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Argentina-s. Ricardo Piglia dialoga con la generacion del '37 en la discontinuidad

2002; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 70; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3246927

1553-0639

Ellen McCracken, Laura Demaria,

Latin American Literature Analysis

Ricardo Piglia dialoga con la generacion del '37 en la discontinuidad. By Laura Demaria. Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1999. 206 pages. Dialogue and discontinuity, the key connecting words of Laura Demaria's title, succinctly reveal her thesis about the work of Ricardo Piglia, one of Argentina's most innovative and groundbreaking contemporary writers. In his complex fiction, Piglia carries on a textual dialogue with Argentina's foundational nineteenth-century intellectuals about the meaning of national identity and its reformulation in moments of crisis in the twentieth century. Piglia engages with the Generation of 1837's definitions of nation, its discourse of power, and its systems of exclusion, as he refreshes public memory about the origins of the homologous political structures reasserted a century later. In contrast to the singular notions of national identity that members of the Generation fought over in the years of the early republic, Piglia's hybrid fiction proposes the multi-layered notion of plural Argentina-s. Focusing on three primary texts of Piglia's-Prision perpetua (1988), Respiracion artificial (1980), and La ciudad ausente (1992)-Demaria deliberately limits her study to a partial but immensely important sector of Piglia's complex system of intertextuality with world literature, history and philosophy. By directing her attention solely to Piglia's dialogue with the foundational texts of Argentine nationalism, she builds on the work of critics such as Morello-Frosch and writes the first systematic, thorough, and nuanced reading to take up Piglia's dialogic invitation. By encouraging readers to join him in a strabismic glance at both the present and the past, Piglia teases out the internal contradictions of the Generation that were sometimes disguised beneath the desire to fight Rosas or establish a unified political alternative for the new nation. Piglia builds on the heterogeneity of the foundational texts, maximizing their differences, Comparing Sarmiento's Recuerdos de provincia to Piglia's En pais, Demaria notes that the latter is the antithesis of the former in its formation of the autobiographical I. Sarmiento establishes the genre in order to lay claim to a space of power and to undergird his criticism of Rosas. Piglia, in contrast re-invents and re-semanticizes the genre to subvert and negate the ideological tenets of Sarmiento. In Prision perpetua, Piglia symbolically kills the father of Argentine autobiography, in order to create an otro pais, to re-inscribe the marginalized, the imprisoned, and the exiled who have been excluded from the official narrative of history. By creating a false autobiography (the character Steve Ratliff, for example, is fictional, and the story was not presented at a conference in New York as Piglia's footnote claims), Piglia inscribes prohibited voices and challenges the prescriptions for the genre established by Sarmiento and his class. …