The Absent City: Ricardo Piglia’s aesthetic and political reading of Macedonio Fernández

Abstract

This article studies the presence of Macedonio Fernández’s figure and works in The Absent City, woven by literary uses of his eccentric biography, intertextual and metafictional strategies. It examines the configuration of the city, the Museum and the island as well as their relationship with other topics like the machine and the secret society, inquiring on how they relate to key concepts in Macedonio’s poetics: deterritorialization, aesthetics of interruption and digression, notion of author as a critical reader and of literature as a chain of variants. Through the dialogue with Macedonian texts (his twin novels, his theory of art, “The Surgery of Psychic Removal”, among others), the revised topics unfold a dialectic between tradition and utopia, and reflect on the nature of power, both in the fictional and political fields. This analysis seeks to clarify the peculiar way Piglia reads Macedonio and, more importantly, it inquires on which aspects of Piglia’s own creative system these literary uses reveal.