There were also the legendary but altogether real nocturnal attacks by large packs of wild dogs - some rewarding César Aira completism

Why have I been reading the 1995 Rizzoli coffee table book Argentina: The Great Estancias?  “Estancias” are estates, enormous cattle and sheep ranches, many of which have central houses – mansions – palaces – of great architectural and historic interest, given any interest in Argentinean ranches.

Edited by Juan Pablo Queiroz and Tomás de Elia, photos by the latter, text by César Aira.  There we go!  Aira was at this point a know writer in Argentina, unknown elsewhere, author of a mere twenty books.  This book is a professional gig, and I now think also a favor for friends.  This bit that I am writing is perhaps of narrow interest, to Airaists and fans of, I guess, Argentinean ranch architecture, but it is also a tribute to the pleasures of completism.

Aira is a conceptual artist and a surrealist.  His best quality, as far as I am concerned, is his inventiveness, his screwy surprises.  In The Great Estancias he is on his best behavior, which is unfortunate, but once in a while there is a reward:

There were also the legendary but altogether real nocturnal attacks by large packs of wild dogs.  (185)

Or:

In one of the old buildings, known as la casa de los huesos (the house of bones) Natalie Goodall maintains a collection of skeletons of dolphins, porpoises, and seals.  (200)

Those sound like Aira sentences.

Aira is also suspiciously attentive to visiting writers and to libraries:

That’s at the San Miguel estancia in the Córdoba province. 

Even with the ladder, those highest shelves, how?

This book was quite helpful in filling in the background of Aira’s subset of historical pampas novels, Ema the Captive (1981), The Hare (1991), and An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (2000).  The protagonist of the latter, the German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas, is discussed on p. 50 – not that this is five years before the novel is written – and the book includes a Rugendas drawing that will be specifically parodied in Aira’s novel.

So I learned a lot about Argentinean ranch houses, which are frankly pretty interesting, and I learned some things about Aira and his art, which is why I sought out the book.

Aira recommends a book himself:

Lucas Bridges recounted the story of his father, Harberton [the estancia], and Viamonte in The Uttermost Part of the Earth, a beautiful book published in 1948 and reprinted many times.  (198)

This is Harberton, with the whale tooth arch, on Tierra del Fuego.  I of course immediately requested the book from the library.

The joys of completism.  I recommend the book to all amateur Airaists.  I was inspired to finally pin down Argentina: The Great Estancias because of the recent Mookse podcast on Aira.  I have not heard the show but I will eagerly read the transcript as soon as it is available.  For some reason Mookse omits this book, and one other, from a list of Aira books available in English.

The last of my April reading - novels, stories, travel, a play - the winter evening was darkening into night and the image of buttered toast loomed large in the mind

The rest of my April reading.  Novels and stories and such.

Herman Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund (1930) and Lao She, Rickshaw (1937), already covered.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930).  A titanic novel.  Some big changes in the history of the novel occur more or less here.  I read Michael Gorra’s Norton Critical Edition, which was itself outstanding.  The biggest surprise in it was how well reviewed – not merely positively, but with understanding – Faulkner was from the beginning, for all the good it did him.  Well, it worked out eventually.

The first Faulkner novel that made it into French was the next one, Sanctuary (1931), but the French saw what was going on immediately.  That is one of the big changes, maybe the first one.

I suppose it had been thirty years since I really read As I Lay Dying, really read it, not just looked into it.  I have read a lot more books since the last time.  Faulkner’s novel still appeared to be full of brand new things.

Frank O’Connor, Guests of the Nation (1931).  His first book, mostly stories set during the Anglo-Irish War and the Irish Civil War.  At some point, it occurred to me that the only precedent was Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (1926), although O’Connor is not as cold-blooded as Babel, and it was no surprise to learn that Red Cavalry was O’Connor’s direct inspiration.  Only two of the fifteen stories are in the 1981 Collected Stories, perhaps because they work well together, certainly not because they’re not good enough.

Somerset Maugham, Ah King (1933).  Six stories set in Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and the like.  I find Maugham more interesting for his subject matter, the odd British people who find themselves in the colonies, than his careful, casual storytelling, and with three books of stories left, he says these are the last ones from Asia.  What the heck is he going to write about?

A favorite bit from “The Book Bag,” where the narrator is distracted while being told a melodramatic tale of Byronic incest – I do like Maugham’s casual narration, just not as much as his subjects:

My eye was caught by a chik-chak, a little brown house lizard with a large head, high up on the wall.  It is a friendly little beast and it is good to see it in a house.  It watched a fly.  It was quite still.  On a sudden it made a dart and then as the fly flew away fell back with a kind of jerk into a strange immobility. (p. 795 in East of West)

Perhaps the Maughamish narrator is identifying with the lizard.

