La piratería textual : un estudio hipertextual de Son vacas, somos puercos y El médico de los piratas de Carmen Boullosa

Sammanfattning: The aim of this study is to examine the rewriting of the memoirs of the former pirate Alexander Olivier Exquemelin, Los Piratas de América, originally published in Amsterdam in 1678, which the Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa carries out in two recent novels: Son vacas, somos puercos and El médico de los piratas. In the light of Gérard Genette’s theory of hypertextuality this study deals with the formal as well as the thematic aspects of this rewriting. In order to situate the two novels in the context of contemporary Latin American literature, this study includes an introductory chapter on the “new” Latin American historical novel, preceded by a more general introduction to Carmen Boullosa’s narrative. In the first chapter a discussion is also maintained with former critics of Son vacas, somos puercos, with the intention of placing this study in a critical context, particularly in a confrontation with the postmodernist interpretations of the novel that generally have read it as a parodic subversion of its hypotext (intertext). In the second chapter Genette’s theory of hypertextuality is surveyed and a series of problems that this theory raises are addressed. The third chapter contains a survey of the textual history of Exquemelin’s memoirs as well a short look at the “estilization” of Boullosa’s language in comparison to that of Exquemelin. Finally, the fourth and fifth chapters are dedicated to the analysis of the two novels. Relevant aspects in the analysis are the textual amplificaction, the narrator’s attitude, and the thematic transformations. The dissertation concludes with the suggestion that Son vacas, somos puercos presents a hypertextual unfolding of the ideology of the pirate’s brotherhood; that the greater subjective presence of the narrator-protagonist in the rewriting highlights the temporal discrepancy between the narration and the history, and consequently also implies a greater emphasis on the disagreement between the experiences of the protagonist in the past and the present knowledge of the narrator. Furthermore it is suggested that the diegesis originally described in Exquemelin’s memoirs is nuanced by the inclusion or activation of women, African slaves and Indians. The idea that in Son vacas, somos puercos, the image of the pirate is “transvalorized” in constructive terms is also put forward. Finally it is underscored that Boullosa’s first rewriting of Los Piratas de América does not present a subversive nor an alternative version, but a complementary one.