Context

"This dream is short but this dream is happy" are the redemptive words uttered on the last page of Kiss of the Spider Woman, Manuel Puig’s most famous novel. This dream, turned into an Oscar-winning film and then a glamorous Broadway musical, reached a vast audience, but its dreamer never saw the musical that opened in 1992 and won seven Tony awards. He died July 22, 1990, a few days after emergency surgery on an inflamed gallbladder, at the age of 57, in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Whether or not his name or his Argentine nationality is remembered by the public, his prison romance under the stars of Hollywood nostalgia—in which William Hurt as Molina, a gay window dresser, falls in love with Raul Julia as Valentin, a Marxist journalist who looks like Che Guevara—still remains. Kiss of the Spider Woman was Puig’s most affirmative, most daring, the book to come out of the closet, the only one with heroes: the Marxist, prejudiced by his politics or blind to their contradictions, learns that tolerance for the Other is essential for true political action, just as his gay cellmate is liberated by a selfless act.

Puig was one of the most significant as well as enigmatic Latin American writers of the second half of the twentieth century. While collective memory of him is sustained mainly by the film and the play, this fourth novel was, like many literary milestones, only part of a life’s work, only part of his vision and impact, certainly on Hispanic culture, beginning in the late sixties when his first two books appeared in Spanish. Considered Latin America’s first "pop" novelist, this slight timid man took a giant step beyond the famous "Boom" literary lights such as Garcia Marquez, tinkering ingeniously with the raw materials of film nostalgia and mass culture, exploring compassionately the (then) forbidden territory of sexual identity and politics.

Puig did not set out to be a novelist, however; his dream, from early childhood, was to make movies. Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1968), his first novel, had started as a screenplay but developed into something else, which, during the early stages of composition, he described to a friend as "Spoon River" (Edgar Lee Masters) type monologues spoken by characters taken from his childhood. At first he thought this material could serve as the basis for a screenplay:

In order to put some distance between me and the autobiographical stuff, I planned to write a description (for my exclusive use) of each leading character. Learning from past mistakes, I wrote in Spanish, but didn’t know how to do the description. One day in March I was roughing out a scene in the script in which the off-screen voice of my aunt was introducing the action in the laundry room of a typical Argentine house. Suddenly her voice, in the first person, came out quite clearly, talking about my cousin’s triumphs with girls. I began to write a kind of voice-over. I could remember exactly what she had been saying twenty years before, and I took note of it. . . . Though her voice was supposed to take up at most three lines of dialogue, she went on without stopping for almost thirty pages. There was no way I could shut her up. Everything she said was banal, but I couldn’t cut a lot because it seemed to me that the sum of the banalities lent a special meaning to what she was saying. . . . It was my desire for more narrative space. . . . I could play with it all I wanted. . . . By the second day it was clearly a novel. I had stories that needed more space than the two hours a movie gives you. I needed to explain my childhood and why I was in Rome, thirty years old without a career, without money and discovering that the vocation of my life—movies—had been a mistake.1

Puig would later remark that Freud was his model, throwing a theoretical bone, so to speak, to the Argentine intelligentsia. Freud was the father of the modern novel: if we are ruled by our unconscious, the only way to know a character is to listen to what he says, and especially to how he says it. The "talking cure" was an inventive narrative mode, with the writer playing two roles, shifting between the analysand’s couch and the analyst’s notebook. Omniscience was a myth, and hence no one version could be taken at face value—but this also meant, with multiple voices on the page, that Puig was not writing a viable script. He realized he was not constructing a linear sense-making story but that, with those many voices, he could oblige the reader to connect with the complexities of the human heart:

Ninety percent of the novel is real. Sometimes for the sake of economy two characters from films became one; but it was about me, and the people close to me. The characters were the family that didn’t have time for me as a child, as well as the people who shared something with me in that era, relatives, neighbors, people who had time to listen to me. I wanted them to give me their secrets, their intimacy. Letting them talk or write a letter, they would reveal things to me.2

met up again with some of the characters from my childhood. I was struck by an overwhelming disenchantment in those whose lives fitted into the social system of the period and who had never made any attempt to rebel. They had accepted all that world of sexual repression, had accepted its rules, the hypocrisy of the myth of female virginity and, needless to say, they had accepted authority. They struck me as disillusioned, now that they were growing older. . . . It wasn’t that they were conscious of being let down, just that they gave off an air of frustration and unhappiness . . . these people had believed in the rhetoric of irresistible love, irresistible passion, but their lives had not reflected this in any way.3

Puig saw that stifling town as a circular melodrama, a soap opera like the ones people used to listen to on the radio every afternoon in General Villegas. Their emotional lives seemed inhabited by the soap operas or women’s pictures they attended regularly; their feelings were the feelings of characters in a melodrama, and they spoke the language of those old songs, radio plays and movies to which they were addicted. Puig’s image of Villegas as a soap opera led to a friend’s suggestion that he write a folletin in the popular style of the best-selling Spanish author Corin Tellado. "Impossible," Puig at first responded, "I couldn’t even write a letter of condolence." Boquitas pintadas would begin with an ending, an obituary notice, followed by the standard folletin-style letter of condolence. His characters, comatose consumers of soap operas and tangos, were social conformists who needed to "act," who resisted self-knowledge and honest self-expression; they saw themselves as romantic heroines or the star-crossed lovers in popular songs. The book took the shape of a radio drama, subtitled folletin, "serial novel," and, like Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, it had sixteen chapters, or episodes—sixteen would become the magic number of chapters in nearly all of Puig’s eight novels.

