(2014-11-01) The Essential Gratuitousness Of Cesar Aira

David Kurnick: The Essential Gratuitousness of Cesar Aira. Aira has made a discussion of his practice obligatory. To read him is less to evaluate a freestanding book, or a series of them, than to encounter one of the most extraordinary ongoing projects in contemporary literature.

Aira has published around 80 books, mostly novels and mostly very short, since 1975; beginning in the 1990s they have appeared at a rate of about four per year.

late mornings he stations himself in a café, usually in Buenos Aires. He starts with an idea for a story, but beyond that the only guarantee is that he’ll write something

The less propitious an event or passerby seems for inclusion, the more likely Aira is to seize on it. In one account of his practice, he says that if a bird wanders into the café, a bird goes into his book. In another, he mentions seeing a man dressed as a rat walking down the sidewalk: “So I’ll put someone dressed like a rat into the marital drama I’m writing.” He produces about a page a day, and does not permit himself to revise. Aira calls this the “fuga hacia adelante,” the flight forward.

Certainly it has produced a body of work nearly indescribable in its lunatic variety.

Aira’s tone is no more predictable than his content.

Roberto Bolano’s comments about the Argentine writer, scattered across several essays, provide some useful clues to Aira’s precursors: Bolaño mentions Osvaldo Lamborghini, the Buenos Aires vanguardist who was Aira’s friend until his death in 1985, and Raymond Roussel, the early 20th-century novelist whose rule-generated whimsy inspired the surrealists and the Oulipo group

Bolaño’s encomium is strictly accurate: Aira is addictive to read.

Utterly indifferent to the usual criteria of the “readerly” text—his novels are skimpy on convincing accounts of psychology, event, or social structures—Aira is nonetheless peculiarly attentive to his reader’s experience, and we always know that he knows how disorienting his worlds are.

Even Aira’s writing about writers seems to offer an account of his own practice.

his most revealing piece of criticism is Edward Lear, a book-length essay on the Victorian nonsense poet (2004, untranslated). Aira declares that “even nonsense cannot escape the gravitational law of sense”

close readings of Lear’s first 50 limericks

Two stray remarks in the book on Lear offer a clue as to why, even at its silliest, Aira’s work feels like a project of authentic historical importance. Discussing Lear’s preoccupation with the limerick, Aira comments that “every artist has to find his format … The format, whatever it is, is eminently historical, and as such it only works once”

suddenly clear that Aira’s “format” is not the novel or the story or the essay—his writing is hard to definitely characterize as any of these—but the book, and that a good part of his power derives from the insistence on making his work take the shape of book after book (after book), each one a self-enclosed world.

Aira’s graphomaniacal project, after all, would in many ways be better served by the Internet. But web publication would dilute his experiment in format, the effect of which is to emphasize the singularity of his book-objects

Aira’s subject is the exhausting proliferation of detail in a life, the way experience is always threatening to overwhelm design.

Luckily for his readers, the end of that project is nowhere in sight.