A Melted Author: Uses of Autofiction in Daniel Saldaña París' Aviones sobrevolando un monstruo

Abstract

In 2021 the Mexican writer Daniel Saldaña París (Mexico City, 1984) compiled many personal texts to form the collection Aviones sobrevolando un monstruo. This essay proposes, however, that the “personal texts” are far from being just an autobiographic exercise. In the nine works, and the “preliminary note” that compose this volume, the author uses a series of literary, figurative and fictionary resources, in order for the “autobiographic pact”—in words of Phillipe Lejeune—to become an “ambiguous pact”, where autofiction emerges in a protagonic way and can be appreciated not  only as a testimonial book, but as a fully aesthetic and rhetorical one. The experiences referred in these pages will serve the purpose, more than just bringing together an identity, to desediment it, move it around, make it functional to the text that it’s trying to articulate. In summary, it’s a book with ten texts where the author that wants to become a writer depicts his doubts, but without actually doing any concrete operations for this purpose, he travels and reads. Those trips and readings wish to become memories, as an autobiographic discourse, but the literature (either as a reflection or as an incorporation of readings) contaminates the nude image of the cities that were visited and the anecdotes that were lived.