Metaplagiarism and the Critic's Role as Detective: Ricardo Piglia's Reinvention of Roberto Arlt

Author(s): Ellen McCracken

Source: PMLA, Vol. 106, No. 5 (Oct., 1991), pp. 1071-1082
Published by: Modern Language Association
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Metaplagiarism and the Critic's Role
Detective: Ricardo Piglia's
of Roberto Arlt
ELLEN McCRACKEN is as-
sociate professor of compara-
tive literatureat the University
of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Her publications include De-
coding Women's Magazines
(Macmillan and St. Martin's,
1992) and articles on contem-
porary Latin Americanfiction,
mass culture, and Latina writ-
ers in the United States. She is
at workon a book-lengthstudy
of thefiction of Latina women
in the United States and is
coeditingRearticulations:
The
Practiceof Chicano Cultural
Studies.
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EllenMcCracken
as
Reinvention
iQue es robar un banco comparado con fundarlo?
La propiedad es un robo.
RicardoPiglia,"Homenajea RobertoArlt"
What is robbing a bank compared withfounding it?
Property is theft.
A NCONTEMPORARY Latin American writer boldly steals
from the bank of world literature. He copies an early-
twentieth-century European short story nearly line by line and leaves
dozens of textual clues to denounce his crime. But no one seems to
notice. The stolen text takes on a life of its own, as scholars and
bibliographersfail to recognize it as a reappropriation,analyzing and
cataloging it independently of its pre-text. How is it that such a well-
documented literary transgression goes undetected? Does the post-
modernist text lack postmodernist readers?
Narrative Deception and Active Readership
Writersoften create false paths leading to eventual reversalsthat cause
readers to reevaluate assumed fictive truths. Julio Cortfazar,for ex-
ample, insists on the reader's active role, embedding in many of his
fantastic stories deceptions that the texts and readerstogether unmask
as the narratives progress. His "La noche boca arriba" (1956; "The
Night Face Up") and "Continuidad de los parques" (1960; "Conti-
nuity of Parks") duplicitously compel readers to posit incorrect or
only partially true textual settings and times, which are revealed to
be inaccurate in the stories' climactic endings (Relatos 72-82,
1071
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1072 Metaplagiarismand the Critic'sRole as Detective
312-14; "End"66-76, 63-65). Rereadings of the
texts uncover subtle clues to the deceptions,
which the author sprinkles throughout to chal-
lenge readersinto active coauthorship. This tech-
nique reaches its limits when a writer leaves no
openly revelatory ending and instead counts on
readers to decode the deception on their own.
Such a requirement pushes the concept of the
active reader to its extreme, for the writer wants
the aesthetic ruse both to be discovered and to
remain hidden.
The contemporary Argentine writer Ricardo
Piglia engages in such an enterprise in his 1975
volume of short stories, Nombre falso 'False
Name.'1 Using a technique I term "metaplagia-
rism," he reproduces a slightly altered version of
a Russian short story from the early twentieth
century and attributes it to Roberto Arlt, an Ar-
gentine writer who died in 1942. Piglia compli-
cates the theft further by prefacing the story,
which he titles "Luba," with a parodic scholarly
essay, "Homenaje a Roberto Arlt" 'Homage to
Roberto Arlt,' documenting his spurious literary
discovery. Desiring both to conceal and to reveal
his metaplagiarism, Piglia never plainly ac-
knowledges it but leaves numerous textual clues
throughout for readersto discover for themselves.
In spite of the multiple modes in which the
text confesses to its crime, the metaplagiarism
has remained largely undetected. Libraries have
cataloged the story as Arlt's, and scholars have
either voiced uncertainty about its authorship or
analyzed it as if it were indeed his.2 The apoc-
ryphal attribution has taken on a life of its own-
in a sense, the logical conclusion of the process
Piglia began with his deception. Piglia demon-
strates potently that despite an author's self-
denunciation and truth telling, readers establish
a text's meaning; even after years of working with
modernist and postmodernist texts, they may not
discover the intertextuality, reading to a certain
degree monologically.
"Homenaje" and "Luba" might be classified
as what Linda Hutcheon terms "historiographic
metafiction,"in which self-reflexivityis conjoined
to a preoccupation with the discursive construc-
tion of historical events and figures; writers of
such work contest dominant liberal humanist
culture by critically appropriating it, working
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within literary and cultural conventions to sub-
vert them (Poetics, esp. 5; Politics; and "Prob-
lematics"). Just as "Homenaje" exaggerates the
conventions of the scholarly essay to challenge
them, so "Luba" uses a kind of plagiarism to
counter the moral order that deems the act trans-
gressive. In contrast to the usual copying and
stealing that we call plagiarism, metaplagiarism
here calls into question the concept of literary
private property, as does the inflated documen-
tation of Piglia's parodic scholarly essay, which
claims the stolen text as the narrator'sown dis-
covery and property. Piglia plagiarizesand at the
same time carries the act beyond itself. On first
uncovering the literary theft, readers recognize
plagiary and the transgression it represents.
Eventually, however, they realize that Piglia uses
plagiarism against itself.
To expose the metaplagiaristicintertextuality,
readers must first grasp the code of fiction;
"Homenaje" and "Luba"must be read as a fictive
continuum. Within this code, Ricardo Piglia is a
construct, an autodiegetic narratorwho recounts
fictitious events. But so successfully does
"Homenaje" imitate the conventions of the
scholarly essay that readers can forget that the
text is presented in a volume of short stories, in
which the overarching code of fiction delimits
each of the constituent parts. And readers who
become suspicious may not distrust in the way
that postmodern writing frequently demands.
They may fall into Piglia's playful trap and direct
their suspicion to his claim of having made a lit-
erary discovery rather than to his doubly coded
narrative technique.