Dashiell Hammett, The Glass Key (1931).  I’m still rooting around in crime novels, covering the basics.  Here we have more gangster nonsense.  The “detective” is a mob fixer in an utterly corrupt town, solving a murder mystery for the mob boss even if it ruins his life – the boss’s, or his own, or both.  It is all pretty nuts, but only maybe half as nuts as Red Harvest (1929).

So-called Nicholas Blake, Thou Shell of Death (1936).  Since Cecil Day-Lewis was a poet, I expected his prose to be a little better, even in a detective novel, and sometimes it is, but he seems just as happy with clichés.  The single best character who gives the novel a lot of energy is the main murder victim, and the second-best character gets clonked on the head soon after.  If you want to solve the mystery, just catalogue every moment where you think “Wait, that makes no sense.”  And maybe read The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), which is a good idea regardless.

I’ll try another “Blake” novel.  This is my kind of detective: “They talked for nearly an hour more, until the winter evening was darkening into night and the image of buttered toast loomed large in the mind” (Ch. VI).  He has his priorities straight.

César Aira, Shantytown (2001).  Another one of these, an Aira novel.

An adventure and a play:

Valerian Albanov, In the Land of White Death (1917).  An Arctic adventure, a trek across the ice to from a doomed ship to safety, notable especially because it is Russian.  Albanov’s only map, his great guide, was a copy of Fridtjof Nansen’s Farthest North (1897); I recommend reading Nansen first.

Mark Rylance, I Am Shakespeare (2007).  A play, brilliant, hilarious.  A “who wrote Shakespeare” nut accidentally summons the candidates, including Francis Bacon and Mary Sidney and, you know, Shakespeare (the actor) to his internet show.  Rylance does a terrific job undermining his premise,  but as much as I enjoyed the play and would love to see it performed, I loathe the entire subject.  I’m just sick of it.  But if you’re going to ask these tedious questions, I Am Shakespeare is the way to do it.

All right, that was April.

Whether he had meant it as a joke - Aira's "Cecil Taylor" - She is not a story.

I doubt I was the only one who did this.  Roberto Bolaño had called César Aira’s “Cecil Taylor” (1987, I think) “one of the five best stories I can remember,” so even though it was not available in English I had to see for myself even if I could not exactly read it.  What I wanted to know was if the story was actually about Cecil Taylor, the thorny jazz pianist, one of the inventors of free jazz – he broke free from chords – and one of the few surviving giants of the 1950s.  One of two, I am afraid, along with Sonny Rollins.

Yes, the story is in fact about Cecil Taylor and his struggles early in his career not to be understood but just to be heard.  César Aira has now published something like ninety little books, sometimes producing three or four a year, but in 1988, well, I suspect there is some strong identification of the author with his subject.

His experience at Cooper Union was even less gratifying.  They used a blackout as a pretext to stop him halfway through; there was vigorous booing, and from what he heard later, his performance left the audience wondering about the limits of music, and whether he had meant it as a joke.  (349)

“Cecil Taylor,” now available in English via Chris Andrews in The Musical Brain and right here, was at that time only accessible in a 1992 collection called Buenos Aires: una antología de nueva ficción argentina (which someone should translate in its entirety).  Each story in the anthology was preceded by a new preface from the author.  How I wrote it; how I thought it up.  Aira prefaced “Cecil Taylor” with this (not in The Musical Brain):

On CECIL TAYLOR

The genie, outside of the bottle, tall like a twenty-story building, briefly instructed the young man:

“You will have in your life a beautiful woman who you will have at your whim.”

“Beautiful?”

“More than you can imagine.  And helpless, without resources or friends.”

“For me?”

“For you alone.  She will be yours.  But there is a condition,” advised the genie with severity, “Do not think for an instant that she is an example or a metaphor for some other thing.  She is reality.  She is happening right now.  She is not a story.”   (my translation)

The nature of personal pronouns in Spanish tempts me to translate the last sentence as the Diderot-like “It is not a story.”  A Musical Brain features several genies; Taylor is himself described as a genie:

His continual changes of address protected him; they were the little genie’s suspended dwellings, and there he slept on a bed of chrysanthemums, under the shade of a droplet-laden spiderweb.  (346, tr. Andrews)

I know too little about the actual Taylor’s biography to know much about what in “Cecil Taylor” is fact and what is plausible guesswork, but this bit, I assume, is taken from life.

Here you can see Aira meet Taylor earlier this year, when Aira was in New York to promote The Musical Brain.

