Attuned Listening in Ricardo Piglias Plata quemada

eva-lynn jagoe
university of toronto


One has simply to listen . . .
Sigmund Freud, 1912.

icardo Piglias novel, Plata quemada, would seem to be markedly different in

its genre, style, and topic from its predecessors, Respiracion artificial and La
ciudad ausente. Whereas those books have learned characters who discuss questions of philosophy and literature, Plata quemada is a true crime novel that
narrates the events of a robbery that took place in the 1960s in Buenos Aires and
the subsequent shootout between police and thieves in Montevideo. Instead of
writers and intellectuals, the novel is populated by cops and robbers whose sordid slang is quite different from the language used in Piglias previous novels.
There are correspondences, however, and one can find in Plata quemada a manifestation of the preoccupations that have shaped his writing: the reliability of the
narrator, the relationship between narration and history, and the telling of stories and their reception. These are the questions that inform my response to the
novel and allow me to articulate not only a textual reading but also what I consider to be a reading strategy towards which the novel gestures.
Plata quemada is narrated through an interweaving of different voices: the
media, the police, the bystanders, the stream-of-consciousness thoughts of the
criminals, and a sometimes omniscient narrator who switches temporal tenses
within the same paragraph. The narrator insists that that he has consulted many
recordseyewitness accounts, newspaper clippings, and police and psychiatric
documentsand in the epilogue, he thanks various archives, scholars, and doctors who allowed him access to the information. Throughout the novel, he references these sources in mid-sentence in a manner that defines the register being
deployed, be it conversational, journalistic, or scientific. But Piglia is mischievous, as anyone who was fooled by his publication of a lost story by Roberto
Arlt knows, and the veracity of his claims is questionable.1 He plays with the

1
In the novella Nombre falso (1975), Emilio Renzi and Ricardo Piglia are both characters in a detective fiction filled with paratextual references that deals with a supposedly unpublished story by Arlt, Luba. Many readers were fooled into thinking that Luba was
really by Arlt, a mistake promulgated by the Library of Congress, which catalogued it as such.
See Ellen McCrackens 1991 PMLA article, as well as Maria Eugenia Mudrovcics letter and
McCrackens reply in PMLAs Forum in May 1992 for a discussion of these misattributions
and Piglias motives in contesting notions of authenticity and propriety.

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distinctions between fiction and non-fiction in this novel, recreating conversations or internal thoughts that he could not have accessed, playing upon literary
allusions to describe the criminals and the events, and sometimes quoting
from the real Uruguayan newspaper El mundo, whose reporter on the scene of
the shootout is, according to the narrator, Emilio Renzi. This name is not unfamiliar to Piglias readers, since Renzi is a character in his stories and novels,
and the pseudonym used by Piglia to publish some literary articles.2 Thus the
newspaper articles are obviously invented, and render suspect all the other
sources. This mix of fact and fiction is woven into a complex plurivocal account
that conveys many different reactions, interpretations, and versions of a crime.
The different characters in the novel attempt to narrativize what they see or
hear, interpreting the events through sociology, anthropology, or psychiatry, or
characterizing them as a Greek myth or a morality play. They feel the need to
respond to the situation by representing it, interpreting it, and judging it before
they have perceived the larger forms that shape its meanings. The subtlety of
Piglias art is to represent the ways that those different voices seek to define and
limit the events according to their preconceptions or anxieties. I suggest that we
attend not only to what the different voices say, but also to how they say it and
how they are heard. Critics have tended to focus on the radical element of this
plurivocality as a rendering of the story that does not confine itself to one interpretation. To them, this is a book about telling. I add to these readings by focusing on the listening, insisting that hearing all those voices without attempting to
tell one story allows for a more open, receptive experience of the novels violence and its historical, political, and aesthetic contexts.
Listening as the dominant mode of perception makes sense in this novel because of its attention to sound as a thematic register. Plata quemada engages a
practice of listening, whether it leads to mistaken conclusions or deeper comprehension, that permeates the ways that information is disseminated and events
are understood. The novel does not reside in a visual recreation of the characters
and their surroundings so much as an auditory one that attends to their voices,
their intonations and vocabulary, and the shrill and terrifying sounds of violence
and pain. Through transcripts of interviews, interrogations, and secret wiretapped recordings, the narrator claims to have assembled a chronicle that recreates the sounds of the era.
The characters in this novel listen, but not just to each others threats and
suggestions. They hear interior monologues, stray conversations, or voices carried on electrical wires, so that frequently words float and are not directed at
anyone in particular. They are not parts of dialogue per se, but rather, to quote
from the novel about the voices heard inside one characters head, music.
This figure is useful because if we conceptualize the many chaotic words that
circulate in this novel as music rather than as speech, then we are not seeking
the meanings of each word so much as tuning into the form of the communica2
Renzi seems to function as an alter-ego for Piglia, expressing a love of literature and a
nave understanding of politics and history that is earnest and optimistic in a way that Piglia
is not. See pp.15862 of The End of the World for my analysis of Renzi as a vehicle of literariness
in Piglias work.

