Politics of the body in Luisa Valenzuela's «Cambio de armas» and «Simetrías»

Gwendolyn Díaz

At the heart of Luisa Valenzuela's narrative is a deep preoccupation with the use of power, the abuse of power, and the structures of domination which permeate the most basic aspects of our existence. These structures of domination are based on the struggle implied in the idea of politics. What is meant here by politics is the competition between diverse interest groups for power, leadership, and the allocation of value. These structures of domination surface in the politics of the body, the politics of sexuality, the politics of language, and the politics of the state, particularly the authoritarian state. The narrative of Luisa Valenzuela skillfully portrays the interdependence between each of these levels of political exchange and underscores the serious problems embedded in structures of domination and their repercussion from one level of our existence into others.

Valenzuela's two stories «Cambio de armas» (1982) and «Simetrías» (1993) explore the relationship between body, language, and power, as well as the coercive structures that privilege one gender, social order, or political view over another. Both of the stories, which deal with the plight of female torture victims, take place in Argentina during the period of military dictatorship called the «Dirty War» (1976-83), a period that was euphemistically referred to by the government as the «Proceso de reorganización nacional» (Process of National Reorganization). At this time all civil rights were suspended, and the military dictatorship had free rein to seize anyone suspected of being a subversive. This period of extreme military repression began with the coup of General Jorge Videla, whose main target was the urban guerrillas and leftist organizations responsible for terrorism. However, of the estimated six thousand to twenty thousand desaparecidos or «disappeared» victims, relatively few were actually terrorists (Lewis, 449).

In these two stories the author not only analyzes the repression, subjugation, and violence exerted by the totalitarian regime on its victims, but also shows that this same repression is embedded in the culture through its perceptions of body and gender differences, as well as evident in the language which structures the social order. Therefore, parallel to the study of the literature, this analysis reviews an evolution of the concept of dominance and subjugation that underlies human relations and is reflected in fiction. In doing so, it briefly focuses on common denominators in the views of G. W. F. Hegel, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault, who offer valuable insight into the psychological, social, and political variables that structure society according to a system of power relationships. Hegel shapes his view of human relations in terms of the master-and-slave dichotomy explained in his Phenomenology of the Mind (217-27). The master/slave dialectic suggests that a subject is only conscious of itself when it has before it another consciousness. At this time it comes outside itself and finds itself in the other being. What it wants is the recognition of the other. The two subjects then must prove themselves in what Hegel calls a struggle for life and death in which they risk their life to obtain freedom in the form of the truth of their own being. The outcome of this struggle results in a subject that exists for itself, the master, and a subject that is dependent on the other, the slave.

Lacan, who studied Hegel, views the master/slave dialectic as a rationale for the way in which subjects constitute their gender identity. His reading of the dialectic places the emphasis on desire not so much for recognition, but desire for that which is lacking, which he calls the «object a» or missing object («Desire», 15-16). What is crucial in Lacan's account of the formation of sexuality is that woman is construed as the one who is lacking. The most obvious lack is that of the male organ (as pointed out by Freud). Lacan explains that what the organ represents is the abstract concept of phallus, which he defines as language, authority, and power. Hence, he suggests, society is structured around a valorization of male discourse as represented in the association between possessing the phallus, possessing the word, and possessing the authority. Hegel's master/slave dialectic and Lacan's theory of the formation of sexuality vis-a-vis the phallus reflect a patriarchal view of society based on dominance and subordination. Woman is viewed as the other of man and as such is perceived (by man) as mystery, lack, and loss. In Hegelian terms, the man is positioned as the master who sees in the other a means of defining himself and his superior value. The woman, on the other hand, is positioned as the slave whose identity is dependent on that of the master and his desires. Lacan's sexual metaphor for the distribution of power within society has been taken to task by feminists such as Irigaray and Kristeva, who have critiqued his thought as implicated in the phallocentric system it describes. Others, such as Rose and Mitchell, have seen Lacan's theories not as a reflection of male supremacy, but as an exposition of the arbitrary nature of both male and female sexual identity¹.

Whereas Lacan puts emphasis on the power of language to mold and affect our psyche and social relations, Michel Foucault focuses more literally on the body itself, developing a historical account of how the human body has been molded, manipulated, and conceptualized as the site in which power and knowledge exert their control. Lacan's metaphorical reading of the power relations implied in sexual difference takes on a physical and carnal emphasis in Foucault's History of Sexuality. «Sexual relations -always conceived in terms of the model act of penetration, assuming a polarity that opposed activity and passivity- were seen as being of the same type as the relationship between a superior and a subordinate, an individual who dominates and one who is dominated, one who commands and one who complies, one who vanquishes and one who is vanquished» (215). Since sexual relations were seen as social rivalries, the active role was valorized over the passive one because of its capacity of dominating, penetrating, and asserting itself.

