From yo to je: Héctor Bianciotti and the Language of Memory

«J'espère, Monsieur, ne vous causer ni surprise ni chagrin en disant que certains peuvent trouver déroutant qu'un si précieux champion de notre langue la parle avec un accent qui n'est pas vraiment celui de la pure tradition.… Et pourtant nous pouvons nous en réjouir … on peut être un grand écrivain français et aimer notre langue, même quand on vient, en effet, d'ailleurs, et même de très loin.»¹

—Jacqueline de Romilly, response to Héctor Bianciotti's acceptance speech into the Académie française

The Italian ring of Héctor Bianciotti's name, coupled with the fact that he has never written in Italian, emblematizes the layers of complication surrounding the already confusing question of his linguistic and cultural identities and affiliations. An Argentine author born in 1930 on the outskirts of Córdoba into a family of Piedmont immigrants—who prohibited their children from speaking Italian so as to encourage assimilation—Héctor Bianciotti wrote six Spanish-language texts before becoming a French-language author and ultimately, as a sign of his success and acceptance into the world of French letters, an académicien.² For Bianciotti, this chosen linguistic conversion from Spanish to French always recalls that primary and imposed conversion from a denied mother tongue. By examining the delicate ways language choice plays out in Bianciotti's autobiographical works, this article argues that his bilingual project—a series of texts written either in Spanish or French, but never self-translated—exposes life writing as a genre that ultimately must recognize the inaccessibility of the past and the failure to retrieve memories intact.

Bianciotti's 1977 Le traité des saisons, a translation of his fifth and penultimate Spanish-language text, La Busca del jardín, earned him his first literary prize: the prix Médicis étranger for the best foreign-language book in French translation. La Busca del jardín marks a turning point in Bianciotti's career that extends beyond (but goes hand-in-hand with) literary recognition: it announces his imminent conversion to writing in French and serves as the first volume of what I call his autofictional tetralogy.³ The three subsequent volumes—Ce que la nuit raconte au jour, Le pas si lent de l'amour, and Comme la trace de l'oiseau dans l'air—were all composed and published originally in French. This article sequentially works through Bianciotti's tetralogy to examine how autofiction as a genre responds to the particular challenges and dilemmas that the bilingual writer faces. Bianciotti himself embraces the genre in a 2001 article written for Argentina's La Nación entitled "Autoficciones"—whose debt to "ficciones" is tacitly made clear by its adjacency to another article, written by Bianciotti, in homage to Borges. For Bianciotti, "autoficciones" allow identity to fluctuate, self-representation to float somewhere between truth and falsehood, and literature to alter one's self-image: "Me gustaría no hablar de mí en mis libros: sé que soy incapaz de continuar la historia de ese personaje que, quizás sea yo mismo, aunque se va alejando de mí … Tal vez esté condenado a hablar de mí mismo, pero el 'mí mismo' ya está borrado: la literatura nos reinventa" ("Autoficciones" 2; I would prefer not to talk about myself in my books: I know that I am incapable of continuing the story of that character that may be myself, although he gets further and further away from me.… Perhaps I am condemned to speak about myself, but the 'myself' is already erased: literature reinvents us). Bianciotti's formulation—oddly reminiscent of his fellow bilingual's "je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer …" (Beckett 213; I can't go on, I will go on)—captures the tension between memory and narrative invention and suggests a certain fluidity of identity across time and space as fundamental to the autofictional project.

Bianciotti's embrace of the category "autofiction" coincides with a contemporary trend among writers and critics alike to test the boundaries and limitations of autobiography. As...