(Re)Negotiating the Family Romance: Luisa Valenzuela's «Cuchillo y madre»

Sharon Magnarelli

First a bit of positionality: I have realized in recent years that all my critical studies reflect what I was reading or what else I was writing at the time I was working on them. The theoretical discourse seems to become disembodied and internalized and to penetrate me like a knife, a simile that will prove to be most apropos in the next few pages. And, surely this article is no exception. As I was writing it, I was also preparing a lecture on the criticism of Spanish-American literature during the last third of the twentieth century. In preparing for that lecture, I became more conscious than ever of the current debates about whether or not critical theories from Europe and the North-American academy (poststructuralism, deconstructionism, postcolonialism, feminism, subaltern studies, postmodernism, psychoanalytical theory, etc.) are applicable to Spanish-American literature. The questions the debates raise are: first, isn't the imposition of «foreign» theory another form of imperialism or colonialism? and second, are our first-world forms of relevance in Latin America? This paper is in some sense a response to that debate. In addition, as I prepared for that lecture I was struck by how frequently literary critics lose sight of the literary text: sometimes it is because they are busy arguing for or against theory in general; sometimes it is because they are busy showing how text A exemplifies theory X. Stanley Fish's famous question, «Is there a text in this class?» kept popping into my mind, although with a different meaning than that of the original query. In my case, the question means, what have we done with or to the literary text that is supposed to be the focus of this critical work? Conscious as I am of our tendency to internalize the theoretical discourse, the literary critic in me is nevertheless puzzled by this inclination to privilege the theoretical text, all too often uncritically, while marginalizing the literary text and using it as a proving ground for the theoretical.

Therefore, in this paper I would like to invert that process. Rather than imposing a theoretical text or master on Valenzuela's work, I would like to use one of her stories to challenge the masters' texts and to suggest a different family romance, a different story from the one the masters imagined, or at least a different one from the one they told. The story that I shall examine and impose on the masters, «Cuchillo y madre», comes from Valenzuela's Simetrías (1993), a collection that posits a series of Yes, buts to a number of the master narratives, fairy tales perhaps most overtly, but also the Freudian, Lacanian psychoanalytical narratives. It is also a collection that focuses on the very question of disembodied discourse, the «they say» that comes from the narratives we are raised on and is so often repeated that it is eventually internalized (we do not ask where the knowledge came from, if it came from a reliable source) and naturalized (it appears common-sensical, the «natural» or logical order of things). Thus, the discourse goes unquestioned because it is by implication unquestionable, not unlike many of our theoretical texts¹.

My focus in will be the family romance, specifically, the daughter-mother relation «Cuchillo y madre». Let me note that I have intentionally inverted the traditional order of these terms (daughter-mother), first to highlight the chronological movement and second, but more important, to provide a constant reminder that the latter (the mother) is necessarily both, a mother and a daughter. Remember a woman cannot get to motherhood without passing through daughterhood first, and even as a mother, she is still a daughter².

Also, as we consider the daughter-mother relation in «Cuchillo y madre», it is important to bear in mind that motherhood, daughterhood, and the very notion of family as they are constituted today, are themselves, like the nation-state, relatively recent developments, sociopolitical, historical constructions that date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they are not natural phenomena³. They appear to be personal experiences, but they are in fact highly political and complexly entangled in social mores. As Ann Dally has stated, «There have always been mothers, but motherhood was invented» (17)⁴.

Before we look at «Cuchillo y madre» in conjunction with some of the master narratives, a brief plot summary is in order. The main storyline, which is embedded in a frame narrative, is told in the third person, principally from the daughter's perspective, and describes the developing (or at times deteriorating) daughter-mother relationship. First the five-year-old daughter wants to kill herself by plunging a knife into her belly so the mother will notice her, cry for her, perhaps love her more -so that the mother will suffer the child's absence as presumably the child suffers the mother's absences. Then, as an adult, the daughter is repeatedly accused by the mother of wanting to kill her. Remembering the first scene, the daughter comes to a clear perception of a golden thread, «elástico, resistente, dúctil» that connects the two and that stretches and stretches (19). Later, when she remembers the knife, she decides that perhaps the mother had been right all along and that rather than wanting to kill herself as a child, as she had believed, she had «really» wanted to kill her mother (as she had been told). The images of the thread and the knife reappear to her, but in spite of her self-admonitions to cut that thread, the connection to her mother, significantly, she never does. Thus, the story ends not neatly and tidily with any resolution but with the words «Se sintió liberada, y», words that have already been repeated several times in the narration and words that are then followed by a blank space and a parenthetical epilogue about the current status of the knife, which from the beginning had been labeled one of the story's three protagonists.

