The most interesting literary art form in post-millennium Argentina is not poetry or fiction, but the essay. And it is partly a symptom of this fact that the most influential novelist of right now in Argentina-- the prolific, performative and slippery César Aira-- laces his novels with essayistic asides and premises. In Latin America and Spain the ensayo or essay genre is broader and more generous than it is in the English-language world. Typically the term "ensayo" can be applied to any general work of nonfiction, unless it is overly technical or circumscribed to a very specific field. For example, Anagrama, the great Spanish publishing house, holds a contest every year for manuscripts in two categories: novela and ensayo. In other words, a manuscript submitted in the ensayo genre might be a reflection on virtually any subject or event. Notice that the terms "fiction" and "nonfiction" are not used, as they rarely are in a publishing or book-selling context in the Spanish-speaking world. This fact liberates both the essay and the novel from the exigencies of prescriptive categories and allows them both to do what they do best, which is to process the world we live in through their filters, incredibly flexible and incisive lens in both cases, and not because of a tendency toward truth or untruth. We might say, casting aside the veils of fiction and nonfiction, that the novel usually tells a story and an essay refines and creates ideas, but of course there is a great deal of overlap and for that reason there are novels of ideas and narrative essays. Not to mention the important fact that the meta-subjects of both, in every case, are language and its evolution, culture and its transformations, ethics and its political manifestations.
As a recent takeout on the new Argentine essay in newspaper Clarín notes, it is in the intersection between narrative and conceptual innovation that some of the great contemporary writers work: J.M. Coetzee, Spaniard Enrique Vila Matas, and the sadly departed W.G. Sebald (as does the aforementioned César Aira and the Mexican Mario Bellatin, also mentioned in the essay).
The word ensayo also has another felicitous and still very much used connotation in Spanish, it can be a synonym for practice, as in a band practice or a theater practice. The implication then is that an ensayo is not the final word, but an exploration, a reconnoitering of the territory, a first foray. In other words, it is part of a larger process in which perfection and comprehensiveness are eternally a step away. It's a healthy and I would argue bracing and liberating paradigm for the ensayo: an aesthetic of imperfection and incompleteness. Ensayando or essaying means to practice or try something out.
This Clarín article, written for the newspaper's literary supplement Ñ, does a good job of summarizing new trends in the Argentine essay and singling out two representative writers, the self-described "full-time" essayist Rafael Cippolini, who I have written about before, and the poet and occasional novelist and essayist Fabián Casas. It isn't only the "amphibious" space between nonfiction and fiction that these writers explore, in the sense that the first-person essay, necessarily a performance, is as much about a provisional truth or a hypothesis and a pose as it is about any steadfast truth. But these two writers are also "amphibious" (Cippolini's term) in the sense that both are indelibly marked by the Internet, their use of the medium for publishing drafts of their essays at various stages of gestation, even as they also simultaneously function in the slow speed of book publishing. They are also amphibious in the sense that they swim between high and low culture, theory and slang. The third book mentioned in this article is by Reinaldo Laddaga, an essential Argentine critic who has been ahead of the curve in identifying emerging and social forms of art such as online collectives and mass performative projects. His book on Aira, Brazilian writer J.G. Noll and Bellatin, is called Espectáculos de realidad. These fiction writers are arguably the other face of this essay-writing streak, since their texts are marked by a continual interpenetration of reality and fiction, conceptual dances that mix the theoretical depth of the essay with the quick gloss of narrative; these writers make a "spectacle out of reality" in the sense that their fictions escape from the bounds of book culture and aim at something else, a kind of transmigration into our daily lives and a transfiguration of our comfy metaphysical contours, a subversion of the mental lazy boys which we lean back in, complacent that what we think, believe and feel is complex enough as it is.
Here is Laddaga as quoted in the article, referring to the self-referential writing culture bred by the Internet and communications technology (blogs, text messages, twitter, flikr, etc.):
"We live in the midst of a generalized explosion of fictional acts, which disconcertingly, are carried out in the name of sincerity. Spectacles of reality are indivisible from this situation. I don't see how an artist, today, could fail to be interested in them. I also don't see how an artist, confronting this form of spectacle, could prevent himself from imagining a fantastic version of it, which would extend some of its principles and cancel some of its more lamentable elements." In other words what Laddaga sees is an aesthetic opportunity, and arguably it is one that already has been seized, intentionally or not, by the essayists and novelists already mentioned. It involves an immersion in the language and rhetoric of self-exhibition, arguably the cultural lingua franca of our age, with the aim, through distortion or astringency, to alchemize it into art.
Art by Daniel García; top illustration created for publisher Beatriz Viterbo and Laddaga's book, Espectáculos de Realidad
