SOURCE: Piglia, Ricardo. “Sarmiento the Writer.” In Sarmiento, Author of a Nation, pp. 127-44. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Piglia contends that Sarmiento played a key role in the development of Argentine literature and that his writing reflects changes in the burgeoning country.

To speak of Sarmiento the writer is to speak of the impossibility of being a writer in nineteenth-century Argentina. The first problem: one must visualize within this impossibility the state of a literature with no autonomy; politics invades everything, there is no space, functions are intermingled, one cannot be only an author. The second concern: that same impossibility has been the condition for writing an incomparable work. Sarmiento was able to write some of the best texts in Argentine literature because to be a writer was impossible. His greatest works (particularly Facundo) express within their forms this central paradox.

The euphoria...