BEYOND PLAGIARISM AND SELF-PLAGIARISM, AN INVESTIGATION OF THE SECRET HISTORY PRESENT IN TWO STORIES BY RICARDO EMILIO PIGLIA RENZI

Abstract

The article analyses, in the first place, the autotextual relationship formed by plagiarism and self-plagiarism in and between the short story La loca y el relato del crimen and the novella Homenaje a Roberto Arlt, both published in the collection Nombre falso. In both works there are dialogues, scenes and characters that are repeated. Homenaje, moreover, is constructed on a secret: Who wrote the story Luba included in the text? Our object is to reveal, through detective work, this enigma concealed in the “secret history” in the form of a narrative vacuum to be discovered. In the second place, following earlier criticism, we show the traces of other writings in the texts noted. These are key relations for the construction and reading of the work. Thus, La loca y el relato del crimen could be read in the way that Borges makes a collage of Cervantes’ and Menard’s El Quijote; and the structure of Homenaje appears to be the same used by Onetti in his novellas