Displaced Subjetcs: Valenzuela and the Metropolis

María Inés Lagos¹

«Displaced Subjects: Valenzuela and the Metropolis». World Literature Today 69, 4 (Fall 1995): 726-32.

In 1990 Luisa Valenzuela published two novels, Novela negra con argentinos and Realidad nacional desde la cama. The first, translated as Black Novel (with Argentines), focuses on two Argentine writers, a woman and a man who travel to New York, apparently escaping political repression in their home country. Supported by a grant, they intend to continue working on their projects once they settle in the city. However, the characters painfully discover that moving from Buenos Aires to New York entails more than just a change of scene. The second novel, titled Bedside Manners in the English translation, focuses on a woman who, after ten years of exile in New York, returns to her home country, presumably Argentina, which has become a democracy. This woman can be best described by Frantz Fanon's words: «The native intellectual who comes back to his people by way of cultural achievements behaves in fact like a foreigner» (223). In both novels the characters have difficulty adjusting to their new environment. In this essay I examine how spatial displacement -the trip to the metropolis and the exile's return- transforms the characters, shaking their sense of identity and the belief in the independence of their culture². As Edward Said argues in Culture and Imperialism, «Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic» (xxv)³.

From the moment she confronts the title, a reader of Black Novel (with Argentines) faces a matrix of literary conventions, for the title places the text in a literary category and in a cultural setting. Black Novel calls attention to a specific genre, the noir detective story -el género negro- with its long modern tradition from Edgar Allan Poe to Ross MacDonald, while (with Argentines) identifies the characters by their national origin⁴. Just as in Borges's detective stories, however, this book does not center on solving a crime; instead, the crime is a situation that emphasizes the precariousness of self-identity⁵. Even though the search to find the character who «done it» creates real tension, the text calls attention above all to its fictionality, for it is presented as a literary artifact. The metafictional stance reiterates the instability of truth and of identity, proposing that experience itself is a formulation constructed with a language that in turn assimilates other languages (Scott).

The two main characters, Roberta and Agustín, from whose perspective the novel is told, are writers who are recent arrivals in New York. Valenzuela purposefully uses the English name New York instead of the Spanish Nueva York. To be sure, by leaving the city's name in English, the text evokes the condition of being alien, emphasizing the fact that the characters inhabit an unfamiliar space. Thus, each time the city is named, the rhythm of the Spanish prose is interrupted to accommodate the English word, a narrative strategy that is lost in the English translation. In Nomadic Subjects Rosi Braidotti has noted that «being in between languages constitutes a vantage point in deconstructing identity» (12). Furthermore, the city is presented as a labyrinth in which the rules of the game learned in one's native country simply do not apply. The new rules puzzle Agustín, who has just arrived from Argentina when the novel opens, while his guide Roberta, the writer who has already spent several months in the city, is used to the differences.

New York appears at first as unknown territory, but the protagonists gradually learn to make it their own by exploring and strolling the streets, venturing into different neighborhoods, and constantly crossing boundaries. At times the urban setting resembles a stage because of its theatricality and instability, a place where the characters play various roles. Yet it turns out that, more than a mise-en-scène, the city offers them the opportunity to change and to discover their own decenteredness. Just as they cannot locate the theater where Agustín had met his victim, they can never go back to their original sense of having an identifiable fixed identity. Emblematic of an inner self-discovery, the city dislocates them, thus freeing them from the past. Hence, at the same time that the text stresses its status as a literary and cultural object, it offers a reflection on individual identity, its relationship to national idiosyncrasy and to discourse.

By focusing on two writers temporarily transplanted from Argentina to the city that represents the spirit of postmodernity, Black Novel recalls another literary experiment which in the 1960s was considered to be one of the pillars of Latin American literary modernity, Julio Cortázar's Rayuela(1963). Whereas Rayuela, presented itself as a narrative in which it was possible to skip some chapters -especially if the reader was a «lector hembra»- in Black Novel there is no such option. On the contrary, the text shows that the characters' experiences are inseparable from their intellectual pursuits. The story also suggests that the way in which the two protagonists perceive their daily routines is tinted by cultural and linguistic processes, in which sexual identity plays a major role. As Roberta adapts to the city, she experiments, changing her appearance, discarding her customary Argentine apparel, dressing as a man, and dyeing her hair red. She realizes that her sheepskin coat does not fit her new surroundings. Whenever she wears it, she feels transported to her past, feeling that it no longer agrees with her new sense of self. Thus, she stops perceiving it as something natural, seeing it rather as a product attached to a place and a situation that she has left behind.