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tion as a whole. This attuned listening is akin to the attention that the Lacanian
psychoanalyst gives to her analysand, one in which she does not feel her onus to
be that of response, self-defense, or agreement.3 For if the analyst inserts her own
ego onto the process of interaction, the analysis will not attend to the analysands
articulations, will not allow for the irruptions of desire that mark the analysands
fragmented representation of his own history.4 An analyst knows that she is not
being spoken to, but words are being spoken. When the cops and the criminals
talk to each other in Plata quemada, they engage in the closed normative listening that is endemic to societys resistance to those parts of humanity that are not
productive or easily comprehensible (this is what Lacan would call the subordination of thought that marks the American way of life). Both sides seek to
inscribe themselves and the other in the restricted and subjected places that they
hold in society as bad guys and good guys. These interpellations fail to account
for the affective nuance that is audible in their cries of anger, pain, and tenderness. Yet these outbursts narrate the story that Piglia wants to tell, so that his
garnering of facts and evidence and opinion is just noise that the culture makes
in the face of a desire that insists on its illogical and dangerous existence and
makes itself heard through the intimate music of the novel.
The text gives close attention to the language used by the criminals and the
police, and the narrator claims to have respected their vernacular (221). This
is achieved, according to the epilogue, through an interview conducted with one
of the criminals, the gaucho Dorda, and through two vital transcripts to which
the narrator had access: Dordas interrogation and the secret recordings made
by the police during the siege of the criminals in Montevideo (223). Thus, within
the fictional logic of the veracity of these sources, the actual words used are
replicated in the novel to give it an orality that contributes to its realism. The
eye witness accounts are snatches of dialogue that often describe something
overheard rather than seen, functioning as registers of oral language that are
quotidian and local. The documents that are supposedly used are transcripts of
words heard without any visual reference. Both refer to moments of hearing
voices. In the case of the Dorda transcripts, which are then analyzed by a psychiatrist who ascribes to them a condition of psychotic schizophrenia, Dorda proves
to have been hearing voices in his head since he was young. These voices urge
him to act, and he interprets them as personal messages, killing or taking drugs
in order to silence or appease them. In a kind of mirror listening, there are the
transcripts of the wiretapper, Roque Perez, who sits in a cabin trying to decipher
the sounds in the apartment under siege. He functions as a model for an attuned
listening, a sort of psychoanalyst (who is nothing like the psychiatrist in the
novel), and his attention to sound over meaning is juxtaposed to the kinds of
listening that the other characters enact.
3
This comparison of listening to music and analytic listening has been theorized by Alexander Stein, who argues that listening, in both music and in psychoanalysis, is predicated on
constructs of harmony and tonality.
4
Jacques Lacan, Seminar II. If we train analysts, it is so that there will be subjects in whom
the ego will be absent. This is the ideal of analysis, which, of course, remains virtual. There
is never a subject without an egoa fully realized subjectbut this is what we must always
try to obtain from a subject in analysis.

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This approach to the novel is the counterpoint to the excellent analyses by

Joanna Page, Michelle Clayton, Gareth Williams, German Garca, and Francine
Masiello. What they share is an interest in the novels language (especially its
orality) and the plurality of voices that narrate the story. Like these critics, I
engage in metaphors of orality and sound (telling, listening) to describe
what would more typically be referred to as the writing and reading of the novel.
As Page says, The politics of possessing and telling stories is given a particular
meaning in Plata quemada (31). And Masiello argues that the novel leaves us
with a series of questions about the authority of narration: Who has the power
of access to information, who controls retrospection, who directs the ear of the
state and usurps the readers trust, who controls the art of telling? (199). These
approaches focus their attention on the act of telling as a political one that
engages questions of agency and power. I propose that the myriad ways that the
characters and the reader react and respond to these tellings inform what
emerges as an ethics of listening. To truly listen, not only to what is said but also
to what is not said and to the affect that is conveyed, constitutes the conditions
for what Alain Badiou might call an event, a concrete situation in which one is
changed, indeed constituted into a subject.5 That subject then commits him or
herself with fidelity to the truth of the event. In Plata quemada, the demand for
such a commitment is evidenced both by the behaviors of the characters, who
choose to either listen or not, and by the very act of reading the novel. In his
contradictory and plurivocal account, Piglia leads his readers to an attuned listening whose objective is none other than that of psychoanalysis itself: el de
restituir la continuidad en ese tejido desgarrado que es la representacion que el
sujeto tiene de su propia historia, anudamiento de mitos, fabulas, leyendas, fantasas y recuerdos encubridores6 [that of restoring the continuity of that sundered skein that is the subjects representation of his own history, that knot of
myths, fables, legends, fantasies and screen memories]. Piglia has listened to all
the words that surround their actions and situated them in a context that creates
a history not only for his characters, but also for his readers, who read without
drawing conclusions. This willing suspension of judgment is an ethical stance
and I venture to accord it the status of a new engagement of reading as attuned
listening.7

Hostile Language
The language that most of the characters use in Plata quemada is not a language
that seeks to impart information. Rather, it expresses the layers of violence and
5
The most accessible account of the event in Badious work is found in his brilliant essay
on Ethics.
6
This definition is taken from Nestor Braunsteins cogent book on psychoanalysis, 186.
My translation.
7
This reader response is one that is evident to me every time I teach the novel. Students
invariably ask yet are unable to answer questions such as Are they heroes? Are they criminals? In attending to all the different voices in the text, they come away with a sense of
having listened without forming judgment.

