Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies

ISSN: 1356-9325 (Print) 1469-9575 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjla20

A private revolution? Alejandra Pizarnik's la

bucanera de pernambuco o hilda la polígrafa

Catherine Grant

To cite this article: Catherine Grant (1996) A private revolution? Alejandra Pizarnik's la
bucanera de pernambuco o hilda la polígrafa , Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 5:1,
65-82, DOI: 10.1080/13569329609361876

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569329609361876

Published online: 27 Feb 2009.

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 Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1996 65

A Private Revolution?1 Alejandra Pizarnik's La bucanera

de Pernambuco o Hilda la polígrafa

CATHERINE GRANT

In an article published in 1973 as a homage to her friend, the Argentine poet

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Alejandra Pizarnik who had taken a fatal dose of sleeping tablets the previous
year, the Uruguayan author Cristina Peri Rossi wrote:
Pizarnik lived enclosed in an inner world in which the experience of
others was never allowed to take over the leading role. Her poetry
remained distant from manifestations of collective feeling: we will
never find in any of her books a single allusion which might allow us
to mark her out as someone who inhabits a continent in turmoil,
struggling and fighting for a more just future. She never felt that
obligation and for this reason, she never experienced the pleasures
which participation in collective endeavours can bring. Although at
times revolutionary writers commit suicide—Mayakofsky, Arguedas—
of her we can say that she was a great poet who remained unaffected
by the collective experiences of the outside world. (Peri Rossi 1973: 588)
What is notable is that in this article in which Peri Rossi casts Pizarnik as one
of the greatest poetic talents ever to have emerged in Argentine literature, the
Uruguayan author, who the previous year had gone into exile in Spain to escape
political reprisals for her own left-wing activism, seems subtly to criticise her
friend for two main evasions of the 'real' world of writerly commitment: the
first, Pizarnik's hermetic, often solipsistic poetry and the second, interestingly,
her suicide. Peri Rossi's frustrations with Pizarnik, particularly the first, seem to
be emblematic of a good deal of criticism of Latin American literature. As
George Yudice writes, with reference to the work of Jose Maria Arguedas (also
mentioned by Peri Rossi),
In Latin America, few are the artists who are not judged in terms of the
social effectivity of their work. The 1960s and 1970s were rife with
recriminations shot back and forth between writers who associated art
in the service of social justice and those who held that formal innova-
tions were in and of themselves revolutionary. (Yudice 1992: 9)
This debate has resurfaced from time to time in the context of some feminist-
motivated criticism and commentary, in which some of the works of Latin
American women authors such as Pizarnik have been held aloft as examples of
'revolutionary' writing, not particularly on the grounds of 'political' subject
matter but largely, as we shall see, on the basis of concerns with avant-garde
aesthetics. In this paper, I intend first to explore these competing claims of 'real'
versus 'textual' dissidence as they have played themselves out so far in some
1356-9325/96/010065-18 © 1996 Journals Oxford Ltd
 66 C. Grant

criticism of the work of Alejandra Pizarnik. Then, I shall go on to outline what

I consider to be a more fruitful way in which feminist-influenced critics of Latin
American literature might investigate these concerns, based on the example of
some of Pizarnik's posthumously published texts (therefore, almost certainly
unknown to Peri Rossi in 1973) which were gathered under the humorous title
La bucanera de Pernambuco o Hilda la poligrafa (The Lady Buccaneer of Pernambuco,
or Hilda the Polygraph; Pizarnik 1982,1993: 291-364). This approach, while in no
way denying the intermeshing of literature and politics, argues—to use the
words of the critic, Rita Felski—for the 'necessity of moving beyond either a
polarization or a simple conflation of political and aesthetic spheres' (Felski 1989:
8).
According to Alejandra Pizarnik's biographer and foremost critic, the Argen-
tine writer, Cristina Pifia, Pizarnik's teenage 'rebellions' in Buenos Aires of the
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late 1940s and early 1950s were couched in the terms of a then fashionable
version of Sartrian existentialism (Pifia 1991: 27). Yet, when she became a serious
poet she opted for a form of writing of which Sartre would not have approved.
In his essay, Qu'est-ce que la litterature? (What is Literature?) published in 1948
when events such as the Holocaust remained a very recent memory, Sartre
expressed the view that 'modernist' or avant-garde poetry was, for the twenti-
eth-century intellectual, an evasion of responsibility, compared with 'responsible
writing', or narrative prose. Sartre, whose work was extremely influential in
Argentina during the 1950s, was supported in this opinion to a certain extent by
many Latin American writers and intellectuals, and in the Argentine context, by
those associated at that time with the journal Contorno, such as David Vifias, who
rooted similar thoughts very much in his own national context (see Sarlo 1983;
Masiello 1985; Katra 1988; and King 1986, 1993).
The work in the early 1970s of the French critic, Julia Kristeva, however,
attempted to reverse this view, foregrounding instead the revolutionary claims
of avant-garde poetry. According to critic Suzanne Guerlac, Kristeva

succeeds in substituting the taboo term 'poetry' ... for the Sartrian term
'prose' as the instrument of engagement. In other words, she rendered
revolutionary (again) that which Sartre attacked in the name of revol-
ution: aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) avant-gardism (Guerlac 1993: 253)

Kristeva's early work on avant-garde writing, which has been widely con-
tested as, to say the least, uncontextualized and idealist, has nonetheless been
influential in the last ten years within the field of criticism of Latin American
women's writing, and in particular, as we shall see, in feminist debates about
Alejandra Pizarnik's work.
In her 1974 book La Revolution du langage poetique (Revolution in Poetic
Language), Julia Kristeva developed a theory of the avant-garde which drew on
a wide range of theoretical traditions from linguistics and semiotics to Marxism,
phenomenology, psychoanalysis and Russian formalism. For Kristeva, because
avant-garde poetry disrupts language, often breaking linguistic and other laws
and releasing elements which are repressed during the infant's pre-linguistic
experience, it involves a transgression of the 'symbolic order'. This latter is the
name given by psychoanalytic critics to the structured system of linguistic
differences which constitutes all possible signification and through which, ac-
 Alejandro. Pizamik's 'La bucanera...' 67

cording to Lacanian theory, the individual subject is constituted. Kristeva argues

that a feminine element which she calls the 'semiotic' (which, again according to
Lacan, is always suppressed by entry into the patriarchal symbolic order during
the resolution of the infant's Oedipal complex) appears, or rather, irrupts in
avant-garde or modernist poetry in the guise of rhythm, musicality, the unexpec-
ted, the obscene and, effectively, any other element which disturbs or destroys
the symbolic order of the traditional poetic text. In this way, as John Lechte
writes, for Kristeva, a 'revolutionary' poetic language is able to
pluralize, pulverize and musicalize ... all static socio-symbolic fea-
tures—from the family and Catholicism to the naturalist text and the
punctual unitary subject. It challenges the order of these institutions
(their rules and syntax for example) as well as the institutions as such
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(Lechte 1990: 29).

