First Annual Monterroso Lecture Series
Friday March 23, 2012
Dr. Raúl Carrillo Arciniega, Department of Hispanic Studies
The first time I read/heard the short story the Dinosaur by Monterroso I was living in Guadalajara, Mexico around 1990. I used to spend my evenings going to the theater to watch Pedro Almodóvar’s films without actually attending school. To me these films opened a new visual paradigm and advanced my unsteady and incipient artistic formation. A friend more knowledgeable than me in literary matters presented the story and the author to me when we were talking about the films that we had watched that day: La ley del deseo and Matador. I cannot recall why we ended up talking about dinosaurs rather than matadors but I guess this is the way youth works. This friend whose name I think I have forgotten asked me if I knew the shortest work of fiction in the history of literature, he didn’t use the term Hispanic literature because at that age we didn’t believe in frontiers or borders. I replied, almost with shame, that I hadn’t heard of the story or the author. The name Monterroso was so unfamiliar to me, perhaps the same way that it is for you right now. I remember my astonishment when he recited the story for me in the middle of our chat at the café La Paloma where we had gone to talk about Almodóvar. “Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí”. It seemed to me that he had pronounced some kind of prayer, and he leaned back in his seat to wait for some reaction on my part. I couldn’t say anything because to tell the truth, I didn’t understand a thing. I mean, I could imagine something but I wasn’t sure if what I had understood was something “valid” due to my shaky reasoning and developing ability to talk about literature. I remained in silence waiting for my friend to reveal “that something” I couldn’t grasp at that moment. I opted for not saying anything. For me, the message communicated by literature resided deep inside me, far from any type of verbalization, there where the absolute cannot be materialized. The problem was that my friend didn’t say anything about the short story either. At the time, we simply didn’t know what to make of it. Its message was still hidden from us, but we pretended to understand it nonetheless. Now, adding years to my perspective, I think, I believe with fear, that literatures have some kind of particular way of revealing the unutterable, a certain way of speaking about the human condition even though the narrator speaks to us now from death. Nevertheless this minifiction even though it is the most famous in Hispanic literatures is still written in Spanish, and many would think Spanish is a spoken language not a language that communicates culture and sophistication. The dinosaurio, now I understand conveys that culture filtered through a perspective that involves the only element that literature could give: ambiguity.
I think, in that spirit, that I accepted to come here to talk about this story just because I am in debt for not knowing what to say twenty years ago when I thought I knew everything.
Therefore, the story of the dinosaur has remained part of the tradition of those stories that nobody actually comprehends. Its hermeneutics has gathered a very good number of scholars and writers, and it is not my intention here to decipher it but rather to present a number of playful implications with free associations on what I can extract from these seven words. I think that the most valued process of reading a text is just to come up with questions, hopefully good ones, rather than with answers. One of the most pertinent questions is why a dinosaur? What is a dinosaur for certain cultures. Monterroso lived his adult life in Mexico, particularly in Mexico City, where he wrote the majority of his work. That is why we can consider that the dinosaur has some significance for Mexican culture or at least for the way dinosaurs are conceived in Mexico before Hollywood would construct them as mythological creatures. In Monterroso, we are confronted with the concept of ambiguity. This concept is key for understanding the role of creative process and active reader participation. This ambiguity is generated in Spanish thanks to the structure of conjugations and the possibility of omitting the subject pronoun—a situation that emphasizes the no places, the voids that pronouns generate as spaces where, because nothing is certain, the image we have of a subject in our mental representations becomes diluted. Without a specific subject the uncertainty increases accentuating the deitic process. Deixis as linguistics states “applies to the use of expressions in which the meaning can be traced directly to features of the act of utterance … Several of the pronouns are predominantly used deictically, with I and we referring to the speaker and a group including the speaker, you to the addressee(s) or a set including the addressee(s)”. No subject populates these places permanently. They are absent of meaning; hence the active representation of a subject is put on hold. We don’t know who the principal character is for sure. We can fill that emptiness in with meaning or a surplus of meaning, if we prefer to do so. The fact that the story begins with a Cuando despertó, in other words, a temporal conjunction with this ambiguity as well, confronts us with a temporal and narrative dilemma: when was that and who actually woke up? The Spanish language is the most uncertain language that I know. Cuando refers to a point in time where the subject confirms his/her or something’s in between existence.
