Dwelling in La ciudad ausente: Piglia, Heidegger and Literary Experience

Noir detective fiction is a clear literary corollary to Heideggerian Being-in-the-world. Rather than privilege the abstract thought of the Cartesian tradition, Heidegger emphasizes our gut know-how as we navigate and interact with our environs, not unlike the detective of film noir who follows his instincts while maneuvering through an urban underworld. For Heidegger, thought coexists with phenomenological experience. It has less to do with rational interpretation and more to do with a “care” for our surroundings, or the “world” into which we are thrown. Heidegger emphasizes the very condition that allows one to exist with and through the object, to be with other entities and engage with them. This is similar to the anti-hero of film and roman noir, whose physical attraction to the femme fatale is the point of departure of any case, not to mention his affective and material liabilities to other gangsters. And, like Marlowe, whose union with Los Angeles is of an almost mystical nature, attuned as he is to the very heart beat of the city, Heidegger’s phenomenology is an experience of space as one is there, in the world, practicing with it.

Ricardo Piglia, whose novel La ciudad ausente (1992) will be the focal point of this essay, presents a similar reading of the North American novela negra. Piglia claims that the detective is viscerally thrown into the action: “en la novela negra no parece haber otro criterio de verdad que la experiencia: el investigador se lanza, ciegamente, al encuentro de los hechos, se deja llevar por los acontecimientos y su investigación produce fatalmente nuevos crímenes; una cadena de acontecimientos cuyo efecto es el descubrimiento, el desciframiento” (Crítica y ficción 68). As we move to Piglia’s own literary noir novels, it would seem that this experiential, material component is utterly absent. According to Idelber Avelar, for example, “Literature for Piglia has little to do with experience, if one takes experience as the anecdotal content of a personal trajectory, the mass of lived moments in all their banality. In a word, literature’s material is not experience as Erlebnis, lo vivido, the raw collection of empirie” (100). However, if we place Piglia’s novels into the hardboiled world of deception and subterfuge, we can identify a kind of experience within the very slippage of language and interpretation. This said, experience and interaction with the surrounding world continue to underlie novels like La ciudad ausente, Nombre falso (1975) or Respiración artificial (1980), but they occur through textuality. Whether through the stolen identities, the double agents, or the cracked mirror reflections, the author teases out the textual play that is ubiquitous in the noir tradition and brings it to the fore in his own work. Thus, he is able to posit a distinct form of Being-in-the-world, one that is made possible by inhabiting apocryphal, false and alternative narratives.¹

While representation seems to take a back seat within Heidegger’s project, Piglia’s work shows us that representation and text can actually heighten our experience of the surrounding world. Inhabiting a strange text discloses other angles of praxis, conspiracies and complots, and thus reveals other corners of being that could otherwise go unnoticed. For example, in “Un pez en el hielo,” Renzi views Turin through the lens of Cesar Pavese’s diary. In La ciudad ausente, Junior, Elena, and Macedonio are colonized by relatos ajenos that cue them into an “absent city” within the city. If Being-in-the-World is for Heidegger a mode of dwelling that is attuned to those zones outside of traditional Cartesian thought, Piglia’s work signals such experience through the simulacra and foreign narratives that shift one’s perception and material engagement with their milieu. As we will see in this essay, the act of inhabiting alternate storylines and simulacra becomes a mode of “being” in La ciudad ausente.

In his seminal work, Being and Time, Martin Heidegger ambitiously sought to reposition the whole of western philosophy away from the central consideration of thought, onto what precedes mental activity: the fundamental...