The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, translated by Aaron Kerner. NYRB Classics, 176 pages. 2024.
Who exactlyis Eduardo Torres?
Any proper answer would have to come in phases. For starters, Torres is (or was—his existential standing is a matter of debate) a provincial literary critic hailing from San Blas, Mexico; an enemy of some and and mentor to many; the scripturient founder of the Sunday Cultural Supplement of El Heraldo de San Blas, “a daily paper that, much like the light of those stars still observable by the telescopes of astronomers after millions of years of extinction,” as his brother recalls, “continues to illuminate the hearths of the residents of San Blas even fifteen or twenty minutes after having been read.”
More honestly, or at least more literally, Torres is the subject of the Guatemalan miniaturist Augusto Monterroso’s sole foray into the novel form, The Rest Is Silence, published in Spanish in 1978 and appearing now in English in a sinuous translation by Aaron Kerner.
And then, you can’t escape the fact that Torres is really Monterroso himself, a gently mocking self-portrait of the quintessential writer’s writer’s writer—a figure who’s maybe best described less as a member of the Boom latinoamericano than as an M-80 erupting on the margins of the literary scene, no less potent for his peripherality.
Over a literary career spanning five decades, Monterroso published sparingly, pushing out a dozen works of fiction and memoir at irregular intervals with what you almost have to imagine was a grimace. Patient, unassuming, but with a wry sense of self-awareness, he managed to turn his decided non-prolificity into a generatively self-reflexive joke. Given the deliberately patchy nature of his body of work, it doesn’t really feel right to describe The Rest Is Silence as a career capstone, the work in which he brings it all together. Or maybe that’s exactly how to describe it—the novel-as-collection, a work that jangles like a jar of spare buttons. Cooked up by a mind constitutionally wary of synthesis, Monterroso’s oeuvre is ultimately as stubbornly irreducible as the man himself.
Monterroso’s writings are obsessed, subtly but persistently, with the intricacies of self-definition, and for good reason. Born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on December 21, 1921, to a Honduran mother and a Guatemalan father, Monterroso would spend much of his youth shuttling between his birth country and the neighboring state of Guatemala. In his memoir The Gold Seekers, published in Spanish in 1993, he attributes “the sensation of estrangement, of not belonging, that has accompanied me since then” to this “back-and-forth” movement. The family relocated to Guatemala on a permanent basis when Monterroso was fourteen, but a sense of errancy would remain a constant in his life. Forced to flee the country for political reasons in 1944, Monterroso led a peripatetic existence for much of the next decade and change, finally settling in Mexico City for good in 1956, where he would reside until his death in 2003.
The Rest Is Silence can often feel like a Rube Goldberg machine of self-critique, the mechanical boundaries of which are hazily defined.
The Gold Seekers also details Monterroso’s formation as a writer—or rather, his discovery of those mental and personality-based tics that would frustrate this formation. By his own admission, Monterroso lacked the unity and persistence of focus often associated with a sustained and traditionally productive literary career. Fittingly, his memoir is a fidgety reminiscence, picking over anecdotes and sense impressions with a gleaner’s gimlet eye. “I remember the exterior, the façade and the pale violet color of our house’s interior as if I were there today,” he writes of his childhood home, “but I am incapable of representing them in words, owing to the enormous difficulty I have always felt when describing places or making physical portraits of people, real or fictitious, given that I tend instead to seek or imagine their inner lives, with their jumble of true or imaginary conflicts.”
Monterroso’s earliest stories, collected in 1959’s Complete Works (and Other Stories) and 1972’s Perpetual Motion, are rife with similarly meta musings on the nature of writing. In “Brevity,” a story, fittingly, of just four paragraphs, the narrator opines on his own thwarted circumstances. “The truth is that the writer of short pieces wants nothing more in this world than to write long texts, interminably long texts in which the imagination does not have to work,” he admits, “in which facts, things, animals, and men meet, seek each other out, exist, live together, love, or shed their blood freely without being subjected to the semicolon or the period.”
In contrast to the flabbiness of his pen hand, Monterroso’s reading habits were always hypertrophied. With no formal education after the fifth grade—a fact that would cause him some embarrassment when he began to hobnob with members of the Mexican literary establishment—Monterroso set out as a young adult on an ambitious campaign of self-education, and his later writings evince in spades the autodidact’s respect for tradition. He fell in love with the Spanish classics, devouring the arch picaresques of Cervantes and delighting in the ornate classicism of Luis de Góngora. Throughout his works, Monterroso also invokes a goodly number of Latin and Greek sources, reveling in the atmosphere of dusty pomposity these allusions kick up. His hard-earned facility with the classics, you sense, allowed him the freedom of irreverence—he’s constantly making light of one sacred cow or another, treating his idols with a bright, affectionate irony.
