The mesticine

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The Mestizin , in the Argentine original " Ema, la cautiva " (completed 1978, published 1981), is a novel by César Aira and was published in German in 2004. It is set in the second half of the 19th century in Argentina, which is developing into a nation state. The author outlines the emancipation process of the young mestizo Ema, who is brought in a prison wreck from Buenos Aires via Azul to the border town of Pringles . After a year she was kidnapped during an Indian attack in their area and spent two years there as the wife of different men. Before she can freely leave the Indians, she is introduced to the art of pheasant breeding . When she returned to Pringles, she founded a pheasant farm with Indian day laborers and became a recognized entrepreneur.

content

The plot is divided into four roughly equal sections:

  • The transport of prisoners escorted by soldiers to Pringles (p. 5–64)
  • Life of Emas in the border town of Pringles (pp. 65–134)
  • Ema as a prisoner with the Indians (pp. 135–187)
  • The pheasant farmer Ema in Pringles (p. 188–252)

The narrative perspective generally corresponds to the personal narrative situation , with different narrators alternating depending on the person constellation and in some, sometimes essayistic passages, the authorial narrative situation predominates without an “omniscient” narrator being recognized (p. 5-14 , P. 188 or p. 207-211).

The prisoner hunt

The way from Buenos Aires to Pringles is about 500 km long and leads through the humid pampas . The trek, made up of riders and carts pulled by oxen, on which there are either provisions and transport goods or chained male and female prisoners, is on the way for almost six months. (The women are destined for the border guards; the male prisoners, if they survive, are made compulsory for military service at the border.) The highest authority in the trek is a young lieutenant who has supervised such transports for ten years, wearing gloves, the only one English He used a saddle with a pommel and how his subordinates - former prisoners - regularly consumed schnapps from the canteen, because " drinking was innate to them " (p. 8). Coming from a rich family of large landowners, educated, you can still feel with him “ a barbaric pleasure that even the most primitive soldiers missed and perhaps also the prisoners who had nothing human about them ” (p. 17 - 20 f. : arbitrary murder of a prisoner). He has been entrusted by the central government with a French engineer who has to do a special job at the destination in the border region, namely to build a printing press for the commander there (pp. 20, 95). Duval, as his name is, passes the travel time and the tiredness that afflicts him by imagining a novel to be written based on his impressions, the content of which is “ the apotheosis of the futility of life ” (p. 21). The experience of the seemingly endless pampas, the vast grasslands of which are populated by various insects, birds and mammals and crossed by Indian nomads, but are still considered a " desert " (p. 27 and more) because they have not yet been developed and "uncivilized" by European settlers “, Brings him to the insight that man disappears into this world, the individual does not count and the species is everything (p. 42). The further inland and to the west they move, the more they leave civilization (→ barbarism and civilization ) and the arm of the law (p. 31). Promiscuity prevails among the prisoners on the carts , the soldiers look for their night companions among the female prisoners, the lieutenant publicly copulates in the presence of his indifferent officer comrades with the prisoner mesticine, who usually shares Duval's resting place and appears in the second section as Ema . As they approach their destination, Duval has the impression that “ the border he longed for as boundless territory ” will make him a new, happier person (p. 63 f.).

