The Miracle Cures Of Dr. Aira (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
‘Just because there had not yet been any miracles, however, didn’t mean they couldn’t happen…’We live in a world dominated by the media. In a world where nearly anyone can have a camera primed and ready in their pockets, where everything we say or do can be unearthed by digging around the internet, we are constantly under the threat of having any of our actions called to the table for mass public scrutiny. César Aira’s novel, The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, written at the turn of the century as the internet media was rapidly booming, examines the shrinking place of miracles in a world where nearly anything can be scrutinized, compartmentalized, and rationalized while being broadcast to the masses. Aira, as author and narrator, unveils the plight of Dr. Aira, a producer of medical miracles, as he attempts to document his Miracle Cures while evading the skeptical eyes of the media controlled by his nemesis Dr. Actyn. In a fantastic, cyclical manner, Aira takes the reader on a highly abstract and metafictional examination of the Novel as a metaphor of miracles in a world where our reputation is foremost and fragile. [T]exts withstand time only when they are associated with an author whose actions in life—of which their texts are the only tangible testimony—excite the curiosity of posterity.One false step, one poor public display, can ruin an person forever. We place vast importance of a person’s personal reputation, which often overshadows their work. It only takes one ridiculous outburst from an actor or actress for the masses to forget the artist’s outstanding performances or only one embarrassing thread of personal detail has to surface can cause a public figures greatest works to be neglected. However, do the unsightly personal details really change the words written in a novel; the breathtaking stage delivery; the brushstrokes on a canvas? Aira, who is himself a bit shy of the public realm and rarely does interviews, fills his Miracle Cures with the public eye that is always watching and aching to witness the downfall of a fellow human. Dr. Aira’s nemesis will stop at nothing, resorting to highly elaborate play-acting in an attempt to catch a display of the ‘miracles’ on tape where they can be examines and stripped of their glory through (what he hopes to be) simple rationality and thusly destroying Dr. Aira’s glory. ‘Dr. Actyn had mobilized the mass media in his attempt to destroy his prestige.’ Whoever controls the media controls the context and therefor the message, and one can quickly understand why Aira would distrust the growing media that could ruin any artist with one out-of-context quotation, video clip or skewed representation.The doctor’s attempts at writing his miracle cures echo author Aira’s own slim novels (as does the character’s name and hometown of Pringles). Aira attempts to usher us across the distinction between the particular and the general as he, like the doctor, doesn’t blatantly reveal his ideas, but offers us a window into them through a metaphoric representation, or ‘do-it-yourself-examples’. Dr. Aira’s miracles, written in numerous, short installments, were then veiled from scientific scrutiny. he was a theoretician, one could almost say a “writer,” and the only thing that linked him to the Miracle Cures was a kind of metaphor…Hence, their miraculous charm would never coincide with any proof, and the underlying theory would be left untouched. Only by dint of useless miracles could one prevent a theory from degenerating into a dogma.Much like the numerous, short novels by César Aira (this one being only 80pgs in length), Aira is able to create many particular stories that can be unpacked to unveil a general statement towards the world. In short, the miracle cure installments are a particular of the generalization of his literary projects.The true genius of Aira is presented in the way the doctor’s miracles and literature coincide. For Dr. Aira, miracle are a work of art, much like how a novel is a work of art for César Aira. Miracles are only miracles when ‘the precise boundary between what was and was not a miracle had not yet been established.’ Through Actyn’s scrutiny, he could disenfranch any miracle by rationalizing what happened and transform the miraculous into a mere outlying—yet explainable—chunk of data for the masses to tear apart in their disillusioned fury. A novelist is under a similar scrutiny at all times, where a critic can undermine an entire book by illuminating an overlooked structural flaw. In Actyn’s world, there are no miracles, there is only cold science and reason. Under these conditions, a miracle was simply impossible. But it could be created indirectly, through negation, by excluding from the world everything that was incongruent with it occurring.Anything can occur if the forces that make it impossible are removed. Aira directs our attention to the way a novel works: any plot is possible if it is orchestrated to remove any obstacles of such-and-such event occurring. It’s as simple as putting a cellphone dead-zone into a horror plot to ensure the characters can’t simply call the police. Dr. Aira’s miracle cures (the explanation of which is quite incredible and well done, yet cannot be touched upon without ruining the novel and offering a premature explanation for his ‘labyrinthian past’ and somnambulistic nature) are reflective of the god-like abilities of an author to create and reshape reality to allow their stories to transpire. The author becomes a miracle worker of their own metaphysical universe, offering structured, realy-made, particular examples that hint at their generalizations. The trick was to put into play the greatest of encyclopedias and to compile the relevant list from that. Who could do that? The customary response, the one that had been offered since