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Fiona J. Mackintosh
‘New Voices from the Landscape’ at the Edinburgh International Festival. Sunday 29th August 2010.
Part of the Explorations series of talks and panel discussions, in association with the British Council: http://www.eif.co.uk/explorations/landscape
[The panel discussed contemporary literature and theatre in Latin America. The following comments formed part of a longer presentation given by Dr Fiona J. Mackintosh, in which other writers were discussed)
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One of the contemporary women writers who throughout her long career has consistently and unflinchingly probed Argentina's troubled political life is Luisa Valenzuela. She has, in the majority of her novels and short stories, engaged with Argentinian politics, and she invariably does it from a specifically gendered point of view. I'll give a brief overview of some of her key works, commenting on how they present Argentinian society.
‘Aquí pasan cosas raras’ (1975) – ‘Strange Things Happen Here’ (1979). Short stories which in their black humour and absurdity give a distorted parallel of the topsy turvy society at the end of Isabelita's rule.
‘Libro que no muerde’ (1980) – ‘Book Which Doesn't Bite’. This title is clearly ironic. The short prose pieces in it pack a punch, attacking the complicity and denial of those who during the dirty war said 'aquí no ha pasado nada', nothing has happened here.
They also pack an anti-machista punch. There's one story in particular which attacks machismo through humour. In 'Ni el más aterrador ni el menos memorable' (Neither the most terrifying nor the least memorable) the well-worn metaphor of the human body as a continent to be explored is used, but instead of it being the woman's body, as is traditional in poets from John Donne (who describes his mistress in ‘Elegy XIX: To his Mistress Going to Bed’ as 'my America! my new-found land') to Pablo Neruda (for whom the woman's body in the first of his ‘20 Love poems’ is white hills in which the poet goes excavating), here it is the man's body which becomes territory ripe for exploration. The female narrator, his girlfriend, buys a tourist guide to his body, and she enjoys the attraction of his newly acquired obelisk! [El Obelisco is one of the main icons of Buenos Aires, built in 1936 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the first founding of the city. It is located in the Plaza de la República and is nearly 70 metres high.] The narrator goes on to make tongue-in-cheek comments about frequent power cuts in 'the city', i.e. the boyfriend's body, thereby humorously deflating machista obsessions with phallic potency.
‘Cambio de armas’(1982) – ‘Other Weapons’ (1985). Here gender and Argentinian politics go very uneasily hand in hand. The last, and most famous, of this collection of short stories, 'Other weapons', revolves around the relationship between a torturer during the dirty war, and one of his prisoners. She is a woman called Laura who is suffering from amnesia and is being confined to a room by this man who claims to be her husband yet who is sporadically sadistic in his behaviour towards her. The story explores female desire and expression interwoven with sexual and political violence, and ends with Laura recovering her memory and pointing her captor's gun at his head.In this story Valenzuela makes clear connections between autonomy and control in the private sphere and in the public, political domain.
‘Cola de lagartija’ (1983) – ‘The Lizard's Tail’. This fantasy novel bases its characters on political figures from the time of Isabelita Perón's regime, in particular her minister for social wellbeing, José López Rega, known popularly as 'El brujo'. In the tradition of great dictatorship novels like García Márquez's ‘Autumn of the Patriarch’ or Roa Bastos' ‘I the Supreme’, The Lizard's Tail turns 'El brujo' into a power-crazed messianic figure in order to ridicule him.
‘Novela negra con argentinos’ (1990) – ‘Black Novel with Argentines’ (1992)
‘Realidad nacional desde la cama’ (1990) – ‘Bedside Manners’ (1995).
These two novels deal with a period of Argentinian history when Argentina was suffering rampant inflation and both, in very different ways, look at feelings of guilt about what has happened in Argentina from the perspective of those not actively involved. One of the characters in Black Novel says 'I'm Argentinian. Pay attention to these phrases so typical of us: Nothing has happened here, or, They must have done something to deserve it.' and later he says 'We're all responsible. […]It's a city built on corpses, a country of disappeared people.'