One of the merits of Valenzuela's narrative is that she is able to create a fictional world which weaves together all these structures of domination to create a pattern that reflects the complex dynamics of an existence based on oppression. In her story «Cambio de armas» it becomes evident that authoritarian regimes are a reflection of the sexual and social organization of the culture. The story is constructed as a series of episodes each headed by a title that puts emphasis on a significant object or issue. The fragmented nature of the structure reflect the fragmented nature of the psyche of the protagonist, who has lost her memory and perceives reality only as she experiences it in the present. To her the past is a gap, a deep dark well of forgetfulness which she has repressed in her unconscious. What she has repressed is the fact that she has been apprehended by the colonel she had attempted to kill and that he has become her torturer as well as the abusive lover who uses her as a sexual slave. In the process she has lost her identity, and the colonel, who is called Héctor and later Roque, is reconstructing her identity in terms of what he wants her to be. He has called her Laura and has placed a photograph in the apartment where she is imprisoned, in which she appears in a wedding dress with an absent expression while he stands next to her looking triumphant. Her lack of identity is mirrored in the fact that the man who is supposed to be her husband could be any man to her; she calls him by many different names, not knowing for sure who he really is. This signals the fact that this specific colonel is important not as an individual but as a type, a dominating force, implied in the name with which he signs the wedding photo, Roque (hard like a rock).

The section called «The Mirrors» is a key to understanding the dynamics of the relationship between the torturer and his victim. He and the woman are in bed in a room where the walls and ceiling are covered with mirrors. Her reflection in the mirrors comes back to her «inverted and distant» (114); that is to say, she does not recognize herself as the sexual slave he has made of her. The scene is reminiscent of Lacan's mirror stage, in which the subject constitutes her image of herself as a whole being (Écrits, 4). By seeing herself inverted, the protagonist understands subconsciously that her true self is not the one which she is experiencing in that bed. However, the colonel has chosen precisely the bed as the place to build her identity according to his view. When she closes her eyes, he orders her to open them and commands her to look at what he is about to do. He touches her body as if drawing her piece by piece, first a leg, then a knee, then a thigh. This action, rather than erotic, implies Roque's perception of her as an object, as a series of body parts defined by him.

The episode brings to mind Hegel's view of the master, who sees the slave as merely another consciousness through which he can validate his superiority. In Lacanian words, man defines woman in terms of his own desire. When the woman once again closes her eyes, the colonel yells at her, calling her a «whore» and ordering her to open her eyes (115). It becomes evident that what he wants is for her to accept his definition of her, to see herself through his eyes, as a mere sex object, a whore. The woman seems to recall another order, her head being kicked in, her arm twisted, a voice commanding her to speak up, to sing, to give the names. This brief flashback is a confused memory of the period in which she was tortured and ordered to confess the names of her accomplices. When she yells «No», her scream is so loud that it «seems to shatter the mirror on the ceiling, that multiplies and maims and destroys his image, almost like a bullet shot» (115). This image recalls her own attempt to kill this colonel and challenge the military regime. In a similar fashion the image shows her desire to confront this man who has humiliated her. The «No» she emits underscores the fact that she has neither confessed the names of her accomplices nor accepted his perception of her as a sex object. Here, as throughout the story, the parallels between structures of domination in the realm of sexuality and those in the realms of language and of politics become intertwined.

In the episode called «The Colleagues» the woman is visited in her apartment by two military colleagues of the colonel. They question her as to her memories, and she realizes she is being interrogated. She is asked about her place of origin, which is Tucumán (a province where guerrilla activity was prominent), about her recollection of a particular bombing, about her health and her back problems (she has a severe scar on her back). Realizing that she has no memories, she feels completely empty, void of identity, and wants to vomit. The colonel stares at her, pleased with his work (119). The scene is a grotesque example of the concept of woman as lack. As in Hegel, the master triumphs over the slave, sublates his identity, and projects his own onto the slave. We encounter also the Lacanian idea of woman as lack and void. In Encore Lacan develops the theory that «the woman» does not exist, for the essence of woman cannot be defined except by her lack (69). Again, the cultural image of woman unfolds into the political realm, where the colonel attempts to fill this void which is woman with his own perception of her denigrated status and sexual servility. Nevertheless, the falsity of this assumption is reflected in the falsity of the environment of the apartment. In the apartment that serves as her prison everything is fictitious: a window that does not open, keys that do not work, a wedding photograph she does not recognize, the presence of One and Two (the bodyguards of the colonel), the medications she is forced to take -all this belies the false nature of this construed reality and underscores the falsity of social constructs of gender.

