The eroica cadence of the arrhythmia of time in Diana Bellessi’s poetry

Abstract

With the return to democracy, the local literary field experienced an unprecedented phenomenon: the proliferation - noted by Alicia Genovese in La doble voz (1998) - of literature written and signed by women. In those years, another remarkable event occurred, although little studied by critics: folded and insinuated among the verses, or explicitly deployed in them, traces of lesbian sensibilities, bodies, affectivities and desires that began to modulate a multiple and heterogeneous voice appeared with greater systematicity on the textual surface of Argentinian poetry. Eroica (1988), by Diana Bellessi, was the first collection of poems published in Argentina in which the manifestation of lesbian desire and bodies burst forth without masks, without euphemisms and in a celebratory and defiant tone. That is why it became a milestone of this phenomenon.

In this paper, on the one hand, I review some fundamental critical readings of this book in order to provide other perspectives from which to read the lesbian imaginary and its (re)presentation in Eroica. On the other hand, I propose to investigate the intertwining relationship between the appearance on the textual surface of a lesbian voice that (self-)affirms itself and the modulations of temporality, based on the analysis of the tempos of the writing and the rhythm of poems. I will carry out this exploration by working with the figures of the arrhythmia, the instant, the discontinuity, and the circular temporality.