Bulletin of Spanish Studies

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China in Argentine Exotismo: Contemporary

Inventions of the Orient

Amanda Holmes

To cite this article: Amanda Holmes (2008) China in Argentine Exotismo:

Contemporary Inventions of the Orient, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 85:1, 71-83, DOI:
10.1080/14753820701791528

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Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume LXXXV, Number 1, 2008

China in Argentine Exotismo:

Contemporary Inventions of the
Orient
AMANDA HOLMES
McGill University, Montreal

Building on pre-conceived notions of China, César Aira (b.1949) in Una

novela china (1987) develops the image of the Asian country to portray an
exotic landscape open for fictional experimentation.1 While in such novels as
Cómo me hice monja (1993), La mendiga (1998) and El mago (2002), Aira
chooses a character identity to allow for expressive liberty*the child, the
beggar and the magician all self-referentially represent authors in the
respective works*in Una novela china, the exoticized setting opens up
the fictional space to liberal manipulations of plot and characters. As Aira’s
literary projects are defined in part by the creation of a fiction unrestricted by
conventional limits on the imagination, the choice of an exotic, and often
Oriental, setting becomes another literary tool for exploring this concept, one
exploited, moreover, by several Argentine authors in the 1980s and early
1990s. Novels published in this era such as Daniel Guebel’s La perla del
emperador (1990), Alberto Laiseca’s La hija de Kheops (1989) and La mujer
en la muralla (1990) use ‘exotic’ settings, Malaysia, Egypt and China
respectively. In ‘Nuevos avances y retrocesos de la nueva novela
argentina’, Martı́n Caparrós explains this trend as characteristic of the
‘nueva narrativa’, an attempt to carve a ‘new’ perspective for literary repre-
sentation. That*as Caparrós explains*these authors ‘casi paródicamente’
called their literary group, ‘Shanghai’, points to the complexity of the image
of the Orient for them.2 Although the Chinese city of Shanghai exemplifies
the ‘exotic’, these authors are aware that this representation develops
from their vantage point as Argentine writers. Their consciousness of
their subject-position allows them to maintain exotic elements in their

1 The dates for Aira’s novels in the text are those of the first edition of publication,
rather than those that appear at the end of each novel.
2 Martı́n Caparrós, ‘Nuevos avances y retrocesos de la nueva novela argentina en lo
que va del mes de abril’, Babel, 2:10 (1989), 4345 (p. 43).

ISSN 1475-3820 print/ISSN 1478-3428 online/08/01/000071-13

# Bulletin of Spanish Studies. DOI 10.1080/14753820701791528
72 BSS, LXXXV (2008) AMANDA HOLMES

representations of the Orient, while they simultaneously acknowledge that

they are fabricating images that belong to the realm of fiction.
As Caparrós expresses in his article, and Graciela Montaldo3 and Sandra
Contreras4 both reiterate in their analyses of Argentine exoticism of this era,
these authors respond to Jorge Luis Borges’s seminal essay, ‘El escritor
argentino y la tradición’, in which Borges famously insists that the Argentine
author need not set his work in Argentina.5 Citing as an example the absence
of camels in the Koran, Borges argues for an openness in literary expression
for the Argentine author. Caparrós observes poetically that, while Borges
probably did create a new Argentine tradition, ‘donde ser argentino
signifique escribir sin poner los camellos por delante’, some of the
contemporary authors remain so confined by this prescription as those ‘de
la caravana marchando en medio del simún, bebiendo en oasis de folklorismo
y representación de lo inmediato’.6 In Montaldo’s account of the impact of
Borges’ article on Argentine letters, the critic similarly notes two
contemporaneous trends. Although Borges opened the limits of Argentine
fiction by inspiring authors to include a wide range of settings, he also
restricted other literary forms, ironically including adventure literature, a
genre to which Borges was, in fact, partial.7 The exoticist novels of the 1980s
and early 1990s counter the limitations imposed*albeit unwittingly*by
Borges by embracing the genre of adventure literature. Simultaneously, they
employ distant settings, ‘suavemente utópicas’,8 open to the possibilities of
fiction, allowing for a change of perspective on the perception of Argentina.
The introduction of exoticism into whichever site they choose*Copi’s La
internacional argentina (1988) and Aira’s Ema, la cautiva (1978) and La
liebre (1987) exoticize Argentina itself*allows these authors to revisit the
concept of the ‘exotic’ from the perspective of a Latin-American who writes
from an ‘exotic’ space. That the image of the exotic for these Argentine
writers includes Argentina as well as Oriental and European sites indicates a
reaction not only to Borges’ prescriptive essay, but also to the style of magical
realism with which writers of the literary Boom consciously exoticized Latin
America, creating a universal appeal for their narratives. These post-Boom
Argentine authors choose to expand the realm of the exotic in order to

