The nightly enlightenment of the civil servant Varamo
The nightly enlightenment of the civil servant Varamo is a novella by the Argentine writer César Aira . The book was published in Barcelona in 2002 under the title " Varamo " and was published in 2006 in German. The action takes place in Colón in 1923, when Varamo, a scribe in a ministry of the state of Panama founded in 1903 in Colón , unexpectedly becomes the author of a (fictional) masterpiece of Central American poetry - " The Song of the Virgin Child ".
content
The novella is presented by an authoritative narrator (pp. 5–6) who himself pretends to want to follow and follow the design means of the experienced speech when telling the story (pp. 45–49), that is, to disappear as an authorial narrator to leave, which he also followed in the second half of the text, until he indirectly brings himself in again in the final paragraph with a reflection on what the work of art and reality have in common.
The plot spans ten to twelve hours and shows Varamo between his way home from work until the end of his waking night when he finishes his lyrical work.
action
Varamo, a 50-year-old bachelor, left the ministry on the last day of the month in 1923 after collecting his salary. He is very quickly certain that he has received two false banknotes, but does not return them and gives in because he senses that " the illegality of these banknotes implicitly calls for silence and discretion " (p. 7) . Between this event, which Varamo tears " out of his usual path of thought ", and the completion of the poem, the narrator sees events at work that explain the work, which is considered to be puzzling as the " starting point and climax of the daring experimental language avant-garde " like everything in the world Form a ' coherent chain of causes and effects ' (pp. 5-6).
Troubled by the thought that he cannot put the banknotes into circulation as a means of payment without becoming a perpetrator and criminal, he embarks on his usual way home. A Hispano-Suiza with a chauffeur who is an employee of a ministry and who has an extra income in brokering lottery stakes is at his height, and the driver hands him a profit of 2 pesos for his mother, so that he gets regular money, With which he buys a candy from an Indio woman in the afternoon market in the center . Between sailors, prostitutes and a look into the open cathedral, he comes across a beggar who, with an intrusive re-enactment, brings him another amount of coins. When he got home, he first had a siesta, from which he was startled by tins, which were set in motion by an unintentional knock against the cupboard in which Varamo had stacked them because he was a bachelor, and then tumbled out. So he continues his hobby, namely embalming small animals, where he is currently killing and preparing a fish that is swimming in a bowl, which he would like to place as a pianist on a piano stuck together out of paper. The insight that the fish cannot be shaped for lack of arm-like forelegs leads him to put the fish, which has been treated with a number of chemicals, back into the bowl, where, to his amazement, it begins to list ' bent, bloated and monstrous '. He notes his approach " in his elegant English professional handwriting (...), leaving a space between the notes and also numbering them to rule out any doubt about the order " (p. 27). Finally his senile and confused mother, who is Chinese and immigrant, prepares the fish for dinner, the consumption of which makes Varamo hallucinate and feverish. He sinks into meditations in which he looks for ways to get his fake banknotes into circulation without being prosecuted. Because there has never been counterfeit money in the young state, so that it would set a precedent for a pending regulation.
After he has put his mother to bed, he goes to the café following his habit. At a certain stretch of the way, as always, he hears voices that seem like an “ everyday attack of madness ”. He hears single clauses, half clauses and words that make sense in themselves, but remain inexplicable overall. They appear to him like dictations (p. 51). Now they seem particularly threatening to him, as he fears that they will also be heard by others and that they will betray him as the owner of counterfeit money.
At an intersection, an accident occurs before his eyes: a small car does not pay attention to the right of way of a large car, bumps into it so that it tips over and remains on the roof while it continues the journey itself. The car that crashed is that of the economics minister, who has just become interior minister during a cabinet reshuffle. He is unconscious and is taken to the house closest to the scene of the accident. The black driver who has remained unharmed is the same one who, in addition to brokering the lottery, also deals in cigarettes. He informs Varamo that the accident was an assassination attempt by fleeing anarchists . The minister was involved as a supervisor in a so-called regularity race, which takes place at the opening of the road link between Colón and Panama and in which the goal is to reach the finish at the most steady speed. For the police it is a good opportunity to arrest anarchists who do not adhere to the guidelines and want to bring chaos into the event.
The house where medical care is awaited belongs to two elderly Creole women who appear to be withdrawn but are involved in very extensive social contacts through which they sell their contraband - golf clubs for the Channel's foreign staff and local officials - to sell. These golf clubs come from ships from which they are fetched as they pass through the Canal, after contact has been made with an encrypted sequence of voices sent by the House of the Góngoras, an allusion to the Spanish Baroque poet Luis de Góngora . Varamo learns that because of the regularity of his visit to the café, his body mass triggers a magnetic field that triggers the voice apparatus. Since the Góngoras and their housemaid fear that the minister’s driver wants to obtain the voice code and his apparatus in order to start a movement from Haiti that is supposed to conquer power for the black race (p. 74) , give Varamo the notebook with the recordings of the voice encodings so that he can change them and make them unusable for others.
