Cuestión de principios: sobre dos novelas de César Aira que solo comienzan

Abstract

This article aims to explore the implications of a narrative device used by Cesar Aira in Como me hice monja and La costurera y el viento, by means of which the author seems to stop his fictions in a recurrent and permanent beginning. This deliberate interruption of the narrative process questions the notion of literary narration understood as a causal and teleological sequence, and at the same time it offers to the readers the possibility of elaborating critical interpretations which allow them to access to the aesthetic, political, and philosophical background of the elusive phenomenon of the narrative beginning. Using conceptual and theoretical reflections by David Lodge, Peter Sloterdijk, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Luc Nancy, among others, the beginning is studied in this article as a problem and this problem, at the same time, as the beginning of alternative readings of the two mentioned novels as well as other Aira’s works.