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
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A Portrai t of the Present: Sergi o
Chej fec s Photographi c Reali sm
Luz Horne
Cornell University
Juro que este livro e feito sem palavras. E

uma fotograa muda. Este livro e

um sile ncio.
Clarice Lispector
. . . el relato es algo que requiere ser visto y despue s le do.
. . . quiza no postule el futuro sino bajo la forma como se vera nuestro 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 Argentinean
and Brazilian literature. It argues that one of Chejfecs narrative peculiarities
lies in the appropriation and use of avant-garde techniques to generate a
particular reality effect. In this process, the use of photography and the
passage from classic realist representation to an indexical mode of sig-
nication is crucial. By incorporating the logic of the image within the text,
his narrative creates an impression of discontinuity similar to that used in
avant-gardist writing, but instead of producing discontinuity to emphasize
the articiality of representation or the impossibility of mimesis, it is used
in a positive manner to create a representation of the contemporary. Dis-
continuity becomes in Chejfec a constructive medium to produce a portrait
of the present time, of cityscapes marked by growing marginality, degraded
and soiled spaces.
j ::, Hispanic Review (spring :oIo)
Copyright :oIo University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.
:,o i ui sv.xi c vvvi vw : spring
The demand to represent the present has been one of the central problems
of realism since the nineteenth century. The dictum Il faut etre de son
temps was the motto of the group that formed around Courbet, and it was
quickly adapted to the literary eld 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 of mise rabilisme, 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, aspects
that foreground a kind of bestiality or savageness.
In fact, the concept of New Realisms has been circulating in the eld 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 reection has eliminated a certain demode
air that realism had acquired from the I,oos on; realism has returned to
scholarly and cultural agendas.
1
In the particular case of Argentinean litera-
ture, since the I,,os, 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
I. Several issues of academic journals and magazines are dedicated to this topic, such as Nuevos
realismos in milpalabras or Les nouveaux realismes in America: Cahiers du CRICCAL. Articles
published about this topic include Anke Birkenmaier; Sandra Contreras; Beatriz Jaguaribe; Beatriz
Sarlo, Fogwill: La experiencia sensible and Sujetos y tecnolog as; Karl Erik Schllhammer, Os
cena rios 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 Costumbrismo of 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 (:ooI), Vivir afuera by Rodolfo Fogwill (I,,8), and Rabia by Sergio Bizzio
(:oo,). In the essay S sifo 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 gure of
Sisyphus, he equates the cirujeo, roaming through the trash (an activity that is central to El aire)
to factory work (the subject matter of Boca de lobo).
Horne : . vov1v.i 1 ov 1uv vvvsvx1 j :,I
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 in
which marginal subjectivities are treated in a work of art: Do we see a stereo-
typical, exotic, or costumbrista construction? 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 difcult 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 something about the present, to have contempo-
rary topics, 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
modied 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
eld and directs the readers gaze toward the marginal aspects of society, it tends to reproduce
exclusion through a representational system of classication and normalization. From Roland
Barthess S/Z to 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 Latin
America (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 (Um
mestre 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.
:,: iui sv.xi c vvvi vw : spring
Chejfec presents an ideal case for thinking about these problems. His writing
displays a clear interest in classic realist themes while also incorporating
avant-garde techniques. The nature of Chejfecs realism is singular precisely
because of how he makes a particular use of avant-garde techniques in order
to generate a reality effect. His narrative incorporates the logic of the image
within the text generating an impression of discontinuity. However, in con-
trast to the avant-gardist desire to produce discontinuity in order to empha-
size the articiality of representation and the impossibility of mimesis,
discontinuity in Chejfecs case is used as a positive (or realist) force, as a
constructive medium to create a portrait of the present time. I argue that this
process crucially depends on the use of photography and a shift from classic
realist representation to an indexical mode of signication.
The Text Becoming Image
Many recent literary productions are preoccupied with depicting contempo-
rary life and society. The Brazilian writer Joao Gilberto Noll, for example,
denies being an intimate writer and states his intention to create a repre-
sentation of his time: um afresco do tempo em que estamos vivendo [a
portrait of the times we are living in].
