Supreme and Necessary Elegance Andrew Walser (bio) Birthday César Aira Chris Andrews, trans. New Directions Publishing https://www.ndbooks.com/book/birthday/ 88 Pages; Print, $13.95 Writing is a technology — one that permits the transmission of the contents of consciousness across space and time. A work like Michel de Montaigne’s Essays almost demands to be read as a model of the mind, with its striated layers of first, second, and third thoughts, separated out by letters in scholarly editions of the text. An even more striking example is Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913), in which a complex structure of consciousnesses — past and present, submerged and surficial — becomes visible through the interplay of memory and literary creation. At first glance, César Aira has little in common with these writers. He is hardly a philosopher, as Montaigne can plausibly be said to be, and in place of Proust’s mammoth magnum opus he has given us scores of miniatures, most of them under a hundred pages long. Yet one could easily construct a single work out of these little texts, thanks to two key facts. First, there is Aira’s method of composition, the fuga hacia adelante or “flight forward,” in which he composes one page a day, every day, and seldom returns to earlier pages to revise. Such a procedure — which inevitably leads to both prolificity and strangeness — ensures that we have a sequential record of the writer’s labors. Second, there is Aira’s habit of dating the last page of every completed work. All an intrepid critic will need to do is line up these dates, and read through the successive stages of the fuga hacia adelante, to reconstruct a day-by-day record of an extraordinary consciousness. Toward the end of Birthday, recently translated into English for the first time by Chris Andrews, Aira seems to allude to this possibility. In the middle of a discussion of his peculiar career, he cryptically mentions his “Encyclopedia” — the first such work to be written by a single person, and one that will create its meanings through a “complicated game of equivalences.” This Encyclopedia will serve as the “central battlefield in a war against the aberrant logic of the example.” What can this possibly mean? Aira is no Diderot or d’Alembert, and as far as I know he has no massive reference book waiting in the wings. (The scale of the Encyclopedia seems to go far beyond Aira’s Diccionario de autores latinoamericanos [2001]). My guess is that he is prodding us to think of his emerging oeuvre, if only for a moment, as a unified work, a catalog of the late capitalist world as seen through a single consciousness. In this context, a “complicated game of equivalences” is — like Jorge Luis Borges’s “alphabetical archive of variable veracity” — simply a fancy way of saying literature. Birthday is always engaging and frequently hilarious, but readers new to Aira’s work should probably start elsewhere — with the zombie invasion of Dinner (2001), or the monstrous blue worms of The Literary Conference (1997), or the surreal cornucopia that is The Musical Brain (2005). These works give a better idea of Aira’s narrative genius, the way the fuga hacia adelante produces a sense of sustained surprise similar to the effects created by music. (No accident that Aira has written a story called “Cecil Taylor,” about the great jazz innovator.) But those familiar with Aira will find Birthday fascinating — an idiosyncratic hymn to error and time, two of the central themes of the Encyclopedia-in-Progress. Much of the comedy in this hybrid text — a memoir of sorts, but marketed as fiction — comes from the ubiquity of error, starting with the narrator (whom I may as well call “Aira”) making an embarrassing mistake about the phases of the moon. This error may be a “monstrosity,” a reminder of how uncertain and even spurious our knowledge can be, but it is also the occasion for the inventions that make up the book. The fiftieth birthday that gives the novel its title promises controllable change — resolutions and new habits and “bright hopes” — and yet it comes...
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Jun 1, 2024
John Check 
Open Access