a portrait of the present: sergio chejfec's photographic realism

8/12/2019 A portrait of the present: Sergio Chejfec's photographic realism.

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A Portrait of the Present: Sergio Chejfec!s Photographic Realism

Luz Horne

Hispanic Review, Volume 78, Number 2, Spring 2010, pp. 229-250 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: 10.1353/hir.0.0112

For additional information about this article

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hir/summary/v078/78.2.horne.html
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A P o r t r a i t o f t h e P r e s e n t : S e r g i o

C h e j f e c s P h o t o gr a p h i c R e a l i s m

Luz Horne

Cornell University

Juro que este livro e feito sem palavras. E uma fotografia muda. Este livro e

um silencio.

Clarice Lispector

. . .el relato es algo que requiere ser visto y despues ledo.

. . .quizano postule el futuro sino bajo la forma como se veranuestro presente

cuando le toque ser pasado.

Sergio Chejfec

ABSTRACT This essay reads Sergio narrative as a particular type of

realism in the context of a return to this aesthetic in recent Argentineanand Brazilian literature. It argues that one of Chejfecs narrative peculiaritieslies in the appropriation and use of avant-garde techniques to generate a

particular reality effect. In this process, the use of photography and thepassage from classic realist representation to an indexical mode of sig-

nification is crucial. By incorporating the logic of the image within the text,his narrative creates an impression of discontinuity similar to that used inavant-gardist writing, but instead of producing discontinuity to emphasize

the artificiality of representation or the impossibility of mimesis, it is usedin a positive manner to create a representation of the contemporary. Dis-

continuity becomes in Chejfec a constructive medium to produce a portraitof the present time, of cityscapes marked by growing marginality, degraded

and soiled spaces.

j Hispanic Review(spring )Copyright University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.


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The demand to represent the present has been one of the central problems

of realism since the nineteenth century. The dictum Il faut e tre de son

temps was the motto of the group that formed around Courbet, and it was

quickly adapted to the literary field to characterize this aesthetic current. In

recent years, in the Latin American context, the realist ambition to represent

contemporary life has returned with considerable force. After a certain

impasse in the avant-garde movements, caused in part by a sensation of

monotony generated through the repetition of experimental techniques,

recent decades offer a plethora of texts that build verisimilar worlds, and

present clear, legible prose and classic realist themes. In general, these themes

could be described as a new type ofmiserabilisme, to borrow the term the

French applied during the rise of naturalism, that is, a narrative marked by

the presence of certain low and dark aspects of humanity and society, aspectsthat foreground a kind of bestiality or savageness.

In fact, the concept of New Realisms has been circulating in the field for

some decades. From special issues of academic journals dedicated to new

realisms, to pieces in mass circulation newspapers and literary magazines, to

the publication of articles that analyze cultural manifestations in particular

national contexts, a new trend of reflection has eliminated a certain demode

air that realism had acquired from the s on; realism has returned to

scholarly and cultural agendas.1 In the particular case of Argentinean litera-ture, since the s, as the social crisis has become more pronounced, a

series of texts have appeared that adopt a realist aesthetic in the effort to

expose a growing marginality and to show the city as a degraded, dirty, and

ruined space.2

. Several issues of academic journals and magazines are dedicated to this topic, such as Nuevos

realismos inmilpalabrasor Les nouveaux realismes inAmerica: Cahiers du CRICCAL. Articles

published about this topic include Anke Birkenmaier; Sandra Contreras; Beatriz Jaguaribe; BeatrizSarlo, Fogwill:La experiencia sensible and Sujetos y tecnologas; Karl Erik Schllhammer, Os

cenarios urbanos and A procura de um novo realismo; Graciela Speranza, Magias parciales

and Por un realismo idiota; and Flora Sussekind, Deterritorialization. Chapters of books that

take up the issue include the work of Daniel Noemi Voionmaa on the aesthetic of poverty, or that

of Jean Franco, who speaks of the Costumbrismoof globalization (). Of course, I refer here

only to work focusing on Latin American literary production.

. There are many examples of the resurgence of these themes. Three very different cases are La

villa by Cesar Aira (), Vivir afuera by Rodolfo Fogwill (), and Rabia by Sergio Bizzio

(). In the essay Ssifo en Buenos Aires, Sergio Chejfec talks about this problem and analyzes

two texts that have the social degradation of Buenos Aires as a central subject. His analysis traces

some of the themes that are present in his own narrative. For example, through the figure ofSisyphus, he equates the cirujeo, roaming through the trash (an activity that is central to El aire)

to factory work (the subject matter ofBoca de lobo).


