writer, the Neolithic Celtic world of Merlin and Stonehenge, Faidir, the planet of Ijje and the winged psyches with three eyes, and Rybel, the world of Ana’s character Arlena, the “jumen” on the run in an alien planet after being wrecked in a space ship—through Ana’s writing. Ana uses mental exercises and automatic writing to temporarily regress to a pre-rational state of consciousness where these parallel universes interpenetrate and cross in the locus of her subconscious. Writing for her is a form of possession that withdraws her from her immediate reality into a visionary state resembling that of a shaman. She is a writer being invented and written by her own characters. Her stories are not fictions, but already existing realities, and she is a channel by which they are able to manifest their existence through her writing. This science fiction vision of worlds within worlds suggests another origin of science fiction in the ancient literary genre of Menippean satire, a type of fiction that appeals to highly cosmopolitan, alienated readers who seek to renew contact with the sources of consciousness from which technological and social change have alienated