Fulgentius, César Aira's Roman general and playwright
Fulgentius, César Aira's Roman general and playwright
A book review and some personal news, kind of. Adam's Notes for March 11, 2024
The Argentinian writer César Aira calls his method “fuga hacia adelante,” which usually gets translated as “flight forward”: he doesn’t go back to edit or revise what he’s written, instead he paints himself into corners and forces himself to escape, often employing surrealist imagery or an absurdist contrivance or a sudden change of genre.
The result is that his writing is all over the place. It’s erudite and playful and it's so imaginative that you often can’t really anticipate what you’re going to get from one paragraph to the next. There’s a bit in one of his books that I’ll always half remember, I think it’s The Literary Conference, where a fictitious Aira, now a mad scientist, attempts to make a clone army based on the DNA of the late Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, but accidentally extracts DNA from Fuentes’ tie and makes a giant silk worm by accident. Stuff like that. Still, there often comes a point in his books, even though they’re generally quite short, where I grow tired of his approach and ask myself if it’s really worth continuing.
So it came as a bit of a surprise to me to see that his new book, Fulgentius, was more of a conventional novel, and one in a genre I’ve always appreciated: a sweeping historical epic. Okay granted, it's only 130 pages long, but that’s a lot for Aira, whose books often top out around 89 pages.
The story of Fulgentius is pretty straightforward: Fulgentius is a general in his late sixties serving in the army of the Roman empire. He volunteers to lead one last campaign against some rebels in Pannonia not because he wants to win any martial glory but so that he can force provincial towns to stage his one and only play, which he considers unfit for the more cultured audiences of Rome.
The play is about a Roman general also named Fulgentius, who has a star-crossed romance with a princess of the steppes before dying at the hands of the henchmen of a Scythian king. As one character comments, it is both autobiography and tragedy, though these two parts don’t overlap. Fulgentius wrote the play as a child and rediscovers it as an adult, after his uncles have the scrolls copied and the play performed at a festival. Fulgentius only hears about it when an acquaintance remarks that the play’s protagonist shares his name, and a summary of the plot jogs his memory.
The play allows Fulgentius to dabble in artistic commentary: seeing so many iterations of the play forces him to think about the subtleties actors bring to the role (he prefers casting a well-spoken rustic to a taller man who can't act, and in one production has a foreign slave girl play the role of the Scythian princess—she stands onstage “without saying a word or knowing what theatre was … an intruder, an inexplicable presence,” the actors complain but Fulgentius loves it); since his play is always highly praised by provincial officials looking to curry favour, he observes that “Sycophants had a very limited repertoire, which he already knew by heart”; on writing the play, he recalls how his intention was to satirize the tragic genre by tracing “a heroic destiny, with all the standard clichés exaggerated for comic effect”, but finds himself defeated by the genre's form: “He let the meter guide him; it gathered in all sorts of unexpected words. Once he realized that the meaning was developing on its own, he gave it little thought.”
I think writing about art, and especially writing about writing, is something we both need but also something that risks becoming self-indulgent and buffoonish. Think about all those novels about divorced middle-aged professors in the english department or millennial woman struggling to make it on the outskirts of New York's art world. Having his reflections come from an ancient Roman general allows Aira to have his cake and eat it too. Fulgentius reflects on his art, but there’s also something clearly a little winkingly ridiculous about a guy who at one point reflects that it was worth laying waste to a province just to experience the emotion that comes with watching the performance of a play he wrote as a student.
I really liked his meditation on stage death versus the real thing:
Death on stage was not, as people said, a caricature of that ultimate formality. True, when the play was over, the dead got up and went home, or retired to the tavern, cracking jokes. But their survival did not invalidate the deaths that they had acted out. Death was an event that had only half an existence, if that: one of its halves was superreal and full of action, but the other was completely empty. The second, dark half could be set aside as nonexistent, so it made no difference whether its subjects were lying cold and stiff in a grave or going to the tavern to drink with their friends.
Then again, consider all the death this guy is leaving in his wake and it seems a bit callous to value a stage death at the same rate as the real thing.
As the novel moves on, the play recedes into the background and the campaign to pacify Pannonia takes focus. There’s a great passage where the army hunkers down for the winter, and Aira paints a scene that feels like a Brueghel landscape, albeit a millennium and a half early:
In the third week the lake froze over. The men burst their chrysalids in a fit of playfulness, and took up skating. In mobs of a hundred, they wheeled around on the thick crystalline layer, tracing endless circuits, smiling intently as they surrendered to the glide, oblivious to all the rest as if they were solving mathematical problems. The snow dust that had built up on the surface of the lake flew off to each side of the passing blades, forming ephemeral wings reminiscent of Mercury’s sandals.