3 Graciela Montaldo, ‘Un argumento contraborgiano en la literatura argentina de los

años 80 (Sobre C. Aira, A. Laiseca y Copi)’, Hispamérica: Revista de Literatura, 19:55 (1990),
10512.
4 Sandra Contreras, Las vueltas de César Aira (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2002).
5 César Aira’s essay ‘Exotismo’ also debates Borges’ article. Here Aira argues against
Borges that it is impossible for the author to shed his or her national identity. See César Aira,
‘Exotismo’, Boletı́n del Grupo de Estudios de Teorı́a Literaria, 3 (1993), 7379. For a lucid
discussion of the argumentation used in this essay by Aira, see Contreras, Las vueltas de
César Aira, 7485.
6 Caparrós, ‘Nuevos avances’, 44.
7 Montaldo, ‘Un argumento contraborgiano’, 106.
8 Caparrós, ‘Nuevos avances’, 45.
CHINA IN ARGENTINE EXOTISMO 73

connect the New World literarily with a range of other landscapes. Along
with this shift of perspective towards Latin-American literary production
comes an explicit focus on spatial representation in these novels. This is
especially true for Aira’s Una novela china, in which spatial images, instead
of temporal or historical references, are emphasized repeatedly in the
depiction of a marvellous China.
While Chinese philosophy, literature and history have influenced
Hispanic culture from the European Age of Exploration, Aira revives and
reframes an exoticized image of the Asian country from a contemporary
context that imagines a China as exotic as any fictionalized setting. Instead
of Edward Said’s classic division between the European Self and the Oriental
Other,9 Aira exploits the Oriental setting to propose that perspective causes
an imbalance, be it through a minimized focus or an amplified vision, in the
identification of what is real. This conceptual premise becomes more potent
in the context of the novel’s composition during the military dictatorship in
Argentina, in which reality was misrepresented in order to impose
oppressive governmental policies. Fiction converges with the real under
these political circumstances; propaganda, corruption and violence lead to
revised notions of the boundary between fiction and reality. In his embrace of
absurdist elements in his novel, Aira does not retreat to Said’s interpretation
of the European equation of the Orient with the Other. Rather, in Una novela
china, the inverosimilitude of the setting serves as an appropriate space from
which to explore the meaning of a distorted vision and the significance of the
literary work in contemporary society. In order to emphasize this distinction
between Aira’s novel and other Latin-American representations of China in
the second part of this study, I shall trace briefly, in the first part, the history
of the depiction of China in Latin-American literature and culture.

I
In the search for revised spatial models in Latin America through which to
represent the late twentieth century, what constitutes the ‘exotic’ loses its
clarity within a new system that accepts shifting perspectives. The
hegemonic model of centre and periphery is being replaced increasingly by
concepts that encompass the encounter and cohabitation of peoples in one
place, evident in conceptual terms such as the ‘contact zone’ (Mary Louise
Pratt) and spatial hybridity (Néstor Garcı́a Canclini).10 The increased
Western exposure to the culture of the Orient, in part through the
displacement of population in emigration and travel, calls into question its
definition as the quintessential Other.

