El bautismo

El bautismo (Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, 1991)
by César Aira
Argentina, 1991

Who knows just what the frick don César Aira's prattling on about for most of this approximately 150-page doorstopper--the representation of reality? literary criticism? Mother Nature and mass extinction?  LOL!--but does it really matter much what the human Cheshire Cat is up to given that his entire career is essentially an extended homage to the unreliable narrator?  I thought not.  In any case, El bautismo [The Baptism, not yet available in English] is ostensibly concerned with depicting two landmark events in bourgeois parish priest turned film critic Máximo's life--the first having to do with the storm-tossed night when he refused to baptize a prematurely born baby because it was so hideous to the eyes and of an undetermined gender that it was worth denying the sacrament to and the second having to do with a night some twenty years later when the now elderly priest realizes that the handsome young man he's been keeping company with during a catastrophic flood is the very same person he'd refused to baptize years and years ago.  Mischievous baptism/flood parallels notwithstanding (the incessant rain of the second night is said to be the cause of "la muerte por inmersión de millones de animalitos" ["the death by immersion of millions of little animals"] with "little animals" naturally including humans such as you and yours truly [83]), non-theological gags constitute the primary sources of humor here as in the free indirect discourse swipe at an infamously uptight American master of the same ("Como Henry James, tendría que dar los más interminables rodeos para evitar hablar del sexo" ["Like Henry James, he'd have to beat around the bush ad nauseam to avoid speaking about sex"]) (64); the several pages dedicated to competing lettered and unlettered interpretations of Campo Argentino [Argentinean Countryside] magazine's comic book feuilleton of what would appear to be a cross-dressing and particularly violent sequel to the gaucho epic Martín Fierro; Máximo's provocative claim that regardless of the intrinsic good or bad value of a movie, "el producto final del cine son los buenos críticos" ["the end product of film is good critics"] (115); and a surrealist sight gag in which the edifice in which the priest and the young man have taken shelter is revealed to be a doll house.  OK, so maybe that bit about good critics being the true end product of film is more provocative than funny.  Still, it's at least somewhat amusing to see where Aira and the priest go with the joke: "La verdadera astucia de un productor de cine es trabajar con muertos, no con vivos" ["The true cleverness of a film producer lies in working with the dead and not the living"], Máximo argues.  "Hay que ponerse del lado de la fatalidad.  Los muertos en la realidad no se mueven ni configuran argumentos interesantes, pero el cine puede crear esa ilusión, y es la que mejor le sale...  Cualquier película, la más trivial, mejora con el sencillo expediente de considerarla una danza de cadáveres" ["Put yourself in Fate's shoes.  The dead in reality neither come up with nor fashion interesting plots, but film can create that illusion and that's how things turn out for the best...  Any movie, no matter how trivial, improves by the simple expedient of considering it as a dance of cadavers"] (115, ellipses added).  WTF?  Word, homey!

 César Aira

Other Aira Works Reviewed on Caravana de recuerdos

Ema, la cautiva (1981)

"Cecil Taylor" (1987)

Los Fantasmas (1990)

La prueba (1992)

Cómo me hice monja (1993)

Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero (2000)

La Vida Nueva (2007)

Continuación de ideas diversas (2014)

Una excursión a los indios ranqueles: Captivity Narratives I

Una excursión a los indios ranqueles (EDICOL, 2006)
by Lucio V. Mansilla
Argentina, 1870

Towards the very end of Una excursión a los indios ranqueles--a book first published as a series of letters in the Buenos Aires newspaper La Tribuna and, as previously mentioned, now translated into English by Eva Gillies as A Visit to the Ranquel Indians [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997]--Colonel Lucio V. Mansilla shares two captivity narratives that probably weighed on the minds of many of his readers back home seeing as how they had to do with the abduction of white women by Indian raiding parties along the Cordoban frontier.  Although I'm not going to take the time to comment on the second captive's story right now, in the first of the two stories Mansilla describes his meeting with a captive by the name of Doña Fermina Zárate, seized at about the age of 20 and now one of the longtime wives of a Ranquel cacique or chieftain known as Ramón.  Chief Ramón, one of the Ranqueles whom Mansilla most admires, has just told his visitor that "la señora es muy buena, me ha acompañado muchos años, yo le estoy muy agradecido, por eso le he dicho ya que puede salir cuando quiera volverse a su tierra, donde está su familia" ["the señora is very good, she has kept me company many years, I am very grateful to her; so I've told her she may go if she wishes and return to her own country where her family lives"] (492 in the Spanish, 360 in Gillies' English translation).  However, to Mansilla's surprise, the captive greets the news of her liberation not with tears of joy but with torrents of tears.  To give you a close-up of Mansilla's personality as a writer, his struggles to overcome his racism, and a dramatic indication of his work's value as a primary source,  here's the rest of the vignette-like scene in Mansilla's own words beginning with the moment when the colonel and the captive are left alone by the Ranquel husband Ramón (493 in the Spanish, 360-361 in the English):

-¿Y por qué no se viene usted conmigo, señora? -la dije.

-¡Ah!, señor -me contestó con amargura-, ¿y qué voy a hacer yo entre los cristianos?

-Para reunirse con su familia.  Ya la conozco, está en la Carlota, todos se acuerdan de usted con gran cariño y la lloran mucho.

-¿Y mis hijos, señor?

-Sus hijos...

-Ramón me deja salir a mí porque realmente no es mal hombre; a mí al menos me ha tratado bien, después que fui madre.  Pero mis hijos, mis hijos no quiere que los lleve.

No me resolví a decirle: Déjelos usted, son el fruto de la violencia.

¡Eran sus hijos!

Ella prosiguió:

-Además, señor, ¿qué vida sería la mía entre los cristianos después de tantos años que falto de mi pueblo?  Yo era joven y buena moza cuando me cautivaron.  Y ahora ya ve, estoy vieja.  Parezco cristiana, porque Ramón me permite vestirme como ellas, pero vivo como india; y francamente, me parece que soy más india que cristiana, aunque creo en Dios, como que todos los días le encomiendo mis hijos y mi familia.

-¿A pesar de estar usted cautiva cree en Dios?

-¿Y Él qué culpa tiene de que me agarraran los indios?  La culpa la tendrán los cristianos que no saben cuidar sus mujeres ni sus hijos.

No contesté; tan alta filosofía en boca de aquella mujer, la concubina jubilada de aquél bárbaro, me humilló....

["So why don't you come away with me, señora?"

"Ah, Sir!" replied she with bitterness, "and what am I to do among the Christians?"

"Come and join your family!  I know them, they're at La Carlota, they all remember you with the greatest affection and mourn for you."

"And what about my children, Sir?"

"Your children?"

"Ramón's letting me go myself--because really he's not a bad man; me at least he's always treated well, after I became a mother.  But my children--he doesn't want me to take away my children."

I could not make up my mind to say to her, "Leave them behind, they are the offspring of violence."  They were her children!

She went on, "Besides, Sir--what sort of a life would I have among Christians, after being away from my hometown for so many years?  I was young and pretty when they took me captive.  And now, as you can see, I've grown old.  I look like a Christian, because Ramón allows me to dress as they do; but I live like an Indian woman and, honestly, I think I'm more more Indian than Christian--though I do believe in God and indeed commend my children and family to Him every day."

