Spanish Shorter-than-Short Fiction: Subverting Tradition

Abstract

This article examines issues of length and proportion in very short Spanish narratives, focusing on a number of minimalist and antirealist practices that set the microstory apart from the canonical nineteenth-century short story, and make it defy categorization under traditional genres. In the late nineteenth century, the short story emerges as a fixed literary genre that reflects Spanish culture and ideas of the time. In contrast, modernist and the avant-garde short stories undergo generic hybridization and experimentation, oscillating between the norms of prose and poetry. The forms generated include the lyric tale, allegory, prose-poem, and other distinctive forms, such as 'greguerías', 'caprichos', and 'glosas'. In the hands of postmodern writers, for whom all genres are regarded as equally valid and may exist in the same work, the mimetic and progressive story is further subverted by non-literary media discourses and folkloric and subliterary material (anecdotes, sketches, parables, tales, allegories, animal fables, epigrams, jocular tales, jokes, riddles, etc.). This confers on them a new significance within a global culture that embraces post-humanist attitudes and virtual forms of communication. The microstory or fragment is an ideal medium for subverting norms of tone and style, spatio-temporal contiguities, and conventional perspectives and perceptions. Writers are able to manipulate these features of their work for structural as well as epistemic purposes, filling their creations with ambiguities, puns, contradictions, and discontinuities. These qualities of the microstory convey eloquently the unease, dissonance, and sense of infinite possibility that characterize modern life.