Introduction: Reading Silvina Ocampo

Summary

Silvina Ocampo has been described as having practiced the art of hiding in plain view. She remained a shadowy presence within the literary group which included her sister Victoria, the founder of Sur, Jorge Luis Borges, its most famous contributor, José Bianco, Sur's director, and Adolfo Bioy Casares, enfant terrible and Silvina's husband, to name just the obvious connections. Once described as Argentina's most underrated writer (King, “Victoria” 18), Silvina Ocampo has more recently received a heightened level of attention from many different quarters. For instance, after many years all her works are back in print and a new critical book on her early work argues for her key position among the writers of Sur's literary elite. As this book was being prepared for publication two new translations of her works into English have been published in the United States, and a book-length biography and numerous film and theater adaptations are appearing in Argentina and elsewhere. These are excellent developments for those of us interested in her work, and make the current volume especially timely as it seeks to look both forward and back, at what has been written about and what still remains unstudied and unheralded in this remarkable writer's extensive oeuvre.

Noemí Ulla, the scholar who pioneered the systematic study of Ocampo's works, pointed out (Escritora oculta) that Ocampo was not studied at the Universidad de Buenos Aires until the late 1980s. Indeed, Patricia Klingenberg's 1981 dissertation, written at the University of Illinois, was, to our knowledge, the first in any language. The belated aspect of critical work on Ocampo has persisted even to the present. Part of the answer to why this has been so lies with the author herself: she refused to follow what Matilde Sánchez has described as the “career” of the literary author: attending awards ceremonies, serving on panels, granting interviews, and so forth. Silvina Ocampo refused absolutely to discuss her adult life, wrote no account of herself and her opinions, and deliberately allowed confusion to circulate around her, permitting, for instance, errors as basic as her date of birth to persist without correction, and famously signing books written by Silvina Bullrich for people who mistook her for a writer she despised.