Abstract
The image of Arlt’s dead body is well-known: his coffin being removed through the window of a room in a poor building in Buenos Aires. Such a large body, such a large coffin, that the stairs cannot support its passage. The signature in this image is also well-known: Ricardo Piglia. And it is based on this image that, in his essay “Vagaries of the Literature of Doom”, Roberto Bolaño associates Arlt with Jesus Christ and Piglia with Saint Paul: “Arlt had his Saint Paul. Arlt’s Saint Paul, the founder of his church, is Ricardo Piglia”. The present text intends to explore the superposition of these figures, as in those photographic albums that existed before cinema, those “little books of photos that could be made to flit past the viewer under the pressure of the thumb, presenting a boxing match or a tennis match”, of which Benjamin spoke in his well-known essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. This exploration will enable us to consider the reading effect that these “last readers” achieve in the production and dissemination of images of their favorite authors, a written collection that tells different versions of skillfully woven myths.
Keywords
Piglia; Bolaño; Arlt; Latin America; Reader; Myth