“Desde La traición de Rita Hayworth hasta Pubis angelical el factor de la contradicción—implicita of explícita—ha sido uno do los recursos más importantes para configurar la estructura profunda del texto. … Los alcances de tales contradicciones deben ser determinados por el lector, sin estar nunca explícitos en el discurso—como es requisito ineludible en Puig. … El objetivo último de dichas contradicciones no es, como pudiera suponerse, la ambigüedad del mundo representado, puesto que el estrato semántico del texto es paradigmático y no conjetural, pese a la polivalencia y a la inagotable variedad de registros que detectemos al nivel de la escritura.”

—Enrique Giordano, “De Maldición eterna a Sangre de amor correspondido: Las Figuraciones del Inconsciente,” 91.

Most major characters in Manuel Puig's novels dream frequently, and they are not always said to be “asleep” when they do so. Although Puig's characters often lead drab, pedestrian, boring or severely restricted lives, their sleeping and waking “dreams” generally are antithetical in nature to their conscious experiences. For example, the characters Molina and Valentin in Kiss of the Spider Woman temporarily “escape” literal imprisonment as Molina “tells” a number of Hollywood films to Valentin, and the novel ends when Valentin, after a savage beating by the authorities, “escapes” from both his pain and his imprisonment in the company of one of the lovely dream figures that Molina has conjured up for him. But Valentin's “escape,” which is directly parallel to similar escapes in each of Puig's six other novels, raises, for the thoughtful reader, a serious problem of textual interpretation: for the ubiquity of such “dream escapes” throughout Puig's fiction seems to support equally two contradictory and mutually exclusive propositions concerning the function and importance of dreams in people's lives. On the one hand, the dreams of Puig's characters may be seen as evasions or denials of the human condition and of literal truth, and thus as pathetic and ultimately pointless attempts to negate the reality of an indifferent, alien or hostile universe. But on the other hand, such dreams may be seen with equal validity as affirmations of the existence of an alternative universe, a subjective and psychological cosmos, which somehow compensates for—or perhaps even obliterates—the cold and inhospitable world of objective fact.

Now I do not believe that this essential contradiction (or ambiguity) which lies at the heart of Puig's fiction can be resolved, accounted for, or explained away as long as we focus upon the dreams of Puig's imaginary characters. Or rather, as I have indicated above, I believe that such a focus inevitably will lead us to either one or the other of two contradictory interpretations, with something like mere chance or personal bias determining which interpretation we choose. Or at best, we will need to posit, as Lucille Kerr does in her recent book Suspended Fiction: Reading the Novels of Manuel Puig, a kind of unreliable narrator who does not, cannot, or will not take a clear and unambiguous stand on important questions raised in or by the texts [see especially Professor Kerr's concluding chapter “In the Author's Place: Unfinished Business,” (236–253)]. Professor Kerr argues that such narrators “work against any idea of closure. … [they] keep things open and suspended … in Puig's novels” (252–53). Now I basically agree with Professor Kerr's approach and conclusions, as long as we focus upon the imaginary lives and dreams of Puig's fictional characters, but in the remarks that follow I would like to try an approach somewhat different from hers, and thus to see if I can reach different conclusions. For if we define closure as the providing of satisfactory answers to important questions raised within and by the text, questions such as that of the possible relationship between dreams and reality, then it seems to me that all of Puig's novels do reach closure, but I also feel that we cannot always see or appreciate that fact if we focus exclusively upon what the novels tell us about imaginary persons, rather than upon what they show us about ourselves. Therefore, my focus here will be upon how one of Puig's novels, Pubis Angelical, may be seen to achieve closure when it is viewed as a fantasy or waking dream on the part of the reader, rather than as a delineation of the imaginary dreams of imaginary people.

Pubis Angelical is the most outrageously anti-realistic of Puig's novels, and thus it is highly unlikely that even the most determined (or naive) of readers could “suspend his disbelief” as to the reality of its characters and events. As Norman Lavers has observed, “The reader who finishes Kiss of the Spider Woman and immediately begins reading … Pubis Angelical … may think he is listening to one of Molina's narratives” (45). In other words, in Pubis Angelical it is the reader who is called upon to play something like the role that the character Valentin plays within the text of the earlier work.

