By Jeff Bursey
In August 2013 I started a month-long reading jag of Argentinean writer César Aira (b. 1949), by no means able to read his many novels, but only the handful available in English, published mostly by New Directions, in preparation for his newest book (in English), Shantytown (November 2013). Apart from the introduction to his methods and approaches that reading Ghosts (2008), The Seamstress and the Wind (2011), Varamo (2012) and The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira (2012)* provided, there was the joy of encountering a new novelist whose works amuse, baffle, stretch one’s imagination, and reaffirm that the form of the novel is untiring of innovation. For this discovery thanks must go to Scott Esposito, co-author of The End of Oulipo, who spoke highly of him in that book.
As Esposito says, “…Aira relentlessly combines genres in a very postmodern frenzy of activity, but the books that emerge from this process feel remarkably whole, and they frequently partake in an original lyricism that pays due heed to the jouissance of fiction.” In Shantytown facets of noir fiction are present—a shady part of town, a crooked policeman, women in trouble—but the purpose is neither to recycle overfamiliar tropes nor upend a genre. Aira has greater ambition, and a fine sense of what can be called menace. In Shantytown we are, with each page, slowly denied the expected contours of a noir and given something much less formulaic.
On the very first page Maxi, the gym-going innocent (innocent here means weak and untried), offers his strength to help the “local cardboard collectors to transport their loads.” This “act performed once, on the spur of the moment, [that] had developed over time into a job…,” becomes a regular routine. Maxi doesn’t view it as “an act of charity or solidarity or Christian duty or pity or anything like that. It was something he did, that was all. It was spontaneous, like a hobby.” Maxi doesn’t have the ability to know much of his own thoughts (what character does?), and when others refer to him as a “‘meathead’ or ‘brainless hulk’” the narrator agrees that “they weren’t too far from the truth.” The inability to comprehend what compels him to assist the poor leads us, from the start, into the various levels of uncertainty that make up Shantytown.
Prone to falling asleep as soon as daylight fades, Maxi is unreliable, as the narrator makes clear:
Maxi had never gone that far [into the shantytown], but he’d gone far enough to see: in contrast with the dark stretch of road leading up to it, the shantytown was strangely illuminated, almost radiant, crowned with a halo that shone in the fog. It was almost like seeing a vision, in the distance, and this fantastic impression was intensified by his “night blindness” and the sleepiness besetting him already. Seen like that, at night and far away, the shantytown might have seemed a magical place, but he was not entirely naïve; he knew that its inhabitants lived in squalor and desperation. Perhaps it was shame that prompted the scavengers to say goodbye to him before they reached their destination. Perhaps they wanted this handsome, well-dressed young man, whose curious pastime it was to assist them, to believe that they lived in a distant and mysterious place, rather than going into the depressing details.
Apart, then, from being advised not to trust Maxi’s conceptions and perceptions, and the shroud that the garbage collectors throw over their lodgings, the narrative expresses doubt through the use of almost, might, and perhaps, as well as fog, fantastic and magical. This language is frequent, and the narrative also leans heavily on the words if and must. Later in the novel the narrator says: “If God intervened in earthly justice, crimes would be punished straight away. And that could only happen if it had been happening all along, in which case human beings would have adjusted their behavior accordingly… But in the world as we know it, God waits.” We are not going to gain access to most of what is going on; instead, we are pushed into confusion. Since this is a noir fiction, maybe that’s one of its aims, with the possibility everything will be revealed at the end.
In an article for The Quarterly Conversation, “The Literary Alchemy of César Aira,” Marcelo Ballvé quotes Aira and provides useful commentary:
In fact, Aira has staked out a very cogent and immensely influential (in Latin America) artistic position that basically says “storytelling at its finest avoids explanations, information, interpretation, etc.” In a series of 1988 lectures delivered at the University of Buenos Aires, Aira was clear on this point: “The real story, which we have grown unaccustomed to, is chemically free of explanation…. The story is always about something unexplainable. The art of narration declines as explanations are added.”
