SOURCE: “Manuel Puig: The Masks and the Myths,” in World Literature Today, Vol. 65, No. 4, Autumn, 1991, pp. 643-47.

When I met Manuel Puig in 1971, he had already published two of his eight novels, La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968; Eng. Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, 1971) and Boquitas pintadas (1969; Eng. Heartbreak Tango, 1973). From that point onward until his death we corresponded, and for a time we resided in the same city, Rio de Janeiro, a fact that occasioned my sharing in the creation of his books by reading, offering opinions on, and reviewing many of his original works before their publication. In the following article I maintain the basic interpretation postulated in previous studies dealing with aspects of the meaning of Manuel Puig's universe, which I now reexamine with new considerations.¹

Fundamental to the poetics of the novel is the development of a criticism that seeks to surprise the work in its literariness. One of the aspects of the literary revitalization brought about by the contemporary novel is the problem of the narrator and his point of view. The point of view establishes a transformational process of various discourses in an altogether new discourse.

In contemporary fiction the narrator is included as a participatory character in the work, one who is placed within the circle of protagonists created by his own discourse. Among Manuel Puig's has been the exclusion of the author from his narrative space. Beginning with his first novel he let go of his characters, who were liberated unto themselves in a kind of self-exposition. With this he withdrew from all direct participation.

Puig's novels are made up of voices that create reality. The characters evoke a world and situate the reader within their context by way of dialogues, letters, and monologues. Through the dialogues (which many times hide more than they reveal) the characters are linked with empirical reality: in their consciousness they project tensions, conflicts, and memories. The characters are represented and presented by their own discourse—crystallized syntagms, expended words—within which they can build their own universe. They express themselves through the use of lyrics from tangos and boleros or film texts, and, curiously, such expression in turn creates them as characters. The novels are transformed into games of mirrors, and the narrator becomes impersonal or tends to disappear completely (for example, through purely scenic presentation).

On the level of the story line the distinctions carried out by Jean Pouillon are pertinent.² The fictional quality of the narratives does not diminish its psychological worth, and the theory of points of view is explanatory in terms of the logic of the actions and relations among the characters. Pouillon combines point of view with time. All the characters reflected in Toto's consciousness enter into the interior monologue with their own “truths.”

As a unique case of “vision with,” the interior monologue multiplies the points of view. The temporality of what is narrated about the characters and their feelings is analogous to the durée of personal experience, with its redoubling by the subject of the past and the future, beginning with a contingent present. What is experienced by the narrator-character “with” can be perceived and is situated in the interior of the narrative and participates in the same events at the same moment in which they are produced, without mediation on the part of the narrator, who no longer mediates everything. Now the reader is confronted with an unknown world, with sequences he must piece together and intuit. The resources employed by the novelist demand that the reader become integrated as an active agent with the narrative, since he disposes of the elements that constitute the text as organization. Such is the case with a novel like Michel Butor's Modification (Eng. Changing Time), in which the narrator is “absent” and the point of view is situated within a character's mind. The “subjects” of the verb no longer refer to “psychological” characters, whereas the temporality of the writing revives that of the fiction. The author does not reveal the hero's reality but instead provides his own revelation of all the points of view, his awareness of himself, as a secondary reality. There is representation, not expression; the hero does not become confused with the author, and there is distance between character and author.

Toto's monologue, on the other hand, is more an interior discourse. It is directed in a vital way to all he thinks and says, a process that also appears in Heartbreak Tango, when Pancho addresses Mabel in his monologue: “Don't you have any regrets?” (154).³ All the characters introduced in the interior discourse assume an impossible original contact among voices in a real dialogue. They resound within the interior of a single consciousness, becoming capable of mutual penetration. The developmental process of Toto's inner life is to a great degree a process of discovery and confirmation by himself and others of what, in reality, he has known for a long time. The character anticipates judgments and formulates the words of others about him by including in his discourse their replies. The author does not construct a character, a type, a temperament, but rather a word from the hero about himself and his world.

