Adam through the glass. Deconstructing Bolivia Construcciones

DAGATTI, MARIANO

Londres

Conferencia; Conference "Arts & Belongings in the Americas Today"; 2013

Senate House

In late October 2006, Bolivia Construcciones, Bruno Morales'first novel, received La Nación-Sudamericana Award for Fiction amid wide media coverage. The novel, which fromthe title itself suggests the focus on different construction procedures, tellsthe story of a Bolivian migrant, construction worker for a construction companyin the city of Buenos Aires.In the days surrounding the award, coverage includes, besides the unanimousverdict of the jury, favorable comments from its members and statements of theauthor. A random event, but not least, helps to give visibility: the donationof the prize money to a Bolivian ONG, in charge of posting personnel tofacilitate the process of filing of Bolivian migrants in Argentina.Three months after its publication in early February 2007, following anallegation of plagiarism that appear on the website of a bookstore in BuenosAires, the jury, in collusion with management of both companies (multimedia La Naciónand Sudamericana editorial), reverses the decision under the powers conferredby the existing award, arguing for the inclusion of fragments of the novel Nada, written by Spanish author CarmenLaforet, "so that the story does not allow to identify the sources so asto be visible to any reader, weakening the merits of the novel and invalidatingthe reasons why it failed to please". A few days later, manyintellectuals, academics, writers and literary critics, among others, havesigned a letter of request for publication in the newspaper La Naciónin Bolivia Construcciones' defense,claiming legitimacy in the recurrence of "a series of long-standingliterary uses" and "the constant presence of an allegorical levelbelow the realistic". "Without deliberate relationships betweentexts, sometimes obvious, sometimes hidden, the literature does not exist",the letter concluded. The reply was swift. Promptly and with many disparate andinconsistent criteria, as many intellectuals, teachers, writers and criticscame to the fore, outraged by the desperate defense of what they considered"a plain and simple plagiarism". The case quickly took on newdimensions and the expansion of the case put into question the notion ofbelonging in literature, in a novel, not naively, works on construction about /on migrants and therefore on the belonging and provenance in a supposedlyglobalized world. Not least in this regard that the complaint of plagiarismcomes from a virtual network that is heralded by many as the end of theproperty in the culture industry. The case is the result of a novel that, bybuilding their own devices, has become a novel, which brings into focusdifferent dimensions of belongings in the culture: intellectual property,copyright, authority, reward, plagiarism, experimentation, skills reading, andhas started to roll a sum of conflicts artistic, cultural and social perhapsintractable. The representations of belonging in the literature acquired in thenovel in question the tone of a reflection on social constructions: Bolivia Construcciones can, therefore,return to the questions about belongings as an irony of our times.