About book An Episode In The Life Of A Landscape Painter (2006)
‘It was another proof of art’s indifference; his life might have been broken in two, but painting was still the “bridge of dreams”.’In order to achieve the depth of soul and vision necessary to become a true artist, Rainer Maria Rilke prescribes a life of solitude. However, this exchange of artistry for solitude may come at a very high price. While on a journey through Argentina to paint landscapes, German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas suffered a tragic accident that left him with an horrifically maimed face and damaged nervous system. As his disfigurement and bouts of pain separate him from his companions, pushing him inward towards his own solitude, his new morphine fueled vision unlocks the inner beauty of the world and pushed him further into an elevated artistic spirit. ‘It was as if he had taken another step into the world of his paintings.’ César Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is a succinct allegory of an artists solitude and place in the wide world, as Aira’s compact prose illustrates a grand portrait of artistic history and the delicate balance of existence.Landscape by RugendasAira is so precise, so exacting with his language, that this succinct novella retains the broad scope of a lengthy novel. In 80pgs, Aira covers a story and a deep well of ideas that could easily have been discussed for hundreds of pages, yet, the reader does not feel that Aira has slighted them with his brief, but powerfully moving, book. Every word hangs perfectly in balance, not a word out of place, which is impressively fitting with many of Rugendas and his companion’s investigation of balance in the world. Although Episode finds its roots in factual biography, this is, for all intensive purposes, a fictionalized account of Rugendas, however, like the way Rugendas’ hallucinations blend with reality, the blend of fact and fiction opens up the inner beauty of life and art that is impenetrable to fact and common reality. ’And yet, at some point, the mediation had to give way, not so much by breaking down as by building up to the point where it became a world of its own, in whose signs it was possible to apprehend the world itself, in its primal nakedness.’To further embody this sentiment, Aira crafts his fictional account to resemble a biographic novel, writing as if citing letters that don’t actually exist and interspersing encyclopedic asides of biographical information. This seemingly factual information grows in the soil of fiction to become something far greater. ‘Reality was becoming immediate, like a novel.’Having studied in the genre of physiognomy of nature, a scientific approach to landscape painting laid out by the ideas of Alexander von Humboldt, Rugendas reproduced exactly species to create a perfect, scientific totality.‘[Rugendas'] aim was to apprehend the world in its totality; and the way to do this, he believed, in conformity with a long tradition, was through vision…The artistic geographer had to capture the “physiognomy” of the landscape by picking out its characteristic “physiognomic” traits…The precise arrangement of physiognomic elements in the picture would speak volumes to the observer’s sensibility, conveying information not in the form of isolated features but features systematically interrelated so as to be intuitively grasped…The key to it all was “natural growth,” which is why the vegetable element occupied the foreground…’The artistic style has him reproduce exact, scientific elements in each painting to maintain an accurate image of reality, to highlight a specific moment in fluid history. As he reproduces small details of flowers to better capture the whole of a landscape, when drawing the Indian cattle raids, he comments that each toe, each tiny element of the Indians body is an expression on the whole of the man, which then must be reproduced, ‘seeing it as part of the multitudinous species, which would go on making nature. Continually reappearing from the wings, the Indians were, in their way, making history.’ History itself becomes an important motif of the novella. On their journey, each vision absorbed into them contains some statement on the history of the world, and mans mark he has made on it. ‘The mules were driven by human intelligence and commercial interests, expertise in breeding and bloodlines. Everything was human; the farthest wilderness was steeped with sociability, and the sketches they had made, in so far as they had any value, stood as records of this permeation.’While storytelling is often the method for passing down history, Rugendas argues that ‘art was more useful that discourse.’ If all the storytellers fell silent, he argues that history could be better passed down by ‘a set of “tools,” which would enable mankind to reinvent what had happened in the past, with the innocent spontaneity of action.’ Rugendas argues for repetition, that all of humanity’s actions deserve to happen again to better learn from them. The repetitions of events lead to the telling of humanity, and each individual part speaks volumes to the whole. Like the reproduction of individual flora and fauna to create an accurate landscape, each scene, like the Indian raid, is an individual piece to the larger portrait of history. ‘The scenes would be part of the larger story of the raid, which in turn was a very minor episode in the ongoing clash of civilizations.’Aira blend of fact and fiction, with the purpose to create a poignant statement fact or fiction couldn’t achieve on it’s own, Rugendas new-found, and highly paid for, vision of the world is a blend of reality and nightmare. ‘Nature, in its nineteen vegetal phases, adapted itself to his perception, enveloped with Edenic light: a morphine landscape.’ Each of his hallucinations carry with it fragments of reality, and the two combine on paper to illustrate a truth in the world that was once hidden to him before.. Whereas he must cover himself behind a veil, the veil of reality is lifted before his eyes. ‘Rugendas had come to the conclusion that the lines of a drawing should not represent corresponding lines in visible reality, in a one-to-one equivalence. On the contrary, the line’s function was constructive.’ His surrealistic paintings embody a truth nobody else had been able to envision. ’He was like a drunk at the bar of a squalid dive, fixing his gaze on a peeling wall, an empty bottle, the edge of a window frame, and seeing each object or detail emerge from the nothingness into which it had been plunged by his inner calm. Who cares what they are? asks the aesthete in a flight of paradox. What matters is that they are.’His new facial strangeness and ugliness opens up the beauty of strangeness in the world. Rugendas companion, Krauss, spends much time pondering the balance of the world, and with Rugendas, we see Rilke’s balance of artistry and solitude come to life in mortifying glory. The man leaves humanity all but behind to fully embody painting.This is an incredible novella that seems like a trick of the eye must have taken place as so much knowledge is packed into such a small space. Like the best of short fiction, each word is fitted perfectly together to build a grand story — each word is like each physiognomic detail in Rugendas paintings. Aira is certainly not an author to be passed over as he is able to create such a fine balance of fact and fiction as well as beauty and grotesquery. As stated by Roberto Bolaño in the forward: ‘[Aira’s] novels seem to put the theories of Witold Gombrowicz into practice, except, and the difference is fundamental, that Gombrowicz was the abbot of a luxurious imaginary monastery, while Aira is a nun or novice among the Discalced Carmelites of the World.’ If prayer is literature, than Aira certainly offers up some powerful prayer to the literary gods. 4/5Cattle Raid as depicted by Rugendas‘All these scenes were much more like pictures than reality. In pictures, the scenes can be thought out, invented, which means that they can surpass themselves in terms of strangeness, incoherence and madness. In reality, by contrast, they simply happen, without preliminary invention.’
Could it be that the novella - not the short story - is the pre-eminent literary artform (the form most accommodating to the search for perfection)? As focused and taut (almost) as a classic short story, yet discursive and atmospheric as few stories can be, An Episode... is a good argument for the ascendance of a form that is too often overlooked in Anglo letters. Sure, it starts dryly, and for the first 10 or so pages it's so information-dense you may wonder where the art is, but soon enough (as his protagonists reach the Andes) Aira's descriptive powers kick in and you realise he's hooked you:Dawn and dusk were vast optical explosions, drawn out by the silence. Slingshots and gunshots of sunlight rebounded into every recess. Grey expanses hung out to dry forever in colossal silence; airshafts voluminous as oceans.For those who've read another novella seriously suggestive of perfection - Georg Buchner's 19th century genre-definer Lenz - the tone may seem familiar, and it's tempting to think Aira had Lenz in mind as he wrote this. In some ways, too, he supercedes that hyper-real but youthful and overwrought 'descent into madness' tale, by choosing a subject whose cataclysm is more-easily describable in three dimensions. Along with the shimmering yet exact, vivid sense of place, there are dramatic scenes here that made me shiver or laugh in exhilarated disbelief. It's entertaining, it's a ride, it's well-written and it suggests (like a good short story) a trajectory that continues after the last page. Still, like a short story, a novella often benefits from being collected with others of its kind, and until I've read a couple more of Aira's I don't think I'll be confident that I've begun to grasp what makes him tick. (3 points to make a straight line, after all, so Roithamer.) It's not Alvaro Mutis's The Snow of the Admiral, but then that was a novella so good that when it was collected with others they all paled in comparison. It's not Metamorphosis or The Old Man and the Sea, but they were one-offs, never to be repeated. If Aira really has 80 of these little books then, maybe, he's some kind of a discovery. But that would also explain why this book doesn't quite feel 'singular', but like another episode in the development of a writer of novellas.My advice? Read it, before you've had a chance to read too much about it. I liked it; time will tell whether I love it.
