Autobiography, autofiction: theoretical debate from El escritor y el otro by Carlos Liscano

Abstract

The book El escritor y el otro by the author Carlos Liscano from Uruguay, proposes a deep discussion on the games of fictional creation, and also reflects the possible limits of the authors factual life and its written form. With that starting point, this paper aims to argue how Liscano’s text suggests the problematization between the fiction that appears to be a life story and the mutual contaminations derived from that crossing. In El escritor y el otro both life and writing are fictionalized, acting as a literature that looks inwards, that is self questioning. Beyond that, the book also reveals the diversity of the “I” of a Liscano that inscribes himself as fiction, and at the same time appeals often to self-referentiality, to data recognized as being from the personal life of the public man and also from Uruguay, projecting the desire to wipe off the frontiers between factual and fictional. Therefore, we start from the hypothesis that the stories present in El escritor y el otro are not limited to a testimonial literature neither to a autobiographical literature, but are projected through a script that is assumed to be undecided in terms of gender, in a text that reinvents a life in its words, and outlines the performance of an author and his spectacular image, as a way to mock the writers life and the same speculate form of the own text that he elaborates.