A Form to Dwell In: Narrative and ‘Rhetorical’ Unreliability in Alejandra Pizarnik’s Diaries

Abstract

This article examines the impact of form on the delivery of information in Alejandra Pizarnik’s Diaries. Literary unreliability - both narrative and what I call ‘rhetorical’ - questions the one-to-one correspondence between content and form. Through rhetorical strategies such as paradox and metaphor, the Diaries subvert notions of authorial control, revisiting the ‘death of the author’, as well as the relationship between the literary and the psychological. Instead of promoting an autobiographical reading of this work as a linear story marked by tragedy, these considerations suggest an alternative, interpretive path: one in which the diaristic text tends towards the absurd and the production of a fruitful ‘nothingness’. Considering linguistic manipulation in this way allows us to situate the Diaries within Pizarnik’s aesthetic evolution, not in terms of biographical content, but according to its critical and experimental engagement with a central, theoretical issue: the (im)possibility for language to represent a reality beyond itself.