Between silence and cream, fantasy: polyponies in the work of Ana María Matute. The green grasshopper and Pinocchio's cricket

Abstract

The emblematic song of the cricket and its capacity for communication and transformation is in line with the symbolism of the siren song. The duality of its literary representation converges with that of Pinocchio’s cricket and the spirit of the puppet boy. The desires of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio to achieve humanity and that of Yungo to find his stolen voice in Ana María Matute’s Saltamontes verde are brought together in these pages to study the intertextual and literary relationships between these voices. Alongside these authors, there are notable convergences in their poetics with Hans Christian Andersen and his desire to be a dancer, James Matthew Barrie with his Peter Pan, Lewis Carroll with Alice in Wonderland, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Le Petit Prince, Philip Pullman and his daemon, and even Carlos Bribián with Pinocho blues and its double character. Similarly, Matute’s extensive work contains noteworthy themes that are explored in this article, such as ecofiction, death, and dystopias. Autofictional narration coexists in these stories with their overflowing fantasy as a refuge, and the broad transmediality in The Adventures of Pinnochio is remarkable in all literary, graphic, and cinematographic genres.

   Our thesis is based on the conviction that Ana María Matute’s universe and her poetic philosophy are shared by a number of authors. The themes and authors discussed above form a brilliant and authentic literary constellation in the world of universal youth literature that moves energetically with its own voice. Based on these premises, a working hypothesis is formulated. This literary constellation (following Guadalupe Jover) is embodied in the literary desire of all the authors cited to show in their writing their own childhood, loneliness, violence, abuse and the tendency towards dehumanisation suffered by children in silence, without a voice. Numerous convergences emerge and some questions arise in the research: where is the boundary between humanity and animality in children’s and young adult literature? Why does writing, which can sometimes be therapeutic, create places such as those we know: “Neverland”, “The Beautiful Country”, “The Land of Games”, “The Land of the Blackboard”, “The Land of Bare Feet”, “Uninhabited Paradise” or “The Forest of Illusion”? In terms of methodology, 
a comparative study is carried out between Matute and Collodi, mainly between two works: The Green Grasshopper and The Adventures of Pinocchio. In addition, the comparison includes a selection of works (listed above) in which the problems posed by the hybridity of literary genres in the different works are also analysed, as well as intertextuality, transmediality, ecofiction and autofiction. Sociopoetic and thematic and symbolic or metaphorical criteria are the most appropriate. 
The conclusions reached reinforce the cohesion in this literary constellation: Between Silence and Scream, Fantasy. The readings linked together in this plural literary system show the denunciation, the cry of their own lives and literature as a weapon of salvation through Fantasy in literary fiction. All the paradises created with enthusiasm by and for children are literary refuges from the loneliness and traumas suffered by their creators in their childhood, coinciding with what Jack Zipes theorised in his brilliant research on abuse, violence against children and dehumanisation. Zipes proposes breaking the 
spell and provides a political vision of folk and fairy tales. 
Keywords: polyphonies, animality/humanity, Ana María Matute, The Green Grasshopper, The Adventures of Pinocchio