Varamo by César Aira Read Free Book Online Page B

style is the key mechanism of trans-subjectivity,
without which we would have no understanding of social interactions.
    But our invasion of Varamo’s consciousness is not magical
or even imaginative or hypothetical. It is a historical reconstruction. Th e difference is that we have presented it
backwards, starting with the final results of our research. All the
circumstantial details with which we have been coloring the story of the
character’s day and making it credible have been deduced (in the most rigorous
sense of that word) from the poem that he finally wrote, which is the only
document that has survived. Partly because it is all we have, and partly because
of its inherent characteristics, that document is absolute, and worthy of
unqualified trust. Th e course of events that
preceded the composition of the poem can be deduced from the text, in ever
greater detail, as one reads it over and again. Perceptual data is recovered in
this way, but also psychological binding elements, including memories,
daydreams, oversights, uncertainties and even subliminal brain flashes. Th e treatment of the external conditions should be
similarly inclusive: the succession can be progressively enriched with particles
of reality, down to the subatomic level and beyond. Consequently, no invention
has been required to recount the process of inspiration as a straightforward
narrative, not unlike a novel. It has, however, been necessary to make a
rigorous selection, since the poem provides us with everything, and could have
given rise to a tome the size of a telephone book. Restraint had to be exercised
because the objective was to write a slim volume, since this is an experiment
(an experiment in literary criticism), and to be convincing, experiments must be
brief; once the initial hypothesis has been demonstrated, there’s no point going
on. Not to mention the risk of boring the reader.
    As a landmark of Latin American avant-garde writing
in the first decades of the twentieth century, Th e Song of the Virgin Child belongs to the category of “experimental
literature.” Th e poem’s capacity to integrate
all the circumstantial details associated with its genesis is a feature that
situates it historically. It doesn’t possess that capacity by virtue of being an
avant-garde work; in fact, it’s the other way around: it’s avant-garde because
it makes the deductions possible. It can be said that any art is avant-garde if
it permits the reconstruction of the real-life circumstances from which it
emerged. While the conventional work of art thematizes cause and effect and
thereby gives the hallucinatory impression of sealing itself off, the
avant-garde work remains open to the conditions of its existence. And the more
accomplished it is, the more confident the critic can be in restoring the
antecedent events and thoughts. In the case of a masterwork like Varamo’s poem,
that confidence is absolute, and all the critic has to do is translate each
verse, each word, backwards, into the particle of reality from which it sprang. Th ose “particles of reality” are what the
critics call “circumstantial details,” and when appropriately combined, they
constitute a discourse that could be mistaken for that of a novel. Two
qualifications need to be made here: the first is that the size of the elements
used for the reconstruction is not fixed: they can be words or lines, but also
syllables or stresses, or one particular sense of a word, or something as large
as a stanza, a section, or even the poem as a whole; the same goes for the
reconstructed fragments of reality, and there is no one-to-one correspondence
between those fragments and the elements of the text. Th e second qualification is that the particles of reality
reconstructed by interpreting the poem, although complete and sharply defined
like miniature universes, appear as discrete units with nothing to indicate
their order of occurrence, so that the critic who is picking them out is