Setting aside the many difficulties which might be suggested by this conflation
of a particular kind of poetic practice with such a broad range of other
'signifying systems', I shall turn now to describing the text on which I shall be
concentrating in this paper, and to outlining the use that has been made of
Kristeva's early work in some criticism of it. One of the reasons why Pizarnik
has been of some interest to feminist critics (apart from the fact that she is one
of the few women poets whose work appears to have been accepted into the elite
male club of poets with 'genius') has been that, grounded as her work is in
various genres of avant-garde writing, it seems to have provided suggestive
material for a feminist appropriation of this debate about the radical effect of the
'irruption of the feminine' (see Kuhnheim 1990; Graziano 1987; and Pifta 1990,
1991, 1994). Indeed, all of the male writers analysed by Kristeva in her various
studies of poetic avant-gardes—Lautreamont, Mallarme', Artaud, for example—
were also among Pizamik's poetic models, and ones about whom the Argentine
author wrote admiring comments and essays, associating their view of poetry
With her own.
The section of Pizamik's work that seem to have proved most fruitful as an
object for Kristevan commentary, though, have been the longer 'prose poems' or
'narrations' which the poet was working on in the late 1960s and just before her
death, notably the posthumously-published, 'comic' texts, La bucanera de Pernam-
buco o Hilda la poligrafa (Pizarnik 1993: 291-364). These texts differ enormously
from almost all of the poetry and short prose pieces which Pizarnik published
during her lifetime, the earlier work being characterized, on the whole, by an
internally consistent style and tone, and a recognizable, solipsistic poetic dis-
course or 'universe', generally lacking in humour, which has been admirably
dissected in a number of critical studies (see in particular, Pifta 1981, 1990;
Lasarte 1983; Goldberg 1995). La bucanera, probably finished between 1970-1971,
is not only the longest of all of Pizamik's published works, but is also the most
anarchic and eclectic in its style and content. It consists of a series of nineteen
separately-named 'chapters', gathered together under the title of the final one,
which are preceded by several mock indexes, comic dedications, over-blown
prefaces and silly epigraphs: 'hasta es posible que me haya metido en la boca un
mondadientes: Kafka' ('it is entirely possible that I have put a toothpick in my
mouth: Kafka'; Pizamik 1993: 291). The texts are seemingly 'populated' by a
collection of nonsense characters—Dr. Flor de Edipo Chu, Coco Panel, Pedrito el
 68 C. Grant

periquito (Pedrito the Parakeet), La Coja Ensimismada (the Enraptured Cripple),

and many more—together with their monologues, dialogues and much ex-
traneous 'narratorial' comment, all of which is at once senseless and overloaded
with sense. Pizarnik's text pays, in its final dedication, a homage to the Cuban
writer, Severo Sarduy, well known for similar attacks on the integrity and
decency of the bourgeois literary institution, but also feeds on several traditions
of writing in a similar (although by no means identical) vein, from the nonsense
texts and deliberate game-playing obscenities of the male Surrealists, to the work
of a Latin American current of writers including Sarduy, but also his compatriot,
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and in Argentina, to various texts by Oliverio
Girondo, an avant-garde poet from several poetic generations before Pizarnik,
and who was both her friend and mentor.
Suzanne Jill Levine, who has made a very valiant attempt at translating a
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small section of this untranslatable text, has described La bucanera as the result
of
Alejandra's feverish, irreverent play with the 'normal' distinctions
between sexes, between food and feces, between texts and, most of all,
within language. Perverse Borgesian allusiveness and Lewis Carrollian
non-sense are the 'rules of the game'. (Levine 1987: 78)
I quote from a short piece of text, drawn from the final section, itself entitled 'La
bucanera de Pernambuco o Hilda la polfgrafa' (here with the corresponding
section of translation by Levine), to give a flavour:
Desnudo como una musarana, Flor de Edipo Chu reia de los consejos
superfluos que nadie le daba.
De repente tuvo ganas de pasear por este texto y telefone6 a Merdon
y Merdon a mi.
En caso de que el lector haya olvidado el recinto por donde Chu se
pasea encinto, Merdon advierte que es el mismo de antes: la boutique
de Coco Panel, quien, como va vestida (no va puesto que esta sentada)
parece un gordo desnudo. En cuanto al Dr. Chu, esta desnudo (en
verdad, va y viene hablando de Miguel Angel). El sinologo se arras-
traba cansino porque toda la noche habia cabalgado un caballo de
calesita. Chu no estaba contento, en Alabama de la negra demonia de
la verdad sea dicho. Y puesto que fumaba un puro, se esfum6. Asi
antano el pirata Apocalipsis Morgan se eclipso porque Fata Morgana lo
desnudo.
jQu£ damnacion este oficio de ecribir! Una se abandona al alazan
objetivo, y nada. Una no se abandona, y tambien nada. (Pizarnik 1993:
360).
Naked as shrewmouse, Oedipussy Chew Flower laughed at the
superfluous advice nobody gave him.
Suddenly he felt like taking a stroll through this text and telephoned
Shithead and Shithead called me.
In case the reader's forgotten the crash pad where pregnant Chew
pads about, Shithead informs us that it's the same as before: the
boutique of Coco Panel who fully clothed (though not necessarily
 Alejandra Pizarnik's 'La bucanera...' 69

well-dressed) looks like a naked fat man. As to Dr. Chew, he's naked
(and comes and goes talking of Michelangelo). The sinologist was
dragging his feet since he had spent the whole night galloping on a
rocking-horse.
Chew wasn't cheerful, in the black devil's Alabama the truth be told.
And smoking his cigar, he went up in smoke. Thus yesteryear's pirate
Apocalypso Morgan was eclipsed when stripped by his Fata Morgana.
Damn this job of writing! I abandon myself to my brown study, to no
avail. I abandon myself, to no avail. (Levine 1987: 79)

