El ajedrez en la literatura argentina. Borges, Walsh, Piglia.

This dissertation studies chess as a device in the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Rodolfo Walsh, and Ricardo Piglia. In Borges, the device underlines the influence of Ramón Lull’s combinatory logic and Xul Solar’s “Panajedrez” (1930) in El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (1941). The device also emphasizes the dialogue the collection of short stories establishes with Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and the book’s dynamic structure as a totality before integrating Ficciones (1944). In Walsh, the device elucidates both his work with the ellipsis and Chess Theory as a conceptual framework in “Zugzwang” (1957) and “Trasposición de jugadas” (1961). Exploring these two short stories within this framework brings to the surface a subtle political commentary rarely associated with Walsh’s fiction. In Piglia, chess as a device allows the reader to delve into Respiración artificial’s (1980) complex hypertextuality, its condensation of key dates in Argentina’s history, and the mechanisms operating as an homage to previous works. A second novel, La ciudad ausente (1992), advances a theory of narration by establishing parallels between storytelling, chess and the development of chess engines. In the five works studied, the game acts as a thread that enables the reader to identify common elements in the three author’s poetics. Yet, in each of them the device occupies different literary planes: in Borges, the intertextual and the aesthetic; in Walsh, the experiential and the political; in Piglia, the historical and the narratological.