oldest antiquity was: God. And to remain with that meant Miracles would have stayed within his jurisdiction. Dr. Aira’s originality was in postulating that man could do it, too.Here’s an example that sort of fits, and a true story at that. The night I finished this short book, I had done a bit too much drinking and thinking and in some strange depressive and frustrated funk, decided to delete my Goodreads account. The second I clicked the ‘ok’ button, regret and grief exploded in me and I began cursing the world around me. Then I realized that I couldn’t navigate to any other page, or even go back to Goodreads to see the void where my reviews once were, and realized at the exact moment I clicked ‘ok’ (I rapidly went through it like ripping a band-aid off because I’m guessing I subconsciously knew I’d stop myself if I didn’t), the internet went out temporarily. In fact, by the time I got back inside from my shame-cigarette, the internet was back up and my account was still active because I had been disconnected when trying to destroy it. Jules from Pulp Fiction would call that an act of God, some would call it luck, some would state the statistic probability of losing service at that moment, some would call me a liar, etc. All I know, and all I care about, is that somehow I lost internet service microseconds before pulling the trigger. Had this been a novel I was writing, I would have shaped the reality of the novel to make the possibility of deactivation incongruous with the events that transpired, almost like playing God with my characters. In Aira’s world, Dr. Aira would have altered all the facts of reality, the ‘encyclopedia’ of reality, to ensure that the internet would have went down at that moment. This anecdote is rather irrelevant, but it felt poignant having occurred the same night as completing this book about miracles.This was a fun romp through Aira’s metafictional mind and ensured that I would be reading far more of him in the future. While An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter resided in a more grounded reality while offering a glimpse into the abstract, Miracle Cures floats in the peripheries of abstraction and looks back at how it can reshape reality. It is this abstract look that really won me over, and I am excited to learn that most of his novels (or novellas, depending on how you want to label them) are in this same vein that almost borders on magical-realism (enough so to warrant mention, but not enough so that it should frighten away any readers who interpret magical-realism as a sort of literary cancer). This book is best served to those who are already acquainted with Aira, since much of the joy comes from drawing up the parallel’s between the authorial voice and character as well as the discussions on the Miracle Cure installments, however, it can be enjoyed by anyone. Aira elevates authors to a god-like status in this tale of dodging the media’s noose and reminds us all how easily a public image can be shattered, and the lengths our enemies will go to allow the public to enjoy watching another fall from grace.4/5‘The plausible had completely changed. Laughter was justified; happiness needed no other motive.’
embarking upon a newly translated césar aira novella is often as exciting an experience as the story itself. given that the argentine author is so astonishingly prolific, one never really knows quite what to expect from his fiction- save, of course, for the creativity and originality so common in his writing. with this, even when a particular aira story fails to be as captivating as the last one, it is nonetheless an enjoyable read.the miracle cures of dr. aira (curas milagrosas del doctor aira) is the slim tale of a preternaturally gifted and beleaguered doctor constantly set upon by his colleague, detractor, and nemesis, dr. actyn. in the author's hometown of coronel pringles, dr. aira finds himself reluctant to share his impressive talent of late on account of the ongoing ridicule it seems to attract. whether the good doctor can be convinced to employ his curative skills at the risk of further humiliation may well determine the course of both his professional career and personal life.among the many marvels of césar aira's fiction is the way in which he deposits the reader directly into his story, free from excessive or extraneous introduction and exposition. aira seems to trust his reader enough that this direct immersion into whatever world he has created (one that does not always conform precisely to reality) will not prove to be a hindrance. known as he is for writing directly and without revision, aira's novellas are thus marked by an unpolished quality that perhaps paradoxically lend his works a transcendent aesthetic, as if maybe he had indeed mapped out the entire story all along. this is not likely a strategy that would work well for most authors, but with aira it infuses his writing with a certain and distinctive charm. not knowing himself how a particular story may turn out as he is writing it, aira eliminates (or at least ought to) the latent tendency in a reader to attempt a guess at where the plot may be headed. the miracle cures of dr. aira, to this reader at least, is not aira's finest tale, yet it still somehow comes off as compulsory and delighting a work as any that have yet been translated into english. he looked at the trees along josé bonifacio street, and it occurred to him that they were machines designed to crush the world until the atoms were released. that's how he felt, and this was the natural effect of theater. who said that lies lead to the truth, that fiction flows into reality? theater's misfortune was this definitive and irreversible dissolution. that was also its gravity, above and beyond the iridescent lightness of fiction.*rendered from the spanish by katherine silver (the literary conference, castellanos moya, martín adán, daniel sada, et al.)