"Despite being a captive, you believe in God?"

"And what fault of His is it that the Indians grabbed me?  The fault lies with the Christians, who don't know how to look after their women or their children."

I made no answer: such high philosophy from the lips of that woman--the pensioned-off concubine of that barbarian--humbled me....]

Mansilla's obvious struggle to make sense of the complexity of the situation--"I could not make up my mind to say to her, 'Leave them behind, they are the offspring of violence.'  They were her children!"--and Doña Fermina's description of the Christians as "they" rather than "we" are the sort of things that make Mansilla an excellent and "authentic" tour guide.  And even though Mansilla doesn't hesitate to call his Indian host "that barbarian," he often tries to understand the barbarians and their "more Indian than Christian" captives from their points of view.  Is that enough to justify his frequent racism?  You be the judge.  Next up: a captivity narrative from Mansilla about a Ranquel Indian abducted by whites.  Below: two 19th century paintings dedicated to the trauma or propaganda value of Indian raids: Argentinean Ángel della Valle's La vuelta del malón [The Return of the Raiders], a detail of which figures on the cover of my EDICOL edition of Una excursión a los indios ranqueles, and German Johann Moritz Rugendas' El malón [The Indian Raid], a canvas concerning a Mapuche raid in Chile.  People who have read César Aira's 2000 novel Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero [An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter], a work having to do with the "landscape painter" Rugendas' multiple and exotic misfortunes in Argentina including being struck by lightning and witnessing Indian raids, can now start debating whether the surrealistic scene in which an Indian raider grabs an uncommonly large salmon as if to steal it for a mate is actually an inside joke inspired by the lady captive's salmon steak-colored dress in the center of El malón below.  Mansilla-della Valle-Rugendas-Aira.  That sure seems to be the case to me!

 La vuelta del malón
(Ángel della Valle, 1892)

El malón

(Johann Moritz Rugendas, 1836)

Lo que dice César Aira

"Lo que dice César Aira"
by Sergio Pitol
Mexico, 2006

Sergio Pitol's eight page long tequila shot "Lo que dice César Aira" ["What César Aira Says," as far as I know not yet available for consumption in translation] is the sort of warm, memoiristic slap to the head that might induce more of a fannish literary history buzz in people who are already familiar with Aira's 1997 El congreso de literatura [The Literary Conference]--a true story about a mad scientist named César Aira who decides to clone Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes at a literary conference in Venezuela--but even for people who haven't drunk the Aira Kool-Aid as yet, it's still exactly the sort of mind-altering amber goodness you might expect when one of your favorite writers decides to hoist a shot glass or two in honor of another one of your favorites.  In any event, I'll step out of the way and let Pitol (photo above) get the anecdotal ball rolling:

Debió ser a finales de 1993 o principios de 1994 cuando conocí a César Aira.  Fue en uno de esos congresos anuales de literatura en Mérida, Venezuela, a donde invitaban una o dos docenas de escritores hispanoamericanos, y que tenía como sede un hotel campestre, rodeado de chalets.  Después de los escritores venezolanos, que eran legión, la delegación mexicana era la más amplia: seis o siete narradores.  A mí me tocó compartir una cabaña de tres dormitorios, un amplio salón y un baño, con el español Enrique Vila-Matas, amigo desde hacía muchos años y con un joven argentino para mí enteramente desconocido.  Era César Aira, quien se presentó con nosotros muy educadamente, pero con un leve aire de lejanía.  Durante los cinco o seis días que duró la reunión, cambiamos escasísimas palabras.  Los saludos en la mañana, las buenas noches después de la cena y durante el transcurso del día alguna que otra frase banal sobre el clima.  En la noche había fiestas y convivios bastante divertidos a donde él no concurría.  Siempre lo veía inclinando escribiendo en unas pequeñas libretas.  Sus compañeros argentinos Héctor Libertella y Sergio Chejfec hablaban de él con reverencia.  Comentaban que quizás era la figura más inusitada de la nueva literatura.  Era una escritura provocativa, irritante, radicalmente desconcertante, semejante a la de Gombrowicz, nos decían a los mexicanos, quienes, como yo, también lo desconocían.  El único de nosotros que podía participar en esas conversaciones era Hernán Lara Zavala, pues había publicado en la colección que dirigía en la UNAM una novela suya, El llanto.  El tema del congreso ese año se ceñia a una ars poética; cada uno debía explicar la suya.  Aira definió su juego de procedimientos narrativos como un mecanismo que se movía en dirección contraria a las convenciones narrativas.  A él no le interesaba hacer lo que todos hacían, ni seguir las líneas de Balzac o Stendhal, a quienes conocía perfectamente y respetaba, porque esas formas ya estaban cristalizadas; la novela contemporánea que tocase los mismos temas y siguiera haciendo algunas variaciones sobre formas narrativas ya canonizadas, le hastiaba.  A él le interesaba remontarse a los orígenes, empaparse en ellos, para luego proseguir una fuga hacia el futuro, hacia lo no manoseado, hacia una escritura estimulante (173-174).

[It must have been at the end of 1993 or the beginning of 1994 when I met César Aira.  It was at one of those yearly literary conferences in Mérida, Venezuela, where they'd invited one or two dozen Spanish-American writers, and which had a rural hotel, surrounded by chalets, as its base.  After the Venezuelan writers, who were legion, the Mexican delegation was the largest in size: six or seven narrators.  It was my lot to share a three bedroom cabin, a bathroom and a spacious common room with the Spaniard Enrique Vila-Matas, a longtime friend, and with a young Argentine who was entirely unknown to me.  It was César Aira, who introduced himself to us very politely, but with a slightly distant air.  During the five or six days that the gathering lasted, we exchanged very few words.  Greetings in the morning, goodnights after dinner, and during the course of the day one or another banal comment on the weather.  In the evenings, there were quite entertaining parties and banquets which he didn't attend.  His fellow Argentines Héctor Libertella and Sergio Chejfec spoke of him with reverence.  They commented that he was perhaps the most unusual figure in the new literature.  His writing was provocative, irritating, radically disconcerting, similar to that of Gombrowicz, they told us Mexicans, the rest of whom, like me, also didn't know about Aira.  The only one of us who could participate in those conversations was Hernán Lara Zavala since he had published a novel of Aira's, El llanto, in the imprint he oversaw for UNAM.  The theme of the conference that year was on the topic of an Ars Poetica; each writer had to explain his own.  Aira defined his strategy for narrative proceedings as a mechanism which moved in the opposite direction of narrative conventions.  He wasn't interested in doing what everybody else was doing, nor in continuing in the line of Balzac or Stendhal, whose work he knew well and respected, because those forms were already crystallized; the contemporary novel which touched on the same themes and continued making slight variations on narrative forms which were already canonized bored him.  What interested him was going back to the origins, steeping himself in them, to then press on with a flight toward the future, toward forms that hadn't been fiddled with, towards a writing that was stimulating.]