Whether or not he revisited Villegas after this novel came out, he never returned to the town as a subject, as if the place had finally been laid to rest and Heartbreak Tango were an elegy to a time that no longer existed.

"There are two elements that need to coincide for me to write a book," as Puig later explained his writerly urge:

I have to feel a need to exorcise certain personal obsessions. There are others I have no need to exorcise. Each of us has his own little masochistic game, and wants to continue with certain tortures until death, but there are some tortures of which I do say "enough of this already." But I don’t write a novel—since for me it’s not only about writing but about communicating—if I have the sensation that the problem is not shared. That is, I’m interested in situating myself as one more victim of the collective unconscious. . . . Yes, I’m interested in clarifying certain things for myself and achieving certain stylistic [aesthetic] goals, but the book has to be read too; if not, it lacks a certain sexiness. Writing is a dialogue with another person. On the other hand, I go alone to see a movie: that’s an act in which the other person is for me the movie.

His next and even more controversial novel, The Buenos Aires Affair (1973), would place his life in danger in the fascist Argentina of the seventies, and he went into permanent exile, where he wrote Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976), Pubis Angelical (1979), Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages (1980), Blood of Requited Love (1982) and, finally, Tropical Night Falling (1988).

This last book begins with the voices of two aging sisters speaking about the sadness of twilight and how the death of the day reminds them of the loss of loved ones, evoking also their own impending fates. They echo a soliloquy uttered by "the Mistress" of the house in one of Puig’s three stage plays, Under the Mantle of Stars, written shortly before he began writing Tropical Night:

This time of the day always frightens me, the death of the day. Because it’s not always certain the sun will rise again. One day or another, things die. That afternoon when I was waiting for you . . . it was growing dark . . . and for me the dawn never came again.4

more than anything, because for the first time, very close to me, are persons who have entered their old age. I’ve had to bring my parents to live with me because they’ve suddenly turned very old and dependent economically on me. I have realized that old age is the epic age par excellence, since you are no longer master of your near future. You have to consult death on everything. And these people are not only taken by surprise by age with these terrible problems, but are also living in times where fundamental changes are happening.

Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, which depicts movies as fictions that transform lives, anticipated Bogdanovich’s Last Picture Show, Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo, Ettore Scola’s Le Bal, notably Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso and certainly Fellini’s Fred and Ginger. And Valentin, the imprisoned guerrillero, was liberated by Molina’s tales of Hollywood before a glamour girl poster became the threshold to a man’s freedom in Stephen King’s story "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption." Manuel Puig was a writer ahead of his time, whose fictions foretold that the total fiction machine—the media—would not only consume art as we have known it, but would absorb all that we call reality. Puig’s vision was ambiguous, or rather irreducible, and like those images or virtual existences he glimpsed in the fleeting, phantasmal experience of the movies: you return to the scene in a text by Puig you thought was there and it has vanished, as when you return to a moment you remember seeing in a movie, only to find that your memory was false. With a naughty wink to his readers, Puig was always one step ahead of his critics. And though the spider woman’s bite was deadly, Molina survives.

1 Manuel Puig, "Cinema and the Novel," Modern Latin American Fiction: A Survey, ed. John King (New York: Hill & Wang; London: Faber & Faber, 1989), 286-87.

2 Katherine Bouman, "Manuel Puig at the University of Missouri-Columbia," American Hispanist, 2, no. 7 (1977): 11-12.

3 Suzanne Jill Levine: "Author and Translator: a Discussion of Heartbreak Tango," Translation, 2:1-2 (1974), 33-34.

4 Manuel Puig, Under a Mantle of Stars (New York: Lumen Books, 1987), 92.

5 Juan Goytisolo, El bosque de las letras (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1995), 122-25.

Selected Works by Manuel Puig, in Translation

Betrayed by Rita Hayworth. Out of Print.
Blood of Requited Love. University of Minnesota Press, $15.95.
Buenos Aires Affair. Out of Print.
Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages. University of Minnesota Press, $15.95.
Heartbreak Tango. Viking Penguin, $11.95.
Kiss of the Spider Woman. Vintage Books, $13.00.
Pubis Angelical. University of Minnesota Press, $15.95.
Tropical Night Falling. Out of Print.

CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community.

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