The border town of Pringles

The white population of Pringles consists entirely of soldiers and their companions. Ema, the mestizo, one of the two youngest women among the prisoners and already the mother of an infant, is assigned to a lieutenant from the crew of the border fort . When his lover from Europe is supposed to arrive, she leaves the fort and is placed in one of the numerous huts to a gaucho who is a forced recruit and takes her as his wife after he has thrown out his two Indian concubines.
In contrast to Azul, colonization is out of the question, as the peace settlement with the Indians is only progressing slowly. Colonel Espina, commander of the fort, trusts in a means of getting by without war with the Indians and their caciques , and wants to prevent their attacks and raids by sending them large quantities of colored paper money printed on Duval's new machine becomes. Espina, “ enigmatic money printer ”, is convinced that he can create a “money climate” with the Indians by trusting their play instinct and using it as a “ lubricant of circulation ” for creating continuity. In exchange for the money, he initially received a hundred pheasants as a gift and at the same time strengthened Pringles' place in the sun in the extensive Indian empire. Numerous Indian embassies arrive and perform “ true tournaments of elegance ” for the villagers (pp. 96–103).
Ema, pregnant again, often stays with the Indians, who have set up a camp in the sun near the fort and lead a peaceful life like in Azul, where they have already settled in their thousands. She begins a relationship with one of the young Indians. Because Gombo, her gaucho companion, spends his life when he is not assigned to the guard in the fort, mostly gambling with his comrades or fishing. In his philosophy, life remains impossible, " because if it weren't impossible, life would be horrible " (p. 129). Ema, " almost still a girl, alone in the world, with the exception of her baby, [...] felt she was being pushed into an exposed and undefined borderland. The epoch required complete rest, people had to become as imperturbable as animals ”(p. 78). The Indians experience them as frivolous and melancholy, surrendered to a world of appearances in which gestures and body painting are important elements of a worldly aesthetic: "Everything was seduction, a uniform field of passion and concentration" (pp. 103-106) .

“El Malón”: painting by Moritz Rugendas (1802–1858). - “Malón” was the name given to a mounted Mapuche attack on European settlers.

During a nocturnal thunderstorm, warlike Indians attack the village before the residents can seek refuge in the fort and set fire to the huts. They steal women. A savage grabs Ema without dismounting and lifts her onto his horse.

As prisoners among Indians

For the Indians, Ema is considered to be white, not because of her skin color, which can hardly be distinguished from the Indian, but because of her history and her “ romantic ” prison status (p. 166). In the hands of their kidnappers, this makes them a desirable object of exchange for the respected Indians, who take them in among their other wives for a while until someone else can acquire them. She spends two years among them west of Pringles in a wooded area stretching for thousands of miles, where she reaches, for example, Cuchillo-Có , gives birth to her second child and, at the end of her stay with the Indians, has her third. At first she lived with a cacique, then with a cacique prince, and spent a summer wandering around with a crowd of young men with whom she came to the empire of the powerful cacique Catriel, where she became one of the wives of a minister responsible for religious matters. Finally, with his consent, she marries a zoological engineer who familiarizes her with pheasant farming.
Ema moves in the upper Indian social classes and gets to know their way of life. With one of her companions, a prince, who usually narcotises himself with laudanum and morphine , but leads an excessive social life (p. 165), she spends vacation on an island in an inland lake overflowing with Indian tourists. - The minister, ecstatic and sad at the same time, actually tired of life, shares his wisdom with her, namely that thinking is not worthwhile and that money is the only telepathy that people need (p. 184). The money and its abundance give them the impression that they are living too little. Like Gombo, he and the other Indians are convinced that life is impossible and this knowledge expresses " thinking in its clearest and most radical form " (p. 185). That is why etiquette is part of every lifestyle and slows down all processes, giving everything the appearance of the impossible. Purposeful work is considered abhorrent. “ They grilled chicken and fish, collected wild fruits, led an artificial shepherd's life ” (p. 176) in a city where real masses wallow on the sidewalks (p. 172). Ema has the impression that the Indians are not artists but art itself and that this expresses the ultimate purpose of their melancholy madness (p. 183). On the pheasant farm, too, Ema realizes that work is unreal and like nonexistent (p. 186). The Indians' melancholy and profound humor also ground the uniformity of Ema's days, until she informed her last husband, the zoological engineer, that she wanted to return to the fort in Pringles.

