Juan José Saer: scenes from an involuntary biography

Abstract

Starting from certain essays by Juan José Saer gathered, mainly, in The concept of fiction (1997) that challenge the biographical genre, it is interesting, on the one hand, to make a journey through the conceptual knots of his poetics delimited around this challenge and on the other, to propose the hypothesis that Saer’s biography has been written “involuntarily” by his friendly circle and by literary critics who have or have not maintained a link with the author. It would, then, be “biographical scenes” scattered in the critical bibliography as self-sufficient fragments that neglect the chronology to mount, instead, in a continuity that reinforces the dramatic quality (in a theatrical or cinematographic sense) of the story of the life of others.