Los microrrelatos de Augusto Monterroso: una lectura anticanonica de las fabulas

Abstract

The author tries to explain the mini-text in relation to the so-called post-modern condition by resorting –in particular- to the notion of ‘fractal’. This term is taken from the scientific language and distinguishes itself from the notion of ‘detail’, which would clearly refer to a modern vision of the text. Moving from the realm of science to the literary domain, it is inevitable to think of the deconstruction of the narrative canon not so much to negate it as to explore and exploit its creative potentialities in the form of shards, fragments, which the necessary extension of the traditional novel has suffocated since its origin. This outlook implies, in general, an ironical re-reading of the narrative sub-genres and, almost always, a ‘hybridation’ of their own individual traits. The author studies the literary production in this area of Augusto Monterroso and above all his collection La oveja negra y demas fábulas whose texts postulate a special involvement on the part of the reader. The tales of La oveja negra y demás fábulas are delicately balanced between respecting and disregarding the genre’s rules and contents. The apparent naivety of these stories conceals subversion in the broadest sense: this is no continuation of a tradition but a controversial parody of it. Monterroso does not reject the ethicality of the fable but the ideological definition of this ethicality: in his own fables there is no proposal, and the elimination of the moral is significant. His fabulous world has no ‘centre’ and the pessimism pervading it intends to display the author’s interpretative freedom, the acceptance or refusal of a text exceeding its boundaries and making the fable into a convenient choice, interchangeable with any other