Chapter 34 - César Aira and the Art of Invention

Summary

This chapter reads César Aira’s work as an intervention in Argentine literature at the end of the twentieth century, which – since its irruption in 1981 – called for new reading protocols based on a fundamental operation: the transformation of the concept of fiction into invention. The radicalness of this invention – which embodied an unprecedented way of writing in Argentine literature – constitutes a point of inflection in storytelling.This phenomenon is described from diverse and converging points of view: the development of a singular economy; writing as the art of continuum and as a form of contemporary art; the imagination of worlds of the present by means of a general theory of documentation. The hypotheses put forward draw on a transversal reading which, while considering the whole of his books (more than a hundred), focuses on key texts which are representative of the diverse profiles of his works: the parable of nineteenth- to twenty-first-century Argentina, between Ema, the captive and Shantytown; the aporias of vision and the machines of thought from An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter to Marble; the fables of the writer in the contemporary world, between Varamo and Parménides.