The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Absent City by Ricardo PigliaThomas Hove
Ricardo Piglia. The Absent City. Trans. Sergio Waisman. Duke Univ. Press, 2000. 147 pp. Paper: $15.95.
This is the third of Piglia’s books to be translated into English, and it marks him as a worthy successor to the likes of Borges and Cortázar. The novel takes place against a fantastical reconstruction of Argentina’s notorious “Dirty War” period of military dictatorship (1976-1983). Its anachronous plot follows a journalist named Junior on a quest for a storytelling machine created by the Argentinian poet-novelist Macedonio Fernández as a substitute for his dead—possibly “disappeared”—wife Elena. Like Galatea, the Muses, Scheherazade, Beatrice, and other avatars of the Holy Ghost and the Eternal Feminine, the cybernetic, schizophrenic Elena serves as an elaborate conceit for the hopeful, life-sustaining, reproductive powers of the imagination. She acquires political significance by disseminating and generating alternate realities that work against the repressive drive toward total domination. Whether that drive takes form in the Argentinian police state, American cultural imperialism, Japanese-style conformity, scientific reductionism, or the triumph of death, total domination cannot be achieved as long as people believe that reality can be transformed into “an eternal story, where everything always starts again.” Among the literary allusions Piglia invests with this theme are ingenious reworkings of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Poe’s “William Wilson,” Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Like the open-ended paranoid quests of Borges, Pynchon, and DeLillo, The Absent City is frequently confusing. But Waisman’s introduction and Piglia’s afterword provide helpful thematic and historical background, and overcoming the plot’s difficulties should satisfy anyone interested in seeing how intricate literary puzzles reflect the political significance of the narrative imagination. Macedonio’s recreation of Elena represents the need to transform a repressive “objective” reality into a hopeful virtual reality, and Piglia’s hall-of-mirrors novel reiterates why such a transformation must remain eternally deferred—yet always possible. [Thomas Hove]