Acceso usuarios
Melanie Nicholson
The animal fable is an archaic literary form that readers may associate with children’s tales, relegating it to the status of a folkloric genre with little relevance to contemporary issues. This essay questions those assumptions by considering the theoretical foundations of the nueva fábula, a mode that incorporates modernist and postmodernist values. Working within the traditional structure of allegory—with animal characters acting and speaking in the guise of humans—the new fable introduces significant notes of parody, textual fragmentation and open-endedness, and meta-literary allusion. Most importantly, it eschews the overtly didactic nature of the traditional animal fable, while retaining a critique of human behaviors and attitudes. Through close readings of a selection of short texts, I examine the work of two writers who have reformulated the ancient beast tale: the Guatemalan satirist Augusto Monterroso and the North American humorist David Sedaris. By placing in indirect dialogue Monterroso’s La oveja negra y demás fábulas (1969) and Sedaris’s Squirrel Meets Chipmunk (2010), this essay argues that the beast fable offers the reader a contemporary rendering of what Aesop offered his audience: a good laugh and a disquieting flash of self-recognition.
