Tórtola Valencia and Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent: Celebrity and Self-Plagiarism

On March 25, 1913, the Spanish writer Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent published the short novel La primera de abono in the kiosk literary collection El Libro Popular. Mobilizing Hoyos's signature blend of folkloric costumbrismo and cosmopolitan Decadence, the narrative recounts the tragic demise of a love affair between an amateur bullfighter and a famous dancer. On February 12, 1915, Hoyos republished the text under the title La zarpa de la esfinge in another short novel collection, Los Contemporáneos. Apart from some small revisions and typographical corrections, the rebaptized text features a new dedication to the modern dancer Carmen Tórtola Valencia as well as fourteen new portraits of Tórtola by renowned painters and illustrators. La primera de abono and La zarpa de la esfinge contain nearly identical texts, but the latter novel's paratexts contribute new meaning by encouraging readers to associate the female protagonist with Tórtola, a prominent dancer in Spain at the time. Not coincidentally, Tórtola was at the height of her celebrity when La zarpa de la esfinge hit kiosks in 1915.

On the one hand, the republication of La primera de abono followed standard practice in kiosk novel collections such as El Libro Popular and Los Contemporáneos. As we shall see, prolific contributors often resorted to dubious means of churning out novels, not least of which was to publish the same text multiple times under different titles. The editorial paratexts of La zarpa de la esfinge give no indication that the text had been published previously as La primera de abono. Moreover, Hoyos discussed the later novel without acknowledging its origin, making way for early reviewers to present it as an original work.¹

On the other hand, the circumstances surrounding the transformation of La primera de abono into La zarpa de la esfinge make this case of self-plagiarism into something more than a commercially motivated ruse. The paratexts of the latter publication do not simply package the text in new trappings; rather, they modify its meaning to the point that La zarpa de la esfinge is a significantly different novel.

This article analyzes the variations between La primera de abono and La zarpa de la esfinge while situating the novels in a larger textual corpus that attests to the long-term friendship between Hoyos and Tórtola and their mutual desire for celebrity. The aim is to elucidate the possible motivations behind the recycling of La primera de abono as well as the aesthetic and sociocultural effects of its metamorphosis into La zarpa de la esfinge. Together, the two novels furnish a fascinating case study into the intimate relationship between kiosk literature and celebrity in the context of two important novelistic subgenres of Silver Age Spain, the novela taurina and the roman à clef.

Hoyos and Tórtola, Celebrities

Hoyos and Tórtola rose to celebrity in Spain, especially in Madrid, in the years before and during World War I. By that time, the Spanish word celebridad had undergone a shift in meaning to a definition that remains recognizable today. Noël Valis notes that between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, this word applied to individuals who were celebrated for their virtue, heroism, or noble lineage. With the growth of commercial print culture and the decline of the aristocracy in the late nineteenth century, new usages began to shed these previous meanings, such that modern celebrity referred less to accomplishment and high birth than to the generation of widespread attention by the nascent mass media (Valis 130–32). In this context, celebrity involves the "attribution of glamorous or notorious status to an individual within the public sphere," an attribution that may derive from the celebrity's "special talent or skill," but that may just as well hinge on scandal and sensationalism (Rojek 10, 18). As deft manipulators of celebrity culture, Hoyos and Tórtola drew attention to themselves by means of their art, their unconventional public personae, and their sustained engagement with mass cultural forms such as kiosk literary collections and illustrated magazines.

Antonio de Hoyos y...