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With this development, not only is realism renewed, but so are the discus-

sions and polemics that have accompanied it since the nineteenth century.

While some discussion has been centered in moral arguments or in the artis-

tic quality of the works, other criticism has put into question the way inwhich marginal subjectivities are treated in a work of art: Do we see a stereo-

typical, exotic, orcostumbristaconstruction? Are we talking about a pedagog-

ical or moral literature? Or is this a literature that presents other ways of

treating political themes?3

It is within the context of such a return to a realist aesthetic that this essay

is situated. However, I focus on a particular return to realism that incorpo-

rates avant-garde techniques within a narrative that displays elements of tra-

ditional realist narrative. Of course, it is always difficult to talk about

aesthetic innovation, and, especially, a return to an aesthetic current such

as realism, since there have always been examples of this aesthetic in the

history of literature (and of Latin American literature).4 In fact, one reason

why realism has changed throughout history is related to the push to be

contemporary. A double exigency operates in the idea of making a portrait

of the present: it has to say somethingaboutthe present, to have contempo-

rarytopics, but it also needs to be a mode of representation that is adequate

for the present moment. If we consider that each epoch has its own modes

of representation, many of the characteristics of realism as it was understood

from the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth would have to be

modified today.5 The narrative practice of the Argentinean writer Sergio

. According to a well-known critic of realism, even though this aesthetic broadens the artistic

field and directs the readers gaze toward the marginal aspects of society, it tends to reproduce

exclusion through a representational system of classification and normalization. From Roland

BarthessS/Zto Leo Bersani and D. A. Miller, a clear link is drawn between realism and discipline,

yet in each case with subtly different emphases. Two important books on naturalism in LatinAmerica (Sussekind, Tal Brasil, qual romance?; and Nouzeilles) tackle the problem of realisms

political reach in similar terms. In a longer work (Hacia un nuevo realismo), I approach this

problem in more depth and argue that the indexical effect of realist narrative implies an attempt

to avoid some of the problems implied by the category of representation and, with it, the didacti-

cism that hindered the political potential of some of the classical realist writings.

. Since Chejfecs literature doesnt correspond to traditional realism, his precursors are not to be

found within the tradition of hard or classical realism. According to the line of argument

explored in this essay, it would be possible to think about a certain family resemblance to Clarice

Lispector, Felisberto Hernandez, Silvina Ocampo, Osvaldo Lamborghini, or Juan Jose Saer, among

others.

. A version of this argument can be found in Roberto Schwarzs work on Machado de Assis (Ummestre na periferia do capitalismo and A Brazilian Breakthrough), who charts the change in

realism in terms of its passage from the cultural center to the periphery.


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with what he calls either the coagulated moment, ecstasy, or trance,

which he identifies with the suspension of temporal flow. To achieve this

quality, he posits a narrative suspension that is associated with visual arts

and photography. To the fluid and slow temporality of the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries Noll opposes a form of narrative action that is character-

istic of MTV music videos and is related more to photography and the plastic

arts than to literature (Weis ).8

This same preoccupation may be recognized, with differences and

nuances, in different writers such as Caio Fernando Abreu, Cesar Aira, Mario

Bellatin, Luiz Ruffato, and, of course, Sergio Chejfec.9 According to these

writers, whether through zapping, through MTV videos, installations, pho-

tography, or painting, in order to make an accurate portrait of the present

and to tackle the political realm in a way that is different from classical real-

ism, literature must incorporate something of the logic of the image. This is

not because the technology of the image implies novelty in itself, but because,

according to these writers, the temporality of its logic corresponds to the

very temporality of our epoch. This is what allows a text to capture some-

thing about how reality is perceived in the present and to return to the realist

aesthetic in a different manner.10

Faced with the problem of incorporating the image within the text, the

. Reinaldo Laddaga analyzes this characteristic of Nolls fiction and talks about the creation of a

lenguaje invertebrado that agrees, at some points, with my reading (Introduccion a un lenguaje

invertebrado and Espectaculos de realidad). In his latest book, which focuses on recent Latin

American narrative, Laddaga proposes a hypothesis that is related to some of the ideas I develop

below. He notes a confluence of Latin American writers who produce narratives in relation to

different kinds of artistic production. These books, he says, are related more to performances or

espectaculos de realidad than to the traditional form of the novel (Espectaculos de realidad).