Part of the reason readers fail to see "Home-
naje" as fiction and parody is that Piglia atten-
uates the distance between text and pre-text that
parody usually establishes. While in parody there
must be some intertextual gap to facilitate rec-
ognition of the literary technique, plagiarism
usually aims to abolish any difference between
itself and what it copies.3 (Of course, it never suc-
ceeds completely in this effort since every copy
is necessarilyalso a transformation.)Just as Piglia
wants readerstemporarilyto fail to recognize that
"Homenaje" is parodic, so too does he want the
metaplagiarismto remain undetected for a while.
Thus, at this level of partial narrative truth, he
 Ellen McCracken
likens the parodic intertextuality to the metapla-
giaristic one by hiding the relation of each story
to its pre-text. At this interpretive stage, readers
fail to demarcate the distance between the imi-
tation and the real object, mistaking the copy for
an original.
When active readers discover and pursue fur-
ther the pivotal clue that Piglia mentions quite
casually at the end of"Homenaje," an extensive
network of previously hidden self-denunciation
becomes visible, allowing them to reestablish the
distance between the texts and pre-texts of both
the parody and the metaplagiarism and to distin-
guish the texts as imitations of the pre-texts. And
failure to engage in the work of what Piglia terms
the vanguard reader ("Notas sobre literatura"
146) leaves obscure the most important intertex-
tuality in this pair of stories-the relation of
"Luba" to its Russian pre-text.
For many readers,decoding the metaplagiaris-
tic intertextuality requiresdetective work outside
the text; few in the West are so well versed in
Russian literature that they can immediately
connect "Luba" and the Russian story. By se-
lecting an uncommon pre-text, Piglia subverts
cultural conventions, catching critics at their own
game of purportedly establishing truth through
excessively documented scholarship.Why has the
writer pushed the concept of the active reader to
its limits here? How do the contours of this nar-
rative deception ultimately pay a unique tribute
to Roberto Arlt, as the title of the penultimate
story in Nombrefalso promises?
To answer these questions and, indeed, to ac-
tualize the postmodernist project that Piglia ini-
tiates, one must embark on a formalist reading
of the two texts. In a noteworthy reversal of con-
temporary literary fashion, the vanguard reader
on whom Piglia's text depends must on one im-
portant level engage in a patient, close decoding
or miss the text's larger theoretical concerns.
Crime as Homage
In "Homenaje a Roberto Arlt," a series of nar-
rative kernels ensnares readers in Piglia's delib-
erate and playful deception. First, meticulously
following the conventions of the scholarly essay,
the autodiegetic narrator gains the reader's con-
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1073
fidence, telling of his discovery of "Luba." He
purchases the typescript of the story from Arlt's
friend Kostia. Shortly after this sale, Kostia pub-
lishes the story under his own name, changing
the title. The friend's ostensible act of plagiarism
bewilders readers as much as it initially does the
narrator.In the final scene of"Homenaje," Arlt's
former landlord brings to the narrator a previ-
ously undiscovered box of Arlt's belongings.
Warning readers in passing that the contents ex-
plain why Kostia published the story with his own
name, the narrator lists the heterogeneous array
of seemingly insignificant objects in the box,
among them a notebook with the original, hand-
written manuscript of Arlt's story. The narrator
ends by revealing that he has succeeded in estab-
lishing the definitive version of "Luba," which
follows in the appendix, by working from Arlt's
notebook and the typed version of the story pur-
chased from Kostia.
Numerous digressions impede this plot. Elab-
orate documentation, lengthy footnotes that take
up more space on some pages than the primary
text does, and long metadiegetic narratives that
temporarily displace the main story are crucial
constituents of the parodic discourse of "Home-
naje." But it is precisely the excessiveness of par-
ody here that helps to disguise the truthful code,
advancing the deception; the lengthy digressions
may try the patience of readers and lead them to
scan portions of the text superficiallyto discover
the outcome of the primaryplot, which the writer
tortuously denies his audience.
Indeed, many commentators have failed to
notice in the box of Arlt's things the crucial clue
that reveals the metaplagiarism-a copy of"Las
tinieblas de Andreiev" (145)-even though Piglia
attempts to incite curiosity and investigative ac-
tivity with his hint. Readers who have the cu-
riosity, time, and energy to engage in the
important role of detective and who obtain a copy
of Leonid Andreev's text will discover that Piglia
has copied it entirely, with slight adaptations.
First published in 1907, Andreev's story existed
in English at the time I first read Piglia's book
only in a rare edition titled The Dark and pub-
lished by the Hogarth Press in 1922.4 When I
found that this edition was available only in my
library's special collection, where it was under
1074 Metaplagiarismand the Critic'sRoleas Detective
guard and reading of it was restricted, Piglia's
theft and reappropriation seemed to be magni-
fied. The uncovering of this pre-text disrupts the
reading process, "exploding the tyrannical lin-
earity of the act of reading" (Hutcheon, "Bor-
rowing" 232). An inquiry into why Piglia violates
the codes of literaryprivate propertyreveals other
important intertextual relations between Piglia's
fictive dyad and Arlt's work.
Indeed, Piglia's crime is an especially fitting
tribute and "homenaje" to Arlt, whose writing
persistentlyassociates literarytexts with theft and
other kinds of lawbreaking. The idea that the
worlds of literature and crime are coterminous
arisesin Arlt's 1926 novel Eljuguete rabioso 'The
Rabid Plaything,' which portrays the acts of
stealing, renting, and reselling books as elements
of an economic continuum that under capitalism
links artistic production to money. For Arlt, a
similar continuum structures such literary prac-
tices as quotation, translation, parody, and, ul-
timately, plagiarism.5
In "Homenaje," Piglia connects the elements
of these continua by comparing Arlt's story
"Escritor fracasado" 'The Failed Writer' with
Borges's "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote"
'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote';both sto-
ries have protagonistswho fail at being "original"
writers, who learn that they can only write when
they falsify. In Piglia's narrative,Kostia links Arlt
to the connected practices of translation, falsifi-
cation, theft, and plagiarism:
iSabe de quien fue testigoArlt?:de EdgarSue [sic],
de Rocambole. . . . Leia como loco: todo en las
traducciones de Tor.. . . [E]so era la gran literatura
para el.. .. Lea Escritorfracasado.... La historia
de un tipo que no puedeescribirnadaoriginal,que
robasin darsecuenta:asi son todoslos escritoresen
este pals, asi es la literaturaaca. Todo falso,falsifi-
caciones de falsificaciones... . [C]ompare Escritor
fracasado con ese cuento de Borges, con Pierre
Menard:son la mismacosa.El tipono puedeescribir
si no copia, si no falsifica, si no roba....
