Sergio Pitol, Sick of Literature. A Short Study about the Literary “Central Position” (or Obsession) on Trilogía de la Memoria’s Essays

Abstract

The forward article is dedicated to study the central position, which could be almost obsessive, of the literature on the essay books of the “Trilogía de la Memoria” –El arte de la fuga (1996), El viaje (2000) y el Mago de Viena (2005)–, by Mexican writer Sergio Pitol. Besides, it tries to figure out the way this literary “excess” deform – just for give it a name– some of the categories that Pitol critics, with good or bad luck, have used for define the author’s work. Then, among those concepts, Autobiography, Memory, Travel have been used, and also it has attended to prove how this literary “excess”, this attempt of “literaturize” everything in his work, gives these categories, at the end, some characteristics that make them different from its traditional use in the literary history. So, the thesis of this article demonstrates, in some way, the originality of Pitol’s essays, because he got that those old categories look innovative