Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
The Uruguayan writer Felisberto Hernández dedicates three of his main stories,
“Por los tiempos de Clemente Colling”, “El caballo perdido”, and “Las tierras de la
memoria”, to the remembrance of different episodes of his childhood and youth.
While they are clearly based in his own life, these stories lack of a traditional
autobiographical style. They completely disregard any chronological structure, but
instead go back and forth in time. Also, Hernández deliberately omits facts
traditionally considered crucial, such as names of places and people, or even the
explicit description of his social context. Instead, he focuses on impressions and
reflections, as he attempts to recapture them through the act of remembering. In the
end, the reader is left not with a picture of his life, but with an impression of how he
viewed the world. Furthermore, since the Uruguayan writer is always overly
conscious of the act of remembering while he writes, the reader also witnesses the
struggle of a man trying to get a hold of his past. Hernández’s approach to
autobiographical writing is truly original in the sense that he records a process, not
a still image. The memories that he brings are not treated as fixed, but they change
as the writing process moves along. My presentation develops this approach framed
within the modern autobiographies, which slowly move away from the ambition of
merely representing series of events.