The cartographic memory: The diaries of Emilio Renzi between the space of formation and the space of catastrophe

Abstract

In The diaries of Emilio Renzi, the city of Buenos Aires first appears as a space of formation and then as a space of catastrophe. It is during what Emilio Renzi, Ricardo Piglia’s alter ego, calls “the years of the plague” – the years of the Argentine military dictatorship – that the city takes on threatening aspects and changes from what was previously literary and cultural effervescence to a space of emptiness and loneliness. In a memoirist tone, blurring the lines between personal document and fiction, the three volumes of the Diaries blur literary genres in a collage process. In this article, we will focus on elements that characterize the relationship of the “self” with the space, especially during the dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing from readings by Beatriz Sarlo, Adriana Rodríguez Pérsico, Maria Antonieta Pereira e Júlio Pimentel Pinto, we will analyze the “autobiographical map” of the city, as delineated by Renzi, and the forms that the cartography of this space takes throughout the volumes of the Diaries.