Now, the first narrative on which I would like to impose «Cuchillo y madre» is the following. «In the beginning was the word». Or so we are told. Says who? and whose word?, one might well ask. This is the end of the twentieth century; we all know that words can no longer pass as disembodied: they come from somewhere, from someone, and have a political agenda, a vested interest, just as I do here in reframing them and just as my readers do in accepting or rejecting my reading. We need to re-embody that word and ask, whose word? The answer in the most general of terms: the word of the master. Sometimes he was one of the Judeo-Christian tradition's great patriarchs and his word is captured in our sacred texts. Sometimes he was called Jung or Freud or Lacan. Or perhaps Darwin, Marx, Hegel, Levi-Strauss, Derrida or Foucault⁵. And that word shaped all we perceived: how we perceived others, how we perceived ourselves. Yet rarely did anyone seriously question, and what if the master and his word just didn't get it right? Oh, yes, other masters quibbled over the details, but few challenged the basic premise -in the beginning was the word, the master's word. But, in this story (and in others to be sure), Valenzuela challenges and denaturalizes that word.

Furthermore, the master's word usually developed into a narrative, or perhaps several narratives but all with similar plots and similar goals: to explain to us the right and «natural» way to conduct ourselves in our society and specifically within the microcosm of the family. For young women (daughters), that plot advocated passive waiting until prince charming (implicitly the fittest survivor, if we want to mix in yet another master narrative) appeared to carry us away to begin the process all over again. While we waited, we would desire our fathers and hate our mothers, who, the psychoanalytical narratives told us, would have really preferred a son anyway. But, then, those narratives also told us that the mother would find her fulfillment in the child and focus her entire world on that child, and we never quite forgive her for her failure to embody that narrative. In other words, from a very young age we all «know» what the family is supposed to look like, although I suspect very few of our families ever quite fit that ideal, if indeed imaginary, mold. And that was thus mother's fault for her failure to fulfill her proper role, for those same narratives inevitably placed the father's primary role and business elsewhere, outside the family, in the larger world of «important» sociopolitical, economic matters, and he was thus relieved of primary responsibility for what might go on inside that family. When we later repeated the pattern in our own families, now as the mothers we had formerly hated, we were supposed to hate or at least be jealous of our daughters (or our step-daughters if we happened to be wicked queens), daughters who, we were told, would surely be more desirable to our husbands than we and who would desire (love) them more than us⁶. This is «only natural» according to the Oedipal, Freudian, psychoanalytical narratives, which in turn, they tell us, are based on classical myth (more master narratives). It is also «only natural» according to modern renditions of many fairy tales. Now, perhaps this was not the intention of the «original» tales; perhaps they, like many of our sacred texts, have just been translated, rewritten, and re-interpreted too many times and thus imbued with the ideology of a series of readers with their vested interests, but this we can never know. Yet, perhaps it does not matter, for what does matter is what «they» told us and how we have internalized it and accepted it as «only natural».

But, what does Valenzuela's corrective «Cuchillo y madre» say about what is «only natural»? Let's start with the frame story, which begins, «Se empieza simplemente queriendo cercenar». Note, this is not what the master narratives have told us. On the contrary, the beginning has been moved; the basic premise reformulated. In the beginning was desire -«Se empieza [...] queriendo». Whose desire? It does not say; presumably everyone's, as Valenzuela parodies that impersonal, universalizing discourse of the master narratives. Desire for whom or what? «Queriendo cercenar»: wanting to cut off. In the beginning there was not the castration complex, a sense of lack or incompleteness, but the desire to cut, to do violence. Significantly, the subject and object of the psychoanalytical narrative are inverted. To cut off whom, what, why? Or «cercenar» meaning «redondear», to pare away and trim to give a round form, to trim to fit a mold. Whose mold? By encouraging us to ask these questions, or at least leaving space for them to be asked, Valenzuela's opening sentence might well be read as a challenge to the master narratives as it, first, questions their impersonal, universalizing discourse and, second, foregrounds the «trimming», the cutting off of excess to create the desired form, which is surely the basic operation performed by the master narratives. Remember that as those narratives pretend to reflect us and proffer models for our lives, metaphorically they encourage us to trim and shape ourselves to fit the form of someone else's desire, to make our desires reflections of the masters'. Valenzuela's corrective continues, «Después hay toda una vida para ir averiguando qué». It will take a lifetime to figure out what that object of desire might be, what we might want to cut or harm. The discourse has been internalized but not fully comprehended. Which is not to say that it will not affect our performances in the meantime, how we fill our daughter or mother roles. In the beginning there was desire, a desire to do violence, a desire to shape and trim the object of desire, so it would fit comfortably within the frame of the looking glass, or, as Valenzuela seems to suggest in «Cuchillo y madre», within the narrative that would presume to provide that looking glass.

