Piglia: literature and history (Some notes on <i>Respiración artificial</i>)

Abstract

Around 1980, Ricardo Piglia publishes an emblematic book: Respiración Artificial (translated as Artificial Respiration in 1994). In the first page –that starts with the question: “Is there a story?”– two significant time marks appear: 1976 and 1941. Right there, the cyphered bond between the Nazi genocide and the beginning of the most criminal dictatorship in Argentine history appears. The reflective level in the treatment of philosophical problems, historical or of literary theory, may imply the supremacy of the essay, but the intensity of the story about the imaginary meeting between Kafka and Hitler dominates conceptual developments. It is fiction that engulfs the essay –strengthening it at the same time–, and broadens its conversational partners in a moment when that and other discourses were censored.