Monday, July 29, 2013

César Aira's Method, and mine - a look at Varamo

Nobody cares what I think about César Aira or his 2002 novellisimo Varamo.  Nevertheless I will write something about it.  No , it is all right, you do not have to pretend.

Varamo is a Panamanian bureaucrat who inadvertently writes one of the great masterpieces of experimental Latin American poetry despite never having written poetry before.  Varamo is the account of how he did it, “an experiment in literary criticism” (44) that otherwise resembles Surrealist fiction.

By Surrealist, I mean this kind of thing:

His aim was to produce a fish playing the piano.  (23)

Grafting on a pair of little arms, the arms of a frog for example, would be horribly complicated.  (26)

He couldn’t quite put his finger on what was giving him that impression of chaos…  But then, all of a sudden, he realized: it was the golf clubs all around the room, in expensive leather bags that were propped against the walls and the furniture, or just lying around.  (64)

The story covers one eventful night as Varamo – but what matters with Aira is not what happens but The Method, the deployment of the Aira Conceptual Apparatus, through which Aira is not allowed to revise previously written work.  Each day he confronts himself with the previous day’s exquisite corpse and must somehow move on with it, which perhaps seems easy enough except that he deliberately sets bizarre traps for his future self, inserting nonsensical plot twists and ludicrous digressions in order to keep himself interested.  Or to keep me interested  (“Not to mention the risk of boring the reader,” 44).  “[O]n the other hand, the reality effect is lost, as it always is when an automatic mechanism intervenes” (46).

Please note that this is, with minor modifications, also the method of Wuthering Expectations.

Varamo is actually about The Method.  Or about creativity.  Thus the business about the piano-playing fish – the incipient poet’s first creative hobby is taxidermy.  Then there are stories (“For Varamo, this story was a sort of metaphor or fable,” 35), codes, hallucinations, counterfeiting.  Near the end Varamo bumps into a couple of publishers – if that ain’t a tipoff.  They fill him in on the history of Latin American publishing.  “Faced with the alternative between becoming translators or alcoholic bums, some at least favored the first option” (76) – Aira is himself a translator.

I just read an Adam Thirlwell review of a recent collection of Italo Calvino’s letters.  Over and over, Thirlwell’s descriptions of Calvino could be about Aira:

If one tried to make a list of [Calvino’s] values from this collection of letters, it would include the cosmic, the frame, the refusal of the personal, the love of small forms, the fantastic, the metafictional, or self-consciously fictional. And all these values are on either side of the human scale: either too small or too large.

Varamo is the seventh Aira text I have read, out of eighty or ninety that he has written, so what do I know, but that is pretty close to Aira’s list.

An odd feature of Varamo, not shared by all of his books, is that the story ends where the narrator first said it would, with an explanation for the creation of the poem, as well as an Apology for the Method:

Novelty makes its causes new, giving birth to them retrospectively.  If historical time makes us live in the new, a story that attempts to account for the origin of a work of art, that is, a work of innovation, ceases to be a story; it’s a new reality, and yet a part of reality as it has always been for everyone.  Those who don’t believe me can go and see for themselves.  (89)

Which is what the reader who gets to these last lines just did. 


The review at Tony’s Reading List inspired me to read Varamo.  Chris Andrews translated this one.

16 comments:

  1. I enjoyed this one, too. He had me with the fish.

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  2. Me, too. The passage leading up to and past the fish was outstanding comedy. Not merely strange.

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  3. I'm pleased to see that you didn't consider this "lesser Aira" even though I had to go over to Tony's blog to read that verdict. In any event, will try to get to Varamao one day. In the meantime, I just read this short story of Aira's ("A Brick Wall") from a new short story collection of his (Relatos reunidos, Mondadori, 2013) that kind of blew me away: like Aira's 2007 La Vida Nueva it's a meditation on friendship and writing but with little that is actgually conceptually weird or "surrealist." Straightforward, almost "normal" Aira? Wow, who woulda thunk it? I realize this has little to do with Varamo per se, but I wonder what kind of portrait of Aira will develop once more of his readers actually read closer to his full body of work. That will take a while, of course.

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  4. One thing we will find out, I predict, is that Aira does not always use The Method, although he sure does here - I could see the seams, or thought I could, and I assume I was meant to.

    Even better would be if it turns out The Method is pure obfuscation, an outright lie, and that Aira revises and polishes and rewrites just like everyone else.

    At this point, I doubt anyone at New Directions is interested in non-weird Aira. Prove me wrong, ND!

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    1. I suspect you're right about New Directions' non-interest in non-weird Aira. Don't think that's necessarily a good thing (some of my current favorites by him are not weird at all), but I won't give them too hard a time about it since they're doing way more than the rest of their publishing counterparts. Plus some of his weirdest stuff is pretty great, after all.

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    2. Even when Aira uses The Method the distance from weird seems to vary a lot. Of a few Aira novels I've read in French, the one I'd most like to see translated into English is Les Larmes (El llanto), which contains a great, histrionic restaurant scene amply seasoned with weird, but then the novel settles into something less frivolous, more serious in tone - and unusually moving. I had not seen that coming, so I suppose The Method worked.

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    3. It would be interesting to know what combination of translator preference, expert advice, and publisher intuition leads to the Englishing of particular titles. Maybe they are chosen randomly, perhaps by consulting the I Ching. That would also be in the right spirit.

      Ghosts is a good example of a novel with a really interesting mix of weird and ordinary (the domestic arrangements of the family on the roof, and their little party). I understand why it is the favorite of many readers.

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    4. I'd like to know that myself. A great many publishers' decisions regarding what to translate seem like the result of some occult throwing of sticks.

      About twice as many Aira novels have been translated into French as have been translated into English, with less overlap than one might expect.

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    5. I hope some poor soul is translating Aira's madman mentor Osvaldo Lamborghini, too.

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  5. What would be great is if the Aira translations came out like the original books do in Argentina, on numerous obscure presses. No standardization of format, no idea of where the next book might come from. Maybe one title is only available in a particular bookstore, another just by mail order.

    I suppose I would find this frustrating, but it would be in the right spirit.

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  6. I never got surrealism. I'm willing to acknowledge its right to exist. But it just makes me weary.

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    1. What kind of Surrealism have you come across?

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    2. A bit of American surrealism with which Shelley might have some sympathy is the prairie fire chapter in Little House on the Prairie.

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  7. That is just what I am going to write about, but at an oblique angle and in obscure light.

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  8. True to the Method, this literary branding is going somewhere unpredictable. The partnership with New Directions is certainly diluting the spirit of haphazard publishing of the originals. But I can't afford to complain, especially if it's going to bring out The Collected Works (in Translation) of César Aira. They just have to be more inventive in the packaging of books. They all look the same. Where are the literal "cardboard" books? The chapbook-like single story books?

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  9. I would love to see the appearance of facsimile cardboard books, editions that replicate the original Argentinean version. My fear is that they would priced as collectibles - $100, limited edition of 250, etc.

    No, surely not. I do appreciate the way New Directions has not really standardized the appearance of their Aira books.

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