In the traps of memory

when the self is an other in Valter Hugo Mãe’s Contra Mim (2020)

Abstract

This article, analysing Contra Mim (2020), an autobiographical work by Valter Hugo Mãe, aims to question the assumptions of autobiography as a literary genre, located on the vertiginous treshold between fiction and non-fiction.

In fact, in a first stage, we will try to see to what extent this particular work comes close to the canonical register of what an autobiography is supposed to be (assuming an allegedly strong guarantee of truth, promoting an entry into the intimate spaces of the (auto)biographee and, in the cases of writer’s lives, helping to understand his work as an author of fiction).

After that, we will see how a metaleptic game is established, presenting the author/writer as an Other, according to the complex characteristics of the autobiographical genre, namely: its complex and difficult objectivity (which can compromise its foundations of truth); the constraints of translating the totality of an existence, which gives rise to the selection of episodes considered exemplary, obscuring others that are perhaps equally or more important; the construction of a non-fictional account, which can be read in comparison with the other works of this same writer.

In conclusion, Contra Mim will demonstrate how autobiography can only be written against itself, explaining its paradoxical title.