I don’t think of myself as a cruel person but there’s often a sort of casual brutality that I look forward to when reading about Ancient Rome. I think it works partly in a manner similar to nostalgia, in that past hardship draws out current comforts. A sort of child’s understanding that it’s okay to be cruel to your toys because it’s all just pretend. I don’t know. Aira just offers it up without really interrogating it, so why should I? But it’s there, all over the place, like when the slave actress is offed in a single sentence by a sudden gust of wind dashing her against the rocks. That said, there aren’t any great battle passages––the one real battle is interrupted by a boar that sends everyone home laughing and triggers more self-reflection from Fulgentius. It’s a disappointing remove that you’d never suffer in ‘real’ historical fiction.
A group of pagan monks up in the mountains refuse to pay taxes and have to be dealt with. The monks are enigmatic—I assume they’re an invention of Aira’s but I don’t know for sure. That’s what I like about his writing, the little details that could be true, like the disciplining of his soldiers’ hair:
The incident was soon forgotten. It was buried by new events, and new decisions that had to be carefully considered, such as ordering the legionaries to tie back their hair. Long hair had been in fashion for some years, but Fulgentius had observed that it tended to get in the soldiers’ eyes when they were fighting, and although they swore that it didn’t bother them, it could obscure their vision at a crucial moment. They were too disciplined to ignore an order but they also found ingenious ways to bend the rules. So the most elaborate buns and braids began to appear on their heads, growing ever more complex and architectonic as the stylists rivaled one another. The time they spent on those constructions was taken away from the maintenance of their kit, so they had to be called to order once again. Although they had entered a peaceful zone, skirmishes could not be ruled out, and getting their helmets on would be a problem.
Finally the novel ends with the army returning home, and inspired by a new friendship with a patrician prisoner (accused of counterfeiting coinage but ultimately immune from prosecution due to his class; the locals ask Fulgentius to take the guy to Rome and ‘lose’ him on the way—god, there’s enough plot there to sustain a whole novel), Fulgentius starts contemplating a new project, a sort of encyclopedic collection of knowledge, but ultimately decides he’s too old to begin the undertaking.
There’s clearly a connection between Aira’s flight forward method and Fulgentius’ artistic undertakings, made obvious once you remember that Aira often refers to his collected work as a grand encyclopedia which he knows he’ll never finish. But the frustrating thing is, there’s just not enough on Fulgentius’ play to form develop this connection. Is Aira asking himself if he, like Fulgentius, has been defeated by (admittedly self-imposed) literary conventions? Every time it feels like we’re starting to get at something deeper, we’re off to the next thing. Typical Aira.
Still, it’s a question I’ve always struggled with when reading Aira. For every great surprise (the reveal that a string of lights let’s people navigate the ghetto in Shantytown, the surprise solution here in Fulgentius once Aira ‘realizes’ there’s a discrepancy in the description of the general’s horse (remember he won’t allow himself to go back and fix it)) there’s a ton of bullshit you have to put up with (I swear there’s one book where the kid turns into a balloon or something). I think what makes Fulgentius work for me is that the trappings of historical fiction offer a rich enough bounty that Aira can employ his method while staying within the genre’s boundaries. Aira’s considered a perennial contender for the Nobel in literature, so it’s not like my opinion matters, but I far prefer Fulgentius to his other stuff (although How I Became a Nun is great too).
Like Fulgentius’ play, there is clearly something autobiographical going on here. But again, like Fulgentius, he’s not all that interested in seeking an answer. He’s content to meander, and I’m content to let him.
After all, who needs answers when you have a method?
Some personal news
I received some really exciting news on one of my longshot projects this week and I’ve been dying to tell everyone about it, but I’m not allowed to just yet. Should be public in the first half of April. I was asked if I had an instagram account that could be linked to in the announcement, so I decided to create one, which you can visit here. I think I’m going to try making Instagram my online home for my writing projects. I’m less likely to get offtrack on some inane discussion of the day’s political scandal or whatever. That said, I’m still new to the medium, so if you have any advice on how I should use the account I’d really love to hear from you.
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