Özet:

Abstract In the tittle of Ángel Gustavo Infante’s only novel, Yo soy la rumba (1992), an identity is enunciated. It is formed from music and through the text, producing an intertextual “I” that structures itself from his relation with the music, the radio, the newspapers, and other literary texts. The novel narrates the story of a salsa composer, his childhood in the “cerro” or ghetto and his life as an adult in Caracas’s underground salsa movement. Following Dällenbach’s analysis in El relato especular, we can say that the text presents a mise en abyme that reproduces inside the story both the author and the creative process: the novel is a specular tale that reflects inside its pages the production of an artistic text. This mechanism is supported by a metaleptic intertextuality: in a self-conscious manner, the text inserts itself into a literary tradition that includes other works by the same author, Cerrícolas (1987), and so it builds an identity that differentiates itself from Infante, but still have some relations with him as an author. The specularity appears through a collage of intermedial references: the imitation of radio scripts, jingles, fragments of songs, and newspapers clippings. Above all, Ángel Gustavo Infante’s prose evokes the rhythm of the music that he wants to emulate, like salsa, bolero, etc. Considering all of this, we can say that the novel constructs a fictitious self that reflects what we will call the postmodern identity and also reflects the function of the author inside the text.

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