César Aira's Method, and mine - a look at Varamo

Nobody cares what I think about César Aira or his 2002 novellisimo Varamo.  Nevertheless I will write something about it.  No , it is all right, you do not have to pretend.

Varamo is a Panamanian bureaucrat who inadvertently writes one of the great masterpieces of experimental Latin American poetry despite never having written poetry before.  Varamo is the account of how he did it, “an experiment in literary criticism” (44) that otherwise resembles Surrealist fiction.

By Surrealist, I mean this kind of thing:

His aim was to produce a fish playing the piano.  (23)

Grafting on a pair of little arms, the arms of a frog for example, would be horribly complicated.  (26)

He couldn’t quite put his finger on what was giving him that impression of chaos…  But then, all of a sudden, he realized: it was the golf clubs all around the room, in expensive leather bags that were propped against the walls and the furniture, or just lying around.  (64)

The story covers one eventful night as Varamo – but what matters with Aira is not what happens but The Method, the deployment of the Aira Conceptual Apparatus, through which Aira is not allowed to revise previously written work.  Each day he confronts himself with the previous day’s exquisite corpse and must somehow move on with it, which perhaps seems easy enough except that he deliberately sets bizarre traps for his future self, inserting nonsensical plot twists and ludicrous digressions in order to keep himself interested.  Or to keep me interested  (“Not to mention the risk of boring the reader,” 44).  “[O]n the other hand, the reality effect is lost, as it always is when an automatic mechanism intervenes” (46).

Please note that this is, with minor modifications, also the method of Wuthering Expectations.

Varamo is actually about The Method.  Or about creativity.  Thus the business about the piano-playing fish – the incipient poet’s first creative hobby is taxidermy.  Then there are stories (“For Varamo, this story was a sort of metaphor or fable,” 35), codes, hallucinations, counterfeiting.  Near the end Varamo bumps into a couple of publishers – if that ain’t a tipoff.  They fill him in on the history of Latin American publishing.  “Faced with the alternative between becoming translators or alcoholic bums, some at least favored the first option” (76) – Aira is himself a translator.

I just read an Adam Thirlwell review of a recent collection of Italo Calvino’s letters.  Over and over, Thirlwell’s descriptions of Calvino could be about Aira:

If one tried to make a list of [Calvino’s] values from this collection of letters, it would include the cosmic, the frame, the refusal of the personal, the love of small forms, the fantastic, the metafictional, or self-consciously fictional. And all these values are on either side of the human scale: either too small or too large.

Varamo is the seventh Aira text I have read, out of eighty or ninety that he has written, so what do I know, but that is pretty close to Aira’s list.

An odd feature of Varamo, not shared by all of his books, is that the story ends where the narrator first said it would, with an explanation for the creation of the poem, as well as an Apology for the Method:

Novelty makes its causes new, giving birth to them retrospectively.  If historical time makes us live in the new, a story that attempts to account for the origin of a work of art, that is, a work of innovation, ceases to be a story; it’s a new reality, and yet a part of reality as it has always been for everyone.  Those who don’t believe me can go and see for themselves.  (89)

Which is what the reader who gets to these last lines just did. 

The review at Tony’s Reading List inspired me to read Varamo.  Chris Andrews translated this one.