. In a longer work (Hacia un nuevo realismo), I have analyzed some of these authors in light

of this hypothesis.. As in Noll, the way Luiz Ruffato explains his narrative project makes this trait very clear. He

expresses a realist ambition, but he also manifests his intention to renovate this aesthetic current

through a dialogue between literature and other arts and technologies: Do meu ponto de vista,

para levar afrente um projeto de aproximacao da realidade do Brasil de hoje, torna-se necessaria

a invencao de novas formas de apreensao dessa realidade. Escrever romances baseando-se nas

premissas do seculo XIX para descrever o caos do seculo XXI me parece um contra-senso. Por

isso, acredito na busca de novas formas de expressao, em que a literatura dialoga com as outras

artes . . . e tecnologias (qtd. in Bloch). [From my point of view, in order to pursue a project of

tackling contemporary Brazilian reality, it is necessary to invent new forms of accounting for that

reality. I think it is ridiculous to write novels that are based on nineteenth-century premises to

describe the chaos of the twenty-first century. Thats why I believe in looking for new forms ofexpression in which literature dialogues with other arts and technologies]. Ruffatos novel, Eles

eram muitos cavalos, could be read as an example.


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question that arises immediately is how literature, constructed with words,

can produce this type of textuality. In a text called Fragmentos de un diario

en los Alpes, Cesar Aira tells a story that helps us to understand. This is a

story about the narrators stay at a friends house. The particularity of thisplace is that in it [hay una] proliferacion de imagenes . . . imagenes-objetos

. . . cosas que funcionan como signos. Imagenes materiales (; my empha-

sis). The inclination of the owners of the house to collect images was such

that even their literature was shot through by this tendency:

Toda la casa estapoblada de los mismos objetos-imagenes, y lo demas son

libros. Y de estos una buena cantidad son libros de imagenes; los que no lo

son, es porqueesta

n en el proceso de hacerse imagenes; el gusto de Michel seinclina definidamente por unaliteratura figurativa o de genesis de imagenes.

(; my emphasis)

What is interesting for my argument is the reference to a literature that, even

though it does not include images, generates them through their textuality:

books that are not strictly made of images but which are in the process of

becoming images. But, how can an image be made of words? This is

achieved by building texts in terms of blocks, as compact units that produce

the illusion of eliminating succession and the temporal flow that are charac-

teristic of the linguistic order.

In an essay on Mario Bellatins narrative, Chejfec talks about a visual type

of literature. After quoting the Mexican writer when he affirms his intention

to write a novel with independent chapters, in which each of them may be

read como si de la contemplacion de una flor se tratara, Chejfec says the

following:

[esto] puede servir de indicio acerca de la importancia que Bellatin otorga

a los elementos aislados que traman una solidaridad de hecho, casi por

fuerza de contiguidad, pero en especial muestra la idea de que la literatura

estasoportada por lo visual; el relato es algo que requiere ser visto y des-

pues ledo; y en este sentido se propone como algo adicional, un suple-

mento. (Cuadros de una instalacion)

In another essay, called Breves opiniones sobre relatos con imagenes,

Chejfec also comments on the incorporation of images within texts.

Although he talks about actual images and not images that are constructed


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verbally, he refers to the possibility of destabilizing writing through this

incorporation and to the limits of the written register in producing this

destabilization by itself. His narrative usually contains something that can be

thought of as a limit to the symbolic register, something that cannot be pro-cessed through language or que la palabra escrita no puede poner en claro

(). However, these remnants are usually central to the development of the

narrative and guide thealways very subtleplot and even the possibility of

writing. In order to talk about what is impossible to say, Chejfecs writing

produces a destabilization of the narrative structure, imitatingas in

Airas commentsthe logic of the image. As the previous quotation suggests,

his narrative develops from the idea that imagesin particular photographic

imagescan say something that cannot be expressed by words alone.Both Los planetas () and Los incompletos () are ideal examples.