Pheasant farming in Pringles

In Pringles, land can now be allocated to those willing to settle. However, it is mainly soldiers who want to retire because they long for peace and quiet on a piece of land in the floodplains. Ema lives with her children and two Indian women on the outskirts of the village before she takes lovers again. It is now she who chooses. Because through her time in the Indian territories she has matured and appears mysteriously like a " dark queen " who is no longer reminiscent of the insecure mesticine who was carted up from Buenos Aires (p. 189). Above all, she wants to set up a pheasant farm and supply the white population with poultry as far as Buenos Aires. For them that means work, because the land has to be reclaimed, a settlement has to be established and the terms of business and the exchange of pheasants have to be clarified with the caciques. The man she lives with arranges a conversation with Espina, who accommodates her in every way with her ideas, allocates her land and grants her a generous loan. For Espina, Ema's project is a good opportunity to get the money flowing at the Kazikenhöfe, because with the pheasant traders the magnates of the “ wild nation ” (p. 190, 210) are included in a network with the whites. She is looking for the necessary personnel among the young Indians who live around the fort. She finds around fifty future breeders who join her with brides, friends and babies and take her out into the jungle, where they want to set up the farm in suitable clearings. Ema realizes that she will run a business in which pheasants are a means of her future wealth that was " as secure and convertible as gold " (p. 200). She contacts the neighboring tribes to build up her breeding stock and learns that a cattle market is being held. There she would like to perform, for which she needs cash, which Espina brings her on a cart drawn by four oxen. He becomes Ema's confidante and tells her how he turned the Indians' initial contempt for whites into respect. For this it was necessary to convince her with a whole system of his own luxury, which he set in motion with his money printing machines. He confirms Ema her impression that as a prisoner she is still living day and night in a human paradise (p. 206).
The cattle market is a big festival with artistic tight-rope performances in treetops and an orchestra. Hostesses take care of the visitors, who were able to offer large sums of money when bidding for award-winning animals. One has " brought with him " Dawn bills made of tiger and turtle paper boiled in a swamp "(p. 212). Ema is determined to secure a large population of pheasants. She was respected when the word got around that she was white and had good relations with Catriel. The bidding process becomes a dangerous matter of competition and sadism and shows the corrosive effects of money. But since the Indians invented “ the theater of money ”, in which money accumulates and destroys itself over and over again, there is always a balance and Ema succeeds in “getting out of there alive ” (p. 220) and her pheasant rearing gradually expand to a population of forty thousand pheasants in the wild.
At the end of the season and after a work-intensive phase, Ema, who is heavily pregnant again, goes with her workers on a vacation trip to caves in a mountain area near Bahía Blanca to relax . Before there was a massacre there, it was a place of pilgrimage for the Indians. Ema and her family go hunting there, look at Bahía Blanca, think or sleep.

subjects

Aira has repeatedly engaged in a confrontation with the Argentine history of the 19th century, first in " Die Mestizin ", 1984 with " Un vestido rosa ", 1991 with " La liebre " and 2001 in " Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero "(Eng." Humboldt's Shadow ", 2003).
In " Die Mestizin " he addresses the following:

  • Mestizo (Spanish “mestizaje”), which, according to today's understanding, is intended to describe how the ethnic and cultural state of Latin America is currently presented at the end of a historical process , but basically means a birth flaw from a non-European liaison and as a moment of the Racism is to be seen;
  • the Argentine myth of the robbery of women in the form of the "cautiva", the white people captured by Indians;
  • the borderland myth in the form of the American " frontier ";
  • the pampas as supposedly empty space and as a “desert” that lends itself to colonialist conquest (→ desert campaign );
  • the Argentine world of the Indians before the conquest, as it indicated until the 1880s;
  • the role of money as an arbitrary construction (p. 95) through which social contact and exchange are to be established (→ The nightly enlightenment of the civil servant Varamo );
  • instead of the genocidal war of conquest, the chance of a peaceful Argentine-Indian development, as the fictional historical draft in the art of the novel form tries to present as a different reality.

"The Mesticine" as an alternative Bildungsroman

Aira gives his novel a geographical framework with many place names and also a historical framework with the authentic names of the various caciques. The fictional and alternative to the actual story is not only visible in the money printing machines of Colonel Espina and those of the Indians, but also in the description of the main settlement of Catriel as a big city with sidewalks (p. 172) and the representation of Indian summer visitors on an island Inland Sea (pp. 135–163) or with the mention of a car that is supposed to bring the lieutenant's European lover through the pampas from Buenos Aires to Pringles (p. 79).
The Bildungsroman belongs in the Argentine literary repertoire. Elisa Carolina Vian emphasizes that the Indians who rob Ema do not deprive her of her honor and chastity, but honor her as a mother and allow her sexual permissiveness. Contrary to the romantic Argentine tradition, she does not become an object, but instead unfolds with the Indians as a self-aware subject that was withheld from her among her own kind in so-called civilization. This corresponds to the fact that Aira recognizes himself in Ema, as Gustave Flaubert said by Emma Bovary : " Ema, mi pequeña yo mismo " ( Ema, my little self ). Aira emphasizes that Ema has to learn “ the last and final lesson ” on the Indian pheasant farm , while at the same time emphasizing that this is not an anabasis (Greek for “marching up”) (p. 186). When Ema returned to Pringles, she was different. Duval initially noticed them in the midst of the stench among the prisoners on the trek as follows:

“The woman who wore the rags of two different clothes was short, so thin and emaciated that he would have thought she was a child. Negroid features were visible beneath the thick layer of dirt that covered her, and her hair was short, frizzy, and greasy ”(p. 48).

After her stay with the Indians and about to become an entrepreneur, Colonel Espina Ema considers:

“Ema was holding the youngest of her three children, a four-month-old girl. When she unbuttoned her dress to breastfeed it, the Colonel couldn't help but wince in admiration at the sight of her chest. She was a symbol of purity ”(p. 222).

reception

Florian Borchmeyer sees Aira writing “ Die Mestizin ” in the FAZ of March 8, 2005 as the successor to Jorge Luis Borges . He is thus worthy of the Nobel Prize. With the Indian world he represented a highly artificial Far Eastern feudal society, which resembles an imperial court of Japanese literature in the eleventh century, with concubines, complicated hierarchies of officials and pagoda palaces. For Borchmeyer, Aira unfolds set pieces in an ingenious ironic game "of all times, utopias as well as horror scenarios that do not want to fit together ", so that the society of the Pampa Indians becomes a " grotesque hybrid monster ". For Maike Albath ( SZ January 25, 2005) the novel is initially a book that she would have liked to close after the first 60 pages because she finds the narrative rhythm fragmented and awkward. But then she discovers in Aira the author of the neo-avant-garde, who ironically varies the topoi of Argentine national literature. Ema becomes a revenant of Madame Bovary for her. She refers to Esteban Echeverría's verse tale “ La cautiva ” and Lucio Victoria Mansilla's important travel report from 1870 “ Excursión a los indios ranqueles ” (“ Excursion to the tribe of the Ronqueles ”) as foils for Aira. In doing so, she is bothered by the fact that Aira's Indians " all riot [...] about the purpose of money circulation, the art of finance and their understanding of freedom ". On the other hand, she finds the description of the lush forest vegetation, the pomp of Indian court society, " the rules of etiquette, the practices of body painting, the total aestheticization of everyday life " captivating .