Agustín also reflects on his clothes. Upon arriving in New York, he notices that his garments expose his identity: «Ya en el ascensor [Agustín] puede alisarse la tupida barba, recomponer su aspecto. Puede ajustarse la corbata, esa defensa del porteño contra el desajuste de una ciudad demasiado desconcertante, esa posibilidad de ahorcarse un poquito cumpliendo a diario la condena» («In the elevator he collects himself, smooths his thick beard. Adjusts his tie, that porteño -that typical Buenos Aires- defense against an overwhelming city, the act of strangling oneself slightly in the daily service of one's sentence» [NN, 4-5; BN, 10]). The new territory positions them in a different setting, and in the process of transformation their past no longer seems familiar. Thus, the sartorial, with its emphasis on the body and its connotations of costume, mask, and ornament, plays a dominant role in the creation/representation of subjectivity. The articles that had seemed familiar and quotidian, comfortable, and those with which the characters had identified, are transformed into alien objects; from being heimlich, they become unheimlich, unfamiliar, disquieting.

To fight his uneasiness in a city' depicted as cruel («despiadada» [22]) and full of dangers, Agustín Palant buys a handgun, offering the excuse that he will have to be able to defend himself when he retires to write at an isolated cabin in the mountains. The violence of the city evokes in him another type of violence, that of the ubiquitous political threat and the presence of carceral and repressive systems in Buenos Aires. The constant threat of physical violence that people faced under the military regime in Argentina surfaces as a counterpoint to what Agustín feels while walking the streets of New York.

But the violence does not come from the outside: the novel opens with Agustín's crime. Without knowing why, he kills an actress after accompanying her home from a play only hours after meeting her. As a result of this act, Agustín no longer recognizes himself as Agustín Palant, the Argentine writer who had arrived in New York on a grant. He feels horrified when he confronts his action, which transforms him into an assassin, just like the torturers of the military government he is escaping. Yet he refuses to accept that there can be similarities between his own actions and the military's repressive strategies. On Roberta's advice, he decides to change his name after the crime -or rather, Roberta decides he should change his name, clothes, and appearance. In addition to the physical transformation, he becomes passive, staying inside Roberta's apartment⁶. To help him regain confidence, Roberta recommends that Agustín shave his beard. He protests, saying that hardly ever has he seen his bare face (NN, 44; BN, 47). But Roberta assures him that, after he shaves, he will be able to see his face, and this will allow him to go out in the street. Agustín must confront another image of himself, an image created by Roberta, who has induced him to change his appearance and wardrobe. Wearing Roberta's clothes after the crime, Agustín is described as handicapped, someone who does not know who he is. Perhaps he never knew (NN, 34; BN, 37). During this period Roberta becomes a kind of mother figure he eventually will need to leave behind.

These transformations occur in a city that is described as a labyrinth with no border lines. As in Borges's story «El sur», there is the South of the imagination, of literature, and there is the South of geographic reality. New York, as presented in the novel, is not the city an average New Yorker would recognize, but a personal and metaphysical city, like the Paris of Horacio Oliveira in Rayuela.

The Spanish American intellectual's trip to the European metropolis and the relationship between the European and the national traditions have been leading motifs in Spanish America's intellectual history. In the case of Argentina this presence has been especially poignant, as David Viñas has shown in his essays of «El viaje a Europa» (138). Viñas suggests that this trip can be explained by the desire to leave an undervalued zone in search of a possible salvation in the region of Culture with a capital C (139). His analysis of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's travels may illuminate this discussion⁷. In Sarmiento's own account of his trip to Europe, North Africa, and the United States from 1845 to 1848, he writes that the only appropriate titles for one who would conquer a great European city and its intelligentsia are «author or king»: «En París no hay otro título para el mundo inteligente, que ser autor o rey» (1:194). Sarmiento is confident that the keys he carries with him will open the doors of Parisian intellectual circles⁸. The first key is the Chilean government's official recommendation, which will help him complete his assignment to study the French educational system as a model for reforms in Chile; the second key is his recently published book, Facundo (1845). He has faith in his book, and so he starts by using the latter key. Unfortunately, he does not succeed, because his book has not been read- in part because the copies he sent by boat were lost and in part because the book has not been translated. He laments that he has only one copy and is not prepared to part with it. Furthermore, Sarmiento does not find in France what he had expected. He is disappointed to discover that the overwhelming majority of the citizens do not belong to the cultured circle whose works he admires. To his credit, Sarmiento changes his views as he travels.

