Luisa Valenzuela's work is part of a specific post-Boom response -- to dictatorship, to the loss of faith in the Grand Narratives of the Boom, and also to the phenomenon of exile.
Their work also belongs to perhaps the most important sub-phenomenon of post-Boom writing, which is the forceful emergence of women's voices from Latin America in the 1980s.
Unable to ignore the social turmoil around them, and often personally affected by it, post-Boom women writers find in the renewed phenomenon of military dictatorship an appallingly clear extension of the latent violence at work in patriarchal society more broadly. The critique of dictatorship becomes linked in their work to a critique of the normative gender system. The terrorized condition of exile is turned into a critique of the governing fictions of identity, power, nationhood.
Written 1973-75, but like everthing else, it got caught up in the maelstrom of the dictatorship. Although published in BsAs 1977, several changes had to be made to get it past the censorship
Most drastic -- omission of a sort of fictional prologue called "Página Cero" (Page Zero) which graphically recounts the torture of the novel's protagonist and sets up a clear political frame for what may otherwise appear to be a psychoanalytically inspired novel about the lack underpinning desire and the fantasies of fulfilment with which human beings invest desire. The entry for Page Zero still remained in the index, however, so the discerning reader might have been able to intuit censorship and interpret the title in its latent political sense. The suppressed prologue was published in the English translation, but did not appear in Spanish until the 2001 edition of Casa de las Américas.
appeared improbably amidst the maelstrom of the newly installed military regime in Argentina
Early in her literary career, in 1969, Valenzuela won a Fulbright Commission scholarship to attend the International Writers Program in the University of Iowa, and subsequently spent time in New York, experiences which fundamentally marked her writing style, rendering it more ludic, non-linear and experimental (as seen in El gato eficaz [1972] written during this period). Travelling to Barcelona, Paris and Mexico in the 1970s, she “was reading Jacques Lacan’s theories on language and the unconscious” (Valenzuela in Díaz, Women and Power 100), reflected in the close engagement with, and parody of, Lacanian theory in Como en la guerra . Subsequent books by Valenzuela are marked by her engagement with fervent debates within feminist literary theory of the late 1970s and ’80s during her writer’s residence at Columbia University and subsequently at CUNY
The novel concerns an Argentine Professor of Semiotics in Barcelona, possibly called AZ, who seems to recognize a former acquaintance from Argentina in a possible prostitute. He decides that he must investigate the cause of her turn to prostitution and, adopting different disguises including transvestism, he visits her at 3am every night to try his hand at amateur psychoanalysis. The woman is nameless in the novel, although curiously the 2001 edition named her in the blurb on the back as Sabina. AZ discovers her graphomania, and the analysis gets confounded with occasional sexual acts. His wife, Beatriz, helps him to transcribe the recordings he makes of her conversations, and even helps with his disguises. Abruptly, the woman disappears, leaving AZ to confront his increasing entanglement with her and his fantasy projections of femininity. The novel then enters an hallucinatory world, probably an extended dream, or perhaps the delirium produced under the torture described in "Page Zero". In these sections, AZ travels first to Mexico, undertakes a Mazatec purification ritual which degrades into the counter-cultural icon of María Sabina, the Mexican medicine woman who introduced Westerners to the hallucinatory mushrooms used in the Mazatec ritual. He then travels south, through Chiapas, which is superimposed onto Misiones and Tucumán, where he meets a paradoxical group of theatrical revolutionaries who re-enact some displaced form of anthropophagism in their possible eating of a fat Western hippy woman who has brought various stereotypical New Age talismans from India to the indigenous population of the area. Finally AZ ends up in Buenos Aires, where there are queues and queues of people waiting to file past the coffin of la Santa. AZ makes his way painfully and slowly towards the sarcophagus, but gets caught up with a group of militants who want to blow up the concrete structure surrounding the sarcophagus. He agrees to take part, and under constant machine-gun fire, he manages with great difficult to insert the sticks of dynamite into the holes around the concrete building. The dynamite is finally set off, and the strucutre explodes to reveal Ella -- AZ is convinced that it is his Ella -- suspended in her crystal tomb.
This is a novel that describes itself in the original blurb as a rompecabezas, with the veiled violence which that term implies, and its male protagonist is a Professor of Semiotics who has a flirtatious interest in Jacques Lacan, and whose name (AZ) is modelled after Roland Barthes famous essay on Balzac called SZ. Being named AZ (possibly), he is clearly a subject who exists in a relation of mastery to language. But this does not mean simple mastery over language, for he is clearly also mastered by language, a point which is the subject of much irony in the novel.
