New Directions • 88pp • $12.99 • 16 October 2012
César Aira, the Argentine author who has published some eighty novels in his native Spanish since 1975, wrote The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira in his hometown of Coronel Pringles in 1996. It was a time of reform for the country: Buenos Aires, just to the north of Pringles, held its first mayoral elections since the 1994 reform of the Argentine Constitution, which had granted the capital city autonomy (and christened it with the more formal, and cumbersome, name of “Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires”). But this period of renewal occurred in the aftermath of the desaparecidos and the war crimes of the fascist regime of Jorge Rafael Videla, the repercussions of which were still palpable. The country was also becoming increasingly broke: not even a decade later, President Fernando de la Rúa, who held his post for a single tumultuous week in December 2001, would declare a default of $100 billion on the Argentine national debt, the largest government default in history.
It is not surprising, then, that money, or its notable lack, plays a major role in The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira. Indeed, it has become something of a theme of Mr. Aira’s work: Varamo, which was released in English earlier this year, was written after the default, and feels like it. A kind of carpe diem that is informed by Argentina’s economic collapse without quite treating it explicitly, Varamo follows a Panamanian bureaucrat who discovers he has been paid his monthly salary in counterfeit tender. Emboldened both by financial desperation and a series of impossible coincidences, he winds up writing the “celebrated masterpiece of modern Central American poetry.” Varamo‘s plot—and its execution—exemplifies Mr. Aira’s masterful handling of sarcasm, as does The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira.
The story begins with Dr. Aira, a middle-aged cynic who lives a life of poverty, in the midst of a bitter remembrance: he is recalling unnamed “small, ridiculous, and perfectly private disgraces.” The implication is that these anonymous embarrassments are the (now past) miracle cures referred to by the title. It is these “cures” that have forced him to take “recourse in solitude.” Despite the efforts of his “archenemy,” Actyn, the chief of medicine at the local Piñero Hospital in Buenos Aires, Dr. Aira now refuses to perform any cures—but his nemesis proves relentless: Actyn and two orderlies eventually kidnap Dr. Aira with an ambulance, and force him into a face-to-face encounter with a dying man in order to coerce him into performing a miracle. Dr. Aira refuses. Luckily, it’s only a set-up: when Dr. Aira leaves the ambulance, the “dead” man rises to call him a jackass.
Rather than be exploited by Actyn, Dr. Aira decides that he will write and publish his miracle cures as a series of how-to pamphlets. This is the context of his initial ruminations on embarrassment and disgrace. Seen as a body of texts, it is hard not to draw an analogy between Dr. Aira’s miracle cures and Mr. Aira’s own vast, and uneven, volume of work, which is at times as banal as it is brilliant. (Mr. Aira himself has called attention to its inconsistencies: he is quick to inform interviewers that he is not a big fan of revising.) Of his cures, Dr. Aira thinks:
They made strong impressions on him, clots of meaning that block the flow of events. For some reason, they were irreducible. They resisted translation, such as a transfer to the present. Whenever they appeared, they paralyzed him in the middle of his somnambulistic activities, which is what would bring them out of their labyrinthine lair of the past.
Just as Varamo was a self-conscious nod to the creation of the book the reader held in his hands, The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira seems in some regards a metafictional—and self-reflexive—pat on the back. It is no coincidence that the miracle doctor’s name is Aira. “He was a theoretician,” the narrator points out, “one could almost say a ‘writer.’ ” Mr. Aira was, like his protagonist, approaching fifty when he wrote the book. The cures in question are indelibly linked to middle age, and getting older is hardly treated lightly by the book: “that endpoint, coming sooner or later, could occur at any moment,” Mr. Aira writes ominously. Still, if aging is that thing which requires a cure, a miracle, the necessary ingredients are comically opaque. He describes the miracles as:
nothing less than the identification of all the facts that made up the Universe, the so-called “real” ones in the narrow sense as well as in all the others: imaginary, virtual, possible; as well as groupings of facts, from the simplest pairs to the multitudes; and fragments of facts, that is, a thousand-year-old empire as well as one’s first attempt to drink a beer.
What these miracle cures actually treat is far from clear: they do not “[give] the patient perfect health but rather…[extricate] him from his death trance.” They are more of a sustained distraction than an actual cure, a description that Mr. Aira’s narrator interprets explicitly: “the resulting formation of a field that would serve as a different universe had an antecedent: nothing less than the Novel itself.”
The synonymy of the miracle cures and the “novel itself” would be more interesting for readers, and more edifying, had Mr. Aira not come to this conclusion on our behalf. But it is not simply that Mr. Aira is writing about writing, and casting himself as the protagonist of his book. As in his genre study, the pseudo-biography An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, the diary-like How I Became a Nun (“written” by a girl named César), or Varamo, in which the book is not a stand-in for the “celebrated masterpiece of modern Central American poetry” but rather “a literary history” of that masterpiece, The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira is writing about writing about writing. It is a guide to its own construction, a how-to manual reminiscent of Dr. Aira’s own pamphlets.
Mr. Aira continues to assert the interchangeability of the novel and the “miracle cure,” calling attention to the fact that, like quixotic chemists, most writers have encyclopedic aspirations when they start a project, a desire to include a universe of material (a particularly absurd notion in the case of The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, which runs all of eighty pages). But every writer—or miracle doctor—must eventually come back down to earth. “In fact,” Mr. Aira writes, “it could be said that to write a novel one must make a list of particulars, then draw a line that leaves only some of them ‘inside’ and all the rest in an absent or virtual state.” The known universe, both Mr. Aira and Dr. Aira conclude, cannot be contained in a series of words.
Perhaps finishing a book is only a minor miracle, but publishing one at least ensures that the words on the page have a chance, if only temporarily, of “[transforming]…one Universe into another”—helping to ensure that its author “[can] remain inscribed on memory.” Life imitates art imitating life, in the end. In 1997, a year after he wrote The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, his 1991 book La liebre became his first work to be translated into English. He is now translated at roughly the same rate that he writes. And so, with each passing year, it becomes more likely that César Aira’s international reputation will outlive him—miraculously or not.
This review appears in the October issue of The American Reader (on newsstands now).