Luisa Valenzuela: The Lizard’s Tail; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York.

 

The Lizard’s Tail reflects two important tendencies in Latin American fiction. One is a sense of obligation to make social and political commentary. Few Latin American writers escape the pressures to be active participants in the solution of economic, political, and cultural problems. As the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa remarked in explaining such pressures, “To be an artist, only an artist, can become, in our countries, a kind of moral crime, a political sin.”

 

 

The other tendency, often in tension with the first, is toward experimentation in narrative technique. It is essentially an aesthetic impulse leading to a preoccupation with fantasy and magic. Style takes precedence over content imaginative recreation of reality over imitation of reality, and the vision becomes increasingly subjective and idiosyncratic. “Magical realism” is the term used to denote some of this fiction.

 

Because the pressures toward social and political commitment are so strong for Latin American writers, aesthetic experimentation, fantasy and magic are often not procedures for escaping social reality; on the contrary, they become a vehicle for exposing social and political evils. This appears to be what Valenzuela was attempting in The Lizard’s Tail.

 

The novel is a fantasized biography of Lopez Rega, Isabel Peron’s Minister of Social Well-Being, who apparently governed through sorcery. Valenzuela’s character is simply known as the Sorcerer or Witchdoc. He has set up his own peculiar kingdom in the interior of the country, which we assume is Argentina. The military government tolerates him because he oversees a profitable cocaine­ processing plant it has installed in his domain and because it respects his diabolical genius and ability to control people by exploiting fear and magic. The novel relates the Sorcerer’s childhood, how he became involved in magic, how he came to power, how he was overthrown by the military and how he plans to regain power.

 

His plan to obtain power is bizarre to say the least. And it is not just national power he craves. Like some sort of comic strip villain, he lusts for power without bounds: “To rule the world is the only possible voluptuousness. The great cosmic orgasm.” Here is his plan. He happens to have three testicles, one of which he believes is his sister, who he calls Estrella. He intends to have a son by that sister, a son who will come to rule the world. Mother, father, and son will all be he alone. It is the consummate egomaniacal fantasy. The reader cannot be blamed for puzzling over the physiological details of this extraordinary conception and birth because the Sorcerer himself is similarly curious. But with the aid of magic and hormones the testicle does become pregnant and the novel ends with an explosion of blood from the Sorcerer’s bed which presumably signals the birth.

 

The Sorcerer is not simply a run-of­ the-mill villain. His gustatory pleasures include eating newborn infants served with apples in their mouths and having his eunuch aide urinate in his mouth. He has a penchant for dismemberment. He saves a sawed-off foot as a trophy, decapitates drowned bodies, and amputates a young woman’s finger because he happens to need one to further his plans. He takes pride in his torture skills and dreams of new and refined methods. His manual of torture, used by the military government, was the product of much experience, beginning in his youth with the unimaginative practice of dabbing the victim with honey and staking him to an anthill. For sexual thrills he likes to lash maidens with a leather whip called the lizard’s tail, and he delights in sodomy. He takes visual pleasure in pecked skulls and seeing brains fly when a bullet enters a human head. Asa boy he watched contentedly as a body was eaten by scavengers, a body which happened to be his father’s. He day­ dreams of such things as using a straw to sip blood from a maiden’s jugular, wrenching the bowels from his enemies, and inventing a solution that would dissolve uteri, thereby solving the overpopulation problem and making war a pleasure, not a necessity. Valenzuela has a fertile imagination and no compunctions when it comes to horrors, sadomasochism, and scatology.

 

The military leaders are as evil as the Sorcerer. They simply lack his genius for wickedness. He has weapons they lack, weapons of the spirit. For this reason they try to use him in their exploitation of superstition. Like the Sorcerer, they abhor doubt: “Doubt has to be eradicated by decree. There’s no room for doubt in history.” The plan for “National Reconstruction” requires that “the authoritarian tradition” and martial values be infused into all areas of national life. The generals find inflation and undernourishment desirable as a means of subjugating the people. In addition to trafficking in cocaine, they raise taxes in order to buy new weapons, which please them the way toys please little boys. They make people disappear, torture babies in front of their parents to make the parents confess, and beat pregnant women until they miscarry. The dust jacket refers to this portrait of the generals as “piercingly accurate.”