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hostility that inform the characters relationships to each other. Insult, outrage,
anger, and threat are evoked through a powerful and fluent slang. The narrator
recounts the initial impetus to write this book in his epilogue in which he describes meeting the girlfriend of one of the criminals on a train journey. He
describes the language that she uses to recount the details of the siege as un
lenguaje que sonaba hostil, como suele sonar el lenguaje cuando se lo usa para
contar una derrota (225) [a language that sounded hostile, as language usually
sounds when it is used to describe a defeat].8 Its aim is less to communicate the
details than to express the affective response of the teller, with all the emotional
hostility and violence this invokes. This framing narrative shapes the tone and
aim of the retelling, making it a novel that seeks to convey affect rather than
information.
This affect is one that connects the police with the criminals, the torturer and
the tortured. In a society that would seek to demarcate the lines between criminal action and lawful control, the novel depicts the interconnectedness of violence through a shared language of profanity and brutality. Some of the men in
the novel wear uniforms and some do not; all are criminals, all are victims. Jacques Rancie`re differentiates between la basse police, or the low-level police force,
and la police, which is, in Gabriel Rockhills explanation, an organization of
bodies based on a communal distribution of the sensible, i.e. a system of coordinates defining modes of being, doing, making, and communicating that establishes the borders between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the
inaudible, the sayable and the unsayable (Rancie`re 89). Of particular note in
this article is how la police functions as an arbiter of that which can be heard and
not heard. In the insults that they hurl at each other, Piglia finds a commonality
that has to do with sound, inflection, tonalities. What the police and the thieves
share is a desire to break the other down, to render him defenseless and powerless. They are both part of the same linguistic community, and have come to
learn the power of words to insult, to violate, to damage. Within a system in
which individuals are subjected to institutionalized brutality and that is itself
policed, both sides will deploy similar weapons.
The examples below follow upon each other in what John Durham Peters
would call a dissemination rather than a dialogue.9 That is to say, the characters
are not really talking to each other in a way that communicates feelings or information. Rather, they are throwing out words and tones that they hope will hit
their mark. In this, these words are similar to the bullets that spray out of the
semi-automatic weapons that both the police and the criminals use. Due to the
structure of the building and the siege of the apartment, the opponents seldom
actually see each other and instead shoot indiscriminately, hoping that the sheer
number of bullets will meet a body or two. The verbal exchanges between the
police and their hostages take place over the intercom system of the building, so
they cannot even see the person to whom they are talking or be recognized
All translations from the novel are mine unless otherwise indicated.
As Peters avers in The Word Made Flesh, much of culture is not necessarily dyadic, mutual,
or interactive. Dialogue is only one communicative script among many (34). Peters points
out that much of culture consists of signs that are dispersed and not meant to be reciprocated.
8
9

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for who they are. Thus the language used becomes more hostile because it is
communicating an antagonism that is depersonalized, that could be directed to
anyone with the hopes of conveying its message of violence. The other is not
being engaged as an individual, but rather as a cana [cop], or, in the case of the
police view of the criminals, as enfermos mentales (178).
The intercom system is an important trope for how sound is transmitted and
language is heard and communicated in the novel. The first time that it comes
into the novel is when the criminals first realize that they have been discovered.
They are playing cards in the apartment in Uruguay when all of a sudden sintieron un zumbido, incluso lo oyeron antes de que sonara, un instante antes de
que se oyera primero el zumbido metalico y despues la voz que los llamaba
(134) [they heard a hum, they heard it even before it sounded, an instant before
they heard the metallic buzzer and then the voice that called them]. The connection announces itself and is felt and apprehended before any communication
takes place. The electrical wires that carry the sounds of the voices enable them
to be heard as disembodied menace. The wires announce themselves, crackling
with meaning. Faces are not connected to bodies, and dialogue does not take
place, but fear and menace are disseminated. The next passage returns twice to
the zumbido metalico, expanding upon the imagery of the scene: cuando se
oyo el zumbido metalico, parecido al chillido de una rata, al chiflido del
demonio (134) [when they heard the metallic buzzer, sounding like a rat
squealing, a devil shrieking]. The shrieks and squeals to which it is likened render the noise itself animate, so that it proclaims its connection and its communication to the criminals before a voice is even heard. When that voice is heard, it
is distorted by electrical transmission, rendered through a medium that does not
allow for the authenticity of its sound.
La voz llegaba distorsionada, en falsete, una tpica voz de guanaco,
retorcida y prepotente, vaca de cualquier sentimiento que no fuera
el verdugueo. Tipos que gritan seguros de que el otro va a obedecer
o se va a hundir. Esa es la voz de la autoridad, la que se escucha por
el altavoz en los calabozos, en los pasillos de los hospitales, en los
celulares que llevan a los presos en medio de la noche por la ciudad
vaca a los sotanos de las comisaras para darles goma y maquina.
(134)
[The voice that reached them was distorted, a falsetto, a typical pigs
voice, twisted and arrogant, empty of every sentiment apart from
those of the executioner. The type of voice used to bellowing, convinced that the other will obey or dissolve on the spot. This is the
voice of authority, the one you hear over loudspeakers in the cells, in
hospital corridors, in the dungeons where they transport prisoners in
the middle of the night, across the empty city down into the police
station basement to torture them with lashes and electricity.]10
10
This translation is taken from Amanda Hopkinsons Money to Burn, 121. However, I disagree with her translation of tipo as type of voice. In this context it means primarily
guy.

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This voice is not an individual one; rather, it is representative of a type, and its
inflections carry a whole history of abuse, violence, and authority ceded through
fear. The voice carries only one sentiment, and that is of violence, so that innuendo is suppressed and the message that comes through is clear. The voice yells,
expecting that it will be obeyed not because of its content but its form. In detailing the other spaces of the military-industrial complex11 in which this voice is
heard, Piglia emphasizes that this voices authority is experienced through the
sound systems that carry it. Thus it is depersonalized and omnipotent, carrying
with it the resonance of what its sound portends.
Torture with electricity is the endpoint of the voices threats, yet it is also
inherent in the structure of the voice carried by electric wires. At another point
in the novel, one of the characters describes the torture inflicted in prison by
the continuous electric light that is never turned off so that he cannot escape
into his own interiority. The prisoners are unable to control what is transmitted
to them by electricity either visually or sonically. The use of electricity to control
and terrorize them is a way to subdue them, to break their individuality even
before the use of a more focused form of electricity to torture them.
Torture with voice and torture with electricity are paired throughout the book
because both function in the same way: an invisible yet potent communication
goes instantaneously from sender to recipient, sending a vibration that communicates its message. Thus both voice and electricity are used concomitantly to
break down an individuals resistance. That breakdown is described thus: Tipos
pesados, de la pesada pesada, que se quebraban en la parrilla, que se entregaban
al final, despues de or a Silva insultarlos y darles maquina durante horas, para
hacerlos hablar (168) [Tough guys, from out of the toughest jails, broken on
the electric grill, surrendering at last, after being forced to listen to Silva insulting and applying the picana to them for hours on end, to get them to talk].
Words and electricity are both transformed from means of communication to
tools of torture itself. Both are invisible in their effects and even their applications. They are intangible yet nonetheless effective in their power to communicate.
A language that sounds hostile is shared by the police and by the criminals,
both threatening each other with their words as much as with their weapons and
their assaults. In the novel, the besieged criminals taunt Silva over the intercom,
brutally describing a sexual act that they say is being performed on his imaginary
daughter up in the apartment. This is a pure performance, because with these
shocking words they do not seek to impart information but to assert their power,
their refusal to surrender, their entrapment and consequent desire to taunt. The
language that they use is similar to that of the police themselves: Hablaban as,
eran mas sucios y mas despiadados para hablar que esos canas curtidos en inventar insultos que rebajaban a los presos hasta convertirlos en mun
ecos sin
forma (1678) [Thats how they spoke, filthier, more crude and brutal in their
11
The term was used by Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address (1961) to define the
relation of the U.S. military to the government and industry. The concept is one that would
have had resonance at the time of the robbery (1965), and it encapsulates the structural
aspects of the society that is made up of spaces such as prisons, hospitals, and police stations.

