Fiona J. Mackintosh
University of Edinburgh
Thanks
to the generous award of a Friends of Princeton Library Research Grant (in
conjunction with a Small Project Grant from the British Academy 44th
Congress of Americanists fund), I undertook a 4-week research visit in August
2005 to the Firestone Library to look at the papers of the Argentinian poet
Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972). One of the strengths of the Special Collections
at Princeton is their impressively wide-ranging collection of literary
manuscripts and correspondence of major figures in Latin American
twentieth-century literature; the Pizarnik papers at Princeton permit a
comprehensive overview of Pizarnik’s total output, encompassing poetry, prose,
critical works, notebooks, diaries and correspondence. Other material relating
to Pizarnik is to be found in the papers of Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Manuel
Mujica Láinez and Alberto Girri, which are also housed in the Princeton
collections, making this a unique resource for seeing Pizarnik’s material in a
broad context.
Pizarnik’s
work has most frequently been analysed in terms of a few key thematic
obsessions – silence, the night, death, childhood – or biographically through
her lesbian orientation, her počte maudit image and her suicide. Such
readings need to be put into perspective by taking into account an extremely
important aspect of Pizarnik’s work, namely the tremendous impact on her entire
output of her meticulous reading of other literature; in the Princeton
collection are several notebooks which she labelled her palais du
vocabulaire, in which Pizarnik carefully recorded significant phrases from
other writers’ work which will subsequently feed directly into her own creative
and imaginative processes. The aim of this project, therefore, was
systematically to analyse the ‘palais du vocabulaire’ and the ‘diarios de
lecturas’ in parallel with her diaries and letters, mapping her sources, and
thereby allowing for a new contextualization of Pizarnik within a modernist
aesthetic of fragment, intertextual borrowing and citation.
In
the context of my earlier research on Pizarnik, which looked at her deliberate
intertextual reference to other writers (such as Lewis Carroll), this research
at Princeton has enabled me to go into far greater depth, getting a mucher
fuller idea of the range of Pizarnik’s reading and of her determined
autodidacticism with regard to both literature and language. I have been
surprised by her range of reference; her closeness to French poetry and
surrealism, for example, is well-documented, but looking through the Princeton
material, her dedication to reading Góngora as well as Genet, and anonymous
Aztec songs alongside Artaud sheds new light on certain of her recurrent tropes
and images. It also becomes evident that Pizarnik’s compilation of the palais
du vocabulaire not only feeds directly into her poetic creations, but also
contributes significantly to her self-writing through the parallel worlds of
correspondence and diaries.
Amongst
the gems at Princeton are many unpublished manuscripts of prose poems, groups
of recitas (along the lines of the French récit) and chants.
Pizarnik’s published prose works, some quite violent and obscene in their
language, are often dismissed or ignored by critics who prefer the tiny,
polished more lyrical earlier works. Seeing the extent of Pizarnik’s
experimentation in prose and the amount of critical reflection she devotes to
the possibilities of writing prose calls for a serious critical re-evaluation
of what constitutes her oeuvre. The Jewish element of Pizarnik’s biography also
comes more to the fore in this material, as does her linguistic playfulness and
love of humour – the latter displayed in one notebook which contains over 70
titles of ‘Instrucciones para …’, the work of a true Cortazarian cronopio.
My
article on the palais du vocabulaire resulting from this research is
intended to form part of a collection of essays on Alejandra Pizarnik, offering
a reassessment of the Obra ‘completa’, a de-mythologization of Pizarnik
(emphasizing her literary context and her important work as a literary critic)
and a more systematic stylistic analysis of her work, in particular the many
complex facets of her humour.
Receiving
this Grant from the Friends of Princeton Library has been invaluable to my
research, and I am extremely grateful for this opportunity.
24 August 2005
libraryf@princeton.edu
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