Burst Capillary Breast

THE short story: ESE PYGMY

By Pedro de Miguel

micro story, minicuento, tiny story, tales in miniature, even cuentículo ... There are too many names to give substance to the story brief, among which seems imposed on " short story" .

A phenomenon at all new in the literature, which nevertheless seems to be fashionable in the last half century, with the help of famous Latin American growers of fiction as Borges, Cortazar, García Márquez, Arreola, Denevi and Monterroso. Because although the short story is no stranger to all contemporary literature, is sufficient to recall the strange beauty of short stories Kafka or priceless humor by Slawomir Mrozek, "seems to have broken more strongly to other Across the Atlantic, which also has tried to give it a theoretical basis and distinguish it from related species. There is no shortage in our country growers brilliant short story, as Luis Mateo Diez, Max Aub and Antonio Pereira, and it is rare el escritor que no haya perpretado uno alguna vez.

El microrrelato hunde sus raíces , como toda literatura, en la tradición oral, en forma de fábulas y apólogos, y va tomando cuerpo en la Edad Media a través de la literatura didáctica, que se sirve de leyendas, adivinanzas y parábolas. Algunos han visto el microrrelato como la versión en prosa del haiku oriental y otros lo han hecho derivar de la literatura lapidaria.

Pero es en la época moderna, al nacer el cuento como género literature, when the short story was popularized in English literature through the combination of two phenomena of different nature: the explosion of avant-garde with its expressive renewal and proliferation of magazines that demanded short illustrated texts to meet their cultural pages.

greguerías Some of Ramón Gómez de la Serna are true stories of just a line, and Ruben Dario and Vicente Huidobro published minicuentos from different aesthetic. Next to these authors, Mexican critics also said Julio Torri and Argentine Leopoldo Lugones as critical precursors of the current short story.

In the second half of the twentieth century short story reaches maturity. It is no longer an exercise in style, a sharp pirouette or a more or less mysterious patch of poetic prose. The short story is presented as a genuine literary proposal, as appropriate to define the genre, parody or turn inside the fast changing times and the postmodern aesthetic. Something that has to do with Italo Calvino and his "Six Memos for the Next Millennium", with its "multicultural hybrids" as noted by Enrique Yepes, one of the scholars of this art pygmy. The brief story is the ideal arena where fashion is fighting the destruction of gender, to the extent that it is impossible and useless to try to define, distinguish or legality wrap.

proliferate and these "stories focused the most, beautiful as theorems," according to Argentine David Lagmanovich expression, which, with its stripping, test "our routine ways of reading." To distinguish the aphorisms, phrases or miniensayos lapidary must meet the basic principles of narrative, albeit in a Batty concentrated. They are almost always rewriting exercises, or tiny experimental language lab, or ambitious attempt to enclose a few lines a transcendent vision of the world.

But there is a suspicion: is not there at all this or n bit of sloth? With his usual humor, Augusto Monterroso seems to cast doubt when he writes: "The truth is that the writer of brevedades anything else in the world yearns to write endlessly long texts in which the imagination has to work, which made things, animals and men come across, be sought or flee, live, live, to love or spill their blood freely without being subject to a semicolon, to the point ".