Antonio Tabucchi's 'Autobiographies d'autrui' Explores Post-Hoc Poetics

Antonio Tabucchi's essay collection 'Autobiographies d'autrui' (subtitled 'Poétiques a posteriori') examines the relationship between fiction and its retrospective theorization. The book opens with a quote from Joseph Conrad: 'One first makes a work and then theories afterwards. It is an amusing and selfish activity, largely useless to everyone and quite capable of leading you to erroneous conclusions.' Tabucchi revisits his own novels—'Requiem,' 'Pereira prétend,' 'Le Fil de l'horizon,' and 'Il se fait tard, de plus en plus tard…'—to illuminate the unusual accidents within his fictions and dissect the threads leading to incongruous facts embedded in his narratives. He offers an intimate glimpse into the real-life origins of his fictions and his post-hoc theories, including a reader's letter identifying with his fiction. Tabucchi questions how to develop a poetics of one's work when unexpected reality intrudes into novel-writing. The essays open up the body of fiction, proposing new ones. Citing Elias Canetti's belief that 'authentic' diaries hide 'true human essence,' Tabucchi quotes Alexander Pushkin: 'I wept so many tears over fiction.' He rejects a single truth, asserting that literature is not a charitable association. His unorthodox essays move from one fiction to another, blending narrative forms with digressions in what is termed the 'Tabucchi mood,' showing the novel as a liberal object that must renew the perception of literature. The review is by Patrick Amine.