Explanation and information, Aira says, are the currencies of our communicational era, our culture of information-saturated media and scientific analysis. We have become so conditioned by this reality that as readers many of us demand “credible” stories, with explanations, linear causality, and perfectly seamless narrative structures.
The novels mentioned at the opening are like Shantytown in their questioning of what can be known. In Ghosts, set in an apartment building under construction (equivalent to the development of the book itself), we witness a young girl coaxed to her suicide by the spectral figures of men (who she calls “floury clowns”), but though we read about them, not everyone can see them; in the more absurd The Seamstress and the Wind, where a wedding dress is swept into the air (almost as ghostly as the figures in Ghosts), “the mad force of events” leads into a liaison between a dressmaker and the wind that’s fallen in love with her, only to clash with a Monster (though we are never told what happens, as if Aira had gotten bored with that thread); in Varamo a lonely civil servant, whose hobby is taxidermy (“His aim had been to produce a fish playing the piano”) and who hears voices no one else does, experiences one bad day only to create, using everything in his life and what happens in those twenty-four hours, “a landmark of Latin American avant-garde writing in the first decades of the twentieth century, The Song of the Virgin Child”; and in The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira a possible quack (not a stand-in for the writer despite the shared last name) is hunted by a “cursed ambulance, which had been pursuing him in dreams and throughout wakeful nights, in fantasy and reality, always driving with its siren blasting along the uncertain edge of two realms!”
As Ballvé says, “Like the storyteller of prehistory, Aira is concerned not so much with verisimilitude or realism as he is with that bewitching kernel of mystery that is at the heart of a narrative.”
Aira’s short books, easily fitted into a jacket pocket, spring from many genres, though it would seem that each form, initially useful as a frame for a given project, becomes eclipsed by the time the last page is reached. An aesthetic distance, a bent towards sociological observations and a prevalent humour that can be dropped without notice keep readers off balance. The shantytown, and what it stands for, is both (though not always simultaneously) a source of humour and a bleak hole that houses misery. In what may be a sideways comment on it (and perhaps Argentina) a female resident of the shantytown passes on received wisdom to Maxi: “‘What poor people? Sir, that’s an old-fashioned word. In the old days, there were poor people and rich people because there was a world made up of the poor and the rich. Now that world has disappeared, and the poor have been left without a world.’”
Earlier, the narrator had used similar words, but the tone is different: “Anyway, what poor people? The few [Maxi] saw… looked and behaved like any other Argentines. The only thing that identified them as poor was living in those makeshift dwellings… Those dollhouse-like constructions had their charm, precisely because of their fragility and their thrown-together look. To appreciate that charm one only had to be sufficiently frivolous.” A reader might conclude that the narrator is uncaring, as when he appraises the appearance of the carts of the poor as “folk art.” Such remarks provoke rueful laughter, as well as appreciation for echoing the voice of power that will not speak on behalf of the disadvantaged.
How are we to regard a narrator who seems to speak without either kindness or complete mockery about major and minor characters, and who denies us the expected conclusion of a novel—that is, a resolution that leaves us wiser and satisfied as we close the book? Our conclusion may be that, as there exist mysteries the narrator shows cannot be pierced, then by extension, since Shantytown is an object in our so-called real world, we need to consider that the unknown is as prevalent here as within the walls of fiction. Our complacency is rebutted, and this is emblemized in the final section when a terrific rainstorm floods everything, “leaving only the pure scenography of danger, in which, by definition, nothing could happen.” Even language dissolves. “‘Heddo,’ [Vanessa, Maxi’s sister] said, and tried again, grimacing, but without any more success, on the contrary: ‘Geddgo … leglo …’ Then, finally, she got it right: ‘Hello!’” From habit characters cling to routine and to seemingly solid things. Four friends at a pizzeria “had to rest their feet on the crossbars of the chairs because the tiled floor was under four inches of water.” Will this save them from being inundated?
What can save us? For, like the characters in this and other Aira novels, we look for a solid perch during calamities, and we also assume that, in time, and with effort, we will get to the heart of matters. But suppose we are deluding ourselves, and that what we consider as concrete is illusory, at best transitory, and therefore untrustworthy. It’s an unsettling thought, and that constitutes the menace I mentioned earlier. We must take César Aira and his work as seriously as we would any other artist, and upon doing so admit there will be repercussions.