‘Simetrías’ (1993) – ‘Symmetries’ (1998)
Valenzuela reveals her penchant for rewriting fairytales as a way of attacking traditional machismo. Her cuentos de hadas become cuentos de hades (which Margaret Jull Costa, in a stroke of translatorly genius mirrors in the word 'Firytales'), in which Princes are scared of waking up princesses with kisses because the princesses get too excited and sexually voracious, Little Red Riding Hood enjoys getting into bed with the wolf, and the sister who spits toads and frogs becomes a writer whose words tell the truth and tell it straight. Her re-writing of the tale of 'Bluebeard's Castle' is given a political slant, praising the virtue of curiosity that allowed Bluebeard's last wife to escape her fate, and connecting this desire to find out the truth with the persistent efforts of the 'Madres' of the Plaza de Mayo, searching for the truth about the disappearances. The story comes at the end of the volume and is dedicated to 'Renée Epelbaum and the other Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.'
A short story published by Valenzuela in 1999 shows her playful relationship to the patriarchal literary tradition of Argentina. 1999 was the centenary year of Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina's most famous writer, and as part of a collection of short stories by various younger writers in homage to him, Valenzuela wrote 'The Other Book'. This story parodies Borges' characteristic bookish style, and invents a book written by a woman which undermines Borges' apparent originality by predating all of his most famous stories. So, in this 'other book', there are titles such as 'The Alpha' (JLB 'The Aleph'), 'The sect of Medusa' (JLB 'The sect of the phoenix'), and 'Petra Minardi, author of the Sylvains' (JLB 'Pierre Menard, author of the Quijote'). With this playful parodic homage, Valenzuela clearly demonstrates that she is not suffering from any overburdening anxiety of influence.
‘Peligrosas palabras’ (2001) – ‘Dangerous Words’. In this book of essays, Valenzuela explores women's creativity and argues that women don't have a particular 'feminine' way of writing, but that they should operate a 'radical change in the electric charge of words'.
‘Brevs’ (2004) – ‘Shorts’ includes some humorous anti-machista sketches, such as 'Visión de reojo' (Sideways glance) in which a woman, subjected to groping by a man on the bus, decides to grope him back and steals his wallet into the bargain. Or 'M'apretjan', where a woman writing on a crowded NY subway train finds a man standing with his groin provocatively in her face, and in response, she draws a censorious red line on his white trousers. Or 'La cosa', 'The thing', in which sex is described with heavy irony in grammatical terms of subject and object. 'He, who we shall call the subject, and the present writer (belonging to the female sex) who we shall naturally call the object, met one night and that was how the thing began.' 'The object immediately took the unobjectionable attitude which is wrongly called passive which is in fact the most active and receptive. Subject and object slide into each other.'
‘El Mañana’ (2010) – ‘The Future’
Valenzuela's latest novel, only launched earlier this year, is right up to date in its portrayal of post-crisis Argentinian society. The main protagonist is a woman writer, who along with a group of other women writers was mysteriously put under house arrest after a conference they were all having on women's writing. Wondering if any of her fellow writers will have buckled under the pressure of the 'imposed norms' and switched to writing 'insipid novels based around recipes, magical worlds, sickly sweet romance, exuberant tropicality or old histories about lovers of Great Men', she defiantly asserts 'Not me. I've always written like a speleologist, burrowing into caves'. In her view, doubt and uncertainty are more important than being right, good novels should be read between the lines, and words are weapons. This woman escapes from house arrest and finds refuge in a shanty town inhabited by 'cartoneros', the underdogs of contemporary society who scrape a living by foraging for cardboad and plastic to recycle. Valenzuela makes this group pivotal to the novel, and connects the mysterious suppression of the women writers to larger and more sinister forces of repression still at work in contemporary Argentinian society. In this way, she ties together many of the themes which have been present throughout her work - denouncing repression, scrutinizing the political and social fabric of Argentinian society, and speculating on whether women have a particular role to play in combatting oppressive structures.
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