THE DIARY ON THE LITERARY MAP: RESONANCES OF BARTHES AND BLANCHOT IN ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS

Abstract

The novels of the catalan Enrique Vila-Matas, as well as of other contemporary writers, dialogue critically and creatively with the current fever of experiential narratives, questioning the first person formation mechanisms. One of these novels, Montano’s Malady (2005), incorporates the form of diary, through an autodiegetic narrator, renewing the possibilities of this genre, always testing the lector’s ability of (un)belief. This novel will be analyzed taking into account the displacement of its narrator-protagonist, who has an obsessively literary connection with space. This obsession with literature is in constant correlation with the reflections of Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot about topics such as authorship, writing, space and death. Thus, the reading proposed here considers the intertextual and metafictional mechanisms performed to discuss the fictional construction of the diary, which many times is put into play through self-referential performatic procedures.