Whether it’s a first exposure to Argentinean writer Cesar Aira or a reintroduction to his work, Ghosts rewards the reader with both entertainment and challenge. In this accessible short novel, Aira applies his usual odd yet deft touch to draw a day in the life of a family that lives at a construction site and the spirits that share it with them. At once humorous, intellectual, socially conscious, emotionally aware, and calmly sinister,
Ghosts uses an unfinished building as a jumping off point for an exploration of family and social dynamics. It serves as a metaphor that leads into more esoteric realms dealing with the space between the real and unreal, between concrete time and dream time, between signs and what they signify.
Reality and unreality are not as easily defined in an Aira novel as they might be elsewhere. Those unfamiliar with this prolific author will soon discover his controversial reputation. A tireless publisher of over sixty books throughout his literary career, Aira (perhaps also an accomplished molder of his own public image) claims that he does not edit his work much, believing that the backward-looking nature of editing denies the forward pull of creativity. Hugely popular in Argentina, he remains a source of conflict in the literary community there. Frequently specializing in combining the absurd with the mundane, Aira’s style tends to defy categorization. He often avoids specific or linear explanations of his work, preferring instead to discuss the procedures and sources of artistic creation. To some, his mix of prose styles, his twisting of realities, his obsession with the procedure and process of art, and his indefinable narrative structures make him inventive but sloppy and undisciplined; to others, those same qualities mark him as inventive and brilliantly creative.
Whatever one thinks of him, Aira is undeniably innovative. Traveling from concrete events to intellectual debates, he combines opposing forces in a balance unique to him. The worlds he creates have their own realities. In How I Became a Nun, he recounts a six-year-old’s first experience with ice cream, integrating humor, irony, and escalating violence in a supposedly autobiographical tale. But rejecting first impressions, the first person narrator is alternately referred to as a boy or a girl. The book’s title suggests a girl, but the character has a boy’s name that he shares with the author. Gender swirls, consciousness bends in on itself, and the story becomes more an account of the development of an artistic mind than a literal autobiographical story. An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter begins as an historical document, and becomes a journey into the question of what lies at the center of artistic expression. Storytelling, according to Aira, has less to do with concrete explanations, justifications, and linear logics, and more to do with avoiding those very explanations, eschewing realism for the unexplainable, the mysterious, the contradictory elements of mind and heart that drive a story forward.
In Ghosts, Raul Vinas and his family, Chilean transplants to Argentina, live at the top of an unfinished building on which he is both working and serving as caretaker. The day is December 31st and the owners wander through their unfinished apartments, the builders take a half day and drink their way through the afternoon, and Vinas’ wife and stepdaughter prepare for the New Year’s party that night while the other children play. Aira guides the reader through the perspectives and activities of the builders, of Raul, of his nephew, of Raul’s wife Elisa, and eventually of the stepdaughter Patri, who becomes the pivotal figure for the rest of the story. Through it all, a collection of naked male ghosts observe just as we do. We wander through the levels and structures of all the characters, much as the ghosts float through the levels of the unfinished building filled with open and undefined space.
At once pragmatic and fantastic, the ghosts are never explained. They simply appear in the narrative, as real and valid as anyone else: “A woman in violet was catching her breath on the stairs between the six and seventh floors. Others didn’t have to make an effort: they floated up and down, even though the concrete slabs.” This small detail, that some in the unfinished building are not like the rest, might even be missed, until we are told that “on the edge of the [satellite] dish, a sharp metallic edge on which no bird would have dared to perch, three completely naked men were sitting, with their faces turned up to the midday sun; no one saw them, of course.” No one who doesn’t live there, that is. Vinas and his family see, accept, and matter-of-factly share space with them. Vinas, in fact, keeps his wine chilled by “resolutely approaching a ghost and inserting a bottle into its thorax, where it remained, supernaturally balanced” and, in two hours, cooled and turned into fine cabernet sauvignon. Yet as the day progresses and we venture into Patri’s mind, the coexisting of human and ghost, “provisionally, balancing on the edge of time,” becomes less humorous and more problematic.
Ghosts is ultimately a story engaged in semiotics, the study of signs and what they represent or signify, the interpretation of those signs and symbols, and the way in which “culture produces signs and/or attributes meaning to signs." From an artistic creation to a facial feature to an arrangement of huts in a native culture, a sign can be anything used to create, understand, or interpret the world. Like Umberto Eco, the noted semiotician and novelist (The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum), Aira explores literary text, storytelling, social activities, and even anthropology as related to this search for meanings. What seems to concern him most is the space, the distance, between signs and that which is signified—how that space might be reached, what it means, and if signifier and signified can ever become one, or even be clearly defined.
Midway through Ghosts, Patri has a dream, a seemingly simple representation in which she sees the building in which she lives in its current unfinished state. But dream reality is different than waking reality even - or especially - when the object dreamed is the same. Aira posits waking habits, behaviors, and languages as based in time, while dreams, like ghosts, are free of time. He notes that the dreamtime of the Aborigines created their realities. So things become twisted in on themselves; the dreamtime becomes the “giver of meaning” and more real than the waking time. Which is “reality” and which is the representing sign? Aira questions how to get from one to the other, and how the space between the two relates to where meaning and artistic impulse/creation may truly lie.
Aira repeatedly returns to architectural terms to describe life. A horizontal axis, like a building’s floor (or story, in both senses of the word), measures life’s duration. It is filled with repetitions and predictability, a waking reality of the “already built.” A vertical axis (or access, as Aira puns), like a condominium high rise, stratifies life into “layers or doors through which one could ‘enter’ or ‘exit.’” And here lies the danger, not just to the artist searching for the spatial dimension beyond both axes, but also to young Patri.
On the verge of womanhood, Patri is constantly told to find a “real man.” Questioning what that means, she is drawn to the ghosts, especially when singled out by their invitation to THEIR New Year’s party. Watching her family, Patri sees her life as laid out for her, a series of patterns repeating the options and choices of the female lives that have come before her. She must decide between “sliding over those repetitions” in the horizontal timeline of her life, and the singular point on the vertical “exit” axis that would take her into that dreamtime, into that mysterious unknown space where ghosts of tempting mystery and undefined meaning float.
To the rest of the family, “the apparent is more important than the real,” but as with waking time and dreamtime, which is which? Her mother, trying to keep Patri focused on finding a “real man,” tells her “for us there are always ghosts. Subtract a Chilean man from an Argentinean, or vice versa. Or add them up. You can actually do whatever you like. The result will always be the same: a ghost.” In other words, accept but ignore life’s ghosts.
But for Patri, the ghosts, still naked, are becoming more flesh colored, more three dimensional, more interactive…in essence, more real. The mother, while worried about her daughter’s growing connection to the ghosts, is eventually reduced to answering her questions with only a “mysterious smile”— a sign signifying that same mysterious space beyond words in which Aira the artist is so interested and which Patri must ultimately decide if she wants to explore.
In the same way that the painter in Episode is driven by his desire to find that landscape point of emptiness between the two horizons, Ghosts is driven by finding what lies in the space between real and unreal, between built and yet to be built, between concrete and undefined, between any sign and what it signifies. This search leads through anthropological discussions to art, and what lies between creative impulse and actual execution. That space, the “dreamtime,” lies at the heart of Ghosts and of Aira’s process as he writes his way towards “an art in which the limitations of reality would be minimized, in which the made and unmade would be indistinct, an art that would be instantaneously real, without ghosts. And perhaps that art exists, under the name of literature.” We, like the ghosts, are there to bear witness to his process.