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speech than even the cops, for all their experience in inventing insults intended
to humiliate prisoners to the point where they became useless floppy puppets].
It is Renzi who notes the transformation of words into weapons. Given to
flights of poetic imagination, Renzi is the reporter who listens through literary
tropes, who narrativizes the acts of violence around him as elements in a mythic
story.12 He notices how words are transformed from their everyday uses into live
objects:
Los restos muertos de las palabras que las mujeres y los hombres usan
en el dormitorio y en los negocios y en los ban
os, porque la polica y
los malandras (pensaba Renzi) son los unicos que saben hacer de las
palabras objetos vivos, agujas que se entierran en la carne y te destruyen el alma como un huevo que se parte en el filo de la sarten.
(168)
[The dead ends of words that women and men use in the bedroom
and at work and in the toilets, because the police and the crook
(thought Renzi) are alone in knowing how to make words into living
objects, needles that bury themselves in your flesh and destroy your
soul like an egg breaking on the sharp edge of a frying pan.13
Used in the spaces of daily life (the bedroom, the workspace), words create
lines of communication between human beings. However, in the mouths of the
criminals, both legal and extralegal, these words are used not to communicate
quotidian facts, feelings, and needs, but to pierce through the membranes that
keep people individuated and protected from each other. Like needles, they find
their way in and through, breaking apart the living nucleus of the soul. They are
not the living words used in common, shared, quotidian situations, but rather
the dead leftovers from that life, used like zombies for nefarious purposes.
In keeping with Renzis understanding that the police and the criminals both
manipulate language as a sharp weapon, the same image of the needle is used
to describe the sound of Silvas voice. Taunted by the men who anonymously call
out challenges through the intercom, Silva responds with a voice that carries the
history of menace and brutality that has shaped the penal system:
Basta de joda, che, quien es que habla ah. Soy Silvadice Silva, tranquilo, con su voz turbia, de criollo, una voz gastada por el alcohol,
por el tabaco fumado en medio de los interrogatorios, tratando de
ablandar a un chorrito, a una puta, a un pobre quinielero [ . . . ] una
voz hiriente, como quien quiere hundir una aguja en el odo de un
zombie que se niega a decir lo que uno quiere que diga. (167)
12
See Masiellos reading of Renzi as a figure that gains a voice of his own in the novel, and
has the courage to assert his version over that of the police. In my view, Renzi in this novel
seeks to fictionalize and narrate the events according to his desires to write a cronica, to
mythologize the criminals as heroes in a tragedy, and to insist on his somewhat nave leftist
take on society.
13
Hopkinson, 153, my translation at the end.

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[Enough fucking about, Che, whos that speaking there. Its me,
Silva, says Silva, calm, in his Creole accent, in a voice clouded and
wasted with alcohol and the cigarettes smoked during interrogations,
attempting to soften up a swindler, a whore, or some poor lottery
fixer. . . . that piercing voice, like someone who wants to stick a pin
into the ear of a zombie who refuses to say what one wants him to
say.]
Though Silva does not know exactly to whom he speaks, he speaks with his usual
tone of voice. He is accustomed to not treating people as individuals, but rather
as sources of information. They are types: chorritos, putas, quinieleros, and his voice
cuts through them.
Of more interest than Silvas motives in this tired and derogatory hailing of
the criminals are the effects that his words have on the person he addresses.
Sinking a pin into the others ear, Silva pins down the listener as a zombie,
a victim of interrogation. Silvas che has resonances with Louis Althussers
discussion of the way ideology transforms individuals into subjects through an
act of interpellation, which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police . . . hailing: Hey, you there! (174). The person
hailed will, according to Althusser, recognize that it is he being hailed and turn
round, becoming, in that instant, a subject. That recognition is a strange phenomenon, and one which cannot be explained solely by guilt feelings, despite
the large numbers who have something on their consciences (174). In this
model, the policeman is a metaphor for ideology, and a sequential model for
something that does not have such a temporality, but rather has always already
occurred, namely, the ideological interpellation of individuals as subjects. Althusser strangely puts quotation marks around the question of guilt or guilty
consciences, insisting that the response to a hail does not just come from having
a prior guilty conscience. However, we could say, following from his rejection of
the temporality of his theoretical theatre, that the individual is interpellated
as guilty, made guilty in that moment of hailing. Thus the hail of the policeman
creates a guilty subject.
I counterpoise Althussers example to Plata quemada because in that novel,
both the police and the criminals are interpellated by the hey yous that they
have always already hurled at each other. There is no stepping out of this relation
of power, no way to not be hailed. This is the way ideological state apparatuses
work. As Althusser says, nine times out of ten the individual turns round. But
what of the one in his story who does not? Hailed but not interpellated, the
individual may hear the call but not feel the need to respond. This does not take
him out of ideology, but it does, in the temporal structure of Althussers story,
render the possibility of a pause, a moment when the hail is not met, when
something is heard and nothing is done. The zombie does not say what one
wants him to say, but also does not hear what one wants him to hear. He is not
interpellated as a subject yet because he does not respond. Instead, he remains
an individual, an object who has not entered into communication, who has not
heard the message and been transformed by it.
The next section examines the characters in the novel who do respond to a

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hail in a personal way, with the burden of their guilty consciences. Feeling that
they must respond, they cannot hear the ways that they are being interpellated,
the way that they are part of an ideology that they cannot comprehend, only
inhabit. I will conclude with a last section that poses, through one of the characters, the possibility of that one time out of ten that an individual does not feel
interpellated, does not respond with his guilt. He can hear the hail and just listen
to it and its reverberations. In that moment of non-action, of non-response, what
is heard? The possibility of the creation of the subject will be found not through
an interpellation, but through a Badiouvian event.

