Transmedial Ekphrasis: César Aira's "Cecil Taylor" as Black Hole

Abstract: Cecil Taylor, whose experimental atonal piano repelled some and attracted many, exhibited a particular sensibility for transmedial and trans-sensory experience. It is therefore no coincidence that Argentinean writer César Aira would turn to the iconoclastic musician in order to stage his own version of transmedial aesthetics in his piece "Cecil Taylor." By opening the literary text to music in a way that does not reduce it to a representation, Aira stretches the limits of a what a literary text can do, exposing the unrepresentability necessarily at the heart of literary discourse, the non-linear or anti-teleological force that most narrative labors to eclipse or foreclose entirely. This essay proposes the term "transmedial ekphrasis" to describe the strange incorporation of Taylor's aesthetic and method into Aira's, extending W.J.T. Mitchell's understanding of the ekphrastic image as a kind of black hole. The article concludes by examining the role "black holes" and blackness more generally might perform in Aira's and Taylor's ekphrastic aesthetics, in dialogue with Evelynn Hammonds, Rizvana Bradley, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Tavia Nyong'o.