“An order was implicit in the phenomenal revelation of the world…”

I am way behind the times in reading César Aira. I could have worked through a (tiny) shelf of his tiny novellas by now, and perhaps should have considering my love of the form. But I have finaly got under way, with An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter.

The landscape painter, Johann Moritz Rugendas, is a genre painter. His genre is the landscape, more specifically, “the physiognomy of nature, based on a procedure invented by Humboldt. As you can see from the Wikipedia link above, this part is “real.” Humboldt, of course, is also real, perhaps real-er—Aira has not latched on to his life, requiring of it an episode fit for a novella. I have not read every bit of writing on An Episode in the Life by any means, but I’ve been surprised not to see any of Rugendas’s paintings reproduced elsewhere. Both of these depict Brazil as opposed to Argentina, where An Episode in the Life is set, but one does include Native Americans, others of whom are significant in the novella.

Back to genre. Aira gives a simple and brief disquisition on the value of genre itself as Rugendas and his fellow artist and friend Krause are discussing history and art.

He suggested, hypothetically, that, were all the storytellers to fall silent, nothing would be lost, since the present generation, or those of the future, could experience the events of the past without needing to be told about them, simply by recombining or yielding to the available facts, although, in either case, such action could only be born of a deliberate resolution. And it was even possible that the repetition would be more authentic in the absence of stories. The purpose of storytelling could be better fulfilled by handing down, instead, a set of “tools,” which would enable mankind to reinvent what had happened in the past, with the innocent spontaneity of action. Humanity’s finest accomplishments, everything that deserved to happen again. And the tools would be stylistic. According to this theory, then, art was more useful than discourse.

Useful, that is, in “understanding how things were made,” which is, for Rugendas, the purpose of stories.

I don’t know why, but it always seems a bit uncomfortable when writers so successfully meta-analyze not only what they’re doing, but also what the reader is doing. Of course, whether this passage is actually relevant to Aira’s project (whatever that might be—I certainly do not know yet) or only to Rugendas’s remains a mystery to me.

Soon after this, Rugendas has a bit of really terrible luck that will leave him severely disfigured. Essentially, his face is torn up and tentatively pieced back together, resulting in a grotesquerie of misfiring nerves and uncontrolled muscle spasms. Krause cares for him studiously, but has difficulty looking at his face, not because it is ugly but because the tools of Rugendas’s face—the features, the planes, the muscles, the expressions they come together to create—are broken.

To create a story, choose some available facts, follow a few rules about how they can be put together, et voilà. Replace the facts with nonsense and break all the rules, and you are left with a man whose speech does not match his expressions, whose feelings do not match his face. His life is based on the ultimate faithfulness of representing landscapes according to their physiognomy, but his own physiognomy has been altered to make him unreadable.