The traces of narrative heterogeneity in Cristina Rivera Garza’s Autobiography of Cotton (2020)

Abstract

This article is oriented in the opposite direction to that suggested by Cristina Rivera Garza and endorsed by most of the specialized texts on her work: instead of prioritizing rupture and innovation (so common in her literary production), it focuses on the link that ties Autobiografía del algodón to a fertile narrative tradition in Latin America: that which is committed to representing sociocultural otherness. With the help of theoretical contributions of the peruvian critic Antonio Cornejo Polar on heterogeneous literatures, this article aims to contribute to the scrutiny of Autobiografía del algodón from an analytical perspective infrequent in studies on the work of the author from Tamaulipas. My hypothesis is that, without undermining the avant-garde gestures of this novel, it is possible to find in it tensions that, at different levels, refer to the difficulty of grasping the image of the cotton growers it seeks to vindicate. hus, although Autobiografía del algodón is offered as a transition from the personal and familiar to the communitarian/national (insofar as it extends temporally and territorially the effects of cotton planting), the truth is that Rivera Garza faces the difficulty of dealing literarily with a referent whose sociocultural affiliation is dissimilar to his own. I conclude that the fluctuation between the attributes of homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narration, the externalization of the layers that compose the text and the possibility of a different temporality are the resources put into play to try to diminish the unavoidable alienation from the represented world.