. A usted
le parecemal?Y sin embargono estamal,esti muy
bien:se escribedesdedondese puedeleer.Dostoiev-
ski pasadopor los traductoresgallegos.,Sabe por
que era genial Arlt?Porquese dio cuenta que ahi
habiaun estilo. Despueslos boludosdicen que es-
cribiamal. (132-33)
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Do you know who Arlt'smodels were?EdgarSue
[sic], Rocambole .... He read them like a madman:
in the Tor translations.. . . That was greatliterature
for him. . . . Read "The Failed Writer" . . . the
storyof a guy who couldn'twriteanythingoriginal,
whostolewithoutrealizingit:that'showall thewrit-
ersin thiscountryare,that'showthe literaturehere
is. All false, falsifications of falsifications.. . . Com-
pare"TheFailedWriter"withthatstoryof Borges's,
with "PierreMenard":the two are the same. The
guycan'twriteif he doesn'tcopy,if he doesn'tfalsify,
if he doesn't steal.. . . Does that seem bad to you?
Butit's not, it'sverygood;you writefromwhatpeo-
ple can read.Dostoevsky,via the Galiciantransla-
tors.Do you knowwhy Arltwas a genius?Because
he realizedthattherewasa stylethere.Andthenthe
creepssay he writesbadly.
Kostia devalorizes the notion of originality by
depreciating two of its representative events-
the invention of a literary text and the reading
of a work in the language in which it was first
written. Mainstream Argentine criticism exces-
sively valorized originality in both these senses,
labeling Arlt a bad writer because, in part, his
language reads like a translation. Kostia asserts,
however, that this quality is preciselywhat makes
Arlt great; translation democratizes access to lit-
erary works, and an author such as Arlt writes
from what "se puede leer" 'people can read.'6
Piglia in this homage to Arlt has offered a falsi-
fication of a falsification of a falsification, by
copying and slightly adapting a translation of
Andreev's story and by falsely representing it as
Arlt's work. The reference to Pierre Menard,
whose word-for-word reproduction of chapters
of Don Quijote is nevertheless a different text,
points to the paragraphsand entire pages copied
from Andreev that in fact constitute a new,
metaplagiaristic text in Nombrefalso. Menard's
reading of Don Quijote, different even in its os-
tensible sameness, parallels Piglia's reading of
Andreev, adapted from a Spanish translationthat
is itself a reading of the original;vanguardreaders
are to follow suit by transforming the last two
stories in Nombrefalso.7
In a footnote to "Luba,"Piglia plays again with
the notion of the original. He attempts to alert
readers to the literary theft with a self-contradic-
tion: "Hemos transcripto este parrafo seguinapa-
 Ellen McCracken
rece en su version definitiva en el original del
relato. En el cuaderno, en cambio, ... el texto
se lee como sigue .. ." 'We have transcribedthis
paragraph as it appears in its definitive version
in the original of the story. In the notebook, in
contrast, . . . the text reads as follows . .
(128n10; my italics). What, the careful reader
must wonder, is the original version of the story
if not Arlt's notebook? Like the apparently un-
motivated allusion to Andreev's text at the end
of "Homenaje," this puzzling allusion should
alert the vanguard reader to the existence of an
"original"that is not Arlt's notebook-Andreev's
story.
Foucault has argued that historically the "au-
thor-function" was assigned to texts to fix re-
sponsibility and to punish authors whose works
were transgressive. When strict copyright regu-
lations were establishedin the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries to protect literary
ownership, "the transgressive properties always
intrinsic to the act of writing became the forceful
imperative of literature"(125). Piglia's transgres-
sion of the author function-although executed,
on one level, entirely within the rules of literary
ownership, attribution, and proper documenta-
tion-questions the function's validity and the
notion of literaryprivate propertythat established
authorship seeks to protect. Like Foucault, who
urges substituting concerns about discourse for
the traditional preoccupation with authorship,
Piglia demonstratesthe primacy of discourse over
the author function, as he tricks readers into an
incorrect attribution of authorship, in part by
creating discursive patterns similar to Arlt's. Pi-
glia's transgression of the accepted codes of his-
torical authenticity is in fact a profoundly
historical act, as Hutcheon argues all historio-
graphic metafiction potentially is ("Problema-
tics" 3).
In the context of Argentine letters, Piglia's
homage to Arlt is an intervention into the classic
polemic about civilization and barbarism. In ef-
fect, Piglia has barbarized a European text, en-
abling Argentine literature to assert itself with a
vengeance against the hegemonic European
model. In fact, as Piglia argues in several other
forums, even writers who ostensibly elevate the
European cultural models over the allegedly bar-
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1075
barous Argentine ones themselves practice such
"nonoriginal" literary techniques as quotation
(both accurate and inaccurate), translation, and
incorrect attribution. For example, Domingo
Faustino Sarmiento's use of an inaccurate and
misattributed French quotation in the beginning
of Facundo (1845), a text that some argue in-
auguratesArgentine literature, shows how his at-
tempt to valorize himself through European
culture becomes "barbarized."8
Even Borges-who, in Piglia's view, carriesos-
tentatious and fraudulent erudition to its limits,
poking fun at Argentina's second-hand pedan-
try-remains oriented to the nineteenth century,
in contrast to Arlt, a truly twentieth-century
writer. "PierreMenard," Piglia suggests, is a par-
ody of the French writer Paul Groussac, who in
Un enigme litteraire (1903) uses elaborate schol-
arly documentation to verify the author of the
famous apocryphal version of the second volume
of Don Quijote, which appeared under the pseu-
donym Alonso Fernandezde Avellaneda in 1614.