Secondary literature

  • Leo Pollmann: Una estética del más allá del ser. Ema, la cautiva de César Aira . In: Roland Spiller (ed.): La novela argentina de los años 80 . Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert 1991. pp. 177-194.
  • Silvia G. Kurlat Ares: La utopía indígena en la literatura argentina de la última década: el caso de Ema, la cautiva de César Aira . On-line. Accessed April 13, 2011.
  • Lucía De Leone: César Aira y su inscripción en el regionalismo narrativo . On-line. Accessed April 13, 2011.
  • Núria Calafell Sala: La subversión de los discursos en Ema, la cautiva de César Aira . Online . Accessed April 13, 2011.
  • Zulma Sacca: La reescritura del desierto en César Aira y José Pablo Feinmann . Online (PDF; 158 kB). Accessed April 13, 2011.
  • Valeria Sager: La circulación, el don y el intercambio como marcas de presente. De Ema, la cautiva a Las aventuras de Barbaverde (César Aira) . Online (PDF; 56 kB). Accessed April 13, 2011.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ It is quoted from the edition published by Nagel & Kimche by Carl Hanser Verlag, translated by Michaela Meßner and Matthias Strobel: César Aira, Die Mestizin , München-Wien 2004, ISBN 3-312-00341-5 .
  2. ^ Héctor Alimonda / Juan Ferguson: La producción del desierto. Las images de la campaña del ejército argentino contra los indios, 1879 . Online ( Memento of the original from October 18, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 657 kB). (Accessed April 12, 2011). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.elortiba.org
  3. ↑ The caciques mentioned in the novel all have historically proven names such as Catriel, Cafulcurá, Pincén.
  4. ↑ See Et in arcadia ego . (Retrieved April 13, 2011).
  5. ↑ Online in Spanish . According to Georg Diez, his “ perhaps the best novel ” (cf. About César Aira . Accessed on April 13, 2011). - For César Aira's preoccupation with the 19th century, see also: Claudia Leitner, Christopher F. Laferl (eds.): About the limits of natural life. Forms of presentation of the human-animal-machine relationship in the Iberoromania , Berlin-Münster-Vienna-Zurich-London: LIT Verlag 2009, ISBN 978-3-8258-0289-9 , pp. 172–179.
  6. ↑ See Astrid Vindus: Afro-Argentine and Nation. Modes of construction of Afro-Argentine identity in Buenos Aires of the 19th century , Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag 2005, ISBN 978-3-86583-004-3 .
  7. ↑ Susana Rotker: Cautivas. Olvidos y memoria en la Argentina . Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1999. - The figure of the “cautiva” plays a role in Argentina similar to that of the European white slave in the oriental harem in the orientalism fashion of European painting from Delacroix to Kandinsky. (Cf. Martha Delfín Guillaumin: El tema del cautiverio en Esteban Echeverría y Mauricio Rugendas . Online  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice . . Accessed April 13, 2011.)@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.nostromoediciones.net  
  8. ↑ See Pedro Navarro Flora: El desierto y la cuestión del territorio en el discurso político argentino sobre la frontera Sur , in: Revista Complutense de Historia de América, Vol. 28 (2002), ISSN  1132-8312 , pp. 139-168.
  9. ↑ Cf. Ghislaine Dagorn, who works out the diverse ethnic and cultural as well as trade exchanges between the resource-rich Indian regions and the whites who integrated themselves there (!) In: La frontière indienne du Río de la Plata, un espace de contact et d'échanges , America [online], 2 | 2010, posted on June 14, 2010, http:// Amerika.revues.org/987 , accessed on April 13, 2011. Also Argentinian Indians (Spanish). Retrieved on April 13, 2011. - In Aira's representation of the Indians there are also traces of the reading by Claude Lévi-Strauss mentioned in an interview , on p. 36 from “ Sad Tropics ” and on p. 164 from “ Wildes Thinking ” ( See Letras Libres , November 2009, p. 75).
  10. ↑ See Leo Pollmann: Una estética del más allá del ser. "Ema, la cautiva" by César Aira . In: Roland Spiller (ed.): La novela argentina de los años 80 . Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert 1991. pp. 177-194.
  11. ^ Blas Matamoro: Güiraldes , Arlt y la novela educativa . In: Saúl Sosnowski (ed.): Lectura Crítica de La Literatura Americana , Vol. 3, Vanguardias y tomas de posesión (Biblioteca Ayacucho, Vol. 195), Caracas 1997, ISBN 980-276-300-4 , pp. 254– 265.
  12. ↑ Elisa Carolina Vian: Cruzando Fronteras: Ema, la cautiva de César Aira . In: Annali di Ca 'Foscari, XLIV, 1-2, Venice 2005, pp. 351-356. Online  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 88 kB). Accessed April 13, 2011. - To “ Madame Bovary, that's me! “See here (PDF; 402 kB).@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / lear.unive.it  
  13. ↑ On p. 34, Charles Baudelaire's poem “ L'invitation au voyage ” from Les Fleurs du Mal is quoted. In the appendix there is the poem " Je n'ai pas pour maîtresse une lionne illustre ", where the poet, in analogy to the Marian litany, ends with a shabby young prostitute as " ma richesse, ma perle, mon bijou, ma reine, ma duchesse " ("My wealth, my pearl, my treasure, my queen, my duchess") celebrated. On p. 189 the filthy prisoner has become the “ dark queen ”, a little later “ the symbol of purity ”.
  14. ↑ Palimpsests of the Pampas . Accessed April 13, 2011.
  15. ↑ In the middle of nowhere . Accessed April 13, 2011.