Being and Text: Piglia's Nombre falso as Literary Noir

This article examines Ricardo Piglia's use of the noir tradition in his short novella Nombre Falso in order to map the interdependence of the abstract and the material. Piglia's concept of literary crime allows us to triangulate the convergence of thought, literature or exchange value on one hand, with corporeality or material production on the other. Whether we are talking about textual burglary, stolen identities, or the fiction of capital, literary crime engenders a material, bodily experience. While plenty of scholarship surrounding Piglia's work has zeroed in on his engagement with the literary tradition, I try to show how literature becomes a mode of being and of existing. Piglia's characters take on false identities and claim foreign texts as their own, and thus find themselves out of place within their immediate storyline. The fact that they position themselves against their symbolic environment cues a sort of bodily tension, which, I argue, is a key part of Piglia's notion of literary experience and crime. The author takes all of the literary subterfuge so common to the noir genre through the stolen identities, the impostors and the lies in order to posit a sense of material experience. In a second step, I show how money and capitalist ideology also unchain a similarly tangible engagement with the material world. The seductive properties of exchange value beget a kind of material desire that is key for understanding Piglia's view of crime within capitalism.