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Abstract
Among other questions on the figure of the author, many autofictional protagonists are made to ponder the place occupied by the author in an industry in which cultural goods are increasingly classified as merchandise made available for consumption. The mechanisms by which autofiction deconstructs the ‘romantic’ conception of the author as an original, unique and autonomous being, instead presenting them as another agent in the cultural and literary system, will be analysed based on the above idea. We will focus our attention on the example of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s autofictional texts.
Notes
1 I borrow the notion of ‘performative authorship’ from Sonja Longolius, who argues that we must distinguish between the autobiographical Self and the author-Self whose name appears on book covers and whose identity is perpetually evolving. ‘Authors’, writes Longolius, ‘have not only created works of art, but in the conscious and unconscious creation process, they have simultaneously created their own author personae’. See Sonja Longolius, Performing Authorship: Strategies of ‘Becoming an Author’ in the Works of Paul Auster, Candice Breitz, Sophie Calle, and Jonathan Safran Foer (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2016), 7; original emphasis. As a result, the author turns into a figure or an image in a constant state of change that interacts with other agents i.e., readers, critics, awards received or media attention of which the author is the object. As will be discussed below, autofiction is thus revealed as a conducive space in which to stage performative authorship and authorial performance.
2 Ana Casas, ‘Desmontando al autor: ironía, parodia y sátira en la narrativa y el cine autoficcionales’, Tropelías. Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada, 24 (2015), 174–90; available online at <https://papiro.unizar.es/ojs/index.php/tropelias/article/view/1152> (accessed 30 October 2020).
3 See, for example: Philip Roth, Operation Shylock (London: Cape, 1993); Enrique Vila-Matas, El mal de Montano (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2002); César Aira, El congreso de literatura (Mérida: Fundación Casa de las Letras Mariano Picón Salas, 1997); and Amélie Nothomb, Une forme de vie (Paris: Albin Michel, 2010).
4 Pierre Bourdieu, Les Règles de l’Art. Gènese et structure du champ littéraire (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1992).
5 Guy Debord, La Societé du spectacle (Paris: Galimard, 1992 [1st ed. 1967]), 28; original emphasis.
6 Manuel Alberca, ‘De la autoficción a la antificción: una reflexión sobre la autobiografía española actual’, in El yo fabulado: nuevas aproximaciones críticas a la autoficción, ed. Ana Casas (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2014), 149–68.
7 Aina Pérez Fontdevila & Meri Torras Francès, ‘Hacia una biografía del concepto de autor’, in Los papeles del autor/a: marcos teóricos sobre la autoría literaria, comp., ed., & bibliografía de Aina Pérez Fontdevila & Meri Torras Francés (Madrid: Arco Libros, 2016), 11–51 (p. 24).
8 Paula Sibilia, La intimidad como espectáculo (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2008), 204.
9 Jérôme Meizoz, La Littérature ‘en personne’: scène médiatique et formes d’incarnation (Genève: Slatkine, 2016), 29.
10 Due to limitations of space, I will omit Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s extensive poetry production, in which the poetic Self—identified as ‘John Snake’—works as an autofictional alter ego.
11 The fact that a large number of autofiction texts incorporate the death of the author as a theme is one indication that autofiction accommodates many of the debates concerning authorship. The death-of-the-author theme was prefigured in 1967 by Roland Barthes in one of his most famous essays (‘The Death of the Author’, trans. Richard Howard, Aspen, 5–6 [1967], n.p. [subsequently published in French in 1968]) (available at <https://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html> [accessed 8 December 2021]), and also in Fernando Vallejo’s La rambla paralela (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2002), Summertime (London: Harvill Secker, 2009) by J. M. Coetzee, La Carte et le territoire (Paris: Éditions J’ai Lu, 2010) by Michel Houellebecq and John Waters’ Carsick (New York: Farrar Strauss & Giroux 2014), wherein the characters embodying the author die in extremely diverse ways, sometimes due to illness or old age, and other times violently. See Ana Casas, ‘Muertes del autor: reflexiones en torno a la autoficción paródica’, Bulletin Hispanique, 120:2 (2018), 545–64.
12 Dominique Maingueneau, ‘El ethos: un articulador’, in Los papeles del autor/a, ed. Pérez Fontdevila & Torras Francés, 131–54 (p. 135).
13 However, the rhetoric of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez establishes connections with other Cuban writers of the same period who also use profusely obscene language, such as Ángel Santiesteban and Jorge Alberto Aguiar Díaz, whose ‘dirt’ would seek to contradict the hygienist discourse of the revolution. See Sonia Behar, La caída del Hombre Nuevo (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 35–69; and Teresa Basile, ‘La escritura sucia de Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’, Katatay, 6:8 (2010), 115–19 (pp. 116–17).
