[In the essay below, Araújo explains the relation between the feminine body and language in terms of the violence and degradation depicted in Other Weapons.]

The stories, narrations and other works of fiction of Luisa Valenzuela reveal a trajectory that incorporates female identity into social and historical circumstances. El gato eficaz and He Who Searches are baroque, truculent and multiple novels. With bold rhetoric, the erotic is intermingled with the political, thereby propitiating a textuality bordering on the absurd. Her short-story collections, such as Aquí pasan cosas raras, lead to fragmentation with passages of black humor mitigated by frustration-rpression. The more recent and more personal Other Weapons describes and punctuates a feminine sexuality which adheres to processes of power. There, subjected to organized and subtle reflexive instances, love corresponds to a subjective interiorized code. While the determinisms are wielded with the vacuous purpose of a game, the superimposition of temporal levels crystallizes desanctifying conflictive processes. In the text, tropes do not derive their effect from their intrinsic value, but from a metonymy that grants them intelligibility within the narrative rhythm. Ever harmonious, this follows the cadences of a discourse directed to the reader as associative agent of processes favorable to the intertextuality. There are times of anguish, cathartic discharges in retrospective introverted monologues. One would say that the conduct of the protagonists implies an exercise of interpretation in the deciphering of psychic phenomena linked to the identity. Oscillations between today and yesterday, the I and the other, impose cycles referring to the woman-being. Feminine and feminist, the existentialist projects paradoxical disencounters, confirming once more [Jean-Paul] Sartre's statement that in the person "the act or the work is what best reveals the secret of conditioning."

Heroism, eroticism … she and they vacillate between a disgraceful passivity and an appetite that opens them (as Bataille would say) to the joy of caprice and to the premonition of death. Certainly, representation can be a game of coquetry, a mechanics of vice or a model of licentiousness. Perhaps living certain experiences is not the same as triumphing over them. One more time, embodiment takes itself as an exhaltation of the senses and of the desire for writing. In its unfolding, the theme is intersected by the sexual: one could say that there is an erotic density in the connotations, propitiating transference and reduction. At the level of the amorous process, writing thus becomes, in [Julia] Kristeva's words, a "function of the verbal tension, a between-the-signs." Throughout the text, the amorous propulsion incites and liberates, although it also works destructively. It lives and yet it doesn't; in the same way that memories dissolve into the past, experiences dissolve into this passage of time. Therefore, the efforts to transcend the dichotomy of pleasure and pain in a territory free of guilt.

Masochism, narcissism … In five feminine stories the object of desire and the object of sacrifice are confused, lost in reflections that dilute the consciousness of things. A brilliant polysemic textuality draws from the narrative nuclei the multiple dimension of the drama. Captivated by their interior mirrors, the women believe they exist as anti-heroines while trying to enter history. Female-mirrors, idiom-mirrors, mirrors in the production of signs that impose the code of a humiliated, manipulated flesh. In the title story, the protagonist realizes that "the only real problem is that which blossoms forth when one accidentally bumps into it with one's image and spends a long time in front of oneself trying to examine oneself."

Image of images … in narratives that deal with an intense life, the discourse repeats an equal watchword, an equal truth. "I am the author, appropriating myself of this material that generates the desperation of writing," says the narrator. Her story is simple: a delicious stranger, a gothic ambassador arrives in a city besieged by terror and torture. When he looks at her, she feels "a wave of heat that creeps up her ribs, one by one, it enters her mouth and thereupon emerges between her legs, forcing her to separate them." They meet. And while passing afternoons and evenings in amorous reunions, guilt and joy brand them in their complicity for the rescue of those destined to "disappear." Beyond the reach of legal forums, asylum is erected in a space of subversion and utopian liberty. And the festival that celebrates it and consecrates it infuses resistance with a surrealist sympathy. Bella is the name of the protagonist who dies beautifully…. Suicide? Sacrifice? Here and there, diverse and dispersed, her successors recognize in the task of love a disgrace, but also a "starting point."

If one of them dedicates herself to formulating questions which later leave her "wounded in bare flesh," it is not by accident. Without resting she examines, denounces, and confesses, releasing all to the watchword of manliness, in "the objectivization of the other person, the domination of the other person" (Adrienne Rich). Thus, on her lips the word "murderer" bursts forth like a rebel yell from the utter depths of the soul. However, in her body, a tenuous unfolding could discharge the exorcisms of the possession with rituals of masks, dances and ablutions. At last, for her, the jewels of gallantry turn out to be unfulfilled promises "sketched in the air." An unsatiated hunger for sex, feelings, surrender, which takes its revenge in another anti-heroine, draws her into the revolutionary cause. In the last story, a sordid version of captivity lived by "la llamada Laura" (the so-called Laura), concerns a husband in the military, a shocking torturer. Frightened, wiped out, and amnesiac, the prisoner manages, however, to recover at a given moment her dignity. At that point, her energy transforms into "pure destruction," and she herself into a "loaded weapon" which gives the order to fire from within.

As metaphor-text, hyperbole-text, Other Weapons is a landmark in Latin American feminine literature. If at the beginning of the narrative the protagonist pretends to surrender and conform to a relational language, this at once becomes self-referential, transmitting messages in the interchange of language and speech. As [Roland] Barthes said, "The eucratic discourse (employed by those who seek power) never yields to the systematic but rather is opposed to the system." Perhaps the compulsion of submission does not imply a compulsion of dominance. Corresponding to sexist, hierarchical and technified societies, there is a state that imposes structures backed up by an ideology of exploitation. Exploitation called oppression with respect to the feminine condition.

By describing the sordid routines of a woman driven by torture to the limits of autism, Valenzuela's story exceeds any intention of linearity. Oscillating between a function of object and a function of symbol, the feminine body defines and punctuates a text that deals with the degradation of language. The titles of each sequence ("words," "concepts," "voices") denounce a semantics in which signifiers have lost their signifieds, and forms their content. Everything refers to a monstrous powerful situation of fear. And has not fear been the "weaker" sex's response to the "stronger" sex? Victim and paradigm of this fatality, the protagonist conforms to an identity that ignores her free being. Day after day, hour after hour, she must be conditioned to passivity. In her story, the nefariousness of a space consecrated to repetition shatters in the reflection of its own image.

A thing of flesh … used, abused. Hispanic tradition consecrates and legalizes an ethic of this use and abuse, an ethic that in Latin America goes very far back, since [Christopher] Columbus, in his second voyage, offered a Carib woman to a member of his retinue; he later enthusiastically relates tying her and whipping her, and enjoying her to such a degree in the sexual sense that "it seemed as if she had been educated in a school of whores" (Todorov). Secular machismo, fantasies of rape, violence. Throughout history the woman's body has been annexed to a phallic order and its trajectory is resolved in the structural organization of an interchange-sign, the same as objects. In this text by Luisa Valenzuela, the interpretation of the feminine embraces an allegorical space and a code of perversity. From terror to fascination, from fascination to terror. Confined in asphyxiating spaces, the prisoner does not conform as such, but neither does she rebel. Upon gaining the control of her body, her intimate interior being has been placed in danger. "Like a fun-house circus mirror, she sees that which has more vitality, more nobility, which is her erotic capacity." However, she adds, "On this side of the door, with its so-called locks and its so-called keys crying out loud that she transgress the limits." Liberty or death. The moment arrives along with this resplendent revelation: the wife-whore-slave glimpses how to cease being so. And she risks a change of weapons.