El microrrelato como fragmento de un amplio conjunto narrativo en Bartleby y compañí­a de Enrique Vila-Matas

Abstract

In Bartleby y compañí­a Enrique Vila-Matas combines a big number of short and shortest stories of authors that left writing at a certain time of their life. The autonomy of these 'short-short-stories' is similar to that of the oral narrations which the authors/editors of the 15th-and 16th-century combined in anthologies and collections of tales, or in chivalric and pastoral romances. While the invention of print facilitates more complex text structures, as well as a subtle system of hypotaxis, which increasingly give coherence to voluminous narratives, Enrique Vila-Matas opts for a primarily paratactical structure. Making use of insinuations to a multitude of hypotexts, this structure suggests a state of fragmentation and a liberty of association that illustrates the central subject of this book: a rejection of an 'alimentary' literature, in favour of a literature of the No.