Issue five: César Aira
Every writer dreams of a future in which they will produce more books, if only the professional and personal obstacles presented by being alive would disappear. Many writers find writing excruciating. We trade shameful anecdotes about the excesses of our procrastination and tips on how to get started each day. We convene informal groups to encourage each other to work. The Argentine author César Aira has published over 100 novels. He can be forgiven for being so infuriatingly prolific because his books are brief and they appeal to every writer’s worst impulses. He describes his creative method as a “la huida hacia adelante,” the flight forward, always moving on from the previous day’s work, inventing not revising, yet he chronicles interruption, self-doubt, daydreaming, worrying about research and other habits writers are fond of. In his poignant memoir, Birthday, Aira describes working on an encyclopedia which he knows he’ll never finish: “Which is ideal for me. It allows me to rest.”
His latest to appear in English translation is The Famous Magician (originally El ilustre mago, written in 2013), which is published this month by New Directions for the inaugural batch of their “Storybook ND” series. (The idea behind the series, devised by Gini Alhadeff, is “to deliver the pleasure one felt as a child reading a marvelous book from cover to cover in an afternoon.”) It’s Faust for bookworms: A middle-aged writer, blocked and morose about his career, bothered by aches and pains, is offered magic powers by a mysterious, boorish bookseller in return for giving up reading and writing entirely. The narrator consults his wife and his friends about what he should do, but his indecision leads him descending an increasingly surreal spiral of events.
Aira’s novels rarely reach 100 pages long. (Ironically, his collection of short stories translated in English, The Musical Brain, is three or four times the length of any of his stand-alone books.) He writes as if trying to emulate the knots of thought before they can be straightened out by speech and ironed into prose. The stories are loopy, digressive—these books may be short, but they’re never concise—and the narratives stop and start, distracted by observations about daily minutiae or childhood memories. Many are told in the first person, often by a narrator called César Aira, who comes from the small rural town of Coronel Pringles, and may or may not be consonant with the real César Aira from Coronel Pringles. Aira delights in the minor plot trigger—a man is accidentally drenched in rainwater collected in a cafe’s awning in The Divorce, for instance; the narrator of Artforum is unable to get hold of a copy of the famous US art magazine in Buenos Aires—then meanders his narrative into absurdism and fantasy. The soaking man is reunited with an old college friend outside the cafe, which leads to a dreamlike account of a terrible fire at their alma mater. Among other misfortunes, the Artforum obsessive is shot during a gunfight outside his apartment while checking the mailbox for his ever elusive subscription copy.
Jorge Luis Borges is the presiding spirit over Aira’s work. “We are always talking about Borges,” he said in his 2017 New Yorker profile. His stories are often vehicles for miniature philosophy experiments but there’s a lightness and self-deprecation to Aira’s musing, and his fantasies are never mawkish or sentimental. Where Borges comes across as the learned author with a towering intellect and access to the strangest, deepest secrets of the cosmos, Aira is like a stand-up doing wry observational comedy about the nature of existence. Borges for slackers.
The Famous Magician unspools Aira’s familiar themes about the nature of literature. The narrator worries that his writing career has insulated him from experience. “I had never lived. All I had done was read and write, and I had believed in the relative privilege that a handful of readers had ascribed to me, but it was a simulacrum of real life, a convenient substitute, even if it had spared me many problems.” He is concerned that writing fiction has been a means of avoiding some more more visceral, honest—yet unidentified—way of living. (It’s the canard that bothered British novelist B.S. Johnson, who asserted in 1964 that “telling stories is telling lies,” but who could never escape the impulse to narrate.) As if the imagination is not itself part of the human experience, as if the edifice of fiction could be torn down along with all the ideological propaganda that is smuggled within it, so we could be free to… do what exactly? Talk endlessly about ourselves? It would be like being trapped in a desperately boring self-actualization cult. Aira suggests that reading and writing are themselves forms of magic, capable of transformation and change:
"Magic, he said, was very limited, limited to itself: it was what it was and nothing more. Admittedly, it could do anything: move objects, transform them, make them appear or disappear, but always on the condition that it remained itself, the same old magic condemned to go on reusing its stale old power. Reading, on the other hand, was always going beyond itself, because it had nothing of its own; it had what it had provisionally, on loan from the book, which kept changing."
Aira’s postmodern technique might seem unfashionable to some, going over old ground. (I’d love to take a serious work of history of art or literature and substitute each instance of the word “movement” for the word “fashion.” The perceptual effect would be instructive.) But he uses it to get at something deeper than the limits of fiction. A theme that Aira returns to repeatedly in his work is the question of whether a career in letters—or any artistic life—will, in the end, have felt like a life well-lived. He worries that he wasted his youth, that young people are better placed to be writers. (I’d argue that in writing—as opposed to, say, dance, in which the discipline relies so much on the body—the year-on-year accrual of experience improves the artist. Inexperience in a young writer can give rise to conservatism just as much as the fossilization of habits and opinions can in the old.) “Every writer would like to be a different sort of writer,” he explains in Birthday. “I would like to have style: if I did, all my experiences would be connected; my acts and thoughts would be follow one another by reason, not just by chance or on a whim.” It’s the anxiety every artist feels when looking at the careers of others, which inevitably seem so much more coherent than one’s own. The mistake that being well-dressed equates with being well-put-together in all other aspects of life. An artist’s private insecurities, tragedies, fallow periods, financial worries, disappointments, and failures are rarely on view, and if they are, then only ever in hindsight, romanticized into noble struggle against the odds. Yet, paradoxically, it’s often the mirage of artistic and professional coherence that inspires people to become artists in the first place.
Aira knows this. In his story Cecil Taylor (2011), he conjures the early years of the innovative US jazz pianist, taking temporary jobs in restaurant kitchens, as a night porter, as a cleaner, all the while constantly being thrown off stage, told by club promoters never to come back, never catching a break. Aira ends the story before Taylor receives recognition for his music; at the end of yet another night, alone, paid “twenty dollars, on the condition that he would never show his face there again.” We know that in real life Taylor eventually got his dues, but Aira refuses the romantic pay-off. Recognition is only for the few, the story suggests. Most artists remain unknown, uncelebrated.
If Mephistopheles offered me the choice, I don’t know if I’d opt for a life of magic, or one of reading and writing. Early in his indecision, the narrator of The Famous Magician explains: “I had always thought that only one thing could persuade me to stop writing and reading: the offer of a vast sum of money, an inexhaustible bank account.” With that in mind, please consider a paid subscription to this newsletter. Alternatively you can email me with financial offers to stop. (Serious buyers only.)
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