It’s like every contemporary art museum, but who can resist the video stuff? You’re dropped in medias res. A train is passing through an alpine landscape. You watch the train for five minutes, and you listen to the violins and nature sounds behind it. “Art, sure,” you assess—so you leave. You can’t articulate how, exactly, but it confirms your suspicions about the vapidity of contemporary life. Better a video than a painting, at least. Tickets aren’t cheap. To get your money’s worth, you walk quickly to the end of the exhibit. Then you walk back. But passing the curtain again, you hear something new. You stop. Is that? Yes, it is. You think it’s maybe laughter. That’s a surprise, so you pull back the curtain. You check the museum label. César Aira, Coronel Pringles, born in 1949. It’s one of those collages that runs on a loop all day and all night. Now you’re intrigued, so you open the curtain, and you’re back where you were before. The couple on the bench has been swapped out, and it’s true. They’re laughing. The train is gone. On the screen it appears that Snoopy is up to no good with, you think—is that a Weimaraner? Only it isn’t a video. It looks like a cartoon, but it’s not—not exactly. It’s actually a hundred books, you learn, and the abrupt tonal shift is apparently the norm. Together these thousand shifts comprise the full self-accounting of an uncommonly free and active mind.
With Aira’s Fulgentius, in Chris Andrews’s new translation, we arrive at the museum near closing time. The titular Roman general is sixty-seven, like his author at the time Fulgentius was written. Aira explained to an interviewer from Latin American Literature Today, “My characters are my ideas, my words, my way of thinking, and all of my characters are me.” But unlike Aira, Fulgentius is starting a campaign to pacify the province of Pannonia, maybe the last campaign of his life. He begins in modern Vienna and ends near modern Belgrade. Along the way, he razes forests, crucifies monks, and demands that Illyrian archers swallow their arrows. His real passion, however, is the theater. As a twelve-year-old schoolboy unimpressed with the tragedies he read in school, Fulgentius wrote a play called Fulgentius. He has not written anything since. After a surprise encounter with a performance of his juvenile parody at a Panathenaic festival—how it arrived there, he never finds out—he begins to use his military campaigns as a vehicle to stage his work. He assumes that provincial audiences will be more understanding than the metropole’s, and he is under the impression that putting on shows in Rome is a hassle. (Aira famously prefers small presses.) His reception in Pannonia in particular is aided by his command of the Lupine Legion, the Classical Army Rangers.
We begin in medias res times two. The campaign has begun, and a performance has begun. The first words we read are Latin poetry supposedly pulled from the chorus in Fulgentius’ play, but lifted in fact from the anonymous tragedy Octavia. Most of the play’s content is not germane or is only revealed peripherally. It has a princess, a number of Scythians, and a “Coliseum of Shadows.” The only detail of consequence is that the play’s titular general, also Fulgentius, ends up dead. At every staging, this fictional demise shocks and moves the real Fulgentius. He is neurotic, and his secondary passion is mourning his advanced age. (“All of my characters are me.”) Adopting a suitably artistic attitude does not come easily to the general, so he looks to the audience for cues. He wonders whether the local bureaucrats, who are obliged to attend, are immersed or fighting sleep. He wonders whether he could tell the difference. For a more honest perspective, he turns to the few legionaries in attendance, all of whom have also attended showings on earlier, farther-flung campaigns. Their familiarity breeds indifference, and they chat among themselves in the upper tiers.
Whatever—who needs their opinion? Fulgentius knows as well as anyone that legionaries are notorious philistines: “As if repetition were not the essence of theater and its main attraction.” He returns to the play and mouths the lines along with the Pannonian actors.
At dawn the morning after the show, the Legion is off to the heart of the province to purge its curiously Andean peaks and its curiously Pampean flatlands. Fortunately for Aira, his readers are not Roman legionaries, and we return to him for familiar strokes. A varnish of the new is enough. This time the novelty is Ancient Rome. Predictably, the familiar is the meat of it—some elements recycled a few times only, others close to ubiquitous. We have a frustrated artist, a conflict with an indigenous army, some stoner-ish dormroom talk about nothing, and a narrative peopled with characters and twists that seem all to have origins in deep left field. A white horse turns into a black horse until it reverts inexplicably to white. A countess hosts the Legion in a palace described in the language of Symbolist excess. A letter makes the arduous journey from Rome to inform the general that his grandson awoke with a cough, six months earlier. Also, the letter is from his biographer, who also happens to manage his finances. A brotherly friendship develops between Fulgentius and a genius counterfeiter, who happens to be the Legion’s prisoner, until he disappears without comment. It seems likely that Fulgentius has ordered him killed. The general’s most persistent companion is a young, able aide-de-camp named Lactarius, anticipating a genus of mushroom.