The section titled «The Peephole» reflects how the subject is created through the gaze of others. The colonel possesses the woman in the living room after having opened the peephole in the door to allow his colleagues to watch. He exposes her for all to see in a humiliating and violent act that places her in the position of sexual slave and himself in that of master. What is significant about this scene is that here the colonel flaunts himself in front of the public eye of the peephole. He faces the peephole (and the myriad onlookers it connotes) to «point toward it with his proud erection» (125). By so doing, he is asking to be recognized by the public as a sexual power, a dominant master with the force of a beast. He construes his identity in terms of his dominance and her subjugation. He needs the gaze of others, whose recognition will authenticate the presumed nature of his selfhood.

Hegel's thoughts on the subject's search for recognition of himself in the other and Lacan's views of the gaze of others as constituting the subject's identity (The Four, 74-77) come together in this denigrating episode, where both characters have been lowered to the status of animals, one by force and the other by choice. She feels like «an ambushed animal», and he roars and paces the room in a state of excitement. The twisted nature of this scene is reflected in the animal imagery used to describe the situation. She is referred to as a «bitch» while he «bellows» and «roars» like a «caged animal displaying the strength of his dissatisfaction» (126-27). This debasing ritual brings to mind Lacan's analysis of the dynamics of sexual politics: «For the soul to come into being, she, the woman, is differentiated from it [...] called woman and defamed» (Encore, 69). Man, hence, equates himself with the soul and denigrates woman, his other, by relegating her to the merely carnal (Encore, 69).

In «Cambio de armas» the issue of torture is rationalized in terms of a sick patient who needs treatment. The protagonist is referred to as a sick person recovering from an illness and taking medication for both physical and mental ailments. Foucault shows that the illness metaphor has traditionally been used as a way of justifying torture. It is metaphorized as a way of «treating» a criminal viewed as «sick», a «patient» in need of a «cure» (because the act of defiance is considered abnormal or unnatural; Discipline, 22). The metaphor of the sick body was also used by the Argentine military, whose authoritarian discourse described the political situation in terms of a nation whose body was «sick» and in need of radical «surgery» to extirpate the diseased parts. The metaphor was used as a rationale in order to justify the extreme measures to which they resorted in the process of «curing» the «infirm» body. The violence to bodies and identities was explained as a necessary means of healing the nation².

In the denouement the colonel learns that he must leave the country, and he wants to tell his victim who he is and who she is so that his victory and revenge will be fulfilled. He tells her that he has broken her as one breaks a horse, that he has taken her apart piece by piece and put her back together again, rebuilding her to suit his whim (134). He shows her the weapon which was taken from her and tells her that he has weapons too, referring to the sexual torture. Once more we see the idea of woman as a tabula rasa to be molded by the male signifier. The association between the phallus and the weapon indicates the superimposition of sexual domination and political authoritarianism. The story comes to a stop when the woman picks up the revolver and aims at the man's back. The lack of a final resolution (does she or doesn't she shoot?) is a question mark that leads the reader to think further about the structure of dominance. If she shoots him then she too would be resorting to violence and aggression. If she does not, then she falls into the role of passive victim lacking in power and will. The question mark with which the story ends is an incitement to the reader to reconsider the structures that underlie the politics of relationships.

«Simetrías», the title story in Valenzuela's most recent collection of short fiction (1993), deals even more poignantly with the issue of torture during the «Dirty War». In a recent interview she says that this story is the book's piece de resistance and that she weaves into it many incidents of female torture which were later revealed as having occurred during the repression. She adds that «Simetrías» serves as the other side of the coin, the symmetrical counterpart to «Cambio de armas»³. «Simetrías» shares several parallels with the previous story. The protagonist is a female torture victim whose torturer has taken a fancy to her, set her aside for himself, and begun to focus obsessively on her. Also, the character of Héctor Bravo, who has surfaced before in Valenzuela's work (as a doctor and torturer in Novela negra con argentinos) and is referred to in «Cambio de armas» (where the torturer's name is Héctor before he changes it to Roque), serves in «Simetrías» as the narrator. Both stories develop the idea that sexual aggression is mirrored in political aggression, that torture is an extreme and perverted form of domination, and that the memory of the horror must be preserved in order to avoid its recurrence. Other parallels are the development of animal imagery to illustrate bestial tendencies and the recurrence of the military as perpetrator of sadistic acts.

