How I Became a Nun

How I Became a Nun (1993) by César Aira, tr. Chris Andrews (New Directions, 2006)


In my second reading of How I Became a Nun I suggested how, borrowing from Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet, gender identification may be a strategy to break grammatical rules and assert freedom of choice in spite of the restrictions of usage. In subverting the conventions of language, where 'he' must refer only to a male person, the novelist was flouting style guides. 'Free radicals' were not always welcome in the body of literature. They were operating outside the system, outside the norm. The heresy was already prefigured in the novel's first paragraph.

My story, the story of "how I became a nun," began very early in my life; I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down to the last detail. Before, there is nothing, and after, everything is an extension of the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken, including the intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the veil.

The self-referential nod to the title was a programmatic approach to metafiction. Yes, this was the story of the narrator turning into a nun, right down to the moment when she took the veil. These are gendered nouns. Somehow, this story (my story) was also the story of the writing of this novel (called "how I became a nun"). The story could be reconstructed to the last detail. There's reliability for you.

It was as if Bernardo Soares was intoning: Today, during a break from feeling, I reflected on the style of my prose. It was a fluid telling of the child César who identified (insisted) on the feminine gender every step of the way. In twenty-three instances* César viewed herself as a girl.

From the point of view of others, from five viewpoints** actually, dear little César was all of a boy. This "boy" had a militant streak. He got into some thorny situations and miraculous experiences.

Was the child's gender preference only a deep-seated stubbornness? Was the novelist's gender preference a deliberate violation of grammar? Was it not an innocent compositional choice? Or a mock display of freedom from the constraints of gender and rules?



* Pages in the book and the exact feminine gender identification.
2 devoted daughter
23 little girl
25 girl
28 difficult girl
32 daughter
42 little girl
46 girl
54 fourteen-year old Argentinean girl
59 daughter
61 daughter
63 girl
64 girl
67 daughter
72 daughter
82 girl
92 normal little girl
94 girl in the crowd
96 supreme mistress
100 girl
107 idiotic daughter
111 little girl
113 another girl
116 six-year old girl

** Pages in the book, the masculine gender perception, and the person speaking.
6 "Everyone except you, son, because you're a moron." (father)
16 "Is it my fault if the boy didn't like it?" (ice cream vendor)
34 "And how are we today, young Master César?" (doctor)
56 "That Aira boy ... He's here among you, and he doesn't seem any different. Maybe you haven't noticed him, he's so insignificant. But he's here. Don't be fooled. I always tell you the true, the theck, the trove. You are good, clever, sweet children. Even the ones who are naughty, or have to repeat, or get into fights all the time. You're normal, you're all the same, because you have a second mother. Aira is a moron. He might seem the same as you, but he's a moron all the same. He's a monster. He doesn't have a second mother. He's wicked. He wants to see me dead. He wants to kill me. But he's not going to succeed!" (Miss Rodríguez, the teacher)
57-58 "He want's to kill you too. Not me. You. But don't be afraid, teacher will protect you. You have to watch out for vipers, tarantulas and rabid dogs. And especially for Aira. Aira is a thousand times worse. Watch out for Aira! Don't go near him! Don't talk to him! Don't look at him! Pretend he doesn't exist. I always thought he was a moron, but I had nnno idea ... I dddidn't realize ... Now I do! Don't let him dirty you! Don't let him infect you! Don't even give him the time of day! Don't breathe when he's near. Die of asphyxiation if you have to, just so long as you freeze him out. He's a monster, a killer! And your mothers will cry if you die. They'll try and blame me, I know them. But if you watch out for the monster nothing will happen. Pretend he doesn't exist, pretend he's not there. If you don't talk to him or look at him, he can't harm you." (Miss Rodríguez, the teacher)
67 "César Aira ... a boy by the name of César Aira." (voices from loudspeakers)

Transcritic

Many modern novelists, at one time or another, have felt that storytelling is a tedious obligation, a regrettable concession to popular taste. Writing to Louise Colet in 1852, Flaubert reflected wistfully, What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style. In the first of his Clark lectures, given in 1927, E. M. Forster imagined three voices answering the question, "What does a novel do?" The third voice, his own, says regretfully, "Yes, oh dear yes, the novel tells a story." He adds: "I wish that it was not so, that it could be something different—melody, or perception of the truth, not this low atavistic form" (34). In 1963, Alain Robbe-Grillet combatively declared that plot was an obsolete notion; not only was storytelling no longer necessary, it had become "strictly impossible." Ten years later, in the introduction to Aren't You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs?, B. S. Johnson lamented the prevailing backwardness of fiction writers and readers: "surely it must be a confession of failure on the part of any novelist to rely on that primitive, vulgar and idle curiosity of the reader to know 'what happens next.' ... Why ... do so many novelists still write as though the revolution that was Ulysses had never happened, still rely on the crutch of storytelling?"

Chris Andrews opens the third chapter of his expansive book of literary criticism Roberto Bolaño's Fiction: An Expanding Universe (Columbia University Press, 2014) with a display of erudition. The chapter is called "Something Is Going to Happen: Narrative Tension", and it offers a reading of Bolaño's fiction in terms of the deployment of narrative suspense. According to him, Bolaño handles narrative tension by "cultivat[ing] suspense more than curiosity, and surpris[ing] the reader by confounding expectations rather than by revealing withheld information." Then he offers specific sample passages of this suspenseful tendency in Distant Star, making me want to reread the novel and closely observe the technique for myself.

Another tendency he observes in the writer is to favor a particular blend of uncertainty and secrecy in stories. He builds on two types of suspense explored each by Ricardo Piglia and Guillermo Martínez. The former explains how the classic short story and modern short story distinctly use and combine the "visible story" and the "secret story" in their plots. The latter explains suspense in terms of how the "logic of fiction" and "logic of common sense" initially coincide before coming apart, with the logic of fiction starting to displace common sense. To illustrate these two modes of narrative tension, Andrews chooses to analyze three short stories by Bolaño.

With this study, Andrews proves himself to be not only a consummate translator of Bolaño's outputs but a wonderful guide to them as well. His careful translations, in fact, are what must be the ballast that allowed for authoritative commentaries on his writer. Like his subject, he shows a natural, effortless erudition and mastery of prose/narrative structure. If writer B is capable of using compelling structures to tell his tension-filled narratives, then translator A is capable of teasing out ideas using a carefully worked structure of long form criticism.

Andrews develops his approaches to Bolaño's "fiction-making" system in intricate fashion. The book does not claim to be comprehensive and exhaustive yet it somehow provides a synthesis of a writer's seemingly inexhaustive and prodigious works. His fluent eye for details and literary perspectives must have enabled him to translate and think through fiction with creative facility. The translator's openness to ideas is evident in the way he modified passages from his own published translations quoted in the book. The translator is a bonafide critic too.


Read in anticipation of Stu and Richard's July Spanish Lit Month. My book copy is from NetGalley.