SOURCE: “Expressionism,” in Fantasy and Imagination in the Mexican Narrative, Arizona State University, 1977, pp. 77–88.

In the following excerpt, Larson discusses several of Arreola's short stories, describing them as efforts to expose “the moral conscience of the individual.”

Perhaps the most obvious features of Arreola's stories are their stylistic elegance and the extravagance of their action, either of which would be enough to set them apart from the course of the Mexican narrative so long subject to evaluation according to ethical and not aesthetic criteria. Socialist realism values content above form, and encourages direct expression of an impersonal conception of reality. Arreola acknowledges the artist's social responsibility, but he contends that documentary fiction is merely a useless repetition of life and that its task could much more effectively be performed by the newspaper, radio, cinema, or television.

If art is the transformation of exterior reality into aesthetic experience, Arreola...