While we are on looking glasses and frames, let me note that the fact that Valenzuela's story is itself a framed, embedded tale, overtly re-enacts the framed context in which all our subject development occurs. We do not grow up in a vacuum, but in an already formed society with its naturalized narratives, regulatory practices or fictions, and concurrent expectations. The discourse and the social roles -constructed as they are- precede us and surround us. And, like it or not, we are expected to fit into them. Indeed, our development consists principally of learning to fit those roles and, in the process, of losing, forgetting, trimming what is excess, what does not fit, including perhaps the connection to the mother that Valenzuela foregrounds here -«lo que había sido cortado en el comienzo de los tiempos» (20). Thus, the story of the daughter-mother relationship comes to us already embedded in impersonal, internalized discourse⁷. Indeed, I would argue that those discursive frames, master narratives, provide what the narrator of «Cuchillo y madre» labels the antagonist in the daughter-mother story: «Antagonista es todo aquel que entre los protagonistas se interpone, uniendo; o viceversa» (15). Since the protagonists have already been named as the mother, the daughter, and the knife, the antagonist must be social expectations, the regulatory, naturalized fictions, the master narratives. But, let us not forget that the master narratives themselves depict that antagonist differently, stipulating that what comes between daughter and mother and creates the adversarial relation is the father, or at least, the proverbial Lacanian phallus. Insofar as there are no males in this story, Valenzuela clearly posits other possibilities for that antagonist, which she specifically labels invisible and changeable. Thus, I would argue that the antagonist here is the naturalized, internalized «law of the father», but I would redefine that term to encompass all the regulatory fictions, including most specifically the patriarchal master narratives proffered by psychoanalysis, the discipline, which perhaps more than any other, has been adamant about telling us what we desire. Thus, Valenzuela daringly implies that the object of desire might well be different from what the master narratives, with their vested interest, have proclaimed⁸.

Significantly, the inner story of «Cuchillo y madre» begins with a lower case letter, marking its embeddedness to be sure, but also its lack of pretense to authoritativeness (unlike the master narratives). Similarly, the lower case letter points to individuality, not universality and homogeneity. This is one story, not necessarily The (implicitly only) story⁹. The story (like the psychoanalytical master narratives) would universalize and naturalize, presuming that all individuals are subjects of the same story. One story leaves room for other possibilities and does not insist on erasing differences (differences between and differences within). In another story from this same collection, «Si esto es la vida, yo soy Caperucita Roja», Valenzuela posits that the wolf is not just out there in the world waiting for us. It is already within us. So too are «good» mothers and «bad» ones. And, our images of them cannot be disentangled from each other nor from our images of good or bad daughters. But, The story (with its upper case letter) would presume to disentangle them, privilege one over the other, and thus become either the mother's story or the daughter's story, eliding the fact that women are both at the same time. Finally, as mentioned, the lower case letter with which Valenzuela's inner tale begins highlights the embeddedness and thus evokes the fact that the development of subject identity, is an ongoing process, always in medias res, without origin or end, always linked forward and backward by that golden thread that stretches and stretches, always subject to citing previous performances but equally important, to re-negotiation, in both senses of the word¹⁰.

Specifically, this inner story opens, «la hija tiene apenas cinco añitos cumplidos cuando empieza su camino de percepción que se arrastrar confuso por los años de los años» (15). Already at age five, the child has begun the process of internalization of the discourse and narratives that will authorize what they name, including our daughter-mother roles¹¹. She may be only five, but she has already been shaped to know what she is and is not allowed to perceive, to desire, to perform, to be. And, what she perceives (in the inverse of the Snow White story) is her mother's beauty, and she suffers as she studies it/her while the mother prepares to go out¹². Does she hate the mother, does the mother hate her, as the master narratives would have us believe? Apparently, not. But that is not to say that the relation is unproblematic either. Indeed, the daughter does feel anguish -anguish and confusion, perhaps because she is not as beautiful as the mother (although the beauty motif is surely another ramification of the master narratives) but also, and perhaps more important, because the mother is going out, abandoning her, foregrounding their separation and non-identity. So the daughter wants to kill herself: «A los cinco años la nena se quiere matar, cree querer matarse para que su madre la llore» (16). The child is distraught because she is not central enough to the mother and inversely because the mother she perceives is not the ideal mother (the one who would focus her entire world on the child)¹³. On the contrary, this mother goes out, away, marks her difference.

