This essay will explore Alejandra Pizarnik's years in Paris (1960–64) as a reader of surrealism at its source, and the effects this intense reading had on her work, specifically on the title piece from her Extracción de la piedra de locura (1968, but written in 1964). The inter-textual density of her work obviously implies careful reading on her part, and yet, paradoxically, her work appears to discard allusion and bookish matters to deal directly with her inner world and its fraught relationship with language, what Bernardo Ezequiel Koremblit called her ‘delatora transparencia’. It could be that so much study, so much jettisoned literary work was a cause of her sense of impotence, of not being able to find the authentic language of being she sought inside herself, even contributing to the now mythical sense of being haunted by a future suicide. That is, so much library work contributed to her mutism, to her inability to hear the music.

Cristina Piña, her first biographer, quoted a critic and friend, Ivonne Bordelois, as noting that her poetry did not read like conventional surrealism: ‘el parentesco vital de Alejandra con el surrealismo es obvio, su escritura está lejos del surrealismo’. César Aira, another friend, developed this crucial insight by situating Alejandra Pizarnik in the ‘estela’ of surrealism. Surrealism for him was primarily ‘un sistema de lecturas, el más rico y productivo de los tiempos modernos’, where he would also situate his own stream of bizarre short novels. Rather than stimulating a mimetic urge to become a surrealist by practising automatic writing and the myth of the authenticity of the first draft, Pizarnik's engagement with surrealism led to her developing a strong critical sense of not imitating blindly what she read. Edgardo Dobry noted that Pizarnik ‘seemed’ to be conscious ‘del agotamiento de los métodos del surrealismo’. But there is no need for that ‘seemed’. That is, Alejandra Pizarnik expressed a critical posture towards surrealism in her texts, as well as in her essays.