9 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

10 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York:
Routledge, 1992); Néstor Garcı́a Canclini, Culturas hı́bridas: estrategias para entrar y salir de
la modernidad (México DF: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1990).
74 BSS, LXXXV (2008) AMANDA HOLMES

For Julia Kushigian and Araceli Tinajero, alterity does not develop as the
prominent image of the Orient in Hispanic-American literature of the
twentieth century. As Kushigian argues in Orientalism in the Hispanic
Literary Tradition (1991), Hispanic-American Orientalism in twentieth-
century literature recasts the Orient as a space of fusion with Latin
America, rather than the dominated Other of Said’s analysis.11 For
Kushigian, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz and Severo Sarduy all maintain
a respect for the Orient that distinguishes their depictions from those
of their European counterparts. While Araceli Tinajero agrees with
Kushigian’s interpretation of the Orient in twentieth-century Hispanic-
American literature, she contends in Orientalismo en el modernismo
hispanoamericano (2004), that this attitude already appeared in
modernismo’s version of Orientalism.12 Indeed, the representation of the
Orient in twentieth-century Hispanic-American literature as a more revered,
and less distant culture than its depiction in European literature emerges, in
part, from historical and fictional relations between the Orient, particularly
China, and the New World.
The literary connection between the New World and China is evident in
the works of the first New World chroniclers including, most prominently,
Christopher Columbus’ diaries. As is well known, when Columbus
encountered the New World, he was searching for Cathay, the Gran Khan,
along with the gold and the advanced civilization he expected to find ‘there’,
in what for Columbus was supposed to be the Far East. Peter Hulme has
shown that the discursive duality of Columbus’ interpretation of the
encountered territories as both ‘savage’ and a part of a sophisticated
‘Oriental civilization’ plays itself out temporally and spatially in the
diaries: ‘The relationship between them is expressed as that between
present and future: this is a world of savagery, over there we will find
Cathay’.13 By moving continually through this new territory, with the
expectation that it is, in fact, another place, Columbus superimposes the
contemporary European invention of the exotic onto a space as yet unknown
to the Europeans.
In a similar analytical projection, the Spanish Augustinian, Fray Juan
González de Mendoza, more than one hundred years after Columbus’ voyage,
interlaces cultural aspects of Mexico in his travel book on China, Historia de
las cosas más notables, ritos y costumbres del Gran Reino de la China (1585).14

11 Julia A. Kushigian, Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition: In Dialogue with

Borges, Paz, and Sarduy (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1991).
12 Araceli Tinajero, Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano (West Lafayette:
Purdue U. P., 2004).
13 Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean (London:
Routledge, 1992), 21.
14 Nancy Vogeley, ‘China and the American Indies: A Sixteenth-Century ‘‘History’’ ’,
Colonial Latin American Review, 6:2 (1997), 16584.
CHINA IN ARGENTINE EXOTISMO 75

Nancy Vogeley notes that, in his text, Mendoza weaves various perspectives
regarding the exotic subject, perhaps in part because he never travelled to the
Far East, but did spend years in Mexico. In this way, Mendoza represents the
perspective of the European towards the Other of both the Orient and the New
World during the colonial era in his collapse of China and Mexico into foreign,
exotic sites with inhabitants to be governed and converted to Christianity.
While the first projection of the Chinese Other onto the New World
depicted by Columbus creates a conflation of these two territories so distant
from Europe, and Mendoza’s bestselling ‘history’ of China incorporates
images of Mexico into the depiction of the Far East, these texts also have
an impact on the development of Latin-American identity. Araceli Tinajero
underlines one aspect of this shift of perspective towards the meaning of the
exotic for Hispanic literature: the displacement of the exotic from China to
the New World during the Colonial era. The modernista authors of Tinajero’s
analysis write about the ‘exotic’ Orient from their perspective in the ‘exotic’
New World, the exotic self depicting an also exotic other.15 For Tinajero, this
paradox in the definition of ‘exotic’ for the Latin American requires a more
nuanced perception of the Orient from the vantage point of the New World,
specifically for her analysis of Orientalism in modernismo. That the Latin-
American author recognizes the perceived exoticism of his or her home
becomes a principal impetus for the literary production of the ‘nueva
narrativa’ in late twentieth-century Argentina. The colonial European
definition of the ‘exotic’ that includes both the Hispanic ‘self’ and the
Oriental ‘other’ allows contemporary Latin-American authors to explore
the term through apparently contradictory referents. In this sense alterity
also includes what would normally constitute the familiar setting of their
New World home.
By the end of the twentieth century, the Latin-American perception of
China emerges not only from an imagined interpretation of the Orient, but
also from substantial contact with its people, culture and customs. The
nineteenth century already witnessed Chinese immigration to Latin
America, permitting a more informed perception of the Asian country and
its culture. As early as 1847, Chinese workers were brought to Cuba to work
in the sugarcane plantations.16 Between 1851 and 1875, 300,000 Chinese
arrived in the West Indies, British Guyana, Cuba, Peru and Panama.17 Well
documented in Cuban literature, especially in Severo Sarduy’s De donde son
los cantantes (1967) and, recently, Cristina Garcı́a’s Monkey Hunting (2003),