As if so engrossed in the Ars Poetica business that he momentarily forgot that he was writing about his introduction to Aira, Pitol spends most of his follow-up paragraph citing the literary mad scientist on his preference for "la mala literatura" ["bad literature"] over "la literatura convencional" ["conventional literature"] even when the latter is actually good literature ("aunque sea buena," 174).  The words that follow are Aira's as lifted from an essay by Marcelo Damiani.  Just what does César Aira say?

Lo que tiene de bueno la literatura mala es que opera con una maravillosa libertad, la libertad del disparate, de la locura, y a veces la literatura buena es mala porque para ser buena tiene que cuidarse tanto, se restringe tanto, que termina siendo mala.  Termina siendo aburrida, o directamente no vale la pena leerla.  Algunos libros de Marguerite Yourcenar, Octavio Paz o Milan Kundera, que se suponen buena literatura, podría traducirse interiormente como "Estoy bien escrito, estoy bien escrito, estoy bien escrito, etcétera", y eso es todo.  Y uno querría otra cosa, ¿no?...  Una buena literatura es buena en relación con las normas establecidas.  Si la función de la literatura es inventar normas nuevas, no podemos limitarnos a seguir obedeciéndolas (174).

[What's good about bad literature is that it operates with a wonderful freedom, the freedom of folly, of madness, and at times good literature is bad because in order to be good it has to be fussed over to such an extent, to be reined in so much, that it ends up being bad.  It ends up being boring or, more to the point, it isn't worth bothering to read.  Some of Marguerite Yourcenar's books, of Octavio Paz's or Milan Kundera's, which are presumed to be good literature, could be translated internally as "I'm well written, I'm well written, I'm well written, etc." and that's it.  And one would want something different than that, no?...  A good literature is good in relationship to the established norms.  But if the function of literature is to concoct new norms, we can't limit ourselves to continue abiding by them.]

"I'm well written, I'm well written, I'm well written, etc."  Classic bookish smack talk!

Whatever one makes of Aira's dismissal of conventionally "good" literature (I, for one, like to imagine that he could just as easily have been throwing under the bus those book bloggers who get all weak in the knees whenever they drone on about that nonexistent genre known as "literary fiction"), his admirer and fellow novelist Pitol returns to the autobiographical/memoir tip to speak of the Argentine in the most glowing of terms.  The novel that made him an Aira convert?  I'll let the essayist tell the story:

Para continuar con la coexistencia en aquel encuentro de escritores en Mérida y el trato con Aira, puedo decir que fue sólo el último día cuando hablamos de literatura, de lo que leíamos y lo que cada quien estaba buscando en la escritura.  Al despedirnos me regaló su última novela: Cómo me hice monja.  Ese día marca un hito en mi vida de lector: existe un antes y un después de la lectura de esa extraordinaria novelita.  La leí en la noche.  Al día siguiente, en Caracas, no pude sino hablar de ese libro, y poco después, al regresar en el avión a México, volví a releerlo.  Desde hacía muchos años no había sentido el asombro y placer que me produjo recorrer una y otra vez sus páginas, donde la transgresión era continua, como lo era también la permanente transmutación de toda norma de tiempo y espacio (175).

[To continue on with that writers' encounter in Mérida and my relations with Aira, I can say that it was only on the last day when we spoke of literature, of what we were reading and what each of us was looking for in writing.  Upon saying goodbye to each other, he gave me a gift of his latest novel: How I Became a Nun.  That day marks a milestone in my life as a reader: there exists a before and an after in regard to the reading of that extraordinary little novel.  I read it at night.  The next day, in Caracas, I couldn't do anything else but talk about that book, and shortly afterward, on the plane back to Mexico, I went back and reread it.  It had been many years since I felt the astonishment and pleasure produced in me by thumbing through its pages again and again, where the transgression was ongoing as was the permament transmutation of all norms of time and space.]

One of the reasons I wanted to share this piece with you today, friends and lurkers, is that in his typically exuberant fashion, drunk on literature as he so often is in his nonfiction writing, Pitol uses this confession as a prelude to an Acapulco cliff diving-like leap into the waters of readerly delirium.  He claims that the adolescent reader lives and dies with the happiness produced by the reading of works that produce just such delirium--in his case Mann's Doctor Faustus; Dickens' Great Expectations; Schwob's The Children's Crusade; Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom; Borges' The Aleph; the Quixote "of course," and a host of unnamed authors.  Although Pitol admits that this adolescent delirium tends to lessen in frequency over the years, it never really disappears, a pretext which leads Pitol to cite another number of the books he read later in life which took him back to this readerly paradise of his youth.  Among the titles? "Casi todas las novelas cortas y algunos cuentos de Chejov" ["Almost all the short novels and some short stories by Chekhov"]; The Brothers Karamozov, "que fue en mí una lectura tardía" ["which was a late encounter for me"]; Tolstoy's War and Peace; Gogol's short stories; Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita; Rulfo's The Burning Plain; almost all Galdós; Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers; Kusniewicz's The King of the Two Sicilies; Felisberto Hernández's The Flooded House.  What does this all have to do with Aira and How I Became a Nun?  "La mas tardía revelación fue la obra de Aira" ["Aira's work was the latest revelation"], Pitol tells us (175).

Although the enthusiastic Pitol says many more things about Aira in this reminiscence that I'd love to share, I'm afraid you'll have to take my word on that for now since your humble scribe is about to succumb to a bad case of translator's cramp.  Before I go, though, a few final notes.  Pitol, who would have been about 60 years old when he first met the younger writer, says that he now only has five or six of the earliest Aira titles left to read since "los he leído tan pronto como los he encontrado (que no es nada fácil) y luego los he releído en un orden cronólogico" ["I've read them as soon as I've found them (which is no easy task) and then I've reread them in chronological order"] in search of the method behind Aira's madness (176).  What has Pitol found?  Among other things, this: "trozos de la vida del escritor, de las calles que transita, los cafés donde escribe, el pueblo de su infancia.  En ese continuum se expande la biografía secreta del autor" ["slices of the writer's life, of the streets he travels, the cafés where he writes, the town of his childhood.  The secret biography of the author expands in that continuum"] (Ibid.).  That being said, Pitol does makes a distinction between what he calls "las más altas expresiones" ["the highest expressions"] of Aira's work and the more "tedious"or lesser ones, proposing The Hare, El bautismo, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Un sueño realizado, and Las noches de Flores as the cornerstones of Aira's oeuvre alongside How I Became a Nun (176-177).  What does Aira say in these books as Pitol sees it? "No me interesa, dice, la literatura comercial.  Tuve la suerte siempre de ser un snob.  En lugar de leer lo que leía todo el mundo, leía cosas que no leía nadie.  Leo a los clásicos, a los extravagantes, a los surrealistas, a los locos" ["Commercial literature, he says, doesn't interest me.  I was lucky to always be a snob.  Instead of reading what everybody else was reading, I read things that nobody read.  I read the classics, the outlandish writers, the surrealists, the madmen"] (177).  However, as Pitol adds, there's a big difference between "el escritor excéntrico y el vanguardista" ["the eccentric writer and the avant-garde writer"] just as there's a big difference between the works of Tristan Tzara, Filippo Marinetti and André Breton in comparison to the works of Gogol, Bruno Schulz and César Aira (179).  The crux of the matter?  "César Aira ha declarado su deuda con los vanguardistas, sobre todo los surrealistas; ha estado cerca de ellos.  Ha acometido retos tan peligrosos como los vanguardistas, pero su temperamento, sus gustos, su ars poetica es plenamente distinta.  Es uno de lo pocos autores que seriamente hacen de la escritura una celebración" ["César Aira has expressed his debt to the avant-garde, the surrealists above all.  He's been close to them.  He's undertaken challenges as risky as those of the avant-garde, but his temperament, his tastes, his Ars Poetica are completely different.  He's one of the few authors who seriously turn literature into a celebration"] (180).  I'll drink to that--here's mud in your Aira.

