A Study Guide for Luisa Valenzuela's "The Censors"

The Censors

Luisa Valenzuela

1988

Introduction

Luisa Valenzuela, an Argentine novelist and short story writer, published the short story The Censors in English in 1988, and later, in a bilingual Spanish/English short story collection, in 1992. A well-known and highly acclaimed author in her own country, Valenzuela began to gain critical attention in the United States in the 1980s. Her story The Censors focuses on the efforts of the main character, Juan, to infiltrate the government censorship office in order to intercept his own letter to his beloved Mariana so that the letter can be successfully sent without harm coming to either Mariana or himself. As Juan moves through the ranks of the censorship office, he becomes increasingly devoted to his work, and when he finally comes across his own letter, he censors it with enthusiasm, as he would any other letter. He is subsequently executed. Like many of Valenzuela's works, The Censors is reflective of the turbulent political atmosphere in Argentina during the 1970s and 1980s. The story features themes of government oppression on the political level and psychological transformation on the personal level. The duality of this structure is characteristic of Valenzuela's fiction, in which political and personal realities are explored in tandem.

Valenzuela's The Censors first appeared in English in the 1988 short story collection Open Door Stories, published by North Point Press. A bilingual edition of the story was published in 1992, by Curbstone Press, in the collection The Censors.

Author Biography

Valenzuela was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on November 26, 1938. Her mother was a respected writer who guided Valenzuela's early interest in writing and literature. When Valenzuela was twenty years old, she traveled to France and married a French merchant marine sailor, Theodore Marjak. Settling in Normandy, France, the couple had a daughter, Anna Lisa, but divorced six years later. In the early 1960s, Valenzuela moved to Paris, where she wrote for Radio Television Française and gathered material for her first novel, Hay que sonreír (1966; later translated as