[In the following essay, Fores examines diverse ways language, or the word, performs in Cat-O-Nine-Deaths.]

The importance of Cat-O-Nine-Deaths (El gato eficaz) does not rely on setting, theme, or even characters, but on the function of the word, the process that man imposes on language as a communicant. The protagonist of the future is the word; it is the only character that counts in all reality: "I am a trap made of paper and mere printed letters."

The novel itself has no plot. If fragments of a story of a mysterious dark love, or segments of a cripple bitterly descending "a cement stairway" could be called a plot, then there is one. Also, unlike most traditional novels, Valenzuela's includes no characters in Cat-O-Nine-Deaths. The protagonist, who at times is a woman, changes always, in a metamorphosis where becoming male is just another phase. The only constancy in this character is that she/he has no constancy. This character/non-character we follow through the mechanical staircases, the mechanized escalators. Margo Glantz, in a Mexican literary newsletter, Bellas Artes, explains this elusive writer:

Maybe one of the keys to Luisa Valenzuela's narrative is not in the difficulty of naming reality but in the impossibility of giing things their true name. As if anything were truth in a reality which in itself is imperfect, always on the eve of destruction and captured from the outside like something ready to explode.

Only in her narrative voice do we see stability. The voice (the writing—the language—which is the body, a body we are never sure of) is the only being which pursues us, even though, in itself, it also changes into different phases of being.

This novel, filled with a terrorizing surrealism for its readers, is sublime in its unconscious discourse. Valenzuela demonstrates with ferocious ability an automatic and incoherent writing, which simultaneously evokes a poetic lyricism and magic all its own. Cat-O-Nine-Deaths is a novel which "takes root at the point where eroticism and death find each other." Valenzuela joins the two with an ability which becomes extremely organized, yet at the same time is poetic and intuitive. This seems to be a paradox. The "montage" which she perfects with language, with the word, becomes obvious upon reading the book. This perfect structural solidity opens doors to other worlds; what makes her most enthusiastic is finding those words, that language, which shocks the audience but at the same time makes that audience think. These hypotheses are exposed in Cat-O-Nine-Deaths.

In this novel, Valenzuela uses a variety of methods and their contradictions. Sections which are filled with the most profound thoughts have no punctuation whatsoever:

I do not want to have fornicons on my face or pimp(el)s on my ass or anything that would bother the free flowing of my beauty I want to ame lions I want to have a scalpel at hand so I can cut my tongue each day I want and I want and I want not to belong to anything ecause belonging erases all possibility of revolution w hi ch is the onyl pruth in man in man and in woman too….

She mixes both—the form with the idea—to give us a fusion of life where the only recognizable truth is eternal chaos. She also joins words together, and invents others; she floods our minds with constant repetitions, and writes each word as if it were an unconscious flow, a being without any form or structure, absolute order without logical synthesis.

Valenzuela not only plays with language, but she also transposes sensations. The senses become interchangeable, until we do not know consciously what is occurring. The novel, to be read as well as to have been written, has to ensnare intuition so that it works in spite of the illogicity of language. This novel cannot be read on a superficial, analytical level; we, as readers, must intuit it: "My musical ear will compose symphonies of flatulences and will arrange the cackling of our empty guts. My acute aesthetic vision will discover the sweet greenish blush of those beings that show their ribs."

The writer, now speaking as a male, consciously voices ideas which are completely revealing; she does not realize she is exposing her authorial self. Language speaks through her, and the outlet of that unconscious flow becomes art itself.

As [Erich] Neumann writes in his book, Art and the Creative Unconscious:

The creative individual seems to enjoy such prestige partly because he exemplifies the utmost transformation possible in our time, but above all because the world he creates is an adequate image of the primordial one reality, not yet split by consciousness—a reality that only a personality creating from out of its wholeness is able to create.

That is why, when Valenzuela wrote this work, she could not impose a specific structure. The methodology intuitively formed itself. Because a traditional novel cannot be written with such rigidity, Valenzuela, like many of her colleagues today, has preferred using the method of the New Novel, or the antinovel. This form includes everything; it has no limits; its openness enhances the liberty of the writer, and the word itself.

