A daring of Sarmiento. Autobiography and novel in Recuerdos de provincia

Abstract

The circumstances of the writing and the publication of Recuerdos de provincia, in December of 1850, are more or less known. However, the passage of time has tended to make one forgetful of the risk that Sarmiento entailed in writing and publishing his autobiography. In this article, drawing from different theoretical approaches to the autobiographical genre (among others, those of Judith Butler and Jean Starobinski), it is analyzed how that particular risk took place. Likewise, based on certain statements by Lionel Gossman on the Confessions of Rousseau, it is also proposed that this risk implied, very markedly, the putting into crisis of what, at that time, was considered to be proper to be written and published and what was not. A central hypothesis, then, is that Recuerdos de provincia sought, perhaps unthinkingly, to break with what in its epoch was considered as writable and publishable. Finally, in relation to certain ideas of Jacques Rancière on the “aesthetic regime”, we consider the possibility that these characteristics of the text are linked to the presence of the novelistic, and then it is proposed to think of Recuerdos de provincia as an intonation of the Bildungsroman, a capital genre of the novel in the nineteenth century.