«Simetrías» is structured as a series of monologues that alternate between the torturer and his victim and are strung together by means of the viewpoint of the narrator, Héctor Bravo, who relates the similarities between incidents that took place in 1947 and those taking place in 1977. The narrative set in 1947 (at the time of Perón's first presidency) focuses on a relationship between a woman who goes to the Buenos Aires zoo and an orangutan caged in that same zoo. Little by little, the woman and the orangutan become fascinated with each other. The orangutan takes on human characteristics and is said to have fallen in love with the woman, who in turn loses her composure and becomes animal-like. The woman's husband is a colonel who realizes he has been cuckolded by an animal and takes out his revolver to shoot the beast. Thirty years later, in 1977, during the height of the military repression in Argentina, another colonel tortures his female prisoner (a captured subversive) on the metal table of the dark, dank quarters of a hidden detention center, close to the Buenos Aires zoo. He has become obsessed with this particular woman and takes sadistic pleasure in torturing her by day and escorting her out on the town at night. An elaborate complex of associations is developed among these four figures: the female prisoner, the orangutan, the torturer, and the woman in the zoo. The torturer's obsession with the prisoner is mirrored in the obsession between the woman in the zoo and the caged orangutan.

The story reveals the sick relationship that forms between the torturer and his victim, while allowing the reader to witness the thoughts of both as exposed in the monologues. The discourse of the torturers reflects their belief in the fact that they possess the right to break these women in order to punish them for having dared to subvert the authority of the state. «Gloriosamente es como nosotros las matamos, por la gloria y el honor de la patria» (Gloriously is how we kill them, for the glory and honor of our fatherland [177]). Andrés Avellaneda's book on authoritarianism and culture presents a well-developed analysis of the discourse of the authoritarian regime in the specific case of Argentina in the years 1960-83. He explains that the discourse centered on establishing the government as the legitimate savior of the nation and its people, and to do so it developed a manipulative discourse that focused on upholding morals, sexual customs, religion, and national security (19-22). The female subversives were seen as particularly offensive because they dared to subvert not only the political order but also the sexual order; hence the sexual emphasis on female torture: «Las mujeres que están en nuestro poder [...] han perdido sus nombres [...] y saben dejarse atravesar porque nos hemos encargado de ablandarlas» (The women in our power [...] have lost their names [...] they know how to let themselves be penetrated because we have taken charge of softening them [174]). The concept of «penetration» is later associated with that of the «word», which is seen as penetrating like a «bullet» (174). The phallus as signifier inscribes in the woman the structure of domination implicit in the patriarchal symbolic order and reflected in the association between the word, the phallus, and the bullet.

The tortured women have had their names and their senses stripped away from them. They are described as not being able to see (a reference to the blindfolds put on them when they were being tortured), as having an absent look in their eyes, as being mute or as having nothing but a «fine thread of a voice» left (175). These broken women are seen as empty receptacles for the inscribing power of the torturers. «Les metemos cosas muchas veces más tremendas que las nuestras porque esas cosas son también una prolongación de nosotros mismos y porque ellas son nuestras. Las mujeres» (We stick things in them that are many times more tremendous than ours because those things are also an extension of our very own selves and because they are ours. The women [176]). After stripping the women of their identity, the torturers literally «fill» them with new meaning, the meaning of terror and violence embedded in the structure they attempted to subvert. Foucault's comments on torture as a mechanism of inscribing the parameters of power show that, historically, the torture victim had to have his punishment «inscribed» on his body so that it would be «legible to all», making the guilty person the «herald of his own condemnation» (Discipline, 42). The victim walked through the streets in a procession wearing a placard that stated his or her crime as a way of «publishing» that crime (43). The linguistic metaphor illustrates the association between the body and a page on which the ruler publishes his own order. This underscores Lacan's perception that the phallic order structures society as well as Hegel's perception that human relations are based on dominance and subjugation. It also gives insight into the sexual nature of torture, in that the woman's act of subversion is considered a threat not only to the political structure but to the patriarchal organization of society as well.

In Valenzuela's story the crime of the victims is published through the grotesque charade of taking them out to dinner at night. The monologues of the women relate that the torturers dress them up in beautiful clothes, being careful to hide their scars, and take them out to eat. However, they can hardly taste the food because their dresses press so painfully on their thorax, and the torturers soon reinstitute them into the horror and make them vomit what they have eaten (173). Later one learns that these women have been taken out to show that the torturers have a power that is even more absolute and incontestable than the power of humiliation and punishment (179). That greater power is the power to break the human spirit and make a public display of it.

