At Asymptote, we have been following Aira for a long time. In December 2017, his autobiographical novel The Lime Tree (And Other Stories, 2017) was picked as the inaugural monthly selection for our Book Club, and his other works have either been reviewed in our issues or covered in our blog.
Aira’s literary nonconformism is well known. His writing often resists the constraints of plot, veers among multiple worlds of possibility, and changes genres in the space of a single book. “It seems like the insertion of a different plot line,” the narrator interjects in The Literary Conference (New Directions, 2010), “from an old B-rated science fiction movie.” This nonconformity also carries into our interview, where Aira offers enigmatic definitions of reality, meditates on possibilities that catch his attention, and even denies understanding his own work. His unfettered approach turns our correspondence into something more than a regular interview about an author’s life and work—what emerges in it is a new Aira text, witty and unexpected.
—Michal Zechariah
Many of your books are famously fantastical, yet they are often set in familiar locations such as your childhood town or even feature characters based on yourself. How do you wish your literature to relate to reality? What kind of truths do your stories tell?
Reality is what provides me with everything I need to write. It is inexhaustible, and all I have to do is let it come, like the fairy with the magic wand that fulfills all wishes, at least all writers’ wishes. It is always different, varied, deliriously changing. I owe it the best things I’ve ever written, and I’ve learned to wait for its help when I don’t know how to go on. I only invent in extreme cases where reality does not manifest itself. But they are rare, exceptional cases. The great Dadaist Goddess Reality is generous, she has too much to give to be stingy. My job is basically to make the transitions between her gifts. It is because of my devotion to Reality that I hate Realism, that inhuman corset that turns off all the lights of the marvelous.
How would you describe the difference between this definition of reality and what others may call inspiration?
Reality gives me the material I need to write. Then comes something, which can be called Inspiration, Art, Talent, Craft, or simply Work, with which I organize that matter. Orthodox surrealists would disqualify me for that organization, which is rational and attends very carefully to the verisimilitude.
Having imagined fictional versions of yourself in some of your books, have you ever considered a different career?
That frequently asked question is too optimistic. We writers are almost always something else, because we have to live. Translator, journalist, teacher . . . But yes, there are vocations or intentions that we sacrifice to writing. In my case it’s painting or drawing, but I didn’t really sacrifice it, because everything I’ve written I’ve drawn and colored mentally, and with a pen. Writing for me was always a dream of images.
Your most recently translated book, The Divorce, really does read like a “dream of images.” The portrayal of countless moths completely covering a burning boarding school and creating a momentary ghost image of the edifice is one of many vivid visuals in the book. Can you say more about the relation between language and image in your work?
If I don’t see it, I can’t write it. And I write it to see it better. Writing, I catch the image. It’s an image hunt. I don’t know if it’s just an aesthetic preference or if it has a biographical cause, in which case it would be at the origin of my vocation as a writer. I was a myopic child, and affected by a progressive myopia that meant that, until the evil stopped in my adulthood, I could never see clearly enough because the glasses that were prescribed to me were insufficient shortly after they were released. Hence, I lived my formative years with a permanent hunger for the visual, which I satiated, or tried to satiate, taking possession of the image in writing, giving it on the page the precision that it did not have in reality.
Another distinctive feature of The Divorce is how its multiple stories all distend from a single “frozen moment”—the moment in which a young man is drenched by a splash of water on the street. The stories themselves are digressions expanding on the accidents of that moment.
The anecdote of the moment really happened. It happened to an American poet tourist in Buenos Aires, and he told me about it. Perhaps you know him, his name is Kent Johnson. I transcribed it without changes, and I limited myself to inventing the flashback episodes after each moment, that is, to “fill in” the instant.
I have always been fascinated by that unverifiable statement, which could well be another urban legend, according to which at the moment of death one relives his entire life in an instant, day by day and minute by minute. Someone recently pointed out to me that if this hallucinatory film is really exhaustive, it must include itself, because it is also something that happens to us, and this second will include a third, and so on ad infinitum, and we will never die. In other words, perhaps it is the moment that holds the secret of immortality.