These novels are structured around the evocation of memories, dialogues, or

small stories that arise from the contemplation of photographs. In Los pla-

netas, the protagonist remembers when he and his friendwho disappeared

during the Argentinean dictatorshipexchanged photographs in a ritual that

sealed their friendship. The picture of the dead friend evokes a nonsuccessive

temporality. By establishing a link between the past in which the picture was

taken and the present in which it is seen, the photographs shift the text and

its narrative register into a plain present (), a stopped temporality that

intends to relive the dead friend.11 The exchange of the respective pictures

between the friends also establishes the central metaphor of the novel: the

picture of the dead friend is now the picture that belongs to the protagonist

(his picture is the others picture). The plot is woven around this identity

exchange and the fateful yet arbitrary fact that one friend disappeared and

the other did not. The novel unfolds as a web of anecdotes, miniscule sto-

ries, conversations, and unfinished dialogues. The narrator-character moves

like a planet with an orbital connection with M (the disappeared friend),

living within memories established by the dead friends history (which, on

the other hand, is at the same time his own).12

. Saying that the novel attempts to remember the disappeared friend seems wrong, because

what its trying to do, precisely, is to avoid the double temporality of memory. The novels effort

which is impossible, in factis to retrieve fragments from the past and place them into the

writing as if the fragments were present, as if it would be possible to relive them, but without the

difference that is implied in repetition.. One scene synthesizes this idea in a graphic fashion: the two friends are walking on the street

when another person calls them. Both react at the same time: habremos compuesto con M una


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words, thus creating an effect of exposicion prolongada ().15 The novel

tells the story of a man called Barroso who, abandoned by his wife, sets out

on a journey drifting through the streets of Buenos Aires. He becomes love-

sick and dies in agony.The perception of the city exposed by the novel is related to the protago-

nists mode of perception; and both are linked to a photographic register.

When his wife abandons him, the rhythm of Barrosos normal life is

altered and, with it, his manner of perceiving the world. It is not simply a

change in the content of perception. It is not that he sees different things

than previously (although this also happens), but rather that it is the typeof

perceptive register which changes. Barroso reconstructs the departure of his

wife and obsessively repeats his own actions. The mise en sce`

neof his memo-ries has an effect: the change of temporal perception turns life into a day-

dream. His thoughts and ideas are associated in a fractured manner without

form or continuity (El aire ). As in Los planetas and Los incompletos,

there is a discontinuity of experience, an emphasis on individual scenes as

aborted moments that lead to a perception of temporality as a pure present

and to a performative dimension, an acting out of sensations. In fact, the

narrator says that Barroso has always had a special way of thinking in which

the relation between cause and effect is not essential but simply casual

(by chance). Even before his wifes departure, his obsession for calculating

distances, speeds, weights, and magnitudes causes him to question the natu-

ral association between things (El aire , , ). Every time there is a

storm, Barroso calculates the speed at which thunder occurs after lightning,

and with a Humean-like logic, he perceives thunder with a childish surprise

and navete, as if it were simply a chance occurrence. The link between this

mode of perception and the photographic register is spelled out clearly in

the novel. When Barrosoby then suffering intense pain and almost at the

brink of deathdecides to rest, he meets a woman, a photographer, for

whom Benavente, Barrosos wife, developed pictures. She makes the link

between photography and Barrosos particular perceptive mode that doubts

causal relations, breaking temporal succession:

Ella [Benavente] a veces cuando fuimos mas conocidas, me hablaba de

usted, me preguntaba si no crea que su obsesion por calcular las distancias,

. Besides Saavedra, Damian Tabarovsky () and Noemi Voionmaa comment on Chejfecs writ-

ing as being slow.


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los pesos o las magnitudes tuviera algo de fotografico. Yo, disculpeme si

soy franca, generalmente le deca un rapido Squerida, en realidad apu-

rada porque me entregue el material. Pero llegara un momento en el cual,

a fuerza de repetrmelo, acabara siendo algo en lo que posteriormente mepusiera a pensar muchas veces. Tampoco podra asegurar ahora si su obse-

sion por calcular las magnitudes alude mas o menos a unamateria fotogra-

fica, pero s pienso que es una forma de desconfiar de la progresion,

documentandola.(El aire ; my emphasis)

That is, just as photography stops temporality, the obsession for calculation,

found repeatedly in other of Chejfecs novels, is also linked to the desire to

retain time and to produce proof or a document.16

By rupturing thesuccession of events, El aire adopts Barrosos perceptive mode and pretends

to document the order of the realto describe a state of affairsin a

photographic manner. By making the text act like a chain of blocks, it pro-

duces the illusion that the succession characteristic of the linguistic order is

eliminated. This destabilizes the narrative structure, thereby giving rise to

a temporality that corresponds to the present that the novel aspires to depict.

