Tradition and appropriation: El hacedor (by Borges), Fernández Mallo’s remake

Abstract

The cultural scene suggests that the figure of the author occupies an ambivalent position in the contemporary world. While we cannot so easily dismiss the author’s name and the function it plays in the relationship it has with the literary text, we have been dealing with incidents and works that demonstrate a certain amount of detachment and slipping in the author function, suggesting a reinvention of the mode of inscribing signatures. This essay aims at reviewing one such case, that of El Hacedor (remake), by the Spanish writer Agustín Fernández Mallo. Identifying in this text a compositional strategy that recycles ideas and images already present in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, it is easy to see how such a writing procedure profits from theoretical foundations suggested in the notions of “uncreative writing”, as elaborated by Kenneth Goldsmith and “unoriginal genius”, investigated by Marjorie Perloff. Accordingly, my hypothesis is that the “creative appropriation” in operation can be seen as a strategy of redimensioning of the modes of understanding the dynamics of authorship in the literary system, compromising, by extension, the notions of work, of originality, and the very concept of literature.