Parallel
Lives: Heterotopia and Delinquency in Piglia’s
You
got to
tell me brave captain
why are the wicked so strong
How do the angels get to
sleep
when the Devil leaves his porchlight on?
Tom Waits, "Mr.
Siegal"
I.
"What is
the robbing of a bank compared to the
opening of a bank?" Brecht's famous rhetorical
question stands as the explicit epigraph to Ricardo Piglia's thoroughly
hard-boiled novel Plata quemada (1997), as if announcing a
classical
Marxist critique of capitalism. In the epilogue, the fictionalized
author
claims that he has based his novel on real events, and that he has
tried to
keep in mind "en todo este libro el registro estilístico y el
'gesto metafórico' (como lo llama Brecht) de los relatos
sociales cuyo
tema es la violencia ilegal" (221). How are we to read this Brechtian
framing of an Argentine novel of delinquency? Perhaps surprisingly, Brecht's interest in
crime fiction was mainly limited to the classical English crime novel
so cherished
by Borges. Why? Because this is a genre which
allows for a
view of reality and history as an ordered system of things and events.
In itself, the traditional crime scene takes on the general appearance
of a
minor "catastrophe" area. It includes a series of signs, haphazardly
presented so as to give the impression of chaos, or at least of chance.
Through
the workings of detection, however, hidden connections are revealed and
organized into a perfectly intelligible pattern which points towards
the "logical"
solution to the enigma. Accordingly, the classical story of detection
grants us
a virtually immediate and rational explanation which we are normally
denied
with respect to large scale catastrophes such as revolutions and wars.
In such
cases, we must await the retrospective perspective of history in order
to be
able to read the "crime" scene as a rational system of signs.
On the following pages I shall try to show how Ricardo Piglia
renegotiates these generic delimitations, suggesting that Plata quemada is written in a script which
challenges the schizophrenic flow of money
and desire connecting delinquency to the capitalist machine. By doing
so, I
will gradually move beyond the Brechtian horizon in order to propose
other
theoretical emplacements with which Piglia's novel also seems to be
productively engaged. The conceptualizations of space found in the work
of
Foucault and Deleuze/Guattari are the principal models which will
inform the
following reflexions on the parallel lives of Plata quemada.
II.
The first crime scene in Plata quemada could be seen
as
corresponding to a quasi-classical locus delicti. After the
violent
robbery of five million 1965 Argentine Pesos from a money transport,
the open
streets of a Buenos Aires suburb are virtually littered with signs and
traces
(dead bodies, firearms, vehicles) for the public eye to read. There are
several
witnesses to the crime, including a surviving guardian, suggestively
named
Spector. The impression is deceptive, however, for the opening scene
does not
point towards an ensuing scene of detection exposing the underlying
rational
schema which connects the authors of the crime to its effects. Rather,
the
opening scene is mirrored by a second crime scene which, although
confined to a
modest apartment in
Firearms are only the most conventional of the weapons used
by the
police during the siege. They also employ toxic gases, inflammable
liquids,
grenades, tears gas, and various intelligence devices. In the words of
the
Police Captain: "Esto es una guerra –declaró Silva–. Hay que tener en cuenta los mandamientos de la guerra"
(179). In other words, the final
crime
scene transcends the traditional "logical" schemes of crime fiction,
even in the noir or hard-boiled
genre. It amounts to a veritable catastrophe resembling those "real"
historical events referred to by Brecht in his essay, events which can
only be
properly analyzed, if ever, from the vantage point of retrospection.
This is a
quality which the novel suggestively dramatizes by placing an
"archaeological" or "archival" framework around the main
plot line: the text is interspersed with references to, and selected
quotes
from, juridical documents and press coverings of the events, which, the
author
insists in the epilogue, actually occurred on the very locations where
he
situates his fictional reconstruction. As Edgardo H. Berg has observed,
there
are undeniable Foucauldian resonances in such a methodology
("Asesinos" 97).
