The Villa and La Villa by César Aira: Territory and Literature in the Folds of Crisis

Abstract

From the notions of territory and urban island elaborated by Ludmer (2020), this work proposes a reading of Cesar Aira's La villa that problematizes some aspects of Ludmer's reading of the novel and theoretical speculation. It is suggested that what unites the inhabitants of the shantytown and makes community is not given by an invariant biological substrate, but by a series of practices that emerge as «sudden adaptations» to the precariousness imposed by the Argentine crisis of the late 1990s. The practices constitute improvisations of collective invention, with which the shantytown inhabitants organize the territory and transform their living conditions. Elaborated with precarious materials, the writing of the novel is permeated by these practices, whose logic it adopts as a constructive principle of the plot. The shantytown and La villa, the territory and Aira's writing are identified as inventions of new possibilities of life in the fold of the neoliberal crisis. Finally, the territory makes it possible to distinguish the literature of La Villa from both modern autonomous literature and the way television works.