Sarmiento's transformation is not only intellectual; it also concerns the body. Viñas writes that Sarmiento «vive como nunca su cuerpo en Europa» (he lives his body like never before in Europe [156]). Observing that he replaces his wardrobe, as stated in his Diario de gastos, Viñas makes clear that fashion becomes one of Sarmiento's major expenses. In Viñas's words, Sarmiento overcomes his shortcomings as far as clothes are concerned, for «desnudo se está vistiendo» (naked he clothes himself [158]).

A century later, Cortázar's trip to Paris in 1951 seems to represent a break with the traditional trip to Europe, in Viñas's view, because Cortázar traveled to Europe and stayed there, although his reading public continued to be Latin American, especially Argentine (187)⁹. Yet if we consider that Sarmiento did not stay in Europe but, after learning of Horace Mann's innovative educational policies, traveled to the United States in search of the man who a few years before had done exactly what he was attempting to do, to study the French educational system for the purposes of developing an effective system in his home country, we can appreciate Sarmiento's perceptive understanding of where to look for a model. Unlike other exiles who had unconditionally admired the French model, Sarmiento, the colonial who had learned and admired so deeply French and European culture, dared to search for the unconventional, the new, and traveled to America like a new Alexis de Tocqueville.

In Black Novel Roberta and Agustín's journey becomes far more than a search for a convenient place to write. Instead, the trip changes the protagonists intellectually and physically, as in Sarmiento's case¹⁰. The new scenario is a challenging experience. The vision of the city presented in the text is a personal vision, for the city is seen from the perspective of the baggage the writers bring along. The contact with New York's diversity is not an empty ritual, and what the city offers them is not just esoteric experiences but very concrete opportunities to embrace new, penetrating, and contradictory outlooks on life.

In contrast with the traditional trip of the Latin American intellectual to Europe, usually to Paris, this time the metropolis is in the New World. The capital of Culture with a capital C is the city of pop art, diversity, and multiculturalism, the postmodern city where popular and high culture live together, a city that is not easily understood and digested. The text underlines the inescapable influence the chameleonic city has on its inhabitants. Change and transformation are occurring all the time, to the point where theaters and bars are constantly opened and closed, and even people appear and disappear without leaving a trace, as did the actress Agustín killed one night. It is a city where nothing is stable, not even the characters' personalities or their names: «En esa ciudad onfálica, todo es desplazamiento y transfiguración y cambio. Cambio y corto» («In this umbilical city, all is displacement and transfiguration and change. Change and over» [NN, 222; BN, 210]).

Jean Franco's questionable assertion that «the metropolis has always been the place in which knowledge is produced» (368) seems to be true in Black Novel. It is in New York that the characters discover the rigidity of their upbringing, but it should be noted that their New York is also a personal reading of a «social force» (Brennan, 226) from the perspective of the Third World visitor who reads the labyrinth in a way that differs from that of the average New Yorker¹¹.

Black Novel emphasizes the interdependence of several worlds: the postcolonial world and the metropolis, the West and the East, masculine and feminine, popular and high culture. In Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad Néstor García Canclini mentions two examples -taken from studies by Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach- that illustrate the difference between the Old World, represented by the Louvre, and modernity7, as suggested by the architecture and organization of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City¹². Although the Louvre's architectural and artistic displays «are subordinated to the history of France, they build an iconographic program that dramatizes the triumph of French civilization, instituting it as heir of humankind's values. By contrast, the Museum of Modem Art in New York is located in a cold glass-and-metal building with few windows, as if the disconnection with the outside world and the plurality of choices gave [to the visitor] the feeling of being able to go anywhere, as a free individual option, as if the spectator were in the same position of the creative artist» (45-46, my translation)¹³. The first example describes the world the characters have left behind; the second, the new order they encounter in New York.