However, the torturers do not always succeed. In this story, as in «Cambio de armas», they have failed to extract a confession from their victims. As Foucault points out, one of the aims of torture is to force a confession from the criminal in order to make him acknowledge the established order as «true» as well as provide knowledge of accomplices (35-40). The issue of confession is a crucial one in both stories, because the female victims have refused to confess anything at all to the torturers. The fact that the prisoners neither confess nor give up the names of any accomplices denotes, in a sense, their triumph and the failure of the torturers to extract any useful admissions or information.

The animal imagery alluded to in «Cambio de armas» is developed more fully in «Simetrías». Here the author develops a contrast between the human who is more savage than the beast and the beast that is more humane than the human. Héctor Bravo is obsessed with two occurrences: one is the sadistic relationship between the colonel and his prisoner; the other is the sexual attraction he witnesses earlier between the woman in the zoo and the orangutan. Bravo superimposes these two occurrences and often confuses them. During one of the woman's visits with the orangutan, they stare at each other through the bars of the cage and the once simple and comical animal is no longer the same; he looks at her with the eyes of a human in love (178). She, on the other hand, has become tattered and alienated, with the air of someone who lives in the jungle (181).

The second focal point of Bravo's obsession is the relationship between the colonel and his captive. The colonel, whose actions toward his victim are extremely savage, becomes so fascinated with her that he thinks he has fallen in love with her. He is no longer torturing her for the sake of the nation but realizes in her a sadistic passion that he construes as love. In a sense, his feelings for her seem to have softened him. When his superiors realize this, they send him away to Europe so that they can kill the woman. Conversely, his prisoner is described in terms of an animal. The colonel has ordered an expensive necklace for her, a tight choker that looks a bit like a dog collar, and a snakeskin belt he fancies as a leash with which he could walk her all over the world (183). The association between the caged orangutan and the captive woman reaches its peak in a grotesque scene in which the victim is being tortured with an electric cattle prod; in the same sentence her spasms are compared to the jerky movements of the orangutan who expresses his attraction for the woman in the zoo (181). The orangutan couple act as a parody of the other couple, reflecting the perverted nature of each relationship.

In the final lines of the story the two time periods appear to have become one and the same in the mind of Héctor Bravo. The bullet that kills the orangutan and the one that kills the torture victim also seem to be one and the same (187). The story ends by relating that when the two lovers return to the site of their desire, the woman to the zoo and the colonel from Europe, they find their respective cages empty and are stricken by terror and hate (187). Of the other two, the prisoner and the orangutan, we learn that they both die as a result of being loved too much.

Two hypotheses come to mind regarding the symmetries implied in this tale. First, in the symmetry reflected in the juxtaposition of the two couples we see that the zoo woman's desire for the orangutan has humanized the beast and that the beast's desire for her has animalized her. Similarly, the bestial colonel seems to acquire something akin to what he construes as the human ability to love, while the prisoner (who never does acknowledge him) is given animal characteristics attributed to her by the colonel. Each lover has become caged into the relationship. Each is trapped in his or her own desire for the other. These two examples suggest the Lacanian notion that the subject is trapped by the structure of its desire. They also show that people are the victims of their own passions as well as of the passions of others.

The second symmetry is that of the historical times. In 1947 Juan Perón had been president for a year. During that time, the police-state instruments which had been developed earlier (control of political activity by the police, almost unlimited power to search and detain, the use of torture) were all institutionalized (Weisman, 89). In 1997 the repressive mechanisms of the government ballooned into what became a war against its own citizens; hence the name «Dirty War». History came full circle, repeating the violence and oppression embedded in the system. As suggested in a passage that equates the screams of the torture victims with those of archaic wounded animals in the depths of Paleolithic cavern (182), the story shows that violence and domination have existed for ages and that they continue to surface in a world which exists under the illusion of being civilized.

Valenzuela does not offer any facile solutions to the recurring incidents of the abuse of power. What she does is effectively expose the acts of terror and the mechanisms of dominance and subjugation that permeate our sexual relationships and overlap into our sociolinguistic and political structures. The reader is challenged to give thought to these dilemmas and to take consciousness of the paradigms that mold our world and structure our psyche. Neither Hegel's master-and-slave dichotomy, nor Lacan's phallic order, nor Foucault's politics of the body reflects constructive paradigms. The challenge to all of us is not only to denounce these systems, as Valenzuela does, but also to actively deconstruct them in order to reconstruct a more humane way of relating to one another.

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