Butler's short text is a speculative examination of the puzzle that Antigone represents for philosophy, psychoanalysis and feminism.
Does anyone know who Antigone is in Sophocles' version, and what her family relationship to Oedipus was?
Antigone was the result of Oedipus' incestuous union with his own mother. Her father, Oedipus, is therefore also her brother. Her sister, Ismeni, is also her aunt and her niece, and her brothers Polyneices and Eteocles are also uncles and nephews. She thus represents a radically unstable point in the structures of kinship imagined by Sophocles and Greek legend.
Antigone seems to trouble that boundary where kinship relations become fixed as symbolic structures, those symbolic structures which are, for Lacanians, not the same as social norms but are the abstract and unmoveable structures which confer cultural intellibility on conventional family and social structures and which disallow other configurations. Butler's definition of the Lacanian "Symbolic Order" is this. She locates Antigone as lying at a radical point of instability in these structures but also as a figure who lies at the limits of representability:
You may know that Antigone buries her brother Polyneices against the direct orders of the King Creon. Antigone's act is a direct challenge to the Law of Creon, but unlike the various philosopher such as Hegel, Lacan and Irigaray, who in one form or another interpret Antigone's act as the primitive sway of kinship or blood ties -- even of incestuous brotherly love -- against the social law which must demand alliegence to the father, and hence ultimately as an unsustainable social position, Butler suggests that:
Antigone is traditionally figured as anti-generative, if not degenerate, through the very etymology of her name, the anti-goni. Antigone is condemned to death by Creon, and for Butler, her public murder by being walled up, i.e. burried alive, comes to stand for the refusal to countenance forms of sociality that do not conform to the standard models by which the Oedipal drama is resolved: to what Freud calls Oedipal family romance. While not exactly setting up Antigone as a queer heroine, Butler engages the kinship trouble that surrounds Antigone, the instability of the subject positions available to her, as a way of challenging what she ultimately names as the curse of the symbolic order:
I don't want to claim that Ella, in Valenzuela's novel, is Antigone in any simple sense -- indeed, in many ways she is the reversal of Antigone, an anti-anti-gone. But like Antigone, Ella forces a crisis in representation and intelligibility at many different levels. For Ella's subject position is unstably written into the text even as she resists and confounds AZ's blundering attempts to psycho-analyse her. What AZ misses until the very end of the novel is the suppressed story of her militant past, her possible betrayal by her militant lover Alfredo Navoni -- a character familiar to readers of Cola de lagartija and Cambio de armas -- and her love/hate relationship to her twin sister and double, who we might be tempted to call Ismeni. She is ambiguously subject to the Father's Law in the form of the ambiguous father/brother/lover figure that is the revolutionary Alfredo Navoni, who has perhaps cursed her to a living death through a possible betrayal. She is a subject of dereliction in her abandonment in exile, and appears to have turned to that unstable subject/object position, both the margin and the precondition of normative patriarchal femininity, that is represented by prostitution.
So, while not quite emerged in the....
... her unstable subjectivity nevertheless poses a serious challenge to that...
Yet just as AZ thinks he has entrapped her in his analytic grid, Ella seems to slip away from his psycho-sexual classifications:
Indeed, it is actually AZ who finds his subject position radically destabilized by incestuous legacies that seem to be re-activated within his highly symbolic, fantasized relationship to her:
You will appreciate that there are complexities here which cannot be properly worked out in the 20 minutes I have for this text, so I will merely point now to some examples from the text which could go into a reading to support these destabilizing readings.
This episode occurs during “El viaje”, and takes the form of a titled inset-story, “La larga noche de los teatrantes” (166) told to AZ by one of this revolutionary group whose dead leader might or might not be (the text tells us) the famous Mexican “Che Guevara”, Lucio Cabañas.
the displacement of the totemic meal onto the body of a fat Western hippy (her predilection for eating sandwiches and processed cheese suggests her likely origin, 169), invests this unintentional or disavowed meal with a twin focus: the female body which just “disappears” during the theatrical meal, leaving no trace of its (excessive) materiality (no blood, guts or bones); and the post-colonial struggle (as seen by revolutionary groups of the 1970s in Latin America) for cultural as well as political autonomy, and which accounts for the prehistory of the brutal repressive dictatorships of the 1970s.
