A bigger burro? | Jürgen Scheeff / Unsplash License
It’s difficult to write about The Rest Is Silence (trans. from the Spanish by Aaron Kerner, New York Review Books, 2024) without sounding like Eduardo Torres, the puffed-up literary critic and protagonist of Augusto Monterroso’s metatextual satire—but I will do my best. The novel, originally published in 1978, is the only one by Guatemalan-born Monterroso (1921–2003), whose archly elegant, politically barbed microfiction earned him the praise of Italo Calvino (“the most beautiful stories in the world”) and comparisons to Jorge Luis Borges, but never a wide readership. He remained a writer’s writer.
The Rest Is Silence (the third work of Monterroso’s to be translated into English) is presented as a four-part celebration of the life and work of Torres, preeminent literary critic of the fictional San Blas, Mexico. But The Rest Is Silence abounds with unreliable narrators who don’t celebrate Torres so much as they do air their grievances. Most of the “tributes” in part one are hatchet jobs delivered by his friends, familiars, and one maniacally obsessed servant; part two’s “Selections From the Work of Eduardo Torres” consists of the critic’s rambling, ostentatious misreadings; part three (“Aphorisms, Maxims, Etc.”) showcases Torres’s slapstick forays into quasi wisdom; and part four (“Impromptu Collaborations”) displays a hall of (vanity) mirrors. What is wisdom, The Rest Is Silence asks us, without foolishness? Or, in the words of the wise critic Eduardo Torres: “Intelligence tends to engender the sort of foolishness that only foolishness could possibly correct.”
Eduardo Torres, with his self-important pronouncements, is nothing if not windmill-chasing. Miguel de Cervantes, alluded to throughout Monterroso’s novel, was considered low-class among the nobleman writers of the early seventeenth century. Monterroso, similarly, was an autodidact: He dropped out of school at age 11, later working a day job at a butcher shop and taking classes at night. Like Cervantes’s Don Quixote, The Rest Is Silence abounds with earthy humor. (Torres on virginity: “You have to use it in order to lose it.”) Metafiction and self-satire also define Don Quixote. Its “original author” was an “Arabic historian,” whose bloated syntax Cervantes, acting as “editor,” mocks. The Rest Is Silence is similarly curated by an “editor” who has arranged texts written under pseudonyms that lambast and obsess over the fictional Torres. One such passage is a letter to the editor about how wrong Torres gets Don Quixote in one of his articles for the Sunday papers.
Under Monterroso’s microscope, the affectations of the literati, including his own, come into focus. Nobody, he seems to say, can write without risking foolishness. And it’s even more reason to continue. If you haven’t read Diogenes’s “fragments,” don’t have the patience to treat literature as a puzzle, detest endnotes (translator Aaron Kerner’s are essential), and can’t relate to the plight of Borges’s Pierre Menard, then you probably won’t like The Rest Is Silence. To me, however, the novel’s erudition does not cause Monterroso/Torres’s brow to migrate too high, thanks to the Groucho Marx nose and mustache glasses he keeps firmly on.
“The Burro of San Blas (Or, There’s Always a Bigger Ass),” a poem poking fun at Torres, nearly concludes the book’s “celebration” of the critic. But a commentator, the pseudonymous Alirio Gutiérrez, has the final befuddling word:
“(a) the subject of the epigram is Eduardo Torres.
(b) I know the author of the epigram.
(c) the author of the epigram is me.
(d) the author of the epigram is Eduardo Torres.
(e) the subject of the epigram is me.”
However, the joke is on us. “Gutiérrez” reminds us of the conclusion of “The Burro of San Blas”: “If anyone reading believes what’s been said, / he’s a much bigger burro for having thus read.”
The novel’s title is attributed erroneously to The Tempest. But “the rest is silence” are the words that leave not Prospero’s but the dying Hamlet’s mouth. Monterroso’s father died young, in his son’s words, “determined to found newspapers and magazines in hostile environments.” Monterroso was himself a member of Guatemala’s Generacion del 40 (a coalition of activists and artists inspired by the Guatemalan Revolution of 1944), and his own environment became hostile to the magazine Acento and the political newspaper El Espectador, both of which he founded as a student. Dictator Jorge Ubico took control of Guatemala by spreading outrageous propaganda against the Communist Party, brutally torturing and killing its leaders, and arresting Monterroso and his editors. Monterroso fled for Mexico City in 1944, where he lived as a minor politician and writer. His exile was punctuated by a brief return to Guatemala in 1996 to receive the national award for literature. He died in Mexico City in 2003.
To the literary critic and Marxist philosopher György Lukács, Cervantes’s Don Quixote displays a “mature man’s knowledge that meaning can never quite penetrate reality, but that without meaning, reality would disintegrate into the nothingness of inessentiality.” When the fantasy ends, Don Quixote dies. Foolish meaning-seekers like Don Quixote and Monterroso’s Eduardo Torres question all political fictions, thereby threatening ideologies that degrade reality. Twenty-first-century writers and critics should look to Augusto Monterroso to find words as silly as they are serious, for the rest is silence.