Intimate Music
In her article on Plata quemada, Michelle Clayton argues that the many misreadings that the different voices in the text enact are motivated: The author (the
narrator) is of course not simply interested in the coexistence of divergent versions, but in the motives which prompt their articulation, in the circulation of
stories and versions in social spaces as objects of exchange (47). The motivation, I would argue, lies in a sense of feeling interpellated. An event occurs, a
word is said, and the listener or the observer feels that it is directed at him or
her, and responds with an interpretation, a reaction, a narrativization, an action.
This gives the listener agency. This agency can, however, be the result of a mistaken listening, one that engages in a grandiose sense of being talked to, of
needing to respond, and of feeling that ones reaction matters. In such a narcissistic response, nuance, contradiction, and attuned listening are lost and contexts are flattened. The words and sounds that the characters are hearing are
taken personally instead of being understood as the words produced by a violence that negates dialogue.
Silva uses his words, along with torture, to get the victim to speak against his
or her will. Silva does not seek evidence or investigate details, but rather seeks to
elicit the words upon which he will base his case: no investiga, sencillamente
tortura y usa la delacion como metodo (60) [he doesnt investigate; he simply
tortures and uses denunciation as his method]. In pushing his victim until he
begins to sing (this expression is used in the book) his denunciation, Silva
gathers evidence that should not be taken as legitimate because of the method
of extorting it. The words said under torture express the moment rather than
conveying information. They do not impart information; they express pain. The
song produced is one that is highly discordant, not reliable as a discursive
vehicle of information, but very effective as an expression of both violence and
the pain that it occasions. Silvas motives in listening to this song are obvioushe
seeks to make cases, control criminality, assert his authoritybut he is mistaken
if he takes that song literally as a dialogue in which specific information is imparted.
Perhaps the most literal example of mistaken or tragic listening in the novel is
that of the Gaucho Dorda, a psychotic criminal who has been hearing voices in
his head since he was a child. These voices urge him to violence, and he spends
his time trying to silence them through acts of violence or taking drugs, or he

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listens to them, sitting quietly and not talking. As the psychiatrist Bunge says
about him:
Oa voces, entonces (segun Bunge), el Gaucho Rubio. No siempre, a
veces, oa voces, adentro del cerebro, entre las placas del craneo.
Mujeres que le hablaban, le daban ordenes. Ese era su secreto y hubo
que hacerle varios tests y varias consultas con hipnosis para que fueran apareciendo los contenidos de esa musica ntima. (63)
[He heard voices, the Blonde Gaucho. Not all the time, but from time
to time, he heard voices, inside his head, between the plates of his
skull. Women addressing him, issuing commands. That was his secret
and Dr. Bunge determined it was necessary to give him various tests
and various sessions of hypnotherapy so that the themes of this intimate music could be drawn out.] (54)
Like the intimate music that is produced during torture, the voices that the
Gaucho hears are not reliable sources of information but rather expressions of
violence. Piglia describes them in the language of electricity, as a short-wave
radio, (57), a frequency (64) the energy exchange (69) or una cosa electrica que hace cric, cric adentro del mate y no te deja dormir (69) [an electric
buzz you can hear going cric, cric inside your brains, that doesnt let you get to
sleep (58)]. Described this way by a character who has had his brain emptied
by electric shocks (203), the voices come from outside of him, imposed by the
electricity that shapes the activity of his brain. Thus, like the words produced by
electrical torture, they are words that matter for their form rather than their
content. Sometimes they actually say something, but other times they are strange
noises, a murmur in a foreign language, a constant noise (57) that signifies the
loss of control that Dorda experiences over what he can hear, over what constitutes the inside and the outside of him.
At the end of the novel, Piglia engages in a depiction of Dordas childhood
and the disapproving and alienating voice of his mother, who reacted against his
strange and violent behaviors and always told him he would come to a bad end.
Though the connections are not made explicit, Piglia seems to be drawing a
parallel between the mothers voice and the female voices that Dorda hears. The
resonance of the mothers comments in the text points to a reading that would
trace out the environmental causes of his ostracization and criminality as opposed to giving it a more chemical or biological interpretation. The echoing
voice has great impact on making him who he is. Which comes first, his cruelty
or her horror? Since childhood, he has heard the voice of his mother and the
voices of the women, and they have made him a criminal, the mother through
her labeling of him, and the voices through their consejos, porqueras, and
ordenes contradictorios (204) [advice, obscenities, and contradictory orders].
Both the mother and the voices lo maldecan [cursed him], and a curse is a
speech act, with the illocutionary force of an expectation, a demand. There is a
cause and effect here, with Dorda becoming what his mother has expected, or
doing what the voices tell him to do: Los que matan por matar es porque escu-