 

The author thrusts herself into the story in the second of its three parts, which begins, “I, Luisa Valenzuela, swear by these writings that I will try to do something about all this, become involved as much as possible, plunge in head-first, aware of how little can be done but with a desire to handle at least a small thread and assume responsibility for the story.” She says the Sorcerer is writing a novel that superimposes itself on hers and is capable of nullifying it. She feels her story slipping from her hands, taken over by him. This begins a pattern of clever narrative games in which the author is absorbed into the events of her own story. She is the creator of it and yet unable to control it. She self-consciously mentions that she is inventing this biography, but then claims that the Sorcerer is taking control and doing the writing: “There’s an affinity in the voice as I narrate him, sometimes our pages are indistinguishable.” Perhaps she would have us believe that the Sorcerer represents a dark side in all of us. In any case, she wonders why fiction and reality get so entwined within her, or at least within her writing, why she can’t keep them separate. She is alarmed that she must compete with the Sorcerer in telling the story because he invents more skillfully. She considers killing him off with a stroke of the pen but cannot bring herself to do it: “He’s our reverse face, the dark side of our struggle. The arouser. I couldn’t kill him if! wanted to, and I hate him for that reason, too.”

 

Valenzuela is obviously more interested in experimenting with narrative than in making a telling criticism of political corruption and social injustice. She is fascinated with what can happen when the barrier between fiction and reality is eliminated and when meaning in both realms becomes indeterminate. She is clearly influenced by radical versions of contemporary literary theory. Apparently as a way of tipping us off about this she sprinkles a couple of short chapters with terms from recent critical theory. The opponents of the government feel a need to “deconstruct. the textuality inscribed in the para-official discourse.” They refer to Umberto Eco’s quotation of Warren Weaver’s notion that “the words information and uncertainty are intimately interrelated. “They bewail their lack of “interstitial free­ dom.” In short, Valenzuela calls our attention to the fact that she is providing a “chain of signifiers” and invites us to ponder the metaphorical nature not only of the characters and events in the novel but also of the process of its composition.

 

A basic assumption in all this is that reality and fiction are essentially indistinguishable. For example, Valenzuela receives an invitation from the Sorcerer to attend a masked ball. She first remarks that he shouldn’t even know she exists ( after all, he is a character she has created) and then says, “I’m not going, and maybe the masked ball I will describe will be more exact than the real thing, or maybe the Sorcerer will decide to write his own story of the party, or we will find out through some unsuspected source what really will happen and maybe that will turn out to be the least informative of all.” In the world of this novel nothing is determinate.

 

If this is the case, is it possible for literature to influence actual life? Valenzuela raises this question but provides no clear answer. At one point she is disgusted with herself “for believing that literature can save us, for doubting that literature can save us, all that bullshit.” At the end of the long middle section, which begins with, “I, Luisa Valenzuela, swear” and ends with her signature, she curses the pain and futility of writing while, nearby, innocent people are being tortured and killed. She speaks of planting the written word that maybe will serve her as seed someday. Then, in a bewildering ceremony, she says she abandons the pen, thereby abandoning the Sorcerer to his fate. By being silent she can make him silent.

 

But in fact he is not silenced, for the following section begins with him saying, “How well I feel today,” and the story goes on.

 

The novel is fascinating in certain ways. The Sorcerer calls himself “the great syncretizer” and exploits the magic traditions of a number of countries and ages. Even his enemies, including the author herself, combat him with magic. This treatment of magic, especially magic as a vehicle for obtaining power and manipulating others is intriguing. Likewise, the ingenious narrative games stretch our imagination and stimulate our thinking about the fictional process.