This is not the only way in which Plata quemada
transgresses the
frontiers of classical crime scenes. Something seems to happen with the
very
notion of space, especially in the second half of the novel, a feature
which
might also be accounted for by recurring to Foucault—and his notion of
"heterotopia." Heterotopias are places
qui sont dessinés dans l'institution même de la
société, et qui sont des sortes de contre-emplacements,
sortes
d'utopies effectivement réalisées dans lesquelles les
emplacements réels que l'on peut trouver au l'interieur de la
culture
sont à la fois représentés, contestés et
inversés, des sortes de lieux qui sont hors de tous les lieux,
bien que
pourtant ils soient effectivement localisables ("Des espaces autres"
1574-75).
From being, in the first place, moderately "heterotopic," due
to its numerous and mutually incommunicated dwellers, the apartment in
which
the robbers barricade themselves is gradually turned into a scene or
cell
connected with virtually every emplacement of the surrounding social
space. But
this is not simply a question of multiple representation.
A kind of precarious circuit, with frequent loops and unpredictable
interferences, crystallizes around this heterotopic place. Not only is
the
apartment being bugged. The intercom system is also tapped by a radio
operator
who strives to isolate the conversation taking place in the apartment
from the
polyphonic interference of "other" voices; to identify the speakers;
and to read their next move. In addition, the robbers use the intercom
system
as a weapon to demoralize the besieging forces. This aberrant
"intelligent" network is redoubled by the brute, mechanic perforation
of ceiling and walls effectuated from adjoining apartments by police
and
firemen, in order to inject gases, throw bombs, or gain new angles for
their
snipers. Moreover, on the floor in the fortressed apartment stands a
TV-set
through which the delinquents may follow the activities outside. In
this way
they are able to orchestrate their own movements so that they may have
the
desired effect, be it for tactical or merely spectacular reasons.
Thus the enclosed "cell" opens up to the surrounding
emplacements in which it resembles a self-consuming war-machine more
than a
crime scene. The very logic of this escalating process, by which
excessive,
spectacular violence breeds an equally excessive and equally
spectacular wave
of counter-violence, is clearly seen if we juxtapose the following two
passages. The first one refers to the visible signs of the police's
attempt to
storm the apartment: "La puerta de entrada a la vivienda colgaba,
Arguably, this radical "deconstruction" reveals an intimate
complicity between the (excessive) endeavour to correct
the desperate resistance of the confined and marginalized
subjects—by rendering manifest the harsh consequences of their
transgressions—and previous manoeuvrings to discipline their minds and
bodies. As Foucault has shown in Surveiller
et punir, the inscription of a rigid
pattern of
behaviour in "correctible" subjects has replaced the supposedly
surpassed mode of "spectacular" castigation. However, there actually
seems to be a very thin line separating the operations through which
the
delinquent/inmate's body is marked with a normalizing scripture from
the
obsolete practice of dismembering and exposing the very same body. What
takes
place is, in both cases, an effacement of already-inscribed marks: a
reduction
of the organism to an empty substance or surface, soon to be inscribed
with
other signs, or itself converted into a sign of neutralized
delinquency.
Transferred to the "catastrophic" crime scene of Plata
quemada, a parallel reciprocity apparently prevails between
the act of displaying the force of law through an accumulation of
corrective/exhibitory signs, on the one hand, and the violent
disfiguring of
this manifest scene of writing, on the other. Thus, paradoxically
enough, the
crime scene turned into a ruinous war zone seems to be the strictly
logical end
result of the narrated events.
III.
Piglia's novel also traces the lieux
which unites this final catastrophic heterotopia to other places which
are
heterotopic in a more precise sense. I am thinking of that kind of
institutionalized
space which Foucault calls "heterotopias of deviation" (1576). These
are the modern replacements of ancient "crisis
heterotopias"—viz "des lieux privilégiés, ou
sacrés, ou interdits, réservés aux individus qui
se
trouvent, par rapport à la société, et au milieu
humain
à l'intérieur duquel ils vivent, en état de crise"
(1575-76)—which comprise institutions designed to house those whose
behaviour is considered deviant with regard to the average or to a
required
norm. The most obvious examples of such places are of course those
which
Foucault analyses in his books, such as asylums, psychiatric hospitals,
prisons, etc.