In fact, however, the plagiarist identified by
Groussac had died in December 1604-before
the first volume of the original novel was pub-
lished. Piglia argues that it was Groussac who
first used the technique of reading that Borges
ascribes to Menard-the device of deliberate an-
achronism and erroneous attribution. In effect,
Piglia suggests, Groussac was playing a joke on
his Argentine readers from his position as a
merely mediocre intellectual whose European
birth made him a cultural arbiter in Argentina:
"Un europeo legitimo se divertia a costa de estos
nativos disfrazados"'A legitimate European had
fun at the expense of these disguised natives'
(Respiracion 156).
Piglia's tribute to Roberto Arlt is a critical
continuation of the Argentine tradition of ap-
propriating European texts. Now, however, the
"native" initiates the joke, and he is so successful
that his "barbarism"passes as the epitome of the
civilized.
The System of Embedded Clues
Discovering the literary theft that underlies
"Homenaje" and "Luba" exposes a constellation
of clues that the metaplagiarist has playfully es-
1076 Metaplagiarismand the Critic's Roleas Detective
tablished to denounce himself. Behind this net-
work is the smiling figure of Piglia, chiding
readers whose failure to perform a careful for-
malist reading temporarily disenables the theo-
retical ends of the two stories. Frequently, the
clues not only make public the crime but high-
light the elements of Arlt's thought that render
the theft so fitting a tribute to him.
Besides discovering the important intertex-
tuality between each story and its pre-texts, the
reader must decode a crucial internal intertex-
tuality between the constituent parts of Nombre
falso. The textual unit that must be studied begins
with the volume's title, continues with "Home-
naje" (to which "Luba" is merely an appendix),
and ultimately leads back to Andreev's version.
Readersmay find no obvious connection between
the title and the content of Piglia's book until
they encounter the phrase in "Homenaje." The
story ends with the unresolved puzzle of why
Kostia, when publishing Arlt'stext under his own
name, changes the title to "Nombre falso: Luba."
Just as Kostia attempts to alert his readers to his
crime of plagiarism (and, by implication, to
Arlt's) by adding the words "nombre falso" to
the story's title, so too does Piglia, by entitling
his volume with the same phrase, hint that he
himself is involved in a similar transgression.9
The relation of names and false names to the
safeguarding of private property is highlighted
immediately in "Homenaje" when the narrator-
protagonistPiglia notes in the firstsentence: "esta
en juego la propiedad de un texto de Roberto
Arlt . . ." 'what is at issue is the ownership of
one of Roberto Arlt's texts' (99). Several codes
operate here, facilitating Piglia's deception. As
part of an initial innocent or face-value code, at
work for the reader who still trusts the author,
the phrasesignifiesthe common scholarlyventure
of literaryattribution:the critic provides evidence
of the authentic authorship of the newly found
text. For the readerwho has finished "Homenaje"
but still not acted on the allusion to Andreev, the
phrase participatesin a second significatorycode:
the critic, defraudedof the ownership of a literary
discovery, desires to denounce the thief who
published the story under his own name. Most
important, however, is the third code, in which
the phrase warns the alert reader that the text
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attributed to Arlt is in fact the property of some-
one else. And, finally, although the scholarly dis-
course tempts the reader to understand the
opening sentence and subsequent text as nonfic-
tion, a fictive code permeates all the other levels
because this piece appears in a volume of short
stories. The reader must eventually return to this
code of fiction when encountering such phrases
in the first paragraphas "Yo soy quien descubrio
el unico relato de Arlt que ha permanecido ine-
dito despues de su muerte. El texto se llama
Luba" 'I am the one who discovered the only
text of Arlt's that has remained unpublished after
his death. The text is entitled "Luba" ' (99).
Piglia, of course, wants to have it both ways
and calculates that his audience will become en-
trapped at first within the code of the innocent
readerwho interpretsthe fictive as nonfictive. He
especially encourages this response later in the
story when he establishesthe first-personnarrator
as himself, the literary critic ("Digale que llamo
Ricardo Piglia" 'Tell him Ricardo Piglia called'
[143]). But this postmodernist version of a mod-
ernist device should signal the code of historio-
graphic metafiction, reminding the vanguard
readerthat besides being a critic, Piglia is a fiction
writer and the author of the book of stories now
in hand. Only after readers have successfully fol-
lowed the path of the critic as detective can they
fully participate in the fiction of these ostensibly
nonfictional phrases.
Piglia exaggerates"the paratextualconventions
of historiography" (Hutcheon, Poetics 123) in a
self-critical gesture designed to urge the reader
more directly to become a detective. Using a
scholarly convention against itself, he buries sev-
eral explanations of his metaplagiary in a long
footnote, where they might be overlooked:
Un criticoliterarioes siempre,de algunmodo, un
detective:persiguesobrela superficiede los textos,
las huellas, los rastrosque permitendescifrarsu
enigma.. .. Arltidentificasiemprela escrituracon
el crimen,la estafa,la falsificacion,el robo.En este
esquemael criticoaparececomoel policiaquepuede
descubrirla verdad. (136)
A literarycriticis always,in some way, a detective,
followingthe contoursof texts,the tracks,the traces
that allow the enigma to be deciphered. ... Arlt
 Ellen McCracken
alwaysidentifiedwritingwith crime,swindle,falsi-
fication,and robbery.Accordingto thisschema,the
criticfunctionsas a police officerwho can discover
the truth.'0
By performing the work of detectives and the po-
lice, readers can arrive at the truth behind the
literarypuzzle of the story; that is, by discovering
the hidden crime, they engage the fictive code of
"Homenaje" that helps to reveal Piglia's swindle,
falsification, and theft (and, within the fictive dis-
course, Arlt's).