It is significant, too, no doubt, that the child observes the mother from the outside, the hallway, peripheral rather than central to the mother's world, and is filled with self pity: «pobre de mí, ¿quién va a sufrir cuando yo muera?» (16). In addition, the daughter is watching the mother watch herself in the looking glass¹⁴. In this respect, the story highlights the mother's double distance and double independence from the child as well as the mother's own split, self and reflection. But, I would insist that this is definitively not the Lacanian scene of the mirror stage; here the child sees not the self but the mother, first, as separate and, second, as multiplied in the mirror and senses that there is no space in it for her¹⁵. Thus, Valenzuela evokes a double bind here: from the child's perspective, on the one hand, there is no room for her in the mother's looking glass, but on the other and inversely, the mother does not fit into the child's mold or looking glass, the regulatory fictions prescribed by those internalized master narratives¹⁶. So, it would seem then that one of the two (if not both) will have to be trimmed to fit into the mirror of the other. Remember, «Se empieza simplemente queriendo cercenar». As this story has it, the child turns the knife on herself -«me lo voy a clavar [...] en la panza» (16), but only in her imagination, for, as the text notes parenthetically and with typical Valenzuela irony, the child knows she is not allowed to touch the knife- a prohibition she challenges only at the end of the story, when, as an adult, she decides to «agarrar finalmente el cuchillo por el mango» (20), at this point not in order to trim or cut anything, but simply to defuse the danger, a gesture which in many ways parallels Valenzuela's own here as she confronts a difficult, almost taboo subject.

Still, within the story, the child's desire to turn the knife on herself performs several narrative functions. First, it reminds us of our unwitting complicity (along with the concurrent self-inflicted blame) in the internalization and enactment of the master narratives that shape our perceptions, including the perception of what our own desires might be or have been. The knife will penetrate us like the discourse has, unless and until we take hold of it, control it in reality as we have been led to believe we do in our imaginations. Significantly, in her desire for attention and approval, the child is prepared (imaginatively to be sure) to harm herself, metaphorically to perform a role that may not be in her best interest but one for which she will be rewarded (or imagines she will be) with love and attention. Surely, the mother, primping herself before the mirror, is metonymically and metaphorically doing the same -assuming a costume («sus alegres vestidos floreados que tan bonito le quedan», 16) and preparing to perform a role, again one that may not be in her best interest, but one for which she will be implicitly rewarded (or inversely, punished should she fail to properly embody and perform it)¹⁷. Second, the imagined act of self-inflicted violence here is predicated on an internal alienation or split from the self, perhaps also echoing the split from the mother that causes the child such anguish. The child mentally watches herself plunge the knife into her belly, assumes the positions of both spectator and spectacle. In many ways, then the looking glass itself has been internalized: «yo me voy a levantar, en estos momentos me estoy levantando aunque no me mueva de esta reposera [...] voy a ir estoy yendo a la cocina [...] me lo voy a clavar y es como si me lo estuviera clavando en la panza» (16)¹⁸. Thus, in this imagined act of violence, the child is imitating the mother in two respects: 1) she is watching herself as the mother is in the mirror; and 2) like the mother, she prepares (imaginatively, to be sure) to go away, to leave. Indeed, the daughter's apparent desire to kill herself may be read as a desire to beat the mother at her own game by going away and abandoning her first.

Significantly, this pattern will be inverted later when the mother repeatedly accuses the adult daughter of wanting to kill her¹⁹. Here, what others say (the mother included) is overtly internalized, and the daughter concludes that they must be right, that this must have been what she desired all along -«Debe haber querido» (19). That her «knowledge» seems to come from within, seems to be an insight that emanates from her, may well be a reflection of the degree to which she has internalized that Oedipal narrative. But, it is also important to note that in her accusations, the mother too is reflecting the extent to which she has internalized the assigned role and is performing a script, one that the daughter specifically labels «la farsa» and «esta eterna historia» (18) -that eternal story of long-suffering motherhood as scripted by modern Western society²⁰. Still, just as the daughter presumably abandoned her role of victim earlier (she did not kill herself), the mother too abandons the role when the expected «rewards» are not forthcoming: «sabe salirse con facilidad del papel de víctima cuando éste no la favorece» (18). In the Valenzuela story, then, what is perceived as insufficient love or attention on the part of the other, is to a large degree the product of both the daughter's and the mother's inability to escape those internalized roles and pre-scriptions, which dictate not only how each will perform her role, but also how each will expect the other to perform hers.

