Alejandra Pizarnik's Poupées

Abstract

The poetics of the Argentinean author Alejandra Pizarnik show, from its writing processes and the fact that it belongs to a hybrid culture, as the one of the La Plata River, a component of appropriation of foreign models that cannot remain unnoticed. As Nestor García Canclini claims, “Writing, especially in peripheral countries, means to occupy an inhabited place” (2013: 116). In this sense, the multiple influences, from very different places and historical periods, which operate in Pizarnik’s writing, make us realize the productivity of the marginal position of Argentinean literature. In her work, we verify Borges’s motto about how writers of the La Plata River have the possibility and the need to build a genealogy from universal literature. Our corpus is composed by three short prose texts by Alejandra Pizarnik, one of them published and the other two unpublished (Pizarnik Files: Princeton) and her theatre play Los poseídos entre lilas (1972). We will use the concept of hybridization to analyze three problems present in the texts: the productive reception or appropriation made by Pizarnik with the works of the German artist Hans Bellmer, the hybrid generic status of the works and the configuration of dissident bodies.