Autofiction and its fantastic modalities in César Aira’s Cómo me hice monja

Abstract

As a narrative practice in which the author invents a personality and an existence while preserving his personal identity and true name, ‘autofiction’ constitutes a suitable instrument to give rise to ‘the fantastic’. By fusing the narrative pacts of the autobiography and the autobiographical novel, autofiction establishes an ambiguity similar to that of the ‘vacillation’ between the strange and the marvelous, which lays the foundations of the fantastic genre. The continuous allusion to the author’s person, in addition, provides the reference to reality, which is crucial in accentuating the uncanny, and intensifies the sense of perplexity experienced by the reader. This affinity between these concepts will be illustrated in Cómo me hice monja (1993), a short novel by César Aira, in which autofiction elicits the fantastic, at the level of ‘perception’, by merging with the monstrous, and by establishing a posthumous narration, at the level of ‘language’. By acting in concert, these two modalities revive ancestral fears and corroborate the unusual character of the fantastic genre.