This is a dream, recounted by the woman to AZ during the psychoanalytical sessions, and attributed to Ella's revolutionary lover, Navoni, where “a man eats a wolf, becomes a Wolf Man, and then eats a dog and ducks” (Hicks 73). In the original Wolfman case, Freud, as is well known, initially attributed the Wolfman’s psychosis (manifested in his terrified dream of wolves waiting to eat him) to his observance of a primal scene, aged one-and-a-half, of his parents engaged in coitus a tergo (Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” 235). Further analysis led Freud to deduce a perversion of this fairly common “primal scene” via the (incestuous) seductive attentions with which the Wolfman’s older sister had regaled him when he was just over three, while she tormented him with the picture of a wolf from a picture book which would set him screaming furiously, “fearing that the wolf would come and gobble him up” (213). I thnk this points us to the role of the (twin) sister(s), Ella y su hermana, as a latent content underlying the dream of the revolutionary (if we read Navoni’s dream through Freud’s analysis), and his ultimate rejection/betrayal of the sister(s), leads us back to the suppressed political text which in fact frames the two dreams that are recounted
I can't go into any more details here, but I hope to have shown you some of the ways in which this text intervenes in the conventional gender structures established by psychoanalysis, and radically destablilizes them.
Luisa Valenzuela's novel, Cola de lagartija (published in 1983), contains an extremely powerful critique -- but also an extremely bizarre one -- of what we might call "the sexuality of fascism". Which is to say that the text passes its critique of authoritarian power politics through the grid of sexuality, aiming to reveal the sexual co-ordinates of macho power politics.
Up to a certain point, Luisa Valenzuela's novel follows the tradition of Latin American dictatorship writing in centering its account on the monstrous figure of the dictator himself. Like García Márquez's Patriarca or Roa Bastos's Supremo, the dictator holds a core fascination for the writer because he is in some ways the "author" of the destiny of so many lives. But, the dictatorships of the 1970s are actually unlike the earlier dictatorships; they are not, for the most part, power structures centred around one man whose word becomes law. They are systemic dictatorships, where power is diffused throughout a whole system of control, not centred on any one person. It is therefore fitting that Luisa Valenzuela's dictator is himself a marginal historical figure, although a megalomaniac. He represents a diffused system of power and terror -- he is a symbol of the operation of power, and of the psychoses of power. This is because Valenzuela is using her dictator figure to point to the latent or hidden psycho-sexual motivations underlying the fascist authoritarian politics of the military regime, including the psycho-sexual motivations underlying the use of gratuitious torture.
Like previous dictators in literature, Valenzuela's dictator figure is also a MONSTER, both physically and mentally. The etymology of the word monster is interesting - Latin monstrum, that which is shown (compare "de-monstrate"). The traditional function of the monster in literature is to mark the edges of the normal, by putting on show what lies beyond the norm. The monster or the freak indicates some kind of psycho-sexual boundary, and it is this monstrous, irrational, psycho-sexual edge of military authoritarianism which Valenzuela is exploring. The dictator is nicknamed El Brujo = Warlock / Wizard] throughout the novel, and he belongs to bizarre historical fact, or rather belongs to that point where history vanishes into myth, where the opposition between fact and fiction cannot easily be drawn.
Valenzuela's dictator is, then, the obscure historical figure José López Rega.
Known even back then as El Brujo due to his penchant for the occult, López Rega had played an obscure rôle in Perón's entourage in Madrid, apparently chaperoning Isabel Perón, acting as personal secretary to Perón and virtually controlling access to the old man
—. there are several anecdotal accounts of what is known or rumored about López Rega's life before joining Perón's entourage. One historian, Eduardo Crawley mentions the 740-page book he pub-lished in 1962, the year of his retirement as a police officer. Entitled Astrología esotérica.
Simpson and Bennett mention that López Rega declared one of his books to have been co-authored by the Arch-angel Gabriel, and that he escaped bankruptcy by fleeing to Brazil, where “a business partner of his introduced him to Brazilian-African magic: a variety of voodoo” (p. 62f). The references to the esoteric publications and to Brazilian-African magic are explicitly taken up in Cola de lagartija.
As Minister of Social Welfare from 1973, in charge of an extremely large budget, and with extensive police contacts, he is widely believed to have put together the murderous death squads later known as the ‘Triple A' (Alianza Anticomunista Argentina)
He was thought by many to have been instrumental in persuad-ing Perón to return to Argentina, seems to have been the organizational centre of the Peronist Right, and was almost certainly one of the planners behind a massacre of demonstrators on 20th June 1973, the day of Perón's return to Argentina.
