Glorious Delusion

Augusto Monterroso’s The Rest Is Silence is a fictional Festschrift for a provincial Mexican intellectual, Eduardo Torres, a writer and elder statesman from the town of San Blas. The novel’s four sections – grouped loosely into tributes to Torres, his selected writings, aphorisms and ‘impromptu collaborations’ – teem with invented texts, imaginary writers, dubious footnotes and unreliable memories. The opening ‘tributes’ from friends and family, flush with character and incident, are anything but: vigorously combative, they are largely hatchet jobs born of petty jealousy or disappointment after long acquaintance. The selections from Torres’s literary criticism that follow are bathetic, incoherent and, invariably, wrong – incredible misreadings all. Yet the vivisection is marked by compassion as much as it is by savagery. The figure that emerges from Monterroso’s ludic assemblage is one of the sublime fools of literature, a man whose commitment to delusion is itself a kind of glorious art. Through the risible figure of Torres, avatar of vanity and misjudgement, Monterroso smuggles an oblique autobiography within his deflation of Mexico’s literati.

Monterroso was born in 1921 in Tecuigalpa, Honduras, to a Guatemalan father and a Honduran mother. He was largely self-taught, his schooling interrupted by frequent migrations between his parents’ home countries. While working odd jobs, he attended night classes at the National Library of Guatemala. He was enamoured of the Greek and Roman classics – Virgil, Aesop, Catullus – as well as with Cervantes, Shakespeare, Johnson, Byron, Dante and Rilke. After founding a literary magazine that was critical of the dictator Jorge Ubico, he petitioned for and was granted asylum in Mexico, where he’d spend most of his remaining years until his death in 2003. Respected by his peers, he published only sparingly, a significant but ancillary figure of the Latin American Boom. Monterroso’s reputation today rests on his extraordinary short stories, unclassifiable, technically sophisticated microfictions suffused with paradox, wry humour and metaphysical irreverence. (‘The Dinosaur’, perhaps the shortest story in all of literature, reads in its entirety: ‘When he awoke, the dinosaur was still there.’)

Monterroso siphoned energy from shorter forms to fuel what would be his only novel. The fictional essays and reviews in The Rest Is Silence possess some of the lacerating energy of Monterroso’s Complete Works (1959) and Perpetual Motion (1972), scathing masterpieces of minimalist satire that skewer the commitments and confusions of the mid-century intellectual. In its metafictional high jinks, the novel shares something with the work of Monterroso’s contemporary Borges. One gambit sees Torres reviewing Monterroso’s collection The Black Sheep and Other Fables (1969). (He calls attention to the author’s ‘paucity of production’.) And Torres himself is mentioned in an earlier Monterroso story, ‘Humour’. These porous, portable fictions push against the boundaries of their smallness. They are whetted shards that almost escape the confines of the mosaic.

But Torres’s colossal self-regard unifies all, an energy field in which the novel’s disparate particles constellate. Pompous, impractical and hopelessly fond of his own blathering, he is made ridiculous by the incongruities between his self-belief and his ability, his reputation and his achievement. In the unflattering reminiscences of those closest to him, we get a sense of how he spends his days: combing bookshops for obscure poetry, taking long baths, hanging around younger writers, repeating jokes, basking in local admiration and drinking to excess at parties.

Torres begins his ‘Writer’s Decalogue’, a sort of Thirteen Commandments of writing, with the following maxim: ‘When you have something to say, say it; when you don’t, say that as well. Never stop writing.’ His fidelity to this disastrous precept is almost admirable. In contrast to his creator, Torres is inordinately prolific: he writes much but little of any worth. Few topics escape his attention. On the past: ‘One could say that, before History, all was Prehistory.’ On class struggle: ‘The Rich should love the Poor and the Poor should love the Rich, for otherwise all is Hate.’ On contradiction: ‘If it was not for contradiction, contraries would cease (so to speak) to exist, and, incidentally, to contradict each other.’ On literary style: ‘Delete one line per day.’ On law: ‘It is strict.’ Platitudes vie with non sequiturs; absurdities multiply. One begins to wonder how Torres earned his reputation in the first place. Whence the renown, the invitations, the accolades? What spell has he cast over San Blas? On his ascension, his wife is typically blunt: ‘He became a big deal in San Blas, but that must be because nobody around here knows anything’.