What do You think about The Miracle Cures Of Dr. Aira (2012)?
http://www.full-stop.net/2012/12/03/r...Review by Alli CarlisleIn César Aira’s The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, the main character, Dr. Aira, is troubled by an excess of the ruminative faculty. We meet him wandering down a street in Buenos Aires, contemplating human dominance of the planet and the way moments of embarrassment, social awkwardness, have punctuated the grammar of his existence. Dr. Aira, very noticeably a namesake of the author, strikes one as perhaps a bit hapless, absorbed as he is in self-reflection and in discoursing to a tree, allowing his meditations on his own past social roughnesses and the nature of reality to catch him in eddies of thought. The philosophy Dr. Aira constructs in his head in this scene, one decidedly opposed to realism, sets the tone for the rest of the book: “In order for action to be effective, one had to depart from the purely reasonable, which would always be an abstract way of thinking devoid of any truly practical use.”In the midst of his placid if heavy contemplation, a sudden flurry of action introduces us to the main thrust of the story. Two young doctors in an ambulance pick up Dr. Aira and implore him to save a dying man. Dr. Aira, we find, is a Miracle Healer, and a famous one. But the request to save the dying man is a complicated one — Dr. Aira suspects that the men have been sent by his arch enemy, Dr. Actyn, a zealous devotee of the medical sciences who apparently goes to excruciating efforts to expose Dr. Aira and his Miracle Cures as lies. Dr. Aira, consequently, goes to great efforts to avoid being caught, refusing even to try one of his Cures on the seemingly dying man.Read more here: http://www.full-stop.net/2012/12/03/r...
—Full Stop
César Aira is flooding the market with his books—at least the Spanish-reading market (the English translation market cannot catch up). His is a thorough and deliberate exercise in style: each novel a miraculous variation of each other. The words within a single work are often self-referential, both to the work and to Aira's entire oeuvre itself. Consider a passage in the middle of The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira. The first thing was to begin publishing his installments of the Miracle Cures. First of all, obviously, he had to write them ... But at the same time he didn't need to write them because throughout the last few years he had filled an unbelievable number of notebooks with elaborations on his ideas; he had written so much that to write any more, on the same subject, was utterly impossible, even if he'd wanted to. Or better said, it was possible, very possible; it was what he had been doing year after year, in the constant "changing of ideas" that were his ideas. Continuing to write or continuing to think, which were the same, was equivalent to continuing to transform his ideas. That had been happening to him from the beginning, ever since his first idea.It will not be a spoiler, for it is already obvious, if we say that Dr. Aira's "miracle cures" are also the real César Aira's extra-large quantity of publications. The miracle worker is the novelist himself, but the novelist is not trying to be subtle about it. That both of them share a name only indicates that one of them, or either of them, may be trying to pass himself off as the other. Every other statement in that passage is a contradiction of the previous one (he had to write them ... he didn't need to write them; to write any more, on the same subject, was utterly impossible ... it was possible, very possible). He attributed this self-contradiction to his perpetual "changing of ideas" ("perpetual flux", he later said) or continuous transformation of ideas. He said it "had been happening ... from the beginning", from the get-go. Let us then consider here the beginning, the first paragraph of the novella.One day at dawn, Dr. Aira found himself walking down a treelined street in a Buenos Aires neighborhood. He suffered from a type of somnambulism, and it wasn’t all that unusual for him to wake up on unknown streets, which he actually knew quite well because all of them were the same. His life was that of a half-distracted, half-attentive walker (half absent, half present) who by means of such alternations created his own continuity, that is to say, his style, or in other words and to close the circle, his life; and so it would be until his life reached its end—when he died. As he was approaching fifty, that endpoint, coming sooner or later, could occur at any moment.Almost every other phrase or clause (unknown streets ... he actually knew quite well) is either a send-up or a comic reinforcement of the preceding. At the level of the sentence, Dr. Aira constantly revises his ideas, inverting the sense where possible. His miracle cures