Juan José Arreola (1918–2001)

A Mexican giant: Arreola. The “story” is told chunks ranging from a few lines to a few pages in length. Each entry is told by from a wide variety of different characters and perspectives. And, in fact, it’s not so much one story as it is the many stories of the inhabitants of Zapotlán, based on Arreola’s hometown of Ciudad Guzmán. It took me quite a while to get accustomed to what was happening: different characters tell different stories and, though they occasionally intersect, show more mostly they don’t except that they are all told by people living in the same town, a town about to celebrate a fair in honor of its patron and founder. The writing is often funny and I suspect that the ridicule of religion is Arreola, not his characters, speaking. I am certain that I missed quite a bit: there are so many different story lines and so many characters that I simply failed to keep track of them all. And yet there is a narrative power that’s almost overwhelming: from the shoemaker who decides to become a farmer and plant corn, to the dispossessed seeking justice , from the creation of an immense fireworks show to the death of a leading citizen and, finally, to the place of the church, the land and the people take center stage. An impressive work and one that bears multiple re-readings, I think. This is Arreola’s only novel and it was seductive enough that I need to get to Confabulario, a collection of stories. show less

La mayoría de los cuentos del Bestiario son de los mejores en su estilo que he leído, y no me sorprende el que Arreola haya influenciado a toda una generación de escritores. Cada vez que toca un tema, que habla de algún ser, te hace verlo por primera vez, reimaginarlo. A pesar de que algunos son bastante crípticos o demasiado entrevesados, la habilidad poética y el ingenio de Arreola hace de su Bestiario una lectura obligada para el amante del texto breve.

I continued my short vacation from the novel with this compilation of short stories by Mexican author Juan José Arreola. It includes stories from Confabulario, originally published in 1952, as well as some additional texts published in a 1949 volume entitled Varia Invención. The author is considered one of Mexico's greatest and most innovative writers of short fiction in the 20th century, and he wrote around the same time as Juan Rulfo that other famous Mexican writer of short stories (and show more one short novel). Their creative paths crossed in their youth, in the form of the literary journal Pan, which they co-founded. The biographic information included in the introduction to this critical edition notes that Arreola was an enthusiastic reader of Marcel Schwob during his younger years, and he also once took an inspiring trip to Paris; the author once stated that "my life is divided into two parts: before the trip and after the trip." The reference to Schwob made more and more sense to me as I read these stories, some of which are brief portraits of historical figures similar to those I've been reading recently in Schwob's Vies imaginaires. The Arreola-Schwob connetion was also nice to know for another reason, because it reinforced another connection that I'll discuss later.

It took me a while to get into these stories. They were less accessible, less conversational than the stories by Augusto Monterroso that I'd read before beginning this book. One of the first stories is about an entrepreneur, Arpad Niklaus, who is collecting money to conduct an experiment that will involve reducing a camel to a stream of molecules passable through the eye of a needle. The project grows in scale, requiring the construction of facilities and generations of wealthy donors committing steadily-increasing sums of money. The theological implications of the success or failure of Niklaus's experiment are far-reaching, and it was as both possible outcomes were being discussed in terms of God and religion that I realized how much I liked the story, how what had begun as a simple sideshow experiment had been extended to an immense scale that encompassed the fate of all mankind. I hadn't expected it to go there.

Then, a few stories later, I came to "El guardagujas" (The Switchman), in which a traveler buys a ticket for a train then discusses with the switchman whether it will ever come. The railroad industry in the traveler's country is laying down an ever-expanding matrix of criss-crossing tracks, and it has created precise schedules for the running of its trains; however, the switchman has some interesting news for the traveler concerning the possibility that his train may or may not arrive to the station. He tells some fascinating stories about travelers unknowingly sent down the tracks to establish new communities in particularly beneficial locations, trains taken apart and put back together by passengers in order to cross ravines, and people who grow old and die on trains, with the railroad company making funeral arrangements with pride. The story is odd, and I was again struck by how a simple encounter between a traveler and a railroad worker spiraled to a scale I wouldn't have anticipated.