Monterroso taught Don Quixote at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México for many years, and there is something of the mad don about Torres – call it an unwavering fealty to illusion – that ennobles his otherwise ludicrous persona. (Torres’s own extraordinary misinterpretation of Cervantes’s masterpiece constitutes one of the novel’s most hilarious chapters.) Also like Quixote, Torres is a creature of remarkable vitality. He has no particular mission, no legible aesthetic, no self-awareness or intellectual rigor. Yet he possesses – is possessed by – a profound belief in art, the work without which he would cease to exist. For Torres, literary criticism is a sacred pursuit. With dusty books and literary supplements, he takes arms against an otherwise disenchanted world.

Monterroso’s prose – compressed yet supple in Aaron Kerner’s fluid translation, the first into English – is thrillingly ambiguous. Its urbane, ironical sweep offers little room for either exultation or condemnation. Rather, it revels in inscrutable behaviours, galling inconsistencies, lies and evasions. ‘But then tell me’, Torres’s valet asks, ‘is there anything having to do with the soul of man that isn’t at bottom strange and paradoxical?’ This is Monterroso’s territory, the hinterlands of human contradiction, ambivalence and delusion.

The novel closes with an analysis of a poem, ‘The Burro of San Blas’, an impromptu contribution from a pseudonymous critic, or so we’re told in the footnotes. The critic, one Alirio Gutiérrez, suggests that the anonymous poem, apparently a minor classic in San Blas, was actually written by Torres. (The poem’s implicit attack on Torres himself is thought to be strategic, another shield for his identity.) The analysis is prolix, rife with asides and inane commentary. It is almost certainly the camouflaged work of Torres himself. There is a dizzying moment – eminently Monterrosan – when we realize we are likely reading Torres on Torres, doubly removed by way of anonymity and pseudonymity, a gimmick whose surpassing indulgence renders it utterly plausible. The poem – terrible by any standard – stages its ambush within a mangled sonnet: ‘In the town of San Blas, not far away / there dwells a useless ass, they say / Everyone thinks he’s exceedingly quick / but nothing of worth ever falls from his lips.’ The essayist, whoever he or she may be, suggests that Torres is the ‘only epigrammatist in the history of literature so wholly devoted to self-mockery’.

In his single novel and his many shorter works, Monterroso created a host of composite literary figures whose defects serve as satirical fodder. But it is precisely here, in this motley crew of failed artists and preposterous intellectuals, that Monterroso – aphorist, diarist, elegist, writer of essays and criticism and microscopic fictions – reveals his affinity for the ineffectual journeyman, his tender recognition of the consuming obsession, unfounded arrogance, provincial obscurity, tireless striving and jealously guarded success of his muddled, ridiculous, wonderfully vivid characters. They are models of confused passion, at war with insignificance and resignation, the humiliating undercurrents of literary life. As Torres writes at the novel’s end:

sooner or later, when everything’s said and done, all of it will wind up in the trash. If someday somebody takes up that trash once again and from it fabricates a few new sheets of paper, I trust that the next time around said paper will be used for something less ambiguous, less falsely magnanimous, less futile.

Monterroso’s assessment of posterity isn’t as sanguine, judging by the subtitle of ‘The Burro of San Blas’: ‘There’s Always a Bigger Ass’. That may be so. But after spending any time with this beguiling novel, one feels sure there will never be another Torres.

Adapted from Dustin Illingworth’s introduction to The Rest is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, published by NYRB Classics in December.