To hear Taylor, please sample anything from Cecil Taylor in Berlin ’88, which is what Taylor was doing when the story was written, not what he was doing in 1956.  His early innovations have been so thoroughly absorbed that Jazz Advance (1956) or, even better, The World of Cecil Taylor (1960) now just sound like jazz.

A conventional musician, [Taylor] thought, is always dealing with music in its most general form, as if leaving the particular for later, waiting for the right moment.  And they did pay [Taylor]: twenty dollars, on the condition that he would never show his face there again.  (351, Andrews).

That is how Aira’s non-story ends, but In Berlin ’88 and The Musical Brain tell me what happened when these artists kept showing their faces, again and again.

Surrealism is so beautiful! It changes everything! - César Aira embarks on the great avant-garde adventure

In one of the mad scientist stories, Leopoldo Lugones explicitly invokes Poe’s “imp of the perverse,” Poe's greatest psychological insight:

The demon of scientific inquiry, which is nothing but the embodiment of the spirit of perversity, impelled me, nevertheless, to resume my experiments. (Strange Forces, “Yzur”)

I take this as a self-description, and also as a description of his countryman, future Nobel anti-Prize winner César Aira.

Surrealism is so beautiful!  It changes everything!  (“The Infinite,” 1993, p. 226)

As if Aira’s own fiction did not contain enough self-description.  That one is about a young Aira and a friend inventing a game in which the goal is to say a number larger than the previous number, children demonstrating a philosophical exercise about representation.

Daydreams are always about concepts, not examples.  I wouldn’t want anything I’ve written to be taken as an example.  (235)

My knock on Aira is that however inventive the surface variation he is always writing the same story, but perversely The Musical Brain (2015), a collection of short stories, mostly variations on the same handful of ideas, is the perfect introduction to Aira.  When surveying Aira, it helps to be able to triangulate, or at least it is easier to see Aira mention again and again, in story after story, the “fact” “that a piece of paper cannot be folded in half more than nine times” (“A Brick Wall,” 2011, 18) or to wonder about the surprising number of genies.

My friends and I had become experts in deciphering that perfect economy of signs [Aira means film narrative].  It seemed perfect to us anyway, in contrast with the chaotic muddle of signs and meanings that constituted reality.  Everything was a clue, a lead.  Movies, whatever their genre, were really all detective stories.  Except that in detective stories, as I was to learn at around the same time, the genuine leads are hidden among red herrings, which, although required in order to lead the reader astray, are superfluous pieces of information, without significance.  (“A Brick Wall,” 7)

The movies “seemed like a super-reality.”  Sometimes I wondered is Aira was being too bald, but can I blame him if once in a while he wants someone to understand him, or, speaking for myself, pretend to understand him, since it is more than likely that I have been distracted by the savory red herrings, so good on toast.

From outside, it [contemporary art] might have seemed like a meaningless eccentricity contest.  But when one entered the game, the meaning became apparent, and dominated everything else.  It was, in fact, a game of meaning, and without meaning, it was nothing.  (“The Two Men,” 2007, 272)

Aira was the impetus for and center of a week of writing about conceptual art I did a couple of years ago.  In a 2013 essay in The White Review that is only superficially distinct from a couple of the stories in The Musical Brain, Aira describes the avant-garde, his avant-garde, as “an attempt to recuperate the amateur gesture,” to “restore to art the ease with which it was once produced.”

We were embarking on the great avant-garde adventure.  (“Athena Magazine,” 2007, 38)

The result is, as in this story and often in so-called real life, not the creation of the thing itself, in this case a magazine, but the perfect idea of a magazine, which for Aira almost counts as a success.  Not quite, though.  Tomorrow, “Cecil Taylor.”

There are many things a novel does not say - The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira

November and December 2013 is the perfect time to sample the Argentinean Literature of Doom, says Ricardo de la Caravana de Recuerdos.  Why, I do not know, but I did it, enjoying one of last year’s César Aira translations, The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, originally published in 1998.

The title is well-chosen.  It warns readers of the contents – CAUTION: Contains meta-fiction.  The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira turns out to be about fiction.  The Miracle Cure is fiction.  Dr. Aira is César Aira.  Or all of this is a trick to encourage such a surface interpretation by a shallow reader like me.  The other César Aira translation from last year, the 2002 Varamo, was also about the fiction of César Aira.

I know there are readers who loathe this sort of thing, who are instantly bored by it.  In this case, fair warning, I say.

Dr. Aira performs Miracle Cures.  He is fifty, though, and thinking that it is time to finally write a book about his methods, published in installments of “four or eight” pages, “no more than that” (42), amounting to “the penning of an Encyclopedia of all things from all times” (39).  In other word, one of my favorite literary curiosities, the omnibook.

