SOURCE: “From Poetic to Prosaic Animal Portraits: Arreola's ‘El Elefante,’” in Romanic Review, Vol. 85, No. 3, May, 1994, pp. 473-82.

In the following essay, Metzidakis contends that Arreola's “El Elefante” is a perfect example of Arreola's modern approach to the traditional bestiary fables and poems of writers like Aesop and de La Fontaine.

Although the present topic is somewhat limited by its close reading of a single short work, it relates to a stylistic phenomenon that is, in fact, much more pervasive in, and important to, modern Western literature than is often realized. For this reason, it will be useful, indeed, indispensable to analyze several other related European texts before arriving at the target work. What I propose to do here is to examine a series of textual manipulations that is best described as the prosaic transformation of a centuries-old, transcultural poetic image. The image I have selected is that...