In Cat-O-Nine-Deaths, there are no sexes and all sexes; the woman is not so much a woman, and the man is not a real man. Neither are we so superior, like the hermaphrodites, that we are gods and not animals. We always believe that we belong to that higher spiritual abode where the gods reside and we forget that, in part, we are also bestial. What we have to remember is that in everything we are sublime, whether we are, in essence, a god or a toad. "Frogs are singing, I am singing." Valenzuela, through her ambiguous use of sexuality, establishes a sexual vacuum, eliminating the confusion which genders create. Throughout all the changes, however, the protagonist always returns to the feminine: does that mean, then, that Valenzuela believes woman is superior to man? "This is my confession and also my legacy: future generations will know to what point I approached him to destroy him, how I schemed in elevators to take his soul and to engrave my seal in the depths of his flesh, so that I could retire, dignified, leaving him at the mercy of my fire."

The voice in Cat-O-Nine-Deaths is constantly changing. At times, the narrative "I" becomes the undisguised author, Luisa Valenzuela. This narrative voice forms a type of confessional: "I am not writing a novel, but actually only noting with the little life that's left me this major prose which is my testament." Like the protagonist who undergoes various metamorphoses—from woman to cat to tarantula to man/god ("I am a young Apollonian athlete")—language, in its stability, bores her. Because of this, Valenzuela constantly includes stylistic changes throughout Cat-O-Nine-Deaths. At times, we see a narcissistic protagonist: "all of myself a cat's paw, a lickable cushion, a bit in love with myself because I am so easygoing … I ask myself what compels me—me, so beautiful—to be an accomplice to a cat of death…." We also see her loving life; even though she may see it as complete chaos, she still celebrates what she encounters: "For a short time I integrate, I sway with his rhythm, let myself be trapped by his self-deception. Most of all when he makes his music, when he becomes the music and his teeth chatter." The only constancy in this vision is that everything that the protagonist feels changes, like everything in life. All appearance is illusory; change is the sole factor which has a static possibility in the reality of being. What, then, is man? "Few recognize that sweet purring of anguish when we don't know where we're going, who we are, or from where we come."

Because she doubts that the true reality of man is a changeless human nature, Valenzuela enjoys manipulating mythology in her writing. In part, she uses it as a joke; everything, in its finality, can be explained through a game with language. She changes one letter for another; Prometheus then becomes Trometheus: "I go about the world spreading the message of the game, just like Trometheus. Flame, game, that is how I am occupying myself with one letter even to its form and I half cut it from an upward path."

Just as the gods were said by Plato to have divided androgynous man in half to punish him, Valenzuela also breaks words in two, or changes them in some way:

      This is the enduring   Here, I want
          breath             the imperious drum
      that has no                     to sound
          beginning                 in time
      that reaches                   with the brush beats
       into eternity        (The drum that makes a racket)
                          (The cymbals at the same time)
 
                    Gloria in excelsis Deo
                    Gloria inexcelsisdeo
                    Gloria in
                   Gloria inexcelsis
                       Deo

In this, she becomes the creator, the perfect player. In this, also, she is rising to the heights of the gods. What an absurd game mythology becomes, then, in any human invention which parallels man to god!

We also see an echo of the myth about Orpheus and Euridyce, but Valenzuela manipulates its meaning to suit her ideas about the use of language. Instead of wanting to leave the subterranean world, the protagonist desires to enter its gates, even though she cannot. In Cat-O-Nine-Deaths, it is she—not he (the cripple who supposedly parallels Orpheus)—who cannot enter the infernal depths: "I saw his grimace as I turned around. In his pain and in his effort was his triumph: I had chosen the easy path that takes you nowhere, maybe to a subterranean train with glances." What she wants to reach is an infernal life, instead of the life we know in today's world. Does Valenzuela then want to tell us something about this "dogged life"?

We also see the presence of Narcissus, the mythological figure who is in love with himself, and that of Pan, the god of music. Valenzuela combines these sources within the text so that the reader is invaded with paradoxical language. What have the gods to do with man? Does he rise in the comparison? "She caressed his face, grazed the nape of his neck, whispered never let yourself fall in love with a reflection, do not search anymore for pleasure in a solitary flute."

The writer even mixes Greek mythology with Hebrew lore, Sisyphus with Jesus Christ: "the weight of the rocks grinds at my loins, my hands become splinters and all of me becomes flaying stone caused by the effort of creating and destroying the labyrinths." Valenzuela does this purposely so that she can engender, in the reader, not a passive sentiment, but a shocking realization; she wants him to think, to participate in the work. The reader then has no choice. By asking why Valenzuela has chosen these two diverse images, the reader becomes a part of the work itself. She succeeds in making the reader an active participant in her work; her language, as well as her message, come to life through him.

