The storytelling machine: language, law, and the “truth effect” in Ricardo Piglia’s "The absent city"

Abstract

The article examines the intersections between Law and Literature through a reading of The Absent City by Ricardo Piglia, which it describes as a “dense, deliberately chaotic, intertextual, and intentionally disordered” narrative. It argues that the axis of the story is the “Macedonio machine,” a biocybernetic device assembled with a woman, Elena, which “has the capacity to generate narratives” and “ultimately blurs the distinction between reality and fiction.” The novel is said to function as a “virtual palimpsest,” in which the narrative multiplies through loops and “white nodes” that condense memory and power, emphasizing that Law is also a narrative machine: from the Twelve Tables to judicial decisions such as Siri and Kot, one can observe how judges construct narratives that produce a “truth effect” (Foucault). Narrating, both in the novel and in law, is thus understood as “giving life,” “animating the inanimate,” like the sculptor who “preserves the life” fixed in some enduring material. The article proposes that the story of the “machine” can be linked to Freud’s, Lacan’s, and Hofstadter’s theories of the self (a “strange loop”), as well as to Turing’s and Gödel’s reflections on the limits of formal systems, expressing skepticism toward formalist illusions. It views law and literature as self-referential systems that seek to impose coherence on the undecidable. In sum, it suggests that Macedonio’s machine is simultaneously a metaphor for power, memory, and resistance: a deus ex machina that reveals how language—whether juridical or literary—organizes experience and produces truth.