Between media culture and high culture: Ricardo Piglia and La Argentina en pedazos

Abstract

The relations that argentine writer Ricardo Piglia maintained with the media and mass culture have been partially documented but have always been visible: from his classes on the Argentine novel and Borges on cultural television, film scripts and his narrative work in which he has created works between the police genre, science fiction and fantasy, passing by its proximity to other forms considered extraliterary, such as graphic novel and comic, has opened new ways of receiving his own work and that of the authors of the literary tradition that he has analyzed in his novels, essays and journal notes. Thus, and despite the enormous complexity of attentive reading of his narrative, his interventions in the mass circuits do not make concessions to a non-specialized public with literary studies but at the same time brings him closer to reading Borges, Leopoldo Marechal, Manuel Puig o Roberto Artl, for example. This paper analyzes Piglia’s relationship with the volume La Argentina en pedazos (1993), a work that was published in a fragmentary and periodic way in Fierro magazine since 1984, and stops in particular in the cartoon versions of some works centrals of argentine literature, such as Esteban Echeverría’s “El matadero”, Cortázar’s “Las puertas del cielo” and Arlt’s Los lanzallamas. The texts selected and studied by Piglia for La Argentina en pedazos suggest, indirectly, the review that the argentine writer makes of his literary tradition; simultaneously, the encounter between two seemingly antagonistic cultural manifestations is part of an aesthetic and political operation that encourages artistic renewal and denounces the violence of the State produced in Argentina since its fundation as an independent nation.