SOURCE: "Fragmentation in Luisa Valenzuela's Narrative," in Salmagundi, Nos. 82-83, Spring-Summer, 1989, pp. 287-96.

Below, Rubio discusses the fragmentary nature of Valenzuela's writings, focusing on her narrative procedures, themes, characterizations, discourse, and word-play.

Luisa Valenzuela's writing belongs to that class of contemporary works Umberto Eco has called "open works." In them the harmonious representation of reality, supported by logic and syllogism, is replaced by a more ample and complex vision in which the laws of causality cease to operate in a linear fashion. The ordered Weltanschauung of the standard realist narrative—the tradition to which Clara, Valenzuela's first novel, and [Los heréticos (The Heretics)], her first collectin of short stories, belong—disintegrates in the face of desire, cruelty, the instinctual, the magical, the fantastic, the sickly. The rules governing ordinary discourse are trampled on. The causality governing the typical realist plot is replaced by association and disjunction. The...