La bucanera's thousands of scatalogical and sexual references can only be hinted

at by the above quote. These texts, however, also give Pizarnik ample occasion
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for introducing unexpected rhymes and endless elaborate plays on words and
syntax. For example, when La Coja Ensimismada is asked about her 'hermanca'
('one-armed sister'), she replies: ' "Se pesco...una tranca y aparecio en Sala-
tranca"3' (' "She got tranca [pissed] and appeared in Salatranca" '; Pizarnik 1993:
322). This is followed, as indicated, by a footnote reference on the same page: '3.
La frase evoca: "Se pesc6 una mina y aparecib en Salamina"' ('3. The phrase
evokes: "She picked up a mina [Argentine slang for 'young woman'] and
appeared in Salamina" '). These two phrases, of course, seem to evoke at least a
further sentence Pizarnik does not include: 'Se pesc6 una manca (one-armed
woman) y aparecio en Salamanca' (the 'real' name of the Spanish city). This very
convoluted piece of word-play, probably one of the many humorous, though
indirect references to lesbianism (and homosexuality) which run throughout La
bucanera, is made even more daring by yet one more possible deferral of
meaning in this absurd chain of signifiers when, later in the same paragraph,
Pizarnik mentions again the 'missing link' manca in connection with one of
dozens of word-plays on her own name: 'el aula Alejandra Magna se llena de
mancas' ('The Aula Alejandra Magna fills [itself] up with one armed women').1
Many of the other plays on words involve the subversion of grammatical gender
in the Spanish language, for example, that of nouns which are always gender-
marked. This can be seen in the following (untranslatable) expansion of abbrevi-
ated modes of gendered address which uses all the vowels in Spanish instead of
the usual two which would normally mark the binary system of 'available
gender' positions: 'Sras; Sres; Sris; Sros; Srus' (Pizarnik 1993: 302).
La bucanera makes hundreds of 'disrespectful' allusions to, or pastiches of
artist(e)s, writers, film-makers, and their work: Borges, Lugones, Duchamp,
Gardel, Tolstoy, Novalis, Baudelaire, Wilde, Genet, Josephine Baker, Liberace,
Gorriti, Mistral, Ibarbourou, Storni, Shaw, the Ocampos, Bioy Casares, Gertrude
Stein, Goethe, de Sade, Ionesco, Margaret Mead, Bram Stoker, Mallarme, Lorca,
Engels, Andres Bello, Bertolucci, the Shelleys, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx
Brothers, Paz, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cortazar, Lewis Carroll, Pabst, Queneau,
Conan Doyle, Marshall McLuhan, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Chekhov, Pieyre de
Mandiargues, Freud and Melanie Klein, to name only some of the most obvious
ones. The text is, in good part, a collage of these countless references from both
'High' and 'Low' culture (see the 'Michelangelo' quote from Eliot's 'Prufrock' in
the long section from La bucanera cited previously, a line which is pastiched at
least a further three times elsewhere). Pizarnik also includes some lines from her
 70 C. Grant

own work (Pizarnik 1993: 345). One of the effects of this irreverent treatment of
the cultural field is clearly, as one critic has noted, the 'desacralization' of Art,
and the 'denaturalization' of artistic 'taste' and 'seriousness' (Pina 1994: 191).
Just as with other kinds of cultural practice which exploit an allusive 'postmod-
ern' style, however, another effect is to continually point up the cultural
erudition of the practitioner (and of the reader who can 'recognize' the refer-
ences), even as the very notion of the 'patrimony' of High Culture is debunked.
Finally, La bucanera is also particularly notable for its highly irreverent mixing
of genres and discourses. The baroque language of fin-de-siecle texts such as
Ruben Dario's modernista meditations on Romantic and Symbolist writers and
yoltes maudits in his book Los raws, is parodied (as Cristina Pina has perceptively
noted; Pina 1991: 230) in several places (see especially Pizarnik 1993: 307);
academic literary and scientific discourses are savaged, in part with frequently
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ridiculous footnotes and the epigraphs which accompany most of the 'chapters';
and Pizarnik mocks the discourses of the mass media, especially those of
commerce and advertising. Political language is also ridiculed, though notably
few 'real' political figures, and certainly no contemporary ones, are alluded to.
All these discourses are mixed up, both with each other, and with further
pastiches from popular, or vernacular language: tango and pop song lyrics,
lunfardo (Buenos Aires slang) and other kinds of slang, including from languages
other than Spanish. No one register of language is allowed to prevail for long in
this polyphonic, polyglot and polymorphously perverse collection of texts.
It is unsurprising, therefore, given the many kinds of 'avant-garde' linguistic
transgression that these texts appear to exhibit, that the use of Kristevan frames
of reference should have been considered appropriate for the purposes of critical
commentary upon them. Cristina Pina, for example, who was both the first critic
to read Pizarnik through contemporary literary theory and the one who has
done so the most effectively, has consistently used this framework in her highly
original work on these later texts, hi an article about Pizarnik's prose and
theatre, 'La palabra obscena' ('The Obscene Word'), Pifia writes that 'lo obsceno'
(the obscene) in La bucanera, which is present in some of Pizarnik's earlier work
(notably in La condesa sangrienta), 'changes to a more intense level, leaving the
demands of representation to one side', and 'completely invades the signifier' in
accordance with Kristeva's theory of the semiotic (Pina 1990: 35). Pifia goes on
to argue, more convincingly perhaps, that in these texts, obscenity is uttered so
often that a kind of vertigo results which turns the process of word production
on the basis of phonic recognition into an exhausting game where all the rules
are broken. This 'breaking of the rules' in the symbolic order is, as we have seen,
where Julia Kristeva sites the revolutionary potential of the action of the
semiotic.
Pizarnik's La bucanera has, however, also been described as 'carnivalesque',
loosely following the ideas of another theorist, the Russian writer, Mikhail
Bakhtin. That is to say, this collection of texts seems to exhibit the irruption into
authorized discourse of the low, the popular, the vernacular, the excluded, and
the non-official (Bakhtin 1984). Perhaps since it was Julia Kristeva who was one
of the scholars and critics most responsible for publicizing Bakhtin's work in
France in the 1960s and 1970s, some feminist critics, including Pifia, influenced
principally by Kristeva's reading of the Russian critic's work, have frequently
utilized the concept of the 'carnivalesque' in a manner akin to the Kristevan
 Alejandra Pizarnik's 'La bucanera...' 71

