In the Shadow of Mao by Bruno Bosteels

Every book begins as the desire for another book, as the drive to copy, to steal, and to contradict, as envy and as overconfidence. - Beatriz Sarlo, Una modernidad periférica

"Homenaje a Roberto Arlt" ("Homage to Roberto Arlt"), the closing text of Ricardo Piglia's collection of short stories Nombre falso (Assumed Name), at first sight seems to revolve around the theme of plagiarism as the key to a renewed understanding of the literary. This understanding would situate the act of writing between the two extremes of originality, which turns out to be undesirable aside from being an illusion, and falsification, which becomes deliberate to the point of being an authentic duty. In fact, as other critics have suggested, the story combines not one but two figures of modern Argentine literature: not only Arlt, but also Borges.1 The project consists in articulating the writerly modes of these two precursors in the direction of a single narrative poetics, where previously the debate had been overshadowed by the old polemic, which determined so much of Argentina's official literary history, between the groups of Boedo and Florida. Piglia would close this gap between the autonomy of the text and its social and political inscription. A new practice of storytelling that tried to demonstrate the fallacy of these oppositions, together with others such as that between commitment and vanguardism: such would ultimately have been the ambitious project made possible by the idea of plagiarism-all this, it seems, without having to exceed the limits of the literary itself, with everything this notion promises or threatens to convey.