You mentioned limiting yourself to filling in the instance. Your famous “flight forward” method is also a kind of limitation, preventing you from editing what you’ve already written. What other limitations do you use in your writing?
I am bad at limiting myself. But there is no game worth playing without rules. One that has been very useful to me lately is to locate the action of my stories in a very remote past (I did it with imperial Rome, and with archaic Greece), not to write a historical novel, which I hate, but to have to think about what I am writing and not let myself get carried away by the daily discourse. If I tell something that has happened to me, but I stage it in a society of two thousand years ago, the necessary transformations will make something artistic of what would have been a banal autobiographical confession. In addition, the game of avoiding anachronism forces you to be very attentive, and attention is the main part of the art.
I have a couple other questions about The Divorce. The book is set against the backdrop of Argentinian economic prosperity after a long period of hardship, but it is skeptical about this prosperity. Money itself seems insubstantial, and the narrator reflects that “if Argentina lapsed back into poverty, it would be interesting to see if anyone noticed.” What were your thoughts on money when writing this book?
I am a great admirer of money, which is what gives life flavor and interest. I share the opinion of the Cuban poet Dulce María Loynaz: “If money were taken away, the world, despite being round, would lose all its curves, it would deflate, it would remain empty and wrinkled like a dried fruit, like a squeezed orange.”
Like Balzac’s heroes, I could have done anything to be rich, so burning was my wish. I would have stopped at nothing, not even crime. But I didn’t do anything, or I did it only in the imagination. I didn’t even work, due to lack of time: I always had a lot to read.
Finally, The Divorce starts with a familiar kind of separation and ends with a wildly fantastical one. I couldn’t help but notice the framing story is set in a coffee shop, and you’ve brought up writing at coffee shops on other occasions. What is it about coffee shops that transforms the familiar into the fantastical?
The coffee shop is the ideal environment to write because I can write there for an hour (it’s all I need to complete the day’s work) since I only have my Montblanc and my notebook with me, while at home I have books to read, music to listen to, movies to watch, my wife to chat with . . . In my house there is always something more important to do than write.
They ask me how I can concentrate in a coffee shop full of noise and movement and with the spectacle of the street on the other side of the windows. It happens that to write, to write what I write, I need to de-concentrate. Concentration would lead me inexorably to the tedious subject matter of my own boring life.
In this and others of your books, some characters are possessed by an overarching desire, from world domination to magazine collecting. Can you say more about your interest in human obsession?
In fact, I write about what happens to me. Because writing, as a free activity that brings no other pleasure than doing it, is a harmless form of obsession. In pre-Freudian times it was called a vocation.
Your book Birthday, which contains some of your most detailed reflections on writing, seems to describe this kind of obsession or vocation. It outlines a new and impossible “totalizing project” for which all your previous writing would be only a preparation—an Encyclopedia containing everything. Twenty years after conceiving this fictional goal, are you still interested in it?
Encyclopedism has been the permanent horizon of my work. Thanks to which my work always seemed incomplete to me, and I always had something else to do. It must be the reason why my books are brief: they know, and I know, that they cannot aspire to a totality, not even a partial one. They are the fruit of incompleteness as the aesthetic of knowledge.
That youthful project of an Encyclopedia, for which I took innumerable notes (that are still gathering dust in a folder), was to make an encyclopedia of the particular. Not one that had definitions and descriptions of things and beings in general, but of each one. Not “hare” but each one of the hares that were and are in the world, in art, in the imagination, in dreams. An impossible project, I agreed, but what interested me was to analyze its conditions of possibility (which are those of literature).
What did you learn from investigating these conditions?
Again, you are being optimistic, believing that I can answer such a difficult question. Writers are not necessarily smart. Not even good writers, especially them, proof of which are the bad decisions they often make in their lives. I gave up intelligence since I noticed that it led to the commonplace and the obvious. Literature is the art of the form of discourse, not of its meaning.
Shortly after you describe this Encyclopedia, you write: “If I could translate what I don’t know into what I know, I would be able to understand the purpose of my life.” I’m fascinated by this description of knowledge acquisition as translation. Do you remember writing this line?