notion of the 'semiotic', imbuing 'carnival' with a psychoanalytic significance

which is not particularly evident in Bakhtin's own analyses.
In a brilliant article published in 1994 in which her discussion of Pizarnik's
work is thoroughly infused with a Kristevan, and this time also a Bakhtinian
rhetoric, Cristina Pifta argues that the work which Pizarnik published during her
lifetime was 'monological', that is to say, characterized by a highly-elaborate and
controlled consistency of tone and reference, based on poetic norms long
established within the consecrated field of High Culture. This, she argues, is the
exact opposite of the posthumous texts, which 'on every level appear as
transgression, carnival, heterogeneity' destroying the poetic 'subjectivity'
Pizarnik had previously inscribed in her work (Pifta 1994: 191, 194).
In terms of producing a critical reading of Pizarnik's later work, these
comments are highly persuasive, although Pifta goes on to make an elision
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between Pizarnik's suicide and the 'destructive style' of La bucanera based on

Kristevan theories to which I do not subscribe (Pifta 1994: 194).2 However, I
would argue further that this kind of emphasis on textual production, and the
purely psychic, or psycho-linguistic processes which may be linked to it, leaves
unanswered important questions about the specific effects of particular examples
of 'revolutionary poetics' (even if one of the theorists behind this kind of
approach, Kristeva herself, seems in the past to have disavowed concerns with
immediate political 'efficacy'; see Lewis 1974). As Ann Rosalind Jones writes,
For whom does the poem call the finality of language into question?
Are grammar and memory publicly or permanently subverted by
Modernist textual practice? ... [Kristeva's] focus on the psychogenesis
of texts blinds her to issues of literary context and reception. This is a
curiously private revolution: the poet, solitary, original, unique, and the
critic/semiotician are the only participants it requires. (My emphasis;
Jones 1984: 60)
I will examine these particular points now in more detail by turning back to
Pizarnik's work, and also by returning, briefly, to Bakhtin. Clearly, there is much
in the Russian theorist's work which is useful for the feminist critic of La
bucanera. Some of the forms of carnival folk culture which Bakhtin ennumerated
in his study of Rabelais are, as we have seen, clearly present in Pizarnik's text:
'comic verbal compositions, parodies ... ; and various genres of billingsgate
(curses, oaths, profanations, marketplace speech)' (Russo 1986: 218; Bakhtin
1984). Also, in a comment which is highly suggestive if applied to La bucanera's
discourse on culture and authority, Mary Russo writes,
It is as if the carnivalesque body politic had ingested the entire corpus
of high culture and, in its bloated and irrepressible state, released it in
fits and starts in all manner of recombination, inversion, mockery, and
degradation. The political implications of this heterogeneity are obvi-
ous: it sets carnival apart from the merely oppositional and reactive;
carnival and the carnivalesque suggest a redeployment or counterpro-
duction of culture, knowledge, and pleasure. (Russo 1986: 218)
Despite all of this, there are several aspects of Bakhtin's theories which have so
far been overlooked by those who have heralded Pizarnik's 'carnivalesque' texts,
or her work in general, for expanding the limits of what it was possible for a
woman to write. These have rather obvious consequences for the discussion of
 72 C. Grant

their radical potential. Bakhtin's understanding of textual carnival—the irrup-

tion into authorized discourse of the low, the popular, the vernacular, the
excluded, the non-official—is very much linked to external social change. For
Bakhtin, as Clair Wills writes in an essay on his relevance for feminism:

It is only by bringing the excluded and carnivalesque into the official

realm in a single text that the concept of public discourse may be
altered. (Wills 1989: 132)

It is, therefore, one thing to wax lyrical about the 'semiotic' and the 'carniva-
lesque' in Pizarnik's work. It is, however, quite another kind of critical activity
to examine how her later, transgressive texts have actually been brought into the
public (published) or official realm, where—if at all—they are going to exert
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their radical effect. Unless, of course, this is just going to be a very 'private
revolution' indeed, with the solitary critic poring over an unpublished manu-
script.
Cristina Pina recounts in her biography of Pizarnik how the poet presented
the drafts of the texts later published under the title of La bucanera to several
literary friends, among whom may well have been those who had published her
earlier work. This group, undoubtedly familiar with the work of Girondo,
Sarduy and Cabrera Infante as well as with that of the Surrealists, believed these
texts to be 'without any value', and dismissed them as 'porquerfas'/'trash' (Pina
1991: 229). Perhaps these friends were horrified by the prospect of these works
entering the public domain and, as Pina hints, further influenced in their
reaction by a prevailing cultural view about the hysterical woman artist (a view
which, incidentally, is shored up in the theoretical realm by, amongst others,
Julia Kristeva.3 So the texts, later gathered under the title La bucanera, were not
published at all during her lifetime. Nor, apparently, were they to be included
together under this collective title in the anthology of Pizarnik's work, El deseo
de la palabra, which was prepared under her supervision for a Spanish publishing
company in the last years of her life, but which was only published in 1975 in
a different format than earlier intended, after her death.3 Clearly, then, at that
time La bucanera could not be seen as part of Pizarnik's official, or public, corpus
of work.
La bucanera de Pernambuco o Hilda la poligrafa finally appeared for the first time
in August 1982, in an Argentine collection of some previously published and
other unpublished poems, fragments of theatre and prose pieces entitled Textos
de Sombra y ullimos poemas, edited by Pizarnik's friends, the poets, Olga Orozco
and Ana Becciu (Pizarnik 1982:133-217). It was published by Editorial Sudamer-
icana, a well-respected, mainstream poetry publishing house and a particularly
large first run (1500 copies), for a book of poetry, was produced. No explanation
is given in this edition by Orozco or Becciu as to the reasons for their inclusion
of this or any other piece which, because of its length, dominates this collection,
but the date of publication is very interesting and surely significant. What was
inadvisable or just impossible to publish, for whatever reason, in early 1970s
Argentina, with its public climate of economic crisis, the rise of state /military
and left-wing terrorism and the announcement of the return to Argentina of the
exiled Juan Peron; was finally able to enter into authorized discourse—to use a
Bakhtinian turn of phrase—along with Pizarnik's other 'transgressive' texts, in
 Alejandra Pizarnik's 'La bucanera...' 73

