Do you like innovate, avant-garde fiction polished superfine? Introducing César Aira from Argentina, author of dozens of quirky, quizzical, lyrical novellas and novels, many translated into English, his best known An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, a surreal yarn of a nineteenth century German artist's travels in Latin America and Ghosts, a tale about a haunted luxury apartment complex in the city of Buenos Aires.
Why haven’t I heard of César Aira before? Perhaps because he takes delight in being somewhat obscure. As he stated in an interview, nearly half of his ninety titles are pamphlets or booklets, many less than twenty pages. Since by his reckoning every story is a book, he prefers small, independent publishers willing to print a limited run. Therefore, he surmises, if someone really wants to read his books, they will find them.
I'm delighted I did just that! The Literary Conference is my first César Aira and it will certainly not be my last.
I was under the impression The Literary Conference would be about, well, a literary conference, featuring famous Latin American authors discussing the aesthetics of literature. I found to my astonishment, what begins as international adventure shifts to a comic version of mad scientist taking over the world via cloning and then again to B-movie, a science fiction monster flick, all the while offering meditations on the nature of art and creativity - contained in a mere eighty-five pages.
The narrator, a playwright with the name César, travels to Venezuela, to the coastal town of Macuto wherein he solves the centuries-long enigma of the Macuto Line and its sunken treasure. Just the right vibration from his fingers on the old hemp line and ta-da! - treasure miraculously falls at his feet. My sense is this piece of authorial legerdemain serves to remind us we are, after all, being told a tale and if the storyteller wants riches at the feet of César (perhaps César Aira himself?), then that’s what will bloody well happen.
Moreover, the Macuto Line could be taken as metaphor: the author engaging his imagination as the rope to guide himself down to the lower depths of his own psyche in order to mine a treasure chest of images and words he can bring to the surface and thus compose the very novella we are reading.
We arrive at the actual conference itself, not exactly a round table discussion, more an extension of César’s internal dialogue. One of the first observations made is how the tale he is relaying must be kept clear since poetic fog horrifies him. However, he acknowledges a fable provides the foundational logic for his story and that fable requires the underlying logic of yet again another fable. And the story we are reading provides the logic for a second story. Does all this Russian dolls story within a story remind you of anything? It does for me: One Thousand and One Nights of Scheherazade, among César Aira’s favorite modes of storytelling.
César goes on to relate how there was once a mad scientist who allowed the clones he created to roam the streets of his neighborhood. Ultimately the mad scientist needed CONTROL and the best way to maintain such control was to clone a superior man. And what will be the nature of such a superior man? Ah, according to the mad scientist, an individual having achieved greatness in the realm of high culture, things like philosophy, literature, history and being steeped in the classics.
César then reveals the truth: the mad scientist in question is none other than himself. And who does César judge the superior man fit for cloning? Why, of course, that giant of world literature – Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes. Permit me a side note: a number of years ago American men and women were asked what individual should be cloned to improve the quality of life within the United States. The results were divided: half the Americans polled voted for Albert Einstein and the other half for Michael Jordan. Perhaps a combination of both would be ideal - theoretical physicists who could tear up a basketball court.
Wacky weird, bugged out bizarre and Kool-Aid kooky from here on out. Thus I will shift from the narrator's singular story to a number of his reflections sweetly seasoning this literary conference confection. Firstly, how “language has shaped our expectations so extensively that real reality has become the most detached and incomprehensible one of all.”
Indeed, our view of ourselves and others, our notions of life and death and everything in between is a combination of fact and fiction. And because we coat our world with the thick syrup of language, I suspect the split is along the lines of 2% fact, 98% fiction.
“My Great Work is secret, clandestine, and encompasses my life in its entirety, even its most insignificant folds and those that seem the most banal. Until now I have concealed my purpose under the accommodating guise of literature.”
Hmmm, is the narrator (César Aira himself?) suggesting there is an underlying riddle to be solved along the lines of Hugh Vereker’s literary puzzle in Henry James’ The Figure in the Carpet? What a tantalizing prospect! No wonder a number of literary critics have linked Aira with his fellow countryman, Jorge Luis Borges.
“I was considering, with amazement, the quantity of things that were happening to me while nothing was happening. I noticed this as my pen was moving: there were thousands of tiny incidents, all full of meaning. I’ve had to pick and choose carefully, otherwise the list would be endless.”
Thank goodness César can choose wisely; otherwise The Literary Conference might include enough peregrinations, colloquies and bagatelles to fill hundreds of pages.
“Only through minimalism is it possible to achieve the asymmetry that for me is the flower of art; complications inevitably form heavy symmetries, which are vulgar and overwrought.”
At eighty-five pages, The Literary Conference undoubtedly qualifies as minimal in terms of length. And César Aira’s style is the opposite of heavy, vulgar and overwrought; rather, the author has created a little book chock full of ideas and philosophy that’s sheer fun, all within a breezy storyline too preposterous to be read without a smile.
"The soldiers got out and fanned out in front of the blue mass. At that moment denial was no longer possible: the men looked like insects next to the monster - and pathetically ineffectual. This became obvious once they began to shoot at it with their machine guns."
César Aira, born 1949
"And there, with a prodigious crack and a burst of foam, the treasure chest at the sunken end of the Line leapt so forcefully out of the sea that it rose about two hundred feet in the air, hung there for an instant, then shot down in a straight line, while the Line retracted, pulling back, until the treasure fell intact onto the stone platform, about three feet from where I was standing, waiting for it." - César Aira, The Literary Conference
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