After the death of Perón, his rôle mushroomed even further under Isabelita's administra-tion, when he was appointed the President's ‘private secretary' and chief adviser, effectively the most powerful man in the country and Isabel's ‘manager' in the campaign to turn her into another Peronist parody mimicking the image of Evita. The Peronist Left termed this period of government ‘brujovandorismo'.
From 1975 López Rega masterminded the military war against the Left, including the creation of the National Security Council which put the military in overall control of the countrywide ‘anti-subversive' operations. Mean-while, López Rega's clandestine AAA was abducting and murdering ‘leftists' at the rate of fifty per week.
All these elements, and many more, are included in the portrait of the Brujo in Cola de lagartija. However, the novel avoids tying itself down explicitly to history, elaborates freely and extensively on the material and indeed dramatizes its own relationship to history by questioning the ethical status of writing.
The Brujo is both at the centre and at the periphery; he is banished to his own remote northern kingdom (the swampy area in North West Argentina known as the Esteros) but he is nevertheless shown to be at the unacknowledged centre of an area to whose patrolled periphery he has been relegated.
The military have excluded him, yet they are dependant upon his advice, his ideas, his methods. He no longer rules, yet he touches the nerve-centre of the military raison d'être.
In this sense it is justifiable to take the libidinal complexes pres-ented in the analysis of the Brujo as representative of precisely what is supplementary to the military Process, excluded from it because it is central to it. I’ll be concentrating somewhat on the theme of the sexual supplement, because it is in the extensive ramifications of this notion of supplementarity that the most fascinating insights of the novel into the psycho-sexual roots of sadism are to be found. In fact what has been called the ‘logic of supplementarity’ pervades the thematics and even the structure of the novel.
* El Uno
* D*os
* ¿Tres?
At the level of structure, the novel is divided into three sections, enigmatically entitled ‘El Uno', ‘D*os' and ‘¿Tres?'
—. ‘El Uno' straightforwardly represents the principle of auth-ority at the heart of any dictatorial system - single authority, imposition of uniformity or oneness.
—. ‘Two' (Dos) represents the principle of dualisms and binary oppositions (Good/Evil, Soldier/Terrorist) governing the Western system of duality and binary oppositions attacked by Octavio Paz and others. In this way Two (Dos) is synonymous with ‘God' (Dios). Two represents the normative system of sexual complementarity: male/female, the traditional heterosexual belief that male complements the female and the female complements the male. Two can also be seen as generally representing the principle of symmetry ─ after all, we have two hands, two eyes, two ears, and (this is not gratuitous) men usually have two testicles (a crucial theme upon which the novel plays, as we shall see).
—. But what of the third term? Does it represent something different htat disurbs o undermines the power structures of the regime, or is it merely an extension of them, a Holy Trinity?
This, I would suggest, is why ‘¿Tres?' is hedged with question marks, for while the Brujo tries to become three in one, there is an inherent instability or supplementarity which ultimately wrecks the triangular totalitarian project (represented furthermore in the triadic Junta of the three Armed Forces). It remains to be seen how this instability is implanted and how, left to itself, it is able to carry out its secret subversive work.
The theme begins on the very opening pages of the novel, where the Brujo gives an account of his childhood, his affinity with the red fire-ants (who did not eat him but instead cloaked him with their red bodies), and his puberty during which it was discovered that instead of the usual two testicles, he had three. This is where the novel gets really bizarre!
The third testicle is called Estrella, and is described throughout as ‘she', ‘‘la reina'' (p. 14), ‘‘hermana'' (p. 24, et passim), etc. She is described at one point as menstruating (p. 25), and becomes the supreme representative for the Brujo of ‘the feminine': ‘‘Yo vengo con mujer incorporada, soy completo'' (p. 32). After a ceremony of auto-insemination and impregnation (p. 274f), the ball becomes pregnant, and this leads up to a final, climactic ‘birth' (p. 300).
I use the word ‘supplement' with the same double sense that Jacques Derrida gives it in De la grammatologie. This idea is not actually difficult, although it might sound difficult.
—. Derrida argues that a lot of Western thinking has been based on the comfortable notion of complementarity. For example, sexuality: woman and man are traditionally seen as complementing each other, forming a nice fulfilling relationship: man completes woman and woman completes man. The two together are complete, fulfilled. Derrida shows how such complementary relationships are in fact disturbed by what he calls a subversive supplementarity.
