Re-extracción de la piedra de locura: análisis de los dibujos de Alejandra Pizarnik

Abstract

The literary critiques on the work of Argentinean writer Alejandra Pizarnik have focused exclusively on her literature without restricting themselves to the texts published in her life --poetry in verse and prose--, but rather all of her writing: letters, diaries, literary critics, and posthumous texts. In general, the image that is commonly adjudicated to her is that of the poet who writes brief and obscure verses, whose fragility ends in suicide, which is seen as the ultimate act of her accursedness, since her work is mostly read within the literary tradition of the poètes maudits. The literary critiques of her work have recognized a certain influence of the fine arts in her writing --specifically when designing the spatial arrangement where the poem is created, due to the ekphrastic features of certain poems, and the manner of working with the poem as if it were a painting. However, her visual production has not received attention as an art object in itself. It has been unattended to due to the ossification of the tautological figure of the poet identical to her poetry (Pizarnik = poems). Different from this perspective, in this current work I present a first reading of Pizarnik's drawings, arguing that it is necessary to understand them within the continuum of Pizarnik's poetic work given that the drawings amplify and open the fixed image held of the poet.