14 José María Pozuelo Yvancos, ‘ “Figuración del Yo” frente a autoficción’, in La autoficción: reflexiones teóricas, ed. Ana Casas (Madrid: Arco Libros, 2012), 151–73 (p. 168).
15 Michel Foucault’s renowned text on author-function can be read with a commentary in Dinah Ribard, 1969: Michel Foucault et la question de l’auteur. ‘Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?’ Texte, présentation et commentaire (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2019).
16 ‘The writer is able to invent a writing style and, to a certain degree, “recreate” language, exert influence over that tool we all share, and make it evolve by imposing their own forms and personal “style” upon it. For this reason, they must differentiate themselves, not only from ordinary forms […], but also from the effects of rhetoric that have already become standard by dint of tradition; in other words, they must affirm their own style by rejecting the effects of style and aspiring to be a “writer who counts” ’ (Nathalie Heinich, Être écrivain création et identité [Paris: La Découverte, 2000], 176). All translations from French to English within this article are by myself and R. Reddin.
17 José-Luis Diaz, L’Écrivain imaginaire: scénographies auctoriales à l’époque romantique (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007).
18 Cristina Pérez Múgica, ‘ “Con los pobres de la tierra quiero mi suerte echar … ”: la figura del intelectual-lumpen en las obras de Guillermo Rosales y Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’, Catedral Tomada. Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 7:13 (2019), 25–53 (p. 31); available at <http://catedraltomada.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/catedraltomada/article/view/409> (accessed 30 October 2020).
19 ‘For me, this notion is twofold, entailing history and language: posture is simultaneously both a behaviour and a discourse. On the one hand, it is how authors present themselves, their public behaviour in literary contexts (awards, discourses, banquets, public engagements etc.); on the other, it is how they project their image within and through their discourse, that is what rhetoric has called ethos’ (Jérôme Meizoz, Postures littéraires: mises en scène modernes de l’auteur [Genève: Slatkine Érudition, 2007], 21; original emphasis).
20 However, Meizoz allows for the possibility of examining authorial posture in fictional texts which involve more complex mediation and an abundance of delegated characters. See Meizoz, Postures littéraires, 28.
21 ‘Literary work arises from tensions in the purely literary field; it can only say something about the world by enunciating the problems posed by the impossibility of socially inscribing—in society and in literary space—its own enunciation’ (Dominique Maingueneau, Le Discours littéraire: paratopie et scène d’énonciation [Paris: Armand Colin, 2004], 74).
22 Maingueneau, Le Discours littéraire, 86–87.
23 Maingueneau, Le Discours littéraire, 79.
24 Nathalie Heinich, L’Élite artiste: excellence et singularité en régime démocratique (Paris: Gallimard, 2018 [1st ed. 2005]), 329.
25 The film was co-produced by production companies based in Canada, Cuba and Venezuela, and directed by Frank Rodríguez and Pedro Ruiz. More information may be found at <http://www.faitsdiversmedia.com/animal-tropical.html> (accessed 7 January 2022).
26 The film was additionally nominated for three Goya awards (Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography and Best New Actress) and that same year, it won four Gaudí awards (for Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Cinematography and Best Costume Design) of the twelve nominations the film received.
27 Among them, the following works, mostly focused on the dirty realism of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, deserve to be highlighted: Anke Birkenmaier, ‘Más allá del realismo sucio: El Rey de La Habana de Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’, Cuban Studies, 32 (2001), 37–54, and, by the same author, ‘Dirty Realism at the End of the Century: Latin American Apocalyptic Fictions’, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 40:3 (2006), 489–512; Esther Whitfield, ‘Autobiografía sucia: The Body Impolitic of Trilogía sucia de La Habana’, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 36:2 (2002), 329–51; Guillermina De Ferrari, ‘Aesthetics under Siege: Dirty Realism and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s Trilogía sucia de La Habana’, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 7 (2003), 23–43, and especially the pages that this scholar dedicates to Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s ‘hyperrealism’ in her book Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba, Kindle Edition (London/New York: Routledge, 2014); and, finally, the section ‘Literatura sucia: Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’, coord. Teresa Basile, in Katatay, 6:8 (2010), 84–133.
28 Available at <http://pedrojuangutierrez.blogspot.com/> (accessed 7 January 2022).
29 Pedro Juan Gutiérrez defines his character as a ‘macho tropical' on many occasions. For example, in ‘El recuerdo de la ternura’ he states that his relationship with Jacqueline (a cultured and sophisticated artist) was ‘un producto demasiado complicado y poco assimilable por un macho tropical y visceral como yo’ (Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Trilogía sucia de La Habana [Barcelona: Anagrama, 2019], 15).
