Literature in Dispute: on the Baroque Fictions of Miguel de Cervantes, Jorge Luis Borges, and Washington Cucurto

Abstract

In Ficciones barrocas, Carlos Gamerro develops the concept of “baroque fictions” (baroque fictions) to refer to fictional works in which one can perceive a playful strategy in which opposites encounter and displace each other. One of the baroque folds is constituted by the opposition between the original and the copy, and in more general terms, between the authentic and the apocryphal, both identified by Gamerro in the works of Miguel de Cervantes and Jorge Luis Borges. In this article I propose to extend this analysis, taking in addition the case of Argentinian author Washington Cucurto, another writer associated with the baroque. I argue that two different conceptions of literature and two equally different notions of the author are at play in these encounters between copy and original, authentic, and apocryphal and reality and fiction. While in Cervantes there is a notion of literature as private property and of the author as proprietor, Borges and Cucurto revindicate literature as plagiarism and a figure of the author as someone devoid of authority and originality, all of which invites us to think of an alternative organization of literary language as a common possession instead of a property.