The Subversive Silence of Alejandra Pizarnik

The poems of Pizarnik are rooted in a group of meticulously selected emblematic words. One of these emblems, the term ‘silencio’, was reiterated ‘sin cesar, sin tregua, sin piedad’ (2012: 311) by the poet throughout the entirety of her rebellious yet extremely brief poetic life. The thematic notion of silence first surfaces explicitly in Las aventuras perdidas (1958). Its textual presence is gradually developed over Árbol de Diana (1962) and culminates in Los trabajos y las noches (1965) where nearly one third of the volume embraces either the term ‘silencio’ or ‘silenciosa’. It is thereafter retained in Pizarnik’s poetry as one of its most crucial lyrical features. Although this important aspect has been commented upon by some critics, no explicit work has so far drawn a connection between the notion of silence in Pizarnik and the rebellious energy conveyed in this seemingly submissive idea. In Límites, diálogos, confrontaciones (2012), Piña asserts the poet’s inclusion of obscenity in her prose work as a form of subversion.1 Though she declares that ‘la represión y la ausencia’ of obscenity in Pizarnik’s poetry is ‘la peculiar forma de obscenidad’ (Piña 2012: 45), the subversive force underneath such a silence of sexual explicitness in Pizarnik’s poetic work remains undisclosed. However, when one considers the poet’s restless demand for silence and her explicit pronouncement of suicide as a profoundly subversive act often pertaining to the same realm as silence (Pizarnik 2012: 299), the silence of Pizarnik seems to be more than a state of mere calmness and tranquillity. To interrogate the notion of silence, a corpus of sixty-seven poems where the term ‘silencio’ and its associated adjectives are explicitly pronounced will be my principal focus. I will show that Pizarnik’s silence subverts the Symbolic, in the Lacanian and Kristevan senses, through challenging the Symbolic language. To understand the process of the subversion, I divide the chosen corpus and categorise the poems into three progressive phases of rebellion (this does not imply, however, that there is an absence of overlap between these three stages). The first phase begins in Las aventuras perdidas (1958) and demonstrates her increasing awareness of silence as homeland, just as poetic language is a homeland. For Pizarnik, poetry from the very start had always been the place ‘donde todo sucede’ (Pizarnik 2012: 299). Similar to all her favourite ‘poetas malditos’ (Aira 75), she chose poetry, this simultaneously protective and rebellious realm where all subversive acts are born, as the refuge for both surviving and