Literary Talent and Money

Ricardo Piglia






Economy is the basic metaphor of the device: it defines, first and foremost, a relation between
literature and money. Joyce, for example, believed that his talent could be explained by his
tendency to waste: spending what he did not have, giving huge tips, borrowing and getting into
debts, and seeing how this prodigality with money as related to his literary talent.

The reverse could be Kafka: money is like a foreign and dangerous object. In a letter to Milena,
during January 1922, he told a story that could illuminate what is being said. In procrastination,
the scene concentrates on the narrative world of Kafka: 'Once, when I was little, I had acquired a
ten cent coin and very much wanted to give it to a beggar that used to sit between the two
squares. Well now, it seems to me a huge amount of money, a sum that probably no beggar has
ever received, and therefore I am ashamed to have done something so extravagant in front of
the beggar. But nevertheless I had to give the money: change the coin, give one cent to the old
woman, and then go round the block of the municipality and the arcade, returning to appear as a
new benefactor from the left, returning to give another cent to the beggar, then run around and
repeat the same action ten times. (Or maybe less, because I believe that at certain moment the
beggar has lost her patience and disappear.)' As always with Kafka, everything is displaced: the
generosity is a requirement, unavoidable, one must try to hide it, even though it is futile.

Waste, alm, loans, credits, all these terms could be highly productive metaphors of modes of
reading. Rather than an interpretation, it is a system of appropriation that defined such uses -
the property is displaced. E. M. Forster, in Aspect of Novel, imagined all the novelists from
different eras writing at same time on a table in a library with the entire literature at his
disposal. An idea that, surely, is the opposite of linearity and hierarchy; any past element could
be used as new. The image of Forster is the representation of a concrete space where
instruments, experiments, and preparations coexist. It is Joyce working in his room with rough
papers and books, in bed with a magnifying glass and the entire literature in front of him. The
literary tradition is a field of associations as visible as the streets of Dublin. Or rather, a physical
space as visible as the paths of the city. See how Joyce realised all the literary styles in English
lanaguge in the chapter on the clinic in Ulysses: regardless of the era, totally out of context, or
rather, within the context of his current usage.
Translated by Justin Loke (2013)
From El Ultimo Lector p. 167