Why, when such concerns and styles of writing are not “Latin American” but universal, has Monterroso been ensconced within the happy borders of his continent? The way in which Monterroso and his literary accomplices (among others, many Mexican poets) present their work and self-image to the public leaves no option other than to describe their narrative wisdom and common sense as “minor.” In various moments and forums, many of us who have devoted a good part of our academic or everyday lives to Monterroso and his “complete works” have fallen into the trap of justifying his utter lack of conventionality as the rule of a minor literature. But the “stories” that follow confirm, after all, Monterroso’s vitality as a major antidote to the verbal carelessness of an otherwise extremely rich Latin American literature. He is well aware of the misapprehensions that have accrued around his personal and writerly myths. But he also knows that his contradictions and the spareness of his publications are integral to those myths and to the public’s appetite to see more of those oppositions in his writings.
This elegantly accurate translation by Edith Grossman contains the first two collections published by Monterroso. As a constant pursuer of le mot juste and le bon mot (at least once, when asked about how he wrote, he has answered “I don’t write, I correct”), the time period between each of his works is long. Just when we think that we understand most of what Monterroso and his narrators are saying, and just when it seems that the only hope left is to see his work in an exquisite glossy journal, or as the sensible and serene critical intelligence included in a collection of scholarly criticism on the literature of the fantastic, or in a heartfelt tribute to Julio Cortazar, he comes up with another, entirely original work. When this happens there is always another critic who rediscovers Monterroso, or one to whom his previous work says something totally unheard of. This is the tension that a great writer always creates. It is a never-ending process, because besides these stories, Monterroso has published essays, criticism, apocryphal biographies, diaries, drawings, fragments, a prolog or two, translations, and all kinds of paratexts. If one adds to the above the Borgesean hybridity that informs many of his texts, the critic’s task is equally endless.
Since his Mexican exile (generally permanent since 1944) Monterroso has been a pilgrim in many countries, the charming emissary of our subtle and shared Latin American specificities, and drawing from these, of the richness of the Spanish language. Rereading Edith Grossman’s superb translation of Monterroso’s very precise Spanish can finally convince one of the polemical notion that an original can also come alive in a version construed in another language, and that a translation can sometimes be a valid interpretation of a work which everyone says should not be translated.
Tangentially, the texts of these two collections also convince us, in yet another language, that it is possible for other readers to observe how much we Latin Americans owe to Monterroso. This is so mainly because, as the late Uruguayan critic Angel Rama wrote, Monterroso avoids “the rhetorical Latin American jungle.” That is, even before the literary Boom of the sixties, modernity, albeit troubled, was part of our autochthonous patrimony. Moreover, Rama adds, Monterroso’s technical sophistication and irreverence has put an end to the myth of Latin American literary tropicalism. Rama rounds off his assertions with the comment that “Despite being a testimony of radical modernization, Monterroso’s literature has not failed to secure a reelaboration of his regional culture, with which he has lucidly come to terms.”
What we owe Monterroso is the consciousness of another way in which to define ourselves, or of what should define us. Thus, as many of the stories in Complete Works (and Other Stories) indicate, his writing is a way of decolonizing stereotypical representations and, more importantly, avoiding the critical postcolonization of our literature by the specter of those who tell us what should be politically correct for a Latin American. It is no coincidence that when the Latin American writers of the last two decades assume testimonial responsibility (fraught with personal danger) in history, Monterroso and his work are an obligatory point of origin in which to find the bases of commitment.
The above is generally perceived by critics who write from Latin America. (I refer to mental states, not locations of culture.) We have always known that the subaltern can speak (ongoing indigenous struggles attest eloquently to that), and this is why, when confronted by the new imperial I’s of the English-only “first world” (see “Mister Taylor” and “First Lady”), Monterroso’s characters almost invariably win, and even choose to be modern. For better or worse, the hardly essentialist practice of letting Latin Americans decide for themselves fits into a current problem of the nineties. This is the issue of who or what is deciding the canon of texts that make up the literature of our America that should be taught or heeded. Because of such conflicts, when one reads a fantastically ingenious writer like Monterroso the unavoidable question is whether he is merely witty. The immediate answer is no, because he is both serious and daring in his approach to style. Thus, his critics have had a hard time grasping the originality of his social commentary. Monterroso fascinates and confuses us, he shakes us out of our complacency and neat little mental boxes. Monterroso ultimately cures us of the mistaken belief that we can write about an author about whom our perceptions cannot change.
In the end, like the title essay-story in Perpetual Motion, he becomes a fly we can never catch. Nevertheless, and to his great embarrassment, Monterroso is now well known, quoted and published. Today, without promotional campaigns or introductions like this one, his declarations, novel ideas, and idiosyncracies easily become popular news or the quote of the day. So when he wants to let his critics rest, Monterroso writes aphorisms, dedications, vignettes, newspaper articles, epitaphs, and the like. As a result of these acts of integration and assimilation, his interpreters can only begin to decipher his perpetual literature, and we always return to the exceptional paradox that any new work by Monterroso can be. His literature, like his life, is an experience of limits, and these are ours. In his prose, the interpreter’s or the interpreted’s positions can sustain the fiction that the person who writes and the person about whom one writes are a single seamless entity. By extension, his texts also correct the fallacy of believing that a primary characteristic of “minor” literature is that everything in it is either aesthetic or political. Orwell, who believed it impossible to avoid politics in our century, reminds us that politics can also be a bunch of lies, evasions, madness, hate, and schizophrenia. Perhaps because of this, and due to the imminent danger of decontextualizing, it is better to realize that we sometimes propose readings that contradict our convictions.