Source

"Lo que dice César Aira" appears on pp. 173-180 of Pitol's La patria del lenguage: Lecturas y escrituras latinoamericanas (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor, 2013) and has been anthologized in at least one other Pitol collection that I can't remember the name of right now.

Continuación de ideas diversas

Continuación de ideas diversas (Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2014)
by César Aira
Argentina, 2014

Two questions.  1) What might an ars poetica from César Aira look like?  2) How does Aira's nonfiction differ from his fiction?  Aira, last seen in these parts in connection with his fantastic 1990 novella Los Fantasmas, inadvertently answers both of these questions during the course of this amusing, playful, occasionally reader-baiting Continuación de ideas diversas [Continuation of Various Ideas]--an 86-page long free association of ideas on reading, writing, art and etc. in which Borges, Kafka and Raymond Roussel get lots of love and in which both the conventional novel and Julio Cortázar get trashed on multiple occasions.  A few examples.  "El modo más común de describir o recomendar novelas consiste en decir 'es sobre...', y a continuación poner el tema o ambiente o personajes: 'una familia disfuncional', 'los refugiados de la guerra en Sudán', 'dos jóvenes que buscan su vocación'..." ["The most common way of describing or recommending novels consists in saying 'it's about...,' and in what follows referring to the theme or the setting or the characters: 'a dysfunctional family,' 'refugees from the war in Sudan,' 'two youths in search of their vocation'..."], Aira writes.  "Las críticas o reseñas hechas por profesionales no son muy distintas" ["The criticism or reviews done by professionals aren't very different"], he adds.  "Si la recomendación es muy enfática, el relato de la temática se extiende y detalla, y eso es todo" ["If it's a very strong recommendation, the discussion of the subject matter gets more drawn out and detailed, that's all"].  The problem with this approach? "Pero la literatura es forma.  Esas descripciones o recomendaciones no dicen nada sobre el mérito o demérito literario de la novela" ["But literature is form.  Those descriptions or recommendations don't say anything about the literary merit or lack of merit of the novel"].  The next part is the best in terms of Aira's insight as a critic of critics--let's just hope I don't muck up the translation too much for you to appreciate the subtle irony: "El hecho de que sea casi imposible hablar de una novela sin decir en algún momento 'es sobre...' debería significar algo sobre el género novela o la 'forma novela'.  Ese algo puede ser o bien que la forma de la novela sea su materia, o bien que indique el triunfo de la materia sobre la forma, vale decir una derrota de la literatura en su formato más exitoso" ["The fact that it's almost impossible to talk about a novel without at one point saying 'it's about...' ought to signify something about the novel genre or about the 'novel form.'  That something might be either that the form of the novel is its subject matter or that it indicates the triumph of subject matter over form--which is to say a defeat of literature in its most successful format"] (23).  Elsewhere, Aira takes a more lightheartedly self-critical look at matters of reading tastes and the craft of writing when he admits that when "leyendo novelas policiales, buenas, apasionantes... me pregunto por qué yo no escribo así.  ¿Qué razón hay para escribir estos vanguardismos que escribo yo?" ["reading detective novels, good ones, thrilling ones... I ask myself why I don't write like that.  What reason is there to write these little avant-gardisms that I write?"].  Although he answers this question with what for me was a disarmingly simple proposition--the notion that reading and writing are "dos actividades radicalmente distintas" ["two radically different activities"] with corresponding "distintos objetivos" ["different objectives"] to match (54)--a much more colorful explanation comes in the form of an earlier passage in which he says that the Superman comics of the '50s and '60s were "la principal influencia" ["the main influence"] in his writing life.  "Ahí estaba todo lo que yo después quise hacer escribiendo, y en cierta medida, hasta donde pude, hice" ["There was to be found everything which I later wanted to do in writing, and in a way, to the extent that was possible for me, I did"].  What was it about these comics that was so appealing?  For one thing, "los argumentos tenían muy poca psicología, en su lugar tenían siempre un sutil juego intelectual" ["the plots had very little psychology; in lieu of that, they always had a subtle intellectual game instead"].  Along with that, the artwork.  "Y los colores, sobre todos los colores, claros, hermosos como un amanecer o como el pensamiento cuando se enfrenta a la aventura de la inteligencia" ["And the colors, above all the colors, bright, beautiful like a dawn or like the mind when confronted with the adventure of intelligence"].  According to Aira, Borges and "las revelaciones posteriores (Lautréamont, Marianne Moore, por nombrar dos)" ["later revelations (Lautréamont, Marianne Moore, to name two)"] were the beneficiaries of how his comic book fandom prepared him for "el goce y el ejercicio pleno de la literatura" ["the enjoyment and the full exercise of literature"] as a result of the "el hechizo persistente de los dibujos, los colores, la visibilidad intensiva de las reglas de juego de la ficción de Superman" ["the enduring spell cast by the drawings, the colors, the intense visibility of the rules of the game of Superman's fiction"] (46-47).  Having spent more time on this post than I'd intended without even once touching upon how the slippery Aira, self-described as "un lector muy precozmente intelectual, muy highbrow y no poco snob, muy literario" ["a precociously intellectual reader, very highbrow and more than a little snobbish, very literary"] who at the age of 14 already "quería ser un gran escritor, un genio, como Kafka o Proust" ["wanted to be a great writer, a genius, like Kafka or Proust"] but was troubled by how those writers "estaban cargados con la inmensa responsibilidad de mantener la calidad, de construir su Obra-Vida, de no apearse del monumental camello de lo Sublime" ["were charged with the immense responsibility of maintaining a high quality, of constructing their Life's Work, and of not falling off the monumental camel of the sublime"] (37-38) in contrast to the writers of the cowboy novels that his dad was a fan of who could write whatever they wanted and who had nothing to fear from the critics, differs in his nonfiction voice from his fictional voice, let me brief at last: not much.  Here, for example, is just one fragment out of many sporting the same sort of trace of a conceptual slap in the face that you can also find in his novellas (85):

Uno de los varios motivos por los que me opongo a la promoción de la lectura es el más evidente de todos, y por ello el menos visible: los libros están llenos de vulgaridad, prejuicios, estereotipos, falsedades.  Su frecuentación no puede sino embotar el pensamiento y la sensibilidad, distorsionar las ideas, falsificar la experiencia.

Se dirá que los buenos libros no son así, y que producen los efectos contrarios a éstos.  De acuerdo, pero los únicos que leen buenos libros son los que leen desde siempre y no necesitan campañas de promoción de la lectura.  Los que no han leído, y se deciden a hacerlo por una de estas campañas, necesariamente van a leer libros malos.