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This book is short though usually referred to as slim, at eighty eight pages. Its prose, rather than slim, deepens in ever reaching transcendental layers never revealing intention. There is no trace of crafting it down or trying to say more. The allotted pages were precisely what this story called for and where it ended. It was created in the absence of the tools of the post modern trade. Its immediacy ran the length of the novel maintaining its tightened grip to the last word. Each of Aira's words are important in this seamless narrative, thoughtful, crafted, quietly carrying the weight of its meaning. The story can be read with equal relevance, as in all excellent literature, in different ways. I will try to express my reading of it and not repeat reviews already written by more able goodreads reviewers.After gasping at the sheer beauty of the landscape descriptions of lush vegetation, mountain passes, luminous skies, I watched Aira, lived with him through it, create a journey of an individual passing through the stages of art, battling through the passage into becoming an artist.Rugenda, a disciple and friend of the landscape painter Humbolt, who himself had developed a revolutionary theory within the confines of landscape painting, began his journey with the younger German painter, Robert Krause, from Mexico to Chile and Argentina. Carrying the measurements and boundaries of civilization, the world with them they kept barometric records, estimated wind speeds with a sock of white cloth, two glass capillary tubes containing liquid graphite as an altimeter. Mercury from a thermometer suspended from a pole provided them light. Leisurely, they sought Humbolt's physiognomy of landscape, nature. Nature's perils and beauty, country dwellers and indians, their feuds and battles began the leaving of civilization behind and the entry into the wild. Rugenda's disfigurement due to a an accident propels his passage. The clear trails turn to sinuous dark pathways.They ride into the night appearing as shadows of giraffes, bats delicately brush their faces. Rugenda's disfigurement is lit by moonlight. We descend on the trail with them, Rugenda traveling deeper into the sinews of the creative unconscious, its lurid dangers and promise of unspecified reward. I understood the risks and now let him go on without me. I watched him cover his disfigured face with a black veil, creating a pin-prick vision, an impressionist scope, as increasingly, without plan, he delves into himself, rising up, filling himself. The world seen through his eyes, through the mantissa veil, is new, disfiguring. Increasingly obsessed with work and his own vision leaving Humbolt's quadrants behind for an existence of search and discovery. Due to his disfigurement, his new vision through the eyes of his self, Rugenda is now the isolated artist removed and never able to return to his home, back into the the world he knew. Life is now created in its vivid rawness no longer requiring its veil as Aira has discarded his, to reach beyond the safety of boundaries.The final scene is a haunted image of a lone artist removed from the world, embedded in his art as it creates itself beneath his hand. The image will be embedded within the reader and remain without any sign of receding.
—Stephen P
In a moronic attempt to get a jump on my 2111 Reading Challenge, I opted for the slimmest title on my TBR list—a novella of 87 pages that should have taken only moments from a day spent reading other people’s reviews and wishing I had more time to read the books they’ve reviewed. Speaking of other reviews, much better ones for An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter are to be found here and here. I suggest you immediately leave off this more mediocre and humdrum musing and devote your attention to those.Landscapes—aren’t they the paintings that graced the walls of hotel rooms prior to the arrival of pastel impressions that compliment the barrenness of rooms neutered in their standardization and into which they provide the only sources of color? Landscape artists? Landscape artists? It’s unthinkable. Unless, of course, one thinks of what Cormac McCarthy can do with a landscape, or Thomas Hardy, or César Aira:Peaks of mica kept watch over their long marches. How could these panoramas be rendered credible? There were too many sides; the cube had extra faces. The company of volcanoes gave the sky interiors. Dawn and dusk were vast optical explosions, drawn out by the silence; air-shafts voluminous as oceans. (Dammit, Jimmy beat me to the punch with that quote, but it bears repeating) Maybe there was a point behind all the references to the sublime (a Longinus-tudinal study? that can't be right) in those Lit classes of so long ago. Now, if your indulgence persists, consider a landscape filtered through a mantilla (read the book, you’ll see why it matters). One person’s lacy mantilla is a matter of discretion and self-effacement; for another, it’s a work of needlecraft, art and display. For some, a mantilla filters what’s beyond it, for others it filters what’s concealed inside or beneath. For some, art is an imaginative creation mediating the real and the real. Finishing this book and writing this review (such as it is) leaves me wondering—4 stars or 5? It’s not one I’d recommend whole-heartedly for any and every reader. It is one I’d recommend whole-heartedly for some readers. If you’re one who likes artists writing about art and other artists, read it. On my profile I’ve said the difference between 4 and 5 stars is that I liked a book and that I read it at the right time. I read this one at the right time, and I’m going from this to more by this author (yeah, it’s another slim volume—one of NDP’s Pearls—a series or collection that bodes well for me as I’ve yet to be disappointed in NDP).
—Mike Puma
Three stars means "I liked it" so I guess that is good enough for me. Though my measly rating looks bad among all these five stars I see around me. The book was very easy to read and I liked some of the words the translator chose to use. More on this later. But I wasn't all that moved by the monstrous other-worldly trip-off in the spirit-quest for art, or for its sake. I will expound later when I have had more time to run this reading through my mind's-eye filter. Or if the text somehow finds itself getting deliberately burrowed deeper below my skin.
—M. Sarki
