The “after” in Monterroso is never a full departure from his beginning, because his texts make manifest a consciousness that after centuries of shared human experiences almost everything has been thought of and written about. This perception of the creative process does not refer to his own works, because they are not variations on a theme. Between the two collections you are about to read he published La oveja negra y demás fábulas [The Black Sheep and other Fables], whose polyvalence totally renovates the notion that such texts (fables) place their readers in front of a mirror. After these three collections he abandons the pithiness of their form for Lo demás es silencio (La vida y la obra de Eduardo Torres) [The Rest is Silence (The Life and Works of Eduardo Torres) (1978)], an apocryphal biography of a small town intellectual. Presented in four parts as the testimony of friends, family, and wife; as an anthology of the farcical and honest Torres; and as a collection of his aphorisms, sayings, and “literary criticism,” the text caused hilarious reactions among Mexico City literati, ready to cry foul and accuse the “fictitious” and “real” author of libel and other nonliterary offenses. In 1987 the “after” meanders toward the diary form with La letra e (fragmentos de un diario) [The Letter e (Fragments of a Diary)]. Again, “diary” is a convenient generic label, because the author always seems ready to let his new readers slide easily into his world and then shock them with the strategies, codes, and narrative economies that define him.
His most recent work to date is Los buscadores de oro [The Gold Searchers (1993)], which as autobiography contains a lyricism and imagery that, of course, only serve to present new possibilities for the genre. Once again, if what Monterroso employs as thematics is seen as clairvoyant, there is the added element of timeliness. In the first half of this last decade of the century Vargas Llosa, Bryce Echenique, Bioy Casares, Arenas, Paz, the late Ribeyro, and Arreola (told to Fernando del Paso) have felt compelled to write partial or complete autobiographies. However, as the master of brevity, in the sense of a Gracián, Monterroso outdoes them all by writing the shortest one, devoted to the shortest life period, in the briefest chronological sense. Between and among these works there have been critical editions, translations, a plethora of literary awards and national and international honors, anthologies of his works, at least five festschriften, a film about his life, a stint as the Edward Laroque Tinker Visiting Professor at Stanford, memberships in editorial boards, and his appointment to the Academia Guatemalteca de la Lengua. It is within the context of all the preceding events that the collections included here can be understood, and reading them will prove the futility of discussing their contents in full. Nevertheless, let us go to the “before” Monterroso with at least an inkling of what he does there, because there is no grand gesture as art in that period.
Complete Works (and Other Stories) has acquired a wide public beyond the confines of the elite Spanish American literary circles that found in its stories, always surprising in form and content, scathing allusions to the weaknesses and defects of the artistic or intellectual world. Once again, and now in English, we see clearly that behind all brilliant satire lies a sense of compassion, that this work’s scope is expansive, and that its nimble variety reaches us all. Those who search for symbols in this book do well. But those who do not will no doubt find them, as long as they are not afraid to confront their own images at every turn of the page. Here Monterroso shows the knack of creating ordinary and unusual characters (Mister Taylor, Fombona, the First Lady) bruised by the meaninglessness of their existence. Yet their ingratiating simplicity merges with the author’s unswerving faith in humanity’s ability to represent itself. Other stories, whose allusions to Western imperialism are clear, prove to us that the struggle over historical and social meaning is part of human history. This collection presents Monterroso at his full range, from ironically sublime to abruptly colloquial. There are endless elliptical asides, recondite images, thematic innovations, metatextual games, and exploits with time and space, all heightened by the energy with which his language is embued.
If the long interval between his books has been a source of frustration for readers, the reality is that to this day he has not repeated himself. As its name indicates, Perpetual Motion is a book whose pages dread the horror of stability. Visually, for example, the random placement of epigraphs (not always related to the texts that precede or follow them) is a means of fashioning the book as object. To the exasperation of linear spirits, these pages pass from theme to theme and from one genre to another with the courage that only the fear of repetition or closure provides. Perhaps this work’s greatest virtue (according to its author) is that it can be acquired or not, retained or not, without anything happening to the readers, the author, or the universe. Here, then, is one of the few decidedly dispensable books of all time — a rare quality today and always. For this reason there will be eager readers (hence it is being published) who will consider this book essential, if only to reaffirm their faith in gratuitous acts. This is the case with the very moving story “The Maids,” where the sheer succulence of the author’s language leaps from the page, leaving us to ponder its social criticism. Language is no less the protagonist in “essays” such as “Flies” and “You Tell Sarabia…” In these hybrid texts reality is mediated through montage. Yet there is the sense that we know perfectly all that the narrators are trying to tell us.
So what or who comes “after” Monterroso? If we were to answer based on what he accomplishes in these two collections, we would come up with a list of untranslated Spanish American authors as well as with the names of some canonical authors. They are the non-so-new breed of what Rubén Darío once called “the odd ones,” and, like Monterroso, their rebellious attitudes against stilted forms and received ideas regarding literariness has characterized every moment of their lives. After all, it is Monterroso who invents the new genre called “perpetual motion,” and later on, in his 1983 collection La palabra mágica [The Magic Word], posits and expounds on the obituary as a new genre. Thus the names of Spanish American authors like Felisberto Hernández, José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Roberto Arlt, Macedonio Fernández, Pablo Palacio, Julio Garmendia, Julio Torri, and Antonio Porchia come to mind for the first half of this century. Juan José Arreola, Oliverio Girondo, Virgilio Piñera, Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Julio Cortázar, and Jorge Luis Borges immediately come to mind for the period of the Boom. More recently, there are Mario Benedetti, Salvador Elizondo, Eduardo Galeano, Pía Barros, and many others. Like them, Monterroso explains that merely for the sake of “going native” critics and common readers alike should never suppress the cultural, ideological, and institutional contexts within which such authors write.
Latin American prose at the end of the twentieth century is an elegant bookstore and library, constructed like a solipsistic Escher painting, or, even more recently, like Mark Tansey’s wry explorations or artistic issues through imaginary narratives whose background texture is made up of letters. To go from one of the library’s or bookstore’s shelves to another, its readers have to pass through deconstructionist literary minefields, through a central hall with no symmetry, or through chains of solutions decorated with the metaphors of the books we have read. Everyone has to pass through the central hall (the reference room as it were) that connects all the rooms in that library, but no one outside of it knows that a central hall exists. From now on let us call that central hall the almost complete works of Augusto Monterroso. Its doors open in every direction, to all the missing links we have been searching for, and with all the scepticism, ire, passion, and amusement we need. His work is, in the final analysis, a testimony to a love of literature and the condition of Latin American culture. His positive displacement of genre constraints does not mean ideological abandonment, nor a reliance on the schlock and schmaltz of popularizers. Rather, his commitment is to the ethics of a writer and his writing, with the most pristine expression of the components of a life devoted to literature.