Along with the narrator,vanguard readers are
to become uneasy about certain details. Why, for
example, would Arlt have accepted advance pay-
ment for a story, then written it, but never pub-
lished it? Why did Kostia wish to hide the
existence of the story and then, after accepting
money for it (as Arlt had also allegedly done),
prevent its publication under Arlt's name? Why
did Arlt, according to his notebook, originally
intend to entitle the story "La propiedad es un
robo" 'Property Is Theft,' a translation of Pierre-
Joseph Proudhon's phrase?
Piglia suggests that it is literature's connection
to the economic under capitalism that explains
the crimes perpetrated here and that lies at the
root of the uneasiness and doubts these details
cause. In "Homenaje," Arlt has recorded in his
notebook, following the handwritten version of
"Luba," his frustration at this monetary degra-
dation of literature:
Escriboesto a los jovenesque todaviano estancor-
rompidoscomo yo que escribotodoslos diasporque
me he entregadocon almay vida a este oficioen el
que para ganarme la vida, pierdo mi alma.. . . [N]o
podemos escribirsi no tenemos tiempo libre (es
decir:dineroparafinanciarel tiempolibre). (119)
I writethis to all the youngpeoplewho are not yet
corruptedlike me, writingevery day becauseI've
deliveredmy life and soul to this profession,where,
in orderto earn a living, I sell my soul. . . . We
can'twriteif we don't havefreetime (thatis to say,
moneyto financefreetime).
Nearby in the notebook is a list of books, among
them Andreev's Las tinieblas, and the names of
people to whom Arlt owed money, his debts to-
taling 33,000 pesos.
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1077
If accepting money for artistic production (for
most writers,a quid pro quo for creatingart under
capitalism) is degrading, why not highlight the
corruption by committing a crime such as pla-
giarism? If the attempt to make art private prop-
erty by paying for it is, in fact, a theft ("la
propiedad es un robo"), then why not openly rob
another's work for money? In this sense, Arlt,
Kostia, and Piglia commit different versions of
the same crime-they accept money for artistic
production that they stole or appropriated.
Severaltimes in the story Piglia links the notion
of the critic as detective to Arlt's belief that the
economic nexus corruptsliteratureand the artist.
Continuing a long footnote, Piglia observes:
[C]omoen toda buena novelapolicial,lo que esta
en juego no es la ley sino el dinero(o, mejor:la ley
del dinero).ParaArlt,los criticos. .. [regulan]la
circulaciony la venta de los librosen el mercado:
ser "criticado"(descubierto)es perderlectores,esto
es, no poderganardinerocon la literatura.Una vez
mas, como el falsificadorque fabricabilletesfalsos,
ser descubiertono es un problemamoral (en este
caso:literario)sino economico. (136)
As in all good detectivenovels,what is at stakeis
notthelawbutmoney(or,rather,the lawof money).
For Arlt, the critics. .. [regulate]the circulation
and sale of books on the market:to be "reviewed"
(discovered)is to lose readers,that is, to be unable
to earnmoney by writingliterature.Once again,as
is the casewiththe counterfeiterwho producesfalse
bills, to be discoveredis not a moralproblem(or,
in thisinstance,a literaryone)butan economicone.
By extension, the similar crime of plagiarism is
not a moral or literaryproblem but an economic
one because it violates the laws of private
1
property.
In an important early clue that "Luba" is a
falsification, Piglia plays on the comparison that
Arlt establishes between literary production and
counterfeiting money. Using the persona of Arlt,
Piglia notes in an apocryphal quotation:
Todos nosotros,los que escribimosy firmamos,lo
hacemosparaganarnosel puchero.Nada mas. Y
paraganarnosel pucherono vacilamosen afirmar
que lo blancoes negroy viceversa.La gente busca
la verdady nosotrosle damos monedafalsa . ...
1078 Metaplagiarismand the Critic'sRoleas Detective

Lagentecreeque recibela mercaderialegitima... wayI havebeensubjectedto the sametestthatMax

cuandoapenasse tratade una falsificacionburda,
que tambiense inspiraronen
de otrasfalsificaciones
falsificaciones. (101)
All of us who writeand signour names[to ourwrit- these texts. He reminds them that the words
ing] do so to earn our daily bread.Only for that.
And to make a living, we don't hesitateto affirm
that blackis white and vice versa.Peoplelook for
the truth and we give them false money.. . . People
believethey'regettinglegitimatemerchandise. . .
when in fact we give them a common falsification,
of otherfalsificationsthat in turnwereinspiredby
falsifications.
The text forewarns readers here that "Luba" is a
kind of counterfeit money, a multiple falsification
extending from Andreev's story to the translation undergoing a test similar to Brod's, the honest
from Russian into Spanish and then to Arlt's,
Kostia's, and Piglia's appropriations.
A digression about Franz Kafka features one
of Piglia's most direct illuminations of these acts
of plagiarism. After Kostia is offeredpayment for
Arlt's manuscript, he remarksthat if he had been
Max Brod, he would have published The Castle
under his own name; both the narratorand Kos-
tia agree that Arlt would have done the same. In
a footnote, Piglia explains that Kafka's deathbed
instructions to burn his manuscripts without
publishing them left Brod with the dilemma of
betraying either literature or his friend. Piglia ar-
gues that Brod's real dilemma, however, was
whether or not to publish them under his own
name; since the author had rejected them, in a
sense they no longer belonged to anyone. In a
parenthesis in the footnote, Piglia states that he,
in effect, has been subjected to a parallel test:
( ... El hecho de que al presentar un texto inedito
de RobertoArlt me haya visto forzadoa usar la
formadel relato,el hecho de que el cuento de Arlt
se lea en el interiorde un librode relatosqueaparece covered Piglia's postmodernist sleight of hand,
con mi nombre . . . demuestra-ya se vera--que
de algufnmodo he sido sometidoa la mismaprueba initial
que Max Brod.) (135) readers.12
( . .. The fact that in presenting an unpublished
text of RobertoArlt's,I havebeen forcedto use the
short story form, the fact that Arlt'sstory is read
withina book of shortstoriesthat appearwith my
name . .. shows-it will be seen-that in a certain
Brodwas.)
