The Parody of Authorial Self-Mythologising Strategies as a Resource for Self-Representation: Carlos Pujol in His Texts

Abstract

It is well known that during the Romantic era artists developed strategies of self-mythologising from which they created their public image and defined their position within the literary system. The authorial clichés and stereotypes that emerged then are still today part of the referents from which each writer elaborates – through texts and gestures – his or her own authorial image, adopting, rejecting or reworking the inherited stereotypes. The purpose of this article is to show that in the fiction and non-fiction texts of the writer Carlos Pujol (Barcelona, 1936-2012) a parody of the strategies of self-mythologisation characteristic of romanticism is carried out as a resource for forging his own authorial self-representation. To this end, an analysis is made of the writer-characters in Los ficticios (a collection of short stories published posthumously) and the authorial image that emerges from the opinion article "Literatura anónima" (Anonymous Literature) and from his poetics. It is concluded that these fictional characters are a caricature of the stereotype of the romantic writer and, at the same time, an inverse mirror image of the author, his anti-image, since they embody values contrary to the authorial image that emerges from his works of thought. In short, the demystification of the stereotyped image of the romantic writer reveals the ethical and literary values that make up Pujol's authorial image and a poetics that could be called a poetics of the hiding and revelation of the self.