THE MISSING BODY: THE PERMANENCE OF LITERATURE IN RICARDO PIGLIA

In this article, I analyze how writing behaves in regard to the flow of life in Ricardo Piglia's work. To this end, I investigate how, in his writings, the battle for meaning ends up finding, in matter in motion, a virtually insurmountable obstacle. In my reflection, I start with the inert body as something that inspires fiction to spring into action. From there, I suggest that the search for meaning permeates Piglia's work, both in fiction and criticism, especially in his own relationship to detective fiction. The question of meaning is made increasingly more complex by the impossibility of narrating experience, a Benjaminian topic that Piglia embraces wholeheartedly. At the end of my article, I scrutinize a word change that I recently discovered while I was flipping through Piglia's typewritten notes in his personal papers, now stored at Princeton University's Firestone Library. How do meaning and truth relate? And how does narrative offer a space for a relationship such as this to fully unfold? These are some of the issues addressed here, with Piglia's work both as inspiration and object of analysis.