29th of May – Summary of the discussion of César Aira’s ‘Ghosts’ by Cory Nguyen

This week’s session was led by Dr Emily Baker

The Summary of the discussion is written by Cory Nguyen

This week, we discussed César Aira’s novel, Ghosts, an atmospheric text that takes place within a luxury apartment complex in the process of being built. The novel begins by writing of the owners visiting the construction site, seeing the building in the process of being built, yet the narrative later reveals that the space and the text itself is occupied by the Viñas family and various ghosts. Indeed, these titular ghosts are what set Aira’s novel apart from a long line of literary ghosts; they do not evoke a sense of terror. They are so utterly un-ghostly that the ghosts themselves seem to approach a very real, human existence. And here lies an essential question brought up during the seminar: How does one read Aira’s ghosts?

We discussed how Aira’s ghosts seem to be tied up in a complex web of ontological ambiguity—their function within the text resists a singular reading. It was suggested that the physical openness of the space within the novel refers to the open textuality of the novel itself, including, of course, the function of the ghosts. Aira’s text seems acutely aware at all moments of the space surrounding the characters, at one point describing how ‘the whole site was outside’ (5), yet their presence hardly shares the same openness. Though their presence is undoubtedly real, we come to question what these ghosts are and why Aira writes them as he does. He writes, for example, how the ghosts ‘had started shouting, bursting into thunderous peals of laughter that shook the sky’ (47), emphasising a physical affection by the ghosts and affirming their existence. Even in the novel’s last line, ‘man and ghost stared at each other’ (139), Aira places man and ghost in the same state, committing the same act, and we find here a certain mirroring, an ontological equivalence between man and ghost. In this manner, the ghosts assume a certain presence that perhaps rivals that of their human counterparts, sharing the Viñas’ ghostly presence within the building.

This apparent presence is the reason why it was brought up that Aira’s ghosts seem not to haunt, as we expect ghosts to do. Ghosts tell you that something has happened, they are themselves signs that a haunting is taking place; yet, there is a sense of ahistoricity in the ghosts’ existence. Indeed, Aira portrays within his novel a tension between space and time. Patri, the Viñas’ eldest daughter, dreams at one point of ‘an art that would be instantaneously real, without ghosts’ (57). The ghosts certainly seem to be real, but at the same time they reflect the Derridean spectre in that they occupy a space of ambiguity, a space between the state of being finished and unfinished. That space ironically, of course, is time. The ghosts disappear when art occurs instantaneously, their very existence is tied with the notion of time. It is here that the forward motion of the ghosts came up, with the entire novel situating itself on a border of time, New Year’s Day, with the underlying knowledge of the forward progression of time. The ghosts, like time, want to move forwards, to fly forwards, yet their occupation within the very transitory state of the building prevents them from doing so. Just as the ghosts seem to have no history, they seem to have no future either; they do not seem to precede anything. The ghosts occupy a present that cannot be projected past itself. In this manner, Aira subverts the notion of spectrality and haunting, because the ghosts neither belong to the past nor the future; their present presence subverts the literary expectations of ghosts. The ghosts do not strike fear to those who see them, nor are they characterised by some subterranean existence. They stand out in the open, on a hot Summer’s day, inciting irritation in the building’s inhabitants. It is Aira’s open defiance of the ghostly genre that forces open the text, allowing no reliance on previously established expectations.

One of the most peculiar points about the ghosts is that they are not seen by the rich, bourgeois owners of the apartment complex, only the proletarian Viñas family, to whom their existence is hyper-normalised to the point that their existence, so undoubtedly and excessively real, becomes a nuisance. One suggested reading of the ghosts pivoted around this intermediary role of the ghosts, the link between the two social groups. In this manner, we read through the ghosts to reach the humans. In this reading, the ghosts were metaphorically read as representing the means of production, which the owners refuse or lack the ability to recognise. To the Viñas, who work to construct the building, however, the existence of the ghosts is as real as their own. Their irrefutable existence to the Viñas proves not to be irrefutable after all—to the owners, the ghosts lack recognition and thus the certainty of their existence seems to shatter.

Yet the idea that the ghosts only function as a pivot was challenged in other readings, such as the ghosts as a mirror of the Viñas family. Elisa, the mother, bleaches the clothes of her family with the goal of whiteness and pallidity— they want to become ghosts to avoid being seen, to avoid being recognised as illegal immigrants. The ghost, here, is read as a social figure, stemming from the Viñas’ need to hide their identity by becoming invisible to the Argentinians. The desire to become ghost plays an important role in the novel when Patri is presented with a dilemma: she is invited to the ghosts’ ‘Big Midnight Feast’, but to attend, she would need to be a ghost. Though one ghost tells her ‘of course you’ll have to be dead’ (105), we are left unsure of whether this is true. How does one become a ghost? Is it truly through death? Can the Viñas only fulfill their desire through death? The novel ends with Patri deciding to go to the party, but Aira never explicitly states that she becomes a ghost. He writes two lines: ‘Patri leaped into the void. And that was it’ (138). Is it a Lacanian death drive that incites her to jump off of the roof of the unfinished building, or is it simply the desire to become ghost? What does she achieve? It is important to recall the fact that Aira’s ghosts differ greatly from traditional ghosts, and here we question whether or not it is even in death that one becomes a ghost. Aira, of course, cleverly leaves Patri’s final jump wildly ambiguous, yet the key to understanding his ghosts lies in those two lines, not knowing Patri’s final fate. Patri jumps into a void, a space of ambiguity, of both being and non-being. Only in this manner, perhaps, does she become a ghost.

The discussion turned towards the physical characteristics of the ghosts at one point, focusing on their masculinity and their nakedness. The complete lack of embarrassment from the side of the ghosts and the side of the Viñas becomes almost comical, such as when Patri was almost caught ‘peeking’ at a ghost’s penis, but felt that ‘their laughter proved her innocence’ because she ‘did not feel that she had been “peeking” at the ghost’s genitalia, not at all’ (49). Aira almost seems to satirise the quasi-macho haughtiness of the ghosts, but this, again, is tied to the openness of the ghosts. Is their nakedness a display of masculinity that perpetuates the capitalistic exploitation of machismo? Is their nakedness a comment on the bareness of the transitory state of writing? Of architecture? Of art in general? Or perhaps even, despite their apparent ahistoricity, their nakedness emblematises the trauma in the Southern Cone, a present trauma, one that is rebuilt in the present military and capitalist violence deriving from the incorporation into a global neoliberal ideology. The trauma is laid bare, normalised, and to an extent, even scorned. Yet, Aira leaves their nakedness at just that. The ghosts are naked, ‘and that [is] it’.

Aira’s ghosts are enigmatic figures, not because we do not try to know them, but because we cannot know them. Our framework of understanding is insufficient from what Aira decides to tell us. He leaves us not in the dark, but rather, he leaves us in the open. And because of this, we find ourselves stuck in the same incompleteness as the building, as if we can never truly finish this act of reading.

by Cory Nguyen