Language, which Valenzuela then saw as an asexual entity, today she views as having a definite sexual identity. She can now view words and feel differences just by examining their syntactical arrangement. From this, we can see that Valenzuela has matured in her thoughts, or at least, what before to her was an unconscious intuition today she has transformed into an articulated theory of writing. The intuitive process, which is said to connote a "feminine" mind, and the masculine, which relies upon rationality and logic, are harmoniously blended in Valenzuela's work. Although she believes herself to be a rational being, she also depends heavily upon her intuitive mind: "I live thinking in aristotelean terms, that is, rational terms. But then, I fall into platonic and pythagoric planes. At the same time, reason deviates, disperses, and scatters in disorder."

Symbolic and mythical language is always a contradiction. Valenzuela wants to show this to the reader, and she does this through games, distinguishing the difference between denotation and connotation, between sign and symbol. She begins with one word, and takes a connotation of that word: "Las excusas semanticas no sirven para nada: que gatillo sea gato chiquito estoy de acuerdo, que el revolver sea gata paridora de plomo eso si que no, no me parece." She then employs that same word with a different connotation from the first. She, therefore, is saying something else, something completely different. What she wants to form is an ambiguous language in which she may be saying two things, or three, or ten simultaneously. She wants us to see, through the medium of language, the multiplicity of life: "Words have a life of their own. What is said is more important than the characters. I don't care so much for psychological truth but for profound truth of the word, of language."

Valenzuela even tears away the denotations of words we thought we knew. She wants to say that life is chaotic; through that same language which she explores, she forms, purposely, a labyrinth of confusion. We do not have to read something explicitly; the absurd game in which she forces us to participate has an extremely serious message: "For me, on the other hand, language is a fundamental experience. Verbal games are my weakness, perhaps because through them I realize that it is actually the word that plays with us, and determines our being."

Valenzuela also utilizes the technique employed by the contradiction, making a statement seem paradoxical: "Yes, I want to help man by exposing his faults, denouncing his miseries, cutting his wounds. I am going to destroy him in order to help him, dissole him into particles of aid. I will show him how to die the death of other beings. He will know that there is nothing livelier than the lethal experience of death." To construct a new world, one of perfection, we have to destroy the old one. Of course, we will never reach that utopia, no matter how hard we try. However, evil imposes itself when we destroy the old order without any positive condition to follow. Parallelism, in this sense, is everything, in language, as in life; evil counteracts goodness, purity. With this balance, we can go on living. Valenzuela does not want to create the effect of disintegration of the world. In actuality, she believes that reality is an exploited illusion. This is why she tries to exhaust the parallels in life and death; she wants to present a world that, if not admirable and good, is at least balanced:

The boys come out with laden arms to distribute smiles. They turn on a switch in the throat and light up their faces; there are red and green ones, there are those with an intermittent smile, and others with illumination that runs along the teeth highlighting the row. They walk about shedding light on those corners where couples are embraced or a drug addict is shooting up. Their mission is to spread joy to the four winds but they do it halfway: almost always their smile illuminates those in hiding who see darkness and know how to be happy without the neon of good intentions.

The drug addict negates the lovers' embrace; the luminous smiles of the children oppose the darkness of those in hiding. The life of spring (is it ironic that the chapter heading is "The Springtime"?) dies quickly, and again, death triumphs. All is cyclical; with life comes the unalterable opposite, death. The infinite cycle exists; the duty of the writer is to show us this journey without end. In the language itself this language is consumed; all that flows is a river of lyricism, a language so poetic that it cannot be called prose. At the same time, this celebratory prose also expresses crudeness and ugliness: "His foot at times is missing, at times they cut off both his legs so that a good pair of crutches sustain him ten centimeters from the floor. His ass amidst the snow I tell him, but he knows how to laugh, laugh with his ass where his body ends, slightly amputated."

The most important factor is that the writer should not allow himself to fall into a rigid structure. Although he should examine his work constantly, and should always analyze the product in itself, intuition should erase all logical dialectic. Because of this concept, the ideal becomes, then, the incorporation of a reasoned intuition within the work itself. By balancing opposites, Valenzuela attempts to achieve equilibrium. This she does with great success.

The "Fucking Game," a section which is extremely logical and mathematical, like a chess game, instead of producing erotic sensations, succeeds in achieving the opposite. We feel its coldness; we perceive the science of the act. We can do nothing but laugh at the absurdities Valenzuela has juxtaposed:

It is convenient, though not essential, to have a bed nearby, and to play with dimmed lights …

Because there are neither winners nor losers, "The Fucking Game" hardly ever causes brawls.

