"El piano"

Piglia's piece in El país gives a rather scathing critique to all sorts of institutions.  It would seem we are at once overly-connected in the most terrifying way and also set-off, separated from our immediate reality:

A la vez en estos días la intervención militar y el riesgo atómico han sustituido a las noticias locales.

The local, sealed-up sense of reality or home is lost.  Its replacement seems to be a hyper-glossing of images, which Piglia identifies with the digital in its various phenomena:

En las mesas cercanas, las chicas y los muchachos toman agua mineral o té verde, concentrados en sus notebooks, sus iPod, sus BlackBerry, los auriculares puestos, aislados en sus cápsulas espaciales pero ligados a las realidades exteriores por el teléfono celular.

"Sus cápsulas espaciales" -- in this sense, we are not homeless, but rather sealed-up in a different kind of home.  It would appear that the nonlocal, as Tim Morton would put it, still has its neat, glossy viewing window (e.g. Mac-book screens).

Piglia continues his affront with an attack against the status quo of literary criticism: "La crítica literaria es la más afectada por la situación actual de la literatura. Ha desaparecido del mapa".  I would seem, correctly perhaps, that literary criticism has disappeared.  For Piglia, the best critics now are historians.  And there may be something to this tracing other lines through the dirt of history...  The first time I read these lines, I wondered, if it may also be the case that the map(ping) of literary criticism has disappeared.  Much time has been spent urging the public to read in a literate public (Vasconcelos would be very sad).  Instead, literary criticism seems to take its cue from glossing the image, giving name to the (hyperbolic) frontal assault by images.  How do we read them?  What names do we give them?

Piglia is fascinated by developing other routes towards the future (cf. Respiración artificial).  What is terrifying, for me, about this series of journal entries is its silent plea when faced with vacuum-sealed solipsists waiting around after "la destrucción de la naturaleza" only to exclaim, well finally this may be the last days of winter... perhaps (Nadie hace cola porque no hay nadie. Compro una pala para la nieve, un par de guantes de lona y una pinza (para abrir y cerrar las ventanas). Se anuncia una tormenta de nieve, la última del invierno, quizá.)


Let's hope against this (slight) pessimism that the literary has not died.  I'm not so sure it has...