The Pampas as Zero Landscape: Alexander von Humboldt, Johann Moritz Rugendas, and César Aira

Abstract

This article offers a comparative reading of Humboldtian science writing through the lens of César Aira's surrealist avant-garde aesthetics and vice versa. It reads the way Aira dramatizes the Humboldtian painter Johann Moritz Rugendas as a reflection on the scientific order of knowledge that still shapes our world-view today. In his paintings, the Pampas emerges as a major agent, resisting appropriation either as empirical-aesthetic landscape or as tabula rasa for human creativity. Aira's narrative refutes Humboldt's landscape typology while affirming it as a transcendental operation that facilitates the critique of Argentine national mythopoesis and a proto-ecological global reflexivity.