Language in circles: experience and narration in Ricardo Piglia

Abstract

One of the stories created by the narrative machine in the novel The absent city, by the Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia, presents the tale of a girl who, seeking to reserve "her own territory for herself [...] from which she wanted to delete experience as a whole", eventually eliminates language from her life. Thus, without constituting experiences with words, the girl not only erases the other, but also herself, from a relationship with the world. Since narrating is not exactly understanding, experience is constituted primarily in the gaps of what is reported. It is at fault, the division between knowing and not knowing, where one can encounter the narrative. Experience and narrative establish themselves in this gap, which opens necessarily to the other. From considerations on the transmission of experience in contemporary society, we analyze how, in Piglia’s work, the relationship between language and experience takes place.