Plata quemada's last chapter consists of a series
of analepses centered around the by then only surviving delinquent,
Dorda (El
Gaucho), as "objeto de interés para los médicos, los
psiquiatras" (212) from his early adolescence on. However, in a gesture
reminiscent of the parallel lives narrated in Hernández' Martín
Fierro, it also includes other figures with similar destinies. One
of these
destinies is that of the quasi-mythical figure of Anselmo, who serves
as a
modern incarnation of the archetypical matrero, and whose crime
record
El Gaucho Dorda initially seems to copy. Another such figure is Nene,
whom
Dorda had first met in a reformatory and who later became his friend
and lover,
thus appearing as a contemporary equivalent to Fierro's companion,
Cruz.
Through these analogous destinies the novel provides a narrative
context for
the fragments of medical and psychiatric language which are inserted at
various
stages of the text's unfolding. In a crucial metaphor, the words from
this
"scientific" discourse appear as sewn
onto Dorda's soul; "[c]osidas, las palabras, con
One might perhaps maintain that the disciplinary procedures
"fail" to produce the "desired" effect. However, the novel
seems to suggest, in a very Foucauldian fashion, that their purpose is
not
primarily to "correct" but to fabricate
a category of delinquents which may serve as a screen for the free
unfolding of
institutionalized crime and violence. Instead of correcting the
individuals
under their jurisdiction, the heterotopias of deviation function as a
kind of
factory producing subnormal subjects which understand their own selves
in terms
of the categories established by juridical and psychiatric discourses.
Also,
these subjects adapt their psychic apparatus and their bodies to the
value
system inherent in these normalizing protocols, thus adding the
"pleasure" of humiliation to their own "deviant" or
"degenerated" desire. Instead of functioning as desiring
machines—to use Deleuze and Guattari's concept (L'Anti-Oedipe)—they
are turned into machines of abomination
and destruction. And when they are successfully linked in larger
series,
synchronizing their drives and impulses, it seems as if they manage to
transgress the frontiers of heterotopic space: instead of acting
randomly and
self-destructively through internalized despise, they now actually answer the force of law with an
extremely concentrated and almost equally forceful counter-attack.
As though by dint of a short circuited dialectic—something in
between a spiralling profusion of power and a relapse into the
arresting logic
of desperate abomination—these desiring machines gone awry take on the
general appearance of very primitive war machines, fuelled by hatred
and drugs.
They evince no tactical sophistication whatsoever; their only purpose
is to
create a massive wave of counter-violence. Instead of connecting to the
desire
of other organisms, or to the "body politic," in a complementing
fashion, these war machines, totally out of control, reproduce the
machinations
of institutionalized violence. It is as though the infamous practices
alluded
to by the untranslatable phrase "darles máquina," repeated
throughout Piglia's novel, is transferred from one heterotopic place to
another. In their new and violently "parodic" frame, they are no
longer directed towards an enclosed delinquent but distributed,
impartially, to
the crowd of policemen, journalists, firemen, and other bystanders
outside the
besieged apartment. Not only does this apply to the use of physical
violence.
The primitive war machines also work verbally,
reproducing the obscene discourse of sexually aggressive and homophobic
insults
which have rained over their own head and bodies during
interrogating/torturing
máquinas, redirecting them
towards their former executors (or any other addressee, for that
matter).
"Hablaban así," the narrator comments after one particularly
rude harangue; "eran más sucios y más despiadados para
hablar que esos canas curtidos en inventar insultos que relajaban a los
presos
hasta convertirlos en muñecos sin forma" (168). Heterotopic
space
is thus turned inside out; the final war/crime scene appears as an
inversion of
the above mentioned heterotopias of deviation.
IV.
There is, however, another logic
of space which
supplements, and redirects, this heterotopic explosion. Apparently by
sheer
impulse or intuition, the marginalized and rebellious members of the
body of
delinquents seek to break out of their confinement, not by a massive
frontal
attack, but by various lines of escape which might be seen as
communicating
with different structures of emplacement, or quite simply with other
forms of being. These alternative scenarios are
situated "beyond" or "underneath" the heterotopias which
gradually yet systematically have turned desiring machines into war
machines;
most significantly, they appear in a space constructed according to
parameters
which radically contradict the delinquents' predicament as entrapped in
the
crime/war scene.
