lost paws:

Review: An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter / by Cesar Aira ; translation by Chris Andrews. New Directions, 2006.

In the universe of fiction, setting the mood is a practice that critics tend to look down upon, something that seems to suggest forsaking literary sensibilities for the sensibilities of genre fiction (esp. hard-boiled crime, and horror). For better or for worse, the authors who steal the most from genre fiction are those that tend to set the best mood in their work, and the really good ones like Auster, Borges, Gene Wolfe, don’t do it at the expense of their literature. (The truth is, I am a big proponent of mood, and I think almost everything could use a little more of it.) Aira’s novella belongs to this select group of good books that are also capable of entering this expressive space by touching our raw nerves. An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter -- written in historo-biographical fashion -- details a fictional episode in the life of Johann Rugendas, a nineteenth century documentary painter who worked in the physiognomic method of depiction pioneered by the great naturalist Humboldt.

Aira takes the reader along with Rugendas and his steadfast companion Krause (also a documentary painter, albeit a poor one) on a journey from the Cordillera of Chile, to an Argentinean border-town, to the Pampas and back again. While the Germans are visiting the border-town, Rugendas becomes interested in the large carts used to cross the Pampas to the “fabled Buenos Aires”, which move “at a caterpillars pace, which could only be measured in the distance covered per day or per week, (and) provoked a flurry of quick sketches, and perhaps this was not such a paradox in the work of a painter known for his watercolors of hummingbirds, since extremes of movement, slow as well as quick, have a dissolving effect.”

After a week or so, Rugendas and his companion set out for the Pampas with an Indian guide, despite a prolix advisory from Humboldt that a painter would find nothing of a value to depict in a region which was known for its extraordinary flatness. Rugendas, however, has harbored a longtime belief that witnessing the complete and total flatness of the Pampas, a place he describes as “a lunar ocean”, will change his entire understanding of painting. Afterwards, in a series of scene that capture an exquisite, perfectly executed Lovecraftian horror, Rugendas gets his entire face ripped off. The second half of the novella deals with the physical and psychological consequences of his accident, and is unfortunately, somewhat more lackluster than the first, but my feelings might be biased by the extreme pleasure I took in reading the first-half.

For me, the most interesting aspect of Episode is Aira’s exploration of physiognomy, or the idea that outward character/appearance is able to relate certain facts about inward character. The novella explores physiognomy on three different planes: that of art, that of the plant, and that of the human. When the facial twitches that result from Rugenda’s accident frustrate all attempts to communicate meaningful physiognomic information, the entire system of physiognomic painting (or painting that captures the essence of nature), breaks down to absurdity for Rugendas. The idea of flatness, of capturing the void, at first seems in no way related to the violent nature of Rugenda’s facial contortions, but for Aira these phenomena are interconnected – essentially, the impossibility in capturing meaning from signs that either produce nothing or produce everything, that point at which expression breaks down. To a lesser extent this impossibility of meaning is also felt by Rugendas, an obsessive letter writer, when he attempts to convey to loved ones and friends the total devastation of his face; he finds the words are incapable of conveying the magnitude of the accident.

Postscript: In the introduction, Roberto Bolaño compares Aira to “Roussel on his knees in a bath red with blood.” I don’t know if I see it (Aira makes points that are way to calculated for Roussel, who was more interested in the creation of absurdity through calculated production techniques), but I like it.