The first sentence arrested my attention by way of a sort of paradox: “I first encountered Dreux on an afternoon in autumn; the deer, precisely five years later.” How, I wondered, could one ever know what was precisely five years later than a time imprecise as “an afternoon in autumn?” I had to mull that over not only as a common reader, but as an editor, because I have been Maria Gainza’s editor, over a period of several years when she was contributing occasional reviews of exhibitions in Buenos Aires to Artforum. The last of those, a quick search of the magazine’s website reminds me, was in 2012, two years before she published her first novel, El nervio óptico, very much the work of an art historian and critic, a devotee of emphatic looking. (She published a second novel, still untranslated, in 2018.) I couldn’t help reflect that, as Gainza’s editor, I probably would have taken exception to that sentence’s vagueness mashed up against the claim of precision. So why do I like it in a novel? Maybe that’s because I still believe—quixotic as it may sound—that a review should be something like what’s called nonfiction, and that it should clear at least some small area of knowing within the vast range of my ignorance; whereas a novel may have more to do with unknowing, uncertainty, and contradiction than anything else—not clearing them away but exploring them as such. That’s why a novel (at least this kind of novel, the semi-fragmented self-examination of a “discontinuous first-person” à la Renata Adler—though from time to time, inexplicably and unfortunately, it turns second person) is where, as Gainza says, “you write one thing in order to talk about something else.” What else is Gainza talking about? It’s hard to put your finger on. About a third of the way through the book, I was reading it on the beach when, unexpectedly, a friend happened to pass by. He stopped for a socially-distanced chat? “What’s the book about?” I didn’t know how to answer. “Um, it’s about a particular person living in Buenos Aires.” I think he thought I must be going daft. “It’s the kind of novel that doesn’t have a plot,” I added, hoping that this would somehow justify my inarticulacy. If I’d read further into the book by then I might have been able to explain that—although this is not at all the same thing as inarticulacy—the book is about the insufficiency (which of course also means the necessity) of words in the face of art, that is, of the way, for instance, “before a Rothko, you might reach for something meaningful to say, only to end up talking nonsense.” I have to say, though, that I prefer it when Gainza’s unnamed narrator muses over works, not by renowned artists like Rothko or Courbet—the familiar stories of their lives and work can feel potted—but rather by forgotten figures who I might have imagined were fictions: for instance the early twentieth-century Argentine artiste maudit Augusto Schiavoni, in one of whose portraits the narrator find her own double, aged eleven; or Alfred de Dreux, who you’ll remember she encountered in the book’s first sentence, a protégé of Géricault once renowned as a painter of horses. The hunting scene she sees in a private collection
pulses with atavistic symbolism: the struggle between good and evil, light and dark. The deer is about to die. One of the dogs sinks its teeth into the back; another, a leg. The deer on the verge of giving in, is goggle-eyed with the same helpless astonishment as the hare described in Lampedusa’s The Leopard: “Don Fabrizio found himself being stared at by big black eyes soon overlaid by a glaucous veil: they were looking at him with no reproval, but full of tortured amazement at the whole ordering of things.”
Gainza’s glancing literary references are impeccable: Cyril Connolly, Danilo Kiš, Jean Rhys…the sea she translates through Marguerite Duras, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Sylvia Plath. As for her eyes, evidently big enough whatever their color, they, like the dying deer’s, are full of amazement, though not tortured by it; just, for now, observantly perturbed.
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Maria Gainza, Optic Nerve, translated by Thomas Bunstead, is published by Catapult, New York, 2019.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.