the period which coincided with the initial crumbling of the state control of the
1976-1983 military dictatorship following defeat in the Malvinas.
Interestingly, this raises some retrospective questions about the elision of
Pizarnik's life and work and the consequences of this for a political interpret-
ation. As Pina's biography makes clear, Pizarnik took no part in conventional
political activities—the 'manifestations of collective feeling', as Peri Rossi calls
them in the quote I reproduced above. Whilst it may be a truism to suggest,
though, that even in her apolitical intent she was being political, this is indeed
the case. I would argue that in her early 'choice' of publishing outlets for her
work during the early to mid 1950s, Alejandra Pizarnik had opted for the
upper-class, 'liberal' cultural establishment, a move which was 'apolitical' only
in the sense that this establishment {Sur, the SADE, the Argentine Society of
Writers; see Arias el al. 1969) had found itself in opposition to Peronist national-
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ism and the modernizing social, economic and political changes which had
occurred during the first Peronist regime. Ironically, these were among the very
changes (some of which had been brought about in spite of that regime's efforts)
which allowed someone from Pizarnik's background—the daughter of a not
particularly privileged, east European, Jewish, immigrant couple—to be able to
attend university and aspire to be a published poet in the first place.
When she first made moves in the cultural arena, Pizarnik joined the groups
around small poetry magazines in her city (for example, Poesia Buenos Aires)
which promoted the same sort of view of art and culture as her European
influenced family, her anti-authoritarian, anti-Peronist Jewish school, and her
own reading of the early Sartre and the poetes maudits (Pina 1991: 26). This was
a political move, even if unwittingly, because as several cultural critics have
pointed out, the legacy of the 1920s and 1930s in Buenos Aires had so politically
polarized the cultural field (see Katra; Sarlo; Masiello; and King). As John King
writes:
The downfall of Peron in 1955 heralded a decade or more of modern-
ization in the intellectual field in Argentina. After the cultural autarky
of those years, Argentina was once again receptive to 'the new', that is
to say, to cultural influences from beyond its borders. (King 1993: xii)
Pizarnik, with her French-influenced poetic rhetoric, graduated from editing and
publishing in the small anti-Peronist but 'apolitical' magazines to having both
her poetry and her critical articles accepted by Sur, the bastion of the Argentine
liberal, pro-'foreign' establishment, still a highly influential magazine in the mid
to late fifties, but according to John King stifled by its patrician connections
during the 1960s, when some of Pizarnik's work was published there (King 1986:
194-195).
As long as Pizarnik's work was 'appropriate'—dealing only in a textual
transgression sanctioned as acceptable thanks to a long tradition of European
and Latin American poetry in that discourse (Romanticism, Symbolism, moder-
nismo, and so on)—it could form part, at least on the margins, of the elite, liberal
tradition of Argentine letters. Pizarnik would even be invited to write the
prefaces for anthologies of poetry by young writers (Pizarnik 1968, 1993:
367-369). She would have poets of the stature of Octavio Paz writing prefaces to
her own work (Paz 1962). And her work would be hailed on numerous
occasions, by friends and critics, as 'one of the purest voices of contemporary
 74 C. Grant

Latin American poetry' (my translation and emphasis) (Cobo Borda 1972: 40).
However, when her work stepped over those boundaries of acceptable taste by
which women writers in particular were expected to abide, detaching itself from
the metaphor of 'purity' and crossing over to the realm of 'dirt' or 'trash',
signalled by the reference to 'porquerfa', then it had become a little too
'dangerous', perhaps too 'contaminating', to be seen in public. Pizarnik's friends,
advisers and publishers, and Pizamik herself were the ones who policed these
boundaries, in the shadow of inestimable difficulties in the public political
sphere where censorship and the worrying rhetoric of 'subversion' thrown up by
the military government continued to attach itself to very real penalties for
'oppositional voices'.
Interestingly, there is a stark, albeit ironic commentary on some of these very
questions of acceptability, readerly 'taste', censorship and self-censorship which
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runs throughout Pizarnik's text of La bucanera, which has so far gone unre-
marked by criticism on this work. After the very first, defiant sentence of the
text—'Me importa un carajo que aceptes el don de amor de un cuentic6n
Uamado haschich ... ' ('I don't give a damn whether or not you accept the talent
for love of a spinner of tales called hashich'; Pizamik 1993: 293)—the narrator
sets up a scattered dialogue with the reader(s), in which a mocking unease
seems to emerge and then dissolve. This is worth quoting at length:
Lectoto o lecteta: mi desasimiento de tu aprobamierda te hara leerme a
todor vapor
Omni-male or Fe-mammary Readers: my disabowel of your ap-
probaishit will make you read me at full tilt (Page 293)
Vos, lector, pedis dialogos, no paisajes
You, Reader, ask for dialogues, not for landscapes (Page 298)
soy un pobre periquito que perora para Pizamik y para nadie mas
I'm a poor little parakeet who pronounces for Pizamik and for no one
else (Page 298)
Pedrito se caga en los lectores. Pedrito quiere lo mejor para Pedrito y
para Pizamik. ^El resto? A la mierda el resto y, de paso, el sumo
Pedrito shits on the readers. Pedrito wants the best for Pedrito and for
Pizarnik. And everyone else? They can go to hell and, while we're at it,
the rest can too (Page 329)
Si el lector (o no), que los hay (o no) preguntase con su consabida (o no)
voz gangosa (o no)
If the Reader [or not], if there are any [or not] should ask with his
ubiquitous [or not] nasal voice [or not] (Page 334)
Sacha, no joda's. Deja que empiece el cuento...NO SEAS BOLUDA,
SACHA...Tengo miedo
Sacha [Pizarnik's nickname], don't piss about. Let the story be-
gin...DON'T BE SUCH AN ASSHOLE, SACHA...I'm scared (Page 345)
Por tanto les digo, lectores hinchas, que si me siguen leyendo tan
 Alejandra Pizarnik's 'La bucanera...' 75