[One of the various reasons I'm opposed to the promotion of reading is the most evident of all and, because of that, the least visible: books are full of banality, prejudices, stereotypes, falsehoods.  Frequenting them can only dull one's sensibility and thinking, distort ideas, falsify experience.

It will be said that good books aren't like that and that they produce effects contrary to these.  Agreed, but the only people who read good books are the ones who have been reading them for forever and they don't need any publicity campaigns for reading.  Those who don't read, but who decide to do it because of one of these publicity campaigns, are necessarily going to read bad books.]

César Aira

I hope to share another Aira post or two with you later in the month.  In the meantime, here's one more snippet from Continuación de ideas diversas (page 55) since who knows when or if it will ever make its way into English:

Lo difícil es escribir, no escribir bien.  En los talleres literarios se puede aprender a escribir bien, pero no a escribir.  Para escribir bien hay recetas, consejos útiles, un aprendizaje.  Escribir, en cambio, es una decisión de vida, que se realiza con todos los actos de la vida.

[The difficult thing is writing, not writing well.  In writing workshops, one can learn to write well but not to write.  To write well, there are instruction manuals, useful advice, an apprenticeship.  Writing, on the other hand, is a life decision which is realized with all the actions in one's life.]

Los Fantasmas

Los Fantasmas (Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, 1990)
by César Aira
Argentina, 1990

How would you write a ghost story that's "realistic" and yet a fucking ghost story at one and the same time?  I'm glad you asked because that's just one of the trick questions that César Aira has up his dapper, impish, conjurer's sleeves in the improbably mesmerizing 1990 Los Fantasmas [Ghosts].  To help explain, it's the last day of the year at the construction site at la calle José Bonifacio 2161 in the barrio of Flores in Buenos Aires.  Various families who will own new homes in the building once the work is finally finished are gathered together with the construction workers to help usher in the new year with the usual assortment of roast meats, wine, friendly ribbing of one another, and fireworks.  As early as the second page in the novel, though, the narrator casually lets slip that "el calor era sobrenatural" ["the heat was supernatural"] (8).  Later, the reader will learn that the building is filled with what one character irritably describes as "esos payasos enharinados" ["those flour-dusted clowns"] (57)--dozens of seemingly harmless (if predominantly nudist and extremely well-endowed specimens of male) ghosts who float around mostly doing what ghosts will do while not drawing any undue attention from the humans who cross their path.  However, things take a dramatic turn once a couple of the ghosts start speaking to teenaged Patricia Vicuña and invite her to a New Year's Eve blowout of their own.  The only catch for young "la Patri"?  In the words of one of the spirits, "Claro que tendrás que estar muerta" ["Of course, you'll have to be dead"] (82).  Dead?!?  The unpredictable Aira, who disappointed me twice last year with the boring cartoonish violence of La prueba and the boring cartoonish sci-fi of El congreso de literatura [The Literary Conference], does everything but saw a body in half here to redeem himself with Los Fantasmas.  A dream that la Patri has about the unfinished building she's sleeping in, for example, leads to a fairly unhinged "analogía arquitectónica" ["architectural analogy"] of a digression on "lo no-construido" ["the unconstructed"] in the arts (47-48)--part of which wryly equates the written word's construction of reality with the scaffolding of an empty building.  What does that have to do with our ghost story?  The narrator proposes conceiving of a form of art in which "las limitaciones de la realidad" ["the limitations of reality"] are minimized to the extent that "un arte instantánamente real y sin fantasmas" ["an art instantaneously real and without show-offs"] is created as if out of thin air: "Quizás existe, y es la literatura" ["Perhaps it exists, and it's called literature"], he (or she) waggishly adds (the analogy is aided and abetted by an apparent play on words insofar as fantasma can mean both the usual "ghost" and "show-off" in Spanish).  Elsewhere, the intrusive narrator judiciously picks his/her spots for editorial asides to the audience.  Right before la Patri gets invited to "El Gran Reveillon de las doce" ["the midnight New Year's Eve blowout"], for example, the reader learns that the teenager perceives an "insinuación de temor, de lo desconocido" ["an insinuation of dread, of the unknown"] emanating from one of the uninhabited rooms.  Still, she hesitantly goes to investigate what's going on, which elicits this ironically pained reaction from the narrator: "Eso es típico.  El miedo no cuenta cuando una mujer, en una película por ejemplo, va hacia un cuarto misterioso que no se atrevería a hollar el más osado de los espectadores" ["That's typical.  Fear doesn't come into play when a woman, in a movie for example, heads toward a mysterious room in which not even the bravest of spectators would dare to tread"] (77).  As you might imagine, la Patri's decision on whether or not to attend the party with the ghosts hinges on how much she can bear to say goodbye to her family in order to accept the once in a lifetime invitation offered by the fantasmas.  What you might not be able to imagine is the perverse glee with which the novel compares "los hombres de verdad" ["the real men"] in the character's life with the virile-seeming ghosts--and what distress la Patri's mom causes her when she says that "los fantasmas son maricas" ["the ghosts are queers"] (99)!  Should this untoward comment matter to the young girl?  I won't give away the secret.  However, in one of the closing sequences, the narrator draws a great comedic parallel between the knowledge absorbed by the young girl from her surroundings and the knowledge obtained by a typical reader of fiction: "Supóngase una de esas personas que no piensan, alguien cuya única actividad sea la de leer novelas, actividad para él muy placentera y en la que no pone ni una sola gota de esfuerzo intelectual, sólo el dejarse llevar por el placer de la lectura" ["Imagine one of those people who don't think, whose only activity is reading novels, a very pleasurable activity but one in which he doesn't expend a single drop of intellectual effort, only allowing himself to be carried away by the pleasure of reading"], he/she begins.  "De pronto, en algún gesto, en alguna frase, por no decir 'en algún pensamiento', muestra que es un filósofo malgré-lui.  ¿De dónde le ha venido el saber?" ["Suddenly, in some gesture, in some phrase, if not to say 'in some thought,' he demonstrates that he's a philosopher in spite of himself.  Where does the awareness come from?"] (103).  After explaining that it would be absurd to expect that type of novel, as opposed to those of say Thomas Mann's, to offer any such enrichment, the narrator moves in for the satirical coup de grâce and embeds it in a well-placed parenthesis: "Con la televisión, el ejemplo se habría hecho un poco abusivo" ["In the case of television, the example would have been a little abusive"] (104).  In short, both a fearless and a funny demonstration of Aira's literary sleight of hand--or, as one character says about an unrelated realist plot twist contained in Zola's L'Assommoir, "¡Qué rudo golpe para el lector burgués!" ["What a terrible blow for the bourgeois reader!"] (13).