Piglia warns readers directly to be suspicious of
the code of initial trust with which they approach
they
are reading form a story, not a scholarly essay,
and that "Luba" appears in a volume of his sto-
ries, under his name and implicit authorship.
But once again, even so direct an allusion to
the plagiarism as this can also be read within the
innocent, trusting code. The unsuspecting reader
can interpret what amounts to a confession of
the crime as merely the critic's profession of his
honesty: unable to publish the lost text separately,
Piglia was forced to include it with his own fiction;
narratorhas emerged with his integrity intact by
attributing the story to its author, Arlt. Again,
Piglia has it both ways. The clues with which he
denounces his crime are encoded within two dis-
cursive systems so that the warnings fit in well
with both the innocent, trusting interpretation
and the suspicious reading that sees something
amiss.
Underlying such direct although doubly coded
allusions is a network of more subtle clues that
become visible only to readerswho enter the code
of suspicion. Kostia would often joke with Arlt,
referringto Arlt's 1929 novel Los siete locos 'The
Seven Madmen' as "Los siete ahorcados," an
evocation of another of Andreev's stories, "The
Seven Who Were Hanged." Further, Kostia "lo
jodia con Andreiev" 'kidded him about Andreev'
(127) and remarks after reading "Luba": "no
podrias encontrarleuna vuelta que sonara menos
San Petersburgo?" 'couldn't you find a way to
make it sound less like Saint Petersburg?'(122).
After readers have learned to distrust the docu-
mentary discourse in "Homenaje" and have dis-
this network of clues will remind them of their
entrapment, their failure to be vanguard
The Metaplagiaristic Text
And what of "Luba" itself? An integral part of
Piglia's homage to Roberto Arlt, the story repeats

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 Ellen McCracken
many of the themes that preoccupy Arlt, as Hayes
shows in his article about it. Those like Hayes
who fail to detect the metaplagiarism do not read
entirely monologically; in following the false path
Piglia offers, they remain at the text's overt yet
deceptive intertextual juncture with Arlt's work.
But such readings are to a certain degree mono-
logic because they do not decode the text's dia-
logue with Andreev's story. To arrive at what
Robert Scholes terms the text's centripetal
meaning (8-10), one must recognize that Piglia
reproducesin "Luba" sentences, paragraphs,and
entire pages of Andreev's story. At the same time,
he condenses the story, sometimes reparagraph-
ing and reorganizing. He adds elements that es-
tablish the distance between text and pre-textthat
some plagiarists aim to abolish. Now the meta-
plagiaristic intertextual distance parallels the
parodic distance visible in "Homenaje" after the
story is decoded as fiction.
Reproduction might legitimately be combined
with condensation, deletion, and altered order in
the preparation of a mass-market version of a
classic work or a Reader's Digest abridgment. By
omitting Andreev's name from the title page and,
worse yet, attributing the story to Arlt, however,
Piglia breaks the rules flauntingly. Just as the
content of "Luba" pays homage to Arlt, so does
its form; the story parallels the translations of
mass-market writers such as Eugene Sue and
Pierre-AlexisPonson du Terrailthat Arlt enjoyed
and the Galician translations of Dostoevsky pop-
ular in Argentina.
More important, "Luba" embodies falsifica-
tion, theft, and plagiarism. Piglia does not attrib-
ute "Luba"to Arlt in the book's table of contents
or on the story's first page, exclusions that are
important elements of the double discursive pat-
tern in Nombrefalso through which Piglia both
lies and tells the truth.
In counterposition to these truthful omissions
is an untruthful "voice-over" to the story that
Piglia establishes in a series of footnotes. The
notes of"Luba" continue numerically from those
of"Homenaje," another indication that the two
stories form a single text. On one level, the
"Luba" annotations reinforce the code of the lie
by suggesting that Piglia is working from Arlt's
manuscript and Kostia's typescript to establish a
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1079
definitive text; several notes claim to contain
paragraphsthat Arlt penned through to delete or
that Kostia's version omitted.
At the same time, however, these notes are
truthful;often they reproduceverbatimtranslated
lines from Andreev's story that are omitted from
the main text. Within the truthful code, the an-
notations are only a more accurate copying of
Andreev. In footnote 23, though, Piglia breaks
with this faithfulnessto the originaland succumbs
to the temptation to add to Andreev's story, as
Arlt himself might have done. In this note, the
protagonist emphasizes that he is an anarchist,
whereas Andreev characterizes him simply as a
revolutionary.
The final footnote opens the text to Piglia's
most extensive transformation of the Russian
story-a completely new ending. (The note sug-
gests that Kostia is a coplagiaristwhen it attributes
the change to his version.) Whereas in Andreev's
conclusion the revolutionary abandons the cause
and enters police custody with Luba, in Piglia's
ending Lubajoins the protagonist'sradicalgroup.
Andreev plants the seeds of such a transformation
of Luba, but her change in consciousness comes
too late, after her arrest.13Piglia, writing at a dif-
ferent historical moment and for a different pur-
pose, replaces Andreev's pessimistic closing with
an optimistic one.
The modified ending and the few other in-
stances where Piglia adds to Andreev's text all
develop Arltian themes. Early in "Luba," for ex-
ample, Piglia finishes a sentence left incomplete
in the Russian version, making explicit what An-
dreev lets the readerinfer. After the revolutionary
asks the prostitute for permission to remove his
coat, Andreev has her say, " 'Please do. After all,
you . .. ,'" and adds, "She did not finish"
("Darkness" 193). Piglia alters her answer to
make overt the monetary nexus that binds the
two people: "Quiteselo. Ya que ha pagado"'Take
it off. Since you've paid' (151). Piglia wishes to
emphasize what both writers refer to a few lines
earlier-that the revolutionaryhas rightsover the
prostitute because he has paid for her. Like the
artistic commodity under capitalism, Luba be-
comes private property.
