Finnegans Wake in Ricardo Piglia’s La ciudad ausente

Abstract

Ricardo Piglia writes his fiction as an answer to the “fiction” of the monologic official discourse of the State, and from this definitively historical and ideological position, faces the issue of Argentine cultural and literary identity with a self reflexive narrative whose meaning is built mainly through an intertextual poetics.In this context, Finnegans Wake is assimilated and transformed in La ciudad ausente (1992) as a homage to James Joyce. This article aims at showing how this work is achieved through a montage based on a metaphorical isotopy whose main analogy is the syntax used in both novels. It also proposes an approach to Piglia’s novel as an interpretation and explanation of Finnegans Wake through fictional discourse, as a commentary on Finnegans Wake, to show how the bitextual structure opens the possibility of reading Piglia’s novel from the narrative premises of the Irish novelist.