Autobiografia e metaliteratura em Enrique Vila-Matas

Abstract

By creating narratives that takes the reader through a dizzying network of references, the Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas transformed his prose in a tribute to literature. In this paper we aim at showing how a particular canon feeds the Vila-Matas’ autobiographical work, as a kind of metaliterature. For this purpose we will analyze the autobiographical novel Never Any End to Paris (2003), where the main character is – like Vila-Matas – a renowned Catalan writer who prepares for a conference, while remembering the years that he lived in Paris in the 1970s. In this book, there is a number references made to the American writer Ernest Hemingway and his own autobiographical novel A Moveable Feast (1964). Vila- Matas revisits Hemingway's novel to subvert it and confuse the story of the American author with that of his own alter ego. By doing so, the narrative of Never Any End to Paris leads us to a brief consideration on autobiographies and related themes, like New Historical Novels, Historiographic Metafiction and Autofiction, contemporary terminologies centered on the relationships between life and fiction.