The interconnections of these worlds in the making of subjectivity are present throughout the text. One of the writers with whom Luisa Valenzuela has frequently been associated is Julio Cortázar. I have already mentioned the textual dialogue between Black Novel and Rayuela, yet one could add other texts by Cortázar, such as «Axolotl», «La noche boca arriba», and «El perseguidor». In these stories Cortázar problematizes the traditional body/mind, body language/verbal language, East/West, past/present, self/other distinctions¹⁴. Black Novel proposes the impossibility of separating these oppositions in a Cartesian fashion. Its labyrinthine streets point to other, equally entangled labyrinths, to other textual and cultural discourses. The intertextual dialogue with Artaud, Bataille, Borges, Calvino, Camus, Cortázar, Djuna Barnes, Gide, Hesse, psychoanalysis, Eastern and Hindu philosophies, and other works by Valenzuela herself show the convoluted discursive road that leads to the signs of identity of a narrator marked by culture, historicity, and personal preferences. The references to Hermann Hesse are particularly significant¹⁵. In Steppenwolf (1927) the German author, a naturalized Swiss whose parents were missionaries in India, reveals a preoccupation for exploring the unconscious; in addition, his efforts to join Oriental thought and his penchant for the psychoanalytic characterize several of his works. This confluence and this permeability are emblematic of the process of transformation the characters in Black Novel go through when confronted with an alien environment. Roberta and Agustin leave behind their necktie and corset, and their life «en otro país, otro tiempo, otra vida, otra historia» («in another country, another life, another life story» [NN, 4; BN, 10]) to venture in «el largo deambular más allá de la frontera» («a long stroll beyond the border» [NN, 17; BN, 21]).

The idea Roberta promotes, to write with the body, is another manifestation of the need to recognize the inseparable relationship of body and mind, of conscious and unconscious realities¹⁶. The text often emphasizes that the masculine tradition has erased the corporeal despite some notable exceptions. In Black Novel this preoccupation is portrayed in the dialogue between the two protagonist-writers, Roberta and Agustín, who represent two distinct ways of conceiving the writer's task. Roberta recommends that Agustín change his writing style: he should write with his body, she says. Agustín does not seem very keen about mending his ways, abandoning a mode that is familiar to him, until he loses control of his own body after killing Edwina, the actress. Ironically, it is Agustín who learns this lesson to the hilt, for he cannot escape what he has done. His crime affects him deeply in both his body and his mind. Black Novel suggests that this and other binary oppositions are impediments to exploring subjectivity, and that it is necessary for writers to dissociate themselves from some learned paradigms.

In Nomadic Subjects Rosi Braidotti distinguishes among the migrant, the exile, and the nomad. Whereas the migrant «has a clear destination» (22), usually searching for economic advantages, and the exile expects to return to her country of origin, «the nomad does not stand for homelessness, or compulsive displacement; it is rather a figuration for the kind of subject who has relinquished all idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity. This figuration expresses the desire for an identity made of transitions, successive shifts, and coordinated changes, without and against an essential unity. The nomadic subject, however, is not altogether devoid of unity; his/her mode is one of definite, seasonal patterns of movement through rather fixed routes» (22, my emphasis). If Roberta and Agustín could originally have considered themselves travelers, migrants, or exiles, they seem to have loosened themselves in New York, becoming nomads in Braidotti's sense.

In Orientalism Edward Said points out that «orientalism itself... was an exclusively male province; like so many professional guilds during the modern period, it viewed itself and its subject matter with sexist blinders» (207). Gayatri Spivak expresses a similar opinion: «If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow» (287). These two Valenzuela novels show that the old tenets no longer hold true, especially if we consider that, in the last twenty years in Latin America, the voices of the female subaltern are indeed speaking. This is not an isolated phenomenon, for as Said recognizes in Culture and Imperialism, feminist readings of the Arab world have effectively contributed to the rereading of colonial discourse (xxiv). The woman narrator in Black Novel is so powerful that Agustín seems at times to be no more than a character in her novel. While Agustin's fate seems a reversal of that of Augusto Pérez, the protagonist of Unamuno's Niebla -Pérez acquires a life of his own, becoming independent of his author- Roberta develops a particular independence, seeming as though she is the author. Agustín fears he may become a character in Roberta's novel: «Ella reclama más y quizá lo que pretende es usarlo a él de personaje. Hecho pulpa, atrapado entre dos tapas de un libro de Roberta, así se siente a veces» («Roberta demands more and more and perhaps has it in mind to use him as a character. Sometimes he feels squeezed into a pulp and pressed between the covers of one of Roberta's books» [NN, 22; BN, 27]). Moreover, the exiled intellectual of Bedside Manners, who returns to her home country after ten years in New York, is, significantly, a woman.

