Plagiarism and Authorship in Turn-of-the-Century Venezuela

This article explores the connection between modernismo, a literary movement that relied heavily on imitation and intertextuality, and accusations of plagiarism, copying, and appropriation. It contextualizes the analysis within a nineteenth-century legal moment in which intellectual property protections were just beginning to take hold at the international level. It examines claims of authorship in the absence of meaningful intellectual property legislation, and in an asymmetrical context in which European authors were widely reprinted and read in Latin America but Latin American authors were barely read in Europe. And it considers performances of plagiarizing and of being plagiarized—that is, the unease expressed by one who suspects his work has been copied. Specifically, the article analyzes an accusatory epistolary exchange between Enrique Gómez Carrillo and Manuel Díaz Rodríguez; the novel El hombre de hierro (The Iron Man; 1907) by Rufino Blanco Fombona, which was interpreted as a copy of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary but justified by its local character; and the very curious case of Rafael Bolívar Coronado, whose writing implodes the category of authorship that underlies intellectual property legislation. Taken together, the three cases demonstrate the development of the notions of authorship and plagiarism in Venezuelan literature at the turn of the century.

Making Literary Connections

Chapter 4 suggests that, by linking their own writing to that of an author they admire through quotation, allusion or reference, Méndez Guédez, Chirinos and Zupcic both counter Venezuela’s literary isolation and explore issues of particular importance to them. Through playful references to other writers, Chulapos Mambo (Méndez Guédez, 2011) draws attention to the limited access to international literary developments in Venezuela. In addition, real Latin American writers appear throughout the story, most notably Mario Vargas Llosa and Alfredo Bryce Echinique, two writers who, like Méndez Guédez, have been judged negatively for their political beliefs. In El niño malo… (Chirinos, 2004), as well as integrating fragments of Eugenio Montejo’s poems into the narrative, Chirinos makes the poet one of the main characters of his story. This allows Chirinos to both pay homage to Montejo and to contemplate his own experience of being Venezuelan abroad. In Círculo croata (2006), Zupcic honours Salvador Prasel, a Croatian emigrant who became a writer in Venezuela, while also linking Prasel to William Faulkner, allowing Zupcic to allude to Faulkner’s appreciation for Venezuelan literature.

Introduction

The introduction posits the enduring importance of the national in Venezuelan literature, in contrast to recent theories of ‘global’ Latin American literature. It argues that factors including the absence of Venezuela from the ‘Boom’ and low levels of migration from Venezuela until the 21st century have limited the opportunities for the global circulation of Venezuelan literature, thereby making national markets and the cultural policy of the Bolivarian Revolution more significant. This cultural policy is then outlined, as well as recent developments in national publishing outside the state system. The introduction also includes an overview of the eight novels and authors to be studied, as well as a summary of relevant theories of metafiction, autofiction and intertextuality in relation to these texts.

Venezuelan Literature

This article presents an overview of some of the most representative and influential writers and works from Venezuela in the genre of novel, poetry, short story, and essay, from the 19th to the 21st century. Although Venezuela has a rich literary culture and critically acclaimed authors—such as Rómulo Gallegos, Arturo Uslar Pietri, and Miguel Otero Silva—whose works have become Latin American classics, the country’s literature has remained for the most part underread and understudied outside its frontiers. The reasons for this relative invisibility have been the focus of many debates among intellectuals both inside and outside Venezuela, who have pointed—not without criticism—to the writers’ almost exclusive reliance on national publishing houses, the impossibility of a recognizable literary identity, and the lack of noteworthy innovation as some of the reasons behind it. Nevertheless, since the mid-1990s, a renewed interest in Venezuelan literature has become palpable; international publishing houses have awarded prestigious awards to works by Venezuelan authors (Alberto Barrera Tyszka’s novel Patria o muerte was the winner of the XI Premio Tusquets Editores de Novela, and Rafael Cadenas’s extensive poetic work won him in 2016 the Premio Internacional de Poesía Federico García Lorca, to mention but a few), several new anthologies have been published, and symposiums and conferences drawing scholars from all over the world have been organized on the topic by prestigious international universities and organizations. This has partly been due to the political events that have taken place in the country since the arrival to power of Hugo Chávez, which have made Venezuela—and thus the literature written there—a “hot topic” among academic circles, both national and international. Furthermore, recent waves of emigration have brought Venezuelan authors to many universities abroad, where they have given the country’s literature more exposure, in many cases with the help of social media and other online platforms. In light of these events, this article offers a chronology of Venezuelan literature as a whole rather than constructing a separate chronology for each genre, and thus serves as an introduction to the authors and works that critics consider fundamental in the evolution of the country’s literary history. While theater has been excluded from this selection, two references have been included that give an overview of Venezuela’s abundant theatrical production and the important role it has played in shaping the country’s cultural and political identity.

Fleeing (Post-)Chávez Memories: The 1990s and the Black Friday Generation

After 17 years of Chavism, Venezuelan literature is living a boom confirmed by the Tusquets Novel Award (2015) granted to Patria o muerte by Alberto Barrera Tyzska. Young writers such as Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez, Eduardo Sanchez Rugeles, Ricardo Ramírez Requena, Gustavo Valle, Hector Bujanda and Camilo Pino have problematized the current situation of the country in their narratives. In this essay I propose a comparison of the apocalyptic imaginaries in the novels La última vez (2007) by Bujanda, Bajo tierra (2010) by Valle, and Valle Zamuro (2011) by Pino. Focusing on the period preceding Chavista hegemony, these narratives expose dissolution processes that lead their protagonists to generational strangeness. These processes uproot the principles that sustain the sense of nation. The Chavista political change, then, does not represent a break with the past, but a form of continuity with these historical processes of collapse.

Doña Bárbara y lo político

Resumen: En este artículo proponemos una interpretación de la novela Doña Bárbara (1929) de Rómulo Gallegos a partir de la dialéctica entre la totalidad y el exceso que ella pone en juego. Esta obra plantea la creación de un orden social armónico y bien compensado; sin embargo, este orden solo se consigue al precio de excluir aquello que lo está suplementando. Este conflicto político entre el consenso deseado y aquello que lo excede pero que ayuda a fundarlo se aprecia asimismo en la concepción estética y lingüística presente en la novela.Palabras clave: Doña Bárbara, Rómulo Gallegos, Novela venezolana, Literatura venezolana. Abstract: In this article, I interpret Doña Bárbara (1929), the great novel by Rómulo Gallegos, taking into account the dialectics between totality and excess that it puts into play. This literary work proposes the foundation of a harmonic and well-compensated social order. Nevertheless, this order is achieved only at the price of excluding what is supplementing it. This political conflict between the desired consensus and the rest that exceeds it is analyzed as well in the linguistic and aesthetic conception present in the novel.Key words: Doña Bárbara, Rómulo Gallegos, Venezuelan Novel, Venezuelan Literature.