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chan voces, oyen hablar a la gente, estan comunicados con la central, con la voz
de los muertos, de los ausentes, de las mujeres perdidas (69) [Those who kill
for killings sake do it because they hear voices, they hear people talking, theyre
in contact with the energy exchange, with the voice of the dead, with lost women
(58)]. The voices come from the dead (Dordas mother is always prefaced with
the adjective finada [deceased]) and evoke murder, either of others or a selfdestruction. Later in the book we find that Dordas first murder is of a prostitute
because he hears her voice urging him to kill her. The energy exchange is a
place where sound and death meet, where voices can communicate and push
the listener to more death. The description above may come from the psychiatrist Bunge, or from the narrator (it is unclear in the novel), but it has spiritualist
overtones that have to do with the transfer of energies, with the possibility of
communication across the boundaries of life and death. The novel does not
reside in that sphere, however. Rather, it seeks to demonstrate how voices have
life-and-death effects, even if they do not carry explicit messages, even if they
are just remembered or imagined or even anticipated. Thus, in a more literal
murderous response to the possibility of a voice sounding, Silva thinks haba
que matarlos para que no hablaran (177) [they had to be killed so they would
not speak].
There is a mistake here. The sound of voices is being acted upon in a personal
manner. Both Silva and Dorda seem to think that they are in dialogue with the
voices, and that they are expected to respond. Silva thinks that he needs to protect himself or his police force by silencing the criminals, since he fears what
they could say if they did speak. Dorda thinks the female voices are speaking to
him, and giving him orders that he needs to follow, and thus he kills. Yet both
sets of voices give voice to something more generalized, less individual, which
has to do with the rage of injustice, cruelty, ostracization, and fear. An attuned
listening on the part of the characters and, indeed, on the part of the reader,
would put aside these reactive and defensive modes of response and allow for an
understanding of these words as parts of an attempt to render very particular
experiences and histories.
The import of this claim is made most explicit in the eponymous climactic
scene of the criminals burning the money that they have stolen and throwing it
out of the window so that the police and the spectators see what is happening.
This gestureand the subsequent reactionfunctions, in my reading, as a metaphor for the misfires in verbal communication that take place throughout the
novel. Though some of the bystanders have been ambivalent or even sympathetic
to the outlaws up until this point, the burning of the money changes their views.
Indignados, los ciudadanos que observaban la escena daban gritos de horror y
de odio (172). That they feel horror at the destruction of so much money
seems comprehensible, but to feel indignation and hate is to respond to
the situation in a highly singularized fashion. The sense of indignation arises
from the idea that this is a total war, an affront to society (173), and the next
sentences are quotations of horrific murderous intentions of the bystanders as
they realize this, (although ironically the net result of destroying paper currency
is to effect a proportional increase in the exchange value of all the other paper
bills chasing a fixed amount of gold or real wealth within a circumscribed

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economy). They find it easier to identify with society and its symbolic manifestations than with the criminals who show paper bills to be just that, paper, which
is only linked to value because of the society that ascribes it.
Trapped in the building and excluded from circulation, the moneys value is
that of a hostage, not of currency. The outlaws taunt the police and the spectators with their action, signaling their understanding of both its power and its
uselessness. As they burn it, they comment on how long it would take a police
officer to earn that much. Thus they comment on the ways that society is at fault
in creating this antagonism between those who are within the law and those
outside of it, those who work for a small amount of money or steal a large
amount. Money, clearly, is what caused the friction in the first place. As Peters
says, Marxist thought serves as a salutary reminder that failures of communication often owe less to semantic mismatches than to unjust allocations of symbolic
and material resources (125). The failure of communication that takes place
here is for the observers to take this as an affront against themselves, instead of
a statement about the culture under which they too suffer. They are interpellated
so that they believe the system works for them. As Althusser states, If [an individual] believes in Justice, he will submit unconditionally to the rules of the Law,
and may even protest when they are violated (Althusser 167).
The burning of the money is not a defiant gesture made to incite any particular bystander to hatred. It is, rather, a broad stroke that disseminates the trapped
mens sense of defeat, imprisonment, despair, inequality, ostracization, and injustice. However, the crowd takes it personally and feels great outrage and hatred. By the end of the novel, when Dorda is removed from the building as
the sole survivor, the crowd is animated by an aggrieved and intense feeling of
vengeance that surges through it like an electrical current: El deseo de venganza [ . . . ]corra con velocidad electrica por entre la muchedumbre (219)
[The desire for revenge ran through the crowd with the speed of electricity].
The speed is electric but so is the transmission of the same affect to a large group
of people. There is little thought given to the feeling; like a body that reacts
immediately to electric shock, they are triggered into a primitive self-serving response by the sight of Dordas injured body. Electrified, they act almost automatically and rush to beat him and yell at him. He stands as a scapegoat for all their
anger, as a synecdoche of the violence and criminality to which they have been
exposed and which they have seen as an attack against them.
The crowd does not think to be angry with the police who initiated the siege
and forced the residents to leave their building. Could they not have caught the
criminals in a less spectacular and confrontational way? Were they not aware of
the amount of weaponry the outlaws had? Why do they choose to understand
the events in the way that they do? The only character who questions Silvas
actions is Renzi, the journalist whose leftist literary tendencies make him interpret events in a romanticized literary light that skews his understanding. On the
failures of communication in this novel, Ingrid Waisgluss states, As the testimonies in Piglias novel suggest, if the right wing citizen helps the police state
through fear and denial, the left winger revises, elevating the common criminal
to a martyred apotheosis. Their commonality is none other than their utter failure to treat the other intrinsically (6). If it were possible for the bystanders and

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police and criminals to listen, on both a literal and metaphorical level, without
preconception, without ego, they would experience a more intimate feeling of
the horror of the violence taking place, and be humbled by it into knowing that
they could not easily pin the fault on any particular individual, that the violence
was bigger than all of them. In portraying the bystanders vicious and selfish
reactions, Piglia shows how they are trapped by the ideological discourses that
shape them, and simultaneously offers the possibility for his reader of a different
kind of listening, one that can hear the different sides and contextualize both
the actions and reactions.

