from
The Literary Alchemy of César Aira
Essay by Marcelo Ballvé
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In my opinion, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is one of the great works of world literature from the last 25 years of the last century, as good if not better than W.G. Sebald or Roberto Bolaño. But to really know César Aira as Argentines know him—as a writer who constantly risks making a fool of himself in his search for the essence of literature—one needs to read How I Became a Nun.
III.
Aira’s novels tend to begin straightforwardly, immediately immersing the reader in the climate of the story. These beginnings are done with a natural self-confidence, the entrancing self-possession of the best oral storytellers. Aira understands that to begin a story, no fancy words or purple prose are necessary. Nor are complex situations meant to be presented as such at first. The job at hand is to begin. The story must be allowed to unfold first, before it can be refolded by the author into something strange, with infinite folds—an origami monster.
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Every time the action threatens to reach a plateau of routine or narrative equilibrium, Aira introduces a destabilizing element. Other authors use plot surprises to create rising action (the soap opera-patented device of revealing unexpected blood ties, for example). But Aira does something different. In each of his novels, events and narration typically swirl into denser and denser configurations that challenge the postulates of verisimilitude, reason, or good taste—or all three. Like the climate before a storm, when barometric pressure drops and the air seems to be buzzing with a desire for relief, Aira’s novels arrive at a point at which the reader is pleading for resolution. How is all of this going to come together?
IV.
It should be said that, in the opinion of some critics, Aira’s books usually don’t come together at all. This opinion is not just held by the occasional reviewer abroad who has no context in which to place Aira’s books; within Argentina itself there are influential writers and critics who believe Aira is overrated and a malign influence on younger Latin American writers who look up to him.
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In this, Aira’s stories might again be usefully compared to folk tales. They have the same compressed nature, the same power to suggest a universe of meaning despite being short texts. Each of Aira’s miniature novels include a multiplicity of fictions. Aira himself has referred to the work of literature as analogous to the creation of Russian dolls, those bulbous wooden ones that fit one inside of the other until one arrives at the final miniature doll, its features nearly illegible. The final doll, of course, is always a disappointment: the Russian dolls game is in reality a metaphor (another popular one is “peeling the onion”) for humankind’s congenital incapacity to get to the center of things. Aira’s fictions, like the Russian dolls, are about folding worlds into worlds to the point of absurdity. In doing so they simulate a kind of search for the essence of story, of anecdote—of the tale in its purest essence.
Aira’s literary universe brings to mind an open alchemical laboratory in which the guts of storytelling are prodded, weighed, and examined. It is a lab in which Aira, or Dr. Aira (as he once called himself in another novel) is madly searching for the Philosopher’s Stone. Or we might call it the Storyteller’s Stone, the key which might allow him to effortlessly produce an endless stream of literature spun from the drab material of ordinary life. Of course, Aira, like the medieval alchemists, suspects his attempt is doomed to failure from the start, but that doesn’t keep him from trying. He is incorrigible: he has the blind optimism of a dreamer.
V.
According to Aira, he never edits his own work, nor does he plan ahead of time how his novels will end, or even what twists and turns they will take in the next writing session. He is loyal to his idea that making art is above all a question of procedure. The artist’s role, Aira says, is to invent procedures (experiments) by which art can be made. Whether he executes these or not is secondary; Aira’s business is the plan, not necessarily the result. Why is procedure all-important? Because it is relevant beyond the individual creator. Anyone can use it.
Aira’s procedure, which he has elucidated in essays and interviews, is what he calls el continuo, or la huida hacia adelante. These concepts might be translated into English as “the continuum,” and a “constant flight forward.” Editing is an abhorrent idea in the context of Aira’s continuum. To edit oneself would be to retrace one’s steps, go backwards, when the idea is to always move forward. To judge yesterday’s writing session, to censor a lapse into the absurd or the irrational, to revive a character your work-in-progress sent tumbling over a cliff—all of these actions go against Aira’s procedure. Instead, the system prioritizes an ethic of creative self-affirmation and, I would say, optimism. To labor to justify previous work with more strange creations that in turn establish the need for ever more artistic high-wire acts in the future—this is the continuum, the high-wire act the artist must perform when he refuses to submit to any rule that is not his autonomously chosen procedure. It is an act performed with deep abysses yawning to each side of him—conformity, market pressures, conventionality, self-repression of all kinds . . . In other words, Aira’s literary career, embodied in each of his 63 novels, is a reckless pursuit of artistic freedom.