Material Images: From the Effect of the Real to an Indexical Effect

The juxtaposition of literature and various technologies of the image in order

to produce discontinuity is not new, of course. The emphasis on disconti-

nuity in Chejfecs work could lead us to think that it simply repeats the avant-

gardist gesture of fragmenting the narrative and showing the impossibility of

any kind of mimesis. However, while the avant-garde produced discontinuity

in order to mark a distance between language and reality or to highlight theartificiality of representation, in Chejfecs narrative discontinuity is deployed

as an attempt to adjust realism to the present, as a response to change that is

perceived in temporality. Chejfecs fragmentation is used not as a negative

force but as a positive one: there is a desire for conformity and a will to

produce a portrait of the present and to illustrate our times and society.

From the nineteenth century on, the illusion of reality in classical realism

was constructed from a convention: verisimilitude. But Chejfec challenges

. Calcular era retener el tiempo, su avance, eso cualquiera lo habra advertido (El aire ).


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the logic of common sense in his narrative, and even though we can still

recognize the world that he depicts, verisimilitude in its classical sense is

broken. How, then, does Chejfec attain a realist effect?17 Why, given the dis-

continuity of his narrative structure, is it still possible to talk about real-ism? Explaining his own narrative project, Noll uses a metaphor that can

help to understand this. He talks about the abortion of the scenes, which

leads us to a second component of the photographic image beyond its fixity

that is important to my argument: the materiality of the photographic image.

This material quality of the image is also achieved in Nolls notion of the

coagulated moment, in Airas idea of material images or object

images (Fragmentos), and in the idea of documenting the real, present in

Chejfecs writing. All of these metaphors suggest a desire to capture a mea-sure of materiality through language.

With this in mind, it is worth looking at Chejfecs essay Fabula poltica y

renovacion estetica, where he discusses the challenges faced by contempo-

rary artists who are concerned with elaborating social contents (). Even

though he uses artistic installations to illustrate his ideas, his comments pro-

vide a key to understanding his writing:

Se trata de las obras llamadas instalaciones, donde la apuesta parece residirmas en el reciclaje estetico tambien en un sentido espacial de artefac-

tos que en la creacion de un objeto unitario a partir de principios construc-

tivos tradicionalmente considerados artsticos, incluso por parte de las

vanguardias. En las instalaciones, la extrapolacion de objetos nos habla de

un naturalismo conceptual, pero a la vez anuncia una fragilidad inherente

que en las obras de arte de otras disciplinas no se haba puesto de manifie-

sto excepto frente al paso del tiempo. Creo que esta contradiccion entre el

fuerte enlace referencial de los materiales u objetos utilizadosy lavolatilidadde la organizacion fsica que constituye a la instalacion, pone en escena

contenidos transparentes como la unica forma de darle una consistencia

semantica a su mismo estatuto artificioso; o al reves: el contenido general

aparece en la superficie cuando el ambiente no puede sino organizarse

gracias a la genealoga de los objetos extrapolados. (; my emphasis)

. Chejfecs narrative is constantly preoccupied with the definition ofverisimilitudeand differentways in which literature plays with its destabilization. See, for example,Los planetas ; orBoca de

lobo , , .


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reality in an indexical mode. A text has no tracks, no material remains in the

written word that can render a reality different from the words themselves.

Thus, says Roncador, o ndice na escrita esempre por excelencia uma cons-

trucao ou ficcao; uma impressao, ou efeito, que o texto pode aspirar a criar[the index in writing is always par excellence a fictional construction, an

impression or effect that the text can aspire to create] (). According to

this notion of the fiction of the index, we could say that Chejfecs realism

substitutes the Barthesian effect of the real, in which the laws of verisimili-

tude are paramount, with an indexical effect, in which it does not matter

whether the composition is verisimilar. Such a text possesses no figuration

but rather attempts to retain certain material or bodily remains. In this sense,

my argument is not about postulating a kind of ontology of literature; rather,I wish to understand the ontological rhetoric displayed in it.

