Dos autorretratos literarios: Guillermo Cabrera Infante y Virgilio Piñera

The discourse is about two emblematic cases of the literary "self-portrait". The text first analysed is "Autorretracto" by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, which exactly befits and confirms Michael Beaujour' definition: "il n'y a pas de récit suivi, ni d'histoire systématique de la personalité. Autoportrait plutót qu'autobiographie." Our analysis mainly focuses on the question how a "portrait", which characteristically belongs to the visual domain, can be created with verbal instruments. Nevertheless, the short-story is also regarded as a tract on the theoretical questions of visuality. The other short-story analyzed is Virgilio Piñera's "La cara" which can be interpreted as a modern version of the myth of Narcissus: the love of the two protagonists developing via telephone. It happens frequently with Pinera that a short-story moves within the scope of the dichotomy of vision versus blindness, and the self-portrait shifts to the domain of the invisible, namely to the sphere of imagination. The two short-stories raise theoretical comments reflecting on some questions of interdisciplinarity, and that of the modern paragon. Is impossible to paint a picture through words? How does the spatial (visual) representation appear in a genre (narrative) that normally develops in time? And finally, is there any difference between the means of delineation of something visible and of an imaginary picture which is scant of spatiality?