The Absent City Read online

  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.”

  There is something of this in Macedonio as well. But Macedonio takes a position that, in my opinion, is more radical than Joyce’s. For although Joyce spends seventeen years with Finnegans Wake, at the end he publishes it. Whereas Macedonio spends nearly forty-five years writing the Museum of the Novel of the Eternal One, and dies without publishing it.

  Both are writers who refuse to compromise with society. One could think of writers who negotiate with society, who establish multiple relationships, and there are certainly some great writers who fall into this category. Then there are those who sever such relationships. Joyce and Macedonio have something of the figure of the writer who makes these ruptures, and then establishes very strange relationships in their place: the scenes of Joyce with the women who maintain him, or Macedonio surrounded by his friends.

  Macedonio is also an example of great clarity with regard to the distinction between the production and the circulation of literary material. He understood the two fields very well, spoke elegantly about their division, and constructed a theory of the passage between them (which is, in reality, a theory of the novel). He wrote his entire life, and his books are full of prologues and warnings to the reader and advertisements and opinions about his books, but in real life we could say that he refused to publish. I like this example of a writer who places himself outside circulation, who works in peace, following his own rhythm. The writer who does not conceive of his books in terms of the customer whose order must be satisfied, but rather in terms of the reader who is always looking for a lost text amid the crowded shelves of a bookstore.

  Usually, one tends to infer the kind of society implicit from a text, what the society in which it was written must have been like. What I have tried to do with “The Island,” instead, is create a society that might constitute the context for Finnegans Wake. Not the society within which Joyce wrote the Wake, which would point to Ireland in tension with England, and everything else that makes up the context of the real text. But rather: what would be the imaginary context in which the Wake could function? Or: in what society would Finnegans Wake be read as a realist work? The answer is a society in which language is constantly changing. This approach has interested me for a long time as a possible model of literary criticism. I believe literary criticism should try to imagine the implied, fictional context of works of literature. In this case, the question became: what is the reality implicit in Finnegans Wake? And the answer: a reality in which people believe that language is that which is written in the text.

  The same thing could be said about The Absent City. You could say that The Absent City is a novel in which I imagine a society controlled by stories, that it is like a realist novel of a society in which what really exists is spoken stories, machines that tell fragmented, Argentine stories. There you would have a connection between what I do with Finnegans Wake in “The Island” and what is supposed to take place throughout The Absent City.

  With certain contemporary writers, such as Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, I feel I have something in common that I refer to, somewhat in jest, as a fiction of paranoia. In a way, it derives from other readings, such as William Burroughs or Philip K. Dick, or Roberto Arlt. It is the idea of a conspiracy, which is very much present in these writers, and in The Absent City as well. The idea that society is constructed by a conspiracy, and that there is a counter-conspiracy in turn. This pulls toward a certain kind of relationship with genres, and toward a reflection of politics as intrigue. I do not mean political literature in the traditional sense, in which there is a private and a public world, with the political novel more closely linked to the public one. But rather the manner by which politics is present in literature when these two categories have dissolved — and perhaps this, then, would be the definition of the postmodern, the dissolution of the tension between the public and the private, and the dissolution of the tension between high and low culture. So that when these oppositions have dissolved, the conspiracy, the intrigue, appears as the model that the subject holds of what politics is in society.

  The private subject perceives the world of politics almost like the Greeks conceived of destiny, or of their gods: as a strange manipulative movement. This is the perception that some novelists, including myself, have of the world of politics. That is, politics enters the contemporary novel through the model of a conspiracy, through the narration of an intrigue — even if this conspiracy is devoid of any explicitly political characteristics. The form itself constitutes the politicizing of the novel. The conspiracy does not necessarily have to contain elements of a political intrigue (although it may, as is the case with Norman Mailer) for the mechanism of utilizing a conspiracy to be political. It can be a conspiracy involving the delivery of mail, or a conspiracy involving Italian immigrants in Argentina, or any other invention. It is the form itself that illustrates the fictional perception of politics in our world today.

  This idea, parenthetically, is already present in Borges. He was the first to use this formula, because “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is based on a conspiracy, as is “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” and “The Garden of Forking Paths,” among others. So that Borges, with his miniaturization, was the first to speak of parallel worlds and of conspiracies as paranoid political representations of reality.

  This perception of a relationship between things that are otherwise incompatible is an important aspect of contemporary fiction. A subject who obsesses deliriously with history, or a subject in delirium about a universe — or, in The Absent City, for example, subjects who experience deliriums about realities that are not as they appear to be.

  Finally, I believe that the translator experiences a very strange relationship with the author of a book. The issue is not just questions associated with style, references, possible mistakes, or what kind of modifications can be established in the translation of a text. The interesting thing, rather, is the kind of work involved in translation — for it seems to be an unusual exercise in relation to reading, on the one hand, and to property, on the other. I have always been interested in the relationship that exists between translation and property, since the translator rewrites an entire text that is his/hers, and yet is not. The tra
nslator finds him/herself in a strange place, in the sense that what he/she does is transpose into another language a kind of experience that both belongs to him/her, and does not. A writer cites from another’s text, or simply copies, as we all do sometimes — because one forgets, or because one likes it too much not to do so — but the translator carries out an exercise that draws a path between both places. Translation is a strange exercise of appropriation.

  I hold the same relationship with literary property as I do with property in society: I am against it. I think there is a game with property in translation. That is, it puts into question something that common literary sense takes for granted, which is the fact that issues of property in literature are extremely complex, just as they are in society. Language is a common property; in language there is no such thing as private property. We writers try to place marks to see if we can detain its flow. There is no private property in language; language is a circulation with a common flow. Literature disrupts that flow, and perhaps that is precisely what literature is.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND THE TRANSLATOR

  Ricardo Piglia was born in Adrogué, in the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1940. He is the author of numerous short stories, novels, and critical articles. His books of fiction include Jaulario (1967); Nombre falso (1975), translated as Assumed Name (1995); Prisión perpetua (1988); Respiración artificial (1980), translated as Artificial Respiration (1994); La ciudad ausente (1992); and Plata quemada (1997), which received the Premio Planeta.

  Sergio Waisman is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at San Diego State University. His translation of Ricardo Piglia’s Assumed Name received a Meritorious Award in the 1995 Eugene M. Kayden Translation Contest.