But of course in Spider Woman even the tough-minded, cynical, and realistic Valentin soon succumbs to the charm of Molina's fantasies, but he never forgets that they are fantasies until the novel's final scene when, in effect, he uses fantasy himself to escape from a horrible reality, thus confirming Molina's assertions concerning the value of fantasy as an escape mechanism. And the possibility of such an escape is also confirmed for the reader of the novel: Spider Woman, through its accounts of Molina's and Valentin's wasted lives, its atmosphere of totalitarian oppression, and its soulless and often contradictory “clinical” footnotes, presents familiar images of modern man as the victim of powerful, destructive forces. Yet the experience of reading the novel includes the experience of seeing a way out: although the reader may know all along that such a way out provides no real escape for the novel's imaginary characters, whose situation is, of course, equally imaginary, nevertheless he vicariously experiences the possibility of such an escape as he reads the text. Similarly, the world of Pubis Angelical, which in many ways is more grim and depressing than that of Spider Woman, also presents “escape mechanisms” which the reader experiences as he reads the novel, but in this case it is the reader who needs to “escape” rather than the imaginary characters [it is important to note here that Puig has said on several occasions that he wrote Pubis Angelical specifically as a “feminist” novel (Gautier, 226)]. Both novels thus may be seen as microcosms of the real world, with Pubis Angelical by far the more fantastic of the two, but both ask essentially the same questions about the macrocosm that they mirror: is there a way out? And the imaginative experience of reading both novels is that of receiving a positive answer to that question. But since Pubis Angelical deals with an escape from nothing less than human sexuality itself, rather than from an imaginary condition of imprisonment and a particular sexual role or orientation, as in Spider Woman, then it is not surprising that the former work is more egregiously and ostentatiously fantastic than is the latter. And although neither of the main characters in Spider Woman really escapes, the conclusion of Pubis Angelical is so constructed as to allow the reader a “way out” of the stifling fantasy world he necessarily experiences as he reads the text.

Pubis Angelical is composed of three distinct but thematically related narratives which are held together by the fact that the female protagonists in each are spiritual “sisters” who share common memories and experiences and who try, mostly unsuccessfully, to communicate with each other. Each has had disastrous relationships with men, and each feels imprisoned by her own sexuality. Part I, written in the style of a grade “B” Hollywood film of the 30s or 40s, begins in Europe in the 1930s; it centers around “the most beautiful woman in the world” (3), who is held as a virtual slave by her wealthy husband. When she escapes from him, she moves to Hollywood and becomes a famous actress, but she again becomes enslaved, this time to an unscrupulous Hollywood producer. She finally is murdered by an envious rival. From the story of this actress, we move to Part II, the story of Ana, a young Argentine expatriate, who suffers from cancer and is confined to a Mexican hospital during the mid-1970s. Like the actress of Part I, Ana has had a bad marriage and currently is being wooed, both sexually and politically, by a man named Pozzi, a fellow expatriate who wants to use her to satisfy his personal desires and goals. In addition to expanding the novel's focus upon sexuality, conversations between Ana and Pozzi establish Lacan's psychoanalytical theories and contemporary Argentine politics as important corollary themes. Part II, which is the most realistic of the three narratives, concludes when, after Ana rejects Pozzi and he returns to Argentina and is killed, Ana undergoes an apparently successful operation and appears to be on her way to emotional and physical health. But the ostensibly optimistic conclusion of Part II, already rendered questionable by the pessimistic ending of Part I, is undermined even further by the grimly pessimistic Part III, a fantastic tale as bleak and depressing as any to be found in modern antiutopian fiction (Yudice, 50).

The central character of Part III, W218, lives in a totalitarian future world in which sexual enslavement has become institutionalized: she works as a sort of public concubine who mechanically relieves, on government orders, the sexual tensions of anonymous men. Moreover, she carries with her a personal computer which supposedly helps her to solve any personal problems she might have, but which actually works to ensure her conformity and obedience. In short, W218's world is simply a nightmarish extension of the worlds of the actress of Part I and Ana of Part II and, ironically, W218 is plagued by dreams of those earlier characters and by tantalizing visions of what their worlds were like. At one point we are told that W218's thoughts run as follows:

Why was she visited in her dreams by that forsaken woman [the actress]? Without realizing it she had begun to think of her as her best friend, but at the same time it was painful to be unable to help her. … A woman from another age and other lands, now vanished. In fact, what most distressed W218 during the nightmares was not knowing where this woman had lived, because the landscape where she appeared had been wiped out forever with the great polar inundation of years gone by. … Elderly survivors used to report that previously the planet had been much more beautiful, and in whispers severely punished by the State they described sensuous flora and crimson dusks. A change in the planet's rotational axis had been enough for vivid colors to disappear from nature and for the lands lately emerged to know only winter. W218 saw in her dreams scenery that corresponded with those accounts by the elderly. Surely those same stories had given rise to her overflowing imagination … (135)

Ironically, it is W218's “overflowing imagination” which finally destroys her; like the actress and Ana, she also dreams of a “perfect man”, and when she thinks she has found him, he turns out to be a treacherous betrayer. She then tries to kill him, and consequently is disgraced and exiled to a disease-ridden penal colony called “Ices Everlasting” (218). Again ironically, however, it is in the penal colony that she finally achieves, at second hand, a vision of the escape from sexuality which was denied to the actress and to Ana. A fellow prisoner describes to her the mystical appearance on earth of a sexless, angelic creature who has the magical power to restore peace and bring harmony among mankind (231). And although hearing this story changes nothing in W218's material condition, it does bring her emotional contentment (233). And finally, a few pages after W218's story concludes peacefully, the story of Ana also concludes with Ana's hopes (dreams?) of peace and reconciliation with her mother and daughter (235–36). In short, Pubis Angelical concludes with hopes and dreams of contentment, peace, and reconciliation which hardly are supported by the details of the three stories which make up the bulk of the text. What, then, is the reader to make of all of this?

My answer to this question is to assert that the purpose of Puig's novel (or at least one of its potential functions) may be to provide for the reader a satisfying fantasy rather than to cause him to speculate seriously about the relationship between dreams and reality. From the opening scene, which reads like a director's notes for filming a romantic movie, to the concluding images of W218 and Ana finally encountering visions of peace and harmony, the experience of reading Pubis Angelical is (or at least can be) more like that of viewing a film than that of reading an ordinary or conventional novel. And although, as Puig himself has insisted, “a book can wait, its readers can stop to think; this does not apply to images in a film” (“Cinema and the Novel,” 289), nevertheless, Puig has skillfully arranged the text of this novel in such a way as to put readers in a position analogous to that of Valentin as Molina “tells” him the movies in Spider Woman. Obviously, any given reader can “slow down the text” (i.e., “stop to think”), but I am convinced that doing so in effect creates a text significantly different from the one we experience if we read the novel straight through as if we were viewing (or being “told”) a film. For example, Pamela Bacarisse, in her recent book The Necessary Dream, devotes 42 pages to an analysis of the structure, recurrent motifs, symbolism, psychological patterns, and allusions in Pubis Angelical; her text is roughly one-fifth as long as Puig's novel, and she admittedly brings to light important aspects of the work which simply are not available (or visible?) to the reader who reads the text more or less straight through as if he were viewing a film. In Professor Bacarisse's approach, the characters, actions, settings, and even the characters' dreams are to be analyzed and evaluated in the same way they would be if they were (or were purported to be) real-life phenomena. Therefore, her approach may very well provide a gain in our intellectual understanding of the potential (or implied) relationship between Puig's fictional world and the real world, but it also entails a necessary loss of our aesthetic appreciation of the novel as an outrageous but fascinating fantasy which takes us for a while completely out of the real world, much as Molina's narrated films provided for Valentin the only “liberation” he ever was going to receive. Marta Morello-Frosch underscores the importance of the parallels between reading Puig's text and viewing a film when she asserts that, “Puig … manipula estas referencias populares asumiendo una inteligibilidad previa y generalizada entre sus lectores. En su obra presume que todos vamos al cine a ver las mismas películas” (39).

