A Little Spatial Instrument: On César Aira’s Shifting Dimensions

---

Flames the height of Penicillium fungus. A wasp the volume of a speck of dust and its thimble-sized chalet made of cellophane. Destiny compressed to rock crystal. One particle blown from a construction site, resting on a child’s retina, in which a whole house is visible. A replica of a piano constructed to seat a taxidermied fish. A paper foldout containing all elements and possibilities of the universe. “[T]he expanding universe turned toward its infinite contraction.”

Argentine author César Aira is obsessed with scale. His literature is of the miniature: He compresses reality and takes to it with a microscope, moves subatomic objects around with invisible tweezers, etches the topography of the moon into a pavement curb.

Aira has written over 125 novelitas chistosas—“funny little novels.” The output is the byproduct of what he’s dubbed his el continuo and “flight forward” method, which means he writes a certain amount every day, pushing on past plot holes, and rarely edits. Aira’s methodological quirk lands somewhere between automatic writing and Oulipian constraint; it is improvisation, game, and creative parameter at once. The effect is that each of Aira’s books has an asymmetry to it, a tilt. Each reads like a fragment of something larger. According to the author, each book is a fragment of something larger—a scrap from an “encyclopedia” that has been the “horizon” of his work. There are what Roberto Bolaño calls, in 2666, “the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown,” and the shorter, more perfect works of the masters—and then there are the many imperfect Airan novelitas, a collective, unfinished torrent. Aira has claimed his whole literary career is one big footnote to Borges, presenting his oeuvre as a peripheral, micro-spatial project, tunneling beneath already miniature texts—as if capable of triggering an infinite textual regress.

Miniaturism, for Aira, is thus a formal method, a style, and a primary subject matter. That Aira’s page count is typically around the 100-mark isn’t all that makes him a miniaturist; he is a miniaturist in the phenomenological sense. Standard literary theory states that miniaturization serves a dual purpose: a tool for containing the world; a space that induces reverie. Both involve the sense of comfort that comes with grasping an object in your hand. An expanse hides within the novelitas, ready to disturb that comfort. This miniaturism is Dadaist and absurd: not a way to make reality safe and controlled, but a deliberate destabilization.

Aira attains scalar instability in a number of ways. He is particularly fond of deploying a capricious plot pivot. He writes as though coming across something, some sudden mutation or temporally incongruous maneuver casually attributed to, for instance, an “architectural effect,” glitch, or memory loss. The story’s action may happen within a memory of a conversation about misremembering a movie that aired on TV; he may open the novel trying to figure out how to begin, as though he’s left his notes in the published version. (It is sometimes too ridiculous.) He tends to dip into essayistic digressions, macro lenses floating at whim into his micro-stories. Theories proliferate. These idiosyncrasies serve to manipulate the space-time of the novel, stretched and warped within the pages of these small books. 

Aira tips the scales, and the ostensibly insignificant becomes tectonic. Peripheral details become major events. In Aira’s universe, the secret key is found in the flimsy, the overlooked—the workplace manual, the bureaucrat’s notebook, the trashy magazine. The newsstand, grocery store, construction site, street vendor, corner café—each is treated as a site of complex logic, where an event of cosmic circumstance could easily occur unnoticed.

•

One summer morning at a café in Buenos Aires, in December 2007, the late poet Kent Johnson had coffee with the artist Leticia Obeid. The owner of the café, El Gallego, unfurled the awning above their sidewalk table to offer some shade. But there had been a storm the night before, and El Gallego’s unfurling dumped a cascade of rainwater onto a passing bicyclist. As it happened, the bicyclist was no stranger but Enrique, an old friend of Obeid’s. Johnson, too, recognized the drenched man: He was the owner of the Palermo pensión where he was staying. To make the event even more surreal, the still-dripping Enrique runs into his mother, right there on the sidewalk. And then Johnson goes off to meet the famous Argentine author César Aira, to whom he tells this strange tale.

Upon hearing the story—as Johnson wrote in his pseudo-memoir-in-encounters I Once Met—Aira guffaws, claps, and says:

[It was] a reminder that a whole dimension of quantum strangeness most certainly waited for moments of entanglement with diffident smirk and bearing behind our own dimension, which is—our dimension, that is—a kind of ‘ontological dementia’… and that the clarity and purity of the former seeps through, now and then…into the banal forgetfulness of the latter…

Following this, Aira leaves abruptly, presumably to begin sketching what would become his 2010 novel, The Divorce. 