atentamente dejo de escribir. En fin, al menos disimulen...(tachado AP:

me aburro)
Therefore I must say to you, loyal readers, that if you continue to read
me so attentively I shall stop writing. Well, at least pretend ... (crossed
out by AP: I'm getting bored) (Page 346)
con la pluma y con la concha de tu hermana, hypocryte lecteur, mon
semblable, mon frere ...
with the quill and with your sister's fanny, hypocryte lecteur, mon
semblable, mon frere ... (Page 347)
El cuento de Alejandra es para todos, y si no les gusta consiganse uno
especial para ustedes, que mientras estean aqui, estamos en la democra-
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cia
Alejandra's story is for everybody, and if you don't like it get one just
for yourselves, because while you're here-ish, we are living in a
democracy (Page 351)
Lector, soy rigidisima en cuanto atafie a la etiqueta. Es el buen tono,
precisamente, lo que me insta a la precisi6n de un estado de profusa
vaguedad
Reader, I am utterly rigid when it comes to etiquette. Good taste is
precisely what urges me on towards the precision of a state of abundant
vague remarks (Page 360)
quiero terminar. ^Asi? ^Sin arrojar unos adjetivos a los que aprecian en
el escritor las facultades descriptivas e instructivas?
I want to finish. Just like this? Without throwing in a few of those
adjectives for those people who appreciate descriptive and instructive
faculties in a writer? (Page 362, in the final sentences)
In La bucanera, the 'Readers', arbiters of literary and social taste, become the
ultimate authority figure, although notably there are others—literary prizes and
scholarships (pp. 305-306), the brief appearance of a demagogue (pp. 335),
censors (pp. 304, 342), and the field of culture in general—which are challenged,
ridiculed and debunked under various narratorial guises. It appears that
Pizarnik's attempt in these pieces of writing to epater les bourgeois worked so well
that in the early 1970s, at least, they even managed to alienate those who formed
part of her circle of literary advisors, or at least made these latter unwilling to
consider this collection of texts as 'worthy' of literary publication, and of taking
up their place alongside the poet's earlier, 'consecrated' body of work.
What had occurred by August 1982, enabling La bucanera finally to find a place
in public, was a radical transformation in political positionings within the
cultural field in Argentina, which was happening against the background of an
apertura, brought about by the failing control of the military government. Those
who before the Proceso had more or less clearly been on the 'liberal' side of the
cultural establishment, if they had survived the regime's vicious attacks on
writers and artists who made up a large number of the Disappeared and exiled,
now found themselves in a different, even more complex place. 'Manichean
 76 C. Grant

simplicities' (Torrents 1988: 96) such as the Argentine debate about 'civilization'
and 'barbarism', as well as concerns about the public role of culture in a society
where many forms of expression had been brutally proscribed, were under-
standably in question.
In this different place, even previously published, 'polysemic' texts (perhaps
'apolitical', metaphysical meditations on death, shadows, 'inner exile', pain, all
themes and images present throughout Pizarnik's published work) could ac-
quire specific political meanings in the new reading context, which were perhaps
different from those which had been 'intended', or which had been interpreted,
when they were first written or read. And private discourses which seemingly
spoke a language of countercultural opposition, could also begin to be uttered
publicly. As the critic, David Foster has testified (Foster 1991: 98, and 1994: 320),
some of Pizarnik's work had probably always circulated clandestinely during
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the authoritarian regimes of the late 1960s, early 1970s and 1976-83. With the
publication of Textos de Sombra y ultimos poemas it could be said that, like the
work of some other poets writing during the 1960s and early 1970s, Pizarnik's
texts were '(re)born' publicly as anti-authoritarian and 'political' in the 1980s.
What seems to have happened, therefore, in this case is not, of course, that La
bucanera has itself become more or less formally radical or acceptable, enabling
it to be permitted to enter the public arena. Instead, what has changed are the
sites of discourse, including those of production (editing, publishing) and recep-
tion. The publication of this text, albeit after the apertura, with its humorous
discourse on taste, morality and censorship, its total reliance on allusion and
inference, and its endless debunking of the over-blown, 'sacred cows' of the
cultural patrimony, testifies to the fact that aesthetic judgements, such as the
earlier label 'trash', are entirely historically contingent. In this context, one of the
'values' that La bucanera indirectly acquires as it moves into the realm of public
distribution is, ironically, that the act of its publication in Argentina can be
clearly 'read', I would argue, as a small act of resistance (see Newman 1992 for
descriptions of other cultural interventions during this period).
Not only were Pizarnik's texts re-situated as 'political'. As I noted above,
David Foster has written that Pizarnik's work became associated with clandes-
tinity during the various authoritarian regimes from the late 1960s, up until the
return to democracy in 1983, establishing after her death in 1972 an 'under-
ground' reputation which Foster calls 'the Pizarnik legend' (Foster 1994: 320).
This may in some ways be a little hard to square with some of Pizarnik's public,
canonized trajectory as a young writer, working with Sur and other 'establish-
ment' publications and groups, during her own lifetime. This 'underground'
reputation is, however, entirely consonant with other aspects of her life. As
several critics have noted, like many of her artistic role models, Pizarnik, who
filled letters and diaries with discourse on fusing life and art, and experiencing
'situaciones limites', 'experimented' with drugs and alcohol, had sexual relation-
ships with women and men, suffered breakdowns and underwent various forms
of therapy, before dying as the result of an overdose at the age of 36 (Pina 1991:
passim). Like many of her heroes, critics have ascribed to her the label of poeta
maldita. Before the publication of Cristina Pina's biography, the details of
Pizarnik's life had circulated as eagerly and almost as clandestinely as some of
her work. This may only have added to the attraction of her persona for
followers of what Carrie Jaures-Noland has called the 'paradoxical "tradition" of
 Alejandro Pizarnik's 'La bucanera...' 77

