María Gainza and Her Pictorial Narrative
María Gainza is an intimate and multifaceted author who has gathered the essential ingredients to write a short novel that reflects her own intimacy and complexity. Optic Nerve represents the culmination of a work of art constructed through the pictorial qualities of words and the poetic resonances of images. It harnesses the power of its origins, driven by the strength of experience and memory.
A Novel Without a Plot but Full of Meaning
Far from focusing on specific characters or events, Gainza’s plotless novel embodies an archaeological-like process, where the reader takes on a dual role: experiencing the author’s journey through various scenarios in her life, her visual everyday reality, her memories, and the halls of a museum. Three distinct spaces unfold before the reader: the physical, the mental, and the timeless. The latter resides within the paintings she observes and discusses, encompassing different periods in art history. However, Gainza does not aim to deliver an academic lesson. The text steers away from conventional objectivity; the author’s gaze is akin to opening a lock, whispering a series of revelations that are uniquely hers, even as she shares them with the reader. Dostoevsky said in White Nights: “I like shaping the present according to the image of the irretrievable past.” María Gainza undertakes a similar exercise in Optic Nerve, molding the present through what she sees and feels, connecting it with the past embedded in paintings and her knowledge of them. She creates a small yet vast world of meanings made comprehensible by her passion for and consumption of art.
The Optic Nerve as Both Metaphor and Reality
The author’s optic nerve, the vital mechanism enabling vision, is presented as altered, giving rise to double vision. This diplopia is not merely a reference to the ocular condition she has experienced since childhood (she notes at the novel’s start, “When I was seven, they tried to operate on me, but the doctors gave up—I was so restless the anesthesia wouldn’t take”), but also functions as a strategy for reassembling memory and life. The novel rests on two narrative threads: one closer to art criticism and the other tied to biography. Yet this dual vision is also a privileged perspective, born from a context and education shaped by access to certain advantages. It is, therefore, a privileged gaze, but one through which Gainza challenges conventional readings and perceptions, offering fresh and thought-provoking perspectives.
An Artistic Process Reminiscent of Photography
In a way, Gainza’s approach resembles the process of taking a photograph: the image of the painting she engages with becomes imprinted on her retina. From the impression it leaves and her knowledge of it, she develops a depth of analysis and critique far removed from mere academic appraisal. This impression stretches out like a long-exposure photograph, pulling in layers of her everyday life and incorporating them into a kind of collage. The book comprises eleven narrative fragments, each a foray into the essence of art and brief glimpses into the author’s life. Stories about life intertwine with stories about painting, preventing any sense of detachment.
Gainza’s Narrative Style: Between Poetry and Painting
Although Gainza may identify as an art critic, she complements her exposition with excellent narrative execution. Her style is direct yet delicate, choosing words and expressions that translate artistic impressions into written language: “The space narrowed, its figures emptied and stretched, as if adapting to the situation”; “Lampedusa so clearly understood how things swirl before disappearing, leaving their snail trails, their transparent, damp silver wake, only to sink into memory.” Every word seems perfectly placed, every adjective chosen with care, resulting in a style as vivid and plastic as the artworks she analyzes, yet incredibly poetic. This poetic quality is most evident at the end of her chapters, where she concludes with subtle, striking “illuminations” reminiscent of short story compositions or compact novels like Pedro Páramo. “My cousin and I had the same name. Only now do I realize our name contains the sea, as a call, as a premonition.”
In this way, literature and painting converge, alongside the social influence that both exert. Gainza evokes poets and writers who parallel painters, such as Guy de Maupassant and Aldous Huxley: “That same year, while strolling in Étretat, Maupassant encountered the painter. He described it thus: ‘In a large, bare room, a dirty and greasy man smeared chunks of white paint onto a canvas with a kitchen knife.’” Likewise, Gainza references Huxley, who remarked, “If El Greco had lived into his nineties, he would have turned to abstract art, so visceral was his work.” Ultimately, both types of artists coexist and influence one another within their shared society, as Gainza demonstrates when recounting how Courbet leveraged his connections with literary figures like Baudelaire to gain provocative publicity.
A Collection of Images and Personal Memories
Gainza’s novel acts as a personal and intimate collection. Her earlier novel, Selected Texts, is set primarily in galleries and artist studios. In contrast, Optic Nerve offers a more public space. While the focus of her previous work is contemporary art, Optic Nerve pursues something more complex and elusive. Three of the most notable analyses in the book include Alfred de Dreux’s Stag Hunt, Gustave Courbet’s The Stormy Sea, and reproductions of Mark Rothko’s paintings. Dreux’s painting depicts a stag being hunted and attacked by a pack of dogs, capturing a moment of both awe and horror in a rustic European setting. What captivates Gainza is the stag’s facial expression—both alive and dead, frozen in a mummified anguish. She observes the earthy, subdued colors of the forest and notes, “Feel how the painting pulsates with primal symbolism: the struggles between good and evil, light and dark. The stag was painted just moments before its death.”
The painting radiates unease, reflected in the animal’s exhausted expression, tongue lolling out. Despite the profound and jarring impact of Dreux’s work—intended to provoke such a reaction—it remains largely overlooked, relegated to the realm of sober decoration. This recurring theme of art’s use, appreciation, and designated place underpins much of the book.
Often, the author’s encounters with paintings are coincidental or unexpected, yet they trigger a cascade of reflections she immortalizes in text. This creates a distinctive narrative where her aesthetic evaluations of artworks lead her into the lives of the artists themselves. Her art history is deeply personal and secondary to the overarching story of her life.