15 Tinajero, Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano, 911.

16 Roberto Echevarrı́a cites this as the first year in which Chinese were brought to
Cuba. According to his research, by 1858 a Chinese restaurant had already been opened in
Havana (Roberto González Echevarrı́a, ‘Introducción’, in Severo Sarduy, De donde son los
cantantes [Madrid: Cátedra, 1993], 1583 [pp. 5051]).
17 Wei Djao, Being Chinese: Voices from the Diaspora (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press,
2003), 23.
76 BSS, LXXXV (2008) AMANDA HOLMES

the influence of Chinese culture on Cuba and other regions of Latin America
adds another layer of complexity to the racial, cultural and ethnic hybridity.
Over the course of the twentieth century to the present day, immigration into
Latin America from China has continued; diplomatic and economic ties have
recently created more intimate relationships between China and countries
such as Chile, Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, Brazil and Cuba.18
While Latin America in the 1980s did not yet enjoy such amenable
connections with China, the perception of the Far East during this era had
changed from that of the earlier part of the twentieth century, mainly
because of China’s interpretation of socialism. Although China’s new political
identity in the twentieth century reframed its representation in Latin-
American literature and culture to include aspects of the socialist country’s
more recent history, the image of China propagated by the Chinese
government sought to maintain its exotic appeal. As interpreted by Megan
F. Ferry, Chinese propaganda posters from the Cultural Revolution that
circulated in Latin America featured a new version of an exotic space
associated with the promotion of its socialist ideology. Ferry argues that
‘even though China wanted to promote itself as a socialist country on a par
with the rest of world, it was still ‘‘orientalized’’ ’.19 Notably, rather than
revise its foreign image as an exotic place, China added ‘revolutionary
paradise’ as another element of its exoticism promoted in its posters,
ostensibly taking advantage of Western Orientalist projections. Ferry
explains further:
Ironically, at the same time as these publications propagated Maoist
ideology, they also exoticized Chinese culture. That is, the visual
propaganda stressed the universality of China’s revolution, but at the
same time exhibited the particular characteristics of Chinese traditional
art. Such a tradition had already circulated the globe during
prerevolutionary relations, and thus, was not imbued with the memory
of a modernizing and vanguard China but of an exotic, faraway land. [ . . .]
For the foreign viewer, China was at once a revolutionary paradise and
an orientalist arts and craft fair.20

The influence of Chinese propaganda posters on twentieth-century

Latin-American politics is evident especially in the interpretations of the

18 Cuba was the first Latin-American country to establish relations with China in 1961,
but it is only since the collapse of the Soviet Union that Cuba’s ties with China have increased
significantly.
19 Megan M. Ferry, ‘China as Utopia: Visions of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in
Latin America’, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 12:2 (2000), 23669 (p. 239).
20 Ferry, ‘China as Utopia’, 250.
CHINA IN ARGENTINE EXOTISMO 77

