The Schizophrenic Bond: The Struggle to Acquire Knowledge and Sanity in Luisa Valenzuela’s “Cambio de Armas”

Luisa Valenzuela’s story “Cambio de armas” from her eponymous collection of short stories explores various ways in which self-knowledge is related to sanity. The story, set in Argentina’s guerra sucia, follows the experience of a woman identified as Laura who suffers from amnesia and is living as the wife of her captor, Roque, who she later discovers had killed her former lover and repeatedly tortured her. Her only contact with the outside world is through Roque, his two guards, whom she identifies as “Uno” and “Dos,” and a maid, Martina. Even though it appears as if Laura is insane because her amnesia blocks her access to certain forms of basic knowledge and moral judgment, she appears most lucid and rational when she uses her intuition to formulate an understanding of her identity and circumstances, particularly when her interpretation directly contradicts Roque’s fabrication of reality. In the section of the story titled “El concepto,” the narrator affirms: “Loca no está. De eso al menos se siente segura, aunque a veces se pregunte – y hasta lo comente con Martina – de dónde sacará ese concepto de locura y también la certidumbre. Pero al menos sabe, sabe que no, que no se trata de un escaparse de la razón o del entendimiento, sino de un estado general de olvido que no le resulta del todo desagradable” (115). However, how can Laura be sure that she is not mad? How does she know anything whatsoever about herself when she has amnesia and her primary contact with the outside world is through her captor, Roque, who brainwashes her? To answer these questions, it is important to explore the concepts of knowledge, madness, and external versus internal reality.

Shoshana Felman, in Writing and Madness states: “We begin to understand that if the issue of madness has been linked so insistently to the current upheaval in the status of knowledge, it is because madness poses in more than one way a question whose significance and meaning have not yet been fully assessed and whose self-evidence is no longer clear... What does it mean to ‘know’?” (12-3; her emphasis). In other words, madness evolves from a fundamentally epistemological question. In “Cambio de armas,” the narrator employs objects as stimuli for her exploration of the concepts of knowledge and madness. The objects with which Laura comes into contact not only provide her with knowledge about herself, but also cause her to question the certainty of her knowledge and the level of her sanity.

Before examining the important role of objects in Laura’s exploration of knowledge and madness, it is necessary to understand how Laura herself perceives knowledge acquisition and insanity. People who are mad acquire knowledge and express themselves in such ways that call into question the fundamental, common-held beliefs upon which sane people base their knowledge. Laura may appear insane, in part, because she reevaluates the meanings of even the most basic concepts. For example, she often refers to people and objects with the expression “llamada,” such as “la llamada Laura,” and undermines the certainty of her statements by adding questions in parentheses (114). She comments: “Uno y Dos están fuera del departamento (¿departamento?), ahí no más del otro lado de la llamada puerta” (115). In general, she is doubtful about information from the external world, particularly when it has passed through Roque as a filter. It would seem as if her own identity (“la llamada Laura”) and her own memory (“[¿memoria?]”) should form part of her internal reality. However, she reevaluates these basic concepts because Roque’s methods of torture have disturbed the natural balance between her external and internal worlds, leaving her without any sense of identity or moral compass in the fabricated world that Roque has created for her (126).

Although Laura’s amnesia causes her to appear insane because it contributes to what Felman would describe as an “upheaval in the status of knowledge,” she attempts to distinguish between the phenomenon of amnesia and the condition of madness (12...