Spazio vissuto e spazio rappresentato

Abstract

Autobiography is a highly problematic genre whose main features are commonly considered memory, experience and identity. Nonetheless, there is also an inevitably degree of fiction-making concerned with the autobiographical act, as most autobiographies are inspired by a creative, and therefore fictional, impulse to select only those events and experiences in the writer’s life that build up an integrated pattern. As such, this encourages questions about fact and fiction, about the relations between reality and the text, and about origins: in this sense, there is a necessary link between the conditions – political, economic, and social – in which writers find themselves and the kinds of stories they choose to tell. The space they inhabit and the accrued meanings of space and time play a constitutive role in their narratives; but space is not given: it is culturally constructed or produced, it incorporates temporal change. The progresses in technology, the new media and migrations have finally led to «time-space compression», and to the concept of nonplaces, where the individual is out-of-the-world. In this sense, Canada perfectly represents what it means to live in a «third space» of in-betweenness: so, we will see how German-Canadian writer Frederick Philip Grove avoids categorization of literary nationalism locating himself in an isolated and paradigmatic position between literatures; we will appreciate Mordecai Richler, whose irony is crucial in order to describe the moments and spaces given to a Canadian Jew in Montreal’s ghetto; finally, we will look at Michael Ondatjee’s continuous references to the cultural and political situation in Sri Lanka, and how he uses these connections to build a sort of third-person autobiography through which he can recover the memory of the places from his Ceylonese childhood. At the end of this analysis, it will be clear how many difficulties the autobiographical impulse has to face, how many parameters it has to respect, and how much truth and fiction influence and corrupt each other. [edited by author]