I discovered the great Latin American fabulist Augusto Monterroso through a bilingual Arabic-Spanish edition of La Oveja Negra y Demas Fabulas (The Black Sheep and Other Fables). I have read through it slowly several times, checking the Spanish words I don’t know against the Arabic, and the fewer Arabic ones against the Spanish.
Monterroso is a master ironist of elegant concision, so he repays that kind of plodding, methodical, savor-each-word approach. He is muy famoso (in the Spanish-speaking world) as the holder of the world’s record for the shortest short story ever written: The Dinosaur. “When he woke the dinosaur was still there.” Since it is untranslatable, here is the original Spanish: “Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.”
Last week, while rereading Monterroso on the plane to Tarragona, it occurred to me that his short-short story The Lion’s Share might please the self-styled “race realists” and “Western chauvinists” who, like me, are avid readers of The Unz Review. Since it is a very short story, and constitutes a paltry portion of La Oveja Negra, I doubt that Monterroso’s heirs will sue me if I translate it here in its entirety:
The Lion’s Share
Once upon a time, the Cow, the Goat, and the ever-patient Sheep teamed up with the Lion in hopes of enjoying more peaceful lives. The depredations of “that monster” (as they called him behind his back) had kept them in a state of anguish and anxiety. They knew that they, and their escape plan, had better be good.
Thanks to the foursome’s well-known hunting skills, one day they killed an agile Deer (whose flesh, of course, the Cow, Goat, and Sheep found repugnant, accustomed as they were to nibbling herbs) and in accordance with the agreement they divided the immense carcass into equal parts.
Proffering in unison all sorts of complaints, and alleging their helplessness and weakness, the three began heatedly shouting, as they had conspired in advance, demanding the Lion’s share as well as their own, since (as the Ant’s example taught them) they needed to save something for the hard days of winter. But this time the Lion did not even take the trouble of enumerating the obvious reasons why the Deer belonged to him alone, but instead ate them all in one sitting, in the midst of their lengthy screams in which were heard such expressions as the Social Contract, the Constitution, Human Rights, and others equally powerful and decisive.
Why might race realists and Western chauvinists like this story? Let’s start with definitions. A self-styled race realist is someone who proclaims that racial differences are real and significant and who likes his own race best, in obedience to marching orders issued by a certain Charles Darwin. A Western chauvinist, who is probably also a race realist, proclaims the superiority of Western culture over all others, and resents the complaints of the Global South about historical crimes of imperialism and colonialism.
For these people, the Lion represents the white, European West, while the Cow, the Goat, and the Sheep represent the yellow, brown, and black races (not necessarily in that order). If the Europeans figuratively devoured the folk of other continents, enslaving some and robbing others, they did so in accordance with their superior hereditary endowment, just as the Lion devours his prey due to his majestic nature, not his criminality.
These readers will notice that the competent Lion, not the “hunting party of four,” felled the Deer, just as the riches of today’s technological civilization are the product of the white race’s efforts. They will claim that the Western Lion is under no obligation to share his feast with resentful, complaining lesser breeds, who ultimately are no more suited to enjoying its benefits than herbivores are suited to relishing a meal of lion-felled flesh.
Like Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron, Monterroso’s story can also be read as a libertarian or Nietzschean parable. The only way the Lion could become the equal of the herbivores would be if he were declawed, defanged, and otherwise handicapped. That might be nice for the herbivores—at least until the bred themselves into famine—but for the Lion it would be quite the indignity.
The shock long-sentence ending in which the Lion devours the scheming, whining pests at one sitting might, in the race realist Western chauvinist imagination, epitomize the moment they’ve all been waiting for: the day the white West rises up and expels nonwhites and immigrants, reasserts its world dominance, and roars.
That’s a plausible interpretation of the story. But is it really what Monterroso meant? If you ask an AI chatbot about Monterroso’s politics, you’ll see things like this:
In short, Monterroso was not exactly a defender of the leonine prerogatives of the rich and powerful. So what might our race realist Western chauvinist Nietzchean-libertarian interpretation of The Lion’s Share be missing?
Let’s begin by noting the obvious: Monterroso is, above all, an ironist. Here’s Google’s first definition of irony:
The expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.
The Lion’s Share, I submit, is meta-ironic. For while Monterroso’s anthropomorphic animals (like Aesop’s and La Fontaine’s) normally signify human foibles, alerting readers with a wink and a nudge that “we animals are really people,” in this case another level of irony turns the story’s superficial meaning inside-out: These “animals” who are really “people” are, unfortunately, acting like animals, in the pejorative sense.
The animal characters of The Lion’s Share inhabit a jungle in which the strong terrorize and devour the weak. There are predators and there are prey, and any attempt to confound the two categories is bound to fail.
Unlike animals, human beings, it should go without saying—or so Monterroso implies—should not be devouring each other. Man may sometimes be a wolf to man, or (as in this case) a lion, but such is obviously not a desirable state of affairs. So The Lion’s Share satirizes both the oppression of the Lion and, more sharply, the ineffectual responses of the Cow, Goat, and ever-patient Sheep. (Calling the Sheep “ever-patient” is a hint that Monterroso casts a baleful eye over the multitudes of alleged human beings who resignedly go along with whatever their predatory leaders tell them, thereby earning the sobriquet sheeple so beloved by us conspiracy theorists.)
So Monterroso is satirizing the social world as he sees it, not endorsing it. Anyone who wishes to remain on an animalistic level, condemned by their biology to thump their chests while bellowing out the virtues of their own race, might appear to him not as a noble Lion, but as some sort of lesser ape.
God made man in his image. And is known the dominant "frizzy" gene overrides all other yellow, brown, white, chosen, etc homo sapiens recessive genes, to result in a "black" baby. Proof that the first man with the dominant gene was actually black ie God is a nelsonmandela and not a goldameir!! But dont tell the khazar fake jew turkic/slav pig-tailed (Caspian khabib like) supremacist idiots spitting on the Palestineinjuns trying to genocide them in the West Bank and Gaza.
Lemmings was used by another writer..
Inertia seems to be a disease thats infecting the worlds response
to genocide.