6
However, Noll considers classical
realism to be obsolete. Times have changed, and writing must also change.
According to him, the difference between the nineteenth century and the end
of the twentieth lies in their respective temporalities. He contrasts the long
journeys of the heroes of classical novels and the lack of time in our current
epoch, but, in response to this negative perspective on contemporary tempo-
ral perception, Noll proposes a positive take on the same phenomenon: the
seduction of the instantaneous.
7
Thus, he says that in his ction he works
o. See Bernardo Ajzenbergs interview with Noll. Translations from Portuguese are my own.
,. As longas peregrinacoes dos hero is balzaquianos ou aubertianos do seculo I, sao imposs veis
hoje. Ninguem mais tem o tempo ideal para acompanhar isso. No novo livro [A ce u aberto] jogo
muito com essas duas forcas quase opostas: a impossibilidade de tempo neste m de seculo e a
seducao pela instantaneidade. Um dos desejos do fazer poetico e alcancar a possibilidade da
coagulacao, o extase. . . . Nao interessa muito o uxo insensato de um dia apo s o outro. Me
interessa o momento coagulado [The long journeys of the Balzacian or Flaubertian heroes of the
nineteenth century are impossible today. No one has the time to accompany this. In my new book
[A ce u aberto], I play a lot with those two almost-opposed forces: the impossibility of time at the
end of the century and the seduction by instantaneity. One of the desires of the poetic work is to
achieve the possibility of coagulation, or ecstasy. . . . The nonsensical ow of one day after the
next is not interesting. I am interested in the coagulated moment] (Ajzenberg; my emphasis).
Horne : . vov1v.i 1 ov 1uv vvvsvx1 j :,,
with what he calls either the coagulated moment, ecstasy, or trance,
which he identies with the suspension of temporal ow. To achieve this
quality, he posits a narrative suspension that is associated with visual arts
and photography. To the uid and slow temporality of the nineteenth and
twentieth 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 ,o).
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
8. Reinaldo Laddaga analyzes this characteristic of Nolls ction and talks about the creation of a
lenguaje invertebrado that agrees, at some points, with my reading (Introduccio n 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 conuence 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
especta culos 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.
Io. 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 a` frente 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-rst century. Thats why I believe in looking for new forms of
expression in which literature dialogues with other arts and technologies]. Ruffatos novel, Eles
eram muitos cavalos, could be read as an example.
:, i ui sv.xi c vvvi vw : spring
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 this
place is that in it [hay una] proliferacio n de ima genes . . . imagenes-objetos
. . . cosas que funcionan como signos. Imagenes materiales (,8; 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 esta poblada de los mismos objetos-ima genes, y lo demas son
libros. Y de estos una buena cantidad son libros de ima genes; los que no lo
son, es porque estan en el proceso de hacerse imagenes; el gusto de Michel se
inclina denidamente por una literatura gurativa o de ge nesis de imagenes.
(II; 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 ow 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 afrms his intention
to write a novel with independent chapters, in which each of them may be
read como si de la contemplacio n de una or 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
esta soportada por lo visual; el relato es algo que requiere ser visto y des-
pues le do; y en este sentido se propone como algo adicional, un suple-
mento. (Cuadros de una instalacio n)
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
Horne : . vov1v.i 1 ov 1uv vvvsvx1 j :,,
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
(I,o). 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 (I,,,) and Los incompletos (:oo) 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 (:,I), 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 unnished 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
II. 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.
I:. 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
:,o iui sv.xi c vvvi vw : spring
The plot of Los incompletos is also organized around photographs. The
novel begins with the narrator remembering the moment in which a friend,
Felix, decides to leave Buenos Aires for exile. Later, through postcards (pho-
tographs) and letters that he receives, different stories unfold, along with the
different worlds, anecdotes, or situations that Felix experiences during his
sojourn in different cities around the globe. These stories, captured by pho-
tographs or by a handwritten script that is more like a drawing than a string
of symbols, shape and structure the novel through the notion of incom-
pleteness. As ideas that do not quite crystallize into a denite form, the
scenes and situations in the novel become tenuously linked, creating and
weaving a stuttering (interrupted) narrative.