The phantasmal César Aira

(photo: Javi Martínez)

La prueba

Cómo me hice monja/La prueba/El llanto (Debolsillo, 2006)
por César Aira
Argentina, 1992

Mao y Lenin son dos punks lesbianas, de negro, que abordan a Marcia, una gordita rubia y tímida de dieciséis años que camina "envuelta en su aureola" de conformismo heterosexual y virginidad (105), en la calle cerca de la Plaza Flores en Buenos Aires.  Mao, a Marcia:  --¿Querés coger?--  Después de su susto y miedo al principio se disminuyen, Marcia decide pasar un rato con las agresivas punks porque siempre quiso conocer algún punk "pero nunca se había dado la oportunidad" (115).  Las tres van al Pumper Nic, donde una de las muchachas punks blande una navaja frente a la supervisora del local.  Después, van a un supermercado gigantesco donde Mao y Lenin aterrorizan a los clientes con una orgía de destrucción llevada a cabo para poner a prueba "el amor" de Marcia por sus nuevas amigas.  En medio de estas dos escenas, Mao putea a Robert Smith of The Cure (¡bien hecho!) y Freddie Mercury de Queen (¡ídem!) y sin querer cuenta una historia divertida sobre un conocido punk suyo que se llama Sergio Vicio quien, como el bajista de los Sex Pistiols Sid Vicious pero ya vivo, andaba "siempre drogado" (134).  Dado que la pobre ultranormal Marcia se entusiasma por la forma de narrar de las punks pero no le gusta cómo su nihilismo "desvaloriza todo lo que han dicho..." (140), es difícil saber si La prueba es una provocación irónica que tiene algo que ver con la teoría literaria sobre "la verdad" de un texto, es una crítica marxista de la sociedad de consumo en la Argentina, o es una mera parodía violenta de las estupideces de las pelis norteamericanas estilo John Hughes de la década de los '80 dedicadas a los teenagers.  Sin obstante, no importa en tanto que, con la excepción de una mención de Tom Verlaine y su grupo neoyorquino Television, ésta sea la primera novela breve de Aira que he leído que juzgaría como, ¿cómo se dice?, un coñazo total.

*

Mao and Lenin are two lesbian punks all dressed in black who hit on Marcia, a chubby, sheltered 16-year old blonde who walks about "envuelta en su aureola" ["all wrapped up in her halo"] of heterosexual conformity and virginity, on the street near the Plaza Flores in the neighborhood of Flores in Buenos Aires.  Mao to Marcia: "¿Querés coger?" ["Do you wanna fuck?"]  After her initial shock and fear subside, Marcia decides to spend some time with the abrasive punks because she'd always wanted to meet a punk "pero nunca se había dado la oportunidad" ["but had never been granted the opportunity"].  The three end up going to a Burger King knockoff, the Pumper Nic, where one of the punk chicks brandishes a knife at the supervisor of the joint.  Later, they go to a mega supermarket where Mao and Lenin terrorize the customers with an orgy of over the top violence designed to test Marcia's "love" for her new friends.  In between these two scenes, Mao insults Robert Smith of the Cure (nicely done!) and Freddie Mercury of Queen (ditto!) and tells an unintentionally funny story about a punk acquaintance named Sergio Vicio who, just like fellow bassist Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols only still alive, was "siempre" ["always"] in the habit of going everywhere "drogado" ["all drugged up"] (134).  Given that poor ultranormal Marcia is so into the punks' manner of telling a story but can't relate to how their nihilism "desvaloriza todo lo que han dicho..." ["devalues everything that they've said"] (140), it's tough to figure out whether La prueba [The Test or The Proof, unavailable in English as yet] is an ironic provocation that has anything to with literary theory about "the truth" of a text, is a Marxist criticism of consumer society in Argentina, or is just a mere violent parody of the idiocies of all those John Hughes-style teen flicks from the '80s.  However, it doesn't really matter all that much insofar as this is the first Aira novella that I've read that, with the exception of one Tom Verlaine of Television reference aside, struck me as more or less a total dud on account of how fucking boring it was.

César Aira

La Vida Nueva

La Vida Nueva (Mansalva, 2007)
by César Aira
Argentina, 2007

I read this earlier in the year, enjoyed it a bunch, but then didn't write about it at the time for some reason that's now completely unfathomable to me.  I decided to reread it this week because--what's the technical term?--it's fucking funny, man.  A 77-page Slinky happily tumbling down the stairs of authorial time in a single uncoiled paragraph, La Vida Nueva [The New Life] is César Aira's warm, chatty, intermittently preposterous account of his friendship with his first publisher, Horacio Achával, and of the many, many, many delays that Aira's 1975 debut novel Moreira suffered at the hands of Lacanian proofreaders, high-speed book-delivery motorcyclists, and other pataphysical forces before finally seeing the light of day.  Without wanting to take anything away from Don César and his own impertinent storytelling personality, I have to say that one of the great joys of reading this book is that it made me think of what Dante's La Vita Nuova might have been like had it been written by the narrator of Bolaño's short story "The Insufferable Gaucho."  Wild!  In addition to providing a fun "autobiographical" goof, however, this novel should also be of interest to at least two Caravana readers on account of its entertaining look at the Argentinean writing life from both sides of the new author/small publisher divide from 1969 up till the present day.  How much of what the 2007 version of Aira says about his younger self is true rather than mere leg-pulling is rather difficult to ascertain, of course, but that shouldn't stop anybody from enjoying the local publishing industry color or laughing at the first-time novelist's alleged doubts about whether a print run of 1,000 copies was way too high of a number for his prospective audience given the well-known anecdote that Borges himself only sold 64 copies of his first book.  Achával, "un típico espécimen, quizás el más típico, del mundo de las editoriales de izquierda, con sus cuantiosas tiradas populares" ["a typical specimen, perhaps the most typical specimen, of the world of leftist publishing houses with their massive populist print runs"] naturally tells the young Aira that "no quería saber nada de esos derrotismos de élite" ["he didn't want to hear anything about that elitist defeatism"] (30) and for good reason; for, as he mentions with exquisite irony elsewhere, Aira's novel is "un arma de grueso calibre contra el cinismo rampante del postmodernismo" ["a high-caliber weapon against postmodernism's rampant cynicism"] (50) and, more to the point, "no había que subestimar al público, que siempre estaba a punto de cansarse de lo convencional y previsible y predigerido, del realismo chato y los sermones bienpensantes" ["there was no reason to underestimate the public, which was always on the verge of losing its patience with the conventional and the predictable and the predigested, of cheap realism and right-thinking sermons"] (12).

 

The cover of César Aira's Moreira as published by Achával Solo in 1975.  The blurb at the bottom reads: "Un día, de madrugada, por las lomas inmóviles del Pensamiento bajaba montado en potro amarillo un horrible gaucho" ["One day, early in the morning, mounted on a yellow colt, a horrible gaucho was descending through the motionless hillocks of the Mind"].



Cómo me hice monja

Cómo me hice monja (Debolsillo, 2006)
por César Aira
Argentina, 1993

"Cómo me hice monja es mi autobiografía, parcial porque trata sólo de un año de mi vida, entre los seis y los siete, empieza cuando pruebo un helado por primera vez, y termina cuando me asesina la viuda del heladero."

