The Absent City

by Ricardo Piglia

  Ricardo Piglia

  The Absent City

  INTRODUCTION

  Sergio Waisman

  The Absent City is Ricardo Piglia’s third book to be translated into English, and the second published by Duke University Press. Since its original publication in Argentina in 1992, it has been widely read and hailed in the Spanish-speaking world for its combination of literary innovation and poignant sociopolitical reflection. With this translation, Duke makes available to an English-speaking audience one of the most fascinating novels to come out of Latin America in recent times.

  Ricardo Piglia and His Work

  Ricardo Piglia was born in Adrogué, in the Province of Buenos Aires, in 1940. His first book, a collection of short stories entitled Jaulario (La invasión in the Argentine edition), received an important prize from the Casa de las Américas in 1967. Since then, he has published three collections of short stories—Nombre falso (1975), Prisión perpetua (1988), and Cuentos morales (1994) — and three novels: Respiración artificial (1980), La ciudad ausente (1992), and Plata quemada (1997), which won the Premio Planeta that year. He has also published numerous critical articles, including three editions of the collection Crítica y ficción (1986, 1990, and 1993). His latest book is Formas breves (1999), a collection of short, critical narratives. In recent years, Piglia has also worked on several film projects. Among others, he has written the original screenplay of Foolish Heart, directed by Héctor Babenco, and a screen adaptation of Juan Carlos Onetti’s El astillero. In addition to English, his fiction and criticism have been translated into French, Portuguese, German, and Italian.

  Nombre falso (Assumed Name), a collection of five stories and an eponymous novella, marked an important point in Piglia’s trajectory and established his international importance with striking singularity. My translation of Assumed Name was published by the Latin American Literary Review Press in 1995. In the novella, the author himself is the protagonist attempting to solve the mystery of an unpublished manuscript allegedly written by Argentine writer Roberto Arlt. In the first part, “Homage to Roberto Arlt,” fiction doubles as literary criticism as Piglia reworks a genre best exemplified by the stories of Jorge Luis Borges. The second part of the novella then produces the mysterious manuscript, “Luba.”

  When Assumed Name appeared for the first time in Argentina, Mirta Arlt, Roberto Arlt’s daughter, called Ricardo Piglia on the telephone to tell him that she did not know of this story by her father, and that Piglia should not have published it without her permission. In the United States, “Luba” was cataloged by the Library of Congress with Roberto Arlt as its author, and remains miscataloged to this date. These anecdotes underscore the importance that issues of originality, translation, and recontextualization play in Piglia’s work.

  When Duke published Piglia’s first novel, Respiración artificial (Artificial Respiration) in 1994, it brought to an English-speaking audience, in a translation by Daniel Balderston, one of the most important Latin American novels from the 1980s, and perhaps the most important one from the “dirty war” period in Argentina. Artificial Respiration contains many levels of ironies and double entendres, of mystery and displacements. The narrator, Renzi (a character who appears in much of Piglia’s work), is searching for his uncle, who has vanished, and the search leads to a series of revealing conversations about history, exile, and literature. Written at a time when Argentina was living through the most repressive military dictatorship in its history, when thousands of citizens were “disappeared” by the government (facts not explicitly mentioned in the novel), Artificial Respiration displaces the focus and discusses Argentina’s nineteenth-century political turmoil, including Rosas’s dictatorship in the first half of that century. At a time of active censorship by the military regime, the novel has a character who is a censor trying to decipher supposedly coded letters and messages.

  Plata quemada (Burnt Money), not yet available in English, is a fast-paced, exciting novel that revolves around the disturbing crimes of two extraordinary characters, who seek to escape the police after they rob a bank. Burnt Money explores the relationship between these two marginal personalities, as well as the connections between crime and community, between money and identity.

  The Absent City: The Seduction of the Story

  The Absent City is a captivating novel that makes use of several literary genres. On the one hand, The Absent City resembles a detective novel: Junior, the son of English immigrants in Argentina, is a newspaper reporter trying to solve the mystery of what is happening in the city of Buenos Aires. But it is much more than a detective novel, as, in a sense, the city becomes a metaphor for the novel, and vice versa. The world in which Junior operates is a futuristic Buenos Aires, in which the map of the city is constructed by a series of fictional narratives. The intrigue of each of these stories (written in different tones, or registers) multiplies as they intersect each other (like streets and avenues of a city) and unfold to make up the enigma of the text (the written, as well as the geographic and political text) that Junior is trying to solve.

  At the heart of the novel and the city is the unusual heroine, Elena, who used to be a woman but is now a machine (she is the center of the novel and the city, since she composes the stories that make up both). Elena was Argentine writer-philosopher Macedonio Fernández’s wife. In the novel, he tries to save her, when she becomes terminally ill, by placing her memories in a machine. Thus under the surface there is also a story of love and loss. A man loses the woman he loves; he cannot bear that loss; therefore he builds a machine to try to preserve her memories; the machine then outlives the man.