Dr. Aira’s method is not that of César Aira, but it is related.  He has thousands of manuscript pages which he plans to assemble into a collage.

He could start anywhere; no introduction was necessary because the subject was already well defined in the collective imagination…  The same thing was happening here: life, death, illness – there’s nobody who doesn’t know what they’re all about, which would allow him to create small, delightful variations that would seem like inventions even if they weren’t (thereby sparing the author the exorbitant effort of inventing a new story).  (37-8)

In the first chapter, Dr. Aira is asked to perform a cure but refuses.  In the second, he theorizes about his cures, as above.  In the third and final, he is asked to perform a cure and does.  So Aira does not cheat on this aspect of his conceit, as I suspected he might, since given his method he may well have launched the novel without knowing exactly where he was going.

The Miracle Cure applies the omnibook to reality, something like an application of the memory palaces of Giordano Bruno, and not so far from the central conceit of John Crowley’s Aegypt books, and of course akin to this and that infinite bit of Borges.  It is even more like an application of the power cosmic by the Silver Surfer or Thanos, the ludicrous yet god-like space-faring characters from Marvel Comics.  Aira scholars should figure out which comic books he read.  Here is a Spanish reviewer who is way ahead of me: “without doubt,” he says, Aira grew up with the bizarre and inventive comics of the DC Silver Age, which explains a lot.

There are many things a novel does not say, and this absence makes it possible for action to take place within its restricted universe.  Hence, the novel is also an antecedent of Miracles, precisely because the events the novel recounts can happen as a result of what it excludes.  (67)

Each Cure destroys and then replaces the universe.  This is the most Doom-like part of the Miracle Cures.

I have avoided describing the first chapter because it is the funniest piece of extended Aira I have yet read, wonderful Monty Python stuff.  The metafiction-hating reader could enjoy it and skip the rest of the book.

Katherine Silver translated this one.  Fun gig.

Why conceptual art? - against "a kind of inhuman hyperprofessionalism"

How did we get here?  Meaning, in this week’s context, how did we get to a point where Alvin Lucier’s recording of a mechanically distorted bit of speech can be credibly placed among the most important pieces of music of the 20th century.  Why does anyone worry about, while writing a novel, the alphabeticization of the words, like Walter Abish did?   How on earth did we get to – to – to – this:

If that image does not immediately appear at the website of Jeff Koons, click on “Inflatables” – or better yet, do not.  That place is a chamber of horrors.

More to the point, why are these works so prestigious and important.  No, that is easy.  They are pres. & imp. because certain other people believe they are p. & i., but I have just moved the target of the Why? and added a Who?

I don’t know the answers.  I am always looking for evidence.  Part of my pursuit of Austrian literature was a search for clues.  I found plenty.  A lot changed around 1900 – or 1910, Virginia Woolf says everything changed in 1910.  Maybe so.

I am so glad Rise pointed me to César Aira’s essay on conceptual art.  It is worth revisiting.  Aira has a good one-word explanation: professionalization.  This is what he means:

Once a professional novelist is established, he has two equally melancholy alternatives: to keep writing the ‘old’ novels in updated settings; or to heroically attempt to take one or two more steps forward.  This last possibility turned out to be a dead end within a few years: while Balzac wrote fifty novels, and still had time to live, Flaubert wrote five, shedding blood in the process.  Joyce wrote two, and Proust a single novel, and it was a work that took over his life, absorbing it, a kind of inhuman hyperprofessionalism. The fact is that being able to make a living from literature was a momentary and precarious state which could only happen at a determined moment in history.

The avant garde, a focus on concept and process rather than content, is Aira’s way to break the impasse, “an attempt to recuperate the amateur gesture” rather than trying to outdo Proust.  Note Aira’s strong sense of progress in the arts.  One could quibble with some of Aira’s evidence.

Now, lots of people write and far more read lightly updated versions of the old novels, Flaubert and Proust for our time (or Austen and Dickens), and they can find readers, and receive awards and critical praise.  This is the big difference between literature and classical music or fine art.  The audience for new work in fiction is much larger, and the avant gardists have not captured whatever mechanism is it that distributes prestige.  Sometimes I think they have captured poetry, other times I am not so sure.  But fiction is too big. Too – no, I don’t know what.

I thought about writing this post as a series of questions.  What is innovation in fiction?  How does originality differ from innovation?  Is there a taste for innovation?  And once I answer these questions, if I can, I have to historicize them – would the answers be the same in Shakespeare’s time, or Johnson’s, or even Dickens’s?  No – so what changed, and why?  I don’t know, I don’t know.

