POLA OLOIXARAC
Pola Oloixarac is an Argentine author, journalist and translator. Her third novel, Mona (2021), is a dark satire of literary culture, which takes aim at the performance of identity in the name of cultural capital. Based on her experiences of the international literary circuit, Oloixarac describes the novel as a comedic “fake auto-fiction”. Her protagonist, Mona, is a glamorous, vain and erudite Peruvian novelist who abandons her PhD at Stanford University and boards a plane to Sweden to attend “the most important literary award in Europe”, where she will compete with other international authors for fame, glory and a handsome cheque. Oloixarac discussed with TANK the novel’s themes of vanity, national identity and the market of culture.
Interview by Natasha StallardPortrait by Denise Giovanelli
Natasha Stallard Mona is a Peruvian novelist who finds herself branded as a “person of colour” for the first time in her life at Stanford University, much to her dismay. The novel begins with her leaving her post there following a mysterious, violent incident and heading to a prestigious literary prize in Sweden. What drew you to that setting?
Pola Oloixarac I wanted a place where culture is at its limit, in a way. The idea of the north, or the Nordic, so close to the poles where things literally end, where monsters used to live and so many other legends took place – this felt like a good setting to be playful with the limits of culture. What is our playbook in culture and what are the limits inherent to that playbook? It felt very natural that Mona would have to go to the verge of civilisation to experience this summit with other writers. They arrive at the end of culture in order to celebrate culture.
NS Mona watches speeches by various international authors, who play with the narratives of their home countries in order to win the prize. One of the things you’re satirising in the novel is political correctness. What do you think it is about the meeting of writers that leads to this performance of national identity?
PO One of the issues is how when you go to these places, you observe how the conversation is regulated in order to please the society hosting the event. What we understand as knowledge and the parameters of culture is given by society. This is part of how the politesse of these environments works. And the fact is, culture is a market. All the ideologies that are there for this playbook are also there to seduce, to become marketable, to make you more lovable and to become recognisable as trends. The trends are going to give you followers and make you loved or not loved. These people are trapped in this market situation, which I think we’re all trapped in any time we need to engage in this regulated conversation. Precisely because it is regulated, there are many things taken for granted, such as the level of gratitude the person of colour has to show every time she is invited to these events, where she’s also invited to engage with her exoticism. That is how you fuel the machine of this market of culture.
NS You describe the freedom Mona finds in being surrounded by writers who do not share her Spanish and who communicate in English: “Life in translation, on the other hand, was like swimming in an Olympic pool: people could cheerfully ignore each other. This allowed Mona to luxuriate in her own exoticism, gliding freely through her very own ocean, feeling special and unique.”
PO The English made a great job of colonising, really, because it would have been different if we didn’t have the language of Shakespeare, but we have that. It’s beautiful that we can all indulge in Shakespeare’s sonnets, et cetera. So the novel was definitely an opportunity to make fun of all that. To me, this was the perfect comedy setting: everyone is putting on a show and acting like a comedian of their own legacy. In a way, this kind of narrative made me understand what was going on every time I went to these events and helped me deal with them.
NS Mona is a deadly funny novel, full of devastating one-liners and character descriptions. What does “comedy” mean to you as a writer?
PO I’m obsessed with it. Comedy is what keeps you going as you write, because it makes you not just imagine the idea of a reader, but that the reader is there with you. You’re having fun with it, and you want to make it funnier. The reader becomes inherent to the writing when you’re thinking about comedy. There has to be a crispiness; there’s that Alan Alda line in Crimes and Misdemeanours: “if it bends, it’s funny; if it breaks, it’s not funny.” Comedy gave me a sense of technique. In my first book, Savage Theories, I was interested in comedy, but it was a different kind of humour. In this book, there was more nuance and digging into the scenes where the irony would become apparent. That made it very interesting to work with Adam Morris who translated the book, which was a fantastic process.
NS How does it work to translate a joke?
PO It’s a lot of fun. Adam understands contemporary English so well and the conversation where culture is trapped now. He was really capable of bringing the Spanish into that. Sometimes in the Spanish it was even like, please, we can’t put this in English because I will be hanged! So he did a great job of keeping my head so I will not be decapitated.
NS There is a funny moment when Mona is watching porn and she contemplates how #MeToo could be pronounced “pound me too”, “which in ‘Colonial’ Spanish would translate to something like dame masa a mí también, destroy me, fuck me, too”.
PO It’s so funny, right? When you come from another language you can see the linguistic richness of it.
