The Tormenting Beauty of Ideals: A Deleuzian Interpretation of Alejandra Pizarnik's La condesa sangrienta and Franz Kafka's ‘In the Penal Colony’

Summary

Desire for a deeper sleep that dissolves more.

The metaphysical urge is only the urge toward death.

Franz Kafka

The excess of reason engenders the unjustifiable.

The excess of transparency engenders terror.

Jean Baudrillard

Alejandra Pizarnik is notorious for a short prose work entitled La condesa sangrienta, which, contrary to what is stated in the recently published Prosa completa, first appeared in 1965 under the title ‘La libertad absoluta y el horror’. The story was then republished several times in various journals and eventually came out as a book in 1971, the year before Pizarnik committed suicide. Surprisingly, this piece, which Pizarnik claimed to be her best prose, started life as a humble book review (Diarios, pp. 464–5). A book review, however, which soon enough elides completely the ostensible object of its scrutiny, Valentine Penrose's La comtesse sanglante (1962), in order to distil and transform the history therein narrated. What we have here is effectively the second most celebrated and oddly absolved case of plagiarism in Argentinian literature after the works of Borges's Pierre Menard. But it is perhaps this unconventional gestation, combining critical intent with dexterous piracy, which makes the piece so different from the rest of Pizarnik's work. The story is that of Erzsébet Báthory, a sixteenth-century Hungarian countess famed for the alleged torture and murder of some six hundred girls, who is said to have bathed in their blood in order to preserve her youth. Báthory has gone on to become, alongside Vlad the Impaler, one of the main historical sources for the myth of Transylvanian vampirism – both feature in Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould's seminal anthology The Book of Were-Wolves (1865). In the twentieth century, Báthory inspired the likes of Georges Bataille, who claims in The Tears of Eros that ‘if Sade had known of [her] existence, there is not the slightest doubt that he would have felt the fiercest exaltation; [she] would have made him howl like a wild beast’; and Angela Carter, whose puckish account of the Carpathian countess as photosensitive lamia in ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ is contrasted with Pizarnik's terser, more sinister sketch in The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. These rather distinct writers all exalt Báthory as the force of devastating sensuality which interrupts the received order of things.