Realidades animales en los bestiarios contemporáneos de Juan José Arreola, José Emilio Pacheco y René Avilés Fabila

In medieval literature, a bestiary is a collection of texts and images that report on real and fantastic animals around a moralizing explanation; This literary tradition has transcended to the present day. In such a way that, thanks to the masterful pen of three Mexican writers, contemporary literature has to its credit the Bestiary of Juan José Arreola, the zoological poetics of José Emilio Pacheco and the Bestiary of prodigious beings by René Avilés Fabila. And it is the works of these three authors that will be addressed in this investigation to elucidate how the descriptions of all types of animals are no longer—as it was for their predecessors from other centuries—a pretext to symbolically and indirectly embody the projection of Christian mentalities and they are a means to communicate the reality that the animal lives. Thus, in the works under study, on the one hand, the authors occasionally follow the paths of symbolism and, on the other hand, they highlight the ailments and discomforts typical of animals that are found behind the bars of a cage in the zoo. Therefore, in the following paragraphs I analyze the aspects that refer not only to the animal image, but also to the feeling and situation that the aforementioned authors refer to about the captive animal in a zoo.