AFTERWORD RICARDO PIGLIA. TRANSLATED BY SERGIO WAISMAN
I have always liked novels that have several juxtaposed story lines. This intersection of plots correlates with a very strong image that I have of reality. In this sense, The Absent City is very much like life. I sometimes have the physical sensation that one goes in and out of plotlines, that throughout the day, as one circulates with friends, with the people one loves, and even with strangers, an exchange of stories occurs, a system akin to doors that one can open to enter into another plot — something like a verbal net in which we live — and that the central quality of narrative is this flow, this apparent fleeing movement toward another story line. I have tried to narrate this feeling, and I believe it is the origin of The Absent City.
The first problem I faced was how to incorporate the stories of the machine. This raised an issue that has always interested me in the organization of a noveclass="underline" the idea of interruption as a central factor in the art of narrative. As I thought about interruptions, I had in mind certain references, such as Scheherazade, and a series of texts within this tradition, until we arrive at a novel by Italo Calvino that drew my attention, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. That is, a tradition that conceives of the novel as a genre founded on interruptions, and which, taking this as its point of departure, establishes a connection with what one might call the experience of life — which is basically one of interruption and suspension.
Another text that I very much admire, in this regard, is Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” It is written in a supercondensed manner, within a labyrinthine system, where there is always a corner that pulls you toward another story line. I liked this idea of a plot that is like a street in which you open a door and suddenly your life is completely different. It is from there, perhaps, that my decision came of using the city as a metaphor for the space of the novel.
An additional problem in which I was interested was the idea of imprinting a certain velocity in the narration, a concern no doubt related to the manner in which the transitions between the stories are produced, as well as to the issue of interruptions, fragmentation, and suspense. This idea of velocity was something new for me with respect to my previous books. What I try to work with in The Absent City is a degree of extreme condensation and speed while dispensing as much as possible with the recourse of irony, which is a trait that comes naturally for me (it is the defining mark of the writing of Artificial Respiration, for example).
A few words, now, about Macedonio Fernández, and some parallels with Joyce. In a way, a formula like the title “The Absent City” is the most Macedonian aspect of the novel. What I mean is that it alludes, even if it is not immediately obvious, to one of Macedonio’s fundamental ideas: that which is absent from reality is that which is truly important. This idea expresses his nonpragmatic ethics, which I believe are very appropriate for our time.
The idea of a man in love who walks through a city that belongs to him, but where the city in which he walked with the woman he loved is lost. Because the city is a memory machine. Of course, that lost or absent city also includes other moments of life, not just those associated with a woman. This is how Joyce’s Dublin works, for example.
Dublin and Buenos Aires share the fact that they are both literary cities, in the sense that they have had a large density of writers (in the 1930s and 1940s, Macedonio, Borges, Arlt, Cortázar, among others, all lived in Buenos Aires), who have had a tense relationship with the Metropolis. For example, the tension Stephen Dedalus feels with English, which he considers to be an imperial tongue. Similarly, the issue of the inheritance of the Spanish language and the struggle to become independent from Spain was very much present in Argentina. One can see an analogy between Joyce’s relationship with Shakespeare, and Macedonio’s with Cervantes. The question becomes: whose language is it? And: how do we overcome the political control associated with this language to reach Shakespeare, for example, thinking of Joyce’s parodies in Ulysses, and the position that Macedonio takes with respect to Spain’s Golden Age?
Another point in common between Joyce and Macedonio is a certain hermetism as a poetics. Joyce, the writer who writes so as not to be understood by his contemporaries, who postulates a kind of narrative, and a kind of usage of language, which assumes a distance with respect to any possible transparency of the reading of his work by his peers. It becomes an element of his poetics. The artist who does not seek to be understood by his contemporaries, but rather to present them with an enigma. As Joyce himself said: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”