13
In this way, the frozen temporality provided by the photographic is trans-
lated in Chejfecs narrative into a rhythm of thought and, therefore, into a
language and a type of writing that, ironically, is resistant to being placed
itself in the linguistic order. There is no natural association between the
parts; the texts are constituted by a series of quasi-independentor sus-
pendedblocklike parts. In Los incompletos, there is a situation that illus-
trates this further. Fe lix, the narrators friend, nds the remnants of a
scribbled note that was left by a prior hotel guest on a pad and tries to
decipher it. The rst thing that he notices is the large size of the handwriting
and how it resembles drawings. He then remembers unos cuadros que pare-
c an mas escritos que dibujados (,). That is, in this note in which it is
possible to trace in cada letra un dibujo (,), Felix evokes something that
works as the reverse of Chejfecs writing, as it displays a writing that seems
more drawnor photographedthan written.
14
Chejfecs novel El aire (I,,:) plays with the photographic motif through-
out, so much so that the text reads as if it were a photograph. Guillermo
Saavedra says, Si pudieramos leer El aire como se mira una foto (,8), in
an analysis that emphasizes the slowness with which Chejfec expounds his
errada gura simetrica (I,,). Los planetas talks obsessively about the lack of symmetry that is
inaugurated by death.
I,. Los incompletos goes from one situation to another with sentences that emphasize hiatos
Aca el recuerdo se interrumpe hasta la situacio n siguiente (,)and incompleteness: Entonces
se puso a pensar en esa casa, pero fueron ideas incompletas que no alcanzaron a formarse (Io).
I. In his last novel, Baroni: un viaje (:oo,)which for reasons of space I cannot analyze
herewe again nd this characteristic. Indeed, in an interview in which Chejfec talks about this
novel, he says the following: Precisamente conceb la novela como si pudiera ser pintor y cons-
truir una obra que, al terminar de leerla, uno pudiera sentir que esta frente a un cuadro (Houni).
Horne : . vov1v.i 1 ov 1uv vvvsvx1 j :,,
words, thus creating an effect of exposicio n 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 type of
perceptive register which changes. Barroso reconstructs the departure of his
wife and obsessively repeats his own actions. The mise en sce `ne of 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 ,,o). 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 Io, :o, :,,o). 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 na vete , 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 ma s conocidas, me hablaba de
usted, me preguntaba si no cre a que su obsesio n por calcular las distancias,
I,. Besides Saavedra, Damia n Tabarovsky (,) and Noemi Voionmaa comment on Chejfecs writ-
ing as being slow.
:,8 i ui sv.xi c vvvi vw : spring
los pesos o las magnitudes tuviera algo de fotograco. Yo, discu lpeme si
soy franca, generalmente le dec a un rapido S querida, en realidad apu-
rada porque me entregue el material. Pero llegar a un momento en el cual,
a fuerza de repet rmelo, acabar a siendo algo en lo que posteriormente me
pusiera a pensar muchas veces. Tampoco podr a asegurar ahora si su obse-
sio n por calcular las magnitudes alude ma s o menos a una materia fotogra-
ca, pero s pienso que es una forma de desconar de la progresio n,
documentandola. (El aire I8I; 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 the
succession 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 the
articiality 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
Io. Calcular era retener el tiempo, su avance, eso cualquiera lo habr a advertido (El aire ,,).
