Experiencie of reading(s), writing and life in the diaries of anargentine young girl of the 60s

Abstract

The article explores the four diaries written by María Adela Reyna Lloveras (1947-1978) during her adolescence and before entering, almost simultaneously, the Literature career (UNC) and the organization Montoneros. The diaries, which cover since 1960 to 1966, register at the beginning the daily experiences in the domestic area –the intimate space of the room where the writing happens– and in the school area where that writing is socialized and loses its private status. But over time –and with the beginning of a love relationship that is going to be related with the later militancy– the writing becomes a register, on one hand, of the readings that Maria Adela does and, on the other hand, of her love experience and the emotions mobilised by that experience. From that moment (the start of her love life), María Adela writes and transcribes compulsively: the pages of her diaries are full of other people’s texts that she makes her own by the double practice of reading and copying (and sometimes, of stealing the signature of that she copied). Her reading and her writing are in tension: the obligations imposed by the didactic-moralizing books due to the Christian formation seek to lock up a desire that, instead, the literary texts encourage with an almost performative force, molding and modeling the affections that the loving experience imposes and that María Adela translates into another way of writing: the diary becomes an epistolar register in order to express the absence of the loved one. A question about the similarity or even the overlapping between the love experience and the one related to the militancy pretends to be, if not fully answered, at least posed in this article.