But the fons et origo of Monterroso’s style is really to be found in distraction—more specifically, in “the incurable distraction” that afflicted him throughout his life. Maybe it isn’t surprising that a writer prone to distraction would gravitate toward miniature forms. After all, the writer of micro-fictions and essaylets doesn’t have to focus for as long when composing. But I think it’s also true that the quality of their attention is different, more intense. The constitutionally flighty nature of his mind led Monterroso to develop a narrative approach that he deemed “internal realism,” which emphasizes brevity and quickness and deals in swift generalizations. As a mode, it concerns itself less with the stream of emotions coursing through a character’s mind and more with the welter of conjecture that runs alongside it—the arguments we’re constantly having with ourselves, or the straw men we’ve thrown together to batter and best.
Along with Monterroso’s predisposition to brevity comes a penchant, much savored, for pedantry. For the naturally discursive mind, a gift for hairsplitting is a salvation of sorts, opening up the possibility of a hermeneutics of the glancing, a phenomenology of the scintilla. But the true pedant is also aware that their interest in a given detail or line of thought is subjective—the object of interest is both of paramount importance and completely disposable at the same time. This, I think, is the nature of Monterroso’s light touch. The details in his texts have an aura of overwhelming significance, but they don’t insist on their essentiality—you get the feeling they could be swapped out fairly easily for something else without doing much damage to the spirit of the text or sending Monterroso’s oddly weighted stories careening off the rails.
Which brings us to The Rest Is Silence. Monterroso’s only novel opens with an underwhelming epitaph for its subject, the potentially deceased E. Torres, and ends with a flurry of practically useless scholarly addenda—an index of names, a bibliography, and a list of abbreviations used in the text. In between is what you might call the main course, comprising, among other gristly bits and bobs, a selection of aphorisms penned by Torres; a sampling of Torres’s articles on subjects ranging from Don Quixote to International Living Creature’s Day, complete with several cartoonishly amateur drawings of a host of animals; and an extensive analysis, by one Alirio Gutiérrez, of a satirical sonnet aimed at Torres.
Four tributes to the biographee open the text, establishing a vibe like that of a ructious literary conference. There’s one by Torres’s erstwhile private secretary, Juan Islas Mercado; one by his brother, Luis Jéronimo Torres; one by Luciano Zamora, another secretary; and one by Torres’s wife, Carmen. As tributes, they all whiff it magnificently. Mercado’s offering, replete as it is with Latin quotations and Homeric similes, seems less an attempt to honor Torres and more an effort to flaunt the florid prose style cribbed from his maestro. The remembrance by Torres’s brother, likewise stippled with classicisms, doubles as a minor case study in fraternal resentment. And Carmen’s chapter unfolds in long, ranting skeins, the sentences prancing on for pages at a time. We learn, among other things, that Torres wasn’t a very attentive father, “hardly ever helping out with the children, leaving them to me, or when he did, it was only to tell them to read such and such a book, as if that would do them any good at all.”
Torres functions as an absent center throughout the novel, a sort of confessional void—which is to say, when the book’s characters critique Torres, they’re really aiming their barbs at Monterroso himself. As a result, The Rest Is Silence can often feel like a Rube Goldberg machine of self-critique, the mechanical boundaries of which are hazily defined. It’s not just Torres who seems like an exaggerated projection of Monterroso. The novel’s other characters also embody various Monterrosian traits. Zamora, for instance, confesses to being “frequently distracted,” so that “the most important things can happen to me as I daydream without my even realizing it.” After these tributes manqué, we’re introduced to Torres’s own writing. The excerpts provided are laughable, rife with sophistic arguments, stylistic peccadilloes, and clumsy misreadings of the classics, like an overly general précis of Don Quixote in which Sancho Panza is described as “a coarse and contemptible peasant wholly dedicated to the satisfaction of his basest physical desires.” A general windbaggery maintains, as in the essay “Translators and Traitors,” which opens with a clunker of nerve-rattling intensity. “Anyone who has had many years of successful experience with translation,” Torres writes, “will be well aware that this type of work is, perhaps—and, at the risk of exaggerating, not even perhaps—of all tasks essayed by the inquisitive human mind, if not the most difficult, then certainly the least easy.”
If Monterroso’s fictions and essays are undeniably miniature, there’s rarely anything tight about them.
Monterroso has often been compared to Borges, and the comparisons are generally pretty apt. Both writers preoccupied themselves, formally, with short stories and essays that seem to merge into one another; both had a playful interest in scholarly arcana; both were obsessed with the question of style; and both were fascinated by parables and fables. But compared with the ironclad intertextuality of a writer like Borges, Monterroso’s own brand of self-referentiality isn’t exactly philosophically sound—a result, probably, of his antic disposition. It doesn’t approach, or even attempt to approach, the ideal of a closed system. Read a Borges story, and you often get a sense of the author going solemnly about his work like a monk. In a Monterroso story, the image called to mind is rather that of a clerk—one who is lazy, or bad at his job, or poorly trained, or some combination of the three. Things seem simply to have been misfiled.