30 Among the many quotes that present such ideas, I highlight the following from Animal tropical: ‘Reconozco que soy un indecente y un individualista de sálvese quien pueda. Y lo asumo. No me pongo a moralizar ni cojones. Acepto el mundo como es’ (Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Animal tropical [Barcelona: Anagrama, 2000], 209). All quotations from this novel have been taken from this edition and will be given in parentheses in the main text.
31 Che Guevara, El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba (México D.F.: Ocean Sur, 2011 [1st ed. La Habana: Ediciones R, 1965]), 19.
32 Javier Ignacio Alarcón, ¿Quién escribe? La autoficción especular en la literatura venezolana (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2020), 85.
33 Celina Manzoni, ‘Violencia escrituraria, marginalidad y nuevas estéticas’, Hipertexto, 14 (2011), 57–70 (p. 60); available online at <https://www.utrgv.edu/hipertexto/_files/documents/articles/hipertexto-14/celina-manzoni.pdf> (accessed 30 October 2020).
34 Philipe Lejeune, ‘L’Image de l’auteur dans les médias’, Pratiques, 27 (1980), 31–40 (p. 36).
35 This is not the first time Pedro Juan Gutiérrez has included this type of disclaimer. El insaciable hombre araña includes the following caveat from the author: ‘Esta novela es una obra de ficción. Todos los sucesos y personajes son imaginarios’. In Estoico y frugal, he states: ‘Esta novela es una obra de ficción. Cualquier parecido con personas o situaciones reales es pura casualidad’.
36 There are more moments like this; for example, when Pedro Juan runs into a former lover again and admits having used her story in Trilogía sucia de La Habana:
| — | Con aquel marino y contigo escribí un cuento. | ||||
| — | ¡Yo no lo puedo creer! ¡Ay, hijoputa, qué dirá la gente! ¿Con los nombres de nosotros? | ||||
| — | Claro. Carmita y Luis. | ||||
| — | ¿Y lo publicaste? | ||||
| — | Se titula El regreso del marino’. (Trilogía sucia de La Habana, 246) | ||||
37 José Manuel González Álvarez, ‘De peritextos y epitextos: juegos intermediales en Jorge Volpi, Damián Tabarovsky y Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’, in El autor a escena: intermedialidad y autoficción, ed. Ana Casas (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2017), 161–74 (p. 170).
38 Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Diálogos con mi sombra: sobre el oficio de escritor, Kindle edition (London: Amazon, 2013), ‘Irreverencia y obscenidad’, para. 8. All references are to this edition and will be given in parentheses in the main text.
39 The distances between author and character are pondered in numerous passages in that very book. Concerning Pedro Juan, the author affirms that: ‘Discutimos. Nos peleamos. Es como un diablito enérgico y electrocutante que me machaca y me encabrita con sus argumentos. Siempre a contrapelo. Siempre a contrasistema. Como debe ser. Un desobediente perfecto. Un borracho lúcido y paranoico. Un poeta furibundo, atormentado. No teme al ridículo. Todo le da igual. […] En el fondo le admiro. Y hasta le envidio. Quisiera ser como él. Pero no. Yo soy un poquito más paciente, más precavido y más racional’ (Diálogos con mi sombra, ‘Prólogo’, para. 5).
40 Manzoni, ‘Violencia escrituraria, marginalidad y nuevas estéticas’, 59.
41 Esther Whitfield supplies some interesting information on Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s critical reception in Cuba: ‘No hubo hasta el año 2002 una edición de Animal tropical, la única novela del ciclo ambientada en gran parte fuera de Cuba, publicada por Letras Cubanas, precedida en 2000 por Melancolía de los leones, cuentos que no formaron parte del ciclo. La atención de la crítica en Cuba fue tardía a pesar de la notoriedad de Gutiérrez en el exterior. Luego de unos años de silencio, se le concedió cierta aprobación a El Rey de la Habana, significativamente era el único libro que se apartaba considerablemente de la narrativa fragmentada en primera persona y por lo tanto renunciaba a los testimonios e invitaba a evaluar los criterios formales de la novela’. See Esther Whitfield, ‘Mercados en los márgenes: el atractivo de Centro Habana’, Katatay, 8 (2010), 86–106 (p. 87). It should also be noted that Ediciones Unión had published the Cuban editions of Carne de perro (2012) and Trilogía sucia de La Habana (2019), nine and twenty-one years, respectively, after they had been published by Anagrama.
42 However, these statements are somewhat contradictory to the mention of Bukowski in the story ‘En busca de la paz interior’, included in Trilogía sucia de La Habana. In this text, the narrator finds out his son’s notebook which is full of quotes from ‘Herman Hesse, García Márquez, Grace Paley, Saint-Exupéry, Bukowski y Thor Heyerdhal [sic]’ (Trilogía sucia de La Habana, 35–38 [p. 37]). I owe this information to one of the anonymous readers of this article. Admiration for Bukowski would come about anyway, as can be seen in the comments about this author that were included in Diálogos con mi sombra and Estoico y frugal, as well as the fact that El nido de la serpiente opens with a quote from Bukowski's ‘Son of Satan’.