Between battles, sieges, unpleasant executions, and lively depictions of mountains running with “torrents of blood,” the shows go on. The general reenacts Aira’s art in his strikingly divergent rehearsals and stagings. The identification is aided by snippets of the play’s content that together recall an Aira novel. It is a genre parody that uses generic devices to mock its source, but move its audience. It contains obscurities that might be inanities, and Fulgentius writes his namesake’s death—both à la Aira. (Fulgentius is not bold enough to resurrect himself on the next page, as Aira has done, but Roman provincials are more easily awed than sophisticated modern readers.) With each new performance, he shows himself open to fleeting inspiration, even false inspiration, and he follows the eccentricities of every small-town theater troupe. In the transformations wrought on the show by circumstance, whether by his cast or his audience—material transformations, not just tweaks—he seeks a fresh and meaningful angle. If meaning is revealed to be a bridge too far, it suffices to be along for the ride.
On the stage, as opposed to the battlefield, Fulgentius does not discriminate. When an “effeminate” former slave is tapped for the lead, the general is pleased (and surprised to be pleased) at the “touching fragility” he brings to the role. When an unctuous hanger-on in Sirmium insists on speaking in his ear through the whole performance, Fulgentius enjoys the distance the commentary opens between himself and his work. It makes his engagement more intellectual and less distractingly personal, he thinks. In the only version he directs himself, in rehearsals in the Legion’s winter camp, he chooses a slave who does not speak Latin to play the “princess of the steppes.” This avant-gardey move would seem to hinder more than it helps, and the Legion’s actors are miffed, but Fulgentius is thrilled with the fragmenting, “mechanical” effect of her muteness. She keeps the show from going stale. If coincidence accords with his private thoughts and not only enlivens but deepens stale lines, Fulgentius is elated. But the main thing for him is to make it new, and to go on making it new. Perfection attracts Fulgentius less than the prospect of stuffing whatever strikes him into the same machine, then attending carefully to the different result. A Roman aristocrat-soldier is far from Aira, the person—a former translator of Stephen King who spends afternoons riding his bike through Buenos Aires—but the general’s endless restagings may offer the completest metaphor to date for Aira’s practice as an artist.
Aira’s most famous innovation is his fuga or huida hacia adelante, his peculiar “flight forward” technique. He writes for only an hour at a time, he has no outline past a setting and a premise, and he will not abide revision, which he claims to avoid out of sloth. The oddness of Aira’s work has been both under- and overattributed to method. The commitment to sticking with the first draft is the most commented-on feature and his least essential; few writers’ first drafts look at all like Aira’s. Magazines that turn into beachballs and giant clones of iridescent silkworms are not the kind of textual imperfections that authors erase between drafts. What distinguishes Aira from conventional writers is an openness to chance and impulse that he shares with his general, an appetite for experiment paired with careful attention to the small, irregular movements of a fantastical inner life. In The Literary Conference (New Directions, 2010, translated by Katherine Silver), the silkworm novel, he describes language as a “valve” for a hyperactive mind. He practices a form of psychological realism preoccupied less with behavior than with following his unfettered thoughts. Daydreams, perceptions, and half-baked aphorisms enter the fiction directly. All writers are condemned to write what they think, but Aira’s instrument is unusually sensitive. He records every gust. “If a little bird enters into the café where I’m writing, it also enters into what I’m writing,” he says in another interview. “Even if a priori it doesn’t relate to anything, a posteriori I make it relate.” In ambition he is close to Knausgaard—albeit playful, diligent, lyrical, and without the self-mythology. But the seamy quality of his work places him closer to Jackson Pollock. The brushwork is all on the surface, and you can see the sweep of the hand on the canvas—where he gets bored, where a bird distracts him, where a stranger enters the café. Your twelve-year-old could almost do it, but Aira has a remarkable hand.