The literary topic of the awakening is widely found in fantastic and science fiction literature. This short story can be read as a part of this genre if we are assuming some degree of time travel to the past for example, in case we want to construct a mental frame where we could situate this narrative. If we generate a Sci-fi reading the suspension of disbelief, which characterizes this genre, it put us within a travel experience where the protagonist will confirm not only his/her existence but also his/her fears. This realization is extended to a whole setting where consciousness reveals limits of the body that contemplates another. Hence this time is constructed within mythological space to give the narration simultaneity with the awakening, and the contemplation. The mythological time is ahistoric, according to Ernst Cassirer, a French philosopher that wrote a beautiful book entitled Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. In this ahistorical time the subject wakes up to enter a symbolic time, that of the myth, which coincides with all possible times. His/her entrance to this universe, or to sound more avant-garde, multiverse occurs in an abstract time and place in which the certitude collapses, and with this collapse there arises the possibility to identify the subject as an active part of the narration. In rites of initiation the conscience needs to be awakened because it was sleeping, that is to say, the awakening is precisely a revelation state, a discovering, in which time consolidates and merges into one unity. Hence when the character wakes up, we understand that the subject came from a dreaming state, almost marginal, one that didn’t respond to the pulsions of the phenomenic world.
He/She has run away from his/her factual reality and she had to cross the threshold to experience another type of perception. In this way the perception of the phenomenological world in both universes is not parallel, but one that evokes the other. She came from a dream that is materialized by means of perception not logic. The protagonist’s emptiness suggests an altered state of perception. Suddenly, the Dinosaur appears. The narrator give us his approach without hesitation and just shows us what his narration requires. Suddenly the two ends of the narration, narrator and reader, clash. We are there with the narrator lost in the middle of an implausible story. A story that is not from this world but that we intend to believe, again is the mythological time where everything is possible. This mythological space is made possible by the use of language, discourse where the most important factor is not precision, according to cognitive sciences, but cohesion. We believe in the story because, even though nobody has seen a dinosaur, we are able to reconstruct it, just like we picture angels with big wings in their backs as part of a plausible realm.
The narrator at this point has decided to dissociate himself from any moral responsibility. He has decided to transfer all the responsibility to the reader, to us. That is why we can start the process of misreading the text. As Harold Bloom has stated, the history of literature is only a history of misreadings. Alteration is an active part in reconstructing the story to give it an open meaning through time and context. Argentine short story writer Jorge Luis Borges, with his short story Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote, was the first one to show that time is an active element in the act of reading. To every reading the reader brings what Eco would call an “encyclopedia” to be applied to the reading in which the reader deciphers his/ her own universe by confusing it with a story that she is trying to make sense of in her mind. That is why the semantic information that the reader brings with him multiplies and increases the meaning of the discourse he is reading. Wittgenstein said in his Tractatus “The limits of my knowledge are the limits of my language”. All knowledge is determined by the ability to transmit it.
This fulfillment of information makes possible as well that the limits of the conscience reach a state of equilibrium where the reader can make sense of his reading. The open text, once more following Eco, gives us the criteria to the questions of life answer in a certain way where the significance must be extracted from all the possibilities that can offer a credible outcome. In the creative process this credible factor has to be achieved by the author in order to present his fiction as a possible scenario where the reader could identify something as valid. In this way I wonder why Monterroso’s dinosaur is plausible? A possible and straight answer is because the dinosaur cannot trespass the boundaries of the written text. That is to say, with Monterroso’s minifiction we are exposed to a verified narrative time in its own enunciation. This statement forces us to return to the function of dreaming and awakening.
In Monterroso’s dinosaur the function of dreaming and the awakening transport us to fictional but possible lands. The sense of plausibility versus the truth is established as a method to ponder the factor that anchors the narration to the present world. It is true only because it resembles something written and reconstructed in museums. Dinosaurs are footprints of history that evoke a distant realm where giants were possible. Nevertheless, the author detached from his own narration shows us a character who wakes up from an almost lethargic dream. How much time has this character been sleeping, and where is he coming from? In other words, his/her entrance to this world is unexpected; it comes, perhaps, from an ancestral tiredness of being. What was she doing before she became this character whose signs we cannot reconstruct?
The awakening presents a saturation of realities. Suddenly the dinosaur appears, this is not an ontological construction but rather a phenomenical materialization of being. In Spanish the distinction between ser to be and estar also to be is precisely the temporal distinction which the subject confronts. Estar is to be thrown into the world to experience being. In this way Phenomenology has been one of the mayor philosophical systems in Latin America, because it forces the subject to confront his/her perception of the world that actually surrounds the subject who contemplates it. Our protagonist awakens in that similar state and she confronts a monstrous image: a dinosaur that we don’t know how to picture. Again ambiguity is the key concept in elaborating this mental image or not. The presence is confronted with the essence. There is an action of someone who contemplates a factual world even though that world is outside of our daily life. Dreaming and awakening are the link between the imaginary and the possibility to find an element that anchors them in the fictional realm. Monterroso creates an effect of eternity in which he recommences the story each time that the dinosaur appears. It is just like Zion in the film The Matrix that has been rebuilt and destroyed again and again. It is a process of recursiveness, reactualization. Nevertheless, the problem for the reader and the protagonist is precisely this constant agony that the character is experiencing over and over again thanks to his senses. The dinosaur appears as an empty entity to be imbued with sense—and that’s what this lecture series is all about. Please join us next year.
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