are much sought after because they are "real" cures for the sick. However, his mortal enemy, Dr. Actyn (the name is quite meaningful), wants to expose the good doctor's methods and so keeps taunting him by setting up a trap for him one after another. That is partly the reason why Dr. Aira is wary of patients propositioning him. One of the doctor's escapes from this paranoid state of affairs is writing. He decides to publish his miracle cures in installments. Hence, the implied comparison of dispensing miracle cures to novella-writing is so obvious it does not even need to be concealed.This work, however, turns out to be not only an allegory for writing or the creative process but for the actual publishing process as well. The doctor worries too much about how to include diagrams and illustrations in his planned installments and what other materials to put in, say, an "autobiographical component". He seems to be more concerned about the additional "textual apparatus" and physicality of the text than the contents.As opposed to other objects, texts withstand time only when they are associated with an author whose actions in life—of which their texts are the only tangible testimony—excite the curiosity of posterity. Such posthumous curiosity is created by a biography full of small, strange, inexplicable maneuvers, colored in with a flash of inventiveness that is always in action, always in a state of "happening".With this passage as a clue to interpreting the writer's work (and vice versa, a la Varamo), some of his publishing quirks will no longer puzzle us. It partly explains why in Ema, la cautiva (1981), a very early "installment" of the real Aira, a letter is addressed to the "agreeable reader" at the back of the book. Or why the writer takes pains to bring out his installments in as many venues as possible, in as many small presses as possible, including one that bounds books in between cardboards.More than the art of self-blurbing, more than self-advertising or trying to gain the world record for having the most number of ISBNs, Aira seems to be concerned with encapsulating the modes of production into his own books, dissolving the base into the superstructure, so to speak. More than the commercial and literary considerations of the texts/installments, the accretion of published texts is their concretion, a way to increase a writer's exposure and ubiquity, a way for the writer to actively participate in the merchandise of memory and posterity. Hence, the novels, in addition to being novels, function as their own textual apparatus as well. And it's not the same César Aira production if there's none of the usual idiosyncratic exploration of the novelist's instantaneous (moment-by-moment) method of writing. The way Dr. Aira performs his "miracle cures" at the final section of the book is very instructive in this regard, at least in terms of understanding the novelist's writing and publishing process. Partly revealed is the secret mechanism behind the doctor and the novelist's careful selection of bibliographic (biographical, fictional) details, the material forces that go into book production. The doctor's final miraculous act is a scene to behold: "He looked like Don Quixote attacking his invisible enemies". (His actuations are actually similar to that of Tom Cruise in the movie Minority Report [2002, as in this scene, spoiler alert].) Like the other installments in the series, this book provides another peek into the workings and theatrics of the Airaesque.
—Ryan
The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira (New Directions) by César Aira begins with the title character talking to a tree.So begins another original novel by Argentine-based Aira, whose Varamo was released earlier this year. In this 80-page novel, Dr. Aira is a Buenos Aires doctor who believes he is being followed and filmed in pursuit of his miracle cures.The book is funny and philosophical at times, strange and confusing at others. Take this passage that shows Dr. Aira’s paranoia – and the book’s charm:"He had developed at least one sure method for finding out if somebody was observing him: it consisted of yawning while secretly spying on the one he suspected; if he yawned in turn, it meant his eyes had been on him, because the contagious property of yawns is infallible. Of course, somebody who just happened to be looking at him at that moment might have yawned; and anyway, proof didn’t do him much good, though at least he knew what to expect, which was enough for him."But Aira writes in long sentences that can ramble and may need to be reread. The ending may be a bit mystifying for some readers – but it’s just about what you would expect from the quirky mind of César Aira.Note: This review appeared on my blog, The Hispanic Reader. (http://hispanicreader.com). I received a review copy from the publisher.
—Jessica