To return to my first paragraph, since I feel bad about lumping them together for illustrative purposes – Lucier is narrow and brilliant, Abish is narrow and interesting, Koons is a con man.

Alvin Lucier's Music 109 - Your professor is prepared.

Yesterday I was trying to get to a wonderful book, Music 109 by Alvin Lucier (2012), an adaptation of the music history class Lucier has been teaching at Wesleyan University for the last forty years.

Lucier is, in the sense I was discussing, a conceptual composer.  His compositions break music down into sound.   He hooks a wire up to some electronics and lets it vibrate – that’s a composition (Music on a Long Thin Wire). In his best known work, I am sitting in a room (1969), Lucier records himself describing the piece, and then records a playback of the recording, and then records a playback of the playback, repeating until the acoustics of the room have destroyed any trace of speech aside from its rhythm.  What remains, surprisingly, is music, or something very much like it (“Speech became music.  It was magical”).  The process of the creation of the piece is crucial to understanding what it is, to even know what I am hearing.  Why would anyone record this uninteresting text, which begins with “I am sitting in a room”?

It was crucial to avoid poetic references – poems, prayers, anything with high aesthetic value.  I felt that would only get in the way.  I wanted the acoustic exploration to be paramount, the room acoustics and its gradual transformation to be the point of the piece.  (90)

The finished recording is forty-five minutes long.  The distorting acoustical transitions are small and the piece moves slowly.

As César Aira writes, in an essay on John Cage and conceptual art that I swear I did not know about until Rise pointed it out to me yesterday, “what we think of as the ‘work’ can be the method by which the work is made, rather than the actual work itself, the work acting as a kind of documentary appendix which serves only as a means of deducing the process from which it arose.”

Although Lucier also wants to hear the results of the process.  He likes the surprise.  I believe I have only made it all the way through I am sitting in a room three times, although I have listened to parts of it many times.  I must have first come across Lucier in William Duckworth’s survey 20/20: 20 New Sounds of the 20th Century (1999), which included I am sitting in a room alongside Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Ives’s Concord Sonata, and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue as one of the seminal works of the century.  Really?  Yes, at this point, yes.

Since Lucier is now part of music history, his music history class is his music history.  The first work discussed is Charles Ives’s Symphony No. 4.  Beethoven appears as the author of the Grosse Fuge, “the only nineteenth-century work that can exist on a wholly modern music concert” (183).  The major figures are John Cage, Robert Ashley, La Monte Young – people Lucier knew and worked with.  Chapter titles cover forms (Opera, String Quartets), but also concepts (Indeterminacy, Repetition) and who knows what – Bell Labs, Words, Tape Recorders.

The prose is conversational, although secretly filled with pedagogical mines designed to explode years later.  I should try to write more like Lucier.  He gets to the point.

When [Cage] was at Wesleyan in the Sixties, he taught a course in which he sent everyone to the library to find a different book.  The students used chance operations to generate the call numbers.  They all came back with different books on different subjects, some even in different languages.  Cage thought it was a stupid idea for everybody to read the same thing.  He thought it would be more interesting if everyone read something different.  (13)

How wonderful that with the internet a curious reader can now listen along with whatever crazy piece Lucier mentions, no matter how obscure.  How wonderful Lucier’s class must be.

Let’s pack up our book bags and go into the tunnels under the Music Studios, the acoustics there are very reverberant.  I brought along a pitch pipe.  (Your professor is prepared)…  Let’s carry our perfect fifth with us into the tunnels and perform La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #7.  (102)

Aira and Abish - literary conceptual art

The fiction of César Aira is conceptual.  It is created under a restriction that is not part of the text itself.  Aira talks about his method of composition openly in interviews, so it is no secret, but there is no way to derive the method from the text.  The narrator of Varamo says that is exactly what he is doing (“all the critic has to do is translate each verse, each word, backwards, into the particle of reality from which it sprang,” 45) but he is fictional, and that line is a joke.  You have to read the little tag beside the painting to know about the concept.

This kind of explicitly conceptual fiction is rare and has always been rare.  No need to pester me with your favorite exceptions.  Conceptual theater and poetry are much more common, which is why Varamo is about the composition of a poem.  The novel is set during 1923 (p. 3), so the great poetic masterpiece that is supposedly at the center of Varamo, which itself is composed in a conceptual manner (it is a found object collage), is written in the same year as The Wasteland, another collage-like masterpiece.  This is not a coincidence.

