Childhood in the Works of Silvina Ocampo and Alejandra Pizarnik by Fiona J. Mackintosh , Silvina Ocampo , Alejandra Pizarnik (review)

Abstract

852 Reviews the main body of the text itself. This phenomenon was particularly noticeable in the introduction, which perhaps needed to contextualize and elaborate on the debates around the 'visual turn', and also to provide a clearer definition of the volume's methodology. Symptomatic of this was SilvinaPersino's definition of the 'poetica' of the volume's title: 'El termino "poetico" debe ser entendido aqui como una estrategia de lectura que privilegia ciertos aspectos cuya articulacion, aunque necesariamente provisoria, permite pensarlos como un conjunto' (p. 13). Ultimately, I am still not convinced that I know what this means. University of Durham Andrea Noble Childhood in the Works of Silvina Ocampo and Alejandra Pizarnik. By Fiona J. Mackintosh. Woodbridge: Tamesis. 2003. 190 pp. ?45. ISBN 1-85566-095 Over thirtyyears and a wide social gap separated the childhoods of Silvina Ocampo and Alejandra Pizarnik, the firstborn into a wealthy and influential patrician family, the other to Yiddish-speaking Russian immigrants. And yet, as Fiona Mackintosh argues in her excellent monograph, the writers shared certain childhood sensitivities, particularly a sense of not belonging to the world that surrounded them. Chap? ter 1 explores the affective and aesthetic relationship between the two writers, both fascinated by childhood and attracted to its 'Alice in Wonderland' logic. The chapter 's title, 'Sylvette and Sacha', underlines the infantilism, even erotic infantilism, of their private language, as noted in the content and drawings of Pizarnik's letters to Ocampo. Childhood, death, and eroticism are thematic concerns in both writers' literary output, and other affinitiesnoted are gardens, dolls, mirrors, paintings, and a preoccupation with the self and with death. Mackintosh traces common sources of inspiration, though she prefers to talk of 'irradiations', and proceeds to show the di? vergent way in which these are developed by the two writers. For instance, Ocampo's 'teasing attitude to self-definition' is all but unthinkablein Pizarnik; gardens (in ruins) are real for Ocampo but symbolic for Pizarnik; in Ocampo the sacred and the illicit in childhood can be seen to coexist and overlap, but in Pizarnik the transgressive and the illicit become sacred. The two writers' positioning towards childhood also differs in that, while Ocampo can adopt the narrative framework 'of an adult looking back at childhood' and weigh it up accordingly, this distancing is impossible in Pizarnik: 'She and her poetic personae are driven, angst-ridden, possessing a great sense of urgency but without knowing its goal' (p. 65). Two chapters follow focusing on each of the two writers' work. Ocampo uses chil? dren's imagination as a means of redefining the roles of children and adults. Much has been written about her 'ninos crueles', and Mackintosh talks of this as an inseparable clichein all Ocampo criticism (p. 114), yet, as she herself points out, 'thejuxtaposition of childhood and violence is one of the hallmarks of Ocampo's work'(p. 66). Some stories focus on the child's perspective, and relate complex emotions such as the trauma of discovering the facts about childbirth, the awakening of sexuality, and the fear of adulthood. However, in some of the more disturbing stories there is a reversal in the role of adults and children, who appear to exert a threatening hold over adults who fear them. In Pizarnik's writing, as her recently published diaries confirm (Diarios, ed. by Ana Becciu (Barcelona: Lumen, 2003)), childhood is not a nostalgic place of innocence or safety per se but a protection from a much-feared entry into the adult world. The 'childlike personae' she creates in her many 'ninas' ('nina extraviada', 'nina ciega de alma', 'la hija del viento', 'muchacha desnuda', 'la pequena olvidada') are MLR, 100.3, 2005 853 beset by desolation, and a feeling of orphanhood from the surrounding world. A precocious death wish is ever present. These 'orphaned' figures develop, in the later prose, into a lacerated monster child, self-consciously rebellious, out to shock and transgress. Persistent and perverse sexual innuendoes, playful lavatorial humour, and deliberate indulgence in obscenity are marks of these texts 'issuing from Artaudian torment'(p. 157). Pizarnik's self-image was that of a poete maudit and Mackintosh explores in some detail her attraction to absurd and...