Which does not mean he never slips. Knowing the details of Aira’s “flight forward” makes it easy to account for the worst in Fulgentius, but accounting does nothing to boost their appeal. Aira’s vision is seductive in proportion to its distance from the median dream journal. When a dream escapes the journal and succeeds—and most of Aira’s dreams beat the odds and work—it may be derailed by one of his dubious forays into metaphysics. Fulgentius claims to not put much stock in philosophy, which does not prevent him from trying it himself. A reflection on the nature of heartlands produces a fairly representative sample: “Perhaps all centers were empty, thought Fulgentius, and that was what made them centers. Even so, the mere possibility that the empty and the full might be the same was poison to his mind.” A thought that is poison to my mind, too. Aira’s epigrams have the paradox of a good Zen koan, but they lack the bracing concision.
These passages make difficult work for a scrupulous translator. English-language readers may be tempted to attribute Aira’s sloppiness to Andrews, who is good and extremely faithful. To monoglot readers, slipups may seem unlikely, mixed in with so much genius, but it’s true—in English and Spanish both, Fulgentius meets the Whirling Dervishes a thousand years before Rumi, and it’s true—Fulgentius really does say, not obviously prompted, “If it’s true that some flowers are hermaphrodites, I’m allowed to do anything.” Elsewhere, Andrews corrects Aira’s Latin (or changes it anyway, I can’t read Latin) but he bravely leaves the rest intact. Sometimes a fifty-cent word is traded for a two-dollar synonym—seeing “conglomerate” twice is unfortunate, whether for conjunto or for ensamble—but sometimes the trade is as good as it sounds, and Aira gets a lift in English. Though he is meticulous with language despite or because of his aversion to editing, his language is not the central attraction. The point is to tail any stray thought and transmit it to the page without interference. Andrews’ valve is his, not Aira’s, but it remains an excellent valve.
We are condemned to suffer and enjoy, in about equal measure, whatever falls through it. To which column does Aira’s latest belong? Fulgentius is one more installment, and like every preceding installment, or at least the ones I’ve had time to read, it peaks where his imagination seems both at its freest and closest to life. Between these peaks are the doldrums, and the doldrums are wide and tiresome—where the plot turns silly without being funny, or where we enter the throes of a cartoon battle. Tedium is the cost incurred for a high that can only be achieved as Aira achieves it, quickly but dreamily, in a roundabout way, and the peaks in Fulgentius reach as high as its predecessors’. Hearing a recounted dream is tedious until a door opens from the unconscious into a fresh perspective on the real. Most of the time, when you tell a dream at the breakfast table, the door remains locked, and you induce your partner to try to bury her face in her cereal milk. Other times, you find the structure of benzene, or you resurrect the melody to “Yesterday.”
The general gets his “Yesterday” moment. It arrives in the middle of the Pannonia campaign when the Legion camps for the winter by a lake. The lake freezes over, their tent stakes freeze to the soil, and the legionaries have nothing to do but hunt and mix with the locals. Aira loses the plot for a while, and he sets the fireworks aside. Briefly released from the duties of command, Fulgentius takes full advantage. He will direct his soldiers in his own production; he won’t hand it off to professionals. They rehearse and rehearse and rehearse. Phantasmal images and figures are summoned from the snow and dissipate whence they came, and the rehearsals continue without a performance. Fulgentius likes it better in flux. His assistant falls for an Illyrian woman. A camel trader en route from Armenia to Rome causes a stir in the camp. The legionaries rustle a camel from him. Storms blow in, and the snow deepens. They badger Fulgentius about giving a performance for real. If it happens, we never see it, but he partly relents. They build a set from the snow, with a “Coliseum of Shadows,” and the storms twist them into “oyster-like shapes, which were greatly admired.” The script doesn’t change, but every chance happening finds an analog in a show destined not to debut.
Aira is worst when describing his dreams, but he is best when he invites us to share them. Here we approach the source of creation, where reading is perilously near to writing. Fulgentius is throwing up his arms and shouting, “Rehearse! Rehearse! Just one more time!” They make a few changes, and they take it from the top—again, again, and again. Unassumingly behind the general-director, over the snow and across the Atlantic, through the window of his favorite café, you can see César Aira—watching and thinking the world go by, metabolizing every event in the street. He laughs softly to himself and asks, “Che—what if we tried it in Rome?” He sets his papers on the table, and he starts halfway to the end.
It’s different this time. It’s just like before.