  All this occurs in a city under intense police surveillance. The repressive setting reminds the reader of Argentina’s deeply troubled military past, especially the period of dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. But it also has a broader resonance with the dangers of all totalitarian regimes, and some of the twentieth-century atrocities associated with them. Thus another theme that arises is the power of language to create and define reality — the State’s official version of history; a machine that creates stories that become real; the attempts of the police to control the flow of information; a world in which people tell stories in an attempt to rewrite history or to prevent others from writing it for them. The proliferation of stories in The Absent City becomes important as a way to challenge official versions of reality. Through a series of reproductions, translations, simulacra, and simulations, narrative becomes a site of political and aesthetic resistance.

  The different genres that make up the novel — detective, love story, political or historical, science fiction — interrupt and cross each other (like the different narrative lines) to rupture the traditional form of the novel, constituting an important aspect of Piglia’s innovation. More than a combination of genres, of story lines, we end up with a distorted — or, better yet, fragmented — recombination. No single genre or narrative line can contain the entire novel, and yet each one tries to tell a similar story, even as they point in different directions. For example, one might be tempted to think of The Absent City as a political novel, because of its specific historical references and allusions. But the text also works with a series of paranoid delusions, in which it is impossible to ever determine whether the subjects are truly the victims of a larger conspiracy or whether this belief is a product of their own minds.

  Another genre that the reader might recognize is the cyberpunk version of science fiction, reminiscent of the work of William Burroughs. The interwoven stories themselves form a net — of plots, characters, literary and historical references, media of communication — that seems to exist in a virtual reality, especially to the extent that they originate from a machine. A machine that produces stories; an investigation (by J
unior, by the reader) that fluctuates between past, present, and future; the possibilities of artificial intelligence and neurosurgery associated with interrogations and surveillance; drug-consciousness manipulation combined with hallucinatory ambiguities — all elements that contribute to the sense of a science fiction narrative.

  However, as with the other elements present in The Absent City, there is more than one explanation possible. The zigzagging stories told by a woman in order to seduce and survive also remind the reader of Scheherazade in The Arabian Nights. In other words, they touch on a tradition as old as narrative itself, the drive to tell a story, to hear a story, which speaks of the relationship between desire and story-telling, between narration and the perception of reality.

  Macedonio Fernández and James Joyce

  The Absent City contains references and allusions to a number of Argentine writers. In The Absent City, as in much of Piglia’s work, there is a project to (re) draw literary genealogies and raise issues associated with accepted canons. An important aspect of a nation’s identity is its literary inheritance and how this heritage is perceived — and constructed — in the present. All writers inherit a past, but, as Jorge Luis Borges might have said, they also create their precursors, by changing the way readers read previous writers through the lens of new ones.

  There are also a number of references in The Absent City to works and writers not from Argentina: The Arabian Nights, Dante Alighieri, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, William Faulkner, James Joyce, and others. Of these, a few words should be said about the role of Joyce in The Absent City. But first, we must consider Macedonio’s place in the novel.

  Macedonio Fernández (1874–1952) is one of the most unusual characters in Argentine literary history, much celebrated by Borges and others for his ingenuity, and a key figure in Argentina’s avant-garde movements. He married Elena de Obieta in 1901, with whom he had four children. She died in 1920. His texts include the poem “Elena Bella muerte” (“Elena beautiful death”) (1920) and No todo es Vigilia lo de los Ojos Abiertos (Not Everything is Wakefulness When our Eyes Are Open) (1928). In 1904 he began writing a lifelong novel, Museo de la Novela de la Eterna (Museum of the Novel of the Eternal One). He worked on it for approximately forty-five years, until his death, but never published it. It was finally published posthumously in 1967.

  In his writing, often humorous and logically unpredictable, Macedonio puts into play the importance of language in creating meaning and in our conceptions of time and space. But he does so by emptying out traditional linguistic and literary constructions and conventions to demonstrate their arbitrariness and lack of any real existence. The Museo de la Novela de la Eterna, a text that is both a novel and a theory of the novel, has over fifty prologues and characters with names such as Dulce-Persona (Sweet-Person), Quizágenio (Maybegenius), and the No-Existente-Caballero (Non-Existent-Knight).

  But this Macedonio Fernández from history is not necessarily the Macedonio that the reader encounters in The Absent City. Readers should not assume that they are reading about Macedonio Fernández at a literal level. The Macedonio in The Absent City is not the man who lived and wrote in Argentina in the first half of the twentieth century, but rather a fictional character named Macedonio.

  The origins of this narrative technique — of this inversion between the real and the fictional — in Argentine literature can be traced to Borges, whose texts actively blur the distinctions between genres: between essay and story, between literary criticism and fiction. Piglia’s reworking of this technique is one way in which he dialogues textually with Borges’s works and ideas. For example, the point of departure for Borges’s story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius” is a discovery that Borges (the narrator, also a fictionalized “real” person) tells us is made by his friend Bioy Casares, whom we identify immediately as the Argentine writer, Borges’s lifelong friend and literary collaborator. This is but one example of the kind of contamination between reality and fiction that Borges achieves in his work, a move that allows Borges — and Piglia as well — to interpret reality (including history, politics, and culture) through literature.