Sound versus Meaning

In the novel, we are given three-fold access to the words that the criminals say
while trapped in the apartment: the exchanges that take place over the intercom
system, the voiceover of the sometimes omniscient narrator, and the words that
are picked up by the wiretap installed in the apartment. I have characterized
some of the conversations that take place between Silva and the outlaws as
belligerent and antagonistic, using words to hurt each other and assert their
power. The information that the criminals impart about themselves with these
intercom exchanges conveys power, defiance, and bravado. Yet the exchanges
do not help the spectators or the reader to know what is transpiring inside the
apartment. The narrator gives different points of view, so that in one paragraph
he will stress that no one knows what the Argentines are doing or thinking, and
in the next he will either state what is happening in the apartment or even
reproduce a stream-of-consciousness internal monologue of one of the criminals. This is the stuff of literature, where the narrator is allowed a privileged
space of interiority that he will present to the reader at certain moments to drive
the plot forward, and Piglia plays this narrative voice adeptly against the other
voices that he permits to jostle in order to interpret the events. The sounds
overheard thanks to the wiretap provide another version, one that is both internal and external, partially privy to what is happening in the apartment if the
sounds can be distinguished. The omniscient narrator intervenes obtrusively in
this listening, so that when the surveillance operator, Roque Perez, names the
voices One and Two, the narrator clarifies by stating in parentheses that One is
Dorda (164). My reading of Roque Perezs listening attends to these narratorial
intrusions, differentiating them from what the operator hears because they enact
different projects. The narrator seeks to narrate, to interpret events, whereas the
operator seeks to listen to the forms. In fact, Roque Perez, with the same initials
as Ricardo Piglia, can be seen as an authorial surrogate, embodying a form of
listening without narration towards which Piglia has gestured in his previous
writing. Think, for example, of the way in which form overshadows content in
La ciudad ausente, a novel that is filled with many stories, many narrations, that
act as nudos blancos [white nodes] in the texts metanarrative preoccupation with
storytelling, memory, and loss. In Plata quemada, the figure of Roque Perez, confined to a cell that renders him acutely sensitive to sounds, serves to emphasize
the auditory as a tool of perception. In our predominantly visual culture, where

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to pay attention is described as focusing, looking, and seeing the big picture, sound can function as a non-normalized way to alert us to perceiving not
only what is being told but to how it is told.
The image of the sound operator, hidden in a small cell with his earphones
on, adjusting his dials in order to differentiate the sounds coming from the
apartment from the sounds in the entire building and even in the surrounding
area, is particularly compelling. In his epilogue, where Piglia reiterates the historical accuracy of this case and the documents he used to compile his evidence,
he mentions access to the transcripts of the sound recordings. I wish that Piglia,
in his invention of sources and names, had claimed that he had listened to the
recordings instead of reading them. To imagine him immersed in the tones, the
intonations, the cacophony and the stillness, is in keeping with the novel, which
portrays those nuances in such an experiential evocative way. Piglia is of course
documenting the audible, with all the challenges it entails, and thus he does not
refer to the primary text, that of the recordings, but to their transcription. Sound
in writing, the movement from sound to writing: these are the concerns of a
novel that hearkens to a whole gamut of gunshots, screams, imprecations,
groans, tunes, buzzes, and cracklings.
In Plata quemada, the wiretapper, Roque Perez, plays a passive role, that of a
subject without an ego. Though one would expect him to have the disciplinary
power of surveillance, Piglia situates him in a sensory-deprived cell of his own,
prisoner to the sounds that come through his earphones. Like the other policemen, he does not have power over the situation or the criminals, but is bound
in a one-sided relationship with them. Unlike Silva or Bunge, he does not seek
to find meaning in the behavior and words of the criminals. Though he knows
that the police seek to gain certain information from his listening, he himself
seems to be less motivated by any desire to find out what they are doing. He is
immersed in the sounds of the building, the street, the radio, and the apartment,
and they wash over him. He distinguishes the different sounds but does not
invest them with meaning. His is a receptive listening. It hears sounds in context;
it does not prioritize particular sounds over others. In hearing the different
sounds, Roque Perez does not engage in dialogue. He knows that he is not being
spoken to, and that he is not expected to respond. Thus, like a psychoanalyst, he
listens for the symptom instead of the conscious protestation, attending less to
what is said than to how it is said.
Roque Perezs job is to identify the voices and be able to differentiate them.
He does not know why the microphones have been installed in the apartment
(according to the narrator, they may have been for a previous surveillance of the
drug dealers who used the apartment, or they may have been installed once it
was known that the Argentines were using it as a hideout), and he does not know
how many people he is listening to and what it is that he is listening for. He is
given to understand that se espera (segun le ha dicho Silva) que alguno afloje
(164) [it is hoped, according to what Silva has told him, that one of them will
soften]. This is not the hope of Roque Perez (as is mistakenly translated in the
edition by Amanda Hopkinson), but rather the hope of the police. Roque Perez
just concentrates on the sound: no quera captar el sentido, sino el sonido, la
diferencia de las voces, los tonos, la respiracion, para identificar a cada uno