The session comes to its end when one of the two—or more—participants falls exhausted. This does not mean that he has been defeated; actually, the opposite is true. The one who gives more of himself is the better player.

Opposed to this, what is not obviously sexual emerges with a mysterious sensuality. Then, in the lyricism of language, and not in obvious sexuality in pornography—do we find eroticism. Valenzuela triumphs in forming a creation in which the union of opposites is what is principally desired; this she achieves, not with the development of themes or characters, but with the purity of language.

With every word, Valenzuela intends a "double entendre." Like Cat-O-Nine-Deaths as a whole, individual passages become metaphors (ah, another metamorphosis!) to symbolize what in reality is the function of this novel—to embody the process of artistic creation. Valenzuela believes that the only positive thing an artist can do to make her creations authentic is to change the form itself. As with all literary achievement, metamorphosis is the supreme value: "Condemned I am to change, to renovation. It is the fault of my cells. With each newborn cell I am someone else. I am in every particle of myself and suffer transformations."

"From Here to There" is the verbal personification of what Valenzuela would like to achieve. It is an intuitive process in which, through the medium of the word, she can find what that exact word really means, and thereby participate in the creation of art, the imaginative process. The chapter called "We Have to Die Wretchedly" portrays the resurrection to a real life. The process of interior development hurts, but suffering consumes all: "If the music pains me, if only the passing of a finger over soft cotton is a laceration, if a smell pierces thorns into my ethnic breasts, what can the feeble beings expect of me? I look at others with eyes of contempt and that gaze grieves me, denudes my essence."

Valenzuela also recognizes that the process of writing is chaotic, it has no logical order, no specific time for development. Although the finished product may seem logical in its completed form, the evolution of a piece may be erratic in its development: "Each time I take a bath that old anguish grips my throat. Finally at the end of the day ideas consume me so that I have to run, grasping the soap between my teeth with an urgency of a long-distance telephone call."

When Valenzuela began Cat-O-Nine-Deaths, she could not write; a mental block crippled her, making her feel totally frustrated. Finally, however, from the depths of her subconscious, a radically innovative text began to emerge, one which today surprises even its author: "It was a very unconscious text, one so deep that, even today when I read it, it surprises me." Valenzuela discovered, through this work, that the subconscious discourse—that style exhibited by stream of consciousness—is something which can be extremely organized. Like the cover of the novel, which is geometrically designed but which at the same time shows by a sketch the intuitive process of Valenzuela's mind (two black cats joined in the whiteness of the circle), the novel itself also shows the totality of the mind in collective man. The drawing is one, two cats in one. The two cats are not only resurrected from the unconscious mind of the author but also of complete humanity. The novel transcends specific personal patterns and becomes involved in the Jungian process, where one man/woman represents collective humanity. Also, if the figure is seen as one cat, the observer can discern the masculine and feminine qualities, the yang and yin of one being. Are the cats the blackness, the death, the ugliness and the horrors of our own unconscious? Carl Jung, in his essay "Psychology and Literature," states:

Human passion falls within the sphere of conscious experience, while the subject of the vision lies beyond it. Through our feelings we experience the known, but our intuitions point to things that are unknown and hidden—that by their very nature are secret. If ever they become conscious, they are intentionally kept back and concealed for which reason they have been regarded from earliest times as mysterious, uncanny, and deceptive.

In Cat-O-Nine-Deaths, Valenzuela discovered this great secret: "I am the junction of all contradictions, and as such, I do not exist. I am that point where language converges and at the same time separates." Language is the antenna of those contradictions; it is the mirror image of reality. The medial point between the unconscious and man himself is the word. That word transforms sensory perceptions into a logical process. The word, then; gives synthesis and meaning to the unconscious thought. The writer only has to join these scattered words, these sensory perceptions, to give a vision of reality through written form: "I go out with a net to capture verbal clichés and return home overloaded."

Cat-O-Nine-Deaths, the ultimate concrete realization that a writer can achieve, is a novel of theory about the creative process. Though Valenzuela sees now that when she wrote the novel the ideas were so new and radical that she had to explicitly incorporate them within the body of the "new novel," she says that she would be more subtle today. She would use the theories implicitly: that is to say, she would incorporate them within the body of the novel without saying. In this, her later novel, He Who Searches, has more maturity. However, Cat-O-Nine-Deaths has its merit; it is a step toward Valenzuela's literary development.