(César Aira, desde la contrasolapa de su "autobiografía")

 

Cómo me hice monja, si no literalmente una autobiografía, es, digamos, una especie de Künstlerroman disparatada en que "el niño César Aira" cuenta una historia en que su yo femenino (o sea la niña César Aira) afirma narrar "la historia de 'cómo me hice monja'" (11) con una circularidad muy admirable e inventiva.  En otras palabras, es un dedo en los ojos del lector incauto y/o taradito.  La historia, o mejor dicho, la falsedad empieza cuando la supuesta narradora relata, en un comienzo a caballo entre la comedia y el horror, su inolvidable introducción al mundo de helado de frutilla a la edad de seis años.  ¿El giro imprevisto?  "Yo había sido víctima de los temibles ciánidos alimenticios... la gran marea de intoxicaciones letales que aquel año barría la Argentina y países vecinos" (26).  Aunque la niña sobrevive al envenenamiento después de un rato en el hospital, resulta que sus arcadas y su delirio se contagian a lo que queda de sus memorias: de hecho, el novelista se aprovecha de la situación para decirnos no cómo la niña César Aira tomó los hábitos sino sí cómo el niño César Aira aprendió convertirse en escritor en edad temprana (según cabe presumir, el pibe Aira ya era l'enfant terrible de su escuela y un bromista de primera categoría incluso en aquel entonces).  Por supuesto, un torrente de mentiras más una historia de venganza siguen según las reglas del juego en esta serie de besos mandada en honor del oficio de escribir y de la figura del narrador de poca confianza.  Beso #1: "Tendría que haber sido un monstruo para mentir por gusto" (15).  Beso #2: "El mentiroso experimentado sabe que la clave del éxito está en fingir bien la ignorancia de ciertas cosas.  Por ejemplo de las consecuencias de lo que está diciendo" (61).  Beso #3: "Todo este relato que he emprendido se basa en mi memoria perfecta.  La memoria me ha permitido atesorar cada instante que pasó.  También los instantes eternos, los que no pasaron, que encierran en su cápsula de oro a los otros.  Y los que se repitieron, que por supuesto son los más" (63).  ¿La moraleja? Confusion Is Sex.

el niño/la niña Aira

Ema, la cautiva

Ema, la cautiva (Editorial de Belgrano, 1981)

by César Aira
Argentina, 1981

Ema, la cautiva [Emma, the Captive should it ever be translated into English], Aira's first or second nivola depending on whether you care about whether his 1975 Moreira was actually published or was only written in that year, is an ahistorical fiction genre workout that might best be thought of as a sort of conceptual slap in the face to 19th century captivity tales like Esteban Echeverría's La cautiva and 19th century civilization and barbarism discourse like that found in Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo.  In the unlikely event that I haven't already driven away all squares from this post, please rest assured that I'll try and stick to a description of the captivity story at hand here since I've yet to read Echeverría's work (actually a long poem) and have only read a handful of chapters from Sarmiento's idiosyncratic political biography-as-national ethnography.  These literary criticism ground rules now firmly established, I should probably point out that Aira's 234-page historiola, like many of the more visceral moments in his 2000 Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero [An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter] which is also set in some time-warped reconfiguration of the mid-19th century, begins with an apparent nod to the great realist writing of days gone by: "Una caravana viajaba lentamente al amanecer, los soldados que abrían la marcha se bamboleaban en las monturas medio dormidos, con la boca llena de saliva rancia" ["A caravan was traveling slowly at dawn.  The soldiers at the head of the march were swaying in their saddles half asleep, their mouths full of rancid saliva"] (7).  Before long, the presumably rancid saliva-free 21st century reader, jolted out of his or her city-dwelling lethargy by the immediacy of this atavistic country prose, will learn that the hardscrabble armed caravan consists of a mixed group of soldiers and prisoners sent from Buenos Aires to populate the frontier lands to the south.  Ambassadors of civilization!  The title character, it turns out, is one of the prisoners through no fault of her own.  And the soldiers?  "Eran hombres salvajes, cada vez más salvajes a medida que se alejaban hacia el sur.  La razón los iba abandonando en el desierto, el sitio excéntrico de la ley en la Argentina del siglo pasado" ["They were savage men, more and more savage as they moved further south.  Reason was abandoning them in the desert, the eccentric site of law in the Argentina of the past century"] (12-13).  Ema's frontier transformation from forced concubine to happy Indian bride of a warrior whose "entretenimiento favorito era la caza con gases paralizantes" ["favorite pastime was hunting with paralyzing gases"] (160) to a single business woman/ex-captive who rejects civilization in order to philosophize and shoot dice and view snow falling on the Patagonian beaches among the sleeping pill-happy and man-sized fish-hunting "savages" in the south takes up much of the rest of the novel, but why would I want to ply you with information about all that when I could just refer you to the unexpectedly difficult to translate letter that our young author has conveniently left for you on the back cover of his book instead?

César Aira

"Ameno lector:

     Hay que ser pringlense, y pertenecer al Comité del Significante, para saber que una contratapa es una "tapa en contra".  Sin ir más lejos, yo lo sé.  Pero por alguna razón me veo frivolamente obligado a contarte cómo se me ocurrió esta historiola.  La ocasión es propicia para las confidencias: una linda mañana de primavera, en el Pumper Nic de Flores, donde suelo venir a pensar.  Tomasito (dos años) juega entre las mesas colmadas de colegiales de incógnito.  Reina la desocupación, el tiempo sobra.

     Hace unos años yo era muy pobre, y ganaba lo necesario para analista y vacaciones traduciendo, gracias a la bondad de un editor amigo, largas novelas, de esas llamadas "góticas", odiseas de mujeres, ya inglesas, ya californianas, que trasladan sus morondangas de siempre por mares himenópticos, mares de té pasional.  Las disfrutaba, por supuesto, pero con la práctica llegué a sentir que había demasiadas pasiones, y que cada una anulaba a las demás como un desodorizante de ambientes.  Fue todo pensarlo y concebir la idea, atlética si las hay, de escribir una "gótica" simplificada.  Manos a la obra.  Soy de decisiones imaginarias rápidas.  El Eterno Retorno fue mi recurso.  Abjuré del Ser: me volví Sei Shonagaon, Scherazada, más los animales.  Las "anécdotas del destino".  Durante varias semanas me distraje.  Sudé un poco.  Me reí.  Y al terminar resultó que Ema, mi pequeña yo mismo, había creado para mí una pasión nueva, la pasión por la que pueden cambiarse todas las otras como el dinero se cambia por todas las cosas: la Indiferencia.  ¿Qué más pedir?"

[firmado] C Aira

*

"Agreeable reader:

     One has to be from Coronel Pringles and belong to the Commitee of the Significant to know that a back cover of a book is a 'cover that's against something.'  To take an obvious example: I know it.  But for some reason I find myself frivolously obliged to tell you how this storyola occurred to me.  The time is ripe for confidences: a beautiful spring morning at the Pumper Nic in Flores, where I'm wont to come to think.  Tomasito (two years old) is playing in between the tables overflowing with unknown school kids.  Leisure reigns, there's time to spare.

     A few years ago I was very poor, and I earned just enough for a shrink and vacations translating--thanks to the kindness of an editor friend--long novels, those that are called 'Gothic,' odysseys of women, now British, now Californian, that take the usual hodgepodge and set sail through hymen-optic seas, through oceans of passionate tea.  I enjoyed them, of course, but with practice I began to feel that there was too much passion and that each new one canceled out all the rest like an air freshener.  I gave it some thought and came up with the idea, an 'athletic' one if you will, of penning a simplified 'Gothic' novel.  Hands to the task. I'm prone to imaginary snap decisions.  Eternal Recurrence was my means.  I renounced Being: I turned into Sei Shonagon, Scheherazade, plus the animals.  The 'anecdotes of destiny.' I amused myself for several weeks.  I sweat a little.  I laughed.  And upon finishing, it turned out that Emma, my little female self, had created a new passion for me, the passion for which all other passions can be swapped just like money is swapped for everything: Indifference.  What more to ask for?"

