Heimat

This research presents a transareal study of the autofictional series of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard and the Colombian Fernando Vallejo, two authors whose work is marked by a fierce critique of their homelands, their Heimaten, but also by a complex rootedness. The interpretative analyses show that in Die Autobiographie and El río del tiempo the Heimat is presented as a construct that encompasses not only blissful but also negative, dissolutive, destructive elements, thus distancing both authors from a traditional conception of Heimat as a necessarily harmonic territory to which the subject feels positively attached. Instead, it is conceived as a dissimilar set, to which the subject relates, necessarily, in an ambivalent and problematic way. In both authors, literary narration is configured as an act in which this ambivalence is not simply represented, but in which, above all, the forms of hostility that give the Heimat its inhospitable character are contested. To this end, the authors resort to the implementation of two fundamental resources: mimesis and movement. The research demonstrates how their literary works present the Heimat as a space of continuous movements, exchanges and interactions, in which structures of oppression are at work, but also opposition mechanisms, practices of intersubjective openness and aspirations of community integration.