We may conclude, then, that Pubis Angelical really does reach what Professor Kerr calls “closure” if we focus upon what the reader experiences as he reads the text straight through rather than upon what logical analysis may reveal about possible relationships between the imaginary characters, their dreams, and the real world. Obviously, the experiencing of an artfully contrived fantasy can be a real experience for a given reader, and thus it can provide imaginative visions of the resolutions of otherwise intractable or unsolvable problems. And it is important to emphasize the fact that the experiencing of such visions is part of the real life of the reader; as Wayne C. Booth has observed, “We all live a great proportion of our lives in a surrender to stories about our lives, and about other possible lives; we live more or less in stories, depending upon how strongly we resist surrendering to what is ‘only’ imagined” (14–15). Professor Booth further observes that the reader must decide for himself how he will read, how much he wants to “surrender,” and thus what kind of experience he will have:

If the border is fuzzy between life and narrative … the distinction between narratives that are true and those that are fictions is even fuzzier … [however] in practice, we simply read differently when we believe that a story claims to be true than we do when we take it as “made-up.” Whether or not we are critically innocent, we never read a story without making a decision, mistaken or justified, about the implied author's answer to a simple question: Is this “once-upon-a-time” or is it a claim about events in real time? (16)

As I have suggested throughout this paper, I believe that the reader who chooses to regard Puig's novel as “made-up”, and thus to experience the text in much the same way that movies are experienced, will receive a more satisfying and rewarding experience than will one who takes the outlandish and far-fetched tale seriously. Because any attempt to convince us that we might literally, in real time, find a way out of human sexuality is probably doomed in advance to failure, at least as long as readers are either men or women who themselves are caught up in sexuality. But in the world of “once-upon-a-time,” a world accessible only through the imagination, anything is possible—including the beautiful fantasy of seeing or becoming a mysterious creature with a pubis angelical who has the power to restore peace and bring harmony to mankind.

Finally, then, the resolution of the problem of textual interpretation which I identified at the beginning of this paper depends upon how we decide to read Puig's novel. If we stop and analyze systematically the possible relationships between Puig's fictional world and the real world (as Professor Bacarisse and others do), then we get an essentially negative experience, and we are obliged to conclude that the dreams of Puig's characters are merely what I identified at the beginning as evasions or denials of the human condition and of literal truth. In short, such dreams appear to be pathetic and ultimately pointless attempts to negate the reality of an indifferent, alien, and hostile universe (i.e., we see that there is no way out). If, however, we read the story straight through, as if we were viewing a film, then we experience a way out as we read the text; moreover, such a reading yields a positive rather than a negative experience in that it demonstrates the power of the human imagination somehow to compensate for, or even partially to obliterate, the otherwise implacable world of objective fact. And to anyone who might object to such an “escapist” reading of Puig's text, perhaps we should appeal to the implications of an important passage in that text itself; at one point Pozzi criticizes Ana as a hopeless romantic and a dreamer, and she responds as follows: “If one is no longer able to imagine something beautiful, what else is there? If in this world you can't imagine beautiful things you're lost, because they don't exist” (127). If we take the implications of Ana's response seriously, then our choice as readers is clear: we can use our intelligence to debunk the notion that fantastic dreams can come true, or we may let our imaginations create a beautiful and liberating fantasy which consequently becomes just as much a part of our real personal experience as is our sense of imprisonment within our own sexuality. Thus we may either force Puig's text to tell us that beautiful things do not exist, or we may allow it to show us that they do.

Works Cited

Bacarisse, Pamela. The Necessary Dream: A Study of the Novels of Manuel Puig. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1988.

Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

Gautier, Marie-Lise Gazarian. “Manuel Puig.” Interviews with Latin American Writers. Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1989: 219–233.

Giordano, Enrique. “De maldición eterna a Sangre de amor correspondido: Las figuraciones del inconsciente.” Manuel Puig: Montaje y alteridad del sujeto. Roberto Echavarren y Enrique Giordano. Santiago: Monografias del Maiten, 1986: 91–101.

Kerr, Lucille. Suspended Fiction: Reading the Novels of Manuel Puig. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987.

Lavers, Norman. Pop Culture into Art: The Novels of Manuel Puig. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1988.

Morello-Frosch, Marta. “Usos y abusos de la cultura popular: Pubis angelical de Manuel Puig.” Literature and Popular Culture in the Hispanic World. ed. Rose S. Minc. Montclair State College: Ediciones Hispamérica, 1981: 31–42.

Puig, Manuel. “Cinema and the Novel. On Modern Latin American Fiction. ed. John King. New York: Hill and Wang, 1987: 283–290.

———. Kiss of the Spider Woman. trans. Thomas Colchie, New York: Vintage, 1980.

———. Pubis Angelical. trans. Elena Brunet. New York: Aventura, 1986.

Yudice, George. “El beso de la mujer araña y Pubis angelical: Entre el placer y el saber.” Literature and Popular Culture in the Hispanic World: 43–57.