Feminine writing in La travesía, by Luisa Valenzuela: between the folds of the autobiographical self

Abstract

This article analyzes the autofigurative strategies of La travesía by Luisa Valenzuela in terms of the narratives of the self, the Argentine dictatorship and feminism. A correspondence is found between the disavowal of the voice, the structure of the autobiographical account and the portrait of the experience of the violence of the military regime and of gender. Initially, the novel is situated at the height of the narratives of the self that, with literary resources that are separated from the most conservative autobiographical writings, denounce the impossibility of understanding the subject as univocal, while founding different approaches to the retelling of the experience. This location allows exploring the formal experiments that Valenzuela carries out around the autobiographical exercise and that highlight the crisis of the construction of memory and the exposure of contemporary subjectivity. In addition, it is shown how such strategies serve as a vehicle for reflection on feminism and dictatorship that permeate all of her work. For this, Valenzuela's notion of feminine writing is used, which puts the multiplicity of perspectives before the univocity of the autobiographical voice, the ambiguous before the precise, and the collective before the authoritarian. La travesía is, then, read as part of the works that come to the narration of the experience itself in a framework of the retelling of collective memory, with narrative games that point out the deictic futility of the self and the difficulty of recounting past time, without, therefore, abandoning the call for its reconstruction as a guarantee of non-repetition.