In this respect, the Valenzuela story challenges the master narratives that define the object of desire (as well as the object of violence) as the father and suggests that the object of desire and violence might well be the mother, but more importantly the mother we already carry within us and to whom we are connected by that golden thread, the thread that stretches, presumably marking the distance between the two even while it marks the bond, in what we might well read as 1) the simultaneous connection and disconnection (identification and disidentification) between daughter and mother and 2) the multiple subject positions they both inhabit at all times insofar as they both embrace and perform good daughters and bad ones, good mothers and bad ones²¹. Yet, once again, the master narratives are internalized and turned on the self, for the daughter not once but twice tells herself («se dijo»), «Tengo que cortar el hilo» (20), and the reader is led back to the same questions: says who? why? Those questions are not answered (indeed they are not explicitly asked) but, significantly, the daughter does not cut the thread; she does nothing.

Thus, the story ends with inaction, but I would argue that here not acting marks the assumption of agency, a choosing not to act, or what Valenzuela has elsewhere called «la actividad dentro de la pasividad» (Díaz, «Entrevista» 43). Indeed, the story specifically states, «sintió que ya no se trataba de cortar o no cortar sino de agarrar finalmente el cuchillo por el mango, asumir lo que había sido cortado en el comienzo de los tiempos» (20). What has been cut, forgotten is the collective past of all human beings, the child-mother connection that is elided or severed in the master narratives because it is one that would produce an alliance that could well threaten the patriarch(y)²². Remember that in the psychoanalytic tradition the bond between mother and daughter must be broken so that the latter can «become a woman», but in «Cuchillo y madre» that bond is not broken. Indeed, Valenzuela's story emphasizes that bond and encourages us to remember that connection and that past but in an unidealized way that would simultaneously allow us to recognize the potential for violence. By not acting, not cutting, the daughter opts to re-plot and renegotiate (in both senses of the word) the daughter-mother relation and not to eliminate or marginalize one at the expense of the other as stories of that relation have traditionally done²³. The result is a story that is neither the mother's nor the daughter's, but both as it acknowledges the deep imbrication of the two. In this way, Valenzuela challenges the binary logic that marks our Western society by demonstrating that mother and daughter are neither completely separate nor fused; their relationship is neither Oedipal nor uncomplicitous with that narrative.

At the same time, «Cuchillo y madre» is a story that faces the negative, terrifying, disordered and disordering aspects within us -our capacity or desire for violence (including perhaps matricide or infanticide)²⁴. «Cuchillo y madre» recognizes the horror within, that we are capable of wanting to harm, marginalize, or efface the other in order to enhance our own hegemonic position, even as it asks to what extent that desire is the result not of some «natural» phenomena but of internalized master narratives²⁵. Once we recognize that the «source» of the violence is not necessarily «natural», we can begin to act to avoid or at least attenuate that violence. That is not to say, however, that the metaphoric knife, agent of the master narratives in whatever its form, is not still a force to be contended with. Indeed, at the end of the embedded narrative, the frame narrative turns back to the knife to assure us that, even though some say that the knife is damaged or discredited, its blade is as sharp as ever. Thus, while we need to take the knife by the handle (or the bull by the horns) and face the danger, recognize the desire to violence (whether it originates inside us or outside), we do not have to use it in real life or in literature. As Valenzuela has demonstrated, in life and in our representations (narratives) we can choose not to efface or subsume the other. With Valenzuela's narrative it is possible to re-imagine relationships with women not totally contained by the traditional narrative frameworks that have deemed that men (or the imaginary phallus) be central to conflictual relations between women. Yes, mother and daughter may be in conflict and may want to kill each other or even themselves, but in Valenzuela's narrative, 1) it is not for the same reason as scripted in the master narratives, and 2) they do not. They choose not to, and that makes all the difference.

It also is significant that, while «Cuchillo y madre» ends, it does not reach conclusion or closure except perhaps ironically to the extent that the knife is now enclosed in parenthesis and thus made parenthetical, not central. Indeed the embedded story ends, «Se sintió liberada, y» (20). Freedom has its price, but this state of freedom, reached in a story that is all about process and continual change («Siempre un pasito más adelante», 15), is but one more step in the never-ending process, just as subject formation (including motherhood and daughterhood) are ever on-going processes. Valenzuela's story does not end because the same old story does not end; it keeps getting played out over and over -the knife, the possibility for violence, the master narratives are all still there.

Nonetheless, Valenzuela proposes that our representations and subject positions (including those as daughter or mother), and by implication our desires, are culturally and historically grounded rather than essential and eternal. And, if our desires and subject positions are neither static nor fixed, but in continual process and renegotiation, then we always have the potential to recover the agency that the master narratives have masked or elided. We may not be able to escape unscathed from the sociopolitical scripts, the master narratives, but we can become active agents in replotting the narrative²⁶.

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