“alone and in dialogue”, appears to be the objective that, should she achieve it, would at last allow her to extract that insane “I” stone that seems to have plunged her, as Alain Badiou v says about Hölderlin, “into metaphorical unicity.” A type of solipsism that, according to the philosopher, is only overcome for the first time in the twentieth century with the poetry of Celan, where a true leap into the void finally leads from “I” to ‘you’. Badiou declares that this leap is an event that coexists with May ’68, together with other privileged events such as the Lacanian theory of love and the episodes in Poland.
“alone and in dialogue”, appears to be the objective that, should she achieve it, would at last allow her to extract that insane “I” stone that seems to have plunged her, as Alain Badiou v says about Hölderlin, “into metaphorical unicity.” A type of solipsism that, according to the philosopher, is only overcome for the first time in the twentieth century with the poetry of Celan, where a true leap into the void finally leads from “I” to ‘you’. Badiou declares that this leap is an event that coexists with May ’68, together with other privileged events such as the Lacanian theory of love and the episodes in Poland.
And Pizarnik, that same year, also seems to be searching for a way to make the leap. Although her writing had, from the beginning, developed under the invocation of the Rimbaudian “I is another”, that other is still too closely linked to “I”, another of oneself, as if the Siamese mirror of textuality precluded separation. Therefore her objective is now voices, preferably “in dialogue”, she says. But she had already told us that oral poetry repelled her, so we cannot easily identify that need to write voices with a mere attempt to include orality in writing. On the other hand, if we follow her reading itinerary during ’68, as it is recorded in her diary, we might find some other clues about the attributes of those voices. She states that she is reading García Márquez and Rulfo because they have an “accent” and that fascinates her. “I believe that my anguish about the way I write is because of my accent. Accent and the exact word are divorced in me (...) While I like Rulfo’s fluid accent, I am also attracted to hieratic, ceremonial language. If I aspire to preciseness in a text I have to kill its accent.”
And Pizarnik, that same year, also seems to be searching for a way to make the leap. Although her writing had, from the beginning, developed under the invocation of the Rimbaudian “I is another”, that other is still too closely linked to “I”, another of oneself, as if the Siamese mirror of textuality precluded separation. Therefore her objective is now voices, preferably “in dialogue”, she says. But she had already told us that oral poetry repelled her, so we cannot easily identify that need to write voices with a mere attempt to include orality in writing. On the other hand, if we follow her reading itinerary during ’68, as it is recorded in her diary, we might find some other clues about the attributes of those voices. She states that she is reading García Márquez and Rulfo because they have an “accent” and that fascinates her. “I believe that my anguish about the way I write is because of my accent. Accent and the exact word are divorced in me (...) While I like Rulfo’s fluid accent, I am also attracted to hieratic, ceremonial language. If I aspire to preciseness in a text I have to kill its accent.”
This unresolved problem of the mot juste, the literary, hieratic, ceremonial word, and on the other hand the desire for an accent she cannot achieve, leads her, in mid’68, to read Cortázar because “he can help me to free myself of my literary prisons.” She confesses to being totally absorbed in the reading of La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos, and remarks that whereas she finds “verbal magic” in the book, she also finds “evidence of imposture”. “Julio thinks that because he uses expressions like ‘che pibe’ (hey, kid) he automatically stops writing like a man of letters and writes as when we talk. I think he’s mistaken,” she says. . We had established that, towards the Sixties, one of Pizarnik’s main objectives was to no longer seem a “woman of letters”. However, she does not seem to believe that by automatically exchanging language for speech, the quality of writing will be modified. This is the reason she makes use of the term accent, and accent -from the Latin ad cantum- draws voice closer to song, and refers more to the material support of the voice than to the signifiers. “Regional accent is a norm that differs from the established norm; this makes it obstructive and causes it to sing. The established norm is an accent that has become regarded as a nonaccent,” declares the Slovenian philosopher Mladen Dolarvi. Pizarnik’s interest can thus be interpreted not as an attempt to bring dissonant accents closer to the legitimacy of a norm –as she believes would happen in Cortázar’s endeavor to assimilate the che pibe into “literary” language- but as an effort to make the language sing in its difference. On reading Hilda la polígrafa and Los Poseídos entre Lilas, both of which she calls “my corrosive prose”, it can be seen clearly that the search that is being carried out there is for an accent. “My idea is to write voices...but how many voices, and how should I identify them? I could name them, but
This unresolved problem of the mot juste, the literary, hieratic, ceremonial word, and on the other hand the desire for an accent she cannot achieve, leads her, in mid’68, to read Cortázar because “he can help me to free myself of my literary prisons.” She confesses to being totally absorbed in the reading of La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos, and remarks that whereas she finds “verbal magic” in the book, she also finds “evidence of imposture”. “Julio thinks that because he uses expressions like ‘che pibe’ (hey, kid) he automatically stops writing like a man of letters and writes as when we talk. I think he’s mistaken,” she says. . We had established that, towards the Sixties, one of Pizarnik’s main objectives was to no longer seem a “woman of letters”. However, she does not seem to believe that by automatically exchanging language for speech, the quality of writing will be modified. This is the reason she makes use of the term accent, and accent -from the Latin ad cantum- draws voice closer to song, and refers more to the material support of the voice than to the signifiers. “Regional accent is a norm that differs from the established norm; this makes it obstructive and causes it to sing. The established norm is an accent that has become regarded as a nonaccent,” declares the Slovenian philosopher Mladen Dolarvi. Pizarnik’s interest can thus be interpreted not as an attempt to bring dissonant accents closer to the legitimacy of a norm –as she believes would happen in Cortázar’s endeavor to assimilate the che pibe into “literary” language- but as an effort to make the language sing in its difference. On reading Hilda la polígrafa and Los Poseídos entre Lilas, both of which she calls “my corrosive prose”, it can be seen clearly that the search that is being carried out there is for an accent. “My idea is to write voices...but how many voices, and how should I identify them? I could name them, but
32
32