In Chejfecs narrative, this ontological rhetoric can be found whenever the

text tries to say something that cannot be put into words. In El aire, this

discursive limit revolves around social abandonment and marginality. Dur-

ing his adventure, the protagonist Barroso discovers a new perspective on

Buenos Aires and its inhabitants, finding a world of decay and social degra-

dation. Just as he has been abandoned, so has the city. The illness of Ba-

rrosos individual body manifests itself in the body of the city and its

inhabitants. Soon, the protagonist concludes that the lives of city dwellers

cannot be entirely thought of as being human: they are completely desubjec-

tivized. However, this is not due to an individual disease but to a social one.19

Therefore, even thoughEl aireis a novel about the loss of love and the agony

of death, it is also a novel about the loss of Buenos (the good) in Buenos

Aires and about its agony. That is how we can read its title, as incorporating

an absence.20

. The relationship between the social abandonment endured by the city and its inhabitants and

the protagonists personal abandonment in love becomes clear throughout the novel. Precisely

during his walks when he discovers urban ruin and social degradation, the protagonist feels the

first symptoms of his disease, until death catches up with him in a return to the natural that

may be compared to that experienced by the city and its inhabitants.

. In this sense I disagree with Martn Kohan, who reads in this novel una impronta [mas]

personal y familiar que corresponde al orden de los afectos than to politics (Partir sin partir del

todo). According to my reading, the personal story is not related to the familiar, and, in it, we

can read a story that perhaps belongs to the realm of affects or feelings, but that is clearly collective

and, as such, squarely political. As Noll says about his own narrative, it is misleading to readChejfecs literature as intimate, subjective, or psychological (Ajzenberg). In fact, beyond this sur-

face appearance, Chejfec offers a perspective on social and political aspects of the present.


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As part of this process of change, the city and its inhabitants enter into a

regressive phase, a return to the natural or to the past (El aire ). That

is, we witness a process of de-urbanization, if one understands urban in its

double sense of city (urbano), since the country literally invades the cityitis said that the city becomes Pampa ()and in the sense of civility

(civilidad), since the change produces a regression to barbarism, a return to

animality. People of the city literally lose their capacity to speak, and the

absence of articulated language turns them into animals.21 On one walk, Ba-

rroso finds a zone in which the pampeanizacion has spread. At that

moment, an obstacle appears. He stops and decides not to enter an area filled

by darkness. This zonethe climax of the citys degradation in its regression

to the naturalconstitutes a limit to language, an interruption in the narra-tive flow. However, Barroso finally does walk through this area (the text talks

about it and shows it to us). A scene at this juncture of the novel makes

evident that the indexical presence indicated by photography is a privileged

medium for depicting social marginality. As Barroso moves forward through

this highly degraded, run-down part of the city, he finds two lost boys crying

loudly. After a while, Barroso hears a woman screaming, who then

approaches the children and hugs them (). Barroso is deeply touched by

this scene, not because of the encounters emotion but because he is able toimagine the childrens desperation. The desperate crying comes from a child-

like perception in which the future is absent, in which a short interval of

solitude can be perceived as abandonment: Pero en ellos, por ser ninos, lo

actual significaba un estado puro, una tension intolerable, como si fuera un

presente absoluto, perenne y total ().

The following day, when Barroso reads the newspaper, he finds pictures

that illustrate an article about los nuevos pobres and discovers something

that attracts his attention. He sees the degraded area in which he had beenwalking and recognizes, in one of the images, the boys hugging their mother

(El aire ). In a small detail, not easily discerned, in photographys station-

ary temporality, Barroso finds an element that belongs to the order of the

. See El aire : a la gente del campo, a pesar de conocer las palabras, le resulta imposible

hablar: Saben hablar y solo piensan palabras. El paisaje haba bloqueado sus aptitudes intelec-

tuales y permanecan, tambien inmoviles, todo el tiempo impavidos como los animales que deban

vigilar. OrEl aire : En el interior nos encontramos con gente que pareca a medias muda y amedias sorda: como si supieran hablar pero solo dijeran palabras sueltas. Eran lentos, estaban

todo el tiempo a la espera de algo, comoembrutecidos(my emphasis).


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experience. In this scene, the novel entertains the possibility that an extralit-

erary element can be transferred to the text, but through photography, thus

providing an example of situations in which, according to Chejfec, el

mismo texto parece evadirse porque no se reconoce en el registro escrito(Fabula poltica ). It is crucial that this newspaper photograph depicts

a run-down area and that it illustrates an article about the new poor, a

subject presented in the novel as having a limited linguistic voice. The text

shows that, through the indexical presence conveyed by the photographic

register, it is possible to illustrate something about abandonment, whether it

stems from love (as with Barroso or the children) or from social conditions

(as with the city and its inhabitants).