Horne : . vov1v.i 1 ov 1uv vvvsvx1 j :,,
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 xity
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 Fa bula pol tica y
renovacio n estetica, where he discusses the challenges faced by contempo-
rary artists who are concerned with elaborating social contents (IoI). 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 residir
mas en el reciclaje estetico tambien en un sentido espacial de artefac-
tos que en la creacio n de un objeto unitario a partir de principios construc-
tivos tradicionalmente considerados art sticos, incluso por parte de las
vanguardias. En las instalaciones, la extrapolacio n 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 hab a puesto de manie-
sto excepto frente al paso del tiempo. Creo que esta contradiccio n entre el
fuerte enlace referencial de los materiales u objetos utilizados y la volatilidad
de la organizacion f sica que constituye a la instalacio n, pone en escena
contenidos transparentes como la u nica forma de darle una consistencia
semantica a su mismo estatuto articioso; o al reves: el contenido general
aparece en la supercie cuando el ambiente no puede sino organizarse
gracias a la genealog a de los objetos extrapolados. (IoI; my emphasis)
I,. Chejfecs narrative is constantly preoccupied with the denition of verisimilitude and different
ways in which literature plays with its destabilization. See, for example, Los planetas :,; or Boca de
lobo I,, ,, I,I.
:o i ui sv.xi c vvvi vw : spring
This type of artistic work displays a method of construction that is also
found in Chejfecs novels. On one hand, this works structure is so ethereal
that it puts into question its own artistic status thus going one step further
than the avant-gardists, who, according to Chejfec, maintain more surely the
artistic unity or coherence of their work. On the other hand, the various
elements associated in this installation have enough referential attachment
for Chejfec to classify this type of work as conceptual naturalism. Of
course, here he talks about the concrete objects (real objects) of which instal-
lations are made, but the example nevertheless can be applied to Chejfecs
attempt to create a similar structure through a rhetoric that simulates the
incorporation of the object within the work of art. This is attained through
textual construction of the photographic image that makes the text move
from a symbolic to an indexical register.
According to Charles S. Peirce, the indexical sign works neither by conven-
tion as a symbol nor by analogy as an icon; rather, it operates through an
existential link with that which is represented. From Siegfried Kracauer to
Andre Bazin, and from Roland Barthes in La chambre claire to Susan Sontag
and Rosalind Krauss, photography has been conceived of as indexical. That
is, it relies on the mechanical transference of a luminous exposure onto a
sensitive surface. All photography is the result of a physical imprint, and this
differentiates the photograph from the pictorial image. The painted portrait
of an object resembles the object, but a photograph has more than an analog-
ical relation to the object. More importantly, a photograph has a relation of
contiguity or continuity with the object, and so it can also be thought
of as a metonymic or indexical phenomenon. Of course, with the advent of
digital photography, this imaging process has been transformed. Today,
when looking at a photograph, it is very difcult to know whether the image
maintains such contiguity with its object, or whether the image has been
digitally manipulated.
18
However, it is not crucial whether every photograph
can be considered indexical, since what is at stake in this discussion is litera-
ture, which is always about a ction of an indexical signication.
In her interpretation of the later work of Clarice Lispector, Sonia Ronca-
dor reads in these texts an indexical dimension that is manifested in a man-
ner she calls cc ao do ndice [a ction of the index] (III). Given the
linguistic nature of a text, it is impossible to pretend that it can document
I8. On the digital photographic image, see Carol Squiers and Martin Lister.
Horne : . vov1v.i 1 ov 1uv vvvsvx1 j :I
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 e sempre por excelencia uma cons-
trucao ou ccao; uma impressao, ou efeito, que o texto pode aspirar a criar
[the index in writing is always par excellence a ctional construction, an
impression or effect that the text can aspire to create] (IIo). According to
this notion of the ction 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 guration
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, nding 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 though El aire is 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
I,. 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
rst 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.
:o. In this sense I disagree with Mart n Kohan, who reads in this novel una impronta [ma s]
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 read
Chejfecs 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.
:: i ui sv.xi c vvvi vw : spring
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 Io). 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 cityit
is said that the city becomes Pampa (Io,)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 nds a zone in which the pampeanizacio n has spread. At that
moment, an obstacle appears. He stops and decides not to enter an area lled
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 ow. However, Barroso nally 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 nds two lost boys crying
loudly. After a while, Barroso hears a woman screaming, who then
approaches the children and hugs them (I,:). Barroso is deeply touched by
this scene, not because of the encounters emotion but because he is able to
imagine 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 signicaba un estado puro, una tensio n intolerable, como si fuera un
presente absoluto, perenne y total (I,:).
