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.”

three days of horror beneath the celestial lash - the esoteric cataclysms of Leopoldo Lugones

As far as I can tell, all of two books by Leopoldo Lugones are available in English.  One is the 2001 version of Strange Forces (1906) translated by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert, twelve short stories, half about mad scientists, half about nightmarish apocalypses, more or less.

The other is the 2008 Selected Writings in the Oxford Library of Latin America, translated by Sergio Waisman, which contains half of the stories from Strange Forces and thirty pages of newspaper writing and speeches, including the one from 1924 in which Lugones embraced fascism.  These writings were of mild historical interest.  Nowhere in the later book is the earlier translation even mentioned.  Honestly, I do not see the point of this book.  Did Waisman think Alter-Gilbert had botched his translation or something?

Alter-Gilbert does have a fondness for obscure English words.  My favorite new word was “fragor” (“a loud and sudden sound”), which translates the Spanish “fragor,” i.e., the same word.  The obscure Latinate words emphasize the resemblance of Lugones to Poe.

Lugones has a story titled “El Escuerzo” which Waisman “translates” as “El Escuerzo” and Alter-Gilbert as “The Bloat-Toad,” a superb title for a nightmare story. – “the toad began to inflate, to swell, to puff up by degrees, bulging, expanding, ballooning in a prodigious fashion, until it had tripled in size.”  How horrible.

The best Lugones stories feature neither mad scientists nor bloat-toads, but rather mythic apocalypses.  Sodom and Gomorrah get a story apiece, the latter describing in detail the city's destruction by a rain of super-heated copper pellets.  The stories finest moment is when the ruins of the city are invaded by lions:

Bald as mangy cats, their manes reduced to pitiful wisps of singed strands, their flanks seared unevenly, giving them the comic disproportion of half-clothed clowns wearing oversized masks, their tails standing on end and twitching, like those of rats in flight, their pustulous paws, dribbling blood – all this declared in the clearest terms their three days of horror beneath  the celestial lash…

“Origins of the Flood” mixes Genesis with Darwin.  Species rise and fall, with, at one point, the earth dominated by a species of intelligent mollusks that “lived, worked, and felt in a manner analogous to that of today’s humans” until the Flood, which did not involve rain but was rather “[a] progressive softening” which “endowed everything with the consistency of yeast.”   All of this is revealed by a spirit at a séance.  Perhaps the various chemicals and changes of state are meant to have an allegorical or alchemical meaning.

My favorite, though, is “The Horses of Abdera,” an expansion of an obscure myth associated with Hercules.  A city’s horses are so fine and well-trained that they develop intelligence and eventually rise up against the humans in an apocalyptic assault on the city.

Some time later, as it turned out, the beach was littered with dead fish which the tide had washed up, as had often happened in the past.  The horses glutted themselves on this gratuitous maritime bounty and, when they were sated, sauntered back to the suburban meadows with ominous slowness.

Etc., etc.  Weird, weird story.

Even apart from this last outburst of drivel - Leopoldo Lugones invents the Argentine Literature of Doom

When I came across Roberto Bolaño calling Argentine literature a “literature of doom,” I took it in part as a joke or as a way to emphasize the place of some specific Argentine writers like the prankster César Aira, at the time almost untranslated but now universally beloved, and the “excruciating” Osvaldo Lamborghini, still untranslated because, I assume, all decent English-language translators refuse to have anything to do with him.

But no, the more I have read in the literature, the more I have seen that Bolaño’s joke was of the “funny because true” variety.  Argentina has the most doom-laden, apocalyptic canon.  Esteban Echeverría’s “The Slaughterhouse” (1838/1871), Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845), and José Hernández’s The Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872) all find themselves foundering in doom before they end.  And the tradition continues in Roberto Arlt, J. Rodolfo Wilcock, and Aira.  Much less so in Borges.

Thus the annual Argentinean Literature of Doom hosted by Richard of Caravana de Recuerdos, a connoisseur of literary doom.

This year I have finally read Leopoldo Lugones, specifically his Poe-like collection Strange Forces (1906), which I have been meaning to read in its Gilbert Alter-Gilbert translation since coming across, years ago, an enticing post at 50 Watts (and please see this interview with Alter-Gilbert).  Lugones is the key figure in Argentine Doom because he was the first writer to really see it, to pull the texts I mention above together as the central works of Argentine literature.  This was all long before he became a fascist and killed himself over a love affair.

He could see the strain of apocalypse because he shared it.  Strange Forces begins with the destruction of Gomorrah (“The Firestorm”) and ends with a scientist in an insane asylum.  If I am counting right, fully six of the twelve stories are about mad scientists, most of whom destroy themselves in their attempts to convert music into light, like Scriabin, or teach a chimpanzee to talk, or build a disintegration ray.  “What this extraordinary gardener wanted to create was a flower of death” (“Viola Acherontia”).

I guess it is an symptom of Doom – what other literature has such a high proportion of mad scientists?  They feature in Roberto Arlt’s The Seven Madmen (1929), a novel that justifies its title, and Aira’s The Literary Conference (1997), just to pick a single example. J. Rodolfo Wilcock’s The Temple of Iconoclasts (1977) appears to contain an entire catalogue of mad scientists, making the mere six of Lugones look measly.

“I bought the ape at an auction of property from a bankrupt circus” (“Yzur”) – now that is a good first line.  The story cannot quite live up to it; none of Lugones’s scientific romances really do.  “[T]he resolution of any debate which the telling of this story may occasion will not rely, for its sole support, on my proficiency in the scientific arena” (“Psychon”), but in an all too authentically Poe-like gesture they mostly have too much science, too much scientistic gibberish.  “Even apart from this last outburst of drivel, the unbalanced personality of my interlocutor was evident to me…” (“Viola Acherontia”).  Lugones is in on the joke, although Alter-Gilbert argues that there is an esoteric side to the stories that the author meant entirely seriously.  All of that is invisible to me.

And anyways the six stories not about mad scientists are better, and less Poe-derivative, so who cares.  Tomorrow for those.