The reader will know almost everything about Héctor Aguilar Camín's latest book,
Plagio (A novel),
in the first pages.
You can even read it on the back cover: a man who has just won the most prestigious award in Mexican literature is denounced for having plagiarized his latest novel and a series of newspaper articles;
the fraud admits his crime and renounces the award and his position as a high official at the university;
he soon learns that his wife was the one who betrayed him with the whistleblower, the young promise of his generation with whom she cheats;
the precocious author appears dead with 17 stab wounds.
Everything is there and yet the reader is cautious because he is warned of a game: "Everything that is told here is true, except for proper names, which are also false."
Aguilar Camín (Chetumal, 74 years old) builds in 133 pages a cynical story that portrays the dynamics of power in Mexican culture and the decline of a man who is part of its elite.
A bureaucrat who gives and receives, who places at will, who dines with bald leaders and seduces young debutantes.
"Cultural policy has the same vices and virtues as politics," says the author, a Fine Arts medalist, to EL PAÍS by videoconference.
The publishing entrepreneur, close to former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari and one of the intellectuals critical of the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, reflects in this novel about literary creation, admiration, envy and jealousy.
Question.
Why did you write 'Plagiarism'?
Reply.
I began to write it as an attempt to escape from the situation in which Mexican public life was entering, and from myself.
Suddenly I wondered what would happen if I published a book written by me, but signed by another.
I started playing with it, genuinely for fun.
P.
Finally yes he signs it
A. You
have to be who you are.
You have to be very cool to invent another writer.
P.
In the first chapter, you already tell a large part of what is going to happen.
How did you technically plan to maintain the intrigue?
R.
It is clear that what matters about the stories is what they are about.
But the fundamental thing is how they are counted.
Can one know what the
Charterhouse of Parma is about
[de
Stendhal], but if you don't read it you will never enter into the true experience of that book.
I trusted this from the beginning: it doesn't matter that people know where they are going, they better know.
That leads me to construct enough adventures and surprises within each chapter so that even knowing the outcome, the reading makes sense for itself, for its own vitality.
P.
The plagiarist is a petulant character, a womanizer, with impunity because he is a high official of the university.
Why did you build it like this?
R.
I do not know well.
This is in the context of a great scandal that there was at least in a certain part of the Spanish language regarding plagiarism.
There were big scandals with a fantastic Peruvian writer that I admire and love very much, who is Alfredo Bryce Echenique, who was clearly denounced as a plagiarist of newspaper articles.
There was another scandal in Mexico, regarding an author friend of mine, whom I also respect and love very much, who is Sealtiel Alatriste.
I also had a situation similar to that of the character in my novel, but Sealtiel wrote his own novel.
Now ... this character is much closer to being a writer than being a plagiarist.
Or rather: it is much closer to doing what all writers do, which is to write under the influence of books, passages, lines that have marked our lives.
He is a plagiarist only in a technical or formal sense because he deeply copies, rewrites all stories.
Q.
But you do commit a crime
A.
Naturally.
It is a crime and he commits it.
Now, plagiarism is a crime ... how to put it?
If an argument is stolen from a book, I am still the author of the book.
If someone takes my car, I cease to be the owner of my car.
[Plagiarism] is a misdemeanor.
There is a problem with this issue of ownership and originality.
The entire literary tradition is a long river of influences, copies, plagiarisms, adaptations, inspirations ... Pure originality is a fantasy.
What is it that injects into a writer the desire to be a writer?
Well, the same thing that injects into the plagiarist the desire to steal: admiration for what someone else writes.
P.
Who do you admire to the point of wanting to plagiarize?
A.
I have voluntarily and involuntarily plagiarized almost all the writers I admire.
I've been under the influence of each and every one of the world's great writers.
Of almost all American authors, starting with Faulkner, which is our Latin American commonplace.
Also Scott Fitzgerald, Capote, and not to mention Hemingway.
I have been under the influence and I have been a voluntary plagiarist of Cortázar, García Márquez, Stendhal, Balzac, Borges.
It is impossible in the Spanish we speak today that we are not all plagiarists of Borges or García Márquez.
Because modes, words, metaphors, images, environments that they put in the flow of the language are now part of the language.
Q.
In the book you make a portrait of the Mexican cultural scene, with all its awards, its scholarships, its links, the favors ... how has the link between culture and politics been in your years as part of that world?
R.
Same as everywhere.
Cultural politics is part of politics.
It has the same vices and the same virtues.
Cultural life is a life full of quarrels, but as is the life of doctors as well, and the life of footballers.
Only that it is a community that writes, that tells of its lawsuits, its differences, its grievances.
It is a community that seems more litigious, more envious than others.
It is basically the same, only that the great rivalries of great writers and not so great writers are being written down.
[In the novel] I tried to look with the ironic eye of a man who has been there, who has managed that world, and has been defenestrated by that world and who now, as in a kind of joyous revenge, tells all the things that everyone knows they are there but no one says because they are all part of the arrangement in some way.
And nobody wants to look bad with someone who can later turn out to have a certain cultural power to favor them
Q.
How do you see the situation of workers in the sector in Mexico?
They are taking away budgets and options.
They are destroying a good Mexican tradition.
The State has always invested a lot in education and culture, and that is something that makes it qualitatively different, at least in Latin America.
This investment by the State in culture —of course, cultural patronage, canonies, and transcendental influences have followed one another— has the net result that in Mexico there is an extraordinary cultural infrastructure that is solely and exclusively due to the budgets that the State has put there.
If we had allowed Mexican society or its philanthropists to be the only ones to invest in Mexican culture, this country would probably be a wasteland of a symphony orchestra, four, five or ten museums and some 15 or 20 private universities.
Without the investment of the State, which this Government is suspending, Mexico would be a wasteland.
Q.
How do you see Mexico facing the 2021 elections?
A.
No. I wrote this book to get out of the public environment of Mexico.
I don't want to go into that for this book.