La intertextualidad en la narrativa breve de Sergio Pitol

Abstract

This dissertation studies intertextuality in Sergio Pitol’s short narrative works: specifically, the way the writer consciously uses this phenomenon as a literary technique, and how it relates to his ideas about literature, his poetics, his personal canon, and his role in the current Hispanic-American literary system. Under the label ‘short narrative’ we include all the author’s short stories and other short texts which, being partly narrative in nature and difficult to classify in terms of its literary genre, were not conceived or presented by the writer as ‘short stories,’ but as autobiographical essays or writings. This study focuses, however, on the short stories, but from there tries to delineate the paths through which Pitol’s short narrative has advanced since the mid-nineties. As for intertextuality, the study is carried out from a dual perspective. First, from the perspective of textual analysis, distinguishing the “other texts” incorporated into his narratives, the way they were treated (transformed and interpreted by the author), their functions and meaning. The objective of applying this perspective is to explainPitol’s fundamental literary mechanisms and to delve into his work, clarifying and discovering new meanings. The second perspective is broader and considers intertextuality as a phenomenon that intervenes in textual circulation (what Lubomír Doležel called “transduction”). In this sense, we understand the intertextual practice as a conscious transgression of literary borders—in a broad sense: national, genre, artistic...—, which positions Sergio Pitol’s work in a global, transcultural and multidisciplinary context, playing a relevant role that must be determined. From this second perspective, we study the problems related to the literary canon in which the author aims to intervene, as well as his willingness to connect himself to a literature that aspires to be “international,” and not exclusively “national” (these terms understood in the sense which Pascale Casanova does). The work is divided into two parts. The first partis contextual, historical, general and panoramic (chapters 1 and 2), in which we explain the conceptual foundation on which the subsequent study is based. The second partis analytical (chapters 3-6), geared towarda study of the texts and their relation to the literary panorama described specifically in the second chapter. The first chapter presents a summary of the theories on intertextuality which is synthesized into specific monographs. The most notable points of view on the subject will be restated, and new further ideas on the topic will be introduced. The second chapter offers a global approach to the historical and literary context in which Pitol wrote his short narrative works: the second half of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first. Biographical details will be discussed, but these matters will be always intermingled with fundamental information about his work and the context in which it was conceived. The corpus of study that will be analyzed in the second partwill be specified, as well as the stages or periods in which we divide hisshort narrative, and, mostly based onhis essays and autobiographical writings, several points about his ars poetica and his personal canon will be elucidated. In the second part, in chronological order, each of the four chapters (chapters 3-6) is devoted to one of the previously established literary stages. The third chapter deals with the short stories written between 1957 and 1962. The next chapter covers all the writings between 1962 and 1972. The fifth one is dedicated to the short stories published between 1980 and 1982. Finally, the sixth chapter, which is shorter, is intended as an epilogue that aims to offer a glimpse of the way in which the Pitolian hybrid narrative of the nineties and beyond is related to the short storytelling of the previous three decades.