The Silence’s Abyss, the Death Drive: a Reader’s Guide for Los trabajos y las noches by Alejandra Pizarnik

Abstract

From a conception of silence as an interstice that shows the abyss, this article presents a reading guide for Alejandra Pizarnik's Los trabajos y las noches, which reveals the writing process of a poet that constantly dialogues with the death drive. In the second half of the twentieth century, Western and Latin American poets started to hesitate referring to failure of concepts as Truth, Reality or Subject creating disruptive writings that lack confidence in language. Along the lines of this tradition, through repetition and alliteration, Pizarnik presents a formal work that tries to gain ground for a language that reveals the essential and deals with the dismantling of the concepts of reality and representation of a subject who desperately dialogues with death until finally the corpse –textual corpse– brings silence.