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Abstract
In the 1990s, César Aira took a negative view of artistic professionalization in his essays, but he also wrote a biographical novel about a professional artist: Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero, which depicts landscape painter Johann Moritz Rugendas’ South American travels in the 1830s. In his essays, Aira characterizes professionalization as a freezing of artistic form, and he positions the avant-garde as a dynamic process emerging out of a static professionalism. This essay argues that his novelistic treatment of Rugendas follows, but also diverges from, the ideas in his essays, exposing dynamics internal to professionalism itself.
Notes
1 César Aira, Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero (México D.F.: Biblioteca Era, 2001 [1st ed. 2000]), 62. Further references are to this edition unless otherwise indicated and will be given parenthetically in the main text.
2 César Aira, ‘La nueva escritura [1998]’, Boletín del Centro de Estudios de Teoría y Crítica Literaria, 8 (2000), 165–70 (p. 165).
3 Aira, ‘La nueva escritura’, 165.
4 Aira, ‘La nueva escritura’, 165.
5 Aira, ‘La nueva escritura’, 165
6 Aira, ‘La nueva escritura’, 166.
7 Aira, ‘La nueva escritura’, 166.
8 Aira, ‘La nueva escritura’, 165–66. This article limits its focus to how the physiognomic procedure is understood and practised in Un episodio. For a broader consideration of Aira’s use of the term procedimiento and how it marks a point of inflection in Argentine literary history, see Jens Andermann, ‘La operación Aira: literatura argentina y procedimiento’, in Roberto Arlt y el lenguaje literario argentino, ed. Rolf Kailuweit, Volker Jaeckel & Ángela Di Tullio (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2015), 183–98.
9 Sandra Contreras’ Las vueltas de César Aira (Buenos Aires: Beatriz Viterbo, 2001) remains the foundational study of how Aira’s late twentieth-century literary project relates to the historical dynamics of the Avant-Garde. For other prominent considerations of this topic, see, among many others: Graciela Speranza, Fuera de campo: literatura y arte argentina después de Duchamp (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2006); Reinaldo Laddaga, Espectáculos de la realidad: ensayo sobre la narrativa latinoamericana de las últimas dos décadas (Buenos Aires: Beatriz Viterbo, 2007); Alan Pauls, ‘El arte de vivir en el arte’, in his Temas lentos, selección & ed. Leila Guerreiro (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Univ. Diego Portales, 2012), 166–84; and Julio Premat, ‘Los relatos de la vanguardia o el retorno de lo nuevo’, Cuadernos de Literatura, XVII:34 (2013), 47–64 (available online at <https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=439843031003> [accessed 21 February 2024]).
10 Aira, ‘La nueva escritura’, 166. The present essay reads Un episodio within the parameters of ‘La nueva escritura’, but it is worth noting that in recent years, Aira has tended to, at least partially, walk back the positions taken in this and other essays from the 1990s. See, for example, ‘ “Se necesita mucha sinceridad, mucha convicción, para escribir mal.” Entrevista de Damià Gallardo’, Quimera. Revista de Literatura, 303 (2009), 46–51, wherein he states: ‘Durante una época, hace unos veinte años, yo no abría la boca si no era para hablar del Procedimiento: decía que la función del artista no era crear obras sino crear el procedimiento para que las obras se hicieran solas […] y muchas cosas más por el estilo, que sonaban bien pero no tenían mucho sentido’ (48).
11 Eduardo Thomás Dublé, ‘Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero de César Aira: el artista rebelde’, in Rebeldes y aventureros: del Viejo al Nuevo Mundo, ed. Hugo R. Cortés, Eduardo Godoy Gallardo & Mariela Insúa Cereceda (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2008), 261–73 (p. 264).
12 Fermín Rodríguez, Un desierto para la nación: la escritura del vacío (Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2013), 54.
13 Rodríguez, Un desierto para la nación, 54.
14 Brett Levinson, ‘Procedures for Drawing the Event of the Indians: On Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter’, CR. The New Centennial Review, 14:1 (2014), 47–70 (p. 56).
15 Aira, ‘La nueva escritura’, 165.
16 Aira, ‘La nueva escritura’, 165.
17 Aira, ‘La nueva escritura’, 166.
18 Aira takes significant liberties with Rugendas’ story. For a study of Rugendas which examines the relation between fiction and historical reality, see Lucile Magnin, ‘Una vida del artista viajero, entre ficción y realidad. Rugendas, un personaje de novela’, in Rugendas: el artista viajero, ed. Pablo Diener & María del Fátima Costa (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones de la Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, 2021), 201–24. Among other things, he exaggerates the damage done to Rugendas’ face by the lightning strike, and invents a vast archive of Rugendas’ correspondence when in reality, Magnin points out, ‘no poseemos más que unas pocas evidencias escritas de su propia mano’ (221).
