“La historia de cómo ha ido muriendo un hombre”. Tanatografie e autofinzioni nella Spagna del ’900

Abstract

The paradoxical foundation of the life account, which always oscillates between two ineffable poles – birth and death of the narrator-protagonist – entails a constant modulation of metonymical procedures which aim to represent on the page the lived experience in a reliable way. Through these different modulations and solutions the genre of the autobiography reflects on the representation of “harmonies” and “dystonias” between beginning and ending, and becomes itself a privileged field of research for the investigation of the evolution of codified teleologies, foretold deaths and desires of total extinction. In twentieth century literature, several issues deeply modify the genre questioning the possibility to narrate the lives of “people like us”. The article focuses on the structural narrative tensions which lead the life account towards the unnarratable death, highlighting the twentieth-century heterogeneous responses to the rarefication of the nineteenth-century autobiographical conventions. One of these is the recurrence to unexpected mechanism of seriality.
Rafael Alberti, Ramón Gómez de la Serna e Javier Marías are the authors taken into consideration to show the main narrative procedures and themes which re-elaborate the “sense of an ending” as an already foretold and systematically avoided end.