—. Think about the word supplement. We often use it, like the verb ‘supply’, to mean that which is necessary to fill up a lack, to make good what is missing:
—. for example, Vitamin supplements, or when we say, I need something which you can supply
—. But, curiously, a supplement is also something which is in excess, an optional extra. For example, we might say that something is supplementary to our needs, in excess of our needs, something unwanted or unnecessary.
—. Derrida suggests that, with these two oddly related yet contrary meanings, the supplement is evocative of a sub-versive doubleness at the very heart of rational systems of thought, yet it is a doubleness which we generally attempt to push aside so as not to upset that system.
Valenzuela seems to take on board the full implications of this ‘logic of supplementarity' in order to show what is really at stake in the conflation of violence and sexuality, cruelty and pleasure, within the nightmare that evolved out of late Peronism, and more generally at the very heart of patriarchy.
Woman, she suggests, is the subversive supplement at the heart of masculine identity posturings. The patriarchal male needs violently to control that feminine supplement which is both necessary to his identity, which he hates himself for being dependent upon, yet which he sees as an unnecessary excess which he would like to exclude, do away with, if only he could. If he could he would like only to relate to other men, but women keep getting in the way, and moreover he unfortunately needs woman in order to reproduce himself, to reproduce the patriarchal system that would like to exclude women.
In the novel, this analysis concentrates on the structure of the erotic triangle. The internal elements vary, but the triadic structure remains the same:
—. for example, one predominant structure consists on the following: the rôle of the woman, Evita (never named directly); the rôle of the other one, Isabel, or María Estela as her real name was, who came to occupy the seat of male power, being Argentina’s first ever woman president; and the rôle of Estrella, the supernumerary ball. This triad of ‘women' (Evita-Estela-Estrella) forms a structure of substitutions, one version of the ‘‘Triple E'' (p. 197) which must be interpreted as the psychotic flip-side of that other Trinity established by López Rega, the ‘Triple A'.
The triadic structure is in fact repeated with variations throughout the novel (QUOTE 8), but whichever characters are substituted as signifiers within the structure, the problem remains the same: that of ‘the feminine' disturbingly signifying both excess and lack.
To take another example: after we are told of the supernumerary testicle, we are given an account of the Brujo's first love, a girl called Seisdedos, Sixfingers, whose peculiarity was that of having a supplementary finger on each hand and an extra toe on each foot. His first experience of sexual love involves this disturbing sense of excess and lack.
The rôle of ‘the Finger' is then bizarrely extrapolated as the novel progresses. Like the Phallus in psychoanalysis, it is presented as an imaginary detachable object which confers power on the person who ‘possesses' it. However, Jacques Lacan makes it clear that in the case of the Phallus this ‘possession' is only ever a loan, for the male is only affirmed in ‘having' the Phallus by means of the desire of another: usually the desire of a woman, who, in conventional relationships, is the support for the man’s belief that he ‘has’ the Phallus, i.e., that he ‘has’ a virile, masculine identity.
This fetishizing of the finger as substitute for the Phallus is extended in the novel to Evita, since the Brujo steals the finger from her mummified corpse to use as some kind of primitive talisman allowing him to control Evita's followers and adorers. Valenzuela is here playing with Freud's theories of fetishism,
In his famous essay called ‘Fetishism', Freud argues that the male fetishist is stuck at that childhood phase in which the little boy supposedly discovers that his all-powerful mother (read here: Evita) does not have a phallus. His reaction to this discovery is not to believe it, to disavow it. He wants, against the evidence of his eyes, to go on believing in the maternal phallus, or rather cannot accept the discovery that his mother does not have the revered object, because this discovery would represent too much of a threat to his own organ. If there are some people, women, who do not have the phallus, the boy supposedly reasons, then it must be because the father has cut off, which means that he might cut the little boy’s off as well. Even in adult life, the fetishist still disavows his perception of the female genitals to ward off the potential threat of castration to himself. A fetishistic part-object, such as a shoe, a raincoat, underwear, or even a shiny nose (and here, a finger) is substituted for the missing maternal phallus, and is revered or worshiped by the fetishist.
We've only touched on the surface of these complex novels' thinking on the deep-seated relationships between gender, sexuality and the perversion of political power. But hopefully these sketches will provide a launching pad for your own readings. I'm always happy to supervise on these texts if anyone wants to take them further, with the agreement of your supervisor of course.
