Dark, sombre, black; angry, aggressive, corrosive; transgressive, iconoclastic; puerile, experimental, incomprehensible; surrealist, absurd; and above all, joyless. These are some of the words that come to mind most immediately when thinking about the difficult and painful topic of humour and Alejandra Pizarnik. There is not much, if any, in her poetry, which has meant that until recently humour was a neglected aspect of her writings, but the publication of her prose work, including her correspondence and diaries, has brought to our attention the significant role that humour played in her life and work. Pizarnik's most important writings on humour can be found in much of her correspondence as well as in Prosa completa (2002), where there is a whole section gathered under the rubric ‘Humor’ followed by the complete version of her only play, Los perturbados entre lilas.

The late texts, published posthumously, were often ignored or all but dismissed as embarrassing by readers who considered them either puerile, private jokes or lashings of despair by a mind on the border of derangement. However, recent criticism has begun to consider them, emphasizing the seriousness of the dark humour that pervades them. In the words of Cristina Piña: ‘Sólo que no es el lenguaje de la locura sino el de un arte que ha llegado hasta el fondo de su impulso transgresor, imitando peligrosísimamente el habla descarrilada del delirio.’ Significantly, Sylvia Molloy – a close friend of Pizarnik – spoke in a recent interview against a ‘purified’ hagiographic version of Pizarnik that eliminates ‘la parte cómica, soez, pornográfica, como si eso fuera inferior’. My contention is that these are important writings whose cruel anger and obscenity complements the tormented wonderment of her poetry.

In this chapter I offer an introductory discussion of the place of humour in Pizarnik's non-fictional writings before proceeding to examine its explosive presence in her tortuous and splintered late prose works, which is where most of the humour is found. In the second part of the chapter I examine Pizarnik's relationship to Jewishness and look at the presence (or absence) of a Jewish dimension to Pizarnik's humour.