Communist Party of Peru (Shining Path) in the 1980s, but Maoism also had
an impact on Colombian political movements.21
In the 1950s and early 1960s, before the Cultural Revolution, the
response of official Latin-American visitors to China was one of encounter
with the Other. The Peruvian delegate leader, Jorge Dulanto Pinillos, who
visited China in 1958, equates his anticipation at entering the country with
that of a man’s desire for a woman. Furthermore, Pinillos writes that during
his stay in the Far East, he sought ‘Aladdin’. Other delegates, such as
Margarita Paz Paredes, the Mexican who visits in 1964, and Ricardo Alcalde
Mongrut, a Peruvian visitor in 1959, are struck by the enthusiasm of the
Chinese people for the revolution and their lifestyle. These visitors both
incorporate images in their accounts; Paz Paredes includes paper cut-outs in
her account and Alcalde Mongrut adds photographs, including one entitled
‘China Sonriente’ of women peasants happily working in the field.22 Despite
their first-hand experience in China, these Latin-American visitors perceive
the country as exotic, a reaction that still persists, in part because of the
control imposed by Chinese governmental policy which restricted foreign
access to the Chinese people through the 1980s.
A literary representation of this perception of China can be seen in the
ironically humorous autobiographical novels of Luisa Futoransky.
Especially, Son cuentos chinos (1983), but also, De Pe a Pa: De Pekı́n a
Parı́s (1986), depict China from the perspective of a Jewish Argentine
woman, who works for a year at the English-language radio station in
Beijing, during the late 1970s, just after the infamous Cultural Revolution.
Son cuentos chinos underscores the elements that remove the Argentine from
an understanding of contemporary China: linguistic and cultural divisions
lead Futoransky’s narrator to frustration at her Chinese experience, grateful
for the opportunity to leave the Far East at the year’s conclusion. While
Futoransky portrays China as unwelcoming to foreigners, she ironically
points to the validity of the expression, ‘cuentos chinos’; for Futoransky’s
Argentine narrator, China and its culture remain largely incomprehensible.
Although still exotic, for the Latin American of the 1980s China no longer
represents the same distant, fantasy-like space imagined by the Europeans
during the Colonial era. China is not conflated with the New World, as it was
for Columbus and Mendoza; nor does it represent venerable philosophies and
alternative, but potentially positive, customs and culture as it did for the
modernistas and for the mid-century authors. In the 1980s, China forms part
of Latin America’s complex identity: Chinese immigrants are members of
its population; and China serves also as a radical political example of

21 In her incisive study, Ferry observes similarities between the propaganda posters
circulated by the Chinese government and those produced by the Shining Path in the 1980s.
The second half of her article focuses on the Peruvian interpretation of China during the
Cultural Revolution.
22 Ferry, ‘China as Utopia’, 25456.
78 BSS, LXXXV (2008) AMANDA HOLMES

communism, in particular, for Peru’s Shining Path. While China has become
less fantastic, it still remains exotic, as is evident in the Latin-American
delegates’ response to China, its promotional posters and in Futoransky’s
representation in Son cuentos chinos. After so many Latin-American authors
over the course of the twentieth century have attempted to comprehend
China and its culture, Aira’s novel, Una novela china, which depicts China as
a utopian-style fantasy, would appear to be an anomaly, or at least
dramatically out-of-date. However, this judgment of Una novela china is
only apt outside of its particular context: as an Argentine novel written in
1984 by César Aira.
Sandra Contreras notes that Argentine exile during the military
dictatorship of the 1970s and ’80s led to a revised perspective on
Argentina, not only for those authors living abroad, but also for those still
writing from Argentina.23 Through the ‘telescopio invertido’, Aira and the
writers of the ‘nueva narrativa’ considered the idea of perspective as a means
of reconceiving Argentina during this era.24 The shifting distance between
the viewer and a landscape leads the viewer to a new perception; Aira often
includes images of miniature settings in his novels to emphasize this idea of
perspective.25 The ‘exotic’ setting depends on the distant and ignorant
perspective of the viewer or the reader to be able to fictionalize the
unknown space and incorporate marvellous elements within it. Aira not
only exploits strategies for exoticizing places in his works, but he also
highlights their exotic elements to such a degree that their representations
become parodies of exoticized settings. In this way, exoticism permits the
author to emphasize the concept of perspective, rather than the idea of a
strange and marvellous place.
China, for Aira in the early 1980s, becomes the ideal setting for this
literary project in part because of the complexity of that country’s identity for
Latin America. As Said demonstrates, through its historical relationship
with Europe, China maintains its traditional exotic image. At the same time,
however, through its historical relationship with the New World, the image
of China fuses with that of Latin America. Later, China’s post-revolutionary
political identity allows for a new form of exoticism based on an alternative
ideological system. Finally, real interactions between China and the New
World, through immigration and travel, deflate the traditional idea of China
as an exotic site. In this context, China is as exotic as the perspective of the
viewer, reader or writer allows it to be, the ideal setting for Aira who can
enjoy unrestrained artistic expression in his manipulation of the fictionalized
referent in his novel.