The following day, when Barroso reads the newspaper, he nds 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 been
walking and recognizes, in one of the images, the boys hugging their mother
(El aire I,). In a small detail, not easily discerned, in photographys station-
ary temporality, Barroso nds an element that belongs to the order of the
:I. See El aire I,:: a la gente del campo, a pesar de conocer las palabras, le resulta imposible
hablar: Saben hablar y so lo piensan palabras. El paisaje hab a bloqueado sus aptitudes intelec-
tuales y permanec an, tambien inmo viles, todo el tiempo impavidos como los animales que deb an
vigilar. Or El aire I,I: En el interior nos encontramos con gente que parec a a medias muda y a
medias sorda: como si supieran hablar pero so lo dijeran palabras sueltas. Eran lentos, estaban
todo el tiempo a la espera de algo, como embrutecidos (my emphasis).
Horne : . vov1v.i 1 ov 1uv vvvsvx1 j :,
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
(Fa bula pol tica I,o). 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 and
the 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 with
words. 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 reection about the material aspect of writing and to a particular
way of readingfrom tracks, footprints, or indexes.
Both Boca de lobo (:ooo) and Los incompletos are good examples of this
strategy. The latter constantly reects 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 signiers (see ,,). In Boca de lobo this
concern 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 lobo is about sexual desire and work, but more specically 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 brilliantly
shown, this metaphor also speaks about the insurmountable difference between two worlds: the
protagonists (man, intellectual, bourgeois) and Delias (woman, worker, lower class).
: i ui sv.xi c vvvi vw : spring
through the city, they come upon a group of people who are looking at
garbage. In response to the narrators astonishment, Delia explains that
poor people stare at trash because they are trying to decipher what it was
before it became waste. They try to imagine Lo que no se tiene (I,).
Beyond the irony and the cynical humor inherent in this situation, in which
poor people contemplate the detritus of the rich in order to imagine a con-
sumerist past that does not belong to thema theme that appears before in
El aire and is addressed in later workswhat I want to underscore here is
the way the text talks about garbage as a sistema de senales or a fuente
pro diga de indicios (I,). The novel is full of references to these registers
of experience that are foreign to linguistic order.
23
However, such registers are not present in the novels themselves, as they
do not include actual photographs or indexes. That is why the ction of
indexicality can be traced only through an ontological rhetoric in which the
words, without subjective or logical support (with a vola til structure),
attempt to retain something of the material world and of sensory sensations.
Thus, the texts simulate what the reader is able to see, smell, touch, or hear
in the plots.
24
In El aire, this ontological rhetoricimitating the structure
that Chejfec nds in artistic installationsbecomes evident precisely in rela-
tionship to the novels title: in a change produced in the nature of the air
itself. The air of Buenos Aires loses its lightness and transparency and
becomes something opaque, heavy, erce, gray, unbreathable, suffocating,
and intolerable (I:8, I:o, I,o, IoI). Finally, the air turns moist and barroso
(muddy):
De todos los temas acerca de los cuales Barroso se inclinaba a reexionar,
el ma s natural era el sentirse de algu n modo aludido por el limo del r o; su
nombre establec a cierta comunio n inmediata, supercial, aunque leg tima,
con el lecho impermeable y escondido de esa agua que era de algu n modo
el origen del paisaje y su objeto secreto y nal. Puede sonar rid culo con-
siderarse familiar de algo por el signicado del propio apellido, pero esto
:,. For example, certain drawings found by the protagonist to which he gives the status of docu-
ments; or the drawings that were produced at the factory, tracing the employers uniforms
buttons as a way to control them.
:. See Los planetas oo: era una aspiracio n de las palabras a ser otra cosa, alcanzar una segunda
categor a, un escalo n auxiliar donde no tuvieran que confrontarse con prueba alguna para corro-
borar su verdad.