In Piglia's modified ending, Luba reminds her
companion that her name is a false one she as-
1080 Metaplagiarismand the Critic's Roleas Detective
sumed when she became a prostitute. This ad-
ditional implicit comparison between the artistic
commodity and the prostitute highlights again
Piglia's artistictheft. The prostitute, like the work
of art, masquerades behind an assumed name,
and both thereby signal the commodification and
degradation they undergo. This declaration by
Luba allows Nombrefalso to begin and end with
allusions to false names-interpretive brackets
designed to reshape the reading of the texts they
enclose.
Connected to plagiarism and the prostitute's
false representation of herself as Luba is the ref-
erence to counterfeit money that Piglia adds to
Andreev's text. Again, he intends to highlight his
own metaplagiarism thematically. ",,Sabes,
Luba? Con esta plata vas a empezar una nueva
vida, vos tambien. Es plata falsa, pero eso no im-
porta: nadie va a notar la diferencia. Son perfec-
tos: los hizo el mas grande falsificador de
Sudamerica . ." 'You know, Luba? With this
money you too are going to have a new life. It's
false money, but that's not important: no one
will notice the difference. It's perfect:the greatest
counterfeiter in South America made it .'
(170). The comparison of art to counterfeit
money in "Homenaje" prepares readers to see
that this passage also alludes to art-in fact, to
the very story they are reading;and some of them,
after discovering Piglia's plagiarism, might con-
sider him "el mas grande falsificador de Sud-
america."
The Vanguard Reader
Piglia merges the short story and literarycriticism
in his two-part homage to Roberto Arlt, not sim-
ply because Piglia is both a writer and a critic but
because he believes that there is a profound re-
lation between the two genres. In a 1984 interview
he notes: "Por mi parte me interesan mucho los
elementos narrativos que hay en la critica: la cri-
tica como forma de relato; a menudo veo a la
critica como una variante del genero policial. El
critico como detective que trata de descifrar un
enigma .. ." 'I myself am especially interested
in the narrative elements of criticism-criticism
as a form of storytelling; often I see criticism as
a variant of the detective genre. The critic as a
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detective who tries to decipher an enigma . . .'
("Lectura" 12-13). He melds the two genres not
only to honor Arlt but to insist that readers per-
form their roles as detectives properly.
The postmodernist reader must patiently
identify the vast network of clues and then ex-
trapolate from it to come to grips with the larger
philosophical currents that underlie Piglia's use
of parody and metaplagiarism. After deducing,
for example, that (within the fictive discourse)
Arlt confessed his plagiarismto Kostia when they
met during Holy Week in 1942 and that for this
reason Kostia then plagiarized Arlt's story,14the
reader must carry these observations a step fur-
ther. "Luba" is not Arlt's or Kostia's or even An-
dreev's. Piglia has created a new text that is, in a
sense, jointly rather than individually owned.
In a 1986 interview Piglia points out: "un
cuento siempre cuenta dos historias . .. una de
las cuales se cuenta de un modo casi invisible y
secreto" 'a short story always tells two stories .
one of which is told almost invisibly and secretly'
("Entrevista" 52). In performing the role of de-
tective thoroughly, readers uncover the almost
invisible, secret subtext that makes this story a
fitting homage to Roberto Arlt. They engage in
what Scholes terms "dialectical reading," which
actualizes both the centripetal and centrifugal
impulses of texts. Centripetal reading focuses on
"an original intention located at the center of a
text"; the centrifugal mode situates "the life of a
text along its circumference, which is constantly
expanding, encompassing new possibilities of
meaning" (8).
The almost invisible, secret story to which Pi-
glia refers is the centripetal impulse. But in a du-
plicitous pair of storieslike Piglia's,the centripetal
reading must at the same time be centrifugal;one
can only arrive at the center through the periph-
ery. When the audience fails to read actively, it
remains at the incorrect and only partial centrip-
etal level, tracking authorial intention along the
false path that Piglia establishes. By following the
text's centrifugal clues to the crucial external in-
tertext, readers ultimately discover the centripe-
tal, meeting Piglia's challenge.
As vanguard texts, "Homenaje" and "Luba"
invite readersto participatein two levels of textual
dialogue with the author. At one interlocutory
 Ellen McCracken
level, readers are to trust the false path and fall
into a trap of partial and incomplete knowledge.
The second position, essential to decoding the
text's metaplagiaristic intertextuality, requires
what Piglia terms a vanguard reader. When he
notes that "todos los escritores queremos ser de
vanguardia" 'all of us writers want to be in the
vanguard,'he also begs critics to read thoroughly:
"lo fundamental para un escritores que el publico
y la critica sean de vanguardia" 'what is funda-
mental for a writer is that readers and [literary]
criticism be in the vanguard.'15Piglia made this
remarkaftercritics had misread "Homenaje" and
"Luba" for some ten years, muting the van-
guardism of the two texts.
It is the reader's postmodernity that is tested
here, proving true Hutcheon's axiom that inter-
textuality is as much a hermeneutic concept as
it is a formalist one in which the reader plays as
important a role as the author ("Borrowing").
But the formalist configuration of the parody and
metaplagiarism in this pair of stories should not
be downplayed; indeed, the reader'svanguardism
in this instance depends precisely on the close
textual reading no longer in critical fashion. Al-
though writers such as Cortazar have demanded
the audience's coauthorship, rarely are readers
asked to be as distrusting and careful as they are
in Piglia's homage to Roberto Arlt. This variety
of postmodernisttext delights in deceiving readers
yet at the same time cries out for discovery. Piglia
aims at vanguardism but cannot achieve it with-
out patient and aggressive readers who will col-
laborate with him in actualizing the text's literary
experimentation.
Notes
1 Translationsfrom the
Spanishnot attributedto a published
source are my own.
