Autofiction as a poetics: the world of Juan José Millás

Abstract

The present work aims to analyze the use of autofiction in the valencian writer Juan José Millás’ novel El mundo (2009). We propose to understand the resource of autofiction as the mechanism that allows Millás, in first place, to refer in writing the literaturized life experience itself, and in second place, to offer the reader an explanation as to what mobilizes his writing, in order to legitimize various aspects of his poetics. By means of autofiction, Millás interpellates the reader through the individual perspective of a writer narrator to recognize his own vision of the world in the experiences of a self at once autobiographical and fictional. As close, we will postulate that this strategy of enunciation is linked to the postmodern realism theorized by Joan Oleza, inasmuch as it constitutes a way of referring reality from the conviction of its unstable and subjective character.