Aira says that when he sits down to write his daily page or two, he writes pretty much whatever comes into his head, with no strictures except that of continuing the previous day’s work. (The spontaneous feel of his stories would seem to back up this claim, but I’ve always asked, can anyone write as well as Aira does while simply letting the pen ramble?)
True, his books are very short. Aira says in interviews that he’s often tried to make his novels longer, but they seem to come to a natural rest at around the 100-page mark. Technically, much of what Aira has written would have to be classified in the novella category, but it’s hard to classify Aira’s work within any genre, be it story, novel, or novella. In my mind, Aira’s creations are something different altogether. They are stories, pure and simple, which Aira has managed to ennoble by seeing them into publication in the form of a single book. What he has done is put stories into circulation as objects, which is a defiant feat when seen in the context of a global literary market that demands hefty, sprawling, “big” novels.
The key to Aira’s curious career, I think, is to be found in his conception of literature as something with more affinities to the realm of action than the inner world of reflection. Literature is perhaps nothing more complicated and glorious than the act of writing and publishing, and publishing again and again. Editing is dispensable, so is the search for the “right” publisher. (Aira publishes seemingly with whomever shows any interest in his manuscripts; at least a dozen publishers, most of them small independents, in Argentina alone.) The idea seems to be: publish first and ask questions later.2
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Aira is now entering the late stage of his career, and it seems he has begun to take stock. La Nueva Vida, Aira’s latest novel, is another loosely autobiographical tale that explores his first steps in publishing. The novel tells the story of a publisher/author relationship in which a Kafkaesque publisher is forever putting off the promised publication of the author’s novel. Here in a typically contradictory manner Aira is referencing his own career.
In a sense, though, Aira has always been chasing his own tail. All his books revolve around the basic questions haunting art: What is it? How do I do it? It was the same questions medieval alchemists asked: What is the essence of matter, and how do I master it? Like a true alchemist, Aira does not despair about the answers that always slip away: he enjoys the dizzying running around in circles, the constant asking. I only wonder how long he will do it for. I wonder whether he might not be nearing the point at which his search for the source of literature might come to a natural conclusion. The history of philosophy, literature, and art is full of examples of great thinkers and artists who abandoned their search once they felt they had explored all its potential. For a time, Wittgenstein abandoned philosophy and became a schoolteacher. Duchamp abandoned art for chess. Rimbaud gave up writing. The great Brazilian artist Lygia Clark drifted from painting to installation art and collective performance pieces, but ended her career practicing sensorial therapy on patients.
Aira himself has spoken, implicitly, about the abandonment of art as the culmination of an artist’s career. In his 1988 lectures at the University of Buenos Aires, he advanced the radical idea that writers of genius don’t in reality need to write a word. They might manifest their particular genius simply by being. Their actions, inevitably, would leave the appropriate mark upon the world. Their particular manner of approaching life would have its impact. Their novels or paintings would exist, but in virtual form, as potential contained in the texture of their lives. Their art might be deducted, virtually, from the manner in which they live. In Aira’s writing there’s a constant emphasis on this question: life—and, more specifically, action—as the real work of literature and art.
At the end of this lecture, citing Argentine writer Alberto Laiseca, Aira compared the writer to a magician: “The greatness and efficacy of a magician is measured by his refusal to use magic. The true magician, the greatest, is the poorest and most unfortunate of all mortals. Because between his magic and his person forgetfulness takes shape, in the form of the world.”
Literature, perhaps, is only what all of us flawed, deluded authors do when we’re still pursuing answers, convinced they are there. Aira seems to be close to lifting the veil on this search and realizing it is only a way to pass the time. For now, he’s still writing his fictions dictated by his mutant imagination, carried forward by an irrepressible momentum, drunk on imperfection. One day, perhaps, he’ll stop writing. We’ll be left with his novels, which are stepping stones, a trail of crumbs leading to a place as close to the molten heart of creation as it is possible to come without burning up.
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1In my view the book is a self-conscious imitation of the Noble Prize-winning high literary style; it is an imitation done so well it transcends parody—as Don Quijote does when it parodies chivalric epics—and becomes even better than the real thing.
2In fact Aira’s mentor, the deceased Argentine poet and novelist Osvaldo Lamborghini had a saying: “Publish first, write later.”
Marcelo Ballvé lives in Buenos Aires, where he edits the literary magazine Sancho’s Panza and the community newspaper El Sol de San Telmo.