I didn’t remember having written this sentence, and now that I read it I don’t find any sense in it, thanks to which readers will surely find many different enigmatic and interesting meanings. You have to be wary of writers: if a sentence sounds good, it’s fine, and someone will take care of its meaning. I have several like this, which are often cited. For example: “The function of literature is to transform the world into a world.” Sounds good, okay. I am sure that more serious writers and philosophers than myself have done the same thing many times.
Are you ever concerned about readers misunderstanding your work?
I was about to say that I want to be well understood, although the misunderstanding enriches the reading, blah blah blah, all the usual bullshit on the subject. But I realized that in reality we writers care very little about being well or badly understood. What matters to us, and that matters to us supremely, is to be liked, be admired and praised.
Is there anything more boring and depressing than a reader who gives us a subtle and extremely intelligent interpretation of one of our books, and doesn’t tell us that he liked it? And to think that he believes he’s flattering us!
You once remarked, in your New Yorker profile, that your entire work might be a “footnote to Borges.” Literary influence seems to be a recurring theme in your work, including innocuous descriptions of your early days at the public library in Pringles, but also a fictional attempt to clone Carlos Fuentes gone horribly wrong.
I have been generous with myself in matters of influence: I have regaled myself with all of them. So much so that it is as if there were none. I think the famous anxiety of the influence occurs when a writer feels he is the victim of the influence of a single author, and it creates something like a master–slave relationship. When the authors who influence one are all the great writers of the past, there is no anxiety but gratitude.
Among the many modalities of influence, there is a very special one that I have experienced: when one ardently wants an author to influence him, and it does not happen. This is what has happened to me since my youth with Lautréamont.
Moving on to other artistic mediums, I noticed that both Ghosts and Dinner contain wonderful reflections on television. In Ghosts, an adolescent girl is seduced by ghosts who speak in unaccented Spanish, “like on television.” In Dinner, a television show makes all the difference between a deadly zombie apocalypse and a practical joke. Do you watch television? What do you like or dislike about it?
Sophisticates and intellectuals despise TV, and I shared that opinion (with a dose of hypocrisy, because I loved Maxwell Smart, or The Nanny, or Bonanza). I changed radically when I saw what television meant to my mother in her last years, and what it meant to so many lonely, sick, and old people. We sophisticated intellectuals can be quite inhuman. Also, TV is part of reality, so I can’t help but love it, and it has given me a lot to write about. I especially appreciate the modesty of the television. Unlike cinema, which was also a technical innovation that served as entertainment, but evolved into full art, TV remained a household appliance, sacrificing its artistic future to serve as company and comfort to people in need.
You are also a translator, a revered profession in our journal, and I would love to hear more about your relation to translation. What is your approach to translation? Has translating affected your writing?
I translated for money, out of the need to earn a living, not out of conviction. I believe that a good reader should make the effort to learn several languages, and read the classics in their original languages. Although it is true that there are classics in their original language that are translations, like those of Arthur Waley.
What kind of interactions do you have with translators of your own work? Which of your books that have not been translated into English yet would you most like to see translated?
I don’t have any interaction with my translators, beyond being very grateful to them and clarifying any doubts when they ask me, although I usually can’t clarify anything. From the moment I give a book to a publisher, I forever disregard that book, its reissues, translations, compilations, whatever. What’s more, I forget what it was about.
Is forgetting itself important for your work?
I once defined myself as esthète de l'oubli (it sounds better in French; it sounds like it has a meaning). But besides being a joke, it could be interpreted as what the sculptors say, id est, that Venus is waiting inside the block of marble, and you only have to remove the excess marble that covers it to see it. In the same way, in the formless block of memory is our Venus, and it has to be oblivion that extracts the surplus and reveals it.
What are you working on right now?
I am not young, not very healthy, lack energy, lack literary ambitions. I should take a break. I seriously mean to, but it’s useless. I like to write, I feel that the day I don't write is a wasted day, and besides, I have such a collection of the best pens in the world, and exquisite paper notebooks, that it would be a shame not to use them. Even if it doesn’t turn out as well as before, and I suppose it will turn out less well every time, I’ll keep writing.