23 Contreras, Las vueltas de César Aira, 6872.

24 César Aira, Copi (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 1991), 21.
25 Aira follows Copi in his use of the image of the miniature in his work. See Aira’s
series of essays, Copi.
CHINA IN ARGENTINE EXOTISMO 79

II
While the title of the novel, Una novela china, underlines the significance of
the setting with a strategy similar to that used by Futoransky in her title,
Son cuentos chinos, a play on the popular expression ‘cuento chino’, Aira
elicits the Far East through references to commonplace knowledge about the
country from the perspective of a Latin-American or, more specifically, an
Argentine reader. Of course, Aira chooses Chinese names for his characters,
and sets the scene in a mountainous countryside, reminiscent of Chinese
landscape paintings, as well as in places such as the Great Wall and Beijing.
The novel refers to well-known Chinese customs such as the drinking of tea,
and games such as mahjong; to political events such as the Long March and
the Cultural Revolution; to socialist politics in references to the proletariat,
the petit bourgeois and, more generally, communism; to strategies for
agricultural management in Lu Hsin’s job to organize the water system
and Hin’s management of an enormous field of sugar beet; as well as to
typical cultural and artistic expression in China in references to dragons,
porcelain jugs and, especially, landscape painting. While these and other
typical elements place the novel in twentieth-century China, these references
are often treated with an irreverence that marks them as stereotypes. For
example, many of the names for characters and places that Aira chooses
begin with the letter ‘h’, silent in Spanish: the novel is set in ‘la Hosa’, with
characters, Lu Hsin, his relatives, Han, his cats, Ha and Huc, his adopted
daughter, Hin, and his friend, Mr Hao.
Along with these stereotypical depictions of China, it would appear that
the subject and setting for the novel were the image of China represented in
propaganda posters during the Cultural Revolution. According to Megan
Ferry, the Chinese publications of this era depicted an exotic image that was
twofold: ‘On the one hand, it is a place reminiscent of the exotic (happy
minority women) and, on the other, it is a place of ultimate perfection
(contented revolutionaries)’.26 Aira’s representation of China portrays not
only the attraction of the ‘minority women’*Lu Hsin adopts and finally
marries a girl from the mountains, part of a minority group whose women he
finds especially attractive*but also a paradisiacal revolutionary
lifestyle*for a time, Lu Hsin and Hin feel deep satisfaction at the
management of their respective unwieldy agricultural projects. Indeed,
Aira amplifies the exoticism of his subject even further by including also
aspects of exotic pre-revolutionary China: the protagonist is initially a
landscape artist; his mother made a living selling toasted watermelon seeds;
he lives a harmonious life in a natural mountainous setting among animals
such as snakes, ducks and bears; he hosts intellectual gatherings in his
house reminiscent of historical meetings of the distant past. To this, Aira
adds incongruous elements to the plot: at one point the characters travel in

