Más allá de Bestiario: reflexiones en torno a Amanuense de Arreola de José Emilio Pacheco (original) (raw)

«Amanuense de Arreola», by José Emilio Pacheco, has been included as a postface in Editorial Planeta Mexicana’s edition of Juan José Arreola’s Bestiario since 2006. Intended as a homage, the text is written as a memoir in which Pacheco narrates the extraordinary creation of Bestiario by Arreola. This paper presents a series of reflections on Pacheco’s text and its relations with Arreola’s work from different and complementary perspectives. First, Pacheco’s text is discussed in terms of four different levels of historical conceptualization: Chronicle, Story, mode of Emplotment, and mode of Argument (White, 2014). Later, the discussion focuses on its textual genre regarding its autobiographical nature (Trosbrog, 1997; Egan, 2001; Lozano Herrera, 2006). Next, the paratextual functions of Pacheco’s text in Bestiario are analyzed (Genette, 2001). Finally, the literary mechanisms within the text are exposed to illustrate the effects they produce (Berman, 2009; Popovic, 2006; Verani, 2006). It is concluded that, besides its contribution to conform a cultural memory, the inclusion of «Amanuense de Arreola» as a postface in Bestiario has made it a necessary complement of it, in spite of its derivative nature.