Mixed with these stories are short descriptions of rhinoceros-men and bull-men living in the modern world, historical accounts of men like Sinesio of Rodas, whose theological writings on angels were forgotten during the great wave of Christianity that swept through the western world, and Nabónides, who devoted his life to the compilation of an immense written history of Babylonia. There is one story that is an advertisement for artificial women who replace real flesh-and-blood wives, and in another, a traveling salesman comes to town and offers new wives in exchange for old ones; the town's men all take him up on the deal, except for one, who sticks with his old wife. In the end, nobody is happy. Another story is about an ant who finds a prodigious miligram. This small chunk of mineral matter is eventually worshipped by the colony, but their desire to see divinity in everyday grains of sand leads to their downfall.

As I was getting used to Arreola's more serious and erudite style, I came to a story entitled "Pablo." It's about a normal, boring accountant who one day discovers that he is God reincarnated. God, after creating the world and mankind in his image, exploded himself into bits and pieces that are present in all people, with successive generations representing a slow and steady progression that will end in the restoration of Himself, intact in one human being. Pablo is that guy, and when he realizes his godliness one day at work, he is awakened to a world of possibilities, experiences and human histories that all now belong to him. This brings with it positives and negatives, and in the end, Pablo makes an important decision regarding his fate, and the fate of all mankind.

I thought, wow, this story about a man with suddenly infinite possibilities and memories reminds me an awful lot of Jorge Luis Borges's "Funes the Memorious." And then I thought that actually, a lot of Arreola's stories made me think of Borges. There are marked differences between the two, most noticeable to me in Arreola's uneasy, complicated depiction of gender relations (besides the two stories about manufactured wives, there are also many stories about unhappy spouses and romantic betrayals), and his frequent use of Christian themes (God, the Devil, angels and other elements of Christianity make frequent appearances in his stories). However, there are also great similarities: Arreola, like Borges, was an avid reader whose education in literature was largely autodidactic; both men exhibit great fascination with the past and the stories of men whom history has forgotten; and both are able to take small stories revolving around simple objects or single encounters between people, and expand the meanings of these objects and encounters to immense, sometimes infinite scopes. I enjoyed these similarities because, as I've been wanting to read more books by Mexican authors, it was nice to begin with Arreola, whose short stories are in some ways analogous to those of Borges. I imagine the two men, who were born a few decades apart at the beginning of the 20th century, growing up at opposite corners of Latin America: Borges, looking out from between the bars of the fence separating his family's Palermo home from the streets filled with hard, savage men, gauchos and malevos distant and fascinating to the young Argentine; and Arreola, growing up in a Mexico far less familiar to me than Borges's Palermo, whose streets I once had the pleasure of walking. Arreola's upbringing would appear to be more Catholic and also humbler (Arreola's biography contains no seven year stays in Switzerland), but as they grew up and began their careers in the world of literature, their short fictions in some ways ran parallel.

Borges wrote his Universal History of Infamy in part inspired by Schwob's imaginary biographical sketches, so the connection Borges-Schwob-Arreola, which I had briefly considered as I started reading the introductory biography of this Mexican author who almost exclusively wrote short stories, ended up being more compelling than I might have expected. This makes me happy. I'd rushed up to the library on my break at work one day after reading an essay about Borges and how some of his writings exhibit the influence of Schwob, and I wanted to get to know this French antecedent to an Argentine author I know and love. Now I've seen how the Frenchman influenced the writing of another author from the opposite end of Spanish speaking America.

After reading this book, I've decided to continue with Mexican literature for a little while, and I started reading Elena Garro's Recuerdos del Porvenir yesterday. It's pretty good so far. I've also got two books by Alfonso Reyes, a Spanish man who had deep literary connections with both Mexico and Argentina. I hope his books will help me understand the ways that both nation's literatures developed and interacted with each other in the early part of the 20th century. show less

Poche pagine, racconti brevissimi che più che racconti sono piccoli quadri di quello che siamo. Ma descritti come animali.
Un libricino da riprendere ogni tanto in mano, così. Per uno spunto.