* Publication in English translation; original publication years differ.
Shantytown, by César Aira, Trans. Chris Andrews | New Directions | 128 pages | $15.00 | paper | ISBN #978-0811219112
No Solid Perch
Columns
By Jeff Bursey
As Esposito says, “…Aira relentlessly combines genres in a very postmodern frenzy of activity, but the books that emerge from this process feel remarkably whole, and they frequently partake in an original lyricism that pays due heed to the jouissance of fiction.” In Shantytown facets of noir fiction are present—a shady part of town, a crooked policeman, women in trouble—but the purpose is neither to recycle overfamiliar tropes nor upend a genre. Aira has greater ambition, and a fine sense of what can be called menace. In Shantytown we are, with each page, slowly denied the expected contours of a noir and given something much less formulaic.
On the very first page Maxi, the gym-going innocent (innocent here means weak and untried), offers his strength to help the “local cardboard collectors to transport their loads.” This “act performed once, on the spur of the moment, [that] had developed over time into a job…,” becomes a regular routine. Maxi doesn’t view it as “an act of charity or solidarity or Christian duty or pity or anything like that. It was something he did, that was all. It was spontaneous, like a hobby.” Maxi doesn’t have the ability to know much of his own thoughts (what character does?), and when others refer to him as a “‘meathead’ or ‘brainless hulk’” the narrator agrees that “they weren’t too far from the truth.” The inability to comprehend what compels him to assist the poor leads us, from the start, into the various levels of uncertainty that make up Shantytown.
Prone to falling asleep as soon as daylight fades, Maxi is unreliable, as the narrator makes clear:
Maxi had never gone that far [into the shantytown], but he’d gone far enough to see: in contrast with the dark stretch of road leading up to it, the shantytown was strangely illuminated, almost radiant, crowned with a halo that shone in the fog. It was almost like seeing a vision, in the distance, and this fantastic impression was intensified by his “night blindness” and the sleepiness besetting him already. Seen like that, at night and far away, the shantytown might have seemed a magical place, but he was not entirely naïve; he knew that its inhabitants lived in squalor and desperation. Perhaps it was shame that prompted the scavengers to say goodbye to him before they reached their destination. Perhaps they wanted this handsome, well-dressed young man, whose curious pastime it was to assist them, to believe that they lived in a distant and mysterious place, rather than going into the depressing details.
Apart, then, from being advised not to trust Maxi’s conceptions and perceptions, and the shroud that the garbage collectors throw over their lodgings, the narrative expresses doubt through the use of almost, might, and perhaps, as well as fog, fantastic and magical. This language is frequent, and the narrative also leans heavily on the words if and must. Later in the novel the narrator says: “If God intervened in earthly justice, crimes would be punished straight away. And that could only happen if it had been happening all along, in which case human beings would have adjusted their behavior accordingly… But in the world as we know it, God waits.” We are not going to gain access to most of what is going on; instead, we are pushed into confusion. Since this is a noir fiction, maybe that’s one of its aims, with the possibility everything will be revealed at the end.
In an article for The Quarterly Conversation, “The Literary Alchemy of César Aira,” Marcelo Ballvé quotes Aira and provides useful commentary:
In fact, Aira has staked out a very cogent and immensely influential (in Latin America) artistic position that basically says “storytelling at its finest avoids explanations, information, interpretation, etc.” In a series of 1988 lectures delivered at the University of Buenos Aires, Aira was clear on this point: “The real story, which we have grown unaccustomed to, is chemically free of explanation…. The story is always about something unexplainable. The art of narration declines as explanations are added.”
Explanation and information, Aira says, are the currencies of our communicational era, our culture of information-saturated media and scientific analysis. We have become so conditioned by this reality that as readers many of us demand “credible” stories, with explanations, linear causality, and perfectly seamless narrative structures.
