The limits of fictionality: examples of autofiction in current Spanish narrative

Abstract

The paper presents the contemporary Spanish novel based on texts of some authors that at the beginning of the new century are trying to find exits from the perpetual postmodernist recycling. In the course of the 21st century, writers began to wonder about the future of literature and aesthetics of the novel. Although in the past century the death of the novel was announced many times, this genre has not disappeared yet, indeed, each crisis has left it renewed and more determined to survive. In Western literature, a new genre that addresses the problem of the relationship between the truth and the verisimilitude is gaining place. In the contemporary novel, a pact between the fiction and the autobiography is emerging, the fictional autobiography known as autofiction, whose main characteristic is the mix of genres belonging both to the real and the fictional world. Once again the decisive influence of Cervantes's Don Quixote has been shown. The texts that are looking for the way out of the vicious postmodernist circle, as new palimpsests of Don Quixote, scraping the traces that cannot be erased, are as well narrative texts of Enrique Vila-Matas and Javier Cercas.