19 The present article prefers to describe the narrator as a ‘biographer’ and the book itself as a novel or a biographical novel. It is possible to read Un episodio in a more essayistic light, as a book narrated by Aira himself. The narrator’s views on art and its history demonstrate significant affinities with those elaborated by Aira in his essays and novels. There are, however, key points of divergence, most notably the contrast between the extensive research and documentation that the narrator claims to have carried out (including, as mentioned above, the consultation of archival materials that do not exist in reality), and the relative lack of research carried out by Aira himself prior to writing the book. For more information on Aira’s discovery of the story of Rugendas and his composition of the novel, see Magnin, ‘Una vida del artista viajero’, 202, and Lucile Magnin, ‘Estudio’, in César Aira, Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero, con estudio final de Lucile Magin (Buenos Aires: Blatt & Ríos, 2013), 129–83 (pp. 130–31). Notably, Magnin, paraphrasing a conversation with Aira, highlights the same sort of dialectic between invention and professionalism that structures the present article: while Aira claimed to dislike the professional genre of the historical novel, and set out to write something different, ‘cuando hubo terminado se dio cuenta de que había escrito una novela histórica, sin quererlo’ (131).
20 For a detailed analysis of Humboldt’s writings on the physiognomic procedure and how they relate to Aira’s depiction of Rugendas, see Bernhard Malkmus, ‘The Pampas As Zero Landscape: Alexander von Humboldt, Johann Moritz Rugendas, and César Aira’, Modern Language Review, 116:4 (2021), 527–52.
21 Contreras, Las vueltas de César Aira, 85; original emphasis.
22 Contreras, Las vueltas de César Aira, 85–86.
23 Contreras, Las vueltas de César Aira, 85 & 22; original emphasis.
24 Contreras, Las vueltas de César Aira, 16.
25 Since its release, Contreras’ book has served as an important touchstone for Aira scholarship. See Rafael Arce, ‘Otra vuelta sobre Las vueltas de César Aira’, Praüse, 4 November 2021, n.p.; available online at <https://revistaprause.blogspot.com/2021/11/otra-vuelta-sobre-las-vueltas-de-cesar.html (accessed 21 June 2023). Arce describes the impact of the book in terms that are very similar to Aira’s description of professionalism in ‘La nueva escritura’: it marked, ‘la cristalización de una serie de intervenciones en la forma de una lectura que transformaba los textos de Aira en una obra’, and it is a reading that ‘capta las fuerzas de una situación epocal y las hace coagular’. Through these images of crystallization and congealment, Arce historicizes Contreras’ vision of Aira’s works and insists on the need to read Aira both with and against Contreras’ book, re-opening, for example, the possibility of reading Aira through the very paradigms of critical negativity that, twenty years ago, Aira’s literature seemed to be working so strongly against.
26 See Levinson, ‘Procedures for Drawing the Event of the Indians’ for an extended consideration of Un episodio in terms of philosophical notions of the event.
27 Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition’, October, 18 (1981), 47–66 (p. 55). For broader considerations of nineteenth-century uses of the emptiness of the desert as a generative point of origin for the imagination that bridges aesthetic, scientific and political registers, see Rodríguez, Un desierto para la nación; and Javier Uriarte, The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America (London/New York: Routledge, 2020). See also Ana Neuburger for a reading of Un episodio through the lens of these and other considerations of the desert, highlighting the novel’s critical intervention into this long tradition of originating new ways of seeing the world out of this emptiness (‘La invención del comienzo: vacío, desierto y ficción’, ALEA. Estudios Neolatinos, 25:1 [2023], 218–36; available online at <https://www.scielo.br/j/alea/a/NHn3dmZNyVrqvWWB3HqHXnw/> [accessed 22 February 2024]).
28 This pursuit also occupies a central place in prominent histories of modern Latin-American literature. See Roberto González Echevarría, ‘Cien años de soledad: The Novel As Myth and Archive’, MLN, 99:2 (1984), 358–80 for a classic narration of this history that culminates in García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967), where ‘a clearing has been reached, a razing that becomes a starting-point for the new Latin American literature’ (367). See also Brett Levinson, The Ends of Literature: The Latin American ‘Boom’ in the Neoliberal Marketplace (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2001), esp. Ch. 5 (pp. 107–27) for a discussion of the limits of this understanding of the modern Latin-American novel.
29 As Krauss emphasizes in ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde’, 58–64, the thought that the landscape may always be preceded by documentation was central to nineteenth-century landscape painting and discourses on the picturesque.
30 César Aira, ‘Arlt [1991]’, Paradoxa, 7 (1993), 55–71 (p. 55).
31 Aira, ‘Arlt’, 55–56.
32 See Contreras, Las vueltas de César Aira, 251–59 for a study of how this ‘fábula de expresionismo’ (252) functions as an artistic origin story. As she puts it, ‘la literatura de Aira ficcionaliza el nacimiento del Monstruo’ (255). See also Lucile Magnin, ‘Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero de César Aira: le peintre voyageur dans l’Amérique latine du XIXe siècle entre littérature, art et science’, Doctoral dissertation (Université de Grenoble, 2012), 135–54 for an extended analysis of Rugendas’ monstrosity in terms of dehumanization.
