Procedures for Drawing the Event of the Indians: On Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter

In Ricardo Piglia’s Artificial Respiration, The Character Marcelo Maggi writes: “Since the discovery of the New World, nothing has happened in these parts that deserves the slightest attention” (1998, 17–18). In the following essay, the eccentric thesis that the conquest represents the sole event—all others stand as mere epiphenomenal reflections—of Latin American history will pave the way both for a reading of César Aira’s An Episode in the Life of Landscape Painter (2000) and a rethinking of the very idea of an “event.” Contemporary interest in the latter issue, at least within Latin American studies, springs from the recent or recently translated works of Alain Badiou (2005), in particular the aptly titled Being and Event.¹ Yet important meditations on eventhood have existed for quite some time. Deleuze, Lyotard, and Derrida have all tackled the matter in detail. Heidegger’s effort to counter his own emphasis on being in his earlier works with an exploration of Ereignis (the event of appropriation) in On Time and Being (1972) stands as an “urmoment” within the endeavor.

For no concept of the event can fail to focus upon the relationship of beings and events. Both are names for the origin. They—the “first beginning” and the “other beginning,” as Heidegger puts it—are hence inseparable; but they are also irreducible the one to the other. Beings originate in and reflect the eidos, the ideal.² As such, they persist in time and space. They present themselves in their temporal-spatial representations, even if such appearances are just appearances rather than the being itself. Events, conversely, are singular. They happen once or at once, occupying no temporal-spatial extension. Emerging through no cause-effect continuum, they are not accidents, miracles, or coincidences either. Thus, not even expressions such as “brief occurrence,” “instant,” or “blink of an eye” can account for the time of events, since all measurement presupposes extension, eidos.³

However, discourses on the event, even ones as disparate as Badiou’s and Heidegger’s, also posit events as impactful. Events influence history beyond the “once,” the singularity; they carry over. A contradiction or even impossibility seems to arise. If events, such as the “discovery of the New World,” hold sway over later (or redefine earlier) incidents, they by logic persist, even if as the disruption between two epochs, even if solely in their traces. And if events run on, they can only do so as presences set off, like all presences, from the representations in which they “merely” appear. Events last; it would seem also, then, that they must be the very beings that they must not be, if they be events. One thereby understands the temptation to reduce events to absences within the field of representation: events are, but cannot be represented. Here, though, the schism between what is and what happens (beings and events) slides into the more traditional splits between reality and appearance, fact and language, eidos and mimesis, subject and object. And, in the Western metaphysical tradition, that very difference is eidos—not event. Exemplifying the slippage would be the many Latin Americanist postcolonial scholars who, in response to Maggi-like articulations, sustain that the statement “discovery of the New World” itself falsifies Latin America’s authentic beginnings. Latin America obviously existed for myriad peoples before the conquest, and hence was hardly discovered in 1492. The truth of Latin American history is lacking from its Eurocentric portraits. Postcolonial scholarship, consequently, views as its mission that of rectifying Western images of Latin America, images that aid in the violent deletion of the pre-Colombian foundations or essence. The erasure of the true events surfaces as itself the event, the blow that informs and continues to inform the unfolding of Latin America.

However, if the event of Latin America is this hole in the story of Latin America’s descriptions or names, if the event is the thing about which the Latin Americanist both must speak and cannot speak (that is, cannot represent: the event...