Within his constraints, Aira does not break so many rules.  He has characters, plots, jokes, transitions, all of the usual stuff of fiction.  Heck, Walter Abish has all of that stuff.  See the amazing post Rise put together.  Abish’s Alphabetical Africa (1974) employs an arbitrary constraint based on the alphabet.  The first chapter only uses words that begin with the letter A, the second chapter expands to words that begin with A and B, and so on for 26 chapters, after which each chapter removes a letter until we shrink back down to A words at the end.  As soon as you leaf through the pages you get the concept.  And yet the novel still has characters (not particularly good characters, I admit), a plot, etc.

I have argued that Madame Bovary belongs in this company.  I am not sure many people believe me.

If conceptual fiction is rare, purely conceptual fiction, or for that matter poetry or plays, barely exists.  I mean novels consisting of a single word repeated ten million times, or poems without words.  That kind of thing.  It has never been an important part of literary history.

Twentieth century fine art and music are of course full of – from the point of view of many people, plagued with – this stuff. John Cage’s 4’33”, just four minutes and thirty-three seconds of a pianist not playing the piano, or Marcel Duchamp’s signed urinal, or Yves Klein’s monochromatic blue paintings, or Yoko Ono’s string quartets, where the complete score is something like “The musicians and audience leave the concert  hall and look at the stars.”  I made that specific one up, but that’s what they are like.

Many music lovers and art enthusiasts hate this stuff, just loathe it.  They think it has ruined modern art, and that the artists are con men and the audience a pack of fools.  Let’s not go into the reasons for this.  Skeptical readers can comfort themselves that despite the best efforts of various Dadaists and Surrealists and Vorticists, conceptual literature has remained more of a concept than it has in music or fine art.  In literature, it is fairly easy to pretend that conceptual art does not exist.

This is all a preface to a kind of book review, if you can believe it.

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.

Bolaño, Aira, and the Argentinean Literature of Doom

Roberto Bolaño’s contribution to the Spanish issue of The Hudson Review is flattering.  It’s a post I wrote last year, on the extraordinary riches of Argentine literature.  His essay is maybe just a little different than mine, superior in terms of knowledge, skill, breadth, depth, humor, and every other virtue associated with good writing and good criticism, but is otherwise much like what I wrote.

Post-Borges Argentine literature has become, Bolaño claims, “the literature of doom,” a “literary nightmare, literary suicide, a literary dead end.”  That sounds worse than he means – better literary nightmares than real ones.  Bolaño thinks of Roberto Arlt, for example, as a great writer, but here’s his metaphor for Arlt’s anti-novels:

Seen as a closet or a basement Arlt’s work is fine. Seen as the main room of the house, it’s a macabre joke.  Seen as the kitchen, it promises food poisoning.  Seen as the bathroom, it’ll end up giving us scabies.  Seen as the library, it’s the guarantee of the death of literature.

An aside – I would not want to argue that this is the way all literary criticism has to be written.  No, not all of it.

The strain of doom that has only recently wandered into English is that of the mysterious Osvaldo Lamborghini and his disciple César Aira.  Bolaño describes Lamborghini’s novels as “excruciating,” readable only two or three pages at a time, smelling of “blood, spilled guts, bodily fluids, unpardonable acts.”  If someone could report back on this, I would appreciate it.

That is not at all how I, or Bolaño, would describe the compulsively readable Surrealist César Aira, author of dozens of little novel-like objects.  Five have appeared in English, with another coming in June.  I am surprised to discover that I have read four of them, all but The Hare.  Tess Lewis, in The Hudson Review, has put together a fine and useful, if perhaps insufficiently skeptical* overview of Aira-in-English.

I have written elsewhere, briefly, about a single amazing scene from An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, easily the best Aira novellino I have read (Bolaño prefers the fluid How I Became a Nun), and also the most conventionally novel-like novel, suggesting that I am an aesthetic reactionary.  I read someone – not Tess Lewis – who claimed that Landscape Painter was Aira’s deliberate parody of the well-crafted Modernist novel.  Could be.

The Literary Conference (2006), Englished last year, is about a mad scientist – “the typical Mad Scientist of the comic books” (18) – who plans to conquer the world with an army of clones led by a clone of Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes.  The mad scientist is the narrator, and author, César Aira.  Of course he is.  Who else would he be?

Aira writes his fiction under a regime of self-imposed daily serialization.  My understanding is that he can polish and refine his day’s writing, but can never revise an earlier day’s work.  He deliberately inserts impossible, unsolvable situations to stymie his future self, who is stuck with whatever nonsense he had previously written.  His novels are one-man exquisite corpses.  A close canonical equivalent I can think of is The Old Curiosity Shop, a brilliant improvisatory flight, which often descends into Dadaist lunacy.  As Aira (“Aira”) thinks, watching one of his old plays at the literary conference:

What was this all about?  I didn’t recognize it, it was too Dadaist.  Nevertheless, I had written it. (55)

Now I see my attraction to Aira.  It is as if he is me, reading one of my old posts at Wuthering Expectations.