When Varamo arrives at the café, he is talking to the three most famous pirated print publishers in Panama who are looking for new materials for their printing presses after the wave of modernism tied to Rubén Darío has exhausted itself. When Varamo says that he would like to publish his experiences as a hobby embalming artist under the title “ How to embalm small mutating animals ” (p. 81), the publishers agree to pay him 200 pesos, since writing is also for someone who is as untrained as he is, is an easy matter that he will have done within hours.
Varamo leaves the café and passes the time until midnight with a long, stimulating walk through the nocturnal city, where the race is still taking place. When he gets home, he is sure of what he has to do to turn his fake pesos into real ones (p. 86): With slight changes, he copies the papers that he has taken with him from the ministry, using that as the basic pattern Booklet with the voice codes from the house of the Góngoras, which he changes at random, and lets his afternoon notes flow into corresponding gaps. Without knowing it, he becomes a writer, which means something like a “ forger malgré lui ”, “ who left his encrypted traces ” (p. 89). “ The result was his famous poem; only that it was not really a result, but rather that what had preceded it became the result ”(p. 90).
subjects
The topics are grouped around the questions of social cohesion that arise with the founding of a new Central American state, which mainly suffers from the fact that there is a surplus of European men (pp. 22, 84). This is initially a consequence of the construction of the Panama Canal , but had already applied to the father Varamos, who, as a wealthy businessman, married a Chinese woman. In order to make Varamo's social environment understandable, the narrator sees “experienced speech” not only as a literary medium, but for him it becomes “a vital device of trans-subjectivity , without which one would not understand what is going on in social life is going on ”(p. 45). His protagonist is a privileged member of this society because, even if only as a " third-rate writer " (p. 5), he receives a regular state salary and can thus lead a bourgeois life with appropriate free time, in which he not only has his whole house , but makes " all of Colón, all of Panama " his secret laboratory (p. 26). His predominant concern does not so much relate to his role as a bachelor, but to dealing with his difficult mother, whose only support he is because with her everything seems to revolve around the mother-son-unity as a " primordial constellation " (p. 36).
Critics see the following topics addressed in this “ intellectual fairy tale for adults ”: Aira shows how a society like the Panamanian is ruled by money and its unjust distribution. The public sector is corrupt and does not adequately pay for its employees. The establishment of a state without its own traditions makes Panama easy prey for foreign powers and their economic interests. With their smuggling with members of the better classes, the Góngora sisters provide an example of self-evident criminal behavior: " After all, in modern capitalist society everyone safeguards their own interests, and crime was only the adequate and natural form of safeguarding interests " (p. 69) . " The pirated publishers who will ultimately publish his brilliant poem are only interested in the market and in business, they are not interested in literature itself, you write what makes money ."
reception
Hans-Martin Gauger rated the novel in the FAZ as “ short, cheerful, humorous, funny, mildly satirical, witty, full of realistic imagination, cultivated, well done - and not just 'made', but also beautifully naive, because this is the difficulty: intelligence alone is not enough, maybe it is not even a necessary condition. In addition, the book is exciting, although there is almost no criminal or eroticism ”.
Maja Rettig wrote for literaturkritik.de that Aira was producing sheer nonsense in his reflections on the genesis of the poem by Varamo, with which he violated all literary laws " with which the narrator himself is very familiar ". She comes to the conclusion that " César Aira at least (...) with this 'wrong' story of forgeries (has) written an absolutely inspiring work, not to be surpassed in terms of complexity and clever comedy - Borges in everything equal ".
For the Peruvian literary scholar José Miguel Herbozo, the novella is similar in its peculiarities to the other works of Aira: the author shows his readers the veins and mechanisms of his literary fiction without harming the storytelling process. After all unexpected turns of phrase, the effect of chance reflects not only the future, but also a past, where everything becomes something else in reality or according to the author's will.
Individual evidence
- ↑ The page numbers refer to the edition of both the “novel” and “novella” published by Klaus Wagenbach Verlag , Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-8031-2636-8 .
- ↑ This is completely different in Aira's novel Die Mestizin from 1978/1981, where money in the border region around Coronel Pringles is printed in all variants by the Argentine commander of the border fort as well as on the Indian side, without the question of whether the respective money is wrong could, ever poses.
- ↑ Dietmar Hillebrandt on "Varamo"
- ↑ "Conditions of a Masterpiece"
- ↑ "Song of the work of art from the spirit of forgery"
- ↑ A Peruvian assessment