If Black Novel underlines the lack of an axis mundi that can function as a backbone to identity, as an ideology or religion, it offers instead a myriad of human possibilities¹⁷. The city of New York, emblematic of postmodernity and a place in which different cultures, languages, and discourses coexist, functions, on the one hand, as a destabilizer of the norm, of the heimlich, but, on the other, emphasizes the multiple dimensions of the individual. A variety of cultures comes in contact in the city, thus allowing the survival of diversity and simultaneously encouraging the breaking of boundaries. As several critics have suggested, a process of hybridization is the main characteristic of the late twentieth century (García Canclini, Said, Sarlo).

Similar to Oliveira's return to Buenos Aires in Rayuela, Valenzuela's Bedside Manners presents almost the reverse situation we have observed in Black Novel. The woman, who returns to her country from a ten-year exile, needs to alter the frame of mind she has acquired abroad if she is to survive in the culture created by years of political repression and economic chaos. Ironically, the military leaders who presided over that period were in turn following the advice of a manual designed in the United States, as the woman's maid points out to her. The maid is proud to show she knows it by heart: «En esto sí que admiramos a los gringos. Usted que viene llegando de allí seguro que lo conoce. El desafío de las armas de combate, se llama» («This is something we do admire about the Yanks. You've just come from there, you're bound to know it. The Challenge of Combat Weapons, it's called» [CA, 34; BM, 36]).

The woman has a hard time getting used to her country, for she has missed decisive historical developments and the making of a new culture. To help her recover, a friend lends her a bungalow. This bungalow has big windows facing a country club, but the curtains remain always closed. The woman is assisted by the maid, who suggests that she turn on the television to learn what is going on; but the intellectual in her at first refuses to give in to the temptation of TV, although eventually she ends up watching just like everybody else¹⁸. The maid, her only contact with the outside world, offers practical advice, persuading her to buy whatever is available, because the next day everything will be twice as expensive. For a while it seems as though nothing happens in this quiet place, but suddenly the outside world starts sneaking into her bedroom. Her food disappears, and complete strangers pop in as if by magic. The woman gets used to these interruptions and learns to take pleasure in watching TV, because in its images she recognizes a world similar to the one she knew before leaving for New York, a world in which there is order and happy endings.

As Beatríz Sarlo comments in Escenas de la vidaposmodema, explaining Western societies' addiction to the media, «los finales del folletín ponen las cosas en su lugar y esto les gusta incluso a los sujetos fractales y descentrados de la posmodernidad» (the endings in soap operas manage to fit everything in place, and this is to the liking of the decentered subjects of postmodernity [68])¹⁹. The protagonist's initial resistance turns into compulsory watching, because, just as Sarlo suggests in her analysis of the media's role, «en una cultura sostenida en la visión, la imagen tiene más fuerza probatoria porque no se limita a ser simplemente verosímil o coherente, como puede ser un discurso, sino que convence como verdadera: alguien lo vio con sus propios ojos, no se lo contaron» (in a culture based on the visual, the image has the power of evidence . . . since, unlike discourse, spectators can assert they saw it with their own eyes; it was not something someone told them [79]). It is not surprising then that when the TV malfunctions, she cries and loses control. She says that her city has been changed, everything has been changed: «Ahora no sé quien es el enemigo, no sé contra quien pelear. Antes de irme sabía, ahora el enemigo no está más o dice no estar y está y yo ya no sé donde estoy parada» («Now I don't know who the enemy is, I don't know who to fight against. Before I went away I did, now the enemy's no longer there, or at least he says he isn't, but he is and I just don't know where I stand» [RN, 69; BM, 78]). Totally confused, she is on the brink of losing her mind. She knows the situation is dangerous, especially for intellectuals. She has been warned that, unlike intellectuals, the military entertain no doubts; they act: «-Los militares no dudamos, actuamos. . . . La duda es una jactancia de los intelectuales. O de las intelectualas como ésa que está ahí en la cama haciéndose la desentendida» («The army doesn't hesitate, it acts. . . . Doubt is a concept for intellectuals. Or for female intellectuals like the one lying on the bed over there pretending not to listen» [RN, 78; BM, 88]). The woman feels torn: a part of her is comforted watching TV, but her other half thinks.

The novel ends with a big party at which the people who have invaded her room celebrate their victory in having gained control of the country club that had been taken over by the military. Nevertheless, the woman seems distrustful of this victory. Although she is again lucid, those around her appear to have lost their heads. The woman resists the revel, remaining an outsider. She realizes that she has missed the period when this new cultural discourse emerged and cannot understand how those who celebrate can have such a great time believing in their victory. She has decided, however, that she will not hide like «an ostrich ever again» (BM, 120), for she wants to know. She ends up speaking, perhaps with the hope that, by raising questions, she can be an agent of change.