 

Ultimately, however, the novel is unsatisfying because its elements work against each other. The clever narrative ploys that blur the distinctions between the real and fictitious and establish the uncertainty of all information eventually undercut the social and political commentary and satire. The exaggerated evil of the Sorcerer and the military government diminishes the subtlety and consequently the force of the satire, but beyond this, the emphasis upon the indeterminacy and fictiveness of everything precludes the possibility of a satiric norm. Within the context of such philosophical-aesthetic play both good and evil lose their significance. It is impossible to take such extravagant caricature as the Sorcerer seriously, particularly when the author reminds us along the way that he is pure invention and her choice of incident and characterization are sometimes arbitrary. And by the same token, it is difficult to take seriously the love interest in the story or the plight of the victimized people and their hopes for the future.

 

In short, Valenzuela tries to have it both ways. Under the guise of serious literary treatment of the social-political problems of her country, she indulges her appetite for faddish philosophical­ aesthetic playfulness. It is not a successful mix.

 

The Lizard’s Tailcan be seen as a testcase for how certain versions of post­ structuralist theory can be applied in the creation of a novel. The renunciation of traditional conventions, the heady if perverse freedom supplied by the notions of indeterminacy and uncertainty and the ensuing latitude for subjective aesthetic play allow for exciting and original effects. But when that irradicable human impulse to use literature to comment on life arises, as it inevitably does, the author must recognize that she has undermined all grounds for credibility and significance.  ccLuisa Valenzuela: The Lizard’s Tail; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York.

 

The Lizard’s Tailreflects two important tendencies in Latin American fiction. One is a sense of obligation to make social and political commentary. Few Latin American writers escape the pressures to be active participants in the solution of economic, political, and cultural problems. As the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa remarked in explaining such pressures, “To be an artist, only an artist, can become, in our countries, a kind of moral crime, a political sin.”

 

The other tendency, often in tension with the first, is toward experimentation in narrative technique. It is essentially an aesthetic impulse leading to a preoccupation with fantasy and magic. Style takes precedence over content imaginative recreation of reality over imitation of reality, and the vision becomes increasingly subjective and idiosyncratic. “Magical realism” is the term used to denote some of this fiction.

 

Because the pressures toward social and political commitment are so strong for Latin American writers, aesthetic experimentation, fantasy and magic are often not procedures for escaping social reality; on the contrary, they become a vehicle for exposing social and political evils. This appears to be what Valenzuela was attempting in The Lizard’s Tail.

 

The novel is a fantasized biography of Lopez Rega, Isabel Peron’s Minister of Social Well-Being, who apparently governed through sorcery. Valenzuela’s character is simply known as the Sorcerer or Witchdoc. He has set up his own peculiar kingdom in the interior of the country, which we assume is Argentina. The military government tolerates him because he oversees a profitable cocaine­ processing plant it has installed in his domain and because it respects his diabolical genius and ability to control people by exploiting fear and magic. The novel relates the Sorcerer’s childhood, how he became involved in magic, how he came to power, how he was overthrown by the military and how he plans to regain power.

 

His plan to obtain power is bizarre to say the least. And it is not just national power he craves. Like some sort of comic strip villain, he lusts for power without bounds: “To rule the world is the only possible voluptuousness. The great cosmic orgasm.” Here is his plan. He happens to have three testicles, one of which he believes is his sister, who he calls Estrella. He intends to have a son by that sister, a son who will come to rule the world. Mother, father, and son will all be he alone. It is the consummate egomaniacal fantasy. The reader cannot be blamed for puzzling over the physiological details of this extraordinary conception and birth because the Sorcerer himself is similarly curious. But with the aid of magic and hormones the testicle does become pregnant and the novel ends with an explosion of blood from the Sorcerer’s bed which presumably signals the birth.