33 Rodríguez, Un desierto para la nación, 57.
34 Rodríguez, Un desierto para la nación, 58.
35 Levinson, ‘Procedures for Drawing the Event of the Indians’, 54.
36 Rodríguez, Un desierto para la nación, 58.
37 Rodríguez, Un desierto para la nación, 57–58.
38 Martín Kohan, ‘A Rugendas los dibujos le salían pluralistas: una teoría del arte por César Aira’, Ramona. Revista de Artes Visuales, 32 (2003), 70–75 (p. 74).
39 It could also be the object of a cinematic scene. The Good Earth (Sidney Franklin, 1937) offers the canonical early treatment of a swarm of locusts in Hollywood cinema.
40 Nancy Fernández, ‘El artista como crítico: notas sobre César Aira’, Hispamérica. Revista de Literatura, 111 (2008), 109–15 (p. 112).
41 Aira himself frequently offers variations of this action-based vision of art; in ‘Arlt’, for example, he postulates: ‘Es que en el arte la percepción es acción, no contemplación’ (66). In secondary literature, this is often related to the notion of the huida hacia delante that Aira introduces in the essay ‘Ars narrativa,’ in his La ola que lee: artículos y reseñas (1981–2010), ed. & prólogo de María Belén Riveiro (Buenos Aires: Random House, 2021), 176–82. As Fernández puts it: ‘Las historias de Aira cuentan fugas construyendo puentes de pura acción’ (‘El artista como crítico’, 111), and ‘la narrativa de Aira tiene su anclaje en una ‘perpetua huida hacia delante’ (‘El artista como crítico’, 110). This linking of art and action reflects a broader tendency in recent Latin-American art. See Jens Andermann, Tierras en trance. Arte y naturaleza después del paisaje (Santiago de Chile: Metales Pesados, 2018) for a study of how, in the art of the second half of the twentieth century, the collapse of traditional distinctions between mediums and languages leads to ‘la confluencia en un mismo nivel espacio-temporal de “actos” que se desprenden de su proveniencia plástica, poética, escultural o fotográfica en la medida en que van coincidiendo en un único plano-acción’ (249).
42 Rodríguez, Un desierto para la nación, 56.
43 Kohan, ‘A Rugendas los dibujos le salían pluralistas’, 70.
44 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara Habberjam & Robert Galeta, 2 vols (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986–1989 [1st French ed. 1983–1985]), I (1986), The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam, 1.
45 Deleuze, Cinema, trans. Tomlinson & Habberjam, I, 2. Kohan makes a similar observation about Rugendas’ art: ‘es que lo que quiere hacer Rugendas es más que dibujar el movimiento […] Lo que quiere hacer Rugendas es poner las imágenes en movimiento’ (‘A Rugendas los dibujos le salían pluralistas’, 70). Due to this aspiration to set images in movement, Kohan goes on to assert: ‘César Aira, es evidente, ha contado la historia del surgimiento del cine, la ha situado en Mendoza, Argentina, a mediados del siglo diecinueve, y le ha puesto por título Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero’ (‘A Rugendas los dibujos le salían pluralistas’, 70).
46 In a 2006 interview, Aira acknowledges the impact of Deleuze’s Cinema books on his literature. See Craig Epplin & Phillip Penix-Tadsen, ‘Cualquier cosa: un encuentro con César Aira’, CiberLetras. Revista de Crítica Literaria y de Cultura, 15 (2006), 413–21; available online at <https://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/documents/ISSUE15.pdf> (accessed 23 February 2024). See also Natalí Incaminato, ‘Aira lector de Deleuze: “Continuo” y “literatura pequeña” ’, Revista Chilena de Literatura, 106 (2022), 739–48 for a helpful study of Aira as a reader of Deleuze.
47 Magnin, ‘Una vida del artista viajero’, 213.
48 Roberto Arlt, Notas sobre el cinematógrafo (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Simurg, 1997), 51.
49 W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Introduction’, in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), 1–4 (p. 2).
50 Levinson, ‘Procedures for Drawing the Event of the Indians’, 53.
51 Aira, ‘Arlt’, 61.
52 Aira, ‘Arlt’, 63.
53 While it exceeds the scope of this essay, it would be interesting to pursue a broader consideration of how this notion of inhuman professionalism might be extended back to Aira’s decades-long literary project itself. For one possible starting point, see Arce, ‘Otra vuelta sobre Las vueltas de César Aira’, wherein Arce revisits the now-canonical distinctions that Contreras constructs in Las vueltas de César Aira between the professionalism of Juan José Saer and Ricardo Piglia, and Aira’s literary project as it takes shape in the 1980s and 1990s.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.