It’s a Real Nowhere Map: Ricardo Piglia’s The Absent City

Abstract

This entry deals with urban literature of resistance to dictatorship written to elude censorship and reach a readership without having to be clandestine. Cryptic literature composed to accomplish the double goal of surpassing censorship and, at the same time, be legible and understandable by and for its intended audience. The entry offers examples of this in Argentinian literature written during the military regime of the 1970s and 1980s and in its aftermath, and then focuses on one novel, The Absent City, in which Ricardo Piglia imagines a Buenos Aires that becomes phantasmagorical and unreal due to the multiplicity of political discourses (discourses of domination and discourses of resistance) that flood the city to a point at which it becomes utterly impossible to tell the difference between reality and fiction, official history, and alternative versions of history. The entry also deals with the graphic novel version of The Absent City, which translates this sense on the unreal from words to images.