Here again the protagonist seems displaced, since the country has gone through many changes, political and cultural, during her absence. Sarlo's analysis of the displacement of intellectuals in postmodern Argentine society could explain the protagonist's confusion. Sarlo writes that, in old times, intellectuals thought they had the last word because they spoke for those without a voice of their own (173); in addition, like intellectuals in other parts of the globe, Argentine intellectuals were convinced that knowing was a source of freedom, although they did not recognize that it was also a source of control (176), and in their arrogance, they loved to be acclaimed for establishing a dialogue restricted to their peers, despising the public (177). She affirms that intellectuals with such a haughty concept of themselves «se sintieron libres frente a todos los poderes; cortejaron todos los poderes. Se entusiasmaron con las grandes revoluciones y, también, fueron sus primeras víctimas. Son los intelectuales: una categoría cuya existencia misma hoy es un problema» (they felt free in front of the powers that be, became excited with the big revolutions, and were, also, their first victims. They are the intellectuals: a category whose existence today is very much in question [178-79, emphasis in original]). But despite this state of affairs, intellectuals' criticism is still needed, says Sarlo, «porque no se han desvanecido las injusticias que dieron impulso al fuego donde se impugnaron poderes absolutos y legitimidades basadas en la autoridad despótica y la concentración de riquezas» (because injustice, authoritarianism and the concentration of wealth among a few have not yet vanished [179]). However, Sarlo warns that the old type of intellectual, the prophets, «no volverán a ser los únicos administradores de la globalidad» (189). The power they have lost will not be returned to them, she concludes (189). In her process of reincorporation into her society, the «señora» in the novel learns that, as an intellectual, she needs to negotiate from a new perspective. It is true that she has the last word when the novel ends, but her words form only a question.

The protagonist in Bedside Manners does not have an answer to the personal, social, and political situation she encounters upon returning to her homeland. Similarly, in Black Novel Roberta and Agustín continue to engage in explorations of places and relationships in what appears to be an open-ended search. Just as the Zen koan «What is the sound of one hand clapping?» -alluded to in Black Novel (211)- is neither easily resolved nor admits a verbalized answer, so the novel ends without closure, with no period. There is no end of the game. The urban, textual, and individual labyrinths in Black Novel do not lead to an easy way out, since, as the author has written in her «Little Manifesto», «Literature is the site of the crosswaters -the murky and the clear waters- where nothing is exactly in its place because there is no precise place. We have to invent it each time... Literature doesn't pretend to solve anything. It disturbs and stirs ideas, keeping them from becoming stale» (20). By raising questions, the woman in Bedside Manners puts this principle into practice. Hence the awareness of dislocation and «nomadic consciousness» does not exclude agency; on the contrary, as Braidotti asserts, «Nomadic consciousness is a form of political resistance to hegemonic and exclusionary views of subjectivity» (23).

Together, Black Novel and Bedside Manners explore a distinction similar to the one presented in Cortázar's Rayuela: «el lado de allá» (Paris) and «el lado de acá» (Buenos Aires). But whereas in Rayuela Oliveira ends up taking refuge in an insane asylum with threats of committing suicide, the characters in Valenzuela's novels tackle the challenge faced by the intellectual in contemporary society, although the answers are not forthcoming. Through the exploration of subjectivity, these two novels by Valenzuela suggest the unstable and permeable character of identity and the central role played by the subject's positionality. Stuart Hall has labeled as «diaspora identities» «those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference» (402). The spatial displacements of the twentieth century, from periphery to metropolis to periphery, such as those portrayed in Black Novel and Bedside Manners, show the extent to which the metropolis and the postcolonial world are interdependent and how the knowledge exported to the latter is manipulated. The trips undertaken by Sarmiento in the 1840s and by those who preceded him -from Garcilaso Inca to Esteban Echeverria- and those who followed him -from José Marti to Luisa Valenzuela- have not stopped, for the travelers continue to cross borders in greater and greater numbers, contributing to the dialogue between the center and the periphery. Just as a century ago, the metropolis still «seems» to be the place where knowledge originates, but the postcolonial has an active role in the process. Valenzuela's «nomadic» protagonists are active performers and agents of a new form of social discourse²⁰.

Washington University, St. Louis

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