Multioperational Style, Eccentricity, and Valeria Luiselli's Aesthetics of Education

Abstract

Multioperational Style, Eccentricity, and Valeria Luiselli's Aesthetics of Education Alexandra Kingston-Reese (bio) Is there such a thing as speculative novel form? In the afterword to the English translation of her second novel La historia de mis dientes (The Story of My Teeth, 2015 ), VALERIA LUISELLI proposed a formula. "The formula, if there was one," she muses, "would be something like Dickens + MP3 ÷ Balzac + JPEG."1 Perhaps, maybe, kind of: this formula appears as hindsight, almost as a throwaway comment. The conditional clause weighs heavily: if, if, if. But where flippancy denotes narrative, affective, and political uncertainty, Luiselli's subjunctive grammar is more speculative than specious.2 In 2016, Luiselli adapted the formula, but this time in a short piece for the Financial Times on the twenty-firstcentury novel and the internet: "Dickens + MP3 ÷ Cervantes − Wikipedia = 21st-century novel."3 In solving x for y, y is no longer a specific novel but any novel from this century. For the readers of the Financial Times [End Page 551] (paywalled), Dickens is retained, Balzac is removed, Cervantes added, and Wikipedia makes an appearance in an ambivalent subtracted position. Any such formula is attuned not only to the values included within it (the Dickens, the Balzac, the MP3, and the JPEG) but also to the grammar of the operation: the addition, division, and subtraction signs. Like in mathematics, where operationality describes a process by which values are transformed, so too are Luiselli's so-called values transformed. The three mathematical signs are also grammatical: the + comes to mean adding, listing, accumulating; the ÷ comes to mean bisecting one category with another; and the − comes to mean peeling away parts of the whole. The original site for Luiselli's play with speculation, reification, and abstraction, however, is not her formula but the novel itself. The Story of My Teeth is a story of class mobility in which its central figure and narrator, Gustavo "Highway" Sánchez Sánchez, in his role as an auctioneer, uses financial speculation and stylistic hyperbole to turn dead objects (his own teeth, among others') into commodities to provide access to art. At once a financial and aesthetic speculator, Highway, perhaps a reader of the Financial Times, is eccentrically invested in the pursuit of garnering knowledge in exchange for audacious lies. By dialing up the friction between artistic and financial value, The Story of My Teeth presents itself as an allegory of eccentric aesthetic education, whereby aesthetic education provides the working class access to wealth at the moderate expense of one's moral license. The contention that the more value art has, the less it needs to defend itself, impels not only the novel's style and plot but its material conditions. In 2012, [End Page 552] Luiselli was approached by Magalí Arriola and Juan Gaitán, curators of the private contemporary art collection Galería Jumex in Mexico, to write an entry for the catalog of the exhibition El Cazador y la Fábrica (The Hunter and the Factory).4 Part of the commission instructed Luiselli "to reflect upon the bridges—or the lack thereof—between the featured artwork, the gallery, and the larger context of which the gallery formed part," fictionally.5 Housing the large private Colección Jumex, Galería Jumex was located in 2012 in Ecatepec, just outside Mexico City on the grounds of Grupo Jumex's headquarters and factory. Despite being within the estate, Luiselli notes, there was, "naturally, a gap between the two worlds: gallery and factory, artists and workers, artwork and juice."6 The path that took this commission to the novel La historia de mis dientes was largely a dialogical one: to establish how literature can "play a mediating role" between two opposing but materially entwined worlds must first require acknowledging, in a Bakhtinian fashion, the novel form's discursive role in public life.7 To properly enact this function, Luiselli sent short installments of the novel from New York to a reading group made up of the Grupo Jumex factory workers in Mexico across that year. The factory workers then recorded their conversations and stories for Luiselli to parse over and incorporate into the novel.8 From these discussions...