43 The inside cover of Animal tropical also features the following opinion, this time from critic Miguel García-Posada: ‘Tan radical como Reinaldo Arenas y mucho más hiriente que Zoe Valdés’ (quoted in Dieter Ingenschay, ‘Exilio, insilio y diaspora: la literatura cubana en la época de las literaturas sin residencia fija’, Ángulo Recto. Revista de Estudios sobre la Ciudad como Espacio Plural, 2:1 [2010], n.p.; available online at <http://www.ucm.es/info/angulo/volumen/Volumen02-1/articulos02.htm> [accessed 30 October 2020]).
44 As De Ferrari explains, in Cuba the search for new economic income after the fall of the Berlin Wall, together with the insolvency of national publishing houses, encouraged writers to seek opportunities outside the island, especially in Spain. This gave them more freedom in addressing certain issues, even if those works, as in the case of Trilogía sucia de La Habana, might face difficulties in getting published in Cuba. See De Ferrari, Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba, ‘Cultural Vision, Political Blindness’, para. 5.
45 Whitfield, ‘Mercados en los márgenes’, 88.
46 Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, El nido de la serpiente. Memorias del hijo del heladero (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006), 79.
47 Alejandro Del Vecchio, ‘Memorias de un joven indecente: El nido de la serpiente, de Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’ (2011), n.p.; available at <https://www.academia.edu/36774993/Memorias_de_un_joven_indecente_El_nido_de_la_serpiente_de_Pedro_Juan_Gutierrez> (accessed 30 October 2020).
48 Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Fabián y el caos (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2015), 235. All quotations from this novel have been taken from this edition and will be given in parentheses in the main text.
49 At the time, the statement ‘dentro de la Revolución, todo; contra la revolución, nada’ became particularly famous. See Fidel Castro: ‘Palabras a los intelectuales’, Tareas, 154 (2016), 77–110 (p. 87).
50 Claudia Gilman, Entre la pluma y el fusil: debates y dilema del escritor revolucionario en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2003), 332.
51 This hyperbole may be viewed as a rewriting of the masculine values of Che’s revolutionary figure.
52 Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Estoico y frugal (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2019), 13. All quotes from this novel have been taken from that edition and will be given in parentheses in the main text.
53 Whitfield, ‘Mercados en los márgenes’, 87.
54 ‘[P]ublishing implies accepting to play a game whose rules are no longer solely those of pure creation’ (Heinich, Être écrivain création et identité, 78).
55 ‘Se puede ganar dinero o no. Es algo muy extraño. Al menos a mí me parece raro porque escribes un libro con todo tu corazón puesto, con pasión, con locura, te entregas a eso. Y cuando lo terminas lo entregas a tu agente y a tu editor, y automáticamente se convierte en una mercancía. Es un producto. Se convierte en dinero. Realmente cuesta comprender eso’ (Diálogos con mi sombra, ‘Centro Habana’, para. 104).
56 This strategy goes beyond this specific example and extends to a multitude of literary fields: ‘The author’s name and attached personae have become key focal points for the marketing of literary texts, such that one could argue that the current industry brands literature more by authorship than by other aspects of or ways of approaching a given work’s meaning’ (Sarah Brouillete, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace [London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011], 65–66).
57 Eduardo Becerra, ‘El interminable final de lo latinoamericano: políticas editoriales españolas y narrativa de entre siglos’, Pasavento. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 2:2 (2014), 285–96 (p. 288); available online at <https://ebuah.uah.es/dspace/bitstream/handle/10017/23878/interminable_becerra_PASAVENTO_2014_V2_N2.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y> (accessed 11 January 2022).
58 Becerra, ‘El interminable final de lo latinoamericano’, 289.
59 This idea can be related to the vision that Josefina Ludmer offers of contemporary Latin-American literature: ‘paradójicamente diaspórica, no solamente por sus territorios y sujetos, sino por sus modos de circulación y lectura’. Because of this Gutiérrez's characters are often placed inside and outside the city, society, work, the law etc. See Josefina Ludmer, ‘Ficciones cubanas de los últimos años: el problema de la literatura política’, in Cuba: un siglo de literatura (1902–2002), ed. Anke Birkenmaier & Roberto González Echevarría (Madrid: Colibrí, 2004), 357–71 (p. 359).
60 Whitfield, ‘Mercados en los márgenes’, 101.
61 De Ferrari, Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba, ‘Socialist Legality, Revolutionary Faith’, para. 7)
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.