Another aside – if someone would hurry up and translate Aira’s only short story, “Cecil Taylor,” that would be great.  Thanks.**

* Aira, like Bolaño, is a straight-faced prankster; their own claims about their biographies and methods should be taken as artistic creations.

** According to Bolaño, one of the five greatest stories he had ever read.  No idea what the other four were.  According to Aira, “No es un cuento” (“It is not a story,” translation by me).  “Cecil Taylor,” accompanied by a perplexing allegorical introduction, can be found in an anthology titled Buenos Aires (1999, ed. Juan Forn).  Someone should translate the whole book.

The Wuthering Expectations Best of 2010, I guess

The best book I read all year was, easily, incontestably, Moby-Dick.  The closest competitors, in audacity, scope, intensity, were the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson and the first edition of Leaves of Grass. A different kind of reader would include The Brothers Karamazov.  I don’t want to write about any of these – I wrote plenty about Melville and Whitman, did justice to Dostoevsky, and have just barely begun to pretend to comprehend that enormous bolus of Dickinson.

Makes her sound pretty appealing, yes?  One of things I had to say about Whitman was that he had dropped a Brooklyn city directory on his foot.  I forgot I wrote that.  Not bad, huh?  If you can’t make yourself laugh – where was I?

So I don’t really want to write about the Best Books of the Year.  How about the Biggest Surprises?

1.  There’s this Argentine surrealist, César Aira, who writes weird little novel-like thingaroos.  I read three of them this year.  An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (2000) has a scene where a painter, and his horse, are struck by lightning, and then struck by lightning again, that is an unbelievable piece of writing.  Just crazy, stunning.  Nuts.

2.  I could single out every other episode of Gottfried Keller’s enormous Green Henry (1854).  In Part 3, Chapter 1, young Henry encounters the collected works of Goethe.  “From that hour I did not leave the couch, and I read for forty days on end, during which time the winter returned, and the Spring came back, but the white snow, whose shining I saw but heeded not, passed me by like a dream” (tr. A. M. Holt).  Green Henry is absolutely suffused with Goethe, dripping with Goethe.

3.  The City of Dreadful Night (1874), Bysshe Vanolis!  An amazing piece of poetic crankery, a brilliant pastiche of English and European poetry, a serious attempt to bring Baudelaire and Nerval into English.  The universe as a clock with no hands, the sinners who have so little hope that they cannot even go to hell, the Childe Roland-like wasteland of despair.  Fantastic, in all senses.

4.  Speaking of wastelands of despair, my weirdest experience of the year was reading one of my own recurring dreams in George MacDonald’s Lilith (1895).  Please read that dream-stuffed book; maybe you’ll find one of your own.  That reminds me one of the year’s true highlights, a guest post on MacDonald by my mother.  Thanks, Mom!

5.  All those French poets – Verlaine, Rimbaud, Hugo, Corbière, Laforgue, Mallarmé.  But I guess they were not surprises.  Like I didn’t know they were going to be good.  Please.

6.  Still, they were full of lots of individual little surprises.  As there were in, to switch to a novel I knew I would love, Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford.  The Armistice scene at the end of the third book, A Man Could Stand Up- (1926), it just builds and builds, and then, a joyous pow!  I looked for a quotation, but out of context, none will make sense.

That’s plenty, I guess.  No room for Moishe Leib Halpern, or Clarel, or The Ebb-Tide, or Skylark. No James Hogg or Tolstoy or Kalidasa.  Peter Pan floats away on a bird's nest.  The mayor of Casterbridge witnesses his own drowned body.  The time traveler witnesses the senescence of the earth.  This is now.

Next year, I guess: more books.  Or maybe I should just read these again.  They sound pretty good.

We're discoverers who have only a vague idea of the direction we're heading in - Restless writers

Of which I am one, sitting in a library, dithering, restlessly thinking about restlessness, not an activity that leads to repose or, I fear, clear thinking.

That title is from the very end of Roberto Arlt’s Seven Madmen (1929), a novel that is as jittery as they come.  No one in the novel can sit still, although they can be drugged or stunned or clubbed on the head.  Everyone is full of schemes – inventions, secret societies, plans to conquer Argentina with brothels and poison gas (the brothels will finance the poison gas), the usual.  Everyone is more or less nuts, as the title warns, but insanity is insufficient.  Everyone is restless, including, most importantly, the author, who flits about, unwilling to stitch all of his pieces together.