Virginia Woolf has explained the disappearance of the objective narrator by evoking the impenetrable obscurity of life that does not allow omniscient observation but instead, in a contradictory way, advocates a faithful imitation of reality, a nonwithdrawal from life. This problematic broadens our concept of the novel. Criticism, according to Wolfgang Kayser, still has not placed enough importance on the relation between the narrator and reader, or on the prescribed role of the reader.⁴ Both are poetic and correlative elements of the universe. Within the art of fiction the narrator is never the author but rather a role assumed by him. According to Kayser, in Madame Bovary, beginning with the second chapter, there no longer exists a personal narrator or character-narrator. We are not reduced to the characters' word, to think only their ideas, to feel their impressions. There is an intermediary to tell us what they think and feel.

Such does not occur, however, in Betrayed by Rita Hayworth. The protagonist sees his universe and narrates it.⁵ In the classic novel all enunciation remains outside the narrative; in the modern novel all enunciation is immersed in what is spoken. With Puig the author's word does not oppose the hero's. Puig does not speak of the hero but rather with him.

The seventeenth-century novel concedes to the personal narrator a distinct and varied role. The first-person narrator moves with surprising facility between his point of view as narrator, which is rather imprecise, and the narrated universe, as if he simultaneously had the right to dual citizenship: as narrator outside and as character or presence inside the fictional universe. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the figure of the narrator was renounced and his omnipotence limited, and he therefore represented a distanced, three-dimensional vision. In his book on Dostoevsky, Mikhail Bakhtin establishes an opposition between the polyphonic and the monologic genres of the traditional novel.⁶ The former is characterized by the absence of a unifying narrative consciousness, which encompasses the consciousness of all characters. This is what occurs in Betrayed by Rita Hayworth: there is no consciousness on the part of the narrator, who is isolated from the rest on a superior level and who assumes the discourse of the whole. He presents us with a distinct version of the esthetic law of James and Lubbock by determining that the vision should correspond to what Pouillon calls “with.” The new position of the author in relation to the character is dialogic, rigorously respected, and affirms the character's independence, inner freedom, infiniteness, and indecision. For the author, the character is not a “he” or an “I” but a completed “you”—that is, another “I,” different yet equal. Therefore, in Betrayed by Rita Hayworth there is no description of situations; instead there are conversations, monologues, and confessions that multiply the points of view with unrestrained freedom of syntax. A subtlety of uncommon procedures allows Puig to judge the shadows, the silences, to capture the characters in a web of images and reflections in which his personality is placed in question.

According to Todorov, point of view refers to the manner in which events are perceived by the narrator.⁷ The individual personality of the psychological novel had to undo itself in order to reveal the archetypal configurations of the human being, who is as nontemporal as myth. In the mythical dimension, past, present, and future are merged; the characters are open not only for the individual past but for the collective past as well, as masks of an eternal process that transcends humanity itself.

In traditional novels psychology has been demonstrated 1) by the examination of simplifying words (love, jealousy, pride) applied to the immense complexity of the inner world, and 2) by the attempts to penetrate the mental universe of the characters through the examination of the “confessions” necessary for decoding. In Betrayed by Rita Hayworth the rupture of the past in the present, of the unconscious in the conscious, is the formal expression of a world in which the continuity of empirical time has no meaning. The phrase gathers associations, and its charge of emotions intermixes, as in stream of consciousness, actual fragments of objects or real people by embracing the future or lived experiences from long ago, asserting them with greater strength and reality than “real” perceptions. The narrative discourse is, in this way, one word among others: the word of information about the absence of representation and the word of the hero. There are no dominant words, be they of the author or the protagonist. The author does not judge, and therefore his perspective is no more complete than that of others.

Puig does not impose a narrative style; it is introduced in each of his characters, without third-person descriptions, by the presence of a voice capable of narrating in the third person that needs to exist due to the internal demands of the story but that knows how to disguise itself, to disappear among his characters, and, in the final analysis, to detach itself from them. Although there are many third-person narrators, they are practically inconsequential. The narrator bases the narrative on objective discourse, retaining only the indispensable elements for the story's composition (spatial placement of the characters: “illuminated by the new florescent light of the kitchen” [H, 10]), or becomes absent from it, by transferring new reports to the active agents of the narrative. For example, the speech of the Gypsy (76) and the photograph of Pancho in the portrait album (34) anticipate the subsequent actions of the characters. This transfer is possible only because the narrative is directed toward the characters (who are responsible for the action and are its motivators). From this arises the autonomous highlighting of Juan Carlos, Nélida, Fanny, Pancho, and Mabel. The absence of an omniscient narrator thus gives rise to various points of view that predominate over the various perspectives.

