Dimensions of the self in the poetry and diaries of Alejandra Pizarnik

Abstract

The present article aims to observe how certain ideograms that appear in Alejandra Pizarnik's works (the travelling woman, the dead woman, the forgotten woman, the little girl, the insomniac woman) and which, having become common places, contributed to mythologizing her authorial figure as a cursed poet, associated with a space-time dimension which would allow "measuring" the shape and size of the lyrical and diaristic self. Indeed, in her poetry and diaries, the first person is self-figured as small, miniaturized and, paradoxically, magnanimous, perhaps because there is almost no exterior space, except for the forest and the garden: as if some of the features that we can presume in the landscape (variety, multiplicity, extension) had been engulfed by the self that unfolds exorbitantly and abysmal, reluctant to admit the existence of an outside. This miniaturized egoic hyper-concentration, in addition to giving the total work a certain suffocating tone, enables us to conjecture about the strict regimen of purity of her poetry and the impossibility of writing a novel, tirelessly consigned in her diaries.