Horne : . vov1v.i 1 ov 1uv vvvsvx1 j :,
fue lo que sintio , casi con enternecimiento. El agua, el fondo, la vegetacio n,
el tiempo y hasta el aire resultaban barrosos esa jornada. (I8; 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 reecting 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 ,o), 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 themes
are 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 reection
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 suceda neo verbal
de su persona, dif cilmente pod a 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 fotogra cos que nada nos dicen si no conocemos de algu n modo al retratado
(Barthes), el apellido es mudo si no esta asignado a un individuo (I,o). In El aire, Barroso is
thus a photograph not only of himself but also of his city and the materiality proper of the present.
:o iui sv.xi c vvvi vw : 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 in
the 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
Io,)take to watching the garbage-pickers as a hobby or cultural explora-
tion: for them era como mirar a los animales (Io,). The change can be
seen in the streets themselves, where whole families congregate, waiting at
bus stops as if they were tribus otantes (I:I, Io,).
The second situation in which the regressive state of city life becomes
manifested in relation to social and economic causes is what the novel calls
tugurizacio n 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
oo). 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 (I,8) 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 (oI), producing
a change in el paisaje Aereo de la ciudad (o:). Again, the airas when
glass became moneyis materialized. It is signicant 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.
Throughout El aire, therefore, Chejfec reects on the concept of marginal-
ity and its changing meaning. In the novels presentour present
marginality is not dened by a spatial limit but rather by a corporeal
:o. In Argentina, at the beginning of the I,,os 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 foreshadowing
what happened to Buenos Aires with the cartoneros. Cesar Aira dealt with this change in his novel
La villa, but only after it became real. In El aire it is still a sort of exaggeration or omen.
Horne : . vov1v.i 1 ov 1uv vvvsvx1 j :,
presence that is detached from the social structure, by a subject removed
from its political being and its possibility of language.
27
As Barroso veries on
his walks, marginality is omnipresent, because it is corporeal and its presence
modies the urban and social landscape. This is the core of the portrait of
the present which here is depicted through an indexical ction 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
ow 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 guration or similitude. Its metonymic and
nonmetaphoric 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 ction, 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 aire shows 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 nomos of present society.
For Agamben, the structure of the camp is dened 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 what
is incommunicable and mute and what is communicable and speakablewas taken from us
forever (I88).
:8 i ui sv.xi c vvvi vw : spring
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. Sujetos y tecnolog as: la novela despues de la historia. Punto de Vista 8o (Dec.
:ooo): Io.
:,o iui sv.xi c vvvi vw : spring
Schwarz, Roberto. A Brazilian Breakthrough. New Left Review ,o (Nov.-Dec. :oo,):
,IIo,.
. Um mestre na periferia do capitalismo: Machado de Assis. Sao Paulo, Braz.: Duas
Cidades, I,,o.
Shllhammer, Karl Erik. Os cenarios urbanos da violencia na literatura brasileira. In
Linguagens da viole ncia. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, :ooo. :,o,,.
. A procura de um novo realismo: teses sobre a realidade em texto e imagen
hoje. In Literatura e m dia. Ed. Heidrun Krieger Olinto and Karl Eric Shllhammer.
Rio de Janeiro: PUC, :oo:. ,o,o.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, I,,,.
Speranza, Graciela. Magias parciales del realismo. milpalabras: Letras y Artes en Revista
: (:ooI): ,,o.
. Por un realismo idiota. Otra Parte 8 (Autumn :ooo): :o:o.
Squiers, Carol, ed. Over Exposed: Essays on Contemporary Photography. New York: The
New P, I,,,.
Sussekind, Flora. Deterritorialization and Literary Form: Brazilian Contemporary Liter-
ature and Urban Experience. University of Oxford Centre for Brazilian Studies: Work-
ing Papers , (:oo:). :o Sept. :oo, http://www.brazil.ox.ac.uk/papers.html.
. Tal Brasil, qual romance? Rio de Janeiro: Achiame, I,8.
Tabarovsky, Damian. Literaturas de izquierda. Rosario, Arg.: Beatriz Viterbo, :oo.
Weis, Jose. Entrevista: o tempo da Cigarra. Brasil/Brazil I, (I,,,): ,,,.