26 Ferry, ‘China as Utopia’, 254.

80 BSS, LXXXV (2008) AMANDA HOLMES

an airplane to Beijing, a detail that seems almost anachronous after the

descriptions of village life in the mountains; earlier in the story, a bear leans
over Hin’s crib, but does not harm the baby girl, and is never mentioned
again; and, at another instance in the narrative, the ducks adopted by Hin as
pets all die mysteriously.
While the exotic image of China in Una novela china retains parodic
elements, the novel does not make fun of China itself, but rather of
Orientalism. This becomes most clear in the episode concerning Lu Hsin’s
landscape painting in blue, with which Aira parodies both Oriental and
Occidental cultural traditions. In this scene, Lu Hsin wins a landscape art
contest for tea-dyed paintings with a piece composed solely in blue, a colour
apparently nonexistent in the traditional shades of paints made from tea
leaves. In order to ensure that his painting will not be disqualified from the
competition, the artist invites the judges to taste the new tea he has
discovered at his home to prove that it is, indeed, tea. This art that only
counts as art if its paint has been made from tea leaves is challenged by a
painting in blue, the symbolic modernista colour signifying artistic
inspiration. Here, the Western colour of art defies the Eastern tea-painting
contest; the recipient of the prize has managed to overcome the boundary
between Occidental and Oriental artistic expression. Notwithstanding the
humour, this artistic surmounting of the frontier between East and West
recalls the art of modernismo and its attempt to represent the Orient. Aira
inverts the process: the Western blue enhances the Eastern landscape
painting.
The transformation of landscape painting, exemplified in Lu Hsin’s
introduction of blue, demonstrates changes in perception caused by the
process of artistic representation. In the novel the description of landscape
shifts between the real setting and the painted one. From the simple
statement that describes Chinese art*‘nuestro arte siempre ha sido
pródigo en la pintura de paisajes’27*the border between the painted and
the real landscapes begins to collapse: the Long March is described as ‘un
recorrido por entre la selva de paisajes pintados que caı́an del cielo’ (13), and
the role of the landscape painter is to raise ‘lo real a lo imaginario que lo
volvı́a real, o al menos possible’ (14). Even the ‘real’ setting of the novel
evolves into landscape art. Lu Hsin finds himself entering a painting when
he traverses the mountainous region*he remarks that he enters ‘uno de esos
paisajes en los que tanto habı́a pensado’ (49)*a scene that is usually the
object of representation rather than the setting from which the painter
conceives his piece of art. Here it is as if the painter were moving through his
own creation.

27 César Aira, Una novela china (Buenos Aires: Javier Vergara Editor, 1987), 8. All
subsequent references to the novel are to this edition.
CHINA IN ARGENTINE EXOTISMO 81

As is frequent in Aira’s fiction, and has been studied by Montaldo,

Laddaga and Contreras, manipulations of perspective and the representation
of optics within the novel underscore Aira’s perception of the author as the
constructor of the frame for representation. The author’s gaze shapes and
packages the scene through a distant lens, one that understands a complete
world as if viewing it in miniature. Shifts in visual distance are emphasized
repeatedly; at one point, Lu Hsin declares that in order to gain some
understanding of the world, ‘de ahora en más, todo lo verı́a desde muy lejos’
(46). Moreover, the protagonist is often referred to as observing the world
from afar: ‘mientras tanto dejó vagar la mirada por la distancia’ (48); ‘fumó
mirando a lo lejos’ (49), etc. The views from the airplane and from the Great
Wall in the final scenes of the novel also comment on changes in vision. While
Lu Hsin is fascinated by the landscape perceived from the sky, the
conversation with the tour guide at the Great Wall reiterates concepts of
perspective in a discussion about locating the Wall on earth if viewed from
the moon. Similarly, the description of Lu Hsin’s house as a miniature site
recurs throughout the text, even as the house is redesigned and expanded,
following Reinaldo Laddaga’s assertion that Aira often depicts a diorama in
miniature in his fiction.28
Because the viewer’s gaze defines the artistic product, geographic
interpretations dominate historical understandings in Aira’s representation
of the exotic. This conceptual revision fosters a new strategy for interpreting
reality*initially predicted and espoused by French philosophers, Henri
Lefebvre and Michel Foucault*one that forecasts the importance of the
contemporary in the politics of globalization. More than historical events, the
perception of landscape inscribes aesthetic significance into the site: fiction is
shaped by the author’s vision of the site. In this way, fiction reflects
perception in the globalized era in which economic, political and cultural
relations between countries subsume and dominate the historical perspective
on past events within one geographic site.
The representational significance of the spatial relationships developed
in the novel counters the term, ‘poéticas antirrepresentativas’ applied by
Verónica Delgado to describe the literary strategies employed by the group of
‘nueva narrativa’.29 Especially in the case of Una novela china, this term
should be nuanced to incorporate the partially representative aspect of the
work. Representation on the conceptual level leads the reader to a fresh
interpretation of contemporary ideas. Furthermore, the reader still
recognizes China in the novel, despite its exoticized, fantasy-like depiction.
By casting the Chinese landscape as art, Aira underscores the fictional