The Rest Is Silence, for instance, contains a chapter that’s a review, by Torres, of Monterroso’s collection The Black Sheep and Other Fables. And in Monterroso’s collection Perpetual Motion there are already hints of Torres; several epigraphs are attributed to him, while in one story a character, in an attempt to amuse himself, “writes three pages of false exegesis of one of Góngora’s octaves.” As he does so, he “piles inanity upon inanity, attributing them to a provincial critic.” This will become the chapter “The Bird and the Zither (On a Forgotten Octave by Góngora)” in The Rest Is Silence.
If Monterroso’s fictions and essays are undeniably miniature, there’s rarely anything tight about them. Messiness isn’t something to be abhorred but embraced; Monterroso seemed to live and write by the postulate, tossed off by Borges, that “imprecision is tolerable or plausible in literature because we almost always tend toward it in reality.” It isn’t surprising, then, to find him at one point praising not the aperçu but the fragment:
Sometimes a fragment may be more thoughtful than an entire modern book. In its zeal for synthesis, Antiquity greatly cultivated the fragment. The ancient author who wrote the best fragments—whether with great discipline or simply because he was naturally disposed to the form—was Heracleitus. It is said that every night, before stretching himself out to sleep, he would write down that evening’s fragment. Some came out so small that they have since been lost.
The irony here is layered. The notion that ancient works of literature haven’t simply come down to us in fragmentary form, but that the ancients in fact excelled at writing fragments, is a basic inversion, almost childlike in its simplicity. But like one of Shakespeare’s fools, Torres gets at something approximating wisdom through his upending of the conceptual status quo—since this, anyway, is how we tend to read fragments: as possessed of a compression that isn’t real, a poetry that was never intended. When it comes to reading and works of literature, Monterroso verges on suggesting that compression and extensity alike are fabrications—that, in other words, it’s not the writer who creates form, but the reader.
“Pedantry is incompatible with form,” the critic Erich Heller once observed of Thomas Mann’s fiction. “Therefore it is the enemy of art.” What Heller had in mind was Mann’s much-maligned essayism, his tendency to overstuff his novels with ideas and research until they strained against their limits like a burgherly paunch against its waistcoat.
But pedantry, as an avocation, might best be considered a subset of collecting, one in which the things collected lack (or seem to lack) what would more commonly be considered a connective trait. There isn’t an overarching project involved, or if there is, the project is so large as to be self-defeating—see, for instance, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, in many ways the apotheosis of the pedant’s art.
Monterroso’s major totem was always and ever the common fly. “Years ago I had the idea of compiling a world anthology of the fly,” Monterroso writes in the short essay “Flies,” in his collection Perpetual Motion. “I soon realized, however, that it was a practically infinite undertaking. The fly invades all literatures, and, of course, wherever one looks one finds the fly.” (But he never really abandoned the project, as a footnote concedes.) The essay, a mock-solemn phenomenology of the fly, depicts its humble subject as an eternal figure, perpetually present, intrusive in the most minimal of ways, but never really observed, never pinned down. The fly is best read not simply as a symbol of Monterroso’s skittish temperament—and, by extension, of his literary production—but as a model for it as well; it’s pedantry made manifest, the smallest possible thing that’s still capable of nagging at us, of ceaselessly capturing our attention.
The Rest Is Silence is just as flyblown as Monterroso’s other texts. At one point, Torres’s deputy Zamora falls back on a dipterous analogy to capture the experience of a particularly prolonged and trying bout of distraction:
My mind during those days was like one of those flies that you find at some moments sitting uneasily on the ceiling rubbing its hands, and at others flitting anxiously around by the window without making up its mind to go out, or fixed to the wall, immobile, as though dead, and apparently oblivious to the various ills of this world, or in any old place that flies habitually frequent, except when they’re melancholy or lovestruck and at wit’s end, since in such circumstances they don’t feel much inclination to go out in the street or even to pass their time on the wall . . .
It keeps going, of course, Zamora’s thoughts sprinting ahead, like a happy panic attack. As with the novel itself, there’s no designated endpoint here, no sense of culmination. Thoughts and perspectives simply multiply, to the point that the fly becomes a symbol, for Monterroso, of the boundlessness of the minutest subject.
In a brief addendum to the text, Torres takes up the subject of the book we’ve just read. “When I first read this anthology, it seemed to me that my own life, and San Blas, and my relatives and friends and enemies, had been a sort of dream, and that these crumbs were all that remained of it,” he observes. “Sometimes, rereading myself, I paused, glanced from side to side, and wondered whether I’d actually written the things that have been included here, whether I’d actually thought the things that I said, or the things that it’s said that I said.”
The note of uncertainty here is critical. At the end of the book, we can’t really be said to know Torres, to have grasped his character in any meaningful sense. Was he a good writer, or a tragically bad one? Or else something in between? That is, was he simply someone who lived by his pen, who, like most writers, was sometimes inspired, and sometimes not? Who every now and then was forced to knock out a few pages of dreck? Whose brain—like most brains—functioned sporadically? The Rest Is Silence offers no definitive readings, and it doesn’t try to. Eduardo Torres—like you, and like me—is a mystery that will never be exhausted.