The Divorce, narrated by Kent, a recently divorced tourist from Providence, Rhode Island, occurs within the freeze-frame moment of the sidewalk drenching. The anecdote at the core of The Divorce “really happened,” Aira says. “I transcribed it without changes,” limiting himself only to filling in the instant.

Kent acts as a spout for a series of stories radiating from Enrique, the drenched bicyclist. First, he and Leticia meet in the midst of a burning boarding school, from which their only escape is into a scale model of the school, kept on a billiards table in its basement. The adventure is a series of crumbling facades. In one of Aira’s most striking images, thousands of moths flock to the flames and create a simulacrum of the building before turning to ash. Within the walls of the secular school hide Jesuit priests, their presence repeated in atomic size inside that “magical doll’s house” with toothpick beds and a piano that could only be played by a “creature from the realm of almost nothing.”
 

Enrique and Leticia don’t actually make it out of that miniature boarding school within the active narrative, leaving us with the impression that each successive tale exists on a different plane. The plummet into a miniature realm where “everything [is] more immediate” is the book’s mise en abyme. In both Gaston Bachelard and Susan Stewart’s foundational theories of scale, the attraction of the miniature lies in a feeling of possession: We see its wholeness, we feel safe; we can project ourselves inside it or feel god-like above it. Aira’s miniature makes this fantasy ersatz: The model in the basement does not provide a feeling of power or a means of escape. It does, however, open up an infinite landscape from within. Diminutive space such as a dollhouse evokes an immense interior expanse, and with Enrique and Leticia left in that little burning building, the psychological magnitude of the miniature absorbs the narrative above. At the end of the chapter, we’re told that “there is no other world than this.” We snap back to the café with Kent to find that the nested stories are the entire novel: the metadiegetic level of The Divorce subsumes its frame.

No matter how fantastical, Aira stays materially in the world—the minor goddess of ice hovers through bourgeois Palermo Soho; a sculptor’s apprentice, who had a life-changing experience with the child god Krishna during a childhood of poverty, is abused by an alcoholic artist and his hungry dogs; Enrique’s mother does what she has to do to run the family business after her father dies, potentially magical office manual notwithstanding. Aira’s mise-en-abyme-on-fire never stops burning because it is a traumatic memory, set off when the characters all run into each other on the sidewalk. The initial coincidence is a collision; all of the miniaturized histories whizz outward upon impact. As readers, we experience the stories both as a burrowing further into the scale model world, and as pocket worlds that act like balls on the billiards table where the model of the school sits, and which have fractured the linear and collectively swallowed it up. 

•

In Margarita (A Memory)—kicking off Five, the new New Directions collection—the anxiety of encroaching adulthood and a watershed election is compressed into toys and fables. Our narrator, an Aira avatar, is going on eighteen against the tense backdrop of 1957 Argentina, during the standoff between Arturo Frondizi and Ricardo Balbín in the shadow of Perón. Memory has the tendency to jump, shift, and blur, and the emotional intensity of a late adolescence or a precarious political moment only exacerbates that sensation. Aira collapses the 1957–1958 period into a very brief novelita—reportedly written on index cards—about a dreamy summer with the Snow White-esque Margarita. She breezes into town as guardian angel–governess to her elderly attorney father, who, Aira tells us, represents Argentina’s past: “the nation’s fate, the ship of state on its hazardous course, political commitments, oligarchic paternalism, populist deference.”

Margarita constantly shrinks the gigantic abstract down to domestic, interior size. Margarita herself seems a “chronological mistake,” both a distraction from political chaos and grid failures and an embodiment of temporal distortion. In the span of her young life, there have been “a series of political upheavals and revolutions that, in the history of another nation, would have occupied centuries.” Margarita and her father move into a lodge designed gratis by avant-garde architect Francisco Bullrich; the romanticism of her mother’s death by a duel’s spare bullet seems straight out of a locked-shut storybook. They sequester themselves from the intensity of the political shifts outside, a brief refuge from the legal scandals that keep the father in perpetual exile. Margarita’s survival tactic involves a “little collage world” that folds up into a cardboard suitcase. Meanwhile, the narrator’s family has an onyx figurine of Frondizi on their mantelpiece; a Balbín doll is taken out at night and stabbed with needles.