antiestablishment art' (Jaures-Noland 1995). The 'legend' of Pizarnik's life has

become so fused with the work that for many readers (and this includes some
critics) the two are inseparable, forming one, almost seamless discourse, in a
similar way, for example, to other poetes maudits. As David Foster again writes,
Pizarnik has become 'an emblem of the poet as a marginal individual in society'
(Foster 1991: 98).
I would go further than Foster and, following the work on culture by the
French social theorist, Pierre Bourdieu (1993), and recent feminist appropriations
of it (Moi 1991; Elliott and Wallace 1994), argue that in recent years Pizarnik's
work and her persona have begun to be co-opted and reified by the kinds of
bourgeois and commercial culture against which La bucanera might be inter-
preted as mounting its carnivalesque attack. Pizarnik herself may have con-
stantly lamented her inability to make money because of her overwhelming
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determination to be a poet, albeit ironically in the following example: 'iQu€

artfculos de consumo fabricar con mi lenguaje de melancolfa a perpetuidad?'
('What consumer goods can I manufacture with my perpetually melancholic
language?', cited in Malinow 1980: 2838). But, as Jaures-Noland again writes in
her recent article on 'Style as social deviance' (1995: 608), 'resistance to corn-
modification conforms brilliantly to commodification'. And as Bourdieu points
out repeatedly in his work, the deliberate attempts of artists to attack bourgeois
taste, has often had an opposite effect in the long term throughout literary
history.
It is precisely Pizarnik's oft-reported, total commitment to her role as a
marginalized, 'transgressive' poet, writing only for small circulation journals
and books, and in both her life and work following in the footsteps of her poetes
maudits heroes, which most seems to fascinate a large number of those who have
written about her work. Some striking examples of the fascination with this aura
of poeta maldita can be seen both in academic and popular discourse on Pizarnik,
both of which have, in the last five years, expanded considerably to comment on
and accompany the increasing number of collections of her work, with its recent
inclusion in several anthologies in Spanish and other languages. The special
issue of Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos (1990) dedicated to Pizarnik and Violeta
Parra, which contained Pitta's groundbreaking article on the poet, 'La palabra
obscena', also carried several uncritical biographical pieces and a number of
photographs of Pizarnik. Numerous other critical studies have also carried
similar photos of Pizarnik in suitably 'dissident intellectual' poses, smoking,
reading books, with avant-garde artworks in the background. Postcards of these
photographs are on sale in many bookshops in Argentina in a collection entitled
'Las hechiceras' (The Enchantresses'). The upmarket, Buenos Aires cultural and
political weekly magazine, La maga, dedicated its 31 August, 1994 edition to
'Historias de la noche', on the subject of the decadent and oppositional nature
of Buenos Aires' night culture. This included a feature article by Fernando
Noy—described in the piece as 'Admirable poet, and friend to many artists,
from Alejandra Pizarnik to Fito Paez [an oppositional rock musician]'—which
carried the following quote in a section entitled 'Alejandra' (as opposed to
another section entitled 'Cortazar'):

I have to name Alejandra Pizarnik here, because Alejandra was la

cultora (a true exponent) of the night and its culture ... The nights went
 78 C. Grant

on for as many days as your energy could last. This whole world can
be witnessed in her work, because when Alejandra wrote she became
part of the poem. You just had to see her. (Noy 1994: 47)
This fetishizing of Pizarnik as the 'transgressive artist', which, as we can see in
this last example, is usually inflected by her gender, age and artistic status, is
one of the contemporary manifestations of what Pierre Bourdieu has called the
'charismatic economy' of the cultural field (Bourdieu 1993: 40). It clearly inherits
much from the pre-Romantic tradition of viewing the artist as a sacred, magical
creator, and even as the ideology behind it disavows economic and political
capital in favour of what Bourdieu calls, 'symbolic capital', the effect is usually
to advance the capital—in economic, political and cultural terms—of all those
who participate in its processes. In the above example, Fernando Noy, and La
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maga, may thus enhance their symbolic capital by associating themselves in

passing with the transgressive 'Pizarnik legend', at the same time as they
contribute to the symbolic capital of this 'legend' itself.
This last point brings me nearer to my conclusion. In the words of Bourdieu,
'the work is made not twice, but a hundred times, by all those interested in it,
who find a material or symbolic profit in reading it, classifying it, deciphering
it, commenting on it, combating it, knowing it, possessing it' (Bourdieu 1993:
111). La bucanera has had several such 'makings' (including this one), and
various aspects of the debate about literature and politics have had to be staged
here in order to discuss just some of them. If I argue most strongly against the
kind of readings which privilege a Kristevan valorization of the 'revolutionary'
potential of such experimental pieces of writing as La bucanera, it is not only
because I am sceptical about some kinds of psychoanalytic theory. It is also
because I feel that it is not the most effective form of political criticism which
feminists could be practising. Even Toril Moi who has been very supportive of
Kristevan theory, has written about it that, 'It is still not clear why it is so
important to show that certain literary practices break up the structures of
language when they seem to break up little else' (Moi 1985: 171). In some parts
of her work, Julia Kristeva does acknowledge 'outside' political constraints on
literary production, particularly in terms of the broad point about forms of
censorship. As Kelly Oliver writes of Kristeva's essay, 'The Ethics of Linguistics',
'the ethics of a social discourse may be gauged by how much poetry it allows'
(Oliver 1993: 2; Kristeva 1980: 25). Yet, this still does not help us account for
specific personal and political mechanisms or effects, as I hope I have shown in
my discussion. As Clair Wills writes in her critique of Kristeva's appropriations
of Bakhtin, 'It is her simple positivisation of Bakhtinian carnival which means
that she will only be able to alter representation rather than sites of discourse'
(Wills 1989: 142). I would agree with Rita Felski when she writes that,
Abstract theories of text and gender, particularly those grounded in
psychoanalytic models, are conspicuously unable to account for femi-
nism as distinct from femininity and frequently seek to ground a theory
' of resistance in characteristics traditionally associated with the feminine
(hysteria and pleasure, for example). The problem with trying to locate
resistance in every micropolitical strategy, in every libidinal impulse, is
that subversion is located everywhere and nowhere; the valorisation of
the 'feminine' as a site of resistance fails to acknowledge that women's
 Alejandro Pizarnik's 'La bucanera...' 79

assignment to a distinctive feminine sphere has throughout history

been a major cause of their marginalization and disempowerment.
(Felski 1989: 11)