The narrative of Heartbreak Tango is centered on two viewpoints, the first-person (in the correspondence) and the omniscient. The latter assumes two temporal levels: descriptive and narrative. The narrative process will assume a referential base through realistic representations: letters, agendas, announcements, photo albums, official documentation, clippings from periodicals and magazines.⁸ These texts, added to those from the radio, quotes from other works, songs, intercalated genres (such as a composition by Casals or intimate diaries), are superimposed in a polyphonic montage. In this way the work comes to have other texts as referents in order to capture reality in a globalizing way. These extratextual ties are organized in a unique system and, out of their context, are transformed in art by the new meaning and the new effects of meaning they acquire.

The same event is seen from different angles, as in Fanny's monologue.

With this clothespin I hang one tip of the petticoat with the tip of the white silk shirt, another pin to the other tip of the shirt, and don't you touch the checked napkins, and tomorrow you'll all be dry, will it be cold on the street corner in my new dress? but the clothes hanging in the laundry room won't get black from dust. “What's your name?” they're going to ask Panchito. “My name is Francisco Ramírez, and I'm going to study to be a police officer,” when his father's old his officer's job will go to his son for sure. But one day I'll be walking with Panchito on the street 'cause he already walks by himself, will he be bowlegged forever? “… and the gaucho all in wonder, speaking softly to his saddle, said his gal would not come back …” it's a sad tango, because when his gal dies the gaucho is left alone with his horse and he feels so lonely. (H, 146)

The narrator also utilizes different points of view with respect to a single character: “He always looked at me when I went by the bar. … Hail Mary, full of grace, God is with thee, blessed art Thou amongst women” (195). The time of the chronological and present pronouncement (Nélida's writing) is superimposed onto the time of the enunciation, a time both present and past: “When we stopped speaking to each other, and after what happened to Celina, we sent back the letters” (12–13). This superimposition is reiterated by the coexistence of a present awareness (made sad by Juan Carlos's death) that bears an absent memory (the evocation of her relationship with Juan Carlos). Moreover, the present space (Buenos Aires) is superimposed onto the past space (Vallejos), and the exterior space reiterates the interior one (tango lyrics—a couple's separation—are identified with Nélida's thoughts [24]).

The epistolary form is a kind of Ich-Erzählung. It acts as the word reflected by another. The letter is characterized by an acute awareness of the existence of the interlocutor, the addressee. It is directed to a specific person, aware of his possible reactions or response. It takes into account the absent interlocutor. Letters or intimate diaries are familial genres that can be considered extraliterary.⁹ The exchange of letters among characters constitutes one of Manuel Puig's favorite devices. The epistolary form seems to be a direct way of giving life itself to the characters: each can tell his or her story, totally or partially, but is shown as he or she wishes to be seen, which is not as it always is in reality. The letters serve as a narrative device and are taken as the object of another language, as a form of ideological concretion. Heartbreak Tango makes use of letters that are directed to someone who does not read them and that are answered by yet someone else. The reader is totally engrossed in the scheme of the plot, in the fascination of the game, into which suspense is introduced: the rewriting of the letters of Juan Carlos's mother that were not written by her. The enjoyment of the text is a result of that suspense, of the connected discovery of a secret. This indirect narrative method inscribes the means of communication, which register a multiplicity of languages. Taken out of their context and inserted into the narrative, those extracts become informative in their estrangement. The interweaving of different codes contributes to the polysemy and depersonalizes the author. In his final work, Cae la noche tropical (1989; Eng. Tropical Night Falling, 1991), Puig incorporates other discourses that assume the status of texts, providing stereotypes that are transformed into voices that engage in dialogue.¹⁰ Faced with the impossibility of finding themselves, they mask themselves, choosing models in which they are projected (cf. the diaries and the letters). What interests Puig is the problem “of the oppression of the environment on the individual, the question of the unconscious, the world of prisons we carry inside us without knowing it.”¹¹

The narrator of the novels is the mythical creator of a universe who remains a shadow. He hides behind a game of masks tied to the myths of mass culture. The transformation of the story into myth increases the whole range of possibilities that did not otherwise exist, even while potentialities can still be activated by memory. To the myth of the lost paradise of childhood is added the myth of the cinema, the realm of happiness communicated by films of the thirties that form part of the petit bourgeois models. The myths established in the heart of the middle class, which is eager to climb socially, are re-created by Puig. The characters desire to violate social norms. They try to dismantle social discourse through the myth created by the cinema, establishing an alternative system to reality. Models (or masks) are proposed, and they fabricate their own myths by way of their readings of “an already given mythological subuniverse.”¹²