Obsessed with Oscar Wilde’s essays and infected with the compression-mania of his household, our narrator sees Margarita as the fairy tale figure she has been abstracted into by those around him. Margarita teaches him to live outside the page, beyond the diagram—and yet she remains “at a slight remove from concrete reality,” suspended and idealized. If Margarita had stepped out of a fairy tale, “I was the imaginer entering open-eyed into my own creation,” he recalls. He treats her like a creature of fiction sent to distract him from his fear of growing up and entering the adult sphere of blackouts and dictators. The pair hide in a pastoral microcosm. Away from the turmoil, Margarita and the narrator enter an enchanted forest, a haze of secret chambers. The prose here is folkloric, ethereal: “The forward flight had come to a halt in a golden quadrant. Space folded over time, and new images of the two of us appeared on its various undersides: Margarita and I falling through fogbanks, weaving our way through the sleeping steers.” The outer world disappears when the pair drop into this snow globe of sylvan detail. But the dream is shattered when Margarita and her father abruptly skip town.

Our narrator is inconsolable. He is so distraught at the departure of his friend that he wishes for ants to tear him to pieces, to be rid of the “horrible unity” of his body. At the story’s close, he imagines Margarita living in a hut in the distance. She shifts scale in his mind as he tries to grasp the truth of her absence. She is first “like Alice, a real girl in a dollhouse high on a mountain, serving tea, one drop at a time,” and then she is “wandering, lost, and tiny, as I would have liked her to be, so I could have held her in the palm of my hand, and talked to her, smiling.” He turns Margarita into a souvenir of herself, squishing her into an image of domestic fantasy that could be played forever—displacing both the reality of her egress and their summer together. Ultimately, this denial of the passage of time fails; reality can no longer be scrunched up into a pocket-sized myth. What is a figurine in the face of grief? Only a fragment. When the boy runs home to his mother in tears, he realizes his friend is too real for “the mutant dimensions of a fable.” The image short-circuits; the container explodes. She has real girl legs that walk away; in her wake, she leaves a void. Even the moon begins to disappear…

•

Aira marks every novel and story with the date of its completion. His debut novel, Ema, The Captive (1981), is timestamped October 21, 1978, in the middle of Jorge Videla’s far-right military dictatorship. State-sponsored propaganda celebrated the centennial of General Roca’s Conquest of the Desert the following year; leftist guerrillas dubbed themselves Montoneros after the nineteenth-century militias that fought centralizing forces out of Buenos Aires.

Miniaturism functions here as a Dadaist mode of subversion. Ema drifts languidly in a liminal period between the nation-state unification of Adolfo Alsina’s frontier campaign and Roca’s brutal conquest, which would ultimately establish the modern Argentine state by way of centralized borders, national military power consolidation, and an agro-export economy. None of this is referred to explicitly, only implied with a yawning, anachronistic irony. Mostly, we follow Ema, a young mother who roams the frontier as concubine, wife, and indifferent captive to various men—a Frenchman, a soldier, a king, and a zoological engineer among them. As the late Sergio Chejfec noted, Aira establishes his relationship with the great looming shadow of the nineteenth-century realist novel: temporal structure and social types are intact, but psychology and conflict are replaced with paradox and surrealist imagery. Everyone is preoccupied, bored, and obsessed with gambling. The colonizers and the Indians are all busy inventing capitalism, setting up a new model of transactional reality: “a comedy of extortion.” Aira presents the network of currency as both absurd and as a way for Ema to, eventually, attain a kind of autonomy—by the end, she has her own pheasant-breeding operation, thanks to a minister’s desire to flood the system with Victoria-printed bills.

The characters of Ema traverse and occupy the Pampas, where a landscape of vast, unstable dimensions warps all sense of proportion. The primary settlement fort appears as a “motley toy city” of “chaotic hives.” Passing dwarf chañar trees, travelers feel “like giants treading a miniature forest”; they see a mantis the size of a dove. There’s a garden with “the air of a miniature” and a beach “of fine sand where everything seemed microscopic.” The natural world squirms and shapeshifts beneath endeavors to contain it; the puckish language pantomimes the era’s pathologies. Many of the men seem to be driven mad by the Pampas’ sublimity, its unmanageable size mocking the colonial conquest. Aira’s scalar oscillations show the anxiety at the core of the expanding state’s attempt to tame and constrain: the fear of being small. Using the framework of theorist Alfonso de Toro, the critic Djibril Mbaye writes that “Argentina can be considered a miniaturization of the center/periphery relationship.” The Conquest of the Desert was the attempt of Buenos Aires’s ruling class to construct a wealthy state modeled on France or England—a self-inflicted miniature replica of European colonialism that tried to squeeze a geographical immensity into a capitalist maquette.

