The Problems of Figuration: Totality and Fragmentation in Ricardo Piglia’s Fiction

Ricardo Piglia presents us with what seems like the quintessence of postmodern narrative. Novels such as Respiración artificial (1980) or La ciudad ausente (1992) are disorienting and difficult to decipher as the author weaves a circuitous web of metafiction and intertextuality that fuses mass culture to high literature. These works undermine any notion of fixed meaning and coherent authorial vision, and their fragmentary structure appears to be a direct nod to post-structuralist theorists like Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, or Nelly Richard, who praise fluidity and difference. Likewise, most postmodernist readings of the author’s work trumpet his use of the fragmentary in order to question all-encompassing projects of national identity.¹ Read in this manner, Piglia’s disjointed and at times, schizophrenic aesthetic, affirms the silent traces of ruins that contradict the totalizing logic of a grand narrative such as modernity or neoliberalism.

While I do not doubt the relevance of the term “postmodern” nor the significance of fragmentary narration in reference to the author’s aesthetic, such a discussion often loses from sight other topics that are equally relevant for a socially-engaged interpretation of Piglia’s work. One of these, from a more materialist standpoint, is the idea of totality.² Upon first glance, any notion of totality would appear to be diametrically opposed to the author’s literary imagination. María Cristina Pons, for example, contrasts Piglia’s affirmation of fluidity or difference with the more totalistic literary projects of previous Argentine intellectuals: “se advierte, en oposición a la visión totalizante propuesta por Sarmiento en Facundo, la fragmentación discursiva de la subjetividad o descomposición del enigma actual argentino y la multiplicación del sentido” (44). However, a closer look at certain works by Piglia demonstrates a more nuanced and dialectical relation between fragmentation and totality, one in which both concepts mediate and over-determine each other constantly. Such a relation cues a latent desire, within Piglia’s work, to visualize the broader, dominant forms of social practice that underpin the elliptical appearance of contemporary culture.

In this case, the totality that Piglia’s work attempts to represent is the capitalist system that subtends society, culture and thought as a whole. It acts as a phantom afterimage that we, as readers, are able to reconstruct from the various clues scattered throughout Piglia’s oeuvre. Paradoxically, the author uses fragmentation to invoke the social totality. The author’s schizophrenic and circular narratives remit to a larger economic system that is rapidly colonizing the globe and, at the same time, churning out the fragmentation of culture en masse. This is the underlying secret of Piglia’s work, the truth to which we must arrive as detective-readers. If, for Piglia, all good stories contain the repressed subtext to which we have access through only disparate signs—“Un relato visible esconde un relato secreto, narrado de un modo elíptico y fragmentario” (92)—then this notion of totality can be read in like manner. The global system itself is the alternate story, the contours of which, on occasion, come into focus. This essay will explore the notion of totality in several works by Piglia and examine the different strategies they posit for elucidating the ubiquitous machinations of political economy. As we will see, Piglia utilizes a fragmentary aesthetic to trace a map of the capitalist system.

This approach to Piglia’s work implies a more nuanced look at postmodernism, one that does not reduce its critical potential to a rejection of fixed meaning and stability, as significant as such a rejection may be, but also takes into account a desire to illuminate the secret stories and social forms that are very much the real conditions of existence. In this sense, postmodern fragmentation and capitalist totality are conceived as dialectically intertwined—the fluidity of postmodern culture can be seen as a symptom of the global economic system, which spreads the logic of reification throughout the world, but also cannibalizes national cultures at the same time. Fragmentation is, thus, less explored in this essay as a subversive strategy than...