With such an optics, the act of
burning/sacrifying money could be seen as a ritual in which these
"other" lines of flight are somehow represented. The general import
of this ritual is dramatized through the reactions of the bystanders
who
unanimously condemn the purposeless destruction as blasphemic.
Furthermore, the
sacrifice is given a "philosophical" interpretation by the Uruguayan
philosopher Washington Andrada, who sees it as an innocent potlach
"realizado en una sociedad que ha olvidado ese rito,
un acto absoluto y gratuito en sí, un gesto de puro gasto y de
puro
derroche que en otras sociedades ha sido considerado un sacrificio que
se
ofrece a los dioses" (174)—since money represents, in our society,
an infinitely and unquestionably valuable "good" whose sacrifice is
worthy of the gods. One immediately thinks of Bataille's concept of dépense (of which Andrade's
interpretation could be seen as a paraphrase): here we witness a very
precise
example of the "general economy" which structures pre-modern society
around the sphere of the sacred. This archaic logic, repeated in the
age of
capitalism, traces a trajectory along which the circulation of capital
is
"symbolically" brought to an end—not by physical barriers or
anything of that kind, but— through a pas
delà which leaves nothing but a spectral economy of ashes.
If this
is so, could one not say that a certain directionality informs the
"monetary holocaust," tracing a possible line of flight from the restricted economy of which the
institutionalized places of disciplination/normalization are manifest
symptoms?
Underneath these modern heterotopias of deviation—archeologically, as
it
were—thus emerge the "crisis heterotopias" as the ruins of an
economy by now relegated to the realm not of the hetero-, but of the u-topic.
There is a phantasmatic aspect to this excessive expense, a
wish-fulfillment appearing in an unfixed state: as displacement,
unfolding,
elevation, bifurcation, growth, metamorphosis. An interior line of
flight thus
opens up, as the endless possibilities of becoming—a
process of anticipation, as it were: to escape by abandoning
oneself to
a flux towards other forms and other places. In Plata
quemada, a "rhizomatic" structure seems to
crystallize, a structure which reads like a combination of
Deleuze/Guattari's mineur
scenarios (Kafka) and the interfering
systems in Julio Cortázar's work. It is probably most fully
expressed in
the following passage of free indirect discourse on Dorda's interior
world:
"Abajo de la tierra, bajo los adoquines, estaban las cloacas, los
caños maestros que corrían
It would appear that the most probable outcome of such an
interior
escape-line is the violent negation of its "poetics of becoming,"
whose most radical version would be death. However, to varying degrees
the
final deaths and detentions actually seem to represent an "escape" of
sorts. Mereles' death from a police bullet reads like a continuous
displacement
which ends in a surreptitious elevation: "Había entrado en la
cocina para buscar un ángulo de tiro
y
murió sin darse cuenta,
When the same simile is used, later, to refer to Dorda, it is
attributed
to the journalist Emilio
Renzi: "Un
Cristo,
anotó el
V.
However, this final chapter is followed by an epilogue in
which the
"author" reveals that his novel is in fact a true story and
enumerates the many sources which he has had at hand. He also makes
known his
own tangential involvement with the course of events: a meeting, on the
train
from
Me parece que ese sueño [i.e., the story] empieza con una
imagen.
Me gustaría
terminar este libro con el recuerdo de esa
imagen, es
decir con el recuerdo de la muchacha que se va en el tren a
The shared emptiness of the two endings suggests a blank
space soon to
be filled in with written marks, like the bodies enclosed in the
novel's
heterotopic spaces. Yet one cannot fail to notice a crucial difference
between
the parallel scenes: the presence of the narratorial/authorial figure
in the
latter, as a first mark of inscription. From this point of departure
emerges a
series of textual frames each of which offers a fragment from, or a
particular
perspective on, the episodes and characters which make up Piglia's
novel.