While the men are occupied with their state-building schemes, Ema slips between the lines. She gets the idea for the pheasant farm while studying maps. Fully open, the “fine, wrinkly paper” covers most of the floor in the small room; folded, they fit in her pocket. “Beautiful miniatures stood in for absent inscriptions: the capital with its palaces and bridges, villages in remote clearings, and even the fort in Pringles and the settlement.” Her favorite map shows pheasants. “The bigger the drawing, the more birds it stood for.”

Ema finds in this graphic abstraction a world made of rearrangeable symbols. “As for the birds themselves… she realized that they were shards scattered by a prodigious shattering of passion, and that their colors were signs of absent thoughts.” Her observations have a cosmic tilt, whereas men like the minister insist “The real [is] the State” and its currency. She goes off to create her own miniature commercial empire, turning herself into one of the birds on the map—like a character from a children’s book diving into an illustration.

In a rare author’s note, Aira divulges that he came up with Ema while sitting in a Pumper Nic—a much-nostalgized, defunct Argentine copy of Burger King. Aira calls Ema “my miniature self,” who instilled in him “the passion for which all others can be exchanged, as money is exchanged for all things: indifference.” Politics raging outside the Pumper Nic insists on grand national myths, so Aira turns small and ridiculous, his avatar navigating a frontier of monetary schemes and ostentatious pheasants like a board game. It’s as if he took an old rotting book, hollowed it out, and stuffed his own weird little objects in there.

• 

During the heyday of imperialist expansion, the popularization of the microscope and subsequent codification of germ theory engendered a profound cultural anxiety that, beyond the measurable world, nested invisible universes. If the microscope could reveal tiny alien monsters living in a drop of drinking water, then an unseen world of fairies was not outside the realm of possibility—and maybe all those maps and classifications were balderdash, too. 

A nineteenth-century cartographer or taxonomist wanted the world to behave linearly, like a stable, classical particle. nineteenth-century nonsense writers poked at this unease, parodying colonial categorization-mania and the absurdity of encyclopedic knowledge. In his book-length essay on nineteenth-century limerick writer Edward Lear, Aira suggests that, within the limerick, Lear accessed a realm below the atom—specifically, the realm of the quantum. In quantum thinking, wave-function dictates that matter isn’t fixed in one place; rather, it’s a cluster of overlapping probabilities until measured. According to Aira, Lear’s limericks have a “compulsive and frenzied movement” that leaves waves of superimposed afterimages. Within a very brief space, the characters appear to teleport, making quantum leaps across lines of verse, boundaries of time and space completely irrelevant. Lear’s figures are a cloud of absurd, unresolved possibilities. Each little poem is so compressed and chaotic that its energy ripples outward. Instead of treating the nonsense poem like a classical particle, Aira treats it like a quantum wave, vibrating with unpredictable energy.

“¿Quieres coger?” What vibrates with more unpredictable energy than bored hormonal teenagers? In The Proof (1992), Marcia is on her daily after-school walk when she enters a dense, enchanted space that is both the street and “a fortuitous moment of the evening.” Clusters of long-haired youths in leather jackets loiter on this corner in Plaza Flores, near the mall and the record shops, yelling ¡Boludo! back and forth. The Cure is playing (probably Disintegration). Marcia, chubby and uncool, would typically pass through unnoticed. “[S]he felt she was gliding along too rapidly, like a body in the ether where there was no resistance”—as if Aira had plucked her out of a vacuum to bump around in his particle accelerator. (It’s also what growing up feels like: the notion that there must be a story waiting for you—without it, nothing matters.) Suddenly, the weight of reality changes; time becomes denser. Marcia can feel the story condensing around her. It seems that “now, anything could happen.”

Cornered by punk girls Mao and Lenin, Marcia’s life transforms. In a Pumper Nic, Mao tells Marcia that they must reject “the world of explanations” for the intense speed and energy of lightning, and the trio heads to the Disco supermarket to cause chaos. Time shrinks into a “vertiginous instant” once the punks padlock the grocery store doors. All the action from here on out occurs within a “packed continuum.” Glass rains between Fruit and Veg, a man in plastic overalls catches fire climbing through yogurt, a woman is beheaded. Her lopped dome soars over produce aisles as crowds trample and the cleaning department explodes. A woman melts into a monster with stretched and twisted limbs while singing more beautifully than Maria Callas, a rainbow forming above her. She becomes all things at once, a living Aleph, and yet is “no more than a gaze, a tiny insistence.” Only five minutes have passed when the girls leave the scene unscathed and disappear back into the streets of Flores.