So many of the early proto- or pre-Modernists are preternaturally restless.  I mean something other than energetic.  Honoré de Balzac or Anthony Trollope obviously had reserves of energy that stagger me, but they could plant themselves at their desks and write.  Charles Baudelaire wrote plenty, really, but his restlessness is part of his art.  He must have sat still often enough, but the rest of the time, he’s out in Paris, wandering about, with no purpose other than being there.

The protagonist of Arlt’s Mad Toy (1926) names two personal heroes, the men he wants to be when he grows up: Charles Baudelaire and Rocambole, a fictional bandit and adventurer.  Isidore Ducasse emulated Baudelaire, and in Maldoror (1869) also invokes Rocambole, as a sort of heroic evil-doer.  Arlt can’t have known Ducasse, can he?  Ah, who cares.

I suspect that part of what we find modern in characters like Don Quixote, or Hamlet, or Moll Flanders, is their restlessness, their dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and their psychological need for change.  I wonder how to link the idea to Modernism, though.  It was Dante, after all, in the 14th century, who sent Odysseus off on one final adventure.  Perhaps the difference in the 19th century is the pace of change, the certainty that the world is shifting out from under our feet. 

Arlt is a real Buenos Aires writer, just as Baudelaire and Ducasse were Paris writers. Not that urbanism explains everything.  Who was more of a city writer than Charles Dickens, and who was more energetic?  But his novels generally end with the promise of rest, a new steady state.

All I have done here is wander into Pascal’s insight that “all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”*  Pascal got that right.  And now, somehow, I was quiet enough, and still enough, to have written something, and will restlessly move on.  For the next few weeks, healthful and pure books, exclusively.

* p. 48, Modern Library edition, 1941, trans. W. F. Trotter.

Even so, it cannot have been good for his health - I marvel at Argentinean literature

Roberto Arlt’s Mad Toy is a short book – 130 pages or so – that packs in a lot of different pieces.  They do not all mesh so well, but they all contribute to the messy energy of the novel.  The tour of Buenos Aires, circa 1910, was as interesting to me as anything else.  The markets, the shops, and the immigrants, all of those immigrants, Italians, mostly, but also Spaniards, Eastern European Jews, Turks, and who knows who else.  The novel is drizzled with Italian and even a bit of Yiddish, as well as Argentinean slang.

Buenos Aires was a rapidly growing city of immigrants.  Some potted facts, which I should probably look up, so don’t trust me: at the end of the 19th century, Argentina had a higher proportion of immigrants than the United States.  The per capita income was close to that of the U.S., too.  It was right around then that a mismanaged financial crisis (which also affected the U.S. and Australia, but less severely) led to the divergence of income that we still see today.  If the economic problems are mentioned in Mad Toy, I missed it.

To an American, by which I mean a norteamericano, by which I mean a yanqui, Argentinean history is unusually interesting.  It parallels the history of my own country in key ways – the immigrants, the frontier, the cowboys, the wars with indigenous people – that help me understand U.S. history better.  I want to learn more about it.

Argentinean literature has become best known for its fabulists and metafictionists – Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar and so on – which makes the instrumental use of literature as substitute history or sociology even trickier than usual.  I’ve read a couple of the tiny novels of César Aira – Ghosts (1990) and An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (2000).  The latter is a historical novel, set in the 19th century pampas, featuring a “real” German painter, Johann Moritz Rugendas.  But Aira is a surrealist, so even the apparently accurate map of Argentina that New Directions put in front of Chris Andrews’s 2006 translation of the novel is open to suspicion.

Part of my favorite section of that novel:

The horse began to turn beneath him. It was till turning when a lightning bolt struck him on the head. Like a nickel statue, man and beast were lit up with electricity. For one horrific moment, regrettably to be repeated, Rugendas witnessed the spectacle of his body shining. The horse’s mane was standing on end, like the dorsal fin of a swordfish. From that moment on, like all victims of personalized catastrophes, he saw himself as if from outside, wondering, Why did it have to happen to me? The sensation of having electrified blood was horrible but very brief. Evidently the charge flowed out as fast as it had flowed into his body. Even so, it cannot have been good for his health. (32-3)

And then later an Indian pretends to make out with a giant pink salmon (p. 71).

So what I’m saying is, I want someone to organize an Argentinean Reading Challenge Readalong, starting with Domingo Sarmiento’s Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845), moving on to the gaucho epic Martín Fierro (1872/1879) of José Hernández, and continuing with Leopold Lugones, Roberto Arlt, and then on to Adolfo Bioy Casares and Fogwill and so on.  There’s an Argentinean writer who just uses his surname, which is “Fogwill.”  Curious thing, Argentinean literature.

So, to whomever sets this up, thanks in advance!