Monterroso’s Dinosaur

There is no major critical study of the work of Augusto Monterroso. What little criticism is available seems to demonstrate that his narrative has resisted conventional literary criticism. Monterroso's short stories, fables and essays defy traditional generic expectations, thereby producing an inventive, rebellious, new style of short narrative proper of posmodernism. This reading will attempt to give a lecture on this microrelato or micro-short-story called: The Dinosaur.

Upon awakening, the dinosaur was still there.
Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.

Once the reader finishes to read the micro-short-story many questions may come to his or her mind:

Is the protagonist a person from prehistory?
Is it a dinosaur perceived in dream that has materialized?
Or, is this simply the toy with which a child fell asleep?

This text may be understood, literarily, by integrating information that the reader meets progressively: at first, the reader recognizes phonemes that are attached to temporality elements: adverbs of time (upon) and (still), an adverb of place (there), a definite article (the), verbs (to awake, to be) and the noun dinosaur. Nevertheless, the establishment of an overall significance supposes another work on behalf of the reader, who must develop several assumptions, in particular on the identity of the sleeper and the space-time framework where the story takes place.
Wondering about the sequence of the two proposals, the reader tries to confer a meaning to this text, which, in theory, must have one.

On the other hand, a bunch of analogies are caused by these seven words that may seem prosaic, but may produce on the reader an irresolute enigma.
Scarce contextualization, distiches and pronouns without referent, make that the reconstitution of the history could hardly take place.
The reader who is not a text theorist will undoubtedly not think if the micro-short-story observes the minimal conditions of the text as the transformation of a state of being.

The text, at first glance, appears to be not minimal, but incomplete. It is indeed impossible to evaluate the relative meaning of the two proposals without prolonging the utterances of the text by narrative scaffolding, which is plausible and dubious at the same time.


All this said, the margin of maneuver -- the "freedom" --, which is authorized to the reader here, may be limited.
However, it seems to us that uncertainty, combined to impossibility of slicing between the various assumptions, may rather cause to stop the development of only one total scenario at once.

It is true that, with the participation of the reader, a text controls to a certain point its reading by the establishment of a relevant axis that allows the reader to distinguish the principal elements from the additional elements and to assemble in a whole dissimilar single unit all the information in a text.

It is precisely on these points where the minimal text appears anything but a text in miniature, like a quantitative reduction of the complexity of the text.
The qualitative silences of Monterroso’s sentence have as a consequence that the text’s organization is not very constraining so that the reader won’t arrive to a single result, but many.

Monterroso’s micro short-story guides the reader with difficulty, too much necessary data being missing, but this is done with a purpose. The minimalism of the text is not reflected on its reading which is done rather in a maximalist way.
The work of reconstitution requires in this case a high number of inferences.
Another fundamental factor to demolish the principle of a unit, and a single lecture, is born with the disappearance of the traditional subject.
The reader’s individual experience is collectivized in the use of demonstrative deictics that lets us understand the previous experiences of the characters. In this micro short-story the subject, if there is any, has no gender.

Therefore, the key of the text lies on the verbs and the adverbs, that suggest the reader’s knowledge of the time and the space in which the plot may be developed, but that does not restrict the imaginative freedom of the receiver.
We all know that the artifice of the fable consists of presenting a dissimulated or hidden truth. Is there, however, “truth” in Monterroso’s fable? Is there, perhaps, an anti-truth that denounces the lie that passes for truth? There we see the first break from the purpose of the fable: Monterroso teaches nothing, his genre is not didactic, the moral is not before the story, nor after it, nor even distributed diffusely, like a kind of ethical sweat.

Monterroso does not try to establish a moral canon, but proclaims that everything is relative. In this story, the fable genre does not lose by the subtraction of a superfluous moral, but gains from the addition of openness and relativity, becoming more appropriate for our time as more compelling for the reader. Monterroso leaves this text in suspense and offers to the reader the possibility that he/she himself/herself, with a given jurisdiction, establishes the moral. The reader thus becomes a co-fabulator, the old genre is renewed with an unsuspected capacity of subversion, if we are capable of that.