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(165) [he did not want to capture the meaning, but rather the sound, the difference of voices, the tones, the breathing, so as to identify each one]. Thus he
listens for form, context, and tone rather than content, and in that kind of open
listening, a different kind of understanding is forged. Perhaps if Silva came in
and took the earphones from him, the wiretap would seem much more intrusive
and active, but Roque Perezs mode of listening is one that tunes into the sounds
of sadness, despair, sweetness, and melancholy that are just as much part of the
whole siege as are the louder ones of gunshots, threats, and obscenities.
Francine Masiello engages in an insightful analysis of the ways in which fiction,
drugs, and money all function as signs that interfere with direct experience
(201). Her reading of the above passage deduces an opposite message from
mine: Form overrides content and style displaces meaning, but more importantly, Roque Perez attempts to reassign materiality to voice despite the states
mandate against it (200). Asked by the police to identify the voices and the
number of men in the apartment, the materiality that Roque Perez assigns is,
in my view, precisely the states mandate, not his assertion against it. Whereas
Masiello reads his listening to the form as a failurewe are left with virtual
form without access to the possibility of meaning (200)I believe that an attention to the form, to the sound devoid of meaning, allows him to experience
without an immediate desire to narrate, ascribe meaning, decipher, and interpret.
Roque Perez runs through many different registers and thoughts while he sits
in his cell. His listening is passive, but he is deeply affected by what he hears. At
different moments through that long and solitary night, he is aware of himself
and his own trains of thought and feeling. He thinks of himself as a spy, he
imagines being caught by the criminals, he wonders if a womans praying comes
from the building or from his own memory. These are ephemeral thoughts,
provoked by the strongly affective resonances of the sounds that he hears.
El universo de Roque Perez se haba vuelto mas estrecho todava; no
se hallaba contenido en el diminuto espacio del altillo desde donde
manipulaba los controles, sino que estaba limitado al casi intangible
sonido que llegaba del esqueleto del edificio. Se producan ciertas
interferencias y estaba entonces conectado con el espritu de toda la
ciudad. (187)
Roque Perezs universe was growing narrower all the time; there was
no space left in the diminutive control room where he was in charge
of maneuvers: he was constrained to follow the almost inaudible
sounds emanating from the skeleton of the building. They generated
a level of interference and were therefore connected with the spirit
of an entire city. (171)
Enclosed in a small space, his universe is contained, yet through that intense
listening he is connected to a much larger context, one that is not even bound
geographically, but also encompasses different temporalities. The deprivation of
the sense of sight has heightened his sense of hearing so much that he enters

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another plane and hears the voices of the dead, coming from the past (188),
and I add, from the future, since the criminals are characterized by Silva as
cadaveres vivos (179) [the living dead].
This contraction and expansion of experience that Roque Perez experiences
is one that is produced by the confusion of sounds, by the interferences and
inundations (162) of different signals all jumbling together in his earphones.
It is una enloquecida y torturada multitud de gemidos e insultos con los que la
imaginacion de Roque Perez (el radiotelegrafista) jugaba y se perda (163) [a
crazed and tortured multitude of groans and insults with which the imagination
of Roque Perez (the wireless operator) played and would lose itself]. His imagination is engaged and it plays with the different possibilities of what the sounds
could be, but it cannot hold to one meaning. It is, after all, his imagination that
listens, not his interpretive faculties. He is immersed in the experience of those
sounds and does not have the ability (or perhaps the desire) to distance himself
enough to not get lost in it.
In juxtaposition to this kind of non-interpretive listening, the narrator superimposes a literary comparison on Roque Perezs experience of what he hears. In
a paragraph written in the third person, Dante is referenced: gritos de las animas perdidas en las angustias del [ . . . ] Infierno de Dante (1623) [screams
of the souls lost in the agonies of . . . Dantes Inferno]. This allusion to Dante
does not come from the imagination of Roque Perez, but from the narrator
who seeks, Renzi-like, to transform the events into literature. This paragraph
demonstrates the ways that an attuned listening can be transformed into a narrativizing and self-protective hearing. The likening of an experience to a literary
referent robs the experience of its immediacy and bestows the listener with a
distanced, cultured, and static interpretive model.
If a listening is committed to the singularity of the situation, there is no room
for likening, for an interpretation that folds a moment into a previous one
that is similar. The situation is, to return to Badiou, an event, and ethics dictates
our fidelity to its call. Badiou argues that there are only four conditions that
constitute an event: mathematics, politics, art, and love. In engaging with this
book as a work of art that constitutes us as listening readers, we are already
committed to the event. But to understand the demand placed upon us we need
to look at the one diegetic moment of love in Plata quemada.14 This takes place
as the Nene [Kid] dies in the Gaucho Dordas arms. The Nene has been the only
person that has ever understood Dorda and the ways that the voices in his head
make it difficult for him to express himself. With the Nene, Dorda has felt safe.
The novel provides little conversation between the two, but rather snippets of
monologue superimposed on each other so that they seem like a dialogue. But
in this last moment, described by the omniscient narrator, the two communicate:
el Nene le dijo algo al odo que nadie pudo or, una frase de amor, seguramente, dicha a medias o no dicha tal vez pero sentida por el Gaucho que lo beso
14
In deliberately using the terminology of film (diegesis), I am invoking the idea of sound
as content. The love event in question is not an extra-diegetic one which is outside of the
narrative per se (examples would include Piglias love for his characters or our love for the
book), but rather one that is found (heard) directly in the novel.

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mientras el Nene se iba (197) [The Kid murmured something into his ear
which no one could hear, some words of love, no doubt, uttered under his breath
or perhaps left unuttered, but sensed by the Gaucho who kissed the Kid as he
departed (181)]. The narrator describes this exchange as a tableaux that can be
watched and almost heard, though the reader knows that no one else is in the
room and that Roque Perez would not have picked this up on his wire. It is not
clear what, if anything, is said, and what is heard. But Dorda is listening, and
even if nothing is said, even if no content is divulged, he senses the form and
kisses the Nene goodbye. As Martin Heidegger would have it: Of course our
hearing organs are in a certain regard necessary, but they are never the sufficient
condition for our hearing, that hearing which accords and affords us whatever
there really is to hear (47). This moment when words may or may not be spoken, where communication would seem to be broken, is an event that constitutes
the subjectivity of the characters, gives them the particularity of their histories.
It could be seen as the goal of psychoanalysis, which, as Ramiro Armas Austria
describes it, is to cease to love the Other and begin to love another.15 The fight
for power, money, authority, for what in Lacanian terms is the Name-of-theFather, the big O Other, that has shaped the encounters between the characters in the novel, ends at this moment. No longer interpellated by the hey you,
the characters love one another and are constituted as the subjects of their own
history.
In this analysis of Plata quemada I have proposed a model of attuned listening
as a way to approach the text. This listening does not close itself off through
guilt, defensiveness, emotionality, or narcissism, but rather accords and affords
us whatever there really is to hear, attending to the form of the text rather than
interpreting its content. By attuning our reading to the complex and intimate
music that makes up a novel, we can begin to understand the ways that form
renders intelligible complex social formations and subject positions.
works

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In a private conversation, March 2009.

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