While the novel acknowledges the existence of something unspeakable andthe inadequacy of the discursive register to name the world, the narrative

nevertheless moves forward and the protagonist continues walking through

the city. Chejfecs recognition here of the limits of discourse is not merely

negative. He appropriates the avant-garde technique of destabilizing narra-

tive by imitating the logic of the image precisely to produce a different mode

of narrative that can point at something exterior to the text. In Chejfecs

work, the text acts as if it were a photograph, as if it could name the experien-

tial, the corporeal, or material in a way that cannot be done directly withwords. In this way, his work repeatedly questions how the world speaks in

an effort to make literature speak. Chejfecs narrative approach gives central

place to reflection about the material aspect of writing and to a particular

way of readingfrom tracks, footprints, or indexes.

Both Boca de lobo () and Los incompletos are good examples of this

strategy. The latter constantly reflects on the texture of paper and the marks

of writing. The novel returns obsessively to the graphic aspects of the printed

letters and to their condition as signifiers (see ). In Boca de lobo thisconcern is also present. A man who remembers his relationship with Delia,

a factory worker, narrates the novel.22 In one scene, as the couple walks

. Boca de lobois about sexual desire and work, but more specifically it is about certain elements

of animality, corporeality, or automatism in relation to sex and work. It highlights the tribal,

primitive, or animal aspect of the world of workers where desubjectivization predominates. The

metaphor of the night or darknessboca de loboplays with the impossibility of putting into

words this aspect that is, nevertheless, central to the novel. As Noemi Voionmaa has brilliantlyshown, this metaphor also speaks about the insurmountable difference between two worlds: the

protagonists (man, intellectual, bourgeois) and Delias (woman, worker, lower class).


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fue lo que sintio, casi con enternecimiento. El agua, el fondo, la vegetacion,

el tiempo y hasta el aire resultaban barrososesa jornada. (; my emphasis)

In the name of the protagonist Barroso, a certain materiality becomes mani-fest: the word incarnates, attempts to referindexicallyto something

that happens to the citys air.25 Like an object in an art installation or a

photograph, the name Barroso alludes not just to the materiality and deca-

dence of the personal body but also to decomposition and corruption of the

present and the city. As previously mentioned, the reference in the novels

title to Buenos Aires can be read here as reflecting a relation between the

subject (Barroso) and a certain new urban air that has little good (bondad)

in it. This is seen through a dialectical relation established between the degra-dation suffered by the individual body, on one hand, and a bodily degrada-

tion produced by economic and social exclusion, on the other. The link

between the personal story and the collective urban situation is clearly estab-

lished when it is said that the citys air, besides being barroso is also lati-

noamericanizado (El aire ), where this word becomes synonymous with

impoverishment and social degradation. Therefore, through Barrosos name

and story, the novel captures a materiality to which a negative status is

assigned and that pretends to be a portrait of the present.

A Portrait of the Present

El aire presents two situations in which the dehumanization of people and

the regressive state of the city are related to social and economic causes. Here,

the ontological rhetoric is used to show something about the contemporane-

ity of the text: the text meets its exterior, and the traditional realist themesare seized, albeit in a different form. First, the novel tells us about a deep

. It is curious that Chejfec is preoccupied with the problem of naming, leading to reflection

about the possibilities of mimesis. Almost as a game, his texts sometimes suggest that there is a

natural relationship, or, at least, one that is not arbitrary, between a name and the person it

designates. For example: estaba persuadida de que Marta como senal, como sucedaneo verbal

de su persona, difcilmente poda ser la palabra adecuada (Los planetas ). In an essay called

Lengua simple, nombre, Chejfec traces an analogy between a name and a photograph: Porque

como los retratos fotograficos que nada nos dicen si no conocemos de algun modo al retratado(Barthes), el apellido es mudo si no estaasignado a un individuo (). In El aire, Barroso is

thus a photograph not only of himself but also of his city and the materiality proper of the present.


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i : spring

economic change: glass has been transformed into money. The transparency

of glass, as with the air, is lost. This materiality of glass, of course, has conse-

quences in the daily life of the city. Not only do people pay with glass, but

the poors search for glass and empty bottles becomes a common activity inthe city. A sector of the population rummages through garbage, even in the

darkest corners of the city, generating a kind of Darwinian war for survival.