  The other technique used by Borges is to have imaginary writers (such as Al-Mu’tasim in “An Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” or Herbert Quain in “Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain”) invent texts to which we have access only by reading the stories in which they are described. In these stories, fictional characters write novels that are summarized for us as if they were real. Piglia’s turn of the screw on this technique is to take a real character, a writer from history, and attribute to him fictional works and actions. It is the inverse, in a sense, of one aspect of Borges’s poetics; and it is what he does in creating the character of Macedonio in The Absent City.

  However, it would be misleading to imagine that the use of Macedonio’s name in The Absent City is arbitrary. In fact, there is a move in the novel to place Macedonio’s anarchic ideas as an aesthetic and political response to the totalizing narratives of the State, which seeks to order and control the individual, to determine meaning and one’s place in society from outside the self. In contrast, for Macedonio, the self is not what it perceives, but what it utters. It is therefore an unstable and imaginary creation, one that resists another’s definition of its existence.

  Furthermore, a contrast is drawn between Macedonio’s position as a writer and that of the poet Leopoldo Lugones. The novel’s critique of Lugones does not necessarily relate to the value of his work, but rather to the fact that Lugones willingly allowed himself to become part of the mechanism of the State. He became the figure of the patriotic writer whom the State uses to limit freedoms. At an aesthetic level, Lugones can also be seen as the figure of the canonical writer used to exclude entry of more revolutionary or anarchistic thinkers, such as Macedonio Fernández.

  The other major literary figure present in The Absent City, in addition to Macedonio, is James Joyce. One question that arises is why a contemporary Argentine writer such as Ricardo Piglia would turn to someone like James Joyce. I will mention just one of several possibilities here: both Joyce and Macedonio, in their respective countries and traditions, challenged the status quo aesthetically and politically. In this sense, they epitomize a certain project of the avant-garde with which Piglia clearly identifies. The question, left to the reader, is how this kind of avant-garde challenge applies to our current condition. Or, better yet, why is such a response necessary in our Neoliberal, postmodern world?

  But there are other ways to approach the possible connections between Piglia, Macedonio, and Joyce. On the one hand, one can speak of certain parallels between Buenos Aires and Dublin, of their affinities in terms of their literary and historical relationships with the metropolis. On the other, at a more specific level relating to The Absent City, there is a way in which Junior’s loss (of his daughter, when his wife abandoned him and took their daughter with her) resonates with Macedonio’s loss of Elena, which leads him to build the machine in The Absent City, as well as Joyce’s slow loss of his daughter, Lucia, who progressively lost her sanity, especially during the period in which Joyce was writing Finnegans Wake.

  The form of the novel also draws from both Macedonio and Joyce. From Macedonio we have the idea of the novel as a museum, of a textual place in which almost anything can be made to (co)exist. And from Joyce we have the novel as city, the city as novel, composed of journeys that draw a textual map that readers can follow as they read. The configuration of the novel does not come entirely from Joyce, of course, as there is a long tradition in Argentina of textually representing the city of Buenos Aires that extends back to the nineteenth century, with writers such as Sarmiento and Echeverría, and is explored again by Borges and Arlt, and then Marechal and Cortázar, among other twentieth-century writers.

  Furthermore, these various points of contact between Piglia and Joyce should provide some clues to reading “The Island,” found in chapter 3 of The Absent City. As Piglia has e
xplained in an interview, when writing this chapter, he asked himself: what would be the imaginary context for Finnegans Wake? In other words, not the context within which Joyce wrote the Wake, but rather the implicit reality of the text. The answer he provides is a society in which people take the Wake as the Book, in which language changes constantly. This invention becomes “The Island.”

  Finally, there is an additional parallel between the two novels that is important to mention. In a sense, what Joyce does with language in Finnegans Wake—cross one tongue with another, blur and distort linguistic and grammatical distinctions, to end up with a language that seems to contain all languages — is similar to what Piglia does with narrative lines in The Absent City. For example, there is a point in The Absent City when several stories cross and overlap and we find a superimposition of female narrators and different repressions. These include José Mármol’s Amalia, James Joyce’s Molly, Roberto Arlt’s Hipólita, William Faulkner’s Temple Drake (from Sanctuary), and Evita Perón:

  I am Amalia, if you hurry me I will say that I am Molly, I am her, locked up in the big house, desperate, pursued by Rosas’s mazorca, I am Irish. ., I am her and I am also the others, I was the others, I am Hipólita, the gimp, the little cripple. ., I am Temple Drake and then, oh you despicable creatures, you made me live with a justice of the peace…. I remember. . Evita slapping the ministers around, yes, she would slap the Minister of the Interior on the face the moment he uttered even the slightest derogatory comment about the working classes. (135)

  Here and throughout The Absent City, these unexpected combinations create startling effects, a rupture with form and reality. They are meant to suggest comparisons and contrasts — literary as well as political — unachievable through traditional techniques of narration. Piglia’s innovations raise questions about history and literature, and our relationship to them as readers and citizens. The Absent City forces us to look into the face of absence — the very real absence of our contemporary world — to see and hear what we find there.