28 Reinaldo Laddaga, ‘Una literatura de la clase media. Notas sobre César Aira’,
Hispamérica: Revista de Literatura, 30:88 (2001), 3748.
29 Verónica Delgado, ‘Las poéticas antirrepresentativas en la narrativa argentina de las
dos últimas décadas: César Aira, Alberto Laiseca, Copi, Daniel Guebel’, Celehis: Revista del
Centro de Letras Hispanoamericanas, 6:68 (1996), 25568.
82 BSS, LXXXV (2008) AMANDA HOLMES

aspect of this version of the Asian country, along with an awareness of the
artistic construction of an exotic site. Aira does not exoticize China, but
rather uses the setting as a tool by which to explore the concept of exoticism.
Conventionally, the site that stands for the ‘exotic’, the fictionalized country
of China, rather than the ‘real’ site, is appropriated by Aira as the starting
point for representation.
Therefore, the adoption of the baby girl, Hin, by Lu Hsin represents self-
reflexively the appropriation of the exotic within the fictional-philosophical
frame of the novel: the landscape artist creates Hin, his human art object.30
As a symbol of the exotic within the already exoticized setting of the novel,
Hin comes from a small village in the mountains, a site that is the object of
landscape paintings, and the home of women*‘minority women’ from the
propaganda posters studied by Ferry*who for Lu Hsin epitomize beauty and
desire. While representing the closing of the distance between two settings,
Hin also becomes a symbol for the work of art. The girl is equated with
Western instead of Eastern art in this case, another ludic reversal of
perspective on the nature of the exotic: Lu Hsin’s rather disturbing idea to
raise the child in order to marry her is compared with surrealism, ‘como un
collage de los pintores surrealistas de occidente’ (50). That Lu Hsin raises
this exotic child demonstrates the possibility for the artist, like the Argentine
author of the ‘nueva narrativa’, to create with material removed from his or
her setting. Appropriating the ‘object’ becomes more difficult, however, as is
represented in the completion of the self-reflexive metaphor of the
relationship between Hin and her painter/father. The discomfort caused by
this equation of human being with artistic object is even recognized by Lu
Hsin at the end of the novel when he finds himself unable to suggest the idea
of marriage to his grown daughter.
The exotic, therefore, needs to remain distant in order to maintain the
objective quality necessary for fictional creation. The artificial exoticization
of sites, underscored by the representation of an already exoticized China,
allows the contemporary artist the liberty necessary for creation. Aira
appropriates the fictionalized version of China as a space that signifies the
exotic, but even so is no more unreal than any other site. By shifting between
the amplification and reduction of the focus, Aira demonstrates with Una
novela china that the exoticized vision of China can be exploited for fictional
exploration from the Argentine perspective. Although the country is depicted
as an exoticized space, this perception, in fact, serves to elevate China’s
image provided the novel is read in its literary context, one in which
Argentine authors even exoticized their own country, which places China
on the same level as any other literary site. By adopting the exoticized image
of China*its image in propaganda posters, in fantasized accounts of

30 Instead of having his own child, Lu Hsin adopts Hin, reflecting the lot of the
contemporary artist to recycle, or to employ artistic strategies that have already been used.
CHINA IN ARGENTINE EXOTISMO 83

exploration or in inventions of what it might be like*instead of creating his

own exotic image of China, Aira builds on a fictionalized image of the
country. The exaggerated image of China as ‘Other’ allows Aira to question
the significance of contemporary artistic expression, and emphasize the
importance of the viewer’s gaze at the cusp of the globalized era.