Autobiography: blunted dialectic and sublimation. About Jorge Baron Biza’s narrative

Abstract

The work of Jorge Baron Biza, El desierto y su semilla, is a novel just composed of grafts, of experiences –i. e., of memories in which sensation predominates, as Baron Biza himself argues in his programmatic text about the genre he practices–. This enhances the idea about this novel as a montage of grafts that are presented in chapters stripped off all intrigue, all epic, and all development and purpose. There, each experience is a past event, closed as a monad, which, in play with the others, promotes a dialectical movement that despite its attempts, cannot arrive at any synthesis, and thus settling for the movement itself since at least in its search, something that tragically fell apart (family life, the mother’s face) is being reconstructed. Here, aestheticizing details of corrosion also point to a decadent spirit: a rhetoric of the splendor of ruin, of the decomposition of form. This autobiographical novel seems to seek a kind of purging or purification of the heavy family history through writing so that its cathartic nature can be understood. Then his conciliatory hope, of sterile achievement, operates together with a decadence that at least seeks a sublimation of decay; that of his legacy.