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Thursday, April 29th, 2010
Monterroso writes, "There are three topics: love, death, and flies" -- and right away I'm thinking of Robyn Hitchcock... This is the introduction to part II  of Monterroso's collection Complete Works (and Other Stories).*
There are three topics: love, death, and flies. Since humanity has existed, this sentiment, this fear, these presences have accompanied him everywhere. Let others deal with the first two; I will occupy myself with flies, which are greater than men (if not than women). For years I've had in mind the idea of putting together a universal anthology of the fly. I still mean to do it -- but, I soon came to realize the task was practically infinite. The fly pervades literature; anywhere you cast your eye, you are sure to find the fly. There is no true author who has not taken the opportunity to dedicate a poem, a page, a paragraph, a line to him; if you are an author and have not done this, I advise you to follow my example, to hurry up and do it. Flies are the Eumenides, the Erinyes; they are chastisers. They are avengers, for what we don't know -- but you know that they have persecuted you; as far as you know, they will go on persecuting you forever. They are vigilant. They are the avatars of something unnameable, something benevolent or malign. They pursue you. They follow you. They watch you. When at last you die, it's likely (and it's too bad) that one fly will suffice to carry your poor, distracted soul who knows where. Flies convey -- and they come over the course of the ages to own their cargo -- the souls of our dead, of our forebears, who thus remain close to us, accompanying us, determined to protect us. They are a means for our small souls' transmigrations; they accumulate wisdom -- they come to know everything that we do not dare to know. Perhaps the ultimate propagator of our tired western culture will be the body of this fly, who has come down through the course of the centuries, furthering his line without enriching himself....
You can read the original at valdeperrillos.com, where they have the beginnings of the anthology Monterroso dreams of -- I am surprised not to see Denevi's God of the flies in there as well.
 * It appears this piece is actually from a different collection, Perpetual Motion; the two collections were published together in translation under the title of the first.
posted evening of Thursday, April 29th, 2010: Respond
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Friday, April 30th, 2010
The rest of the piece I started yesterday -- Monterroso explains some of the role flies play in our universe.
...And think about what I believe Milla said (an author whom of course you will not know but whom thanks to having occupied yourself with the fly, you are hearing mentioned for the first time today), that the fly is not as ugly as it appears at first sight. But this is because, at first sight it does not appear ugly -- precisely because nobody has ever seen a fly for the first time. Nobody ever thinks to wonder, were there flies before me? will there be flies after me? In the beginning was the fly. (It's practically impossible that such a phrase would not appear here -- in the beginning was the fly or some such thing. We live out these phrases. Phrases which --fly--, like sorrow --fly--, mean nothing. Grievous phrases which fill up our books.) Forget it. It's easier for a fly to land on the Pope's nose than for the Pope to land on the nose of a fly. The Pope, or the king or the president (the president of the country of course -- the president of a financial company or a corporation or a maker of product X is in general foolish enough to be considered better than that) is not able to call out his Swiss Guard or his Royal Guard or his Presidential Guard to kill a fly. On the contrary, he is tolerant; perhaps he will just scratch his nose. You know. And you know that the fly knows too, and watches out; you know that what we actually have is a guard of flies, who take care at every hour lest we fall into mortal sin -- which would require a guard of angels, who would soon slack off and turn into accomplices, like the angel in Hitler's guard or the one in Johnson's. But it doesn't have to be that way. Let's return to noses. The fly who lands on yours is a direct descendant of the one who dropped in on Cleopatra's. And once again you fall into these prefabricated rhetorical allusions which everyone has used already. And still you want to create literature. The fly wants you to wrap it in this atmosphere of kings, popes and emperors -- and it wins out. It is your master. You cannot speak of it without an inclination towards grandeur. Oh Melville, you had to sail the seas in order finally to make up this great white whale on your desk in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, without realizing that all the while, since the hot evenings of your childhood when Evil would flutter around your strawberry ice cream and, as the years passed by, over you yourself in the dusk as you pulled out one by one the brown hairs of your beard, reading Cervantes and polishing your style; and not necessarily in that enormous mass of bones and sperm incapable of doing any evil, but rather in him who interrupts your nap, like the crazy Ahab, and Poe and his raven? Ridiculous. Take a look at the fly. Observe. Think.
...Well, much of this is pretty rough. That last sentence in particular, about Melville, is a monstrosity that is going to take a while to figure out. The author Milla whom Monterroso refers to at the top of this piece is José Milla y Vidaurre, who has an essay about flies in his Book Without a Name. Not sure why Monterroso doesn't think his audience would have heard of Milla -- the Wikipædia entry makes it sound like he was an important author in Guatemala. Come to think of it I don't know if Monterroso was writing for a specifically Guatemalan audience, or if he was even living in Guatemala when he wrote this book. Lots to find out... The next book Milla wrote was called Book With a Name.
posted evening of Friday, April 30th, 2010: Respond
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