Allegedly, every episode can be traced back to a specific document (or
other
source); where no such documentation exists, the narrator/author
asserts,
"he preferido omitir los acontecimientos" (222). The result is a
weblike structure of voices which could perhaps be described as a
deterritorialized
panopticon, a structure whose literary genealogy has been deftly traced
by D.
A. Miller in The Novel and the Police.
There is also a sombre parallel between the cacophony of voices which
flow
through the novel and those which resound inside the head of the
schizophrenic
Dorda, a parallel which reflects the pressure of surveillance and
punishment on
the human psyche as well as the vertiginous circulations of the
capitalist
machine.
In an Argentine context, the complicity between crime and
literature has
been studied by Aníbal González in his Journalism
and the Development of Spanish American Narrative. Plata
quemada relates in a suggestively
ambiguous manner to the tradition established by González. It
seems to
fit perfectly into a series of works which stretches from Sarmiento's
politico-novelistic biography of Facundo Quiroga—through Borges' twice-told tales and other journalistic
experiments—and beyond. Piglia's earlier involvement with Sarmiento and
Borges is well known; and traces of this affection
is
easily detectable in Plata quemada.
The train episode narrated in the second half of the epilogue is only
one such
textual trace, pointing towards the borderline incident in the
"Advertencia del autor" with which Facundo opens.
Also, the reappearance of
Emilio Renzi, the curly-haired and glass-wearing cronista of El
Mundo,
as an embedded image of the authorial narrator, echoes the "myopic,
atheist and very timid" editor of the Yidische
Zaitung who plays a minor (yet probably crucial) role in Borges'
"La
muerte y la brújula." To these intertexts should perhaps be
added
the gauchesco genre (on which both
Sarmiento and Borges draw heavily) as one that combines politics,
delinquency,
and pseudo-oral "journalism"; as has already been noted, echoes from
the Martín Fierro resonate on several levels throughout
Piglia's
novel. The list could no doubt be enlarged virtually ad infinitum.
Sandra
Garbano has suggested—to cite just one further example—that Plata
quemada could be read as a tribute
to Roberto Arlt, an author equally famous for his journalistic columns
as for
his novels of delinquency.
Yet at the same time Piglia's
use of the journalist/crime matrix alters its traditional function as a
morally
denouncing and/or aesthetically entertaining discourse. Plata
quemada could
be read, among other things, as a parody of journalism in the age of
sensationalism and public opinion. The parallelism between the police
and the
press is only one such topic, perhaps epitomized in the figure of
Lucía
Passero (cf. Clayton 48); another, the absurd communication machine
constructed
on the crime/war scene whose components and functions turn out to be
highly
confused. (Yet the ensuing short-circuits only seem to propel the
insane flow
of information.) Metacommentaries regarding the unreliability of
witnesses also
abound. On a more textual level, the narrative technique of Piglia's
novel
mimics the documentary film in its sometimes ostentatious collage of
testimonies; whereas many characteristic turns of phrase, such as "hoy
(por
ayer)," point towards the chronicle/news report genre.
According to the epilogue, the
articles signed "E.R." hold a privileged place among the journalistic
sources involved in the writing of the novel. These initials obviously
refer to
Emilio Renzi. As a framing device, this attribution complicates the
workings of
Piglia's narrative machine to a considerable degree. Renzi, who is
visible both
behind the scenes and as a character in the story, is everything but an
innocent narratorial figure. When on one occasion he interviews Captain
Silva,
Renzi appears as a self-conscious aspirant to the status of hard-boiled
detective-cum-journalist. Besides, it
is all too clear that his understanding of the situation is essentially
a
literary construct. Earlier in the novel we find him searching the
dictionary
for the meaning of hubris, after
which episode several sequences establish striking parallels between
the
Argentine delinquents and the heroes of Greek tragedy. These formal and
thematic parallelisms (such as the blind power of fate, the
extreme pathos of certain scenes, and the
moralizing function of the chorus),
which on a cursory reading might seem to redeem the story from the
narrow
perspective of journalism, are severely destabilized when we realize
that they
can actually be traced back to the very same limited journalistic
horizon.