Aira calls his trio the Three Marias, the naming itself a compressional sleight of hand. Explicitly, they are the three bright stars of Orion’s Belt, tethered in Argentina to the trio of holy women from the Catholic gospel. Implicitly, they are also the adolescent girls of Rachel de Queiroz’s 1939 As Três Marias, and The Three Marias, the Portuguese women whose 1973 obscenity trial for their collaborative feminist text made them folk heroes. The pulsating novel ends with a readymade matryoshka doll, folding the celestial, the political, the hagiographic, and the literary into one glittering marble.

Nearly a century after Lear, Werner Heisenberg put forth his uncertainty principle: At a certain point of reduction, the instruments of measurement inevitably disturb what they are measuring. In Aira’s quantum science of the novel, articulated in his introduction to Copi’s City of Rats, “space-time is a maquette”—an architectural model, a sketch for the way reality operates, a miniature structure you can turn around in your hand. At the subatomic level, standard rules of narrative gravity go out the window. Qualities cease to apply, hierarchies dissolve, and “we float on the same level as everything else.” 

In The Proof, Aira uses this quantum logic as a metaphor for the jittery drama of adolescence, but also as a narrative prank against misogynist political structures. Like Lear’s figures, the girls tunnel quantumly, going so subatomic they loop to the cosmic. In their leap to the stars, they don’t just break out of societal rules but escape the rules of “reality” itself, ascending to myth. Aira’s Three Marias resist any measurement.

•

In The Dream (1994), newly translated for Five, a neighborhood newsstand becomes involved in a mad conspiracy involving malevolent robotic nuns, a sensational bank embezzlement, and the local shelter for single mothers, where the newsstand stores their overstock. At the peak of this fast-moving tale, Aira manipulates scale to freeze time within a thronged chapel. The scene is arranged as a “Caravaggesque deposition.” Aira pauses to break the chaos down into rapid-fire close-ups—a hand, a foot, a gasping mouth, a cornice, a niche—using the page like a physical miniaturist who slows time with granular textures packed onto a minute surface. We stare at each corner of the chapel, flesh in freeze-frame, à la Caravaggio’s flash of chiaroscuro catching his figures mid-gesture. Elsewhere in The Dream, there is an attempt to map knowledge onto a city street seen from above, a labyrinthine underground realm with its own set of rules, and tea that alters perception by the microsense. At one moment, it seems the title may refer to the entire hallucinatory sequence of events—but no, the dream in question is one our protagonist Mario had about the Argentine football team Racing Club improbably winning the championship. This dream—like The Proof’s quantum condensation—makes anything seem possible. 

To solve one piece of the mystery, Mario tracks down an old copy of the women’s lifestyle magazine Para Ti in a local woman’s archival stash. At first, Mario doesn’t find anything of note—why would he? It’s just a silly magazine, right? And, anyway, the clue could have been hidden anywhere. “In the atomic composition of the paper. In a typographical error, which might have created a magic word.” But then he does find it—in a seemingly innocuous article on fertility. Para Ti is the most widely read women’s lifestyle magazine in Argentina’s history, a class-transcending, generation-spanning domestic handbook that has also historically been the site of conservative dogma. In her study of the magazine, scholar Mónica Farías notes that in the mid-1990s, Para Ti’s rhetoric partitioned the single and married as well as the public and private space: if the home is not to be infiltrated by politics, then neither is the woman. Burying the key inside this ostensibly trifling feminine manual, Aira acknowledges, in his droll way, that tools of control are often found in the most mundane places. 

Hurrying off to save the day, Mario notices his newsstand: “Seen from a distance, as now, it was a miniature, a little spatial instrument. In miniature, figures become more precise. Not by magnification, but its opposite: they shrink, shrink, and take on a polish in the air.” The network of Buenos Aires is held entirely in this small, folding kiosk. Political systems can be found hiding within the configuration of their magazines’ stories; each thin newsprint page could hold the combinatory code to the universe. This is how Aira’s novels work, too. Usually, we look at miniatures as a way to make life safe and manageable, to hold what otherwise can’t be held. Aira packs his with dense hyperreality. His narratives are spatial instruments—accelerated, pressurized, microcosmic gadgets. They reflect the frantic speed of reality outside, burrow inside our smallest, subatomic details, and point to power structures hiding right there on the open page.