Could H.P. Lovecraft Create a Semblance of Normality?

The Ofèlia Dracs’ Operation of Genre Fiction in Catalan Literature

Abstract

As part of historically minorized culture, Catalan literature endured difficult periods, e.g., the Francoist regime. To imagine different worlds writing in this language was even more arduous in the 20th century because of the negative attitude towards the fantastic shared by two fundamental trends of Catalan literature up to the 1970s: Noucentisme and historical realism. Nonetheless, H.P. Lovecraft was an important reference in the Catalan non-mimetic fiction that had a certain revival in post-war times. As a step towards “normalization” of Catalan literature after Franco’s death, the writers’ collective Ofèlia Dracs published several collections of short-stories of “genre” fiction–among them Lovecraft, Lovecraft! (1981). On the one hand, this article inscribes this exceptional collection in its historical context and in the contemporary Catalan literary system; on the other, it aims to shed light on Lovecraft’s role in Ofèlia Dracs’ book, proving the projection of his extraordinary supernatural world onto it by the presence not only of Lovecraftian hypotexts in its different tales, but also of metafictional elements inherited mainly from Joan Perucho’s postmodernist writings.