Perhaps we should read these ironies as symptomatic of what is going on
in Plata quemada: a writing more intimately aligned
with Dorda's schizophrenic voices than with Renzi's "dramatic" or
"tragic" interpretive schema.
VI.
I opened these reflexions on Plata
quemada by calling attention to the framing references to Brecht in
the
novel's epilogue and epigraph. However, embedded in the novel's text
another
epigraphic space opens up suggesting a different view of the capitalist
world/machine, a view which is more attuned to the scenarios which have
been
mapped above. I am referring to the quotes which are given from two
songs,
"Parallel lives" and "Brave Captain," allegedly to be found
on a hit single from the mid 60s. It is attributed to the apocryphal
pop group
Head and Body. But in fact all quotes from both songs belong to Tom
Waits'
"Mr. Siegal," released on the album Heartattack & Vine. What Tom Waits seems to be doing
is roughly parallel to the strategy adopted by Piglia in Plata
quemada.
He "connects" with a
parallel universe of crime
and violence, at whose center appears the figure of "Bugsy" Siegel, American mid-war
gangster boss. In Tom Wait's song, Mr. Siegal serves as an imaginary
point of
contact with a destabilized
world of drugs and delinquency.
Ricardo Piglia,
for his part, repeats this gesture. He identifies with his porteño
delinquents, sees the world sub specie delicti, and
"signs" his borrowing with the
twice repeated verses from "Parallel lives"/"Mr. Siegal":
"if I can find a book of matches, / I'm goin' to burn this hotel
down."
The imaginary beat of Head and Body's "Brave
Captain" and "Parallel Lives" seem to be inscribed as an accompagnement
to the unfolding of Plata
quemada's story line. These apocryphal tunes function as a
fictionalized
soundtrack of sorts, echoeing the story of Malito, "head," and the
"parallel lives" of the three members of his narcotized
"body" without organs—as well as of their enemy, the notoriously
"brave Captain" Silva. When Malito vanishes without a trace, the head
as controlling mechanism is (metaphorically speaking) cut off, thus
leaving
behind an acefalic organism, trapped within a cage. Perhaps
Plata quemada should be read as a
reenactment of the endeavour to escape from this entrapment. How? This
is a
text which attaches itself to every source it can find, repeats every
voice it
hears, delights in false attributions, connects with the plot line of
its own
story, destratifies its improvised hierarchies of interpretation, and
ends by
dissolving the provisional architecture of its own narrative apparatus.
Qua
writing, Piglia's novel challenges the stochastic flow of money and
desire
which absorbs the delinquent into the capitalist machine. By this move,
Plata
quemada also supplements the impasse of schizophrenia as a clinical
phenomenon (embodied in Dorda) with a deterritorializing
"schizophrenic" line of flight.
Works Cited
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Edgardo H. "Asesinos por naturaleza: sobre Plata quemada
de Ricardo Piglia. CELEHIS – Revista del Centro de
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Clayton,
Michelle: "Plata quemada."
[Ricardo Piglia: Conversación en
Deleuze,
Gilles and Félix Guattari: L'Anti-Oedipe.
Capitalisme et schizophrénie.
Deleuze,
Gilles and Félix Guattari: Kafka
– pour une littérature mineure.
González,
Aníbal. Journalism
and the Development of Spanish American Narrative.
Foucault,
Michel. "Des espaces autres." Dits et écrits II,
1976-1988.
Foucault,
Michel. Surveiller et
punir: naissance de la prison.
Garbano,
Sandra. "Homenaje a Roberto Arlt: Crimen, falsificación y
violencia
en Plata quemada." Hispamerica 96
(2003);
Gutiérrez
González, Josué. "Notas para
un
mapa de voces en Plata quemada." La palabra y el hombre
[Universidad
Miller, D.
A. The Novel and the
Police.
Piglia,
Ricardo. Plata quemada
[1997].
Waits, Tom.
Heartattack and Vine.
Elektra Entertainment, 1980