Particularidades Absolutas: a autoficção como um procedimento literário em César Aira

Abstract

This work aims to propose the reading of autofiction as a literary procedure. Since Doubrovsky announced the concept of autofiction in 1977 and presented its initial definition, discussions of this phenomenon have only increased. In contemporary literature, there are very diverse autofiction narratives, ranging from those assumed by their own authors to those whose classification is based on critical analysis. It is not the intent of this doctoral dissertation to focus the analysis of autofiction on the comparison between a writer's life and work or on attempts to delimit a new literary genre between novel and autobiography, for example. This text is articulated from the way César Aira relates to the common attributes to autofiction. After all, if Aira does not usually recognize the value of autofictional narratives, on the other hand, he uses autofictional attributes to construct his own fictions. The sui generis characteristics of Aira’s literature and the lack of consensus on theoretical approaches to autofiction are among the main motivations for the proposal to understand autofiction as a literary procedure. To this end, we start from the observation that the effects caused by autofiction - its specular effect, its capacity to denounce the fictionality of fiction itself, its power to reinforce and also to suspend the supposed reversibility between the Self inscribed in fiction itself and the biographical Self of the writer - translate into peculiar narratives. In view of these particularities, it is relevant to think of autofiction with the concept of ostranienie in perspective. Thus, the theoretical foundations of our investigation include Chklovski and Ginzburg’s essays on ostranenie and its importance for the history of Western literature. If Chklovski attributed to this procedure the power to highlight the differences between world and language, it could be said that autofiction, in turn, seems to produce a perceptive shift in relation to the first person, to the Self and its effects of truth and/or presence in a fictional narrative. For the development of the intended analysis, we use theoretical support from authors such as Agamben, Klinger, Sarlo, Contreras, Foucault, Barthes among others, and also essays by César Aira himself. After all, from César Aira’s literature, the conceptualization of procedure also implies considering its artistic significance: procedure as combinatory exercises of meaning for literary creation, such as those put into action by Raymond Roussel, or by Marcel Duchamp and the ready-made. The conclusion of our research is that it would be helpful to understand autofiction as a literary procedure. However, this would also imply paying attention to its modus operandi, that is to say the use, on a case by case basis, of formulas and procedures capable of generating such particular, sui generis, and practically unrepeatable narratives. A difference between the autofictional procedure and ostranenie in this sense would be that, from Aira's literature, autofiction could be understood as an ad hoc procedure, that is, as the result of a particular and provisional combination of literary procedures whose meaning effects would operate against the possibilities of definition, or universalization of the characteristics and compositional elements that would act in each autofiction.