 

The Sorcerer is not simply a run-of­ the-mill villain. His gustatory pleasures include eating newborn infants served with apples in their mouths and having his eunuch aide urinate in his mouth. He has a penchant for dismemberment. He saves a sawed-off foot as a trophy, decapitates drowned bodies, and amputates a young woman’s finger because he happens to need one to further his plans. He takes pride in his torture skills and dreams of new and refined methods. His manual of torture, used by the military government, was the product of much experience, beginning in his youth with the unimaginative practice of dabbing the victim with honey and staking him to an anthill. For sexual thrills he likes to lash maidens with a leather whip called the lizard’s tail, and he delights in sodomy. He takes visual pleasure in pecked skulls and seeing brains fly when a bullet enters a human head. Asa boy he watched contentedly as a body was eaten by scavengers, a body which happened to be his father’s. He day­ dreams of such things as using a straw to sip blood from a maiden’s jugular, wrenching the bowels from his enemies, and inventing a solution that would dissolve uteri, thereby solving the overpopulation problem and making war a pleasure, not a necessity. Valenzuela has a fertile imagination and no compunctions when it comes to horrors, sadomasochism, and scatology.

 

The military leaders are as evil as the Sorcerer. They simply lack his genius for wickedness. He has weapons they lack, weapons of the spirit. For this reason they try to use him in their exploitation of superstition. Like the Sorcerer, they abhor doubt: “Doubt has to be eradicated by decree. There’s no room for doubt in history.” The plan for “National Reconstruction” requires that “the authoritarian tradition” and martial values be infused into all areas of national life. The generals find inflation and undernourishment desirable as a means of subjugating the people. In addition to trafficking in cocaine, they raise taxes in order to buy new weapons, which please them the way toys please little boys. They make people disappear, torture babies in front of their parents to make the parents confess, and beat pregnant women until they miscarry. The dust jacket refers to this portrait of the generals as “piercingly accurate.”

 

The author thrusts herself into the story in the second of its three parts, which begins, “I, Luisa Valenzuela, swear by these writings that I will try to do something about all this, become involved as much as possible, plunge in head-first, aware of how little can be done but with a desire to handle at least a small thread and assume responsibility for the story.” She says the Sorcerer is writing a novel that superimposes itself on hers and is capable of nullifying it. She feels her story slipping from her hands, taken over by him. This begins a pattern of clever narrative games in which the author is absorbed into the events of her own story. She is the creator of it and yet unable to control it. She self-consciously mentions that she is inventing this biography, but then claims that the Sorcerer is taking control and doing the writing: “There’s an affinity in the voice as I narrate him, sometimes our pages are indistinguishable.” Perhaps she would have us believe that the Sorcerer represents a dark side in all of us. In any case, she wonders why fiction and reality get so entwined within her, or at least within her writing, why she can’t keep them separate. She is alarmed that she must compete with the Sorcerer in telling the story because he invents more skillfully. She considers killing him off with a stroke of the pen but cannot bring herself to do it: “He’s our reverse face, the dark side of our struggle. The arouser. I couldn’t kill him if! wanted to, and I hate him for that reason, too.”

 

Valenzuela is obviously more interested in experimenting with narrative than in making a telling criticism of political corruption and social injustice. She is fascinated with what can happen when the barrier between fiction and reality is eliminated and when meaning in both realms becomes indeterminate. She is clearly influenced by radical versions of contemporary literary theory. Apparently as a way of tipping us off about this she sprinkles a couple of short chapters with terms from recent critical theory. The opponents of the government feel a need to “deconstruct. the textuality inscribed in the para-official discourse.” They refer to Umberto Eco’s quotation of Warren Weaver’s notion that “the words information and uncertainty are intimately interrelated. “They bewail their lack of “interstitial free­ dom.” In short, Valenzuela calls our attention to the fact that she is providing a “chain of signifiers” and invites us to ponder the metaphorical nature not only of the characters and events in the novel but also of the process of its composition.

