Triad 9 of 32 · 2026-10-02 · Difficulty 3 · Genealogy/influence, Shared form or method, Shared figure or motif
The thread
Three stories in which a man from the city or from Europe takes a wound to the head and then goes into the Argentine plain, which he already knows as a picture. Borges, ‘The South’ (1953): Dahlmann’s forehead is brushed in the dark (‘a bat? a bird?’), septicemia follows, and he takes the train to a South he knows through ‘nostalgic, literary knowledge’; an old gaucho throws him a dagger. Aira, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (2000): Rugendas, Humboldt’s physiognomic painter, is struck twice by lightning, survives on morphine with a ruined face, draws an Indian raid under a lace mantilla, and near the end ‘A bat coming in the opposite direction brushed gently against his forehead’, which answers Borges’s question. Bolaño, ‘The Insufferable Gaucho’ (2003): an ex-judge leaves Buenos Aires in the 2001 collapse, weeps over the store in ‘The South’, finds ‘no horses left here … only rabbits’, and stabs a writer back in the city. Genealogy: Bolaño’s named rewrite; Bolaño’s preface opens the Aira volume; Chris Andrews translated both. Shared form: wound, then a plain already pictured, then a face-to-face ending.
The three books
- Collected Fictions (‘The South’), Jorge Luis Borges, Andrew Hurley (translator); 1953 (story); added to Ficciones 1956; Hurley trans. 1998. The source: forehead brushed in the dark, fever, train south, the store like an engraving, the dagger; two readings (events / dream on the operating table).
- An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, César Aira, Chris Andrews (translator), Roberto Bolaño (contributor); 2000 (Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero); Eng. 2006. The oblique middle term: Borges’s literary knowledge becomes Humboldt’s procedure; the cut becomes a face ruined by lightning; the bat answers Borges’s question; the face-to-face Dahlmann only steps toward.
- The Collected Short Stories of Roberto Bolaño (‘The Insufferable Gaucho’), Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews (translator); 2003 (El gaucho insufrible); Eng. 2010. The declared descendant: ‘The South’ rewritten in the 2001 crisis as farce and entropy; rabbits for horses and cattle; the knife fight moved back to Buenos Aires.
Notebook
- The bat or the bird: Borges (‘a bat? a bird?’, ≈12%) vs Aira (‘A bat coming in the opposite direction brushed gently against his forehead’, ≈95%). Write a scene where one touch on the forehead is the whole event, once with the question and once with the answer. Which keeps the second reading alive?
- Literary knowledge / procedure / citation: Dahlmann’s ‘nostalgic, literary knowledge’; Humboldt’s ‘system of mediations’ (Aira ≈88%); Pereda’s ‘just as he had read in Borges’. Describe a place you know mainly through books three ways (nostalgia, a fixed list of types, quotation); where it fails, write BANG BANG (Aira ≈76%).
- Non-compensation: Krause, ‘The Indians had no need of compensation’; Rugendas’s face ‘expressed things he did not mean to express’; Pereda, ‘I believe we are losing our memory … And just as well too.’ Write a manifesto for a prose that refuses to compensate, then one paragraph of it.
Rabbit holes
Links as checked on the day of the reading.
- Humboldt, ‘Physiognomy of Plants’, Aspects of Nature vol. 2 (trans. Sabine), Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68953
- Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, Rugendas papers (293 letters, incl. Carmen Arigada de Gutike) https://www.iai.spk-berlin.de/en/collections/about-the-special-collections/papers-and-manuscripts/estate/rugendas-johann-moritz-1802-1858.html
- Sarmiento, Facundo (1845), Spanish text, Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33267
- Hernández, El Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872), Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14765
- David Varno, ‘Travel Journals for Sleepwalkers: The Stories of Roberto Bolaño’, Words Without Borders (2010) https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/travel-journals-for-sleepwalkers-the-stories-of-roberto-bolano1
To carry
“In the beginning was Repetition, and only there.” — César Aira, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, trans. Chris Andrews (≈94%)
Themes
2001 Argentine crisis · bat · Borges’s ‘The South’ · compensation · face · forehead · gaucho · Humboldt · Indian raid · literary knowledge vs direct knowledge · mask/mantilla · morphine · pampa · physiognomy of nature · procedure · rabbits · repetition · rewriting · Rugendas · wound
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