2
Naomi Lindstrom's analysis notes only that Piglia "en-
courag[es] readers to question and doubt the text" (138) and
that the attribution of authorship to Arlt grows "ever more
problematic in the course of Piglia's essay" (140n10). Rita
Gnutzman writes merely that in "Homenaje" "una trama
policiaca acerca de un posible robo y de una serie de falsifi-
caciones testimonia la lectura atenta por parte de Piglia de su
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1081
antecesor" 'a detective plot about a possible theft and about
a series of falsifications gives testimony to Piglia's careful
reading of his [literary] ancestor' (228). More seriously mis-
leading, Aden W. Hayes, who has written a book on Arlt's
work, apparentlyaccepts Arlt as the author in an entire essay
devoted to the story. The error even exists in the Library of
Congress listings, from which it was passed on to the com-
puterized library catalogs of institutions such as the Univer-
sities of California and Massachusetts;the entries on Nombre
falso in these systems note that the volume contains an ap-
pendix with "Luba" and attributethe story to Arlt. Similarly,
under Arlt'sname in the computerizedcatalogsthere are cross-
references to Piglia's book.
3 Annapaola Cancogni notes, "Plagiarismis the closest re-
lationship a text can entertain with a pre-text, a relationship
based not just on imitation or similitude but ratheron identity
and substitution . . ." (151). Hutcheon defines parody as
"repetition with critical distance that allows ironic signalling
of difference at the very heart of similarity" (Poetics 26; see
also Hutcheon, Politics).
4 In 1987 another English translation was published, under
the title "Darkness."
5 In 1977 Piglia gave lectures in the United States offering
these readings of Arlt's work. See also Arlt's aguafuerte, or
humorous journalistic note, "Ya no se plagian versos: se pla-
gian irecetasde cocina!"'Now They'reNot PlagiarizingVerses:
They're PlagiarizingCooking Recipes!'
6 Piglia developed these themes further in his 1980 novel
Respiraci6n artificial, arguing that Arlt's crime of "bad writ-
ing" is the result of integratingratherthan excising the verbal
mixture that immigration produced in the standard national
language of Argentina, codified by such figures as Leopoldo
Lugones.Similarly,Arltwas the firstArgentinewriterto defend
readingin translation;he acquiredhis "bad"style, Pigliainsists,
from reading the cheap Spanish translations of Dostoevsky
and Andreev. Arlt's style was transgressive because it chal-
lenged those whose attempts to purify ArgentineSpanish were
paradoxicallyalways influenced by European languages(168-
71). Piglia himself engages in a similar contestatory tactic in
Nombre falso by using Arlt's "bad" style to enact his own
transgressionof the prevalent concept of literaryprivate prop-
erty. Note, for example, how Piglia plays at bad writing in
this passage by deliberatelygetting Eugene Sue's name wrong.
7 For a discussion of Menardas a readerand the
importance
of the reader'srole in intertextuality, see Hutcheon, "Borrow-
ing" 233.
8 See "Notas sobre Facundo" and Respiraci6n 161-62..See
also Sylvia Molloy's excellent discussion of Sarmiento's ap-
propriation of texts written by others (26-35).
9 Several years before Nombrefalso, Piglia published a par-
allel adaptation that also involved Arlt. When compiling a
volume of short autobiographical statements by famous Ar-
gentine literary and political figures, Piglia included the first-
person statement "Yo: Roberto Arlt," which he himself had
written. Although Piglia notes openly in the volume that he
adaptedthe piece from a 1929 articleabout Arlt, this invention
of a pseudo-documentary "I" is a precursor to the spurious
attribution of an entire story to Arlt in Nombrefalso.
1082 Metaplagiarism and the Critic's Role as Detective
'o See also Piglia's remarks in an interview: "En mas de un
sentido el critico es como el detective: el lector de la ley. Y el
escritor es a menudo el criminal, el transgresor. Se podria
pensar que la novela policial es la gran forma ficcional de la
critica literaria"'In more than one sense, the critic is like the
detective: the reader of the law. And the writer is often the
criminal, the transgressor.One could argue that the detective
novel is the great fictional form of literary criticism' ("En-
trevista"50). Witness, for example, my role in this essay, where
I argue that "Luba" is a stolen text.
" For furtheranalysis of the "literaryeconomics" of Arlt's
work, see Piglia's "Roberto Arlt: La ficci6n del dinero."
12 Similarly, Piglia's fictitious notes about a novel Arlt in-
tended to write, which form a story within the story, contain
many veiled allusions to the metaplagiarism. Two characters
in these notes parallel the figures of Arlt and Kostia in "Ho-
menaje," and such motifs as a diary in which a crime is con-
fessed, Arlt's changing of a female character'sname midway
through the notes, and the forging of a medical prescription
point to details of the mystery in the larger story of "Home-
naje." In another such clue, immediately after obtaining the
typescript of "Luba" from Kostia (who acknowledges that it
is not the original), the narratoradmits to feeling "atrapado
por un extraiio sentimiento de posesi6n, como si ese texto
fuera mio y yo lo hubiera escrito" 'trappedby a strangefeeling
of possession, as if that text were mine and I had written it'
(139). Again, Piglia connects the notion of art as private prop-
erty to a direct clue that the story is not Arlt's.
13Andreev's Luba successfully urgesthe protagonist to give
up his revolver but realizes her mistake when she experiences
police brutality: "'Darling! Why did you give up your re-
volver?' screamed the young woman, fighting the policeman.
'Why didn't you bring a bomb? We would have . .. gotten
. . .them all!' " ("Darkness" 237; ellipses in the original).
14Piglia entraps readers here by dating the events before
Arlt's actual death, on 26 July 1942. Had he set the alleged
meeting after July, careful readers might begin more quickly
to suspect the authenticity of the claims made in "Homenaje."
15 "Notas sobre literatura" 146. In 1988 Piglia republished
"Homenaje a Roberto Arlt" and "Luba" under the subtitle
"Nombre falso"in a new collection of fiction, Prisionperpetua.
He thereby offeredcritics another chance to become vanguard
readers of the two stories, in a volume where the texts exist
in new relations of montage with another set of stories.
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