 

A basic assumption in all this is that reality and fiction are essentially indistinguishable. For example, Valenzuela receives an invitation from the Sorcerer to attend a masked ball. She first remarks that he shouldn’t even know she exists ( after all, he is a character she has created) and then says, “I’m not going, and maybe the masked ball I will describe will be more exact than the real thing, or maybe the Sorcerer will decide to write his own story of the party, or we will find out through some unsuspected source what really will happen and maybe that will turn out to be the least informative of all.” In the world of this novel nothing is determinate.

 

If this is the case, is it possible for literature to influence actual life? Valenzuela raises this question but provides no clear answer. At one point she is disgusted with herself “for believing that literature can save us, for doubting that literature can save us, all that bullshit.” At the end of the long middle section, which begins with, “I, Luisa Valenzuela, swear” and ends with her signature, she curses the pain and futility of writing while, nearby, innocent people are being tortured and killed. She speaks of planting the written word that maybe will serve her as seed someday. Then, in a bewildering ceremony, she says she abandons the pen, thereby abandoning the Sorcerer to his fate. By being silent she can make him silent.

 

But in fact he is not silenced, for the following section begins with him saying, “How well I feel today,” and the story goes on.

 

The novel is fascinating in certain ways. The Sorcerer calls himself “the great syncretizer” and exploits the magic traditions of a number of countries and ages. Even his enemies, including the author herself, combat him with magic. This treatment of magic, especially magic as a vehicle for obtaining power and manipulating others is intriguing. Likewise, the ingenious narrative games stretch our imagination and stimulate our thinking about the fictional process.

 

Ultimately, however, the novel is unsatisfying because its elements work against each other. The clever narrative ploys that blur the distinctions between the real and fictitious and establish the uncertainty of all information eventually undercut the social and political commentary and satire. The exaggerated evil of the Sorcerer and the military government diminishes the subtlety and consequently the force of the satire, but beyond this, the emphasis upon the indeterminacy and fictiveness of everything precludes the possibility of a satiric norm. Within the context of such philosophical-aesthetic play both good and evil lose their significance. It is impossible to take such extravagant caricature as the Sorcerer seriously, particularly when the author reminds us along the way that he is pure invention and her choice of incident and characterization are sometimes arbitrary. And by the same token, it is difficult to take seriously the love interest in the story or the plight of the victimized people and their hopes for the future.

 

In short, Valenzuela tries to have it both ways. Under the guise of serious literary treatment of the social-political problems of her country, she indulges her appetite for faddish philosophical­ aesthetic playfulness. It is not a successful mix.

 

The Lizard’s Tailcan be seen as a testcase for how certain versions of post­ structuralist theory can be applied in the creation of a novel. The renunciation of traditional conventions, the heady if perverse freedom supplied by the notions of indeterminacy and uncertainty and the ensuing latitude for subjective aesthetic play allow for exciting and original effects. But when that irradicable human impulse to use literature to comment on life arises, as it inevitably does, the author must recognize that she has undermined all grounds for credibility and significance.  ccLuisa Valenzuela: The Lizard’s Tail; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York.

 

The Lizard’s Tailreflects two important tendencies in Latin American fiction. One is a sense of obligation to make social and political commentary. Few Latin American writers escape the pressures to be active participants in the solution of economic, political, and cultural problems. As the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa remarked in explaining such pressures, “To be an artist, only an artist, can become, in our countries, a kind of moral crime, a political sin.”

 

The other tendency, often in tension with the first, is toward experimentation in narrative technique. It is essentially an aesthetic impulse leading to a preoccupation with fantasy and magic. Style takes precedence over content imaginative recreation of reality over imitation of reality, and the vision becomes increasingly subjective and idiosyncratic. “Magical realism” is the term used to denote some of this fiction.