This comment about assignment to a marginalized 'feminine' sphere cannot be

over-stressed when examining women's interventions in the specific cultural
field of 'avant-garde' writing. It is not that there have never been avant-garde
women writers. It is just that their 'contributions' have, more often than not,
been forgotten, ignored, read 'differently' from those of men, or have just not
been published. In La bucanera, Pizarnik pays an ironic tribute to her feminine
forebears with some jokes about the tradition of Latin American 'poetisas'
(poetesses; Pizarnik 1993: 299). Yet, in the same section, she also includes a witty
footnote about a female 'avant-garde' writer: 'Rachilde: ma mere, une hippie' {op.
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cit.: 298). Rachilde, according to critic Elaine Showalter, was 'the only woman
writer admitted to the literary men's club which dominated the Parisian cultural
scene of the 1880s and 90s', and was 'a major figure in fin-de-siecle culture',
admired by many other 'Decadent' writers. Showalter notes that when she died
in 1953 Rachilde had been 'virtually forgotten' (Showalter 1995: 5-6).
Pizarnik's work (including texts from La bucanera), like that of Rachilde, is
being republished and discussed again principally within the context of inter-
national, feminist cultural debates and interventions (see for example, Ferna'n-
dez-Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 1991). In these contemporary sites of feminist
discourse, which are as historically-contingent (indeed, as 'market-led') as any
other sites, the work of both writers is being heralded as 'revolutionary'. This
celebration is the most recent of the 'political' readings of Pizarnik's work which,
in part, I have been tracing in this article. Others have ranged from that of Peri
Rossi, for whom in 1973 the memory of Pizarnik's work and life was an emblem
for the 'flight of poetry' from the necessity for militancy in the Latin American
'real world'. For others, she has been the 'transgressive poet' armed with words,
attacking the very origins of oppression with her linguistic assault on bourgeois
subjectivity. For others, she has been a dedicated young poet with a clear
political resonance for the late twentieth century, too alienated to bear testimony
to the painful truths of the outside world, instead attempting to speak the
painful truth of an inner world.
The role of a feminist cultural criticism, however, is not only to celebrate the
skills and resistance which have been required of women in order to produce
work and to get it into the public domain, although I would argue that this
remains a political imperative. If we are to go beyond the limits of the above
'readings', indeed if we are seeking to influence the sites of discourse within
which they have been produced, feminists, and others committed to ethics-based
cultural criticism, cannot afford simply to continue with the disavowals, mis-
recognitions and over-simple positivisations involved in each of them. I have
only just begun in this article to pay attention to the wider aspects concerning
the specific sites of discourse of Pizarnik's work. As Bourdieu has put it,

The theory of the [cultural] field [leads] to both a rejection of the direct
relating of the individual biography to the work of literature (or the
relating of the 'social class' of origin to the work) and also to a rejection
of internal analysis of an individual work or even of intertextual
 80 C. Grant

analysis. This is because what we have to do is all these things at the same
time' (Bourdieu 1990: 147, my emphasis).

Acknowledgement
The phrase 'A Private Revolution' is Ann Rosalind Jones' (Jones 1984: 60). I am grateful for the
financial assistance of the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, and of the University of
Strathclyde which enabled me to carry out research for an extended piece of work on Alejandra
Pizamik in Buenos Aires, July-September, 1994, of which this article is a part. I also thank Carmen
Dominguez, Nuala Finnegan, Graham Roberts, Jeremy Lane and, especially, Cristina Pina for helpful
discussions in the course of this research, and Eamonn Rodgers and the Editors for their useful
comments about this article. An earlier version was read at the Institute of Latin American Studies,
University of Glasgow in February, 1995. All translations are my own except where otherwise
indicated.
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Notes
1. As many commentators have noted (including Pina 1991: passim), Pizarnik had several import-
ant sexual relationships with women, and her work contains many references to lesbianism,
which are often 'veiled', as they are here (see also her most famous prose text, La condesa
sangrienta, which was first published in 1965; Pizarnik 1993: 371-391). The veiled nature of these
references is hardly surprising considering the vicious private and state repression of same-sex
relationships in Argentina during Pizarnik's lifetime, not to mention since. A very lively debate
on these matters has been published (see Foster 1991 and Chávez Silverman 1995) to which I
have contributed in an unpublished conference paper ('[Des]entendida: avowal and disavowal
in work by and about Alejandra Pizarnik', given at the Conference on Latin American Women's
Writing at the Institute of Latin American Studies, London, in June 1994) which now forms part
of my longer study of Pizarnik's work.
2. Piña adds, 'And in this carnival, the subject leaves, is cut off by death' (Piña 1994:194). Both here
and in other articles, Piña implicitly supports the argument that, while neither Pizarnik's life nor
her later work were 'political' in any conventional sense of that word, both were extremely
transgressive of a whole range of social, cultural and political norms, and so were clearly
'revolutionary' in the Kristevan sense, taking questions of form to the very edge of acceptability
or sanity, and over ('suicide'). As we can see from this fleeting elision of 'textual' and
'extra-textual' subjectivities, and from the work of another of the critics who has written about
Pizarnik, Frank Graziano (1987), Julia Kristeva's work has also been particularly influential
when it has warned of the difficulties precisely for the woman writer who attempts to enter
avant-garde discourse, but who is necessarily too estranged from language and the symbolic
order to make this entry. The danger, according to Kristeva, is that, as Clair Wills cites, 'if no
paternal "legitimation" comes to dam up the inexhaustible, non-symbolised impulse, [the
woman writer] collapses into psychosis and suicide' (Wills 1989: 142, citing Kristeva 1986: 41).
I feel that this 'pathologization' of the woman writer is one of the logical, if highly unfortunate,
extensions of an approach which is ultimately determinist ('the feminine is always repressed') in
its argument about the (psycho-)linguistic acquisition of 'subjectivity', and hence my scepticism.
3. Pizarnik (1975), edited by Antonio Beneyto. See Beneyto's epilogue to the collection where he
explains the difficult trajectory of the book following Pizarnik's death, 252-256. Four of the
individual texts which formed part of the later collection are included in Beneyto's collection
alongside other pieces written by Pizarnik in the last years of her life (115-139).

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