Another groupwhich in the novel is named la gente acomodada (El aire

)take to watching the garbage-pickers as a hobby or cultural explora-

tion: for them era como mirar a los animales (). The change can be

seen in the streets themselves, where whole families congregate, waiting at

bus stops as if they were tribus flotantes (, ).

The second situation in which the regressive state of city life becomesmanifested in relation to social and economic causes is what the novel calls

tugurizacion de las azoteas. As he reads in newspapers and observes on his

walks, Barroso discovers that some people have built shelters on the roofs of

houses and buildings in fancy neighborhoods. It is as if a second or parallel

city has been constructed in the heights, almost like an elevated slum (El aire

). As a consequence, the periphery settles at the center of the city itself.

Marginality is no longer limited to a geographically delimited zone. What

the novel calls los nuevos pobres () are now on rich peoples roofs,literally over their heads.26 As the narrator says, marginality and degradation

have been imported to the Articulated zones of the city (), producing

a change in el paisaje Aereo de la ciudad (). Again, the airas when

glass became moneyis materialized. It is significant that in these two exam-

ples what is transparent becomes opaque, and the intangible or ethereal

becomes concrete, because this is the process that literature tries to imitate

in its structure, with words simulating an embodiment of reality.

ThroughoutEl aire, therefore, Chejfec reflects on the concept of marginal-ity and its changing meaning. In the novels presentour present

marginality is not defined by a spatial limit but rather by a corporeal

. In Argentina, at the beginning of the s when the novel was published, the publics opti-

mism about the governments neoliberal promises crashed against the incipient political conse-

quences of these same policies: little by little poverty increased in Buenos Aires. It even reached

rich neighborhoods where it had never been before. El aire speaks of urban tribes, of whole

families that gather glass to be used as money. Surprisingly, this can be read as foreshadowingwhat happened to Buenos Aires with thecartoneros. Cesar Aira dealt with this change in his novel

La villa, but only after it became real. In El aireit is still a sort of exaggeration or omen.


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presence that is detached from the social structure, by a subject removed

from its political being and its possibility of language.27 As Barroso verifies on

his walks, marginality is omnipresent, becauseit is corporealand its presence

modifies the urban and social landscape. This is the core of the portrait ofthe present which here is depicted through an indexical fiction or the simula-

tion of an incarnated word. The perception of marginality as corporeal

and as something detached from the social structure is possible to put into

words because the text imitates the logic of the image, creating an interrupted

flow and generating an impression of instantaneity, in which an ontological

rhetoric is displayed. In this sense, the indexical does not pretend to lead to

a referent that is proposed as real, but, rather, it allows for the creation of

an illusion of reality without figuration or similitude. Its metonymic andnonmetaphoric character creates an effect that does not necessarily partake

of verisimilitude but, instead, of materiality.

In Chejfecs narrative, the representational structure that in some realist

texts organizes the sense of a story and gives an impression of didacticism is

transformedas in installationsinto a pure statement, into a fragile or

volatile structure that links its contents with a strong referential anchorage

or, at least, with a referentiality that is simulated as such. In this way, through

the indexical fiction, Chejfecs narrative shows the transformation of individ-ual bodies into human remains: the relationship between life and politics

proper to our contemporary democracies. This technique allows his texts

to make a portrait of the present, to say something about contemporary

economic exclusion without using the classic system of verisimilitude, and

therefore to adapt realism to a temporality and a mode of perception that

are proper to the present.

. In a longer work (Hacia un nuevo realismo), I have understood this in light of Giorgio

Agambens biopolitical theory.El aireshows that when the social safety net collapses and the poor

are abandoned by the state, the limit between nature and culture, between the private body and

the public body, becomes blurred and indistinguishable. In Spanish it is possible to say that

the transformation of the city in campo, in the sense of campestre, of return to the natural, or

pampeanizacion, may parallel the transformation of the city and society in a second sense of

campoas Agamben uses the word, as a concentration campas the nomosof present society.

For Agamben, the structure of the camp is defined precisely by the biopolitical operation that

erases the social in the human: In the camps, city and house became indistinguishable, and the

possibility of differentiating between our biological body and our political bodybetween whatis incommunicable and mute and what is communicable and speakablewas taken from us

forever ().


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i : spring

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a portrait of the present: sergio chejfec's photographic realism

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