Una biografía “metabiográfica”: Benjamín Jarnés y su "Sor Patrocinio" (1929)

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to examine how the “new biography” discourse was concreted in Benjamín Jarnés, starting from his first contribution to the genre: his biography Sor Patrocinio, la monja de las llagas. To this end, we shall consider the epistemic and structural principle underlying his narrative: the domain of the “meta–” field, mobilized trough the biographer’s presence in his own text, making his presence felt between the reader and the biography. Jarnés approaches to the genre, from the epochal epistemological precariousness, as a question about the discourse’s legitimacy and the validity of reconstructions, and not as a resolution of another existence’s contradictions. The result will be to name Jarnés’ work as a “metabiography”: a speech that stresses the cognitive process, which is built simultaneously with an active reader’s participation, and, finally, which reveals –dramatizing– his methods of composition