The novels mentioned at the opening are like Shantytown in their questioning of what can be known. In Ghosts, set in an apartment building under construction (equivalent to the development of the book itself), we witness a young girl coaxed to her suicide by the spectral figures of men (who she calls “floury clowns”), but though we read about them, not everyone can see them; in the more absurd The Seamstress and the Wind, where a wedding dress is swept into the air (almost as ghostly as the figures in Ghosts), “the mad force of events” leads into a liaison between a dressmaker and the wind that’s fallen in love with her, only to clash with a Monster (though we are never told what happens, as if Aira had gotten bored with that thread); in Varamo a lonely civil servant, whose hobby is taxidermy (“His aim had been to produce a fish playing the piano”) and who hears voices no one else does, experiences one bad day only to create, using everything in his life and what happens in those twenty-four hours, “a landmark of Latin American avant-garde writing in the first decades of the twentieth century, The Song of the Virgin Child”; and in The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira a possible quack (not a stand-in for the writer despite the shared last name) is hunted by a “cursed ambulance, which had been pursuing him in dreams and throughout wakeful nights, in fantasy and reality, always driving with its siren blasting along the uncertain edge of two realms!”
As Ballvé says, “Like the storyteller of prehistory, Aira is concerned not so much with verisimilitude or realism as he is with that bewitching kernel of mystery that is at the heart of a narrative.”
Aira’s short books, easily fitted into a jacket pocket, spring from many genres, though it would seem that each form, initially useful as a frame for a given project, becomes eclipsed by the time the last page is reached. An aesthetic distance, a bent towards sociological observations and a prevalent humour that can be dropped without notice keep readers off balance. The shantytown, and what it stands for, is both (though not always simultaneously) a source of humour and a bleak hole that houses misery. In what may be a sideways comment on it (and perhaps Argentina) a female resident of the shantytown passes on received wisdom to Maxi: “‘What poor people? Sir, that’s an old-fashioned word. In the old days, there were poor people and rich people because there was a world made up of the poor and the rich. Now that world has disappeared, and the poor have been left without a world.’”
Earlier, the narrator had used similar words, but the tone is different: “Anyway, what poor people? The few [Maxi] saw… looked and behaved like any other Argentines. The only thing that identified them as poor was living in those makeshift dwellings… Those dollhouse-like constructions had their charm, precisely because of their fragility and their thrown-together look. To appreciate that charm one only had to be sufficiently frivolous.” A reader might conclude that the narrator is uncaring, as when he appraises the appearance of the carts of the poor as “folk art.” Such remarks provoke rueful laughter, as well as appreciation for echoing the voice of power that will not speak on behalf of the disadvantaged.
How are we to regard a narrator who seems to speak without either kindness or complete mockery about major and minor characters, and who denies us the expected conclusion of a novel—that is, a resolution that leaves us wiser and satisfied as we close the book? Our conclusion may be that, as there exist mysteries the narrator shows cannot be pierced, then by extension, since Shantytown is an object in our so-called real world, we need to consider that the unknown is as prevalent here as within the walls of fiction. Our complacency is rebutted, and this is emblemized in the final section when a terrific rainstorm floods everything, “leaving only the pure scenography of danger, in which, by definition, nothing could happen.” Even language dissolves. “‘Heddo,’ [Vanessa, Maxi’s sister] said, and tried again, grimacing, but without any more success, on the contrary: ‘Geddgo … leglo …’ Then, finally, she got it right: ‘Hello!’” From habit characters cling to routine and to seemingly solid things. Four friends at a pizzeria “had to rest their feet on the crossbars of the chairs because the tiled floor was under four inches of water.” Will this save them from being inundated?
What can save us? For, like the characters in this and other Aira novels, we look for a solid perch during calamities, and we also assume that, in time, and with effort, we will get to the heart of matters. But suppose we are deluding ourselves, and that what we consider as concrete is illusory, at best transitory, and therefore untrustworthy. It’s an unsettling thought, and that constitutes the menace I mentioned earlier. We must take César Aira and his work as seriously as we would any other artist, and upon doing so admit there will be repercussions.
* Publication in English translation; original publication years differ.
Shantytown, by César Aira, Trans. Chris Andrews | New Directions | 128 pages | $15.00 | paper | ISBN #978-0811219112