NS The novel has been described as a satire. Not just of the international literary scene, but of the way culture is aligned with the politics of the era. How do you see the relationship between politics and comedy? Do you think the left has lost its sense of humour?
PO I’m going to talk from the perspective of a Latin American person from Argentina. An idea of what “left” means to me: the grand and beautiful literary tradition in Argentina and most of Latin America has become Borges, Manuel Puig, Manuel Mujica Láinez – all people unaligned with Peronism, and the funniest writers in my country. The left has absolutely nothing to do with the humour and beauty of literature in Argentina. So it’s very easy to find kinship with Borges and others who were considered right-wing, even though they were not; it’s just that they were not communists. They were not saying, “Yes, it’s great to kill people in Cuba; it’s great to kill homosexuals”, like Che Guevara’s homophobic left championed; they were people who were always liberal, who always supported individual freedom, and that’s where I find myself politically. That’s the tradition I love to write in, and which inspires me and inspires my connection with humour. It’s very clear in Borges how incredibly funny he was. Then, of course, you can extrapolate that the left and “wokeism” is devoid of humour, but in my opinion, that is because this generation has had no access to capital whatsoever. There is no access to property, so all they can do is juggle with symbolic capital. You know, linguistic goods, symbolic goods. I don’t blame them for doing that, but I think they’re wasting their time. It’s much more interesting to do other stuff with your imagination.
NS What also drives the novel is Mona’s role as an anti-hero. She’s vain, erudite, sexy and ambitious. She fires up her weed pen and gets aroused by the language of Dante. Did you want to create a new type of female anti-hero?
PO There are so many things that we can explore as women writers that haven’t been explored. It’s such a rich expanse. I remember as a teenager how I really liked Henry Miller and the early books of Martin Amis, like Money and Dead Babies. I was obsessed with them. Everything was so disgusting and so funny – these guys waking up and jerking off and having sex. I remember very tiny things, like how a character shifting the weight in his legs would make me burst into laughter. It was so well-observed. I wanted to have a female character who was also part of this bohemia, who was drinking and very sexually awake.
NS She is also a writer, of course.
PO Yes, I really wanted a character who had this elan and instinct for writing, which is also a part of her life. You have the part where you are playing the professional, but you also have the part where you are questioning what you are doing there and feeling completely lost. You are also part of this attraction, which is your body. There are so many things that can happen at any moment; you’re always on the brink of something that can be wonderful, because we are in our bodies. So I really felt the novel could be this kind of horror story but trapped in the body of the woman. The body of the woman would guide us, and have a feeling of vertigo because of it. There is a narrative structure in this victim theme that we see in so many places, where women are much more controlled, are doing Valium, et cetera, but retiring from life and retiring from their desires. This is a perfect situation that the patriarchy wants – a woman devoid of all her powers.
NS She also travels to Sweden after a violent event, which remains mysterious for most of the novel. At the prize, she hides her bruises under BB cream and her body is described as Egon Schielelike. But the violence that has occurred does not interfere with her desire for fame and glory.
PO Mona cannot identify as a victim because she has blocked it. There’s the good and bad part of that. There isn’t just one choice to become a victim. In order to survive and to keep on writing, you cannot be the victim; you have to keep going to make yourself unstoppable. That’s the only thing that’s going to keep you alive. One reason why I wrote Mona was because I didn’t want to comply with the trend of women as victims as the main narrative of the way a young woman relates to the legacy of patriarchy.
NS Mona is also a great novel of vanity. Mona is extremely, beautifully vain. At the prize ceremony, there’s so much vanity at stake and the authors are all are hiding or performing their vanity in different ways.
PO Vanity in men is much more tolerable; it is what you’re supposed to expect. Vanity in women is different; you can have a perfectly lined eye, a perfect quote, you can know your Latin very well. I feel that type of vanity was lacking and I wanted to see characters like that.
NS Mona’s level of glamour feels more like what you expect to see from an actress than an author at times. She wears Kenzo sweatshirts and dons fake eyelashes in the sauna. Do you think there is an element of glamour missing from the literary scene?
PO I feel like writing has a lot of performing in a way; you have to create a self. In Mona’s case, I was faking an autofiction. Mona is supposed to be me, but she’s actually not. This involves a performance that’s very rich and involves some deployment of glamour.
NS It is not unusual for a wildly famous author to turn up at a glamorous event in a fleece…
PO That’s also the Houellebecq legacy – the very chic literary writer has to come in raggedy clothes. That element has to be there; it’s part of the charm. I feel like after the pandemic, that’s a luxury we cannot have. We have to bring out the best of ourselves. For the sake of the pandemic, let’s try and be a bit more glamorous. ◉