Institutional Voice and Clandestine Voices in La ciudad ausente and “La loca y el relato del crimen”, by Ricardo Piglia

Abstract

Starting with the novel La ciudad ausente (1992) and the short story “La loca y el relato del crimen” (1975), Ricardo Piglia organizes a space structured by different voices: the institutional voices (the police, medical and legal discourse) which enter into tension with the adjacent and peripheral voices (of gauchos, inventors, madwomen and journalists). Those voices acquire a corporeality in the different machines of narration, such as the tape recorder, the telephone and the cassette. Literature and media. The study of the
voice (a voice that is simulated in the text) in both of Piglia’s narratives is permeable to different philosophical and psychological discourses. What would happen if the flows of information (what is said) could not be controlled, codified and, therefore, reterritorialized, that is, put back in a place, labeled as, for example, licit or illicit? The aim of this paper is to analyze the voices present in the literary texts and the dynamics of control, censorship and authority that weave them, from where it is proposed to think and work the hypothesis that Piglia constructs Junior and Renzi, central characters of the texts, as attentive listeners.