In the twentieth century mass culture pervades Western culture with new instruments of communication, as a response to the demand of emerging sectors of the middle class, that give rise to a new writing. The function of mass literature is to attune the individual's consciousness to the world, but by entertaining it as in a game. For this reason, it utilizes recognized forms and mythical elements: the detective novel, science fiction, comic strips, the soap opera, and, in particular, the serial, whose mass-cultural characteristics are placed in opposition to “literary” tradition.

For the belle époque, the serial provided a form of escape. For Manuel Puig, on the other hand, it is a means of getting to the heart of certain problems. Puig shows the inauthenticity of certain ways of life as well as the alienation due to the means of mass communication, which are linked to the alienation of discourse. The results are serialized lives and beings, beings who are deprived of humanity, and passions that become diluted and dissipated in the hope for a Prince Charming. Only death will free them from limitations and from the vicious cycle. Facing death, they understand that they have lived heroically, that they have created a monumental existence amid the artificial paradises created by society.¹³ One can, in this way, point out an (esthetic) engagement of the author with myth, since Puig avails himself of the serial—the mythical discourse established by a fixed society seized by the still-powerful ideological lords (the values of consumption and class power)—to try to penetrate the myths of the petite bourgeoisie. Through that narrative model, which is sustained, according to Roland Barthes, by the “mythical word,” the banal (cursi) universe of the characters is constructed.¹⁴

Puig adopts the form of the serial as a notable experiment in literary discourse, inasmuch as the world of the serial needs no narrator, is endowed with the neutral ubiquity of the press or of historiography, and disappears in the impersonality of its anonymous technique. From there the duplicity of the narrative structure emerges: the consciousness that narrates is always present, whatever takes place. Although Puig remains at a distance from his characters, he does not eliminate distance with regard to his fiction, and he restructures language anew. In this way, he undertakes an important renovation within the fictional genre by expanding the discursive space. Puig creates dialogic texts wherein polyvalence establishes points of view and the text becomes a complex network of reading possibilities. The use of an intra- and intertextual deconstructive discourse questions the hegemonic politics maintained by traditional fiction. The apparent heterogeneity and the lack of causality offered by a body of texts, ordered by juxtaposition, manifests the presence of multiple narrator-characters who habitually eliminate the mediation of the impersonal and detached narrator, whose omnipotence Puig always condemned.

In a paradoxical way, the mutable forms of the “mythic word” will demonstrate the impossibility of authentically living the myth (a world without restrictions) in the present, in a way in which those characters will never overcome the corrosion of time and cultural immobility, which is resented by a society directed by set notions regarding morality, religion, and sex. We can provide some examples from Heartbreak Tango of elements endowed with mythic meaning: the day of the spring festival, when the entangled conflict between Nené and Cecilia developed and desire was established (Mabel and Nené versus Juan Carlos); the heroes, exemplary models of social conduct from American cinema who correspond to artificial paradises; the photo albums that emphasize a mythological behavior in modern man, whose vestige is observed in the desire to secure the distant past and to reencounter the same intensity with which something is lived for the first time (according to Mircea Eliade); the institutions of pleasure, the product of the society of abundance and of what Baudrillard calls the egalitarian ideology of well-being (which is questioned in the discourse of the novel through commercial language). In sum, they are going to accentuate passivity—the evasion and privation of History, the characteristics of bourgeois man, as distinguished by the characters of the novel's discourse.

The modern forms of myth are going to favor a basic paradox, by reason of the serialized context of the characters: the illusion of those who are not able to situate their personal experiences on the level of myth. In this sense, the mise en abîme is exemplary of the composition of the thirteenth episode of Heartbreak Tango, in which two levels of fiction are correlated: fiction 1 (the novel) and fiction 2 (the radiophonic novel). The second reiterates the likely construction of the author's characters and makes fictional those of the second level of fiction. The imaginary relations among the characters on this plane emphasize the romantic myth of Ideal Love that utopically establishes the rupture of social and moral barriers. The unconventional realization of Mythical Love is an achievement for the “real” characters of fiction 2—metacharacters in relation to the characters who comment—whose existence is moved by good bourgeois sense: in Nené's case, the fear of the spread of tuberculosis conditions her isolation from Juan Carlos; in Mabel's case, separation from Juan Carlos is going to make possible the stabilization of her feminine “status,” that of sexual castration. Juan Carlos is a mythic character. Although absent, he becomes present in the other characters' memory.