Symbolism in Dreux’s Art and Personal Memory
In Dreux’s Stag Hunt, the dying animal’s scene intertwines with the memory of a friend’s death. Both figures, though separated by time and space, are victims of hunting traditions: the stag devoured by dogs, Gainza’s friend struck accidentally by a bullet piercing her lung. “She collapsed in the mud; the Frenchman said her face only showed surprise: ‘Was that all?’ it seemed to ask. ‘Is it over?’” In Gainza’s imagination, the stag and the woman become a single entity, an analogy for brevity and innocence in the face of the world’s natural and violent inevitabilities. This is a clear example of the unusual yet commendable connections Gainza weaves.
Courbet: A Liberating Realism
Courbet diverges from Dreux’s static and sculptural realism, embracing a more liberating approach. Gainza describes her discovery of The Stormy Sea as a sudden infatuation. “Mer orageuse is the French term, and the rasping gargle of the consonants echoes the roar of the waves,” she notes, again blending art and poetry. Her engagement with Courbet reaches an emotional depth foreshadowing the advent of a new artistic era. Gainza discusses the painting with vigor, reflecting its energy: “The Stormy Sea explores water in terms of form: direct ventures toward abstraction, still tethered to the horizon line.” She likely admires The Stormy Sea for its unique quality—Courbet’s ability to make art dissolve and let life take its place in all its texture. As the vitality pervading the novel calls forth its nemesis, death, Gainza returns to loss. She contrasts the abrupt death of her friend with the quieter passing of her cousin, succinctly mentioned in just two lines. The former feels like the tearing of a canvas, while the latter is like the addition of a brushstroke—one disruptive, the other inclusive.
Rothko and the Effect of Abstraction
The artistic experience culminates in a spiritual apex, epitomized by Rothko—a defining framework that influences all subsequent fragments of Gainza’s work. Rothko’s paintings are often metonymic, serving not as bridges to the representation of objects but as representations in themselves. Gainza encounters a reproduction of a red Rothko, of all places, in an ophthalmologist’s office. The Rothko hangs against a stark white wall, which acts as a tedious backdrop from which the painting emerges—like a flame on snow, representing the genesis of Life (red) and Death (black).
Rothko stands as the epitome of abstraction: recognizable forms vanish, leaving the effect itself to dominate over the object. Vision assumes a new role, unprecedented in Gainza’s narrative so far. Lines disappear, and colors dissolve into the canvas as though a dilated eye overlays the painting, mediating between the artwork and the viewer. This interplay of distorted perception and contemplative engagement yields a unique pictorial outcome—a deviation from conventional representation akin to how subversions in perception influence poetry and literature.
Gainza notes that Rothko was constantly betrayed by words: during his life, his relentless need to justify his work consumed him. Scholarly critiques often fall short when faced with his paintings, a sentiment echoed across real life, literature, film, and television. Thus, Rothko engulfs both image and language: only subjective impressions and silence suffice to approach his work. There is no absolute truth here.
Rothko’s death in 1970 is recounted without the poetics present in Gainza’s accounts of other deaths. It is stark, brutal, and direct—neither unforeseen nor natural. Gainza cannot resist comparing the bloodied scene to one of Rothko’s own paintings. Despite his ties to expressionism, Rothko rejected the label of abstract painter and any associations that might situate him or his art in a comfortable position. Rothko existed on the margins of the margins, loyal only to art itself. El nervio óptico emphasizes this defiance, exemplified by his refusal to complete the commission for New York’s famed Four Seasons restaurant in a supposed act of protest.
Barthes’ Camera Lucida and Parallels with Gainza
An essay that intertwines knowledge with personal experience in a manner similar to Gainza’s is Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. The thematic overlap is evident, as both works analyze the nuances of images, albeit in different media. While Barthes uses personal and subjective experiences to support his theories, Gainza’s goal is simply to share her personal impressions. Interestingly, Barthes’ concepts can be applied to Gainza’s narrative as well.
The “studium,” as Barthes describes it, refers to the cultural, linguistic, and socially constructed meanings of a photograph. It encompasses general interest or the cultural, historical, and contextual aspects that inform interpretation—a framework that aligns with Gainza’s analytical approach to art. For example, in El nervio óptico, Gainza situates authors and painters within the world they inhabited, exploring their societal roles and cultural positions. Of Courbet, she writes:
“At twenty, he went to Paris to immerse himself in the Louvre. He studied Titian, Zurbarán, Rembrandt, and Rubens. From them, he adopted technique but discarded the traditional values that technique served.”
Similarly, of Toulouse-Lautrec:
“Young Henri felt stifled in the suffocating aristocratic environment. The only person he connected with was René Princeteau, a deaf-mute painter who taught him the basics and urged him to move to Paris. Like all escapees of his class, Montmartre welcomed him as a son.”
In Barthes’ terms, the “punctum” is the element of a photograph that unexpectedly pierces or wounds the viewer—a deeply personal and subjective detail. It is not something easily defined but rather a feature that profoundly impacts the observer. Gainza’s engagement with art often reveals these “punctums,” serving as portals to her world of associations and connections.
For example, she reflects on Courbet’s The Stormy Sea:
“Every time I look at The Stormy Sea, something clenches inside me—a sensation between my chest and trachea, like a slight bite. I’ve come to respect that twinge, to pay attention to it, because my body reaches conclusions before my mind does.”
These moments of connection are Gainza’s entry points into deeper reflections. More than a single concrete detail, each artwork she explores carries an overarching motif that bridges past and present, art history and personal experience. With Henri Rousseau, it’s flight; with Courbet, the sea; and with Rothko, the color red.