Genesis and Poetics of Antonio Pereira's Short Short Stories

Abstract

In this article we analyze the short short stories of Antonio Pereira, a writer who forges his vocation to the brevity in his poetic work and in journalism. Without subjecting himself to the canonical norms and the generic question, the writer breaks the established limits and arrives at the micro-story throughthe condensation of the non-narrative and descriptive components of the prose poem. Within the short narrative this literary genre represents a minimal part in his literary work and is scattered among his books of short stories: Los brazos de la i griega (1982), Picassos en el desván (1991), Relatos sin fronteras (1998), Cuentos de la Cábila (2000) y La divisa en la torre (2007). We study the génesis of his short short stories and the origin of some of the stories that make up his plots, such as some news read in the press in order to deepen in the process of narrative condensation to which Pereira submits the plot through ellipsis to a continuous pruning, which is at the service of the rigor of the composition and the exact word. We define the features that shape Pereira’s style in the writing of short short stories, such as autobiography, metafictional reflections, oral register, culturalism, condensation of the anecdote, the play with generic hybridization, the purification of eroticism and changes of perspective; and we outline the resources through which the writer subverts semantic fields and destabilizes the expected order, such as lyrical condensation, humor, irony, linguistic games and paradox, among others.