One of the fundamental aspects of Manuel Puig's work is the synthesis of the myths of our time, of the instruments that contemporary man utilizes to gain knowledge and to know himself. Perhaps someday the profound influence of Manuel Puig as responsible in part for the new writing and for the revitalization of Hispanic American fiction will be better determined. With his renunciation of any theoretical-literary model, he broke new ground with each successive new work. His universe of beings will accompany us from here on out, but a profound night now falls upon us.

Notes

1. Bella Jozef. “Manuel Puig: Renovación por el lenguaje,” in Literatura de la emancipación hispanomericana y otros ensayos, Lima, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1972, pp. 287–89; “Manuel Puig: Reflexión al nivel de la enunciación,” in Nueva Narrativa Hispanoamericana, 4 (1974), pp. 111–15; “La dimensión renovadora del folletín,” paper presented at the 19th Congress of the Instituto International de Literatura Iberoamericana, Pittsburgh, June 1979, published in Texto/Contexto, Madrid, 1980, pp. 163–71; “El folletín como modelo,” in Romance hispanoamericano, Sāo Paulo, Atica, 1986, pp. 180–87.

2. Jean Pouillon, O tempo no romance, Sāo Paulo, Cultrix/Edusp, 1974.

3. Manuel Puig, Boquitas pintadas, Barcelona, Seix Barral, 1972. English translations are taken from Heartbreak Tango, Suzanne Jill Levine, tr., New York, Dutton, 1973, and are referred to by the abbreviation H.

4. Wolfgang Kayser, “Qui raconte le roman?,” in Poétique, vol. 4, Paris, Seuil, 1970, pp. 498–510.

5. It is not by chance that I use the verb ver (to see): the glance is of fundamental importance in Puig's novels. I cannot develop the theme here, and I refer to several considerations: “Solidāo e morte na noite tropical,” América Hispânica (Rio de Janeiro), 4 (July–December 1990). In an interview he granted me he claimed: “Mis recuerdos más lejanos están ligados a las sensaciones de un malestar ante la gente y de una enorme placidez durante las funciones de cine donde yo no era más que una mirada” (My most distant memories are linked to feeling ill at ease toward people and an enormous serenity during the rituals of the movie house, where I was nothing more than a glance). The italics are my own.

6. Mikhail Bakhtin, La poétique de Dostoievski, Paris, Seuil, 1963.

7. Tzvetan Todorov, “Les catégories du récit littéraire,” in Communications (Paris), 8 (1966).

8. For Plato and Aristotle, verisimilitude is “the relation of a specific text to another generalized text that is called common opinion.” According to Todorov, “It is the mask assumed by the laws of the text and that we should accept as a relation with reality.” Aristotle, Poética, Porto Alegre, Globo, 1966; Plato, A república, volume I, Sāo Paulo, 1965. For Julia Kristeva, “truth would be a discourse that approximates the real: the verisimilar, without being true, can be the discourse that approximates the discourse that approximates the real” (Communications, 11 [1968]).

9. Mikhail Bakhtin, Esthétique et théorie du roman, Paris, Gallimard, 1978, pp. 466–67.

10. Manuel Puig, Cae la noche tropical, Barcelona, Seix Barral, 1989.

11. Jorgelina Corbatta, “Encuentros con Manuel Puig,” Revista Iberoamericana, 49: 123–24, (April–September 1983), pp. 591–620.

12. The utilization of heterogeneous materials can be called bricolage, a term used by Claude Lévi-Strauss in La pensée sauvage (Paris, Plon, 1962, p. 32) to characterize mythic thought: “Le propre de la pensée mythique, comme du bricolage sur le plan pratique est d'élaborer des ensembles structurés … en utilisant des résidus et des débris d'événement.”

13. See Bella Jozef, “O espaço reconquistado,” Vozes (Petrópolis, Brazil), 1974, pp. 119–20.

14. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Paris, Seuil, 1957.