[signed] C Aira

Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero

Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero (Ediciones Era, 2001)
por César Aira
Argentina, 2000

Para gente como yo que se aburre fácilmente con la novela histórica, leer Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero es casi como rendirse a un gran chiste surrealista.  Me gustó.  A caballo entre una biografía ficcionalizada y una novela histórica fingida, esta novela corta de 74 páginas admirablemente cuenta lo que pasa durante un día en los años 1830 cuando el pintor viajero Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858, el artista de carne y hueso retratado en la portada arriba), de paso entre Mendoza y Buenos Aires en la Argentina de las luchas con las fuerzas indígenas, tiene la mala suerte de recibir un rayo en la cabeza.  La descripción del narrador es apropriadamente horrorosa.  "Como una estatua de níquel, hombre y bestia se encendieron de electricidad.  Rugendas se vio brillar, espectador de sí mismo por un instante de horror, que lamentablemente habría de repetirse" (31).  Según se verá, el segundo rayo le cae al pobre pintor menos de 15 segundos después del primero con "efectos más devastadores".  El hombre y el caballo "volaron unos veinte metros, encendidos y crepitando como una hoguera fría.  Seguramente por efecto de la descomposición atómica que estaban sufriendo cuerpos y elementos en la ocasión, la caída no fue fatal" (32).  A pesar de la tragedia física de Rugendas, que sobrevive el acidente pero con la cara destrozada y con heridas a los nervios faciales que se hace parecer a un monstruo y que se requiere la morfina, la provocación de Aira se revela cuando el narrador da a intender que la estética del pintor ha cambiado y quizá ha mejorado a causa del accidente.  ¿De dónde sale esta nueva inspiración artística?  ¿La electricidad, las drogas, o ambas cosas a la vez?  No se sabe por cierto, pero sea lo que sea el pintor viajero, en tiempos pasados el representante por excelencia de su género de realismo, ahora descubre que el mundo real es más y más irreal y llena de sorpresas como la escena en cuál un indio aparece con "un descomunal salmón" y indica a Rugendas que parece querer decir "me lo llevo para reproducción" (61).  ¿Un poco raro?  Sí, clarinete, pero deliciosamente incomformista al mismo tiempo.  (www.edicionesera.com.mx)

César Aira

Cecil Taylor

Cecil Taylor

por César Aira
Argentina, 1987

Cecil Taylor empieza con una escena magnífica y totalmente asombrosa: una prostituta neoyorquina, al volver a su depto después de una noche de trabajo, se encuentra con un grupo de vagos que están mirando algo en la vidriera sucia de un negocio abandonado.  ¿De qué se trata?  La lucha inminente entre un gato y una rata.  De repente, la mujer golpea la vidriera con su cartera, distraendo del gato suficientemente para que se escape la rata.  Los hombres se enojan con ella a causa de la interrupción del show, y un hecho de violencia no especificado tiene lugar como resultado.  A pesar de ser tan cautivador, es facil pasar por alto la genialidad de este principio porque lo que sigue en lo demás del cuento no parece tener nada en común con ello.  En lugar de eso, encontramos la historia del pianista free jazz Cecil Taylor situada en el año de 1956.  Taylor, en aquel entonces un cero en cuanto a la fama, sufre la indignidad de ser expuesto a la mofa pública en bares con piano donde todos los clientes son músicos, drogadictos, o alcohólicos; en lugares prestigiosos como el Village Vanguard, donde él tontamente cree que al menos sus collegas los músicos tratarán de comprender sus inovaciones atonales; e incluso en una fiesta privada en la casa de Long Island de la señora Gloria Vanderbilt (los invitados aplauden cuando la heredera dice "para").  Frente al estilo de vanguardia del músico, casi todo el mundo reacciona con desaprobación a su arte atonal o, lo que es peor, con una pregunta sincera sino insultante cómo la del dueño del bar que especializa en el tráfico de la heroina: "¿No habrás querido tomarnos el pelo?"  Aunque las desdichas de Taylor nunca paran a lo largo del cuento de 14 páginas, la belleza salvaje y la artesanía del relato se encuentran en la escritura fiera de Aira y en la sugerencia provocadora que el proceso creativo--la realidad vivida en cual los conciertos de Taylor generan una falta de comprensión evidente como "escarnio invisible licuado en risitas inaudibles" [136]--es análoga en alguna manera a la historia de la prostituta y los vagos en cuanto al "fracaso" del artista de sobrepasar lo que se esperaba en la imaginación de la audiencia.  Aira, ¡vos sos un capo!

*

"Cecil Taylor" begins with a magnificently drawn and absolutely striking scene: a New York prostitute, returning to her apartment early one morning after a night of work, runs into a group of lowlifes apparently transfixed by something visible through the dirty windows of an abandoned storefront.  What are they looking at?  An impending fight between a cat and a rat.  Suddenly, the woman strikes the glass with her purse, distracting the cat long enough for the rat to escape.  The men then get mad at her on account of the interruption of the show, and an unspecified act of violence takes place as a result.  As attention-grabbing as all this is, it's easy to overlook the compositional brilliance of this opening scene because it doesn't really appear to have much in common with the rest of the short story apart from its atmosphere.  Instead, we're treated to a hard luck story about free jazz pianist Cecil Taylor set in 1956.  Taylor, at that time a virtual nobody in terms of his fame, suffers a series of public indignities in piano bars where the small crowds consist primarily of musicians, drug addicts, and alcoholics; in a disappointing showcase performance at the Village Vanguard, where he foolishly believes that at least his fellow musicians will understand what he's trying to accomplish; and even at a private party given by Gloria Vanderbilt at her Long Island mansion (the guests applaud when the socialite pulls the plug on him).  Confronted with the musician's avant-garde stylings, almost everybody responds to his atonal art with either open disapproval or, what's worse, this sincere but insulting question put to him by a bar owner almost exclusively occupied with heroin-trafficking: "Are you sure you're not just pulling our legs?"  Although Taylor's misfortunes never let up throughout the length of this fourteen-page story, the savage beauty and the craftsmanship of the tale are to be found in Aira's feral writing and the provocative suggestion that the creative process--the lived reality in which Taylor's performances generate a lack of understanding manifesting itself as "escarnio invisible licuado en risitas inaudibles" ["invisible derision liquified in inaudible laughter"] [136]-- is somehow analagous to the story about the prostitute and the night owl lowlifes in terms of the artist's failure to deliver what constitutes a show in the minds of the audience.  Aira, you the man!

Fuente/source:
Juan Forn, ed.  Buenos Aires: Una antología de nueva ficción argentina [Buenos Aires: An Anthology of New Argentinean Fiction].  Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 1992, 129-144.

Arriba/Above: Cecil Taylor; Abajo/Below: César Aira