César Aira: The Conversations

I was more prepared to explain how Kant had written his three Critiques than how an adventure movie was made. Even so, I had one idea. I had read somewhere that there was never only one screenwriter who developed the script for a movie, but rather a group, and a large group at that. This was understandable, due to the huge capital investments involved. The studios could not depend on the inspiration or talent of a single individual, because that would be like betting everything on a single card, and North American businessmen prefer to play it safe. In the first place, of course, because the creativity of a single person necessarily tips things too far toward the personal and the idiosyncratic, necessarily limiting the target audience. But the principle motivation is practical: to tightly pack in the attractions by filling the dead times that inevitably exist in a story told by a single person. Refined after decades of practice, the assembling of those groups of screenwriters follows a well-thought-out division of labor: one specializes in jokes, another in romance, another in science, another in politics; there is an expert in verisimilitude, one in police procedural, one in psychology, and so on. From the artistic point of view, the method has its advantages and its disadvantages. Personal unity of the imagination is lost, and one runs the risk of reducing the flights of fantasy to a normative level of consensus and conformity. A superior, transpersonal unity, however, can be achieved. After all, the solitary mind is also subject to multiplicities that create consensus around unconscious conventions and conformity, and it is very possible that a real multiplicity could liberate energies that would otherwise remain dormant.

We need to be sensitive to these arguments because to a certain extent they could be applied to us. What is attractive about conversations is right there: in the other being truly an other , and in his thoughts being unfathomable to his interlocutor. When I go over conversations at night, alone, I turn into the artist or the philosopher who works his material at his will, like the director of a movie who does what he wants to or can do with the script. I, like all of them, have to face the superior unity of collective creation. However, the simile of movies is not quite right because I do not work with cameras and actors and stage sets but rather only with thoughts, and thoughts are made only of words.

Everything is made of words, and the words had done their job. I could even say they had done it well. They had risen in a confusing swarm and spun around in spirals, ever higher, colliding and separating, golden insects, messengers of friendship and knowledge, higher, higher, into that region of the sky where the day turns into night and reality into dreams, regal words on their nuptial flight, always higher, until their marriage is finally consummated at the summit of the world.

February 2, 2006