 

Because the pressures toward social and political commitment are so strong for Latin American writers, aesthetic experimentation, fantasy and magic are often not procedures for escaping social reality; on the contrary, they become a vehicle for exposing social and political evils. This appears to be what Valenzuela was attempting in The Lizard’s Tail.

 

The novel is a fantasized biography of Lopez Rega, Isabel Peron’s Minister of Social Well-Being, who apparently governed through sorcery. Valenzuela’s character is simply known as the Sorcerer or Witchdoc. He has set up his own peculiar kingdom in the interior of the country, which we assume is Argentina. The military government tolerates him because he oversees a profitable cocaine­ processing plant it has installed in his domain and because it respects his diabolical genius and ability to control people by exploiting fear and magic. The novel relates the Sorcerer’s childhood, how he became involved in magic, how he came to power, how he was overthrown by the military and how he plans to regain power.

 

His plan to obtain power is bizarre to say the least. And it is not just national power he craves. Like some sort of comic strip villain, he lusts for power without bounds: “To rule the world is the only possible voluptuousness. The great cosmic orgasm.” Here is his plan. He happens to have three testicles, one of which he believes is his sister, who he calls Estrella. He intends to have a son by that sister, a son who will come to rule the world. Mother, father, and son will all be he alone. It is the consummate egomaniacal fantasy. The reader cannot be blamed for puzzling over the physiological details of this extraordinary conception and birth because the Sorcerer himself is similarly curious. But with the aid of magic and hormones the testicle does become pregnant and the novel ends with an explosion of blood from the Sorcerer’s bed which presumably signals the birth.

 

The Sorcerer is not simply a run-of­ the-mill villain. His gustatory pleasures include eating newborn infants served with apples in their mouths and having his eunuch aide urinate in his mouth. He has a penchant for dismemberment. He saves a sawed-off foot as a trophy, decapitates drowned bodies, and amputates a young woman’s finger because he happens to need one to further his plans. He takes pride in his torture skills and dreams of new and refined methods. His manual of torture, used by the military government, was the product of much experience, beginning in his youth with the unimaginative practice of dabbing the victim with honey and staking him to an anthill. For sexual thrills he likes to lash maidens with a leather whip called the lizard’s tail, and he delights in sodomy. He takes visual pleasure in pecked skulls and seeing brains fly when a bullet enters a human head. Asa boy he watched contentedly as a body was eaten by scavengers, a body which happened to be his father’s. He day­ dreams of such things as using a straw to sip blood from a maiden’s jugular, wrenching the bowels from his enemies, and inventing a solution that would dissolve uteri, thereby solving the overpopulation problem and making war a pleasure, not a necessity. Valenzuela has a fertile imagination and no compunctions when it comes to horrors, sadomasochism, and scatology.

 

The military leaders are as evil as the Sorcerer. They simply lack his genius for wickedness. He has weapons they lack, weapons of the spirit. For this reason they try to use him in their exploitation of superstition. Like the Sorcerer, they abhor doubt: “Doubt has to be eradicated by decree. There’s no room for doubt in history.” The plan for “National Reconstruction” requires that “the authoritarian tradition” and martial values be infused into all areas of national life. The generals find inflation and undernourishment desirable as a means of subjugating the people. In addition to trafficking in cocaine, they raise taxes in order to buy new weapons, which please them the way toys please little boys. They make people disappear, torture babies in front of their parents to make the parents confess, and beat pregnant women until they miscarry. The dust jacket refers to this portrait of the generals as “piercingly accurate.”

 

The author thrusts herself into the story in the second of its three parts, which begins, “I, Luisa Valenzuela, swear by these writings that I will try to do something about all this, become involved as much as possible, plunge in head-first, aware of how little can be done but with a desire to handle at least a small thread and assume responsibility for the story.” She says the Sorcerer is writing a novel that superimposes itself on hers and is capable of nullifying it. She feels her story slipping from her hands, taken over by him. This begins a pattern of clever narrative games in which the author is absorbed into the events of her own story. She is the creator of it and yet unable to contr